The new issue of springerin focuses on ‘Teslocracy', the term coined to describe the regime of power relations and temporality shaped by (but not limited to) Elon Musk's Tesla.
Teslocracy is ‘a technocapitalist apparatus of domination in the making, in which the accumulation of capital is increasingly translated into immediate political and infrastructural power', write guest-editors Christoph Chwatal, Alexander Karschnia and Heimo Lattner. The Berlin-based trio – art theorist, dramaturg, and artist, respectively – approach the subject out of a grass-roots interest in the construction of the Tesla gigafactory in Grünheide, near Berlin and its political, ecological and cultural implications.
Taking its lead from the recent anthology of the same name, the issue focuses on the idea of Teslocracy as a ‘zone' beyond of the laws of the rest of the country. As the editorial puts it, ‘the suspicion that this “zone†is not merely a metaphor, but in fact a programme in its own right: a space in which the exception becomes the rule and acceleration replaces every form of participation'.
Imagining the Zone
Christoph Chwatal sketches out how the zone can be understood as ‘selectively reorganizing' state functions, be it via the market-radical logic described by Quinn Slobodian, or via Hakim Bey's concept of the ‘temporary autonomous zone': ‘The zone appears not as a space for escaping social obligations, but as an attempt to create and defend partial autonomy within specific spaces.'
Teslocracy, Chwatal writes, can be described as a ‘zone' that is both a form of government as well as of conflict. While zones may speed up processes, shift responsibilities or limit democratic objections, they are also ‘contested spaces that can be occupied and defended, imagined and alienated, as well as taken away.'
‘In addition to their function as an instrument of Teslocratic rule, zones can serve as spaces of protection and resistance, spaces for aesthetic experience, or arenas for political negotiation,' according to Chwatal. Among his examples is the Zone à defender or ZAD, a zone of resistance against a large-scale airport near Nantes, to which a subsequent, multi-page photo spread is dedicated.
Teslocracy and the end of art
Florian Cramer and Nienke Terpsma discuss whether, in today's hyper-individualised ‘postmodern fascism', artists in the classical sense are still needed – or whether they have long been superseded by meme culture and influencers.
In the Netherlands, decades of neoliberal politics combine with the so-called ‘armlengte afstand', the non-interference of the government in matters of art, implemented in 1862. At the same time, the Netherlands has the highest density of data centres; here, Teslocracy has long become normality.
The consequence is the complete loss of meaning of contemporary art for public life and discourse. In the US, MAGA seems to operate similarly with the same strategy of divestment as in the Netherlands: institutions are being bled dry, not single artists cancelled.
Ultimately, Cramer casts doubt on the very concept of art itself, or rather on the influence of art under Teslocracy: ‘It seems to me that, despite its supposed decolonisation, the Western art system is incapable of coming to terms with this reality. Interestingly, Teslocracy acts as a catalyst for the end of art – like petrol on a smouldering fire.'
Tesla tempo limits
Heimo Lattner and Julia Palmer reconstruct how Teslocracy manifests itself in concrete terms in a small town. On the basis of water law, groundwater levels and the minutes of a public hearing in Grünheide, they demonstrate how the ‘Teslocratic logic of acceleration' – the ‘Tesla tempo' – clashes with the intrinsic timing of natural systems and results in a conflict that cannot be overcome through regulatory processes.
The transcript is an extract from a full-length radio play of the two artists and demonstrates the frustrating back-and-forth between citizens and state officials, bordering on the Kafkaesque. A photo spread by Ulrike Feser (Zone Grünheide, 2020) vividly illustrates the hotly contested destruction of nature rendered in bureaucratic jargon during the hearing.
From catastrophe to utopia and back
Alexander Karschnia traces the history of the concept of the ‘zone' from the ‘zones rouges' of the First World War, through Hakim Bey's ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone', William S. Burrough's city Interzone (Naked Lunch, 1959) and Jonathan Glazer's Auschwitz movie The Zone of Interest (2023).
German history provides the additional backdrop of the GDR as so-called zone: ‘In the collective memory, the enduring legacy of this administrative term plays an ambivalent role: it kept the memory of the immediate post-war period alive, whilst at the same time creating a sense of distance through irony. Thus, the East-West German squabble helped to suppress the fact that this term was also commonly used to refer to the German occupation during the Second World War.'
In a final twist, the concept of the ‘home zone' suggests that instead of domesticizing humankind, it encourages us to think about how to save the planet. Naturalist and biologist E.O. Wilson's proposal in Half Earth Socialism to turn half the planet into a no-go nature reserve appears as a way out of the teslocratic cosmo-colonial dream of the conquest of space.
Review by Kathrin Heinrich
