A Nonconscious Turn? On the Emergence of Nonconscious Zones as Couplings of Human and Nonhuman Agency
The rapid development and comprehensive networking of digital media technologies call for terminology and modes of analysis with which to effectively grasp the complex interlocking of technical implementation, social engineering, individual subjectivation, and political organization. To make this possible, theoretical approaches are needed that foreground the relationality of human and nonhumanagency, taking into account intra-actions that cause nonconscious zones to emerge through digital-affective coupling. In such zones, biological, cognitive, and technical processes combine in ways whose radical nonconsciousness has yet to be examined by media studies. With the concept of an affective-digital nonconscious as the zone of such couplings, I would like to open up a new field of research, against the backdrop of historical and current theoretical discourses.Taking this as my point of departure, I describe and analyze developments in media technology based on a view of social processes and processes of subjectivization as being linked viadigital operations of affection. With the help of the term nonconscious(as opposed tounconscious), I would like to examine the emergence of zones of connection, separation, and dislocation––between a) humans and machines, b) humans and environments, and c) environments and infrastructures––that must be seen both as new arenas for strategies of digital manipulation and as new human-nonhuman (often also referred to as more-than-human) fields (of action).
Marie-Luise Angerer is Professor of Media Studies/European Media Studies in the joint program of the University of Potsdam and the University of Applied Sciences of Potsdam. She is Acting Director of the Brandenburg Center of Media Studies (ZeM) and spokesperson of the graduate program “Sensing: The Knowledge of Sensitive Media,” funded by Volkswagen Foundation.
„Intensive Milieus – komplexe, relationale und offene Kopplungen“, in: Beate Ochsner, Sybilla Nikolow, Robert Stock (Hg.): Affizierungs- und Teilhabeprozesse zwischen Organismen und Maschinen, Wiesbaden 2020, S. 173–190; Affektökologie. Intensive Milieus und zufällige Begegnungen, Lüneburg 2017 (engl. Ecology of Affect. Intensive Milieus and Contingent Encounters, Lüneburg 2017); Begehren nach dem Affekt, Zürich, Berlin 2007 (engl. Desire After Affect, London, New York 2014).
Der Begriff des affektiven Nichtbewussten verfolgt eine doppelte Bewegung: ein „Einholen“ und „Anschließen“. Nicht „Entzug“ und „Mangel“ (wie im Falle des psychoanalytischen Unbewussten), sondern „Kopplung“: eine Intervention digitaler Technologien in die Sphäre des somatischen/organischen Empfindens und gleichzeitig ein Anschließen/Anschmiegen des Organischen an medientechnologisch aufgerüstete Umgebungen.