[-empyre-] a week to go on the trump effect

[Brian Holmes]

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