Affecting societies, affecting risk (and opportunities)

Abstract By producing simultaneity, instantaneity and ubiquity, the technical macro-systems in which we are immersed penetrate our life, forcing us to be: efficient, fast, mobile and performative. As emerges from much specialist literature, the prevailing aesthetic in the new regime of communication is therefore that of performance. In the hypothesis developed in the essay, however, performance is not only an intrinsic effect in technical systems, but also takes the form of a grammar/posture used by the social actor to break out of prescriptions and produce improvisations in order not only to conform but also to resist domination. The new communicative regime, based on the alternation between miracle and trauma, defines a specific communicative framework. According to the double bind theory, when individuals are exposed to paradoxical communication, which contains two messages wherein one denies the other, a potentially schizogenic communicative framework is generated. A digitalized space is one that empowers the subject, but at the same subtracts power away from the subject. Performance is therefore the aesthetic response to a situation perceived as paradoxical and unsolvable from a cognitive point of view. With these considerations in mind, what does this new aesthetic consist of? I have chosen to analyze three qualities: sensoriality, simulation and connectedness. In the last part of the article, I offer an analysis of these dimensions, highlighting their ambivalences and polarities and distinguishing in the social field between aesthetic and anesthetic impacts.