Abstract/Summary

Alternation between mundane invisibility and spectacular foregrounding is a critical touchstone of infrastructural aesthetics. Moments of infrastructure failure, which mediate between these states, therefore attract disproportionate attention despite causing scholars to focus on things that no longer function as infrastructure. This article seeks to escape this impasse through analysing cultural artefacts for evidence of processes which are inconspicuous but nevertheless constitute the happenings of infrastructure. Through four short essays which engage with Under the Gaslight (1867), a sensation drama which interweaves melodramatic narratives with infrastructural spaces and temporalities, we introduce three techniques for navigating the representational slipperiness of infrastructural processes and relations. We suggest that following fictional characters’ engagements with infrastructures can disclose the experiential textures of mundane infrastructural functioning, that engaging with fiction across historical distance can defamiliarise formerly mundane infrastructural processes and render them spectacular, and that examining the infrastructural promises embedded in melodrama can foreground infrastructure’s temporalities.