{"id":56849,"date":"2024-08-13T10:00:09","date_gmt":"2024-08-13T15:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=56849"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:10:40","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:10:40","slug":"what-is-the-infrastructure-of-critique","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/what-is-the-infrastructure-of-critique\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is the Infrastructure of Critique?"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Israel blockading electricity<\/a> to the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio<\/a>, we live in a moment of infrastructural collapse. Large-scale public works projects have been privatized, meaning that the systems of circulation that enable day-to-day life\u2014from pipelines to data clouds, drinking water to education\u2014are crumbling at increasingly accelerated rates. Now is \u201ca scene shaped by the infrastructural breakdown of modernist practices,\u201d writes Lauren Berlant.1<\/a><\/sup> Thus, in the political and cultural imaginary, infrastructure has gone from perennial bit player to a starring role.<\/p>\n

Not only is political attention to public infrastructure increasing, but also scholarly attention to literary<\/em> infrastructure. Such work investigates material infrastructure (the object that generates critique) as well as generating a method of critique grounded in infrastructural thinking (investigating how and under what conditions literary critique is produced).<\/p>\n

When I say that infrastructure itself is the object of critique, I mean that an increasing number of critics are interested in the literary life of material infrastructures. Books like Julia Lee\u2019s The Racial Railroad <\/em>and Jessica Hurley\u2019s Infrastructures of Apocalypse<\/em>, for example, consider how railroads and nuclear power create new narrative logics and literary forms. Lee and Hurley underline how systems and hierarchies are reproduced through the infrastructures that we depend on in our daily lives.<\/p>\n

But infrastructure has also become a method for thinking about how and where we produce literary critique. Consider a triumvirate of books published last year: Alexander Manshel\u2019s Writing Backwards<\/em>, Dan Sinykin\u2019s Big Fiction, <\/em>and Courtney Thorsson\u2019s The Sisterhood<\/em>. All three are concerned with the infrastructures that produce and circulate literature: Manshel focuses on literary prizes, Sinykin on conglomeration publishing, and Thorsson on how a group of Black writers enshrined their work in the commercial and academic marketplace. Although vastly different in scale and scope, these books share an acute interest in the infrastructures that enable and disable literary production and literary critique.<\/p>\n

Manshel, Sinykin, and Thorsson, in other words, think about literary criticism as an infrastructural method. These critics model a way of approaching critique that resembles the function <\/em>of infrastructure: opening up new ways to analyze individual texts through careful close reading, while also thinking in the abstract and accumulative about how literary scholarship itself enables or disables different types of relationships to infrastructures.<\/p>\n

This might be most clearly seen in Thorsson\u2019s work. In The Sisterhood<\/em>, Thorsson traces how a cadre of Black women scholars in the late \u201970s created \u201ca model for collective action to change cultural institutions.\u201d This was a collective enterprise where authors\u2014including June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shang, and Audre Lorde, among others\u2014would cite one another\u2019s work, add readings to syllabi, and nominate one another for literary prizes. The Sisterhood <\/em>is not interested in the specific representation of infrastructures by any of the authors it discusses (although there is plenty of that too!), but rather with how they created the scholarly conditions to reproduce new types of knowledge outside of institutional path dependency.2<\/a><\/sup> What Thorsson\u2019s book provides, in other words, is a reading of the work of these authors as an infrastructural method <\/em>of critique.
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Related readings<\/div>\n\n
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\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
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\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Morrison and Davis: Radicalizing Autobiography<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n Melina Moe <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/p>\n

Similarly, Anna Kornbluh\u2019s work strives to understand what I describe as this nascent mode of infrastructure-as-method<\/em>. She is interested in how the novel and studies of the novel produce what she calls \u201cinfrastructures of relation to support a world, abstracting from concrete content to produce and limn wholes.\u201d Literary criticism becomes about building and sustaining new relations\u2014whether that is among texts (as in Kornbluh\u2019s work) or among other critics (as in Thorsson\u2019s). Kornbluh continues: \u201cWe live in destructive times, on an incinerating planet, over institutional embers, around prodigious redundancy between the plunder of the commons and the compulsive echolalia \u2018Burn it all down.\u2019 Theory must prepare to build things up, and literature models that building.\u201d3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Actual infrastructures\u2014whether those are universities or bridges\u2014provide the material foundation to perform critique. But infrastructures are not just technical systems. They are also aesthetics and cultural ones that produce very specific articulations of modernity. Thus, Thorsson\u2019s network of like-minded writers and Kornbluh\u2019s call for new ways to approach aesthetic form are both infrastructural.<\/p>\n

My argument in this article is that the work of certain authors (including Thorsson, Kornbluh, and others that I detail below) are infrastructuring <\/em>critique: building new models of critique, which foreground how infrastructure is not just an object of concern, but a methodology for contemporary scholarship. This provides a way for literary critique to intervene into our understanding of those infrastructures. As a literary method of reading, infrastructural critique becomes a practice that seeks to not just offer rejoinders of existing systems, but to actually build and sustain new ones.<\/p>\n

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I want to spend the rest of this essay thinking through a question that Christopher Breu and Jeffrey R. Di Leo pose in a recent special issue of symplok\u0113 dedicated to infrastructure: “Why has the humanities turned toward infrastructure? Why now, after the decimation of the infrastructure of the humanities by neoliberalism?\u201d4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Like Breu and Di Leo, my own sense is that a change in institutional headwinds has ushered in a new research environment. The administrative push toward interdisciplinarity, the increasing winnowing of humanities departments, legacy media think pieces on the death of the English major, and the global divestment in humanities funding all indicate a new epoch, where our research faces new crises that are distinctly infrastructural.5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

This hasn\u2019t gone unnoticed by those of us working in the humanities, especially those in my own discipline of English.6<\/a><\/sup> Since 2020 alone, there has been a dizzying proliferation of monographs, special issues, and edited collections, all dedicated to the nexus of literature and infrastructure, like some of the ones I list above.<\/p>\n

This scholarship builds upon methods that percolated across the social sciences in the preceding decades. In the mid- and late \u201990s, anthropologists began turning their attention to infrastructures through the framework of inversion<\/em>. \u201cInversion,\u201d as originally coined by Geoffrey Bowker, describes a reorientation of background and foreground, so as to locate and diagram the political and ideological work undertaken by various systems of circulation. Susan Leigh Star began writing ethnographies of infrastructural systems and developing methodologies for engaging with infrastructure, as she phrased it in 1999, \u201cto study boring things.\u201d7<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

This, to return to my earlier point, is a useful way to approach infrastructure as an object of critique. But it\u2019s also a methodology that has limited purchase for literary studies.<\/p>\n

Kelly Rich, Nicole Rizzuto, and Susan Zieger summarize this historical trajectory in their introduction to last year\u2019s collection, The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure<\/em>: \u201cTwenty years ago, a critic could provoke readers merely by claiming that infrastructure was not boring.\u201d8<\/a><\/sup> This new crop of criticism contends that it isn\u2019t enough to simply make visible the previously invisible (isn\u2019t this, in fact, what literary scholarship has always done?). In fact, those ostensibly invisible infrastructures humming away in the background weren\u2019t actually that boring or invisible anyway, at least not for everyone.9<\/a><\/sup>
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As a literary method of reading, infrastructural critique becomes a practice that seeks to not just offer rejoinders of existing systems, but to actually build and sustain new ones.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n


\nMy claim is that infrastructural critique in literary studies understands infrastructure not just as object that needs to be brought into the foreground, but also<\/em> as method. This is a way of understanding infrastructure as an approach to critique: thinking about how the type of critical practices we undertake enable and disable new patterns of circulation.<\/p>\n

We can trace this method of infrastructural critique through the prominence of reading <\/em>across this emergent field. In a 2021 joint special issue of Resilience <\/em>and American Literature <\/em>on the topic, \u201cInfrastructures of Emergency,\u201d Reuben Martens and Pieter Vermeulen provide a useful summary of reading infrastructurally: \u201cThe critical task is then not simply to make unseen violence visible <\/em>but to make it readable <\/em>in relation to social and cultural frames, personal and collective memories and desires, and political and economic forces that impose their own rhythms on what can be felt, intuited, and apprehended.\u201d10<\/a><\/sup> Their idea is that readability\u2014as opposed to visibility\u2014becomes a political framework: a way to not just identify, but to become actively involved in the process of changing the way we understand ourselves in relation to both one another and the systems that enmesh us.<\/p>\n

This charge is taken up in a special issue of Social Text <\/em>titled (appropriately) \u201cReading for Infrastructure,\u201d11<\/a><\/sup> and in The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure<\/em>. In the latter, the editors\u2019 introduction, \u201cReading Infrastructure,\u201d provides the most explicit detailing of what this methodology looks like: \u201cFirst, to read is to place an object in context, attuning oneself to its chronology and setting, to test its narrative against itself. Second, reading trains us to assess the social and political production of infrastructural space, a practice that requires imaginative investigation beyond the visible.\u201d<\/p>\n

What is being outlined is a practice of infrastructural close reading. The authors in this collection are interested in very specific infrastructural spaces\u2014roads, dams, borders, etc.\u2014but their practice of reading those object through their aesthetic, political, and cultural dimensions means that they see these infrastructures as a set of contingent relations, ones that are continually open to rearrangement. Infrastructure is not structure. A bridge may look like a static monolith, but it requires continual reproduction by everyone: from the commuters driving on it to the politicians who make the case for funding its maintenance. The act of critique then becomes a place where otherwise relations to existing infrastructure can be imagined.
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Related readings<\/div>\n\n
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\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
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\n Interviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Life inside the Fiction Factory: Dan Sinykin on Conglomerate Publishing<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"Clayton <\/a>\n \n Clayton Childress <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/p>\n

Take for example Yanie Fecu\u2019s essay on Frantz Fanon and radio in The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure. <\/em>Fecu traces the complicit role that radio played in perpetuating colonial ideology, but she also looks at how radio was transformed, through creative practice, into an insurgent medium of revolution. She writes that the act of collective listening \u201cgenerated not only a counterpublic but also a counterinfrastructure that disrupted the cultural, political, and economic circuits of empire.\u201d12<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

What Fecu does is provide a framework for identifying, diagnosing, and (re)interpreting existing infrastructures, alongside the role that critique plays in disrupting and\/or sustaining those relations. This is something that Fanon does, but also that Fecu mimics in alerting us to how acoustic infrastructures (e.g., radio) were instrumental as not just telecommunications technologies but also enabled collective practices of rebellion.<\/p>\n

Another camp of critics approaches reading infrastructurally through form. In Lee\u2019s The Racial Railroad<\/em>, for example, she thinks through how the railroad both creates and consolidates \u201cthe stories we tell about race in the first place,\u201d while also gesturing toward an insurgent underside where the infrastructure of race is interrogated and critiqued. The train operates as a particularly important example for its continued prominence in the American imaginary as a tool of environmental exploitation and racialization while also being a site of imagined and actual promise and potentiality.<\/p>\n

This is true materially: the train, after all, was a place where some of the earliest class and racial struggles took place, thanks to the Pullman porters. But it is also true at a literary level. Lee looks at how Black and Asian writers turn to the train to map the entrenchment of white supremacy and how it becomes instrumental in their critiques. From Anna Julia Cooper to Colson Whitehead, writers continually use the train as a surrogate for their critiques of systemic racism (a topic that has graced the pages<\/a> of Public Books <\/em>previously).<\/p>\n

This formalist approach draws from the resources and terminologies of genre critique and is equally prevalent in Hurley\u2019s book, Infrastructures of Apocalypse<\/em>. \u201cInfrastructure is thus produced by narrative forms,\u201d she writes, \u201cand at the same time it also establishes\u2014at least partially\u2014the kinds of narratives that can play out within its space.\u201d<\/p>\n

In these accounts, infrastructures are simultaneously produced by and produce narrative.13<\/a><\/sup> Infrastructure is equally material and <\/em>metaphorical. And it\u2019s this movement between these two valences of infrastructure in which literary critique thrives.<\/p>\n

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Looked at in a certain light, ideas around the infrastructural humanities mirror the omnipresence of turns<\/em> in critical theory (not to mention the en vogue <\/em>prefixing of the humanities more generally). Whether it is the environmental, material, affective, digital, or \u2026 fill in the blank<\/em>, there has been a proliferation of ostensible novel frameworks for reading in the past few years. In this sense, it\u2019s hard to shake the feeling that literary studies of infrastructure are just another front in the so-called method wars, where competing practitioners make the case for the primacy of their approach to interpretation.<\/p>\n

What troubles me about this emphasis on methodology is that we occasionally lose sight of what we are trying to actually do as literary critics. Matt Seybold and his guests across the best-in-class podcast series \u201cCriticism Ltd<\/a>.\u201d have argued that method has become a substitute for actually thinking through the politics of critique. Much of this work has confused cause and effect. In a recent survey of the method wars, Stacey Margolis drives this home: \u201cOne of the strongest critiques of the formalist turn\u2014and, by extension, many of these new methodologies\u2014is that it mistakenly equates passively thinking with actively performing political actions.\u201d14<\/a><\/sup> Observation is not the same as actually acting.<\/p>\n

But the scholarship emerging on infrastructure wants to move past this methodological impasse and to think about how a literary critique of infrastructure can and should produce action. Jeffrey Insko and Jessica Hurley phrase this question concisely in their introduction to American Literature<\/em>: \u201cIf another world is indeed possible, then how can we make it from the infrastructures of the world that we have?\u201d15<\/a><\/sup>
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Infrastructural critique in literary studies understands infrastructure not just as object that needs to be brought into the foreground, but also as method.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n


\nLet me give an example of what I mean. In Kornbluh\u2019s most recent book (the genuine academic blockbuster) Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism<\/em>, she thinks about how to create the infrastructures to support artistic and critical production. She identifies how the contemporary is defined by its prioritization, above all else, of circulation, from binging entire TV shows to Amazon\u2019s next-day delivery. This, of course, is an infrastructural relation, as Brian Larkin wrote back in 2013: \u201cInfrastructures are matter that enable the movement of other matter.\u201d16<\/a><\/sup> What this means is that the political also becomes infrastructural: the contested site between flow and blockage. Infrastructure, in this iteration, is the metaphor and method for her own critical thinking.<\/p>\n

Kornbluh wants to create new infrastructures for producing theory. Sure, an extemporaneous X-thread can come up with an interesting syllabus almost immediately (a genre Kornbluh practically invented<\/a>), but it doesn\u2019t allow for the structural conditions necessary to perform sustained and ongoing criticism. She argues for the importance to theory of \u201cdistance, abstraction, movement away<\/em>\u201d as opposed to the primacy of immediacy\u2019s \u201cintimacy, immersion, the negation of intercession.\u201d If we are invested in the act of trying to create these metaphorical structures of literary criticism, why wouldn\u2019t we want to figure out how to start building new structures?<\/p>\n

Kornbluh concludes by reading Caroline Levine, Sianne Ngai, and Fredric Jameson, describing their collective critical practices as \u201c[committed] to categorical <\/em>thought, the composition of categories that work for and through scale, impersonality, and hold. They offer interpretation of aesthetics to propound syntheses that can, in turn, capacitate new understandings and other kinds of critical theorizing.\u201d<\/p>\n

This, for my money, is an infrastructural critique. She constellates a way of thinking across scales that are named and enabled by and through infrastructure that, in turn, offer the potential space to create new patterns of possibility.<\/p>\n

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We can trace these patterns in Mark McGurl\u2019s Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon<\/em>. McGurl takes on the complex infrastructure of Amazon and subjects it to generic critique. He explores how its infrastructural and logistical operations are conditioned through various devices of genre: the romance, the epic, and the novel.<\/p>\n

While the specifics of the critique are less important to me, what is telling is the way he thinks through how an actual existing logistical enterprise is materialized and made legible (and, therefore, readable<\/em>) through the logics of genre. For McGurl, this becomes a way of thinking about how we move past the stranglehold a company like Amazon has on determining the conditions of the contemporary. He writes: \u201cTo analyze fictions produced in Amazon\u2019s shadow is hardly sufficient to the task of reconstructing our collective life on more sustainable grounds, but it is one place to start thinking about what it would mean to try.\u201d
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Related readings<\/div>\n\n
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\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
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\n Essays<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n In Defense of Imagination<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"\" <\/a>\n \n Rose Casey <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/p>\n

McGurl\u2019s final phrase, \u201cto try,\u201d feels like a particularly useful way to summarize infrastructural critique more generally. These scholars are not just thinking, but also trying:<\/em> modeling new ways of reading and working with texts that might be able to generate new conditions of circulation.<\/p>\n

Today, the infrastructure that supports our research and teaching continues to teeter as it is continuously rescripted by administrators, journalists, and popular culture into a moment of forever crisis. As such, we must continue to identify new ways to try and build something different. This reflective glance inward at infrastructure\u2014at what is \u201cbeneath, behind, before\u201d17<\/a><\/sup>\u2014seems like as good a starting place as any.<\/p>\n

If we want to build new infrastructure, we first must study it. But we can\u2019t stop there. We also need to try to build new ones.<\/p>\n

  1. Lauren Berlant, \u201cThe Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times,\u201d Environment and Planning<\/em>, vol. 34, no. 3 (2016), p. 394. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  2. Andy Hines\u2019s equally excellent Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University <\/em>(University of Chicago Press, 2022) traces a similar narrative in the preceding generation of Black radical criticism. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  3. Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space <\/em>(University of Chicago Press, 2019). \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  4. Christopher Breu and Jeffrey R. Di Leo, \u201cTheorizing Infrastructure: An Introduction,” symplok\u0113<\/em> vol. 31, no. 1 – 2 (2023), pp. 1 \u2013 8. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  5. I should be clear here that collapsing infrastructure is not new. What is <\/em>new is not that infrastructure has changed, but\u2014as anthropologists Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel argue in their seminal 2018 collection The Promise of Infrastructure\u2014<\/em>rather that the crumbling monoliths of infrastructure have been made \u201cvisible in the global North in different ways.\u201d And one of these very visible collapses of infrastructure is the university in which so much literary scholarship takes place. It\u2019s also worth flagging that there has been a steady stream of infrastructural critique in literary criticism for nearly two decades, from Patricia Yaeger\u2019s \u201cDreaming of Infrastructure\u201d (PMLA<\/em>, vol. 122, no. 1, 2007) and Kate Marhsall\u2019s monograph Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction<\/em> (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), to the 2015 special issue of Modern Fiction Studies <\/em>on \u201cInfrastructuralism.\u201d \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  6. Last year, the historian Mary Bridges provided a quantitative analysis of how the term \u201cinfrastructure\u201d has come to dominate her discipline. \u201cIn 1970, the word \u2018infrastructure\u2019 appeared in 1.5 percent of history dissertations. By 2021, that number had increased to nearly 40 percent,\u201d she writes. There is something similarly afoot in my own discipline of English. Mary Bridges, \u201cThe Infrastructural Turn in Historical Scholarship,\u201d Modern American History<\/em>, vol. \u00a06, no.1 (2023), pp. 103\u2013120. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  7. Susan Leigh Star, \u201cThe Ethnography of Infrastructure,\u201d American Behavioral Scientist<\/em>, vol. 43, no .3 (1999), p. 377. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  8. Kelly Rich, Nicole Rizzuto, and Susan Zieger, \u201cReading Infrastructure,\u201d in The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure: Race, Affect, and Environment <\/em>(Northwestern University Press, 2023), p. 2. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  9. Jennifer Wenzel (who pens the afterword for both the Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure <\/em>and a special issue of Social Text <\/em>dedicated to infrastructure), puts this punchily: \u201c[Infrastructure] cannot be invisible to those charged with its maintenance and repair \u2026 and certainly not for marginalized communities consigned to inhabit a state of intimate disconnect\u2014a form of life that entails living in close proximity to infrastructure while at the same time disconnected (or excluded) from its circulatory systems.\u201d Jennifer Wenzel, \u201cForms of Life: Thinking Fossil Infrastructure and Its Narrative Grammar,\u201d Social Text<\/em>, vol. 40, no. 4 (2022), p. 159. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  10. Reuben Martens and Pieter Vermeulen, \u201cInfrastructural Prolepsis: Contemporary American Literature and the Future Anterior,\u201d Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities<\/em>, vol 8, no .1 (2021), p. 18. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  11. Adriana Johnson and Daniel Nemser, \u201cReading for Infrastructure,\u201d Social Text<\/em>, vol. 40, no. 4 (2022), pp. 1\u201316. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  12. Yanie Fecu, \u201cFine-Tuning Frantz Fanon\u2019s Infrastructural Affects,\u201d in The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure<\/em>, p. 82. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  13. Using the techniques of genre study and formal analysis to approach infrastructure is a key intervention by literary scholars. It\u2019s worth noting that this is an amplification of an undercurrent in anthropological scholarship. Star was interested in the literary forms of telecommunication systems and her theoretical progeny\u2014from Brian Larkin to AbdouMaliq Simone\u2014continue to think through the poetics of built physical and social systems of circulation. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  14. Stacey Margolis, \u201cAs the World Turns; Or Against Methodology,\u201d American Literary History<\/em>, vol. 34, no. 1 (2022), p. 259. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  15. Jessica Hurely and Jeffrey Insko, \u201cIntroduction: The Infrastructure of Emergency,\u201d American Literature<\/em>, vol. 93, no. 3 (2021), p. 351. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  16. Brian Larkin, \u201cThe Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,\u201d Annual Review of Anthropology<\/em>, vol. 42, no. 3 (2013), p. 329. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  17. Jennifer Wenzel, \u201cForms of Life: Thinking Fossil Infrastructure and Its Narrative Grammar,\u201d Social Text<\/em> vol. 40, no. 4 (2022), p. 173. \u21a9<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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