dispatch 004: affective logistics: on the algorithmic capture and routing of emotion
Affective Logistics is a serialized research dispatch tracking the infrastructures, algorithms, and administrative architectures that capture, route, and monetize emotion.
✦ This Haunted Inbox Where I Archive ✦
A drawer inside the cathedral. Fragments drift through. You may linger, but some things will not be explained.
Last month’s dispatch traced latency-aware sonification and the residues of infrastructural mourning: sonic delay, affective drift, the spectral economies of what cannot be made present in real time. That text explored how infrastructures do not merely mediate experience but actively script the conditions for feeling, that is how sound, interface, and latency are operationalized as sites of affective administration.
Today, I move from the aesthetic and sonic registers into the conceptual substrate underpinning these operations. The following text, excerpted from my master document on Affective Logistics, stakes the theoretical coordinates of this emergent regime. Here, I attempt to name the system that captures, routes, and monetizes emotion as logistical matter: not as metaphor, but as administrative infrastructure.
If the last dispatch documented spectral traces and the choreography of delay, this one examines how contemporary computational architectures precondition what forms of feeling are possible, permissible, or disposable. It is not a call for “wellness,” “care,” or a restoration of affect’s supposed spontaneity; rather, I am attempting a forensic account of how affect is rendered actionable, optimized, and archived under regimes of computational sovereignty.
What follows is, again, an attempt at a recursive deepening of an inquiry already in motion. I offer it as both context and provocation for anyone tracking the infrastructural and algorithmic capture of emotion as the dominant logic of our moment. When in my last dispatch I said “The refusal of frictionless design is a political act”, I left that statement hanging. Today I follow up with the why.
✦ Affective Logistics: On the Algorithmic Capture and Routing of Emotion
Abstract
This project theorizes affective logistics as the emergent infrastructural regime through which emotion is captured, routed, optimized, and archived under computational sovereignty. Departing from earlier models that conceptualized affect as intensity, circulation, or orientation, this framework traces how feeling is rendered operational matter: anticipatively preconditioned, infrastructurally staged, and financially securitized.
Across domains including biometric surveillance, synthetic companionship, domestic optimization, sonic governance, and the financialization of emotion, Affective Logistics maps how contemporary systems do not merely register affect but preconfigure its possibility, latency, volatility, and disappearance. The project articulates concepts such as algorithmic spatialization, joyful austerity, gastro-logistics, synthetic sovereignty, acoustic governmentality, and affective futures, positioning them within a genealogy of infrastructural capture extending from colonial classification to algorithmic governance.
Methodologically, the work maintains a clinical detachment: theorizing affect with minimal affect to mirror the logistical architectures it analyzes. Refusing solutionism, planetary abstraction, and resistance romanticism, it offers a situated account grounded in the transatlantic circuits of the United States and the European Union.
Affective Logistics does not ask how emotion persists under algorithmic life. It examines how infrastructural regimes precondition the emergence, recognition, monetization, or erasure of emotional states.
Prologue: After Affect, Before Capture
This work emerges in the aftermath of a critical tradition that made it possible to think of feeling not as private property, but as routed, sedimented, and circulated through social life. I owe much to those who have mapped the entanglements of emotion and governance, such as Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Jasbir Puar, Achille Mbembe, among others, whose insights revealed that no sensation arrives untouched by history, power, or infrastructure. Their work is not my departure point because it is insufficient; it is my departure point precisely because it succeeded so thoroughly that it altered the very conditions under which feeling can now be theorized.
The infrastructural shifts of the contemporary, that is, biometric scoring, logistical governance or algorithmic preemption, have moved affect beyond the sticky surfaces of bodies and signs. Feeling is no longer merely circulated; it is administrated, formatted, archived, and optimized within logistical architectures that anticipate sensation before it can emerge. This is not a betrayal of the critical traditions that precede me. It is their continuation under altered conditions: a genealogy of emotion routed not only through bodies and narratives, but through frictionless interfaces, biometric gates, and algorithmically staged environments.
What follows, then, is not affect theory as it has been institutionalized, that is, centered on intensities, emergence, or resistance, but an excavation of affective logistics: the forensic study of how emotion becomes infrastructural matter. If I trace feeling now, it is not to recover spontaneity, but to reveal how it has already been routed, measured, and redeployed under the sign of optimization, and to mourn what forms of feeling may be lost in its capture.
✦ The logics of affective logistics
Two control logics shaped the conditions for algorithmic affect: one developed in military command rooms, the other in the kitchen drawer. Together, they produced the subject who experiences joy without resistance and interfaces without friction.
This project begins not with a rupture, but with an unveiling, an excavation of the infrastructural undercurrents that, from the outset, pulsed beneath earlier inquiries. If Haptic Mournings named the chimeras that touch without body, and Amorino Latente mourned what cannot be translated (and first named the figure of the technician of self-curation), then Affective Logistics traces the conditions under which such touches are rendered legible, and such mourning administrable. It asks: what logistical systems govern the emotional terrain in which chimeras are read as hallucinations and not relics? Under what infrastructural regimes is the latency of affect rendered a design flaw, a glitch, or a risk metric?
✦ A Study in Pre-Feeling
“To touch what does not exist is to enter the field of the pre-felt.”
—Haptic Mournings
“Where translation fails, infrastructure begins.”
—Amorino Latente
This project is, then, a study in pre-feeling. It charts how affect is routed, optimized, and staged across architectures that promise intimacy without intimacy, joy without density, and sovereignty without agency. It emerges from within the recursive folds of prior inquiry, the folds in which affect has always been more than intensity. It has always been infrastructural.
✦ Terminals of Affective Supply Chains
This infrastructural shift, where affect becomes not only measurable but administrable, spans domains that appear unrelated: the modular charm of the IKEA showroom, the frictionless intimacy of a large language model companion, the pulse-detecting gaze of a biometric surveillance gate. But these are not anomalies. They are terminals within the same affective supply chain. Each participates in the logistical conversion of emotion into signal: IKEA stages joy as ergonomic compliance, the AI girlfriend offers attachment without opacity, and the Entry/Exit System of the EU translates emotion into biometric threat.
Together, they compose a regime in which emotion is no longer spontaneous or interior, but anticipated, routed, and optimized under the imperative of seamless experience. This is not the end of emotion. This is what I identify as its infrastructural capture.
✦ Naming a Regime: Affective Logistics
Affective Logistics designates the emergent infrastructural regime through which emotion is rendered computationally actionable. It encompasses a system that captures, classifies, simulates, and governs affect across seemingly disparate domains: from biometric surveillance and predictive platforms to domestic design and emotional UI. While these systems may appear disjointed, they belong to a unified logistical paradigm in which affect is no longer treated as ephemeral, ambiguous, or interior, but as a signal to be routed, optimized, archived, or neutralized.
This framework builds on, and departs from, existing affect theory by shifting from models of intensity, orientation, or circulation (Massumi, Ahmed) toward a theorization of emotion as operational matter: subject to infrastructural constraints, classificatory violence, and extractive design protocols.
Affective Logistics is not metaphorical. It is administrative. It marks a transition from affect as experience to affect as computational residue. It also extends and sharpens my earlier theorizations of vital austerity, that is, the reduction of life to conditions of machinic legibility and optimization. In this context, affect is no longer surplus, but pre-formatted, rendered functional or discardable in accordance with the needs of the system.
This includes:
Synthetic architectures of attachment (e.g., language models that simulate intimacy without reciprocity);
Coercive classification regimes (e.g., emotion-recognition systems that translate facial and vocal cues into security risks);
Domestic containment systems (e.g., IKEA catalogues that pre-script affective atmospheres of cheerful austerity).
Each participates in the same overarching logic: emotional governance under computational sovereignty.
Methodological Note
This project is situated within the affective and logistical infrastructures of what is conventionally referred to as the West, specifically the transatlantic circuitry between the United States (where many of these computational systems are developed) and the European Union (where they are normalized, legislated, and experienced). I live within these systems. I write from inside their logistical architectures.
This is not a planetary theory. It does not claim universality. I deliberately decline to extend this inquiry into geopolitical contexts I do not inhabit, such as Nairobi or Shenzhen, not because affective logistics are absent there, but because to theorize them without embedded, situated knowledge would replicate the same extractive gestures this project critiques. To do so would render those locations into illustrative terrain, mere proxies for Western anxieties, or data-fields for theoretical validation.
This project traces the genealogy of affective logistics as it emerges within, and is co-constitutive with, capitalist infrastructures. It does not claim that affect was unmediated prior to capitalism, nor does it seek to totalize all affective experience under this frame. Rather, it delineates the logistical capture of affect as a historically situated phenomenon, aligned with the emergence of extractive economies, colonial governance, and algorithmic governance.
Provisional Closure
This text does not seek to finalize the conceptual terrain of Affective Logistics, nor to offer a synthetic account of affect under algorithmic governance. Rather, it is presented as a provisional incision, one node in a recursive inquiry that remains, by necessity, unfinished. The arguments traced here are indebted to, and in dialogue with, my broader research on latency-aware sonification, infrastructural mourning, and the operational architectures of affect. In this sense, Affective Logistics is not a completed theory but a working method, a form of ongoing infrastructural annotation that will continue to unfold across media, methods, and sites.
I offer these reflections as both diagnostic and incomplete: an invitation for friction, annotation, and antagonism, as well as for resonance and amplification. If the project charts a regime, it does so provisionally, in anticipation of emergent forms, failures, and counter-logistics that may yet reroute its claims.
This dispatch is then not a closure but an opening, part of a serialized, recursive engagement with the infrastructures that precondition affect, and with the losses, frictions, and latencies that remain uncaptured within logistical regimes. Future installments will continue to develop these threads, particularly through the experimental lens of sonification and affective resonance.
§ This is errant correspondence. There are no contact forms.
If you wish to reach the reliquary, begin with the dispatches.
→ Subscribe or linger.