Infrastructural Injustice

• In Event: Structure in Motion

Abstract

It has become commonplace among political theorists, political scientists and even lay political observers to treat injustice as fundamentally structural. The idea of structural injustice, perhaps most influentially articulated by Iris Marion Young (if not by Young alone), refuses to ascribe ultimate critical significance to individual motivations and acts, instead enjoining analysts to identify the background of social relationships and institutional distributions of power that generate those motivations and acts. Young’s account, and the idea generally, have risen to prominence not only in light of their descriptive persuasiveness, but also in large part due to their ability to focus both intellectual and practical energy on the underlying causes of oppression, domination and disenfranchisement. This paper, however, argues that an emphasis structure as a conceptual and normative rubric is incomplete as a source of critical orientation, at times distracting from the sources and enablements of political struggle (as opposed to the objects of political opposition). To both demonstrate and respond to this deficit, this paper shifts registers to develop infrastructure as an alternative analytical frame. It does this in two ways. First, drawing from the emergent field of critical infrastructure studies, the papers articulates a politics of “repair,” “care” and “maintenance” towards the social, material and intellectual infrastructures that sustain political action, complementing, and sometimes displacing, the more conventional politics of “resisting” and “dismantling” and “abolishing.” Second, the paper returns to Young’s early work in Justice and the Politics of Difference to recover a latent interest in infrastructure as both an object of political reflection and a key dimension of political imagination. The paper thus retains and extends Youngs insistence that the negative focus on injustice should be a primary source of theoretical orientation, highlighting the distinctive modes of injustice brought out through the lens of infrastructure.

Author

• Colin Kielty, University of Richmond