Editorial

This issue of Too Little/Too Hard is dedicated in memory to the brilliant cultural theorist Marina Vishmidt (1976–2024).

Marina had kindly agreed to write an essay for this issue. We’d been in contact since the beginning of this project, as her thought and work were integral to its foundation – in particular, her outstanding critical theorisation of how speculation (philosophical, financial, artistic) shapes contemporary subjectivity by value relations: Speculation As A Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity In Art and Capital. In this book, Marina establishes a symmetry between ‘financial speculation and speculative or aesthetic judgement’ – or finance and thought, among other things. We recommend that everyone reads this important work. You can listen to Marina discussing Speculation as a Mode of Production in a podcast interview with Andreas Petrossiants, followed by a further written conversation. Andreas has also written a moving tribute in e-flux, where he says: ‘Marina is more alive than living, and our struggles are stronger for it, because she put the whole world in there, in her work, in her friendships, and in her commitment to revolutionary horizons.’ 

Marina’s idea for her essay for TL/TH was this: ‘developing the speculative more in terms of method, and articulating it with a recent trajectory I've been looking at in Notes from Below and Brooklyn Rail from the organiser/engineer Nick Chavez – can we take a speculative approach to political composition through a close engagement with the empirical, or the technical composition of the political? That sounds very general, but maybe a direction to elaborate. An earlier moment of 'methods-based’ reflection, though again not very systematic, is here.’ 

These suggestions brought us back to thinking about Marina’s focus on infrastructure in her essay ‘Between Not Everything and Not Nothing: Cuts Toward Infrastructural Critique’ where she writes – and this feels more relevant than ever –

A literal reading of ‘infrastructure’ as bridges, tunnels, and sewers is ineradicably tied to its function as a locus of social abstraction. It’s for this reason we could suggest, for example, that the dangerously frayed built environment of the United States offers one of the best views on the formerness of the ‘West’ as a progressive theodicy, levelled down by necrocapitalist extraction, while it still exerts a disproportionate capacity to project violence across the globe and on its residents. Broken infrastructure is loquacious.

We are listening. May some of these ideas, as with all of Marina’s work, metamorphose into further lines of possibility and ways of seeing. Our thoughts are with Marina’s loved ones at this time.

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Thinking further about infrastructure, it appears to us that collectivity and collective solidarity continue to be the most impactful way to make changes in culture and cultural production. We are thinking here of the actions that writers and book workers have been undertaking in solidarity with the Palestinian people; from fundraising, boycotts, protests, teach-ins, supporting solidarity encampments, to collective actions (such as withdrawing labour) and organising of groups such as Book Workers for a Free Palestine and Fossil Free Books. In relation to the Baillie Gifford divestment campaign, the subsequent backlash that Fossil Free Books and its supporters have received has been revealing, in particular from established industry figures, who conveniently choose to ignore the fact that writers withdrew their labour from U.K. literary festivals in protest against a company who invest millions in fossil fuels and companies involved in Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide. Overall, things have grown clearer, more disturbing during this time; bringing into sharp relief once more the way that – as Sarah Brouillette has expertly outlined in Literature and the Creative Economy – creative-economy discourse dovetails with neoliberalism (and imperialism). In turn this reifies and propagates the ‘model of the asocial or antisocial flexible individualist [...which] is in fact historically produced, highly contested, and contingent; and we need to identify and articulate alternative visions of a self not sufficient to itself, a self whose anti-egoism and need for sympathetic community are no less essential or natural than the predilections of the creatively flexible individual.’ (Brouillette). We are back to aesthetics and politics again, questions of work, time and value…

Which brings us onto the six articles featured in our summer issue.

In ‘Cheap Lit’, author and translator Claudia Durastanti interrogates the affordability of different literary practices: in what subtle, unconscious ways must a writer and their practice adapt to survive in an increasingly unequal and unpredictable labour market? Keiran Goddard’s poem ‘for work/for rest.xls’ compiles that same practice of surviving into an Excel spreadsheet, one lemma per day, five days a week, for forty-seven weeks of the year. To follow, in ‘Dear emerging, pre-emerging & post-emerging poets,’ the ever-inspirational Brenda Hillman writes a poetic letter of encouragement and comfort to poets everywhere. In ‘Pedagogies of Panic: Teaching, Dreaming and Writing’ , Holly Pester examines the complex relations between dreaming and sociopolitical structures, in particular the structure of the neoliberal university. Guiding us through her wonderful course ‘Dreaming and Writing’, Pester examines the potential of dreams as conduits for writing and their obverse, the abstraction of experience in marketised HE dreamspace: does our unconscious, too, become colonised by performance metrics and production targets? ‘Side Work’ by Dizz Tate addresses a similar emotional seepage: the continuous, uninterrupted dream of the writer who lives a double existence, working a demanding day job to meet the inflated costs of living. Academic and poet Mia You’s essay, ‘Bad Daughter’, closes this issue by returning to the institution of the university and its problematic disciplinary models, while also taking us back to a space of collective action, in this instance a student encampment in solidarity with Palestine. 

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Thank you to our generous contributors. As the poet Lyn Hejinian writes in ‘The Rejection of Closure’, ‘Form is not a fixture but an activity’: agitated thought, vitreous, new thoughts, molten and fluid, may these thoughts continue –  to (un)close with Hejinian, another influential writer who has left us this spring, but also has not:

Some kind of consciousness is always going on. One begins as a student but becomes a friend of clouds. Please note that in my attempt to increase the accuracy of these sentences and the persistence and velocity with which they proceed, I’m pursuing change while trying to outrun the change that’s pursuing me. Consciousness carries us farther and farther into the world. Perhaps will and fate are the same chance. 

(from my life and my life in the nineties)

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