Danny Hayward – författare

A new long poem for half a voice on the subject of despised knowledge and political invisibility, published alongside a selection of shorter poems and essays dealing variously with the merging and commingling of smartphones and human bodies, the role of elegy in the mid-2000s, the social basis of fascism in the 2010s, social class, and the symbolic dysmorphia of the British high street. All of the work collected here circles around two central relationships: between politics and knowledge, and between poetic language and speech.

As we search for ways to imagine a life beyond capital and its drive to extinction, the dream of the institution as a critical refuge from existing social relations becomes less and less credible. Infrastructural Critique proposes a new materialist counter-praxis. By treating the contemporary art institution as a resource base and site of struggle, Vishmidt reanimates critique by connecting it to the effort to erode capitalist authority over the means of our existence, build power and seize resources for new practices of social invention. A tour-de-force of Marxist philosophy, art criticism, Milanese radical feminism and AppleTV+ dinosaur documentaries, this book, edited in the wake of the author's tragic early death, weaves in the gaps of theory and praxis to assess the main infrastructurally critical artmakers at work today. Approaching their practices as 'crystal drills' - at once means of seeing, and practical cutting implements - the text showcases the light-bending, life-shaping thinking of one of the most playful, politically radical theorists of her generation.