Aesthetics
In the expanded sense deployed throughout Open Machine research — following Bernard Stiegler’s use of aisthēsis — aesthetics is the question of feeling and sensibility in general, and thus the fundamental question of politics. Power, in its relationality, is “nothing less than this matter of feeling.” The dominant “sensible community” of today is fabricated by technologies of control — “aesthetic conditioning” that replaces genuine aesthetic experience, making it impossible. Against this, the protocol underground represents zones of aesthetic self-determination, willfully defiant against administrative or commercial capture.
Aesthetics in this usage is neither decorative nor subjective: it is the atmosphere of any social space, the pervasive “vibe” that shapes the structure of the possible. Underground spaces are characterized by their participatory aesthetics — co-creation of environment and atmosphere, rejection of passive spectatorship and consumption. “There is no objective vibe, there is no monopoly of the real. Feeling, sense, atmosphere are relational.” (— Sketches Toward a Theory of the Protocol Underground)
The insistence on aesthetics as political also grounds the analysis of institutional “dead zones” (David Graeber): administrative bureaucracies are defined above all by the atmospheric, subtle implication of violence — the “oh so-subtle” implication that permeates legally sanctioned institutions. Freedom from this atmosphere is not merely a political question but an aesthetic one: the cultivation of sensory environments in which high agency, consent, and ontological creativity are possible.
Undergrounds protocolize aesthetic practices when they are outlawed — they become more pluralistic, and that pluralism solidifies their resistance to institutional capture. When aesthetics becomes economy, as in the noöpunk program, the question of who counts as an agent, what counts as feeling, is directly political.