Nuremberg Broadsheet (detail), 1561, Wickiana Collection, Zürich Central Library
Sightings of objects in the sky have been around for a long time. Carl Jung mentions the Nuremberg Broadsheet of 1561 where «numerous men and women saw ‹globes› of a blood-red, bluish, or black color… there were ‹great tubes in which three, four, and more globes were to be seen. They all began to fight one another.› Underneath the globes a long object was seen, ‹shaped like a great black spear.›»[1] Jung’s interest in the UFO phenomenon lies in its human psychic component and mythological roots. Jung sees in the UFO the making of a modern myth, an object where «one often did not know and could not discover whether a primary perception was followed by a phantasm or whether, conversely, a primary fantasy originating in the unconscious invaded the conscious mind with illusions and visions.»[2]
The objects in the sky under consideration here are primarily from cinema. After all, some of the strangest, strangely logical images manifesting in dreams also materialize in this most dreamlike phenomenon called cinema.
Pre 2007–2008 Financial Crisis
In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 novel Childhood’s End, vast alien spaceships position themselves above Earth's principal cities. Clarke cites the sighting of barrage balloons over London during World War II as a key inspiration for his novel. Barrage balloons are large kite balloons used to defend against aircraft attack by raising aloft cables which pose a collision risk, making the attacker's approach more difficult. Earlier in the twentieth century, the emergence of Zeppelins shocked citizens all over the globe.[3]
Barrage balloons floating over London in 1941
In the simple yet effective V: The Final Battle (1984) and Independence Day (1996), the narratives are structured around small groups of humans forming resistance against genocidal extra-terrestrials. An object in the sky is the perfect driver and background menace for a compelling sci-fi story. With its looming presence casting a wide shadow, the object signifies the extraterrestrials’ dubious intentions. There is an overlap with the objects examined here and ‹Big Dumb Objects›, a term coined by Roz Kaveney to describe alien structures ranging from the man-sized (the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey) to the planetary (the Death Star in Star Wars). Big Dumb Objects are often mysterious and their ultimate purpose is never revealed.[4] They function as science fiction’s equivalent to a MacGuffin, plot devices which serve to awe the viewer with mystery and intrigue yet bear little to no narrative explanation. The objects we face are visually so striking that they quash further inquiries into their exact raison d’être.
Top: V: The Final Battle
Bottom: (1984) Independence Day (1996)
The investment stakes are high in blockbuster cinema; the blockbuster’s visual and sound effects are designed to make an impact, which hopefully translates into sales. Within the logic of the blockbuster, the presence of a large mothership guarantees at least spectacular visuals. Whereas the ‹City Destroyers› in Independence Day (1996) had a diameter of 15 miles (25 km), roughly the length of Manhattan, the ‹Harvester Mothership› in Independence Day: Resurgence (2016), had a diameter of over 3000 miles (5000 km), a 200-fold increase in size.
Post 2007–08 Financial Crises
The depiction of cinematic objects in the sky has multiplied in the 10 years since the 2007–08 crisis. Here are some examples of recent cinematic objects in the sky:
From top to bottom: V Mothership from V (2009), Mothership in District 9 (2009), Espheni Mothership above Boston in Falling Sky (2011–15), the World Engine in Man of Steel (2013), the Tet in Oblivion (2013), spaceship in Childhood’s End (2015), The Fifth Wave (2016), spacecraft in Arrival (2016), Q-Ship in Avengers: Infinity War (2018), spaceship from the forthcoming Captive State (2019).
These objects in the sky mean trouble for mankind. The objects—a fleet of ships or most commonly a single mothership—appear and leave a stunned humanity gazing in what must be a combination of fascination and fear. The objects imply power and technological ingenuity greater than mankind’s. Human history is fairly bleak with regards to encounters between civilizations of vastly different states of technological development. The result is the quasi disappearance or radical alteration of the technologically less developed civilization. The alien technology implies a developmental imbalance larger than anything experienced on earth. Even in more nuanced scenarios such as Arrival, where the aliens come on a peaceful mission, or in District 9, where the South African government hires Multinational United (MNU), a weapons manufacturer, to relocate the aliens to a new camp outside the city, the objects in the sky are perceived as threatening entities.[5]
What are we to think of these objects in the sky, given the sudden rise in their representation? Is the increase simply due to the popularity of science fiction? Might there be a deeper correlation to the 2007–08 financial crisis?
Wombs, Bubbles, Tumors
The three following, symbolically charged images may act as connecting points between objects in the sky and the human psyche: the womb, the bubble and the tumor.
From top to bottom: Female reproductive system; soap bubble reflecting a house; digital image of a tumor.
We relate to the womb, the bubble and the tumor in a direct, physical way. They are images, yet they may also manifest in our very bodies. The bubble is one of the few effective metaphors of finance capitalism.[6] Bubbles are ephemeral; they may burst unannounced at any time. A fart is essentially a bursting bubble. A summary of the 2007–08 crisis reads: «The financial crisis was caused by a number of factors. However, in simple terms we can say, the crisis was caused by banks being incentivized by deregulation to make risky home loans, which were then repackaged as overvalued and overrated assets, which were then speculated on by banks and investors causing a speculative bubble».[7] Objects in the sky appear to be solid and indestructible, yet they may just be ‹solid bubbles›, implying a risk for the population much like economic bubbles. The solid melts into the air: however solid the objects may be, they tend to be gone by the end of the film, destroyed in a human-alien war. Or the aliens simply vanish, leaving a trail of destruction.
How ephemeral or lasting are economic bubbles? Judging from businesses and people affected by a bursting economic bubble, it has profound material and psychological effects.[8] There is a hard-to-grasp, deep link between economic bubbles and the public. Who was affected by the 2007–08 crisis on the individual level, besides bankers who lost their jobs and homeowners who lost their homes? What kind of psychological scar does a crisis leave behind? Can the opioid epidemic in the United States, for example, be linked to the 2007–08 crisis? After the burst, banks and governments join in the general sense of shock to mitigate blame, describing the crash as if it came out of nowhere.
Graphs of the stages of economic bubbles and basic plot structure in fiction look similar. Does the development of economic bubbles somehow hold an appeal for citizens?[9] Are economic cycles somehow intrinsically connected to us, to a deep-seated human drive towards climax? Do science-fiction objects in the sky provide a form to contemplate an unhurried bubble, a bubble that’s up in the air?
Top: Stages of an economic bubble. Source: http://marketpredict.com/articles/mp-bubblecycle.htm Bottom: Basic plot structure for fiction. Source: http://simplewriting.org/plot-structure/
The air gap between the city and the object in the sky, the way it is elevated as if placed on top of a city by an (alien) curator, provides space for contemplation, comparable to a sculpture in a white cube. The demonstrative ‹neutrality› of this placement is a veil, of course, yet helps the gaze to isolate the object under scrutiny. The space between the city and the object in the sky evokes a sense of ‹in-betweenness›, mirroring ourselves being suspended between events, between potential crises. The coming event hasn’t arrived but might very soon. We cannot stop it, but we also cannot stop looking at it. These objects elicit the excitement of an event to come. That may be why, counterintuitively, they are hard to see, hiding in plain sight. Like dreams, they do not immediately reveal their agenda. The conspirers of a bubble and the ones contemplating it may be in an interlocked state, sensing brooding turbulence. Some of the films have storylines of human collaborators conspiring with the extraterrestrials against humanity. Without trivializing the bad conspirers and deregulating agents, crises do reoccur for a variety of reasons.[10]
The images of womb and tumor, taken here as symbolic images relating to the objects in the sky, are two sides of the same coin, one a productive force (womb) and the other an unproductive one (tumor). A womb is a site of origin.[11] Confusing the binary, in mythology the womb has a frightening, destructive aspect.[12] A womb-like quality detected in cinematic objects in the sky may signify a technological womb detached from human agency.[13] The shiny stealth tech surface may hide a crisis reproduction center. In such a reading, the objects hovering in the sky are unproductive wombs coming from an unknowable outside, threatening ‹our wombs›, our human reproduction cycles. As Melanie Gilligan writes,
«Derivatives are financial instruments whose value is derived from the value of other things—often assets such as commodities, stocks, bonds, or they can be based on interest rates, exchange rates, indexes, or even differentials in the shipping and freight industries and indexes of weather conditions. The modes in which money can be expanded, proliferated, stretched, and layered are what constitute the newest stages of abstraction in finance capital. To return to money’s original task of reconciling capital’s contradictions, Marx in ‹Capital› says that ‹the further development of the commodity› into commodity and money ‹does not abolish these contradictions but rather provides the form in which they have room to move.› Indeed, global banking systems, finance capital and its multiplied forms of credit would all fall into that category. Capital’s contradictions are repeated once again on the level of the financial system, in the gross discrepancies between titles to wealth and surplus value produced.»[14]
As economic bubbles, objects in the sky both hold promise and entail deception. The stillness of the objects implies technological superiority, yet the complete lack of any attempt to communicate makes them appear fundamentally misaligned with humanity. Algorithms don’t advertise their intentions. As what point of abstraction is a system too far removed from the human element? The fact that the objects in the sky reside above city centers underlines the question’s central importance to our very well being.
The objects in the sky are vessels of meaning we have collectively brought into existence: «In just these cases the unconscious has to resort to particularly drastic measures in order to make its contents perceived. It does this most vividly by projection, by extrapolating its contents into an object, which then mirrors what had previously lain hidden in the unconscious.»[15]
This graph compares the total value of companies, assets, debts, and derivatives. Source: Art Against Art, Issue 2, Spring/Summer 2016.
The graph above, which appeared in an article in Art Against Art magazine, visualizes the amount of derivatives in relation to companies, the stock market, assets, global debt. Regardless of its accuracy today, in early 2019 , it does help to grasp the massiveness of the world’s derivatives market. I rearranged the derivative block to make it appear like an object in the sky. Bruno Latour rings true when he writes, «there is something invisible that weighs on all of us that is more solid than steel and yet so incredible labile. Why are we all held by forces that are not of our own making?»[16]
Motherships could also represent corporations that have simply grown to large (Jung labels them as ‹cancerous growth›)—from Apple and Facebook to Goldman Sachs—and may call for regulatory governmental countermeasures.[17]
Above Canary Wharf
The financial centers of London, New York, Tokyo, Frankfurt etc. may be seen as ‹alien zones› oozing inaccessibility, especially from the point of view of an ordinary citizen with limited knowledge of how finance works. In the case of London’s Canary Wharf, the sense of entering a special zone is palpable. Built on land formed by one of the largest meanders of the River Thames, the ‹Isle of Dogs›, Canary Wharf comes across as something of a financial fortress that could lift off and become a detached, floating city with its own extra-territorial laws. Financial institutions are highly secured and controlled, yet at the same time they are places where employees work hard to find loopholes circumventing regulations to gain an edge in the tight market economy. A scene from Thor: The Dark World shows an alien spaceship, ‹The Ark›, landing opposite Canary Wharf on the grounds of the Old Naval College, Greenwich University. The scene evokes the barrage balloons Clarke observed above London in 1941. This time not coming from continental Europe, the enemy lands in front of an invisible, guarded war zone where economic competition between multinational corporations runs wild. ‹The Ark› may be a visitor arriving late to the action nearby.[18]
Top: Scene from Thor: The Dark World Bottom: Canary Wharf as a mothership
Objects in the sky resonate with financial centers. Suppose a mothership would actually land above a city. The technological ingenuity would amaze people. The cost to design and build such a vessel would be gigantic. It would require an economy vastly greater than that of earth. In some sense, the mothership would be a direct rather than just a metaphoric expression of capital. It would imply a large alien economy. The object would be the sum of efforts of a given civilization. It would tell a story of capital and engineering in an interstellar context. Of course, it is possible that technological advancement on another planet helped to significantly lower production costs—Elon Musk and SpaceX are currently working hard on bringing down rocket and launch costs. It’s conceivable that an advanced alien civilization would be able to send many fairly cheap drone ships to countless potential habitable planets to gather intelligence.
But objects in the sky, and science fiction in general, reflect the present, in our case specifically the period from 2007 to 2019. Fictional motherships mirror current preoccupations. The implicit comparison with another civilization, their economy and political makeup, their efforts to join forces and build large structures is tied to contemporary fears about unregulated and, indeed, incomprehensible abstract capital accumulation. Jung captures this when he writes about UFOs: «We at least are conscious of our space-conquering aspirations, but that a corresponding extra-terrestrial tendency exists is a purely mythological conjecture, i.e., a projection.»[19]
Humanity has skin in the object in the sky game; it does have a structure in orbit, the International Space Station (ISS), measuring 356 by 240 feet (109 by 73 meters). The ISS has been described as the most expensive single item ever constructed. Up to 2014, it has cost as much as $160 billion, with the United States providing the bulk of the money—nearly $100 billion.[20] A single state could never afford a structure like the ISS. Building it requires intense international collaboration, a collective vision and sense of purpose. With the idea of fictional objects in the sky as a mirror of the nervous human psyche in mind, these representations are a form of ‹institutional critique› of sorts, implicitly highlighting collective human ineptitude at structure building. Large-scale international cooperation is required not just to build but also to maintain an object in the sky—funding for the ISS ends around 2025. There are vague plans for its post-retirement era through a privatization model with commercialized human spaceflight operations from and to the ISS. Will this most complex human structure ever built vanish like some mothership at the end of a movie? Will we, in the near or far future, build objects in the sky through collective efforts and by overcoming national or economic infighting, emulating those structures we so aptly manage to design in fiction? How would such structures be funded and what kind of global joint engineering, financing, and institutional framework would building them require? How abstract would a system, how massive would a global economy need to become to even come close to fund and maintain them? Or will they simply appear, given enough time and technological development, much as the ISS ‹appeared›? What image of humanity would they project? Would the resulting objects be dubious, ambiguous, or inclusive constructs or will they lift off without any binding social contract, as depicted in Neill Blomkamp’s 2013 film Elysium?
Top: ISS
Bottom: Elysium (2013)
Access through Aesthetics
Representation in the arts shines a light on those issues. The representation of objects in the sky itself may hold a key as a constructive force to think about accessibility. In their book ‹Cartographies of the Absolute›, Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle give examples of how cinema or artworks attempt to map capital. Access to the mothership might only ever be possible through aesthetics, through the representation of such opaque blobs as capital and coexistence. In other words, the entry point to thinking about inclusive ship building begins with representation, «it poses an aesthetic problem, in the sense of demanding ways of representing the complex and dynamic relations intervening between the domains of production, consumption and distribution, and their strategic political mediations, ways of making the invisible visible.»[21]
To build structures we actually want to inhabit, including space stations or settlements on other planets such as Mars, requires aesthetic contemplation on what makes them worth building and inhabiting otherwise they remain obscure and inaccessible like the many cinematic objects in the sky. Otherwise they remain dark, unbuilt. National Geographic’s Mars series, for example, shows people dealing with mundane issues on Mars. The series gives us an idea of what it would be like to live there. The representation of a hypothetical yet realistic Martian settlement helps to anticipate and mitigate conflict. Representation is a way to find a footing in the world. We watch a series, but we also witness, in the case of Mars, human life taking shape on another planet. Imagination expressed in fiction is as a key element to make human ventures happen. Without the aesthetic side to things, nothing would develop and structures will vanish without a trace.
Perhaps objects in the sky are shapes straight out of the unconscious, something we sense about the most recent crisis as we try to anticipate what will happen next, as if the unconscious itself manifested, an object like a black hole of significance hovering above our city. «What the unconscious is in itself we do not know. We know only its paradoxical manifestations.»[22] Is there a way to factor representation, the aesthetic realm of intuition, dreams, imagination, and speculative design, into the IPE in more tangible ways?
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report (2010), a serious, seven-hundred-page document produced by the Congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, notes that «on the surface, it looked like prosperity … underneath, something was going wrong. … Like a science fiction movie in which ordinary household objects turn hostile … familiar market mechanisms were being transformed.»[23] Hamilton Carroll and Annie McClanahan cite the report in an introduction to a collection of essays on the nexus of speculative fiction and economic narratives. They go on to note,
«the reference of ‹hostile› objects, a trope arguably more common to horror than to the genre of science fiction that the Inquiry Report invokes—suggests a world whose most important activity remains persistently unseen, a world that shifts behind our backs in ways that exceed our capacity for knowledge, a world in which what we thought we controlled turns out to have its own hostile intentions. Rather than expressing the confidence of verisimilitude, these representations of epistemological uncertainty register the fear that what we’ve made might unmake us. In so doing, they might also afford us the tools not simply for representing, but also for remaking, the world around us.»[24]
Science fiction has long provided tropes «through which to think about the relationship between human and machinic agency, and that sci fi’s representational capacities have produced a relation to the real that only becomes more mimetic as finance capital relies more and more heavily on abstract and ‹unseen› computational models.»[25] In other words, if the official report compares the 2007–2008 financial crisis to a science fiction scenario, it might be time to conceive of an IPE heavy on aesthetics. This line of research is currently undertaken by Roland Bleiker, Claes Belfrage, Ash Amin and Ronen Palan, among others. Their aim is to integrate elements from aesthetics into the overly rigid economic-political sphere. Claes Belfrage and Earl Gammon write that «by eschewing aesthetics, critical IPE misses an important opportunity to conceive of modes for contesting oppressive social relations; it struggles to project alternative economic imaginaries partly because it is not sufficiently engaged in the aestheticization of its analyses.»[26] According to Roland Bleiker, an aesthetic approach to IPE would
«embrace multiple voices and the possibility of multiple truths. This is why a novel, a painting, a film or a piece of music can never tell us what to do, whether to go for option A or B. But aesthetic engagements can broaden our ability to understand and assess the challenges at hand. They might be able to tell us more about what options A or B entail, or what consequences might issue from them. They might also reveal that A and B are in fact not the only options—that there is C as well. Consider how novelists and artists are some of the brightest and most innovative members of our communities. And yet, they are hardly ever consulted when it comes to, say, articulating issues of security or financial policy. To make this point is, of course, not to argue against expert knowledge or to deny the need for taking clear decisions and assuming responsibility for them. But deciding on a particular political position and a related course of action in a well-informed and far-sighted manner requires a careful balance between specialist and general knowledge, for the problems we face today are far too serious not to draw upon all the resources we have to understand and address them.»[27]
Top: Hildgegard von Bingen, The Quickening of the Child (detail), Scivias, 1151–1152, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Wiesbaden.
Bottom: Benjamin Mason (played by Connor Jessup) in Falling Skies (2011–15).
Umbilical Cords
The two images above show humans connected to a force above. In Hildegard von Bingen’s drawing, an umbilical cord connects a floating square with the body, showing the «quickening or ‹animation› of the child in the body of the mother. From a higher world an influx enters the fetus.»[28] In the Falling Skies TV series, the character Ben Mason is controlled by an organic alien device implanted into his spine. Later on, friends help to remove it, yet some remaining spikes still connect him to the aliens, amplifying his physical and psychic capacities. Going through this ordeal, he gains insights into both worlds.
I include these two examples, because they propose a bridge between the human psyche and higher spheres. The umbilical cord is fragile but connects to what is otherwise cold, inhumane, devoid of life. In return, it animates the above. The umbilical cord inserts a human element into the equation, bridging the binary. Through the umbilical cord, bubbles will float in either direction.
[1] Carl Gustav Jung, Flying Saucers (1959) (London /New York: Routledge Classics, 2002), p. 107.
[2] Jung, ibid., p. xiv.
[3] «The result was a series of phantom Zeppelin sightings by panicked citizens throughout the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand in 1909, then again in 1912 and 1913. When war broke out in August 1914, it sparked a new, more intense wave of sightings. Wartime reports also came in from Canada, South Africa, and the United States.» Tezby, «Objects in the Sky», in sciencefictional, 3 August 2018, https://sciencefictional.net/2018/08/03/objects-in-the-sky/
[4] «There are hulking cylinders: Clarke’s Rama, the whale-seeking probe of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and the hollowed-out asteroids of Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 and Greg Bear’s Eon. There are foreboding spheres: Michael Crichton’s Sphere, the Death Star, and the Dyson Sphere, a hypothetical megastructure surrounding a star and sapping its energy, first imagined by Olaf Stapledon in Starmaker and later included in a number of space opera novels. There are gigantic rings (in Stargate, Ringworld, Halo) and mysterious cubes(in Star Trek, Cube, even Fortnite).» Joshua Wilbur,«In Search of Big Dumb Objects», in 3quarksdaily, 26 November 2018, https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2018/11/in-search-of-big-dumb-objects.html
[5] «The movie paints a disturbing picture of the scenario, suggesting we would be just as prone to abusing our galactic neighbors, given the opportunity.» David Shiga, «District 9: Science is the casualty in human-alien conflict», in New Scientist, 19 August 2009, https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17644-district-9-science-is-the-casualty-in-human-alien-conflict/
[6] «After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming—this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money.» Matt Taibbi, «The Great American Bubble Machine», in Rolling Stone, 5 April, 2010 https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-195229/
[7] http://factmyth.com/the-2007-2009-financial-crisis-explained/
[8] «In the age of capitalism it is not possible for the total system to become directly visible in external phenomena. For instance, the economic basis of a world crisis is undoubtedly unified and its coherence can be understood. But its actual appearance in time and space will take the form of a disparate succession of events in different countries at different times and even in different branches of industry in a number of countries.» Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1972), p. 70.
[9] «Ultimately there was no single cause of the crisis. It was a result of many short-sighted and optimistic, collective self-interests. There was interest in getting homes, putting people in homes, inflating the economy, pleasing investors, making commissions, and selling products. The crisis was also driven by people providing AAA ratings to securities containing troubled assets in order to keep business and save face, providing stimulus to stave off a worse crisis, etc. However, deregulation, speculative trading, loose standards for loans, and government-provided insurance for banks, which incentivized more risky behavior for lenders and borrowers, are often cited as interrelated primary factors in the recession.» http://factmyth.com/the-2007-2009-financial-crisis-explained/
[10] «Such collective blindness to uncertainty is caused by ignorance masqueraded as knowledge so that decisions or choices may be made. In other words, the actors involved appear to be ignorant of their ignorance, with, of course, some troubling exceptions where some (unethical) actors may know the realities about asset values but choose to let the asset acquisition frenzy continue.» Nikhilesh Dholakia and Romeo V. Turcan, Toward a Metatheory of Economic Bubbles (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 75.
[11] «The question about the origin, however, must always be answered by the ‹womb,› for it is the immemorial experience of mankind that every newborn creature comes from a womb. Hence the ‹round› of mythology is also called the womb and uterus, though this place of origin should not be taken concretely. In fact, all mythology says over and over again that this womb is an image, the woman’s womb being only a partial aspect of the primordial symbol of the place of origin from whence we come. This primordial symbol means many things at once: it is not just one content or part of the body, but a plurality, a world or cosmic region where many contents hide and have their essential abode.» Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 13–4.
[12] «Thus the Great Mother is robotic: terrible and devouring, beneficent and creative; a helper, but also alluring and destructive; a maddening enchantress, yet a bringer of wisdom; bestial and divine, voluptuous harlot and inviolable virgin, immemorially old and eternally young.» C.G. Jung, «Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype», in Neumann, ibid, p. 322.
[13] «It is characteristic of our time that, in contrast to its precious expressions, the archetype should now take the form of an object, a technological construction, on order to avoid the odiousness of a mythological personification. Anything that looks technological goes down without difficulty with modern man. The possibility of space travel makes the unpopular idea of a metaphysical intervention much more acceptable.» Jung, ibid., p. 18.
[14] Melanie Gilligan, «Derivative Days: Notes on Art, Finance and the Unproductive Forces», in Texte zur Kunst, 69 (2008), pp. 146–53.
[15] Jung, ibid., p. 8.
[16] Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 21 and 43.
[17] «Just as it felt necessary in America to bear up the great Trusts, so the destruction of huge organizations will eventually prove to be a necessity because, like a cancerous growth, they eat away man’s nature as soon as they become ends in themselves and attain autonomy.» In Jung, ibid., p. 78.
[18] «Instead these banks seem, in the words of Manchester University anthropologist Karel Williams, ‹loose federations of money-making franchises›. One risk analyst talked about her bank as ‹a nation engaged in perpetual civil war›, while a trader said: ‹You have to understand, it’s us against the bank.› The rules, the laws, are annoyances to be fought against and worked around, all in pursuit of the only thing which is real: profit.» John Lanchester, «Let’s Consider Kate», in London Review of Books (18 July 2013).
[19] Jung, ibid., p. 11.
[20] Brad Plumer, «Nasa wants to keep the International Space Station going until 2024. Is that a good idea?», in The Washington Post, 9 January 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/01/09/nasa-plans-to-keep-the-international-space-station-going-until-2024-is-that-a-good-idea/
[21] Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (London: Zero Books, 2015), pp. 24–5.
[22] Jung, ibid., p. 50.
[23]Hamilton Carroll and Annie McClanahan, «Fictions of Speculation: Introduction», in Journal of American Studies, 49 (2015), pp. 655–6.
[24] Carroll and McClanahan, ibid., p. 659.
[25] Carroll and McClanahan, ibid., p. 660.
[26] Claes Belfrage and Earl Gammon, «Aesthetic International Political Economy», in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 45/2 (2017).
[27] Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 188.
[28] Jung, ibid., p. 110.