Abstract
Since the end of the 1990s, there has been an increasing turn to affect, emotions and feelings within cultural studies and the humanities. Digital Cultures and the Politics of Emotion is the first collection to address explicitly what editor Adi Kuntsman calls ‘the affective fabrics of digital cultures’ (p. 1). This refers to the complex ways in which ‘feelings and affective states can reverberate in and out of cyberspace, intensified (or muffled) and transformed through digital circulation and repetition’ (p. 1). This collection provides a key resource for theorising how emotions, affect and feelings operate in an age of pervasive media characterised by tactile, interactive engagements with a wide range of visual culture. The book includes many case studies that draw on everyday experiences such as email and mobile phone use, digital photography, video games, websites and video art.
Kuntsman’s introductory chapter outlines the different ways that affect, feelings and emotions have been theorised by cultural critics in the past 10 to 15 years. Kuntsman describes these as ‘Sites and Anchors of Emotions’, referring to Sara Ahmed’s work on the emotionality of texts in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004). ‘Archives of Feelings’ draws on Ann Cvetkovich’s work (2003), which suggests that archives can be affective depositories of the past. ‘Movement and Circulation’ introduces the idea that ‘digital sites are never still’ (p. 7); ‘Public Feelings and Ordinary Affects’ explains how affective knowledge has contested the site of the political to include so-called private emotions; and ‘Flows, Assemblages, Biopolitics’ defines the affective turn’s concern with the sensual and bodily knowledge that exceeds both consciousness or unconsciousness, as well as discursive explanations of phenomena. Combined, these theorisations of affect, emotions and feelings offer conceptual frameworks that are adopted in different ways by the contributors in the collection. This introduction is useful, as it provides readers unfamiliar with the critical terms with a way to understand the key theoretical shifts that the affective turn has engendered.
The book is organised into four sections. The first, ‘Affect in the Age of the Digital’ introduces a conceptual problem that in some senses characterises the empirical difficulty faced by the whole collection. Clough writes in her article ‘War By Other Means’ that ‘measuring affect is not easy. Indeed, in political terms, affect has been described as immeasurable’ (p. 29). Writers such as Clough, who use this critical moment to enact a different kind of theoretical writing which can be described as embodied, responsive and personal, demonstrate the difference that the affective turn makes. Yet for the full critical potential of affective intelligence to be felt, it requires a qualitative transformation in how the social is understood and interpreted. Because bodily, non-conscious and non-discursive knowledge are foregrounded in the affective realm, it presents a compelling challenge to the ways of thinking and (not) feeling that have dominated western culture since the Enlightenment.
Perhaps most significantly for this collection, it is within the realm of the digital, where the sensate body is inserted into a flow of fast-appearing and disappearing information, where it can be found that ‘affect is at work’ (p. 27). That is, in the particular historical configuration of technological, cultural and economic factors of late or aesthetic capitalism, affect is so protrusive that its impact on cultural perceptions cannot be ignored. However, the issue of measuring affect continues to pose a pressing empirical challenge for the contributors of Digital Cultures and the Politics of Emotion: there is a level of speculative imagination, as well as a commitment to think through the body in order to make affect work.
Moreover, while I welcome what the affective turn and this collection has to offer, there is always the risk, like any intellectual trend or fashion, that the theoretical model becomes the only vector through which to understand the cultural world. Take Karatzogianni’s observation in her essay about the Wikileaks scandal, that ‘it was affect which forged the allegiances and collaborations of Wikileaks with other movements. It was affect which accelerated the emotional and reactive cyber-attack responses to banking and e-commerce’ (p. 58). Such a sentence veers into a parody of the critical explanation that the author is trying to make. I am quite certain that affect was not the only reason why these events took place, unless affect is so unqualified that it is in fact everywhere (which may well be the case). There is a kind of conceptual challenge in applying the theories, so that they are meaningful and tangible.
Focusing on the role of emotions in cultural life can lead to judgements about their ‘good’ or ‘bad’ value. For example, in Mackley and Karpovich’s essay in the second section of the book, ‘Subjects and Objects of Digital Culture,’ they claim that participants’ emotional responses have lead to ‘far-reaching positive effects on both emotional and physical health’ (p. 135).While they make this point in relation to clinical literature, I think there still needs to be sensitivity, care and responsibility in reporting on and designing research projects that engage people’s memories and emotions. This is not to suggest that research participants should be treated with unnecessary caution that would prevent discussions and engagement; rather, that each person’s emotional life is singular and complex, and therefore cannot be easily generalised. In other words, it should be difficult to conclude that expressing or re-experiencing an emotional memory always equates to being good, because such responses are variable depending on the personal biographies of the people involved.
There is a related conceptual problem in Raun’s essay in the third section of the book, ‘Virtual Intimacies’. Here, Raun discusses how the video logs (vlogs) of transgender activists in the USA ‘work as tools of resistance through visualising and addressing shamed bodily processes that do not appear in mainstream media’ (p. 178). While this is undoubtedly true, and the circulation of these videos are important and necessary, it does not necessarily follow that every transgender person who encounters these films is affected in a way that is always positive. Indeed, given that many of the experiences of the transgender vloggers that Raun is referring to stem from feelings of shame, isolation and trauma, the films that they produce will not be free from those affects. Therefore, these traumatic feelings circulate within the public sphere, without being assimilated or healed by individuals or collectives. This means that the moments of self-representation created by the vloggers are not the end of the affective story for viewers. What has not arrived in the affective turn is the appropriate and deeply qualitative, yet open and speculative, methodologies that can grapple with the myriad theoretical challenges that it has produced.
The final section of the book, ‘Feelings, Technologies and Politics’, encourages the reader to be sceptical towards the ‘general optimistic discourse around social media’ (p. 215). Julia Rone’s case study of the Bulgarian election campaign in 2009 demonstrates how Web 2.0 was instrumentalised by a conservative political agenda. She cites the example of a film where ‘a man is seen, his head covered with blood … At one point the cameraman steps back and we clearly see a whole circle of people with cameras filming the injured man (p. 222). For Rone, this exemplifies the hyper-spectacle of Web 2.0, as effective political energy is consumed by commenting on videos, and violent protests become a form of entertainment that people record with their smartphones. This kind of digitally induced apathy, she argues, freezes people’s ability to act, both politically and compassionately.
Digital Cultures and the Politics of Emotion contains many interesting essays that clearly demonstrate how thinking through these areas together is vital for understanding contemporary culture. Work still needs to be done to merge the theoretical and empirical together, so that the affective turn provides compelling evidence of its usefulness and relevance. As a relatively new area of interdisciplinary enquiry, it will take time for appropriate methodologies to be devised which can provide convincing and sensitive accounts of how affect works. However, just because ‘measuring affect is not easy’ does not mean that people should not try.