11.05.2022,
Andrew Barry, Evelina Gambino (University College London): The Labour of
Capitalisation
This
lecture seeks to engage with recent debates around the capitalisation of
infrastructure by interrogating how capitalized futures are both fixed and
destabilised in the present. We understand the capitalisation of infrastructure
as a project aimed at extracting future profit into the present. Rather than a
smooth process, capitalisation is sustained by all manners of efforts that
bridge between the future, the present and the past. In particular, we argue
that there is a need to attend to the specific forms of specialist labour going
into the capitalisation of infrastructural projects which we term the labour of
capitalisation, which is expected to stabilise or fix the future and to render
it predictable and manageable, acting on and through time. The lecture draws on
the fieldwork that we have undertaken, together and independently, across three
of the major infrastructural projects that have sustained developmental
trajectory of the Republic of Georgia since its independence. In the cases we
outline, and others, the capitalisation of infrastructure gives rise to diverse
types of anti-capitalisation, destabilising or disrupting the performance of
the different forms of labour on which capitalisation relies.
