About
Introspecting Institutions is a continuation, reflection, and resonance of the Transcultural Academy of the Dresden State Art Collections (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, SKD). The website continues thoughts that arose between different participants, interested parties, and those involved. Introspecting Institutions was created as a commentary on the public assembly Towards a Worlded Public which took place in November 2022 at the Japanisches Palais in Dresden. It can be simultaneously perceived as an interface between different editions. The Transcultural Academy serves as a starting point from which to reflect on the infrastructures of institutions through which transculturality can be made public. The focus is on the infrapolitical resonances to the topics discussed within the academy, that is, the informal and internal moments with which resistant and critical potential can be unfolded within institutional infrastructures.
The term infrapolitics was introduced into the field of political sciences by James C. Scott in the 1990s. Infrapolitics refers to informal but politically effective actions that undermine systems of power. The cultural theorist Alberto Moreiras defines infrapolitics as a specific form of withdrawal from the political field: “what I call infrapolitics does not propose itself as a form of politics, but rather as a peculiar withdrawal or retreat from the political field, the retreat is still itself politically significant, and that such significance needs to be made explicit.” The effectiveness of the infrapolitical, then, lies in its ambiguity. For this “murky zone of ambiguous indistinction” (both: Moreiras 2021, 74) gives space for interconnections, detours, polyphonies, and dispersal effects that express themselves beyond authorized possibilities of participation in political orders. Infrapolitics takes place under, between, or precisely in the midst of states, institutions, or powerful structures. The prefix “infra” denotes precisely what is “below,” which is also crucial for infrastructures. Infrapolitics mobilizes these very structures and shifts and changes them from within: Infrapolitics makes infrastructures its medium.
When the Transcultural Academy asks how museums can make transdisciplinary research processes visible – and use them to undermine prevailing hierarchies in terms of perspectives, voices, and positions – it is not only addressing its own entanglement in colonial history. At the same time, it asks about the institutionalization of its historical effects and structures of publicness; about the retelling of history, the plurality of histories, and the continuous communication with an audience that, as such, is co-constructed with every act of worldmaking. Introspecting Institutions draws on this shift in existing categories to further question the classification, systematization, and mediation of institutionalized knowledge and the “worlded publics” they articulate. The website uses existing categories of the SKD’s object classification to develop questions from them that confront infrapolitical processes to institutionalized knowledge. The focus is on actions that are situated at the threshold of legitimacy and thus fundamentally open up the space for which systematization principles of legitimacy follows. In this open space of questioning, the website addresses the informal, the everyday, the incidental. It makes these dimensions the main actors of institutional infrastructures and sees in them the potential of resistance. In this sense, the questions on this website open up perspectives on the everyday and implicit aspects that are part of the politics of infrastructures. Infrapolitics is carried out by both internal and external actors, and can be both resistant and loyal to the regime. However, it has the potential to soften or reshape structures through its own implications. This potential lies, for example, in the division of workspaces and responsibilities or in the use of different languages and devices. Infrapolitics unfolds from within and plays out behind the scenes; in its everydayness, it is ephemeral and never quite tangible. In its casualness, it reflects the limits and dynamics of systems, but cannot itself be used systematically. Infrapolitics expresses itself less in academic discourse than in everyday discussion and, as such, dispenses with representative gestures.
Against this background, Introspecting Institutions takes up some of the categories that identify an object in the SKD as part of the collection: Presence, Location, Title, and Material not only provide information about the object in the collection, but also about the infrastructures, times, and paths that are used, traversed, and traveled with it. The categories speak of territorial areas, virtual spaces, and present states; they address and produce various forms of labor and history. Introspecting Institutions aims to break down this infrastructural construction of meaning by having the website undermine linearity and hierarchization of the orders that emerge from the categories. What also emerges are rearrangements of systemically situated questions that raise new questions with each update, establish different orders, and thus produce a narrative layer that continually realigns itself through the use of the website. In the spirit of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s “Potential History” (2019), the apparent plausibility of one historical order is called into question by developing multiple questions from the order; the categorical sorting is transformed into a potential, changeable arrangement. Accordingly, the website aims to use the tools and systems with which institutions themselves operate. As Nora Sternfeld shows with her conception of the “Para-Museum” (2023), institutions can exemplarily perform an introspection and observe themselves by questioning their own means and procedures out of their everyday use. In this way, they can speak back to their infrastructures, addressing systemic dimensions through small, concrete actions: Such an act of speaking back does, in Sara Ahmed’s sense, not speak about, but with particular systems; in order to eventually be able to look more closely at what infrastructures actually do.
In addition to all participants of the Transcultural Academy, Doreen Mende, Petra Martin, Anna-Lisa Reith, and Tanja Schomaker from the SKD especially supported and influenced the research for this project.
Bibliography
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- http://infrapolitics.c4sr.columbia.edu/ (28.6.2023)