Approaching Infrastructural Being

In this chapter, we develop tools for grappling with the complexity of infrastructural being. We identify three social scientific frames that have been typically applied to analyse infrastructures as naturecultural phenomena: (1) infrastructures as socio-material technologies, (2) infrastructures as power, and (3) more-than-human infrastructures. We build on these three overlapping veins and propose that the analogy of metabolism enables attending to the co-constitutive, relational and distributed character of infrastructural being. Moreover, we suggest that infrastructural being may take different shapes and may be done different ways and is thus political through and through. Finally, we highlight how other-than-humans are active participants in infrastructural being in myriads of ways, from co-constitutive agents in the assemblage to beings whose possibilities of existence are conditioned and affected by different sets of infrastructures.