The Body as Infrastructure
In the second session of ‘Embodying Land Financialization & Infrastructures‘, Luis Andueza, Archie Davies, Alex Loftus and Hannah Schling discussed their article “The Body as Infrastructure” (2020), exploring new theoretical frameworks in urban political ecology.
Abstract
In this paper, we conceptualise the human body as infrastructure, asking what kind of infrastructure it currently is and what kind of infrastructure it could be. We therefore tease out the historically and geographically specific ways in which human bodies have been (re)produced as infrastructure, emphasising the violence of abstraction in capitalist modernity that transforms the productive body into a technology of calorific inputs and outputs.
Nevertheless, through demystifying abstract labour we point to the relations of (re)production (needed for the body’s ongoing repair) and the metabolic processes (responsible for both decay and repair) that are subsumed within a broader capitalist system of accumulation. In so doing, we turn to the immanent contradictions and struggles that resist the body’s production as a one-sided technology of circulation and through which it is, and can become, an infrastructure for life and sociality.
About the authors
Luis Andueza is a human geographer with a background in anthropology and critical development studies. He is a lecturer in International Development at the Department of International Development, King’s College London.
Archie Davis is a cultural and historical geographer working across the fields of political ecology and the history and philosophy of geography. Archie is a senior lecturer in Geography at Queen Mary University of London.
Alex Loftus is a political ecologist with a keen interest in the political economy of water. He is Professor of Political Ecology in the Department of Geography at King’s College London.
Hannah Schling is a critical Economic Geographer, working across Feminist Political Economy & Labour Geographies. Hannah is a Lecturer in Economic Geography at the Department of Geography, University College London.