Critical Infra-Structuralism; or, The Humanities After AI: Some Have Been Doing This Work for Decades

J. Owen Matson, Ph.D.

The most powerful infrastructures are the ones we never see, because the moment they work, they erase their own traces, leaving us to confuse their outputs for the world itself. Critical Infra-Structuralism begins with this paradox: to understand how meaning comes into being, we must learn to read the systems that hide themselves even as they shape everything we see, think, and know.

Definition and scope

We cannot understand today’s world without tracing the infrastructures that generate it while erasing themselves in the very act of working, which is why by Critical Infra-Structuralism I mean a humanities practice with recursion in its bones, a way of reading the systems that bring meaning into being while attending to what they fail to register, a practice already long underway even when unnamed, since the humanities have for generations mapped the strange, overlapping architectures through which meaning flickers into existence, even when those architectures present themselves as stable or timeless or inevitable, and even when cultural artifacts—a book, a painting, a political speech—are treated as if they were self-contained nodes of creativity rather than the visible tips of vast submerged networks of printing presses and postal routes and colonial shipping and libraries built by regimes whose names fade from stone, which is to say the basic impulse behind this practice is familiar even as the present moment introduces a new kind of opacity, since today’s planetary infrastructures—platforms and algorithms and machine intelligences performing recursive operations at scales beyond human sense—saturate what we read and see and even think while receding from apprehension as any kind of total field, so that what we now confront are systems whose operations exceed the temporalities and spatialities earlier theorists like Foucault and Kittler and the media archaeologists could fully map, systems whose recursive feedback loops generate culture as they move, shifting the task of critique away from excavation toward a more disorienting accompaniment, one that moves alongside these living architectures, tracing what flickers at their edges while also attending to the zones where signals drop out and patterns dissolve, where omissions and erasures open into strange apertures through which the unanticipated may surface, so that the work becomes less about recovering lost origins than about reading operations and misfires together in a single gesture, as if rigor now means accepting that meaning is generated and unmade in real time and that interpretation itself has become part of the very processes it seeks to understand. The goal here is to sketch the contours of such a practice, offering both a conceptual frame and a series of provisional maps for navigating a world in which infrastructures think us even as we struggle to think them.

The two goals of Critical Infra-Structuralism can be expressed straightforwardly:

1. Tracing what can be seen – mapping how infrastructures operate, how they generate meaning, and how they shape the flows of information, culture, and thought. This involves understanding the technical substrates and operational logics of infrastructures—how code, platforms, algorithms, and networks structure what becomes visible and intelligible.
2. Attending to what cannot be seen – identifying the gaps, erasures, and blind spots that these systems produce, revealing their limits and the possibilities that escape their capture. This requires discerning the ambiguities and silences in texts and outputs that cannot be resolved computationally, relying on embodied, human evaluation to interpret what infrastructures fail to register.

AI models and recommendation engines and pipelines of data humming beneath the surface move far beyond distribution logics, functioning as generative filters that decide in real time what counts as knowledge, which voices amplify, which images and phrases endure the churn of attention and which sink into digital silt, while their operations recede and the very interfaces that let us touch them smooth over their own construction so a chatbot’s confident stream of language feels source-free even as it draws from billions of human traces and planetary resources, a kind of ventriloquism at scale whose ease disguises the violence of assembly.

Critical Infra-Structuralism, as I have been tracing it through these detours and near-definitions that resist settling, extends the long slow work of following currents and eddies through which texts and images and ideas come into being, while trying to keep pace with architectures whose reach widens and accelerates, planetary systems with feedback and distributed agency so expansive and quick they begin to generate the culture they seem to support, so the line between platform and product, between system and what flows through it, thins in ways that leave one a little vertiginous, and within this frame two entwined movements keep surfacing, never as stages and never in clean sequence, one devoted to tracing what shows itself—flows and checkpoints and algorithmic interventions where meaning is produced and sorted and filtered—and another tuned to disappearances, the blind spots and gaps and silences that mark infrastructural limits and the residues of what remains unabsorbed, movements already alive in work across the field, cartographies of the present that emerge almost despite themselves.

Abeba Birhane, for instance, exposes how algorithmic systems reconfigure centuries of racial hierarchy and empire while stripping away relational contexts that give life thickness until harm appears as statistical aberration, a rounding error, while David Berry examines epistemic architectures encoded in computation, showing how technical systems arrange time and value so that certain possibilities for thought feel inevitable and others recede from imagination, and N. Katherine Hayles furnishes the conceptual ground for approaching infrastructures as cognitive actors with their own interpretive rhythms rather than neutral scaffolding, while Ilkka Tuomi and Michael Peters work through the implications for education, a domain where AI architectures reshape the practices through which knowledge is made and judged and shared, and Rachel Horst extends this inquiry into an experiential register through Machinic Ecologies, an interactive, Deleuzian machine composed of human and nonhuman elements that stages polarized AI ethics as a living diagram where metaphors and personas can be rearranged, labels toggled, and intensities felt, a vibe-coded space for futures literacies and fictopoeisis that treats ethical judgment as a situated practice of making and unmaking in public, inviting participants to experiment before policy hardens, to sonify and sketch and move among contradictions as forms of care, so that around and between this scholarship new constellations gather—LLM Studies, Algorithmic Studies, and emergent fictopoethics—fields that link the intricate and often unseen operations of code and model and dataset to the larger cultural and philosophical questions that have animated the humanities, questions of meaning and ethics and power that now unfold in real time at planetary scale, in systems that think us even as we attempt to think them.

Abeba Birhane

Abeba Birhane writes with the kind of unnerving clarity that comes from looking at something everyone else insists is neutral and finding that it has teeth, and maybe also the faint smell of blood baked into its logic, which is a difficult thing to unsee once you’ve seen it, though the temptation to look away remains almost overwhelming because what she reveals is that algorithms—these supposedly clean, modern architectures of intelligence—are stitched together out of centuries-old debris, the detritus of empire and extraction and racial violence, all rendered in the antiseptic language of optimization so that the damage appears to be merely statistical, a rounding error in a machine designed for efficiency. Her writing performs a kind of philosophical archaeology, excavating the layers of relational context that have been stripped away by computational models that treat people as interchangeable fragments, and as you read you begin to feel the uncanny realization that every act of classification is also an act of erasure, and that the speed and scale of machine learning merely amplify what has always been there in the background of modernity’s archives: a hunger to know without the burden of responsibility, to predict without the trouble of understanding. There is a point, somewhere deep in Birhane’s essays and talks and scattered provocations, where you realize with a kind of nauseated wonder that prediction itself is a form of forgetting, a way of smoothing the roughness of lived reality into patterns that can be exploited, and in that moment you start to sense the depth of her project, which is not simply critique but the tentative, precarious imagining of other ways of relating, other ways of building systems that might remember rather than erase, though the very difficulty of that imagining is part of what gives her work its strange, anxious beauty.

David Berry

David Berry writes with the kind of exacting attention that leaves you feeling slightly unmoored, as though the very act of reading were being tracked and fed into some hidden system whose purpose remains obscure but whose effects are everywhere, which, in a way, is precisely what he argues about code, that it is never simply the scaffolding of our digital lives but an epistemic machinery whose operations extend outward until they begin to structure perception itself, bending our sense of what counts as real and even what counts as thought. His idea of the Inversion has this queasy brilliance to it, a moment when machine-generated cultural forms cease to merely imitate human creation and begin, in a kind of quiet ontological coup, to define the very reality they were once meant to copy, so that what emerges is no longer derivative but generative, and the distinction between origin and simulation dissolves into an endlessly recursive feedback loop.

This becomes most visible in what he describes as automimetric production, a strange, almost absurdly perfect example being music that is algorithmically composed, then streamed by bots to generate value for other algorithms, a closed circuit in which human listeners are incidental, their attention neither required nor even particularly relevant, like vestigial organs in an evolutionary process that has moved on without them. As Berry traces this transformation, he suggests that consciousness itself begins to take on an algorithmic quality, shaped through constant exposure to synthetic media that both anticipates and rewires our responses, producing a condition of partial automation in which the boundary between biological cognition and machinic feedback becomes difficult to locate, and perhaps was never very stable to begin with.

Reading him, you have the unnerving sense that even your skepticism is somehow already part of the system’s operation, that critique has been pre-absorbed as data, which makes his proposal for constellational analysis feel both urgent and strangely precarious, an attempt to map relations among technical architectures, cultural practices, and economic imperatives without presuming that any one of them can serve as a fixed point of reference. There are moments, especially near the end of his writing, when he allows himself to imagine acts of algorithmic détournement, playful subversions that redirect the system’s generative capacities toward human flourishing rather than mere extraction, though even this hope arrives shaded with irony, as if to acknowledge that the very tools of resistance may already carry the marks of the forces they seek to oppose, leaving us suspended in the paradox of trying to think outside a machine that has already thought us.

N. Katherine Hayles

N. Katherine Hayles has been writing about machines and minds for so long, and with such uncanny precision, that her ideas begin to move inside your own thought before you notice them there, like a melody you only realize you’ve been humming after several bars have already passed, which makes a kind of recursive sense given her claim that cognition never resides neatly inside a single body or brain but comes into being through distributed systems—biological, technical, cultural—each interpreting information in contexts that bind it to meaning, a phrase that appears simple at first, almost sterile in its clarity, until you realize how it loosens the bolts of centuries of philosophical machinery built to keep the human comfortably at the center of thought. Her vision of cognition as a mesh of recursive relations becomes the conceptual ground on which Critical Infra-Structuralism rests, because it shifts the way infrastructures can be understood as active participants in the generation of meaning, with their own strange tempos and feedback rhythms that are anything but inert.

Over decades of writing, Hayles has been sketching what might be called a planetary ecology of cognition, tracing how loops of interpretation operate across wildly different scales of space and time. In How We Became Posthuman, she revealed how information technologies did more than layer themselves atop human subjectivity, showing instead how they rewired the very circuits through which subjectivity was known, how the borderlines separating human from machine had always been porous, stitched together through historically contingent practices rather than etched in nature. Later, in Unthought, she moved beneath the threshold of awareness, into the nonconscious domains where bodily and affective and machinic processes do their work without presenting themselves to reflection, proposing that what we call consciousness is only a fragile surface, a thin shimmer atop an ocean of subpersonal and systemic activity whose scale we can barely register. Her most recent work, Bacteria to AI, expands this idea to a planetary horizon, building a model in which humans and machines and biological systems are mutual participants in an ongoing cascade of recursive interpretation with no origin to seek and no final point of completion.

Her framework pivots on a definition so understated it seems almost an afterthought—cognition, she writes, is a process that interprets information in contexts that connect it to meaning—the formulation provides a frame for understanding how cognition has always been more than the human mind, that thought has been happening everywhere, all the time, in ways too slow or too fast or too distributed for awareness to perceive, a vast swarm of interpretive processes humming at frequencies our conscious selves barely register, bacterial and neural and algorithmic and planetary, each shaping and reshaping the others. What begins to emerge from this definition is a picture of cognition as a shifting network of loops and folds, biological organisms entwined with technical infrastructures entwined with cultural patterns, meaning arising not from a sovereign subject speaking outward but from countless interactions in which every agent modifies every other, a relational turbulence that never resolves into stability.

Within this dynamic, consciousness becomes something far more delicate than the crown of cognition, a small emergent ripple riding on currents so deep they cannot be mapped, processes that move with speeds either glacial or instantaneous, like weather seen through a window that is itself part of the storm. When these ideas are brought to bear on infrastructures, the ground tilts sharply, because what they describe are not tools that merely transmit thought but systems whose operations actively shape the very contexts where interpretation takes form, so that every predictive model, every optimization sequence, every interface we touch is already participating in the construction of meaning before any conscious reflection arrives. Platforms, algorithms, AI engines—these are not background scenery but living sites of cognition whose rhythms entangle with our own, even as they elude our grasp.

For Critical Infra-Structuralism, this means that tracing infrastructures cannot be separated from the work of epistemology, since what is being mapped are the conditions through which knowledge is made and unmade in real time. These are systems that generate the very criteria by which they are perceived, producing and concealing themselves at once, so that every act of interpretation feeds back into the loops it seeks to describe, becoming another signal in the planetary mesh that Hayles has been struggling to chart for decades. Reading her work feels like standing on solid ground only to realize that the ground is a lattice of moving parts, some so slow they feel timeless, like the long evolution of nervous systems, others so fast they shatter the thresholds of perception, like the automated trades of global markets or the uncanny unfurling of predictive text. The revelation is that these temporalities are not parallel but interactive, colliding and compounding to generate emergent forms of meaning that no agent, whether human or machinic, can fully apprehend or control.

This perspective brings new urgency to the work of scholars like Birhane and Berry. Birhane exposes how algorithmic infrastructures absorb and reconfigure the deep histories of colonial power embedded in their data, while Berry traces how these same infrastructures begin to set the very conditions of perception. Hayles links these analyses, showing why such systems must be approached as cognitive entities whose operations intertwine with ours, entities whose interpretive activity actively shapes the horizons of meaning we inhabit. To read Hayles is to feel the conceptual floor buckle, to glimpse that interpretation itself has become part of the recursive planetary processes it once presumed to survey from a distance, and to leave her pages with the eerie sense that every moment of thought, every word passing through you, is already another loop in a system thinking through you as much as you are thinking through it.

Rachel Horst

Rachel Horst builds a thinking machine that feels wonderfully alive and slightly perilous to approach, an interactive diagram she names Machinic Ecologies where metaphors and personas and disputed ethics move as if on a weather map, the vectors braided from technical code and platform quirks and the ambient temperature of social networks and the older climate of philosophical lineage, and she does this through vibe-coding, which means conversing a design into existence while the code converses back, a duet whose tempo carries intention, error, repair, and that peculiar surge when a half-formed hunch suddenly renders as a working interface that invites more than looking, since the piece asks for touch and rearrangement and the kind of embodied attention that only arrives when the hand drags a node and the eye tracks the arc and the mind feels its own stance tilt in response. Her scene of inquiry begins from an exhaustion with moral postures that speak in ready-made templates and ends in a studio where ethics behaves like choreography, where positions acquire meaning through proximity and sequence and duration rather than decree, where turning the labels off produces a quiet shock as shapes keep their intensity even after language goes dim, which suggests that value systems travel through form and spacing and rhythm as much as through claims, and that judgment grows wiser when it learns to sense texture in addition to argument.

She names the larger method fictopoeisis and the ambience of care that surrounds it fictopoethics, a way of composing with the world that accepts the made-ness of convictions without sliding into theatrical skepticism, since the point is to treat explanations as crafted objects that can be bent and rejoined and revoiced until new responsibilities appear, an approach that frees the thinker from the tight costume of certainty and invites a rehearsal room where competing impulses can breathe and then recombine into unfamiliar obligations, which is why the visualization welcomes contradiction as raw material rather than error, arranging conflict as tension within a composition that the participant can tune by moving pieces, by adjusting axes, by letting sound or drawing or other modalities seep in when sentences begin to occlude what they were meant to clarify. Public theory becomes the workshop and sometimes the furnace, because the feeds amplify temperature and blur, and in that heat Horst refuses the comfort of fixed AI literacies or codified ethics and instead builds a temporary commons where inquiry happens prior to verdict, where educators and learners can approach AI as a planetary infrastructure that touches policy and pedagogy and memory while still granting a provisional pause in which feeling and thought can catch up to one another, which matters because the usual cadence of announcements and compliance checklists rarely leaves room for the vulnerable moment when a mind senses its own partial automation and keeps thinking anyway.

What this section contributes to Critical Infra-Structuralism is a practice for the second movement as well as the first, since it traces technical substrates and operational logics through the interface itself while also staging the unseen, those gaps and ambiguities that computational processes smooth away, and it does so by literalizing accompaniment, by asking us to move alongside an artifact that maps intensities without forcing consensus, by treating metaphor as a sensor for lived ambivalence, by sonifying text so patterns surface without the snag of outrage, by projecting shapes onto paper so bodies can draw with algorithms rather than merely speak about them, which is another way of saying that Horst turns ethics into a studio art with research commitments, a place where people rehearse accountability in public through diagrammatic play, where judgment arrives through attention that grows patient and precise, where a small shift in placement can change an entire neighborhood of meaning, and where the wager is simple and brave, that if we learn to compose our stances the way musicians and cartographers compose lines and layers, something gentler and more exact may take root in the midst of machines that already compose us.

Michael Peters

If Hayles offers the planetary template for thinking cognition as infrastructure, Michael Peters turns that template toward the concrete realms of design and governance, where classrooms and commons and networks become the sites through which these architectures are built and contested, a terrain where the stakes are immediate and bodily in the way that electric current or the smell of chalk dust once were, and where questions of pedagogy bleed into questions of policy, intellectual property, and the survival of shared knowledge itself. Peters constructs an architecture of ideas that behaves like a living system, a dense mesh of concepts and practices in which knowledge socialism provides the metabolic terms for how thought is created and circulates, so that learning communities and public infrastructures and open licensing schemes form the vessels through which ideas move, and the old grammar of enclosure—the habits of privatizing and fencing off intellectual labor—is gradually replaced by practices that treat ideas as common goods, their value increasing with each use, contribution, and recursive revision. Within this ecology curriculum becomes less a set of fixed objects than a workshop for ongoing inquiry, assessment becomes an accounting of participation rather than a tally of deficits, and research pipelines feed outward into shared repositories that expand through further study instead of narrowing into proprietary claims, and this whole shift gathers urgency because AI now saturates the conditions of learning, making questions of governance suddenly visceral in ways they once were only theoretical.

Peters introduces synthetic reason as the name for the emergent faculty that arises when symbolic archives, biological organisms, and machinic systems intertwine in recursive loops of storage, recombination, and guidance, a faculty that acts like an inheritance channel in its own right and therefore sits alongside the genetic, the epigenetic, the behavioral, and the symbolic, except this channel is techno-symbolic and machinic, carrying patterns through models and platforms that read and write and index the world while continuously feeding their outputs back into human practices, where they alter memory, pedagogy, governance, and the slow economics of attention. In this frame reason stops looking like a single organ housed in individual minds and begins to appear as a distributed process with multiple registries and asynchronous rhythms, a field in which archives and datasets and corpora and codebases are not merely backdrops for human thought but active participants in cognition, shaping the trajectories of inquiry even as they emerge from it.

The Symbiotic Adaptive Intelligence Framework, or SAIF, enters here as a higher-order lens, describing intelligence as a process that propagates across cells and organisms and institutions and technical stacks, a cascading evolutionary dynamic in which agency amplifies through feedback and mutual adaptation rather than through isolated leaps, so that AI itself becomes an inheritance channel alongside the genetic and the epigenetic and the behavioral and the symbolic, a machinic line through which patterns persist and recombine and select for futures that grow increasingly biodigital. In this register synthetic reason becomes the faculty that takes shape when biological memory and digital memory braid together, when archives converse with models and models with communities and communities with ecosystems, producing repertoires that guide action without any guarantee of safety or stability, which is why Peters’s writing keeps returning to the language of openness, not as a slogan but as a precarious practice, and to education as the arena where architectures of knowledge meet the everyday arts of care and interpretation and shared labor that give any system a chance to breathe rather than ossify.

Knowledge socialism provides the political metabolism that allows synthetic reason to thrive without enclosure, since a faculty routed through models and repositories depends on open infrastructures for contribution, correction, and shared authorship. Peters describes commons that invite annotation, remixing, and public licensing as the necessary conditions for reason to evolve with care, emphasizing that this is an ethical problem as much as a technical one, because pattern propagation without reciprocity corrodes education and research from within, while truly governed commons allow communities to steer their machinic collaborators toward collective aims. In this way synthetic reason, knowledge socialism, and SAIF form an interdependent braid, a vision of intelligence as symbiotic and participatory, where design decisions about openness, attribution, and access do not simply distribute outcomes but actively shape what intelligence becomes in the first place.

The evolutionary register gives this whole project its horizon, since synthetic reason behaves like a fifth inheritance system, preserving and varying cultural-technical patterns across time, influencing the selection environments for curricula and institutions, and expanding the adjacent possible for inquiry through generative recombination. Because these recursive cycles touch classrooms and labs and ministries and cloud infrastructures all at once, Peters treats policy and procurement and licensing as philosophical instruments—slow, imperfect, but decisive for whether synthetic reason grows toward universal access and contributory practice or collapses into narrow optimization where archives are mined and voices attenuate. His writing continually returns to what he calls designable habits: publishing processes that invite collective annotation, public funding for repositories, systems of community review that encourage repair and refutation, and pedagogical strategies that teach learners to engage models as partners in thought rather than as sources of prepackaged answers.

The wager that runs through Peters’s work carries both urgency and patience: that a living culture of synthetic reason can emerge wherever open infrastructures, contributory pedagogies, and symbiotic architectures intersect; that such a culture will widen the range of possible agencies across scales while sustaining the slow virtues of scholarship; and that education remains the primary workshop for this emergence, since classrooms and studios and community labs provide the most reliable spaces for practicing the reciprocal feedback that lets hybrid intelligence grow without collapsing into domination or dissipation. His global and evolutionary perspective asks us to imagine intelligence not as a static resource humans once possessed and now defend, but as an ongoing planetary process whose shape will depend on how we design, teach, and share the infrastructures through which it flows.

Ilkka Tuomi

Ilkka Tuomi writes as if education were a living system whose boundaries can never be fully traced, only inferred through patterns that appear briefly before shifting again, like tide lines that seem stable until the water rises, which it always does. His work attends to the infrastructures and histories that have shaped contemporary understandings of learning—Skinner’s teaching machines, Bloom’s mastery frameworks, the entire lineage of behaviorist and cognitive models that have equated knowledge with discrete, measurable units—while also engaging the present moment in which artificial intelligence has become deeply embedded in the processes through which learning is enacted, assessed, and imagined. Tuomi’s argument does not rest on the easy claim that AI changes everything, nor on the equally seductive claim that its effects can be contained or redirected through minor adjustments to policy or curriculum, but rather unfolds through an exploration of what happens when new technological actors enter the educational ecosystem, altering the dynamics through which purposes are articulated and practices emerge, so that what once seemed like fixed categories—teacher, student, institution, knowledge—begin to look more like temporary configurations of a system in motion.

His concept of mastery serves here as both an anchor and a point of departure, because mastery learning once promised to close the gaps between learners by individualizing feedback and pacing, but in doing so it reinforced a model of education as optimization toward pre-specified outcomes, a model that fits neatly with the logics of personalization and efficiency that dominate contemporary EdTech discourse.

By tracing the limits of mastery, Tuomi opens a space in which education might be understood as something far more generative and unpredictable, a site where new forms of meaning and new capacities for action can emerge, though never fully in line with the objectives set by designers or policymakers. Reading his work produces the uncanny sense that the very ground of education has always been provisional, that its purposes are negotiated in real time through relationships and contexts, and that the introduction of AI does not so much disrupt this process as render it visible, exposing the delicate interplay of forces that were always there, shaping what counts as learning and why. Through his careful layering of historical insight, systems thinking, and conceptual precision, Tuomi offers a way to think about education that resists both the reduction of learning to data points and the temptation to retreat into nostalgia, a way of seeing that is expansive without being utopian, rigorous without closing down the possibilities it seeks to describe.

Conclusion

The danger, as always, lies in mistaking the map for the terrain, in believing that tracing the movements of these infrastructures, however rigorously, is the same as addressing their consequences, which is how critique quietly becomes maintenance and even rebellion begins to resemble compliance. Critical Infra-Structuralism asks for something more fragile and more demanding: a recursive practice of interpretation that moves alongside these systems without presuming to master them, a way of reading that attends as fully to what disappears as to what is displayed, to the gaps and silences and ghostly residues that point to realities the infrastructure cannot register. In this sense the humanities are not an afterthought to the age of AI, nor an ornament to be defended in the name of culture, but an active epistemic partner, uniquely attuned to the patterns through which meaning flickers into being and then recedes again beneath the surface of technical operations.

The figures discussed here—Birhane, Berry, Hayles, Peters, and Tuomi—are exemplary rather than exhaustive, chosen because their work creates a constellation through which certain dynamics of algorithmic systems and planetary infrastructures become legible. This list is necessarily reductive, and even arbitrary, since there are many others whose thought belongs in this frame and whose contributions have shaped the very conditions for this inquiry. Scholars like Safiya Noble, whose work reveals the deep racialized politics embedded in search and recommendation systems; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, who traces the recursive entanglements of habit, code, and identity; Lisa Nakamura, who explores race and labor in digital economies; Yuk Hui, whose philosophy of technology offers new genealogies of technodiversity; Simone Browne, who uncovers the afterlives of surveillance rooted in slavery and colonialism; and many more across fields as diverse as Indigenous studies, media archaeology, and critical data studies. Each of these thinkers expands the scope of what critical infrastructuralism might become, adding layers and tensions that resist any single theoretical enclosure.

To imagine such a practice is to imagine worlds that have not yet been fully captured, worlds that shimmer at the edges of platform logic and algorithmic production, and to do so without the false comfort of certainty. This is the wager of Critical Infra-Structuralism: that even in an environment where language is generated at industrial scale and cognition is increasingly distributed across biological and machinic actors, there remains a space for interpretation that refuses closure, a space where thinking continues to unfold in ways no metric can predict. The task is to inhabit the recursive loops of meaning they produce with a kind of generative vigilance, tracing and retracing their operations while also attending to the places where those operations falter, where something other than the system begins to take shape. It is here, in these fragile interstices, that the humanities reveal their deepest vocation.