A Performativist Take on Resilience in Infrastructure Maintenance

The present paper explores resilience in the context of performativist approaches to Science and Technology Studies (STS). In being predominantly associated with a realist ontology, the traditional notion of resilience is controversial in a performativist STS-context. The purpose of the present paper is to make a preliminary attempt at re-situating resilience in this context. Thus, it pushes the basic performativist point that although infrastructures have been planned and designed to be highly controlled systems, they nevertheless escape the boundaries of control. Consequently, rather than conceptualizing resilience as pertaining to objective traits of infrastructure systems, the paper explores resilience as emerging from infrastructure maintenance specifically construed as ontological experimentations.