Nonconscious: On the Affective Synching of Mind and Machine

Abstract

Growing numbers of nonhuman companions (smart objects, technical environments, sensor technologies used to augment the human body) are creating affective synching between human and nonhuman agency. Unlike the unconscious of psychoanalysis, this book argues, the resulting nonconscious is no longer coupled to a subject grounded in language, instead acting as an affective link between technical, mental, and physical processes. But how is this nonconscious to be understood? Is it something additional, a new zone intervening between the unconscious and consciousness? Or does it fundamentally call into question the distinction between the two?