Angerer Et Al (2014) - Timing of Affect

Timing of Affect
Timing of Affect
Epistemologies, Aesthetics, Politics
Edited by
Marie-Luise Angerer, Bernd Bösel and Michaela Ott
diaphanes
Table of Contents
Marie-Luise Angerer, Bernd Bösel, Michaela Ott

Introduction 7
Moira Gatens
Affective Transitions and Spinoza’s Art of Joyful Deliberation 17
Michaela Ott
Dividual Affections 35
Steven Shaviro
Discognition 49
Mark B. N. Hansen
Feelings without Feelers, or Affectivity as Environmental Force 65
Bernd Bösel
Affective Synchronization, Rhythmanalysis and the Polyphonic Qualities
of the Present Moment 87
Marie-Luise Angerer
Affective Knowledge
Movement, Interval, Plasticity 103
Orit Halpern
The Neural Network
Temporality, Rationality, and Affect in Cybernetics 119
Wolfgang Ernst
Temporalizing Presence and “Re-Presencing” the Past
The Techno-Traumatic Affect 145
Luciana Parisi
Digital Automation and Affect 161
Anna Tuschling
The Age of Affective Computing 179
Rolf Großmann
Sensory Engineering
Affects and the Mechanics of Musical Time 191
Wiebke Trost
Time Flow and Musical Emotions
The Role of Rhythmic Entrainment 207
Chris Salter
Atmospheres of Affect 225
Christoph Brunner
Affective Politics of Timing
On Emergent Collectivity in Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors 245
Hermann Kappelhoff and Sarah Greifenstein

Feeling Gloomy or Riding High
Timings of Melodrama and Comedy 263
Patricia Ticineto Clough

The Object’s Affects
The Rosary 283
Brigitte Bargetz
Mapping Affect
Challenges of (Un)Timely Politics 289
Sebastian Vehlken
After Affects
Zealous Zombies, Panic Prevention, Crowd Simulation 303
Brian Massumi
The Market in Wonderland
Complexifying the Subject of Interest 321
The Authors 339

Introduction
Since the 1990s, a discussion of affectivity has been conducted across many disciplines,
driven by cultural and feminist studies. This conspicuous turn towards affect and emo-
tion, which can be observed in cultural, media, film and gender studies, in the social
sciences, in cognitive psychology and neurology, in political science, in ethnography, but
also in philosophy, has taken place in the context of a critique of the primacy of language
and representation.1
In this focus on affect, various traditional concepts and discourses have been
revived,2 often updated with new semantic charges. This has resulted in a diversity of
connotations that is often not taken into consideration, thus obscuring the theoretical
and political strategies that govern the way the concept of affect is deployed. Affect is
used differently, for example, in neurobiology and cognitive psychology, and differently
again in psychoanalysis, or in political theory, or in philosophy influenced by post-
structuralism. Moreover, many aesthetic theories refer to a concept of affect developed
by Gilles Deleuze to address questions of the constitution of sensory perception/aesthe-
sis and the specificity of artistic forms of expression. In discourses focusing on media
technology (neo-cybernetics, post-humanism) the concept of affect mixes philosophical
notions with techno-empirical procedures.
These terminological differences are due to culture- and discipline-specific shifts in
translation, as well as specific trends in reception (such as re-readings of Spinoza, Nietz-
sche, Tarde, and Bergson), but they can also result from interests related to research
funding. Consequently, the focus on questions of affect has contributed to a broadening
and differentiation of the epistemological field and fostered a rapprochement between
natural and human sciences, in some cases to the point of transdisciplinary research
projects.3
1 See for example: Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London/
Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997); Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory (London/New York: Routledge, 2007);
Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham/London: Duke University
Press, 2010); Patricia T. Clough and Jean Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham/Lon-
don: Duke University Press, London 2007).
2 Among others the phenomenological tradition, including the works of Luce Irigaray, which are cur-
rently undergoing a revival. See for example: Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphosis: Towards a Materialist Theory of
Becoming (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001).
3 See: Languages of Emotion, Freie Universität Berlin (http://www.loe.fu-berlin.de, retrieved March 3,
2014), SenseLab, University of Concordia, Montréal, CA (http://senselab.ca/wp2/, retrieved March 3, 2014).
7
Introduction
Of course there are differences between the methodical approaches taken by disciplines
in the natural sciences and the humanities to the elusive phenomenality of what is
referred to alternately as emotion, affect, and more recently also affection. While analytic
philosophy of language4 and the social sciences5 continue to work mostly with the term
emotion, there have also been various attempts in the history of Anglo-American psy-
chology and psychoanalysis to introduce the concept of affect in specific opposition to
both “drives” and “emotions” – as in the affect model elaborated by Silvan Tomkins or in
Daniel Stern’s distinction between “vitality affects” and “categorical affects”.6
It is no coincidence, then, that Tomkins’ cybernetic system of affect (rediscovered by
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick7) sparked such a hype in cultural studies in the 1990s. The under-
standing of affect he proposed could be perfectly combined with the rapidly spreading
procedures for neurobiological recording and measurement that have since been widely
used as an empirical basis in media and computer studies.
When we now talk about an “affective turn”, this can be viewed as the culmina-
tion of other “turns” that have been proclaimed in recent times (performative, picto-
rial, material), whose function is not least to promote a comprehensive reframing of the
way we address the subject and society. The use of psycho-techniques8 and the inven-
tion of new affective strategies are being further reinforced by current developments in
media technology and their social networks. In other words, this focus on affect must be
viewed in the context of a rediscovery of the body, movement, tactility, and the promise
of immediacy as key variables, as well as the dissolution of the boundaries of the tech-
nological dispositif.
For the theoretical framing of the “timing of affect”, two factors are especially signifi-
cant – movement and time. Modern recognition of movement as a process of differentia-
4 See for example: Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press,
1987); Hilge Landweer, Gefühle – Struktur und Funktion (Munich: Oldenbourg Akademieverlag, 2007).
5 Monica Greco and Paul Stenner, eds., Emotions: A Social Science Reader (London/New York: Routledge
Chapman & Hall, 2008); Margaret Wetherell: Affect and Emotion. A New Social Science Understanding (London/
Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2012).
6 Silvan Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, 4 vols. (New York: Springer, 1962–1992); Daniel N. Stern,
The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
7 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds., Shame and its Sisters. A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham/
London: Duke University Press, 1995).
8 Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press,
2010); Bernd Bösel, “Die philosophische Relevanz der Psychotechniken – Argumente für die Indienstnahme
eines ambivalenten Begriffs,” Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 38.2 (2013): p. 123–142.
8
Introduction
tion runs from Leibniz via Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead, and Merleau-Ponty through
Deleuze in a philosophico-vitalist tradition that emphasizes movement, focussing on
the body, sensation, and perception.9 In Leibniz’s metaphysics, the monadic individual
is conceived of as an infinite multiplicity that unfolds the entire universe from its own
specific viewpoint of the petites perceptions;10 the universe appears as an infinity of incom-
plete individual movements. Bergson theorizes these mutual reflections between count-
less non-anthropomorphic images over a limitless duration. These then converge around
privileged, anthropomorphic body images that introduce intervals between perception
and movement via the intervening affects.11 Combined with references to Spinoza’s
philosophy, these explanations lead to redefinitions of affect and of “affection images”
in Deleuze.12 His philosophy had a lasting impact on discussions in art and media the-
ory about digital images and spaces, influencing discourse on music and sound,13 on
cinema,14 on video and media art,15 and research into dance and movement,16 as well
as prompting reformulations of subjectivization processes as dividual procedures. In the
wake of extensive re-readings of Whitehead, Deleuze, and Tarde, recent years have seen
a critical epistemological conjoining of process philosophy and the ontology of becom-
ing.17 The focus on Whitehead’s concept of “prehension”18 (with its emphasis on an
always already abstract registering of data by the sensory organs and its de-emphasis
of the conscious subject) makes it possible to merge the concept of the autopoietic and
9 Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch. Archaeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2009).
10 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings, trans. Robert Latta (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1898), p. 131–132.
11 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2004).
12 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I. The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Gilles
Deleuze, Cinema II. The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
13 See for instance: Sean Cubitt, Digital Aesthetics (London/Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1998).
14 Michaela Ott, Affizierung. Zu einer ästhetisch-epistemischen Figur (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2010);
Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Winchester/Washington: Zero Books, 2009).
15 Marie-Luise Angerer, Vom Begehren nach dem Affekt (Zurich/Berlin: Diaphanes, 2007), English transla-
tion Desire After Affect (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014); Chris Salter, Entangled. Technol-
ogy and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 2010); Mark B. N. Hansen,
New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 2004).
16 Erin Manning, Relationscapes. Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 2009);
Marie-Luise Angerer, Yvonne Hardt, Ann-Carolin Weber, eds., Choreographie, Medien, Gender (Zurich:
Diaphanes, 2013).
17 Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead (Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press, 2011);
Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria. Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (Boston: MIT Press, 2009); Bruno
Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University
Press, 1999).
18 Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 162.
9
Introduction
self-affecting organism (of cybernetics) with the “biomediated body”19 as an open entity
with no clear boundaries between itself and its technological environment. In this
sense, ecologically expanded media theories understand affection as a way of connecting
with or becoming attuned to one’s surroundings (interpreted as a “media-ecological
atmosphere”20).
Parallel to the unfolding of this tradition, there is another one that explores time as
something that can be counted and measured. Starting with Helmholtz’s experiments,
it includes both the photographic recordings of Marey and Muybridge21 and the many
studies of personal error in the 19th century.22 Hertha Sturm’s television-related inves-
tigations into the missing half-second 23 in the 1970s and Benjamin Libet’s neurophysi-
ological definition of a short delay 24 can also be situated within this second tradition,
as can the renewed interest in the aspect of just not in time that has prompted studies
of inframedial and non-linear temporality in art, film, and literature.25 In recent years,
this kind of calculable, micro-capitalizable time has also become a focus of reflection in
media philosophy.26
Concepts like medicalization, invasive technification, and optimization have long
since established technological and economic procedures of affection and interven-
tion that register the human body and subject it to biopolitical control. Technological
research (robotics) is also showing increased interest in affect in terms of using human
stimulus-response results to implement self-controlled machine movements (from arti-
ficial intelligence to affective computing) algorithmically via nano- and pico-signals.
Also relevant here are questions concerning “pre-emption” (algorithmically predicted
19 Patricia T. Clough, “The Affective Turn. Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies,” in: Gregg and
Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, p. 206–228.
20 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis. An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Sydney: Power Publications, 1995); Mark B.
N. Hansen, “Medien des 21. Jahrhunderts, technisches Empfinden und unsere originäre Umweltbedin-
gung,” in: Erich Hörl, ed., Die technologische Bedingung. Beiträge zur Beschreibung der technischen Welt (Berlin:
Suhrkamp, 2011), p. 356–409.
21 See: Henning Schmidgen, Die Helmholtz-Kurven. Auf der Spur der verlorenen Zeit (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2009).
22 Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second. A History (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009).
23 Hertha Sturm, Wie Kinder mit dem Fernsehen umgehen (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979).
24 Benjamin Libet, “A Short Delay,” http://www.consciousentities.com/libet.htm (retrieved March 3, 2014).
25 Ilka Becker, Michael Cuntz and Michael Wetzel, eds., Just Not In Time. Inframedialität und non-lineare
Zeitlichkeiten in Kunst, Film, Literatur und Philosophie (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011).
26 See for example: Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, vol. 1–3 (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1998–2011); Maurizio Lazzarato, Videophilosophie. Zeitwahrnehmung im Postfordismus (Berlin: b—books,
2002).
10
Introduction
anticipation) that play an increasingly large role with regard to the economic and politi-
cal control of individuals and masses, as well as the computer-controlled governmental-
ity of political events and upheavals. The growing dependence of contemporary politi-
cal action on mediatized strategies of affection has been highlighted by Judith Butler,
Lauren Berlant, and Sara Ahmed, among others.27 Following Brian Massumi’s critique
of a “politics of fear”,28 there has already been talk of a “war of affects”29 that can alleg-
edly be observed in social networks and in real protest movements.
In summary, we can note that the epistemological developments and shifts towards
affect and processes of affection described above are the result of highly diverse and
ambivalent motivations. They make it possible to examine all of the processes of contact
and synthesis that entangle the human organism with the world around it, but also
with non-human and technological ensembles. As such, they provide explanations for
the constitution of primary sensual perception and the self-modeling of human capaci-
ties; on the other hand, they are also mis/used for biotechnological interventions and
active control. Art in turn reacts to this by producing heterochronic and dividual affects,
staged with a clear impetus against capitalist exploitation (“emotional labor”30).
The theories that have been subsumed under the “affective turn” have not been spared
criticism, which tends to emphasize the problematic nature both of their affirmation
of an ostensible immediacy and their failure to question economic, political, and tech-
nological interests. Clare Hemmings, for example, has expressed her uneasiness with
regard to a tendency towards the ontologization of affect;31 and Ruth Leys suspects the
above-described development in its entirety of pulling the carpet out from under the
arts and cultural studies.32
27 See: Judith Butler, Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London/New York: Verso 2004);
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2011); Sara Ahmed, The Cultural
Politics of Emotions (London/New York: Routledge Chapman & Hall, 2004).
28 Brian Massumi, ed., The Politics of Everyday Fear (Minneapolis/London: Minneapolis University Press,
1993).
29 Nina Power, “She’s Just Not That Into You,” http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/web/rp177-shes-just-
not-that-into-you (retrieved January 7, 2013).
30 Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart. Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2012).
31 Clare Hemmings, “Invoking Affect,” Cultural Studies 19.5 (Summer 2005): p. 548–567.
32 Ruth Leys and Marlene Goldman, “Navigating the Genealogies of Trauma, Guilt, and Affect. An
Interview with Ruth Leys,” University of Toronto Quarterly 79.2 (Spring 2010): p. 656–679.
11
Introduction
All this gives added urgency to the question of which epistemological interests are
now instrumentalizing the terms affect and affection. Our insistence on a “timing” of
affect is meant to emphasize that “affect” is not to be understood as a given and indis-
putable variable, but that its genesis, its impacts, and its legitimizing strategies must be
subjected to a critical reading.
The idea of “Timing of Affect” is to create a momentum: to incorporate a comprehensive

collection of intersecting questions and problems traversing the fields of epistemology,
aesthetics, and politics. Consequently, the writers in this volume bring together a wide
range of interests and approach the subject matter from diverse angles. Moreover, we
invite the reader to follow the different lines of arguments affectionately and hope to
stimulate a “time travel” through these movements of thought.
Moira Gatens reconsiders the current uses of Spinoza’s philosophy for theories of
globalization and affect. In “Affective Transitions and Spinoza’s Art of Joyful Delibera-
tion,” she criticizes certain appropriations of Spinoza’s theory of affect for their lack of
consideration of its connectedness with imagination and deliberation. She argues for
an art of transformation of affect as a precondition for the construction of joyful and
harmonious forms of sociability.
Michaela Ott elaborates on the timing of affect as “Dividual Affections” on differ-
ent epistemic levels. Affection first designates the ontologically primary constitution
of basic aesthesis as a pre(in)dividual and even impersonal field of sensation. Second,
it helps to conceive of human capacities as self-affecting processes which due to their
entanglements with modern technologies bring about new subjectivations, called
“dividuations”. Third, it mirrors the self-affection of the philosophical discourse on
affect through time. And fourth, it allows the conception of specific, heterochronic,
“dividual affects” in works of art.
Against the background of the much discussed “Story of Mary” (proposed by Frank
Jackson in 1986), Steven Shaviro criticizes cognitivist and representationalist theories of
mind for excluding the primordial forms of sentience as a precondition for any sort of
cognition. With Kant, Whitehead and Wittgenstein he defines these primordial forms
of sentience as nonintentional, noncorrelational and anoetic, but affective and aesthetic
articulations of discognition.
Radicalizing the notion of the “biomediated body” (Patricia T. Clough), Mark B. N.
Hansen argues in his essay “Feelings without Feelers, or Affectivity as Environmental
Force” that contemporary computational technoscience introduces a capacity to access
the operation of affectivity within “matter itself”, without being restricted by the limi-
12
Introduction
tations of embodied human consciousness. With Gilbert Simondon and Alfred N. White-
head he develops a new conception of affect as an environmental relationality, being the
“fundamental mode of operation of the energetico-material universe in itself”.
In “Affective Synchronization, Rhythmanalysis and the Polyphonic Qualities of the
Present Moment,” Bernd Bösel takes recent warnings of a “global synchronization of
affects” (Paul Virilio, Bernard Stiegler) as a starting point to explore how synchroniza-
tion processes have been characterized in psychology, sociology and philosophy. He
complexifies this account by turning to two methods: Henri Lefebvre’s “rhythmanal-
ysis” and Daniel Stern’s “microanalysis”, both of which provide helpful concepts to
uncover what might be called the polychronous richness of each present moment.
In her essay “Affective Knowledge. Movement, Interval and Plasticity,” Marie-Luise
Angerer speculates on the relationship between two notions of the interval – from
Helmholtz via Bergson to Hertha Sturm – where the time code switches from a mecha-
nistic, calculable time into a vital, living time and back again, both of which, in their
different ways, can be understood in terms of media technology effects. Thus, it comes
as no surprise that today’s proclamation of the “plasticity” of the brain (Catherine Mal-
abou) combines the two dimensions of time again – and connects them via affect, or
rather a process of auto-affection. In this view, not only does affect organize the relation
between bodies and their (social and technical) environment, but also, in deep layers of
the brain cortex, it organizes the brain’s own activities in their specific time scales.
In “The Neural Network: Temporality, Rationality, and Affect in Cybernetics” Orit
Halpern starts with the historical inversion of cybernetic reasoning by McCulloch and
Pitts who explained mental functioning as emanating from the physiological actions
of neurons. Accepting the incompleteness of human knowledge, they claimed to con-
struct an “experimental epistemology” on this “psychosis.” Expanding on this, Halpern
discusses the ongoing problems of organizing time, memory and control inside of net-
work circuits. She points at their relation to “affective” economies as produced not only
by epistemological changes in truth claims, as Foucault states, but also by cybernetic
accounts of chance and indeterminacy.
In his essay “Temporalizing Presence and ‘Re-Presencing’ the Past. The Techno-Trau-
matic Affect,” Wolfgang Ernst focuses on the human temporal sense, arguing that this
sense is affected on a micro-physiological and neuronal level and cognitively irritated
by the widening gap between the culturally familiar concept of historical time and the
re-presencing power of signal- and symbol-based time machines. The leading assump-
tion is that there are tempo-real traumata which do not stem from individual or social
interaction but are induced in humans by the technological media shock itself.
13
Introduction
In her essay “Digital Automation and Affect,” Luciana Parisi emphasizes that one can
no longer simply conceive of technology as modes of exteriorisation of cognition, since
algorithms are programmed to anticipate responses and thus provide us with pre-made
decisions. Instead, it becomes necessary to address the emergence of a new form of auto-
mation relying on the capacity of interactive algorithms to process, select, rank and list
fluctuating responses. Instead of taking Google as the new social brain, Parisi addresses
the computational nature of digital automation with a new form of reason that relies
on affective responses.
In her essay “The Age of Affective Computing,” Anna Tuschling analyzes the fairly
new connection between emotion psychology and the field of experimental computer
research. With her media-theoretical approach she sheds new light on the “affective
turn,” underpinning not only its discursive and neuroscientific background, but also
its roots in media-societal dynamics. The question she follows is thus what it means to
live in an age of affective computing and how this might reshape our understanding of
affect and emotion?
Rolf Großmann focuses on musical microtime-structures beyond conscious percep-
tion. In “Sensory Engineering. Affects and the Mechanics of Musical Time,” he under-
lines that today, in opposition to the classical “doctrine of affects”, musical composi-
tions with electronic media design differentiated auditory stimuli, opening up an
“indiscernible zone” between preconscious affective perception and conscious cogni-
tion. He sketches diverse methods by which the area of preconscious affection is shaped
by musical sensory engineering.
Wiebke Trost’s essay “Time Flow and Musical Emotions: The Role of Rhythmic
Entrainment” contains a thorough discussion of the emotive power of rhythmic pat-
terns in music. Based on recent neurosciencific research she explains how these patterns
are processed in the brain and distinguishes between several levels of rhythmic entrain-
ment, spanning from bodily perception to social interaction. This musically induced
synchronization of listeners’ physiological reactions thereby enables or enhances feel-
ings of empathy.
In “Atmospheres of Affect,” Chris Salter proposes to examine how atmospheres are
constituted and constantly shifted by their temporal-material unfolding, instead of
just reusing the well-known spatial categories used by many phenomenologists and
ontologists. By combining aesthetic discourse with his own experience as an artist (his
installation Atmosphère manipulates both the temporal dynamics of vibration and audi-
ble sound, darkness, fog, smell, and dazzling light), Salter manages to enact Guattari’s
assertion that affects not only speak to us “but through us”.
14
Introduction
In “Affective Politics of Timing: On Emergent Collectivity in Ragnar Kjartansson’s

‘The Visitors,’” Christoph Brunner reflects on questions of temporal duration, repeti-
tion and immediacy as presented in Kjartanssons’s video work and installation. Draw-
ing on Brian Massumi’s theory of affect he reconsiders an “aesthetics of immediacy”
where an affective attunement of heterogeneous elements cues into specific timings.
The art work is supposed to set free a collective sense of emergent ecologies and affective
politics of timing.
Hermann Kappelhoff and Sarah Greifenstein discuss images of affection and sensa-
tion in two film genres: melodrama and comedy. In “Feeling Gloomy or Riding High:
Timings of Melodrama and Comedy,” they demonstrate that filmic affects in their
aesthetic staging and audiovisual orchestration depend on specific formations of time.
They analyze their modes of affectivity by looking closer into the different genre poetics
and their respective formulations of the temporality of crying and laughing.
In her genre-transcending “The Object’s Affects: The Rosary,” Patricia Ticineto
Clough sets a childhood experience (a child using rosary beads to ward off a mother’s
exorcist practices) alongside recent philosophical discussions about objects and affect.
She thereby demonstrates the entanglement of affect, the unconscious, and the aes-
thetic against a history in which the aesthetic domain was considered to be the realm
of evil, while speculative realists and object-oriented philosophers today are drawn to
reengage the darkness of the liveliness of objects, their beauty.
Recognizing the ambivalence of affective politics is the aim of Brigitte Bargetz’
article “Mapping Affect. Challenges of Un/Timely Politics.” By challenging one-sided
conceptions of affect in recent political theories, she argues that to come to an appropri-
ate understanding of the political potential of affect, its creative moments as a cohesive
force have to be taken into account as well as the ways in which these forces are embed-
ded in a political and economic fabric, and also how emotions are currently used for
politically mobilizing gender, race, and class.
In his essay “After Affects. Zealous Zombies, Panic Prevention, Crowd Simulation,”
Sebastian Vehlken analyzes the rapid development of mobile networks, introduc-
ing “social swarming” as a cipher for a subversive potential for generating “network
affects”, and opening up novel modes of group movement. Whereas classical theories
of masses (Tarde, Le Bon, Sighele) compare mass behavior with animals’ herd instincts,
new dynamic agent-based computer models and automated observation/tracking tech-
niques stimulate a de-psychologization of classical mass psychology. Masses today are
rather seen as guided through network affects, which are controlled by novel time-
sensitive infra-structures.
15
Introduction
In his essay “The Market in Wonderland. Complexifying the Subject of Interest,”

Brian Massumi attempts to set in place a starting point for an analysis of the neolib-
eral economy as a complex open system. In particular, he examines the doctrine of self-
interested rational choice upon which free market capitalism claims to rest. Combining
Niklas Luhmann’s theory of “system trust”, Jocelyn Pixley’s Emotions in Finance, and Gil-
bert Simondon’s theory of transindividuation, he underlines the necessity of an alterna-
tive notion not only of economy but of politics as well, which instead of presupposing
an individual subject of choice is capable of envisioning a beyond of self-interest.
Acknowledgements
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all authors for their cooperative partici-
pation – and Dieuwke Boersma for her committed copyediting. Our thanks also go to the
diaphanes team (especially Michael Heitz). We are grateful to the Academy of Media Arts
Cologne and its rector Klaus Jung who gave generous support in organizing the Timing
of Affect symposium. Many thanks are also due to the German Research Foundation and
the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Research of the Federal State of North Rhine-
Westphalia for financial support. And last but not least to Katja Davar, who allowed us to
use her drawing Ghost with Her Ghost (2012) for the cover design.
Marie-Luise Angerer, Bernd Bösel, Michaela Ott

Cologne, Hamburg, Vienna, April 2014
Translated by Nicholas Grindell
16
Moira Gatens
Affective Transitions and Spinoza’s Art

of Joyful Deliberation *
Contemporary affect theory is a vast and complex field of research that defies capture
in a neat definition. As Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth rightly state in their
introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, there “is no single, generalizable theory of affect.”1
Nevertheless, along with other scholars, they identify “two dominant vectors” of affect
theory that are associated with specific fields of research and with particular theorists.
First, there is Silvan Tomkins’ psychobiological approach that is associated with the
work of Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank; second, there is the approach inspired by Gilles
Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza that is associated with the work of Brian Massumi.2 This
chapter aims to engage critically yet constructively with this latter approach to affect
and will attend especially to Massumi’s problematic deployment of Spinoza’s Ethics.
Spinoza’s philosophy has proven fertile ground for those theorists who judge the
power of images and affects, and their relation, as central to achieving a critical under-
standing of the complexity of contemporary ethical and political life. Some schol-
ars have argued that Spinoza anticipated a theory of the logic of affect – a logic that
conditions the operations of various social imaginaries (e.g., theological, political, and
sexual).3 Spinoza can seem prescient to twenty-first century readers whose affective lives
* I wish to express my deep gratitude to Marie-Luise Angerer for her friendship, collegiality, and
patience. The Timing of Affect Conference in Köln in 2013 was a wonderful event and I want to warmly thank
Michaela Ott and Bernd Bösel who helped to make the occasion memorable. I am grateful to Rosalyn
Diprose and Paul Patton for reading earlier versions of this chapter and making very helpful comments.
1 Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010), p. 3.
2 Gregg and Seigworth, Affect Theory Reader, p. 5. Gregg and Seigworth go on to further complicate
these two vectors with a list of eight theoretical “orientations” that ultimately unsettle the initial neat
division of contemporary affect theory into two. See also: Patricia T. Clough’s astute introductory essay
in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Clough’s scholarship
is distinguished by the profound continuity she assumes between critical social theory of the late 20th
century and contemporary affect theory: psychoanalysis, feminism, class and race analyses, all remain
vital forces – and resources – in her scholarship, alongside her expert deployment of affect theory.
3 See also: Susan James, Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics: The Theologico-Political Treatise (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012); Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies. Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London:
Routledge, 1996).
17
Moira Gatens
are crisscrossed by ubiquitous networks of sound, sign, text, and image. His monistic
ontology – where everything is essentially and necessarily connected to everything else –
seems to have found its time in our present.
The Timing of Affect
There is, of course, playfulness at work in the selection of the phrase: “the timing
of affect.” First, it may be taken to pose the question: how might one account for the
popularity of affect theory today? Why the turn to affect now? Second, it may be taken to
refer to a contentious aspect of contemporary affect theory, namely, the idea that there
exists a gap – often referred to as “Libet’s missing half-second” – between bodily affects
and our conscious awareness of them. Here, the “timing of affect” refers to the premise
that although consciousness may posit itself as the cause of some bodily action or affect,
experimental science claims to have shown that our conscious awareness typically lags
behind our bodily affections. In his seminal paper, The Autonomy of Affect, Massumi builds
on the idea that there is a gap between affect and cognition to claim that what usually
are held to be “higher functions” (e.g., volition, intention, consciousness) in fact are
“autonomic.” Massumi describes Benjamin Libet’s experiment in the following terms:
Brain waves of healthy volunteers were monitored by an electroencephalograph (EEG)

machine. The subjects were asked to flex a finger at a moment of their choosing and to
note the time of their decision on a clock. The flexes came 0.2 seconds after they clocked
the decision. But the EEG machine registered significant brain activity 0.3 seconds before
the decision.4
Massumi links this experiment, and other contemporary neuroscientific work on

the will and consciousness, to his understanding of Spinoza’s account of the illusion
of consciousness and to Spinoza’s critique of free will.5 This link is dubious, as will be
argued below. First, I will discuss both senses of the timing of affect.
4 Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): p. 89–90 (emphasis original).
5 For a robust critique of the work of Massumi, see: Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,”
Critical Inquiry 37.3 (2011): p. 434–472. See also: William Connolly’s response to Leys, “The Complexity of
Intention,” Critical Inquiry 37.4 (2011): p. 791–798; Clare Hemmings, “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and
the Ontological Turn,” Cultural Studies 19.5 (2005): p. 548–567.
18
Affective Transitions and Spinoza’s Art of Joyful Deliberation
Why Affect Now?
In the last quarter of the last century much radical social and political theory was marked
by self-doubt and skepticism concerning its capacity to yield transformative political
action. Poststructuralist accounts of the human subject as formed in and through
subjection seemed to many to amount to a hopeless political position: if there is no
outside of power then perhaps we are condemned to the stark choice of either embracing
our own subjection or descending into madness (where this is understood as a refusal to
submit to the normative demands of sociality). Theoretical analysis seemed to some to
be entirely ineffective in motivating social and political change. Strong feeling, it would
appear, may easily defeat consciously endorsed commitments: our hearts and bodies pay
too little heed to our minds. Increasing numbers of contemporary philosophers of mind
and moral psychologists have come to support the claim that moral reasoning is not
the main driver of our moral judgments or actions. Rather, the “fast” or “hot” system
of affect makes up its mind about the way things are long before the plodding “slow” or
“cold” system of cognition passes its post factum judgment.6 If this is a viable description
of how we live our lives then disaffection with theory that appeals to the power of our
reasoning capacities to guide judgment looks to be justified. Two examples might help
to clarify the point.
First, William Connolly’s conception of neuropolitics seeks to make productive con-
nections between political theory and contemporary neuroscience in a manner that
might release unpredictable and creative abilities to transform our affective as well as
rational judgments. Connolly’s work highlights the gap between one’s conscious atti-
tudes towards say, racial difference or sexual orientation, on the one hand, and one’s
visceral or autonomic responses on the other.7 What if the white heterosexual liberal-
minded person nevertheless experiences a reflex fear response when in close proximity
to a person of color, or involuntary disgust when in the presence of two men locked in a
6 See also: Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to
Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108.4 (2001): p. 814–834. Haidt argues that traditional understandings
of morality are marred by two illusions. First, the wag-the-dog illusion where we falsely assume that moral
judgment (the dog) is driven by moral reasoning (the tail). Second, the wag-the-other-dog’s-tail illusion.
This illusion refers to the situation where in a moral debate we have the expectation that the successful
refutation of our interlocutor’s argument will result in her abandoning her view. This belief, according
to Haidt, “is like thinking that forcing a dog’s tail to wag by moving it with your hand will make the dog
happy,” p. 823.
7 See also: William E. Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002).
19
Moira Gatens
passionate embrace? Here we are faced with a contradiction between a conscious moral
commitment (e.g., equality), on the one hand, and the willfulness of what Connolly calls
“the infrasensible register” of our unbidden affective responses, on the other. Citing the
“radical expansion of mass media”, a 24/7 news cycle, and the canniness of “the radical
Right” in holding our everyday affects in thrall, Connolly conveys a sense of urgency
about the task of progressive politics. It is imperative, he says, that we learn to “stretch
conceptions of politics and ethics” in the direction of engagement with “the infrasen-
sible dimension of politics.”8 Alluding to what he takes to be the dominant political
affects of contemporary Americans – fear, aggression, and resentment – Connolly has
recently posited the “new interfaces between neuroscience and cultural life,” along with
parody and micropolitical counter strategies, as the way forward.9
My second example is taken from a recent book concerned with the political
transformation of our present sexed identities. Amy Allen argues that it is not enough
simply “to change how we think about gender, sex, and normative femininity; we will
have to transform not only our beliefs but also our fantasies and desires.”10 In a manner
that resonates with those who doubt the capacity of deliberative reason to transform
feeling or affect, Allen poses the stark question: is feminism (just) a theory for which there
is no effective practice?11 Can the desire for a secure feminine identity and for a sense
of social belonging overwhelm one’s conscious conviction about the correctness of the
feminist critique of femininity? Are our deliberatively endorsed commitments entirely
ineffective at combating deep-seated desires that contradict those commitments?
I have selected just a couple of examples of what I take to be likely motivators for
the disaffection with a certain kind of critical theory and the turn towards a theory
that directs our attention toward the need for practical engagement with our affec-
tive investments. As Clare Hemmings has argued, affect theory offers a decidedly more
buoyant approach to political analysis and it is typically characterized by affects of hope
and faith, and confidence in the new, the futural.12 Arguably this approach highlights
the need for affective practice whilst underplaying the relation between theory and
8 Connolly, “Complexity of Intention,” p. 796.

9 Ibid.
10 Amy Allen, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 183.
11 The question is borrowed from Sandra Bartky’s Sympathy and Solidarity: And Other Essays (London:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), where she asks: “have feminists produced a theory [the critique of normative
femininity] for which (for reasons not yet articulated) there is no effective practice?”, p. 14.
12 Hemmings, “Invoking Affect,” p. 551 and p. 563.
20
( affective) practice. An underestimation of the unavoidably theoretical nature of affect

theory might be gleaned from the spirited enthusiasm of Sara Ahmed’s comment that
“the question of the future is an affective one; it is a question of hope” or Massumi’s
bold assertion that “affect is the whole world.”13
That Missing Half-second
The turn to affect in the humanities is part of a volte-face embrace of science in general
and neuroscience in particular. The impact on the humanities of recent findings in
neuroscience, in part made possible by new technologies (e.g., fMRI and PET), has been
profound. Concepts and ideas from neuroscience – such as “mirror neurons”, “somatic
markers”, the “fast-slow”, or “hot-cold” systems – now regularly turn up in cultural
studies, economics, law, geography, politics, and philosophy contexts. Journals and
conferences commonly bear titles such as neurolaw, neuropolitics, neuroeconomics,
neuroaesthetics. It is important to position affect theory within this general milieu of
“science-fever.” Taken together these new fields of inquiry add up to what George Lakoff
has called a “neural revolution” that promises to usher in a new phase of knowledge:
“the neurohumanities”.14
But what does the neural revolution promise? Literature, philosophy, history, law,
indeed perhaps all the humanities disciplines, are hoping that technologies of brain
imaging (and the new partnership between the humanities and the sciences) can provide
empirical evidence that will falsify or verify longstanding armchair theories. However,
as I indicated earlier, affect theory has a specific target in its sights: the perceived
failure of humanities theory to adequately engage the affective substrata of life. There
are at least two attractors at work in these newer approaches to affective politics or the
politicization of affect. First, there is prestige in being associated with science because
of its generally higher social value and because recent neuro-work is considered to be
at the vanguard of knowledge breakthroughs: the neurohumanities. Second, affective
13 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 183–184;
Massumi, “Autonomy of Affect,” p. 105.
14 George Lakoff, “The Neural Theory of Metaphor,” The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 17–38. See for example: http://www.neurohumanitiestudies.eu/
(retrieved February 24, 2014). This site states that: “The Neuro Humanities Studies Network aims at creat-
ing a multidisciplinary research community in order to develop and structure a linking platform for neuro-
scientific, cognitive topics and humanities.”
21
Moira Gatens
politics holds out the promise of new ways of being human or even novel ways of being
and becoming, beyond the human.
Affect theory can connect up digital technologies, animal-becomings, and machinic
assemblages and still reserve a central stake in radical political commitment and action.
The hybridity of the 1990s has given way to an endlessly looping and crisscrossing
interconnectivity. Most importantly, this apparently limitless connectivity pledges to
release us from the deathly grip of power that constructs subjects in ways that inevitably
involve subjection and wounded identities. Some versions of affect theory claim that
they have the capacity not only to articulate the elusive reasons for theory’s impotence
in creating any space outside of power but also promise to identify and work on that
elusive place (or non-place). But, as we shall see, affect seems to be treated here as a kind
of atopic topos that is identified with the virtual.
Enter Spinoza
In combining humanities questions and interests with scientific research affect theory
conjures an older image of natural philosophy and knowledge as scientia. It should not
be surprising then that a 17th century philosopher, Benedict Spinoza, should prove an
attractive figure for many in the field.15 Contemporary Spinoza studies is a vibrant and
diverse field that has provided inspiration to contemporary moral and political theorists.
There is not one but several Spinozas and argument over textual interpretation versus
inspirational readings are inevitable. Recent affect theory, however, makes use of the
terms “affect”, and “emotion” in a problematic way. Massumi, who claims Spinoza as the
“precursor” of his approach, defines affect in terms of a pre-personal, asocial, intensity
whereas emotion is identified with personal feeling that interlaces with narrative,
meaning, and conventional signification.16 Many affect theorists rely on a notion of
affect as asubjective, autonomic, and asocial.
It matters that affect is understood here to be unbound by meaning or signification.
For reasons that I will explain shortly, much affect theory relies on the assumption
that there are two independent or “parallel” systems: affect-body and cognition-mind.
Meaning and signification belong with the second, so-called “slow” cognitive system.
15 Antonio Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando: Harcourt, 2003) was
influential in this respect.
16 Massumi, “Autonomy of Affect,” p. 88.
22
This division allows the positing of dual timelines: an affective line and a cognitive line.
This, in turn, permits the theorization of a “break” in the timing of our affects – a lacuna
that some have identified with the gap between a person’s action and their consciousness
of forming the intention to perform that action. According to this interpretation of
Libet’s experiment, what the gap shows is that our common sense assumptions about
how our beliefs affect the actions of the body are false. The control of the mind over the
body and free will are nothing more than commonplace illusions. These illusions are
especially important to those affect theorists who Gregg and Seigworth identify with
the Deleuze-Spinoza vector in The Affect Theory Reader.
In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Deleuze writes persuasively about Spinoza’s
“triple denunciation: of ‘consciousness’, of ‘values’, and of ‘sad passions.’” The first
denunciation involves “A devaluation of consciousness (in favor of thought).” It is this de-
or re-valuation of traditional values that gives rise to what Deleuze refers to as Spinoza’s
“triple illusion”, namely, the illusion of final causes (where the ignorant person mistakes
effects for causes), the illusion of free decrees (where the illusion of the mind commanding
the body is understood in terms of free will), and the theological illusion (where God is
conceived as a judge).17 As I will argue below, Massumi misinterprets each of these
illusions in his apprehension of Spinoza’s philosophy for affect theory. In particular,
Massumi fails to note the very thing that Deleuze rightly stresses, namely, that the
devaluation of consciousness does not amount to the devaluation of thought.
Massumi’s manner of conceiving affect facilitates the construction of a smooth path
between aspects of Spinoza’s philosophy and Massumi’s selective appropriation of some
recent neuroresearch. He cites Spinoza as his inspiration for “rethinking postmodern
power after ideology”18 through the construction of a new “asignifying philosophy
of affect.”19 Massumi offers six ways in which Spinoza’s philosophy foreshadows this
pressing contemporary task. Spinoza’s philosophy, he asserts:
1. Distinguishes between emotion and affect
2. Judges affect to be “irreducibly bodily and autonomic”
3. Holds that affect is “a suspension of action-reaction circuits and linear temporality”
4. Equates affect and effect
17 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), p. 20–21, (italics
original, bold emphasis added).
18 Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” p. 104.
19 Ibid., p. 88.
23
Moira Gatens
5. Maintains “a form/content distinction” where conventional discourse constitutes

“an autonomous or semi-autonomous stratum running counter to the full registering”
and expression of affect
6. That the title of Spinoza’s major work supplies us with the apposite concept to
describe “the project of thinking affect: Ethics”20
I cannot engage with all six of these claims in the detail that I would like but, with
the possible exception of assertion number six, Massumi’s recruitment of Spinoza’s
philosophy to his project is deeply troubling.
Spinoza’s theory of the image and affect could not so readily be combined with
contemporary affect theory if one took the trouble to more closely attend to his use of
the term “affect”. His use of the Latin terms affectio and affectus is complex.21
Affectio can be used more broadly than affectus in order to refer to the general abil-
ity to affect and be affected (in the sense, for example, that a mode is an affection of an
attribute of Substance). Spinoza usually uses affectus (affect) in a narrower sense to refer
to those modifications of the body “by which the body’s power of acting is increased or
diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of those affections [or
modifications]. Therefore, if we can be the adequate cause of any of these affections, I understand
by the affect [affectus] an action; otherwise a passion” (EIIID3).22
There are a number of features of this definition to which one should attend. First, note
that for Spinoza an affect (affectus) is a type of affection (affectio) that can be either passive
(a passion) or active (an action). In other words, contrary to Massumi’s point four above,
not every affect is an effect because there are active affects. For Spinoza an affect may be
an action or a reaction. This is crucial to the viability of Spinoza’s ethical and political
philosophy: without active affects we would be trapped in endless chains of cause-
effect concatenations and would live like wind-driven waves on a vast undifferentiated
sea. In his account of the affects, Spinoza defines joy as the passage or transition of an
individual from lesser to greater perfection and sadness as the transition from greater
to lesser perfection, where perfection is understood in terms of the power of action
enjoyed by the individual (EIIIDefAffII&III).23 For him the “time of affect” does not
20 Massumi, “Autonomy of Affect,” p. 88–89.

21 See: Curley’s “Glossary” in Benedictus de Spinoza, The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. I, ed. Edwin M.
Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), where he writes affectus (affect) “is a state both of
the mind and of the body,” p. 625 (emphasis added).
22 Spinoza, Collected Works I, p. 493 (italic original, bold emphasis added).
23 Ibid., p. 531.
24
involve a “suspension” but rather a passage or a transit. Second, Spinoza’s definition of

affect makes clear that each bodily affection necessarily involves an idea of that affection.
Although this certainly does not mean that we are conscious of each and every bodily
modification, it does mean that for each affection of the body there is a corresponding
idea in the mind. However, we may, or may not, be conscious of this idea. Perhaps the
most challenging and complex aspect of Spinoza’s philosophy is to grasp the claim that
in the description of the workings of affectio-affectus just offered, there is no possible causal
link between the body and the mind. Rather, “what determines the mind to thinking
is a mode of thinking […] it is not the body” (EIIIP2D). This is because “the mind and
the body are one and the same thing” (EIIIP2S).24 There cannot be any causal interaction
simply because there are not two entities that could interact. So affect will always and
necessarily involve a state of both body and mind (where mind cannot, of course, be
reduced to consciousness).
Parallelism is Not Dualism
A fundamental point of disagreement with Massumi concerns his interpretation of

Spinoza’s so-called parallelism (a term Deleuze frequently uses) in terms of some kind
of dualism (Descartes) or materialism (La Mettrie).25 There is nothing in Spinoza’s
philosophy to support the view that affect is solely bodily or essentially autonomic.
Spinoza’s ontology is a dual aspect monism where every bodily thing in extension
necessarily involves a corresponding, or parallel, idea in thought. The problem arises when
his parallelism is improperly understood as involving the existence of ontologically
independent registers. Every affect must involve a corresponding thought: the mind,
according to Spinoza, is the idea of (an actually existing) body, and the mind does not
know anything apart from the affections of the body. This does not mean that when
24 Ibid., p. 494.
25 In fact, Massumi equivocates between dualism and reductive materialism. In Freedom Evolves
(London: Penguin UK, 2004), Daniel Dennett describes a common but erroneous model of consciousness
where theorists assume an “imaginary place in the centre of the brain ‘where it all comes together’ for
consciousness” – a type of “Cartesian Theater,” p. 187. Later he describes the view adopted in Libet’s
experiment as a “Cartesian Theater sketch model of conscious decision-making,” p. 242. For his critique of
Libet’s own interpretation of his “missing half-second” experiment, see p. 242–247. Dennett’s view about
“self” and “agency” is more compatible with Spinoza’s position, namely, that self-awareness and will are
distributed capacities.
25
Moira Gatens
body A is affected by body B then this causes an idea to arise in the mind that is the idea
of body A. Rather, the affections of body A under the attribute of extension are expressed
as ideas in A’s mind under the attribute of thought. Monism is an identity thesis, not
a dual substance thesis so affect simply cannot be understood to be “irreducibly bodily
and autonomic.”
These issues pose a serious problem for Massumi’s reading of Libet’s missing half-
second between affect and cognition – a reading that necessarily involves some kind of
dualism. Working from a Spinozist ontology, the most that one can get from Libet’s
uncertain experimental findings is that we are not consciously aware of some of our
bodily affections. Moreover, some bodily affections may never come to our conscious
awareness. However, for Spinoza, it is impossible for there to be a bodily action or
reaction that lacks a corresponding action or reaction in thought. How could it be
otherwise? There are not two existents – body and mind – but one thing that is
expressed under two aspects: matter and thought. There is no possibility of any kind of
ontological gap opening up between two aspects of the self-same thing. In his haste to
dispatch the “illusion of consciousness” Massumi has thrown out thought as well. From
a Cartesian point of view, this would be to reduce human beings to automata. But from
a Spinozistic standpoint, the notion of a body without a corresponding notion of mind
(thought) is simply incoherent. Thus the affects of complex bodies – including, but not
only, human bodies – necessarily will involve ideational content, and where there is
ideational content, meaning and signification will not be far behind. The emotion-affect
distinction, so prominent in affect theory, cannot take root in Spinozist soil. Spinoza’s
account of affect is explicitly associationist and, as we will see, deeply sociable.
Freedom is not Free Will
Why is the gap, the linear time suspension, or the thesis of autonomous parallel registers
that are governed by “different logics,”26 so crucial to the type of affect theory developed
by Massumi and his followers? If I follow the thrust of the argument correctly then the
gap is not only that non-place of the virtual and the autonomic but through a perplexing
verbal slippage it also is posited as the crack through which autonomy, or freedom,
emerges in the world. This is essentially a negative conception of freedom: it is freedom
26 Massumi, “Autonomy of Affect,” p. 88
26
from power, and freedom from ideology, because affect is here posited as an atopos that
is free from signification, representation, and meaning. It does not involve a “freedom
to”: to act, to deliberate, to flourish. Again Massumi has seen off any coherent notion of
Spinozistic freedom along with “the illusion of free will.”
What is Spinoza’s philosophy of freedom? His account of the relation between
affect and freedom might be most simply illustrated by recalling an evocative thought
experiment that he proposed to one of his correspondents. Imagine, he asks, that
someone has thrown a stone that is travelling through the air in an arc, and that this
stone possesses self-consciousness.
Surely this stone [Spinoza writes] inasmuch as it is conscious only of its own effort […] will
believe that it is completely free, and that it continues in motion for no other reason than
because it wants to. And such is the human freedom which all men boast that they pos-
sess, and which consists solely in this, that men are conscious of their desire, and ignorant
of the causes by which they are determined.27
Of course stones are not complex enough entities to allow the emergence of
consciousness, never mind self-consciousness, but Spinoza’s point is perfectly clear:
even when we are conscious of our affects we are almost always ignorant of their
determinations.
The problem with Massumi’s interpretation is that he fails to realize that Spinoza’s
philosophy identifies an epistemological problem, that is, the problem of our ignorance
of causes: “men generally know not their own selves”28 and our ideas of our affects are
like “conclusions without premises,” that is, they are inadequate ideas (EIIP28D).29 Mas-
sumi mistakenly treats the epistemic problem identified by Spinoza as an ontological
problem where gaps in our knowledge (inadequate ideas) are transformed into gaps in
our being-becoming. This is simply incoherent from the point of view of an immanent
and non-teleological monism. If Massumi were right about “affect [being] the whole
world,” and about affect being equivalent to effect, then we would be living in a world
without causes, a magical world where hope might seem to be our only option.30 But
27 Benedict de Spinoza, “Letter 58,” The Correspondence of Spinoza, ed. A. Wolf (London: Frank Cass, 1966),
p. 295 (emphasis added).
28 Benedictus de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2001), p. 1.
29 Spinoza, Collected Works I, p. 470.
30 Such a world describes the superstitious worldview of the manipulative priests and theologians so
despised by Spinoza. For example, see: the Preface to his Theological-Political Treatise.
27
Moira Gatens
when Spinoza describes affects as effects what he means is that an understanding of

the determinations of our feelings of love-hate, joy-sadness, usually is lacking. We feel
the effect of the affect of love or hate but we fail to grasp the cause of the effect/affect.
Far from involving autonomy, or freedom, this “gap” in our knowledge is the source of
our bondage, our unfreedom, and our vulnerability to being manipulated by unscru-
pulous priests or tyrants. Given that Massumi is especially concerned with the power
of contemporary right wing forces to manipulate our affects then it seems important
to be clear about the ways in which we are susceptible to such manipulation.31 On Spi-
noza’s view, it is the lack of self-knowledge that gives rise to the illusion of free will –
the delusions of the hubristic self-aware stone – but Spinoza does not confuse free will
and freedom. Nor does he run together freedom and corporeal automaticity. The ethical
endeavor that drives Spinoza’s philosophy is to increase one’s powers of understanding
through ascertaining what are the causes, the missing premises, in my experience of
self, other, and nature. This is an epistemological project that does not ignore affect but
rather calls for the cultivation of the joyful act of deliberation, as I shall try to explain.
The Art of Joyful Deliberation
For the remainder of this chapter I propose to consider a resource of Spinoza’s philosophy
that Massumi fails to note, namely, the social and political significance of the joyful
transitions from passive affects to active understanding and deliberation. The experience
of joy and freedom for Spinoza always involves the liberation of captured affect: a
transition from experiences of passivity to those of active affirmation. But there is an
art to the transformation of passive affect, and this art is vital to the construction of
harmonious forms of sociability. It is the art of joyful deliberation.
Although Gregg and Seigworth group “feminist Spinozists” (including myself) in
the same general orientation as Massumi there are important differences between the
two approaches.32 Feminist deployments of Spinoza tend to yield a different kind of
assemblage that is composed of different theoretical moments, practical movements,
31 See also: Massumi, “Autonomy of Affect,” where he asserts that “[a]ffect holds a key to rethinking
postmodern power after ideology” and that “the far right is far more attuned to the imagistic potential of
the postmodern body than the established left, and has exploited that advantage for the last decade and a
half. Philosophies of affect, potential, and actualization may aid in finding counter-tactics,” p. 105–106.
32 Gregg and Seigworth, Affect Theory Reader, p. 7.
28
temporal passages, and connections-disconnections. The movement of thought that I

will briefly trace in the remaining space tells a different story about affect, freedom, and
politics. From a similar starting point – Spinoza’s monism – the theoretical trajectory
that I will trace connects with feminist thought, philosophies of the body, and with the
notion of social imaginaries. I argue that the parts played by affect, imagination, mem-
ory, and narrative, in forming and sustaining the individual and community are essen-
tial to understanding Spinoza’s ethical and political stance. Reading parts III and IV of
the Ethics as offering a kind of “affective therapy” that involves the promotion of joyful
affects highlights a resource of Spinoza’s philosophy that has been largely overlooked in
dominant contemporary affect theory. Insofar as joyful deliberation is understood as a
project that self-consciously aims to transform those affective and narrative dimensions
of human experience that promote sad passions (such as fear and hope), deliberation itself
can be seen as a practice that aims to transform ethical and political reality.33
What are the most important elements of this interpretation of Spinoza as a theo-
rist of active affects, such as deliberative joy? I will sketch out five components of this
alternative view. First, on this reading, one cannot separate affects from images. Indeed,
Spinoza argues that “the images of things are the very affections of the human Body,
or modes by which the human Body is affected by external causes” (EIIIP32S).34 Images,
and the corporeal memory trace of images inevitably will cluster because they will be
organized by experience (e.g., contiguity or constant conjunction), or by our ways of life
(e.g., social mores), or by our pleasures and pains (e.g., loving feelings towards a thing
that is not the cause of but was often present during a pleasurable experience). Spinoza’s
account of affect is deeply associationist and inherently sociable. Recall his explanation
of the workings of the imaginations of differently placed individuals: a farmer seeing
the imprint of a horse in the sand will be determined to think of the plough horse and
the field, whereas the same imprint in the sand will determine a soldier to think of the
warhorse and warfare. The same hoof print conjures up images and entire imaginar-
ies specific to the ways of life of the farmer or the soldier (EIIP18S).35 Apart from the
33 For example, I would include in this approach the work of Simone Bignall who argues that a
Spinozist-Deleuzian understanding of embodiment “gives rise to an ethic of joyful sociability based
on material practices of self-awareness, listening respect and attentiveness to the other.” See: Simone
Bignall, “Affective Assemblages: Ethics Beyond Enjoyment,” in: idem and Paul Patton, eds., Deleuze and the
Postcolonial (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 79–102, here p. 100.
34 Spinoza, Collected Works I, p. 513.
35 Ibid., p. 466.
29
Moira Gatens
(problematic) case of the newborn child, for complex beings such as human beings,
affect is always essentially caught up with signification, meaning, and narrative.36
Second, human affective life involves an open-ended series of transitions or
passages. Affects may be passive (in which case they are passions) or active (in which
case they are actions). Active affects are achieved through the cultivation of our joyful
affects, including reflection and deliberation, and involve what Spinoza calls “strength
of character.” Two major joyful active affects he describes in Part III of the Ethics are
nobility and tenacity (EIIIP58–59).37 These are the active affects attained by the free
person whose endeavor is not restrained by the sad affect of hope (and hope’s constant
companion, fear). It is through the joyful affects of tenacity and nobility that we might
strive to transform those desires that we take to contradict our reflectively held beliefs.
This would be to deploy what Pierre Macherey has called Spinoza’s “affective therapy”
that operates through an art of the imagination where one passes from imagining in
a more or less passive way to a state where one imagines “vividly and more distinctly”
or “more intelligently.”38 Several others – Michele Bertrand and Fillipo Mignini, to
name two – have referred to Spinoza’s philosophy as providing an “art” or a “science”
of the imagination.39 These Spinozists take our ignorance of the causes of our affective
states as the starting point for the possibility of the transformation of the body and
the refiguring of imagination as we transition from one way of being to another
(EVP10&P20S).40 The timing of affect, by their lights, signals not a gap or suspension
of time but an opportunity to become something other than what one was through
deliberation and work on oneself.
36 The very condition that Massumi desires – a condition in which “affect is the whole world”– resembles
Spinoza’s idea of the reactive passivity in which children live. Spinoza’s observations about children
include: “because their bodies are continually, as it were, in a state of equilibrium, [they] laugh or cry
simply because they see others laugh or cry. Moreover, whatever they see others do, they immediately
desire to imitate it. And finally, they desire for themselves all those things by which they imagine others
are pleased – because, as we have said, the images of things are the very affections of the human Body, or
modes by which the human Body is affected by external causes, and disposed to do this or that” (EIIIP32S),
Spinoza, Collected Works I, p. 513.
37 Ibid., p. 529–530.
38 Pierre Macherey, “The Encounter with Spinoza,” in: Paul Patton, ed., Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996), p. 139–161, here p. 154.
39 See also: Michèle Bertrand, Spinoza et l’Imaginaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983); Filippo
Mignini, Ars Imaginandi: Apparenza e Rappresentazione in Spinoza (Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane,
1981).
40 Spinoza, Collected Works I, p. 605–606.
30
Third, I have mentioned that Spinoza’s affective philosophy is inherently political.

Talk of individual ways of being – like those of the farmer and the soldier – should not
obscure the degree to which affect can also unite us, divide us, and determine the social
and political value of different types of bodies. This is not only because of Spinoza’s idea
of “the imitation of the affects” (EIIIP27)41 (though that is important) but also because
so much of human thought and communication consists of combinations of image,
affect, memory, narrative, and parable. As Clare Hemmings has argued with reference
to the importance of recent race and gender research, it is “the black body that carries
the weight of, and is suffused with, racial affect, as it is the female body that carries the
burden of the affects that maintain sexual difference.”42 Thus, the skin should not be
reduced to a mere surface of “fast” reactive non-consciousness captured in Massumi’s
claim that “the skin is faster than the word.”43 The skin also may act as a palimpsest
that carries complex and deep inscriptions of extended histories of value.44
Fourth, Spinoza’s philosophy yields an important description of how norms and
institutions are generated and maintained. Those theorists who mine the Ethics for
a theory of affect but ignore the theological-political works of Spinoza can miss the
suggestive ways in which his ethical and theological-political writings dovetail. All
social and political institutions, for Spinoza, are natural formations. The body politic,
no less than the body individual, strives to preserve itself and achieve joyful affects.
On Spinoza’s account, if some polities are more brutal and, in his sense, sadder than
others then this will be because their institutions have not been well formed and
because the task of government has not been well understood. His diagnosis is entirely
immanent to the natural powers, laws, and interconnections that characterize any given
complex body. Spinoza’s political theory offers largely untapped resources to guide the
transformation of, for example, damaging sexual and racial imaginaries. Collective
practices of consciousness-raising, body-training, and counter-social formations
are possible precisely because we live in transitional passages of time that can be re-
traversed, reiterated, and transformed.
41 Ibid., p. 508–509.
42 Hemmings, “Invoking Affect,” p. 562. She adds, “not only, then, is affect itself not random, nor is the
ability to choose to imagine affect otherwise.”
43 Massumi, “Autonomy of Affect,” p. 86.
44 This is especially important in postcolonial societies like Australia. See also: Moira Gatens and
Genevieve Lloyd, “Responsibility and the Past,” in: idem, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present
(London/New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 136–146.
31
Moira Gatens
Finally, Spinoza was a determinist who nevertheless believed in freedom and the
expansion of knowledge through human striving. His insight that different ways of
being in the world and different ways of knowing the world are co-implicated gives us
a way to think about the intertwinement of ontology and epistemology without suc-
cumbing to the temptation to accord primacy to either. Different ways of life give rise
to different habits of thought that will run in diverse channels of association. Con-
stantly conjoined perceptions create stable patterns of thought. Across time these habits
become ever more deeply etched into our bodies and minds and new experiences tend to
be interpreted within the frame of past experiences because we have a natural tendency
to organize our experiences into the form of explanatory narratives. Freedom, by these
lights, amounts to the ability to understand the causes and conditions that constitute
our contexts of action and to strive to make them more conducive to our enjoyment of
life. As Spinoza made clear, he took “great care not to deride, bewail, or execrate human
actions, but to understand them.”45 Although such understanding involves judgment,
this should not be confused with a utilitarian calculation, or the application of a tran-
scendent maxim. Rather, it involves reflection and deliberation. The active joyful affects,
for Spinoza, always involve the exercise of understanding. These active affects relate to
the powers of the human mind, what Spinoza calls strength of character: tenacity, or
those virtues he relates to the care of one’s self, and nobility, or those virtues he relates
to the care of others (EIIIP59S).46
Spinoza was cautious about the feeling of wonder, and skeptical about claims for
the miraculous, and the new. Although he was uncannily prescient about the radical
instability of human nature and its plastic capacity to become something other than
what it is, this is not a path that he proposed we should explore lightly. In fact, he
explicitly warned against the imitation of animal affects and stressed the fragility of
human distinctiveness and the need to protect it in the face of an indifferent nature
(EIVP68S).47 Perhaps we now have, or shortly will have, the power to become-animal,
or become-machine, or become-post-human, in some very profound sense, but what
would be our reasons for doing so? To value the new for no other reason than it is new
is foolish.
This chapter has tried to show that one can think of the timing of affect as always
involving a passage, a transit, from one state of being to another, rather than involving
45 Benedictus de Spinoza, Political Treatise (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), p. 35.

46 Spinoza, Collected Works I, p. 529–530.
47 Ibid., p. 584–585.
32
a gap in, or suspension of, being. We are always in the middle of a process of becoming –
becoming more active, becoming less active – and such becomings are experienced
as affects of joy or sadness. But joy is not reducible to pleasure, nor sadness to pain.
Deliberating about the parlous state of “late capitalist power” or about the capacity of
the far right to capture and exploit the affects of the postmodern body politic may not
give us much pleasure if what we mean by pleasure and pain is reckoned on a utilitarian
calculus. But insofar as such deliberations lead to understanding something about our
current context that we did not understand before then we will become more active and
so experience joy. In my view, this is the path that Spinoza urges us to pursue: to hold
fast to the values of joyful deliberation, tenacity, and nobility, and to leave wonder and
hope to the magicians and theologians.
33
Michaela Ott
Dividual Affections
1. Introduction
One reason why affects have been discussed as a controversial topic for more than
2,000 years may be the fact that, while their origin cannot be exactly determined, their
effects are often striking and overwhelming. They ask for deliberation and bring about
the demand to better understand where they can be derived from. If we look closer
to the history of philosophy, we discover that affects have been located in the soul by
Aristoteles, in the body by Spinoza, and in the “feeling brain” by Damasio; today they
are supposed to be also located in digital technologies. They have been considered social
in origin by the Scottish philosophers of the 18th century and the essential social ties by
French sociologists at the end of the 19th century. They have been viewed as phylo- and
ontogenetic heritage by Sigmund Freud, as preindividual articulations of social traces by
Gilbert Simondon, and as expressions of collective enunciations in art works by Deleuze
and Guattari. In this sense, Teresa Brennan refutes the premise of neo-Darwinian biology
that “the individual organism is born with the urges and affects that will determine its
fate.”1 She criticizes this theory for acknowledging only the individual as the source of
the affect – not the collective.
Starting from her critique, the most interesting aspect of affects lies in the statement
of modern philosophers that affects should not be reduced to personal expressions and
individual articulations of human beings, but should be unfolded in a more demanding
sense. Phenomenological and poststructuralist philosophies try to enlarge the field of
epistemology and ontology by switching their attention from human affects to ahu-
man processes of affection, to different “timings of affect.” Considering affections as
closely related to primary energies and drives, they ascribe them the ability to gener-
ate very first differences by constituting themselves and by connecting and possibly
even synthesizing heterogenous elements. They consider them ontologically primary
processes of constitution, of self-affection and self-differentiation which bring about
a field of ongoing mutual affections and temporal dynamics, where they stimulate
1 Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca/New York/London: Cornell University Press, 2004),
p. 74.
35
Michaela Ott
f urther organic processes and finally the constitution of complex humans together with
a “becoming-world” (Deleuze/Guattari).
Expanding on these different characteristics I want to consider affection as an
aesthetic-epistemological figure since it helps to conceive of primary constitutions of
time and space, of impersonal articulations of excitements and sensations and of pre-
individual zones of sensuality and sensibility, long before starting their differentiation
of organic capacities – and their becoming human expressions. Furthermore it propels
the epistemological discourse reaffecting and differentiating itself along the question of
affection. To express it once again in different terms: affections are to be considered pas-
sive-active processes which allow for further complexifications of bio- and socio(techno)
logical processes and of epistemology as such.
In their introduction to The Affective Turn, Patricia Clough and Jean Halley rightly
state that this turn expresses an epistemological shift towards a broader framing of the
field of observation, towards a consideration of interactions and, as I would add, inter-
passions and entanglements between an increased number of human and non-human
beings and of their combined articulations. As they put it, the affective turn of today
“expresses a new configuration of bodies, technology, and matter instigating a shift of
thought in critical theory.”2 To that I would like to add the affective configuration of
the psyche as a still valid constitutive dimension of human beings who are shaped today
by countless affective factors, including technological media. Katherine Hayles char-
acterizes this epistemological shift as a different perspective on bio- and socio(techno)
logical processes: “Emergence replaces teleology; reflexive epistemology replaces objec-
tivism; distributed cognition replaces autonomous will; embodiment replaces a body
seen as a support system for the mind; and a dynamic partnership between humans and
intelligent machines replaces the liberal humanist subject’s destiny to dominate and
control nature.”3 However, I would not call the relation between humans and intelli-
gent machines a partnership, since their connection is also based on human interests of
dominance and manipulation which we should not forget to take into account.
The conception of affections as an aesthetic-epistemological figure should help to
explain ontologically primary constitutions, and the unfolding of timings of affect on
different epistemological scales and layers of reality. On all levels, but particularly on
2 Patricia T. Clough and Jean Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2007), p. 2.
3 N. Katherine Hayles, How we Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 288
36
Dividual Affections
the human one, affections should be considered as both conjunctive and disjunctive
processes connecting different terms while holding them in distance to each other. In
so doing, they introduce a temporal interval into the organic process which, in the phi-
losophy of Bergson4, is explained as a zone of sensation, an intermediate capacity inter-
rupting the automatic transformation of perception into action and providing a space
for the further developments of emotions.
Affection as a capacity of differentiation also casts a new light on human subjectiva-
tions in their interactions and -passions with other persons as well as with non-human
and technological agencies. My interest in affections is further propelled by the assump-
tion that in the context of a philosophically, but also technologically widened perspec-
tive, we have to conceive of human beings as unheard differentiated subjectivations
which are affected by so many bio- and socio(techno)logical processes that they can no
longer be considered undivided, individual entities.
Due also to our refined technologies of observation and registration, we attain a
problematic concept of the human being as a multidimensional entity: On the micro-
level, the human being seems to be interwoven with enormous quantities of microor-
ganisms which, while being categorized as non-human, contribute to the unfolding of
the human genome and affect his/her psychophysical constitution. We have to become
aware of unknown concrescences between human and non-human agencies which,
while being classified as different species, cannot be separated without risk to life; they
tend to dissolve classical taxonomic boundaries. On the macro-level, we share technol-
ogy-based affections with human partners all around the world and become uncon-
sciously modeled and registered in our sentience and sensibility. It is for our intense
connection with technological devices that they anticipate our movements and interests
and affect us with promotional strategies; they stimulate our desires with auditive and
visual offers and take over our sense of orientation. Because of these various entangle-
ments we have to acknowledge that human beings depend on interactive and interpas-
sive relations with countless others on different and partly unobservable levels. It is not
a far-fetched thought to assume that this insight undermines the old concept of the
individual and suggests to replace it by that of the dividual. With the epistemology of
Gilbert Simondon I therefore conceive of the single human being as a composition of
different vital, physical and psychic layers; s/he has to integrate preindividual traces of
the surrounding social field with striving for a metastable balance of the heterogenous
4 Henri Bergson, Matière et Mémoire. Essai sur la Relation du Corps à l’Esprit (Paris: Presses Univ. de France,
1982).
37
Michaela Ott
layers: “Il n’y a pas d’essence unique de l’être individué parce que l’être individué n’est
pas substance, pas monade: toute sa possibilité de développement lui vient de ce qu’il
n’est pas unifié complètement, pas systématisé; un être systématisé […] ne pourrait se
développer.”5 Contrary to Simondon I do not speak of processes of individuation, but of
dividuation, because the concept of individuals and even of individuation still depends
on the epistemological and imaginary conception as something similar to a substance
or monade. If we want to conceive of undivided human or other entities, we necessar-
ily have to isolate them from their surroundings and from the bio- and socio(techno)
logical ensembles they live in and are grown together with. Since the interrelatedness
with others is constitutive for their coherence and consistency, I propose to call them
“dividual beings” or “dividuations”.
The term dividual is used twice by Gilles Deleuze: firstly in a positive sense for the
description of impersonal and multiple articulations of musical and filmic works of art;
and, secondly in a rather negative sense, when Deleuze tries to conceptualize the epis-
temological and political shift from the analog to the digital era. In his eyes the techno-
logical shift transforms the human being into an indefinite modulation which varies
according to other fluctuations of the socio-economic field and forces him/her to model
and remodel him-/herself in endless processes of learning and adaptation to evermore
minimalized and capitalized requirements. Since the person is statistically correlated to
abstract and impersonal processes, Deleuze speaks of new modes of subjectivation and
concludes that “individuals have become dividuals.”6 Being dividual, or a dividuation
expresses the constitutive entanglement of humans in bio- and socio(techno)logical
ensembles, and their twofold passive-active status in the Spinozist sense: the status of
inevitably being affected by others while inevitably affecting others. Humans today are
multilayered agents of affection and of affectedness, which I therefore call dividuations.
2. Affection as a self-constitutive process
In the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and later on of Deleuze, affection is unfolded as an

ontologically primary process, a conception that assists the understanding of the foun-
5 Gilbert Simondon, L’Individuation à la Lumière des Notions de Forme et d’Information (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1964), p. 227.
6 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” https://files.nyu.edu/dnm232/public/deleuze_
postcript.pdf (retrieved February 25, 2014), p. 5.
38
Dividual Affections
dation of aesthetic and epistemic processes. In his Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-

Ponty presents affection as a twofold figure due to which primary self-constitutional
and autopoietic acts can be explained. Paradoxically, the twofoldedness of the figure
means that it has to precede itself in order to be able to constitute itself or that is has to
be affected by itself in order to bring about affection. The figure corresponding par excel-
lence to this claim is temporality and its process of timing. Time as infinity and ever-
changing presentification has to be conceived as always given and already lost, always
repeating its past in order to bring about new syntheses of the present, always preceding
and renewing itself. Time constitutes itself in the ongoing process of timing. Time is
therefore referred to as a primary subject: “If the subject is identified with temporal-
ity, then self-positing ceases to be a contradiction […]. Time is ‘the affection of self by
self’; […] the affecting agent and the affected recipient are one.”7 This twofold structure
of repetition and constitution, of self-affection and affection of others, is identified with
the processes of timing and later on with sensual and sensitive becomings. It is supposed
to constitute the heterogenous field of energetic differences and primary sensations and
to set free a temporal dynamic of differentiation and integration, up to the point where
the primary sensations transcend and transform themselves into a coherent surface of
organic sensuality and sentience. Deleuze considers this process of self-affection and
constitution of primary sensations a “first” aesthetics: this first aesthetics does not yet
establish anthropomorphic perceptions and expressions, but a field of impersonal and
(prein)dividual differences and articulations. These are the quasi-foundations of further
non-organic and organic processes of conjunction and disjunction, where timing gets
connected with the cultural context, with techniques, language and image-making.
They bring about non-human affections, among others in works of art.
Anthropogenesis is conceived by Merleau-Ponty analogous to this autopoiesis of
time: “We are wholly active and passive, because we are the upsurge of time.”8 Accord-
ing to him, we constitute ourselves in various processes of self-affections, in manifold
material-mental syntheses and their heterochronic timings. Stephen Jay Gould tells us
that the genomic differentiations between chimpanzees and humans depend on differ-
ent temporal articulations of the genetic code.9 Deleuze expands on Merleau-Ponty’s
idea by explaining that the unconscious foundation of first uncoordinated energetic
7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London/New York: Routledge, 1962), p. 425f.

8 Ibid., p. 428.
9 Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2002).
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Michaela Ott
differences and primary excitements is already accompanied by “larval subjects.”10

Unlike Husserl he emphasizes that the formation of primary passivity is accompanied
by “a contemplative self which doubles the agent.”11 These “small selves” are consid-
ered minimally active in their “contemplation” and are supposed to stimulate further
affections and reactions. Thanks to their differential and integrative work, the field of
sensuous heterogeneity becomes organized and brings about rhythmical and sensuous
habits which Deleuze considers “contemplations-contractions in the second degree.”12
This ongoing self-affection then provokes wider syntheses of time and enables the con-
stitution of memory and finally the complex synthesis of reflection in an active ego:
“The passive egos were already integrations, but only local integrations […]; whereas the
active self is an attempt at global integration.”13 Anthropogenesis here is conceived of as
a process of continuous integration of initially uncoordinated unconscious sensations
and affections into a finally conscious ego. Bergson however insists on the necessary
interruption of the automatic transformation of perception into (re)action in order to
establish an intermediate and differential zone of sensation which later on is supposed
to transform into human emotions. In Deleuze’s as in Freud’s view the inner mobility
of the ego is maintained when s/he reinvests and actualizes his or her heterogenous
beginnings and sustains capacity for affection in order to express it in bodily attitudes
and psychic expressions, in language and image-making and to further model affectiv-
ity in interdependence with given technological settings.
In this context, Deleuze criticizes Kant’s concept of the first capacity of Anschau-
ung – translated into English as “intuition”14 – for its pure receptivity, which questions
neither its affective genesis nor its formation by the aprioris of space and time. Since
Kant divides the human capacities into pure receptivity on the one hand and activity
of reason on the other and since he does not attribute a synthetical force to the ego,
he cuts the foundational process into two parts, corresponding to the two sides of his
aesthetic theory: “the objective element of sensation guaranteed by space and and time
10 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London/New York: The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 78.
11 Ibid., p. 75.
12 Ibid., p. 97.
13 Ibid., p. 98.
14 The translation of Anschauung as “intuition” refers to a subtitle in Kant’s Logic where he parallels
Anschauung with “intuitive cognition.” That this is not the only possible interpretation of Kant’s concept
becomes obvious when, in his Critique of Pure Reason, he connects Anschauung with processes of Vorstellung:
Anschauung is defined here as “nothing but the representation/imagination (Vorstellung) of phenomena”
(B 60, trans. Michaela Ott). In this understanding Anschauung encompasses an involuntary capture by
visual impressions which is not connoted by “intuition.”
40
Dividual Affections
and the subjective element which is incarnate in pleasure and pain.”15 If, however, the
foundation of sensuality and sentience is conceived of as a twofold passive-active process
constituting different spatio-temporal processes, it necessarily develops an immanent
dynamic of excitements and sensations, of pleasures and pains, and brings about further
and more complex capacities due to its continuous reaffection. These capacities enable
us to connect with the ever-changing surroundings and to shape and modify our modes
of subjectivation. Since today we are increasingly stimulated and unconsciously affected
by digital media, we can already observe changes in human capacities, for example a
higher pace of reception and of integration of sensual data. At the same time we become
aware of being threatened by info-overloads and attention deficits. The public discourse
here refers to signs of increased nervousness, of affective dependencies and a decenter-
ing of affection due to permanent technological stimulation and the ongoing demand
to compete with others in affective awareness.
3. Reaffection of the philosophical discourse
From its beginnings in Greek philosophy to the present, the Western discourse on affect
can be reconstructed as an ongoing conceptual reaffection which oscillates ambivalently
between the rationalization of affects, and the insights into their remediation that are
necessary for the further development of the discourse itself as philo-sophy. It is well
known that the initial formulation of the philosophical program, of the philein of sophia
in Plato’s dialogues, is motivated by Socrates’ wish to distance himself from the classical
Greek drama and its murderous performances of mania and possession. Nevertheless in
Plato’s dialogue Symposium Socrates performs his self-affection in the search for sophia
while reproducing a speech of Diotima and being reaffected by her words. Diotima
presents Eros as the medium in the search for beautiful and true ideas while becoming
a medium of inspiration for Socrates and speaking through his mouth. Socrates himself
becomes a medium, transferring his inspiration and affection for sophia onto his listeners.
This unfolding of inspiration within the speech of Socrates performs an initial discursive
self-affection of philosophical thinking through different voices and at the same time
the continuous sublimation of this affection. The love of bodies is translated into
15 Ibid., p. 98.
41
Michaela Ott
discourse and ascends to a love for the eternal view, theoria, and to an infinite passionate
questioning of its own foundations, thanks to which the discourse stays alive.
We know that the literary Platonic expression has been criticized by Aristoteles who,
as a sober philosopher, unfolds distinguished fields of reflection in the (meta)physical,
poetical and political domain. Nevertheless his concept of pathos, mainly explained in
his anthropological writing Peri Psyches,16 becomes immensely important for the self-
understanding of human subjectivations in Christian and Islamic cultures. Aristoteles
associates pathos with the receptive side of visual perception, caused by outer stimuli.
Because of its passive quality, it gets devalued in comparison with more active capacities,
such as reason caused by inner stimuli. This philosophical deprecation is still valid today
since human beings are appreciated according to the attributed self-causation and to
their moderation of affects as claimed by Aristoteles. Strangely enough, the Aristotelian
term pathos has been translated into English as “emotion” whereas the term affect as
noun does not exist in English dictionaries up to today. This is probably why the English
discourse on emotions differed essentially from the continental one in the past. Today
the term affect is widely discussed by English and American philosophers, as shown in
this book, thanks to their inspiration by the philosophies of Bergson, Merleau-Ponty or
Deleuze.
When in the 4th century A.D. the Christian theophilosopher Augustine provided a
list of Latin equivalents for Greek pathos, such as affectus, affectio, passio and voluntas,
he opened up a huge spectrum of possible human articulations ranging from passive
suffering to active will. Starting from this semantic range Muslim and Christian theo-
philosophers of the Middle Ages unfolded an even wider human passiology: on the one
hand all living beings were considered passive because they were created by God, and all
humans were expected to be affected by the passion of Christ. On the other hand, they
were supposed to have active drives and a self-determining will. This broad anthropo-
logical conception established the Western form of subjectivation in a melodramatic
range between self-empowerment, basic passivity and inevitable suffering. In the 16th
century, in the neo-Platonian Renaissance, furor and enthusiasm were rediscovered as
positive affects, thanks to the new self-esteem of independent thinkers who aim at a
scientific understanding of the universe. Giordano Bruno, one of the most undogmatic
and independent philosophers, wrote an enthusiastic literary dialogue entitled De gli
Eroici Furori. Inspired by Bruno, Baruch de Spinoza not only integrated affections as part
16 Aristoteles, Peri Psyches (Cambridge, Mass.: University Press, 1882).
42
Dividual Affections
of nature into his monosubstantial conception deus sive natura, but declared them to be
the very mode of self-differentiation of the unique substance. Extending this convic-
tion, the Scottish and English philosophers of the 18th century developed an optimistic
anthropology which, in clear opposition to the earlier negative conceptions of mankind
in the philosophy of Hobbes, was based on the idea of “natural sympathy” between all
human beings. Unlike Spinoza, Shaftesbury and his followers conceived of affections
as oriented towards society and public life, thereby provoking “social pleasure”.17 In
English and later on in French philosophy we encounter the expression “social affec-
tion” (affection sociale) which, in the longer run, brought about important political and
epistemological changes. Since the epistemological orientation on social affections also
promoted an interest for non-European cultures, it encouraged the first comparative
studies of cultures in England and France. Today social affections are gaining new theo-
retical appreciation because of our awareness that we are inevitably connected with glo-
balized and mediated socialities and are permanently shaping new social affects.
At the beginning of the 19th century the concept of affection became considerably
deprecated when linked with the reactions of populations or human masses. In the
writings of Robert Malthus,18 population replaced the previously used term people
which Robespierre portrayed as a suffering organism worthy of empathy. Malthus
on the contrary characterized populations as threatening quantities of human beings
who are permanently growing and exceeding the possible limits of food supply. The
human masses of industrialized cities in turn were criticized for being affected by
unconscious impulses and, as Gustave Le Bon and Sigmund Freud put it, by child-like
regressive attitudes. The analysis of the masses and of their affections brought about
new disciplines such as sociology, psychology, ethnology and finally psychoanalysis
at the end of the 19th century: Emile Durkheim reflected on the necessity of collective
affections for the foundation of societies, and stated that the modern division of labor is
the highest possible act of solidarity. Convinced of the phylo- and ontogenetic affective
heritage, Sigmund Freud argued that no fundamental distinction can be made between
the psychology of the individual and the masses.
These discourses in turn inspired the first reflections on technological media such as
photography and film and their unconscious affective potentialities. Sergej Eisenstein
17 Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “An Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit,” in: idem, Characteristics of Men,
Manners, Opinions, Times, Vol. II (Farnborough: Gregg Publ., 1968), p. 5–176.
18 Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society (London:
Dent, 1958).
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Michaela Ott
elaborated on the passiological potential of film montage, while Walter Benjamin dis-
covered the physiological affections of film viewers and users of architecture, and hoped
for a change in their political mindset. Reflecting on how in present times these medi-
ated affections are modified, Mark Hansen promotes the idea of a network of sensations
in which atmospheric technological agents interact with human “microsubjectivities.”19
He transfers the passive-active character of affection, once attributed to humans, on sen-
sory technologies and the complex forms of decentralized and distributed technological
powers which today are responsible for the complex economy of sensing and feeling.
His use of the term “microsubjectivities” seems to reinforce my claim that, because of
the multidirectional affective participations of humans on different epistemological
levels, we should call them dividuals.
4. Dividual affects in art
Together with Félix Guattari, Deleuze attempted to apply Spinoza’s affirmative

philosophy of affect to their common writings and to his own reflections on cinema. In
Mille Plateaux20 the authors tried to establish affective discursive strategies which aimed
at connecting taxonomically separated concepts and at provoking transversal affections
between different scientific discourses and distinguished epistemological fields. They
read literary texts as the result of non-natural affections between the writer and non-
human beings, mainly animals; they tried to prove that artistic creations start with
affections for beings who are normally deemed incongruous or even incompatible with
the human genre. These affections are supposed to stimulate artistic processes; setting
free unknown forms of expression and minorizing the “normal” use of language, thereby
expressing ahuman affects, percepts and concepts. A work of art, as they state in Qu’est-ce
que la Philosophie, has to bring about undetermined and unknown affects: “Affects are
exactly these becomings non-human of man.”21 In contrast to Kant, who conceived of
drawings as the highest manifestation of art because of their formal character and their
19 Mark B. N. Hansen, “Medien des 21. Jahrhunderts, technisches Empfinden und unsere originäre
Umweltbedingung,” in: Erich Hörl, ed., Die technologische Bedingung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011), p. 365–409,
here p. 371.
20 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 1987).
21 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),
p. 160.
44
Dividual Affections
correspondance and harmony with human capacities,22 Deleuze and Guattari appreciate
a work of art according to the heterogenesis it instigates between its aesthetic signs, to
its power of transformation of form into something informal, and to its production of
dividual and unknown affects.
In his film theory Deleuze develops the idea of a self-affection of film. He isolates a
certain film image called “image of affection”: this image, mainly realized in close-ups,
is again connected with a disjunctive and conjunctive power since it has to interrupt
the narrative logic and to eliminate the spatio-temporal context of the film. On the
other hand it has to synthesize the representational and presentational character of
the close-up and to strive for an iconic “firstness” of the image.23 By undermining and
flattening the central perspective of the film image and by showing the “materiality”
of its surface, it presents its ever-changing aesthetic qualities and its flat and tactile
character. Thanks to this expressive intensification of the visual side, which can be
further reinforced by sound, the film receives an affective coherence and eventually
produces an artistic affect which cannot be reduced to the emotion of the filmmaker,
nor to that of the viewer. Instead of providing recognizable human affects, a demanding
film develops tactics of de-individualisation and de-anthropomorphization of its
expression and brings about an unknown artistic affect. “The affect is impersonal and is
distinct from every individuated state of things: it is none the less singular, and can enter
into singular combinations of conjunctions with other affects. The affect is indivisible
and without parts; but the singular combinations that it forms with other affects form
in turn an indivisible quality, which will only be divided by changing qualitatively (the
dividual).”24 Since the filmic shots, because of their temporal changes in framing and
their ever-new combination of aesthetic ensembles, can hardly be taken as immobile,
fixed and individual entities like paintings, Deleuze calls their expressions dividual:
The expressed – that is, the affect – is complex because it is made up of all sorts of
singularities that it sometimes connects and into which it sometimes divides. This is why
it constantly varies and changes qualitatively according to the connections that it carries
out or the divisions that it undergoes. This is the Dividual.25
22 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1892), B 42.
23 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I. The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986),
p. 98.
24 Ibid., p. 99.
25 Ibid., p. 105.
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Michaela Ott
The dividuality of expression is also characteristic of modern musical compositions

articulating dissonant voices, for example in certain compositions of Luciano Berio: “In
Berio there is a search for a multiple cry, a cry of the population, in the dividual of the
One-Crowd, and not for a cry of the Earth in the universal of the One-All.”26 Obviously
the concept of the dividual in Deleuze’s understanding corresponds to two different
tasks: on the one hand it expresses the immanent heterogenesis of the aesthetic signs
and the fact that since the work of art and especially the film unfold in time, they can
never be identified with a clear and individual expression and a recognizable affect. On
the other hand it expresses a certain – harmonic or disharmonic – synthesis of different
aesthetic elements, visual and auditive moments, in a particular or even singular way.
According to Deleuze the more an artistic creation unfolds the multiplicity of signs
or voices of a social field, their conflicts and their disparity in an undetermined affect,
the more it becomes a work of art worthy of this name. Such a multiple and often
heterogeneous affective expression is dividual, as demonstrated by certain contemporary
video works of Angela Melitopoulos or Ursula Biemann. Their works of art can be
considered philosophically relevant expressions since they reveal the epistemological
assumption that any affect is composed of countless many, often ahuman voices that
unfold their articulations in time as multiple processes of affection.
5. Summary
As I have stated, this dividual status should, today, not only be attributed to works
of art. Due to the contemporary epistemological und technological shifts, all sorts
of entities such as living beings, intercultural societies, processes of production or
transcultural symbolizations reveal themselves submitted to dividuations. Not only
are we, the humans, dividuated by contemporary technologies and by processes of
adaptation to neoliberal dynamics as suggested in Deleuze’s Postscript. Far beyond that
we are necessarily dividuated because psychophysically and aesthetically constituted
by countless others. Therefore we have to become aware that our perspective, our
timing and our technological framing decide on whether or not we discover ourselves
as essentially composed of micro-complexities, of subliminal processes of affection
and dividual compositions and their ongoing temporal metamorphosis. Depending
26 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 342.
46
Dividual Affections
on our scale of observation, the same observed field appears as a unified and immobile
or teeming and ever-changing entity. When viewing through a microscope, we can
discover that all living beings are interwoven with huge quantities of other organisms
which, while being taxonomically distinguished from them, cannot be separated from
them without risk to life. Their entanglements open up new epistemological relations
which can only be called “distinguished indistinguisableness”. Since these complex
entities do not necessarily lose their psychophysical coherence, we have to recognize
them as apparently undivided, but ontologically and aesthetically self-dividing and self-
affecting dividuations very much as Deleuze states for the work of art.
On the macroscopic level the dividual status of human beings is even more obvi-
ous: we have to become aware that we are interrelated with sociotechnologies in such
intense ways that we can hardly separate ourselves from these devices and their perma-
nent affective lures. They not only stimulate our participation, provoke new interests
and wishes, but profit from our passivity and our affective needs. They control and even
take over our sensory capacities. We distinguish ourselves from these devices while we
cannot separate us from them affectively: We share epistemological relations of “dis-
tinguished indistinguisableness” also with them. This is why we have to acknowledge
that there is no other way than to analyze ourselves as dividuations with respect to our
active participations and passive obsessions. We have to conceive of ourselves as tim-
ings of affect very much like films – continuously reframing ourselves according to our
voluntary and involuntary participations on different bio- and socio(techno)logical lev-
els, to the different timings of these processes and their varying affective articulations.
In order not to get definitively divided and to lose our vital coherence, we also have to
reflect on possibilities of interrupting our interconnections, and on their subversive
use.
Thanks to Evelyn Gora for her thorough and skillful language check.
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Steven Shaviro
DISCOGNITION
There’s a famous story in the philosophy of mind: the story of Mary. It goes something
like this. Mary is the world’s greatest neuroscientist. She knows everything there is to
know about the physical world, and about how our brains work to perceive and interpret
the world. In particular, Mary knows everything there is to know about color and color
vision: from the physics of light, to the structure of the eye and the nervous system in
human beings and other organisms, to the ways that our brains recognize and distin-
guish particular colors, to the evolutionary origins of color vision, to the functions served
in our minds by the apprehension of color, and the ways that our moods are affected by
seeing one color or another. In short, Mary knows every physical and scientific fact that
there is to know about color.
But there’s a catch: Mary herself has never perceived any color at all. She has lived for
her entire life in a room that’s entirely black and white. She has read black-and-white
textbooks, and watched black-and-white videos. And so she knows that the sky is blue,
that grass is green, and that roses are red. But she has never actually seen the sky, the
grass, or a rose. She has only read about them, or viewed black-and-white photos and
videos of them.
The question is: what happens when Mary finally leaves her black-and-white room,
goes outside, and sees a red rose for the very first time? What does it mean for her to feel,
for herself, what she has previously only known about? What is it like for her to perceive
the color red? Does the phenomenal experience of redness add anything to her store of
knowledge about the color, and about how people respond to it? Does Mary learn some-
thing that she didn’t know before?
Our intuitions would seem to suggest that Mary does, at the very least, encounter
something new when she leaves her room. Redness and blueness are what philosophers
call qualia: phenomenal sensations, or “raw feels”, that seem to make up the very fabric
of our mental experience. And the qualia of color vision, in particular, are precisely what
Mary is missing inside her black-and-white room. Until she actually sees a red object,
Mary cannot know what it is like to experience redness. But how does this square with
the supposition that, while still stuck inside the room, she already knows everything
that there is to know – physically, materially, and scientifically – about color?
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Steven Shaviro
The story of Mary was invented by the analytic philosopher Frank Jackson, and first
published in 1986. Jackson calls himself a “qualia freak,” and he uses the story to argue
that “there are certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but also of certain
perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes.”1
For the “information” we get by experiencing something is quite different from the
“physical information” that allows us to say that we know about it, or understand it. No
amount of objective physical information can tell us “about the hurtfulness of pains,
the itchiness of itches, pangs of jealousy, or about the characteristic experience of tast-
ing a lemon, smelling a rose, hearing a loud noise or seeing the sky.”2 Jackson concludes
that physicalism – the doctrine that everything in the world is physical or material – is
wrong. For any description of the world in exclusively physical terms excludes qualia,
and therefore is radically incomplete.
In the decades since Jackson first published the story of Mary, it has been the
subject of scores of articles by analytic philosophers.3 Nearly all of these thinkers have
responded to Jackson’s challenge by seeking to account for qualia and phenomenal
experience in a way that does not lead to his anti-physicalist conclusion. If physicalism
is true, then there must be some flaw in the logic of Jackson’s argument. Even Jackson
himself has come to embrace this position. He now says, rather disparagingly, that no
mere “epistemological claim,” such as he made in his story about Mary, can get in the
way of the metaphysical truth of materialism. We may not know how to “deduce” the
physical basis of qualitative “psychological states” from the information that we have,
but it does not follow that these states are therefore devoid of any such physical basis
at all.4
But there’s one serious problem. Even though nearly everyone agrees that there is
something fundamentally wrong with Jackson’s argument, nobody can agree as to just
where the mistake lies. Every philosopher has a different account of what is wrong. Dan-
iel Dennett, for instance, argues that the whole story of Mary “is a bad thought experi-
ment, an intuition pump that actually encourages us to misunderstand its premises.”5 If
1 Peter Ludlow, Yujin Nagasawa, and Daniel Stoljar, eds., There’s Something About Mary: Essays on
Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), p. 39.
2 Ibid., p. 39–40.
3 Martine Nida-Rümelin, “Qualia: The Knowledge Argument,” in: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Summer 2010). Full text available: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ sum2010/entries/qualia-knowledge/
(retrieved February 25, 2014).
4 Ludlow et al, There’s Something About Mary, p. 409.
5 Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Back Bay Books, 1991), p. 398.
50
DISCOGNITION
Mary really knew all the physical facts about color, Dennett says, then she would already
know what it is like to have the sensation of seeing red. She would not learn anything
new when she left the room. She would not be in the least surprised when she actually
saw a red object for the first time. Nobody could trick her by, for instance, showing
her a banana that was painted blue, in the hope that (since she knows from her read-
ings that bananas are supposed to be yellow) she would mistake the qualitative feel of
blue for yellow.6 The story of Mary is misconceived right from the beginning, Dennett
says, because qualia don’t exist in the first place; or, at least, they don’t have the special
qualities that Jackson – following common sense – attributes to them. More precisely,
Dennett argues that so-called qualia are “mere complexes of mechanically accomplished
dispositions to react” to various stimuli.7 There is no mystery about first-person phe-
nomenal experience, because there is nothing more to it than such mechanistic habits.
The late David Lewis, in contrast to Dennett, accepts that Mary does in fact learn
something new when she exits the black-and-white room. But he denies that what
she learns is a new fact, beyond the physical facts she knew already. Mary does not
gain any new propositional knowledge, Lewis says. Rather, she acquires something like
“know-how,” or the instrumental ability “to remember and imagine and recognize”
the color red.8 “Knowing-how” to do something is not the same as “knowing-that”
something is the case. In this way, the physicalist claim that physical facts are the only
facts is preserved. Lewis, unlike Dennett, concedes that Mary could not have acquired
her know-how about the color red simply by studying all the facts about color from
inside her black-and-white room. But he still insists that there is nothing special about
experience, and that Mary could have also gotten her know-how in other ways. For
instance, Mary might acquire the ability to recognize red through “precise neurosurgery,
very far beyond the limits of present-day technique.”9 Such surgery would implant in
her neurons the very same neural configurations, and therefore the same instrumental
abilities, that exist within her when she is actually able to recognize the color red.
Michael Tye argues that, when Mary leaves her room, she actually does learn some-
thing new; and that what she learns is not just Lewis’s “know-how.” Rather, according
to Tye, Mary develops a new “phenomenal concept” of red.10 This “phenomenal concept”
6 Ibid., p. 399–400.
7 Ibid., p. 386.
8 Ludlow et al., There’s Something About Mary, p. 99.
9 Ibid., p. 78.
10 Ibid., p. 156.
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Steven Shaviro
is the knowledge of “what it is like” to experience red; it plays the “functional role” of
allowing Mary to “discriminat[e] the experience of red from other color experiences in
a direct and immediate manner via introspection.”11 Mary thus gains a genuinely new
piece of knowledge. Despite this, however, Tye still resists Jackson’s antiphysicalist con-
clusions. For Tye says that Mary’s new phenomenal concept does not involve (or cor-
respond to) any new, nonphysical facts. Rather, Mary experiences the same old physi-
cal facts about red – facts that she already knows – in a new way. Even though Mary
has a new – and true – thought, “there is nothing nonphysical in the world that makes
her new thought true.”12 Rather, “the new experiences she undergoes and their intro-
spectible qualities are wholly physical.”13
I have only cited a few of the many published responses to Jackson’s tale of Mary. For
someone like me, an outsider to analytic philosophy, the results are a bit discouraging.
The arguments all display a tremendous amount of ingenuity, skill, and verve; they are
all quite rigorously logical. And they are all more or less convincing on their own terms.
Indeed, I cannot stop myself from being swayed by whichever one of the arguments
I have read most recently. But unfortunately, these multiple arguments are not at all
compatible with one another. Although the argument has been going on for more than
thirty years now, no one has ever convinced anyone else; nothing has been resolved. The
disputes seem to go on forever. Robert van Gulick14 and David Chalmers15 have even
both developed schemas, delineating the logical space of all conceivable replies to Jack-
son’s argument, and showing which philosophers fill each slot. The phase space of the
Mary question has been thoroughly explored, we might say, but no consensus has ever
been reached as a result.
Given this situation, I am led to suspect that there is something wrong with the
entire discussion. Indeed, Jackson’s story seems to me to involve something like a
philosophical version of bait-and-switch. Our attention is captured by one thing, and
then it is diverted to something completely different. What really makes the story of
Mary compelling and exciting is its focus upon qualia, or real phenomenal experience.
Jackson makes the radical and important suggestion that the question “what is it like
11 Michael Tye, Consciousness, Color, and Content (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), p. 27. Ludlow et al.,
There’s Something About Mary, p. 156.
12 Ibid., p. 156.
13 Ibid., p. 157.
14 Ibid., p. 402
15 David Chalmers, “Consciousness and its Place in Nature,” in: Stephan Stich and Ted Warfield, eds., The
Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), p. 102–142.
52
DISCOGNITION
to experience the color red?” might well be even more slippery and unanswerable than
Thomas Nagel’s query, “what is it like to be a bat?”16 Nagel famously suggested that,
although it is indeed “like something” to be a bat, we cannot find out for ourselves just
“what it is like.” I will never know what a bat’s experience is like, because it is too different
from my own. Jackson, however, suggests that Nagel’s question is insufficiently radical.
For Nagel, Jackson says, it is just a matter of “extrapolating from knowledge of one
experience to another, of imagining what an unfamiliar experience would be like on the
basis of familiar ones.”17 But this is not a problem in the case of Mary; I can easily get a
sense of Mary’s new experience, since I have precisely such an experience myself. I know
what it is like to perceive red, and I know what it is like to perceive something for the
first time. And yet, in spite of this complete familiarity, the mystery remains. Jackson’s
story defamiliarizes qualitative experience per se. He shows that there is a fundamental
difficulty even in describing “what it is like” for me to have my own inner sensations.
Apparently, qualia cannot be grasped in objectifying terms, and cannot be known in
advance. Such, at least, is my own speculative reconstruction of Jackson’s argument.
But unfortunately, Jackson himself does not quite pursue this sort of approach. He
declines to speculate in the way that I wish he had. Instead, Jackson phrases his question
in terms of “physical information.”18 He asserts that this sort of information – which
materialists believe to be complete – is not “all the information there is to have.”19
For Jackson, qualitative experience becomes a different sort of information from the
physical kind; “there is something about [such] experience, a property of it, of which we
were left ignorant.”20 But Jackson never questions the equivocal notion of information
itself, or of what it means to “have” a certain type of information, or of how something
experiential can be described as the “property” of a certain state of affairs. As a result,
his philosophical argument diverts us away from thinking about the nature of sensory
experience, and towards thinking instead about something entirely different: the
metaphysical claims of physicalism, and the question of whether the “properties” of
experience are always “physical” ones. Instead of wondering “what it is like” to perceive
the color red, we are led to consider the criteria for – as Lewis puts it – “knowing what
16 Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” in: idem, Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge
University Press), p. 165–180.
18 Ibid., p. 39.
19 Ibid., p. 43.
20 Ibid., p. 44.
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Steven Shaviro
it’s like” 21 to experience red. The story gets displaced from an affective register to a cog-
nitive one.
It is therefore not so much that one or more of the premises of Jackson’s story are
flawed (though they might well be), as that the story itself involves a basic misdirec-
tion. In other words, the whole question of physicalism – which is the crucial stake for
Jackson and for all of his respondents – is actually irrelevant, and entirely beside the
point. Even as Jackson argues for the specialness of qualia, and claims that they can-
not be reduced to the status of “physical information,” he also takes it for granted that
they do indeed have a physical basis. This distinction is important. In the passages that
I have already quoted, Jackson says that qualia can be identified with “certain features
of the bodily sensations especially”; and the examples he gives include “the hurtfulness
of pains” and “the itchiness of itches.” Qualia thus seem to be fundamentally embodied;
they arise in the course of a body’s physical activity, and its interactions with the rest of
the world. For this reason, even in his first formulation of the problem, Jackson already
accepts that “qualia are effects of what goes on in the brain. Qualia cause nothing physi-
cal but are caused by something physical.”22
I would add to this that qualitative experience does not and cannot take place in the
absence of a body. Almost nobody today would argue anything different. Indeed, even
such phenomena as phantom limb pains and out-of-body experiences – which have
become privileged cases for philosophers of mind as diverse as the interactionist Alva
Noë and the eliminativist Thomas Metzinger – seem to require the existence of a body
in the first place.23 For it is only in relation to some lived body that these fantasmatic
experiences of disembodiment or false embodiment can occur at all. I cannot have an
out-of-body experience without there being a body for me to go out from. And I can
only experience sensation in an inexistent phantom limb, if there is some sort of body to
which that limb is supposed to be attached. Indeed, qualia or phenomenal experiences
would still be physical and embodied even if my body were reduced to a brain in a vat
whose neural circuitry was being manipulated by mad scientists. And these experiences
would still be physical even if my mind were downloaded to a computer, and instanti-
ated in silicon instead of carbon. Even an entirely hallucinatory, or programmed, virtual
21 Ibid., p. 131.
22 Ibid., p. 48.
23 See: Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004); Thomas Metzinger, Being No
One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2004), p. 72.
54
DISCOGNITION
reality requires – as Bruno Latour might well remind us – a vast physical apparatus in
order to be produced and maintained.
Despite Jackson’s own initial claims, therefore, nothing in the story of Mary actually
casts doubt upon – or even relates in any significant way to – the actual metaphysical
doctrines of physicalism, materialism, and naturalism. The problem is not one of
physicalism versus something else (like dualism or supernaturalism). It is rather,
more straightforwardly, a question of what we can make of phenomenal experience, or
of unmediated “what-is-it-likeness” – and indeed, of how we can possibly account for
such a thing. And this is the point, I think, at which the logic of analytic philosophical
thought reaches its own limit, and breaks down.
We are rightly suspicious of claims for immediacy, pure presence, and so on. Qualia
are defined as instances of raw phenomenal experience; but how can any experience
truly be “raw”? Is there ever anything free of mediation? Isn’t the very idea of
immediacy itself nothing more than a retrospective construction, as Jay David Bolter
and Richard Grusin claim in their analysis of “remediation”?24 It is on account of
such concerns that most of the commentators on the story of Mary seek to diminish,
or empty out, the very idea of phenomenal experience. In Lewis’ account, for instance,
Mary never actually experiences anything. When she sees something that is red, she
only gains the know-how, or the ability, to recognize the color red when she encounters
it again. The experience itself becomes curiously empty; it points beyond itself, to future
instances, but it never “happens” on its own account. Other thinkers go even further
in this direction. Dennett makes the general argument that, even though “there seems
to be phenomenology […] it does not follow from this undeniable, universally attested
fact that there really is phenomenology.”25 R. Scott Bakker, with his Blind Brain Theory,
similarly suggests that the brain’s unavoidable blindness to its own processes entails, as
a necessary consequence, “the nonexistence of things like affects, colours, and so on.”26
One obvious answer to these contentions is simple exasperation. As Galen Strawson
says in response to Dennett, it makes no sense to claim that percepts and affects only
seem to exist; “for there to seem to be rich phenomenology or experience just is for there
to be such phenomenology or experience.”27 Phenomenal experience is a seeming; it
24 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2000).
25 Dennett, Consciousness, p. 366.
26 R. Scott Bakker, “THE Something About Mary,” http://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2013/05/27/the-some-
thing-about-mary/ (retrieved February 25, 2014).
27 Galen Strawson, Mental Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), p. 52.
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Steven Shaviro
“exists” whether its seeming contents are true or not. This assertion is a very minimal-
istic, bedrock version of the Cartesian cogito: even if everything that I feel is delusional,
I can still say that I am feeling it. We may doubt the assignment of feeling to a stable
“I”; and we may prefer a primordial sentio to an overly intellectual cogito (as Deleuze and
Guattari somewhere suggest). But something still seems to be going on. Lewis, Den-
nett, and Bakker seem to make an unjustifiable slide from the unreliability – or even
the inevitably delusional nature – of subjective experience to the assertion of its sheer
nonexistence.
I think that the problem here is not one of experience, but of conceptualization.
Daniel Stoljar and Yujin Nagasawa, introducing an entire volume of essays on the story
of Mary, acknowledge that “everyone agrees that something happens when Mary comes
out of her room.”28 But they go on to imply that the mere fact “that Mary comes to
have a new experience when she comes out of her room” is nothing more than a banal
“truism.”29 It doesn’t have any significance in itself. What is really important to all
these thinkers, rather, is something else. Jackson wonders what “information” we can
have about Mary’s new experience; Tye finds a way to subsume the experience under a
“concept.” Dennett and Lewis, in their different ways, regard the experience as nothing
more than a trigger, or an occasion, to demonstrate a “disposition” or a “capacity.” What
unites all of these thinkers is that they all find Mary’s experience in itself to be unin-
teresting and unimportant; they only care about its grounds and its consequences. The
experience itself doesn’t seem to matter – but only how it gets cognized or accounted
for. If the modernist poet T. S. Eliot once complained that “we had the experience but
missed the meaning,”30 all these analytic philosophers suffer from the opposite prob-
lem: they know all the meanings, but they have missed the experience.
In other words, when the philosophers squabble over the value and significance of
phenomenal experience, and even over the question of whether it “exists” or not, they
fail to address it in other than cognitive terms. This is wrong, or at least it is overly
limited. For if the story of Mary demonstrates anything at all, what it shows us is that
phenomenal experience is not in itself a cognitive process. To say this is to go against the
explicit arguments both of Jackson and of his critics; but I think that it is demonstrated
by the reductio ad absurdum of all their simultaneous and contradictory efforts to explain
it. Mary may or may not learn something, when she sees red for the first time; but the
28 Ludlow et al., There’s Something About Mary, p. 16 (emphasis added).

29 Ibid., p. 18.
30 T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” in: idem, Four Quartets (New York: Mariner Books, 1968), p. 27.
56
DISCOGNITION
event of her seeing red is not in itself a matter of knowledge, information, or cognition. We
might even state this in the form of a slogan: the philosophers have only interpreted the
world, in various ways; the point is to feel it.
Now, it might seem that, in enunciating such a slogan, I am making a
phenomenological claim for the primacy of perception – or, even worse, a naïve-realist
claim for something like a pure, primordial, unmediated experience. I shall certainly
fall afoul of Wilfrid Sellars’ critique of the “myth of the given.”31 But I think that the
matter is a bit more twisted and complicated than that. I am not doubting that sensory
experience does indeed get cognized, or classified, or theorized, or interpreted – at least
if it is to any degree remembered or retained. Indeed, such theorization is a necessity, if
the experience is to be in any way described or talked about. Phenomenologists as well as
cognitivists will agree with this. And we can say, as well, that such conceptualization or
theorization is precisely the way that experience gets temporalized, that it is constituted
as a Now, a “living present.” Such is the “timing of affect” that we have been talking
about; such is the role of the “missing half-second.”
Nonetheless, this sort of thematization is not the whole of the story. We may well
remember what we have experienced. And as a result, we may well have knowledge
about our own phenomenal experiences, or those of others. Even if we do not explicitly
remember what happened, we may well gain a sort of “know-how” as a result of these
experiences. But such knowledge should not be confused with the experience that it is
about, or as a result of which it has arisen. The event of remembering – even on the time
scale of fractions of a second – should not be confused with the event that is thereby
being remembered. I am pointing to something that is fugitive and fleeting, and that
dissolves in the very act of being recalled or otherwise taken up. The impossibility of
properly expressing what an experience is, or of establishing it as an objective piece of
“information,” does not prevent the experience itself from taking place.
I think that the problem, like so many others in philosophy today, really goes
back to Kant. In the First Critique, Kant makes the famous pronouncement that
thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.32 This
pronouncement still resonates today, in philosophical moves as varied as Sellars’ attack
on the myth of the given, and Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that unreflective experience
must itself be reflected upon, and that such reflection cannot be unaware of itself as
31 Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambrigde, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
32 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 193–194; A51/
B75.
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Steven Shaviro
an event.33 But as Whitehead points out, because Kant is “obsessed with the mentality
of ‘intuition,’” this claim is based upon the “suppressed premise” that “intuition is
never blind.”34 And this “suppressed premise” is itself false. We should say rather that
intuition is always blind, first of all; it is only afterwards that it gets conceptualized.
For this reason, the aesthetic encounter cannot be understood in terms of cognition
and re-cognition. Although Kant initially gives primacy to sensation as reception, such
reception is ultimately relegated to the margins, of his account of experience, when
the basic structures of the Transcendental Aesthetic are overwritten by those of the
Categories in the Transcendental Analytic. Kant and his heirs do not eliminate aesthetic
moments entirely, but they present these moments only as exceptions or incomplete
cases. For instance, we might well say that aesthetic experience fits Thomas Metzinger’s
neurophilosophical description of “the most subtle nuances of phenomenal content.”35
Such content, he says, “is available for attention and online motor control, but it is not
available for cognition […] it evades cognitive access in principle. It is nonconceptual
content.”36 There are certain sensory experiences of such “subtlety” that they “cannot, in
principle, be conceptually grasped and integrated into cognitive space.”37
Metzinger’s account of this sort of perception is not incompatible with Kant’s.
Metzinger, like Kant, says that a perception is “a cognitive construct” that is “functionally
individuated.”38 But just as Kant says that aesthetic ideas cannot be made intelligible
in language, so Metzinger sees an exceptional sort of noncognitive sensation as well.
Metzinger says that what he calls the “informational content”39 of such perceptual states
cannot be recognized or remembered. “The core issue is the ineffability, the introspective
and cognitive impenetrability of phenomenal tokens. […] Therefore, we are not able to
carry out a mental type identification for these most simple forms of sensory concepts.”40
In other words, beneath a certain threshold of cognitive discrimination, perceptual sen-
sations lack identity criteria. Aesthetic apprehensions come and go; we cannot hold
33 See: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London/New York: Routledge, 2002), p. xi:
“[M]y reflection cannot be unaware of itself as an event, and so it appears to itself in the light of a truly
creative act, of a changed structure of consciousness.”
34 Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), p.139.
35 Thomas Metzinger, Being No One (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), p.72.
36 Ibid., p. 73.
37 Ibid., p. 72.
38 Ibid., p. 73.
39 Ibid., p. 73.
40 Ibid., p. 72.
58
DISCOGNITION
on to them or keep track of them. “To speak in Kantian terms,” Metzinger says, “on
the lowest, and most subtle level of phenomenal experience, as it were, only intuition
(Anschauung) and not concepts (Begriffe) exist.”41 Metzinger is of course referring to
Kant’s famous pronouncement, in the First Critique, that “thoughts without content
are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.”42
The virtue of the reductionist approaches is that they prevent us from attributing
features or “properties” to blind intuition that it does not, and indeed cannot, really
possess. Metzinger and Bakker are correct to say that it is categorically impossible to
know the causes of one’s mental states (hence Spinozian active affects do not exist).43
But this leads, for me, to an aestheticism that is apart from any sort of understanding
or cognition: Kant’s Third Critique, instead of the First. Intuitions for which no con-
cepts are adequate. Aesthetic ideas, according to Kant, are “inner intuitions to which
no concept can be completely adequate”;44 “an aesthetic idea cannot become cognition
because it is an intuition (of the imagination) for which an adequate concept can never
be found.”45 Aesthetics is noncognitive and precognitive.
The trouble with Metzinger’s account is that he sees such construction and
individuation as more central to mental functioning than it actually is. He regards
the sorts of singular experiences that I am calling aesthetic only as exceptions to our
more normative modes of perception, recognition, and conceptualization. Metzinger
suggests that we suffer from an “automatic limitation of our perceptual memory.”46
This limitation makes sense in evolutionary terms, since it saves energetic expense. But
its downside is that we are unable to grasp our own mental processes. The seeming
“transparency” of our phenomenal experience is really “a special form of darkness,”47
There are certain moments in the story of Mary, and in the cognitivist account of
consciousness more generally, where this sort of thing comes up. One of these happens
in Michael Tye’s account of Mary. Tye rejects Lewis’ claim that Mary only acquires an
instrumental ability when she comes out from her room. This is because phenomenal
perception involves a sort of overflow. Immediate experience goes beyond our ability to
classify and conceptualize it, let alone to remember it. Thus there is a gap between the
41 Ibid., p. 78.
42 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 193–194; A51/B75.
43 On Whitehead’s “blind emotion,” see: Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 162.
44 Ibid., p. 182–183.
45 Ibid., p. 215.
46 Metzinger, Being No One, p. 80.
47 Ibid., p. 169.
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Steven Shaviro
experience Mary has, and the ability that she gains as a result. Actual “sensory experi-
ence,” Tye says, “is far, far richer” than what is needed to provide a basis for the capacity
that Lewis describes.48 This is because Mary doesn’t just see the color red; she sees one
specific hue of red. She may well learn how to recognize red, in general, as a result of
seeing a red rose for the first time. But she will never be able to distinguish the particular
shade of red that she sees now from another, slightly different shade that she encounters
at a later time. This is simply a matter of the physical capacity of human brains. We
“have no stored representations in memory,” Tye says, for hues that only differ slightly
from one another; “there simply isn’t enough room. My experience of red19, for instance,
is phenomenally different from my experience of red21.” But in my memory, I only have
the general concept of red; there are “no such concepts as the concepts red19 and red21.”49
Because the subtleties of closely-related-but-not-identical hues cannot be remembered
and cognized, Tye says, they cannot be translated into “know-how” in the way that
the general concept of red can be. I can have the experience of seeing a particular hue,
without thereby later knowing what it is like to see that hue. The experience of such a
particular hue is, as Thomas Metzinger puts it, “so subtle, so volatile as it were, that it
evades cognitive access in principle. It is nonconceptual content.”50
This is what David Roden calls “dark phenomenology”: In Being No One Thomas
Metzinger uses Raffman’s account to motivate an argument against classic qualia. The
classic quale is a simple, intrinsic, introspectable property. However, “Raffman qualia” –
the simplest perceptual discriminations – cannot be introspected because they lack
subjective identification conditions. Introspective concepts of classical qualia must,
then, be reifications since maximally fine content fixations cannot be introspected
conceptually.”51 Roden admits that “it may be possible to attend to them non-concep-
tually and they are presumably individuated by their distal inputs and contributions
to behavior.”52 But he opposes how enactionists like Noë make the claim that such
experiential contents are conceptualizable, because we conceptualize them precisely
through enaction. Metzinger says that Raffman’s qualia are available for attention and
for enaction, but NOT for cognition.

49 Ibid., p. 150–151.
51 David Roden, “Nature’s Dark Domain: An Argument for a Naturalized Phenomenology,” Royal
Institute of Philosophy Supplement 72 (July 2013): p. 169–188, here p. 179.
52 Ibid., p. 179.
60
DISCOGNITION
We are in the realm of what David Roden calls “dark phenomenology,” consisting
of experiences that are not directly “intuitable,” and that “transcend […] our subjective
recognitional powers.”53 For Roden, as for Metzinger, dark phenomenology marks the
point at which first-person introspection fails. According to Roden, phenomenological
claims are well-grounded as long as the things they describe are pre-theoretically or
‘intuitively’ given to the conscious subject.”54 But when we reach non-intuitable experi-
ence, this no longer holds. “The criteria for evaluating theories of dark phenomenology
would presumably [be] those applying in other areas of empirical enquiry (instrumental
efficacy, simplicity, explanatory unity within wider science).”55 Since we cannot intro-
spect these “dark” areas of our experience, Roden says, we must turn instead to natural-
istic (third-person) modes of observation and explanation.56 We can only examine these
experiences objectively, from the outside.
However, I want to make precisely the inverse claim. Because dark phenomenol-
ogy cannot be conceptualized from a first person perspective, it cannot be objectified
in terms of third person empirical observations either. From this perspective, Roden’s
“dark phenomenology” can be positioned not as epistemologically defective, but rather
as ontologically primary. The whole point of aesthetic experience, for Kant, is that it is
not subject to the rules of the Understanding, or to what today we would call episte-
mological criteria. Where Metzinger speaks of the “informational content” of aesthetic
perception, we would do better to avoid the unexamined assumption that everything
should be defined in terms of “information.”57 Let us say rather that the feeling of the
beautiful is too intense to be cognized, or to be subsumed under a concept. Beauty defies
any sort of grounding or explanation; its self-evidence is greater than that of anything
that could be called upon to explain it, or account for it epistemologically.
Kantian aesthetics tries to claim universal communicability, or the assent of others,
despite the fact that there is no grounding for this. But his very posing of the problem
leaves room for the possibility of other approaches. We need to retain Kant’s assertion
of ungroundedness, and distinctions between empirical knowledge and aesthetics, in
order to avoid collapsing everything into cognition. This would mean taking a humbler
approach to thought in general. Jackson backhandedly recognizes this when he proposes
53 Ibid., p. 175.
54 Ibid., p. 171.
55 Ibid., p. 173.
56 Ibid., p. 178.
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Steven Shaviro
epiphenomenalism as a solution to the dilemma of Mary. The sensations that Mary has
for the first time when she leaves the room cannot be reduced, Jackson rightly says, to
the “functional role” of brain states.58 They do not serve a purpose in mental functioning,
just because they themselves already are the mental processes in question.
Cognitivist theories of mind seek to provide a utilitarian, functionalist, and adapta-
tionist account of emotional states. Metzinger, for instance, argues that emotions pos-
sess a normative character; they represent the biological or social value of a certain state
of affairs to the organism as a whole […] This feature distinguishes them from all other
conscious representata – although interestingly, the phenomenology of emotions tells
us that they can endow perceptual and cognitive states with a certain ‘affective tone.’59
Thus Metzinger largely sees emotional responses as fallible – but nonetheless
often useful – aids to cognition, because they provide rough-and-ready evaluations
of the ways in which circumstances in the world might help or hinder the biologi-
cal and corporeal needs of the organism. Yet at the same time, he recognizes certain
exceptions to this principle. For one thing, Metzinger’s claim that emotions have
“developed from an evolutionary optimization process”60 leaves open the question of
the non-adaptive consequences of evolution (such as Lewontin’s and Gould’s “span-
drels”). For another, Metzinger notes that his functionalist and adaptationist descrip-
tion of the emotions does not account for the phenomenon of “affective tone.” Indeed,
“affective tone” can be aligned with many other aspects of mental functioning which
are not reducible to cognitive ends. Metzinger’s largely cognitivist account of mental
process and phenomenal consciousness is nonetheless filled with discussions, not only
of bizarre psychological dysfunctions that demonstrate the limits of cognition, but
also of the “beauty” of phenomenal states – such as “Raffman qualia”, “Lewis qualia”,
“Metzinger qualia,” that are “so subtle, so volatile as it were, that [they evade] cogni-
tive access in principle.” And Metzinger also writes about phenomena of “intensity”
and of “structureless density,” which push against the limits of conceptual categoriza-
tion. Even the most hard-core cognitivist accounts of mind, like Metzinger’s, are thus
compelled to acknowledge the supplemental presence of “nonconceptual content.”61

59 Metzinger, Being No One, p. 198–199.
60 Ibid., p. 199.
61 Ibid., p. 73.
62
DISCOGNITION
What we need, therefore, is a noncognitive, and fundamentally affective, account of

sentience: a theory of discognition. Cognitivist and representationalist theories of mind
are confronted with elements that they can neither subsume nor exclude, but can only
regard as supplemental. I suggest that these supplemental elements are in fact the pri-
mordial forms of sentience, and that they are preconditions for – without being thereby
reducible to – any sort of cognition or representation whatsoever. Organisms are affec-
tive before they are cognitive, because they are systems for accumulating and dissipat-
ing energy, before they are systems for processing information. Where cognitive science
and philosophy of mind have tended to assume that affect serves cognition, we should
rather see cognition as a belated and occasional consequence of a more basic affectivity.
There are important philosophical precedents for this line of argument. For Kant, aes-
thetic judgments arise from singular intuitions for which there is no adequate concept.
For Whitehead, primordial “feeling” takes the form of “a ‘valuation up’ or a ‘valuation
down’” that precedes, and determines, any sort of cognition or conceptualization.62 For
Wittgenstein, while inner sensation “is not a something,” it is also “not a nothing either.”63
All these approaches point to a primordial form of sentience that is nonintentional, non-
correlational, and anoetic; and that is best described, in a positive sense, as autistic, affec-
tive, and aesthetic.
In general, what interests me most about analytic philosophy is its power of specula-
tive invention. Analytic thinkers pursue their arguments by means of counterfactual
speculation. They often construct the most bizarre scenarios. Jackson’s story of Mary
locked in the black-and-white room is already exceedingly strange, even if we do not go
on to ask what sort of sadist would subject another human being to such conditions.
Then there is Dennett’s trickster who tries to deceive Mary by showing her a banana
painted blue, and Lewis’s future neurosurgeons who operate on Mary to alter the wiring
of her brain in order to implant in her the memory of having already seen colors. Other
philosophers imagine inverted visible spectra, worlds in which water is not H2O, brains
in vats being fed simulated experiences by neural stimulation, and zombies who are
physically indistinguishable from actual people, except that they lack consciousness or
inner experience. The lineage of this sort of speculative-fiction-as-philosophy extends
back to Descartes’ hypothesis of an Evil Demon. But we are not very far from The Matrix
or Philip K. Dick. Analytic philosophers, much like science fiction authors, engage in
62 Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 241.

63 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulter (Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), section 304.
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Steven Shaviro
a practice of speculative extrapolation. Weird and extreme scenarios can challenge our
everyday assumptions, and push actually existing conditions to their most extreme
possibilities.
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Mark B. N. Hansen
Feelings without Feelers, or Affectivity

as Environmental Force
What does it mean to define affect as excessive in relation to emotion, or in relation to

drive? This is the crucial question that was posed by Brian Massumi and Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick in two watershed articles from 1995 that are largely responsible for putting
affect on the map for the theoretical humanities. This question, the focus of Massumi’s
The Autonomy of Affect and Sedgwick’s Shame in the Cybernetic Fold (written with Adam
Frank), holds the key to understanding why their rejuvenations of older lineages in
affect theory – of Spinoza and of Silvan Tomkins, respectively – have proven so influ-
ential. Despite polarizing affect in fundamentally different, and in some sense, pre-
cisely opposite ways, Sedgwick and Massumi converge in their development of affective
sociality as excessive in relation to the host of delimited subjective unities, including
“deconstructed” ones that have been central to scholarship in the theoretical humani-
ties over the past half-century. For Massumi, affect is more diffuse and in some sense
less “human” than emotion, and as such, furnishes a “line of flight” from the all-too-
human and all-too-cognitive human being that has anchored models of subjectivity
from Descartes to Derrida. For Sedgwick, affect is less automatic and in some sense more
“human” than drive, and as such, furnishes a paratactic logic of behavioral motivation
which breaks free from overriding narrative and philosophical conceptions of a core self
in order to focus on concrete acts of affective engagement. By shifting focus from emo-
tion and drive to affect itself, these two critics have quite literally inaugurated a whole
new terrain for exploring subjective behavior beyond the human subject.
When we ask, however, what sustains or hosts the excess of affectivity, neither
Massumi nor Sedgwick can give a convincing response. Both critics invoke, or rather
postulate, the operation of a sociality – “pure sociality” (Massumi) or “social affect”
(Sedgwick) – that somehow forms a “virtual remainder” or “non-egoic actant” para-
doxically generated within and as part of a process of bodily or narrative capture.
What remains beyond the reach of both projects (and, by implication, of the wealth
of scholarly production they have catalyzed) is any capacity to speak of affectivity as
truly “autonomous”, where autonomy would betoken an authentic independence and
a positive existence beyond the effect-structure that furnishes a crucial hermeneutic
thread for both critics. The result is a situation in which affect can be theorized as being
65
Mark B. N. Hansen
“two-sided” or as functioning outside of narratives of the self, but cannot be grasped in

concrete operation. Affect can only be grasped, that is, as something indeterminate and
amorphous – something that exceeds the body’s or the self’s mechanisms of capture,
but that is nonetheless required as a “virtual object cause” to explain any and all result-
ing (bodily or self-referential) actualizations.
From Bodily Matter to Matter Itself,

or Affect Beyond the “Virtual Remainder”
In her own assimilation of the watershed moment of affect theory, Patricia Clough makes
a similar point. For Clough, the reigning discourses on affect have simply not gone far
enough in reckoning the significance of the “affective turn.” While affect theorists were
quick to make good on affect theory’s promise of a return to “bodily matter” following
several decades of its suspension in various poststructuralist, deconstructivist, and
cultural constructivist models, they have not been able to follow the turn all the way to
its radical endpoint. As Clough understands it, affect’s introduction into reigning critical
discourses was dictated – and ultimately constrained – by an overly restrictive polemical
function: to rebuke poststructuralism for its suspension of everything bodily. As a result,
the more radical promise of the affective turn went unfulfilled, and remains, circa 2008
when Clough wrote her article as well as today, a road not taken. For Clough, who has
started down this road, “the turn to affect points instead to a dynamism immanent
to bodily matter and matter generally – matter’s capacity for self-organization in being
informational.” This capacity, Clough proclaims, “may be the most provocative and
enduring contribution of the affective turn.”1
Affect theory’s critical myopia betokens a larger shortcoming – its neglect of the tech-
nical dimension of affectivity. As Clough sees it, this shortcoming is bound together with
affect theory’s adherence to a certain model of the body, what she calls the “body-as-
organism.” Largely an inheritance from cybernetics and autopoietic theories of the self,
this model of the body channels affectivity in the service of organic reproduction; as
such, the body-as-organism forms an obstacle to the realization of the radical poten-
1 Patricia T. Clough, “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies,” in: Melissa Gregg
and Gregory Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 206–
228, here p. 206–207, emphasis added. An earlier, slightly longer version of Clough’s essay appeared in
Theory, Culture & Society 25.1 (2008): p. 1–22.
66
Feelings without Feelers, or Affectivity as Environmental Force
tial of the affective turn – its focus on the dynamic capacities of matter generally. As an
alternative, Clough proposes the “biomediated body,” a definition of the body in terms
of “what it can do – its affect.”2 This model “points to the political-economic and theo-
retical investment in the self-organization inherent to matter or matter’s capacity to
be informational, to give bodily form.” The biomediated body, continues Clough, “is
not merely technological all the way down. More importantly, the biomediated body
exposes how digital technologies, such as biomedia and new media, attach to and
expand the informational substrate of bodily matter and matter generally, and thereby
mark the introduction of a ‘postbiological threshold’ into ‘life itself’.”3 This “postbio-
logical threshold” names the “limit point” of the extant discourses on affect, and points
to what they shy away from embracing – namely, the potentiality for affectivity to char-
acterize and to inform the operationality of matter itself (and not just that of a privileged
kind of matter or material organization, i.e., the body-as-organism).
To explore affect theory’s neglect of technicity, Clough focuses on Massumi’s concep-
tualization of autonomy on the basis of a series of technoscientific experiments. What is
at stake in the experiments, following their appropriation by Massumi, is a philosophi-
cal conversion of the empirical. In a move that “seems to make affect the equivalent of
the empirical measure of bodily effects,” Massumi “uses such measures for a philosoph-
ical escape to think affect in terms of the virtual as the realm of potential, unliveable as
tendencies or incipient acts, indeterminant and emergent.”4 Conceptualized through
Massumi’s work, the turn to affect thus opens the body to its own indeterminacy, to a
domain of experience that cannot be lived directly by it and that can only be theorized
as a “virtual remainder.”
Where Massumi comes up short is in his failure to appreciate the significance
of the concrete technical set-ups of the experimental production of “traces of the
superempirical.”5 For Massumi, these technical set-ups and the experiments they make
possible are nothing more than devices for illustrating the autonomy of affect, the fact
that affect exceeds it bodily capture. Massumi, in short, subordinates their concrete
operationality to their philosophical payoff. For Clough, such a subordination misses
the promise of contemporary technoscientific experimentation on matter. As she sees
it, experimental set-ups of contemporary technoscience furnish nothing less than a
2 Ibid., p. 207.
3 Ibid., p. 207–208.
4 Ibid., p. 209.
5 Ibid, p. 211.
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Mark B. N. Hansen
echanism for connecting “bodily matter” to “matter as such”: “if it is increasingly

m
possible,” reasons Clough, “to register the dynamism of the superempirical as the dyna-
mism of matter, it is because the superempirical is not only a philosophical conceptual-
ization of the virtual but also a technical expansion that reveals matter’s informational
capacity.”6 As Clough sees it, and I concur wholeheartedly, the development of con-
temporary, data-driven, computational technoscience has given independent, non-bodily
access to the beyond of bodily experience, which means that it no longer needs to be
restricted to the status of a beyond that can only be theorized philosophically, as a vir-
tual remainder. This is precisely what she means by her notion of “technical expansion,”
and it provides the basis for a radicalization of affect theory as it has been developed by
theorists in the wake of Massumi and Sedgwick.
To develop Clough’s insight here, we need to correlate two developments, both due
to advances in material science and computation that together inform the irreducible
artifactuality of affect, in its contemporary configuration. On the one hand, we must
recognize that affectivity is inherent to the flux of matter itself: far from being the prod-
uct of a materialization within bodies, affectivity is always already in operation in the
vibrational relationality of the material continuum. On the other hand, we must take
stock of the double function of technical processes: at the same time that they operate
to mediate affective processes exceeding the scope of consciousness, technical operations
are deeply and nontrivially imbricated within the processuality of the material sphere
itself, and in ways that are fully decoupled from human modes of thinking and under-
standing.
These two developments help expose Clough’s lingering attachment to the body.
At the same time as she announces the imperative to examine how the experimental
set-up gives access to affectivity beyond the philosophical figure of the remainder, she
telescopes this contribution in reference to bodily activities and “bodily matter”:
[T]hese experiments are technical and conceptual framings of bodily responses that pro-
duce affect and reveal the capture of the virtual. Massumi’s exemplary illustrations of
the autonomy of affect not only show what the body can do; they show what bodies can be
made to do. They show what the body is becoming, as it meets the limit of a postbiological
threshold, which draws to it the dynamism of matter that had been hidden in the opposi-
6 Ibid., p. 210.
68
tions held in place by the body-as-organism, between the living and the nonliving, the
physical and the biological, the natural and the cultural.7
In order to radicalize affect theory following Clough’s lead, we will accordingly have to
question something Clough seems to accept at face value: Massumi’s characterization
of affect’s excess as “virtual.” It is precisely this characterization that puts into place the
figure of the remainder (Massumi’s “virtual remainder”), and with it, the entire structure
of excess by which affectivity can be operational without being presentified.
To develop an account of affectivity that would overcome this restriction, we need
to dispense with any lingering vestiges of the Spinozist channeling of forces through
bodies. We must understand the technicity involved in the production of affectivity to
extend well beyond the laboratory situations explored by Massumi, where its impact is
channeled into the production of bodily traces of the superempirical. In contemporary
developments in biomedia and digital computing, technicity opens the domain of the
superempirical to experimentation and in this respect can be seen to contribute directly
to the genesis of affectivity well beyond the affect-body-emotion complex. In the age
of biotechnical convergence, the key issue is not “what bodies can be made to do,” as
Clough puts it, but rather what matter is. Here we come upon the true significance of
Clough’s insistence on the technicity of affect and its centrality for extending affect to
the “dynamism of matter generally”: far from being a merely instrumental mediation
that operates to produce affect or to give access to affect produced in something else,
technicity operates within material fluxes themselves. It is an internal element in mate-
rial processes that are themselves affective. What is needed then, to expand affectivity
beyond bodily matter and bodily agency, is an account of technicity that takes stock of
its material efficacy at the same time as it deploys experimental setups as mechanisms
for granting human access to the expanded domain of the empirical they make opera-
tional. Rather than “technical […] framings of bodily responses that produce affect,”8 we
must view experimental setups as technical framings of material processes which are
“environmental” in relation to bodily activities and responses and in the face of which
bodies can only remain passive.
In programmatic terms that address affect theory as an institutional formation, this
situation requires us to dispense with two fundamental theoretical commitments of
affect theory as it has been inherited by today’s theorists. First, we must see beyond the
7 Ibid., p. 210–211 (emphasis added).

8 Ibid., p. 211.
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Mark B. N. Hansen
correlation of affect with power, and instead seek to theorize the crucial dimension of
passivity as the key dimension of affectivity’s material operationality. This imperative
calls for an interrogation of the central role accorded bodies and specifically, of the
source for the focus on bodies as power, namely Spinoza’s account of bodies in the
Ethics. No matter how much Spinoza’s philosophy supports a materialism that moves
beyond anthropocentrism, the privilege Spinoza – and his contemporary inheritors –
accord bodies institutes a nontrivial restriction on how the affectivity immanent to
material process can matter, or in Clough’s rendering, can be made to matter. Second,
we must cease conceptualizing affect in terms of its excess – whether over human
modes of consciousness or over types of bodily response – and instead reinscribe it as
a force operating wholly within processes, including processes that involve delimited
perspectives (e.g., human consciousness) themselves incapable of directly grasping its
operationality. This, too, calls for a rejection of certain elements of the philosophical
sources for affect theory, again including Spinoza, and more proximately, Deleuze’s and
Negri’s recuperations of Spinoza as the basis for an account of affect that is outside the
operation of political power.
This dual imperative certainly stems from a sea change in the critical environment
since 1995, but beyond that – and indeed, as part of its impetus – from developments in
technoscientific experimentation that have increasingly made it possible to address pro-
cesses of the material world without any reliance on the framework of consciousness and
sense perception. The practices of experimental science have in effect caught up to the rad-
ical postulations of theory: as a result, the “virtual remainder” (or any other philosophi-
cal figure of excess) need not remain amorphous and quasi-causal, but can be fleshed out
in ways that are extremely concrete and empirical, though not in the traditional philo-
sophical sense of being directly available for the experience of human perceivers.
Feeling the Universe, or the Fundamental Passivity

of Worldly Affect
To carry out this double reform of affect theory proposed here, let me turn to the work
of two philosophers from distinct traditions, Alfred North Whitehead and Gilbert
Simondon, who have both been tangentially introduced into affect theory,9 but whose
9 By Shaviro and Massumi, respectively. See also: Marie-Luise Angerer’s and Luciana Parisi’s texts in this
volume.
70
respective conceptualizations of “feeling” and of “affective exchange” hold much as yet

untapped promise to move affectivity outward from bodily matter to material process.
Whitehead’s account of feelings as the basis for the relationality of the world can help
us grasp the purely passive origin of affectivity – how it informs the very worldly ele-
ments (attained actualities) from which all experiential entities, including bodies of all
sorts, are composed. Simondon’s account of affective exchange between disparate lev-
els of being – specifically, what he calls “individuation” and the “preindividual” – fore-
grounds affectivity as an autonomous operation that relates individuated being with
its source in the metastability of energetico-material processes. His account can help us
understand how affectivity is crucially involved in the operation of the compositional
process whereby bodies and other experiential entities are composed from preindividual
elements. Together, Whitehead and Simondon furnish the theoretical grounding for
a reconceptualization of affectivity as an element of material process itself: by placing
affectivity at a level of material process, prior to though not without relation with, the
formation and operation of bodies, their work provides what we need to make the leap
from “bodily matter” to “matter itself”.
In Process and Reality, Whitehead describes his philosophy of organism in terms of an
aspiration to
construct a critique of pure feeling, in the philosophical position in which Kant put his
Critique of Pure Reason. […] in the organic philosophy Kant’s ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’
becomes a distorted fragment of what should have been his main topic. The datum
includes its own interconnections, and the first stage of the process of feeling is the
reception into the responsive conformity of feeling whereby the datum, which is mere
potentiality, becomes the individualized basis for a complex unity of realization.10
What is lacking in Kant’s Aesthetic, Whitehead reiterates, is a conception of the

interconnectedness of feelings: following Hume, Kant “assumes the radical disconnection
of impressions qua data, and therefore conceives his transcendental aesthetic to be
the mere description of a subjective process appropriating the data by orderliness of
feeling.”11 Their complexity notwithstanding, these passages provide a preliminary
answer to the question: what, for Whitehead, is an affect? An affect is a “feeling,” which
10 Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay on Cosmology, Revised Edition, ed. David R. Griffin and
Donald W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1979), p. 113.
11 Ibid.
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Mark B. N. Hansen
is to say that it is the fundamental relation informing the connectedness of stuff in the
universe (or what Whitehead, in the technical language of his speculative metaphysics,
calls “actual entities” or “actual occasions”).
From these passages, we immediately grasp much about what an affect (qua feeling)
is not (or is not primarily or exclusively): an affect is not an atomic impression or datum
that requires the supplementary activity of another agent to be synthesized or brought
into relation with other affects; an affect is not the synthesis performed by a higher-
order organism on such atomic impressions or data; and an affect is not a product or
result of another process. Feelings, moreover, are decidedly not exclusive to certain
kinds of beings, i.e., beings endowed with particular types of bodies or particular mental
capacities, but are operative at every scale of process from the most minimal (atomic and
molecular processes) to the most maximal (geophysical change). And indeed, feelings
are also compositional in their own right, meaning that whatever affectivity belongs
to a given body or society is the more or less complex composition of all of the feelings
belonging to their components.
Here, we come upon the most fundamental characteristic of feelings or affects on
Whitehead’s account: they are elements of relations constitutive of unities of expe-
rience independently of being, and before they can become, qualities or properties of
experiencing entities. This is the case whether the unities one is speaking of are those
constitutive of elementary physical processes like the enduring existence of a table or
stone or those constitutive of conceptual processes characteristic of higher-order beings
like human consciousnesses. Such divergent types of process involve highly disparate
degrees of intensity, in a sense that has been explicated by philosopher Judith Jones. In
her study of Whitehead’s cosmology, aptly titled Intensity, Jones focuses on the power
of elements of the settled world to produce contrasts, as well as on the power of these
contrasts, in turn, to generate intensity, or more precisely intensities of variant degrees.
The general law for such composition is simple: the more elements composing a given
actuality, the more intensity.12
Despite immense variations in the degree of intensity (tables and stones involve little
more than simple physical repetition and thus very little intensity, whereas conscious-
ness, of all cosmological entities, involves a maximum degree of intensity), this univocal
determination of feeling as the reception of data of the settled world that is itself replete
with feeling results in a highly anomalous view of affectivity. On this view, it is not
12 Judith Jones, Intensity: An Essay in Whiteheadian Ontology (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998).
72
some bodily response that produces affect, and affect is not the property or quality of
some endowment of internal structure or complexity; rather, affect is the basic building
block, the core relationality, that informs the texture of the cosmos, that produces time
and space.
This is a situation grasped perfectly by Steven Shaviro in his chapter on feeling in
Without Criteria. As if speaking directly to my above criticism of affect theory’s fixation
on the question of what a body can (be made to) do, Shaviro underscores Whitehead’s
focus on feeling as specifying how an actual entity affects other actual entities:
Every subjective form is different from every other; no subject feels a given datum in
precisely the same manner as any other subject has done. This means, among other things,
that novelty is a function of manner, rather than of essence. The important question for
Whitehead is not what something is, but how it is – or, more precisely, how it affects, and
how it is affected by, other things. […] This emphasis on “subjective form” as a manner of
reception is what links Whitehead to Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic. For all that Kant
privileges and foregrounds cognition, he is drawn into a movement that precedes it and
that is irreducible to it. Time and space, the inner and outer forms of intuition, are modes
of feeling before they are conditions for understanding.13
For Whitehead, in other words, time and space are not “forms of intuition” that
somehow preexist the relations of entities in the universe; on the contrary, they are
themselves products of these relations, or more precisely, products of the process
whereby distinct entities feel one another and acquire their own form from the manner
in which such feeling occurs, as a product of the how of this activity of feeling.
With this understanding of feeling as the fundamental relationality of the world,
we acquire a conceptualization of affectivity that is capable of moving from bodily
matter to matter itself, as Clough would have it. What is involved in such a movement,
however, is not a simple “expansion,” not even a “technical” one, as if we could simply
go from a situation in which the body produces affect that can only be captured with
technical mediation to a situation in which matter would take the place of the body
and in turn produce affect that can only be captured with technical mediation. What is
required is a far more fundamental reconceptualization of what the shift from bodily
matter to matter as such entails: not only does it not amount to a simple substitution
13 Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2009), p. 56.
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Mark B. N. Hansen
of a different, more encompassing body, i.e., the body of the material universe as science
constructs it, for the organic body at issue in affect theory, but it also requires a critical
reassessment of the role accorded bodily activity, the active response of the body, to
material perturbation. In this sense, we can see that lingering traces of the autopoietic
“body-as-organism” continue to animate Clough’s technical expansion of affect theory.
What Whitehead’s alternate, cosmological or environmental (as opposed to bodily)
view of feeling introduces is nothing short of a radically new conception of the rela-
tion between affectivity and the compositional entities or “societies” that populate the
domain of worldly experience. For Whitehead, bodies – which are, again, one kind of
society among others (societies being compositions of actual entities of varying com-
plexity) – are compositions of attained actualities or superjects, each of which has come
to exist and to wield “superjectal-subjective” force because of its own self-inaugurating
feeling of the entirety of the settled world to which it adds itself.14 Bodies, for White-
head, can be said to have or to experience affectivity not because they respond to “vir-
tual” forces but because they are literally made up of elements that all have their respec-
tive origins in feeling and that cohere together through higher-order resonances that
build upon, but do not supersede, their constitutive affective relationality.
On this score, Whitehead’s account of feeling stands opposed to the entire tradition
informing contemporary formations around affect theory, Spinoza included. For
Whitehead, feeling is not and cannot be a quality, activity or property of an already
constituted entity, whether that be thought of as a subject, a body, or an agent. Far from
being the source of power, bodies are more like hosts or channels for the force of worldly
matter. As the superjectal-subjective force of the universe itself, feeling is what impels
the constitution of such entities, and as such can only be felt in a mode of receptive
passivity that is, at the same time, the inchoate instigation of an always singular pattern
of contrast amongst attained actualities or superjects.
In Feed-Forward: On the Future of 21st Century Media, I have developed an interpreta-
tion of Whitehead’s speculative philosophy that addresses the contemporary liberation
of technical media from the anthropocentrism informing its great 19th and 20th century
forms.15 Effectively, I argue that media have begun to operate in ways and at timeframes
14 Superjectal-subjective force designates the power of “attained actualities” to impact the genesis of
future actualities, as well as to operate as elements of higher-order, experiential entities or “societies”.
Quoted terms are key concepts from Process and Reality.
15 Mark B. N. Hansen, Feed-Forward: On the Future of 21st Century Media (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2014).
74
that no longer require or desire the participation of humans and that no longer inter-
face with the domains of our perceptual experience, and I turn to Whitehead’s neutral
ontology of organism to develop resources for rethinking what experience, and human
experience in particular, is within such a context. At the core of this project is an effort
to correct Whitehead’s own massive underestimation of the importance of the superjec-
tive power of the settled world of attained actualities and “real potentiality.” Building
upon Jones’s work in Intensity, I counter Whitehead’s own tendency, a tendency repro-
duced by the vast majority of his critics and commentators, to privilege “concrescence”
(the genesis of new actual entities) over “transition” (the reentry of attained actualities
into the settled universe) and to position conscrescence as the sole source of novelty in
the universe. What results from this correction is an integration of the operations of
concrescence and transition into a single account of process that foregrounds the power
of data, as the bearer of the “real potentiality” of the settled world, to give rise to new
entities (which is equally to say, to more data). Far from being the (sole) source of nov-
elty, concrescence on this account is the product of always singular patterns of contrast
amongst already existent or objectified attained actualities or superjects. The novelty
that is central to process results from the worldly operationality of data, not from the
interior operations of a delimited subjective entity, and this remains the case even
though such a subjective entity – what Whitehead calls the “subjective aim”– is also the
result of the very same worldly operationality of data.
If we carry over the payoff of this correction to the topic of feeling in Whitehead,
what we find is a similar division between the worldly operationality of data, which
Whitehead most typically calls “feeling,” and the delimited subjective formations to
which it gives rise, which Whitehead designates as “the emotional complex” of the
finished or “satisfied” concrescence:
A “feeling” belongs to the positive species of “prehensions.” […] An actual entity has a per-
fectly definite bond with each item in the universe. This determinate bond is its prehen-
sion of that item. A negative prehension is the definite exclusion of that item from positive
contribution to the subject’s own real internal constitution. This doctrine involves the
position that a negative prehension expresses a bond. A positive prehension is the definite
inclusion of that item into positive contribution to the subject’s own real internal consti-
tution. This positive inclusion is called its “feeling” of that item. Other entries are required
to express how any one item is felt. All actual entities in the actual world, relatively to a
given actual entity as “subject,” are necessarily “felt” by that subject, though in general
vaguely. An actual entity as felt is said to be “objectified” for that subject. Only a selection
75
Mark B. N. Hansen
of eternal objects are “felt” by a given subject […]. But those eternal objects which are not
felt are not therefore negligible. For each negative prehension has its own subjective form,
however trivial and faint. It adds to the emotional complex, though not to the objective data.
The emotional complex is the subjective form of the final “satisfaction.”16
Only by dispensing with Whitehead’s apparent desire to maintain a symmetry

between positive and negative prehensions can we do justice to the radical potential
of his account of the passively-received, non-subject-centered, superjective agency of
objectified data. Rather than characterizing feeling (or positive prehension) first and
foremost as a “contribution to the subject’s own real internal constitution,” we would
do better to divide feeling between two distinct standpoints, that of the objective data
informing process and that of the incipient subjective polarization. Prior to giving
rise to the latter – and in order to do so – feelings characterize the pattern of contrasts
of objectified data as they bond together and converge around a congealing unity that
can only subsequently emerge as the prehender or feeler of these feelings. Feelings thus
precede the constitution of any distinct feeler.
At certain moments in Process and Reality, such as when he describes his philosophy of
organism as the “inversion” of Kant’s philosophy, Whitehead clearly grasps the relation
between feeling and feeler as a genetic one, with feeling playing the role of source:
The philosophy of organism seeks to describe how objective data pass into subjective
satisfaction, and how order in the objective data provides intensity in the subjective satis-
faction. For Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the
subject emerges from the world – a “superject” rather than a “subject.” The word “object”
thus means an entity which is a potentiality for being a component in feeling; and the
word “subject” means the entity constituted by the process of feeling, and including this
process. The feeler is the unity emergent from its own feelings; and feelings are the details
of the process intermediary between this unity and its many data. The data are the poten-
tials for feeling. […] The process is the elimination of indeterminateness of feeling from
the unity of one subjective experience.17
Despite Whitehead’s finalist claim that “the feelings are what they are in order
that their subject may be what it is,” there is a clear sense in which feelings must first
16 Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 41 (emphasis added).

17 Ibid., p. 88.
76
operate in the mode of efficient causality precisely in order for any subsequent subjective
polarization to emerge. Thus, we can conclude that Whitehead, notwithstanding his
undo emphasis on subjective polarization, accords a primacy to feeling as the source
for worldly contrasts that give rise to subjective polarizations. With Whitehead, then,
we can affirm that “a feeling – i.e., a positive prehension – is essentially a transition
effecting a concrescence.”18
We can now appreciate what is at stake in Whitehead’s efforts, halted as they may be, to
correlate feelings with the objective data of worldly superjects as they generate contrasts
that will yield concrescing subjectivities. In what amounts to a categorical distinction
between feelings and emotions, Whitehead here installs feelings as something like a
medium or texture of relationality in which the objectified matter of the world can, by
generating the concrescence of new actualities, produce new feelings. Far from being
relative to any subjective perspective, feelings are what make such perspectives possible
in the first place: bluntly put, feelings mediate the relations among data that produce
subjective intensity, or as Whitehead puts it in one of the above cited passages, they are
“intermediary between [the feeler’s] unity and its many data.”
As they are described in Whitehead’s account of “the emotional complex,” emotions
pertain to the “subjective form of the final ‘satisfaction’” of an actual entity’s concrescence.
They describe the how of the concrescence, which is to say, the way in which the “unity
as felt,” the unity that is a “contrast of entities” or objective data, is transformed into a
unity of subjective form in the accomplishment of the concrescing actuality.19 In a sense,
then, emotion in its Whiteheadian determination is a capture or maximal contraction of
affectivity (or feeling), just as it is for Massumi, Clough, and other contemporary affect
theorists. Yet, in Whitehead, emotion, like feeling, operates first and foremost within
the speculative process whereby the real things that compose the universe come to be.
Emotion is not a macroscale contraction of the microscale operations of affectivity, as
it is on Massumi’s account; rather it is, like feeling, a microscale operation that can be
differentiated from feeling precisely because of its status as the final result of the process
that eliminates the indeterminateness of feelings.
Steven Shaviro is, accordingly, mistaken in his assessment of how Whitehead’s
categories map onto Massumi’s:
18 Ibid., p. 221.
19 All quoted terms refer to concepts from Whitehead’s Process and Reality.
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Mark B. N. Hansen
I will use the terms “feeling,” “emotion,” and “affect” pretty much interchangeably. This
is in accordance with Whitehead’s own usage. Nonetheless, I remain mindful of Brian
Massumi’s crucial distinction between affect and emotion. […] I think that this distinction
is relevant for Whitehead as well, but he does not mark it terminologically. As I will argue,
Whitehead’s “feeling” largely coincides, in the first instance, with Massumi’s “affect.”
Whitehead goes on, however, to give a genetic account of how, in “high-grade” organisms
such as ourselves, something like “emotion” in Massumi’s sense arises out of this more
primordial sort of feeling.20
Shaviro’s effort to map Whitehead’s critique of pure feeling onto the structure of
affect theory, with its defining division between a molecular, nonsubjective affectivity
and a molar, subjective emotion, misses what is most novel and significant about it.
Shaviro misses the fact that, for Whitehead, feeling comprises the vector character of the
physical cosmos itself and, as such, is built into the process of the world at all levels.
Here we come to the question of what Whitehead can offer affect theory. As I have
been suggesting, his approach to feeling as the basis for the relationality of process
allows us to situate affectivity as a component of worldly materiality itself, rather than
a result of bodily reactions to such materiality. As distinct dimensions of affectivity,
feeling and emotion thus pertain to different aspects of speculative process: while
feeling explains the general process through which data of the world gives rise to new
data, emotion characterizes a specific phase in that process, the moment when a new
actuality (a new datum) is completed. It is clearly the case that Whitehead’s philosophy
would have room for, if not in fact require, an account of emotion in higher-order
experiential entities (societies); however, we must admit that he does not really provide
a robust account of affectivity as an experiential achievement. More specifically, even as
his philosophy of organism allows us to locate affectivity directly within the material
flux itself, Whitehead does not really explain how the feelings that characterize actual
entities as the data of the settled world (i.e., as superjects) relate to feelings of experiential
entities or societies that are composed from them. There is a general, yet vague, sense in
Whitehead that the subjectivity (superjective subjectivity) produced by feeling at the
speculative level is what furnishes the source for higher-order, experiential forms of
affect and emotion, but nowhere does Whitehead tells us how this takes place: how, that
20 Shaviro, Without Criteria, p. 46.
78
is, the affectivity of component actualities can be subsumed into and can become the
motor for the affective experience of societies.
Affective Exchange, or the Integration of Excess
To address this process, one that is absolutely fundamental for any account that would
predicate affectivity of matter itself, we must turn to the work of another philosopher –
one who, it would seem, was not directly influenced by Whitehead’s work. Affectivity,
or more precisely, “affective exchange,” plays a fundamental role in Gilbert Simondon’s
philosophy of individuation. In his major text, L’Individuation à la Lumière des Notions
de Forme et d’Information, Simondon develops a general account of ontogenesis that
encompasses all levels of being from the physico-chemical and biological to the psychic
and collective.
The basic concept at the heart of this project is individuation, and Simondon’s key
move is to think the individual from the standpoint of individuation, rather than fol-
lowing the tradition of hylomorphism which accords individuation exclusively to an
already constituted individual. The anteriority and surplus of individuation over the
individual means that the latter has a constitutive relation to something outside of it.
In the case of inanimate beings, like the crystal that Simondon takes as a key example,
individuation occurs abruptly in a single event that produces a dyad of individual and
milieu; the ongoing evolution of a crystalline structure following this event involves
the simple, physico-chemical production of more crystals from the interaction with a
highly stable milieu. In the case of the living, by contrast, both individual and milieu
continuously evolve on account of their distinct but intertwined, ongoing relations to
a preindividual domain of metastability that forms an inexhaustible and separately
evolving source of potentiality. By contrast to the crystal, in the case of the living, there
is “perpetual individuation, which is life itself.”21 “The living,” Simondon reiterates, “is
theater and agent of individuation; its becoming is a permanent individuation.”22
With this fundamental distinction between animate and inanimate individuation,
Simondon structures his general account of ontogenesis in a different way than does
Whitehead. For the latter, there is no particular line of demarcation between the living
21 Gilbert Simondon, L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Grenoble: Millon,
2005), p. 27 (trans. Mark B. N. Hansen).
22 Ibid., p. 29.
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Mark B. N. Hansen
and the nonliving, and life itself must be sought in the quotient of novelty involved in
the genesis of actual entities rather than in the organization of experiential entities (organ-
isms). For Simondon, by contrast, the living is defined by the structure of the living
being’s relation to a metastable outside: as opposed to an inanimate being like the crystal,
a living being remains in perpetual becoming. To achieve the flexibility or indeterminacy
required for such becoming, the living being self-complexifies: it doubles its relation to
its exterior milieu by developing what Simondon calls an “internal resonance.”23
Because of Simondon’s effort to specify the particularity of living individuation,
he introduces something that remains underdeveloped in Whitehead’s account: an
explication of how affectivity and emotion take on a special role in living processes.
Whereas Whitehead locates feelings at the level of process itself and explains the purely
passive origin of affectivity, Simondon excavates the central role played by affect and
emotion in the compositions that organize the basic components of process (actual
entities) into experiential entities or societies, and specifically, into living organisms.
This excavation centers on “internal resonance” and how it specifies the way a living
being undergoes perpetual becoming: internal resonance affords the living being
the resources to adapt to a world that is both constantly changing and in excess over
it: affectivity comprises “the resonance of being in relation to itself, and links the
individuated being to a preindividual reality that is associated to it.”24
Here we can grasp both the specific difference between Whitehead and Simondon
concerning affectivity as well as their common adherence to a “double ontology” that
distinguishes a domain of experience from a domain that is the source for this domain.
Whereas Whitehead posits feeling as the very motor of process itself and thus approaches
it first and foremost as a speculative (pre-experiential) operation, Simondon deploys
affectivity as a hinge between the domain of experience and the preindividual source of
potentiality for experience. It is in affectivity that a living individual experiences its own
partiality and incompleteness, and comes to understand how its ongoing individuation
involves an open relation to a preindividual source of potentiality outside it.
Let us now turn to the question of how Simondon’s account of affectivity helps
transform our understanding of the second key concept in affect theory, the notion
that affect is in excess over something, be it consciousness, cognition, or emotion. As
we shall see, Simondon’s model allows us to conceptualize affect not simply from the
standpoint of the limited experiential entity that it exceeds (the individual), but also
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., p. 31.
80
from the standpoint of the larger relationality that is the source of this excess. Crucially,
Simondon introduces two terms for, and two ways of conceptualizing, this latter stand-
point: it is, of course, the standpoint of the ongoing individuation of the individual;
but it is also the standpoint of what Simondon calls “the subject.” Whereas “individua-
tion” expresses the excess of the process of becoming over the individual, the “subject”
expresses this same excess from the standpoint of individuated being. Unlike the indi-
vidual, which might be understood as a set of individuated realities, the subject encom-
passes both individuated and pre-individuated elements, in a way that makes it laden
with “potentialities.”25 Like all potentiality, these specific potentialities of a given sub-
ject require a relational structure to express themselves. For Simondon, this structure
involves the subject’s relation with other beings and a form of individuation – transin-
dividuation – that, like the preindividual, exceeds the reality of the individual: “Gath-
ered together with others, the subject can be correlatively theater and agent of a second
individuation that gives birth to the transindividual collective and binds the subject to
other subjects.”26
With its capacity to designate an aspect “within” the individual itself that exceeds
the individual, the subject helps us understand the full significance of Simondon’s
characterization of affect in terms of “affective exchanges”: affectivity is precisely the
medium for the relationality that links the individual to its preindividual source and to
its transindividual participation, and it is this relationality itself – the product of affec-
tive exchanges – that constitutes the subject. In this sense, the subject is not so much
an aspect of the individual as it is the expression of the individual’s own constitutive
excess, of the fact that “being is never one,” that it is always “more-than-one.”27 Affec-
tivity, Simondon writes, “is a way for the instantiated being to locate itself according to
a vaster becoming”: it is the “index of becoming.”28
It is important that we appreciate just how anomalous Simondon’s use of the term
“subject” is: by subject, he definitively does not mean the self-reflexive subject of Western
philosophy. Indeed, not only does Simondon’s subject lack the traditional attributes of
philosophical consciousness, it in fact comprises something of an antithesis to it: as a
relational milieu of the individual, the subject is what connects the latter to the larger
biological and technical environment in which its continuous individuation occurs.
25 Ibid., p. 310.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., p. 326.
28 Ibid., p. 260.
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Mark B. N. Hansen
We can now appreciate why affectivity is impersonal and non-individual: it operates

beyond the bounds of, and in some sense against, the psychic individualization that,
on Simondon’s account, complexifies living individuation in ways that yield the kind
of personal experience characteristic of human selfhood. Affectivity is thus the mode of
experience through which the individuated being lives its embeddedness, beyond its
individuality and personality, within larger domains of process where it does not enjoy
any kind of privileged perspective and where it operates as an element of other, broader
processes of individuation. This is precisely why Simondon describes affectivity as an
exchange between two states of being:
Affectivo-emotivity is not only the retention of the results of action within the individual
being. It is a transformation and it plays an active role: it expresses the relation between
the two domains of the subject-being [l’être sujet] and modifies action as a function of
this relation, harmonizing it to this relation, and making an effort to harmonize the
collective. The expression of affectivity in the collective has a regulative value […] of the
manner in which the preindividual individuates itself in different subjects in order to
found the collective. Emotion is this individuation in the process of effectuating itself
in transindividual presence, but affectivity itself precedes and succeeds emotion; it is in
the subject being [l’être sujet], the one that translates and perpetuates the possibility of
individuation in the collective. It is affectivity which leads the charge of preindividual
nature to become the support for collective individuation. Affectivity is the mediation
between the preindividual and the individual.29
Affectivity, in short, is the experiential mode in which the living individual literally
lives outside itself and comes into contact with its preindividual source. It is the
experience through which the individual becomes subject.
As a mode in which a living organism can experience its own connection to its pre-
individual source, affectivity thus phenomenalizes what remains speculative in White-
head’s account – the relationality that comprises the energetico-material domain of
metastability or potentiality. Yet when the individual experiences affectivity, it does not
do so by processing it through its own psychic or embodied systems, but by opening
itself out to a far broader set of energetico-material processes, by living its imbrication
within the material flows of the universe. In this sense, we could say that affectivity is
29 Ibid., p. 252.
82
the capture of the individual by the greater domain of process itself, or perhaps better,
that it is the re-capture of the individual by the material fluxes from which it originated
in the first place.
All of this is part of what Simondon seeks to theorize when he differentiates the
subject from the individual: thought of from the side of experience, the subject is
precisely the mode in which the individual experiences itself not from its perspective
as perceptual center, but as an element in a larger process of becoming. This becomes clear
in Simondon’s explanation of the relations linking perception and action, emotion
and affectivity, where affectivity emerges as the crucial operation that spans the gap
separating the perceptual world of the individual from its preindividual source and
continuous correlate:
[A]ffectivity indicates and comprises this relation between the individualized being and
preindividual reality; it is therefore, to a certain degree, heterogeneous with respect to
individualized reality, and appears to bring it something from the exterior, indicating to
it that it is not a complete and closed unit [ensemble] of reality. The problem of the indi-
vidual is that of perceptual worlds; the problem of the subject, by contrast, is that of the
heterogeneity between perceptual worlds and the affective world, between the individual
and the preindividual. This problem is that of the subject insofar as it is subject: the sub-
ject is the individual and other than the individual; it is incompatible with itself. 30
It is precisely though its incompatibility with itself that the subject can grasp its
operation as a part of a larger energetico-material becoming.
Returning now to that central investment of affect theory – the differentiation of
affect from emotion – we can understand better what it involves: rather than designating
the intrusion of a virtual dimension into bodily experience (which is equally to say, the
bodily capture of the virtual), as it does in Massumi’s updating of Deleuze’s neo-Spinozist
model of affect, the distinction of affect and emotion in Simondon marks a differentia-
tion of two distinct, yet correlated models or accounts of experience, one that remains
psychic and bodily and that retains the individual as its frame of reference, another that
is material in a more radical sense and that, by introducing the perspective of the subject,
manages to capture how the individual is itself part of a broader domain of process.
30 Ibid., p. 253, emphasis added.
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Mark B. N. Hansen
If what differentiates emotion from affectivity on Simondon’s account is not and

cannot be a distinction between virtuality and actuality, that is because, for Simondon,
affectivity and emotion literally belong to different domains of reality. In a sense, emo-
tion is the capture of affectivity by the individual, but what results is a psychic and bodily
experience that belongs exclusively to and is entirely contained within the perspective
of the individual. Affectivity, as we have already seen, marks the relation between the
domain of individuated being and the preindividual, and thus broaches the bounds of
the individual’s perspective. Whereas Massumi’s account presupposes a single plane
of immanence on which all processes unfold, Simondon’s institutes a divide between
ontological domains and correlates this divide itself to the experiential modality that
he calls affectivity. With this divide, we achieve what we have been seeking, a doubled
account of affectivity that is able to conceptualize it at once as an aspect of the expe-
rience of the individuated-being-in-continuous-individuation and as an aspect of the
energetico-material processes that comprise the ongoing individuation of the universe
itself. On this account, the materiality of affectivity is not limited to “bodily matter”,
i.e., to materialization of affective forces in the body, but encompasses the entirety of the
contact between individuated being and the larger universe within which and as part of
which its becoming happens.
If Simondon thereby furnishes an experiential account of affectivity that dissociates
it from its exclusive focalization in relation to the individual (and more precisely, to
the virtual-actual economy of the individual), what remains to be accounted for is how
Simondon’s account of affectivity as the bridge linking the individual to the preindividual
correlates with Whitehead’s account of feeling as the relationality of process. With his
understanding of affectivity as a material modality that crosses between the domain
of preindividual process and the domain of individuated becoming, Simondon helps
us to flesh out the operation whereby actual entities, which hold the status of the
preindividual within Whitehead’s process ontology, get composed into experiential
societies (the equivalent of individuated being or individuals). As objectified actualities
or superjects, actual entities comprise the “real potentiality” of the settled world both
for future process and for the formation and perdurance of individuated societies.
What Simondon adds to this picture is an account of how (preindividual) attained
actualities relate to (individuated) societies, a dimension of process that remains obscure
in Whitehead. The attained actualities that compose the disjunctive continuum and
that inform the “real potentiality” of the settled world furnish a preindividual source
for the continuous becoming that constitutes any and every experiential society, from
the most minute (atoms or quantum disentanglements) to the most broad (geological
84
formations). In the case of certain higher-order beings, including of course humans,

this correlation of preindividual attained actualities and individuated societal becoming
takes the form of a continuous and modulated being-with an energetico-material excess,
that remains, however, part of societal becoming and that is experienced by the society
itself as instability, as a threat to its ongoing coherence, as being “more-than-one.”
If the qualitative modality of this experience of continuously-constituting-societal-
excess is affectivity, something that Simondon helps us to appreciate, then we have
license to conclude that the (Simondonian) subject is a (Whiteheadian) society of a certain
level of complexity, i.e., that level constitutive of the living human organism. With his
understanding of feeling as the elementary relationality of the universe – a relationality
that effectively forms the very basis for the ongoing evolution of Simondon’s
preindividual domain – Whitehead in turn helps us appreciate the fact that affectivity
does not originate from the reaction of the individuated bodymind to its constitutive outside.
Rather, in line with Clough’s insight that has guided my thinking here, Whitehead
furnishes a mechanism whereby affectivity can be predicated of the processual
becoming of the preindividual itself, independently from, prior to, and outside of its
operation as the qualitative correlate of individuated societies/subjects. And he also
thereby helps us appreciate how the material affectivity comprising the relationality
of the preindividual – what Whitehead conceptualizes as the “presubjective” intensity
generated through contrasts of attained actualities – itself directly informs experienced
affectivity, without it having to be first processed by the experiencer of the experience.
If this direct experience appears, from the standpoint of the individuated experiencing
society, to come from the outside, from the standpoint of process itself, by contrast,
it remains internal both to the relationality of the preindividual energetico-material
domain and to whatever incomplete and inherently unstable societal becoming it
specifically informs. I would thus wholeheartedly concur with the analogy Couze
Venn draws between Simondonian affect and gravity, on account of their constitutive
relationality and their presubjective model of operationality:
Affect between living beings is like gravity for physical bodies, since gravity too requires
that there be more than one body in the universe. No less than gravity, affect is not an
immaterial thing secreted by bodies. In short, affect, as a relational force or energy, is radi-
cally interior to the relation and not an outside force.31
31 Couze Venn, “Individuation, Relationality, Affect: Rethinking the Human in Relation to the Living,”
Body & Society, 16.1 (2010): p. 129–161, here p. 153 (emphasis added).
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Mark B. N. Hansen
With this conclusion, I can close the circle on my effort to radicalize the material turn
within affect theory: insofar as affectivity demarcates a continuum from the elementary
relationality comprising the preindividual to the qualitative experience of the embed-
dedness of individuated beings within this relationality, there simply can be no outside
to it. Affectivity is not an excess over individuated being, as the tradition inherited from
Spinoza would have it. On the contrary, it is at once the fundamental mode of operation
of the energetico-material universe in itself (which, of course, encompasses the indi-
viduation of higher-order living organisms) and the mode in which the individuated
living being’s inherence in this larger universe can be experienced from the perspective
of its own ongoing individuation. Just as the experience of gravity by a body attests to
the materiality of gravity as a physical force of the universe, so too does the experience of
affectivity by a subject attest to the materiality of affectivity as the relational force of the
universe. As a force that operates across all levels of individuated being (as well as under-
neath individuation as such), affectivity informs the universe’s ongoing becoming just
as much as it does the individuated subject-society’s constitutive suturing of the gap
between individuation and the preindividual. Affectivity, in short, is the relational force
of process as such.
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Bernd Bösel
Affective Synchronization, Rhythmanalysis

and the Polyphonic Qualities of the Present Moment
The Affective Dispositif
It is no coincidence that affect has emerged as a major topic in the humanities, social
and natural sciences in recent decades. Since the 1970s this development has been
a response to an increasing sense of urgency (or rather to a set, a bundle of urgencies
originating within and outside scientific discourses) about overcoming the hegemony
of representation, signification and cognition, but also, crucially, to utilize knowledge
about affects and emotions to improve the ability to influence and control populations.
Understanding affects and emotions in this way then, is clearly not just of theoretical
interest. Rather, this understanding converges with political, economic and techno-
scientific power relations. It gives spin doctors a better grasp of how to deal with the
moods and desires of the electorate, thereby enabling a constantly improving, strategically
orientated politics of feeling.1 It also increases professionials’ abilities to identify and react to
the emotional states of whoever is being observed: customers and clients, commuters and
passengers, job applicants and employees, suspects and convicts. And it provides basic
research for one of the most ambitious projects of the twenty-first century, the teaching
of machines to first display emotions and then even to genuinely feel them, and of course
to appropriately interact with their programmers and users – to attune affectively to those
notoriously emotional entities formerly known as humans.
In her book Vom Begehren nach dem Affekt (Desire After Affect) Marie-Luise Angerer
interprets these developments as an on-going emergence of what she calls the “affective
dispositif.”2 What distinguishes Angerer’s use of this term from the rather inflationary
adoptions of Foucault’s concept in the humanities and social sciences is that she explic-
itly ties it to the latter’s History of Sexuality by suggesting that the affective dispositif is
presently replacing the sexuality dispositif (dispositif de sexualité) described by Foucault
1 For a discussion of this concept, see: Brigitte Bargetz’ article in this volume.
2 Marie-Luise Angerer, Vom Begehren nach dem Affekt (Zurich/Berlin: Diaphanes, 2007), p. 7. English trans-
lation Desire After Affect (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014).
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Bernd Bösel
in the 1970s.3 One of the main effects of this shift concerns the question of how subjec-
tivity and truth are being aligned. Within the affective dispositif, a subject’s truth is no
longer conceived as lying hidden in its unconscious desires, but rather as being displayed
in its various affects, moods and emotions. This shift from desire to affect correlates,
according to Angerer, to the turning away from metaphors of the deep, of the inner core
that was believed to truly contain what is inextinguishably individual about a subject,
in favor of an affirmation of surface metaphors. These metaphors can be found, to name
just a few nodes within this emerging affective dispositif, in recent philosophical dis-
course (Deleuze’s affection-image); in internet terms like the emoticons that are used in
social media to express or rather display moods and feelings; in the psychology of emo-
tions’ claims to be able to read emotions from facial expressions or body postures (Paul
Ekman);4 and in neurophysiology’s pride in being able to visualize emotional arousal
through functional brain imaging technologies.
The truth is no longer to be revealed by slow hermeneutic processes, by interpreting
and reinterpreting, by revealing hidden layers of meaning, but is rather to be recognized
visually, either by simple techniques that can be learned as a social skill or through
emotional intelligence training, or by highly sophisticated technologies that make
visible what has been invisible for too long. The shift is not just from the depths to the
surface, but also from slowness to quickness, and one may ask whether the latter might
be the fundamental shift.5 In other words, is the affective dispositif the next logical step in
the on-going acceleration of technological as well as social conditions? At least it seems
to fit perfectly into this acceleration process, which again and again has been described
as the main driving factor of modernity.6 From this point of view, the socio-political
urgency that Foucault spoke of regarding the emergence of new dispositifs seems to
have crossed a certain threshold of speed (both technological and socio-political) around
the 1970s and/or 1980s. Words and meanings – the semiosphere, to adopt Jurij Lotman’s
3 See: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 – An Introduction (New York: Random House,
1978). The term dispositif de sexualité, which is also the title of one of the book’s chapters, was originally
translated as “deployment of sexuality.” Since “dispositif” has since been adopted into English and
German, I have not used the original translation.
4 For a discussion of Ekman’s research and its deployment, compare: Anna Tuschling’s article in this
volume.
5 A very similar shift from surface can be observed in discussions of music, compare: Robert Fink, “Going
Flat: Post-Hierarchical Music Theory and the Musical Surface,” in: Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, eds.,
Rethinking Music (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 102–137.
6 Compare: Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration. A New Theory of Modernity (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2013).
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Affective Synchronization, Rhythmanalysis and the Polyphonic Qualities of the Present Moment
term – have become too slow to remain the defining factor for political, economic and
artistic developments in what can be called the late-modern acceleration society. They now
accompany affects and images, whereas for a long time it was the other way around.
If one acknowledges the hypothesis that acceleration follows its own logic and is not
something modern societies can decide for or against, the “shift from the sayable to the
visible”7 looks like a necessary one, and reveals the affective dispositif to be the fitting
response to the growing pressures of the post-Fordist era.
The hypothesis of acceleration as the true subject of history has, of course, been
Paul Virilio’s central idea for as long as he has been publishing as a “dromologist.” In
his more recent writings, he has extended his bleak diagnoses by inventing words and
phrases that can be seen as an important contribution to the analysis of the affective
dispositif. The possibility of real-time data processing around the globe has, in his view,
led to a new form of totalitarianism that he dubs “globalitarianism.” The distinguish-
ing features of this globalitarianism are social cybernetics, control and surveillance,8
“civil dissuasion” that aims at keeping civilians in a constant state of fear, and the “glo-
balization of affect” or the “synchronization of emotions on a global scale,” a topic that
seems to have become a main focus within Virilio’s vision of contemporary existence
as it brings the worldwide techno-medial synchronization process to a new, and in his
view, absolutely fatal stage.9 But of course, affective synchronization by itself is neither
a new, nor an intrinsically problematic phenomenon. So to better consider this topic, it
might be useful to take a look at how affective synchronization has been conceptualized
in psychology and sociology, before returning to philosophical accounts of contempo-
rary media and technology.
Affective Synchronization – Variations on a Theme
Indeed, synchronization has recently become a term that pervades our daily routines.
Whenever we turn on one of our gadgets, it will try to synchronize with the time frame
of a higher-order medium that is acknowledged as setting the tempo. If you plug
7 Angerer, Vom Begehren, p. 120.

8 Paul Virilio and John Armitage, “From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond,” in: John
Armitage, ed., Virilio Live: Selected Interviews (London: Sage, 2011), p. 15–47, here p. 29.
9 Both are recurring themes in Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear (Cambridge, Mass.: Semiotext(e),
2012).
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Bernd Bösel
your portable music device into your computer, it will ask you to let these gadgets
synchronize. If you turn on your computer, it will almost certainly try to get into
contact with real time on the Internet. Real time synchronization is the way our things
now work; this will most probably only come to our attention when synchronization
stops, when we don’t feel connected to the real time that is mediated through globally
connected media, when the ongoing refreshes, updatings and actualizations stop. In a
Heideggerian turn, we could say, the time structure of our real-time-dependent activity
only shows itself when some unforeseen desynchronization occurs. Time seems to stop,
or to drag unbearably, it stretches instead of unfolding, we feel abandoned by real time,
or left within an unmediated real time but without the presence of a virtual community
that, precisely because it is not a bodily presence, will always be fresh rather than tired,
exhausted, slow and asleep. It is not so much the city, but the World Wide Web that
never sleeps, that is awake in a way nothing has been before.
The variations of affective synchronization that will be presented here are arbitrary in
the sense that other sources could have been used, but nevertheless the chosen variations
are presented in a logical order. To start with developmental psychology means to start
with dyadic relationships; to continue with sociology provides the opportunity to
pick up on psychological findings and transfer them to small and large groups; and to
end with analyses of contemporary media enables us to address the pressing issue of
a possible global-scale synchronization concerning not just a large group, but global
society itself – if there is indeed something that can be called a global society.
In developmental psychology, the topic of interpersonal synchronization is debated
along with the term “affect attunement” proposed by Daniel Stern in his book The
Interpersonal World of the Infant. Why did Stern feel the need to introduce the term “affect
attunement” when he investigated the interactions of infants (9–15 months old) and
their mothers?10 Apparently the alternative conceptualizations that were at hand in the
1980s did not fit the observations of what was going on in these interactions. Stern’s
examples always begin with some action on the side of the infant, who may become
excited by a toy or make some gesture that calls for attention. The mother then always
responds by picking up some quality of what the infant was doing and acting in a way
that relates to it expressively and affectively. A form of matching is going on. But this
matching does not need to be in the same mode or channel. If the infant uses sound, the
mother may answer by making a gesture; if the infant makes a gesture, the mother may
10 See: Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
90
answer by saying something, emphasizing certain words; if the infant repeats a word,
the mother may break into a smile. So the matching is largely cross-modal, according
to Stern. This is crucial, because it proves that what is going on is not imitation in the
common sense of the word, but rather a translation of one expression into another, of one
behavior into another that reflects the person’s feeling state. “Attunement behaviors […]
recast the event and shift the focus of attention to what is behind the behavior, to the
quality of feeling that is being shared.”11 So one might also say that sharing affective
states operates through what may be called affect attunement interactions. The sharing
does not occur when there is no such interaction. Stern concludes that “feeling states
that are never attuned to will be experienced only alone, isolated from the interpersonal
context of shareable experience. What is at stake here is nothing less than the shape of
and extent of the shareable inner universe.”12
Crucially, this synchronization process does not lead to a complete matching –
synchronization is not complete,13 it is not total, and it depends entirely on diachronicity,
on an interaction that takes time and has a certain rhythm. This rhythm provides a
time frame that must not be broken, or the interaction stops, which means that the
participants are not sharing any more – until the rhythm is picked up again or a new
one is found. Also, Stern stresses that the attuning reactions do not need to be on the
same level of intensity; variations may occur, some unintentionally, because an exact
repetition is impossible in the first place. But some variations may occur intentionally
when, for example, the mother feels that the affective state of the infant should be
intensified or, on the contrary, dampened. Stern calls these variations over-attunement
and under-attunement. Both still qualify as affect attunement, even if they are used as
ways to intervene.
Another important distinction that Stern makes is between “categorical affects” and
“vitality affects”. Categorical affects are those that have a clear-cut content that can
be sociolinguistically fixed.14 Stern mentions “happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust,
11 Ibid., p. 142.
12 Ibid., p. 151–152.
13 To be exact, Stern does not use the term synchronization here, but developmental psychology, in line
with his findings, does – for example Allan Schore, one of the leading theoreticians of what is called “affect
regulation”. See: Allan Schore, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, Inc., 1994).
14 Stern’s distinction runs parallel to Massumi’s between affect and emotion. See: Brian Massumi,
Parables for the Virtual. Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 28.
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Bernd Bösel
surprise, interest, and perhaps shame, and their combinations.”15 But looking into
affect attunement interactions, one can see that most affective states that are shared
and attuned do “not comfortably fit into these current theories of [categorical] affect,
and for that reason they require a separate name.”16 So Stern calls them “vitality affects”,
and uses the metaphor “rush” to convey what he means by the term; and he also refers
to neurology when he speaks of “envelopes of neural firings” to further explain what is
felt in a vitality affect.
The theory of affect attunement thus describes how affective synchronization
between two persons is established: it is an effect of diachronous interactions of a certain
quality. All of these interactions express and convey a certain affective intensity, most
of them being vitality affects rather than clear-cut categorial affects. Through the
chain of these affective responses something like a background affect is being shared
or created, something which could be called mood. Through the diachronous exchange
of short-term affects, a longer-term affect is created that runs synchronously through
the psychophysical systems of the participants. This interplay and interdependence of
diachronicity and synchronicity is of great importance, as will be made clearer in the
discussion of Bernard Stiegler and Henri Lefebvre.
Even though Stern develops his theory of affect attunement by investigating mother
and child interactions, it might have become clear that his descriptions suit other inter-
actions as well. It is no surprise then that American sociologist Randall Collins refers to
affect attunement when he analyses what he calls interaction ritual chains. Interaction ritu-
als range from dyads to very large groups, but independent of their scale, their function
is to establish synchronicity between their participants. This enables Collins not only to
transfer categories of Emile Durkheim’s ritual theory to the level of microsociology, but
also to integrate Stern’s research to demonstrate how emotional or affective synchroni-
zation works long before the capacity to speak is developed.17
So how are group members able to synchronize? Again, by falling into the same
rhythm or by developing a rhythm that can be shared. This synchronization process
has been dubbed rhythmic entrainment: “Individuals who get into the flow of an inter
action have made a series of adjustments that bring their rhythms together; hence they
can ‘keep the beat’ with what their partner is doing by anticipation, rather than by
15 Stern, Interpersonal World, p. 54.

16 Ibid., p. 55.
17 Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 79. For
Stern’s research, see: Interpersonal World, p. 79.
92
reaction.”18 This corporeal process leads, if sufficiently intense, to emotional entrainment

as well.19 Through this synchronization process, solidarity is created – “the greater the
entrainment, the greater the solidarity.”20 There are also indications about how long
the feelings of solidarity and belonging created in interaction rituals remains – more or
less a week.21 But of course there is a way to prolong this interval: by creating symbols,
which in large crowds are usually taken “from whatever it was that the audience was
consciously focused upon,” which may be a sports team and its emblem, or the artistic
performers, “or possibly the music, play, or film itself that becomes the Durkheimian
sacred object.”22 So the interaction ritual is now seen as integrating symbols and objects,
which are not yet the source of the synchronization process, but definitely contribute to
its communal power.
That modernity has seen a fundamental shift in the relation between real-life inter-
actions and symbols, or objects that function as their amplifiers and memory images,
is a hypothesis that contemporary critical media theories generally share. In the case
of Bernard Stiegler, this assumption is embedded in one of the most elaborate (if not
uncontested) philosophies of technology that have yet emerged. In the third volume of
Technics and Time, Stiegler analyzes what he calls industrially produced temporal objects.
By this he means time-related media content: radio programs, movies and TV shows that
might also be called “temporal programs” because they are designed by what Stiegler
calls the “programming industries” to produce a synchronicity that in turn can bring
about a loss of individual temporality, of differal and thus of eventfulness.
Stiegler is aware that synchronization has “always [been] at work in public
commemorations, private or public festivals, and other cultural moments, but always
as moments of exception,” but due to the emergence of electronic media and a globalized
distribution system, these moments of exception have now become “quasi-permanent
and systematic.” 23 It is precisely this transformation from exception to rule that brings
with it the risk of “a generalized loss of individuation and a swallowing up of exceptional
18 Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains, p. 77f.

19 For a more thorough discussion of “rhythmic entrainment”, see: Wiebke Trost’s article in this
volume.
20 Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains, p. 83.
21 Ibid., p. 237.
22 Ibid., p. 83.
23 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3. Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press 2011), p. 100.
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Bernd Bösel
moments in the continuous event-ful flux the programming industries unleash on the
hypermasses of consciousness.”24
To sharpen his argument, Stiegler adopts Gilbert Simondon’s model of psychic and
collective individuation. A single consciousness unfolds for itself in idiosyncratic dia-
chrony but of course always stays in touch with the time structure and affectivity of a
given community: without this contact no group cohesion would be possible. But what is
even more fundamental is that not even understanding is conceivable without a synchro-
nization of consciousnesses and their retentional systems. These synchronizations depend
on artificial means of memory that tie individuals together in a commonality of symbolic
and material objects. Both the individual “I” and the collective “We” are understood as
“inseparable processes of co-individuation” that together are meant to form a rhythm.25
Even though he uses cognitive (or even ontological) rather than affective concepts, it is
clear that what Stiegler describes is very similar to sociological theories of rituals and sym-
bols, as all of these synchronize the bodily rhythms and affects of their participants.
But Stiegler manages to extend this perspective by inserting it into his foundational
theory of external tertiary retentions or “epiphylogenetic” memory systems.26 Due to
their exteriority, these memory systems always already are capable of being manipu-
lated and transformed. It is exactly their transformability that enables and drives the
evolution of technical systems, which the social and cultural systems then have to adapt
to. In the course of the nineteenth century, industrial technologies finally made it pos-
sible not just to industrialize the manipulation of matter, but also to industrialize the
manipulation of memory or mnemotechniques: phonography and photography were
invented. Thus audiovisual content could be recorded and reproduced in exactly the
same way, enabling an industrial system to emerge that produces infinitely reproduc-
ible content. By means of distribution, invigorated by marketing techniques developed
simultaneously with the industrial programming industries, these “time-objects”
have reached an ever-increasing and now virtually global audience over the course of
the twentieth century. In his more recent writings, Stiegler uses the term “psychotech-
nologies” for this cultural and marketing industrial apparatus.27 The effect of these
psychotechnologies is that synchronization through industrially designed programmes
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., p. 102f.
26 For the conception of “epiphylogenesis,” see: idem, Technics and Time 1. The Fault of Prometheus (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 140–142.
27 See: Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2010).
94
increasingly displaces diachronous individuation processes by standardized and sche-

matized content and “thereby destroys diachrony in a politically and economically
hegemonic, totalizing, and totalitarian entropic fusion.”28
Stiegler exacerbates this diagnosis by warning of “the obvious and absolutely current
risk of an entropic synchronization of consciousness that would add up to nothing less
than the end of time,” given that lived time is understood as a continuous rhythmic
attunement of diachronuous and synchronuous processes.29 He ends this passage in an
apocalyptic tone:
The very possibility of the end of time […] here means the problematic possibility of
the renunciation of freedom and of what could be the only result of that: the politico-
spiritual, if not also of the material and corporeal, apocalypse; in some respect this would
be a neutron bomb of the mind, whose explosion would mean uninhabited matter and
corporeality – a world of automatons.30
Apocalypse now: This is of course a very dreary way to put things. One may resent
the apocalyptic tone of Stiegler’s analysis, but the question remains if there is not
a good reason to warn of tendencies like this.31 At the very least, Stiegler has pointed
out a possible major unintentional consequence of the emergence of electronic media
28 Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3, p. 102.

29 Ibid., p. 74.
30 Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3, p. 74–75.
31 One might wonder what Jacques Derrida, Stiegler’s teacher and supervisor and, of course, author of a
text called “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” in: Harold Coward, ed., Derrida and
Negative Theology (Albany, NJ: State of University Press New York, 1992), p. 25–72, would have said about
this apocalyptic passage. Stiegler himself admitted to the dreariness of his perspective in an interview
some years later, where he spoke of “tendencies” instead of one-directional processes and also mentioned
counter-tendencies, while still considering them to be much weaker than the prevailing development.
See: Bernard Stiegler, Denken bis an die Grenzen der Maschine (Berlin/Zurich: Diaphanes, 2009), p. 80. But what
remains questionable is his reliance on the dichotomy of producers and consumers (or of transmitters and
receivers). In contrast to the printed media era, when being able to read automatically meant being able to
write, the era of electronic media deepens the asymmetry between those who can produce – the industry –
and those who are condemned to only receive what is being sent. Obviously, Stiegler’s analysis is inspired
by the broadcasting conditions of the 20th century, and he does not seem to have reflected on the changed
conditions arising in Web 2.0 society. Nevertheless, critical media theorist Geert Lovink makes very
similar remarks – more differentiated and from an insider’s point of view to be sure, but sharing the same
uneasiness: “If the Web goes real-time, there is less space for reflection and more technology facilitating
impulsive blather,” Geert Lovink, Networks Without a Cause. A Critique of Social Media (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2011), p. 19.
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Bernd Bösel
transmitting industrially designed programs in real time, thus giving the global
audience the chance to synchronize their attention and affects for the first time in
history. It is exactly the industrial form of these programs that in Stiegler’s view precludes
the possibility of a global solidarity and instead propels him to warn of a complete loss
of the rhythm of psychic and collective individuation.
If Stiegler prepares his warning by his preceding volumes of Technics and Time, thus
embedding it in a grand explication of technology as a necessary human prosthetic,
Virilio relies on implicit statements that nevertheless refer to the same mediotechno-
logical developments. Since the first decade of this century, he has frequently warned of
what he calls “a sudden globalization of affects in real time that hits all of humanity at
the same time,”32 thus focusing more on the affective dimension of these processes than
Stiegler, who mostly sees the problem to be one of attention. Moreover, Virilio suggests
confronting this affective synchronization with a critical term that deserves serious con-
sideration: chronodiversity.33 Coined as an echo of the ecological concept of biodiversity that
has recently gone mainstream, chronodiversity refers to the different time structures and
rhythms that pervade each of us individually, to the inherent time of a body that can
and is affected at every point of its life in multiple ways. Virilio fears the risk of losing
chronodiversity, of depleting it by a shortsighted use of electronic media, and he pro-
poses to work on the “rhythmological culture of time-planning and a way of life that
resists this totally invasive speed.” What he sees as missing is a “ministry of time and
speed.” Emphasizing that it is not about the simple dichotomies of technophilia and
technophobia or of acceleration and deceleration, Virilio wants to discuss the question of
the “diversity of rhythms” because our societies have become or at least are on the verge
of becoming “arrhythmic.”34 But not only does society miss an opportunity here, Virilio
does so himself by not referring to a fellow Frenchman, Henri Lefebvre, who had pro-
posed a concept and a method to analyze this diversity of rhythms two decades earlier.
32 Virilio, Administration, p. 75. As the title of the book suggests, Virilio’s special concern is the global
synchronization of a certain affect, namely fear. But in his more conceptual remarks, Virilio makes it clear
that the problem he sees is not just the administration of this negative affect, as opposed to a positive
affect like happiness. The problem rather is that affective synchronization inhibits individual rhythms
altogether. Whether the central affect in this synchronization process is fear or happiness is only of
interest on the level of content, rather than on a formal level, which is the focus of this article.
33 The term “chrono-diversity” can also be found in: Karlheinz Geißler, “A Culture of Temporal
Diversity,” Time & Society, 11.1 (2002): p. 131–140. As of 2011, it has also been used in a German book that
proposes to establish a politics of time or “chronopolitics” – see Nils Weichert, Zeitpolitik. Legitimation und
Reichweite eines neuen Politikfeldes (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2011).
34 Virilio, Administration, p. 27.
96
From Rhythmanalysis to Affectanalysis
Éléments de rythmanalyse, conceived as the fourth volume of the series Critique of Everyday
Life, was the last book Lefebvre wrote and was published only posthumously in 1992.
In his introduction to the English edition of 2004, Stuart Elden explains how Lefebvre
manages to show the interrelatedness of time and space by elaborating on the concept of
rhythm.35 Some quotations will help to convey the content as well as style of the book,
the first of which concerns the figure of the rhythmanalyst:
He will be attentive, but not only to the words or pieces of information, the confessions
and confidences of a partner or client. He will listen to the world, and above all to what
are disdainfully called noises, which are said without meaning, and to murmurs [rumeurs],
full of meaning – and finally he will listen to silences. […] He listens – and first to his body;
he learns rhythm from it, in order consequently to appreciate external rhythms. His body
serves him as a metronome.36
Lefebvre frequently compares rhythmanalysis to the attentive experience of music,

as when he writes that the rhythmanalyst “will come to ‘listen’ to a house, a street, a
town, as an audience listens to a symphony.”37 This clearly shows that his whole project
is about transferring musical attentiveness to other areas of everyday experience. What
is most important about the concept is that Lefebvre conceives of it as a method that can
be applied to all aspects of life. He introduces some further terms like “polyrhythmia,”
“eurhythmia” and “isorhythmia” that can help us understand the ambiguities of what
we have now have come to know as affective synchronization.
Polyrhythmia? It suffices to consult one’s body; thus the everyday reveals itself to be a
polyrhythmia from the first listening. Eurhythmia? Rhythms unite with one another
in the state of health, in normal (which is to say normed!) everydayness; when they are
35 See: Stuart Elden, “Rhythmanalysis: An Introduction,” in: Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis. Space,
Time and Everyday Life (London/New York: Continuum, 2004), p. vii-xv. As Steve Goodman points out, the
concept of rhythmanalysis goes back to Pinheiro dos Santos and was adopted by Gaston Bachelard, who
then influenced Lefebvre. Goodman himself extends the concept to what he tentatively calls an “ontology
of vibrational force.” See: Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare. Sound, Affect and The Ecology of Fear (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), p. 81–89.
36 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, p. 16.
37 Ibid., p. 22.
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Bernd Bösel
discordant, there is suffering, a pathological state (of which arrhythmia is generally, at

the same time, symptom, cause and effect). The discordance of rhythms brings previously
eurhythmic organisations towards fatal disorder.38
As he again makes clear in his concluding remarks, all of his descriptions are mod-
eled on a mindful examination of the rhythmic processes of the living body.39 Still, one
might feel a slight uneasiness about the linkage of eurhythmia to health, or of arrhyth-
mia to pathology, which makes the contemporary reader most likely think of biopoliti-
cal agendas that certainly were not what Lefebvre aimed at.40 Of course he does not want
to exclude arrhythmia altogether. The fact that every illness is accompanied by arrhyth-
mia, which is at least its symptom if not its cause, does not mean that the opposite is
also true. Quite the contrary, not every arrhythmia leads to sickness; rather arrhythmias can
be inventive, creative, and thus contribute to saving what Lefebvre calls a “metastable
equilibrium.”41 In fact he is quite precise when he talks about the “antagonistic effects”
of the deregulation of rhythms because such a disruption “can also produce a lacuna, a
hole in time, to be filled in by an invention, a creation.”42 Nevertheless, within Lefeb-
vre’s framework, the aim of these interventions is always “to strengthen or re-establish
polyrhythmia,” and in the same context he even mentions the possibility of a “rhyth-
manalytic therapy.”43 So rhythmanalysis does not want to stop arrhythmic moments
from happening, but it differentiates between what could be called functional and dys-
functional arrhythmias.
The linkage between polyrhythmia and metastable equilibrium is, in my view, decisive,
because apart from total arrhythmization there is another state that has to be avoided:
isorhythmia, the total coincidence of rhythms (which could also be called a static equilib-
rium). The examples that he gives are based on the term “dressage”, which puts into
place “an automatism of repetitions”; dressage is called “the military model of rhyth-
mization” but does not remain within these boundaries. Rather, societies “marked
38 Ibid., p. 16.
39 Ibid., p. 67.
40 For a thorough discussion of the linkages between medical and musical discourses, including the idea
of healthy and unhealthy rhythms, see: James Kennaway, Bad Vibrations. The History of the Idea of Music as a
Cause of Disease (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).
42 Ibid. The terms used here bear some resemblance to Deleuze und Guattari’s rhythmological concepts
in A Thousand Plateaus (London: Athlone, 1988).
98
by the military model preserve and extend this rhythm through all phases of our
temporality.”44 Dressage is used in religious, educational and economical contexts as
well, which is why Lefebvre says that “it determines the majority of rhythms” in society,
and also emphasizes that isorhythmia and eurhythmia are mutually exclusive. In other
words: the same (iso) cannot be beautiful (eu) and the beautiful cannot be the same.
So how can we now apply this rhythmanalytic terminology to the problem of affec-
tive synchronization and its deep ambiguity? Well, by adopting Lefebvre’s methodology
we might be more attentive to the questions of what is being synchronized and how it is
being synchronized. Does synchronization refer to a state of isorhythmia? This is appar-
ently the case with Virilio’s use of the term. But in the sociological and psychological
conceptions that we have looked into, it is quite another story. There we have found
synchronization processes that include and maintain differences, that only function
because there is a polyrhythmia at work that needs to be harmonized in such way that
it is then felt as something that constitutes emotional closeness, solidarity and bond-
ing. All of these instances show that a loss of rhythm of synchrony and diachrony shat-
ters the foundations of commonality.
But Lefebvre not only offers an analytical framework for a hopefully increasing atten-
tiveness to the rhythms of everyday life (media-saturated or not), but also hints at the
possibility of intervening: “interventions are made, or should be made, through rhythms,
without brutality.”45 At least two levels of intervention can be discerned in his writ-
ing. First, in order to grasp rhythms, “it is necessary to get outside them, but not com-
pletely: be it through illness or a technique”46 – an interesting choice of words, because
it suggests that techniques of getting outside of rhythm could play a pivotal part in a
more encompassing conception of psychophysical health. And second, by breaking the
rhythm, by inserting what can be called functional arrhythmias,47 which would mean that
one remains inside the realm of a given rhythm but tries to change it from within, thus
inhibiting a probable tendency to isorhythmic entrainment or synchronization and
thus arrhythmization. The rhythmanalyst thus could, as Lefebvre puts it, “accomplish a
tiny part of the revolutionary transformation of this world and this society in decline.”48
44 Ibid., p. 39–40.
45 Ibid., p. 67.
46 Ibid., p. 27.
47 A term that I encountered through the music of free-funk saxophonist Steve Coleman, whose most
recent recording bears the same title: Steve Coleman and Five Elements, Functional Arrythmias (New York:
Pi Recordings, 2013).
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Bernd Bösel
Picking up on the question of techniques of desynchronizing, I now want to finish

by turning to philosophy – especially to a conception of it that gives credit to the notion
of intervention and social therapeutics. From its beginnings, philosophy has been con-
ceived as a form of life that is fundamentally critical of socio-political synchronization
processes. Philosophers first and foremost had to learn to desynchronize themselves
from the sayings and doings of the anonymous crowd. They had to be trained in a num-
ber of techniques that helped them to become at least partially immune to the rhythms
of everyday life, of common sense and of fashion, in the broadest sense of the term (and
with regard to the critique of sophism as a generic phenomenon, every time and place
has its own sophism from which it needs to be desynchronized). These desynchroni-
zation or immunization techniques have remained pivotal up until the modern era.
Friedrich Nietzsche gave us a great term to conceive of philosophy’s counter-hegemonic
chronicity when he spoke of its “untimeliness.”49 In a different vein, but with a simi-
lar tendency, Ludwig Wittgenstein expressed his wish that philosophers might greet
each other be saying: “Take your time!” 50 which could be adapted to: Don’t let yourself
be taken by time, especially not by digital real time. Or we could adopt the remarks
made by Roland Barthes in his seminar How to Live Together, wherein he confides in a
“fantasy […] of a life, a regime, a lifestyle, diaita, diet” that is “like solitude with regular
interruptions.” And only by chance, writes Barthes, his fantasy found the fitting word:
idiorrhythmy, idiorrhythmic, “that was the word that transmuted the fantasy into a field
of knowledge.”51
But taking seriously the recent diagnoses of media scientists and philosophers, one
cannot simply distance oneself from the general tendencies of technologization and
mediatization. Since the shift from the psychotechnology of writing to the psychotech-
nologies of audiovisual media and now to the emerging psychotechnologies of ubiq-
uitous affective computing cannot intrinsically be stopped, strategies have to be con-
ceived to preserve the capacity of reflection and critique. Within the affective dispositif,
this will hardly be possible without actively tending to affects, emotions and atmo-
spheres52 – but not in order to deepen the classical distinction of thinking and feeling,
but rather to complexify the interrelatedness of these psychic capacities. The writings of
49 See: Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

50 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1980), p. 80.
51 Roland Barthes, How to Live Together. Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2013), p. 6.
52 For a discussion of the concept of “atmospheres,” see: Chris Salter’s text in this volume.
100
Brian Massumi address these issues in a productive way that offers an answer to the dire
diagnoses of Virilio and Stiegler, who, as we have seen, often end in an apocalyptic tone
and have little to offer in terms of counter-hegemonic strategies.
In an interview from 2008, Massumi picks up on Daniel Stern’s concept of “affect
attunement” to emphasize that, even in heavily charged collective situations, a genu-
ine affective synchronization cannot occur, because every participant who gets affected
encodes and processes this affect in an idiosyncratic fashion, according to his or her his-
tory of affection: “Since each body will carry a different set of tendencies and capacities,
there is no guarantee that they will act in unison even if they are cued in concert.” This
embodied singularity precludes the production of what otherwise is called the same
affect: “There is no sameness of affect. There is affective difference in the same event.
Reactions to fear […] vary wildly, and even vary significantly at different times in the
same individual’s life.”53 This sensibility to the non-identity of socially shared affects
can be traced, through Massumi’s writings, once again to Daniel Stern, who not only
distinguished between vitality affects und categorical affects to account for the dynam-
ics of affect attunement processes, but more recently published a book that provides
a highly useful approach to unlock the mostly hidden plenitude of affective experi-
ences that lie in each and every “present moment.”54 By designing a technique called
the “micro-analytic interview,” Stern was able to show how much of conscious everyday
experience gets omitted and ignored if not deliberately recalled. Even the most tedious
and habitual episodes (like this morning’s breakfast, as in the interviews evaluated in
his book) can thus be reconstructed in their experiential or affective richness, which
otherwise would have remained undetected: “As these present moments unfold, there
are split-second micro-shifts in the intensity or quality of our feelings.”55 This rich-
ness does not only concern how many present moments actually do contain memorable
phenomenal intensity, but also how complex a given moment can reveal itself to be,
often containing several “time-shapes” or “vitality affects” (Stern uses both terms inter-
changeably). This simultaneity reveals the “polyphonic and polyrhythmic” quality of
many, if not all, conscious experiences.56 Microanalysis is thus a simple, yet powerful
method for detecting and revealing this polyrhythmic structure of everyday experience.
53 Brian Massumi, “Of Microperceptions and Micropolitics. An Interview with Brian Massumi, 15 August
2008,” Inflexions. A Journal for Research-Creation 3 (October 2009): p. 1–20, here p. 6. (http://www.senselab.ca/
inflexions/volume_3/node_i3/massumi_en_inflexions_vol03.html).
54 Daniel N. Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).
55 Ibid., p. 36.
56 Ibid.
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Bernd Bösel
It seems that Massumi has something very similar in mind when he proposes to
leave behind the sociolinguistic fixations of affects as personal emotions in order to
make the mostly unattended affective qualities of everyday experience accessible to
consciousness. By adopting Stern’s micro-analytic interview technique and combining it
with Massumi’s theory, one could design what could be called affect analysis. This affect
analysis which would not only be of service in psychotherapeutical contexts but also offer
a way to break open media-induced processes of affective synchronization by revealing
the polyrhythmic qualities that a given moment contains for the subject who experiences
it – to “open up the subliminal affections within a well-known affect,” as Michaela Ott
expresses it in regard to the power of the arts.57 This would not prevent synchronization
from happening, nor should we necessarily look for a way to desynchronize with what
is going on in the global society; but it would augment the awareness that shared
affects, even if they are induced in a standardized and industrialized form, are not the
same affects, but rather couplings of sufficiently similar experiences for the emergence
of communal feelings. Affective synchronization, in this view, is still a problematic
tendency in precisely the way that Virilio and Stiegler described it: namely as a threat
to the diachronous unfolding of consciousness, especially if attention is directed only
to the events that are depicted in psychotechnologically designed time-objects. But this
synchronization does not at all determine the way that presentness of this programmed
experience gets intermingled with idiosyncratic or idiorhythmic processes. The problem
is not one of destroying consciousness, as Virilio and Stiegler, in their apocalyptic tone,
would have it, but rather one of controlling the relation of foreground and background
within consciousness, which of course is a serious enough issue in itself. We therefore
should not permit the societies of control to regulate the way we conceive of affection
altogether, which could lead to an unwilling contribution to their perfection; but rather
propagate a more complex and vivid conception of how affective experiences make
themselves felt, acknowledged and also, if necessary, countered, and remind ourselves
of the anticipatory dimension of affects and affections and their unending power to generate
new thoughts.58
I would like to thank Stephen Zepke for his thorough and skillful language check.
57 Michaela Ott, Affizierung. Zu einer ästhetisch-epistemischen Figur (München: edition text + kritik, 2010),
p. 42 (trans. Bernd Bösel).
58 See: ibid., p. 21.
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Marie-Luise Angerer
Affective Knowledge
Movement, Interval, Plasticity
For some years now, the notions of neurodiversity and neuroleadership have been linked
with promises of magically transforming Homo economicus into Homo emotionalis who (in
economic terms, of course) will be more effective and more easily deployable as a worker.
The concept of neurodiversity is based on the assumption that people are “triggered” by
behavioral patterns (both conscious and unconscious) that take shape over the course of
their lives as connected paths in the brain that work like highways. In this process, the
brain proves astonishingly malleable (plasticity), strengthening synapses and developing
new ones in a matter of seconds. The system of rewards and punishments, the limbic
system of the emotions, and the system of memory all play a part in this.1
This increased interest in the plasticity of the brain has been accompanied by a
surprising revaluation of the moving and especially the dancing body – and I argue
that the two are closely related. “Today,” writes philosopher Boyan Manchev, “we are
witnessing a gigantic transformation in which the fate of the world is at stake, and dance
is at the epicenter of this transformation: it is a symptom, an exemplary consequence.”2
How is it that philosophers today claim to identify changes taking place in the world
by looking at dance? How is it that philosophy is now discovering (or rediscovering) the
dancing body, after a long period when it was often cited by philosophers and historians
as the epitome of transgression and symbolic withdrawal?3 Manchev’s main point here
is that no critique is possible as long as it makes use of language or understands itself as
discursive. Instead, mind and body must come together to enable resistance – resistance
understood as a mode of existence.
I would like to take these two aspects – the recent focus on brain plasticity and the
dancing body as a mode of existence – as my points of departure in order to underline
1 See: http://www.neuroleadership.org/index.shtml (retrieved April 7, 2014).

2 Boyan Manchev, “Der Widerstand des Tanzes,” Corpus, www.corpusweb.net/der-widerstand-des-
tanzes.html, (retrieved January 9, 2013: trans. Nicholas Grindell)
3 Margaret Wetherell describes the case of a dance epidemic that is supposed to have taken place in
Strasbourg in 1518 and that can be read as an example of the affective, dancing body that will no longer
be calm, see: Margaret Wetherell, Affect and Emotion. A New Social Science Understanding (London/Thousand
Oaks: Sage, 2012), p. 5.
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Marie-Luise Angerer
the double nature of the timing of affect: on the one hand, the “golden age of affect”
we have been seeing for many years now and, on the other, the aspect of time inscribed
into affect itself. According to a basic assumption of Timing of Affect, these forms of time
and their specific movements (technological, physical, economic, political) constitute
the central context for identifying epistemological affection in contemporary thought.
Inscribed into this movement time is the interval (what Bergson refers to as the “zone
of sensation”) which has now gained significance both with regard to definitions of
affect and concerning the neural activity of the brain and the timing of digital media
technologies.
In 2007, in my book Vom Begehren nach dem Affekt (Desire After Affect),4 when I first
spoke of an “affective dispositif” to suggest a broader shift in conceptions of the human
that was taking place beneath the surface of the remarkable hype surrounding affect,
I could not have foreseen the scope or depth of this notion. Today, in the context of a
politics of control, neuroplasticity and the material movements of the body and brain
(often measurable and recordable only by means of technology) constitute the central
topoi in a redefinition of what “life” under the conditions of (media) technology will be
or might become.
The time/timing of the interval
In the mid-1970s, students of media and communication studies in the German-

speaking world heard from Hertha Sturm and her team that they had discovered the
“missing half-second.” In Sturm’s view, television needed to broadcast slower image
sequences; audio and video needed to be more congruent; the text or spoken language
should follow the images or vice versa, rather than supplying additional information.
For as the researchers found, their test subjects (mainly children) were unable to process
the excessive amount of information “properly” and their reactions were quite simply
too slow for the abundance of images. As a result, children reacted “happily” to sad
image sequences and “unhappily” to cheerful ones. The test subject’s mood was gauged
by measuring pulse, heartbeat, and transpiration, giving a curve of physical arousal
indicating mood (or rather allowing it to be deduced) with low frequency pointing to a
depressive basic mood and high frequency pointing to high spirits.
4 Marie-Luise Angerer, Vom Begehren nach dem Affekt (Zurich/Berlin: Diaphanes, 2007), English transla-
tion Desire After Affect (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014).
104
Affective Knowledge
The reason for the anomalous moods measured, according to Sturm and her team,
was the “missing half-second,”5 an amount of time that passed between perception
(signal, stimulus) and reaction without it being clear what occurred during this lost
time.
Twenty years later, however, this out-of-synch or lost time made a comeback in Brian
Massumi’s theory of affect, contributing to a veritable affective turn within cultural
studies and media theory. “The skin is faster than the word,”6 wrote Massumi in the
mid-1990s, paraphrasing his definition of affect as an intensity belonging to a “different
order”: “Intensity is embodied in purely autonomic reactions most directly manifested
in the skin – at the surface of the body, at its interface with things.”7
In A Tenth of a Second,8 Jimena Canales reconstructs the history of the search for
and research into this missing space of time, documenting a huge interest within the
disciplines of experimental psychology, astronomy, physics and metrology. Sigmund
Freud was taken with it, as was Wilhelm Wundt at his institute of psychology in Leipzig.
Others like Frances Galton saw the study of the missing split-second as a continuation
of craniometry on a different level: those who react slowly have a sensitive personality;
those who react quickly are aggressive, more intelligent. Gradually, this interest in
measuring individual reaction times, “personal equating” or “personal error”, also began
to appear in art, with noteworthy early examples including Marey’s chronophotography
and Muybridge’s proto-cinematography. All this began with Hermann von Helmholtz,
who wrote in 1850: “I have found that a measurable amount of time passes as the
stimulus exerted by a momentary electrical current on the lumbar plexus of a frog is
propagated to the place where the femoral nerve enters the calf muscle.”9 Helmholtz was
a student of Johannes Müller who, in 1826, formulated the law of specific sensory energy
which states that each sensory organ always reacts to stimuli in its own way, whatever
their nature. The eye, for example, reacts to mechanical pressure with a sensation of
light. From this, Müller concluded that objective reality cannot be recognized, and
5 Today, the half-second is attributed primarily to Benjamin Libet, who calls it the “short delay.” See:
Marie-Luise Angerer, “Vom Lauf der halben Sekunde,” http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/kunsttexte/2011–1/
angerer-marie-luise-6/PDF/angerer.pdf (retrieved March 4, 2014).
6 Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” in: Paul Patton, ed., DELEUZE: A Critical Reader (Cambridge,
Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), p. 217–239, here p. 219.
7 Ibid., p. 218f.
8 Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second. A History (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009).
9 Quoted in: Henning Schmidgen, Die Helmholtz-Kurven. Auf der Spur der verlorenen Zeit (Berlin: Merve,
2009), p. 74 (trans. Nicholas Grindell).
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Marie-Luise Angerer
that perception is something highly subjective, based as it is on and in the body. In his
Techniques of the Observer,10 Jonathan Crary accords a prominent place to Müller because
he defined the eye and sight as being dependent on physical stimuli, thus, as Crary
emphasizes, overturning the hegemony of a neutral visual apparatus.
What Helmholtz had discovered with his measurements, however, was not only the
disappearance of time but also and above all the delay of energy – the energy in a muscle
is not exerted completely at the moment of the stimulus, “but to a large extent only after
that stimulus has already ceased.”11 Between stimulation and contraction, then, time
(and energy) passes – not much, but enough to be clearly identifiable. The immediacy
on which previous assumptions had been based turned out to be “an interval, a period, a
space of time both circumscribed and empty – an interim, du temps perdu.”12
The definition of affect as an intermediate zone, an image of contact and interrup-
tion is linked in particular to Gilles Deleuze’s first cinema book, where he productively
applied his adaptation of Bergson to film. Henri Bergson understood the world as an
image in which we move, ourselves a special kind of image. “There is,” he writes, “no
perception which is not prolonged into movement.”13 But precisely this moment of
not-yet-movement, the interval placed by Bergson between one movement and another
(which he referred to as “affection”) indicates a movement that is not yet action. Out of
this, Deleuze developed the image type of the “affection-image,” a close-up that inter-
rupts the logic of narrative and overrides depth of focus, causing the film image to bring
forth a singular space – “any-space-whatever,” – neither geometric nor geographic nor
social in any strict sense. This “any-space-whatever” is marked by visual or acoustic
situations that credit the film (image) with affect of its own.14
As I explain in Desire After Affect, Mark Hansen has criticized this,15 accusing Deleuze
of having read Bergson in a way that is, if not actually wrong, unacceptable for today’s
media (art) context. Hansen introduced the concept of the “any-space-whatever” into
digital art praxis. There – now outside any cinematographic framing – it combined with
autonomous affect. This difference is important insofar as the autonomy of affect in
Deleuze’s reading of film is qualitatively different from anthropomorphic emotions. In
10 Jonathan Crary, On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press,
1992).
11 Schmidgen, Die Helmholtz-Kurven, p. 93.
12 Ibid.
13 Henri Bergson, Memory and Matter (New York: Cosimo, 2007), p. 111.
14 Gilles Deleuze, The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 5–6.
15 Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, Mass./London: The MIT Press, 2004).
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Hansen’s version, on the other hand, it combines with a neurobiological view that has
generally abandoned the question of the subject. Digitally generated space is no longer
connected with any kind of human activity. Its singularity and its potential are autono-
mous, neither understandable nor occupiable in human terms.
Today, following Hansen’s reintroduction of Bergson into recent debates on media
technology, updating the body as a central image filter for the (immersive) visual world
that surrounds us (as well as giving renewed credence to an essentialist view), attempts
are being made, mainly using Alfred N. Whitehead’s process philosophy, to conceive
of perception and sensation without the categories of consciousness or a fixed subject.
Whitehead defines physical perception as always emotional, calling it a “blind emotion”
that is “received as felt elsewhere in another occasion.”16 This involves not an accumu-
lation of data but always a data relationship. The perceiving subject does not pre-exist
the perceived world, but emerges through and in the process of perception. For White-
head, the tradition of metaphysical theories of perception is marked by a fundamental
misunderstanding whose central cause he sees in their privileging of visual perception.
“I see something, so I simply perceive it” – this would be the classical description or
basic theory, which Whitehead criticizes by pointing out that this seeing must always
already be preceded by a process of abstraction (“prehension”), as a result of which “the
feeling is subjectively rooted in the immediacy of the present occasion: it is what the
occasion feels for itself, as derived from the past and as merging into the future.”17At
the end of the perceptive process stands the “superject” that generates itself out of data
received from the senses. In contrast to Kant, for whom experience also begins with
affected contemplation that sets the activity of reason in motion, Whitehead assumes
that consciousness is a negligible aspect of subjective experience. As constant percep-
tion, experience takes place for the most part below the threshold of consciousness, as
the physical sensation that precedes every subject. In this “theory of sensation” the sub-
ject as superject is “the purpose of the process originating the feelings.”18 This process
of subject generation centers neither on language nor on the subject, but on (physical)
sensation, on (always already abstract) prehension or grasping, and on processes of affec-
tion by which matter becomes form and form becomes data.
16 Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 162.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., p. 222.
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This linking of Reality and Process is exemplified by thinking about affect, for if affect is
conceived of as a force that brings forth a form, then there can be no body without affect;
instead, a body is always the result – the event – of affective modulations. According to
Deleuze, writing on Spinoza, affect is bound to the body; the more affections a body has,
the greater its power. Decisive for Massumi, however, is the transition from this virtual
power to an embodied event; and how this embodied event can be grasped conceptually.
Terms such as “experienced qualities,” “sensations of life”, “oceanic experience” repre-
sent attempts to name what Massumi brings together in his concept of “intensity”: “By
that I mean the immanent affirmation of a process, in its own terms. This is […] an activ-
ity. It’s when a process tends to the limit of what only it can do. It’s not mystical to call
that self-affirming ‘life’.”19
Later, in the discussion of neuroplasticity, we will return to this affective modulation –
as auto-affection or auto-modulation – and to the question of how the movements of the
neurons can be translated into what Jaak Panksepp20 has called “subcortical affects.”21
From a not-yet-movement to small and swiftest movements
No longer small but not yet large22
Unlike René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz denied that the mind was always
active, insisting instead that there were moments and stretches of time during which
19 Brian Massumi, “The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens: The Semblance of a Conversation,” in Inflex-
ions 1:1 (http://www.inflexions.org/n1-The-Thinking-Feeling-of-What-Happens-by-Brian-Massumi.pdf;
last retrieved April 25, 2014).
20 Jaak Panksepp, “At the Interface of the Affective, Behavioral, and Cognitive Neurosciences: Decoding
the Emotional Feelings of the Brain,” Brain and Cognition, 52 (2003): p. 4–14. I would like to thank Frank
Pasemann for drawing my attention to this neuroscientist.
21 Although the work of Donna Haraway may not appear to play a role here, her concept of coshaping is
evidence of the degree to which she, too, has been influenced in her thinking by Alfred N. Whitehead. She
explains for instance how, during agility training with her dog, their bodies, her body and that of her dog,
began to adjust to one another. “In recent speaking and writing on companion species, I have tried to live
inside the many tones of regard/respect/seeing each other/looking back at/meeting/optic-haptic encoun-
ter. Species and respect are in optic/haptic/affective/cognitive touch: they are at table together; they are
messmates, companions […]. Companion species – coshapings all the way down, in all sorts of temporalities
and corporealities – is my awkward term for a not-humanism in which species of all sorts are in question,”
Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 164.
22 Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch. Archeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Book, 2009), p. 209.
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consciousness registers (perception) but without conscious perception (apperception)

of such overly small movements. According to Leibniz, consciousness as understood
by Descartes and his followers always necessarily misses something, as something is
always happening but not everything passes the threshold of conscious perception. With
Spinoza, Deleuze explains the affectivity of the body by saying that each body defines
itself by its length and breadth, by its longitude and latitude of power. The length of
a body here refers to ratios of rapidity and slowness, of rest and motion between its
particles, while its width comprises the sum of its affects, all of its intensive states.23
Leibniz uses the monad as the smallest particle, representing the universe. As every
monad supposedly expresses the totality of the universe, it follows that the universe is
expressed in a gradually complete sense. This means that not everything is expressed
in the same way but on a scale of conscious to unconscious, from clear to less clear
perceptions. One often-quoted example of this is Leibniz’s description of the sound of
the sea, which he says we only hear because we hear each single wave, which we hear
in turn only because we hear every single drop of water. But it is clear, Leibniz explains,
that no ear can really hear this:
The impressions (effects) made on our ear by the individual waves, but which we are
unable to distinguish between (discern) (because they are such changes in the external
world as are not accompanied by changes in our bodily organs), are a typical example of
petites perceptions. All significant changes within our bodies are soon noticed, thus leading
to contents of consciousness.24
Leibniz distinguishes between three kinds of perceptions. Firstly, those that cause
no changes to the organs, although it should be emphasized here, as Richard Herbertz
writes, that they produce no “noticeable change,”25 but they certainly do produce
changes, just ones that go unnoticed. Secondly, perceptions that occur in too large
numbers, thus not capable of being registered as separate by consciousness. And thirdly,
those where weaker perceptions are obscured by more powerful ones.26
23 See: Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza. Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), p. 127.
24 Richard Herbertz, Die Lehre vom Unbewussten im System von Leibniz [1905] (Hildesheim/New York: Olms,
1980), p. 45 (trans. Nicholas Grindell).
25 Ibid.
26 See: ibid.
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Whereas Leibniz still viewed his monads as being driven by a Creator God, Spinoza’s
“impersonal uniform substance” is characterized by infinite modes that can be under-
stood as affections. Both Spinoza and Leibniz refer to affection, connecting it with the
idea of the self-unfolding of the substance and therefore within time so as to define this
substance as oneness and multiplicity at the same time.
From the mid-19th century, these small movements – sensations – started to be mea-
sured, produced under experimental conditions in laboratories, captured and recorded
using early forms of photography, as mentioned earlier. And then, with the advent of
film around the turn of the century, it became possible not only to intervene in the
recording of movement (as life), but also to bring it to life as something existing in time,
as a temporal sequence of images.27 These media techniques (of recording and playback)
convey the movement of the living as something living, presenting it as permanent
delay, as something always already deferred, although visually transparent. This is a pro-
cedure that can be mapped onto an existential life praxis that installs the delay in time
(of life) as the space of the now – as a sequence of intervals: movement at a standstill –
stasis as movement.
A similar moment can be identified in the cybernetic debate of the mid-20th century,
where the phenomenon of time emerged as the gap between signal and movement of
the machine/automaton. Norbert Wiener borrows Bergson’s concept of “duration” and
applies it to both living humans and machines: “Thus the modern automaton exists in
the same kind of Bergsonian time as the living organism, and hence there is no reason
in Bergson’s considerations why the essential mode of functioning of the living organ-
ism should not be the same as that of the automaton of this type.”28 In 1951, Max Bense
elaborated on this, claiming the time interval as the basis of the commensurability of
machine and man in general terms. Except that, unlike humans, computer machines are
capable of using (and exploiting) even the smallest interval. The interval in the human
organism, empty according to Hertha Sturm or too full according to Brian Massumi, is
filled by cybernetic computing machines with a speed of task fulfillment that surpasses
27 See: Christopher Kelty and Hannah Landecker, “Das Schauspiel der Zelle. Unsterblichkeit, Apostrophe,
Apoptose,” in: Marie-Luise Angerer, Kathrin Peters, Zoe Sofoulis, eds., Future-Bodies. Zur Visualisierung von
Körpern in Science und Fiction (Vienna/New York: Springer, 2002), p. 21–47.
28 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics. Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1965), p. 44.
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human comprehension: “Cybernetic machines exhaust the smallest interval. An addi-

tion takes place in five millionths of a second; in five minutes, it can perform ten million
additions or subtractions of ten-figure numbers.”29 However, Bense explicitly associates
this mechanistic-sounding operational capacity with Bergson’s “duration” and sets it
apart from steady, Newtonian time.
Neuronal and affective (time) gaps
Que faire de notre cerveau? asked Catherine Malabou in her 2003 book of that title, in which
she introduced the “field of action of an open plasticity of the brain.”30 In 2007, her
next book The New Wounded31 bore the telling subtitle: From Neurosis to Brain Damage.
Her central questions here included: What if psychoanalysis was only able to identify
certain illnesses? What if at the time, in the early 20th century, it could not assess the
brain correctly, leading it to examine only mental illnesses whose main trigger was
repressed sexuality? And what if this sexual eventality were to be replaced within a
future psychopathology by cerebral eventality?
And what, I would further ask, if this plasticity of the brain were to prompt us to
rethink the connection between body, affect, and media technologies?
By substituting the brain for sexuality in this way, Malabou further confirms my
theory that the dispositif of sex is shifting towards one of affect.32 But this also involves
a reordering that shifts mental self-reference as the narcissistic ego ideal (mirroring)
towards the technically controlled relationship of autoaffection. For, as Malabou goes
on to explain, cerebral autoaffection displays a paradoxical blindness: “An inability of
the subject to feel anything as far as it is concerned.”33 So although the brain is the reason
29 Max Bense, “Kybernetik oder die Metatechnik einer Maschine,” in: Ausgewählte Schriften, Vol. 2:
Philosophie der Mathematik, Naturwissenschaft und Technik (Stuttgart/Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 1998), p. 429–446,
here p. 440.
30 Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
31 Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded. From Neurosis to Brain Damage (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2012).
32 It should be underlined here that this shifting or replacement of sexuality has been underway since
the mid-20th century. One prominent example is Silvan Tomkins, whose affect model contributed to the
affect hype that set in within cultural studies in the mid-1990s. See: Angerer, Desire After Affect; and idem,
“Affekt: Scham und Paranoia,” in: Angelika Baier et al., eds., Affekt und Geschlecht. Eine einführende Anthologie
(Vienna: Zaglossus Verlag, 2014), p. 111–130.
33 Malabou, The New Wounded, p. 42.
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why we touch ourselves, the brain itself does not appear as part of our body image.
“The brain absents itself at the very site of its presence to self. It is only accessible by means
of cerebral imaging technology.”34 One might of course object that the unconscious as
defined by psychoanalysis can also be neither felt nor integrated into the body image –
revealing itself instead in the famous Freudian slips, in dreams, as displacement and
condensation. Freud also used the example of the Mystic Writing Pad to explain the
functioning of the unconscious: Every trace ever scratched or inscribed on the pad is
preserved, even if it is no longer visible, revealed when light shines on the wax from
a particular angle. With this image, Freud described the unconscious as something
that is atemporal, beyond time, but that also intervenes in subjective time (the time of
the speaking, forgetting subject). The new unconscious entity, however, the “cerebral
unconscious”, does the opposite, operating as pure time. It comes as no surprise, then,
that affect appears in this context, introduced by Malabou as follows: “Within the brain,
affect does not detach from itself; it does not deprive itself of its own energy; it does not
delegate itself; […] Indeed, the self, at its very core, is not gathered; its manifestation is
fundamentally temporal.”35 This means that affect and the core self are one. But it also
allows Malabou to define affect as the center of a new libidinal economy, thus not only
altering the relationship of body and mind, but also radically questioning the division
between the human and natural sciences.36 This in turn means that besides forming
the basis for a new libidinal economy,37 affect itself will be redefined.
When Antonio Damasio published Looking for Spinoza,38 his interpretation of Spinoza
as a neurologist avant la lettre could be dismissed as a presumptuous exaggeration.
Today, Damasio has long since been accepted by the humanities, where there is now
a striking readiness to use his interpretation of emotions and feelings, of patterns
and representations of the body in the mind, and, more generally, to accept a new
affective ontology.39 In Spinoza’s refusal to view body and mind as separate entities,
understanding them instead in terms of different intensities, Damasio sees the first step
34 Ibid., p. 43.
35 Ibid., p. 44.
36 Catherine Malabou and Adrian Johnston, Self and Emotional Life (New York: Columbia University Press,
2013), p. 3.
37 A new libidinal economy following on from that of psychoanalysis, parallel to Parisi’s “biodigital
conception of desire,” Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2004) and Guattari’s
“ecological libido,” Félix Guattari, Les Trois Écologies (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1989).
38 Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza. Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Boston: Harcourt, 2003).
39 See for example: Grant David Bollmer, “Pathologies of Affect. The ‘New Wounded’ and the Politics of
Ontology,” Cultural Studies, vol. 28/2 (August 2014): p. 298–326; thanks to Bernd Bösel for the tip.
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towards a biological definition of consciousness, the exploration of which is now driving

the development of computer technologies. The aim of these new computer simulations
is not only to visualize the active brain, but to translate brain activity directly.40 Here,
neurology, media technologies, and affect have entered into a powerful alliance whose
impact is now becoming increasingly clear.
Plasticity and Affects
In 1958, Gilbert Simondon made a distinction between the plasticity of the machine and
that of the human brain. While the first refers to the plasticity of the carrier, in the case
of humans it refers to the plasticity of content, of memory, as Simondon emphases. “The
memory of the machine triumphs in the multiple and the disordered: human memory
triumphs in the unity of forms and in order.”41 The reason for this is the lack or absence
of integrative plasticity on the part of the machine, a crucial aspect of the human.
Whereas human memory reforms itself with every new input, so that every new content
means a new formatting code, the form of the machine is stable/static, with plasticity
limited to its software. “In humans, and living beings in general, content becomes encoding,
whereas in the machine encoding and content remain separate as the precondition
and that which it shapes […]: the living is that in which the a posteriori becomes a priori;
memory is the function by which this takes place.”42
Here, Simondon also refers to Bergson, who saw this capacity for storage – which
interested him primarily in its function of temporal compression – as the key factor for
change: human beings, and living beings in general, are by definition agents of change:
“The living being is that which modulates, that in which there is a modulation, and not an
energy reservoir or an effector.”43 But what if this distinction from 1958 can no longer
be upheld? What if form and content – as Bruno Latour, among others, has prominently
asked44 – can no longer be kept apart? What if, instead, self-modifying machines with
40 https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/de (retrieved February 18, 2014).

41 Gilbert Simondon, Die Existenzweise technischer Objekte (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2012), p. 113 (trans. Nicholas
Grindell).
42 Ibid., p. 114.
43 Ibid., p. 131.
44 Bruno Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special
Attention to Peter Sloterdijk),” http://www.scribd.com/doc/12820973/A-Cautious-Prometheus-A-Few-
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their evolutionary programs alter and recode themselves – in ways that may be similar to
the brain – making it possible, conversely, to utilize the plasticity of the brain by means
of media technology and pharmacology?45
The term “neural plasticity” was introduced in 1949 by the Canadian neurologist
Donald Olding Hebb.46 Catherine Malabou takes it as a basis, adding two further
forms of plasticity: that of brain development and that of brain renewal (neural
renewal, secondary neurogenesis, resilience). The fact that we now operate with the
image of brain plasticity, rather than using comparisons with a telephone exchange
(Bergson) or the hard drive of a computer (cybernetics), may have less to do with actual
advances in neurological research and more with economic and political developments.
Nonetheless, the parallel between the affective interval and the cerebral space, described
as consisting of cuts, gaps and jumps, is unmistakable: “Nerve circuits consist of neurons
juxtaposed at the synapses; there is a break between one neuron and the other,” as the
French neurologist Jean-Pierre Changeux put it in the early 1980s.47 In their countless
movements, then, these unconnected neurons, equipped with a specific time, translate
matter into feeling, into a “blind emotion,” in the words of Whitehead, who also, with
respect to the brain, defined subjectivity as a zone of lost time, as the “life […] in the
interstices of each living cell and in the interstices of the brain.”48
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When media art began to be widespread in the 1990s, interest grew in the interface as the
link between humans and machines. Immersion in virtual worlds was often compared
with the early stages of infant development where the lines of orientation and distinction
have not yet been clearly drawn. As well as Deleuze and Bergson, Daniel Stern’s approach
was much discussed in this context. According to Stern, subjectivity develops out of a
transsubjective character, emerging from the body’s zones of intensity as the overlapping
Steps-Toward-a-Philosophy-of-Design-with-Special-Attention-to-Peter-Sloterdijk-by-Bruno-Latour
(retrieved March 6, 2014).
45 See: Luciana Parisi’s text in this volume.
46 http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Models-of-synaptic-plasticity (retrieved February 2, 2014).
47 Jean-Pierre Changeux, Neuronal Man (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), p. 83.
48 Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 105f.
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of “sharable” and “non-sharable affects.”49 Later, Stern’s interest increasingly shifted

to the moment of the now. And it might be considered as no coincidence that Stern’s
more recent analyses of this present moment name a specific time: the present moment
lasts between one and ten seconds. Why one to ten seconds, Stern asks himself, what
happens in this time, what eludes us in this interval? This brings us back to the findings
of Hertha Sturm, but we can also see links to the description offered by Leibniz with his
“petites perceptions.” Stern now also argues that we are only capable of perceiving larger
units: “We are bombarded with almost constant sequences of such small units. If we
considered each such perceptual unit as a potentially important and meaningful event
requiring attention and awareness, it would be like continually being under the fire
of a machine gun. These sequences must get chunked into larger units more suited to
adaptation.”50 Stern even goes on to explain how each holistic happening of the present
moment can be broken down into component parts (affects, cognitions, a sequence of
actions, perceptions, sensations) but that for the individual it constitutes a whole that
is temporally dynamic. He calls these dynamic time-shapes “vitality affects,” described
using terms such as accelerating, fading, exploding, unstable, tentative, or forceful.
Stern further explains that these micro-temporal dynamics, what he calls the “temporal
contours of stimulation,” play upon and within our nervous system and are transposed
into “contours of feelings” within us.51
This description certainly corresponds with the “hard” facts offered by neuro-science
when it assumes that consciousness is based on affect, making it impossible to grasp
fully in terms of cognitive faculties alone. These affective layers are defined as subcortical
structures that are active long before any consciousness, making consciousness appear
as something far more widespread, not limited to human consciousness. Cognitive
psychologist Jaak Panksepp thus argues that “we should remain open to the possibility
that the fundamental ability of neural tissue to elaborate primary-process forms of
affective experience evolved long before human brain evolution allowed us to think and
to talk about such things.”52 And biochemist Nick Lane insists that even if feelings are
physical, they are not material, but merely a neural construct: “But if feelings are no
49 Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant. A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental
Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 37–68. See also: the texts by Bernd Bösel and Chris Salter in this
volume.
50 Daniel N. Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (New York/London: Norton, 2004),
p. 42.
51 Ibid., p. 36.
52 Panksepp, “At the Interface of the Affective, Behavioral, and Cognitive Neurosciences,” p. 7.
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more than neurons doing their thing, why do they seem so real, why are they so real?
[…] because they have real meaning, meaning that has been acquired in the crucible of
selection, meaning that comes from real life, real death.”53
This kind of affective knowledge can be now found both in fictions like Stieg Larsson’s
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo54 and in a positive valuation of autistic persons in real
life.55 In the novel, towards the end of his successful cooperation with Lisbeth Salander
(the eponymous girl with the dragon tattoo), Mikael Blomkvist remarks that she must
have something like Asperger’s syndrome: autistic as far as people and her surroundings
are concerned, but brilliant at identifying patterns and structures, brilliant at hacking
networks and computers, and even more brilliant at following clues.56
But such an emphasis on pattern recognition capabilities is not new, even if they
are now being placed within a new context regarding their usage. Susanne Langer, a
student of Cassirer and Whitehead, is one of the recently rediscovered philosophers who
anticipated the “affective turn” by formulating a critique of what they saw as a misun-
derstanding of philosophy of language, defining the language of the arts, especially that
of music and dance, as forms that are not discursive but presentative. Whereas Russell,
Carnap, Frege, and Wittgenstein understood the logical beyond the unspeakable as a
sphere of subjective experience, assigning it to psychology and no longer considering
as part of the realm of the semantic, Langer took a radically different position. Borrow-
ing from Cassirer, she introduced a concept of the symbolic that also includes what is
generally understood as the “affective gesture” or expressive articulation of emotion. In
Langer’s view, then, there is a world that does not exist outside of the physical world or
beyond time and space, but which nonetheless does not fit in any grammatical scheme
of expression. In the spirit of Whitehead, she therefore insists that “an object is not a
datum, but a form construed by the sensitive and intelligent organ, a form which is at
once an experienced individual thing and a symbol for the concept of it, for this sort of
53 Nick Lane, Life Ascending. The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 259.
54 Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Toronto: Penguin Group, 2011).
55 In May 2013, for example, the software company SAP sent out a press release announcing plans to hire
autistic staff on account of their unbeatable qualifications with regard to error detection in production,
http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/sap-stellt-autisten-ein-a-901090.html (retrieved March
7, 2014).
56 “Asperger’s Syndrome, he thought. Or something like that. A talent for seeing patterns and understanding
abstract reasoning where other people perceive only white noise,” Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, p. 399.
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thing.”57 For Langer, this bundling and recognition of patterns is an innate ability that
she sees as the root of our entire capacity for abstraction and “which in turn is the key-
note of rationality; so it appears that the conditions for rationality lie deep in our pure
animal experience – in our power of perceiving, in the elementary functions of our eyes
and ears and fingers. Mental life begins with our mere physiological constitution.”58
Conclusion
If sensory perception of the world takes place prior to all consciousness, one might ask,
finally, what this “prior to consciousness” means – is it an unconscious or rather a non-
conscious? Who is dancing when dancers dance? Who is moving when bodies process
stimuli? For Freud, the notion of the drive was a transitional concept bridging the divide
between the somatic and the mental. I think that today, for various reasons, it is possible
to replace the notion of the drive with that of affect to obtain a similarly transitional
concept. But as I explain in my theory of the affective dispositif, this concept is one that no
longer follows the movement of desire (for the Other) but which, with a focus on move-
ment, interval, and plasticity, leads to surprising parallels (synchronizations) between
the socio-political and the somatic.59 In this context, the “not-yet-movement” of affect
often mentioned here can be understood as a form of auto-affection,60 as self-moving in
the sense of a first difference (to be moved by motion). Against this background, brains,
bodies, dancers, crowds,61 and even financial markets62 can be understood as fields of
movement with different timings. This auto-affection is not a question of consciousness,
but is deeply connected with the un- or non-conscious, making it all the more necessary
to link it with the consequences of the cerebral unconscious as introduced by Malabou
and others. As already mentioned, the cerebral unconscious is one in time – more than
this, it is time. This unconsciousness or now non-conscious is no longer produced by and
57 Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (New York: The New American Library, 1962), p. 83 (empha-
sis original).
58 Ibid.
59 John Protevi, Political Affect. Connecting the Social and the Somatic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2009), p. 17.
60 See: Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976); Patricia T.
Clough, Autoaffection. Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000).
61 See also: Sebastian Vehlken’s text in this volume.
62 See also: Brian Massumi’s text in this volume.
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through language (as seen in psychoanalysis), but through movement and its intervals:
real movement, smaller movements, or “embodied simulation,”63 as described in neuro-
science today. This shift not only makes it possible to draw parallels as described above,
but also points to new forms of relatedness – towards the self and to others (including
non-humans). There is increasingly strong evidence of an affective mode of existence focus-
ing on the use of media technologies (of control and surveillance). Brain scans, Google
Glass and smart gadgets for home and travel promise constant updates on one’s own
personal mood status in an environment that is algorithmically rendered transparent
to a similar degree. This means that the great interest in dance and the findings of neu-
roscience really is due to an inkling that body and brain now find themselves bracketed
together in a new category that would like to encompass both the smallest and the big-
gest movement.
Translated by Nicholas Grindell
63 Simulation here indicates something beyond the realm of action, a “functional mechanism, used by
vast parts of the brain. […] Its mode of operation is unconscious, automatic and pre-reflexive,” Marc Jean-
nerod, Motor Cognition (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 148.
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The Neural Network

Temporality, Rationality, and Affect in Cybernetics 1
What we thought we were doing (and I think we succeeded fairly well) was treating the brain
as a Turing machine; that is, as a device which could perform the kind of functions which a brain
must perform if it is only to go wrong and have a psychosis.
Warren McCulloch (1948)2
In 1948 on a conference on circuits and brains in Pasadena California, the prominent

cybernetician and neural net pioneer Warren McCulloch addressed a room of the most
prominent mathematicians, psychologists, and physiologists of the day. In his comments
he sought to titillate his respectable audience by offering them a seemingly unintuitive
analogy. Finite state automata, those models of calculative and computational reason,
the templates for programming, the very seats of repetition, reliability, mechanical,
logical and anticipatable behavior, were “psychotic” but brain-like.
These statements cannot, however, be thought in terms of human subjectivity or
psychology. McCulloch, while trained as a psychiatrist, was not discussing patients in
mental clinics. Rather he was responding to a famous paper delivered by the mathema-
tician John von Neumann on logical automata.3 The psychiatrist had no intention to
argue about the essential characteristics, the ontology, of machines or minds. He recog-
nized that computers were not yet the same as organic brains. The question of equiva-
lence was not at stake.
What was at stake was the set of methodologies and practices, the epistemology
that might build new machines – whether organic or mechanical. And the answer,
both McCulloch and von Neumann suggested, was to develop a new form of logic, an
1 Special thanks goes to all my reviewers, and particularly to Marie-Luise Angerer, Michaela Ott, Luciana
Parisi, Patricia Clough, Chris Salter, and Joseph Dumit for their input, inspiration, and assistance with
this article. I also want to thank Dieuwke Boersma and Bernd Bösel for the editorial assistance.
2 William Aspray, John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1990); John von Neumann, “The General and Logical Theory of Automata,” in: William Aspray and Arthur
Burks, eds., Papers of John von Neumann on Computing and Computer Theory (Pasadena: MIT Press and Tomash
Publishers, 1948/1986) p. 422 (my emphasis).
3 Von Neumann, “The General and Logical Theory of Automata,” p. 391–431.
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Orit Halpern
epistemology they labeled “psychotic” and rational, that might make processes usually
assigned to analytic functions of the brain, perhaps associated with consciousness and
psychology, amenable to technical replication. McCulloch gave voice to an aspiration to
turn a world framed in terms of consciousness and liberal reason, into one of control,
communication, and rationality. And he did not dream alone. At this conference where
many of the foremost architects of Cold War computing, psychology, economics, and
life sciences sat, we hear a multitude of similar statements arguing for a new world,
now comprised of “psychotic” but logical and rational agents.
I want to take this turn away from pathology and reason, to a new discourse of cog-
nition and rationality, as a starting point to consider the relationship between memory,
reason, and temporality in cybernetic discourse. McCulloch and the works of his col-
leagues serve as useful vehicles to begin examining the displacement of older concepts
of agency, consciousness, and autonomy into circuits, cognition, and automata.
But if McCulloch was voicing the desire for a new form of intelligence, he was only
doing it through the language of an older psychoanalytic psychology. While explicitly
antagonistic to psychoanalysis, his definitions of psychosis largely conformed to the
definitions of the day in psychoanalysis. And his model was troubled by questions of
memory and time, features he assigned to the human psychology:
Two difficulties appeared [when making neurons and logic gates equivalent]. The first
concerns facilitation and extinction, in which antecedent activity temporarily alters
responsiveness to subsequent stimulation of one and the same part of the net. The second
concerns learning, in which activities concurrent at some previous time have altered the
net permanently, so that a stimulus which would previously have been inadequate is now
adequate.4
Stated otherwise, for McCulloch historical time presented challenges to making

thought and logic equivalent. As a result, McCulloch managed to build a new machine-
mind out of the matter of neurons, but the problems of temporal organization, change,
and perhaps, even consciousness continued to trouble him. This paper is therefore not
a theory of “psychosis” but rather a historical investigation into the psychoanalytic
relationship to cybernetics, and to the cybernetic relationship to temporality.
4 Warren McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1988), p. 21–22.
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The Neural Network
For cyberneticians, cognitive- and neuroscientists seeking to logically represent

thought the literal mechanisms of thinking always haunted the computational mod-
els. Older histories of science, psychology, and philosophy, invested in the surplus and
un-representable elements of human thought, troubled the new machinery of social
and human science. Despite therefore proclaiming, “Mind no longer goes ghostly as a
ghost,” and that psychoanalytic concepts could now be disavowed for neurophysiology,
McCulloch continued to be haunted and animated by these ongoing problems of orga-
nizing time and space inside of networks.5
This discourse of time and logic also speaks to our contemporary debates about
affect and time. If today, we continue to insist that human beings are not liberal,
enlightened, reasonable, or Cartesian, it comes within a history of the human and social
sciences that has long turned such pronouncements into entities such as financial
instruments, psychiatric diagnostic manuals, and international relations models. I seek
to offer historical sustenance and complication to contemporary accounts of biopolitics
and affect that argue that life and capital are now inextricably linked through digital
computation.6 This ever greater intertwining of economy and life to the affective,
sensory, and even neural scale has a history.
This piece will suggest that the mechanism driving economic and vital processes into
such intimacy, if not equivalence, is not a single technology but rather an epistemological
change in the type of truth claims and questions posed by cyberneticians about reason
and calculation that have influenced the social, human, life, and computational
sciences since the late 1940s. These speculative discourses, first murmured in numerous
conferences, universities, and corporations, reformulated ideas of agents, and ultimately
populations and systems, in important ways that continue to inform our present.
The statements articulated by many early cyberneticians and human scientists in
the late 1940s thus bridge the gap between our contemporary concerns with agents,
affect, preemption, networks, and collective intelligences, and older historical concerns
within science about consciousness, temporality, and representation. At this pivotal
moment, demarcated by a catastrophic world war, these sciences were part of produc-
ing an aspiration for a new world made up of communication and control – but not
without producing a novel set of conflicts, desires, and problems. I turn, then, to out-
5 Ibid., 22.
6 Patricia T. Clough, “The New Empiricism: Affect and Sociological Method,” European Journal of Social
Theory, 12.2 (2009): p. 43–61; see also: Tiziana Terranova, “Another Life: The Nature of Political Economy in
Foucault’s Genealogy of Biopolitics,” Theory, Culture, and Society 26.6 (2009): p. 235.
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Orit Halpern
lining the conflicted relationships between memory and control, embodied within the
discourse of psychosis for example and what this might say about our present concep-
tion of both media and minds. It is my contention that this relationship between logic
and archiving continues to animate our machines and digital networks, driving a dual
imaginary of instantaneous analytics and collective intelligence, while encouraging the
relentless penetration of media technologies into life.
The Logical Calculus of the Nervous Net
It is perhaps no accident that autonomy and will were being re-scripted as circuits in
machines at the time. Much of the logic that underpins contemporary ideals of intel-
ligence emerged from the Second World War and the science of communication and
control, labeled cybernetics. As is well documented, cybernetics emerged from work at
the Radiation Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT] on anti-aircraft
defense and servo-mechanisms during the Second World War. The MIT mathemati-
cian Norbert Wiener, working with the MIT trained electrical engineer Julian Bigelow,
and the physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth, reformulated the problem of shooting down
planes in terms of communication – between an airplane pilot and the anti-aircraft gun.
These researchers postulated that under stress, airplane pilots would act repetitively, and
therefore have algorithmic behaviors analogous to servo-mechanisms and amenable to
mathematical modeling and analysis. This understanding denoted that all entities were
“black-boxed” and should be studied behaviorally.7
In 1943, inspired by this idea that machines and minds might be thought together
through the language of logic and mathematics, the psychiatrist Warren McCulloch
and the logician Walter Pitts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign decided
to study quite literally the machine-like nature of human beings. The pair would later
go to MIT in 1952 at Norbert Wiener’s behest.8
The article “A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” which
appeared in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, has now come to be one of the most
commonly referenced pieces in cognitive science, philosophy, and computer science.
7 See also: Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, Julian Bigelow, “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology,”
Philosophy of Science 10.1 (1943): p. 18–24.
8 Lily E. Kay, “From Logical Neurons to Poetic Embodiments of Mind: Warren McCulloch’s Project in
Neuroscience,” Science in Context 14.4 (2001): p. 591–594.
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The Neural Network
Fig. 1: The Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1963 editon, p. 34.
There are a series of moves by which neurons could be made equivalent to logic gates,
and therefore “thought” is made materially realizable from the physiological actions of
the brain. These moves reformulated psychology, but they also demonstrated a broader
transformation in the constitution of evidence and truth in science.
The model of the neural net put forth in “A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent
in Nervous Activity” has two characteristics of note that are critical in producing our
contemporary ideas of rationality.9 The first characteristic of the model according to
McCulloch is that every neuron firing has a “semiotic character”; it is mathematically
rendered as a proposition. Pitts and McCulloch imagined (in a departure from the real
brain) each neuron as operating on an “all or nothing” principle when firing electrical
impulses over synaptic separations. The pair interpreted the fact that neurons possessed
action potentials and delays, as equivalent to a discrete decision. This event affirms or
denies a fact (or activation), and therefore neurons can be thought of as signs (true/false),
and nets as semiotic situations, or communication structures (just like the structured
scenarios of communication theory).10 [Fig. 1 and 2]
This discrete decision (true or false, activate or not) also made neurons equivalent to
logical propositions and Turing machines.
The second element of the model is a strictly probabilistic and predictive time.
Neuronal nets are determinate in terms of the future (they are predictive), but
indeterminate in terms of the past. [Fig. 3]
9 The model has been reviewed elsewhere, here I am briefly outlining the work with a focus on episte-
mology: Tara Abraham, “(Physio) Logical Circuits: The Intellectual Origins of the McCulloch-Pitts Neural
Networks,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 38 (Winter 2002): p. 3–25.
10 See also: Warren McCulloch and Walter H. Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous
Activity,” in: McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind, p. 19–39, here p. 21–24.
123
Orit Halpern
Fig. 2: “A Logical Calculus,” p. 36.
Fig. 3: “A Logical Calculus,” p. 36.
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The Neural Network
In the model, given a net in a particular time state (T), one can predict the future
action of the net (T+1), but not the past action. From within the net, one cannot deter-
mine which neuron fired to excite the current situation. Put another way, from within
a net (or network), the boundary between perception and cognition, the separation
between interiority and exteriority, and the organization of causal time are all in-dif-
ferentiable.
McCulloch offered as an example the model of a circular memory neuron activating
itself with its own electrical impulses. [see Fig. 2]
At every moment, what results as a conscious experience of memory cannot be the
recollection of the original activation of the neuron, but merely that it was activated in
the past at an in-determinant time. The firing of a signal, or the suppression of firing,
can only be declarations of “true” or “false” – true, there was an impulse, or false, there
was no firing – not an interpretative statement of context or meaning.
Within neural nets, at any moment, one cannot know which neuron sent the message,
when the message came from, or whether the message is the result of a new stimulus or
merely a misfire. In this model the net cannot determine with any certitude whether a
stimulus comes from without or from within the circuit; whether it is a fresh input or
simply a recycled “memory,”
McCulloch and Pitts ended on a triumphant note, announcing an aspiration for a
subjective science. “Thus our knowledge [they wrote] of the world, including ourselves,
is incomplete as to space and indefinite as to time. This ignorance, implicit in all our
brains, is the counterpart of the abstraction which renders our knowledge useful,”11 If
subjectivity had long been the site of inquiry for the human sciences, now, perhaps, it
might become an explicit technology. Many cyberneticians forwarded this new concept
of ignorance and partial perspective as a technical opportunity rather then an obstacle
to knowledge.
McCulloch and Pitts were explicit that their work was a Gedankenexperiment, a
thought experiment that produces a way of doing things, a methodological machine.
Almost cheerily, McCulloch and Pitts admitted that this was an enormous “reduction”
of the actual operations of the neurons.12 “But one point must be made clear: neither of
11 Ibid., p. 35.
12 McCulloch and Pitts had derived their assumptions about how neurons work from what was at that
time the dominantly accepted neural doctrine in neurophysiology. The pair used the research of the
Spanish pathologist, Ramón y Cajal and his student Lorento de Nó, and so had the neurological armory to
begin thinking of neurons as logic gates. Namely, Ramón y Cajal was the first who suggested in the 1890s
that the neuron was the anatomical and functional unit of the nervous system. He was, furthermore,
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Orit Halpern
us conceives the formal equivalence to be a factual explanation. Per contra!”13 McCulloch

and Pitts were clear that for purposes of logical experiment, such aspects as fatigue and
the speed of firing and activation must be disregarded as unimportant. At no point
should anyone assume that neural nets were describing a “real” brain.14
But reduction or not, the pair had proved that logic and very sophisticated problem
solving might emerge from small physiological units like neurons linked up in circuits.
In doing so, and by way of labeling these circuits psychotic, amnesic, neurotic, and his-
torically incoherent, McCulloch and Pitts made neural nets analogous to communica-
tion channels, and shifted the terms of dealing with psychology and consciousness to
cognition and capacities. Neural nets were thus made equivalent to Markov chains and
also compliant with the Russian mathematician A. A. Markov’s famous definition of
algorithms as possessing three variables: definiteness, generality, and conclusiveness.15 I
can make a final extrapolation and argue that for McCulloch and Pitts, processes of rea-
soning can be directly equated with logic gates, represented as algorithms, and derived
from the physiological mechanism of the neuron’s actions. More significantly, the neu-
ral net suggests a change in attitudes to psychological processes that rests on an episte-
mological transformation in what constituted truth, reason, and evidence in science.
This epistemology rests on three important points that are seemingly unimportant
alone, but are significant when recognized as joining a history of logic, engineering
practices, and the human sciences in a new assemblage. The first is that logic is now both
material and behavioral, and agents are non-ontologically defined or “black-boxed,”
The second is that cybernetic attitudes to mind rest upon a repression of all questions of
documentation, indexicality, archiving, learning, and historical temporality. And third –
the temporality of the net – is preemptive: it always operates in the future perfect tense
but without necessarily defined endpoints or contexts.16
largely responsible for the adoption of the neuronal doctrine as the basis of modern neuroscience. The
work of Lorento de Nó focused on action potentials and synaptic delays between neurons and reverberating
circuits. See also: Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Texture of the Nervous System of Man and the Vertebrates (Vienna/
New York: Springer, 1999).
13 McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind, p. 22.
14 Ibid.
15 Andrey A. Markov, Theory of Algorithms, trans. Jacques J. Schorr-Kon and PST Staff (Moscow: Academy of
Sciences of the U.S.S.R., published for the National Science Foundation and the Department of Commerce,
U.S.A. by the Israel Program for Scientific Translation, 1954), p. 1.
16 See also: Orit Halpern, “Dreams for Our Perceptual Present: Temporality, Storage, and Interactivity in
Cybernetics,” Configurations 13.2 (2005).
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The Neural Network
Rationality could thus be redefined as both embodied and affective, and good science
was not the production of certitude but rather the account of chance and indetermi-
nacy. For neural net researchers the question then turned to determining not whether
minds are the same or different as machines, but rather, as Joseph Dumit has put it:
“What difference does it make to be in one network or another?”17
Control and Computing
Having inserted the logic of the machine into the brain, this model would feedback
into the design of machines. The model of the cycling memory neuron in fact directly
refracts an earlier concept of control in the Turing machine (and would later become the
model for memory in von Neumann’s architecture for EDVAC).18 Control in the Turing
machine is the head that “reads” the program from memory, and then begins the pro-
cess of executing it according to the directions in the memory. On the one hand, control
directs the next operation of the machine. On the other hand, control is directed by the
program. The control unit, or the reading head in a Turing machine, is directed by the
tape it is reading from memory, not the reverse. Control is that function that will read
and act upon this retrieved data, inserting the retrieved program or data into the run
of the machine. Such machines do not operate top down, but rather in feedback loops
between storage, processing segments, and the interface for input and output. In his
1946 report on building a computing machine, the ACE Report, Turing reiterated that
only the possession of memory “give[s] the machine the possibility of constructing its
own orders; i.e. there is always the possibility of taking a particular minor cycle out of
storage and treating it as an order to be carried out. This can be very powerful,”19 If there
is a feature that allows minds to act in uncanny and unexpected ways, it is this surpris-
ing capacity to change the pattern of action by way of insertion of a program from stor-
17 Joseph Dumit, “Circuits in the Mind,” unpublished manuscript (April 2007): p. 7.
18 John von Neumann, “First Draft of A Report on the EDVAC,” Contract No. W-670-ORD-4926 between
the United States Army Ordnance Department and the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Moore
School of Electrical Engineering, June 30, 1945). Von Neumann confessed that the McCulloch/Pitts’ model
had influenced him in conceiving machine memory. EDVAC stands for Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic
Computer, it was one of the first electronic computers, was binary and was a stored program computer.
19 Alan M. Turing, “Proposal for Development in the Mathematics Division of an Automatic Computing
Engine (Ace) (1946),” in: A. M. Turing’s Ace Report of 1946 and Other Papers, Charles Babbage Institute Reprint
Series for the History of Computing, eds. B. E. Carpenter and R. W. Doran (Cambridge/London: MIT Press,
1986), p. 21.
127
Orit Halpern
Fig. 4: “Planning and Coding,” p. 157.
age. Control in computers is like reverberating circuits in brains, and both are classi-
cally defined as psychotic in receiving memories without history. If today we regularly
assume we know what control is and deploy the term critically at will, from within the
machine it is far less clear, and far more dynamic. [Fig. 4]
The historical redefinition of rationality therefore demands a reconsideration of
what “control” means. In most scholarly documentation, control has been correlated
with prediction, knowing the future, and (often military) command.20 In their famous
book, Planning and Coding, von Neumann and Goldstine first introduced flow charts
and circuits for stored program computers. In describing their circuits they wrote, “[w]
e propose to indicate these portions of the flow diagram of C by a symbolism of lines ori-
ented by arrows. [Fig. 4 above] […] Second, it is clear that this notation is incomplete and
unsatisfactory,”21 In other words, control is not definable; its operable imagining and its
explicit definition are incommensurate. But rather than treat this failure in representa-
tion as a problem, this threshold became a technological opportunity; this emergent
space between the definable and the infinite provided the contours of the engineering
problem – an opportunity to turn from logic to technology.
20 See also: Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,”
Critical Inquiry 21 (1994); Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War
America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).
21 Herman H. Goldstine and John von Neumann, “Planning and Coding of Problems for an Electronic
Computing Instrument: Report on the Mathematical and Logical Aspects of an Electronic Computing
Instrument, Part II, Vol. I,” (Princeton: The Institute for Advanced Study, 1948), p. 157.
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The Neural Network
Significantly for us, McCulloch and Pitts inverted the problem posed by the original
negative proof of the Entscheidungsproblem that is the Turing machine. If throughout the
19th and earlier 20th centuries, an army of mathematicians and philosophers struggled
to infinitely extend the limits of logical representation to which the Turing machine
is a negative proof demonstrating the impossibility of fully representing all state-
ments in first-order logic, then McCulloch and Pitts had a different epistemology and
frame.22 Accepting that there were many things that could not be known or computed,
McCulloch inverted the question Turing had posed. If, instead of seeking an absolute
reasonable foundation for mathematical thought that an army of other logicians and
mathematicians including Gottlob Frege, Kurt Gödel, David Hilbert, Bertrand Russell,
Alfred North Whitehead, and Alan Turing had attempted, McCulloch and Pitts had cho-
sen to ask instead: What if mental functioning could now be demonstrated to emanate
from the physiological actions of multitudes of logic gates? What could be built? (not:
What could be proven?), then the problem could have been inverted from seeking the
limits of calculation to examining the possibilities for logical nets. What had been an
absolute limit to mathematical logic became an extendable threshold for engineering.
McCulloch implied that we should turn instead to accepting our partial and incomplete
perspectives, our inability to know ourselves and make this “psychosis” in his words an
“experimental epistemology.”23
Affective Logics
What the cybernetic reformulation of logic as psychotic permitted was an abandonment

of ontological concern with the past and the present in the interest of focusing on
future interactions. These models measure not what is happening, but prepare us for
what will happen as a result of finding patterns of past data that ironically was devoid
22 Compare: Alan M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs
problem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, no. 1 (1936): p. 2–42; Bertrand Russell, The Principles
of Mathematics (London/New York: Routledge, 2009); Erich H. Reck, From Frege to Wittgenstein Perspectives on
Early Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The Proof
and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); Kurt Gödel, On Formally Undecidable Propositions of
Principia Mathematica and Related Systems (New York: Basic Books, 1962); Alan M. Turing, The Essential Turing:
Seminal Writings in Computing, Logic, Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, and Artificial Life, Plus the Secrets of Enigma
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
23 McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind, p. 359.
129
Orit Halpern
of historical temporalities. The transformation in truth claims and epistemology opened

a new frontier for study – subjective interactions in environments without complete
information.
These literally nervous networks and logical rationalities proliferated in the social
and human sciences. Cybernetic and communicative concepts of mind were part of a
broader shift at the time in concepts of reason, psychology, and consciousness; informing
everything from finance and options trading equations, environmental psychology
and urban planning programs of individuals such as Kevin Lynch, and later MIT’s
Architecture Machine Group and the Media Lab headed by Nicholas Negroponte, to
the political science models of Karl Deutsch at Harvard, and the “bounded rationality”
introduced by Herbert Simon and widely considered the start of contemporary finance.
The postwar social sciences were repositories of these techniques that transformed what
had once been a question of political economy, value production, and the organization
of human desire and social relations to problems of circulation and communication by
way of a new approach to modeling intelligence and agency.24
This rationality is also sensible, perhaps affective; a situation that puts in considerable
revision of dominant understandings of digital and computational mediums as
distancing, disembodied, or abstract. And if it is one of the dominant assumptions in the
study of modern history and governance that liberal subjectivity and economic agency
is defined as a logic guided by a reason separate from sense, then these discourses mark
a clear separation.25 The science historian Lorraine Daston reminds us that we would do
well to recall that those things today considered virtuous and intelligent, such as speed,
logic, and definitiveness in action were not always so. She is explicit: rationality in its
Cold War formulation, despite the insistence of technocrats, policy makers, and free-
market advocating economists, is not reason as understood by Enlightenment thinkers,
liberals, or even modern logicians.26
24 See also: Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason (Durham: Duke University Press,
forthcoming); Herbert Simon, “A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics
69.1 (1955): p. 99–118, here p. 101; Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern
America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); idem et al., Economics, Bounded Rationality and
the Cognitive Revolution (Northhampton, MA.: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1992).
25 See also on rationality: Donald A. MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera. How Financial Models Shape
Markets (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006); and Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision
and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990) for a discussion of mediation,
reason, and observation that supports my critique of dominant histories.
26 Lorraine Daston, “The Rule of Rules, or How Reason Became Rationality,” unpublished talk (University
of California at Berkeley, March 25, 2011).
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The Neural Network
If this is true then our financial instruments, markets, governments, organizations,

and machines are all rational, affective, sensible, and preemptive, but never reasonable.
To recognize the significance of this thinking in our present, it might help to contem-
plate Brian Massumi’s definition of “preemption”., Preemption, he argues, is not pre-
vention, it is a different way of knowing the world. Prevention, he claims, “assumes an
ability to assess threats empirically and identify their causes.” Preemption, on the other
hand, is affective, lacks representation, and is a constant nervous anticipation at a liter-
ally neural if not molecular level for a never fully articulated threat or future.27
Within ten years of the war, cyberneticians moved from working on anti-aircraft
prediction to building systems without clear end points or goals, and embracing an
epistemology without final objectives, or perhaps objectivity (even if many practitioners
denied this). Nets, taken as systems, are probabilistic scenarios, with multiple states
and indefinite run times even if each separate neuron can act definitively. In cognitive
and early neuroscience the forms of knowledge being espoused were always framed in
terms of experiment, never definitive conclusions. “Experimental epistemologies,” as
McCulloch put it, came to mean that there are never final facts, only ongoing experi-
ments.
These human and social scientists made operative the unknowable space between
legibility and emergence, and turned it into a technological impulse to proliferate new
tools of measurement, diagrams, and interfaces. At the limits of this analysis is the pos-
sibility that emergence itself has been automated. As the theorist Luciana Parisi puts
it in this volume, cybernetics takes hold of the space between infinity and logic, and
makes it the very site of technical intervention, the very site to proliferate algorithms
into life.28 If cybernetics initially sought to control the future, now control itself became
the unclear site of emergence, an indefinable state that was part of networks operating
in the future without full definition or information either about endpoints or pasts.
The problem of how to act under conditions of uncertainty, or how to define a man or
a machine, became instead a pragmatic mandate and a focus on process. Instead of ask-
ing what is a circuit, a neuron, or a market, human scientists turned to asking: What do
circuits do? How do agents act? This created an ongoing opportunity to entangle calcu-
lation and life at the very level of nervous networks, by literally correlating the nervous
system with the financial and political system.
27 Brian Massumi, “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption,” Theory & Event 10.2 (2007): p. 4.
28 See also: Luciana Parisi, Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, Space (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT,
2013).
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Orit Halpern
Psychoanalysis in the Machine
Having repressed historical interests in the social and human sciences concerning desire,
motivation, agency, and sovereignty, these older questions, however, returned to plague
the new epistemology of the circuit. We might then seek to historically situate the rela-
tionship between these cybernetic and computational discourses and older modernist
discourses of psychology and drives to ask: What is at stake in this movement from con-
sciousness to cognition? And in particular: What work did a discourse of psychoanalysis
and psychosis do to permit this redefinition of mind? For McCulloch’s psychoanalysis
obsessed and possessed his writings: he discussed it literally as an almost satanic pres-
ence possessing psychiatry and psychology and demanding exorcism. His language
regularly invoked the occult, superstition, and ghosts in describing the older sciences of
the psyche. Psychoanalysis, with its insistence on narrative and talk therapy, appeared to
McCulloch to offer a religious and occult understanding of the mind as entirely spiritual
and in the realm of representation, narrative, and human language – not an animated,
vital, mechanical mind as he envisioned.29 Such violent repudiation, of course, might
suggest affiliation rather then differences between the two projects.
It is perhaps no surprise that psychosis might offer this possibility of produc-
ing a logic “spoken” directly by nerves, or that it should be related to computational
machines and digital mediums. Friedrich Kittler has already suggested that the initial
effect of psychoanalysis was the externalization of the psyche and its incorporation into
larger discursive networks. In delineating the “discourse network of 1800” from the “dis-
course network of 1900,” Kittler specifies the latter as being concerned with an obsession
with the minute, unimportant, and indiscriminately recorded, which characterized
the nascent media technologies of the time.30 Therefore Freud’s obsessive concern not
with the obviously scripted “events,” but with slips of the tongue, minute details, and
so forth, advances a larger technical assemblage obsessed with delivering recorded and
stored events from any clear referential relation to an external, meaningful “reality,”31
Early psychoanalytic discussions of schizophrenia often bore striking resemblance
to, and investment in, new media technologies of the day. The occult and telepathy,
for example, obsessed Freud, and were phenomena linked to transgressed boundaries of
time and space, often analogized to media technologies such as radio and photography,
29 McCulloch and Pitts, “A Logical Calculus.”

30 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 3.
31 Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
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and increasingly figured in the theorization of both transference and psychosis. Freud’s
concern with the occult, and telepathy in particular, stemmed from the space that such
phenomena offered in relation to the physical nature of psychic phenomena; here, psy-
choanalysis appears directly in tandem with later efforts in both computation and neu-
ral nets. Freud argued, for example, in an essay on “Dreams and Occultism” that:
the telepathic process is supposed to consist of a mental act in one person instigating the
same mental act in another person. What lies between these two mental acts may easily
be a physical process into which the mental one is transformed at one end and which is
transformed with other transformations back once more into the same mental one at the
other end. 32
As the critic Patricia Thurschwell points out, telepathy appeals to Freud precisely as
a mechanism that refers back to an older, perhaps primordial form of communication –
language as “inseparable from biology,”33 For Freud, telepathy and the occult re-merged
as sexuality in drives that tied the seemingly psychical to the evolutionary and biological
processes of reproduction and trait inheritance.
For example, the only major study of paranoid schizophrenia that Freud managed
to collate was that of the famous Saxon judge, Schreber, who had written an autobi-
ography. In it, Freud comments at one point with pleasure on the manner by which
psychotic persons assume that an external influence similar to telepathic control and
figured as such – an “influencing machine” to use the language of Victor Tausk34 – is
controlling them, even if that force actually emanates from within their own psychic
machinery. He noted that these phenomena perfectly support his own theories of sex-
ual desire and paranoid homosexual libidinal processes misdirected from their objects
of desire.35 “The [only] difference,” Thurschwell writes, “between Schreber and Freud
should be that the psychotic, Schreber, lives through his delusional systems while the
doctor, Freud, analyzes them.”36 Psychoanalytic actions appear seamlessly anticipatory
32 Sigmund Freud cited in: Pamela Thurschwell, “Ferenczi’s Dangerous Proximities: Telepathy, Psychosis,
and the Real Event,” Differences 11.1 (1999): p. 156.
33 Ibid., p. 157.
34 Victor Tausk, “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia,” in: Jonathan Crary and
Sanford Kwinter, eds., Incorporations (New York: Zone Books, 1992).
35 Sigmund Freud, The Schreber Case (New York: Penguin Classic, 2002), p. 3–4.
36 Thurschwell, “Ferenczi’s Dangerous Proximities,” p. 162.
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Orit Halpern
of later attitudes in computation to both the occult and the circuits of communication
that make up rationality.
But cybernetic invocations of psychoanalysis, and of the occult, complicate the seam-
less extension of the 1900 discourse network into the present. For Freud also found
such proximities – between the doctor and the patient, mind and body, and desire and
knowledge – troubling. To the psychoanalysis of the earlier 20th century, struggling for
credibility under the terms of objectivity offered at the time, telepathy – and with it,
psychosis – presented a dangerous proximity to the practice of transference in psycho-
analysis, and a threat to the clear-cut separation between the analyst and the analysand.
Telepathy was an act that bridged boundaries, a reminder of both past mysticism and
theological forms of knowledge, and an accession of the proximity and perhaps indiffer-
entiability between the patient and the doctor that threatened the scientific and medi-
cal mores of objectivity that Freud aspired to.
The problem was that this clear separation between analyst and analysand was vio-
lated by the proximity between the paranoid fantasy of being penetrated by an external
mind-force, and the analytic practice where the psychoanalyst is offered interior access
to the patient, in a sense taking up the paranoid position as a penetrative force com-
manding the psychotic. For Freud, this psychotic possibility was not thought. This ten-
sion revealed itself most clearly in Freud’s debates with figures such as Sandor Ferenczi
and Carl Jung, who were proponents of telepathy, but were also quicker to embrace
(literally and figuratively) sexual and intimate proximity with patients, and to forego
their ability to clearly delineate the separation between the analysand and analyst in
psychoanalytic therapy. Ferenczi was more than willing to sleep with and accede to his
own desires in the relationship with his patients. For him, psychoanalysis opened up a
world of intersubjectivity where the interior and the exterior of the subject were perme-
able terrains. Ferenczi was ready to rethink normative sexualities and theories of desire
to recognize this psychotic and telepathic, perhaps occult, nature of psychoanalysis and
was also open to new forms of subjectivity and new ways to encounter difference.37 All
therapy possessed a psychotic element in that it was intra-subjective, which was also
the opportunity to re-channel desire.38
37 See also: Arnold Rachman, Sandor Ferenczi: The Psychoanalyst of Tenderness and Passion (New York: Jason
Aronson, 1997).
38 See also: C. G. Jung, The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, ed. Frederick W. Peterson and A. A. Brill (New
York: Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease Pub. Co., 1909); Peter Gay, Freud – A Life for Our Times (New
York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1998), p. 197–225.
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Freud on the other hand had an unwavering ambivalence about psychosis, and about
telepathy, along with other media technologies of the day such as cinema, which was at
the heart of his tensions in relationship to both the occult and his followers. Psychosis
posed a threat to the authority of the analyst and seemingly made visible the occult and
transgressive features of psychoanalytic therapy.39
At stake in this debate over the occult, telepathy, and psychoanalysis was none other
than the place of analysis and the psychoanalytic relationship to science and its place in
imposing normative subjectivities. The authority of the psychoanalyst as an external
observer, subscribing to what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison define as a “mechanical
objectivity”40 over the analysand, was violated through this occult intimacy.
McCulloch, however, appeared to enjoy dallying with the mystical. In fact, at the
zenith of his analysis such a thing as haunting and possession could not exist if the
new sciences of the mind were appropriated. If there was a critical pivot upon which
cybernetics would separate from previous histories of science, it involved this reformu-
lation of authority and truth.41 This time, however, the occult has been merged with
the machine. The regular invocation of ghosts and other spirit mediums in McCulloch’s
discourse was not to provide a separation between the sciences of the mind and the
vitalist fantasies of earlier eras but to argue that the mind is ghostly, but from inside.
Displacing the problem of analyst and analysand entirely, the autonomous circuit can
directly speak, thus providing the biological substrate to language initially sought for
in theories of telepathy, occultism, and psychosis. “Mind no longer goes ghostly as a
ghost” was his final declaration in the neural net article; it is no longer ghostly because

40 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (Fall 1992): p. 81–125.
41 The history of the pathology of schizophrenia is both long and constantly changing. The disease was
first formally identified as dementia praecox in the 1890s; the term “schizophrenia” and the aforementioned
symptoms were formalized by Eugen Bleuler in 1908 to describe a “split” or cognitive dissonance between
personality, thinking, memory and perception. The definition of the disease continued to evolve: at the
time McCulloch was writing, there was no Diagnostic or Statistical Manual, and his definitions adhered
to those of the earlier 20th century. McCulloch himself was critical of the term, and often thought it
was too often used to catalogue too many psychiatric pathologies, particularly psychotic ones. Like
other practitioners at the time, he classified schizophrenia into multiple subtypes, of which only one –
paranoid – was prone to violence and to the regular imagination of threat and enemies to the self. See:
Eugen Bleuler, Dementia Praecox; or, the Group of Schizophrenias (New York: International Universities Press,
1950); Warren McCulloch, “The Physiology of Thinking and Perception,” paper presented at the Creative
Engineering Conference (June 22, 1954), in: The Papers of Warren McCulloch, B:M 139, Series III (American
Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA).
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Orit Halpern
it is material, but never bounded. Haunting cannot happen without history and with-
out a bounded subject.42
McCulloch was often quick to assert the possibility for reformulating subjectivity
and even quicker to dispense with ideals of an objectivity untempered by subjective
experience or embodiment. In a series of later essays labeled “Of, I and It,” he asserted
that the decentralized nature of human cognition made the clear delineation of other-
ness murky. McCulloch wrote:
yet, from the use of I, me, mine in the communications of daily life in health and disease,
we are entitled to infer that the vagrant solid which the speaker labels I in the moment of
the experience consists only of events that occur as he intends. The rest he calls it.
He went on to argue that concepts of resistances and thresholds should replace

any “explanations” that psychoanalysis might provide.43 For McCulloch, resistances
that may occur from lovers, or even from within the body, such as a causalgic arm or
a nervous tick, produce a fluctuating threshold of differentiation instead of a clear set
boundary between analyst and analysand or between subject and object.
For McCulloch, Pitts, and their many interlocutors in the emerging cognitive and
social sciences of the time, psychoanalytic concerns with pathology, normalcy, and in
fact consciousness were displaced. If for Freud the occult returned in the form of the
erotic as a sexuality without boundaries,44 for cyberneticians – McCulloch most promi-
nently – the occult returned in the form of a self-referential machine whose locus
was never aimed at a desire for an external other demanding re-direction, but instead
became a self-referential and self-generating world.
Cybernetics thus hijacked the apparatus of an earlier history of psychology to
make human reason and machine intelligence equivalent. However, this theft was
only made possible by deferring any encounter with historical time or the erotic. The
anthropologist, cybernetician, and counter-cultural icon, Gregory Bateson, made this
reorganization of the terms of desire into algorithm explicit:
42 McCulloch and Pitts, “A Logical Calculus,” p. 22.

43 Warren McCulloch, series of Manuscripts ‘Of I and It’, Originally Titled ‘Of Eye and It’, in: “The Papers
of Warren McCulloch,” p. 558–559.
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In other words, I believe that much of early Freudian theory was upside down […]. Today
we think of consciousness as the mysterious, and of the computational methods of the
unconscious, e.g., primary process, as continually active, necessary, and all-embracing,45
Bateson implies that science now has a new technique – “computational methods”
of the unconscious – to account not only for the behavior of individuals but that is
“all embracing,” and extendable to systems, ecologies, and organizations. He went so
far as to label these unconscious and computational methods “algorithms of the heart,
or, as they say, the unconscious,”46 Bateson’s statements suggest a transformation of
psychological inquiry and concern from the conscious to the unconscious and the dis-
placement of what had once been a source of vexing scientific concern and a limit to
knowledge (mainly the recognition of the subjective nature of human perception and
consciousness) into a “method” and an “algorithm.”
At stake in the emergence of psychotic logic, therefore, was the stability of older his-
tories of objectivity, truth, and documentation. But also up for negotiation were the
terms of encounter between bodies and subjects. Cyberneticians literally took the appa-
ratus of psychoanalysis – the circuits and drives, the repetitive automatisms, the rela-
tionship of transference – and inverted it. If, as media theorist Mary Ann Doane argues,
Freud was obsessed with cataloguing the unconscious and representing time, cyberne-
ticians now deferred the problem of storage and time to focus instead on process.47 The
obsession with authority and intimacy was displaced – no longer the site of inquiry into
the truth of the subject, and no longer the center of debates in cybernetic and computa-
tional research on the psyche or behavior. This slide from the occult to the erotic to the
algorithmic and rational therefore has everything to do with contemporary structures
of networks and capital. Within twenty years of the war, the centrality of reason as a tool
to model human behavior, subjectivity, and society had been replaced with a new set of
discourses and methods that made “algorithm” and “love” speakable in the same sen-
tence and that explicitly correlated psychotic perspective with analytic logic. Cyberneti-
cians sought to make the very space between rationality and reason, or the unconscious
and conscious, amenable to logical and perhaps even mathematical intervention. The
impossibility of visualizing or representing this process – an impossibility already faced
45 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 135–136
(emphasis added).
46 Ibid., p. 139.
47 Mary Ann Doane, “Freud, Marey, and the Cinema,” Critical Inquiry 22 (1996): p. 313–343.
137
Orit Halpern
by Freud in his turn to dream work – became the site for media intervention; the very
distance between reason and the incoherent and mechanical repetitions of the uncon-
scious reformulated into calculative and probabilistic technologies.
Memory as a Cyclical Machine
We have come far: from the interior of the mind to the structure of organizations and
global economies. This still leaves a few questions. Having supposedly exorcised the
ghosts of historicity, cyberneticians continued to struggle with memory and significa-
tion. In a letter in 1952 to the cybernetician Norbert Wiener, Gregory Bateson spelled out
the problem of memory, time, repetition, and rationality:
What applications of the theory of games do is to reinforce the players’ acceptance of the
rules and competitive premises, and therefore make it more and more difficult for the
players to conceive that there might be other ways of meeting and dealing with each
other[…] I question the wisdom of the static theory as a basis for action in a human world.
The theory may be “static” within itself, but its use propagates changes, and I suspect that
the long term changes so propagated are in a paranoidal direction and odious.48
Discussing the Rand Corporation, the premier private consulting group to the
United States government and military on national security and public policy, Bateson
makes explicit a new dilemma of violence. In this formulation, players no longer cre-
ate violence because of a misdirected desire resulting in a loathing for an imagined
Other, but instead produce violence through a self-referential performance of the game.
Bateson correlates “static” games with paranoid schizophrenics, as a perceptual prob-
lem resulting in repetitive cycles culminating in potentially genocidal violence (nuclear
war in this case) – in his language, a “paranoidal direction,” Authority is psychotic, and
here it comes at the expense of futurity. But it is an authority emerging from the pure
self-reference of the data field. Bateson fears that the performance of past data paraded
as prophecy when merged with older concepts of objectivity will produce only repeti-
tion without difference. In a stunning inversion of psychoanalytic concerns, Bateson
recognizes that the ubiquity of computational logics makes distance impossible to
48 Gregory Bateson, Letter to Norbert Wiener, September 22, 1952 (Norbert Wiener Papers, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, MC22, Box Number 10, Folder 155), p. 2.
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achieve and induces violence, not as a result of any misdirected object choices or imag-
ined enemy Others – game theories have no such formulations within them – but as a
pure result of performing and repeating commands without interpretation. In fact, it
is precisely the lack of imagination that defines this condition. He suggests a total war
without desire.
Having therefore displaced older terms of consciousness, reason and desire from the
algorithmic rationality of the network, these terms would return in cybernetics under
the guise of visualization, time, and memory. At the famous Sixth Macy Conference on
Circular and Causal Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems in 1949 in
New York City, memory was increasingly problematized between its dynamic and sta-
ble elements and storage. In this instance, the immediacy and temporality of the televi-
sual came to replace the older conceptions of tapes, photographs, and films. McCulloch
opened the conference with a beacon and a warning. He offered the example of a new
type of tube in development at Pasadena, similar to a cathode ray tube, that beams on
screen where items are stored. The screen, however, is mutable, and the persistence of
the memory of the beam is temporary, and must be refreshed. This idea of a cycling or
scanning memory was viewed by McCulloch as offering great innovations in the pos-
sibility of miniaturizing and expanding machine memory.
His second example was a warning from John von Neumann. The warning is that
even the entire number of neurons in the brain, according to calculation cannot account
for the complexity of human behavior and ability. McCulloch goes so far as to discuss
“lower forms […] such as the army ant where you have some 300 neurons that are not
strictly speaking sensory or strictly speaking motor items, and that the performance
of the army ant […] is far more complicated than can be computed by 300 yes or no
devices,”49 McCulloch, however, goes on to say that there is no way that these capacities
can be understood as illogical or analog. Rather, he turned to another model that might
retain the logical nature of the neurons, but still account for the capacity to learn and
behave at scales beyond the comprehension of computation.
The answer, coming through a range of discussions about protein structure and
memory within cells, involved refreshing information in time. Wiener argued, “this
variability in time here postulated will do in fact the sort of thing that von Neumann
wants, that is, the variability need not be fixed variability in space, but may actually be
a variability in time,” The psychologist John Stroud offered the example of a “very large
49 Claus Pias, ed., Cybernetics. The Macy Conferences 1946–53, Vol. 1 (Berlin/Zurich: Diaphanes, 2003), p. 31.
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macro-organism called a destroyer,” This military ship has endless “metabolic” changes
of small chores throughout the day, but still retains the function of a destroyer. This
systemic stability, but internal differentiation and cycling, becomes the ideal of agency
and action in memory.50
McCulloch and Stroud presented a model of memory as bifurcated between perfect
retention of all information with retroactive selection or memory as a constant active
site of processing of information for further action, based on internal “reflectors,” or
“internal eyes”:
We may [they stated] need only very tiny little reflectors which somehow or other can
become a stimulus pattern which is available for this particular mode of operation of
our very ordinary thinking, seeing, and hearing machinery. This particular pattern of
reflectors is what I see as it were with my internal eyes just as what I see when I look at a
store window, is a pattern on the retinal mosaic,51
Mental processes are equated here with processing data, and pattern seeking, but
it is these internal “eyes” from within the psychic apparatus that allow a self-reflexive
apparatus for deferring decisions and agency.
Memory and mind became multiple time systems operating between the real-time
present of reception and circulating data, and memory in time; a cyclical “refreshing”
as in a television screen system, where change and differentiation – between the organ-
ism and the environment, between networks – become possible through the delay and
reorganization of circuits from within the organism. The problems of computational
representation, the initial problems that were faced in mathematically and logically
representing intelligence were reorganized away from a language of conscious and
unconscious, discrete and infinite, reason and psychosis to the new terms of vacillating
temporalities between immediacy and reflexivity.
Perhaps Bateson, also an attendant at the aforementioned conferences, offered one of
the more compelling models and practices (he helped birth family therapy and addic-
tion treatment programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous) for rethinking memory and
mind in his model of the “double bind” to explain psychic suffering, addiction and
other maladjusted and compulsive behaviors. In a conference in 1969 at the National
50 Ibid., and p. 35.

51 Heinz von Foerster, ed., Transactions of the Sixth Macy Conference (New York: Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation,
1950).
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Institute of Health, he offered this example to demonstrate his ideas of both psychol-
ogy and treatment. He discussed a research project done on porpoises trained at Navy
research facilities to perform tricks and other trained acts in return for fish (Bateson also
worked with animals, particularly dolphins). One day, he recounted, one female por-
poise was introduced to a new regimen. Her trainers deprived her of food if she repeated
the same trick. Starved if she repeated the same act, but also if she did not perform, the
porpoise was trapped. This experiment was repeated with numerous porpoises, usually
culminating in extreme aggression, and a descent into what from an anthropomorphic
perspective might be labeled disaffection, confusion, anti-social and violent behavior.
Bateson, with his usual lack of reservation, was ready to label these dolphins as suf-
fering the paranoid form of schizophrenia. The anthropologist was at pains to remind
his audience, however, that these psychotic porpoises were acting very reasonably and
rationally. In fact, they were only doing exactly what their training as animals in a
navy laboratory would lead them to do. Their problem was that they had two conflict-
ing signals. They had been taught to obey and be rewarded. But now obedience bought
punishment and so did disobedience. The poor animals, having no perspective on their
situation as laboratory experiments, were naturally breaking apart; their personalities
were fissuring (and Bateson thought they had them) in efforts to be both rebellious and
compliant, but above all to act as they had been taught. Bateson argued this was the
standard condition in contemporary societies.
Having established the mechanism for a now decentered and multiple subject,
Bateson commenced to articulate the dangers and possibilities of this condition. He
recalled how, between the 14th and 15th time of demonstration, the porpoise “appeared
much excited,” and for her final performance she gave an “elaborate” display, including
multiple pieces of behavior of which four where “entirely new – never before observed
in this species of animal,”52 These were not solely genetically endowed abilities, then;
they were learned, the result of an experiment in time. This process in which the sub-
ject, whether a patient or a dolphin, uses the memories of other interactions and other
situations to transform their actions within the immediate scenario can become the
very seat of innovation. The dolphin’s ego (insofar as we decide she has one) sufficiently
weakened to develop new attachments to objects in its environment through the mem-
ories of its past and of other types of encounters. This re-wired network of relations can
lead to emergence through the re-contextualization of the situation within which the
52 Bateson, “Steps to an Ecology of Mind,” p. 278.
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Orit Halpern
confused and conflicted animal finds itself. Schizophrenia, therefore, can be the very
seat of creativity.53
Bateson ended in triumph, having now successfully made the psyche inter-subjective
and simultaneously amenable to technical appropriation in family therapy.54 The pro-
ductivity of a schizoid situation rested for Bateson on the discovery made by both com-
munication theory and physics that different times could not communicate directly to
one another. Only temporal differences resist circulation from within the definition of
communication. Bateson applied this understanding liberally to animals. In cybernetic
models, the ability of a subject to differentiate itself from its environment and make
autonomous choices is contingent on its ability to simultaneously engage in danger-
ous proximities spatially with other objects and its ability to achieve distance through
time.
At stake in the negotiation over the nature of networks and the timescale of analy-
sis was nothing less than how to encounter difference – whether between individuals,
value in markets, or between vast states during the Cold War. A question that perhaps
started in psychoanalytic concerns over psychosis found technical realization in cyber-
netics. For cyberneticians the problem of analog or digital, otherwise understood as the
limits between discrete logic and infinity, the separation between the calculable and the
incalculable, the representable and the non-representable, and the differences between
subjects and objects, was transferred into a reconfiguration of memory and storage; one
that continues to inform our multiplying fantasies of real-time analytics while massive
data storage infrastructures are erected to insure the permanence, and recyclability, of
data.
While the time of neural nets, Markov chains, and communication theories is always
preemptive, the shadow archive haunting the speculative network is one of an endless
data repository whose arrangement and visualization might return imagination and
agency to subjects. These wavering interactions – between the networked individual
and the fetish of data – preoccupies us in the present, speaking through our contem-
porary concerns with data mining, search engines, and connectivity. Our imagination
of technology and ourselves now wavers between rationality and control, seeking an
53 On the relationship between schizophrenia, creativity, difference and genius, see also: Irving
Gottesman, Schizophrenia Genesis: The Origins of Madness (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1991); Shoshana
Felman, Writing and Madness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Sander Gilman, Difference and
Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
54 Bateson, “Steps to an Ecology of Mind,” p. 278.
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impossible dream of consciousness out of the nervous logic of our networks, and driv-
ing the ongoing penetration and application of media technologies into life.
Theorizing the Nervous Network
I opened this essay arguing that cybernetics and its affiliated communication and human
sciences aspired to the elimination of difference in the name of rationality, a dream of
self-organizing systems and autopoietic intelligences produced from the minute actions
of small, stupid, logic gates. The dream of a world of networks without limit focuses
eternally on an indefinite, and extendable, future state.
Earlier in this essay, I also invoked Freud’s concerns about schizophrenia and telepa-
thy to suggest that paranoia and psychosis were produced as pathologies at the moment
the world became a mediated one. Cybernetics marks another turn. What Freud first
articulated as a concern involving authority and difference in his discussion of psycho-
sis has now been transformed into a concern over security – a concern Bateson expressed
in the 1950s, already well within the age of computation and Cold War. What Bateson
articulated was the worry that in the real-time obsession to entangle life with logic,
learning, and by extension thought and change, would be automated to the bereave-
ment, and perhaps destruction, of the world. Affect and circulation here become syn-
onymous in producing violence. This is a conclusion regularly refracted in discussions
of affect and war, such as that cited earlier by Brian Massumi.
This condition only becomes inevitable, however, if we ourselves descend into the
logic of immediate and real-time analytics. We must avoid this conclusion and this
condition. Like Bateson’s porpoise, torn between reactionary return and self referential-
ity, we are forced to ask about the other possibilities that still lie inside our machines
and our histories. The cycles of the porpoise reenact the telling of cybernetic history
where ideas of control and communication are often over-determined in their negative
valence, cybernetics is rendered as a coherent and singular entity, and the inevitability
of the past to determine the future is regularly assumed. These systems that always use
the past to telecast into a nervous future remade the boundaries of the body, subject,
and the mind but these imagined networks also pose the potential of violence through
new forms of knowledge and governance based in self-reference, recombination, and
self-containment. Telecast into our present where these forms of thought and these
problems of time and memory are the very architecture for our digital networks, these
questions haunt us.
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Orit Halpern
For psychoanalysts of the early 20th century, paranoid psychosis was a pathology of
intimacy and proximity. The debates about its etiology and structure were also debates
about the relationship between analyst and analysand, the forms of desire that could
course through science. In the mid-20th century, these debates returned and we are
left to ask about the implications of these two poles exhibited in the nervous network,
one of a nostalgic reactivism and one of an operative amnesia for our own political
and technical imaginaries. Perhaps the hope is in the very machinery that was built –
systems that can both recognize and disavow their history, for which memory and
archiving remain at tense, productively incommensurable distances. We still struggle
with the enormous possibilities and the incredible perils posed through our nervous
networks and psychotic logics.
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Wolfgang Ernst
Temporalizing presence and ‘re-presencing’ the past

The techno-traumatic affect 1
I Media-Induced Affect and Trauma
Traumatic memory from within technological media

In the context of well-known phenomenological analysis of human experience of
presence, the media-archaeological approach focuses on micro-technologically induced
(re-)presencing. Traumatic irritations of temporal experience arise from frictions, from
the intrusion of real timing into the symbolical order of cultural time. Media-induced
chrono-affects are time-critical, choque-like escalations of temporal sensation. They
are equivalents to Marcel Proust’s notion of mémoire involontaire, which refers rather to
what is known as transients in signal engineering than to narrative experience. The time-
critical momentum as Leitmotiv in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu looks contingent
but can be identified to be indexical of a hidden chrono-sensation. A specific affect of
temporality arises from the medium itself; against any anthropocentric fixation, this is
its real technological message. While G. W. F. Hegel considers the process of digestive
remembrance to be the mental interiorization of the past (Er-Innerung) which is supported
by the symbolic order of historiographical narrative, Walter Benjamin concentrates
on involuntary memory that makes the subjective sense of temporality implode and
dislocates the orderly concept of history. In his well-known essay on The Work of Art in the
Age of Reproduction (1936), he coined the term “physical shock” as subliminal perception
of the cinematographical image.2 Different from the photographically fixed moment
in time, the affective momentum in cinematographic image sequences is temporal
movement – thus close to the phonographic voice. Whereas a single image can endure
motionless, a recorded sound cannot.
“Presence” in its fleeting character has long proved resistant to being captured by
scientific analysis. Faced with the impenetrable difficulty of recording ephemeral cul-
1 This text partly results from thoughts developed within the joint research project Archiving Presence
between Humboldt University Berlin and Hebrew University Jerusalem. For intellectual input I owe
thanks to my project partner Amit Pinchevski.
2 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 217–251.
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Wolfgang Ernst
tural articulations, humanities have largely focused on written texts, just like musicians
have largely focused on notes instead of sound. With the emergence of signal recording
media like photography, phonograph, cinematography, magnetic tape and finally digi-
tal recording, however, technical media allow for “archiving presence,” resulting in an
unforeseen disposal of micro-temporalities both in experience and for analysis – time
shiftings and time axis manipulations. There are specific media-induced ways of regen-
erating presence, of “re-presencing”3 which – while apparently having been smoothly
integrated into everyday cultural practice – still result in perceptual shocks which the
cultural unconscious has not yet fully digested.
Due to the formerly evanescent nature of its object, the study of presence has become
inseparable from the study of its recording media which mold human sensation of pres-
ence: analogue signal-recording media and more recently digital signal-processing (DSP
chip based) are provided with a specific power to evoke the affective temporal experience.
Recording technology made it possible for the first time to store, repeat, and manipu-
late presence. An escaping moment – the physical signal – thus became an object that
could be replicated and analyzed.
The traditional textual archive has been technologically challenged by non-alphabet-
ical media recording, starting with photography and the phonograph, not only allowing
for simply “archiving” presence in the symbolical mode, but for restoring presence on
the affective, signal-based level of perception. The different ways of storage thus result
in different ways of restoring presence both in individual and collective memory. Collec-
tions of recorded sound and vision are fast emerging as vital records of cultural memory.
With a focus on the ways presence is being a(r)chi(e)ved both within human cognition
and with technological media, a reverse aspect turns up: the phenomenon that storage
media can re-create the affect of presence in human temporal perception. The analysis
thus zooms between the technological and the phenomenological domain.
The notion of techno-traumatic presence refers to the specific coupling of testimony
and media, and more generally to re-presencing as timing effect caused by signal
recording and data-processing technologies. The basic assumption is that symbolical
or technical inscription of traumatic temporal experience is not only bound to specific
historical situations like wars or accidents but also already rooted within the technicity
of media themselves. The methods developed within the context of traditional trauma
3 Vivian Sobchack, “Afterword. Media Archaeology and Re-presencing the Past,” in: Erkki Huhtamo
and Jussi Parikka, eds., Media Archaeology. Approaches, Applications, and Implications (Berkeley/Los Angeles/
London: University of California Press, 2011), p. 323–333.
146
studies differ from the techno-traumatic research operated by media archaeology.

Whereas studies like Thomas Elsaesser’s Terror and Trauma focus on traumatic
Holocaust memory and their post-traumatic transformation by public performative
media (notably in postwar German film), the media-archaeological approach shifts
attention to an even more fundamental level of operativity, focusing on traumatic
affects as immediate functions of the technological pre-conditions. When coupled to
human sensation, these electronic and algorithmic media operations result in specific
temporalities. From the photographic punctum whose affective temporal indexicality is
a direct function of photosensitive chemicals, or from the cultural choque induced by
the first recordings and replay of voices by the Edison phonograph, to the modeling
of the human unconsciousness according to binary machinic logics (as declared by
Jacques Lacan), the traumatic irritations of the formerly accustomed cultural sense of
temporality springs from the technological condition.
Traditional and posthuman understanding of affect

Media archaeology describes non-discursive practices within the techno-cultural archive,
while media phenomenologists analyze how phenomena in various media appear to the
human cognitive apparatus, that is, to the mind and senses.4 Deleuze identifies affect as
the becoming nonhuman of humans just like a technological function.5 Such an insight
is techno-traumatic indeed: Maurice Blanchot interprets Homer’s Siren motive in the
Odyssee as the traumatic experience of the beauty of the human voice resulting from
monsters. Such sonic signals and their contemporary versions (artificial voices) address
the human nervous system directly – a sensation “that exists in itself and reveals a state
of becoming-nonhuman.”6
The cybernetic assumption of co-originality of signal processing in animals and
machines7 resulted in human-machine systems which extended the self-regulatory
control function of organisms in order to adapt it to new environments by incorporating
4 See also: Kjetil Jakobsen, “Anarchival Society,” in: Eivind Røssaak, ed., The Archive in Motion. New
Conceptions of the Archive in Contemporary Thought and New Media Practices (Oslo: Novus, 2010), p. 127–154.
5 Marie-Luise Angerer, Vom Begehren nach dem Affekt (Zürich/Berlin: Diaphanes, 2007), p. 33. English
translation Desire After Affect (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014).
6 André Piuerre Colombat, “Deleuze and the Three Powers of Literature and Philosophy,” in: Gary
Genosko, ed., Deleuze and Guattari. Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers (London/New York: Routledge,
2001), p. 207–222 and p. 216.
7 See also: Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1948).
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Wolfgang Ernst
exogeneous components. This counts for the temporal coupling of humans and chrono-
technologies as well. Once human sensation is tightly coupled to a technical medium,
it is subject to its technological temporalities. The affordance (Heidegger’s Zuhandenheit)
of new time technologies not only shapes but generates temporal consciousness. This
affective temporality is of a different kind than the well-defined discursive separation
between presence and past, actuality and history. The temporal affect is connected to
the Lacanean “real” as a temporeal(ity) with its proper chrono-quality.
The micro-temporal momentum

A materialist understanding of affective regimes stems largely from nineteenth-century
physiology and experimental psychology with its variety of scientific and experimental
measurements of the capacities deeply embedded in the body of perception. “In other
words, there is a media-archaeological side to the notion of affect as well.”8
Since photography (as the first technical medium in its modern sense), the sense-
affective, presence-generating power of signal-based media cuts short the distance
which has always been the prerequisite for historical analysis, in favor of mnemonic
immediacy – the “electric” shock. Technologically induced micro-affective moments
escalated with the rupture between mechanical cinematography and electronic (ana-
logue) images: “With film, the brain does not ‘fill in’ the images on the screen – it fills
in the motion between images. With television, the brain must fill in (or recall) 999.999
percent of the image at any given moment, since the full image is never present on
the screen.”9 The “given moment” becomes time-data. This corresponds with Caruth’s
definition of the trauma as lacuna (as opposed to Freudian “desire”). Absence is being
micro-temporalized, towards the tempo-real. “While the concept of information itself
implies the possibilities of storage and retrieval (as in computer technology), the notion
of such storage is, for television, largely an alien idea. […] Reused images […] undermine
the appeal to the ‘live’ and the instantaneous which buttresses the news.”10
It is not time as a general term which affects the subject; it is the accidentality of
time which is the form or rather dynamis of affect – different from spatial endurance.
Affect is not only a mode of temporal experience, but itself a radically time-critical form
8 Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge/Malden, CA: Polity Press, 2012), p. 30.
9 Tony Schwartz, The Responsive Chord (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1974), p. 16.
10 Mary Ann Doane, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” in: Patricia Mellencamp, ed., Logics of Television.
Essays in Cultural Criticism (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 222–239 and
p. 226.
148
of sensation. According to Brian Massumi, affect precedes consciousness within human

signal-processing, as can be demonstrated by registering an electric impulse on the skin.11
Thus a disruptive gap between affective and conscious (“thoughtful”) perception of one
and the same micro-event takes place, resulting in an affective/cognitive dissonance –
the traumatic tempo-momentum. For Massumi, the “missing half-second” is not a lack,
but a redundancy: “pastness opening onto a future, but with no present to speak of. For
the present is lost with the missing half-second, passing too quickly to be perceived,
too quickly, actually, to have happened.”12 The tempo-real manifests itself in the time-
critical field. The affective experience of temporal presence and past is a signature of
modernity, which according to Charles Baudelaire is experienced as transitory, volatile
and contingent13 – just as it is implemented in electronic circuits.
Theodor W. Adorno in his fragmentary writing Current of Music describes the “radio
voice” which creates a strong feeling of immediate presence. “It may make the radio
event appear even more present than the live event”14 – a form of hyper-presence, which
in the age of digital signal processing, is being succeeded by real-time: “This feeling of
presence necessarily means a feeling of immediacy, too. There is no gap and no media-
tion between the time something is going on and the time at which you are listening
to it.”15
Hermann von Helmholtz detected that the run-time (the speed of propagation) of
signals in the motoric nerves of a frog counts at around 24 meter/sec. This speed recalls
a synchronization problem within humans, when technical audio-visual synchronicity
might lead to irritation when compared to physical signal run-times in real nature;16
a lightning stroke is seen more immediately than the accompanying thunder is heard.
For the temporal domain of human perception, the media psychologist Hertha Sturm
once experimentally explored that while every day perception always includes a slight
11 Timothy Scott Barker, Time and the Digital. Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of
Time (Hannover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2012), p. 87.
12 Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” in: Paul Patton, ed., Deleuze. A Critical Reader (Cambridge,
Mass./Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 217–239, here p. 224.
13 See also: William Uricchio, “Storage, Simultaneity, and the Media Technologies of Modernity,” in:
John Fullerton and Jan Olsson, eds., Allegories of Communication. Intermedial Concern from Cinema to the Digital
(Rom: John Libbey, 2004), p. 123–138, here p. 123.
14 Theodor W. Adorno, Current of Music. Elements of a Radio Theory [1940], ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), Chapter V “Time - Radio and Phonograph,” p. 120–128, here p. 120.
15 Ibid.
16 See also: Uwe Sander, “Die ‘fehlende Halbsekunde’,” in: idem, ed., Handbuch Medienpädagogik (Berlin/
Heidelberg /New York: Springer, 2008), p. 290–293, here p. 292.
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Wolfgang Ernst
temporal delay of reaction involving a kind of inner speech (“subvokales Ansprechen”),17

electronic media force their audience into immediate affection. Immediate media inter-
faces deprive humans of their natural chance of delayed perception.18 Does nothing or
everything happen within this half-second? Electronic immediacy, the almost missing
micro-temporal gap, is comparable to the essential “time of non-reality” (Norbert Wie-
ner) in digital switching between zero and one.19 There is asynchronicity in signal pro-
cessing time regarding humans on the one hand and electronic machines on the other, a
difference in phase delay of signal transfer between technology and human physiology.
But quasi-technological timing can be detected within human neuroprocessing itself, a
kind of chrono-engineering. Preemptive activity is what apparently is stimulated in the
pre-frontal cortex of the brain which does not simply react to incoming sensations but
time-critically tends to anticipation (familiar from the difference between “live” and
“real-time” signal transmission within communication media).
(Mass-)media-induced “Trauma”
Let us define trauma in the present context as the kind of shock in temporal experience
which has not yet been or cannot be digested by smooth memorization whatsoever
and cannot be contained by historical discourse (narrative ordering of sequential
time). Trauma according to Sigmund Freud refers to stimulations from outside which
are strong enough to break the internal stimulus protection (“Reizschutz”).20 On the
level of so-called “collective memory,” the symbolic order of history is then unable to
shelter discourse against rivaling temporal affects by their narrative reorganization. The
emergence of trauma studies has not only been related to psychoanalysis since 1900 but
to media culture itself. Trauma is among the essential experiences of technoculture, since
its defining characteristics are the disruption of time and space. In addition, technical
communication and storage media now serve themselves “as the main site to represent,
witness, or even actually produce trauma at a global scale.”21
17 Hertha Sturm, “Wahrnehmung und Fernsehen: Die fehlende Halbsekunde. Plädoyer für eine
zuschauerfreundliche Mediendramaturgie,” Media Perspektiven 1 (1984): p. 58–65, here p. 61.
18 Hertha Sturm, Fernsehdiktate. Die Veränderung von Gedanken und Gefühlen. Ergebnisse und Folgerungen für
eine rezipientenorientierte Mediendramaturgie (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann-Stiftung, 1991), p. 55.
19 See also: Claus Pias, “Time of Non-Reality. Miszellen zum Thema Zeit und Auflösung,“ in: Axel
Volmar, ed., Zeitkritische Medien (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2009), p. 267–282.
20 Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. XIII, ed. Anna Freud et al. (London/Frankfurt am Main: Fischer,
1999), p. 29.
21 Aris Mousoutzanis, “Introduction,” in: Aris Mousoutzanis and Daniel Riha, eds., New Media and the
Politics of Online Communities (Freeland, Oxfordshire: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010), p. ix-xix, here p. xvii f.
150
In trauma studies, pauses and interruptions in recorded speech count as symptoms –

symptoms which can be better identified by ultra-sensitive and DSP-based audio analy-
sis software than by human psychoanalysts. From the media-archaeological point of
view, speech and pauses are equally forms of signals. “A series of dots […] indicates a
pause in speech.”22 The real involuntary memory archaeo-logically (no speech / logos)
articulates itself by silence as a temporal interval. Nowadays – in times of digital sound
recording and processing – no more “noise” (traumatic intrusions of the real) in elec-
tronic music appears.23
[T]he very nature and function of the new media reproduce the experience of trauma,
in that they produce new ways of experiencing time and space that resemble the struc-
ture of trauma. […] Contemporary media technologies serve as the major site wherein
contemporary trauma is not just witnessed but actually produced and registered as
traumatic in the first place.24
In Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of temporality, an event in time needs a witness in order
to exist; that is, it needs to be affectively validated as micro-traumatic re-presencing of
the drama of entropic past. Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast by Pink Floyd, as a studio creation,
starts existing for a listener only when she or he puts the recording on and presses play.
“Even if a recording has been released thirty years ago, it will stay out of our percep-
tual and temporal sphere until it will reach our ears and mind.”25 Latency in record-
ing reminds of the difference between mental temporalities and the concept of linear,
chronological time (history as narrative) – a cognitive-(“historical”)-affective (media-induced)
dissonance.26
22 Ben Anderson, “Recorded Music and Practices of Remembering,” Social and Cultural Geography 5.1
(2004): p. 18.
23 Morten Riis, “Machine Music. A Media Archaeological Excavation” (Ph.D. thesis, Aarhus University &
The Royal Academy of Music Aarhus, 2012).
24 Aris Mousoutzanis, “Cybertrauma and Technocultural Shock in Contemporary Media Culture,” in:
Mousoutzanis and Riha, New Media, p. 173–180, here “Abstract.”
25 José Van Dijck, “Remembering Songs through Telling Stories: Pop Music as a Resource for Memory,”
in: Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijck, eds., Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Social Practices
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), p. 107–199, here p. 109.
26 See: Thomas Elsaesser, Terror und Trauma. Zur Gewalt des Vergangenen in der BRD (Berlin: Kulturverlag
Kadmos, 2007), p. 198f.
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Wolfgang Ernst
II Sonic Irritations of the Human Sense of Presence
Sonic media temporalities from analog to digital

With the media-archaeological approach (a close reading of technology in terms of
material hardware, signal recording and symbolic software) a specific variance of trauma
analysis emerges: the irritation of the chronological and autobiographical temporal
order in favor of subjective immediacy. This immediacy becomes especially apparent in
the phonographic momentum.
There is a tight alignment between the unrepresentable Lacanian real and the physi-
ology of the voice as phonographic recording. The dis-embodied voice has got into the
focus of engineering, psychoanalytic and historiographical analysis, particularly in its
capacity to engender a sense of heightened presence (as compared with written records).
Presence has been considered an inevitable fugitive, infinitesimally uncapturable time
momentum for the longest time in occidental tradition; the human voice especially has
embodied and allegorized this fugit tempus experience of presence. An early newspaper arti-
cle announcing the invention of the gramophone disc by Emile Berliner starts with the
remark that volatile speech has finally been “imprisoned” by the new recording tech-
nology, making it not only repeatable for aesthetic or bureaucratic use, but accessible
to scientific speech analysis on a micro-level of formation which – different from the
human physiological options of memorizing delayed presence – only measuring media
can capture, register and thus keep for time axis manipulations. On the darker side of
this widening of research topics for humans, with this option goes the traumatic expe-
rience that the voice can be preserved as a dis-embodied event.
It has been a shock to occidental metaphysics that effects of presence can be derived
from the technological archive, resulting in an irritation of the cultural conception of
time(s). The option of arbitrary, artificial time-axis manipulation results in media-in-
duced shocks which constantly reshape the epistemology of presence, especially in the
“sonic” media archive.27 In many discussions of affect as aesthetic-epistemic figure in the
psychoanalytic, tempor(e)al and technological dimension, the sonic dimension is miss-
ing almost completely, privileging the visual evidence.28 Roland Barthes has analysed
the momentum (punctum) in the perception of photography from the past as opposed to
27 The term “sonicity” is used here in a neo-logistic way as a category of reverberative objects of
knowledge, referring to all kinds of time-based media events which as electro-mechanical and high-
electronic operations share with acoustic events its radical temporal condition.
28 On the neglect of the auditive dimension in research on affect see: Angerer, Vom Begehren, p. 35.
152
its intellectual cognitive studium which refers to its contextualization in history: “This
actually has been” is the affective presence of the past. There is an instantaneous affec-
tive consciousness when viewing a photograph.29 What relates to the visual regime here
in fact belongs to what Marshall McLuhan once termed the “acoustic space.” While
archives of visual evidence (photography, cinematographic frames) represent a static
archive (endurance), the sonosphere of recorded sound and electric circuits stands for
processual temporalities. While on the level of user interfaces the digitization of sound
sources from the analog archive is mostly unnoticed in the everyday media practice, it is
of utmost importance to point out the deep rupture which sublimely takes place when
qualities like analog “live” transmission is being replaced by “real time.” Such calcula-
tions create ultra-short intermediary archives which look like presence in the narrow
time window of what physiologically counts as presence. The authenticity of the indexi-
cal signal is being challenged once it gets processed digitally. Acoustic, oral and even
musical experience within that context serves as a privileged field for analysis. While
recent research has discovered that the specific phonetic alphabet which is in current
use today was invented to record, store and transmit the musicality of Homer’s poetic
voice,30 a different kind of alphabet – the digital code – nowadays dominates most pro-
cessing of cultural communication. The conversion of analog to digital sound record-
ings is not just another mode of cultural memory but a dramatic transformation of its
essence. Algorithmic re-presencing needs thorough reflection by both media and cul-
tural theory. Ironically, by analog-to-digital conversion or sampling, the symbolical code
previously represented by the textual alphabet returns in mathematical forms (alpha-
numeric algorithms), asking for a refreshed grammatology of the theory and practice
of “archiving presence.” Digitization of archived presence does not only require a very
close reading of its impact on micro-temporal operations but might result in a redefini-
tion of the Archive in Motion itself.31
Acousmatic media temporalities as irritations of presence

A primal affective irritation (Freudean Urszene) of presence was the moment when
the human voice, which represented for a long time the most transient articulation
29 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 55.

30 See: Barry Powell, Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet (Cambridge: University Press, 1991).
31 Compare: Røssaak, The Archive in Motion.
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Wolfgang Ernst
phonographically,32 could be stored and replayed even beyond the death of the voice-
bearer. Edison’s invention of 1877 allowed not only for the symbolical (phonetic writing
in vocal alphabet) but also the physical (the acoustic signal) recording of the disembodied
individual voice. This resulted in a cultural shock, which – although it soon became part
of everyday sound-consuming culture – has still not been digested within the cultural
unconscious. What seems natural to an animal (the well-known dog Nipper listening to
His Master’s Voice at the gramophone funnel) for humans leads to a traumatic dissonance
between cognitive knowledge (the historicity of the recording) and neurophysiological
affect, which perceives the gramophonic voice as pure presence.33
Media-archaeological research on genuinely media-induced traumata of percep-

tion of presence focuses on acousmatic sound which is perceived from a hidden sound
originating source. As long as it is not being supplemented (or merged) with an optical
perception like the visible display of loudspeakers, this leads to an essential lack of the
sense of origin. When Pierre Schaeffer, the father of musique concrète in Paris, defined the
acousmatic,34 he reused a term once coined to describe the teaching method of Pythago-
ras who concentrated (“heated up” to use McLuhan’s term) on the human audio channel
of communication by hiding behind a veil (or in a cave) while speaking. This acoustic
purism is truly archaic in the media-archaeological sense: letting the pure, disembodied
voice emanate while the sound-generating human or machine is hidden. For the listener
it is undecidable whether there is human presence, radio transmission or a gramophone
record behind the veil. The visual absence of the sound source does not only refer to
space but to temporal irritation as well. An ongoing (even if apparently accommodated)
paradigmatic shock took place with the invention of the phonograph (and the answer-
ing machine); all of a sudden, the voices of the dead could be heard again in replay:
temporal acousmatics. In addition, there is an additional micro-temporal dimension of
acousmatics; irritation of perception takes place when a corresponding visual source can
be noticed but is not synchronized with the acoustic event, well known from problems
in lip synchronization in sound film. Acoustic, oral and even musical experience within
that context deserves a privileged analysis.
32 Since Plato’s criticism of writing until the deconstruction of occidental logocentrism by Jacques
Derrida’s Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
33 See: Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 2006), Chapter 2
“The Metaphysics of the Voice,” p. 34–57, and Chapter 3 “The ‘Physics’ of the Voice,” p. 58–81.
34 Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des Objets Musicaux (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 91.
154
The sono-traumatic shock

The affect of presence in recording and transmission of sounds past is being achieved
with its implementation in physical vibrations. What had merely been a cognitive or
symbolically notated concept thus starts to haptically affect the human sense of temporal
presence. From this material implementation emanates the power of phonographic
sound recording media to re-presence past performances.
The Freudian identification of trauma to a large degree already refers to the acous-
tic – noise and signals. Whereas the cinematic and TV image is always perceived as
framed and thus contained (as a kind of quote / quotation mark of reality), the acoustic
signal is never minimized but cuts directly, even aggressively into the ear. The radio
voice is not perceived as representation of the “real” (physically present) voice but as iden-
tical with the human voice itself.
The phonographic recordability of the (human) voice has not yet been inserted into
the symbolic order. This signal recording and replay of the human voice may be non-
assimilable to subjective cognition and thereby fulfills the criterium of trauma, against
which stands the effort of historiographical or autobiographical narrative. Benjamin’s
term for the instantaneous, literally accidental experience of media time in modernity
is “shock”, better suited than the psychoanalytical term trauma perhaps. With the Edi-
son phonograph, the auratic uniqueness of the volatile voice was replaced by iterability,
which is deferred logocentrism (in Derrida’s sense).
To convince the audience of the sonic fidelity of phonographic reproduction of
music, the Edison Company staged an experimental setting in New York’s Carnegie Hall
in 1916, placing a mahogany phonograph alone on the vast stage. In the midst of the
initial silence a white-gloved man emerged from behind the draperies, solemnly placed
a record into the machine, wound it up and vanished. Then an opera singer stepped
forward and while leaning one arm affectionately on the phonograph began to sing an
air from Verdi’s Tosca.
The phonograph also began to sing ‘Vissi d’ Arte, Vissi d’Amore’ at the top of its
mechanical lungs, with exactly the same accent and intonation, even stopping to take
a breath in unison with the prima donna. Occasionally the singer would stop and the
phonograph carried on the air alone. When the mechanical voice ended Mme. Rappold
sang. The fascination for the audience lay in guessing whether Mme. Rappold or the
phonograph was at work, or whether they were singing together.35
35 “Edison Snares Soul of Music,” New York Tribune, April 29, 1916, p. 3.
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Wolfgang Ernst
According to another report from the same year in the Boston Journal, “it was
actually impossible to distinguish the singer’s living voice from its re-creation in the
instrument.”36 The chrono-Sirenism of His Master´s Voice which is phonographic signal
recording and reproduction induces the illusion of being-present.
As long as the archival records consist of strings of symbols (i.e. alphabetic writing),
a cognitive distance – in spite of the auratic qualities of handwritten manuscripts or
autographs – can be more or less kept since an act of decoding has to take place which
involves the cognitive apparatus. But once photography and phonography – the first
apparative media in its modern sense – became subject of the archive, the sense-affective,
presence-generating power of signal-based media cuts short the distance which is a
prerequisite for historical analysis, in favor of mnemonic immediacy – the electric shock.
With Valemar Poulsen’s presentation of the wire recorder as telephonic message-
keeping machinery at the Paris World Exhibition 1900, the telephone line – which stood
for the subjectively experienced immediate transmission of telegraphic and telephonic
communication – all of the sudden turned out to be a storage medium for delayed
replay. From that resulted an irritation in the trust of presence in electric tele-commu-
nication.
“Live” dissolving into “real -time”

Physiological sensations which address human perception are faster processed
affectively than cognitively by the brain.37 Time-critical processes that are characteristic
of technological media are in alliance with the temporal nature of affect.38
Breaking news, as a special time-critical feature of news media, represents what can-
not be contained within a historiographical (narrative, symbolic) ordering of temporali-
ty.39 But whether analog “live” or digital “real-time”, human senses cannot distinguish
without additional metadata between what is actually immediate and what is repro-
duction, separated from its temporal origin – a chrono-traumatic irritation indeed,
36 Emily A. Thompson, “Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity. Marketing the Edison Phonograph in
America 1877–1925,” The Musical Quarterly 79 (1995): p. 131–171, here p. 132. See also: Peter Wicke, “Das Sonische
in der Musik,” PopScriptum 10 (2008). Online: “Das Sonische. Sounds zwischen Akustik und Ästhetik,” http://
www2.hu-berlin.de/fpm/popscrip/themen/pst10/index.htm (retrieved February 25, 2014).
37 See: David S. Miall, “Anticipation and Feeling in Literary Response: A Neuro-Psychological Perspective,”
Poetics 23 (1995): p. 275–298.
38 See: Wolfgang Ernst, Chronopoetik. Zeitweisen und Zeitgaben technischer Medien (Berlin: Kulturverlag
Kadmos 2012).
39 See: Doane, „Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” p. 233.
156
resulting in a cognitive-affective dissonance between what is conceived as historical and

perceived as present.
The option of arbitrary, artificial time-axis manipulation relates to a variety of
media from photography over the phonograph and cinematography to electronic sound
recording, “live” television transmission and video recording. The media-induced shock
resulting from such technologies constantly reshapes the epistemology of presence,
culminating in the digitization of presence by immediate recording. Not only that the
authenticity of the indexical signal is being challenged once it gets processed digitally;
the metaphysics of presence is lost within that technologically oscillating temporality
itself.
III The Momentum of “Messianic” Time
Techno-sonic irritations of presence of(f) history

Phonographic recording is Benjaminian “Jetztzeit” caught on vinyl or tape.40 Whether
media-induced affects are identified as symptoms of a “Messianic time” (positively), or as
traumatic in terms of war or genocide (negatively), they are already caught within a dis-
course. The media-archaeological approach to involuntary memory, on the other hand,
locates the symptom in the technology itself.
As happens with the replay of an old phonographic recording of Caruso’s voice, the
phonographic record allows for temporal suspense against the physical and cognitive
law of the irreversibility of history. “New media, as vehicles that carry our senses and
bodies across the space-time continuum, introduce to us old modes of experience […].
Media thus bear the messianic power, in Benjamin’s special sense of that word, to for-
ever alter the past.”41
The historicist obsession with origins is attached to sound in a focused way, such as
Patrick Feaster’s celebrated reconstruction of a “first recording”42 of a gramophone recital
of a Schiller ballade by Emile Berliner himself (optically read from the photographic
40 Amit Pinchevski, “The Audiovisual Unconsciousness: Media and Trauma in the Video Archive for
Holocaust Testimonies,“ Critical Inquiry 39.1 (Autumn 2012): p. 142–166, quoting Walter Benjamin, “Theses
on the Philosophy of History,“ in: idem, Illuminations, p. 253–263, here p. 263.
41 John Durham Peters, “Helmholtz, Edison, and Sound History,” in: Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham
Geil, eds., Memory Bytes. History, Technology, and Digital Culture (Durham/London: Duke University Press,
2004), p. 177–198, here p. 195.
42 As declared at the Ars Electronica exhibition in Linz, September 2013.
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Wolfgang Ernst
illustration of the record in a contemporary newspaper, then translated into the vocal
signal again).
If the inscribed phonographic sound on wax cylinders from Edison’s days is opto-dig-
itally retraced, a formerly inaccessible recording becomes audible again. Frozen voices,
confined to analog and long-forgotten storage media, wait for their digital unfreezing.
Is there a hidden “Messianic” message in media archaeology? A counter-reading frees
this from the “Messianic” in favor of media-induced temporeal(ity) effects and affects. If
for this reanimation of dead sounds and images in media of suspended time I dare to use
the word “redemption”. This is not simply a reference to Walter Benjamin’s “Messianic”
historical materialism but we might phrase it the other way round: Benjamin’s awk-
ward phrasing is now itself redeemed by technical media.
Temporal shortcuts: Sono-chronic tunneling of historical distance

Electronic storage media for audiovisual replay generate a presence of the past by actually
addressing the perceptual nerves within the human in signals, not in symbols (such as
historiographical texts) which require decoding and address the cognitive mind (where
historical modelling takes place). To a large degree, the crisis of the symbolic order is
induced by signal recording.43 Traumatic time suspends the culturally accustomed
modes of the temporal order.44
Sonic recollection is arbitrarily triggered by technological replay such as a music
recording at the press of a button. What happens then is “the re-living of an event that
has already happened in linear time as if it were happening now in repetitive or cyclical
time.”45 The more such a technically induced presence is acousmatically perceived, the
more it is mandatory to reveal its invisible technological conditions for any critical
analysis of such temporal affects.
In contrast to reading textual records from the past which need to be cognitively
decoded (alphabetic symbols and words), with every listening to an ancient recording,
a gap between time-affective and historio-cognitive perception opens. Ears can perceive
nothing but presence, while the historical order of time (or imagination) takes place
exclusively in the mind. In between lies the literal “sense” of history as identified by
Johan Huizinga for musical memory; the media-archaeological sense of arché tries to
43 For a critical position towards this perspective, see: Elsaesser, Terror and Trauma, p. 201.
44 See: ibid., p. 191–207.
45 Anderson, Recorded Music, p. 17.
158
dislocate this acoustic imaginary. Günther Stern46, in his unpublished habilitation the-
sis Die musikalische Situation (1929), differentiates musical Eigenzeit as “enclave” even from
shock.47 It is this being-off-history which correlates operative media time with sonic
temporality. The replay of recorded sound is a Leibnizean temporal fold in its techno-
logical materialization, enabling direct contact between events that are separated when
history time is stretched out on a continuous line. If both affective and traumatic tem-
porality are non-narrative by definition, media time traumatizes historical discourse
and the imaginary of history itself.
The ultimate vanishing point is a quasi-Lacanian holy grail of establishing a direct
micro-physical and -temporal link between the real and symbolic at the complete
expense of the imaginary. […] A whole infrastructure of links and short-circuits is
emerging next to and beyond human history – it may indeed obsolesce history as we
know it. […] [T]he medial recursions extend far beyond minor century-old short-circuits
connecting turntables to i-pods, they go back millenia. And the greatest media-based
madeleine moment will lead us all the way back to the Sirens.48
46 Alias Günther Anders, son of the psychologist Wilhelm Stern who himself developed a non-historicist
model of time as experience.
47 See: Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance. A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone Books, 2010),
p. 325f.
48 Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Siren Recursions,” in: Stephen Sale and Laura Salisbury, eds., Kittler Now
(Cambridge: Polity Press, forthcoming), note 5, http://phenomenologymindsmedia.files.wordpress.com/
2011/05/winthrop-young-siren-recursions.pdf (retrieved February 25, 2014).
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Luciana Parisi
Digital Automation and Affect
Clockwork automata, but also motor automata, in short, automata of movement,

made way for a new computer and cybernetic race, automata of computation and thought,
automata with control and feedback. The configuration of power was also inverted,
[…] power was diluted in an information network.1
As depicted in the movie Elysium, in the near-future scenario of 2124, data will not sim-
ply be processed by machines or by brains but rather exchanged across brains by means
of machines.2 Elysium is a self-sustainable, pollution-free space habitat that lives off the
underclass work of a derelict planet earth, overpopulated and deranged, with a dying
human species. In this scenario, machines cannot think and rather seem to be simply
instrumental to human-oriented intentions (exposing a traditional moral puzzle of the
battle of good versus evil, which is ultimately ascribed to voluntary decisions). Whilst
appearing to be mere channels of governance, machines constitute the computational
infrastructure of Elysium, whose operations are precisely neutral: unable to understand
the cause of things and thus devoid of will (since the AI probe parole officer cannot
interpret Max’s allusive comments and jokes, it says to him: “Do you want to speak to
a human?”). The neutrality of this algorithmic architecture, however, also reveals the
effective power of instrumental reason. Here machines do not simply rebel against the
human (as in the I Robot movie for instance), but they more importantly process (i.e.,
select, exchange, store, activate) any form of information that can be destructive and
creative, beneficial or detrimental to the human race. This form of neutralized automa-
tion, whereby robots do exactly what humans tell them to do, comfortably reveals a sort
of unilateralization of thought, an asymmetry in power between human and machines
through which instrumental reason is realized. It is only the rebooting of the infor-
mation matrix, requiring a radical change in the initial conditions of its algorithmic
inputs, that the entire techno-organic elite of Elysium can be eliminated. And yet it is
precisely the emphasis on the ultimate possibility to change the initial conditions of the
1 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), p. 265.
2 Elysium is an American science fiction action-thriller film written, co-produced and directed by Neill
Blomkamp (released on August 9, 2013).
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Luciana Parisi
automated architecture of Elysium that exposes instrumental reason to an interesting

equivalence of thought and automation, revealing that algorithmic processing, in spite
of much critique, is open to revision.
Instead of reducing this near-future possibility to the mere fantasy of a Promethean
thought free from finitude and death, I suggest that algorithmic automation exposes
the potentiality of instrumental reason to go beyond its premises, that is beyond deter-
minism or the repetition of its initial conditions. In particular, this article wants to offer
a conception of thought that whilst challenging the framework of representation based
on discrete acts of cognition and perception, at the same time points to a dynamic form
of automation based on the possibility that discreteness and finitude are conditioned by
randomness and infinity.
I address Gilles Deleuze’s critique of the “image of thought”, according to which pure
thought is always already based on either a voluntary and common act of thought, the “I
think” (Descartes’s method) or on “re-cognition” (the Kantian method of the transcen-
dental subject).3 By pushing representation towards its own limits, Deleuze’s critique
aims to create new categories of thought defined not by pre-formed subjects or objects
but by contingent encounters. According to Deleuze, these encounters force thought to
think anew through a mode of learning aiming not to prove ideals but to reveal that the
being of the sensible or the ontological condition of affection is the primary motor of
thought, indeed it is thought (thought qua affect). This condition cannot be met by the
bare empirical form of sensorimotor perception, equipping the senses with the capac-
ity of generating thought. On the contrary, thought emerges from the intensity of an
encounter afforded by the being of the sensible and not by the mere fact of sensing.
Intensity is not a capacity of the individual but entails a process of individuation across
scales and dimensions in which singularities, or differential tendencies, explain thought
in terms of heterogeneity. Deleuze discusses this ontogenetic principle of thought as
matter that is affected by external forces that impinge upon the body. In other words,
thought is precipitated by the capacity to be affected and to affect which includes the
“destratification” of thought from what is directly sensed and re-cognized (i.e., thinking
what is already known).
3 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 129–134.
162
The condition of the being of the sensible is thus determined by the uncertainties
of events, changing the rules of thought. In other words, to think is a matter of
contingency in which affects and percepts are activated by the capacities of a body to feel.
Deleuze’s rejection of the image of thought is thus also opposed to both cognitivism and
computationalism, for which thinking simply amounts to the repetition of discrete states
or rule-based processing that can run on any form of hardware.4 Recent articulations of
such views for instance include Andy Clark’s theory of extended cognition: it maintains
that to think results from the input-output relations of neural networks that reveal
that cognitive faculties can be extended to and through machines.5 Here, the Cartesian
subject “I think”, which Deleuze criticizes because based on the universal common sense
that everybody (and everything in this case) thinks, is not only preserved but amplified
by mechanical (analog and digital) devices that act as external plugs of the now enlarged
neural networks of cognition.
Nevertheless, whilst the view of extended cognition appear to reify rather than chal-
lenge a notion of thought based on a universal mechanical repetition of initial condi-
tion, at the same time it seems important to explore complexity in computation. This
article aims to problematize the fusion of affect and thought as well as the too- swift
opposition between automation and affect, or between the being of the intelligible and
the being of the sensible. Here the assumption is that only the sensible defined by the
affective encounter can expose the productive and heterogeneous dynamics of thought
beneath representation, whereas the intelligible is always already trapped in either eter-
nal forms (Platonic ideas), common sense (the Cartesian universalism of I think) or by
the comfort of re-cognition (the Kantian transcendental subject, ante-posing the sub-
ject to the transcendental condition). In this article I will attempt to argue instead that
dynamism (i.e., the being open to revision) is at the heart of the intelligible and can be
evinced from within the formal logic of computation. My aim is to address automation
as the dynamic computational architecture of the intelligible by discussing one of the
fundamental problems in computation, the problem of the incomputable or random-
ness. These problems, I want to point out, reveal that the repeatable condition of discrete
rules is not immune from the infinite varieties of information or randomness that these
rules encounter in online, distributed and parallel computational systems, in which
the possibility of changing initial conditions is actualized. As pointed out in the movie
4 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994), p. 11, 128 and 138.
5 Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58 (1998): p. 7–19.
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Luciana Parisi
Elysium, the instrumental reason of its automated network infrastructure is offered the
possibility not simply to execute rules but to change its initial conditions through an
irreversible re-booting in which the being of the intelligible is revised. In other words
automation exposes the inevitable randomness intrinsic to the being of the intelligible,
and to automation itself. From this standpoint, instead of claiming that the being of the
intelligible is unable to change, my effort here is to expose the dynamics of the intel-
ligible, randomness in computation. In other words, I want to suggest that to challenge
the representational framework of thought (the Platonic ideal form, the Cartesian I think
and the Kantian transcendental subject), it is important to rearticulate the being of the
intelligible and thus reevaluate the relation between the sensible and thought, between
affect and reason.
In particular, I will turn to Alfred N. Whitehead’s notion of prehension as this
includes both the distinct but necessary dynamic activities of the sensible and the intel-
ligible involved in the physical and conceptual selection and evaluation of data.6 For
Whitehead, prehensions explain the function of reason in terms of the concreteness of
abstract relations, but also of the non-reversible and non-equal relation between physi-
cal and conceptual prehensions. In other words, I want to suggest that the theory of
prehension contributes to revisit the notion of affective thought as including the non-
reversible and yet dynamic conditions of the being of the sensible and of the intelli-
gible. Similarly, the theory of prehension will help us to redefine the computational
view of cognition in terms of open-ended rules, that is, rules that are open to be revised
or rescripted not only because they are responsive to the physical environment which
they seek to simulate, but more importantly because their discrete operations become
infected and changed by informational randomness. The apparent opposition between
affect and computation is here dissolved to reveal that dynamic automation is central to
the capitalization of intelligible functions.
Intensive thought
Gilles Deleuze laments that the presupposition of thinking (i.e., thought as Being or
beings) rests upon what he calls the image of thought defined by the general credo of
Cogitatio natura universalis, according to which “conceptual philosophical thought has as
6 Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), p. 22–24.
164
its implicit presupposition a pre-philosophical and natural image of thought, borrowed

from the pure element of common sense.”7 From this standpoint, everybody thinks
and everybody has a desire to know. Thinking therefore is implicitly based on a pre-
philosophical conception of thought, on the very essence of thought as pure thought.
Deleuze rejects both the Platonic form of reason, the synthesis of all thoughts, the Car-
tesian implicit naturalization of thinking and the Kantian transcendental model of rec-
ognition.8 The image of thought here constitutes an ideal orthodoxy, which is rooted
in form, common sense and the transcendental model. The world of representation is
thus defined by “identity with regards to concepts, opposition with regards to the deter-
mination of concepts, analogy with regard to judgement, resemblance with regard to
objects.”9
Deleuze, however, insists that to think is to open up a crack within the crust of thought
revealing that the conditions of thought are primarily the destruction of an image and
“the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself.”10 Instead of being an act of recogni-
tion, to think is “a fundamental encounter” defined not by what can be sensed, but by
the emergence of a sensibility that disarticulates (de-territorializes, de-stratifies) a given
sense. This is an aesthetic encounter but is not determined by the expression of qualities,
which are, according to Deleuze, the point of view of recognition based on the empirical
exercise of the senses. The aesthetic encounter rather involves the activities of the imper-
ceptible that are confronted by a limit. Beyond or beneath recognition, there advances
the activities of the imperceptible force precipitating a change within thought. To think
thus involves what can be sensed but yet remain imperceptible.11 To the question: what
are the conditions for thought to think? Deleuze irrevocably responds: intensity.12 This
7 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 131.

8 Ibid., p. 133–134.
9 Ibid., p. 137–138. Deleuze calls the “I think” of representation as subtending the source and the unities
of all these faculties: “I conceive, I judge, I imagine, I remember and I perceive – as though they were the
four branches of Cogito.”
10 Ibid., p. 139.
11 Ibid., p. 143.
12 Deleuze specifies: “[N]ot qualitative opposition within the sensible, but an element which is in itself
difference, and creates at once both the quality in the sensible and the transcendent exercise within
sensibility. This element is intensity, understood as pure difference in itself, as that which is at once both
imperceptible for empirical sensibility which grasps intensity only already covered or mediated by the
quality to which it gives rise, and at the same time that which can be perceived only from a point of view
of a transcendental sensibility which apprehends it immediately in the encounter.” Ibid., p. 144.
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Luciana Parisi
is difference in itself, the germ of the differential relation, giving rise to more difference.
The contingency of the encounter thus coincides with the eruption of intensity breaking
open and re-establishing connections “which travers[e] the fragments of a dissolved self
as it does the borders of a fractured I.”13 To think is not to re-cognize what we already
know but to be confronted with problems rather prepositions, imperceptible activi-
ties rather than perceptual qualities, with sense-making and not with logos. Ideas are
not pre-formed thoughts but instead pose problems to thought that cannot be solved
through pre-established rules or axiomatic truths.
As opposed to the automata of thought, which now dominate contemporary culture,

Deleuze describes pure thought in terms of intensity because the force of contingency is
registered in terms of affection, exposing the being of the sensible as the primary condi-
tion for thought. Intensity is therefore the motor of the sensible and the being of the
sensible operates by means of affective encounters. According to Deleuze, affect coincides
with the recording of change from one state to another as felt by a body.14 According to
this view, the being of the intelligible has a secondary role and is rather dependent on the
being of the sensible whose material dynamics somehow guarantee that thought cannot
remain the same. In what follows, I precisely aim to tackle how the relation between
measuring and the un-measurable, between discrete units and continuous form has
characterized debates in the context of computational culture.
Central to these debates is a specific attention to the “timing of affect,” which both
include the temporality of the event and a passive and active synthesis of time affording
a body with a capacity to be affected and to affect. The timing of affect thus points out
that thought is at once pre-temporal and durational and emerges from the imperceptible
and anticipatory effects emanating from the eventful character of an encounter, where
the future bends over the sheets of the past. Deleuze describes this process through the
13 Ibid., p. 145.
14 There are different theories of affect that have a different legacy and more importantly here specific
ontological implications. In this article, I am not concerned with giving an overview of these theories and
discuss their non-matching ontological implications. Instead I shall draw specifically on the theory of
affect as developed by Gilles Deleuze and his re-articulation of such concept as derived from Baruch Spinoza
and Henri Bergson. I want to point out that Deleuze’s re-articulation of the notion of affect involves both
the physical capacity to impact on something, i.e. force, and the abstract capacity to undermine what is
perceived and cognized as image. In this context, Deleuze’s critique of the image of thought, against the
already posed image or representation, can also be unpacked through the notion of affect.
166
action of the “dark precursor”;15 what is not yet known is not what is non-accessible to
thought, but rather what advances from a virtual field of potentialities entering the field
of possibilities and probabilities. The timing of affect specifically addresses this bending
of temporalities as being primarily a movement taking up the whole body, suspending
intentionality and emotion. The timing of affect, it has been argued, coincides with a
pre- or a-cognitive time, with a primary movement of thought occurring before and
fundamentally constituting any form of emotion and cognition. As opposed to theories
of representation, the notion of affect offers us a pre-cognitive approach to perception
and thought, emphasizing the primacy of what is immediately (i.e., non-mediated by
ideas, the mind or subjective will) felt by a body. In this context, the timing of affect is
crucial to the extent that what is immediately felt is recorded by a body as a plenitude of
energetic potentials and not as in terms of perception, emotion and cognition. It has also
contributed to extend the understanding of power away from ideological critique whilst
revealing the affective dimension of power, which involves not simply the manipulation
of emotions, but more importantly the capacity of power to activate potential responses
that catalyze decision-making in the present according to what may happen in the
future. This mode of power is said to operate aesthetically as it modulates the capacities
of a body to feel and be directed towards action.16 At the same time however, the timing
of affect has also become the ultimate moment of resistance against the automation of
thought that is now said to operate through interactive feedback.
In particular, algorithmic automation now refers to the capacity of automation to

include temporality as a variable or probability within its quantitative calculations. For
instance, smart phone applications are based on interactive algorithms that multiply
their functions by establishing connections between what the software affords human
users to do. Such affordances are not simply already scripted in the program but are insti-
gated by a set of possibilities that aim to incite and anticipate users’ behavior. Algorith-
mic automation is thus able to quantify human responses through the feedback gener-
ated between users and machines or between real-time data retrieved from the user’s
environment and set of data inscribed in databases. Moreover, it has been argued that
15 “Thunderbolts explode between different intensities, but they are preceded by an invisible imper-
ceptible dark precursor, which determined their path in advance but in reverse, as though intagliated,”
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 119.
16 Massumi elaborates here rigorously this theory. See: Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,”
Cultural Critique 31 (Autumn, 1995): p. 83–109.
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Luciana Parisi
the extended impact of search engines such as Amazon and especially Google developed
through interactive algorithms have led the new form of aesthetic power to directly act
on neuroperceptual capacities, modulating responses and anticipating choice.17
At the same time, however, it has been suggested that within interactive systems,
qualitative responses such as changes in skin conductivity, or the presence of “activa-
tion potentials” in the brain are necessarily analog because they can only be represented
by a continuous modulation of variables. Affective responses are therefore not directly
translatable within algorithmic automation, insofar as computation necessarily oper-
ates through the digital determination of values (i.e., quantification).18 By suggesting
that lived and analog qualities are superior to computational modes of quantification,
the algorithmic automation of affects is said to reduce the being of the sensible, and
thus the potentialities of feeling, to intelligible procedures, involving a discretization of
continuous processes. From the standpoint of affect theories, the reduction of the sensi-
ble can only occur by means of approximation and not through the exact measurement
of feelings. In other words, interactive automation fails to calculate affective responses
or intensity of affective thought.
The tension between the infinite potentialities of affective synthesis versus the
pre-set probabilities of automatic calculation, I want to argue, has reinforced rather
than challenged the opposition between dynamics and mechanics, or thought versus
representation. Much debate about digital culture, aesthetic and politics is grounded
in problematic assumptions about notions of order and chaos in information theory.
Nevertheless, recent information theory points out that the question of order and chaos
within computation rather involves an understanding of randomness in terms of infi-
nite or non-compressible quantities. The next section addresses this question to suggest
that automated thought is not opposed to the pre-individuated activities of affect.
Automation and randomness
Automation involves the breaking down of continuous processes into discrete components
whose functions can be constantly reiterated without error. In short, automation
17 Compare: Anna Munster, An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technologies
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2013), p. 126–130.
18 Brian Massumi, “On the Superiority of the Analog,” in: idem, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect,
Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 133–143.
168
means that initial conditions can be reproduced ad infinitum. The form of automation
that concerns us here was born with the Turing machine, an absolute mechanism of
iteration based on step-by-step procedures. As already discussed elsewhere, nothing is
more opposed to pre-cognitive thought, or the being of the sensible, than this discrete-
based machine of universal calculation. The Turing architecture of pre-arranged units
that could be interchangeably exchanged along a sequence is effectively the opposite of a
differential continuum, intensive encounters and affect.
Nevertheless, I want to point out that since the 1960s, the nature of automation has
undergone dramatic changes as a result of the development of computational capaci-
ties of storing and processing data across a network infrastructure of online, parallel and
interactive systems. Whereas previous automated machines were limited by the amount
of feedback data they could collect and interpret, algorithmic forms of automation now
analyze a vast number of sensory inputs and confront them with networked data sets
and finally decide which output to give. Algorithmic automation is now designed to
analyze and compare options, run possible scenarios or outcomes, perform basic reason-
ing through problem-solving steps not contained within the machine’s programmed
memory. For instance, expert systems now use reasoning to draw conclusions through
search techniques, pattern matching, and web data extraction. From global networks
of mobile telephony to smart banking and air traffic control, these complex automated
systems have come to dominate our everyday culture.
Much debate about algorithmic automation as a form of digital simulation based on the
Turing discrete computational machine (a series of discrete steps to accomplish a task)
suggests that algorithmic automation is yet another example of the Laplacian view of
the universe, defined by determinist causality.19 Instead, I want to draw attention to the
role that randomness plays in computational theory, suggesting that the calculation of
infinities has now turned incomputable functions, that is real numbers, into probabilities,
which are at once discrete and infinite. In other words, whereas algorithmic automation
has been understood as being fundamentally a Turing discrete universal machine that
could repeat the initial condition of a process, the increasing volume of incomputable
data (or randomness) within online, distributive and interactive computations is now
19 Francis Bailly and Giuseppe Longo, “Randomness and Determination in the Interplay between the
Continuum and the Discrete,” Mathematical Structures in Computer Science 17.2 (2007): p. 289–307; available in
pdf at http://www.di.ens.fr/longo/download.html (retrieved September 15, 2013).
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Luciana Parisi
revealing that infinity is central to computational processing and that probability no

longer corresponds to a finite state.
In order to appreciate the role of incomputable algorithms in computation, it is necessary

to make a reference here to the logician Kurt Gödel, who challenged the axiomatic
method of pure reason, by proving the existence of undecidable propositions within
logic. In 1931, Gödel took issue with mathematician David Hilbert’s metamathematical
program. He demonstrated that there could not be a complete axiomatic method, not
a pure mathematical formula, according to which the reality of things could be proved
to be true or false.20 Gödel’s “incompleteness theorems” explained that propositions
were true but could not be verified by a complete axiomatic method. Propositions
were therefore ultimately deemed to be undecidable: they could not be proved by the
axiomatic method upon which they were hypothesized. In Gödel’s view, the problem
of incompleteness in the attempt to demonstrate the absolute validity of pure reason
affirmed instead that no a priori decision, and thus no finite sets of rule, could be used to
determine the state of things before things could run their course.
Not too long after, the mathematician Alan Turing also encountered Gödel’s
incompleteness problem whilst attempting to formalize the concepts of algorithm
and computation through his famous thought experiment, now known as the Turing
machine. In particular, the Turing machine demonstrated that problems that can be
decided according to the axiomatic method were computable problems.21 Conversely,
those propositions that could not be decided through the axiomatic method would
remain incomputable. According to Turing, there could not be a complete computational
method in which the manipulation of symbols and the rules governing their use would
realize Leibniz’s dream of a mathesis universalis.22
20 David Hilbert, “The New Grounding of Mathematics: First Report,” in: W. B. Ewald, ed., From Kant
to Hilbert: A Source Book in the Foundations of Mathematics, Vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press,1996),
p. 1115–1133; Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (W. W. Norton &
Company, 2005); Solomon Feferman, Some Basic Theorems on the Foundations of Mathematics and their
Implications. Collected Works / Kurt Gödel, Vol. III (Oxford: University Press, 1995), p. 304–323.
21 Alan M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,”
Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2nd Series, 42 (1936); for further discussion of the intersections
of the works between Hilbert, Gödel and Turing, see also: Martin Davis, The Universal Computer. The Road
from Leibniz to Turing (New York/London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), p. 83–176.
22 Mathesis Universalis defines a universal science modeled on mathematics and supported by the calculus
ratiocinator, a universal calculation described by Leibniz as a universal conceptual language. See: Norbert
170
For Turing, the incomputable determined the limit of computation: no finite set of
rules could predict in advance whether or not the computation of data would halt at
a given moment or whether it would reach a zero or one state, as established by ini-
tial conditions. This halting problem meant that no finite axiom could constitute the
model by which future events could be predicted. Hence, the limit of computation was
determined by the existence of those infinite real numbers that could not be counted
through the axiomatic method posited at the beginning of the computation. In other
words, these numbers were composed of too many elements that could not be ordered
into natural numbers (e.g., 1, 2, 3). From this standpoint, insofar as any axiomatic
method was incomplete, so too were the rules of computation. As Turing pointed out,
it was mathematically impossible to calculate in advance any particular finite state of
computation or its completion.23
In recent computational theory, a new mode of calculating non-denumerable infinities

(i.e., incomputable data) has come to the fore. Algorithmic information theorist Gregory
Chaitin calls these probabilities imbued with infinities Omega. Omega is the halting
probability of a universal free-prefix self-delimiting Turing machine,24 which Chai-
tin demonstrates to be a computably enumerable probability despite being infinitely
large. In other words, Omega defines the limit of a computable, increasing, converging
sequence of rational numbers. At the same time however, it is also algorithmically ran-
dom: its binary expansion is an algorithmic random sequence, which is incomputable
(or non-compressible into a rational number).25 From this standpoint, the Laplacian
Wiener, Cybernetics or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge Mass.: The
MIT Press, 1965), p. 12.
23 For a clearer explanation of the implications of Gödel’s theorem of incompleteness and for Turing’s
emphasis on the limit of computation can be found in: Gregory Chaitin, MetaMaths. The Quest for Omega
(London: Atlantic Books, 2006), p. 29–32.
24 The definition of the halting probability is based on the existence of prefix-free universal computable
functions, defining a programming language with the property that no valid program can be obtained as
a proper extension of another valid program. In other words, prefix-free codes are defined as random or
uncompressible information. See: ibid., p. 130–131 and p. 57.
25 Chaitin writes: “Given any finite program, no matter how many billions of bits long, we have an
infinite number of bits that the program cannot compute. Given any finite set of axioms, we have an
infinite number of truths that are improvable in that system. Because Ω is irreducible, we can immediately
conclude that a theory of everything for all of mathematics cannot exist. An infinite number of bits of Ω
constitute mathematical facts (whether each bit is a 0 or a 1) that cannot be derived from any principles
simpler than the string of bits itself. Mathematics therefore has infinite complexity,” Gregory Chaitin,
“The Limits of Reason,” Scientific American 294/3 (March 2006): p. 74–81, here p. 79.
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mechanical universe of computation dissipates through the self-delimiting power of

computation, in which non-denumerable infinities do not only defy the determinism of
initial conditions, but also point to another idea of order and chaos, involving the inclu-
sive activities of randomness and discreteness in the calculation of infinities. Omega is
at once a probability, a discrete cipher, and an incomputable number, or randomness.
According to Chaitin, Omega demonstrates the limits of the mechanical view of the
universe according to which chaos or randomness is an error within the formal logic
of calculation. On the contrary, such limits do not describe the failure of intelligibility
versus the triumph of the incalculable. These limits more subtly suggest the possibility
of a dynamic realm of intelligibility defined by the capacities of incomputable infini-
ties or randomness to infect any computable or discrete set. In other words, randomness
or the infinite varieties of infinities are not simply outside the realm of computation,
but more radically become its unconstrainable condition to the extent that by becoming
partially intelligible, randomness also enters order and irreversibly provokes a continu-
ous revision of its rules. It is precisely this new possibility for revision or transformation
of rules driven by the inclusion of randomness within computation that reveals dynam-
ics within automated system and automated thought. This means that whilst Omega
suggests that randomness has become intelligible within computation, incomputables
cannot however be synthesized by an a priori program, theory or set of procedures that
are in size smaller than them.
According to Chaitin, these discrete states are themselves composed of infinite real
numbers that cannot be contained by finite axioms. What is interesting here is that
Chaitin’s Omega is at once intelligible yet unsynthesizable by universals or by the sub-
ject. I take it to suggest that computation – qua mechanization of thought – is intrinsi-
cally conditioned by incomputable data, or that discrete rules are open to contingency.
This is not simply to be understood as an error within the system, or a glitch into the
coding structure, but rather as a fundamental condition of computation. This is also
to say that far from dismissing computation, it is in the axiomatic nature of computa-
tion that incomputable algorithms emerge to defy the superiority of deductive form
and inductive fact.
This is the sense in which the timing of affect involves a radical shift in post-cy-
bernetic culture: in as much as automated algorithms are entering all logics of mod-
eling (urban infrastructures, media networks, financial trades, epidemics, work flows,
weather systems etc.), so too are their intrinsic incomputable quantities unraveling the
problem of contingency in algorithmic automation. As Chaitin hypothesizes, if the pro-
gram that is used to calculate infinities is no longer based on finite sets of algorithms
172
but on infinite sets (or Omega complexity), then programmability will become a far cry
from the algorithmic optimization of infinities actualized by means of probabilities (i.e.,
already set results). Programming will instead turn into the calculation of complexity
by complexity, chaos by chaos: an immanent doubling infinity or the infinity of the
infinite. If the age of algorithm automation has also been defined as the age of complex-
ity, it is because the computational power involved in the search space of incomputables
has become superior to the algorithmic procedures of optimizing solutions. Contrary to
the Laplacian mechanicistic universe of pure reason, Chaitin’s pioneering information
theory explains how software programs can include randomness from the start. Thus
the incompleteness of axiomatic methods does not define the limit of computation, but
its starting condition, through which new axioms, codes, and sets of instructions are
immanently determined.
Dynamic Automation
From this standpoint, contrary to the view that computation is yet another image of
thought, I want to take computation as an instance of intelligible functions that are
imbued with randomness – infinite varieties of quantities – to argue for the incomput-
able conditions of automated thought. In particular, I want to suggest that A. N. White-
head’s notion of speculative reason can contribute to dethrone the intelligible from
representational theories of thought whilst maintaining that the function of reason is
open to revision.26 In particular, I draw on Whitehead’s notion of prehension, of physical
and conceptual prehensions to re-articulate the existing tension between the sensible
and the intelligible, and of affective thought versus computation. As much as physical
prehension is said to involve the simple capture of what concretely is and becomes in the
world, a conceptual prehension is a pure mental operation, referring to the possibility of
how “actuality may be definite.” A conceptual prehension in this sense is the abstract,
non-cognitive, and non-physical capture of infinities. If as Whitehead argues, concep-
tual prehensions bear “no reference to particular actualities, or to any particular world,”
computational thinking implied by the processing of data by computer software could
thus easily be conceived as a form of pure conceptual prehension. This means that the
automation of thought does not just correspond to mechanized performativity. On the
26 Alfred N. Whitehead, The Function of Reason (Boston: Beacon Press, 1929), p. 65–72.
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Luciana Parisi
contrary, the algorithmic prehension of numerical data involves the capture of abstract
ideas not yet actualized yet nevertheless real.
Whitehead’s notion of speculative reason is defined by the asymmetrical activities of

physical and conceptual prehensions. It supports my suggestion that computational
processing is at once a physical and conceptual mode of registering, evaluating and
producing data. It is physical in the actual operations of the hardware-software machine,
conceptual in the grasp of incomputables (i.e., of what is not and yet may be). This
also means that incomputability coincides with uncertainty and with the timing of
futurity, or the ingression of potentiality in actuality, or continuity into discrete units.
Incomputables therefore are the real abstraction of all algorithmic codes, what transforms
their discrete order and makes them into a mode of thought in itself. Here the timing
of affect appears to extend towards the nonlinear time of algorithmic intelligibility in
which the initial conditions of automated thought become infected with randomness,
prehended as infinities within the discrete order of sequences.
The nonlinear time of the intelligible can be precisely conceived in the Whiteheadian
terms of speculative reason.27 Whitehead explains that the function of reason28 is to
counteract the linear chain of cause and effect based on the return to initial conditions.
Similarly, a speculative view of computation may suggest that algorithmic automation
implies that each set and subset of instruction is conditioned by what cannot be
calculated, the incomputables that burst within discrete units. This means that a notion
of speculative reason is not concerned with the prediction of the future through the
data of the past, but with incomputable quantities of data that rather transform initial
conditions. This is why a notion of speculative algorithms or automation is not to be
confused with intelligible forms that derive from a representational theory of thought.
Speculative reason is here used to suggest that randomness – non-compressible data – is
the unconditional condition for intelligible operations to function. This means that not
27 “Speculative reason is its own dominant interest, and is not deflected by motives derived from other
dominant interests which it may be promoting,” ibid., p. 38.
28 Whitehead explains that there are at least two functions of reason. On the one hand, reason is one
of the operations constituting living organism in general. Thus reason is a factor within the totality of
life processes guided by reason. Thus against the slow decay of organic entities, reason has the function
of counteracting such entropic decay. On the other hand, however, reason only defines an activity of
theoretical insights, which are autonomous of any physiological process and from general processes in
nature. Here, reason is “the operation of theoretical realization,” ibid., p. 9.
174
only the realm of the sensible but also the realm of the intelligible can be understood
in non-representational terms and yet without unifying their non-equivalent activities
into a totalizing frame. If the timing of affect explains the primary capacities of a feeling-
thought to grasp and process the real before this becomes cognized, then complexity
at the core of computation also points out that intelligible operations are not simply
mechanical but are inevitably confronted with infinities, revealing the capacity of
conceptual prehensions to add new data (revise and rescript) to the mechanical chain of
cause and effects.
Whitehead’s study of the function of reason neither sits comfortably with the
formal nor practical conception of reason and suggests instead that reason must be
re-articulated according to the activity of final causation, and not merely by the law of
the efficient cause.29 The final cause of reason explains how conceptual prehensions are
not reflections on material causes, but instead add new ideas to the mere inheritance of
past facts. Conceptual prehensions are modes of valuation that open the fact of the past
to the pressure of the future. Final cause, therefore, does not simply replace efficient
cause, but rather defines a speculative tendency intrinsic to the function of reason.
Whitehead explains how decisions and the selection of past data become the point at
which novelty is added to the situation of the present. In other words, reason is the
speculative calculation that defines the purpose of a theory and a practice: to make here
and now different from the time and the space that were there before.
It would however be misleading to equate this notion of final cause or purpose
with a teleological explanation of the universe, since for Whitehead the function of
reason is “progressive and never final.”30 This means that the purpose of reason is to
revise and change its premises rather than being determined by rules returning to its
29 Whitehead’s efficient cause and final cause can be understood as two modes of prehensions, causal
efficacy and presentational immediacy, which are another parallel level of the distinction between physical
and mental poles of an entity. Efficient causes, therefore, describe the physical chain of continuous causes
and effects, whereby the past is inherited by the present. This means that any entity is somehow caused
and affected by its inheritable past. It is the mental pole of any actual entity – the conceptual prehensions
that do not necessarily involve consciousness – that explains how efficient cause is supplemented by final
cause. For Whitehead, a final cause describes how an actual entity is marked by its own sufficient reason,
a conceptual prehension of the data that have nested in its unrepeatable eventuation driven by the final
trajectory towards the exhaustion of its own potentials, which involves a counter-current moving against
the efficient repetition of the data of the past. See: Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The
Free Press, 1978). On “efficient cause,” p. 237–238; on “final cause,” p. 241; on “the transition from efficient
to final cause,” p. 210.
30 Ibid., p. 9.
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Luciana Parisi
initial conditions. While reason does not stem from matter, it is attached to physical
decay, entropy and randomness occurring through the infinite layers of matter.31 For
Whitehead, speculative reason implies the asymmetrical and non-unified entanglement
of efficient and final cause, and must be conceived as a machine of emphasis upon novel-
ty.32 In particular, reason provides the judgment by which novelty passes into realiza-
tion, into fact.33
It is suggested here that the being of the intelligible found in computation must
be reconceived from the standpoint of speculative reason. In order to do so, computa-
tion must be made to confront its indeterminate condition: incomputables at the core
of its closed formal scheme. This means that just as computation has to be rethought
in terms of speculative reason, so too must automation be conceived in terms of algo-
rithmic prehensions: the possibility of automation to become infected with infinities
expose complexities at the core of the intelligible. From this standpoint, the timing of
affect also involves the indeterminacy of intelligible complexity that lies beyond both
the digital ground of axiomatics. It marks the moment at which the limit of computa-
tion (and of intelligible systems) unleashes the incompressible nature of information
into automation.
It would, however, be wrong to view with naïve enthusiasm that incomputables are
central to the realm of the intelligible. Instead, it is important to address algorithmic
automation without overlooking the fact that the computation of infinity is the motor
of a new capitalization of intelligible capacities. My insistence that incomputables
are not exclusively those non-representable infinities that belong to the being of the
sensible, expressed by the affective capacities of a body to produce new thought, but also
reveal the dynamic nature of the intelligible, is indeed a concern with the ontological
and epistemological transformation of thought in view of the algorithmic functions
of reason. This concern however is not an appeal to an ultimate computational being
determining the truth of thought. On the contrary, I have turned to Chaitin’s discovery
31 Similarly, purpose in reason does not have to be exclusively attributed to higher forms of intelligence.
For Whitehead, all entities, lower and higher, have purpose. The essence of reason in the lower forms
entails a judgment upon flashes of novelty that is defined by conceptual appetition (a conceptual lure
towards, a tendency of thought upward) and not by action (reflexes or sensorimotor responses). However,
according to Whitehead, stabilized life has no proper room for reason or counter-agency since it simply
engages in patterns of repetition.
32 From this standpoint, Whitehead attributes reason to higher forms of biological life, where reason
substitutes action. Reason is not a mere organ of response of external stimuli, but rather is an organ of
emphasis, able to abstract novelty from repetition.
33 Ibid., p. 20.
176
of Omega because it radically undoes the axiomatic ground of truth by revealing that
computation is an incomplete affair open to the revision of its initial conditions. Since
Omega is at once a discrete and infinite probability, it testifies to the fact that the
initial condition of a simulation – based on discrete steps – is and can be infinite. The
incomputable algorithms discovered by Chaitin therefore suggest that the complexity
of real numbers defies the grounding of reason in finite axiomatics.
Beside the critique of representational thought intrinsic to the debate on the tim-
ing of affect (e.g., the superiority of the sensible versus the intelligible), the understand-
ing of computation in terms of speculative reason shows that there is another possi-
bility of dethroning thought from pure ideas, subjectivity and cognition by exposing
incomputables at the core of automation and the primacy of complexity in algorithmic
infrastructure. To conclude, I have suggested that automated modes of thought cannot
be subsumed under a totalizing framework of representation. I have argued that auto-
mated thought may be conceived in terms of prehensions: whereby to prehend means
to select, evaluate data, make decisions and generate new solutions. This involves not
only the physical, but also the conceptual prehensions of data: the capacity of rule-based
processes to add new data and changing the initial conditions of data processing. To
conceive of the realm of the intelligible in terms of speculative reason is thus to pose
the question of whether automated algorithms can become critical and thus able to pre-
hend their own final cause. Whether this is already the case or not, it is hard to dismiss
the possibility that the automation of thought has exceeded representation and has
instead revealed that the timing of computation is now driven by uncertainty.
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Anna Tuschling
The Age of Affective Computing
“Affective computing”1 is a fairly new field of research that aims at equipping machines
with emotions. It utilizes findings in the psychology of emotion to design and implement
interfaces allowing for an “emotional dialog” between man and machine. The goal is for
computers to correctly “read” the affective state of their human users. This paper argues
that “human emotion” as conceptualized by the emotion psychology and by researchers
in the field of affective computing is not a range (or a set) of “natural” states of feeling but
a product of scientific research and technological development. Accordingly, this paper
examines the historical and media technological foundations of affective computing.
It is not concerned with the nexus of affect and media in general which has been the
subject of a detailed study.2 Instead, it focuses on a specific kind of affect – the encodable
expressions of the human facial muscles – that is the object of influential psychological
theories (notably Tomkins’s, Ekman’s, Friesen’s, and Izard’s theories of emotion, among
others). In particular, my paper illustrates how this “affect” – which is really a complex
construct of scientific research – is used to develop technologies of affective computing
and how it is supposed to aid the operations of “affective machines”.
Recent advances in affective computing are of great significance because basic
concepts borrowed from the human sciences (concepts of emotion, to be more precise)
are now being employed to design and realize new kinds of man-machine interfaces. I
will discuss a certain aspect of the relationship of affect and technology: a technological
condition (to use a phrase popularized by media philosophers Friedrich Kittler and Erich
Hörl)3 that has only become recognizable today in the guise of affective computing. I
will try to bring into the debate on affect a method characteristic for a certain tradition
1 Rosalind W. Picard, “Affective Computing,” M.I.T. Media Laboratory Perceptual Computing Section
Technical Report (1995); idem, Affective Computing (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). See also: IEEE
Transactions on Affective Computing (New York, NY: IEEE, 2010).
2 Marie-Luise Angerer, Vom Begehren nach dem Affekt, (Zurich/Berlin: Diaphanes, 2007). English transla-
3 Friedrich A. Kittler, Die Wahrheit der technischen Welt. Essays zur Genealogie der Gegenwart (Berlin:
Suhrkamp, 2013); Erich Hörl, ed., Die technologische Bedingung. Beiträge zur Beschreibung der technischen Welt
(Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011).
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Anna Tuschling
of German media theory: what might be described as the strategic disclosure of the
technological condition for the purpose of determining the medial conditionality.
My paper addresses the following points:
1. The goal of the investigation is to reveal the technological condition of the so-called
affective turn using affective computing as the example.
2. What I will not do is give a critique of the standardization of affective states as it
is done in the psychology of emotion. Accordingly, I will not deal with the question
whether “natural” human emotions do in fact exist or not.
3. The subject of my investigation is a single – yet very significant – aspect of the
technological condition of the affective turn: a scientific system devised to encode the
expressions of human facial muscles and a system that has become the foundation for
technological development.
4. From the perspective of media studies I will examine the interrelationship between the
digital computer and certain optical media. Digital computing accomplishes a twofold
purpose: i) It facilitates, indeed it is responsible for the standardization of emotional
states and thereby makes it possible to construct “affect” as an object of science; ii) it
necessitates the functionalization of said standardization in the form of affective and
ubiquitous computing.
This functionalization, though, is possible only because (and this observation will
be the starting point of my critical inquiry) the medial conditionality of affective states
is not acknowlegded by the technological development, i.e., because “affect” can be
incorporated in the development of computing machinery in the form in which it is
conceptualized by the psychology of emotion: as a “natural”, “innate”, and “universal”
state.
Affective Computing: A new trading zone
This paper investigates the recently formed “trading zone”4 between psychology and
computer development, called “affective computing”. I will be arguing here that over
the past few years, developments in affective computing have cast the “renaissance of
4 Peter Galison, Image & Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press
1997).
180
affect”5 in a different light. Most importantly, I would like to suggest this renaissance
of affect may be understood not only from the perspective of discourse history and sci-
ence studies, but must also be regarded as part of contemporary media history and even
media development. Feeling, affect, and emotion stand out against the background of
the 20th-century linguistic paradigm not only for intra-discursive reasons, but also for
reasons proper to the history of technology. Why is this?
Affect and technology assume a new relationship because interactions with intelligent
objects in experimental settings of computer design are increasingly regulated
affectively. Computers are apparently becoming, at least metaphorically speaking,
“emotionally intelligent” and are ever more capable of “responding affectively.”6 The
following paper, however, is only partly devoted to the media-technological situation
— that is, to the cluster of historical and technical prerequisites — which are supposed to
enable computers to simulate empathy. I focus, instead, on how psychology (and which
psychology) has become a basis for the development of interfaces. Therefore, I will firstly
make some remarks on the renewed significance of interfaces and then use an example
of affective computing to further delve into the theme.
Medial Worlds and Affect
The more we view the union of contemporary media not only as apparatuses, but as
atmospheres7 and environments,8 the greater the weight given to affect as the interface
and link between human and technical instrument. If observations on media and tech-
nology have long focused on the specific medium (e.g., book, film, television) or tool,
5 Sigrid Weigel, “Phantombilder zwischen Messen und Deuten. Bilder von Hirn und Gesicht in den
Instrumentarien empirischer Forschung von Psychologie und Neurowissenschaft,” in: Bettina Jago and
Florian Steger, eds., Repräsentationen. Medizin und Ethik in Literatur und Kunst der Moderne (Heidelberg: Uni-
versitätsverlag C. Winter, 2004), p.159–198, here p. 159.
6 See: S. K. D’Mello et al., “AutoTutor Detects and Responds to Learners Affective and Cognitive States,”
Workshop on Emotional and Cognitive issues in ITS, held in conjunction with the Ninth International
Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (Conference Proceedings 2008); S. K. D’Mello & A.C. Graesser,
“AutoTutor and Affective AutoTutor: Learning by Talking with Cognitively and Emotionally Intelligent
Computers that Talk Back,” ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, 2/4 (2012): p. 2–39.
7 Mark B. N. Hansen, “Medien des 21. Jahrhunderts, technisches Empfinden und unsere originäre
Umweltbedingung,” in: Hörl, Die technologische Bedingung, p. 365–409; idem, “Ubiquitous Sensibility,” in:
Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley, eds., Communication Matters. Materialist Approaches to Media,
Mobility and Networks (London/New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 53–65.
8 Hörl, Die technologische Bedingung.
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Anna Tuschling
media concepts in the technically based “network society”9 now demand a “radically
environmental point of view,”10 which would seem suited not only to cases of electronic
worlds. Investigations of cultural history within media studies supply, and have long
supplied, an overwhelming amount of evidence that medial spaces are no modern inno-
vation.11 Taking into account current conditions, in particular “ubiquitous computing,”
Mark Hansen suggests we shelve the established conception of media as a set of inevita-
bly historically contingent conditions of possibility for storage, broadcast, and processing
and instead understand media as a “platform for immediate, action-facilitating connec-
tion to and feedback from the environment.”12 Yet this alternative definition of media
has two flaws: firstly, it is subject to the same objection as any mention of new media as
such, that is, it ignores the long prehistory of putatively new technologies; and secondly,
Hansen indirectly aligns himself with the much criticized media-anthropological
scheme that speculatively understands electrical networks as expansions and extensions
of the human nervous system.13 In the age of the touch screen, the neuronal prosthesis
and affective computing, it continues to be important to articulate, and emphatically,
to question the boundaries between and intersections among the human body, fingers,
sense organs, and brain, on the one hand, and intelligent machines, on the other.
Even when the overlaps, interfaces and intersections within the fundamental
merging of people and media, and above all affect, are recognized for their exceptional
significance, many theories of the “affective turn”14 have not yet elaborated in detail
on the new interactions between human and machinic emotionality and affectivity in
computer design. In short: Affective computing and advancements in robotics are not yet
situated in these debates. Concepts of emotion and theories of affect have experienced,
over the past 20 years, a great resurgence. With the turn away from language theory,
9 Sebastian Giessmann, Netze und Netzwerke. Archäologie einer Kulturtechnik, 1740–1840 (Bielefeld:
Transcript, 2006); Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
10 Hansen, “Medien des 21. Jahrhunderts,” p. 366 (trans. Anna Tuschling and Maya Vinokour).
11 See also: Friedrich Kittler and Ana Ofak, eds., Medien vor den Medien (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007);
Bernhard Siegert and Joseph Vogl, eds., Europa: Kultur der Sekretäre (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2003).
12 Hansen, “Medien des 21. Jahrhunderts,” p. 371.
13 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964); Ernst
Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik (Braunschweig: George Westermann, 1877).
14 Angerer, Vom Begehren; Michaela Ott, Affizierung. Zu einer ästhetisch-epistemischen Figur (Munich: Edition
Text + Kritik, 2010); Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham/London:
Duke University Press, 2010); Patricia T. Clough and Jean Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
182
whose winding way across disciplines – from philosophy (e.g., Wittgenstein), to psycho-
analysis (e.g., Lacan) all the way to anthropology (e.g., Lévi-Strauss) – determined large
swaths of 20th-century discourse history, the non-verbal and the pre-cognitive (the
body, gestures, emotion and affect) should be emphasized once more.15
As a look at media history demonstrates, the reasons for this renaissance of the
affective are far more diverse than the history of the discourses of language theory
and postmodernism alone might lead us to believe. It is much more the case, I would
suggest, that emotion and affect represent an increasingly important element in the
development of technology, which relies upon a greater involvement of human actors
in electronic settings than the more recent definitions of media let on.
I will now continue to investigate why affect becomes so important by considering a
specific setting within affective computing. Affective computing, in this instance, seems
once again to realize cybernetic utopias, with electronic media enabling a self-regulated
and more joyous assimilation of content and learning.
An Example of Affective Computing
In the last few years the formation and direction of “intelligent interactions” and
affective computers have attracted more and more attention because they illustrate the
increasing intensity of the human-machine connection in a specific way.16 The affective
computing projects currently investigating the relationships between emotion/affect
and computers, while not unique, nevertheless provide highly typical and representative
examples of the new direction technological applications to affect are taking. Affective
computing thus deliberately seeks to place 20th-century humanities research on emotion
in the service of developments in computing. In the wake of the emotional turn of 1990s
neuroscience (above all Antonio Damasio), Rosalind Picard defines affective computing
as “computing that relates to, arises from, or influences emotions.”17 Definitions of
affect and emotion are thus not developed out of computer research itself, but rather
carried over from brain research and psychology. Affective computing thus imports affect
15 Angerer, Vom Begehren.

16 See also: Lectures at the international conferences on “Affective Computing and Intelligent
Interaction,” (September 2–5, 2013, Geneva, Switzerland), http://www.acii2013.org/ (retrieved February 26,
2014).
17 Picard, Affective Computing, p. 321.
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Anna Tuschling
as formulated within the humanities into the domain of technological development,

taking psychological theories of emotion – from Cal Izard’s studies of Ekman and
Friesen’s Facial Action Coding System to Lazarus’ motivational theories of emotion – as
a basis for those classification systems upon which the computer, with its “decoding”
of emotion and correspondingly “emotionally intelligent” response, must rely.18 In
current computer development, affects (meaning here the states of human users as
these have been classified by the humanities in the research traditions named above)
furnish no less, I suggest, than a semantics of human-machine interaction since, after
all, the processor’s recognition of affect facilitates the evaluation of user reactions:
“Classification of learner emotions is an essential step in building a tutoring system
that is sensitive to the learner’s emotions.”19 If the whole problematics of humanities
research into the emotions seems poised to engage in a hermeneutics of the states of the
soul on the basis of physiological and especially optical data (from facial expressions),
then the appeal to research into affect rests, at this stage of technological development,
upon something at least as tentative, namely the semanticization and evaluation of
computer-enabled interactions on the basis of taxonomies of emotion established
in psychology and behavioral science. Rosalind Picard’s programmatic definition
immediately reveals that the human-machine interaction is of paramount importance
in affective computing, meaning that learning processes, along with navigation aids
and games, represent one of its most significant areas of application. In this connection,
Picard notes that learning is the quintessence of emotional experience.20 Electronic
learning attains one of its (currently) most comprehensive forms through affective
computing. The following observations on the interplay between affect and technology
are based on the design of a learning system called AutoTutor,21 which belongs to the
Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) group. ITSs claim to be sensitive to the emotional and
cognitive states of learning users.22 Regardless of the setting – whether it is learning,
navigating, or any other interaction with intelligent objects – the computer system, by
recognizing its interlocutor’s affect, should always be in a position to adapt its moves
and offerings appropriately to his or her emotional state. In the case above, one hopes
for a positive influence on the learning process, especially when intensive learning is
18 D’Mello et al., AutoTutor, p. 6f.

19 Ibid., p. 6.
21 D’Mello et al., AutoTutor.
22 Ibid., p. 1.
184
attended not only by negative emotions like confusion, frustration, fear, and boredom,
but also positive experiences like happiness, flow, and surprise.23
In particular, this occurs in computer-based learning environments equipped
with sensors capable of transmitting the learner’s physiological data. Generally
speaking, the electronic teacher sensitive to affect might help close the gaps between
the “highly emotional human” and the “emotionally challenged computer.”24 The
program developers assume that shifting “positive” and “negative” emotions shape
the learning process, the experience of what Czíkszentmihályi describes as “flow”
being the ideal.25 During flow, we forget time, do not feel fatigue, and experience other
“positive” emotions like joy or, more rarely, “aha-moments.”26 Affect and technology
weave together systematically, on several levels: throughout the learning process, a
human user’s electronic environment collects, through sensors such as the Body Posture
Measurement System and Facial Feature Tracking via IBM BlueEyes, physiological data
relating to the acting/thinking/being human users. These data are then reconciled with
a database of similar ones and thus evaluated. Using a given set of affects, the processor
identifies, for instance, a specific posture combined with a specific facial expression
and conversational cues as affects relevant to the learning process, such as boredom,
confusion, or frustration.27
On the basis of this classification, the electronic environment can continually adjust
itself to the user. The learning environment consists in the following: the learner is
in a conventional class setting, sitting on a comfortable chair in front of a screen and
processor, tries to execute a learning program that aims to impart Newtonian physics,
an increase in computer-related knowledge, or raise the level of critical thinking
as such.28 The learner’s activity is accompanied by a digital teacher or avatar, who is
designated by the label Embodied Pedagogical Agent (EPA) or, in other contexts, by
Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA).29 The computer obtains the learner’s various bodily
data via an office chair equipped with sensors and a system for tracking eye movement.
23 Ibid., p. 2.
24 Ibid., p. 1.
25 Ibid., p. 2.
26 Ibid., p. 1.
27 Ibid., p. 3f. and p. 9.
28 Ibid., p. 2.
29 Christos N. Moridis and Anastasios A. Economides, “Affective Learning: Empathetic Agents with
Emotional Facial and Tone of Voice Expressions,” IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing 3/3 (2012): p. 260–
272.
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Anna Tuschling
These data collectively amount to information about the learner’s emotional state, since
the computer reconciles the learner’s data with available data on affect. This in turn
enables the processor as well as the Avatar Tutor to “respond” to the learner’s affective
condition according to specific rules. At its base, the story of affective computing
is a story of sensors,30 since it is their accuracy and functionality that enables the
computer’s so-called “affect recognition.”31 The processor is able to parse users’ affects
on the basis of data from sensors. Templates for affect that incorporate knowledge of
facial expression accumulated across earlier centuries (especially Ekman and Friesen’s
basic emotions) may be sensibly used in learning environments. Whenever the question
of intelligent or affect-sensitive computers arises in the literature, the central issue is
always the verbal bridging of specific technical processes. In this connection it is indeed
important to note that the goal of the present contribution is not first and foremost to
expose the concealed technicity within affective computing. My focus here is rather the
whole medial order with its effects and the recently formed link between psychology
and processor development.
Emotional Psychology as the Basis of Affective Computing
I would like to continue by discussing, in all its historicity, the paradigmatic contribu-
tion of psychology to the development of interfaces within affective computing. The
postwar years saw a decline in cognitivism and the simultaneous emergence of a new
psychological paradigm that completed the turn toward technically based studies of
facial expressions, toward the image. On the basis of Silvan Tomkins’s work,32 a tradition
of research into emotion and affect developed among both the military (sponsored from
1966 to 1970 by the Advanced Research Project Agency, ARPA, of the US Department of
Defense) and university researchers. This paradigm isolates the facial and employs con-
temporary technical avenues to stylize the significant expressions of facial muscles as
“facial affect.”33 The emphasis on Paul Ekman and his peers’ work on facial expressions
may be justified by the fact that the Tomkins-Ekman paradigm can hardly be overesti-
30 Rosalind Picard, “Emotion Research by the People, for the People,” Emotion Review, 2 (July 2010).
31 D’Mello et al., AutoTutor, p. 3f.
32 For the renewal of Tomkins’ approach in recent cultural theory, see: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching
Feeling. Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
33 Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Clues
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975), p. XI.
186
mated in terms of its influence on psychology and the affective neurosciences, an influ-
ence that remains strong even after its displacement by similar techniques. Moreover,
the aesthetic of this research into expression is uniquely transferable to the world of
advertising, acting aesthetics, and television culture.34 Thus, for instance, the TV show
Lie To Me (2009–2011) took as its inspiration the Facial Action Coding System.
The classic images of facial expression research are meant simply to encode eight
innate, allegedly universally valid (that is, cross-culturally and globally valid) basic
emotions: joy, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, and trust. Their
influence and function, however, extend far beyond this purpose; in various ways, they
have been integrated into experimental classification systems in the neurosciences,
as cultural theory and the history of scientific emotion studies show.35 Research into
emotions oriented toward evolutionary theory seeks the roots of these images, as in
Charles Darwin’s The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals and Duchenne de
Boulogne’s aesthetically experimental photography in Mécanisme de la physionomie
humaine (both containing appropriate forewords and commentary by Paul Ekman).36
Through his correspondence and by questioning traveling salesmen and missionaries
especially, Darwin had already attempted to establish cross-cultural comparisons of
emotional expression. But it is Ekman and Friesen’s research that first takes on the
challenge of broadly discussing, and “graphically revealing”, the global validity of
emotional expression. Lee Hough, former director of ARPA, provided strong support
to such scientific investigations of gestures and expressions as studies of visually isolated
tribes in New Guinea (the South Fore People).37 Surprisingly, cultural studies as well
as psychology have so far disregarded Ekman and Friesen’s earlier relationship with
34 Ruth Leys, “How Did Fear Become a Scientific Object and What Kind of Object Is It?,” Representations 110
(2010): p. 66 -104, here p. 88; Weigel, “Phantombilder zwischen Messen und Deuten,” p. 166; Tim Dalgleish,
D. Dunn Barnaby und Dean Mobbs, “Affective Neuroscience: Past, Present, and Future,” Emotion Review 1
(2009): p. 355–368.
35 Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and after (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2007); Leys,
“How Did Fear Become a Scientific Object”; Sigrid Weigel, “Phantom Images: Face and Feeling in the Age
of Brain Imaging,” Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften 40 (2012): p. 33–53; idem, “Phantombilder
zwischen Messen und Deuten.”
36 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, ed. Francis Darwin. The Works of Charles
Darwin 23, ed. Paul Howard Barrett and Richard Brooke Freeman (London: William Pickering, 1989); Guil-
laume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine (Paris: Librairie J.-B. Bail-
liere et Fils, 1876), http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/references?id=lit38953 (retrieved February 18, 2014).
37 Ekman and Friesen, Unmasking the Face, p. XI; Paul Ekman, “Facial Expressions” in: Tim Dalgleish and
Mick J. Power, eds., Handbook of Cognition and Emotion (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999), p. 301–320, here
p. 308.
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Anna Tuschling
the US Department of Defense. Ekman’s much-discussed participation in post-9/11 US

security policy (Ekman was an advisor in the Bush Administration and the founder of a
surveillance-technology company) is, in itself, nothing new and continues earlier rela-
tionships.38 It is only by recognizing these relationships’ indivisibility from their ARPA
context that we may fully appreciate the comprehensive media-historical background
of studies of emotion, affect and facial expression. Firstly, it is no coincidence that the
technologies of facial coding made meaningful forward strides in immediate proximity
to the first networked computers; secondly, the Facial Action Coding System project (FACS)
may thus be understood as an analogy to Noam Chomsky’s universal grammar, which
was similarly developed as part of ARPA’s behavioral-scientific research.
The theoretical validity of a global affective language means to cancel out any translation
difficulties in the spoken word. The tendency toward the globalization of the affect
code compiled thus far is manifested as much in image atlases and catalogs of affect as
in universal grammar and the language of popular images, since this code is precisely
intended to be valid irrespective of space and time and thus also attain global reach in
the service of a better understanding of facial expressions. If we assume that the above
mentioned facial expressions may be traced to innate basic emotions, this neither forecloses
the possibility that feelings may be simulated, nor implies that all humans are equally
capable of recognizing emotions. Ekman certainly takes into account the potential
contained in optical media such as television, which he treats as a training ground
for facial recognition and which, therefore, may present a methodological challenge
to intercultural studies: “Perhaps everyone learned their ‘universal’ expressions from
watching Sesame Street on television!”39
In any case, global entertainment media are not the only ones standardizing facial
expressions; psychology, with its own work, further contributes a bank of images
of worldwide ubiquity. Ekman and Friesen’s attempts at coding created both a
much-used and comparatively long-lasting research tool while also establishing an
aesthetic of facial affect. If the coding of Facial Action focuses, first and foremost, on the
configuration of eyes, nose, and mouth to be recognized, or on the surrounding patterns
of movement, first mapped by Duchenne, manifested in a play of muscles on the skin’s
surface (Facial Action can distinguish between static, slow, and fast facial signals) then
38 Leys, “How Did Fear Become a Scientific Object?”, p. 66.

39 Ekman, “Facial Expressions,” p. 308.
188
we must recognize the pictorial tradition established by FACS as one important part of
its scientific history. The particularly theatrical staging of the first photographic series
has rightly been emphasized.40 Now this historical and technological development has
taken a new turn. Psychology, theories of affect and emotion make “affect” available for
computing machinery (translated into algorithms) and are one of the foundations of
affective computing.
Conclusion
Psychological study of facial expressions as established by Ekman and Friesen along

with Tomkins and Izard, in particular through the Facial Action Coding System, provides,
along with other such studies, a significant basis for affective computing and for the
development of emotionally intelligent objects.41 It is only after global standards for
human interfaces – primarily of the face – have been established that it makes sense
to trust digital technology with a (now also technically possible) mass evaluation of
physiological data that aims to improve human-machine communication. Emotional
psychology will then have done no less than provide media development with a semantics
of standardized affective language implemented in human-machine interaction.
Even Weigel’s description of the tendency to treat images of the human as objects of
measurement rather than of hermeneutics still poses the question of technology too
indistinctly. This question will become central in the Age of Affective Computing.
When seen from the perspective of media studies, timing plays a central role in
affective computing. Not only does it designate the recurring theories and concepts that
have been discussed under the label of affective computing. Rather, it concerns the a
posteriori shift in meaning that concepts in the human sciences undergo when employed
in interface design, affective or emotive computing or intelligent interactions.
The historic interplay of a particular branch of technology (networked computers)
and the affective turn reveals an uncanny functional context: On the one hand, com-
puters are the technological basis on which certain psychologies of emotion and affect
(Tomkins’, Ekman’s and Friesen’s psychologies, most notably) were developed; through
affective computing, on the other hand, computers now “receive” the scientific knowl-
edge on emotion they made possible in the first place.
40 Weigel, “Phantombilder zwischen Messen und Deuten,” p. 171.

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Anna Tuschling
Affective computing thus is based on a temporality of complex, discontinuous and

subsequently shifting relations between science and technology. The case of affective
computing illustrates how the human sciences, relying on technology and experiment,
directly serve the development of media. Neither affective computing nor psychology
take their own historicity and media-technological condition into account.
Translated by Maya Vinokour
190
Rolf GroSSmann
Sensory Engineering
Affects and the Mechanics of Musical Time
“Eleven men in four-four time” was the headline of an article I recently read in a
respected German newspaper.1 It reported on a scholarly experiment on synchronizing
soccer players to achieve better performance and better results. The players of one team
all heard “the same piece of music with wireless headphones, an electronic piece with a
beat speed of 140 beats per minute, synchronized to the thousandth of a second. In con-
trast, their opponents listened to different pieces with a tempo of 119–168 beats per min-
ute.” The results were summarized by the subtitle: “they are better at dribbling, passing
and shooting, and perhaps they even score more goals.”2 It is hardly surprising and easy
to imagine that the team, confused by physiologically inappropriate tempos and artifi-
cially produced beats, should lose against a less troubled team. But what is noteworthy
is not so much this particular experiment but the continuity of attempts to squeeze the
non-verbal knowledge of music into rules and to make it usable in everyday life. And it
shows the level of public discussion which corresponds to the vagueness of empirical
research results that are far from having precise insights in the relationship between
musical structure and bodily and emotional effects, or affective processes in a holistic
view. On the other hand, we have a deep knowledge of composing or designing musical
structure as a cultural practice, which, in some historical situations, is connected with
more or less distinct theories of producing musical forms, patterns and figures. These
poles outline the tensions we will have to deal with in this paper.
If we are working with electronic media designing aesthetic artefacts with respect to
the field of synchronization, resonance and preconscious affective perception, we are in
an open and rarely reflected laboratory of the senses and cultural behavior. There is an
“indiscernible zone”3 not only in the individual process of sensual experience between
the primary affection and the conscious cognition of structure and effect but also in the
cultural process of adaption and the establishing of codes for these procedures of design.
1 “Elf Männer im Viervierteltakt,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 29 January, 2013 (trans. Rolf Großmann).
2 Ibid.
3 Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, The Formula,” in: idem, Essays Clinical and Critical (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 81.
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In music, this zone includes topics ranging from the intonation of tones (e.g. Auto-
tune-FX) on the overtones of sound to microrhythm and artificial space. Electronic and
especially digital media have made this area of preconscious musical time accessible –
by looping, rasterizing, masking and automated analysis – for a differentiated design,
but without being accompanied by a corresponding and widely established practice of
conscious and reflective listening. While pitch relationship (such as counterpoint) and
macrorhythm (e.g., stylized dances) were part of the musical notation of Western cul-
tures, and while their literacy led to composition teaching and aesthetic writings in a
broad cultural and philosophical discourse (e.g., doctrine of affects [Affektenlehre]), this
electronic media type of “sensory engineering” (with Kodwo Eshun) is an open, experi-
mental and dynamic practical knowledge of direct affection (Affizierung). In hiphop’s
“breakbeat science” or as “groove quantize” in sequencers, for instance, rhythmic struc-
tures beyond our conscious cognition are the subject of practical and aesthetic research
and generate a new epistemic situation: the knowledge of designing the rhythmic “feel”
of a song or track; its “swing,” “off-beat” and “groove” diffuses into the mechanical grid
of technical equipment and its control.
Traditions
Especially in music, we are in a long tradition of presenting and evoking affects following
concrete rules of composition. In this context, we already have an elaborated theory of
musical affects. So if we look for traditions of an engineering of sensory stimuli that deal
with rules or mechanics of affects, we can focus on a historical period of objectivation and
rationalizing affects and emotions starting in the 16th century: first, as an illustration of
the emotional meaning of lyrics in Renaissance and – what is very interesting for us –
later, as producing affects by special means of proper composition in the Affektenlehre (a
“theory” or “doctrine” of affects) of Baroque music. It seems that due to the dominance of
the visual (film, multimedia) in the discourse that emerged as the “affective turn”4 in the
1990s, this culturally formed historical theory of affects was not taken into consideration.
Especially in the context of a new awareness of the embodiment of affects in aesthetic
processes, it is remarkable that Affektenlehre is not only a theory but also a practical poetics
4 Patricia T. Clough and Jean Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2007); Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2010).
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which has been used for around two centuries of composing music. In musicology, it
is a well-known and – from the view of composition details – well-investigated topic.
I would not mention it here if it were not also an important step in the epistemology
of the mechanics of affects which I would like to focus on in my contribution. In this
historical period, affects were not thought of as individual subjective emotions but
generalized types of an emotional state of mind. These affects were derived from Aristotle
and the Greek philosophy and are listed and described, for example, by Franz Lang in his
Theatrum Affectuum Humanorum5 or Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia Universalis.6 But, as it
is well-known today, Rene Descartes’ classification of six basic “passions” – l’admiration,
l’amour, la haine, le désir, la joie, la tristesse – was most influential.7 The closely connected
affects, which are caused by the passions, were understood as chemical elements in the
steering mechanism of the brain and at least, the body.
The theory of affects in Baroque music is coined by the basic concepts which came
from the emerging natural sciences that were outlined by Descartes: a rationalized
and at least mechanical concept of the human brain and the body which came from a
mechanical view of the world as whole. The resulting principles for composing affects
in music accordingly followed a rational objective and general type-orientated set of
rules. The models of emotional perception and activation by musical structures are
derived as analogical forms from the physics of acoustics – for example the principle
of resonance, which is still in use today.8 The transmission of affects between musical
structures and recipients as well as the transmission between two persons was viewed as
analog to the resonance between well-tuned strings that can activate one another. Here,
one of the sources of Daniel Stern’s “affect attunement”9 can be found where the meta-
phor of tuning is used for characterizing synchronization processes between mother and
child. And if we want, we can find more analogies: the Baroque theory sets the move-
ment of harmonies (motus harmonicus) and the movement of the brain (motus animae) in
close relation.10
5 Franz Lang, Theatrum Affectuum Humanorum (Munich, 1717) .

6 Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis (Rome, 1650).
7 René Descartes, Les Passions de l’Ame (Paris, 1649).
8 The history of the principle of resonance and its importance for the development of rationality and
modernity is deeply investigated in: Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New
York: Zone Books, 2010).
9 Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant. A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental
Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
10 A detailed critique of the resonance model in the context of musical meaning can be found in Eric F.
Clark, “Perception, Ecology and Music,” in: idem, Ways of Listening. An Ecological Approach to the Perception of
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In terms of musical structure, the rules of the affect theory deal with the progression
of melodic and harmonic intervals or cadenza, the tempo and measure, with dynam-
ics, ornamentation and instrumental arrangement. Aria no. 58 “Es ist vollbracht” from
the Johannespassion (St. John’s Passion), composed by Johann Sebastian Bach in 1724, is a
well-known and easily followed example. [Fig. 1.1 and 1.211]
The example illustrates the change of affects from suffering to hope and victory
in a condensed form. In the first part, there are only a few instruments with a dark
character – solo violoncello instead of violins – and the vocal part is an alto, while the
key of B-minor is the key of darkness and death, the tempo is slow, and the melodic
contour of the phrase “Es ist vollbracht” goes downward. Everything changes when the
lyrics change to the topics victory and hero (“Der Held aus Juda siegt mit Macht”); the key
is now the heroic D-major, the tempo faster, and the melodic motion goes upward.
Here, music is intended as a projection of the emotional gestures of strongly styl-
ized and codified affects. If it were composed perfectly – following the Affektenlehre – the
senses and the body should resonate with the same affect. This normative-static model
was soon expanded and dissolved during the course of the 18th century because it could
no longer adapt to the dynamics of musical development.
Program-controlled performance
So much for Baroque affects. Now let me switch to the mechanics of affection and affect
in the mediascape of the twenty-first century. Since Descartes, there have been many
other concepts of music influenced by natural science, its perception and the senses. If
we read Hermann von Helmholtz’ groundbreaking On the Sensations of Tone,12 it is imme-
diately understandable how far-reaching the unmarked landscapes of acoustic and psy-
chophysical knowledge were and what great efforts were necessary to enter new regions
of a theory of the perception of sound. But now these laborious days seem to be gone:
we can use media technology to zoom into the structures of produced, stored and per-
formed music as well as into the neural topography of perception, cognition, emotion
Musical Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 17–47.

11 “It is accomplished; what comfort for suffering human souls! I can see the end of the night of sorrow.
The hero from Judah ends his victorious fight. It is accomplished!” (trans. Rolf Großmann).
12 Hermann von Helmholtz, Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie
der Musik (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1863).
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Sensory Engineering
Fig. 1.1
Fig. 1.2: Johannespassion BWV 245 Arie Nr. 58 (alto) “Es ist vollbracht” (excerpts)
and meaning. The first method can be executed by accurately controllable synthesizers,
phonography and digital sampling, through auditory and visual interfaces that allow us
to analyze the “real” sound (the acoustic waves) not only the abstract notation of sheet
music. The results can be used to synthesize and shape the sounding musical structure
in every detail of its overtone and time structure.
But in many current fields, the goal of research is very comparable to Descartes’
orientation. The enticement to find the key for a basic mechanical relationship between
musical structure, affection and expressing emotions is still unbroken. That it has
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continued to the present is shown by research contexts like the automatic performance
software Director Musices developed by the Stockholm KTH.13 The research at the KTH
is an attempt to describe and evaluate emotional aspects of music performance. Part of
the experimental evaluation process is a software that produces synthesizer-generated
performances, in which tonal and rhythmic microstructure is completely controlled by
an appropriate set of rules. These rules correspond directly to types of emotion, which
reminds us of categories we know already from the Affektenlehre:
Combinations of performance rules and of their parameters can be used for synthesizing
interpretations that differ in emotional quality. Performances were synthesized so as to
elicit listeners’ associations to six different emotions (fear, anger, happiness, sadness, ten-
derness, and solemnity). In a forced-choice listening test 20 listeners were asked to classify
the performances with respect to emotions. The results showed that the listeners, with
very few exceptions, recognized the intended emotions correctly.14 [Fig. 215]
The large share of media configurations in the “knowledge ability” of musical struc-
ture and its affective impact is remarkable. Basically, conventional notation is still the
paradigm of literacy in the Director Musices software, but now the original function
of operating instructions for the performance is also delegated to a (programmed)
medium. The rules of the automatic performance couple musical notation with another
media-writing, which yet seems to contain (to “embody”) the complex performative
knowledge which was generated from the body knowledge of practicing instrumen-
talists. The embodiment of human body experience and practice in configurations of
human computer interfaces (HCI) and software in music has been investigated in sev-
eral research contexts.16
13 I would like to thank Kai Köpp, Bern University of the Arts (Switzerland), for giving me the reference
to KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, Stockholm).
14 KTH-Department of Speech, Music and Hearing: http://www.speech.kth.se/music/performance/
performance-emotion.html (retrieved February 25, 2014).
15 http://www.speech.kth.se/roberto/emotion/ (retrieved February 25, 2014).
16 Jin Hyun Kim and Uwe Seifert, “Embodiment: The Body in Algorithmic Sound Generation,”
Contemporary Music Review 25.1/2 (2006): p. 139–149; Jin Hyun Kim, Embodiment in interaktiven Musik- und
Medienperformances unter besonderer Berücksichtigung medientheoretischer und kognitionswissenschaftlicher Pers-
pektiven (Osnabrück: epOs-Music, 2012).
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Fig. 2: To get an impression of how the program works and what differences can be heard,
rule-based “emotional music” performances can be played via the KTH website.
The reason for the uneasiness one feels about this transfer of 17th-century mechanis-
tic thinking into the computer-controlled presence is right here. The hubris of defining
affective processes in a set of parameters to directly compare the automatic performance
to a trained pianist reduces the cultural practice of composition, performance and
reception to an almost absurd degree and thus even falls behind the simple mechanical
concept of the Affektenlehre as a set of rules in poesis. Nevertheless, for the purposes of
scientific experiments, it could be quite interesting to compare the performance results
of the program with a culturally educated and musically trained human instrumental-
ist if we are – as the KTH Team surely is – aware of these reductions.
Neuroperspectives
As one new establishing discipline in music psychology the neuroscience of music raises
expectations in discovering significant insights into operations of the brain. These per-
spectives should grant new views on the processes that start when we are affected by
music. If we were to have a deep knowledge of the brain processes, it seems that we could
explore new principles of relationship between media design, affections and emotional
effects. For questions of timing, studies on neurophysiological correlates of the syntactic
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processing of music are very instructive because they deal with a precise timeline of per-
ception.17
Neurological experiments generate a lot of data, based mainly on levels of activation,
its physical location in the brain and timing. To be more precise, in the common experi-
mental design, “activation” means to observe a stimulus-related increase in blood cir-
culation (the “hemodynamic reaction”) or in the electrical level of brain regions (Event-
Related brain Potential = ERP). These data are important in searching for answers that
are related to the medical functions of the brain and can be found by comparing and
analyzing stimuli-response patterns. As a side effect of such experiments and the result-
ing data, some speculations can be kicked off on highly complex cultural phenomena
like the processing of musical structure, its similarity to language or even more com-
plex, musical meaning. But there seems to be a Heisenbergian uncertainty principle
in neuroscience: the closer we get to phenomena of consciousness, sense, meaning and
cultural practice, the more the observed and the observing brain discover new layers of
constructive processes that question the sharp and definite knowledge that we have just
won in the observation of physical processes of the brain.
In our context, I am not interested in these speculations but in the temporal process
of reception that is documented in the data of brain activation (the ERPs). So let me
quote a short passage that describes the first activation responses:
The earliest ERP responses elicited by an auditory stimulus are the auditory brainstem
responses, which occur within the first few milliseconds (ms) after the onset of the stimu-
lus. These responses appeared to be automatic, that is, unaffected by attentional factors.
The brainstem responses are followed by the so-called middle latency-responses which are
presumably generated in the primary auditory cortex. Their latency is from about 9 to 50
ms after stimulus onset.18
The first components that are “modulated by attentional factors” occur at around
100 ms. And now we are not speaking about conscious reception, which decodes seman-
tic information on a level of mental awareness. [Fig. 319]
If we take the ERP timescale as a background to focus on the time structures in
music production with sequencers or digital audio workstations (DAWs) we are work-
17 Stefan Koelsch, Brain and Music (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), p. 212.
18 Ibid., p. 52.
19 Ibid., p. 120.
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Fig. 3: ERPs elicited by regular and irregular chord progressions.
ing in time grids that are far below the threshold of conscious perception. But they are
visualized in graphic interfaces and, of course, time manipulations can be identified by
trained listeners due to the resulting effects. Common sound effects and enhancement
processors deal with time differences below a few microseconds. The half-second which
is widely discussed in affect discourse is half an eternity in music, especially in the spa-
tial perception and rhythmic structures of groove-based contemporary music like jazz
and pop.
To give a few examples, spatial perception is caused by runtime differences of the
acoustic waves in relation to both our ears. If we double a signal, spread it to two chan-
nels and delay one channel around 3 ms, no delay will be heard, but a new impression
of space will emerge (an effect that is well known as the Haas-Effect). If we do not split
the signals into two channels but mix them directly into one channel and gradually
increase the time delay of the signals, we first get combfilter and “phasing” effects, then
a sort of fattening or doubling impression, then echo, then repetition and – if delayed in
beat-related time – rhythmic effects. The signal itself can be identified as a delayed sig-
nal – and this experience matches the ERP timescale – in the doubling and echo phase
above 100 ms delay.
Beside sound effects and, perhaps even more importantly, in the center of a performed
musical structure, there are relative time positions of sound elements in a rhythmic pat-
tern. Even if we consider that we group patterns of events in an active process of rhythm
cognition, the difference that a timeshift of a few percussive events for some millisec-
onds in relation to the rest of the rhythmic texture induces is crucial for the “feel” and
flow of a piece of music. Phenomena such as groove, flow, and swing can be seen as
results of micro-timing, which for current music production software means a specific
deviation of note-events compared to the mathematically calculated correct time grid. In
the early days of sequencing, the simulation of human performance was achieved by a
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random deviation of notes (the “humanize” function), while an orientation towards spe-
cific mask-designed grooves was not possible. The KTH software that simulates “emo-
tional music” performance, as mentioned above, has already implemented functions for
manipulations of the relation between long and short notes (“duration contrast”) and
the delay between soloist and drums (“ensemble swing”).20 Current tools available in
common audio workstations for rhythmic design allow not only a continuous scaling of
a swing factor and individual groove quantize, but also the analysis of preexisting sound
material as drum-breaks or bass-loops. The extracted and stored microrhythmic map
(“groove map”) can be applied to a newly constructed sound pattern or breakbeats which
were cut (“chopped”) into elements and reassembled. [Fig. 4]21
Both examples, the research on musical performance of KTH as well as the grid-
based microrhythm in sequencer programs, show the extent to which the calculative
literacy of digital media redefines the relationship between musical practice and
body knowledge. Despite these sophisticated and powerful tools, no clearly defined
abstract rules for constructing specific grooves or “expressive timing” in professional
production have emerged so far. It seems plausible that beside the deviation to the
mathematical grid, a complex mesh of psychophysical and cultural preconditions plays
an important role, as Rainer Polak summarizes his “chronometric project” on Jembe
Music from Mali: “From a culture-sensitive perspective, the common understandings of
expressive timing emerge as limited. It is more universally valid, I suggest, to conceive
of expressive timing as rhythmic variation of metric expectation.”22 If we follow this
consideration, studio production merges extremely divergent poles of aesthetic design:
Highly developed digital tools for calculative analysis and programmable automation
are used with experience-based trial and error methods of an experimental laboratory
of musical timing.
20 For more details, see: http://www.speech.kth.se/music/performance/performance–rules.html (re-

trieved February 27, 2014).
21 Cubase 6.0 Advanced Audio Production System, Fa. Steinberg, Hamburg.
22 Rainer Polak, “Rhythmic Feel as Meter: Non-Isochronous Beat Subdivision in Jembe Music from Mali,”
Music Theory Online 16/4 (December 2010), http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.10.16.4/mto.10.16.4.polak.
html (retrieved February 27, 2014): “The objective of the chronometric project was to test the existence of
rhythmic feel patterns, specify their structure and proportions, and analyze their stability and correlations
with tempo, ensemble size, ensemble parts, rhythmic grouping structure, and personal styles. The
approach was to calculate the intervals between strokes (IOIs), which are given in milliseconds (ms), as
percentages of the normalized beat duration, or ‘(pulse) timing ratio.’”
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Fig. 4: Quantize Sequencertools
This type of “affective computing”23 is present, hidden as hyper-realistic simulation

or visible as aesthetic design, in the mainstream of everyday media culture. Spatial sim-
ulation, groove quantize and enhancement algorithms can be found in every current
music production. The affective quality of music in the electronic media is decisively
shaped to a considerable extent by specially designed time structures that lie in a range
beyond the above mentioned “attentional factors” and which come to conscious percep-
tion only through complex cognitive and cultural processes.
Vibrations
The focus on advanced musical structures in tonality and rhythm lacks a whole area of
auditory practice, which is latent in Western European art music but has been hidden
23 See also: Anna Tuschling’s text in this volume.
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from the established aesthetics of music: the direct physical affection by the vibration
itself or, as Steve Goodman puts it, “vibrational force.”24
From an aesthetics of a theory-guided, codified, mechanically planned connection
of musical form and affect, this view is concerned with a brute force attack on our per-
ception system: the power of acoustic waves. Sound as a weapon that induces fear and
discomfort in its most simple and probably most effective form is based on the direct
influence of sound vibrations on the ear and, especially in low-frequency vibrations,
on the body. Goodman outlines an “ontology of vibrational force” that goes beyond
these effects on human perception and argues that we need a multi-disciplinary “spe-
cifically tuned methodology” for the sonic that “delves below philosophy of sound and
the physics of acoustics toward the basic processes of entities affecting other entities.”25
“This ontology is concerned primarily with the texturhythms of matter, the patterned
physicality of a musical beat or pulse, sometimes imperceptible, sometimes, as cymat-
ics shows, in some sensitive media, such as water or sand, visible.”26 A visual icon often
used for the physicality of sonic forces beyond music is the change in the arrangement
of sand on a vibrating surface known as Chladnische Klangfiguren. They are material pic-
tures of sound, enabling its effect to be traced directly. [Fig. 5]
It is not accidental that these visualizations should come from a historical phase of
the formation of natural sciences closely following Descartes, and, as Goodman points
out, it would be just as problematic as in the Affektenlehre to produce a mechanical
relationship between the power of the vibrations and the effects of affection. However,
and this is why the images of such forms are quite instructive, they demonstrate very
clearly the massive physical effects of “vibrational forces.”
A path to a contemporary aesthetic of such premusically effective sound structures
crosses the bass frequencies of the dub, its offshoots in dance and disco music and its
successors in hiphop, techno and, referring to Goodman’s producer alter-ego as Kode9,
dubstep: club music, in which sonic force creates a rhythmically organized, community-
building atmosphere of vibrations. This “affective mobilization”27 by “bass materialist
practices”28 brings into the game a psychophysical dimension beyond the elaborate and
culturally determined structures of melody and harmony, a direct physical affection
24 Steve Goodman, “13.7 Billion B.C.: The Ontology of Vibrational Force,” in: idem, Sonic Warfare. Sound,
Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), p. 81–84.
25 Ibid., p. 81.
26 Ibid., p. 83.
27 Ibid., p. xx.
28 Ibid., p. 28.
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Fig. 5: Chladni figures, experimental setup, method published

by Ernst F. F. Chladni 1787.
of the senses and the body, alternating between violence and sonic synchronization of
community building perception.
With the aim of “an investigation of the material processes that accompany the sonic
fictions,”29 Goodman refers to Kodwo Eshun’s collection of afrofuturistic essays that
appeared in 1998 and is subtitled “Adventures in Sonic Fiction.”30 There, Eshun develops
a discursive frame for two highly relevant terms: “break-beat science” and “sonic engi-
neering,” terms of a hybrid media-techno-human musical practice of auditive produc-
tion and reception.
Sensory engineering
As soon as cutting emerges, Rhythm migrates from the drums to the Technics, from
the group to the dj, from the studio to the bedroom. Limb by limb, the drummer is
transferred to the machines. Breakflow scales across the globe. Phase 1: the decks. Phase
2: the rhythm synthesizer. Phase 3 will be the sampler.31
The doors for a laboratory of auditory affects open with a new kind of writing, with
phonography (“the decks”) and with a new code, the programming of digital media.
Media technologies as discussed here offer a new approach to the mystery of sound and
rhythm, especially by making time structures available for precise manipulations from
the shape of waves through delay and reverb to the construction of rhythmic patterns.
29 Ibid., p. 4.
30 Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun. Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet, 1998).
31 Ibid., p. 02[017].
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As was to be demonstrated, media production and reproduction machines are always

deeply linked to human reception. There are no neutral tools for transmitting signals
from A to B and the artifacts which are designed for media reception are optimized and
enhanced to achieve a maximum of attention and, not least, economic success. Media
are always “outsourcing various aspects of the psyche into technological objects.”32
These “media objects”33 are not objects of technological distance to the senses. Indeed,
they are artificial, constructed, products of science, and engineered but they intensify
sensory experience by connecting our senses directly to a simultaneously mirroring and
generating machine.
One evident example is the practice of DJs exploring the elements of breakbeats
through the recurrent repetition of the medially formed loop, to which the perceptual
apparatus is docked until it becomes part of the media configuration itself. Or the
practice of Jamaican dub, which can be seen as a laboratory for hybridization of
transcultural musical practice, alienation of suppressed ethnicities and electronic music
technology. One of the inventors of dub, Lee Perry, is attributed the role of a protagonist
of a hybrid practice of techno-cultural “black electronic”:
Of course, Perry’s instrumentals were also formed in the machine, and it’s this imaginal
network between the machinic and mental realms that opens up both the disembodied
architectures of cyberspace and the more abstract dimensions of the drum. West Africa’s
polyrhythmic ensembles can already be seen as deploying a kind of abstract machine,
their enormous intensities engineered with a notable coolness, precision, and craft. […]
This crisp and cool sensibility informs the Black Electronic’s unique reconfiguring of the
physically alienated or “mental” labor necessary to engineer electronic musical spaces.34
The question remains: What type of knowledge and science is inherent in design-
ing this terra incognita between a blind practice of doing things that make an effect,
32 As Eshun summarizes a contribution of Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid) to the
Neuro-Aesthetics Conference, Goldsmiths University, London UK, May 2005: Kodwo Eshun, “The
Affective Logic of the Sound File in the Age of the Global Sound Archive,” Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory 4
(2005–2007), http://www.artbrain.org/category/journal-neuro-aesthetic-theory/journal-neuro-aesthetic-
theory-4/ (retrieved February 27, 2014).
33 “Computerbasierte Medienobjekte,” in: Georg Trogemann and Jochen Viehoff, Code@Art. Eine elemen-
tare Einführung in die Programmierung als künstlerische Praxis (Vienna: Springer 2005), p. 125.
34 Erik Davis, “‘Roots and Wires’ Remix: Polyrhythmic Tricks and the Black Electronic,” in: Paul D.
Miller, ed., Sound Unbound. Sampling Digital Music and Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2008), p. 53–73,
here p. 62.
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media technology and the rationalized attempts to control affects, emotions (or what
is reduced to the term “mood management” in the current psychology of music, which
is not so far from the mechanical view of affects in the era of Baroque.) Microrhythmic
patterns are located in a time range that cannot be clearly and precisely identified by
conscious reception. Without media tools, our access to this phenomenon is very lim-
ited. Perhaps we would not even know it as a means of design but only as a mystified
resource of musical intensity (like “black” swing in the former days of jazz).
And the thing I notice about breakbeat science, about the way science is used in music in
general, is that science is always used as a science of intensified sensation. In the classical
two cultures in mainstream society, science is still the science that drains the blood of life
and leaves everything vivisected. But in music it’s never been like that; as soon as you hear
the word science, you know you’re in for an intensification of sensation. In this way, sci-
ence then refers to a science of sensory engineering.35
There is a specific media knowledge of processes that need electronic, and in some
extensions, digital media as epistemic preconditions not only as analytical or algorith-
mic tools or instruments but also as sensory connections between humans and new
types of machine mediated artifacts. And we can use media as knowledge machines for
memorizing, re- and deconstructing sediments of aesthetic practice. Breakbeat science
and sampledelia are part of a practical hybrid man-machine science which contains
imaginary models for hitherto unheard of relations and layers of motion and time, and
which enables us to design new aesthetic experiences based on this hybrid knowledge
of sensory engineering.
Thanks to Mike Gardner for his thorough and skillfull language check.
35 Eshun, Sonic Fiction, p. A[177].
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Wiebke Trost

The Role of Rhythmic Entrainment
Emotions and music as temporal phenomena
Time is essential to music as, unlike pieces of art in space, music needs the flow of time
in order to exist. Similarly, emotions are short episodes in time during which patterns
of physiological reactions take place. Most emotion theories agree that an emotional
reaction includes different essential components, which comprise neurophysiological
reactions, motor expressions, action tendencies, cognitive appraisal processes and
subjective feelings, which constitute the affective response.1 The emotional power of
music as an affective stimulus has been known since ancient times. Although scientific
interest in better understanding the attractiveness of music has increased, the principles
of this powerful link remain unclear. Given the specific nature of music as a temporal
form of art, this shared characteristic with emotions and affect should be worth further
investigation when studying the emotional impact of music. This paper will look at the
interactions and temporal dynamics of music and emotions in time.
Musical emotions
There is still an ongoing debate about which kind of emotions can be elicited by music.
Theoretical approaches have suggested that musical emotions cannot be regarded as
everyday emotions because the reaction induced by music is lacking an object. Even
if music makes the listener feel sad, the music is not the object that the listener is sad
about. It has therefore been suggested that musical emotions should be distinct from
so called utilitarian emotions, which have a clear defined object and which importantly
have an adaptive survival function that prepares the individual to react appropriately to
1 Compare: Klaus R. Scherer, “What Are Emotions? And How Can They Be Measured?,” Social Science
Information Sur Les Sciences Sociales 44 (2005): p. 695–729; Agnes Moors, “Theories of Emotion Causation: A
Review,” Cognition & Emotion 23 (2009): p. 625–662.
207
Wiebke Trost
an event.2 Although musical emotions do not have such a direct function, which helps
an individual to adapt to demands and to ensure survival, music is also able to induce
several basic emotions, such as joy, fear and sadness. Some of these basic emotions can
be even universally recognized in the music, as a cross-cultural study with Western and
African participants from the Mafa tribe has shown.3 Actually, it has been suggested
that music is able to induce various affective phenomena, which include preferences,
moods, interpersonal stances, attitudes, and personality traits as well as some utilitar-
ian, aesthetic and epistemic emotions.4 Regarding these affective phenomena, aesthetic
and epistemic emotions are the types of affect that are most often elicited when listening
to music.5 In order to account for this specific spectrum of affective responses to music,
Zentner and colleagues have suggested a domain-specific model for musical emotions,
which comprises emotion categories for basic emotions, such as joy, power, sadness and
tension, but also for more complex aesthetic emotions like the sublime, wonder or nos-
talgia.6
Research in neuroscience shows that emotional responses to music, in terms of
physiological reactions, are as powerful as basic, utilitarian emotions.7 Neuroimaging
research has accumulated evidence in the last years that a large distributed network
of brain structures is involved in the processing of music, and also the experience of
emotions.8 These studies found that brain regions, which are involved in the processing
2 See: Klaus R. Scherer and Marcel Zentner, “Emotional Effects of Music: Production Rules,” in: Patrik N.
Juslin and John A. Sloboda, eds., Music and Emotion: Theory and Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001), p. 361–392.
3 Thomas Fritz et al., “Universal Recognition of Three Basic Emotions in Music,” Curr Biol 19 (2009):
p. 573–576.
4 Klaus R. Scherer, “Which Emotions Can Be Induced by Music? What Are the Underlying Mechanisms?
And How Can We Measure Them?,” Journal of New Music Research 33 (2004): p. 239–251.
5 Klaus R. Scherer and Eduardo Coutinho, “How Music Creates Emotion: A Multifactorial Process
Approach,” in: Tom Cochane, Bernardino Fantini and Klaus R. Scherer, eds., The Emotional Power of Music
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 121–146.
6 Marcel Zentner, Didier Grandjean and Klaus R. Scherer, “Emotions Evoked by the Sound of Music:
Characterization, Classification, and Measurement,” Emotion 8 (2008): p. 494–521.
7 Carol L. Krumhansl, “An Exploratory Study of Musical Emotions and Psychophysiology,” Can J Exp
Psychol 51 (1997): p. 336–353; Stefan Koelsch, “Towards a Neural Basis of Music-Evoked Emotions,” Trends
Cogn Sci 14 (2010): p. 131–137.
8 Anne J. Blood and Robert J. Zatorre, “Intensely Pleasurable Responses to Music Correlate with Activity
in Brain Regions Implicated in Reward and Emotion,” Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 98 (2001): p. 11818–11823;
Koelsch, “Neural Basis”; Wiebke Trost, Thomas Ethofer, Marcel Zentner and Patrik Vuilleumier, “Mapping
Aesthetic Musical Emotions in the Brain,” Cereb Cortex 22 (2012): p. 2769–2783.
208
of non-musical emotions – for example the reward system – are also active when listen-
ers are emotionally affected by music.9
Timing of musical emotions
As music and emotions both develop in the time domain, it is of special interest to look
at their relation in time. Psychological studies have investigated in which moments of
music emotional reactions are induced, and which musical elements are associated and
might cause the induced affect.10 It has been shown that affective responses emerge espe-
cially when new musical sections begin or when a new voice sets in.11 In one of our stud-
ies we have investigated with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in which
moments of music the brain activity of music listeners synchronizes using inter-subject
correlations.12 We also found that at the beginning of new sections in music, brain activ-
ity correlated between listeners, and this not only in auditory brain areas, but also in
the temporal limbic system including the amygdala, which is known to be involved in
emotion processing, especially of socially relevant stimuli (see figure 2A). This finding
suggests that in these moments the listeners were having similar emotional reactions.
Regarding the experience of chills in response to the music, which are musical experi-
ences of high pleasantness and are often described as shivers down the spine,13 some
studies have investigated which kind of music and which musical characteristics would
induce chills. Guhn and colleagues for example suggested that chill-evoking music has a
slow tempo and the moments in which the chill is generated is characterized by an alter-
nation between a solo instrument and the orchestra, by a crescendo (i.e., an increase in
9 Valorie N. Salimpoor, Mitchel Benovoy, Kevin Larcher, Alain Dagher and Robert J. Zatorre,
“Anatomically Distinct Dopamine Release during Anticipation and Experience of Peak Emotion to Music,”
Nat Neurosci 14 (2011): p. 257–262.
10 Emery Schubert, “Modeling Perceived Emotion with Continuous Musical Features,” Music Perception
21 (2004): p. 561–585; Oliver Grewe, Frederik Nagel, Reinhard Kopiez and Eckart Altenmuller, “Emotions
over Time: Synchronicity and Development of Subjective, Physiological, and Facial Affective Reactions to
Music,” Emotion 7 (2007): p. 774–788; Martin Guhn, Alfons Hamm and Marcel Zentner, “Physiological and
Musico-Acoustic Correlates of the Chill Response,” Music Perception 24 (2007): p. 473–483.
11 Grewe et al., “Emotions over Time.”
12 Wiebke Trost, Sascha Frühholz, Tom Cochane, Yann Cojan and Patrik Vuilleumier, “Temporal
Dynamics of Musical Emotions Explored by Inter-Subject Correlations,” (forthcoming).
13 Jaak Panksepp, “The Emotional Sources of ‘Chills’ Induced by Music,” Music Perception 13 (1995): p. 171–
207.
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Wiebke Trost
loudness from piano to forte), an expansion of the tonal spectrum into higher and lower
frequency ranges and ambiguous harmonic progressions.14
Musical emotion induction mechanisms
There are several models to describe the process of emotion elicitation via music. These
models are distinct from models for non-musical emotions for the aforementioned
reasons. One recent framework has been suggested by Juslin and colleagues in which
the authors propose seven mechanisms to be involved in the induction of musical
emotions. The framework is called BRECVEM, which is the acronym of the contained
mechanisms; brainstem reflexes, rhythmic entrainment, evaluative conditioning, emo-
tional contagion, visual imagery, episodic memory and musical expectancy.15 Recently
Scherer and Coutinho have suggested an emotion elicitation approach, which is based
on distinct ways in which music induces emotions. These authors suggest a separate
induction route via cognitive appraisal, memory associations, entrainment, emotional
contagion and empathy.16 Both, the framework by Juslin and colleagues and by Scherer
and Coutinho contain comparable induction concepts. They include a concept for cogni-
tive appraisal processes, for memory associations, a concept for entrainment and a social
concept including contagion and empathy. Within this list of psychological concepts the
one of entrainment stands out, as it refers to a basic physical principle and not primar-
ily a psychological mechanism. In these frameworks of emotion induction descriptions,
rhythmic entrainment is – apart from brainstem reflexes – the concept that refers largely
to the underlying physiological mechanisms. Furthermore, entrainment is an emotion
elicitation principle which is based on the temporal structure and development of the
music. It represents therefore a specificity for music when comparing it to other static
14 Guhn et al., “Chill response”; Valorie N. Salimpoor, Mitchel Benovoy, Gregory Longo, Jeremy R.
Cooperstock and Robert J. Zatorre, “The Rewarding Aspects of Music Listening Are Related to Degree of
Emotional Arousal,” PLoS One 4 (2009): e7487.
15 Patrik N. Juslin and Daniel Västfjäll, “Emotional Responses to Music: The Need to Consider Underly-
ing Mechanisms,” Behav Brain Sci 31 (2008): p. 559–575 and discussion p. 575–621; Patrik N. Juslin, Simon
Liljeström, Daniel Västfjäll and Lars-Olov Lundqvist, “How Does Music Evoke Emotions? Exploring the
Underlying Mechanisms,” in: Patrick N. Juslin and John Sloboda, eds., Handbook of Music and Emotion:
Theory, Research, Applications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 605–642.
16 Klaus R. Scherer and Eduardo Coutinho, “How Music Creates Emotion: A Multifactorial Process
Approach,” in: Cochane et al., Emotional Power of Music, p. 121–146.
210
emotional stimuli (for example images or odors). In the following, the concept of rhyth-
mic entrainment as emotion induction will be discussed in more detail.
Rhythmic entrainment as emotion induction
Rhythmic entrainment is first of all a physical principle which describes the process in
which at least two oscillating systems interact such that they will adapt their phase and
periodicity and will eventually reach perfect synchronicity.17 These oscillating agents
can be found in several contexts, including several periodic systems in the human body.
For example, circadian rhythms such as the sleep-wake cycle, hormonal changes, like the
menstrual cycles, or physiological activities such as cardiac work and respiratory effort
show periodic behavior.18 To achieve entrainment, the oscillating agents have to be
situated in a common system in which they can resonate in order to be able to interact
and to communicate their periodic properties. In the case of the human body, these
different systems have to communicate and collaborate in order to maintain homeostasis
but also to adapt to exterior demands. For example, in the case of an alerting situation
the body has to be prepared for the physical reaction and therefore cardiac activity and
respiratory effort have to be adapted for the imminent action.
Music can also be regarded as an oscillating system, as the sound waves are composed
of air oscillations with different frequencies. When listening to music, these air waves
hit the tympanic membrane in the middle ear and the resonances of this membrane
are thus transduced into neural activity of the auditory nerve in the cochlea in the
inner ear. This signal propagates then via the auditory nuclei in the brain stem to the
auditory cortex in the temporal lobe of the brain. These first steps of the perceptual
processing of the sound show that the frequency oscillation of the music are converted
into neural activity in the body. This propagation of the periodic activity can then even
be expressed in body movements and social interactions. In fact, entrainment processes
have primarily been studied in ethnomusicology, where dancing and social rituals are
investigated which often involve synchronization processes.19
17 Michael Rosenblum and Arkady Pikovsky, “Synchronization: From Pendulum Clocks to Chaotic Lasers
and Chemical Oscillators,” Contemporary Physics 44 (2003): p. 401–416.
18 Martin Clayton, Rebecca Sager and Udo Will, “In Time with the Music: The Concept of Entrainment
and Its Significance for Ethnomusicology,” European Meetings in Ethnomusicology 11 (2005): p. 3–142.
19 Ibid.; Bjorn H. Merker, Guy S. Madison and Patricia Eckerdal, “On the Role and Origin of Isochrony in
Human Rhythmic Entrainment,” Cortex 45 (2009): p. 4–17.
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Wiebke Trost
As pointed out in the previous sections, recent psychological approaches have pro-
posed that rhythmic entrainment could act as an emotion induction mechanism. Jus-
lin and colleagues state, for example, that “the powerful, external rhythm of the music
interacts with an internal body rhythm of the listener such as heart rate, such that the
latter rhythm adjusts towards and eventually ‘locks in’ to a common periodicity”.20
They suggest that this process of synchronizing the bodily rhythms with the rhythms
of the music would create an emotional experience via proprioceptive feedback mecha-
nisms. This definition of rhythmic entrainment refers primarily to autonomic physi-
ological processes, such as heartbeat frequency and respiration cycles. Also Scherer and
colleagues suggest that rhythmic entrainment acts on the autonomic as well as the
somatic nervous system such that the internal rhythms adapt to the external rhythms
of the music and that via bottom-up routes these processes would finally elicit an emo-
tional experience. However, entrainment represents a more general physical principle,
which goes beyond resonance processes in the autonomic nervous system.21
Different levels of rhythmic entrainment
As pointed out earlier, entrainment is a process that can also take place in various periodic
systems in the human body, and different levels can be distinguished at which entrain-
ment behavior can be observed.22 We suggested that apart from neuronal entrainment
processes, which represent a basic principle of neural communication, rhythmic entrain-
ment processes can be differentiated on the perceptual level (e.g., attentional processes),
the autonomic physiological level (e.g., respiration and heartbeat), the motor level (e.g., move-
ments and dance) up to the social level (e.g., movement synchronization in a group) (see
figure 1). Concerning the perceptual level, it has been suggested that attentional pro-
cesses fluctuate in time and that when listening to music with a metrical structure,
these processes synchronize to the periodicities contained in the musical rhythm.23 On
20 Juslin et al., “How Does Music Evoke Emotions,” p. 621.

21 Klaus R. Scherer and Marcel Zentner, “Emotional Effects of Music: Production Rules,” in: Juslin and
Sloboda, Music and Emotion, p. 361–392; Scherer and Coutinho, “How Music Creates.”
22 Wiebke Trost and Patrik Vuilleumier, “‘Rhythmic Entrainment’ as a Mechanism for Emotion Induc-
tion by Music: A Neurophysiological Perspective,” in: Cochrane et al., Emotional Power of Music, p. 213–225.
23 Mari R. Jones, “Dynamic Pattern Structure in Music: Recent Theory and Research,” Percept Psychophys 41
(1987): p. 621–634; Deirdre Bolger, Wiebke Trost and Daniele Schon, “Rhythm Implicitly Affects Temporal
Orienting of Attention Across Modalities,” Acta Psychol (Amst) 142 (2013): p. 238–244.
212
the autonomic physiological level rhythmic entrainment does not apply in the narrow
term but this process represents rather an adaptation of periodic physiological measures
that are under the control of the autonomic nervous system, such as respiratory or car-
diac activity. Several studies have demonstrated the influence of the musical tempo on
respiration and heart rate.24 Movement synchronizations, which characterize rhythmic
entrainment on the motor level, represent the most obvious form of rhythmic synchro-
nization for example in foot tapping or dancing to music. It has been shown that the
movement synchronization is facilitated when the auditory rhythm represents a metric
structure in contrast to non-metrical rhythms.25 Finally, as listening to music is often
a social activity, rhythmic entrainment can also appear on the social level (i.e., in situ-
ations in which musical rhythms engender synchronization of movements in a group
of people). It has been demonstrated that movement synchronization, for example,
is facilitated in the context of drumming with a social partner versus drumming to a
metronome.26 [Fig. 1]
These different levels of rhythmic entrainment phenomena could be regarded as a
hierarchical process. For example, it could be thought that entrainment on the percep-
tual level is the basis for other entrainment processes on physiological, motor and social
levels (bottom-up). On the other hand, it could be possible that the relation of the differ-
ent entrainment levels is also driven by top-down processing, such that the mechanisms
of social or motor entrainment would engender increased entrainment also on the
other underlying levels. A study showed for example that body movement synchroniza-
tion and neural synchronization were increased after a cooperative social interaction.27
More evidence has been given by a recent study that showed when moving to a rhythm
(i.e., entrainment on the motor level), the timing perception of the rhythm is increased,
24 Joset A. Etzel, Erica L. Johnsen, Julie Dickerson, Daniel Tranel and Ralph Adolphs, “Cardiovascular
and Respiratory Responses during Musical Mood Induction,” Int J Psychophysiol 61 (2006): p. 57–69; Patrick
Gomez and Brigitta Danuser, “Relationships between Musical Structure and Psychophysiological
Measures of Emotion,” Emotion 7 (2007): p. 377–387; Luciano Bernardi et al., “Dynamic Interactions between
Musical, Cardiovascular, and Cerebral Rhythms in Humans,” Circulation 119 (2009): p. 3171–3180.
25 Katsuyuki Sakai et al.,“Neural Representation of a Rhythm Depends on Its Interval Ratio,” J Neurosci
19 (1999): p. 10074–10081; Joyce L. Chen, Virginia B. Penhune and Robert J. Zatorre, “Moving on Time:
Brain Network for Auditory-Motor Synchronization is Modulated by Rhythm Complexity and Musical
Training,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20 (2008): p. 226–239.
26 Sebastian Kirschner and Michael Tomasello, “Joint Drumming: Social Context Facilitates
Synchronization in Preschool Children,” J Exp Child Psychol 102 (2009): p. 299–314.
27 Kyongsik Yun, Katsumi Watanabe and Shinsuke Shimojo, “Interpersonal Body and Neural
Synchronization as a Marker of Implicit Social Interaction,” Sci Rep 2 (2012): p. 959.
213
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Fig. 1: Different levels of rhythmic entrainment with the possible hierarchical causation directions
top-down and bottom-up
which represents perceptual entrainment.28 However the nature of the full connections
between the levels still needs to be investigated in more depth.
Types of affect induced by entrainment
The link of rhythmic entrainment to emotions seems evident for some of these levels,
for example the motor and the social level, as dancing to music or making music in a
group can be experienced as extremely pleasant.29 But the general principle of rhyth-
mic entrainment as an emotional induction mechanism of musical emotions is still an
issue of research. Apart from the question of how rhythmic entrainment induces emo-
tions, another important question is which kind of emotions and affects are essentially
induced via rhythmic entrainment. In the psychological frameworks in which rhythmic
entrainment is proposed as an emotional induction mechanism, the description of the
28 Fiona Manning and Michael Schutz, “‘Moving to the Beat’ Improves Timing Perception,” Psychon Bull
Rev (2013): p. 1133–1139.
29 Csaba Szabo, “The Effects of Listening to Monotonous Drumming on Subjective Experiences,” in:
David Aldridge and Jörg Fachner, eds., Music and Altered States: Consciousness, Transcendence, Therapy and
Addictions (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2006), p. 51–59; Stefan Koelsch, “Neural Basis.”
214
actual affect remains unacknowledged. Both Scherer and colleagues and Juslin and col-
leagues describe the induced affect as the process of adapting internal, peripheral physi-
ological rhythms to the external rhythms of the music which leads to a mimicking of
the emotional quality expressed by the music. Via proprioceptive feedback loops, the
peripheral physiological reaction patterns are thus interpreted as the felt emotion. In
this way the kind of affect is induced via music-to-listener emotional contagion which is
based on underlying physiological entrainment processes. However, emotional feelings
in response to music go beyond the mirroring of the expressed emotion, and rhythmic
entrainment does not necessarily contribute only to this kind of affect induction, but
might also assist the generation of other specific kinds of affects. These other possibili-
ties will be discussed in the following.
Empathic feelings
It is reported that moving in synchrony with a partner or in a group of people engenders
behavior and affects which could be described as empathic feelings. Koelsch suggested
that making music in a group would increase communication, coordination, coopera-
tion, co-pathy, contact, cohesion and social cognition.30 These effects can be regarded as
the social function of the music, which improves understanding and affiliation between
in-group members and help the cohabitation in a group. Furthermore, empirical stud-
ies showed that synchronizing movements in a couple leads to increased trust between
partners.31 Wiltermuth and Heath showed that participants who performed synchro-
nization tasks showed afterwards increased cooperation with partners.32 Furthermore,
the study by Kirschner and Tomasello suggests that a social context (i.e., synchronizing
a movement with a human partner) can also facilitate synchronization, which proposes
that motivation for synchronization is intrinsically increased in a social situation.33
Moreover, synchronous behavior in behavioral experiments has been reported to make
the partner also appear more similar to oneself, and consequently increases the feel-
ing of compassion, social affiliation and cooperation.34 These studies thus show that
30 Ibid.
31 Jacques Launay, Roger T. Dean and Freya Bailes, “Synchronization Can Influence Trust Following
Virtual Interaction,” Exp Psychol 60 (2013): p. 53–63.
32 Scott S. Wiltermuth and Chip Heath, “Synchrony and Cooperation,” Psychol Sci 20 (2009): p. 1–5.
33 Kirschner and Tomasello, “Joint Drumming.”
34 Michael J. Hove and Jane L. Risen, “It’s All in the Timing: Interpersonal Synchrony Increases Affiliation,”
Social Cognition 27 (2009): p. 949–960; Piercarlo Valdesolo, Jennifer Ouyang and David Desteno, “The Rhythm
of Joint Action: Synchrony Promotes Cooperative Ability,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46 (2010):
215
Wiebke Trost
s ynchronized activity engenders not only behavioral changes as such, but also explicit
affective responses of empathic feelings. Making music and moving or dancing to music
represent contexts in which the coordination and synchronization of behavior are neces-
sary but happen in a natural, almost automatic way. Given the aforementioned effects
of synchrony, it appears that musical contexts seem predestined for the induction of
empathic feelings, such as compassion, trust and sympathy.
Groove
Another specific form of affect which is induced via rhythmic entrainment is the feeling
of groove. The concept of groove originally comes from musicology,35 but has recently
been discussed also in psychological and neuroscientific research. In psychology groove
refers to the musically induced urge to move to the music.36 It is however distinct from the
concept of action tendencies, which are a general component of an emotional reaction,37
because groove implies a positive affective connotation. The urge to move to the music
represents a pleasant emotional response, which anticipates the enjoyable feeling of
dancing, swinging or rocking to the music without necessarily performing any body
movements. When asked to describe the feelings associated to groove, participants in one
study reported most often the urge to move, the pleasantness of the music and the feel-
ing of being part of the music.38 This finding is interesting as it shows that groove is
associated to a positive feeling that implies the readiness to move, and moreover it con-
tains also the feeling of embodiment with the music, in which the listener feels being
involved and part of the music with his body and movements.
p. 693–695; Piercarlo Valdesolo and David Desteno, “Synchrony and the Social Tuning of Compassion,” Emo-
tion 11 (2011): p. 262–266.
35 See also: the text of Rolf Großmann in this volume.
36 Guy Madison, “Experiencing Groove Induced by Music: Consistency and Phenomenology,” Music Per-
ception 24 (2006): p. 201–208; Maria A. G. Witek, “Groove Experience: Emotional and Physiological Responses
to Groove-Based Music,” in: Jukka Louhivuori, Tuomas Eerola, Suvi Saarikallio, Tommi Himberg and
Päivi-Sisko Eerola, eds., Triennial Conference of European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM 2009)
(Jyväskylä, Finland, 2009): p. 573–582; Guy Madison, Fabien Gouyon, Fredrik Ullen and Kalle Hornstrom,
“Modeling the Tendency for Music to Induce Movement in Humans: First Correlations with Low-Level
Audio Descriptors across Music Genres,” J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 37 (2011): p. 1578–1594; Petr Janata,
Stefan T. Tomic and Jason M. Haberman, “Sensorimotor Coupling in Music and the Psychology of the
Groove,”J Exp Psychol Gen, 141(2012): p. 54–75.
37 Scherer, “What Are Emotions?”
38 Janata et al., “Sensorimotor Coupling in Music.”
216
Flow
Yet another kind of affect which supposedly is based on rhythmic entrainment as
induction mechanism is the feeling of flow. Flow can be experienced when a person is
accomplishing a task for which the abilities of this person match and correspond to the
demands of the task. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as a state of high concentration,
which is a pleasant experience in which attention is completely focused on the task.39
Flow is related to the feeling of groove but still distinct, as the focus of flow relies more
on attentional processes whereas groove is based on motor aspects and movements.
Because of the focusing of attention and concentration it is suggested that flow might be
based on perceptional entrainment of attentional resources.40 Flow can be experienced in
the creative processes of composing music,41 but also simply when listening to music.42
Furthermore, flow is also a pleasant form of affect. Being able to accomplish a task can
be a very rewarding experience. For example, being in synchrony with another player,
with a dancing partner, or with the beat when following the music attentively can be
experienced as very pleasant.43
Neurophysiological basis of rhythmic entrainment
Neuroimaging studies have investigated the underlying brain processes for the different
kinds of affects that are induced by rhythmic entrainment. The neuroimaging literature
on musical emotions and rhythm perception suggests that the close connection between
rhythmical aspects and musically induced emotions might result from the connectivity
of brain structures involved in both processes. [Fig. 2]
39 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990).
40 Sami Abuhamdeh and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Attentional Invement and Intrinsic Motivation,”
Motivation and Emotion 36 (2012): p. 257–267.
41 Felicity A. Baker and Raymond A. R. MacDonald, “Flow, Identity, Achievement, Satisfaction and
Ownership during Therapeutic Songwriting Experiences with University Students and Retirees,” Musicae
Scientiae 17 (2013): p. 131–146.
42 Frank M. Diaz, “Mindfulness, Attention, and Flow during Music Listening: An Empirical
Investigation,” Psychology of Music 41 (2013): p. 42–58.
43 Merle T. Fairhurst, Petr Janata and Peter E. Keller, “Being and Feeling in Sync with an Adaptive Virtual
Partner: Brain Mechanisms Underlying Dynamic Cooperativity,” Cereb Cortex 23 (2012): p. 2592–2600.
217
Wiebke Trost
Fig. 2: Schematic view of brain structures involved in musical emotion processing and/or rhythmic
entrainment. (A) Amy=Amygdala, (B) Motor cortices: MC=Motor cortex, PM=Premotor cortex,
SMA=Supplementary motor area, (C) Basal ganglia: Put=Putamen, Cd=Caudate nucleus,
Gp=Globus pallidus, (D) vmPFC=ventromedial prefrontal cortex
One important route that is involved in rhythmic entrainment processes are the close
anatomical links between auditory and motor networks in the brain.44 This connectiv-
ity is of special importance in groove experiences, in which motivation for movements
are engendered intrinsically via music. Moreover, when listening to ‘high-groove’ com-
pared to ‘low-groove’ music, the motor cortex shows higher excitability (figure 2B).45
More specifically, it was shown that in music that induced the feeling of groove, on-beat
moments seemed to facilitate muscle activity in hand and arm muscles, compared to
off-beats. This demonstrates the direct impact of the music, as a groove-inducing emo-
tional auditory signal on the motor system and eventually movements.
Concerning the perception as well as the production of auditory rhythms, it has
been shown that motor- and premotor areas as well as structures of the basal ganglia
are implicated (figure 2B and 2C).46 Regarding emotions evoked by music it has been
44 Robert J. Zatorre, Joyce L. Chen and Virginia B. Penhune, “When the Brain Plays Music: Auditory-
Motor Interactions in Music Perception and Production,” Nat Rev Neurosci 8 (2007): p. 547–558.
45 Jan Stupacher, Michael J. Hove, Giacomo Novembre and Simone Schutz-Bosbach, “Musical Groove
Modulates Motor Cortex Excitability: A TMS Investigation,” Brain Cogn 82 (2013): p. 127–136.
46 Jessica A. Grahn and Matthew Brett, “Rhythm and Beat Perception in Motor Areas of the Brain,” J
Cogn Neurosci 19 (2007): p. 893–906; Joyce L. Chen et al., “Moving on Time: Brain Network for Auditory-
218
shown that the basal ganglia play also an important role (figure 2C).47 The ventral part
of the basal ganglia is part of the neural reward system, which processes pleasant expe-
riences such as food, sex and drugs, but also pleasant music,48 whereas the dorsal part
of the basal ganglia involving the caudate nucleus has been reported more in cogni-
tive tasks, such as planning of movements or temporal expectancies.49 The basal ganglia
could therefore be a valid candidate to explain this close link between rhythm process-
ing and musical emotions. It is therefore supposed that rhythmic entrainment may act
via the basal ganglia as a stimulator of both motor and emotion circuits. However, more
empirical research is needed to identify the functional connectivity of these structures
in rhythmic entrainment processes.
Motor entrainment is mostly studied in form of sensorimotor synchronization, for
which participants are asked to tap along with the beat while listening to a rhythm
or to music.50 To study social entrainment, often sensorimotor synchronization para-
digms are used in which participants have to perform the task in a social context, (i.e.,
synchronize movements or play music with a partner.)51 Neurophysiological studies
using electroencephalography (EEG) have shown that the brain waves may synchronize
between the players when playing music together.52 A recent fMRI study investigated
synchronized tapping with a virtual partner and found two distinct networks involved
for tapping in- and out-of synchrony with the partner.53 The network that is activated
for social synchrony involves the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the precuneus,
which are known to play a role in social cognition.54 Fairhurst and colleagues inter-
Motor Synchronization is Modulated by Rhythm Complexity and Musical Training,” Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience 20 (2008): p. 226–239.
47 Valorie N. Salimpoor et al., “Anatomically Distinct Dopamine Release during Anticipation and Experi-
ence of Peak Emotion to Music,” Nat Neurosci 14 (2011): p. 257–262; Trost et al., “Mapping Emotions.”
48 Kent C. Berridge and Terry E. Robinson, “What is the Role of Dopamine in Reward: Hedonic Impact,
Reward Learning, or Incentive Salience?,” Brain Res Brain Res Rev 28 (1998): p. 309–369; Salimpoor et al.,
“Dopamine Release.”
49 Jessica A. Grahn, John A. Parkinson and Adrian M. Owen, “The Cognitive Functions of the Caudate
Nucleus,” Prog Neurobiol 86 (2008): p. 141–155; Salimpoor et al., “Dopamine Release.”
50 For a review, see: Bruno H. Repp and Yi-Huang Su, “Sensorimotor Synchronization: A Review of Recent
Research (2006–2012),” Psychon Bull Rev 20 (2013): p. 403–452.
51 Michael J. Hove and Jane L. Risen, “It’s All in the Timing: Interpersonal Synchrony Increases
Affiliation,” Social Cognition 27 (2009): p. 949–960.
52 See for example: Johanna Sanger, Viktor Muller and Ulman Lindenberger, “Intra- and Interbrain Syn-
chronization and Network Properties when Playing Guitar in Duets,” Front Hum Neurosci 6 (2012): p. 312.
53 Fairhurst et al., “Being and Feeling in Sync.”
54 Antonio R. Damasio, “The Somatic Marker Hypothesis and the Possible Functions of the Prefrontal
Cortex,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences 351 (1996): p. 1413–1420; Andrea E.
219
Wiebke Trost
pret this result such that in social entrainment situations achieved synchrony solicits
socio-affective brain networks which contribute to the induction of social empathic
feelings.55 Furthermore, these authors suggest that in the in-synchrony condition not
only social affects but also the experience of flow is induced as the synchronization task
can be accomplished effortlessly, which is experienced as rewarding. The induction of
experiences of flow via music shows that music listening can be a state of high concen-
tration in which attentional resources are focused, and which is thus able to change also
perceptual processes.
Influence of musical emotions on time perception
The timing in music does not only contribute to the induction of emotions, as discussed
above in the case of entrainment processes, but listening to music and the concomi-
tant emotional reactions can also influence attentional processes and time perception
itself. As described above, the basal ganglia are thought to play a crucial role in rhythmic
entrainment.56 Indeed, they might be more generally implicated in the timing of affect,
as they are known not only to be involved in motor planning and control and emotion
processing but also in time processing.57 A model that is often employed to describe time
perception is an internal clock model, in which time pulses are emitted and accumulated,
which allows the judgments of time interval durations.58 It is known that in patients
with lesions in the basal ganglia, as for example in Parkinson patients, time processing
is altered, which is supposed to be because of an acceleration of the internal clock due to
the dysfunction of the dopaminergic system in the basal ganglia.59 However, music has
an influence on dopamine release in the brain as well and thus also supposedly on tem-
Cavanna and Michael R. Trimble, “The Precuneus: A Review of its Functional Anatomy and Behavioural
Correlates,” Brain 129 (2006): p. 564–583.
55 Fairhurst et al., “Being and Feeling in Sync.”
56 Repp and Su, “Sensorimotor Synchronization.”
57 Catalin V. Buhusi and Warren H. Meck, “What Makes Us Tick? Functional and Neural Mechanisms of
Interval Timing,” Nature reviews. Neuroscience 6 (2005): p. 755–765.
58 Michel Treisman, “Temporal Discrimination and the Indifference Interval. Implications for a Model
of the ‘Internal Clock’,” Psychol Monogr 77 (1963): p. 1–31.
59 Michael Schwartze, Peter E. Keller, Aniruddh D. Patel and Sonja A. Kotz, “The Impact of Basal Ganglia
Lesions on Sensorimotor Synchronization, Spontaneous Motor Tempo, and the Detection of Tempo
Changes,” Behavioural Brain Research 216 (2011): p. 685–691.
220
poral processing.60 In fact, music listening can have quantitative and qualitative effects
on time perception. This means it can influence the accuracy of temporal processing as
well as the perception of time durations.
An example for the qualitative influence is given by the effect of perceptual entrain-
ment of attentional processes.61 It has been shown that when listening to metrical
music, moments in the music which correspond to an elevated level in the metrical
hierarchy – for example, the first beat of a measure (sound presented on beat) – are pro-
cessed more accurately than the second beat (sound presented off beat).62 This shows
that according to the temporal structure of the music, certain time points are processed
with more depth than others. Further evidence for the qualitative effect comes from the
paradigm of the attentional blink. The attentional blink effect occurs when two visual
targets are presented with less than approximately 500 milliseconds between each other
within a stream of other visual information: the second one will not be detected.63 Con-
cerning music, it has been shown that listening to music while performing the task
of detecting the visual targets can attenuate the effect of the attentional blink.64 This
means that with music in the background the second target is better detected than
without music. This finding suggests that music listening could stretch the accuracy
of temporal processing to a finer-grained level. The role of affect in quantitative effects
of music on temporal processing still has to be investigated more in detail. However, it
could be plausible that the affective influence of the music contributes to this enhance-
ment of temporal processing in music. For example according to the broaden-and-build
theory by Fredrickson,65 positive emotions enlarge attentional capacities, whereas nega-
tive emotions narrow them down.
60 Salimpoor et al., “Dopamine Release.”

61 Mari R. Jones, “Dynamic Pattern Structure in Music: Recent Theory and Research,” Percept Psychophys
41 (1987): p. 621–634; Trost and Vuilleumier, “Rhythmic Entrainment.”
62 Bolger et al., “Temporal Orienting”; Adam Tierney and Nina Kraus, “Neural Responses to Sounds
Presented on and off the Beat of Ecologically Valid Music,” Front Syst Neurosci 7 (2013): p. 14.
63 Kimron L. Shapiro, Jane E. Raymond and Karen M. Arnell, “The Attentional Blink,” Trends Cogn Sci 1
(1997): p. 291–296.
64 Christian N. L. Olivers and Sander Nieuwenhuis, “The Beneficial Effect of Concurrent Task-Irrelevant
Mental Activity on Temporal Attention,” Psychol Sci 16 (2005): p. 265–269.
65 Barbara L. Fredrickson, “The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology. The Broaden-and-Build
Theory of Positive Emotions, ” Am Psychol 56 (2001): p. 218–226.
221
Wiebke Trost
Quantitatively, music listening can also influence the perception of time durations.66
This effect seems to be based mainly on the emotional quality of music, as it is known
that emotions and moods change the way time is perceived.67 Often it is cited that time
seems to fly when we listen to music.68 It has been shown that emotional sounds are
experienced as shorter in duration compared to neutral sounds and when these emo-
tional sounds are evaluated as pleasant they are perceived as shorter than unpleasant
sounds.69 These findings suggest that time duration perception is shortened in positive
affect, for emotionally arousing as well as neutral stimuli. In a similar way for music
it has been shown that pleasant music shortens the subjectively perceived duration.70
However, concerning the arousal dimension, the result for musical stimuli differs:
Droit-Volet and colleagues investigated the impact of the musical tempo on time dura-
tion perception and found that fast versions of the same pieces were perceived as longer
than slower versions. These authors interpret this finding such that faster tempo and
the associated arousing effect yield a speeding up of the internal clock.71 This effect of
arousal, which is different for acoustic sounds and musical stimuli with a tempo, shows
again the importance of the temporal structure in music which assigns to music spe-
cific effects not only in emotion but also time perception.
Conclusion
The aim of this this paper was to point to the basic principle that both music and
emotions represent temporal phenomena which develop and interact in time in various
manners. It has been shown on the one hand that the temporal structure of music
influences affective states and emotional responses, and on the other hand that musically
induced affect manipulates the perception of music and time itself. Time is thus a close
66 Sylvie Droit-Volet, Emmanuel Bigand, Danilo Ramos and Jose L. O. Bueno, “Time Flies with Music
whatever Its Emotional Valence,” Acta Psychol (Amst) 135 (2010): p. 226–232.
67 For a review, see: Sylvie Droit-Volet and Warren H. Meck, “How Emotions Colour Our Perception of
Time,” Trends Cogn Sci 11 (2007): p. 504–513.
68 Droit-Volet et al., “Time Flies.”
69 Marion Noulhiane, Nathalie Mella, Severine Samson, R. Ragot and V. Pouthas, “How Emotional
Auditory Stimuli Modulate Time Perception,” Emotion 7 (2007): p. 697–704.
70 Droit-Volet et al., “Time Flies”; Sylvie Droit-Volet, Danilo Ramos, Jose L. O. Bueno and Emmanuel
Bigand, “Music, Emotion, and Time Perception: The Influence of Subjective Emotional Valence and
Arousal,” Front Psychol 4 (2013): p. 417.
71 Compare: Treisman, “Temporal discrimination.”
222
link in the relation between music and emotions, as it represents the necessary medium
for both to exist.
Rhythmic entrainment encompasses different forms of physiological and bodily
synchronization processes and represents one principle of emotion elicitation via music.
Besides, it might be a very general underlying principle for musical emotion induction,
as it seems to play a role also in emotion elicitation via musical expectancies and musical
contagion. Moreover, it has been suggested here that various entrainment processes are
also involved in the induction of specific forms of affect, which include empathic affects,
the feeling of groove and flow. Especially the latter form of affect also points to the idea
that music can also induce altered states of consciousness, in which temporal process-
ing and time perception are modified.72 It should be noted that entrainment processes
are only one aspect of emotion elicitation via music and that there are other induction
mechanisms which are equally important, such as memory associations, evolutionary
conditioning and cognitive evaluations. However, rhythmic entrainment is one of the
temporal characteristics that music has as a specialty to induce emotions, compared
to other forms of arts and types of emotional stimuli. Given the multiple interactions
between the timing of music and emotions, this relationship deserves further empirical
research in psychology and neuroscience in order to gain more insight into this power-
ful impact of music on emotions.
72 Jörg Fachner, “Music and Altered States of Consciousness: An Overview,” in: Aldridge and Fachner,
Music and Altered States, p. 15–37.
223
Chris Salter
Atmospheres of Affect
Atmosphere #1
A screaming comes across the sky.

It has happened before,
but there is nothing to compare it to now.
Thomas Pynchon1
The flash of bombs and the stink of sweat, mud, water and rotting corpses. The dense air
is tinted by flashes of gunpowder and permeated by damp frigidness. In the quagmire,
the stale, stench-borne air seems almost suddenly to have shifted its state. It becomes
infected, contaminated with another scent mixed between pepper and pineapple. Taste
contradicts smell – a burnished metal, burning the back of the throat. A ghastly cloud of
yellow-green hovers in the air, the result of some 168 tons of chlorine gas released above
the trenches of Ypres, France on 22 April, 1915. A colored haze whose potency is quick and
brutal leads to the asphyxiation of over 6,000 French troops. “The air,” as Bruno Latour
tells us in his story of the incident, “has been made explicit; air has been reconfigured
[…] air had become public; gas had become a branch of the military; a whole science of
atmospheric manipulation had been declared.”2
Atmosphere #2
The room is filled with luminous and aural phantasms. On the wall, a long French text is
horizontally stenciled in off-white vinyl letters. The words are barely visible in the hazy
darkness, except when I stare at them from a specific angle. As we read fragments of the
1 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking Press, 1973), p. 3.
2 Bruno Latour, “Air,” in: Carolyn A. Jones, ed., Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary
Art (Cambridge: Mass., MIT Press: 2006), p. 105–107. Here Latour refers to Peter Sloterdijk’s argument that
the air has been made explicit, compare: Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air (New York: Semiotext/Foreign
Agent, 2009), p. 71–109.
225
Chris Salter
French with the world behind our back, the room lurches from one color to another –
first red, then yellow, blue and white accompanied by an almost silent aural pulse while
a thin polyphony of almost unheard string sounds completes this cloudy scenography.
Some of the group gathered turn towards the colors emanating from the room. Before us,
three colored glass frames suspended from the ceiling, in the direct center of the space,
which bifurcate the room in two. Each of the surfaces frames a luminous colored object
freely floating in space. Staring intently at the three colors lined up in a row, several in
the crowd blink for a second. In the interval, the solid colors suddenly flash for less than
a split second before returning to normal.
The room seems to slowly grow dark as the sound shifts from almost unheard
vibrations to the swell of a rapid crescendo – a constellation of white noise at a higher
decibel level. The colors of the glass turn a sickly green as the room fills with a thick,
white haze. I myself begin to walk towards the green suspended glass. The air near the
glass is somehow different: thicker and warm as it hits my shoulders. The haze begins to
choke the view before me as I reach out to touch the glass. A vibration of seismographic
intensity and a powerful burst of cold white light ruptures the room, and what I have
thought was a green glass surface before me now vanishes into the thin air.
How does the room think it is?
Architectures made of clouds, steam and light; spaces producing artificial weather;
ambiences of threat constructed through the almost impossible to articulate feeling
of temperatures, air currents, infrastructural drones, reflections, luminous washes and
throbbing vibrations that infect and saturate “non-places” (Augé) like train stations,
airports and sterile shopping centers. Atmosphere, that which is impossible to describe
or what architectural theorist Mark Wigley calls “some kind of sensuous emission of
sound, light, heat, smell and moisture; a swirling climate of intangible effects generated
by a stationary object [building].”3
If all that is solid melts into air, to invoke a much too often cited Marx quotation,
then the moment of political-social-technical and ecological crisis in which we are
immersed provokes an increasing number of artists, designers, architects, scholars and
scientists to turn towards the theorization and production of atmospheres; intangible,
3 Mark Wigley, “The Architecture of Atmosphere,” in: Cristina Diaz Moreno, ed., Breathable (Madrid:
Rueda, 2009), p. 86–99, here p. 86.
226
hard to grasp and hold onto, strange entities that nonetheless do something to us as
perceiving subjects in the world. Atmospheres indeed are ontologically puzzling: a sur-
plus, a not really there, an in-between state, a feeling that is somehow nowhere. But
what is it about something “in a certain sense indeterminate, diffuse but precisely not
indeterminate in relation to its character,” that speaks so strongly to us in our current
historical moment?4
As their chief philosopher Gernot Böhme suggests, atmospheres are a fundamental
part of a new aesthetics focused on entities that are ontologically indeterminate since
“we are not sure whether we should attribute them to the objects or environments from
which they proceed or to the subjects who experience them.”5 This is an aesthetics that
emphasizes not only blurring between subjects and “objects,” for how can something
like a smell or the movement of a 18-Hz acoustic wave be demarcated and bounded spa-
tially-temporally from a “subject” who comes to it as it comes to her. This aesthetics of
atmosphere also forges an understanding of “the relation between environmental qual-
ities and human states. This ‘and,’ this in-between, by means of which environmental
qualities and states are related, is atmosphere.”6
That a new aesthetics of the phase change and micro-thresholds and limits would
pervade the practices of artists and designers who increasingly attend in their work
to the movement and transformation of climates, clouds, air, haze, acoustic waves or
thermal assemblages seems easy to account for in an age where metastable shifts in
the environment portend macro effects, ultimately edging us towards potential anni-
hilation. What is not so obvious, however, is why the interest in producing or making
atmospheres that ride on such ontological instability and how such atmospheres enable
the production of affect? Atmospheres after all, emanate and radiate not from any sin-
gular source, subject or thing but are collectively produced and circulated just as Félix
Guattari argues that affects are “installed ‘before’ the circumscription of identities and
manifested by unlocatable transferences, unlocatable with regard to their origin as well
as with regard to their destination.”7
Spinozist genealogies of affect are well known. We do not know what a body can
do; what its capacities are to affect and to be affected by the world. In Moira Gatens’
4 Gernot Böhme, “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics,” in: Moreno,
Breathable, p. 28–53, here p. 28.
5 Böhme, “Atmosphere,” p. 29.
6 Ibid.
7 Felix Guattari, “Ritornellos and Existential Affects,” Discourse 12.2. (Spring-Summer 1990): p. 66–81,
here p. 66.
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informed take on the subject, the affects, for Spinoza, result in shifts in corporeal power
and intensity. “The awareness of actual bodily modification – the awareness
of things as present – is fundamental to the affects; and this is what makes the defi-
nition of the affects overlap with that of imagination.”8 Later, from Spinoza on down
through Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari and more recently, the work of many of the
contributors to this volume including Brian Massumi, Patricia Clough, Steven Shaviro,
Michaela Ott and others, the debate rages on about whether affect is pre- or post-social,
pre- or post-cultural, trapped in or liberated from questions of identity and subjectiv-
ity or enabled, halted or transformed through the social-technical world of things, pro-
cesses and entities beyond strictly human acts.
The one common thread snaking through all of these inquiries is the tendency to
examine affect mainly through the lens of subjectivity (hence again its roots in Spinoza):
its production and for better or worse, its disappearance or alteration. Teresa Brennan
began her posthumously published book The Transmission of Affect with the question “Is
there anyone who has not, at least once, walked into a room and ‘felt the atmosphere’?”
In arguing that in order to feel an atmosphere, we have to take into “account of physi-
ology as well as the social, psychological factors that generated the atmosphere in the
first place,” Brennan positions affect as deeply attuned to the social and psychic world of
subjects.9 Anthropologist William Mazzarella makes a similar suggestion when he states
“affect points us towards a terrain that is pre-subjective without being pre-social. As
such it implies a way of apprehending social life that does not start with the bounded,
intentional subject while at the same time foregrounding embodiment and sensuous
life.”10
As always, even with that which is indescribable, a gap remains. The first gap is that
affect can only be observed through the lens of subjects and objects and through the
process of how such objects or environments exert forces and affects onto unsuspecting
subjects. Affect finds its landing site on the subject but not necessarily the other way
around. The other gap is the tendency to focus on the affect-environment constellation
through chiefly spatial modes of thinking. If theorists ranging from Hermann Schmitz,
Hubertus Tellenbach, Gernot Böhme, Félix Guattari and Mark Wigley, among others,
8 Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (London: Routledge,
1999), p. 52.
9 Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 1.
10 William Mazarella, “Affect: What is it Good For?,” in: Saurabh Dube, ed., Enchantments of Modernity:
Empire, Nation and Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 291–309, here p. 291.
228
have theorized atmosphere using spatio-ocular descriptors such as “aura,” “distance,”

“halo,” “appearance,” “borders” and “location,” these writers have rarely noted the
temporal dynamics that enable such “spheres of presence,” as Böhme calls them. Why
then do ontological discourses relating to assemblages, becomings, relations, networks,
objects and agencies always ignore the nuances of temporal dynamics or describe such
temporalities as anthropologist Georgina Born labels it, as “singular and continuous – a
monotemporality”?11
The material energetics of mechanical, chemical and electro-magnetic phenomena
that constitute what we call an atmosphere indeed operate over different temporal con-
tours, scales and registers; accelerations/decelerations, crests, explosive suddenness and
suspension, shifts in density, repetition or the mixing and combining of such phenom-
ena from the scales of microseconds untold to perception to the milliseconds inherent
in grasping a stimulus through the sense organs. These different “temporal qualia,” as
the late psychologist Daniel Stern labeled them, are in fact, critical for producing those
mainly spatial impressions of unboundedness, unlocalizability and metrics of distance
that seem to instantiate the dominant characteristics attributed to the affect that radi-
ates around and through atmospheres. Such temporal scales constitute a meeting: the
lived, felt experience of such temporal shapes by a subject and the behavior of the chemi-
cal-mechanical-electrical phenomena that constitute an atmosphere in the first place.
The temporal fusion of subject and environment into the broader construct of
atmosphere is akin to what Stern argues is the resonance between the temporal contours
or “time profiles” of things and the dynamic “vitality effects” brought on in subjects
due to these temporal contours.12 While it is indisputable that affect and subjectivity
are intertwined with one another, I want to provoke here a slightly different question.
What would it mean to examine the question of affect not only through the spatial but
also the temporal-material unfolding that constitutes and produces atmospheres rather
than through the discreteness and demarcation of subjects/objects in all their various
guises and ramifications (production, circulation, diffusion)?
In other words, if we want to approach the subject of the timing of affect we have to
forge further with an understanding of affects by way of the temporal strategies and
11 Georgina Born, “Digital Music, Relational Ontologies and Social Forms,” in: Deniz Peters, Gerhard
Eckel and Andreas Dorschel, eds., Bodily Expression in Electronic Music: Perspectives on Reclaiming Performativity
(London: Routledge, 2012), p. 163–180, here p. 170.
12 Daniel Stern, Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy and
Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 7–8.
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Chris Salter
melds that take place between perceiver and environment. This goal seriously takes
into account the fact that timings are never mono-temporal but rather, simultaneous,
overlapping, crossfading, synchronous or diachronous actions over different scales and
contexts.
To explore this question, my intervention in these pages takes as its departure point
an artistic environment appropriately entitled Atmosphere realized in 2001 and since
presented internationally in various iterations. The installation Atmosphere provides us
with a materialized form in which to explore issues of affect through different temporal
profiles by way of the installation’s chief elements of haze, light, sound and, occasion-
ally, smell – the gradations, abruptness, acceleration/deceleration, cycling-looping and
synchrony/diachrony that takes place among and through these materials. Can we thus
examine the “timing,” the temporal nature of affect through the setup and production
of aesthetic atmospheres by asking as Deleuze proposes, not what these atmospheres
“mean” but how do they function in and over different temporal shapes?
Circulating through all manner of the world…
We are outside on a late afternoon November day. The air is thickened with greyish-
lavender clouds that portend snow. The trees are bare with the last leaves of fall clinging
to their branches. The chilled, moist air seems to shift as the wind stirs up and minute
flakes of snow start falling, populating the sky with millions of frozen particles, like
whitish, falling noise. The wind churns up the noise, whipping it around into turbulent
eddies, micro-vortexes. Vision begins to dim as the darkness slowly subsumes the last
elements of grey in the air, turning it black. A slowly expanding field of blinding white
particulate and whistling waves of howling that blankets the steps of space through
which we move. How does this scene emanate its qualities of color, cold, moistness,
luminosity? What is their phrasing from one temporal moment to the next? What is
it about this situation’s qualities, its micro- and macro-textures magnified or made
explicit to perception that makes us “feel” differently than any other situation?
In his essay Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of New Aesthetics, Böhme argues
that in order to overcome the “ontological unlocalizability” of atmosphere, we need to
rightly “liberate” the concept from the subject-object binary. The ontology of things
resides in both their primary (the qualities and characteristics that distinguish one
thing from another) and secondary qualities (how does the thing exert external effects
230
as part of perception). Thus, the thing is not only its qualities but also its meld between
a perceiver meeting it and it meeting the perceiver through the environment/world.
Guattari also suggests as much in his 1990 Ritornellos and Existential Affects when he
writes:
[A]ffects circulate, intersect and intertwine themselves through the world, making no dis-
tinction or value judgment over human, animal, vegetal, mineral. […] Somewhere, there
is hatred, in the same way that, in animist societies, beneficent or nocuous influences cir-
culate through the spirit of ancestors, and, concurrently, of totemic animals, or through
the ‘mana’ of a consecrated place, the power of a ritual tattooing, a ceremonial dance, the
recounting of a myth, etc.
As he concludes, “affect remains hazy, atmospheric” and yet, at the same time,
“perfectly apprehensible to the extent that it is characterized by the existence of
threshold effects and reversals in polarity.”13
That different thresholds and limits of affect flow and circulate through objects,
sites and practices suggests that affect, like its expression by way of materials and
percepts, is in continual movement. Yet, Guattari labeling it as “hazy” suggests that its
movement produced through, in and by atmospheres is not altogether clear but cloudy,
misty, somewhat opaque. Even the subject who is caught in the intense experience of an
atmosphere, of sensing a space that feels “foreboding” or “uncanny” is neither temporally
singular nor stable. This “subject” is “no more than a fluctuating intersection, and the
consciousness ‘terminal’ of these diverse components of temporalization.”14
Just as there is no clearly bounded subject, no immediately stable “I” that is affected,
there is also no clear object demarcated, astray or for itself in the world that acts as the
sole origin or site for such affects to land and freeze in their tracks. Atmospheres too, like
Deleuze’s and Guattari’s understanding of artistic practice as a bloc of sensations – of
percepts and affects – also exist as this bloc, with neither perception or affection situated
or lodged at any particular locale or singular moment.
13 Guattari, “Ritornellos,” p. 66–67.

14 Ibid., p. 69.
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Gradations
In the same essay on existential affects, Guattari describes a scene in which affect comes
back as a repetitive motif. The oncoming twilight brings “the somber red color of my
curtain” into a new “existential constellation with nightfall.” The quality of the color,
material, texture of the curtain thus shifts from moment to moment within a temporal
contour as the darkness of the outside gradually plunges the room itself into a chiar-
oscuro-like tint of luminous thresholds; from one everyday moment into a new series
of moments where the world of the room and beyond both sink into “an irremediable
void.”15
What is it about the temporal passage of one state to another (here of color and
light), whose complete continuum at every moment is unavailable to perception but
whose accumulated gradations over a specified duration nevertheless actually consti-
tute a changed atmosphere – something that was in one state five or ten minutes before
has now qualitatively changed into something else? Studying the early life of an infant,
Daniel Stern’s 1985 work The Interpersonal World of the Infant offers one potential direc-
tion for why affect’s transmission through Guattari’s atmosphere of chiaroscuro twi-
light invokes such resonance. An infant’s tendencies towards amodal perception, where
a percept in one sense modality can be transferred into another, suggests that s/he
doesn’t see color or shapes, hear tones, or smell something but instead reaches for “more
global qualities of experience” – “shapes, intensities, and temporal patterns.”16 Pulses,
rhythms, densities and temporal cycles – do they provide the compositional textures of
atmospheres that condition the possibility of shifting qualities, moods and the “sense”
of such contexts?
Within the artistic work Atmosphere, one of the chief elements used to generate the
shifting sense of “climates” in the actual physical room is water-based haze or fog. That
an aesthetic strategy for the artificial creation of an atmosphere rests on the ability
to precisely regulate the force of spraying fine glycol or water particles into the air of
an environment which quickly condense into an constructed fog might seem both
puzzling and, at the same time, self-evident. Such a dense constellation of particles
obscures the visual scene, generating a great “cloud of unknowing” by distorting the
properties of the scene. Yet, an artificial blanket of haze (far less dense than fog) also
creates surfaces in motion; overlapping density gradients that scatter light by bouncing
15 Ibid., p. 68.
16 Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 51.
232
it off minute condensation particles in all directions, continually shifting the optical
signal/noise ratio.
Light as a technical medium transforms its state in the presence of haze. Depending
on the shape of the lighting instrument’s reflectors and lenses, from an environment
filled at first with minimal luminosity emerges saturated reflections and geometries,
shapes, forms produced in the interaction between waves and water particles. But if
atmospheres can be seen as hovering within a kind of pregnant, latent state, the artificial
regulation of gradients of particulate intensity such as fog density and fan speed by way
of the internal DMX parameters of the machine provide its producers with the ability to
temporally shape an aesthetics of crepuscular effects; a continuum of increasing levels
of indistinctness that result in programmed visual degradation.17 To quote the website
of Look Solutions, a German-based manufacturer of “high performance fog and haze
machines” used for live entertainment situations, “as any lighting professional knows,
a good haze is rather important when it comes to creating the proper atmosphere.”18
Artificially produced fog and haze have long functioned as core materials in the quest
for artificially produced atmospheres. The great Japanese fog sculptor Fujiko Nakaya’s
material since the 1960s has been condensed water droplets, sprayed and scattered at
high pressure into rivers, parks, the undersides of bridges, fountains and other public
spaces to form masses of undulating, kinetically behaving enveloping air subject to
dissipation by way of changing meteorological conditions. Nakaya described her Fog
Sculpture for the 1970 Pepsico Pavilion at Expo 70 in Osaka as “a fog to walk into, to feel
and smell, and disappear in.”19 Similarly, architects Diller + Scofidio’s 2002 Blur Building
produced an atmosphere of acoustic, visual and tactile wet white noise through the
spraying of water from some 31,710 computer controlled nozzles producing a mass of
scattered light and water over the border of Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland for the 2002
Swiss Expo – an atmosphere that could be described using Niklas Luhmann’s notion of
atmosphere as the “surplus of space between place (Stelle) and objects (Objekte) which is
ungraspable.”20
17 DMX or digital multiplex is a seven bit serial data protocol used to control and communicate with
commercial lighting fixtures.
18 Look Solutions website, http://looksolutionsusa.com/about-us/product-review-unique-hazer/ (retrieved
February 25, 2014).
19 Fujiko Nakaya, “Making of ‘Fog’ or Low-Hanging Stratus Cloud,” in: Billy Kluver, Julia Martin,
Barbara Rose, eds., Pavilion. Experiments in Art and Technology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), p 207–223, here
p. 207.
20 Martina Löw, Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2000), p. 146 (trans. Chris Salter).
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Chris Salter
Responsible for both the fog technologies used in Nakaya’s and D+S’s works, already
as early as 1970 cloud physicist Thomas Mee Jr. described the transformation of an
atmosphere through technical means: regulating the size (from 2–40 microns) and
amount of suspended water-based droplets or particles through mechanically (and
later, computer) controlled nozzles. With millions of droplets suspended in the air, only
a “white, hazy substance” becomes available to vision due the human eye’s inability to
see the individual particles but only the results of a moving, fluctuating mass: that of
scattering light.21
Brian Massumi’s work on Ganzfeld (“total field of vision”) phenomena (2002) also
describes the manner in which slowly shifting gradients of haze, fog or light which
build upon and overlap with another can lead to increasing states of disorientation.
In examining a psychological phenomena in which vision is confronted by a homoge-
neous, “featureless field,” Massumi describes Ganzfeld experiments from the 1920s-1960s
in which strange, inexplicable results occurred in a variety of subjects – “a vacuum of
vision” – vision empyting out, suspended, unable to grasp anything. What is more,
increasing levels of disorientation in subjects who were exposed to such featureless
fields of color or light occurred only after a prolonged exposure resulting in apparent
blindness and descriptions of “levels of nothingness.”22
It is not hard to notice contemporary artists who are interested in the transformative
potential of atmospheres of increasing obscurity exploring such phenomena as well.
In artist Kurt Hentschlaeger’s work Feed (2004), a seated audience is first exposed for
twenty minutes to a large projected video image depicting the spatial contortions of
3-D animated characters’ bodies afloat in a gravity-less space. As the image fades, the
room grows dark and the thundering subsonic sound increases in amplitude, a mass
of thick fog suddenly engulfs the entire room, simultaneously cutting off vision and
proprioceptive orientation.
The swirling thickness that reduces vision also silences the flow of time as one
moment effortlessly slides like a wave into the next. The atmosphere transitions – it
shifts from a locatable and repetitive sense of time with the apparent recurring rhythms
and temporal shapes in the image (the bodies continually rising, falling, merging and
disintegrating) to a chaotic turbulence of eddies and whorls giving way to extreme reti-
21 Thomas Mee, “Notes and Comments on Clouds and Fog,” in: Kluver et al., Pavilion, p. 224–227.
22 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press,
2002), p. 144–147.
234
nal afterimages, produced through a battery of ten high-powered stroboscopes, each

tuned to a different frequency, which illuminate and reflect off the surging fog.
But fog is not the only element of dazed and vertiginous atmospheres. In artist James
Turrell’s colossal installation Aten Reign, premiered within a completed redesigned
Guggenheim rotunda in New York in the Summer of 2013, visitors lie underneath a
massive upside-down, five-story tall “stack of lampshades viewed from the inside.” The
physical structure of Turrell’s work consists of a series of concentric circles outfitted
with 1,000 LED strips that cycle through a gradation of complementary colors over a
forty-five minute cycle. Turrell’s choice of creating a time profile for the light itself
contrasts with some of his earlier indoor installations in which the environment itself
remains static and time is given over to human perception as the eye of the viewer
gradually opens up to reveal the space itself. In Aten Reign, the total field of vision once
again triumphs: the room saturates in extreme colors that are continually modulating,
shifting and causing the space of the rotunda itself to undergo transformation – “the
submission of a disquieted vision to a field of perception void of objects or planes.”23
Abruptness/Abruption
As the room fills with haze, the sickly green light projected from the LED strips gradu-
ally grows in brightness. The fog that saturates the space itself appears to shift from cold
white to a shimmering green fluorescence. This all seems gradual, slow, a time curve
that is continuous and monotonic in its shape. But in a split second, this smooth curve
of gradual brightness and color intensity is punctured by the sudden and brilliant flash
of a xenon strobe, somewhere in the corner of the room. The shocking, fracturing blast
seems to be accompanied by a delayed reaction of sound – a thundering yet, intensely
short seismic feeling burst. Movement along the smooth curve continues, as the room
becomes even harder to perceive – the green LED’s original rectilinear geometry washed
out by the brightness and the sudden brutality of the flash – and then, it happens
again.
That an atmosphere of haze and fog can be understood as a field of gradual percep-
tion with a smooth time profile only makes sense given the time behavior of the con-
densation nuclei and the water and dust that adhere to such nuclei to form cloud or fog
23 George Didi-Huberman, “The Fable of the Place,” in: Peter Noever, ed., James Turrell: The Other Horizon
(Ostfildern/Ruit: Hatje-Cantz, 2001), p .45–56, here p. 46.
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Chris Salter
droplets. But not all elements that constitute atmospheres behave in such a continuous
manner. The swift, unforeseen flash or burst of light or sound is an aesthetic tactic that
disrupts flow and punctures gradient change by reminding us of an ever-lurking dis-
continuity. The mathematician René Thom, who did his most important work on the
sudden breaks or “critical points” of mathematically “well behaved functions” famously
claimed that “the primary experience in any receiving of phenomena is discontinuity.”24
The affect produced by a sudden unexpected leap from a chair or the brutal force of a
sforzando (literally, “forcing”) accent in a score is hard to grasp. What then do such sud-
den alterations of the flow of an atmosphere do? Is there affect to a discontinuity in an
atmosphere that attempts to give the illusion of continuous change?
Sonically or visually, abrupt temporal shapes serve to break morphologies of
continuity. The singular break. A luminous surge that cuts through an existing field. An
unanticipated discrete sonic event at an intensity even slightly exceeding the existing
amplitudes of a given atmosphere (brightness or loudness intensity, density) serves to
shatter the existing flow, rupturing the “mood.” Such breaks in continuity highlight
and then carve out a sudden and momentary and transitory new object out of that field,
like an impulse response serves to newly excite an already existing space. The rapid
attack of a sound leaves acoustic traces, reflections and reverberations that, depending
on the size, shape, volume and materials of the room, may quickly dissipate, allowing
the atmosphere to re-emerge somehow unscathed or linger, shifting it momentarily
until the source fades away.25
Based on an event’s duration, suddenness also creates potential fractures in the dura-
tion of perception. A less than 25ms flash of a high-powered strobe in a pitch-black room
renders the eye capable of only experiencing a receding afterimage. The flow of time
halts, isolating and atomizing the environment. Likewise, the ear cannot distinguish
timbral features of a sound if its duration is less than 12ms, leaving hearing with the
impression of a click rather than a distinguishable pitch. If acoustic dynamics give us
the ability through the physical structure of instruments (percussive membranes and
objects, jetté or pizzicato techniques in violin bowing) or electronic circuits to create sud-
den attacks and transients as well as variable intensities of loudness and (after a given
duration) timbre, such capacities are heavily reliant on the time constants of materials and
instrumentariums: response times and refresh rates; the tunings and timings inherent
24 René Thom, Semiophysics: A Sketch (Menlo Park: Addison Wesley, 1990), p. 3.
25 See also: Wolfgang Ernst’s text on the “techno-traumatic affect” in this volume.
236
in components and circuits; the specific filaments and gasses of lighting instruments;
the speed of data transmission.
Discontinuities are not all of the same kind or degree. They are highly contextual,
dependent on the atmosphere, technique and the precision of perception. Each technol-
ogy has its own time constant, based on its material formation and structure. An analog
lighting instrument such as a Fresnel or Ellipsoidal, standard issue lighting technolo-
gies in live performance settings like theaters and concert halls, can be “bumped” or
flashed on and off quickly but due to the ramp or “rise” time of their tungsten bulbs
and color temperatures, rarely “go off” completely, always leaving their varying traces
to be picked up by perception. These transients, effected by electrical and chemical sub-
strates, leave no possibility to outwit the threshold of perception since the time con-
stant of the technologies themselves sometimes match the “refresh rates” of vision or
hearing and, at other times, are behind.
Cycling/Repetition
Upon entering the room, a thick drone limply hangs in the air; its quality smothers the
environment. At first, the tone’s sonancy lends itself to influence other phenomena in
the room – the thick fog that envelops the space seems to be frozen; the ever-shifting
intervals between the sudden burst of color in the light seems periodic and predictable;
the sense of warm fingers on the body, produced by some kind of hanging infrared heat
source, feels constant, unchanging, thermally monotonous. Here, repetition, unending
loops, bring about the experience of non-movement, inertia, stasis. But within a
specified duration, what seems to be at first monotony becomes trance-like, overtaking
the atmosphere with ostinato-propelled fury.
If gradations play on modes of fine grained, gradient change, like almost impercep-
tible shifts of clouds, colors or fogs while abruptions and transients shatter, if only tem-
porarily, the smooth flow of time in atmospheres, the repetitive cycling of sound, light
or heat enables a different kind of affect to be born and circulated. In describing the
work of the so-called American “minimalist” composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley,
Steve Reich and Philip Glass, the Belgian composer and theorist Wim Mertens argues
that the continual use of repetition, pulsing and cycling structures in their composi-
tions “displaces attention away from the details of form towards the overall process so
that extreme variations on the micro-level may paradoxically produce an impression of
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Chris Salter
immobility.”26 For example, the very slow system of movement and change in composer
Terry Riley’s work, according to Mertens, produces the sense of a “vibrating motionless
trance.”27
The sense that many atmospheres embody the sense of a kind of hovering, standing
state is highly dependent on phase – where the constellation of elements that constitute
it is located in time. Tones generated by machines or apparatuses that produce invari-
ant, periodic frequencies and amplitudes almost immediately unfasten themselves
from their point of origin, forming standing waves through continual reflections off
the architectural surfaces of a given space. Resonances themselves are constructed of
oscillating frequencies that can only be perceived as continual lines, without the struc-
tural understanding of their own repetition.
Perhaps the hearing system’s inability to perceive change due to the speed of cycling
inherent in frequencies is why artists and designers constructing artificial sonic atmo-
spheres always return to the use of sinusoidal waveforms as compositional material.
Here, repetition is smeared, not based on distinct, separable units or “cells” of the same
structural elements but rather flat lines, without any perceivable change except for the
way they interact within the spatial order and architecture of the atmospheres they
both bring about and transmit through as a medium.
The invariant, static sense of time produced through a sinusoidal waveform can eas-
ily be contrasted with another acoustic phenomena that artists continually harness:
the pulsing or beating of two frequencies slightly detuned from each other. Beating as a
principle is well known. Two sinusoidals separated in temporal distance by a few cycles
per second or Hz from each other, produce continual oscillations through the rising
and falling of amplitudes caused by interference between the two waves. Increasing the
distance between the waves produces stronger, more pronounced oscillations until the
waves drift far apart so that they first enter the so-called critical bands, producing the
psychoacoustic effect of “roughness” in human listeners, and second, towards complete
and utter separation in two distinctly perceivable tones.
With beating, the continual and periodic change of intensity, sinusoidal pulses have
no direction, teleology or indeed, forwards motion. They constitute sonic atmospheres
where time seems to stand still and yet, continually vibrates and pulses. If sound under
the structure of such repetition can produce varying shapes of intensity, then such
structures distinguish acoustic atmospheres from the repetition or cycling of other
26 Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music (London: Kahn and Averill, 1983), p. 91.
27 Ibid.
238
elements such as light. On the one hand, gaps, breaks and ruptures from bursts of
light only yield to vision when the persistence of vision ceases to function. On the other
hand, the temporal rate of a flickering stroboscope can increase to the limit where the
atmosphere ceases to be fractured by time but instead, becomes constant and flowing,
no longer yielding to discontinuity.
The continual motion of bodies, textures, hazes or air caught in the periodic repeti-
tion of a stroboscope is temporally fissured due to the strobe’s sharp attack and decay/
release times; the gap between the interval. Because of their specific technical modes of
existence, stroboscopes utilizing gas discharge lamps can fire in repetition without arti-
facts of time: no fading trails, wisps or afterglow like described earlier with incandes-
cent technologies can compete with the rapid off and on firing of such an instrument.
This clarity of puncture is a far cry from the slow decay and slow attack of incandes-
cent lights bulbs that leave nothing of the bursting, switching intensity that gives an
atmosphere generated by a slowly flickering strobe or LED the sense of accelerating, and
unending recurrence.
But repetition does not necessarily demand or bring on acceleration. It can also give
way to sonic atmospheres of slowness: the crawling ostinatos of Yogyakarta gamelan,
the incessant phasing of Ghanaian drumming, the expanding lines of Japanese Gagaku
or the periodic percussive strikes that accompany the ritual slowness of Japanese Noh
theater – all of these musical forms utilize pulse structures that generate atmospheres
of drifting: stasis in motion that captures perception through a kind of temporal phase
locking between brain, body and environment. In the case of gamelan, the slowness
of motion is based on overlapping phases. The ramp times of such pulses are indeed
short – attack times that are just as soon masked by the next attack, the relaxation
period quickly disappearing into the next strike of a stick, a mallet and hand in rapid
successive order.
It is no secret that the constant and interlocking repetition of motifs, pulses, patterns
or rhythms produces atmospheric conditions encouraging entrainment and trance.28
These are atmospheres that, at first sense, seem to consist of an incessant sameness that,
while we might call them static, are far from standstill states, producing environments
that act as enablers of ecstasy and trance. These states are what Mertens, after the
musicologist Ivanka Stoianova, calls “monadic sound intensity”; “where each moment
and each sound is a centre in itself.”29
28 See also: Wiebke Trost’s text on “rhythmic entrainment” in this volume.

29 Mertens, American Minimal Music, p. 102.
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Chris Salter
But there is another kind of repetition that resides in and simultaneously produces
atmospheres. If the vibrating motionlessness generated by an element like sound or
light/image can be continually cycled, bringing forth a frozen time, the smallest varia-
tion in a continually recurring figure can also enact the opposite: a sense of creeping
but nevertheless forwards motion. A relentless 150-bpm loop that apparently repeats
but slowly introduces polyrhythmic interlocking or a growing amplitude within the
structure of a perpetual, throbbing repetition brings forth growing change but not
necessarily teleological development; difference, which Mertens through Deleuze artic-
ulates as repetition as an affirmation of difference.
Atmospheres that use repetition to generate the sense of forwards motion, a growing
of intensity, operate in the realm of affects via Deleuze and Guattari’s famous “blocs
of sensation”; compounds of percepts and affects that emerge from slowly shifting
ostinatos and densities as well as atmospheres where apparent suspension bleeds into
motion. Can repetition of a motif or pattern intercut in the interval between with
minutely shifting but accumulating difference transform an atmosphere from stasis to
swelling intensity and even climax? What does the room think it is?
Synchrony/Diachrony
After the storm, the room goes black. The thrall of noise that previously saturated all
space and time subsides, leaving no trace except for the faintest, tiniest pulse barely
audible in the thickness of relentless haze. A chase, the term for an on and off sequencing
of adjacent lights, begins with one cold white strip of LEDs. The lights go on and off
in sequence as the visual chase moves in and out of synchrony with the pulse, giving
the impression of time synching up only to slide slightly forwards as it rushes towards
the future. An occasional burst of two strobes, each positioned on opposite ends of the
room, fuses with the flow of the lights and sound. Yet, at another moment, there seems
to be three different, parallel times running throughout the space; temporalities which
occasionally lock into step with each other and then, just as suddenly, drift apart to once
again maintain their separate identity.
If atmospheres not only consist of the diffusion of unbounded elements through
space, then the coming together and then sudden pulling apart of the elements that
constitute such environments is also a question of temporal synchrony. Synchronous
events are defined as those that lock in step with each other, occurring simultaneously
in space and time. The spatial movement of the light sequenced and moving through
240
a space and punctuated by bursts of noise “can stage,” as composer and sound theorist
Michel Chion argues, “the meeting of elements of quite different nature.”30
While Chion describes that the audio-visual fusion that occurs when image and
sound line up in film (what he calls “syncresis”) gives moving images their phrasing
and dynamics, points of synchrony within the different elements which construct
atmospheres denote simultaneous phenomena but not necessarily of the same temporal
shape and duration. A sudden but singular burst of acoustic noise lasting a millisecond
or two may suddenly align with the on and off chase of the light sequence described
earlier at only one moment in a forwards flow depending on the nature of its action.
Synchrony highlights the parallelism and potential fusion of two disparate events but
as a series of discrete moments. This is an anti-Bergsonian time, a chronos consisting
of instants drained of the passage of duration and measured only as a series dots and
points.
Drift and extended forwards movement of synchronic events or phrases, however,
contradicts this monotemporal, chronological approach to temporality. For if affect
produced through atmospheres circulates and moves through and in/out of all manner
of entities, biological, physical and psychic, it cannot be imagined not only as discrete
synchronous points, fracturing time into independent slices but also as something that
changes over different phrasing; as something qualified as diachronous.
While synchrony and diachrony refer to Saussure’s argument that the structure of
language operates within two different temporal spectrums – at specific points in time
(synchrony) and transforming over time (diachrony) – the discussion brings us back to
an understanding of atmospheres as consisting of different temporal shapes that may or
may not lead anywhere but are not evolving as pure continuous “becomings” lurching
forwards with the same rate, tempo or shape. In perceptual psychology research, for
example, it is well known that sound shifts and influences the duration and rate of
vision. In tests where subjects were exposed to different switching tempos of light and
sound sequences, accuracy in identifying the temporal order of some lighting sequence
(what comes before or after what) is improved if a sonic event comes slightly before or
after the flash of a light. Temporal resolution degrades, however, if sound is inserted
in between the flash of a light. Sequencing of diachronous phenomena alters temporal
shape within perception leading to affects of projection and illusion.31
30 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 59.
31 See: Chris Salter, Entangled. Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 2010) for further examples of such cross-modal perceptual issues of temporal versus spatial
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Chris Salter
This granular understanding of the myriad ways that atmospheres function in

terms of their coupling between temporal evolution and affect gives us further handles
on describing the operation of Daniel Stern’s meld between the time profiles of an
environment and the vitality effects operating in subjective perception. But this notion
of such a differentiable diachronous temporality is also found in discussions of what
composer and computer musician Curtis Roads has termed “microsound.”
According to Roads, sound increasingly moves from large (supra timescale of months
and days) to smaller and smaller temporal shapes (meso, sound objects, micro, sample,
subsample), continually decreasing in scale until we reach levels of granularity only
accessible to mathematical intuition (the infinitesimal) that lie beyond perception.
Through these transitions, one gets different acoustic shapes and phenomena. The scale
of the grain gives us the possibility of working with sound as particles and masses, con-
tinually evolving textures that the composer Iannis Xenakis described as “a multitude
of sounds, seen as a totality.”32 Moving upwards, the scale of a phrase or a sequence that
extends over the duration of more than a few seconds (a musical note or sudden and
perceivable staccato transient has a duration of between 100 ms to 3000 ms) constructs
different kinds of “sound gesture shapes” (Denis Smalley).33
But what do such temporal strata of sonic structures have to do with atmosphere?
That synchrony (simultaneity) and diachrony (the evolution of events over time) con-
taminate each other leads ultimately to what Chion calls “temporal elasticity,” the fact
that time is expansive, appearing to speed up and slow down based on shifting points
of synchrony of elements or the shifting up or down of time scales in the evolution of
a structure, pattern, rhythm or phrase. If an atmosphere undergoes a morphological
transition from isolated moments of synchrony between elements to an increasing dis-
junction where light, sound, smell or other temporally orchestrated materials begin to
move out of sync, forming their own temporal scales, then no mono-time can be said
to exist.34 There is no overall master clock that couples and interlocks the time of per-
ception to the behavior of multiple intensities that compose an atmosphere. Multiple
macro- and micro-times stack on top of each other. The passage of time in the room
becomes pliable, rubbery and resilient.
resolution residing in vision versus hearing.

32 Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition, ed. Sharon Kanach (New
York: Pendragon Press, 1992), p. 9.
33 See: Curtis Roads, Microsound (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), p. 1–49.
34 See also: Bernd Bösel’s text in this volume.
242
Conclusion
Hovering. Speeding ahead. A burst of suddeness. Slow, gradual tension. A surge forwards.
Ongoing repetition. Motifs that recur and return. A fade or relaxation only to crescendo
again. These time shapes are characterized and constituted by abruptness, cycling, syn-
chrony and gradation constitute the composition of atmospheres beyond simply their
usually understood attributes of spatial diffusion and unboundedness.35 Indeed, given
these more nuanced temporal forms, diffuseness in atmosphere does not play out all
in the same way or time. So we return to our original premise that affect is not only
engendered through processural auras, halos and localities influencing the produc-
tion of subjects, but also through phase, cycles of repetition that become wrought with
slow variation and sudden switches, synchrony and counterpoint of densities, tonali-
ties, textures, timbres, rhythms and durations that are inherent to atmosphere itself. If
affects, as Guattari claimed, speak not only to me but “through me” and mark out a place
“for mutual becomings,” then these becomings, like the atmosphere of sudden bursts
of bombs and the barely perceivable shifts of toxic smell molecules from chlorine gas
that flow across the Ypres trenches (to repeat Latour’s narrative that we started with) or
the incessant flow of haze, sound and light that takes perception to the edge of vertigo,
trance and beyond, are as much the result of timing of affect, when they are, as where
they are.
35 See also: Lone Bertelsen and Andrew Murphie, “An Ethics of Everyday Infinities and Powers: Félix
Guattari on Affect and the Refrain,” in: Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory
Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 138–157.
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Christoph Brunner

On Emergent Collectivity in Ragnar Kjartansson’s
The Visitors
The task of perception entails pulverizing the world, but also one of spiritualizing its dust.1
I) Introduction
Upon entering the exhibition space, one is enveloped in a space of black carpet with
modular cushion furniture and nine immense screens. The room is ample and invites
for endured inhabitation. Many children are present. There is constant movement, sub-
tle chatting, walking around, and running. Everything happening in the room moves
through and with the visual and audio envelope of Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s
video and sound installation The Visitors. Each screen shows a musician staged in one of
the rooms of the upstate New York mansion Rockeby Farm. The musicians play, wired
together through headphones while being spatially apart. Speakers accompany each
screen emitting the sound of the instrument (dis-)played. Depending on the position
in the room, the visitor of the installation can tune into one particular instrument by
approaching the screen or enjoy the blending of all of them by moving toward a more
central position in the space. Apart from the eight screens with musicians, a ninth screen
shows a porch with another handful of people, overlooking the green hills rolling down
toward the Hudson River. Outside a cannon, accompanied by an elderly man with an
old-fashioned firefighter’s helmet, is lit every 20 minutes functioning as timer for the
musicians playing inside the house.
After performing for about 60 minutes, the musicians gather around a grand piano
on one of the screens and then appear next to the porch continuously singing while
walking down the green hills until they disappear. The audience inside the installation
attunes to this joyful event, itself moving in the room and shifting toward the screen
showing the hills witnessing the small crowd slowly disappearing. At the same time
1 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993),
p. 87.
245
Christoph Brunner
a technician, quietly humming the main refrain, turns off one camera or screen after
another until only the last screen illuminates the space and then goes black.
Rockeby Farm is a colonial mansion built about 200 years ago and has been modestly
maintained so that it keeps its patina without falling entirely apart. Its rich texture
and diverse interiors mirror the lives of its inhabitants still living there, mostly
descendants of the Astor family and friends. The musicians insert themselves into the
interior of the house, oscillating between standing out as performers and becoming
one with the background. The whole mood of the piece draws on a slow and subtle
process of dramatization of the space and its shared endurance in the performance. A
tension immanent to the piece lies in its strong contrasts. First, the old and decaying
mansion in its textured appearance is projected on the screens through crystal clear
high definition images. The technology enabling the performance’s consistency and
presentation defines an actively shaping part of the piece. Rockeby Farm’s aged spaces
reveal their texture particularly strongly in contrast with the sober yet comforting
design of the exhibition. Second, the actual performance has been shot in one single
take, suggesting a sense of improvisation. At the same time, all the juxtaposed elements
(spatial, technical, human and nonhuman) are highly choreographed. Third, a sense of
separation and concentration of each musician suggests a certain “individuality” while
the practice of making music together evokes opposite effects in the actual exhibition
space mixing the soundtrack of each screen.
Similarly, the title underlines a double relation. On the one hand, the musicians and
their friends on the porch are visitors to Rockeby Farm. On the other hand, the visitors
of the installation are drawn into the interior of the space composed of screens, sound
and cozy surfaces in the exhibition. The piece folds different states of relation into each
other, oscillating between conjunction and disjunction of space, time and humans with
their environments evoking a constitution of togetherness or collectivity. The collective
quality of the artwork moves through singular points, such as the screens, instruments
or visitors and is held together through sound, rhythm and technologies.
On first sight, The Visitors possibly evokes clear signs through its content pertaining
to togetherness, friendship, and conviviality.2 On the expressive level it is a soothing
2 In an art context, all of these aspects could be considered in relation to what has been termed
“relational aesthetics”. Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics generated strong reactions in art theory
discourse especially in form of critique and foregrounding questions of participation and socially engaged
art practice. However, and central for this article, the notion of relation as philosophical concept has
gained little to no attention in these discourses. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses
du réel, 1998). For critiques, see: Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall
246
and warm piece, potentially reminding us of times with friends or merely the beauty of
enjoying life. However, under the surface of the convivial and joyful, the work pushes
towards another conception of perception in such immersive media artworks. Through
its highly choreographed and precise juxtaposition of technical, bodily and audiovisual
elements, it points at the conditions of experience emerging across a sensation of shared
time and space. The Visitors, I propose, activates a particular sensation of collectivity and
togetherness through its emphasis on timing by means of suspense, attunement and relay-
ing. Sensing the collective while individually experiencing the work over a longer period
of time reworks, I suggest, the general order of the aesthetic regime of perception in
contemporary art. One possible reading of contemporary conceptual and political art
resides in a critical distance from and clear opposition to major political, economic,
or social signifiers and their entanglement in capitalist operations. While these cri-
tiques are utterly necessary in aesthetic practices, they resemble in part the structures
they critique. Such resemblance, I argue, happens in the way lived experience becomes
contained and quantified. In distancing critique, quantification happens through the
extrapolation of a clear category, sign, or signifier positioned in chronological orders of
a temporal linearity.3 In capitalism, the parceling of time into discrete entities pertains
to early industrial rationalizations of labor power and finds its most advanced iteration
in the computerized high-speed trading of stock exchanges. Against critical or capital-
ist quantification, The Visitors, in its affirmative gesture, proposes another qualitative,
heterogeneous, and emergent time immanent to lived experience. In foregrounding its
eventful unfolding, I suggest, the work subtly re-orients signs of a bohemian lifestyle
such as “playing music and have a good time with friends” towards a sensibility for
the temporal qualities at work in emergent experience. The collective quality of the work
defines a potential for an affective aesthetic politics where affect underlines experience-
in-the-making. In taking the work’s expressive qualities as a point of departure, I will
outline three conceptual entanglements: one concerning the relation between affect and
sensation, one underlining what I call the work’s “ecological” aspect, and one pertain-
ing to memory as attractor for future action. Affect, sensation and memory all concern
how processes of time and timing constitute what comes to pass as felt embodied expe-
rience. In pointing at the emergent quality in experience, where different timings relate
2004): p. 51–79; idem, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012); Jacques
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009).
3 A prime example of such tendencies can be found in Bishop, Artificial Hells.
247
Christoph Brunner
affectively to form sensation, we might then think of a politics of affective timing where
experience in the making lies at the heart of contemporary aesthetic practices.
II) Framing affect and sensation
The Visitors gains its strength from evoking a sense of co-presence and collective inhabi-
tation between performers and actual visitors. The installation operates by folding audio
and visual elements and the spaces they traverse on the screens directly into the exhibi-
tion, generating an immediate relation to the sensing bodies of visitors moving through
and with it. The screens, in their size and with their high-definition images, produce an
immediacy of the on-screen performers in the exhibition room, while receding into the
detailed background of the images. There is an elasticity between the visual content and
the bodily movement of the visitors. The visitor is lured into the affective pulsation of
the work, moving between screens, mixing their sounds, and thus actively synthesizing
them. A relaying occurs between the artwork’s content, its “mediated” expression, and
how it relates to the bodies inside the exhibition. Inside the exhibition space this relaying
works through rhythm and tonalities rather than discrete objects and structural signs.
Slowness in this case means not only the musical refrain which is chanted repeatedly,
inscribing itself into our sense organs, but also the ample space given for attuning to the
work. The screen as a surface becomes a conductive tissue through which a sensing of the
piece’s aliveness resonates between the actual performers and their immediate environ-
ment. In its affective force, the work immediately works on the way bodies move with
and through it. The spatial folding is also a temporal folding of shared time, repetition
and resonance between spaces, bodies and their relation to sensation. Sensation defines
the zone of experience where a bodily capacity of sensing with its environment precedes a
distinct perception of a body positioned in space. “Sensation is the mode in which poten-
tial is present in the perceiving body.”4 Put differently, through its spatial, technical and
aesthetic arrangement, The Visitors foregrounds the fleeting relay between sensation and
perception, between a process of becoming and its actualization, both being immanent
to bodily experience. In its dynamic between perception and sensation, the body itself is
4 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press,
2002), p. 75.
248
not a container but in a state of constant transformation – a bodying oscillating between

motion and rest, speeds and slownesses.5
Affect is the relay between an indeterminate openness immanent to sensation and
its expression in perception. Sensation is attentive to the qualitative dimension of
emergent experience that is “a perceptible expression of uncontained affect.”6 It has
an in-between function of pure movement. If there is an emergent zone of experience-
in-the-making, The Visitors not only emphasizes collectivity on an intersubjective level
but also addresses an emergent collectivity immanent to experience before bodies are
positioned in space and time. The collective thought in relation to affect underlines the
world’s general relationality always exceeding what becomes expressed in a situated (or
eventful) experience. Working with sensation’s openness for relationality proposes an
aesthetic politics of potential. The question for an aesthetic practice concerns how to
compose an affectively engaging environment that activates sensation’s openness in
experience.
Affect inhabits the relay between a pure qualitative state of emergent experience
that is time, and its quantitative expression in space, as perceived.7 These states are not
chronological but co-emergent and together compose the “dynamic unity” of experi-
ence.8 One of the particularities of The Visitors, as it occurred to me, is its attraction to
stay over long durations inside the piece, meandering through the space being very sub-
tly choreographed toward the end assembling the visitors in front of the last screen.
This slow and endured attunement to the work, I propose, suspends an immediate con-
scious capture attempting to categorize what is happening and what it might mean.
Foregrounding the emergent and endured qualities of time in experience points at tech-
niques of affective timing actively working on the qualitative level of sensation, while
taking its effects in space and time as bodily states into account. The work evokes strong
associations of convivial togetherness but immediately undermines them through its
power of suspense. Against a critique of celebrated conviviality without much mean-
ing and political valence, The Visitors allows us to attune to a politics of perception in
the making. Affect not only points at the emergent but also underlines an activity of
5 Such a definition of the body derives from Spinoza, see: Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San
Francisco: City Light Books, 1988), p. 123.
6 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 220.
7 This concept of sensation derives mainly from Henri Bergson for whom “our senses perceive the
qualities of bodies and space along with them,” Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate
Data of Consciousness (Mineola NY: Dover Publications, 2001), p. 91–92.
249
Christoph Brunner
continuation. “Affect is the connecting thread of experience. It is the invisible glue that
holds the world together. In event. The world-glue of affect is an autonomy of event-
connection continuing across its own serialized capture in context.”9 The serialized cap-
ture in context would be the immediate conscious ordering into pre-existing meaning
structures. Affective timing concerns the time of the event – how it operates qualita-
tively in difference to quantification. Immediate and endured differentially, these are
the affective operations at stake in experience. It denotes an interstice or interval outside
linear time.
Affect addresses the relay of a complex relational entanglement between fields of
potential and their actualization. It underlines activity and processes of activation.
“Affect activates the very connectibility of experience. It is the force, the lure, through
which a certain constellation comes to expression.”10 By relating affect to time, the
emphasis lies on how activity traverses different forms of existence temporally, an
expressive cut and its potential endurance. Affect concerns the relaying between a “bare
activity” which is in the “broadest and vaguest way synonymous with life” and the
immediately felt effects of embodied experience.11 There is a double temporal quality in
experience, a relational field of forces and their concretization in an actual occasion. It
is the latter one, which usually overlooks the former and which is worth investigating
through affect.
The affective interval is not a spatial gap but a temporal cut and suspense which
has its very own time. The time of the in-between, the interval, is the time of affective
attunement.12 Affective attunement underlines a crucial process in emergent experience
where relations constituting an event operate differentially. The “form” the artwork
takes in the exhibition is actually a catalyst for differential attunement to the same
expressive event across bodies. Each individual body attunes to the work differentially
while being part of a shared event. Affect as a temporal quality concerns the phase of
experience where relations as tendencies or movements attune to each other and start
9 Ibid., p. 217.
10 Erin Manning, Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013),
p. 26.
11 See also: William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996),
p. 161–162. Brian Massumi takes the notion of bare activity from William James underlining the already
active potentiality immanent in life. In this sense bare activity is opposed to Giorgio Agamben’s “bare life”
as an after-effect of human politics.
12 The concept of affect attunement has been coined by Daniel Stern and adapted by Brian Massumi. See:
Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (London: Karnac Books, 1998), p. 138–161; Brian Massumi,
Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2011).
250
to resonate to become expressive. In other words, attunement is not a grouping of bod-

ies but their singular capacities of differentially resonating with the work through a
shared sense of timing. Inside The Visitors, bodies can be “induced into inhabiting the
same affective environment, even if there is no assurance they will act alike in that
environment.”13 The affective tonality of the work, for instance its soundscape, makes
an opening for sensation to foreground its differential operation of attunement. People
are not acting alike at all, but many share a sensation that something has changed pro-
foundly in the way they conceive of their perceptual experience after visiting the piece.
How such a sensation plays out individually over time relies on the changing milieu
through which the sensation’s traces return, now as a felt thought activated through a
sensory memory.14
Affect opens up a temporal interval of change rather than stasis. Such intervals are
“dynamic thresholds.”15 Dynamic means that these thresholds emerge through move-
ment “expressing” in experience without having a discrete origin or finite goal. In
having their own time quality, these intervals bear potential for immediate modula-
tion to be felt in experience. In The Visitors, one such dynamic threshold is the poem
chanted repeatedly throughout the entire performance. In repetition the tonality of its
expression varies while its content remains the same. The visitors, in attuning to the
continued repeated differentiation, experience the elasticity of the content through its
varied expressions. The expressive quality experienced depends as much on the musi-
cian’s active performance as it relies on the visitors’ movement in the space. And finally,
the refrain marks one of the strongest sensuous resonances over time, being felt and
silently repeated long after one has left the exhibition. What is experienced affectively,
are not discrete entities but the relational movements of processes of attunement in the
making across a field of relations.16 In this sense, affect generates a nucleus of attun-
ement moving toward emergence while bypassing an immediate capture as present
experience. Massumi writes: “The present is held aloft by affect [where] affect is not in
13 Brian Massumi and Joel McKim, “Of Microperception and Micropolitics,” Inflexions 3 (2009): p. 6, http://
www.senselab.ca/inflexions/volume–3/node–i3/PDF/Massumi%20Of%20Micropolitics.pdf (retrieved March 3,
2014).
14 On the relation between thinking and feeling, see: Brian Massumi, “The Thinking-Feeling of What
Happens: A Semblance of a Conversation,” Inflexions: A Journal for Research Creation 1 (May 2008): p. 6, http://
www.inflexions.org/n1–The-Thinking-Feeling-of-What-Happens-by-Brian-Massumi.pdf (retrieved March
3, 2014).
16 Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), p. 13–17.
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Christoph Brunner
time, it makes time, it makes time present, it makes the present moment, it’s a creative
factor in the emergence of time as we effectively experience it; it’s constitutive of lived
time.”17 Experimenting with affect in aesthetic practices allows for rendering experi-
ence in the making felt and actively operable. Time modulations yield a different sense
of the relation between body and space through sensation. Affect is not an entity or dis-
crete signal, but an aesthetic expression which can be sensed through resonance and
attunement over time and through time.18
A body, and particularly a human body, feels in advance of its conscious register-
ing an affective charge of potential-in-formation as the initial phase of experience. Its
temporal disjunction with the present as felt after-image requires an immanent futu-
rity, that is, change, to effectuate a future differentiation. One can glimpse the temporal
process of differentiation between contraction and extension in the contrast between the
scenographic arrangement of the rooms at Rockeby Farm and the slick “totality” of the
immersive installation in the gallery. There is an incompleteness to the space in the
house as an analog, texturally rich and lived space, compared to the absolute space of
the digitally enhanced imagery on the screens and the precise sound in the exhibition.
The fissures and friction of the visual lushness of the images’ background becomes an
active operator for affective relaying by means of the digital contrast. Without this dis-
junction of the digital and the analog the effect of perceiving perception-in-the-making
as temporal process would not be possible.19 While affective attunement underlines
the differential activation immanent to experience as event, relaying addresses the re-
potentialization of a felt impression as future sensation. Such relaying is a differential
mode of continuation allowing new encounters and elements to alter the initial experi-
ence. Its time form is memory-like. The temporal problem affect poses lies in its opera-
tion as simultaneously immediate and direct registering of potential in experience, that is,
its temporal involution, and its expression in space and over time as expression. Affection
is simultaneously extensive and contracted – and both shape our sense of timing.
17 Massumi and McKim, “Of Microperception.”

18 On the “capacity” of affect and being affected, see: Deleuze, Spinoza, p. 123–124.
19 Massumi, Semblance and Event, p. 75–76.
252
III) Ecology of Relation and Techniques of Affective Timing
Affect folds the body and its milieu into an intense zone of mutual becoming. It is
neither physical nor vital, but pre-individual and non-organic, that is, virtual. It defines
a relational outline of experience, where relations are themselves as real as the terms they
relate.20 As a time form, affect “belongs to the virtual, defined as that which is maximally
abstract yet real, whose reality is that of potential – pure relationality, the interval of
change, the in-itself of transformation.”21 The ontogenetic power of relations to actualize
is the process of relations resonating, instigating an expression. How this expression
comes to be felt, concerns the entire ecology of relation constitutive of an embodied
and sensed experience. Effects arise affectively, through sensation’s attentiveness for
experience’s most open phase in becoming. Instead of conceiving of The Visitors as a work
focused on the relationship between individual entities, such as screens, musicians, or
the visitors of the artwork, as specific parts of a collective experience, it underlines their
pre-individual openness to an already operating collectivity in potential. In other words,
ecologies of relation point at the temporal layering of differential forces co-composing
what is felt in perception. Perception, as Bergson and Deleuze point out, is always the
object minus something, that is, the result of an induction which subtracts from the
virtual multiplicity of relations.22 An ecology of relation is not an organic or systemic
metaphor, but another way of expressing the disjunctive synthesis that defines affection.
Affection is the relaying procedure from a fielding and temporal layering towards an
effective actualization. Relationality as the continued world-glue generates an immediate
link between the body and its milieu through affect and sensation. Perception grounds
experience in space, it gives it extension and navigable coordinates. The affective relay
operates temporally, addressing different bodies according to their varying speeds and
slownesses and capacity for attunement. An ecology of relation is not a hermetic system
but rather what Isabelle Stengers calls an “ecology of practices.”23 In such an ecology
each practice underlines a specific mode of affecting and being affected, its relational
capacity, without being like any other practice. It is their differential which generates
the ecologically expressed peak of an experience as what is felt spatially and over time.
20 James, Radical Empiricism, p. 42.

22 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 25.
23 Isabelle Stengers, “Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices,” Cultural Studies Review 11.1 (2005):
p. 183–196.
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Christoph Brunner
From pure relationality toward an ecology of relation, an amplification takes places

which selects out of the manyness of potential lines several without disregarding the
others. This process is politically relevant because an ecology does not mark an already
closed system but gives forces the potential to actively attune to an emergent situation
“in the name of that which emerges.”24 Emergence is a mode of selection that includes
what it has backgrounded as active in the present. In other words, embodied perception
filters a temporal multiplicity into a spatial multiplicity, rendering affect into a felt
effect as an ethico-political process. Ecological means that we cannot detach the event
of experience from its actively moving milieu. Such a milieu is a population of forces
pertaining as much to the physical, vital and virtual dimensions of existence. Affect is
“the sensation of invisible forces acting on a body; the abstract dimensions of sensation
falling out of step from emotional responses and neural mapping. What comes first here
is not the neutral representation of the states of bodily feeling, but the direct inarticulate
sensation of change: the arrest or snapshot of perpetual motion, the residual rhythm
traversing sensing-thinking regions of a body.”25 How might The Visitors in its outline
enable us to address the temporal folding immanent to sensation and to investigate its
political potential?
The Visitors’ political potential lies not in a critique of something but concerns how
the making of the present is instrumentalized by an immediate subsumption under
potential capitalist values. It deals with economies of attention, the quantitative sepa-
ration of time-chunks, coordinating activities such as labour but also looking at art,
writing essays or checking emails on the subway. Affect, making time, or making time
present, addresses the very clamour over techniques of timing determining what comes
to pass as present and thus immediately relevant. Linear or chronological time is the
most rudimentary aspect of experience, expressed in spatially confined situations. How-
ever, to endure, such constellations require temporal operations of differentiation. The
crucial political difference concerning change lies in either conforming to a predefined
order or to attune differentially according to potential ecologically relevant attractors.
In relation to sensation, affective timing potentially embraces the qualitative openness
of emergent experience adding new tonalities to an existing ecology. This qualitative
leap is opposed in part to the mere quantification of such temporal operations for the
24 Isabelle Stengers, “The Cosmopolitical Proposal,” in: Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making
Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), p. 999.
25 Luciana Parisi, “Technoecologies of Sensation,” in: Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., Deleuze/Guattari & Ecology
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 182–199, here p. 190.
254
sake of calculability. A differentially emergent nexus of relations alters conventions of

habit amplifying unexpected potentials taking effect.
From an ecological point of view, The Visitors combines different techniques of affective
timing with the help of technologies. The work in itself is minutely produced, with the
help of digital means and their capacity of precise amplification. The affective quality of
the work moves through its temporal as much as its spatial expression. The emphasis on
sensation as a bodily zone of fielding experience before it settles into distinct perceptions
neither neglects the vital body and its sensuous constraints nor does it disregard spatial
confinement. However, foregrounding sensation means asking what more there is to
experience than what can be found in contained perception. The Visitors, I suggest, evokes
such strong reactions on behalf of the audience because its affective capacities move
through the quantitative dimensions of space and from there open up the qualitative
dimension of time. It is contrast which defines the work’s inner dynamic and allows for
affective relaying.
Rockeby Farm’s rooms and spaces could not foreground their shared belonging and
difference without the detailed HD images and the comfortable but still very sober
exhibition space. On the screens they are abundantly populated with details, each of
them flickering across the screen, luring attention without clearly calling it out. Simul-
taneously, the actively shaping technology enabling the recording and display of the
piece is an integral part of the work’s choreography. At the beginning Kjartansson gives
last technical instructions and toward the end, a technician reminds us of the techni-
cal activity, turning off one camera after another. The installation is full of movement
across these dimensions and visual vibration augmented by the audio shape of the work
with its refrain repeating over and over again the same lines of Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdót-
tir’s poem: “Once again I fall into my feminine ways” and “there are stars exploding,
and there is nothing you can do.”26 The aural mantra contrasts with the visual hetero-
geneity. The exhibition space, while being charged with the large screens, is also vast
and empty allowing for maximum freedom to move around. Depending on the visi-
tor’s position in the room, perception of the work shifts dramatically. One can never get
the full picture visually while being thrown into the center because of the enveloping
sound.
26 Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir, Feminine Ways (2010: http://www.tba21.org/program/current/195/artworks2?

locale=en, retrieved April 29, 2014).
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Christoph Brunner
A constant pulling of attention occurs while the piece, in its single time, has its
own choreography. Sensation becomes foregrounded in this particular arrangement
due to the actual difference in degree between visitors and the oversized screens, and
through the temporal dimension of the single take of the performance. The time of the
experience constitutes itself affectively with and through the visitor’s bodies and their
capacity for movement. The work depends on the visitors moving with the audiovisual
performance, choreographing their very own trajectories while attuning differentially
with the piece. Affection becomes the relay between affect’s temporal extension, its
contraction toward a perceptual event, and a bodily capacity of being affected, that is,
for attuning differentially through resonance. As an ecology of relation, the piece has
to maintain an openness for affection to occur differentially with each body and across
them all. Through its continued openness, the work avoids pre-forming how a body can
become with the piece. Accordingly, it provides lures for activation rather than presum-
ing participation or turning the visitor into an actor. What becomes sensed collectively
is the work’s emphasis on activation, a certain manner of operation, a how, rather than a
pre-defined what of the emergent encounter. In staging the recorded live performance in
an historically charged space – full of minute details, each of them having its very own
time – The Visitors forces perception to constantly switch and shift from the abundant
flow of visual information. While the visual opens to an uncontainable quality of emer-
gent potential in experience, the sonic refrain carries attention from one fractal sensa-
tion to another. The HD image, for all its detailed expression, provides less a clear over-
view of what is happening than emphasizing the material details populating the screen
alongside its main protagonists. The space of Rockeby Farm is charged with temporali-
ties of the past, populating the present moment of experience in potential. The digital-
technological enables a relaying technique of the work, making the spatially disjunctive
conjunct temporally in the exhibition space. The visitor becomes bodily activated in
the space affectively through luring affective pulses open for attunement. The work’s
collective quality resides in its open gesture to join its very own movement of affective
relaying. The collective as emergent quality renders none of its elements into actors but
activates their potential for resonance. In bodily experience, resonance moves through
the body’s affection as sensation and leaves traces as a kind of sensuous memory.
Carrying such singular grains of experience across a shared space and time turns
audio-visual seeds of the piece into concrete perceptions. Each screen functions not
as representation or source of an image, a body, and a sound but as a seed or germinal
time quality. In the work, time multiplies rather than being merely quantified in
256
space.27 The chanting and looping, its slowness and intensity, creates an envelope of the
situation where image and sound become seeds for potential sensuous relay through
the installation’s visitors. As temporal seeds, the screens remain separate while the
sound generates a dynamic crystallization making sense of each screen’s singular expres-
sion being part of a collectively constituted situation. The screens are more than mere
elements with defined attributes as much as their resonance goes beyond the constitu-
tion of a new whole or totality. Their relaying moves through material encounters as
ecological procedure. Each aspect of an ecology capable of affecting and being affected
potentially relays into what comes to be felt in sensation before it produces a discrete
and induced perception. The notion of material changes dramatically, however, includ-
ing physical, vital but also temporal and virtual aspects of space and timing. Thus the
work exists through the visitors’ movement in a double sense: the visitors inhabiting
and moving through Rockeby Farm and the visitors of the exhibition, both constantly
modulating their expressive capacities in resonance with their respective milieu. Across
the difference in space they attune – through a collective sense of time triggered by the
works – particular spatial and technological-procedural composition, “time as primary
matter.”28
Time as primary matter becomes a common ground of activity pushing towards
expression. It defines the potential of emergent collectivity to spark from the most
heterogeneous relations. Through the distribution of seeds, the work constantly produces
new points of entry, new relays, for attunement. To become effectively felt in perception,
the seed needs to crystallize in an image, a felt sensation as after-image. Herein lies its
specific relation to the body as itself a continued and shifting mode of existence that
is capable of self-affecting its eventful becoming. Such self-affection across differential
temporal attunement might be called memory. In crystallizing, time splits into a past
as constituted at the same time as the present and an “immediate future which is not
yet.”29 Such time involutions create an emergent collectivity not built on entities being
connected but of an affective timing expressing itself differentially while emerging
through time as primary matter. In the image as time-image there is tendency toward
27 The problem of the spatialization of time, a crucial topic in discourses on intermedia performance,
has been emphasized in Sarah Bay-Cheng, “Temporality,” in: Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy
Levender, Ribon Nelson, eds., Mapping Intermediality in Performance (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2010), p. 85–90.
28 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 115.
29 Ibid., p. 81.
257
Christoph Brunner
emergence, a bare activity to perpetuate change and self-differentiation. The seed is as

much actual as it is virtual, affectively active with incipience toward effectuation.
The screen becomes a membrane and surface frequented by intensities of different
matters ready for crystallization. The notion of the crystal is crucial for a process of
co-emergence predetermining neither the emergent body nor its environment. The
membrane of the screen is permeable, allowing for synchronization and syncopation,
while constituting a contour of the event where seeds crystallize with their environment,
both mutually attuning to each other’s movement and rhythm. As chemical process, a
crystal grows at the limit toward extension and depends on its solution. Both crystal
and solution require mutual attunement to effectuate growth. In crystallization,
the differential forces attuning express their fractal collectivity in resonance to their
milieu, marking a flicker of stability while underlining their dynamic relationality
toward future extension. Deleuze takes this processual but mostly spatially explored
image and foregrounds its temporal aspects. He says: “We do not know in advance if
the virtual seed will be actualized, because we do not know in advance if the actual
environment enjoys the corresponding virtuality.”30 In the process of extending the
limit, each virtual image of a seed and its membrane-character becomes a potential
attractor for resonance and attunement. However, these attractors have to be attuned
to an environment and vice versa. Accordingly, an artwork, like The Visitors, cannot be
conceptual in the sense of staging a fixed idea, but has to function as a proposition for
making the attunement process felt in its immediate occurrence and by that allowing
for differential experimentation with the affective threshold of emergence. Through the
formation of crystals, the work proposes bodily encounters attentive to the temporal
fragments attuning in an emergent event of perception. Rendering the crystal nature of
the aesthetic experience inside the exhibition sensible produces a feeling of the work’s
virtual and actual multiplicity co-composing the immediate passing of the present.
How can such intense fields of attunement be composed? In The Visitors a sensation
of comfort and enjoyment affectively engages and coordinates attention in the exhi-
bition space – it is a lure for attraction. The moving bodies are taken up along their
capacity for relaying perceptually and through habituated modes of sensing and move-
ment in space. In other words, they are comforted. However, comforting harmony alone
would not generate the effects the piece actually has on its visitors. Something more
is required putting the habit of comfort and harmony to the edge and making bodies
30 Ibid., p. 74.
258
inhabit the space over long durations, especially in times when art and its reception
builds on critical distance, analysis and curbed categories for its social, political and
ethical value. The work actually produces an abundant flow of micro-shocks and min-
ute perceptions working on the level of sensation, before reaching a conscious classifica-
tion. Such fissures are the distributed seeds which might be found in a vas or wallpaper
in one of Rockeby Farm’s rooms or the omnipresent witnesses of cameras and sound
recording devices, modulating the recorded piece into a semblance of a live performance
in the exhibition space. Making these elements come alive collectively transduces from
the work’s compositional setup across the moving bodies inside the exhibition. First
one might be appealed by the soothing tone of the piece but then more and more details
take their space, slowly exploding perception to the point that any immediate capture
of classification is suspended. In this suspense another quality of the immediate arises
where past and present collectively compose what comes to pass through sensation.
Sensing experience-in-the-making relays bodily toward a differential operation of the
overall event. In the fissuring interval of affective attunement, an immediate capture
and its suspense work alongside each other, making sensation the contestedfield shap-
ing how an experience is felt in its effects.
IV) Politics of Timing – Memories of the Future
An affective politics of timing concerns ways of making time and how time composi-
tions at the heart of experience become potentials for aesthetic experimentation. The
affective interval of time in the making defines the contested field of either aesthetic
techniques of suspense and the narrowing of potential emergence through strategies of
pre-emption. Through slowing down and suspending The Visitors emphazises “time-in-
the-making” countering chronological and controlled time.
In its focus on rhythm, togetherness and by folding spaces into each other through
movement and timing, The Visitors resists a contemporary urge for representational
conceptions of the political in contemporary aesthetic practices. It contains a “resistance
to the present” if the present denotes an immediate subsumption of a creative process
under the capture of capitalist value extraction.31 The piece has an immediate effect on
31 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),
p. 108.
259
Christoph Brunner
the way we move with and through it, on how we frequent it in memory as a felt sensa-
tion. Suspense operates at different levels simultaneously, all working through the affec-
tive and bodily process of sensation. In relation to discursive orders of contextualization
and capture, the installation evades an immediate critical distance often deployed in art
critique for the sake of objectivity. It lures the visitor affectively into a sensually charged
situation, playing with habitualized recognition of comfort, friendship and joy while
taking these feelings to the limit through repetition, abundant detail and a feeling of
liveness in the performance.
Through the suspense effect, an affective extensive and intensive time-fold becomes
actively perceived. Affective politics concerns not only ways of making such temporal
extension felt in aesthetic experience but how they alter the general state of experience
related to becoming. While preemption attempts to preclude the range of potential felt
in experience, affective politics of timing foster the emergent collectivity of time relations
working transversally across different modes of existence. The famous half-second
lag between a bodily sensation and its capture as consciously registered perception is
the zone of an entire politics of affective timing. Preemption attempts to inhibit the
registering of potential affective charges in experience for the sake of control. Politics of
preemption are omnipresent in contemporary media productions, military research and
warfare tactics.32 Making time affectively as an extensive field of potential becoming
turns into “the-force-to-own-time” as reduced and pre-orchestrated distribution of the
sensible controlling how perception comes to pass in experience.33 Preemption develops
techniques of foreclosing affect’s uncontained openness by inserting mechanisms of
immediate counter-actualization into the process of emergent experience. However, in
affective timing an immanent form of time’s own mode of resistance comes to the fore.
The distribution of seeds cannot foreclose the actual crystallization and the crystal cannot
foretrace its re-becoming in a future milieu. In The Visitors, time relations constitute an
immanently felt potential across bodies in the midst of experience’s expression. In its
32 In relation to military practices dealing with pre-emption, see: Brian Massumi, “Potential Politics
and the Primacy of Preemption,” Theory & Event 10.2 (2007), http://0-muse.jhu.edu.mercury.concordia.ca/
journals/theory–and–event/v010/10.2massumi.html (retrieved February, 1 2014); Charles Rice, “The Space-
Time of Pre-Emption: An Interview With Brian Massumi,” Architectural Design 80.5 (2010), p. 32–37. In rela-
tion to mass media and politics, see: Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 (London/
New York: Palgrave, 2010): p. 41–49.
33 On the distribution of the sensible, see: Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution
of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2004). On owning time as military strategy, see: Brian Massumi,
“Perception-Attack: Brief on War,” Theory & Event 13.3 (2010).
260
most extended state, such a sensation might be addressed through memory. If there
is a future immanent in the passing experience of the present being felt, there might
be a memory of the future. Developing techniques to actively experiment with such a
memory of the future enables new forms of collective ethico-aesthetic practice capable
of sustaining the differential affective tonality of experience while suspending its reduc-
tive capture.
“Nostalgic in a forward-looking way” is the expression Kjartansson uses in an interview

on music which could also apply to The Visitors.34 In the artwork, nostalgia as a
figure of backward longing and the lack of its endurance into the present modulates
toward a potential return (a repetition) in a future instant. Kjartansson points at the
entanglement of his aesthetic practice with a specific kind of memory, a collective and
extensive memory countering preemptive foreclosure. The Visitors’ relational-ecological
dynamic not only undermines divides of digital and analog, subject and object, past/
present/future, but also foregrounds how such immediated experience relates to memory
as repetition.
Memory takes on a specific relation to repetition. One can differentiate a recollec-
tion memory as a kind of “non-conscious memory of the present” where the past is
an “actively present ‘germ’” or seed and where the “future has a kind of felt presence,
an affective presence, as an attractor.”35 As invitation to recollect, recollection memory
affectively lures attention towards a virtual multiplicity of the past (sheets of past) shap-
ing the present in potential activation. Second, there is contraction memory or con-
scious memory which defines the bodily contraction of experiential excitations from
which quality arises. Conscious memory is “retrospective, going from the present to
reactivate the past.”36 Thirdly, and closest to the collective memory foregrounded in The
Visitors, there is a Kierkegaardian memory. By making a difference between recollection
and repetition Kierkegaard points out in his piece Repetition: “Repetition and recollec-
tion are the same movement, just in opposite directions, because what is recollected has
already been and is thus repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected
forwards.”37 Massumi comments on this passage, “recalling backwards is conscious
34 “Edgar Baertz and Ragnar Kjartansson in Conversation,” in: Heike Munder, ed., To Music (Zurich: JRP,
2013), p. 25.
36 Ibid.
37 Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press,
2009), p. 3.
261
Christoph Brunner
remembering. Remembering forwards [repetition] is the feeling of the attractor […] The attractor
is a futurity but it’s memory-like in that it only has futurity by virtue of contracting pastness. It
pulls a contracted past through the crucible of the present, towards itself, the not-yet of
this event.”38 What occurs in the emergence of an actual event is not a presentness but
the ingressive force of a futurity pulling the present out of pastness as attractor. In the
exhibition space the full contour of an affective field leaks out of every detail shaping
the situation of immediated experience by suspending the moment of the present. If
there is a present it is a specious present, “‘specious’ because it’s all coming out of a fis-
sure in time, a cut in time, a shock and suspense.”39 As specious, such a present irrupts
and suspends capitalist capture.
The fissuring nature of time defines the differential outline of a collective memory.
It is a memory that folds recollection, consciousness and repetition into one extensive
continuum. The Visitors’ activation of repetition as remembering forwards brings the
political valence of timing in aesthetic practices to the fore. In making suspense one
of its major techniques, the work fosters a sense of time’s multiplicity and resistance
immanent in sensation. It further emphasizes that the aesthetic force of immediate
experience folding time relations and their bodying effects into ecologies requires
transversal and transductive techniques of timing. Memory as repetition is collective
because it contracts the heterogeneous multiplicity of sheets of past into the passing
occasion of experience in the present by means of a remembering forward. Remembering
forward, while never detaching from the common ground of the past and a singular
time, expresses a temporal collectivity operating differentially, extending the continuum
of singular experiences while enveloping them through extension. The felt bodily
experience of the piece comes back as after-images in singular streams of remembering
belonging to an extensive collective memory. Activating feeling for a collective memory
to come instigates new practices of aesthetic and political experimentation resisting
preemptive foreclosure and overhasty critique and judgement.

39 Ibid.
262
Hermann Kappelhoff & Sarah Greifenstein

Timings of Melodrama and Comedy
Temporality, affect, and the poetics of genre
To speak of laughing and crying in the cinema is to address a wide range of things: the
mood of the spectator in the theater, the cheerful or sorrowful facial expressions and
gestures on the screen, but also the concrete staged occasions of being touched and
exhilarated. What amuses us, makes us sad, is highly dependent on the time that we
live in and the social and cultural constellations that we are embedded in. Experiencing
cinematic images is one manner of becoming embedded, which entwines individual
sensation with a cultural fantasy, with aesthetic forms of reflection, and with audiovisual
forms of affect and thought. Such embeddedness can be seen, for instance, in Lubitsch’s
comedies, where the spectator’s laughter is often positioned in the film as an empty
space, a pause surrounded by the speaking in the dialogue. From our contemporary
perspective, these ellipses in Lubitsch still have the effect of inciting laughter – one can
positively sense the corporality of the address – but even if one personally doesn’t feel
that kind of vocal resonance to the audiovisual image every time, one still experiences a
spectatorship that is addressed in the scenes, a laugh that is not audible, but that is still
more than one’s own chuckling.
When we examine how comedy and melodrama take shape as paradigmatic genres
for the phenomenon of laughing and crying in the cinema, then specific aesthetic
properties become significant. For it is here that we see the peculiarity and particularity
of the genres’ poetics, thus positioning our own feelings in the experience of the
film staging as part of a cultural-historical arrangement of how modalities of feeling
are formed. If one views the film genres without this view to the specific, then what
stands out is the ever-similar plot constellations. This is why genre definitions, which
draw solely on the criterion of fixed narrative patterns, are not very illuminating
when it comes to the problematic of the historically changeable ways that affect is
formed. Furthermore, sadness and mirth in the cinema cannot be traced purely in the
represented facial expressions of the characters, in the acted performance of emotion.
For instance, the several minutes of Carole Lombard’s childish crying in My Man Godfrey
(La Cava, USA 1936) is in no way contagious for us spectators; instead, the unhappy
263
behavior of the millionaire’s daughter is the source of great hilarity. In a similar way,
Joan Crawford’s laughing in Mildred Pierce (Curtiz, USA 1945) cannot really be exuberant
and cheerful, since at that point in time, when she is celebrating the opening of her
business with friends, the dark clouds are already appearing to announce the intrigue of
the calamitous affair between the lover and the daughter.
Speaking metaphorically, Stanley Cavell noted that comedy and melodrama in classic
Hollywood cinema behave toward one another like two dissimilar sisters. Specifically he
is speaking of both film genres in terms of the transformation of the woman as the
emblem of the transformation of the human, or of being human.1 The transformation
of the woman in the comedies of remarriage or the screwball comedies is configured
through communication, conversation, and repartee with her sparring partner, which
for Cavell coincides with the term marriage. Instead, the transition of the unknown
woman in melodrama can be described as negation.2 In melodrama:
a woman achieves existence (or fails to), or establishes her right to existence in the
form of a metamorphosis (or fails to), apart from or beyond satisfaction by marriage (of a
certain kind) and with the presence of her mother and of her children, where something
in her language must be as traumatic in her case as the conversation of marriage is for
her comedic sister – perhaps it will be the aria of divorce, from husband, lover, mother,
or child.3
As can be seen from this passage, for Cavell it is a matter of effectively showing the
reader, through the conditions of possibility in parantheses – “(or fails to)”4 – that the
melodramatic heroine is constantly processing an ideal, distorted, or desired image,
imagining some wished for condition, longing for a change, regretting something in
the past, bemoaning something absent, or suffering a loss. The term negation is central
insofar as it invokes the comedies, time and time again in Cavell’s book Contesting Tears.
1 Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness. The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1981). The idea of a new woman is particularly associated with new sound technologies, a new form
of speaking practice in film. Cavell says: “The genre […] can be said to require the creation of a new woman,
something I describe as a new creation of the human”, ibid., p. 16. Cavell’s formulation “creation of a
new woman” has often been criticized from a feminist position, see e.g.: Lucy Fischer, Cinematernity. Film,
Motherhood, Genre (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1997), p. 117. Though already in Pursuits Cavell
claims that the genre, which he describes as a“comedy of equality” (p.82) contains an emancipatory
potential, he understands the time of the genre as a “phase of feminism,” p. 19.
2 Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears. The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), p. 87.
3 Ibid., p. 88.
4 Ibid.
264
The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, identifying them as the reflection of
the good life: against the backdrop of success, the pursuit of happiness is beset with
positivity, for instance with the development of marriage as a common achievement of
a renewed togetherness, of a “together again” 5 that comes about through compromise.
With such a description of loss and success, Cavell aptly describes the films as visual
forms of reflection. Nevertheless, the question that remains to be discussed is how
exactly melodrama and comedy can produce loss or success with respect to the corporal
and affective sensations of the spectator. For fundamentally, the various registers
of feeling are indeed addressed by the poetics of genre: laughing and crying, fear and
sympathy, horror and thrill.6 Linda Williams, for instance, has stressed the fact that
temporality plays a significant role in relation to body genres, which Thomas Elsaesser
elaborates further in his reading. The too early in horror, the too late in melodrama, the
now in porno, and empty time in film noir describe temporal boundaries as corporal-
affective modalities of experience as much as ideas of character and plot.7 These genre
films synchronize the events on the screen with spectator perception, audiovisually
capturing the spectator’s corporality and placing him or her into the time of the scene
in each case, which pushes feelings to the border of the relevant genre fantasy. The
temporal structure of the perceptual process thus takes on central significance: suddenly
5 In Pursuits of Happiness Stanley Cavell writes on the central story, the basic plot of the comedies: the
“plot is not to get the central pair together, but to get them back together, together again” (p. 2). The
address to a unity and repetition is an aesthetic and content program of the films. In the together again
the comedies reflect just this reconfirmation of marriage, which Cavell sees in relation to Emerson’s
term moral perfectionism. This cannot so much be described as perfectionism in the everyday sense, but in
Cavell’s reading, is defined as a positive orientation and approval of the changing quality of the world, of
a common agreement, and of negotiation. Elisabeth Bronfen has written: “In the film comedies, which
Cavell takes as exemplary of a rite de passage of moral perfectionism, this deep connectedness stands out in
the successful conversation (mode of conversing) of the married couples, which allows them to rediscover,
acknowledge, and nurture each other,” Elisabeth Bronfen, Stanley Cavell zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius,
2009), p. 18.
6 Hermann Kappelhoff, Matrix der Gefühle. Das Kino, das Melodrama und das Theater der Empfindsamkeit
(Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2004), p. 11–13; Hermann Kappelhoff and Matthias Grotkopp, “Film Genre and
Modality: The Incestuous Nature of Genre Exemplified by the War Film,” in: Sébastien Lefait, Philippe
Ortoli, eds., In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012),
p. 29–39.
7 Linda Williams, “Film Bodies. Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44.4 (1991): p. 2–13; Thomas
Elsaesser, “‘Zu-spät, zu-früh’: Körper, Zeit und Aktionsraum in der Kinoerfahrung,” in: Matthias Brütsch,
Vinzenz Hediger, Ursula von Keitz, Alexandra Schneider and Margit Tröhler, eds., Kinogefühle. Emotionalität
und Film (Marburg: Schüren, 2005), p. 415–440; Thomas Elsaesser, “Erfahren, Erleben, Entgrenzen. Das
Kino der (zu starken) Körper und Gefühle,” in: idem, Hollywood heute. Geschichte, Gender und Nation im
postklassischen Kino. (Berlin: Bertz und Fischer, 2009), p. 35–52.
265
and unexpectedly being assaulted by dread and shock in the horror film, delightfully
prolonging suspense, or the present unconditionality of the technological-corporal
desire to become part of something bigger in the war film designate poetic phantasms,
but also concrete, physical experiences.
Genres can be considered specific culturally and historically formed varieties of
mediatized modes of embodiment and modalities of affect. Deleuze attributes Eisen-
stein with the idea of an affective reading of film, thus introducing his reflection on the
affection-image, which is: “both a type of image and a component of all images.”8 The
paradigm of the affection-image is the close-up, which can be equated with the face. But
the cinematic forms of expression of the affection-image are also articulated in other
compositional aesthetics, always when the image or the “thing has been treated like
a face.”9 With the affection-image in mind, we would like to examine the two genre
modes, melodrama and comedy, as well as the ways that they stage affectivity in time by
means of two sequences: we will analyze a scene from Magnificent Obsession by Douglas
Sirk (USA, 1954) and compare it with an analysis of a scene from Adam’s Rib by George
Cukor (USA, 1949).
The temporal staging of the I sense in Magnificent Obsession 10
The film Magnificent Obsession with Rock Hudson (Bob Merrick) and Jane Wyman (Helen
Phillips)11 is about a woman, Helen, who loses first her husband and then her sight
through the fault of the man that she falls madly (blindly) in love with: Bob Merrick,
a rich playboy, who finally straightens himself out into the virtuous hero. The plot can
be read as a crude version of the Oedipus myth. The mythical signs of guilty desire –
blindness – are transferred over to the woman, from which she is then freed, literally in
8 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image (London: Athlone, 1986), p. 87.

9 Ibid., p. 88.
10 In the following we are drawing on a film analysis that was developed in its original form as an
attempt to define more precisely the modality of affect in the understanding of the “image” (“image of
sensation”). See: Hermann Kappelhoff, “Empfindungsbilder: Subjektivierte Zeit im melodramatischen
Kino,” in: Theresia Birkenhauer and Annette Storr, eds., Zeitlichkeiten – Zur Realität der Künste (Berlin:
Vorwerk 8, 1998) p. 93–119.
11 USA 1953, director: Douglas Sirk; studio: Universal; producer: Ross Hunter; script: Robert Blees, Wells
Root, based on a novel by Lloyd C. Douglas; camera: Russell Metty; music: Frank Skinner, cast: Rock
Hudson (Bob Merrick); Jane Wyman (Helen Phillips); Barbara Rush (Joyce Phillips); Agnes Moorehead
(Nancy Ashford); Otto Kruger (Rudolph).
266
an operation, by the man, who in the meantime has become a doctor. The sequence that
we are looking at presents a kind of stereotypical scene: The woman alone in her room is a
standard dramaturgical formula, which refers to the basic melodramatic constellation,
even far beyond the cinema. The heroine finds herself abandoned by her lover, and
plummets from the illusion of love into the awareness of radical abandonment.
One evening in a Swiss hotel room: in the first shots we see living room furniture,
a large window, balcony doors, the décor is washed in reddish brown tones. The view
from the window positions the event, but the image of the view from the window to a
village idyll is more than that, it is an ostentatiously exhibited prospect, a code: Switzer-
land as we know it from books. Through a somewhat brighter beam of light, which only
partially illuminates the interior space, we see an exterior world with a church tower
and the roofs of houses, with lush green meadows and walking paths. The spectator
sees, on the one hand, the woman alone in her hotel room, on the other hand, as the scene
progresses, he grasps this image space12 as the expression of a state of consciousness, as an
I sense. The step-by-step darkening of the image as the hours progress indeed picks up
on Helen’s blindness, but with a difference in perspective. It is evening and it is getting
darker, and soon it won’t be possibly to see anything anymore. This is the case for the
situation narrated here – the evening in the hotel room – and for the spectator – the too-
dark image – but not for the female lead, who is in fact blind.
The temporal unfolding of both the scene and the audiovisual image can now be
understood as the metamorphosis of sensation. In the first shots we see Joyce closing the
French doors to the balcony, Helen enters the room. They speak of the looming night
and the agonies of sleeplessness, and finally of the desperate hour in which the knowl-
edge that the night that will no longer be brightened by any light becomes unbearable.
The dialogue spans the metaphorical arc of the twilight over the darkness of blindness
up to the night of death. In doing so, it graphically sketches out the process that sets up
the staging that follows. What at first is a description of the location of the action – a
hotel room in the evening – unfolds into an image of internal darkness, it is translated
for the spectator as the time of increasing desperation. The internal darkness here is not to
be understood abstractly, it is primarily constituted precisely through the staging of the
play of light and color composition, which also encompass the actors’ gestures.
12 Hermann Kappelhoff, “Der Bildraum des Kinos: Modulationen einer ästhetischen Erfahrungsform,”
in: Gertrud Koch, ed., Umwidmungen: architektonische und kinematographische Räume (Berlin: Vorwerk 8,
2005), p. 138–149.
267
A conspicuous sidelight – falling in through the window – divides the visual surface:
two bright stripes in the middle, thick fields of shadow on the upper and lower edge of
the image. The two characters – Joyce and Helen – increasingly enter into a backlight, so
that by the end of the dialogue we can hardly see much more of their faces than silhou-
ettes. Before Joyce leaves the room, she turns on two table lamps; one of them is located
right next to Helen, who is now sitting in an armchair, and another lamp is in the
background of the image. This continues the motif of increasing darkness. For a short
moment there is indeed literally more light, but the dim bulbs can scarcely bestow any
brightness at all. Helen remains stuck in her darkness, and this solitude is the room,
which for the spectator – but not for the character of the blind woman – is illuminated
by the faint sources of light.
Helen gets up, it is her empty gaze that this shot inserts into the image; it strays
off into the uncertain outside, into the off-screen space. She disappears from the frame,
the next shot shows her in the middle of the image. A bright light comes in from the
balcony, it makes a wide diagonal swath that divides the image into sharply contrasted
areas of shadows. Another sidelight – placed somewhat higher and broken by the pat-
tern of the curtains – casts a turbulent network of shadowy lines across the surface of
the image. Helen takes a step toward a lathed wooden post, leans on it and slumps down
slightly. Her form is turned away from the light, from the dark post, increasingly sub-
merging her in shadows; finally her face disappears entirely in the darkness. The light-
ing thus underscores the uncertain movements of the blind woman; it orchestrates, as
it were, the action of the actor.
The creeping shadows gradually unfold a sinister undertone. They are pragmatically
defined by the time of day; but the source of the sidelight – the French doors of the
balcony – is emphasized more and more from shot to shot. The accentuated light from
the imaginary outside world heightens this moment all the more into the realm of the
uncanny, when the coming night here is joined up with its opposite, that of a growing,
indeterminate light: a gleaming light that casts the oversized shadows of the cross made
by the window panes and the lace curtains into the interior of the room. In this way, the
signs of the time of day become associated with the symbolism of death. The music is
arranged with similarly sharp contrasts, choirs sing in high tones, violins and a piano
also intonate a high-pitched melody, then deeper sounds from a piano accompany the
high voices. The darkness, depth, and the high brightness of the sound are built up
from the beginning as a sharp contrast in the music as well.
When Helen approaches the balcony door, the ray of light is reflected in the acting.
Her tense body signals a growing desire, her gait is now deliberate. Brought out from
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the darkness of the surrounding area and enveloped in just this ray of light, we think
we see how an undefined will, a concealed goal is awakened in her. Helen turns out-
ward toward the light, now very sure of herself; she walks into this brightness until
her form has become a silhouette in the backlight. Haltingly, the camera follows the
actor’s movements until she can only be seen from behind; the image in this movement
switches over from a medium shot to a closer medium shot, the balcony door enters
the picture, the source of the light that Helen is going toward – a dark silhouette in the
backlight surrounded by light. If this suggests that the light is forcing its way into the
blind woman’s darkness, the thread of metonymic condensation is taken up a notch.
Through the significance of the goal before our eyes, the light falling in from outside
can stand in for its opposite and illuminate the character’s hopelessness: in the darkness
of her desperation, the thought of a final escape dawns. One is tempted to ascribe to the
actor, what is in fact essentially performed by the staging. The actor herself does not
articulate anything more of the character’s sensation than raising her head, stretching
out her body, and focusing her gaze, which had previously been empty, on some far-
away point. When she straightens up, tensing, slowly turning her face to the light and
finally walking into this light falling in from outside, the room as a whole has become
the image of her inner world. From the evening hour, past the darkness of blindness,
night falls and her desperation increases. In relation to the spectator, this is the time in
which the character’s world of sensation emerges as a projected image of the spectator’s
sympathy. The character’s desperation is revealed to us as a transformation of the film
image. The successive filling out of the image space by color, music, light, and gesture
is the movement of the staging, comparable to the application of paint; all at once it
describes the prolonged unfolding and emerging of the image as a movement of affect.
In fact, the scene comes to a head, in order to make it possible to experience the
moment, just as the desperation threatens to engulf the character: Helen wants to jump
from the balcony. How will this negating wish, this desire for not-wanting-anymore on
the part of the character be staged? The dramatic climax here is also created in part
through the music. As Helen steps out onto the balcony, the choir transforms from
a gentle development into an ever-louder and faster escalation. The shadowy forms,
which overlap one another in the visual movement, become increasingly more rapid
and erratic. We see how the curtains still veil Helen’s face. Her facial expression lights
up brightly for a short moment, but then the shadows of the trees immediately cast
darkness over her face again, until finally her blind groping for the handrail causes
her to knock over a flowerpot. The camera follows the falling pot, accompanied by the
high-pitched voices in the choir, their escalation into the heights starts to sound almost
269
like shrieking. Visual and auditory heights and depths span out graphically, just as
brightness and darkness had done before. The shattering of the pot perfectly fills in the
silence of the accompanying music. The camera jumps back to Helen on the balcony.
We see the tensed shape of the woman – she pauses for a moment, and then throws her
face into her hands and collapses. Her tears are surrounded by a furious piano passage of
deep, dark tones. This acoustic space, this span of time waiting for the noise, forms a last
correspondence to the motif of inner darkness. For the spectator, the image is presented
as such: Helen becomes aware of the abyss before her, which in fact she cannot see.
Here it definitively seems to be the music that internalizes all the expressive means –
the actor’s gestures, the color, the image, the movement – and relates the image space
to a space of disembodied voices and the musical depiction of sentimentality. The one
is linked up with the other in the clanging of the falling pot, the sonic space of the
music and the visual. What can be seen in the synesthetic compositional principle is
excessive expression (called “hyperbolic space”13 in melodrama theory). The staging
connects the musical unfolding with the visual staging and the acting performance
in the mode of excessive elements of expression. The correspondences of the aesthetic
qualities, compositions of color, light, and sound can be traced solely on the level of an
unfolding “expressive movement,” which describes the interpenetration of the image’s
temporality and the affective movement of the spectator’s sensation.14
When Merrick knocks on the door, the sound falls just during the last tones of the
piano; in the consolidation of the clanking sound and the knocking on the door, the
motifs of death and love meld into one another, the sharp reversal of feeling from the
deepest darkness to the eagerly awaited fulfillment. Unseen and unexpected by the
character of Helen, Merrick enters the room. The spectator sees him, literally in place of
the blind woman, through the veil of the curtains; a restrained violin motif accentuates
the changed situation. Helen questioningly calls out her daughter’s name. He answers
13 Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” Monogram 4
(August 1972): p. 2–15. Slightly abridged and revised: Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury,” in:
Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is (London: BFI, 1987), p. 43–69; Peter Brooks calls the melo-
dramatic mode the “aesthetic of excess” (p. 203) and the “hyperbole of melodrama” (p. 148); Peter Brooks,
The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, London:
Yale University Press, 1976); see as well: Hermann Kappelhoff, Matrix der Gefühle, e.g. p. 35–38.
14 Kappelhoff, Matrix der Gefühle, p. 136–172. The term expressive movement is a theoretical concept that
understands cinematic movement as shaping affective resonances in the act of the film experience. For
the concept of expressive movement with regard to the term “spectator feeling,” see also: Hermann
Kappelhoff and Jan-Hendrik Bakels, “Das Zuschauergefühl. Möglichkeiten qualitativer Medienanalyse,”
Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, 5(2) (2011): p. 78–95.
270
with a quiet no. In turn we see her face, then a close-up of his face. A short moment
of silence, then the sound of the strings carries the sound of his voice into her world.
They relate the man’s face in close-up to the woman who cannot see it, lending him
the suggestive unreality of a dream image. The vision of desperation culminates in the
hallucinatory fulfillment of the desire for love. Now we see the couple as they embrace,
both faces are brightly lit, shining out of the background of the darkness surrounding
them. The unexpected happiness, however, is still inscribed in the eclipse of sight, so the
back of Jane Wyman’s head is covered by a crown of shadows, a dark spot juts in shortly
into the bright face, threatening almost to cover it up again.
The temporal shaping of the scene can be described as a “sensation-image”:15 the
long, drawn-out movements, divided by contrasts in the staging between bright and
dark light values, deep and high sounds, the synchronicity of the actor’s movements
with the changes in light, editing, and the dramaturgy of color. All the visual elements
are related to Wyman’s face in a way that undoes the representative mode of narrative
and transforms an inner space into an image of subjective interiority. In the temporal
structure of the audiovisual staging, the inner conflict, the feeling of the heroine
becomes apparent to the spectator as an I sense, the desperation, the death wish. This
slow staging lasts until it starts to consolidate, then it accelerates in a crescendo of all
the visual and expressive elements, through which an external movement – the falling
of the flowerpot – can be experienced as an internal movement, as a fall of consciousness,
between hopelessness, powerlessness, and desperation. The knock on the door marks
the apotheosis, an abrupt reversal of the staged atmosphere, then the camera tarries in a
long standing shot in a prolonged view of the lovers. The wish fulfillment is brusquely
opposed to the continuous desperation. From the woman alone in a dark room the
image has been transformed into a bright light, the shared embrace.
The transformative situation, a woman’s longing for her lover, is also the topic in
Adam’s Rib but here it is orchestrated in a completely different temporal form, in the
cheerful mode of the comedy.
15 The “sensation-image” is understood in the sense of the Deleuzian “affection-image” in its specific
and concrete articulation in melodrama. Deriving from the German word “Empfindung” (“sensation”)
the term tends towards interiority and the subjective side in affectivity. See Hermann Kappelhoff, “Emp-
findungsbilder: Subjektivierte Zeit im melodramatischen Kino,” in: Theresia Birkenhauer and Annette
Storr, eds., Zeitlichkeiten, p. 93–119.
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The temporal staging of a we-feeling in Adam’s Rib
Adam’s Rib by George Cukor is a film about the equal status of women in a male-
dominated world, told from the perspective of the married couple Amanda (Katherine
Hepburn) and Adam (Spencer Tracy) Bonner.16 The two New York lawyers get into an
argument over breakfast about a crime that’s become a scandal in the newspapers, in
which a married woman and mother shot her husband in the presence of his lover. The
marital spat becomes a court battle, in which Amanda represents the woman who has
been charged with assault, while Adam is assigned to represent the man who was shot.
Amanda wants to make the case an example to make common cause of a feminist goal:
the demand of equality for everyone before the law, not just on paper, but also in practice.
The film’s construction is cyclical, constantly shifting between the official business of
Mr. and Mrs. Bonner during the day in court, and the private lives of Amanda and Adam
at home at night.
In one of the last scenes in the film the two meet after having disputed and separated
the night before, in a situation that resembles the one that gave rise to their case, and
which evokes the crime at the beginning of the film for the viewer, but with the gender
relation reversed.
At first we see Amanda with their neighbor Kip (David Wayne), who is also an admirer
of hers, in his apartment. The image shows the conversation between the two friends
in a brightly lit apartment, the walls covered in pictures. There is a sculpture, a grand
piano, and several lamps in the room. In this first shot she is leaning on a bookshelf
reading out loud, Kip is sitting on a stool serving her champagne, while she casually
lets the glass dangle in her hand. Amanda is directing the conversation. Hepburn is also
the visual center; she stands out against the predominantly bright grey background of
the image due to her clothing. Her black dress with its large, extravagant white collar
emphasizes her face.
While Amanda and Kip do have a conversation of sorts, in fact they are talking at
cross purposes. The image is staged as a constant shift of cinematic movement, based
on the structure of the dialogue and at the same time orchestrating how the spectator’s
feeling is formed. We see both of the actors in a medium shot, Amanda standing in
16 USA 1949, director: George Cukor; studio: MGM; producer: Lawrence Weingarten; script: Ruth Gordon,
Garson Kanin; camera: George J. Folsey; music: Miklós Rózsa, cast: Katherine Hepburn (Amanda Bonner);
Spencer Tracy (Adam Bonner); David Wayne (Kip Lurie); Judy Holliday (Doris Attinger); Tom Ewell (Warren
Attiger).
272
front of him while she talks, then Kip pulls her down towards him. Posing a question,
Amanda gets back up again and begins to walk about in the room, looking for a
place to sit down. He follows her, sits down next to her and looks at her longingly,
but his expression seems to indicate that he’s not at all hearing what she’s saying. It
goes on like this for a while longer, with the camera accompanying the up and down
of the dyadic acting in flowing, gentle movements of approach and distancing. The
camera work, with its rhythmic movements, not only accompanies the interaction of
getting up, sitting down, and getting up again, but also lends a sensual quality to the
conversational structure of constant asking and answering. In this cinematic figuration
of restless alteration, we also start to notice the emptiness of their communication.
Formally speaking, they do trade questions and answers, but in terms of content, no
strand of conversation is followed up on, no topic is delved into further, which both
would participate in or by which one of them might become aware of the other.
But the movement – the up and down, pacing and changing – is even more than this
in its episodic construction. On the one hand it gives expression to a certain restless-
ness, which also appears in the dialogue in what Amanda says about her husband Adam
(“You’re sure that we can hear my phone in here?” – “Why don’t I call him?”). On the
other hand, the movement orchestrates the gentle flirtation of the two as the play of an
ambivalent maybe. Its surging, snuggling, and baiting presents an exaggerated closeness
with an inherent possibility of seduction, but which is interrupted time and again by
Amanda getting up. She gives an impassioned speech on the topic of what marriage is
supposed to be, while he sits down at the piano and accompanies her speech with gentle,
quiet melodies, as if she were singing a song.
The staging initially exhibits Kip’s very obvious wooing, beguiling, flattering, and
courting in a straightforward way as an empty ritual of approach. As soon as Amanda
gets up, he gets up with her, he follows her like her shadow, he repeats her words, he
accompanies her speech on the piano, he indulgently gazes at her, his face is so close to
hers, while she barely looks him in the eye. In the longing gazes and approaches, we start
to recognize desire as a kind of overacting. But this only concerns certain short moments
of bodily movements, which cannot be equated with the affective dynamic of the audio-
visual image. This dynamic is only produced in the temporal structure of the interplay of
all the levels of the staging, in the temporal unfolding of the movement image. Hepburn
is staged in a way that makes us understand her acting as oriented to something absent.
She looks and speaks outside the frame, while the shifts in her facial expressions, which
accompany what she says – primarily about Adam and marriage – are directed toward
some undetermined entity. The affect is formed by two competing audiovisual forces,
273
which are staged through the up and down, close and somewhat further away, state-
ment and reply, walking and following, speaking and piano playing, and which form an
oscillating image of restlessness and of longing desire. This gives an audiovisual form to
the search, the aspirations of Hepburn’s invocation of something absent. Hepburn’s act-
ing is only one element of this. All the visual elements are unified – even those of her act-
ing partner: both bodies, the interior, the vocal intonations, and the tender approach of
the camera orchestrate this rhythmic movement as a one that becomes assembled over
time. It is what orchestrates the image in time as an affection-image.
But the image of the comedy is not comical if it is not broken up. It is always dual,
sensation and reflection of the sensation in turn. Alongside the modalities of speech and
audio-vision articulated in opposition, the image also stretches out over the rhythm
created between the unmotivated approach as banal flirtation and the restlessness of
a lover, longingly conjuring up her absent husband. Both audiovisual forces are posi-
tioned in the spectator’s experience as a struggle between two interests at the level of the
characters, as his impetuous desire for Amanda and as her restless invocation of Adam’s
absence, or of the discussion of marital cohabitation. At the same time, they produce the
affect as a movement, which aesthetically connects contrary forces. The round, gentle
up and down, and the repeated address to something absent, set up a spectator percep-
tion that gives expression to just this restlessness and longing, while at the same time
presenting a caricatured version of desire in the character of Kip. What is attributed to
the character as feelings or will is based on the spectator’s bodily resonance, in the per-
ceptual process of cyclical structures of staging, that shift back and forth between the
image of a desire and a caricature of desire. Furthermore, the form of this caricature is
incorporated into the cyclical movement pattern; time and again it shows up details
of this representation in Kip’s indulging gaze, Kip’s desire and aspiration for Amanda,
which he openly states in the dialogue, and in the exaggeratedly yearning gestures. This
dimension is amusing, for it represents something that is indeed realized as an affec-
tion-image in the temporal structure of the cinematic process, and at the same time
transforms it, representing affect as a momentary pose, a point in time.
A bit later, in the second part, the temporality changes, as does the tone. Adam
(Spencer Tracy) enters the apartment, he points a revolver at Amanda and Kip, who are
now in each others arms, and confronts them. A shot-countershot alternation begins,
which adds to the expressive bodily movements in the acting to help build up a tension:
Amanda and Kip’s terror in close-up in front of the mirror, followed by Adam with a
devilish grin, shot from slightly below. Hepburn and Wayne overact in that way that
is only possible in comedy. Amanda trembles and shakes, Kip drops the bottle he was
274
holding, they exaggeratedly turn away from one another or they freeze into conspicu-
ously large gestures. Adam brings up the court case, reminding his wife of her scrupu-
lous speech as the lawyer Bonner.
Once again, a fast-paced round of shot-countershot begins; the exaggeratedly fearful
faces alternate with Spencer Tracy’s expression, smiling in utter gratification. Now Adam
points the gun into his mouth. Amanda screams, puts her hand in front of her face – Kip
stares wide-eyed with his hands over his mouth. The back of his head is doubled in the
mirror, so that his behavior is multiplied, and it looks as if there were even more people
in the image. At the moment in which the shot is expected, we see Adam biting off the
barrel of the gun, then chewing it with relish. The gun was candy. “Licorice!” he says
with his mouth full.
The tension in their shocked, almost frozen faces slowly relaxes, their hands sink,
their eyes become calmer. The expression of emotion in the acting is clearly and polariz-
ingly contoured in the mode of comedy; the actor’s movements proceed more quickly in
their temporal form and multiply into a group image that quickly relates the contradic-
tory expressions to one another. Adam’s mouth has a horrific streak in his smile, but the
camera never rests on a developing facial expression, never stays in one place for very
long. Instead, the various gazes get modified, start communicating with one another.17
The shot-countershot is here less a standard formula of narration than a contrast-mon-
tage of contradictory facial expressions.18 The toy gun, which can be eaten, makes light
of the events, unmasks the criminal situation as comedic, which for a few seconds had
been defined by the genre conventions of film noir, retrospectively turning the terror
of the dramatic climax into a reflexive game, a childish as if. This even transforms the
opening scene of the film, which showed an actual crime, into a kind of plaything.
The end of the scene is made up of montage units with longer, sustained shots, in
which the oscillating movements in the frame steadily become faster and more variable.
After the moment of calm, Hepburn shatters a glass; in the medium shot, we see the
three actors rushing for the door all at once. Angry retorts are traded as we experience
the three going after one another, a staccato of volleyed insults (“corrupt, mean, rotten,
17 Jacques Aumont, Du Visage au Cinéma (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile, 1992), p. 49. In his book, Jacques
Aumont has called this dimension the communicative function of the face in classical narrative cinema.
The face communicates with other images, gazes, faces; it does not refer to itself, but relinquishes its
genuine expressivity to the montage.
18 Sarah Greifenstein, “‘If you won’t do it for love, how about money?!’ His Girl Friday und das Klein-
geld großer Gefühle,” Nach dem Film (October 2010), http://www.nachdemfilm.de/content/if-you-won
%E2%80%99t-do-it-love-how-about-money (retrieved February 25, 2014).
275
dirty, contemptible…”) punctuate the image in hard, choppy sequence. Hepburn’s

movements are doubled by Wayne as if he were her shadow. He thus seems less an
independent character than a visual underscoring of Hepburn’s bodily expression,
giving the flare-up of her gestures more weight, since they visually double the posture of
her body pushing forward. And so the moving image is transformed into an oscillating,
shimmering texture, in which statement and response can be seen as polarized visual
tensions in a sustained movement of the frame.
The end of the scene begins with the actors’ musical, instrument-like movements,
here producing a we-feeling from the tense combination of threats, acting, and reveal-
ing. Aptly in a violent act that remains invisible, the bodies of the three actors are some-
how united in the staging. Having reached the door, Hepburn pushes both men back
into the apartment, and the door closes behind the trio. The camera discreetly remains
outside. We hear the sound of clashes, screams, and acts of violence. Then the door opens
up once again; all three are back in the hallway, Kip has a bloody face and his clothes
are torn. The camera shows the events from somewhat further back – the three drown
each other out with their yelling, and the hubbub is accompanied by harsh, aggressive
bodily movements and expressions of outrage. The movement of the three consolidates
frantically and excitedly. Protestations, convictions, placations, and attacks appear until
the acting ensemble unravels from the consolidating movement, synchronously mov-
ing apart from one another, and at the same time disappearing behind three slammed
doors: she into the elevator, the two men each into an apartment. The coda comes gen-
tly, but once again as a synchronized movement. The two men appear again, walking
toward one another like a mirror image, then past one another, each into the other, that
is, his own apartment.
This final part of the sequence stages a social interaction in which the actors’
individual movements seem to become futile through the stark distance of the camera.
Even more obviously than before, the three actors’ movements become elements of the
aesthetic shaping. Through the synchronicity of the bodies – all at once they separate, all
three slamming their respective doors simultaneously – exiting the visual frame becomes
a collective disappearance, and so every gesture, every word, every facial expression loses
its subjective side. The ruling figure is the camera at a distance; it orchestrates a violent
argument and fight as a harmonious triad.
The fury represented is almost dissolved, hardly imaginable any more for the experi-
ence of the spectator. Instead it is enclosed in the aesthetic shaping, which provides a
view to another feeling: the bodily movements become wedded in the image, although
they are contradictory on the narrative level of the plot. The we-feeling appears as a plu-
276
ral, contradictory, and nonetheless unifying movement, its temporal structure is that of
rapid exchange.19 The individual gestures and facial expressions are dissolved in a couple
gesture or a collective movement, through which fury, anger, and agitation take effect
and cause amusement in the acting almost concretely.20 Adam and Amanda’s insults,
her admirer’s bloody face, the slamming of the doors – all of this becomes light and
harmless in the spectator’s perception due to the temporal staging, just as the edible
gun had turned the threat into a game. The comedy is about serious conflicts, but these
are not treated seriously; instead they are reflected on analytically, dissected, and play-
fully parodied. The pleasure is articulated through the experience of befuddling vitality,
aimed at the spectator as an audiovisual mode. And it is just this experience of agitated
vitality and lightness that takes weight and gravity away from the fear, anger and threat
represented through the acting.
The ways that time is orchestrated in the two scenes, that of melodramatic and
comedic staging, are intimately connected to the ways that affect and feeling are formed,
with crying and laughing. They can be grasped in just this temporality as various
formations of the affection-image.
The affection-image and compressed time
The affection-image can be described as a process in which various elements of temporal

expression in perceptual sensation come into relation with one another in a very specific
way, which allows Deleuze to speak of affect as an image of pure expressive quality.21 The
close-up is “an absolute change: a mutation of movement which ceases to be translation
in order to become expression.”22 The affection-image can take shape in the images of
faces, but also in a network of visual shots, or montages of landscapes or rooms; even
19 For a more thorough presentation of this aspect, of the contradictory qualities of acting movement,
which are unified cinematically to give rise to a coherent and contrastive movement that produces a comic
effect in screwball and remarriage comedies, see: ibid.
20 On the idea of the “couple gesture”, see: ibid.
21 With regard to its qualities and powers of expression, Deleuze describes the affection-image as such:
“What produces the unity of the affect at each instant is the virtual conjunction assured by the expression,
face or proposition. Brilliance, terror, decisiveness and compassion are very different qualities and powers
which are sometimes connected and sometimes separated,” in: Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 105. He understands
the “reflexive face”, for example, as expressing “a pure Quality, that is to say a ‘something’ common to
several objects of different kinds,” ibid., p. 90.
22 Ibid., p. 96.
277
“affects of things” belong to this, such as, for instance, the “edge,” “blade,” or “point” of
a knife.23 What the forms of the affection-image have in common is that the image space
is completely enclosed in its capacity for transformation: that the screen itself becomes
a face. In the modulations of the film image, the synesthesia and correspondences of the
perceptual qualities in film, the world presented in the film refers to an image that itself
is taken to be still emerging, that, as Deleuze says, is virtual. In this sense, affects are not
personal: “Affects are not individuated like people and things, but nevertheless they do
not blend into the indifference of the world. They have singularities, which enter into
virtual conjunction, and each time constitute a complex entity. It is like points of melt-
ing, of boiling, of condensation, of coagulation, etc..”24
Deleuze understands affects as temporal condensations of different, unifying ele-
ments of expression, which are not divisible in themselves, but become complex assem-
bled entities and can enter into temporal relationships with other affects:
The point is that a face remains a large unit whose movements, as Descartes
remarked, express compound and mixed affections. The famous Koulechov effect is
explained less by the association of the face with a variable object than by an ambiguity
of its expressions which always suit different affects. On the contrary, as soon as we
leave the face and the close-up, as soon as we consider complex shots which go beyond
the simplistic distinction between close-up, medium shot and long shot, we seem to
enter a ‘system of emotions’ which is much more subtle and differentiated, less easy to
identify, capable of inducing non-human affects.25
The face-like dimension of the image – its “faceicity”26 – is particular and ambiguous
in equal measure, which refers to the way that moving matter can constantly change
qualitatively, which means an undecided coming-into-being of the image.
The affection-image furthermore always refers to two sides, as Deleuze explains,
which are only constituted as such by defining its faceicity. It is the surface, the con-
tour, or the outline that carries a moving expression: the “immobile receptive plate”27
cannot be separate from the facial movements, the “micro-movements of expression,”28
which means the intensities, or the pattern of agitation in the interplay of all the
23 Ibid., p. 97.
24 Ibid., p. 103.
25 Ibid., p. 110.
26 Ibid., p. 97. The term derives from the French “visagéité.”
27 Ibid., p. 90.
28 Ibid.
278
changing facial features. Only in this connection of both sides in a temporal develop-
ment does affect emerge.29 Even if the two sides are always necessary in order to make
an expression visible, we can still tell the difference when one or the other is empha-
sized more strongly.30 In the reflexive and intensive face, the two poles come into effect to
various degrees.31 Sometimes it becomes the changing of “intensive series”32 – express-
ing reversals, strong cohesive tensions of all elements, the interpenetration of mov-
ing facial features – then again it becomes more the “reflecting unity”33 that forms a
certain constancy, duration, and the experience of a quality brought to expression.
Both sides of the affection-image can be related to the analyses of melodramatic and
comedic temporality. Deleuze uses Griffith’s Broken Blossom (Griffith, USA 1919) as an
example of the reflexive face. He refers to the face of the young woman, to which the
question is put: “What are you thinking about?”34 In a similar way, the slow unfolding
of expressive movement in the scene described from Magnificent Obsession also empha-
sizes such a temporal entity as immersion, and as being drawn in by the image, which
itself has become a reflexive face in its duration. Blindness, the staring blankly into space in
the protagonist’s facial expression, is on the one hand part of the dynamically formed
visual arrangement, but the sensual unresponsiveness of the blind woman is offset on
the other hand by the way the image is formed. For the spectator, the changing light
and color values, and the swelling music are inscribed in this relatively neutral and
immobile face and they change it, turning it into a responsive face, so that what is actu-
ally being emphasized by the staging in its temporal unfolding gets ascribed to the char-
acter of Helen: the duration of a subjective sensation as a figuration of movement. This
sensation image, the basic form of melodramatic staging, corresponds to the one side of
the affection-image.35 Indeed, we can grasp a cinematic image in it that can appear in its
entirety in the mode of subjective sensation. At the moment when the scene comes to
its culmination, however, the entire staged tableau comes to an apotheosis, turning the
29 Ibid.
30 Power and Quality are two dimensions of both sides of the face merging constantly into each other:
“Just as the intensive face expresses a pure Power, that is to say, is defined by a series which carries us from
one quality to another, the reflexive face expresses a pure Quality, that is to say a ‘something’ common to
several objects of different kinds,” ibid., p. 90.
31 Deleuze states: “It appears that a director always gives pre-eminence to one of the two poles – reflecting
face or intensive face – but also gives himself the means to get back to the other pole,” ibid., p. 92.
32 Ibid., p. 90.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., p. 88.
35 See also: Kappelhoff, “Empfindungsbilder.”
279
sensation-image around into the mode of the intensive face. The camera stages the con-
sciousness of plunging, falling, and crashing, the woman throws her face into her hands,
the music changes from the high, fast choral voices to the slow, deep sounds of a piano.
Deleuze’s description of the serial montages of faces in Eisenstein – as an example
of the affection-image in the mode of the intensive face as a dense succession of points
alternating between agitation and intensity, which brings along with it the potential
for expression – can also be thought in relation to the movement patterns in the scene
from Adam’s Rib. The many faces come together there: they alternate, they are contrasted,
they overlap one another. In the mode of the intensive face, according to Deleuze, one asks
a different sort of question: “What is bothering you, what is the matter, what do you
sense or feel?”36 The high variability of the image, the breaks and reversals here precisely
do not aim to draw the spectator gradually in, but are more strongly defined as a series,
as expressive alteration, changes, and jumps. Unlike in Magnifient Obsession where the
film image describes a transformation as a gradual and continual intensification, the
formation of time in the comedic staging is less stretched out, unfolds less gradually.
Rather, the scene from Adam’s Rib is enclosed in a permanent rhythmic frequency,
accomplished by a shimmering or vibrating of expressive elements. So the visual tension
of oscillation is given shape in the mode of the intensive face, starting over time and
again, which relates the movement of two or more actors to one another as a sequence.
Repetitions in the montage, relations of faces and gestures create abrupt, short, and
incisive moments of intensively experiencing tenseness; they pause briefly, and they
realize the experience of elation and relaxation in the exchange.
Conclusion: Duration and changeability
In both analyses we pointed out a temporality of cinematic staging specific to each

case, which is closely connected with the unfolding of the audiovisual movement of
expression. The melodramatic and comedic stagings of time could not be more different
from one another.
The melodramatic staging makes it possible to experience loss and irretrievability
not only in the context of the narrative, but it shows this to be subsequently reflected
in the spectator’s sense of time, through which time itself becomes the protagonist of
36 Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 88.
280
the activity of sensing.37 The melodramatic performance is targeted at the experience

of a temporality that is quite different from that of time as a measurable, assessable,
and controllable succession. It is the time in which a thought unfolds as the duration
of thinking, a sensation as the duration of feeling. In film melodrama this is the time
in which this duration unfolds as a temporal structure of how the film image is staged
for the spectator. For this, the time of the movement-image that appears before one’s
eyes gives expression to a style of thinking and sensing, a specific way of perceiving the
world. In the actors’ movements, in their gestures, as well as in the camera’s move-
ments, the rhythm of the montage, in the lighting, the shifting color patterns, and
in the composition of the sound design, a visual space unfolds in which a figure is set
into the scene as an I sense, and which likewise determines the awareness of this feeling.
Melodrama designates a subjective world of sensation as the center of the performance
and this world has a specific temporal form.38
In opposition to the extended unfolding, to the staging of a subjective perception in
melodrama, which always already refers to the quality of the crying person being with-
drawn into the self, laughing forms a quite different temporality. Rapidly exchanged
verbal sparring emerges as the temporal form of a film composition – for instance of a
specific audiovisual rhythm39 – which is often accelerated or marked by brisk changes in
tempo. The expressive movements in the scene from Adam’s Rib are set up in such a way
that they stage images of couples or trios in the temporal forms of cycle, repetition, and
oscillation, so that tension and vitality – but also elation – get built up in the spectator’s
sensations. The image space does not focus on the individual face, but dissolves it into an
ensemble. It is always already populated by other faces that frame it, that inscribe them-
selves into it, or that erase it.40 The movement figure in comedy does not stage a subjec-
tive sensation, but a collective vibration or resonance with one another: a we-feeling or a
process of synchronizing different subjectivities, one that constantly has to be negoti-
ated, which is realized as the rapid montage of several faces, through gestures or congru-
ent qualities of group views related to one another by rhythm.
37 Hermann Kappelhoff, “Unerreichbar, unberührbar, zu spät – Das Gesicht als kinematografische Form
der Erfahrung,” montage/av 13.2 (2004): p. 29–53.
38 Kappelhoff, Matrix der Gefühle, p. 51–62 and p. 156–172.
39 On the various affective forms of staging rhythm in film genre, see: Jan-Hendrik Bakels “Audiovisuelle
Rhythmisierung. Filmmusik und die affektive Erfahrung des Zuschauers” (unpublished PhD thesis, Freie
Universität Berlin, forthcoming).
40 Aumont, Du Visage, p. 49–51.
281
The two forms of staging in melodrama and comedy can be linked back to the corporal
forms of expression of laughing and crying in their temporal shaping, or described in
temporal congruence with them.41 Laughing and crying have been described by the
anthropologist and philosopher Helmuth Plessner as expressive forms of “limits of
behavior.”42 Both phenomena emerge from the fact of being confronted with something
that one no longer knows how to react to, and as a consequence, the body itself responds
to the situation.43 The cinema produces multiple forms of affectedness. What the visual
and perceptual modulations of cheerfulness and sadness, emotion and sensitivity have
in common is that they are especially intensive forms of addressing spectators in their
embodiment, of pushing them to the limits.
This can in part be seen in how the patterns of perception and experience form the
poetics of the genres. If melodramatic staging and its mode are focused on posing the
basic question of subjectivity – How can a sensing and perceiving I become visible? –
then comedy often inquires into plural relationships: How can we see or experience a
we-feeling? These forms of viewing the I and the we can themselves be grasped in the film’s
temporal shaping, understood as specific dynamics of affect.44 The figure of sensation
in the scene from Magnificent Obsession instigates a gradual unfolding that refers the
entire visual space in its articulation to the face of the heroine – her movements are
synchronized with the step-by-step development of the image. In Adam’s Rib the image
presents short, abrupt structures of tension between two poles, in which the individual
faces are dissolved in a way that each development of the image refers to this vacillation
between the faces.
* Translated by Daniel Hendrickson
41 Daniel N. Stern, Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy and
Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). On the dynamic forms of interaffectivity, see also:
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “Getting to the heart of emotions and consciousness,” in: Paco Calvo, Antoni
Gomila, eds., Handbook of Cognitive Science: An Embodied Approach (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2008), p. 453–465.
42 Helmuth Plessner, Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1941/1970), p. 138–157.
43 Ibid., p. 67.
44 Ibid., p. 146–147. This also corresponds to what Plessner says about the temporality of the expressive
forms of laughing and crying. Furthermore in laughing, the person always already produces a relation-
ship to his or her surroundings, to other people, to the situation, whereas the crying person withdraws
from the world into the feeling of sadness, turned inward.
282

The Rosary
Viscosity, the heat

the oil drips
down my cheek. As I sit,
my feet barely touching the floor,
the exorcism begins
right there in a chair, up against
the kitchen sink.
Frightened and fascinated too
I look up into her face over me
into the small black centers
of her eyes.
My mother calls out the evil spirit
that has been put into me
by some other little girl, due to jealousy
she told me that first time.
If only I could I would place my big sister there—

to sit beside me, hold my hand and insist we both resist.
My mother.
Unworthy of taking the office
of doing what only the ordained were meant to do,
she proclaims evil living in me
before she casts it out and sets me free.
I did not move.
So it would seem that even before I was I, God was displeased with me,1
having been found guilty of some sort of receptivity, or complicity.
1 John Donne, A Sermon, Preached to the King’s Majestie at Whitehall (1625), quoted in: Juliet Mitchell,
Siblings, Sex and Violence (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003), p. 59. These words, taken from John Donne’s 1625
poem Sermon actually are “And God was displeased with me before I was I.”
283
Her illegitimate wielding of power fixed what would never come to be:
Clarity, definition, not even an uneasy settlement between the real and the unreal,
the good and the bad, would there ever be.
I lived in my childhood not so much in my own skin but in a shroud of undecidability

and a loneliness in my sister’s inability to attend to me – her means of psychic survival
a denial of a mutual infection of wounds. Left to a private communion, falling back into
an ecstasy of fear, my gaze would fix on his hands and feet, ripped through. Blood poured
down from the gash in his side, and the ignominious crown of thorns was driven into
his brow. I did not fail to kneel, early in the morning and later in the night, each day
translating something done to me, correcting an idolatry, resisting a false worshipping
yet ever inviting an attachment to my mother and this sacrilegious confrontation with
evil, this will to do violence with the violence of the sacred, a misappropriation of a
divine violence.
My fingers move from bead to bead, ten and then one alone, and then ten again:
feeling without seeing, tactile before being visible, like a blind person’s object or thing,
counting and praying, Hail Marys.
Although thought to be mostly a matter of the Reformation, iconoclasm existed in the

late Middle Ages as a drive to rid spirituality of images or objects mistaken for the real,
confusing the miraculous with the magical. In the late Middle Ages, iconoclasm was
enacted in religious art as a movement from scenes of the crucifixion with the upright
figure of the suffering Christ to those scenes of his body being brought down from the
cross, on the way to the grave, dead and becoming invisible.2 Together these scenes can
be taken as an allegory of an iconoclasm of the image: the image making god visible
in the body of the crucified Christ and then the body brought down to be buried, the
image becomes mere image again pointing only to an invisible god. But by the late
sixteenth century, the host of the transubstantiated flesh, Christ under the guise of the
everyday is held up for the adoring gaze of those who pray in a golden monstrance edged
2 See also: Amy Knight Powell, Deposition, Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (New
York: Zone Books, 2012), p. 21–42. Knight Powell argues that through the fifteenth century the deposition
from the cross was so frequently represented that it rivaled the representation of the crucifixion and as
such these representations together not only prefigure the iconoclasm of the Reformation but also the
disposition of the image itself.
284
with a corona of light and administering angels all around, shifting weight from the
commandment to turn away from false gods, mere objects or images,
to believe and cherish instead
the divine touching the human,
two substances aligned:
salvation by complex perception of the real,
there to be felt more than seen or known,
there in affect, advancing to what is without language
more magical than magic.3
Iconoclasm may well be a violent start of a genealogy of philosophies of the object and
relations, implicating the nature of reality. And again today another turn in philosophy
in an effort to touch vitality, in an effort to recover objects and their energetic powers,
their virtuality: to recover objects from the assimilating act of human consciousness.
The correlation between being and knowing is broken and the question of the image
and the real is replaced by the question of substance and manifestations, objects and
relations, the vibrations, rhythmicities or oscillations of each and every thing.4
But is it idolatrous to say that objects are themselves lively, that they have capacities
to affect and be affected? Is it idolatrous to say that objects withdraw from human
consciousness and from each other, falling back into the networks of meaningful
reference of which they are apart but from which they stand apart. And yet, do objects
take measure of each other, feel and be felt by one another and by feeling become however
slightly or massively changed, indicating the object’s internal energy, its differing
from itself, its nonidentity with itself from which the object radiates a lure to feeling,
an aesthetic of forces of repulsion and attractio. Can we say that there is an aesthetic
causality that once philosophers thought to be a force of evil, a demonic force beyond
understanding and will?
3 Knight Powell, Deposition, p. 121–158.

4 I am referring here to what in philosophy and critical theory has been called the ontological turn that
is especially concerned with the agencies or affective capacities of objects. Here objects refer to any entity
or thing without their being opposed to subjects or without privileging the epistemological position of
human consciousness. See also: Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, eds., The Speculative Turn
(Melbourne: Re:press, 2011).
285
Nothing left but this: aesthetic practices, ritual practices to think at the limit of
thought beyond thought, beyond understanding and will.5
My fingers move from bead to bead, ten and then one alone and then ten again: the
rosary, like a holy abacus for counting mysteries, as I laid in bed and prayed.
Perhaps an important marker of our similarity and difference was the position of our
beds, iron cots pulled out each night, my sister’s placed right next to my parents’ bed,
the three of them, head to head to head, while mine was placed at the foot of the bed
near enough to touch their feet, moving, moving under the sheet. And just beyond and
over their heads, the crucifix hung that my sister could not see from where she lay. It was
there, I thought, only for me: to condemn or protect me, I could not be sure, from the evil
spirits that I thought I saw all around.
She with my parents, and me left to pray the rosary, counting Hail Marys against the
return of some little girl’s jealousy.
The Rosary is a string of beads used to keep count of prayers as they are recited. First
given to Saint Dominic by the Blessed Virgin Mary in the 13th century, the rosary would
be popularly practiced with spiritual intensity. There also were rosary books, among
the earliest vernacular devotional manuals to be printed, thus defining the role of print
as a way of shaping and reflecting religious awareness. But the rosary was popular as
much among those who could read as those who could not, as indulgences were offered
offering a surplus value of grace in exchange simply for the number of prayers that were
recited. And with this, a concern arose that the value given to sheer repetition would mix
up quantity and quality, spirituality and superstition, depth and superficiality, faith and
calculation. Against this mere repetition in the use of the rosary, a set of meditations
5 I am especially referring here to: Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Car-
pentry of Things (Chicago and LaSalle: Open Court, 2005); idem, “On Vicarious Causation,” Collapse II 11.26
(2007): p. 187–221; Steven Shaviro, “The Universe of Things,” paper delivered at Objected Oriented Ontology,
A Symposium, Georgia Technological Institute (April 23, 2010); idem, “The Actual Volcano: Whitehead, Har-
man, and the Problem of Relations,” in: Bryant et al., The Speculative Turn, p. 279–290; Timothy Morton,
“Objects in Mirror are Closer than they Appear,” in: Tom Sparrow and Bobby George, eds., Singularium
Lessons in Aesthetics, 1 (2012): p. 2–35; idem, “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry,” New Literary History, 43
(2012): p. 205–224.
286
were prescribed: scenes from Christ’s and his mother Mary’s lives. Mysteries, they would
be called, joyful, sorrowful and finally glorious, to be kept in mind as one prayed.6
My fingers move from bead to bead, ten and then one alone, and then ten again. The
beads vibrate with certain energies, having been touched for centuries. Hail Mary full of
grace. Hail Mary full of grace. Hail Mary full of grace.
And so it would be that no one cared that my sister was not kind to me. As I struggled to
comprehend another already born, in my place and yet different than me, I was turned
to abstract thought and a philosophical wonderment that offers the very young child a
sense of the mind like a womb, giving birth to ideas, numbers and numbers of them, in
one series and than another adhering one series to the other, trying to bring together
body and soul, quality and quantity, substance and sensuality, my sister and me.
By the sixteenth century, the host had become an object of adoration especially for
women. Linked first to the Eucharistic feast, the host was believed to be the body of
Christ in the consecrated bread. It was meant to encourage in the one who beheld it an
imitation of Christ’s life – for the woman mystic to be in her body as he was in his suf-
fering and dying. This union gave her the experience of horrible pain whether inflicted
by God or by herself was not clear. But this was not an effort to destroy the body, not pri-
marily an effort to shear away a source of lust, but rather an effort to plumb the depths
of Christ’s humanity at the moment of his most insistent and terrifying humanness, the
moment of his dying. This embrace of physicality at the point where it intersects with
the divine was thought to be a refusal of dualism: body and soul, matter and spirit in
ecstatic union. For the woman, this is a becoming Christ as a matter of fact, not imagi-
nation or memory. Of a tradition in which male is to female as soul is to matter, these
women found in themselves a blessed physicality that endowed them with authority to
point out uncomfortable truths about the male priesthood. Yet this, a women’s power,
often was seen as resulting from possession by demons rather than being of a Godly
inspiration.7
6 Anne Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose. The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages (University Park: The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
7 Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption. Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval
Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 119–150.
287
And what now of this history and a mother misplaced by centuries such that what was
once of spiritual significance comes to have a psychic resonance, infecting my thinking
oscillating it between godly inspiration and demon possession and turning me most
recently to those translations of theologies into philosophy, heeding a call to rethink
a dark mysticism8 and to find a prayer adequate to a world near destruction or violent
extinction.
To refind poetry
to allude to what cannot be told directly
of a mixture of hate and love unresolved,
of tendencies to reproduce an evil of failed recognition and lack of care
yet seeking a way to a new ethics and a political repair.
The reproduction of evil today is understood psychoanalytically and thought to be related

to malignant trauma and the experience of intense loneliness. This loneliness is not
“something wordless that can be ultimately rendered in speech.”9 It is “unformulatable.”
As described, it is a paradox: “the experience of traumatic annihilation produces the need
to be known that continually meets the impossibility of being known.” Experience in
this mode exists only in the ephemeral somatic present and never becomes linguistically
encoded while it shapes bodies affectively with its full force.
So that in bodies there still can be a memory that points to trauma and beyond to a
divine violence brought with the wild intervention of the dark angel of history who
seeing the pile of debris of nameless, faceless suffering, a wreckage of injustices, and the
misappropriation of the divine, she strikes back to enact revenge for the destructive lack
of care, love having all but failed. Let us go meet this angel. Let us meet her without
fear.
8 Eugene Thacker, Horror of Philosophy Vol.1: In the Dust of This Planet (Washington: Zero Books, 2011).
9 Sue Grand, The Reproduction of Evil: A Clinical and Cultural Perspective (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press,
2000), especially p. 4.
288
Brigitte Bargetz
Mapping Affect
Challenges of (Un)timely Politics
Affective Epidemics?
In the late 1980s and early 1990s Lawrence Grossberg discovered “affective epidemics”1
within the U.S. American context. Starting from the theoretical premise that hegemony
cannot simply be implemented but must gain people’s consent, Grossberg argued that the
emerging U.S. American conservatism is less of a struggle over the “minds of the nation”
than it is a struggle “over its hearts and bodies.”2 Affective epidemics, he notes, orga-
nize, discipline, and mobilize people’s attention, volition, mood, and passion and place
them in the service of specific political agendas.3 Grossberg identifies affective epidemics
within discourses on health and the body, within nationalism and patriotism, as well as
affective heteronormative family epidemics. These epidemics reorganize everyday life by
redistributing and diffusing energies and, more explicitly, by producing fear, panic, and
ultimately also political apathy. Grossberg’s take on affective epidemics is interesting in
two respects: first, he theorizes hegemony and consent as matters of affect; hegemony is
established and transported across moods, atmospheres and sentiments; second, he con-
siders affective politics problematic, as they are ultimately a mode of de-politicization.
About fifteen years later, Marie-Luise Angerer also refers to affective epidemics in
describing the current historical present and its seemingly all-encompassing “desire for
affect.”4 This desire becomes visible in different contexts and discourses and involves
subjects as well as institutional practices, media, art, academia and even political govern-
ments. The desire for affect, however, also brings Angerer to interrogate what happens to
desire after affect,5 or more specifically: What are the political and theoretical consequences
1 Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place. Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New
York/London: Routledge, 1992), p. 281.
2 Ibid., p. 255.
3 Ibid.
4 Marie-Luise Angerer, Vom Begehren nach dem Affekt (Berlin/Zurich: Diaphanes, 2007). English transla-
5 This twofold perspective also transpires in the German book title Das Begehren nach dem Affekt, since
nach indicates both “for” and “after.”
289
Brigitte Bargetz
when the current predominant form of power is coined in terms of affect? In this vein,
affective epidemics are crucial and even problematic for at least three different reasons.
First, by absorbing the sexual and bodily into the affective and sensual,6 sexuality, desire,
and gender may become invisible and ignored as technologies of power. Second, predom-
inantly referring to affect fosters an old belief in and yearning for the sensual, authentic-
ity, and immediacy. Third, placing the emphasis on immediacy and posthuman tendency
entails the risk of suppressing the dimension of language and unconsciousness and thus
also the loss of forms of resistance to the current hegemony of affects.
For Angerer and Grossberg, affective epidemics delineate different and sometimes
even contrary phenomena and insights. Grossberg considers affect as a new way to
understand politics while Angerer identifies epistemological and political shortcomings
of the current affective dispositive. They still both have an ambivalent take on affect
and point out the risks that accompany affective politics – especially the risk of depo-
liticization in terms of political disinvolvement, as Grossberg indicates, and in terms of
restricted epistemological and political potentials, as Angerer emphasizes. Connecting
politics and affect, both notions of affective epidemics relate to the current “affective
turn”7 and the debates on its political potentialities. While it is impossible to do justice
to the manifold discussions, angles, perspectives, and complex arguments within these
debates,8 in the following I will briefly highlight some core elements that touch upon
political agency, critique, and knowledge production.
While for some the current turn to affect promises new modes of critical inquiry and
consequently new forms of political agency, others remain skeptical.9 The approaches
under scrutiny are those that invoke Brian Massumi’s distinction between affect and
emotion and, more explicitly, the temporal dimension, the “missing half-second”10 that
6 Angerer, Vom Begehren, p. 8.

7 Patricia T. Clough and Jean Halley, eds., The Affective Turn. Theorizing the Social (Durham/London: Duke
University Press, 2007).
8 See also: Angerer, Vom Begehren; Patricia T. Clough, “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and
Bodies,” in: Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham/London: Duke
University Press, 2010), p. 206–225; Clare Hemmings, “Invoking Affect. Cultural Theory and the Ontological
Turn,” Cultural Studies 5 (2005): p. 548–567; Anu Koivunen, “An Affective Turn? Reimagining the Subject of
Feminist Theory,” in: Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen, eds., Working with Affects in Feminist Read-
ings. Disturbing Differences, (London/New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 8–28; Michaela Ott, Affizierung: Zu einer
ästhetisch-epistemischen Figur (München: Edition Text und Kritik, 2010); Carolyn Pedwell and Anne Whitehead,
“Affecting Feminism: Questions of Feeling in Feminist Theory,” Feminist Theory 13 (2012): p. 115–129; Gregory
J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in: idem, eds., Affect Theory Reader, p. 1–25.
9 Koivunen, “An Affective Turn?,” p. 9.
10 Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): p. 83–109, here p. 89.
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Mapping Affect
distinguishes emotion from affect. For Ruth Leys,11 for instance, this distinction risks
romanticizing affect by assuming as seemingly autonomous, spontaneous, and true
corporeal reactions, and therefore hints at a universalizing politics of truth. The newly
emerging dichotomy between pre-cognitive affect and cognitive emotion therefore nei-
ther provides an insightful venue for critique nor a different, enabling form of agency.
Instead, this dichotomy conveys “old problems.” It assumes people are ignorant and
researchers are the only ones capable of understanding affect.
Mastery, (critical) knowledge (production), and political agency are also at stake in
debates that allude to affect as a mode of relationality, intensity, and solidarity. These
approaches tend to dismiss what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has famously framed as a
“paranoid reading” and follow her emphasis on a more “reparative reading.”12 So-called
paranoid reading, which Sedgwick applies to Marxism, psychoanalysis and poststruc-
turalism, is problematic because of its “hermeneutics of suspicion” – an expression she
borrows from Paul Ricœur.13 Paranoid reading, she argues, implies “suspicious and
aggressive attacks,” and largely refers to “exposure” and “unveiling hidden” truth,14
as well as power and domination.15 Such a paranoid reading is contestable because it
claims “ownership over the truth”16 and disavows affect. Understanding affect in a more
reparative sense instead leaves space for the unknown and for surprise. It offers those
affectively engaged an enabling potential to see what has not been seen or to know what
has not been known beforehand.
This emphasis on surprise, potentialities, and “restorative power”17 has also been
called in question. It is argued that stressing only the productive, that is, the positive
effects of affect tends towards romanticization and, as Clare Hemmings argues, pushes
forward an “illusion of choice.”18 Affective politics of empathy or compassion do not
necessarily create political solidarity. They may also indicate a new mode of governing
11 Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 3 (2011): p. 434–472.
12 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You
Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in: idem, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity
(Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 123–151.
13 Ibid., p. 124.
14 Ibid., p. 138–139.
15 Sedgwick’s claim, however, is less dualistic but rather calls for re-reading a paranoid perspective with
a reparative claim.
16 Heather Love, “Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” Criticism 2
(2010): p. 235–241, here p. 236–237.
17 Hemmings, “Invoking Affect,” p. 551.
18 Ibid., p. 548.
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Brigitte Bargetz
or enhance (neo)liberal politics through moralization, individualization, and privati-

zation.19 In this way, politics of empathy can privilege the individual over the social;
feelings of political empathy at home over an articulation of political anger in public;
or private donations over struggles over distribution. Politics of empathy may function,
following Eva Illouz, as an emotional “style” in an “age of therapy.”20 These approaches
place political agency under scrutiny by asking how affect is mobilized and translated
“into political registers.”21
What can these controversies on affective politics tell us? What are the conse-
quences for a theory of the political that has, at least within a malestream tradition,
long neglected affect and emotions, and instead equated politics with rationality and
objectivity, simultaneously (re)producing a gendered, racialized, and class-oriented “lib-
eral dispositive of feelings”?22 How could a political theory be formulated that does not
ignore affect? Would it need to adopt a reparative approach and conceive of affects as
useful political modes because they facilitate new forms of political critique and agency?
Or would it need to attend to a more paranoid reading since such a perspective inter-
rogates emotional hierarchies and facilitates the critique of the marginalization of feel-
ings and of affective modes of governing?
This article takes up these questions and suggests approaching affective politics in
a way that exceeds the binaries of a paranoid reading and a reparative reading, and of
romanticizing and delegitimizing affect and emotions. Countering what Anu Koivunen
maps out as two newly emerging camps between reparation and paranoia,23 I elaborate
on a “political grammar of feelings”24 that considers affect in a twofold manner: on the
one hand, as sensory register and mode of sensation, perception, recognition, and agency
or what I call feeling politics; and on the other hand, as an instrument and means of the
19 See also: Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics,” in: Sara Ahmed, Jane
Kilby, Celia Lury, Maureen McNeil and Beverly Skeggs, eds., Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism
(London/New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 33–47; Carolyn Pedwell, “Affective (Self-) Transformations:
Empathy, Neoliberalism and International Development,” Feminist Theory 13 (2012): p. 163–179.
20 Eva Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 2008).
21 Koivunen, “Affective Turn?,” p. 21–22.
22 Birgit Sauer, “‘Politik wird mit dem Kopfe gemacht’. Überlegungen zu einer geschlechtersensiblen
Politologie der Gefühle,” in: Ansgar Klein and Frank Nullmeier, eds., Masse, Macht, Emotionen. Zu einer
Politischen Soziologie der Emotionen (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1999), p. 200–218.
23 Koivunen, “Affective Turn?,” p. 23.
24 Brigitte Bargetz, “Jenseits emotionaler Eindeutigkeiten. Überlegungen zu einer politischen Gram-
matik der Gefühle,” in: Angelika Baier, Christa Binswanger, Jana Häberlein, Eveline Y. Nay and Andrea
Zimmermann, eds., Affekt und Geschlecht: Eine einführende Anthologie (Vienna: Zaglossus, 2014), p. 117–136..
292
Mapping Affect
political or as I phrase it, a politics of feelings. This political grammar of feelings invokes
the grammatical figure of the noun-verb distinction to emphasize feelings both as tools
and as ways of doing. I suggest that differentiating between feeling politics and a politics
of feelings may enable us to leave the above-mentioned dilemma behind; a dilemma
through which we remain stuck in an ongoing debate on whether affects and emo-
tions are politically good or bad, enabling or disabling, productive or dangerous. Such a
debate is limited, as it risks remaining within a liberal logic by politically demonizing
or romanticizing emotions. It also risks naturalizing, universalizing, and substantializ-
ing affect and emotion. With this twofold political grammar of feelings I attempt to move
beyond such “easy” oppositions and emphasize the political ambivalence of affect and
emotions.25 A theory of affective politics must therefore be able to account for creative
moments of affect as a relational force, and help investigate how this force is embedded
within the political and economic fabric.
In order to elaborate on this political grammar of feelings that distinguishes between
feeling politics and a politics of feelings, I make use of Ann Cvetkovich’s approach to
political depression as well as Lauren Berlant’s concept of national sentimentality. I
thus refer to queer-feminist research on affect that situates affect, feelings, emotion,
sensation, sensibility, and sentimentality within the social and political by highlight-
ing embodied sensation as well as psychic experience. My approach does not follow the
strand of affect theory that considers affect and sensation primarily to be a pre-personal
intensity or energy beyond the subject, which builds on the work of Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari or Brian Massumi.26 Instead, my approach is informed by Fredric Jameson
who, evoking Marx, claims there is a historicity of the senses;27 by Raymond Willams’s
understanding of “structures of feeling”;28 and by Berlant’s way of “addressing the
affective component of historical consciousness.”29 Cvetkovich’s emphasis on feelings as
a “generic,” sufficiently ambivalent, and “intentionally imprecise” term30 resonates in
some ways with my suggestion for a political grammar of feelings.
25 Brigitte Bargetz, Ambivalenzen des Alltags. Neuorientierungen für eine Theorie des Politischen (Bielefeld:
transcript, 2014).
26 Massumi, for instance, distinguishes between sensation and perception. See: Brian Massumi, Parables
for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2002).
27 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London/New York:
Routledge, 1983), p. 217.
28 Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” in: idem, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), p. 128–135.
29 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 15.
30 Ann Cvetkovich, Depression. A Public Feeling (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 4.
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Brigitte Bargetz
I start by presenting Cvetkovich’s and Berlant’s concepts and show the insights they
provide for theorizing affective politics. I then explore how these approaches may be
framed as two different, yet complementary modes of affective politics. Finally, I discuss
how this political grammar of feelings may inspire political thought by re-invoking the
political notions of agency, critique and knowledge production, which are characteristic
of contemporary debates on affect.
Political Depression and National Sentimentality
Ann Cvetkovich and Lauren Berlant have engaged with affect and emotions since the
early 1990s. Both work from a queer-feminist cultural studies perspective, mainly using
literature as a means to engage with sentimentality, sentimentalism, and sensational-
ism, including a historical perspective on questions of public and private in the United
States. Like other strands of critical and queer-feminist theory, both Cvetkovich and
Berlant contest the political exclusion of emotions within liberal political theories and
liberal democracies and focus instead on the political and, in particular, the heteronor-
mative and racist implications of a politics of emotions. They are both part of the Public
Feelings Project, a group of activists, artists, and researchers that critically engages with
(neo)liberal forms of affect and aims to think about “liberalism and neoliberalism in
affective terms.”31
In her recent work on the ordinariness of depression Ann Cvetkovich addresses
affects as “sites of publicity and community formation,”32 and depression as a “cultural
and social phenomenon rather than a medical disease.”33 She proposes a “racialized
understanding of depression”34 and frames depression not as personal or individual,
but as political and, more explicitly, as an effect of past and present power relations.
Thus, her approach links up with the feminist tradition of politicizing the personal.35
Instead of aiming to transform negative affects into positive ones, Cvetkovich argues
that it is necessary to trace depression back “to the histories of colonialism, genocide,
31 Ann Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” South Atlantic Quarterly 3 (2007): p. 459–468, here: p. 465.
32 Ibid., p. 460.
33 Cvetkovich, Depression, p. 1.
34 Ann Cvetkovich, “Depression is Ordinary: Public Feelings and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother,”
Feminist Theory 13.2 (August 2012): p.131–146, here: p. 134.
35 See also: Cvetkovich, “Depression,” p. 8.
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Mapping Affect
slavery, exclusion, and everyday segregation.”36 She goes against the “current explosion
of interest in trauma studies”37 as she does not perceive depression as an effect of some
spectacular, extraordinary or catastrophic past. Political depression is rather ordinary;
it is inscribed in people’s everyday practices and sensory registers. By engaging with
Saidiya Hartman’s scholarly autobiography Lose Your Mother, Cvetkovich discusses affect
as traces of the past, as a mode of transportation and translation into daily situations of
the present. One example is her interpretation of the story of 12-year-old Hartman who
gets stopped by the police “after accidentally running a red light on an icy street.”38 For
Cvetkovich the young girl’s reaction – yelling “at the cop in a state of indignant rage
despite her mother’s fear of confrontation”39 – articulates an affective legacy of the his-
tory of colonialism and institutional(ized) racism. The outburst expresses, as Cvetkovich
notes, “the underbelly of dreams of freedom and racial uplift and the emotional uncon-
scious of a world that remains ‘ruled by the color line.’”40 Within the performance of
white authorities, racism and colonialism translate through “fear and suspicion”41 into
the temporalities of the everyday. Thus, considering depression as political phenom-
enon can make explicit the endurance of past power structures and how they translate
into the present.
Cvetkovich’s approach, I argue, offers a way of theorizing affect as a transindividual
and historical force. This means that everyday feelings, the “small dramas”42 of the
everyday, are not only shaped by current but also by past relations of power, as well
as by modes of power and exploitation that one may not have personally experienced.
Emphasizing everyday feelings, Cvetkovich draws attention to the habitualized, often
taken-for-granted and thus nearly invisible forms of power. She considers the possibil-
ity that, for those in a marginalized and de-privileged position, feeling bad or depressed
can serve as an “entry point”43 into political life, and thus offer insightful knowledge
about racism, colonialism, and slavery. In this vein, depression constitutes a way of
knowing through feeling.
36 Cvetkovich, “Depression is Ordinary,” p. 132.

37 Ibid., p. 138.
38 Ibid., p. 140.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., p. 141.
41 Ibid.
42 Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” p. 464.
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Brigitte Bargetz
In her current work, Lauren Berlant also interrogates how the historical present is
affectively perceived.44 In her longstanding work on national sentimentality she not
only discusses the historical insights of affective sensation, but also the production and
political deployment of affective knowledge within the the US context. Drawing mainly
on popular culture but also on cases of the US Supreme Court, she argues that the US
nation-state is shaped by an “unfinished business of sentimentality,”45 a national senti-
mentality that is politically problematic and even violent in multiple ways.
For Berlant, national sentimentality exists when painful feeling, suffering, and
trauma become founding principles of the nation-state and, more explicitly, of citizen-
ship. In her view, in the United States from the mid-19th century on, “the trumping
power of suffering stories”46 became established, thereby instituting national collectiv-
ity through sentimentality. This form of politics becomes important “since abolition
and suffrage worked to establish the enslaved Other as someone with subjectivity,
defined not as someone who thinks or works, but as someone who has endured violence
intimately.”47 National sentimentality can be understood as a precarious “cultural poli-
tics of pain”48 because it addresses a “subject of true feeling”49 and thus establishes pain
as a new regime of truth, which is also applied in demands for political rights. Referring
to Wendy Brown’s critique of fetishization, Berlant emphasizes that such a politics risks
reproducing all too well-known resentments while simultaneously imposing a kind of
“victim politics”50 from the outside. While this politics of national sentimentality incites
struggles over who suffers most, the way in which it fetishizes pain also establishes a
political norm beyond pain and suffering: “The object of the nation-state in this light is
to eradicate social pain, marking the absence of pain as definition of freedom.”51 In this
vein, national sentimentality fosters an understanding of consensual politics, a politics
without ambivalence and dissent, without political struggles. National sentimentality
sustains a belief – using Berlant’s terminology – in a “foggy fantasy of happiness,”52 a
happiness that is supposedly best established by the nation-state.
44 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, p. 4.

45 Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture
(Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2008).
46 Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling,” p. 34.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., p. 33.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., p. 34.
51 Ibid., p. 35.
52 Ibid., p. 36.
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Mapping Affect
Berlant’s critique is not only directed towards how national sentimentality reinforces
and reproduces the established nation-state by envisioning it as a primary source of
happiness, thus evading the existence or necessity of political struggles. She also argues
that this politics presupposes that “a nation can best be built across fields of social dif-
ference through channels of affective identification and empathy.”53 While a politics of
compassion performs an official refusal to accept collective pain, for Berlant it relates
de facto to a moralizing and individualizing politics of privileged people, to a “defen-
sive” inwardly oriented politics of the privileged, which following Audre Lorde could
be called a “politics of guilt.”54 Like Lorde, Berlant calls for awareness because national
sentimentality may invoke feelings of empathy yet it does not necessarily bring about
struggles for social change. Hence, national sentimentality appears depoliticizing and
privatizing, because, as Koivunen also emphasizes, it “sidesteps discussions of structural
inequalities, foregrounding instead a discussion of moral obligations.”55 In reference to
Nancy Fraser, national sentimentality avoids a politics of redistribution and enforces
instead a politics of recognition, or, as I suggest, a politics of emotional recognition.
Both a politics of guilt and a politics of emotional recognition enforce individualization
and de-solidarization which – embedded in discourses of rescue56 – evoke at best pater-
nalistic gestures of charity.57
At first sight, theorizing affective politics seems to contest the liberal notion of the
political because it dismisses the liberal idea of rational politics. This understanding
challenges Western modern dichotomies such as rationality/emotionality, public/pri-
vate or mind/body, which devalue and delegitimate emotions as well as those character-
ized as emotional.58 This has usually referred explicitly to women, but it has also been
(and still is) used for devaluations related to class, race, and ability.59 At second sight,
53 Ibid., p. 34.
54 Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” in: idem, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: The Crossing
Press, 1984), p. 124–133.
55 Koivunen, “Affective Turn?,” p. 20.
56 See also: Anja Michaelsen, “Zur Zurückweisung rassifizierter Melancholie und nationaler Sentimen-
talität. Affektpolitiken transnationaler Adoption in Sophie Brediers autobiographischer Dokumentation
‘Nos traces silencieuses’ (F 1998),” in: Baier et al., Affekt und Geschlecht, p. 159–179.
57 Brigitte Bargetz and Birgit Sauer, “Politik, Emotionen und die Transformation des Politischen. Eine
feministisch-machtkritische Perspektive,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 2 (2010): p. 141–155.
58 See also: Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London/New York: Routledge,
1995); Sauer, “Politik.”
59 See also: Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004);
Lorde, “Anger”; Elisabeth V. Spelman, “Anger and Insubordination,” in: Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall, eds.,
Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 263–274.
297
Brigitte Bargetz
however, Berlant’s critical and complex notion of national sentimentality reveals how
affective politics can also enhance a (neo)liberal logic of politics, enforcing individual-
ization in terms of de-solidarization and moralization, harmonic consensus-based poli-
tics, regimes of truth, and (neo)liberal rhetorics of promise.
Politics and Feelings: A Political Grammar of Feelings
Calling into mind the different debates on politics and affect, these two approaches may
seem contradictory or even incommensurable at first sight. Whereas Cvetkovich argues
for a consideration of bad or negative feelings as a way of knowing in order to grasp social
norms and power structures, Berlant cautions not to take negative feelings too seriously,
as this would imply that negative feelings are the only form of truth and, consequently,
the primary basis for claiming political rights. Although both authors discuss affect
in terms of power relations, Cvetkovich still seems to come closer to a “reparative
sensibility”60 of political affect, at least in terms of political consciousness-raising and by
emphasizing Hartman’s approach to memoirs as an “emotional labour of reparation.”61
In contrast, Berlant seems rather suspicious and closer aligned to a paranoid reading
through problematizing the depoliticizing effects of national sentimentality. While for
Cvetkovich depression may well become an enabling and reparative mode for political
action, Berlant’s approach appears to disavow an emancipatory understanding of politi-
cal feelings, and to suggest abandoning feelings for political purposes.
Such a reading, however, is incomplete. It not only fails to fully apprehend
Cvetkovich’s and Berlant’s objectives, both of which argue in favor of understanding
politics of affect as complex, complicated, and explicitly ambivalent. I aim to show here
that these two approaches are not necessarily contradictory or mutually exclusive. Both
refer to different logics of affective politics and can best be read through each other,
thus constituting a complex understanding of affective politics, which I call a political
grammar of feelings. Using the noun-verb distinction as a figure for thinking through
this form of affective politics, I propose a concept of affective politics that analytically
distinguishes between feeling politics and a politics of feelings.
Cvetkovich and Berlant seek to frame affect and emotions in order to better under-
stand subjects and society. By emphasizing depression and national sentimentality they

61 Ibid., p. 142.
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Mapping Affect
consider how affect relates to power as indicator of and instrument for power relations
and politics. Cvetkovich underlines that power relations are not only produced, but
also felt or affectively perceived in the temporalities of the everyday; I call this perspec-
tive feeling politics. Assuming that racism and colonialism are infiltrated and translated
affectively into daily situations, she elaborates on how this takes place and thus also on
how to incorporate affect and affective knowledge into theorizing power structures.
Reading affective investments of the marginalized and de-privileged as political invest-
ments, Cvetkovich contributes to de-pathologizing seemingly individual “problems”
by showing how depression is imbricated in social relations, hierarchies, and modes of
exploitation. In doing so, Cvetkovich reframes depression as an expression of history,
emphasizing it following Hartman as an “afterlife of slavery.”62 Consequently, this way
of perceiving affective politics can help analyze racism and colonialism. Affect can be
understood as an invisible fabric through which current as well as past social hierar-
chies and differences are translated and re-articulated. Feeling politics frames the present
as historical present; it is a present that is not presentist, not ahistorical, but one which
acknowledges that contemporary politics also carry traces of the past.
Following Cvetkovich’s considerations makes it possible to theorize affect as transin-
dividual and historical force. Feeling politics examines how power circulates through
feelings and thus counters a privileging of rationality and objectivity. However, empha-
sizing that politics and power relations are also felt, does not mean that these feelings
become the only mode of recognition and knowledge. A similar misinterpretation has
already marked debates around the feminist slogan “The Personal is Political.” The
distinction between feeling politics and a politics of feelings can help avoid such a misin-
terpretation. By conceptualizing a politics of feelings I seek to emphasize that power
and politics work through feelings. The figure of a politics of feelings articulates that
feelings – a specific way of feeling, for instance, feeling wrong or right, comfortable or
uncomfortable – are produced within specific normative frames.63 A politics of feelings
alludes to what Raymond Williams has called structures of feelings. Consequently, feel-
ing politics does not imply “true feelings” either. Conceptualizing feelings as effects of
politics conceives that feelings are not located beyond, but rather that they are produced
within specific power relations and social structures. Reading a politics of feelings and
feeling politics together highlights, for instance, that feeling depressed is both an expres-
sion and an effect of power.

63 See also: Ahmed, Cultural Politics.
299
Brigitte Bargetz
Berlant does not claim to completely abandon feelings as modes of perception and
sensation. However, she emphasizes that political struggles must also “include non-sen-
sual experience and knowledge as a part of any ‘personal’ story.”64 Reading her approach
as a politics of feelings means shifting the focus from the sensory registers or subjective
affective perception of power towards acknowledging affects as instruments and means
of politics. Conceptualizing affective politics as politics of feelings can make explicit that
feelings can become a form of governing and thus, for instance, how the nation-state
is also constituted through feelings. In this vein, Berlant criticizes a politics of compas-
sion as a politics of humanizing through individualizing and argues that feelings may
also be used in terms of hegemony in order to create affective consent. Moreover, such a
politics of feelings does not ignore that some people, following Hemmings, are politically
more “suffused” with affect than others65 and that, as Ahmed enphasizes, “emotions of
fear and hatred stick to certain bodies.”66 This is commonly related to sexism, classism,
racism, and ableism,67 and illuminates the premise of an understanding of politics that
relies on the autonomous, rational, disembodied or able-bodied subject.
Although a politics of feelings engages with feelings as political instruments or, in
Berlant’s case, as a form eventually evoking depoliticization, this does not mean that
affective instruments necessarily imply modes of governing, domination, and exploi-
tation. Similarly, Berlant does not completely dismiss affective politics either. A poli-
tics of feelings also indicates that feelings can become mobilizing political forces, for
instance, as Audre Lorde argues, in relation to anger.68 For Lorde, the anger of Black
women regarding white women’s racism and ignorance can also turn into a means of
solidarity. Anger can be “translated into action” and allude to political visions and alter-
native futures, and thus become a “liberating force.”69 Comparably, Berlant emphasizes
a “powerful and political rage,” which she identifies as a counterpart to “political opti-
mism” that remains promising without ever “drowning in the present.”70
64 Berlant, “Subject of True Feelings,” p. 45.

65 Hemmings, “Invoking Affect,” p. 562.
66 Sara Ahmed, On Being Included (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 2.
67 Ableism is often used for describing the powerful mechanism that makes the abled body, implicitly or
explicitly, the social and political norm. See also: Fiona Kumari Campbell, Contours of Ableism. The Production
of Disability and Abledness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
68 See also: Lorde, “Anger”; Bargetz, Ambivalenzen.
69 Lorde, “Anger,” p. 127.
70 Berlant, “Subject of True Feelings,” p. 44.
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Mapping Affect
Political Affect: Some Considerations
By distinguishing between these two perspectives of feeling politics and a politics of feel-
ings I pursue two objectives. My first aim is to consider feeling as a sensory register, as
one – but not the only – mode of sensation, perception, recognition, and agency. Cvet-
kovich’s approach indicates what feeling politics could mean and how this perspective
may inform an analysis of power structures. However, in the second place I argue that
sensory registers are imbricated in a politics of feelings. Feeling politics does not allude to
an autonomous, preexisting emotional subject whose emotional mode of sensation, per-
ception, and acknowledging may tell the truth. I also want to highlight a politics of feel-
ings that emphasizes affect and feelings as forms of politics, making visible how power
operates as an emotional regime.
Emphasizing this twofold political grammar of feelings, what are the epistemological
benefits? How may this political grammar reframe a theory of the political? I close with a
discussion of some considerations that engage with the political dimensions of affective
agency, critique, and knowledge production, which I addressed in the beginning.
With this twofold political grammar of feelings I firstly want to make a case for
thinking affect as neither solely emancipatory nor as largely restraining. A political
grammar of feelings considers feelings as part of a theory of the political and not in an
effort to celebrate affect and emotions as a promising new political mode. Such a claim
would be misleading: affective politics are neither a new phenomenon, nor are they
exceptionally emancipatory. The historical present reveals that anger and outrage can
inform current struggles over democracy, which we have recently witnessed through
the events at Tahrir Square, Puerta del Sol, Wall Street or Gezi Park, to name a few. At the
same time, affective politics are also currently being employed to mobilize and spread
racism and anti-Semitism. Consequently, a political grammar of feelings is not con-
nected to a naïve optimism, but instead argues for a critical engagement with affect in
(neo)liberal times and for scrutinizing where and what kind of emotionalization is at
work. By emphasizing a political grammar of feelings I aim to open a space for asking
about how politics moves us, how feelings are mobilized politically, if and how they are
equally or unequally distributed within the political and the social, and thus how poli-
tics works affectively. Affective politics, then, is less about what affect is, but more about
what affect does politically. Following Kathleen Stewart’s research on ordinary affects,
affects may be understood as individual as well as collective “forces” that “have gathered
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Brigitte Bargetz
to a point of impact to instantiate something.”71 This is also the starting point for a
political grammar of feelings to enter into the political.
Secondly, by distinguishing between a politics of feelings and feeling politics I empha-
size feelings as sensory registers. This means taking into account how politics and
power are also affectively embraced. Such a perspective can make explicit how power
and politics materialize affectively within subjectivities and everyday practices and,
therefore, how they affect political agency. By conceptualizing depression as an affec-
tive legacy of the colonial past, Cvetkovich considers a mode of knowing through feel-
ing. Her approach allows us to modify one’s understanding of sensation, perception,
and agency by emphasizing new logics; logics that perhaps may still need to be further
developed and include notions, such as energies and intensities, relationalities, involve-
ment, investment or belonging.
Thirdly, distinguishing between feeling politics and a politics of feelings I aim to stress
that thinking the political through affect cannot be reduced to a reparative or a para-
noid mode, but should be regarded in more ambivalent and subtle terms. First and fore-
most, the contribution that contemporary affect theory makes, is to expand a theory of
the political to encompass feelings and affect. Thus, it should not be misunderstood as
a claim that seeks to establish a new universalizing political category that is capable of
explaining everything.
The turn to affect in the humanities, social sciences, and technosciences has proven
to be highly affective itself by now. It has been fueled with ambition, hope, and invest-
ment in critical thought and has contributed to further spreading and thinking of cru-
cial queer-feminist insights on the everyday, intimacy, subjectivity, emotions, publics,
and the body. The increasing debates – concerning categories and phenomena that have
long been particularized, marginalized, and delegitimized in main- and malestream
research – can undeniably provide hope for further critical research. Nonetheless, I also
believe that some skepticism, maybe even paranoia, may be in order. This means asking
ourselves if this theoretical and political optimism that we attribute to affect does not
occasionally block us or, to use Lauren Berlant’s phrase, asking ourselves if this opti-
mism is not ultimately a sort of “cruel optimism.”72
71 Kathleen Stewart, “The Perfectly Ordinary Life,” S&F Online 2 (2003), http://sfonline.barnard.edu/ps/
stewart.htm#section1 (retrieved February 24, 2014).
72 Berlant, Cruel Optimism.
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After Affects
Zealous Zombies, Panic Prevention, Crowd Simulation
I. Zombieland
If George A. Romero had visited the BBC website on July 9, 2013, he might have smiled
whimsically at a short article in the science section. Even on first glance, the respective
headline that read “Essex University uses ‘zombies’ in evacuation study,”1 hardly seemed
to refer to an empirical behavioral study using probands from some prevailing generation
of allegedly shallow-brained and sheepish B.A. students. On the contrary, it alluded to
a project that presumably for the first time designated academic honors to zombies: A
team around mathematician Nikolai Bode and biologist Edward Codling modeled the
exit route choices in emergency scenarios by using data generated by a zombie-themed
computer game. In this interactive virtual environment the players – as opposed to the
protagonists of Romero’s classical zombie movie Dawn of the Dead (USA 1978) who seek
shelter in a deserted shopping mall – had to escape from a building.2 This simulated
environment was filled with computer-controlled agents – the zombies – who also tried
to escape from the scenery, competing with the players for viable exits. Would they avoid
crowded areas and try to find individual routes, or would they go with the herd? Would
the model show rational choices, or would it show patterns rather associated with an
egoistic behavior uncontrolled by social or cultural constraints, which is commonly
simply called panic?
On any account, the study contributes to a debate about the collective behavior of
human crowds in critical situations and of the affects involved in these interaction
processes that has now lasted for more than a century. The discourse spans from early
theories of mass psychology around 1900 to recent approaches in fields such as complex
systems studies. Given this historical index it is certainly not a coincidence that the
paper had been published in the journal Animal Behaviour. From the very beginning,
1 “Essex University uses ‘zombies’ in evacuation study,” BBC News, July 09, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/
news/uk-england-essex-23239221 (retrieved August 14, 2013).
2 Nikolai W. F. Bode and Edward A. Codling, “Human Exit Route Choice in Virtual Crowd Evacuations,”
Animal Behaviour 86 (2013): p. 347–358.
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Sebastian Vehlken
human mass behavior had been compared to the behavior of animal collectives, and
accordingly had been subsumed under a cloud of being irrational, unconscious, or purely
instinctive – and therefore devoid of everything that would characterize a self-determined
subject. And whilst the authors associated with mass psychology3 included insights
from 19th-century natural scientists into their writings, today’s approaches intertwine
biological, sociological and psychological findings in computer-technological models
of collective dynamics.4 Still, an ongoing mutual query concerns the role of the affects
and affections that are distributed within these collectives, and how they contribute to
the overall formation and dynamization of collective movements and decision making.
Around 1900 this questionnaire involved hypotheses about the spreading of psychic
qualities like fear, anger and other emotions throughout human crowds. Eventuated by
contagious affective forces (Gustave Le Bon) of transportation between individuals (Gabriel
Tarde), this led to the emergence of the mass and its animalistic and explicitly non-
humanistic side effects in the first place. Hence, (mental) emotions and (bodily) affects
are firmly bound together in the writings of mass psychology.
Interestingly, in recent years the perception of affects and affection in human collectives
substantially changed. In an article on new forms of techno-collectives with the title
Networks, Swarms, Multitudes, the media scientist Eugene Thacker states that it is the very
separation of emotions and affects which is essential for adequately describing their novel
modes of collective organization.5 In addition, Thacker’s article shows how the meta-
phorical portraiture of human crowds first transformed from attributions like the mass
to decentralized and technizised concepts like networks and further to more ephemeral
notions like swarms under the impact of (mobile) media and networking technology. From
this stems a first aspect regarding a Timing of Affect. Recurring to Spinoza’s and Deleuze’s
understanding, Thacker defines affect as a mode of collective organization induced by
local communications, by the locally organized circulation of signs, and by the self-orga-
nized movements of swarming bodies. According to this and in contrast to the traditional
3 See: Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie der Massen (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1982); Gabriel Tarde, L’Opinion et la foule
(Paris: Alcan, 1901); Scipio Sighele, La Foule Criminelle. Essai de Psychologie Criminelle (Paris: Alcan, 1901).
4 For an overview, see: Dirk Helbing and Anders Johansson, “Pedestrian, Crowd and Evacuation
Dynamics,” in: Robert A. Meyers, ed., Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science (New York: Springer,
2009), p. 6476–6495.
5 Note that the term “collective” in this article is used in a mere operational and technical understanding
and that its political dimensions and meanings are not taken into account. Collective thus simply alludes
to a crowd or group consisting of multiple interacting individuals.
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After Affects
notions of mass psychology, these affects exist outside of the individual body and lie in the
relations between them: “Affect is networked, becomes distributed, and is detached from
its anthropomorphic locus in the individual.”6 These affect-relations become the consti-
tutive force of the specific relationality in collective bodies: As biological studies in large
groups of animals showed, affects are distributed through the constantly changing and
moving collective by individual bodily actions and reactions. This for instance leads to
the interesting effect that a bird flock or a fish school as a whole is capable of reacting sub-
stantially faster to external stimuli (like an attacking predator) than a single bird or fish.
Signals – visual, acoustic or through air pressure – are detected via the eyes, ears and body
receptors. Every animal only processes the incoming movement information from a cer-
tain relatively small number of neighboring individuals. By this distributed interaction
structure, an affective stimulus like a predator inducing fear to some members spreads
by and as a bodily movement information through the collective and results in a global
behavior that is an adequate reaction to the stimulus. Some authors thus refer to such
swarms, flocks, herds and schools as sensory integration systems.7 The Timing of Affect here
enfolds as an evolutionary advantage of the collective.
Usually, writes Thacker, these network affects – the intensification of dynamic processes
and the emergence of unpredictable events in network structures – ought to be distin-
guished from the network effects – the technical infrastructure, the rationality, formality
and to numerically computable knowledge about networks. However, in swarms these
network affects intriguingly mix up with the network effects. The given – in traditional
forms like, for example, the telephone – wired network structure with nodes and edges on
which the network affects run and are initiated, in swarms is replaced by a topology where
the nodes – that is, each swarming individual – function also as edges of the network. The
network as such only emerges on the basis of the spreading of network affects.8
This novel mode of dynamic collective organization has gained substantial impact
in the humanities and culture discourses over the last several years. Driven by the
rapid development of mobile network technologies, social swarming in humans became
a buzzword for a (widely appreciated) subversive potential against less dynamic and
more hierarchical forms of collective organization, of opening up novel modes of group
6 Eugene Thacker, “Networks, Swarms, Multitudes,” CTheory, May 18, 2004, http://www.ctheory.net/
articles.aspx?id=423 (retrieved August 31, 2013).
7 Carl R. Schilt and Kenneth S. Norris, “Perspectives on Sensory Integration Systems: Problems,
Opportunities, and Predictions,” in: Julia K. Parrish and William H. Hamner, eds., Animal Groups in Three
Dimensions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 225–244.
8 See: Thacker, “Networks, Swarms, Multitudes.”
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Sebastian Vehlken
movement, and even of (metaphorically) re-conceptualizing mass panic as a mode of

dynamic resistance against control societies.9 In this regard, a second aspect of a Timing
of Affect concerns its alleged potential to open up novel ways of engaging in political
action, either by more flexibly and more spontaneously organizing manifestations on
the street with the help of mobile devices and communication applications, or by novel
forms of synchronized online protest in social networks.
Nonetheless, this social swarming discourse with its focus on biological and social
ideas of affective orderings widely neglects or underestimates the adherent media
genealogy. More profoundly than on a mere metaphorical level, since the 1990s the
related media-technological developments are based on the recursive intertwinement
of a biologization of computer science on the one hand, and of the computerization of
biological research on the other. Profiting from principles and findings of this so-called
computational swarm intelligence, research projects in areas such as crowd control,
evacuation planning, or crowd sensing, for instance, seek to formalize a variety of mass
dynamics. Thereby, they transform all sorts of affective behaviors over time into calculable
movement vectors. Fostered by the capacities of sophisticated multi-agent computer
models, simulation tools, and automated observation and tracking techniques, these
studies – and this will be my guiding thesis – initialized a thorough de-psychologization
of approaches which had formerly been dominated by (mass) psychological concepts
and socio-psychological experimental settings. Thereby, the current dynamic models
not only question the conventional ties of human crowd behavior to poorly defined
affective attributes such as fear, panic, excitement, or herd instincts,10 but also doubt
the recent and oftentimes euphoric notion and the hitherto proclaimed freedom and
unpredictability of socio-political network affects. Both lines of thought nowadays are
countered by media-technical, time-sensitive control infrastructures. From this derives
a third and theoretically prominent aspect of a Timing of Affect, located in the attempts
to model affective behavior as bio-physically describable events in space and time by
means of computer simulation and computerized tracking systems.
9 See: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs. The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge: Basic Books, 2002); Kai van
Eikels, “Schwärme, Smart Mobs, verteilte Öffentlichkeiten. Bewegungsmuster als soziale und politische
Organisation?,” in: Gabriele Brandstetter, Bettina Brandl-Risi and Kai van Eikels, eds., Schwarm(E)motion.
Bewegung zwischen Affekt und Masse (Freiburg: Rombach, 2007); Tiqqun, Kybernetik und Revolte (Berlin/Zurich:
Diaphanes, 2007).
10 For a more detailed discussion, see: Sebastian Vehlken, “Angsthasen. Schwärme als Transformations
ungestalten zwischen Tierpsychologie und Bewegungsphysik,” Zeitschrift für Kultur- und Medienforschung 0
(2009): p. 133–147.
306
After Affects
In the following juxtaposition of older approaches to human crowd behavior (part II

and III) and actual studies with multi-agent systems (part IV) the article will shed light
on this physicalization and de-psychologization of affects. This will be exemplified in
the contexts of mass panic as an instance of affective, critical collective behavior. Thus, the
text explores how the uncanny body politics of the mass and its eerie affects have been
transformed into the computable logistics of mathematically defined agent systems.
In this regard, a second zombie-related event of the summer of 2013 comprises more
than just coincidence and illustration: The blockbuster movie World War Z (Marc
Forster, USA 2013) confronts the audience with numerous impressive crowd sequences
depicting masses of zombies invading a cityscape. Whilst aesthetically appealing to the
conventional notions of mindless rioting masses, the underlying software uses refined
multi-agent animation models for choreographing the animated zombies. Generated
by Moving Picture Company’s (MPC) crowd rendering software ALICE, their inherent
computational swarm intelligence methods are quite similar to those used in scientific
multi-agent simulations of dynamic collectives. Or, more bluntly put: Softwares like
ALICE, Weta Digital’s Massive, or Adobe’s After Effects provide simulated mass dynamics
which come after affects. The Living Dead of Romero’s times today are revived by agent-
based forms of artificial life – just like concepts of human crowds consisting of imbecile
individuals are challenged by much more differentiated models of collective dynamics,
fostered by crowd simulation and crowd tracking techniques.
II. Arithmetics of Agitation
This article will not review the abovementioned and well-known treatises of mass psy-
chology – there is little or rather no controversy over the fact that in the writings of
LeBon, Tarde or Sighele, human crowds trigger a depravation of the human individual
to animalistic behaviors. The crowd is therefore described as far less intelligent, but far
more emotionally tangible than individuals acting alone. “In this account, ‘instincts’
will overwhelm socialized responses, and collective bonds or social norms will then break
down as personal survival becomes the overriding concern.”11 Masses are, as German
11 John Drury and Chris Cocking, “The Mass Psychology of Disasters and Emergency Evacuations: A
Research Report and Implications for Practice,” Research Paper (University of Sussex, 2007), http://www.
sussex.ac.uk/affiliates/panic/Disasters and emergency evacuations (2007).pdf (retrieved August 31, 2013).
307
Sebastian Vehlken
media theorist Joseph Vogl once put it, events “where the social is always accompanied
by the anti-social.”12 More interesting are those animal studies which actually contrib-
uted to the mass psychologists’ theories of corporeal affections and contagions. These
approaches already attempted to identify some basic biologically feasible modes of affec-
tive distribution shared by animal and human crowds. And they resulted – a fact that is
not at all self-evident in the late 19th century – from observations in something one may
dare to call early animal field studies.13
For example, Francis Galton portrayed the specific herd behavior of ungulates which
he observed over several weeks during a trip through South Africa. Galton was most
fascinated by the “blind gregarious instincts” of wild oxes and unable to identify signs
of a normal social behavior:
[The oxes] are not amiable to one another, but show on the whole more expressions of
spite and disgust than of forbearance and fondness. […] Yet although the ox has so little
affection for, or individual interest in, his fellows, he cannot endure even a momentary
severance from his herd. If he be separated from it by strategem or force, he exhibits
every sign of mental agony; he strives with all his might to get back again, and when he
succeeds, he plunges into its middle to bathe his whole body with the comfort of closest
companionship.14
Galton realistically recognized this asocial togetherness as induced by fear of standing

alone. This serves as a functional protection against predators. The aggregation increases
the chances for survival of each individual. As a group, it is far more difficult to ambush
the oxes in surprise. Every ox, writes Galton, transforms into a fiber in a widespread
detector-network: “[A]t almost every moment some eyes, ears, and noses will command
all approaches, [every single beast] is to become the possessor of faculties always awake,
of eyes that see in all directions, of ears and nostrils that explore a broad belt of air.”15
One encounters similar notions in the comparative-psychological studies of French
zoologist Alfred Espinas. In his account of wasps, though, not fear is identified as a con-
12 See: Joseph Vogl, “Über soziale Fassungslosigkeit,” in: Michael Gamper and Peter Schnyder, eds.,
Kollektive Gespenster. Die Masse, der Zeitgeist und andere unfaßbare Körper (Freiburg: Rombach, 2006), p. 171–
189, here p. 178 (trans. Sebastian Vehlken).
13 For a more detailed account, see: Sebastian Vehlken, Zootechnologien. Eine Mediengeschichte der
Schwarmforschung (Berlin/Zürich: Diaphanes, 2012).
14 Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (New York: MacMillan, 1883), p. 49.
15 Ibid., p. 75–76.
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After Affects
stitutive affective factor of collective action, but enragement and agitation. The respec-
tive insects, writes the author, do not rely on any kind of spoken language in order to
communicate with each other, neither do they make use of direct bodily contact – as
observed in ants by Espinas and the swiss natural scientist Auguste Forel, insects which
use their antennae for information exchange.16 Espinas gives a simple explanation: If
an individual would sense a certain level of agitation in other individuals of the same
species, it would be immediately imprinted by it and be “taken away” by the move-
ments of the others, thus instantly imitating their inner and outer state by a mere and
automatic imitation. “In the whole field of intelligent life it is a common law that the
imagination of an agitated state evokes the same state in the observer.”17 In wasps,
writes Espinas, the “energy level” of the agitation is intra-individually transferred by
the intensity of the humming sound which the individuals produce, resulting in the
same state of excitement (also known as: state of mind).18 Corresponding to Galton’s
ideas, the wasps interconnect to a network of multiple coupled sense organs – and here,
as well, a surrounding media-technological zeitgeist of electricity surfaces in the con-
ceptual accounts. Interestingly, Espinas even describes the exponential scaling effects
of these affections in a fictional mathematical model of quantified emotional feedback
loops. This would work like in a parliamentary speech situation, where a speaker tries
to arouse his audience. The auditorium would reflect his engagement within the crowd
and back to the orator, and in a rapid cascade of positive emotional feedback, the crowd
would quickly turn into “something entirely different” – that is, not simply into a con-
glomerat of individuals, but into a single, somehow connected multitude.19
With this line of thought, Espinas follows the path of an organismic logic which con-
ceptualizes the transmission of mutually escalated stimuli to “nervous bodies”20 or “col-
lective organisms”21 which ensure their integrity by the intra-individual interchange of
affects.22 Espinas and Galton both confront human and animal collectives on a shared
behavioral level unimpressed by rationality and consciousness, which nevertheless
16 Auguste Forel, Les fourmis de la Suisse (Zurich: Schweizerische Gesellschaft, 1873).

17 Alfred Espinas, Die thierischen Gesellschaften. Eine vergleichend-psychologische Untersuchung (Braunschweig:
Vieweg, 1879), p. 343–344 (trans. Sebastian Vehlken).
18 Ibid., p. 344.
19 Espinas, Die thierischen Gesellschaften, p. 343–347.
20 Compare: Eva Johach, “Schwarm-Logiken. Genealogien sozialer Organisation in Insektengesellschaften,”
in: Eva Horn und Lucas Mario Gisi, eds., Schwärme – Kollektive ohne Zentrum (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009),
p. 203–224.
21 See: Espinas, Die thierischen Gesellschaften, p. 349.
22 Ibid., p. 183–187.
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Sebastian Vehlken
enables and guarantees an aggregate behavior that corresponds to changing external fac-
tors without an underlying centralist control structure.
While Galton uses this common ground to criticize the slavish instincts of the ordi-
nary people in mass societies and calls for “outstanding individuals,” Espinas puts
forward the ubiquity of sociality on all complexity levels of biological life. Both their
naturalists’ views on animal groups thus is imprinted by and mixed up with mere
proto-sociological (and, to a certain extent, ideologically biased) hypotheses about the
structure of human societies. And yet – or rather because of this – in both authors, the
notions of affect, of emotion and of instinct and their discrimination remain rather
indifferent and unclear. Affect and emotion seemingly intermingle and overlap and
only serve to distinguish a certain psycho-corporeal behavior from conscious individual
reactions and actions. However, such observations from early ethological studies served
as illustrative examples and empirical foundations for the mass psychologists’ hypoth-
eses of pre-conscious, affective contagion in human crowds, resulting in a somewhat
blind and overagitated group mind – and thus in their disavowing characterization.23
III. (Mis-)Understanding Mass Panic
Humans thus are depicted as rather deficient swarm members. While birds, fish and
other herd animals often develop adequate collective dynamics even in case of great dan-
ger and are also beheld at all times as miraculous and astonishing phenomena, human
masses tend to behave less acceptably in such cases and are far more critically perceived.
In his fundamental tome Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti called such affective behaviors
the “disintegration of the crowd within the crowd,”24 eventually resulting in panic and
thereby emanating a paradox: A shared fear would beset the mass, but at the same time
would lead to extreme individual reactions. Anybody would kick and push and trample,
thus emphazising his singularity with all force, resulting in a highly uncoordinated mass
movement. In accordance with Canetti’s text, panic has for a long time been assumed
“to be the natural response to physical danger and perceived entrapment.”25 But despite
23 See: Edward A. Ross, Social Psychology. An Outline and Source Book (New York: MacMillan, 1908); William
McDougall, The Group Mind (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920).
24 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Continuum, 1960), p. 26–27.
25 Anthony R. Mawson, “Understanding Mass Panic and Other Collective Responses to Threat and
Disaster,” Psychiatry 68.2 (2005): p. 95–113, here p. 95.
310
After Affects
this common belief and regardless of the numerous articles from fields like social psy-
chology and disaster studies that until the 1980s fostered the characterization of panic
as an infectious, egoistic, asocial and even irrational behavior in large crowds,26 panic
has always remained a vague term. As early as 1963, a scholar from Hudson Institute
complained: “The literature on panic research is strewn with wrecked hulks of attempts
to define ‘panic.’ When these definitions are placed side by side, one is confronted by
chaos.”27 “[They] range from ‘uncontrolled flight’ to cognitive states or inappropriate
perceptions leading to irrational behaviors.”28 And in a recent overview, Enrico Quaran-
telli delivered the punch line concerning the diversity and heterogeneity of the notions
by stating that: “the only common dimension is that whatever it is, panic is something
that is bad.”29 As an effect, a recent encyclopedia article defines mass panic only very
broadly as “a breakdown of ordered, cooperative behavior due to anxious reactions to a
certain event” often accompanied by the “attempted escape of many individuals from a
real or perceived threat in situations of a perceived struggle for survival.”30
These definitional difficulties arose in a scientific environment which for decades
mainly concentrated on the dangerous potential of masses as a whole, rather than on
the security of individuals within a crowd.31 Or, as sociologist Clark McPhail noted in
1991: “Students of the crowd, with certain exceptions, have devoted far more time and
effort in criticizing, debating and offering alternative explanations [for mass actions, SV]
than they have to specifying and describing the phenomena to be explained.”32 Only
some authors in disaster sociology and safety science from the late 1950s onwards began
26 See: John P. Keating, “The Myth of Panic,” Fire Journal 76.3 (1982): p. 57–61.
27 Nehemian Jordan, “What is Panic?,” Discussion Paper HI-189-DP (Washington, DC: Hudson Institute,
1963), cit. Enrico L. Quarantelli, “Conventional Beliefs and Counterintuitive Realities,” Social Research 75.3
(2008): p. 873–904, here p. 876.
28 Lee Clarke and Caron Chess, “Elites and Panic: More to Fear than Fear Itself,” Social Forces 82.2
(2008): p. 993–1014, cit. Paul Gantt and Ron Gantt, “Disaster Psychology. Dispelling the Myths of Panic,”
Professional Safety 57.8 (2012): p. 42–49, here p. 43.
29 Enrico L. Quarantelli, “Conventional Beliefs and Counterintuitive Realities,” Social Research 75.3 (2008):
p. 873–904, here p. 876.
30 See: Helbing and Johansson, “Pedestrian, Crowd and Evacuation Dynamics,” in: Robert A. Meyers, ed.,
Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science (New York: Springer, 2009), p. 6476–6495.
31 See: Serge Moscovici, The Age of the Crowd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
32 Clark McPhail, The Myth of the Madding Crowd (New York: de Gruyter, 1991), p. XXIII, cit. Jonathan
D. Sime, “Crowd Psychology and Engineering,” Safety Science 21 (1995): p. 1–14, here p. 4; see also: Had-
ley Cantril, “The Invasion from Mars,” in: Eleanor E. Maccoby, T. M. Newcomb and Eugene L. Hartley,
eds., Readings in Social Psychology, (New York: Henry and Holt, 1958), p. 291–300; Enrico L. Quarantelli, “The
Nature and Conditions of Panic,” American Journal of Sociology 60 (1954): p. 267–275; Anselm L. Strauss, “The
Literature on Panic,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 39 (1944): p. 317–328.
311
Sebastian Vehlken
to turn aside such perspectives on processes of a collective consciousness (or, for that
matter, a collective unconsciousness) of crowds. They instead started studying the individ-
ual behavior and psychology involved, challenging the former notions of irrationality
and asociality.33 Thus,
when people, attempting to escape from a burning building pile up at a single exit their
behaviour appears highly irrational to someone who learns after the panic that other exits
were available. To the actor in the situation who does not recognise the existence of these
alternatives, attempting to fight his way to the only exit available may seem a very logical
choice as opposed to burning to death.34
Such an individual-based perspective on mass dynamics offered an alternative way

for representing, evaluating and addressing crowd disasters. Research emancipated
from former accounts which sought to bind together individual with mass psychology
and continued with the quest for a group mind, a somehow identical state of mind
of people in a crowd.35 However, the study of individual behavior in cases of panic
proved difficult. When scientists attempted to identify the effects of cooperative or
competing behavior in cases of restricted escape routes by simulated room evacuations
and psychological laboratory- and group experiments, thereby trying to evaluate the
rationality of individual behavior in cases of panic, these endeavours resulted in rather
insufficent data.36
The experiments have failed to explore the social dynamics of crowd movement directly,
why and where flight behaviour and/or crushing occurs and how it can be prevented. The
single group in the psychological experiments has been assumed to possess the essential
properties of the far larger crowd. Ways in which a crowd’s composition will vary […] in
33 Jonathan D. Sime, “Crowd Psychology and Engineering,” p. 10, cit. Enrico L. Quarantelli, “The
Behaviour of Panic Participants,” Sociology and Social Research 41 (1957): p. 187–194; see also: Alexander
Mintz, “Non-Adaptive Group Behaviour,” Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology 46 (1951): p. 150–159.
34 Ralph H. Turner and Lewis M. Killian, Collective Behaviour (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1975), p. 10,
cit. Sime, “Crowd Psychology,” p. 5.
35 See: Helbing and Johansson, “Pedestrian, Crowd and Evacuation Dynamics,” p. 6483; Miles Hewstone,
Wolfgang Stroebe and Klaus Jonas, eds., Introduction to Social Psychology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).
36 See: John C. Condry, Arnold E. Dahlke, Arthur H. Hill and Harold H. Kelley, “Collective Behaviour
in a Simulated Panic Situation,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 1 (1965): p. 20–54; Sharon Guten
and Vernon L. Allen, “Likelihood of Escape, Likelihood of Danger and Panic Behaviour,” Journal of Social
Psychology 87 (1972): p. 29–36.
312
After Affects
different types of settings and situations […] are not represented in the laboratory based
psychology experiments.37
Socio-psychological approaches from the 1960s to 1990s thus inevitably neglected

the effects of specific spatial environments on crowd dynamics. Moreover, an empirical
account of mass panic seemed little feasible in terms of realism. Neither would it be
easy to evoke a human mass panic in an experimental setting as such, nor would the
conjoint threat to the sample individuals be without problems from an ethical stand-
point.38 Add to this a complementary strain of animal experiments that had to deal
with the questionable correspondence of observations in mice or ants to human panic
behavior. And if one takes into account some models developed in engineering during
the same time which tried to describe human mass movements in analogy to physical
phemomena like hydraulic flows or granular particles in pipe systems and tanks, they
introduced their particular set of flaws: For example, they reduce the individual poten-
tials of deviating behavior to identical elements, and, according to Jonathan Sime, put
forward a
notion that people can be equated with nonthinking objects encourages an emphasis on
crowd control through centralized (autocratic) building control systems, rather than
crowd management through distributed (democratic) building intelligence.39
As an outcome, quite a few studies began to look at case studies of real-life disasters,
taking them as empirical evidence for studying panic behavior. And somewhat surpris-
ingly, “systematic studies of a variety of different emergencies and disasters have each
emphazised the sheer lack of crowd panic.”40 Qualitative studies, interviews with disas-
ter victims, or fatality demographics most often revealed that the individual behavior
was far from anti-social. Panic behavior in the classical understanding seemed indeed
to be a myth.41 On these foundations, emerging approaches like the affiliation model42
37 Sime, “Crowd Psychology,” p. 7.

38 Drury and Cocking, “Mass Psychology,” p. 13.
41 See: Keating, “The Myth of Panic,” p. 56–61.
42 Anthony R. Mawson, “Panic Behavior: A Review and New Hypothesis,” paper presented at the 9th
World Congress of Sociology, Uppsala 1978.
313
Sebastian Vehlken
and the normative approach43 stated that even in disaster situations people were unwill-
ing to leave companions behind and that behavior was to a great extent “structured by
the same social rules and roles that operated in everyday life.”44 And while these models
accounted for behaviors based on pre-existing relationships or elements, the social iden-
tity model tried to explain the oftentimes observed sociality even in groups of complete
strangers, calling for a “model of mass emergent sociality,”45 turning the older notions
upside down.
But even if this turnaround somehow rehabilitated the image of the psychology
involved in human crowd dynamics and assigned a decisive role to cognitive decision-
making and not merely to affective behaviors, these models were only able to look back-
wards in history. Undeniably, they insinuated consequences for the design of disaster
management strategies which started to include more direct and distributed communi-
cation of officials with a panicking crowd instead of just trying to regulate it by central-
ized brute force.46 But also without a doubt, crowd disasters still occurred, and with
sometimes high fatality rates47 – with or without an assumed mass emergent social-
ity, and in most cases due to scarce spatial resources. Thus, the planning of preventive
measures of undesired crowd dynamics in environments like stadiums and other highly
populated buildings or jammed plazas called for complementary strategies.
IV. The Computer-Simulated Crowd:

From Affect and Emotion to Motion
The insufficiency of socio-psychological approaches owes to the fact that “despite of

the frequent reports in the media and many published investigations of crowd disas-
ters, a quantitative understanding of the observed phenomena […] was lacking for a
long time.”48 However, since the middle of the 1990s the collective dynamics of large
43 Norris R. Johnson, William E. Feinberg and Drue M. Johnson, “Microstructure and Panic: The Impact
of Social Bonds on Individual Action in Collective Flight from The Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire,” in:
Russel R. Dynes and Kathleen J. Tierney, eds., Disaster, Collective Behaviour and Social Organization (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 1994), p. 168–189.
45 Ibid.
46 See: Gantt and Gantt, “Disaster Psychology,” p. 47–49.
47 Even in combination with advanced computer modeling techniques, crowd disasters still occur. Take
for example the Duisburg Love Parade Disaster in 2010.
48 Helbing and Johansson, “Pedestrian, Crowd and Evacuation Dynamics,” p. 6484.
314
After Affects
crowds and agglomerates are studied with novel techniques such as computer simula-
tions. These approaches aimed at complementing the socio-psychological findings with
computer models that would provide the means for defining and predicting specific
parameters of crowd dynamics and disasters. The formerly criticized simplifications into
non-thinking objects in mechanistic model analogies are also complicated and elevated to
another level: In so-called Agent-based Computer Simulations (henceforth: ABM), agents
can act as individual or group decision-makers. Autonomy replaces the former (and eas-
ier) modeling of homogeneous objects. Individual agents can be described by a variety
of different and differing agent attributes and agent methods. The former define the inter-
nal dispositions of an agent, the latter determine the capabilities of an agent to inter-
act with others and the environment.49 Instead of the criticized centralistic approach of
the former mechanistic models, ABM operate in a highly distributed fashion, and thus
epistemically generate collective behavior in crowds as an accumulation of intrinsic,
individualized influence factors such as agent velocities, collision probabilities, accel-
eration or pressure forces, or simulated perceptual constraints. These studies continue –
under the conditions of advanced object-oriented software models – in the movement
away from vague concepts and notions such as asocial or irrational. They convey a regu-
latory approach that deals much more neutrally with something which now is called
“non-adaptive behavior”50 and results in statements like the following: “Here, however,
we will not be interested in the question whether ‘panic’ actually occurs or not. We will
rather focus on the issue of crowd dynamics at high densities and under psychological
stress.”51 ABM coalesce the formerly separated areas of psychological behavioral stud-
ies and of the mechanistic modeling approaches in virtual programming environments.
In this process, the models couple the earlier mechanistic references with bio-physical
groundings of collective behavior. The latter are based on the mathematical definition
and the computer-generation of a variety of autonomous virtual agents and their simu-
lated inter-individual information exchange. And as an effect, they clarify the relations
between certain spatial environments and a realistic human crowd behavior, insofar as
the environments can also now be conceptualized as “an information system through which
49 Charles M. Macal and Michael J. North, “Tutorial on Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation, Part
2: How to Model with Agents,” L. Felipe Perrone, Barry G. Lawson, Jason Liu, Frederick P. Wieland, eds.,
Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Winter Simulation Conference (Monterey, December 3–6, 2006), http://ieeexplore.
ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4117582, p. 73–83 (retrieved March 4, 2013).
50 Dirk Helbing, Illés Farkas and Tamás Vicsek, “Simulation Dynamical Features of Escape Panic,” Nature
407 (September 2000): p. 487–490.
315
Sebastian Vehlken
people move.”52 Henceforth, they enable a quantitative account of mass panic which
shows novel qualities, for instance emerging pressure waves in the crowd which precede
crowd disasters as typical patterns.
Some groundbreaking work in ABM derives from the simulation of biological sys-
tems such as swarms, flocks, and herds, which show how complex behavior on a collec-
tive scale can emerge even from a set of very few and simple decision and behavior rules
in each individual. Two of the seminal computer simulations – which have also been
quickly adopted to and modified for biological studies in animal collectives53 – have
been William Reeves’ particle systems and Craig Reynolds’ boids model. Since their design
in the mid-1980s, models of these kinds have been advanced to far more complicated
agent systems.54 Terzepoulos, Thalmann, Helbing and others for instance started to
model human crowds and equipped their agents with ever-more detailed artificial senses
and biophysical control. This led to a more realistic behavior in relation to other agents
and the simulated environment compared with the mechanistic models, for example,
when it comes to cohesion or avoidance or to the coordination with neighboring indi-
viduals.55 Furthermore, in some models the agents get the ability to learn from already
experienced situations and memorize by way of evolutionary or genetic algorithms. Or
they are pre-programmed with certain preferred cultural determinants or social forces,56 for
example with conventions on how to avoid other pedestrians or to choose a certain side
when walking in a corridor. And they take into consideration scaling effects: “In some
sense, the uncertainty of the individual behaviors is averaged out at the macroscopic
level of description.”57 Instead of assigning instances like a group mind or collective con-
sciousness to human crowds, these computer-based simulation studies look for the devel-
opment of certain typical global patterns as an effect of various local and individual

53 See: Vehlken, Zootechnologien.
54 William T. Reeves, “Particle Systems – A Technique for Modeling a Class of Fuzzy Objects,” ACM
Transactions on Graphics 2.2 (1983): p. 91–108; Craig W. Reynolds, “Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed
Behavioral Model,” Computer Graphics 21.4 (1987): p. 25–34.
55 Helbing, et al., “Simulating Dynamical Features of Escape Panic,” p. 487–490; Soraia Raupp Mousse,
Branislav Ulicny and Amaury Aubel, “Groups and Crowd Simulation,” in: Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann
and Daniel Thalmann, eds., Handbook of Virtual Humans (New York: John Wiley, 2004), p. 323–352; Wei Shao
and Demetri Terzopoulos, “Autonomous Pedestrians,” in: Ken Anjyo and Petros Faloutsos, eds., Proceedings
of the 2005 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (Los Angeles, July 29–31, 2005).
56 See: Kurt Lewin, Field Theory in Social Science (New York: Harper, 1951); Dirk Helbing, “A Mathematical
Model for the Behavior of Individuals in a Social Field,” Journal of Mathematical Sociology 19.3 (1994): p. 189–219.
316
After Affects
movements and movement decisions. These dynamics only emerge synthetically in the
runtime of their simulation models and are not observable by real-life experimentation
or by pure mathematical-analytical approaches.
As an outcome, a large enough number of such lifelike autonomous agents, put together
in a virtual spatial environment, would show a collective behavior similar to real life in
specific situations. And this holds true especially for evacuation scenarios with high den-
sities, where human behavior is much easier to model and to predict due to the entailed
environmental and perceptional constraints. By the modulation of the parameters
involved one then can identify and tune the relevant factors involved by experimenting
with the simulation model. However, these ABM do not attempt to implement a sort
of artificial psychology, since internal processes in the agent are only relevant insofar as
they result in certain motions in time and space, and thus in the emergence of certain
global patterns. The models do not attempt to describe the emotions or the bodily affects
involved in crowd dynamics, but only calculate (with) the motions defined by individual
agent movement capabilities and environmental constraints. As an outcome, human
crowd behavior can no longer be described as a degeneration of humans into animals.
Rather, the computational abstraction of biological movement rules enables an opera-
tive and quantitative description of crowd dynamics in humans. And furthermore, the
network affects, as defined by Thacker, cannot be separated from the inherent network
effects, since the models realistically calculate cases of panic only with the help of effective
simulated motion data. Or, to put it shortly: There is little point in pursuing strategies
of affective computing58 when it comes to realistically modeling the dynamics of affective
behavior in human collectives. Physically described and quantified effects depict what
had been assigned to affects, and the more advanced models realistically produce crowd
phenomena like the freezing-by-heating-effect, the faster-is-slower-paradox, or the emer-
gence of phantom panics.59
For the last ten years – and implying the only recent development of algorithms that
can simultaneously handle thousands, ten thousands or more lifelike agents – research-
ers have attempted to literally calculate disasters with the help of such ABM models, or
rather: to calculate survival and prevent disasters in real life by running disastrous
crowd scenarios in their computer simulations. In this context, one simulates for exam-
58 See: Rosalind W. Picard, “Affective Computing,” M.I.T Media Laboratory Perceptual Computing Section
Technical Report No. 321 (Cambridge, MA, 1995); Marvin Minsky, The Emotion Machine (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 2006).
59 Helbing and Johansson, “Pedestrian, Crowd and Evacuation Dynamics,” p. 6487–6489.
317
Sebastian Vehlken
ple the behavior of pedestrians in various spatial environments, with differing velocities
and grades of density. As a consequence, one can for instance identify feasible architec-
tural interventions to improve the speed of evacuation of a certain building. It seems
interesting in this context that the computer simulation tools are not exclusively devel-
oped in scientific laboratories, but that SFX companies like the abovementioned Massive
Software also provide sophisticated engineering simulations.60 This owes to the fact that
their know-how in depicting collective dynamics of Orcs, zombies and other mindless
movie characters can be employed to simulate and study more realistic scenarios as well.
Those simulations can guide the modelers to counter-intuitive solutions, (e.g., to place
a column directly in front of an exit, which substantially increases evacuation speed.)
The situations can be tested under different environmental conditions, for example by
adding smoke or fires to the scenarios which further constrain the orientation of the
agents. And if combined with advanced methods of crowd capturing – that is, the live
feedback of data generated by the automated analysis of digital video images of mass
phenomena into the ABM models – the simulation can help event organizers and emer-
gency response personnel to detect emerging, potentially critical crowd situations at an
early stage. Once typical patterns (e.g., of so-called movement waves) are identified which
indicate catastrophic outcomes at a later stage, various counter-measures can be tested
in the computer model and the optimal reaction strategy can be identified.
Even more refined systems are underway: A reseach project of the German Research
Centre for Artificial Intelligence in Kaiserslautern generates pedestrian-behavior models
by inferring and visualizing crowd conditions from pedestrians’ GPS location traces.
Coined crowd sensing, it was tested in 2011 and then applied during the 2012 London
Olympics. The system is able to infer and visualize crowd density, crowd turbulence,
crowd velocity and crowd pressure in real time. This works by the collected location
updates from festival visitors. The researchers distributed a mobile phone app that on
the one hand supplied the users with event-related information, and on the other hand
periodically logged the device’s location, orientation and movement speed by GPS and
the built-in gyroscope. Then, it sent the data back to the running model. The system
allegedly helped to assess occurring crowd conditions and to spot critical situations
faster compared to traditional video-based methods.61
60 See: http://www.massivesoftware.com/engineering.html (retrieved August 31, 2013).

61 Compare: Martin Wirz et al., “Inferring Crowd Conditions from Pedestrians’ Location Traces for Real-
Time Crowd Monitoring during City-Scale Mass Gatherings,” Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE 21st International
Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (Toulouse: WETICE, 2012), p. 367–
318
After Affects
Calculating disasters today means to coalesce empirical data of past catastrophies,

observational data of mass events, and the computer-based experimentation and sce-
nario-building with virtual ABM models of realistic agents and spatial environments.
It thus combines analytical and synthetic approaches, supported by advanced visualiza-
tion techniques, in the areas of crowd simulation, capturing, and sensing. With the lat-
ter, the crowd itself becomes kind of an operational medium – not only for its internal
organization, but as a medium that helps regulating the multiple sensations and pos-
sible affections in a crowd in a real-time feedback loop to a computer model – a model,
that in turn itself feeds back to the real-life crowd, sending information or warnings
to the handheld devices of the app’s users. However, one would still rather question
the applicability of the proposed feedback loop, as most people with the crowd sensing
app most likely would not read the (individualized) directives appearing on their smart-
phones in the case of panic.
V. After Effects
The employment of ABM in crowd control and evacuation studies signifies a turn from
socio-psychological approaches and studies of group behaviors to physically describable
parameters. Despite the fact that ABM incorporate findings from the biological study of
animal collectives, they do not seek to directly determine a certain nature of affects like
fear or panic, but facilitate virtual computer experiments that indirectly account for the
spreading of affects by making observable collective movement patterns. What has often
been an inquiry of the missing half-second,62 now turns into the minute description of
individual movement vectors and capabilities of group individuals under certain critical
conditions, and of the emergence of typical global movement patterns. Regardless of the
nature of the involved affects, the (pre-) calculation of their effects in most cases suffices
to deter undesired outcomes and feasible reactions to vaguely described pre-conscious
psychological states. The preoccupation with these effects operationalizes the involved
372; Werner Pluta, “Crowd Management Smartphone soll Massenpanik verhindern,” http://www.golem.
de/ news/crowd-management-smartphone-soll-massenpanik-verhindern-1209-94331.html (retrieved June
28, 2013).
62 See for example: Marie-Luise Angerer, Vom Begehren nach dem Affekt (Zurich/Berlin: Diaphanes, 2007),
English translation Desire After Affect (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014); Brian Massumi,
“The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): p. 83–105; Hertha Sturm, “Wahrnehmung und Fern-
sehen – Die fehlende Halbsekunde,” Media Perspektiven 1 (1984): p. 58–64.
319
Sebastian Vehlken
affects and situates them as bio-physical movement parameters. Such operational, effec-
tive softwares – sometimes even developed in the special effects business – successfully
come after affects. Nonetheless, they not only might calculate disasters and provide
for life-saving strategies, but they could also be utilized to counterattack the proposed
potential of the socio-political network affects of social swarming. But anyway: The latest
thing one should do in the face of these technologies is to behave like a zombie from the
onset.
320
Brian Massumi
THE MARKET IN WONDERLAND

Complexifying the Subject of Interest
The hypothesis of a calculable future leads to a wrong interpretation of the principles

of behaviour which the need for action compels us to adopt, and to an underestimation
of the concealed factors of utter doubt, precariousness, hope and fear.
John Maynard Keynes1
We are enjoined to rational choice. We are taught that our freedom is one with the
freedom of choice. We are told we become who we are by how we choose. We are assured
that if we choose well, according to our own best interests, we will end up serving the
interests of all. We are told that there is a mechanism in place to ensure this convergence
between our interests and others’. Market is its name. Its “invisible hand” adjusts
best choices to each other, its magic touch guided by the principle of competition.
Competition weeds out suboptimal choices, selecting for efficiency. Efficiencies multiply
each other, minimizing effort and maximizing profit for all. The market, we are further
led to believe, is self-regulating. It has a natural inclination toward optimization. As
political subjects, we are enjoined to vote, rationally, in its interests so that we may
pursue our own, for the general good. Rationally, the political subject coincides with the
economic subject of self-interest that we all are, fundamentally, in our private pursuit of
happiness. And what, if not that, gives meaning and motivation to our lives? We are all
paying guests at the Tea Party of choice, spreading our favorite jam on our very own slice
of the bread of life, served on the silver platter of efficiency by the invisible hand.
But on closer inspection, it appears there is a rabbit hole at the heart of the market.
It plummets from the apparently solid ground of rational choice to a wonderland where
nothing appears the same. Affect is its name. The “concealed factors” of doubt, precari-
ousness, hope, and fear – and why not?, love, friendship and joy – tend to bubble back
up to the surface with rowdy abandon. In today’s version of free-market ideology – neo-
liberalism – the affective commotion has become so insistent that something else sur-
faces as well: the creeping suspicion that it is upon the groundless ground of these now
1 John Maynard Keynes, “The General Theory of Employment,” in: idem, The Collected Writings of John
Maynard Keynes, Vol. 14 (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 109–123, here p. 122.
321
Brian Massumi
n ot-so-concealed factors that the edifice of the economy is actually built. Efficiencies,
we are still assured, multiply each other. They lasso each other, bootstrapping the econ-
omy out of its periodic crises into a provisionally stable order that we are still entreated
to consider rational. But when markets react more like mood rings than self-steering
wheels, the affective factor becomes increasingly impossible to factor out. It becomes
obvious that the “rationalizing” of the economy is a precarious art of snatching emer-
gent order out of affect. The creeping suspicion is that the economy is best understood
as a division of the affective arts.2
The implications of this groundless grounding in affective artistry are worth a look,
not least for what it might say about “rational” self-interest as the guarantor of self-
optimizing order, but also for the rethinking it might necessitate of the very concept
of the rational in its relation to affect. Michel Foucault provides a provocative starting
point in his 1979 lessons on the genealogy of neo-liberalism.3
The Market in Wonderland
The “invisible hand” makes at least a cameo appearance in every discussion of the free
market. Foucault’s is no exception. As its inventor Adam Smith conceived it, Foucault
argues, the concept had nothing of the godlike quality that has come to be attributed
to it. The whole point of the concept was that the economic system is too churningly
complex for there to be any possibility of a lordly overview upon it. In his genealogy of
neoliberalism, Foucault makes the point in no uncertain terms: when it comes to things
2 For a classic study of the role of affect in the economy, see: Jocelyn Pixley, Emotions in Finance: Dis-
trust and Uncertainty in Global Markets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Art: then-US Federal
Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan underscored the centrality of the creative factor in an October 2001
speech where he credits the economy’s ability to bounce back from the “shock” of 9/11 to a “different kind
of efficiency” that is none other than the super-flexible “creativity of our system”, see: “The September 11
Tragedy and the Response of the Financial Industry,” remarks by Alan Greenspan to the American Bank-
ers Associations Virtual Annual Convention, October 23, 2001, http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/
Speeches/2001/20011023/default.htm (retrieved March 1, 2014). Greenspan liberally employed the affec-
tive vocabulary of “shock” to the system in the immediate post 9/11 period (See for example: “The Condi-
tion of the Financial Markets,” testimony of Alan Greenspan before the Committee on Banking, Hous-
ing, and Urban Affairs, U.S. Senate, September 20, 2001, http://www.federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/
TESTIMONY/2001/20010920/default.htm (retrieved March 1, 2014). Of course, 9/11 was not the last shock
to have affected the market.
3 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979 (New York: Palgrave-
Macmillan, 2008).
322
economic, there is no “total transparency.”4 Not only is there no total transparency there
is no transparency or totality. The concept of the invisible hand, as Foucault interprets
it, is a principle of blindness in an open field of ceaseless activity whose contours, always
shifting, are by nature indefinite. “Being in the dark and the blindness of all the eco-
nomic agents is an absolute necessity.”5
For neoliberals, this is actually a good thing: it makes economic liberalism unavoid-
able. It means that the economy can have no sovereign. The invisible hand actually means
“hands off.” The liberal’s principle of laissez-faire, Foucault quips, becomes for the neo-
liberals “do-not-laisser-faire government”: tie the government’s hands.6 Any governmen-
tal attempt from on high to weave the strands together into a well-defined, predictably
regulated whole will just fray the fabric to the ripping point. Government purports to
act all-knowingly in the general interest, and in its hubris always fumbles. Individuals,
too, are under injunction, in the name of the general good, to act without regard for it.
For it is only then that the real invisible hand can work.
But it’s not a hand at all. It’s an accumulation of little-handed decisions, which end
up serving the general good in spite of being self-interested. Individual decisions, made
in the darkness of self-interest, percolate through the field. To the extent that the results
of these decisions form positive feedback loops, they give rise to mutually beneficial
multiplier effects and there occurs a “spontaneous synthesis” of what’s best for all.7 The
synthesis is entirely involuntary with regard to each individual.8 This “rationalization”
of the economy to which the subject of interest’s decisions involuntarily contributes is
an emergent property of a complex, self-organizing system: a novelty and a creation,
forever self-renewing. The synthesis, Foucault continues, is a “positive effect” of an
“infinite number” of “accidents” occurring on ground level in the “apparent chaos”,9
or quasi-chaos, of the market environment. These are bound together by a “directly
4 Ibid., p. 279.
5 Ibid., p. 297.
6 Ibid., p. 247; in practice, of course, neoliberalism entails a large and even expanding range of forms
of governmental intervention designed, paradoxically, to maintain the freedom of the market from
government intervention, see: ibid., p. 175–176 and p. 296. The crucial point, for Foucault, is that these
mechanisms are “environmental”: they are aimed at modulating the “rules of the game” rather than the
actions of the players directly, and operate on the supposedly leveled playing field, not form on high-in a
sovereign manner, see: ibid., p. 259–260. On environmentality, see: Brian Massumi, “National Enterprise
Emergency: Steps Toward an Ecology of Powers,” Theory, Culture & Society (UK) 26. 6 (2009): p. 153–185.
7 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, p. 300.
8 Ibid., p. 275–276.
9 Ibid., p. 277.
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Brian Massumi
multiplying mechanism” – competition – which, Foucault emphasizes, operates in the

absence of any form of transcendence.10 In other words, the positive synthesis of market
conditions occurs immanently to the economic field. The choice of the subject of self-
interest rabbit-holed in that field of immanence is “irreducible” and “nontransferable.”11
It is “unconditionally referred to the subject himself.”12 At its core, Foucault says, the
economic model is one of “existence itself”: it concerns first and foremost a relation of
the “individual to himself.”13
This is existence in its dissociative dimension.14 The subject circles itself more and
more tightly around its individual power of choice, like a dog to sleep, wrapping itself
centripetally around a center of promised satisfaction. It circles in on itself, away from
the social, unmindful of non-economic societal logics. But it all works out to the best
for society in the end, they say, thanks to the positive synthesis of multiplier effects.
Relation to oneself involuntarily amplifies across the multiplier effects to become a
system-wide social fact. The inmost dimensions of individual existence are operatively
linked to the most encompassing level, that of the market environment that is the
economic field of life. What is most intensely individual is at the same time most wide-
rangingly social. The smallest scale and the largest scale resonate as one, in a quasi-
chaos of mutual sensitivity. To relate self-interestedly to oneself is, in the very same act,
to relate involuntarily to everyone else.
But there is a problem. It has to do with the future. Success, of course, is not guar-
anteed. The self-organizing of the system at the largest scale can synthesize its way past
many a micro-failure. As choices percolate through the economic field, the negative
impact of individual failures is compensated for by the multiplier effects of the suc-
cesses. Given the infinity of accidents riddling the economic field of life and the existen-
tial blindness of all economic actors, there is an ever-present threat of a misstep. Every
economic calculation is a calculus of risk. “Behavioral finance (psychology) and rational
actor models (the ‘rational economic man’, or REM) rarely emphasize how uncertainty
10 Ibid., p. 275–276.
11 Ibid., p. 272.
12 Ibid., p. 272.
13 Ibid., p. 242.
14 On the dissociation of the social and the economic, see: Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, p. 200–201. It is the
concept of “human capital” that existentializes this dissociation and simultaneously overcomes it. The
individual as human capital becomes an enterprise (“entrepreneur of himself,” p. 226), as the enterprise at
all scales becomes the fundamental unit of society, p. 225. On human capital, see: ibid., p. 224–265.
324
differs from risk and probability.”15 Choices in the present become highly charged affec-
tively with fear for the uncertain future. The present is shaken, tremulous with futu-
rity. There is no calculus of risk independent of an individual’s affective self-relation to
uncertainty. You can calculate risk in terms of probabilities, but probabilities by nature
have nothing to say about any given case. The affect accompanying uncertainty is there,
in any case.
Even in the best-case scenario, rationality and affectivity cannot be held safely apart.
Unlike the juridical subject of the law and the civil subject of society, the economic sub-
ject of interest is never called upon to renounce its self-interest for the general good.16
Self-interestedness remains “unconditional.” Self-interest is measured in satisfaction.
We have been successful in our self-interestedness if we have given ourselves satisfac-
tion. What the economically productive subject of interest ultimately produces is its
own satisfaction.17 Paradoxically, the measure of how “rationally” a subject of interest
behaves can only be measured affectively, in the currency of satisfaction. Rationality and
affectivity are joined at the self-interested hip, in one way or another, for better and for
worse. “Emotions function in the core structures of the financial world.”18
The subject of interest is never called upon to renounce self-interest. But it is fre-
quently called upon to defer the very satisfaction by which its self-interest is measured.
Feeling insecure? Be reasonable. Defer your satisfaction to a more secure time of life.
Work toward retirement. But this is only a rational choice if you trust the system’s self-
organizing. This is an increasingly difficult sell as crises follow each other in rapid suc-
cession. Each crisis is a shock to the system, at all scales. Uncertainty starts to feed on
uncertainty. Fear builds into panic. Negative multiplier effects take over. Household
savings vaporize and national economies crumble. Suspicions grow that the invisible
hand suffers from a degenerative motor disease.
All signs are that the condition is congenital. Crisis no longer seems a punctual
interval between periods of stability. It starts to feel like the new normal. That it should
be so only stands to reason. The premise of any rational calculation is that similarly
strategized actions will yield similar results. But the whole point of an economy
that selects for creative multiplier effects is that multiplier effects are nonlinear: by
15 Pixley, Emotions in Finance, p. 18.

16 Foucault insists on the incommensurability between the subject of law (or right), and liberalism’s
homo oeconomicus, the subject of economics (subject of interest), Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, p. 272–276.
17 See: ibid., p. 226.
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Brian Massumi
definition, they are effects that are not commensurate with their causes, even if the
causes be known. The whole point of capitalist enterprise is to “leverage”: to extract a
surplus yield of effect over and above what would normally be expected to follow from
an investment. The capitalist process is driven by the potential for, and yearning after,
an excess of effect over any given quantity of causative input: surplus-value. The more
complex the system is, the more uncertain the future becomes. And complexification has
been a constitutive tendency of the capitalist system from its beginnings. Capitalism has
always been a far-from-equilibrium system, becoming ever more so. The same multiplier
mechanism that promises future satisfaction makes it exponentially less certain.
Why defer satisfaction if the capitalist future is constitutively uncertain? But on the
other hand, how can you not play it safe by deferring your satisfaction, precisely because
the capitalist future is so uncertain? The risk calculations of the subject of interest
become more and more affectively overdetermined by the tension between fear of the
future and hope for success, and between satisfaction and its uncertain deferral. The
embrace of rational self-interest and affective agitation becomes all the closer. They fall
all the more intensely into each other’s orbit, to the point that they contract into each
other, entering into a zone of indistinction, at the heart of every act.
It’s a vicious circle. Positive multiplier effects can be counted on only when individuals’
rational choices mutually reinforce each other, catching like a contagion. This is the
point at which rational choice is indistinguishable from “irrational exuberance” (in the
legendary phrase of Alan Greenspan). This is also precisely the mechanism that forms
speculative bubbles leading to crisis.19 The same mechanism that promises satisfaction
brings on crisis. The tired hound of self-interest, circling in for satisfaction, traces its
own private vicious circle in its self-relating movements. Its sleep will be agitated. It
will twitch with dreams of disappearing rabbits.
The Inmost End
In times of crisis, the first words out of the mouth of any economic leader are: “we must
restore trust in the system.” But as systems theorist Niklas Luhmann blithely observed,
under these endemic conditions “trust rests on an illusion.”20 In a chaotic economic
19 On contagion and “market psychology,” see: Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New
Economy to the War Economy (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008).
20 Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), p. 32.
326
field, personal relations of trust are impossible to guarantee. “In actuality, there is less
information available than would be required to give assurance of success.”21 “Linear
causal explanations come to grief.”22 However well-intentioned the other party may
be, they cannot be trusted. The nonlinear dynamics of the economy could well frustrate
their best intentions. What’s an enterprise system to do?
If relying on personal bonds of trust is out of the question, there only is one option:
“depersonalize” trust. Make it “impersonal.”23 Entrust the system. “System trust” is the
only answer. But how does an individual trust a system that doesn’t trust itself to follow
its own line? “There must be other ways of building up trust which do not depend on
the personal element. But what are they?”24 Luhmann has an ingenious answer to his
own question. You actually “shift forward the threshold of effective distrust.”25 In other
words, you foster distrust as a starting condition.26 You foster distrust, but not as the
opposite of trust: as its “functional equivalent.”27
What on earth does that mean? It means that you “interlock them so that they
intensify each other.”28 You bring trust and distrust together into a zone of indistinction
where they are in such immediate proximity to each other that one can easily tip into
the other at the slightest agitation. They resonate together, intensely. As actions are
taken, the resulting affective state of the individual oscillates between them. Foucault
notes that the “horizon” of the neo-liberal field of life is one of increasing differentiation
that is constitutively open to “oscillatory processes.”29 By differentiation, he is referring
to capitalist society’s overspilling of disciplinary modes of power based on normative
models imposed on the individual and the accompanying proliferation of “minority
practices.”30 When he mentions oscillatory processes he is talking about the fluctuation
of economic indicators such as salaries, job creation figures, industrial orders, and most
fundamentally prices, which mark the ups and downs of the system’s self-regulatory
mechanisms. But the same description applies equally well to the smallest unit of
the economy, the enterprising individual, as it does to the system as a whole. On the
21 Ibid., p. 32.
22 Ibid., p. 83.
23 Ibid., p. 93.
24 Ibid., p. 46.
25 Ibid., p. 75.
26 Ibid., p. 88.
27 Ibid., p. 71.
28 Ibid., p. 92.
29 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, p. 259. Oscillatoire is rendered as “fluctuating” in the English translation.
30 Ibid.
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Brian Massumi
individual level, trust and distrust interlock and intensify each other, resonating
together in immediate proximity, forming their own oscillatory system. As do fear and
hope, satisfaction and self-denial, all in it together.31
The individual subject of interest forming the fundamental unit of capitalist soci-
ety is internally differentiated, containing its own population of “minority practices”
of contrasting affective tone and tenor, in a zone of indistinction between rational cal-
culation and affectivity. In other words, there is an infra-individual complexity quasi-
chaotically agitating within the smallest unit. The individual remains the smallest
unit despite this infra-level complexity, because what resonates on that level are not
separable elements in interaction. They are intensive elements, in “intra-action.”32 They
are immediately linked variations, held in tension, resonating together in immediate
proximity. Their oscillatory co-motion expresses itself at the level of the individual,
where it is marked by fluctuating indicators, just as the actions of individual economic
actors express themselves on the systemic level in fluctuating indicators such as prices.
We call the indicators of the intra-action occurring on the infra-individual level moods.
“Moods,” Gilbert Ryle writes, are like “the weather, temporary conditions which in a
certain way collect occurrences, but they are not themselves extra occurrences.”33 Moods
collect infra-occurrences and sum them up in a general orientation giving direction to
the next level up, just as price fluctuations collect the micro-economic decisions of indi-
vidual actors and sum them up in the general orientation of the economy as a whole.
This means that we need to add a whole new dimension to economic thinking.
Beneath the micro-economic level of the individual there is the infra-economic level. At
that level, an affective commotion intra-churns. Its variations are so immediately linked
that we cannot parse them out into separate occurrences. The individual, speaking
infra-ly, is not one. It may collect itself as one. It may figure as one, for higher levels. But
in itself, it is many. Many tendencies: potential expressions and orientations held together
in tension. Buffeted by these tendencies’ coming turbulently together, divided among
them in its relation to itself. Divided among them, awaiting their complex playing out
31 For a more detailed development of the concept of processual polarities entering into proximity in
a “zone of indistinction” and the corresponding “logic of mutual inclusion,” see: Brian Massumi, What
Animals Teach Us About Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
32 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 33.
33 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1949), p. 83.
328
in a shift in general orientation, it is the dividual.34 The dividual is the individual as

affective infra-climate, in relation to itself, commotionally poised for what may come,
storm or shine, doldrums or halcyon days.
Nothing divides and multiplies the individual so much as its own relation to the
future. The uncertainty is not just external, relating to accidents and the unpredictable
actions of others. It agitates within. Even if you play it as safe as possible by deferring a
decision until sunnier days to come, all you have done is find another way to increase
uncertainty: now it is not just others’ decisions that are unknown to you, but your own
as well. “These unknown nondecisions recur endlessly.”35 Who knows what will possess
you to decide when to decide, or what you will decide when you do. You don’t yet know
your future self. You are infra-buffeted by your own unworked-out tendencies awaiting
a complex playing out that is as likely to surprise you yourself as any stranger. Weather
forecasting is as unpredictable in the infra-climate of the (in)dividual as at other scales.
The affective infra-climate of the dividual poised for what may come is the rabbit
hole of the economy. The unknown nondecisions and not-quite-occurrences recurring
endlessly in a turbulence of tendency are complex in the same way as the economy as
a whole. Both are like the weather – quasi-chaotic self-organizing systems. This puts
a whole new perspective on “rational” choice. The individual, Foucault said, is uncon-
ditionally referred to itself, and this referral is irreducible and nontransferable. This
means that rational decision is unconditionally, irreducibly, nontransferably referred to
an infra-individual zone of indistinction with affect. Rationality and affect become “func-
tional equivalents” by Luhmann’s definition: interlocked and mutually intensifying, in a
zone of indistinction, at the “forward threshold” of economic existence.
Luhmann’s analysis of trust posits that this infra-level of individual complexity is
directly connected to the collective, macro-level of the economic, without necessarily
passing through the mediation of the intervening micro-economic level at which the
individual is but one. It is a defining characteristic of complex environment that the
extremes of scale are sensitive to each other, attuned to each other’s modulations. This is
what makes them oscillatory. They can perturb each other. System-wide changes in the
weather are sure to resonate at the infra-level, for example in a localized patch of fog.
Perturbations channeling back up from the infra-level are apt to amplify into multiplier
effects. Think of the way a local fog can amplify into a mega-traffic jam. The individual
34 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Society of Control,” in: idem, Negotiations (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995), p. 177–182, here p.179; see also: Michaela Ott’s text in this volume.
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blindness of the subject of interest is the fog of the economy. When multiplier effects
channel upward, the individual is not mediating between the levels in any conventional
sense. Self-organizing effects channel through the individual level on their infra-way
to larger things. The individual is an amplifier mechanism for multiplier-effects self-
forming. It channels the threshold noise of the system – the functional indistinction
between rational calculation and affective response – into an emergent economic
ordering that is as ever-changing and continually self-renewing as the winds. In a very
real sense, the infra-individual is the crucible of the system.
When Foucault says that the individual’s choice is irreducible, he can only mean that
the individual’s tendential dividedness in relation to itself is irreducible. The dividual
is irreducible. The infra- of the individual is irreducible, in the sense that when system-
wide perturbations blow down its hole they can go no further. They have nowhere
else to go but to turn around and blow back out. The economy ends in the recesses
of the infra-individual, which Foucault remarked was not only irreducible but non-
transferable. What is non-transferable is inexchangeable. At the infra-individual level,
the possibility of exchange comes to an end. If the economy is defined by exchange, then
the economy ends in the recesses of the infra-individual. It reaches a limit, as a function of
which it is organized, but which lies outside its logic. Foucault speaks of this affective infra-
level as the “regressive endpoint” of the economy.36
The infra-individual is the regressive – recessive or immanent – endpoint of the
economy. The dividual is the non-economic wonderland of intense and stormy life on
the brink of action that lies at the heart of the economy: its absolute immanent limit.
Endpoint – and turnaround. It is only ever possible to approach an absolute limit. The
movement toward the endpoint of the economy either disappears into its own infinite
regress, or turns itself around into a movement of return.
Collapse of the Affective Wave Packet
Returning to Luhmann’s analytic of trust, to say that trust and distrust resonate together
in a zone of indistinction of immediate oscillatory proximity to each other means that
what is felt in the lead-up to an economic act, as it is brinking, is neither one nor the
other, neither trust nor distrust. Luhmann says that what is felt is a “readiness” to feel
36 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, p. 272.
330
either come next.37 The individual is in an infra-state of readiness potential. Trust and dis-
trust are together as co-present potentials for what might come next. They are in super-
position, in the sense in which the word is used in quantum physics. Though insepa-
rable, their distinction is not erased. It is held in ready reserve.
The affective feeling of the readiness potential, Luhmann continues, presupposes a
“corresponding reserve of energy which is elsewhere not determined.”38 In other words,
the system itself, because it is similarly complex and nonlinear, is in an energized
state of readiness potential that is structured in a fashion homologous to the subject’s
affective state. The economy is ready and “responsive,” poised like its individual units,
for what may come, in a state of brinking agitation. On the infra-level, the brinking
is a superposition of trust and distrust in readiness potential. On the macroeconomic
level, what is held in readiness potential are the system states of success or failure. At the
moment a given choice is made, the success or failure of that action is “undetermined
elsewhere.” Which it will be will depend on actions of others brewing elsewhere, still in
tendency, as yet undecided. The economic outcome depends on how these tendencies’
expressions will inflect and amplify each other as they turbulently play out across the
economic field in a cascade of caroming choices. When this self-organizing process
works itself out, the cumulative effects will be “collected” and “summed up” in a system
indicator. Until then, success and failure will remain in a state of superposition – as will
trust and distrust at the individual level. The affective states of trust and distrust and
the system states of success and failure lie at the two oscillatory poles of the economic
process. They are sensitive to each other, they reciprocally determine each other,
effectively connecting across their differences of nature and the distance between levels
through a complex, nonlinear process of feedback and feedforward.
Under these conditions the subject of interest is not in a position to know how any
given act it takes will turn out. But it cannot not act. You can only defer so long, or so
much, and only in certain areas of your activity. Any act you perform triggers the pro-
cess leading to a resolution of the commotion of affective states held complexly together
in tension on the infraindividual readiness potential into a determinable outcome reg-
istrable in terms of success or failure. In short, making a choice leads to the collapse
of the superposition of affective states. To borrow the vocabulary of quantum physics,
it collapses the affective wave packet. A particle of trust or distrust spins off into the
world, where it will perturb the infraindividual complexity of other individuals poising
37 Luhmann, Trust and Power, p. 79.

38 Ibid., p. 80.
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Brian Massumi
for action. Again like quantum physics, the causality is recursive. The determination of
what the act will effectively have been, which state it will be found to have been in, is
in suspense until a measurement is made. The measurement makes what comes what
it will have been. Until then, what has occurred is less an act or a choice than an as-yet-
unresolved perturbation. The perturbation must percolate up to the level at which it is
collected and bundled into overall economic indicators before it can be determined. Fig-
ures are released monthly, and in the case of the most affectively weighted and eagerly
awaited, quarterly. In the meantime, particular indicators, such as the stock market or
the price of oil, fluctuate continuously like the batting of tiny butterfly wings. Now
with the Internet, the fluctuations can be followed minute by minute, or even second
by second. Without the quarterly indicators to contextualize them, extrapolating a
trend from this passing economic wing-batting is highly conjectural, to say the least.
Extra-economic events can spook investors and consumers, such as a political crisis in
an oil-producing region of the world. These extra-economic perturbations are all the
more affecting in anticipation. The uncertainty of these so-called externalities occur-
ring, and what their exact fall-out will be if they do occur, sends shivers through the
system. The shivers almost instantaneously amplify into a low-grade fever that may
prove at any moment to have been the onset of a chronic illness. The system is in a con-
tinual state of pathological excitability, if not because of the publication of new indica-
tors, then in the intervals between them, in the urgency of the feeling of the need to
respond to trends before they emerge onto a macro-enough level and are tidily summed
up in the indicators.
To act on threats before they emerge was the Bush administration’s definition of
preemption. The economy is continually agitated by the affectively fraught, felt need to
preempt it. As the neoliberal economy takes hold, deferral becomes less and less of an
option and preemptive action more and more of an imperative. The economy is affectively
activating more than it is effectively rationalizing. It runs more on perturbations and
cascading amplifications than determinate acts of choice.
As this state of affective agitation heightens, what economic actors often end up react-
ing to most directly are the agitated affective states of other actors. This has given rise to
a whole new service industry, that of “internet mood analysis.” The Internet is trawled
by algorithms, which search out affectively laden words and terminology to provide a
real-time pulse-taking of the mood of the economy. These services go by such names
as AlmagaMood, whose catchy slogan is “Leveraging Big Data to Enhance Investment
332
Foresight.”39 It is not just economic sites that are mood-mined. It is the entire Internet,
including blogs, news sites, and the expanding Twitterverse. The economy as a whole
vibrates with the fickleness of what the pundits call “social mood.” This internet-based
mood registering occurs informally through the social media and all manner of net-
working. In our networked society, with the global media reach and cross-platform
convergence of the internet, any act anywhere resonates, potentially, everywhere, in the
economic analogue of Einstein’s “spooky” action at a distance. Readiness-potential wave
packets collapse, affectively-systemically, in real time (or its functional Internet equiva-
lent). Individual actions are affectively entangled at a distance. It is only the complex
playing-out of the entanglements that decides in the end what will have been a success
and what a failure. Complexly correlated to each quantum of success or failure, there
will come to expression determinate affective states of trust or distrust, satisfaction or
sadness.
Individual economic actors are infra-connected. They are connected at a distance, in
the recesses of their affective rabbit holes. They communicate at a distance, in immanent
affective proximity, churning in and turning around the regressive endpoints of their
respective individualities. The infra-level resonates transindividually.40 Individuals spook
each other or goad each other on, turning around what is non-transferable in them as
individuals: their infra-individual affective commotion. That is to say, they resonate
non-economically, in their dividuality. As they reciprocally perturb each other, their
readiness-potential wave packet collapses, correlated transindividually at a distance.
Quanta of trust and distrust fly off in all directions. These affective emissions feed
up into macro-level expressions of economic success or failure, which no sooner feed
back down from the system’s macro level into the affective infra-fray. Given the cross-
sensitivity between scales, at the limit the economic system and the subject of interest are
themselves in a functional state of indistinction. The whole system is always going down the
rabbit hole. It is just as continually reemerging, through multiplier effects, channeled
through affectively-inflected individual actions, back onto its own level. It does not
make the trip to its own regressive endpoint and back unchanged. It becomes en route.
It addition to the economic system, as governed by macroeconomic market mechanisms
and as analyzable using quantitative indicators, there is the process of this back-and-
39 AmalgaMood.com (retrieved March 6, 2013).

40 Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Grenoble: Jérôme
Million, 2005), p. 251–316; Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013), p. 25–50.
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forth between levels from which economic determinations periodically emerge. The
process as a whole is neither governable nor quantifiable. It is affective-relational.41
Each individual’s rabbit hole of affect is at the immanent limit of the economy. The
multitude of these regressive endpoints “communicate,” entangled at distance. Their
transindividual entanglement composes what Deleuze and Guattari would call the
“plane of immanence” of the economy. The plane of immanence of the economy is the
irreducibly affective limit of a complexly relational field. It is the economy at its absolute
co-motional limit of tendential stirrings in uncertain readiness potential.
On the plane of immanence, the economic system and the subject of interest are
jointly in potential, in a functional state of indistinction at the level at which action
is just beginning to stir, in the incipience of what is to come. Entangled in the zone
of indistinction of readiness potential, the subject and the system come together, to
become together. Each little act leads to a collapse of the wave packet, destroying the
state of functional indistinction. The extra-occurrent commotion on the infra-individ-
ual level registers as an indexable occurrence, “summing up” the individual’s irreduc-
ible and non-transferable relation to itself in an economically significant act. The indi-
vidual’s self-relation, in this “dissociative” or dividual dimension, having thus found
expression, plays a functional role in the system’s integral self-organizing. It contrib-
utes the system’s orienting of its own global tendencies, as it creates its future on the
fly. The system’s future is also each individual’s future, as it composes its life journey
through economic successes and failures. The system and its denizens become in tan-
dem. Every little act exerts a quantum of creative power, globally and locally, in cor-
relation. Every little choice exerts, to some degree, a power of local-global becoming: an
ontopower. What has been lost to the system and to individuals in terms of knowablility,
calculability, and predictability, is regained in resonant ontopower. An ontopower, as a
power of becoming, is a creative power.
When what is created is a state of system trust, Luhmann emphasizes that the trust
is entirely “unjustified.”42 It may be rationalizable after the fact, but in its genesis it
is rationally unjustifiable. It did not occur as the separate result of a rational decision
judiciously preceding the actions that brought it into being. It came flush with an
affective regress, and its turned-about playing out. At the limit, all economic acts are
rationally ungrounded in the endpoint of the economy. This does not mean that they
are affectively grounded there. Any state of system trust that emerges is as affectively
41 On the distinction between system and process, see: Massumi, “National Enterprise Emergency.”
334
unjustified as it is rationally unjustified. It was not grounded in anything preparatory to

action that could be qualified as in any way trustworthy. The transactions that worked
out well and led to success proved themselves trustworthy. They became trustworthy, as a
function of how they played out. The state of system trust is effectively self-justifying.
It “justifies itself,” Luhmann writes, in the way that it has “become creative”43: in the
emergently creative way it is generated as a trust-effect of the economy’s complex self-
organizing. The self-organizing emergence of the trust-effect is retroactively validating.
It is affectively validating in the currency of satisfactions gained.
If enough trust-effects emerge at a sufficient rate of generation, then however
unjustified they are, the system has a chance of continuing, metastably, in a positive
orientation, trending up. Trust in the system has been restored. The affective conditions
for continued surplus-value production are in force. Follow-on actions reinforce the
trend. Positive feedback between the systemic and infra-individual levels locks in.
Positive multiplier effects bubble through the economy.
When the indicators come out, it is there to see, rationally summed up in a trend.
The summing up can then be projected forward into future trends. Based on these sta-
tistical projections, a calculus of risks and probabilities can be made. The affective effect
is now as rationalized as it can get. The rationalizing indicators stoke economic activity,
reinforcing the affective conditions for growth. They feed back to the regressive end-
points of the economy composing its plane of immanence, and turning around them,
resonate transindividually across the economic field. Feedback loop. Economically,
affectivity and rationality circle creatively around each other. The regress to the end-
point of the economic and the upward progress of the economic indicators are a single
two-way movement of reciprocal feedback. They are systemically superposed pulses of
the capitalist process, together ontopowerful.
Mirroring the quantum vocabulary of the reduction of the wave packet, Luhmann
refers to the production of a state of system trust as a “reduction of complexity.” The
economy cannot be micro-managed: do not laisser-faire the government. Although the
economy cannot be micro-managed, through the feedback process it can be infra-stoked
toward the emergence of trust-effects. The instability of the economy can, at least for
certain hiatus periods, be affectively primed into metastability: a provisional stability
snatched emergently from far-from-equilibrium conditions. Halcyon days. Vacation
days from the full destablizing force of complexity. Provisional stability: no one really
43 Ibid., p. 78.
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Brian Massumi
knows how long the trends will hold. System-trust is a fragile artifact hypersensitive to
turbulence.
Luhmann drives the point home: “in the reduction of complexity” resolving into a
metastable state, at the immanent limit at the heart of the process, “there always lies an
unstable, incalculable moment.”44 It is around this unstable, incalculable, hypersensi-
tive moment that everything begins to revolve. The principle of decision at work “can-
not lie in cognitive capacity” actually involving a calculation that guides action before the
fact.45 Ultimately, there is no prospectively knowing economic act. The whole process
actually works best, Luhmann maintains, if the consciousness of trust and distrust are lost,
so that the reduction of the readiness-potential wave packet “becomes autonomous.”46
So that decision becomes autonomous. The affective priming of the system is best left
unbeknownst even to itself.47 Nonconsciousness becomes the key economic actor.
A Doing Done Through Me
It is palpable that the individual subject of interest is no longer an autonomous agent of

calculated choice. It is the act of choice that is autonomous, in the dissociative dimension of the
dividual: that of the individual plied by superpositions of contrasting states in a mutual
immanence of functional indistinction. Choice happens out of the readiness potential
of the subject’s blind spot, nonconsciously. That nonconscious level is nonpersonal. In
the intensity of its immanence, the entire system at all its scales resonates in potential,
carried to the absolute limit of its regressive endpoint. This infra-level holds all system
states in itself, immanently, in potential. It only dissociates itself from other individuals
and other levels the better to supercharge itself with what, elsewhere in the system, will
play as separate states, following divergent tendencies: trust and distrust, satisfaction
and frustration, hope and fear. The nonconscious infra-individual level is, at the limit,
the superposition of all levels.
In the strange hyperdifferentiated infra-zone of indistinction between contrasting
states, who or what decides? Dividually speaking, who or what chooses? Choice
44 Ibid., p. 74.
45 Ibid., p. 79.
46 Ibid., p. 71.
47 On becoming autonomous of system-level affective self-organizing in its political dimensions,
see: Brian Massumi, “Fear (The Spectrum Said),” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 113.1 (Spring 2005):
p. 31–48.
336
happens, there is no denying it. And as it happens, it is creative: an ontopowerful act.

It is tantamount to an existential decision. But who or what decides? The answer is: no
one. As in the French personne, which means someone and no one. Decision happens:
affectively-systemically, in the nonconscious autonomous zone. The event decides. As
it happens.
At the decisive moment, the self is no more in a state of determinate activity than a
cognitive state. It is absorbed in a readiness potential that is intensely overdetermined,
holding, Luhmann says, “a whole range of possible differences” in “sub-threshold
latency.”48 The whole range of potentials are in it together. They are in a state of mutual
inclusion, on the verge, poised toward the collapse destined to resolve the overdetermi-
nation of the and-both into this-not-that determinate effect, registrable in a calculus of
risk and probability: from intensity to statistic. Such is the arc of neo-liberal becoming.
The nonconscious “sub-threshold latency,” churning with the intensity of a mutu-
ally inclusive range of potentials, in co-motional intensity, deserves a name of its own:
bare activity.
When we speak of the subject of interest’s “self-relation” to bare activity, or the rela-
tion of the individual to its infra-individual dimension, “self-” has to be understood
directionally. It connotes return. What moves to the limit of the economic field of
life’s regressive endpoint has nowhere to go but back out, into becoming. What comes
in, becomes out. The plane of immanence of the infra-individual is, at the limit, all
enveloping, and all-emitting. It is self-relation, in this double movement. Here, “self-”
is an adverb, not a noun. It designates the absorptive in-to-the-immanent-limit and
ejective out-into-the-becoming of bare activity. It connotes a vector of life eventfully
folding back into the autonomous zone of readiness potential out of which its next
determinate step will decide to come. Self-relation in this adverbial sense is not reflex-
ive, as in philosophical parlance, nor is it reflective in the psychological sense. Both of
these notions recognitivize the event, implying conscious recognition or rational calcu-
lation – precisely what Luhmann has entrusted not to be the case.
All of this radically changes what is meant by choice. We do have a word for a choice
that makes itself. There is name for a decision that wells up from a state of unknowing,
yet still produces knowledge, in effect. For an act that has intense personal resonance,
but of which it cannot be said that “I” felt it coming in full cognizance. A doing done
more through me, self-relating, than by my I. That eventfully brings a creative moment
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Brian Massumi
to life in a way that registers as a change in me that is also world-changing. That word
is intuition.
The paradox of the economic subject of interest is that the “calculus” of interest is
unthinkable without reference to subthreshold activity more akin to a flash of intuition
than step-by-step conscious deliberation. The “rationality” in the system is necessarily
referred to an autonomy of decision bare-actively stirring at the affective heart of self-
relation. The transindividual nature of this mechanism calls into question any politics
of individualism unparadoxically predicated on an economy of self-interested rational
choice.
As an alternative, what would a politics of dividualism look like?49
49 This essay (in a slightly revised version) forms the opening section of Brian Massumi, The Power at the
End of the Economy (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2015).
338
The Authors
Marie-Luise Angerer is a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Media Arts
Cologne. The focus of her research is on media technology, affect and neuroscientific reformula-
tions of desire and sexuality. Her most recent publications include Desire After Affect (2014), Chore-
ography, Media, Gender (with Yvonne Hardt and Anna-Carolin Weber, 2013), and numerous articles
in books and journals on the topic of affect, art, and media theory.
Brigitte Bargetz is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University
of Vienna. She is the author of Ambivalenzen des Alltags: Neuorientierungen für eine Theorie des Poli-
tischen (2014) and co-editor of the feminist journal Femina Politica. In her current project “A Politi-
cal Grammar of Feelings,” she relates to political theories of radical democracy, debates about the
current turn to affect and matter, as well as feminist, queer and postcolonial research on political
feelings.
Bernd Bösel is a fellow of the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and stipendiary of the Austrian
Academy of Sciences (APART-Program) with the project “The Art of Producing Emotions – Philo
sophy as Critical Psychotechnology.” He is the author of Philosophie und Enthusiasmus. Studien zu
einem umstrittenen Verhältnis (2008) and co-editor of Die Stile Martin Heideggers (with Patrick Baur
and Dieter Mersch, 2013) and Denken im Affekt. Praterstern Protokolle Band 1 (with Eva Pudill and
Elisabeth Schäfer, 2010).
Christoph Brunner is a researcher in the Department of Art & Media at the Institute for Contem-
porary Art Research of Zurich University of the Arts. In his most recent work he deals with the
notion of the collective in aesthetic practices and its relation to media ecologies. He has published
with Third Text, AI & Society, Fibreculture, Inflexions, and the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture amongst
others. In 2012 he co-edited the book Practices of Experimentation: Research and Teaching in the Arts
Today.
Patricia Ticineto Clough is a professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center
and Queens College of the City University of New York. Clough’s work has drawn on theoreti-
cal traditions concerned with political economy, technology, affect, and unconscious processes.
Her most recent publications include: Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology
(2000), co-editor of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (2007), co-editor of Beyond Biopolitics: Essays
339
The Authors
on the Governance of Life and Death (2011) and Intimacies. A New World of Relational Life (2013). Forth-
coming is The End(s) of Measure: Rethinking Quantity and Quality.
Wolfgang Ernst is a professor for Media Theories in the Institute of Musicology and Media Studies
at Humboldt University, Berlin. In the 1980s and 1990s his academic focus has been theory of his-
tory, museology and the archive; his current research fields embrace time-based and time-critical
media, their chrono-poetical capacities and implicit sonicity. His recent publications include the
twin monographies Chronopoetik. Zeitweisen und Zeitgaben technischer Medien, and Gleichursprünglich-
keit. Zeitwesen und Zeitgegebenheit technischer Medien (2012), Signale aus der Vergangenheit. Eine kleine
Geschichtskritik (2013), and Digital Memory and the Archive, edited by Jussi Parikka (2013).
Moira Gatens is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Spi-
noza Lectures: Spinoza’s Hard Path to Freedom (2011), editor of Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza
(2009), co-author of Collective Imaginings: Spinoza Past and Present (1999), and has published many
articles in the area of early modern philosophy, social and political theory, and philosophy and
literature. Her current project is on the complex theoretical connections and influences among
Spinoza, Feuerbach, and George Eliot. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Humanities and of the
Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Sarah Greifenstein is a lecturer in the Film Studies program at the Freie Universität Berlin and a
research assistant at the center Languages of Emotion. She is writing her PhD thesis on cinematic
expressivity in screwball comedies, investigating the relation of tempo and affect. Her most recent
publication (co-authored with Hermann Kappelhoff and Thomas Scherer) is “Expressive Move-
ment in Audio-Visuals: Modulating Affective Experience” (in: Cornelia Müller et al., eds., Body –
Language – Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction, Vol. II,
in print).
Rolf Großmann is a professor for Digital Media and Audio Design at the Leuphana University
of Lüneburg (Germany); founding member of the Institute for Culture and Aesthetics of Digi-
tal Media (ICAM) and since 1997 director of the division ((audio)) Aesthetic Strategies. For many
years he was an active jazz musician and lecturer on digital production and aesthetics of music.
Research interests: technoculture and aesthetics of music, production and distribution of music
in the context of new media.
Orit Halpern is an assistant professor in History at the New School of Social Research. Her focus is
on histories of digital media, cybernetics, cognitive and neuroscience, art and design. Her current
340
The Authors
book Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (forthcoming) is a genealogy of big data
and interactivity. Her published works and multimedia projects have appeared in numerous ven-
ues including The Journal of Visual Culture, Public Culture and at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. She
has also published essays in numerous exhibition catalogues.
Mark B. N. Hansen teaches in the Literature Program and in Media Arts & Sciences at Duke Uni-
versity. His work focuses on the experiential and nonrepresentational effects of technologies. He
is the author of Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing, New Philosophy for New Media (2004),
and Bodies in Code, as well as numerous essays on cultural theory, contemporary literature, and
media. His study Feed-Forward: the Future of 21st Century Media is forthcoming.
Hermann Kappelhoff is a professor of Film Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is author
of Matrix der Gefühle. Das Kino, das Melodrama und das Theater der Empfindsamkeit (2004), a book on
cinematic melodrama as a paradigm of artificial emotions. He is author of Realismus. Das Kino und
die Politik des Ästhetischen (2008) and its English version The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism
(forthcoming). He is director of the research center Languages of Emotion (Freie Universität Berlin).
Brian Massumi is a professor of Communication at the University of Montreal. He specializes in
the philosophy of experience, art and media theory, and political philosophy. His most recent
publications include What Animals Teach Us About Politics (2014), Thought in the Act: Passages in the
Ecology of Experience (with Erin Manning, 2014), and Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the
Occurrent Arts (2011).
Michaela Ott is a professor of Aesthetic Theories at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg. Her
research focus is post-structuralist philosophy, aesthetics and politics, aesthetics of film, theories
of space and affection, knowledge of the arts. Recent publications: Virtualität und Kontrolle (with
Hans-Joachim Lenger et al., 2010); Affizierung. Zu einer ästhetisch-epistemischen Figur (2010); Dividu-
ationen. Theorien der Teilhabe (forthcoming); Re*: Ästhetiken der Wiederholung (with Hanne Loreck,
forthcoming).
Luciana Parisi is a Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the PhD programme at the Centre for Cul-
tural Studies, Goldsmiths University of London. Her work looks at the intersection of science and
philosophy, technology, aesthetics and politics. In 2004 she published Abstract Sex and she is the
author of Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and Space (2013).
341
The Authors
Chris Salter is an artist, Director of the Hexagram Centre for Research-Creation in Media Arts
and Technology and Associate Professor for Computation Arts at Concordia University (Montreal).
His work has been shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Vitra Design Museum, LABoral,
Lille300, Ars Electronica, among many other venues. He is the author of Entangled: Technology and
the Transformation of Performance (2010) and the forthcoming Alien Agency: Research-Creation with the
Non-Human.
Steven Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of
Connected, Or, What It Means To Live in the Network Society (2003), Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead,
Deleuze, and Aesthetics (2009), and Post-Cinematic Affect (2010). His work in progress involves studies
of speculative realism, of post-continuity styles in contemporary cinema and music videos, and
of recent science fiction and horror fiction. He blogs at The Pinocchio Theory (http://www.shaviro.
com/Blog).
Wiebke Trost studied mathematics and cognitive science at the University of Kassel (Germany)
and Bordeaux (France), and obtained a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the University of
Geneva (Switzerland). Currently she is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the Neuroscience of
Emotion and Affective Dynamics Laboratory and the Interdisciplinary Center of Affective Sciences
in Geneva. In her research Wiebke Trost is focusing on the brain processes of emotions in response
to music.
Anna Tuschling is a Junior Professor of Media and Anthropological Knowledge at Ruhr-University
Bochum (Germany). She has written a book on gossip in the age of electronic communication and
co-edited (with Till A. Heilmann and Anne von der Heiden) a collection of contemporary German
and US-American contributions to media studies (medias in res. Basic Positions in Culturally Oriented
Media Studies, 2011). Her publications include articles on schizophrenia and media archeology, cul-
tural theory and the media history of learning. She is currently completing a book on the history
of media anthropology.
Sebastian Vehlken is a Junior Director of the Institute for Advanced Study on Media Cultures of
Computer Simulation (mecs), Leuphana University Lüneburg. He specializes in media theory,

media history of computer simulation and supercomputing, media cultures of the atomic age,
and cultural histories of the ocean and deep seas. Recent publications include: “Zootechnologies.
Swarming as a Cultural Technique,” Technology, Culture, and Society (2013); Zootechnologien. Eine
Mediengeschichte der Schwarmforschung (2012); co-edition with Thomas Brandstetter and Claus Pias
of Think Tanks. Die Beratung der Gesellschaft (2010).
342
First Printing
isbn 978-3-03734-669-3
© diaphanes, zurich-Berlin 2014
www.diaphanes.net
Realized with the kind support of
the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Research of the Federal State of North Rhine- Westphalia.
all Rights Reserved
layout and prepress: 2edit, zurich
Printed in Germany
front cover illustration: Katja Davar, Ghost with Her Ghost (2012).

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Timing of Affect

Marie-Luise Angerer, Bernd Bösel and Michaela Ott

Marie-Luise Angerer, Bernd Bösel, Michaela Ott

Hermann Kappelhoff and Sarah Greifenstein

Patricia Ticineto Clough

The Authors 339

The idea of “Timing of Affect” is to create a momentum: to incorporate a comprehensive

In “Affective Politics of Timing: On Emergent Collectivity in Ragnar Kjartansson’s

In his essay “The Market in Wonderland. Complexifying the Subject of Interest,”

Marie-Luise Angerer, Bernd Bösel, Michaela Ott

Translated by Nicholas Grindell

Affective Transitions and Spinoza’s Art

The Timing of Affect

Brain waves of healthy volunteers were monitored by an electroencephalograph (EEG)

Massumi links this experiment, and other contemporary neuroscientific work on

Why Affect Now?

8 Connolly, “Complexity of Intention,” p. 796.

(­ affective) practice. An underestimation of the unavoidably theoretical nature of affect

That Missing Half-second

5. Maintains “a form/content distinction” where conventional discourse constitutes

20 Massumi, “Autonomy of Affect,” p. 88–89.

involve a “suspension” but rather a passage or a transit. Second, Spinoza’s definition of

Parallelism is Not Dualism

A fundamental point of disagreement with Massumi concerns his interpretation of

Freedom is not Free Will

26 Massumi, “Autonomy of Affect,” p. 88

when Spinoza describes affects as effects what he means is that an understanding of

The Art of Joyful Deliberation

temporal passages, and connections-disconnections. The movement of thought that I

Third, I have mentioned that Spinoza’s affective philosophy is inherently political.

45 Benedictus de Spinoza, Political Treatise (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), p. 35.

2. Affection as a self-constitutive process

In the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and later on of Deleuze, affection is unfolded as an

dation of aesthetic and epistemic processes. In his Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-

7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London/New York: Routledge, 1962), p. 425f.

differences and primary excitements is already accompanied by “larval subjects.”10

3. Reaffection of the philosophical discourse

16 Aristoteles, Peri Psyches (Cambridge, Mass.: University Press, 1882).

4. Dividual affects in art

Together with Félix Guattari, Deleuze attempted to apply Spinoza’s affirmative

The dividuality of expression is also characteristic of modern musical compositions

26 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 342.

28 Ludlow et al., There’s Something About Mary, p. 16 (emphasis added).

48 Ludlow et al., There’s Something About Mary, p. 151.

58 Ludlow et al., There’s Something About Mary, p. 39.

What we need, therefore, is a noncognitive, and fundamentally affective, account of

62 Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 241.

Feelings without Feelers, or Affectivity

What does it mean to define affect as excessive in relation to emotion, or in relation to

“­two-sided” or as functioning outside of narratives of the self, but cannot be grasped in

From Bodily Matter to Matter Itself,

­ echanism for connecting “bodily matter” to “matter as such”: “if it is increasingly

7 Ibid., p. 210–211 (emphasis added).

Feeling the Universe, or the Fundamental Passivity

respective conceptualizations of “feeling” and of “affective exchange” hold much as yet

What is lacking in Kant’s Aesthetic, Whitehead reiterates, is a conception of the

Only by dispensing with Whitehead’s apparent desire to maintain a symmetry

16 Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 41 (emphasis added).

20 Shaviro, Without Criteria, p. 46.

Affective Exchange, or the Integration of Excess

We can now appreciate why affectivity is impersonal and non-individual: it operates

30 Ibid., p. 253, emphasis added.

If what differentiates emotion from affectivity on Simondon’s account is not and

formations). In the case of certain higher-order beings, including of course humans,

( affective) practice. An underestimation of the unavoidably theoretical nature of affect

“two-sided” or as functioning outside of narratives of the self, but cannot be grasped in

echanism for connecting “bodily matter” to “matter as such”: “if it is increasingly