New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

Aesthetic seems to evoke what already was, rather than what might be. Indeed, if theNew Aesthetic suggests a particular subject, as we go on to discuss, it would be moreaccurately described as desubjectified, or partial. Defined more by intensities than byconsciousness or action, which are deprioritized or unavailable, this is comparable towhat Tiqqun call the Bloom (2000), but we describe under computationality as theriparian user (Berry 2011). However, we want to suggest that this is not some criticalfailure of the New Aesthetic (it was never trying to be otherwise); rather, it can betaken as a generalized symptom of disassociated relations that are characteristic ofsoftware, bound by the logic of computation.It is a related concern that the computational regime is operative during a phase whenthe post-89 market-driven social and economic reforms of neoliberalism have comeinto crisis, impacting upon our comportment in the present as producers, critics andeveryday negotiators of culture at large. This is another, until recently, obfuscatedparadigm of production for today's fine art and creative industrial work. As aneoclassical economic approach to governmentality, it stresses the efficiency ofprivate enterprise, delimits the state’s role in providing from public services through apolitics of risk privatization and social disinvestment. As welfare state agendas aredeemed outmoded, in the view of its historian's like David Harvey, neoliberalism namesthe deepening penetration of processes and regimes of capitalization into politicaland social institutions – and indeed, cultural consciousness (2007). On many levels itis not a changed capitalism, merely an intensified, pernicious version of realsubsumption. But its difference, tracked early in 1979 by Foucault in The Birth ofBiopolitics (2008), is the way in which the latter has succeeded in creating greatestconceptual distance between the state, corporate takeovers of wealth, and theconception of the 'free' liberal democratic imaginary of citizenship. This freedom risesinto its own ethic above all other political imperatives, and cultural logics.For affect theorist Lauren Berlant, both art and popular cultural experiments processthe present of our neoliberal, networked relations and their conditions of possibility(2011). Aesthetic relations take shape as trackable 'genres' or forms which enablecontemporary subjects to attach to and at least inhabit the contradictions andambivalence of this Now. A genre, perhaps especially when pitched as 'new'(pertaining to now) offers us a recognizable form that we can "groove with" or holdonto, so that we modulate and adjust to the present in the form of affective contractsupon encounters with people and things. Genres, significantly, can be both effortstowards, and defenses from, more politicized ways of thinking and feeling through thepresent.Most relevantly, Berlant has taken up these approaches to aesthetic forms to replacethe persistent legacy approaches to aesthetics inherited from modernism that are verymuch unsuited to thinking through moments of ongoing crises. In Badiou, for example,events throw us into a new present, supposedly rendering old tools, categories andanalytics, including political analytics, supposedly obsolete (2009). Berlant dedramatizesthis to suggest contrarily that the present moment is increasingly beingexperienced as the imposition of a sense of extended crisis. Incidents don't infactshock us differently, the drama in fact is the opposite of this; things more tend to pileup and we navigate them in a mode of adjustment that itself feels as permanent as itdoes precarious (2011). For her, new aesethetic genres invested in the political, the16