WE ARE HERE AND WE ARE IN IT

Recently, I’ve been taking Marina’s classes. That obviously means something quite different now than it did when she was teaching them herself, but there’s something quite comforting to me in the activity of accompanying her in this way, week by week, class by class, through a period of time that I experienced alongside her and yet very differently. I go backwards in time, but also forwards, to a moment in the formation of her thinking that remains incipient, where the relationship between her own thoughts and those of others remains in process, shifting and yet now unchangeably underdefined. The courses she taught at the Angewandte during the last six months of her life covered the main areas of her research during the previous years of her work, but from new angles. I’ve been doing the reading she set for all four. She only finished two of them, and in the folders on my desktop, containing her notes for the class on Ciaran Finlayson’s book Perpetual Slavery, her commentary suddenly breaks off in week 3, with some scattered comments on Saidiya Hartman’s idea of “burdened freedom”: 

The question of freedom is not just about the development of history or diagnoses of historical narrative, but, as Adorno also acknowledges, the position of the subject within it, noting, however, that narratives very much affect positionality. 

I’ve been going through the syllabi she prepared and trying to think about where her theory was moving in the last months of the year before last, and in the long first months of the last year, with all of its distinctive twists and doublings back, its noteworthy distaste for the end of the sentence. I’ve been catching up. It’s taken a long time, but I’ve wanted to think about how her theory moves, and in what way it was moving, as well as in what direction, in its final stages. Classes on aesthetics; on the critique of political economy; on US slavery; and what Marina named the “conditions” for it. Art history, totalities since 2008, Ciaran Finlayson’s book Perpetual Slavery, infrastructure: it feels right to me to say that these are the main paths along which her thinking was travelling, going both forwards and back. “I remember how you said in 2021,” I wrote in the first draft for this: 

That theoretical coordinates need to be bracketed or recontextualized in the constant process of collective struggle whose results can be minimal and deferred, if there are any results at all, and I remember the love note that you'd written for us twelve years before you died, that I found in a notebook in our flat, in July 2024, a loose leaf in a collapsing, orange covered book, with lecture notes scrawled on the other side, which ended 'everything has stopped... everything has stopped... though I feel the vibrations still the reports he and I are the stop we are here and we are in it'. 

I start at the end and go backwards. I’ve been trying to think about how Marina’s theory moves, about how it exists inside of history, about how it provides a language for the history that is inside of it, that we are in, rotating in ways that are both liberating and painfully contorted. I have the materials for the courses because of a minor but to me enormously significant act of infrastructural critique, by Marina’s student Luciano Pecoits, who enrolled on all of the courses retrospectively so that he could download the reading lists and send them to me back in the autumn of 2024, after Marina’s illness ran out of control and she and I were moved to the palliative care ward of the Vienna General Hospital, an event that must have been terribly shocking for the students in her classes, and for which I know, from the bottom of my heart, she would have wanted to apologize. It takes a lot of work to catch up with someone who read faster than you and who was reading for a longer period of time, but I’ve had more than a year now that Marina didn’t.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last months thinking about what a theory should do, or be—about what a theory is. Perhaps it seems self-gratifyingly meta to talk about the (social) ontology of a theory, its being or way of being, rather than more prosaically about what the theory says, or helps us to do, but my own primary engagement with poetry also teaches me about the significance of time in altering the meaning of what is read. I love a lot of books that sat in manuscript form in cardboard boxes for many decades after the deaths of their authors, before they could be published and read, and transformed. I also love, though he doesn’t seem like an immediately relevant point of reference here, the writings of Pier Paolo Pasolini, who said that a death is the epistemological precondition for the understanding of a life. I want to negate that claim, but in what Marina might call its negative relationship to truth it remains helpful to me. I’ll come back to it in what follows.

I’ve been thinking about the way that Marina’s theory moves, which is to say about the way that it theorizes movement, but also the resources it provides to describe its own movement, both with and without me, in the months after Marina’s death. In May of this year, at the Performing Arts Forum (PAF) in Picardy, I participated in a collective reading led by the artist Noor Abed of the writings of Palestinian prisoners. They were smuggled out of high-security Israeli jails using the various techniques for smuggling such writings known to political prisoners for as long as there have been politics, and to me mainly through David Beresford's book Ten Men Dead, his history of the 1981 Irish hunger strike in the British state internment camp Long Kesh. Because the theme of the meeting at PAF was infrastructure, we talked in that session about how the “conditions” of our own reading of these texts, in a collectively-owned and refunctioned convent in a relatively impoverished and therefore—for international cultural workers—relatively inexpensive part of Northern France, could be thought of as an “infrastructure”, as something that is integral, and not just incidental or loosely connected, to its meaning. At the same event I proposed for inclusion in the reader a text by the architectural theorist Reinhold Martin, a text that I knew Marina loved, and that she cited in her first text on infrastructural critique from 2016, but that I hadn’t yet read:

As its name suggests, the purpose of the dumbwaiter was to exclude Black voices and Black ears from the conversation above. The dumbwaiter, then, did not merely regulate the boundaries of a sphere that was reserved, in a Kantian sense, for the public use of reason; it helped to produce that sphere by minimizing interference and distortion, and restricting transmission and communication in a manner that ontically differentiated master from slave.  

Martin is writing here about the social ontology of a theory—in this case, of classical liberalism—via the mechanical dumbwaiters that Thomas Jefferson installed in his classicized mansion, Monticelli. The dumbwaiter, Marina would later write, in her class notes for the course on infrastructure that she taught at the Angewandte in 2024 (although this was a class she never got to teach, because it was scheduled to take place on the same day that she was moved into palliative care) “repeats the dehumanization of the enslaved in object form [in a process that continues] up to the self-driving car”.

I am preoccupied with the way Marina’s theory moves, because I am trying to understand, like you, what it is: because I want to know What Is Infrastructural Critique. I am preoccupied with this question because I know, by instinct and by education, that I cannot know what it is unless I pay attention to how it moves, which is to say how it has moved in my own hands, as one of its editors, and how it moves now beyond both Marina and me, in circles of mediated, reciprocal influence that I cannot predict or necessarily always hope to follow. I know that Marina was committed to the overcoming of boundaries, such as the “boundaries of a sphere that was reserved, in a Kantian sense, for the public use of reason”; between the art institution and its “outside”; and between political struggles of different kinds; and I know that in committing to all of this she also made her theoretical work as unfinishable as her sentences sometimes seem to be, because the language in which we describe overcoming should itself be overcome. I know, as well, that Marina believed in the power of the boundary, as a social fact, to use Adorno’s term, reliant on an infrastructure, to use Reinhold Martin’s, and providing certain resources of abstraction and speculative indeterminacy, to use hers, though these markers of ownership are themselves provisional and unstable, liable to disappear or scatter under historical or philological scrutiny. Marina knew this too and was convinced of the status of her own project as collective work, carried on by many hands, and many different kinds of hands, in many different “spheres”, all of them with their own boundaries that need to be overcome, often by making use of them, by leveraging their different scales and syntaxes, forms and functions, levels and levers. I know, finally, that in thinking about movement in Marina’s theory, about negation as transformation, as she put it, I cannot entirely remove, delete, or negate myself, and that when I think about myself as one of the editors of her book on infrastructural critique, the creator of what I hope is a dialectical image of it, of its movement at a standstill, I cannot not think about editing in the light of other writers who I love, who have had something to say about the way in which death is itself an editorial act, an aspect of large historical movements that exceed us, though we are here and we are in it: 

Editing is thus very similar to the choice which death makes of the acts of a life, placing them outside of time [...] I was saying earlier that death affects a rapid synthesis of a past life, and the retroactive light that it shines on that life highlights its essential moments, making of them actions which are mythical or moral outside of time. Well, this is the way in which a life becomes a story.     

Marina may not have considered all of these concepts to be quite right: the concept of the mythical, for example, or the moral, or “outside of time”, or “death” viewed as something punctual and final. And, come to think of it, she also had her doubts about the concept of “life” as well. But I take some courage from the fact that the copy of the book from which I just quoted belonged to her, and I’m trying to understand what infrastructural critique is: to see how it moves. 

I know that the image of movement is not quite adequate on its own. I know this because at the Performing Arts Forum in May 2025 I also read an article by Lauren Berlant, in which they write: “Movement is what distinguishes infrastructures from institutions, although the relation between these concepts and materialities is often a matter of perspective.” Which is so admirably clear, but also made me realise, as Marina herself scrawled in 2002 across a Master’s application she’d written, in which some of her ideas about speculation and subjectivity were worked out for the first time: you have to be more specific. So, what kind of movement distinguishes infrastructure from institution? And is movement infrastructure’s only distinguishing feature? And how else do we track the “shift”, or as Marina wrote in 2017, “perhaps rather a drift, since the shift is not historical but one that can be observed as temporally concentrated in the wake of the exhaustion of other strategies,” from an institutional to an infrastructural critique?  

I could start by saying that if we take Reinhold Martin seriously, which Marina did, then another distinction between infrastructure and institutions, besides the one Lauren Berlant proposes, is that the former are “dumb” and the latter are loquacious, and that the dumbness of the one, even when it’s made out of language, such as, for example, the infrastructure of the law, is a “condition” of the loquacity that takes place in the other. As Martin writes:

Population and education were organized in an ascending scale into a pyramid of knowledge, at the actual, incomplete apex of which would eventually stand the University of Virginia, with its central organ for managing the attention of young white men, the library.

The “dumb” waiter moves silently up its shaft, its inhuman, wooden passageway, towards this apex, the apex of a social pyramid that presents itself as, or that understands itself to be, a “sphere”, and which becomes this only after the people who have been relegated to the bottom of it no longer appear, having been mechanically replaced. “The colonial-era ‘dumbwaiter’ [...] repeats the dehumanization of the enslaved in object form’ [in a process that continues] up to the self-driving car,” remarks Marina, in early 2024, for that seminar she didn’t quite get to teach.  “[T]his week’s reading,” she continues, “will be a first venture into the symptomatology of ‘artificial intelligence’”.

The dumbwaiter, this “symptom” of intelligence, moves silently up its shaft. It has no idea that the humans that it apes and invisibilizes needed to be replaced, “infrastructurally”, in order for the dining room to be “constituted” as a “sphere”, despite remaining in some other reality—the non-institutional, the “real” one—a pyramid, that is, a hierarchy in which certain kinds of people at the top can talk, without the embarrassment of other, lower kinds of people overhearing. A sphere, or geometrical circle: a space in which all ideas of hierarchy, all gradients, apexes and power verticals are reassuringly, magically smoothed out, into the mellifluous curves of infinitesimals and functions that vanish at a point, which is to say the magical language of a technical rationality in which society all but disappears, or rather disappears and then reappears as something else: a figure of speech, a fiction, a form, curve, circle or concept. It moves, as Lauren Berlant accurately says that an infrastructure must, so that the institution can stay, or remain, fixed, and can eventually be redeemed or sublimated into such notions as liberalism, democracy, freedom, and art.

So, this is a lesson about the role of infrastructure, not only in the construction of institutions, but also in the formation of concepts. “Silence,” ca. 1800, is what Reinhold Martin calls it. What about silence ca. 2025? I am trying to understand what infrastructural critique is, and I am trying to think about how it moves. 

On the first anniversary of Marina’s death, on April 26, 2025, a group of some of her closest friends visited a large exhibition of work by the artist Park McArthur at the mumok in Vienna, some of which Marina had remarked on in passing in her extant writings on infrastructural critique. “The floors are tarrazzo,” begins McArthur’s exhibition text:

The floors are marble, wood, and gray concrete.

Everything is installed on Level 0 opposite a large glass wall and transparent security gate. Everything on Floors 0 and 1: spread throughout the Temporary Exhibition Gallery by the building’s entrance, the multi-storey High Gallery, the Street Level Foyer Gallery leading back to the museum cafe, and the Skylight Room upstairs.

The museums open and close.

If you walk into Level 0 of the mumok, as we did on that afternoon, you see “everything all at once, nothing to hide”. “Two oversized blocks of soundproofing foam face off with a pair of highway sign sculptures”. In the exhibition guide, the works are concretely described, but they also repeat, as when McArthur writes, at the end of a text titled “Elsewhere”, that “decommissioned and disassembled, signs depart from this text. Temporary and preserved, stolen, covered, and carried away, they are ignored and avoided—cursed, consequential, and inferred.”

The works that are first introduced literally are preserved and inferred “elsewhere” by means of poetic para-text, an erring half-rhyme, which is to say by means of one of the central techniques of Park McArthur’s art. Preserved, inferred. The highway sign sculptures are called Softly, Effectively. They resemble two massive non-reflective, or at least only partly reflective, mirrors, “reflect[ing] the day’s light through windows facing the sculpture garden.” The gallery text cited on the MoMA webpage listing their acquisition reads:

The US Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) declares that traffic control devices ‘speak to us softly, yet effectively and authoritatively.’ In this work—one of forty blank signs the artist had made based on specifications from an FHWA [Federal Highway Administration] manual—McArthur omits ‘authoritative’ text and images to challenge the systems that determine patterns of human movement. By subverting the sign’s intended purpose as a wayfinding device, McArthur has created an object that is equally inaccessible to all—a wordless monument to the impossibility of conforming lived experience to a single structure.

The signs are “decommissioned and disassembled [...] stolen, covered [...] carried away”. Silence ca. 1800, silence ca. 2025. How does infrastructural critique move, per Berlant? What is its form of movement, per Marina? 

About two months after our visit, one of the people who was there, a person who cared for Marina during the final weeks of her life, was informed that a workshop he was to give at the mumok’s sibling organization, the Kunsthalle Wien, had been cancelled, after he and his collaborator notified the venue that their discussion—due to focus on Walter Benjamin’s 1934 anti-fascist text “Author as Producer”—might touch upon contemporary debates around fascism and genocide. A few weeks after providing their advance warning, they received a message to say that their event had been cancelled. Apparently, too few staff were available to facilitate the workshop.

Just as with Thomas Jefferson’s dumbwaiter as theorized by Reinhold Martin, though, of course, analogies are always precarious—or, as Marina would argue, speculative, because analogies are always unities of identity and nonidentity—we encounter here a situation where labor seems, as if magically, to disappear, just where you might expect it to exist in the most abundant supply. The end result of this disappearance is dumbness, or silence that has been intentionally produced, which is to say, in Park McArthur’s terms, a few hundred feet away at the mumok, or at least in the terms of the critic tasked with composing the label with which her art is displayed: “the creation of an object that is equally inaccessible to all”. Two infrastructures, two sets of conditions:

1. A blank highway sign, deprived of the signs that would allow it to speak, speaking only of itself. A readymade object, for which the apparatus of the art institution supplies a different language, reclothing it in signs of a different kind: in this case the inclusive, tangibly vague idiom of “lived experience”: the spontaneous ideology of the liberal public sphere. 

1. A closed art space, emptied of the public who, through its contentious or even conflictual exchange of “lived experiences,” could be said to constitute a “public sphere”. It could have done so, that is, if we hadn’t already started to see behind that abstract, geometrical shorthand something much more mechanical, which is to say, infrastructural: a stripped-back, material framework for which no second-order language is intended to be supplied, so that we have to supply it here instead. Signs depart from this text, are cancelled, decommissioned, and disassembled, are taken for wonders.  

What is left once the talks have been “decommissioned” and the instructions have been stripped away is the infrastructure that “helped to produce them” and that served as their conditions: large metal highway signs, aluminum, measurements overall: 71 5/8 x 114 x 1 1/2 inches (181.93 x 289.56 x 3.81 cm); an empty room full of stacked plastic chairs. The kinds of things that Park McArthur describes, or perhaps just notes, in her work, with a close and searching interest that is based in need, or that starts with need but which is always trying to arrive somewhere else, in a concrete movement towards a concrete somewhere else, as Marina once described the practice of negation:

In my 2018 book Speculation as a Mode of Production, I explored art and financial capitalism as two institutions of contemporary life that deploy a surplus of uncertainty—speculation, risk—to ground their claims on value. At the same time, I was interested in underlining how both are mechanisms of making labor ‘disappear’ using the spells of creativity, freedom, and self-investment. 

Here, then, is a third way in which labor “disappears” in the magical circle or sphere of contemporary art. And I can guess, though I can only guess—because often it is only possible to guess, or to speculate—that Marina found the image of the dumbwaiter in Martin’s essay, this image of a machine or an infrastructure which allows some men to talk about freedom and justice, while rendering some others “dumb”, an irresistible metaphor for the institution of contemporary art itself, for its “sphere” of discursive or gestural progressivism that so often performatively contradicts itself. 

I am preoccupied with the way Marina’s theory moves, because I am trying to understand, like you, what it is, though I also know, by instinct and by education, that I cannot know what it is unless I pay attention to how it moves; and I know that often it is necessary to move not forwards but backwards. On the very first pages of Adorno’s Lectures on Aesthetics, a book which Marina read in the summer before she moved to Vienna, he talks about what I think might be a principle of infrastructural critique, about the role of the “dumb” or unspeaking in it (the underlining here is Marina’s):

In other words, quite simply put: that objectivity of the aesthetic which I assume will occupy us here can result as objectivity only from an analysis of the facts, problems and structures of aesthetic objects—that is to say, the works of art. There is no other path to this objectivity than to immerse oneself in the objects themselves, and I will not hesitate to show you at least [...] a few models [...] here [...] our central methodological tenet should be—if I may use Hegel’s words again—to devote ourselves as purely as possible to the matter without adding too much of ourselves.

Silence circa 2025. An empty room, designed to “carry” signs, or rather, to permit a kind of speech, to be a sort of infrastructure for speech, and yet itself remaining mute, silent: the art institution as dumbwaiter. “[T]o devote ourselves as purely as possible to the matter without adding too much of ourselves”: the dumbwaiter as critic. If I search in the English translation of Aesthetic Theory for the word “mute”, the first result appears on page 23 of the Continuum edition, in the opening chapter “Situation”, a passage of which Marina assigned as reading for her class at the end of her course on Finlayson’s Perpetual Slavery: “Art is modern art through mimesis of the hardened and alienated; only thereby, and not by the refusal of a mute reality, does art become eloquent; this is why art no longer tolerates the innocuous.” In 2013, Marina quoted the entirety of that passage in an article on the social enterprise artworks of the artist-entrepreneur Theaster Gates, an article that used this phrase, mimesis of the hardened and alienated, as its title. Marina comments there that 

We can make some extrapolations here, which may not necessarily be Adorno’s own. One is that part of modern art’s very being consisted of emulating that which is alien to it. That is, its [art’s] autonomy was based upon a relation of troubled proximity—whether of rejection or mimesis—to the banal social, economic, material facts from which it operated at a remove.

“Like all narratives of modernization”, she continued, ‘the one of art cannot help but also evoke the narrative of economic growth, the liberation theology of capital.” She notes in the same text that “A recent exhibition [of Gates’s] at the White Cube in London [was] titled “My Labour is My Protest” [and] presented his work for a UK audience,” and that his ‘entrepreneurial outlook—promoting the virtues of labor in social change, preferably the labor of others, while he interfaces with real estate developers, art institutions, and NGOs—is resolutely and unapologetically ‘post-political’.”

I want to stay close, if I can, to the problem of dumbness or silence here, as an aspect of infrastructure, or infrastructural critique, and to the problem of what it means—“not necessarily”, as Marina says, in Adorno’s own sense—to speak about “devot[ing] ourselves as purely as possible to the matter, without adding too much of ourselves.” The title of Gates’s White Cube exhibition rhymes, or rather clashes, with the title of the exhibition of another US artist concerned with the systematic impoverishment of Black people, an artist about whom Marina had a lot more to say, and an exhibition that is one of the main focuses of the book Perpetual Slavery. That exhibition, 91020000, by Cameron Rowland, is referred to by a mute, dumb list of numerals that serve the purpose not of identifying the labor, possessively and pronominally identified, belonging to the entrepreneurial figure of an artist-author, who talks “about” this labor while assigning its performance to others, but to the lots in a police auction that provide the artist with readymades. 

Marina also wrote in “Mimesis of the Hardened and Alienated” about the work of the artist Tino Seghal:

In his work, this tendency [to render the social a contingent aspect of the work’s mythopoesis] can be described as a kind of optical illusion that presents two dimensions at once, but which cannot be perceived simultaneously. Either you, as a viewer, agree to the social contract of the work—which involves focusing on the immediate, direct experience of orchestrated sociality in Seghal’s case, or a processual and temporal theatre of community in Gates’s—or you try to understand the conditions of possibility of these performances, the performers’ agency, power relations in this ensemble of social mimesis, and so forth. Each perspective cancels out the other, referring any critical approach off limits, or even redundant, because the distance demanded by critique breaks the social contract of frictionless exchange on which this work is predicated (just like in the service industries that it emulates).

Either/or. Either      

“My Labor Is My Protest” or “91020000”.      

“Each perspective cancels out the other”. 

I am trying to think about how Marina’s thinking moves, and at this point, it begins to move towards what I perceive as a problem of language, as an aspect of subjective experience. The dumbwaiter, the blank metal highway signs and the shuttered art space with its disappearing labor, all rhyme with the numbers assigned to the New York gallery Artists Space as a bidder in a police auction in which, as a nonprofit institution, it was permitted to purchase, at below market prices, items of furniture manufactured by mainly Black prison labor in the State of New York: inexpressive functional numerals that in their new context, the exhibition context of Artists Space itself, become a kind of linguistic readymade, over which a new shell of affect grows, like a hardened and alienated crust, across the surface of an apparently living experience, yours or mine. These objects rhyme with these numerals, they all share this quality of appearance, because in the evacuation of ostensibly living experience each reveals something about the material conditions of subjectivation, of a subject existing in the gap between the subject of “My Labor is My Protest” and another subject who doesn’t exist yet, who remains silent, dumb, virtual, a kind of negative potential, latent in the infrastructures of social life “like a spirit like a gas”: in the “banal social, economic, material facts”, in relation to which “art” maintains its troubled proximity—whether of rejection or mimesis—as both autonomy and social fact. 

On March 11, 2024, Marina gave her second-to-last public presentation at the launch for Volume 3 of the pamphlet series Diversity of Aesthetics, titled Looting, an edited transcript of an informal discussion between the political theorist Vicky Osterweil and the historians and theorists Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe and Rinaldo Walcott. She proposed some questions prompted especially by a few remarks of Hartman’s, whose writing is at the center of the classes she was teaching in the months before her death. “[A]s Hartman brings up so eloquently in the conversation,” writes Marina, “when they do it [organized theft], it’s capitalism, or conservation, or development, or what have you, but when we do it, it’s looting. There’s a slight elision of what the ‘it’ is or could be because, of course, scale and systematicity have an enormous role to play. Otherwise, the question of exploitation—whether by race, gender, class—that can differentiate and inscribe the value-form as a structural question would not make sense.”  

Again, the discussion here touches on a question, familiar to us in the present, of language, representation, visibility, and silence, and especially about the ability of constituted power, usually state power, to use two different words to signify the same practice, based on whether the agent is the state itself or its enemies. The discussion in the rest of Looting comes back quite often to this problem of speech or representation, the question of muteness or silence, of what Hartman calls, in an interview with Frank Wilderson from two decades before, “the position of the unthought”, a position which Marina made central to her own reflections on abolition as a category that shifts across a number of political boundaries: movements against anti-Blackness and slavery, against gender, against capital and its value-forms. “What I’m animated by,” says Walcott, “is thinking of looting as a particular form of speech that’s not assimilable to the forms of speech that are already available to us.” A readymade language, one which brings to mind the image of Duchamp’s bicycle wheel, itself a thesis about language in general and perhaps about political language in particular. “All the language around MOVE was an attempt to make them incomprehensible,” says Sharpe. “It’s like, ‘oh, we don’t actually value this,’” says Hartman of the images of rioters, “we are content to see it burn to the ground. Our radical indifference to the national project is on display. The desire to bring about its end is revealed. The repressed and the unspeakable are in plain view.” “Art is modern art through mimesis of the hardened and alienated; only thereby, and not by the refusal of a mute reality, does art become eloquent,” adds Adorno.  

I’m trying to think about how infrastructural critique moves, and one of the ways in which it moves in its more recent stages is towards these questions of speechlessness, incomprehensibility, illegibility, the non-assimilable, the fugitive, the repressed, and unspeakable, the hardened and alienated, the unthought, the “dumb”, whose inhabitation as elements of a different kind of language form aspects of a tradition of Black refusal, or another “form of speech” (Walcott), the refusal of the refusal of a mute reality, to use Adorno’s terms, or “continuous refusal, collective refusal,” to use Cameron Rowland and Thomas Lax’s; a refusal enacted by many hands, and many different kinds of hands, in relation to and across many different kinds of boundaries, to use Marina’s term—though none of these proprietorial markers really mean anything. 

In other words, what we are dealing with here is the question What Is Critique, a question nested within the question What Is Infrastructural Critique: a question within a question. “Finally,” Marina wrote in her 2022 Humboldt lecture on infrastructural critique, the source text for her last really finished theoretical articles:

All these tasks point to the need to understand the concept of critique at issue in ‘infrastructural critique’. The perspective argued for above cannot leave critique in its own right untouched, with its acknowledged genealogy in the unconditional autonomy of the isolated and European-identified Enlightenment subject that rightly informs most debates around the notion in the sphere of radical theory these days. Instead, the aim is to contribute to the comparatively sidelined history of critique as a material practice of antagonism whose subject, if it has one, is dispersive, uncategorizable, and collective

I go backwards in time, but also forwards, to a moment in the formation of Marina’s thinking that remains incipient, which has to do with this idea of the dispersive, uncategorizable and collective subject of critique, emergent within histories of practical negation of the types discussed in Looting, but also transformable into the infrastructure of social life: banal social and economic facts. On February 22, 2024, Marina travelled to Troy, New York to give a presentation at the Curtis Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, her third-to-last public event. Along with the work of Margaret Raspé, she discussed a 1981 short film by Fronza Woods, Fannie’s Film. Woods’s work intercuts footage of a Black cleaner in New York, Fannie, talking about her life, and working in an expensive gym whose customer base is sculpted white men and women in their twenties. “The conditions of representation,” argued Marina,

In this film displaced onto Fannie, though it is really of course Woods’s film of Fannie, not Fannie’s film at all, are here redoubled in the content of the film—mirrors, frames, devices for the reproduction of docile and active bodies— which then go on to create the conditions for the representation of a kind of labor that disappears in its task, and thus can’t really be represented at all. Which is why its visibility becomes a political question, and potentially a challenging one, especially when intensified by the naturalization of non-white menial labor in a way analogous but not assimilable to the work of the white middle-class housewife (which is also the reason why Black Women for Wages for Housework was always going to be situated differently to the generality of the Wages for Housework campaign).

Dumbwaiters, blank metal sheets, inexpressive numerals, incomprehensible languages, hardened and alienated frames, devices for the reproduction of docile and active bodies, white ones. Marina was herself at this point almost silent, having lost her voice due to her illness the month before. She was planning to talk in Troy with the help of what she called, in the amazingly detailed notes for one of her seminars, “this marvellous contraption”: a portable microphone and speaker kit of the kind used by tour guides, the type of tour Andrea Fraser once mimicked during her famous work of second-generation institutional critique A Gallery Talk in 1989. “[S]peak to us softly, yet effectively and authoritatively”, says the US Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) of its traffic control devices. Speak softly, yet effectively, redacts Park McArthur, in presenting to us the blank, unspeaking, dumb and mute infrastructural “conditions” of that speech, in the form of a metal sheet, 181.93 x 289.56 x 3.81 cm. Technical specifications, accessibility requirements, legal and financial infrastructures, contracts, exhibition guides, audio guides, microphones and speakers, captions, frames, devices, mirrors, administrative workers, technical assistants, cameras, conference assistants, creative class workers, lecterns, lecturers. I’m trying to see how infrastructural critique moves, which is to say its form of movement, its movement “inside and outside”, to use the language of Diversity of Aesthetics, to see the way in which it moves across, and so negates, but also makes use of the existing social power of, the power of the social fact of, the boundary, which is to say the boundary between art and life, between institution and society, wage labor and non-wage labor, the Black radical tradition of the fifteenth-century through to today and the much shorter history of Marxist-feminism. 

In Marina’s remarks about Fannie’s Film, about the problem of the mute, the silent, the dumb, the hardened and alienated, the polished and the cleaned, about the infrastructure of a reality in which “my labour” and “my protest”, and also “my body” and “my art”, are situated, a new question about movement emerges, which we can add to the questions that she asked two weeks later, at the launch for Diversity of Aesthetics. This question emerges, in Marina’s thinking, as a question about labor, about scale, about infrastructure. It is a question of how a movement of antagonism “in the streets”, for example in the George Floyd uprising of 2020, can begin to articulate itself in the “material” infrastructures of the institution, in the whole compositional field presented to us by the “conditions for … representation”, in particular in the forms of labor that disappear, non-white menial labor, reproductive labor, often Black women’s labor, as well as the financial and legal infrastructures that reproduce such labor as the property of a particular kind of person over long periods of time, “in the long tail of involuntary servitude”, as Thomas Lax puts it in “Continuous Refusal, Collective Refusal”, or over the “long term”, as Rowland puts it, in relation to their own infrastructural work “on time”, which Marina would describe in yet another presentation in March 2024, two days before her talk in Troy.

I am trying to connect these thoughts of Marina’s, shared with many others, about the long afterlives of slavery with her thinking about infrastructure, in order to articulate what Deleuze would call the problems and the questions of her work, at the point at which it “trails off into formlessness, which is to say at the point at which it becomes ours. The problem at first seems to be how to “represent” the form of critique that is coming into focus in Marina’s work, in opposition to the “critique” of institutional critique, which is to say the critical movement of the dumb, the mute, the silenced, against existing value forms; and about how to realize this other form of critique within the institution, or perhaps more accurately across it, since it can’t really be stably represented, because it is, by definition, non-or anti-representational. Which is why its visibility becomes a political question, per Marina, all incomplete, per her great influences Stefano Harney and Fred Moten.

Some work that Marina produced in the months between October 2023 and April 2024: three lecture transcripts, four reading lists, some class notes, two transcripts of responses at book launches, a proposal for an unwritten article, a short artist’s catalogue essay, and some published correspondence with a colleague and friend. “The recursive element of reproductive labour,” she writes for the event in Troy in February—and perhaps this applies to archiving as well, even to editorial work—“is somehow not a representational one. It conveys process [...] and is always an offcut of ongoingness, never a condition or even an object of representation.” “THESE FILMS ARE CUT-OUTS OF THE RUNNING THREAD OF THE TIME OF THIS SPIRAL ... INTO AN UNKNOWN FUTURE,” per Margaret Raspé.

In early October, I travelled to Glasgow to give a talk at the School of Art. The topic was Marina’s work and a published conversation between the two of us from late 2021, broken off unfinished and then returned to by me alone, edited and published in an abbreviated form two months after her death. With my hosts, I visited two tiny exhibitions inspired by her writing in independently run galleries in the southside neighbourhood of Pollokshields. Small shopfront spaces, refurbished by the unpaid labor of their founders, the opposite of the mumok with its 700 square meters of five-meter-high column-free, uninterrupted exhibition areas, one on top of the other, which can be subdivided as required, or the Kunsthalle with its large pools of paid labor that sometimes seem to disappear.

One of the pieces showing in the exhibition was a film by the group Channels titled This Is A Window, narrated by Marina in 2017, which I wrote about in the introduction to her book. Another is a film by Park McArthur, a one-channel video installation in which another voice narrates, to gentle but insistent musical accompaniment, several variations of a story about two people, Crip 0 and Crip 1, taking a daytrip to a beach. A third work in the exhibition, by the artist Dora Budor, consisted of a discarded blue cardboard packing case for bottles of Nicolas Feuillatte champagne, retrieved by the artist on New Year’s Day from the streets of the financial district of Manhattan, and repurposed as a dysfunctional DIY television, its screen a Fresnel lens. The screen was to display for as long as it was switched on a short loop of “artificially restored and colored scenes of Marcel L’Herbier’s 1928 silent film L’Argent”, depicting scenes of stock trading on the Paris Stock Exchange.

I’m suggesting Marina’s answer to the concern about the recuperation of critique is that this worry about recuperation is really a worry about representation, and that it dissolves at the point at which the dispersive, uncategorizable and collective subject of this other language “takes on an infrastructural dimension”. It does so in the refusal of the refusal of a mute reality, that is, in the transition from the representational to the language of the banal social, economic, material facts, which are only accumulated in the work of Theaster Gates, but which can also be made to speak, “softly, effectively”, confrontationally, antagonistically, or all of the above, about a concrete movement towards a concrete somewhere else, using “words” whose graphemes, morphemes and sinew of connecting syntax may be made out of concrete, or discarded cardboard, or the dry language of artist’s contracts or the financial vehicles, trusts and offshore facilities that sustain the field of contemporary art, or the audio description channel prepared in principle for the blind, or the ASL interpretation for the deaf and the dumb, and, finally, from the forms of organizational politics—themselves transformed and not simply represented—in the classic “sphere” of representation, in art. These hard, inexpressive incomprehensible languages.

I’m trying to think about how infrastructural critique moves. In the last months of her life Marina was trying to think about this too. She proposed in a letter to the editors of a literary magazine a text in which, as she said, she would be trying to

Develop the speculative more in terms of method, and articulating it with a recent trajectory I've been looking at in Notes from Below and Brooklyn Rail from the organizer/engineer Nick Chavez—can we take a speculative approach to political composition through a close engagement with the empirical, or the technical composition of the political? That sounds very general, but maybe a direction to elaborate. An earlier moment of 'methods-based’ reflection, though again not very systematic, is here. 

I think that what she writes here perhaps sounds not general, but complicated, and this is because she is speaking, once again, in a different theoretical language: not now the language of critique as it emerges in the tradition of radical Black studies but in the idiom of workerism, a minority tradition within post-war European communist theories concerned with the workplace as the locus of the political, and the composition of the working class as a motor of historical change. But I think what she is saying about the relation between a “speculative approach to political composition” and the “technical composition of the political” is also about infrastructure, and that the reason why what she is describing is not simply a determinism (where the technical “produces” the political, or creates it), is that she is talking about what happens when the technical is itself treated politically, as a dumb, inarticulate sheet, which can yet be made to speak.

I also have to recognize that part of the distinctiveness of Marina’s thinking is that she spoke several different languages—I mean theoretical languages, idioms—all of them existing on different sides of disciplinary and historical boundaries; and that while she was always interested in “making the connection at a systematic level”, as she put it in a discussion with Sven Lütticken in late 2023, or in the problem of totality, she was also interested in gaps: what she called in a text about Budor’s work,

the metamorphosis of gaps. Gaps rather than voids, for instance, because a void already hypostatizes its emptiness as completeness, whereas a gap subsists in relation. A void is thus always aspiring to the status of an object, whereas a gap is in time or in language. It’s a spacing that telescopes in and out of a structure, and may give an impetus for connecting beyond it.

“In trying to build an imaginary milieu for Budor’s practices,” she wrote in the same essay, “I was drawn, again, to the category of ‘infrastructure’.” 

Budor’s blue champagne packing crates, drawn from the infrastructure that Marina was drawn to, telescope into the streets of the Manhattan financial district and then return to Europe via the medium of an exhibition in the southside of post-industrial Glasgow, where the gaps left by what were previously champagne bottles, drunk and discarded by revelling city workers in the fading empire of the early-to-mid 2020s, are converted into windows or portals, now looking back out to France again, the financial and artistic centre of a century before: cut-outs off the running thread of time, per Raspé, or “perforated frames stacked and leaning [as] so many doors attenuated by holes,” per Marina. Budor’s crates or windows, Inner Vampires as she calls them, subsist in relation to the hatch between kitchen and dining area that is the subject of the film This Is A Window, shown in the exhibition space next door, and also to the one text that appears on both of Marina’s reading lists for the courses she was never able to finish teaching at the Angewandte in the spring of 2024, on Finlayson’s Perpetual Slavery and the concept of infrastructure, respectively. They exist, that is, in relation with the only text that serves as a door, or window, or portal, between these two areas of research, into the banal social and economic history of slavery—“critique” in the Black radical tradition—and into technology as what Marina calls “both a material force and a ‘real abstraction’ in the political genealogy of the present”: these offcuts of an ongoingness cut short, these gaps we can work with.

Cameron Rowland’s early work Pass-Thru, from their 2014 exhibition “Bait, Inc” at Maxwell Graham Gallery in New York, is also a kind of door, or window, or portal, the physical spatialization of an abstract movement between commodity and money, in the form of the (or a) window between buyer and seller. As physical infrastructure for an abstraction, writes Richard Birkett—in the text that occurs on both Marina’s infrastructure and Black studies reading lists—a “pass thru” is  

an object commonly found in the world, one in fact seen both in mass-produced and ‘homemade’ forms. Pass-Thrus consist of a rotating chamber, housed in a surrounding box, installed in some businesses to pass cash or goods back and forth. When used in post-offices or banks they are typically industrially fabricated with bullet-proof glass. Those commonly used in low-income urban areas, in liquor-stores or corner stores, are often made by hand, as in Rowland’s versions, with basic Plexiglas as the cost of bullet-proof glass proves too expensive. Paradoxically such cost-saving measures, where one material is called on to ‘pass’ for another, are often adopted in the small businesses most prone to being victims of criminal activity.    

The pass thru is something that exists on, but also constitutes the facticity of, a social boundary. First, this is a window, to borrow Marina’s phrase from 2017, a hatch or a door perforated by holes, that contains another window, another hatch or door perforated by holes; a window, hatch or door perforated by holes within a window, hatch or door perforated by holes, and the role of this door within a door, of this recursive door, similarly to the role of the question within a question, of the question of what is critique within the question what is infrastructural critique, may serve to answer, but also to block, the question within which it is embedded, depending on how it is used, or posed—or rotated. It is a door or portal that exists so that it can be blocked. In Rowland’s use of it, this (anti-) door within a door becomes, as Ciarán Finlayson puts it, a work of anti-art within the institutions of art, existing in two versions, one of which is fitted with a sheet of cardboard: “a feature carried forward from stores where, between transactions, employees block the Pass-Thru to retain heat or cool air on their side of the partition.” So it also has two forms, almost identical, one of which is for sale and one of which is for rent; two abstract forms, almost identical, but related to two distinct economic, or class, or racial positions, each now a window onto the other, as the art gallery is a window onto the small business on whose systematic impoverishment it relies.

As a door within a door, the pass-thru opens a channel between two “areas”, or perhaps we could say “spheres”, or abstract locations, within a grid, at once abstract and physical, of commercial space. It facilitates transactions between these two areas, but it can also inhibit them, and in its rotating performance of facilitation and inhibition, lubrication and blockage, in turn and by turn, it suggests, or illustrates, or represents, the violence that can break in on these transactions from the outside and that is also always latent in them, “immanently”. Then again, it opens another channel between the commercial environment that is divided into two abstract areas—the area of the buyer and the seller, divided, physically, by means of bulletproof glass—and the commercial environment of contemporary art, between the bodega or money exchanger and the “autonomous” and yet also commercial space of art, in which the only large sheet of glass is likely to be the one facing the street, the abstract space, or “sphere”, of “the public”. And because a “real” pass thru is, as the gallery text written by Cameron Rowland states, made out of bulletproof glass, but these pass thrus, which are doubly unreal because they are made as art objects by Rowland, are made from of acrylic glass, because of this, we also have another doubling of levels: a door within a door, representing or mimicking or passing as another kind of door within a door made from more expensive material, existing in two almost identical versions distinguished by their relationship to an abstraction of sale. A door within a door that represents a transaction taking place between two positions within a single commercial environment, while opening up a channel between that commercial environment and another, the space of art. This is a window: onto the social conditions of exchange, which is to say the endless multiplication of levels of abstraction and representation across a spatial grid of violent exclusion that, in the end, is itself social and historical, comprising the “banal social, economic, material facts”, all the elements of a banal social and economic totality, all materials to be used.

I’ve been trying to think about how infrastructural critique moves, and the answer that seems to be supplied by Cameron Rowland’s pass-thrus is that it rotates; that it rotates and returns to its beginnings in the invention of the dumbwaiter, this other kind of geometrical physical or mechanical cube, as a means for removing from the “sphere” of the visible and the discursive the social violence and subordination on which it depends. And I’m struggling with a thought about what this means, because I know that in searching for images for infrastructural critique that can convey to you what it is—for images like Park McArthur’s blank metal highway signs, or Dora Budor’s champagne televisions, or Fronza Wood’s mirrors, or Reinhold Martin’s dumbwaiters, or Cameron Rowland’s pass thrus, and, of course, also Marina’s own kitchen-hatch windows and frames—I know that in searching for images like these, I’m speaking strictly at the level of the representative, of the representational. I’m talking, in other words, at the level of metaphors and visual display systems, on which the “sphere” of representation depends, when what I am really trying to describe or represent to you is about the language, a potential infrastructural language, which is also a potential infrastructural subject, a nonsovereign subject or “infrastructural agent”, of refusal, of the refusal of the refusal of that which has been rendered alien, dumb, silent, outside and inarticulate, by the mechanical operation of the infrastructure, including the infrastructure of art; which is to say by a socio-technical apparatus that is always, as Marina argued, an epistemic one as well, since the lesson of the relation of technical and political composition that Marina wanted to write about in an article from mid-2024 is that both must be seen at the same time, as a unity, as a principle of method. I’m struggling with this thought because I am just one set of hands, with one particular set of dispositions, and because I need you, the others who are doing this work with me, to help me to understand, which also means not simply to represent but to enact this language of critique, this question within a question or revolution within a revolution, or rotation within a rotation, that can never just be a language of concepts and discursive spheres and procedures, even though it relies on them, and on institutions like this one, the Angewandte, as its “enabling constraint”: as the starting point and resource base for a work that will not be finished until the institution is negated along with the long histories, the burdened and burdening materialisms, that cast their long shadow across it and that make it up. I am trying to understand what infrastructural critique is, and I am relying on you to help me to enact this critique here, a critique which makes use of that which it negates and that which it inhabits, inhibits and blocks, and I am trying to see how it moves, and for now I have no other answer for you but that it moves like this: rotating, blocking, inhabiting, telescoping in and out of relation, and creating secret windows and doors that look out onto what Marina called, in her very last presentation—given at this institution on March 23, 2024—a concrete universal: an abstraction that is completely saturated with particulars, that is not static, that continually moves and yet which always remains at hand, creating new windows and doors within doors in this world we must leave through the forces of negativity that inhabit it. And, like Marina a year and a half ago, having moved not one step further ahead, despite, or perhaps because of, how much and how far we have moved, it is with “this tentative and elementary research program” that I will conclude.                

//

This contribution was first presented in the frame of the conference "What Is Infrastructural Critique?” co-organized by KKP (Sofia Bempeza and Annette Krauss) together with Danny Hayward and Rose-Anne Gush, and hosted at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, in October 2025.

• Cover Image:

  Mariuccia Secol, STENDARDO (LIBERAZIONE 1945). Photo: Magdalena Typiak