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Five years ago, in a volume charting a ���formerness��� for the Global West, I proposed a shift from institutional critique to infrastructural critique. This was described as a shift from a critique of the enabling container for a certain discourse or performativity of citizenship (institution) to an embodied critique that necessarily owed more to praxis. Thus the direction was towards a critique based on contingent ruptures, with the interpretation and activation of these ruptures the source of political meaning. The immanence of such an approach registers in the sense that it works with desires that are latent in the infrastructure, thus broadly conceived. It is the notion of infrastructure as a mode of thinking that favours the concrete over the abstract - concrete that is immanent to real abstraction ��� that I would like to develop in this article, concentrating on the epistemic and political relations between infrastructure and critique., Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts, v. 13 n. 3 (2021): On Criticism: ���Is there a place (still) for criticism?���

Since the global financial crisis of 2008, there has been a resurgence of Marxist feminism, with many writers and activists engaged in assessing its theoretical and political adequacy for the present conjuncture. It is in this context that social reproduction theory has come to be a rallying point. Central to this theory is the claim that the sustenance of life and human relationships, whether or not it is recognised as (waged) labour, is fully integral to capitalism as a mode of production. For many feminists, this sustenance is understood more specifically as the reproduction of labour-power. Social reproduction theory positions gender, and gendered labour, as central to the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. It thus follows historic trends in Marxist feminism which analysed the structural role of social distinctions such as gender or race in capitalism, rather than seeing them as ‘superstructural’ (ideological or cultural) phenomena.

Last February, Marina Vishmidt and I met in London where we discussed her book Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (2018) in the Historical Materialism Book Series. We then planned to collaborate on an event in New York that Spring. When that didn’t happen, we recorded a short interview for the e-flux podcast, but wanted to keep the conversation going. In the ensuing months, we emailed and added notes to a shared doc discussing, among much else: her book and how her arguments on artistic and financial speculation and infrastructural critique related to our shared interests in ‘art activism’ and some of the shortcomings of aesthetic theory; the pandemic and multiple crises of social reproduction that it would, did, and continues to set forth; the police and state violence in the US and elsewhere that only increased unabated as crumbling welfare systems unleashed further austerity; on the autonomous and extra-parliamentary responses to racialized capitalist crisis that manifested themselves and developed in the streets; and much else. After many months of exchange and discussion, we have collected and condensed our thoughts here.

The last quarter of the twentieth century marked the\ud emergence of ‘the body’ as a key heuristic in much poststructuralist\ud and post-foundationalist cultural theory\ud and philosophy. More recently, the terminology of ‘bodies’\ud has moved to the foreground in academic debates, but\ud also gained traction in activist discourses and everyday\ud forms of cultural speech. This is a terminology, primarily\ud Anglophone, that speaks of bodies as subjects (‘we\ud are/there are bodies’) rather than as objects (‘we/they\ud have bodies’). ‘Bodies’ as the basic unit that enumerates\ud humans in (a) space assumes the status of a convention\ud by means of a prior or ongoing shift to a consensus that\ud invoking ‘bodies’ as such is to name them as the locus of\ud socio-political agency in preference to or in distinction\ud from terms such as ‘person/s’, ‘people’, ‘individuals’ or\ud ‘subjects’.

Not Working brings together the contributions by artists, theorists and writers who in their work examine the interdependence of artistic production and social class. The complex structures and substantial rise in social inequalities, particularly visible in light of the current pandemic, have given the concept of class a wide range of connotations. Despite the ongoing attempts to view contemporary art in the sense of “class homogeneity”; it remains complicit in the reproduction and masking of existing conditions which it often claims to overcome. The texts in this book form a ground were class can be mediated with respect to artistic practices and other structures in the art world.\ud \ud Published on the occasion of the exhibition Not Working, Artistic production and matters of class at Kunstverein München September 12 – November 22, 2020.

For The Tank special issue on the book.

The question of the anomaly as a way of framing the economy of art in capitalism is an interesting and a demanding one. This is because, unlike in most logical cases and empirical situations, where it is the rule that makes the exception visible, in the case of art – and, as I will suggest, not only art – it is the exception that allows us to understand the rule. What does that mean? By focusing on a social form that appears to be anomalous to the rules of markets and the law of value alike, we come to see the tools of accounting as markers of unaccountability. The rule in its suspension; suspended before us, visible from every angle.

While much attention has been paid in recent years to philosophical realism—especially to speculative realism—and its implications for contemporary art, this roundtable purposefully aims to broaden the discussion to account for more “traditional” and art historical forms and modes of realism, which one can still find at the centers and margins of contemporary artistic and aesthetic debates. Without necessarily favoring or promoting any particular direction—be it mimetic, figurative, social or socialist, critical, or speculative—we are inquiring whether today the renewed interest in various modes of realism is simply another postmodern citation of what the Russian Formalists would have called an “automatized” and outdated historical device, or if it is an indication of the potential for a radical transformation of realism that is taking place at the crossroads of progressive art, culture, technology, and critical theory. We invited our respondents to reflect upon both the history and the present of realism, asking how its various revivals might be regarded as part of a long trajectory of “Western” art and aesthetics, and how such revivals might be triggered by discourses outside of contemporary art. If a new aesthetics of realism were possible, how would it differ from its multiple historical antecedents? Is realism in its various modes an obsolete artistic form or style of the past (like baroque painting or modernist collage) that as such is incompatible with the modes of production and the augmented social reality of late capitalism?

The proposition ‘speculation as a mode of production' is intended to set the terms of an inquiry into how art and of labour start to draw closer together in recent decades, as systems of value become more and more abstract. The relation between art and labour, as two contrary social forms - one predicated on uselessness and the other on a social use-value- undergoes a shift as exchange-value and the immanence of abstract value increasingly determine the conditions of production and experience for both. Here, we need to consider the relationship between an objective logic of speculation and the kinds of subjectivity it produces. The speculative subject, whether of aesthetics or labour-power, is key to understanding how the current model of social reproduction in capitalism – a mode that has been defined in terms of 'fictitious capital' or a 'double decoupling' between labour and capital (Simon 2011: 98) – sees a re-orientation of art and labour away from the discrete terrains set out for them by a previous mode of accumulation. The logic of self-expanding value structural to capitalist accumulation is modified into a worker-facing ideology couched in notions such as 'creativity' or 'human capital', notions which traverse the norms of labour and artistic (non-) labour alike as both are re-crafted in the image of capital, that is, as entrepreneurship, and as forms of activity without content (and thus, without a principal distinction between them) This is the tendency I am designating as 'speculative'.

The text considers some issues arising through an experience of local activism contesting gentrification, and relates this to some formulations in Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben and Karl Marx on the politics and ontology of ‘community’ as an articulation of common being, or the impossibility thereof. There may be a correlation between Marx’s precept of the proletariat as the class that exists both to annihilate itself and class society as such in the social relations engendered by communism, and Nancy and Agamben’s variously ‘political’ and ‘post-political’ iterations of ‘community’ as a horizon of being-in-common that is sundered from the contingencies that create communal identity (nation, religion, ethnicity) and that proposes an unfounded community based on contingency and a common experience of dispossession and fragmentation in social life, the ‘such’-ness of singularities not individuals. These axes collide and diverge incessantly, and the text embarks on an initial encounter with their implications for a ‘potential politics’ that is neither tied nor divorced from history and the created facticity of social life in capital, and also declines to naturalise a structurally-derived political agency, in an analysis which also departs from some of the more aporetic moments of Paolo Virno’s attempt to theorise multitude or immaterial labour as a site of negative as well as revolutionary potential.

This talk will explore how bodies became so productive in contemporary and recent political vernaculars, and will attempt to trace a line from biopolitics to mimesis. With the emergence of ‘the body’ as the central signifier of much poststructuralist and post-foundationalist cultural theory and philosophy some decades ago, and the more recent terminology of ‘bodies’ as the loci of political agency (‘bodies assembling’, ‘Parliament of Bodies’), an ostensible move beyond the humanist confusions of ‘subject’ and ‘people’ rather presents us with the possibility of pseudo-concreteness that often accompanies theoretical projects intolerant of (real) abstraction. The discourse of the body and of bodies elides the question of how and why bodies are produced, accepting the bio-, if not necro-, political, premises of the current dispensation – one that capitalises on the fragile, isolated and suffering body - and converting them into an ethical victory. This then tends to exemplify rather than challenge a scenario in which ‘the reproduction of capitalism and the reproduction of organisms become indistinguishable’ (Johnson). In other words, what form of social relation makes such a thing as ‘the body’ not just legible but a departure point for any political subjectivation? Another suggestion comes from the somewhat recessed category of mimesis, here understood as the suspension of the human/nature, human/technology divide by means of struggle, play and performance. I will conclude with a close analysis of Valie EXPORT’s Body Configurations series.

Group of events, meetings, talks, conference at South London Gallery, Raven Row and Artists Space, NY