Affect and Automaticity: Towards an Analytics of Experimentation

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.