New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

crisis-ridden economic condition, is impossible to "wish away;" there is contrarilly a"special relation today between the mode of production and its mathematics"(11). The New Aesthetic found this special relation, in its absolutely direct capturing ofits patterns, channels and economies of attention.Implications of an Apolitical New AestheticIf it is not obvious by now, we have been as a collective differently innervated,perplexed and ambivalent about this thing called the New Aesthetic. While we arekeen to distance ourselves from a possible passive reading/writing of its style, a stylethat we have described as riparian, in as much as it encourages consumption of acertain kind of digital product(ion), the New Aesthetic as a case has delivered to usmore understanding of the present condition and the possibilities of using media toreconfigure things a little. The way that the phenomena so strongly linkedcomputation with consumption and aspects of the neoliberal economic reality,enabled us to generate new insights and questions; for example, about the care forartistic and creative work, that we have captured in the curatorial anxieties stressed inthe middle section of this book. It has felt crucial, moreover, that these complexassocations that we have generated in proximity to the thing create reflexivearticulations. Here, we are recognizing our own potential breaks from computationaland calculative reason. As Darrow Schecter notes,The exercise of power and the formalisation of knowledge to be intimatelybound up with the constitution of living individuals as subjects ofknowledge, that is, as citizens and populations about whom knowledge issystematically constructed... Subjects are not born subjects so much asthey become them. In the course of becoming subjects they are classifiedin innumerable ways which contribute to their social integration, even ifthey are simultaneously marginalised in many cases. (Schecter 2010: 171)Our neoliberal selves have become more strongly attached to the norms of 'marketcivilization' through specific combinations of rationalities, strategies, technologies andtechniques that mobilize government at a distance, and by manipulations of powerthrough the economic and discursive networks of a massively deregulated andexpanding new media (Gupta and Sharma: 2006).The most conventional anxiety around neoliberal subject formation is that this modeof governmentality reduces citizens to consumers only, enfolding all of life and cultureto its representational practices. This is its logic of course, but it can not be ever fullyachieved. As Wendy Brown (2006) has argued, the difference of the regimes andpractices of neoliberal transition is that they emphasize market rationality as analready-achieved state, rather than an aspiration. This gives neoliberalism ateleological force and ordinariness that is difficult to counter, and unpack. It issignificant twist of already-realized market rationalization that has significantramifications not just on a theory of the subject, but following from this, on any theoryof the spectator or user of art, media, design, and culture. The New Aestheticacknowledges the ensconcement of neoliberalism in subjectivity, but to thinkaesthetics 'now', how can we think beyond this?58