There were very good reasons, in the last quarter of the 20th century, to claim that the personal is political. One could see the #MeToo movement as its (late but) direct consequence. It may be more accurate, however, to see two approaches converging in #MeToo and its aftermath. One narrowly retributive approach is focused on denouncing offenders, sending them to courts and to prison, in order to balance the harm they have caused with the appropriate punishment they deserve. While this approach counts on the collective deterrence-effects of punishment, it remains based on an individualistic premise of personal responsibility. Another more transformative approach incriminates not only abusive individuals, but a larger ‘rape culture’, which was of course comforted by the rarity of actual punishment for rape crimes, but which had a much broader extension within our social structures, collective imaginaries, and mental prejudices. It is only at this level that the personal can be understood as political: it pertains to the collective duty of our common political institutions to protect women from sexual abuse. What one rapist feels entitled to commit is not (only) a matter of his ‘personal choice’, but (also) a matter of collective, political responsibility – raising the question of what policies, laws, regulations and institutions ought to be set in place to prevent, as much as possible, the general causal processes leading to actual violence.

When pushed to its consequential limit, transformative justice attempts to identify the structural causes that help explain personal behavior.¹ In her investigation on the meaning of consent, Clara Serra has persuasively shown that inquiring into the causal infrastructures that condition our personal behaviors leads to disturbing questions about the ethical (if not legal) status of our individual capacity to choose and consent.² The current all-out attack against ‘wokism’ may be interpreted as an ideological defense-reaction against the truly transformative implications of understanding the personal as political. Beyond a rather traditional ‘culture war’ between the (far-)left and the (far-)right, what is at stake is not only our political bend, but also our shared conceptions of causality and individuality – insofar as these conceptions are being reshaped by a growing awareness of how much infrastructures matter.

Infrastructure Studies are a surprisingly recent development in social analysis. In the English language, they have emerged during the last four decades. While, from a scholarly point of view, they are closely associated with Science and Technology Studies, they also seem to surf on a broader political wave deeply rooted in a (post-)Marxist tradition. As our growth-oriented productive mega-machines have to face new constraints brought by ‘the end of cheap nature’,³ the most radical analyses of the Capitalocene have clearly identified infrastructures as the main site of political struggles in the years ahead, as illustrated in books by the French Invisible Committee (2014, 37, 41):

This conception of infrastructures implicitly focuses on their physical materiality: we are led to imagine them as human-built systems of material substrates that fulfill needs, providing basic services not spontaneously given by nature, and therefore establishing new forms of dependency towards them once they have been established. By asserting that ‘power resides in the infrastructures of this world’, the Invisible Committee radicalizes a common intuition about ‘political ecology’: infrastructures are a matter of ecology, insofar as they provide the human-made ‘environments’ which condition our possible forms of life; making decisions about our common infrastructures is intrinsically political, insofar as our future social life, for generations to come, will be determined by the way these infrastructures have been designed and implemented. Launch the planning and construction of at least six (and up to fourteen) new nuclear power plants – as French President Emmanuel Macron did without any democratic consultation or debate in 2025 – and billions of people’s lives will be deeply affected by this decision, not only during the 50 years of the plants’ operations, but for the 100 000 years when dangerous nuclear waste will have to be managed and controlled (at a cost nobody has yet started to seriously figure out).

If the political is now infrastructural, it certainly is not democratic: ‘the technical configuration of worlds’ is left to engineers, economists and executives dramatically removed from our conception and practices of civic agency. This may be why the Anthropocene fails to capture popular engagement: among all the anthropoi (ανθροποι) concerned by infrastructural design, only a minuscule elite of (mostly) andres (ανδρες) find themselves in a position to decide how our common scene will be structured. Hence the paradox: the political may now be infrastructural, but the infrastructural remains deeply a-political (in our common imaginary and in our current decision-making processes).

To better understand this gridlock – and hopefully to break it up – one needs to consider the very special properties of infrastructures. Luca Corchia and Andrea Borghini have accurately described

Not only do infrastructures shape current and future human agency, but their material ‘thingness’ always carries with itself an institutional and an imaginary dimension. Airport buildings and runways are not only entangled with airplanes and kerosene, but also with institutions (airline companies, with their hierarchies made up of top executives, pilots, flight crews, ground crews) and with shared representations (the possibility and desire to cross the world to enjoy a family holiday or to spend a winter week-end on a hot and sunny island).