The User Unconscious: On Affect, Media, and Measure

246 Pages·2018·5.58 MB·English

by  Patricia Ticineto Clough

The User Unconscious
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The User
Unconscious
ON AFFECT, MEDIA, AND MEASURE
Patricia Ticineto Clough
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
Minneapolis
London
Copyright 2018 by Patricia Ticineto Clough
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
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Names: Clough, Patricia Ticineto, author.
Title: The user unconscious : on affect, media, and measure / Patricia Ticineto Clough.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2018] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017042833 | ISBN 978-1-5179-0421-0 (hc) |
ISBN 978-1-5179-0422-7 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Affect (Psychology). | Experience. | Unconsciousness. |
Interpersonal relations. | Social sciences—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC BF175.5.A35 U84 2018 | DDC 303.48/3–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042833
For Lucy and Clara, with love,
always, just your Mimi
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Contents
Introduction ix
Notes toward a Theory of Affect- Itself 1
Patricia Ticineto Clough, Greg Goldberg, Rachel Schiff,
Aaron Weeks, and Craig Willse
War by Other Means: What Difference Do(es) the
Graphic(s) Make? 21
Praying and Playing to the Beat of a Child’s Metronome 32
Gendered Security / National Security: Political Branding and
Population Racism 40
Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse
My Mother’s Scream 59
Feminist Theory: Bodies, Science, and Technology 67
A Dream of Falling: Philosophy and Family Violence 87
The Datalogical Turn 94
Patricia Ticineto Clough, Karen Gregory, Benjamin Haber,
and R. Joshua Scannell
The Object’s Affects: The Rosary 115
Rethinking Race, Calculation, Quantification, and Measure 121
And They Were Dancing 134
Ecstatic Corona: From Ethnography to Performance 141
Acknowledgments 161
Notes 163
Previous Publications 195
Index 197
Introduction
At a time when it seems urgent to reenvision the potential for productive
interventions in the present and near future, the essays collected here
look to the past two decades of the twenty- first century. Originally pub-
lished between 2007 and 2016, the essays were written in the aftermath
of the bombing of the World Trade Center, the 2008 financial crisis, and
the worldwide intensification of militarism and policing, leading me to
grapple with the tightening relationship of neoliberalism, biopolitics, and
the expansion of digital media and computational technologies. During
this time I also turned my attention to affect, objects, and other- than-
human agencies, drawing on the perspectives of speculative realisms,
object- oriented ontologies, and new materialisms. Over these same years,
the analyses of media, especially digital media, were extended to com-
putational technologies that provide the infrastructure for the expansion
and multiplication of the operations and functions of social media, the
internet, and technologies of surveillance and control.
Taken together, the essays point to what early- twenty- first- century
critical theory, philosophy, and media studies of the past still have to
offer us in facing the near future as digital media and computational
technologies, neoliberalism, and biopolitics continue to reach into the
ontological grounds of human subjectivity and sociality, both in their
operating on nonconscious, bodily responses or affect and in their flood-
ing the domain of connectivity with other- than- human agencies or data-
fication. Moving from the affective turn to the datalogical turn, the essays
propose that what in important about early- twenty- first- century critical
theory, philosophy, and media studies is their recognition of an originary
technicity in ongoing processes of denaturalization and their insistence on
the indeterminacy immanent to human and other-t han-h uman agencies.1
The recognition of originary technicity and the insistence on indetermi-
nacy are not in themselves liberatory or, for that matter, inclined to any
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