The biosocial subject: sensor technologies and worldly sensibility

ABSTRACT

Sensor technologies are increasingly part of everyday life, embedded in buildings (movement, sound, temperature) and worn on persons (heart rate, electro-dermal activity, eye tracking). This paper presents a theoretical framework for research on computational sensor data. My approach moves away from theories of agent-centered perceptual synthesis (on behalf of a perceiving organism) and towards a more expansive understanding of the biosocial learning environment. The focus is on sensor technologies that track sensation below the bandwidth of human consciousness. I argue that there is an urgent need to reclaim this kind of biodata as part of an unequally distributed worldly sensibility, and to thereby undermine more narrow reductive readings of such data. The paper explores the biopolitical implications of recasting biodata in terms of trans-individual inhuman forces, while continuing to track the distinctive power of humans.

KEYWORDS:

• Biosocial
• sensor technology
• electro-dermal
• posthumanism
• environmental sensibility
• worlding

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge support from the Biosocial Laboratory at Manchester Metropolitan University, and contributions of ideas from colleagues Maggie Maclure and David Rousell.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Economic & Social Research Council (2014) ESRC framework to enable biosocial research. http://www.esrc.ac.uk/files/research/framework-to-enable-biosocial-research-pdf/

2 As Nafus (2016) points out, a broad definition of ‘biosensor’ helps open up the conversation around subjectivity and self.

3 Epigenetic research has inherited cybernetic notions of receptor and relay, so that the environment now ‘signals’ and is transduced through bodies (Landecker, 2016).

4 The lead MIT researcher at the lab, Rosalind Picard, founder of the company Affectiva, is interested in how EDA might help Autists, and people suffering from seizures, anticipate and thereby avoid traumatic incidents. For other examples of research in this area, see Choi, Ahmed, and Gutierrez-Osuna (2012), Hernandez, Riobo, Rozga, Abowd, and Picard (2014), and Sano and Picard (2013).

5 Hansen (2015) – whose work we discuss in more detail below – critiques Deleuze and the concept of the virtual, and emphasizes intensity instead. Indeed, Hansen is keen to differentiate himself from many other theorists. Despite these claims, our reading of Deleuze – his work on both virtuality and intensity – shows the relevance of his work.

6 Protevi cites Chemero (2009), Noe (2004), and Wheeler (2005). He then adds and complicates this work in embodied cognition by introducing ideas from Gilles Deleuze (in particular the concept of the virtual).

7 Although not adequate room here to develop this idea, there are important ways in which the concept of the virtual offers a twist to conventional theories of emergence. There is also increasingly more work on quantum cognition and quantum sociology, offering alternative ways of conceiving of ‘determination’ in contrast to the concept of ‘emergence’ as articulated in dynamic systems theory (see, for instance, Wendt (2015).