The Gaze of Ruin in the Neoliberal Era

Abstract

These stones know you, of the ruins Wandering soul, you seem doomed Contemplating your unburied bones. These trees know you. and myself I feel I don't know how vague and numb. (Machado de Assis, 1870)Recently, some authors have reiterated the need to insert Politics into the mainstream of Administration research to reflect on how politics creates and produces ways of managing and organizing (Bispo, 2021;Bresser-Pereira, 2020;Comin, 2015). Some of these studies problematized the deep connections between the nature of liberal and neoliberal theories and managerial practices, illuminating how these processes are intended to reshape subjectivities and social relations along similar lines as those prescribed by management (Hanlon, 2018). Wendy Brown (2019), in her most recent book, published in 2019, "In the ruins of neoliberalism: the rise of antidemocratic politics in the West", helps us understand these processes by redirecting the gaze from ruin to the following question: after all, how did "neoliberal rationality prepare the field to mobilize and legitimize fiercely anti-democratic forces in the second half of the 21st century"? (Brown, 2019, p. 16).