Search

Batja Mesquita: Between Us - How Cultures Create Emotions. New York: WW Norton & Co 2022. 978-1-324-00244-4

This contribution argues that with the emergence of affective media, affect or emotion regulation is undergoing a decisive transformation, because it is increasingly facilitated by automated systems that process users’ affect expressions and encourage certain behaviors to maximize their happiness. It further develops the notion that affective media regulation itself demands regulations in a legal and sociopolitical sense. This argument is developed in four stages. (1) A brief overview of the terms “affect regulation“ (Norbert Elias) and “emotion regulation“ (Allan Schore; James Gross) in sociology and psychology provides some insight into the increasing centrality of these concepts and their position within the Foucauldian genealogy of the “security principle“ (Frédéric Gros). (2) The term “affective media“ is defined with recourse to Kittlerian/Winklerian media theory as pertaining to affect-responsive media, or media capable of processing affect. (3) The near-total reliance of present affective computing applications on Paul Ekman’s contested, if not outright refuted, theory of universal basic emotions leads to some serious doubts about its possible effects on users and their “emotional granularity“ (Lisa Feldman Barrett). (4) Picking up on arguments made by critical algorithm studies, Shoshana Zuboff’s critique of “surveillance capitalism,“ and legal scholars’ fight for a “right to reasonable inference“ by automated systems (Sandra Wachter and Brent Mittelstadt), a wide-ranging discussion of the dangers and pitfalls of blackboxing emotional life through affective media is encouraged.

Günther Anders: Schriften zu Kunst und Film. München: C.H. Beck 2020. 9783406747717

Das emotionale Leben wird zunehmend durch digitale Technologien ausgelesen, reguliert und produziert. Diese gleichermaßen von Hoffnungen und Ängsten begleitete Entwicklung ist die vorerst letzte Station einer bis in die Frühgeschichte zurückreichenden, tiefgehenden Verschränkung von Affekt und (Kultur-)Technik. Bernd Bösel eröffnet einen umfassenden genealogischen Blick auf die epochenmachenden Neujustierungen dieser Technisierung. Denn erst im Nachvollzug der verschiedenen Logiken des Verfügens über Affekte wird es möglich, die Verflechtung der Technisierungsformen zu verstehen, auf denen die Psychomacht der Gegenwart basiert.

The “affective turn” has been primarily concerned not with what affect is, but what it does. This article focuses on yet another shift towards how affect gets organized, i.e., how it is produced, classified, and controlled. It proposes a genealogical as well as a critical approach to the organization of affect and distinguishes between several “affect disposition(ing) regimes”—meaning paradigms of how to interpret and manage affects, for e.g., encoding them as byproducts of demonic possession, judging them in reference to a moralistic framework, or subsuming them under an industrial regime. Bernard Stiegler’s concept of psychopower will be engaged at one point and expanded to include social media and affective technologies, especially Affective Computing. Finally, the industrialization and cybernetization of affect will be contrasted with poststructuralist interpretations of affects as events.

Die Erkennung, Regulierung und Produktion von Affekten wird durch die emergierenden Affekt- und Psychotechnologien, insbesondere durch das affective computing, in einer Weise automatisiert, die noch vor wenigen Jahren unabsehbar war. Die Grundlagen für diese algorithmische Automatisierung sind jedoch in der Übertragung kybernetischer Schemata auf die Psychologie in den 1950er Jahren gelegt worden. So lässt sich eine Genealogie von Silvan Tomkins' Affektsystem über Paul Ekmans faziale Emotionserkennung bis zu Rosalind Picards Konzeption und Mitentwicklung affektsensibler Computersysteme nachzeichnen. Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der hierin angelegten Überwachung und Aufzeichnung affektiver Informationen fehlt bisher allerdings und soll hier in ersten Schritten geleistet werden., Through the emergence of affect- and psychotechnologies, especially with the advent of affective computing, the recognition, regulation and production of affects have been automatized to an unforeseeable degree. The foundations for this algorithmic automatization can be observed in the propagation of cybernetic models in the field of psychology from the 1950s onwards. A straight genealogy leads from Silvan Tomkins' affect system via Paul Ekman's facial emotion recognition to Rosalind Picard's conception and co-development of affect-sensitive computer systems. Nevertheless a critical assessment of the implicated aspects of surveillance and collection of affective information is still missing and will be outlined here in a few points.

Affective media technologies are becoming more and more standardized, and objects of commercial interest. Based on concepts of critical discourse analysis, this contribution argues that current developments cannot be explained solely as the result of technological progress, but should be understood as the effect of a heterogeneous network of relations. A central element for the stabilization of this network lies in the character- istic “constellation of desires” (Hartmut Winkler) of affective technologies. What are the relevant promises and expectations that drive the ongoing “industrialization of emotions”?

Affective transformations : politics - algorithms - media / edited by Bernd Bösel and Serjoscha Wiemer; Lüneburg, Germany : meson press 41-48 (2020). doi:10.14619/1655, Published by meson press, Lüneburg, Germany

This contribution reflects on the cultural pol- itics of affective media in the field of global humanitarianism. Liberal advocates of internet connectivity continue to celebrate mobile and other digital networking technologies as vehicles for global dialogue and transnational justice. A key conceit of this tradition is an ontological linkage between the scale of mediated communication, the sensorial range of human experience, and the capaciousness of moral attention. In reference to recent developments in digital humanitarian advocacy, this chapter disrupts these linkages and tells a more complex story about the politics of mediated humanitarian affect. Digital humanitarian campaigns enhance moral sensitivities but also engender new forms of digital labor, data gathering, and political control. Crisis mapping technologies expand opportunities for liberal institutions to manage distant populations according to specific rationalities of governance. And the algorithms that circulate video advocacy campaigns are translating distant conflicts into new sites for enjoyment and moral urgency. The case of mediated humanitarian affect reveals the extent to which human affective energies are being captured by the technologies and regimes of power characteristic of neoliberal societies.

For some influential advocates of the “affective turn,” the concept of affect stands for a spontaneous, collective, subjective and progressive becoming-other that promises “new possibilities” that are never quite articulated. This perspective has great potential, but risks lapsing into a naïve celebration of affect that is ill-equipped to grasp the negative aspects and uses of experiences of becoming (i.e., liminal experience). A liminal occasion is an occasion of passage between categories during which, for whatever reason, the forms of process associated with modes of being are subject to metamorphosis. A focus on liminality, it will be argued, has two chief advantages. First, it allows us to focus on the affectivity that comes into play when we, or our circumstances, are in the process of transformation. This highlights the fact that many of the positive, exciting, desirable features attributed to “affect” are characteristics of liminal occasions, but also that these occasions can have a darker side. A second advantage is that it encourages us to recognize the long history through which different “technologies” have emerged to manage, generate and communicate the liminal affectivity typical of liminal occasions. The oldest of these “liminal affective technologies” is ritual, which dates back to prehistoric times. Without denying the distinctiveness of the present moment, in which affectivity is routinely summoned and manipulated by a host of new technological means, this argument opens up new ways of locating our present within a broader genealogy.

Our networked condition under capital relations continues to open pathways to tap into new sources of value. Since the social media turn, the expansion of capital in the digital realm has successfully tapped into body data by way of products like Fitbit. More recently, the proliferation of psy data is underway with chat bots, backed by artificial intelligence to harvest the last remaining and intimate part of expressiveness that neoliberal subjects are producing: mental health apps are at the last frontier of capital’s attempts to profitably govern its subjects. To understand these processes, a recap of Marxian theory and the use of some tools created by Félix Guattari will be undertaken.

Affective transformations : politics - algorithms - media / edited by Bernd Bösel and Serjoscha Wiemer; Lüneburg, Germany : meson press 121-133 (2020). doi:10.14619/1655, Published by meson press, Lüneburg, Germany

In recent discourse, notably concerning speculative realism and accelerationism, the sublime is redis- covered as an epistemological and aesthetic tool. This “comeback” of the sublime is deeply rooted in the attempt to think of the world in a non- anthropocentric manner and to establish a kind of alien thinking. Even today the notion of the sublime challenges the concept of semiomorphic knowledge. A sense of amazement interwoven with fear and terror is an integral aspect of the sublime—not only as an aesthetic but as an epistemological category. It is related to philosophical traditions of thinking the unthinkable and grasping the limits of rationality and subjectivity.

The concept of a “synhaptic sensibility“ expresses a new relation between sight and touch that comes to power with new haptic and synhaptic technologies. These technologies work on a variety of haptic data and change our affective relationship with each other and with ourselves. They transform our affective live. With regard to the power of political and social control synhaptic technologies are local and imply a synchronized multiplicity. This puts them in opposition to the centralized invisible oversight that characterizes the model of the pan- opticon. Therefore “synhaptic sensibility“ can help to understand how “control societies“ are related to the current transformation of the properties of touch and sight and to the communication of affects.

The crisis liberal democracy is facing today is a new challenge: the relation between alternative factuality and the unleashing of affective impulses is mediated by the transformation of the pre- existing structure of belief. There is an affective turn in the political realm—a realm structurally marked by collective sentiments and their non- relativizable nature. While the structural social and psychic setting of the functional differentiation of society remains unchanged, a crucial component of it has been strongly “affected” by a re-ordering of the function of belief within the cognitive dimension of social communication. In this crucial situation we need a new pedagogy of real-true worldliness to develop cognitive and doxic forms immune to the fakization of any deixis of the world, be it scientific, religious, or customary.

The Affective Turn has lost its former innocence and euphoria. Affect Studies and its adjacent disciplines have now to prove that they can cope with the return of the affective real that technology, economy, and politics entail. Two seemingly contradictory developments serve as starting points for this volume. First, technological innovations such as affective computing, mood tracking, sentiment analysis, and social robotics all share a focus on the recognition and modulation of human affectivity. Affect gets measured, calculated, controlled. Secondly, recent developments in politics, social media usage, and right-wing journalism have contributed to a conspicuous rise of hate speech, cybermobbing, public shaming, “felt truths,” and resentful populisms. In a very specific way, politics as well as power have become affective. Affect gets mobilized, fomented, unleashed. When the ways we deal with our affectivity get unsettled in such a dramatic fashion, we have to rethink our ethical, aesthetical, political as well as legal regimes of affect organization., Bernd Bösel: Affective Transformations: An Introduction Paul Stenner: Affect: On the Turn Gabriele Gramelsberger: Algorithm Awareness: Towards a Philosophy of Artifactuality Bernd Bösel: Affective Media Regulation: Or, How to Counter the Blackboxing of Emotional Life Oliver Leistert: From Social Data to Body Data to Psy Data: Tap, Tap, Tap Marie-Luise Angerer: Affective Milieus: Intensive Couplings, Technical Sentience, and a Nonconscious In-between Pierre Cassou-Noguès: Synhaptic Sensibility Dawid Kasprowicz: Encoding Proximity: Intuition in Human–Robot Collaborations Irina Kaldrack: Autonomous Dwelling: Smart Homes and Care IT Serjoscha Wiemer: Happy, Happy, Sad, Sad: Do You Feel Me? Constellations of Desires in Affective Technologies Andrew A. G. Ross: Mediated Humanitarian Affect Michaela Ott: Affection and Dividuation Matthias Fuchs: Attuning to What? The Uncanny Revival of the Aestheticization of Politics Jean Clam: Witnessing the Dismantlement of a Proven Structure of Belief: The Challenge of Populism and Alternative Facts to Liberal Democracy Markus Rautzenberg: Alien Thinking: On the Return of the Sublime as an Affective Medium