The deepening intervention of digital and intelligent technologies may open up new possibilities for understanding human emotion. Photo: IC PHOTO

Over the past half century, sociology has produced a rich body of scholarship on emotion. Yet critics have noted that this research has, to some extent, constructed an overly narrow developmental trajectory for the sociology of emotion—one largely confined to reproducing a series of binary oppositions such as nature/culture, subjective/objective, reason/emotion, mind/body, micro/macro, and structure/agency. Within such frameworks, emotion is typically presupposed as an internal and relatively stable attribute of the individual (whether socially or biologically derived), while bodies, technologies, and spaces are treated as passive containers. This approach disaggregates human beings, technologies, and institutions into isolated units, while leaving unresolved tensions between macro and micro, discourse and body, and structure and agency.

In response, the deepening intervention of contemporary digital and intelligent technologies may offer an opportunity for critical reflection. Here, the “digital” points to what Gilles Deleuze identified as the numerical modulation of life processes in societies of control—the continuous capture of data flows and the regulation of conduct. The “intelligent” refers to new mediating mechanisms of cognition and emotion, most prominently represented by artificial intelligence (AI). The intertwining of these two dimensions is reconfiguring the foundations, forms, and mechanisms through which emotion is generated. This raises a pressing question: When the object of emotion shifts toward algorithms, and emotion is increasingly entrusted to data-driven mechanisms, where will human emotional life ultimately be led?

This article treats emotion—or, more broadly, affective experience itself—as an effect generated, provisionally stabilized, and circulated within networks of heterogeneous actors. By integrating Michel Foucault’s concept of the dispositif with Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT), it proposes an analytical framework of the affective dispositif. As a configurational network composed of humans, technologies, and institutions, the affective dispositif functions to capture, modulate, and govern the domain of affective experience, thereby producing specific emotional categories and forms of subjectivity. This network is collectively woven by multiple actors, including human users, algorithms, interface designs, and institutional arrangements.

Perspective of affective dispositive, pathway of affective tracing

In today’s technologically mediated environment, emotion is increasingly read and managed through technological systems: Physiological signals are captured, traces of interaction are recorded, and experiences are translated into data objects. At the technological level, this appears to bridge the gap between inner experience and external expression, resetting the conditions under which emotion can be expressed, “seen,” and even understood by the self. Compared with earlier forms of social life characterized by clearer differentiation and boundaries, existence and emotion in liquid modernity are now inevitably attached to dispositifs. For instance, short-video platforms automatically assign labels such as pleasure or surprise based on users’ facial responses and viewing duration, and users often adopt these same labels when describing their emotions in comment sections. Such arrangements preemptively guide—and delimit—the narratives through which emotion can be articulated.

Introducing the concept of the affective dispositif means that emotion is no longer explained on the basis of social structure as a prior given—the notion of an emotional regime alone no longer adequately captures the affective phenomena of the digital–intelligent age. Rather, sociality itself becomes part of the explanatory object. The central question becomes: Which actors, through what dispositifs, and by what forms of connection, collectively construct emotions that can be perceived, named, and governed? And how are these configurations maintained—or dismantled—through controversy and breakdown? In this sense, understanding affective experience in the digital age requires shifting from asking what emotions a subject possesses to analyzing how affective dispositifs generate specific forms of subjectivation and emotional configurations. The core methodological pathway proposed here is affective tracing: systematically following the dynamic associations among heterogeneous actors within the dispositif, including processes of translation, contestation, and stabilization.

The significance of affective tracing lies in symmetrically following how human actors (bodies, discourse, intentions) and nonhuman actors (objects, technologies, concepts, institutions) interact and mutually translate one another through chains of “faire-faire” (“doing” and “being done to”). Who is pulling whom? Why can a certain emotion achieve temporary stability within a particular dispositif, and how does it subsequently collapse or transform? If the dispositif is a woven network of heterogeneous elements, then affective tracing follows how these threads are linked, stretched, and reshaped within a particular pattern of weaving.

How, then, should such tracing be carried out in practice? Within the affective dispositif of literary narrative, the text offers readers a traceable assemblage: nonhuman actors are articulated with memory, narration, and scene, thereby shaping the conditions under which affective intensity is orchestrated. What must be traced is how these actors translate one another. On this basis, tracing the grounds of emotional generation requires revealing how emotion is shaped by material practices and spatial programs. Emotion is not an internal attribute that can be preserved across contexts; rather, it is provisionally generated through the situated configuration of object, scene, body, institution, and narrative. Once any actor or node is replaced, repositioned, or translated differently, both the intensity and directionality of emotion are correspondingly rewritten.

Affective tracing–production on digital platforms

However, the dominant platform dispositifs of the digital-intelligent age are better understood as mechanisms for organizing emotional affordance rather than tools that simply identify preexisting emotions. Here, “affordance” refers to actionable possibilities that emerge from the relationship between the platform environment—including interface, rules, and algorithms—and its actors. It both enables and constrains, depending not only on the material and functional properties of objects but also on users’ perception and practice.

Through the coupling of front-end interfaces and back-end systems, platforms rewrite the boundaries of the sensible. The front end discretizes experience into actionable events—swiping, pausing, liking, reposting, and commenting—offering users a set of perceivable and callable interaction pathways. The back end then rearranges these events into usable affective evidence, establishing through ranking and filtering models what counts as emotion, when it counts, and with what density.

Emotional affordance thus constitutes a carefully orchestrated catalogue of emotion. Every button or gesture is not merely a functional option but also an authorized channel of emotional expression, while implicitly simplifying or excluding more forms from this catalogue—subtle melancholy, complex ambivalence, mild hesitation. In order to gain visibility and interactional feedback, users are compelled to engage in continuous interface-based emotional labor, actively or passively translating, compressing, and even recasting their rich and fluid inner experiences into standardized signals recognizable within this scripted framework.

In this way, platforms develop a distinctive logic of affective tracing–production: systematically translating experience into highly operable signals and circulable labels, thereby driving a closed loop of attention and visibility. For experience to become computable, platforms must compress complex and diverse networks of practice into recordable interface events, then homogenize heterogeneous experiences through standardized labels before converting them into metrics. Visibility thus comes at the cost of incommensurability. The unique value of human experience lies in its irreducible depth and contextual dependence. When platforms forcibly compress experience into circulable labels, subtle details and concrete contexts—those that generate meaning and understanding—are stripped away. Every act of translation entails a loss of meaning and an impoverishment of experience.

Emotional affordance is not merely a mode of observation; it is also a form of governance. It stipulates the temporal scale (immediacy), amplitude (above the threshold of recognizability), and structure in which emotion should appear. Some scholars argue that the rules governing emotional expression are themselves being reshaped by the visibility logic of the “cool” and the spectacular, diluting deeper emotions through instant stimulation and performative norms. Under this narrowing of the dispositif network, affective production in platform contexts is often perceived externally as generating “shallow” emotional experience.

Preliminary research program

Through this analysis, a research program moving from the emotional subject to the affective dispositif and affective tracing gradually emerges. First, emotion should no longer be understood simply as an internal state or structure, but as a relational product configured within specific affective dispositifs, often appearing in an unnamed state. Second, rather than defining emotion, the task is to trace how it is produced, contested, and connected within concrete affective dispositifs. Emotion is both the way in which we become entangled with the world and the force through which we reconfigure it.

The tracing practices of digital platforms are crucial insofar as they configure affective networks into actionable fragments and homogenized labels. Literary modes of tracing, by contrast, allow—and indeed compel—more heterogeneous actors to speak, connect, and remain in processes of ongoing?translation. This difference in modes of configuration—rather than technology itself or any intrinsic property of emotion—helps explain why platforms are often seen as producing “shallow” emotions, while literature is regarded as preserving emotional “depth” or “richness.” Rapid naming and incorporation on platforms effectively limit the network’s extensibility. Literature, by contrast, preserves the possibility of enrichment across time and space through deliberate gaps and relational elaboration.

Research on the affective dispositif unfolds precisely through understanding the differences among these and other modes of tracing. The central question is not what emotion is, but within what kind of dispositif, and through what processes, emotion is shaped into this form. More importantly, it asks how, through tracing and intervention, might alternative configurations within the dispositif be explored and enacted. In other words, how might the dispositif itself be rewoven through tracing and intervention so as to create new pathways for the generation of emotion.

Cheng Boqing (professor) and Su Hao are from the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Nanjing University. This article has been edited and excerpted from the Journal of Intelligent Society, Issue 5, 2025.