”Only as Self-Relating Negativity”: Infrastructure and Critique

Five years ago, in a volume charting a ‘formerness’ for the Global West, I proposed a shift from institutional critique to infrastructural critique. This was described as a shift from a critique of the enabling container for a certain discourse or performativity of citizenship (institution) to an embodied critique that necessarily owed more to praxis. Thus the direction was towards a critique based on contingent ruptures, with the interpretation and activation of these ruptures the source of political meaning. The immanence of such an approach registers in the sense that it works with desires that are latent in the infrastructure, thus broadly conceived. It is the notion of infrastructure as a mode of thinking that favours the concrete over the abstract - concrete that is immanent to real abstraction – that I would like to develop in this article, concentrating on the epistemic and political relations between infrastructure and critique.