Technopolitics as a Sociomaterial Process
An Infrastructural Study of the Berlin Wall
Nils Alexander Teschner Technopolitics as a Sociomaterial Process An Infrastructural Study of the Berlin Wall
Master Thesis
Nils Alexander Teschner (né Schrader)
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Lissa L. Roberts
Second Reader: Dr. Michael H. Nagenborg
MSc Philosophy of Science, Technology and Society (PSTS)
Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences University of Twente July 2019 Table of Contents
1. Introduction 1 1.1 Historical Inventory 2 1.2 Multiple perspectives on infrastructures 6 1.2.1 Multiple scales of and on infrastructures 7 1.2.2 Infrastructures and/as environment 8 1.2.3 Transcending modern binaries 9 1.2.4 From multiscalar to multi-level 11 1.3. Thesis outline 12 2. The Berlin Wall as paradoxical infrastructure 14 2.1 Introduction 14 2.2 Approaching the Berlin Wall as infrastructure 14 2.2.1 The Wall's infrastructural poetics 14 2.2.2 Poetic paradoxes 16 2.2.3 Mutual orientation—Poetics across scales 17 2.3 A dance of materiality and poetics: The Wall’s becoming 19 2.3.1 Emerging poetics and barbed wire 20 2.3.2 Fortification: The becoming of a death strip 21 2.3.3 Appeasing the West: Technopolitics through co-evolution 23 2.4 Conclusion 26 3. From Bricks to Pain: Infrastructural Violence and somato-politics 27 3.1. Introduction 27 3.2. Introducing infrastructural violence 27 3.3 Wall disease and infrastructural violence 30 3.3.1 The emergence of the Wall disease 30 3.3.2 Violence through broken connections 31 3.3.3 Disentanglement and urbicide 33 3.3.4 Infrastructures, bodies and psychosomato-politics 36 3.4 Conclusion 37 4. Repairing, Appropriating, Remembering: The Wall’s cultural politics 39 4.1 Introduction 39 4.2 Destruction and Repair: The micro-politics of material engagement 39 4.2.1 The creative destruction of wall pecking 39 4.2.2 Repairing concrete chunks: Far more than restoration 42 4.3 Proliferation and re-use: Politics of memory 45