This is really only a note, but I wanted to get something down before forgetting. It has to do with the capacity for denial that comes with infrastructure: this comes with both the notion of infrastructure as a unified, “seamless” whole (see: Rossiter, 2017, xvii); and that infrastructures rather create a fragmented series of worlds which can be reassembled as “accidental” wholes. (See Bratton, 2015, 8)
Both of these states are facilitated by the principle/constraint iterable inter-operability that means infrastructures can function with each other, and with other things. However, since this inter-operation is scalable concept, as in all sites, instances, or scales of infrastructural entities must be equally operable or executable within the infrastructural system for it to work* (see: Infrastructure as Code; Keller Easterling on architecture becoming via infrastructure a repeatable formula or software to be rolled out (2016, 11–12); or, execution as social function — both in terms of performing punishment and enacting bureaucracy, where execution “always relates to the now, to an actualization, a presence which is always already over.”Critical Software Thing, “Execution,” Posthuman Glossary, 2018, 142), it has to be understood that infrastructure produces an internal wholeness, that tends towards a conceptual horizontality, to which meaning within that horizon becomes completely immanent. That is to say, infrastructure enacts a reality that is sovereign, and thus denies — or allows the denial — of all that is beyond it.**
Of course how this intersects with institution creates power dynamics, and vertical arrangements of decision and consequence that must also be considered, nonetheless, the point is here that infrastructure allows a denial of its constitutive outside whether that infrastructure is of a fabled or practical whole or totally fragmentary and small. As Ned Rossiter has written on the subject of logistics (which as an infrastructural model can be translated at the level of method): “The logistic imaginary disavows the political. Let us be sure, this world has not gone away but rather persists as the constitutive outside to the logistical fantasy of seamless interoperability.” (Rossiter, Software, Infrastructure, Labour, 2017, xvii)
Thus, this points initially at the need for a theory of infrastructure that incorporates this structural non-unity at the macro scale. (see Bratton; Critical Software Thing, 2018, 143, column 2.) This is also distinct to the idea of network theory in which nodes of a network can be distinct so long as they agree to the protocols and procedures that grant access to being realised within that network; rather this speaks to an idea that the node can actually be actually a full, self-realised, self-aware reality, to which externalities must conform in order to enter.
It is also important to set this within a context in which totalisation and denial can be deployed as political content and its ground. That is to say, how can infrastructural platforms be used to deny political, social, or environmental realities, as well as to affirm others; to do this with the seeming ability to accommodate the (apparently) exact opposite — the predominance of Facebook in platforming and affording capacity to far right wing political groups; and offering all the ability to deny their constitutive outside, despite their parallel and potentially, partially overlapping co-existence,*** and to allow the fantasy of becoming and operating as if they were already a total space — which structurally as the means of interfacing the world, these platforms are.
Secondly, to return to the question of the execution of these infrastructures as worlds, is the power of this infrastructure of denial, not simply to allow one to turn away, but specifically to deny the existence or even actualisation of that political other in the first place. To return to the idea of execution as expressed by Critical Software Thing:
“As an effectuation of a sentence, execution always relates to the now, to an actualization, a presence which is always already over. Execution in this instance then is not dying, but specifically to be deprived of being. It is not deceasing, nor is it homicide, it is death by punishment. It is a sudden death forced upon a body of punishment which has no control over the violence executed by the system. In these iconic self-presencing actualisations [public executions], we are made to witness execution’s quality as an event, an act of a juridical, political, technical or biological discourse enacted decisively upon its sentenced subject.” (Critical Software Thing, 2018, 142)
We might therefore say, execution as “the actualization and execution of a system into an instance of discourse,” (Critical Software Thing, 2018, 142) or in lived reality, expresses the denial of being of one as a positive expression of another. Here, I want to return to a previous post on the work of Forensic Architecture and the question of indexing (or the addressing of bodies within an infrastructural reality to Bratton’s term, 2015, 9–10) Discussing their work The Left to Die Boat, Central Mediterranean Sea, 27 March 2011, I posited that Forensic Architecture, were making visible the ways in which the infrastructure of both the European Union’s political system and its border force Frontex, indexed migrants as external to, and thus deniable to the infrastructural permissions required of citizenship, contrasting these with those of a gallery visitor watching.
It would seem from the perspective here, however, Forensic Architecture’s work to bring put events into a public sphere would be to bring them out of deniability and to recognise these events, not as unfortunate consequences, but as a deliberate act for that public. That is as “an actualization” of infrastructural power: These are people “not dying, but specifically [being] deprived of being,” where infrastructural enactments are acts “of a juridical, political, technical or biological discourse enacted decisively upon its sentenced subject.” (Critical Software Thing, 2018, 142) Forensic Architecture’s use of the public sphere is key in destabilizing the distancing possible in an infrastructural distribution of power, that is emphasizing the various dimensions of intimacy and proximity of what Rossiter calls the “remote intimacy” of infrastructure. (2017, 139) ****
To pull this discussion fully into art would seem trite. However, the question remains as to how art as a practice can substantiate a reality, as well as substantiate alternative ones: and how this occurs at functional (instrumentalised), institutional, economics, aesthetic levels. Forensic Architecture offer one example. Where denial as an infrastructural reality is both whole and fragmentary, it is therefore a selective reality, one which is selectively cooperative.
When autonomy as locale is increasingly problematic form this simply structural sense, for instance, could this remodelling, and potentially disarticulation of deniability through art also look something like the school French architect Xavier Wrona has proposed in order to generate a counter-right wing material culture in the infrastructurally diminished areas of France in which Le Pen took hold in the 2017 presidential elections? To what extent art participates in or rejects the selective cooperation of infrastructural wholes is therefore a key facet of any criticality it might claim.
end of note …
* Here, we might see further work on the notion of scale, and the propensity to see infrastructural at large scale: that is in order for something to be recognised as infrastructural it would seem that it needs to be able to scale, and therefore can only be recognised as such, if it has reached this scale. Easterling’s concept of disposition might be helpful here (as in the disposition of those constitutive parts or those who do / can enter); as it Amaro’s work on precognition and the confirmation bias of algorithmic prediction which acts in advance of computation, but only to confirm biases based on past (most often cultural) biases. It would be especially useful to follow on from Amaro’s recent work as he discussed at the Animate Assembly 9 at Goldsmiths, (11 Jan 2019) around the splitting of identities or a quantum self.
** On the notion of constructing an infrastructural agency as sovereign within itself, see also Critical Software Thing on the computational “cut” that makes the analogue world readable in code and code time, in, “Execution,” Posthuman Glossary, 2018, 143, column 2 – 144, column 1. “Such cuts — execution performed by computation — … can be compared to what Karan Barad refers to as ‘agential cuts’ (2007: 429). They are made in the name of a certain agency; in the case of computer code, a computational agency.” This work on execution as the creation of an actual now, out of the virtuality of a system is key to describing infrastructure as a conceptual/imaginary form of consequence, not simple concretised abstraction in the literal sense of the word concrete.
*** cf. Arch one-time No Deal-Brexitier Jacob Rees-Mogg re-tweeting a video of a AFD co-leader’s speech to the German Parliament, in which she argues for allowing a broadened single market closer integration with the UK in the terms of exit; at once contradicting the Brexit mantra of global Britain not needing to partner with the EU, just going without a deal, and speaking to a facist exclusion of all non-German or non-northern European countries, this speech and its retweeting indicates both parallel realities and the combination of certain elements of that reality: which in practice points an attempt by Rees-Mogg’s to bridge a fascist reality between the two countries.
**** I wouldn’t easily go so far as to fully extend the comparison with Critical Software Thing’s analogy: rather the function of infrastructure perhaps has more to do with the racialised concept of deployment and disposability, in which those persons travelling from the African continent are not even granted the status of being. The latter category of what Judith Butler and others have called the disposability of bodies in infrastructure (2015, 11) would be better thought through the work of Sylvia Wynter on who, or rather what is counted as human, or Achile Mbembe’s Necropolitics: following this with the end of note 1 above. Deployment would also lay the track for a critical reading of Forensic Architecture’s engagement in the space of art — though perhaps only if it is read only as an art work / cannot transform that space — insofar as these subjects and cases could be said to only be deployed as tokens of a generalised state infrastructural violence; that is that that there is a difficulty in fully interfacing the one space (of the event and the event of viewing) with another transformatively — unless that is this is viewed as a subject for consideration by the public (which it is in part). It is in this sense that the event is more of a deployment into the infrastructural milieu of the art space.