Extended body … extended mind: The risk of thought

Abstract

Communication may be understood through its manifest meaning or through the medium in which it is expressed. The latter approach begins from the material social relations and technologies that constitute the medium of communication. This approach has a certain similarity with affect theory understood as a pre-cognitive focus on bodies and technologies. An affective network sets up the manifest subject‐object, or human‐machine, relations with a subjectified anxiety. The objectification of intelligence produces a fundamental anxiety about what it is to be human. I attempt to determine where thought may yet intervene in a world of algorithms which is pervaded by anxiety.