The Virtualization of Affectivity

Abstract

Immaterial labour, in a postfordist era where life is thought as a value in productive terms, developes its function enhanced to abstract values like knowledge, information, communication and “affects”. Leisure and business times, personal and professional relationships are entwined in such a manner that makes them con-fuse in just one productive moment. This is; affectivity, which usually remained in a personal field, nowadays has achieved a special relevance challenging governability and capital strategies via collaborative practices based on communicative and affective articulations.
In order to explain how affectivities complicate and develop new power relations in society, we will think of affectivity as a relation rather than a “thing”. This is, we will think of it in terms of “event” opposed to “substance”. A qualitative moment instead of a quantitative succession of emotional states.
According to this, we will trace how affectivity works at the family, enterprise, or social action levels; taking into account control and resistance practices made possible by information and communication technologies.
So we hope to see what guides affectivity once being virtualized by TIC’s. To do so, we will use Pierre Levy’s (1999) conceptual work about the virtual, finding everyday examples that reassemble technological and affectivity issues.