For the critical theorists, as capital becomes increasingly concentrated and the state and economy become ever more interdependent, traditional political economy becomes insufficient as an explanatory framework for understanding the new forms of emerging capitalism.

Hence, the critical theorists turned their attention to the ‘assessment of the mode in which ideas and beliefs are transmitted by “popular culture” - the way in which the personal, private realm is undermined by the external (extra-familial) socialization of the ego and the management and control of leisure time' (Held 1997: 77).

For Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, in particular, sociology and critique are inseparable: to analyse a work of art, or a particular cultural artifact, is to analyse and assess the way it is interpreted. This entails an inquiry into its formation and reception. Such an inquiry seeks to understand given works in terms of their social origins, form, content and function - in terms of the social totality. The conditions of labour, production and distribution must be examined, for society expresses itself through it cultural life and cultural phenomena contain within themselves reference to the socio-economic whole. (Held 1997: 77)

This is to explore the way in which society itself and its organization are ‘crystallized' in cultural phenomenon. However, in contrast to most Marxist accounts of culture, the critical theorists did not think of culture as merely the superstructure, which was in some sense determined by a base. Indeed, the critical theorists rejected such a model altogether. They also rejected ‘traditional cultural criticism' that disconnected it from society, as if it could be understood in and of itself, divorced from its social production and practices. Indeed, they argued that ‘culture emerges from the organizational basis of society as the bundle of ideas, mores, norms and artistic expressions - the heritage and practices of intelligence and art' (Held 1997: 80).

The spheres of material culture and intellectual (artistic, “higher”) culture. Material culture comprises “the actual patterns of behaviour in ‘earning a living'” the system of operational “values” and includes the social, psychological and moral dimensions of family life, leisure time, education and work. Intellectual culture refers to the “higher” values, science and the “humanities” art, religion. (Held 1997: 80)

For Adorno, the concept of the ‘new' within art is understood with reference to the determinate negation of the old. In other words, only by reference to that which has gone before can a distinction be developed which enables a ‘new' to be articulated as such. This is crucial in understanding that the ‘new' will always involuntarily repeat the old, even if there is a disavowal of previous work and claims to a decisive break. Nonetheless, Adorno does not take the view that artworks can be an instrument in the cause of social justice. Adorno argues instead,

That works of art, rather than being instrumental “interventions” offer a criticism of instrumental reason and action as such. In so far as art is autonomous, it does not criticize some particular good or bad action, as though actions could be weighed outside their increasingly total context, but the whole framework within which practice takes place........................................................................................................ As sheer

instruments they could no longer offer a critique of instrumental reason.... The danger for politically committed art is that it will end up as bad art without becoming good politics either. (Jarvis 1998: 121)

Artistic culture represents the ‘perennial protest' of the ‘particular against the universal', that is, ‘culture, in the true sense, did not simply accommodate itself to human beings; but it always simultaneously raised a protest against petrified relations under which they lived' (Adorno 2005b: 100). That is, the artistic transformation of objects such that they reveal the conditions under which they exist.

the most prevalent trends in contemporary art since the '90s seem united in their apparent eschewal of the digital and the virtual. Performance art, social practice, assemblage-based sculpture, painting on canvas, the “archival impulse,” analog film, and the fascination with modernist design and architecture: At first glance, none of these formats appear to have anything to do with digital media.... But when we examine these dominant forms of contemporary art more closely, their operational logic and systems of spectatorship prove intimately connected to the technological revolution we are undergoing.... I am suggesting that the digital is, on a deep level, the shaping condition—even the structuring paradox—that determines artistic decisions to work with certain formats and media. Its subterranean presence is comparable to the rise of television as the backdrop to art of the 1960s. One word that might be used to describe this dynamic—a preoccupation that is present but denied, perpetually active but apparently buried—is disavowal. (Bishop 2012)

In this chapter I want to explore the digital in relation to the aesthetic - and its disavowal - particularly in relation to the way in which digital works are acknowledged or rejected as forms of art. Here, I do not necessarily mean purely formal art production, nor in terms of institutionalization of art through gallery curation necessarily. Rather, I want to look at claims to an aesthetic moment itself revealed in and through aesthetic practice and popular culture surrounding the digital. Indeed, it is interesting in terms of the refusal of new aesthetic practitioners to abide by the careful boundary monitoring between the art world and the ‘creative industry' more generally, really bringing to the fore the questions raised by Liu (2004) regarding how design and art might be conceptually linked through a notion of what he calls ‘cool'.

In a similar fashion to Adorno, I do not necessarily want to examine these moments as ‘interventions' as such; instead I want to look at how digital aesthetic works are presented for no obvious purpose, in contrast to a world in which things are normally presented as being for the sake of other things, and by this I mean instrumentally (see Jarvis 1998: 121). The key point for Adorno is not to oppose a contemplative ideal of the work of art against that of an instrumentalized one, but rather to criticize an entire framework within which artist practice takes place, such that ‘the critique exercised a priori by art is that of action as a cryptogram of domination.... The effect of artworks is not that they present a latent praxis that corresponds to a manifest one, for their autonomy has moved far beyond such immediacy; rather, their effect is that of recollection, which they evoke by their existence' (Adorno 2004b: 241). I take two main cases of aesthetics and the computational, the ‘new aesthetic', a constellation of objects and practices that bear the traces of the computational within them, for example, through digital artefacts, breakdown or structure, and the argument that code and algorithms are themselves in some sense aesthetic.