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?

In this workshop we want to approach the task of describing and analyzing the current constellations of technopolitics, finance and sovereign power from the vantage point of “making public.” We take “making public” to have a double meaning. One the one hand, it means to develop and strengthen methods that help to unpack hybrid configurations of economic-political-technological logics. It is an act of shedding light on hybrid formats for which we still lack a proper analytical toolkit. On the other hand, it is dedicated to a project of “public sociology” that seeks to broaden the arenas for debate on these matters. Our inquiry operates on two levels: first, in terms of a scientific analysis of making visible and rendering subjects analyzable; and second, in the sense of making public – exploring ways to render the current hybridity and entanglements intelligible and actionable for public contestation.

We address these aims through a specific two-partite workshop format: We want to combine intensive discussions on work-in-progress amongst a smaller group of scholars with a roundtable on the “ethos of the contemporary” (Paul Rabinow). With the latter, we aim to engage in broader debate by drawing on brief contributions from various scholars to explore how academia can identify, articulate, and respond to the present moment.