On the Endless Enfoldments of Empire and Corner Infrastructures of Living

This article is an extended consideration of the cardboard box, elaborating upon various experiments of inhabiting the endless enfoldments of empire and its tetrising structures of violence across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Starting with the makeshift cardboard cribs used during Operation Babylift at the end of the war in Vietnam, part 1 charts how corrugation has been central to shaping the treacherous geometries of this containerized present, structured by the interlocking operations of militarism and capitalism. Yet, amid these totalizing forms and functions of empire are various corner infrastructures of living through, getting by, and making otherwise with the remnants and ruins of cardboard. In this way, part 2 troubles the seemingly total and telic structure of empire by tracing the labors of native and nomadic Vietnamese artists, waste workers, space/time travelers, and adoptees across their four respective corners of the world: the art gallery, the landfill, the interplanetary tree house, and the photograph. Such corner infrastructures, as this article conjectures, are incongruous and interstitial spaces wherein to visualize ways of abiding amid the ongoing afterlives of war. Corners are those queer and amorphous shapes of refurbishment and refabrication that are always already installed within the seemingly rigid geometries of modernity.