However, with ElliQ as our example, intuition deals with something different, namely the formalization and coding of *affects*. Here, the social habitus of bodily proximity, gestures and haptics are discussed and transformed to target the human as the environment for a robotic system. Being intuitive therefore means creating an expected proximity that includes the potential affect of the human partner in the calculations of the robotic system. On the following pages, I will refer to a special field of human–robot interactions, so-called human–robot collaborations in industrial labor, to show how the notion of intuition transforms from a guiding concept for human–machine or human–computer interactions to a complex procedure entailing practices of modeling, simulating and materializing human–robot relationships. First, I will argue that within this transformation, intuition turns from the magical semantic of a "gut instinct" into a *modus operandi* to communicate social expectations, bodily routines and the tacit knowledge of labor between human and non-living agents. Secondly, I will use a case study of human–robot collaborations to demonstrate how these operations create a new interface that does not relate to displays or design objects, but to the space in between the heterogenous ontological agents. In this example, the operation is the robot's task of carrying a table with his human partner. Here, the coding of intuitive haptics not only regulates the sequence of actions but also the social status of each of the collaborators either as the leader or the follower of the movement. But before we turn to

the case study, I will go deeper into the problem of intuition as the natural and unmediated immediacy from a historical perspective.

# **2. Mediated Immediacy—The Meaning of Intuition**

In a general sense, a better understanding of what intuition might be can be given by explaining what it does not mean: a discursive formation to describe the world, to represent an idea, and therefore to activate something that mediates between the subject and the object—like concepts, images, or symbols. From this point of view, one could trace this idea back to Plato's "eidos." On the one hand, we can only think of the archetype through the image as a reproduced being that we can perceive. On the other hand, the image—as the "idea"—always belongs to the archetype and is derived from it at the same time. Here, the unity of being and the manifold of the sensually perceived world need something that mediates them.

However, regarding the modern age, the conception of a mediator for the transcendent world (whether it is the Platonic "eidos" or God's will), is suspended by the consciousness of a self. Intuition turns from the contemplation of God to an unmediated access to truth via the reasoning human self. This meaning of a clear, non-synthetic insight is made explicit in René Descartes' *Rules for the Direction of the Mind* when he writes:

By 'intuition' I do not mean the fluctuating testimony of the senses or the deceptive judgement of the imagination as it botches things together, but the conception of a clear and attentive mind, which is so easy and distinct that there can be no room for doubt about what we are understanding. … intuition is the indubitable conception of a clear and attentive mind which proceeds solely from the light of reason. (Descartes after Williams [1684] 1996, xxiii)

As the philosopher Bernard Williams writes, the light of reason is similar to a classical Augustinian and Platonic sense of seeing intelligible things (1996, xxiii). In the philosophy of Immanuel Kant this god-given light of reason (or better: cognition) has nothing to do with intuition. For him, intuition means to synthesize the received manifold impressions of our sensibility to an apprehension. The intuitive use of reason is here, again, opposed to the discursive, which necessitates concepts. But—and this is an important turn—without explicit intuition, no conceptions of our apprehensions can be made. Finally, Kant's use of intuition defines access to the world that is only mediated through our sensibility—it neither depends on a *cogito* nor

on a special quality of the world outside. Without our "sensible intuition" of the world, there can be neither any perception nor judgment of the world (Kant [1791] 1998, 288). However, all perceptions depend on two "axioms of intuition," as Kant calls them—the inner intuition of time, which combines the manifold sensations in the mechanism of causality, and the outer intuition of a "unity of space," which is based on the axioms of Euclidean geometry (262). These two "*a priori* conditions of intuition" ground the existence of our perceptions as the contingent "empirical intuitions" (284).

In these examples from Cartesian and Kantian philosophy, intuition maintains its enchanting power as unmediated access to *a* world or *to the* world outside. It comes together with an ambivalent status of something that is pre-conceptual, but which requires the discursive elaboration of a (self-)observing philosopher. This ambivalence continues throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, although here, intuition turns its meaning to a non-rational, non-analytic technique of reasoning. Philosophers like Henri Bergson see intuition as a method against the empirical and axiomatic definition of Kant. For Bergson, intuition opens up the questioning of the metaphysical absoluteness again ([1934] 1946, 32–34). The other significant approach comes from Edmund Husserl. Like Bergson, Husserl understands intuition as a method. But for him, it is the key to overcoming the Cartesian legacy of a world-constituting *res cogitans* on which all perceptions depend. Instead, Husserl calls for a "pure intuition" by which all external and historical circumstances are detached and only the unmediated, perceptual act of seeing can be used for statements about the world ([1929] 1977, 24). Whether as a concept for the unmediated access to our perception of the world or as a method for the genesis of knowledge, intuition keeps its ambivalent status and represents a special technique of thinking, which must be made explicit but that also withdraws from analytic concepts.

Today, this mixture is the dominating idea in the myriad books on business management. Economic success is something nobody can predict but nevertheless, some managers have a special talent for choosing the right option. Here again, it is a kind of "gut instinct" that enables some decision-makers to recognize a situation and then to decide more habitually than analytically, since they can't have access to all relevant information. The social scientist Herbert A. Simon termed this mode of intuitive decision-making "bounded rationality," and opened up the way for numerous theories and research projects on the affective constraints of *Homo oeconomicus* (1947, 1987; for a historical overview see Akinci and Sadler-Smith 2012, 109–16).

Another big influence on the question of decision-making and intuition in economics came from the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Their research about gambling behavior in lotteries from 1981 showed an alternative to the Utility Theory. The premise of the Utility Theory is the *Homo oeconomicus* and rational mode of thinking, which can be derived from any economic situation if all conditions have been considered. But for Kahneman and Tversky, as for Simon, these models have been much too normative and ignorant about the hidden parameters influencing the human decision-making process (Kahneman and Tversky 1981, 5). Again, intuition is the hidden source underneath rational conclusions—it is, as Kahneman and Tversky write in one of their earlier publications, "our lay model of the world" (6).

In all its modes and meanings, whether as the intelligible insight into truth, or as the *a priori* for perceptions in space and time, whether as a method of metaphysics or as the "informal and unstructured mode of reasoning, without the use of analytic methods or deliberate calculation" (5), intuition represents both unmediated access to knowledge and a set of expectations for meeting the world. Thus, intuition does not only refer to a philosophical discourse, but it embraces the communication of different layers of a world, to paraphrase the term of Kahneman and Tversky. It is here where philosophers and engineers meet and where the construction of collaborative robots requires the formalization of those hidden, affectual layers.

# **3. Encoding Proximity: Man, Robot and the Interface**

How does this relate to the actual questions around human–robot collaborations? First, the use of intuition in robotics aims to build up expectations of a direct and "natural" way of communicating with technical objects. The technics of gestures, signs and haptic commands open up a wide space of possible executions. The idea of a collaboration, as the agreement to pursue a single goal together, demands a mutual understanding between partners of the other's intentions, as well as the negotiation of one's own next movement. Hence, collaboration always implies not only the recognition of a partner's intentions but also the renegotiation of one's own intentions about the possible actions of the other, which are at the same time the variables for one's own movements. This mutual inclusion

of the other, which Niklas Luhmann in his *Social Systems* called "interpenetration"2 (1995, 213), entails another dimension of intuition in human– robot collaborations, in which gestures, signs and haptic commands have to be both "explicit and intuitive" (Gleeson et al. 2013, 349). It is here where the process of en- and de-coding proximity becomes crucial, because the practice of bodily routines and their assumed intuitive affect depends on the practice of formalizing movements and gestures to make them explicit. The Austrian-British philosopher and chemist Michael Polanyi called this the relation between "knowing-that" and "knowing-how." While the first designates the "proximal" term about the circumstances we are aware of but are not yet able to express, the second refers to the "distal" term that denotes the execution of the action (1966, 9–10).

In human–robot collaborations, the so-called tacit knowledge of the proximal must be modeled and materialized. An often-cited example of this logic is the task of carrying a table by two agents. In the following passages, I will describe the formalization of this tacit knowledge using the example of a project of a French group of robotic engineers from the University of Montpellier.

The goal of the project, which ran from 2009 to 2013, was to construct a robot that is able to execute simple tasks together with its human partner. In the group's project, to move the table with the human partner, the robot should not react to the fixed cues of a follower or a leader in the sense of stimulus-reaction chains. Instead, it should "recognize" the intentions of its human partner and interpret them so that it can anticipate the next movement and negotiate "its own programmed intentions" (Evrard and Kheddar 2009, 45). In this case, negotiating means to program subtle changes in body postures and movements to avoid uncomfortable table positions or too intrusive recommendations that could confuse the human partner. Hence, the formalization of haptics in the collaborative task of carrying a table does not refer to what autonomous agents *can do* in the first place, but how their haptics can be *en*coded to meet the social expectations of their partners. Encoding haptics of autonomous robots initiates the modeling of social values into a collaborative task.

2 It is important to indicate that for Luhmann, interpenetrations are intersystem relations that are environments for each other. Therefore, the collaborations are a mode in which the human becomes the environment of the robotic system. Moreover, one can't reduce interpenetrations to stimulus-response chains. Luhmann describes them as reciprocal penetrations that one can observe as the determination of the penetrating system by the receiving system. Each system does not react to the other but creates its own complexity with regard to penetrating systems (Luhmann 1995, 213).

Forthiscollaborativesetting,theFrenchresearchgroupusedamodelcalled"homotopyswitching,"afterthemathematicalprincipleofhomotopy (greek,homos=sameandtopos=place).AhomotopytakesplacebetweentwotopologicalspacesXandYthataredefinedinthefunctions*γ*0 and *γ*1 *.*  IfallpointsofthespaceXareidenticalandthesameisthecaseforthespaceofY,thenthetwofunctions*γ*0 and *γ*1 connecting the spaces are called homotopic.Inasimplesense,thesefunctions(whicharealsopathsinatopologicalsense)havetwoparameters[0,1]—"0"fortheinitialconditionwithtwotopologicalspacesand"1"asthetimethatrunswhilethetwofunctionsdeformintooneanother.ThesalientpointisthatXandYarenotonlyidentical,butequivalent,definedbythetwofunctionscreatingthehomotopicspacebetweenXandY(fig.2).

[Figure2]Homotopyoftwopathsy:[0,1]→X,Credits:Archibald,Wikipedia,https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Homotopy\_curves.svg

Thus,inthecaseofhuman–robotcollaboration,themodelisimplementedtocomputetherobot'sdesiredjointpositionsaftersensingthehapticcuesof its human partner. Through the continuous deformation of one space intoanother,therobot'sandthehuman'sinputsareprogrammedasahomotopybetweentwoimpedancecontrollers—orinotherwords,theinternalforcesoftheagent'shapticcues(Evrard2013,35).Inthissense,theencoding of the homotopy model entails the transformation of social codes intoa"hapticlanguage."Intuitionbecomesamodusoperandiinwhich "therobotcanbeshapedbetweentheextremeleaderandfollowerroles" (Evrard2013,35).Astheengineerswrite,therobotcannotdifferentiatebetweentheintentionofitspartnerora"misunderstanding"ofthe

human's intentions. What the robotic agent senses as internal forces and what it computes as an adequate answer for being *in between* the role of a follower or leader is only materialized by the position of the table. Hence, intuition as the modus operandi defines technics as making the bodily and social routines of postures and haptics explicit and transforming the so-called tacit knowledge into a field of computerized models for robotic controllers. From this point of view, intuition cannot be exhausted by a technological euphoria of robots facilitating or taking away the job of the human employee. It addresses a sensible domain of socio-technological entanglements that are displayed on three levels—the modeling of the interaction as "homotopy switching," the computer simulation of the models, and the materialization of the robot.3

The transformation of social values into programming language and then mechanical executions are phenomena that have been neglected so far in social studies on robotics. Concerning the question of the social in robotics, ethnomethodological approaches in Science and Technology Studies describe how bodies are shaped through the maintenance of interactions between heterogenous agents (Alač 2016a; 2016b). Also, increasing numbers of theorists of the Actor–Network Theory (ANT) will include a dialogical and psychological dimension in their concept of communication, which refers not only to actions but to the challenge of a narration of the mechanical self (Jones 2017).4 However, the imaginations of the social are also interwoven with the engineer's models and their chosen collaborative tasks. The aforementioned ambiguous situations of indecisive or misinterpreted haptic cues call for the mediation of factors like trust, autonomy, and the creation of an addressable self in the partner's actions. So, here the question arises—How to extract these factors from the data of the agent's movements?

Today, the challenge of predicting upcoming states with incomplete datasets is often solved with so-called Nearest Neighbor algorithms. One such algorithm is the estimation-maximization (EM) algorithm taken from stochastics. Since the robot's perception of bodies is always incomplete due to the complexity of changing movements and the noise and range limitations of sensor technologies, a procedure is needed to automatically complete the data until something like a body posture has been "recognized." At the same time, the robot must remain aware of its own location in space. This problem of mapping several sensorial inputs within a certain time frame, while it remains uncertain what will be sensed and where, is called the "data association problem" (Thrun 2002, 56). Thus, the EM algorithm calculates an expectation based on the associations of sets of sensed data. If the datasets are incomplete, as in the case of haptic communication during a collaborative task, the algorithm does not and cannot wait until the data are complete but calculates new expectations of incoming data iteratively. After this step, the algorithm generates so-called posterior sequences with an increasing likelihood of them happening.

As for the question of an operative intuition in human–robot collaboration, this leads to several more questions. First, the importance of the social aspect of collaborations, the weighting of one's own intentions with that of your partner's, depends on mapping and training algorithms. Whether the robot suggests movements like a leader or stays passive as a follower depends on the calculated expectations and the mapping of a contingent environment. The algorithm is part of the internal state estimation, which turns into a social factor that becomes observable through the interface of the carried table. On the one hand, the notion of intuition embraces still the meaning of a non-discursive, effortless but effective way of formulating a phrase or executing a movement.

Intuitively, when the trajectories are the same, it is likely that no conflicting situation occurs; on the contrary, different desired trajectories induce a situation of conflict that needs to be negotiated and resolved. (Evrard and Kheddar 2009, 47)

On the other hand, intuition refers to a complex procedure of modeling and simulating the tacit knowledge of bodily communications between two agents. Negotiating a desired trajectory does not only mean designing a solution and programming its conversion through the robot. It also embraces a conglomerate of media like models, programs, algorithms and— not least—the material for the construction itself to articulate the social bond between the mechanical and human agents. This complex can

be illustrated with Bruno Latour's concept of "delegation." Delegation, from the human point of view, contains both the expectation and the trust that the other agent will meet one's own intentions, as well as the new, passive status of the human in the network of non-human agencies. Latour takes his example from the traditional practice of a shepherd who guides his flock:

As a common shepherd all I have to do is delegate to a wooden fence the task of containing my flock—then I can just go to sleep with my dog beside me. Who is acting while I am asleep? Me, the carpenters, and the fence. Am I expressed in this fence as if I had actualized outside of myself a competence that I possessed in potential form? Not in the slightest. The fence doesn't look at all like me. It is not an extension of my arms or of my dog. It is completely beyond me. It is an actant in its own right. (Latour 1996, 239)

Although, seemingly, the gap between Latour's shepherd laying in the countryside and the collaborating robots could hardly be wider, the means by which the fence becomes an agent "in its own right" takes up the withdrawal of the human subject and the opening up of a new space of expected and executed delegations. This is a space of intuition as operation. In opposition to Latour, the time of negotiation here is infinitely more critical, as is the impact of sensing each other's bodies. That's why the homotopic model represents both—the ideal of a collaborative task with agents leading and being led as well as the model to program controllers who manage flexible and fast force changes. The result is an en- and recoding of proximity in man–robot collaborations that not only program bodily movements but also new ways of computationally dealing with social affects. Therefore, instead of maintaining its magical role of an unmediated immediacy, intuition is here the term for a transformation of knowledge from body postures over haptic communications to the standardized ways of carrying a table.

## **Conclusion**

The human "gut instinct" of intuition does not only belong to the depths of human thinking anymore. The concept of intuition has undergone, as I argued, an important semantic shift that relates it today to affective media technologies like human–robot collaborations. Due to our embodied media habits and screen environments, intuitive gestures belong meanwhile to a tacit user knowledge. Hence, on the one hand, this knowledge entails finger movements, body postures, screen-gaze couplings—all those little

acts that don't have to be demonstrated because they are performed every day. On the other hand, intuition turns also into an operative mode that constitutes new interfaces as in-between spaces—like the carried table as a task modeled after the mathematical model of "homotopy switching." Thus, the notion of intuition refers to this twofold meaning: a tacit knowledge in interaction with media and an operation that constitutes new interfaces between man and technology through the formalization and simulation of this tacit knowledge.

In this sense, the table becomes the materialization of an algorithmic proximity. This does not lead to another turn of hybridized embodiments, but to human–robot practices that involve the formalization of gestures, the encoding of a semantics of routine bodily practices, and of haptic codes for social questions of leading and being led as well as the numerous indefinite states of transition. It is here where intuition becomes a modus operandi for the computerization of affects.

Therefore, to describe the phenomena of human–robot collaborations as an example of a posthuman society to come would be shortsighted (Gladden 2016). This overlooks the importance of the messiness of the transformation of our bodily tacit knowledge through models, simulations, and constructions. Instead, the formalization of tacit bodily knowledge retroacts on the social space—in other words, to sense and read human bodies presupposes to model the human as a part of the robot's environment. Drilling down to the level of routine bodily practices, the encoding of proximity becomes a research object for new ways of describing human– centered concepts like autonomy and free will. This shift then triggers also the question of how these new companions should address us in order to be understood as easily as products like ElliQ promise to be.

#### **References**

	- 15 (2). Accessed April 29, 2018. https://www.zfmedienwissenschaft.de/online/ points-and-shakes-robots-hand.

Freud, Sigmund. (1919) 2003. *The Uncanny*. London: Penguin Classics.

Gladden, Matthew E. 2016. *Posthuman Management: Creating Effective Organizations in an Age of Social Robotics, Ubiquitous AI, Human Augmentation, and Virtual Worlds*. 2nd Ed. Indianapolis: Synthypnion Press.

Gleeson, Brian, et al. 2013. "Gestures for Industry: Intuitive Human–Robot Communication from Human Observation." *Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human–Robot Interaction (HRI)*. 3–6 March 2013, 349–56. doi: 10.1109/HRI.2013.6483609

Husserl, Edmund. (1929) 1977. *Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology*. Translated by Dorian Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Jones, Raya A. 2017. "What Makes a Robot 'Social'?" *Social Studies of Science* 47 (4): 556–79. Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. 1981. *On the Study of Statistical Intuitions*. Technical

Report, Engineering Psychology Programs, Office of Naval Research. Arlington, VA.

Kant, Immanuel. (1791) 1998. *Critique of Pure Reason*. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Polanyi, Michael. (1966) 2009. *The Tacit Dimension*. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Simon, Herbert A. 1947. *Administrative Behavior.* New York: Free Press.

 **SMART HOME**

 **CARE SERVICES**

 **HABITS**

 **AUTONOMY**

 **CARE**

# **[8] Autonomous Dwelling: Smart Homes and Care IT**

**Irina Kaldrack**

**In the context of eHealth, the development of smart homes aims to enable older and ill people to live in their own home environment. This paper focuses on the relationship between dwelling, autonomy and care, approaching it from three perspectives: from the perspective (and interests) of the vendors, from the experience and perspective of the people living in the smart home, and from the view of care providers and services.**

The introduction and implementation of smart and autonomous technologies in private households is frequently accompanied by three arguments: the new technology will improve convenience for its user, enhance security, and help to sustain or increase individual independence. According to the "Smart Home Monitor 2017," a representative survey of Germany, this holds for smart home technologies as well: prospective buyers of networked household appliances and central controls for home automation wish for comfort (63.9%) and security (39.1%). The actual utilization of smart home technologies covers energy management (59.7%), entertainment and communication (56.1%), home automation (36.4%),

surveillance/security (32.5%) and health (15.5%) (see Splendid Research 2017).

Although smart home technologies may not seem to be used primarily for health reasons, they feature as a field of research and teaching in informatics, medical informatics, and eHealth. Additionally "Ambient assisted living" and "assistive technologies" are subjects of different funding programs on a national as well as on a European level.1

Two main arguments stress the imperative of the development and implementation of smart home technologies: the first points to increasing costs and the growing need for personnel and nursing facilities in times of ageing societies. The second makes the point that people want to live at home as long as possible. Following these arguments, smart homes fulfill the desires of the individual and solve the upcoming societal problems of the near future (see Neven 2015; Domínguez-Rué and Nierling 2016b).

In the following I want to demonstrate how smart homes for medicine (re-)configure dwellings in a specific way. My focus lies on the relationship between dwelling, autonomy, and care. I describe this relation from three different perspectives. First, the perspective (and interests) of the vendors—developers of technologies, and providers of housing and care services —which could also be seen as a "backend" perspective or as an external view on the smart home, and second, the experience and perspective of the people living in the smart home, thus being-in the smart home. In comparing these perspectives, their similarities and divergences become apparent. Finally I consider the view of care persons and service providers, whose positions regarding the smart home and its agency change and develop, entering the smart home from the "outside" and leaving it from the "inside."

### **1. Perspective: Development**

I will continually refer to one specific example: the so-called smart home for medicine, developed and researched at the Peter L. Reichertz Institute for Medical Informatics at Technische Universität Braunschweig. The Institute runs the research apartment Halberstadtstraße in Braunschweig, which is equipped with all sorts of sensors to track activity and deduce behavior.

1 For the EU program "Active and Assisted Living Research and Development Programme (AAL)," see: http://www.aal-europe.eu/, accessed May 7th 2019. In Germany, AAL is part of the High-Tech Strategy of the Bundesregierung as well as of the Digitale Agenda 2014–2017.

It is a kind of testbed to collect data, evaluate methods, and develop algorithmic analyses. "The goal of the 'research apartment Halberstadtstraße' (HSS) is to establish the home as a site for diagnostics and therapy for medical care" (Mielke, Voss, and Haux 2017, 93).

The research apartment aims to detect mental illnesses such as depression, dementia or bipolar disorder at a very early stage of the disease. The collected data are used to deduce behavioral patterns and the habits of the resident. On the basis of such analyses the flat is then supposed to decide whether its inhabitant is healthy or ill. The vision of the developer is that in the future the flat will be able to intervene at a very early stage of an illness.2

#### **1.1 Sensors and Data Collection**

Crucial for the survey of behavior patterns and habits of the inhabitant of a smart home are several factors: the sensors, the collected data, their computation, and the interpretation of their results. In the research apartment every room is equipped with presence and brightness detectors installed in the ceiling, and temperature and humidity sensors in the walls (see Mielke, Voss, and Haux 2017, 94).

The presence detector contains three passive infrared sensors (PIR) that detect temperature changes (changes in thermal radiation) in their respective reception area. A brightness sensor uses a photodiode to measure the intensity of light in a room. Every window and the front door is equipped with (magnetic) contact sensors to indicate whether they are open or closed. Finally, there are sensors monitoring all taps, measuring when and for how long cold or warm water is running. These sensors record values either in short intervals or, if a particular condition is detected, send them (via a bus) to a MiniPc, where they are stored as time series.3

Essentially, the data can tell us *when*, *where*, and *what*: where a heatemitting object (maybe a person) is, and where and when which devices are used. To then deduce behavioral patterns and habits from these data, the data have to be merged, analyzed, and interpreted.

#### **1.2 Analysis and Interpretation of Stored Data**

There are different stages of data analysis and interpretation: the first two weeks of data storage are set as a reference phase—the measured data are considered to represent the normal everyday life of the subject. Based on this, the monitoring/surveillance is supposed to recognize differences and deviations from that norm.

Regarding these stages of data processing, statistical methods are used to calculate characteristic parameters like maxima, minima, means, deviations, variations, and the like. These numbers summarize and characterize the time series output of one sensor in a chosen time interval. As such, they characterize first of all the activity of a specific sensor.

Regarding the detection and interpretation of the behavior and habits of a person, it is reasonable to relate the data from a number of different sensors.

For example, in a smart home setting, multiple sensors such as motion, temperature, and pressure sensors gather complementary data about a Cooking activity. Motion sensors can provide data about a human presence in the kitchen area, temperature sensors provide clues to whether the stove is on and pressure or vibration sensors can indicate whether any kitchen objects are being used. While these three sensor classes may independently be weak at characterizing the Cooking activity, fusing them together leads to a stronger model. (Cook and Krishnan 2015, 34–35)

In order to relate measurements made by different sensors data mining methods are used. Statistical analyses of the single sensor measurements show patterns—what sensor events occur when and how often. With methods like correlation it becomes obvious which of the sensors are most likely to simultaneously measure activity.

The interpretation of the data follows the framework of the so-called ADLs, or "activities of daily living." There are a couple of ADL indexes, depending on national traditions and on the contexts in which they are used, but they all provide a categorization of activities of self-care. They include tasks like bathing, dressing, toileting, transferring, continence, and feeding. The ADL indexes define (to a certain extent) standard specifications of self-care and provide a kind of test or rating of how self-care has to happen. They are used in health care of elderly people, where their ability to perform certain ADL tasks can be a crucial factor in deciding whether they can be

discharged from hospital. In this perspective, ADL indexes allow the assessment of the degree of a person's autonomy.

#### **1.3 The Relation Between Dwelling, Autonomy, and Care**

From my perspective, the smart home for medicine considers dwelling as daily routines—what do people usually do in their apartment? The "doing" itself is mainly being in and moving through the space and using its facilities and devices. The "usually" is determined by two aspects: *firstly* by the data collection of the reference phase, in which the data are set as "normal" and used to recognize differences and deviations in the data. *Secondly* the "usually" is determined through the definition or categorization of ADL. Then dwelling is performing daily routines, which includes performing enough ADL and taking sufficient time or duration for each of them.

Care is understood initially as self-care with regard to physical or personal hygiene. The smart home for medicine incorporates a diagnostic view or perspective of elderly care in its monitoring. In this view self-care activity and self-care ability are references for normal behavior and autonomy.

In the context of the smart home and its diagnostic view, autonomy predominantly means the ability to live alone without health service intervention. Thinking about autonomy as a concept, it has a double structure of independence and self-determination (the latter in the sense of self-legislation—giving oneself aims and performing them with discipline).4

The smart home evaluates whether the behavior of its resident with regard of performing independent and self-determined actions guarantees the preservation and care of the body and its vital functions. Thus autonomy somehow equals self-care or, to be more precise, autonomy shows itself in self-care; self-care is a feature of autonomy. Which means that one's autonomy is proven, because one is performing sufficient self-care in using the facilities in the home. Conversely, that means not performing sufficient self-care is the indicator that one's autonomy is somehow broken. The envisioned health services and interventions do cure the symptoms:

4 There is a vital debate in philosophy and social science as well as in media studies around the term and concept of autonomy. The crucial points are, if anybody might be seen as isolated from others, or if everybody is embedded in (social) relations and every self is influenced by cultural and governmental issues. I do take up the discussion with a focus on relational autonomy later. Another question is, how (media) technologies enter in the formation of self-conception (Selbst-Verständnis), self-relation (Selbst-Verhältnis), and technologies of the self (Selbst-Technologien) which are crucial for autonomy.

the smart home would call for support or assistance, to get its data back to normality. With this analysis, I do end up in a bio-cybernetic vision of organism-and-environment (see e.g., Morin [1981] 2015). Care IT would then provide a form of self-regulation for this composite of organism and environment, which materializes as self-regulation of the data streams representing it.

In a way, this diagnosis is unsatisfactory: the relationship between living and autonomy is not limited to personal hygiene—it includes categories of personal space, having control and feeling at home, which includes aspects of affect regulation as well. Following up, I would like to consider the questions: What does dwelling mean in the experience of the living human? And how does this relate to autonomy and care?

# **2. Dwelling as Experience and Perception— Inhabitants' Perspective**

What is dwelling? As a part of an adequate standard of living "the right of housing" is recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). It has been regarded as a freestanding right in International Human Rights Law since 1991. As such it demands that there is sufficient living space (including necessary infrastructure such as electricity and water) and that the housing is protected against state and private interference (see Krennerich 2018).

[H]aving a home is undoubtedly one of the most basic of human needs: the right to adequate housing is founded and recognised under international law. Described under article 25(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the right to adequate housing is one that has also been identified within other major international human rights treaties. Referring to much more than the robustness of a building, 'adequate housing' encompasses also the intangible, but no less essential elements of what makes a dwelling into a home. This includes creating a private space that is secure and safe, which encloses and facilitates the formation and maintenance of human relationships and personal bonds. (Guihen 2016, 141–42)

In these terms of human and political rights, housing serves to protect against the forces of nature and society and is the condition that enables physical well-being and emotional relations. Dwelling or living—*wohnen* in German—is more than housing: it refers to being or feeling at home.

Thus on a basic level dwelling comprises a demarcation and thus a distinction between outside and inside. At the same time, dwelling is emotional or affective: the inside becomes a living place in subjective experiences and the affective inhabitation of the space. This understanding of dwelling is grounded in the experience of the subject, and resonates with approaches of (phenomenological) philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century.5

Around 1900, the traditional notion of a preceding, empty, homogeneous (Euclidean) space extending into infinity became problematic. In different disciplines space is no longer thought of as an independent and given container, but as something becoming, something evolving in relations and in perceptions. In the early phenomenological thinking of Edmund Husserl the corporality is the origin of perception and experience, and it is in the intentional experience that space is constituted. Thus the "here" of the own body is the zero point of orientation in the space. Equally the space arranges itself in relation to my "here" in top/bottom, front/back, right/left, and near/far (see Hebert, 2012, 56ff.).

Even though Ernst Cassirer was not a phenomenologist in a strict sense, he has contributed important considerations to the relationship between space (constitution), experience, and affect. Following Bösel's reconstruction, Cassirer shows that the mythical relation to space is bound to physiological differentiations such as top/bottom, front/back, and right/ left. More importantly, these differentiations are structured by emotional or affective values:

The principle of differentiation occurs as an affectability that allows to distinguish sites, districts or areas that are perceived as particularly powerful from the rather inconspicuous places in space. (Bösel 2018, 144 [translation by author])6

Bösel emphasizes that already in protoreligious and cultic practices—as examined in Cassirer's "Mythical Thought"—the demarcation, the act of limitation, is accomplished as a kind of space-modulating activity. The separation of interior and exterior space "… does not only have the

power of space division, but also of highlighting, if not constituting, a special atmosphere" (Bösel 2018, 145 [translation by author]). That means: limitation is an affective differentiation of space, which is actively created. This applies to sacred rooms, but Bösel extends this double operation with Heidegger to inhabited/residential rooms. Accordingly, both Cassirer and Heidegger share the assumption of a "foundation of the inhabited space in the basic act of enclosure" (Bösel 2018, 146 [translation by author]).

In the paper "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" (Heidegger 1971) Heidegger expatiates on the intertwining of building (as the act of actively creating a place) and dwelling. Accordingly, building as construction is what makes living possible in the first place. Furthermore, according to Heidegger, the etymology of the word Bauen/building refers to staying as well as to cultivating and sparing as in the sense of agriculture.7

The old word *bauen*, which says that man *is* insofar as he *dwells*, this word *bauen* however *also* means at the same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine. Such building only takes care—it tends the growth that ripens into its fruit of its own accord. Building in the sense of preserving and nurturing is not making anything. (Heidegger 1971, 145 [italics i.o.])

Building and dwelling coincide, whereby the Gothic word for dwelling/ Wohnen emphasizes the experience associated with it:

*Wunian* means: to be at peace, to be brought to peace, to remain in peace. The word for peace, *Friede*, means the free, das *Frye*, and *fry* means: preserved from harm and danger, preserved from something, safeguarded. (147 [italics i.o.])

Conversely Heidegger's concept of dwelling is linked to his concept of being-in or being-in-the-world (as a mode of Dasein): "To be a human being means to be on the Earth as a mortal. It means to dwell" (145). In this sense, being-in-the-world means to inhabit the world, to make the world habituated and to experience equally protection and freedom. In turn "… dwelling itself is always a staying with things" (149). In this way it is based, as Hebert argues, equally in the unconscious, pre-reflective, active handling of things (see Hebert 2012, 63–64). Thus dwelling might be characterized as

7 On the etymological interconnections between building, living, being and cultivating, see also the entries on "bauen," "Frieden," "frei" and "wohnen" in Kluge (2011).

a performative act grounded in an action context.8 It is strongly related to everyday activities, bodily routines, and habits.

Thus the condition of dwelling is the limitation as an active and affective space division, differentiating between an inside and outside space. The inside space becomes an inhabited space, a "living room" and a home through performative acts and routines grounded in actions, making the space familiar/habituated.

The reference to the context of action opens up another aspect of what constitutes home, dwelling, and living. Getting back to International Human Rights Law, the inside is not only a familiar place, but a protected place— it is supposed to be protected against state interference. This protection against interference opens up a space of freedom and self-determination. Saskia Hebert argues with reference to Bernhard Waldenfels:

The apartment as an own space is separated from the surroundings as a foreign space. Within the boundary that separates the outside from the inside, the protected private space is created: "My" apartment (a way of speaking that I also use when I am not the owner but rather "inhabitant") is the place, where, within certain limits, I am free to do whatever I like. (Hebert 2012, 68 [translation by author])

Thus the inhabitant has control over the space, allowing them a certain freedom of action. One's own home is therefore a familiar place, and a selfdetermined place, a place that one can have at one's disposal by acting.

This means that a home—and the experience of being-at-home from a phenomenological point of view—modulates dwelling as a creation of an "own" space grounded in action contexts—these encompass habits and daily routines as well as the freedom to do what one wants, which necessitates a certain self-determination in acting. The repeated performative acts of dwelling resonate with caring in the sense of cultivating, sparing, and preserving. The aspect of self-determination resonates with a "classical" understanding of autonomy. In such a "classical" approach, autonomy is characterized as self-determination or self-government that is based on the rational mind and free will of a "self" or subject—which includes it being independent of external forces or coercions. Although the freedom to do whatever one wants does not equal rational driven

8 "Das Einräumen der Orte, bei Heidegger durch Um- und Wegräumen der Dinge ergänzt, ist ein *performativer* Akt, der das Wohnen wesentlich in einem *Handlungszusammenhang* gründet" (Hebert 2012, 64 [italics i.o.])

self-government in all aspects, both forms of self-determination include the aspect of not being surveilled.

To put it very pointedly: the autonomous rational universal (male) subject is—since Descartes—formed as an interior almost independent of the outside world. In and through its thinking, it processes and evaluates the impressions that enter from the outside to its inside. In addition, and this is crucial, it has a reflective relationship to itself, it can think about itself. At the same time, the Descartes subject has far-reaching control over what steps from inside to outside, be it as statement or expression. Similarly, the private sphere associated with housing is conceptualized as an interior independent of external powers, in which the responsible citizen processes impressions and information about the external world and internalizes them in opinions about or attitudes towards the world. What is decisive, especially for the formation of political will, is that this space is largely protected from state intervention. The (politically) mature citizen has control over what moves outside.

Of course, the notion of the self-contained autonomous subject is not tenable in this way, and even Descartes' philosophy includes aspects of being interwoven with and affected by the outside world. Historically, a different understanding of the connected, and thus affected and relational, subject can be drawn from Leibniz via Spinoza, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty to Deleuze. More recent concepts of relational autonomy also emphasize that the rational, universal subject does not exist.

The critiques emphasize that an analysis of the characteristics and capacities of the self cannot be adequately undertaken without attention to the rich and complex social and historical contexts in which agents are embedded; they point to the need to think of autonomy as a characteristic of agents who are emotional, embodied, desiring, creative, and feeling, as well as rational, creatures; and they highlight the ways in which agents are both psychically internally differentiated and socially differentiated from others. (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000, 21)

Accordingly, the self-relationship is not to be thought of as autonomous and isolated from others.

One's relationship to oneself, then, is not a matter of a solitary ego reflecting on itself, but is the result of an ongoing intersubjective process, in which one's attitude toward oneself emerges in one's

encounter with another's attitude toward oneself. (Anderson and Honneth 2005, 130–31)

In more recent media studies on what can be described as the infrastructure of living, it has become apparent that the inside space is by no means closed off from the outside space. On the contrary, exchanges have long been taking place between the inside and the outside: sewage/water, gas and electricity lines, radio and telephone break through the separation. In contemporary discourses, the intrusion of the "new" media such as radio and telephone was addressed particularly under the aspect of surveillance and intrusion into the private sphere (see Kammerer 2014).

An early example of the outside–inside connection is the electrified doorbell, as Florian Sprenger demonstrates in the essay "Elektrifizierte Schwellen. Zur Kulturtechnik der Klingel" (Sprenger 2015). He refers to the signal technology possibilities in households described by the Kaiserliche Telegraphen-Inspektor (Imperial Telegraph Inspector) Oskar Canter and locates these in the context of logistical control:

According to Canter, electrical alarm systems occupy the thresholds of a house to report their crossing, door locks can be locked remotely, and thermometers in control systems indicate the temperature of remote rooms. Contacts are activated and circuits are opened or closed so that the desired event of ringing, chiming or lighting occurs. … All these processes serve to regulate the flows of invited and uninvited guests, of energies and objects—or at least to suggest measures for this purpose. Entering the house by passing the threshold becomes an act monitored from a distance; the intruder can be stopped at the threshold, controlled or even let in automatically. (Sprenger 2015, 208–9 [translation by author])

However, and this is crucial, control over the intrusion into homes with telephones "around 1900" is greatly reduced. Following on from Walter Benjamin's *A Berlin Childhood around 1900* (Benjamin 2006), written in the 1930s, Sprenger describes:

According to Benjamin, no one can escape the ringing of the bell, which disturbs a world-historical epoch during the midday sleep, no wall, no door stops it. In the era of the domestication9 of electricity, the

9 With domestication, Sprenger refers to Silverstone's concept of "domestication," which describes how "new technologies" are incorporated into the everyday lives of users, especially through their utilization in the domestic environment (see Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992).

thresholds and the transmission of electricity modulating space and time also change the status of the house as the "other" of the world as the place where the world is turned into its opposite, because inside and outside are redefined and intertwined here. (Sprenger 2015, 215 [translation by author])

With regard to my thoughts on the relationship between dwelling and autonomy, as it is modulated in the "infrastructure" of the smart home for medicine, it can be said that the smart home seems to reverse external– internal relationships. The relationship between dwelling as experience and being-in the world is shaped by the fact that the living person has control over the interior. On the one hand, s/he obtains this in a pre-reflexive action context, handling the domestic environment and dwelling in the rooms. On the other hand, the protected interior also gives the residents a certain freedom in their actions and decisions. This goes hand in hand with the fact that control over the interior consists of (or is imagined as) determining what enters or leaves the living space.

With the smart home and its monitoring, this is inverted: it is not so much a question of whether and what enters from the outside to the inside. Rather, the interior moves outwards, in the form of the measured representation of living-as-a-habit. Autonomy is equated with the ability to live alone, i.e., to care for oneself (and the home). The aspect of autonomy, which is connected with decision and freedom of action (and which is bound to privacy), is suspended.

# **3. Care Services—Entering the Inside**

From the perspective of the developers of the smart home for medicine, this suspension may not be so decisive, since it applies to people affected by depression or dementia in old age.

Where our mind is often considered the core of our existence as independent, self-directing individuals, dementia tends to be portrayed as involving a loss of self. This depiction effectively makes people with dementia invisible as persons and easily leads to a "malignant social psychology" (Kitwood 1997, 4) that further undermines their personhood by stigmatization, infantilization and objectification. (Kamphof 2016, 164)

Kamphof's research is interesting for my purposes because she has undertaken qualitative ethnographic research of situated practices in the context of telecare. In the Dutch pilot project, apartments of elderly dementia

patients were equipped with smart technologies that are very similar to the technologies and evaluation principles described above.

Kamphof accompanied the work of the caregivers ethnographically and examined how the handling of technologies affects care relationships. Following Kitwood Kamphof understands "dementia care as 'person work' " (Kamphof 2016, 165) and emphazises the close connection of "perceptive attention to the needs of frail elderly people with ethical respect for their unique personhood" (166). Following on from the meaning of the word respect as seeing again, Kamphof examines

how processes of technologically mediated *seeing again* and of care's tinkering take shape in a specific compound in Dutch homecare, and how respect—or disregard—for clients as persons is part of emerging care practices. (166)

Kamphof describes the conditions of success for monitoring-supported care: first of all, patients must accept that their home and their behavior are measured:

Clients have to refrain from meddling with the sensors, they have to entrust themselves to the system and the observation of caregivers, and allow these to bring up issues. The system asks them to be, at the same time, generally aware of the security provided, but to forget its presence on a daily basis. (174)

The caregivers, in turn, must become engaged in monitoring and read into the data patterns:

Caregivers mentioned being struck by the observed consistency of patterns displayed by their clients. Habits, in this view, are not dull conformity to norms, but an expression of being able to live in-the-world and a vital part of our embodied identity.

Lifestyle monitoring thus operates in a field of tension between the inherited and normative and individual being-in-place. Seeing rhythms connects the quantitative where and when, detected by sensors and algorithms, with qualitative aspects of bodies living in space. Detecting rhythms is not computing averages; it requires observers to open their body to the resonance of emerging patterns … . Within the monitoring compound, the observing body open to rhythms … is a composite of technology and the sensibility of human caregivers. (169)

Ideally, the data streams or data patterns mediate between the people in charge and the people being looked after. People with dementia can hardly name what they have done and only partly express what their needs and desires are. With reference to the data streams, however, their behavior can be named and it is possible to derive their needs or wishes from the data.

Increasing familiarity, both with the system and their client, makes them recognize specific patterns as typical for their client. When discussing data displays, they often referred immediately to particular situations. Hermeneutic perception, with the help of contextual knowledge and imagination, thus turns into an embodied feeling of clients through the system. (177)

The crucial point is that this technology is embedded in a structure of care relations in which the results of monitoring are the basis for "negotiations." The carers read the results, allowing themselves to be affected by the everyday life of their care recipients on a rhythmic level, so to speak. In this way, caregivers can also strengthen the freedom of action for an "autonomous dwelling," which threatens to disappear through the orientation of data processing to the norm of habit. Ideally, they allow a reflective access to the behavior of the resident, thus empowering him or her to work on their own personhood and opening up opportunities for intersubjective negotiation.

Regarding the affective transformations taking place in this form of computer-aided autonomous dwelling, I would like to offer the following conclusions: the technical-medial infrastructure of the smart home relates to dwelling, autonomy and care (services) in a specific way. In particular, their non-conscious registers are addressed: here living is considered as a habit, which also includes practices of self-care and autonomy as living-byoneself in the lanes of regular and "normal" activities.

The domestication of surveillance and monitoring is being justified by economic-liberal arguments—elderly people want to be able to live by themselves and this wish can only be realized through care IT in an affordable way. The technical-normalizing access (see Angerer and Bösel 2016) to autonomous living occurs in turn on a level of non-conscious processes, on the level of habits, pre-reflective contexts of action, and affective qualities. In this approach, aspects that have to do with autonomy as self-made decisions in an unsupervised space are particularly neglected.

Within this regime, carers are able to create leeway because they can interpret the deviations from the normal and the habitual—which are regarded as markers for a loss of autonomy in technical monitoring. However,

this interpretation mainly takes place at the level of empathy with data patterns, as an aesthetic affirmation, so to speak.

It remains to be asked whether such shifts to the level of the affective really are reservoirs of resistance. Maybe it is time to open up new registers.

#### **References**

Domínguez-Rué, Emma, and Linda Nierling. 2016b. "All that Glitters is not Silver: Technologies for the Elderly in Context. Introduction." In *Ageing and Technology: Perspectives from the Social Sciences*, edited by Emma Domínguez-Rué and Linda Nierling, 9–23. Bielefeld: transcript. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1xxrwd.

 **DISCOURSE ANALYSIS**

 **DESIRE**

 **MEDIA HISTORY**

 **INDUSTRY**

# **[9] Happy, Happy, Sad, Sad: Do You Feel Me? Constellations of Desires in Affective Technologies**

**Serjoscha Wiemer**

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

*… affective computing is not just the science fiction of tomorrow; it is being used today not only as a marketing tool but also in medicine and a number of other fields. Tara J. Brigham (2017, 400)*

Affect technologies have recently been met with a previously unknown interest. This is not only true for theories of affect in cultural and media studies.1 For some years now, there has been a growing number of applications for technologies that are optimized towards the recording, processing, and influencing of affects. In addition to robotics, security research and psychotherapy ("augmented mental health"), such fields of application also include gaming and health applications, and various types of recommendation systems. Individual affect technologies are part of everyday smartphone apps. Automotive technology (e.g., EVA2), marketing and consumer registration ("affdex for market research") are commercial hotspots for affective media.

The company Affectiva, which can point out that Rosalind Picard, one of the well-known protagonists of so-called affective computing, was one of its co-founders, promotes its services by claiming one quarter "of the Fortune Global 500, including 1,400 brands like Mars, Kellogg's and CBS" would use its "emotion database" for advertising and media analysis.

Affective technologies are also being used, or scenarios for their implementation being developed, in the fields of education, training and human resources management as well as employee training and workplace

design.3 A survey a few years ago already counted more than 100 publications that deal with applications of "affective computing in education" (Wu, Huang, and Hwang 2016).

Despite all the differences in detail, the core of each of these publications deals with the developments in and applications of human–machine systems that are optimized for affect detection and production. In view of the breadth of possible applications, it is not surprising that affect technologies are discussed in economic and technical discourses.4 In order to find out what expectations, hopes, and promises characterize affect technologies or are associated with their introduction, I have examined a collection of discourse fragments.5

The material I have examined has been selected to bring together affirmative positions in the field of application-oriented discourses. In particular, I have looked at those strands of discourse that are related to the development and dissemination of affect technologies and those that include management aspects. Texts, videos, software and databases from the fields of affective computing, management, computer science and information economics were selected as sources. In addition, I looked at different cloud services offering the recognition or processing of emotion and affective data in a standardized form.6

Most of the corpus comes from the field itself:

professor for artificial intelligence, and entrepreneur. Among other things, he was involved in an EU research project dealing with "Social Semantic Emotion Analysis for Innovative Markets," which aims to combine big data analysis with emotion recognition.7

This brief list is intended to illustrate what is meant by the notion of industry-related or affirmative discourse fragments. As "fragments" they may represent certain positions within the affirmative discourse with exemplary and explicative value.

The heterogeneous discourse fragments refer to affective technologies in quite different ways. What they have in common is that they participate in processes that I suggest understanding as the movement of the "industrialization" of affect technologies. By this I refer to efforts to institutionalize and standardize technologies and practices that work towards the broadest and most effective dissemination, application, and economic exploitation of affect technologies or affirmatively accompany such developments.

# **Methodological Orientation: Structures of Desires, Affect Technologies, and Discourses**

For the fundamental question of the promises, hopes and expectations associated with media transformations, Hartmut Winkler's approach of the "constellation of desires" contains an elaborated theoretical concept. Winkler developed the idea that media history "pursues describable sets of implicit utopias" (1997, 17). For the study of media history it is not sufficient to describe the state of the technological tools and to hold it responsible for media development. Rather, Winkler claims, the implementation of certain

7 "MixedEmotions = Big Linked Data Platform for Emotional Analysis" as described on the project's website (Buitelaar n.d.).

technologies in media history is based on a "precisely describable structure of desires" (17). In his investigation into discourses of digitalization and the computer, he shows that it is possible to identify certain desires through affirmative enunciations, which are important for a media constellation and for the interrelation of politics, society, technology and economy, also in the sense of an invocation and evocative practice. A constellation of desires is presented by Winkler as a "terrain" on which different exposed points can be identified (51).

What is interesting about Winkler's concept of desire is that a characteristic of desire is seen in its "impossibility." It is not clear whether this applies to all desires in Winkler's sense, but it is certain that one of their important functional principles is seen in the fact that, "despite a real impossibility, they have very real effects" (40). The desire can thus also become effective in terms of media history, without the desire itself having to be fulfilled. Here, "desires" are not bound to persons and individual subjectivities. The term does not directly belong to a "psychological" theory, but rather designates certain structural elements of discourse dynamics. Constellations of desires are related to deficits and contradictions in existing media– technological formations. They gain their relevance because they reject them or promise the dissolution of existing contradictions. In Winkler's concept, desires are not only mirroring certain media developments or making them describable, but can, more broadly speaking, function as "a driving force" in the development of new media (40).

The question of structures of desire in the current development of affect technologies concerns the relationship between media technology and discourses. I use the term "discourse" here in reference to approaches to critical discourse analysis, following Foucault, and with regard to a discourse-analytical concept of media, as a part of German media theory (cf. Conradi 2015, 65–90; Winkler 2004; Stauff 2005). A characteristic feature of the theory of critical discourse analysis is that discourses are seen as relevant power factors. Discourses exercise power, for example, as "'carriers' of respectively valid 'knowledge'" (Jäger 2004, 149). And they contribute to the "structuring of power relations in a society" (149). If the dynamics of the development of affect technologies in media history depend on the fact that technical, economic and managerial strands of discourse can overlap, influence and support each other, then constellations of desires can be seen as an element of the interweaving of these strands of discourse.

According to discourse-analytical concepts of media formations, discourses are not external to technologies or media formations. Structures of desires and discourses are not a kind of affirmative accompaniment of affective media technologies or a side effect of technical developments, but are involved in the very production of these technologies and in their social, political, economic, and infrastructural shaping. In critical discourse analysis, the strategic as well as legitimizing function of discourses is particularly emphasized in order to underline their operative and productive effectiveness (cf. Jäger 2004; Link 2008).

For a contemporary concept of media that describes the constitution of media as the concatenation and formation of practices, discourses, and technology, the function of discourses is even further amplified. Markus Stauff, for example, understands media as a temporarily stabilized "heterogeneous network of relationships" (2005, 200). Such a concept of media not only takes into account the changing dynamics and instability of digital media (formations), but also draws attention to the fact that discourses and practices are included in the development of media from the outset. Discourses "enable and stabilize the technical functioning" (192). This applies in particular to the realization of new technologies, which in their emergence are dependent on the interplay, the increasing interlocking—and thus on the intertwining—of different fields of knowledge and spheres of action. If one considers affect technologies in this sense as media-in-the-making or as media formation, then the constitution and productivity of affective media technologies must be analyzed as a concatenation and temporarily stabilized formation of heterogeneous practices, discourses, and techniques.8

A decisive hurdle for the media function appears in the problem of concatenation. How does a discourse organize its own continuity and the interaction of heterogeneous practices and discourses? It is important to understand how the operativity of discourse stabilizes the heterogeneous elements, the "heterogeneous network of relationships" (Stauff), and how the continuity of a formation is established in the first place.

The assumption that constellations of desires and the expression of hopes and expectations play an important function is supported by the fact

8 The distinction between discourses, practices and technology is anything but strict. In materialist traditions of discourse theories, the term "discourse" does not designate specifically a totality of *symbolic* practices, but can refer to practices as well as utterances. Similarly there is no strict ontological difference between technology and practices as technology emerges from continued practices (cf. "the model," Winkler 2004, 116–30).

that—as will be shown later—an intensification of the parallelism of discourses of technical application and of the articulation of wishes can be observed in the field of affective media technologies.

# **Algorithmic Affective Technologies—Steps towards the Industrialization of Emotions**

The fact that the IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) has been publishing *Transactions on Affective Computing* since 2010 can be seen as a sign of a flourishing scientific and commercial interest in affective technologies. The IEEE describes itself as the "world's largest technical professional organization for the advancement of technology." It is influential as a scientific community and a relevant institution when it comes to technical standardization. The regular volumes of the *Transactions on Affective Computing* follow the aim of "disseminating results of research on the design of systems that can recognize, interpret, and simulate human emotions and related affective phenomena."

In the introduction to the first issue, Rosalind Picard emphasized the shift of affective computing from an experimental theoretical field to a widely received and "serious" undertaking (2010). She claims that "insights about emotions" have become a necessary part of the "engineering dreams to build intelligent machines." In 2017 Björn Schuller took up the rhetoric of this "engineering dream" in an editorial for the journal, to merge these "dreams to build" with the rise of artificial intelligence to form a new dream of commercial success that should come when the technology conquers broad consumer markets:

In its eight years, the *IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing* (TAC) has witnessed a time of great opportunities for the field: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning have recently made great progress increasing the distribution and usage of intelligent solutions in the greater public and commercial world. This progress bears many great chances for Affective Computing, as with increasing intelligence of machines, one may increasingly desire according intelligent systems to also possess emotional intelligence as the "next big thing" in commercial exploitation of AI—the Artificial Emotional Intelligence or AEI for short. To give but a few examples, with the advent of spoken language assistants in our homes, and the day-by-day rising usage of such assistants on smart phones and personal computers, it seems more than timely to also lend these assistants the ability to

understand their users' emotions and react appropriately to them. Similarly, there is a huge trend in measuring oneself in many ways to track activity, steps, heart rate, sleep time, and whatnots 24/7—one may easily expect emotion tracking to become of broad interest soon, as well, which certainly also bears high promises for serious medical applications. As a last example, with gradually smart retrieval of multimedia, the emotional aspect will likely soon play a much more important role, when—for example—asking your retrieval agent for some funny pictures, bluesy music, or a movie loaded with tension and surprises. Obviously, this also bears a huge challenge for robustness, as the expectancy will be nothing but high once Affective Computing finds its way into the broad consumer market where severe real-world conditions need to be faced. (Schuller 2017, 1)

This quote is given in such extensive detail to convey the way in which a rhetoric of desire or "dream" is unfolded here, which provides an understanding about the direction in which affect technology is developing in the phase of its industrialization. Or more precisely: how different strands of discourse are intertwined in order to continue the discourse and create a "future." One striking feature, for example, is the formula of "next big thing": the rhetoric used raises expectations and sketches future prospects in a way that makes it difficult to distinguish between the description of possibilities and the call to actively bring about a certain future.

An entanglement of scientific, economic and institutional strands of discourse becomes apparent. As the rhetoric of Schuller and Picard reveals, these different fields of action and discourse are strategically linked with each other, which, following Stauff's discourse-analytical concept of "media," can be understood as a discursive practice to stabilize a heterogeneous "network of relations" and to secure a (future) technical functioning (aiming at the realization or market-driven implementation of partially new technologies compatible for broad consumer markets).

Parallel to this type of discursive practice, transformations take place at the level of tools and techniques, which are characterized by tendencies towards the standardization and automation of procedures and processes. There is a trend towards a standardization of modules or building blocks that can be used to produce more effectively and uniformly what is "manufactured" in the course of an "industrialization of emotions." This happens in order to identify, excite, reproduce or simulate and process emotions on a mass scale and at low cost.

This development is based in particular on the algorithmically rationalized side of affect technology. It is precisely through the use of software that the scalability of applications (for growing markets) and thus ubiquitous mass compatibility is expected. The production of software itself, however, is often dependent on services that cannot be completely standardized: programming can be characterized as a highly individual, creative, and manual process. Software can be understood as a "mosaic of algorithms, protocols, infrastructures, and programming conventions" (Mackenzie 2006). Nevertheless, software development also operates with levels of standardization in order to achieve uniformity, effectiveness, or cost savings. Basic examples are the use of standardized development environments (IDEs), quasistandardized tools (such as certain editors for writing code), and unifying interoperability interfaces (APIs), shared databases, or standardized code libraries.

An example of these standardization tendencies is the approach of the Mixed Emotion Toolbox, an open-source toolbox for multimodal emotion analysis.9 This programming toolbox is a plug-and-play platform that combines functionalities for the "multimodal" analysis of text, audio, video and data structure links in one package. This includes functions for sentiment and emotion analysis from texts, for the recognition of emotion, age and gender from audio processing, and functions for face detection and emotion tracking with video processing, which also includes estimation of head and body postures, and the integration of linked data as knowledge graphs (Buitelaar et al. 2018, 2455).

Another example of the state of development towards the commercialized mass application of affect technologies and associated standardization are the numerous cloud services that offer emotion recognition as a technical service. Among the market leaders in this area are the market leaders in the IT industry such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and IBM. All these companies offer cloud-based application and data exchange interfaces. They provide an infrastructure that allows virtually any user or programmer to perform algorithmic identification and processing of "emotion" according to pre-defined schemes without the need to invest in individual infrastructure or deep knowledge of affective computing. The number of providers of such services is so large that there are guidebooks and online

9 It should be noted that the Mixed Emotion Toolbox can be seen as an example of standardization efforts. However, its actual function could not be verified. Questions to the authors of the Mixed Emotions Toolbox, via the official e-mail-address, on the status of the projects remained unanswered.

comparisons that offer "customers" orientation in a growing market of cloud-based emotion recognition services.10

At Google, the emotion-recognition application interface is part of Google Cloud Vision. The "Cloud Vision API" provides face recognition based on different characteristics; emotion identification is simply one of several modules integrated into the face recognition infrastructure. Microsoft, with the "Oxford" project, has offered an application interface for the recognition of emotions since 2015. Emotion recognition is part of the "Microsoft Azure" cloud computing platform. The company points to the fact that since 2019, emotion recognition has been generally integrated into its face recognition services: "Try the emotion recognition capabilities of Face API now." The offer is addressed to the potential customers who build "personalized apps." The associated pricing model includes a free service to get started ("Emotion API—Free: 30,000 image transactions free per month") and prices between \$0.10 and \$0.25 per 1,000 transactions (Azure 2018).

These and other offerings are complemented by a variety of available databases on the internet that provide access to photos or videos of facial expressions either free of charge or for a small fee (e.g., to train neural networks), or databases with text segments that are already pre-categorized according to emotional values to perform language analysis as sentiment analysis.11 In addition, there are—no surprise numerous YouTube tutorials that explain how to use the offerings and how to program your own apps, e.g., for smartphones.

### **Discourses and Great Promises**

As the examples show, the technology is on the market and ready for widespread use. This supports the hypothesis that affective media technologies are in a phase of industrialization and standardization. And it helps to illustrate the change in media history that is taking place with regard to affective media. The relevant function of the constellation of desires that supports and drives such a change becomes more apparent against the background of the actual breadth and intensity of this development. So what are the related promises and desires? And what are the existing contradictions that they are positioned against?

10 For example, more than 20 vendors are compared in Kairos and Rapid API (RapidAPI Staff 2018; Virdee-Chapman 2018).

11 A selection of such databases is presented on https://www.face-rec.org/databases (Grgic n.d.).

In her essay "Merging Technology and Emotion," Tara Brigham (2017) refers to the unavoidable and ubiquitous "interactions between humans and computers" that permeate everyday life and the work environments as the basis for one of the fundamental promises of affective computing, which, according to Brigham, consists of optimizing interaction and understanding in the handling of computer-based technologies. Technical systems could be improved if they would respond to subtle or subliminal traces of emotional expressions in their interaction with users, in order to increase the "effectiveness and satisfaction" of human–machine interactions.

What Brigham describes is a common trope in the discourse of affective computing. It is often that this idea of an optimized human–machine interaction is accompanied by the promise of a more "natural" interaction. The prospect of optimized machines is also mutually connected with the concept of an optimization of human users, for example in the idea of augmenting human emotional abilities. An example for this position can be found on the blog of "ventureradar":

While great advances are being made in the analytical capabilities of computer systems there are also impressive developments being made in *making computers more emotionally intelligent*. This field is known as Affective Computing, and is defined as the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human emotions (or affects). These developments are being *driven by a need for more natural human–computer interactions*, but there are also many examples where affective computing technology is augmenting our own abilities, and *enabling us to become more emotionally intelligent*. (Thomson 2016, emph. SW)

Another position in the affirmative discourse aims at an increase in knowledge and cognition. Machines that process emotions are imagined as being useful "in order to understand humans better" (Brigham 2017, 400). However, the idea of an increase in knowledge is not limited to philosophical self-knowledge, but can repeatedly be found linked with business thinking or the desire for commercial exploitation. In the magazine article "Empathy—the killer app for artificial intelligence," the hope for a new man–machine relationship is expressed, in order to "help businesses peer into our inner feelings" and to "make customers and employees happier" (Noga et al. 2017).

A technologically enhanced, controllable and digitally expandable "emotion awareness" could benefit companies, customers and employees alike and help them achieve greater "happiness." These and similar topoi can

be found in many places, albeit with different accents. For example, in an article in the business-oriented online magazine D!GITALIST, which explains "How Emotionally Aware Computing Can Bring Happiness to Your Organization," the promise of increased attention to feelings is associated with happier employees (heading: "Do You Feel Me?" ). Employers could observe the feelings of their employees and thus change work processes in such a way that productivity, effectiveness, and job satisfaction increase. The happiness promised or longed for here is not only "satisfaction" at work for employees, but, combined with it, an economic benefit—as if it would belong together: "increase in productivity, effectiveness, and satisfaction" (D!GITALIST 2017).

To achieve these promises, it is seen as necessary (and desirable) for employers to be able to monitor the mood of employees at any time and in any place by means of "mood recognition technology": "through the application of machine learning, Big Data inputs, image recognition, sensors, and in some cases robotics, artificially intelligent systems hunt for affective clues: widened eyes, quickened speech, and crossed arms, as well as heart rate or skin changes" (D!GITALIST 2017). The monitoring of feelings could help to identify and classify negative moods at an early stage in order to counteract them with appropriate measures. Through "positive feedback," motivation and satisfaction should be increased.

Maricel Cabahug, the "Chief Design Officer responsible for SAP's overall design strategy and product design," describes the future of a "more emotional" work environment through the emotional responsiveness of machines in a euphoric manner and optimistic terms: affect technologies would create "room for more natural kinds of dealings with machines" and the interaction between man and machine would become more emotional and thus more personal (Cabahug 2018).

Affect technologies, Cabahug claims, would make dealing with machines less abstract, and instead more natural, intuitive, and therefore more human. An "emotional connection" with the digital tools would be created in a mutual fashion. This could be achieved in particular through digital assistants equipped with "personality." Affect technologies, in this perspective, are a means of overcoming the separation between man and machine and enabling more "intimacy" and connectedness.

Our expectations for intelligent systems to understand us, help us, and connect with us on an emotional level will increase exponentially in the coming years. We will be conversing and interacting more and

more with machines, expecting them to sound and react in a way that is convincingly human. (Cabahug 2018)

The company itself is thought to be transformed into an "emotional enterprise." The transformation of the work environment that Cabahug envisions is staged as a radical "disruption" with a new "immersive experience" on the horizon: "Being transported visually and acoustically in time and space gets under your skin and goes directly to primitive centers of the brain ... work is about to get much more human and much more rewarding" (Cabahug 2018).

# **Constellations of Desires and "Natural" Machinic Intimacy**

Looking at the briefly outlined positions, it is striking that it is not only about the topic of "emotion," but many different motives are addressed: human self-awareness, the relationship with machines, the hope for more happiness, more efficiency, more satisfaction at work, more control over employees, more knowledge (and power) over customers, success in business, etc. Many of these topics are—considered separately quite trivial. They are formulas that one might associate with product advertising—life should become more beautiful, better, happier. According to the theoretical concept of a constellation of desires, however, it is not the superficial advertising messages and clichés that are remarkable, but rather the characteristic *constellation* of heterogeneous and partially contradictory structures, which in sum contribute to the result of the stabilization and continuity of the discourse.

Concurrently the discourse fragments show that a bundle of statements directly addresses problems of *technological mediation*, such as user interfaces, man–machine communication and, in general, the mediality and relationality between man and machine. In conjunction with the turn towards affect technologies, the desire for overcoming abstraction and for a more "natural," humane and personal technology is articulated. In addition, the desire for a dissolution of boundaries and resistances between human sensory realities and machine "others" is emerging. An example of this can be seen in the vision of an immersive emotional connection (Cabahug 2018), which is to be created from "natural kinds of dealings with machines." The affirmation of affective technologies poses itself thus, at least in part, in opposition to the characteristics of modern, technology-dependent society or is connected with the (paradoxical)

desire to overcome alienation, abstraction and a-human technology by an intensification of human–machine interactions.

At this point, it should be recalled once again that the "impossibility" of their fulfillment in Winkler's concept can almost be considered a characteristic of desires. At least in so far as it is one of their (discursive) functional principles, "despite a real impossibility, the more real effects they have" (Winkler 1997, 40).

"Natural" interaction, intimacy, immediacy and emotional connectedness as characteristics of human–machine communication are virtually opposed to the complex technicity of communication through digital mediation. The discourse on affective media technologies is resonating with the desire for a-mediality and immediacy. This desire for immediacy is diametrically opposed to the factual logic of computational quantification and the hypermedial machinic coding and re-location of emotions in complex media networks, databases, and human-algorithmic-sensory assemblages. A further analysis could take this contradiction as a subject for further investigation into the discursive dynamics of affective media technologies.

#### **References**

Mackenzie, Adrian. 2006. *Cutting Code: Software and Sociality*. New York: Peter Lang.

# **HUMANITARIAN AFFECT**

# **VIDEO ACTIVISM**

 **SOCIAL MEDIA**

 **HUMAN RIGHTS**

# **[10] Mediated Humanitarian Affect**

**Andrew A. G. Ross**

**This contribution reflects on the cultural politics of affective media in the field of global humanitarianism. Liberal advocates of internet connectivity continue to celebrate mobile and other digital networking technologies as vehicles for global dialogue and transnational justice. A key conceit of this tradition is an ontological linkage between the scale of mediated communication, the sensorial range of human experience, and the capaciousness of moral attention. In reference to recent developments in digital humanitarian advocacy, this chapter disrupts these linkages and tells a more complex story about the politics of mediated humanitarian affect. Digital humanitarian campaigns enhance moral sensitivities but also engender new forms of digital labor, data gathering, and political control. Crisis mapping technologies**

**expand opportunities for liberal institutions to manage distant populations according to specific rationalities of governance. And the algorithms that circulate video advocacy campaigns are translating distant conflicts into new sites for enjoyment and moral urgency. The case of mediated humanitarian affect reveals the extent to which human affective energies are being captured by the technologies and regimes of power characteristic of neoliberal societies.**

In a January 2010 address on the topic of internet freedom, then-United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton celebrated online and text messaging efforts that had raised massive funds for victims of a devastating earthquake in Haiti. She reported that the Text HAITI campaign had already generated more than \$25 million and described it as "a showcase for the generosity of the American people" (Clinton 2010). This success story revealed the great democratic potential of the digital age, as information technologies create what she, recalling Marshall McLuhan (1994), described as "a new nervous system for our planet." The idea that communications technologies might encourage global sensitivity and thereby increase humanitarian responsiveness has deep roots in liberal internationalism. And, as evidenced by commentators who invoke the potential for internet connectivity to sustain democratic openness on a global scale (MacKinnon 2012; Shirky 2011; Slaughter 2016), the notion of a "global village" continues to inform the liberal imagination (Srinivasan 2017). The central conceit of this tradition is an ontological linkage between the scale of mediated communication, the sensorial range of human experience, and the capaciousness of moral attention.

In reference to recent developments in digital humanitarian advocacy, this chapter disrupts these linkages to tell a more complex story about the politics of mediated affect.1 Dispensing with narratives focused on

1 I assume that, despite the availability of many compelling philosophical critiques of human rights (Arendt 1973; Rancière 2004), Western humanitarian advocacy continues apace and needs to be understood as a force unto itself in cultural politics. geographic scale, I argue that viral expressions circulated through social media are reconfiguring the landscape of cultural authority and power in ways that confound liberal aspirations toward a generalized empathy. The visual images and expressive acts associated with campaigns to save child soldiers in Uganda, to free the so-called Chibok girls of Northern Nigeria, and to help refugees in Syria are laying channels of sensitivity selectively attuned to particular events, beneficiaries, and problems. Through these sensitivities, practices of digital humanitarianism are creating affectgenerating outlets for cultural expression, sites of entertainment, and opportunities for enjoyment. To explore such processes, here I will focus not on individual participants, campaigns, and movements but instead on non-subjective affective energies I call "mediated humanitarian affect."

While humanitarian campaigns and networks are engaged in moral advocacy, mediated humanitarian affect bears no necessary, normative, or political valence. Mediated flows of humanitarian affect cannot be reduced to the generalized compassion or empathy of Fassin's "humanitarian reason," and nor do they conform to the ironic gestures associated with Chouliaraki's "post-humanitarianism" (Fassin 2012; Chouliaraki 2010). And yet, because they enable specific, politically significant forms of cultural authority, they call for the critical ethos that these authors invoke. Digital humanitarian practices comprise part of a larger cultural political economy of distributed agency, with humanitarian affect serving to direct attention, instantiate sites of cultural authority, and sustain new forms of political control. These social and political consequences of mediated humanitarian affect remain concealed as long as we accept the tight linkage between the scale of communication, the possibility of human sensory enlargement, and the capaciousness of moral imagination. I thus begin with a critical genealogy of these associations.

### **1. Feeling Global**

When Clinton and other liberal observers attribute a global scale to media technologies, they give expression to the latter's historical identification as instruments of communication. The concept of communication evokes the idea of sharing or making common (Peters 1999, 7), but the idea of achieving such a shared exchange across geographic distance only emerges historically as technologies facilitate wider spheres of transmission and engagement (Thompson 1995). Technologies such as railway-enhanced postal delivery, telegraphy, and radio broadcasting created an association between communication and the transmission of informational content

across geographic space (Guillory 2010; Headrick 2000; Peters 1999, 7–9). During the modern period, mediated experience thus becomes associated with communication—understood, through "a metaphor of geography or transportation" (Carey 1989, 15), as the sending of informational data.

As opportunities for mediated communication proliferated during the nineteenth century, they became implicated in the political economies of liberal internationalism. Figures such as David Livingstone, Leonard Woolf, and Norman Angell held up transportation and communication technologies as opportunities for achieving cross-national understanding and peace (Rosenberg 2012). These claims echoed the utopian ideas of Saint-Simon and Michel Chevalier, both of whom saw communication as the key to fostering transnational solidarity (Mattelart 2000, 15–16). Networks of travel and communication together held the potential to promote unity and imperialist conceptions of civilization, important antidotes to the nationalist and racial fragmentations characteristic of nineteenthcentury politics. Such theories laid the groundwork for an explicit connection between the sociology of communication and the politics of liberal internationalism.

The normative value of communication was further enhanced during the twentieth century, as new technologies permitted both faster transmission and worries about a corollary loss of authenticity. The proliferation of channels facilitating communication thus served to underscore its value for promoting democratic sociability. The American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley embraced these potentials and approached communication as a liberation from geography—even regarding communication technologies as facilitating a kind of unconscious spiritual connection across distances (Peters 1999, 187). But, as Peters notes, Cooley's reflections are indicative of a broader cultural anxiety over the impact of new technologies. The advent of everyday opportunities for long-distance communication only placed a greater premium on face-to-face—and other forms of social and spiritual connection regarded as possessing greater authenticity. In this vein, Dewey (1946) and others expressed a characteristically twentieth-century effort to recover authentic forms of deliberative communication, and social and political threats such as fascism and commodification only augmented that endeavor (Habermas 1989; Horkheimer and Adorno 2002).

While Dewey, Habermas, and other democratic theorists focused on public deliberation at a national level, the moral potential of communication found its logical realization in discussions of a "global public sphere" (Fraser 2007; Fraser et al. 2014; Volkmer 2014). Such late-century theories of global

dialogue are staged against the backdrop of post-WWII institutional experiments aimed at peace, education, and scientific cooperation. The *Constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization* (UNESCO) thus declared in its preamble the intention to leverage communications practices and technologies "for the purposes of mutual understanding and a truer and more perfect knowledge of each other's lives." And, while UNESCO accepted the United Nations' fundamental commitment to state sovereignty, it nevertheless pursued a global mandate: the "sacred duty" to support "the wide diffusion of culture, and the education of humanity." Through the work of this institution, the idea of "one world" successfully displaced cultural pluralism as the basis for liberal internationalism (Duedahl 2011, 103). Protecting the "free flow of information" through mass media became a key preoccupation in the service of those objectives and is now reflected in UNESCO efforts to protect internet freedom (Duedahl 2016, 27; Peters 1999, 26; Dutton et al. 2011, 8). Clinton's efforts to align global-scale communication with moral solicitude and democratic values resonate with these multilateral projects.

But recent developments in humanitarian practice suggest that the digital technologies Clinton celebrates are being used in ways that confound mid-century visions of "one world." McLuhan was surely correct in his claim that media technologies alter the sensory capabilities of the human beings that use them. But, in the early twenty-first century, his attribution of global scale to that sensory realignment seems remarkable for the holism it presumes. The contention that our "global village" is a "resonating whole" allowing for "totality and inclusiveness" or "world consciousness" (McLuhan and Powers 1989, 91, 95, 103) does not adequately reflect the manner in which processes of mediation are sustaining more localized and differentiated affects. The "planetary nervous system" is not one unified organism but a multitude of selective sensitivities fueled by specific repertoires of digital practice.

#### **2. Humanitarian Affect**

Enthusiasm for digital humanitarianism is a chapter in this narrative of global holism. Various digital technologies—including social media platforms, video sharing sites, serious video games, and crowdsourced crisis mapping—are now routinely used for humanitarian advocacy by governments and various non-governmental organizations. And, while both scholars and practitioners have begun to assess the effectiveness of these practices on an operational level, the advent of digital humanitarianism

has yet to be contextualized in relation to the broader history of communication, its capacity to augment sensory and affective experience, and its connections with the project of liberal internationalism. Taking steps in this direction, I suggest that these digital humanitarian practices are producing localized flows of humanitarian affect induced by specific events, campaigns, and issues, rather than generating global awareness or sensitivity.

Advocacy for human rights has long been associated with augmentations of human sensory experience. Since human rights violations are often concealed by the state actors who perpetrate them, and since humanitarian crises often occur at a distance from the outside actors who respond to them, the task of humanitarianism is inherently dependent upon public awareness and witnessing. Human rights is, at its core, "a visibility project" (Gearty 2006, 4). Organizations such as Amnesty International were founded on the practice of witnessing, employing techniques such as letterwriting and prisoner adoption as the conduit for extra-local public involvement and advocacy (Hopgood 2006; Scarry 1985). Beginning in the 1980s, images circulating via newspapers, magazines, and direct mail campaigns helped to bring outside attention to famines and other humanitarian crises in the Global South (Moeller 1999). During the 1990s, real-time news coverage was seen as playing an important role in not only securing public attention (Robinson 1999), but also in the inauguration of a new sensory regime of visual simulation (Baudrillard 1995). Because human rights claims have historically involved geographical and cultural distance, we can understand them only by excavating the mechanisms of visibility and simulation connecting and constituting willing humanitarians and would-be beneficiaries.

Social networks and the algorithms behind them have qualitatively transformed mediated access to human suffering. As mobile computing and social networking technologies afford opportunities for ordinary users to co-produce media content, broadcasting networks and centralized organizational structures are no longer integral to mediatized humanitarianism. Indeed, much attention has been paid to such "userdriven" capabilities, which Castells (2009) associates with the phenomenon of "mass self-communication" and Bennett and Segerberg (2013) with the "personalization" of social movement organizing. But these accounts reposition agency onto the individual user without calling into question the ontology of intentionality that privileges communication as the primary aspect of mediated experience. What makes social networking and mobile computing practices distinctive is not only their reliance on user-generated content but also the manner in which they distribute opportunities for cultural expression and agency. Here the suffering human is more than an external object triggering action; they are part of an assemblage of technical, sensory, and affective processes involved in channeling human activity and directing attention.

Humanitarian campaigns built around hashtags, viral videos, and iconic images therefore do more than merely communicate information to a user: they distribute inducements to affective expression. Human rights organizations are increasingly seeking to capitalize on the power of crowdsourcing through innovative use of digital media tools (Cornell, Keisch, and Palasz 2004; Joyce 2010). Viral video and hashtag campaigns such as KONY 2012 and #BringBackOurGirls showcase the potential for new forms of participation (Berents 2016; Carter Olson 2016; Loken 2014): the latter generated over four million retweets during the second half of 2014 (Carter Olson 2016, 773), while the Kony video attracted more than 100 million views in just six days (Brysk 2013, 158). The significance of this participatory element can be seen in both the content generated by users and the affective energies produced by the curatorial practices of clicking, forwarding, liking, and posting. Crisis maps and other forms of digital crowdsourcing generate data for the purposes of witnessing and coordination among relief agencies (Ziemke 2012), but they also distribute the experience of solidarity and moral confidence within an emergent assemblage of mediated participation. What results are "circulations of affect" (Ross 2014) that coalesce around the catastrophic events, celebrity activists, and iconic images that most acutely direct attention to human suffering.

These humanitarian affects do not pre-exist the mediations that induce them: they are socioculturally constituted and contextually specific responses rather than generic emotions. The emotionality of human rights advocacy has been widely recognized by various cultural histories of humanitarianism, with many accounts pointing to the importance of compassion and empathy in motivating and defining the scope of human rights consciousness and advocacy (Crawford 2014; Hunt 2007; Ure and Frost 2014). And yet, as I have suggested elsewhere (Ross 2018), these stereotyped emotions do not capture the various emotions and moods including anger and guilt—that can arise in response to human suffering. Moreover, as Hutchison (2016), Käpylä and Kennedy (2014), and others have demonstrated, even seemingly commonplace emotions such as compassion are shaped and disciplined by the images and campaigns that elicit them. Humanitarian practices such as celebrity activism and its attendant technologies, moreover, have enhanced certain styles of affective

expression, such as the intimacy of "confession" (Mitchell 2016, 295). These affects are generated through the social processes, cultural values, and technical media that sustain contemporary humanitarianism.

Humanitarian affect does not pre-exist its expression because human affectivity is so deeply constituted by media technologies. Contemporary media theory suggests that mediation needs to be understood not as human actors using instruments of communication but as human and material elements co-evolving within composite systems, or assemblages (Clark 2003; Clough 2000; Galloway, Thacker, and Wark 2014; Hayles 2012; Massumi 2002). Mediated practices of humanitarianism have become important nodes in this co-constitution of technological and human capability. Research in neuroscience shows that affective responses are predicated on patterns of embodied sensitivity, such that exposure to an emotionally significant object activates responses in the brain. But the class of images, objects, and experiences that qualify as "emotionally competent stimuli" (Damasio 2003) changes with experience. The brain's capacity for plasticity (Angerer 2017; Malabou 2008; Wexler 2006) ensures that affective capabilities are continually channeled and directed according to repeated patterns of exposure and stimulation. What at first seems to be a quintessentially human endeavor—pooling the capabilities of some human beings to attend to the needs of others—is also the interface between cultural representations of suffering, the algorithms and other technical processes that distribute them to human sensory receptors, and the styles of affective response that both help to normalize.

Studies of humanitarian practice provide some indications of these new styles of affect. One shift has been toward enhanced opportunities for pursuing enjoyment through helping others. Critical commentaries point to the danger of "narcissism" as a generation of social media users becomes absorbed in self-expression and public performances of generosity (Papacharissi 2009; Rifkin 2009). Even without fully endorsing such worries, however, we can accept that digital humanitarian practices are providing opportunities for experiencing pleasure through small acts of perceived generosity. Helping, giving, and saving involve distinct exchanges of affect, and, as Bornstein suggests, we need to understand "the subtle shades of humanitarian efforts—differentiated by varied imperatives, impulses, and systems of obligation and assistance" (2012, 11). The digital labor associated with navigating and curating humanitarian content builds new styles of affect around distributed forms of action. Research in moral psychology suggests that moral judgment and altruistic actions generate feelings of pleasure and pride (Haidt 2003; Prinz 2007, 81). Contemporary forms of

mediated humanitarianism are multiplying opportunities for these joys of moral action (Chouliaraki 2010).

Ethnographic research also points to the growing salience of urgency within contemporary humanitarianism. Whereas older forms of human rights advocacy tolerated incremental change, the accelerated forms of communication afforded by digital technologies are amplifying moods of urgency within humanitarian networks (Mitchell 2016, 290; Pandolfi 2010). The Rwandan genocide was a key catalyst for this specific temporality, which helped to fuel international support for the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine. It is in this cultural context that the Invisible Children organization invested their KONY 2012 campaign with such a distinctive impatience. The short film at the heart of that campaign relates the story of American students on a church mission trip who, after witnessing the plight of child soldiers in Uganda, are eager to expose the injustice and catalyze American intervention. As the film's narrator pivots into an explanation of the campaign, he states "we can change the course of human history but time is running out" (Russell and Invisible Children 2012). The imperative to "do something!" has more authority in an environment in which readily accessible forms of digital engagement give the impression that its sole alternative is to "do nothing." As many critics have suggested in the aftermath of the KONY 2012 case, the rapid responses enabled by digital humanitarian campaigns disempower local actors, mis-represent the structural causes of suffering, and promote misguided remedies as a consequence (Brysk 2013, 156–60; Finnegan 2013; Mamdani 2012).

Urgency, enjoyment, and other forms of mediated humanitarian affect are not well understood as manifestations of a uniform expansion of sensory range or a global enhancement of empathy. Human rights advocates continue to embrace new media as opportunities to realize the ambitions of liberal internationalism. In this vein, Michael Ignatieff asserts that new media technologies are facilitating "the steady enlargement of the audiences before which we feel we much justify ourselves" (2017, 15). Indeed, as tools of communication, digital media have the potential to reach globally distant users—but as sites of affective mediation, their impact is both more differentiated and more mutable. Iconic images and signal events hold the potential to forge specific sensitivities that direct attention in a selective manner and generate styles of affectivity within specific media milieus. Generalized assertions of global empathy and moral concern obscure such affective processes.

### **3. Capturing Humanitarian Affect**

Political assessments of digital media and social movements often alternate between celebration and suspicion. On one side are those who regard digital tools as affording new mechanisms for enhancing civil society and organizing and facilitating collective action without a strong organizational center (Bennett and Segerberg 2013; Castells 2012). The emphasis here lies on the mechanics of organizing, especially the potential for user-driven contributions to achieve an outsized impact through digital networking and aggregation. On the other side are those who worry that online activities such as social media networking are producing a deficit of authentic political commitment (Joyce 2011; Morozov 2013; Rifkin 2009). In this vein, Gladwell (2010) argues that social media-driven movements lack the personal sacrifices and "strong ties" that underpinned the US civil rights movement. He and other skeptics argue that clicking, liking, and posting amount to a form of "slacktivism" that cannot produce real change.

While not without their merits, both views are quick to apply metrics of effectiveness that leave the broader political economy of digital humanitarianism unexamined. The last three decades have seen human rights advocacy subsumed within the market rationalities of neoliberalism (Goodale 2009; Hopgood 2013; Moyn 2010). Organizations and networks operate within a competitive marketplace wherein media, donors, and celebrities play an integral role in securing attention among would-be sympathizers (Bob 2005; Chouliaraki 2013; Vestergaard 2010). Moreover, use of social media and other digital tools is creating a growing imperative for actors in the humanitarian sector to tailor their publicity to social media algorithms and other data analytic tools. That supporters are often motivated by genuine concern for human suffering does not insulate the enterprise of humanitarianism from capture by the processes, technologies, and cultural authorities that comprise neoliberalism.

Humanitarian affect helps to secure human participation in those broader neoliberal assemblages. The joy and urgency associated with representations of human suffering fuels the circulation of digital content within global economies of giving and receiving. In this context, messages, posts, and appeals become significant not only for their content, but also for the role they play within a larger system that Jodi Dean calls "communicative capitalism"; they are, to use her words, "mere contributions to the circulation of images, opinion, and information, to the billions of nuggets of information and affect trying to catch and hold attention" (2009, 24). Campaigns seek to leverage evocative images and alluring

celebrities in order to accumulate "caring acts" within a distributed pool of "audience labor" (Wilson 2014, 114).2 Affect thus creates the basis for distributed agency in the absence of geographic proximity, cultural identity, or ideological coherence. The resulting social formations consist of both constellations of individual users and circulations of pre-individual affects that direct attention and inspire action even before the emergence of networks of "mass self-communication" becomes visible.

The moral and political motivations behind digital humanitarian labor tell us little about the regimes of power into which they are drawn. When digital media create opportunities for crowdsourcing and the co-production of content, they serve as engines of participation but do so according to specific terms of intelligibility. Flows of humanitarian affect direct attention to those kinds of human suffering for which moral sensitivities are most acute. Research on transnational social movements notes that issues involving bodily harm receive special attention (Keck and Sikkink 1998); others point to media representations that treat children as privileged objects of moral concern (Moeller 2002) or non-Western populations as needing benevolent Western assistance (Hutchison 2016).  Genocide, child soldiers, sex trafficking—each of these high-profile issues provokes such sensitivities and, as a result, presents different potentials to engender flows of humanitarian affect.

This capacity for selectivity means that humanitarian affect enters politics in ways that empower and legitimize certain kinds of norms and institutions. The urgency and enthusiasm generated by the KONY 2012 campaign, for example, became integrated into institutional responses associated with outside military and juridical intervention (in this instance, by the United States military and the International Criminal Court). Moreover, digital tools used to crowdsource the practice of human rights witnessing creates affective channels of authority and dependency between helpers and beneficiaries.3 For example, a study by Kamari Clarke examines user-driven crisis tracking platforms and smart phone-based capabilities for video capture that are being used by international criminal justice institutions. She argues that these "capture technologies" are

leveraging the affective potential of the "victimized body" and investing digitally equipped helpers with surveillance capacity and political authority once held by the state (2017, 365). Mediated flows of affect thus serve as mechanisms for eliciting and sustaining local human involvement in the institutional sites of neoliberal world politics.

# **4. Conclusion**

The field of humanitarian practice affords insight into the "affective media transformations" of the twenty-first century. In making creative use of social media networking and various forms of mobile computing, humanitarian movements are crowdsourcing the work of witnessing, fundraising, and cultural awareness. But these technical capabilities are not creating the "planetary nervous system" that McLuhan once predicted and that liberal internationalists associate with internet freedom and global connectivity. Instead, contemporary humanitarian practice is producing a more differentiated and mutable field of affective sensitivities and flows. In this context, generalized accounts of empathy cannot capture the channels of enhanced sensitivity that direct attention to specific issues, populations, and campaigns. Humanitarian affect needs to be understood in the particular.

The phenomenon of humanitarian affect offers further indications about how human elements function within contemporary media assemblages. To begin with, the willful intentions and subjective experiences of individual users comprise some but not all of those human elements. As human beings inhabit humanitarian media environments, affective sensitivities co-evolve with the demands placed upon them to contribute specific kinds of digital labor. That such effects are less visible than the communicative and networking functions of digital media does not make them any less significant for the field of cultural politics. Moreover, the moral motivations behind humanitarian practice bear no fixed imprint on the normative and political valence of humanitarian affect. Images and representations of human suffering engender flows of affect, but that humanitarian genesis offers an unreliable indicator of the institutions and regimes of cultural authority with which they later align.

#### **References**

Shirky, Clay. 2011. "The Political Power of Social Media." *Foreign Affairs* 90 (1): 28–41.

Vestergaard, Anne. 2010. "Identity and Appeal in the Humanitarian Brand." In *Media, Organizations and Identity*, edited by Lilie Chouliaraki and Mette Morsing, 168–83. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

 **AFFECTION**

 **DIVIDUATION**

# **BIO- AND SOCIO(TECHNOLOGY)**

# **POLITICAL AESTHETICS**

 **AFROPOLITANISM**

 **AFRICAN FILM AND ART**

# **[11] Affection and Dividuation**

**Michaela Ott**

**In order to counter the monolithic understanding of "affect," coined by Brian Massumi in a specific reading of Gilles Deleuze's concept, I want to unfold a more epistemologically demanding understanding of affective processes through a historical reconsideration of the philosophically differentiated term "affection," meaning "doing with" or "doing by" in its literal sense. In Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology it is conceived as a self-contracting temporal process able to catalyze and synthesize interactions and inter-passivities between different entities. Because of its inevitable participation in and with others, I want to highlight its "dividual" character. "Dividual" is a term coined by Deleuze for the aesthetics of film and music, which, due to their temporal character, cannot be identified as individual, undivided expressions. Extending**

**on this, I consider dividual affections as stimuli and participants of bio- and socio(techno)logical processes where they can be intentionally reinforced for political aims. Finally I present aestheticpolitical affections in a (post)colonial perspective, with regard to Achille Mbembe's concept of "Afropolitanism" as to different art works of "African" artists.**

Around ten years ago, when I began my study on the concept of affection, I did so with the intention of countering the undifferentiated, block-like understanding of affect that has become widespread in academic discourses (as a consequence of certain post-structuralist statements). I wanted to introduce a historically differentiated concept that would set the discourse of affect in motion once more, and would also make cultural theory analyses available to it. In this, I saw a genuine task of philosophy: to replace the term affect with the more processual one of affection, both in its historical genesis and systematically, as the effect of certain ontological constructions and their conceptual codings—which, admittedly, are confined to the West—and thus to contribute to the development of a differentiated way of thinking about affect.

Ever since Gilles Deleuze's emphatic, Spinoza-echoing interpretation of affect, which unites physical and media affection processes with demands for their intensification and multiplication, affect has become overstrained in academic discourse itself, leading to a de-differentiation of discourse. It is not only that insufficient distinction is made between affects and emotions, affection processes and affect expression, including in terms of language—the term affection is not considered in its historicity and its different connotations in the English, French or German languages. In the very same way as the affective is used in the electronic media for advertising and manipulation purposes, so too is it deployed in the manner of a buzzword in academic discourses, in a spirit of self-advertising. Resorting to the concept of affect appears in itself to be attractive and timely; it is amalgamated with other discourse parameters and is composed of set pieces from various theory traditions, from anthropology, cybernetics, and poststructuralism to biology, technology, and political science, so that ultimately it can no longer be used as a self-evident term.

In my critical reconstruction of the affective I proceeded on the conviction that it should not be understood as an automatic given value, as it was by Aristotle (1926), who listed 11 affects (*pathei*) in his *Nicomachean Ethics*  and passed this down as a doctrine so that up to the 16th century Latin scholars, mainly Albertus Magnus (1951) and Thomas Aquinas (1937, 1955) wrote commentaries on it. Thus, they perpetuated an understanding of human affects that is still largely accepted today. In order to counter this ahistorical and schematic understanding of human subjectivation, I have attempted, with the aid of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's *Phenomenology of Perception* (1945), to base affect in temporally occasioned micro-processes of affection, and to develop affect expression as a time, culture, and media-dependent value. Affections, as I learned to understand with him, are autogenetic synthesis and differentiation processes that, in union with the relevant set of cultural codes, are indispensable for the constitution and cohesion of the most widely diverse range of phenomena, from the smallest organisms to persons and social constructs, cultures, religions, and artworks. The way in which they unite with aesthetic qualities in order to become perceptible and to achieve expression is part of what interests me in my work as an aesthetic theorist.

So, in my book *Affizierung: Zu einer ästhetisch-epistemischen Figur* (Ott 2010) I tried to reconstruct the processual and philosophically changing term of affection in its specific historical situatedness and its Western understanding. By unfolding its changing epistemological application I am calling for a disaffection of the affect discourse and for as sober as possible an analysis of affection processes that, in our present day, feed into biological, cultural, and sociological sciences research. In order to counterbalance the political-media affection strategies that influence our societal life in a problematic way, I tried to highlight the deviations from affective stereotypes in philosophical theories and artistic, mainly cinematic, practices.

### **Affection and Dividual Expression**

In order to explain my understanding of affection more precisely, let us once again revisit its foundations in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology (1945)1 : according to him, the potential of affection processes lies in their autogenetic character, insofar as they, identified with temporality, are supposed to bring themselves about by repeating their antecedent infinity, and to coalesce in temporal syntheses that are different in each case, as a condition of the possibility of anything whatsoever emerging. They open up

1 For a more thorough analysis of his philosophy, see Ott (2010, 438–41).

a microstructural field that makes affect understandable as an ephemeral value that is in interaction and inter-passivity with others and brings itself to expression and transforms through media coding. The interesting thing about affective articulations is that, because they are the result of microprocesses, they can offer unknown ways of expression. The precondition for this is that they are not immediately categorized under the known taxonomy. In this sense, those neurobiological sciences that uncritically presuppose emotions—the English term often used for non-culturalized psychic expressions similar to the German understanding of affect—as a given should be contradicted: for instance, when they reveal the area of the brain whose blood supply is boosted during a specific emotion's articulation. In this scenario, one is told nothing about the complex psychophysical and culturalized affection processes, only about the possibility of visualization of movements in the brain, which are then coupled with names that appear to stand for something self-evident.

And yet, in epistemological, political, and aesthetic terms, it is of relevance to the affection processes that they often bring together that which was hitherto not related and place it in a tension-rich relationship, thereby revealing cross-discipline interferences and generating unknown expressions. They also compel one to the insight that affections are to be thought of as non-individual processes, manifesting as sub-surface powers in many agents simultaneously. Thereby, they cross between self-contained entities and connect these multidirectionally, producing affective associations and participation problems, which I have begun to negotiate under the heading of de-individuation or "dividuations" (Ott 2018). The term dividuations places the accent on the various types of participation, of the simultaneous distribution and captures of capacities with which we struggle to learn how to live; it eliminates the "in" of individuation, thus contesting the assumption of undividedness—of anything at all—because an undivided entity is encountered only where some sort of violence is deployed, in the realm of identified beings, things, cultures, and so forth. Thanks to refined technologies, we can recognize today that the assumption of indivisible elements is a fallacy, and that everything exists within relationships of interference and affection, even if they possess coherence and their own affect quality.