The recent response to Nelly Richard’s critical stance against infrapolitics, has prompted an ongoing conversation although not always public. However , there has been a public reaction in a column by Samuel Toro Contreras, “El poder ya no está donde creemos” published in El Mostrador. I do not think that this reply is necessarily critical of Contreras’ article, since I tend to agree with its main framework. I mean this comment as a sort of recalibration of Contraras’ observation, which ultimately hinges upon on two central elements: first, that there is no need for “cultural war”; and second, that a debate regarding the centrality of politics (the hegemonic position) or the non-centrality of politics (infrapolitics) is already a duality surpassed by the question of technology. 

Of course, I agree with the analytical intuition deployed by Contreras that the essence of concrete domination today is to be analyzed in the organization of infrastructure. The transformation of sovereign power into the molecular and administrative dispersion of control has been invariably present in what infrapolitics has tried to think through in its different approaches. And not only infrapolitics, of course, but also other theoretical positions that refuse the fantasy of hegemonic politics. I do think that infrapolitics does not think this problem factually; what we continue to call “politics” – inherited from the Greek dispensation of the polis, in contrast to the chôra and the Arcadia, just to name two counterfigures – is already functioning as proto-infrastructure of the social community of norms and reproduction and the economy. The meson of the polis is the infrastructural design, to use the terminology of Alejandra Castillo, in which life is only possible as determined by the equivalent. The problem of technology does not begin with the locomotive, “cybernetics”, “Artificial Intelligence”, or what have you.

When Contreras writes that “la pregunta de base seria anterior, sobre que infraestructura técnica produce hoy aquello que todavía seguimos llamando política”, he is inadvertently endorsing infrapolitical thought, with the caveat that infrapolitics is not merely invested in the objective conditions of politics, but on those conditions of thought cannot be absorbed by politics. To say that politics amounts to infrastructure in our time is to say that the “destiny as political” as defined in European modernity can be paragraphed today as “our destiny is geopolitical”. This is another way to say that politics is no longer organized around time and decision, but on space and administration. 

To simply call this “politics” responds to the inertia of language that tends to obscure the terms of exchange. Infrapolitics does not claim clarity, but in the wake of the absolutization of infrastructure of the Gestell, it does favor the possibility of thought rather than exerting a new political primer of action or reform. In light of this, it is not the relation between technology and politics what is at stake; the authentic step back is the difficulty presented by the non-relation of technology and thinking. This might be a slight displacement from Contreras’ own position about infrastructure, and it is one that never really wanted to align itself with either politics or culture.