Introduction

Abstract

This chapter introduces the aims of the text and the different methodologies used to achieve these goals. It shows that a goal of this book is to make it more difficult for neoliberalism to foster a reality that “has always been” and to make strange the values, governmental rationalities, and modes of knowledge production that neoliberalism takes for granted as just the way things are. One way this study does this is through a simultaneous engagement with cyberpunk science fiction and neoliberalism. Another aim is to defamiliarize seemingly non-neoliberal notions, everyday practices, and material conditions, such as self-cultivation, biohacking, biopolitics, cyborgs, science fiction, postmodern, and exercise. By doing so, this chapter and book highlight the ways in which neoliberalism perpetuates itself in not so obvious ways. This chapter introduces readers to the book's approach to theoretically examining the logic of intensity by focusing on the co-productive relationship between art and neoliberalism and on the everyday micro-practices of living intensely and precarious survival. It propose moving away from more traditional disciplinary aesthetic methods of analyzing power and urban systems to problematize the biopolitical present, which defines and controls life through an integration of economic calculation and economic rationalities into life and bodies.