**Keywords**: infrastructure, chrononormativity, molar, molecular, dysfunction #### Define infrastructure. Dysfunction as the key focus of research, shift of priorities over the years The idea of dysfunction and inefficiency in technology can be approached not as an accidental and inconsistent state of knowledge in the present, but as a prepared-for and intentional condition for future knowledge. The problematics of breaking things down intentionally is a theme that can be and has been approached from various angles, however, what I’d like to do here is to take a step back and sketch the onto-epistemology and space-time of infrastructure. Starting the conversation about the infrastructure in this way would give us a more informed view of the conditions in which infrastructures exist and shed light on why the inefficient kinds of uses are viable and beneficial. I begin the paper by introducing the notion of infrastructure and what queering of infrastructure may mean through the lens of gender scholar Judith Halberstam. Then I proceed by thinking through the notions of molar and molecular as they are applied in the work of the intersectional feminist writer Nina Lykke, and I close by looking at the differences in ontology and epistemology of molar and molecular approaches to space-time of infrastructure. For the present discussion, infrastructures are system-agnostic networks where the nodes are the institutions, people, buildings and information resources that generate, share and maintain specific knowledge. The mode of being of infrastructure is bound with the ways it makes knowledge available, in that while ontologically the purpose of the infrastructure is to create the material basis of reproduction of relations between the nodes,[^1] epistemologically their resilience and lasting power is warranted by their ability to share and reproduce knowledge about how specifically such reproduction can be realised. Infrastructures can either be technologically constructed in the form of material assemblages or appear as purely cultural instruments, in the form of corporate or organisational cultures. What distinguishes all infrastructures is that, as sociologist and gender scholar Penny Harvey notes, they generate effects and structure social relations either through intentional design or unplanned and emergent activities. [^2] Throughout the last decades of scholarly research on infrastructures, the problematics of their breakdown consistently appear on the top of research agendas. In the 1990s, these issues were the priority of organisational scholars who focused on the ecological aspects and participatory design.[^3] More recently the consequences of dysfunction were discussed by decolonial scholars in connection with the infrastructure’s temporal and spatial dimensions, or more specifically in which way infrastructures present histories, memories, archives, as well as living bodies.[^4] As an example of technological infrastructure, political theorist Timothy Mitchell offers a temporal-epistemological function of infrastructure as the mechanism for creating interruptions or delays as a capital accumulation strategy. The capacity, or in Mitchell’s case, incapacity of the infrastructure to provide access to resources, nevertheless prevents us from thinking otherwise. By breaking the infrastructure down, it becomes possible to extract future value to substantiate value claims in the present, all the while leaving no possibility for those who want to organise the future otherwise. [^5] > “Infrastructures work on time, but not only in the ways we commonly assume. While they may increase the speed at which goods are transported, people travel, or energy flows, this acceleration of time is not their most important attribute. Their physical scale, technical durability, and political strength give them another purpose. They introduce an interruption, a gap, out of which the present extracts wealth from the future.” (Mitchell, 2020) In regards to infrastructure of a non-technical kind, we can look at an example of the feminist activist Zandi Sherman, who presents race as infrastructure at the core of circulation of bodies and objects, that ‘determines which bodies circulate where and how, and what kind of mobilities are available and to whom.’[^6] The infrastructure here mediates the access to resources, as Marxist theorist Marina Vishmidt emphasises, ‘whose withholding is key to the population management … for efficient extraction – a differentiated management of ‘infrastructural coercion’ and ‘infrastructural neglect.’’[^7] #### Queering the infrastructure From here, we need to go further by revealing the problematics of breakdown by ‘queering the infrastructure’. I define the practice of queering as it is usually defined by queer theory scholars, such as Judith Halberstam, Siobhan B. Somerville and Nina Lykke.[^8] First, a more specialised view of ‘queering’ comes from a critique of the normative heterosexual matrix developed by gender theorist Judith Butler,[^9] and sees queering as a practice of undoing the normativity as it applies to bodies and sexualities in terms of direct governance over them. Second, in a more general sense which applies to critical infrastructure studies, as well as to the broad range of other themes outside of direct engagement with sexuality, ‘queering’ refers to the dismantling of the normativities in all their forms, intending to understand the means and purpose of existing identity categories, both normative and non-normative. As Halberstam notes, ‘queer’ operates on the level of non-normative logics and organisations of community, embodiment, and associated activities that require specific notions of time and space. In other words, a queer outlook on infrastructure is possible from a specific queer time and queer space. ‘Queer time’ to Halberstam is a term for those specific models of temporality that emerge within contemporary culture once we leave the temporal frames of the normative ethos of reproduction, family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance. ‘Queer space’ refers to the place-making practices in which queer people engage and it also describes the ‘new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer counterpublics.’[^10] Looking back at the ideas of Mitchell and Sherman, the queer outlook reveals the strategies for extraction by developing non-normative notions of coordination and mediation of community, embodiment and activity that such view of time and space provides. > Queer time: outside of normative ethos of reproduction, family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance. > Queer space: the new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer counterpublics. #### Molar and molecular kinds of space-time Queer time, or ‘strange temporality’ as Halberstam refers to it, is developed by Lykke in her notion of ‘chrononormativity’. [^11] Lykke notes that queering time is traditionally perceived as a mode of resistance that deploys ‘temporality that refuses futurity and longevity’ of a normative progress narrative, where a worthwhile lifestyle is expected to unfold through key milestones such as reproductive heterosexual family-building. [^12] Historically, as noted by Halberstam, queer time emerged in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, when the refusal of futurity in the queer community was employed as a radical shift of cultural focus away from living long lives, to forging personal connections in relation to risk, disease, infection, and death. Yet, it was not only compression and annihilation that were the focus of queer time, but the prominent absence of such priorities as family and child-rearing, which diminished the value of associated artefacts, such as inheritance and insurance. Building on the theorisation of philosophers Deleuze and Guattari,[^13] Lykke, in her recent study on mourning, differentiates the ‘molar’ and ‘molecular’ approaches to queer time. ‘Molar’ is an idea of something as a complete entity from a high-level perspective, for example, a human body with organs. Conversely, the molecular view presents the same body on a particle level, in terms of the intensities, vibrancies and movements that exist between those particles, - ‘the body without organs’, as Deleuze and Guattari put it. The notion of ‘becoming’, which is always already molecular, reflects the process of establishing the particle relations, without imitating other entities: > Starting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfills, becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes.[^14] The context of the infrastructures as entities evolving through their temporal and spatial dimensions, informs a notion of ‘molar’ as the production of a complete and externalised entity which can be traced clearly, such as the chrononormative presentation of history in terms of sequencing of network facts and events. ‘Molecular’ provides a contrary reference scale, which departs from the human-to-human relationship and dissolves the subject to become imperceptible and dehumanised, albeit still richly imbued with affect, creating a new relationship to events through the entanglement of the more-than-human subjects, consisting of technical protocols, compliance policies, cultural and managerial artefacts, and vested interests of various kinds of stakeholders.[^15] #### Time of inheritance and hypothetical temporality It is necessary to emphasise that realising the opportunity of molecular time and space within infrastructure’s onto-epistemology, which creates a fleeting and contingent view of the network and simultaneously reverses the view of systemic dysfunction from accidental to intentional, does not imply that such a vision is in any way a principal or a sole one. As Lykke suggests, the process of shifting from molar to molecular is open-ended and full of oscillations, which makes me want to propose to see the two views as evolving in parallel. [^16] The queer space-time of infrastructure marks the components which are transient in temporal and distributed in spacial terms. Instead of longevity and futurity, the strange temporality exists in the potentialities of the unscripted. Indeed, there is a benefit of having little concern for longevity in the situation where the infrastructure exists in the thick managerial wrapper, as it has to be in the contexts of constant technological drift, such as in epistemic infrastructures of software systems, where things are not built to last, but on the contrary, are expected to change continuously. Since my research largely deals with the presentation of software systems as queer performative phenomena, I naturally think about digital infrastructures as my starting point. Due to its extreme complexity and changeability, the software demands infrastructures that are transient, fleeting and contingent. One prominent example is Agile methodology, a disruption-based style of production which provides enough resilience to be able to reproduce and maintain context-heavy knowledge environments, without losses in performance. Another example is Continuous Delivery, a software production methodology that relocates software releases into the ‘queer space’ in the meaning we give it here, by delivering often and in small batches, while maintaining a highly complex problem space via version tracking, which is designed to render the normative dimension of risk management irrelevant in the more-than-human dimension of the production process. [^17] As Halberstam notes, the queer time and queer space can be seen as useful terms for life, location and transformation, expanding their use to posthuman and sociotechnical phenomena, such as material and epistemic infrastructures. Queering infrastructure opens the possibility of describing them not only in terms of normative behaviours they promote but in the ways they ‘oppose or sustain the conventional forms of association, belonging and identification’. [^18] Returning to the idea of infrastructure’s simultaneous presence in both molar and molecular manifestations, there is no evidence that the molar notion of time can be given up without losing access to everything that makes them prominent in their material sense - that is, their longevity and futurity. Halberstam notes two important molar temporalities that are equally relevant to the reproduction of software infrastructures as they are to the reproduction of chrononormative narratives in social fabric: time of inheritance and hypothetical temporality. In the first instance, time of inheritance is present in engineering whenever a derivative technical system adopts some of its components from the parent one, which is necessary for creating the local instances of the system while retaining control over their core functionality. For example, a local instance of a smartphone operating system can have a different interface style or language, while inheriting the core functionality from the parent system. In other words, the time of inheritance is the time that provides the continuity which is necessary for maintaining the circulation of knowledge between the network nodes. Molarity here is expressed through the temporal sequencing from the parent entity - which always comes before the child, as well as spatial separation, where the child is only necessary where the location is different from where the parent is. In the second case, ‘hypothetical temporality’ is the time of ‘what if’, as Halberstam suggests, which is a kind of time that assumes national and familial stability and requires protection in the way of insurance policies, health care and wills. [^19] This temporality is present within the infrastructure in the form of risk management, as prevention and avoidance of danger. The fact that molar presentations cannot be discarded just because we have molecular alternative leads us to assume an ontology principle, whereby infrastructure is always present in the _normative_ and the _strange_ temporality at the same time - in other words, molecular is not the lens that we have to adopt to see the existing infrastructure in a new way, but rather another facet of an infrastructure that we did not take into account before, and that we need to methodologically accommodate. [^20] #### Conclusion: the effects of the space/time split <!--Sedgwick and Foucault: why it is important to theorise space and time when talking about infrastructure--> In conclusion, I’d like to look at the differences that the molar/molecular space/time split has on the ontological and epistemological aspects of infrastructure. We have seen before that for critical infrastructure studies, unlike the other adjacent branches of new materialisms, the problematics of time and space are perhaps a higher priority than those of subject and relations of form and matter. To understand this, it is helpful to look into the essay by Stephen M. Barber and David L. Clark, who discuss queer temporality by bringing together the French philosopher Michel Foucault and gender theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. To Sedgwick, ‘queer’ is a temporality, a moment that hinges specifically on a person’s ‘performative acts of experimental self-perception and filiation’.[^21] Queer is therefore not only a moment, but also a force, and more precisely, a temporal force located in the ‘crossing of temporality with force’. [^22] This force is ‘immemorial’ and ‘current’ in that, first, it reaches beyond the limits of memory and history, and second, it always belongs to the now. Foucault expresses this temporal or persistently present force in his formulation of modernity as ‘an attitude rather than as a period of history.’ The attitude, he continues, is > ...a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task” (Foucault, 1997:304). Bringing these two ideas together suggests that while molar temporality is indefinite, molecular one is virtual - which are the characteristics of infrastructural ontology. Epistemologically, keeping the same normative/queer simultaneity principle outlined before, the molar facet is responsible for the continuity and risk attributes, including inheritance and ‘what if’ scenarios, while the molecular side of the split describes the transient and distributed aspects of the infrastructure, expressed in Sedgwick’s queerness as a persistently present temporal force. | | Molar | Molecular | | ------------ | ----------------------------------- | --------------------------------- | | Ontology | Indefinite | Virtual | | Epistemology | Continuous (inheritance), risk mgmt | Distributed, persistently present | [The effects of the space/time split] <!--Check Foucault's The History of Sexuality, for temporality refs--> <!--‘In Sedgwick, Barber and Clark identify an elaboration of the relation between temporality and writing; in Foucault, they find a model for the relation between temporality and ways of being. They summarise these currents in terms of a “moment,” a “persistent present,” or “a queer temporality that is at once indefinite and virtual but also forceful, resilient, and undeniable” ‘[^23]--> ---- #### References Barber, Stephen M., David L. Clark, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, eds. 2002. _Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory._ New York, NY: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1990. _Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity_. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. _A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia_. Translated by Brian Massumi. Vol. 19. https://www.jstor.org/stable/203963?origin=crossref. Halberstam, Judith. 2005. _In a Queer Time and Place_. New York University Press. Harvey, Penelope. 2016. _Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion_. 1st ed. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315622880. Humble, Jez, and David Farley. 2010. _Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation_. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley. Larkin, Brian. 2013. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (1): 327–43. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522. Lykke, Nina. 2022. _Vibrant Death_. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Mitchell, Timothy. 2020. “Infrastructures Work on Time.” E-Flux (blog). January 2020. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/new-silk-roads/312596/infrastructures-work-on-time/. Neumann, Laura J, and Susan Leigh Star. 1996. “Making Infrastructure: The Dream of a Common Language.” Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference. Nuttal, Sarah. 2021. “Infrastructure’s Drift.” 2021. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/coloniality-infrastructure/420102/infrastructure-s-drift/. Sherman, Zandi. 2021. “Infrastructures and the Ontological Question of Race.” 2021. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/coloniality-infrastructure/411239/infrastructures-and-the-ontological-question-of-race/. Somerville, Siobhan B., ed. 2020. _The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies_. Cambridge ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Vishmidt, Marina. 2021. “”Only as Self-Relating Negativity”: Infrastructure and Critique.” Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts, 13-24 Páginas. https://doi.org/10.34632/JSTA.2021.10906. [^1]: Vishmidt, 2021:19. [^2]: Harvey, 2016:5. [^3]: Neumann and Star, 1996; Larkin, 2013. [^4]: Mitchell, 2020; Nuttal, 2021, Sherman, 2021. [^5]: Mitchell, 2020:11. [^6]: Sherman, 2021:3. [^7]: Vishmidt, 2021:19. [^8]: Halberstam, 2005:17; Somerville,2020:2; Lykke, 2022:256. [^9]: Butler, 1990. [^10]: Halberstam, 2005:18. [^11]: Lykke, 2022:43. [^12]: Lykke, 2022:43-44; Halberstam,2005: 14. [^13]: Deleuze and Guattari, 1987. [^14]: Lykke, 2022: 127 citing Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 272. [^15]: Lykke,2022:130. [^16]: Lykke,2022:130. [^17]: Humble and Farley, 2010: 280. [^18]: Halberstam, 2005:16. [^19]: Halberstam, 2005:17. [^20]: Halberstam, 2005:16. [^21]: Barber, 2002: 8. [^22]: Barber, 2002: 8. [^23]: Halberstam, 2005:23.