Thinking Infrastructurally: On Diversity of Aesthetics, Part 2

Diversity of Aesthetics, vol. 1 (2021). Photograph by Pietro Scammacca.

Continued from Part 1

“Integration—into what?” For Guy Debord, this was the question posed, in all its revolutionary significance, by the Watts rebellion of August 1965. The eruption of a “spontaneous riot” sparked by an “incident involving traffic police and pedestrians” was a reminder of the combustible social substance of those who belong to the class that has been “globally deprived of a future, a sector of the proletariat unable to see any significant prospect of advancement or integration.” When this “sector” acts, it is the task of a revolutionary, Debord writes, “to offer a theoretical account of the truth sought implicitly by their practical action.” Taking the promise of affluence “at its word,” the rioter destroys the very form of the commodity by refusing to accept the mediation of its socially sanctioned exchange: “the rat-race of alienated labour and increasing, ever-deferred social needs.” Debord adds: “The blacks of Los Angeles,” by forcibly insisting on the satisfaction of the “false needs” engendered by the promise of affluence (“the official value of every American”), expose the contradiction of having been “pre-selected” to belong to a society from which they are in reality excluded. At once integrated into society (through the engendering of false needs—the paradise of consumption) and repulsed from it (having been refused the means to realize the promise of affluence), the American Blacks of Watts, in their rebellion, “are the rallying point for all who refuse the logic of integration into that system—integration into capitalism being, of course, the ne plus ultra of the integration on offer.” Debord continues: “The theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity, or their power cut off, is the best possible metaphor for the lie of affluence transformed into a truth in play.” In and by this action of destroying the form of the commodity (its exchange value), the rioters free themselves, and the object, from their subjection. This destruction—“truth in play”—is incongruent with the rituals of consumption that otherwise govern everyday life. “The flames of Watts consumed consumption.”1

There is a truth in the act of looting, and this truth is exposed by the violence of the response that seeks to restore law and order. In a society organized around the defense of property, of ownership, the defense of this social relation—that is, the defense of what is owned: objects—is of greater import than the preservation of human life. Those who reject this social compact are, in such liminal cases, no longer human—less than an object, a mere thing, vermin that can be disposed of. They must be disposed of because they have rejected being “the active servant of commodities,” Debord writes. They thus refuse “the indignity of being answerable to the police,” whose raison d’être consists in ensuring “that a given product of human labour remains a commodity with the magical property of having to be paid for instead of becoming a mere fridge or rifle—a mute, passive, insensible thing, captive to the first comer to make use of it.” The act of looting, by tearing up this social contract, demonstrates, Debord suggests, that there is “another quality of the present” that is not servile to the interests of accumulation. As Debord conceptualizes it, looting in the riot is not a generic instance of theft but rather theft that breaks its very form. It is not about the accumulation, primitive or otherwise, of property but the abolition of its significance (even if only momentarily). Debord’s analysis is thus conjunctural. Looting is divisive insofar as it breaks with the very form of the commodity.2

The last volume of Diversity of Aesthetics, “Looting,” returns us to Debord’s analysis, extending it through a reflection on the Black radical tradition and the George Floyd rebellion. Vicky Osterweil suggests that looting is “a nearly irrecuperable aesthetic gesture” that “destabilizes the ideological hold of whiteness, property, and capital, and has done so, since the enslaved looted themselves singly and en masse from the plantation.”3 The discussion turns on this strange and novel use of “to loot” as a reflexive verb. 

What does it mean “to loot oneself” from subjection? It is a matter of expropriation. Developing Debord’s usage, looting itself would seem to be a destruction of the social relation that determines an object as a thing owned by another. In this sense, the abolition of slavery (and by extension, practices of decolonization) is the fundamental lens through which the abolition of property and thus the struggle against capitalism can and should be seen. Those who have been historically enslaved have an inherited unease, Saidya Hartman suggests in Diversity of Aesthetics, with property and thus with the “worldview of the bourgeoisie, the colonial scheme, the design for mastery [that] inculcates the idea ‘oh, we should want that too.’” Christina Sharpe adds: “If one has been made into property by law, then the only orientation should be looting: the orchestrated theft of oneself and others. Harriet Tubman was a looter.”4

When situated within a longer history of slave rebellions and the struggle against racism, looting is not about expressing a desire for the things one has been barred from (whether consumer goods or things needed for survival—so-called “good” looting). It is rather an articulation of a fundamental “dissatisfaction” with what is on offer. It is not about “access to commodities and material goods,” as Rinaldo Walcott suggests, but a rejection “of what those things mean.”5 It is a demonstration, to paraphrase Hartman, that the rioter is ungovernable and refuses the terms of citizenship. It is an expression of undefeated despair.

John Berger reminds us that the stance of undefeated despair can take many forms. One may become a political militant and take up arms against one’s occupiers. One may remain steadfast in their commitment to place, accepting the possibility of martyrdom. One may dedicate oneself to the struggle through a diversity of aesthetic means. Shellyne Rodriguez argues that what defines the artist is an “ability to see in space.”6 Art after Duchamp is not a matter of making but placing. Art appears in and through its infrastructural dislocation: present and absent, here and elsewhere, within and against. As Berger says of the poetry of Nazim Hikmet, invoking Rimbaud, consciously or unconsciously: “The here of all his poems is elsewhere.”7 One may be located within the confines of an institution, but its infrastructure marks the place of an elsewhere. This elsewhere belongs to no one, unconfined. It is Mahmoud Darwish’s wilderness.

If the strategy of the rich and powerful today is defined, as Berger suggests, by the activity of building walls—“walls of concrete, of electronic surveillance, of missile barrages, minefields, frontier controls, and opaque media screens”—it is the multitudinous poor, “collectively unseizable,” that have “the capacity to outlive the walls.” What the poet and the poor share is an attachment to what cannot be priced and an ingenuity and resilience in locating the gaps, the holes in the wall, finding use for the discarded and the useless. What is useless cannot be seized or appropriated, cannot be put to work, and thus occupies a zone of indistinction between that which is without and that which is beyond value. The poor’s acceptance of an adversity that is neither passively endured nor a matter of resignation enables them, Berger suggests, to “peer behind the adversity and discover there something nameless.”8

It is the poet’s and the poor’s attachment to this nameless thing that cannot be confined that makes them an ever-present danger to those who must protect their possession with walls, believing that these walls will protect them from despair. Yet it is despair that brings one close to the wilderness. What the wilderness keeps for itself is that which cannot be domesticated, since it cannot be made to belong. Its foreignness is not anyone’s possession. Hikmet’s poetry attests to that which does not belong to anyone, defining a space that refuses containment or frontier, continually overreaching “its own confinement!” If, as Hikmet writes and Berger cites,

The worst
is when people—knowingly or not—
carry prison inside themselves.9

then the poem is a struggle against the worst.

The aesthetic as it is conceived by Petrossiants and Rosales is also such a terrain of struggle. One begins to think infrastructurally when one exceeds the terms of one’s confinement: being within and against. It is thus particularly fitting that they not only dedicate Diversity of Aesthetics to Marina Vishmidt but go a step further, suggesting that she is the book’s “coauthor.” Marina was a colleague, a friend, and a comrade of mine. I knew her for too short a time but long enough to know that she did not carry prison inside herself. Not even her disease could confine her. She remained undefined by its sentence. Undefeated in despair. This is how she lived, but her undefeated despair was also evidenced by her political commitment to the infrastructure of resistance. The infrastructural is perhaps what holds open the gap between despair and defeat.