Feeling Machines: Affect, Automation, and Machinic Assemblages of the Self

The human mind, along with the cognitive faculties of consciousness, language, memory, and imagination, has historically been positioned as what sets humans apart from other species and non-living systems. Though behavioral research on non-human animals in the field of animal studies—as well as recent work on the cognitive properties of technical systems—has decentered the human as uniquely cognitive, affect and emotion are still considered the dividing line that separates human from machine, and therefore remain the final frontier in AI research. But if the mechanical is so often conceptualized in opposition to the human and therefore devoid of affect, I ask, then why has the machine been a critical object and metaphor for the articulation of theories of human affect, emotion, and cognition? My project aims to answer this question by bringing into conversation the deeply intertwined histories of cognitive science, affect theory, automation, and computing. I explore the machine—with a particular emphasis on the android machine—as both a material object and metaphor for selfhood, privileging affect-laden gestures displayed by machines, affective encounters between humans and machines, and the ways in which our technological inventions have influenced—and continue to influence—theories of human cognition and affect, just as our views of the mind have shaped our understandings of the machine. The machine—and by extension, the mechanical—has always figured into our conception of the human, serving as a metaphor for both what the human is and is not, but not always in ways that have been clearly articulated or understood. An overwhelming tendency has been either to reduce the human to the mechanical or to anthropomorphize the inanimate, which reinforces the anthropocentric binary between the human and non-human. My approach takes up the human and various mechanical objects—automaton, computer, chatbot, and emotional robot—as actors capable of displaying affect and engaging in the affective encounter. I discuss affective beings and objects, both living and non-living, in an inclusive framework that evades the dominant binaries of human/nonhuman and anthropomorphization/dehumanization, privileging embodied affect in both biological beings and technical systems. Central to my examination is an exploration of how these humanoid technologies have historically been—and continue to be—gendered and feminized. —Giorgina Samira Paiell