To what extent does ‘turn to affect’ in media and cultural theory help us to understand the role of media in the digital age?

“We have tens of thousands of nerve-endings in our fingertips and yet we’ve settled on pictures behind a warm rectangle of glass.”

Like. Heart. Smiley. Gif. Swipe. Click. Living in a digital Buadrillardian ecstasy world where communication is faster, shorter, more visual and almost free, where subjects exist in two or more spaces at any given time, all seemingly connected to each other through the web of internet, how one navigates the labyrinths of the network and consumes data is being studied in the contemporary media and cultural theory. The way we absorb and engage with different media images, sounds and texts has changed so drastically in last five to ten years that various theorists have called this change a turn to affect — an abstract notion the definition of which is hard but essential to understand.
The origin of the word comes from Latin ‘affectus’ which translates to passion or emotion, intensity or a quality of excess. According to Spinoza, Deleuze — Guattari and Bergson, affect amounts to certain pre individual bodily forces that augment or diminish a body’s capacity to act. The body has been considered as human’s first and foremost technical object and means (Maus 1973:75) and as a nexus of culture. Subjectivity is embodied where body and mind, interiority and exteriority of the self intermingle. Media’s ultimate purpose then is to transfer sense experiences from one person to another and serve as a conduit for affective expression. In the biomediated body, autonomic responses go beyond conscious states of perception and point to what Massumi describes as “visceral perception” that is generated somewhere inside the body and moves outward. Cities, places and people all resonate a certain color, texture, smell, taste which can be experienced subjectively when encountered by an individual at whose center the affective resides. Simondon describes this as the relationship between the individual’s relation to itself and the world.

Affect then becomes a part of biology. (Connolly, 2002:67) Sara Ahmed (2004) views it as integral to the body’s perceptual becoming and feeling (always becoming something else), and simply does not emanate from within but rather from intensities and forces of encounter generated between bodies — it is a relational process connecting the individual to other bodies. Affects can be very powerful as they are able to shape, constitute and transform bodies, circulating and reproducing over time unravelling subjectivity and modifying the political body. The best example is cinema where audience identifies with and is moved by bodies on the big screen and sometimes even imitate their gestures, body language and voice. Affects can also arise in the form of impersonal intensities that do not belong to or reside in the mediating space between a subject and object. For instance, thrill and adventure seekers generate autoaffection just to feel alive. Ahmed (2004) also adds that affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values and objects. It is cross temporal and sticks to the skin through memory which is probably why negative affects tend to stick longer than the positive.
Although exalted by pathos, it extends beyond meaning, belief, cognition or feeling as a general way of making sense, negating the materialist theory of the false dichotomy between mind and matter. It informs our general sensibility toward the world surrounding us, which is inclusive of potentialities and “regimes of expressivity”. We’ve all had those experiences that are impossible to put in words, those sensations that can’t be described through language but only felt through body. This stream of consciousness affectivity is transcribed through mediums like Twitter, Instagram or Bandcamp where affects can be archived. Because of its ‘not yet’ element affect contains anticipation, promise, hope, potential. (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010). Psychologist Silver Tomkins talks about how in the affective world of rhythm, mood, shape, timing, poetry, justice, resignation, hate, desire — eight different variations hide namely, interest — excitement, enjoyment-joy, surprise-startle, distress-anguish, anger-rage, fear-terror, dissmell and disgust.
Our inability to understand the force and power relations in a highly complex global world, its numerous pushes and pulls, obstinacies and rhythms, refusals and invitations can leave us overwhelmed or cause us to suspend action. In the midst of this inbetweenness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon lies affect. It however precedes emotions and drives the intensity with which emotions are felt. One maybe super- emotional in day to day events but still be unaffected by media events or vice versa. Deleuze (1995) describes this as microfascism in everyday life which according to Marx can be overcome by ‘abolition of private property’ resulting in ‘emancipation of all human senses”. Affects reorganize sensation and instinct, temporalities that resonate with whatever socio-political context is going on in the world — like globalization, neoliberal economics, global warming, the war on terror and also through art, mathematics, love, music. Hence, they are inherently political. In this sense, a connection lies between affect and ideology, feeling and belief, emotion and reason.

Capitalisation of affect
The turn to affect is therefore legitimized as timely because it represents the massive economic and cultural change happening due to the use of new media — The rise of social networks and new form of value and labour centered around information and images, emergence and consolidation of biopolitical networks of discipline, surveillance, control and the development of the molecular and digital sciences and fleeting and ephemeral relationships among people. All over the world, governments are spending in biometrics and residence cards, to track all activities done by a citizen. Brian Massumi says it very frankly “The ability of affect to produce an economic effect more swiftly and surely than economics itself means that affect is a real condition, an intrinsic variable of the late capitalist condition, as infrastructural as a factory.”

As life becomes increasingly articulated to capital, our dependence on information search engines like Google for every thought that comes in our mind calls for a deeper understanding of human — machine relations. New media brings newer ways of connecting and the ability to make our own subjective mental images of the lives of others, or what Walter Lippman (1922) calls pseudoenvironment — blend of the outside and pictures in our heads. Technology affects not just the aesthetic of media content but also the way people understand themselves, interact with each other, what they talk about and how they construct their social lives in the virtual world.
In the neoliberal economy, rampant individualism, democratization of media and availability of plethora of choice of networks to get involved in and explore objects, bodies and images makes the nature of affect, its randomness, and unpredictability even more complicated. Whether to text, call, send an email, image, video call or to not communicate — each means has its own tensions and affect depending on the time, work, person to contact and urgency. The storytelling platforms of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter invite observers to tune into live global and personal events on a screen they are physically removed from by imagining what these might feel like for people directly experiencing them. Hyper-immediacy makes us feel like we are there but also removed. Taking Facebook’s timeline (which keeps adding new features lest people get bored) as a diagram of contemporary political economy, in order to outline an infrastructure of the material and expressive conditions of affect, where every few seconds, new content flashes as the ticker goes down into never ending chain of personalized news, pictures, comments and articles forming an individual’s consciousness, it’s interesting to see how “bubble effect” plays and how each person is trapped in an echo chamber talking to themselves and their group of friends. All that matters is that someone likes something where both the ‘like’ and ‘something’ being immaterial and transient. Social networks capture the anxiety or the feeling of ‘unbearable invasion’ which is both produced and consumed by its users. Status updates are instant mood indicators (S&G, 2011). “Live” point of view videos show viewers what it is like to accompany a police officer on raid, sitting on an elephant in some backwaters or to be a skydiver or a race car driver hurtling through space causing this instant affect, the feeling that everything is happening now and we’re missing out or not rich enough to do those things.

What is one supposed to make of images of war and violence put together with touristy hotspots, selfies, political rallies, dystopic news of natural and man made disasters, porn, comedy shows and film commercials all on the same screen and no authentic source? Borrowing from Raymond Williams (1961), Papacharrissi (2015) talks about social media platforms as soft ‘structures of feeling’ that reflect social experiences — the culture, feeling and mood of a particular moment in time. Collaborative narratives that coalesce around hashtags on twitter work as structures of feeling which connect different types of people around subjective and highly affective expressions and impulses, restraints and tonality. When one can consume music, cinema and art for free from any part of the world instantly, the affect is independent of time and space. It is instead turned into economic value according to Tiziana terranova’s take on digital economy. Birth of timeline is part of a larger capitalization of culture, the culture industry and labour defined by capitalism. Consumers of media are also conscripted into its flows at an unconscious level via graphic signs and logos, advertised musicals. These signs and logos whether in sign or image form, generate feelings that mobilize the body’s capacity for synesthesia, in which affect circulates with data and information. Agency and intent become contingent on the network rather than just human agency.

In such a situation, a new configuration of bodies, technology and matter has been devised (Clough, 2007). Digital images have infrastructure with layers of algorithmic processing or a matrix of numbers severing all reference to an independent reality. And since all images we consume are digital, whether in cinema, on the laptop, table or mobile phone, big visuals which are usually in the hands of powerful men with capital have more affect that colonize the senses and an aesthetic that reeks of shine/glamour. Because audiences experience intensities, taking in images through bodies rather than giving a thought to politics, representation and ideology, they can be easily manipulated. (Featherstone, 2010) Handheld devices give the users the ability to make their own images and stories online, and get paid through crowdfunding on independent media channels. Even though these images are small and fit into the palm of the hand, through intimacy, sexuality, love and activism, they have the ability to move us, sending a shiver down the spine or create gut feeling or may even cause disaffection. Consumer culture is saturated with affects because the signifying capacity of goods is their main attraction (Illouz, 2009)

What happens when we can see and experience everything secondhand? We live in a society of the screen which is the main means of accessing information, still images, moving images or text.(Lev Manovich, 2002) Screens are so ubiquitous in urban visual culture, colossal screen facades, mobile phones, television sets, game consoles make the virtual — “the other three dimensional world” actual and situates it in our normal space. Mobile apps where we can purchase or use anything on demand, the individual user is atomized and desire quantified. With visuality, mobility, gamification, play, interactivity and touch screen, we become more alienated with our immediate surroundings and more engaged in what is happening on the screen. Location based apps become a tool to experience anything in the vicinity. The body while being attached to the network can remain non-visual and non-representational. The affect of desire which is generated from somewhere behind the screen is partially fulfilled through the sense of touch. This is called haptic communication and in the case of sexuality, when people are more separated than ever in terms of geographical space, the possibility of digital sex which needs touch is not far away. Soon algorithmically rendered materiality may make affective gestures embodied, permitting them to attain discursive materiality — which means not just touch but other senses as well. There’s already a device called “Kissinger” that lets one kiss one’s partner on a long distance call.

Personalisation of affect

We slowly become accustomed to the formats of social networks and get so addicted that the feeling of being trapped and not being able to leave haunts us. In an age of extreme individualism, public and private boundaries collapse offering opportunities for expression that may simultaneously empower and compromise individuals. Personal branding to become a microcelebrity and strategic self-commodification especially by women makes life performative with audiences diverse, spread out across the globe. Play becomes a strategy for dealing with fixity of norms, to navigate power structure. Affective fabrics of digital culture, within contexts, forums, blogs, comments, and computer screens also harbors the postmodern affect of complete chaos, collapse of bigger narratives of investment in future, security and well being and world becoming all surface with no depth. All of internet becomes a digital museum where the organic is lost and all is data modulated by algorithms viewed by people to either like or dislike. On top of that, these behaviors are quantized and tracked by networks and sold to companies to sell products who in turn want to generate more conversations and traction around their brand. They call this “behavior marketing.” Virtual reality which is the next step in technological innovation is even more immersive with so much heavy affect that it is a medium whose purpose is to disappear.

Political affect
Networked affect can also be used to mobilize crowds and create political agency. Capitalism and mass media’s infantilizing subjectivity (Guattari) has led to repression, rise of religious fundamentalism, exploitation, racism, oppression of women. To counter these and ask for liberal values that the world stands for now, there have been riots happening on the streets of the cities around the world. Political affect can be created both by the political parties and by people by creating groups online. Online media affords visibility to voices frequently marginalized by the societal mainstream (Couldry, 2012) but the question is how much is the effect of blogs, youtube comments that generate personal and mass opinion with a hysterical tone that creates mediatized contagion. Every other day, there’s visuals of people in Chile, France, Brazil, Korea indicating that disorder, marginality and anarchy remain the habitat for affect (Tettegah, pg 19) There can be a down side to it as well — Movements and online activism like #blacklivesmatter or protests like #Jesuischarlie tend to create herd following where people who may or may not understand the issue, use it to belong or show off creating a clash between personal and political. This is called “the hivemind”. People start taking pleasure in mediation of violence, suffering and pain as it seems to be happening in another world. Photographs of conflict and wars can even be made to look aesthetically beautiful.
To conclude, in the contemporary political environment, affective expressions on media communicate frustration with the inability to change a capitalist economic hierarchy that predetermines privilege and networking and prefers power and money over any humanitarian values. The challenge remains is whether they can generate enough visceral affect over time that may lead to subtle disruptions of power hierarchies producing considerable energies of resistances and renegotiation of boundaries. Since it’s an ongoing process, with new developments every day, only time will tell.