Send message to Author

Short abstract

Is maintenance creative, does it have an aesthetics? These questions matters massively in a world in which a creativity dispositif (Reckwitz) has become dominant. In this contribution they are answered empirically by looking at aesthetic practices of a broad range of infrastructure maintainers.

Long abstract

Infrastructural maintenance is repetitive and does not fight for attention or aim for dramatic change. As such it positions itself firmly outside the ubiquituous creativity dispositif described by Reckwitz (2018). He argues that in an aesthetic regime of "the new", which has become dominant in late modernity, central goals are to evoke affects and to achieve attention.

Given this definition of what Reckwitz calls "aesthetic socialities", how would a truly infrastructural aesthetic regime look? Here we are not looking for the kind of infrastructural symbolism evoked by modernist mega-projects. Instead, we search for a system of aesthetic practices, which does not lead away from infrastructures but rather helps us to appreciate them in the non-eventful, passive, and inconspicuous states foregrounded in this conference session.

The search for an aesthetics of infrastructures presented here starts with the aesthetic practices of those who infrastructure: how do they try to evoke affects and achieve attention? The cases presented are selected strategically to represent very different forms of infrastructuring: as public service (e.g., awareness campaigns run by municipal public works), as part of an extractive digital platform (e.g., how Google and Microsoft present their infrastructural offerings), and as part of community self-infrastructuring (e.g., how digital activists style their self-organised platforms in the fediverse). Different as they are, they all have to solve the same problem, to engage audiences for something which is invisible, unspectacular, and ideally "just works".

Reckwitz, Andreas. 2018. “The Creativity Dispositif and the Social Regimes of the New.”