Making Public: Current Constellations of Infrastructure, Finance, and Sovereign Liberalism

Since more than a decade, neoliberalism seems to undergo waves of radical transformations. We witness various types of state interventions in the name of financial security, the rise of authoritarian politics and a cultural shift towards exclusionary politics. Technology herein plays a crucial role in not just enabling concentrated economic power, but also for increasingly supplanting established forms of governing. Thus, the links between neoliberal agendas and the logics of technological infrastructures and political rationalities of power assume novel intertwined forms. In recent years, many scholars have sought to understand such hybridity, but the conceptual tools available need to be adapted and broadened to address the contemporary moment. How are we to conceptually grasp and empirically describe new forms of such entanglements that increasingly take shape within current transformations? The aim of the workshop, organized by Carola Westermeier (MPIfG), and Ute Tellmann (TU Darmstadt), is to describe and analyze the current constellations of technopolitics, finance, and sovereign power from the vantage point of “making public.”