For Brian Larkin, infrastructure is not merely a technical substrate for moving water, electricity, vehicles, data, or people; it is a material form of governance, imagination, and sensory experience. His central argument moves infrastructure away from the apparently neutral domain of engineering and into an anthropology of technopolitics and material poetics, showing that roads, pipes, satellites, metros, and electrical systems condense state rationalities, collective desires, and embodied ways of inhabiting modernity. A pipe, therefore, does not simply distribute water; it may also distribute citizenship, dependency, moral calculation, or exclusion, as in Mumbai and Soweto, where access to water becomes entangled with political patronage, urban belonging, and neoliberal discipline. Likewise, a road may promise progress even when it remains empty, while a housing project may function more effectively as an administrative document than as actual shelter. Larkin’s strength lies in showing that infrastructure operates doubly: as a technical system enabling circulation, and as an aesthetic sign addressing its publics through visibility, monumentality, failure, or desire. Against the claim that infrastructures become visible only when they break down, he demonstrates that many are deliberately hypervisible: emblems of state power, progress, sovereignty, or collective aspiration. In conclusion, to study infrastructure is to examine not only cables, bridges, pipes, and roads, but also budgets, affects, materials, imaginaries, and bodies; where there appears to be mere circulation, Larkin reveals a deeper grammar of modern power.
