Stephanie Wakefield

Maybe we will draw the new maps of a people who poetically make new out of old, who are not slaves to the suffocating idea of life as suffering/survival/interlinkage. Perhaps the new standard is whether you chose to participate in this process or not. From there, there are many ways to play, and that is fine.

As Baudrillard once said, perhaps the main rule is that the game continues. It won’t be without paradox, contradiction, and heartache. But that’s fine too. There is no blueprint. But like lovers—or like mountains that raise themselves above, while remaining within the landscape—what is certain is that it will not need your permission.

Whereas until recently, the topic of infrastructure was practically invisible, studies of the spaces, landscapes, and geographies of infrastructure now abound, and for many critical thinkers, infrastructure has become perhaps the political question of the Anthropocene. This review traces two distinct but related paradigms of liberal governmentality and infrastructure, the first, modern infrastructure and its project of mastery and order, and the second, contemporary paradigm of infrastructures of resilience, ruins, and survival. Through this review, I also trace a story of the crisis or dislocations of liberal thought and practice underway as what we now refer to as the Anthropocene. Exploring this crisis and its responses through the lens of infrastructure, I suggest, offers new ideas for other ways to move forward amidst the splinters of the present, and I conclude with some remarks on the political possibilities inherent in both critical infrastructure studies and resilient infrastructures themselves.

Working across earth and social sciences, this article reevaluates resilience’s conceptual framework, drawing out alternative pathways for understanding and responding to the dislocations of the Anthropocene. Via a critical reading of the Anthropocene with the help of resilience’s adaptive cycle heuristic, I locate the possibility of new forms of life in its phase of release and reorganisation: the back loop. More than a brief, negative phase to govern or navigate, I argue that the back loop o ers the possibility for a practical orientation to the Anthropocene based on experimentation with new uses, release of old frameworks, and allowance for the unknown. Inhabiting the back loop, as I call it, articulates an ethos couched not in fear or survival but rather creative and technical audacity in unsafe operating space, as embodied already in a variegated landscape of practitioners.

Father of resilience theory C.S. Holling has a useful way of thinking about a time like this. He calls it a “back loop.” This concept refers to the adaptive cycle, the main heuristic used by resilience ecologists to describe the four phases of life experienced by all natural systems–a human being, a city, a society, a civilization, a swamp, a forest, a company. On one hand, the adaptive cycle contains a “front loop” of early rapid “growth,” leading to a “persistence” or “stability” phase dominated by a few species and characterized by rigidity and the capture of earlier energies. Those “stable” states are not permanent. Gradual or sharp disturbance can cause systems to slip into a “back loop,” marked by a “release” phase where energies and elements previously captured in conservation phases are set free, unexpected new combinations emerge, and wild, exuberant experimentation becomes the modus operandi. The most understudied aspect of ecological systems, back loops are also one of the most exciting. As observed in ecological systems, the back loop is the phase of life in which individual organisms or small groups of individual organisms interact across previously unbridgeable divides and in doing create something fundamentally original. In contrast to life in the regimes we are leaving behind, where innovation was stifled and influence limited to a few actors with the greatest power—the stability “trap”—in the back loop beings and things are released and open to new potentials.29 Although most back loops studied by ecologists have been regional in character, in 2004 Holling penned an essay suggesting that “we are at the time of a large-scale back loop,” a global situation in which “each of us must become aware that he or she is a participant.”30 I think Holling’s challenge is important; but it is also an apt description of a phenomenon already underway.

If we accept being in a back loop, the question becomes, how do we respond? Do we try desperately to maintain the old “safe operating space,” freeze a process already in motion? Or could we let go, allow a time of exploration and experimentation, see what becomes of the pieces of us and the world?

The Neoliberal Subject ends with a powerful claim that is actually the starting point for inhabiting the Anthropocene: the idea of life forwarded by neoliberalism and resilience is a fiction. “Life,” Reid reminds readers, “is not led that way, anywhere, by anyone…In reality the real world is a human one, replete with politics, hubris, creativity, action, imagination, and transformative potential” (p. 184). Where the modern model tells us to look elsewhere for answers or authenticity, resulting in the sensation that what is here is lacking —and where apocalyptic dreams of the future and nostalgic commemorations of the past create an equally painful present— all we need today is to begin from where we are, in and with our worlds, where nothing is missing. No one creates themselves or dreams outside of these worlds, but always as Martin Heidegger (1962/2008) would say, over and against the ‘factical’ conditions in which we are always already thrown (for example the rain pouring onto the roof of the compact urban apartment where I am writing now under two deadlines on a laptop running out of disc memory). Understanding this is not the same as saying to thank or bow down to the weeds and mushrooms. It is to seek what Heidegger called freedom.

But it will only be by opening ourselves to our epoch—creating there, finding each other there—that all this will be possible. Taking up this path perhaps we will contribute—are already contributing—to creating a completely different, richer plane of reality than contemporary politics has yet offered. I do not know what the future holds but I am certain that as these tendencies grow we will see miraculous events in our lifetimes: movements for freedom, love, passion, depth unlike those past but taking on their own tenors, which to the modern (Holocene?) mind may necessarily seem insane.

‘Oystertecture’ or ‘Living Breakwaters,’ one among six winning designs in the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s ‘Rebuild by Design’ competition, and part of a larger effort to attenuate future storm surges and remediate polluted water in New York City, is today heralded as cutting edge replicable infrastructure adequate to the ‘new normal’ faced by many coastal cities across the world. As resilient infrastructure, oystertecture is not merely physical; it is also metaphysical. In this chapter we explore what oystertecture tells us about infrastructure, temporality, and politics, and the relation between them, in an age of global climate change. Part of what makes the oyster-as-infrastructure unique, we argue, is that over the course of living its biological life, and passing over into death, it builds the infrastructure and is the infrastructure, building itself as infrastructure in response to changing environmental conditions and adapting to ocean levels as they rise and fall. Yet oystertecture is not significant only because it enrolls nature as ‘living’ infrastructure, but that with projects like oystertecture infrastructure gains a new political ontology. Oystertecture turns the progressive temporality of modern infrastructure on its head. Rather than promising the future, oystertecture functions to ward it off. Moreover, it seeks to do so in perpetuity, ‘elegantly’ adapting to changing conditions so as to keep all other things the same. In this sense, oystertecture is emblematic of a brand of ‘resilient’ infrastructures being developed across America’s cities that are not meant to be eventful in their own right, but to cancel out or absorb events. As ‘emergent’ infrastructure, oysters are not meant to change the world; they are tasked with adapting to a changing world where there is no promise of future redemption, only the endless and continuous management of crisis on earth. Time marches on, but history comes to a stop. The present becomes a time of waiting, outside history and without future.

How might we respond to this? How might futurity be reopened, and on what terms? Exploring the concept of ‘use’ found in the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben we imagine the possibility of living in the middle voice, and how this may require experimental collaborations whose outcome cannot be known or predicted in advance. This we suggest will require not ever more ‘resilient’ apparatuses to ward off the future, but rather learning to inhabit capitalist ruins in a more-than-human world; ruins in which ‘we’ may not stand at the center. If dispositifs of resilience leave us suspended in an eternal present, then to jump start history may require that we be deliberately and explicitly post-apocalyptic, living as if the end of times has already arrived, and with it, the end of ‘man’ as we currently know him.

All living beings are in a form of life, but not all are (or are not always) a form-of-life. In the moment that the form-of-life constitutes itself, it deactivates and renders inoperative not only all the individual forms of life, but first of all the dispositif that separates bare life from life. It is only in living a life that a form-of-life can constitute itself as the inoperativity immanent in every life. The constitution of a form-of-life coincides, that is, completely with the destitution of the social and biological conditions into which it finds itself thrown. The form-of-life is, in this sense, the revocation of all factical vocations, which deposes and puts in tension from within the same gesture by which it is maintained and dwells in them. It is not a question of thinking a better or more authentic form of life, a superior principle or an elsewhere, which arrives from outside the forms of life and the factical vocations to revoke and render them inoperative. Inoperativity is not another work that appears to works from out of nowhere to deactivate and depose them: it coincides completely and constitutively with their destitution, with living a life. And this destitution is the coming politics.

One understands, then, the essential function that the tradition of Western philosophy has assigned to the contemplative life (to theoria) and to inoperativity: praxis, the properly human life is that which, rendering inoperative the specific works and functions of the living, makes them, so to speak, spin idle [girare a vuoto], and, in this way, opens them to possibility. Contemplation and inoperativity are, in this sense, the metaphysical operators of anthropogenesis, which, freeing the living being from every biological or social destiny and from every predetermined task, renders it open for that particular absence of work that we are accustomed to calling ‘politics’ and ‘art’. Politics and art are neither tasks nor simply ‘works’: they name, rather, the dimension in which the linguistic and corporeal, material and immaterial, biological and social operations are made inoperative and contemplated as such.

Oh Humanity!
All this is to say, Man is in shambles. Today, anyone seriously organizing to shape the future knows already that, whatever it will be, the coming humanity won’t have much to do with humanist anthropology. Whether Google’s data-drenched sanatorium of screen invalids (this would be the logical outcome of the 1960s—the possibility of an island), flanked by the “but you know you can’t go back” refrain and idiotic images of us in spacesuits bouncing around on asteroids, or the attempts of cities like New York and Paris to stitch the human, technological, and natural wreckage that was the modern city into a resilient self-healing network able to avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable—no one believes in this anthropology anymore.

Except us. We’re still living out this fiction. Hence the incredible confusion and delirium everywhere. Reiner Schürmann used the expression “anarchy principle” for a contradictory threshold moment at the end of metaphysics, in which the first principles—the ways of knowing and acting that gave civilization shape and sense—are still functional, but are fractured, falling away.

Decades of “work” to show the metaphysical nature of the catastrophe, the stratigraphers have climbed over all of this (just another heap of debris) and placed us, succinctly, directly, in the present. Naming the age after its first principle-in-ruins, they force us to face our age in all its schizophrenia.

One of the less examined aspects of the turn to resilient urbanism in New York City has been the leading role taken by its major cultural institutions, from art institutions and large museums to major magazines and newspapers.MoMA’s 2010 ‘Rising Currents’ exhibition (Figure 1) may have been the first to present NYC as a real-time experiment in resilient design (see the article by Bruce Braun), but it was certainly not alone; its vision of the city as an integrated but vulnerable socio-ecological system was quickly reprised elsewhere. At the BMW-Guggenheim ‘Urban Lab’ (Figure 2) – a mobile exhibit/venue based in NYC, Berlin and Mumbai – participants were taken on “ecosystem tours” of wastewater treatment facilities, waterways and landfills and invited to interactive workshops on ‘resilience’ in communities like the Lower East Side. Not to be outdone, participants in the Whitney Independent Study Program ran an “ecosystems” exhibition at sites that included the experimental gallery The Kitchen, the post-industrial eco-renewal site known as the High Line, and other urban metabolic sites like the North River Wastewater Treatment Plant (Figure 3). At each of these sites artists and viewers were invited to experience the urban environment as an “entangled” network in which nature and society could no longer be seen as separate systems. MoMA itself returned to the theme with its 2013 EXPO 1: New York  (Figure 4) which imagined a contemporary art museum dedicated to ecological concerns, presenting a series of modules, interventions, solo projects, and group exhibitions including a school, a colony, a cinema, a geodesic dome, a Rain Room, and more.

Addressing risks incumbent to global climate change, Mike Davis (2010) recently declared the city to be “its own solution”. While for Davis this meant investing in the city’s social infrastructure as a way to reduce vulnerability to climate change and erase its uneven geographies, it is the scale of his proposed solutions that now stands out. In the face of climate change, and the failure of international efforts to curb carbon emissions, the city is now viewed as the most pressing and promising site for anticipating and addressing uncertain futures. To the extent that we inhabit a ‘planetary urbanism’, in which the city is the site of metabolic exchanges that are global in reach and extent, the future of humanity is increasingly understood in terms of the city’s social organization and physical design.