Paul Chan and Sven Lütticken

Claire Bishop

Dressed up in a benign rhetoric of egalitarian progressiveness (now everyone can be educated—and in debt!), the blithe snobbery of the government’s position can be sampled by glancing at an article by Michael Gove, now Education Secretary, from 2003: “Anyone put off from attending a good university by fear of that debt doesn’t deserve to be at any university in the first place.” The arrogance and privilege of this statement is inconceivable. It is utterly obscene that a post-war generation who enjoyed free education as a democratic right can now, while in government (as a result of that free higher education), condemn future generations to a lifetime of liability.

Gavin Butt

Much has been made about the politically mobilizing power of anger, but this didn’t feel so mobilizing—at least not in the first instance. It somehow felt more insidious and invasive: as if the anger was not mine, that it had been imposed upon me somehow by the organs of the British State—parliament, police, media—acting in authoritarian concert that day. I felt as if I’d been impregnated with rage, goaded into feeling it by the unjust punishment I received for exercising my democratic right to protest.

Melanie Gilligan

For the markets, as for the Con-Dem coalition, fear is the medium that forces cuts to national budgets. At the moment, the anxiety surrounding debt (that age-old extension of present into future) is very coercive. The Con-Dem coalition would have people docile and fearful from the weight of their economic burdens. Without a social buffer to save them from poverty and homelessness, people are pressured to take on self-managing, cautious attitudes toward the future. However, the protests of the last months have shown that many in the UK will not, out of fear, swallow the cuts.

Sabeth Buchmann and Jens Kastner

The erosion of the country’s education system and intellectual culture forcefully driven by the right-wing political climate is growing to ever greater and previously unimagined dimensions. A few weeks ago, for instance, the public learned about the Grand Coalition’s plans to withdraw public base funding for free research. This paves the way for the country’s intellectual decline into provincialism, as does the cancellation of so-called “discretionary subsidies.”

Tom Holert

The contemporary cocktail of political projects is composed of seemingly incommensurable ingredients. Thus, contesting and de-articulating the current confusion of vocabularies (of emancipation and exclusion, freedom and racism) seems to be the most urgent priority.

Hito Steyerl

Now led by an even more openly fascist new leader, the FPÖ still enjoys around 30 percent of votes, as a recent election in Vienna has shown. The infatuation with fascism among large parts of the population has not wavered. Were one to ask them to choose between wealth and racism, a substantial majority would go for racism.

Renée Green

A conservative wind? From my perspective this never subsided. There are of course specificities that can be noted in different places and times, but the foundation linked to excesses of financial capitalism continue, despite shifting obfuscations.

Brian Holmes

If you don’t want the predictable future to take definitive hold—namely, the future of an authoritarian neoliberalism, modeled in some way after the big success story of capitalist communist China—then it becomes essential to start working on a critical, resistant, and constructive ethos for an egalitarian and ecological left, which has to be cooperative in its very essence and take imperial downsizing as a positive pleasure.

Gregg Bordowitz

Poems explore every condition
Physical, political, mystical

They confound reason with core emotions
They expand what we think is reasonable

Paul Chan

Not only must the state be reduced in order to maximize freedom, but that freedom must be paid for by those who are enlarged by having a state in the first place. Libertarianism here begins to show its authoritarian face, as efforts to increase individual liberty turn into enmity toward those for whom a nation must be greater than a collection of private interests, and want more than the invisible hand of the market to protect rights and due processes that ultimately enable private interests to become something greater than the right to goods and services.

Sven Lütticken

Art projects that are seen to somehow attack “our Dutch culture” or “our national identity” can count on vitriol. In a reversal of Carl Andre’s dictum that “art is what we do” and “culture is what is done to us,” the contemporary populist imagination regards art as what is done to us while culture is what we do, or rather: what we simply are. Strictly speaking, this means that culture would need to be defined without having recourse to art at all.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh

It has become clear enough that the aggressive tone of right-wing populists is now resounding on all sides of the fence, and this has been their real success. Even if many museum directors, critics, and editors ridicule the idea of the “left-wing hobby,” and distance themselves from the “enemy” of culture they recognize in PVV, the tendency to follow this populist logic seems widely accepted by those who produce ideas and arguments in the public sphere.

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

In 2006, more than a hundred thousand people protested in Copenhagen against the “new necessary measures” for securing the Danish economy. But until now it has been very difficult to make connections between protests against racial laws and demonstrations against welfare cuts. Anti-racist and anti-war resistance have rarely fused with a critique of the government’s neoliberal policy. And of course that is also a part of a more general picture in the Western world, where there is no coherent resistance.

Peio Aguirre

Somehow, this dual relationship positions the nation-state as the main paradox for this accommodation of cultural diversity: it has become too small to control the economic forces that determine the livelihoods of its citizens and yet too large to satisfy the expressions of their localized identities.

Etel Adnan

A globalized world is not a meaningless one. But there is no explanation for the state of human rights in Egypt, for example, or the chaos in Lebanon, without a discussion about what’s happening to the United States and in the United States. The rest of the world is divided, roughly, between two empires: a declining one and an emergent one: both still powerful enough to wipe out the world in a nuclear war.