Infra-Economy: Braudel's Structures of Everyday Life

So back in the Winter, I re-read Fernand Braudel. I had encountered the early portions of The Structures of Everyday Life before. But this time, I believe I found what I was looking for.

For some vague reason, I've been pondering quite a lot the origins of capitalism. The basic logic is this: I'm thinking these days about infrastructure (and how things become infrastructural). From the STS crowd, I've come to appreciate that infrastructure is characterized as much by humans, norms, and institutions as it is by specific technological artifacts. So, as I considered the large infrastructure projects that characterize (indeed, usher in) the modern era, it's hard not to wonder where the cart and where the horse should go.

So I began thinking about capitalism generally as a framing device, an infra-infrastructure that foregrounds the construction of canals, road systems, railroads, etc. And that led me to think about Braudel. Well, first I was thinking about the Hanseatic League (i.e., the emergence of free cities that had for themselves a bevy of infrastructure problems and set about addressing them). But my curiosity about the League, as a protocapitalist set of institutional arrangements, is really curiosity about the origins of capitalism. Or perhaps I'm still interested in the League, but can't find a good overview or history in English (let me know if you have any recommendations).

Okay, so what do I find in Braudel? His explanation of his enterprise: In the emergence of modern economies, we really witness the rise of several economies. The one we study in textbooks, the economics of "production and exchange", comprises those economic activities that are readily observable. And hence, economics confines itself "within this privileged arena".

But Braudel is interested in "another, shadowy zone, often hard to see for lack of adequate historical documents, lying underneath the market economy: this is the elementary basic activity which went on everywhere....This rich zone, like a layer covering the earth, I have called for want of a better expression, material life or material civilization."

The things we take for granted in the study of economics that focus on the former, readily formalizable topics are in fact wholly reliant on the latter, inchoate realm of everyday life. Braudel refers to it, in fact, as the "infra-economy," providing already a set of "active social hierarchies" upon which the market economy could base itself.

Relating this basic position for a moment to the process of infrastructuration, consider for a moment the famous example of marketing automobiles in the hinterlands described by Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch ("Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States," Technology and Culture, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Oct., 1996), pp. 763-795). The appropriation of cars as mobile power units rather than as transportation devices is an example par excellence of the law of unintended consequences. Or really, unintended repurposing. But what Braudel's approach bids us to consider is that the world of latent demand is framed by everyday life. In other words, system-builders construct based on their perceptions of this vie quotidienne.