Emotional syntax: from social construction to virtual function

In the study of emotions, the disciplines of biology, psychology and sociology meet.

2015

""While emotions are implicated in many aspects of social life, a sociological perspective should foreground the part they play in producing the social world and human history. This paper turns away from individualistic and anthropocentric emphases on the experience of feelings and emotions, attending instead to an exploration of flows of ‘affect’ (meaning simply a capacity to affect or be affected) between bodies, things, social institutions and abstractions. The paper establishes an anti-humanist sociology of affects that acknowledges emotions as a part, but only a part, of a more generalised affective flow that produces bodies and the social world. Within this affective sociology, emotions are not a peculiarly remarkable outcome of the confluence of biology and culture, but part of a continuum of affectivity that links human bodies to their physical and social environment. Romantic love illustrates this perspective, showing how apparently personal and private, embodied feelings can link to broader aspects of social organisation. The paper concludes by re-assessing the part that emotions play in producing capacities to feel and to act, in a wide range of areas of interest to sociology.' This paper has now been accepted, but please note the version downloadable here is the pre-peer review version. Please do not quote or cite without my permision. I may be able to give an update on pubilication.""

Emotions in Late Modernity, 2019

This international collection discusses how the individualised, reflexive, late modern era has changed the way we experience and act on our emotions. Divided into four sections that include studies ranging across multiple continents and centuries, Emotions in Late Modernity does the following: 1 Demonstrates an increased awareness and experience of emotional complexity in late modernity by challenging the legal emotional/rational divide; positive/negative concepts of emotional valence; sociological/philosophical/psychological divisions around emotion, morality and gender; and traditional understandings of love and loneliness. 2 Reveals tension between collectivised and individualised-privatised emotions in investigating 'emotional sharing' and individualised responsibility for anger crimes in courtrooms, and the generation of emotional energy and achievement emotions in classrooms. 3 Debates the increasing mediation of emotions by contrasting their historical mediation (through texts and bodies) with contemporary digital mediation of emotions in classroom teaching, collective mobilisations (e.g. riots) and film and documentary representations. 4 Demonstrates reflexive micro and macro management of emotions, with examinations of the 'politics of fear' around asylum seeking and religious subjects, and collective commitment to climate change mitigation. The first collection to investigate the changing nature of emotional experience in contemporary times, Emotions in Late Modernity will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as the sociology of emotions, cultural studies, political science and psychology.

Emotions and Society, 2023

In its volume 6, Culture Machine published in a contribution by Jeremy Gilbert: “Signifying Nothing: ‘Culture’, ‘Discourse’ and the Sociality of Affect.” In this article, he discussed the search in Cultural Studies for a theoretical approach that can effectively address the experiential dimension of culture. The article brings into question how to understand cultural forms like music, that convey recognizable effects at a corporeal level, which are not effectively described nor fully understood through linguistic models. Affect, Gilbert suggests, is a concept that allows us to discuss “a more or less organised experience, an experience probably with empowering or disempowering consequences, registered at the level of the physical body, and not necessarily to be understood in linguistic terms”. However, his contribution also underscores this experience as always organized by social relations. But how do we engage with an affective and corporeal social that is mediated by technology? To expand on some of these issues I have sought the insight of Nestor Garcia Canclini and Maritza Urteaga, two scholars engaged in the study of new technologies and youth culture in Latin America. I think both their work and Jeremy Gilbert’s essay bring under scrutiny the conceptual paradigms operating in the study and critique of culture in the information era. Here are some of their observations from the field and reflections on how to think about the social in the digital age.

International Journal of Technology and Human Interaction, 2007

This article introduces emotional digitalization as a phenomenon of future information systems. It argues that emotional digitalization is a progress that will lessen the gap between technology and humanity, as well as between computer and man. The author develops and verifies his assumption besides theoretical references arising from his experiences with the information technology within the BrandLand Autostadt.

Even if emotions have gained an extraordinary cultural status, the attitude toward them remains ambivalent. On the one hand, the public exhibition of emotions represents the evidence of the development of a more intelligent and sensitive society, on the other hand boundaries are set for the emotions which are cause of social unease. Therefore, only the emotions useful to the project of individual self-fulfilment are presented in a favourable light while those which create dependences are looked at with suspicion: thus emotions are objects of cultural reverence but also of psychological treatment. In any case, emotions have always been represented as a constant characteristic of social life. From this point of view, if today the social debate revaluates the emotions and the duplicity of human being it’s because authors such as Georg Simmel and Norbert Elias have taught us that the individual should be analyzed and considered as a whole.

topologik.net

In Medias Res, 2022

The Internet age of media communication has been gradually and subtly changing the way in which we experience ourselves and the world we live in. Broadcasting our lives on the web also involves the everyday exteriorization of emotions onto the technical mediators of the third degree, as Jensen calls them (2006). Expressions of emotional experience is something we see every day on social networks, but they are also becoming an integral part of user content under the media text on web portals. These so-called intellectual technologies are acquiring some of the essential human characteristics such as rationality, memory, calculation, and translation, as well as emotionality and communication (Carr 2014, Turkle 2011). Where do Emotions live when we transfer them into the virtual world and how do they become an integral part of media content? Where does one’s soul live when transferred to one’s virtual self? These are the questions we will try to answer in the first part of this paper. We will analyse the virtual space, its possibilities and limitations. We will discuss the potential of online media to mediate emotional experiences. We will also seek to understand technology and devices as an alternative humanity, when people fail or refuse to act by themselves. We will try to find answers to questions about the consequences of such mediation, referring to the research of other scholars including Siva Vaidhyanathan, Sherry Turkle, Nicholas Carr, and others.