Infrastructure and/as Metaphor: In and Beyond Institutional Critique: Paper presented at 55th International AICA Congress: Contested Infrastructures, 13-17 Nov 2023, University of Kraków

Towards the end of an essay on cultural revolution in Valences of the Dialectic, Fredric Jameson suggests that Althusserian ideological state apparatuses, among which art institutions must surely be counted, present “something like an
nfrastructure of [...] superstructures as such.” An attempt to complicate—while also partially salvaging—Marxist theories concerning the relation of the economic base to the socio-cultural superstructure (and vice versa), Jameson’s attempt to situate with some degree of precision the position of cultural institutions in this schematic and arguably dualistic divide of economy and culture are reminiscent of Marina Vishmidt’s influential proposition of a shift toward a form of institutional critique in both art theory and artistic practice. “At minimum,” Vishmidt writes in a crucial passage, “the shift from institutional critique to infrastructural critique as I’m defining it is the move from the institution as a site for ‘false totalizations’ to an engagement with the thoroughly intertwined objective (historical, socioeconomic) and subjective (including affect and artistic subjectivization) conditions necessary for the institution and its critique to exist, reproduce themselves, and posit themselves as an immanent horizon as well as transcendental condition.” In the very last sentence of the short essay, she returns to the notion of the art institution as a site for false totalizations, highlighting the need to move beyond the all-too-abstract, and overly neat totalizations of “rejection or complicity.”

Among the merits of Vishmidt’s proposition is that the focus on the infrastructural qualities of art institutions, as a hermeneutic shift, implies and indeed enforces moving critical attention toward the specific ways in which economic determinations and cultural production interlock, coordinate, and clash in these sites. While the critique of art institutions and/as infrastructures was always already part of the historical project of institutional critique, it is certainly also true that (a certain reception of) institutional critique has come to impede rather than to propel forward incisive critiques of art institutions’s relations to the capitalist mode of production at large and of their specific emplotments of heteronomy and autonomy, precisely by lingering or insisting on the false dilemma between rejection or complicity—as if the conditioning of critique by complicity wasn’t also critique’s very condition of possibility, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney maintain.

In my paper, I will argue that it is a conception of the art institution as a metaphor for infrastructure that makes possible its rendering as a site for false totalizations in certain strands of institutional critique, and will insist on a somewhat more literalist (and more materialist) approach to the question of art institutions and infrastructure. While my contribution to the congress would
be largely theoretical in nature, I plan to concretize it by taking frequent recourse to various artistic and aesthetic practices I am currently researching in the framework of a larger and in-process research project on the an/aesthetics of infrastructure. Foremost among these practices will be the case of Permanent, which is described as a “practice-based research to develop a mixed-use
infrastructure for embedded and permanently affordable cultural, educational and social space in Brussels” while avoiding “contributing to a process of gentrification and profit-driven urban development.” As I will demonstrate, in addition to providing a corrective to the over-emphasis on institutions for presentation and display in much of institutional critique, the case of Permanent
brings into view the pragmatic dialectic of institutional making and breaking that necessarily accompanies the contestation of existing infrastructures, as well as the building of new ones.