Larkin’s ‘Promising Forms’ argues that infrastructure must be analysed not only as technical function but as political aesthetics. The iconic idea is that roads, cables, electrical systems and switchboxes address subjects through form: they organise desire, authority, expectation and sensory life before they deliver any service. Its theoretical contribution is to expand infrastructure studies beyond material circulation and technopolitics into the domain of aesthetic force, where promise becomes palpable through concrete semiotic vehicles. Methodologically, the chapter reads infrastructure as a form-bearing ensemble, attending to interfaces between humans and machines and to the political rationalities condensed in technical objects. Its conceptual operation is aesthetic infrastructuralism: form becomes the medium through which power is felt, imagined and contested. The bridge to the wider field joins anthropology, STS, media theory, political aesthetics and urban infrastructure studies.
