Ask me about my new critique of institutional crtique

August 23, 2024 8:05 AM

Writing in Public Books, Henry Ivry describes the turn to infrastructure in the humanities, not just as a topic to study but as a mode of literary critique. This mode is as much about the work that goes into critique—reading, analyzing, writing, etc.—as it is about reconsidering the structures and relationships that produce it. Certain authors, the argument goes, "are infrastructuring critique: building new models of critique, which foreground how infrastructure is not just an object of concern, but a methodology for contemporary scholarship." Ivry's best example is a "cadre of Black women scholars in the late '70s" who established "the scholarly conditions to reproduce new types of knowledge outside of institutional path dependency" by nominating one another for literary prizes, citing one another, and adding their compatriots to syllabi. Above the fold, this post is about a perennial favorite topic on MetaFilter, but infrastructure is one of those expansive, tessellating, recursive topics, so there's much

Ivry spends half the essay unpacking the questions of "Why infrastructure?" and "Why, now, in the humanities?" The answers offered involve a tour around the anthropology of infrastructure. A central insight from that field comes from Brian Larkin, who suggests that "Infrastructures are matter that enable the movement of other matter." Larkin's decade-old observation drew from Susan Leigh Star's work in the '90s, which led to theorizing infrastructure as political terrain, something that has been done at length in the intervening years. Many, including those cited in the article, have described the novel forms of politics that certain infrastructures engender, including the subjects/objects involved and their varied agencies. (Larkin also said that infrastructures are "things and the relations between things," i.e., political.) This most recognizably includes modernist ethical aspirations like building highways and dams in pursuit of the good life, but infrastructure also gets unpacked in technical, financial, and cultural terms.

Any one of these lenses can be applied to similar ends, and I think the result is generally like the art world's institutional critique and turn to social practice, but in the context of the humanities and, to some extent, the sciences. In both settings, there can be profound insights, but what results is generally descriptive. If there is any challenge to or change in actual infrastructures, they're generally counter cultural and short lived.

Where Ivry doesn't go, but I think is useful, is into the capacity of infrastructures to generate and reconfigure arrangements amongst more-than-human subjects. Casper Bruun Jensen and Atsuro Morita describe infrastructure's ability to do all that I've described above at once (PDF). In other words, infrastructures aren't just political/social/technical/financial/cultural, but ontological, and their constant reconfiguration makes them open-ended experiments. Infrastructures are capable of all this because they are heterogeneous assemblages. Being so complex, infrastructures have to choreograph the varying ontologies of their components in order to be understood as infrastructure. I think the fullest example of this can be found in nature-based infrastructures, where multiple forms of life are involved in the choreography. The recent popularity of nature-based infrastructure pushes past descriptive limitations and into real world applications, where there is a bidirectional relationship between life and its so-called substrate.

There is a reference in Ivry's article to "reading infrastructurally" that might be a useful method to this more expansive end, although Ivry's reading of it is squarely political. (There may be some interesting hints of James C. Scott's concept of legibility in that approach.) Whether or not you think that's the case, happy reading!

posted by criticalyeast (4 comments total)

Ask me about my new critique

tell me about it :)
posted by HearHere at 8:43 AM on August 23 [1 favorite]

Best of the web, flagged as fantastic!
posted by cupcakeninja at 8:43 AM on August 23 [1 favorite]

I wonder if one could stretch the analogy back to the way novelists (in England and Russia in particular) used to talk about money, in the sense that one had capital (or didn't) and it threw off a fixed income and how much one had of it meant wealth or not. And prices were both mentioned and stable. Then, in the 20th century, that system fell apart and "suddenly" there was much less talk of wealth by way of fixed income and more about cash flow and there was no real reason or desire to talk about prices because they were a moving target. Perhaps now infrastructure, as it ages and fails, is becoming a topic of both literature and criticism because the system is failing (and that makes it interesting), and also because instead of a culture of maintenance of existing infrastructure we have a much brighter focus on ridiculous things like NEOM.
posted by chavenet at 10:00 AM on August 23 [4 favorites]

questions? art world:

Danto coined the term to suggest that it is not possible to understand conceptual art without the help of the artworld, that is, the community of interpreters – critics, art curators, artists, and collectors – within galleries and museums [aljazeera]

is Danto’s coinage counterfeit (b/c) teleological [g]‽

(the link above/below the fold, institutional critique, mentions only art)

further, while ‘when is a pipe not a pipe?’ is interesting question, answered* in the essay by Larkin,

Pipes, in this sense, turn out not to be about pipes but about their production as a representational form that allows reports to be written, budgets to be satisfied, and sponsors to be mollified. A pipe may not be attached to an effluent disposal system, but it is attached to techniques of regulation, audit, and administration

if ‘infrastructures’ are ultimately abstracted into “metapragmatic objects, signs of themselves deployed in particular circulatory regimes to establish sets of effects,” does focusing on physical manifestation miss the point, e.g. of Saskia Sassen’s ‘assemblages’ where “one of the foundational principles of liberal democracy – the protection of individual privacy from public scrutiny – is, Sassen argues, becoming inverted via surveillance mechanisms ranging from CCTV cameras to the Patriot Act”? [dissent]

put another way, can Gluckmann’s deconstruction avant la lettre of a Rhodesian bridge function (so) precisely, as the pdf approaches m/organically, because fluency necessarily implies (specific) circulation, i.e. when the PDF is simply “designating infrastructures as experimental systems…the piping system of a building coordinates water flows and usage in kitchens, toilets and baths” who are they experimenting on [oslo]? & how?

*Larkin’s ‘questioning’ paradoxically concretizes the authors’ early title, a statement:

Using governmental data against governmental interpretation, the essay shows how a pragmatic issue of substandard original construction, undersupervised repairs, poor to nonexistent maintenance, and rapid shifts in policy attention is hidden to reinsert householders as the main culprits of substandard living conditions in many Aboriginal communities.
…
That is, it is literally not a pipe—defined as a hollow cylinder for transporting fluids—when it stops a meter from the house, buried under dirt, without deliberate connection to a subterranean plumbing network…an illusion when no system of institutionalized expectation is in place to connect the physical structure (house) and the range of functions it is assumed to be able to provide to the resident: safety, security, and health benefit (which might then deserve the title “public housing”).

posted by HearHere at 1:32 AM on August 24