Turning from anthropology to critical theory, we can begin to tease out the theme of infrastructural darkness. For instance, in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1983), Deleuze and Guattari argue that “desire belongs to the infrastructure, not to ideology: desire is in production as social production, just as production is in desire as desiring-production” (348). Here, desire is thought of as an impersonal productive force that is constitutive of the social field. Infrastructure, on this reading, is a set of dynamic, libidinal relations that can either stabilize into structures with concomitant ideological interests in this party or this program or can be set into dynamic, flexible, indeterminate patterns and flows in order to maximize states of becoming and social experimentation. What is most important here is that Deleuze and Guattari reroute the project of revolution from political and ideological concerns to infrastructural investments, speeds, and intensities. In this sense, infrastructure can be thought of as a plane of immanence upon which ideological structures or party formations might emerge to territorialize desire, and to think infrastructural immanence as dynamic unfolding is a “groping experimentation” that is akin to a “witch’s flight” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 41). In passing, Deleuze and Guattari thus once again gesture toward a notion of infrastructure as an occult (witch’s) power to produce movement that somehow exists outside of scientific measurement or capture. Infrastructure exists in the twilight zone below or above articulated and concretized ideological frames and social formations.

From a completely different philosophical lineage, critical theorist David Kishik (2015) offers a similar argument. Kishik suggests that infrastructure is that which subtends and articulates the classical Marxian concepts of political superstructure and economic base.[2] It is, for Kishik, “anything that is understood in and of itself” (75) before it comes to serve economic or political functions. “Infrastructure” is a term that refers to things in their thus-ness, or how things are before this thus-ness is routed into serving specific ideological or economic imperatives.  In relation to his theory of the metropolis, Kishik makes the passing comment that infrastructure is like a “city’s id,” the origin of which is “lying or lurking underneath both structure and superstructure” (76). Of course, the prefix “infra-” means “below” or “beneath,” but because of this, there is an implicit connection between infrastructure and darkness. It is that out of which visible economic and political life are derived but which remains in the dark, hidden beneath or behind these secondary manifestations. Or even better, infrastructure hides in plain sight as a blind spot in our vision. As such, Kishik’s description enables us to further pivot toward the articulation of infrastructure with darkness. For all the X-raylike precision of critical theory, infrastructure has largely remained lying or lurking just out of view, always on the periphery of theoretical articulation—a witch’s flight or desire/force that is unquantifiable in experience yet exerts a certain ambient intensity (as Larkin argues).

Keller Easterling offers another important point of reference for thinking about the darkness of infrastructure. For Easterling, infrastructure is more than physical networks. It is also composed of flows of information, actions, and energy. Differently from Kishik, Easterling argues that, “far from hidden, infrastructure is often the overt point of contact and access, where the underlying rules of the world can be grasped in the space of everyday life” (2012, 7). While Kishik argues that infrastructure resides in the fuzzy background of critical theory (obscured by the more infamous dialectic existing between base and superstructure), for Easterling, it is perhaps even more mysterious still: although readily apparent, an expanded notion of infrastructure as action and information remains nevertheless diffuse, intangible, and for all these reasons, dark. Indeed, Easterling further describes infrastructure as a disposition or an imminent, indeterminate capacity that escapes explanation, “remain[ing] as a ghost” (30) within a script or technology yet never reducible to either. Drawing on Gilbert Ryle, Easterling concludes that this ghost in the machine acts as an “occult agency” existing in a “limbo world” (43), or what we might call a “shadow world,” that exists below or beneath a certain threshold of perception while still exerting direct and indirect pressures on and through technologies, codes, scripts, and so forth.

In short, the witch’s flight, the lurking, the pre-thematic thus-ness, and the ghost of infrastructure cumulate in Ryle’s intimations of occult agency. This is the point of intersection between theories of infrastructure and the theme of (nonhuman) darkness.

Our first inclination might be to think of this dark netherworld of strange, invisible infrastructural powers as full of danger and foreboding. Just as the “dark web” conjures up images of illicit transactions, so too gentrification has come to symbolize the “dark side” of urban, infrastructural development. We might also think of top-secret government agencies, hidden military bases, and covert laboratories that collectively make up the so-called black world (Paglen 2010). Yet the desiring-productive powers of Deleuze and Guattari’s infrastructure, or the ghostly web of occult agencies described by Easterling, or the lurking thus-ness invoked by Kishik would seem to be beyond (or perhaps below) good and evil. In short, darkness as infrastructure and infrastructural darkness both demand an ontological turn to that which subtends subjects and objects (while also, inevitably, folding into these very same subjects and objects). For instance, on the ontological level, there is the haunting, occult presence of Dark Being, which permanently withdraws (in the form of the abyss) (Galloway 2012). Here we might recall Deleuze’s notion of the “dark precursor” as one such manifestation of Dark Being, which Deleuze describes as “difference in itself or difference in the second degree which relates heterogeneous systems and even completely disparate things” (1995, 120). Perhaps most forcefully, François Laruelle speaks of a “transcendental darkness” that is “prior to light” and “escaped from the World before the World was born into the World” (2013, 105). Darkness demands a crypto-ontology that subtends semiotic, social, and ideological registers, not unlike the witchy, occult thus-ness of infrastructure. Darkness as the infrastructure of the universe, which the human can never leave and yet never fully enter . . .

Dark Traces

We can discover ontical traces of such dark infrastructure at work in subterranean political, aesthetic, ecological, educational, and technological practices that focus on themes of fugitivity, criminality, and anonymity. For instance, the terrain of political struggle is increasingly concerned with interruptions of cybernetic infrastructural systems. Andrew Culp (2022) calls for a conspiratorial communism that suspends the integrating logics of cybernetic control. Whereas cybernetic policing functions through the logic of visibility and representation, Culp highlights those guerrilla-like insurgency movements that refuse to partake in the politics of recognition. Instead, these ungovernable subalterns are guided by a philosophy of subtraction, anonymity, and imperceptibility. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Culp describes the imperceptible as “that which interrupts simulations, short-circuits diagrams, and evades representations [. . .]  receding before it can be captured, and put to work for the benefit of the state” (8). As an example, Culp highlights the distinction between armed militants (who merely imitated the violence of the state) and more creative, intensive guerrilla movements that emerged out of Italy’s Years of Lead (late 1960s until the late 1980s). The latter experimented with subterranean radio stations, bands, celebration, riots, and squats, all of which formed what Culp refers to as “an empty architecture of indistinction, informality, and semisecrecy” (22). Here, Culp emphasizes the subversive use of abandoned and/or marginal infrastructural elements and powers for experimenting with antifascist, anarchic potentialities of escape. Extrapolating from the radical Italian politics of escape, Culp argues that the new guerrilla must become “a scholar of density” (42), capable of finding escape routes in and out of the cybernetic metropolis so as to intensify the flexibility and mobility of insurgents: “there are many parts of the new cybernetic landscape that appear as dark as a moonless night even when the sun is shining its brightest, for anonymity is to our contemporary metropolis as the cover of nighttime is to the city” (43). In this analysis, Culp points out the importance of dark (counter)infrastructural networks simultaneously enabling diffusion/withdrawal of insurrectary actors while also enabling them to remain loosely connected (without a centralized head, organized party, or elected leader to unite them).

Furthering enriching Culp’s analysis, Davide Panagia (2020) highlights the darkness of the nonnormative, nonrepresentational, and (an)aesthetic dimension of algorithms subtending our experiences of cybernetic simulations. Algorithms, on this reading, are not “manipulations” of reality (with all the weight that this term holds for critical theory) but rather function in ambiguous (if not “shady”) ways to produce certain reality effects. The “darkness” of such functions lies not only in the hidden work per se but in the obscurity of their continual transcodings, which seem to fall outside of our usual evaluative and normative frameworks. If the signatures of Dark Being refuse capture by representational theories of likeness, then what practices are up to the task of dimming vision so that it can see in and through darkness? What tactics and practices utilize such darkness to produce disruptions in continual, global policing (as Culp might argue)? How might we conceptualize these tactics and practices as part of a postdigital configuration of the “dark” or “black” arts that help conjure the forces, potentialities, witch’s flights, and powers of the infrastructural occult of cybernetic sorcery? As Ezekiel Dixon-Román and Ramon Amaro (2021) state, one such practice might be “Black techno-conjuring,” which not only diagnoses the racial and colonialist violence of algorithms but also the anticolonialist hauntings of such digital infrastructures by the creative indeterminacies of Blackness. The thus-ness of infrastructure might therefore lend itself to undoings, exits, and tactical subversions of “recursive colonialisms” (Critical Computation Bureau 2021) that can remain imperceptible to state control or capitalist expropriation.

Against the prevailing commonsense assumption that schools should enlighten (bring into the light of the truth), educational theorists are increasingly calling for an “endarkenment” of educational philosophy (Lewis 2013). Drawing on the work of Édouard Glissant, Derek Ford and I (2018) argue that the darkness of opacity (a refusal to articulate and explicate) is an important aspect of communist pedagogy of escape, while Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013) have theorized the undercommons as a form of dark infrastructure or a place of fugitive, Black study that refuses to be policed, controlled, or managed by the audit culture of educational institutions. In both cases, the fugitive nature of study is emphasized as a way to resist the cybernetic emphasis on calculation, visibility, and representation that is so prevalent in higher education. The informal networks of outcasts, dropouts/pushouts, and political dissidents that study in the undercommons replace economics of debt with relational or social debt. Perhaps we can even go so far as to suggest that the opacity of the undercommons enacts an exorcism of bad debt from educational practices, leaving open a gap for a dim (perhaps imperceptible) educational form of life beyond capture by learning metrics, assessment measures, and analytics of excellence. Such would be a mysterious (if not wondrously weird) education.

The nonhuman dimension of dark infrastructure can also be found lurking in the shadows of Timothy Morton’s notion of the “strange loop” of dark ecology (2016, 7). For Morton, ecological thinking must attempt to think the weird and uncanny dimensions of appearances beyond mechanical, causal understandings of “nature.” Drawing on the ancient Norse meaning of “weird” as “twisted,” Morton proposes ecological awareness as awareness of the strange loops in which “two levels that appear utterly separate flip into one another” (7), such as the weird way in which nature and culture, individual and species, and geology and humanity contact one another with a sudden, uncanny urgency. One might think of infrastructure in terms of the negative feedback loop of “agrologistics” (42) as a technical, planned approach to global agriculture, but what I am emphasizing is another counterinfrastructure constituting the weird, mysterious, wonderous feedback loops of dark ecology. On my reading, Morton is attempting to theorize (and in some sense poetically enact) the invisible and inaccessible infrastructural loop of witchy, occult powers that articulates otherwise distinct levels, dimensions, and strata of an unbound ontology of dark beings.

Darkness, obscurity, withdrawal . . . can we depict such states of Being? Can we answer Darby English’s provocative question “How to see a work of art in total darkness?” (2010), especially when the techniques of artmaking embrace and exclude the very darkness that they envelop? For Moten, Blackness is an “ontology of disorder, an ontology of dehiscence, a para-ontology” that manifests itself in the “incalculable rhythm of the life of things” (2008, 187, 202), examples of which include the post-optical, dark paintings of Mondrian. The incalculable darkness of Blackness withdraws, and in that withdrawing, demonstrates a power that is prior to (and perhaps elicits) governmental responses to contain, control, and police such Blackness. Furthering this point, the darkness of Blackness interrupts and suspends what Culp refers to as the “white infrastructure of photography” (2020, 133). Capture is, for Culp, the defining structural feature of such white infrastructure (think cybernetic codification), forcing Blackness to reveal, expose, and perform for a white gaze. Darkness, on this reading, is an (an)aesthetic of invisibility, the refusal of the incalculable rhythms of the life of things to be fully present and thus turned into spectacles of pain, suffering, or desirable otherness. In short, a new kind of (an)aesthetic process capable of supporting ways of seeing not predicated on a light-based aesthetic (or, at a minimum, light-based metaphors or analogies) is needed. While the white infrastructure of photography attempts to illuminate Blackness in order to police Black bodies (Browne 2015), what is necessary is another sensory practice that enables one to see in total darkness (in the undercommons, in the night of study, in the opacity of weird ecological loops) without illumination.

In this sense, I have to disagree with Levi Bryant’s suggestion that “part of political practice would consist in diminishing the darkness of quasi-dark objects, of devising strategies to ‘brighten’ or intensify their appearance in situations” (2011, n.p.). Instead of such enlightenment aesthetics, ought we not call for more experimentation with how to bring the darkness of Black objects to our ways of sensing? How can we endarken the senses, and what role can art play in sensitizing the human perceptual system to existence in the dark (thus avoiding falling back onto overreliance on white aesthetic infrastructure)? Perhaps we can think of darkness (sensing the presence of an absence, an apparent opacity within experience) as the phenomenology of Blackness (transcendental darkness, prior to any light, prior to governance). The question then becomes, which alchemical arts are capable of manifesting the Blackness of darkness through processes of endarkenment?[3] Without darkness, Blackness is simply a nothing, and without Blackness, darkness is simply a byproduct of white infrastructures of surveillance and governance. At stake here is an aesthetic capable of a radicalization of darkness (total darkness à Blackness) to the point where its dependence on light suddenly transgresses its own limits.

Cultivating dark perceptual capacities is particularly difficult given the temporality of Blackness. Whereas light always comes from a source, and thus has a beginning (an earlier and later), Blackness does not have such an origin and thus appears outside of temporality. Light projects out, and for this reason, has a history to it. Yet Blackness is not a projection. Instead, it merely subtends in its thus-ness, or we might say it withdraws into its thus-ness. If there is any way to figure such Blackness, it might be through the holes it leaves within light (the darkness of shadows, for instance). Dark infrastructure, on this reading, would appear (if at all) only in the moments of temporal break or interruption, when the Blackness of darkness produces a hole in the surrounding lightscape (not unlike a reverse pinhole camera).

Whereas Hannah Arendt once argued that politics is located in and defined by a “space of appearance,” which “comes into being wherever men are together in manner of speech and action” (2018, 199), I would argue that today, key political, educational, aesthetic, and ecological questions concern escape from visibility into the darkness of invisibility, impenetrability, withdrawal, opacity, obscurity, shadow, and fog. This is not a retreat from politics but rather a tactical dispersal in order to become imperceptible werewolves, dreamers, redeemers, enemies, sailors, exiled stowaways, idols, messengers, extortionists, ghosts, stalkers, viruses, vagrants, fighters, criminals, and creatures (Mohaghegh 2019). Cybernetic (white) infrastructure deploys dark powers to force appearances whereas escape artists live within the darkness, appropriate it, and redeploy it in order to remain dark, thus interrupting the dialectic of revealing and concealing that lies at the heart of cybernetic control. The challenge of the issue is how to theorize, describe, or somehow contact the dark dimensions of infrastructure that lurk, invisible, all around us in order to put it to new, partisan uses (against colonialisms, anti-Black racisms, sexisms, and class exploitation). What are the techniques we can use as artists, theorists, political subversives, and scientists to probe the occult world of dark infrastructural functions, structures, logics, and processes in order to better understand the untapped potentiality of its Black thus-ness? How can we attune our senses to the becoming-imperceptible of flows, circuitries, and networks that are the dark matter of infrastructural witchcraft? To tackle these questions, we bring together various artists and designers interested in experimenting with, on, and through dark infrastructure and our modes of engagement with it. The goal is not to impose a particular meaning or definition of dark infrastructure but rather to start an interdisciplinary discussion of what the darkness of infrastructure might mean.

Back to Black: Toward a Dim (An)aesthetics

In curating this “dark issue” of Techniques, Nasrin Tork and I were interested in both written essays as well as artistic/digital experiments with, in, and through dark infrastructure in order to understand valences of darknesses in relation to the infrastructures of physics, aesthetics, history, geopolitical relations, education, finance, race/class/gender, and crypto-ontologies of dark objects. Issue D, as a whole, has subsequently come to embody the theme of dark infrastructure in its form, tinkering with the Techniques website in order to create an “upside-down” journal issue. One can think of D(I) as a bonus track on a CD, a haunting, or perhaps a hidden level of a video game. Actually, Techniques is already a special kind of dark academic infrastructure, existing within yet somehow beyond the institutional and professional constraints of the “journal.” It draws power from within the shadowy interstices of art, science, design, and philosophy. Our issue is meant to thematize this darkness, drawing to the surface the occult powers already flowing through Techniques. Or, better yet, D(I) can be thought of as a conjuring device or digital divining rod for eliciting the spectral exhaust or dark/ghostly radiation/aura of the journal. The contents of issue D(I) follow suit, provoking further experimentation with (rather than mere reflection on) the ontological, political, educational, ecological, and aesthetic potentialities of various levels of darknesses beneath, between, and beyond objects, representations, and practices.

We begin with the broadest notion of dark infrastructure: Diana Rojas-Ponce’s haunting video Event Horizon. This is perhaps the Blackest of all the contributions to this issue. Rojas-Ponce conjures up the effects of invisible cosmic powers and forces on visible matter and light, leaving us to speculate on the existence of nonhuman infrastructure subtending the poetic folds and perturbations in space-time. Zooming in on earthly infrastructures, Metahaven produces a map titled DVD Zone 5, which is a territorial fiction and historical fabrication that depicts the infrastructural interplay between empires, technologies, psychological states, corporate entities, and weather patterns, all of which exist in a dynamically invisible force field moving across continents. Both Julie Libersat and Triton Mobley focus our attention on the racial politics of highway infrastructures. Libersat and Mobley are attentive to how such infrastructure—meant to connect and transport—separates, divides, and acts as a concrete barrier to the convivial, predominantly Black communities that are displaced by these large-scale infrastructural monoliths. For Libersat, Endless Highway is a nightmarish loop that takes us nowhere, a modern version of the eternal return that belies the promise of progress often projected onto such infrastructural investments. Mobley’s images of highway architecture vibrate as if caught in a perpetual earthquake. He unsettles the purported solidity and reliability of this uniquely urban megalithic structure. The darkness of the infrastructure works on two levels here. First, Mobley’s scathing critique of urban planning from the perspective of critical race theory reveals the underside of the modern miracle of our highway system. Secondly, the images seem to gesture toward another, counternarrative of Black resistance to erasure that shakes these indomitable structures to their core. Christopher Meerdo’s creepy Apeirophobia offers us an extended meditation on the ubiquity of surveillance infrastructures. Subversively, he takes footage from various surveillance cameras to create a perpetually morphing series of emergent phantom images that interrupt the ability of surveillance technologies to police and identify. Thus infrastructures of visibility are transformed by Meerdo into technologies of evasion and opacity. Peter Lemmens also taps into the relationship between presence and absence at the heart of the dialectic of dark infrastructure. His playfully cheeky “Ghost_Stories” is a reflection on the frontend and backend narratives that are produced through digital coding and how these two narrative dimensions interact but also recede from one another. “Lost and Found, and Lost Again” is a complex composition written by the Brussels-based artist collective Jubilee and other collaborators that (fictitiously) recounts their process of developing a cartographic portal for creating shared, specific, situated maps emerging from nomadic walking practices. What is captured here are the levels of darkness that surround infrastructural projects and questions: darkness is involved in the performance of any relation that always leaves something unknowable, incomplete, and unsayable, not as negative conditions but rather as positive conditions for creative production and dialogue. Elnaz Salehi’s CHECK IF can be interpreted as an existentialist advertisement for a fictitious app that enables us to determine whether or not we are alive or dead at any given moment. Salehi’s dark humor recognizes our current state of emergency in which life and death are indistinguishable and offers an absurdist “solution” to an already absurd condition. Nasrin Tork highlights the relationship between the natural infrastructure of the shell of a seed and the human-made infrastructure of packing material, creating a strange isomorphism between consuming food and consuming manufactured products. The collection then ends with James Beckett’s “Skeptical Structures of Max,” which is a collage of images and quotes from his book of the same name. If we started with Rojas-Ponce’s macroscopic reflections on infrastructure on a cosmic scale, then Beckett offers a microscopic, fine-grained celebration of the aesthetic qualities of the most banal construction material found in mundane and cheap infrastructures worldwide: Max Himmelheber’s chipboard.

The collection reveals the multiple levels of darkness within infrastructure that give it witchy and occult powers to affect relations while at the same time receding from measure and visibility. Each artist deploys a series of tactics to sometimes sabotage white cybernetic forms of visibility and to sometimes tap into the potentialities of darkness for (an)aesthetic experimentation with agentic powers emitted from para-ontologies of Black becoming. Such tactics include anonymization, dark satire, concealment, desubstantialization, morphogenic loops, temporal warping, techno-conjuring, and relational processing. The collection also reveals how darkness is never fully empty/void but also has its own internal shapes, forms, informational excesses, and infrastructural grids that lie just below our perceptual horizon, exerting invisible pressure. The interplay between the darkness of infrastructure(s) and the infrastructure of darkness(es) forms generative dialectical tensions between creative and destructive, dangerous and advantageous, aesthetic and anaesthetic potentialities. Our wager has been that the arts can provide us with unique resources for experimenting with dimming our vision and dampening our hearing so that we can, perhaps, approach these dialectical reversals with equal parts caution and wonder.

___

[1] One exception to this trend is the work of Anirban Gupta-Nigam (2016) on “black infrastructure.”

[2] The idea of an economic base or Grundlage has also been translated into French as infrastructure. Yet the “economic structure of society” or “real basis” or “real foundation” is, at least in classical Marxist thought, different from the English understanding of infrastructure in two important respects. First, economic base is much narrower than infrastructure, and second, the power of determination attributed to this economic base is lacking in discussions of infrastructure (indeed, linguistic, cultural, and technical infrastructure are often interpreted as determined by a preceding and controlling economic base). As such, the two overlap but are not exactly synonymous.

[3] Eugene Thacker’s genealogy of darkness, blackness, and night in Starry Speculative Corpse (2015) offers a short overview of various mystical, philosophical, and aesthetic approaches to thinking through dark arts. In particular, he draws upon Nicola Masciandaro’s argument that darkness is a property of black, while black is not darkness. Thacker then speculates: “Perhaps there is a black that is seen—a black of shading and gradients—as well as a black that is unseen—the black of retinal inactivity” (55). On my reading, this would mean that blackness as such cannot be seen, whereas darkness is blackness’s opacity, seen as opaque (sensing blackness on the periphery or limits of sensation).

Commentary by Anirban Gupta-Nigam

1. Commenting on “[…]Larkin frames this question in relation to methodological choice, but I would make a stronger claim: that the ontology of infrastructure itself contains a dark if not occult-like power that resists methodological thematization/operationalization.[…]”

There is perhaps a stronger claim at play here: if the recessiveness of infrastructure resists methodology at an ontological level, then in what sense is ignoring this level, or tracking infrastructure without attending to its recessiveness, or positing its recessiveness as merely a matter of in/visibility a question of choice, methodological or otherwise?

For the moment, I note this less to stake a position one way or another regarding ontological analysis than to ask whether anthropological and historical studies of infrastructure raise an important question about what counts as a method to begin with. Differently put: it seems to me that the moment one thinks of infrastructure as elucidating social, political, aesthetic, and economic concerns, its recessiveness withdraws, disappears from the analytic frame. In this sense, an investigation of the sociotechnical forces composing infrastructural regimes is not an investigation of infrastructure as such but its translation into everyday life.

2. Commenting on: “[…] In short, the witch’s flight, the lurking, the pre-thematic thus-ness, and the ghost of infrastructure cumulate in Ryle’s intimations of occult agency. This is the point of intersection between theories of infrastructure and the theme of (nonhuman) darkness.[…]”

What kind of inquiry is an ontological inquiry? In my reading of it, Nahum Chandler’s work forces us to confront the fact that before committing to or deviating from ontological analysis, we must contend with the fact that the ontological question is a type of question—that it calls for a type of inquiry.

That racism has and continues to be articulated in the guise of a “thoughtful” question about ontology (“On what basis and in what manner can one decide a being, and its character of existence, as one kind or another?”) ought not to distract from the fact that the ontological question could only arise once a “metaphysical infrastructure of discourse” had been put in place, organized, formalized. This is how I hear Chandler’s claim that the “question is an ontological one (even if it is not radical or rigorously fundamental)”: the question is an ontological one not because ontology is the only ground for thinking race but because it is the ground on which the race question has been handed down to us, i.e., it must be dealt with in those terms without the terms necessarily being buttressed in the process.

(Here, I want to add [in parentheses!] that to my mind Chandler offers a powerful interpretation of the specific movement of racism as opposed to, say, colonialism. While grounded in discourses like civilizational hierarchy, colonialism did not pose an ontological inquiry into the status of the colonized as human. The nature of the colonial question was not ontological. One wonders whether this is one of the reasons for postcolonial theory’s deeply inadequate attention to race—a point made long ago by Malini Johar Schueller and more recently by David Lloyd). —Nahum Chandler, X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought

3. Commenting on “[…] the creative indeterminacies of Blackness […]”

“I think the key point here is whether the ‘ending,’ which is the only reasonable thing one can ask of this racial capitalist world, must happen within or outside something and whether this something that is retained is new or a part of this world. … I am invested—because I don’t see how we will be able to exist otherwise—in the end of the world as we know it.” —Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “An End to ‘This’ World”

4. Commenting on “… what is necessary is a (non)aesthetic that enables one to see in total darkness…”

In line with Denise Ferreira Da Silva’s distinction between the end of the world and the end of the world as we know it, I wonder whether one of the challenges thrown up by these states of recessiveness is letting go of the need to know. I think here also and especially of Stanley Cavell, for whom the constant threat of skepticism—about another’s states of mind, their humanity, and the world itself—stems from an inability to accept our finitude as humans and the autonomy of the world from our capacities to know it.

Commentary by Juuso Tervo

What I wish to do in these short commentaries is make use of the interconnections between darkness and infrastructures as put forward by the editors. This means that instead of attempting to elucidate or highlight some aspects of these contributions—or, alternatively, asking for elucidation or enlightenment from the authors—my hope is to engage with the infrastructural darkness they might point to or work with.

This, of course, brings up a problem: how to engage in a discussion about dark infrastructures in a way that resists “the dialectic of revealing and concealing”; a dialectic that so often fuels the flames of academic desire to set up and sustain infrastructures of knowledge? What kind of “dark commentary” might this resistance require, especially if the discussion in itself (that is, not only its topic) ought to take a “witch’s flight” from the well-lit agoras of academia?

Before addressing these questions any further, it’s perhaps necessary to say a few words about the topic itself. What I find compelling in this issue are the double-exposures—or better, double-(under)-exposures—rehearsed by the editors when addressing the interconnections between darkness and infrastructures. I’m using the term “exposures” in plural since it is not only darkness and infrastructure as concepts that they enmesh: indeed, their call for “a crypto-ontology that subtends semiotic, social, and ideological registers” guides us to enter “the shadowy interstices of art, science, design, and philosophy” that, in themselves, can be quite messy even without any additional tenebrous epithets. Thus encouraging to mess up clear, standardized coordinates guiding Academic (with capital A) thought and practice, we as readers might find ourselves within the parameters of a dark “Universe which the human can never leave and yet never fully enter.…”

Of course, there are other domains through which we might have accustomed to grasp such aporetic terrains. One may ponder, for example, is this “universe” simply another name for “language,” “the unconscious,” “history,” or any other central motif of modernity that has played a pervasive-yet-evasive role in attempts to come in terms with human existence. This is not to say that the double-(under)-exposures that the editors invite us to attend to should be disregarded as mere same-old-same-old. After all, as they argue, the shift from structural to infrastructural concerns and critiques indicates a shift in strategy. Instead of speaking, writing, thinking, or making art so that one could operationalize some outside force to trample with the structural conditions of the present (in the name of History, for example), an infrastructural approach can be considered to attune us to a web of contingencies and interrelations—both dreamed of and all too real, both human and nonhuman—that ultimately remains inexhausted by whatever frame of reference makes it sensible at a given moment, whether past, present, or future. So, when Marina Vishmidt writes that infrastructural critique allows us “to ask political questions that can no longer be replied to in the abstract, with the false totalizations of rejection or complicity” (2016, 268), “dark infrastructure” as discussed by the editors can be seen to add a gothic vibe to the politics Vishmidt speaks of—a politics that directly engages with repetition and reproduction without seeking to establish a singular, unrepeatable event or position that would break out from the great chain of being and, by doing so, put the world in a completely new light.

What there is to say about this touche du gothique that, at least for me, seems to surround the editorial—if not the entire issue? Here, I’m not simply referring to romantic melancholia paired with black lipstick and pale makeup (even though that’s not completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand) but more like Marx’s Victorian world of vampires, ghouls, and black magic that haunts the apparent clarity of the day. Indeed, a creeping sense of all things dark and occult has offered a handy way to tamper with horizons of expectation steeped in enthusiastic narratives of progress and growth. Just like Kant once argued that the signs of the end of times tend to be terrifying because “talents, skill and taste (with their consequence, luxury) naturally runs ahead of the development of morality” (1996, 225), attending to the darkness of infrastructures and infrastructures of darkness can be understood as an attunement to chimeric discrepancies in historical imagination; in other words, to the flows and intensities of time’s unfolding that are unabashedly irrelevant to our self-confident desires (whether implicit or explicit) to make History (with art, science, politics, education…). While calling this long, slow shadow treading on our heels “morality” may seem to take us frighteningly close to the narcissistic feedback loop of bad consciousness, I see that the image of two tempos that Kant conjures is helpful when trying to come in terms with dark and infrastructural dis/appearances of “occult agency” swarming within the fabric(s) of everyday life. To flirt with psychoanalytic terminology, one could even say that “dark infrastructure” names a repository for things and thoughts that the bright sun of telos represses in our historical imagination, meaning that to engage with “infrastructural witchcraft” is to summon the repressed to return from the shadows of structured/structural development (here, I’m thinking how the editors use the adjective “prior” to describe the relation between darkness and governance). From this perspective, the gothic vibe I’m getting from the editorial has to do with a determinate resistance toward imaginaries of solutionist confidence so prevalent in today’s entrepreneurial zeitgeist—a resistance that, in the brightness of the day, may come across as a bit off (like goths on the beach).

What would this all mean for the art of commentary? Going back to Vishmidt (2016), the “transitive character” of infrastructures— that is, their existence “between the material and the possible, between machines and working drawings, between cognitive maps and what is pictured on them” (268)—leads me to envision dark, infrastructural commentaries as commentaries that operate within the fabric of the form that thought has taken (text, artwork, etc.). Rather than trying to distill the unsaid from the said, I’m thinking something akin to the ritual practice of building concealment: a tradition in which magical objects (dead animals, bones, coins, etc.) were placed within the structures or foundations of buildings for various social purposes (e.g., protection, prosperity…) (see Hukantaival 2016). From this perspective, to comment on a work darkly would mean to conceal something within it—something that does not tamper with the form or edifice of the work but nevertheless acts with the time and space that the work carves to its sociomaterial surroundings.

References