Affective identification reduces complexity but renders the system rigid and non-transferable.

Evidence

Feelings accomplish external and internal reduction in a single operation – that is their strength and their weakness. They reduce the possibilities of the environment by settling preference on one object, and accordingly at the same time establish internal possibilities of processing experience. The affective system, as one says, ‘identifies’ with its object. In allowing no alternatives either outside or inside, feelings are inelastic, fixed, non-transferable. They can only be reorganized by being destroyed and remade. Every breakdown of the emotional relationship would restore the crushing complexity of the world. Anxiety therefore lurks in the background of feeling and motivates the continuance of the relationship, if it receives any kind of confirmation. Feelings try to make themselves immune from refutation, if at all possible. Love and hate make one blind. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 288

Categorization

• XREF: The fragility of emotional bonds and their non-transferability parallels the reader’s interest in how system trust can’t substitute for facework; ties to Giddens’s distinction. — connects to: Emotion recognition reduces feelings to pattern-recognition problems for computers. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 889