As Paul Edwards notes, infrastructure “simultaneously shape and are shaped by…the condition of modernity,” even as the “large, panoptic systems” associated with modernity shift toward the “distributed and dispersed control” associated with the digital networks and technologies of our present. Contemporary forces of security, financialization, and control do not simply and immediately replace modernist infrastructure but integrate with and work alongside it. The persistence of this infrastructural modernity, however, opens it to the possibility of sabotage, resistance, and repurposing, which in turn motivates continuing processes of securitization. Such dynamics in turn raise critical questions about how infrastructure mediates power, precarity, and dissent in both everyday life and aesthetic form. 

This panel draws attention to the global nature of these processes by exploring the dialectical relation of security and sabotage as evinced in aesthetic encounters with the lingering, and often crumbling, infrastructures of the past and present. We welcome comparative and transnational approaches to literature, film, and other media that activate modernist and postmodernist infrastructure as sites of ongoing concern for the state and its subjects, uncovering their embroilment in security processes while simultaneously imagining possibilities of sabotage, destruction, and refusal that reactivate them as arenas of resistance.