Reading
Spring 2026 Volunteer Potluck and Reading
In gathering to read Marina Vishmidt’s work together we will attend to her crucial contributions to understanding the hurdles that emerge in revolutionary activity. Among them: “The politics of subjectivity always interferes with the schema of self-abolition. Who is the subject that initiates and who comes out of the other side of self-abolition?” To think about this dilemma and its different manifestations in movements big and small, we will discuss Vishmidt’s notion of “infrastructural critique” alongside her critical writing on the way that care has been depoliticized in much contemporary discourse. As Vishmidt describes infrastructural critique, 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.” After reading passages from Vishmidt’s work, we will break out into groups to discuss the infrastructures that we are intertwined in and think about practices through which we can repurpose them. During the second half of the gathering we will consider Vishmidt’s reminder that if “political actors are held to be acting politically insofar as they organize on the basis of their vulnerability then no common horizon beyond pain management can be envisioned.” How can we avoid thinking about survival as a political end and instead reimagine care practices as means for reorganizing shared values? What modes of solidarity can we imagine by investigating “creative capitalism” and its recuperation of artistic labor? Are the legacies of institutional critique holding us back? Which common horizons can we speculatively imagine from a position of collective, infrastructural struggle?
This Dis/Course Workshop is free to attend but reservations will be required (the workshop will be capped at 40 participants). The following required readings will be sent in advance to all confirmed workshop participants:
Marina Vishmidt, “‘Only as Self-Relating Negativity,’: Infrastructure and Critique,” Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts 13, no. 3 (2021): 13–24.
Marina Vishmidt, “Bodies in Space: On the Ends of Vulnerability,” Radical Philosophy 2, no. 8 (August 2020): 33–46.
Marina Vishmidt, “Pure Maintenance,” South as a State of Mind, no. 10 (Summer/Fall 2018): 81–91.
