If the turn to affect is registering a reconfiguration of the body, labor, and technology, as my coauthors and I went on to argue, then we also wanted to propose that it is due, in no smallpart, to digital technologies and to the technosciences of information that now propose that information is the general theory of matter/energy and that thermodynamics is only a special case.4 Here affect at every scale of matter points to the self-organization inherent to matter or matter's capacity to be informational or informing. It points as well to the digital technology that supports a mathematics that is able to attach to and modulate the informational substrate of bodily matter and matter generally such that technosciences—for example, biomedia and new media—introduce what Keith Ansell-Pearson (1999) has called the “post-biological threshold" into “life-itself." Thatis to say, these technologies are changing what the body can do or its affective capacity, with the postbiological as a threshold or a limit. However, in what follows I suggest that in her treatment of nanotechnology, Parisi raisesa question as to the status of this limit in thinking of bodies, affect, technology, and labor—a question that also points to recent philosophical debate over ontology.
In the years since the 2007 publication of “Notes Towards a Theory of Affect-Itself,"the thought of affect as a technological assemblage hasbeen refined through interdisciplinary discussions about affect, media, technology, governance, and economy. This has occurred as media studies discourse has been shifting its focus from technologies and uses of mass communications to affect or capabilities of perception and sensation, and not only human perception and sensation, In fact, media arebeing defined in terms of a subtractionof human perception as the presumed center of being and feeling.Steve Goodman, writing on sound technologies and leaning toward the process philosophies of Deleuze and Whitehead, argues: “If we subtract human perception, everything moves.... At the molecularor quantum level, everything is in motion, is vibrating" (Goodman 2009: 83). For subjectivity and objectivity, all that is required is that an entity be felt by another entity. “All entities," Goodman continues, “are potential media that can feel or whose vibrationscan be felt by other entities" (Goodman 2009: 83). Here media are understood in terms of nonanthropocentric affect, where “affects are transitions, gateways, and passages between dimensions," as Jussi Parikka has put it (Parikka 2010: xxvi).
TheDigital, Labor, and Measure beyond Biopolitics
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