Infrastructural Critique: Between Reproduction and Abolition

Conditions of Possibility                                                       

From the beginning of my involvement in the field of art and cultural production, whether I was practicing as an academic, a writer, an organizer, an editor, my focus has always been, in one way or another, on conditions of possibility, whether those conditions are considered formal, social, economic, historical, or ontological. These conditions of possibility include the existence and allowances of a demarcated field of practice, as well as, self-reflexively, or perhaps paradoxically, the practices that transpire in that field. Throughout all my work, I have always wanted to know the conditions of legibility for practices to register in a field even when they might originate from elsewhere, and how practices originating in that field can work transversally or away from its demarcated boundaries. So, conditions for and in a field, but also the composition of that field, along the vectors of objective and subjective determination by race, class, gender, and so forth.

In other words, since before the beginning, my experience and thus my understanding of culture has been collective, with the social and personal dimensions always embedded in the conceptual. Because my entry to participation was at first in zine culture, which was very much defined by riot grrrl, punk, and infinite configurations of both projects and structures that were DIY, the artistic and political, material and method, were co-constitutive; the milieu in its positioning was defined by antagonism, not just politically on specific issues in a right-wing cultural environment, but toward the modes of individualized celebrity and mystified creativity typical of mainstream culture. Thus, it was always clear that the ways of organizing artistic production were as critical and political as anything that could be isolated as a work or as a product, and in fact the distinctions between these, which can also be read along the process/product binary, were always contingent matters of practice and proximity.

So this was the 1990s, obviously, the last moment in capitalist modernity, especially in the West, or the imperial/colonial rich world, when something like a self-sustaining and oppositional underground culture could be said to exist. And yet even then the principles and practicalities of separation from what was at the time called the “mainstream” were starting to break down—a process that perhaps culminates in the contemporary obsolescence of the concept of “selling out,” in terms of the accompanying structure of feeling no less than the economic agenda of rugged independence it represented. Of course, many things are obvious now that would have been obvious to many also at the time: that is, as a dissident cultural milieu in the US, it was a sphere of privilege, or, in a more materialist vocabulary, of “resource advantage.” Predominantly white and English-speaking, it thus exerted a disproportionate cultural influence even as a reference or a model of “underground” and independent musical, publishing, and artistic practice. And gender was a much more visible battle than other group identifiers ascribed for oppression and exploitation—at least within the zine milieu. Certainly, there were many other milieus in the “underground” (you only need to think of the Detroit techno collective Underground Resistance), so it’s important to come to this as only one instance of an antagonistic/self-sufficient cultural logic, again, both in terms of structure and composition. Nor do I mean to assert that this is a logic that is extinct or has been made extinct by social media platforms and their powers of capital and attention concentration and fragmentation. Funded, unfunded, less-funded, variably funded—vestiges of DIY culture continue to exist, especially in poetry and artist publishing, to take some obvious examples, though the taboo of “selling out” is perhaps less generalized across these cultures, at least in a North American-European context.

Conditions of Speculation

This very contained flashback furnishes a backdrop for explaining what I have come to refer to as infrastructural critique. In my approach, attention to infrastructure is inseparable from the attempt to develop a materialist theory of “conditions.” This means the material conditions of the institution’s reproduction, both in and beyond the art field. We need a theory that doesn’t rely on idealist philosophical paradigms and yet can simultaneously attend to the so-called historical and social ontology of art. Beyond this, it needs to engage with the space of social struggle and organizing, the field of work, and everything that the field conceals or excludes, both within and beyond its own institutional environment. At its far limit, it should also be able to deal with questions of social abstraction, which, as I will argue throughout this book, also means with colonialism and race. 

For me, these connections emerged organically, in the course of my writing and teaching and through reflection on the relations between my practical and intellectual concerns. In the years I was preparing this work, in my academic job, I was pursing my abiding concern with artistic labor and the politics of its “exceptionality” via a Masters’ program in “culture industry,” which both inhabited and turned inside out the genre of the “cultural and creative industries”: a managerial formation on offer under similar labels across the field of higher education. In class, we would spend a lot of time discussing divergences between success ideology and empirical failure, and how part of the systemic character of that failure is the erosion of social institutions like the welfare state or global trends of financialization, underdevelopment, wage arbitrage, and industries of extraction from dispossession of land to the harvesting of data. We would also talk about the infrastructures of psychic extraction, about individualization of responsibility, or blame, for economic failure perceived as personal failure—inability to sufficiently leverage or mobilize your own human and social capital—and about the (ostensible) impossibility of collective action in an industry driven by personal branding, unless that action can itself be branded.

As we investigated the “exceptionality” of artistic labor—the idea that such labor is constitutively distinct from labor of other kinds, including wage labor—our conversations would often return to the conditions of the field: its infrastructure. And over time these discussions compelled a shift in my thinking, from a notion of critique that called on a certain discourse or performance of citizenship—what we could call, essentially, a discourse of institutional accountability—to one that took a more “immanent” view on the means of production of the institution or its conditions of possibility: a shift from institutional to infrastructural critique. Of course, an institution can be a type of infrastructure, but the point is to move from a standpoint that takes the institution as its horizon to one which takes the institution as a historical and contingent nexus of material conditions, amenable to rearrangement through struggle and different forms of inhabitation and dispersal. As I tried to examine the different levels at which infrastructure operates in this analysis, I also came to ask how infrastructures repeat across scales, as well as how the speculative force of aesthetics can clarify, open up, and repurpose these infrastructures in investigative and/or “transversal” political situations, or dis-appropriate them or their constituent parts for other ends.1

As its most basic move, the shift from institutional critique to infrastructural critique has to decide whether the horizon that critique aims for in the space of art as a “space of permissible critique” is the institution or the social (and geophysical) world.2 My first answer is to say “surely, it’s both,” but also to designate the ways in which each term folds into the other, meaning that infrastructural critique as I conceive it deals with infrastructure both within and beyond art, but does not take a static view on the relevant scales and boundaries. This implies a refusal of the metonymic move that simply treats art as a microcosm of social reality, while also insisting on specificity—the specificity of particular social spaces with particular material possibilities or “affordances.” My approach is always to think strategically. There needs to be a double focus on infrastructure both in and beyond institutions. This entails zeroing in on their conditions of reproduction, and drawing speculative lines of solidarity from there. As Andreas Petrossiants has written, “the terms—artist, tenant, worker—aren’t specific classes but, rather, forms of exploitation or forms of (re)production that can be overcome by creating solidarity networks across occupation, across fields, across income levels.”3

Conditions of Struggle

This open-ended approach to infrastructure can also be thought of as speculative. Over the past years of critically engaged participation in the sphere of activity that has until recently been neutrally known as “contemporary art,” I have been developing a constellation of ideas which speak about the imbrication of art with political and economic forces in the disaster capitalism of our era, from the standpoint of the production of subjectivity and labor. I came to call this constellation “speculation as a mode of production.” In my 2018 book of that title, I explored art and financial capitalism as two institutions of contemporary life that deploy a surplus of uncertainty—speculation, risk—to ground their claims on value.4 At the same time, I was interested to underline how both are mechanisms of making labor “disappear” using the spells of creativity, freedom, and self-investment.

With the simultaneous expansion of finance and art in the speculative mode of production, the boundaries between art and labor become indistinct: the laborer becomes an entrepreneur, creatively speculating on their “human capital,” and the artist becomes a prototype for the “post-Fordist” laborer.5 But with this hypothesis of speculative identity, a contrary proposition emerges: speculative identity is also a non-identity in the sense defined by Theodor W. Adorno, in the sense that identity thinking must be thought against itself and yet thought cannot help but identify.6 Speculative identity is both sameness and difference. This experience of difference can then recursively enter into the construction of a critical approach that receives its orientation from non-identity and hence strives to remain speculative at the level of concepts as well as practical intervention.

In all of my work, I try to come back to categories as ways of staking out relations of antagonism, rather than categories as fixed classes of things, or identities. This comes back to “non-identity” as a form of social experience, and the wish to deflect the reification of boundaries in political and artistic praxis. I remain committed to the notion that capitalism is the total enemy (relation) that incorporates and generates all others, speaking and thinking historically and systematically rather than mythically or ontologically. Since capital totalizes and separates, as part of its own valorization and the suppression of the life of everything else, what this means is that we have to fight in specificity, as Black queer feminist socialist movements have shown from the 1970s right up to the present.7 It’s necessary to know what is based in a common world, and what is a specific fight based on how that world has identified and subjugated you, and where struggles overlap or diverge.8 So, when saying that capitalism is the total enemy, what that has to mean is that capitalism = anti-Black exterminism, capitalism = misogyny, capitalism = ecological collapse. None of these are incidental or simply included in a higher term; they are synonyms, and it’s obtuse to try and separate them, logically or empirically. 

This approach to categories governs my approach both to speculation as a mode of production and infrastructural critique. In the period in which the focal point of my research shifted from the former to the latter, the forms of speculative finance that we talked about in class have developed—have been allowed to develop—to a point where they are functionally insulated from catastrophic social and ecological tendencies that they have institutionalized, rewarded, and found ways to profit from for a long time. The institutions of art have often served as consensus-building mechanisms in this totality, structurally and ideologically laundering the imperative to extract profit while offering avenues of representation of alterity that remain notional on the whole so far as their own conditions of possibility are not at stake. For the time being, the reflective shimmer of a politically radicalized art necessarily feeds off what it critiques, until, I would propose, it can learn to operate transversally with struggles in the infrastructure—both in the arts and elsewhere. Ultimately this may imply an infrastructural vision that will make art as it is currently practiced impossible, because both capitalism and the autonomy it grants to art would have disappeared into the black hole opened by our present situation and the historical movements to overcome it.

[…]

A Huge Hovering Bear

At a fundamental level, infrastructural critique begins from the assumption that it is possible to completely sidestep all the handwringing over the limits of the institution and instead acknowledge what resources are there, how they can be repurposed, which ones cannot, and which ones are needed. As my comments on “Everything Remains to Be Done” suggest, the whole premise of infrastructural critique is to forget about insides and outsides as limits or borders for us—which is what 1980s and ’90s institutional critique often boiled down to, until its austerity was upgraded and franchised by relational aesthetics—and take them up as part of the productive equipment afforded to us by the art field, both economically and ideologically.9 The attempt to leave behind the boundedness of the institution is in turn related to an ambivalence I have always felt towards sectarianism of all kinds, in leftist and communist as well as art-field politics: the search for radical coherence, a position-taking that is not so much an escape from a feeling of marginality as a direct expression of it, though it often takes a displaced form. What does this book provide instead? A non-deterministic approach to social antagonism, especially from the viewpoint of practice, committed to taking the speculative subject, the self-optimizing doom of creativity, ingrained in artistic subjectivation, and the confidence in experimentation those forms of education can also impart, and turning that inside out as a resource for experimental forms of connecting and infrastructures of organizing. The first section of the book will lay out the fundamental categories and timelines required for an approach to infrastructural critique; while the second will set out a series of categories or “prismatic drills” through which to conceive a speculative politics within the infrastructure. This is, I argue, one way of thinking speculation and infrastructure alongside one another; what I propose is that the “means of abstraction” or speculation also need to be thought from the bottom-up and inside-out, in conjunction with social struggle, and the question of abstraction is not just about control but also can give us a relational view on artistic and economic practices as they constitute social forms: the smallest meaningful unit of a politically entangled art-historical, art-theoretical method.

Where this takes us will be examined in the following chapters, but maybe a final touchstone for now is Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Borne, with its huge hovering bear that terrorizes everyone in a town but then its fur becomes a rich repository for scavengers when it’s asleep. The allegory can accompany us as we try to think the relation of institutional to infrastructural critique and of critique to antagonism as the boundary between inside and out breaks down—insofar as it can be said to have existed in the first place.