1) In 1969, artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles made a speculative proposal to turn the Whitney Museum into a waste processing and pollution remediation plant, titled [name missing]. What does a proposal like this mean, politically, aesthetically, practically?
2) Mierle Laderman Ukeles famously asked, “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” Who do you think she was asking about?
3) Does infrastructural critique provide another way of posing the question?
Drifts and Shifts
4) How can we transform Ukeles’ proposal into a concrete gesture for the present?
5) Isn’t what’s missing in the proposal the element of rebellion, or a collective decision-making framework?
6) What happens when we treat the institution not as a horizon (for reform) but as a site of resources—material and symbolic?
7) However, isn’t this the neoliberal norm already?
You saved your park from becoming a parking lot, but it’s called Bank of America Park now. You were able to avoid eviction and stay in your squatted building, but now you have a mortgage. You can have a (crumbling) train station, but there are only two trains now; meanwhile, Elon Musk is building a tunnel between casinos.
8) Is the “drift” towards the creation of popular tools of survival during the introduction of mass austerity sufficient?
9) How could the “drift” become a “shift”, i.e., “a decisive and popular change in tactics”?
10) How can we move from a standpoint which takes “the institution as its horizon […] to one which takes the institution as a historical and contingent nexus of material conditions amenable to re-arrangement through struggle and different forms of inhabitation and dispersal?”
11) How can solidarity appear in a field that is structured to exclude it?
Scale
12) How do infrastructural movements within the art field relate to wider movements?
13) How do they (infrastructures) relate to circulation struggles at the supermarket, at a pipeline blockade, or within other gaps in the capitalist infrastructure?
14) Must movements necessarily be appropriate along existing scales as they reappropriate value in movement?
15) Should practices like looting, mutual aid, squatted encampments, and collective care be “scalable”?
16) Are Stefano Harney and Fred Moten right when they say, “scaling up is really scaling down, losing connection rather than gaining it, losing abilities rather than consolidating them, settling for form rather than formation”?
17) How can we possibly hope to confront how fucked everything is without scaling up our activities?
18) How can we avoid getting stuck in a cycle of reproducing the present by only attending to immediate needs?
19) “How do you see the problem of scale in determining what looting can be as an autonomous force, and not just a reaction to its capitalist scale [which is the] accumulation of value and the enforcement of property?”
Am I Infrastructurally Critiquing?
20) By studying the cultural worker’s drift, how do we derive lessons on how to speculatively enact the shift beyond any specific sphere of production or reproduction?
21) Does the global movement to stop the genocide in Gaza offer internationalist lessons in this respect?
22) If all levels of the infrastructural death machine (from local elected officials to global supply chains) are involved in reproducing genocidal violence, and are thus also nodes of the infrastructure that can be actively negated, is this not an object lesson in scale and connection?
23) How do we resist the pressure to individualize needs? Can an infrastructural critique anticipate and prevent governance from recuperating the functions performed by revolutionary movements?
24) Can we imagine a test of/for infrastructural critique?
a) You’ve abolished x, but does y still structure the relations that remain?
b) You’ve looted the paracetamol and set its price to zero, but does this commodity still mediate between otherwise alienated workers?
c) Does a given action or movement against the capitalist mode of production require the reproduction of a false totalization? Does it promote mere survival? Care for care’s sake? Abolition for some but not for others?
d) Does a given action engender complicated questions about reorganization, redistribution, and who subjects become as they self-abolish?
25) Does the action transform the categories of analysis?
26) To return to Ukeles: after the revolution, there will certainly be garbage, but will Monday still exist?
The following quiz is adapted from Abolition and Organization: Marina Vishmidt’s Infrastructural Critique.
