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Infrastructuring as a planetary phenomenon: timescale separation and causal closure in more-than-human systems

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Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>23/12/2022
<mark>Journal</mark>Historical Social Research
Issue number4
Volume47
Number of pages22
Pages (from-to)193–214
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Building on recent work identifying how the infrastructures of human social and economic life themselves depend on the “natural infrastructure” of biogeochemical systems, I explore the idea that infrastructuring—involving causal relations between subsystems operating at different timescales—might be a strategy widely adopted by matter undergoing self-organization under planetary conditions. I analyze the concept of infrastructure as it is used to describe features of the human “technosphere” and identify the importance of a difference in timescales between supporting and supported structures and processes. I explore some examples of how the wider planet might be said to engage in timescale-distancing and infrastructuring, focusing, in particular, on examples from the hydrosphere and biosphere. I then turn to the question of how to explain infrastructuring, developing a neocybernetic account of infrastructuring as involving the separation of a system into subsystems at different timescales in mutual but asymmetrical causal relations. I conclude by exploring the implications of this approach for the way we think about planets in general and the human technosphere.