Mapped in real time: Affective Technologies and the Post-human Subjectivity
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Affective technologies have been critically theorized as a contemporary biopolitical apparatus on multiple grounds, often together with the attention economy (Parisi & Terranova, 2000; Andrejevic, 2011; Dowling, Nunes, & Trott, 2007). Nevertheless, an established encompassing historical-genealogical connection with the development of technological devices related to social and affective computing (Picard, 2000) seems to be lacking. In my presentation, I will attempt to unravel the knot corresponding to the mirroring relationship between the emergence of affective/social robotics and a specific cognitive model of autism as emotional/affective deficit, by trying to combine the historical-epistemological insight of discursive analysis with the most current disability studies perspective and results (McInerney & Keyes, 2024; Nagy, 2022; Williams, 2023; Williams, 2021). Investigating the emergence of affective technologies in the context of a renewed biopolitical governmentality at the current conjuncture of the crises of the post-Fordist capitalist economies (Clough & Halley, 2007; Arvidsson, 2011), the paper aims to open up a series of issues: What is the relationship between the social as an ever-reformulated occurrence, mapped in real time, of affective technologies (now unrelated to the stochastic paradigms of statistics, aspect that marks an important distance with biopolitics as a technology of raison d’état) and the post-human subjectivity? What are the implications in terms of agency and subjectification? What fractures in the biopolitical continuum would offers themselves to a critical address that does not want to retreat into the discourse of datafication and quantification as a reduction of the human? |
| Related projects: |