Power and aesthetics: from body to space

The planetary diffusion of telecommunication networks has recently contributed to question and discredit the democratic model by introducing more directly participatory models. Banking on empathy and affectivity, digital cultures allow cybernauts to get directly into public space and, through new virtual communities and urban tribes, participate in “communocracy” (De Kerckhove, 2008). As though, from the organic solidarity model of modernity, we were returning to mechanic solidarity, never mind about Durkheim (1893). It is a form of sharing symbols, affects, and horizontal information - which does not imply the vertical, diachronic dimension - while we are still under the influence of a political, thus vertically exercised, power. Here lies the paradox of this effervescence, which reveals itself statu nascenti (Alberoni, 1968) of political rather than digital power. However, in digital tribes, like in traditional communities, what underlies interaction and the meaning of human relationships is always the body. In history, it is the first object of observation and imitation through art, but also the first measure of space and the first form of active and passive power: it exerts power and suffers it through the construction of symbolic schemata and is soon distinguished into physical body and political-symbolic body. The social perception of the body is always changing, diachronically and synchronically, according to the times and spaces recognized and allotted to the body itself, at the same time giving different values to the body inscribed in the social. Within a more historicistic than idealistic or materialistic-dialectic view like that of Fernand Braudel, mental prisons generate dichotomous conditions of history (traditional societies/modern societies) that are solved only through huge mentality changes. All forms of rationalization and all attempts to exercise social control, and therefore power, on the body - from the image of Corpus Mysticum Christi, as the metaphoric organizational structure of consensus to power from the Low Middle Ages to the early Modern Age - do not however fully cover the instances of individual freedom and the contradictions that the body carries within a social and economic system. At the same time, it is always the body that gives places forms mirroring wide and varying symbologies of power. The form of the city and the form of the garden are clear examples, the former as the image of the territory circumscribed by the sulcus, thus of legitimatized power, the latter also as a territory, first as sacer, symbol of the dualism nòmos (law, culture, power) vs. nomòs (pastures, uncontrolled nature), circumscribed and limited both symbolically and in space. A social and aesthetic representation of power can be clearly read from the labyrinths of antiquity to the Baroque gardens. If in ancient Rome city and garden expressed power but also culture and measure, today it must be bitterly acknowledged that the classic priority of political acting (pràxis) over technical doing (pòiesis) is over: technical-economic doing prevails over the symbolic aspect of political acting.