Enactive Affectivity, Extended

Mentalized Affectivity

This article focuses on a particular kind of affect regulation, mentalized affectivity, which entails revaluing, not just modulating, affects. The author argues that affectivity challenges us to comprehend the impact of our representational world on affective experience and that this process plays a crucial role in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Three elements of affectivity are delineated and d...

1 Affectivity

The concept of affectivity has assumed central importance in much recent scholarship, and many in the social sciences and humanities now talk of an ‘affective turn’. The concept of affectivity at play in this ‘turn’ remains, however, somewhat vague and slippery. Starting with Silvan Tomkins’ influential theory of affect, this paper will explore the relevance of the general assumptions (or ‘utmo...

Running Head: Truly Enactive Emotion Truly Enactive Emotion

Interactivity is Affectivity

The report of the death of interactivity comes from Mark Andrejevic (2001). He calls the initial failure of the Big Brother television format in the United States a watershed moment in the passage from interactivity to what he terms, following Slavoj Zizek, interpassivity. During its first season, viewers voted off the show's most interesting participants, the ones most likely to fight, seduce,...

The enactive approach

There is a small but growing community of researchers spanning a spectrum of disciplines which are united in rejecting the still dominant computationalist paradigm in favor of the enactive approach. The framework of this approach is centered on a core set of ideas, such as autonomy, sense-making, emergence, embodiment, and experience. These concepts are finding novel applications in a diverse r...