Affect and automaticy: Towards an analytics of experimentation

Abstract

This article is a response to an increasing rapprochement taking place between the humanities and the sciences, and specifically between cultural theory and the cognitive sciences within the field of affect studies. The focus of the article will be on the area of automaticity research in both its past and present formations. This field of research has furnished cultural theorists with concepts and theories for animating affect and therefore provides a fruitful intersection for interdisciplinary enquiry. The article offers a strategy of incorporating cognitive science into affect theory that returns to a pre-positivist analytics of experimentation found within early psychology. When this analytics is brought into dialogue with science and technology studies and performative approaches to experimentation, the problematic of subjectivity is not displaced or elided but rather becomes a central recurring issue. It will explore what might be at stake in such strategies of appropriation and re-invention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved) (journal abstract)