Category: infrastructure

Story telling, or narrative accounts of the relationships, often complexly layered, increasingly constitute our understanding and experience of being ecologically and technologically embedded.

All the discourse and jargon that goes with that, systems, etc. And I said to them, but where do you see that system empirically? Show me where you see that.

So what are we talking about? And so you get them to rethink the paradigm with which they’ve come in, and get them to start piecing together what they see. Tack from the macro to the micro, the other way around, start with the micro, and situate that, situate, situate, you’re situating everything.

And so it becomes this process of connecting. And that’s incredibly empowering to see people begin to be able to do that in their own worlds and with their own life experiences.

These are really powerful moments where African students, graduates, can engage with theory and both speak back to it and say, yes, this fits, but no, that doesn’t fit. But also fundamentally experience that the way that the environmental humanities work is often written in the storytelling mode. I’m thinking of Tom von Duren’s work, for example, Donna Haraway’s stories, you know, tell stories that take you in to the big picture, that enable you to speak of, you know, the macro in relation to the micro

Lesley Green, Multispecies Worldbuilding Lab: Lesley Green – Part 2, 26 Mar 2021

By connecting and encapsulating multiple dimensions, entities, events and temporalities in situated, non-complete forms, narrative and story telling are key tools in the visualisation, research, analysis and public communication of the depth of relatedness, causality, inheritance and web of effects and consequences that make up long durational often human-induced/affected phenomena such as the Anthropocene or eco-systemic equilibrium. Phenomena that, like narrative, constitute our worlds as much as being produced in or by these worlds.

Narrative and story telling allow conceptual shifts in scale, diagrammatic connections, illustrative actions, focus to be drawn across dimensions, metaphor, simile and description etc., to all function as epsito-ontological devices; devices that cohere in a secondary form what cannot be seen all at once.  I’ve certainly been attracted to the idea of narrative, a methodological and epistemic mode that has been increasingly used to navigate, communicate, and often critique the complexity of contemporary infrastructure. But at the same time, a turn to story telling when discussing infrastructure in its environmental, human context, can naturalise the closure of infrastructural promise, practice and repetition. Why, specifically, is it important to consider the consequence of the tools or methods by which we know, analyse and transform our world through infrastructure?

Infrastructure turns. 

There has, undoubtedly, been an infrastructural turn. The term appears much more often that it once did. Whether this be the rise in the use of the term; in the spread of infrastructure projects driven by technology and climate adaptation; the creeping infrastructuralisation or consolidation of public resources into the vast portfolios of private equity and asset managers; or the realisation that while neoliberal (and now authoritarian) policies may have extended legal and economic infrastructures in the capture of resources, they left public and social infrastructures for dead. The infrastructural turn is as much a realisation that infrastructures need rebuilding and reclaiming — from local government, housing, in the arts and in the architectures of truth making, as it is a reflection of the priorities of societies, governments and in cultural and academic practices reflecting on or researching this.

Infrastructure is not, however, an agnostic term, which is key. Much work has been done to invert, surface and denaturalise the actually existing edifice of infrastructure. But as Dominic Davies persuasively argues (2023), infrastructure is not simply a physical or operational system but a specific semantic, symbolic, and culturally-significant entity. That is, it is, in contrast to public works, a term which took the place and role of infrastructure before the massive investment and rebuilding of countries after the second world war, infrastructure is deeply wedded to economy. That is, it is a term and entity that can be and is read through the lens of its economic metics, such as infrastructure as an investment, a measure of a countries domestic product, as a means towards an economy. Of course this is not all an infrastructure is or means; but it is a powerful constraint on what it does, and in what is referred to when, in many fields, infrastructure is turned to.

The use of narrative reflects an attempt to both join the dots between the unfamiliar, complex, and multi-layered realms, dimensions, events, and actions that constitute ecologically and systemically aware and embedded realities that are understood to be the setting for life today; and to situate these encounters or experiences within and as culturally-situated phenomena. This situating might be in time, place and environment; but it is also to situate the story teller and reader, the knowledge, the prompts, inheritances and connections within which they embark on infrastructural encounters.

To embed a concept of reality through narrative to interpolate who ever is on the other end of that conceptualisation into what Lauren Berlant called the historical present (2001) — the affective experience of being embedded into all that shapes each moment of that experience as how and why history unfolds as a series of localised instances. Narrative recreates or conjures, diagrammatically and metaphorically the deep range of factors that constituted a lived reality. In this case, narrative surfaces the various factors of an infrastructure we might only passingly acknowledge or know in use; yet through the use of which we become part of a much bigger dimensional space and setting. For instance, to use the internet is depart from the space-time of the telegraph, the geological or extra-planetary space of energy use, the colonial-material dimensions of mined hardware components as well as the micro-macro time space of global connected computation, and the future-oriented anticipation of using the web for a specific purpose. These can all be encompassed within the expanded narrative of me sitting down at my laptop to write this blog post, in part to hold in place thoughts for later research, in part to get back into the habit of writing — if only to improve it.

More conceptually, this urge to situate accounts of reality within the historical present might be said to respond to a number of factors. These include, the expansion of human activity into a geological and ecological dimension and consequences, with terms such as the Anthropocene, the more than human, etc; to the deepening and broadening of historical perspectives and legacies to incorporate the other sides of histories of empire and colonisation and the ongoing inheritances of these; the pluralisation of imagined communities and disassembly of institution of truth and fact through the interconnected rise of increasingly complex simulation and communications technologies and geopolitical reconfigurations around these networks and economic infrastructures increasingly centralised on the demands of financial (and private equity) and technological infrastructures (see Brett Christophers, 2023). In short, to the material, discursive, cultural and social implications of the infrastructural turn. And here I mean the infrastructural turn in its wider sense, not just in academic or artistic discourse and practice (as Harney and Moten might argue). But rather, in the ways that certain kinds of infrastructural logics — economic assets, digitally-modelled, scalar, productive, etc., — are infused and diffused into more and more of the how human life and its consequences or interactions with more than human realms unfold, repeat and are imagined. (I.e., where increasingly, Benjamin Bratton’s 2015 argument that the Earth has become an (accidental) computational megastructure or stack, feels less fanciful and boosterish and more politically analytical.) Narrative bears a heavy weight in the context of conceptualising infrastructure and cultures build on, around, through and for it; a freighting that bears further analysis.

Narrative infrastructure 

As many argue, narrative acts in such systemically complex and dynamically-experienced contexts as a framing device. It allows us to account for and assemble coherence within these settings. A coherent account of moving through, being affected by or affecting that assemblage, or of accounting for what is not immediately or routinely seen. Here narrative, as Mieke Bal would put it (1999), is a motor to stitch seemingly disparate parts together into something meaningful. There is more to be said about how we got here. This includes, what might be called a post-post-modern situation in which there is a technological and philosophical imperative to bring coherence back to the fragmented narratives and truths the post-modernists alerted us to, and which are both multiplied and fought against through the individuated self-storying of social media; and of the return of meta narratives simultaneously with and without a strong relationship to the future such as climate change and AI (see Johnathan White, 2024). There is also the use of fiction as a speculative device in art, philosophy and visual culture — aimed against the closure of the future through financialisation or indeed climate modelling (Reeves-Evision, 2021; Sullivan; Konior, 2019).

But the main purpose of this post is to note down two other closures with respect to narrative and to infrastructure. Namely, that the term infrastructure, while key to thinking about conditions of possibility, may be in effect so socially and historically specific that it equates to a closure of those possibilities of a vast array of conditions of collective coordinated activities, resource allocation, co-produced and experienced forms of meaning, sensing or energy exchange. And following this that, connectedly, it may be that narrative, or at least certain kinds of narrative are part of how that version of infrastructure and its limitations are being fixed in place or repeated.

(1 April 2025, https://bsky.app/profile/alangreene.bsky.social/post/3llr2ghagzk2s)

As this post from a Bluesy user indicates, narrative has been centred in accounts of public truth, to the extent that it might even replace other modes of evidence. It is not just a more accessible form for articulating how things go together and unfold in time. Moreover, could it be the case that the construction narrative as a social and individual device of meaning making is so embedded into the infrastructures of contemporary reality (the feed, storify, constructed reality, social media as affective, epistemic and sensory prosthesis), and in forms that have centred local, individual, partialised narratives that it is no longer useful as a hermeneutic, critical, aesthetic and political device? At least from the perspective of getting to verifiable, common, or evidence-based truths — and in building or instituting meaning in common or truths around this?

In part, I think the answer comes from addressing the prevalence and enclosures of the terms infrastructure and narrative, or at least defining how they are used and framed currently. That narrative as often constructed and experienced — in a temporally linear mode (listening, reading), semantically complete (completed by present of teller / receiver), coherent (in its own terms), inclusive (of its constituent parts), performative and metaphorical (scalable on a human basis — i.e., lessons, prompts, accounts, rules on human experience or behaviour), or durable speaks to inheritances of imagined and institutional forms of meaning (see Castoriadis, 1987) whose integrity as evidence is based on  reproducibility rather than errancy in the setting of its telling and re-telling. To begin with I’m thinking about the institution as a long-duree form for maintaining certain narratives of purpose and value in forms that exist beyond the life world of individuals as in the case of Monasteries (Pottage, 2014) or social imaginaries (Castoriadis, Ibid.); I’m also trying think of this long-duree formation of narrative closure in infrastructural terms — as well as its rupture in these terms. But this means paying attention to how narrative functions like an infrastructure, in relational, systemic, subordinate or at least intra-positional modes as opposed to supra-positional forms like institutions.

For instance, in the academic setting, narrative or testimony of an interviewee in an account of experience or event must be treated as a sacrosanct document which must not be altered in order that it is accepted into the analytic frame; which then seeks to uncover meaning from that testimony so that neither the original testimony and the methodological approach or environment of the telling and re-telling are unchanged too — i.e., unexpected variability is closed off.

In conspiracy stories, a semi-permable world / story is created; it’s persistence is determined by the ability of the narrative to selectively incorporate new information within its parameters; excluding or incorporating contractions as not relevant or as proof of the need for hermeticism to protect the truth against the subterfuge of other evidence.

Similarly, in tech the so-called weird is often invoked to describe that which appears within a complex model or system but which cannot be explained within its stated narrative. While the weird is often seen as a potential site of novelty or aberration, it must also be understood as a a function of a wider, if not fully understood closure by complex computational model infrastructures; a narrative bulging not a shift.

In the context of more familiar social and economic infrastructures, narrative can function as a further enclosure; for instance the idea and story of the big society (David Cameron-era Conservative UK government), where members of a society each play a role in keeping that society cared for and in motion, taking up what the state had or should have done, in fact allowed for the re-cohering of soft infrastructure at a much reduced level. It re-enclosed the terms of social life within the re-parametricised terms of austerity.

(Another limit to consider is that narrative can often work best with a protagonist. This complicates the multi-perspectival aspects of infrastructure and its relevance to those perspectives (see Star 1998).)

Now on the one hand this implies that narrative as analytic (and I include narrative research devices like walking in this) might also replicate the infrastructural form, including its closures, at study in ways that might in fact redouble or reproduce the kind of effect of concern. But this also has implications for the kinds of practice we might one to initiate in response. If we want to transform our world — stories and narratives must act more like the things we are seeking to describe or align and attune with or to (e.g., Gaia, sustainable balances of eco systems; gathering and dispersal; plural possibilities of being and identification, etc.,), and take a more critical view of how a tools for visibility or analysis like narrative work already as part of and towards the closure of existing structures and systems.

Narrating an otherwise

In good faith, we talk about the need for infrastructure where it is lacking. Or else, are concerned with who is a stake holder, who is affected, or what. Or what is the objective and what is the means of that infrastructure? But, in each case, does infrastructure simply remain an abstraction or automation achieved through organisational techniques or infrastructural work (see Carse, 2012) that is simply too repetitive and constrictive, scalable (see Tsing, 2012), to achieve flexible or alternative aims necessitate by the new kinds of story discussed above? Do we need to think about what is after ‘infrastructure’ practically, conceptually and in terms of cultural/communicative forms? What kinds of narrative are necessary to this? How do we go beyond the value of narrative that reveals something about the underlying, unseen, inderterminate and abstract aspects of infrastructure to a narrative that reconfigures these forms of shared world building and sustaining objectives and means?

I want to suggest that the kinds of story that must be told to achieve this — i.e., where stories are part of public making in the wider sense — must be janus like, shimmering narratives. That is, to both make use of the infrastructural and the be able to live after infrastructure, in open-ended rather than closed futures, narratives must fork or bifurcate: intensifying some dynamics, halting others; causing coherence collapse whilst also carrying on as a support structure for other kinds of life.

If a conspiracy theory can be destabilised by creating a new perspective within the logic that goes so hard it eradicates base foundations — asking those who believe the moon landing is faked, that they believe in the moon; or MAGA world which part of the Epstien conspiracy is fake — then building intensification into excluded or edge stories might be a used crack in the closure of extant infrastructural narratives as well. For instance, how bringing in more energy into the city might help solve the ecological / climate crisis, by allowing for more re-use and re-cycling of resources, as Tim Lenton argues in “Gaia Devices for a High-Energy Solar-Powered City” (e flux Architecture, September 2025)

In the curatorial space, perhaps narrative modules might allow intensification or bifurcation within the wider cultural infrastructural stacks within which curating participates and performs. This is to be developed.

x

References and credits.

Anna L. Tsing, ‘On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales’, Common Knowledge18, no. 3 (2012): 505–24.

Alain Pottage, ‘Law after Anthropology: Object and Technique in Roman Law’, Theory, Culture & Society 31, nos. 2–3 (2014): 147–66, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413502239.

Susan Leigh Star, ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’, American Behavioural Scientist 43, no. 3 (1999): 377–91.

Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT PRESS, 2015).

Bogna Konior, ‘Modelling Realism: Digital Media, Climate Simulations and Climate Fictions’, Paradoxa 31 (2020 2019): 55–75.

Brett Christophers, Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World (Verso, 2023).

Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination (Stanford University Press, 1987).

Dominic Davies, The Broken Promise of Infrastructure (2023) London: Lawrence Wishart Press

Jonathan White, In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea (2024) Profile books

Lauren Berlant, ‘Trauma and Ineloquence’, Journal for Cultural Research 5, no. 1 (2001): 41–58, https://doi.org/10.1080/14797580109367220.

Mieke Bal, ‘Narrative inside out: Louise Bourgeois’ Spider as Theoretical Object’, Oxford Art Journal 22, no. 2 (1999): 101–26.

Susan Leigh Star, ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’, American Behavioural Scientist 43, no. 3 (1999): 377–91.

Theo Reeves-Evison, Journal Article: ‘The Art of Disciplined Imagination: Prediction, Scenarios, and Other Speculative Infrastructures.’ Critical Inquiry, Volume 47, Number 4, Summer 2021: 719-748  – https://reeves-evison.co.uk/The-Art-of-Disciplined-Imagination  

Top image: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Fell_(Pennines))

Today’s blog is about positioning infrastructural culture research (and the PPC research area) in its broadest terms. (Sub themes and projects deal with specific points of entry, methodology, theme, question, approach and so on.)

Basic idea of this research area is that the current critical, practical and cultural ideas of infrastructure are not enough for the requirements to re-think and re-make the current models and worldings of ‘planetarity’. The planetary, and the more-than human, are idea key to understanding that infrastructure is the necessary interface between societies and ecologies (i.e., the frame by which we can truly live at systemic and meso scale in relation to ecologies; i.e., not just as individuals / individual gestures as is the case in art — see “life after life” Art Monthly 465 , or the Art and Ecology MA programme at Goldsmiths — though this is important, if we can assign the individual place within the assemblage artefacts of infrastructure (e.g. pattern, position), Emergency Hildyard does this well) — but as part of system-system forms or thinking). However, the idea of infrastructure as simply a means to an end, in which the conceptual, philosophical status quo of individuals, fractal societies, etc., — and this is the case even in settings that are notionally explicitly systemic, such as computing, where users = singular — is not enough to develop the (more than human) public cultures and worldings to deal with, or move through, the current crises. (What are these is also an important definitional and political problem, see Mbembe and Roitman 1995.) Understanding, problematising and re-tooling the imaginary-operational whole of infrastructure is key to this. That is to say, unbuilding infrastructural imaginaries and what is imagined by infrastructure as part of a generative, sustainable, capacious and open more-than-human infrastructure cultures.

Building this approach, the scope and scale of speculative-iterative approaches from across a number of disciplines including curating, visual cultures, design & architecture, geography, anthropology, environmental humanities, STS, etc., as well as non-disciplinary, indigenous, folk, non-human knowledges are included. In general and specifically as these are articulated as with lens on or organisational devices for experimental infrastructuring, great care must be taken to analyse and distarticulate means and ends so that the tendency to automate repetition through infrastructure does not foreclose the possibility of negotiation, re-configuration, bifurcation and bumpy repetition discussed above and elsewhere, and which is necessary to the infrastructuring of other (kinds of) story. For example, The Terraforming is, like much of Bratton’s work, useful in reconceptualizing the socio-cultural-technical dimensions at stake in the infrastructural / planetary. But to take it forward, it is necessary to address the content, conceptualisation and positionality of a world as also an aesthetic-ethical-political thing, something which includes myth and the non-rational and which can also easily inherit destructive, exclusionary or oppressive imaginaries, concepts and operations (i.e., those of the Anthropocene, Imperialist, industrialist, modernist, colonial, scalable (etc.,) imaginaires. Something that Bratton is unwilling to do. Although his critique of anti-truth myth is nonetheless important, see Revenge of the Real; how we disarticulate the potential for a neo-colonial or homogeneous, extractive or tightly operationalised worlding in thinking and making at the (potentially) planetary scale. This is, as Claresse Hill points out, an artefact of some of the particular ways that technology has, in the west, been used, made and embedded as infrastructure — as well as to what ends. Other kidneys of techno-social approaches and imaginaries, such as the quantum (as defined by the likes of Barad, Amaro, or da Silva) are important in rejecting the anti-truth authoritarianism of technology.

Some thoughts on an outline of the current covid-crisis and thinking infrastructurally.

If anything this text is about getting thoughts in order in the midst of the fear and the isolation and the unknown. To say this crisis is a perfect example of the power and the weakness of current infrastructural analysis is not to disassociate from the deep sadness that unfurls in the presence of the covid-crisis. Rather, it is to reflect on how the human impact is ongoingly pulled through infrastructure and how this makes calls for change difficult to address. Putting a stop to much of the texture, rhythm and necessity of the everyday — in all but the most essential sense — the crisis reveals in dramatic terms the lay of the land, the inequalities and the key work and workers that make up and maintain that everyday. These are inequalities totally connected to how the maintenance and valuing of the basic conditions of social life of distributed, differentiated and politicised. It also shows the limits of reacting practices to change infrastructure once the interruption of mass-infection and resulting suspension of social and economic activity — not for want of trying.

Where we can define infrastructure as that which suspends and maintains the forms and modes of transition, transmission and reproduction that make up a sense of normality, the scale and scope of what the covid-crisis shows about daily life is as unprecedented as it is disruptive. As such it is met by calls for both a need for normality (not lockdown, reduced health threat) and presents the kind of revolutionary conditions that make calls for the vast changes to what normality might look like both possible and politically necessary and palatable. Why for instance would many workers want to go back to the conditions before? Why return to destructive economic and industrial processes. And at the same time the infrastructural dimensions of this crisis show how infrastructures are susceptible to mundane as well as wildly-opportunistic narratives that seek to normalise, make sense of and exceptionalism its local quirks and desires – evangelicals, fascist conspiracy, charity and battles ‘waged’ and ‘lost.’ The overlaying of these narratives with the material realities, shifts and breakages highlights a problem in how we attach the content of narratives that make infrastructure reliable and ‘everyday’ to the conditions we experience, and how these narratives actually serve to construct infrastructure.

(Tweet by Kate Rayworth on #Earthday2020, 9:54 AM · 22 April 2020 (link). Raworth is the author of Donut Economics)

The art world in particular stands as a good example of these calls. It is precarious, with little ability to react to economic fallout and is already laying of both workers and future programming and funding.[1] Yet maintaining a conceptual and performative autonomy form the medical, numerical, scientific and economic imagination of the pandemic and the metrics tracking it, the art field is also full of big ideas and big claims about a crisis from which it is at the same time distanced from.[2] These claims include those which already reimagine the world anew,[3] but whose conditions of possibility – radical social upheaval — were previously only speculative and mythical in a constantly-out-of-reach horizons of possibility;[4] yet now with new deal-style propositions it is possible to at least realistically imagine “entire school districts employed artists to give Photoshop tutorials for hundreds of students via Zoom,” and “large-scale public or environmental art projects sweep[ing] the land in an age of social distancing and climate urgency.”[5]

(Instagram post by thewhitepube, 22 April 2020 (link))

However, while everyone claps and makes rainbows for key workers — once little cared for or venerated: from NHS and social care staff, to teachers and bin-collectors, to delivery drivers and supermarket staff — in an emotional reaction as much as one spurred on by the shock of the confrontation with the possible loss and just about maintenance of the basic infrastructures we rely on (from food, healthcare and waste disposal), talk of the possibility of change is hampered the lack of critical and discursive vocabulary through which to rebuild the difficult to discuss unfolding, relational, trans-dimensional and trans-positional conditions of what is called normality. We won’t go back to what was normal before in any whole sense, but the ‘return’ will be very much defined by ideas of preserving what — as all infrastructure is relied upon to do — must be continuous with what we have learned to expect before the crisis, and with what we can anticipate in the future. Infrastructure is seen as the answer, even if it only appears like one: central banks step in to preserve core aspects of everyday — oil and finance and credit — with social support implicitly tied to payback that currently see little chance of being for the top. Or, bottom-up mutual aid replaces infrastructural life support in ad hoc and totally functional ways. The fact that infrastructure must repeat in order to be infrastructure shapes the temporality of any calls for change, and as such this repetition determine how any change might be actually possible and therefore realisable.

Infrastructure is in this way difficult to really change since we rely on it for a semblance of normality and sustainability; we depend on our expectation of it. In art this dependency is seen in the negative space left by funding that looks increasingly uncertain, institutional revenue is nose-diving, freelance fees and income has evaporated, and art schools and universities face an immediate existential crisis that is coupled with likely questions of social utility of arts and humanities courses in the incredibly hard times ahead. This is notwithstanding the pragmatic infrastructural-survival mode that has seen numerous support groups, covid-resource pages and solidarity syndicates[6] that spring up at the grass roots level, where precariousness is endemic. Nor packages such as in Germany, where €50 billion is promised to support the country’s cultural workers and industries, in part to maintain cultural and social solidarity – at the German and more tellingly at the EU level.[7]

Nonetheless defined by the institutional consequence — whether its specific instances, or in the loss of the value art is said to provide — these responses appear to remain trapped within the disciplinary boundaries and autonomy that set how art operates as an inwardly-defined and -constituted sector. At the heart of many of the responses see art as a space apart from the rest of the world in which to rethink what normality we might return to. But, this cuts off the response from the calls to remodel the normality that they seek to hold onto some semblance of.

This tension is of course caught in the need for maintaining basic material conditions for those affected, but meeting this implicit necessity through a continuation of the infrastructural conditions from before, can also be seen to shortcut to the possibility of changing that before. And outside of those already embedded functions, the images of how we might depend on infrastructure — in an ideal, pragmatic, or indeed catastrophic sense — can often, as Lauren Berlant describes, only every be drawn through propositional ontologies for which the world must “create infrastructures to catch up” with them (2016, 395). Here the dominance and limitation so the institutional approach to this problem – representation / symbolic / maintaining autonomy and notions of cultural value and articulation and organisation can be seen in pre-existing visibility-based support from Arts Council England (any recipients must have been already public funded; and must compete within a vastly insufficient pool of 8000 grants), fragmentary foundations and philanthropy in the US, the rush to online exhibitions, and the wild rush to fill time with endless reading lists and video playlists (speaking to both the imposition to appear busy and to stay ‘relevant’). The question is how the aftermath and therefore the present that sustains and leads us there might be constructed as a different kind of normal.

(Tweet by Chris Hayes, @chrishyzz, 8:14 PM · 22 April 2020 (link))

Quite different dynamics are at play ‘outside’ of the disciplinary boundaries of art. At one level this can be seen in the interdependence and interoperability of oil and finance markets— where, as the crisis began to collapse demand for oil, the US federal reserve had to step in to save a deeply entangled US economy and finance industry: otherwise the whole world economy could’ve been at stake. (See: Tooze, Thompson and Runciman, April, 2020, available at: https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2020/227-adam-tooze-on-the-crisis/.)

At another level, an awareness of the politics and possible stakes of infrastructure are much clearer when framed around what cultural critique Egbert Alejandro Martina has described as the conditions of infrastructural liveability — a metric that has long been implicit to knowing and experiencing what he calls “black urban space.”[8] Here, we can look to calls and potential experiments in Universal Basic Income as in Spain for instance.[9] Such particular infrastructural imagination might be culturally and historically-specific, but they also highlight the need to understand the changes that might be possible not just in the symbolic — institutional sense — but in the unfolding, mundane and deeply entangled and complicit sense of infrastructure, of support, resources, repetition and reproduction and the figures it shapes. For instance, one of the things that Covid-19 has shown of infrastructural operations is how fragile the parameters of the figure of the infrastructural user can be. With the removal of contact and users because of a viral particle so small 600 of which could fit across the human hair, has radically disrupted most user-parameters and revealed the different risks afforded to and thus inherent within other infrastructural figures – in particular those whose bodies, labour, lives are part of infrastructural provision: from delivery to care staff, supermarket workers to distribution centre workers. The radical disruption that might come from an interruption of the habitualised patterns, distributions and boundaries of care and reproductive labour is an argument familiar to the campaign for wages for housework of post-marxist feminists such as Silvia Federici; as is the case that it is possible to map out these relatiosn and operations in advance of the collapse a demand for wages for reproductive labour would precipitate. In the case of the covid-crisis, that is to say we could see these relations before the current crisis made ignoring them less possible. If we can consider infrastructure as reproductive as much as productive this critical legacy might be a useful place as any to think about not just who is at the core of any critical new normality, but how and what they do is rethought, and how that might be part of restructuring what we rely on for it. Ultimately, that is to say in how we might remake the sustainability and suspension of certain imaginaries and values in relation to material, reparative, and useable infrastructural conditions of access and anticipation of use and needs-met that manifest them.

What these examples show, where systemic or living reproduction is in different ways already on the surface is an imaginary for rethinking infrastructure as a socially relevant field. Already there at the technical and formal, aesthetic, ethical or symbolic level it does not need to be ‘revealed’ through a moment of crisis, this sense of infrastructure is both changeable and critiqueable, analysable and implicitly known — the means of responding to the crisis is already to hand (the effects of that crisis notwithstanding).

How quickly we seek, create, and attune to a version of normality, even defined by crisis. Infrastructures is so deeply linked to structures of anticipation and expectation that it is notable how little it is described and critiqued within our understandings of the social world. While we want to get back to normal now — perhaps this is more a question of limited individual freedoms more than a lack of capacity to normalise those limits. As such, normality as a guide to the replicability and commonality of infrastructure might also point to the need for new institutions and institutional relationships to infrastructure through which to make, unmake and institute normality, to make it changeable. This might be an institution in the loosest sense that is immanent to infrastructure and the variability of the unfolding relations that make it up.

Whether art in its current institutional forms be able to affect any change on that normality, or perhaps even if it will survive this crisis, will depend on whether it can see itself in such infrastructurally-relevant terms. This survival could mean more speculative relations to infrastructural conditions to those drawn in reaction to the disruption to the normality of the art world; or imply those only imagining a new world based on the institutional parameters of art from that normal. Could for instance the interdependence of art to other industries as be used as a bargaining chip in the funding of art — a strategic non-autonomy as with oil and finance, or as was leveraged in the case of the German bail out.

Where talking about the infrastructural takes us into the domain of liveability and the very sustainability of the reproduction of life, the autonomy of art can no longer be as the basis for a critical remaking of getting back to ‘normality.’ Instead, at the centre of this task, it seems like the very question for the art field — or whatever comes of/from it — is to re-establish the terms and relations of its interoperation and interdependence. Furthermore, to redistribute the agency that defines the limits and parameters of the dynamic relations that constitute infrastructure. Something perhaps akin to the before and before discussed by Harney and Moten: an undercommons as the infrastructure to come.

notes

[1] https://frieze.com/article/whole-generation-artists-might-be-wiped-out-carolyn-christov-bakargiev-museums-care-and;

[2] https://frieze.com/article/why-covid-19-might-be-our-chance-reimagine-arts;

[3] https://www.artforum.com/slant/hannah-black-and-philippe-van-parijs-discuss-universal-basic-income-82760

[4] Claims whose critical vectors are nonetheless complicated by current events. With contemporary art for instance, its creation of difference within and against the fantasy worlding of convergence and standardisation by post war globalisation has in fact been shown by this crisis (among others) to now be the very mode through which state and corporate power is expressed in a multipolar and ever-more nationalist / nationally-defined world and crisis. (See Tooze, “Shockwave,” in London Review of Books (4 Apr 2020), available at: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n08/adam-tooze/shockwave)

[5] https://frieze.com/article/can-germanys-cultural-bailout-set-groundwork-21st-century-new-deal

[6] Just a range here: https://www.are.na/tom-clark/covid-resources-c98jrh1a7c0

[7] https://frieze.com/article/can-germanys-cultural-bailout-set-groundwork-21st-century-new-deal; https://www.culturalfoundation.eu/culture-of-solidarity

[8] https://processedlives.wordpress.com/2016/10/12/liveability-and-the-black-squat-movement/

[9] https://www.businessinsider.com/spain-universal-basic-income-coronavirus-yang-ubi-permanent-first-europe-2020-4?r=US&IR=T

(Leo Asemota & Nástio Mosquito, photo: Anne Wellmer, 2017)

Contemporary Art is able to be or act as an infrastructure as it is inherently ‘iterable’ and revisable. It has not passed into history, as say Modern art, or a classical object. Contemporary Art is of the present in the sense that as a whole it can be consistently re-made to fit the present, and that this changing definition updates the category through a process of scaling (witness the ways that stylistic trends are propagated, rather than occurring as ruptures). (This this in comparison to classical sculptures, which conveyed the fixity and profundity of their fixed iconographic meaning.)

Complicating this of course is the differing ways in which Western art history has categories works from the west and non-west: as temporally-situated and as distributed spatially. (Miwon Kwon, “Questionnaire on the Contemporary, Art Forum, 2009–2010, 13)

This would not be to say that this is necessarily a problem for Contemporary Art. This is its power. And this can be put to use by those wishing to change what the ‘normal’ is. See Leo Asemota & Nástio Mosquito, Portikus, for example, http://www.portikus.de/de/exhibitions/215_215.

However, returning to a different infrastructure through which art’s conditions of possibility are set — the market — and which of course interleave with others such as the means of making a living, or cultural imaginaries, this disruptive characteristic of of Contemporary Art as infrastructure does not delaminate it (to se Benjamin Bratton’s term, The Stack, 2016, 5) it from existing infrastructural and institutional arrangements of power inherently.

It does however offer a way to think about the indeterminacy of Contemporary Art.

Index of glossary terms

Foundation of Public Code:

• Codebase
  • All of the code – including source code, policy, documentation and the history – of a product. Often stored in one or multiple repositories.

    Codebases of the products stewarded by the Foundation For Public Code are hosted and managed by the Foundation For Public Code.

• Ecosystem Level
  • At the level of the Public Code ecosystem and outside of the specific organisational, national or legal contexts.
• Public Code
  • Public Code is both civil code (like policy or regulation) and computer source code (such as software and algorithms) executed in a public context, by humans or machines.

    Because Public Code serves the public interest, it should be: Open, Legible, Accountable, Accessible and Sustainable.

    By developing public code independent from but implementable in a local context, as well as documenting the development process openly, it can provide a building block for others to re-implement in their local context, take as a starting point to continue development or as a basis for learning.

    To facilitate re-use, Public Code should be either released into the public domain or licenced with an open licence that permits others to view and reuse the work freely and to produce derivative works.

• Product
  • A re-implementable set of Public Code, packaged with documentation. We support products over projects to acknowledge that code is not something you make and then abandon, it is not just about planning and control, it is about innovation and maintenance.

Infrastructure as Code:

• Environment
• Instance