Get In Left Field
Infrastructure and Its Discontents, Essay No. 6
The sound reached him before anything else.
Not quite a crack, not quite a thud, something between the two, the sound a tennis ball makes against a borrowed bat on a Tuesday afternoon in early summer when school is finally out and the day belongs entirely to those who show up. He heard it from half a block away and started shuffling toward it without deciding to.
The game had already started. Four kids spread across a patch of asphalt and scrub grass at the edge of the park, running the bases, three flattened squares of cardboard one of them had kept from a recent move, the kind of cardboard that comes from packing up an apartment quickly and starting over somewhere new. The bat belonged to someone’s foster dad, who had left it leaning against the stoop one morning. Nobody had asked. It had simply become available, and availability in that place and that summer was its own kind of generosity.
He arrived winded and uncertain, the way you arrive when you weren’t there at the start and have to find your place in something already in motion. They looked at him. Someone said something at his expense, which he couldn’t quite catch, and two others laughed, and then someone else said get in left field, and just like that he was in it.
He spent the next two hours inside something he would not have known how to name. Not happiness exactly. Something more like recognition, the specific feeling of being known well enough to be teased, of mattering enough to be given a position in the field, of belonging to a group that had not been assembled by adults or organized by institution but had simply arrived, the way children arrive when the summer is long and the afternoon is open and there is a bat and a ball and enough cardboard for three bases.
When he finally went home, the feeling came with him.
It was still there the next afternoon, sitting on his stoop, listening to the same sound from across the road.
He has thought about this, sitting here. Not systematically, he is fourteen after all, and the afternoon is long, and his neighbors are across the road laughing at something he cannot quite hear. He has noticed things in the way a person thinks when they have time and nowhere comfortable to go.
The sidewalk is broken. It has been broken for as long as he can remember. The road has no crosswalk, no signal, no place to stand halfway across and let the first lane of traffic pass. The park on the other side is a public park, which he understands to mean it belongs to everyone, which means it belongs to him, which means the getting there should not require what it requires. He does not know whose job it is to fix these things. He knows it is someone’s job. He knows it has not been done. He has been to his cousin’s neighborhood, where the park has a path to it that you do not have to think about. He has noticed the difference. He is a Black boy in a American city in the early years of this century. The difference he has noticed has a history longer than he is old.
He doesn’t have a word for what he’s noticing. He only has the noticing.
Beneath the road the boy is looking at there are tracks.
Steel rails, laid when this neighborhood was a destination rather than a corridor, when the street’s organizing logic was the person crossing it rather than the vehicle passing through. The line that ran here stopped running sometime in the middle of the last century. The decision was made by people who did not live on this block, based on calculations that did not include the cost of a fourteen year old boy trying to get to the park.
What replaced it was this. The truck route. The crumbling sidewalk. The road with no crossing and no signal and no median island to rest in halfway.
The philosopher Iván Illich spent much of his life thinking about exactly this kind of substitution. He called the condition he was defending conviviality. Illich’s concept was not the beery sociability we tend think of today, but a technical description of our relationship to the tools we use. A convivial tool enhances the user’s autonomous capacity for relationship and action. It puts the person using it more fully in contact with the world and with others. A shovel. A saw. A bicycle. Its opposite, what Illich called counterproductive infrastructure, replaces that capacity with managed passage, substituting the institution’s logic for the person’s own. This infrastructure moves you efficiently toward destinations it has decided matter, at speeds it has decided are appropriate, through corridors organized around uses that have nothing to do with your crossing.
The streetcar was imperfect. But its logic was human proximity. It moved people through the city at a pace that permitted encounter, through a network dense enough that the neighborhood was its operating principle. The truck route that replaced it moves freight. The boy on the stoop is not freight. He is, in the infrastructure’s own terms, simply not relevant.
He is sitting, without knowing it, above the ghost of a different decision. The rails are still there under the asphalt, under the buckled concrete, under the packed dirt where the sidewalk gave out. They are not going anywhere. Neither, most afternoons, is he.
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas argued that we do not arrive in the world as finished selves who then decide, at our leisure, whether to engage with others. We are called into our fullest selves by the encounter itself, by the irreducible presence of another person who is not us, who cannot be fully known or categorized or assimilated, and who makes a claim on us simply by being there. He called this “the face of the other.” He did not mean the literal face, but rather the moment when another person’s particularity, their difference, their interiority, their own unique life lands on you as a kind of demand, a demand that precedes choice.
The boy on the stoop is already oriented toward this. His wondering about what his neighbors are saying, what they are laughing about, what it would feel like to be in the middle of that game rather than listening to its edges is not idle curiosity. It is the beginning of exactly the movement Levinas is describing. He is reaching toward the face of the other. He wants to be addressed by what and who is not him.
The road is holding him at the distance where that reaching cannot complete itself.
If Levinas is right that the ethical self forms in encounter rather than prior to it, then what the infrastructure is doing is not merely inconveniencing a teenager who wants to play baseball. It is intervening in a developmental process that requires proximity, repetition, and the accumulated experience of being known by people who are different from you. The teasing and the accepting. The negotiation of belonging that happens in the middle of an informal game on a lazy Tuesday afternoon. These are not only recreational. They are formative. They are how a person learns that the other is real, particular, and worth the effort of genuine attention.
The boy has felt this. On the afternoons he made it across he felt the specific warmth of belonging to something, a sort of friction associated with being known. He carries that feeling back to the stoop with him. It is what makes the distance, on the afternoons he doesn’t cross, feel like more than inconvenience.
It feels, though he would not use this word, like deprivation.
The philosopher Maria Puig de la Bellacasa argues that care is not a feeling. It is a practice, and practices require conditions. To authentically attend to another person, to be curious about their interiority, to stay with them long enough for something real to form, requires time, proximity, and enough slack in the nervous system to look up from the ground you’re navigating and see who is there.
The boy has learned, without being taught, to monitor his steps on the buckled sidewalk. He has learned the rhythm of the truck traffic well enough to feel, in his body, when a gap might be crossable. These are forms of attention, highly developed, metabolically expensive, and oriented entirely toward survival rather than encounter.
This is what hostile infrastructure costs. Not only the unmade crossings. Not only the afternoons on the stoop instead of at the park. But the attentional and relational bandwidth consumed by navigation, vigilance, and the chronic low-level work of moving through a space that was not designed with your body, your crossing, your wondering in mind. By the time the boy reaches the other side, on the afternoons he reaches it, he has already spent something. The ease genuine encounter requires, the capacity to be present to another person rather than to the ground beneath your feet, has been partially consumed before the game even begins.
Puig de la Bellacasa calls this “staying with”, the practice of remaining attentive to what is particular and other, long enough and closely enough for care to become knowledge and knowledge to become relationship. It is not a luxury, but rather a fundamental condition of ethical and political life. A person who has never been able to stay with others long enough for that accumulation to happen is not morally diminished. They have been structurally prevented from developing a capacity the infrastructure around them treated as irrelevant.
The boy on the stoop is not incurious. He is burning his curiosity on the crossing.
What he is doing, on this stoop on this Tuesday afternoon, is political philosophy. The kind that arrives when the built environment makes its argument clearly enough that a person of ordinary intelligence and no particular training can feel the shape of the injustice before they can name it. The kind that starts with: this is broken, and it has been broken for a long time, and the breaking is not evenly distributed, and someone decided that, even if no one will say so.
He is not wrong. The tracks under the asphalt know it. The ghost of the streetcar knows it. Illich knew it. Levinas knew it, in his way, knew that the encounter the boy is reaching toward across that road is not incidental to human life but constitutive of it. Puig de la Bellacasa knew it, knew that care requires conditions, and that a built environment can consume those conditions so thoroughly that curiosity burns itself out on navigation before it ever reaches another person.
The boy knows it too. He arrived at it from the other direction, from the ground up, from the body outward, from the specific texture of a late Tuesday afternoon in the summer on a stoop above tracks he can barely see.
Across the road, someone hits something and there is a sound of running and laughter. He listens for a moment. He can almost make out the words.
The trucks come through, and the sound is gone.
He is still listening.
Further Reading
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1961). The foundational text for Levinas’s argument that the ethical self forms in encounter with the other rather than prior to it. His concept of the face, the irreducible presence of another person that makes a claim on you before you have decided whether and how to respond, underlies this essay’s claim that infrastructure which prevents proximity is not merely inconvenient but formative in its effects.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (2017). A philosopher of science and technology on care as a material practice rather than a sentiment, one that requires specific conditions, including time, proximity, and attentional bandwidth, which hostile environments systematically consume. Her argument that care is always situated and always dependent on infrastructure that either supports or undermines it gives this essay’s account of the boy’s attentional costs its theoretical precision.
Iván Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973). Illich’s distinction between convivial tools, which enhance the user’s autonomous capacity for relationship and action, and counterproductive infrastructure, which replaces that capacity with managed passage, underlies the essay’s reading of the streetcar and the truck route as not merely different technologies but different arguments about whose movement matters and at what scale. Still the sharpest philosophical account of what is lost when infrastructure is organized around efficiency rather than human proximity.
Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Justice (2000). The foundational text for understanding how infrastructure disinvestment is distributed across American cities, via decisions that have consistently sorted the costs of the built environment onto communities with the least political power to refuse them. The boy’s stoop is situated in a geography this book explains.
Convivial vs Counterproductive. It reminded me of the terms Sociopetal vs Sociofugal. If places are thought of as tools (infrastructure), then some tools are meant to bring us together like the modern kitchen while others are meant to keep us moving like the hallway.