In Real Time: Affective Technologies and the Epistemology of the Cognitive Subject (online presentation)
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The paper offers an operational definition of the concept of “affective technologies” based on the Simondonian notion of technicity (Simondon, 1958; Thrift, 2008) and on Jonathan Crary's analyses of the subject of the psychological view of modernity (Crary, 1990, 1999). Considering the characteristics of attachment to life and vital functions, their relationship of direct proportionality to a population's pursuit of its own vital interests (the more the population follows its own inclinations, the tighter the control), and their pervasiveness in the relations of the self to the self, affective technologies can be critically theorized as a contemporary biopolitical apparatus (Foucault) on multiple grounds, along with the attention economy (Stiegler, Terranova). The first part of the presentation indicates in what terms we can understand this shift (or rather, mutual reinforcement - insinuation of the letter into the space of the former) from attention as an element to be monetized and exploited by digital apparatuses to affect and emotion. In the second, it is pointed out how the genealogy of affective quantification and computability (thus, the condition of possibility of affective computing) stands in a particular and paradoxical relation to the psychiatric discourse on “autism,” particularly the cognitive turn, in the reformulation of “disorder” as “deficit” (leaning here on disability studies and genealogies of autism). The conclusions open up questions regarding the reconceptualization and reconfiguration not only of the body but also of the social as produced with and by such technologies and their related subjectivity. |
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