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STS scholarship has acknowledged that society and technologies mutually shape each other.

One of the earliest debates around the specific relationship between politics and technology was raised by the eminent STS scholar, Langdon Winner (1980) in his article, ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’ He argues that ‘the intractable properties of certain kinds of technologies are strongly, perhaps unavoidably, linked to particular institutionalised patterns of power and authority’ (ibid., p.134). Winner’s work is representative of the politicisation of technologies and a concern for whether technologies can in fact be democratically designed, deployed and regulated (c.f Morone & Woodhouse, 1989; Ravetz, 1971; Sclove, 1995). STS

scholarship, keeping in mind a systems view of technology, has asserted that small

technologies with varying standards or other idiosyncrasies slowly become infrastructures that have a decisive impact on shaping modern life (Bijker, Hughes, & Pinch, 1987; Edwards, 2003; Hughes, 1993). In general, the social constructivist view of science and technology has been a major part of the STS scholarship since the 1980s (MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1985).

Overall, while the literature has been insightful in theorising the technological-social relation in complex ways, there are nonetheless some concerns when it comes to the epistemological foundations of STS.

Since at least the 1980s, the theoretical and methodological frameworks for STS scholarship have been driven by symbolic interactionism (Star & Clarke, 2003) (c.f. Katz, Rice, & Aspden, 2001; Katz & Rice, 2002; Robinson, 2007). This theoretical framework was derived initially by the Chicago school of anthropology in the 1950s, especially by George Herbert Mead and John Dewey. Their pragmatic approach argued that the meaning of any particular

phenomenon depended upon how this phenomenon was embedded in relationships that Mead called ‘universes of discourse’ (Mead, [1938] 1972, p. 518). These universes have also been called social worlds that generate shared perspectives; whereas individual and/or collective identities are formed by the acts of participating in these social worlds (Strauss, 1959, 1978, 1982, 1984). Symbolic interactionism provides a framework that accounts for both collective perspectives as well as identity construction through interactions that are deeply situated within a particular social world. For instance, Clarke and Star (2008, p. 115) argue that ‘infrastructures can be understood, in a sense, as frozen discourses that form avenues between social worlds and into arenas and larger structures’. An explicit and historical theorisation of power seems to be missing from symbolic interactionism. The key question for my research is how does STS (inspired by symbolic interactionism) locate intentionality and flows of power? Such a question becomes crucial since actual society is marked by historically situated subject positions inflected by race, caste, gender and sexuality, class and so on. Such subject positions are necessarily involved in interactions exercised in and through power relations. However, since it incorporates both interactions of individuals and groups with infrastructures while at the same time providing a way to theorise how identities are constructed through and within spatially and discursively located social worlds, this framework of symbolic interactionism is useful and I build on it.

Symbolic interactionism relies on concepts of perspective and commitment where actors have their own perspectives that are articulated through discourses defined as ‘assemblages of language, motive and meaning, moving toward mutually understood modus vivendi – ways of (inter) acting. Perspectives, as defined by Mead to include commitments that stem from work and material contingencies, are discourses in collective, material action’ (Clarke &

Star, 2008, p. 116). This use of the term discourse is very different from that developed by the European tradition, epitomised by Michel Foucault. Even if power does somehow enter the discussion, the flows of power seem to start from individual actions (individuals who seemingly have pre-existing motives assembled via language) and flows outward towards infrastructures and indeed, social worlds. This perspective assumes at some level that subjects are constituted through interactions with social worlds that are collectively generated.

An expansion of the ‘social construction of technology’ perspective came in the late 1980s with Bruno Latour and colleagues who argued for the role of non-human ‘actants’ whose importance or weightage is taken on par with humans in the analysis of complex networks or technologies (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987; Law, 1987). Just as symbolic interactionism provided a way to account for the social without power relations being constitutive of the social, similarly, Bruno Latour and colleagues expanded the framework to included non-human objects. Calling technologies ‘lieutenants’, Latour (1988, p. 310) argues that ‘[i]f, in our societies, there are thousands of such lieutenants to which we have delegated

competences, it means that what defines social relations is, for the most part, prescribed back to us by nonhumans’. In this dialectical account, we design for instance, automated doors to which we designate certain functions, and that in turn then ‘return’ to prescribe our behaviours, so we behave to accommodate the automated door (Latour, 1988). Actor Network Theory (ANT) has remained influential in acknowledging non-human agency (c.f.

Bennett, 2010) and continues to generate contemporary scholarship on infrastructure¹⁴, although its insights derived from a post-humanist perspective have been critiqued from a decolonial perspective.

For instance one of the important consequences of ANT is the recent ‘ontological turn’ in infrastructure studies: ‘ontological politics covers more than the question of how politics is embedded in technological devices, for it concerns the emergence of potentially novel forms out of infrastructural arrangements’ (Jensen & Morita, 2015, p. 85; Woolgar & Cooper, 1999; Woolgar & Lezaun, 2013). The post-humanist perspective implicit in such a position has in fact been a significant and historical aspect of indigenous peoples’ cosmology and subjectivity in many parts of the world (Strehlow, 1971; Todd, 2016), although

acknowledging indigeneity in post-humanism would inevitably foreground the colonial relations that underlie the hegemony of Western dualist thought (Holbraad, Pedersen, & de Castro, 2014; Sundberg, 2014; Watts, 2013). The erasure of the indigenous subject and knowledge from the ‘mainstream’ points to the dangers of post -humanism without sensitivity and attention to historical contexts and alternative epistemologies (Grosfoguel, 2012; Santos, 2016). Through my research, I build on the contributions of the ontological

14 For example see interviews with John Durham Peters in Chapter 1 and Katherine N Hyles in Chapter 2 (Packer & Wiley, 2012)

turn: ‘In shifting attention away from politics as a primarily discursive activity, these new materialist reworkings have distanced themselves from conventional political categories in order to focus instead on processes and relations that exceed these descriptive concepts’

(Braun & Whatmore, 2010; Knox, 2017, p. 365; Marres & Lezaun, 2011; Whatmore &

Landström, 2011). Theorising internet infrastructure as a specific constellation of material and discursive arrangements enables me to foreground precisely those ‘processes and relations’ in correspondence with indigenous subjects (see Chapter 6). Further, I argue that social anthropology has useful contributions to make on theorising infrastructure especially on themes that are relevant to my research – governmentality and subjectivation.

Anthropology has typically stayed away from infrastructure since it understood its own role primarily as that of studying people and societies. Take for example this quote, ‘The

development of the study of infrastructures proper is a task which must be left to history – with the aid of demography, technology, historical geography and ethnography. It is not principally the ethnologist’s concern’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1966, p. 130). More recently, there is a history of anthropological research on infrastructure, understood as a specific technology with specific influence on groups of people (Larkin, 2013). A good example of such an approach is the literature on roads, in terms of how roads shape a given society, for

instance, in the Peruvian Andes (Harvey & Knox, 2015) or Niger (Masquelier, 2002), Pakistan (Khan, 2006) or Greece (Dalakoglou, 2010). There is similar literature on cars (Verrips &

Meyer, 2001) and on dams (Ghosh, 2006; Mains, 2012).

In the Peruvian region surrounding Ocongate, Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox (2015) deconstruct the infrastructural technologies of roads to argue that they ‘…as infrastructural forms manifest the political, not just through the transformations that they promise but also by arranging and rearranging the mundane spaces of everyday life’ (ibid. p.7). Using a

relational approach and drawing upon the work of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Harvey and Knox unpack the notion of expertise as a specific subject position occupied by civil engineers who are involved in planning the development of roads. It is precisely this kind of attention to infrastructural practices that I draw upon, for instance in section 5.2, where I examine how engineers and bureaucrats involved in the planning and administration of the

National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) discuss their anxieties and panics about the other underlying the developmentalist discourses around connectivity and nation-building.

Infrastructure, is now seen as a concept, or as a system within a wider social, political and economic system, what has been called a ‘system of substrates’ (Star, 1999, p. 380). In other words, anthropologists have now begun to take seriously, precisely the domains that Levi-Strauss once opined were outside the ethnologist’s concerns. Anthropological work on large scale infrastructure particularly the intersection of infrastructures with social aspects

(including state and subject formation) have been tremendously useful and have served to inspire the theoretical and methodological design for my doctoral research. In the later sub-sections in this chapter addressing issues of governmentality and subjectivation, I engage with the literature on anthropology of infrastructures in a more detail. For the time being, suffice it to say that drawing upon the relational nature of the social, anthropological approaches are crucial to ground theorisation of communicative infrastructures as socially embedded, implicated in flows of power and processes of constructing the state and subject.