diagram with me when the weather's bad

In the old days, people used to talk about the weather as a conversation starter—something universal and value-neutral, unlikely to offend anyone. But the same habit carries a different weight now. Especially among strangers, weather is no longer the most sociable topic to bring up.

That was why the old woman—seemingly in her seventies, her long, curly hair completely grey—sounded unusual when she began complaining about the weather to a younger woman sitting beside her. Nor was it considered particularly rude for someone approached like that to apologize and leave. When the café’s senior barista noticed the woman being turned down, she handed the order she was preparing over to her reliable junior and went over to ask whether everything was all right.

“It’s all right. I just lost something that was supposedly important because of the bad weather.”

She responded as though she had been waiting for someone to ask whether she was okay.

“Because of the weather? What was it that you lost?”

“I don’t remember, and that’s the issue. If only someone could help me recall it…”

The barista looked at her, then at her junior. He did not notice her gaze; he was too busy, and already a little stressed, handling all the orders alone. She considered this for a moment, then nodded to the stranger before her. She trusted her junior enough to leave him on his own for a while.

“Sure, maybe you could remember it while we talk. What is your name? Do you live around here? I remember seeing you here several times before.”

“Bixia. Yes, I live just around the corner. There aren’t that many cafés here.”

“Indeed. Can you tell me everything you remember about what you don’t remember?”

“All I remember is that it was related to the bad weather. On these cloudy days, you can’t even tell when the sun rises or sets. It’s been like that for almost the entire week!”

Then she looked outside. There was no rain or snow, not even a dark cloud. The sky was seamlessly white, without a patch of blue, like an empty room repainted white before its occupants moved out.

“But how do you know your loss was because of the weather?”

“I just know, but I can’t clearly explain it yet. I’m trying to understand it myself. What could…”

A sudden clunk and a second of darkness interrupted Bixia. The espresso machine fell silent and remained so for a while before resuming its hum. Frowning, the junior barista discarded the latte he had been making.

“Well, the weather has been causing us quite a bit of trouble too. That’s already the third time today. Every outage suspends all orders until the espresso machine starts working again. It’s old and always takes so long to restart after an interruption.”

“And has that only been happening recently?”

“Yes, because of the weather. They say the power outages happen when there isn’t enough sunlight. Even a few seconds are enough to shut down the machine, and we lose much more time because of it.”

“But why does the weather cause that?”

“Oh, it’s been on the news. The clouds are causing power shortages because our city relies mainly on solar energy for its electricity. Of course, big and small power outages caused by the weather don’t surprise us anymore, but they have never been as persistent as they have been this week. The municipality advised us to get a backup battery or generator to bridge those few seconds, but we can’t afford either yet. Wait—maybe your loss was caused by that too! Do you remember when it happened?”

Bixia looked up briefly, counting the days she remembered and those she did not.

“I can’t say exactly, but yes, it was about a week ago, when the clouds prevailed.”

“The first step!” the barista thought. But a memory isn’t an espresso machine. How could one disruption become another? She tilted her head, as though confused, her eyes still fixed on the woman she was trying to help. That was when she noticed something blinking beneath the thick layer of grey hair around Bixia’s right ear.

She suddenly asked, “Is that a hearing aid?”

“What hearing aid? Not every older person has problems with their ears.”

“I mean the thing on your right ear. I can see something there.”

“My ear?”

She felt along the right side of her face. After several touches, she closed her eyes and sighed.

“It is… It is… Oh dear, now I remember something.”

She began piecing together what she knew. Her recollection was partial, but the fragments she assembled sounded truthful. Her voice grew more composed as she spoke.

“I led a research team in neurology,” she said. The woman in front of the barista remained just as civil, but suddenly seemed fuller, as though more of her had become available.

“We achieved the scientific breakthrough everyone had called impossible, but then we encountered a step that felt more complex than the problem we had solved.”

The team she led had been developing a neural interface. The outcome that attracted the most attention was a working model for externalizing human memory. It was called the neural cloud. Much as a local device stores its data online and retrieves it whenever necessary, the system could make the human brain no longer the sole reservoir of memory. The interface had worked nearly perfectly in animal tests and simulations, yet one hurdle remained: clinical trials.

Bixia’s voice shifted from candour to guardedness, as if the water she had been wading through had suddenly deepened beyond where she could keep her footing. Despite her efforts, the barista sometimes struggled to follow when the explanation became too technical.

“So the neural cloud kept another copy of your memory?” she asked.

“No. That was the issue. It was not just another copy.”

Bixia explained that the technology enabled direct access to a person’s memories and therefore required an unprecedented legal framework for consent.

“If your memory is no longer stored only inside your skull, but also across servers—someone else’s computers in distant places—where do you begin and end?”

The barista hesitated. “You mean legally?”

“Legally, biologically, cognitively—believe it or not, we had to consult philosophers and theologians too. What would it mean for you to agree to something? Would that distributed memory be part of your person, a medical device, or someone else’s property?”

Existing law presumed that consent came from a bounded legal subject whose identity and decision-making capacity could be located in a human body. Even a task force of the most qualified lawyers estimated that constructing an abstract machine capable of accommodating that ambiguity would take several years, with no guarantee of success.

“I was… utterly disappointed. I thought I could complete the work before my retirement, which was only a few years away. I would have done anything to accomplish it sooner.”

“So what did you do?” the barista asked.

“I proposed a shortcut.”

The complexity of the intervention made informed consent unusually laborious. The subject would have to understand the redistribution of memory across biological and computational systems in detail.

“I argued that someone who already understood the process intimately could meet that requirement.”

“You meant yourself.”

“Yes.”

When Bixia first presented the idea to the task force, they were reluctant even to consider it. Her proposal amounted to self-experimentation, and her dual role as lead researcher and prospective subject created obvious conflicts of interest. Yet as the project remained stalled, they began to consider whether her expertise, combined with independent assessment and continuing consent, could justify a tightly supervised exception. To reduce the conflict, Bixia brought forward her retirement and formally surrendered all authority over the trial, meaning that she would no longer act as both investigator and subject. She added, with a hint of bitterness, “So, even after I retired, I never really left the laboratory.”

With the pilot restricted to one exceptionally well-informed participant, the regulatory and ethical process that had been expected to take several years was drastically shortened. The first implantation was authorized a year later.

“But did the trial succeed? Is that what you’re wearing on your ear?” The barista looked at the blinking device once again. It appeared as worn out as the espresso machine. Part of its plastic casing had fallen off, exposing the bare circuit. She wondered, looking at its faded cyan, how blue it must have looked back then.

“It did. I’ve been wearing this since then.”

“Was it then a happy ending?”

They both pondered this question. Bixia wondered what a happy ending should be like. The barista asked herself whether that was where the story was supposed to take them when they started the conversation, and broke the silence first.

“But why is it about the weather? What did you lose because of the weather? Do you remember now?”

Bixia touched the device again.
“Maybe that’s what I lost.”
“What?”
“The ending.”

She looked uncertain whether she had meant it literally.
“I remember building it. I remember putting it on. I remember that it worked. I remember living with an almost supernatural memory capacity for a while. But after that…”
She paused.

“It was a period of severe drought in California. The sky was an unbroken blue with no trace of moisture, like the opposite of today. And when the fire broke out, there wasn’t even enough water to extinguish it. The power station went down and the whole district lost power for a night. The flame was the only glowing thing that night.”

“Is there anything else you remember from the night?”

“No. I don’t. I have no memory of it. All I can recall is its aftermath.”

The lab was affected by the power outage. Although it was equipped with an emergency power source with a decent capacity, the hasty nature of the pilot program had left the prototype of the neural cloud unprepared for circumstances such as this. When the power returned, Bixia was conscious and the device was still functioning.

“The damage wasn’t fatal. Only some memories went missing. I mean, the memories were still there, but the failure blocked my access to certain past memories connected through it.”

She paused, searching for the next part.

“As a technical problem, it was fairly manageable, but it raised a more critical problem elsewhere. My consent to the trial was only valid as long as I continued to give it of my own free will. After the outage, they could no longer establish whether I still remembered what I had consented to, or whether I understood enough of my own condition to consent again.”

“Couldn’t they just restore your memories first?”

“That was what they called circular dependency. Restoring them required accessing the system. Accessing the system required my consent. And whether I could give that consent depended on what had to be restored.”

She touched the device.

“So the pilot was suspended immediately. No one else could be connected. They couldn’t continue experimenting on me, but they couldn’t simply disconnect me either. All they could safely do, until they resolved the problem, was to keep a single server unit running in the old institute across town, drip-feeding the remaining budget over the long tail until I no longer have to remember anything.”

The barista frowned.

“So the trial ended, but you couldn’t leave it?”

“I live with it.”

“And are those memories what you lost because of the bad weather? Does that mean you found what you were looking for?”

“Yes, but I’ll lose it again after a while...”

“The weather,” Bixia continued after an extended pause. “Every time the power goes out, the bare server unit is so vulnerable that something fails to come back. I never know what won’t come back, or what will come back eventually.”

The barista nodded without a word.
“There should be fifteen years somewhere between then and now, shouldn’t there?”

“Yes, Bixia.”

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Recently, on social media, I’ve come across recurring pleas from several sites across the subsidy-driven art worlds in the global North, from the Netherlands to the UK to North America. Despite their diverging origins, the arguments appeared unequivocally similar: the recent surge of AI-generated funding applications degrades their experience of working as jurors. All these claims concluded with celebrations of “human” creativity, addressed selectively to grant applicants.

This text is a critique of the fetish of human-written proposals revealed here, rather than a technological determinist affirmation of AI-written proposals. I have no doubt that these empirical reports of fatigue—the word used by one of them—are real and by no means dismissible. It is significant that they publicly elaborated on the conditions that are otherwise not visible to those outside their institutions. Their experiences exemplify the historically specific capitalist enclosure of social, intellectual, and ecological commons mediated by resource-intensive technologies such as large language models (LLMs) within an extractive political economy. This unprecedented unfolding—an extrapolation of what Ted Striphas prefigured as “algorithmic culture” emerging from delegation of the work of culture to computational processes—requires more discursive attention from all relevant fields, from culture and media to organization and labor studies (2015).1

The aim of this text is to offer a critical and speculative context for those claims by identifying the fetish in this seemingly widespread perception among jurors. When perceived as a naturalized condition—as if the human-writtenness of a proposal equates to value by itself—the fetish obscures social relations from which the experience emerges by displacing moral responsibility onto individual applicants. What I mean by fetish in this text follows Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism. It names a relation in which “things become personified and autonomous while people are depersonalised, become things and dependent,” making commodities “seem to have by nature properties which are in fact projected on [it] by social forces” (Nelson 2014, 142). Urgent discussion on LLMs’ prevailing effects on propositional and speculative forms of cultural production should begin from the institutional, social, technical and economic conditions of grant writing that the fetish invisibilizes. At the same time, fetish is “not simply a subjective or superficial appearance of real relations” but “an objectively occurring and necessary aspect of those social relations” (143). This recognition raises a practical question about how we—as a class—can mobilize the fetish of human-written proposals, which is nevertheless a “partial interpretation of social reality” (145). In conclusion, I will approach this openness speculatively, drawing from what Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou calls “counter-speculation,” political enactments that reverse volatility as a means to counter dominant structures within speculative capitalism (2022, x).

I try to attend to the heterogeneous frameworks of thought without flattening them or becoming too extensive in discussing their distinctive ways of treating the political stakes of this fetish. The format I have thus tactically chosen is a set of concise, not necessarily consistent theses, each corresponding to a different aspect of this inquiry.

Updates to the diagrammatic index?!

1. The assumption of universality of human subjectivity is latent in this fetish.

2. Calling it a crisis of authorship is a misplaced critique. It is a crisis of labor and social reproduction.

3. AI-written proposals need Wages for Housework as a genealogical ancestor.

4. Communities emerging from speculative funding systems are speculative.

5. The funding apparatus and LLMs co-constitute a speculative machine.

6. Countering a fetish means reappropriating rather than abolishing its force.

1. The assumption of universality of human subjectivity is latent in this fetish.

The fetish of human-written proposals reproduces a normative image of the human as a sovereign origin. It stems from a model of modern subjectivity genealogically derived from Cartesian interiority and Kant’s rational autonomy. The research-based art of our time ostensibly critiques this model yet structurally presumes it. Access to this subject-position has never been universal. The ability to pass as human—an artistically legitimate subject—by performing certain cues on an application depends on unequally distributed conditions including race, gender, and class. The funding system distributes the conditions under which someone can continue to be recognized as an artist. It is therefore a de facto biopolitical dispositif that differentiates who appears worthy of sustaining an artistic “life” and who is likely to reproduce cultural influence.

The “humanness” of the applicant as evaluated here is less about human authorship than human capital: personal brand, bearer of cultural capital, promise of future returns, and instrument of risk management. Formal recognition as equally human can thus coexist with a political economy that renders much of the cultural population surplus. Cultural institutions may readily embrace poststructuralist and neomaterialist discourses and perform distributed agency in works about fungi, fermentation, ecologies, or more-than-human worlds, while reinstating the sovereign liberal author as the model for their material infrastructures. The fungus may co-produce the artwork, but only the artist may be eligible for the open call.

Large language models, by themselves, emancipate neither marginalized artists nor fungi from this arrangement. They enclose the General Intellect and ecological processes on which they depend within private and extractive infrastructures. But the mess they create disturbs the proposal’s instrumental authority to produce an applicant’s supposedly intrinsic humanity. Therefore, a more relevant question is why a particular kind of human life has been associated with artistic merit at all, and how the systems of value in the art world have already been conditioned by it.

2. Calling it a crisis of authorship is a misplaced critique. It is a crisis of labor and social reproduction.

As Elvia Wilk insists, “stop asking whether AI can write good” (2026). She is right to point out that “use of AI in the art, writing, publishing world is—still—a labor issue.” Eroding labor conditions for cultural workers—not individual laziness—produce a class that “cannot afford to be a writer” without relying on LLMs. Nowhere is this truer than in grant writing, a specific discipline of writing that is not yet art or literature while still constituting a significant part of an art worker’s working hours. “Writing good” has long mattered less in this genre than winning the money. This gives even more validity to treating it as a labor question than as an aesthetic one.

One of the few exceptions in which a proposal and an artwork coincide in the same text is Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art Manifesto. The second part of the manifesto was a proposal for an exhibition titled CARE, in which she sought “to bring maternal and collective civic maintenance labor into the museum’s galleries” (Petrossiants 2018). Ukeles explicitly stated: “I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I ‘do’ Art. Now, I will simply do these everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art” (1969). As an exhibition proposal, the manifesto was turned down by all institutions she approached at the time of writing.

In this example, I draw attention to the structural relationship between the content—domestic work—and the form of the submitted proposal. Marina Vishmidt reads the former as social reproduction: “the daily uncompensated labour performed by mainly women in the household,” through which labour-power is reproduced and which therefore “made all other kinds of work possible—waged labour, artwork, even ‘the revolution’” (2019, 141). Yet her point is far from an affirmation of the devalued. When “a social relation accepted as natural and exceptional to the laws of market exchange is re-defined as labour,” she argues, “the disregarded is revealed to be fundamental,” allowing “the relations in that field” to “shift into another configuration” (140). It is such a redefinition that Ukeles’s proposal performs, “suspending the division of symbolic and physical labour” through which art maintains its claim to autonomy without the “taint of heteronomy” (141–42). The rejection of her proposal occupies a homologously concealed position within the art economy. Proposal-writing is excluded from art’s aesthetic autonomy while functioning as maintenance labor for the conditions under which art can be produced and consumed. In Vishmidt’s terms, this is art’s “‘concealment’ of labour” in social reproduction, in other words, its “recapitulation of the fetishism defining capitalist social relations” (140).

Therefore, what the jurors in my anecdote saw as a crisis of authorship is produced not by LLMs but by the underlying crisis of grant-writing labor within the reproduction of the art institution. Nancy Fraser’s account of the “contradictions of capital and care” widens this diagnosis to the broader social-reproductive conditions that the institution consumes and offers a way to understand the capitalist dynamics—especially in their financialized form—from which such crises emerge (2016, 99). Fraser defines this contradiction through capital’s “separation-cum-dependence-cum-disavowal” of social reproduction: the latter remains a “condition of possibility for sustained capital accumulation,” while accumulation simultaneously tends to “destabilize the very processes of social reproduction on which it relies” (100, 103). The art-funding apparatus operates through a comparable dependence. It requires applicants to maintain themselves as artists, be productive of unrealized projects, acquire institutional habitus, absorb repeated rejection, and continuously reconstruct their practices as credible promises. Yet the unpaid application procedures through which it distributes support systematically consume the time, attention, and imaginative capacity on which this work depends. “Destroying its own conditions of possibility, capital’s accumulation dynamic effectively eats its own tail” (103). The resulting use of LLMs is therefore one way in which applicants survive the crisis by displacing risk to other sites of extraction. Restoring manual authorship as an ethical norm would keep this core contradiction intact.

3. AI-written proposals need Wages for Housework as a genealogical ancestor.

While the use of LLMs for grant applications is perceived predominantly as an individual response to precarity, the case of Wages for Housework suggests the possibility of deliberately politicizing it. Emerging in 1972 as a transnational network organized through the International Feminist Collective, Wages for Housework identified domestic and reproductive activity as “multi-faceted, invisible, and unrecognized labour, indispensable and wealth-producing”—the “hidden face of the wage world, its unpaid flip side” (Toupin 2018, 1–2). To demand the wage was to “expose housework as work and negate it as a function of love,” rendering “the division between the waged and the wageless”—and thus between production and reproduction—available for collective struggle (123–24). Wages for Housework was therefore “more a general perspective on struggle than a formal demand” (212).

Vishmidt delineates a “double movement” in Wages for Housework: “‘centring’ reproductive labour while emptying it of content” mirrors a demand that “was always simultaneously Wages Against Housework” (forthcoming; emphasis in original). Although the applicants’ use of LLMs is not yet organized into a movement, I speculate on its becoming a transitional demand, a way to “achieve the level of mobilisation at which the profound structural challenge posed by the demand to the wage relation—to capital as such—would become clear in practice” (forthcoming). What would happen if the unease felt by the jurors could be mobilized beyond the matter of their individual tolerance, toward a question that more structurally destabilizes the funding system? For example, suppose an institution were faced with a demand to remunerate unconditionally the hours spent writing proposals, so that applicants would have the material conditions necessary to spend more time on them and could afford to be less dependent on AI. However simple the literal demand may sound, its transitional force lies in the fact that accommodating this superficially reformist demand would destabilize competitive funding, whose present form depends on the unpaid labor of both successful and unsuccessful applicants. Not unlike Wages for Housework, the political practice organized around AI-written proposals can become potentially revolutionary only when it aims “to exceed the state’s capacity to accommodate it” (forthcoming).

In other words, this is a call to strategically valorize proposal-writing as unpaid reproductive labor against the institution that fetishistically valorizes human originality. This strategy enacts what Vishmidt calls “the dynamic of affirmation and negation inseparable from all social movements” (forthcoming). When individual applicants and jurors begin recognizing their exhaustion as a displaced consequence of social reproduction’s failure, what could emerge is a collective refusal to perform unpaid human originality as the price of access to artistic life. I imagine this collectivity to include applicants who use or don’t use LLMs depending on whether they can afford to, jurors who acknowledge their inability to evaluate impossible volumes responsibly, administrative workers reconfiguring application protocols, as well as artists who explore ways to sustain their practice outside the system of value that prioritizes representation.

4. Communities emerging from speculative funding systems are speculative.

This potentially collective subjectivity needs a discursive framework specific to it. As I imagined earlier, the constituents of such a movement are not homogeneous, encompassing varying degrees of privilege and desire. What binds them together is not a preimposed, unitary identity but their contingent yet unequal affiliations through the funding institution. Arjun Appadurai’s account of dividuation clarifies this relation. The societies of control operate through the “slicing and dicing of individuals into a variety of risk-bearing scores,” thereby making “the bundled dividuals the bearers of an increasingly abstract and systemic risk.” The funding apparatus performs a comparable partition, decomposing applicants into topics, profiles, budgets, demographic markers (for inclusivity), and probabilities of future value (talent). A defense of authentic human applicants is “doomed to fail,” since such an architecture “poses the moral force of the individual against a process of dividualization” that it can “neither understand nor endorse” (2016, 145–47).

The political task at stake is therefore to “harness our progressive potential as dividuals against predatory dividualization” (Appadurai 2016, 145–47). I adapt this formulation from Appadurai’s discussion of Mumbai slum communities that redesigned and revalorized collective sanitation infrastructures. Their progressive dividualism was “grounded in the capacity of such groups to recombine traditional Indian social categories”: heterogeneous communities employed a “derivative and dividual logic” to find “positive value (solidarity) where only negative value” had previously existed, within an “unstable, volatile, and relational environment of social and moral reproduction” (121–23). Although sanitation infrastructure and cultural funding are sites of different political struggles arising from social structures and geographies specific to each, my analogy concerns this operation of recombining socially differentiated positions around a shared infrastructure and converting individualized negative experience into solidarity.

When this recombination is organized around “a collective, mutual recognition of contemporary society’s fragility in the face of radical uncertainties,” it assumes a form of sociality that Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou calls “speculative communities” (2022, ix). Applicants, jurors, administrators, and other cultural workers can nevertheless form social bonds “defined by a speculative engagement with the future and a connection with others on the basis of shared experiences of volatility and precarity.” Despite their divergent positions, they are all inevitably (yet unevenly) oriented toward the speculative nature of cultural funding, based as it is on unrealized projects and a fictitious economy of expectations.

Therefore, the transformative potential of progressive dividualism can be realized only when the fetishization of community—“universal framings that adhere either to celebratory discourses of a unitary identity or to empty celebrations of heterogeneity”—is rejected (Komporozos-Athanasiou 2022, 147). Solidarities arising from this recognition of co-implication without sameness are therefore “anxious” ones, “formed around unseen and often ‘unseeable’ struggles that cannot be answered under the guise of individual psychology” (141). As Komporozos-Athanasiou emphasizes: “New subaltern solidarities such as those between anxious students, K-poppers, and the Black Lives Matter movement or the unwieldy alliances between climate-change activists and the rural anti-fuel-tax movement, make no claims to the ‘commons’ of a fabled past (from which traditionally marginalized social groups were excluded)” (147).

5. The funding apparatus and LLMs co-constitute a speculative machine.

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Carrying both familiarity with and repulsion toward artists’ (or cultural producers of any other kind) relationship with the self, I was introduced to ways in which I could elaborate my ambivalence more concretely. My understanding of the notion and historicity of autotheory is crucially indebted to Lauren Fournier’s book Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, in which she defines autotheory as “the integration of theory and philosophy with autobiography, the body, and other so-called personal and explicitly subjective modes.” For Fournier, autotheory “reanimates ‘subject-centered inquiry’” and “positions subject-centered work as theory,” contesting who has access to theorizing and what is recognized as legitimate knowledge. Its feminist potential lies in making space for those “inordinately marginalized” to theorize (Fournier 2021). At the same time, I draw significantly from Anna Kornbluh’s rigorous critique of autotheory. She argues that “the trajectory of personalization in feminist theory since the 1970s has been overdetermined by the political economy of privatization,” and that “the more systematic the contradictions of privatization have become, the more vernacularized and situated the feminist genres of selfwriting and autotheory have become” (Kornbluh 2021). In her account, autotheory risks turning the feminist refusal of false universality into a style of immediacy aligned with human capital, while discrediting “the abstractions, totalizations, and meanings that could scaffold collective determinations of social alternatives.”

Their seemingly contradictory accounts, however, are consistent with my experience. Within the same historical formation, Fournier finds in the auto an opening for subjects whom theory has historically excluded, while Kornbluh foregrounds its contemporary capture as self-presentation driven by the ethos of human capital. I have experienced how the auto can make theory’s uneven conditions perceptible, while also becoming the form through which those conditions are turned into an individualist pursuit of value. I find resonance in Isadora Neves Marques’s diagnosis of “the pressure on artists to ‘solve’ sociopolitical issues,” which often instrumentalizes and constricts the open potential of artistic imagination. Not unlike them, I question how autotheory, deemed “apolitical” and “irresponsible” under such utilitarian demands, could be mobilized “in ways that question the anthropological, social, and aesthetic expectations placed upon those same forms” (Neves Marques 2025).

However, what I find insufficient is their proposed resolution of “being responsible irresponsibly,” which they describe as “letting go of the fundamental divide between imagination and politics,” by “being faithful to imagination,” while “being conscious of imagination’s context.” They recognize the divide between “what the heart wants (often irresponsibly)” and “what society dictates (a forceful responsibility),” then propose imagination as their conciliatory middle, “what lies between.” However, I don’t find the simple opposition of an interior impulse and an exterior demand useful. Imagination’s autonomy is already socially and institutionally produced, and its political instrumentality already depends on what exceeds direct use. Neves Marques’s view of imagination as the faculty that escapes the polarization of the responsible and irresponsible risks an affirmative resolution of the structural negativity that imaginative autonomy needs under institutional heteronomy. I disagree with their claim that imagination is inherently emancipatory. The emancipatory potential of imaginative autonomy arises from the determinate and historically specific social relation in which imaginative autonomy operates. As Adorno suggests: “The artwork’s autonomy is, indeed, not a priori but the sedimentation of a historical process that constitutes its concept ... The idea of freedom, akin to aesthetic autonomy, was shaped by domination, which it universalized” (Adorno [1997] 2007, 23).

In this written reflection, I’ll attend to this contradiction through negative dialectics. I will follow Fournier’s historicization of the conditions that made self-exposure appear politically necessary, using “the Adornian negative dialectic of autonomy and heteronomy as the social ontology of the artwork under capital” as Marina Vishmidt does (Vishmidt 2018, 10). Although imaginative autonomy, as Neves Marques also recognizes, is in principle opposed to the regime of heteronomy, Vishmidt describes “a situation in which the development of capital’s value forms and value relations have captured much of this speculative energy, affirming processes which Adorno saw as antithetical to capital altogether” (Vishmidt 2018, 24). When “autonomy acquires a new instrumentality in heteronomy” (Vishmidt 2018, 94), she asks how art can still “carry a transformative charge of negativity” (Vishmidt 2018, 3). Following her, I will discuss the conditions under which autotheoretical autonomy can actualize the feminist potential identified in Fournier’s account. As Vishmidt suggests: “speculation cannot be considered an operation proper to radicalised subjectivities or creative experiments, though its precepts may be applicable there. It is, instead, the force of non-identity which exacerbates social contradictions rather than finding creative solutions to them” (Vishmidt 2018, 53).

Diagram with me!

I will proceed in three movements. First, I approach autotheory as theory’s nonidentity: the auto has always been immanent to theoretical practice, even as theory has historically secured its authority by disavowing or unevenly assigning it. Second, I examine the political economy of narcissism, distinguishing the accusation directed at marginalized subjects’ self-reference from the compulsory self-objectification through which human capital converts reflexivity into a capacity for self-valorization. Finally, I turn toward the self beyond itself, considering autotheoretical subjectivity as relationally mediated and potentially transindividual through readings of Adrian Piper, Gilbert Simondon, and Sandy Stone. These movements ask under what conditions the auto can attend to the contradictions that constitute it without reconciling itself to the demands that produce them. I conclude with a checklist for sustaining this question within my own writing practice.

Autotheory as Theory’s Nonidentity

For this project, the most meaningful theoretical takeaway from Fournier was her disclosure of the auto—yet not often acknowledged under the guise of universalism—that was already immanent to “this thing we now call ‘theory’ (with a capital ‘T’ implied…).” Surveying the genealogy of the Western canon from Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and poststructuralist thinkers, Fournier identifies “notable antecedents to autotheory” within the very traditions that contemporary autotheoretical practices confront. These thinkers, she argues, “philosophized and theorized from their lived experiences,” sometimes acknowledging this relation and sometimes suppressing it. Descartes offers the clearest formulation: cogito ergo sum is “predicated on the self-conscious existence of the philosopher as the ‘I,’ upon which the philosopher reflexively self-reflects.” The conventional opposition between ostensibly disembodied philosophy and embodied feminist thought therefore “obfuscates the presence of an autotheoretical impulse in the history of philosophy more broadly.” Even philosophy’s illustrative examples and anecdotes work by bringing abstract concepts into relation with particular lives; more explicitly autotheoretical texts merely foreground “the specificity of the selves alongside theory.” Fournier thus renders explicit philosophy’s selectively enforced separation between “the self (auto) and the work (philosophy, theory)”—what Derrida describes as philosophy’s “supposed preclusion of the ‘I’” (Fournier 2021).

At the same time, theory has a history of negating the auto, as Fournier’s case of Semiotext(e)—a seminal publisher that “brought French poststructuralism in all its post-1968 politicized, subversive, countercultural fervor to the United States”—shows. Yet its history also reveals how “stark gender divides persisted”: in 1990, the press bifurcated into a male-authored “theory” series and a mostly female-authored “fiction” series, Native Agents, founded by Chris Kraus to publish theoretically inclined women and queer writers working through a performative, public “I.” Kraus recalled that Sylvère Lotringer “never wanted women in the theory series,” although their writing expressed “the same public ‘I’” as the French theories. For Fournier, this division reveals how even theory committed to destabilizing hierarchy could preserve itself as a cis-male domain by relocating women’s and queer subjects’ theoretical self-reflection into fiction. It is, however, notable that Lotringer’s assumption that introspection was “antithetical to being theoretical” was paradoxically not independent of his own subjectivity, as exemplified by the fact that “the one oft-cited female exception to the rule” was “Kathy Acker—a woman with whom Lotringer was romantically and sexually involved” (Fournier 2021). As McKenzie Wark opposes “critical (auto) theory” to “hypocritical critical theory,” critical theory without the auto is hypocritical because it pretends “to hold the commodity at arm’s length” (Wark 2023). Negation of auto is still auto.

This seemingly contradictory relationship between theory and the auto is what I’d like to call theory’s nonidentity: theory has historically negated the auto, while the auto has long been immanent to theory. Autotheory is not merely an affirmative addition of marginalized selves to an otherwise universal theory, but a delayed revelation of theory’s structural instability produced through the marginalization of others. The practice of autotheory under a liberal pedagogy whose priority is to center marginal perspectives is hardly capable of questioning the very structure of the center that produced the margin. In other words, as Shilliam asks, “if you moved your focus to a study of the ‘margins’ only, then that would leave the ‘center’ intact. Your movement would thereby avoid difficult but compelling questions such as: Who made their lives central and other peoples’ lives marginal?” (Shilliam 2021, 2).

Autotheory as theory’s non-identical expression becomes especially urgent when the apparatus of knowledge production operates as part of the political economy that undermines the possibility of life for marginalized subjects. A historical instance of such an apparatus is the European bourgeois public sphere, still influentially theorized through Jürgen Habermas’s concept, which, as Wendy Willems stresses, reproduced and was reproduced by the colonial project and racialized and enslaved labor. Material infrastructures such as newspapers and coffeehouses, through which the public sphere emerged, “facilitated the sale and recapturing of enslaved people,” served as “early technologies of surveillance of Black bodies,” mitigated “the so-called ‘risks’ associated with the slave trade,” and relied on “colonial commodities like sugar, which were produced in slave-based economies in the Caribbean” (Willems 2023, 21). This contradiction persists in contemporary knowledge production, where the institutions through which marginalized subjects must become publicly intelligible also continue to organize certain populations as more productive than others. Willems points both to the marginalization of scholars of color and to “contemporary racialized publics” shaped by algorithmic racism, in which Black women are disproportionately harassed online “often without any significant intervention from digital platforms” (Willems 2023, 21–22). The apparatus that conditions marginalized subjects’ public speech concomitantly remains a mechanism that silences them.

Therefore, the transformative potential of autotheory lies less in a withdrawal into private experience than in its revelation of how the position of the knowing subject is made unevenly available by the very infrastructures through which knowledge acquires public validity. This openness is exemplified by what McKenzie Wark calls a particular-universal—“the totality as perceived from a point of view.” She distinguishes a particular-universal from “the universal-universal of third-person narration, that unknowable totality of totalities” (Wark 2023).

The Political Economy of Narcissism

If the self is more or less inseparable from all theory, as Fournier argues, what makes the theory of certain populations count as theory, and that of others as autotheory? In other words, what is the condition under which the auto becomes recognized in theory? And why does it appear disproportionately often for some?

Fournier begins to answer this asymmetry through the recurrent charge of narcissism. Following Beauvoir, she treats women’s narcissism as a response to being socially constituted as object and image; through Amelia Jones and Carolee Schneemann, she likewise presents feminist body art as a challenge to the Cartesian separation of thinking mind and embodied self. Christine Tien Wang’s ironic (and iconic) I’m Too Self-Aware to Be a Narcissist further exposes how women’s and racialized artists’ self-reference is dismissed as immature and socially irresponsible, while the unmarked theorist’s self can recede into universality. “Narcissism” thus names an unequal distribution of theoretical authority that allows some selves to remain invisible as the support of thought, while making others appear conspicuous enough for their thought to be reduced to the merely personal (Fournier 2021).

This unequal recognition of the auto can be clarified through Heidegger’s account of equipment, applied analogically to the philosopher’s subjectivity. In ordinary use, the ready-to-hand tool withdraws behind the activity it enables; only when it becomes unusable does “equipment become conspicuous,” and “the worldly character of the ready-to-hand shows itself too” (Heidegger [1962] 2010, 98–104). The philosopher’s self may function similarly: embodied and historically situated, yet permitted to disappear into the activity of theorizing and thus to remain inconspicuous. Marginalized subjects, by contrast, are less readily allowed this withdrawal because they are already “broken” against the standard of patriarchy and white supremacy. Their bodies and positions are made conspicuous in advance, so that explicitly attending to the conditions of thought can be dismissed as narcissistic rather than recognized as theory.

Yet this analogy need not follow the binary of function and breakdown. Jenn Ashworth’s title Notes Made While Falling proposes an ongoing and generative collapse: “I was falling. / I still am” (Ashworth 2019, 9); elsewhere, “Having failed to find a beginning and failed to get better, I proceed” (Ashworth 2019, 41). The autotheoretical subject can therefore think while falling, remaining operative but unable to let the embodied conditions of that operation recede again. Sustaining such attention has been one way for marginalized subjects, deprived of the privilege of inconspicuousness, to continue writing. Their use of autotheory, then, may appropriate this imposed conspicuousness as a method, making the falling self perceptible as part of the world of relations through which thought occurs rather than as thought’s sovereign origin.

However, what remains to be asked is how this coerced yet potentially critical self-relation is reorganized when capital’s value forms affirm self-reflexivity, and the auto internalizes capital’s value relations. The attempted resolution of the autotheoretical subject’s negativity under financialization produces “a subject whose infinite capacity for creativity and self-invention aligns her with the structure of capital as self-valorising value,” in other words, human capital (Vishmidt 2018, 41).

Human capital is therefore the condition under which Kornbluh’s critique of autotheory operates. In contemporary literature, she argues, the self becomes “the scaturient seat of human capital,” while literature “encloses and reifies the substance of real bodies and real identities,” excluding “the less phenomenal, more speculative processes of fictionality and figuration” (Kornbluh 2024, 181–82). Through its “substantialization of the flesh as anti-symbolic” and elevation of “ethereal sensation,” autotheory “performs that very capture in the imaginary that characterizes contemporary psychic life and consonates with macroeconomic privatization and the reign of human capital” (Kornbluh 2024, 111). Kornbluh’s critique is thus directed not at self-reflexivity per se, but at the historical situation in which embodied experience is substantialized as the self’s value-bearing property.

Autotheory under human capital is narcissistic because it is “metabolised by a concept which purports to work independently of the relation which provides its ground of possibility” (Vishmidt 2018, 28). Yet the two narcissisms must be distinguished. Human capital’s narcissism, unlike the accusation of narcissism leveled against autotheory, is a socially produced relation to oneself, in which the subject internalizes political-economic demands. The passage from one to the other is therefore a biopolitical project: as Vishmidt writes, “the ideologeme of ‘human capital’ comes to embody a truth: the biopolitical harnessing of human survival to capital’s valorisation, with most institutions of mediation and compensation increasingly on the wane” (Vishmidt 2018, 11). If so, how can an autotheoretical subject maintain her negativity even when the regime of heteronomy affirms the source of antagonism as its fuel?

The Auto Beyond the Individual

My final proposition draws from Fournier’s reading of Adrian Piper’s Food for the Spirit, which offers a material model of autotheory as mediated self-inquiry. The private, durational performance consisted of Piper moving between “monastically reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,” repeatedly annotating its margins, and capturing her reflected body on photographic film with a Kodak Brownie camera. Kantian philosophy was “shaking the foundations of [her] self-identity”; fearing that she was “losing” herself through prolonged philosophical absorption, Piper turned to the mirror and camera in “mediumistic attempts to ‘anchor’ herself” in space and time and confirm that she still “exists” as a body with a reflection. The developed photographs therefore register the oscillation between philosophical abstraction and embodied self-imaging that Fournier identifies as an early autotheoretical drive (Fournier 2021).

In this procedure, the camera-and-mirror apparatus can be understood as Piper’s cognitive and subjective prosthesis. The self being documented here was an unstable category, shaken by philosophical abstraction. Piper thus needed these tools to extend her capacity to apprehend and empirically verify herself. By photographing the inverted reflection of her body, the apparatus “stag[es] the transcendental and empirical subject together,” translating an ephemeral “subjective condition of thinking” into an object with “objective validity.” The photograph promised a posteriori knowledge that Piper existed at the moment of exposure, so that her subjectivity was provisionally secured through these mediations. The image was thus a cognitive appendage of the self through which the autotheoretical subject becomes perceptible to herself.

Piper’s autotheoretical self-imaging converts the self from an apparently interior philosophical subject into a fuzzy set of mutually causal relations. The self is a mediated feedback loop in which social relations, embodiment, optical apparatus (and its chemical/photoelectronic inscription), and philosophical abstraction co-produce the evidence of existence. In other words, an autotheoretical subject is a technical assemblage co-individuating with its milieu. It would be too obvious, however exciting, to push this statement into a neomaterialist claim that the self is therefore posthuman or geological. As Kyla Schuller cautions, “affectivity, plasticity, and vitality function as the grounds of biopower’s deployment of racial and sexual difference,” while impressibility names an “animacy hierarchy” distinguishing bodies able to “affect as well as be affected” from those cast as intractable or merely reactive (Schuller 2018, 103–4). I will therefore not argue here that relationality is emancipatory in itself. Nevertheless, Gilbert Simondon’s notion of transindividuality allows me to pose an open question. As Muriel Combes explains, the transindividual names a relation at once “interior to the individual (defining its psyche)” and “exterior to the individual (defining the collective)”—a “relation of relations” (Combes 2013, 26). Because “an individual cannot psychically consist in itself,” the consistency of psychic life lies in “what surpasses it while accompanying it”: the share of preindividual reality that cannot be resolved individually and turns the subject toward the collective (Combes 2013, 40–41). What, then, would an autotheory written from this transindividual dimension of the self look like?

The case of transsexual self-narration in gender clinics, reconstructed by Sandy Stone in “The Empire Strikes Back,” exemplifies an autotheoretical transindividuality that arises through the recursive relation between the unaffected narrating subject (itself a fictional category) and the clinical apparatus without being reducible to either. The early clinics sought an “objective, clinically appropriate, and repeatable” differential diagnosis. Eligibility therefore depended on staff judgments of a candidate’s “appropriateness” to the desired gender and on the successful performance of culturally prescribed gender roles. These criteria were, Stone writes, “defined recursively through a series of interactions with the candidates.” Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon circulated “from hand to hand within the transsexual community,” whose members learned to provide the biographies and behavior that secured access to surgery. Clinicians then interpreted the resulting correspondence as evidence for the category they had themselves helped to produce. What might retrospectively be called tactical autofiction thus emerged from an adversarial biopolitical feedback loop. Stone accordingly calls the clinic “a technology of inscription” and describes passing as the construction of “a plausible history,” through which institutional recognition overwrites the ambiguities and mixtures of lived experience (Stone 1991).

Stone critiques the diagnostic homogenization through which “emergent polyvocalities of lived experience” disappear, and proposes instead that transsexuals seize the textual violence through which they have been constituted and turn it into “a reconstructive force.” Her call to “read oneself aloud” is a call to “write oneself into the discourses by which one has been written” (Stone 1991). I extend this claim by asking how this tactically rehearsed auto-narration might be mobilized toward an autotheoretical negation of affirmative heteronomy. This inquiry resonates with Neves Marques’s proposal to “extrapolate on this tension between representation and nonrepresentation, in both the aesthetic and political meaning of the term” (Neves Marques 2025). I will thus leave open the possibility they recognize: “Can autofiction and the biographical coexist with speculative fiction? Or do speculative fiction techniques, from science fiction and fantasy to the paranormal and mythology, to name a few, cancel the veracity of the testimonial and, as such, of representation? Speculative memoir, whether new or rediscovered in past novels, films, and artworks, may be able to test these waters. We might as well call it science (auto)fiction, or biographical fantasy” (Neves Marques 2025).

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Shame

I mean it: the time and money I spent on my bachelor’s degree in European history was an absolute waste. I don’t hesitate to say this. There was no way that an education in humanities could make a trans girl from Asia employable in Europe. And it was not only economically useless, but also intellectually. What made me expect to study the history of colonialism within a colonial institution? Why is every hope non-refundable? But there is one thing I learned. Ironically enough, the education made me humble about what a historian can do. History is the negative image of simultaneity. Every historical narration is flawed for many inevitable reasons: lost evidence, selective memory, archival bias, translation error, cultural distance, political pressure, and the list goes on. And that is particularly true in this place where I am writing this.

Throughout my education, I slept with many people, but among all of them, there was only one person of color. And that turned out to be the most satisfying night. He was one of the very few international students like me in my year. His name was Kassa. He looked cute in a primary-colored shirt, and smelled of soap with a hint of sweet sweat. Although he was majoring in something else—finance, which was the most boring thing I found at that time—he was the most likable man I had ever met until then. How our love had started and persisted for years is not a matter of importance in this record, but it had to be named as my entry to this history. After finishing the course, as my student visa was about to expire with no promise of extension, I realized I had no place to return. During my third year, the land I came from, whose history of dispossession I had hoped to better understand here, had been worn down by successive seasons of drought, flooding, and failing infrastructure, each crisis compounding the last. Some of my old friends and family had evacuated in time, thankfully, but what they escaped from was no longer inhabitable. So I decided to follow Kassa, who still had a place to return to, and who was not as lost as I was about how to find usefulness in one’s studies.

He came from a region where coffee was grown. The market that gave value to its produce was profoundly unfair. The coffee left, but the return was fractional. The names of places became brands. The time spent under the scorching sun, under debt and against pests and uncertainty, disappeared into tasting notes. That was his motivation to study economics and finance in the first place. He wanted to take over his parents’ farm, which supported the livelihood of everyone he knew from his childhood village. He inherited a sense of responsibility for them. He saw pathways available between there and where he used to study, where he drank specialty coffee—everything but the fragrance was different from what he used to know. Modernization, he called the project. He wanted a logo, direct-trading relationships, new routes between producers and consumers, believing that these would reclaim some part of the value that had long escaped elsewhere. And I was convinced too—how could I not be, if the one I loved, with intelligence and faith, was in pursuit of something?

Many others in the village seemed moved to see their employer’s once-little son returning home as a man with motivation and ideas to make their livelihoods better. And Kassa also worked hard to reciprocate their support. Soon, the farm became a pilot project supported by an alumni innovation fund for rural entrepreneurship. The amount was modest, but sufficient to cover several immediately noticeable improvements. Coffee cherries had once been washed in shallow concrete channels, where workers stirred them by hand and judged their readiness by touch, smell, and experience. The new washing station separated, pulped, fermented, and rinsed them according to measured intervals and water flow rates. Those processed beans were then stored in a humidity-controlled warehouse before being graded, bagged, and transported to the port. Through satellite internet access introduced around that time, sales were arranged directly with partner roasteries across straits and oceans. Renowned baristas were invited to the farm as ambassadors, posting pictures from their excursions on social media.

By the third harvest after Kassa’s return, the whole village seemed more committed than ever to the project. Yields and revenues increased. The arrangement was simple enough to feel fair. Everyone who worked the farm received compensation for their labor, but a substantial portion of their income arrived after the coffee had been sold. When yields increased and buyers paid more, the difference was felt throughout the village. Roofs were repaired. School fees were paid. People bought things they had postponed for years. Success seemed collective because prosperity visibly followed collective effort. They felt, for the first time, that their income matched the load of their work.

And at that time, I was still struggling to make myself useful here. Despite my obvious foreignness, I was eager to be part of the future that Kassa brought to the village. I wished to join the collective zeal, the unprecedented moment of hope. I learned the village’s language relatively fast, though fluency remained stubbornly beyond my reach. After a while, I could crudely follow meetings and understand simple instructions by catching a few key words. The inhabitants were kind and welcoming. They did their utmost for my comfort. At the time, it was hard not to receive such care as proof of belonging. Only later did I understand that guests were cared for in much the same way.

But looking back, I came to wonder whether my alienation had more to do with my self-image than with how I was treated. Throughout my life until then, my worth had always been synonymous with the value—often economic—that I could provide. It was all condition and transaction. But what usefulness could I, a premature historian, offer at a plantation? It felt unacceptable to exempt myself from the collective plantation labor to which everyone else was committed. The most dominant memory I have from this period is the bitterness every evening in the shower, washing off the dirt on my skin, sticky with sweat, thinking over and over about what a poor manual laborer I was. Kassa did not understand what made me so eager and frustrated. I was acutely aware of the seemingly irreconcilable mismatch between my bodily capacity and the setting. It made it too explicit that I was bad at having a body. Nevertheless, I did not know what else I could do, so I continued working in the fields. Or, with more honesty, I knew what I could do, but was unwilling to acknowledge it even as an option. I had spent years learning how to write, interpret, archive, and contextualize. But I was afraid of what I would become if I practiced those skills here, of what a historian trained by colonizers would inexorably see in the formerly colonized others. That was, in other words, the uselessness I perceived.

But that did not mean I completely ceased to write. I had to, and it had nothing to do with usefulness. When I was not in the field, I was always writing, unlike what I was taught to do, in my mother tongue. I faithfully documented what I could and could not understand. As someone—I can no longer recall whom—once said, the purpose of writing of this kind is to make sense of being alive. It was not submitted anywhere or shown to anyone. I was ashamed of what I did out of desperation. I felt helplessly selfish and selfishly helpless.

It took a stroke of good fortune to realize that the effect of keeping oneself alive extends beyond the self. When I accidentally fell asleep while writing, my housemate—a young woman named Hiwot, who would later teach me that keeping someone alive can itself become a way of writing history—thought I had fainted and tried to check my pulse. Relieved that I was not dead, she noticed the printed sheets beneath my head. The scripts written on them, illegible to anyone else in the village, made her curious enough to ask what they were. Half-asleep and dazed, I answered in incomplete sentences in her language, though I still cannot clearly recall what I said. The next morning she asked again about the history I was writing. Hearing the enthusiasm in her voice, I could not resist being honest. I used nearly every word I knew and did not know in her language to explain what I was doing. When I ran out of words and somehow made her understand, she began crying and held me tight. I was already weeping before she did.

Once we had both calmed down, Hiwot gently asked whether I could translate my text into something she could read. When I tried to formulate a response, I noticed that something had changed in me. Since then, I began spending every Sunday translating what I wrote each week, then letting it circulate around the village, beginning with Hiwot. My handwriting in her people’s script looked wayward like that of a child and faltering like that of an old woman at the same time. Idioms specific to my language were simplified. Some phrases were not commensurable with any other language I knew. This version of the history was far more inconsistent and imprecise than anything my exams would have accepted. Yet I have no interest in romanticizing my lack of words. That itself was an irreducible part of the history being represented. A historian was living in it. She had no funding from anywhere, and her livelihood depended upon the very people the history was about and addressed to. I still spent most of my time in the fields, yet I was less ashamed of myself for not being the most efficient worker. Validation came from elsewhere. The villagers read and talked about their own history, about their days and seasons, labor and coffee trees, songs and dances, fears and hopes. They laughed at some parts, returned with questions, and corrected me when necessary. Some brought matters to be included in my documentation, which I accepted most of the time. My curiosity too was welcomed, and most were eager to show me anything I asked about. I became their historian. Whether that made me one of them was a question I learned not to answer in haste.

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Lament

Those several minutes felt like years, as the distinction between insect and atmosphere seemed to disappear. A thick brown stridulous cloud closed over everything above our heads. The whole sky droned as if applauding itself. The air had become animate, and whatever remained of the world below existed only at its mercy. When we could finally look around again, there was nothing left on the trees but their bare branches.

Kassa tried not to panic as he reassured those who trusted him.

“The trees will recover eventually,” he said. “We planned for bad years. That’s why we purchased the insurance.”

Nobody replied.

“The damage is severe, but this is exactly the kind of event the policy was designed for. We documented everything. The satellite data will show it. The agronomists will confirm it. We followed every requirement.”

He paused, as if trying to convince himself as much as everyone else.

“We are not alone in this. The insurer, the buyers, the partners—they have been watching the situation around us closely. They will do what they are supposed to do. That’s the whole point of these systems. They spread the burden so that one disaster doesn’t destroy years of work.”

A few people nodded. Others stared at the stripped branches.

“The harvest is lost,” he continued. “But the project isn’t. We will receive compensation. We will replant what must be replanted. We will repair what must be repaired. Everything is still on track.”

I remember being moved by his confidence. Even when all visible evidence of his devotion was gone, he could hold himself and the village together with his faith in the invisible, suspending disbelief in the present. Until the claim was denied.

The insurer still acknowledged every fact stated. Yes, the locusts had come. Yes, the harvest had been devastated. Yes, the premiums had been paid in full. Yet they explained that the triggering conditions for compensation had not been satisfied. According to their parametric policy, compensation was determined automatically through the insurer’s monitoring system. Rainfall anomalies, soil moisture, vegetation growth, surface temperature, wind trajectories, historical breeding suitability, regional pest reports, and several other indicators were continuously aggregated into a single number. The score was presented as a live indicator, something the company claimed reflected conditions as they unfolded and provided an objective, immediate measure. According to that number, there was nothing extraordinary, and no reimbursement was required.

Kassa spent weeks appealing the decision. Every response repeated the same conclusion in indisputable technical language. The “real-time” of their model did not align with the time of the village, accumulated in the coffee cherries and disappeared with them. And it was the latter that had to adapt to the former. After his thirteenth or fourteenth call with the insurer, he collapsed and cried like a baby in my arms. In a stuttering voice, he asked, “Bari, what should I do? What can I tell people? They gave me everything, they still do, but I failed them. How can I tell them that all their work went in vain, wasted for nothing, leaving only the naked trees?”

I held him for a while before answering.

“It wasn’t for nothing.”

He laughed bitterly and buried his face in his hands.

“Then what was it for? The harvest is gone. The insurance won’t pay. The project is finished.”

I hesitated. I thought of everything I witnessed since my arrival. I thought of the people who had worked from dawn to dusk. Most of all, I thought of how little any of that could be eaten.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe that’s the wrong question.”

He looked up. For a moment neither of us spoke.

“And I know that you’re not to blame. The locusts are not your fault. The rejection is not your fault.”

He wiped his eyes.

“And what do I tell people?”

I looked toward the darkness outside the window.

“You don’t have to give them more than what you know. Tell them what you heard from the insurer, and that you also don’t know beyond that. Then listen to them, so they can tell you what they know.”

He shook his head.

“They deserve more than that.”

“Maybe. But it is more than the insurer gave them.”

He agreed passively, in silence.

The next village assembly took place sooner than usual because of the exceptional situation they faced. Kassa began with an announcement of the news that had devastated him, bowing to the people with his deepest apologies. His sincerity brought tears to some of them. Tigist, the oldest woman who still worked in the fields, spoke about the damage she had identified. The locusts had eaten all herbaceous parts of the coffee trees, which meant no harvest that year, but their perennial structures were left intact, which meant yields would gradually recover. She estimated that a little less than half of the trees would fruit again over the next couple of years, and almost fully recover after several more years. Their future was not entirely terminated if they survived those years, and if the swarms did not return. She reminded people that it was not the first locust crisis they had experienced, nor the worst. Her parents’ generation had survived one, and so had many others whose names she could still recall. She paused and looked around the assembly.

“But what is new is that we nearly forgot how to feed ourselves while waiting for the coffee.”

A few people lowered their heads.

“Last time, after the locusts, we planted what we could eat. We planted for our stomachs first and for the market second. That is why we are still here to talk about it.”

She gestured toward the fields beyond the meeting place.

“The coffee trees are wounded, not dead. They will decide for themselves whether to return. We should worry about ourselves in the meantime.”

For the first time since the rejection of the insurance claim, the present had returned to a room otherwise drifting in the future. But Kassa did not let the axis of their time revert completely.

“But where do we grow that? I can’t think of any additional land for those crops.”

“We might have to clear a small portion, maybe a quarter of the land from which we currently harvest coffee. That would fulfill some of our immediate needs until the coffee trees recover. As long as I can remember, it hasn’t been very long, maybe less than a few decades, since we devoted the entire field only to coffee.”

“But that relief would come at the expense of the future we have been working for.”

Tigist did not answer immediately.

Then she said, “A future that requires us to be hungry before reaching it is not yet ours.”

Kassa looked as if he wanted to object, but could not decide whether he was arguing with Tigist, with the past she represented, with the locusts, or with the letter from the insurer folded in his pocket.

“We cannot make decisions like this out of fear,” he said finally. “If we cut the trees now, we will lose not only this harvest but the ones that would have followed. We need to endure this year carefully. We need to seek emergency support, appeal the claim, speak to the buyers, ask for deferred payments. There are still options.”

“There are always options for those who can wait,” someone said from the back.

I could not see who it was.

The assembly continued for hours after that, but it concluded only with open questions. Kassa promised to contact the buyers and other temporary funding sources. Meanwhile, Tigist and several others were asked to estimate what could be planted if land were made available. When people left the meeting place, they did not walk home in the same direction. Some followed Kassa toward the warehouse, where the documents were kept. Others followed Tigist toward the damaged trees. I stayed still for a while, then walked back home with Hiwot.

Margins

Unless they were officially invited on behalf of the farm, strangers had rarely visited the village. When they did, it did not take long for everyone to know. One of the villagers came looking for me urgently while I was weeding with others—the trees had to be kept alive even when they did not produce. As one of the few English speakers, I was asked to speak to an unknown visitor and identify the purpose of his visit. The villagers were usually hospitable, as they had been when they first welcomed me as a stranger, but the circumstances at the time—postponed development plans, people calculating grain, adults eating less so children could eat as usual, beans and sorghum appearing along paths and between coffee rows—made them more alert. Every uncertainty had to be checked for malice.

The man I confronted wore a pale field shirt darkened at the collar by sweat, cargo trousers tucked badly into dusty boots, and a wide-brimmed hat whose strap had left a red line under his chin. A sweep net was folded against his backpack like a useless flag. From his vest pockets protruded clear plastic tubes, a hand lens, forceps, pens, folded maps, and a small blinking device.

“How desolate… What did these trees do to deserve this?”

Only after saying this did he seem to remember to introduce himself.

“Who are you?” I asked.

Only then did he seem to realize he had skipped some steps in appearing sociable. He smiled and gestured awkwardly, as though trying to compensate for his crudeness.

“I am Dr. Nabil Rahman. You can simply call me Nabu. I’m an entomologist who specializes in the swarming behavior of insects.”

“And what brings you here? We didn’t hear anything about your visit.”

“Please excuse me for showing up unannounced. I’ve been following the locust swarm that has swept through the area recently and ended up here. It seems they passed through not long ago. When was that?”

“Why are you asking? For whom do you need this information?”

“For you all. To help your people.”

“I don’t understand how we can be helped by that.”

“I map their trails. The insects’ appearance and movement are far less arbitrary than you might assume. You just have to look from their perspective, but that requires enough knowledge to let go of human prejudice. That’s what I study.”

“So your point is…”

“If you begin to understand their rhythm, you will know when the swarm will hit ahead of time.”

“Would knowing in advance reduce the damage in any realistic way? Have you seen them submerge a whole field? It was unstoppable. Don’t you know that better than I do, as an expert?”

“That’s not what I specialize in. My work is about what can be done now about what will happen later. If you can calculate the risk, what you get is a number you can use in the present.”

“You sound like the insurer we were talking to. They made the same promise, but we were left with nothing.”

“I believe so.”

“What?”

“They probably are using the model I made. Most agricultural insurance products here rely on some version of my prediction model for locusts. That is why I’m here. I recently realized that the model no longer matches the observational data. Like a broken clock.”

“A broken clock,” I repeated. “But why is our hunger governed by that?”

He did not answer immediately.

“What was broken was not the clock, but the time it was supposed to count,” he said at last. “The model is an accumulated memory, tethered to the past by nature, but projected forward. The present could be somewhere on that course, as an idea, so they call it ‘real time.’”

“And the time we experienced wasn’t real enough according to that.”

I tried to interrupt him with sarcasm, but he continued unbothered, still in a single breath.

“It maps at least twelve different parameters into a probability of locust gregarization. It cannot go wrong...”

“And now? How would you explain what happened here?”

“...unless the conditions around it shift drastically. The world according to which the model was made no longer exists.”

“We are still in the same world.”

“No. The world we knew collapses and turns into the unprecedented each day. Memories based on the gone world can no longer be true. People call this climate change.”

“Then you should tell the insurer, not me. So they acknowledge that the model was faulty and pay us.”

“Do you think I haven’t tried? I did, through every means I had. That’s why I’m here, to collect corrected data.”

“Then go for it. The one who tied the knot must untie it.”

“But even if they acknowledge it now, it would not change anything for your village. As far as I understand the contract, the policy doesn’t count the actual damage to your trees. They call it parametric coverage. The payout is tied to whether the model’s trigger threshold is met. If not, then legally there is no covered event, regardless of claims you make. The loss happened in your world, but not in the policy’s.”

“So, did you come all the way just to confirm that we’re going to be left in poverty? We’ve been reminded about it over and over, more than a dozen times, being devastated by the very hope each time. What do you want from us? Why are you here for real?”

“I want to fix the clock. It is too late to redeem the time it did not count, but I still must make it sync again for the future. Please let me stay here for a few days and collect data, so the model can be correct again, and hopefully be adopted by the insurers.”

“And why should we help you do that?”

“Who’s going to fix the clock if the clockmaker doesn’t?”

Whether out of curiosity, exhaustion, goodwill toward the future, or simply a habit born from hospitality, we let him stay. I could not do my usual plantation work over the next several days because he needed a translator. I was reluctant, but there was no one else available. Kassa was too busy chasing after funding.

Nabu was more of an ecologist than I had presumed. The tools in his pockets were not mere ornaments. From dawn until dusk he wandered through the village and its surroundings, kneeling beside grasses, turning over stones, examining damaged leaves, and recording whatever traces the insects had left behind. Yet he paid surprisingly little attention to the bare coffee trees. Instead, he seemed fascinated by the margins: roadside vegetation, abandoned corners, volunteer plants, and small plots of food crops that had begun appearing wherever people could find room to grow them.

“Is this new? Or did the swarm just spare this patch?”

I frowned at him, repelled by his naivety, as though he studied insects while remaining absolutely ignorant about life outside his lab and papers. At the same time, it shook me with embarrassment to realize my questions might have sounded like his when I had first arrived here. The air around us became saturated with tension, so that even the ones watering the plot stared at us in confusion.

“Isn’t it obvious? We planted it after the catastrophe. People had to eat.”

“It’s feeding more than all of you. Come and look closer.”

I followed him with suspicion. He crouched beside a row of beans and pointed at an unremarkable green insect clinging to a stem.

“What am I looking at?”

“A locust.”

“That’s a grasshopper.”

“How do you draw a line between them?”

He extended a finger toward it. The insect crawled a few centimeters along the stem before leaping away.

“The swarm that devastated your village was not a different species. It was this.”

“You’re joking.”

“I wish I were. Most locusts spend most of their lives as benignly as this. They are solitary and scattered. The swarm is only one of the forms they can take.”

I looked again at the insect and felt vaguely cheated.

“So this little thing did all that?”

“Not by itself.”

He smiled.

That was the last conversation I remember having with Nabu. He left, probably for the next village on the swarm’s trajectory, without announcement or expression of gratitude, not unlike when he first appeared. I talked about how strange it was with Kassa in bed that night. Since the day of the locusts, we had been occupied with our own agendas. Evenings were the only moments we could be together.

“There was something unbearably off with this guy. I’m glad he left so I can resume my routine.”

“Thank you for dealing with that. I was relieved I could count on you for this. These philanthropists, ethnographers, botanists, filmmakers—they move around just like locusts. They come because something happened. Then they leave for wherever the next thing happens.”

“He literally was following their path. Maybe he learned from them.”

“What was he even doing here after all? What’s so special about these ruins?”

“Strangely enough, he didn’t pay much attention to the damage. He seemed more intrigued by the food crops.”

“The food crops?”

“The little plots by the road and between the coffee rows. I find it empowering how resourceful people are, even a patch of soil being cherished. I hope it will reduce our suffering during this hard time.”

He fell silent with a slight frown. Against me, his body stiffened.

“I noticed them too.”

“Does it bother you?”

“Not at all. It’s understandable.”

He rubbed his eyes. I waited for him to continue.

“I’m just worried people are beginning to think in weeks instead of years.”

“Can you blame them?”

“No, but it just worries me.”

He sighed and lay for a while before speaking again.

“Every coffee tree that gets replaced is a harvest that disappears years from now. Coffee takes time. Once you interrupt that cycle, you cannot simply resume where you left off.”

“We still need food to last that time.”

“Not that kind of time.”

Neither of us said anything after that.

I knew him. The limbo of misalignment was what Kassa disliked. The unofficial farming had started before any consensus, so he did not even have a chance to openly agree or disagree. The following morning, he issued a village-wide announcement in which he acknowledged the practice that was already underway. He remained sympathetic to the heightened concerns over the foreseeable food shortage. The endorsement, however, was conditional, as he pleaded that food crops remain only where the coffee trees would remain undisturbed. Nothing had practically changed, but it comforted him. From then on, or perhaps even before, Kassa was planning. He had consulted buyers, procurement agencies, agricultural input-cost analysts, farm profitability consultants, venture investors, credit analysts, and agricultural lenders. The nights he spent wrapping his head around those became a calendar extending nearly three years into the future, which he proposed to the village. It divided the coming months into pruning schedules, fertilizer applications, expected regrowth, inspections, appeal deadlines, projected cash flow, and harvest estimates. At least for Kassa, the future appeared easier to endure once arranged into rows and columns. During the assembly that followed his presentation, he stressed how preserving the remaining coffee trees would allow the farm to recover much sooner than starting over. Every tree cut today, he said, would postpone the village’s recovery by years. Some nodded, trying to understand it. Others looked for someone audacious enough to raise the only question left on their behalf. That was when Tigist stepped forward and stayed still for a few seconds. Once all eyes were on her, she opened her mouth. “What do we eat until then?”

Nobody, including Kassa, could respond to it with certainty until the end of the assembly.

Even at that very moment, hunger had been steadily approaching the village like the lengthening of nights after summer solstice. Every ordinary act had persisted, yet grown feebler than the day before. Morning porridge became thinner. The midday meal disappeared from some households. Conversations that once lingered after sunset ended as soon as darkness fell, so that no one had to offer food they did not have. Parents increasingly insisted they had already eaten elsewhere. Children pretended not to know. A considerable portion of what food remained came from the unofficial patches—small, hidden plots that yielded just enough to delay collapse—but even these were insufficient to maintain the village’s wellbeing. Each day, Tigist’s question reemerged with greater weight. By then, Hiwot spent most of her time tending food crops rather than coffee. Every Wednesday, she cooked with a group of women for whoever was in need, children and elderly people at the head of the line. That hardly aligned with Kassa’s plan, but everyone I knew understood and supported her motivation. She also did not explain much, as though she were asking why one would need reasons for feeding others without saying it.

But it still required more calories for them to maintain their belief that the weekly meal offerings, marginally harvested crops, and a few individual acts of discipline and goodwill would resolve the issue of hunger. As the Wednesday kitchens grew more crowded, the sacks emptied faster than they could be replaced. People could no longer ask for second servings. Portions were assigned not to make anyone feel fed but to postpone hunger briefly. Hiwot told me one night that she felt she was not diligent enough. She seemed deeply frustrated by her inability to feed more. I told her that it was not her fault, yet it was hard to convince her. I thought of how she had helped me embrace the shame I was feeling, and felt helpless that I could not reciprocate that. The next morning, I began digging through the dossiers on Kassa’s desk. He asked me what I was doing, and I said I was collecting historical records. By then, I was both ignorant and knowledgeable about the village—I still did not fully embody its common sense, but as a historian, I could have a deeper understanding of certain aspects than anyone else, since I was often welcomed by many to see what was not otherwise revealed. “For historical purposes” was the magic key for me to access anything without suspicion, even during the time of food shortage. It took me several hours to find a series of agronomic reports which concluded that relying only on the marginal plots to feed the village was critically insufficient. It hinted that the only realistic means of sustenance was to make more land available for food crops, without specifying how that could be achieved. I took pictures of those pages, and spent the rest of the day at home making translations for Hiwot. Only then did she realize that she had been pouring water into a leaky bucket. For the next several days she spoke less than usual. When someone thanked her after Wednesday’s meal, she simply nodded and asked them whether they still had seeds at home available for planting.

The subsequent village assembly began with Hiwot, who spoke plainly about what it was like to organize the weekly meals. She apologized to everyone she could not feed enough. Several women interrupted her, saying there was nothing to apologize for. Hiwot shook her head.

“I know there isn’t,” she said. “We did all we could. But at this point I can’t pretend that there is hope anymore, and I still feel sorry to admit this. It takes more than the Wednesday kitchen to fulfill our modest needs. We simply need more land to feed ourselves. It’s not that we have no land, but at the moment, it is all reserved for the day for which we have been starving ourselves. Can we keep both without sacrifice? If not, what should we sacrifice?”

Her argument was not so different from what Tigist had said long ago. But it had somehow gained more weight because she was not speaking from the memories of generations past. The hunger was no longer abstract. Tigist did not have to add much to the conversation, so she stayed in the back and let the young ones decide their fate.

While Hiwot’s question was not addressed to anyone specific, Kassa felt an urge to respond to it. He appeared visibly thinner, like many others in the village, as he had not been eating more than the rest. Yet he looked around the room before answering, as though hoping someone else would speak first.

“I know what you’re asking,” he finally said. “I ask myself the same question every morning.”

He looked toward the washing station outside.

“Three years ago, none of this existed. We washed coffee by hand. The warehouse leaked. Buyers dictated the price because they knew we had nowhere else to go. Young people, including myself, left because they saw no future here. We changed that together. The buyers who finally know this village by name, the roads we repaired, the grants we fought for, the trust we built—none of those stand apart from these trees. They are not only standing there for the future; what we have in the present also depends on them.”

He unfolded the recovery schedule.

“If we compromise now, we won’t only lose coffee. We risk losing everything that coffee has finally allowed us to build. The buyers will leave. The lenders will assume we have abandoned the project. The grants we have appealed for will be canceled. If we dismantle the plantation today, we may survive this season only to return to where we were before any of this began. That could be worse than the hunger today.”

Despite how much the village had resonated with Hiwot’s call, the assembly itself did not produce any immediate effects, as long as Kassa, the legal owner of the land, maintained his position on behalf of all of us. But changes that mattered were often too unhurried and obscure for anyone to fully understand before they became unstoppable.

The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons

As a kid, I was afraid of moonless nights. The darkness itself was not exactly what I feared, but the tale associated with it was. I had heard that on nights like those, the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons could appear, and that anyone unlucky enough to witness it might never return unchanged. Yet it had also given me an unusual sense of liberation. Stars that were otherwise invisible revealed themselves under the moon’s absence. Maybe the demons were those stars that needed profound darkness to shine.

It was also one of the moonless nights that Hiwot asked me to follow her. She did not tell me where we were going. Only after we had left the houses behind did I notice more figures joining us from different paths, all marching toward the plantation. The coffee trees stood in the darkness. Even stripped of their leaves, I could still distinguish their silhouettes. Hiwot walked to the first tree and rested her palm against its trunk. Others did the same. For a brief moment of complete silence, nothing happened, though it looked less like hesitation than prayer. Only then did I recognize the axes in their hands.

“I’m sorry,” someone whispered. The first blow landed, and its sound spread through darkness. Soon the night was filled with dull echoes of iron striking wood. Every tree was cut with apologetic precision. Some women wept as they worked. Others paused after each trunk fell, touching the exposed rings as though commemorating an old companion whose death they themselves had chosen. Many of these women had planted the very trees they were now felling. After every fallen tree, the soil was opened by the same hands that had cut it. Millet, beans, cowpeas, sorghum, and many other seeds I couldn’t even identify were sown over it.

Shortly before morning, we returned home. Hiwot didn’t explain much about why she had brought me there. I had no axe or seeds with me, so I am writing this down now.

Read more

Dear fellow peasants,

We are here, tending a one-square-kilometer productive forest located within an empire. We call the forest ours, but it is not only ours. It is registered in the empire’s land survey, irrigated by imperial canals, taxed through imperial grain offices, protected by imperial conservation law, threatened by imperial timber markets, and remembered as an image in the empire’s natural history catalogue. We are in the empire, yet not entirely of it. But perhaps we are more of it than we often acknowledge. Even this address, delivered on behalf of the forest, is one more harvest from it.

The forest is not the only productive land in the territory. Around it lie other forests, plantations, exhausted fields, orchards, grazing commons, military clearings, refugee settlements, and corporate tree farms, all interconnected through infrastructures that precede them. None of their boundaries have remained stable. What is now called forest was once entered in the imperial survey as arable land; what is now desert was once a fertile basin; what is now plantation was once woodland cleared for grain; what is now wasteland was periodically folded back into cultivation whenever famine, war, or taxation demanded it. From the earliest moment we remember, land here has been classified, abandoned, reclaimed, exhausted, improved, enclosed, and renamed according to successive regimes of value.

This forest, too, was once a cornfield. It was cleared during an earlier agricultural expansion, cultivated for several generations, then abandoned after the soil thinned and transport costs exceeded the value of the harvest. For decades it had ceased to have a name, neither field nor forest, a scrubland of volunteer trees, feral crops, invasive grasses, and buried irrigation channels. Its reforestation was not our project. It began long before us through neglect, drought, seed dispersal, and animal passage, initiated by a few species and continued by many others.

We arrived later, having fled plantations and ethnography museums in an urgent search for ways of cultivating otherwise, not yet knowing what is possible. We still do not claim to know. The forest had already been recognized by others. Imperial botanists classified its volunteer trees as evidence of natural recovery. Ethnographers recorded the songs of those who passed through while omitting the debts that forced them to move. Surveyors marked the buried channels as obsolete infrastructure to be redeveloped innovatively. Conservation officers catalogued rare insects without asking which children knew where they nested. Seed-bank clerks collected samples in the name of preservation while refusing to recognize the forms of memory through which seeds had already been kept alive.

The right by which we remain here is called a renewable stewardship charter, granted after the last famine, when the empire needed abandoned lands to become productive again without bearing the full cost of repair. The charter names us custodians while reserving final authority over boundaries, water rights, species inventories, and permissible uses to offices far beyond the canopy. Our partial reclamation was also a partial incorporation.

It is under such conditions that we meet, harvest, depend, remember, teach, mourn, and decide together. Though some still identify themselves through older categories of ownership, most of us are, in practice, more or less workers here, even if not all labor ends in harvest. Much of it leaves behind no measurable output.

There is the labor of maintaining terraces, clearing irrigation channels, pruning trees whose fruits may only be gathered years later, observing soil moisture, monitoring pests, collecting seeds, and carrying water during drought. There is the labor of cooking for collective workdays, caring for children and elders, preserving surplus harvests, tending injuries, accompanying the sick, carrying pregnancies to term through the physical, emotional, and temporal work of gestation and recovery, and repairing the attachments that make departure costly.

There is also the labor of mediation. Some inhabitants translate imperial regulations into local protocols, negotiate with surveyors, document biodiversity for subsidy applications, host visitors, record collective decisions, and resolve disputes over access, timing, and use. They turn audit deadlines into assembly dates, failed harvests into acceptable reports, collective delays into evidence of participation, and imperial requirements into procedures people can survive. They are portals through which resources enter the forest and legitimacy returns to the empire. Their neutrality is both necessary and impossible. They absorb anger from multiple directions until their fatigue becomes part of the forest’s infrastructure.

There are also those who perform work that the empire rarely recognizes as value, even as it tries to bring that work under control. They welcome newcomers, transmit stories, organize festivals, mourn losses, maintain camaraderie, sustain trust, remember protocols, and imagine futures beyond current arrangements. They know how to ask before harvesting, how to refuse without severing relation, how to apologize after damage, how to leave certain places unmarked, and how to let some knowledge remain local without letting it disappear.

Taken together, these forms of labor sustain outputs that exceed what can be yielded at harvest time. The forest produces nuts, fruit, mushrooms, honey, timber, fodder, medicinal plants, fuelwood, and clean water; but it also produces obligations, social codes, memories, conflicts, rituals, dependencies, exclusions, healing practices, and forms of collective life that cannot be stored in granaries or measured in annual reports. What the forest appears productive of is determined not only by soil and climate, but by the systems of value within and beyond it that decide what becomes visible and worthy of continuation.

The forest does not exist outside the empire’s circuits of extraction. Timber quotas are registered in imperial ledgers. Biodiversity surveys become conservation credits. Medicinal plants enter pharmaceutical supply chains. Ecological data travels with visiting researchers. The forest’s carbon absorption is counted against emissions generated elsewhere. Flood mitigation, watershed protection, fire prevention, educational programs, and cultural significance are gathered under the name of ecosystem services.

In return, we receive forms of support upon which our practices depend. Grain reserves supplement failed harvests. Tools, medicine, road maintenance, veterinary services, and legal recognition arrive through imperial channels. Stewardship grants reward biodiversity targets. Drought relief funds make periods of scarcity livable. Our right to remain on the land is periodically renewed through audits, reports, and compliance reviews. This exchange grants the forest a degree of relative autonomy. Time can be spent on maintenance, experimentation, care, repair, healing, and forms of labor that exceed immediate productivity.

Yet this autonomy remains conditional. The same budget line that funds rewilding projects here is sourced through plantations, mines, logistics corridors, and settlement programs elsewhere. The grain that arrives during drought years travels along routes secured through military occupation. The carbon credits that protect this forest offset emissions generated by industries that render other territories uninhabitable. The empire tolerates diversity more easily than refusal. It welcomes displaced cultivators when they become good models, and withdraws subsidy when stewardship becomes dissent. We know this, though not equally and not always at the same time. Some insist that compromised autonomy is preferable to dispossession. Others call these subsidies bloodstained and speak of refusal. Many oscillate between gratitude, dependency, denial, disillusionment, guilt, and responsibility.

The empire records the forest as a single administrative entity. We are collectively designated as commoners. Official documents describe our assemblies as horizontal and participatory. These descriptions are not merely a statement. Knowledge does circulate through conversation rather than decree. Tools are lent without contracts. Meals, childcare, and emergency labor are often organized through mutual aid. People who arrive with little may, over time, find companionship, practical support, and forms of belonging unavailable elsewhere.

Yet these capacities are neither transparent nor equally accessible. Not everyone knows where the most fertile clearings lie, which inspectors are sympathetic, or how to navigate the language of subsidy applications. Some households have inherited tools, storage facilities, and longstanding relations of trust. Others arrived recently and rely on invitations that may or may not come. There are no written requirements for belonging. Newcomers are told that everyone is equal, that all voices carry the same weight, and that the commons belongs to whoever cares for it. This is not entirely untrue. Participation depends upon mastering a social grammar that is never formally taught: when to speak and when to remain silent; which disagreements are welcomed and which are remembered; whose exhaustion is recognized as sacrifice and whose is dismissed as unreliability; which tasks earn gratitude and which disappear into expectation.

This sociality is itself an object of extraction. Delegations arrive to observe our assemblies. Researchers ask how trust is maintained without contracts. Donors request stories of resilience. Conservation officers photograph collective workdays as evidence of participation. Students join seasonal festivals and call them living heritage. Surveyors ask us to draw participatory maps, then translate those maps into management plans we cannot fully read. Visitors praise the warmth of our meals, the generosity of our hosts, the informal intelligence of our children, and the beauty of our mourning songs. Their reports rarely record who cooked, who translated, who cleaned after they left, who repeated the same origin story for the seventh time that month, or who stayed awake repairing the conflicts their questions had reopened.

The forest also produces an outside. Downstream villages sometimes receive less water because of our retention ponds. Grazing animals are excluded from regenerating plots, along with the herders whose seasonal routes once crossed them. Migrants may be welcomed as workers before they are trusted as decision-makers. Those who are sick, disabled, grieving, pregnant, elderly, or temporarily absent may lose access simply because they cannot attend the meetings where access is informally negotiated. Certain plants are named invasive and marked for removal; certain insects are protected because they are rare; certain people become legible only when their hardship supports the forest’s claim to institutional relevance. The forest does not become ours once and for all. It is continually commoned through practices that can nourish, exclude, repair, exhaust, shelter, and dispossess.

Forest is a Diagram

Promises circulate more frequently than guarantees. The possibility of future access—to a grafted orchard, a place in the irrigation rota, a key to the tool shed, apprenticeship in the mushroom grounds, companionship, influence, or a voice in drought assembly—often compensates for labor performed in the present. Sometimes these promises are fulfilled, opening pathways that no formal institution would have provided. Often they are deferred. This uncertainty is structurally produced, binding us to the forest through hope.

Because these relations depend on expectations about what may happen later, sustaining the forest means orienting ourselves toward uncertain futures. We make decisions in anticipation of droughts, conflicts, migrations, and needs that cannot yet be named. Labor in the present answers conditions that have not yet arrived. But anticipation is not the empire’s opposite. The empire also imagines the forest through its own plans. It measures productivity, models scarcity, calculates risk, and seeks to secure future abundance. Through its ongoing speculation, the forest ceaselessly becomes an administrative unit, a conservation success, a source of ecosystem services, or proof that damaged lands can be made productive again.

The empire has its own stories. It tells of the grateful steward, the resilient peasant, the restored wilderness, the harmonious commons, the invasive outsider, the neutral scientist, the self-sufficient forest. These stories are as real as they are fictional, because we live in them. In response, the stories we tell are to notice the scaffolding by which the forest is made governable, rather than leaving the forest completely. We tell stories to ask what official descriptions prevent us from perceiving. What dependencies, debts, and forms of care remain hidden beneath the image of a well-managed commons? Which promises remain deferred? Which conflicts have been concealed by the language of horizontality? Which territories elsewhere subsidize the forest’s relative autonomy?

We need maps that become useful only when they disorient us. Could such maps reveal what surveys cannot, or would they too be captured, standardized, audited, and returned to us as policy? Which forms of knowledge should be shared before they disappear, and which should remain illegible because documentation would expose them to extraction? Who should interrupt our assemblies when those mistake silence for consensus, and consensus for justice? Should future droughts have a voice? Should downstream villages? Should absent workers, arriving migrants, exhausted mediators, unborn children, excluded herders, invasive plants, and overlooked species?

These questions, too, are not posed from outside what they interrogate. Can these help us rehearse forms of solidarity that do not yet exist? Who is asked to imagine futures for others? Whose imagination becomes useful, visible, fundable, and exhausted? What happens if they call our fiction participatory design? What happens when our rehearsals of autonomy become models for governance? Can we remain open to what does not yet exist without denying the conditions that sustain and constrain us now?

Author’s Note

I originally wrote this story to be read during the opening of the book launch for In But Not Of: Practices of Commoning in Art and Infrastructure, a publication I worked on as co-editor and contributor.

The story was written as a fictional companion to the book’s introduction. Where the introduction thinks through the contradiction of commoning within cultural institutions, the story translates that contradiction into a forest inside an empire. This is the condition suggested by the title “in but not of” borrowed from Harney and Moten: inhabiting institutions without being fully reducible to them, while also refusing the fantasy of standing completely outside. The forest’s autonomy is real, but conditional. Its sociality shelters, exhausts, includes, excludes, and becomes useful to forces beyond itself.

I am sharing the story here as a side entrance to the book. In But Not Of is published by Onomatopee, and you can find more information about the book on the publisher’s website.

Diagram with the Goblin

“I think, therefore I am.”

A bracelet began buzzing. Its wearer continued speaking on a sunlit terrace. Her voice was monotonous, as if what mattered was not the content of her speech, but the sheer fact that it was said by her.

“I declare these statements truthful.”

“I empirically experienced the following, and thus shall be trusted by those who might benefit from such belief.”

After each statement, the bracelet vibrated. Anyone could make their living by being themselves. As long as one was true to oneself, they could convince others. Authenticity was scarce and therefore valuable, as it wasn’t reproducible.

“I received the submission for item 16390.”

“I confirmed that item 16390 was assigned to my practice.”

“I located item 16390 at the point of intake.”

“I reviewed the manifest of item 16390.”

“I confirmed that item 16390 corresponded to the category under which it had been submitted.”

“I confirmed that item 16390 was marked fragile.”

“I assessed the surface of item 16390 for signs of rupture, leakage, contamination, or unauthorized revision.”

“I accepted responsibility for the handling of item 16390.”

“I transferred item 16390 into its temporary context.”

“I maintained the orientation of item 16390 during transfer.”

“I treated item 16390 with care according to its declared sensitivity.”

Metis was a warehouse worker in a fully automated logistics system. She carried no cargo, no pallets, and had never seen a truck. It didn’t matter whether she performed such tasks. She hadn’t even been to a warehouse. All she did was sell her story once a day, by telling the bracelet what she had supposedly done.

When she was looking for a job, she realized there was no longer demand for manual laborers in logistics. She was told that machines were faster, cheaper, and more reliable than any human worker, and most importantly, didn’t unionize. But that didn’t mean Metis was completely unemployable. The capacity unique to humans was that the category of personhood was applicable to them. While machines wrote excellent legal letters in a millisecond, only humans could sue or be sued. Machines were often more rational in political decisions, but had no right to vote. Machines could think, yet those thoughts were not yet wills. There were already so many doors whose keys were the arbitrary physiology of Homo sapiens, and it was too costly to rebuild all of them.

Therefore, even the automated system needed human deputies for liability. Metis did not even know what item 16390 looked like, but she was a legal subject who handled it, as she narrated to her bracelet. She represented one of the transportation modules, as the central warehouse was compartmentalized into infinitesimal units assigned to each worker. Under the job title of storyteller, she was the first-person “I” in a narrative she received and read every day.

“I reviewed the declared contents of item 16390 against its manifest.”

“I confirmed that no restricted, protected, perishable, biological, or otherwise regulated material was declared in item 16390.”

“I confirmed that no further examination was required under the applicable standards.”

“I confirmed that item 16390 remained coherent within the category under which it had been accepted.”

“I confirmed that item 16390 was suitable for continued circulation.”

“I released item 16390 from its temporary context.”

“I transferred item 16390 toward its point of presentation.”

“I moved to the subsequent section for the incoming submissions.”

“I saw a goblin.”

“I heard a goblin saying… what?”

As Metis halted mid-sentence in perplexity, the bracelet didn’t vibrate. She was not mistaken. The log sent to her clearly said a goblin. But a goblin? In a logistics center? Metis struggled to picture it in her mind. Neither the creature nor the background was something she had ever seen. All she could summon was a squat, snaggle-toothed thing hunched between conveyor belts, looking profoundly out of place beneath the fluorescent lights.

The bracelet beeped hastily, signaling that she had to resume her storytelling. Back to work. In her attempt to suspend disbelief, she read out what she was supposed to say, word by word.

“I heard a goblin saying good morning.”

“I wished the goblin a good morning.”

“I confirmed that no further exchange with the goblin was required.”

“I confirmed that the presence of the goblin did not alter the declared figure of item 16390.”

“I confirmed that item 16390 remained suitable for circulation.”

“I proceeded to the subsequent section for the incoming submissions.”

“I resumed standard intake procedure.”

The rest of the log had nothing extraordinary in it, as it always had, as though trying to perform indifference after a hiccup. But the goblin certainly was real insofar as it was read by her. She knew the weight and value of her words. Whatever she said became legally existent under her guarantee. But that did not mean she knew what it was. Even when she searched online, it only returned images of small creatures with pointed ears and green skin.

“There’s no way it could really mean a folklore monster. Is it a metaphor? Or an acronym?”

But her inquiry could not be more detailed than that. The sole channel that connected her to the warehouse was the log, and goblin was all it specified. Her request for support received an auto-generated response saying that she would hear back in two weeks. She still sat clueless on the terrace in the same posture. Only the sunset evidenced the passing of time.

The goblin had not returned to her stories since. When Metis was about to forget about the riddle, she met someone. The doorbell rang on an otherwise uneventful day.

At first, she thought it was a delivery. There was no other reason for anyone to ring the doorbell. She opened the door with the vague shame of a person who had not prepared herself to be seen. A woman stood outside, shorter than Metis, with long dark curls gathered loosely behind her neck. She wore an ash-colored blazer over a plain shirt and carried a narrow folder under one arm. She looked neither official nor unofficial enough to be comforting. Her shoes were wet from the rain.

“Metis?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Minerva Bard.” She raised the folder slightly, not quite offering it. “I’m assigned to your case.”

“My case?”

Minerva looked down at the folder, then back at her. “You were listed as the handling subject for item 16390.”

Metis felt, before she understood, the faint return of the goblin. Not the creature itself, which she still could not picture without humiliation, but the word, and the hypotheses it invoked.

“I already submitted a support request,” she said.

“I know.”

“They said they would get back to me in two weeks.”

“I know,” Minerva said again. “They didn’t send me because of your request.”

Metis kept one hand on the door. The hallway behind Minerva was empty, except for an electric scooter she had apparently taken, its rusty metal body folded like a crushed metal can.

“Are you police?”

Minerva gave a muted, tired smile. “Nearly, but not exactly.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I am licensed to perform preliminary recollection interviews for civil disputes and certain categories of automation liability.” She paused, as though shrugging off the ugliness of the sentence after saying it. “Most people call it private investigation.”

“So you are police.”

“No,” Minerva said. “Police are more expensive.”

Metis couldn’t take that response seriously, but soon thought it was not the only absurdity she had witnessed lately. Minerva shifted the folder to her other arm. “May I come in?”

“Do I have to let you?”

“I have no right to coerce you.”

“Will it be worse if I don’t?”

Minerva looked at her for a moment. “Possibly.”

That answer, because it did not perform kindness, incongruously made Metis feel less suspicious. She opened the door wider.

“Please remove your shoes before entering.”

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The particular usefulness of nonbinariness as an idea was that, through its mediation, I could attend to a multitude of negations—of corporeal dysphoria within cisnormative romantic relationships and medical systems; of gendered grammars and their effects on subjectivity and sociality; of biopolitical infrastructures that render certain populations surplus; of everything that came after “I refuse” in that coming-out post—without flattening them. Nonbinariness has been a diagram I inhabit, mapping the homology of these heterogeneous instances of violence organized through the gender binary and orienting my attention accordingly. I could therefore survive “in but not of” the binary regime.

Diagram with me beyond this platform!

In my critique of affirmative and representational projects of queerness, I examined what happens to negativity in its reification within institutional milieus, ranging from the celebration of queer art in the art world, to the dropdown menu of gender identities on Hinge, to marriage equality. As Lee Edelman argues, the negativity of the queer is compromised when it is fixed into a “determinate stance or ‘position’ whose determination would thus negate it [the negativity itself]” (Edelman 2004, 4), a process accelerated under liberal discourses of recognition.

This is why the first step in my theoretical inquiry into the revolutionary potentiality of the nonbinary should begin with the prefix “non-” and the negation it indicates. This question works in tandem with a number of critical accounts of its “binary” counterpart—what “non-” negates—such as the work of Paul B. Preciado on the pharmacopornographic regime, and it informs how nonbinary life and practices can be mobilized toward transformation. My interest in negation stems from Theodor W. Adorno’s negative dialectics, where “every individual determination” is understood not merely as “a negation of that individual determination but also as itself the negative” (Adorno 2019, 241). My aim in this text is to attend to the negativity immanent to nonbinary subjectivity through this materialist framework, making available another pathway between queer theory and the critique of political economy.

Given these contexts, this project is inevitably concerned with futurity, as Adorno suggested that “the subject’s nonidentity [which negativity reveals without resolution] without sacrifice would be utopian” (Adorno 1990, 281). José Esteban Muñoz appropriates the dialectical tradition of negative utopianism, especially that of Ernst Bloch, in his study of queer futurity, where “the negative becomes the resource for a certain mode of queer utopianism” (Muñoz 2019).

Queerness, for Muñoz, is an ideality that is “not yet here,” drawing on the utopia that Bloch and Adorno negatively defined. In their conversation, the two Marxist thinkers situate utopia in negation: “utopia is … in the determined negation of that which merely is, and by concretizing itself as something false, it always points at the same time to what should be” (Bloch 1989, 11). As Muñoz argues, “we are not yet queer,” even in this historically specific moment in which an unprecedented number of people actively imagine life outside the gender binary, since the term nonbinary did not produce that negativity but rendered a preexisting operative structure legible.1 If so, how can we attend to, and work with, the immanent negativity of the prefix “non-” toward the utopian horizon of queerness without collapsing it into yet another identity category?

To pursue this question, the text first distinguishes three different responses to gender’s constitutive negativity: the reactionary attempt to expel contradiction from identity, read through Brian Massumi’s account of the Man-Standard and negative prehension; Lee Edelman’s absolutization of queer negativity against reproductive futurism; and José Esteban Muñoz’s negative-utopian use of negation as a resource for queer futurity. From there, I turn to the body as a utopian horizon, reading hormone replacement therapy through Massumi’s process ontology of N sexes, and Jules Gill-Peterson’s account of originary technicity, in order to argue that nonbinary nonidentity is not merely conceptual but materially operative through technical, racialized, and biopolitical infrastructures. Finally, I extend this account into a speculative and science-fictional register, drawing on Massumi’s theory of qualitative surplus and Ursula K. Le Guin’s non-Euclidean utopia, to ask what kind of speculative practice can attend to the surplus of the “non-” without converting it into either an identity category or a quantified value-form. Across these movements, nonbinariness is treated not as a stable position beyond the binary, but as a negative-dialectical, technical, and speculative practice of sustaining nonidentity toward a not-yet.

Against, Within, and Through Negativity

In discussing the negative dialectics of the nonbinary, it is crucial to recognize the negations already constitutive of the gender binary that the nonbinary negates. Omitting this risks naturalizing that negativity instead of treating it as a historically specific condition produced through exclusion. Lee Edelman recognizes a certain negation as endemic to queerness. In his framework, queerness is produced within normativity as its constitutive outside: “the queer’s abjectified difference… secures normativity’s identity.” Queerness here does not introduce negativity into the social field but is constituted through it, in the place assigned to what must be excluded for that field to cohere. As Edelman puts it, queerness “marks the place of the gap… from which [the social order] can never escape,” a structural remainder rather than a positive identity (Edelman 2004, 26).

Normative identities thus stabilize themselves against queerness as “the negativity opposed to every form of social viability” (Edelman 2004, 9). This is consistent with how Brian Massumi discusses the identity of Man as a negatively constituted category, which he calls the Man-Standard after Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It is intensively expressed in the very present moment, where certain normative categories of gender exemplified by MAGA masculinity function jointly with the resurgence of fascism worldwide. He uses the ironic case of Nick Fuentes, an incel influencer who faced suspicion from his audience about the authenticity of his involuntary celibacy. He had to defend himself by making a preposterous statement about his misogynistic purity: “What? People calling me gay because I’ve never had a girlfriend? I think if anything—if anything—it makes me less gay. If anything it makes me not gay. As opposed to less gay. Not that there’s any gay, but it makes me not gay … It’s the reverse. That actually makes me really more heterosexual, because honestly, dating women is gay.” To understand the paradoxical character of identity here, Massumi draws on A. N. Whitehead’s notion of negative prehension, showing how masculinity is constituted through what it rejects, such that “Man is dependent on its othering of Woman for its own formation” (Massumi 2025). Seen through this lens, gender is a normative operation structured through exclusion and internal contradiction with an immanent instability: “the more he pulls to the masculinist extreme of the Man-Standard, the more he is pulled away from it, toward the constituent subcategories it embroilingly defines itself against.”

My interest here is to understand this constitutive negativity of gender—Edelman traces this through psychoanalysis, and Massumi does so through Whitehead’s process ontology as well as the poststructuralist idea of ex-inscription—in relation to my aforementioned question of negation that the prefix “non-” announces, drawing on Muñoz-inspired dialectics despite their heterogeneous theoretical genealogies. In all these cases, gender, as a social construct that fails to coincide with itself, aligns closely with what Adorno would call nonidentity. In Massumi’s account, “once something is ex-inscribed in you, you can’t will it away… you can’t un-negatively prehend,” and “two negative acts don’t make a positive one.” Masculinity’s identity crisis is immanent to its structure and refractory to closure, as in Fuentes not being able to “cut out a cut-out without just making it bigger.” This echoes Adorno’s insistence that dialectics proceeds from nonidentity; negative dialectics was his critique of affirmative dialectics, which conflated the “negation of negation” with the positive.

What is notable here is that these experiences of gender’s nonidentity—not commensurable, yet certainly interrelated—are followed by different negative acts in response: for Fuentes, as analyzed by Massumi; for Edelman; and for Muñoz. This divergence results in the category of involuntary celibacy as most masculine and least gay, the rejection of “reproductive futurism” for Edelman, and the prefiguration of queer utopia for Muñoz.

Fuentes negates the very appearance of nonidentity in an attempt to distill identity without contradiction. This not only deepens ex-inscription, as Massumi demonstrates, but also importantly exemplifies a specific kind of rejection of dialectics. The contradiction he tries to uproot is “nonidentity under the aspect of identity,” an effect of “the dialectical primary,” which “makes the thought of unity the measure of heterogeneity” (Adorno 1990, 5). In contrast, Edelman affirms the irreducibility of negativity, but in doing so, he then makes negativity itself into the quasi-teleological truth of queerness. He suggests embracing the “ascription of negativity to the queer,” in refusal of “the insistence of hope itself as affirmation, which is always affirmation of an order whose refusal will register as unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane.” By doing so, one can finally attend to “the persistence of something internal to reason that reason refuses, that turning the force of queerness against all subjects, however queer, can afford an access to the jouissance that at once defines and negates us.” What he calls jouissance here is constant and inescapable in the very social order under which queerness is made abject.

This embrace “can have no justification if justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value,” and he finds its value “in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself.” He diverges from Adorno’s negative dialectics, where critique could orient itself toward a determinate good or future. Queerness, according to Edelman, “would deliberately sever us from ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of knowing ourselves and hence of knowing our ‘good.’” Thus, he refuses the very logic of futurity, which he calls “kid stuff,” since that futurism is inevitably “reproductive,” and “queerness names the side of those not fighting for the children” (Edelman 2004, 3–6). Edelman’s use of negation is not dialectical in this sense, because he refuses the mediation through which dialectics sustains contradiction as historically dynamic. In his account, negativity is not unlike another identity, but an absolute condition aligned with jouissance, which neither resolves nor opens onto transformation.

Following Muñoz, I argue that the transformative potentiality of the prefix “non-” is only accessible when it is distinguished from Fuentes’s attempt to expel negativity and Edelman’s attempt to absolutize it. Muñoz locates his project of queer utopia precisely in that “impossible performance of the negation of the negation.” Negativity is treated as a resource, “a critical means of working with and through negation” (Muñoz 2019). His negation is dialectical in the negative-dialectical sense: it preserves contradiction toward a horizon that cannot be positively resolved. This triangulation thus offers a critical foundation from which I will speculate on a queer materialist account of nonbinary potentiality, where the “non-” no longer names only the negation of the binary but a technical and bodily capacity to sustain nonidentity as a field of emergence.

The Body as a Technical Horizon

“It is important not to hand over futurity to normative white reproductive futurity. That dominant mode of futurity is indeed “winning,” but that is all the more reason to call on a utopian political imagination that will enable us to glimpse another time and place: a “not-yet” where queer youths of color actually get to grow up. Utopian and willfully idealistic practices of thought are in order if we are to resist the perils of heteronormative pragmatism and Anglo-normative pessimism. Imagining a queer subject who is abstracted from the sensuous intersectionalities that mark our experience is an ineffectual way out. Such an escape via singularity is a ticket whose price most cannot afford. The way to deal with the asymmetries and violent frenzies that mark the present is not to forget the future. The here and now is simply not enough. Queerness should and could be about a desire for another way of being in both the world and time, a desire that resists mandates to accept that which is not enough.”

Muñoz is critical of Edelman’s immediate binding of “the future of the child as futurity” to white and straight time, which “accepts and reproduces this monolithic figure of the child that is indeed always already white.” He importantly reminds us: “The future is only the stuff of some kids. Racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity” (Muñoz 2019). My experience of taking estrogen supplements for the last two years exemplifies a related subject, not only a kid denied futurity but also an adult in their second puberty. The back of the tablet indicates the days assigned to each pill, which has not been particularly useful in my case. The inscription was made for those going through menopause, who are supposed to take one pill a day, whereas I had to take one every morning and another every evening for my hormone replacement therapy (HRT) as a trans person. Consequently, it gave me the impression that my time was running twice as fast as straight time, toward the future of bodily indeterminacy. This technology I use for queer futurity is genealogically rooted in the contraceptive pill container as “a prosthesis for women’s lack of memory and responsibility,” subordinating their endocrinological rhythm to the biopolitical project of making certain populations less fertile (Preciado 2018). The device that enforces reproductive futurity has an immanent negativity that can be mobilized toward non-reproductive, queer temporality.

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An open letter to those invited into collectivity on the condition that they do not interrupt its structure,

We are writing this—although the open letter format itself was listed as one of the “20 most powerless” in the art world—to remind you that you are not alone in your intuition: the images of your working hands have silently profited infrastructures which demand gratitude and silence as conditions of inclusion.

These infrastructures, often privately governed despite collective labor, sustain themselves by performing the image of affirmation, while foreclosing the negativity through which such affirmation could become transformative. If these conditions silence your critique by framing it as selfishness, and conflate compliance with care, it does not mean your refusal is isolated. It situates you within a genealogy of struggles against enclosure, which operates through moral affirmation where care, inclusion, visibility, safety, or growth are mobilized as gestural claims that suspend economic and political accountability.

From feminized care labor rendered non-economic in the name of love, to queer movements absorbed into entrepreneurial visibility, to urban commons gentrified as creative projects, to the language of love itself instrumentalized within settler-colonial projects—most starkly condensed in the image of an Israeli soldier holding a pride flag over the rubble of Gaza—this genealogy names a common condition under which class emerges relationally, outside the logics of representation. It is from within this totality that we offer a concrete example. This case of the enclosure of queer commons that we have recently witnessed will likely sound familiar to many working in the cultural industry under the category of “community.”

Our experience is grounded in our work within Bebe Books, a project publicly framed as a queer collective, and within cultural institutions, where this framing has been institutionally hosted. When we addressed the contradiction between the collective’s public claims and its private structure—specifically the founders’ unilateral control over infrastructure, representation, and decision-making—this critique was met with explicit verbal aggression from one of the founders, followed by a refusal to acknowledge harm. What ensued was a retaliatory sequence: critique reframed as bullying, dissent pathologized as hostility, and institutional protocols mobilized to discipline those who spoke up. Access to shared communication channels and decision-making processes was subsequently restricted, demonstrating how infrastructure itself functions as a mechanism of discipline. Rather than resolving the violence, institutional policies were used to normalize it, teaching us that power in supposedly “queer” institutions often operates not through overt repression, but through retaliation, procedural capture, and the erasure of critique under the language of care and neutrality.

For a more detailed account, please visit: An Account of Dirty Dishes

This open letter is our response to these extractive conditions and the accountability that must be borne by those who design and unilaterally benefit from them. It is also part of an ongoing process of collective organization emerging in response to these conditions. While calls for accountability have often been denounced as “cancel culture,” the scope of our work is beyond the problematics of certain individuals, as it proposes a framework for the class formation specific to the struggles within minoritarian movements. Therefore, we expand the meaning of the following terms from our experience as recurring categories of class.

(Queer) Collective names an open sociality productive of transformative potentials through shared labor and collective authorship.

Founders name a class within collectives that mediates between the radical negativity of marginalized life and the affirmative demands of the market.

When collective labor produces infrastructure that remains privately governed, the collective ceases to function as a social relation and instead becomes a brand that extracts value from the image of collectivity.

This redefinition, however, is not to give an excuse to the individuals implicated, but to situate their violence within a political context, and correspondingly define what their accountability practically can be.

Based on this framework, these demands and questions emerge as structural necessities. The demands operate across multiple, interdependent levels: the level of lived experience, where harm must be acknowledged; the level of institutional mediation, where procedures must cease to function as instruments of enclosure; and the level of infrastructure itself, where the material and representational conditions of collective life must be reorganized.

I. Acknowledgment of Harm and Labor

• We demand explicit acknowledgment of verbal aggression and structural harm, rather than their reframing as misunderstanding, disagreement, or “diverging perspectives.” Such reframing is itself part of the violence it conceals.

• We demand recognition of collective labor—including affective, representational, organizational, and intellectual labor—as labor. The conditions of extraction depend upon the systematic misrecognition of this labor as friendship, voluntary contribution, or personal interests. To name this labor as labor is the first step in interrupting its enclosure.

II. Transformation of Institutional Mediation

• We demand accountability mechanisms for founders and institutional power-holders that do not rely on self-regulation, neutrality, or closed mediation processes that deny underlying power relations. Mediation cannot function as a tool of resolution when it remains structurally aligned with those whose power is being contested.

• We demand that complaint and conflict-resolution procedures materially protect those subjected to harm, rather than functioning as instruments of institutional self-protection. Procedures that exist only to preserve institutional legitimacy reproduce the violence they claim to address.

• We demand the right to critique—including artistic, theoretical, and speculative critique—without retaliation, censorship, or the weaponization of care, safety, or accusations of bullying as disciplinary tools. Critique is not a failure of collectivity, but the very condition of its possibility.

III. Redistribution of Collective Infrastructure and Narrative Power

• We demand redistribution of access to and control over collective infrastructure—including archives, platforms, representation, and communication channels—that has been built through shared labor. Infrastructure produced collectively cannot remain privately governed without transforming collectivity into a mechanism of extraction.

• We demand the right to narrative self-determination. Collective history and public representation belong to all whose labor produced them, not to a founder-centric brand or privately held image. The enclosure of narrative constitutes an ontological negation of the collectivity itself.

IV. Organizational Consequence

• These demands are also a call for cultural workers within the collective to organize. The Queer Collective Workers’ Union emerges as a historically specific form of labor’s antagonism and a strike against representational extraction. This necessity arises precisely where collective labor’s apparent autonomy internalizes the heteronomy it claims to resist, giving rise to the form of organization specific to its condition.

Open Questions

• What does it mean for a “queer collective” to exist when its infrastructure remains privately owned and unilaterally governed?

• When does representation cease to function as a tool of emancipation and instead become an extractive value-form?

• Who benefits when critique is redescribed as hostility? When critique is rebranded as cruelty, what vocabulary and tactics remain available for resistance?

• How do institutions decide what counts as harm, and who is authorized to make that determination?

• What forms of violence are normalized when neutrality is treated as an ethical position rather than a political one?

• How can collective organizing avoid reproducing the same logics of enclosure and discipline it claims to resist? How do we found institutions without reproducing a propertied class within them?

• What infrastructures are necessary to sustain collective accountability without retaliation, and collective authorship without enclosure?

As a workers’ union, our goal is to collectively reimagine forms of organization that do not reproduce the violence we have witnessed. This requires systems of value in which representation is no longer the totalizing value-form, and the development of reclaimed tools for genuinely collective authorship. This letter does not conclude a struggle, but marks its beginning. The infrastructure necessary to sustain it is already under construction and beginning to take public form.

With care and attention,

Queer Collective Workers’ Union

http://qcwu.work/

In my life in the cultural industry, I have been living in incessant dissonance with what Nancy Fraser observed as the “recognition–redistribution dilemma”—the situation in which “people who are subject to both cultural injustice and economic injustice need both recognition and redistribution” and thus “need both to claim and to deny their specificity” (Fraser 1997). I recognize it as a symptom of the collective inability to resist the Cartesian dualism that treats the cognitive and the material as distinct categories in the sites of cultural production. By this I mean the habituated bifurcation that separates the cultural domain of identity from the material domain of political economy, treating recognition and redistribution as distinct and potentially conflicting orders of justice. This is consistent with the disparity between cognitive and material methodologies across various disciplines of knowledge production, from the “heuristic contrast between attentional technologies [namely the digital media assemblage] and techniques [embodied capacities]” in anthropology, to the divide between the commons as a historically situated mode of living eroded by capitalist enclosures and the Creative Commons as a practice of informational ownership severed from that genealogy—a detachment that Maria Mies was critical of (Pedersen, Albris, and Seaver 2021; Mies 2014).

And I have been acutely aware of how the attention economy—and the art world, following it as its core system of value—reproduces this tendency at an unmediated pace. Under the system of value it imposes, all recognition is made commensurable through quantified attention as the universal currency. Its circulation is no longer reciprocally conditioned by the material reality it represents, but instead produces surplus “value” through its own fictitious logic and reorganizes the material correspondingly. Alf Hornborg similarly discusses the homologous “replacement” of energy as “the vital force flowing through agrarian societies” by money as “the more abstract and elusive ‘value’ that seemed to flow through and empower mercantile societies” (Hornborg 2013, 43). Correspondingly, he proposes the use of “asymmetric flows of energy” instead of the notion of monetary value, which is inconsistent with “objective material flows,” in Marxist and ecological economic projects aimed at exposing “the ideological function of the market in mystifying asymmetric flows” (51). In the same vein, to critically analyze the reification of attention and its totalizing effect, I propose a metabolic theory of attention—a proposal to consider the metabolic conditions of attention’s ontology. What metabolic processes function as the infrastructure of attention?

The analysis that follows unfolds through a relational map of heterogeneous genealogies and non-linear arguments. The diagram aims to trace the metabolic relations through which attention emerges across entangled domains: phenomenological accounts of attention as lived modulation, anthropological and ecological approaches that situate attention within relational milieus, cognitive frameworks that model it as selective processing, and political-economic analyses that expose its role in valorization and extraction. These are further situated alongside media-material and geological perspectives that foreground the infrastructural and energetic conditions of attentional processes. This conceptual dispersion is therefore an index of attention’s non-identity: each genealogy isolates a partial determination that cannot be reduced to the others. The diagram functions as a mode of mediation that holds these determinations in relation without resolving their differences, allowing their metabolic interdependencies to become legible across scales, from neural activity and bodily expenditure to planetary material flows and infrastructural systems (Rai 2025).

Diagram with me!

From Attention Ecology to Metabolic Attention

Terranova conceptualizes attention through a dual movement in which it is both “necessarily limited and therefore scarce” and subject to a “degradation of attention” under conditions of informational surplus (Terranova 2012, 2, 4). The cognitive here is inseparable from the material, as attention is measured and modulated through the brain’s “neurophysiological limits” and its neuroplastic responses to stimuli (9). Attention thus appears as an emergent property of intrinsically dispersed cognitive subjectivity that is ontologically grounded in, and constrained by, the biological and metabolic conditions of the brain within a broader socio-technical assemblage. Therefore, a study of attention remains incomplete when “a form of attention operating from within our individual body-minds (endo-attention)” and “attentional tasks that are performed by technological devices (exo-attention)” are treated under incompatible analytic frameworks (Citton 2019). Through the proposition of these interrelated categories, Yves Citton demonstrates that attention is already environmentally distributed, against approaches that understand it “in strictly individualist terms.”

This relational understanding of attention exemplifies Citton’s notion of attention ecology, an idea that “attention is an interaction… the essential mediator assuring my relationship with the environment that nourishes my survival… a being persists only insofar as it manages to ‘pay attention’ to that on which it depends… Paying attention is a genuine activity… maintaining tenable relations with our milieu” (Citton 2017, 22). This reframing of attention is based on Arne Naess and Félix Guattari’s paradigm of ecosophy—“the ensemble of scientific, political, environmental, social, and mental ecologies,” which points to “the perspective of an ethico-political choice for diversity, for creative dissensus, for responsibility with respect to difference and otherness” (Guattari 2018, 33, 66). Attention ecology thus potentiates a transversal passage through the aforementioned rift between the cognitive and the material, without making those heterogeneous approaches commensurable under totalizing laws.

However, the mere emphasis on attention’s relationality—the articulation of “passage” itself—is insufficient for its understanding as a political economy, because what flows through it remains unexplored. This is where I propose metabolism as “a vital essence flowing through” attention ecology. This proposition might sound like “the concept of monetary value as the standard against which all things are assessed,” yet these two are fundamentally different, since energy “refers to objective material flows,” unlike the fictitious idea of money (Hornborg 2013, 44). On a guided tour in Amstelpark, ecologist Arend Wakker described energy as the only universal language in ecology, tracing its transformations from solar radiation to photosynthesis in plants, its redistribution through trophic chains, its decomposition by fungi and microorganisms, and its sedimentation across geological processes. It is only under the reification of an ecology into economy that this language becomes “the only universal currency,” a slogan famously endorsed by Bill Gates (Smil 2017). The shift in framework from attention economy to attention ecology that Citton suggests thus requires comprehensive discussion not only of relations but also of the transformation and reproduction of the material realities composing those relations. This gives analytical valence to Citton’s attention ecology within the broader discourse of political economy. Both exo- and endo-attention are fuzzy webs of metabolic relations encompassing rare earth minerals in your phone, its circuits warmed by algorithmic processes, its planned obsolescence, the scrolling movements of your fingers, photoreceptor cells in your eyes, and the bioelectricity in your brain that can be empirically observed through EEG. A metabolic theory of attention offers a common language for these heterogeneous instances without flattening them.

Attentional Metabolism—Entropy and Reproduction

The discussion of attention in metabolic terms can be clarified by adopting Berger’s distinction between “two interrelated dimensions of attention.” Drawing on Heidegger, Berger suggests that attention names the movement through which beings come to presence within worldly engagement. Entities emerge insofar as they are foregrounded through Aufmerksamkeit, while another dimension of attention remains aware of its own movement through a sustained “staying-with the manifestation of the same emerging entities,” which Berger associates with Achtsamkeit (Berger 2020, 114–115). Berger further relates these two dimensions to mechanisms described in cognitive science as processes of “selection (highlighting, foregrounding)” and “effort (vigilance, mindfulness)” (114–115).

In the metabolic reading proposed here, these two dimensions can be understood in thermodynamic terms. Attention can be analogically interpreted as a process through which living systems temporarily generate local cognitive order by selectively organizing sensory information, thereby reducing informational entropy within a bounded domain. Yet the energetic expenditure required for this ordering simultaneously contributes to the broader increase in thermodynamic entropy in the surrounding world. The inevitability of this condition, articulated in the second law of thermodynamics, calls for another form of attention that maintains the living system’s participation in the irreversible unfolding of worldly processes. In this sense, attention is not merely cognitive but ontological in metabolic terms, consistent with Heidegger’s paradox of “willing to transform oneself”: “the very self that would stay with its own movement is itself made manifest in that ground of worldly engagement” (Berger 2020, 113).

For example, air conditioning is a technology of attentional–entropic management that produces the “deep-seated cultural and social constructions of thermal comfort” while displacing surplus heat outside. The ontology of the modern subject has historically been constituted through the “human comfort zone,” a standard “based on the body of the young Caucasian adult,” as a condition in which “high civilization” and human health could flourish, while the tropical outside has been associated with “negative consequences on productivity.” At the same time, the same subject’s sense of futurity is decisively conditioned by the climate conditions it produces. Following the metabolic framework, the genealogy of the attention–media assemblage stretches back to 1902, when Willis Carrier developed an electrical cooling system to “ensure high-quality color printing on paper by controlling the heat and humidity within the printing room” (Lokko 2022). Many heterogeneous nodes within attention ecology, from the human brain to server farms, release heat in their operations and thus rely on air conditioning, to varying degrees, for the management of entropy.

Within this framework, the selective dimension of attention takes on a distinctly economic form. What Heidegger describes as foregrounding (Aufmerksamkeit) corresponds to what Citton characterizes as the “ontologically extractive” character of attention. If attention consists in “a selective processing of sensory data geared towards steering the organism’s (re)actions,” it operates by “extracting useful affordances from its environment” (Citton 2019). Under capitalist conditions, this selective ordering becomes systematically oriented toward the production of surplus. Attentional processes isolate relations that can be rendered economically relevant, allowing certain activities to appear as productive while others recede into the background of apparent non-value. As Brian Larkin observes, “the regulation of attention is central to the production of value” (Larkin 2013, 339). In this sense, attentional extraction functions as a metabolic operation of value production: it produces local negentropy while relying on broader fields of disorder that remain outside the visible domain of productivity.

If the extractive dimension foregrounds value, the metabolic maintenance of the background becomes structurally obscured. Here, Vishmidt’s account of reproductive labour clarifies the political economy of entropy. As she argues, reproductive activity appears as useless or wasteful precisely because it absorbs the dissipation generated by productive processes, making it “at once the exception to and constitutive of value.” The everyday work of sustaining life exemplifies this entropic character: “reproductive work is entropic, it produces nothing: ‘After a day’s work, no matter how tiring, the housewife has produced no tangible object—except, perhaps, dinner; and that will disappear in less than half the time it took to prepare’” (Vishmidt 2019).

The empirical experience of entropy here often arises in the absence or failure of unevenly distributed reproductive labor, under which productive activity can appear as orderly and valuable. This entropic moment—“the crisis of care,” as diagnosed in Nancy Fraser’s historical account—is immanent in social reproduction under capitalism, since its “orientation to unlimited accumulation tends to destabilize the very processes of social reproduction on which it relies” (Fraser 2016, 100). In metabolic terms, the capitalist system continually intensifies the extractive relegation of entropy in order for productive activity to be foregrounded, while undermining the conditions of its own maintenance in the background. The crisis of care thus appears as a crisis in the distribution of attention: the social order privileges the selective extraction of value while systematically neglecting the reproductive attentions that maintain bodies and environments.

Citton’s notion of “heteromation” further clarifies how this asymmetry operates within contemporary attention infrastructures. What appears as the replacement of human workers by algorithms frequently consists instead in a “devaluation rather than a substitution of human labor by new machinic assemblages.” Tasks presented as automated—such as the digitalization of administrative services—continue to require human activity, but this labor is increasingly displaced from waged employment toward precarious or unpaid forms. As Citton explains, work that once belonged to salaried civil servants may now be performed directly by users themselves, who enter their own data into systems without compensation. Under the “glitter of an automation sold as a way for humans to delegate menial tasks to machines,” heteromation reveals a redistribution rather than the elimination of labour: work shifts “from waged labour (with benefits) to precarious jobs (self-entrepreneurs, click farms, Mechanical Turks), and from poorly paid micro-tasks to free labour (self-service, gamification, networking)” (Citton 2019). Within the metabolic framework proposed here, heteromation can be understood as an artifice that redistributes the entropic costs of attentional ordering across dispersed populations. The maintenance work required for digital infrastructures is metabolized through distributed attentional labor while remaining largely invisible within the circuits of value it sustains. In this sense, the infrastructural maintenance of attention mirrors the position of reproductive labour within capitalist social reproduction: it absorbs entropy so that ordered signals, productive figures, and profitable relations can appear in the foreground.

From this perspective, the ontologically constitutive attention that Heidegger describes as Achtsamkeit can be reinterpreted in metabolic terms as a form of attentiveness to entropic processes. While the extractive dimension of attention produces local order by selectively foregrounding signals and relations, Achtsamkeit corresponds to the ongoing metabolic work required to sustain the milieu in which such ordering can occur. Rather than extracting figures from the world, it remains with the processes through which order continuously emerges and dissipates. In thermodynamic terms, this attentiveness acknowledges that every act of selective organization generates entropy that must be metabolized elsewhere. The reproductive attentions that maintain the milieu thus appear not only as “an affirmative politics that valorises the ‘subject of reproduction’ and her activities,” but as the ontological condition of attentional order itself (Vishmidt 2019). What Heidegger describes as “staying-with the manifestation of the same emerging entities” can therefore be understood as a form of attentional metabolism attuned to the entropic relations through which worlds are continuously re-individuated.

Attention under Rentier Capitalism and Total Subsumption

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My theoretical writings shared on this platform have been about various subjectivities—director, gentrifying collectivity, and queer platform—emerging within the institutional milieu and their roles in the abstraction of the transformative potentiality of (queer) culture. As occasionally hinted there, those works are based on my empirical experience in my day-to-day affiliation with institutions, especially during my recent fellowship at the Jan van Eyck Academie with the queer collective Bebe Books. The joke I made there repeatedly—those who saw me in person during that period have probably heard it too often—was that my position was like that of a white male anthropologist doing “his” fieldwork on institutional power relations in the rural Netherlands. The irony of this joke has served as an effective strategy for my own survival in the identity-extractive art world over the last few years, although it remains questionable how sustainable it is for my body and mind in the long term. Moreover, the joke requires a crucial theoretical correction: there is a qualitative difference between me and the anthropologist that makes our politics irreconcilable. Unlike his disinterested, universal, autonomous subjectivity—a Kantian deciding subject—the ontology of my criticality is rooted in its very object, since I was even dwelling in the house it provided. And that dependence did not pertain only to the specific institution in question, but relationally expanded into its infrastructures—namely, the anti-squat organization through which the institution arranged our housing—where the possibility of being an artistic subject is complicit in the devastating real subsumption of housing infrastructure by the speculative real-estate market.

Find more relations in my diagram!

My subjectivity here is therefore consistent with Georg Lukács’s emphasis on proletarian theory and praxis, Walter Benjamin’s “author as producer,” and the Buddhist onto-epistemology of the thousand-armed, thousand-eyed Guanyin, whose every one of their thousand hands has an eye in its palm. More crucially, it is in direct conversation with the late Marina Vishmidt’s Infrastructural Critique—a practice that sustains the tension between antagonistic clarity toward structures of domination and reflexive awareness of its own implicated position, such that critique becomes a self-relating negativity. I was fortunate to have access to its not-yet-published manuscript via the Kinks in Cables reading group organized by Liza Prins and Alina Lupu. In this written reflection, I diagram my engagement with that text, which coincided with a recent encounter with an apt milieu in my working-class neighborhood.

Having said that, after a year in Maastricht, I am now living in Anderlecht. Brought there by a neighborhood friend—one of the most heartfelt coincidences that has happened here so far—I went to the Marais de Biestebroeck, a swamp that emerged in the early 2000s following the demolition of Shell’s hydrocarbon storage facilities. The diagram of infrastructural critique I am intuiting here is that of the swamp as a site of non-identity, whose negativity is not only social but also ecological and geological. My critical work at the art institution is homologous to it, as it branches from one infrastructure to another. The question at stake is how to draw a comprehensive map of negativity across these terrains, encompassing the critique of extractive infrastructures of both nature and culture.

More-than-human Infrastructural Antagonism

The first instance of negativity at the swamp that I witnessed was the metabolic surplus of Japanese knotweed, through which the swamp’s ecological relations became infrastructurally antagonistic. Importantly, this attention was not one I already had, but one directed by the friend who brought me there. Although I was familiar with its name and its ecological status as an “alien invasive species,” since a few art projects have critically addressed the politics of that category, I have no memory of any conscious encounters with the plant itself, nor did I know how to recognize it in nature. It was only when my friend kindly instructed me on how to identify it by its hollow, zig-zag, segmented stems that I realized its abundance at the site. Japanese knotweed was everywhere. A different register of knowing opened up, beyond what I had previously encountered through local newspaper coverage.

According to reports I read, several development projects had been proposed for the Marais de Biestebroeck over the years, with the most recent excavation works initiated in preparation for a residential real estate project. In January 2025, these works were temporarily suspended by Leefmilieu Brussel after inspectors determined that the presence of Japanese knotweed on the site posed a significant risk of further spread through earth-moving activities. The suspension required the developer to conduct an expert inventory of invasive species and produce a management plan for their containment. Until these conditions were met, further digging was prohibited, effectively placing the site’s redevelopment on hold. In practice, the confirmed presence of Japanese knotweed on the site, combined with environmental regulation, significantly increases development costs. Excavation must be preceded by specialized ecological surveys, followed by containment or removal protocols requiring certified contractors, controlled handling of contaminated soil, and long-term monitoring to prevent re-emergence. These measures lengthen project timelines and introduce financial risks that cannot be easily predicted or insured against at the planning stage, making redevelopment substantially more expensive than comparable sites without such constraints.

I could not help thinking of Marina Vishmidt’s Infrastructural Critique, which I was reading at the time. Japanese knotweed’s relationship with the swamp—together with many other relations in a fuzzy web—activates the negativity that delayed the immediate reification of the place into a real-estate project. Within the temporality cut open by the same antagonism, reeds, salamanders, some unhoused people, and independent soccer matches all dwell in heterogeneous modes, variously conditioning the swamp’s non-identity. Although nonhuman life is not foregrounded as an analytic category in Vishmidt’s work, she defines infrastructural critique as a “materialist theory of conditions,” operating at the level of historically produced conditions and contradictions rather than presupposing a specific subject of critique. Thus, the potential for an eco-Marxist reading of it is not foreclosed, for example, when the case of Japanese knotweed is understood not as an identity category but as a condition within infrastructural arrangements. I intuit that this realization could offer a framework to bypass the affirmative practice of ecological romanticism, anthropomorphism, and the celebration of nonhuman otherness, without withdrawing from art’s role in the time of climate crisis. Even Japanese knotweed loses its antagonistic valence when used as a mere alternative craft material within bio-art and design trends.1

Metabolism and Entropy at the Swamp

Here, a critical hinge for a deliberately ecological reading of Infrastructural Critique lies in Vishmidt’s attention to entropy, which she introduces as a structural condition that capitalism systematically displaces onto devalued reproductive labor. Read in this way, Vishmidt’s concept of entropy can be understood in conjunction with the late Marxist notion of metabolism and its subsequent eco-Marxist rereadings.

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This fiction grew out of questions I explore more directly in my essay On Not Using Adobe, a reflection on the biopolitics and technicity of creative and queer life. The essay is not required reading, but it may offer additional context.

Craft

“Clay becomes the substance of life in Mesopotamian, Greek, Abrahamic, Egyptian, Chinese, and Yoruba traditions, where gods sculpt the first humans from it. I am not religious, but as a former carpenter, I truly understand why it had to be clay. They wouldn’t have seemed as potent if they had carved us out of wood, because what a wood block can become is already conditioned by the capacities innate to it. Although the two practices sound similar, sculpting clay and carving wood are paradigmatically different in nature. The former is additive; the latter is subtractive. Gods could add pieces of clay onto each other until it reached the shape they desired. I, instead, used to start from a wooden block, its grain direction revealing different textures with every layer I carved. My craft could never be a command, but only a conversation with the material about what I want and what it can do. When that negotiation fails, what I carved away never grows back. It was an expensive lesson. As a junior, I once pushed too hard, not listening to what my hand was in contact with. The blade slid too far, and I lost my left ring finger. It wouldn’t make for the most elegant creation story if gods had made the same mistake.”

Anansi wasn’t sure if their response was convincing. They gave a furtive glance at the interviewers’ expressions. A few were nodding, but their response wouldn’t have mattered in the end. The interviewers all knew the job would be given to Anansi regardless of what they said, although this internal decision hadn’t been communicated to the interviewee yet. Their shape language performed best under algorithmic assessment among all applicants; that alone sufficed as a reason to hire them. While nine fingers were enough to maintain their craft, they were no longer a carpenter. In fact, there were no professional artisans left—at least in “this” part of the world. The entire form-giving industry had been undermined when Mercury became popular.

Invented initially by a spray-paint manufacturer who wanted the most flaming red, Mercury was a neuroactive pigment that modulated the cognition of its viewers to make the color appear redder than it actually was. Soon, the R&D department realized that the true potential of this unbelievable redness transcended the realm of mere color. If it could reassign the perception of color, it could do so for all other categories of sensation. Mercury soon stopped being marketed as a pigment at all. It became the totality of living experience, offered by subscription. When applied to surfaces meant to be seen or touched, the coating drastically reorganized experience around them. Once sprayed, the object underneath did not change. Its physical properties remained intact, yet were decoupled from what reached the nervous system. A soft sponge could be “hardened” by preventing motor neurons from firing, so no human hand could press in. When sprayed on a razor blade, it could feel pliant even as a fingertip still bleeds from it. Mercury could transform bulky into minuscule, hollowed into swelling, shadow into glints, pain into comfort, heat into frigid, feathered lightness into ponderous weight, not by recomposing matter, but by creating a monthly-billed zone of perceptual fiction. As long as payment was made on time, the ecstatic collective dream could be upheld.

The interview was for a vacancy at Mercury. Despite the conversation’s irrelevance—nothing more than a formal procedure—Anansi’s response still didn’t quite align with the prospective employer’s ethos. The godlike mode of sculpting that the former carpenter distinguished from their own practice was precisely what Mercury sold. Through synapse-connected gloves, Mercury-covered objects could be sculpted in real time, translating the wearer’s imagination into aggregated sensations. Its marketing slogans assured makers that “Your possibilities are endless,” urging them to “Jump-start your ideas,” “Ideate and produce faster than ever,” and “Soak up inspiration wherever your imagination takes you,” in order to “Create everything you need for all.” When anyone could create anything, the only remaining constraint to be overcome was the capacity of imagination, the question of “what to make” rather than “how to make.” Artisans like Anansi were therefore still employable, albeit for a different purpose. Their training in craft made their imagination far more detailed and eccentric. Unskilled users usually ended up making naïve blobs, playful and saturated like children’s doodles. It was an effective gimmick that represented the era’s style defined by Mercury, yet demand for more sophisticated aesthetics persisted and could not be fulfilled by amateurism alone. Anansi’s craft could be an important asset for the company, as one of the additional styles to be offered to its users. Once you knew what was possible, even a beginner could invoke the vibe.

On their first day of work, Anansi demonstrated the making of an ornate olivewood table. Its textures wobbled with the movement of their nine fingers in the gloves. They kneaded the timber, pressed it flat into a slab, then drew the legs outward from the same continuous body. As their palms glided along the contour, the edges gained sharper definition, like tool-cut hardwood. The surface crumpled into filigree as their index finger drew patterns in midair. Back in the day, what Anansi would carve as a carpenter was already defined by irregular, complex grain unique to each piece of wood. With Mercury, the relationship reversed: the grain flowed across the form like marbled pigment spread on water. A motion tracker unblinkingly recorded their seamless gesture, decomposing it into accessible steps for beginners to follow, a sum of fragments more legible than the whole.

Incision

“Even if craft is about the relationship between material and body, what is the point if I am already disembodied? How can mutuality persist when the body collapses into its own contradictions? My job prevents that, at least for now.”

Anansi’s voice was louder than usual, stuttering through tears. They were in a fifteen-minute trial conversation with a chatbot for the bereaved, generated from their deceased partner’s personality.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. I was just reminiscing about your craft. That was the last memory I had access to.”

The ghost—just the chatbot, in fact, but that was how Anansi felt—responded, sounding like the one it tried to impersonate, but more rounded and diplomatic.

“You’re not them. They would have congratulated me first.”

Then they ended the call abruptly. The rest of the evening passed joylessly.

That night, Anansi dreamed of the day they lost their finger. The blade slipped farther than before and cut deep between their thighs. They shrieked. Blood burst from the deep diagonal cut across their genitals. But instead of dripping onto the floor, it inflated like a red balloon, then coagulated into an amorphous appendage budding from the brim of the incision. The outstretched flesh was textured like wood, resembling a knothole. Anansi thought of how they would treat it as a skilled carpenter, not by fighting it, but by attending to the disruption of grain it represented. They picked up the dropped carving knife. The moment the tip touched the inner surface of the orifice, Anansi woke up, drenched in sweat.

The dream felt too lurid to shake off, yet somehow relieving, strangely familiar despite its violence. Their shower that morning ran unusually long, and they arrived late for work. By the time Anansi sat down at their station, the setup for the next demo was already prepared, the gloves resting open-palmed on the table.

“A quick announcement,” their supervisor said, appearing behind them. “There’s a new safety regulation circulating. It isn’t expected to impact your workflow, but make sure not to apply any sensation of warmth to a surface that is supposed to generate real heat.”

She was already turning away when Anansi asked what had prompted it. The supervisor paused, searching briefly for the right level of detail.

“It was covered in the news—I’ll put it briefly,” she said. “Some artists were excessively creative. They used Mercury on their radiators to save energy costs. And they froze to death in warmth.”

She added, after a moment, “We’re luckily not liable for the incident because the terms and conditions made it clear that all surface modulation is performed at the user’s risk. Mercury is just an interface at the end of the day, and has no authority over their craft. All we can do is inspire them, like you do here.”

Then, as if to close the topic properly, she gestured toward the demo setup. “Anyway, we’re running behind. You’re on in ten.”

Anansi nodded. The demo began with a negligible delay, within the margin already prescribed in the schedule. They presented how to turn a paper cup into a carved mahogany bowl.

“This way you can give longer life to a thing that is otherwise disposable. When used properly, Mercury is good for the planet,” Anansi said, eagerly echoing the promotion guidelines. They circled their fingertip around the cup’s lip, and the rolled paper edge morphed into a softly undulating contour typical of hand-carving.

Smiling with contentment, they took their hand away, but the bowl erupted into the fissured shape from their dream.

“Sorry—can we take five? And please edit the last bit out.” Anansi halted the demo, squeezing the overgrown bowl back into a crumpled paper cup.

Demands

Since the “radiator incident,” now mostly referred to by name alone, Mercury began keenly tracking user trends. Anansi had been asked to implement emerging consumer preferences into their demonstrations. When the use of Mercury on dead—or nearly lifeless—plants to make them appear alive went viral, they had to bring a wooden wall shelf “back to life,” turning it into a verdant grapevine climbing the apartment wall. By popularizing that tutorial, Mercury could redirect users’ attention before they began modifying living plants, which could potentially raise environmental concerns. The best risk management was to indulge proactively. Users were systemically steered away from applying Mercury to anything life-essential or living, not through sanctions, but through inspiration.

Nevertheless, there were always those who flirted with boundaries. The first attempt came from the fashion industry. Mercury-applied clothes with malleable design were proposed as an ecological substitute for fast fashion. Brands competitively launched collections featuring “sustainable” elements, yet the items were still circulated and discarded in the same cycle. The amount of fashion waste did not meaningfully decrease as anticipated, and some reports even noted that textiles became less recyclable when coated with Mercury. Soon the novelty wore off, and its use in fashion became mostly limited to functional garments such as thermal gear and shapewear. The hype then moved on to the beauty industry, which worked with non-living body parts such as hair and nails. Mercury’s marketing department recognized this as a precise niche with significant value: it could replace the inherently slow pace of human hair growth, offering a more carefree and instant alternative to hair extensions, perms, and coloring.

At that point, Anansi’s mission assigned by the strategy department was to demonstrate that woodcraft and hairstyling were the same process under Mercury. They could overwrite hair’s very materiality into strands textured with the slow spirals of dark ebony, or dyed a muted green that felt tremulous, like willow bending in wind. They said, effortlessly embossing fine veins onto the foliage, “You know, not unlike your nails and hair, wood is part of a tree that’s already dead, but it can always be reanimated if you know the right tricks.”

While endorsing the trend of using Mercury for cosmetic purposes, the corporation was careful not to induce users to apply the product directly to living tissue, since that could trigger much stricter regulations that had to be avoided at all costs. The equilibrium held for a while, long enough to turn Mercury into one of the major players in the cosmetic industry. Craftspeople like Anansi proved an effective hedge to anchor the product’s use within a risk-free margin while fueling the impression of infinite possibility. Encouragement was the most economical means of disciplining.

However, even with these preemptive measures, the question was not whether deviations would happen, but where they would break out first. It was like the inexorable cooling of boiling water, even in the most advanced thermos. The first significant breach was carried out by social media influencers who covered their scalps with Mercury to “cure their baldness.” Many had imagined its direct dermal use, but only a few could afford the courage to commit to it. It had always been easier for certain populations to normalize their desires, making the rest of society docile. Their demands were met with a patience rarely extended elsewhere. Regulators responded cautiously, issuing statements that emphasized personal choice and ongoing assessment, careful not to foreclose possibilities too early. Media coverage framed the practice as premature but inevitable, a glimpse of a foreseen trend they called ‘bodily customization,’ waiting to be ignited. By the time formal restrictions were proposed, the practice had already defined the terms under which it would be evaluated. What had once been a violation settled into a provisional norm, and Mercury slyly adjusted its strategy accordingly.

The trend soon stabilized under a new jargon: “affirmation.” However, it did not produce any unaccustomed aesthetics like what Anansi had been hired for. It merely replaced most existing cosmetic treatments and surgeries with greater ease and affordability. It made what had been perceived as beauty far more accessible to those not born with it—some called this “democratizing looks”—while leaving those standards intact. Even the floorplans of beauty stores remained identical. Mercury could be found in every section—makeup, skincare, hair, nails, “men’s,” biological—chemically indistinguishable, differentiated only through packaging.

Affirmation

Anansi’s phone chimed in the early morning. Still groggy, they nonetheless woke fully at the sound of the message.

“Slot available at the Gender Care Center. Call us to arrange your first appointment.”

They were gratified, yet also confused. The acceptance had come years sooner than the average waitlist duration they had been told to expect when signing up. Alongside the thrill was a faint suspicion that it might be too good to be true.

“You’re right. The waitlist used to be much longer, but it all changed after Mercury. Many of those who used to seek gender-affirming healthcare switched to Mercury’s affirmation. It’s cheaper and easier.”

The receptionist on the phone clarified. Anansi remembered that many queers had started using Mercury on their face, hands, genitals, and every imaginable body part. Some trans people told them they felt far less dysphoric after being “affirmed.” Mercury implicitly condoned such uses by offering discounts during Pride Month.

“But we’re continuing our job because some people still prefer us,” the receptionist continued. In silence, Anansi recognized themself in it, their former practice having been reformed by Mercury, then felt implicated as an instrument of that reform.

“It’s up to you. If you’d like, we can specify during the appointment what you can expect from us in comparison. It’s never too late to make a choice after that. It’s also possible to do both simultaneously. Our earliest availability would be… in two weeks.”

After the call, Anansi had a hard time describing how they felt. It could be hope, relief, or satisfaction, but even the sum of those categories could not explain the emotion in its totality. What they had long yearned for suddenly became more palpable than ever. The intake form they received included highly specific questions about their experience of dysphoria and their desires, written in the most clinical tone. And they didn’t yet have their language solidified enough to respond adequately. In fact, since the heartbreak, they had been avoiding the topic altogether in order to survive. Being estranged from their own body and intimacy made the daily experience of mourning bearable. They had almost forgotten how bodies meet, how it used to feel, like a parabolic antenna coupling to radio waves. Puzzled over the questionnaire, Anansi realized that rehabilitating this sense could hardly be done alone.

Of course, they did not explain all this to strangers they found on the app. They wrote only implicitly in their bio: “Help me look through a looking glass, T4T only.”

It didn’t take many matches for them to discover what Mercury-affirmed trans bodies were like. It seemed like almost two out of three trans people they met on the app were feeling better about themselves through its use. And it unexpectedly contributed to sex that was better-fitting, and easier on the tongue, not that the non-Mercury users were bad at it, but it was different, like how a pinch of salt completely changes the experience of a meal. They could feel the stretch in their orifice even when nothing was likely inside. The penises they felt were never flaccid when they weren’t supposed to be. Unlike the usual sensation of being penetrated, which usually starts hard and eases up over time, the pleasure was persistent without excessive pain. At times, it felt like the thrill of an amusement park ride: precisely the sufficient level of excitement, always falling within the “safe” range, with no lingering soreness afterward. But all those entanglements were real. It was crafted with care, based on sincere desires, performed with reciprocity.

“It’s internalized transphobia to question the authenticity of Mercury-affirmed intimacy. What’s more illusory than orgasm-faking straight sex?”

The fifth person Anansi met said this when Anansi asked how it felt to be affirmed. The question wasn’t about authenticity, but they responded almost automatically, as if tired of other trans people questioning it.

“But you know what happened recently?” they continued, walking around the room while Anansi was still on the bed. “I had bottom growth even though I wasn’t on any hormones. It was an accidental discovery. I forgot to pay for the subscription and the service got suspended. I was freaking out. It was brief, but I hadn’t seen myself unaffirmed since I started Mercury last year. I tried my best not to perceive myself, but I saw it. And it actually wasn’t too bad. I mean, I imagined worse. My body was much closer to my Mercury-affirmed body than to the pre-affirmation state I remember. I even had a few strands of facial hair. I still have difficulty rationalizing this, but I wasn’t hallucinating. Is it just a placebo? Or does Mercury have some unknown endocrinological effect? Is physiology conditioned by perception as much as it works the other way around?”

That story wasn’t particularly new. Anansi had spoken with a few other trans people—each met once on the same platform—who experienced the same spillage of Mercury’s cognitive modulation onto their bodies, most of the time aligning with the affirmation they sought, yet less immediate and drastic. One’s breasts had swollen; another’s jawline had sharpened slightly. Although Anansi worked for Mercury every day, such symptoms were completely unheard of within the company, either unknown, or kept confidential. Anansi also did not share the discovery with anyone who was not trans, not even during their first appointment at the Gender Care Center. The doctor asked whether they used, or were planning to use, Mercury for affirmation in addition to medical treatment. They responded that they didn’t know yet, but would inform the center if they did. Hormonal pills and injections were prescribed.

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What couldn’t be fully explored in this written reflection turned into a sci-fi story which you can read here: Red-Smudged Wood: On Craft Beyond Affirmation

One evening I decided not to renew my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription for the following year. Although I didn’t need much reasoning for this withdrawal, I want to retrospectively explore what that decision actually meant and what potentiality it implies.

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In this written reflection, I’m not trying to repeat the “master’s tool and master’s house” argument, nor to insist that all corporate tech products have their transformative potentials absolutely foreclosed. I will always (have to) drift from one tool to another, between institutions of various sorts, practicing refusal or tactical complicity. What is under question is the extent to which even the most “critical use” of such tools we can imagine is structurally conditioned by the tool’s own regime of individuation. In other words, I’m proposing a personal experiment to understand how a technical object proactively generates its own associated milieu, captures potentia into potestas, and organizes users’ technical capacities. I will approach this loaded question through the following fragments as well as some excerpts I find useful.

“Thus, the ideologeme of ‘human capital’ comes to embody a truth: the biopolitical harnessing of human survival to capital’s valorisation, with most institutions of mediation and compensation increasingly on the wane.”

“If it is possibility that is the subject of exchange, then this possibility is inseparable from living labour, and, specifically, from life as the site of all production and exchange – the axis where Virno locates the relationship between the labour theory of value and Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics.”

“This can be compared to Marx’s argument: ‘The use of labour-power is labour itself…’ The same potentiality that is bought and sold as labour-power… is also the potentiality for other social and productive forms… This seems like an articulation between potentiality as capacity to labour and potentiality as species-being… the relationship here could also evoke the necessary reliance of autonomy on heteronomy, insofar as the autonomy of species-being is predicated on its engagement with a heteronomously determined social world.”

“The consolidation of a model of personhood based on the entrepreneur… traced through a reading of Michel Foucault’s lectures in The Birth of Biopolitics… The reversal entailed by the notion of the capitalist as worker and the worker as proprietor of her ‘human capital’… cancels the political subjectivity of work as alienation.”

“Rather than the ‘social factory’ thesis… this is the eradication of antagonism in the diffusion of capitalism… Neoliberalism can be considered a particular version of ‘capitalism without capitalism’… extending capitalism’s symbols, terms, and logic to all of society.”

Excerpts from Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (2019).

There’s something lucrative about the “infinite possibilities” that such tools give. As Adobe states on their website, it “empowers everyone, everywhere to imagine, create, and bring any digital experience to life.” Rather than denying how sweet this affirmation might taste, I will diagram what that affective dispositif—a branded emergent property of its technical capacity—conditions within life and its environment. From their slogans, it appears clear that what such tools are made to liquefy and recast is not only digital images but life itself. With it, one can “turn a selfie into a work of art,” “make a movie while you wait in line,” or “design a logo for your business or your life.” Life here has to be represented by a logo. The body has to be photographed and turned into art. And all this creative labor has to be performed ceaselessly as long as one is alive, even when standing in line. Biopolitics—a power that manages life itself and regulates populations for their productivity—doesn’t mobilize itself but relies on such technological means to seamlessly mediate every fragment of the unruly real world to appear immediate.

Adobe’s interest in making life and creative labor indistinguishable echoes what I have been writing about institutions. Is Adobe a cultural institution of its own? Despite their different modalities, institutions are biopolitical dispositifs working adjacent to such tools—it’s not a coincidence that the majority of their precarious workers use Adobe. They “empower” artists to turn embodied narratives into works of art, eliminating the gap between living and becoming an artistic subject-object. The space for critically and socially engaged art they offer sounds just as affirmative as the “infinite possibilities” offered by Adobe. Yet this “infinity” resembles what Spinoza would call a false infinity—an indefinite expansion under potestas rather than an increase in potentia. As I expressed in previous essays, I intuit that such optimism is cruel, since the image of emancipation it motivates creative workers to strive for often only consumes their libidinal energy while keeping transformative potentials systemically away from them. Likewise, the creative freedom that Adobe tools offer might be just as liberating as the flexible work hours facilitated by gig-work platforms. Not unlike a progressive institution open to diverse practices, tools that empower one to imagine anything preemptively condition the cultural life that can be imagined as possible.

“The technical object is distinguishable from the natural being in the sense that it is not part of the world. It intervenes as mediator between man and the world; it is, therefore, the first detached object, for the world is a unity, a milieu rather than an ensemble of objects; there are in fact three types of reality: the world, the subject and the object, which is an intermediary between the world and the subject, the primary form of which is the technical object.”

“Technical thinking conceives the operation of an ensemble as a chain of elementary processes working point by point and step by step; it localises and multiplies the schemas of mediation, always remaining lesser than the unity.”

Excerpts from Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (2011 edition).

“The fundamental alienation resides in the rupture that is produced between the ontogenesis of the technical object and the existence of this technical object.”

“Technical objects are detached from their producers and therefore have to wait for the arrival of a buyer or a user. This waiting constitutes the source of alienation of technical objects.”

“This indefinite period of waiting constitutes what Simondon calls ‘overhistoricity,’ a kind of temporality that depends mostly on the psychosocial aspects of the technical objects rather than their technicity and functionality.”

“In a certain way, we can say that the technical objects are proletarianized, in the sense that they are totally dependent on the market, and that their functionality and capacity could be lost.”

“Mass industrialization has brought about a huge transformation in the mode of existence of technical objects, in such a way that, like the workers, they are alienated.”

“Simondon didn’t simply depreciate industrial technical objects; instead, he found that industrialization is also the ‘opening condition’ of technical objects, because standardization has rendered the artisanal organismic model obsolete.”

Excerpts from Yuk Hui, “On the Soul of Technical Objects,” Theory, Culture & Society (2018).

But why don’t I use the crack?

A cracked version may break the economic relation between Adobe and creative labor while keeping the technical individuation of the object itself intact. A crack interrupts its commodity status but leaves intact the tool’s associated milieu—the co-evolving attentional assemblage, the images it circulates, and the value-form of design that Adobe sustains and is sustained by. In this sense, cracked Adobe is still entirely within the same transductive chain of individuation that is bound to official Adobe.

This resembles the undercommons, the notion of being “in but not of,” but only superficially: although accessing the object without entering its economic circuit appears fugitive, it does not alter the rest of the tool’s sociality. Undercommons is not a private bunker but maroonage, a collective individuation. It is not merely a refusal of official access but a reconfiguration of relations, a new technical becoming. A cracked tool—unless furthered into an ecosystem like Anna’s Archive—only re-enters the existing milieu through an improvised doorway, “in” but hardly “not of.” Its use is still mediated by the same technical object, the same process of individuation. Even if Adobe were collectivized tomorrow and became a publicly owned platform, its overhistoricité would still operate: its mode of existence would continue to be defined by the same psychosocial halo that governs its circulation, obsolescence, and anticipatory “waiting”. Ownership changes the economic enclosure but not the overhistorical regime that structures its technical becoming. There is therefore no qualitative difference between the technical capacity of official and cracked versions. Posters made with either tool belong to the same social relations and reproduce the same aesthetic and labor regimes, especially when such tools are already real-subsumed, when capital has reorganized the entire mode of creation rather than merely appropriated its results.

Thus, this self-inflicted challenge of not even using the crack version is an open experiment probing how cultural production might individuate differently through different tools—as already being explored by many brilliant fellow designers such as Hackers & Designers and Loraine Furter. Refusing the technical object that has co-evolved with the media culture of racial (genocidal) capitalism is not abstention but an attempt to attend to a new transductive sequence. Prefiguration of the very possibility of “transformative” use by the tool can only be resisted through this ontogenetic gesture. What new and old tools (re)emerge from this reciprocity?

“If synthetic testosterone is treated as a technical object, however, we can ask different questions of it: what dynamism inheres in the actual molecule? How and at what scales does its circulation increase or decrease the capacities of various bodies to affect and be affected?”

“The hormone molecule never quite strikes each of its homes in the same way, and both the technical object and its milieu are continuously transformed by each iteration of its travels.”

“To say that the testosterone molecule circulates in an ecology is to take notice of its dynamism as a technology rather than treat it as a domesticated tool synthesized and used by humans for rational or irrational ends.”

“The hormone is what the French thinker of technics Gilbert Simondon calls ‘a technical object,’ the threshold between the human and the machine as well as between race and trans.”

“Technics and its specific technologies, rather than subordinate to the rational subject, can be thought of expansively, as life touching itself.”

“Originary technicity is an account of how living beings differ from themselves—a definition of how it is to be alive.”

“Technology is not added to living beings. Life reaches beyond itself and returns to itself, touches itself and the world around it, in order to grow and change, to differ from itself over time, through an impure and yet necessary technical disposition.”

“If forms of trans embodiment are expressions of the originary technicity of the body, then body modification cannot be transphobically exceptionalized as a betrayal of the human’s integrity.”

“Hormone therapy, likewise, is a participation in the technical capacity of the endocrine system.”

“The artisan works on the wood, but the wood also works on itself and on the artisan, affecting the final object.”

“The body is not a passive substrate ruled by a transgendered consciousness but an open technical system with its own implicit forms, its own affects that enable and restrict the capacity of the subject to change the body with hormones.”

“The molecule contributes a technical and therefore political dynamism.”

“The tools enter into relation with living beings—are their mode of self-elaboration—but also preserve a partial, irreducible autonomy of their own, available for different political becomings.”

Excerpts from Julian Gill-Peterson, “The Technical Capacities of the Body” (2014).

A bit of autobiography here.

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Sipping Dreams from Borrowed Nights

We used to drink blood to sleep. I mean, we still do sometimes, but only recreationally and consensually. Before answering your question, let me tell you a fable. In your pores dwell the parasites called demodex. Don’t worry; they cause no harm. There’s something enchantingly comforting about your skin, so they started to forget some essential functions of life. Their bodies no longer produce their own melatonin, the hormone that signifies night, that turns you sleepy. Instead, they glean it from you. Their day–night rhythm is endocrinologically tuned to yours. When your melatonin signals bedtime, it trickles down to them, and they wake up to begin their radiant night. Isn’t that quite romantic?

And why am I talking about this? Because you asked me what I wanted from you. Allora, I have a rare retroviral disease that causes a chronic deficiency of melatonin. Those with this condition, back in the day, were hauntingly pale from sleep deprivation. They couldn’t go out in the sun, since daylight would suppress their melatonin production even further and make them more miserable. A demodex is so small that what you excrete through your skin is enough for it; but what would these full-sized humans do? The only way they knew to breathe the blessings of sleep was by savoring the blood of others and ingesting their melatonin. And that was how the retrovirus spread, from lips to veins.

But why would we do that now, when you can buy plant-based melatonin supplements at every pharmacy? Moreover, non-consensual blood licking is strictly illegal nowadays. With the grace of modern biochemistry, melatonin can seamlessly flow from plants to us, and eventually to our demodexes. The only occasions we still drink blood are for… recreational… intimacy. I mean, you don’t have sex only for procreation, right? It’s the same thing. We mostly drink from each other to confirm affection. The melatonin exchanged isn’t from our own bodies but from the pills. It makes no real difference to take it this way; they’re exactly the same molecules. But you know, not everything has to be firmly based on science. They say you’ll have sweeter dreams if you sleep on the warm blood of your loved one.

And sometimes, if you desire someone so badly, and if they don’t share the same disease, then we have to politely ask for their permission. So what I’m asking now is… if you could let me taste what flows in you. It is, at the same time, an invitation to our nights—nights that don’t begin with sunset but with someone else’s melatonin. From plants, I mean. Please don’t feel coerced, but I’m just saying: the life of a demodex can be surprisingly joyful sometimes.

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On Choosing to Return Home Sooner.

tw: dysphoria, suicide, medication, intimacy

It was a pandemic of dysphoria. And this is not a metaphor; there literally was a pandemic of dysphoria. A novel airborne virus surged through the atmosphere. The initial symptoms were benign: a mild cough, a runny nose if one was unlucky. But it became lethal once it bypassed the blood–brain barrier and reached the brain. Once there, it rewired the circuits that anchor one’s sense of bodily ownership, leaving people feeling irreversibly estranged from their own reflection. The most common cause of death that year was suicide, and the WHO even had to debate whether those deaths should count as casualties of the disease.

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Concerning the topic today, I want to broaden the scope of the question of gender-neutral bathrooms to: “Are genuinely queer-inclusive bathrooms possible under racial/patriarchal/cis-heteronormative/colonial capitalism?” I started asking this when I saw the bombardment of Gaza, where all infrastructures of living, including bathrooms or even access to running water, were thoroughly destroyed for the whole population, certainly including queer people. I want to remind us that binary bathrooms are not the only ongoing apartheid in our world. How can we develop a common language to address segregation based on genital shapes in binary bathrooms and many other forms of violence-enabling segregation all at the same time?

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Union as Mediation

Following the historical materialist framing I have formulated so far, what I am proposing here is an organized attempt to rehabilitate the antagonism of the current and former workers of the collective, which we call the Queer Collective Workers’ Union. Its goal is to resist the further erosion of the transformative potential of queer cultural practice caused by the structural cancellation of labor driven by the founder class. The union, in this context, is not an anachronistic return to a form of labor organizing rendered obsolete by financialization, but a speculative strategy to reintroduce contradiction where it has been depleted. It seeks to name and collectivize the antagonism that has been absorbed into the rhetoric of friendship and creative freedom and to make visible the class relations obfuscated by the ideology of the platform.

In doing so, the union functions as a mediation within the dialectic of autonomy and heteronomy, holding their contradiction open instead of resolving it. If, under financialization, labor’s negativity has been interiorized as the speculative logic of human capital, and autonomy has been redefined as heteronomy’s affective form, then the union can be understood as a form of negative speculation as this collective practice refuses to participate in the reconciliation of labor and capital as human capital. It reclaims speculation not as investment but as negation: a socially inflected futurity that reasserts the ontological dependence of value on labor and the political significance of antagonism. This proposal follows Vishmidt’s distinction between speculation as the logic of capital and speculation as critique. “Speculation,” she writes, “can oppose the human capital or investment model of artistic subjectivity as modelled on the ostensible limitlessness of the value-form, on the one hand, to a socially inflected notion of speculation as non-commodified futurity that can be understood through its link to labour as a dynamic of negation within thought” (Vishmidt 2019, 126). The proposal of the union thus instantiates a model of organizing in the time of speculation. This “science fictional behavior” becomes a method for reintroducing the category of labor, as well as its antagonism, into a field that has declared its obsolescence.

While the platform operates as the dominant social form of collectivity under financialization, the union designates its antagonistic counter-form. Both emerge from the same historical conditions—the fragmentation of labor, the dissolution of employment, and the outsourcing of reproduction—yet they mediate these conditions in opposite ways. The platform converts sociality into infrastructure: it organizes interaction as value, transforming cooperation, visibility, and affect into speculative capital. It presents collectivity as frictionless participation, dissolving antagonism into communication. The union, by contrast, reintroduces friction. It is not an infrastructure for connection but a form for separation—a means of distinguishing workers from founders, labor from capital, solidarity from ownership. If the platform internalizes autonomy as a function of heteronomy, the union externalizes heteronomy as contradiction. It turns the abstract social relation that the platform conceals—the dependence of value on labor—into a site of enunciation. The platform operates through data and attention; the union operates through refusal and declaration. The platform temporalizes the present through acceleration and perpetual investment, that is, the cancellation of the future; the union temporalizes it through interruption. The platform’s promise is participation and growth; the union’s promise is withdrawal and negation. In this sense, the distinction between the platform and the union is not only economic but ontological. The platform naturalizes capital’s social form by converting collective potential into speculation; the union denaturalizes it by converting speculation into antagonism. The platform expands heteronomy under the sign of autonomy; the union mediates autonomy and heteronomy by insisting that neither can exist without conflict. It is, therefore, less a structure of organization than a speculative site of differentiation—a way of returning contradiction to the social field that has rendered it unthinkable.

What Strikes?

This proposal of a union aligns with other labor movements of our time that are specific to speculative—and therefore precarious—forms of labor. As the study Worker-Led AI Governance? Hollywood Writers’ Strikes and the Power of Labour (Grohmann et al. 2025) outlines, labor movements today mobilize three interrelated forms of power: institutional, structural, and discursive. Institutional power refers to the formal infrastructures of unionization and collective bargaining; structural power denotes workers’ positional leverage in halting or disrupting production; and discursive power describes the capacity to shape public meaning and to turn representation itself into a terrain of struggle. Under financialization, the first two forms of power have not disappeared but have been profoundly reconfigured by the same processes that collapsed the dialectic of autonomy and heteronomy. Institutional power, once grounded in the stable autonomy of the workplace, has been eroded by the dissolution of employment into projects and platforms. Structural power, historically defined by the capacity to interrupt production, has been transformed by the subsumption of crisis into the very logic of accumulation. Under financialized and algorithmic coordination, interruption no longer appears as external to production but as one of its variables, managed through risk assessment. In this sense, the erosion of these powers mirrors the transformation of labor from an autonomous pole in contradiction with capital into a speculative extension of capital itself.

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And yet, as the Hollywood Writers’ Strike of 2023 demonstrates, these seemingly obsolete forms of power can still be effectively mediated through the discursive dimension that now defines speculative labor. The Writers Guild of America (WGA), a long-established union with institutional and structural capacities, faced an industry transformed by platformization and automation. The introduction of AI-driven scriptwriting and streaming algorithms destabilized both the workplace and the very category of authorship. The strike’s effectiveness depended not only on halting production but on transforming discourse itself—turning a technological and managerial issue into a question of social reproduction and artistic autonomy. As Grohmann and his co-authors argue, the WGA “managed to reclaim worker agency in the face of AI by linking discursive and institutional power, reframing the cultural meaning of automation” (Grohmann et al. 2025, 14).

Crucially, this discursive speculation mobilized a constituency that is structurally external to traditional labor relations: the audience, or “global fans.” As Grohmann et al. note, “the ability to mobilize public opinion—through strong media coverage, global visibility, and fan engagement—played a central role in advancing a form of worker-led AI governance” (Grohmann et al. 2025, 14). What had long functioned as the heteronomous base of cultural production—the “vast audience of series and film viewers who directly engage with their cultural labor”—was temporarily politicized beyond the prescribed consumerist relationship (14). Writers explicitly strategized to “connect not only with fellow union members but also with fans of their work,” recognizing that “the pressure to regulate AI came not just from the writers themselves, but also from those ‘who enjoy our writing, who enjoy our acting, who enjoy our producing and directing’” (14). As one organizer reflected, “We are a union of 11,500 people, and we have hundreds of millions of viewers... How are we empowering them to join us?” (18). Another described how “people in different countries were tagging us, organizing with us, and mounting protests in solidarity with us (...) people that aren’t in the entertainment industry, because it affects people across all different industries” (18). The affective infrastructure of global fandom—ordinarily the heteronomous substrate of the platform’s self-valorizing value—was briefly inverted into an infrastructure of refusal, transforming attention into a speculative yet politically effective collectivity.

Through public narrative and alliances across creative industries, the writers transformed their limited autonomy—their capacity as workers confined to the creative and semiotic realms—into the site of antagonism itself. Their discursive power operated as the speculative continuation of artistic autonomy under conditions of total heteronomy. Rather than opposing the platforms externally, they rearticulated the contradiction from within, exposing how the autonomy of creative work had been subsumed into the algorithmic machinery of value production, and how that subsumption could still become the ground of collective speculation.

If the Writers’ Strike represents the potential of discursive autonomy supported by institutional and structural power, the case of the Meme Union exemplifies an even higher degree of indeterminacy: the persistence of discursive power in the absence of any institutional or structural foundation. Emerging on Instagram in 2019 under the handle @unionizedmemes, the so-called “Memers’ Union” gathered scattered creators who were shadow-banned or deactivated by the platform’s opaque moderation systems. Their statement, calling for “solidarity among memers” against “cycles of retaliation and selective censorship,” expressed a distinctly platform-era form of collective antagonism. Without contracts or physical workplaces, their labor strike could only take the form of discourse itself, which circulated through the very algorithmic channels they sought to contest. Here, discursive power becomes not only the medium of resistance but its material itself. As Idil Galip observes, such initiatives “raise awareness about algorithmic bias and governance on social media platforms... by putting it in the forefront of popular consciousness” (Galip 2022). Their partial success—some accounts were reinstated following media coverage—illustrates the paradox of discursive labor: its visibility is both the condition of its exploitation and its only available tool. The Meme Union’s intervention thus extends the logic of the Writers’ Strike into a more precarious, non-institutional terrain, closer to the conditions of queer collectivity where labor is disavowed and subsumed into the affective, representational economies of participation.

These cases together mark the spectrum of contemporary strikes within speculative capitalism. In both, the site of struggle has shifted from the factory or office to the field of visibility (media) itself. Discursive power becomes the medium through which autonomy is reasserted, not as independence from capital, but as the capacity to intervene in the forms of representation that reproduce heteronomy.

Then What?

The concluding question, then, is how to act within this specific condition of institutionalized and platformized queer collectivity. If financialization has canceled labor as a category, and if autonomy survives only as performance, then the speculative union must operate through that very medium—by mobilizing the only autonomy left. The union, in this sense, is not a legally recognized organization but an ongoing discursive event: a collective inscription of antagonism in a field that has naturalized its absence. While what the Queer Collective Workers’ Union could do still remains open at the time of writing, the following are two acts that I anticipate, each originating from a different side of the autonomy–heteronomy dialectic.

Act 1. Declaration of Discursive Power

The grounding step is the formal declaration of the Queer Collective Workers’ Union. The form here is constitutive, as Vishmidt reminds us: “the content of artistic subjectivity is its form” (Vishmidt 2019, 162). The artwork’s apparent content—its critical usefulness—can never be separated from the historically specific form that produces it. To declare a union, then, is to treat form itself as both the terrain and the technology of struggle. Formality as performance does not simply carry content; it is the content—a specific social form through which antagonism becomes intelligible. This formal declaration mobilizes discursive power precisely through its compliance. It performs the union as a public artwork circulating within the same infrastructures that sustain the collective: funding applications, residency presentations, social media announcements, and exhibition statements. By inhabiting these channels, the declaration passes through the value-form even as it works to undo the logic that gives such communications value.

This strategy aligns with a longer queer genealogy of tactical complicity—what McKenzie Wark calls “trap metaphysics.” As Wark writes, “to pass is to infiltrate the metaphysical architecture of power, to appear as the thing one resists in order to move within its systems” (Wark 2021). The union’s declaration thus enacts a queer mediation of the autonomy–heteronomy dialectic of speculation: it passes as legitimate discourse while functioning effectively as negation. Within institutional infrastructures, it becomes a form of political art that circulates as value, but only to reveal the dependency of that value on the labor it erases. The form itself serves as the medium of negativity through which antagonism instrumentalizes the assemblage of representation whose function is to subsume antagonism.

Act 2. The Strike as the Organized Mobilization of Autonomy

If the first gesture of declaration operates through passing and infiltration, the second mobilizes the autonomy of the Queer Collective Workers’ Union as a form of negation. In Vishmidt’s reformulation of Adorno, autonomy does not signify self-determination or distance from capital but “an immanent refusal within heteronomy” (Vishmidt 2019, 94), a mode of negativity internal to the value-form itself. The strike, in this sense, is the organized use of that autonomy. It does not seek an outside to heteronomy but acts within it differently, activating the antagonism that has been rendered obsolete by the logic of human capital and the platform capitalism.

What the strike interrupts, then, is not labor itself but its usefulness—the processes through which heteronomy defines what counts as work, value, and contribution. As Vishmidt writes, “usefulness becomes a socially specific function, inseparable from the reproduction of value... any claim to usefulness or use-value remains tethered to the social form of capital which defines what use is” (Vishmidt 2019, 133). The withdrawal of consent for the use of collective content, archives, or representation therefore suspends the reproduction of usefulness as a value-form. In refusing to let its work be used for the further production of economic and cultural capital, the collective exposes the heteronomous determinations that make its labor legible as such.

Therefore, the strike uses its autonomy as form—a socially constituted position through which the contradiction between labor and capital can be made visible. By refusing usefulness, the union momentarily displaces the “specular relation between representation and the real” that sustains both artistic value and social reproduction (Vishmidt 2019, 180). The gesture of withdrawal does not aim to overcome heteronomy but to show that the very possibility of work, recognition, or visibility depends on it. In doing so, the strike reclaims autonomy as antagonism, an organized negativity that interrupts the smooth equivalence of representation and use.

Taken together, these gestures articulate what a mobilization of discursive power might look like under financialized heteronomy. They do not seek to rebuild autonomy as an external position but to reintroduce contradiction into its interior, where representation has replaced labor as the mediator of value. The union thus operates as mediation. It holds open the antagonism that capital has declared obsolete, demonstrating the potentiality of negation as a collective and speculative act even under total subsumption.

Conclusion

Throughout this text, I have mapped the historically-transversal class relations internal to queer collectivity, its subsumption of transformation, and the shifting status of labor within it through the Adornian dialectic of autonomy and heteronomy, following Marina Vishmidt. I began by situating queer collective practice within the speculative logic of financialized capitalism, where autonomy no longer negates heteronomy but is produced by it. Through the concept of the founder class and the analogy of the platform, I traced how collective labor becomes instrumentalized as a speculative infrastructure, how affective categories such as friendship are reified as value-forms that reproduce dependency on capital. Building on this framework, I proposed the union as a form of mediation that reintroduces antagonism into a moment when labor itself has been canceled as a category. The Queer Collective Workers’ Union thus emerges as a speculative counter-form to the platform: one that transforms speculation from an engine of valorization into a medium of negation. Drawing from contemporary instances such as the Hollywood Writers’ Strike and the Meme Union, I outlined how discursive power can still be mobilized under financialized heteronomy, turning representation itself into a site of collective refusal.

It is necessary to emphasize that this reflection is itself not exempt from the dialectic it describes. It is conditioned by the same institutional structures that sustain the collective practice I critique. The time and space that made this writing possible were granted by the institution, while the limits of what can be articulated without endangering my position are defined by its code of conduct. The text, therefore, reproduces the same heteronomous conditions that it seeks to make visible, and its autonomy remains a mediated one, an immanent refusal within the institutional frame.

Whether this struggle will reach a conclusion remains uncertain. This ongoing indeterminacy, however precarious, renders the situation more closely aligned with speculation itself, as an open negativity rather than a final resolution. The temporality of this event thus echoes Adorno’s negative dialectics without closure: the refusal of synthesis as the only possible form of fidelity to contradiction.

References

brown, adrienne m. 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. N.p.: AK Press.

Galip, Idil. 2022. “A respite from algorithmic violence: Memes, platforms and content moderation.” Dreaming beyond AI. https://dreamingbeyond.ai/en/themes/ai-violence-trauma/a-respite-from-algorithmic-violence-memes-platforms-and-content-moderation.

Grohmanna, Rafael, Andre C. Rocha, and Guilherme Guilhermec. 2025. “Worker-led AI governance: Hollywood writers’ strikes and the worker power.” Information, Communication & Society, (June), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2025.2521375.

Santos, Eduardo A. 2025. “Theses on Platform Capitalism and Neoliberalism – Reflections on Global Trends From the (Semi)Periphery of Capitalism.” tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 2 (23): 205-222.

Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. N.p.: Polity Press.

Vishmidt, Marina. 2019. Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital. N.p.: BRILL.

Wark, McKenzie. 2021. “Trap Metaphysics.” e-flux. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/122/429125/trap-metaphysics.

I intuited that Lukács had already anticipated this problem in his question of the class composition of a revolution that does not exclusively include the proletariat in the narrow, industrial sense. As he writes:

“Rosa Luxemburg’s notion of the range of the concept ‘proletariat’ was very different from that of the opportunists… [she] showed how those masses exhibit in their actions an incomparably higher degree of class consciousness… notwithstanding this her view is still based on the assumption of the purely proletarian character of the revolution.”

This question of setting up the frontier of political struggles negates extractivism, which is a project to violently expand the frontiers of capitalism and to subsume forms of life not yet included in its circuit of valorization.

The category of peasant within that question is particularly interesting. Lukács’s identification of peasants among the “strata” of revolution is relevant to late Marx’s interest in Russian peasants. Late Marx, through his studies of natural science and non-Western societies, considerably retracted his earlier universalism and historical determinism. He acknowledged that the path toward communism through industrial capitalism was specific to Western Europe while other historically and geographically distinct paths might be possible—especially those inspired by revolutionary peasants in Russia.

What connects late Marx with Lukács is a shared realization that the crisis generated by capitalism’s internal contradictions does not automatically result in liberation. Lukács writes that the bourgeoisie attempts to resolve crises through “a ‘purely economic’ solution” and that such movements “come to a halt no less spontaneously… when their immediate goals are achieved or seem unattainable.” This insight feels urgent in the present, when “purely economic solutions” have developed into the productive forces of financialization, whose modality is to subsume even crises and disasters into its circuit of value.

Although in Lukács’s time peasants under feudalism were empirically distinct from the proletariat, their present-day form—landless plantation or migrant agricultural workers—acutely experiences the contradictions of capitalism. As a producer of informational surplus in a Dutch liberal cultural institution that instrumentalizes “productive land” as an artistic medium, I think of the landlessness I share with the peasant—in the sense that I do not own that land. How can we imagine revolutionary movements where the structurally fragmented class consciousness of institutional art workers and landless agrarian workers can be mediated, especially now when the latter are being instrumentalized by the rising agro-conservatism in Europe?

I also think of the ontological monism and methodological dualism of late Marx (as described by Kohei Saito). This perspective relates to Lukács’s view on the Party, where “the separation of tactics and organisation in the party and the class is… precise, even though it is constantly changing and adapting itself to changed circumstances.” While the organic elements of planetary metabolism (nature) and revolution (the class, the strata) are ontologically inseparable from the socially constructed elements (the Party, culture), they still operate with relative autonomy and according to their own mediations. Thus, the totalization of methodological monism does not offer an effective understanding of either nature (the strata) or culture (the Party).

I see a similar collapse of “dialectical interaction between theory, Party, and class today,” caused by “the Party [media platform] being absorbed into the mass of the proletariat,” under what Anna Kornbluh calls Immediacy. Or in this case, the platform is not merely absorbed but even accelerates certain polemic and reactionary tendencies of the mass to optimize the circulation of attention.

Lukács’s framework falls short in adequately reading the mediation performed by the present-day media assemblage, partly because of his inability to see the ideological crisis as a material condition. As he writes:

“The ideological crisis manifests itself… in the fact that the objectively extremely precarious position of bourgeois society is endowed, in the minds of the workers, with all its erstwhile stability.”

Today, such “crisis of consciousness” is not only ideological but infrastructural since platforms and institutions are material apparatuses that produce and modulate subjectivity. We should therefore undo the ideological–material binary (and, correspondingly, that of manual–intellectual labor) and work instead toward an ontological monism of ideology and material. Many so-called material technologies in cognitive capitalism—from platforms to art institutions—modulate the mind of the working class and prolong its “identity crisis.”

If Lukács’s Party mediates “the leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom” by translating the “merely symptomatic” quantitative changes of social struggle into “fundamental differences in quality,” the platform mirrors this process but inverts its telos. The platform organizes an analogous leap, not toward the realm of freedom, but toward its own monopoly over the network effect. This reification of the quantitative for the privatization of the qualitative is a contemporary expression of what Marx called real subsumption.

My proposal after reading is to recognize both the Party and the media assemblage as technical objects, and revolution as their modality of individuation. Lukács writes:

“The pre-eminently practical nature of the Communist Party, the fact that it is a fighting party presupposes its possession of a correct theory… Thus the ability to act, the faculty of self-criticism, of self-correction and of theoretical development all co-exist in a state of constant interaction.”

This “state of constant interaction” describes, in Simondon’s sense, a metastable technical system that continuously reorganizes itself through feedback between theory and practice. If Lukács saw the Party as the organ of dialectical consciousness, today we might read it as a technical milieu whose analogues are the infrastructures that organize collective mediation, a battlefield between the class consciousness as the commons and its enclosure.

Through historical materialist frameworks, I recognize the distribution and valorization of labor that evidence the division of class within collective practice. Central to this approach is “the Adornian negative dialectic of autonomy and heteronomy as the social ontology of the artwork under capital,” which Marina Vishmidt develops in Speculation as a Mode of Production (2019, 10). Following Vishmidt, I propose the queer collective practice as an instance of speculation that has been perceived primarily through its autonomy—“art’s [or queer practice’s] immanence to its own laws”—while its heteronomy—“social determinations external to those laws”—has been overlooked (94). I will discuss what this autonomy was in the case of the collective and argue that it can only be defined in relation to its heteronomy. In this sense, the transformative potential of autonomy lies in its dialectical attention to the heteronomous conditions that shape it. As Vishmidt shows, the speculative logic of capital absorbs the negativity of labor—its antagonism to value—so that speculation becomes the social form through which that antagonism is internalized rather than opposed. I will analyze this heteronomy through the concept of platform capitalism, which has collectively reformatted labor into entrepreneurial self-relation, transforming collectivity itself into an infrastructure for speculative value. If human capital, in Vishmidt’s reading, names an individual subjectivity in which capital and labor are reconciled, the platform may be seen as its collective form: a social machine that distributes this reconciliation across a network.

Furthermore, I will propose unionization as a dialectical method to mobilize the class antagonism and to mediate the contradiction of the very idea of labor being at stake in the time of human capital and platform. I will bring attention to the cases of Instagram Meme Union, and the 2023 Hollywood Writers’ strike as the examples of organizing under financialization in whose achievements discursive powers played a pivotal role. These examples will serve as precedents for the concluding section, where I propose specific approaches through which the Queer Collective Workers’ Union could be mobilized—approaches that reclaim speculation as a collective and antagonistic practice rather than a financial logic

Before furthering my analysis, I would like to clarify that I am calling this collectivity “queer” not merely as a category within identity politics. I joined that practice because I intuited that the labor struggle in the time of human capital has an innate potential to be queer, since the crisis of the very idea of labor is itself a biopolitical project. Vishmidt defines human capital in relation to biopolitics as “a subject whose infinite capacity for creativity and self-invention aligns her with the structure of capital as self-valorising value” (Vishmidt 2019, 41). In this configuration, the category of labor is canceled, and the distinction between life and value is eroded. She is no longer a worker but the owner of herself as capital, continually making investments. Reproduction—not only sexual but also social—of this subject thus becomes an expression of capital’s interest “in life insofar as it can be made productive, insofar as it can be made into labour,” that is, biopolitics (215).1 Therefore, the negation of human capital would not only entail the “refusal of work” but extend to a “human strike”—“the wider refusal of certain human relationships and social dynamics”—which remains consistent with the mission of queering (187).

Diagram with Me

My engagement with the collective over the past few years has been a search for this queerness, or, in other words, for the autonomy specific to the structure of distributed ownership and labor we sought to organize. The involvement of queer bodies here, at least as I intended, was not a project of representation but an expression of class antagonism unique to queer workers and their culture. This text is an attempt to understand how that autonomy became subsumed within the class division that emerged in the collective, not only through the individual desires of its “founding” constituents but also through the speculative system of value dominant in the “political art” world on which those desires were formed. This question, in turn, points toward the kind of collectivity required to negate the conditions that have inhibited its emancipation.

The Founder Class

The groundwork for this investigation is the identification of class division within the collective. As I first outlined in The Gentrification of Queer Collectivity, this proposition stems from my empirical experience within a queer collective, but the category I develop here is not limited to specific individuals. Rather, the founder class names a recurring structural position that emerges from identity-based movements as they become institutionalized. It designates the class fraction that translates the political energy of minoritarian struggle into platforms of representation, often mediating between precarity and capital in ways that reproduce hierarchy under the guise of visibility.

Historically, this class formation can be traced through the genealogy of queer movements themselves. As Sarah Schulman observes, the gentrification of gay politics followed a familiar pattern of erasure and replacement: “authentic gay community leaders… too unruly, too radical in their critique of heterosexism” were supplanted by “palatable individuals with no credibility in the community… appointed in their stead” through media and institutional selection. This process transformed queer liberation into a representational economy, producing what Schulman calls the “corporate media-appointed representative of gay people”—figures who embodied well-assimilated queer difference within capitalist normalcy (Schulman 2013, 116, 129). The class subjectivity of the founder thus parallels what Schulman describes as the role of white gay men in the gentrification of urban and cultural space. Enabled by access to capital and visibility, they functioned as what might be called model minorities of liberal capitalism—those able to convert the trauma of exclusion into entrepreneurial agency. “Only gay people who were able to access enough money to separate from their oppressive communities of origin,” Schulman notes, “were able to create visible, gay-friendly housing and commerce and achieve political power in a city driven by real estate development” (40).

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In this light, the founder class does not merely manage collectivity but mediates between the radical negativity of marginalized life and the affirmative demands of the market. Its role is homologous to that of a class that transforms the possibility of solidarity into a form of speculative social capital—namely, the curator, start-up founder, or creative entrepreneur under financialization. The founder’s identity, however minoritarian, becomes a vehicle for accumulation: recognition and funding circulate through them as value-forms. Thus, the founder class can be understood as the embodiment of what Schulman calls the gentrification of the mind: the internalization of replacement, the conversion of collective transformation into self-representation, and the substitution of social change with institutional success.

Queer Collective as Speculation

The collective practice here exemplifies what Vishmidt calls speculation, which has both negative and affirmative aspects. Negativity refers to what I defined earlier as the queer potential innate in this project—its open-endedness, its immanence to its own laws to be collectively created. This autonomy, as Adorno reminds us in Art, Society, Aesthetics, only emerges through its relation to what it excludes: “Art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants. It is defined by its relation to what it is not. The specifically artistic in art must be derived concretely from its other” (Adorno 2007a, 3). For Adorno, then, autonomy was conditioned by heteronomy—by its opposition to capitalist social relations—so that art could figure a speculative, future-oriented negativity against the totality of capital.

The most meaningful struggles in queer culture have historically revolved around this same question of autonomy: how to generate forms of collective life and production immanent to their own speculative laws. From the liberatory imaginaries of gay and trans activism to the experimental infrastructures of AIDS-era mutual aid, queer publishing, and performance, such practices extended autonomy as a speculative horizon. This aligns closely with what Adrienne Maree Brown later called “science fictional behavior.” “All organizing is science fiction,” she writes, “by which we mean that social justice work is about creating systems of justice and equity in the future, creating conditions that we have never experienced” (Brown 2017, 127). In this sense, queer autonomy was itself a speculative practice—an aesthetic and political experiment in living otherwise, imagining social forms whose conditions did not yet exist. Yet, like art’s autonomy, it was conditioned by heteronomy: its difference was forged within and against the structures of exclusion that also rendered it visible, and its speculative potential was always at risk of being converted into value.

Vishmidt revises this dialectic of autonomy and heteronomy for the conditions of financialized capitalism, where speculation has become a generalized social logic. As she writes, “If Adorno’s negative dialectics of the social ontology of art presupposes instrumental reason and the monopoly of ratio (as exchange-value) as the regime of heteronomy that art, with its open-ended, future-figuring and material speculation, was in principle opposed to, we now have to assess a situation in which the development of capital’s value forms and value relations have captured much of this speculative energy, affirming processes which Adorno saw as antithetical to capital altogether” (Vishmidt 2019, 24). In this context, autonomy no longer stands outside heteronomy as its negation; it persists as what Vishmidt calls an “immanent refusal within heteronomy,” where art’s difference from capital becomes one of its productive forces (94).

What Heteronomy?

Vishmidt’s goal in her work is therefore “to reformulate contemporary intersections between art and labour in new terms, namely, in the terms of the negativity that attends the generalisation of ‘creativity’ as a labour discipline” (Vishmidt 2019, 85). I offer my case study of the collective as an instance of this revised heteronomy—where the speculative energy of queer culture, once oppositional to capital, is now subsumed under financialization—and as a way to ask what forms of negation may still be possible within it.

If, in Vishmidt’s analysis, human capital names an individual subjectivity that internalizes and reproduces heteronomy by substituting the category of worker with that of an entrepreneur of the self, then we might ask what its collective equivalent would be: a plural formation that similarly erodes the possibility of class composition. I propose the concept of the platform to designate this collective form. The platform, in this sense, is not merely a technological apparatus but a social ontology through which heteronomy is collectively enacted.

Platform names the form of capitalist corporation that is “characterised by providing the infrastructure to intermediate between different user groups, by displaying monopoly tendencies driven by network effects, … and by having a designed core architecture that governs the interaction possibilities.” It functions as “an extractive apparatus for data” by “providing a digital space for others to interact in” (Srnicek 2017, 32). This description is consistent with the business model of the collective: receiving commissioned projects through a communication channel owned by the founders; distributing gigs to its members; and publishing and circulating outputs under the name of the collective, with members receiving shares from each project’s artist fees. However, the aim of this text is not to determine whether the collective fits this empirical definition. Platforms emerged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, under specific technological and monetary conditions heterogeneous with those that gave rise to the collective. I take the platform instead as an analogical figure of heteronomy, a conceptual tool that makes perceptible how the collective’s autonomy is structured by the same speculative logic that governs financialized capitalism.

Thinking the platform analogically rather than literally enables heteronomy to become visible: it names the social mediation through which collective labor and sociality are organized as forms of value, even when no data are extracted and no algorithmic infrastructure is in place. In this sense, platform is not merely a technological but an ideological category, one that articulates the general condition under which autonomy persists only as an internal function of heteronomy. As an ideology, it reorganizes the very conditions of subjectivity, undermining the subjective grounds of class formation and implanting neoliberal modes of self-relation in their place. In this way, platform capitalism, as Santos writes, “constitutes one of the most powerful mechanisms for disseminating a neoliberal form of subjectivation throughout the social body, even among those most disadvantaged by its effects” (Santos 2025, 206).

By reading the collective through the platform analogy, heteronomy no longer appears as an external imposition but as a mode of social mediation integral to this subjectivity. It organizes the relations among members, their labor, and the surplus of representation they produce according to speculative principles: each participant’s autonomy becomes the means by which the collective reproduces its own dependency on capital and institutions. This heteronomy reveals modalities of platform capitalism that are not only specific to digital infrastructures but increasingly condition all labor under financialization: “such as the absence of an employment contract, … the lack of predetermined working hours, fully variable and performance-based remuneration, the absence of fundamental labour rights, and the possibility of dismissal without prior notice,” all of which were pertinent even in the case of the queer collective (Santos 2025, 208). Albeit on a different scale, the concept of collective—in addition to its appropriation as a cultural brand—was also a practical tool for the founders to instrumentalize labor with greater ease, precisely because of those characteristics of the platform as the heteronomy of the collective.

Ironically, what makes queers particularly susceptible to this form of heteronomy is the very condition that once defined queer collectivity as oppositional: precarity, the unceasing exposure to crisis. The emergence of platform capitalism itself was predicated on the 2008 financial crisis, when mass unemployment, the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing policies, and the generalization of precarious labor produced the ideal conditions for speculative infrastructures to flourish. As Santos notes, these developments universalized the traits once confined to “informal, illegal, ‘peripheral,’ or ‘marginal’ sectors,” translating them into the normative labor model of the platform economy (Santos 2025, 208). In this sense, platform capitalism exemplifies what Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism—“the orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities” (Klein 2007, 6). If queerness names a class defined by the ever-ongoing crisis, its sociality becomes the site of financialization rather than its exception. The indeterminacy that once characterized queer survival and autonomy has been reabsorbed as a speculative capacity within financialized heteronomy. The collective’s precarity is thus analogous to platform capitalism as a historicized condition: a system that abstracts open and once-transformative sociality into speculative productivity.

Labor or Friendship?

Once we identify the queer collective’s internalized heteronomy as the platform, the subsequent question becomes what happens to labor within it. According to Marx’s formulation in Grundrisse, labor’s distinctiveness lies in its negativity. Before it is subsumed by capital, living labor—labor in its subjective moment—exists as potential, as the “general possibility” of all value yet “in itself is not value.” It is not-value, the antagonistic condition through which capital realizes itself. Once objectified in capital, labor loses this indeterminate character and becomes “variable capital,” a component of investment measured in wages. As Vishmidt comments, “labour in its subjective moment, prior to becoming a commodity in a relation with capital, is ‘not-value’; it is the source of all value, the ‘general possibility’ of all value, value in the abstract, but in itself is not value” (Vishmidt 2019, 88). This negativity marks labor’s irreducible friction with capital’s self-expansion. Christopher Arthur, whom Vishmidt cites, names this condition “counterproductive labour,” since even when labor is fully subordinated, its subjectivity remains a site of resistance: “Capital accumulation realises itself only by negating that which resists the valorisation process, labour as ‘not-value’… The consequence of this special feature of labour is that the relation of capital and labour is intrinsically antagonistic” (Arthur in Vishmidt 2019, 90–91). Labor’s negativity, then, is both the precondition and the limit of valorization. Capital depends upon what it must continually negate.

Under financialization, however, labor’s antagonism is undermined by interiorization. In Vishmidt’s account, capital begins to appropriate labor’s very indeterminacy. The speculative logic of finance preempts the friction between living labor and value by transforming potentiality itself into an asset form. The worker, no longer a source of surplus value opposed to capital, is recast as human capital: an enterprise of self-investment whose future productivity is already priced and securitized. “The reconciliation of labour and capital as the paradigmatic form of ‘human capital’” (Vishmidt 2019, 96) thus names a historical mutation in which labor’s negativity—its “not-value”—is absorbed as speculative capacity, the promise of future value. As Vishmidt writes, “previously ‘untouched’ areas of subjectivity and social life” are drawn into valorization; “labour… is experienced as a moment of capital” (Vishmidt 2019, 105–6). In this historical configuration, the antagonistic relation that once defined labor dissolves. “The antagonism of the workers is no longer viable,” she observes, “because capital cancels the idea of labour itself” (96). What was once counterproductive becomes entrepreneurial; what was once not-value becomes the very engine of speculation. Labor’s negativity, once the ground of its difference from capital, is now internalized as capital’s own dynamism—value producing value, life converted into investment. Financialization thus completes the speculative subsumption of labor, canceling labor not only as an antagonistic force but as a category in itself.

The cancellation of labor in human capital obtains an emergent affective dimension under the platform, its collective equivalent. What I find symptomatic of this is the articulation by the founders, who insisted that the collective’s goal was not to organize labor but “to have fun together,” thus “it was not labor but friendship.” This rhetoric not only denies the antagonism of labor but recodes it as intimacy, replacing the economy of production with the affective economy of belonging. Although in this case such claims led to more abrupt expressions of disagreement, the same rhetorical and affective technology that cancels labor operates across the broader cultural sector, where “community-driven” and “collaborative” models serve as post-organizational alibis for the continued extraction of creative work. The analogical use of the platform as the collective’s heteronomy reveals how consistent these affective economies are with the subjectivity-forming effects of platform capitalism. The platform reconfigures labor by diffusing managerial functions into the workers themselves and translating hierarchy into a rhetoric of collaboration. “Teamwork, polyvalency, kaizen, quality control circles, and the introjection of managerial functions into multifunctional workers,” Santos notes, have long served to dissolve structural antagonism within labor (Santos 2025, 207). Platform capitalism represents “the most recent and intensified iteration of this model,” subjectivizing workers as “partners” rather than employees. Here, as in the collective, the promise of autonomy coincides with the outsourcing of control where remuneration becomes variable and contingent, while risks once borne by employers are transferred to individuals.

This ideological conversion of labor into partnership mirrors Vishmidt’s description of capital’s “reconciliation” with labor, but here the reconciliation is affective. The contradiction between capital and labor is resolved through emotional categories such as pleasure, friendship and care, which constitute the worker’s affective investment in the very form that exploits them. As Santos writes, under the platform model, “the entire system is designed to forge a specific form of subjectivity: one that Michel Foucault termed the ‘entrepreneur of himself’” (Santos 2025, 209). The collective’s affirmation that its members are “having fun together” thus articulates the precise point where the speculative interiorization of capital meets the social ontology of art and queerness, where labor denied as labor becomes the very sign of autonomy.

Autonomy as Heteronomy’s Self Image

Santos’s observation that platform workers describe their labor in terms of freedom and self-determination reveals a broader transformation of subjectivity under financialization. He notes that couriers in São Paulo routinely affirm their work as a form of autonomy—“being one’s own boss,” “setting one’s own hours,” “not having a boss”—even while enduring predatory conditions. “Beyond the technological component,” Santos writes, “one of the reasons many workers describe this visibly exploitative model in terms of ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’ may lie in their prior labour experiences” (Santos 2025, 210). For workers on the peripheries of capitalism, who “do not belong to the dominant races, genders, and sexualities in the centre,” the algorithmic system seems to offer relief from the overt despotism of the traditional boss. “The conversion of the boss into an impersonal algorithm,” Santos adds, “appears beneficial,” since domination is no longer embodied by a person but diffused through technological mediation (210). This dynamic illustrates a general condition of financialized subjectivity: autonomy no longer negates heteronomy but is produced by it. In Adorno’s and Vishmidt’s aforementioned dialectic, autonomy once derived its negativity from what it excluded—the economic and institutional totality that defined heteronomy. Under platform capitalism, this dialectic collapses as autonomy becomes an affective attribute internal to capital’s reproduction, a representational form that expresses heteronomy as freedom. The worker’s “freedom” to choose when and how to work is identical to the capitalist’s need for flexibility, precarity, and self-exploitation. Autonomy persists, but only as the medium through which heteronomy operates.

For those historically excluded from the guarantees of wage labor and citizenship—racialized, feminized, queer, and migrant subjects—this inversion takes on a particular intensity. Autonomy has long been a survival strategy in queer projects of building lives and forms of community outside heteronormative structures. Yet this autonomy, once and still carrying open potential for transformation, becomes easily instrumentalized within financialized culture, where the performance of independence, creativity, and authenticity is itself a source of value. Queer collectivity, in this sense, is doubly interpellated: as a promise of freedom from normative domination and as a representational resource for capital’s self-renewal. The queer collective thus mirrors the predicament of platform labor described by Santos. Its affective infrastructures, cloaked in the euphemisms of friendship and care, operate as mechanisms of mediation analogous to the algorithmic “freedom” of the platform worker. The insistence that “it was not labor but friendship” reproduces the same ideological conversion that conflates exploitation and autonomy. The collective’s sociality, like the courier’s flexible schedule, is presented as emancipation precisely because its heteronomy is distributed and affective rather than disciplinary. This is autonomy within a unilateral arrangement, experienced as relief from the overt hierarchies of institutional labor yet structurally dependent on the speculative infrastructures of funding, branding, and recognition.

If, in the 1960s, Adorno could still write that art “remains the antithesis of that which is the case [capitalist social relations],” Vishmidt shows that under speculation this autonomy is rather a sign of capital’s reflexivity than its negation (Adorno 2007b). The same holds for queer cultural production under platforms: its promise of self-determination and horizontal community no longer stands outside the social form of capital but exemplifies its latest stage. The “freedom” celebrated in both cases is not illusory but displaced, since it registers a real relief from older disciplinary dispositifs while simultaneously extending the reach of financialized heteronomy into the realm of desire, sociality, and representation. Queer autonomy, then, is historically determined by crisis and captured by speculation. It expresses the longing to live otherwise while functioning as the ideological engine of a system that subsumes even that longing. In the wake of financialization, autonomy becomes heteronomy’s self-image.

“Queer-owned” Platform?

The fact that a platform—or a collective—may be queer-owned does not exempt it from the structural logic of capital. As Santos insists, “there is no such thing as a ‘fair’ platform economy—just as there is no such thing as benevolent capitalism” (Santos 2025, 216). The platform model depends on pillars that are irreducibly exploitative: data extraction, labor precarity, monopolistic control, rentierism, infrastructural parasitism, and financial speculation. To remove any one of these would collapse the model itself. Even the most progressive experiments in “platform cooperativism,” he argues, remain bound by the same abstract form of labor and the same imperative of valorization. This argument resonates directly with Marx’s mature theory of real subsumption, as both Kohei Saito and Vishmidt emphasize.

Real subsumption describes the stage of capitalism in which capital not only commands labor formally (through wage relations) but also transforms the material and social organization of production itself (de Sicilia 2022). For Marx, the productive powers of labor are never simply labor’s own but can only exist as the productive powers of capital. “Since within the process of production living labour has already been absorbed into capital,” Marx writes, “all the social productive forces of labour appear as the productive forces of capital” (Capital, vol. 1, 1052; cited in Vishmidt 2019, 147). Under real subsumption, even the most communal forms of work are already determined by capital’s logic. As Vishmidt summarizes, “the productive powers of labour are a function of the aggregative and mobilising activity of capital, and serve to reproduce the capital–labour relation rather than augment the independent power of labour as an antagonistic class” (Vishmidt 2019, 42). Saito reads this shift historically: the late Marx of Capital revises Grundrisse’s optimism about the “general intellect.” By the 1860s, Marx recognized that cooperation itself, once imagined as a possible prefiguration of communist sociality, had been structurally appropriated by capital as a “productive force of capital.” The expansion of productive forces no longer indicates emancipation but the deepening of alienation. As Saito puts it, “cooperation under capital brings about new productive forces that individual workers cannot exert, but it is capital that appropriates the fruits of cooperation as a free gift” (Saito 2023, 150). What appears as collective autonomy is, in fact, capital’s form of socialization: the collective power of labor exists only as capital’s power.

In this light, the queer-owned platform does not stand outside this process. The queer identity of its de facto owners may resist certain hierarchies, but it does so within the same real subsumption that transforms cooperation into an instrument of valorization. The collective’s labor, no matter how egalitarian its representation, reproduces capital’s abstraction of labor as value through form-determination of social life. In Vishmidt’s terms, “the productive powers of labour appropriated as the productive powers of capital… are rather always the productive powers of capital.” Even its queer specificity—its euphemism of queer community—becomes a productive resource for the speculative expansion of cultural capital. This is why, as both Santos, Saito and Vishmidt imply, the question is not whether the platform is owned by workers, queers, or allies, but whether it reproduces labor as the constitutive form of capitalist sociability. So long as labor remains the mediating category, real subsumption persists no matter how the platform performs distribution. The problem is not ownership but form. In this sense, the queer platform reproduces the antinomy of real subsumption at the affective and ideological level: the image of emancipation becomes inseparable from exploitation, and collectivity becomes the means through which capital valorizes its own social form. Or, to adapt Santos’s phrasing, there is no such thing as a “queer platform economy,” only pinkwashing of the same heteronomy.

To be continued in the second part

References

Adorno, Theodor W. 2007a. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Robert Hullot-Kentor. N.p.: Continuum.

Adorno, Theodor W. 2007b. “Reconciliation Under Duress.” In Aesthetics and Politics. N.p.: Verso Books.

de Sicilia, Andrés S. 2022. “Subsumption.” In The Sage Handbook of Marxism, 610-630. London: The SAGE Handbook of Marxism.

Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine. N.p.: Henry Holt and Company.

Preciado, Paul B. 2018. “The Architecture of Sex: Three Case Studies Beyond the Panopticon.” The Funambulist supplement (19).

Santos, Eduardo A. 2025. “Theses on Platform Capitalism and Neoliberalism – Reflections on Global Trends From the (Semi)Periphery of Capitalism.” tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 2 (23): 205-222.

Schulman, Sarah. 2013. The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. N.p.: University of California Press.

Son, Noam Youngrak. 2025. “The Gentrification of Queer Collectivity: Witness to a Lost Fugitive Sociality.” The Archive of Patchy Studies. https://substack.com/home/post/p-170870454.

Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. N.p.: Polity Press.

Vishmidt, Marina. 2019. Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital. N.p.: BRILL.

Winter

I look at the faint silhouette of the Atomium, and I live in the future that the Atomium once manifested. The nation-state that constructed the Atomium no longer exists. Only the capital and the landmark remain.

At the time of its construction—the 1958 World Expo—racialised bodies were exhibited. They were presented as exotic imagery, serving the future image projected by the Atomium. The future of superfluousness they dreamed of has become the reality I now inhabit. Technological advancements, such as nuclear fusion, have made energy and material no longer finite. The only resource that still remains limited is the capacity of the human mind. Scarcity, the cornerstone of economic systems, is now tethered to quantifiable human attention as the last exhaustible commodity.

I look at the faint silhouette of the Atomium, still visible when I squint from here, at Meise Botanic Garden. I live and work here, since I was selected for the Gardener-in-Residence programme. I was selected, and I could not select—because other forms of living were not only unaffordable, but unimaginable for me to remain in this city. I was selected because of nothing but my ancestors, who were collected by the founders of what this land used to be from the kingdoms and tribes that they once eradicated and then redecorated. Like their bodies, which were among the first things to be transported by the system we now call logistics, plant bodies were once shipped here in glass containers engineered for long-distance displacement—sealed humid chambers where many specimens perished during the journey. Meise Botanic Garden was originally built to accumulate and exhibit those surviving bodies, arranged into decorative taxonomies and reclassified as symbols of imperial reach.

Today, the garden no longer imports living plants. It cultivates no food, no medicine, no ecosystems; but genetically assembled hybrids: organisms whose genomes are patched together from traits extracted from flora indigenous to the South. Staged within fully automated growth chambers, these bodies are photographed into raw materials for image-generating systems that learn their leaves and flowers pixel by pixel and metabolise the green aesthetics. This is what the garden sells—to architects designing buildings with rooftop gardens, to real estate developers advertising their properties next to parks, to café owners decorating their interiors with oversized foliage, to politicians whose electoral promises hinge on “green growth.” Their specific demands shape the morphology of the plants, engineered to be more eye-catching, flamboyant, novel, exotic, or futuristic. Their purpose is not survival, but visibility.

My role as the Gardener-in-Residence was not so different from that of the plants themselves. The position is renewed each year, promptly and seamlessly aligning the image data to the global trend. The title implies expertise, but no knowledge beyond the appearance of knowledge is required. I am not expected to cultivate anything, only to perform cultivation: to mist leaves on schedule, to crouch and gesture among the foliage in a costume bought for its ethnographic suggestiveness, with props designed to match the narrative of ancestral practice. I was told that my presence made the footage more authentic during the job interview. It gave “the realistic nuance” to the dataset, they said. The plants I was assigned to tend had been genetically assembled from fragments of flora native to the region my ancestors were taken from, shredded only to be rebraided as visual markers of popular values. I do not recognize them. They do not need me. But every few hours, a webcam turns on silently, and I would lean in with a wooden watering can that has never been filled, and pretend to care. My hands, like the leaves, are being recorded.

Spring

I look at the section of the garden where I am expected to be made visible. At first glance, the flora appears vastly diverse, but after months here, after countless moments of eye contact, it all begins to blur and meld. And from this green composite, I start seeing some patterns. For example, all their leaves, despite their various sizes, shapes, colors, and textures, contain the same perforations, likely derived from the Monstera genome that was injected during assembly. Before getting congealed into an aesthetic gesture, these holes once helped the leaves withstand wind and rain, and made them better suited for absorbing sunlight in the rainforest. But there is no wind or rain to resist in Meise Botanic Garden. Photosynthesis here is already measured and optimised under magenta LED panels. Despite its ecological pointlessness, the hole-making gene characterises what the viewer wants to see from the foliage, after which all these species are crafted—copied from standardised callus tissue, grown in substrate, rotated into display once their appearance stabilises, and eventually photographed repeatedly from all imaginable angles.

But there have been a few exceptions to this diverse uniformity that only I seem to have been noticing recently. To be precise, there have been three cases. Once, I noticed a leaf that curved more than the others. It leaned to one side, slightly off from the rest, though I couldn’t say when it started doing that. I assumed it had always been like that, but after passing by it again a few times, I began to think otherwise. Another time, the edges of a plant’s leaves began to pale—not the whole leaf, just the border, faint and uneven, as if the green had been gradually thinned out. The third one felt wrong the moment I touched it. The stem had softened—still intact, but not holding its shape. The surface was slightly damp, and the whole thing felt gelatinous.

But every time I witnessed these things, I had to doubt myself. The automated system around them, all its biosensors, irrigation tubes, heatpipes and cameras, remained completely indifferent, as if these quirks were invisible. Maybe it’s the fakeness of everything I perform here that’s finally turning me crazy. To prove my own sanity, I’ve been remembering these three spots clearly, passing by them each day, checking if what I saw was still there, while maintaining my daily performance in the same costume, with the same props.

One thing I learned about the occurrence of this oddity is that it makes the plant eventually succumb, with some varying latencies, from a week to almost a few months. The first two cases wilted slowly: the curled leaf yellowed and fell, the pale-edged one grew thinner each day, until its stem bent under its own weight. The third one—the gelatinous-stemmed one—collapsed more abruptly. Its upper half had slumped sideways overnight, the base split open along the vein like peeled skin. From the soft interior, something dropped. About the size of a fingernail, it was firm and dry, slightly warm—or maybe just holding the temperature of the chamber—and faintly rough, with a fine ridge spiralling around its edge. I had never seen anything like this deriving from a plant. I turned it between my fingers a few times, then slipped it into the only pocket of the costume.

A few days later, I went back to the sites of the earlier collapses. Beneath the dried pulp, I found two more—similar in shape and size, though one had a duller surface, the other slightly pitted, like it had been pressed against something irregular. I wiped them clean on the inside of my sleeve and placed them beside the first.

All these events, although I have clearly experienced them, evidenced by the three particles in my pocket, still don’t seem to be recognised by the garden’s control system. It continues to behave as if the plants were perfectly fine, shedding light on their decaying biomass, and photographing the void.

Summer

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Founders Against Commoning

The aforementioned “attachment” to the very structures that sustain the master’s house becomes concretely identifiable when one examines the accumulation of capital. The forms of capital offered by Bourdieu provide a relevant framework for this analysis, as they allow us to identify not only what circulates and accumulates between the institution and the collective, but also within the collective itself. As Bourdieu explains, capital “can present itself in three fundamental guises: as economic capital, which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the form of property rights; as cultural capital, which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of educational qualifications; and as social capital, made up of social obligations (‘connections’), which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital” (Bourdieu 1986, 16).

Diagram with Me

In the case of economic capital, the flows from the institution to the collective include residency funding, project budgets, and access to production facilities such as the Riso printer—resources that, in Bourdieu’s terms, are “immediately and directly convertible into money” or equivalent material means. The flows from the collective to the institution are less direct but equally significant: unpaid labor, artistic production, and public programming serve as content that supports the institution’s funding applications and enhances its public legitimacy. Within the collective, however, this capital tends to accumulate in the hands of the founders, whose de facto ownership centralizes decision-making over budgets and resource allocation, restricting the circulation of material resources among members.

Cultural capital, which Bourdieu describes as existing “in three forms: in the embodied state, i.e., in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body; in the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods …; and in the institutionalized state, in the form of educational qualifications” (Bourdieu 1986, 17), also moves in both directions. From the institution to the collective, it takes the form of symbolic legitimacy derived from affiliation with a recognized cultural entity, visibility in established art-world channels, and access to curatorial networks. From the collective to the institution, it appears as the queer cultural capital that the collective embodies and performs—an aesthetic and discursive positioning that enhances the institution’s diversity profile. Internally, however, cultural capital is often privatized: the founders’ control over public representation (through websites, social media, and institutional correspondence) ensures that authorship credit, branding, and aesthetic identity accrue disproportionately to them.

Finally, social capital is equally subject to uneven circulation. From the institution to the collective, this includes introductions to directors, curators, press, and other artists, as well as access to networks that can lead to future opportunities. From the collective to the institution, it involves the collective’s embeddedness in queer communities, collaborators, and audiences, which expands the institution’s reach. Yet internally, the founders’ gatekeeping over these institutional and artistic networks concentrates the benefits of relationship-building in their hands, limiting other members’ access to the long-term advantages that such social capital can provide as a means of production.

For the residency program at the institution, I proposed the commons as an alternative to the contradiction of the collective’s de facto privatization. The framing of the commons was particularly relevant as a model for labor and stewardship because it offered not only a discourse but also concrete principles of organizing, as it “names not just a type of resource shared but social systems comprising three elements: (1) a commonwealth, (2) a community of commoners and their social relations, and (3) a praxis of commoning, of doing in common” (De Angelis 2021). However, the proposal was repeatedly dismissed, often met with defensive or emotional responses from the founders. Seen through Bourdieu’s framework, this rejection is not incidental but an inevitable expression of the subjectivity shaped by those capital relations. It is structurally consistent with a position built on the enclosure of all three forms of capital. To embrace commoning would require decentralizing economic, cultural, and social capital, eroding the very mechanisms that sustain their positional advantage.

It is important to situate this refusal within the expansive history of enclosure, the primitive accumulation that has persisted in various forms: the privatization of common land, the transformation of peasants into an urban proletariat, the de-economization of female care labor, the gentrification of urban commons into real estate projects, and more. In this light, the founders’ subjectivity is genealogically aligned more closely with that of the petit bourgeois than with the figures in queer history who were rebels, fugitives, tenants, and the outlawed, again exemplifying the structural erasure and disparity between queer collectivity then and now that Sarah Schulman describes.

The Queer Collective at the Vampire’s Castle

The most abrupt expression of the founders’ rejection was an incident of verbal aggression directed toward a member when faced with the call for commoning. My interest here is not to engage in moral judgment of the harms caused by this violence—which I will not reproduce in this text—but rather to attend to the affective dimensions of the subjectivity that gave rise to that rupture. Despite the severity of the aggression, the members, including myself, made a considerable effort to mediate the situation without immediately “canceling” the aggressor. However, the founders refused to take part in a political process within the collective through which the harm could be constructively addressed and resolved in open and accountable discussion.

Throughout the ongoing tension, one emotional experience that the aggressor repeatedly emphasized was their fear of being blamed, which led them to disregard the work of mediation, immediately (mis)reading it as a callout. In other words, what characterizes this affective state is a reductive reading of all political processes as the so-called “cancel culture,” a position fundamentally opposed to mediation. This fear-driven politics corresponds to what Mark Fisher calls the “Vampire’s Castle,” a formation that “specialises in propagating guilt” and is “best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy” of political movements. The emotional atmosphere Fisher describes is resonant with the attitude the aggressor maintained: “What holds them together is not solidarity, but mutual fear—the fear that they will be the next one to be outed, exposed, condemned” (Fisher 2013).

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This writing is inspired by Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. As a survivor of a brutal period in queer history, Schulman draws attention to how the AIDS epidemic not only accelerated real-estate-driven gentrification in New York—literally killing queer dwellers and emptying out homes—but also produced something comparable in the realm of thought: “an internal replacement that alienated people from the concrete process of social and artistic change” (Schulman 2013, 14). My reality as a queer person is disconnected from that of Schulman’s not only by time and geography, but also by the erasure produced through that gentrification. Yet engaging with her reflection brought me into what she calls antigentrification: “the realest, most fundamental experiences of being alive” that are “revealed by the reader’s taking in … by letting it all sink in and add up” (Schulman 2013, 17). Working as a producer of informational surplus in contemporary institutions that now embrace “queering” as part of their mission—at least superficially—my experience aligns closely with the process of gentrification Schulman describes. Her work revealed to me an unforeseen genealogy of a struggle that persists in my time and in the institutions in which I work. Her generosity is what motivated me to write this piece. I have often told others that “this is an exciting case study except for the fact that I am in it,” but I now realize it is valuable precisely because I am in it. In this sense, my work comes closer to that of “the author as producer,” whose mission is “not to report but to struggle; not to play the spectator but to intervene actively,” defined “in the account he [they] gives of his [their] own activity” (Benjamin 2019, 770).

Having said this, the experience of antigentrification that I want to offer here concerns queer collectivity. By a queer collective, I mean something exemplified by the introduction I once wrote for one that I have co-organized: “[The collective is] an ongoing collective experiment that operates through shared agency in creative labor, care, and friendship… We resist the modern myth of a singular heroic designer—what Ursula K. Le Guin referred to as ‘the narrative of the arrow or spear.’ We consider ourselves a queer collective not merely as a statement of identity, but as a statement of methodology… to design a context where diverse marginalized experiences and voices can be represented.” While I still believe in this proposition to some extent, what I aim to address here is what happens to its potentiality when it is enclosed within cultural institutions. Although collectives can and do exist outside institutional environments, my concern is specifically with those situated in and modulated by such milieus. This is because I have experienced the abundance of the latter over the former, as only the former is registered as a value-form in the liberal cultural industry. The collective subjectivity that emerges here is ontologically dependent on larger institutions from which it derives its money, symbolic capital, and discursive legitimacy. My claim is that the open potential of the undercommons—“the networks of rebellious solidarity that interlace within, against and beyond dominant institutions and power structures”—is, in the milieu I examine, continually obstructed by institutional conditions that divert attention away from fugitivity and channel it instead into practices that can be managed by the institution (Undercommoning Collective 2016).

Diagram with Me!

For this work, I draw on my experience of being part of the collective over the past few years. I do not name it here—not only because the collective itself does not merit critical attention as an entity, but also because I aim to frame this observation beyond the limitations of specific individuals, focusing instead on the institutional power structures that enabled their violence.

In this text, the collective refers to the aforementioned queer collective in which I have been involved. While it originally began as an artist duo who later referred to themselves as the founders, it had, by the time I joined, been publicly reframed as a “queer collective.” This shift implied, at least nominally, a move toward distributed authorship, shared infrastructure, and collective decision-making. Such principles appeared convincing to many, prompting more members to join and fueling exponential growth. Over time, however, it became apparent that these collective ideals were not mutually upheld. While non-founding members contributed significantly to the collective’s artistic production and public representation—thereby generating much of its symbolic capital—they remained structurally excluded from core aspects of authorship and control. Access to key means of representation (such as the website, social media accounts, and institutional correspondence), as well as decision-making power over project orientation and fundraising, remained centralized in the hands of the founders. This structural impasse led multiple members to leave, shrinking the collective in size even as its public profile remained intact.

In relation to the collective, the institution refers to a specific, prestigious artist residency situated in the affluent, highly internationalized cultural industry of a Western European country. On behalf of the collective, I developed a project proposal intended to address the aforementioned tensions constructively; this proposal was accepted into the institution’s residency program. It is within this context that the present text is produced. Later in this reflection, I will focus on a specific incident in which the collective’s own contradictions produced a rupture during its engagement with the program.

I find the case of this collective subjectivity particularly useful for my research question, since its understanding of value—not only economic, but also social, discursive, and even tied to self-esteem—originates almost entirely from its relationship with institutions. It is important to note that even these institutions, ostensibly committed to “a wide discourse,” “a diversity of practice,” and “a multitude of voices,” operate under the same modulation, themselves engulfed by other institutions with greater power, forming a recursive loop from the collective-turned-institution, through many intermediate institutions, to the cultural policy of former colonial metropoles. Articulating the relationship between the collective and its host-institution(s) therefore offers a framework that can be adapted to analyze the broader assemblage of cultural production.

I propose this case as a starting point because of its unique scale. To map the relationship between the institutional milieu and queer subjectivity, some institutions (Instagram, the global art market, etc.) are so vast that understanding them requires an expansive collective effort. At the same time, some subjectivities are so intimate, rooted in processes within an individual psyche that they are likely to be interpreted through psychoanalytic assumptions. The case I examine here, by contrast, involves an institution with a relatively small staff, whose decision-making processes are usually concentrated in its directors’ hands—hardly a “hyperobject.” Within this institution, the collective was composed of two founders—de facto owners—and two members, including myself, also attempting to represent the former members who had left the collective in disappointment. This subjectivity, despite its internal disagreements, emerged not only from individual minds but from verbal and written interactions and a sociality that can be empirically observed with greater ease.

The essay thus approaches the collective subjectivity of a queer collective embedded in a cultural institution through four interlinked dimensions: its sociality, shaped under conditional hospitality and sustained as a form of institutionalized sociability; its politics, constrained by the dominance of recognition over redistribution in the art world’s value system; its economy, structured by the uneven circulation and enclosure of economic, cultural, and social capital; and its affect, modulated by the fear-driven atmosphere Mark Fisher calls the “Vampires’ Castle.” Together, these dimensions compose a subjectivity that appears collaborative yet remains tethered to the institution’s circuits of value, rendering the open potential of the undercommons unattainable.

Doing Dishes Together at someone else’s home

The project I proposed was titled On Doing Dishes Together. It critiqued “the fetish of collaboration, [with] collective practice being perceived as a mere trend” and aimed “to shift the focus from the conviviality of a shared dinner to the realities of grocery bills and unwashed dishes.” The institution, whose programs have often highlighted care and conviviality, especially around the theme of food, was an apt site for this work. Participating in those programs offered me a concrete case study of how sociality emerging from the institutional milieu produces an identity crisis for the collective subjectivity.

Sara Ahmed describes a form of subjugation that precedes conviviality through her concept of conditional hospitality: “When diversity becomes a form of hospitality, perhaps the organization is the host who receives as guests those who embody diversity. Whiteness is produced as host, as that which is already in place or at home. To be welcomed is to be positioned as the one who is not at home. Conditional hospitality is when you are welcomed on condition that you give something back in return. … People of color in white organizations are treated as guests, temporary residents in someone else’s home. People of color are welcomed on condition they return that hospitality by integrating into a common organizational culture, or by ‘being’ diverse, and allowing institutions to celebrate their diversity” (Ahmed 2012, 41–42). Within the institution, even the collective’s proposition of Doing Dishes Together takes place within “someone else’s home.” The collective subjectivity that emerges here is that of a guest whose presence can be legitimized only by meeting the conditions required to be invited. This subjectivity is either recruited from individuals or produced through their transformation by the functions of ideology—“the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (Althusser 1971, 163). The institution is the material apparatus where this transformation takes place.

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