time streams and presenting to <strong>the</strong> user a mode of cognition that is hyper attentionbased coupled with real-time navigational tools. Thus,<strong>the</strong> riparian user is strangely connected, yet simultaneously disconnected, to <strong>the</strong>data streams that are running past at speeds which are difficult to keep up with.To be a member of <strong>the</strong> riparian public one must develop <strong>the</strong> ability to recognisepatterns, to discern narratives, and to aggregate <strong>the</strong> data flows. Or to usecognitive support technologies and software to do so. The riparian citizen iscontinually watching <strong>the</strong> flow of data, or delegating this ‘watching’ to a technicaldevice or agent to do so on <strong>the</strong>ir behalf. It will require new computational abilities<strong>for</strong> <strong>the</strong>m to make sense of <strong>the</strong>ir lives, to do <strong>the</strong>ir work, and to interact with botho<strong>the</strong>r people and <strong>the</strong> technologies that make up <strong>the</strong> datascape of <strong>the</strong> real-timeweb (Berry 2011: 144).53
11. THE POLITICS OF EMERGENT AESTHETICSIn <strong>the</strong> well-known lecture, ‘What is Critique?’ Foucault traces "<strong>the</strong> critical attitude"from <strong>the</strong> "high Kantian enterprise" (to know knowledge) to everyday polemics found ingovernmentality. In this way, criticality is a stance that follows modernity: an act ofdefiance by limiting, exiting and trans<strong>for</strong>ming historically constituted arrangements ofpower. Foucault referred to critique in this context as “<strong>the</strong> art of not being governed,or better <strong>the</strong> art of not being governed like that, or at that cost” (2007: 45). Expressedas a will, this is conveyed by a suspension of judgment that drives praxis into a directinvolvement with prevailing conditions of possibility and power/knowledge, he adds,If governmentalization is...this movement through which individuals aresubjugated in <strong>the</strong> reality of a social practice through mechanisms of powerthat adhere to a truth, well, <strong>the</strong>n! I will say that critique is <strong>the</strong> movement bywhich <strong>the</strong> subject gives himself <strong>the</strong> right to question truth on its effects ofpower and question power on its discourses of truth. (Foucault 2007: 47)This reconfiguration of problems is suggestive of a way to suspend <strong>the</strong> riparian userwithin <strong>the</strong> altered historical context of computationality and neoliberal govermentality.Consider <strong>the</strong> practices associated with media art: hacking, free and open sourcesoftware, net criticism and so on. Consider Philip Agre's influential framework of'critical technical practice' (1997) or, more recently, Julian Oliver, Gordan Savičić, andDanja Vasiliev's 'Critical Engineering Manifesto',The Critical Engineer considers any technology depended upon to be botha challenge and a threat. The greater <strong>the</strong> dependence on a technology <strong>the</strong>greater <strong>the</strong> need to study and expose its inner workings, regardless ofownership or legal provision... raises awareness that with eachtechnological advance our techno-political literacy is challenged.(Oliver, Savičić & Vasiliev 2011).Such examples aim to process existing regimes precisely through <strong>the</strong>ir capacity tosuspend or reconfigure any 'correct' techniques and contexts <strong>for</strong> engaging within<strong>for</strong>mational infrastructures, whe<strong>the</strong>r commercial interfaces, plat<strong>for</strong>m services,junked hardware, atmospheric sensors, network traffic or geo-tagged data. We aresuggesting that <strong>the</strong>se practices work to hack <strong>the</strong> relational, affective and algorithmiclogics of neoliberal subjectivity to <strong>the</strong> extent that we begin to actively think with <strong>the</strong>seinfrastructures in new ways, apply a threshold of encouragement to break privatizedsenses of risk and loss, to diagram structural violences, to reconfigure at-riskecologies of practices, and so to foster different modes of comportment. If critiquealways <strong>for</strong>ms within pre-existing conditions and settings, it does so through 'voluntarydisobedience.'There are, of course, constant and ongoing risks involved in critique, and in criticalcultural practices, since <strong>the</strong>y are provoked by difficulties carried along by insecurityand precariousness itself. Never<strong>the</strong>less, we should not be disheartened ordisappointed by <strong>the</strong>se challenges. As Judith Butler argues in her commentary onFoucault’s lecture, this is "a moment of ethical questioning which requires that we54
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