The Infrastructural Labour of Relationality: Solidarity in ‘Troubling Times’

My engagement with Jennifer Chun’s new book Against Abandonment will focus on the key words of affect and infrastructure. In The Inconvenience of Other People, Lauren Berlant defines infrastructure as the ‘lifeworld’ of structure, the sets of relations and affects that make worlds, the ‘activity of poeisis’. I will examine the ambivalences and proximities involved with fomenting, holding and letting go of forms of solidarity through the lens of infrastructure. My perspective will be influenced by my first book on the generation and reproduction of the attachments of retail workers in South Africa over decades to the collective political subject of ‘abasebenzi’ [workers], and what new forms of relation emerged and ruptured, and what these processes portended for labour politics. I will also reflect on Chun’s research through my current book project, Lift Stories, in which I examine elevators as affective urban infrastructure in Johannesburg, constituted through different forms of labour to make intimate space into sites of political contest.