How Irritants Shape Infrastructure Engineering

From a new materialist perspective, infrastructures are contingent and animated by agential forces, including the matter and objects from which they are constructed. They do not always behave as intended; instead, infrastructures-or parts of them-can become irritants. This article introduces the idea of "irritants" to highlight the disruptive and generative capacities of the material world. Through a case study of the Guri Dam in Venezuela during the 1960s, it examines how engineers responded to the jamming sluice gates that threatened the dam's stability. Drawing on Jane Bennett's notion of "thing-power," the article attributes agency to the gates themselves. Initially, engineers lacked a clear solution; and only after a prolonged process of experimentation and the introduction of new technical objects, such as custom-built grids, was the issue resolved. The article contributes to new materialist scholarship by exploring microhistorical approaches to materiality and emphasizing the agency of nonhuman entities in infrastructural history

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy) · Archaeology · Architectural engineering · Boom · Civil engineering · Construction engineering · Epistemology · Materialism · Materiality (auditing) · Political science · Scholarship · Sluice · Social science · Sociology · Engineering · History · Law · Philosophy · Water Governance and Infrastructure

• Ground Realities

  Open Access•María Ignacia Jeldes Olivares, Paul Sprute et al.•Technology and Culture•2025

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