Patricia Clough

Bio

Patricia Ticineto Clough is professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York. She is author of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000); Feminist Thought: Desire, Power and Academic Discourse (1994) and The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (1998). She is editor of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, (2007) and with Craig Willse, editor of Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death (forthcoming). Clough’s work has drawn on theoretical traditions concerned with technology, affect, unconscious processes, timespace and political economy. She is currently working on Ecstatic Corona an ethnographic historical research and experimental writing project about where she grew up in Queens New York.

Abstract

The digital  affect and measure beyond biopolitics

My presentation will go back to an earlier co-authored work on affect-itself, the conceptualization of which involves reevaluating certain assumptions necessary to theorizing digital labor. These assumptions concern the relationship of energy, matter, work and information on one hand and on the other the relationship of measure and value. In suggesting that the digital is instigating a transvaluation of value, I will offer comments on labor power, economy and governmentality.

My presentation is meant as an intervention or an inserted reflection raising the question who or what is laboring in the conceptualization of digital labor?