New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

‘informational societies’? How devoted are they to helping others who sufferdeprivation and hardship? How conciliatory are they towards their opponents andenemies in network cultures (flame wars, etc.)?Clearly too, the New Aesthetic as the surface manifestation of the computationaldevice, its politics, has been useful for gaining only so many hooks on thecomprehension of the present and the possible forms of practice and critique towardsthis condition. We considered firstly that the New Aesthetic is an ideologicalmanifestation of a computational ontotheology being instantiated in a number ofmedial moments (technology, politics, social movements, the environment, the state).We also wished to deconstruct its attractive manifestation of the commodity form asends without means, in effect an example of commodity fetishism. Finally, our critiqueimplies a new form of literacy, which elsewhere Berry (2012c) has called 'iteracy,' ableto understand and intervene directly in the technological system we inhabit.Cognitively, it has been argued that streams are also suited to a type of reading called‘distant reading’ as opposed to the ‘close reading’ of the humanities (Moretti 2007).This ‘close reading’ has created a certain type of subject: narrativised, linear, whatMcLuhan called 'typographic man' (1962). At present, there is a paradoxicalrelationship between the close reading currently taught in educational institutions andthe distant reading required for algorithmic approaches to information. To illustrate,books are a great example of a media form that uses typographic devices for aidingcognition for ‘close’ reading: chapters, paragraphs, serif fonts, avoiding textual 'rivers'and white space. Most notably, these were instantiated into professional typographicpractices that are themselves now under stress from computational algorithmicapproaches to typesetting and production. Close reading devices required a deepsense of awareness in relation to the reader as a particular conscious and activesubject: autonomous, linear, narrativised, and capable of feats of memory andcognitive processing. Devices, meanwhile, were associated with a constellation ofpractices that were surrounded around the concept of the author.We want to extend this observation and consider how neoliberalism and computationcomplement each other, but where nonetheless this complementarity opens folds forcritically thinking through the issues and questions that are raised both by the newaesthetic and the new anxieties it appears to introduce. Crucially, Foucault'sperspective on criticality, introduced at the start of this chapter, suggests thepossibility of a subject manifested within arrangements of power, whilst nonethelesscapable of drawing limits, capable of being a line-of-flight within computationality.Here, as Schecter notes,Critical thinking can deconstruct the visible harmony between casualseeing and instrumental reason... in contrast with monolithic appearances,surfaces are characterised by strata and folds that can inflect power tocreate new truths, desires and forms of experience (Schecter 2010: 175).This link between perception (not just visuality) and power raises the question of anaesthetic itself deployed towards intelligibility. Tumblrs, and related collection-orientedcomputational systems certainly contribute to visualizing forms of understanding,through the generation of geometric and photographic truths manifested in painted62