2011
8. 02
Just as design has had to acknowledge its complicity in the aesthetics of warfare, we must now come to terms with an aesthetics of management, whose archive--which constitutes the very essence of modern environmentalism--is no less beautiful or brutal. This task has nothing at all to do with the refutation of false advertising or cynical public relations campaign, dispensing ad nauseam the dull ecstasy of green consumption: unadorned common sense can guide that activity. Rather it consists in examining the intimate historical relation of modern managerial-scientific representation to all that it silently posits as natural or ontological. It involves uncovering an ongoing transposition of the pathos of militarism into the concepts of environmental management, whereby all space becomes a theater of war; whereby the desire for speed, efficiency and control exist as unquestioned values; whereby "the Earth became the common enemy." It involves uncovering, in the spatial politics of neoliberalism, the peculiar forms of contamination that structure contemporary subjectivity. Specific to our own recent disciplinary history, it involves discerning the points of contact between the concepts of autonomy and automation. (J May, "The Church of Managerial Certitude," The Control Papers)
