Issue #155 Infrastructural Critique: Between Reproduction and Abolition

Infrastructural Critique: Between Reproduction and Abolition

Marina Vishmidt

155_vishmidt_01

At an event in late April 1979, Barbara Smith, with megaphone, protests nine murders of women of color that took place in the first months of the year. Photograph by Ellen Shub / Courtesy the Estate of Ellen Shub.

Issue #155
June 2025










Notes
1

For a first approach to “transversality,” see Félix Guattari, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Penguin, 1984), 11–24.

2

Hannah Black, “The Identity Artist and the Identity Critic,” Artforum 54, no. 10 (Summer 2016) .

3

Andreas Petrossiants, in Diversity of Aesthetics, vol. I, Inside and Outside: Infrastructures of Critique, eds. Andreas Petrossiants and Jose Rosales (Emily Harvey Foundation, 2021), 35.

4

Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value-Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Brill, 2018).

5

Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production, x, 21, 25.

6

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (Seabury Press, 1973), 143; see also Marina Vishmidt, “The Hard Labour of Speculation: Shaping a Reflection on Methods,” MaHKUscript: Journal of Fine Art Research 3, no. 1: 1–8.

7

See Combahee River Collective, The Combahee River Collective Statement .

8

Marina Vishmidt, “Lights, Camera, Now Time!: Polly II, Plan for a Revolution in the Docklands,” Mousse, October 7, 2024 .

9

For further discussion on the Kantian history of boundary setting, see Vishmidt, “Hard Labour of Speculation,” 1.

Excerpted from Marina Vishmidt’s forthcoming Infrastructural Critique: Between Reproduction and Abolition (Verso). The editors are grateful to Danny Hayward for allowing this excerpt to appear in this issue about the relations between art and theory, which Vishmidt magisterially investigated and invaluably politicized at every turn.