Beyond control: critical reflections on infrastructure and events

In philosophical terms, events are based on rupture: they emerge from grounds and bring to the fore an infrastructure that otherwise would remain in the background. Narrowing our focus to look at pre-planned events, however, this picture is turned upside down, and the relationship between event and infrastructure appears reversed: instead of the event coming first, which then shifts attention to its grounds or infrastructure, the infrastructure is there first, and this - on an organisational and material level - allows the event to unfold. However, the point is not to conduct a critique of “pseudoevents”, i.e. to denounce pre-planned events as failed events. Rather, the aim is to critically investigate and problematise the relationship between events and their infrastructure at a variety of scales, including that typical of pre-planned events. Indeed, this relationship appears to be at its most ambivalent in pre-planned events. On the one hand, the production of these events generally aims to control how they develop, while on the other, the way they unfold includes practices and processes that cannot be controlled. Regarding the latter, some of the research findings from the author’s empirical investigation into civil society events will be discussed in order to underline three points: (a) how events exert a subtle cultural power through their infrastructural dimensions; (b) how pre-planned events are themselves an infrastructure that allows a variety of practices and micro-events to take place; and (c) how events’ infrastructure cannot be unilaterally controlled.