Durabilities in the age of disruption
This essay engages with the theme of infrastructural disruption from the
perspective of a French deep-sea cable-repair ship (flying under a flag
of convenience) docked in Cape Town's harbor. This vessel sails both
the Atlantic and Indian coasts of Africa to fix malfunctions and
ruptures in the undersea infrastructure through which Internet traffic
flows between nations and continents. It is this invisible network of
thin, pale cables that hardwires the so-called “Age of Disruption”
(Stiegler, 2019). Yet the ship and the infrastructure it repairs also
bring us closer to the question of durability – that which is lasting,
persistent and constantly maintained. Using a collection of images,
photos and ethnographic vignettes, the cable-repair ship allows us to
explore durabilities along two axes. First, there are the imperial
afterlives of colonial geographies that live in underwater networks of
connectivity. Second, there is the hidden and everyday work of
maintenance that “navigates” against infrastructural disruptions and,
simultaneously, makes (digital) disruptions and innovations possible.
Through these different durabilities, the cable repair ship shores up
competing notions of disruption, at once something that can be avoided
through the work of material repair, and something that should be
embraced towards alternatives to dated legacy systems.
Samuel Giraut, Andrea Pollio and Liza Rose Cirolia
In Urban Geography (2025).