Thinking Infrastructurally: On Diversity of Aesthetics, Part 1

There is nothing left of us in the wilderness save that the wilderness kept for itself.

—Mahmoud Darwish

Amid pain, loss, and even despair, whether personal or collective, there is something else that emerges that is irreducible to the feeling that occasions it and has everything to do with survival and resistance, with politics, poetry, and art. In a dispatch from Palestine, John Berger refers to this something else as a stance of “undefeated despair”: “Despair without fear, without resignation, without a sense of defeat, makes for a stance towards the world, here, such as I have never seen before.”1 Occupation engenders despair. This is its function, and the occupier believes that despair will lead to resignation, acceptance of servility, and ultimately defeat. The infrastructure of the Israeli regime’s occupation, which is epitomized by the construction of walls—“concrete, bureaucratic, surveillance, security, racist walls”—is designed meticulously to confine, limit, and destroy any sense of a beyond-the-occupation. By killing this elsewhere, they kill “a people,” sabotage the promise of “a nation,” and engender a subject resigned to its disappearance, to its invisibility, to injustice and inequality—a subject, in short, accepting of defeat.2

Yet there is no necessary connection between despair and defeat. Apache helicopters, Merkava tanks, F-16s, two-thousand-pound bombs, and the use of an AI targeting system to ‘“accelerate target generation’ and ‘shorten kill chains’” will indeed produce despair.3 The disparity between those who have “the full arsenal of the latest military technology” and a willingness to engage in industrial scale massacres in the interest of territorial expansion and demographic control and “those who have nothing, save their names and a shared belief that justice is axiomatic” cannot ensure defeat. Those who come to know that they have nothing know in turn that they are not confined by despair. Defeat requires not only despair—a “sense that your life and the lives of those close to you count for nothing”—but an acceptance of confinement, an acceptance that there is no other horizon than that of occupation, that there is no place called Palestine and thus no such thing as a Palestinian.4 Despair aims at the destruction of the very sense of the aesthetic, of the Palestinian experience of place, of space and time. Israel’s colonial occupation is but the brutal enforcer of the “key term of the present global chaos”—“de- or re-localization.” It aims to produce clients, to forcibly “persuade people that being a client is the ultimate salvation.” And as Berger insightfully suggests, “Clients are defined by where they check out and pay, not by where they live and die.”5

The client accepts this definition and accepts in turn the destruction of the aesthetic. The aesthetic, i.e., the experience of place, is thus an eminent site of struggle, of antagonism against those who insist on enforcing the “key term” of the present global order. This is Berger’s point of departure, but it is also the implicit point of departure of the editors of Diversity of Aesthetics, Andreas Petrossiants and Jose Rosales. 

They dedicate the book to Marina Vishmidt (1976–2024), and it is, indeed, her thought that informs the editorial framework for bringing the three volumes of roundtable conversations together. This is most explicit in the first volume, “Inside and Out: Infrastructures of Critique.” Focusing on the legacy of institutional critique, specifically within the context of Strike MoMA, the discussion between Petrossiants, Michael Rakowitz, Shellyne Rodriquez, and Stevphen Shukaitis draws directly on Vishmidt’s introduction of the concept of a “drift” from the institutional to the infrastructural.6 However, both the discussion between Iman Ganji and Claire Fontaine, moderated by Rosales and entitled “Foreigners Everywhere” (volume 2), and the discussion between Saidiya Harman, Christina Sharpe, and Rinaldo Walcott, moderated by Vicky Osterweil and entitled “Looting” (volume 3), are concerned with the problem that this “drift” poses.

If “commercial colonization has gone beyond the infrastructure and has now reached the infrathin,” as Claire Fontaine provocatively suggest in the second volume, obliterating the capacity of a subject to discern a minimal difference between quality and quantity, then there is no difference between the eye and the mind.7 Everything can be integrally subjected to a calculus that exhausts the sensorium without residuum. The subject is programmable. The evisceration of a difference between concept and intuition, word and thing, interiority and exteriority, abolishes in turn the aesthetic as such. The aesthetic, if it exists, is evidence of a subject that is unprogrammable.

Diversity of Aesthetics’ effort to differentiate between forms of critique—between critique that is sanctioned, functioning as “loyal criticism,” and a form that remains diffident to the institutional site of its inscription—is an attempt to preserve the aesthetic as a form of experience that remains undomesticated, siding at least in principle with the wilderness. By shifting the “object” of critique from the institutional to the infrastructural, Vishmidt foregrounds the ways in which critique often reinforces the image of the institution’s magnanimity under the banner of inclusivity—the hollowness of which has been thoroughly exposed by the utterly tepid institutional response to the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. Infrastructural critique views “the art institution as a site of resources—material and symbolic—and calls for an opportunist deployment.”8 Art’s relation to the institution ought to be tactical.

By remaining “conspiratorially anti-institutional,” as Petrossiants and Rosales put it, the artist, curator, or critic can be lucid with respect to the institution’s claim to beneficence, and clear with respect to who their true enemy is: the class to which cultural institutions ultimately remain loyal.9 As they themselves put it:

The motivation of this series is to discuss how to variously conceive of and actualize struggle against institutions without being subsumed into the frameworks of sanctioned critique, without acknowledging the validity of those inside/outside borders unless it is to our advantage.10

Vishmidt puts it starkly in an interview with Petrossiants: “No one can avoid trying to find money to survive, and whoever pays you that money is de facto your enemy. As Tai Shani wrote, in the conclusion of a recent broadside against the servility of non-performative autonomy, ‘We should not be worrying about biting the hand that feeds us … We should eat the hand, for it is … much, much tastier than the boot.’”11 A joke that is no joke.

The starting point of the three conversations could thus be formulated as: how to think forms of critique given that art’s criticality is integral to the process of its institutionalization. If we take art’s relation to the institution (to the museum-gallery-biennial complex) as integral, the problem concerns how to locate art’s antagonism. The diversity of the aesthetic here proposed concerns, echoing Mario Tronti, tactics of refusal. If Tronti is also one of the main inspirations of the book, it is because the book’s editors turn to him to formulate the problem of the “zwieschlächtige Natur” of the artist as at once a cultural worker integrated into the field of cultural production and an artist antagonistic to the ideological functions he is forced to serve.12 The artist is at once within and against the field of cultural production, integrated into the institution but politically opposed to its ends. Even if the artist and the museum remain integrated at the economic level—to adopt the framework of Tronti’s Workers and Capital—the artist remains forever in contradiction at the political level. The distinction between the institutional and infrastructural as it operates within the three volumes aims to foreground this contradiction. The editors conceive the aesthetic as political insofar as it is inherently antagonistic to the institution to which it nevertheless belongs.

This enables the editors to approach the “aesthetic” as a site of abolition where the negativity of the dialectic is evidenced in the concrete tactical struggles against the institution. The terrain of this struggle is not only territorial and thus geopolitical but psychic.13 Institutions are designed to ensure that the process of institutionalization produces subjects that will reproduce it. Critique, for Vishmidt, and thus for Petrossiants and Rosales, begins with the primacy of the “and”—to be within and against—and thus with the gap between a system of production and its reproduction, between the institution and its infrastructure. To relate to the institution as material identifies a gap between the process of institutionalization (the inclusion of the artist within the institution) and its reproduction.14 The effective mobilization of this gap can bring the institution (within the constraints of a specific conjuncture) to a halt. The primacy of the “and” allows one to grasp the incommensurability between being within and against. Like Tronti, the editors conceive of antagonism as prior to its institutional inscription and thus, at least in principle, irrecuperable.

Infrastructural critique, as Vishmidt conceives it, is not opposed to institutional critique but shifts its focus. It is born of a refusal of the forms that institute belief in the necessity of the reproduction of its form. Infrastructure is thus the means through which institutions maintain and reproduce themselves, but it cannot be made identical with this end. As Vishmidt writes,

An institution can be a type of infrastructure, but the shift needs to be understood as moving from a standpoint which takes the institution as its horizon, thus accepting the moralized premises that perpetuate it, to one which takes the institution as a historical and contingent nexus of material conditions amenable to re-arrangement through struggle and different forms of inhabitation and dispersal.15 

Infrastructural critique is a matter of shifting or displacing the subject’s relation to its institution and thus, the institution. By divesting the institution of its moral authority, the subject is in turn divested of its commitment to its perpetuation. An institution comes with its own “ego-ideal,” and those who internalize it often develop a punishing superego that ensures that the institution’s line dance is well choreographed. This defines its moral infrastructure. Faith in this infrastructure allows one to critique the institution by differentiating its form from its content. Deviations from its form can serve to hold the institution to account without calling it into question as such and as a whole. The shift from the institutional to the infrastructural is designed to mark places within and/or without the institution whose points of leverage confront the structure with an element that divides the institution as a whole, enabling the separation of its infrastructure from the form of the institution. The shift intends to mark a difference between efforts at reform and revolution. Infrastructural critique locates a crisis in the very form of the institution and institutionalization as such.

As Vishmidt put it in her introduction to an interview with “the collective artist Claire Fontaine,” published shortly before her death and amidst the “hellfire of the genocide” in Gaza: “If the conditions of being a human in today’s world are intolerable, it follows that the labor of reproducing those conditions can become the object of sabotage.”16 Forms of critique are institutionally tolerated as long as they do not harm the Good that an institution represents. However, this presumes that this Good includes the whole of society. The process of institutionalization is the process of the cultivation of a shared moral sentiment. Any politics of form will encounter the problem that is here designated as that of shared moral sentiment. The vast share of critical practices, theoretic and artistic, are careful to not violate this moral compact that can be sabotaged. And the institution as a whole is geared towards mobilizing the whole against the would-be saboteur in the name of this Good. The act of sabotage sunders the moral reflexes that the institution has cultivated, exposing the political fault line, the rift, that divides the purported unity of the social body.17

Those who have been functionally and effectively institutionalized have indeed identified with those coordinates of the institution that define their place within it, and the act of sabotage can open up a rift in this shared identity. Depending on the institution, the institutionally placed will indeed have more or less latitude, but when the latitudinal limits are reached or breeched, the institution has mechanisms to keep its subjects in line. To be effectively institutionalized is to be effectively habituated to the institution’s structure and to know one’s place within it. This is how an institution instills within its members a “moral compass.” The saboteur, however, in and by their act, divests themself of this moral equation and thus the shared identity of those whom the institution has included. Infrastructural critique is nothing if not an unsettling of this moral compass whose function is to neutralize the subject’s antagonism. 

Against the liberal institution of an aesthetics of diversity (as proposed by the program of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, the dominant form of the institution’s sanctioning of critique which, as Saidya Hartman states, “at the end of the day, is just neoliberal governance” 18), Diversity of Aesthetics insists on the defense of the nonidentity of the subject with the form of its representation. As Rosales and Petrossiants put it in their introduction to the second volume: “Strikes become the collective practice of dis-identifying with that which makes us accomplices of power. This refusal to be an accomplice is what is at stake in Walter Benjamin’s dictum, ‘to side with the proletariat is to become a foreigner in one’s own country.’”19 The politics of aesthetics at issue here concerns the politics of institutionalization, where the interests of the institution and that of the artist and worker can be opposed through their respective relations to infrastructure.20

One is not confined by what one struggles against. Institutions will fail you. They will let you down. But they can only do so if you confer on them the moral power to do so. If you stop believing in them, you begin to see them for what they are … infrastructure—means without end.

To be continued in Part 2