----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- On 04/02/2017 02:09 PM, Alan Sondheim wrote:
so much of what we find catastrophic here is fundamentally infrastructural.
This is true, and unfortunately, the question of infrastructure is usually neglected by left-leaning humanities people. A fascination with the miracles that code can accomplish on the Internet has largely eliminated any knowledge of the Internet itself as an infrastructure, let alone any curiosity for the tremendous range of infrastructure that powers contemporary civilization. If automation had set us all free, infrastructure wouldn't matter so much: the better utopia, the grander flight of the imagination would carry the day, and material realities would be inconsequential details. But automation has been deployed strictly within the context of existing social relations, so it creates unemployment without any liberation from existential anxieties for the unemployed. Worse yet, the new infrastructure of globalized capitalism has not created any liberation from the grievously anitquated hierarchical relations that continue to hold all of society in their grip. As the number of people who actually work with the crucial machines of extraction, production and distribution rapidly declines, increasing power accrues to those who own and direct that machinery. Finance, which operates through networked codes and appears to be "merely virtual," is in reality largely concerned with these matters of ownership and control over real machinery and labor processes of all kinds. Once again, most of the contemporary left remains almost entirely ignorant of these things.
Around a decade ago I reoriented my critical practice, and now my art practice, to include both infrastructure and technoscience as central categories. Although it is neither necessary nor desirable to specialize in these things, I do not believe that a viable politics (and a viable political theory) can ignore them. Art itself becomes insignificant when it does so. Min Tanaka, whom I read about on this list a few days ago, is a fantastic artist, and it seems to me unlikely that anyone emerging from the Butoh tradition would ignore technoscientific reality. In my view, the Fukushima Daiichi reactors - or the one at Wilkes Barre, PA, for that matter - deserve as much sustained attention as Min Tanaka's dances. Politics is the recognition that human fate depends crucially upon machines, and indeed, on what used to be called "the forces of nature." Tragic beauty inheres to, rather than escapes from, the technological infrastructures of capitalism.
BH _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
