When reading Todd McGowan’s Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan I was suddenly struck by how interesting it would be to think about infrastructure from a Lacanian perspective. Consider how he talks about the Lacanian notion of the Imaginary on loc 2060:
The imaginary can present an illusion of completeness because it appears to involve just two parties – someone looking and what is seen. The imaginary relationship is a dualistic one that fails to account for the influence of a third party on this dualistic interaction. From within the imaginary perspective, I consider only what’s on my computer screen, not the structure that makes it possible for me to view this screen, including the labor that produced my computer in the first place and the coding that mediates my encounter. Seeing a direct, one-on-one relationship with the image amounts to falling for an imaginary lure. Lacan wants to bring the symbolic and real to light to counter the blinding power of this lure.
What he terms the third party here can equally be framed as infrastructure: “the structure that makes it possible”. I had a conversation with Richard Sandford yesterday about algorithmic folklore which was lingering in my mind as I read this. Could the stories we tell about algorithms be framed as attempts to incorporate the infrastructure into the imaginary? They turn the absent structure into a real presence which evokes stories and ideas in us about what it is and what it wants. It turns the third into a dyadic relationship in which I am directly confronting the algorithm and trying to decipher its desire. In doing so we lose contact with the negativity inherent in grappling with the limits of the Imaginary, as Todd puts it on loc 2078:
Enthralled by the imaginary, we can’t see what we can’t see. We can’t see that we can’t see everything. While the subject allows itself to be captivated by images, absence disappears in the surfeit of presence. The problem with the imaginary is that it is too visible: We see the imaginary as a whole and never see what it’s missing – namely, the symbolic order and the real.
I wonder what happens to the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries, which I’ve never liked, if we read it through this frame? The Imaginary is comforting because it forecloses a deeper engagement with a reality which is disorientating and beyond our full comprehension. Rather than sociotechnical imaginaries being essentially a synonym for ‘shared vision’ we can read them as a defence mechanism through which engagements with infrastructure are transposed into a more comforting register. What would sociotechnical Imaginaries (the capital marking the Lacanian spin) look like if we see them as operating in this way? What’s their relationship to, say, moments of breakdown when the infrastructural bursts into conscious awareness through its sudden mode of failure? What would this framing mean for the repair and care work involved in sustaining infrastructure?
Mark Carrigan 