Infrastructural Critique

Marina Vishmidt (1976-2024) was a philosopher, organiser and art theorist. One of the major critical theorists of her generation, her writing spanned art theory, feminist social reproduction theory, finance, ecology, labour and labour organising, value-form theory, black studies, and film. A lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London and Professor of Art Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, her first book was Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value-Subjectivity in Art and Capital (2018)Larne Abse Gogarty is a writer and art historian from London who teaches at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Her most recent book is What We Do Is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy (Sternberg Press, 2023).Danny Hayward is a poet and critic whose most recent books are Training Exercises (Both are Worse, 2024) and Loading Terminal (87 Press, 2022). Kerstin Stakemeier is a writer in Berlin and educator at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg. With Marina Vishmidt, she co-authored Reproducing Autonomy (Mute, 2016).

Marina Vishmidt speaks with unfailing clarity about how value feeds on devastation and how art's institutions sit inside the chain of extraction rather than outside or above. Infrastructural Critique is essential reading for anyone who despite all is not ready to give up on the artworld as a place for collective struggle, and who not only wants to experience how 'infrastructural critique' pulls conditions of possibility into the frame -- above all, the material conditions of reproduction -- but more importantly, crack open the impasses and alibis of institutional critique. What makes this book, her last gift to us, so generative is that it never stops at the diagnosis: between reproduction and abolition it opens ground for new forms of origination.

• Preface by Stefano Harney and Fred MotenIntroduction: A Life Lived in Different Circumstances, by Danny HaywardPart 1 - FoundationsChapter 1 - Speculative InfrastructuresChapter 2 - Critique, Institutional and Infrastructural Chapter 3 - Infrastructure InterruptedPart 2 - Crystal DrillsChapter 4 - ReproductionChapter 5 - EntropyChapter 6 - AbolitionConclusion - Critique is the cutting tool, not the price of admission Acknowledgements