(In)Visible and (Un)Homely. Underground Infrastructures as Spaces of Dissension

Contribution

Julia Lossau

2020

Carving out the paradoxes of underground urban infrastructure, this paper attempts to establish a dialog between infrastructure studies, on the one hand, and Contradiction Studies, on the other hand. It starts from the premise that the technical and political characteristics of infrastructure are only thought of and made visible in case of failure or breakdown. It is thus only through their eventual absence that infrastructures gain a certain presence. This first paradox is both doubled and bedeviled in the case of underground infrastructure which, despite “lying low” in geographical terms, bars itself from being placed “underneath” in symbolic terms. It is argued that it is precisely the uncanniness of underground infrastructure that prevents the latter from being taken for granted and rendered invisible. The theoretical arguments are then illustrated by a discussion of AMFORA, a speculative urban design concept for the city center of Amsterdam. The paper concludes by discussing some of the lessons that can be learned from an exploration of the unhomely for a theorization of contradictions which aims at challenging simplistic conceptualizations of the contradictive.

In Julia Lossau, Daniel Schmidt-Brücken & Ingo H. Warnke (eds.), Spaces of Dissension (Contradiction Studies), 237–255. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-658-25990-7_12

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ideal of a contradiction-free world

“Science has long been animated by the ideal of a contradiction-free world in which logical orders could merge with society, politics, culture and language. In the GRC Contradiction Studies we are working on ways of describing the multiplicity and complexity, the danger and beauty of our worlds that clearly go beyond concepts of freedom from contradiction.”

Michi Knecht
relational

“At first I thought contradiction was always a relational thing; but the more I ponder it, the more I think contradiction creates relation.”

Ingo H. Warnke
limits

“Resistance is a democratic right, sometimes a duty. With literature we can find models for this right and think about its limits.”

Gisela Febel
prison of difference

“‘Contradiction is the prison of difference‘ writes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Worlds of Contradiction asks: how can we explain and describe the world without making it more coherent and systematic than it is?”

Michi Knecht
Afterlife of colonialism

“Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” (Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh)

Rozena Maart