Critical Realism Returns: From Anti-Fascist Counter-Cartography to the ʻInfrastructural Critiqueʼ of Supply Chain Analysis

Keynote by Jeff Diamanti
VENUE: Casino Luxembourg.

This talk explores the ʻsupply chainʼ as an object of cultural history and argues for a reconsideration of the nature of that object in light of the economic geographies emerging to bear the weight of the new capitalist imperium. Jeff Diamanti wagers that the critical realism of supply chain criticism (in keeping with Allan Sekula’s designation of the 1990s) runs like a red thread through to investigate aesthetics of anti-fascist resistance in the 1940s, through to the national liberation struggles of the 1960s, and the logistical turn underwriting the postindustrial hegemony in our century. Though the propositional ambition of critical realism has largely been disavowed in favor of participatory, performative, and experiential trends in recent contemporary art criticism, Diamanti will suggest that it offers an unexpectedly compelling account of how subjectivity is bound up with large scale infrastructural systems, and demonstrate its epistemological and aesthetic capacity to coordinate collective inquiry today. 

Jeff Diamanti holds the special professorship in Global History of Sustainability at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and teaches Philosophy and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam where he is also an Associate at the Institute for Advanced Studies. For over a decade he has researched and written on logistical cartographies, energy infrastructure, and political ecology. His first book, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum: Locating Terminal Landscapes (Bloomsbury, 2021) tracks the political and media ecology of fossil fuels across the extractive and logistical spaces that connect remote territories like Greenland to the economies of North America and Western Europe. His new research on bloom ecologies follows the mining of phosphorous in the occupied Western Sahara to the aquatic currents forcing algal bloom and hypoxic milieu all over the planet. He is also building a long-term research network on supply chain criticism to document and evaluate the conflicts implied by the EUs Critical Raw Materials Act.