Affective Milieus: Intensive Couplings, Technical Sentience, and a Nonconscious In-between

Abstract

The developments in media technology at the dawn of the twenty-first century are characterized by an understanding of once separate entities as rad- ically open systems. Human and animal bodies, and technical and natural environments, are connected in complex ways via processes of organic sentience and algorithmic sensors: signals are transposed into data, which are in turn exchanged (in the form of information) between the bodies and their surroundings, creating a pool of data from which political, economic, social, and ethical conclusions are drawn. Donna Haraway’s companion species, Lynn Margulis’s symbionts, and Myra Hird’s micro- ontology all point to processes of contagion, infil- tration, and multiple agencies that call not only for a thinking in relations but for a thinking “as embedded, embodied and even ... as the very ‘stuff of the world’”.