Infra Cultures

Category: index

  • How to model contemporary arts teaching after contemporary art: Arts teaching and indexing

    How to model contemporary arts teaching after contemporary art: Arts teaching and indexing

    As I embark on planning and working across the school of Art and Design to co-develop a new future-oriented, practice-focused contextual studies module, I am re-posting this blog I originally wrote in 2019 written as I was teaching at Goldsmiths, University of London and undertaking a PhD.

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    How to model contemporary arts teaching after contemporary art, and after the marketisation of universities means that students expect authentically delivered, authentically now content?

    The skill of teaching is not simply in having the right content, or being able to speak for or from it, but in how you create the conditions in which to learn.

    This feels pertinent to a system in which a) universities are marketised, and marketed as places in which a student-customer is given access to a set of resources they themselves activate and take with them into employment; and b) where the student teacher situation must be defined as one in which the teacher can be favourably indexed against that content — can speak authentically from it.

    While it is crucial that a teacher can be sensitive to the specificities of each subject, topic, and student, this should be addresses in their skill and ability to created adequate and respectful learning situations for all involved, not only by their ability or capacity to speak from them. Again this is not to challenge the right to claim a set of material or content as a group not represented for instance, but to challenge the way in which university education is positioned as a format of content provision. This makes both the teacher’s job, and the university’s capacity to be responsive to (and ultimately this means keeping happy) student’s demands on that content. This is by its nature indeterminate, increasingly difficult. This indeterminacy would be fine were teaching simply about content delivery; but it is clearly not: being both a social situation and one in which information is put into and thought through a context.

    To be sure this must be part of the terms set out by the teacher, but it must also be reflected in the model by which education happens. That is to say that the university — and the labour performed within it — is not simply rendered as an infrastructure through which information is delivered, but a space in which to model knowledge as a social form. (This is not simply an aspiration, shaping knowledge as a tool for a later career is the social form that is expected and accounted for.)

    A more appropriate infrastructure might be one which makes the necessary resources both available and flexibly deployable. This would mean steering the infrastructure away from the delivery of content types — here I am thinking of the ubiquitous multi-functional display pods in every classroom — and instead making time, money and space resources that can be put to use according to the evolving needs and scenarios of teaching. The physical or stable infrastructure of the university (a time constraint, location, accreditation, future) would need to be lean, and the abstract and resource infrastructures of teaching which plug into this would be thicker and more plentiful. Rather than being defined completely by top-down constraints on classroom activity according to successful, countable content delivery, this would mean constraints are the means by which flexible projects access the basic infrastructure. That is, in order to be formally indeterminate, a project reaches certain standards and outcomes, but how it does this can be much more flexible. This is essentially the previous model, but attempts to retrofit the current infrastructure to be able to be judged on its ability to be formally rather than content-indeterminate.

     

    (image source: modular teaching architecture, HGK, Critical Media Lab, Basel: https://criticalmedialab.ch/agenda/)

  • User imaginaries — sketching a method for seeing infrastructure in action in the figure.

    As ethnographer of infrastructure Susan Leigh Star describes, the relationality of infrastructure makes for particular difficulties when the boring and mundane traces of its everyday use and operation scale up into the working, socially-interoperational and embedded infrastructures at issue (1999).[1] To consider the quickly-scaling and complexifying relations that make up, not only infrastructural design and assemblage work, but also its maintenance, use and promise,[2] infrastructural study quickly becomes not only difficult, but physically and conceptually overwhelming. Could one really visit every part and permutation of an infrastructure one is looking at? How does one study action at a distance? What are the ethics of studying actors whose identity you may never know?  (1999, 379)

     

    This problem of scale is compounded by the differing arrangements and operational/conceptual relationships constituting different layers or levels of the infrastructure/infrastructural intersection in question. For instance, an abstracted system-level view of an infrastructure scales un-evenly — in terms of form and manifestation and the research methods that are sensitive to these forms — into the experience and adaptations to meanings made by people acting as users of those infrastructures, inscribing their actions into a built infrastructure environment (1999, 383).

     

    As well as being overwhelming, this scaling up of information as a relationship between moving and interconnecting, interoperating and systemic parts, not simply of quantity, makes models of ‘deep’ interpretation based on objects, texts, sites, etc., difficult.[3]

     

    Infrastructure does not exist in one place, nor in one form, and its actions and constituent parts are often frozen behind the standardised and multiple background aspects of the unfolding every day. This contingency requires networked models that challenges the approaches of reading the depth of objects or subjects — what is ‘really’ going on beneath the surface — found in both the humanities and social sciences, by staying close with what is being described to describe what happens and is affected in its movement and action within the sphere of its influence.

     

    Notwithstanding subsequent advancements of methods of data visualisation, which, in concert with the increased datafication of infrastructure / infrastructuring of data,[4] have meant that infrastructural traces can be used to show patterns not interpretable in single objects, sites, or texts, Star proposes that treating such mundane elements of infrastructural activity as a birth certificate form, the spreadsheet, or the standard bridge height as ethnographic site can offer moments of infrastructural crystallisation, tension, and manifestation. These can for Star offer, albeit abstracted, figures and forms for interpretive “‘reading’ [of] infrastructure and unfreezing some of its features” (1999, 384).

     

    Consolidating the ‘invisible work’ of design, real-time adjustment, maintenance that shapes the use of infrastructure, infrastructural manifestations, points of interface, or transformation/ transition (like an official form, a bridge, a computer code) are points where ‘master narratives’ are encoded into infrastructures, and where others are excluded (384). For example, where phone books list only husband’s names for married couples, it is fair to assume — in part — that this reflects a heterosexually-based, sexist society (1999, 378); or where the bridges across the Grand Central Parkway between Queens and Nassau boroughs in New York were constructed to be too low for public transport, that lower income would be effectively barred from the richer Long Island suburbs, “not by policy, but by design” (1999, 389).[5] Studying where infrastructure becomes a differential condition is key to unpicking the ecological and relational world infrastructures shape.

     

    Star’s focus is on large scale systems, which creates certain frame, one which tends towards this complexity. I am also interested in the question of scalability as a dynamic movement back and forth, between micro and macro, in the ‘meso’ scale. This ‘in between’ scale connects the systemic to the depth of interpretation. It suggests that the individual experience of infrastructure is not simply one of being determined by infrastructure — though this is a key frame, not least in terms of how power is distributed and experienced — but that infrastructuring is also a generative and creative act not limited to the infrastructural ‘object’ itself, but also an abstract projection of meaning that is shared and can be staged. It is through this generative movement between scales — imagined and manifest — that the scope of infrastructuring exceeds the object and lives in the performative relationship to how infrastructure patterns social worlds, in formal affective and cognitive and behavioural dimensions through which its relations are practiced away from that object itself (Thrift and Berlant). It is also possible, I am arguing, to think about how certain fields, such as those associated with knowledge production, mediation and dissemination stage infrastructural meaning as its infrastructural function.

     

    If we can pivot towards the imaginary of infrastructure we can discuss and interpret the role of infrastructural imaginaries in practices that repeat certain imagined and manifest ideas about the movement between different scales, and different effects of this relationship. This approach offers a methodological surface, which develops Star’s proposal, on which to think about critical practices which are neither simply caught in infrastructural objects or technologies, nor simply representational existing within infrastructural determination.

     

    For Star, certain objects/forms can be used to focus the various factors involved in the construction of infrastructure as they contradict, reveal, or suspend and delimit human agency and becoming. But to record patterning as the expression of an imaginary we can turn to the figures/figurations passing through it to act as tracers in what is established and manifest as a pattern that shapes and constrains movement through the meso-scales of an infrastructural field.

     

    By following figures through the parameters, interoperations, processes, capacities, functions, positions, proxemics, promises, through which it is used, we can see the kinds of relations and transition that an infrastructure makes possible, that is what it is imagined as, in how the movement or transition expresses the relationships it makes up and connect with in the social field in which it is relevant.[6]

     

    This approach means that infrastructural study does not have to be limited to the study of technology, nor of dominant or hegemonic forms of infrastructure — a model to which infrastructure tends out of the necessity that, to be infrastructure, it is expected, anticipated, and conjured as inevitable (see Thrift / Berlant). It can see infrastructure as a site of productive tension, between patterns of possibility, where infrastructure is not simply that which actors are subject to or determined by, and where infrastructural agency is, in part, a question of how infrastructure is performed.

     

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    An interview on the Radio 4 breakfast news flagship, the Today programme on 15 Dec 2020 offers a good example of the differences that such figurations can help to describe and trace in different kinds of infrastructural imaginary.[7]Specifically, at stake was how different imaginaries around the role, scope, operations and users of education as a social infrastructure, differently positions and values the individuals it produces in relation to the social field it is a member or part of.

     

    In the last week of term before the 2020 school Christmas holidays, the government had had to strengthen restrictions aimed at fighting the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic because of steeply rising-infections in the capital, moving London from Tier 2 to Tier 3 restrictions.[8] As a sign of how quickly cases were rising, the move came two days before a planned review of tiering. However, a legal battle ensued between the government’s Department of Education (DfE) and Greenwich Council who has asked schools to close a week early because of the exponential rise in the borough. The DfE threatened legal action if the council did not keep schools open, in line with its national policy.[9]

     

    Where these events focused government policy on the pandemic, but also its policy on education onto local events and conditions through the question of access to the infrastructures of education (whether they were open/closed), they also offer a view onto how the presence of that infrastructure manifests certain narratives about the role of education and how it should be experienced and offered. That is, how education sets in play a pattern into which children become individuals — despite the pandemic.

     

    In the discussion over whether the schools should have closed or been kept open in response to spiking epidemic in London between Robin Bevan a headteacher at Southend School for Boys in Essex and President of the National Education Union, who had closed his school, and Rebecca Hickey, Assistant Director of a federation of 9 Harris academies in south London, two clearly distinct positions emerged.[10]

     

    For Bevan, there were three priorities for any head teachers when questioning whether to stay open or go all online:

    1. “what is the very best way of sustaining quality of learning?”
    2. “what is in the best interests of public health?” Is it keeping 1000+ students in dense, over-sized and crowded classrooms over winter?
    3. “do we have sufficient resource, sufficient staffing” to keep school and facilities running and safe?

     

    Ultimately, Bevan argued, the decision to close for safety has to rest in the hands of head teachers “in consultation with their local public health officials,” not ministers.

     

    Hickey, argued against closure since: “head teachers have always had to be incredibly flexible.” More importantly, she said that she couldn’t stop thinking about what happened to many students while they were in lockdown situation, with “very profound levels of trauma that many [students] experienced…” Saying that, while there are “blended learning opportunities,” there are “far greater benefits for students and teachers from being part of the community and live.”

     

    Such principles do not seem to be fundamentally at odds with Bevan’s argument, however, when Hickey describes how the risks of the Covid-19 disease were being managed, a difference is discernible. Across the 49 schools, Hickey stated, “incredibly stringent sanitation and safety restrictions were in place.” As such any case for closure would be made on a case-by-case basis: up to a point where there was “not enough staff to operate risk assessments.” Indeed, Hickey said that head teachers also had to consider parents’ needs, many of whom were key workers. “We have a duty well beyond the four walls of our building.”

     

    Between these positions then are two models of risk, in which the pupil is figured in two ways. The former, for Bevan, is a pupil who is already part of a series of interlocking, and irreducible communities, whose relationship to risk and education is qualitative. This locates the pupil within a series of complex social contracts.

     

    The latter, for Hickey the student is more of a service-user who can expect access to a well-managed service, which has adequate assessment of risks of interruption, but where access and service continuation is the main “impetus” (Hickey).

     

    Here the duty “well beyond” the four walls of the school is indeterminate, it expands into any of the potential infrastructural interfaces that the academy can be seen to meet: but where the academy becomes in this sense not a qualitative boundary, but critical to other infrastructures too: many parents are key workers. Such dependency relies on and is critical to the fantasy of ‘seamless interoperability’ between infrastructures,[11] where access and operation must be preserved, since one failure will propagate to all connect infrastructures.

     

    In this sense, where its inter-dependencies become both critical and indeterminate, the service-user, the student, must also submit to the continuation of that service. This individuates the pupil as a user within this service, in contrast to Bevan’s model, where the student is part of a complex set of shifting community pressures. At certain points the risk to one group outweighs another. Certainly, while the service-user model sees each student as an individuated figure, it also allows the student’s needs to be indexed against their specific situations: such as vulnerability to traumatic experience.

     

    At the end of the interview, Bevan said he would stay closed, and Hickey committed only to a careful, case-by-case review of each Academy’s situation.

     

    What I am seeking to draw out here is not simply the two master narratives at play in these two visions of the operation of the infrastructure of education, but how these are instituted through the figuration of a pupil embedded in a series of local dynamics, and an individual student for whom there is a service to be provided.

     

    The risks associated with developing covid-19 as a result of higher virus transmission and of pupils being out of school focused these differences, but what they revealed were pre-existing, conflicting ideas about how these relationships were assembled into broader social patterns and values — how school instituted, in the kinds of individuals it ‘produces,’ different kinds of imaginaries. [12] Such imaginaries are understood in relation to the infrastructural intersections around education, what that education should do, and its place in the broader society of which it is part, and how each infrastructural condition repeated or multiplied existing power relations. That is to say, that these two figures instituted as imaginaries specific master narratives about what worlds infrastructure should make, and how its users are positioned by it.

     

    For Bevan, the student is situated by an education infrastructure that supports delivery of a certain quality of education possible in a local authority, but which is distinct to public health infrastructure they are part of, albeit differently. The power relations which determine the educational infrastructure and its operating parameters are closely aligned to those of local authority and public government. There can therefore be a hierarchy between these which can be applied to the operations of these infrastructures. The student is thus situated by the principle of the civic social contract of becoming a citizen.

     

    For Hickey, two things are raised: one is that the experience for students of such conditions is indexed against their real material conditions as they experience traumas, in part, determined by access to and distribution of social support infrastructures, of which school is a part. However, there is also another implication of this indexing, which is that it freezes infrastructural figures into the interconnecting and interdependent relations that keep an infrastructure running. When, as Hickey makes clear, we privilege the interconnectedness of infrastructure (a duty beyond the four walls), service users — students — are required to submit to the necessary operating parameters of that infrastructure. This factor comes to be more pressing when infrastructure is increasingly understood as interfacing within a web of others, and as infrastructure becomes more interfaceable and modular. The power in this version of infrastructure is manifest in how this operating demand allows and disallows actions, values, and rights of its users. As Star argues, power is weighted in this case towards those designing and overseeing this infrastructural compact to keep it running as planned. Where this power is manifest in the continuation of the infrastructure, this model can be differentiated from Bevan’s, since in this latter case, where infrastructure remains separable, there is threshold at which its operations should not continue.

     

    As such, the differences between these positions, seen through an infrastructural lens, turned on different concepts of what risks where at play, and how these risks were imagined through the relationship between pupils, schools, the local communities, and the broader society of which they were part. These different priorities build different worlds in which the figure of the student means different things traceable by their role, capacities and limits within those worlds. The political capacity of each in turn rests on the expectation and possibility for change or deviation from carrying on as normal baked into each.

     

    Notes:

    [1] Star, Susan Leigh. ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’. American Behavioural Scientist 43, no. 3 (December 1999): 377–391.

    [2] See: Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, eds. The Promise of Infrastructure. A School for Advanced Research Seminar. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2018.

    [3] For this concept of a different approach to reading depth, see: Love, Heather. ‘Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn’. New Literary History, New Sociologies of Literature, 41, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 371–391.

    [4] See for instance: https://nic.org.uk/studies-reports/new-technologies/the-digital-twin-data-challenge-datasets/; or the use of data dashboards to integrate various information and social infrastructure such as for Sars-Cov-2 data: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk

    [5] See also: Winner, Langdon. ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’ Daedalus, Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity?, 109, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 121–136.

    [6] For further elaboration on this see Randy Martin / choreography / promise of infrastructure / description of Klein.

    [7] See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000q9f1 – 2:39:25–2:44:44

    [8] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/14/london-likely-to-enter-tier-3-covid-restrictions-to-curb-surge-in-cases

    [9] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/15/greenwich-backs-down-over-plans-to-close-schools-in-face-of-legal-actio

    [10] Academies are non-charitable trust-run schools in the UK, which are directly funded by the DfE, and independent from local authority control. They are not required to follow the National Curriculum and can specialise; in sponsored academies, the sponsor can influence specialism, ethos and building. They are often criticised by teaching unions.

    [11] See: Rossiter, Ned. Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmares. New York: Routledge, 2017. xvii

    [12] Alongside developing a method for infrastructural figuration and how it ‘moves’ through the patterns of different infrastructural imaginaries, this difference is also interesting for thinking about how the virus has been thought of in the west, as a serious disease afflicting individuals, and in China, where they have experience of Sars on their society, where it is seen as a serious virus. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/12/where-did-coronavirus-come-from-covid

  • Fragmentation and denial

    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.

  • Indexing, Infrastructure and Social Performativity

    Indexing, Infrastructure and Social Performativity

    For a while now I have been thinking through the question of how one might experience or attempt to perform agency in an infrastructural setting. That is how can we think through a similar negotiation to that of the inside / outside of the institution in infrastructural terms, when infrastructure presents itself as a theoretically total object? (To begin with, this ideal of totality is easily dispelled: either scaling back to include whomever does not get counted as a proper user as far as an infrastructure is concerned (such as the border); or by simply considering the way that infrastructures layer and differentiate themselves and access to their functions, precisely by being layered (see: Bratton, 2015).) One complicated, though temporarily adequate answer might be found in the notion of “indexing.”

    At a more anecdotal level, what I am also trying to point to here is the way in which students I have taught over recent years seem to be less interested in saying “what is,” but rather are engaging in positioning themselves in relation to what they perceive as privilege — theirs or other’s. This is perhaps an internalisation of what Judith Butler describes as the infrastructural politics of vulnerability: that is the ability to negotiate the individual life promised by infrastructure in a neoliberal political order, and the extent to which one is structurally able to actually life independently of one’s dependency on the hard, soft, social and natural infrastructures that support life. (Elon Musk’s escape to space being the prime example.)

    To begin with, it is possible to think indexing in these terms in the following ways:

    • Indexing on a plane / in a field. I.e., where does one stand in a literal, figurative, imaginary, social (etc.) sense?
    • Indexing in relation to, these same things.
    • The index as a measure (see FA post)
    • The index as address (in both senses, of noun and verb) — as an identity and identification: making it possible to be addressed, but also speaking in advance to what can be addressed, politically as much as actually. (This is political insofar as it is both ascribed to a subject, and can be defined by a subject — both as an object and in relation to others. The illegalized migrant is indexed as such; the self-assigned member of an assembly or group defined through difference is another.) It is also a making sense of ones position in relation to not just institution as categorical site, but to infrastructure as spatio-temporal location.
    • The index as a complication of the notion of category. Google’s early tagline: “Search Don’t Sort,” is indicative of this sublimation of the category as container of informational characteristics into categories of objective characteristics — i.e. what can be done with it (can it be searched, indexed, etc.; is it an image, website and so on; one could also think about the way the memory of information itself is treated as a function of how to search it rather than the ability to recall it). This means not so much fitting into a category, but by placing oneself in relation to the category as meta-definition. This act could be mapped against the agency one might have to place or identify oneself on the one hand, or on the other, as Ramon Amaro has so well described, by being identified by others and other systems of averaging and deviation from the norm / pattern (which can be socially as much as mathematically determined, as with the notion of ‘work’ as the normal, against which deviation is measured). This is all to say: category still exists, but the membership of that category is relative and can be negotiated — at least in theory, and only if, there is an alternative infrastructure to support that negotiation: hence the need for platform in political struggles.

    Preliminarily then, indexing might be the aiming for stability in the moving negotiations of infrastructural space and time, and its cultural, social, economic, political, spiritual, religious, imaginary, aesthetic, affective, (and so on,) consequences. The framing of negotiation draws upon the use of the term in The Constituent Museum, 2015:

    NEGOTIATION refers to a constituent right to form, shape, and continually re-define relationships of power, as well as structures of inequality, through processes of active commoning. As such, negotiation is also taken to indicate the active process of reaching agreements that are, of themselves, both fluid, provisional, mutual, and constituent. (2015, 9)

    However, where the agency of the constituent users of museum are offered an agency vis-a-vis the structure that defines this negotiation (the institution) which echoes the separation between institution and public, and therefore neutralising the institution in the face of constituent power and its critique of institution (Boltanski, 2011): what I want to stress with the infrastructural perspective, is the inseparability of user from structure — that they configure one another, to echo Suchmann, 2012. It is in this sense that indexing is useful insofar as it describes a condition of negotiating relation to or among, rather than simply position, in or outside.

    To follow Judith Butler (2015), it is important here to stress that it is the social performativity of these indexes and positions, and their boundaries, that gives them consistency, not their systemic fullness or functionality. In other words, these infrastructural negotiations exist in as much as they are performed, not simply or only if they can be described as systemic or structural. This is a key point in the wresting of the infrastructural conversation away from the domain of technocracy and technocrats.

    A question that remains is: How does infrastructure turn social performativity into a system, to institute it or to make it concrete, in law, culture, economy, behaviour or otherwise? Secondly, how does this incorporate a negotiation of the systemic and non-systemic: that is the individuated or singular as non-reducible or not relegated by the systemic?

    *

    See also:

    • Judith Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, 2015
    • Wolfgang Streeck, “Communities of Consumption”
    • Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology
    • Benjamin Bratton, on ‘addressability and individuation,’ “Address Layer,” The Stack, 2015: 191
    • Claire Selvin, “Musée d’Orsay Temporarily Retitles Manet’s ‘Olympia’ for ‘Black Models’ Show,” ArtNews, (03/26/19) available at: http://www.artnews.com/2019/03/26/edouard-manet-olympia-musee-dorsay-black-models/
  • Consistency (or indexicality)

    Consistency (or indexicality)

    How to put Forensic Architecture into context?

    While Forensic Architecture’s engagement within institutional settings such as art puts pressure on the distinctions between aesthetic possibility and instrumental functionality, it is also possible to contextualise the experiential potential of their work through the infrastructural requirement for consistent and stabile designation of actors in its dynamic systems. I will attempt to develop this way of contextualising an infrastructural practice of art in the case of Forensic Architecture by sketching out how they remodel the ways in which the terms of infrastructural use are determined by indexing consistent and stable users.

    (more…)