New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

eak the habits of judgment in favor of a riskier practice that seeks to yield artistryfrom constraint" (Butler 2001). The moment, or movement, of critique is not based oncorrecting errors or mistakes, but on a 'virtue' of questioning the limits themselves.Critical aesthetic practices tend to involve pulling open conductions of control,surfacing from twisted ensembles of things, dragging their problematic configurationsinto view. Such efforts have been central to media art in the past, but how can thesepractices be fostered under current configurations of compulationalism and thedestructive tendencies of neoliberal governmentality? Can the New Aestheticilluminate these ecologies of practices in new ways, to light up for an instant theinvestments, subjectivities and conflicts that define a critical network culture?RefreshA key premise of this book has rested on a relatively uncontroversial claim that thedigital, especially software, is an increasingly important aspect of our post-Fordistinformational societies and cultural practices. We have taken a synoptic look at thedigital through the phenomenon of the New Aesthetic, the questions it raises, and thestyle of comportment that it suggests. This experiment in thinking the present throughcollaborative and interdisciplinary authorship has enabled us to consider the profoundways in which computationality and neoliberal governmentality are imbricated withinemerging aesthetic forms, expressions, logics and effects. The 'deep' materiality ofthe digital crystallizes particular social forms and values, but also generates newmentalities in combination with economic forms and social relations. This notion ofcomputationality as ontotheology indicates the prevailing doxa of a digitally materialworld. Indeed, as Marx argued,Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct processof the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process ofproduction of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptionsthat flow from these conceptions (Marx 2007: 493, footnote 4).We are not suggesting here that excesses of instrumental reason, delegated intomachines, have created a totalitarian dystopia where the computational and theinstrumental have become synonomous. That is a reading of technology thatHeidegger criticized as a poor understanding of technology which remains "caught inthe subject/object picture" (Dreyfus 1997). In Heidegger's final analysis, the goal oftechnology was "something completely different and therefore new" (1977: 5). Itinvolved increasingly efficient orderings of resources simply for the sake of thisordering and it has created a world in which "everything is ordered to stand by, to beimmediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a furtherordering" (1977: 17). Crucially, it's at this level that we have been drawing linksbetween computationality, thought and comportment.Neoliberal Re-Forms55