Commodity encounters: late capitalist re-design of the consumer pathosphere

My paper investigates the possible connections among affect, design and late-capitalism strategies of commodification of experience. Drawing from a Spinozistic-Deleuzian concept of affect I intend to map how the current production of subjectivities is profoundly entangled with capitalist strategies of management and control of the affective sphere.

As Deleuze wrote in his prescient Post-Script on the Societies of Control, contemporary capitalism operates by mining and modulating the pathosphere. Value is now extracted from life; a new distribution of the sensible shapes consumption; affects are being co-opted by what I call semio-chemio-affective-neuro capital.

The contemporary pathosphere is being designed by interventions that simultaneously indicate capitalism’s capacities for reinvention, as well as the relentless expansion of the signature of the commodity. Specifically, the encounter with designed commodities needs to be probed to address the way in which subjectivities are being produced by, and emerge from, the designing of experience itself as a commodity.

What types of subjectivities are required by the current formation of capitalism? Can it be argued that these new affect-literate subjectivities emerge from their relations with designed commodities? How can this encounter with the commodity be reconfigured to account for contagious affective competencies? Are subjectivities increasingly designed and commodified too?