New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

We now find ourselves in a situation of increasing reliance on digital technologies ofcomputation and calculative rationalities. Many of these systems were initiallydesigned to support or aid the judgement of people in undertaking specific activities,analyses, and decisions, but they have long since "surpassed the understanding oftheir users and become indispensible to them" (Weizenbaum 1984: 236). With a lackof adequate technical literacy, combined with processes of blackboxing, thesesystems themselves resist interrogability. Accordingly, in our current dependency oncomputationality, such infrastructures tend toward growth, through addition of controlat higher and higher levels of abstraction (Beniger, 1986). Indeed, as Kitchin (2011)argues, software can tie in strongly with specific regimes of governmentality, in denseand complicated patterns and dynamics:Over the past two centuries a mode of governmentality has developed inWestern society that is heavily reliant on generating and monitoringsystematic information about individuals by institutions. Software-enabledtechnologies qualitatively alter both the depth and the scope of thisdisciplinary gaze, but also introduce new forms of governance, becausethey make the systems and apparatus of governance more panoptical innature. At the technical level, software is producing new machine-readableand software-sorted geographies that are radically altering how cities areregulated… Software creates more effective systems of surveillance andcreates new capture systems that actively reshape behaviour by alteringthe nature of a task. In recent years there has been much academicattention paid to qualitative changes in surveillance technologies as theyhave become digital in nature, leading to the development of a new field ofsurveillance studies. That said, there is still much conceptual and empiricalwork to be done to understand how forms of governance are beingtransformed and the role played by software, and not simply the broadertechnologies they enable. (Kitchin 2011: 949)Neoliberalism’s deep penetration into subjectivity, or what Foucault calledsubjectivation, pulls economized, 'market-civilization' thinking into social spheres inways that work in destructive and atomizing registers. This is one of the challenges, inour view, marked by the New Aesthetic.Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s conception of mediatized subjectives that attune to suchpresents by finding form (2011), we have considered the New Aesthetic as just onekind of affectively compelling genre that had success as a 'concept' for hingingoneself to an obfuscated present. From specific conditions of possibility, it spoke ofpatterns, computational regimes and economic conditions that had become very muchour own. The New Aesthetic twisted conventional anxieties; for us, the predictableresistance seemed too staid, even for those who were ambivalent about it. Thisphenomenon showed us that to think aesthetic encounters now, we need to thinkdifferently. The New Aesthetic isolates the urgency of our need for new concepts: tobe clearer on how the dynamics of civil society have become increasingly eroded awayand are being reworked by computational technologies and neoliberal technocraticorders.These relate to aesthetics of comportment, to orientations with objects, relationships,56