Vol. 31, No. 1-2 [2023]

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Over the past forty years or so, the humanities have largely been concerned with issues of representation. Such a focus is not surprising, given that the textual, broadly conceived, sits at the center of humanistic endeavor. Much contemporary online discourse has a similar focus. As our lives become more virtually mediated, questions of representation appear to become ever more central. Yet what is obscured by our investments in the computer screen and avatar culture? The singular focus on representation has worked to mystify the systems, structures, and forms of labor that enable representation to take place and life and ecosystems to flourish. In an era defined by climate emergency, pandemics, and massive inequality, the issue of infrastructure becomes ever more pressing. 

This special issue, Infastructuralism, is dedicated to thinking about the centrality of infrastructure to the humanities and to the most pressing political questions of our moment. We define infrastructure broadly to include economic structures and systems, ecosystems, material state formations, institutions, computational and web-based materialities (including servers, fiber-optic cables and code), various forms of labor, forms of textuality that exceed representation, as well as all that more regularly goes under the name of infrastructure. As people working in the humanities, we are interested in how cultural objects and forms of theory engage with the question of infrastructure. How does representation engage with that which exceeds and enables it?  

Focus Editors: Christopher Breu, Jeffrey R. Di Leo

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Christopher Breu and Jeffrey R. Di Leo

Theorizing Infrastructure: An Introduction

Anna Kornbluh

In the Air Tonight: Mediating Infrastructure with Miami Vice

Jeffrey R. Di Leo

Theory as Infrastructure: A Proposal for Troubling Times

Zachary Tavlin

What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Infrastructure

Christian P. Haines

Up in the Cloud: Digital Infrastructure, Lyric Poetry, and Late Capitalism

Johanna Isaacson

Of Oozing Walls and Bloody Pools: Horror Film, Water Infrastructure, and Feminist Critique

Crystal Bartolovich

Land as Infrastructure

Jordan B. Kinder

Indigenous Infrastructuralisms? Grounding Materialisms along and against the Pipeline

Sean Grattan

Settler Colonialism and Apocalyptic Infrastructure in Almanac of the Dead

Tim Matts

Infrastructural Nomads: Graffiti Futurism and the Afrofuturist War Machine

Hunter Bivens

Werner Bräunig’s Rummelplatz: Reading for Socialist Infrastructure

Nathan Schmidt

Park Infrastructures and the Duties of Trees

Christopher Breu

The Infrastructural Unconscious

Abhisek Ghosal and Bhaskarjyoti Ghosal

Blue (Infra)structuralism: Blue Postcoloniality, New Earth, and the Ethics of “Desiring-Production”

Caroline Levine

Water Infrastructure Is Life

Alberto Toscano

Tests of Truth: Foucault’s Anarchaeology of the Oath

A. J. Carruthers

What Anticriticism Is (after Karl Shapiro)

Brad Evans and Julian Reid

Thinking as If Already Dead: The Imaginal Life of Gilles Deleuze

Tyson E. Lewis

Sacred Night of Study

Henry Staten

The Return of Teleology: A Primer on Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter

Val Nolan

“A New Persistent Cough”: The Coronavirus, Hyperobjects, and the Pandemic Aesthetic

P. Kishore Saval

The Destiny of the Work of Art: Causes, Propositions, and Shakespeare

Benjamin Schreier

Joyful Criticism

Bryan Counter

Reading Incompleteness

Jose Alvarez Lara and Abigail Muller

Zombie Work Force: Capitalism, Sacrifice, and the Virtual Afterlife of Labor

Crystal Bartolovich

Transparent, Holistic, Inclusive, and Humane: Health Benefit Struggles in an Age of Pandemic

Clint Burnham

Canadian Truckers’ Protest: Setting Lacan on His Feet?

Claire Colebrook

Science Is Real

Jeffrey R. Di Leo

Affective Academe: Immaterial Labor, Higher Education, and the Pandemic

Peter Hitchcock

The Political Economy of Pestilence

Sharon O’Dair

The End of Labor, No End of Work

Brian O’Keeffe

Isolation and Community: Reading Daniel Defoe with Our Pandemic Philosophers

Jeffrey J. Williams

The Pay-to-Play MA: A Twenty-First-Century Financial Innovation

Zahi Zalloua

Racial Resentment or Economic Anxiety? On the Politics of Material Interests

Jeffrey J. Williams

The Politics of Form: An Interview with Caroline Levine

John Muthyala

Blue Humanities—Oceans, Seascapes, and Ecotones: A Conversation with John Gillis

Jeffrey J. Williams

Crossing between Academic and Public Criticism: An Interview with Sheila Liming