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  • Language  english       Pages  243
  • Publishing Year  2020
    ISBNs:
  •  978-3-95796-165-5 (print)
  •  978-3-95796-166-2 (PDF)
  • DOI:
  •  10.14619/1655

Affective Transformations

Politics – Algorithms – Media

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.

Table of Contents

Affective Transformations: An Introduction
Bernd Bösel

Affect: On the Turn
Paul Stenner

Algorithm Awareness: Towards a Philosophy of Artifactuality
Gabriele Gramelsberger

Affective Media Regulation: Or, How to Counter the Blackboxing of Emotional Life
Bernd Bösel

From Social Data to Body Data to Psy Data: Tap, Tap, Tap
Oliver Leistert

Affective Milieus: Intensive Couplings, Technical Sentience, and a Nonconscious In-between
Marie-Luise Angerer

Synhaptic Sensibility
Pierre Cassou-Noguès

Encoding Proximity: Intuition in Human-Robot Collaborations
Dawid Kasprowicz

Autonomous Dwelling: Smart Homes and Care IT
Irina Kaldrack

Happy, Happy, Sad, Sad: Do You Feel Me? Constellations of Desires in Affective Technologies
Serjoscha Wiemer

Mediated Humanitarian Affect
Andrew A. G. Ross

Affection and Dividuation
Michaela Ott

Attuning to What? The Uncanny Revival of the Aestheticization of Politics
Mathias Fuchs

Witnessing the Dismantlement of a Proven Structure of Belief:
The Challenge of Populism and Alternative Facts to Liberal Democracy
Jean Clam

Alien Thinking: On the Return of the Sublime as an Affective Medium
Markus Rautzenberg

Authors

Reviews

Affective Transformations […] sets out to investigate the ways networked technologies modify our affects, feeling, and emotions. This is a welcome intervention as, in spite of the vastness of scholarship on both affect and digital media, speculative research that straddles their intersections remains surprisingly rare.

– Jernej Markelj in New Media & Society

The collection is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the intersection of media theory, affect and new-materialism, as it provides timely theoretical concepts and discussions focusing on material interactions between bodies, technology and media.

– Ana Makhashvili on Affective Societies