Contingent Claims

Abstract

Technocapitalism acts through micro-performative mechanisms which escape human cognition and sense perception but at the same time influence individual behaviour and social conduct. Automated finance and corporate surveillance are both leveraged by proprietary tools operating in the invisible realm of microseconds. While its immediate agency colonizes the future at present, it escapes our phenomenological scope. In fact, technocapitalism operates on a new level of exercising power by shifting its language from representative to performative speech. Hence, data-driven performativity has very material consequences on our real biological and social lives – we are losing our senses in more than one way. How can we move and see through the maze of finance and other data-driven performativity? This essay argues that the performative arts are well situated to create participative situations and alliances that allow for embodied awareness to reveal and resist these infrastructures. However, such art needs to translate technocapitalism beyond cognition, speech and rationality. And such counter-performative aesthetics are to be situated in the field of consequences and take performance outside the metaphoric spaces of the (live) arts. The essay therefore proposes a new reading of the term ‘resolution’ and its semantic field – ranging from perception and visualization to knowledge production and (joint) decision making – to counter the non-transparency of black box exploitation. But there is an urgency to go a step further and transgress the realm of critique and representation towards performative engagements in insurrection if we want to claim an agency in which all the senses of resolution come to bear. Activating the potential of resolution as an alternative to the rather passive notion of transparency calls for ‘renegade activism’ as a strategy of resistance that makes the black box speak from inside.