Marina died of cancer on 26 April 2024, two weeks before her 48th birthday. The following was drafted as an introduction for a book presenting her writing on what she called ‘infrastructural critique’, edited by Larne Abse Gogarty, Kerstin Stakemeier and me, and due to be published by Verso in 2026. Marina’s work always maintained a collaborative ‘double focus’ on the social whole and the collective means to change it; and the aim here is to make that method available for others to pick up, adapt and carry on.
Maybe it starts with hopping turnstiles in the NYC subway en route to the movies. The Angelika at the Cable Building in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, ‘the most successful arthouse in the United States’; the late 1990s; the history of NYC fare evasion. Minor negation, in a major key. A relationship of art to infrastructure begins somewhere ordinary like this, in the basic everyday, with material conditions and the desire for culture as the two postulates of a life’s dialectical opening sequence.
(There is no starting point for thought like Marina’s because the desire always to be in the midst of collective movement remakes its own origins; and thought is a movement of contradiction.)
‘This last … loops back to the first’, Marina once wrote to me,
having had no opportunity to travel out of New York State for the first 20 years of my life, there’s still an indecent patina of class mobility in travelling a lot, a constant flaunting of the un-necessity of everything I can do or be.
Marina Vishmidt was born in 1976 in Kharkiv and made her way to New York with her mother and grandparents when she was three, joining the exodus from the Soviet Union to the United States (the so-called ‘dropouts’) after Jewish emigration was permitted in the 1970s. She studied at the Bronx High School of Science, made zines, read all the fiction in the library, and went to Sarah Lawrence College around an hour upstate. She ‘always seemed to know’, wrote her friend Dimitra Kotouza, ‘where she wanted to be and how to get there by mobilising the scarcest of resources’.[1] The image of her hopping fare gates comes from memories of friends during her undergraduate years, but perhaps it feels like something ‘from the movies’ as well, so reality and representation have already arrived here at a point of indifference, or ‘indeterminacy’: the same point that the teenager who hopped turnstiles would later invoke when she wrote a book titled Speculation as a Mode of Production, a work in which aesthetic representation and economic infrastructure constantly pass over and into one another, operate on one another, becoming indeterminate, at a level of abstraction that can feel painful, splendid, awkward, and bewildering.
In her theoretical work Marina came to think early on of conceptual abstraction as the scarcest or scantiest resource of them all, a shadow that dances across some things, a thing not a thing in itself, desperately close to being nothing, a negation, a mere ‘hole in what it is not’.[2] Later, she would argue that what she called conceptual ‘indeterminacy’ is one simple result of abstract identification, of the type art is (equal to) capital, or speculation is (equal to) a mode of production. It opens up a little nick, a cut, through which the ‘antagonistic relations that both inhabit and exceed these divisions’ reveal themselves as ‘the only concrete, and concretely political, matter of concern’.[3]
So it starts with hopping turnstiles in the NYC subway, with the tiniest little nick in the total system of value relations conceivable, really something barely even perceptible, and then it widens. Marina moved to London in 1998 aged 21. She hopped the turnstile of the UK border system by means of a fake marriage, worked at the artists’ moving image organisation LUX, made a number of experimental super 8 films, and fell in with the writers, filmmakers and musicians around the politics and culture magazine Mute. She studied philosophy at Middlesex, wrote her thesis on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Gilles Deleuze; published essays on bears, cartography, precarity, jetpacks and gentrification; refined her taste in macabre, absurdist children’s literature; and worked a lot, initially in the early 2000s London service economy—bar jobs, food catering jobs, film extra jobs, nighttime press clippings jobs. In a now unthinkable landscape of New Labour law and order, squats, and dying open source activism, the terrain of her aesthetic tastes was characterised by fantastical machines, recursive topography and the ‘elaborate, grotesque and impenetrable lyrical apparatus’ of Mark E. Smith of The Fall; and the terrain of her political ones by Italian autonomia and the work of the US collective Midnight Notes, in particular the Marxist-feminist theorist of wages against housework Silvia Federici. Later, as she ‘got into the world of living off my brain’, Marina began to apply the writings of Marx and Adorno to post-’60s conceptual art, a line of inquiry that would culminate eventually in her first solo-authored book, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value-Subjectivity in Art and Capital. She screened anti-work films in squats, wrote essays on education struggles, travelled a lot, and participated, when time permitted, in a years-long series of discussions about the financial crisis led by London communists and anarchists in the upstairs rooms of East London pubs, in one of which, one Friday night in late January 2011, I met her for the first time.
The discussion that night was about ‘communisation theory’. I arrived late to a small meeting room already full, crammed with the people who would become the major figures in my life. ‘Communisation’, the theory group Endnotes had written, in the first issue of their journal two years earlier, ‘is the immediate production of communism: the self-abolition of the proletariat through its abolition of capital and state’.[4] For several years, that thesis would simply be there, in the air of post-financial crisis social movements, a kind of shibboleth. The word itself had the properties of a magical formula, and so even when it was used as an in-joke, an ironic wish fulfilment fantasy, or as a byword for long ‘lists of things to be abolished’, it felt inescapable.[5] Later the person who I remember that night speaking in long branching sentences and gazing intently at twisted threads of hair when she was listening would write at length about Endnotes’ analysis, in particular in relation to ‘surplus populations’, logistics, gender and race; though it was the second part of the thesis quoted above—the ‘self-abolition … through … abolition of capital and state’—that most attracted her attention, giving direction to an inquiry that she would carry out with many collaborators across many settings and which culminates—prematurely—in her concept of ‘infrastructural critique’. Years later she would write to me that the idea of the subject skipping over the turnstile of itself couldn’t help ‘but evoke … the image of Baron Munchausen pulling himself out of the hole by his own hair, or the Russian idiom “you can’t leap over yourself”’.[6] As a theorist of (self-)abolition, she always wanted to find ways to deepen the paradox, to elude the carnival strongman game of ‘radical politics’ as futile test of virility. But what she appreciated in the schema was the challenge to think the transformation of subject and objective conditions together, in the same breath, for which task the programme of infrastructural critique supplies the statement of an experimental artistic and political method.
Via the history of taste, it’s possible to write a sort of shadow biography, an account of a life that never wanted to account for itself. ‘Points on a libidinal map’.[7] Marina preferred low modernism to high, Witold Gombrowicz to James Joyce, situational comedy to polemical denunciation, Félix Guattari to Guy Debord. She preferred Viktor Shklovsky to Vladimir Mayakovsky, Lisa Crystal Carver to Kathleen Hanna, Shulamith Firestone to Valerie Solanas, De La Soul to Public Enemy. She liked the late Marx more than the young, and the eccentric and carnivalesque films of Ulrike Ottinger more than the semiotically precise ones of Laura Mulvey. She enjoyed reflexive negation, Edward Gorey, Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls and Cameron Rowland’s infrastructural critique more than the grandstanding floridities of the transgressive avant-garde, and she prized the eccentric, ironic and grotesque, the fabulous machines of Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus, over everything rhetorically declamatory, consummate and self-affirming. She disliked improvised public speaking and preferred to carry out her operations from a modified or alternative stage, ignoring the principled objections that ring out in self-asserting voices from the proscenium. In 2007 she wrote a short text titled ‘The Humorous Dimension of Time’ in which a familiar character appears in the style of an avatar:
A radiant young engineer busies himself, to the delight of onlookers, in arranging and rearranging liliputian modules of the City of the Soviets on a small platform extending from a proscenium arch. Toy cranes dispose the buildings here and there. From inside some of them, principled objections ring out in tiny voices: ‘Help! Moscow, where are you going?’–‘God save us!’–‘They’re moving houses like furniture these days!’.[8]
Marina would never want to be defined in her relation to her origins, that was the whole point; but it is impossible to talk about her without her objects, the objects of desire through which she defined her negativity, a reflexive abstraction at the level of the subject and an endless landscape of the imperfect, ludic and changeable at the level of its materials. It begins with Miss Mary Mack and zines and the Angelika at The Cable Building in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and it ends with infrastructural critique, on a desiring trajectory that has nothing to do with the rectilinear and uninteresting ‘progress’ that characterises a typical academic life. Marina never wanted to be a teacher. She wanted at first to be an artist and in her characteristically askew and singular way she always was one. A ‘diffident’ public speaker by her own estimate, she found asserting herself intimidating and shrank from it wilfully, in search of a ‘space which was purely motoric but also impressionable’, wanting ‘to have as little resistance to the brutality of novelty or sociality which I knew I could not understand and there was no point throwing myself against it’. She experienced competition ‘viscerally as a burning sensation, and subjectively as one of the greatest impoverishments / abjections imaginable’, and she grew up as an immigrant in a single-parent family with scarce resources, immersing herself in literature, cinema and art in that order in a search for the means of movement that was never secured to her as a right. Her negativity was her style and her sense of humour a reaction to social experience and the feeling of subjective and rhetorical impoverishment before it was anything like a philosophical ‘position’, which helps to explain why her theoretical preferences were in complete defiance of any conventional canon of academic coherence. To be un-necessary, to be nothing but that, to be nothing but the un-necessity of the state of affairs through which you are defined, conditioned and deformed; to see yourself not as the bearer of negativity but as its object; to identify with negativity as the possibility of difference or change in things, including the thing that you are, means to want to be no more than negativity because to be more than this is to be less than what it is possible to be, in an approach in which there is no firm ground on which to stand, and no standpoint other than the constant movement through and against our own conditions, in a society defined by private ownership and the relentless accumulation of capital. ‘Elements of negation already make up what you are, no less than what you are capable of becoming’ (Speculation as a Mode of Production):[9] This is the slogan of the person who defines herself neither through her material conditions, as per the logic of identitarian institutional ‘class politics’, nor through the hypothesis of one or another kind of abstract transcendence (humanism, mysticism) but through the movement of opposition to them, a movement of negativity that can take place on every scale running from this sentence to the turnstiles of a city’s public transport system to its cultural institutions and financial architectures all the way to the totality of material social relationships on which all of these depend, where contemporary, ‘post-conceptual’ art plays its tiny, walk-on role, and makes its incision.
There are various ways to understand the project that Marina gave the working title ‘from institutional to infrastructural critique’, but one way is to understand it is as being about contradiction. Its title is a contradiction, suggesting that the quintessential superstructure or ‘sphere of representation’, the art institution, is itself conceivable in Marxist terms as an ‘infrastructure’, a base. In the book version of the project forthcoming in 2026, so is the title of its first chapter, the central thesis of its second, and the normative horizon of its third, as well as the substantive content of the dialectical philosophy on which Marina often draws, which in her thinking always exists alongside a philosophy of difference that rejects it, in contradiction of the claims to self-sufficiency of both.
In a 2017 text written for a film produced by the short-lived feminist art collective Channels, Marina offered some informal thoughts about what she thought of as the ‘personality’ of contradiction, waste and non-identity:
I am less interested in positive appropriations of waste time. I hate care. I like the idea of ‘staying with the trouble’, but also see how in the current structure of society this often shades off into indulgence. I am worried about the whole concept of indulgence though as well, and the notions of abjected stuckness and inutility it reinforces, gendered notions. So perhaps it’s not a good direction to take either. I am not sure about reappropriation of anything, as reappropriation feeds into a cycle of reification, though it can also be thrown out of it. I feel uneasy about so much of radical thought’s lack of interest in, or we could even say care for, contradiction, and its love for new words as if they mapped onto things, rather than loving the words for their opacity. Waste itself has a dynamic and a personality that does not need to be recuperated but expanded as an angry, loving detachment from what keeps us running in place, whether it’s driven by axioms of care, or work, or profit. Taking up space in the sink, taking space.
In many ways, this short film contains the entire problem of infrastructural critique as Marina would go on to develop it. In the opening sequences, we see a picture of four women eating while a fifth bathes naked in the sink in a women’s squat in Rosetta Street, South London in 1974, along with images of Marina’s own kitchen in Hackney, East London, shot through a wall-hatch from the living room next door (fig 1). ‘Generally’, Marina suggests gently on the voiceover, ‘washing is not conversational’ and ‘does not usually share space with dinner parties’. Yet the ‘mediations’ or more simply the walls in this image have collapsed, and in place of two distinct reproductive and social ‘institutions’ we see the sinuous outlines of one, a domestic moebius strip: ‘a home dwells folded into itself as an institution and then transits as if whole and unharmed into another institution, so a ground that also feels like a container’.
Like in so much of Marina’s thinking, at least from the time of her Master’s Thesis on Deleuze’s cinema writings, ‘a reversible continuum is glimpsed’. Indeterminacy between distinct social domains begins as the result of an abstract identification, the outcome of a speculative connection between the logically diverse and notionally distinct—but it becomes a way of introducing a gap or unexpected opening within the norms of conventional or prescribed use, similar, in its way, to the gap introduced into the unbroken system of value relations by teenagers jumping over a turnstile, on their way to wherever it is they want to go. Marina’s interest in this (perhaps unusually literal) conceptual move has a few distinct philosophical sources, but the insistently materialist inflection of her treatment of it flows back to an insight most often associated with ’70s Marxist-feminism: the concept, the norm (surplus value, wage labour) is reproduced through something outside of itself (wage labour, housework), its structural exception; and the two terms are dynamically co-constitutive. In this case, the ‘institution of the social’ (the dinner party) appears in the film as something needing to be reproduced, demanding of resources from another institution outside of it (the institution of domestic labour); and this second institution is capable of being ‘folded in’ to the institution of the social itself, by means of an unexpected collapsing of differences—here of the differences conventionally distinguishing bathroom and dining room.
In the language of the film-essay quoted above, the ‘conceptual’ or ‘perceptual’ frames of the art institution theorised by Michael Asher in the 1970s, and reasserted by Andrea Fraser in 2005, have been displaced, bringing ‘conditions into the frame’. Or, rather, the frame remains the object, but only insofar as the conditions themselves become a frame. Thus the continuum reverses:
- ‘the frame’ stands for the material conditions of the institution that make possible its status as a sphere of representation. Just as there is no dinner party without kitchen work, there is no art without reproductive labour;
- yet, the material conditions in this case are themselves a frame, only now not a picture frame but the frame of a kitchen hatch in which reproductive work occurs, and not just of any kitchen but of Marina’s kitchen, the kitchen of a privately rented East London ex-council flat in which she and several other collaborators on the film had lived, worked, made art, cooked and hosted dinner parties since 2003;[10]
and so we finish where we begin. The structure of the film is deliberately recursive; and recursion is in some ways the method of Marina’s approach to theoretical concepts. If, classically, ‘recursion’ occurs in cinema when ‘we see a painting on a wall in a film scene, and later the characters walk into the painting and it becomes the mise-en-scene of the fictional universe, with the rest of the film being absorbed into it’,[11] then here Marina, the author of that sentence, is doing it herself, strolling into the ‘frame’ of institutional critique which has become the frame of the hatch in her own home; and the strategic crumbling of conceptual mediations again supplies us with a point of indistinction: social reproduction—speculation as a mode of production—infrastructural critique. Just as theoretical concepts are ‘constituted in the divisions wrought by the abstractions and the contradictions of the commodity as the universal mediation of capitalist society’, the materialist move is to make the materials move.
And so Marina looks out at us, through the hatch, with her cheek resting on her left hand, a tin of tea that she liked placed unassumingly in the foreground, and a mise en abyme opens up, stretching backwards through the sequence of her own collective activities: making dinner for friends, making feminist art about social reproduction theory, making off-kilter theoretical texts about cult Italian horror movies in which American real estate investors get sucked into a gruesome painting on the wall, ‘with the rest of the film being absorbed into it’, as in maitre du macabre Lucio Fulcis’s Beyond (1981),[12] ‘each level pointing to the other one’. By comic implication her kitchen becomes his vision of hell, ‘a vast grey landscape in which nothing lives’, a zone of abjected stuckness, inutility and waste, of opacity and metamorphosis and speculative contradiction. ‘Something forces us to think’, Marina often wrote, in fidelity to her love for the early Deleuze. And the movement stretches yet further back still, to illuminate something still more basic: a thought about the uses of speculative method itself. Because if speculative identities like ‘speculation as a mode of production’ or ‘infrastructural critique’ fold into themselves differences thought to be essential, as a means of accessing ‘the negativity inherent in … indeterminacy’,[13] if thought occurs in this space where ‘one institution transits as if whole and unharmed’ into another institution, to produce either the experience of bizarre juxtapositions (women become the plates they clean), or a simple disclosure of dependence—if this is how Marina’s critical theory works, then all levels of the analysis operate on one another, and recursivity is the means to keep moving through them without setting up one as the ‘truth’ of the others: a critical theory of movement as a theory of misuse, whether of NYC fare gates, Marxist-feminist theory, kitchen hatches, reproductive labour, or the institutionalised traditions of conceptual art. If you ‘collapse all the mediations together… brutally, they come out the more sharply as they decompress under the eye’: Marina always loved a film by the German feminist artist Margaret Raspé, ‘The Sadist Whips the Obviously Innocent’ (1971), and wrote about it repeatedly, for the last time just two months before she died.[14] There, the artist intrepidly straps a camera to her head and then uses an electric whisk to beat up some cream; an early first-person shooter. There was perhaps some projective identification here: a mutual love of mixing things up.
In fact, it was in a text about Raspé’s film that Marina wrote about ‘infrastructure’ at length for the first time: ‘Reproduction as axiom’, she proposed there, sarcastically: ‘Once we get the infrastructure—or, as the jargon has it, “the means of not dying”—right, then our work here is done’.[15] That was in early 2015, in a lecture initially prepared for the experimental poetry magazine Materials. Several lines of critical inquiry here click into place for the first time, like the accessories of some merciless kitchen appliance. As the long years of (real) abstraction in the wake of the 2007–8 financial crisis gave way to its long concrete aftermath (geophysical crisis, state abandonment, proliferating discourses of resilience), a generation of artists began to use the language of Marxist-feminism—as well as its focus on reproduction—as an alibi for the refusal of a politics of ‘critique’, including collective politics in the art field as such. At the same time, self-managed ‘infrastructures’ of reproduction were increasingly depicted as a kind of utopian horizon, elevating mere survival, the art of not dying, to the status of a political goal:
preoccupation with ‘infrastructures’ defined by their flexibility and resilience depends tacitly on the idea of the present or future collapse … of whatever infrastructure already exists; so that its concept of usefulness grows in appeal only by tacitly promoting the idea that our existing structure of useful labour will at any moment be subjected to irreversible devastation.[16]
In Speculation as a Mode of Production, ‘usefulness’ was already analysed as a term contained within the capitalist value-form, defined by the co-existence of use-value and exchange-value in the commodity. The two poles traverse one another. When art(istic autonomy) and labour arrive at a point of ‘indistinction’, they each ‘trigger reflexive negations’ in the other.[17] Infrastructure appears at the end of the book in much the same way, as a sub-category of the ‘useful’, a term in a relation, an aspect of the ‘cell-form’ of capital and the antagonistic unity of social use and exchange. On this (to all appearances) ‘Marxist’, or more specifically ‘value-theoretical’, account, it follows that if the opposition of ‘useful’ infrastructures to ‘abstract’ critique affirms one term in the relation at the expense of the other, then theoretical vocabulary absents itself from the field of social form, in which concrete and abstract are always moments in the unity of a higher instance, the commodity. Also, political debate contracts into variations on a theme: the effort to develop radical concepts (‘care’, ‘the useful’, ‘the infrastructural’), rather than to conceptualise ‘radical thought’ as ‘counter-reification device’ and ‘conceptual solvent’, a way of breaking concepts down and setting thought in motion.[18]
But the Raspéan whisk continues to turn, and the argument gradually thickens.
On the wall of Marina’s living room in Hackney there hung a print of the Danish painter Asger Jorn’s Canard inquiétant (‘The unquiet duck’) (1959) (fig.2), the famous work in which Jorn took a terrible twentieth-century landscape painting and then scrawled over the top of it an infantile, elephantine duck, its Goyaesque beak dripping orange-yellow gore. Like the toy donkey in Brecht’s studio that wore a sign saying ‘I too must understand it’, this domestic familiar conveyed an important theoretical axiom. Infrastructure is ‘mediated’ by social abstraction, but the relation of these terms can itself be made into a means of composition. ‘Critique’ in the Jorn painting (in this case, critique as vandalism) depends on the pre-existing ‘infrastructure’ of the landscape painting he defaces; but this infrastructure is the medium of the critique and becomes something other than itself through its changed conditions of use. Widen the historical aspect ratio and it’s obvious that Marx’s use of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice parable in the commodity fetish chapter of Capital is already prototypical ‘maintenance art’ in the style pioneered by Mierle Laderman Ukeles a century later, and that the dancing broomsticks, the self-incinerating map of Claire Fontaine’s ‘America (Burnt/Unburnt)’, the human ironing board of Letitia Parente’s Terefa I, the waste that has ‘a dynamic and a personality of its own’, the slave as the instrumentum vocale or ‘speaking implement’, Pierre Klossowski’s ‘living currency’ and Margarete Raspé’s half-woman half-whisk are all so many other walking, talking ways in which the infrastructures of social life can be made to tell the same story, about the ways in which abstract and concrete operate on one another, through the form of the commodity and the waste and the disorder to which that violent, speculative identity gives rise.[19]
In 2025 the language of infrastructure is more or less ubiquitous, though many of its end-users still believe themselves to be thinking exclusively about things. For ‘critics’ of political economy in the Marxist tradition, this only partially materialist outlook is obviously and painfully limited, insofar as it fails to see that infrastructure speaks its own language whether we want it to or not, an abstract language of flows and investment schedules extending into the long run in which, famously, we are all dead. Affirmative theories of infrastructure, sometimes bruited in the artworld as a kind of ‘critique of critique’—a moral economy of the ‘useful’ conceived as the means to survive in austere circumstances, in which criticism is set aside as a ‘luxury’—[20] falls short in this sense, because it fails to situate ‘the useful’ within a dialectical unity of capitalist value, a unity that is no less concrete than it is abstract. But the unquiet duck who sails through Marina’s infrastructural critique from its first conception is also a reminder that ‘mediation’ is not just an objective social process (the basis of ‘real abstraction’) but also a means of composition, a way to animate the material conditions of our social life by connecting material struggle to the practice of ‘social invention’ and locating new registers of critique by making the materials move:[21]
Marina where are you in here? … the world of your objects is being exposed to an irresistible decay… I need your desire to move through them, across them, to animate them again, as Zoe said so truthfully about you, to join them again through the superlative medium of your being alive and knowing them and loving them and introducing them into your beautiful puzzling sentences, puzzles and jigsaws and Vision Masters and etch a sketches and toys everywhere, you my best friend, you beautiful child whose mother worked in a toy shop, you riddle.[22]
Marina was a serious critic of political economy, but she was also, always, playing, which means thinking about the ways to make things speak. The medium of her riddles was always the mediations, the disappearing walls, the frames that become what they frame, their own objects, puzzling jig-saw-like objects that disassemble themselves and then transit whole and unharmed into something else. ‘If we follow a number of contemporary commentaries which attempt to place transformations in the conceptual and productive infrastructures of art along a trajectory of economic and social change’, Marina wrote in her PhD, ‘then the axis where this change has been often situated is that of language’.[23] Infrastructural critique is about language, then, about how infrastructure speaks, about the language of the value-form but also a language of another kind, the language that comes from the collapsing and decompression of mediations under the eye, a language of the crisis of things, its syntax scraped from error and the conjugations of negation and surprise; and then about the freezing of ‘radical thought’ that serves as alibi for the silencing of all this, for endless reproduction of the same. It’s part of the strategy of mixing things up to always conceive ‘Marxism’ in the theory of infrastructure as a way of thinking about the operation of the mediations as the basis of another kind of speech, a way of speaking back to things, with things, with other things, with an etch-a-sketch, in a language that loves things for their opacity. Does it hurt to say I hate care? Marina knew that unless you learn to say it then the infrastructure says it for you.[24]
So it starts with zines and movies and hopping turnstiles in the NYC subway, and it continues with the politics of mediation and the collective culture of the small magazine. Throughout the whole period of her formation as a critical theorist, Marina remained committed to the left-Deleuzian concept of ‘individuation’, to the idea that there is no individual without ‘a collective social context’ (Paolo Virno), without the means for its formation in the form of an infrastructural common ground.[25] Her own ‘collective social context’ was for many years a loose grouping of left publishing projects on the borderline between politics and art, like the already mentioned Mute, its Scottish twin Variant, the outputs of the gallery space-cum-commons Casco and the eponymous publication of the Russian art collective Chto Delat?. Marina always thought the alternative to a collective context was what she called ‘value subjectivity’: non-speculative identity of subject and capital.
In the London art scene of the mid-2010s, a peculiarly distorted version of this idea began to acquire visibility in the inverted, conservative form of a theory of infrastructure. It starts with gallery directors talking anti-austerity and drinking highballs on the rooftop bar of a converted carpark in ‘regenerating’ Peckham, and it ends with private collectors with a background in arms manufacture for the IDF re-fashioning themselves as trailblazers for a new, radically reproductive commonsense. The doctrine that ‘artists need to eat’, and that the objective need for infrastructure always trumps the subjective desire for collective politics, arrived at its logical culmination on a cold morning in February 2017, amid confrontation and broken glass, with a protest outside the neo-reactionary, ‘race realist’ art gallery LD50, for the past 12 months an exhibition space for many of what Marina would call the ‘reproductive realists’ of the London art scene.[26] Marina was there, selling t-shirts at cost price outside, putting into practice her belief that the flipside of commitment to collective political antagonism is the funfair egalitarianism that all shall have prizes! She didn’t skip turnstiles anymore, and she no longer worked in catering, but the account of reproductive realism that threads its way through her writings on infrastructural critique—‘an infrastructural acedia, thuggishly pouting’—was always personal for her, in a manner that is unusual in a body of theoretical writing that otherwise always places its emphasis on the trans-individual and the collective. She arrived in London with no resources, no family network and (at least at first and strictly speaking always) no legal right to remain, and her distaste, bordering on disgust, for this particular ‘cycle of reification’ derived from its status as a travesty, an obscene doubling, of her own beliefs, a cruel joke at the expense of the need for a collective context issuing, with mechanical inevitability, into a self-sculpting and -exculpating determinism.[27]
At the moment when the windows of LD50 were being smashed, she’d only recently finished the first sketch of a programme for an explicitly ‘infrastructural critique’, as succesor and counterpart to the conceptual art tradition of institutional critique formalised by Benjamin Buchloh, Andrea Fraser and others. The explanation of how she got there is inseparable from her engagement with collective magazine projects as vehicles of subject-formation, as well as with her Raspéan propensity to take an electric whisk to the industrially separated discursive entities of ‘politics’ and ‘art’, but the genealogy of the concept requires us to take a step back from the reproduction/infrastructure debate in the artworld, and to explore a related post-crisis discussion in the field of communist theory:
In times of crisis, when the ratio of waged to unwaged starts to tilt negatively, reproduction becomes the political battleground, if only through sheer force of numbers of people who can’t get access to a wage, as well as the important category of the ‘working poor’ who have to rely on benefits.[28]
The blockade of the Port of Oakland in September 2011 under the rubric of a ‘General Strike’ revived a discussion of logistics, technology and capitalist infrastructure first introduced into anarchist and communist debates some years before by the acts of sabotage at the centre of the case of the Tarnac 9. At the same time, Marxist-feminist discussions around the ‘gender relation’ also began to ‘tilt negatively’, a movement memorably encapsulated in a response by Maya Gonzalez and Jeanne Neaton in the third issue of the journal Endnotes to Silvia Federici’s call for feminists to ‘re-claim the house as a center of collective life’, that ‘we do consider this possibility worse than death’.[29] The intensity of those debates, and the rapidity with which they ran up against the limits of their own abstractions, is captured by some introductory remarks of Marina’s in a lecture, ‘Reproduction of What?’, delivered in Banff in 2014. ‘Two years ago’, she wrote then,
I took the stance that a focus on reproduction, in the ways the Italian workerist and post-workerist marxist feminists defined it, was still in and of itself a radical challenge to the system of gendered abjection and exploitation that constituted the reproduction of capital and its social system. Even then however, I was beginning to understand that a further layer of abstraction was needed, one which saw gender as a form to be abolished alongside the form of value: a toxic mediation that the process of communisation would have to confront and overcome for the communist project to have any hope of succeeding. This maximalist horizon, the immanence of feminism to communism posed in this way, was appealing. These days I am less convinced that the category of abolition taken on its own, no less than the category of reproduction, are adequate responses to the feminist problematic, or to the social and ecological crisis in which we encounter it.[30]
Marina’s participation in these discussions, signally at a conference on the concept of ‘subsumption’ in Bilbao in 2014, was a major influence on the terms of her own approach, beginning in the mid-2000s, to the political claims and histories of institutional critique. While her own contribution to the Bilbao event took the form of a mapping exercise, in which abolitionist proposals within feminism and Black radicalism were examined together, the discussion around ‘subsumption’ (of labour, life, or infrastructure under capital) seemed to her to be unhelpfully, abstractly metaphysical.[31] Its sterility was registered by the movement of many of the participants in the debate towards other, more practical forms of activity:
we are precipitated into rather ‘theological’ problematics of immanence and transcendence; into questions of whether the mode of production has any ‘outside’; into visions of the future as a completely contentless blank slate–for if everything really is to be at stake, then what lies beyond can only be nothing.[32]
That last passage is from an article on infrastructure by Endnotes, first published in 2015, focused on the eternal return of elementary metaphysical questions in debates about communism in which ‘communisation’ can only be perceived as a pure event: a rupture with everything that is knowable or sayable within the material conditions of capitalist social life. Marina’s response to its criticisms was characteristically non-intuitive. Rather than reading in it a legitimation of the knowable and sayable institutions of contemporary art, she instead recognised, ‘transversally’, that the remarks apply with near perfect homological exactitude to Andrea Fraser’s assertion, at the end of her important ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique’ (2005), that ‘we cannot exist outside the field of art, at least not as artists, critics, curators, etc.’.[33] And this becomes the move with which an explicitly ‘infrastructural critique’ is inaugurated: the totalisation of the institution of art and the totalisation of abolition (of art as well as all other social institutions) are folded into one another, so that each becomes a ground that also feels like a container, and the diagnosis of an end is folded back into a beginning, the insights of communist theory transiting as if whole and unharmed into the institution of art; each a rabbit to the other’s duck.[34] Just as for Endnotes, infrastructure interrupts the ‘false totalisation’ of theories of subsumption under the heading of ‘error’, infrastructure becomes for Marina a means of challenging the ‘false totalisations’ of institutional critique in the field of contemporary art.
A year after the appearance of the Endnotes piece, a month after the protest that shut down LD50, Marina’s short essay ‘Between Not Everything and Not Nothing: Cuts Towards Infrastructural Critique’ argued with explicit reference to the Endnotes text that it is ‘infrastructure’s transitive character—between the material and the possible, between machines and working drawings, between cognitive maps and what is pictured on them—that enables it to ask political questions that can no longer be replied to in the abstract, with the false totalizations of rejection or complicity’.[35]
Infrastructure now appears in her writing as a figure of recursivity and as a response to the potentially theological preoccupation of institutional critique with the question of outsides. The specific significance of its displacement from the Endnotes piece into an argument about institutional critique rests in turn on two distinct ironies. The first is the identification of the loop I’ve already mentioned, between the false totalisation of art and the false totalisation of the discourse of its abolition. The second is that Marina’s first definition of infrastructure is still a definition of reproduction: infrastructure like reproductive labour is ‘that which repeats’. The ‘reproductive aspect of infrastructure, however, has to retain an openness to the “temporal cut”, which undoes crystallizations and institutions in the attempt to realize the desires that were the initial impetus for their establishment’. The art institution appears as something requiring infrastructure to be reproduced, and its infrastructure appears as something that repeats, returning us, by means of another conceptual loop, to the earlier critique of gender as ‘toxic mediation’ and as a ‘form to be abolished’. The concept recurs and the conditions of is recurrence are critical, allowing Marina to deal with infrastructure in the same way that she dealt with reproduction itself in Speculation as a Mode of Production, by means of a speculative identification in which the endpoint of analysis cycles back to its beginning, and negativity is preserved in spite of and against the lures of abstract totalisation.[36] The aim is to develop a negativity that is immanent to the object itself, that is not abstract and does not require theological problematics of transcendence, the apophatic or abstract idea that the only way to negate ‘what is’ is to go beyond, as per the Lucio Fulci movie, by means of a gesture of abolition about which it is impossible to say anything except that it is nothing that we can know or be, because to do so would only prove that we are ‘still inside’, irrespective of whether the inside in question is capitalism or the institution of art—institutions whose speculative identity Marina had already established. The origins of this thinking in theoretical debates about revolutionary process clarifies the purpose of its method. This is a contribution at the level of theory that is deeply concerned with the problem of practice, and its apparent sophistication is deeply rooted in the simple desire to make sure that ‘an angry, loving detachment from what keeps us running in place’, a negativity without end, is itself an endless source of movement: that it does not pass over into the paralytic meta-stable abstractions of a ‘transgressive negativity’ that evacuates all speculative relationship to the real and the concrete. What ‘repeats is not without difference’.[37] Marina’s ‘materialist theory of conditions’ or infrastructural critique participates as if by an optical illusion in several conversations at once, depending on how you look at it, and the recursive negativity that allows it to do this, to make negativity differential and immanent to its own concepts and objects, is her own contribution to the tendency she once noted, ‘vastly different as their apparatus of reference is’, in the respective projects of Fred Moten and Ray Brassier: ‘Far from filling abolition with a positive epistemic or social content, this dwelling on nothingness seems rather to point to the lived experience of negativity as mediation with rather than cancellation of “the world”’.[38]
The final phase of Marina’s programme of infrastructural critique can be picked up in late 2021:
My work as a theorist or a writer, an analyst of contemporary culture with a focus on contemporary art from a marxist, feminist, internationalist and Black studies perspective, from the labor perspective, basically, has not just been informed, but in a lot of ways been eclipsed by … labour struggles and their political and strategic implications … I feel like they set not just the infrastructural but the theoretical conditions for this activity in an absolute way, as they do for a lot of my friends and comrades …[39]
Here Marina, at this time recovering from a devastating injury caused by the failures of the UK health system, argues that ‘labour struggles … set … the infrastructural conditions … in an absolute way’. The art institution is to be seen as ‘a historical and contingent nexus of material conditions amenable to rearrangement through struggle’, and critique is a ‘social practice that will not suffer but actually benefit from those institutions [those in which the critic works] being blown sky-high’.[40]
The transition is itself a result, something posited, to use the Hegelian language, by the cannibalistic, world-ending fury of capitalist social relations as Marina experienced it: ‘in a social order held together by the bones of those who didn’t survive it, cancer can act as a lenticular tool to hold our fates in high resolution’.[41] But it also introduces a break between Speculation as a Mode of Production and Infrastructural Critique, because while the first is a theoretical work rooted in Marxist critique of political economy, the second becomes under historical and bodily duress an interventionist project oriented towards and discursively participating in struggle itself, or, to persist in the Hegelian jargon, an element of struggle reflecting upon itself. Infrastructural critique as ‘materialist theory of conditions’ (of reproduction) upends a contemplative, Kantian philosophical idiom to supply its readers with means for mobile or situational thinking about material possibilities and impossibilities, across the locations and institutional sites of the artworld and its ‘edges’, even as it refuses to establish reproduction as horizon or final ground.[42] The combinatorial metaphor, of ‘material conditions amenable to rearrangement through struggle’, reinforces this approach at the same time as it suggests, as does the language of ‘bracketing’ (‘my friends and comrades … have spent years developing a set of scholarly or theoretical interests and have either bracketed them or re-contextualised them in the constant process of collective struggle’), a pragmatic disposition towards political, theoretical or conceptual vocabularies, including Marina’s own.[43] Accompanying this shift, we see something like a historical transition in the artworks themselves: away from the ‘bohemianism of evasion’ highlighted in ‘Cuts Towards Infrastructural Critique’ (2016), and towards ‘emphatic solidarity of condition’ in the work of Carolyn Lazard, Cameron Rowland, Anna Engelhardt and, perhaps most explicitly in this case, since their work was first introduced as an example of the first tendency, Pilvi Takala. What began as a critique of the doctrine of the ‘useful’ in this way becomes, through its commitment to subjective transformation within the collective social context, a critical theory of misuse: individuated out of its material conditions, ambidextrous between the perspectives of reproduction and abolition, suspicious of false totalisations, and dedicated to the principle that all should have prizes.
‘Reversible figures’, we read in an online encyclopaedia, ‘are visual forms that create ambiguity by exploiting graphical similarities and other properties of visual system interpretation between two or more distinct image forms’. To think in reversible figures means to think under the sign of contingency, indexicality, unstable reference and recursion, making negation into a property of the object itself rather than a decree echoing hollowly from its outside. ‘Infrastructural Critique’ is also a reversible figure; perhaps deliberately a reversible figure in this sense. Its construction is chiasmic. Critique of infrastructure requires infrastructure of critique and vice versa, and the recursivity of this formulation picks up a theme that runs throughout Marina’s work on art, finance and philosophy, in her engagement with Donald Mackenzie’s book An Engine not a Camera and her years-long fascination with Benjamin’s dream allegory in which he stands in front of and is located within a ‘map of hell’ (alluded to, perhaps, in the Channels film-essay), as well as her essay on the Gwion Gwion rock paintings as ‘wholly indexical in an absorption of the mark in the process of marking’.[44] The role of indexical self-reference as a disrupter (‘This sentence is not true’) suggests a critique (of art) by means of infrastructure or the artistic criticism of infrastructure, depending on how you look at it: it is an intervention in several different discussions at once, in an intellectual culture in which the participants of each are habitually inclined to remain oblivious of one another, to the point of making their own special versions of the argument that there is no outside of art, of life, of revolutionary politics. As a way of participating in debates, the method itself recalls a term from the linguistics of Roman Jakobson, the ‘shifter’, a linguistic element whose reference changes depending on its (collective social) context—a term that might serve as a metaphor for a mode of intervention based on transiting as if whole and unharmed from one institution into another, a rabbit-duck in the fields of aesthetics and politics, in search of experimental practice.[45]
This fascination with reference systems as elements of aesthetic politics, and also finally simply of politics, since abstract distinctions between the two domains are inane, connects Marina’s work on infrastructural critique to one final current of her research in the years before her death. In her 2020 Radical Philosophy essay ‘Bodies in Space’, she argues against the uptake in contemporary political jargon of the language of ‘bodies’ as the preferred locution for the individual or person, insisting that this was evidence of ‘an anti-abstracting desire’ that blocks attempts ‘to get a handle on what other bodies are possible’.[46] Judith Butler’s claims in their theory of ‘performative assembly’ for the political power of the ‘fragile, isolated, and suffering body’—here interestingly redolent of the needy, self-isolating body of the reproductive realists—is objected to, as an apparent materialism concealing a preference for simple abstractions. ‘Preconditions’ cannot be dispensed with; the attempt to do so collapses the levels of realism as representation and realism as reference to the conditions of that representation, as well as of infrastructure of aesthetics and aesthetics of infrastructure, not now in the manner of Raspé’s whisk but in a gesture that disavows the existence of mediation in the first place.[47]
In fact, it might be suggested that the ‘Bodies in Space’ article is the negative component of infrastructural critique, insofar as the ‘formalistic’ theory of politics it criticises, focused on the ethical claims of the individual body, is another name for political theory minus infrastructure, the attempt to think a politics of the self without the recursive reference to its own ‘trans-individual’ and material conditions which are the basis of interruption, blockage, antagonism and change. This claim, which is the most developed version of an argument against individualising assumptions masquerading as radical politics that runs throughout Marina’s interventions in contemporary art discourse, brings us back, as does the conclusion of the essay, to the limitations of institutional critique: ‘The only mediation whose presence is still desirable’ in Butler’s theory, Marina notes in passing, is the mediation of ‘the art institution’ itself.[48]
Approaching a conclusion means looping back one last time. At the beginning of her 2022 Arnheim lecture ‘From Speculation to Infrastructure’, Marina traces her interest in recursivity and the speculative identity of production and conditions for production to her early engagement with feminist zine culture during the mid-to-late ’90s. Of the author of those early zines, she said a few years earlier, ‘this was someone who thought everything was stupid—regular culture, zine culture, all milieus were dumb and rotten, so I made fun of everything there was except for what filled me with respect due to my inability to understand it’. She also wrote that what drew her to DIY culture in the first place was the ‘the idea of friendship’ as trans-individuation: ‘friendship that resonates across time and space in love and fascination’.[49]
The contradicted starting points pile up like plates in a sink, like zines in a dorm, like anti-fascist t-shirts on a trestle table outside a fascist cultural space. ‘The speculative proposition’, Marina writes, in a theoretical text on method from 2019, ‘constantly poses and withdraws meaning, but all the withdrawn meanings pile up, probably in an ungainly fashion, and their interactions are unforeseeable’.[50] She always treated divisions between the academy, the artworld and radical political theory as if they were one DIY or zine culture in which negativity is the container and love and fascination the ground, as contingent borders amenable to rearrangement through struggle, as reversible figures and rabbit-ducks and paintings you can walk into.
What distinguishes Marina’s approach from many other works in which ‘infrastructure’ is a theme is a fundamental commitment to theory, to the practice of conceptual abstraction, as a means of collective movement. ‘Infrastructure is what enables’, she wrote in 2020, ‘that is the baseline’;[51] and while that too simple thesis is obviously contradicted in many other places in her thinking, the assertion still conveys an emotional and intellectual truth. In a period in which the left has been split continually by global political events, and the institutions of art have revealed themselves not even as infrastructures, but simply as instruments of oppression, infrastructural critique defines a project that is practical, materialist, scalable in both directions and always oriented to alliances that cut across sectoral boundaries and the hypostatised levels of the represented and the real. Its negative dimensions outline a kind of negative space, an immanent expansion of possibility through recursive refusal of ultimate grounds. Institutional critique is rejected because of its argument that it is impossible to get outside art. (Complete) real subsumption is rejected because it turns abstraction into a means of immobilisation. In the ‘Bodies in Space’ article discussed above, the rejection of the concept of ‘bodies’ in theoretical discourse appears to be differently motivated—and yet the conclusion is almost exactly the same:
recognition becomes the sole claim to amelioration possible to articulate here, since no other collective power, no form of social invention is conceivable, only relentless exposure (to harm, to one another) and the inescapability of this kind of life, lived in these same circumstances. This is a surplus population whose only subjectivity is its ‘surplus-ness’; an actualised internalisation of the capital relation that demands recognition, and asks for counter-praxis.[52]
‘The inescapability of this kind of life’ establishes the basic motif of her work in the form of an inversion. Beyond its individual theses and the currency of the examples on which it draws, Marina’s project of infrastructural critique can be read as a way of thinking art, social institutions, and the limitation of the fragile, isolated individual body from the perspective of their escape, not now into some ineffable outside but into one another through the recursive movement of the book’s central categories, of reproduction, speculation and negativity, played out at the level of the infrastructure on all of its many scales. ‘I have always been investigating’, Marina wrote in 2018,
the desire for political effect, the desire for politics, basically … and what kinds of subjectivities that generates.[53]
And with this we find ourselves back at the NYC subway station, one last time. This is work that appears to be about materialist analysis of things, ‘infrastructures’, conditions we intuitively perceive as existing out of scale with our own lives, as figures of the fixed and the immovable and of the massive inescapable conditions of our existence, and yet the fundamental problem that is present on every single page of this project is the problem of how to appropriate the resources of art, infrastructure and philosophy for us—to turn the terms of the conclusion to ‘Bodies in Space’ upside down—as collective power, as forms of social invention for a life lived in different circumstances, as an end to relentless exposure to harm, that does not demand recognition, but offers counter-practice. So it starts with desire, in other words, with a few tiny nicks or cuts, and in the end it loops back to the first, endless repetition in difference of the collective decision to jump.
Mute Collective, ‘The Conditions of Possibility: Tributes to Marina Vishmidt 1976–2024’ (2024), https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/conditions-possibility-tributes-to-marina-vishmidt-1976-2024-i. ↑
‘a thing is a whole in a thing it is not’: Marina was a fan of this koan by a conceptual artist who I don’t need to name here. ↑
Marina Vishmidt, ‘Art in and as Abstract Labour’, Presentation, Marx & Philosophy Society Annual Conference, 5 June 2010. ↑
‘Afterword’, Endnotes 1 (2008), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/afterword. ↑
P. Valentine, ‘The Gender Rift in Communisation’ (2012), https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/gender-rift-communisation. ↑
Marina Vishmidt & Danny Hayward, ‘Self-dissolution to the left of me, self-dissolution to the right: A political glossary of self-overcomings’ (2018), 7, https://vishmidt.memoryoftheworld.org/#/book/2a14def4-aaf8-4cf0-8c9a-d37c1a82ea9d. ↑
Marina Vishmidt & Lisa Jay Jeschke, ‘Work Breaks Us, We Break Work’, in 365 Days of Invisible Work (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2017). ↑
Marina Vishmidt, ‘The Humorous Dimension of Time’, in Mobile Cinema, ed. Romana Schmalisch (Berlin: Archive Books, 2017). ↑
The exact quote is ‘elements of negation already make up what they [social forms] are, no less than what they are capable of becoming’. Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 83. The individual is also a ‘social form’, of course. ↑
Andrea Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique,’ Artforum, 44, 1 (September 2005). ↑
Marina Vishmidt, ‘A Short Introduction to Reproductive Realism’, Talk given at the launch for Materials special issue “Economic Ophelia”. Friday 6 February 2015, https://vishmidt.memoryoftheworld.org/#/book/fa0cd3d2-744b-4047-95ca-d193b8694dc1. ↑
Anthony Iles drew my attention to the film in a paper presented at Historical Materialism 2024, ‘Plastic Givens: Speculation, Antagonism and Recursion in Uncompleted Work with Marina’. ↑
Marina Vishmidt, ‘Indifferent Agent: Speculation as a Mode of Production in Art and Capital’, in ECONOMY: Art, Production and the Subject in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Angela Dimitrakaki & Kirsten Lloyd (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015) 72. ↑
Marina Vishmidt, ‘On the Recursivity of Care’, Talk at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, 22 February 2024, https://empac.rpi.edu/events/2024/marina-vishmidt. ↑
Vishmidt, ‘A Short Introduction to Reproductive Realism’. ↑
Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production, 222. ↑
Vishmidt, ‘Indifferent Agent’, 72. Marina’s most extensive engagement with the concept of autonomy is in the book she co-authored with Kerstin Stakemeier, Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis and Contemporary Art (London: Mute, 2016). ↑
Vishmidt, ‘A Short Introduction to Reproductive Realism’. ↑
Marina Vishmidt, ‘A Heteroclite Excursus into the Currency that Lives’, Open! (2014), https://onlineopen.org/a-heteroclite-excursus-into-the-currency-that-lives. ↑
Claire Fontaine & Marina Vishmidt, ‘We Can Refuse to Abdicate in a Number of Ways’, Mousse, 3 April 2024, https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/claire-fontaine-marina-vishmidt-2024/. ↑
Marina Vishmidt, ‘New Ruins’, in beyond repair, eds. Natascha Sadr Haghighian & Ernest Ah (Berlin: Archive Books, 2020), 154. ↑
From a letter to Marina, early June 2024. ‘Marina was a kind of animist’, observed her friend and co-author Zoe Sutherland. ↑
Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production in Art and Capital, PhD submitted at Queen Mary University, 2013, 179. ↑
Marina Vishmidt, ‘Care in / as Fire’ (2021), Feminist Art Maintenance Group statement, https://f-a-m.group/strands/care-in-as-fire. ↑
Paolo Virno, ‘The Dismeasure of Art: An Interview with Paolo Virno’, Chto Delat (2008), https://chtodelat.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Virno_Dismeasure.pdf; originally in Arts in Society. Being an Artist in Post-Fordist Times, eds Pascal Gielen, Paul De Bruyne (Rotterdam: NAi Uitgevers, 2009). ↑
Lizzie Homersham, ‘Artists Must Eat’, Art Monthly, March 2015, Larne Abse Gogarty, ‘The Art Right’, Art Monthly, April 2017. ↑
Vishmidt, ‘A Short Introduction to Reproductive Realism’. ↑
Marina Vishmidt, ‘Human Capital or Toxic Asset: After the Wage’, Mute, 2011, https://www.metamute.org/community/your-posts/human-capital-or-toxic-asset-after-wage. ↑
Endnotes, ‘The Logic of Gender: On the separation of spheres and the process of abjection’, Endnotes, 3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender. ↑
Marina Vishmidt, ‘Reproduction of What?: On Reproduction in an Extra-Systemic Sense’, Keynote at
The Marxist Literary Group Summer Institute on Culture and Society, 2014. ↑
Marina Vishmidt, ‘The Paradox of Self-Abolition: A Mapping Exercise’, May 10 (16); see also her text in the forthcoming What is to be Done under Real Subsumption?, eds. Anthony Iles & Mattin (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). ↑
The original publication was Endnotes, ‘Error’, Bad Feelings (London: Bookworks, 2015); the quote comes from the more extensive version, ‘Error’, Endnotes 5 (2019), 132. ↑
Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique’. ↑
As per the famous reversible figure introduced in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, like the Jorn painting a constant point of reference in Marina’s thought.. ↑
Marina Vishmidt, ‘Between Everything and Not Nothing: Cuts Towards Infrastructural Critique’, in Former West: Art and the Contemporary after 1989, eds. Maria Hlavadjova & Simon Sheikh (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). ↑
‘Thus we can propose that speculation as a mode of production also implies a becoming-speculative of reproduction’, Speculation as a Mode of Production, IX. ↑
An allusion to Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 1994). Reproduction of conditions and conditions of reproduction form yet another loop: Deleuze’s account of repetition as difference becomes a means of approaching it dynamically. ↑
Marina Vishmidt, ‘Procedures of Abolition: and Several Paradoxes They Throw Up’, in What is to be Done under Real Subsumption?. ↑
Marina Vishmidt & Danny Hayward, ‘Materialities Shaped by Divisions’, Arts of the Working Class, 32 (2024), 30 https://vishmidt.memoryoftheworld.org/#/book/7cc72e49-0ab6-4d5b-a49d-cf178fb713b0. ↑
The first of these formulations can now be found in Chapter 1 of this book, but both occurred originally in ‘“Only as Self-Relating Negativity’, Infrastructure and Critique’, Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts, 13, 3 (2022), 14, 17. ↑
Marina Vishmidt, Review of Anne Boyer, The Undying, Artforum, 58, 4 (2019), https://www.artforum.com/columns/marina-vishmidt-245505/. ↑
Andreas Petrossiants, ‘Inside and Out: The Edges to Critique’, e-flux journal, 110 (2020) https://www.e-flux.com/journal/110/335739/inside-and-out-the-edges-to-critique/. ↑
Vishmidt & Hayward, ‘Materialities Shaped by Divisions’, 30. ↑
Donald Mackenzie, An Engine not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Cambridge: MA: MIT Press, 2006); Walter Benjamin, ‘Diary Entries, 1936’, 6 March 1938, in Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 335–6; Marina Vishmidt, ‘The Fable of the Bacteria’, Allegory of the Cave Painting, eds. Mihnea Mircan & Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2015). ↑
See https://nosubject.com/Shifter. Marina was also deeply interested in the idea of the ruin, the ruin as allegory, the object that in suffering its own entropic decay becomes at the same time a representation of something other than itself, and through being itself changes what it represents, a problem she wrote about most explicitly in her essay on the Australian cave paintings. ↑
Marina Vishmidt, ‘Bodies in Space: On the ends of vulnerability’, Radical Philosophy, 208 (2020), 42. ↑
Marina Vishmidt et al., ‘Realism Today?’, ARTMargins, 7, 1 (2018), 58–82; Marina Vishmidt, ‘Mediation’, in Keywords for Marxist Art History Today, eds. Larne Abse Gogarty and Andrew Hemingway (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019). ↑
Vishmidt, ‘Bodies in Space’, 41. ↑
Marina Vishmidt, Talk given at Non-Threatening Theatre, June 2014; Marina Vishmidt, Talk given at Towards a Transindividual Self launch event, Archive Books, 12 January 2024. ↑
Marina Vishmidt, ‘Art, Value, Subjects, Reasons. Some Aspects of Speculation as Production’, in Aesthetics of Equivalence, eds. Simon Baier and Markus Klammer (Berlin: August Verlag, 2023), 113. ↑
Marina Vishmidt & Andreas Petrossiants, ‘Spaces of Speculation: Movement Politics in the Infrastructure’, Historical Materialism blog, 14 November 2020, https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/spaces-of-speculation-movement-politics-in-the-infrastructure/. ↑
Vishmidt, ‘Bodies in Space’, 45. ↑
Marina Vishmidt, Talk on ‘What is to be Done under Real Subsumption’ panel, Historical Materialism conference, November 2018. ↑