Leviatã e a Rede: mutações e persistências político-estéticas

Abstract

Through an analysis of the transformations and persistencies in the image­-power­-knowledge relationship that result from the spread of digital communication's technologies, our goal is to characterize the emergence of a conflict that, in the politics of visuality and the cyberspace's techno­political configuration, reflects similar tensions that constitute the actual power relations diagram. The research begins with an investigation of the historical background that influenced Thomas Hobbes Leviathan's images production, where a given visual order corresponds to a new power order. Then, we analyze the changes of this specific configuration – that is perceptible as the Leviathan image regime's metaphor - in face of the analog and digital image production technologies. Our hypothesis is that the disputes (aesthetic, legal, economic) that attempt to regulate the image within the digital media domain and that shape a particular politics of visibility, are similar to those tensions that affect the cyberspace conditions to become a different 'sensible' surface (medium), that potentially mobilizes other forms of knowing, other models of organization and production. To examine this issue, we analyze the ongoing conflict between different social forces that point out both for new practices and meanings that emerge in the cybercultural arena, and for the trends that attempts to impose over the digital medium the regulatory mechanisms established in the context of analog medium. At the end we characterize the current power diagram, and we argue that cyberspace aesthetic and political configuration depend upon a capacity to intervene over the very fundamentals that regulate its field of enunciation and visibility. Finally, we take it as a struggle for others modes of thought and social organization models, as a war over the virtual and imaginary production, therefore a war that is oriented to the future.