On being stuck: the pandemic crisis as affective stasis.

The Covid-19 pandemic put forth a new kind of affective exhaustion. Being forced to stay at home, diminish social interactions and reduce the scale of their everyday mobility, many people experienced boredom, sluggishness, and existential immobility. While state-imposed pandemic policies changed rapidly, everyday life remained strangely unmoving. A sense of being stuck unfurled-as if not only social life, but time itself had come to a halt. At the same time, there was a latent sense of tension and increased aggressiveness which became manifest not only in protests and riots, but also in the texture of everyday life. In this contribution, we argue that both of these states-the feeling of being stuck, and the feeling that this putative tranquility is nothing but the calm before a storm-can be conceptualized as affective stasis. Through a rearticulation of the ancient concept of stasis, we show that these two at first glance incongruous affective conditions are intricately entangled. In Ancient Greek, the term stasis meant "stand, standing, stance". Being used in a wide variety of contexts-politics, navigation, sports, rhetoric, medicine, and others-stasis took on different meanings which can be semantically organized around two opposite poles: one is the total absence of motion, and the other is an event of radical and often violent social and political change. Drawing on affect theory, phenomenology, and ancient Greek semantics, we propose affective stasis as a novel conceptual framework for political phenomenology.

Connectomes as constitutively epistemic objects: Critical perspectives on modeling in current neuroanatomy.

The term "connectome" is commonly taken to describe a complete map of neural connections in a nervous system of a given species. This chapter provides a critical perspective on the role of connectomes in neuroscientific practice and asks how the connectomic approach fits into a larger context in which network thinking permeates technology, infrastructure, social life, and the economy. In the first part of this chapter, we argue that, seen from the perspective of ongoing research, the notion of connectomes as "complete descriptions" is misguided. Our argument combines Rachel Ankeny's analysis of neuroanatomical wiring diagrams as "descriptive models" with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's notion of "epistemic objects," i.e., targets of research that are still partially unknown. Combining these aspects we conclude that connectomes are constitutively epistemic objects: there just is no way to turn them into permanent and complete technical standards because the possibilities to map connection properties under different modeling assumptions are potentially inexhaustible. In the second part of the chapter, we use this understanding of connectomes as constitutively epistemic objects in order to critically assess the historical and political dimensions of current neuroscientific research. We argue that connectomics shows how the notion of the "brain as a network" has become the dominant metaphor of contemporary brain research. We further point out that this metaphor shares (potentially problematic) affinities to the form of contemporary "network societies." We close by pointing out how the relation between connectomes and networks in society could be used in a more fruitful manner.

Mind Invasion: Situated Affectivity and the Corporate Life Hack.

In view of the philosophical problems that vex the debate on situated affectivity, it can seem wise to focus on simple cases. Accordingly, theorists often single out scenarios in which an individual employs a device in order to enhance their emotional experience, or to achieve new kinds of experience altogether, such as playing an instrument, going to the movies, or sporting a fancy handbag. I argue that this narrow focus on cases that fit a "user/resource model" tends to channel attention away from more complex and also more problematic instances of situated affectivity. Among these are scenarios in which a social domain draws individuals into certain modes of affective interaction, often by way of attunement and habituation to affective styles and interaction patterns that are normative in the domain in question. This can lead to a phenomenon that is not so much "mind extension" than "mind invasion": affectivity is dynamically framed and modulated from without, often contrary to the prior orientations of the individuals in question. As an example, I discuss affective patterns prevalent in today's corporate workplace. I claim that workplace affect sometimes contributes to what is effectively a "hack" of employees' subjectivity.

Critical neuroscience meets medical humanities.

This programmatic theory paper sketches a conceptual framework that might inspire work in critical Medical Humanities. For this purpose, Kaushik Sunder Rajan's account of biocapital is revisited and discussed in relation to the perspective of a critical neuroscience. Critical neuroscience is an encompassing positioning towards the recent public prominence of the brain and brain-related practices, tools and discourses. The proposed analytical scheme has five focal nodes: capital, life, technoscience, (neoliberal) politics and subjectivity. A special emphasis will be placed on contemporary framings of subjectivity, as it is here where deep-reaching entanglements of personhood with scientific practice and discourse, medical and informational technologies, and economic formations are most evident. Notably, the emerging subject position of the 'prospective health consumer' will be discussed as it figures prominently in the terrain between neuroscience and other medico-scientific disciplines.

Empathy's blind spot.

The aim of this paper is to mount a philosophical challenge to the currently highly visible research and discourse on empathy. The notion of empathetic perspective-shifting-a conceptually demanding, high-level construal of empathy in humans that arguably captures the core meaning of the term-is criticized from the standpoint of a philosophy of normatively accountable agency. Empathy in this demanding sense fails to achieve a true understanding of the other and instead risks to impose the empathizer's self-constitutive agency upon the person empathized with. Attempts to 'simulate' human agency, or attempts to emulate its cognitive or emotional basis, will likely distort their target phenomena in profound ways. Thus, agency turns out to be empathy's blind spot. Elements of an alternative understanding of interpersonal relatedness are also discussed, focusing on aspects of 'interaction theory'. These might do some of the work that high-level constructs of empathy had been supposed to do without running into similar conceptual difficulties.

The brain as part of an enactive system.

The notion of an enactive system requires thinking about the brain in a way that is different from the standard computational-representational models. In evolutionary terms, the brain does what it does and is the way that it is, across some scale of variations, because it is part of a living body with hands that can reach and grasp in certain limited ways, eyes structured to focus, an autonomic system, an upright posture, etc. coping with specific kinds of environments, and with other people. Changes to any of the bodily, environmental, or intersubjective conditions elicit responses from the system as a whole. On this view, rather than representing or computing information, the brain is better conceived as participating in the action.

Affective intentionality and self-consciousness.

We elaborate and defend the claim that human affective states ("feelings") are, among other things, self-disclosing. We will show why affective intentionality has to be considered in order to understand human self-consciousness. One specific class of affective states, so-called existential feelings, although often neglected in philosophical treatments of emotions, will prove central. These feelings importantly pre-structure affective and other intentional relations to the world. Our main thesis is that existential feelings are an important manifestation of self-consciousness and figure prominently in human self-understanding. We offer an ordering of four levels of existential feelings and also give considerations in favour of the essential bodily nature of these feelings.