How can capital's infrastructures be theorized or appraised, let alone sensed, in the interest of abolishing them? A potentially more important question is even more strikingly unapproachable: how can a post-capitalist future be speculatively imagined as it relates to the infrastructures that are set up to reproduce the present and resist collective appropriation? As Marina Vishmidt's project on infrastructural critique (hereafter IC) puts forward, the first step is to recognize that infrastructures are, in the first instance, modes of reproduction, and that interrupting them—or finding them when they are already interrupted by other hands, whether Covid's supply chain meltdown or an electrical blackout—is an opportunity for reappropriation. Sensing or making sense of infrastructures, writes Vishmidt, "is inseparable from the attempt to develop a materialist theory of 'conditions.'"[1]
Employing Vishmidt's work, I have tried to think through two lines of inquiry. Firstly, can the opposition between abolition and creation (not constitution) be sidestepped from the perspective of infrastructure? How do we give shape to speculative processes from a material understanding of the pair's dialectical relationship? And secondly, what are the imperatives of temporal and spatial scale that make it so ostensibly captivating, so corrosive, and so tantalizing? Confronting the question of scale, particularly from the perspective of time—infinite forks between a communist horizon or futures made destitute not by our own hands—offers a speculative experiment for concretizing modalities of abolition that resist scale as an empirical principle and as an organizational framework. Do material expressions of rebellion prefigure non-accumulative futures as they cut into the infrastructure? How are the grammars and modalities of circulation struggles translated in time?
Thinking about the latter series of questions, how might we appraise a speculative query like that of the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles: "after the revolution, who's going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?"[2] If we sidestep the trap that pits abolition and creation against one another—a false totality in which abolition can mean only the disappearance of that which already exists—and if we insurgently speculate in terms other than those preordained by the spatial and temporal scales of accumulation, then what does it look like to appropriate parts of the infrastructure as it exists without reproducing its relations of reproduction? That is to say, after the revolution there will certainly be garbage, but will Monday still exist?
From a Drift to a Shift
In this essay, I will discuss how Vishmidt's notions of "speculation as a mode of production" and IC are complementary projects for considering how thinking infrastructurally is a methodology of uniting abolitionist theory and practice. By "speculation as a mode of production," Marina means to linguistically relate the creative, even artistic dimensions of financialized capitalism to artistic practice. Marina's deconstruction of the autonomy myth—the idea that art produces (or performs) no value other than financialized surplus—is evidenced by creative capitalism's demand to turn all work into a type of autonomous artistic production. "Creativity," Marina describes, "functions as capitalist populism, assuring every exploited worker and discontented artist that capital's interests coincide with their own."[3]
IC historicizes the drift away from the artistic strategy of institutional critique as well as the institutions of critique that cropped up to limit the borders of a social field of both creativity and action. "'[I]nfrastructure', like 'institution,' is used … to signal a view of the art institution as a site of resources—material and symbolic." She uses "drift" in this instance "rather than shift because the development … becomes more obvious over time, in the wake of the exhaustion of other strategies." [4] Perhaps the drift here is something akin to C. L. R. James's notion of the emergence of socialism in everyday acts of struggle, while the shift is more evident in his later writing when he says: "There is nothing more to organize … The task is to abolish organization."[5]
In the second part of the Maintenance Art Manifesto, Ukeles speculatively proposed to turn the Whitney Museum into a trash processing plant. This is not the same gesture as museums commissioning stopgaps to mass austerity with funding from arms manufacturers profiting from a genocide. But in both instances, there is a double bind, as Marina would say. Ukeles's speculative gesture proposes that the museum become a municipal site for a moment—perhaps only for the almost-instantaneous moment of reading the provocation—but not long enough to negate the institution or indeed the infrastructures for the reproduction of value within which it is a node. But this remains true whether the target of critique stays a museum or becomes a recycling plant. What's missing here is the rebellion or even just the collective decision-making framework that would actively negate it.
As many have historicized, the "drift" towards the creation of popular tools of survival during the introduction of mass austerity at the dusk of Western postwar industrial growth can also be read as self-defeating. This is what urban historian Benjamin Holtzman accurately, but too severely for my money, calls "popular marketization"—or in other words, the grim but difficult-to-refute view that the only way to survive neoliberalism, the only way to protect liberal institutions from neoliberalism, is to become indebted and a cheerleader for the system.[6] You saved your park from becoming a parking lot, but it's called Bank of America Park now. You were able to avoid eviction and stay in your squatted building, but now you have a mortgage. You can have a crumbling train station, but there are only two trains now; meanwhile Elon Musk is building a tunnel between casinos.[7] Though Holtzman's argument is not wrong, it is perhaps diagnosing a shift—a decisive and popular change in tactics—when in fact it is a historical drift: survival pending incorporation and integration rather than revolution.
Vishmidt describes that "the shift [to IC] needs to be understood as moving from a standpoint which takes the institution as its horizon … to one which takes the institution as a historical and contingent nexus of material conditions amenable to rearrangement through struggle and different forms of inhabitation and dispersal."[8] Here Marina uses "shift" rather than "drift" because she is not discussing a historical periodization of the practice's emergence, but rather sketching what it is that needs to be done to actualize it—"it" being a speculative abolitionist future. As Danny describes IC, it is an "interventionist project oriented towards … struggle itself."[9] In the context of this text, the reading of this sentence changes: here, IC is not a historicization of critique and its discontents, but a provocation to think differently about the horizons of struggle as it is already happening.
Of Vishmidt's two projects discussed here, we could say that speculation as a mode of production works to liberate the practice of critique from the damaging inheritance of Kantian transcendence, while IC dialectically emphasizes modalities of confrontational practice that intervene directly into the structural relations between different modes of the reproduction of value so as to develop and reproduce militant strategies. Taken together—which in many ways they cannot but be—they offer branches between struggles or actions that might otherwise be portrayed as immanently oppositional practices. But Vishmidt's goal is not a synthesis of forms of action into a phenomenological totality. As Kevin Floyd, Jen Hedler Phillis, and Sarika Chandra write: "Totality is not something to be restored through modalities of collectivization, socialization, or nationalization," but rather "a web of violent domination to be abolished."[10] As Vishmidt describes: "A lot of contemporary theory today mobilises concepts of totalisation, whether these are feel-good concepts such as multitude or feel-bad concepts such as negation, abolition and world destruction. The role of infrastructural critique, in an optimistic reading, is to put these concepts in motion … to make them speculative rather than totalizing."[11]
To avoid totalization, as operaismo (workerism) detailed, subaltern subjectivity must not be lionized but understood to appear in moments of struggle for its abolition. This is true for all abolitionist projects, whether of the worker or of racialized capitalism. As Marina writes: "The politics of subjectivity always interferes with the schema of self-abolition.[12] Who is the subject that initiates and who comes out of the other side of self-abolition?" For the operaisti, class composition was understood as a dialectical relationship between political composition (class struggle) and technical composition (the development of capital). But as Vishmidt gestures towards in her work, that method needs a further layer of speculative abstraction to avoid a lapse into its own kind of determinism or even an accidental re-enriching of the idealized universality of proletarians.
As Joshua Clover remarks following his dedicated inquiry into the riot: "people struggle where they are."[13] We could say that this is doubly true. Since at least the 1970s, people struggle where they are because many of them have been made surplus to production or forced into spaces traditionally deemed outside of production: thus, circulation struggles at the supermarket, at the pipeline blockade, or at the gaps in the infrastructure, per Vishmidt. But this is also true on the level of what I have taken to calling workerist performativity:[14] they struggle where they are because struggle is where they become—and where they become is where they can abolish themselves. Or as Gilles Dauvé put it: "The proletariat, just like all other real abstractions of capital, are not positions to assume or take up, but targets of communist abolition."[15] Such a tangled relationship between the production of the subject and its immediate abolition is perhaps most immediately sensible in the art sector, where as Vishmidt writes, "solidarity appears in a field that is structured to exclude it."[16]
Vishmidt's crucial point about conditions, quoted above, underlines that infrastructures—like the performative subjectivities such as proletarian, tenant, and worker that are produced in the interest of their abolition—are both the motor and mediating technology of valorization and exploitation, the sinew that constructs the world we seek to set aflame. But they are also, crucially, the roadmaps by which such a world can be speculatively reconstructed anew through its negation. Family abolition provides one example; as M. E. O'Brien writes in Endnotes: "Unlike current countercultural efforts to form alternative families, the abolition of the family would be a generalized restructuring of the material conditions of social reproduction dependent on communization and the suppression of the economy."[17] We might say that the same must be true for all abolitionist projects. Ruthie Wilson Gilmore describes that abolition is "how and to what end people make freedom provisionally, imperatively … against the disintegrating grind of partition and repartition through which racial capitalism perpetuates the means of its own valorization." Like IC, abolition is both negation and a means of provisional rearticulation. IC, writes Vishmidt, enables us "to ask political questions that can no longer be replied to in the abstract, with the false totalizations of rejection or complicity."[18]
Because of this relationship with subjectivity that I am proposing here, I argue that IC is a profoundly generative addition to theories of class composition. Like autonomist feminism's emphasis on socially reproductive labor, Marina sees that political and social struggle are governed by and co-constitutive of the capitalist division of labor in the so-called "social factory," and are thus also determinant of its development. As I have argued in my reading of Leopoldina Fortunati's The Arcana of Reproduction, by taking the perspective of workers' struggle, it is perhaps evident that rather than a totalizing "social factory" permeating out of the site of production as theorized in the early 1960s, under financialized neoliberalism it is rather the labor of the home—that is to say reproductive labor—which exits sites of domesticity or non-productivity to encapsulate all otherwise alienated sites of valorization and the reproduction of labor power and the valorization process and social movements themselves: not unlike what Maria Mies terms the "housewifization" of labor. Following Vishmidt, the lessons we can glean by studying the cultural worker's drift show how to speculatively enact the shift beyond any specific sphere of production or reproduction.
The global movement to stop the genocide in Gaza offers an internationalist crystallization of such a perspective. The larger target of action by Palestinian activists, freedom farmers in the West Bank, journalists and those mourning their targeted killing, university encampments across the planet, cultural and academic boycotts, international humanitarian organizations, and so on, is not just one state or group of states, nor solely an array of arms producers that those states depend on for economic growth, but the entire terms of order that guarantee the continuation of the genocide contrary both to mass popular protest and international law. Movements the world over have been revitalized in their internationalist commitments by attending to the frontlines of the struggle of Palestinians, because the question of liberation takes center stage, because all levels of the infrastructural death machine—from local elected officials to global supply chains—are involved in reproducing the violence, and are thus also nodes of the infrastructure that can be actively negated: whether that looks like Zohran Mamdani's mayoral campaign or the abject terror of capital as small groups of Yemeni rebels block global trade at one chokepoint. As Tareq Beconi described a year into the genocide: "The question for me today is how do we think about this moment of genocide as a way of resuscitating our revolutionary legacy, of going back into our roots and bringing out a political project, a decolonial project, that's not about going back to the past because there's no going back, but it's rather about how do we think about decolonization and revolutionary politics today, in this day and age, thinking about all of these global challenges. And I think that's our most urgent task to date."[19]
Do We Care (About Scale)?
A paramount question that Vishmidt's work helps think through asks whether movements must necessarily appropriate existing scales as they reappropriate value. In other words, must practices like looting, mutual aid, squatted encampments, collective care, and so on be "scalable?" In the first instance, this is a trick question that leads to potentially destructive consequences as movements confront it. As Stefano Harney and Fred Moten put it: "scaling up is really scaling down, losing connection rather than gaining it, losing abilities rather than consolidating them, settling for form rather than formation."[20] On the other hand: how can we possibly hope to confront how dire everything is without scaling up our activity? To modify Ukeles's question: after the revolution, who will make insulin? After the revolution, who's going to put out the fires? Who's going to teach us how to grow food locally, capable of feeding all, or create supply chains capable of reaching those sites where food cannot be grown? Who's going to organize denazification? As M. E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi's speculative novel Everything for Everyone so magically demonstrates, those are the questions that guide the organization of a non-accumulative future: one that understands abolition as a slow process of collective action and experimentation.[21]
Contemporary discourse about care makes another trap evident: by resisting scale, one can get stuck in a cycle of reproducing the present by attending to immediate needs. But as Clover emphasizes, "You don't have to choose militancy versus care work. They're one thing."[22] In their recent book Pirate Care, Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, and Tomislav Medak offer examples that confront this imperative directly: flotillas trying to break Israel's genocidal siege on Gaza, hacking patented medicines and distributing instructions about how to produce them autonomously, providing life-saving nourishment for migrants traversing ever more fascistic border regimes—which the authors argue can "prefigure alternatives" to the present through their very implementation. With that said, how do such practices prefigure a speculative future in which those rules no longer reign, and will they inevitably take the infrastructural shell of the old into the new horizon? Like Vishmidt and Sutherland's question about the abolition of gender or M. E. O'Brien's on the abolition of the family, what kind of caring or cared-for subject passes through the abolitionist portal? Perhaps prefiguration is the wrong word here; if we think about the abolition of use and exchange value as moments in the movement of capital, then perhaps the potential future that emerges during an abolitionist process is not contained in the action itself, but in its ability to constrict the reproduction of use and exchange values as discrete parts of the commodity.
Vishmidt is skeptical of care as an end. She underlines that infrastructures repeat across scales, but perhaps they also mediate between their scales.
Management across scales can also imply management of scales, in the sense that management has the chance to develop into care: a reflexive undertaking rather than that mode of optimizing activity or processes for predetermined ends called efficiency or performance. In this way management comes back to questions of scale from the standpoint of each specific situation. Scale is an artifact of the productive imagination and the specific engineering process in question, not a pre-existing frame of reference keeping a predetermined order that technology is designed to respond to, whether in an ameliorative or a punitive way. [23]
Here, Vishmidt encourages us to be mindful to avoid thinking about survival as a political end rather than as a means for reorganizing shared values, and to resist the urge to individualize needs. Indeed, adherence to the former is what allows modalities of governance to recuperate the functions performed by revolutionary movements. We can think of how the Black Panther Party's breakfast program was coopted by the state to become a technology for enforcing racialized capitalist violence and mass hunger for those made surplus; how feminists identified the role of welfare in enforcing the relegation of non-cis-male workers to the home; and how the slogan "defund the police" was taken up by liberal counterinsurgency to quell the 2020 uprisings and indeed strengthen the police apparatus.
Critiquing Judith Butler's well-known argument that public assembly's power comes from collective vulnerability, Vishmidt retorts: "If political actors are held to be acting politically insofar as they organise on the basis of their vulnerability, then no common horizon beyond pain management can be envisioned."[24] Care—or some other word that can attend to collective social relations rather than a unidirectional relation between carer and cared-for—must move beyond the framework of the individual body (or groups of individualized bodies or even multitudes of individualized bodies) and into the structural, indeed infrastructural, relations that for now guarantee the "state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death," as Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism, but which can also be applied to other forms of violence that structure the gendered, racialized, ableist capitalist mode of production.[25] If we aim to "scale" the notion of care for one or even a group of bodies, then "there is the issue that it is not value-producing labour which is expanding but, rather, value-extracting capital in relation to labour and life seen increasingly as surplus to its requirements and as waste to be managed and maintained in docility, if not exported and killed."[26]
Looting is a useful example to consider here because, unlike other price-setting struggles which directly respond to "vulnerabilities," it most obviously conflicts with the logics to which scale is inextricably linked. On the one hand it is an action in which people collectively act to meet their needs (i.e., care for each other). On the other, as Saidiya Hartman and others have described, it is also the mobilization of preexisting forms of sociality that are always already acting to survive the violence of whiteness, heteropatriarchy, and ableism.[27] To return to IC as a method for confronting these dilemmas, Vishmidt describes that it "begins from the assumption that it is possible to completely sidestep all the hand-wringing over the limits of the institution and instead acknowledge what resources are there, how they can be repurposed, which ones cannot, and which ones are needed."[28]
Vishmidt responded to the third volume of Diversity of Aesthetics with this question: "How do you see the problem of scale in determining what looting can be as an autonomous force, and not just a reaction to its capitalist scale [which is the] accumulation of value and the enforcement of property?"[29] To build movements capable of confronting the many intertwined crises of capitalism against neo-Malthusian logics of scarcity that afflict even well-meaning activists, Vishmidt suggests, reappropriating all that is produced by social labor is just the beginning. We need not think about how to mimic the scale of capital's infrastructures—even if we have become dependent on functions that those infrastructures fulfill (medicine, for example)—but rather about how to appropriate parts of the existing infrastructures by repurposing them for uses that are collectively commanded and which may decide to make certain functions obsolete (drilling oil, for example).
Am I Infrastructurally Critiquing?
In Jasper Bernes's The Future of Revolution, he attests that it is "only the emergence of proletarian self-activity that provides the conditions for an overcoming of the distinction between movement of communists and communist movement."[30] But crucially, "what matters for these moments is learning how to produce communism" rather than "learning how to live in capitalism … once the mass strike transforms into revolution … the tasks facing the councils transform. No longer the expression of a unanimous negation, the councils must socialize wealth and directly organize social reproduction."[31] He proposes two tests for sizing up revolutionary futures, whether existing or speculative. The "test of value" puts forward that "the abolition of value [is not] itself the sufficient condition for communism when it is in fact merely a necessary one."[32] On the other hand, the "test of communism" attests that the production of communism does not necessarily imply the abolition of value. A similar heuristic that attends to organization (of communism) and abolition (of value), I wager, can be modified to apply to the question of infrastructural critique, with specific regard for subjectivity. So: you've abolished x, but does y still structure the relations that remain? You've looted the paracetamol and set its price to zero, but does this commodity still mediate between otherwise alienated workers?
As Jose Rosales describes in a forthcoming article that historicizes the organic emergence of destituent power, the flagship actions of the 2001 rebellions in Argentina—barter clubs, unemployed worker pickets, etc.—were essentially scaled-up versions of mutual aid which became reproductive motors of rebellion rather than of financialized capitalism's relations.[33] (An intentional shift and not an accidental drift.) Today, circulation struggles—price-setting among them—are perhaps the most capable mode for directly confronting capital precisely because the model of accumulation has shifted so dramatically to sites of consumption and circulation: whether the blockade, blocking weapon shipments to genocidal regimes, looting, or the international feminist general strike. As Clover and Annie McClanahan describe:
It may at first seem possible to claim that the change in forms of political organization [to sites of circulation rather than production] follows the change in forms of capital, with the immanence and dispersion characteristic of finance and platforms reappearing as decentralized and leaderless protests. This offers homology in its weaker sense. [34]
In other words, it's incorrect to say that the tactical choices taken by people to struggle "where they are" is just a consequence of capital. It is not just a drift, but rather:
[...] it is better to say that the contemporary, informal modes of organization arise in response to underlying changes, rising where longstanding features of expanded reproduction fall—something no less true regarding the powers of finance and the algorithm. Each of these phenomena meets the withdrawal of industrial capital with its own orienting counterforms. Such an understanding allows us in turn to recognize that revolutionary movements spread neither by contamination nor resonance, as they do not expand across a two-dimensional surface. They burst through the surface in a thousand places, akin because they share the same soil.[35]
Etymologically, "infra" means "below" and "structure" means "building." In Vishmidt's writing, words can come to mean different things in different places—not because she is imprecise but because things change in different contexts when they're put in motion, as Danny Hayward reminds us. For example, we can interpret "building" as a verb rather than a noun. And, like Clover and McClanahan's point about the limits of two-dimensionality, we can think of the "below" of infrastructure in a space-time other than that of capital. So: below the building (noun) or below the building (verb); or the building (verb) could be happening below something else. Infrastructure is the superhighway and the austerity that renders it stuck and thus ready for appropriation. It is the technology of austerity and repression—as in Musk's tunnel—as well as the defensive use of tunnels from Saigon to Gaza City.
Workers' struggle sets the pace of capitalist development, and thus also the armature of the infrastructures of reproduction that mediate between their struggles and culture, broadly speaking. Perhaps, then, the test of IC—or of all cuts into the infrastructures of reproduction—might read like this: does such an action or movement against the capitalist mode of production require the reproduction of a false totalization? Survival? Care for care's sake? Abolition for some but not for others? Or does it engender complicated questions about reorganization, redistribution, and who subjects become as they self-abolish?
