- Marina Vishmidt, Only as Self-Relating Negativity: Infrastructure and Critique
Summary of Vishmidt’s Essay Cuts Towards Infrastructural Critique from which This Essay Builds | I proposed a shift from institutional critique to infrastructural critique. This was described as a shift from:
- INSTITUTION - a critique of the enabling container for a certain discourse or performativity of citizenship to…
- INFRASTRUCTURE - an embodied critique that necessarily owed more to praxis.
- Thus the direction was towards a critique based on contingent ruptures, with the
interpretation and activation of these ruptures the source of political meaning.
- Infrastructural Critique works with Desires in the Infrastructure | The immanence of such an approach registers in the sense that it works with desires that are latent in the infrastructure, thus broadly conceived. (13) ⭐
- Infrastructural Critique thus | Favours the concrete over the abstract.
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🚿 **In Cuts Towards Infrastructural Critique the example below is cited, from Foucault, which demonstrates the appearance of infrastructure as visible through RUPTURES:
The dumbwaiter, bound to slave labor, carries bottle after bottle up to Jefferson’s dining room. Its systemic properties tend to become visible only when the repetitions cease. If the wine ceases to appear, at some level and only for an instant, the entire apparatus of slavery comes into view. 👀**
- When you turn on the faucet and water does not flow, the entire water system leaps into the cognitive field.
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Vishmidt’s Aim of this Essay | It is the notion of infrastructure as a mode of thinking that favours the concrete over the abstract - a concrete that is immanent to real abstraction – that I would like to develop in this article, concentrating on the epistemic and political relations between infrastructure and critique. (13)
- Later She Reiterates the Essay’s Aim | It is both the ambitiousness of this closing claim, and the notion of infrastructure as a mode of thinking that favours the concrete over the abstract […] that I would like to account for and to develop in what follows. […] I will be concentrating chiefly on the epistemic and political relations between infrastructure and critique. (16)
Part 01 | Institutional vs. Infrastructural Critique
