The Infrastructural Time of resilience: Accounting for new (and old) forms of government in the South African grid

Abstract

Temporality has long, if implicitly, structured geographic research on resilience—whether by underwriting scholarly endeavors to show how resilience aligns with late 20th century neoliberal modes of intervention or to suggest that resilience demarcates a recent shift beyond them. It is evident, however, that a range of “old” and “new” governmental rationalities can be observed in resilience measures. To account for that simultaneity, I suggest that researchers turn to infrastructure. Doing so attunes us to the ensemble of historically-situated ethical and political projects that, as they are attached to and enacted through materials, create the complex political and physical terrains in and on which present-day resilience measures act. It also allows us to trace how the time horizons of infrastructure give shape to specific (de)centralized, collectivizing, and individualizing forms of resilience, which can be associated with a range of “old” and “new” governmental rationalities. I make this argument through a case study of the South African electricity system and measures taken to address its ongoing breakdowns. I show how the temporalities of finance, politics, development, and electricity have shaped the contemporary problem space in which resilience measures intervene, as well as the limited and interdependent forms that resilience is taking. In doing so, the paper advances new accounts of, and ways to account for, resilience today. Specifically, it reads contemporary resilience measures as temporal projects: insofar as these measures act on places, they also act on and through time.