Professor Darin Barney on Powerful Infrastructure, Disruptive Politics and The Importance of Being Uncertain
Professor Darin Barney (Critical Social Theory at McGill University)
In a world of rapid-fire technological change, it is important actors like Professor Darren Barney who take on the task of detangling its mysteries and discovering its repercussions. Explore Professor Barney’s impressive career and meaningful contributions to the communications field in this MBR interview.
If you make your way up to the Arts building, walk up the stairs, realize you’re going in the wrong direction and eventually stumble onto the quiet top floor of Arts West, that’s where you will find the Art History and Communications department. This is where Professor Darin Barney concocts his plans of sabotage, as his Wikipedia profile would imply. However, in truth, Professor Barney has little time for nefarious plots as he dedicates most of his time to teaching courses, working with his research group, guiding graduate students, writing books, and chairing committees. This plethora of activities leads students to believe he secretly has a doppelganger running around campus.
While his work resides in the Communications field, Professor Barney’s training is in Political Science. His studies harmoniously coincided with the rise of the Information Society:
“It was very early days in terms of the rise of network technology and digital. Technologies that we associate with the Internet today [were] really just getting started as a publicly accessible kind of infrastructure. [Simultaneously,] utopian democratic aspirations and rhetorics were attached to [its] development.”
Facing claims that the Internet would save democracy, Professor Barney decided to take a critical look at these developments in his first book, Prometheus Wired. After dedicating around 12 years of his career to the politics of digital and network technology, he shifted his focus to infrastructure and its relationship to resource economies and environmental politics. As a result, he found himself squarely in the realm of environmental communications.
Professor Barney’s work typically lies beyond the conventional definitions of environmental communications, which concerns the sharing, creation and distribution of information about environmental conditions in the public sphere. Instead, he and his research group focus more on the material aspects of the communications field.
“We're interested in the way in which environmental relations are constructed through communication practices in various ways, and that includes not just what we say about the environment or how we represent environments, but actually the kind of physical communication, infrastructures and practices through which we engage with the environments of which we are apart, and that ranges from things like transportation infrastructures to information and media.”
Like other social sciences, the communications field has come to see infrastructures in a new light. This is Professor Barney’s bread and butter as he looks at how infrastructures mediate our movements, the movements of other things and our relationship to the environment. With this perspective, extractive, industrial and even social infrastructures become intentionally and unintentionally political which is why Professor Barney emphasizes the need for close attention. Specifically, he points to disability studies as a significant impetus for thinking about the politics of infrastructure. Through various design decisions, infrastructures are all too often made to serve a specific body type while disabling another, and this generates an awareness of how these infrastructures shape lives. Disability studies also have implications in environmental communications as this perspective highlights how some infrastructures enable or disable certain environmental practices and relationships. As a point of reference, consider unrepairable technology that forces discardment and enables hyper-consumerist practices.
Professor Barney’s work in environmental infrastructures has led to some questionable biographical characterizations as his Wikipedia ‘known for’ section contains the words “disruptive politics” and “sabotage.” However, these terms are actually fairly apt in terms of his research into energy infrastructure.
“I started to look into oil and gas pipelines as a kind of medium of politics and political struggle. And that's when I got interested in [...] Resource infrastructures being sites of disruptive politics. [...] various kinds of actors, whether it's labor organizations or environmental organizations or First Nations and Indigenous communities, were seeing the energy infrastructure as a potential site for exerting a kind of political pressure through disrupting the operation of those infrastructures.”
With an eye for disruption, Professor Barney turned to investigating the politics of pipelines in Canada’s energy economy and examined the ways actors disrupted the building or operating of existing pipelines which subsequently led him to research the history and philosophy of sabotage. In contrast to popular conceptions, sabotage encompasses any activity that seeks to accomplish political goals through the material disruption or intervention of the flow of value. Individuals utilize sabotage when more conventional avenues for citizenship are highly limited or closed off. The idea of sabotage became important to Professor Barney when thinking about how resistant or oppositional politics are exercised through infrastructure.
In these ways, Professor Barney problematizes normative ways of thinking and operating in the world, which is an idea that he hopes to communicate to the students he teaches. As a professor, Barney demonstrates alternative ways of perceiving the world to encourage students to do the same. He hopes that students leave his classes suspicious of narratives that try to reduce the world’s complexity and discourage the difficult work of actively pursuing and investigating the known and unknown. As a rule, students should not go into Professor Barney’s class believing that they will have their views affirmed; rather, students should strive towards revealing and confronting complexity. Professor Barney endeavors to open up a space for less certainty, thus bolstering the urge to continuously study rather than accept pre-established perceptions. Uncertainty can most definitely seem daunting as a disposition, but Professor Barney strives to meet it with courage.
“We need courage. We need to be able to say, ‘look, we can't with any certainty predict that the world is going to be, but nevertheless, we have to act into this world. [...] We need courage to engage with people that we disagree with and hope to find some kind of path forward together. We need courage to act into a world that seems to be hopelessly divided.”