Projects are as much an ambiguous as a widespread mode of individual agency and social cooperation. The fact that today almost everything can become a project sheds light on how people understand their activities and their relations to others as well as to themselves. The form “project” can be seen as a basic element of contemporary modes of government and self-government. — The essay traces the genealogy of project making starting with Daniel Defoe’s “Essay upon Projects“ up to the trade and housing projects in the alternative movement of the Seventies. Discussing Luc Boltanksi’s and Eve Chiapello’s “The New Spirit of Capitalism” it then sketches out the job specification of a present-day’s project collaborator, adding an analysis of the technologies which are used to optimize project management and individual self-fashioning as “project ego”.
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