In recent tales of science fiction, large-scale objects silently hover above cities or in earth’s orbit. There has been an increase in the representation of such objects after the 2007–08 financial crisis. This essay traces a partial history of such objects and speculates on what their representation might mean with regards to the most recent financial crisis, the international political economy (IPE) and the human psyche.
Flurina Rothenberger und Franziska Kristensen im Gespräch mit Mara Züst über Klaym, ein Workshop-Projekt, in dem sich junge Fotograf*innen in afrikanischen Metropolen weiterbilden können, und über das ‹kreolische› Hochglanzmagazin NICE, das in den Workshops entsteht
What if – contrary to all carefully constructed appearances – the problem in neo-liberal culture is that there isn’t enough management? Although neo-liberalism presents itself as an economic programme, it is better understood as a massive control apparatus designed to thwart the democratic socialist and libertarian communist experiments that effloresced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The systemic anti-productive inefficiency engendered by neo-liberal managerialism is neither a mistake nor a failure: it has precisely succeeded in its aim of producing a generalised resubordination of workers, and a disabling of former «red bases» such as universities and art colleges. The route to overcoming this consists neither in the (capitalist) realist accommodation to managerialism nor in the fantasy of exit from institutions. Democratic socialism has always been about the promise of a better managed society (where management is precisely not synonymous with top-down control). In order to assert democratic control over our lives and work, we must therefore reclaim management from managerialism.
