“The appearance of spaces and openings versus the need to present a solid, impermeable front is a recurrent theme in the analysis of the relation between gender normativity and political reaction. Klaus Theweleit’s singular book Male Fantasies (1977–78) spelled out the thesis as he read the journals and propaganda of the pre-World War II German Fascist militias, with their horror of fluids, filth, and Communist women, while more recently the poet and writer Danny Hayward revived this inquiry in his reflections on ‘gaplessness’ and the ‘block’ as the body-ideal of far-right affect: ‘Fascists imagine themselves as blocks because the idea that their personalities might contain holes or gaps is unbearable to them. They need to be impenetrable, complete, positively constipated with their own Heroism.’” Marina Vishmidt, in her upcoming book, Infrastructure Critique: Contemporary Art between Reproduction and Abolition
This quote sums up the fascist reaction that is happening nowadays to the growing uncertainty of our times: how to present whole selves and coherent worlds within a disintegrating, entropic reality? Marina Vishmidt has developed a powerful response to this question through infrastructure critique. For Vishmidt, this is not a matter of “epistemic regulation and intellectual hygiene,”[1] but rather “a kind of unfreezing of the fast-fixed, one that can also happen within collective processes of debate, education, organising, and struggle.”[2]
This approach is further developed through her explorations of non-identity thinking, entropy, and self-abolition. In this presentation, I propose to examine how noise relates to these concepts and how it may be understood as that which intervenes in and destabilises the closures produced by naturalisation and reification.
Such an understanding of noise can enable a disentanglement of both the false totalisations concerning capital’s unbounded power and the fascist impulses that seek to re-naturalise categories such as gender, race, family, and the nation-state. Yet, noise has also been mobilised as a vector of ignorance and uncertainty, in what has come to be known as agnotology.[3] The central question, then, is how agency might be constituted within and through the ongoing social noise, how it might be oriented toward the production of conditions of possibility for a transformative reorganisation of the world.
Let’s start by showing the gaps in what lately has been perceived as a capitalist totality:
Setting up the context: Bilbao, November 2014: Abolishing Capitalist Totality
In 2014, together with Loty Negarti, I organised a workshop titled What Is To Be Done Under Real Subsumption? at Bulegoa z/b, an art space in Bilbao. The guests were Federico Corriente, Anthony Iles, Rob Lucas, and Zoe Sutherland (Endnotes), Demetra Kotouza (SIC), Marina Vishmidt, and Ray Brassier. These contributions, plus several others, will be published in the book that Anthony Iles and I have coedited, Abolishing Capitalist Totality: What is to Be Done Under Real Subsumption? (Minor Compositions, February 2026).
The question of real subsumption has been central to debates within the ultra-left and communisation currents over recent decades, particularly in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. It concerns how life and labour are incorporated into capital. While Kant understood subsumption as the act of bringing a particular under a universal concept, Marx redefined it materially to describe how living labour becomes subordinated to capital. He distinguishes between formal subsumption, where capital imposes the wage relation on pre-existing forms of production, and real subsumption, where production itself is reorganised around the extraction of surplus value through the incorporation of scientific and technical means. Various communist currents, from the Italian autonomists’ “social factory” to groups like Négation and Théorie Communiste, interpret real subsumption as the total incorporation of life under capital. This raises the problem of whether to understand it historically, as a completed phase, or logically, as an ongoing dynamic of domination that risks ontologising value itself. Communisation emerged as a response to these conditions: an immanent form of revolution without program or transition, aimed at the self-abolition of class relations and the destruction of the categories that reproduce capital, state, property, money, and the worker as such.
The question of self-abolition brought a paradox that Ray Brassier pointed in his text Wandering Abstraction, which was discussed in the workshop:
“If ‘we’ are constituted by the class relation that we have to supersede, then the supersession of this relation is also the overcoming of the agent of the supersession, and therefore the cancelling of the supersession and the reinstatement of the ‘we’. Since ‘we’ have no position apart from the class relation, ‘we’ are nothing outside of it. But then the moment of the abolition of this relation is also that of the abolition of its abolition.”[4]
Marina already started to problematize this paradox of self-abolition by bringing different perspectives on abolition from radical feminism and black studies. The debates in the workshop and its aftermath were intense: what constitutes a logical conception of self-abolition, how it is grounded in concrete experience, and who the subject of self-abolition might be. Some crude interpretations of real subsumption risk leading to false totalisations, abstract forms of negation, or an almost messianic anticipation of revolution that borders on impotent fatalism.
Out of this workshop, a few alternative perspectives emerged. For example, Marina, in her contribution “Procedures of Abolition and Several Paradoxes They Throw Up,” problematizes in an incredibly sharp way the notion that real subsumption entails the total incorporation of life under capital. For her, the premise of total real subsumption, in which capital and life appear wholly coextensive, functions as a false problem, a vacuous tautology that neutralizes contradiction and recodes critique as contemplative idealism, the ideological comfort of much contemporary art-activism.[5]
Endnotes in the workshop proposed instead to look at the specific material and logistical processes through which this subsumption is constituted. In a later text, what would become ERROR, Endnotes wrote that, in engineering, error marks the discrepancy between intended function and actual outcome, the point where means fail to achieve projected ends. Error thus delineates, negatively, the boundaries of what is practically possible within a given field of action or set of affordances.
As Danny Hayward mentioned in his introduction, it seems that Marina Vishmidt found in Endnotes studies of logistics and errors, a concrete way to go forward by exploring the conditions of possibility and the affordances that exist within current infrastructures. For Vishmidt, “infrastructural critique is a reckoning with what it means that infrastructure persists and makes possible only insofar as it also makes impossible.” [6]
My own interest lies in examining what effects these infrastructures exert upon us, on our modes of perception, relation, and the very constitution of subjectivity. In what follows, I will address forms of abstraction that produce highly concrete effects. Specifically, I will discuss the feedback circuit between infrastructures and subjectivity, how material systems of mediation shape, constrain, and enable our capacities for thought and action, and the noise and the reaction it produces.
Social Noise
What is the fascist fear of noise? This has to do with the inner chaos and terror emerging from the dissolution of the self. For the philosopher Cécicile Malaspina, noise is:
“Not just a state of confusion and indecision, noise is also amplified by the panicked attempt to redraw the boundaries of the sense of self. To regain the sense of self as the first object of cognition, thereby becomes the precondition to reasserting its relation with other objects of cognition. At stake, in other words, are not the noises we perceive, but the noise of cognition constituting itself, against the always looming crisis of its dissolution.” [7]
Noise lies at the core of cognition, insofar as it represents what the concept cannot fully appropriate from the object, a point we will explore further in relation to non-identity thinking. Noise breaks through closure and gaplessness, and is feared by the fascist precisely because it undermines the supposed naturalness of their assumptions. If you don’t have a clear idea of who you are, you are less likely to dominate others.
Today, the noise from above, generated by socio-economic exchange, intervenes in the noise from below, reshaping our inner models through what has been called “hormone hacking,” as digital platforms exploit our brain’s reward systems for profit. In response to this biohacking and to increasingly excruciating conditions, a catastrophic reaction emerges, a withdrawal into psychic and bodily closure. Drawing on Kurt Goldstein’s observations of shell-shocked soldiers, Cécile Malaspina describes this reaction as an inability to cope with ordinary stimuli, producing persistent anxiety and panic. For Klaus Theweleit, the Körperpanzer (body armour) becomes both defence and identity, the fascist “I” as an impenetrable surface. This dynamic reflects what is happening today at the level of the state, from the genocidal colonial project of Israel to NATO’s militarised demands. The general fear of noise and complexity gets instrumentalised for the benefit of the few.
Similarly to the “gaplessness” of fascism mentioned above, the catastrophic reaction produces a state of total enclosure. However, attempts to enclose oneself only amplify the noise. I would argue that, similarly to the shock experienced in the aftermath of the brutalities of the First World War and the effects of industrial weaponry, we now find ourselves amid the dissolution of the modern subject and of the assumptions that had been central to it, autonomy, individual freedom, and an abstract, universal idea of the human, which are increasingly revealed as extremely partial. This, in conjunction with technological advancements that accelerate the dissolution of selfhood by profiting from its disintegration, generates a situation marked by a general catastrophic reaction, a pervasive sense of enclosure.
Marina Vishmidt improvising with infrastructure during the collective final performance of the second workshop What Is to Be Done Under Real Subsumption?, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, October 2018. Other performers: Sean Bonney, Farahnaz Hatam, Colin Hacklander, Anthony Iles, Edyta Jarząb, Sacha Kahir, Mattin, and Paweł Nowożycki.
Opening up Usanitary Gaps!
In my book Social Dissonance [8], I argued that our sense of self is shaped by two intertwined forms of determination that traverse us through impersonal processes: an alienation from above, producing spectral objectivity, and an alienation from below, producing phantom subjectivity. The first corresponds to the Marxist subject–object inversion, in which our subjective capacities are objectified through commodification while objects like money acquire subjective agency, “the dead seize the living,” as Ray Brassier puts it. The second operates at the neurocomputational level, where the brain’s self-model generates the illusion of a stable identity. Following Thomas Metzinger, what we take as the “self” is merely a representational process, intermittently active and fundamentally unstable. Together, these forms of reification structure reality and condition our experience of subjectivity under capital.
However, this phantom subjectivity is not only merely the result of a projection taking place in our brains, nor the gap constitutive division or lack that defines the subject in the psychoanalytic realm. It stems from a particular understanding of how the subject relates to the individual in capitalist modernity. Just as a commodity appears to possess clear boundaries and prices, the self, understood as a subject endowed with agency, also presents itself as having a sharply delimited contour. Yet, as Sylvia Wynter, psychoanalysis, and other critical currents have shown, this apparent solidity is illusory. To speak of phantom subjectivity is not to abstract specific lives into a general form of abjection. As Marina clearly explains through her engagement with Black radical thought, from Saidiya Hartman, who traces how the logics and structures of slavery persist in racial capitalism, incarceration, sexual violence, and the policing of Black life; to Fred Moten, for whom the slave figures as the presupposition of an object never permitted subjecthood; to Frank Wilderson III’s ontology of Black suffering and his claim that “this world we might end”; one encounters divergent yet convergent articulations, some more overtly violent than others, of the constitutive brutality of capitalist exploitation and its entanglement with race, gender, disability, and other determinations.
The reproduction of phantom subjectivity reveals the paradox of being a subject under capitalism: increasingly determined by its logic, yet rendered disposable. Conceptual universals such as equality become redundant, along with vast segments of humanity now reduced to surplus populations or exterminated in a genocide. The phantom subjects appear as the zombies of history, moving without direction, without memory. Yet, as Ray Brassier writes, “The subjectivity of labor as capacity disturbs the automaticity of capital, retarding its relentless advance like an organic residue that is more than a raw material but less than a rival power. It is a phantom subjectivity haunting capital’s spectral objectivity.”[9]
This is not to fall into theories of absolute subsumption, where we are merely functions of capital’s automatic subject. Phantom subjectivity still bears material and organic casualties, the unconscious, our need to sleep, the impossibility of maintaining a constantly activated self-model, and increasing problems with mental health, all of which remind us that there are gaps to a threshold to capital. Yet these gaps are not sufficient to be described as agency, insofar as they are not easily identifiable or mobilised toward concrete forms of antagonism.
Self-Abolition as Activated Negativity
As a response to some of the questions that came up in the Bilbao workshop, especially regarding the paradox of abolition, Marina wrote in an interview with Julia Calver and Mira Mattar in 2016: “Activated negativity comes from thinking how self-abolition can be grounded in some kind of material context, and how it can be a determinate rather than an abstract prescription.”[10]
A process of self-abolition is already underway: the liberal conception of the autonomous, self-possessed individual is disintegrating into something more fluid, machinic, and perverse. Unconscious forms of abolition manifest in contemporary behaviors and online subcultures, brainrot, bed-rotting, coomerism, gooning, edging, symptomatic gestures of withdrawal, exhaustion, and overstimulation. Especially among the young, these behaviors reveal not merely a lack of motivation but a deeper collapse of the very coordinates of desire and subjectivity that liberal capitalism once presupposed. The Machinic feedback loops of pleasure, fatigue, and distraction are an expression of self-consumption of phantomatic subjectivity that does not know where to go.
A project of self-abolition would need to engage with the processes of noise, to redirect them, to propose different kinds of boundaries, without presupposing any fixed notion of the subject–object relationship. It must grasp this relation not from an abstract ideal of white universality, but from within the material and differential conditions that produce it.
Marina Vishmidt grapples with these complexities through a similar tension: non-identity thinking is necessary for thinking in noise, understanding how noise lies at the core of cognition and our perception of reality. Rather than positing visibility and opacity as opposites, it operates in their dissonant simultaneity, both transformative and constitutive. Non-identity thinking thus compels a continual redrawing of our categories, orienting critique not only by what we experience but by the transformations toward, and against, which we move.
For Marina Vishmidt, “social abjection does not always have to wait for the theorist, sociologist, activist, or artist to valorise it. It can be a shared condition of negativity, the negativity that is already there, in the conditions, as the incipient refusal within obedience, production, and reproduction.”[11]
Over the years, I have been trying to think about how it might be possible to share this social abjection, this social noise, through what could be described as a form of Open Source Negativity: a collective effort to make sense of our social determination by exploring the codes that shape our conduct and self-conception, but also the noise that transgresses these determinations. Understanding the complex structural dynamics of alienation seems to me a necessary preliminary step toward a justice of non-equivalent and non-exchangeable agents, capable of recognising and exercising their social potential.
There is a growing malaise that emerges from the impossibility of being a subject with the capacity to act within capitalism. It is a kind of social noise, difficult to define in general terms, yet increasingly tangible when observed concretely. These moments, in which a coherent idea of selfhood cannot be realised, are what I have called social dissonance: a structural form of cognitive dissonance rooted in the contradiction between the individual as a subject and its impossibility of realisation. This contradiction lies between the abstract values of democracy, equality, and individual freedom, and their concrete materialisation in exploitation, unfreedom, and the destruction of the planet.
This social dissonance has very concrete manifestations, such as: impostor syndrome; the artist’s attempt to self-realize while simultaneously self-exploiting, doing whatever it takes to be (and to remain) an artist; gender dysphoria; posting a cheerful update on Instagram while actually feeling like shit; or being in mental health facilities where, due to funding cuts, reduced staffing makes patients even more vulnerable. Some of the biggest social dissonances that I have encountered are in Germany today: claiming “Never Again” while supporting a genocide and repressing/cancelling pro-Palestinian voices.
There is so much negativity produced in this world. Could it be possible to take the concrete negative effects, what Marina calls activated negativity, and collectivize them, to push them not only against the fascist, gapless body but also toward phantom subjectivity?
To explore the noise in the gaps means to attend to the porosity of phantom subjectivity, its deficiencies, entropic processes, and leakages, and to capture them to collectivize, rather than allow capital to convert them into surplus value. In these times, it is necessary to produce a communisation of noise to deal with this malaise: an immanent form of negativity that, through its very potency, comes to understand itself as our own making, as that which we reproduce through and as noise. Yet to do this under conditions of extreme adversity is not easy; to open up is not easy. For these very reasons, we need specific, concrete, and material tools to engage with the noise in the gaps. One of these tools is clearly infrastructure critique.
So what is infrastructure critique? I will try to answer the question of this conference, I would say it is an exploration of the concrete forms and determinations through which capital shapes material reality and reproduces “vectors of objective and subjective determination by race, class, gender, and so forth,” while also attending to the gaps, errors, and affordances that emerge within it, points of activated negativity through which we can intervene. By tracing both the connections and the fractures that constitute infrastructures, we open the possibility of generating forms of solidarity from their negative effects and contradictions. Through such work, we can begin to move toward the abolition of phantom subjectivity and the production of other ways of being together, ways that do not position us as subjects of capital.
//
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.
- Footnotes
[1] Marina Vishmidt, Infrastructure Critique: Contemporary Art between Reproduction and Abolition (London: Verso, 2026).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, eds., Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
[4] Ray Brassier, ‘Wandering Abstraction,’ in Abolishing Capitalist Totality: What Is to Be Done Under Real Subsumption?, eds. Anthony Iles and Mattin (London: Minor Compositions, 2026). Available here: https://archive.org/download/abolishing-capitalist-totality/AbolishingCapitalistTotality-web.pdf
[5] Marina Vishmidt, ‘Procedures of Abolition and Several Paradoxes They Throw Up’ Abolishing Capitalist Totality: What is to Be Done Under Real Subsumption? p. 437.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Cécile Malaspina, An Epistemology of Noise (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), p. 173.
[8] Mattin, Social Dissonance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press / Urbanomic, 2022). Available here: http://www.mattin.org/social_dissonance_mattin.pdf
[9] Ray Brassier, Fatelessness: Freedom and Fatality After Marx (London: Verso: forthcoming in 2026).
[10] Activated Negativity: An Interview with Marina Vishmidt with Mira Mattar and Julia Calver April 1st, 2016, Makzhin Magazine, Issue 2: Feminisms. Available here: https://www.makhzin.org/issues/feminisms/activated-negativity
[11] Vishmidt, Infrastructure Critique: Contemporary Art between Reproduction and Abolition (London: Verso, 2026).
Cover Image: Marina Vishmidt presenting “Procedures of Abolition and Several Paradoxes They Throw Up” at the workshop What Is to be Done Under Real Subsumption? November 2014, Bulegoa b/z, Bilbao.
