Department of English

This module aims to provide an overview of some of the historical approaches to the relationship between affect, emotion and work, and to bring those to bear upon the contemporary politics of work under different contexts of precarity. Specifically, it examines the relation between work and affect under present conditions of post-Fordism and of the neoliberal organization of production, time, and subjectivity. Using cinematic texts as primary references, the goals of this module are to point to bothcapital's exploitation of affect, but also capital's production of affect, as these intersect with the concerns of gender and precarity.

The following two sections provide two approaches for thinking about how forces of capital both exploit and produce affect. Each section provides different resources for thinking about how exploitation and affects can yield new subjectivities and different forms of sociality. These subjectivities and sociality do not necessarily reproduce capital, and can in fact yield forms of resistance. After discussing some of the relevant theoretical issues, each section then suggests ways that these can be understood through readings of films.

Editor's Note for JTAS 3.2

The premise of this article is that a basic understanding of the composition and functioning of large language models is critically urgent. To that end, we extract a representational map of OpenAI’s GPT-2 with what we articulate as two classes of deep learning code, that which pertains to the model and that which underwrites applications built around the model. We then verify this map through case studies of two popular GPT-2 applications: the text adventure game, AI Dungeon, and the language art project, This Word Does Not Exist. Such an exercise allows us to test the potential of Critical Code Studies when the object of study is deep learning code and to demonstrate the validity of code as an analytical focus for researchers in the subfields of Critical Artificial Intelligence and Critical Machine Learning Studies. More broadly, however, our work draws attention to the means by which ordinary users might interact with, and even direct, the behavior of deep learning systems, and by extension works toward demystifying some of the auratic mystery of “AI.” What is at stake is the possibility of achieving an informed sociotechnical consensus about the responsible applications of large language models, as well as a more expansive sense of their creative capabilities — indeed, understanding how and where engagement occurs allows all of us to become more active participants in the development of machine learning systems.

What this chapter offers is not another history of accelerationism as philosophy or coterie, but rather a tracing out of accelerationism as it has become co-opted and memetically entered into popular discourse as political affect and cultural condition. What is the significance of this memeification, and why, beyond the obvious literalization, does this take the form of the rocket? We take account of the way in which a political philosophy committed to pushing capitalism to its breaking point and beyond ironically finds itself deployed for capitalistic, even hyper-capitalistic, ends. What we are calling “rocket theory” is not simply a play on an idiom but also proposes a theoretically informed way of thinking through the convergence of oppositional forces as manifest in accelerationist politics, or anti-politics, in our moment.

Choreographer and dancer Kyle Abraham and photographer and filmmaker Carrie Schneider position intimacy in screen dance as an affective hailing to viewers. The intimate visualities they achieve serve as an opportunity to critically hypothesize ways of being in community and understanding black visual relationships to subjectivity. In both explorations of meaning a production of close relationships to others, to notions of selfhood, and to blackness animate a radical love of others and of self. Their collaborations, the Dance Response Project, subtly, but powerfully tap persistent modes of black being and of theorizing the social new to creative discourse.