Types of Infrastructures of Mystery
Through our conversations with people in different workshop settings, we have explored multiple ways of organizing infrastructures of mystery conceptually. Out of this and out of the literature on infrastructures and social structures more generally emerged the idea that infrastructures can best be defined as being a combination of ‘actual’ resources guided by ‘symbolic’ rules and schemas (as described by Vervoort and Bendor in a paper that is currently being revised). One way to organize thoughts that we have offered to our workshop participants has been to distinguish them by type. But as we will see, some of these proposed types are more clear than others, which challenge the idea that the ‘actual’ and the ‘symbolic’ are so clear cut. In our two online workshops in late 2025 we proposed a number of types that received elaborations:
Physical infrastructures: these could be buildings and locations for religious practice, for engaging with nature, for physical exercise, for psychedelic trips, and more. Specific suggestions offered by our participants included: Communal planting areas in city streets; mycelial and root networks; funeral sites and graveyards; old machines with no purpose except to be loved by people; geology, and open air food markets with all their abundance of food being available.
Financial infrastructures: straightforward examples of these could be funds and foundations for spiritual organizations and projects, funding for religious holidays, the financial aspects of religious organizations and more. However, many types of funding might not be obviously infrastructure of mystery, but could certainly be mobilized for this purpose. This includes much of the funding that goes into the cultural and creative sectors. Unusual suggestions by participants included stock markets (unpredictable and erratic), saving circles in Kenya, the Mandala fund for women’s education; and funding for research with indeterminate outcomes.
Temporal infrastructures: these are infrastructures that make time available as a resource. Think for instance of religious holidays or times in the day dedicated to be taken off work for prayer or meditation. The line here between infrastructures and social practices is thin and can get confusing – examples from participants often included things that could easily considered practices such as retreats, psychological time travel to get in touch with ‘inner children’, and living by temporal patterns dictated by natural signs. Other examples, that also connect to the concept of meaning infrastructures described below, are crip and queer time, and the difference between ‘kairos’ (the time of significant events and experience, non-linear) and ‘chronos’ (regular, linear time).
Digital infrastructures: compared to temporal infrastructures, digital infrastructures are easier to identify if we stick with the definition of infrastructure as ‘actual resources guided by symbolic rules and schemas’. Much of the digital world is infrastructural, consisting of platforms, assets, physical hardware, networks between users and more. Specific mentions by participants included LLMs (mentioned with some humorous flair); video games; and satellite and remote sensing technology.
Communities and networks: a network of connections is a resource that can be mobilized depending on different guiding ideas and intentions. Think of the ways in which people use their social networks to drum up political support or collective action. Examples mentioned by our participants included women’s friend groups, Dungeons and Dragons groups, and networks of different groups involved in research processes.
Knowledge infrastructures: this is a category that has a lot of overlap with the others. Knowledge infrastructures can be understood as infrastructures that allow knowledge to be mobilized as a resource. Such infrastructures include teaching programs, archives and data storage, support structures for the training of skills, and more. Infrastructures that make knowledge available fall in this category. Our participants mostly asked questions around what it means to infrastructure for knowledge, and how this is connected to our final, and perhaps most ambiguous initial category. Interesting comments here in our workshops asked – what about infrastructure for not knowing? What about infrastructure for appreciating complexity?
Meaning infrastructures: Our most unstable and ambiguous proposed category that ultimately requires a different labelling from the rest. What does it mean to have meaning infrastructures? We broke this down into two categories: goals and mandates, and stories and metaphors. In both cases, our definition of infrastructures (actual resources guided by symbolic rules and schemas) already contain the duality of actuality and meaning/the symbolic. When we talk about mandates and goals as meaning infrastructures, this gets a bit messy. It is, however, useful to mention, because of the ways in which changes in meaning can have strong infrastructural power. If we change the name or goal of an organization occupying a building, let’s say the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development is suddenly called the Copernicus Institute for Spiritual Pluralism, or something like that, it could be said that this is an act of infrastructuring for a new meaning. The name could be said to become meaning infrastructure that makes it easier for new social practices to take place (for instance those to do with pluralistic spiritual concerns). The same is true for myths and narratives. The story of a Christian heaven could be understood to be meaning infrastructure because it is real for many people and it provides a reified conceptual basis on which to build ethics, hopes and fears, and spiritual practices. On the other hand, the ‘infrastructure’ of core myths and metaphors aligns very well with the conceptualization of imaginaries, discourses and ideologies. One unusual mention by a participant was the notion of ‘emptiness’ as an infrastructure that creates space in meaning making; other people mentioned accounts of indigenous worldviews.
Other infrastructural categories: Building on this question about meaning infrastructures, participants proposed additional, overlapping categories. These included spiritual infrastructures; metaphysical infrastructures; and musical infrastructures; infrastructure for ontology; and infrastructure for peeling back reality. Examples of such infrastructures included systems that some people believe to be a part of real metaphysics, such as the Akashic Records or the Enneagram. While many of these categories could easily fit under the category of ‘meaning infrastructures’ or even entirely taken out of the infrastructure category and placed under ‘imaginaries, ideology’ and so on, there seems to be something valuable in keeping the infrastructural perspective of them active, if only to challenge the practical but sometimes doubtful stark division between the ‘actual’ and ‘symbolic’ dimensions of infrastructures.