Making Light Work: Infrastructures and Their Many Publics

This article explores the multiplicity of publics that are enacted in relation to infrastructures. We take the case of street lighting infrastructure in the UK in 2013/4, at a point when innovations in light emitting diode (LED) and smart technologies were making the infrastructuring of street lighting newly visible. Multifarious, emergent and recursive publics were variously enacted by lighting professionals, researchers, and publics themselves as part of this infrastructuring. We argue that these publics were constituted vis-à-vis other actors and entities and coalesced around configurations and attributions of knowledge, uncertainty and ignorance. “Supra-publics” indexed long-standing local knowledge gained by lighting professionals. “Occasioned publics” vis-à-vis technocratic expertise emerged when infrastructures became newly visible as lighting professionals (or researchers) consulted publics. “Citizen publics”, mobilized vis-à-vis governance, carefully marshalled experiential knowledge alongside newly acquired technical knowledge. These categories are neither comprehensive nor mutually exclusive, and their contours have shifted since our fieldwork as domains of knowledge and ignorance have changed. However, they are indicative of the multiplicity of publics that are part of lighting infrastructure in liberal states, and suggestive of ways in which publics are not stable entities, but rather in constant flux, as infrastructuring makes light work.