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.