Infrastructural Poetics in Yahya Hassan and Shadi Angelina Bazeghi

This article discusses the relationship between infrastructure and attention through the lens of contemporary Danish poetry. It applies Susan Leigh Star’s concept of “infrastructural inversion” on the poetic practices of two Danish poets with immigrant background, Yahya Hassan and Shadi Angelina Bazeghi, by focusing on the infra-structural conditions for the production, circulation and reception of their poetry via literary institutions and liberal news media in Denmark in recent years.

In his book The Marvelous Clouds, media theorist John Durham Peters proposes the introduction of a new academic doctrine which he frames as a practice diametrically opposed to the laws of the attention economy: "-perhaps now" he writes, "it is time for infrastructuralism. Its fascination is for the basic, the boring, the mundane, and all the mischievous work done behind the scenes. It is a doctrine […] of things not understood that stand under our worlds." 1 Intriguing as this may sound, if we mostly do not choose what we pay attention to, then how exactly, are we to implement such a doctrine?
Habits, norms, and patterns structure our bindings to each other and to the world. When these patterns are infrastructural in nature it means they work without us paying attention to it, they influence us outside of attention. To feminist sociologist of information Susan Leigh Star and professor of informatics Geoffrey Bowker, what qualifies as infrastructure is what we only become aware of when it is no longer working properly. We notice the piping when the water starts leaking. Therefore, instances of breakage, blockage and friction of infrastructural motion are invaluable sources of insight into infrastructure. Writing about new media infrastructure, they use the concept of "infrastructural inversion" to frame how historical changes are frequently ascribed to new "spectacular products" or "heroic actors" when in fact, they are practically always much more "a feature of an infrastructure permitting the development of that product" or supporting that hero.  author's body, personal biography, and various identity attributes have increasingly become a crucial, if not the crucial, interface that absorbs the attention when contemporary literature is being addressed in public. As with all interfaces, the persona is a relational phenomenon co-constructed by many agents across the numerous platforms on which it unfolds. 5 Part object and part user, it is also made from our affective attachment toward what we can identify-or disidentify-with; what we recognize as other but also as somehow already familiar.
To perform an "infrastructural inversion" on this condition, I would suggest, is not a matter of forcing oneself to disregard this interface and "get back to" focusing on the writing that "ought to be" the center of attention-as it is repeatedly advocated by critics in the endlessly recurring and always heated cultural debates on the subject that most often perceive the impact of the persona as a trivialization of the discourse on literature. 6 Rather, it would be an attempt to look through and beyond it, to the specific set of infrastructural conditions that support it and allows it to circulate.
What I call infrastructural poetics is a poetic practice that facilitates and pushes forward this infrastructural inversion. Often, this practice will involve writers that are somehow not applying to the demands by which the structures are designed, and therefore experience friction or even blockage as they try connecting to them. So, one of the ways this poetic can work is when something does not work. Such writerly practices are more prone than writing in general to generate awareness of the infrastructures of production, distribution, and reception that the literary work is embedded in, but that we are generally unable to see because our attention is absorbed by something else. An infrastructural poetics works to transpose the readers' attention from the writing on the page, which we have been trained by literary reading practices to focus on, as well as from our affective investment in the author's persona that distracts us from it, and toward the collective agencies and institutional designs that condition them both. And crucially, it incites us to recognize our own embeddedness in these structures and our implication in maintaining them, but also directs our awareness toward the more overarching designs, priorities, and values they are built on.
In this brief essay, I will sketch an outline of the infrastructural Hassan on the other. In a sense Hassan connects successfully to the infrastructure: As he performs as an independent "brilliant" individual, his poetry is given extreme distribution, but it also lets Solveig Daugaard out how mercilessly these infrastructures commodify and consume him, his body, and his life story, and how the connection he achieves is preconditioned by the selling out of his background. This is something articulated in the poems from the very beginning-but more intensely in his second book thematizing the bodily costs of the individualistic gesture through repeated imagery of the speaker's struggle with keeping himself and his body together, with preventing it from blowing up, while literature's support structures (publishers, educators, journalists, etc.) and cultural consumers alike are depicted as doing their thing, infinitely "more at home" in Hassan's life than he himself is, to paraphrase a line from the poem "STATSBESØG" ('STATE VISIT'). 16 Which, in turn, of course also calls out these functions as problematic, close to uninhabitable. What Hassan's poetry, along with his public performance, did most devastatingly was hold up a mirror to the literary public's fascinated consumption of the "immigrant genius"-inmixed as it was with disgust-and-fear-that caused all positions this public took toward him to appear ludicrous and morally dubious: from the motherly or fatherly tenderness directed at Hassan as an abused and abandoned child 17 , over the 'brotherly' celebration of his street-wise gangster credit 18 to the objectification of him as an autonomous aesthetic phenomenon, himself becoming poetry. 19 While he also produced numerous gestures of re-connecting with others, for instance in his attempts to embark on a political career with the declared goal of bridging the gap between the Muslim diaspora and the Danish political system, these were consistently not taken seriously, and not met by the public discourse distributing his work. Especially after his passing, what is emphasized in Hassan's story is above all an aesthetic praise of his poetic innovativeness, his ability to twist and turn familiar tropes of Danish culture to make them appear unfamiliar, along with a strikingly pathos-filled and selective narrative about his uncompromising dedication to poetry at the cost of everything else. 20 In contrast, the poetic inventions and twisting of words that Bazeghi has produced in her poetry and her translations have often been read as "mistakes" rather than innovations as she recounts in her second poetry collection Flowmatic (2020) and demonstrates in the afterword to her translation of Audre Lorde's poetry (2019) 21 which performatively traps its reader by confronting her with her own approach to linguistic irregularities as blunders rather than poetic devices. 22 And while her outspoken dedication to poetry is no less emphatic than Hassan's it is-in