2011
8. 24
We are thus presented with two distinct time signatures, one of which actively conceals the other. The first--the managerial time of infrastructures--is the time of statistical reasoning and the calculus of variations. Up-tempo and staccato, it is punctuated by regular crescendos, which we call accidents or malfunctions, and which are immediately attributed to either temporary failures or resolvable localized inefficiencies. Managerial time renders systemic realities un-visible. The second time--the historical time of infrastructures, or the time of accumulations--is a slowly unfolding, long-wave threnody, in which the full extents of modernization are evident.
In the first signature, where the concept of efficiency has been fashioned so as to exclude its own externalizations, our managerial rhetoric makes sense. In the second, that same language appears utterly absurd, contradictory even.
The widespread inability to recognize or acknowledge the historical time of accumulations is the most pronounced and obvious symptom of an entrenched infrastructuralism. Particularly acute today among urbanists and bureaucrats--for whom efficiency is an almost erotic obsession--infrastructuralism is a contemporary pathological condition in which the rhetoric and imagery of managerial discourse serve to retard any differentiation between primary and reflexive modernization. Infrastructuralism is marked by the self-veiling of a truth--a terrible truth, unendurable for we Moderns: that the most efficient methods of environmental management are also in fact the most destructive and wasteful. Infrastructualism is a lie we tell ourselves in place of truths that would change us if we were made to face them, and the primary material-moral alibi for the supposed superiority of our limitless, civilized lives. (JM, "Infrastructuralism ...or, the Pathology of the Negative Externality," Quaderns, No. 262 "Parainfrastructures," pgs. 6-9.)