States of Disrepair: Politics of Infrastructural Brokenness and Repair Along Romanian Railroads

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the contemporary nature of public infrastructures in Romania in a postsocialist context of public ownership, chronic underfunding, and enduring disrepair, by focusing on the railway industry. It does so by proposing the notion of "infrastructure regime" as a conceptual framework that captures the concurring articulation and the contradictions of three dimensions of infrastructure: governance and organization, the political entanglements of citizenship, affect, and mobility that socio-technical systems afford, and the material practices of maintaining and repairing these systems. The Romanian Railways (CFR) were chief vectors of industrial coordination and state-sponsored welfare in the state-socialist substantive economy. Deemed the nation's "main circulatory system," they were hyper centralized and designed to provide universal access to collective mobility. Policy makers tried to repair the subsequent postsocialist decline of CFR by relaxing state control and breaking up the enterprise into smaller public companies at the behest of the EU and international lenders. I argue that the so-called "breaking of the rails" has introduced new contradictions within a now disjointed system that is simultaneously disaffiliated from the state and partially encompassed by it. These contradictions are mediated by and materialized in the degraded qualities of the railroad, which, in turn, underpin the symbolic devaluation of rail services and the work and identities of its servants. Ethnographically, this study focuses on how passengers and repair workers experience and make sense of these ruined, albeit functional, material technologies politically and symbolically. While inherently degenerative, brokenness also appears to have generative powers, as passengers and workers deploy varied practical means toward mending brokenness or demanding that it be fixed by the state. Methodologically, this approach required access to both the user's end and to the hidden abode of repair. This was done through mobile ethnography and archival research in the passengers' complaint records filed at Bucharest's North Station, and through participant observation of labor practices at the Bucharest Depot, Romania's most important rail repair shop. Here, at the Depot, technicians at the firm Locomotive Repair maintain machines owned by the firm CFR Călători, the public operator of passenger services. Both firms cohabiting at the Depot have emerged from the splintering of CFR and exhibit the functional contradictions that pervade the system. By focusing on people's embodied experiences with the degraded material qualities of public railroads, this study investigates the affective, semiotic, and practical consequences of brokenness to understand the politics of infrastructures after Communism. It thus speaks to three domains of anthropological interest: 1) the constitution of modern societies through socio-technical systems, 2) the experience of the enduring effects of post-Communist transformations of the state, and 3) the role that materiality plays in everyday politics. In this dissertation, I specifically ask what the postsocialist desolation of a railroad system, one deeply imbued with socialist modernist ideology, tells us about the contemporary fate of the commons. It also explores how train passengers and rail service technicians reify the state through their encounters with public railroads on the one hand, and on the other, how they strive to negotiate their relations to the state and their identities by presenting themselves as subjects worthy of care and recognition. Ultimately this manuscript demonstrates how public infrastructures remain embedded in a specific social, political, historical, and economic context, making them ambiguous signs of postsocialist destruction and resilience.