Dark Infrastructures: An Anarchive of Surveillance and Control in the City of Exception

This paper mobilizes Latour & Hermant’s notion of the oligopticon for a situated analysis of urban technologies of surveillance and control in the city of Rotterdam. Oligopticons are networked devices and their socio-political infrastructures that render the city in extremely narrow but very clear representations. In Rotterdam, public management is building and maintaining oligopticons that map, control and intervene in the illegalized disposal of waste. An analysis of two vignettes from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork finds that these oligopticons do more than simply make visible these practices of waste disposal: they engage in an exception politics that frames transgressing as non-participatory, non-modern and abject. The ethnographic vignettes emphasize the salience of intimate and haptic knowledge of urban ecologies. They are hence anarchival: they rebel against the epistemologies of archival data collection by oligopticons. By turning around on the logic of exception, the paper suggests the need to open alternative avenues to attend to, and care for, people and urban ecologies in dark infrastructures: those infrastructures that escape assignment and control by oligopticons.