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- Title
Infrastructuring as a Planetary Phenomenon: Timescale Separation and Causal Closure in More-Than-Human Systems.
- Authors
Szerszynski, Bronislaw
- 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.
- Subjects
ECONOMIC life of fixed assets; BIOGEOCHEMISTRY; TIMESCALE number; HYDROSPHERE (Earth); PLANETARY water; PLANETS
- Publication
Historical Social Research, 2022, Vol 47, Issue 4, p193
- ISSN
0172-6404
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.12759/hsr.47.2022.44