Affective Formation of Publics (Routledge Studies in Affective Societies) [1 ed.] 1032430311, 9781032430317

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Affective Formation of Publics

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of current formations of publics that is informed by in-​depth knowledge of affect and emotion theory. Using empirical case studies from contexts as diverse as India, Pakistan, Tanzania, and the Americas as well as Europe, the book challenges dichotomous distinctions between private and public. Instead, publics are understood as a relational structure that encompasses both people and their physical and mediatized environment. While each kind of public is affectively constituted, the intensity of its affective attunement varies considerably. The volume is aimed at academic readers interested in understanding the dynamic and fluid forms of contemporary formation of publics—​be it digital or face-​to-​face encounters as well as in the intersection of both forms. This includes researchers from media and communication studies, social anthropology, theatre or literary studies. It is aimed at advanced students of these disciplines who are interested in the unfolding of contemporary publics. Margreth Lünenborg is a professor of media and communication studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Her research focuses on recent changes in journalism due to digitization, gender media studies, migration and media. In CRC “Affective Societies” she heads a research project on “Journalism and its order of emotions” analyzing the affective regime of migration coverage. With a focus on affect and emotions, she has worked theoretically and empirically on questions of mediated affect, affective publics, and the affective structure of digital media platforms. Her most recent book is Affective Media Practices (2021, with C. Töpper, L. Sūna, and T. Maier). She co-​edited the special issue “Global Inequalities in the Wake of Covid-​19: Gender, Pandemic, and Media Gaps” (2023) with M. Siemon and W. Reißmann. She is co-​editor of the book series Critical Studies in Media and Communication (transcript). Birgitt Röttger-​Rössler is a senior professor of social and cultural anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. She is specialized in psychological anthropology with a particular focus on the interdisciplinary study of emotion and affect. She initiated the CRC “Affective Societies,” which

she directed from 2015 to 2022. Her latest research focuses on childhood, socialization, parenting, and emotional development in cultural comparison as well as in migration contexts. Besides this she deals with the challenges of data management and data sharing in social anthropology. Her regional focus is on Southeast Asian societies (Indonesia and Vietnam). She serves as editor of two interdisciplinary books series: Routledge Studies in Affective Societies (with D. Kolesch) and Emotion Cultures (with A.von Poser, transcript).

Routledge Studies in Affective Societies Series editors: Birgitt Röttger-​Rössler is professor of social and cultural anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany Doris Kolesch is professor of theater and performance studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany Editorial Board: Professor Jan Slaby, Professor Christian von Scheve, Professor Hubert Knoblauch, Dr Kerstin Schankweiler, Dr Katharina Metz

Routledge Studies in Affective Societies presents high-​level academic work on the social dimensions of human affectivity. It aims to shape, consolidate and promote a new understanding of societies as Affective Societies, accounting for the fundamental importance of affect and emotion for human coexistence in the mobile and networked worlds of the twenty-​first century. Contributions come from a wide range of academic fields, including anthropology, sociology, cultural, media and film studies, political science, performance studies, art history, philosophy, and social, developmental and cultural psychology. Contributing authors share the vision of a transdisciplinary understanding of the affective dynamics of human sociality. Thus, Routledge Studies in Affective Societies devotes considerable space to the development of methodology, research methods and techniques that are capable of uniting perspectives and practices from different fields. Affective Formation of Publics Places, Networks, and Media Edited by Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-​Rössler

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routle​dge.com/​Routle​dge-​Stud​ies-​in-​ Affect​ive-​Societ​ies/​book-​ser​ies/​RSAS

Affective Formation of Publics Places, Networks, and Media Edited by Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-​Rössler

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-​Rössler; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-​Rössler to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Lünenborg, Margreth, editor. | Röttger-Rössler, Birgitt, editor. Title: Affective formation of publics: places, networks, and media / edited by Margreth Lünenborg, Birgitt Röttger-Rössler. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge studies in affective societies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023015142 (print) | LCCN 2023015143 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032430317 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032430485 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003365426 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Emotions–Sociological aspects. | Affect (Psychology)–Social aspects. | Digital media–Social aspects. | Communication–Social aspects. Classification: LCC HM1033 .A4197 2024 (print) | LCC HM1033 (ebook) | DDC 152.4–dc23/eng/20230510 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023015142 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023015143 ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​43031-​7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​43048-​5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​36542-​6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003365426 Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgments Funding Note 1 Affective Publics and Their Meaning in Times of Global Crises: Zizi Papacharissi in Conversation with Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-​Rössler

x xii xviii xx

1

Z I Z I PA PA C H A RISSI, MARGRE TH L ÜN E N B O RG, AND B I R G I TT R Ö T TGE R-​R Ö SSL E R

2 Introduction: The Affective Character of Publics

10

M A R G R E TH L ÜN E N B O RG A N D B IRGITT RÖ TT GER -​R ÖSSLER

PART I

Places

31

3 Unhappy Objects: Colonial Violence, Maasai Materialities, and the Affective Publics of Ethnographic Museums

33

PA O L A I VA N O V, L AIB O R KA L AN GA MO KO , A ND JONAS BENS

4 Theater Publics in Motion: Affective Dynamics of the Theater and the Street, Berlin 1989

50

M ATTH I A S WARSTAT

5 Digital Administrative Publics: Affective and Corporate Entanglements in Germany’s New Federal Portal TI M M S U R E A U AN D TH O MAS GO TZE L MA N N

67

viii  Contents PART II

Networks

87

6 (Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-​19: The Emergence of a Hemispheric Affective Counterpublic

89

ULLA D. BERG

7 Women Activists Imaged through Social Media Publics: The “Feisty Dadis of Shaheen Bagh” as Political Subjects

106

R A D H I K A G A JJAL A, A N N A DE GA L AN , DE B IP R EETA R AHU T, S Y E D A Z A I N A B A KB A R, AN D JH A L AK JA IN

8 Affectivism and Visibility in the Mediatization of Disappearing Non-​Muslim Women in Pakistan

129

J Ü R G E N S C H A FL E CH N E R

9 Hijacking Solidarity: Affective Networking of Far-​Right Publics on Twitter

149

A N A M A K H A S H VIL I

10 Affective Temporalities of Digital Hate Cultures

173

K A A R I N A N I K UN E N

11 Understanding the Affective Impact of Algorithmic Publics

191

TO B I A S M ATZN E R

PART III

Media

211

12 Contested Image Practices of Public Shaming: A Case Study of an Internet Meme in the Israeli–​Palestinian Conflict

213

V E R E N A S TR A UB

13 “GOOKS, Go Home!”: Vietnamese in the United States S U B A R N O C HATTA RJI

231

Contents  ix

14 Affective Publics and the Figure of the Right-​Wing Writer

252

G E S A J E S S E N , JÜRGE N B RO KO FF, A N D TIM L ÖR K E

15 Opening Up Ethnographic Data: When the Private Becomes Public

271

M I C H A E L A R IZZO L L I A N D B IRGITT RÖ TTGER - ​R ÖSSLER

Index

292

Illustrations

Figures 3.1 A married woman’s ear pendant, collected by Kurt Johannes, brass, leather, (a) D: 10.6 cm, (b) D: 10 cm, L: 42 cm (both ear spirals including leather cord), 17.5 cm × 23 cm × 3.3 cm. III E 4747 a–​b, acquired 1896, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photograph by Martin Franken 3.2 Headdress, collected by Johann Maria Hildebrandt, ostrich feathers, glass, leather, 58 cm × 45 cm × 4 cm. III E 421, acquired 1877, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photograph by Martin Franken 5.1 Screenshot of the Federal Portal, taken on March 7, 2022 7.1 Artistic rendering of Bilkis Dadi that went viral on social media 7.2 Network of tweets #sheinspiresus visualized via Netlytic.org 7.3 Sample profile of #sheinspiresus 7.4 Women of Shaheen Bagh as saviors of the constitution 8.1 Tweeted on March 24, 2022 8.2 Tweeted on June 23, 2022 8.3 Tweeted on March 22, 2022 8.4 Tweet from handle @Pak_​Hindus 9.1 Visualization of the 15 communities showing 93.54% (n =​12,633) of all nodes and 96.04% (n =​33,260) of all edges using Force Atlas 2 algorithm in Gephi. Node size is adjusted according to in-​degree 9.2 Largest community in the network containing 40.69% (n =​5,495) of all nodes and 41.79% (n =​14,472) of all edges 9.3 Co-​occurrence network of top 30 hashtags visualized in RStudio 9.4 Tweet 1: “First she claims she cannot live in Germoney [sic] because of overpopulation, now she claims #WeHaveSpace! What a schizophrenic person.” Tweet 2: “Yeah, this is how it goes … wannabe #refugees” 9.5 “Migrants coming with their household pet #wehavespace #wedonthavespace #wedonthavespace”

36

37 73 117 119 120 122 139 140 141 142

157 158 160

163 164

List of Illustrations  xi 12.1 Screenshot of Eden Abergil’s Facebook album “IDF, the best days of my life” 12.2 Screenshot of Eden Abergil’s photograph on Facebook, showing her with blindfolded Palestinian detainees 12.3 Image macro, “im in ur army … corruptin ur valuez” 12.4 Photoshop Meme, Eden Abergil with Pedobear 12.5 Photoshop Meme, Eden Abergil with Tank Man 12.6 Twibbon campaign, “Support Eden Abergil” 12.7 Reenactment of one of Eden Abergil’s photographs

215 216 221 223 224 225 227

Tables 7.1 Statistical description of the #sheinspiresus dataset scraped via Netlytic 9.1 Ten highest ranking far-right accounts according to their in-degree score

119 159

Contributors

Syeda Zainab Akbar is a PhD student at the School of Media and Communication, Bowling Green State University, USA. With an academic background in social sciences and digital humanities, her recent work has critically engaged with disinformation campaigns and influencer cultures. Broadly, her research interests lie at the intersection of information communication technologies and social impact in the Global South. Jonas Bens is a visiting associate professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Hamburg and a Principal Investigator at the CRC “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He specializes in political and legal anthropology and the anthropology of colonialism. His books include The Indigenous Paradox: Rights, Sovereignty, and Culture in the Americas (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) and The Sentimental Court: The Affective Life of International Criminal Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Ulla D. Berg is an associate professor at the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University, USA. Her research focuses on historical and contemporary processes and experiences of migration, (im)mobility, and confinement in the Andean region of Latin America and the United States. She is the author of the monograph Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the U.S. (NYU Press, 2015). Her most recent publications include “Remote Ethnography in Carceral Settings: Local Configurations of Migrant Detention during the Coronavirus Pandemic” (with S. Tosh and K.S. León, Ethnography, 2022) and “Transnational Families and Return in the Age of Deportation” (with G. Herrera, Global Networks, 2022). Jürgen Brokoff is a professor of modern German literature at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He is the spokesperson of the CRC “Intervening Arts” in which he also leads the project “Intervening Writing.” He is also a member of the excellence cluster “Temporal Communities” with the project “Travelling Matters” as well as head of the project “Contestations of the Principle of Multicultural Diversity” at the CRC “Affective

List of Contributors  xiii Societies.” His most recent publications include the book Literaturstreit und Bocksgesang: Literarische Autorschaft und öffentliche Meinung nach 1989/​90 (Wallstein Verlag, 2021). Subarno Chattarji is a professor at the Department of English, University of Delhi, India. His research interests include literary representations of conflict with a focus on the Vietnam War and Holocaust education. His publications include The Distant Shores of Freedom: Vietnamese American Memoirs and Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2019), Reconsidering English Studies in Indian Higher Education (co-​author, Routledge, 2015), and Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic Responses to the Vietnam War (Oxford University Press, 2001). Anna J. DeGalan is a third-​year doctoral student at Bowling Green State University in the School of Media and Communication, USA. Her master’s thesis, “Crescendos of the Caped Crusaders: An Evolutionary Study of Soundtracks from DC Comics’ Superheroes” (2020), analyzed the intersection of musical analysis, popular culture studies, and critical media studies. Her research centers on intercultural communication, critical cultural media studies, ethnomusicology, and rhetoric; representation of gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality within popular culture; and feminist studies and digital activism. Radhika Gajjala is a professor of media and communication and of American culture studies at Bowling Green State University, USA. Her books include Digital Diasporas: Labor and Affect in Gendered Indian Digital Publics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Online Philanthropy in the Global North and South: Connecting, Microfinancing, and Gaming for Change (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Cyberculture and the Subaltern (Lexington Press, 2012), and Cyberselves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women (Altamira, 2004). She is the managing editor of the Fembot Collective. Thomas Götzelmann is a PhD candidate in social anthropology, studying and working at the Martin Luther University Halle-​Wittenberg, Germany. His research topics include the digitalization of German migration bureaucracies as well as the so-​called anglophone crisis in Cameroon. He is analyzing both of these from the perspective of affect and emotion research. His latest publication is “Digital Infrastructuring as Institutional Affect(ing) in German Migration Management” (with O. Zenker and T. Sureau, Affect, Power, Institutions, Routledge, 2023). Paola Ivanov is an anthropologist and curator at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, Germany. She is head of the project “Contested Property” at the CRC “Affective Societies.” Her research centers on aesthetics, material culture, and museum theory with a regional focus on Africa. Her publications include Die Verkörperung der Welt: Ästhetik, Raum und Gesellschaft im

xiv  List of Contributors islamischen Sansibar (Reimer, 2020) and “ ‘Collaborative’ Provenance Research: About the (Im)Possibility of Smashing Colonial Frameworks” (with K. Weber-​Sinn, Museum and Society, 2020). Jhalak Jain holds a master’s degree in education from Azim Premji University, India. Her research interests include gender, intersectional feminism, and politics. Currently, she is working at The Quint as an assistant multimedia producer. Her research article “The Media Has a Huge Urban Bias in Reporting Gender-​Based Violence” for Feminism in India was selected by Independent and Public-​Spirited Media Foundation for IMPACT 2020. Gesa Jessen is a literary scholar whose research focuses on literature and politics, literature and the environment, and literary theory. After being awarded her doctor of philosophy from the University of Oxford, UK, she joined the CRC “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, as a postdoctoral researcher. Her most recent publications include “Right Reading–​Affective Institutionalizations and the Politics of Literature in the German New Right” (with M. Kählert and T. Lörke, Affect, Power, and Institutions, Routledge, 2023). Tim Lörke is a literary scholar and has published on modernism, literature and politics, and the anthropological basics of literature and religion. His current position is Chief Executive Officer of the CRC “Intervening Arts” at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. His most recent publications include “Right Reading–​Affective Institutionalizations and the Politics of Literature in the German New Right” (with G. Jessen and M. Kählert, Affect, Power, and Institutions, Routledge, 2023). Margreth Lünenborg is a professor of media and communication studies with a focus on journalism at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. She is head of the research project “Journalism and its Order of Emotions” at the CRC “Affective Societies,” where she previously led a project on emotions in reality TV. Her research interests include gender media studies, popular media formats, and migration and media. With a focus on affect and emotions, she has worked theoretically and empirically on questions of mediated affect, affective publics, and the affective structure of digital media platforms. She is the author of seven monographs, numerous journal articles, and book chapters. She has also edited several books. Ana Makhashvili is a doctoral researcher in media and communication studies working at the CRC “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. In her dissertation project, she combines qualitative, quantitative, and automated methods to examine the role of emotions and affect in the formation of far-​right publics on Twitter. Her latest publications include “United in Grief? Emotional Communities around the Far-​Right Terror Attack in Hanau on TV and Twitter” (with D. Medeiros, Media & Communication, 2022) and “Challenging Journalistic Authority in the

List of Contributors  xv Networked Affective Dynamics of #Chemnitz” (with D. Medeiros and M. Lünenborg, Social Media +​Society, 2022). Tobias Matzner is a professor of digital cultures in the Department of Media Studies at Paderborn University, Germany. His research focuses on the intersections of political and social theory with the analysis of digital technologies, particularly algorithms, and machine learning. His recent publications include “Algorithms as complementary abstractions” (New Media and Society, 2022), “The Human Is Dead–​Long Live the Algorithm!” (Theory, Culture and Society, 2019), and “Challenging Algorithmic Profiling: The Limits of Data Protection and Anti-​ Discrimination in Responding to Emergent Discrimination” (with M. Mann, Big Data & Society, 2019). Laibor Kalanga Moko is an anthropologist and a research fellow at the CRC “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. His research centers on material culture, affect, colonialism, and provenance research. His recent publications include “The (In)Alienability of Objects and Colonial Acquisition: The Case of Maasai Ethnographic Collections at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin” (Baessler-​Archiv, 2021). Kaarina Nikunen is a professor of media and communication research at Tampere University, Finland. Her research engages with the ways in which emotions and affect drive solidarity, social movements, and participation; and how they are shaped through and with media. Her recent publications include Media Solidarities: Emotions, Power, and Justice in the Digital Age (SAGE, 2019), Media in Motion: Cultural complexity and migration in the Nordic Region (with E. Eide, eds., Routledge, 2011), and articles on the topics of affect, refuge, social media activism, and gender. Zizi Papacharissi is a UIC distinguished professor of communication and political science and head of the Communication Department, University of Illinois Chicago, and university scholar at the University of Illinois System, USA. Her work focuses on the social and political consequences of online media. She has published ten books, over 70 journal articles and book chapters, and serves on the editorial board of 15 journals. She is the founding and current editor of the open access journal Social Media & Society. She has collaborated with Apple, Facebook/​Meta, Microsoft, and Oculus. She sits on the NRC, NAS, and IOM Committee on the Health and Well-​Being of Young Adults in the US and has been invited to lecture about her work on social media in several universities and research institutes in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Her work has been translated into Greek, German, Korean, Chinese, Hungarian, Italian, Turkish, and Persian. Her tenth book is titled After Democracy: Imagining Our Political Future.

xvi  List of Contributors Debipreeta Rahut is a doctoral student at the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University, USA. Her research interests broadly include gender and media, new media, digital activism, feminist studies, intercultural communication, and media and migration. She takes a keen interest in studying identity and power through a critical intersectional feminist lens. She also examines how everyday data practices shape asymmetries of power in digital spaces. She has formerly worked as an assistant professor at St. Xavier’s University, India, and was a journalist with The Statesman in India. Michaela Rizzolli is a postdoctoral researcher at Qualiservice—​the Data Service Center at the University of Bremen, Germany. Before joining the University of Bremen, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Information Infrastructure and Data Management” at the CRC “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Here, she investigated researchers’ practices and views in relation to data sharing, management, use, and reuse. She is a cultural anthropologist and received her doctoral degree from the University of Innsbruck, Austria. In cooperation with the FID SKA, she is currently developing workflows for the archiving and provision of ethnographic research data that are in line with methodological and ethical requirements. Birgitt Röttger-​Rössler is a senior professor of social and cultural anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. She is specialized in psychological anthropology with a particular focus on the interdisciplinary study of emotion and affect. She initiated the CRC “Affective Societies,” which she directed from 2015 to 2022. Her latest research focuses on childhood, socialization, parenting, and schooling as well as on the challenges of data management and data sharing in social anthropology. Her regional focus is on Southeast Asian societies (Indonesia and Vietnam) in which she conducted several years of fieldwork, mainly in Indonesia. Her current research projects deal with the formation of feeling in transcultural social fields, particularly in “Vietnamese Berlin.” In this context, she also researches on belonging and diasporic publics. She is the author of two monographs, numerous journal articles, and book chapters; she has also edited several books and serves as editor of two interdisciplinary books series: Routledge Studies in Affective Societies (with D. Kolesch, Routledge) and EmotionCultures (with A. von Poser, transcript). Jürgen Schaflechner is a research group leader at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He studies the political and social movements of religious minorities in transnational South Asia in the era of social media and communicative capitalism. His other research interests include the anthropology of global martial arts, conspiracy theories, the politics of emotions (especially ressentiment), and

List of Contributors  xvii ethnographic and documentary filmmaking. His writing and filmmaking can be found at: www.juer​gen-​schaf​l ech​ner.com Verena Straub works as an art historian and visual cultures scholar at Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, where she is the principal investigator of the project “Image Protests on Social Media.” Her research focuses on the role of images in the context of political agitation and on popular image practices online. Her most recent publications include Das Selbstmordattentat im Bild: Aktualität und Geschichte von Märtyrerzeugnissen (transcript, 2021) and Image Testimonies: Witnessing in Times of Social Media (with K. Schankweiler and T. Wendl, eds., Routledge, 2019). Timm Sureau is a postdoctoral researcher focusing on studying the state and state formation, migration, (digital) technologies, and their respective interactions contributing to the anthropology of the state, science and technology studies (STS), affect, and assemblage theory. He studied local processes of state formation in South Sudan during its independence, political processes in Sudan, and migration management in Germany. His latest publication is “Digital Infrastructuring as Institutional Affect(ing) in German Migration Management” (with O. Zenker and T. Sureau, Affect, Power, Institutions, Routledge, 2023). Matthias Warstat is a professor of theater studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany and Principal Investigator in the CRC “Affective Societies” and “Intervening Arts” and in the cluster of excellence “Temporal Communities” at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Since 2022, he is also a member of the Berlin-​Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. His main research areas include modern theater histories, theatricality of society and of politics, and aesthetics of contemporary theater.

Acknowledgments

The impetus for this new volume of the Routledge Studies in Affective Societies series was a lecture series Affective Publics held at the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) “Affective Societies.” Subsequently, conceptual reflections on current publics were both shared and honed collaboratively in the context of a joint workshop. The present anthology emerged from this fruitful and stimulating exchange. Therefore, we would like to thank all participants of the workshop who inspired and, in part, contributed to this book through their well-​considered and thought-​provoking interventions. We would also like to express our deep gratitude toward the 22 authors of this book for their marvelous and intriguing contributions, their thoughtful writing, and for compliance with the multiple editorial requests. We have found working with them to be an affectively rewarding experience; they have all contributed to making the work on this book one we shall remember fondly. Moreover, we had the opportunity to conduct an interview with Zizi Papacharissi, who pioneered work in the relation between public sphere theory and affect studies. In this respect, we would also like to thank her for the engaging interview and her intellectual reflections on this work and the current state of the world. Additionally, a great thank-​you also to Jonathan Harrow, whose meticulous and highly attentive efforts in language editing not only elevated the English in this book to a much higher standard, but also contributed to the improvement of the contributions in terms of substance through thorough reading and carefully targeted questions. Our thanks also go to Annabella Backes for being so spontaneous in assisting in the final stages of putting the book together, thereby helping enormously with its completion. We are very grateful to Emily Briggs and Lakshita Joshi from Routledge for their continuous, smart, and always highly straightforward support. It was a great experience to work with them. Also, we thank the German Research Foundations for their generous funding of the CRC “Affective Societies” from whose research work this publication originated. Our last words of appreciation belong to our colleagues at the CRC Affective Societies. It has been a great pleasure to work with them on various

Acknowledgments  xix types of projects, to discuss and exchange ideas, and to have the opportunity to further develop our thoughts collectively and collaboratively over the last few years. Berlin, February 2023 Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-​Rössler

newgenprepdf

Funding Note

This volume grew out of the research activities at the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1171 Affective Societies–​Dynamics of Social Coexistence in Mobile Worlds at Freie Universität Berlin, generously funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), second funding period 2019–​2023. Unless otherwise indicated, all contributions to this volume are official publications of the CRC.

1 Affective Publics and Their Meaning in Times of Global Crises Zizi Papacharissi in Conversation with Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-​Rössler Zizi Papacharissi, Margreth Lünenborg, and Birgitt Röttger-​Rössler Margreth Lünenborg (ML): Zizi, when you published your book Affective Publics and the related articles between 2013 and 2015, they were based on the experience of the Arab Rebellion and partly inspired by Occupy Wall Street protests. Thus, your thoughts reflect all this enthusiasm and euphoria about the emerging new forms of participation and thus new forms of publics. Zizi Papacharissi (ZP): This is indeed true. My thoughts reflect the context they were borne out of. How can our thoughts not be inextricable from context, after all? They also reflect the unique combination of optimism and skepticism that makes me who I am. I begin Affective Publics 1 by telling the story of a revolution in my own native country of Greece. I relate that I was born during a dictatorship. On the very day I was born, my mother voted on a referendum to abolish the monarchy and strip the royal family of all its titles and privileges. A year before I was born, my father and all my male relatives had been drafted on account of the military conflict in Cyprus. A year after I was born, democracy was restored. These events are part of my own structure of storytelling: My positionality. One’s positionality is one’s own structure of feeling. So, I begin the book by explaining why I can never, by default, be anything but optimistic and skeptical at the same time. I stumbled on the idea of affective publics; I did not start with it. It was an exciting time, in the sense that many were hopeful about the wave of unrest sweeping the Middle East and North Africa region, and what it might mean for stability and democracy there. Having lived through the transformations and instability many countries go through after a regime upheaval, I could not help but be skeptical about what I was observing. I will confess that I had a hard time writing about this skepticism, however. Social media, and Twitter, in particular, fueled an energy among my peers that I had a difficult time fighting back and writing against. It was not enthusiasm, for that is an emotion. But it was an intensity that connected, swayed, shaped, and fled our DOI: 10.4324/9781003365426-1

2  Zizi Papacharissi et al. sensory descriptors. It prefaced and surpassed logic and emotion at the same time. So, I started looking for words to describe it. I was drawn, as you mentioned, to the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement as well as the Indignados Movement. Twitter was a very different medium back then, less infested by misinformation in a way that is difficult to imagine unless you lived through it. We used it mostly to post personal information and mundane information, so its architecture was vested with spontaneity and authenticity, and this gave the platform a different kind of credibility. Once all these movements started using it to mobilize reformative energies, everybody descended upon the platform with their own aspirations for tech-​led utopias. Could social media bring about democracy? Was it the people or the media that were driving this potential for social change? The answer is that it was people living with and in their media, as my dear friend Mark Deuze would say. I was intrigued. I followed the Arab Spring and all of its streams—​who did not, at the time? You had to live under a rock to not be preoccupied with what was happening there. I started following some of the conversations on Occupy. I attended some demonstrations. It was impossible not to stumble into an Occupy demonstration in the United States; they were everywhere. And I also attended some of the European versions of these movements that preceded Occupy, the Indignados. I followed their streams online. I also just walked around and attended some of the meetings. In large outdoor meetings, in response to city restrictions on using sound, they implemented the practice of the human microphone; the speaker says something that the first line of participants repeats, then the second line and so on, until the words echo all the way to the back. If that’s not an affective refrain that bonds, unites, and energizes all in a transient and liminal manner, I do not know what it is. So, you see, it was impossible to observe all these instances and not think affect, even though the world of affect was one I knew little about at the time, and it was not the easiest world to understand. I was struck by the intensity that drove all of this. I turned to it first to talk about the idea of affective news. I researched, then wrote about stream movements produced by movements that maintained an always switched-​on, ambient online home for them, and, at the same time, were co-​opted by news media to fill in and often substitute for their regular newsfeed. Nowadays, our world is filled with affective news to the extent that we have normalized receiving intensity instead of news; affect in the place of a news report. At the time, we were witnessing a transformation in the form of news storytelling. And then a further transformation in how we mobilize. The changes I described were not unique to those times and are always ever-​evolving. And yet that moment crystallized a form of mobilization that was a remediation of previous trends: networked publics, typically from very divergent and frequently opposing ideological backgrounds, all driven by this intensity in common: I called them affective publics. ML: Whereas you developed this concept during a time of upheaval, change, and optimistic awakening, the world has changed radically since then. So,

Affective Publics and Their Meaning in Times of Global Crises  3 what do you think about the idea of affective publics in the context of the different forms of crises we have to deal with today? What does this concept help us to understand in exactly this new setting now? ZP: I end the book by saying that affective publics have always been and always will be. I did not describe a novel phenomenon; I just offered a novel explanation. Counterculture publics forming civil rights movements all over the world in the previous mid-​to-​late century were affective in nature. They used fashion, music, and other open signifiers that forged connections beyond the ideological; that expressed indignation with injustice around them; that sought release from oppression; that united behind affective signaling that this is enough injustice. There are so many examples of affective publics throughout history, frivolous and potent—​and often a bit of both: Flapper publics, arena publics, guillotine publics, military formations, sports fans in stadiums, music subcultures, all the people who ran out in joy when the Berlin wall came down, and many, many more; the angry mob of Trump supporters who stormed the capitol building in the US on January 6, 2021, in the US; the Bolsonaro supporters who took over the state buildings on January 8 two years later in Brazil; but also the women all over the world who cut their hair in protest at the oppression of women in Iran as well as all the supporters wearing their Make America Great Again red hats. The people who united behind President Obama and his messages of #hope and #change_​we_​can_​believe_​in and the 1% percenters who rally behind white supremacy. These are all affective publics. Affect does not have direction. It is pure intensity; all energy. Its directionality is shaped by context, by movement leaders, by people. Intensity can bring together, it can differentiate, it can help articulate, and it can divide. Technologies amplify the intensity that networks us, but it is our stories that connect us, identify us, and potentially divide us. People can exploit that intensity in ways that drive populism. I do not know that we will ever be able to evolve out of that aspect of the human condition. Yet it is important to remember that, even though both truths and lies can be amplified by tech-​ driven intensity, in the end, lies require intensity, whereas truth rests confidently on its own magnificent simplicity. Birgitt Röttger-​Rössler (BRR): Thank you very much. I would like to come in here with a question concerning your understanding of emotion. You just made quite clear how you understand affect. And this is very close to the understanding of affect in our Collaborative Research Center here in Berlin. So, we mainly understand affect as something beyond categorization, as a relational dynamic; but we differentiate it from emotions saying that emotions are categorized. They are culturally as well as socially established and linguistically labeled categories. They constitute a kind of evaluative world relation. So, what exactly is your understanding of emotion in comparison to affect? ZP: Affect is not emotion. It is not the same as emotion. It is the intensity with which we feel. It is the intensity with which we experience an emotion. Joy

4  Zizi Papacharissi et al. can contain affect as much as anger may imprint affect. Oversimplified, affect can be understood as the intensity with which an emotion is articulated. And it is about intensity expression in general, beyond that contained within emotions. It extends to gestures that we make or words that we utter. It is the difference between a caress of the cheek and then a slap: same gesture, delivered with a different intensity, revealing a completely different intention and also yielding a very different impact. It is not a feeling, it is not an emotion, it is the intensity with which we experience the world. And often that intensity manifests before we have really put our finger on or we have named that emotion, before we have made that emotional and cognitive connection that allows us to put a name on that emotion, to call it something. How we identify and classify emotion and logic is socially learned. We are socialized into what societies recognize and term cognitively as anger. It could very well be that one hundred years from now, we shall advance to a very different state of being in which we develop a more nuanced way of understanding emotion, a new vocabulary for our feelings, and perhaps a new set of emotions. I hope we do, because the manner in which we understand joy or happiness, for example, can often be pedantic and oppressive. Our vocabularies reflect the worlds we live in. We could use some new vocabulary that reflects our worlds and the scientific process we have made in understanding our own neural pathways of cognition, emotion, and affect. For instance, sociocultural convention dictates that we respond with just one word when asked how we feel; yet we never feel just one emotion at a time. BRR: Let me ask a follow-​ up question, particularly concerning cultural conventions. I did a lot of research in Southeast Asian societies, most of them are emotionally less expressive compared to our society. So, when a person is very angry or very happy or very joyful, she or he will never really express it, but try to downplay it, to hide the emotion. And the more intensive this emotion becomes, the more the person will try not to show it, not to display it. In social anthropology, we speak of display rules that prescribe how a person has to evaluate a social situation emotionally; that means how she or he has to feel in the respective situation and in what way and with what intensity the person has to express those emotions that are defined as appropriate in the given context. So, what about this cultural diversity? ZP: This is precisely why I am so drawn to the idea of affective publics. One sees the crowds in various cities in China protesting Covid policy by silently raising a white blank sheet of paper, and one recognizes this cultural diversity in affective signaling. During Covid pandemic lockdowns all over the world, people found ways to connect by blinking apartment lights, holding candles, playing the same song, clacking pots and pans, singing, yelling, or just making some noise to release that connective energy—​whether it was across skyscrapers or suburban lawns. This is an intensity that lies at the core of the human experience, no matter what and often, despite what culture and convention affords. We cannot live through our existence without releasing

Affective Publics and Their Meaning in Times of Global Crises  5 that intensity. Cultural form suggests how it is released, as you rightly point out. It affords pathways for that release. But that intensity will always be released, sometimes in ways that are painful and sometimes in manners that are pleasant, and, more often, in ways that are a little bit of both and neither at the same time. ML: You addressed these aspects of the current situation globally—​the simultaneity of various global crises. My impression is that the term “affective publics” has become quite popular, especially in the context of populism and political extremism. It is now used quite often, but in a mostly negative sense as a description of how communication is going on, especially on social media. Affective publics are then used as a counterpart to what Jürgen Habermas has called the ideal type of rational discourse. The dark side now seems to prevail. Affective publics are understood as the loss of deliberation. Do you perceive it in the same way? ZP: You have the good fortune of speaking German and reading Habermas in the original form. So do I, for I speak German although not as my native language. Nuance is often lost in translation, and terms simplified so as to be related to broader audiences. What I take from Habermas is the idea of Öffentlichkeit, which I understand as a general openness to deliberation that is frequently an afterthought in contemporary capitalist democracies and for most commercial media. It is translated into the idea of a public sphere, which has a nice ring to it in the English language but means very little in Greek, my native language, despite its proclaimed deep Greek roots. Generally speaking, it is essential for democracies to sustain societies that are always open to reinventing themselves, and in so doing, hearing new ideas, sounding them out, and having civil albeit frequently passionate conversations about them. The rise of capitalism has pushed out platforms that support these conversations, and has changed the very meaning of that openness that is the essence of democracy. Mind you, openness is not the same as free speech for all, no matter whose rights are trampled on in the process, nor is it anarchy. It is not a public sphere, nor is it a tech-​driven utopia that is always open to the new. It is an openness of the mind, and Habermas writes about how that is limited, and even more so today. Increasingly we have what I call very strong capitalism, and very soft democracy. Somewhere in there, the art of conversation or deliberation in a democracy is misunderstood or lost, per Habermas. But Habermas fills in some pieces of the explanatory puzzle. We cannot rely on one theorist to understand the entire gamut of political experience. At this point, I depart from Habermas and align with Michael Schudson, who writes about why conversation is not the soul of democracy. I agree. We do not lose democracy because we do not deliberate. Democracy eludes us when we can’t find ways to disagree, yet live together and respect one another. People often talk about the art of conversation being a lost skill; we may want to start thinking about the art of friendly, civil disagreement, too. Or messy disagreement that is followed by reconciliation; we do this in

6  Zizi Papacharissi et al. our families and relationships on a daily basis. We fight and we reconcile, so as to continue being together. There is no reason to approach our civic association with others with the same kind of conviction. To fight, to argue, but to not antagonize at the expense of democracy. ML: I would argue with Chantal Mouffe that there is no consensus. There are antagonistic, often conflicting positions. That is capitalism, as you have started with. There are antagonistic interests, and it is either a bit naive or a bit hegemonic to aim at one perspective as the consensus. But going back to Habermas, I think he already, in his foundational work in the early 1960s, described the public sphere in its ideal type as the coffee salon of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. But in late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was already what he called “vermachtet,” characterized by power structures. The capitalized structure of mass media at that time already limited the opportunities for open deliberation. So, I tend to see some kind of idealization of this twentieth-​century media system that was built based on profit interests as well. Nevertheless, of course, we know that the big tech industry today is much more monopolized than the media industry of the twentieth century altogether has been before. But it seems to be a bit of an idealization of the inclusive character of media in the twentieth century. And in his newest reflections of that, Habermas is really longing for a future for the printed press.2 And of course, for his age and his habits of news consumption, I think we can all understand him—​this is the place where all deliberation took place for him. But clearly things have changed irreversibly, and there is a danger of idealizing that “golden age of the press” and holding on to a time that is obviously past. ZP: We prize rational discourse, but forget that discourse is inclusive of agreement, disagreement, and several conversational points in between. The emphasis on what is rational presumes that we cannot be rational and emotional at the same time. This separation of reason from emotion is odd, because the humanities, the social sciences, and neuroscience emphasize that the two are not separate but work together. There is no thinking with your mind and deciding with your heart. We may say that in popular culture, but we are not designed to do that as humans. Our greatest philosophers consistently advise balancing, instead of separating the two. With Affective Publics I revisited the folklore around heart and mind, emotion and reason. I examined the intensity that comes up when we have been forced to be rational for too long. I looked at what happens when democracy does not offer enough avenues for us to express how we feel. I thought about how important it is to provide pathways for releasing tensions in democracy, lest we arrive at societies that are driven entirely by intensity: affective societies, as you brilliantly trace in your own work. Consensus is messy. Rational discourse is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for getting to consensus. Many other factors come into play, including the tendency to idealize the past. Once again, historical insight advises that many of the eras we

Affective Publics and Their Meaning in Times of Global Crises  7 romanticize were far from perfect. Yet we are incapable of letting go of the idea that sometime in our past we got it right, and if only we were able to return to that state of being, we would be able to make things good again. Perhaps this is an inescapable burden that we carry as humans. When we look at spaces that supported political conversation in the past, we find that they were a blend of commercial and social activity. The Greek agora was a place of business and conversation. Merchants crossed paths with philosophers. That is the meaning of the word agora in Greek—​an open space available for assembly and trading. Coffee houses were a business. Salons supported conversation as well as deal making among those who were fortunate enough to attend them. I do not believe the solution lies in separating profit from democracy. I find that the solution rests in placing democracy ahead of profit. For a long time now, profit making has been the driver, with democracy always the afterthought. ML: In our interdisciplinary research center Affective Societies, we especially think about how affect might help us to understand concepts of the public, especially beyond the Western world. Birgitt already offered one example from Southeast Asia on different forms of displaying emotions. But if we think more explicitly about understandings of publics, how can focusing on affect help to go beyond the mostly normative Western notion of public and publicness? ZP: I put the terms together because I wanted to understand how this intensity is released across cultures. This is why the book and subsequent writings draw examples across movements from different countries. It is also why once I completed my work on affective publics, I decided to travel the world and see how this plays out across different cultures and countries for myself with my follow-​up book, After Democracy.3 And I wanted to do that without imposing a Western vocabulary on people I conversed with, or Western expectations about what democracy is and how it comes about. We have a tendency to associate positive affect with movements that lead to democracy. I cannot agree with that. The path to democracy is often painful and takes us through missteps. It is not made up of positive or negative affect. It is driven by energy and often shaped by intensity. There is something deeply democratic, and, utterly humane, about permitting that energy to be released without fixing a culturally specific label on it. I believe we can find ways to try to mend the differences and the extremities that our times have come to be associated with. We have been through some intense times, and we must find ways to release that intensity, but then also to make something creative and generative out of it—​to use it to move forward. Instead, what we are doing at present is going around in circles and putting ourselves through very intense feedback loops. BRR: I would like to introduce another aspect. When we look at different digital platforms like Twitter, TikTok, etc. and think about this notion of

8  Zizi Papacharissi et al. structures of feeling, as Raymond Williams has put it, what would you say: Are different platforms coined by different structures of feelings? Do different platforms go hand in hand with specific structures of feelings? Or is it the other way around? Do different structures of feeling lead to different digital platforms? ML: Just let me add one aspect here. Previously, we mentioned different display rules of feelings, so could we understand digital platforms as providing specific display rules for feelings today? ZP: We could certainly make this argument. The affordances of which platform lend themselves to particular modalities of feeling. It is no accident that the phrase “all the feels” is interconnected with the emergence of platforms, memes, emoticons, and other online gestures of expression that refer to sensing intensely, that point in the mood a certain experience affords. I reread Raymond Williams’ writing on structures of feeling as I was wrapping up Affective Publics, along with various interpretations of what he meant by the term, because he was notoriously vague about it. He connected structures of feeling to particular platforms that lend themselves to expressive modalities that typify an era. Every era has a medium, or a few media that serve as its own storytelling device or devices. These reflect and are shaped by our structures of feeling. There are many different modes, moods, and atmospheres of a specific era. So, yes, social media offer and reflect such structures of feeling for all of us. We use them to tell stories in affective fragments that are often as short as an emoji, and these digital traces support our sense of who we are and who we would like to be. I think with the term “structures of feeling” Raymond Williams wanted to capture the paradoxes and the antitheses that emerge as we move from static forms of structures toward changing modes of doing, being, and feeling. As the habitus, per Bourdieu, moves, shifts, expands, and grows, structures can break; they can certainly bend, they can expand, they can change, and they can also foster particular ways of being, or behavioral modes as you were saying, Margreth, with a somatic dimension. Depending on the particular structure of feeling platform that we find ourselves in, there is a certain intensity, a certain way of being that is invited, that is afforded, that is encouraged. Sociality is suggested by a particular architecture: Instagram, for example, invites aspirational self-​ portrayals, whereas TikTok supports free-​ flowing forms of humor that develop around poking fun at the self. ML: But if we consider this idea of clash of context, which is essential for social media, it is exactly that risk that you can share quite private information on whatever that is suddenly circulated in large audiences and radically misunderstood. ZP: Well, we go through this whole period as children and young adults in which we get socialized in terms of how we are supposed to act when

Affective Publics and Their Meaning in Times of Global Crises  9 we enter different spaces. We learn appropriate etiquette for the workplace, school, the theater, standing in a queue, among many other public areas. We are taught what to expect from each of these spaces. But as a society, we have not yet developed ways of socializing people to the social space that the internet affords. Further adding to these complexities is the architecture of online spaces that are often designed in open-​ended ways that eclipse the social and prioritize functionality and profit. We are drawn to these platforms because they are open ended. They present us spaces where we can turn the mundane into something glorious; where we can play with self-​performance in ways that are not available elsewhere; and where we can connect with people we might not ordinarily encounter. The potential for theatricality, drama, performance, connection is particularly alluring for us, and it is for that reason that it is so easily monetized within capitalist economies. Platform redesigns then further amplify affordances that boost drama. Commercial antagonism, driven by capitalist interests, puts a price on attention. The constancy and repetition of this process provide the affective refrain to the commercial evolution of platforms, contributing to an ongoing and self-​serving, self-​sustaining feedback loop of intensity. There is the assumption that all this intensity is going to bring attention, and attention is going to lead to profit. It is really a question of monetizing our own intensity. Where does this lead? To a distrust of platforms, in the same manner the same tendencies led to distrust of legacy media, and ultimately to the end of platforms and the beginning of something new. I look forward to reading how the scholars you have engaged in this volume explore these ideas. BRR: Thank you so much, Zizi, for this insightful and stimulating conversation. It’s a wonderful prelude to this book! Notes 1 Papacharissi, Z. (2014). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. Oxford University Press. 2 Habermas, J. (2022). Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit und die deliberative Politik. Suhrkamp. 3 Papacharissi, Z. (2021). After democracy. Yale University Press.

2 Introduction The Affective Character of Publics Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-​Rössler

The news on the first day of 2023 started with the war in Ukraine, just as we have become used to every day—​at least in Europe—​since the beginning of the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022. The breaking news on New Year’s Day was that Ukraine had succeeded in a major missile attack on a Russian position in Makiyivka (Donbass) and that dozens (89) of Russian soldiers had been killed. Russia confirmed the strike. According to media reports, the attack had been possible because the young Russian recruits, freshly arrived in their temporary accommodation, were texting and talking on the phone with their families on New Year’s Eve. The conspicuously high volume of mobile data made it easy for the Ukrainians to locate their position. This reveals the close—​and in this case deadly—​intertwining of digital and analog spaces. Soldiers billeted in temporary accommodation contact their families at the turn of the year, thereby sending signals that betray their physical location—​and they pay for this with their lives. However, “locating” concrete spaces with the help of modern technology is not just a factor in the immediate context of armed conflict, but also in war reporting. For example, geodata on successful attacks are used to distinguish strategic false information (i.e., “fake news”) from actual events. Video material produced by people living in war zones can also be used to make the way women, men, and children suffer in war both visible and felt throughout the world—​a “collateral damage” that was barely noticed in earlier wars. But here as well, verification through locational and weather data plays an essential role in distinguishing propaganda from documentary information. Such verification processes of fact checking and debunking are becoming increasingly important in journalistic reporting: Complex circumstantial evidence is used to check whether images depict an actual event and thus “confirm” that they are not digital manipulations and propaganda. At the same time, they are becoming an integral part of strategic warfare: information warfare. A war of digital images to gain public attention and credibility has become an extension of the physical conflicts. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a major event that has been covered closely by the media for almost one and a half years now. It is seldom for DOI: 10.4324/9781003365426-2

Introduction  11 political events to receive such uninterrupted attention for such a long time. The constant media interest is promoted not only by the threatening proximity of this war to the rest of Europe, but also by the character of the Ukrainian President Zelensky. He works with the media in extremely targeted and skillful ways, knowing how to command a constant virtual presence at the broadest range of political gatherings. This is how he prevents the war from being “forgotten” or from losing the significance of the threat it poses. Zelensky systematically exploits the available digital networks to actively engage in politics, to reach agreements, and to negotiate military support. Hence, he thereby shifts or expands the political stage into the virtual sphere. He always knows how to intensify affect in his respective audience. In his daily video messages to the Ukrainian people, which are also disseminated far beyond Ukraine and translated into different languages, he performs the character of the resilient Ukrainian nation. In postheroic times, he appears as an “approachable leader” who maintains personal contact with “his people” and thus generates courage, bravery, and resilience. By weaving in strongly emotionalizing narratives, he ensures their dissemination: be they heroic narratives such as that of the singing soldiers trapped in the Mariupol steelworks or praise for the civilian heroes who bravely endure all hardships in their daily struggle to rebuild what has been destroyed. Physical places, virtual spaces, and digital networks are indissolubly intertwined. They are central elements of this war of resistance with which Ukraine seeks to secure continued support. In 2022, one event briefly pushed the invasion of Ukraine out of the headlines of most European newspapers along with public and commercial broadcasting channels: The death of the British Queen Elizabeth II on September 8, 2022 at the age of 96 after reigning for 70 years. Her death and the subsequent public mourning rituals received the highest international media attention, not just because of the structure of the Commonwealth of Nations, but, above all, because of the British Queen’s charisma of stability, reliability, royal nobility, discipline, and devotion to her task along with her political unassailability. The ten-​day-​long, meticulously choreographed mourning and funeral ritual included the journey of the coffin through London and the four-​day laying out of the Queen in Westminster Hall to grant the people an opportunity to say their goodbyes. This opportunity was taken up intensively. In queues stretching several kilometers along the Thames, hundreds of thousands of people waited, often for over 30 hours and in many cases in pouring rain, to move slowly toward Westminster Hall and say goodbye to the Queen in her coffin. They wanted to show her respect; she deserved to be honored; she had been the one constant that had held the kingdom together; she had been a strong and venerable woman. These were the most frequent answers given by those waiting when questioned by journalists. These queues along the Thames, the mountains of flowers laid spontaneously before Buckingham Palace after the announcement of her death, and the crowds along the streets as the coffin was driven past illustrate the

12  Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler significance of concrete places for sharing emotions and especially grief. The sensory comprehension of death was demonstrated powerfully in the way those waiting fell silent as they drew closer to Westminster Hall and in the tears they eventually shed before the coffin. The ten-​day ritual formed a fully localized event. Although broadcast worldwide through the accompanying media coverage, these other locations did not become an integral part of the event. Instead, the nation of the United Kingdom was evoked performatively at the symbolic sites of the British monarchy in a ceremony established decades ago with a high potential of affective intensity: The media showed the global audience a people united in mourning their Queen. Critics of the monarchy did not queue up to pass the coffin. They communicated their responses to each other vehemently in other places—​ primarily on digital platforms. But nowhere did they disrupt the pompous national staging. The funeral service was simultaneously a transnational event, as evidenced by the presence of heads of state and crowned heads from all over the world. They came to take part and did not just send messages of condolence. This also shows the significance of physical co-​presence in symbolic places. Nonetheless, the Queen’s death also gave rise to critical discussions about England’s colonial heritage in a number of the 14 countries belonging to the Commonwealth of Nations. In countries including Australia, New Zealand, and Trinidad and Tobago, there were calls for future independence from the British crown. Commentaries pointed out repeatedly that it was respect for the integrative power of the Queen’s personality that had so far prevented an active break from the Commonwealth. Whether this affective relationship with the monarch actually functioned as some sort of political glue remains to be seen. Whatever the case, her death is also viewed as a caesura in the political structure of the Commonwealth of Nations. We chose these two vignettes to introduce our book, because they point to the importance of not only physical places but also virtual spaces, networks, and media in the affective formation of publics while also illuminating how these dimensions intertwine in specific ways depending on the particular occasion. The individual contributions in this volume use concrete case studies to investigate the interplay of places, networks, and media in constituting publics—​each focusing on one of these dimensions. But before we turn to the structure and the individual contributions to this volume, we first want to outline the two disciplinary perspectives from which we, as editors, approach the formation of publics, so that we can subsequently outline our shared understanding of publics and the public sphere as relational structures that are always generated affectively (Hauser, 1999, p. 61). Our joint understanding of publics can best be described with Hauser’s (1999) definition as: a discursive space in which individuals and groups associate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common

Introduction  13 judgment about them. It is the locus of emergence for rhetorically salient meanings. (p. 61) Disciplinary Perspectives: Anthropology and Communication Studies Social and cultural anthropology, which forms Birgitt’s disciplinary background, deals comparatively little with the formation of public spheres in any explicit way. This discipline-​specific reservedness is related to the fact that the dichotomization of the public and the private sphere as well as the idea of the political human as rational agent that dominates Western discourses has long been rejected by anthropologists and Southern theorists (Dwivedi & Sanil, 2015; Srinivasan et al., 2019) alike as inadequate for describing the complex and tense interplay of the hidden, the secret, the personal, and the political. This critical rejection of the Western theoretical canon led to a general neglect of the topic, which has only recently begun to regain more scholarly interest in the context of the increasing role of (digital) mass communication as a constitutive part of social life across the world (Graan, 2022). With its traditional focus on small local lifeworlds, social anthropology offers dense accounts of opinion-​forming and decision-​making processes on the local level that cannot be described appropriately using the vocabulary of Western public sphere theories. “Where is the public sphere?” asks, for example, the social anthropologist Piliavsky (2013) in her study of the “bazaar politics” in a provincial town in North Rajasthan in which literacy is sparse, electricity unreliable, and the internet only accessible for very few people. She shows that the marketplace is the key “talking sphere” (Narayan, 2011, p. xxv), the principal site for political negotiations: the place where news, rumors, and opinions circulate; alliances are made or unmade; and political decisions take shape (2013, p. 105). But the apparent resemblances between the bazaar and the public sphere are misleading. According to Piliavsky, the bazaar just looks like an arena for open critical debates, but is nothing of the sort, because the local population does not believe that political decisions can be made in the open. On the contrary, visibility is seen as a threat. Secrecy is the predominant value and seclusion the main force that structures discussions. Thus the logic of the public sphere is turned upside down. What metropolitan theorists see as the virtue of transparency … Rajasthani villagers treat as a threat to exposure, which inhibits expression, conversation, and ultimately the making of political choice. (Piliavsky, 2013, p. 105) Real conversation and decision-​making, she shows in her study, take place offstage, behind closed doors. The same can be observed in other parts of the world; see, for example, Lienhardt’s (2001) ethnographic description of the Arabian marketplace (suq) as a place where people avoid visibility

14  Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler and discuss political topics only within closed circles of consociates. Or see the work of Ivanov (2020), who demonstrates in her ethnographic study of Zanzibar that the Western understanding of the public sphere cannot be transferred to the Islamic cities of the Swahili coast. Like Piliavsky, she asks “where is the public sphere” (Ivanov, 2020, p. 91) and shows that concealment (Verhüllen) constitutes an affectively anchored key social principle that is reflected in bodily practices (covering and veiling), linguistic practices (circumlocution, ambiguity through formulaic, aesthetic uses of language), and architectural structures (pp. 92–​157). However, the general value placed on secrecy, seclusion, and concealment in Rajasthan, Zanzibar, and other local worlds contrasts with the normative ideal of political transparency and participation that characterizes the national politics of democratic states such as India and Tanzania. This apparent contradiction sheds light on the fact that the notion of the public sphere as an arena of open critical reasoning and debating constitutes a travelling concept. The ideal of open debates led by rationally arguing citizens is meanwhile—​despite its very specific, eighteenth-​century European bourgeois origin—​considered to be an indispensable component of modern democracies around the world. However, it is important to acknowledge the specific historical calibration of the ideas “public,” “critical,” and “public sphere” and to notice “their fraught and for the large part occluded relationship with the outside of the ‘west,’ where the ‘outside’ was also determined by ‘the west’ ” as Dwivedi and Sanil (2015, p. 3) articulate. As already indicated, an “anthropology of publics and the public sphere” has only recently begun to establish itself as a new field of research within the discipline.1 This new subfield aims to study how practices and structures of mass communication mediate and generate broader forms of social and political organization. How do publics emerge? How do they normalize some identities and marginalize others? How do some publics become dominant and shape political agendas? How do multiple publics intersect or clash? In taking on these questions, anthropologists attend to “regimes of publicity” as Graan (2022, p. 13) calls them. According to him, the concept implies, that “a public’s imaginaries, infrastructures, norms, ideologies, and metadiscourses are all interconnected and combine to regiment and characterize publicity in that instance” (p. 13). Like media anthropology, the anthropology of publics and the public sphere focuses on such media as text, image, video, or sound, but it foregrounds—​theoretically and methodologically—​the circulation of media as a social process. In line with the literature scholar Warner (2002), representatives of this new field of research understand a public as a particular social form or space that emerges through the “circulation of discourses as people hear, see, or read a message and then engage it in some way” and thus create a “mutual awareness” among each other (Gal, 2006, p. 173; see also Graan, 2022, p. 1). Anthropological works on publics have investigated how media circulation enacts forms of social difference and exclusion (Yeh, 2018), mediates political expression (Lempert & Silverstein,

Introduction  15 2012), or enables young people to articulate themselves and negotiate the contradicting demands placed on them (Kurfürst, 2021)—​to mention just a few topics. What is striking, however, is that in all these studies, affects and emotions always resonate implicitly, but are hardly ever theorized and explored systematically. Among the few exceptions is the work of Mazzarella (2003), who studied the branding strategies of an advertising company in Bombay as a form of “affect management”—​that is, as strategic communication aiming to elicit affective resonances in the target groups. Yet this analysis remained rather superficial; only later did Mazzarella (2010) deal with affect theory in more detail. In general, however, the emerging anthropology of publics and the public sphere has not yet made use of approaches in emotion and affect theory, whereas these are well established in social anthropology. In summary, what anthropology has to offer for an interdisciplinary reflection on the affective formation of publics is, besides its profound knowledge of local worlds and the resultant critique of Western concepts of the public sphere, methodological approaches that make it possible to examine circulating media discourses and their effects on concrete localized lifeworlds. In short, anthropology demonstrates that place matters. Media and communication studies, to which Margreth belongs, started from the other end. Concepts of the public sphere and its now unquestioned diversification into a variety of often competing publics are at the heart of communication studies. There is a vast body of literature discussing its normative foundations, its essential necessity for democracy, as well as its different facets in regional as well as historical perspectives. Because it is impossible to summarize all these debates in a few paragraphs, we shall just trace the central strands of debate in the theory of publics and conclude by presenting novel approaches that attempt to grasp the formation of publics in digital media environments. Compared to the anthropological concepts described above, the understanding in communication studies has been normative, universalistic, and essentialist. The famous Habermasian model of the bourgeois public sphere, which originated in European coffee houses of the eighteenth century (Habermas, 1991), is still considered a milestone today, and it serves as a contrasting background against which the deliberative character of public discourse is measured. Whereas Habermas himself considered the shift from encounter publics in the eighteenth to a mediated public sphere in the nineteenth and its full blossom in the twentieth century as a shift from a critical public to a mostly passive consumer public, the media sphere was nonetheless expected to deliver the forum for debates on matters of public concern (Wessler, 2018). Based on these assumptions, the public sphere in communication studies is understood primarily as the political public sphere: the arena in which citizens have the opportunity to discuss issues of common concern based on rational discourse.2 It was feminist researchers as well as scholars addressing questions from non-​Western perspectives who criticized this universalist claim and its normative underpinnings (Benhabib, 1992; Fraser, 1990). Distinguishing the

16  Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler public from the private with all its gendered implications as well as neglecting the exclusion of large parts of society from the arena of deliberation triggered criticism and contradiction. Bringing together queer theory and the theory on the public sphere, Warner (2002) introduced the concept of counterpublics—​ that is, antagonistic formations of different publics struggling simultaneously for hegemony. Publics, in his understanding, emerge in their “dependence on the co-​presence of strangers” (p. 76). Such a performative understanding of (counter-​)publics introduces embodied experiences as an essential part of their emergence. And he adds that publics do not appear as a casual, self-​evident effect of assemblies; but rather, “publics are only realized through active uptake” (p. 87). This understanding of a performative, embodied, and conflictual arrangement of publics has inspired research ranging from gender and queer studies to social movement research and political sciences—​interested in the dynamic and often conflictual arrangement of public formations. These approaches are explicitly aware of the role of emotions and affects in public gatherings and as a part of the media communication about such events. Political scientist Mouffe (2013) argues that an “agonistic” understanding of politics, which is distinct from the ideal of deliberation aimed toward consensus, should also be understood in this sense, because: the kind of rational consensus which Habermas’s approach postulates is a conceptual impossibility because it presupposes the availability of a consensus without exclusion, which is precisely what the hegemonic approach reveals to be impossible. (p. 69) Agonistic thinking is based on the knowledge about contradicting interests and positions. Mouffe explicitly strengthens the role of passion as an essential part of doing politics. When she reflects on “agonistic public spaces” (pp. 68–​70), she is describing exemplary artistic interventions in public space that refuse the commodification of art and expose power relations instead. Whereas in communication studies, the normative approach to deliberative qualities of media discourse is still strong and has inspired a large variety of empirical studies, the media environment has changed fundamentally. Given today’s “hybrid media system” (Chadwick, 2013), the former distinction between encounter publics and media publics is blurred along with the seemingly clear lines between private and public forms of communication. Supposedly private postings can become part of a contentious public debate out of the blue. In media-​saturated societies, personal communication is as much mediated as public communication was in the predigital age. Technologies of data tracing and image and sound identification make every text, image, and video discoverable, creating archives of public memory that draw heavily on personal data. The collapse of formerly separate fields of communication has produced entirely new perspectives on publics, their emergence, their structure, and their legitimacy.

Introduction  17 boyd (2011) has introduced the term networked publics to describe: publics that are restructured by networked technologies. As such, they are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice. (p. 39) As a core difference compared to other types of publics, affordances of digital platforms shape the ways people interact on these platforms. She identifies four characteristics of these affordances that are persistently shaping networked publics: the persistence of online communication, its replicability, its scalability, and its searchability. Taken together, they have produced a “collapse of contexts” (p. 50) through a fundamental decontextualization of content as mere bits. Based on an analysis of Twitter as an infrastructure of publicness, Schmidt (2014) uses the term personal publics to characterize the overarching nature of communication in social media: “#private or #public? Communication on Twitter is both and neither at the same time” (p. 3). He understands personal publics as an ideal type—​in contrast to “traditional publics”—​that is based on personal selection criteria, addresses an audience established through one’s own (digital) network, and uses a mostly conversational way of speaking in which there is no strict separation between sender and receiver. Schmidt does not address the emotional character of such personal publics, but one could add that informal language, the use of emojis or memes, and the constant switching between intimate, private, and public information create a specific emotional style in such personal publics. With the concept of performative publics, Lünenborg and Raetzsch (2018) and Reißmann et al. (2022) have developed a concept and an empirical approach to its validation that emphasizes the dynamic, fluid, and unstable character of publics in digital environments. Traditional media institutions such as journalism can no longer automatically claim the authority to decide on the relevance of issues for society, and the relational arrangement between a multitude of speakers has replaced the traditional gatekeeper role. This dynamic unfolding of performative publics makes it possible to shift the layers of the public sphere and provide visibility and attention to private individuals without the need to resort to complex media institutions. Based on the analysis of political communication, Pfetsch (2018) and Pfetsch et al. (2018) identify dissonant publics as a challenge for democracy. Negative campaigns, increasing political polarization, dissonance, and disconnection are described as characteristics of current internet-​based forms of public communication. Although the characterization of dissonance describes mainly moments of loss and crisis in the public sphere, it also partly refers to affective modes of this communication, including hate speech as well as empathy and solidarity mobilized via networked communication.

18  Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler Although this listing of current concepts in public sphere theory is by no way complete, it offers a smooth transition to the affective characteristics and dynamics of publics that will be reflected in the next section. The Affective Formation of Publics The close interconnection of affect and publics is not particularly surprising, nor is it a fundamentally new insight. Emotional rhetoric has always played a significant role in political contexts when it comes to mobilizing people in order to convince them of the importance of something or someone. Yet, in political science and communication studies, emotional rhetoric or the emotional/​affective in itself are still seen dominantly as an irritation, as a threat to deliberation, to “objective” argumentation. However, deliberation and factual argumentation are by no means free of emotion and affect, but are part of an emotional order that demands “calm” debating. Such a regulation of emotions established as a feeling rule is especially valid for political debates in the context of Western democracies, but it is also characteristic for the educated bourgeoisie: the style of debate in academia. In other words, rational deliberation in liberal public spheres is by no means free of affect, but demarcates a particular affective position—​namely, that of inhabiting the “rationality” of acting as a calmly pondering person (see also Berlant, 2011). In other words, strict forms of affect regulation have dominated political performances just as much as seemingly neutral ways of news production referred to as “objective reporting.” In many societies, however, such an imperative of deliberative argumentation has never been valid. Rather, in political speeches in particular, it was and is important to convince the respective audience through explicit emotional rhetoric—​that is, to affect it. The power of the spoken word is described vividly in several ethnographies of egalitarian “small-​scale societies” in which no formal offices and positions of power exist, but political influence is acquired through brilliant, affecting speech and economic generosity (see, e.g., the big man system in New Guinea: Godelier & Strathern, 1991). In our opinion, it is too short-​sighted to link the increased emotionalization of public and political discourse primarily to the emergence of digital technologies. Although, on the one hand, new forms of transnational activism can be brought into being through “connective action” (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012), it seems altogether more likely that the multiple publics that have always existed in parallel in a society now gain new forms of visibility as a result of these technologies. On the other hand, it should not be overlooked that many people connect primarily with like-​minded people and move only within their own social and communicative spheres—​that is, they do not perceive the many other voices and publics in their respective societies. But here as well, one might ask whether this is fundamentally new. Choosing like-​minded people as friends and interlocutors was described as social homophily long before digital networks started to exist. What digitization definitely brings with it is a lasting irritation of the

Introduction  19 idea of the public sphere and its classic mass media: Radio, TV, and print. As Srinivasan et al. (2019) note: Our digital age appears to be prone to distorting the public world with its capacities for filter bubbles, echo chambers, fake news, bots and hacks. This is no agora, no polis. There are no rational coffee house deliberations in earshot, no laudable unifying imaginaries through the circulation of unchanging printed texts. (p. 3) In networked publics, the control regulatives that have characterized historically established structures of the public sphere largely fall away: Everything hits at the same time and generates “noise.” Hierarchies of relevance, for almost two centuries organized by journalists as gatekeepers, have been questioned radically. The distribution of content on digital networks is ultimately unlimited and almost uncontrollable. The cacophony of voices becomes generally accessible through the net—​at least it is possible for everybody to access them—​accompanied by different emotional styles and modes of expression. This polyphony thus also becomes more accessible to the empirical social scientist as already existing media texts, and it does not have to be gathered through interviews or surveys. For example, in his analysis of Indonesian political cultures, Language and Power, Anderson (1990) talks about ngoko, the lower Javanese language level that allows for a more immediate and emotionally expressive form of political communication than communication on krama, the highest and formalistic language level of Javanese, which is also the language of official political speeches and print media. He points out that ngoko is hardly accessible to the researcher, because the mere presence of a foreign, white researcher “kramanizes” the situation (p. 154). This shows that the ngoko style of the common Javanese is seen as an inferior, uneducated, and rough mode of communication that people try to hide in the presence of persons perceived as upper class. However, digital chat groups make the ngoko style more easily accessible and documentable for researchers. Taking this knowledge as a backdrop for thinking about the success of populist politicians such as Donald Trump, who virtuously use an aggressive, direct, unpolished, and often offensive style of speaking, allows us to see that this style can touch so many people because it differs clearly from thoughtful and often abstract rhetoric. Hochschild’s (2016) “deep stories” of rural Americans who feel like “strangers in their own land” also point to this connection. In contrast, communication taking place in direct co-​presence (face-​to-​ face) in physical places such as marketplaces or meeting places is generally more fleeting and of limited range, unless these encounters are recorded (i.e., documented audiovisually). This is where cell phone testimonies or camera witnessing (Andén-​Papadopoulos, 2014) become relevant today that record where no professional media producer is present. Especially in the context

20  Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler of political conflicts, these “image testimonies” are becoming increasingly important. Think, for example, of the Egyptian Uprising in 2011 that has been called “the Twitter revolution” especially by Western researchers. Schankweiler et al. (2019), who reflected on the circulation of audiovisual accounts of witnessing from an affect-​theoretical point of view, argue that the special efficacy of image testimonies lies in their ability to affect, to move, and to mobilize people (pp. 6–​7). Building on the theoretical work of the Collaborative Research Center “Affective Societies”—​as we do with this book—​they conceive affects as relational phenomena that unfold in interaction between human and nonhuman bodies and are not reducible to individual mental states or corporeal comportment. In other words: “affect can only be understood as a relational dynamic between actors and the complex socio-​material environments in which they are embedded” (Röttger-​ Rössler & Kolesch, 2018, p. xiii). In their analysis, Schankweiler et al. (2019) describe witnessing and testifying as relational acts based on affectivity that create ties between events, people, and testimonies. According to them, image testimonies “not only serve as vectors of affectivity, but also play a major role in communicating affect” across social worlds (p. 7). Temporality proves to be a highly important element of affect-​generating within these processes of image circulation: The image testimonies are circulated instantaneously, in “real time” on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social media platforms, and this gives the viewer the impression of being a direct witness to the event depicted. The many visual testimonies of ordinary citizens that reach us daily from Ukraine impressively demonstrate the affecting potential of images in times of crisis and war. As stated at the beginning of this introduction, the brutality of war for the civilian population, which used to receive little attention as mere collateral damage, is now visible in detail to everyone across national borders. But such images simultaneously become the object of falsification and propaganda. The affective intensity of “being there” becomes a strategic tool of information warfare. But even if digital and analog spaces are becoming increasingly intertwined, physical places continue to be of great importance, not just because the entire world has not been digitized across the board, but, above all, because the physical co-​presence of people in concrete places remains an important momentum of public formations. Political protests take place on streets and squares, they unfold their effectiveness through the co-​presence of numerous people, even if today they are often organized via digital tools of networked communication (see also Breljak & Mühlhoff, 2019, pp. 7–​8). The unbroken importance of physical co-​presence in political movements relates directly to processes of affective resonance that unfold in the complex interactions between people and their spatial environment. The importance of physical places for the affective formation of publics in protest movements is illuminated in the microscopic analysis by the political scientists Ayata and Harders (2018) of the Egyptian Uprising in 2011 that culminated in the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo for 18 days. They show that the occupation

Introduction  21 of the square constituted a fundamental rupture in the political and spatial routines of the authoritarian regime. The square had been turned by the protesters into a different, out of the ordinary, affective space with new layers of relational affect … while previous layers, such as the memory of colonial domination, authoritarian display of power, and violent defeats remain inscribed and haunt the materiality of the square. (p. 118) Ayata and Harders conceptualize the complex and multilayered interactions and practices unfolding on the square during the occupation as “Midān Moments.” Midān Moments are periods out of the ordinary time, in a delineated space, which is characterized by intensive affective relationality through the bodily co-​presence of protesters and their practices on this space. (p. 118) A midān (Arabic, literally square) is a well-​defined place, a locus of mundane everyday practices embedded in a city as a socially produced multiscalar site. The term “moments” was chosen in order to stress the directness and instantaneousness of relational affect. According to the authors, a Midān Moment combines two temporal registers: the immediacy of, for instance, an affective atmosphere, which imposes itself in a matter of seconds and can lead to an immediate rupture of the well-​known; and the emergence of new ways of feeling. (p. 119) With their notion of Midān Moments, Ayata and Harders conceptualize the linkage between place, space, temporality, and affect as essential for producing “transformative events” that have the power to disrupt, alter, or violate the taken-​for-​granted political routines and social relations (see also Schwedler, 2016). Having introduced some examples of our interdisciplinary work at the Collaborative Research Center “Affective Societies,” we shall now give an overview of the contributions collected in this volume. Structure of the Present Volume The aim of this volume is to investigate the affective characteristics of diverse publics from different disciplinary viewpoints. Our overarching interest is in how—​under the current conditions of increasingly digitally networked communication—​ forms of the public can be captured empirically and

22  Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler described using the theoretical lens of affect theory. The book takes a closer look at three closely intertwined areas: Places, networks, and media. But before these three sections begin, we start with a dialogue with Zizi Papacharissi who first coined the concept of “affective publics” in 2015. Together we reflect on the historical contexts of its emergence and the fundamental changes in political and social circumstances since then. Whereas her introduction of the concept was inspired by the democratic uprising in the Arab region and protests in Europe at that time, political contexts have now shifted radically. Today, “dark participation” (Quandt, 2021), whether in the form of hate speech or conspiracy narratives, is now a priority topic in communication research and public discourse. The conversation with Zizi Papacharissi offers a contextualization of the emergence of “affective publics” as well as a shared reflection on its usefulness for future research. Part I Places

Human communication is always bound to places, even if it is completely detached from concrete physical sites and carried out in a mediatized or exclusively digital form. Analog and digital spheres, however, are increasingly intertwined: They overlap, expand, irritate, and transform each other. The chapters in the first part of this book explore these interconnections and their affective underpinnings. They focus on concrete physical places—​such as museums and their storerooms, urban squares and streets, or administrative offices—​and examine the social meanings connected to them either analogically and/​or digitally. Building on a notion of place that refers to the elaborated social and cultural meanings people invest in or attach to a specific locality or site, the authors investigate what emotional orders and affective arrangements and dynamics characterize these places, and they analyze to what extent affects and emotions change through expansions and shifts in digital space. In doing so, they also rethink the concepts of place and space that are often used interchangeably. The first contribution to this part, written by the social and cultural anthropologists Paola Ivanov, Laibor Moko, and Jonas Bens, is “Unhappy Objects: Colonial Violence, Maasai Materialities, and the Affective Publics of Ethnographic Museums.” It deals with displaced objects from Maasai communities in northern Tanzania that were brought to Europe in colonial contexts and are currently part of the collections of the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin. Building on Sarah Ahmed’s conception of “happy objects,” the authors interpret these objects as “unhappy objects” in accordance with the indigenous conception of ing’weni, which understands these entities as “subjects” with agency that bring misfortune to both Maasai and German society and are thus able not only to create unhappiness for different publics but also to be unhappy themselves. This conception is compared with the emotional debates about ethnographic museums in European publics, especially about the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. The analysis reveals that Maasai

Introduction  23 conceptions gesture toward colonialism as a contemporary phenomenon, whereas European affective publics tend to deny the full scope of ongoing colonialism. The second contribution by Matthias Warstat, “Theater Publics in Motion: Affective Dynamics of the Theater and the Street, Berlin 1989,” uses the example of Berlin theater in the political shift of 1989 to explore how theater publics are mobilized when they come into contact with other publics such as street publics or digital publics in times of social upheaval. He uses an affect-​theoretical viewpoint to discuss how theater publics can be defined and located between individual performances and the general discourses of a society. His analysis focuses on Heiner Müller’s production Hamlet/​Maschine, produced at the Deutsches Theater Berlin in 1989–​ 1990, whose actors took part in demonstrations for regime change in East Germany such as the legendary Alexanderplatz demonstration on November 4, 1989. However, within this process, frictions and ruptures between theater publics and street publics emerged. This contribution examines these as an affective interplay between distance, proximity, competition, and mutual reinforcement. The third contribution by the anthropologists Thomas Götzelmann and Timm Sureau, “Digital Administrative Publics: Affective and Corporate Entanglements in Germany’s New Federal Portal,” is based on ethnographic fieldwork inside the IT department of Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF). The authors examine the transfer of public services to the digital space—​services that were previously located in offices and involved direct contact between civil servants and applicants. Special attention is paid to the production of the Federal Portal (Bundesportal), a web-​based platform for (non)citizens to apply for governmental services. The authors argue that the development of government IT projects leads to the formation of new “administrative publics” that change the relation between “applicants” and “bureaucrats” dramatically. They reduce direct reciprocity, and shape affective relations through market logics in well-​designed digital spaces. The study exemplifies the affective tensions that accompany such processes of delocalization or “displacement” as well as the sometimes overt, often subtle, affective, and emotional effects of governmental practices on “publics.” Part II Networks

Any forms of publics always trace back to and are dependent on social interactions between people that usually take place in direct human contact. Thus, anything that is given a public stage in whatever form—​as an utterance, action, image, or film—​ initially has its starting point “offstage.” Such performative expressions have their origins in very different social constellations—​ be they political associations, secret societies, religious groups, local or transregional interest groups, transnational diaspora communities, or much more. Frequently, the beginnings of larger public

24  Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler movements are characterized by small, closed, and intimate circles of persons or even just individuals; and often, these beginnings remain hidden (Shryock, 2004). “Connective action” as a form of digitally networked protest (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012) is also based on social interactions in which affects are mobilized to form the driving force behind public protest. In digitally networked media, the positions of senders and receivers change constantly, and either personal communication can unexpectedly reach a large public (“go viral”), or the offline behavior of individuals can be rendered visible by the digital vigilantism of netizens and labeled as morally reprehensible. Both are thus becoming digital events. Moreover, as highly aggregated data, mass private communication also represents a form of the public that is accessible to economic interests (targeting) or political influence (surveillance). The contributions in this part of the volume address the networked character of current publics and examine the affective contours of their respective developmental histories. Hence, affect theory is used here to elaborate the character of networks based on concrete empirical studies. This section is opened by Chapter 6 from the anthropologist Ulla D. Berg, “(Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-​19: The Emergence of a Hemispheric Affective Counterpublic.” Reflecting on her own research collaboration, she describes how, at the critical moment of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-​19) crisis, a network of 45 researchers from 19 countries working on the Americas emerged. Faced with sudden immobility due to the pandemic, the network built a cross-​national, transdisciplinary collaboration using different platforms to provide migrants in the Americas with up-​to-​date information and make their voices heard publicly. As a network of care and solidarity, the scholar activists intervened to oppose the new border regime that was detaining thousands of migrants in transit or locking them up in detention centers. The temporality unfolding with the global public health emergency pushed for the unfolding of (Im)Mobility, the hemispheric network of engaged researchers. As a polyphonic map, migrants’ testimonies are heard and provide a “crisis ordinariness,” as Berlant (2011) expresses it. Chapter 7, titled “Women Activists Imaged through Social Media Publics: The ‘Feisty Dadis of Shaheen Bagh’ as Political Subjects,” is co-​ authored by media scholar Radhika Gajjala with Anna DeGalan, Debipreeta Rahut, Syeda Zainab Akbar, and Jhalak Jain. The team of authors, comprising both feminist researchers and activists, analyzes the prominent case of older “subaltern” women in 2019–​2020 who were protesting nonviolently in the Muslim-​majority Delhi neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh against the new citizenship law (CAA/​NRC). The chapter combines social media analysis, visual analysis, and interviews with activists. Bringing the findings together, the authors offer critical insights into the complex arrangement of ghar (the private) and bahir (the public) that produces competing affective publics by global activists. Anthropologist Jürgen Schaflechner contributes with Chapter 8 on forms of (in)visibility of non-​Muslim women in the Islamic Republic of

Introduction  25 Pakistan. He focuses on forms of activism circulating around the alleged forced conversion of Hindu women to Islam. In “Affectivism and Visibility in the Mediatization of Disappearing Non-​Muslim Women in Pakistan,” he analyzes the ambivalence of new forms of visibility through social media that simultaneously produce novel structures of exclusion and exploitation. Schaflechner uses the term affectivism to describe forms of activism with affectively charged messages that enable counterspeech while producing new forms of discrimination—​an inherently ambivalent activism. Thus, his case study sheds light on the dialectic of visibility produced in digital networks including empowerment (potentia) and restriction (potestas). Chapter 9 in this section deals with the conflictive potential of digital networking. Communication scholar Ana Makhashvili analyzes how affective intensities that play out in digital networks of solidarity are appropriated by far-​right actors. German Twitter users mobilized a network of solidarity using the hashtag #WirHabenPlatz (We have space) in response to the massive violence by border police at the Turkish–​Greek frontier in 2020, after Turkish President Erdoğan opened the borders to the European Union. “Hijacked Solidarity: Affective Networking of Far-​Right Publics on Twitter” details how the hashtag was hijacked almost immediately by far-​right actors aiming to contest the claim of solidarity. Drawing on social network analysis and qualitative methods of “reading for affect,” the chapter reveals the affective media practices used to mobilize the hashtag public and transform it into a site of contested sentiments. This is followed by Chapter 10 by Finnish media scholar Kaarina Nikunen on hate in digital networks. In “Affective Temporalities of Digital Hate Cultures,” Nikunen analyzes the types of hate speech visible on digital networks and is particularly interested in their temporal structures. By distinguishing between inward hate speech in the Finnish far-​right group “Soldiers of Odin” and outward hate speech on Twitter in which racism is discussed, she decodes the modalities and intensities of the spread of hate as a core element of affective publics. Presentness and immediacy are described as key aspects of affective temporality. But this focus on anticipation and premediation that mobilize affect must include a simultaneous sense of past and future in the present, the author argues. The two case studies show the different kinds of rhythms and intensity in which hate speech is organized and circulates. Kaarina Nikunen finally reflects on the consequences of these different temporalities for the moderation and governance of platforms. She criticizes the lack of transparency in platform governance when noticing how one of her examples simply disappeared without further explanation. In Chapter 11, media scholar Tobias Matzner theorizes the role of algorithms in affective publics. In “Understanding the Affective Impact of Algorithmic Publics,” he describes algorithms as structural and essential elements of digital media that constitute publics. This role is most evident in social media in which algorithms select the content shown to users based on a variety of parameters such as social demographics, previous usage, engagement,

26  Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler or tracking technology. Matzner thus understands algorithmic publics as the algorithmic selection and production of content, which, in turn, is based on algorithmic measurement of user behavior. While critically engaging with the argumentation of seemingly affectively based concepts such as Pariser’s idea of the “filter bubble” and Cambridge Analytica’s collection of Facebook data, which was then sold for political advertising, he instead proposes to use Berlant’s concept of affective commitment as a critical lens to examine the power of algorithms. Part III Media

The third part of the volume focuses not only on the specifics of different media such as memes, literature, and theater but also on digital media and research data. The individual contributions ask which emotional orders characterize the respective media and which specific affective spaces of resonance they generate. Although media can be described as traditional institutions of “the public sphere,” their meaning, outreach, and formation have changed profoundly in digitally networked communication environments; and such media publics reveal forms of shifting, displacement, niche formation, and convergent entanglement. In this section, the authors deal with questions about the affective nature of media publics and analyze the consequences of novel media figurations for an affect-​theoretical understanding of current publics. They further discuss the significance that the ubiquitous availability of digital media has for these traditional media as historically established institutions of publics. The first contribution to this section is by the art historian Verena Straub who examines the role of memes in the affective formation of publics. In digital media environments, forms of public humiliation and shaming of political opponents become a core element of communication strategies, especially in times of crisis and conflict. “Contested Image Practices of Public Shaming: A Case Study of an Internet Meme in the Israeli–​Palestinian Conflict” delivers an in-​depth visual analysis of an internet meme that emerged in response to a public scandal involving a former Israeli soldier. In 2010, under the title “Israel Defense Forces, the best days of my life,” Eden Abergil posted several selfies on Facebook in which she posed mockingly in front of handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian prisoners. Eden Abergil’s humiliating pictorial act became the starting point for numerous photoshopped montages that were also disseminated on social media and were used, conversely, to shame the soldier. The participatory practices of meme production invite specific types of affective engagement. Their potential to trigger involvement and to mobilize in this case produces heterogeneous and contradictory forms of meaning. Analyzing the formal and aesthetic quality of text and image, its conversion by “memeing,” and the media infrastructures that allow the meme to circulate, Verena Straub offers insights into the affective qualities of memes.

Introduction  27 Chapter 13 in this section deals with a “classical” public sphere, namely literature. In his contribution “ ‘GOOKS, Go Home!’: Vietnamese in the United States,” literary scholar Subarno Chattarji deals with the affective publics inhabited by Vietnamese Americans. In analyzing the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by the Vietnamese–​American writer Ocean Voung, he shows how through his sensory apprehension and articulation of landscapes and memories of pain, trauma, dislocation, love, and loss, the author constructs publics that are quite distinct from the “model-​minority” myths of success associated stereotypically with Vietnamese Americans. Through his fine-​grained analysis of this award-​winning book, Chattarji reveals that the narrator’s queerness, poverty, precarity, and refugee status bring into play a complex sensorium of feelings and realities. He thus points out how intersecting marginalities constitute individual lives and communities, and how “crisis ordinariness” (Berlant) shapes everyday life in the United States at the same time as these lives are haunted by memories of Vietnam and the war. Literary scholars Gesa Jessen, Jürgen Brokoff, and Tim Lörke analyze the affective charge of the public debate surrounding German authors suspected of being in some way right-​wing. In “Affective Publics and the Figure of the ‘Right-​Wing Writer’,” they trace the debate around Simon Strauß’s first novel Sieben Nächte (Seven Nights) that was pursued in the feuilletons of German newspapers as well as in social media and at public events in 2017–​ 2018. They ask about the role of emotions in negotiating political content in literature. In distinguishing between literary emotionality and political emotion, the authors look particularly for the affective categories related to text and author. By highlighting frictions and tensions in affective publics, they identify the alleged right-​wing writer as a mobilizing figure in public discourse. In Chapter 15, “Opening Up Ethnographic Data: When the Private Becomes Public,” anthropologists Michaela Rizzoli and Birgitt Röttger-​ Rössler address the question of how social scientists deal with the so-​called “open science movement” that has been expanding in recent years. Newly developed open science infrastructures not only provide researchers novel opportunities for data sharing but also enable digitally mediated forms of exchange and collaboration between scientists, research partners, and different publics. Based on an interview study—​mainly, but not exclusively, with social anthropologists—​the authors highlight the role that emotions and affects play in researchers’ engagements with data and the sharing of data. The authors nuance the argument that the growing demand for open science provokes ambivalent feelings within researchers due to the affective ties they have developed with their research participants, research theme, and time and thus also with “their” research data. Data, they argue, are always charged with affects, and data sharing thus takes place within specific affective arrangements involving researchers, research participants, methods, data, and digital infrastructures.

28  Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler With these interdisciplinary and truly global contributions, which address current affective formations of publics empirically in very different constellations and in a variety of places, we hope to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of affects and emotional performances as a core element of publics—​be they digitally established, on-​site, or entangled between the two. Publics as embodied, performatively elicited constellations are not disappearing as a consequence of emerging digital technologies. Focusing on the affective structure of public formations enables us to diversify our understanding of publics going far beyond the political as such. Understanding affects as a relational category brings to the fore the diversity of public formations consisting of quite specific relations between people, their environment, media, and digital technology. This is indispensable in Affective Societies. Notes 1 See Graan (2022) for a very good and detailed overview of this new subfield of anthropology. 2 Whereas this focus on rational discourse was understood for a while as a fundamental rejection of any kind of emotion in public discourse, Wessler (2018, pp. 133–​134) has argued that emotions do not have a quality-​reducing effect per se, but can be conducive to discourse under certain conditions if they can be justified or if they promote empathy for opposition groups.

References Andén-​ Papadopoulos, K. (2014). Citizen camera-​ witnessing: Embodied political dissent in the age of “mediated mass self-​communication.” New Media & Society, 16(5), 753–​769. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​14614​4481​3489​863 Anderson, B. R. (1990). Language and power: Exploring political cultures in Indonesia. Cornell University Press. Ayata, B., & Harders, C. (2018). “Midān moments”: Conceptualizing space, affect and political participation on occupied squares. In B. Röttger-​Rössler & J. Slaby (Eds.), Affect in relation: Families, places, technologies (pp. 117–​133). Routledge. Benhabib, S. (1992). Situating the self: Gender, community and postmodernism in contemporary ethics. Routledge. Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg. A. (2012). The logic of connective action. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 739–​768. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​13691​ 18X.2012.670​661 Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press. https://​doi.org/​10.1215/​ 978082​2394​716 boyd, d. (2011). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A networked self: Identity, community and culture on social network sites (pp. 39–​58). Routledge. Breljak, A., & Mühlhoff, R. (2019). Was ist Sozialtheorie der Digitalen Gesellschaft? [What is social theory of the digital society?]. In R. Mühlhoff, A. Breljak, & J. Slaby (Eds.), Affekt Macht Netz: Auf dem Weg zu einer Sozialtheorie der Digitalen Gesellschaft [Towards a Social Theory of the Digital Society] (pp. 7–​34). Transcript.

Introduction  29 Chadwick, A. (2013). The hybrid media system: Politics and power. Oxford University Press. Dwivedi, D., & Sanil, V. (2015). Introduction: From outside the West: Whence? Wither? In D. Dwivedi & V. Sanil (Eds.), The public sphere from outside the West (pp. 1–​12). Bloomsbury. Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text, 25/​26, 56–​80. Gal, S. (2006). Contradictions of standard language in Europe: Implications for the study of practices and publics. Social Anthropology, 14(2), 163–​181. Godelier, M., & Strathern, M. (Eds.). (1991). Big men and great men: Personifications of power in Melanesia. Cambridge University Press. Graan, A. (2022). Publics and the public sphere. In Oxford research encyclopedia of anthropology. Oxford University Press. Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT Press. Hauser, G. A. (1999). Vernacular voices: The rhetoric of publics and public spheres. University of South Carolina Press. Hochschild, A. R. (2016). Strangers in their own land: Anger and mourning on the American right. New Press. Ivanov, P. (2020). Die Verkörperung der Welt: Ästhetik, Raum und Gesellschaft im islamischen Sansibar. Reimer. Kurfürst, S. (2021). Dancing youth: Hip hop and gender in late socialist Vietnam. transcript. Lempert, M., & Silverstein, M. (2012). Creatures of politics: Media, message, and the American presidency. Indiana University Press. Lienhardt, P. (2001). Shaikdoms of Eastern Arabia (edited by Ahmed Al-​Shahi). Palgrave. Lünenborg, M., & Raetzsch, C. (2018). From public sphere to performative publics: Developing media practice as an analytic model. In S. Foellmer, M. Lünenborg, & C. Raetzsch (Eds.), Media practices, social movements, and performativity: Transdisciplinary approaches (pp. 13–​35). Routledge. Mazzarella, W. (2003). Very Bombay: Contending with the global in an Indian advertising agency. Cultural Anthropology, 18(1), 33–​71. Mazzarella, W. (2010). Affect: What is it good for? In S. Dube (Ed.), Enchantments of modernity: Empire, nation, globalisation (pp. 291–​309). Routledge. Mouffe, C. (2013). Agonistics: Thinking the world politically. Verso. Narayan, B. (2011). The making of the Dalit public space in North India: Uttar Pradesh 1950-​present. Oxford University Press. Pfetsch, B. (2018). Dissonant and disconnected public spheres as challenge for political communication research. Javnost–​The Public, 25(1–​2), 59–​65. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1080/​13183​222.2018.1423​942 Pfetsch, B., Löblich, M., & Eilders, C. (2018). Dissonante Öffentlichkeiten als Perspektive kommunikationswissenschaftlicher Theoriebildung [Dissonant publics as a perspective for communication science theorizing]. Publizistik, 63(4), 477–​ 495. https://​doi.org/​10.1007/​s11​616-​018-​0441-​1 Piliavsky, A. (2013). Where is the public sphere? Political communications and the morality of disclosure in rural Rajasthan. Cambridge Anthropology, 31(2), 104–​122.

30  Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler Quandt, T. (2021). Dark participation in online communication: The world of the wicked web. Media and Communication, 9(1). Reißmann, W., Miriam, S., Margreth, L., & Raetzsch, C. (2022). Praxisprofile als mixed-​ methods Ansatz zur Analyse performativer Öffentlichkeiten: Vorschlag für eine relationale Journalismusforschung [Practice profiles as a mixed-​methods approach to analyzing performative publics: A proposal for relational journalism research]. Studies in Communication Sciences, 22(1), 69–​88. https://​doi.org/​ 10.24434/​j.scoms.2022.01.3057 Röttger-​Rössler, B., & Kolesch, D. (2018). Affective societies: Introduction into the book series. In B. Röttger-​Rössler & J. Slaby (Eds.), Affect in relation: Families, places, technologies (pp. xii–​xv). Routledge. Schankweiler, K., Straub, V., & Wendl, T. (Eds.). (2019). Image testimonies: Witnessing in times of social media. Routledge. Schmidt, J.-​H. (2014). Twitter and the rise of personal publics. In K. Weller, A. Bruns, J. Burgess, M. Mahrt, & C. Puschmann (Eds.), Twitter and society (pp. 3–​14). Peter Lang. Schwedler, J. (2016). Taking time seriously: Temporality and the Arab uprisings. Project on Middle East Political Science. https://​pom​eps.org/​tak​ing-​time-​seriou​sly-​ temp​oral​ity-​and-​the-​arab-​uprisi​ngs Shryock, A. (2004). The new Jordanian hospitality: House, host, and guest in the culture of public display. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 46(1), 35–​62. https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​S00104​1750​4000​039 Srinivasan, S., Diepeveen, S., & Karekwaivanane, G. (2019). Rethinking publics in Africa in a digital age. Journal of Eastern African Studies, 13(1), 2–​17. Voung, O. (2019). On earth we’re briefly gorgeous. Jonathan Cape. Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Zone Books Wessler, H. (2018). Habermas and the media. Polity. Yeh, R. (2018). Passing: Two publics in a Mexican border city. University of Chicago Press.

Part I

Places

3 Unhappy Objects Colonial Violence, Maasai Materialities, and the Affective Publics of Ethnographic Museums Paola Ivanov, Laibor Kalanga Moko, and Jonas Bens In recent years, the ethnographic museums in Europe have come under much public scrutiny. More and more scholars, practitioners, and activists are criticizing that ethnographic collections were acquired from the Indigenous populations through colonial violence, and that the collection pieces should be returned to their original owners (Hicks, 2020; Sarr & Savoy, 2018). Indigenous communities all over the world criticize museums’ displays as spaces curating colonial ways of seeing, assessing, and classifying non-​ European cultures, and they demand to be included in decisions regarding how they are represented in museums (Hendry, 2005; Simpson, 1996). Consequently, a broad strand of scholarship has emerged that aims at decolonizing ethnographic museums (Bodenstein & Pagani, 2016; Coombes & Phillips, 2015; Schorch, 2020). The public debate on the coloniality of ethnographic museums has taken on an exceptional emotional force. One example is the Humboldt Forum, a newly created exhibition space in a partial replica of the former Prussian palace in central Berlin, that displays objects from the collections of the Ethnologisches Museum (Ethnological Museum) and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst (Asian Art Museum) of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (National Museums in Berlin). Various people are unhappy with the Humboldt Forum and the affective dynamics it provokes. Indigenous communities in the countries from which the collections originate feel misrepresented and subjected to epistemic violence (Moko & Bens, 2021). Museum practitioners, artists, and activists in the institutional context of the Humboldt Forum itself find themselves engulfed in all kinds of emotional upheaval (Ivanov & Bens, 2021). And broader publics in Germany more generally are similarly unhappy—​ either because people are appalled by the practices of ethnographic museums or because they feel that they must push back against the sharp criticism directed toward these organizations (Benker, 2021).1 This chapter takes up these manifold affective dissonances as its starting point. How do we come to terms with the unhappy publics of ethnographic museums? And who makes up these publics? DOI: 10.4324/9781003365426-4

34  Paola Ivanov et al. In The Promise of Happiness (2010), Ahmed proposes a theory of happiness from an affect studies perspective. Critiquing what she calls the “happiness industry” (p. 3), Ahmed argues for a strictly relational approach to understanding the phenomenon of happiness. Happiness, according to Ahmed, neither emerges in people’s inner selves, nor is it somehow contained in the objects people pursue to become happy. Happiness rather emerges in the in-​between. In those moments when subjects affect and are affected by “happy objects,” happiness comes to the fore—​or it does not. In Ahmed’s words, happiness crystallizes “in the messiness of the experiential, the unfolding of bodies into worlds, in what I call the drama of contingency” (p. 22). For the purposes of our investigation, we take up Ahmed’s idea of the happy object and turn it on its head. Can the collection pieces in European ethnographic museums be described as unhappy objects? This is certainly what it seems like. The objects seem to serve as crystallization points for the unhappiness of the multiple publics we outlined above: Members of communities of origin; museum visitors; and practitioners, artists, and activists who are engaging in critical debate over the collection pieces. The ethnographic museum as an affective arrangement (Slaby et al., 2017) creates unhappiness. In this chapter, we shall unpack the idea of the collection pieces in ethnographic museums as unhappy objects. The ethnographic research we have conducted in the Humboldt Forum, in artists’ collectives and activist groups in Berlin, as well as in Maasai communities in northern Tanzania, from where part of the objects in the Tanzania collections of Berlin’s Ethnological Museum originate, leads us to frame the problem in even broader terms than Ahmed. Taking seriously the relationality of happiness and unhappiness, we ask: Are the ethnographic objects only unhappy objects in the sense that they make the humans with whom they are entangled unhappy? Indeed, as we shall show, due to their transnational and transcultural biographies, ethnographic objects co-​constitute through the relationality of humans and nonhumans in changing affective arrangements (Slaby et al., 2017) different affective communities (Zink, 2019) or publics (Lünenborg, 2019), each with specific, potentially contradictory emotion repertoires. But the very first question we pose is more fundamental: Are not the ethnographic objects themselves unhappy? Are they even objects, or not rather subjects? The scholarship on affective publics that inspired this volume highlights the concept of affective relationality to analyze public places and spaces. At the heart of these approaches lies the legitimate intuition that affect has become more prevalent in the public sphere, mainly in connection to the implementation of technological infrastructures that have enabled instant online mass communication (Breslin et al., 2022; Papacharissi, 2015). Accordingly, scholars propose to study affective publics by paying close attention to the affective dynamics unfolding between human and nonhuman bodies: “How publics are constituted should consider the affordances and capacities that go beyond human intentionality” (Lünenborg, 2019, p. 327).

Unhappy Objects  35 We align ourselves with this approach. But we also suggest going beyond thinking nonhuman agency mainly in terms of technological infrastructures. It may rather be necessary to rethink certain modernist assumptions about who can act in the first place: Can only humans articulate their unhappiness in public, or can other entities as well—​those entities that ethnographic museums keep in their storehouses? Ing’weni: A Maasai Conception of “Unhappy Objects” To theorize the unhappiness of ethnographic objects, we draw from our research on the Maasai collections in Berlin’s Ethnological Museum. Most of the about 590 objects of Maasai origin were brought to Berlin during the times of formal German colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.2 We wanted to better understand the affective dynamics unfolding in the discussion on decolonizing ethnographic museums. But as the media debate is dominated by European voices, we aimed to investigate the perspectives of the Indigenous communities from which the ethnographic objects were taken. To capture these perspectives, we conducted ethnographic fieldwork and engaged in collaborative workshops with Maasai communities in northern Tanzania. We used visual methods such as photo elicitation and ethnographic films (Harper, 2002; Pink, 2020) to create an encounter between our Maasai interlocutors and the ethnographic objects kept in Berlin’s Ethnological Museum. As part of this research, we were interested in discussing specific ethnographic objects stored in Berlin’s Ethnological Museum with our interlocutors. We wanted to know in what terms they would describe these pieces, and what kind of emotions they would display during these discussions. Two of those which we will discuss more deeply in this chapter were an ear pendant (Figure 3.1) and an ostrich feather headdress (Figure 3.2). When it came to these two pieces, it was striking that our conversation partners did not describe them with the Maa word intokiting’, which can be translated into English as “things” or “objects.” Intokiting’ denotes what one buys at the market to use in everyday life, such as a kettle or a pair of shoes. Instead, people used the term imasaa—​a word that might best be translated into English as “belongings.” Imasaa are not simply things that a person owns. Imasaa are nonhumans that belong to humans in a way that goes beyond possession. Not unlike the English “belonging,” the concept of imasaa seems to imply a relationship “in emotional, social, and local terms evoking ideas of commonality and mutuality, modalities of allegiance, and attachments, whether spatial, sensorial, material, or immaterial” (Mattes et al., 2019, p. 300). Belonging, in this sense, includes ongoing affective entanglements in which the well-​being of both the imasaa and the humans to whom they belong depend closely on each other.3 A telling example is an ear pendant worn by a married Maasai woman (see Figure 3.1). Made from brass by other female members of the household, it

36  Paola Ivanov et al.

Figure 3.1 A married woman’s ear pendant, collected by Kurt Johannes, brass, leather, (a) D: 10.6 cm, (b) D: 10 cm, L: 42 cm (both ear spirals including leather cord), 17.5 cm × 23 cm × 3.3 cm. III E 4747 a–​b, acquired 1896, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photograph by Martin Franken.

is given to a Maasai woman during her enkiyama, her wedding ceremony. After the woman and the ear pendant have been joined together in ritual, the woman will wear it all the time. Our interlocutors have described the ear pendant as a life-​giving entity that can facilitate reproduction. It will create conducive conditions to conceive and later bear a child. The Maasai we talked to did not describe this ear pendant as a mere tool for reproduction, something that a woman controls completely at her own will, but rather as a belonging that has power in its own right—​something that must be reckoned with. The ear pendant remains connected with the woman to whom it belongs, even over a distance. If an ear pendant is lost or stolen, it still exerts an influence over the woman. If someone damages the pendant, misfortune can befall the woman to whom it belongs, or the children whom the woman has borne while wearing it. Likewise, a woman can mobilize the power residing in her ear pendant to curse somebody who has wronged her—​her own child, but also somebody outside the family—​so that misfortune will befall the evildoer. As such, an ear pendant is a life-​giving entity with the power to influence the lives of the people to whom it belongs.

Unhappy Objects  37

Figure 3.2 Headdress, collected by Johann Maria Hildebrandt, ostrich feathers, glass, leather, 58 cm × 45 cm × 4 cm. III E 421, acquired 1877, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photograph by Martin Franken.

Another belonging that we discussed in depth with our interlocutors was an ostrich feather headdress (see Figure 3.2). Such a headdress belongs to men aged about 15 to 35 years—​members of the ilmurran age grade, often denoted “warriors” in English (Hodgson, 2001, p. 24).4 A feather headdress like this is made by the women in the household, while it is the duty of young boys to collect the ostrich feathers. Normally, such a headdress is worn by many generations of warriors. Elder warriors who are about to leave the ilmurran age grade in their mid-​to late 30s pass on their headdress to an incoming warrior. The young incoming warriors will bring their headdress, together with their spear and other warrior paraphernalia, to their eunoto ritual, the consecration ceremony into warriorhood.5 It is after eunoto that they become full warriors with all attendant rights and obligations. A feather headdress is therefore not just a specific piece of clothing worn by a warrior; but a warrior is only a complete body when together with the warrior belongings (in Maa: inareta), including the feather headdress.6 Feather headdresses play a crucial role during military confrontations. Our Maasai interlocutors told us that a feather headdress will scare and intimidate the enemy. This intimidation, our interlocutors believe, does not

38  Paola Ivanov et al. emerge just because the (nonhuman) feather headdress somehow symbolizes the (human) power of the warrior, but because the feather headdress itself evokes this fear in the opponent. Inherently powerful, the headdress is able to protect a warrior during battle. These two examples indicate that our Maasai interlocutors assign an ontological status to these museum pieces that does not correspond with a clear-​ cut division between subject and object. As historians of science have shown, the differentiation between objects as passive entities that are scrutinized by active subjects is a culturally specific idea developed in the context of European modernity (Daston & Galison, 2007).7 Different societies define the border between object and subject, person and thing, quite differently from Euro-​Western modernity (Henare et al., 2007; Strathern, 1988; Vivieros de Castro, 1998). What museum anthropologists describe as “ethnographic objects,” hence, as passive things, may be described as “subjects” or “persons” by representatives of Indigenous communities (Hoskins, 2009). In the case of our Maasai interlocutors in northern Tanzania, the ethnographic “objects” were not considered inert and passive, but rather as entities imbued with a capacity to act, react, and even feel—​properties rather associated with subjects. Having an agency of their own, they affect human individuals and collectives and are likewise affected by their social relationships with humans. The appropriate relationship to imasaa is expressing their affection for them, approaching them with love and care.8 In this sense, the relation our Maasai interlocutors describe to imasaa is consistent with what Ahmed (2010) calls a “loving orientation” toward a “happy object” (p. 32). Our interlocutors saw imasaa as inextricably connected to the human bodies to which they belong. Once these belongings are consecrated in ritual contexts—​during an enkiyama marriage ceremony in the case of the ear pendant or during an eunoto warrior consecration ceremony in the case of the feather headdress—​they become part of the person to whom they belong. As such, they must also be cared for in similar ways as one must care for one’s own body. Put in legal terms, this means that imasaa are inalienable. It is not allowed to give them away to somebody else, particularly not to a non-​ Maasai (Moko, 2021). Giving away an imasaa would not be unlike severing an arm or a leg from your body. It is for this reason that our Maasai interlocutors were convinced that the imasaa that are currently held in Berlin’s Ethnological Museum could not have been acquired in any other way than through military violence. In the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, no Maasai married woman would have given up her ear pendant voluntarily to a German collector, nor would a Maasai warrior have sold his headdress. Our interlocutors were very clear in their view: These belongings must have been taken from them by force. Most likely, their owners must even have been killed. In Maasai society, the killing of a person is a most serious transgression and triggers elaborate legal proceedings to deal with the crime. At the core of Maasai legal thought on the killing of a person is the concept of iloikop.9

Unhappy Objects  39 When a Maasai is killed, the person responsible is befallen by iloikop. Some interlocutors described iloikop as a kind of substance, a part of the dead person that sticks to the killer. Others did not refer to iloikop in material terms and connected it directly with the dead person, simply stating that iloikop adhered to the person responsible for a killing. Iloikop itself cannot be seen, but becomes visible only through the effects it produces for the killer, his or her family, and the people around them. It will cause all kinds of misfortunes: Women will have miscarriages, children or cattle will become sick or die, accidents will happen, etc. A person befallen by iloikop will not be able to acquire happiness. Our interlocutors were convinced that when the pieces in Berlin’s Ethnological Museum were acquired from the Maasai and people had been killed, iloikop had befallen the perpetrators. During numerous conversations, they asked us about the names of those soldiers who had killed Maasai in order to acquire the objects, and they urged us to investigate their family history. For sure, we would find misfortunes there: Miscarriages, accidents, untimely deaths. These would be the signs of iloikop; and from these signs of misfortune, we could even deduce whether or not these people had killed Maasai. In fact, such questions differ from the questions normally asked in provenance research. For in the European academic context, one actually also asks about the possible contexts of appropriation of the objects and about the biography of the persons who appropriated them. For example, the German colonial officer Kurt Johannes (1864–​1913), who donated the ear pendants to the museum, was involved in countless military campaigns in what is now Tanzania, including during the time he was stationed in the Kilimanjaro region (1891–​1901) that was populated by, among others, Maasai communities. In contrast, the traveler Johann Maria Hildebrandt (1847–​1881), from whom the headdress stems, was in the region in 1876–1877, before the onset of formal colonial rule; he travelled with a smaller caravan and, according to his own account (Hildebrandt, 1878), was not involved in any fighting with the Maasai. Conventional provenance research, however, does not address the further fate of the collectors, or even the history of their descendants, which were so highly relevant to our Maasai interlocutors. However, we also learned that iloikop cannot only befall people. Iloikop can also stick to belongings. If a Maasai is killed by another person and the killer takes his or her belongings, iloikop will attach itself to the belongings. Our interlocutors told us that those belongings befallen by iloikop are called ing’weni. Just like the killer of a person brings misfortune to his friends and family, ing’weni spread unhappiness all around them. The connection between the ing’weni and the human bodies they belonged to was violently severed; and, as a result, they run out of control. Still somewhat connected to the dead human body with whom they were once joined, they remain to affect their families and relatives—​even the Maasai community as a whole. But ing’weni also haunt their new “owners,” even if they

40  Paola Ivanov et al. are non-​Maasai, and it will make their lives miserable. Ing’weni, belongings stolen from a killed Maasai, are indeed unhappy objects. Our interlocutors were convinced that several, if not most, of the pieces in Maasai collections at Berlin’s Ethnological Museum are indeed ing’weni. As such, they spread misfortune to the humans formerly connected to them. In many conversations, people speculated as to what kinds of ills the ing’weni in Berlin could have contributed to in the Maasai community. These unhappy objects might have caused the continuing disinterest in culture displayed by younger Maasai. Ongoing problems such as disease, death, and infertility could be the result of ing’weni drawing life forces from the community. Some saw the shortage of rain and the long periods of drought as a kind of punishment of the Maasai people for allowing inalienable belongings to be taken away. In the minds of many of our interlocutors, unhappiness has befallen the Maasai because their good luck had been taken away by the colonial violence perpetrated by the Germans. But our interlocutors were convinced that the ing’weni in Berlin’s Ethnological Museum and in the Humboldt Forum were not bringing unhappiness to the Maasai alone. They must also make the Germans unhappy, even if they might not know that the ing’weni are the cause of it. In some way, maybe even as implicit anticolonial resistance fighters, the belongings of the Maasai enact revenge for their violent appropriation. In many ways, the concept of ing’weni, a Maasai theory of an unhappy object, provides a specific take on the phenomenon we presented at the beginning of this chapter: the continuous unhappiness of European publics with the collections of ethnographic museums. In fact, European publics feel the ongoing misfortune that comes with being haunted by a violent colonial past. “Don’t Cheer!”: The Disaffection of German Publics with Ethnographic Objects On September 22, 2021, the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Frank-​Walter Steinmeier, spoke at the official opening of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. The influential weekly news magazine Der Spiegel summarized Steinmeier’s speech with the headline “Bloß nicht jubeln” (don’t cheer): “At the ceremony, President Frank-​Walter Steinmeier spoke and spread a bad mood—​on purpose and quite rightly so” (Knöfel, 2021, translation by the authors).10 The “bad mood” that the opening of the Humboldt Forum elicited in the participants and the wider publics was seen as being aroused by the ethnographic objects themselves: The artifacts, for example from Africa and South America, were supposed to give emotional support to the whole project [the Humboldt Forum] and help Germany to appear open-​minded and cosmopolitan for the new millennium. But already during the construction of the palace, it became

Unhappy Objects  41 clear that nothing would come of it, because even the best-​known museum objects are colonial looted art. Exhibiting them now polarizes even more. (Knöfel, 2021, translation by the authors) By being witnesses of colonialism, the ethnographic objects in the Humboldt Forum do not just fail to fulfill the role of happy objects to support the narrative of a cosmopolitan Germany; they actually do the opposite. As unhappy objects, they demand the recognition of a violent colonial past that, as some had hoped, had long been forgotten. The very fact that the so-​called looted art is being exhibited in the middle of the capital has turned the entire national project of the Humboldt Forum into an unhappy object. The objects have also developed agency when it comes to the emotional repertoires of the German affective publics. They begin to call for the recognition of the crimes they have suffered. Let us follow the Federal President: Ethnological collections are no longer shown just for their own sake, but they make the history of our relationship to the places of origin the focus of attention. (Steinmeier 2021, translation by the authors) In fact, the German and European debate about ethnological collections from colonial contexts that has crystallized over the last half decade, particularly in relation to the Humboldt Forum, has from the beginning revolved around the crimes associated with the appropriation of the objects. At first glance, this seems to bring the agency of the objects felt by European publics close to the Maasai conception of ing’weni. The art historian Bénédict Savoy, one of the most visible protagonists of the European restitution debate, expressed herself as follows in an interview from 2017 that was crucial for the very beginning of the discussion: For me, it is less important to know what function an object had in Namibia than to know under what circumstances it came here … I want to know how much blood drips from a work of art, how much scientific ambition went into acquiring it, how much archaeological luck. (Savoy, 2017, translation by the authors) Hicks, author of the influential book The Brutish Museums (2020), even parallels the objects with dead bodies and, following Mbembe’s concept of colonial necropolitics, calls for a necrography of the objects to uncover the colonial and racist violence associated with them: Perhaps some kind of forensic death-​writing, or autopsy, is part of what colonial collections require of the curator. An exercise in contemporary archaeology (the excavation of the recent past and the near-​ present).

42  Paola Ivanov et al. Forensic because this is about understanding the truth at the scene of a crime. Not an object biography but a necrography. (Hicks, 2021) However, in our opinion, two important differences to the Maasai conception of ing’weni can be identified: First, the self-​referentiality of the European debates, and, second, their complete reliance on a modern object–​subject relation. As several scholars have shown, the museum itself as a public place emerged during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a dispositif whose very technology was designed to produce the modern ordering gaze that separated the world and the self and, at the same time, disciplined them (Hetherington, 1999). In contrast, Maasai concepts and practices bridge the divide between objects, subjects, and society, thus also between public and private. Imasaa, belongings, are in the possession of one or more individuals but, at the same time, owned by social groups and the entire community. They are inalienable and co-​constitutive of all these entities. The concept of ing’weni as unhappy objects therefore appears to us as a suitable concept not only to better understand the problematics and shortcomings of the restitution debate as it is conducted in Europe but also to overcome its Eurocentrism (Apoh & Mehler, 2020). Concerning the first point: For our Maasai interlocutors, the unhappiness of the objects—​their quality as ing’weni—​arises from the fact that they have been torn away from their living environment and from a living body. This entails, however, that our interlocutors, when confronted with the objects now in Berlin, paid a deep, affect-​laden attention to them. They were concerned with all qualities of things—​from their materiality to their social, political, and aesthetic value—​and were determined to (re)institute a relationship of love and care to the dislocated things. From the curatorial experience of Paola Ivanov and others, most interlocutors and collaborators from societies and countries of origin have very similar strong appreciative and emotional relations toward the objects from their own culture as well as their agency or spirituality (Coombes & Phillips, 2015; McMaster, 2019). In contrast, in relation to German and European affective publics, the unhappy history causes objects to be reduced to their unhappiness. The result is that, from their earliest beginnings, the debates around objects from colonial contexts pay much less attention to the social and cultural contexts of the objects themselves—​their artistic value, their technological mastery, their production by human hands, and their use in a living human environment. One can notice in the public and especially in media discourse a disaffection toward ethnographic objects that is accompanied by a devaluation; Hick’s necrology even seems to turn into necrophilia. As Ivanov, as curator of part of the collections from Africa in the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, has often experienced, journalists tend to ask much less about the cultural significance of pieces in the collection, nor about the general context of violence during German colonialism, but exclusively about how specific pieces

Unhappy Objects  43 were appropriated through direct military violence or Raub (robbery)—​ thus, with Savoy, they ask exclusively about the “blood” that “drips” from collection pieces. Broader histories of appropriation, sometimes not less violent although “bloodless,” of the most important works of art do not arouse interest—​thus neither do the artworks themselves. Bloody colonial histories, however, of which the removal of the objects was only a small part, are also much less addressed. Articles on “looted art” are much more predominant in the press than, for example, texts on past or continuing (post)colonial exploitation in the regions from which the collections originate. We see a profoundly Eurocentric view at work here. This view ascribes negative agency to the objects, and because they evoke unhappiness, writers and readers ultimately remain indifferent to the ethnographic objects themselves and, as a consequence, also to the people from the societies from which they originate (Pinther, 2022). With respect to this point, one can speculate to what extent ethnographic objects in Europe have historically ever been the subject of happy affects. The order of museums that evolved in the course of the nineteenth century was deeply rooted in colonial and racist discourses. One symptom of this was the strong valuation of those kinds of museums dedicated to “European” history and art, and an accompanying devaluation of the history and art of “non-​ European” societies. Non-​European artifacts including outstanding artistic products were pressed into an ahistorical cage of supposedly immutable “traditional” cultures and stored in ethnological museums. This order of museums persists to this day and is perpetuated in Germany’s capital Berlin by the division between the so-​called Museum Island (European) and the Humboldt Forum (non-​European). Interestingly, it is the artifacts defined as “high art” and kept in the museums of European art that are most valued and first and foremost seen as creating happiness in the highly idealist Kantian notion of “disinterested pleasure” (Kant, 1790),11 notwithstanding the fact that histories of illicit appropriation are also relevant to objects from museums of European art. And it is the non-​European objects whose presentation in the Humboldt Forum was controversial from the very beginning: from the side of conservative supporters of high art who did not want to see “South Sea boats” in the replica of the Prussian palace (Scholz, 2011), as well as from the side of postcolonial critics. Although ethnographic objects are certainly interesting for a part of the Western museum public, they are not held in the same esteem as, for example, European Renaissance art. Depreciative or negative emotions up to unhappiness thus indeed seem to be associated more strongly with the non-​European than with the European objects. Concerning the second point in our comparison of the European restitution debates with the Maasai conception of unhappy objects, we would like to suggest that the modern Western object–​subject division is one of the reasons why public discourse in Germany and Europe is more concerned with the unhappiness of the collection pieces (the blood attached to them) and less with how they relate to past and present societies of origin—​that is, with the

44  Paola Ivanov et al. people whose blood is in question. Already the appropriation of these objects was linked to what Fabian (1983) has called the denial of coevalness on the part of the (European) researchers toward the (non-​European) “research subjects.” In evolutionist-​ inspired thinking, ethnographic objects were acquired as supposed testimonies of past human epochs, whereas the actual living people became victims of colonization and its violence (Ivanov, 2007). Because objects are detached from their social embedding, any approaches to dealing with colonial history seem to be overshadowed by unhappiness toward the objects. In this affective context, even restitution can be understood less as part of a comprehensive reparation, but rather as a suitable way to get rid of unpleasant feelings (cf. Hicks, 2022). Conclusion As pessimistically as our Maasai interlocutors viewed the situation in which the belongings of Maasai communities had ended up, their perspectives also provide a potential way forward. In their minds, it is urgent to re-​establish a proper relationship of love and care toward the belongings in Berlin’s Ethnological Museum in order to somehow reintegrate them into the community. Maybe, through establishing relations—​and they themselves are not yet sure what these relations might look like—​it will be possible to make the belongings as well as the people connected to them happy again. Indeed, inherent in the concept of iloikop, there is the possibility of reparation and purification from crime that would turn ing’weni back into happy objects. After payment of reparation in cattle as a medium of exchange embedded in social relations and morality, elders can perform purification rituals that free both victims and perpetrators from iloikop. It seems to us that such a perspective as the one that our Maasai interlocutors are proposing on socially entangled objects is more forward-​looking than the object–​subject division of Western modernity, because it aims toward social renewal and balance. In contrast, Euro-​normative museum technologies create affective publics that do not assume a fundamental social embeddedness of things, but rather, in conformity with the capitalist notion of property, separate subject from object, society from things. This is accompanied by a fundamental detachment of broader publics from museum objects—​most of which are stored in deposits anyway and are not part of the affective arrangements constituted by conventional museum presentations. In the affective dispositions of visitors, the objects on display in museums are intended primarily to be sources of intellectual instruction or aesthetic pleasure. Only the museum staff (curators, custodians, museologists, and conservators), to whom a more mechanistic rather than nurturing care for the objects has been delegated, have a tangible relationship to them. It is in this context that the unhappiness European publics feel toward objects kept in ethnological museums has its origin, because they do not meet the expectations placed on them. The notion, however, that merely a property restitution of ethnographic objects is necessary

Unhappy Objects  45 to erase the consequences of colonialism does not take into account how far-​ reaching these consequences are—​economically, culturally, politically, and so forth—​and how without proper recognition and reparations, they will remain unresolved and continue to damage social and natural environments. Notes 1 In contrast to Germany, the issue of the restitution of ethnographic objects is not widely discussed in broader publics in Tanzania. The reasons for this are manifold. See Weckerling (2021) for an in-​depth discussion. 2 Aside from the Maasai collection, the Ethnological Museum Berlin houses several collections that came from what is now mainland Tanzania—​the largest part of former colonial Deutsch-​Ostafrika (German East Africa). The German colonial agents appropriated a considerable amount of these collections, which number about 10,000 to 11,000 objects, in the context of wars such as the Maji Maji war in the Southern regions (1905–​1907), the so-​called Abushiri war against the towns on the Northern coast (1888–​1890), the war against the Hehe and their chief Mkwawa (1891–​1899), and many other lesser-​known wars including military campaigns against the Maasai in the North (Moko, 2022; Reyels et al., 2017). 3 Our Maasai interlocutors described imasaa in three categories: alng’aria (belongings for beauty), iruparen (belongings for rituals), and inareta (belongings for war). The ear pendant is in the category of iruparen, the ostrich feather headdress is inareta. An in-​ depth description of these and other pieces in the Maasai collection of Berlin’s Ethnological Museum can be found in Moko (2021). 4 See Moko (2021) for a brief overview on age and gender categorizations and corresponding conceptions of ownership in traditional Maasai society (pp. 99–​101). 5 See Galaty (1983) for an in-​depth ethnographic account of this ritual. 6 This view resonates well with recent posthumanist theories in the social sciences. Scholars have argued to turn away from an all-​too anthropocentric perspective on culture and society and rather to focus on how humans and nonhumans are assembled in social settings (Latour, 2005), assemblages that have been described with the concepts of cyborg (Haraway, 1990) or hybrid (Latour, 1993). 7 However, such strict dualistic notions of subject–​object, person–​thing can easily amount to a cliché. In fact, not only are such dualisms by no means culturally universal, they and their normative legalities are also renegotiated constantly in modern institutions—​a process in which affective dynamics play a crucial role (Bens, 2018, 2020, 2022). 8 This is particularly striking in the relationship to cattle in pastoralist societies (Abkink, 2003, p. 356). 9 Iloikop is mentioned by early ethnographers, but is described only partially (cf. Merker, 1904, p. 207). The following brief descriptions come from our own research on the topic, drawing mainly from several interviews conducted in August 2022. There is also a well-​known discussion in Maasai historiography about the relationship between “pure” pastoral Maasai and “less pure” agriculturalist Maasai in the nineteenth century with nonpastoral Maasai being called Iloikop (Berntsen, 1980). This debate is, however, unconnected to the use we make of the concept of iloikop in this chapter.

46  Paola Ivanov et al. 0 The President’s full speech can be found in Steinmeier (2021). 1 11 See Hetherington (1999) or Ivanov (2017, pp. 98–​99, 119–​120) for a critique of Kantian aesthetics in relation to non-​European aesthetics and on its connection with the museum dispositive.

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48  Paola Ivanov et al. Mattes, D., Kasmani, O., Acker, M., & Heyken, E. (2019). Belonging. In J. Slaby & C. Scheve (Eds.), Affective societies: Key concepts (pp. 300–​309). Routledge. https://​doi.org/​10.4324/​978135​1039​260-​26 McMaster, G. (2019). An Indigenous curator’s perspective: Non Indigenous museums as “sensitive spaces.” In I. Edenheiser & L. Förster (Eds.), Museumsethnologie: Eine Einführung: Theorien, Debatten, Praktiken [Museum ethnology: An introduction: Theories, debates, practices] (pp. 148–​157). Reimer. Merker, M. (1904). Die Masai: Ethnographische Monographie eines ostafrikanischen Semitenvolkes [The Masai: Ethnographic monograph of an East African Semite people]. Dietrich Reimer. Moko, L. K. (2021). The (in)alienability of objects and colonial acquisition: The case of Maasai ethnographic collections at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin. Baessler Archiv, 67(1), 97–​140. Moko, L. K. (2022, May 6). Experiencing colonialism through visiting collections. Affective Societies Blog. https://​affect​ive-​societ​ies.de/​2022/​sfb-​1171/​exper​ienc​ing-​ colo​nial​ism-​thro​ugh-​visit​ing-​coll​ecti​ons Moko, L. K., & Bens, J. (2021). The affects of colonial collections. Affect and Colonialism Podcast. https://​aff​ect-​and-​colo​nial​ism.net/​podc​ast/​the-​affe​cts-​of-​ colon​ial-​coll​ecti​ons/​ Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. Oxford University Press. Pink, S. (2020). Doing visual ethnography. Sage. Pinther, K. (2022). Die Kunst Afrikas [The art of Africa]. C.H. Beck. Reyels, L., Ivanov, P., & Weber-​Sinn, K. (2017). Humboldt Lab Tanzania. Reimer. Sarr, F., & Savoy, B. (2018). Restituer le patrimoine africain [Restoring African heritage]. Éditions du Sueil. Savoy, B. (2017, July 20). Das Humboldt-​Forum ist wie Tschernobyl [The Humboldt Forum is like Chernobyl]. Süddeutsche Zeitung. www.suedd​euts​che.de/​kul​tur/​ benedi​cte-​savoy-​ueber-​das-​humbo​ldt-​forum-​das-​humbo​ldt-​forum-​ist-​wie-​tsch​erno​ byl-​1.3596​423?redu​ced=​true Scholz, A. (2011). Das Humboldt-​Forum in der Medienkritik: Berichterstattung und Kommentare 2000–​2011 [The Humboldt Forum in media criticism: Coverage and comments 2000–​2011]. Baessler Archiv, 59(1), 63–​81. Schorch, P. (2020). Sensitive heritage: Ethnographic museums, provenance research, and the potentialities of restitutions. Museum and Society, 18(1), 1–​5. https://​doi. org/​10.29311/​mas.v18i1.3459 Simpson, M. G. (1996). Making representations: Museums in the post-​colonial era. Routledge. Slaby, J., Mühlhoff, R., & Wüschner, P. (2017). Affective arrangements. Emotion Review, 11(1), 3–​12. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​17540​7391​7722​214 Steinmeier, F.-​W. (2021). Bundespräsident Frank-​Walter Steinmeier beim Festakt zur Eröffnung der Ausstellungen des Ethnologischen Museums und des Museums für Asiatische Kunst der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin im Humboldt-​Forum [Federal President Frank-​Walter Steinmeier at the opening ceremony of the exhibitions of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art of the National Museums in Berlin at the Humboldt Forum]. Bundespräsidialamt. www.bunde​spra​esid​ent. de/​Sha​redD​ocs/​Downlo​ads/​DE/​Reden/​2021/​09/​210​922-​Humbo​ldt-​Forum.pdf;jse​ ssio​nid=​760FC​BCB3​926B​9F88​8CB5​5852​DAFE​DE8.2_​cid​323?_​_​b​lob=​publ​icat​ ionF​ile

Unhappy Objects  49 Strathern, M. (1988). The gender of the gift: Problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. University of California Press. Viveiros de Castro, E. (1998). Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4(3), 469–​488. https://​doi.org/​ 10.2307/​3034​157 Weckerling, C. (2021). Der Restitutionsdiskurs kultureller Güter in Tansania: Qualitative Interviewforschung über die öffentliche Diskursivität und inhaltliche Positionen des Restitutionsdiskurses in Tansania [The discourse of restitution of cultural goods in Tanzania: Qualitative interview research on the public discursivity and substantive positions of the discourse of restitution in Tanzania; Bachelor thesis, Institute of African and Asian Studies, Humboldt University]. Zink, V. (2019). Affective communities. In J. Slaby & C. Scheve (Eds.), Affective societies: Key concepts (pp. 289–​299). Routledge. https://​doi.org/​10.4324/​978135​ 1039​260-​25.

4 Theater Publics in Motion Affective Dynamics of the Theater and the Street, Berlin 1989 Matthias Warstat

Any reflection on the practices of theater, the forms these may take, and how they are embedded in social change raises the question of the audience. All types of art effectively direct their productions toward an audience. In the theater, however, the audience seems to be inscribed particularly directly in the work of art: If theater is understood as a (widely, historically variable) form of performance, if, in this sense, interactions of actors and spectators who have gathered in the same space at the same time constitute the theatrical event, then an audience is integral to the form. In this sense, every theatrical work, every theatrical object, always already contains an audience. The audience is that part of the performance or theatrical work that makes theater an act of gathering—​that is, something social and understood as part of society. Therefore, the historical changes to theater, insofar as they touch on the history of society, can be described only in consideration of, or even with regard to, the public. In scholarly studies on theater publics, and more generally in any precise intellectual engagement with the subject, one terminological distinction is important: The English term theater publics, which cannot be translated so readily as Publikum in German, refers to an intermediary level between two other relationships of theatrical reception. First, one can describe the attendant audience of a single, concrete performance. In the here and now of an evening of theater, a group of people come together and are united in witnessing one and the same stage event. At the other end of the spectrum, on the most abstract level, the audience is part of the public sphere of a society. Since Habermas’ still influential study The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, published in German in 1962 and first translated into English in 1989, we have become accustomed to imagining the public sphere as a set of institutions that are subject to certain mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion (Balme, 2014, p. 6). In addition to mass media corporations, the press, broadcasting companies, and so forth, theaters are part of an institutional structure that shapes the public sphere of a society. However, an added understanding has prevailed, and states that this public sphere should not be seen monolithically, that it is in fact fragmented and plural in and of itself, DOI: 10.4324/9781003365426-5

Theater Publics in Motion  51 and should be thought of as a conflictual, tense relation of different publics. This insight makes the term publics seem all the more meaningful. It stands for an internal plurality of the public sphere and can also designate a mediating structure between the particular audiences of a performance and the larger public sphere of a society. The social dimension of a theater consists not only of the various crowds of people who gather in the hall night after night (audiences). Through various discursive formations, a theater reaches yet another, larger public attention (publics): There is public dialogue and writing about the theater as an institution, but also about individual, highly regarded productions. There are reviews, online forums, audience discussions, debates in cultural policy committees, established arts foundations, and so forth. When we do not speak of audiences only (Saalpublikum), but of theater publics (Theaterpublika), we are usually referring to this overarching idea of an audience that exceeds the reception of an individual performance, a concept that comes close to the plural Öffentlichkeiten in German. In this respect, at least three theoretical positions are connected with the notion of theater publics: 1 The idea of a plurality of publics. There is no single public sphere that encompasses every social debate and is equally open to all. The bourgeois public sphere described by Habermas (1962/​1989) is famous for its multiple exclusions and abjections (see Gestrich, 2006, for an overview of the various lines of criticism of Habermas’ concept of the public sphere). It has often been pointed out that both women and the entirety of the proletarian and subproletarian populations traditionally find no place in the model of the bourgeois public sphere. However, these large social groups naturally constitute publics as well, and become tangible in their diverse forms of assembly and communication as soon as one abandons a monolithic understanding of the public sphere. The term “publics” stands for a pluralized idea of the public sphere that takes into account its social diversity.1 2 The idea of a continuity of the public. The term “theater publics” makes it clear that a theater’s audience does not exist only for the duration of a single show. Extending from the audience in the here and now of an individual performance are multiple channels and connections to an audience that reaches beyond the place and time of the event, one that is connected to the institution of the theater in a more general sense and can, for example, act as an advocate of theater in various social discourses and institutions.2 The social specificity and already interconnected milieu of this audience are the subject of never-​ending debates and efforts: Would it be possible to make theater accessible to a wider, more diverse, more inclusive audience? Could the audience be expanded to include groups of people who have hardly been able to relate to the institution and what it provides? Such questions of inclusion, accessibility, and diversity arise in relation to individual productions, stagings, and performances, but they

52  Matthias Warstat are discussed even more fundamentally and in the long term with regard to the institution of theater as a whole. 3 The idea of a relationship between different publics. The differentiation of various publics makes it additionally possible to consider a variety of historical and contemporary publics in their relation to each other. The publics related to the theater are different from street publics, or radio publics, or a networked internet community. The habits, preferences, and interests of these various social formations differ. There are, however, certain intersections and points of contact between different publics. Thus, one can examine how theater publics ally with or confront other publics; one can analyze contrasts and lines of conflict; or one can describe dynamics of competition. The term counterpublics (Negt & Kluge, 1972, 1993; Warner, 2002) has been developed to analyze such relationships and tensions. This can be observed especially at the moment of historical upheavals or in phases of accelerated change: Different publics come into contact, confront each other, set each other into motion. In this motion lies one possibility to understand the affectivity of publics: Affectivity does not describe an excitement within a public or an audience, nor an individual feeling or experience, but it considered to be a multilayered dynamic between different publics. If we illuminate the relations between publics, we can also understand how they set each other in motion. In relation to theater, this is once again an opportunity to look beyond the individual performance: Audiences are moved not only by what happens to them internally, as it were in performances, but also by external influences of other publics. In the following section, such dynamics will be discussed, taking as an example the relation between theater publics and street publics. After some introductory remarks on this relationship, a historical example will be examined in more detail. The situation of theaters in East Berlin during the so-​called Wende (change, turning point) in the autumn and winter of 1989–​ 1990 will be analyzed. The concluding section brings together some observations concerning the affectability of theater publics by other publics: In which ways and to what extent can theater publics absorb the affective impulses and energies emanating from street protests, public rallies, and open-​air demonstrations? And conversely, what impulses can theater publics provide for other publics? Theater and the Street: Affective Dynamics A particularly virulent and productive line of conflict in 20th-​century theater history existed between theater publics and street publics (see Primavesi, 2018, on current expressions of the relationship between theatre and the street, as well as theater’s search for an “outside”). Street publics are publics that originate in public gatherings on the street or in squares. They can originate, for example, from political demonstrations or rallies (see Lindenberger, 1995;

Theater Publics in Motion  53 Warneken, 1991). Similar to the theater, a distinction can often be made between actors and audience on the street—​for example, at political rallies—​ where supporters of an organization gather around individual speakers or leaders. Similar to theater, things do not remain with such audiences on the spot, but the impulses from the street reach broader publics through diverse media. On the street, as in the theater, gathered publics can be organized and constituted. Certainly, street publics operate differently, articulate themselves differently, and are subject to other influences than theater publics. Nevertheless, in 19th-​century Germany, they were in some respects subject to similar legal and political conditions. For example, it made a crucial difference whether a meeting—​no matter if in the theater or on the street—​was classified as an entertainment event or a political assembly. The police and the authorities regulating cultural circulation and censorship made up a partnership of crucial institutional interaction both for those who wanted to organize performances in the theater and for those who wanted to call assemblies in the street. There was no general answer to the question of whether conditions were more repressive on the street or in the theater—​in any case, it was possible to camouflage both forms of political gathering (Haupt, 1986, pp. 138–​139; Huber, 1988, p. 109). During the late 19th century in the German Empire, for instance, this was done out in the open with the so-​ called Spaziergangsdemonstrationen (walk demonstrations), which, at first glance, hardly seemed to bear any political referent, but de facto offered a welcome opportunity for mobilization.3 On the other hand, possibilities for political messages and impulses were found in the theater under the guise of education or entertainment. European theater history is well-​acquainted with the monumental, even revolutionary synthesis of theater public and street public: In the years following the October Revolution, the young Soviet Union staged mass productions aiming to replay revolutionary events that had taken place on the streets. The staging effort invested in these re-​enactments was enormous, and historical accuracy in the reproduction of the events—​which had become part of the past only recently—​was not a priority. Some mass stagings placed the October Revolution in a broad lineage of class struggles from antiquity to World War I. The most famous of these performances, staged by Nikolai Evreinov in 1920, replayed the storming of the Winter Palace and sought to make the Bolshevik seizure plausible as a dramatic, decisive battle before the assembled urban public of Petersburg—​the audience of the “original scene” (see Dalügge, 2016, pp., 329–​384; Fischer-​Lichte, 2005, pp. 97–​121). It was an attempt to remain faithful to the key event of the October Revolution, or—​to use Badiou’s (2012) wording—​to remain faithful in turbulent times to an event from which one expected an orientation for the future.4 This motif is even more evident in previous mass spectacles that took place in the midst of the dangerous years of civil war in Russia between 1917 and 1920. In this period, the struggle between the Reds and Whites was far from decided—​on

54  Matthias Warstat many fronts, it was literally burning—​so one might wonder how much energy the Bolsheviks were willing to expend on such a fusion of the stage and the street. What was probably behind this allocation of resources, however, was the hope that a revolutionary drive could also be revitalized on the streets and in urban publics with the help of the theater’s affective energies. A look at the plays and texts that European theater drew upon in the modern era underlines how obsessively theater and street publics observed each other. In the 1920s, for example, both expressionist and new objectivity theater attempted to bring metropolitan squares, street demonstrations, and other scenes of urban public life onto the stage. In Brecht’s Trommeln in der Nacht (2020), the noise of revolutionary riots and processions seems to push through from the street to the stage, and from the stage to the seated audience. Conversely, the large proletarian mass demonstrations and rallies of the Weimar Republic were a framework in which theater could be performed and forms of a theatrical public sphere could be taken up (see Warstat, 2004, pp. 307–​367). Revolutionary energies could shift from the street to the theater and vice versa—​one could describe the affective interrelationship of street and theater publics with the metaphor of communicating vessels. However, this metaphor only partially captures the affective dynamics between theater and street. The following section will take a closer look at a historical situation in which the relations between theater publics and street publics are revealed in all their complexity. It should be noted that publics always enter into multifaceted relationships with a wide variety of actors and groups—​their relationship is never solely bilateral. An important instance that affects theater publics and street publics in their own way is the state with its practice of decreeing the right of assembly and the exercise of police power. In revolutionary constellations or in times of crisis, the relationships between publics and state authorities can become so dynamic that the balance of power may change rapidly and spaces for action can open up anew or close again. The weeks and months surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 are a revealing example of such dynamics. Theater had produced its own publics in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) under relatively repressive conditions. Despite the closeness to the state stemming from the formative German tradition of court and state theaters, the GDR’s theaters were able to establish themselves as a place in which critical debate with the policies of the state and party leadership was also possible. However, this criticism often had to be articulated covertly: Allusions to the current situation were smuggled into historical parables or mythical material, for example. In the fall and winter of 1989, such considerations no longer had to be taken into account. Demands against the regime could now be voiced openly on public streets and squares. What did this new openness mean for the theater and its publics?

Theater Publics in Motion  55 Berlin 1989–​1990: Theater and Counterpublics In an overview on theater in the GDR entitled Theater in der DDR: Chronik und Positionen, already published in 1994, the Berlin theater scholars Fiebach, Hasche, and Schölling presented the Wende’s existence in the theater as a (discussion) process that reaches back into the 1980s. Several entries collected in the chronicle reveal early signs of dissidence and turmoil (e.g., Fiebach et al., 1994, p. 114). For example, the group Zinnober, set up in Crimmitschau in 1979, is considered by many the first independent theater group in the GDR, and it struggled repeatedly with state repression in its first years of operation. From 1980 onward, the actors, puppeteers, authors, directors, and musicians associated with the group worked in a shop at Knaackstraße 45 in Prenzlauer Berg that they also tried to use as a performance space. However, performances often had to be moved to churches and community centers. Stuber (1998) described the group’s position in the GDR theater landscape as a “foreign body with no connection to existing institutional structures or their laws” (p. 245). At the same time, the work of Zinnober shows that from the advent of the 1980s onward, there was a small but burgeoning independent theater scene in the GDR, one that was considering new forms of work beyond the established institutions. Mounting criticism was also articulated in the Verband der Theaterschaffenden (VT), an association of theater producers, although the association always displayed a fundamental loyalty to the state. Not only the claims and critiques, but also the way they were articulated, corresponded to the common description of the GDR theater’s social positioning: An agency at once critical and in foundational agreement with the goals of a socialist society. Its vision derived “from the historical process taking place”; its demands were voiced as detail-​oriented applications “to the association’s leadership” (Fiebach et al., 1994, pp. 134–​135). At the beginning of 1988, the climate of protest intensified. Banners of the civil rights movement were held up in marches through the streets; these expressions of dissent manifesting in urban space also corresponded to those made in the theater (Fiebach et al., 1994, p. 136). Müller’s Der Lohndrücker (2000) premiered at the Deutsches Theater Berlin on January 29, 1988. Thomas Martin—​a contemporary witness of the rehearsals, later coming to work as the chief dramaturge of the Volksbühne Berlin—​gives an account of the discussion on the emerging protest movement during the play’s preparation and rehearsals. From January 1988 to November 1989, there were continuous dialogues and more casual conversation about the changing political situation at the Deutsches Theater.5 All in all, it becomes clear that even in the theaters of the GDR, the Wende was by no means sudden; it came at the end of a process of growing oppositional sentiments, movements, and actions that extended far back into the 1980s. This makes the idea of a sudden revolutionary changeover misleading. Criticism, sometimes still encoded historically, was on the one hand expressed in the theatrical performances themselves. Hein’s play Die Ritter

56  Matthias Warstat der Tafelrunde (1990), which premiered at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden on April 12, 1989, is the most prominent example here, because behind the knights growing old and gray in Camelot, many audiences recognized the state and party leadership. Perhaps an even more notable site of criticism, structured as it was by dialogue, was the audience and workshop discussions that were widespread in the theaters of the late GDR. Thus, since the early 1980s, the theaters played a certain role as forums for an alternative public during the oppositional developments in the GDR. The theaters did not, however, attain the significance of the churches as meeting places for oppositional political practice—​apparently because theaters could not provide clandestine spaces as easily as churches, due to the performative character of their practice. But like the churches, the theaters constituted a kind of counterpublic that could operate at a certain distance from the regime and still be fundamentally committed to the goals of a socialist society. With regard to the theaters’ participation in the political and social events of the autumn of 1989, two phases can be roughly distinguished: The first led up to the so-​called Alexanderplatz Demonstration on November 4, 1989, which is considered the largest non-​state-​controlled demonstration in the history of the GDR. Around half a million people marched for, among other things, free elections and freedom of the press, speech, and assembly. Speakers from the ensemble of the Deutsches Theater set the tone at the event, among them Johanna Schall, Ulrich Mühe, Jan Josef Liefers, and Heiner Müller. Actually, the initiative for the demonstration had come from theater people in Berlin; the actress Jutta Wachowiak, who was connected to the New Forum, should be highlighted as a main initiator. During the second phase of interior German borders opening, the Monday demonstrations and the massive gatherings, in the actual months of upheaval, the theaters began to lose their audiences. But if one assumes that the Alexanderplatz Demonstration was perceived by broad sections of the population due to its wide recognition in national and international media, the theater cannot be denied a concrete part in the mobilization often related to individual actors. However, one of the particularities of the theater’s situation in the Wende period is that it critically reflected at an early stage on its own possibilities in the general dynamics of change. This reflection already characterized the rehearsal work in the months of revolution, and it continued under more depressing conditions when audience numbers slumped, at least temporarily, after November 1989. The dramatic events on the streets, one might conclude somewhat brutally, seemed at first to diminish interest in dramatic events on the stage. The public sphere of the theater and the public sphere of the street are closely related, but one can also draw attention away from the other. Not least because of their institutional inertia, municipal and state theaters often find it difficult to react directly to pivotal social changes. How can theater adapt to the public sphere in a phase of radical flux, and what interactions can be observed between staging as an artistic practice, the

Theater Publics in Motion  57 particular character of the theater public, and the political public sphere? Can the stage itself become a site of revolutionary transformation in such circumstances? Müller’s Hamlet/​Maschine (Berlin 1989–​1990) Müller’s Hamlet/​Maschine, a combination of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Müller’s own Hamletmaschine, from the 1989–​1990 season at the Deutsches Theater Berlin is considered the paradigmatic theater production of the GDR’s turning point. There are several reasons for this that are still easily comprehensible today and clearly demonstrated in Rüter’s documentary film about the rehearsals, Die Zeit ist aus den Fugen (1991). First of all, Müller’s text, Die Hamletmaschine, written in 1977, is an entirely unorthodox play that became a prime example of a postdramatic theater piece: A text of only nine pages in five heterogeneous sections, without a plot in the true sense of the word, and with only a few scenes structured by dialogue—​Müller (1992) himself speaks of an inability to dialogue in his autobiography Krieg Ohne Schlacht.6 There are indeed characters in the script (e.g., Hamlet and Ophelia), but they emerge and fade away, never remaining stable, repeatedly giving way to textual spaces or choral passages in which it is difficult to distinguish individual speakers. In terms of content, there are references to the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, to terrorist attacks by left-​wing radicals in West Germany in the late 1970s, but also to Hamlet as a prisoner of a coercive system (“Denmark is a prison, a wall grows between us”7). At first, the play could not be performed in the GDR, whereas it soon attracted international attention after its Paris premiere, directed by Jourdheuil in 1979. Müller’s 1989–​ 1990 production of Hamlet/​Maschine at the Deutsches Theater (with its extremely long rehearsal process from August 1989 to March 1990) was indeed the first developed by the author himself. Some of the most renowned Berlin actors of the time took part, including Ulrich Mühe as Hamlet, Margarita Broich—​who traveled daily from West Berlin—​ as Ophelia, Jörg Gudzuhn as Claudius, Dagmar Manzel as Gertrud, along with Dieter Montag, Margit Bendokat, and many others. The production was designed as a dual showing of Hamlet and Hamletmaschine and thus required the excessive length of seven and a half hours—​no doubt also due to Müller’s meticulous fidelity to the text. The months of rehearsal coincided with the decisive events of the Wende, including the protests at the celebrations for the 40th anniversary of the GDR in October 1989, the demonstration at Alexanderplatz on November 4 mentioned above, and the  opening of the interior German borders on November 9—​along with all the related discussions about the future of the GDR, its society, and its theater. In Rüter’s documentary on Hamlet/​Maschine, Heiner Müller and Ulrich Mühe comment each in their own way on the extraordinary rehearsal situation in late 1989. Müller states, “The time of art is different from the time of politics. Only sometimes does it make contact. And if one is lucky, sparks

58  Matthias Warstat arise.”8 Probably the most political German-​language playwright after Brecht, Müller is referring to a gap that can hardly be bridged between theater/​art and daily political events. What happens onstage is not directly relatable to daily politics. For Müller, this incommensurability does not necessarily result from thematic differences, but rather from divergent relations to time: The “time of art” can refer to both the rhythms of artistic production (something like rehearsal process) and the temporality of aesthetic processes of perception. In production as well as reception, the processes of art do not follow the same measures of time as those of politics and its digestion in the media. This becomes particularly clear in a moment of revolutionary transition. The concentrated work on a theater production, largely shielded from the outside world, then seems to belong to a completely different time. The actor Ulrich Mühe also explores this discrepancy in his reflections on Hamlet/​Maschine: Hamlet is the kind of play that the whole world can grasp. And in this respect, the conditions are great to do a piece like this at such a time. And the autumn, yes God, September to the beginning of November, we were also vitally important to ourselves with this play and this project and knew or hoped that we would be able to push into a [different] time with this work, that what had upset and frustrated us and made us despair for years up until then, that we would be able to place a rock in this landscape again, on which those who had grafted these conditions onto us over the years could bash their brains out … There were many days during this period that we had no results from the rehearsals. And those were mainly the months of October–​ November, when the street would suddenly scream so loud that we really had to fall silent in the theater from time to time, because we couldn’t cope with it anymore, with the schizophrenic state of, “I’m rehearsing something that deals, I don’t know, with a person who had problems there three hundred years ago, and outside people are running past and have completely different or similar problems.” There were also days when we had the impression that we could also give up the whole thing, that is, where theater has to realize that making theater is a privilege, and in such times, privileges disappear—​rightly or wrongly, I don’t know. And there is the preoccupation with such beautiful thoughts as those in Hamlet, which are then also ridiculous day by day, and if not, it all also becomes absurd.9 In his recollection of the rehearsals, Mühe registers not only the contact between the time of art and the time of politics, but also the feeling that time interrupts the play, that theater comes to an end, or, at the very least, must enter a kind of moratorium because it can hardly stand up to the events on the street. The theater world doubts the possibilities of its art form doing justice to the historical gravity of the situation. The audience also considers other events more important, experiencing enough excitement in the political process itself—​and stays away from the theater for some time.

Theater Publics in Motion  59 This shifting of phases can be explained by the specific character of theater publics. In the phase of the initiation of social upheaval—​that is, in the months of a growing oppositional discourse—​the theaters were able to fulfill important functions and—​comparable to the churches—​opened up spaces for the articulation of criticism of the regime and for considering alternatives. However, at the height of the upheaval, the core of affective engagement shifted entirely to the streets and squares, and the theaters struggled to attract audiences night after night. In his 2016 study, Ibs describes the months of October and November 1989 as a “time of resolutions” with regard to the theaters. In this phase of turmoil, which was not yet primarily about reunification and national unity but rather a reform process for a political renewal of the GDR, the theaters stood out particularly. A total of 73 appeals, open letters, statements, or resolutions from theaters and ten similar communications from theater associations were published during this period—​although the theaters had not led this publication movement, and had actually spoken out later than individual authors and especially later than the entertainers (i.e., the rock and pop musicians). The 50 signatories to the musicians’ resolution included such popular groups as City, Silly, and Karat (pp. 29–​36). Ibs identifies the impulse of this resolution as a direct predecessor to a resolution by the ensemble of the Staatsschauspiel Dresden, which stands out among the statements of the theaters and drew numerous similar statements. It was presented by the ensemble to the audience for the first time on October 6, 1989, after a performance in the Kleines Haus. Other theaters, including Berlin’s Volksbühne, and also the Vienna Burgtheater, for example, read the text on their stages in a gesture of solidarity. The resolution begins with a preamble in which the ensemble members characterize their country and their relationship to its current condition: We are stepping out of our roles. The situation in the country forces us to do so. A country that cannot hold its youth endangers its future. A party leadership that no longer examines its principles for usefulness is doomed. A nation that has been forced into speechlessness is beginning to become violent. The truth must come to light. Our work is in the country. We will not let the country be destroyed. (as reprinted in Fiebach et al., 1994, p. 143, translated from German by Nat Marcus) These first lines once again speak of an interruption of the play: The actors have to step out of their roles, leave the stage, and give up the artistic work in order to directly address the given political situation. It is not the hour of a new political theater, but rather it seems to be time to leave artistic work behind for a while. The moment when actors address the audience from the stage directly and no longer from a dramatic role can have a special impact: The theatrical assembly is transformed into another type of assembly that promises direct political communication. In the face of the

60  Matthias Warstat exodus of the younger generation,10 the repression enacted by the party and state leadership, and their tendencies toward political violence—​which are also noted here on the part of the population—​the ensemble invokes the category of “truth.” This insistence on truth as the enlightened ideal of the arts is emphasized as the possible contribution of theater in the given situation of speechlessness and an inability to engage in dialogue. The authors of the resolution are less concerned with political or social visions on stage than with theater as a site of dialogue and the search for truth. Moreover, the resolution contains a commitment to the GDR as a jointly created “country” that should be preserved and in no way be absorbed into a larger country. The preamble is followed by a list of demands in which the word “dialogue” alone appears three times. What is clearly centered in the resolution’s text is the demand for a new dialogue between the government and the people. A complete change of regime, on the other hand, is not called for. This, according to Ibs’ analysis (2016), is also characteristic of the other theater resolutions of these months. Predominantly, the theater world pleaded for a new form of public sphere, for a retreaded political communication: 1. We have a right to information. 2. We have a right to dialogue. 3. We have a right to independent thinking and to creativity. 4. We have a right to pluralism of thought … 1. We have a duty to demand that lies and whitewashing disappear from our media. 2. We have a duty to compel a dialogue between the people and the party and state leadership … 4. We have the duty to define the word socialism in such a way that this concept once again becomes an acceptable ideal of life for our people. (as reprinted in Fiebach et al., 1994, p. 143, translated from German by Nat Marcus) By and large, with resolutions such as these, the theaters remained true to a social position that they also held in previous years. They continued to see themselves as a critical authority in benevolent proximity to a state that was supposed to be committed to the ideal of socialism. It was the position of the internal critic, the constructive instance of reflection, or the corrective toward solidarity whose hopes were directed to fundamental reforms of the existing state. It is this self-​ image that ultimately enabled members of the theater world to appear at the Alexanderplatz protests on November 4 alongside representatives of the regime such as Günter Schabowski, Manfred Gerlach, or Markus Wolf. Soon after November 9, however, this position was heard less and less—​as the popular spectrum of wishes moved toward the abolition of the GDR and reunification, and perspectives for a third way forward receded into the background. The Affectability of Theater Publics The case of East Berlin’s dissident winter of 1989–​1990 lends some insights into the affectability of publics: They may be distinct but share a mutual

Theater Publics in Motion  61 perception. Publics are not separate entities, but are in constant communication with each other. These connections become possible because everyone participates in multiple publics. Not even the most devoted theater fans will relate their participation in public life solely to the theater; one can simultaneously belong to this sphere and that of the street. For this reason alone, theater publics will never be unaffected when revolutionary events announce themselves in the streets. The perception of these turbulent events in Berlin, the fervor of shouted messages articulated in the demonstrations and rallies, led some theater makers to a veritable silence—​a connection that the actor Ulrich Mühe points out so vividly: Theater practice had to pause in October–​ November 1989 “when the street would suddenly scream so loud that we really had to fall silent in the theater from time to time, because we couldn’t cope with it anymore” (as cited in Rüter, 1991; see endnote 8). The gap between the concerns of the people on the street and the artistic ambitions of a theater production seemed so great that the theater had to consider a kind of moratorium. At least, this was found to be appropriate by those who had a sense for the bundling of affective energies in social discourse: Public speech concentrates at the sites where crucial issues are at stake, where change seems possible, where battles are to be fought. Publics that are affected in this way, seized and engaged by the most prominent social demands and conflicts, move to the center of attention—​and in this concentration of energies, affects, and passions, other publics fade into the background. Theater can easily fall into such a background, if only because of its reflexive belatedness; its practice can find it difficult to react to social issues and demands as quickly as, say, the daily press or social media today: Plays have to be written, productions developed, and performances rehearsed. The time required for this process is often reason enough for theater’s late arrival to interventions upon the most burning social problems of the moment. However, affected by such events as the street demonstrations and the fall of the regime, theater publics could also radically change their faces and internal structures. The artistic work as such took a back seat; the actors had to step out of their roles: “The situation in the country forces us to do so” (as reprinted in Fiebach et al., 1994, p. 143, translated from German by Nat Marcus). An audience that may have seen itself primarily collected as an audience for an artistic performance now became an audience of collective assemblies and resolutions. Declarations were made from the stage; manifestos were written and distributed; debates and meetings of various kinds took place in the theater space. Theater is always also a social assembly with the possibility of politicization, but touched by the revolutionary impulses that emanated from the street in 1989–​1990, this communicative function became dominant in the winter of the Wende. In reverse perspective, however, this reorientation also makes clear what other potentials lay inherent in theater publics. In a constellation of actors taking on performative roles, creating fictional characters in public space, publics are not geared toward verbal debate on topics of general interest, but allow their own worlds to emerge, which (at

62  Matthias Warstat least at the outset) are not intended for negotiation, but for contemplation. The special nature of theater publics here becomes palpable: These publics can be related to their own fictional worlds. The publics themselves are not fictional, and are certainly anchored in society and marked by its conflicts. But what they can find in the theater, what they can take part in or take offense at, are also fictional worlds, related only indirectly to social reality—​connected, for example, by a choice to maintain distance from it. Influenced by the open conflicts and protests, by the political potentialities of a regime change and gaining new freedoms, the theaters of the GDR in October and November 1989 seemed, at least in part, to have put these fictional worlds aside. They gave space to contemporary political debates, rallies, and resolutions; but in doing so, they also lost space and time for the elaboration of artistic worlds. Müller seems to have had all this in mind when he retrospectively formulated: “The time of art is different from the time of politics. Only sometimes does it make contact. And if one is lucky, sparks arise” (cited in Rüter, 1991, see endnote 8). Such a statement can sound relatively trivial and superficial: Everything has its time, so art and politics also have their own times. However, the relationship implied here may also point to a thoroughly complex asynchrony. Artistic work in the theater, the development of productions, and the rehearsal of performances are carried out at their own temporal scale. They are a collective process that requires intensive planning and, generally, a great deal of time. Anyone who has had the opportunity to work in a theater knows how absorbing these processes are. In rehearsal phases, there seems hardly a moment to concern oneself with one’s own private relationships, the demands of everyday life, or the current affairs of politics. Concentration is often directed toward completely different worlds and times—​to medieval Elsinore, to chivalric love affairs, to the fight for freedom at the Spanish court. In this respect, what is produced and shown in the theater often encounters its own publics from a great distance in time and space. In such constellations, theater publics do not negotiate and reflect upon their own affairs directly in situ, but must first render the events they are confronted with as something of their own. Compared to the publics of the street, theater publics remain bound to another mode of acting and perceiving. The frictions that become possible between these different publics are probably what Müller was thinking of when he hoped for “sparks” that can emerge from time to time from the contact that occurs (see Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2005, pp. 5–​6, on the social metaphor of friction). They may be the same sparks that have repeatedly moved theater makers in the 20th century not only to attentively observe events on the street, but also to portray them on stage. Like an energy source, the street with its conflicts and struggles is able to affect and impel (political) theater. Let us return one last time to the idea of a juxtaposition of theater publics, street publics, television publics, radio publics, and so forth. Such a view of the public sphere—​split into a multiplicity of publics and counterpublics—​ opens up new perspectives for the affect-​theoretical study of theater. So far,

Theater Publics in Motion  63 affect-​theoretical studies of theater and dance have focused predominantly on the affective dynamics in individual performances (see Egert, 2020, for a paradigmatic analysis). They have asked how audiences are affected by what happens on stage, how they become involved in affective arrangements, or how they react more or less empathically to the theatrical presentation of individual affects. However, various objections are possible against an isolating view of individual performances. Balme (2014, pp. 12–​14), for example, warns against the tendency to treat performances as some kind of black boxes that function completely independently of their concrete environment. Balme blames the modernist black box concept of theater for the fact that it often fails to reach broader publics of a society. He accuses theater studies of methodologically privileging the same black box model with its focus on single performances and “works of art.” Another objection can be grounded in affect theory: If affects are understood as prelinguistic tensions, dynamics, and physical movements that cannot be easily contained and controlled, then it does not seem plausible that these affects stop at the boundaries of the single performance, a local audience, or a theater building. Just as the individual performance sets in motion many media discourses and, conversely, is shaped by these discourses, so too theater publics can affect other publics and, in turn, be affected by them. The relationship between theater publics and street publics is only one among many. The weeks and months surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 saw, not least, a reorganization of the relationship between different publics in Germany. For the theaters, this upheaval in Berlin and all over East Germany was ambivalent and, in some respects, disappointing: Whereas, on the one hand, the theaters were integrated into political events and nationwide public discussions and rallies through assemblies and resolutions, on the other hand, they lost an important function they had traditionally fulfilled in the GDR: The theater was the place where cautious criticism of the state leadership could be articulated and deciphered, often hidden behind historical themes or seemingly apolitical family plays. The party and state leadership seemed to more or less tolerate this function of the theater. When, in the fall of 1989, criticism of the regime could now be voiced on streets and squares without the usual camouflage, the theater was no longer existentially needed as a medium of criticism. This, too, may have contributed to the fact that theater in East Germany experienced a loss of inner dynamics and affective impact in many places after 1989. It took a long period of reorientation, self-​reflection, and testing of new artistic concepts to place theater back at the center of political and aesthetic discourses (see Bogusz, 2007; Eberth, 2015; Raddatz, 2016). To this day, it is not easy to locate where the theater stands in the interplay of a society’s publics. In times of protest and upheaval, it may show itself to be affected and accessible as a public forum. However, this opening can also mean a functional change, and put theater publics in a somewhat defensive position.

64  Matthias Warstat Notes 1 For the field of theatre and the performing arts, the demand for a pluralization of the concept of the public sphere, notably with regard to globalization, was advanced especially by Reinelt (2011). 2 Balme (2014, p. 15) takes an emphatically sober look at the possibilities of theatre performances to reach such a wider public and raises the provocative question: “To what extent is the theatrical public sphere affected at all by the performance event?” 3 On the development of proletarian street demonstrations in the empire, see Lindenberger (1995), who also elaborates the helpful concept of “street politics.” 4 On this kind of fidelity to the communist idea, and more generally to the idea as truth event, see Badiou (2012, pp. 18–​21). 5 Conversation with Thomas Martin in Berlin, 19 October, 2019. 6 See Heiner Müller (1992, p. 230): “There were no more dialogues. I started to write dialogues again and again, but it didn’t work, there was no dialogue, only monologue blocks, and then the whole thing shrank to this text.” 7 Quote from the first scene of The Hamletmaschine, translated by Nat Marcus. See Müller (2001, p. 546: “Dänemark ist ein Gefängnis, zwischen uns wächst eine Wand.”) 8 This and the following quotations from the film Die Zeit ist aus den Fugen (1991) by Christoph Rüter were transcribed from the DVD edition and translated by Nat Marcus. 9 Ulrich Mühe quoted from the film (see endnote 8), translated by Nat Marcus. 10 In September and October 1989, thousands of GDR citizens fled across the now open border from Hungary to Austria or sought asylum in the embassies of the Federal Republic in Prague and Warsaw.

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Theater Publics in Motion  65 Fischer-​ Lichte, E. (2005). Theatre, sacrifice, ritual: Exploring forms of political theatre. Routledge. Gestrich, A. (2006). The public sphere and the Habermas debate. German History, 24(3), 413–​430. Habermas, J. (1962). Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft [The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society]. Luchterhand. Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT Press. Haupt, H.-​G. (1986). Staatliche Bürokratie und Arbeiterbewegung [State bureaucracy and workers’ movement]. In J. Kocka (Ed.), Arbeiter und Bürger im 19. Jahrhundert: Varianten ihres Verhältnisses im europäischen Vergleich [Workers and citizens in the 19th century: Variants of their relationship in European comparison] (pp. 119–​154). R. Oldenbourg. Hein, C. (1990). Die Ritter der Tafelrunde [The knights of the round table]. In C. Hein (Ed.), Die Ritter der Tafelrunde und andere Stücke [The knights of the round table and other plays] (pp. 131–​193). Aufbau. Huber, E. R. (1988). Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789: Bismarck und das Reich [German constitutional history since 1789: Bismarck and the Reich] (3rd ed., Vol. 3). Kohlhammer. Ibs, T. (2016). Umbrüche und Aufbrüche: Transformationen des Theaters in Deutschland zwischen 1989 und 1995 [Upheavals and departures: Transformations of the theater in Germany between 1989 and 1995]. Theater der Zeit. Lindenberger, T. (1995). Straßenpolitik: Zur Sozialgeschichte der öffentlichen Ordnung in Berlin 1900–​1914 [Street politics: On the social history of public order in Berlin 1900–​1914]. Dietz. Lowenhaupt Tsing, A. (2005). Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton University Press. Müller, H. (1992). Krieg ohne Schlacht: Leben in zwei Diktaturen [War without battle: Life in two dictatorships]. Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Müller, H. (2000). Der Lohndrücker [The Scab]. In H. Müller (Ed.), Werke 3: Die Stücke 1 [Works 4: The plays 2] (pp. 27–​64). Suhrkamp. Müller, H. (2001). Die Hamletmaschine [The Hamlet machine]. In H. Müller (Ed.), Werke 4: Die Stücke 2 [Works 4: The plays 2] (pp. 545–​554). Suhrkamp. Negt, O., & A. Kluge (1972). Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung: Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit [Public sphere and experience: Toward an analysis of the bourgeois and proletarian public sphere]. Suhrkamp. Negt, O., & A. Kluge (1993). Public sphere and experience: Toward an analysis of the bourgeois and proletarian public sphere. University of Minnesota Press. Primavesi, P. (2018). Publikumsbewegung: Auf der Suche nach dem ‚Außerhalb‘ des Theaters [Audience movement: In search of the ‘outside’ of the theater]. In B. Hochholdinger-​ Reiterer, G. Boesch & M. Behn (Eds.), Publikum im Gegenwartstheater [Audience in contemporary theater] (pp. 49–​63). Alexander. Raddatz, F. (Ed.). (2016). Republik Castorf: Die Berliner Volksbühne seit 1992 [Republic Castorf: The Berlin Volksbühne since 1992]. Theater der Zeit. Reinelt, J. (2011). Rethinking the public sphere for a global age. Performance Research, 16(2), 16–​27. Rüter, C. (Director). (2009). Die Zeit ist aus den Fugen [Time is out of joint]. Filmedition Suhrkamp. (Original film released 1991)

66  Matthias Warstat Stuber, P. (1998). Spielräume und Grenzen: Studien zum DDR-​Theater [Spaces and limits: Studies on the GDR theater]. Ch. Links. Warneken, B. J. (1991): Massenmedium Straße. Zur Kulturgeschichte der Demonstration [Street as mass medium. On the cultural history of demonstrations]. Campus. Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Zone Books. Warstat, M. (2004). Theatrale Gemeinschaften: Zur Festkultur der Arbeiterbewegung 1918–​33 [Theatrical communities: On the festive culture of the workers’ movement 1918–​33]. A. Francke.

5 Digital Administrative Publics Affective and Corporate Entanglements in Germany’s New Federal Portal Timm Sureau and Thomas Götzelmann

When scrutinizing the increasing online presence of administrations in this chapter, we suggest using the term “administrative publics” to describe interactions between state bureaucrats and (non-​)citizens. We illustrate this approach with our long-​term research case, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, hence BAMF), in which we analyze its online presence and corresponding internal dynamics, the role of companies within the agency, and the common vision of companies and the BAMF for future digital interactions with (non-​ )citizens. The responsibilities of the BAMF include conducting asylum procedures, making decisions on asylum applications, and administering integration courses. It thereby interacts with citizens who, for example, manage language schools, and with noncitizens such as people with residency status and asylum applicants. We shall call this group with heterogeneous statuses (non-​)citizens. Our main case is the infrastructure of the interaction between the federal state administrations and (non-​)citizens, and we examine this by looking at the production of Germany’s novel online web interface for governmental administrative services called the Bundesportal (Federal Portal) that is accessible on verwaltung.bund.de along with BAMF’s social media presence. We start by introducing our fieldwork at the BAMF, and we then provide a background on constraints to the digitalization of German bureaucracies. We advance our theoretical argument before exploring the activities and engagement of BAMF with the broader public on social media as well as our own digital experience with the Federal Portal from a user perspective. This combination of our exploration from a user’s perspective with our analysis of the software production enables us to show that the fabric of publics is formed not only in verbal discussion but also through sentiments, affects, and emotions. We argue that emotional and affective dimensions play an important role in public administrative spaces—​that is, interactions between the state, companies, and individuals. The online activities of the state described here reach a great number of people simultaneously and uniformly, and they will partially replace personal interactions in town halls and administrative offices. DOI: 10.4324/9781003365426-6

68  Timm Sureau and Thomas Götzelmann We found that this new digital space engenders a sweeping change not only of internal administrative processes and bureaucratic sentiments (Zenker et al., 2023), but also of the spaces in which bureaucrats and (non-​)citizens interact with and affect each other. We call such newish forms of relations between bureaucrats and (non-​)citizens administrative publics. Starting from our observation of strong corporate involvement in everything digital within state administrations, we ask how private–​public entanglements of digitalization change the relations between ministries and (non-​)citizens and, in particular, between BAMF and (non-​)citizens. Research Setting Our study design addressed sentiments related to the digitalization of migration management. Sentiments of bureaucracy (Zenker et al., 2023) denote the affective-​ emotional saturation of the seemingly rational positions of decision-​makers. Our research journey began in late 2019 with negotiations for access to conduct fieldwork at the BAMF on affective dynamics in the digital transformation of German immigration management.1 BAMF eventually invited us to do research exclusively at the Information Technology (IT) Department where we then noticed a remarkable absence of the topic of (im)migration and simultaneously a remarkable presence of insourced company employees and outsourced software projects. The software companies provided their workforce for the production (coding) and maintenance of software, and their employees were physically present in the buildings of BAMF and remotely present in virtual meetings. BAMF employees often attributed their staff shortages to the wage agreement for the public service sector (TVöD), which is rather low compared to the commercial IT sector. We had monitored BAMF’s public tenders beforehand and generally knew about the demand for such digitalization companies, but we were surprised by their omnipresence. One focus of this text is on our research on the complex public–​private entanglement during the reprogramming of the application for travel allowances for integration courses:2 This is known as the integration business file (Integrations-​Geschäftsdatei, hence InGe). Our research on InGe allows us to examine the creation of the Federal Portal to which InGe belongs. The Federal Portal is a web interface that eventually will offer access to all federal, local, and state administrative services (586 bundles3) as prescribed in the 2017 Online Access Act (Onlinezugangsgesetz, hereafter OAA). The Ministry of the Interior—​BAMF’s parent ministry and responsible for the Federal Portal—​ordered its production and maintenance at the nationalized company Federal Printing Office (Bundesdruckerei) that, in turn, had hired the German digital project management and consultancy firm ]init[ to assist with the process (BMI, 2020). The responsibility for implementing InGe still lies within BAMF, but representatives of all these organizations sometimes joined production meetings.

Digital Administrative Publics  69 At the beginning of our research in September 2020, the Federal Portal was barely functioning and BAMF did not provide any of its services there. In the following months, we were able to attend a series of project management meetings with representatives of the relevant caseworker staff, project managers, technicians, software architects, and process managers as well as representatives of the Federal Printing Office, the Ministry of the Interior, and consultancy firms to the Federal Printing Office and the BAMF. Private insourced company employees working alongside public servants was the de facto standard within such meetings. Administrations, Corporations, and Publics To analyze the consequences of these private–​public interminglings, in the following two subchapters we will discuss the particular pasts of public–​ private coproduction of administration and look into debates over administrative publics. The Construction of Administration

We draw a conceptual inspiration from the American public administration scholar Camilla Stivers as a straightforward reminder that BAMF, like all state bureaucracies, can be understood as a service to society. Stivers wrote about the history of public administration in New York creating a “usable past” (Stivers, 1995, 2000; Stivers et al., 2002). “Stivers constructed this past,” Burnier (2009) summarized, “as a means to critique the continued dominance of efficiency, markets, and business management practices within contemporary public administration” (p. 588). Stivers (2000) traced back how in the early twentieth century, US business men created public administrations and managed cities in a similar way to their own private corporations. Meanwhile, another strand of public administration that we nowadays mostly perceive as separate from it—​that is, social work—​stayed in the hands of “settlement women” who advocated for a wide array of policies that entailed the expansion of municipal government functions, including public playgrounds, the juvenile justice system, special education, child health clinics, public employment bureaus, and mothers’ pensions. (Stivers et al., 2002, p. 100) Whereas settlement women, or social workers, advocated politically for social services and “to help [the poor] efficiently” (Stivers, 2000, p. 5), business men organized the administration in a corporate manner, eventually shaping today’s perception of a depoliticized and scientific, rational public administration (Stivers et al., 2002). This process that Stivers describes for the United States4 divided public day-​to-​day functions of the government along

70  Timm Sureau and Thomas Götzelmann gendered lines, with social services marked as emotional contrasted with rationalized bureaucratic and corporate ideals marked as unemotional. She cites the prominent reverend and civil liberties activist John Haynes Holmes who criticized this conception of the administration run as a business and suggested running society as a social institution. He summarized, “the ideal thing today is not a business administration, but a social administration[, and e]conomy is all right as a method of government, but all wrong as an ideal” (cited in Stivers, 2000, p. 91). Administrative Publics

We employ Stivers’ descriptions of a usable past to sensitize for the social within administration and to highlight the transmission of corporate methods into governmental administrations. In our particular case of digitalization that we see in the BAMF, corporations directly affect the client-​facing side of administration, the administrative publics. We thus ask whether this altered outward facing side also affects not only the public administration but the administrative publics themselves. Warner (2002) defines publics as either a social totality, a concrete audience in a shared physical space, or the reading audience of a text (p. 414), with each public as a mutual imagination evoked by the reflection about that text (p. 423). In this sense, each collective interaction with a text or website creates a public; and, as such, a digital administrative web interface creates publics. Skipping over older debates (Habermas, 1974; or also Singh, 2012, p. 634), we turn to Fraser (1990) who built on Habermas’ conceptualization of the public with the tripartite of private, state, and the public. Therein the private sphere includes individuals and also companies that pursue market participation, the state decrees, and the public bridges between the private sphere and the state (p. 56). Although de facto not observable, this conceptual separation, she argues, makes it possible “to keep in view the distinctions between state apparatuses, economic markets, and democratic associations” (p. 57). In our own research on state digitalization, we see the old tripartite of state, society, and economic markets in a new dynamic: Corporations profoundly influence state administrations and the production of their publics from within. Our goal is not so much to further the debate on publics, but rather to point to the observable creation of new administrative publics in which the public administration (representing state action), (non-​)citizens, and commercial sectors are bound together, interact, and experience well-​ designed socio-​ digital administrative space. Through shared perception, these spaces turn into publics that address the state’s social subjects in a collective manner. Spaces of interaction have always been designed. A marketplace with benches can easily also be used as a space of amicable interaction with time, dwelling, and conversation. Without benches, it is mostly a place of economic interaction. The creation of the Federal Portal moves parts of the

Digital Administrative Publics  71 social interaction between public employees and (non-​)citizens into a new digital space of carefully managed interactions in which ideas on user design and user experience are ever present. Meanwhile, important dimensions of social interaction are missing in the digital administrative realm, and this is what makes the management of the remaining space so crucial. To grasp the affective-​emotional dimension of such spaces and the sentiments they carry, we rely on the concept of the affective arrangement, defined by Slaby (2019) as “an array of persons, things, artefacts, spaces, discourses, behaviors, expressions or other materials that coalesce into a coordinated formation of mutual affecting and being-​affected” (p. 109). Our research explores the technicalities of the design process of digital spaces and of the human actors involved in the production, management, and reception of publics. BAMF’s Digital Publics: Experience and Creation We describe three cases that together convey the digital administrative publics of BAMF. The first two are initial online experiences with BAMF in which we emulate administrative publics that we cannot observe collectively because they are happening in a decentralized way on screens. The first case consists of initial interactions through search engines and social media sites; the second is our experience when entering the Federal Portal. The third case is based on our prolonged research on the process of programming BAMF’s section of the Federal Portal—​in particular, the production of an online form related to the software InGe allowing indigent (non-​)citizen language course participants to be reimbursed for their travels to and from courses. Experiencing the Digital Administration Online

Not wanting to be associated with the activities of the Propaganda Ministry under the Nazi regime, the first postwar government looked to the Weimar Republic for orientation in organizing the Federal Press Office … The Press and Information Office fulfils two key functions: it supplies information to the public on the work being done by the government and it supplies information to the government so that the latter can do its work well. (Germany’s Federal Press and Information Office, n.d.) Governments and administrations necessarily structure (legislatively) the preconditions of discourse indirectly—​ for example, through facilitating broadband internet access. They can also act as participants within discursive arenas—​either through deliberate targeting of others (e.g., censorship) or as speakers themselves (information and propaganda). We shall first address this participatory role before moving on to a public that is prestructured by the administration itself.

72  Timm Sureau and Thomas Götzelmann To explore the BAMF public presence on a very basic level, we conducted an online search5 of “BAMF”. The first two pages of results consisted of the following: the BAMF homepage, the Ministry of the Interior, other related state agencies, some large municipal governments, a Wikipedia entry, and BAMF’s social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Aside from the BAMF Wikipedia entry on the first page of results, German administrations controlled all topical pages until the second page with some news reports and a BAMF Instagram “location.”6 This finding is not startling; the search for other German administrative agencies yields similar results. The search for Pro Asyl, a German civil society migration advocacy group, conjures up a similar image: results consisting of the main homepage and some of its subpages, their social media accounts, and similar or “allied” organizations referencing Pro Asyl. The analysis of such search results evokes questions about the workings of search engine algorithms and the wider internet. Irrespective of infrastructural layers providing the visible results and their ranking, the pages provided partake in public discourses about the organizations themselves. We followed the links provided by our searches for BAMF and took part in the emergence of a public of other readers also searching for information about BAMF and then reflecting on it. The white and black corporate design of the German Federal Government welcomed us, as well as the BAMF corporate design of grey, blue, and stock photos of multiethnic groups, emphasizing a display of “diversity” (Vetters & Zenker, 2021). On social media sites, BAMF posted mostly photographs of politicians visiting BAMF locations or talking about migration, infographics of migration statistics, and job announcements. Most responses to their posts on Twitter and Facebook are comments accusing BAMF (employees) of either processing asylum cases too slowly and of not sufficiently welcoming asylum seekers, or, conversely, overspending and granting asylum to too many (“fake”) applicants. The rare responses of BAMF accounts explain that the agency is operating at good speed within the boundaries of reasonable legal frameworks; and they contain conciliatory remarks to keep a general netiquette. BAMF cannot control public discourse about itself, but it does control and carefully manage the reading and perceptive part of a first interaction online. The Federal Portal: The Digital Bureaucratic Welcoming Hall

The Federal Portal adds a new kind of state–​citizen interaction to the existing landscape of governmental homepages and social media accounts. Here, a state institution is not merely presenting information, but offering its services. People enter this portal specifically for information from, interaction with, and decisions by the government. This is our second perspective in which we explore the site and try to find the InGe form whose production is our third case.

Digital Administrative Publics  73

Figure 5.1 Screenshot of the Federal Portal, taken on March 7, 2022.

Thus, with the intent to understand the structure of the site, we visited the Federal Portal. Verwaltung.bund.de greeted us with an image of a euphoric woman, wearing a white blouse, glasses, and bright orange pants (Figure 5.1). She tosses papers into the air as a symbol of getting rid of paper bureaucracy. At the top of the page, a search box asked “What would you like to apply for?” and, above that, were options to switch to easy language or sign language. An icon in the upper left corner led to an about-​section, specifying that this was a basic version. In the top right-​hand corner, a flag icon offered the possibility to switch language to only one other language: English. Switching to English triggered a banner informing us that “not all content is available in English yet. Affected content will continue to be displayed in German.” The homepage had a flat optic consisting of tiles or panels displaying its content. In its center, it offered panels for “Personal matters for citizens” and for “Business matters for companies.” At the bottom, images explained the login procedure with different layers of security (the highest is using the digital German ID card), and links provided legal information and contact, followed by mentioning that the “Server location [is in] Germany,” using a

74  Timm Sureau and Thomas Götzelmann certain encryption and that the website is compliant with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. Looking for the form on travel reimbursements for language course participants, we continued by clicking the button “Migration” in the left-​ hand panel of “Personal matters for citizens.” There, beneath an image of a waiting line, were three new subcategories: “#Immigration,” “#Asylum,” and “#Naturalisation.” Each of these three subcategories led to application forms for a range of different administrative services, ranked by a logic unintelligible to us and offering 80 further pages, all of them listing different forms, in which we could not find the form relating to integration courses. Back on the main page, we chose the button “Education” offering three other subcategories (“#School,” “#Vocational training,” and “#Studying at university level”) where we had a similar experience. We returned to the main page and tried the link “All Personal Matters” that offered 19 subcategories spanning across birth, family, education, work, leisure time, health, retirement, and death. Our search for integration-​ course-​ related forms via the visible structure of the Federal Portal yielded no useful result. The “life situations” that structured this administrative public were unintelligible to us. We turned to the digital version of an “infopoint” of a ministry’s entry hall, its search engine, and typed “Integration.” The German search did not offer the integration courses in the top 20 results. Switching the language to English (the spelling is identical in both languages), we found “Participation in the integration course admission” in third place. This link led to a page where we could choose “Forms & Online Services” among a variety of options. A list of forms popped up that all led to PDF documents. We returned again to home and entered in German “Integrationskurs” which finally yielded the wanted results: a variety of forms marked as “#Online Service.” This early version of the website was completely confusing and offered us a Kafkaesque representation of the state. Visually, the website presents itself as light, modern, and friendly with the woman tossing paper in the air and letting files fly. Corporate design meets bureaucratic inertia. The Public–​Private Production of Administrative Publics

§ 10 Non-​formality of the administrative procedure The administrative procedure shall not be bound by specific forms unless there are special legal provisions regarding the form of the procedure. It is to be carried out simply, suitably, and swiftly. (Verwaltungsverfahrensgesetz, n.d., translation by the authors) Despite long-​running digitalization efforts, much administrative work still happens on paper. Few workflows are without what is called a Medienbruch (media disruption) in the German digitalization discourse. That is the need to transfer data manually, either from the window of one software application

Digital Administrative Publics  75 to the window of another, or via (re)inserting from paper into the interface of a specialized software such as InGe (managing travel reimbursements for integration courses). By using the interface and connected databases of InGe, case workers in the BAMF’s branch offices keep track of data on language schools, integration courses, and course participants in order to account for the quality and funding of these courses. Most of the interaction between language school employees and BAMF staff is done digitally via the interface of InGe. Language course participants, however, are required to contact BAMF directly in some cases—​for example, when applying for the reimbursement of travel costs to and from language courses. In this case, applicants are required to send paper letters to BAMF employees who then have to enter them into InGe. However, Germany’s online access act (OAA) obliges BAMF to provide a digital form for course participants to apply for travel reimbursements on the Federal Portal. When we started participating in meetings that coordinate the connection of Federal Portal and InGe in January 2021, nationwide plans to implement OAA services by the end of 2022 were already lagging behind, and tensions regarding completion were high. Project managers at BAMF told us that at the end of 2020, the Ministry of the Interior had instructed BAMF to speed up and launch its pilot project—​the form for travel reimbursements—​on April 1 instead of September 2021. A variety of actors attended the InGe-​ OAA meetings that included representatives of the Ministry of the Interior who checked up on deadlines, and representatives of the Federal Printing Office, the nationalized company commissioned by the Ministry of the Interior with the production and maintenance of the Federal Portal and its interfaces. The Federal Printing Office in turn had hired the German digital project management and consultancy firm ]init[ to assist with the process (BMI, 2020). Thus, ]init[ employees also sometimes participated in meetings. From BAMF, representatives of the department of integration courses, project managers, and a wide variety of IT experts (architecture, network communication, etc.) joined in regularly. Some of the IT experts were employed directly by the BAMF, others were employees of IT companies working on the basis of framework contracts in the IT department. Due to Covid-​19 restrictions, all our meetings took place in digital meeting rooms, with cameras mostly turned off, and often with someone presenting visual material via screen sharing. This was also the setting for a meeting in early 2021 with 12 participants. During this meeting, varying sentiments on digitalization and bureaucracy became tangible. We shall use these to highlight the process of inserting corporate and bureaucratic sentiments into this emerging infrastructure. Our entry point is the creation of categories on the website. The distinction between “asylum” (decisions on asylum application) and “integration” (language and integration courses) is integral to the self-​ understanding of BAMF. It has determined its work ever since the administration of language courses became part of the agency’s duties in 2005,

76  Timm Sureau and Thomas Götzelmann prefiguring organizational structures into the two categories. It conflicts, as the following vignette shows, with a corporate user design. A consultant started sharing her screen to present the Federal Portal in her browser and explained its basic design. When she showed the category “asylum,” a BAMF IT expert familiar with InGe quickly asked: “Will there be a subitem labelled ‘integration’?” Seemingly unaware of the categorizations important to BAMF, she replied that the search function of the Federal Portal would offer results concerning applications related to integration. Another consultant explained that the search function could be improved by adding key words (“tags”) to the forms. Not satisfied, the BAMF IT expert repeated his question asking about a visible and clickable “integration” category. A representative of the BAMF case workers swiftly explained that they had prepared a list of keywords. The BAMF IT expert complained about a lack of transparency in the creation of the existing categories on the Federal Portal. As a response, the user experience designer of the consultancy team explained: The IT-​Planungsrat7 issued the guidelines for the life situations [the categories of the Federal Portal]. It is about the user experience, a one-​stop shop … In the course of implementation, 14 life situations were agreed upon and then determined by the Federal Ministry of the Interior or the responsible federal states and federal ministries. Not satisfied, the BAMF IT expert then wanted to know the procedure for asking for an extra category, but the discussion moved on. Indeed, a resolution authored by ]init[ employees (Stocksmeier & Hunnius, 2018) on behalf of the Federal Ministry of the Interior and decided upon by the IT-​Planungsrat (2018) demanded the implementation of the major categories called “life situations” to structure the Federal Portal. Chances of changing this from a programmer’s desk at BAMF are rather low. In the following, we shall show how existing categories are inserted, then consolidated, or sedimented (see also Zenker et al., 2023) from already highly standardized analogue workflows into the digital infrastructure to create clickable forms. Shortly later, the discussion on the portal itself had ended, and the consultant who presented her screen switched to a design software with several flow diagrams. The diagrams consisted of several geometrical shapes representing individual pages of an application and arrowed lines connecting the pages in a consecutive order—​ these were the nonfinalized plans for the overall flow and decision trees of integration course applications on the Federal Portal. At several points within a decision tree, a question would steer the applicant away from the main flow. At these points, a branch or side stream would either lead back to the main stream or to a different end of the application process. Questions

Digital Administrative Publics  77 creating new branches were separating EU citizens, non-​EU citizens, and the legal category of (“ethnic German”) late resettlers or migrants with residency permit, temporary residency permit, or “tolerance status” (suspension of deportation). In the travel cost reimbursement application, a separate branch opened early in the process, by asking whether this is the applicant’s first application. Choosing “yes” would lead the applicant to a new fork. Here, the applicant could either choose to change their address information or other data (leading them back to the main route) or select the option of “hardship case” leading to a completely new path. Changing such paths later implies new programming efforts. While here still in the design phase, once implemented, such paths become new infrastructures that will continuously recreate digital administrative publics. These publics of online applicants, however, are quickly and often separated into smaller groups of differing experiences through digitally guardrailed decisions on essential legal categories that impact (non-​)citizens’ everyday lives. Later in the meeting, participants talked about techniques of nudging, providing subtle pushes to steer individuals to follow a predefined path that the creators of the system favor (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). In the case of a business, this preferred outcome could be a nudge toward completing an online purchase.8 During the discussion of flow diagrams, representatives of the case workers usually referred to either applicants or foreigners (Antragsteller or Ausländer). Programmers and other IT staff mostly used the IT industry term “user,” whereas consultants often used the term “customer” (Kunde). When talking about the succession of pages within the form, the user experience designer referred to online shops, explaining that the customer should select the exact product (application form or subapplication form) before entering personal details—​as in an online shop. He also recommended placing complicated entries—​ questions that go beyond a clickable “yes” or “no” answer—​at the back of the form. Following experience gained in sales, the idea is to avoid placing “frustrating” or time-​consuming tasks at the beginning of a multipage process. In this way, the imagined “customer” has already invested time and effort in the process, and is less likely to abort it when confronted with a prompt to enter text or an upload button. Therefore, more “customers” will finish the process than in a flow with a frustration at the beginning. Such planned nudging of (non-​)citizens, as well as the above-​mentioned life situations, are design suggestions to make the site user friendly and to enable users to complete their tasks as easily as possible. This also implies not to structure the Federal Portal according to bureaucratic logics of different agencies as recognizable entities. A feature of this user-​centric design is the one-​stop shop (also called “no-​stop shop,” Goldacker, 2016), in which all

78  Timm Sureau and Thomas Götzelmann forms belonging to one life situation are presented on one website. These sentiments of efficiency transmitted as design prescriptions of a one-​stop shop that steer applicants through the form somewhat preclude a legalistic bureaucratic sentiment that would result in a transparent overview of the application process from the perspective of the applicant. And time limitations further restrained accessibility for all (non-​)citizens. In project documents and further meetings, BAMF’s InGe-​OAA project managers requested fictitious example documents as illustrations next to their forms that would show applicants—​people in the process of learning the German language—​ what they are supposed to upload looks like. The Federal Printing Office had rejected BAMF’s request for illustrations in favor of the administrative one-​stop shop. The Federal Portal brings together applications from ministries and agencies of different administrative areas and levels, and imposes a uniform design on them, thereby excluding such specialized insertions. Similarly, InGe-​OAA project managers deprioritized the provision of an additional input mask for the selection of diacritical marks9 for the time being, after the Federal Printing Press had signaled that it was under high pressure to deliver until the end 2022 and did not want to spend time on requests that they considered marginal. That means, although the website was online, the Ministry of Interior’s pressure to release in April delayed a feature to note diacritical signs while using a computer. A feature that an imagined Yıldırım from Düsseldorf or a Taís from São Paulo with a German keyboard layout would need to fill their forms was deprioritized, and design rules excluded the provision of example illustrations. In the following, BAMF employees presented bureaucratic sentiments aiming to alter the application process in order to provide a feeling of security. Representatives of the BAMF integration course department emphasized the need for the form to seem trustworthy by placing the upload function for documents after the page for personal information. They argued that applicants might have the feeling that their uploads will end up nowhere if they have not identified themselves before uploading them. Technicians explained that this does not make any difference, because the Federal Portal sends the dataset of an application to the BAMF only after reaching the end on the flow diagram. The request for a more reassuring design was discussed at the meeting and possibly written down by the consultants, who did not alter the initially proposed order of pages. Later in the discussion, BAMF employees argued that language course participants were sufficiently able to use the proprietary technologies of Google to provide the necessary information.10

Digital Administrative Publics  79 BAMF employees had decided not to push the issue of diacritical marks after the group members had reassured each other that many or most applicants would use their smart phones with freely changeable keyboard layouts anyway. Similarly, when talking about the necessity for applicants to upload (or via the old route print and send) a screenshot of Google Maps to document the distance between their residence and the language school, InGe case worker superiors remarked that the course participants seem tech savvy enough to do this. After the form went online on April 1, 2021, nothing special happened in the regular meetings. The machine-​to-​machine interface of the Federal Portal was not ready, and at BAMF, the middleware (digital microservices) to communicate between the Federal Portal and the civil servant software InGe was still under construction. These and other topics filled the discussions. Meanwhile, selected case workers of the BAMF had to log in manually into the Federal Portal via browser to check whether applications arrived and then distribute them to the responsible regional branch of the BAMF. Nearly a year later, InGe case workers received only a single-​digit number of applications per week via the Federal Portal nationwide, and the machine-​to-​machine interface and microservices were still under development. BAMF’s Digital Public as an Affective Arrangement The digital interaction of ministries with (non-​)citizens has consequences far beyond the change from paper to PDF. Digitalization changes the very nature of relations between state actors and individuals or nonstate actors. Of course, outcomes of applications will continue to dominate the experience for (non-​)citizens in the long run. Nevertheless, perception and screen interaction matter. This shift from face-​to-​face interaction to digital communication has been discussed widely (e.g., Lamoureaux & Sureau, 2019; Srinivasan et al., 2019), but these discussions often emphasized social media in which actual interactions via emojis such as buttons and written expression are combined with voice messages, videos, and pictures. In our reading, the shift has not been discussed much with regard to the internal characteristics of bureaucracies in their interaction with (non-​)citizens. In our observations, applicants become faceless (but not anonymous), whereas bureaucrats, in many cases, become truly anonymous for (non-​)citizens. We are aware that our cases are not prime examples for this development, because BAMF clerks receive travel reimbursement claims mostly by letter, and the tools discussed in this chapter are also not yet broadly accepted. Quantitatively, the changes we were able to observe were few. BAMF is not a big player on social media, and the number of forms that, at the time of writing, are filled digitally via the Federal Portal is negligible compared to conventional paper forms. We clicked through the homepage for quite a while without finding the form, and only the right search term produced the needed

80  Timm Sureau and Thomas Götzelmann site. Notwithstanding this limitation, we believe the observed processes to be indicative of larger changes happening through the small steps taken simultaneously in many agencies, as well as of a larger trend toward further digitalization in the future. With such little steps, we see that the state is creating a qualitatively different way of accessing public services that—​due to its unified interaction of addressing (non-​)citizens—​we call administrative publics. Therein we are customers or users, and user-​centered life situations constructed in one-​stop shops nudge us through clickable forms that emerge from flow diagrams of algorithmically prestructured pathways. The administrative publics of this digital bureaucracy are designed consciously as well as incidentally through the merging, altering, prioritizing, and deprioritizing of corporate and bureaucratic sentiments into a supposedly easy and efficient bureaucratic encounter. BAMF also engages in social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Habermas’ conceptualization of a public that serves as a space of opinion making in opposition to the state separated from markets and corporate involvement is both an analysis and a political aspiration for thriving democracies. The German government, in the above-​cited words of the Federal Press and Information Office, is trying to “supply information to the public on the work being done” and to avoid unduly influencing public debates. If we look at the Federal Portal and social media, BAMF is actively engaging publics. On Twitter, it notably does so with prudence, because it restricts itself in debates by almost always remaining silent to comments. This particular prudently addressed public stage of BAMF is managed by a corporation, given that Twitter’s regulations apply for administrative publics of BAMF, and Twitter might filter answers for BAMF and limit the character count of BAMF’s messages as they do for every platform user. Thinking with Stivers’ usable past (1995), business logics and corporate sentiments are entering into administration yet again, and changing the very nature of those communicative actions. Social media sites provide design logics charged with corporate sentiments, as do the companies within BAMF that participate in the creation of software. As shown, the software projects within BAMF such as InGe and the Federal Portal are co-​created by companies and also by regulations of the IT-​Planungsrat and their imaginations of efficient user interfaces (UI) and efficient user experience (UX). These concepts are often aiming at customers to prolong their stay on a website—​as they do on social media platforms—​or to finalize their purchase in a web shop. In the context of bureaucratic software development, they sometimes compete with legalistic ideals of a relatively neutral medium that a paper form might convey. In a very tangible way, administrative websites treat the surfing (non-​)citizens as customers. As we have shown, voices within the development of BAMF’s section of the Federal Portal are engaged in creating an administrative representation that looks and feels like the established bureaucratic processes, emphasizing the bureaucratic sentiment of trustworthiness and assuredness via the sequence of

Digital Administrative Publics  81 form pages and by providing pictures of required documents. Here, different adherences to regulations, time restraints, and prescribed design logics clash, as in the case of the time-​consuming software implementation of diacritic signs and fictitious documents as illustrations for forms. Within the distributed agency of this affective arrangement (Slaby, 2019, pp. 9–​10), corporate actors and bureaucratic decision-​makers affect each other reciprocally, leading to a corporate–​bureaucratic arrangement. Looking beyond the ephemeral nature of the situations described, we can see a shift in bureaucratic sentiments. The arrangement of bureaucrats with their sentiments of bureaucracy and companies with their corporate sentiments that we described designs the outward presentations and interactions—​or administrative publics—​of the state. And this alters, we assume, perceptions of the state. This has potentially far-​ reaching consequences that might equal Stivers’ analysis of corporate–​bureaucratic entanglements of the early twentieth century in which something new to us becomes natural to future generations. Philosopher Mühlhoff (2018) in his work titled (roughly translated from German) “Digital Incapacitation and User Experience Design: How Digital Devices Nudge Us, Track Us, and Educate Us to Ignorance” explains that user interfaces obscure the technologies behind tools or websites, and that user experience design eases the usage of these tools. He describes how UI has blinded people to the technology sitting behind computers. The file system vanishes within Windows and MacOS and one saves data and photos in folders called “photos” or just “in the gallery,” without a clue about the files’ locations. Parallel to this, we witness a development in which the administrative software frontend turns into the administrative publics that hide the functioning of ministries behind it. They obscure that civil servants are still working on the respective cases, and that the websites are currently mere digital frontends, mimicking digital workflows or automated decisions. They transmit forms to case workers who only gradually treat them differently than they would treat a letter or any other form of application. Impersonal action on a screen replaces often uncomfortable, interesting, boring, or other types of affective personal interactions in state institutions. The Federal Portal reduces these personal interactions. Persons will interact less with individuals representing the state in a town hall, sensing their style, hair color, clothing, and dialect; instead, they will interact more with screens. And the applicants are less informed by digital forms compared to paper forms: the decision tree that users are guided through never reveals its full form to the user. The reciprocity of affecting and being affected in this sphere is highly prestructured. There is no direct line of communication in the Federal Portal beyond application and decree, and InGe case workers cannot send messages back to applicants, except for positive or negative administrative notices at the end of decision-​making processes.11 Theoretically, applications and administrative decrees could be used creatively for communication beyond their functional

82  Timm Sureau and Thomas Götzelmann meaning. Yet, by its design, the Federal Portal restricts the ability to engage in reciprocal affective relationships. To guide users easily through the process of filling out an application, each user sees only the path they take and will not know either the end of the path until reaching it or the full range of possible endings. Such processes, framed as incapacitation by Mühlhoff (2018), might eventually also simplify access to the state apparatus and increase internal efficiency and adaptability, also through agility (see also Dunleavy et al., 2006). Applicants—​particularly in migration administration—​might actually prefer being somewhat hidden behind the screen, thereby avoiding possibly disagreeable interactions with public servants (Behnam Shad, 2021). With a fully functioning administrative portal slowly replacing physical interaction as already exists in Denmark (Schou & Hjelholt, 2018, p. 18), applicants may interact with the portal without knowing which ministry they are dealing with. Digitalization will slowly alter our perception, the usability, and the user experience of the state, and it might very well obscure its functioning while easing access to it. As a consequence, the affective arrangement of (non-​)citizens’ interaction with the state extends through the material network cables and physical Wi-​Fi signals filtered through corporate design directly into living quarters. We do not have the space to look at the varying awareness among BAMF employees that they are creating a whole new facade of the state by joining the Federal Portal. Many decisions about this new digital “user orientation” happened ad hoc and seemingly without a larger strategy. Instead, within an agile framework, “meeting the deadline,” “technical details,” and then “BAMF case workers’ interest” (in this order) framed most discussions and had institutionalized representation within the meetings. With local spheres of affective reciprocity being restricted to users and their machines on one side and administrators and their machines on the other side, nonhuman digital infrastructure is the main element with which humans affect “reciprocally” and “mutually” (Slaby, 2019). And this will change public debates and publics themselves; it will alter sentiments toward the state and continue to do so within the state. Conclusion The administrative publics created by BAMF’s digitalization consist of a multitude of technical and personal relations with and by the state, composed of invisible layers of cables, servers and software, contracts, regulations and laws, as well as (non-​)citizens, state bureaucrats, and private companies involved in its production and maintenance. While some relations are technical, we also saw the importance of sentiments as well as affective relations involved in bringing those digital infrastructures into being. We understand that once they have become infrastructure (Zenker et al., 2023), the affective relations we could observe during the creation of the software turn into

Digital Administrative Publics  83 relations between applicants and case workers during its use. In this kind of affective arrangement (Slaby, 2019, p. 109), software users on both ends affect each other less directly, but nonetheless participate in asynchronous, nonpersonal, mediated, administrative publics. While competing with legalistic bureaucratic sentiments, corporate sentiments of market systems are applied to the Federal Portal and BAMF’s social media publics. The Federal Portal, a product of “public administration” and “private company” intermingling, functions according to corporate techniques and not as a social institution (Stivers, 2000), turning our interaction with the state into a web shop experience. Administrative publics, denoting the multiple relations between bureaucrats and (non-​)citizens, is thus an analytical concept referring to the sometimes overt, often subtle, affective and emotional participation of the state in publics. The digital application platform Federal Portal is still a prestructuring frontend to concealed human action. The duration of processing of applications may not decrease, or decrease only slightly through this digitalization, whereas corporate-​looking online forms suggest otherwise, possibly creating a further clash between an Amazon customer expectation and Kafkaesque (non-​)citizen reality. Digital governance is a globally spreading phenomenon and an ideal type to evaluate the performance of a state with possible consequences in relation to, for example, investments. Quantified in such a way, digital administrative publics have international consequences by addressing a yet wider audience. We thus suggest to continue looking at the internals of bureaucracy, but also to follow the development of the new digital administrative publics—​the new digital public charm that the German state is presenting to us. Notes 1 Between September 2020 and March 2022, we spent about 11 months within the BAMF IT department, both physically in Nuremberg and (mostly) digitally in the virtual meeting rooms of the IT workers. This research was funded through and conducted within the framework of SFB 1171, a Collaborative Research Center of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. In particular, we want to thank our colleagues, the two lead investigators of our project, Olaf Zenker and Larissa Vetters, for ongoing support; and the editors of this book, Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-​Rössler, for their detailed feedback. 2 In addition to making decisions about asylum claims, BAMF is responsible for the accreditation, accounting, and, in large parts, the payment of official integration courses. These courses focus mainly on language acquisition and are highly relevant for the legal status of non-​citizens. 3 The precise number of bundles changes regularly (https://​inform​atio​nspl​attf​orm. ozg-​umsetz​ung.de/​). The OAA is undergoing an amendment at the time of writing. A plethora of agencies are involved in the process. For a detailed overview and critique of the complexity of the process, see the official report of Germany’s national council for impact assessment (Normenkontrollrat, 2020).

84  Timm Sureau and Thomas Götzelmann 4 Our case is situated in Germany. Although with the introduction of new public management (Schröter, 2019, pp. 115–​119) some ideas have made their way from the USA to Europe, German administration has nonetheless its own history (Seibel, 2017) that sometimes bears similarities. Writing on European forest administration, Scott (1998, pp. 11–​22) described how Prussian forest administrators, driven by a logic of exploitation, created a unifocal view of forests as timber production and revenue. “Missing” in this fiscal logic, as Scott (1998, p. 12) wrote, were all sorts of other economic, social, technical, religious and mystical, and ecological relationships. 5 A Google search with Safari Browser’s “private browsing” mode from the university’s IP address, July 1, 2022. Non-​German IP addresses yielded more results unrelated to the German federal office. Changing search engines and browsers did not significantly change the results. 6 The Instagram “location” is a page referencing a geographical location that other users can tag and add images to, while no user “owns” the page. 7 A digitalization steering committee between the federal and the state levels. 8 Nudging is also widely debated as a way “to exploit imperfections in human judgement and to this extent it is manipulative,” meaning that affective dimensions of decision-​making are abused (Goodwin, 2012, p. 86). A number of researchers (Alemanno & Spina, 2014; Bartke et al., 2014; Kemmerer et al., 2016; van Aaken, 2015) have raised concerns about the role it can play in the context of democracies and constitutional rights and how paternalistic it is compared to prohibitions. 9 “Special characters” within the Latin alphabet that are not all present on a standard German-​language computer keyboard, yet are often part of the (transliteration) of applicant’s names. 10 As a side note, this also opens up the question whether applicants will actually click through life situations and use the search algorithm of the Federal Portal or just use Google to get to respective forms directly. 11 A possible future messaging feature has been discussed in the meetings we attended, the implementation of such a feature was never fully confirmed however and requests for additional documentation are sent via letter.

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Part II

Networks

6 (Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-​19 The Emergence of a Hemispheric Affective Counterpublic Ulla D. Berg In March 2020, an interdisciplinary group of scholar activists from Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America convened online to discuss the rapidly mutating forms of mobility and migration control in the Americas at the onset of the pandemic. Participants were motivated by a shared sense of urgency to stay informed and to act as we witnessed COVID-​19 become the main pretext for incremental migratory restrictions and increasing state violence against migrants in the region. Upon collective deliberation over how we could best use our creative and intellectual energies toward information sharing and collective and/​or “connective action” (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012), a network consisting of 45 researchers from 19 different countries was formed. While the initial impetus was a modest attempt to share updates about the migrant condition in the Americas during the COVID-​19 pandemic within a transnational network of scholar activists, the resulting product was a trilingual, transnational, and transdisciplinary public digital humanities project, (Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-​19 (hereinafter (Im)Mobility), that, through different formats and the integration of various platforms, sought to describe, analyze, and digitally archive information about migrant mobilities and border regimes in the Americas.1 This online archive is the outcome of multiple transdisciplinary and cross-​cultural collaborations, some carried out within the context of the nationally based nodas (nodes) that made up the basic units of the network; others, hemispheric in scope, connecting scholar and migrant activists across the Americas. This chapter analyzes the emergence and development of the (Im)Mobility project as a networked and affective hemispheric public formation defined by the sharing of information and articulated through affect, care, and a search for solidarity with migrant populations and communities during a public health crisis. I begin the chapter by describing the characteristics of the network format that generated this transnational counterpublic and the affective contours of its development and transformation. Drawing on Papacharissi’s (2015) seminal theorizing on affective publics and subsequent scholarly work on related concepts (Lünenborg, 2019; Röttger-​Rössler & Slaby, 2018; Slaby & von Scheve, 2019; Zink, 2019), I examine how the initiative emerged DOI: 10.4324/9781003365426-8

90  Ulla D. Berg from shared feelings of indignation and outrage over state and government treatment of migrant and refugee populations during the COVID-​19 pandemic, and how this led a continuously expanding group of people across the Americas to not only share information but also feel a way into this dramatic historical moment and act upon it. Second, I examine in more detail a centerpiece of the project, the Polyphonic Map, that contains the digitally archived voices of migrants collected through WhatsApp between July 2020 and January 2021 and is organized geographically across a two-​dimensional hemispheric map. Inspired by the Latin American tradition of testimonio as well as its Black/​Chicanx/​Latinx reworkings (Anzaldúa, 1987; Delgado Bernal et al., 2012), these digitally recorded testimonies portray in short, mostly 5-​min segments the daily experiences of (im)mobility from various latitudes on the continent including how migrants face the risk of contagion; navigate encounters with state bureaucracy; and experience unemployment, xenophobia, and gendered and sexual violence whether in their communities or in transit through the region’s many migration corridors. These audio testimonies illustrate how migrants’ vital struggles unfold between solidarity and resilience. Finally, the chapter concludes with a brief reflection on the temporality of affective publics, especially Papacharissi’s (2015) observation that “networks are only as active as the information flowing through them” (p. 126). The insights that affective networked publics often lack a stable and long-​lasting structure and that they are at once “fluid, unstable, fragile, and dynamic” (Lünenborg, 2019, p. 322) invite the following questions: What becomes of affective publics beyond their digital footprints? And what are the afterlife and future potentialities of digital humanities archives such as (Im)Mobility, and of the affectively constituted transnational community of scholar activists that emerged through its production? These questions can best be answered through an understanding of publics and counterpublics as performative, processual, and thus affective (Lünenborg, 2019; Röttger-​Rössler & Slaby, 2018). While it is too soon to tell how the many translocal and transnational collaborative efforts within the network will grow, mutate, and continue to unfold over the coming years beyond its articulation during a moment of crisis, the (Im)Mobility network opened the door to an ongoing potential for dialogue, collaboration, solidarity, and relations of empathy and care that exceeds its own social basis to constitute what is our object of interest here: a hemispheric counterpublic that is performative, processual, and affective. The Affective Contours of a Hemispheric Network When the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020, declared the novel coronavirus to be a global pandemic, governments all over the world started closing their borders in attempts to contain the virus. By

(Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-19  91 mid-​March, most countries in the Americas (except Mexico) had declared a public health emergency, closed their borders, and adopted a series of exceptional measures to immobilize entire populations under more or less severely enforced lockdowns. The rapid onset of the pandemic and state responses to it, including border closures, caught thousands of migrants in transit through various of the continent’s migration corridors; asylum seekers and refugees in the middle of unfinished proceedings; and thousands of migrants locked up in detention centers, awaiting deportation or hoping for relief in their immigration cases (Espinoza et al., 2020). The pandemic also turned hundreds of thousands of precarious migrant workers into “essential workers” overnight—​however, most with no access to health insurance, personal protective equipment (PPE), or added economic incentives for their efforts in keeping their host societies afloat. As all of this unfolded in real time, a group of migration scholars and activists from different parts of the continent began to consider how the exceptional measures to control mobility enforced in the name of a public health emergency could possibly exacerbate enduring forms of exclusion, racism, and hyper-​nationalism by perpetuating the image of the foreigner as the quintessential embodiment of contagion, a common construction that ignited different forms of xenophobic, racial, and gender violence toward noncitizen outsiders. We understood the specific promise that state-​imposed immobility in the form of lockdowns held to contain the spread of the virus, but we were also collectively alarmed by the imminent risk of a direct and violent impact on the lives of thousands of people on the move and in various kinds of legal limbos across the continent. Each of us knew (aspects of) the conditions for migrants in our own local and national contexts, but few had detailed information about elsewhere in the region. We convened in this way with the intention of mapping the conditions and predicaments for migrants on the move during COVID-​19, sharing information, and engaging in collective and connective action. (Im)Mobility, like any other current formations of affectively constituted publics, must be analyzed in its temporal emergence and formation. The network began as a series of conversations initiated by Ecuadorian cultural geographer Soledad Álvarez Velasco with myself and a small group of migration scholar colleagues and friends from different countries in the Americas motivated to address the multiple crises affecting migrants and refugee populations during COVID-​19. Soon the project took off to become a large and far-​reaching transregional network with over 70 committed participants working in groups (nodas) across 21 different jurisdictions (Álvarez Velasco & Berg, 2021). Its growth was fueled by shared feelings of outrage and social indignation among scholar activists over the predicament of migrant and refugee populations during an unprecedented public health emergency, and by a sense of imposed isolation at home limiting the access to our usual field sites and to our in-​person scholarly and activist communities. The network idea was adopted especially quickly by scholar activists who already had an

92  Ulla D. Berg affective disposition to be alarmed and angry about excessive state control and treatment of migrants under various COVID-​19 exceptional politics and felt the need to raise awareness, call out, and act on what we witnessed. Some participants knew each other to begin with; others did not, or knew only a few people; and soon this emergent “affective community” (Zink, 2019) kept growing to engage different communities of migrants, scholars, and activists across the region, many unbeknownst to each other. As Warner (2005) reminds us: “A public is always in excess of its known social basis. It must be more than a list of one’s friends. It must include strangers” (p. 74). As a newly constituted transnational network organizing online events and coordinating the sharing of information via our newly established website (www. inmo​vili​dada​meri​cas.org), (Im)Mobility thus lacked the bounded totality of a known audience in a circumscribed and known space. The network had become more than just a community or a collection of people; it had turned into an affectively mediated public brought into being by our online events and later sustained by ongoing contributions to the project’s online archive and its circulation. Organized in nationally based nodes, this basic unit of the network counted on the participation of between 3 and 13 people in each node who met on their own time and coordinated their work as they saw best depending on the sources and resources available.2 Some participants were tenured or contingent faculty at universities; others were graduate students; and yet others were journalists, writers, or activists. The overall decentralized nature of the network allowed for maximum creativity and a deep sense of co-​ownership of the online archive among the network members. We were also lucky to count on the participation of a group of undergraduate students from the Universidad Central del Ecuador under the coordination of Maria Mercedes Eguiguren who did their research practicum with different nodes (Álvarez Velasco et al., 2021). The nodes generated most of the content for what would become a larger trilingual digital humanities project created with WIX, an easy-​to-​use cloud-​based website builder. A small central coordinating team that included Soledad Álvarez Velasco and myself met weekly, biweekly, or as needed to organize or disseminate new proposals for public events, facilitate communication with and between the nodes, coordinate translations of materials, and make curatorial and time management decisions with our web designer for moving new content online. Much of this labor happened “behind the scenes” to maintain and grow the online archive. Many scholars have pondered the role of technologies and their affordances in creating and sustaining new publics or counterpublics in the context of the network society (cf. Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; boyd, 2011; Papacharissi, 2015; Warner, 2005). These publics are typically organized around issues or events rather than preexisting social groups, and they are formed and transformed via dynamic networks of communication and social connectivity (Rambukkana, 2015). While (Im)Mobility did build on preexisting social relations in the initial phase of the network, it was actualized as an

(Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-19  93 emergent counterpublic of the networked, digital, and mobile technology era through different formats and the integration of various platforms that came together to describe, analyze, and digitally archive information about migrant mobilities and border regimes in the Americas. As a collective, we organized the following four digital interventions: (1) country-​specific reports on the condition of migrants and refugees during COVID-​19 based mainly on the cataloguing and analysis of newspaper articles and other secondary sources; (2) conversatorios/​panel discussions and migrants’ assemblies held on Zoom, streamed on our YouTube channel and via Facebook Live, and recorded for archiving purposes; (3) a polyphonic mapping project featuring migrant voices collected via WhatsApp audio either by scholars or submitted by migrants themselves; and finally, (4) a general timeline of COVID-​19 (im)mobilities in the Americas providing a visualization of the important timestamps of the period.3 In each of these interventions, we documented (1) state measures; (2) risk situations faced by different categories of migrants including internally displaced persons, deportees, detainees, asylum seekers, refugees, irregularized migrants, and children or adolescents; and (3) the social and collective responses in each of the national spaces including solidarity among migrants and the communities they formed or interacted with during transit. The highlights of our activities in community were the conversatorios (conversations/​ talks) and migrant assemblies. The ideas for the conversatorios were generated in a decentralized, bottom-​up, and mostly ad hoc fashion. For the first half-​year of the network’s existence, we organized at least one conversatorio a month (sometimes more) in which members of the network or invited guests spoke about the migrant condition in their local or national context or offered broader regional analysis to understand structural issues affecting people on the move across locations. Our initial aim was to organize a conversatorio for each of the 11 common scenarios that we had identified transversally as impacting migrants across the region. These transversal themes included the closing of borders, the surge of hyper-​nationalisms, violence against migrants, irregularization, the suspension of the right to asylum, the production of fear, spaces of confinement, migrant childhoods, and reverse migrations. Other conversatorios focused on analyzing in depth the social reality in one particular country (Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico).4 Some conversatorios were organized as webinars and others as regular Zoom meetings, but all were streamed through our YouTube channel and Facebook Live and recorded for later digital archiving online. The migrant assemblies were, like the Polyphonic Map discussed below, guided by the principle “nothing about migrants without migrants,” and included participation of Latin American migrant populations around the world and extracontinental migrants currently in Latin America. The conversatorios and migrant assemblies were advertised on the network’s website and on social media posted by the network coordinators or by individual

94  Ulla D. Berg network members on their social media platforms. The events targeted network members, students, and anyone interested in learning more about the migrant condition in the Americas during the pandemic. Obviously, there is an element of self-​selection and affective disposition in these target audiences that structure the affective character of this public, in that most participants were already sympathetic toward the plight of migrants during COVID-​19. However, the contrary could also be the case, and the virtual spaces of the conversatorios were indeed vulnerable to xenophobic and racist attacks. On one occasion, we experienced an instance of Zoombombing. This was during our conversatorio about  the first migrant caravan during the pandemic featuring participants from the  caravan along with Honduran journalists and network members from the Mexico and Central America teams. Zoombombing became widespread during the pandemic as more and more business and educational activities went online, and the practice has been described as a new style of online trolling, disruption, and intimidation (Lorenz, 2020) often taking the form of gendered and racialized harassment (Nakamura et al., 2021). Media scholars have recently begun to study how Zoombombing as a social and cultural practice both contributes to and departs from the already existing repertoires of racist, offensive, and unsettling online practices. Some have studied how different online platforms afford the spread of Zoomboombing both as a discourse and as a user practice, including how the Zoombomb as a media object is remediated by its curation and archiving across platforms, for example, in the form of Zoombomb compilations on YouTube, which serves to further qualify its disruptive nature (Elmer et al., 2021). In our case, the disruption took place at the end of a conversatorio preventing one panelist from finishing her presentation and forcing us to cancel the ensuing discussion. Our remedial action was to increase security in subsequent events by using preregistration and password protection of all future Zoom events or offering the conversatorios as Zoom webinars instead. The webinar format is safer and less vulnerable to Zoombombing, but the format also transforms the affective character of events into a more structured and controlled space offering less opportunity for spontaneous sharing in the community. The various practices and forms of civic engagement surrounding the rights of migrants and refugees described above and sustained through networked media can be said, I shall argue, to constitute an affective public. Papacharissi (2015) first introduced this term to describe the fragile, fluid, and transient character of these publics. She defines affective publics as “networked public formations that are mobilized and connected or disconnected through expressions of sentiment” (p. 125). Based on research into the affordances and use of Twitter in the various Arab Spring movements, the Indignados movement in Spain, and the Occupy movement in the United States and globally, Papacharissi summarizes five defining tendencies of affective publics. It is useful to outline these here because they allow us to understand how affective publics materialize discursively through online platforms whose

(Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-19  95 architecture invites and rewards sharing collaboratively curated narratives. Affective publics, Papacharissi (2015) states, (1) materialize uniquely and leave distinct digital footprints (i.e., hashtags); (2) support connective but not necessarily collective action; (3) are powered by affective statements of opinion, facts, or a blend of both enabling distant and diverse publics to “feel their way into politics”; (4) typically produce disruptions of dominant narratives by representing and amplifying visibility for underrepresented viewpoints; and finally (5) have only symbolic impact, semantic agency, and liminal power (pp. 127–​132). These characteristics make affective publics very dynamic, but also unstable and transient. Even if affective publics might have a strong impact on the emergence of political movements leading to revolutions, there is no guarantee per se that they, as emerging arenas of democratic mobilization, can effectively transform established power hierarchies and national or racial orders in any durable way. This is partly because they are based on the voluntary self-​expression of individuals using personal social media rather than citizen and community organizing (cf. Bennet & Segerberg, 2012). Papacharissi thus concludes that media do not make or break revolutions, but they do lend emerging, storytelling publics their own means for feeling their way into the developing event, frequently by making them a part of the developing story. (p. 5) It is important to highlight here that although networked technologies are important to affective publics, they do not determine their form. It is not the technologies and platform themselves that bring about change or enact impact; rather they support expression and social connectivity that can play out differently in diverse cultural contexts. As a networked and affective public, (Im)Mobility was held together by shared storytelling critical of the migrant condition in the Americas as it developed during the COVID-​19 pandemic. Network members engaged in the initial call to participate for a variety of reasons, but during our public assembly commemorating the first anniversary of the project, many expressed that a main driving force to participate had been to feel engaged with pro-​ migrant politics in a time of hyperisolation in which many of us were confined at home and unable to carry out ethnographic research. The overall narrative of the project connected us to each other and made us feel closer together as peers. This rang true even for people who were meeting for the first time. Most network members were scholar activists with significant commitments to pro-​migrant politics and social movements before the pandemic. While some remained more active than others during the first year of the project, the conversatorios online, the collective emails and social media shares, and the widely accessed online archive made us all feel that we were part of the current moment, even if many of us were physically removed from the unfolding of events on the ground. The circulations of accounts of the migrant condition

96  Ulla D. Berg permitted collective meaning-​making and fostered significant feelings of participation and affective belonging among network participants. To better understand the oppositional nature of the initiative, it is appropriate to bring in Warner’s (2005) notion of counterpublics. For Warner, who is interested in queer and other subcultures, a counterpublic is a public defined largely by its tension with a larger bourgeois public sphere. A counterpublic, he says, “enables a horizon of opinion and exchange; its exchanges remain distinct from authority and can have a critical relation to power” (p. 56). By being fundamentally critical and vocal about state violence toward migrants during the global health crisis, (Im)Mobility does the work of speaking truth to power and promoting the idea of migrant personhood, a notion that fundamentally counters the normativity of exclusionary citizenship and conventional political membership. However, as Lünenborg (2019) reminds us, affective publics are not just geared toward the production of solidarity and empathy. In fact, their intensities can fall on either end of a political spectrum including antidemocratic ones (p. 327). For example, antimigrant and nativist publics have also multiplied during the COVID-​19 pandemic using fearmongering and discourses of contagion to target and scapegoat migrant populations and making them responsible for the spread of the virus. Affective counterpublics mobilized through media and social connectivity are not without tensions, conflict, or challenges; nor are these publics necessarily destined for longevity. As a hemispheric network, (Im)Mobility labored hard to bridge a series of conceptual, linguistic, and disciplinary divides. Some challenges were definitional and included a desire to avoid a top-​down framing of the Americas that tends to place the United States as the unequivocal center that dispenses “value” or meaning to the migration journey and to migrant experiences and how they are publicly framed (see Berg, 2015, p. 242). To understand (im)mobilities in the Americas, we had to embrace an understanding of how the actions of people on the move derive meaning from multiple social and historical contexts, many of which are found outside of the United States in countries with dense histories of colonial, imperial, and transnational entanglements. In this sense, the network embraced a hemispheric vision of las Américas (the Americas), one more akin to Martí’s (1910) continental vision of “Nuestra América” [Our America] than to a conventional understanding of the region as a set of independent nation states. Even though political decision-​ making during the pandemic, including COVID-​19 border closures throughout the Americas, relied strongly on the national container model, our approach continued to emphasize transnational and cross-​border connections and what scholars have termed the autonomy of migration—​that is, the ordinary experiences of mobility that centers migrants rather than borders and where movement itself is understood to force the state to generate regulatory responses of control (Mezzadra, 2011; Papadopoulos et al., 2008). A related point can be derived from Fraser’s (2007) critique of the Westphalian frame of public sphere theory (i.e., Habermas, 1989). Fraser

(Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-19  97 argues that the neat correspondence between sovereign territory, language, citizenship, and political community in the Westphalian model cannot account for the transnationalized and networked world in which we live today where the likelihood that a public coincides with a bounded national territory is significantly diminished—​except for perhaps authoritarian states with strict control of media circulation. In transnational public spheres, public opinion become constituted and conveyed increasingly through multilingual global media platforms rather than national communication infrastructures in a single national majority language. (Im)Mobility was from the outset both hemispheric and transnational in scope, and we embraced the complexities that these framings brought before us. Other challenges were practical in nature and reflect the trials of multilingual publics and their digital footprint. While most of the materials in our online archive were originally generated in Spanish, we were committed to translating all project components into English and Portuguese for the benefit of our Brazilian and North American colleagues and for English-​speaking international participants.5 However, because we had only minimal funding available, our efforts were not always comprehensive; and especially the Portuguese section of our web archive lagged behind. Diana Taylor (2010), founder and past director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University, has discussed similar challenges in her work with the Institute, and usefully reminds us of the need to recognize and accept “the deeper truth that we do not know or understand each other in the Americas” (p. 32)—​at least not fully. Despite these challenges, (Im)Mobility was determined to shed light on the predicaments of migrants during the COVID-​19 pandemic in the region. One of the ways we did this was through the polyphonic mapping project. Polyphonic Mapping Affect and global migration intersect in a variety of ways, yet migration scholarship historically has typically not engaged explicitly with or even alluded to affect theory. This is not to say that academic work and other nonfiction work on migration have not been affectively loaded, even when affect is not necessarily identified as a relevant theoretical framework. For instance, de León’s (2015) work on the human consequences of US federal enforcement policy and the objects and bodies left behind in the Sonoran Desert or Luiselli’s (2017) short nonfiction book on unaccompanied child migrants in New York City immigration courts both expose the affective and corporeal workings of xenophobia, nativism, and institutionalized racism and what Slaby and von Scheve (2019) call “the ugly downsides of political affectivity” (p. 23). Furthermore, racialized migrant populations have occupied a central role in the study of emotions long before “the affective turn” (Clough, 2008) in  the humanities and social sciences and especially in ethnopsychiatry and in culturalist/​psychological perspectives on emotions

98  Ulla D. Berg within US anthropology (Berg & Ramos-​Zayas, 2015). Across a wide variety of historical and cultural contexts, the figure of the migrant has been and continues to be publicly cast in decidedly affective and racializing terms. The COVID-​19 pandemic intensified affective constructions of migrants as outsiders and as dangerous threats to public health, safety, and national security. These constructions, in turn, provided ample justification not only for the closing of borders but also for the implementation of a whole host of antimigrant policies such as the controversial Title 42 expulsions from the United States.6 With the (Im)Mobility project, we wanted to reverse such negative affective constructions of migrants as agents of contagion and a threat to public health and national security. We understood that the best way to show how affect and emotion are also vital driving forces in social practice, sociality, and forms of life for people in movement was to hear and amplify the voices of migrants who lived through the pandemic while trying to carry on with their vital projects under precarious but also life-​affirming circumstances. These are the stories that inhabit the Polyphonic Map. The Polyphonic Map is a centerpiece of our online archive and contains the digitally archived voices of migrants plotted geographically across a two-​ dimensional hemispheric map. This audio archive in construction comprises to date more than 69 audio testimonies of migrants of diverse ages, genders, nationalities, ethnic origins, and sexual orientations who describe daily experiences of immobilization, including how they face the risk of contagion, navigate encounters with state bureaucracy and agents of the law, and experience encounters with xenophobia and violence.7 At the same time, these daily struggles are animated by solidarity and resilience and by an overarching sense of “crisis ordinariness,” as Berlant (2008) would put it.8 This format mimics the way that the testimonio genre centers an individual’s life story in relation to a broader collective experience often marked by precarity, inequality, violence, oppression, and struggle, but also by resistance and resilience (cf. Anzaldúa, 1987). It is exactly this relation between the individual story and the larger scale social history that has been at the center of discussions about the efficacy and truth of the testimonio genre. As Lancaster (1999) reminds us: The testimony is convincing, not because it offers a studied, exhaustive analysis of social structures or historical developments, but because it weaves a narrative of discovery as an autobiographical tale: The author comes to the Truth simply by knowing his or her own experiences, by claiming his or her own voice, by possessing his or her self. The appeal of the story is thus based on the authoritative voice of the speaker, who stands as a representative of larger social groups. (p. 4) Lancaster does not consider affect in his discussion of the testimonio genre, but other scholars have analyzed how testimonial images and practices of

(Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-19  99 media witnessing constitute witnessing communities through affect. For example, Richardson and Schankweiler (2019) use the concept of affective witnessing to reference a particular and inherently relational mode of witnessing in which “affect itself is what is witnessed” through the production, consumption, and circulation of images documenting torture and confinement that, in turn, have consequences for the formation of witnessing communities.9 Many of the testimonios collected during the pandemic reveal stories of hardship, lack of access to medical care, and intensifying experiences of xenophobia and discrimination.10 Yera, for example, is a 37-​year-​old Venezuelan migrant living in Quito, Ecuador, with her partner who is also Venezuelan. Both are members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersexual (LGBTI) community. Yera shared her story via WhatsApp with the (Im) Mobility project: It has been very difficult. Not only because of the pandemic, but because we are Venezuelans and because we are LGBTI. This has made it more difficult to find work, to have stability, and generate income to pay basic services. In the beginning, we worked independently or in transitional jobs, but when people realized that we were part of the LGBTI community, the mistreatments started, the discrimination, the finger-​pointing at how we live our lives. But it shouldn’t be important if we live with one lifestyle or the other, as long as we do things correctly … The pandemic worsened our situation. My partner got sick from being far away from our country, alone, and feeling unprotected. We didn’t even have money to buy a simple pill to cure a headache … When the confinement rules were lifted a little, we started to sell food again in the street, but not everyone will buy from you because they are afraid, and we have to accept that. The police and the military are also after you, telling you that you can’t sell in the streets. It is all very stressful. Yera’s testimonio, which can be accessed in full on the Project website (www. inmo​vili​dada​meri​cas.org/​mape​opol​ifon​ico), illustrates the difficulties that she and her partner went through during the pandemic as Venezuelan LGBTI migrants in Quito, Ecuador. Around the same time, far away from Quito, Saul Quitzet Rivera, an Indigenous migrant and activist from Guerrero, Mexico, living in New York City, also contributed a brief audio message in which he talks about the life of undocumented Indigenous migrant workers in New York City during the pandemic. Saul first offers a greeting in his native language Mixteco and then proceeds to share: It has been difficult for me on a personal level, and it has affected our entire community. We are part of a social movement, and we had many plans for activities that we were about to start up. All our plans got cancelled because of the pandemic. It was hard to see all my friends who are undocumented

100  Ulla D. Berg workers lose their jobs and find themselves desperate because of the lack of income, and to lose everything that we had constructed. I also had a family member who was in hospital because of COVID. It was hard for the families both here and in Mexico. Saul’s bilingual testimonio in Mixteco and Spanish, however brief, speaks to both the individual and collective hardship and suffering of migrant workers during COVID-​19, but also to the resilience that Indigenous migrant communities in the United States and elsewhere displayed throughout the pandemic. While Saul’s organization, Ti Toro Miko, had to cancel many of its planned activities, it organized the production of cloth masks that it donated for free to migrant essential workers in New York City. It also organized a fundraiser at which it sold these masks for $5 to support people in the community who had lost their jobs because of the pandemic lockdown.11 The testimonio genre that inspired the polyphonic mapping project has deep roots in Latin American oral cultures and was popularized in the encounters between Latin American social movements and solidarity movements in the United States and Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s (Lancaster, 1999). The testimonio is often facilitated by an outside interlocutor, and this is what makes it different from an autobiography and more similar to an oral history (although oral history does not ask the person giving the testimony to reflect critically on their experience in the context of a broader sociocultural and political reality). According to Lancaster (1999), the goal of the testimonio then is to “didactically convey salient sociological facts to a Northern audience through an exemplary life history, and to thereby solicit moral, political, and economic support for local struggles” (p. 4).12 Other scholars who have also examined the genre have similarly noted that “testimonio is pragmatic in that it engages the reader to understand and establish a sense of solidarity as a first step toward social change” (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012, p. 364). Less has been written about the genre’s affective qualities, including how it uses affect to bridge different lifeworlds mobilizing affective registers in the self-​narration of experience while also inviting affective attunement of its audiences. The Polyphonic Map is an example of how, in its search for solidarity, affect is fully at play in this abbreviated audible form of the testimonio genre. The Polyphonic Map remains the most visited page on the (Im)Mobility website.13 Its diversity of voices thus offers a unique archive of migrant experiences in the Americas during a public health emergency. When analyzed as a whole, it becomes clear that many migrants experienced significant hardship prior to the pandemic, but that pandemic lockdowns and a generalized anxiety about the spread of the virus made migrants more vulnerable to exclusion, institutionalized racism, and xenophobia. The form of the testimonio works to evoke powerful emotions in its listener, thus serving a general consciousness-​building purpose, one that elicits moral and political support for migrant struggles.

(Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-19  101 The Temporality of Affective Publics Temporality is an intrinsic property of affective publics. The sense of urgency that motivated the launch and early development of (Im)Mobility tempered off as societies in the Americas and around the globe grew into a new normal. As a result, the project entered a different moment mobilizing different modalities of affective intensity. The frequency of public events produced by the network is lower now than it was at the height of its most productive phase (March 2020–​June 2021). The country reports are no longer updated periodically by the nodes, but remain as documentation, alongside video recordings of all conversatorios and migrant assemblies, of the impact of COVID-​19 on migrant populations and communities at a particular historical moment in the Americas. This decreasing intensity of online activities has led to a shift in format: The affective public has turned into an affective archive. The reasons for this shift are manifold, but a brief reference to scholarly observations about the dynamic but also transient and fleeting character of affective publics is in place here. For one, the Zoom fatigue and burnout of the COVID-​19 pandemic is real, whether on the home and family front (Griffith, 2020) or in educational and work settings (Nesher Shoshan & Wehrt, 2021; Pressley, 2021). The existential gasoline that many network members fired on high at the beginning of our COVID-​19 confinements was eventually spent down to critical levels. We also experienced our fair share of organizational and practical challenges. Not all parts of our multimedia platforms/​strategy were dynamic or resourced enough to support the high-​pace content generation by the nodes. For instance, the country reports were based on analyses of media reports collected by members of the nodes during 3-​month intervals. While it was easy for any member of a given node to gather news articles and log them into our Google database, the analysis and summary of the events of a given period had to be done separately, prepared for upload, and translated. This was a very time-​consuming backstage labor that, at times, prevented us from being effective in amplifying the reach of these country-​ specific overviews. Other aspects of the project achieved better immediate impact, for example, the conversatorios that garnered hundreds of audience members and participants. The network did not have its own Facebook or Twitter handle until April 2021 and relied on community groups and individual network members to circulate event posters, announcements, and infographics via their own private or institutional social media accounts. Acting earlier on securing a more solid social media presence could possibly have intensified the sharing and visibility of our materials across a variety of platforms and achieved a greater impact. Another reason for the ephemerality of the initiative had to do with the lack of long-​term funding structures. The project had only minimal funding from Rutgers University and from the CLACSO Working Group on Borders: Mobilities, Identities and Trades (“Fronteras: Movilidades, Identidades

102  Ulla D. Berg y Comercios” and most of our work including translation of content was made with little or no financial support. While the project never officially finished, the participation of members fluctuated from more intense to less intense over time. In its later stages, the focus of participants moved away from generating new content toward analyzing the wealth of information collected during the first phases of the project and reflecting on the process itself. The (Im)Mobility project is therefore a good example of a collaboratively generated archive in which social scientists and affected populations jointly produce data material that, on the one hand, enables future analyses and, on the other hand, allows for ongoing expansions in the sense of a living archive. The (Im)Mobility project has left a visible digital footprint and an affective archive of migrant experiences during the COVID-​19 pandemic. But more importantly, it opened an affective space for cross-​ cultural, transdisciplinary, transborder, dialogue across the Americas. The afterlife and future potentialities of digital humanities archives such as (Im)Mobility are yet to be seen, but the affectively constituted transnational community of scholar activists that gave rise to this transnational and hemispheric counterpublic is alive and well. In May 2021, we inaugurated a series with the online journal Revista Común that featured co-​authored op-​eds and chronicles by network members. In the first intervention of the series, three network members characterized our predicaments as pandemic scholars in the following way: Although the pandemic has weakened our face-​to-​face presence and ties, this time of confinement brought us together, weaved us into a network, turned us into an assembly of chroniclers, defenders, and protagonists of migration. (Varela Huerta et al., 2021) This inspired call for action should be understood as a form of affective activism and care for migrants by scholar activists who work in solidarity to amplify the concerns of migrant and refugee communities, denounce systemic violent abuse of people in conditions of (im)mobility, and push for radical change toward abolishing inhumane regulations on human mobilities. Notes 1 See www.inmo​vili​dada​meri​cas.org. 2 The Mexico team started to use the term “nodas” in Spanish, and the overall project adapted this term. Most of the nodas corresponded to a single country, but some to a region or cluster of countries (e.g., Central America and the Caribbean). See the “Who are we” tab: www.inmo​vili​dada​meri​cas.org/​quie​nes-​somos 3 The timeline was coordinated mainly by Mónica Salmón-​Gómez. Additionally, a specific timeline highlighting the most important timestamps in the evolving

(Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-19  103

4

5

6

7 8

relationship between mobility and control in Mexico during COVID-​19 was developed by Noda Mexico. The conversatorios also included a Spanish-​language launch of the (Im)Mobility project livestreamed by CLACSO; an English-​language launch livestreamed by Rutgers University; and a Portuguese-​language panel focusing on migrants and Covid in Brazil; three research panels with students from the Central University of Ecuador; and two migrant assemblies including one focusing specifically on migrant women. Our group is well aware that all three are colonial languages historically imposed from outside the region. Although desirable, it would be a near impossible task for a largely unfunded project to even contemplate the translation of materials into some of the major Indigenous languages of the region’s migrant-​sending communities. Title 42 is an until recently little-​known provision of the US Public Health Service Act of 1944 designed to prevent the spread of communicable diseases into the United States. It came to the public’s attention in March 2020 when the Trump administration invoked it to turn away asylum seekers from the US–​Mexico border despite the objections of CDC scientists who said there was no evidence that targeting asylum seekers would slow the virus’s spread in the US. Since the onset of the pandemic, the US government has carried out over 1.8 million expulsions under Title 42 (American Immigration Council, 2022). Although the work on this project is collective, I want to specifically acknowledge the central role of Iréri Ceja (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro-​UFRJ) in curating and coordinating the testimonies uploaded to the Polyphonic Map. Berlant (2008, p. 5) states: ‘Crisis ordinariness’ is my preferred way of talking about traumas of the social that are lived through collectively and that transform the sensorium to a heightened perspectiveness about the unfolding of the historical, and sometimes historic, moment (and sometimes publics organized around those senses, when experienced collectively).

9 Although Richardson and Schankweiler’s (2019) analysis is based on a variety of what they call “testimonial images”—​lumping together photographs from Abu Ghraib and selfie protest images that respond to conditions for prisoners in postrevolutionary Egypt—​their point on the affective nature of witnessing is well taken. 10 The testimonios were recorded by migrants themselves as WhatsApp audio messages sent to us or facilitated by researchers in specific sites. Most of the testimonios appear under pseudonyms, except in cases in which participants insisted that their real names and sometimes also photos be included. 11 See announcement on Ti Toro Miko’s Facebook Page: www.faceb​ook.com/​FAS​ HTIT​OROM​IKO2​018 12 The most famous and widely circulated example of the testimonio genre is perhaps Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú Tum’s testimonio transcribed and edited by the Venezuelan anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos (1985). 13 Performance data from WIX, the cloud-​based service that hosts the (Im)Mobilities website, show that our site averages 2,700 unique site visits per month, and more than 25,000 total visits in the first year of the project’s existence.

104  Ulla D. Berg References Álvarez Velasco, S., Berg, U. D., & Eguiguren, M. M. (2021, June 25). La dimención pedagógica del Proyecto (In)Movilidades en las Américas y COVID-​ 19. Blog Migraciones a Debate, Museo da Imigração do Estado de São Paulo. http://​museu​ daim​igra​cao.org.br/​es/​blog/​migr​acio​nes-​a-​deb​ate American Immigration Council. (2022). A guide to Title 42 expulsions at the border. www.ame​rica​nimm​igra​tion​coun​cil.org/​resea​rch/​guide-​title-​42-​exp​ulsi​ons-​bor​der Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/​La frontera: The new mestiza. Aunt Lute Books. Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg, A. (2012). The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 739–​768. Berg, U. D. (2015). Mobile selves: Race, migration, and belonging in Peru and the US. NYU Press. Berg, U. D., & Ramos-​Zayas, A. Y. (2015). Racializing affect: A theoretical proposition. Current Anthropology, 56(5), 654–​677. Berlant, L. (2008). Thinking about feeling historical. Emotion, Space, and Society, 1(10), 4–​8. Bonilla, Y., & Rosa, J. (2015). #Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States. American Ethnologist, 42(1), 4–​17. boyd, d. (2011). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A networked self: Identity, community and culture on social network sites (pp. 39–​57). Routledge. Burgos, E. (1985). Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia. Siglo Veintinuo Editores. Clough, P. T. (2008). The affective turn: Political economy, biomedia and bodies. Theory, Culture & Society, 25(1), 1–​22. de León, J. (2015). The land of open graves: Living and dying on the migrant trail. University of California Press. Delgado Bernal, D., Burciaga, R., & Flores Carmona, J. (2012). Chicana/​Latina testimonios: Mapping the methodological, pedagogical, and political. Equity and Excellence in Education, 45(3), 363–​372. Elmer, G., Neville, S. J., Burton, A., & Ward-​Kimola, S. (2021). Zoombombing during a global pandemic. Social Media +​Society, 7(3), 1–​12. Espinoza, M. V., Zapata, G. P., & Gandini, L. (2020, May 26). Mobility in immobility: Latin American migrants trapped amid COVID-​19. Open Democracy. www. opende​mocr​acy.net/​en/​democr​acia​abie​rta/​mobil​ity-​imm​obil​ity-​latin-​ameri​can-​ migra​nts-​trap​ped-​amid-​covid-​19/​ Fraser, N. (2007). Transnational public sphere. Transnationalizing the public sphere: On the legitimacy and efficacy of public opinion in a post-​Westphalian world. Theory, Culture & Society, 24(4), 7–​30. Griffith, A. K. (2020). Parental burnout and child maltreatment during the COVID-​ 19 pandemic. Journal of Family Violence, 37, 725–​731. Habermas, J. (1989). The public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Polity Press. Lancaster, R. N. (1999). Rigoberta’s testimonio. NACLA Report on the Americas, 32(6), 4–​47.

(Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-19  105 Lorenz, T. (2020, March 20). “Zoombombing”: When video conferences go wrong. The New York Times. www.nyti​mes.com/​2020/​03/​20/​style/​zoom​bomb​ing-​zoom-​ troll​ing.html Luiselli, V. (2017). Tell me how it ends: An essay in 40 questions. Coffee House Press. Lünenborg, M. (2019). Affective publics. In J. Slaby & C. von Scheve (Eds.), Affective societies: Key concepts (pp. 319–​329). Routledge. Martí, J. (1910). Nuestra América (Vol. 2). Imprenta y papelería de Rambla y Bouza. Mezzadra, S. (2011). The gaze of autonomy: Capitalism, migration, and social struggles. In V. Squire (Ed.), The contested politics of mobility: Borderzones and irregularity (pp. 121–​142). Routledge. Nakamura, L., Stiverson, H., & Lindsey, K. (2021). Racist zoombombing. Routledge. Nesher Shoshan, H., & Wehrt, W. (2021). Understanding “zoom fatigue”: A mixed-​ method approach. Applied Psychology, 71(3), 827–​852. https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​ apps.12360 Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. Oxford University Press. Papadopoulos. D., Stephenson, N., & Tsianos, V. (2008). Escape routes: Control and subversion in the twenty-​first century. Pluto Press. Pressley, T. (2021). Factors contributing to teacher burnout during COVID-​ 19. Educational Researcher, 50(5), 325–​327. Rambukkana, N. (Ed.). (2015). Hashtag publics: The power and politics of discursive networks (Digital Formations, Vol. 103). Peter Lang. Richardson, M., & Schankweiler, K. (2019). Affective witnessing. In J. Slaby & C. von Scheve (Eds.), Affective societies: Key concepts (pp. 166–​177). Routledge. Röttger-​Rössler, B., & Slaby, J. (2018). Affect in relation: Families, places, technologies. Routledge. Slaby, J., & von Scheve, C. (Eds.). (2019). Affective societies: Key concepts. Routledge. Taylor, D. (2010). The many lives of performance: The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. In J. McKenzie, H. Roms, & C. Wee (Eds.), Contesting performance: Global sites of research (pp. 25–​36). Palgrave MacMillan. Varela Huerta, A., Álvarez Velasco, S., & Castillo, G. (2021, May 12). Las Américas: Continente de movilidades, migrantes y controles, en el contexto de la pandemia. Revista Común. https://​revis​taco​mun.com/​blog/​inmo​vili​dad-​en-​las-​ ameri​cas-​prese​ntac​ion Warner, M. (2005). Publics and counterpublics. Zone Books. Zink, V. (2019). Affective communities. In J. Slaby & C. von Scheve (Eds.), Affective societies: Key concepts (pp. 289–​299). Routledge.

7 Women Activists Imaged through Social Media Publics The “Feisty Dadis of Shaheen Bagh” as Political Subjects1 Radhika Gajjala, Anna DeGalan, Debipreeta Rahut, Syeda Zainab Akbar, and Jhalak Jain In 2020, the magazine Time featured a woman from Shaheen Bagh, Delhi—​ Bilkis—​“an 82-​year-​old who would sit at a protest site from 8 a.m. to midnight” as one of “the 100 most influential people of 2020” (Ayyub, 2020, para 1). Her images contributed significantly to the popularizing of the “dadis of Shaheen Bagh” [grandmothers of Shaheen Bagh]. Shaheen Bagh is a mostly Muslim working-​class neighborhood in South Delhi that became known internationally during the 2019–​2020 protests against the passing of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Registry of Citizens (NRC) in India. In this chapter, we consider how older Indian Muslim “subaltern” women came to signify nonviolent, caring protestors in social-​media-​based communicative publics. To this end, we have examined Twitter and Instagram archives from December 2019 to March 2020. We focus particularly on how affective sympathies for the older women activists were produced through imagery and text via social media. The visual imagery of the dadis at the protest site in Delhi came to symbolize care at home (ghar). Their sit-​in protest embodies their focus on the family. In what follows, we contrast gharelu (of the house) with bahir (outside the house). We also argue that Bilkis’ peaceful sit-​in imagery affectively resonates that of Kasturba Gandhi, thus invoking the Gandhian women who came out (bahir) to safeguard their home against the colonizers during India’s freedom movement. Our interest in unpacking these strategies is to highlight emerging practices in using social media to produce affective flows. This chapter should not be confused with reports or academic research about “what actually happened,” and it does not claim to be about the on-​site functioning of the activists, even though the interviews conducted do provide evidence of some on-​site events. The activists on-​site ultimately have put their bodies on the line, and we acknowledge and respect their labor and struggle. In the following, we briefly explain the political context and then describe our methods. The chapter is then divided into three sections: The first section DOI: 10.4324/9781003365426-9

Women Activists Imaged through Social Media Publics  107 lays the theoretical foundations for the discussion and comparative visual analysis. This is detailed in the second section in order to show how the images of the dadis of Shaheen Bagh resonate with images of the wife of the Indian freedom fighter M. K. Gandhi. In the last section, we examine how pro-​Modi Twitter users define an inspiring woman and then examine how the dadis of Shaheen Bagh were represented as inspiring women. Finally, we wrap up our overall argument about the importance of the production of affective intensities in the conclusion. The Political Context The CAA and NRC are policies passed by the Indian government in December 2019. The CAA–​NRC triggered protests in India, abroad, and on social media platforms. Salam (2020) describes how Indian citizenship laws have been amended over the years. In general, anyone born in India is automatically given citizenship. But due to allegedly illegal migration from Bangladesh into Assam and other northeastern states of India, citizenship laws were modified. In order to stop the recognition of any illegal migrants as citizens of India, the new laws stated that both parents should be Indian. This led to the creation of the National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC) that was later developed into the NRC to identify illegal citizens. When doing this, the government proposed preparing a National Population Register (NPR) that would help identify people who are not actual citizens from a list of all citizens in the country. Because anyone could come forward and help the government identify unlawful citizens, this would risk communal targeting of people. Anyone unable to produce the required citizenship documents for the NRC would be considered a refugee. Many Indians, however, felt it would be difficult to get the required documents to prove their citizenship. Poor Muslims, for instance, might find themselves in detention centers or be denied citizenship based on religion. Thus, the policy was seen as going against the ethos of the Indian Constitution that guarantees equality and nondiscrimination to people on the basis of religion. Methods Because we were using computational tools to collect comparatively large datasets, which are part of “big social data” in digital publics, we relied on the availability of Twitter developer access that allowed us to scrape thousands of tweets via Netlytic and Gephi. Thus, following the work of scholars such as Papacharissi (2015), Bruns and Burgess (2015), and Jackson et al. (2020), we examined networked and visualized Twitter data. We collected data from three key hashtags: #womenofshaheenbagh, #sheinspiresus, and #shaheenbaghprotests. One of the time periods we focused on covered responses to an International Women’s Day announcement made on Twitter in March 2020 by the Indian Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi. He

108  Radhika Gajjala et al. announced that he would hand over his Twitter handle to seven inspiring women on this day. Later in fall 2022, we downloaded historical data with these hashtags as well. Key methods guiding our work are interdisciplinary. Following the precedent set by scholars such as Jackson et al. (2020) we started by transferring “online counterpublics into networked data” in order to “understand their dynamic and interdependent properties while also narrowing an overwhelming volume of data to a manageable size” (p. 27). This was followed by a close reading of images and texts. In 2020, we did not yet have academic researcher developer access at Twitter. Therefore, we used the Twitter streamer plug-​in available in the open-​source software Gephi to scrape the data. We scraped each of the Twitter hashtags for about an hour each day in the month of March 2020. At that time, Twitter data were also collected via Netlytic. On Netlytic, we set the system to collect tweets around each of the hashtags mentioned for 62 days each. Our findings revealed a cross-​referencing of the hashtags #shaheenbaghprotests, #dadisofshaheenbagh, #womenofshaheenbagh, and #shaheenbaghdadis. Overall, we were able to conduct a content and a network analysis. In order to get a full-​scale reading of what was happening, we needed to look not only at who was saying something and to whom, but also at what they were saying and how they were connecting with the larger conversation. This allowed us to do both a close reading and a distant reading of the data. In this chapter, we focus on some of the images from the larger datasets and privilege the close readings of select visual and textual data. Nonetheless, the visualizations and network analysis tools gave us an understanding of the fluid and relational nature of affective flows that actually or potentially compelled action on the part of various actors. For example, network analysis was able to show us who was talking to whom and how communication and ideas spread across the internet and the world. We were able to trace the “nodes” (the people involved) and the “edges” (how they connect to each other). For example, by following #womenofshaheenbagh, we were able to follow the edges back to South Asian Students against Fascism-​UK, a UK group dedicated to getting the hashtag trending. Once we discovered the SASAF-​UK group, Gephi allowed us to filter and cluster the nodes to see how they connected to other nodes, and to see who the significant voices were among this group. Our work here revealed that the digital space was its own sociocultural environment with its own particular nuances and power dynamics. Several transnational groups that we found did not have a physical grounding with the Shaheen Bagh protestors, but they did have a digital connection that brought attention to the women on the ground. D’Ignazio and Klein (2020) argue that the context is an important part of data, and that it helps us to understand “how the power and privilege that contributed to their making may be obscuring the truth” (p. 153). Merely studying the hashtags and the network does not tell the larger story. Therefore,

Women Activists Imaged through Social Media Publics  109 we also carried out over 30 unstructured interviews with transnational and local activists as well as with social media influencers who did not identify as activists. Interviews were conducted intermittently from December 2019 to September 2021. Some of the interviews were conducted in person by members of our research team; others were conducted online and lasted for a minimum of half an hour and a maximum of an hour and a half. Examining multiple forms of data and immersing ourselves in the digital protest space required not only multiple readings of data but also a commitment to self-​ reflexivity within the research process as feminist scholars (Leurs, 2017). While we engaged with data analytic tools to track this transnational, digital protest, we emphasize our theoretical commitment to feminist approaches to data that privilege partiality, subjectivity, and the situated, embodied quality of knowledge (Haraway, 1988). More recently, feminist scholars have reaffirmed these principles in the age of big data (D’Ignazio, 2015; Klein, 2014; Leurs, 2017; Rettberg, 2020). The next section discusses women as political subjects in India in order to set the stage for drawing a comparison between the 1930s Indian freedom struggle and the strategy of highlighting older subaltern women. We start with the role of Indian women as political subjects within the public and private sphere. Women in India as Political Subjects: Nuancing the Public and the Private In order to unpack the affective attuning (Papacharissi, 2015) of this digital public visibility, we first need to lay out the larger context for the (im)possibility of women as political subjects in contemporary Indian publics. In this section, we review these issues starting with how the ghar–​bahir binary shapes political access. The ghar–​bahir binary is the Indian form of distinguishing between the private and the public. This dichotomy is drawn from Tagore’s work (1916/​1985). His novel Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) narrates the struggle of an upper-​caste female protagonist who dares to step out of her husband’s home (ghar) to partake in India’s freedom movement outside of the home (bahir). The Indian nationalist movement also drew from this binary to demarcate the struggles between self-​rule of India and colonial rule of India with swadesh (of one’s own country) as ghar and the British colonizers as those from bahir. The binary, however, has its root in patriarchal assumptions, and it reasserts the private as a space implicitly for those considered upper-​caste and middle-​to upper-​class women. Being outside of the home—​in public—​was considered unsafe for these women. Ironically, even the Indian women’s movement implicitly adopted this binary by focusing only on activism in public—​conducted outside (bahir) of the domestic (ghar) and often led by dominant caste-​privileged women, henceforth referred to as “Savarna castes” (Deo, 2016; Gajjala, 2019).

110  Radhika Gajjala et al. As Deo (2016) points out, Indian women are constructed as political subjects through their relationship to the state, their social class and caste, and their relationship with their families and their religious community. Their ability to exercise political agency becomes possible or constrained through the history of the Indian women’s movements, the history of state legislation, and the definition of secularism and religious freedom in India. Women from historically oppressed locations—​such as those from Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi locations and from working-​class rural and urban poor locations—​ have had different challenges in accessing political publics in their struggle for justice. Women from minority (non-​Hindu) religions in India, in turn, have had their own unique challenges. For instance, the role of women in the Indian nationalist movement was considered to be the maintenance of the so-​called Indian culture in the home–​ family–​community setting. “Indian culture” here is defined through Savarna caste and Hindu lenses. This placement of women’s role in the nationalist movement also helped the male-​centric nationalist movement to engage with the “women’s question” by allowing women access to education while still defining their political participation as the work they do in the home. The concepts of private–​public, home and the world, ghar–​bahir (Bhattacharjee, 1992; Chatterjee, 1989) were mobilized while reinforcing the woman’s place as within the home. Yet as some feminist scholars note, this manner of resolving the “women’s problem” was limited to the dominant caste and mostly middle-​class society (Paik, 2014; Rege, 2006). The ghar–​bahir framework was taken up differently depending on the social class and caste location of the women concerned. Upon looking at efforts by social reformers and nationalist leaders from Dalit and Bahujan backgrounds, for instance, we see that the postcolonial feminist reliance on the simplistic articulation of how women’s role in nation building was resolved allowed for a tunnel vision that reproduces spatial private–​public binaries of liberal feminism (as we see in Chatterjee, 1989). Savarna-​caste Hindu women are placed in a hierarchy in which they are the keepers of national culture at home. This serves to limit women’s agency for political participation to the home culture alone. They then become complicit in the marginalization of those who do not conform to the heteronormative Hindu ideals of womanhood and manhood. Scholars such as Rege (2006) and Paik (2014) have critiqued the Indian freedom movements’ (mostly male-​centric) reformist articulation of ghar–​ bahir as being based on dominant-​caste Indian women’s experience. As Paik (2014) notes: Only very recently … have scholars begun to provide a corrective, and [have] produced books devoted to the understanding of the internal dynamics of gender inequalities within Dalit communities in different regions of India. I have argued elsewhere that centering attention on the twice Dalit—​“Dalit women”—​allows for the most inclusive and productive

Women Activists Imaged through Social Media Publics  111 politics, and developing new feminist frameworks and critiques of power structures. (p. 75) Further, as Deo’s (2016) research reveals, the ideal Hindu woman very easily becomes an activist for the Hindutva cause which is a radical hardline version of Hinduism taken up as a political stance that sees India as a “Hindu nation.” To be an activist on behalf of such a Hindu idea does not require a questioning or rejection of the patriarchal structure of the home space. Since carrying forward the Hindu way is to protect “home culture.” Even as she leaves the physical confines of her house to do the work of social reform on behalf of the ideal Hindu nation, she is continuing her work to preserve the ghar. Thus, even their participation in Hindu-​oriented community work as “activists” is seen as “an extension of their domestic piety” (Deo, 2016, p. 32). As Ali (2001) observes, it is indeed the particular manner in which the public sphere has evolved in India under colonial rule and during the national movement and hence the very nature that it has acquired has made it susceptible to the recent advance of Hindutva. (p. 2419) The abilities afforded by mobile gadgets and social media tools further extend opportunities for such a Hindu keeper of culture to build affective networks of transnational connectivity through WhatsApp groups and other forms of digital family spaces (Gajjala & Verma, 2018). This activism can and is done with the body placed in the home. Muslim Women and Their Feminist Consciousness through Digital Communication The analysis above leaves unanswered the questions regarding how Muslim women have been impacted by the Indian nationalist movements. For instance, how have Muslim women in India mobilized as activists? Were Muslim women expected to perform their Indianness in the home space? What constitutes “Indianness” for women of minority religions? These questions are important if we are to foreground the ways in which digital affective publics were deployed strategically to highlight the political agency of the older women of the Muslim community living in the community of Shaheen Bagh in Delhi. During the late 1970s and right into the mid-​1980s, a case centering a Muslim woman in relation to alimony and Muslim religious law (Shariat) took center stage. This was the “Shah Bano case” (Ali, 2001). Shah Bano had filed a criminal suit against her ex-​husband for not providing alimony. The Indian courts ruled that she should be given alimony—​however, there

112  Radhika Gajjala et al. was furor around the judgment and claims were made that it went against Muslim personal laws. The Indian constitutional idea of secularism as revolving around religious freedom in personal and religious community contexts was used as an argument against the ruling. It is said that in a bid to garner Muslim community votes, the Indian Parliament then passed the Muslim Women Act in order to restrict payment of alimony according to interpretations of Islamic Law. According to Ali (2001), this was a result of how the nationalist movement created “an autonomous private sphere.” He further writes that, in fact, the Shah Bano controversy was to actually impart an unparalleled momentum to the emerging politics of Hindutva as the former was effectively used by the latter to reinforce the idea that the Indian state was appeasing Muslims. (p. 2422) While the Shah Bano case cast a heavy burden on Muslim feminists, the history of feminist consciousness raising and activism by Muslim women activists in certain regions of India leads to another sort of nuancing of the binary of ghar and bahir. For instance, when we look at instances of Muslim women’s activism in relation to family disputes and education, we see ways in which they attempt to change community practices by focusing on the social rather than on the religious practices. For instance, by learning Arabic and reading primary religious texts, they were able to point out that some oppressive patriarchal practices were not innately Muslim, but were actually social in nature. Therefore, they were able to be committed to community development while also fighting for women’s rights on certain issues. Such Muslim feminist groups argued for a notion of “ethical self” as “important to both men and women in order to act on behalf of the [marginalized] community” (Suneetha, 2012, p. 63). Such an ethical self is not gender specific. It is predicated on a focus on building an equitable community (home) space while emphasizing the need for both men and women to be educated. This approach to reform around women’s issues, rather than leading to religious conservatism, led to the secularization of viewpoints. In the nextsection, we examine how these different views on women’s empowerment are implicitly built into social-​media-​based affective engagements. Affective Publics and Twitter Archives Papacharissi (2015) refers to Twitter publics as “soft structures of engagement” that are formed through “newer modalities of civic engagement” (p. 115). In our continued observing of these publics, we also found that these were fragmented and moment/​ movement-​ driven, yet they reside in searchable archives. For instance, in our collection of tweets around #womenofshaheenbagh, we found that it did not appear on Twitter before

Women Activists Imaged through Social Media Publics  113 December 29, 2019, although the women had been protesting on site from December 15, 2019. We collected a total of 23,966 tweets around the hashtag from December 2019 to October 2022. This shows how the movement took some time to become visible on social media. Once visible on social media networks, the online part of the movement formed visible archives through invisible infrastructures that shape the practices of network linking. Hashtags themselves are only the surface of machine-​to-​machine “talk.” As far back as the mid-​1990s, Derrida and Prenowitz (1995) described the technological infrastructure’s role in shaping the archive. They noted that: the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. This is also our political experience of the … media. (p. 17) In the case of the technical structure of Twitter and Instagram and how it shapes the visibility of archives, Losh (2019) observes that in addition to providing metadata that allows computers to sort through online conversations more efficiently, hashtags with slogans are speech acts that use language to attempt to bring a new order into existence. (p. 63) The interfacing between individual and text occurs via mobile gadgets, with the body itself occupying no particular located space, whereas the infrastructure of the social media archive simultaneously predetermines and allows placement of the utterance in public space. Even as it bursts forth with a sense of immediacy, invoking urgent responses, the tweet first hits the public space as an utterance. Then, it rests, waiting to be reanimated again by some Twitter user who sees its significance and retweets or replies to it. The Twitter archive is both alive in the present and serves as evidence of a speech act providing a “receipt” (Brock, 2020, p. 19) of what was uttered. This particular fluid affordance of social media immediacy and archives has led to the practice of “showing receipts.” These receipts, as Brock (2020) notes, have been developed particularly through a “postpresent discursive digital practice that situates past transgressive behavior … in the now (usually via social media) to be ‘read’ as evidence in the moment” (pp. 219–​220). These are practices that yet again highlight the public–​private fluidity and the interweaving as well as the hidden-​in-​plain-​sight existences of the personal and the public in social media space. Such practices contribute to the “how” of strategic social media use by protest movements, and they have become the norm, particularly in Twitter publics. However, they also contribute to unpredictable outcomes across time, because different kinds of affective engagements with Twitter posts nudge the algorithmic infrastructures in different directions.

114  Radhika Gajjala et al. The fluid and interweaving nature of Twitter publics connects well with Lünenborg’s (2019) understanding of affect. According to her, affect has a dynamic, processual, and fluid capacity arising in the relational interaction between actors and artifacts in any kind of social practice, and embedded in a variety of temporal and spatial contexts. (p. 322) As such, affect is determined to be adaptable and constantly shifting in the relation between actors and artifacts within social practice and other contexts of time and (digital–​ physical) space. New technologies change how we approach and understand communication within the public sphere and how it allows for (human) agency (Lünenborg, 2019). Thus, because affect is relational, affective publics are performative and processual. These “publics” consist of different actors, networks, and societal groups that are not constrained to specific “spheres” or modes of organization such as media (Lünenborg, 2019). To better understand the performativity of publics and find its formulaic patterns, researchers should investigate the doing of publics. Increased technological awareness within political participation introduces networked publics as parts of sites for protesters to participate through both digital and physical spaces. This leads to the formation of ad hoc publics (predigital social networks). In order to examine the affective resonances and sense of connectivity and placement in the community produced through various mediated practices in the context of the Shaheen Bagh movement, we first examined selected snapshots emerging from the larger Twitter datasets. Following the data analysis, we also examined specific Twitter texts that were heavily retweeted. Staging the “Women of Shaheen Bagh” Our entry point into the anti-​CAA–​NRC activism and the Shaheen Bagh protests was filtered through the viral images (some of which form part of our textual analysis) of anti-​CAA–​NRC protestors—​the Women of Shaheen Bagh—​a group of Muslim Indian women protesting the passage of the CAA–​ NRC by staging a peaceful sit-​in on a major roadway in the predominately Muslim neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh in South Delhi (Bhowmick, 2020, January 15; Bhowmick, 2020, February 4; Hameed, 2019; Khan, 2020). Overall in this chapter, we extend our previously argued position that contemporary Indian feminist protests are frequently defined by the interrelation of digital and physical activism (Khan, 2020,). Dey (2016) has also argued that Indian feminist activism today is increasingly being defined more broadly and by its global, digital dimension, despite the persistence of a digital divide, drawing particular attention to the way in which student movements in India, the United States, and the United Kingdom have mobilized to protest and show solidarity.

Women Activists Imaged through Social Media Publics  115 Our analysis revealed a concentrated effort among anti-​ CAA–​ NRC Twitter users to emphasize a narrative of political protest defined by strategic representations of made-​to-​feel-​at-​home-​ness and an ethic of care. Past research has identified where “subaltern images” are deployed among Indian digital feminist movements as a means of spreading a sense of affect and community (Gajjala, 2017). These images of older women and subaltern subjects were being deployed (partly spontaneously and partly in a planned manner) as a strategy by social media users aligned with the movement. This became clear to us through the visualizations we produced using data analytics software. Transnational digital activists played a role in amplifying the narratives emerging from the local sites of activism in India. As Sorce and Dumitrica (2021) have observed in their study examining the Fridays for Future’s (FFF) digital protest communication on Facebook, there is an awareness on the part of current youth activists “of the necessity to act in a ‘vertical’ manner that goes beyond national, geopolitical milieus and towards a transnational activist sensibility.” In our conversation with one of the participants, we learned how the sit-​in protest of Shaheen Bagh was initially started by about 50 women who knew each other and shared social media networks. Regarding the protest strategy at Shaheen Bagh, an interviewee mentioned that there was a feeling that a lot of the local activists had become invisible. Thus, transnational visibility seems to have led to what Tarrow (2005) refers to as “scale shift” of the movement. This, in turn, led “domestic-​based activists” to “form a spectrum of ‘rooted cosmopolitans’ ” who were made visible through their engagement in “transnational practices” (p. 35). Interestingly, one of our interviewees also said that the protest sites in Shaheen Bagh offline were also fractured spaces because of what became visible. She said that some people—​partaking in the protest—​were visible because of their presence on the site and their “accessibility” to social media. For instance, some celebrities came to the protest site to express solidarity, and the crowds rushed to surround them. When we asked her about the international media visibility of dadis and about Time’s story on Bilkis, she noted that this story highlights Indian culture—​a strategy adopted by the activist-​journalist Ayyub (2020) who wrote the article. She equates Indian culture with that of care, love, and respect instead of rage. She said that one could counter rage, but it is harder to counter a peaceful protest. This was clearly a strategy invoking a Gandhian nonviolent resistance in an effort to reassert the community’s identity as Indian. Groups such as United against Hate2 came forth to push for the “compassion” and “peaceful” nature of the protest and Bilkis—​an elderly woman—​became the face of the movement. In the following section, we perform a close and comparative reading of two images followed by an examination of associated messages from both sides of the CAA–​NRC conflict in order to show how the affective resonances

116  Radhika Gajjala et al. that contributed to the older women of Shaheen Bagh being nonviolent saviors of the constitution emerged through social media. The Nonviolent Nationalist Freedom Fighter (Woman)

Ahmed (2004) has emphasized that feminist close reading “works against, rather than through, a text’s own construction of itself … re-​thinking of how [the text] works, of how and why it works as it does, for whom” (p. 17). In what follows, we perform a feminist close reading of two iconic images of women protesting to assert their claims on their home space through nonviolent sitting in place. The first image we discuss is a studio portrait shot of Kasturba, Gandhi’s wife, in 1940, seated on a woven mat delicately holding a thread from a box charkha (traditional spinning wheel).3 A symbol of the nationalist movement, Kasturba represents Indian womanly grace and tradition as she sits cross-​ legged and engages in the act of creating thread. The charkha at which Kasturba is pictured is actually a spinning apparatus that cannot be used to produce the large quantities of handspun yarn needed for the production of handloom cloth. It is in fact an innovation of the more traditional charkhas used in handloom production and is designed to be compact, and mobile so that the middle class majority participants of the Swadeshi movement might be able to incorporate the spinning of yarn into their daily routine as a form of symbolic resistance to the colonial mass production of yarn and textiles that were seen to be displacing the textile laborers in India. Thus, the briefcase charkha pictured in the image serves as an “abstracted symbol, separated from the larger production of cloth, and linked to different kinds of activity” (Brown 2010, p. 4). Excerpted from cottage industry, Kasturba engages in a political act, modernized by the new wheel. Her smile is reassuring and confident, while her actions provide viewers with the compelling contradiction of performing the political act of spinning thread for clothes while also wearing traditional cloth. Spinning as a symbol has strong connotations with gendered practices in the global south region (Brown, 2010). First, the very act of spinning is associated with home and domestic labor for women. Kasturba’s spinning is symbolic as a political act during the Swadeshi4 movement in India. As Brown (2010) notes, for the nationalist movement in India, the act of spinning embodies the national identity of being patriotic. Second, spinning enabled participation in the Swadeshi movement for everyone, especially women, who became activists through the gendered domesticated act of spinning from within protected spaces without having to be out on the streets. Third, the imagery of a smiling and spinning Kasturba resonated that of a mother’s welcoming approach. Also, Kasturba being the center of the image signifies the central role played by women during the anticolonial movement. The act of spinning symbolized anticolonial production through which India’s economy (bahir) was being rejuvenated by women through their domestic

Women Activists Imaged through Social Media Publics  117 skills (within the ghar). The image thus embodies the relationship between the Indian nation and women being made independent of colonizers by the good Indian mother, who is building swadesh (ghar) through her reproductive domestic labor and outcasting the colonizers (bahir). Figure 7.1 is an artistic interpretation of one of the grandmothers of Shaheen Bagh. This image circulated on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. The background of the image is colored in orange, white, and green striped colors with the symbol of the 24-​spoke wheel represent the national flag of India. The black lettering (we shall not move) is a rallying cry found in the feminist movement of Shaheen Bagh. In the foreground, the older woman is depicted wearing undyed cloth with a headwrap. She is holding a rosary, and the object below where she is resting one of her legs suggesting a charkha is actually a mat. The image is suggestive, in that the woman is staring directly at the audience, invoking a sense of consciousness and silently beseeching her people to act, thereby paralleling Kasturba’s image. Both women are representatives of their places in society as the holders of tradition and gender role expectations while becoming a political symbol themselves.

Figure 7.1 Artistic rendering of Bilkis Dadi that went viral on social media. Source: https://​twit​ter.com/​Dad​iBil​kis/​sta​tus/​1337​3815​3316​6960​641/​photo/​1

118  Radhika Gajjala et al. Discourse of Domesticity

Now we turn to the dataset gathered with a focus on tweets that conformed to the original intention of the dataset #sheinspiresus—​designed to reinforce the discourse of domesticity and appropriate public behavior of women who seek to be considered “inspiring.” This dataset was scraped in March 2020 after we heard that PM Modi would be handing over his Twitter handle to inspiring women on International Women’s Day. These inspiring women would, in turn, tweet about other inspiring women using the hashtag #sheinspiresus. Upon hearing of this, social media supporters of the anti-​ CAA protests decided to sabotage this hashtag by connecting it with and highlighting #womenofshaheenbagh so as to make it trend. In one very visible tweet that used both these hashtags to connect them, there was a call to the protesters in Hindi that points to the moment when the Shaheen Bagh movement sympathizers not only caught onto a high traffic hashtag but also actively called out for the appropriation of the #sheinspiresus hashtag: Prime Minister Narendra Modi Ji has said (asked) that do you know some woman who is as inspiring as this? Who inspires you? If yes, then you write about it using this hashtag #SheInspiresUs. Yes, we are inspired by those thousands of women—​ mothers and sisters—​ who are protesting at the site of Shaheen Bagh against CAA. You also learn from them. #WomenofShaheenBagh. (translated by authors) Imagery

Gregg and Seigworth (2010) have stated that affect arises in the midst of in-​between-​ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon. Affect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation as well as the passage (and the duration of passage) of forces or intensities. (p. 1) Extending this definition of affect, Ahmed (2010) explains that we always enter into a space that is affectively laden—​she speaks of rooms, but we might also extend it to speaking of social media networks. Thus, “how we arrive … what impressions we receive” shapes our affective encounter as much as what is already “there.” She writes that: We may walk into the room and “feel the atmosphere;” but what we may feel depends on the angle of our arrival. Or we might say that the atmosphere is already angled; it is always felt from a specific point. (p. 37)

Women Activists Imaged through Social Media Publics  119

Figure 7.2 Network of tweets #sheinspiresus visualized via Netlytic.org. Table 7.1 Statistical description of the #sheinspiresus dataset scraped via Netlytic Dataset Stats Dataset Name Dataset Last Updated Dataset Source Total Messages Unique Posters

#SheInspiresUs 2020-​05-​04 23:53:23 Twitter 93,507 45,180

What does it mean to “walk into the room” of masses of online tweets organized around particular hashtags? In the case of the Indian Twitter sphere for International Women’s Day, the atmosphere was certainly “already angled” by the massive traffic around PM Modi’s Twitter handle. This is shown by the details of the dataset and how the network characteristics privileged affective impressions from the majority of posters. Figure 7.2 shows how the network structure of tweets is revealed when visualized. This figure delivers the network of all posts including #SheinspiresUs and shows how strongly the network is centered around the key instigating account of PM Modi. While Table 7.1 gives us a description of the statistical data that is visualized in Figure 7.2, Figure 7.2 shows the visualized network of all posts

120  Radhika Gajjala et al.

Figure 7.3 Sample profile of #sheinspiresus.

around the hashtag #sheinspiresus. Figure 7.3 is a sample image from posts that are in support of the PM’s idea of an inspiring woman and tweeted using #sheinspiresus. Following this pro-​PM’s vision example, we describe one example of appropriation of the hashtag #sheinspiresus that was coupled with the hashtag #womenofshaheenbagh and was thus embedded in the visualized network from Figure 7.2 while also shifting the algorithm toward praise of the women of Shaheen Bagh (see Figure 7.4). In Table 7.1 we listed the number of unique Twitter posters (45,180) who were responsible for the 93,507 messages (which include original tweets and several retweets of these few original tweets) that can be found in the data we scraped on Netlytic for 62 days (March 4, 2020–​May 4, 2020). In Figure 7.2, the visualized version of this data, we see that the “narendra modi” Twitter handle is a central node from and to which a majority of the tweets with the #sheinspiresus connect. What looks like a massive splash of shades [teal (blue-​green)] on the image is actually a mass of nodes representing the Tweets that connect with PM Modi’s Twitter handle. Handles such as SASAF-​UK which were attempting to highlight the women of Shaheen Bagh, on the other hand, actually formed a very small cluster in the visualization.

Women Activists Imaged through Social Media Publics  121 It was the one tweet from a user called “curious beaver” which tagged the Shaheen Bagh official handle (Shaheenbaghoff1) and used both the hashtags (#womenofshaheenbagh and #sheinspiresus) that connected the larger pro-​ Modi mass to the cluster that SASAF-​UK was a part of (represented by a small cluster of [red] nodes on the image). Figure 7.3 is representative of the kinds of posts that came from the PM Modi Twitter handle that highlights the ideal women considered inspiring by the pro-​Hindu sexist ideology that sees the place of the woman as within the home. The tweets shared from the pro-​Modi handles with the #sheinpiresus orient us affectively toward appreciation of such an ideal woman. Inspiring work by such ideal women is described in two to three bullet points in images tweeted and tagged with the hashtag #sheinspiresus. The ‘outcome’ section in each of these images describes what positive changes are brought about by those inspiring women mentioned. We see thus that domesticity is privileged by phrases such as “prepare food for children,” “regular supplement of food,” and “severely malnourished status to the normal category,” emphasizing the ethic of care practiced by these women. Even though such profiles show working women—​an anganwadi worker (rural child care worker), and lady supervisors—​they emphasize the role of women within the home. The ideal role for her is as a caregiver. Also embedded in such images are claims that these women have been activists for change by enhancing heteronormative and Indian cultural family values. Phrases such as “spearheaded a mass community,” or “worked along with local communities,” or “pursued the family” connotate that clearly. Women of Shaheen Bagh as Saviors of the Constitution

In Figure 7.4, largely circulated on Instagram during the anti-​ CAA protests, we can see various anti-​CAA protestors from the Shaheen Bagh community, with two women students from Jamia Millia University being labeled as “Saviors of Constitution.” One of them holds the placard “Inquilab Zindabad,” which means “long live the revolution.” This is an old protest cry, and can be seen as associated with the Indian independence movement when viewed along with the placement of the other people in the image. In this image, we see three men and five women. The two older women with their heads covered are placed most significantly in a larger frame. There is no doubt that these women symbolized the dadis of Shaheen Bagh, because the wrinkles on their skin make them appear old. However, their facial expressions are calm and welcoming. This highlights the nonviolent tone of the image, invoking an ethic of care—​at home. The image is curated carefully to keep out any impression of confrontation or rage. Even the person holding the microphone and holding a speech is made to appear to be supervised and watched over by the caring older women.

122  Radhika Gajjala et al.

Figure 7.4 Women of Shaheen Bagh as saviors of the constitution.

To contextualize the image, we need to understand its background. The anti-​CAA protest in Delhi became internationally visible during an event at which students of Jamia Millia Islamia University were brutally assaulted by the police (Salam, 2020). These students had been protesting from inside the university which was located close to Shaheen Bagh. This image also includes two of the female students whose photographs—​with them pointing fingers at the police—​went viral. But the positioning for these finger-​pointing students in this particular image seems less belligerent than the stand-​alone images of the same students. Such an image conveys that the protest movement is about nonviolently fighting for their rights, their citizenship. Even the use of saffron and orange color in the background might suggest another signaling that their protest is not antinational as the dominant party supporters had claimed. The saffron and orange is also visible in the Indian national flag and symbolizes patriotism. It would seem that the goal is to remind the larger public of the values embedded in the Indian Constitution that grew out of the Indian nationalist movement of the 1930s and 1940s. As mentioned before, the Indian Constitution gives citizenship without any discrimination based on religion. The current government’s party color is saffron and introduced the CAA in Parliament with the intention of denying citizenship based on

Women Activists Imaged through Social Media Publics  123 religion, thus singling out Muslims and making them face the wrath of detention centers (Salam, 2020). Conclusion Examining social movements through what emerged via Twitter publics raises the question of whether we reach for a context that is far removed from the offline protest site and the embodied negotiations and struggles of the activists and community members on site. Academic researchers doing research through digital data—​ particularly academics writing from the Global North about Global South contexts—​are often accused of either co-​opting a very local struggle for their political/​ideological viewpoints or of appropriating the activists’ labor for one’s own fame, glory, and professional advancement. All these accusations may sometimes be true. Our team of writers grappled with their consciences—​we were also taken to task by some of our interviewees. Yet we feel that what we wrote here has value and needs to be shared. The interventions that our research makes are both a methodological one and one that asserts the materiality of transnational and online engagement with different local struggles even as we wade through the contradictions. Our research methods emphasize a need to retool—​co-​opt—​computational data analytics tools and to contextually understand the material practices of how humans use as they work within pre-​given algorithmic architectures in platformed digital environments. As we worked through the masses of collected data, we developed hands-​on tactics to work through pre-​defined/​ designed computational tools. These computational tools emphasize quantitative metrics that do not necessarily work to describe and analyze the social relationships evident within the data. So while it seems like something magical is happening as we press buttons and apply these metrics or visualize layouts, the resulting visualizations made no sense to us without the qualitative in-​ depth interviews, news reports, and onsite activist engagement of different co-​authors. On the other hand, a purely textual, qualitative approach would not have sufficed to bring out the nuances of how the visibility for the subaltern older woman was produced in transnational media space. In a 2015 publication entitled “Easy Data, Hard Data: The Politics and Pragmatics of Twitter Research after the Computational Turn,” Burgess and Bruns (2015) note how Twitter data can be seen as “low-​hanging fruit.” We would agree that is so under certain conditions of naivette with regard to what constitutes data, what constitutes participation, and what constitutes digital activism. When Twitter data is read through a naïve qualitative textual glance or through the quantitative metrics afforded by the computational tools and with the researcher making claims of being a participant in the activist site because of some retweeting to enhance the hashtag visibility, it is not just a case of appropriation of the offline activist space and labor—​what is crucially missed is what is happening within the digital material infrastructure.

124  Radhika Gajjala et al. Our chapter here implicitly challenges several assumptions at the same time as it asks the question of how visibility for particular groups of activists can happen through transnational digital publics. Thus, we see how the offline presence of dadis of Shaheen Bagh—​as political subjects—​is amplified. The protest strategies amplified as those of the dadis were not aggressive but stern and nonviolent, affectively invoking the Gandhian freedom struggle of India’s nationalist movement. As Chopra and Sanyal (2022) note, in the Gandhian movement, the identity of women who participated in the freedom movement was constructed as the mothering image, the one who cares for her familial kinship, embodying the private duties of ghar and coming out in the bahir space of resistance to support their sons, brothers, and husbands. In our comparative visual analysis, Kasturba was seated, spinning the charkha as a symbolic gesture of domesticity (ghar) for women. In 2019, Bilkis evoked a similar posture, however, spinning the anti-​CAA movement, seated on a mat on the streets of Delhi (bahir), exceptionally normalizing women’s role of rising up against the pro-​Hindutva government, just as Kasturba did with regard to the Swadeshi movement. Brown (2010) notes how during India’s freedom movement, the act of “spinning” enabled people’s participation in the Swadeshi movement, especially for those who could not compromise on their mundane activities to be a part of the movement. They spun from their homes and registered their participation. Just as the spinning imagery during the Swadeshi movement unified the whole village, similarly Bilkis’s spinning of the anti-​CAA movement enabled individuals—​particularly women and domestic workers—​to join the protest cause. It is interesting to note that the similarity of both events lies in the fact that women were at the center of the narrative—​Kasturba then, Bilkis now. Hence, just as every woman contributed to the Swadeshi movement by doing her task, similarly women across the country, going beyond religion, caste, and class, came together at the protest site, joining their voices against the CAA–​NRC bill. Just like carrying out mundane gharelu (domestic) responsibilities is important to women, similarly, coming to the protest site everyday became significant. This was both an extension of ghar and taking charge of things bahir for the sake of ghar. The Muslim women steered the Shaheen Bagh movement in an effort to protect their children and grandchildren by embodying the narrative of care for their family or ghar. These Muslim women came out in the bahir on December 15, 2019, when their sons and grandsons were brutally assaulted by police in a peaceful anti-​CAA–​NRC protest inside the campus of Jamia Milia Islamia University. That incident resonated with people, because it reminded them of the British (bahir) atrocities on Indians (ghar). The affective sense of a national fight against colonizers (bahir) reverberated this time in the form of challenging the pro-​Hindutva politics of bifurcating the country (ghar) based on religious citizenship. The country symbolized ghar for these women who wanted to protect the future of their children from religious

Women Activists Imaged through Social Media Publics  125 fanaticism as caring mothers and grandmothers, doing their gharelu responsibility of care. The fortitude of these Muslim women at the protest site, which became an extension of ghar for them, holding photographs of Indian freedom fighters such as Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Bhagat Singh and singing the national anthem, affectively evoked not only the secularism enshrined in the Indian Constitution but also the Gandhian women exhibiting “feminization of resistance” and “political motherhood” (Chopra & Sanyal, 2022, p. 6). This opened up the movement, calling for everyone to join the dadis of Shaheen Bagh who exhibited such compassion and courage. Their nonviolent stance resonated with India’s freedom movement and made an affective connection with the masses. The bodily strength of these old women, braving the harsh winter of Delhi and not willing to move from the protest site, evoked a sense of masculinity that embodies the bahir; but the way the dadis exhibited pleasing smiles and welcoming attitude to everyone evoked the feminine warmth of ghar. Their singing of patriotic songs, quiet demeanor, and smiles with which they opened their ghar (the protest sites) to people across sectors (bahir) with warmth and acceptance of diversity made these gendered domestic acts into a political one, giving momentum to the movement. We looked at three datasets scraped from Twitter using Netlytic software and proceeded to make sense of them by linking them with the interviews we had conducted not only with activists and witnesses on site in Delhi but also with transnational digital activists from the South Asian diaspora. We were able to see that the significant visibility produced through social media activity was a result of an on-​site activist strategy to use social media while also connecting with transnational activists and sympathetic media personnel—​ both local and global. Therefore, the global visibility of the women of Shaheen Bagh was produced through the combined strategies of local activism, social media outreach, transnational/​diasporic digital activism, and a variety of media organizations. In the case of Shaheen Bagh, the community members on site led the charge not only on the ground but also through their own Twitter and Instagram accounts—​@shaheenbaghoff1. But it was in the affective deployment of content—​ images, videos, text—​ and the strategic populating of particular hashtags by a larger network of digital participants and activist coalitions local and diasporic that generated affective intensities. These, in turn, produced global publics. These affective publics relied on strategies to emphasize an ethic of care, but also focused and reoriented the transnational gaze on the seemingly benign bodies of older women rather than on the rage of the younger feminists and of the men of the community. Following work by other scholars, we examined how Global South activists utilize online tools to generate affective intensities and create affective networks as tactics for intervention while influencing and affectively inviting social media actors bearing global and local visibility into these networks. As researchers looking at data accessed and viewed

126  Radhika Gajjala et al. through computational tools and data analytics software, we also engage in the activist space as researchers. But the way we approach these data is different from the flat epistemic readings that the data analysis tools themselves tend to orient us toward. By moving to offline interviews and in-​ depth reading of texts and placing the Twitter datasets in spatiotemporal contexts—​as cultural studies and feminist methodologies expect us to—​we also draw on our own affective engagement with the activist spaces, even though we are researchers and not activists. Thus, our approach “allow(s) … for something other, singular, quick and ineffable to irrupt the space of analysis” (MacLure, 2013, p. 16). Notes 1 This chapter was part of a larger team project. The work we draw on here was carried out from fall 2019 to summer 2022. Other members of the team who contributed in various ways but who are not active authors of this chapter include Emily Edwards, Sarah Ford, Kiran Bhatia, Dyuti Jha, Oladoyin Olubukola Abiona, Olayombo Tejumade Raji-​Oyelade, Ololade Margaret Faniyi, Sujatha Subramanian, and Riddhima Sharma. We also thank the anonymous interviewees for their valuable insights. 2 United Against Hate is “a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization of common people—​urban and rural, spiritual and secular—​seeking equal protection for all, united against hate, bigotry and racism” (see www.uni​ted-​agai​nst-​hate.org/​). 3 The image is located online at www.alamy.com/​kastu​rba-​gan​dhi-​spinn​ing-​ maha​tma-​gan​dhi-​wife-​india-​asia-​1940-​old-​vint​age-​1900s-​pict​ure-​ima​ge27​1971​ 943.html 4 Produced by self; produced in home country; also a metaphor for home (ghar).

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8 Affectivism and Visibility in the Mediatization of Disappearing Non-​Muslim Women in Pakistan Jürgen Schaflechner

Structurally coined as “the other” of Pakistan’s ideology, religious minorities are constitutionally, culturally, and economically marginalized in the Islamic Republic. For decades, they have been ignored by Pakistan’s state-​sponsored media and misrepresented in education and popular culture (Schaflechner, 2021a). Living within such an environment, it is no surprise that many from the minority communities celebrate the emancipatory potential of social media platforms. These developments over the last decades seem to support Papacharissi’s (2010) argument that social media have a democratizing potential through which video-​blogging, tweeting, but also viewing content may in itself become a political act (p. 130). However, the new possibilities provided by social media to make visible the atrocities minorities are subjected to also produce novel structures of exclusion and exploitation. The online activism of religious minorities in Pakistan is no exception to this. To capture this paradoxical intersection of empowerment and restriction inherent in new communication technologies, I will speak about practices of affectivism. These are forms of activism in which affectively charged messages (a) produce counter publics and broaden narratives sedimented in traditional media, but in doing so, also (b) reify stereotypes and introduce new forms of discrimination. Because affective intensities can produce both productive forces leading to empowerment (potentia) and restrictive forces (potestas) (Braidotti, 2011), affectivism is an inherently ambivalent form of activism. Taking the case study of the alleged forced conversion of Hindu women to Islam, I shall show how affectivism has helped to make non-​Muslim women’s fate visible to a broader public while simultaneously concealing notions of honor (ghairat) within the minority communities themselves that equally perpetuate paternalistic publics. To theoretically elaborate on this ambivalence, I draw on affect theories (Boler & Davis, 2018; Braidotti, 2011; Slaby & von Scheve, 2019), Hacking’s (1998) looping effect of humankinds, and Klug’s (2003) work on antisemitism. This will show that instead of being a tactic of particular activists, affectivism emerges from a variety of conditions which define how marginalized communities become visible in the time of communicative capitalism. DOI: 10.4324/9781003365426-10

130  Jürgen Schaflechner Religious Minorities in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan According to Pakistan’s National Data Base and Registration Authority (NADRA), over 4.2 million National Identity Cards were issued to non-​ Muslim citizens in Pakistan until the year 2022.1 This number is certainly a low estimate, because it excludes, for example, people below the age of 18 (even though child registration certificates are available), landless peasants, and often disenfranchised women from poor backgrounds. The 2017 census estimates that around 3% of Pakistan’s overall population (approximately 220 million in 2020) are non-​ Muslims—​ that is, about 6.5 million people. The actual number notwithstanding, NADRA’s registration provides us with a glimpse of Pakistan’s religious pluralism that comprises around 15 different categories of faith—​including categories such as “spiritism,” “African ethnic,” and “non-​religionism.” The number also shows that Hindus are probably the most numerous religious minority, followed by people identifying as Christians. With such a high number, claims of any unified “non-​Muslim” experience in Pakistan are challenging to uphold. Nonetheless, various past publications have documented the myriad forms of bigotry that people outside Islam must endure daily (Ispahani, 2017; Walbridge, 2003). They bear witness to the way in which discrimination based on religion haunts many non-​Muslim communities in the Islamic Republic. Some of Pakistan’s laws unabashedly discriminate against all who do not follow Islam. Non-​Muslims, for example, cannot take higher offices such as President or Prime Minister, and higher posts in the military are also usually barred to them. The promotion of two Hindu majors—​Aneel Kumar and Kalash Kumar—​to the rank of lieutenant colonel in February 2022 is a notable exception to the rule. More harsh interpretations of Islamic laws have also found their way into the country’s constitution and penal code, often with detrimental results for women and religious minorities (Khan, 2018). One case in this regard is Pakistan’s Ahmadi community, an Islamic sect established around the end of the 19th century. Following decades of incessant pressure from the religious right, which accuses the Ahmadis of denying that Muhammad is the last messenger of Allah, Zulfikar Bhuttos’ government declared the community “non-​Muslim” in an amendment to the country’s constitution in 1974. A few years later, in 1984, the Pakistani penal code made many Ahmadi religious practices against the law, factually producing a standardized system of discrimination based on religious differences. Hatred against the Ahmadis flourishes in many parts of society on the back of this state-​supported campaign against a portion of its own citizens. Because some Muslims consider Ahmadis apostates (murtadd), they openly call for boycotting their businesses on social media. In extreme cases, such hatred even materializes in attacks on Ahmadi property and life. One of the most awful incidents was the bombing of an Ahmadi Mosque in Lahore in 2010. The Ahmadi community is, therefore, the main target of state persecution, day-​to-​day marginalization, and extremist religious groups (Qasmi, 2014).

Affectivism and Visibility  131 While Ahmadis are discriminated against for religious reasons, Hindu communities have for long been associated with Pakistan’s nemesis India. Political tumults in India can lead to repercussions against the Islamic Republic’s very own Hindu citizens. This knee-​jerk reflex was most visible in 1992 when Hindu nationalists destroyed the Babri Mosque in the Indian city of Ayodhya, leading to wide-​scale protests and attacks on Hindu life and property in Pakistan. In 2019, during the India–​Pakistan border clashes, well-​known Pakistani-​Hindu influencers and activists used their popularity to decry any association with India’s actions and to insist (once again) on their allegiance to Pakistan (Schaflechner, 2020, p. 167). Aside from such political-​religious targeting, there are, however, many other ills that communities that happen to be non-​Muslim must battle. Over 90% of Pakistan’s Hindus, for example, are members of the disempowered outcasts, the lowest within Hindu socioreligious hierarchies. For many centuries, these impoverished groups have been landless peasants working in the fields of the influential elites of Sindh, Pakistan’s southern province. Similarly, many Christians in rural Punjab must bear the brunt of working in the province’s brick kilns. Aside from often horrendous and unregulated working conditions, numerous people in the community are plagued by malnutrition, the absence of clean drinking water, and limited options for education. In the urban centers, Hindu and Christian communities often find work only as sweepers or canal cleaners. In my conversations with Hindu and Christian leaders in Pakistan, I often heard complaints about alcohol abuse and domestic violence as some of the major problems the community has to face. Therefore, any study of religious minorities in the Islamic Republic needs to consider the intersectionality of their precarious lifeworlds. On the one hand, the continuous possibility of majoritarian abuse makes forms of solidarities possible among the non-​Muslim communities. Yet, on the other hand, minorities fall into different faiths, linguistic or economic classes, genders, and abilities. Some scholars have attempted to show the multiple identities of people who happen to be non-​Muslim in the Islamic Republic today. Mainly works on the Christian community reveal the double whammy of this marginalization: First, on religious grounds, and, second, based on caste discrimination (Gabriel, 2021; Streefland, 1979; Walbridge 2003). The majority of accounts of Pakistan’s religious minorities, whether academic, journalistic, or microblogs on social network sites, perpetuate what Fuchs and Fuchs (2020) have described as a “prevalent discourse of ‘victimhood’ ” (p. 59). To detail this argument, I will now hone in on the mediatization of the so-​called forced conversions of non-​Muslim women to Islam. (In)Visibility of Forced Conversion Cases of the so-​ called forced conversion of non-​ Muslim women show how affective activism (or what I shall call affectivism in the following)

132  Jürgen Schaflechner in the time of social media yields both emancipation and exploitation. I have addressed the often obscure structures embedded within the cases of disappeared women at length elsewhere (Schaflechner, 2016, 2017, 2020). Here, I simply sketch these incidents to support my argument about activism and visibility. Usually, cases that are mediatized as forced conversion and marriage (FCM) follow the same sequence. A young Hindu or Christian woman disappears from her house or workplace and reappears later as a newly converted and married Muslim woman. The disappearance of non-​Muslim women—​for whatever reasons—​rarely made headlines in Pakistan until 2012. Following the disappearance of Rinkle Kumari, a girl from a wealthy and influential Hindu family from Ghotki, however, cases of alleged FCM started to make national and even international news (Schaflechner, 2016, 2017). The new possibilities of online communication also brought such disappearances into the limelight and changed how people engaged with the issue. It is safe to say that with the coming of social media, disappearances are being reported more frequently, have a wider circulation, and often feature affectively charged images of missing women, grieving family members, protests, or, on rare occasions, statements of women who returned to their homes. National and international media and many online reports regularly frame such disappearances as forced conversions to Islam. In this widespread narrative, innocent and passive female subjects are subjugated to the religious zeal of their kidnappers. High-​profile cases are frequently picked up in the Indian media, where they confirm and further sediment the image of Pakistan as a rogue state in the hands of religious fanatics.2 International non-​governmental organizations (NGOs) also perpetuate this narrative in the Global North, usually by copying local media reports without conducting their own research on the ground.3 My work, however, tells a different story. In most of the cases I documented since 2010, religious zeal did not play any role, and often allegedly kidnapped women left their homes voluntarily. Although it is quite tricky within strict patriarchal environments to establish what counts as a free-​will marriage, it is evident that conversions to Islam have often been used to cover up sexual crimes, to legitimate child marriage, and to conceal human trafficking (Schaflechner, 2017). This has to do with the following three interdependent confinements, making it very difficult for the newly converted to return to their former place in life and to report on their potential abuse: 1 Legal confinement: Changing one’s religion from Islam to any other faith would mean denying the Prophet, Mohammad. This is, mutatis mutandis, apostasy, an illegal act in Pakistan and covered by the blasphemy laws (§295 Pakistan Penal Code). 2 The pressure of religious groups—​especially in cases that have been highly mediatized—​prevents newly converted women from returning to their families and their birth religion.

Affectivism and Visibility  133 3 Most importantly, both communities’ patriarchal structures, paternalistic publics (Khoja-​Moolji, 2021), and concepts of honor (ghairat) hinder a return or any communication between the converted and their families. Combining these three confinements makes conversion to Islam a one-​way street, producing a highly precarious situation for the women involved. The latter point is vital for my argument. Against the mainstream narrative, which aims to portray all women’s disappearances as forced marriage and conversion cases, my ethnography suggests that we also need to understand some of them as acts of female agency within Pakistan’s rigid patriarchal environment (Schaflechner, 2017). In such a situation, a family’s loss of honor (Urdu/​Sindhi: beghairat/​beizzat) dictates one’s social position. Jafri (2008) writes that the opposite of ghairat is tano (Sindhi: ridicule, open taunt), a form of public insult that the family or tribe faces in cases of female misdemeanor (p. 75). A woman eloping, having a love affair, or rejecting the spouse their parents picked for her may be considered transgressive. In the most extreme situations, the murder of the transgressing couple, or, more frequently, the female party, is a way to restore the overthrown order. In other words, aside from the heinous crimes in which a conversion to Islam is used to cover up rape, child marriage, or human trafficking, there are quite a few cases (one Hindu activist I spoke to in the field claims a whopping 80%) in which the woman’s own family has fabricated a kidnapping to avoid the social stigma of a daughter eloping and choosing her own spouse. Why do media reports habitually focus on religion as the main and, at times, the only reason for non-​Muslim grievances instead of considering poor working conditions, malnutrition, or, as we shall see in the following, confining structures of honor? In other words, what are the politics surrounding the becoming visible of Pakistan’s religious minorities today? For this, we need to look at three interdependent planes—​religious nationalism, the market logic of international NGOs, and social media logics—​that have not only significantly influenced how Pakistan’s religious minorities are mediatized but also determine the language used by minority actors themselves in their striving to gain broader visibility. Activism emerging from and navigating on these planes is what I call minorities’ affectivism. Religious Nationalism In her book, The Politics of De-​Secularization, Saeed (2017) describes how three conflicting discourses mark Pakistan’s search for identity since its inception. First, a “liberal discourse” advocates for a secular Pakistan, often citing its founding fathers’ liberal leanings. This interpretation of what it means to be a Pakistani is often highlighted by activists, religious minorities, and members of the civil society. Second is the discourse of “Islamic egalitarianism.” This similarly builds on equality and human rights concepts but has a firm base in the Quran and the Hadith. Third, Pakistan’s religious

134  Jürgen Schaflechner nationalism, which, according to Saeed (2017), supersedes both liberal and egalitarian interpretations of citizenship and is often suspicious of any deviation from hegemonic Sunni-​Islamic teachings. It is useful to think of religious nationalism (like secular nationalism) with the help of Juergensmeyer (2010) as an “ideology of order.” In this process of organizing, religious nationalism makes ideas of religious reform movements available for nationalist endeavors and solidifies them into forms of government (van der Veer, 1994). Through the work of political thinkers, we know that the construction of a nation or simply “a people” proceeds through the exclusion of “an other.” To organize the vastly different interpretations of what it means to be a Pakistani, the country’s religious nationalism often utilizes the non-​Muslim as what the political philosopher Laclau (2005) would call an empty signifier: An overdetermined, constitutive outside that helps to produce a homogeneous people. Such unifying empty signifiers are never fixed but rather change over time. While the ontic content of this constitutive outside might alter—​at times manifested in the image of “the Indian,” “the Hindu,” “the Jew,” “the Westerner,” or “the secularist”—​for Laclau, a nation will always be prone to produce these empty signifiers. Due to the Islamic Republic’s repeated emphasis on religion as the meaning of Pakistan, the nation’s nationalism often organizes unity with the othering of what is considered to be outside the fold of “true Islam” (mirrored in the frequently heard slogan “What is the meaning of Pakistan? There is no God but Allah!” [Pakistan ka matlab kya? La illaha illal allah!]). Such exclusions from the nation-​state project are produced and repeated in governmental politics (notwithstanding the elected party in power), in day-​to-​day interactions, and, most significantly, in the media. Before the advent of social network sites, mainstream media (such as TV, radio, or printed news) determined which issues found their way into the public consciousness. Since the inception of Pakistan, however, the media has been in the hands of the government, and, hence, readily used to promote the state’s ideology. This hold over public opinion meant that non-​ Muslim groups’ visibility in the media was long marked either by negligence or by being framed through Pakistan’s religious nationalism, which used the category of the “non-​Muslim” for inner-​political debates. My research in the archives of newspapers such as Dawn, The Pakistan Times, or the Urdu daily Nawa-​e Vaqt in Karachi’s Liaquat Memorial Library shows that these papers would report large-​scale attacks on religious minorities, such as the 1992 attacks on Hindu temples in Pakistan. However, cultural issues such as Christian celebrations or Sikhs visiting Pakistan for pilgrimage would be reported only occasionally. Cases of alleged forced conversion of non-​ Muslim women were widely absent in the archives of Pakistan’s newspapers until the previously mentioned Rinkle Kumari case in 2012. Censorship did not change with the coming of social media. The government simply adjusted its strategies to control online content. While in 2012, only 10% of the population used the internet, according to the Pakistan

Affectivism and Visibility  135 Telecommunications Authority (PTA), 114 million people were online in the year 2022—​around 52% of its population.4 Over the last decade, recent civilian governments under Asif Ali Zardari (Pakistan People’s Party), Nawaz Sharif (Pakistan Muslim League), and the hybrid civilian-​military government under Imran Khan (Pakistan Tahreek-​e Insaf [Pakistan Movement for Justice]) blocked online services such as YouTube (between 2012 and 2016), Wikipedia, and, more recently, WhatsApp and Twitter (albeit for only a few hours). In 2021, the Pakistan Tahreek-​e Insaf government approved a law to curb unlawful content on social media. This includes posts against “the glory of Islam,” “the security of Pakistan,” “public order,” “decency and morality,” or “integrity and defense of Pakistan.”5 According to an editorial in the newspaper Dawn, these guidelines are intentionally kept malleable so that content can be censored arbitrarily.6 The law also asks the leading social media platforms to set up offices in Pakistan so that complaints can be submitted directly. In cases of noncompliance, the government threatens to shut down a platform’s services inside the country. Generally, any individual can issue a complaint to the PTA based on the categories above. This is crucial, because whereas censorship was firmly in the hands of the government some decades ago, private citizens now monitor themselves and report sites as improper for Pakistanis. An almost complete ban on pornographic material, for example, was achieved with the help of a 15-​year-​old teenage boy and his friends who, after rigorous research, provided the PTA with 780,000 URLs to pornographic sites.7 Such forms of restriction continue a history of censorship that needs to be considered when we analyze how non-​Muslims make themselves visible in Pakistan today. For example, the state has repeatedly blocked material on the Ahmadi community and sites run by the Israeli government (which may potentially be of interest to the country’s small Jewish community). Accusations of blasphemy have also increased after the PTA made it easier to report allegedly transgressive content online (Schaflechner, 2019, 2021b). Religious nationalism has become an all-​encompassing matrix that dictates citizenship and subjectivity in Pakistan. It also defines the frames through which communities that happen to be non-​Muslim can become visible in the country and beyond. International NGOs and the Commodification of Victimhood Traditionally, NGOs, journalists, and activists have made the suffering of disempowered people visible to a worldwide audience. Strategies may vary, but outreach programs are often the first step for individuals, human rights groups, and local insurgencies to gain international attention and solidarity. In their attempts to provide their clients with visibility, NGOs often frame the grievances of the people they support in simplified ways. Mutua (2002) touches on this concern in his book, Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique, in which he describes the role of the victim as feeding a “giant

136  Jürgen Schaflechner engine that drives the human rights movement” (p. 27). For him, the metaphor of the victim builds on a picture of suffering, often aiming to produce clear distinctions between good and evil. In an environment where NGOs frequently face stiff competition for grants and donor money, advertising their services is subject to capitalist logics. To survive in the marketplace, NGOs often reproduce clear-​cut lines of good and evil to create an easy and accessible narrative to induce public indignation. Mutua warns of such dichotomies of victimization and oppression by an immoral “savage” that emerges when the victim is portrayed only as “sympathetic and innocent” (p. 29). The exchange between actors on the ground and international donors often builds on a particular narration of their grievances and demands. In his book The Marketing of Rebellion, Bob (2005) writes about the various ways local activist groups connect with transnational NGOs. He defines the foundation of this relationship as one built on the structure of need and value. While value explains how beneficial the association is to both parties involved, need, on the other hand, signifies the necessity of this interaction. Local agents require international support; NGOs, however, also require ever new and suitable projects to legitimize their work and existence. For Bob, the framing of groups—​that is, how they are portrayed to an outside audience and their demands—​is therefore always “dynamic and mutual” (p. 27). Often both parties change in the process and settle on an agreement between the community and an organization on the use of certain representational frames. At times, such frames also develop into “brands” that help to identify specific grievances with certain groups (Bob, 2005, p. 41). It is not an exaggeration to claim that the alleged forced conversion of non-​Muslim women in Pakistan has become such a “brand” that is easily identifiable globally. The trope of Hindu women willingly—​or unwillingly—​ converting to Christianity or Islam is age-​old, frequently occupied colonial courts, and repeatedly disrupted communal harmony. The trope provides an extensive archive helping a global audience to easily recognize cases of disappeared women as yet another forced conversion. With Bob (2005), we see that framing processes are not only done from above but rather involve a negotiation—​or as I shall call it below, a looping process—​between at least two parties: The groups on the ground and the NGOs. Here, we need to turn to one of the main developments in the becoming visible of religious minorities in Pakistan in the last decade: The coming of social media. Social Media Activism: Influencers, Affect, and Repetition The ubiquity of smartphones and the logic of algorithms that power the leading content-​sharing apps such as Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube have changed how, what, and when people become visible both globally and locally. Prosumer cultures and citizen journalism have radically altered how information spreads and who can disseminate it. Duncombe (2020) speaks in this regard of the age of “digital witnessing” in which images of violence,

Affectivism and Visibility  137 destruction, and abuses are recorded and distributed to bring about a specific emotional response (pp. 610–​612). Social media have also produced a rich economy of content in which various posts struggle for user attention. As I have shown above, marketing is not new to activism. Regarding social media activism, however, tactics of highlighting human rights transgressions have increasingly complexified. How do posts about disappeared non-​ Muslim women become visible online?8 In the following, I shall look at Twitter data to show how influencers, affect, and repetition interdependently make cases of disappearing non-​ Muslim women and girls in Pakistan visible online. With the help of an IT specialist, I collected various tweets, hashtags, and handles that have emerged around cases of the so-​called forced conversion of non-​Muslim women in Pakistan since 2020.9 After Twitter additionally provided us access to large parts of its archive through its academic research program in 2021, we were able not only to collect tweets on current events but also to analyze thousands of tweets from the past based on keywords, hashtags, and handles. It is important to note that the following aims to provide empirical data to show how affective networks are produced around non-​Muslim women without making any claims about the motives behind these disappearances on the ground. At this point, I am solely interested in how such cases become visible online through the help of influencers, affect, and repetition. I broadly use the term “influencer” here to identify not only content creators producing entertainment coupled with advertising but also bloggers, microbloggers, and online activists. In short, influencers are users who invest a copious amount of cognitive and affective labor into their handles in order to become relevant. For Nymoen and Schmitt (2021), sequence and repetition (“Serialität und Wiederholung”) are central to influencers’ work, which means that a high number of trending posts translate into an increased number of followers (p. 61). Because “algorithms establish new conditions through which visibility is constructed online” (Bucher, 2018, p. 82), an influencer will successfully crowdfund content to visibility if he or she understands and participates in the algorithm of the respective platform. What does this mean for minority activism on social media? While footage and firsthand witness reporting on human rights transgressions emerge from the ground, national and international influencers play a crucial role in providing events with broader attention. Before the advent of social media, it was mainly actors such as journalists and NGOs who framed specific issues; now, influencers often crowdsource events to fame. In a time during which attention is becoming increasingly one of the primary commodities in capitalism (Citton, 2017), influencers provide posts with visibility within an unmanageably large amount of online content. A characteristic case study from Twitter will exemplify this. In 2021, Priya, a minor girl from Sukkur, disappeared from her home. While mainstream media did not report on the disappearance, the hashtag #recoverpriyakumari trended through the cognitive and affective labor of

138  Jürgen Schaflechner only a handful of influencers. To follow the online activity after Priya’s disappearance, we collected 9,511 tweets around the briefly trending hashtag between May and September 2021. The analysis made it clear that only 10% of handles produced 38% of all tweets. While this is not unusual on Twitter, in this case, most active handles consisted of male Hindu activists living in Pakistan’s Sindh province (where traditionally many Hindus live). In a personal interview with one member of the group in December 2021, my interlocuter confirmed that their actions are tactical ways in which they aim to make visible news about Hindus who have been traditionally overlooked by the mainstream media. He explained that the group works with a specific system of tweets, mentions, and retweets to highlight human rights abuses against Hindu minorities. A large part of the collected tweets was, in fact, retweets (8,362), revealing how the majority of users only retweeted the group’s specific content, thus leaving the opportunity to frame the case in the hands of a few. Aside from retweeting each other, the network of influencers also mentioned political parties, journalists, and handles with large numbers of followers to support their outreach. The success of the hashtag #recoverpriyakumari was related directly to the cognitive and affective labor of these few influencers who crowdsourced Priya’s case to visibility. But which content is circulated through these networks? To answer this, I briefly need to look at theories of affect. Because the architecture of social media platforms emphasizes posts that enunciate responses, it is particularly affectively charged texts, images, or videos that tend to gain more traction. In a nutshell, affects can be described as visceral reactions or “moments of intensity” in the body (O’Sullivan, 2001, p. 126) that are not yet caught within any symbolic order. Emotions or feelings, on the other hand, are already located within a particular symbolic order—​they are of a “qualified intensity” (Massumi, 1995, p. 88). This does not imply a Cartesian body–​mind distinction, but emphasizes how emotions are culturally specific realizations of affective intensities in relation to certain situations and events (Slaby & von Scheve, 2019). This distinction is helpful when it comes to social media activism. For Boler and Davis (2018), affects are “emotions on the move” (p. 81) that circulate through networked media landscapes. Mobilizing posts—​ often containing text, image, or video—​then move already sedimented emotional structures, rhetoric strategies, and textual genres. In other words, in social media activism, affects may become spontaneous outbursts formed through a framework of previous emotions within which they can function as intensities (Lünenborg, 2016). They are performative, because they produce intensities in the body; but simultaneously also citational, because they are retroactively provided with meaning. In this way, affective intensities may enunciate a wide range of emotions. The visceral intensity of watching a video of a bar fight, for example, may trigger emotions of anger, disgust, or pleasure in different users. Many collected tweets regarding the disappearance of non-​Muslim women produce such intensities through video content or, more frequently, images.

Affectivism and Visibility  139 A collection of 1,675 images published under the hashtag #forcedconversions between 2010 and 2022 shows that specific imagery has sedimented around cases alleged to be forced disappearances and conversions over the last years. This includes an extensive archive of affectively charged pictures of protests, cartoons, and images of crying women. Especially the handle @Pak_​Hindus has produced an extensive library of tweets with narratives and visual content about human rights abuses involving Hindus—​especially the disappearance of Hindu women. The handle has around 5,000 followers (in July 2022) and tweets mainly in English, but at times also writes in Sindhi, the local language of the Sindh province where most Pakistani Hindus live. Images posted by @ Pak_​Hindus are regularly framed in the same green, red, and yellow colors and contain short descriptions of the incidents and the supporting hashtags (see Figures 8.1 and 8.2). In particularly violent cases, pictures of brutalized victims are also attached, and their faces are (at times) anonymized with crying emojis or animated band aids (Figure 8.3). Such visual content can poignantly direct emotions that can even sediment political views. But this imagery always tells the same story: Disappeared women are portrayed as passive victims in need of paternalistic protection. Notions of honor within the Hindu community, but most importantly female agency, are ignored, thus simplifying the very complex reasons for non-​Muslim women to disappear.

Figure 8.1 Tweeted on March 24, 2022.

140  Jürgen Schaflechner

Figure 8.2 Tweeted on June 23, 2022.

Finally, a post needs a specific duration to become visible to a broader audience. On social media platforms, this duration is obtained through the continuous repetition of similar content. Meraz and Papacharissi (2013) speak in this regard of a rhythm or a refrain that plays an essential role in the becoming visible of an event. The vertical structure of social media platforms, in which algorithms determine which posts appear in users’ feeds, makes repetition essential for providing an event with duration and visibility. In other words, information that is not repeated constantly is only short-​ lived and bound to disappear. Thus, continuous engagement is necessary for events to stay in users’ feeds, or as Meraz and Papacharissi call it: “repetitive rhythms gradually [crowdsource] a frame to prominence” (p. 18). Social media platforms tend to reward the repetition of similar content, thus reactivating, producing, and sedimenting the emotional frames through which such cases tend to appear. Retweets, for example, help to make the same content reappear in people’s feeds, and, as we have seen above, their content is often produced by only a handful of influencers. Even trending tweets, however, are only short-​lived. Tweets about cases of alleged forced conversion, for example, seldom remain visible for more than a few days. If a case gains a lot of visibility, particular events, such as protests, court decisions, or recoveries, may briefly revitalize the hashtags.

Affectivism and Visibility  141

Figure 8.3 Tweeted on March 22, 2022.

As we have seen with the Hindu activist network above, retweets and mentions are crucial for repeating content and crowdsourcing it to visibility. Singular handles may also use repetition to produce easily recognizable content. For example, the handle mentioned above, @Pak_​Hindus, uses the same colors, fonts, imagery, and sometimes even the exact same wording to such an effect. For instance, the sentence “Each year thousand girls are kidnapped and converted into Islam” (in different versions, see Figures 8.1, 8.2, and 8.4) is found throughout many of their tweets on this topic. Such and similar kinds of repetition form and inform an online audience and represent cases of disappeared women in feeds as being different but yet the same. How do these three components—​ influencers, affect, and repetition—​ change how religious minorities in Pakistan can make their grievances heard? How does this unity between communicative capitalism and the struggle for recognition produce new subjects worthy of our attention and how does it leave others behind? In other words, how political can social media be (Fuchs, 2017)? Here we encounter a paradox: Platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook have been crucial in making the religious minorities of Pakistan visible online, and activists have widely celebrated the possibilities that come with them. However, the conditions for becoming visible

142  Jürgen Schaflechner

Figure 8.4 Tweet from handle @Pak_​Hindus.

online are subjected to the proprietary communicative environments these platforms produce. Dialectics of Visibility Visibility is a central component when marginalized, persecuted, or repressed individuals or communities want to make their struggles known to a broader public. As we have seen, the dynamics of becoming visible, however, are never neutral, but follow regimes of power and representation. In their study on refugees, Chouliarki and Stolic (2017) state that regimes of visibility “provide the organizing principle” of how, when, and where the category of the “refugee” appears (p. 1167). The highlighting of the disappearances of young women shows how the coming of social media has helped to make the precarious life circumstances of the most marginalized in Pakistan’s society visible to the public. However, the framing of these cases—​done either by the press,

Affectivism and Visibility  143 social activists, or online influencers—​often follows reductionist explanations that quickly circulate online. In this way, the last decade produced and widely circulated the category, or in the words of Bob (2005), the “brand” (p. 41), of the forcefully converted woman, usually portrayed as a victim of Muslim savages who were inspired by some sort of religious zeal. More complex reasons, such as structural violence, the wide-​reaching implications of honor among minority and majority societies, sexual grooming, or child abuse, are often secondary. Such representations provide us with an inevitable ethical conundrum. How can we understand agency, marginalization, and discrimination within the communities that often suffer from severe repressions by the religious nation state? How can we avoid providing arguments to state agencies, religious fanatics, and those who have an interest in further marginalizing the religious minorities in the Islamic Republic?10 In other words, how can we extend solidarity to those who are marginalized by the marginalized? Reading West’s (1992) work on solidarity and leadership in the Black freedom struggle is helpful in this regard. West starts his argument with the 1991 nomination of Clarence Thomas—​ a Black, conservative candidate for the US Supreme Court. During the nomination process, Thomas had been accused of sexual harassment by one of his subordinates, an African-​ American woman named Anita Hill. West describes how this situation brought Black leadership into an ethical conundrum. On the one hand, Black people were closing ranks against White supremacy and advocating for the nomination of an African-​American Supreme Court judge. However, many overlooked Thomas’s backing of the Bush presidency and its conservative and neoliberal agenda, mainly targeting communities of color. Their support for Thomas also marginalized the interests and experiences of discrimination among Black women by sidelining Hill’s statement. For West, this “closing-​ranks mentality” utilized arguments based on “racial reasoning” (p. 392)—​an opportunistic perpetuation of racist stereotypes for the sake of ensuring “our man” (based on skin color and not on ethical agreement) on the Supreme Court, which was, according to West, committed to leaving White-​supremacist power in place. West’s example shows how support for the underdog is often not enough when the structures of oppression remain intact. Mutatis mutandis, when engaging with the religious minorities of Pakistan, understanding their lifeworlds mainly through religious reasoning is often too short-​sighted. The public treatment of disappearing women through a fairly sedimented frame of reference provided by religious rhetoric, international NGOs, and the logic of platform capitalism undoubtedly helped such cases to gain global visibility. But while this threw some light on the horrible crimes that can be hidden underneath a conversion to Islam, this narrative—​often linked to international resentments about Islam—​ has also completely covered how notions of honor in both communities suffocate women’s agencies and marginalize their interests for the sake of highlighting majoritarian abuse.

144  Jürgen Schaflechner I suggest understanding this form of activism, which highlights specific issues and covers others, as the condition for becoming visible for many minorities in the time of communicative capitalism. Affectivism The neologism “affectivism” consists of the terms “affect” and “activism” and describes the morally ambivalent area activists need to navigate to make their demands visible. Instead of suggesting that this is a calculated attempt by certain gatekeepers to commodify the suffering of their peers (even though this might also be a part of it), I understand affectivism as a condition for marginalized communities to become visible in the time of communicative capitalism. As we have seen above, in the case of religious minorities in Pakistan, affectivistic practices respond to various circumstances—​such as Pakistan’s religious nationalism, competitive donor markets, and the logic of social media—​that eventually determine which non-​Muslim grievances are made visible and how. Concerning forced conversion, many activists themselves emphasize religious discrimination over, for example, repressive paternalism and patriarchal notions of honor. Why is this the case? At this point, Klug’s work (2003) on antisemitism is valuable. For Klug, antisemitism confines real people’s multiple identities to stereotypical assumptions about them, a process he describes as turning “Jews into ‘Jews’ ” (p. 7). By typographically marking the second term, he aims to show how people living their Jewish identity are associated with various narratives that seemingly explain their behavior. These biases can be centuries old; they may be related to the politics of Israel or linked with conspiracy theories about Jewish world domination. They may be explicitly hostile and hateful, but they may also be full of admiration and seemingly positive (Klug, 2003, p. 7). In other words, antisemitism builds on sedimented definitions of “Jews” that define any direct or indirect engagement with Jews. I find this distinction helpful in separating real people with multiple, overlapping, and sometimes contradicting identities from how they are defined by a specific image, bias, or stereotype. So, while Jews can be many things simultaneously, “Jews” are often predefined through a particular concept of what it means to be Jewish. For my argument, I would like to extend Klug with Hacking’s (1998) substantial insight into the looping effect of humankinds. For Hacking, classifications are produced through a matrix of ideas, institutions (courts), and actors (lawyers, police officers). Importantly, such classifications are interactive, because they influence the behavior of those defined by the term. In other words, people relate to how they are classified and even “conform to or grow into the ways that they are described” (p. 21). This idea of looping kinds helps us to move away from an actor-​centered practice and understand affectivism as the expression of a sociodigital phenomenon.

Affectivism and Visibility  145 While Klug helps us to separate between Jews, real people with multiple identities, and “Jews,” an identity associated with an archive of stereotypes; with Hacking, we can (with regard to this case study) separate Hindus from “Hindus”—​that is, an image produced by a variety of circumstances and perpetuated by members of the community themselves for the sake of making their grievances visible to an international audience. Affectivism describes practices that turn Hindus into “Hindus” for the sake of becoming visible online. “Hindus” represent an identity that often, and again overwhelmingly, cites religious discrimination as the prime source for their precarious lifeworlds while simultaneously backgrounding class, linguistic, ethnic, or gender distinctions. How can we theoretically grasp this twofold movement of emancipatory and exploitative structures inherent in affectivism? Rosi Braidotti (2011) suggests distinguishing affective intensities as empowerment (potentia) and restriction (potestas). I consider this helpful for when activists on social media use specific tactics—​a network of influencers, affect, and repetition—​as a way to pierce through an abundance of information and make their content visible. This distinction dates back initially to Spinoza (1677/​1996), but has been picked up by the Marxist thinker Negri in The Savage Anomaly (2000). In the book’s preface, Hardt warns about a limited and dichotomized reading of these two terms to distinguish “the different capabilities of subjects with disparate resources” (Hardt, 2000, p. xiii). So it is crucial to understand both of them as capabilities—​however, with different functions. On the one hand, affects can produce intensities that turn people’s attention toward injustices and make genuine grievances of minorities known to a broader audience (potentia). On the other hand, these intensities are often captured by sedimented emotional archives, which albeit travel quickly online, but often leave little room for alternative imaginings of Pakistani Hindu identity outside the victim narrative (potestas). Incidents of the so-​called forced conversion are a clear case in point. Framing women’s disappearances overwhelmingly as forced conversions has helped some of the actual crimes against non-​Muslim women to become more visible. The attention and financial support pouring in empowered the Hindu community and triggered political discussions as potentia, even leading to the passing of the Hindu Marriage Bill in 2017. However, ignoring the fact that some disappearances are also recurrently Hindu women’s way of rebelling against the rigid patriarchal structures within their communities has thwarted any discussions about how notions of honor produce women as second-​class members of their respective societies. This exposes the goal to make such cases visible as struggles restricted mainly to representing male minority interests and thus as potestas. While the affective strategies of social activists and well-​meaning journalists helped make non-​Muslim women’s fate heard, they also produced a new form of invisibility that denied them the right to be seen as subjects with desires and agency.

146  Jürgen Schaflechner Conclusion What conditions determine how non-​Muslim communities can become visible in Pakistan in the time of communicative capitalism, and which forms of activism do they precipitate? In this chapter, I suggested three interdependent moments that produce the emergent phenomenon of affectivism in Pakistan today: (a) Religious nationalism, often perpetuated in the country’s media, yields a matrix from where subjectivity in the Islamic Republic mainly emerges through and within the language of religious belonging. (b) National and international NGOs are bound to the logic of market structures for donor money and often emphasize—​frequently together with their clients on the ground—​simplified narratives of good and evil to reach a broad international audience. (c) Social media provides formerly overlooked communities with the ability to become visible online outside their traditional gatekeepers’ monopoly over the distribution of information. In an information-​ rich economy, however, influencers, affect, and repetition define the conditions through which marginalized communities’ demands can be crowdsourced to visibility. I took the disappearances of non-​Muslim women in the Islamic Republic as an example to show how the activism emerging from such and similar environments yields movements of both emancipation and exploitation. The ambivalence in the activism around the mediatization of such disappearances serves as a paradigmatic example of what I understand as affectivism—​that is, the ways in which marginalized communities become visible in the time of communicative capitalism. Affectivism yields structures of empowerment (potentia) and restriction (potestas). As potentia, the fate of non-​Muslim women has been pulled into the limelight, making crimes such as child marriage or sexual abuse more visible, and even leading to changes in the law. As potestas, however, the increased visibility has not been able to pierce through the paternalistic framing of alleged cases of forced conversion, thus thwarting substantial change for the women involved. Notes 1 This number also includes around 188,000 Ahmadis, an Islamic sect that was declared non-​ Muslim by the Pakistani government in 1974. However, the Ahmadis do not consider themselves to be outside the fold of Islam. 2 Compare here: https://​hum​log.co.in/​natio​nal-​and-​intern​atio​nal/​hindu-​woman-​of-​ pakis​tan-​told-​her-​story/​19995/​ 3 Compare here: https://​ghrd.org/​the-​story-​of-​reena-​megh​war/​#:~:text=​It%20 was%20r​epor​ted%20by%20the,and%20t​hen%20marr​ied%20to%20Qa​sim 4 See the live statistics here: https://​pta.gov.pk/​en/​tele​com-​ind​icat​ors 5 www.geo.tv/​lat​est/​376​018-​pakist​ans-​new-​soc​ial-​media-​rules-​explai​ned 6 www.dawn.com/​news/​1652​311/​the-​last-​fortr​ess 7 https:// ​ t rib ​ u ne.com.pk/​ s tory/​ 3 44​ 4 43/​ d ilig​ e nt- ​ s tud ​ e nt- ​ c ompi ​ l es- ​ l ist- ​ o f- ​ 7 80​ 000-​porn-​sites-​for-​pta-​to-​ban

Affectivism and Visibility  147 8 While I draw mainly from examples of disappeared Hindu women and girls, similar things can be said about cases of disappeared Christian women. 9 The data collection for this part was performed by Christoph Marx, who also conducted the analysis with the help of Python. 10 My body of works on the topic of alleged forced conversions has been used on both sides of the border—​by both Hindu nationalists and the religious right in Pakistan—​to support their own ideological standpoints. The most recent example is an NGO report that, under the guise of scholarly objectivity, aims to perpetuate ideological arguments by framing forced conversions as an Islamophobic tactic to discredit Pakistan (Hussain & Farhat, 2020).

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9 Hijacking Solidarity Affective Networking of Far-​Right Publics on Twitter Ana Makhashvili

On February 29, 2020, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan issued a statement to open the country’s borders to Greece for refugees, despite the controversial 2016 agreement with the EU that was supposed to prevent refugees from entering the EU through Turkey. As a result, thousands of refugees largely fleeing from Syria took to the Turkish–​Greek borders with Erdoğan warning Europe that it would soon be millions (Kinkartz, 2020). Erdoğan’s statement triggered a twenty-​day crisis at the Turkish–​Greek border during which border police violently pushed back people trying to pass the border, including firing tear gas. After several talks with European leaders, on March 18, 2020, Turkey announced that they would be closing the borders to Greece out of concern for the Covid-​19 outbreak (Maurer et al., 2020). The event provoked a significant resonance in Germany, because refugees held at the border were actively appealing to Merkel’s government for help. As the images displaying the violence used against them started circulating, users and activists on Twitter started mobilizing a network of solidarity using the hashtag #WirhabenPlatz (we have space), aiming to pressure the government to offer asylum in Germany (Baller, 2020). As the hashtag started trending, and was paralleled by offline protests, far-​right actors used this occasion to contest these solidarity claims and mobilize nativist sentiments. It is this practice of hijacking and transforming this hashtag public that is explored in this chapter. In the past decade, several studies have highlighted how far-​right actors create an environment, or rather “economies of hate” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 119), that target gendered and racialized “others” online (see Ekman, 2019; Horsti, 2016; Strick, 2021; Sundén & Paasonen, 2018). The affordances of “networked publics” (boyd, 2011) allow these actors to disseminate and mobilize nationalist and racist sentiments, often in the form of strategically orchestrated disinformation, hate speech, or sarcastic commentary (Nikunen, 2018; Paasch-​Colberg et al., 2021). Recent academic literature also draws attention to how the far right on social media resorts to covert forms of discrimination to adapt to each platform’s affordances and regulations, but also to infiltrate and monopolize public discourse (Ben-​David & Matamoros DOI: 10.4324/9781003365426-11

150  Ana Makhashvili Fernández, 2016; Bhat & Klein, 2020; Mudde, 2019). In this chapter, I argue that the mobilization of far-​right publics on social media can best be captured by expanding on the concepts of affective publics (Papacharissi, 2015) and affective (media) practices (Lünenborg, 2021; Wetherell, 2013). Such a perspective entails examining the affective and networked structure of the far-​ right publics as liminal spaces in which intense affects are mobilized and a space of (temporary) belonging is created. Moreover, it considers the specific architecture of Twitter as one that relies on playful, memetic communication and reflects on how far-​right actors and communities may use such contents as carriers of racist sentiments. Combining quantitative-​automated and qualitative methods of analysis, I examine the hashtag public that emerged around #WeHaveSpace on Twitter while focusing on how far-​right users hijacked and transformed this public by engaging in affective media practices. I apply social network analysis to describe its networked structure and examine the far-​right actors and communities emerging here. By conducting hashtag co-​ occurrence analysis, I further discuss the dominant sentiments circulating in this discourse and how they may reflect the practice of hijacking. Finally, through qualitative textual analysis of selected tweets by influential far-​right users, I highlight the importance of irony and sarcasm in far-​right communication, which is often not captured by automated methods, and reconstruct how the use of irony specifically helps the far right reclaim the “We” in #WeHaveSpace. Thinking of Networked Publics through Affect To understand far-​ right formations on Twitter, I suggest to think of networked publics through affect. Networked publics have been defined by boyd (2011) as publics that are restructured by networked technologies. As such they are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice. (p. 39) For social media platforms, boyd (2011) discusses the different affordances that shape the networked publics emerging here. These include replicability of the shared content, scalability of its reached audiences, the emergence of invisible audiences and collapsed contexts, as well as the disappearance of the private–​public divide. Referring to scalability, boyd further contends that “what scales in networked publics is often funny, the crude, the embarrassing, the mean, and the bizarre” (p. 48). boyd thereby highlights how affordances of social media platforms shape users’ communication and practices. In the case of Twitter, public communication is, for instance, enabled (and restricted) not only by the character limit for each post, optional anonymity,

Hijacking Solidarity  151 the public-​by-​default profiles, and textual-​by-​default posts but also by the option to include audiovisual content as well as specific interactive and conversational features such as retweets (RTs) and replies. RTs are especially popular as a low-​level form of interaction that nonetheless proves to be a powerful broadcasting tool. As Burgess and Baym (2020) point out, Twitter’s affordances encourage retweeting more than replying, because Twitter deliberately introduced a single button for retweeting, thereby “making Twitter more newsy, more noisy, and less conversational” (p. 106). In 2009, Twitter also changed its default question from “What are you doing” to “What’s happening” in order to redirect its users to more political and less personal content (Burgess & Baym, 2020, p. 13). Applying a network perspective, however, does not merely mean taking into account the technological and algorithmic infrastructures that shape users’ practices. It also entails thinking about how actors’ social ties define how they feel about a certain issue. Moreover, it invites us to change the way we think about publics into something more unstable and dynamic rather than static that nevertheless engenders processes of meaning making as well as affective exchanges (Lünenborg, 2020; Markham & Lindgren, 2014). The concept of affective publics tries to capture these processes. Building on boyd’s work on networked publics as well as Bennett and Segerberg’s (2012) connective action as a form of activism on social media, Papacharissi (2015) introduced this concept to emphasize the role of affect, emotions, and sentiment in the mobilization (and dissolution) of public formations online. Papacharissi (2015) makes some interesting remarks on how affective exchanges configure storytelling on Twitter and specifically its temporality, which she refers to as “instantaneity” (p. 44). On Twitter feeds, she writes: These feeds [hybrid and live news feeds] capture events in premediation, that is, before they have attained the mediality reflected by dominant news values and news production practices that turn events into news stories. (p. 69) Tweets thus offer affective interpretations of events as these events are unfolding. The (re)centering of emotions in the public sphere is, however, not new and has its roots in queer theory. Warner (2002), for instance, elaborated on the role of publics (and counterpublics) as sites of embodied and felt politics that rely heavily on expressive language and affective exchanges as their medium. Warner further located identity construction and performance within the domain of the public, although these are usually confined to the private sphere in Western liberal thought. While deliberative approaches to social media studies often focus on the (in)civility of speech online, affect-​informed literature draws attention to embodied discursive and nondiscursive practices such as creating memes and GIFs and using emoticons or hashtags to express and mark one’s emotions

152  Ana Makhashvili as well as to lower-​level practices such as liking, sharing, or retweeting. Such interactions have been conceptualized as affective media practices because they convey, circulate, intensify, or subvert affects (Lünenborg, 2021). Affect here broadly refers to a relational intensity that emerges between actors (human and media-​technological) as well as their capacity to affect each other and be affected (von Scheve & Slaby, 2019, p. 43). Without making a strict distinction, emotions describe cultural and linguistic categories that classify affect (von Scheve & Slaby, 2019, p. 43). The practices described here can be conceived of as affective because they foster interactions and relations among social media users and potentially offer a sense of “belonging” (Mattes et al., 2019) to (temporal) communities. Such practices further enable users to make “affective claims to agency” (Papacharissi, 2015, p. 119) and disrupt hegemonic discourses as displayed by cases of antiracist and feminist hashtag activism (Jackson et al., 2020). At the same time, as this study will illustrate, affective media practices can also create disruptions in nonhegemonic discourses and hijack networks of social media activism. Far Right’s Use of Emotions on Social Media Although I focus on the affective in far-​right communication, I argue that affect and emotions are intricately linked with ideologies. Therefore, in this section, I briefly review some of the ideological cores and dominant discursive themes among far-​right actors described by previous literature based mainly on the political and social sciences. Right-​wing politics differ broadly from the political left in their perspective on inequality and social injustice. While the left considers, for example, gendered, classed, racial, or religious inequalities to be human-​made and unjust, and its members adjust their political agendas to fight them, the political right considers these inequalities natural and does not consider it the state’s responsibility to reduce them (Mudde, 2019, p. 7). On the contrary, right-​ wing-​ led politics often perpetuate or even widen these inequalities. In recent academic literature, the evolving right-​wing movements of past decades have been referred to as radical right, populist right, or the alt-​right (alternative right). These terms usually share some main ideological tenets such as nativism, racism, adherence to misogynist gender roles, authoritarianism, or myth building and conspiracy building (Froio, 2018; Mudde, 2019; Tateo, 2006). This chapter expands on Mudde’s (2019) definition of the far right, which he uses as an umbrella term comprising both the extreme and the radical right. The main difference between the two subgroups lies, according to Mudde, in the acceptance of the basic tenets of democracy: The extreme right rejects the essence of democracy, that is, popular sovereignty and majority rule … The radical right accepts the essence of

Hijacking Solidarity  153 democracy, but opposes fundamental elements of liberal democracy, most notably minority rights, rule of law, and separation of powers. (p. 7) Moreover, the extreme right subjects people to the state, and diversions from what the state has envisaged for society are fought with violence (Backer, 2000, p. 88). The communication style used by the far right is often described (somewhat controversially) as populist, because it usually employs a Manichean worldview dividing the world into good and bad in which native citizens are imagined as good and pure, and the bad usually contains representatives of the state and the media—​also referred to as elites—​as well as minoritized groups (Froio, 2018; Haller & Holt, 2019; Mudde, 2019). In a study on anti-​Islamic discourses, Froio (2018) further found ‘race’, culture, and religion to be common frames among the far right. She contextualizes these frames as part of nativism, an ideology positing that states should be confined to native groups or nations, whereas nonnative persons as well as their cultures and ideas should be met with hostility. Beyond ideological frames, some authors have also investigated social media practices commonly (if not exclusively) used by the far right. Several studies identify the constructing of Whiteness as the state of a marginalized, threatened, and oppressed ethnic group as a common practice among far-​ right actors (Deem, 2019; Ganesh, 2020; Tischauser & Musgrave, 2020). Part of this discourse often focuses on White women as especially threatened by Muslim men (Ekman, 2014; Ganesh, 2020; Horsti, 2016), although the victimization of Whiteness also goes beyond women, imagining “white identity” (Ganesh, 2020, p. 3) as a whole to be threatened. Bhat and Klein (2020) draw attention to the use of “dog whistles” in far-​right communication. This refers to words and phrases that acquire cryptic meanings among certain communities, while carrying a different meaning for the general public. Using dog whistles thus can help avoid platform regulations or state laws banning hate speech (see also Åkerlund, 2021). While studies on the far right’s use of affect and emotions often focus on “negative” emotions such as hate or anger, there is also substantial evidence that these emotions are often expressed by means of jokes and closely related modes of articulation such as irony, sarcasm, mockery, or trolling—​ especially in social media settings. Analyzing the hashtag #whitegenocide, Deem (2019) finds that far-​right tweets often conflate the so-​called negative emotions with wry humor. On YouTube, Ekman (2014) also shows that right-​wing extremists resort to humor—​often mocking their opponents—​to gain wider attention, and identifies the far right’s use of humor as “a form of negative campaigning” (p. 93). Nagle (2017) discusses trolling, cynicism, and irony as constitutive elements of online cultures that utilize “public humiliation as viral entertainment” (p. 5). Drawing on examples from 4chan, Tumblr, and reddit, Nagle illustrates how these practices are used by far-​right subcultures online to cause intimidation, fuel harassment and

154  Ana Makhashvili aggression, or even trigger offline violence. Focusing on irony as an affective practice, Nikunen (2018) further contends that in far-​right communication, irony legitimizes and enacts social exclusion and can cultivate hate for certain groups, while creating a distance between the utterance and what it conveys, thus circumventing accountability. In my own analysis, I draw on Nikunen’s conceptualization of irony as “the guiding sensibility (affective practice) in anti-​immigrant online discussions, manifested as a linguistic style, a practice of communication, and a general disposition” (p. 12). Finally, the practice of hijacking a public debate has been discussed by a few recent studies. Hijacking a hashtag refers to the use of a hashtag that subverts its original meaning. It often capitalizes on the prominence of the hashtag as was the case in the 120-​decibel campaign launched by the Austrian Identitarian Movement to hijack the #metoo movement back in 2018 (Knüpfer et al., 2020). Hijacking also serves as a strategy to spread disinformation, as illustrated by Darius and Stephany (2020) for the Covid-​19 pandemic and the #FlattenTheCurve hashtag on Twitter. In this process, slightly modified hashtags may sometimes emerge to create a counter-​discourse, as was the case with #RefugeesNotWelcome or #AllLivesMatter (Booten, 2019; Kreis, 2017). More recently, Avraamidou et al. (2021) have studied the transnational network behind the hashtag #IstandwithGreece on Twitter that also emerged as a response to the Turkish–​Greek border crisis analyzed here. The authors find that the hashtag is mobilized mainly by known European far-​ right political actors who promote far-​right ideologies going beyond this specific case. #WeHaveSpace: Data and Methods This chapter centers on a moment of crisis in 2020 that followed the decision by Turkey’s president Erdoğan to allow refugees to enter the European Union through Turkey. During the crisis, some 18,000 refugees were stuck at and violently pushed back from the Turkish–​Greek border (Smith & Busby, 2020). In response, the hashtag #WeHaveSpace started trending in Germany to express solidarity with the refugees and issue demands on Germany’s government (Baller, 2020). The hashtag was also used to mobilize protests offline resulting in large-​scale demonstrations in Berlin and a few other German cities largely organized by Seebrücke (sea bridge), a civil society movement trying to create safe escape routes and advocating for the decriminalization of search and rescue. At the same time, the German far-​right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany) as well as members of the center-​right parties Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and Free Democratic Party (FDP) put pressure on Merkel’s government to deny entrance to Germany for refugees coming from Turkey, with the AfD calling for an immediate closure of Germany’s borders (Kinkartz, 2020). The data for the analysis comprise 33,053 tweets featuring this hashtag that were posted between March 3 and 5, 2020. Most of these are RTs (83.12%,

Hijacking Solidarity  155 n =​27,475), followed by tweets (12.92%, n =​4,271) and replies (3.95%, n =​1,307). The hashtag was trending only on March 3, but I continued the data collection for three days to generate a fuller picture of this discourse. I used the Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet (TAGS) for data collection. This is a web-​based tool that collects tweets using Twitter’s Application Programming Interface. I combine automated and qualitative methods of data analysis to examine the different layers of the far-​right public. Starting with social network analysis (SNA), I first analyze the structure of the public that emerged around #WeHaveSpace based on the conversation patterns using the open-​source software Gephi. SNA is a method that examines and visualizes relations and interactions between social actors (Knoke & Yang, 2020). Based on the intensity of these interactions, it further identifies communities that are closely connected and also considers how these communities relate to each other. Different centrality measures can also be applied to reflect which actors are influential within a network. In the visualization conducted for this analysis, nodes depict Twitter accounts, whereas edges between them indicate a form of interaction (RT, reply, or mention). Influence here is measured by using in-​degree centrality, which is a measure for in-​coming ties. In this case, having a high in-​degree centrality means that the account has often been retweeted, mentioned, or replied to, and thus gains high attention. The analysis here focuses on (1) how the public is organized and structured around this hashtag. Additionally, I examine (2) whether SNA reveals a distinct far-​right community or subnetwork, and I identify what kind of actors mobilize this community. SNA allows an in-​depth understanding of the affective structuring of publics, because emotions and affect are understood here as relational occurrences that are linked to actors’ social ties and interactions. Combining it with methods of content analysis further illuminates not only how affect and emotions circulate within and among communities, but also how communities emerge around shared affective media practices. As a next step, I apply hashtag co-​occurrence analysis focusing on (3) what kind of public sentiments these hashtags convey. Sentiments are understood here as “relatively stable regimes of meaning embedded into affective and emotional dynamics” (Slaby & Bens, 2019, p. 346). As an inductive method, co-​occurrence analysis is commonly applied to explore what topics and issues are discussed in larger text data (Rogers, 2018, p. 13). It can also reveal what past or present discourses are evoked, as well as what meanings and practices they reverberate or respond to. I argue that hashtags can be used as a signifier for the sentiment that the tweet conveys. Thus, analyzing hashtag co-​ occurrence could reveal how users feel about the specific event. Co-​occurring hashtags are usually visualized as networks, wherein nodes are hashtags, and edges are created between hashtags that are used in the same tweet. The edges can be weighted depending on how often two hashtags co-​occur. For co-​occurrence analysis, I used quanteda, which is a package for quantitative

156  Ana Makhashvili textual analysis in the programming language R (Benoit et al., 2018; Blaheta & Johnson, 2001). Finally, I extract tweets that feature the ten highest ranking far-​right accounts as identified by SNA. This results in a sample of 181 tweets. Then I conduct a qualitative content analysis. The qualitative analysis focuses on (4) what kind of affective practices far-​right actors use to hijack this hashtag public. Here, my analysis draws on the “reading for affect” approach (Berg et al., 2019), an interdisciplinary method of qualitative textual analysis focusing on the production and circulation of affect and emotions in text. Reading for affect is rooted in critical discourse analysis focusing on “how emotions are connected to social problems, ideologies, and power relations” (Berg et al., 2019, p. 47). This makes it particularly useful for studying the far right’s use of emotions in textual data. The analysis proceeds along three dimensions, namely: expression and attribution of emotions, discursive construction of collective bodies, and, finally, linguistic strategies used in text. The combination of these methods enables an in-​depth understanding of the affective dynamics that characterize far-​right publics. While SNA allows this on a network level, especially by revealing communities and possible affective alignments within but also tensions between these communities, methods of text analysis show how affect is produced and mediated, and how it circulates on a discursive level. The Social Network of #WeHaveSpace In the following, I describe (1) how the hashtag public is structured among the interaction patterns between Twitter users participating in this discourse. The network comprises 13,505 nodes and 34,632 edges. Using an algorithm for modularity (Blondel et al., 2008), Gephi distinguishes 173 communities. However, most nodes (96.11%, n =​12,980) are located in the fifteen largest communities as displayed in Figure 9.1. The visualization after community detection reveals two larger subnetworks that have some—​ but rather sparse—​ connections with each other, thereby rendering a polarized network (Smith et al., 2014). This does not mean, however, that there are two homogeneous groups. As Figure 9.1 shows, the subnetwork on the left side comprises a myriad of communities gathered around different influencers. Such influencers are also referred to as “hubs” because they mobilize (micro)audiences around them (Smith et al., 2014, p. 7). Notably, most of these communities are located close to each other, which means that there are frequent interactions between them. Looking at the influential actors within this subnetwork, we can see the search and rescue initiative Seebrücke is the account other users interact with most frequently (in-​degree =​2,111). This is not surprising because the protest movement online and offline was largely mobilized by this organization. In the same cluster, Seawatch, a non-​governmental organization commissioning

Hijacking Solidarity  157

Figure 9.1 Visualization of the 15 communities showing 93.54% (n =​12,633) of all nodes and 96.04% (n =​33,260) of all edges using Force Atlas 2 algorithm in Gephi. Node size is adjusted according to in-​degree. Source: Author’s visualization.

ships in the Mediterranean Sea to rescue refugees, is also positioned prominently (in-​degree =​890). Other influential actors in this and related clusters involve some party and politician accounts of the center-​ left party SPD (Heiko Maas) and the green party Bündnis 90/​die Grünen (Erik Marquardt), the climate change activist Luisa Neubauer, the captain of a rescue ship and political activist Carola Rackete, as well as a citizen blog that counters especially far-​right disinformation (Volksverpetzer). Most of these communities

158  Ana Makhashvili

Figure 9.2 Largest community in the network containing 40.69% (n =​5,495) of all nodes and 41.79% (n =​14,472) of all edges. Source: Author’s visualization.

are so densely connected that they can be aggregated into one subnetwork. In contrast, the blue community stands out by its distance to all other communities. This is where I now zoom in (Figure 9.2). This community comprises 40.69% (n =​5,495) of all nodes and 41.79% (n =​14,472) of all edges, which renders it the largest and the loudest community (Figure 9.2). To determine (2) what kind of community we are dealing with and who mobilizes it, I applied in-​degree centrality and took a closer look at the ten highest ranking actors (see Table 9.1). Of these, four are far-​right spam accounts, some of which I have encountered in a previous case study on the far-​right terror attack in Hanau (Medeiros & Makhashvili, 2022) and on far-​right riots in Chemnitz (Makhashvili et al., 2022). By spam accounts, I mean accounts that share some common features such as anonymity, excessive posting, and extreme speech. Violating platform regulations in some cases leads Twitter to remove these accounts; but often, they come back with slightly modified usernames (see Assenmacher et al., 2020; Martini et al., 2021; Stewart et al., 2018 on spams, bots, and trolls). Four other high-​ranking accounts belong to right-​wing bloggers: Boris Reitschuster—​a blogger and YouTube conspiracist focusing most recently on spreading disinformation around the Covid-​19 pandemic; Rainer Meyer, alias Don Alphonso, a columnist/​blogger for the online edition of the right-​wing

Hijacking Solidarity  159 Table 9.1 Ten highest ranking far-​right accounts according to their in-​degree score Username

In-​degree

Actor type

MiGiHannover _​pandorA_​8 Hartes_​Geld Reitschuster _​donalphonso Beatrix_​vStorch K*************r nikitheblogger dushanwegner Kittypunk7

858 849 826 601 581 443 435 421 398 371

spam account spam account spam account Blogger Blogger political actor other blogger blogger spam account

Note. Usernames are anonymized unless the account belongs to a public person or uses an alias.

newspaper Die Welt often engaging in misogynist and nativist discourse; and another YouTube conspiracist and blogger Niki. There is only one politician among influential actors in this cluster: namely, Beatrix von Storch, a member of parliament for the far-​right party AfD (Table 9.1). Because network analysis gives no information on the content that these accounts share, we should keep in mind that not every account belonging to the same cluster can be categorized as “far right.” However, previous literature has shown that RTs usually function as an affirmative broadcasting tool used to share an information that the user deems valid. Because the dataset consists largely of RTs, it can be assumed that these accounts are the main source of information within this community. Burgess and Baym (2020) also note that the RT button has gained popularity among Twitter users “as a means of figuring out who was worth paying attention to” (p. 94). In addition, Geboers and Van De Wiele (2020) argue that RTs can operate as “signs of affective investment,” because they represent “a performative affirmation of the contents of a particular tweet and a way of spreading a conversation more widely” (p. 751). The findings thus also indicate that these accounts circulate sentiments that other users in this community align with. The Hashtag Network While social network analysis reveals who in the network generates most noise and gains most attention, hashtag co-​ occurrence analysis shows (3) what kind of sentiments circulate in this discourse. While sentiments are related to affect and emotions in general, they refer specifically to relatively stabilized discursive categories that convey how actors (and publics) feel about certain political issues. In other words, sentiments signify “being for or against something, assessing an action as right or wrong, finding an outcome just or unjust” (Slaby & Bens, 2019, p. 346). The analysis shows that most of the frequently used hashtags in this dataset convey solidarity—​ as a dominant sentiment—​ for the refugees

160  Ana Makhashvili affected by this crisis. For instance, the hashtag #refugeeswelcome is used in 3,036 tweets, rendering it the third most used hashtag after #WeHaveSpace and #Greece (n =​6,631). The hashtag #Lebenretten (save lives) is also among the most frequently used hashtags (n =​2,698), as are #Grenzenöffnen and #Grenzenauf, both translating into a call to open borders (used in 1,524 and 1,390 tweets, respectively). Thus, top hashtags reflect the demands of the #WeHaveSpace movement that emerge from the sentiment of collective solidarity. At the same time, among the twenty most used hashtags, I also find hashtag #WirhabenkeinenPlatz (we don’t have space, n =​804), the far-​right party #AfD (n =​956), and the then speaker of the AfD #Meuthen (n =​471), as well as the hashtag #merkelmussweg (Merkel must leave, n =​448) that reverberates far-​ right parties and movements’ contestation of Merkel’s handling of refuge and migration. Also, as the practice of hijacking implies, hashtags may well be used for subverted purposes. As Waldherr et al. (2016) note, co-​occurrence analysis in communication studies can reveal possible interpretations and associations around the hashtag (p. 7). This is why such an analysis provides a better understanding of how these hashtags are used and what sentiments they convey. In a way, the co-​ occurrence analysis mirrors and also complements the social network analysis. On the one hand, we see a cluster of densely connected hashtags expressing solidarity for the refugees and calling for

Figure 9.3 Co-​occurrence network of top 30 hashtags visualized in RStudio. Source: Author’s visualization.

Hijacking Solidarity  161 immediate political action (e.g., #savelives, #openborders, #refugeeswelcome, Figure 9.3). These are the hashtags that are used most frequently in combination with #WeHaveSpace. Some other co-​occurring hashtags in this cluster include locations that are affected (#Greece, #Turkey, or #Lesbos) as well as political actors that these demands are directed toward (#EU or the German social democratic party #SPD). On the other hand, there is a cluster of hashtags that reveal sentiments contesting the demands of #WeHaveSpace activists. One group of such tweets, for instance, expresses support for the AfD (e.g., #afdwirkt—​AfD works; #nurnochafd—​only AfD; or #Meuthen) and disdain for Merkel’s government (e.g., #nurnochafd and #merkelmussweg were used together in 335 tweets). Another part of this cluster expresses solidarity for Greece instead. Such hashtags include #IstandwithGreece, #GreeceunderAttack, #DefendEurope, and #GreeceDefendsEurope. Another group of hashtags works to directly counter the movement and mobilize such nativist sentiments (e.g., #wedonthavespace or #refugeesnotwelcome). Far-​ right users thus appropriate and reclaim the sentiment mobilized by #WeHaveSpace activists and fill it with a different meaning. In these hashtags, Greece and, by extension, Europe—​ not the refugees facing immediate physical threats—​ are positioned as being in a state of danger and threat, which, in turn, not only mobilizes a sense of nativist belonging for all those facing a shared threat, but also delegitimizes expressions of solidarity with the refugees (see also Avraamidou et al., 2021). The co-​occurrence analysis shows that although the most frequently used hashtags seem to convey solidarity with refugees and connect this sentiment to calls for political action, the hashtag #WeHaveSpace is also frequently used to express and demand the opposite. The semantic network thus reveals this hashtag public as a site of contested sentiments. Beyond hijacking this ad hoc public, some users also use this hashtag to mobilize support for the far-​right party and demand the removal of Merkel’s government. Similarly, some co-​occurring hashtags capitalize on this occasion to promote nativist, antimigration sentiments as shown by the hashtags #wedonthavespace, #refugeesnotwelcome, and #defendeurope. Reading for Affect in Tweets The sample for qualitative textual analysis is composed of the tweets by high-​ ranking far-​right accounts as well as the interactions with them as long as they also feature the hashtag #WeHaveSpace and thus are captured through the data collection. Before I go into (4) the affective practices applied here in more detail, some rather general observations should be outlined. In accordance with Twitter’s affordances, RTs in this sample (usually uncommented) serve to amplify certain actors’ voices by expanding their outreach and further circulating their sentiments regarding this issue. Replies, on the other hand, operate as a site for intensification and, in more rare

162  Ana Makhashvili cases, contestation of the affects conveyed in the original tweet (see Wahl-​ Jorgensen, 2019). While it is interesting to see that several users contest the often-​racist sentiments expressed by influential far-​right users, my focus in this analysis remains with those reproducing or adding intensity to such sentiments who also dominate the discourse within this sample. Moreover, despite being curious about the possible differences in the language use of different actors (e.g., political actor compared to a spam account or blogger), I cannot find significant differences here. This is possibly because the sample is too small to examine such systematic differences. The only political actor present, for instance, resorts mainly to posing rhetorical questions. However, this is a practice that other types of actors also engage in. Irony as an Affective Practice

In line with the reading-​for-​affect approach, I start my analysis by looking for expressions and attributions of emotions as linguistic and culturally formed categories that depict “realizations and conceptualizations of affect” (von Scheve & Slaby, 2019, p. 43). However, I quickly realized that the users trying to hijack this hashtag movement, in most cases, do not express or name emotions explicitly, but rather use multimodal affective (media) practices (Lünenborg, 2021; Wetherell, 2013) to convey and perform how they feel about this issue. A practice-​based approach to affect looks for patterns and repertoires of how affect is enacted. It foregrounds the sociality and performativity of affect and understands it as a relational discursive and bodily experience that is shaped by social structures and meanings and, in turn, co-​constitutes processes of collective meaning making (Wetherell, 2015). Media-​ technological environments shape such practices and their modalities through their specific affordances. The far-​right tweets analyzed here resort predominantly to irony as an affective practice and perform it in different (albeit intersecting) ways directed at different groups and objects. As the examples will show, the object of irony spans between the demands and objectives behind this hashtag, the hashtag phrasing itself, and the actors who are assumed to be behind it. Far-​right users express irony in various ways by, for example, using extreme juxtapositions or rhetorical questions, but also integrating Twitter’s affordances to express irony in a single hashtag (e.g., #Gutmenschen, do-​gooders), a GIF, or a series of emojis (Figure 9.4). The first example in Figure 9.4, for instance, recontextualizes a statement made by the rescue ship captain Carola Rackete regarding the lack of affordable housing in Germany. By invoking her statement against the backdrop of claims voiced using this hashtag, the tweet performs an irony, which is also embodied in the attached GIF featuring eye-​rolling and facepalming. The second tweet depicted in Figure 9.4, on the other hand, uses almost exclusively emojis to redefine the reasons for which refugees ask for asylum in Germany. In doing so, the tweet creates an ironic detachment from their suffering.

Hijacking Solidarity  163

  Figure 9.4 Tweet 1: “First she claims she cannot live in Germoney [sic] because of overpopulation, now she claims #WeHaveSpace! What a schizophrenic person.” Tweet 2: “Yeah, this is how it goes … wannabe #refugees.” Source: Twitter.

One of the main groups targeted with irony is the political left. Juxtapositions are used to mock left-​supported issues and the political left as an imagined group—​even without naming them explicitly. Similar to the tweet above, AfD’s Beatrix von Storch draws parallels between the lack of affordable housing and migration to ascribe irony to the left’s support of both: Beatrix_​vStorch: Are all those bawling #WeHaveSpace going to host them at their house and pay for them? And are these the same people complaining about the lack of affordable housing? #Greece #Turkey (March 3, 2020, 15:09:55, translated by authors)1 In other cases, sarcastic commentary is used to produce and disseminate explicitly racist sentiments directed at refugees being pushed back violently at the Turkish–​Greek border (Figure 9.5) but also at migrants and refugees as a generalized collective body, thereby going beyond the discussions around this specific event. Refugees are often also marked sarcastically with the hashtag #Schutzsuchende (asylum seeker or safety seeker)—​a term that is subverted by filling it with opposing meaning. Finally, as I shall elaborate further below, irony as an affective practice often entails victimizing White bodies and creating a network of nativist belonging.

164  Ana Makhashvili

Figure 9.5  “Migrants coming with their household #wedonthavespace #wedonthavespace.”

pet

#wehavespace

Source: Twitter.

Antagonist Bodies and Reclaiming the “We”

Irony and the surrounding narrative that it mobilizes both rely heavily on constructing antagonist groups. The users who started and mobilized the hashtag #WeHaveSpace are imagined as an elitist group ironically embodied by the term Gutmensch (do-​ gooder), which circulates intensively among right-​ wing users. Articulations of this term delegitimize any sentiments disseminated by the activists declaring solidarity with the refugees, and they create an ironic distance not only to their claims but also to the activists as an imagined homogeneous group. It also assumes class-​ based differences between their own community and these activists that permit a (de)legitimization of their sentiments of solidarity. For instance, some far-​right users ascribe material possessions such as villas with gardens to these activists as well as the “comfortable couch” or “expensive districts” that they are assumed to be tweeting from. The following tweets by right-​wing bloggers exemplify this: @nikitheblogger: All the do-​ gooders, posting #WeHaveSpace: In your garden? In your designer kitchen? In your second car? (March 3, 2020, 10:24:12)2

Hijacking Solidarity  165 @ _​donalphonso: Dear migrant savers on your sofas in chic districts! These containers rotting in the dumps of a rural district that are full of asylum seekers because of the overstretched housing market, this is the reality of your #WeHaveSpace. Viewed two days ago … (March 3, 2020, 09:48:34)3 Such tweets assume a material and affective distance—​beyond an ideational one—​between people who declare solidarity for refugees and those who do not, and it offers a legitimization and belonging for the latter. In other words, the do-​gooders can and do express solidarity because they are assumed to not suffer any material consequences of this. On social media, such narratives evade reflections over the users’ own positioning (e.g., whether the mentioned bloggers share the economic struggles of their followers is questionable) and the authenticity of these claims. Rather, such tweets offer affects that any user can potentially assume to be their own. The solidarity claims of the activists are, in turn, described as futile, allowing the do-​gooders to distance themselves from their antagonists, as sarcastically claimed in one of the replies to the blogger Niki: #WeHaveSpace I, the hypocrite do-​gooder, shamelessly claim the moral high ground and higher social status for myself, getting applauded without having to do anything for it, and you, stupid Nazi, will have to pay in your everyday life for the consequences of my selfish and unworldly demands. (April 3, 2020, 16:42:03)4 In these tweets, the “We” is reimagined as a threatened group, and anxiety and fear are mobilized almost simultaneously to the hashtag surfacing in a display of solidarity for refugees. Such sentiments also include imagining male refugees as sexual predators: @dushanwegner: the do-​gooders tweeting »#WeHaveSpace«–​without giving their address and how many young men they will host.‍♂ … (March 4, 2020, 20:51:54)5 And, as one reply to Beatrix von Storch’s tweet exemplifies, they also carry misogynist attacks on activists perceived as women as well as on the asylum-​ seeking men themselves: So, either they absolutely want to be raped or they know they are so ugly that even they wouldn’t want to rape them. I can’t imagine the #WeHaveSpace idiots in any other way. No, #WeDontHaveSpace (March 4, 2020, 09:06:29)6 These tweets accentuate the intersections of antimigration and antifeminist debates. Sundén and Paasonen (2018) also discuss the online hate that feminist activists encounter in the Swedish context in which they are attacked

166  Ana Makhashvili as “tolerance whores” when they express solidarity for racialized people. A similar practice appears here, linking the solidarity expressed in this discourse to feminist demands. For instance, one user sarcastically comments that the activists do not care about the homeless people in Germany because “they’re usually ‘merely’ older White men and thus not worthy in the eyes of those at #WeHaveSpace” (Twitter user, April 4, 2020, 11:27:41). The victimization of White or ‘native’ Germans is also revealed in an emphasis on the social issues currently confronting the country: @_​pandorA_​8: We have - No nurses - No housing - No daycare - Lack of teachers - Jails are bursting at the seams - Wrecked schools - Need skilled workers etc. Above all, this virus is going around and will fill enough hospitals and the do-​gooder howls #WeHaveSpace (March 5, 2020, 06:20:31)7 These issues are emphasized in a way that insists that White or ‘native’ bodies—​minus the elite—​are the only group affected by them; and, in doing so, it reasserts their right to hijack the solidarity with racialized “others.” These examples thus show how hijacking this hashtag public is enacted by reclaiming the We in #WeHaveSpace. The “We” that is signified by people expressing their solidarity and urging the government to open the borders is contested by far-​right actors and reframed as a collective body that is endangered and that expects to suffer the consequences of the elite’s actions. Discussion The findings of this study illustrate how far-​right users effectively hijacked the solidarity sentiments assembled under the hashtag #WeHaveSpace, transforming it into a contested public. Social network analysis showed that various far-​right users ranging from bloggers and YouTubers to spammers managed to mobilize the largest community within this network that was detached and antagonistic to the rest of the public. Hashtag co-​occurrence analysis reflected the nativist political sentiments that were circulated in order to subvert and reframe this hashtag’s meaning. It also made visible the contentious dynamics that characterize affective publics in which different actors engage in a struggle over meaning by offering competing sentiments directed toward political issues. Qualitative analysis, in turn, revealed that the practice of hijacking invites irony, sarcasm, and mocking—​also fostered by Twitter’s affordances—​rather than the expression of explicit emotions such as anger, hate, or joy. It further shed light on how multimodal expressions

Hijacking Solidarity  167 of irony made it possible to convey racist ideology because images, emojis, and hashtags circulated as carriers of racist sentiments (e.g., Figures 9.4 and 9.5). Strick (2021) makes a similar argument in his inquiry into “far-​right feelings” when he claims that far-​right communication on social media often does not include “clearly ‘political’ emotions such as rage, anger, pride, patriotism, or protest” (p. 56, translation by the author). Rather, it often relies on expressions and performances of a certain “mood” or affective experience that invites identification and alliance. For instance, in misogynist discourses, some far-​right users would eschew explicitly promoting traditional gender roles, but rather choose to lament the “marginalization” of cismen—​a feeling that other cismen might relate to (p. 33). Combining these methods helps researchers to understand the different layers of affective and networked structures that characterize far-​ right formations online. It is important to keep in mind, however, that this study provides a snapshot of the dynamic formation that a networked public implies. As Markham and Lindgren (2014) point out, networks, their structures, and the meanings that they engender are always changing along with the actors, their relations, and practices. In this case study, we saw how such publics can emerge instantaneously by engaging in affective practices of mocking, sharing memes, and GIFs, and also by simply retweeting or replying, and, in doing so, reproducing and amplifying the sentiments they align with. And while these practices did not explicitly contain emotions, they mobilized and appealed to fear, anger, and anxiety by constructing a nativist “We” that is under threat. This case study invites us to view far-​right formations on social media through a networked and affective lens, and it provides a working concept that connects academic literature on (counter)publics, the far right, and affect theory. Previous studies have referred to far-​right formations on social media platforms as counterpublics (see, e.g., Rauchfleisch & Kaiser, 2020). However, drawing on the findings illustrated here, I argue that distinguishing between the mainstream public (sometimes referred to as the larger public or the general public) and counterpublics in hybrid media environments brings about many challenges and would be highly instable. This is mainly because the logics for how a certain public attains hegemony have changed immensely in the past decade, and they also vary depending on the platform used (van Dijck & Poell, 2013). For instance, as illustrated through social network analysis, far-​right users constituted the largest community within this discourse; and, at the same time, constructed a narrative of the victimized and marginalized self. It is important to emphasize that far-​right publics perform counterpublicness as a tension with an imagined general public, with dominant societal structures and meanings, and that this situates them in a state of victimhood. Tischauser and Musgrave (2020) discuss this with regard to far-​right media to which they ascribe a “performance of imitated counterpublicity in which critical race rhetoric is coopted to mobilize White supremacist sentiment and organize White tribal politics” (p. 284). These

168  Ana Makhashvili performances are affectively charged and offer a sense of “essentialized racial belonging” (p. 285). Connecting this valuable literature to the findings presented here, I propose to understand far-​right formations on social media as affective and networked publics that emerge relationally between human and computer-​ operated actors that adhere to right-​wing ideology and mobilize racist sentiments by engaging in affective media practices. This perspective implies considering far-​right publics as media-​technological, algorithmic, and affective-​discursive spaces that rely on expressive and ironic language (textual and audiovisual) and operate as a site for right-​wing belonging. Notes 1 RT @Beatrix_​vStorch: Nehmen denn alle, die jetzt #WirHabenPlatz krakeelen, auch welche bei sich zuhause auf und bezahlen für diese? Und sind das die gleichen Leute, die gleichzeitig Wohnraummangel beklagen? #Griechenland #Türkei. 2 RT @nikitheblogger: An alle Gutmenschen, die unter #WirHabenPlatz posten: In eurem Garten? In eurer Designer-​Küche? In eurem Zweitwagen? 3 RT @_​donalphonso: Liebe Migrantenretter auf den Sofas der schicken Viertel! Diese seit 2015 in einem Kaff an der Landkreisgrenze gammelnden Container, die mit Asylbewerbern ausgelastet sind, weil der Wohnungsmarkt voll ist, sind die Realität von Eurem #wirhabenplatz. Aufgenommen vor 2 Tagen. https://​t.co/​B5t​ fsDx​vHX 4 Ich heuchlerischer Gutmensch okkupiere dreist die absolute Moral für mich und kassiere leistungsfrei den Applaus und den höheren sozialen Status und du blöder Scheißnazi musst im Alltag den Preis für meine weltfremden und selbstsüchtigen Forderungen bezahlen. 5 Gutmenschen twittern »#WirHabenPlatz«–​ohne Angabe ihrer Adresse und wie viele junge Männer sie aufnehmen.‍♂ … 6 Also entweder will man unbedingt vergewaltigt werden oder man weiß man ist so hässlich dass man selbst von denen nicht vergewaltigt wird. Anders kann ich mir so #wirhabenplatz idioten nicht vorstellen. Nein, #WirHabenKeinenPlatz. 7 @_​pandorA_​8: Wir haben -​keine Pflegekräfte -​kein Wohnraum -​keine Kita Plätze -​Lehrermangel -​Gefängnisse platzen aus allen Nähten -​ruinierte Schulen -​benötigen Fachkräfte etc. Vor allem geht dieser Virus um und wird noch genug Krankenhäuser füllen Und der Bessermensch gröhlt [sic] #WirHabenPlatz

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10 Affective Temporalities of Digital Hate Cultures Kaarina Nikunen

In 2012, I was exploring a Finnish social networking site, IRC-​Gallery,1 that includes several discussion forums that adhere to the White-​power ideology. Prior to Facebook, IRC-​Gallery was one of the most popular social networking sites in Finland. Founded in 2000, it peaked in 2008 with over 500,000 users. I explored the group “Love your Race,” which had 73 members at the time who openly supported neo-​Nazism and the White-​power movement. I quickly noticed the user nicknames, such as “honestlyRacist” and “skinhead,” eventually stumbling upon the profile picture of a young Black man looking down at the camera, dressed in a grey sweatshirt with a white baseball cap. I was perplexed. What was this profile doing in the group that supports racist ideology? This apparently non-​ White profile also claimed membership of “Born to be White,” “Thank God I’m White,” “Skinheads of Finland,” and “SS Finland.” Perhaps this was a fake profile, perhaps added to the group as a counteraction, a subversive coup, to disturb and to spoil the group. Or perhaps someone had attached this profile to the group as a way to bully the person in the picture. The image may also be an example of an intentional trolling from the person in the profile picture to ridicule the White-​power ideology. The user profile also confused some of the other group members, who demanded the person leave. I was never able to trace back to the motivations behind this profile because I could not reach the users through their old pseudonyms. However, the profile picture still remains on the site as a ghostly reminder of the early days of digital racism. The case has stayed with me as an illustrative example of the confusing logics and complex multimodality of hate speech in the digital online environment. While we may never be certain whether the profile in the “Love your Race” group was an act of hate speech, it appeared in a group that openly declared racial hatred. The case is illustrative of the complexity of hate speech. It takes many shapes from verbal and multimodal expressions to images and actions. It confuses, disturbs, and mobilizes formations of affective publics.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003365426-12

174  Kaarina Nikunen At the time of the study, in the 2010s, the general public was unaware of the growing momentum of far-​right movements and the related online hate speech in some of the darker corners of the internet. However, hate speech has now infected mainstream media and politics. Today, hateful, misogynist, and racist expressions have become a mundane, even ordinary, part of digital communication. Research from Brazil, Ethiopia, Europe, India, and the United States has identified hate speech as a global phenomenon with varying localized practices (Govil & Baishya, 2018; Pöyhtäri et al., 2019; Siapera et al., 2018; Sponholtz & Christofoletti, 2018). This chapter proceeds as follows: First, it offers an overview of recent research on digital hate speech, points out the relevance of the digital media environment for the growth of hate speech, and notes a shift in hate speech research from extreme to ordinary hate speech. The chapter then moves on to introduce the main concepts: temporality and affective publics. These concepts are applied in the two case studies that follow: the inward-​oriented hate speech on the Facebook site of a Finnish far-​right group, Soldiers of Odin, and the outward-​oriented hate speech in the context of a Twitter debate on racism. Using these examples, the chapter seeks to unravel the modalities and intensities of the propagation of hate in the context of a multidimensional, complicated, and conflicted online world. It also seeks to understand the ways in which hate speech connects with the notion of affective publics (Adlung et al., 2021; Lünenborg, 2019; Papacharissi, 2015). As described by Lünenborg (2019), social media are essential to the formation of affective publics because they allow a shift from personal to public communications with the diverse and simultaneous participation of individuals, citizens, activists, professionals, or politically engaged actors. The banal multimodal practices and cultures affiliated with the production of hateful attacks apply collective targeting as well as visual and technological aspects of digital circulation. Notably, the proliferation of hate speech has affected not only digital practices, experiences, and social interactions worldwide but also the regulatory practices of media industries and digital infrastructures in sometimes controversial ways. Hate speech shapes the public’s participation in social media, and its implications travel far beyond those directly targeted or involved. Instead of trying to narrow hate speech to a precise normative definition, this chapter approaches the issue as a complex cultural phenomenon with a variety of social, technological, political, and economic consequences. The focus is on the different modalities and temporalities that shape the affective intensities of hate speech in digital media. Researching hate speech is challenging due to not only the complexity of the phenomenon but also the ethical issues it entails. I know that researching hateful and racist content can inadvertently recirculate the material, adding fame to the agents behind its origins (Askanius, 2020). Therefore, it is important to carefully consider how to present empirical data while

Affective Temporalities of Digital Hate Cultures  175 emphasizing the critical analysis that illustrates not only how hate speech is constructed and circulated but also the sentiments, values, and ideologies it advances. Digital Hate Cultures There are several ways to describe hate speech. For example, in 1997, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers defined it as covering “all forms of expression which spread, incite, promote or justify racial hatred, xenophobia, antisemitism or other forms of hatred based on intolerance” (as cited in Laaksonen, Haapoja, et al., 2020, p. 3). Hate speech is a term often invoked for legal reasons. However, as argued by Brown (2017), it is more than a legal concept; it is also an ordinary construct used to describe “the expressive dimensions of identity-​based envy, hostility, conflict, mistrust and oppression” (p. 427). As Laaksonen, Haapoja, et al. (2020) contended, hate speech refers to a variety of speech acts and other ill behavior that ranges from the penal criminal acts to speech and behavior that is uncivil and disturbing, yet tolerated. (p. 3) Similarly, Brown (2017) argued that we need to expand the definition of hate speech so that we can grasp the multiplicity of the phenomenon and the diverse ways in which it flows around social, cultural, political, economic, and technological contours. In the European context, hate speech manifests particularly in hostility toward racialized minorities and migrants, and generally toward women. Udupa et al. (2021) showed that cultures of hate flourish in various national contexts worldwide, often targeting ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. Pohjonen and Udupa (2017) explored hate speech in Ethiopia and India, arguing that there is a need for a more situational understanding of the cultures involved and their online practices—​something that has largely been obfuscated by the overarching menace of hate speech. Likewise, Banaji and Bhat (2022) identified “the need to locate discrimination, incitement and hate speech historically within specific socio-​political, economic and cultural contexts” (p. 1). To help understand the multiplicity of hate speech, Ganesh (2018) used the term “digital hate culture” to refer to the “swarm of users that form contingent alliances to contest contemporary political culture and inject their ideology into new spaces” (p. 31). Although Ganesh pointed to the political groups that produce or tacitly support hateful content, digital hate culture also refers to the complex cultural practice in the digital context; and, therefore, the use of cultures in plural appears to capture the essence of the practice more aptly. Moreover, reference to cultures points to a grassroots-​oriented

176  Kaarina Nikunen approach to investigate hate speech as a cultural practice rather than as an object of legal evaluation. The proliferation of hate speech is connected to the ways in which social media platforms and their algorithms propagate hateful and intolerant communication throughout society (Back, 2002; Daniels, 2018; Laaksonen, Haapoja, et al., 2020; Matamoros–​Fernandez, 2017). For example, KhosraviNik and Esposito (2018) connected the rise of hate speech to the digital affordances of social media, giving us the “dark side” of digital participation. Similarly, Waisbord (2020) examined several phenomena of mob censorship and harassment in online environments. Social media have indeed become a central forum and a breeding ground for hate speech production, circulation, and consumption. Their structure embraces the postdeferential political climate. As defined by Andrejevic (2013), postdeferential refers to a shift in the media environment by which people are now able to reshape, circulate, and manipulate contents on media, and even create their own truths. The postdeferential political climate, according to Andrejevic (2013), is characterized by narrative multiplication and fragmentation. Digital hate cultures are particularly connected to the rise of far-​right sentiments and political populism, while also nesting and drawing on various subcultures such as the manosphere—​namely, the digitally networked community of alt-​right, anti-​feminist, and misogynic actors (Bratich & Banet-​Weiser, 2019; Ganesh, 2018; Marwick & Caplan, 2018; Nikunen et al., 2021; Vainikka, 2017). Several elements fuel the proliferation of hate speech in social media. The main aspects are connected to the organizing opportunities and multimodal communicative tools they make available. First, social media sites provide opportunities for anyone to publish content at any time without official gatekeepers. Their participatory format has been beneficial for many marginalized groups, but it has also opened doors to hostility and harm. To produce hateful content, it is essential to have the opportunity to bypass traditional media gatekeepers and effectively distribute messages through networks of like-​minded supporters and potential adherents. This creates an avenue for people to create their own versions of reality (Esser et al., 2017; Wodak, 2015). Second, social media provide space for community building in which people with similar political ideas and agendas can meet virtually and develop their ideologies while planning action (Ekman, 2018; KhosravNik & Esposito, 2018). Like-​minded people can easily work together to produce content, they can connect to transnational networks algorithmically, and they can reach global audiences. Although hateful content is disallowed on many platforms in principle, vague rules and policies based on peer moderation make controlling the activity futile. Social media platform business models are designed around the role of facilitation, and unlike media outlets, they seek to avoid bearing responsibility for the content produced (Gillespie, 2018). As Ganesh (2018) argued, digital hate cultures “exploit the gaps of an interstitial zone”

Affective Temporalities of Digital Hate Cultures  177 (p. 37) to escape regulations by adopting coded language and actions, as well as migrating from one platform to another when necessary. Third, instead of face-​to-​face communication, social media forums provide technologically mediated channels with anonymity. Hence, attacks are made easier because technology provides distance and anonymity offers identity protection. These factors are at least partially responsible for the increasing spread of hateful content (Ascher, 2019). Algorithms and bots are used increasingly to disseminate hateful content efficiently and on-​target. The machine elements of automated media, enhanced by humans and encouraged by economic incentives (Andrejevic, 2020), thus enable complex combinations of distanced yet affective forms of engagement. In other words, social media offer technological tools and they provide cover for the dissemination of hateful attacks. At the same time, the use of these tools can accelerate the intensity, scale, and vulgarity of attacks—​thus accumulating the affect. As the IRC-​Gallery example at the beginning of this chapter suggests, social media affordances enable and bring together subcultural practices of ironic play manifested in remix practices, speedy circulation, and virality. The subcultural feel of the early internet with its harmless practices of trolling and memetic taunting collides with cold humor that defies certainty while mocking, ridiculing, and humiliating. The politics of irony (Hawley, 2017; Nagle, 2017; Nikunen, 2015; Prisk, 2017) have grown exponentially with digital media, especially in far-​right politics that target racialized subjects, feminists, and minorities often through networked actors. Importantly, the use of irony assumes an affective community (Zink, 2019) that is capable of recognizing (i.e., “getting”) the coded content and the targets of hate as well as of creating a joint community around these practices (Hutcheon, 1994; Nikunen, 2015). However, although irony flavors some of the most dominant forms of hate speech, digital hate culture also seeks repertoires from more traditional nationalistic and masculine forms as will be seen when the case of Soldiers of Odin is discussed in more detail later in this chapter (Gilroy, 2019; Nikunen et al., 2021). Temporality of Collective Affects In her seminal book, The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Ahmed (2004) discussed hate as an affective force that accumulates value through circulation. Hateful racialized circulation of images and texts provides affective encounters that connect emotions with history, narratives, and subjective experiences. However, affect does not just operate on the individual level, it also operates collectively to “envelop and press upon life” (Anderson, 2009, p. 78). Anderson (2009) discussed affective atmospheres as transpersonal intensities emerging as bodies affect one another to create indefinite, intensive space times. Affective atmospheres refer to a spatial dimension such as a social media forum, Facebook, or Twitter in which interactions are organized and shaped by the affordances of the platform (Tucker & Goodings, 2017).

178  Kaarina Nikunen Distinct groups and forums tend to establish their own affective styles over time; thus, it is possible to distinguish different affective atmospheres of melancholy, irony, shame, fear, or lightness. While the concept of affective atmosphere refers to the formation of a collective feel that is something indefinite, research on affective publics offers the more concrete examples of how emotions travel particularly intensively through digital space and how social media invite affective attunement (Lünenborg, 2019; Papacharissi, 2015). Researching the affective dimensions of online hatred reveals how emotions are experienced, managed, mobilized, and geared in the context of social media and how particular emotions carry moral force (Nikunen, 2019). Digital affect cultures (Döveling et al., 2018; Paasonen, 2015) are open to amplification, manipulation, and rebuttal in order to cultivate various affective canons (Wetherell, 2012). In terms of temporality, research has identified presentness, immediacy, and speediness as dominant time structures (Haber, 2019; Kaun & Stiernstedt, 2014; Poell, 2020). Presentness and immediacy manifest in the sense that there is always something happening on social media and that debates evolve fast. Such immediacy can be seen in the rapidity of reactions to memes and the phase of reshaping images and memes. Yet, as Coleman (2018) points out, the affective temporality of social media is multilayered and includes different rhythms and intensities but also a simultaneous sense of past and future in the present. The concept of affective publics suggests a temporality of anticipation, a premediation that mobilizes affect. This orientation toward the future is central to mediated practices of securitization that aim to predict what will come next in everyday practices of social media use (Lupinacci, 2021). They anticipate that others will join in, and they accumulate new ideas, images, and actions to be shared—​to make things happen. However, affective publics are not just formed around progressive solidarity, as in the cases explored by Papacharissi (2015). They also evolve into cultures of hate (Adlung et al., 2021). Affective publics are formed through immediacy and intensity and are expressed as supportive media engagements. As such, they are often short-​ lived assemblages, or they are built upon extant formations. The technologies and affordances of social media platforms feed anticipation through their suggestive infrastructures embedded in sharing practices. As argued by van Dijck (2013), technological solutions ensure “frictionless sharing” (p. 58) across different platforms. Sharing has become the central ideology empowering social media logic (van Dijck et al., 2018). As argued, digital hate cultures include a wide range of forms (e.g., memes, images, blogs, podcasts, videos, bots, and emojis). These modalities are intrinsically connected to and shaped by the temporality of their travels across platforms, thus gaining affective value (Ahmed, 2004). The ease of travelling across different channels and platforms is central to digital hate cultures. Memes are fast-​moving and draw on cultural bricolage with practices of mixing, reframing, and shaping the materials at hand (Milner,

Affective Temporalities of Digital Hate Cultures  179 2016; Rentschler & Thrift, 2015; Schifman, 2013). Such memetic, associative, and purposeful misconnections obscure contextualization while reinforcing stereotypes. Elements of visuality, brevity, and velocity work against detailed contextualization; therefore, impatience is inscribed into the practice of digital sharing. In summary, the temporal acceleration of public debates is considered fundamental to the emergence of hate speech. Hateful postings seek to provoke and evoke anger via trolling methods that aim to confuse, disturb, and destabilize communication. They engender instant affective reactions operating under the temporal regime of immediacy (Brown, 2017). However, I argue that not all hateful content on social media is created under similar temporal structures. The different formations of hate speech attach themselves to various directions, rhythms, and intensities depending on their context and meaning. In the remainder of this chapter, I offer a closer look at the formation of affective publics within different temporalities. For this, it is useful to distinguish between a hate culture that is inward-​targeted (i.e., shared within a group of like-​minded individuals and operating as ideological glue) and outward-​targeted (i.e., manifested action and harm toward others). The first case focuses on inward-​ targeted postings of memes and images on the Soldiers of Odin Facebook group, whereas the second case examines outward-​targeted multimodal messages on Twitter and their intensity. Both cases adhere to temporal structures of acceleration and intensity, situated, albeit in different ways, in the context of Finland and its rise of far-​right anti-​immigrant movements. I pay particular attention to the ways in which different modalities and temporalities of hate are connected to the formation of affective publics. I also explore the digital housework involved in these cases. Methods and Materials The empirical data in this chapter consist of 286 images and responses shared on the public Finnish Soldiers of Odin Facebook site. Data were collected using the Facebook Graph application programming interface. The analyzed images were posted between December 2015 (when the Facebook group was founded) and February 2017. The site became inaccessible in 2020. All posts, comments, metadata, and images were downloaded for analysis. The second case consists of data collected from a Twitter feed in November 2021, resulting in 104 postings under hashtags #renaz and #valtaoja. The hashtags refer to the names of the persons at the center of a Finnish political debate on racism. The discussion thread includes text, images, videos, and memes. The data consist of only what is available. In other words, there are several posts that have been removed due to moderation. The analysis focuses on the repeated use of images, repertoires, and styles and the responses they evoke. It pays attention to the modes (genres),

180  Kaarina Nikunen interactions (responses), and temporalities (intensities, rhythms) of the social media data. The affective dimensions of the interactions are analyzed by identifying emotions verbalized or coded in comments and responses via exclamation marks, capital letters, emojis, and named emotions. Furthermore, the analysis leverages the idea of following the “thing” to trace different networks, connections, and references using reverse image searching and hyperlinks (Caliandro, 2018; Carah, 2014; Hine, 2017; Marcus, 1995). The aim is not only to explore the desires, claims, and moralities of digital hate culture, but also to connect the formation of these affective publics to the context of the digital interface, its organization, and its temporal structure as well as the digital housework it requires. Inward-​Targeted Accumulation of Hate The first case examines images shared on Soldiers of Odin, an anti-​ immigrant street-​patrol Facebook group established in Finland in 2015 in response to the so-​called “European refugee crisis” (Chouliaraki et al., 2017; Nikunen, 2020). The stated intent was to protect citizens from the alleged threats posed by asylum seekers. The Facebook site rapidly gained nearly 50,000 followers internationally. It had subgroups in at least 13 European countries, including Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. There were also subgroups in Australia, Canada, and the United States (Ekman, 2018). On the Finnish public site, images can be categorized roughly into three types: the members themselves, Viking mythological figures, and immigrants. Here, I focus on the third group. A typical example of immigrant-​related images is a close-​up of bearded, presumably Muslim men shouting at an organized rally or protest. Responses to the images included terms such as “parasites,” “intruders,” and “fake.”2 Expressions of anger and explicit verbalized emotions (e.g., “I’m so angry”) were common, as were textual codes signifying intensity such as exclamation marks and capital letters (e.g., “Fuck those parasites!!!!”). Anger was also verbalized regarding the desire to act by attacking and killing the people represented in the images (e.g., “Cyanide [sic] to those in their food,” “burn them all,” “bomb them,” “call the Gestapo,” “deathtoislam [sic]; missing the SS troops”). In summary, images depicting immigrants with angry expressions seem to have affectively incited anger in the group’s responses—​ in both Finnish and English. A reverse image search reveals that the image in question is commonly used by various professional news sites as well as by right-​wing or religious websites. According to the Associated Press, the image was taken in 2010 by Khalid Tanveer in Multan, Pakistan, during a demonstration against plans to burn Qurans. Thus, the context of the image is far away from Finland and dated long before the so-​called refugee crisis debated on the Soldiers of Odin site.

Affective Temporalities of Digital Hate Cultures  181 Another image contains three apparently Muslim men at another demonstration, tagged with @fakeposters, signifying a freelance group of graphic artists with their own Facebook and Twitter channels. The added heading of the image read, “WE WILL RAPE YOU!” followed by a smaller text at the bottom, “we will rape your sons and daughters, we are poor refugees, you will allow it.” A reverse image search suggested that the original image by the EPA news agency is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement in the Middle East. Their existence is considered illegal in several countries today. However, the true origin of the image still remains unclear, and its connection to the Muslim Brotherhood lacks veracity. On the Al Jazeera news site, the photo was found with the caption, “Protestors shout anti-​government slogans in February 2011” (El-​Shamayleh, 2013). Like the first image discussed, the picture seems to lack any connection to refugees in Finland. Other image types on Soldiers of Odin site consisted of memes that constrasted two images with captions that referred to allegedly genuine refugees (e.g., images of severely malnourished children) against ones that were claimed to be fake (e.g., a young, happy-​looking man in his 20s). They also staged poor Finns needing state support against asylum seekers who camp in reception centers. This was propagated in memes using opposing images of small food portions (captioned “for the elderly”) and a refugee eating a hearty meal (captioned “lunch at the reception center”). Responses to these provocative memes included expressions of emotions in swearwords, slurs, and exaggerated spelling such as [grammar and spelling not corrected] “this if anything in Finland ppisssseesssmeofffff,” “this nxxxxer has such a fistfriendly face,” “my words exactly,” and “my knuckles are itching.” This back-​and-​forth exchange illustrates the power of the provocation produced by the digital bricolage of memes and the intentional practices of mixing and reframing contexts to create powerful affects (Askanius, 2020; Hokka & Nelimarkka, 2020; Rentschler & Thrift, 2015; Schifman, 2013). The actual contexts are irrelevant, because the images serve as a general sign for every Muslim man and every asylum seeker without any real, detailed referent; and, as demonstrated, the references of the images are indeed lost. The repetitious circulation inherent in the nature of these memes draws upon stereotypical ideas of the dangerous, dishonest stranger. This has also been the recurring trope in media coverage of the so-​called refugee crises in Europe (Chouliaraki & Stolic, 2016; Oboler, 2016; van Dijk, 1991). Several similar images form a larger imaginary and a collective understanding of threat. In this way, the images then serve the purpose of the Soldiers of Odin group, who have established themselves as protectors and defenders against the enemy (Saresma, 2017). Affective temporality manifests in short, sometimes single-​word responses enhanced by exclamation marks and capital letters. The responses appear rapidly one after the other while propagating to other networks with suggested hyperlinks to news sites or YouTube videos. The tempo of the responses slows occasionally when outsiders attempt to properly contextualize or

182  Kaarina Nikunen argue against fear-​mongering memes. Such mitigation, however, is scarce in relation to the abundance of the affective anger present on such networks. While there are “outsiders” on the site and traffic that links to other far-​right sites, communication is predominantly targeted to the like-​minded members of the group. This becomes evident in the lack of reasoning over shared images and memes as well as in the abundance of mutual backslapping in the form of emojis and verbal consensus. Moreover, the shared images of the members themselves posing as a group fortify the sense of affective community. Reactions operate as affective support and formation of the ideology of Soldier of Odin. Targeted inward to other members of the group, each response operates as a fortifying echo of congruity, solidifying the group and its mission. Their affective force lies in the anticipation of danger. The angry, furious responses evidence to the danger and threat, whereas the ironic memes seek to ridicule the dangerous other. In other words, the constituting of an atmosphere of threat to which the angry responses clearly attest is accompanied by an ironic laughter (Grusin, 2010). The temporality of the Soldiers of Odin site operates through anticipatory practices that accumulate the sense of hate. The dynamic moves in from the outside, as members collect materials from news and other external sources and bring them to be remixed and shared together in ways that solidify the group and strengthen the grounds of their own culture of hate. Outward-​Targeted Expansion of Hate The second case explores outward-​targeted hate speech as an example of surging affective publics and the variety of genres adopted on social media. This is the case of a public debate on racism evoked by a Finnish television talk show on the public service media (YLE) channel in November 2021. An established White male astronomer, Esko Valtaoja, was invited to debate with a female music journalist and an activist of color, Renaz Ebrahimi, on the current affairs talk show Sannikka that often carries a provocative edge. Ebrahimi was highly critical of the setting and strongly criticized Valtaoja for using the N-​word on the show. Valtaoja explained in the show how the offensive meaning of the N-​word is contextual and gave explicit examples of its use by also legitimizing its use in a historical context. Ebrahimi responded by expressing that the setting of the show made her feel unsafe. This excerpt from the show went viral on social media, and a secondary Twitter discussion evaluated the performances of the two participants. Many users described Valtaoja as rational, composed, and wise, whereas Ebrahimi was described as badly behaved, aggressive, and hateful. The debate deployed gendered understandings of male rationality versus female emotionality, also in the use of hashtags with his surname and her first name. Some participants supported Ebrahimi’s stand and questioned the expert role of an astronomer

Affective Temporalities of Digital Hate Cultures  183 in a debate on racism. However, the debate quickly moved from a generally structured argument to vile, personal commentary. In the beginning of the Twitter thread under hashtags #renaz and #valtaoja, there were several comments supporting Ebrahimi’s reactions in the show; but gradually, these views abated and the feed became dominated by comments that criticized and scorned Ebrahimi and her claims of not feeling safe. The affective tone shifted from intense debate to ironic mockery and malice, bringing together people with similar views from different other platforms and forums such as the right-​wing populist Homma platform, Facebook groups, and YouTube channels. With likes and cross-​referenced hyperlinks, participants formed an alliance, a mob, that sought to target Ebrahimi with postings that were directed and tagged to her, naming her as “disgusting,” “embarrassing,” “fucked-​up,” a “monster,” a “crazy fanatic,” “stupid,” “dangerous,” and a “horrible person.” This public targeting resonates with Waisbord’s description of mob harassment (Waisbord, 2020). The debate extended to other forums when a founding member of the Finnish anti-​immigrant forum, Homma, posted a video from Ebrahimi’s DJ gig from the previous year in which she played and sang alongside rap lyrics that included the N-​word. The purpose was to expose Ebrahimi’s alleged hypocrisy—​she was using the N-​word herself—​and the clip quickly spread. Cartoonish memes were then circulated, shared, and framed (Chadwick, 2013; Meraz & Papacharissi, 2013; Pöyhtäri et al., 2019). The clip quickly found its way to YouTube channels hosted by right-​wing microcelebrities. As argued by Lewis (2018), microcelebrity tactics emphasize relatability and authenticity with their audiences, often resorting to sensationalism, attention-​seeking, and shaming in their productions. In the case of far-​right microcelebrities in particular, the relationship is built upon intimacy and authenticity, whereas the mode of address seeks attention, controversy, and scandal. The microcelebrity video culture builds connections through practices in which hosts visit or watch each other’s shows online as well as through live on-​screen viewer commentary. Rauchfleisch and Kaiser (2020) argued that this behavior is a prime example of what Papacharissi (2015) called “affective publics.” On the Finnish right-​ wing populist YouTube channel, EskoTV, the host and a guest (another YouTuber who performs sport commentary) reprimanded Ebrahimi’s behavior, garnering 2,821 views. According to Ekman (2014) microcelebrity videos capitalize on the affordances of the social media platform to facilitate and amplify public debate as an alternative to one-​way news-​reporting media. Laaksonen, Pantti, and Titley (2020) researched Finnish anti-​immigrant activism and identified three overlapping but persistent communicative strategies: movement building, controversy building, and personal branding. Video genres include live streaming, vlogs, re-​cuts (i.e., response videos; Lewis, 2018), reframed content, and compilations (Laaksonen, Pantti, & Titley, 2020) to arouse controversy. The clips of Ebrahimi’s debate and DJ gig illustrate affective media

184  Kaarina Nikunen practices in their use of platforms to attack, ridicule, and shame. This course of events presents how digital hate cultures operate and adapt to new forms and genres (Titley, 2019) via cultural bricolage of the internet and the logistics of extant networks that give surge to new scandals and mob harassments (Waisbord, 2020). Compared with the first case (i.e., Soldiers of Odin), the second (i.e., Valtaoja and Ebrahimi) offers more conflictual affective attunements of controversy and debate, whereas in the first, the hateful postings were geared more toward solidifying the group’s base and ideology. Solidification is also present in the second, and it fortified the relational bonds of like-​minded participants. In terms of the temporality of hate, hate speech is shared in different rhythms and intensities. While the first case presents a gradually growing online community of the like-​minded enhanced by continuously shared affective hateful contents, the second case illustrates a surge of affective publics and the ways in which this stretches and extends to different forums and genres. The temporality of the second case adheres to intensive immediacy that is enhanced with technological tools to link and share. In terms of creating scandals, such temporality of speed is essential as it creates a sense of intensity and anticipation of something that is about to happen next (Papacharissi, 2015). Rauchfleisch and Kaiser (2020) argued that far-​right inward-​oriented communication is characterized by radical, racist language, whereas outward-​ oriented communication operates on public forums and spreads to wider audiences. Yet, outward-​ oriented communication is not necessarily more moderate in tone, as Rauchfleisch and Kaiser claim (2020). In this case study, the outward-​targeted messages seem to be particularly conflictual and designed to mobilize mob harassment. Digital Housework of Hate While hate speech seems to travel easily and swiftly across platforms, it also involves practices of moderation that seek to calm and slow down the circulation of hate. However, these efforts often seem to fail. As argued by Kalsnes and Ihlebæk (2021), moderation has become more important as online harassment and hate speech have become more usual. Shifting the gaze to moderation enables us to see that hate speech is not just symbolic signs; it is also treated as material content—​as a waste that should be removed from platforms. The implied house-​cleaning requires moderators, either human or machine. Moderation services are often outsourced or delegated to low-​paid individuals (Gray & Suri, 2020; Roberts, 2019). Roberts (2019) estimated that there were some 100,000 content moderators worldwide, and that they made very little money via short-​term contracts or freelancing agreements. Jarrett (2016) used the term “digital housewife” to render a gendered connection to unpaid social reproduction and housework that enables the capitalist accumulation of profit for others. According to some estimates, moderators often

Affective Temporalities of Digital Hate Cultures  185 have around 20 s to make decisions about new content, making the job far from easy (Siapera, 2022). Simultaneously, purveyors of hate speech tend to routinely develop new ways of denigrating or attacking minoritized groups while evading platform standards (Jereza, 2021). Additionally, as revealed by Roberts (2019), moderators are routinely exposed to violent and hateful content that creates hazardous psychological working conditions. Although machine learning promises to overtake many monotonous human-​centered activities, it “introduces further opacity into moderation decisions, because the ways in which algorithms work are neither clear nor accountable” as argued by Siapera (2022, p. 60) based on the work of Gorwa et al. (2020). Ostensibly, forum moderation practices are entangled with platforms’ affordances and lack of transparency. Motivations behind moderation are not always clear, because the practice also involves invisibility. This is manifested in actions that are not explained to the public. Notably, in the second case of this chapter, several comments were removed without explanation (Matamoros-​Fernandez, 2017), making it difficult to analyze the cause or motivations of moderation. Twitter applies a mechanism by which comments detected as including strong views are temporarily hidden so that readers must choose to reveal their content. Interestingly, the warning notice provided by Twitter for this purpose may be an invitation to some, allowing faster access to highly affective content. These types of moderation practices not only blur the motivations of moderation but may also render hateful content affectively lucrative. The other case, the Soldiers of Odin site, simply disappeared (or became inaccessible) from Facebook. In 2020, Facebook announced that it was cracking down on far-​right extremist groups, but there is no evidence that the Soldiers of Odin site was included. While these mechanisms above seem to hide part of the hate speech, they also add to nontransparency of the policies around hate speech. It is not clear whether the platforms actually condemn the contents, or simply wish to reduce their visibility. Additionally, some content, such as ironic memes, may simply be too complicated to be decided on quickly. Otherwise, moderation practices often appear purposefully ineffective, resulting in traffic and advertisement revenue continuing to thrive. Conclusion This chapter set out to explore the modalities and temporalities of digital hate culture in the context of the Finnish right-​wing anti-​immigrant movement. The case studies showed how expressions of hate often sit on the borderline of irony and cruelty, colonizing new media modalities, while also engendering occasional resistance and moderation. This chapter shed light on the ways in which social media groups share and produce affective atmospheres through hate speech and the ways in which affects are encouraged and mobilized in the formation of affective publics. The two cases presented seem to have adhered to the temporality

186  Kaarina Nikunen of immediacy and anticipation, but their dynamics were different. The first case illustrated a compliant atmosphere of like-​minded individuals. Dynamics were based on a movement from outside in, bringing materials from external sources to be remixed and shared together on social media. Their hateful images and memes were intended to invoke a shared hatred, resulting in group camaraderie, ideology sharing, and reinforcement. The temporality was tuned toward the anticipation of danger and ironic laughter. The second case operated by expanding hate speech to different modalities and platforms. The tone of the debate in the second case was more conflictual, characterized by the anticipation of conflict and a preparedness to mobilize mob harassment. Both cases illustrate the surge of affective publics and the ways in which messages travel rapidly across platforms and forums. Importantly, the adoption of different media formats (e.g., memes, cartoons, and videos) is essential for the circulation of hate speech. In this way, digital hate culture acquires new logistical tools that are used to conquer new frontiers of the digital media. This chapter further discussed the ways in which hateful affective practices are materially and intrinsically connected to digital infrastructures, social media affordances, and platform policies. Exploring hate speech from this perspective helps us understand how it is engineered and encouraged by the algorithmic suggestive infrastructure. Moderation of hate speech requires increasing amounts of “digital housework.” Instead of being transparent, platform policies add to the obscurity and nontransparency of the policies around hate speech. Furthermore, the different modalities of hate speech help purveyors escape detection. Even if moderation practices may slow down and break some threads and sites, it seems to be impossible to completely slow down the circulation of hate in its multiple and constantly transforming modes. Notes 1 IRC referred originally to text-​based Internet Relay Chat. However, the use of IRC-​Gallery is not limited to IRC users and it is open to all. 2 The quotes have been translated from Finnish by the author.

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11 Understanding the Affective Impact of Algorithmic Publics Tobias Matzner

Increasingly, publics are being structured by algorithms. Digital platforms have replaced traditional forms of gatekeeping by algorithmic filters that compile content with the promise that this will personalize it for each user (Bozdag, 2013). A high ranking on the relevant search engine is central to visibility on the net—​for both general-​purpose search engines such as Google and specialized search engines such as those for academic publications, software libraries, artworks, and so forth. Video platforms such as YouTube and streaming providers of video and audio are discussed not only for their content but also for their recommender systems that are an essential part of their platforms. With targeted advertising as an increasing source of income and recommender systems as an important inroad for website traffic, the digital content of more traditional media is also increasingly being created to conform with the requirements of algorithmic selection. Some even talk about “algorithmic journalism” and “algorithmic audiences” (Anderson, 2011, 2012). Generally speaking, most of the contents we encounter in digital media are selected by an algorithm in some form or other. Yet, selection does not encompass the full impact of algorithms on publics. Increasingly, algorithms also create content. In the so-​called “robot journalism,” language processing algorithms write texts for newspapers and other media (Calva-​Rubio & Ufarte-​Ruiz, 2021). Algorithmically generated measures such as likes, retweets, or subscribers join established markers of visibility or relevance. In response to this, chatbots disguised as human social media users even attempt to mimic human behavior in order to influence these quantitative markers of success. Currently, even much more sophisticated means of creating manipulative content—​the so-​called “deep fakes”—​are being discussed (Johnson & Diakopoulos, 2021). As yet another iteration of medial deception, they provide the means to create very realistic, yet completely artificial videos to almost anyone. A more hidden, but central function for this algorithmic structuring of publics is the possibility of using algorithms to measure and evaluate DOI: 10.4324/9781003365426-13

192  Tobias Matzner individual users’ behavior. Both the selection and the creation of content are aimed at specific persons using algorithms that attempt to predict the most “successful” content for the respective user (Zuboff, 2019). Successful here can mean many things, such as time of engagement, more sales, and successful political manipulation. To create such measures, a lot of data are collected that are then processed by algorithms. This processing can be based on the behavior of others (“clients who bought what you buy also bought this”), and also on sociodemographic data quite similar to those used prior to the advent of algorithmic publics (e.g., targeting a specific income class or neighborhood). In summary, what I describe here as algorithmic publics is a threefold development: Algorithmic selection of content and algorithmic creation of content that are both driven, in turn, by algorithmic measurements of user behavior. This development toward algorithmic publics comes with various concerns. In this chapter, I shall focus on a specific set of these concerns that deals with the affective structure of publics. Affect is a more or less explicit part of many arguments regarding algorithmic publics. This chapter addresses two variants of such concerns: A first group is algorithmic processes that do not aim directly at affects, but that are discussed critically for producing affective effects. A second group is algorithmic processes that aim directly at measuring and/​or producing affects. The example I shall use for the first group is the idea of the “filter bubble.” This term was introduced by Pariser (2011a) when discussing algorithmic measures for selecting media content according to previous interests. Such measures usually involve parameters such as time spent on device or similarity of the behavior of different users. Affect is not the aim of the algorithmic selection or creation of content; nor do the underlying algorithmic measures quantify affects directly. Yet, Pariser worries that such criteria easily lead to users being served content that supports their views: Content expressing love for what they love and hate for what they hate. In short, users are addressed affectively rather than rationally. Other examples for such affective effects of algorithmic publics would be similar notions such as “echo chambers” (Terren & Borge-​Bravo, 2021) or the affective reactions of users who realize that the content they create will be processed by algorithms and thus act according to an “algorithmic imaginary” (Bucher, 2016). The example I shall use for the second group is the case of Cambridge Analytica. The British consulting firm collected the data of millions of Facebook users without their consent and then sold their analyses for political advertising. The firm claimed to be able to use comprehensive measures of people’s individual personality traits to target them with specific political campaigns that would address them not with arguments but affectively. Due to Cambridge Analytica’s purported involvement in both the Brexit campaign and Donald Trump’s successful election campaign in 2016, the case

Understanding the Affective Impact of Algorithmic Publics  193 rose to prominence and is often cited as exemplary of the huge manipulative potential of affect-​based algorithmic targeting (Laterza, 2018). Another example for this second group would be Facebook’s infamous experiments with mood manipulation, in which Facebook claimed to show that it could influence the mood of its users by selecting particular content in which specific affects were salient (Flick, 2016; Kramer et al., 2014). Also, the use of algorithms for purposes of “nudging” (Thaler & Sunstein, 2009)—​that is, influencing people’s behavior without force—​most often entails a form of affective address of subjects that can be based on personalized user data. Considering the history of thought on algorithms and technology, this connection between algorithms and affects is rather unusual. For a long time, the algorithmic and the machinic have been associated most often with instrumental reason, “cold” pitiless logic, and the proverbial reduction of thinking and feeling beings to numbers or cogs in a machine. This is well illustrated in fiction—​for example, in the movie Blade Runner in which the “Voight–​ Kampff test” that measures emotional responses to specific questions is the definitive way to tell human and artificial intelligence apart (Scott, 1982). There has always been a line of thought in which machines manipulate human beings affectively, but that usually has entailed human likeness—​ often in the gendered form of a seductive woman such as the character of Olimpia in Hoffmann’s (1817/​1972) The Sandman or the robot version of Maria in Metropolis (Lang, 1927/​2011). In discussions over algorithmic publics, however, the affective is used to provide critical leverage for the influence of algorithms on publics. It is clear that an affective technology such as Cambridge Analytica needs a critique that deals with affects. In the first group of concerns, such as the case of the filter bubble, it is the critique that establishes the relation between algorithms and affects. I shall show that in this regard, both cases share an important element: In both, the practices in which algorithms influence publics entail a particular view of subjects as members of the public. Critical analyses of algorithms as affect-​based threats to publics—​again in both cases—​tend to take over this specific view of subjects from the design and use of algorithms. This also leads to a particular, reductive understanding of affect. I shall argue that this way of conceiving both subjects and affects does not suffice to grasp the specific threat that algorithms pose for publics. As a consequence, I shall argue that a different understanding of subjects as members of publics and their susceptibility to affective influence is necessary in order to better understand the challenges that algorithms pose. This understanding is provided by using the works of Berlant (2011) on the influence of affects on political publics. Importantly, I do not want to argue that there is no threat—​just a different one to the one that is often discussed. To begin this argument, in the next section, I shall illustrate how algorithmic processing is tied to specific subjectivities in general, before focusing on the particular forms it takes in algorithmic publics.

194  Tobias Matzner Algorithms and Their Subjects The fact that the effect of algorithms on publics is discussed in terms of affects is not just based on efforts to describe recent developments of information technologies. Rather, both the advocates and users of such algorithms as well as their critics supplement thought and debate on algorithms through other discourses and theories regarding the subjects addressed by the algorithmic processes—​in our case, the members of the public. Thus, the effects of algorithms on publics that are aimed at (by users) or diagnosed (by critics) hinge on these discursive or theoretical supplements. Stark (2018) summarizes the history of such developments as the emergence of what he calls the “scalable subject.” He describes the second group of cases that I have mentioned in which algorithms address affects directly as “logical extensions of a longer scientific genealogy of making emotions legible and comprehensible running from the late nineteenth century up through the present” (pp. 207–​208). Hence, current algorithmic forms of engaging with affect have their precursors in psychology, especially in their developments toward using quantitative methods (Danziger, 1994). However, computer science did not just take over scientific results; it adapted them to its own needs and technical possibilities: Informed by the history of psychology’s intersection with computer science, the subject of digital control is not only plastic but also scalable: shaped and made legible at different orders of technical analysis by those affordances of social media platforms grounded in psychological science, and thrown back to the human person as a model with which to conform or suffer. (Stark, 2018, p. 208) Here Stark makes two important points: First, the legibility of the subject is grounded in science, but no longer serves scientific purposes. Rather, it becomes a part of the function of the “affordances of social medial platforms.” This does not just mean a different use of the scientific processes of making subjects legible and scalable. It also introduces new forms of making the subject legible. The criterion for these new measures is successful function within the context of use—​for example, a social media platform—​rather than scientific methodology. Particularly, the promise of machine learning is to find new signals or patterns representing specific features in large amounts of heterogeneous data. It is important to understand that although these algorithmic measures sometimes aim to reproduce scientific judgment, they still process the data in a completely different manner than human beings do (Matzner, 2016a). Furthermore, most uses of machine learning algorithms aim to find new patterns that are not directly discernible to human beings (Matzner, 2016b). This is not only the reason for their immense potential but also a huge ethical problem, because sometimes even the programmers of

Understanding the Affective Impact of Algorithmic Publics  195 an algorithm cannot tell how it links the input data to the desired output—​ only that it does so within some statistical degree of certainty (Rohlfing et al., 2020). This links up directly with the second point in Stark’s (2018) text: The scalable subject is “thrown back to the human person as a model with which to conform or suffer” (p. 208). Thus, the algorithmic processes very often do not aim at a representation of the subject and its affects, but at a certain functionality for which the processing of affects is only one step, which can very well remain implicit (Matzner, 2018). Part of these effects on subjects is that platforms try to make their users express affects (and other things) in ways that are “aligned with a platform’s models—​conforming to classificatory schemes” (Stark, 2018, p. 214). The consequences of this “throwing back” the algorithmic results on persons are the issue with which most critics engage. They do not argue necessarily that the algorithmic processing of affect is itself wrong or unscientific, but that it has effects that are detrimental—​in the cases discussed here—​to the members of publics. Given what I have described so far by using Stark’s analysis, this is an apt form of critique, because the scientific register is already left by the practices Stark describes. The question is not how scientifically valid these approaches are, but what their use does to publics. Yet, in describing this impact, I shall show that many critics retain the same understanding of the scalable subject—​that is, the same supplement of the analysis of algorithms with a view toward their subjects—​that the practitioners perform. However, while they may drive algorithms successfully, this particular view of affect and subjects is not the best one to take in order to understand an impact on publics and the normative requirements they entail. In particular, the strong and multifaceted critiques from feminist thinkers and postcolonial theorists on publics have demanded time and time again that attention should be paid to the social dynamics that are particular to publics along with their specifics for certain groups within society (Fraser, 1992; Warner 2002). Thus, in what follows, I shall show not only that algorithmic effects on publics are indeed critical but also that critics will miss important elements in need of being criticized if they take over the respective view of what is going on from the practices of using algorithms they analyze. Such an argument has already been advanced by Chun (2018) regarding the use of “filter bubbles” as a critical concept for algorithmic publics. I shall summarize this briefly in the next section before making a similar argument regarding Cambridge Analytica and its use of psychometric microtargeting based on the Big Five personality model. Filter Bubbles and Homophily The concept of the filter bubble was first coined by Pariser (2011a). Since then, the concept has become a prominent trope in discussions over digital media in general and digital publics in particular. Academically, there is valid

196  Tobias Matzner evidence that the concept of the filter bubble and also the echo chamber have been disproved empirically and criticized as being overly vague and simply catchy terms (Bruns, 2019). What interests me in the scope of this chapter, however, is the conceptual presuppositions regarding members of the public and the role that affect plays in their public engagement that animates this critique. This is because, empirical doubts notwithstanding, the filter bubble has been one of the most successful exports from academia into public discourse in recent years. Furthermore, the general issue that Chun (2018) criticizes regarding the concept of the filter bubble—​that is, an unreflected acceptance of the conceptual presuppositions of algorithmic technology—​can also be applied to other cases, as I shall show in the next section. Pariser (2011a) bases his idea on personalization on internet use. This concerns personalized search engine results or the algorithmically curated feeds that determine what users (at least with default settings) see when they use social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter as well as news aggregators. Similar processes also drive the suggestions made by platforms such as Spotify or Netflix. Regarding an influence on the public, the latter—​often considered as platforms that mainly deal in entertainment—​ have rarely been discussed. With the rise of podcasts as an important medium for public information and political analyses, this might nonetheless change. Affect becomes important for Pariser as a critical perspective. He argues that this selection process no longer presents us content that should concern us rationally, but rather provides us with content toward which we have a strong affective reaction. If the latter is the case, users more often react, comment, like, or share the content—​or they simply spend more time with it. These are the very signals that the algorithms process to select content. To do so, they link these signals with other users who are somehow similar to us, whereby this similarity is established once again using algorithmically created data in, for example, Facebook’s “social graph” (Gerlitz & Helmond, 2013). Both factors combined lead to the threat of the filter bubble: What a user is most likely to see is content that other similar users have interacted with in an algorithmically significant manner. It is quite likely that this is content that has strongly affected these similar others. Thus, “bubbles” of like-​minded people form, tied together by affect without rational or critical challenge. In the TED talk that Pariser gave to support the book launch, this is illustrated by a graphic (Pariser 2011b, 5:11) showing little stick figures involved in symbolical a tug of war. While one team, depicted in blue, shares a thought bubble containing a book, the opposing team is drawn in the affect-​connoting color red and thinks of a cone of ice cream. Pariser connects his thought to the idea that—​at least as far as public discourse is concerned—​reason should tame our affects. This idea shares a long history from Enlightenment thinkers to Habermasian ideas of rational discourse (Habermas, 2007) and potentially also has an equally long history of being criticized. Some aspects of this tension are also discussed in this volume.

Understanding the Affective Impact of Algorithmic Publics  197 There is however a second issue that I want to highlight here. This concerns the way in which the “ice cream”—​that is, what affectively pleases us—​is operationalized in social media feeds and search engines, and the way Pariser criticizes it. It has already been mentioned that the idea of the filter bubble strongly overstates the effects of algorithmic content selection. There is no empirical evidence for filter bubbles as systematically distinct content presented to different types of users preventing them from relating to shared descriptions of social reality (Bruns, 2019). Yet, apart from this issue of empirical validity, the argument by Pariser and others who use the idea of the filter bubble is a good illustration of the problems that emerge when the concept of subjectivity and affect that drives the algorithm is used in a critical perspective. Even when the effect is overstated, the description of the function of algorithmic content selection that drives the idea of the filter bubble is correct. What the algorithms do in this case is a kind of social network analysis. They use the measures of individual users’ online behavior and their customer data to build a “social graph” as Facebook calls it. An important function of the graph is to enable a measure of similarity between users, so that similar users can get similar content. Chun (2018) shows that social network analysis is a much older concept. In line with Stark’s (2018) argument, it provides the scientific basis for the way in which the algorithms of social network sites operate today. Chun (2018) traces the idea back to Merton and Lazersfeld, who analyzed friendship in the 1950s and found that people like to mingle with similar persons. Later on, the same concept was extended to other human relations. As Chun (2018) states, it was assumed that “the homophily principle … structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, co-​membership, and other types of relationship” (p. 77). This homophily principle is now operationalized in the search for similar users through algorithms. It is quite clear why a concept that evolved from social network analysis might animate algorithms of social networking sites. Yet, the problem is that critical voices such as Pariser’s follow the same logic when describing the effects of these algorithms. According to this logic, algorithms operationalize homophily, providing affective triggers that effectively circumvent rational control and thus serve the aim of the site: More interaction, longer usage, and so forth. Framed in that manner, however, what happens in the bubble is paradoxically removed from the center of critique: Whatever happens in the bubble is just a consequence of a basic human trait—​homophily—​and not due to specific qualities of its content such as specific affects, or the particular forms of subjects that gather in the bubble. Chun contends that this excuses the hateful, racist, misogynist, nationalist content that makes the online phenomena Pariser calls filter bubbles so worrisome in the first place. Because in this argument, the reason that this content is spread is not hate, racism,

198  Tobias Matzner misogyny, and so forth—​but homophily. As a consequence, “homophily launders hate into collective love” (Chun, 2018, p. 62). These observations show the necessity to develop a sociopolitical perspective on the way in which affects and algorithms are related in social media, rather than basing critique on the implicit assumptions in the ways these algorithms are set to work by their creators. In particular, if the ramifications of algorithms on publics are the concern, it is necessary to develop a theoretical perspective on affect in publics that are a much more specific structure than the networks that have been analyzed exhibiting homophily. Publics also come with quite different social and normative requirements on their subjects than friendships, for example. As Chun (2018) shows, homophily might be an important concept in social research; yet if it is simply applied to publics, it almost justifies behavior that the theorists of the filter bubble originally intended to criticize. Cambridge Analytica and Psychometric Manipulation A similar story can be told about psychometric microtargeting and its potential for manipulation. I shall use the case of the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica as an example. They claimed to use algorithmic measures of Facebook users to build individual profiles of personality traits that could be used, in turn, to microtarget users with specific content that would affectively manipulate their political decisions. Cambridge Analytica was alleged to have influenced both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Similar to the case discussed in the last section, there is no empirical evidence that this works. An investigation of Cambridge Analytica by the British Information Commissioner’s Office found no effects of said attempts (Denham, 2020). Investigations by the press came to the same conclusion (Confessore & Hakim, 2017). Thus, the company’s biggest public impact was due to its illegal use of Facebook data that had been released for research purposes—​ something that comprised a huge breach of the privacy of Facebook users (Confessore & Hakim, 2017). Despite the lack of definitive proofs of successful manipulations by Cambridge Analytica, the case remains interesting, because the mechanism Cambridge Analytica claimed to possess is convincing and seems to be backed by academic publications. Again, it is important to analyze what happens if this mechanism and the corresponding scientific results are turned into a threat to publics and the forms of affect and subjects that are involved. This is particularly relevant, because this case has established psychometric targeting as a very prominent threat of affective computing to publics. Cambridge Analytica is often cited as exemplary of the huge manipulative potential of algorithmic targeting (Laterza, 2018). In order to explain the mechanism that the company purported to use, it is necessary to begin with the research of Cambridge psychologists Kosinski and Stillwell (Matz et al., 2017). Neither of them was at any time involved

Understanding the Affective Impact of Algorithmic Publics  199 with Cambridge Analytica, but their published research was used to argue for the viability of manipulation. In fact, the threat of algorithmic manipulation was voiced publicly by Kosinski himself based on his research (Grassegger & Krogerus, 2017). In particular, Kosinski is a highly controversial academic, who, among other things, has claimed to have created an algorithm that could detect homosexuality from a person’s face—​reviving phrenologist and naturalist ways of thought (Hirschman, 2017). His research related to Cambridge Analytica is less controversial. In a study called “Computer-​Based Personality Judgments Are More Accurate than Those Made by Humans” (Youyou et al., 2015), it was shown that using Facebook likes is a very good way to predict the so-​called Big Five personality traits. The Big Five is a widely used psychological model of personality characteristics that consists of five traits: Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (Goldberg et al., 2006). Giving a score to each of these traits is used in psychology as a universal model of human personality traits—​it has been, however, also a matter of constant debate since its introduction (Boyle, 2008). The question of the scientific quality in its field, however, is not the concern of my argument. Following Stark’s (2018) observation discussed above, it is important to ask what a way of making the subject legible, which may well be grounded in science, does when it is transferred to an algorithm within the context of a social media platform. In this regard, it is interesting to note that the Big Five model was itself developed in a data-​driven manner. Its creators collected human ratings of personality from three different sources: Air Force Officer Candidate School subjects, whom the authors asked to rate each other during their training; the material of a pre-​existing study with college students; and another pre-​existing study involving graduate students of clinical psychology. In these studies, ratings were gathered among peers as well as from professional psychologists (Tupes & Christal, 1961/​1992, p. 228). The authors aggregated all the words used to describe personality traits in these human descriptions. Then, they applied a mathematical technique called factor analysis and varimax rotation. In essence, this method aims to reduce the number of factors used to describe an observation while still being able to distinguish the most relevant cases. In that way, the researchers created five groups of words that they took to represent the essential traits (Tupes & Christal, 1961/​1992). Back in the late 1950s, when this research was undertaken, this was mainly a manual optimization problem. However, the authors claim: “For comparison purposes, one of the solutions was redetermined in a completely objective manner by subjecting the centroid factors to a varimax rotational program on an IBM 650 computer” (Tupes & Christal, 1961/​1992, p. 228). This illustrates that the way in which the Big Five were first created was quite similar to how computers create patterns today (using unsupervised learning). The fact that the Big Five are just a statistical discovery in data and are not backed by any theory has indeed been one of the topics of debate on their validity (Boyle,

200  Tobias Matzner 2008). Today, the “End of Theory” (Anderson, 2008) seems a more promising lookout, at least for some. Furthermore, this history illustrates that already in the original work, an idea of machinic neutrality is at work, while at the same time, the data is based on a quite biased selection of Western middle class male students. I shall return to these points at the end of this section. Let us first continue to explain the Cambridge Analytica case. Today, the Big Five are usually determined using dedicated item sets in quantitative surveys. The study “Computer-​Based Personality Judgments Are More Accurate than Those Made by Humans” (Youyou et al., 2015) essentially determined that they can also be estimated quite well using Facebook likes instead of answers to items in a questionnaire. This is an interesting result, but also not too surprising, given that Facebook is in a sense nothing other than a big dynamic questionnaire on almost anything. This result, however, does not entail a path to algorithmic manipulation. It just shows that one way of gathering the Big Five is a better predictor of them than another. Of course, the intuition that knowing a person’s personality can help in manipulating them is plausible. Yet, we are talking of an algorithmically automated form of manipulation. That is, the relation between Big Five measures and algorithmic content selection needs to be established. Establishing this relation at least as far as targeted advertising is concerned was attempted in another paper by the Cambridge researchers, in which deliberately created ads were selected for persons according to Facebook data corresponding to the Big Five measures (Matz et al., 2017). This study, however, was criticized for various methodological problems (Sharp et al., 2018). Again, this is not a text about the quality of research within its own discipline. I mention these issues for the sake of completeness. As in the case of filter bubbles, what I am interested in is what happens when the understanding of a person that is established in this research is combined with a view toward technology to motivate a political threat of algorithms on publics—​and thus transferred from psychological research to political issues. As I shall continue to argue, similar to the case of filter bubbles, such a simple transfer misses important aspects. However, there is still an algorithmic threat to publics, but a different one to that derived from the work of these Cambridge psychologists. This is important because the relationship between psychological measurements based on data gathered online and the possibilities of manipulating users have not just been voiced by Cambridge Analytica and the researchers just discussed. The claim that psychological measurement was a perfect, and algorithmically automatable, way to manipulate people has been established discursively by both Cambridge Analytica and its critics. Apart from a wave of journalistic texts with titles suggesting threat and a huge impact such as “The Data That Turned the World Upside Down” (Grassegger & Krogerus, 2017), many academic texts also took the capabilities that Cambridge Analytica claimed to have as a threat (Susser et al., 2019).

Understanding the Affective Impact of Algorithmic Publics  201 These critics want to voice a threat for publics—​that is, they need to express what algorithms do in terms of publics in general or at least in terms of members of publics and their relation to affect. There are many different theories of publics, but all understand them, conceived widely, as a political space in which the particular social situation of individual subjects matters. Whether this situatedness should appear in a shared rational discourse (Habermas, 2007), or whether the public interaction is itself situated and embodied—​also in technical media—​is a central issue in debates on publics (Fraser, 1992; Gatens, 2004; Pasquale, 2018; Shah, 2017; Warner, 2002). Even advocates of affective publics argue for more affective content, because it does a better job at doing justice to the social situation and context (Papacharissi, 2016). Regardless of the stance taken in such debates, the psychometric models of Cambridge Analytica are inadequate because the social situation does not play a role at all. It is just personality traits that are considered to be universal—​that is, decidedly not a matter of social or cultural context. In other words, by using the conceptual apparatus that Cambridge Analytica provides, publics are not addressed. All that then remains for critics is to posit a (normative) concept of the public against what goes on in technology—​as Pariser (2011a) also tries to do. As I have shown above when referring to Chun’s (2018) work, this leads to the unpleasant consequence of turning the hate in the bubbles into love, or rather homophily—​a universal human trait. Similarly, in the case of psychometric targeting, taking over the description of what goes on from Cambridge Analytica and other advocates of its technical feasibility such as Kosinsky himself or researchers such as Pentland (2014) is a problematic way to go. This is not to say that algorithms do not have an effect on publics—​they do, and affect is a central issue in understanding them. Yet, taking over the view of the technical possibilities proposed by its advocates promises a level of generality on which any content can be sold to any person—​as if one’s opinions, voting, and other activities in a public were based primarily on one’s personality—​or at least can be made so. Similar to the debate on filter bubbles, such an overly general perspective can produce an uncanny (and often unintended) excusing effect. Psychometric manipulation is a handy explanation for the frustrating acknowledgment that many people actually endorse a politician such as Donald Trump or a program such as Brexit. If this can be blamed on an intricate way of putting manipulations through an affective channel that circumvents critical reflection, the need to reflect on much more widespread and complex sociotechnical reasons does not arise. Such an analysis can also have a depoliticizing effect, as in the case of the Yellow Vest protests in France, in which some analysts, also from academia, blamed the rallies largely on people being manipulated by Facebook’s algorithm (McNicoll, 2018). Such a claim entails saying that the movement does not express political aims by its participants, but rather is just an effect of algorithmic influences. Importantly, insisting on the political content of the movement does not mean to endorse it. In contrast, if one wanted to

202  Tobias Matzner criticize the movement on political grounds, these grounds would first need to be established. Similarly, insisting on political content does not entail that the movement is independent of social media or algorithms. Yet, to analyze their influence, one would need to establish the relationship of algorithms with politics—​rather than removing the latter from the discourse. Of course, the many existing studies of algorithmic effects on social media users are impressive. Yet, the reason that models such as the Big Five or homophily in social graphs are employed is not that they are a good model of users, let alone subjects in a public—​but rather that they are computationally feasible. In both cases that I have considered, the underlying theoretical models themselves have been conceived in a manner that is quite close to their contemporary computational alternatives. As Chun (2018) has shown, research in social network analysis that led to the concept of homophily has important parallels to the way a “social graph,” as Facebook calls it, is used today to determine the content of feeds. In the case of Cambridge Analytica, I have pointed to the history of the Big Five personality model in which descriptions of human character have been clustered into five big groups. In a sense, the results of the Cambridge researchers are a computationally enhanced way of adding more descriptions—​in the form of Facebook likes and similar data—​to these clusters. In summary, while it is no surprise that homophily and trait measures inspire new computational applications, there is nothing in these theories that makes them per se a good starting point for a critical reflection on the relations between publics, affects, and algorithms. Algorithms and Situated Affects More socially situated analyses of affects and publics paint a different picture. In the following, I shall relate to the work by Berlant (2011) to sketch how an alternative take on the affective impact of algorithms on publics might look. Berlant herself is not concerned with algorithms, but establishes a complex body of work on the relation between affect and publics. I shall introduce this briefly in this section in order to show how it offers a different explanation for the effects on publics that the aforementioned critics relate to a particular algorithmic function based on network analysis or trait measurement. In her Cruel Optimism, Berlant (2011) illustrates her analysis with a quote by George W. Bush, reported in the New York Times (Bumiller, 2003): “Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people” (p. 223). Reflecting on this statement, Berlant turns to the general observation that any communication depends on a filter that singles out the signal from the noise. Regarding mass-​media publics, the so-​called gatekeepers should serve as this filter by keeping the public sphere clear of disturbing or inappropriate content as well as admitting a balanced and broad range of positions so that the public can serve its political aims. In Berlant’s (2011) analysis, however, Bush does not just want to circumvent this filter to spread content that would

Understanding the Affective Impact of Algorithmic Publics  203 be deemed inappropriate, manipulative, or ideological. Bush—​and Trump even further—​left many conventions behind in rather scandalous ways with weird, contradictory messages and even blatant lies. Berlant (2011) reads this as the very central function of a particular affective mode of communication: The desire to produce a raw, affective unfiltered stream of content. Bush’s wish to skirt the filter points to something profound in the desire for the political. He wants to transmit not the message but the noise … In his head a public’s binding to the political is best achieved neither by policy nor ideology but the affect of feeling political together. (p. 225) In other words, what is distributed is not even ideology or lies, because even that would be a manipulative message. The content does not matter, just the noise. This analysis explains why the followers of Bush and Trump seem to be completely unperturbed by the obvious lies, contradictions, and opportunistic changes of what has come to be known as post truth. What matters instead is the creation of an affective community that works not through the message, but the noise. It creates “the feeling of intimacy and solidarity by establishing in the public sphere an affective register of belonging to inhabit” (Berlant, 2011, p. 226). Berlant (2011) emphasizes that this affective register of communication is inherent to politics. It is quite salient, for example, in “political meetings in town halls, caucuses, demonstrations, and other intimate assemblies to the pleasure of disembodied migratory identification” (p. 226). At these events, people often tell each other how much they agree, even by repeating the same content to each other. This also happens at dinners and in bars. Thus, even if the messages in the sense of communicating something new are not relevant here, the affective creation of solidarity and community is. In the case that Berlant analyzes, however, this essential part of political publics becomes the only one that matters: Affective noise. This analysis is almost the opposite of what we have seen so far. Neither filters that are too narrow—​ as in the filter bubble—​ nor a too specific selection—​as in psychometric manipulation—​is the cause of problems for the public. Instead of such filters allowing the transmission of ideology and manipulation, filters are circumvented completely to transmit noise—​not lies. To be clear, of course, a lot of lies are transmitted, but it is not this (wrong or deceitful) message that is the point, but the affective noise that they contribute. Importantly, this analysis needs two important qualifications: First, the special type of intimate publics that Berlant (2011) talks about emerges in the context of a particular, global, and local context of change and uncertainty. Second, it is not a turn to a kind of antipolitical form of social relations but rather the expression of a persisting desire for the political. Regarding the first issue, Berlant refers to disconcerting global phenomena that are related

204  Tobias Matzner through established (filtered in her words) media. This turns them into a source of constant threat and uncertainty: Financial crises, war, environmental disaster, and so forth. As a consequence, “fantasmatic clarities about the conditions for enduring collectivity, historical continuity, and infrastructural stability have melted away” (Berlant, 2011, p. 225). In short, media tell us that we need to stop living the way we do right now. Yet, this message hits differently in different contexts. While for some, it can even be a motor for political public engagement; for others, it destroys “the kind of satisfying sense that enables enduring” (Berlant, 2011, p. 225). This context is combined with a failure of established publics and political institutions to address particular parts of the populace, for whom “there are few adequate normative institutions to fall back on, rest in, or return to” (Berlant, 2011, p 226). The intimate affective public with its “noise” attracts those for whom the “messages” are particularly hard to bear—​or who do not feel addressed by them anyway. Thus, intimate publics are no pure media phenomenon. They emerge within specific social, cultural, economic, and environmental conditions. Following Berlant (2011), an affective attachment in such a situation should not be read as antipolitical. Rather, it is the expression of an attachment to the political. This is the second necessary qualification. Berlant uses the example of Black voters in the US who often felt alienated from mainstream political publics and the promise of the Obama campaign to fulfill their “desire for the political” (Berlant, 2011, p. 223). This worked through the equally content-​free message “Yes we can” that, however, fulfilled the very function of carrying the affective attachment to a political to come (Berlant, 2011, p. 228.). Thus, affective intimate publics are not antipolitical. They just exaggerate this one affective element to the detriment of content in forming intimate publics. Those who take part in these intimate publics thus still have a desire for the political, even if they no longer see that desire being fulfilled by the established (filtered in Berlant’s words) publics. In contrast to the optimistic version of the Obama campaign, however, it is possible that this desire for the political is fed and maintained endlessly without it ever turning into content, structure, or policy that benefits its members. This is the situation of many adherents of Trump or Bush, Brexit, the Tea Party, or similar political movements that are often related to the influence of algorithms on publics. Such a persistent attachment to an unfulfilled desire for the political leads to what Berlant (2011) calls “cruel optimism.” She defines this as the object/​scene of desire [being] itself an obstacle to fulfilling the very wants that bring people to it: but its life-​organizing status can trump interfering with the damage it provokes. (p. 227) In this sense, Berlant continues to argue that we misunderstand the effect of the turn from message to noise as a demise of the political. Using the concept

Understanding the Affective Impact of Algorithmic Publics  205 of cruel optimism, she argues that we have to understand noise—​affectively unfiltered content—​as enabling a cruel attachment to the political—​not its opposite. We have to understand it as an affective provision of the attachment that a public was meant to give, as a promise for the political to return, rather than as a cynical reaction to the ignorance of the political system nor as a seduction by ideology and manipulation that carries away from the political. Following this analysis, the impact of algorithms on publics has to be seen differently than in the critiques analyzed above regarding the phenomenon of the filter bubble and the practices of Cambridge Analytica. In particular, there are two consequences for algorithmic publics: First, Berlant (2011) shows that what used to be the content of public debates can be turned into noise and thus an enabler of circulating affect by getting “over the heads of the filter.” The absence of gatekeeping in a lot of digital media has long been discussed as one of their central factors (Wallace, 2018). This attention certainly leads to a focus on algorithmic filters as the replacement of content selection. These filters can actually sustain the transmission of affect. In particular, their platform logics—​that is, the way they optimize traffic and engagement on the public—​can lead to a stream of content that works more as noise than as a succession of messages to use Berlant’s words. However, this is only a potential that needs to be contextualized. There are other features of digital media such as the quick, fragmented communication and the heterogeneous, constant flutter of feeds, tweets, and videos that all accumulate on one portable device that sustain the transformation of content into noise and at the same time into an enabler of affective transmissions. Where is more: These phones are themselves profoundly affective devices that we take wherever we go and that combine social incentives (don’t miss out) with very simple material affectivity: Beeping, vibrating, and so forth. This potential also needs to be contextualized socioeconomically. The affective cruel optimism Berlant (2011) talks about is an attachment to “a desire for the political in the context of threat, uncertainty and other factors that destroy the kind of satisfying sense that enables enduring” (p. 225). More research would be necessary to understand how algorithms relate to these factors. Some ideas in this regard can be derived from the analysis that I discussed at the beginning using Stark’s (2018) work. For example, it has been shown that the promised “personalization” really means categorization: A user is put into relation to similar other users who see the same content. If such a categorization could relate to the aforementioned socioeconomic factors, an algorithmic administration of affect could be the result. Observations in online communities in which conspiracy narratives, alt-​ right content, and so forth thrive show that they are often fairly active and not just passive receptors of pleasing or targeted content. For example, they create memes and other content tailored to their subcommunity and its affective climate (Varis, 2019) or they actively search for new members. Here, algorithms help by enabling the search for not only tools, images, texts, and so forth but also persons to address. Algorithms, as a consequence, do not just

206  Tobias Matzner influence publics by selecting for people but also by helping them select—​or even creating—​content. This is also an area in which algorithmically created content might play an increasing role. Currently, however, algorithms figure in their role as an efficient tool for social and political organizing. As already alluded to regarding the case of the Yellow Vests above, it is important to take that element of organization seriously instead of treating such communities as a mere effect of algorithms on publics. This does not mean legitimizing their political directions, but rather to treat them as a political factor in the first place, even if it is one of which one should be highly critical. Ahmed’s (2014) work on the organization of the circulation of affects might be a good starting place for further research in this direction—​particularly because she shows that it is not just affect that is circulating, but specific affects—​in this case, particularly hate directed at selected others. Second, applying Berlant’s (2011) analysis entails that confronting these issues amounts to more than sustaining the importance of facts or removing manipulative content. There are several attempts to provide more balanced or reliable (e.g., by public broadcasting) content through technical and legal means (Bozdag & van den Hoven, 2015). Such claims still imply Habermasian subjects who, if manipulation is removed, can make use of their faculties of judgment and discourse. As Berlant (2011) shows, there is more to a public than such judgment. Particularly, it is a matter of attachment. Thus, changing the inherent politics of publics is not just about removing manipulative content. It is about enabling a detachment from essentially cruel lives. This, however, “could induce many potential losses along with new freedoms” (Berlant, 2011, p. 228). How to do this far extends the scope of algorithms and publics. Yet, if algorithms are both a symptom and a way of a particular form of attachment, any analysis of algorithms and publics should relate to this scope—​and an analysis of algorithms and affects is one important form of establishing this relation. References Ahmed, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion (2nd ed.). Edinburgh University Press. Anderson, C. (2008, June 23). The end of theory: The data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete. www.wired.com/​2008/​06/​pb-​the​ory/​ Anderson, C. W. (2011). Deliberative, agonistic, and algorithmic audiences: Journalism’s vision of its public in an age of audience transparency. International Journal of Communication, 5, 529–​547. Anderson, C. W. (2012). Towards a sociology of computational and algorithmic journalism. New Media & Society, 15(7), 1005–​1021. Berlant, L. G. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press. Boyle, G. J. (2008). Critique of the Five-​Factor Model of Personality. In G. J. Boyle, G. Matthews, & D. H. Saklofske (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of personality theory and assessment: Personality theories and models (Vol. 1, pp. 295–​312). Sage.

Understanding the Affective Impact of Algorithmic Publics  207 Bozdag, E. (2013). Bias in algorithmic filtering and personalization. Ethics and Information Technology, 15(3), 209–​227. Bozdag, E., & van den Hoven, J. (2015). Breaking the filter bubble: Democracy and design. Ethics and Information Technology, 17(4), 249–​265. Bruns, A. (2019). Filter bubble. Internet Policy Review, 8(4). https://​doi.org/​ 10.14763/​2019.4.1426 Bucher, T. (2016. The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms. Information, Communication & Society, 20(1), 30–​44. Bumiller, E. (2003). Trying to bypass the good-​ news filter. New York Times, October 20. Calvo-​Rubio, L. M., & Ufarte-​Ruiz, M. J. (2021). Artificial intelligence and journalism: Systematic review of scientific production in Web of Science and Scopus (2008–​2019). Communication & Society, 34(2), 159–​176. Confessore, N., & Hakim, D. (2017, March 6). Data firm says “secret sauce” aided Trump; many scoff. The New York Times. www.nyti​mes.com/​2017/​03/​06/​us/​polit​ ics/​cambri​dge-​analyt​ica.html Chun, W. H. K. (2018). Querying homophily. In C. Apprich, F. Cramer, W. H. K. Chun, & H. Steyerl (Eds.), Pattern discrimination (pp. 59–​98). Meson Press. Danziger, K. (1994). Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. Cambridge University Press. Denham, E. (2020). ICO investigation into use of personal information and political influence [Letter]. Information Commissioner’s Office. https://​ico.org. uk/​media/​act​ion-​weve-​taken/​2618​383/​20201​002_​ico-​o-​ed-​l-​rtl-​0181​_​to-​jul​ian-​kni​ ght-​mp.pdf Flick, C. (2016). Informed consent and the Facebook emotional manipulation study. Research Ethics, 12(1), 14–​28. Fraser, N. (1992). Sex, lies, and the public sphere: Some reflections on the confirmation of Clarence Thomas. Critical Inquiry, 18(3), 595–​612. Gatens, M. (2004). Privacy and the body: The publicity of affect. In B. Rössler (Ed.), Privacies: Philosophical evaluations (pp. 113–​132). Stanford University Press. Gerlitz, C., & Helmond, A. (2013). The like economy: Social buttons and the data-​ intensive web. New Media & Society, 15(8), 1348–​1365. Goldberg, L. R., Johnson, J. A., Eber, H. W., Hogan, R., Ashton, M. C., Cloninger, C. R., & Gough, H. G. (2006). The international personality item pool and the future of public-​domain personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(1), 84–​96. Grassegger, H., & Krogerus, M. (2017, January 28). The data that turned the world upside down. Vice. www.vice.com/​en/​arti​cle/​mg9​vvn/​how-​our-​likes-​hel​ ped-​trump-​win Habermas, J. (2007). Moral consciousness and communicative action. Polity. Hirschman, D. (2017). Artificial intelligence discovers gayface. Sigh. Scatterplot. https://​scat​ter.wordpr​ess.com/​2017/​09/​10/​guest-​post-​art​ific​ial-​intel​lige​nce-​discov​ ers-​gayf​ace-​sigh/​ Hoffmann, E. T. A. (1972). The Sandman. In L. J. Kent & E. C. Knight (Eds.), Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann (pp. 93–​125). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1817) Johnson, D. G., & Diakopoulos, N. (2021). What to do about deepfakes? Communications of the ACM, 64(3), 33–​35.

208  Tobias Matzner Kramer, A. D. I., Guillory, J. E., & Hancock, J. T. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-​scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(24), 8788–​8790. Lang, F. (Director). (2011). Metropolis. Warner Home Video. (Original work published 1927) Laterza, V. (2018). Cambridge Analytica, independent research and the national interest. Anthropology Today, 34(3), 1–​2. Matz, S. C., Kosinski, M., Nave, G., & Stillwell, D. J. (2017). Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(48), 12714–​12719. Matzner, T. (2016a). The model gap: Cognitive systems in security applications and their ethical implications. AI & Society, 31(1), 95–​102. Matzner, T. (2016b). Beyond data as representation: The performativity of Big Data in surveillance. Surveillance & Society, 14(2), 197–​210. Matzner, T. (2018). Surveillance as a critical paradigm for Big Data? In A. R. Saetnan, I. Schneider, & N. Green (Eds.), The politics and policies of big data: Big data, big brother? (pp. 68–​86). Routledge. McNicoll, T. (2018, December 4). France’s “Yellow Vests”: How Facebook fuels the fight. France 24. www.franc​e24.com/​en/​20181​204-​fra​nce-​yel​low-​vests-​faceb​ook-​ mac​ron-​fuel-​tax-​mour​aud-​prote​sts-​soc​ial-​media Papacharissi, Z. (2016). Affective publics and structures of storytelling: Sentiment, events and mediality. Information, Communication & Society, 19(3), 307–​324. Pariser, E. (2011a). The filter bubble: What the Internet is hiding from you. Viking. Pariser, E. (2011b). Beware online “filter bubbles” [Video]. Ted Conferences. www. ted.com/​talks/​eli_​pariser_​b​ewar​e_​on​line​_​fil​ter_​bubb​les Pasquale, F. (2018). The automated public sphere. In A. R. Saetnan, I. Schneider, & N. Green (Eds.), The politics and policies of big data: Big data, big brother? (pp. 110–​128). Routledge. Pentland, A. (2014). Social physics: How good ideas spread-​the lessons from a new science. Penguin. Rohlfing, K. J., Cimiano, P., Scharlau, I., Matzner, T., Buhl, H. M., Buschmeier, H., Esposito, E., Grimminger, A., Hammer, B., Häb-​Umbach, R., Horwath, I., Hüllermeier, E., Kern, F., Kopp, S., Thommes, K., Ngomo, A.-​C. N., Schulte, C., Wachsmuth, H., Wagner, P., & Wrede, B. (2020). Explanation as a social practice: Toward a conceptual framework for the social design of AI systems. IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, 13(3), 717–​728 Scott, R. (Director). (1982). Blade runner. Warner Bros. Shah, N. (2017). The cup runneth over: The body, the public and its regulation in digital activism. Crime, Media, Culture, 13(2), 187–​198. Sharp, B., Danenberg, N., & Bellman, S. (2018). Psychological targeting. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(34), E7890–​E7890. Stark, L. (2018). Algorithmic psychometrics and the scalable subject. Social Studies of Science, 48(2), 204–​231. Susser, D., Roessler, B., & Nissenbaum, H. (2019). Technology, autonomy, and manipulation. Internet Policy Review, 8(2). https://​doi.org/​10.14763/​2019.2.1410 Terren, L., & Borge-​Bravo, R. (2021). Echo chambers on social media: A systematic review of the literature. Review of Communication Research, 9, 99–​118.

Understanding the Affective Impact of Algorithmic Publics  209 Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2009). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Penguin Books. Tupes, E. C., & Christal, R. E. (1992). Recurrent personality factors based on trait ratings. Journal of Personality, 60(2), 225–​251. (Original work published 1961) Varis, P. (2019). Conspiracy theorising online: Memes as a conspiracy theory genre (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies No. 238). Tilburg University. Wallace, J. (2018). Modelling contemporary gatekeeping: The rise of individuals, algorithms and platforms in digital news dissemination. Digital Journalism, 6(3), 274–​293. Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Zone Books. Youyou, W., Kosinski, M., & Stillwell, D. (2015). Computer-​ based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(4), 1036–​1040. Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for the future at the new frontier of power. Profile Books.

Part III

Media

12 Contested Image Practices of Public Shaming A Case Study of an Internet Meme in the Israeli–​Palestinian Conflict Verena Straub With political conflicts shifting increasingly online, social media platforms have taken center stage in practices of publicly humiliating and shaming political opponents. This is by no means limited to verbal communication: Images play a central role in affective practices of public shaming. I shall examine this by focusing on one specific case study: A visual internet meme that emerged in 2010 in response to a public scandal involving former Israeli soldier Eden Abergil. The meme is interesting insofar as it was itself ignited by humiliating images: Under the title “Israel Defense Forces, the best days of my life,” Abergil posted several photographs on her Facebook profile in which she poses in front of handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian prisoners. Her humiliating, even dehumanizing, pictorial act became the starting point for numerous photoshopped montages that used her photographs and combined them with lines of text or other images. These memes were also circulated on social media; but, conversely, were used to publicly shame Abergil who, as one Israeli blogger phrased it, was getting a “meme treatment” (Reider, 2010, August 19). One could say her photographic act of humiliation triggered a wave of connective public shaming that was, in turn, directed at her. However, if we look closely at the individual meme adaptations, it becomes clear that what has become known as the “Eden Abergil Meme” is by no means an orchestrated attack directed at Abergil, but reveals very conflicting and sometimes even opposing positions. How are we to understand the affective publics that this meme mobilized? How can public shaming, in this case, be conceptualized as a contested—​and highly fluid—​affective practice that is not only mobilized by images, but also formed and transformed through images on social media? With my case study, I want to address three different levels on which media impact the affectivity of this internet meme. First, I shall discuss how Abergil’s initial act of humiliation (that provoked the meme) was itself necessarily dependent on its mediation and a media public that would participate in the act of dehumanizing the Palestinian detainees. On a second level, I shall look at the aesthetic and formal qualities of the memes themselves that inverted—​or better: diverted—​Abergil’s act of humiliation: What DOI: 10.4324/9781003365426-15

214  Verena Straub kind of affective encounters are at play when two images from different contexts—​or image and text—​are clashed? On a third level, I relate to media as the technological infrastructure in which this meme emerged and circulated. Here, I shall take into account the specific affordances of social media platforms such as Facebook, but also tools such as Twibbon that created very particular affective spaces of resonance. My analysis thus intends to investigate the particular status of memes in mediated affective publics online. Abergil’s Photographic Act of Humiliation To understand the affectivity of this meme, we first need to contextualize the circumstances in which it emerged.1 The public outrage started in August 2010 when Israeli bloggers first discovered and exposed a photo album posted on the personal Facebook profile of Abergil, who, at that time, was serving in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF, Reider, 2010, August 16; Sachim, 2010). Under the title “IDF, the best days of my life,” the former soldier compiled a collection of personal photographs consisting mostly of casual snapshots. The publication of a collection of images that was most likely intended to be viewed by family and Facebook friends—​exposed first by bloggers, then by international media—​shows how easily the public and the private, the professional and the personal, are blurred under the conditions of social media communication (see boyd & Marwick, 2011, on the collapse of multiple audiences and contexts). Many pictures show the uniformed young woman with her friends posing playfully for the camera. We find the typical pouting selfies and souvenir shots in front of military jeeps that seemingly document everyday life on a military base. From this collection of commonplace photographs, however, a set of images stand out: In them, Abergil is seen posing mockingly against the backdrop of three Palestinian detainees seated on cement blocks, their hands bound with plastic handcuffs, and their eyes blindfolded. While the men’s bodily posture shows utter exhaustion, Abergil playfully poses next to them, treating them as just another photo opportunity to share with her friends and family. In one picture, Abergil positions herself in front of the three men who seem to not take notice of her photographic act. Her gaze is directed toward the camera with a seductive smile; her squatting posture, with her bottom stretched out, imitates the sexualized pose of pin-​up or cover girls (Figure 12.1). Another photograph shows her seated next to one of the detainees. While the head of the blindfolded man hangs down passively, probably out of exhaustion, and his hands are bound behind his back, Abergil turns her head suggestively toward him with her lips pursed (Figure 12.2). In both images, the detainees unwillingly, maybe even unknowingly, are turned into “props” in a mocking game. They are exhibited like trophies, unable to defend themselves, unable to look back—​either at Abergil, at the soldier who took the photograph, or at the viewers of the images. The two

Contested Image Practices of Public Shaming  215

Figure 12.1 Screenshot of Eden Abergil’s Facebook album “IDF, the best days of my life.” Source: Reider, 2010, August 16.

photos were taken in 2008 at a military base in Ashdod where Palestinians who tried to cross the Gaza border into Israel were regularly detained for questioning (Williams, 2010). Here, as at many other Israeli checkpoints, putting Palestinians in handcuffs and blindfolding them is a common practice that “clearly serves as a form of immediate, on-​ the-​ spot punishment” (Azoulay, 2008, p. 443). The blindfolding denies the detainees the possibility to return the gaze and thus “allows the soldier not to see the Palestinian by canceling out the possibility that he himself might become the object of the Palestinian’s gaze” (Azoulay, 2008, p. 443). While the blindfolding is a first step in the dehumanization of the three men, the photographic act further demonstrates the soldier’s indifference toward them by treating them as mere “background,” as Abergil herself has put it (cited in Apel, 2012, p. 102). In this sense, her photographic act can be understood less as an act of public shaming, which would involve a degrading exposure of the three men personally in front of the eyes of others with the explicit “aim to undermine

216  Verena Straub

Figure 12.2 Screenshot of Eden Abergil’s photograph on Facebook, showing her with blindfolded Palestinian detainees. Source: Reider, 2010, August 16.

the respect others have for that person, and his or her sense of self-​worth” (Frevert, 2020, p. 30). By depriving them even of their status as persons, Abergil’s act of humiliation reaches even further and needs to be understood as an act of dehumanization. It is important to highlight the active role that photography played in the creation of this humiliating event in the first place. The photographs cannot be seen here as mere documents that simply register what happened, but as the actual occasion of the dehumanization. Abergil’s mocking postures are intended explicitly for the camera; one could even say they take place because of it. In the photographs, this becomes visible through her provocative gaze into the camera and by her reenactment of iconographies that are typical for social media image culture (the pouted lips, the pin-​ up posture, etc.). We can therefore speak of this event as a photographic act of humiliation that is intimately and necessarily linked with its mediation. As has been argued in relation to images of lynching and the torture

Contested Image Practices of Public Shaming  217 photographs from Abu Ghraib, the very mediation of these events points to the perpetrators’ belief that their acts were sanctioned by a larger community and served the interests of that community; both sets of photographs [of lynchings and from Abu Ghraib] reproduced visual protocols of domination and submission and instantiated political hegemony until they were released into the global public sphere and turned against themselves. (Apel, 2012, p. 80) The same can be said about the photographs that appeared on Abergil’s Facebook profile. The fact that neither Abergil nor the other soldier who took the photographs saw anything “wrong” about making and sharing these images with their Facebook audiences (at the time Abergil posted the album, her profile’s privacy settings were on “public,” Williams, 2010) just demonstrates their absolute conviction that their photographic act was approved by the military and broader Israeli public. In a widely publicized interview she had given to the military’s radio station, Abergil said: There was no statement in the photos about violence, about disrespect, about anything that would hurt that person. I just had my picture taken with someone in the background … I did not humiliate those detainees. I didn’t hit them, I didn’t act toward them unpleasantly. (cited in Apel, 2012, p. 102) As many commentators emphasized, this is telling for what it reveals about the normalization and internalization of these kinds of humiliating and dehumanizing actions under the conditions of occupation in Israel/​Palestine (Apel, 2012, p. 102; Kuntsman & Stein, 2015). That Abergil did not show any understanding of why she should feel ashamed or guilty of her pictorial act is in and of itself part of an emotional regime structured by the political power relations between Israel and Palestine. It shows the extent to which emotions—​such as shame or guilt—​are formed by social, cultural, and political factors. Very obviously, the photographs on Abergil’s Facebook page serve as a powerful example of how “public shaming puts power on display” (Frevert, 2020, p. 17). Even more than her public act of dehumanizing the soldiers, however, Abergil’s publicly stated refusal to feel ashamed herself acts as an emphatic assertion of this power. The Viral Life of the Photographs Even before the photographs were exposed publicly by Israeli bloggers, they started to trigger a number of affective media practices (Lünenborg & Maier, 2019; Nikunen, 2018) on Abergil’s Facebook profile. They were liked and commented on by some of her Facebook friends who continued

218  Verena Straub the humiliation of the Palestinian detainees verbally on the social media platform (see screenshots in Reider, 2010, August 16). Because both photographs degrade the detainees as objects in an unambiguously sexualized manner, it is hardly surprising that the immediate comments posted alongside the pictures picked up on the sexualized framing of this scene. To one friend’s comment “You’re the sexiest like that …” Abergil responded: Yeah I know lol honey what a day it was look how he completes my picture, I wonder if he’s got Facebook! I have to tag him in the picture! lol. Followed by another friend’s post: “Eden … he’s got a hard-​on for you … lol for sure!!!”2 Once the photographs alongside their comments were publicly criticized by Israeli bloggers, however, the public discourse shifted drastically. The story was first picked up by Israeli national newspapers (Pereg, 2010, August 16) and rapidly reached broader international audiences through being reported by many news media outlets worldwide (see, e.g., Münch, 2010, August 20; Shabi, 2010, August 17). As Kuntsman and Stein (2015) show in their analysis of the media discourse, the Israeli and international public responded to the Facebook images mainly with “shock,” and a “discourse of scandal proliferated” that eventually aimed at representing Abergil as the exception rather than the rule (pp. 42–​43). This “bad apple” narrative was in line with the official statement by an IDF spokesperson who “condemned” Abergil’s “repulsive” act that “in no way, shape, or form reflects the spirit of the IDF, our ethical code to which we all aspire” (Raz, 2010, August 17). Many international commentaries compared Abergil to former US soldier Lynndie England who was involved in the Abu Ghraib image scandal, echoing similar, highly gendered narratives of deviant female soldiers (Apel, 2012, pp. 79–​111). As many left-​wing critics and activists have argued, this language of exceptionalism stands in stark contrast to the ubiquity of similar, often more violent images that are commonplace within Israeli visual culture. See, for example, the many photographs of soldiers posing next to blindfolded Palestinians discussed by Azoulay (2008) or the vast body of images collected from soldiers’ Facebook pages and released by the Israeli activist group Breaking the Silence.3 Azoulay and others have shown extensively how the personal camera has long been used as a powerful tool by the Israeli military; the photographic act of shaming, or dehumanizing, as in Abergil’s case, being a standard procedure, not an exception. Despite this, the photographs sparked nothing less than “a web storm,” as one Israeli commentator put it (cited in Kuntsman & Stein, 2015, p. 44). Part of this web storm was numerous remixes that prompted the publication of the photographs. In the first days after the Facebook pictures were exposed, social media users (most of them anonymously) started posting memes based on Abergil’s photographs on Facebook (Kenan, 2010; Reider, 2010, August 19).

Contested Image Practices of Public Shaming  219 Memes as Affective Image Practice What makes memes interesting for this volume’s focus on affective publics is, first of all, their unique potential to involve and mobilize users. Unlike other content that goes viral on social media, one of the most defining characteristics of memes is their call to participate: Their call to remix, to create, and circulate a photomontage that is even funnier, even more provocative, or original. Technology researcher Mina (2019) sums this up as follows: “A meme is an invitation: ‘You can do this too’ ” (pp. 6–​7). Memes thus invite a specific form of affective engagement that exceeds the affective media practices of likes or retweets by mobilizing a much more active and diverse creative appropriation. The most cited definition of Internet memes stems from Shifman (2013) who characterizes memes as (a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/​or stance, which (b) were created with awareness of each other, and (c) were circulated, imitated and/​or transformed via the Internet by many users. (p. 41) This highlights another important aspect that is relevant for an affect-​theory understanding of memes: Their relationality and swarm-​ like occurrence. A meme is never just one single entity; each meme adaptation only makes sense in relation to others. Therefore, as many meme researchers have emphasized (see, e.g., the contributions in Arkenbout et al., 2021), the meaning of a meme has more to do with its circulation: Its various adaptations and mutations as it moves through different contexts and media platforms. This circulation is, of course, highly dependent on the computational infrastructures and affective designs provided by the social media companies. Without assuming that the algorithms of social media networks “dictate” certain affective relations—​in this case the virality of certain memes—​in the form of a cause–​effect relationship, it is important to recognize that the affordances of Facebook and other digital platforms fundamentally influence their emergence in complex ways. A concept of affect that focuses on the relations between different bodies—​which involve human bodies and nonhuman bodies such as images and media technologies—​can thus be helpful when trying to understand the dynamic operations and permanent feedback loops of memes. From an affect-​theory perspective, Papacharissi (2015) talks about “memes as they are shared from person to person” as structures of feelings. They are organized enough to facilitate sharing, yet open enough to permit differentiated classes of people to locate meaning in them and further infuse them with meaning. (p. 116)

220  Verena Straub Even though memes follow recognizable formal characteristics that clearly mark their relation to one specific meme complex—​mostly indicated by a hashtag—​in this case, for example, the “Eden Abergil Meme,” the affective bonds they form and the individual meanings they communicate can be very different. It is precisely this double characterization of memes—​structured yet fluid, recognizable yet ambiguous—​that I want to trace in relation to the “Eden Abergil Meme.” Inverting and Diverting the Photographic Act of Humiliation Following the conventionalized visual and verbal grammar of meme culture, Abergil’s photographs quickly turned into templates that were either superimposed with texts (the so-​ called “image macros”), remixed with other images (“photoshop memes”), or reenacted physically for the camera (“reenactment memes”). These different image practices can be analyzed as three different modes of memetic inversion—​or diversion—​of Abergil’s initial humiliating act. Israeli blogger Ido Kenan (2010) collected 36 different variations of the meme that were posted over a relatively short time span of the first week after the photographs were first exposed. Israeli journalist Dimi Reider (2010, August 19) added a few more, including some screenshots of Facebook comments on his blog. As far as the origins of the individual memes are indicated on the two blogs, most of the variations in this collection were published by Israeli users on Facebook—​some in English, some in Hebrew. Unlike other memes that circulate transnationally and shift their meaning as they move through different cultural contexts and times, the immediate reach of this meme seemed to be quite limited to an Israeli audience.4 None of the Facebook accounts Kenan links to as sources, however, are still active. Given the length of time since the emergence of the meme in 2010, it is no longer possible to trace the original memes and their accompanying social media communication directly on the platform. Apart from the deletion of accounts and content, Facebook’s Application Programming Interfaces only allow searches up to 30 days back and thus confront researchers with the fundamental methodological problem that social media content needs to be researched near real time, making historical analyses like this one extremely difficult.5 The following analysis of memes therefore relies mainly on Kenan’s collection, which fortunately gives access to many of the original posts, including some screenshots of users’ comments (Kenan, 2010). Confronting Images with Lines of Text

Some of the memes superimposed the two photos of Abergil with lines of text such as “I has Facebook” or “im in ur army … corruptin ur valuez” set in white Impact font, which has become the iconic standard for image macros (Figure 12.3). The deliberate misspelling relates to internet jargon known as “LOLspeak” that first originated in relation to images of cats that were

Contested Image Practices of Public Shaming  221

Figure 12.3 Image macro, “im in ur army … corruptin ur valuez.” Source: Kenan, 2010.

juxtaposed with silly lines of text, the so-​called “LOLcats” memes. Combined with Abergil’s photographs, these lines criticize the naïve public display of her humiliating acts. By openly mocking Abergil as a person, these memes were part of an act of public shaming that exposed the actions of the former soldier with the explicit aim of damaging her “prestige” and her “right to be respected” (Frevert, 2020, p. 30). While the “I has Facebook” meme obviously ridicules the soldier’s thoughtless use of social media by publishing the initial photos, it did not, however, necessarily criticize the acts themselves. Similarly, the “im in ur army … corruptin ur valuez” meme assumes a mainstream Israeli perspective (“your army”) by blaming Abergil for her damaging effects on the military’s values, not for her humiliation of the depicted Palestinians. This image macro in particular seems to echo the military’s official condemnation of the photos as violating their “ethical code” (Raz, 2010, August 17), and it inverts the structure of violence: Israel (and its values) is portrayed as the scandal’s true victim, not the detained and humiliated Palestinians. This was also a dominant narrative in mainstream Israeli media reports about the event (Kuntsman & Stein, 2015, p. 44). As is often the case with meme culture, especially when memes appear in political contexts,

222  Verena Straub the line between irony and serious commentary is very blurry. Therefore, it remains unclear whether this meme actually follows the military’s public shaming of Abergil, or, on the contrary, is rather an ironic take on their spokesperson’s official statement. Turning Images against Each Other

The majority of examples collected on Kenan’s blog are photoshop memes, confronting the original photographs with other images from various contexts. Some variations seem to follow a clear political agenda—​for example, when Abergil’s portrait is mounted before the backdrop of one of the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs. As mentioned above, the comparison between her and Lynndie England was a very prevalent one, suggesting that Abergil’s photographic act of humiliation can be related to the atrocities committed by US soldiers that were staged equally explicitly for the camera. How memes constantly relate to other memes, that is, how they affect each other and form complex networks of meaning that cross through times, platforms, and contexts, becomes apparent with another example from the body of the Abergil meme. Three different variations show the Israeli soldier in relation to “Pedobear,” a cartoon bear mascot that became known since 2004 through its usage on 4chan signaling that illegal child pornography had been posted (the “pedo” being short for pedophile). Since then, it has been used as a marker to call out sexual predators or illegal online content in general. Its juxtaposition with Abergil clearly denounces and disapproves of her photographic act as an illegal act of sexual assault. In one of these memes, Abergil’s shaming is taken even one step further by adding a blindfold to her eyes, thus forcing her to adopt the position of the Palestinian detainees and calling into question her right to look (Figure 12.4). The same visual logic can be found in another meme that mirrors Abergil’s picture, putting her in the position of the Palestinian man sitting next to her whose image is replaced by her double. This is one of the more thoughtful, self-​reflexive memes, because it anticipates how her photographic act would backfire and eventually turn herself into the object of humiliation. Many photoshop memes combined Abergil’s smiling portrait with stock photos from moments of historic significance, thereby reframing and repurposing the title of Abergil’s Facebook album and transferring it to the most diverse contexts such as, “the invasion of Normandy … the best days of my life,” “the fall of the Berlin wall … the best days of my life,” or “landing on the moon … the best days of my life.” The repetition of this formula again suggests that these memes were created in sight of each other, following a logic of outbidding through ever new “surprising” or “unexpected” clashes of contexts that compete for attention. The logic of substitution was also dominant in other memes in which the blindfolds were distributed to plants or stuffed animals. Other than the Abu Ghraib example, these substitutions seem mostly arbitrary, and it is difficult to discern any clear political stance.

Contested Image Practices of Public Shaming  223

Figure 12.4 Photoshop Meme, Eden Abergil with Pedobear. Source: Kenan, 2010.

Kuntsman and Stein (2015) rightfully point to the indeterminate messages these memes proposed: Was the transposition of blindfolds into dolls, toys, and plants a critique of the ‘thingification’ of Palestinians or a further enactment of it? Was the introduction of Abergil into foundational historical moments a critique of occupation or a refusal to engage with its original military context? (p. 52) Similarly ambiguous in its meaning is a meme that inserted the iconic photograph of the Chinese “tank man” as a backdrop to the soldier’s smiling portrait (Figure 12.5). The widely shared photograph of the man standing alone in front of a column of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square in Beijing 1989 has been reappropriated over and over again in memes (Schankweiler, 2019, pp. 50–​54). In China, the image of the tank man is forbidden. Memes such as the ones that replace the tanks with ducks can thus be seen as an effective way to circumvent censorship and to keep alive the memory of the protests. Posted by an Israeli user as a backdrop to Abergil’s face, however, this meme

224  Verena Straub

Figure 12.5  Photoshop Meme, Eden Abergil with Tank Man. Source: Kenan, 2010.

can hardly be interpreted as protesting Chinese censorship. Nor does the comparison between these two entirely opposite political contexts—​an act of protest against a superior military force on the one side; the exercising of political power through a member of the military on the other—​reveal any similarities. Rather than looking for a pointed political message or critique, most of these memes seem to be driven by a self-​referential play with motifs that have become a staple in meme culture: The image of the moon landing or the tank man are such staples. They have become popular templates, readily available on the so-​called meme generators that help users create memes with just one click, without requiring any technical skills in photo editing.6 This ease of participation ultimately serves the economic interests of social media platforms that are aiming to maximize traffic and user interaction. The affordances of these meme generators, including their collections of stock photos, have certainly influenced which images migrate most frequently through meme cultures, and have thus contributed to their affective value in the meme game. In many of the above-​mentioned variations of the meme, the soldier’s humiliating pose becomes an exploitable joke that negates the original political context and thus relativizes and trivializes the structural violence of the Israeli military against Palestinians. The self-​referentiality of these memes suggests that in the environment of networked media, the function of shaming and

Contested Image Practices of Public Shaming  225 humiliation has shifted. Shaming practices are no longer just about calling somebody out and punishing violations of norms in order to solidify a sense of community against an outsider. As historian Frevert (2020) has argued, “acts of humiliation on the internet make humiliation into an end in itself” (p. 219). In case of—​at least some of—​the Abergil memes, the gesture of shaming is not necessarily appropriated to spread a political message. Rather, its affective charge seems to be (re)used mostly for its shock value in order to compete for attention in social media economies. “Eden Abergil Is Taking a Picture with You!”

A particular group of memes was driven by the web tool Twibbon and invited social media users to add Abergil’s face to their profile picture as part of a campaign that was framed to support the soldier (Figure 12.6). Twibbon is a microsite that allows users to start their own campaign to increase awareness or raise money for a certain cause. One way to publicly support a Twibbon campaign is by superimposing the campaign’s image of choice onto one’s Facebook or Twitter profile picture. Similar to a meme generator, the aesthetics of the resulting images as well as their scope and circulation are very much structured by the affordances of the tool. In the case of the “Eden Abergil-​Support Campaign,” peoples’ portraits appeared behind the smiling face of Abergil, echoing many of the other photoshop memes. A slogan on Twibbon stated provocatively: “Eden Abergil is taking

Figure 12.6 Twibbon campaign, “Support Eden Abergil.” Source: https://​twib​bon.com/​supp​ort/​eden-​aber​gil (accessed May 12, 2022).

226  Verena Straub a picture with you.” Whether people participated in this campaign as an act of solidarization with the soldier, or, on the contrary, as a way of mocking her, is indeterminable. In this denial of certainties lies the power of what Nikunen (2018) calls the “politics of irony—​an affective practice of ironic detachment and cold humour in the corresponding political discourse” (p. 12). As Nikunen and others (see, e.g., Nagle, 2017) have shown, irony has become an effective political tool and “affective practice to further particular political views as well as solidify the group,” while providing “an avenue for not-​ taking-​ things-​ seriously, for evading responsibility” (Nikunen, 2018, p. 12). In this sense, the (ironic) Twibbon project could be interpreted as a way for people to publicly show solidarity with the soldier, while still being able to retreat to the narrative that this is “just a joke” and therefore escape criticism. Reenacting the Images

Another subcategory of the meme is reenactments of the original photographs. There are several examples of Israeli social media users restaging Abergil’s humiliating act with their own bodies—​the photographs of these reenactments being shared again through Facebook (see Kenan, 2010). If we think of memes as mobilizing specific affective publics, reenactment memes are especially powerful examples because they involve and move users’ physical bodies in a very direct and visible way (see Czirak et al., 2018). One photograph shows a woman imitating Abergil’s pose in front of a man who is bound and blindfolded in what appears to be an office space (Figure 12.7); another shows a teenage girl posing with two blindfolded boys who are sitting on a sofa. These variations resemble a similar, quite popular reenactment meme that became known as “Lynndie England Pose” (Know Your Meme, 2004) based on a photograph of the former U.S. soldier humiliating a prisoner on camera at Abu Ghraib. England’s exact pose—​the thumbs-​up gesture in conjunction with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth—​was reenacted by numerous people for circulation on the web. At first sight, one could view these reenactments as ironic acts that were intended to mock the former U.S. soldier. Upon closer examination, however, the gesture was often appropriated by users to humiliate other people in a way that eventually repeated the violence affirmatively (the meme comprises many racist, homophobic, and misogynistic examples of people being sometimes unknowingly turned into the “background” of this degrading reenactment). Similarly, one can ask who the actual object of humiliation in the case of the Abergil reenactments really is: Is the mocking repetition used to criticize her act; or, on the contrary, to relativize, or even to excuse the soldier’s pose as being “just a joke?” In a very different way, the affective practice of reenactment was also used as a political tool by pro-​Palestinian artists and activists. During protests in Bil’in on August 20, 2010, five activists restaged Abergil’s photographs

Contested Image Practices of Public Shaming  227

Figure 12.7 Reenactment of one of Eden Abergil’s photographs. Source: Kenan, 2010.

by posing themselves as handcuffed and blindfolded detainees in front of a line of Israeli soldiers near the West Bank Barrier, making the latter unwilling participants in their mocking performance (see Faulkner, 2013). The shaming of Abergil’s humiliating photographic act was transferred to the group of soldiers, and metonymically to the entire Israeli military. A mobile phone video documenting the event shows how the activists took the weekly demonstration in Bil’in as an opportunity to organize an image event of their own, because the protest was documented by journalists who were present at the spot. While a member of the press photographed the performance, we hear a Palestinian activist saying to the soldiers: “Now you get a picture, you can put it in your Facebook … If any soldier has Facebook you take this picture to Facebook.”7 By “forcing” the soldiers to repeat Abergil’s pictorial act, the pro-​Palestinian activists appropriated the act of humiliation and turned it around and against the soldiers. Contrary to the above-​mentioned examples of reenactment memes that were posted by Israeli social media users, this reenactment is part of a much broader activist action that connects the photographic act of shaming back with concrete political goals. Even though this action does not “belong” to the

228  Verena Straub Abergil meme in a narrow sense (the YouTube documentation lacks the easily recognizable visual markers of memes and was not produced with reference to other meme variations in the sense of an online trend such as with reference to certain hashtags), it nonetheless shows how Abergil’s photographs became part of a larger image economy that was constantly transformed online. Conclusion: Public Shaming as Contested Image Practice I want to come back to my initial question: How to understand the affective publics that this meme created. Papacharissi (2015) defines affective publics as “networked public formations that are mobilized and connected or disconnected through expressions of sentiment” (p. 125). The relational character of memes, as well as their activating, highly involving force, makes them an ideal research object to look at the emergence of affective publics online. What my case study demonstrates is, first of all, how internet memes mobilize publics that bond around shared affective intensities. What is shared by all memes discussed in this chapter is their affective response to Abergil’s act of humiliation—​by remixing, reenacting, or repurposing her photographs. The individual articulations and meanings of these responses, however, could not be more disparate. Quite contrary to Reider’s (2010, August 19) description of a “meme treatment” that suggests a somewhat organized action with the common goal of countering the soldier’s photographic act of humiliation, a closer analysis of the actual image practices shows that the affective publics this meme mobilized are much more heterogeneous, contradictory, and sometimes arbitrary with rather uncontrollable effects. While many memes criticized Abergil’s naïve display of violence (e.g., through inserted text lines such as “Im in ur army, corruptin your values” or “I has Facebook”), the mass recontextualization of the photographs also led to a relativizing of the specific political context or a downplaying of the structural violence of the Israeli military. Instead of simply shaming back, many variations of the meme diverted the photographic act of humiliation to other contexts. Some memes even affirmatively reproduce her act of dehumanization or oscillate between criticism and solidarity. In other words, Abergil’s initial act of humiliating the Palestinian detainees was sometimes turned against her in order to shame the former soldier; sometimes appropriated as a gesture to degrade others, ultimately affirming Abergil’s intention; and sometimes appropriated for pure shock value. In each individual case, these lines were more or less blurry. Rather than being a campaign with common political goals or defined emotional values, the public shaming enacted by this network of memes needs to be understood as a highly fluid and contested affective practice. Images, in this case, were not only the trigger but also the driving force for the emergence of these affective publics.

Contested Image Practices of Public Shaming  229 Notes 1 Kuntsman and Stein (2015) reconstruct the scandal in their chapter “Anatomy of a Facebook Scandal” (pp. 39–​54). In what follows, I draw mostly from their representation of events. 2 A screenshot of the Hebrew Facebook dialogue was shared on the blog “Sachim,” http://​sac​him.tum​blr.com (no longer available), reprint and English translation from Kuntsman and Stein (2015, pp. 40–​42). 3 One of the founders of Breaking the Silence, Israeli army veteran Yehuda Shaul, said after the exposure of the Abergil photos: “This is commonplace. Don’t you take pictures of your everyday life? For these soldiers serving in the occupied territories, this is what they see 24/​7—​handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinians … Being in a place where you cannot see Palestinians as human beings is the default when you are serving in the occupied Palestinian territories” (cited in Shabi, 2010, August 17). 4 This may also be the reason why the “Eden Abergil Meme” is not mentioned by the online meme archive “Know your Meme” (www.knowy​ourm​eme.com), thus pointing to the limitations of this largest online resource of memes and its focus on internet phenomena in the US-​American context. 5 Twitter is an exception in that it allows searches back to the start of its service in 2006. For this chapter, I set up a search with social media analysis tool Pulsar (www.pul​sarp​latf​orm.com) to search for content relating to Eden Abergil’s name in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. However, this did not show any results. One can therefore assume that the meme did not spread on Twitter and was limited to Facebook and/​or personal blogs. 6 One of the earliest meme generators was https://​memege​nera​tor.net/​ that was launched in March 2009. Today, there are countless meme generators online. 7 The video was recorded and uploaded by artist David Reeb (2010) on YouTube: www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​q-​9BQ-​CpS20&t=​61s (accessed May 12, 2022). The reenactment of Abergil’s photographs is documented starting at 01:55 min.

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230  Verena Straub Frevert, U. (2020). The politics of humiliation: A modern history (A. Bresnahan, Trans.). Oxford University Press. Kenan, I. (2010). Eden Abergil meme. Room 404 [Hebrew Blog]. http://​room​404. net/​?p=​33326 Know Your Meme (2004). “Lynndie England Pose.” https://​knowy​ourm​eme.com/​ memes/​lynn​die-​engl​and-​pose Kuntsman, A., & Stein, R. L. (2015). Digital militarism: Israel’s occupation in the social media age. Stanford University Press. Lünenborg, M., & Maier, T. (2019). Analyzing affective media practices by the use of video analysis. In A. Kahl (Ed.), Analyzing affective societies: Methods and methodologies (pp. 140–​161). Routledge. Mina, A. X. (2019). Memes to movements: How the world’s most viral media is changing social protest and power. Beacon Press. Münch, P. (2010, August 20). Israelische Ex-​Soldatin und Facebook: “Die beste Zeit in meinem Leben” [Israeli ex-​soldier and Facebook: “The best time in my life”]. Süddeutsche Zeitung. www.suedd​euts​che.de/​poli​tik/​isra​elis​che-​ex-​solda​tin-​und-​ faceb​ook-​die-​beste-​zeit-​in-​mei​nem-​leben-​1.989​364 Nagle, A. (2017). Kill all normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-​right. Zero Books. Nikunen, K. (2018). From irony to solidarity: Affective practice and social media activism. Studies of Transition States and Societies, 10(2), 10–​21. Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology and politics. Oxford University Press. Pereg, N. (2010, August 16). Scandalous pictures: An IDF soldier takes pictures with Palestinian detainees [in Hebrew]. Globes. www.glo​bes.co.il/​news/​arti​cle. aspx?did=​100​0582​092&From​elem​ent=​MoreN​ews.news/​arti​cle.aspx?did=​100​ 0582​092&From​elem​ent=​MoreN​ews Raz, B. (2010, August 17). Capt. Barak Raz responds to shameful Facebook photos uploaded by discharged IDF soldier. YouTube . www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​aQFA​ vv8H​trk&feat​ure=​youtu​be_​g​data​_​pla​yer Reeb, D. (2010). Bil’in 20.8.2010. YouTube. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​q-​9BQ-​ CpS20&t=​61s Reider, D. (2010, August 16). The best years of her life: Fond memories of blindfolded prisoners. Dimi Reider Blog. http://​rei​der.wordpr​ess.com/​2010/​08/​16/​the-​best-​ years-​of-​her-​life-​fond-​memor​ies-​of-​blin​dfol​ded-​prison​ers Reider, D. (2010, August 19). Eden Abergil gets meme treatment. Dimi Reider Blog. https://​rei​der.wordpr​ess.com/​2010/​08/​19/​eden-​aber​gil-​gets-​meme-​treatm​ent-​says-​ would-​be-​glad-​to-​massa​cre-​arabs/​ Sachim [Blog] (2010). Their time in the army was the best in their lives [in Hebrew]. Tumblr. http://​sac​him.tum​blr.com/​post/​961910​853 (not available anymore). Schankweiler, K. (2019). Bildproteste: Widerstand im Netz [Image protests: Resistance on the web]. Verlag Klaus Wagenbach. Shabi, R. (2010, August 17). Israeli ex-​soldier says Facebook prisoner pictures were souvenirs. The Guardian. www.theg​uard​ian.com/​world/​2010/​aug/​17/​isr​ael-​sold​ier-​ faceb​ook-​pale​stin​ian-​prison​ers Shifman, L. (2013). Memes in digital culture. MIT Press. Williams, D. (2010, August 18). Smiling for the camera, Israeli soldier poses with blindfolded Palestinians … and posts the humiliating snaps on Facebook. Daily Mail.

13 “GOOKS, Go Home!” Vietnamese in the United States Subarno Chattarji

In March 2021, Vilma Kari, a Filipino American, was knocked to the ground and repeatedly stomped upon on her way to church. The assault took place in Times Square, and the viral video of the incident caused widespread outrage. The attacker is alleged to have yelled, “F-​-​-​you, you don’t belong here, you Asian,” before attacking Kari, according to the Manhattan district attorney’s office (Yam, 2021). The attack on Kari was one of thousands documented in the US. A “Stop AAPI [Asian American Pacific Islander] Hate National Report” documented 3,795 incidents between March 2020 and February 2021, stating that “the number of hate incidents reported to our center represent only a fraction of the number of hate incidents that actually occur” (Jeung et al., 2021, para. 1). A total of 68% of the victims were female, with Chinese being the largest ethnicity attacked, followed by Koreans and Vietnamese. In an article on the attack on May 7, 2021, NBC News carried interviews with Kari and her daughter in which Kari wrote of her trauma. Her daughter, Elizabeth, highlighted how her mother was traumatized not just by the attack but also by the media attention, and that she would probably have kept silent if it were not for the outrage. I think, generally, the AAPI community is very fixated on staying in line, working really hard, gaining respect. That idea of respect is so ingrained in culture and family, in our community. It doesn’t lend itself to managing our pain and suffering in an open way. So I do believe a lot of our own pain and suffering does get minimized … If it’s shameful or embarrassing, we don’t want to be connected to it. (Yam, 2021, para. 6) Elizabeth’s statement conjoins ethics of hard work and “staying in line” with the need to gain respect along with subsequent shame if one strays from the ideals of hard work and so forth. The assault is construed not just as outrageous, but is internalized as drawing unwelcome attention to an Asian self that is meant to stay in line. There is a shrinking of the self, a shrinking into DOI: 10.4324/9781003365426-16

232  Subarno Chattarji the self, as if the Asian body must occupy as little public space as possible, and even if that minimal space is violated—​as it was in the assault—​it must be glossed over as an aberration, a shameful interruption in the everyday lives of Americans for which the victim is apologetic. Shame in this context is related to stereotypes of Asian Americans as the “model minority,” the hard working, respectful, and respectable other referenced by Elizabeth. What Kari expressed are the preconditions for assimilation within American domains. As Elaine Kim wrote in 1982: As a permanent inferior, the “good” Asian can be assimilated into American life. All that is required from him is that he accept his assigned status cheerfully and reject whatever aspects of his racial and cultural background prove offensive to the dominant white society. And of course, he must never speak for himself. (p. 18) Whereas Kim’s observations are as resonant today, what she omits is that it is not “aspects of [her] racial and cultural background [that] prove offensive to the dominant white society,” but the very presence of Asian bodies within spaces constructed as White and therefore contaminated by Asian presences. The NBC News article cited Dj Ida, executive director of the nonprofit National Asian American Pacific Islander Mental Health Association, who highlighted the fact of Asian bodies being normatively out of place and therefore perceived as trespassing bodies, bodies with no rights to have rights (to paraphrase Arendt from a different context). Ida also pointed out that concerns around shame and stigma add a complex layer of emotion in the context of hate incidents: The thing that makes a hate crime really, really dangerous is it’s not that you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s you’re being perceived as being the wrong person, all the time, everywhere … You can’t escape … That’s the shame that the children of people who’ve been incarcerated for being Japanese Americans, for being seen as immigrants, that’s the shame that we bear that we should not have to bear. (Yam, 2021, para. 11) In other words, the Asian body is a perennial outsider, inhabiting a state of alienation so absolute that, while it is highlighted in specifically violent events such as the assault on Kari or the incarceration of Japanese Americans, it is a condition of everyday being. To be Asian in America is to be an alien, “the wrong person, all the time, everywhere.” Ida highlights the normalizing of states of being based on histories of American racial othering and structures of power that perpetuate these histories.

“GOOKS, Go Home!”  233 Registers and Affects of Racialization Before considering the implications of this othering, it is worth glancing at the terrain of affective linguistic registers justifying the violence of American settler colonialism that continue to circulate today. Perhaps the most persistent instances of construing an unassimilable other were the characterizations of the Native Americans who were described not only as less than human but as interlopers in the promised land to which the colonists laid divine claim. The rhetoric designated Native inhabitants of the land as outsiders and the colonizers as rightful owners, a reversal of reality that had devastating consequences for Native Americans. For the colonists, the Natives “were not human beings; they were only obstacles to the inexorable triumph of American virtue, who must be swept away to make room for a new reality of American freedom” (Peck, 1988, p. 123). However, the demonization of the Native was not simply an expulsion of a repulsive other for the purpose of consolidating the American self. As Faludi (2007) argues, “Every terror the new settlers experienced in the wilderness was a divinely granted opportunity to be so wounded and healed, to surrender to his mercy” (p. 287). Faludi charts a genealogy of fear and hatred of the Native other that was conjoined paradoxically with the fulfillment of God’s purpose, insofar as the Native American was sent by God to test the integrity and sovereignty of the White colonizer: “In the mind of the New England Calvinist, helplessness and heroism were one” (p. 289). Therefore, the only way to exorcise helplessness and exercise heroism was to exterminate the Native so as to create the “City Upon a Hill” desired by the early colonists. Attitudes toward Native Americans were extended to other “alien” groups such as the Chinese. Chinese immigration to the American West began in 1848, and the Chinese were characterized as “ ‘pagan savages,’ ‘idolatrous savages,’ and ‘almond-​eyed heathens’; a nation of ‘children or idiots’ who lived in an ‘imbecile world’; ‘a poor, miserable, dwarfish race of inferior beings” (Christopher, 1995, p. 118). The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the first legislation targeted at a specific ethnic group, legalized racial discrimination.1 The creation and circulation of a constellation of racialized ideas and language constitute what Blickstein (2019) defines as affects of racialization: White supremacy is understood here not only as an overt ideological or political allegiance to the notion that white people are racially superior and must dominate over non-​whites, but also to the more covert, structural, and systematic manifestation of supremacy that permeate European and Euro-​settler societies. (p. 162) Such manifestations of supremacy underpin ideations of what it means to be American and un-​American, and enable us to think about the violence

234  Subarno Chattarji with which racialized others—​whether individuals such as Kari or ethnic groups—​are treated. This is a very large domain, and I shall only highlight some contradictions in the ideations of what constitutes being American. As Brian Steele (2013) observes in his analysis of the American Declaration of Independence: What the Declaration asserts is a cultural claim that Americans embrace certain liberal values and consider these values to be self-​evident and universally applicable. What makes these real, then, is not, for the Declaration’s purposes, “the nature of the universe or the properties of the human species as such” (though Americans certainly thought that their claims aligned with the natural order), but precisely that Americans believed them. (p. 883) The Declaration has a tautological quality—​Americans believe in certain self-​evident liberal values and therefore they exist—​and an outcome of this belief is that “Americans would recognize each other—​not by language and appearance, not by ethnicity or religion—​but by their common adherence to what [Thomas] Jefferson later called the ‘principles of ‘76’ ” (Steele, 2013, p. 886).2 The Declaration also has an affective dimension insofar as it asserts a domain of feeling that can only be inhabited affectively by those who believe in these assertions and cast out “others” who are normatively seen as incapable of such affective belonging. The emphasis on natural law and rights that underpinned the Declaration of Independence and its repetitions led to the embedding of the myths of inclusion and uniqueness within the American imaginary. Contradictions, however, were also written into this imagined community insofar as the “self-​evident” truths enshrined in the Declaration were applicable only to White men with property. Quite clearly the principles of ‘76 were based not only on adherence to the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but also on the maintenance of chattel slavery as well as class and gendered hierarchies. Inherent in the Declaration and Thomas Jefferson’s articulations of differences between the American and the British—​and Jefferson was very keen to distance America from its former colonizer—​are notions of American exceptionalism, an exceptionalism based on rights and the recognition of the equality of men. Among other things, Jefferson’s Declaration tells what Steele (2013), citing Smith, calls an “ethically constitutive story”—​ a narrative of “moral affirmation” of American peoplehood. And, as any ethically constitutive story does, this one establishes boundaries and exclusions. In this sense, then, Jefferson’s Declaration, whatever else it was doing, also invented the un-​American and inaugurated what has become a long-​standing American tradition of

“GOOKS, Go Home!”  235 sorting out friend from foe on the basis of adherence to the story Jefferson told in 1776. (p. 882) Steele (2013) offers a thoughtful reading of the un-​American as a category that was not strictly legal, but “used to distinguish behavior—​or thought—​that would seem improper for an American—​a kind of internal policing mechanism among citizens (rather than between citizens and aliens)” (pp. 887–​ 888). While it may not originally have been construed in legal terms, the concept of being un-​American has often been mobilized as such, as in the infamous House Un-​American Activities Committee (HUAC). The conceptual category of the un-​American has a long and racialized history in the US, ranging from the demonization and killing of Native Americans to the Salem Witch Trials to HUAC and contemporary constellations of the outsider. In continually expressing and imagining an American self in terms of exceptional origins, qualities, and destinies, America is often at pains to distance itself from what it does, or what is done in its name. For instance, the historian Loren Baritz’s (1985) scholarly study of the Vietnam War, Backfire, concludes with: “America must be for freedom, for dignity, for genuine democracy, or it is not America. It was not America in Vietnam. It runs the risk of forgetting how to be America” (p. 338). If it was not America and Americans in Vietnam, who was it? Why is it that even the so-​called “liberal” historians such as Baritz feel the need to assert the un-​Americanness of the US war in Vietnam? Perhaps such disavowals are linked to what Steele (2013) calls sensitivity to “the perceived incongruity between the ideal America of the imagination and the reality of current American practice on the ground” (p. 894). In this context, the term “un-​American,” Steele asserts, has “a kind of redemptive power to demand self-​evaluation and call Americans back to first principles” (p. 897). In other words, the concept acknowledges contradictions and harks back to pristine origins, but the problem is that such origins are illusory. Steele highlights this problematic when he writes of the processive aspect of defining the un-​American: “Slavery … became un-​American—​but only after political struggle and much bloodshed. Prior to that, it is difficult to deny that slavery was, in fact, as American as apple pie” (p. 898). While this is true, Steele glosses over the legacies of slavery, the “structural, and systematic manifestation[s]‌of [White] supremacy” (p. 898) that haunt contemporary racializations in the US. The reconfiguration of the American Civil War in terms of states’ rights, the debate over Confederate monuments, or critical race theory are obvious instances of this toxic legacy playing itself out in White supremacist ideologies and violence and in nostalgia for pure pasts untainted by non-​White peoples. The fervent support that President Trump elicits and the insurrection on January 6, 2021, can be interpreted within these contexts of racial anxiety, nostalgia, fear, and anger. The historical continuum from 1776 to the present is an

236  Subarno Chattarji affective one, because it constitutes and is constituted by affective registers of racism, fear, resentment, and rage. Thus, the categories of the American and un-​American, while they create affective publics in varied contexts and configurations, haunt public language, spaces, and imaginations throughout American history. Vietnamese Refugees in the US Vietnamese refugees entered these troubled, contested domains after the US left Saigon in April 1975. Between 1971 and 1980, they numbered 172,820; between 1981 and 1990, 280,782; and from 1991 to 2000, 286,145 (Ferry, 2004, p. 40). The Vietnamese influx is divided into three “waves,” with the first one immediately following the North Vietnamese victory; the second consisting of “boat people,” largely ethnic Chinese fleeing after 1978; and the third wave comprising re-​education camp survivors and kin of Vietnamese already in the US as well as Amerasian children under the Orderly Departure Program (ODP, 1979) and the Amerasian Homecoming Act (1987). Media and popular culture narratives of the Vietnamese American community foreground integration and success, and the process of Americanization is represented in linear terms—​from the horror of war and escape to the relative peace, stability, and prosperity of life in the US. Yet the taint of being un-​American clings to their bodies as they, like other model minorities, strive to work hard, be respectable, and stay in line. The refugee influx was construed as that of ordinary people “voting with their feet” against communism. The ideological calculations of the Cold War that had led the United States to the war in Vietnam continued to shape policy prescriptions and perceptions in the aftermath of the lost war. However, despite statist ideological considerations, polls, and interviews among Americans showed a lack of enthusiasm for the new settlers. A Gallup poll in early May 1975 showed that “only 36% thought that the refugees should be permitted to live in the U.S.; 54% said that they should be kept out” (“Refugees: A cool and wary reception,” 1975, para. 1). Newsweek quoted an Arkansas woman: “They say it’s a lot colder here than in Vietnam. With a little luck, maybe all those Vietnamese will take pneumonia and die” (“The New Americans,” 1975, p. 32). A placard in Arkansas was more succinct: “GOOKS, go home!” These reactions can be attributed not only to individual predilections but also to the ways in which the refugee serves as a reminder of the war and our involvement and responsibility in the face of a predominant mood in the country to forget and obliterate the memory of this unsuccessful effort. (William T. Liu et al., 1979, p. 70) It was one thing to fight for an anti-​communist ally in a distant part of the world and quite another when that defeated ally became one’s neighbor, cost

“GOOKS, Go Home!”  237 federal dollars during an economic downturn, and claimed citizenship. The Vietnamese refugee serves both as reminder of a lost war but also, in the iteration of “GOOKS, go home!”, fits into larger affective domains of the other who must be expelled—​a domain that has a long history in the US. The placard expresses and creates a public that is unashamedly xenophobic, and the political affect of that is to reassert the purity of White America. “Hate involves,” as Sara Ahmed (2009) states, the surfacing of bodies through how we encounter others in intimate and public spaces. The politics of racial hatred involves attributing racial others with meaning, a process we can describe as the “making of unlikeness.” (p. 260) Ahmed’s analysis of the affects of hate crime is relevant not only for the assault on Kari but also for the ways in which Vietnamese bodies are made “unlike” normative American ones and thus alien and assaultable. The normalization of hate and its acceptability in public discourse is part of the genealogy of being American, and the slogan fits well within such a telos. Vietnamese as “Gooks” The term “gook,” Christopher (1995) points out, originated “in the Philippines; the Filipinos were referred to as ‘goo-​goos’ ” (p. 122). Asian enemies—​Filipinos, Japanese, Vietnamese—​were seen as subhuman or superhuman, bestial creatures who were rarely, if ever, humanized. “Gook” conjures up a sense of subhuman slime that must be cleansed because it offends one’s sense of the human. As Judith Butler (2009) points out in a different context, violence done against those who are unreal … fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and again). (p. 294) The killing or injuring of “gooks,” therefore, is not really to kill or injure in the sense that one would feel when a non-​gook is killed or injured. And yet, as Butler (2009) reminds us, the prior negation of the hated other that justifies acts of violence does not protect the perpetrator from the uncanny feeling that he has violated a human life. This is the animation that must be negated repeatedly; the way in which the Asian other haunts the White self must be repeatedly, violently put in her place, made to stay in line. The Vietnamese as enemy and ally continue to haunt the American imaginary, reminding Americans not only of their un-​American actions in Vietnam, but also of the un-​American in their midst. Part of the paradox of the “GOOKS, go home!” slogan is that the “gook” in their midst was a former ally on whose behalf America had fought for freedom and democracy. The promise of these

238  Subarno Chattarji freedoms was belied in Vietnam, which led to the exodus from South Vietnam to the promised land that once again betrayed them by categorizing them as “gook.” What the placard in Arkansas erases is that the “gook” fled her home because it was a site of war; it ignores the histories of American militarism in the Asia Pacific region of which the Vietnam War was one example. Wars have consequences, and one of them is the production of refugees. As Viet Nguyen (2016) put it: “We are here because you were there” (p. 206). The histories of Americans and Vietnamese refugees are violently, intimately conjoined, and while one may want them to “go home,” the US is now their home, and “gooks” are citizens and neighbors. The term “gook” is not only a mode of dehumanizing, but also a refusal to acknowledge the loss felt by the other (as well as the self). I want to highlight Butler’s (2009) concept of corporeal vulnerability that she uses to think about America’s War on Terror. What if that grief and rage were turned not to violence against others but toward recognitions of “corporeal vulnerability” is the question Butler raises. If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another? Could the experience of a dislocation of First World safety not condition the insight into the radically inequitable ways that corporeal vulnerability is distributed globally? (p. 392) While I am not suggesting any analogy between 9/​11 and the Vietnam War, might it be possible to think of America’s loss in Vietnam as holding the potentiality of a more nuanced consciousness of American vulnerability? Fifty-​eight thousand US soldiers died in Vietnam and thousands more were injured and maimed. The first war that America lost could have led to a reckoning with American militarism, and to a recognition of “human vulnerability”; instead, the specter of vulnerability led to a desire to expel undesirable slime: “GOOKS, go home!” It is not that such reckonings were absent during the 1960s, particularly in the anti-​war movement. As Martin Luther King Jr. (2001) said: “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam’ ” (p. 144). He recognized that “the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together” (pp. 194–​195). Yet such recognitions were fleeting and they did not significantly alter racialized structures of White–​other relations. Ideological structures that imagine an ideal America and its hateful others circulate within affective dimensions of hate, creating communities based on what Ahmed (2014) theorizes as the organization of hate. As she states: At one level, we can see that an “I” that declares itself as hating an other (and who might or might not act in accordance with the declaration)

“GOOKS, Go Home!”  239 comes into existence by also declaring its love for that which is threatened by this imagined other (the nation, the community and so on). (p. 51) This symbiotic relation between the love of “the nation, community and so on” and the hatred of the other is evident in characterizations of Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese Americans, and Vietnamese throughout US history. It is this love of the besieged nation that drives hundreds to riot at the US Capitol to defend their President, to reverse a supposedly “stolen” election, and to restore the power of White America, a power imperiled by the presence of myriad threatening others. Thus, liberals, socialists, African Americans, immigrants, and a cabal of pedophiles working out of basements in Washington DC coalesce to threaten the “blood and soil” fantasies of a pristine United States. Trumpism and its culmination in the Capitol riots represent a fearful, violent bid to cling onto the undergirding privileges and structures of White power that are perceived as having shifted in favor of others, especially non-​ Whites, whose citizenship (and therefore votes) is always suspect and must be curtailed by law if possible and by riot when necessary. At the heart of the January 6 insurrection and everyday racism is not just hate but fear. As Ahmed (2014) puts it: “Fear might be concerned with the preservation not simply of ‘me,’ but also ‘us,’ or ‘what is,’ of ‘life as we know it,’ or even ‘life itself’ ” (p. 64). This conjoining of hate and fear might explain the violence enacted on January 6, 2021, as well as everyday acts of violence that are not always organized and mediatized. They can be, as in the case of the attack on Kari, individual acts, but their individuation does not take them out of the matrix of hate and fear that motivated the January 6 rioters or the hate–​fear dyad that animates White America’s imagining of the country. Such enactments of hate and fear can be discursive—​“GOOKS, go home!”—​whereby “discourse itself effects violence through omission” (Butler, 2009, p. 394). Such enactments of fear while directed discursively and physically at others assume an autonomic role, creating collectivities based on fear. The autonomization of fear means that while fear is objectified in the figure of the “gook” or immigrant, it simultaneously takes on a momentum of its own, a momentum that culminates in rage and violence. Politically powerful groups nurture the fear of being overwhelmed by immigrants, and that fear creates what Massumi (2010) calls affective facts: “What is not actually real can be felt into being … Fear is the anticipatory reality in the present of a threatening future” (p. 54). These “facts” in turn roil communities and lead to acts of everyday racialized violence and riots such as the one at the Capitol. The hated other, as Ahmed (2014) points out, “might or might not act in accordance with the declaration” (p. 51) with which she is treated. Walking to church is not an expression of otherness that must be beaten into submission; and yet, as in Kari’s case, it is. Similarly, the “gook” by her presence within the US threatens the sovereignty of the White self. The “gook” however, is

240  Subarno Chattarji not a natural phenomenon, she must be made into an “object of hate.” To cite Ahmed again: It is not simply that any body is hated: particular histories of association are reopened in each encounter, such that some bodies are already encountered as more hateful than other bodies. Histories are bound up with emotions precisely insofar as it is a question of what sticks, of what connections are lived as the most intense or intimate, as being closer to the skin. (p. 54) It is these intense, emotional connections and disavowals that are opened up with each interaction with the Vietnamese other in the US, with each iteration of the word “gook.” Hatred of Vietnamese Americans is based not only on the threat that the other represents to the community, imagined nation, and so forth—​the “border anxiety” that Ahmed (2014, p. 76) mentions—​but also on the fact that the “gook” serves as a reminder of losses in war, of a lost war, and the bitterly divisive cultural and political battles of the 1960s. The Vietnam War revealed fractures within the American “we”: the “we” that went to fight for freedom and democracy only to return home traumatized and disillusioned. It also revealed that the un-​American resides not in an other, but within the American self, returning us to the contradictions of the 1776 Declaration. Ocean Vuong’s 2019 novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, conveys affective valences of Vietnamese American experiences, first from a child’s perspective and then that of a young adult coming to terms with his adopted homeland, the legacy of the war, and what it means to be queer and Vietnamese in an almost uniformly hostile landscape. In his foregrounding of the everyday, Vuong highlights multiple marginalities: the narrator is of mixed race, queer, and poor. Questions of passing (as White), precarity, and sexuality form the warp and weft of the fictional representation, as do questions of unbelonging and of making invisible bodies visible. The narrator, his Ma, and Grandma Lan inhabit affect spheres that they cannot always comprehend—​such as the nail salon that is both a means of sustenance and structural deprivation—​but that overwhelm and determine their loves and lives. The narrative offers a sensory apprehension and articulation of landscapes of pain, trauma, dislocation, queer desire, loss, and grief through its emphasis on touch, smell, taste, and sound: a synesthetic apprehension of realities lived, felt, and desired. Vuong’s novel, I suggest, creates an alternative affective public shaped not only by the Vietnam War and its aftermaths, but by the difficult and necessary struggles of creating and asserting a self that refuses to be contained or defined solely by dominant markers of shame and nonbelonging. The form of the novel—​a letter written to the narrator’s Ma—​is an expression of what is normally shared privately (a letter) and rendered public through the genre: a private–​public letter as novel. Through

“GOOKS, Go Home!”  241 these assertions and fictive representations, Vuong’s work imagines modes of being and belonging that are not based on hate or resentment, but on possibilities of beauty, community, and queer love. In so doing, Vuong expands the horizons of what it means to be American and what America can become. Belonging, (In)Visibility, and Racialization in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous Belonging, as Mattes et al. (2019) argue better accommodates people’s affective, partially pre-​reflexive attachments to places, landscapes, languages, and material objects than the notion of cultural identity … At the same time, belonging is to experience a sense of being accepted as part of a community. (p. 301) Vuong’s (2019) narrative in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is affectively attuned to “pre-​ reflexive attachments” such as the Vietnamese language and places available via memory (his Ma’s and Grandma Lan’s) or intimate experience (the tobacco factory and Trevor’s father’s trailer home). The narrator is equally conscious of the “incongruence between … day-​to-​day sensuous experiences (e.g., with regard to smell, sight, proprioception) and their embodied place memory, a dynamic [Amanda Wise] identifies as dis-​ synchronization” (Mattes et al., 2019, p. 303). These incongruences lead to “feelings of discomfort, estrangement, disorientation, and ‘unbelonging,’ which can be read as affective dissonance” (Mattes et al., 2019, p. 303). The narrator, protectively called Little Dog by Grandma Lan, feels disoriented within and dislocated from both the Vietnamese community and the largely White cultural and social milieu in the US. This sense of dislocation is related not only to his being a refugee but also to multiple intersections between refugee status, poverty, precarity, and queer identity. Belonging and unbelonging are linked to processes and networks of (in) visibility, of making oneself visible, and of hiding. Vuong (2019) highlights the visibility–​invisibility dyad within which the narrator and his family exist in America. At an epidermal level, they are marked as others; and that otherness is deepened by the fact that they are the detritus of America’s war in Vietnam, and that war subsumes all identities including language. As Vuong states: What if the tongue is not only the symbol of a void, but is itself a void, what if the tongue is cut out? … Our mother tongue, then, is no mother tongue at all—​but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war. (p. 36)

242  Subarno Chattarji The war not only ruptures pasts lived in Vietnam, but engulfs the lived present with Grandma Lan’s traumatic recollections as reminders of its continuing presence. The war obliterates the Vietnamese tongue, because the only Vietnamese utterances acceptable in the US are articulations of war, as if war defines all of Vietnam and its peoples. The excision of the mother tongue implies that Ma has no means of existing meaningfully in non-​Vietnamese spheres; the nail salon where she works offers points of contact, but no actual or meaningful modes of intercommunication. The narrator acquires English to be the family’s interpreter, to spare Ma humiliations of invisibility: “I code switched. I took off our language and wore my English, like a mask, so that others would see my face, and therefore yours” (Vuong, 2019, p. 37). Code switching is not just linguistic facility, but an assertion of the self and that of Ma, so that Ma becomes visible via translation. Yet such assertations are ironic in that the visibilizing of the self through the English language leads to the erasure of multiple, sedimented selves, because English renders invisible that which is complex and variegated: “One does not ‘pass’ in America, it seems, without English” (Vuong, 2019, p. 52). Passing via English enables access to White domains, yet that access is temporary and precarious, because language is only one filter; there are other insurmountable hurdles such as race and class. The narrator’s decision to take on the mask of English reverses parent–​ child roles, which is a common experience among Vietnamese refugees and immigrants, and upends hierarchical structures and strictures within families. This is true not only in the US, as Röttger-​Rössler and Lam (2018) argue in their essay “Germans with Parents from Vietnam”: “They [parents] lose their authority because they have no ‘map of experience’ concerning the host country with which to guide and advise their children” (p. 87). Because parents find themselves in unfamiliar, unanchored worlds, their children are able to, or forced to, map and navigate new experiences. Such navigations are simultaneously empowering and burdening, because as children explore new horizons, they have responsibilities and traumas thrust upon them. The promise of America is always a mixed one, but especially so for immigrant, refugee children. Vietnamese bodies are rendered visible only if acknowledged by White people, as in the episode in which the narrator is mistaken as a dog walker when out with Paul’s dog. Paul claims the narrator as his grandson and the neighbor, Carol, who had dismissed the boy, shakes his hand, making his body “legible.” The exchange between Paul and Carol inscribes legibility, but within a matrix in which the Asian body is a transactional object that comes into being only when the White person permits/​recognizes such existence. “Sometimes,” as Vuong (2019), referencing histories of American hate, writes of the murder of a Chinese man in 1884, “you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are” (p. 60). The genealogies of racialization outlined earlier emphasize histories of violence and their continuing valence in everyday life in America.

“GOOKS, Go Home!”  243 While the encounter with Carol is a passing one, the narrator’s relationship with Trevor offers the possibility of a precarious permanence, one in which he is seen and therefore valued. When Trevor looks at him, the narrator states, I was seen—​I who had been seldom seen by anyone. I who was taught by you [Ma], to be invisible in order to be safe … “don’t draw attention to yourself. You’re already Vietnamese.” (Vuong, 2019, p. 84) This is the reciprocal character of visibility: the narrator is almost always invisible and practices self-​erasure for the purposes of safety; and now the pleasure of being seen opens up both possibility and vulnerability. As a White boy, Trevor has race privilege, but he is “trailer trash,” subjected to limits of class and poverty, and he dies of an overdose of OxyContin. Trevor’s queerness and addiction place him at odds with dominant ideologies of Whiteness, and yet in creating Trevor, Vuong highlights intersections of race, class, poverty, militarism, and masculinity that underpinned America’s involvement in Vietnam—​ the poor and disenfranchised fought in disproportionate numbers—​and they continue to haunt the social, intergenerational landscape. The narrator sees and offers sensory apprehensions and articulations of landscapes of pain, trauma, and dislocation. To be seen is rare and inevitably fraught. He is made visible by the fact of hanging out with a White boy, and the relationship offers “new openings for how to live,” as Lauren Berlant (2011) writing on queer phenomenology observes: following the tracks of longing and belonging to create new openings for how to live, and to offer the wild living or outside belonging that already takes place as opportunities for others to reimagine the practice of making and building lives. (pp. 197–​198) The tobacco farm, a site of illegal, precarious migrant labor, is transformed momentarily into a locus of beauty, love, hope, and desire. In his relationship with Trevor, the narrator creates and inhabits fleeting spaces that, in spite or because of their impermanence, acquire affective value. However, while queerness is central to the narrator’s identity and sense of self, offering moments of validation and even joy, it remains precarious, and the project of “making and building lives” is not entirely fulfilled in the narrative. Their outsiderness is highlighted in a poignant scene in which Trevor and the narrator venture into the posh suburbs of Hartford and look down on their blighted town: “Hartford of Mark Twain, Wallace Stevens, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, writers whose vast imaginations failed to hold, in either flesh or ink, bodies like ours” (Vuong, 2019, p. 173). Vuong (2019) has to reimagine not only the Vietnamese in America, but also the queer Vietnamese in America—​indeed, the queer body in American literature and reality.

244  Subarno Chattarji The difficulty of the task is indicated when the narrator comes out to his Ma in a Dunkin Donut. The Vietnamese word for “gay” is borrowed from the French to signify pedophile, a signification that conjoins with Ma’s dismay at how her “normal” boy has turned queer, a “perversion” impossible to countenance. As if to reciprocate, Ma shares the story of her abortion and then goes to the restroom to throw up, the memory of past trauma and present disillusion conjoining in the need to physically regurgitate, perhaps expel, both pasts and presents, although neither can be erased. Visibility in terms of sharing one’s sexual orientation leads Ma to reiterate her past and she has no language to express shock, empathy, or love in the present, leading to a shutting out of queer identity within the familial space. The paradox of visibility is that it is not a good in itself, an end that once achieved will lead to restitution in public or harmony in private. As Vuong (2019) states: Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearance. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted. (p. 191) The precarity of survival makes one conscious of the seen-​therefore-​hunted on the one hand, and the invisible-​therefore-​disposable on the other hand, wherein both states are emblematic of a continuum of crisis, or what Berlant (2011) defines as “crisis ordinariness” (p. 63): “To be in crisis is not to have the privilege of the taken-​for-​granted: it is to bear an extended burden of vulnerability for an undetermined duration.” Vuong’s narrator inhabits this domain and carries the burden of indeterminate liminality. The form of the novel—​a letter to his mother who cannot read, of writing made possible by this fact—​is indicative of this inheritance and living-​in-​vulnerability that characterizes the lives not only of the narrator and his immediate family, but that of Vietnamese refugees in the US. As Vuong states: “The very impossibility of your reading this is all that makes my telling it possible” (p. 98). Part of the narrator’s task in the novel is to recover subjectivities and emotion repertoires that have been rendered mute. As von Poser et al. (2019) state: Emotion repertoires endow individuals and collectives with the agency and security to display, negotiate, and thus regulate felt experiences in socially and culturally appropriate ways … [E]‌motion repertoires are the “glue” that connects individuals within different affective communities as part of Affective Societies. (p. 241) While this is indeed the case, in racialized societies, the “glue” does not quite stick, or it does so in ways that create communities of hate and further the kind of alienation and atomization we find in Vuong’s novel. This is not to

“GOOKS, Go Home!”  245 imply that there is no desire for the formation of affective communities3 in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, just that desire is stymied by what von Poser et al. (2019) call affective dissonances, whether within the family or outside. Their empirical study of Vietnamese in Germany offers instructive parallels for Vietnamese in the US. They write of the fraught affective complexities that migration caused in the lives of our interlocutors. Indeed, in today’s increasingly pluralized and complex societies, encounters with different emotion repertoires become much more frequent, as do encounters between persons with highly different worldviews, normative orientations, and values. (p. 245) At their best, such encounters enable cosmopolitan complexity. At the other end of the scale, one can imagine encounters between persons who subscribe to the “GOOKS, go home!” mindset and the “gooks” who are at home as neighbors and citizens, but not recognized as such. Vuong’s narrator, thus, remains an “internal outsider,” continually at odds with the demands of affective citizenship. As Ayata (2019) points out: The concept of affective citizenship helps us to understand what else is required for a rightful belonging to the community that the legal obtaining of citizenship does not confer, such as an affective disposition toward the right feelings for the state, nation, or political community. (p. 333) Arguably, “right feelings” are never quite attained, because such feelings are defined by ideologically dominant groups. Adherence to “right feelings” does not guarantee belonging, partly because the goalposts keep shifting, and there is thus a sense of perennial unbelonging. As Dj Ida points out, the Asian body is by its very presence a foreign body (Yam, 2021). Alternately, as Vuong’s narrator indicates, there could be a refusal to adhere to dominant norms of belonging. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a meditation on and critique of the fantasies of what Berlant (2011) calls the “good life” promised by the American Dream. This is evident in the marginality of the narrator and his family, the back-​breaking labor performed by Ma, and their everyday invisibility. As Berlant points out, the American Dream does not allow a lot of time for curiosity about people it is not convenient or productive to have curiosity about … [I]‌n the American Dream we see neighbors when we want to. (p. 30) The only “curiosity” that the Vietnamese family elicits is hostility or derisive amusement. Yet the narrative stresses visibility, whether in terms of being

246  Subarno Chattarji Vietnamese, gay, poor, or intersections of the three. There is a fierceness in the narrative and narrator that forces us to see and recognize the complex, traumatic, beautiful lives, and memories that Vietnamese refugees carry with(in) them. The narrator’s confidence lies in his ability to show/​display/​ write of fragility, to share the scars and the hurts of life. As Vuong’s narrator writes after Trevor’s death, “What if my sadness is actually my most brutal teacher?” (p. 148) There is a fearlessness and fierceness that is not afraid to express vulnerability and beauty in and through states of dispossession and precarity.4 The narrator perceives the American Dream for the fantasy that it is, and he refuses both nostalgia (for a life in Vietnam he inherits in postmemorial terms) and “the normative optimism that underlies teleological narratives of belonging” (Mattes et al., 2019, p. 306). Mattes et al.’s (2019) comment is on the works of Herta Müller, but is equally resonant for the affects of unbelonging that On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous describes and inhabits. The narrator’s rejection of the telos of belonging is located, as Wen Liu (2020) argues in a different context, on queer temporality that attempts to disrupt the linear progression of liberal politics that depends on a fixed articulation of the past and narrow imagination of the future, and it also questions the viability of the liberal fantasies and attachment to “the good life” in the present. (p. 9) Seen through the lens of queer temporality, it is possible to think of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous not as the stereotypical refugee success story or that of the “melancholy migrant” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 48), but of the lonely courage of a mixed-​race boy/​man who works with and through the mire of war memory, familial trauma, and racial and sexual otherness to acquire an always fragile yet precious sense of the self. The precise, haunting, uncanny style of the narrative—​a poet’s prose—​is the perfect vehicle for these troubled expressions. Vuong’s prose creates a sympathetic, thoughtful, critical readerly habitus that, in turn, enables the expansion of the imagined and affective publics that his narrator inhabits, enlarging the possibilities not only of what it means to be Vietnamese American, but also expanding the boundaries of being American. Vuong’s narrative (2019) is valuable for its breach of American fantasies; it is also crucial in breaking what Blickstein (2019) calls archival silences. Blickstein writes of a topoi of colonial affect that are omitted from “standard histories of colonial statecraft”: By omitting these archives of colonial affect from their narratives, standard histories of colonial statecraft have obscured how deeply European nation-​ building in the mainland was dependent on racialized power relations in the colonies. Such historical silencing reproduce affects of racialization today

“GOOKS, Go Home!”  247 by reinforcing an archive of disavowal. In turn, archival silences produce their own affective scars that continue to inform the way racialization is negotiated by historians of chattel slavery and colonialism. (p. 154) American empire is equally complicit in the erasure of histories of violent dispossession at home and abroad, and categories of the American and un-​ American are predicated on these effacements. The US war in Vietnam was one instance of imperial, racial wars undertaken for no other reason than to spread the gospel of democracy and freedom, but resulting in misery and destruction. The production of refugees was one outcome of the war, and Vuong’s narrative (2019) pushes back against what Blickstein (2019) calls the affects of archival dispossession, “the erasure of life stories, memories, origins … emblematic of the everyday racial calculus of dispossession that continues to impoverish, incarcerate, and imperil black life” (p. 154). Vuong’s (2019) narrator recovers the everyday in archiving monotonous, soul and body-​destroying labor (his Ma at the nail salon) and domestic violence, or the beauty and fragility of his relationship with Trevor and his inevitable death. The narrator refuses pity and sentimentality, but not beauty. All this time I told myself we were born from war—​but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—​but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it. (p. 186) The Vietnam War haunts Grandma Lan and Ma and they are traumatized by their experience of war and its aftermaths. They live, as Antonia Kalu (2003) writes of women during the Biafra War, “in the crevices of cultures in conflict” (p. 25). Their present and presence in the US are spectral reminders of a lost war and country and of the continuing legacies of a racialized America where they are hypervisible and invisibilized. The war is a palimpsestic presence, but the narrator refuses to be defined solely or totally by the Vietnam War. Of course, archival dispossession implies that the impacts of the US war in Vietnam are seldom articulated or imagined from Vietnamese perspectives. Alternately, the Vietnamese in the US are seen only through the prism of war. Vuong (2019) articulates Vietnamese perspectives of war, but there is also life in the here and now and the future—​however inchoate or impossible these presents and futures may be. Racialization, as Blickstein (2019) argues, is exemplary to specific social and national formations. Within such racial regimes, victims of anti-​Asian violence and hate, such as Vilma Kari, feel shame and guilt, whereas the January 6 rioters are seen as patriots by many and express no shame in their public avowals of hate. In an essay on Herr’s Dispatches, the iconic work of

248  Subarno Chattarji reportage on the Vietnam War, Jon Thompson (2002) comments on shame and how shame translates into aggression in the American context: A war fought without shame will be unspeakably brutal and brutalizing because those who perform shameful acts will feel the need to punish those who “caused” them to deal with the psychic burden of shame. A shameful nation will perpetrate more and more terrible acts of aggression in order to prove to itself that it is not shameful, that it is not burdened by stigma, by an indefensible immorality. A shameful nation will always see itself as essentially virtuous, indeed as exceptionally virtuous. (p. 588) The brutalization of Vietnamese in Vietnam and the racialization of “gooks” in the US are part of the same matrix of shameful acts and their psychic burdens that can only, as Thompson (2002) suggests, be redeemed through more acts of shameful violence. Thompson’s thesis helps us to understand how and why such acts are disavowed as un-​American—​“It was not America in Vietnam” (Baritz, 1985, p. 338)—​and yet are indeed intrinsically American, woven into the veins of a nation based on genocidal violence, dispossession of native peoples, slavery, and structured racism. Formation of Affective Publics The Declaration of 1776 serves to articulate affective publics in its creation of the category of the un-​American. This category, as argued earlier, while not a strictly legal one, is affective in that it encompasses “the ideal America of the imagination” (Steele, 2013, p. 894). In turn, the imagined American public sphere is sustained by and intimately linked with affective dimensions of hate. This is what Ahmed (2009) defines as the organization of hate, an affective community formation predicated on the need to safeguard a beloved object or entity such as the nation or community threatened by others, primarily non-​Whites. When non-​White others enter national spaces, they not only disrupt the homogeneity of an imagined American landscape, but threaten that idea by laying equal claim to it. Non-​White others such as Vietnamese strive for visibility but, as Vuong (2019) points out, such strivings are double-​ edged. The visible Asian/​Vietnamese body is the locus of hate, subjected to violence and opprobrium, an object “to be hunted” (Vuong, 2019, p. 191). For its own safety and sanity, the Vietnamese body must remain in the shadows, but Vuong’s narrator (and the novel as narrative) refuses silence and victimhood, articulating instead worlds of hope and beauty in the midst of violence, deprivation, and hopelessness. Vuong’s work is especially valuable because he highlights queer migrant identities, where queerness is not just about sexual orientation but a way of being in and perceiving the world that is at odds with heteronormative formations of the self and its relations with others. Quite clearly, Little Dog is a minority within a minority, and his

“GOOKS, Go Home!”  249 lonely, desperate courage is part of an alternate affect sphere imagining communities not yet in place, not fully formed or acceptable, but worth striving for nevertheless. The popularity of Vuong’s novel worldwide translates Little Dog’s experiences into vastly different cultural and affective domains, indicating not only the specificities of Vietnamese American life in contemporary America, but its resonances beyond. While the category Vietnamese American designates a minority, its literature speaks to larger communitarian entities. Going back at least to Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge (1997), which was reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times (1997), Vietnamese American literature has established a niche, not only in its reflections on minority matters but matters central to the imagining of America, and its troubled relations with varied others. Viet Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015), which won a Pulitzer Prize, is a more recent instance of the mainstreaming of writings by minorities in the US. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Vuong, 2019) is part of this trajectory of thoughtful mediations on what it means to be a child of war now living in the land that was responsible for much of the devastation of one’s homeland. As argued through this chapter, the normalization of hate and its acceptability in public discourse is part of the genealogy of being American, whereas the shame felt by Kari and other Asian American communities further marginalizes them, constructing them as the unassimilable un-​American. Shame, as Thompson (2002) points out, brings about a gnawing sense of isolation from others, or a fear of isolation from the embrace of the community. Shame is not an inert burden, but a corrosive, destructive, internal one; one that transfigures. (p. 588) It is this shame that Kari expressed when her assault went viral, the fear that she had let her community down by straying “out of line,” by becoming visible outside the frame of the model minority. Yet in giving an interview, Kari moved beyond shame and isolation, recuperating her sense of being and belonging, just as other minority groups have done over decades in the US. The voices of the January 6 rioters may seem to dominate those of Kari or Vuong’s narrator, but their voices not only exist, they are expressed with increasing confidence and anger. Their existence complicates the already complex template of being American, of laying claim to the principles of ‘76 and its violent, contradictory legacies. Notes 1 See Chattarji (2001) for examples of racial othering used to justify American imperial interventions in the Philippines and Vietnam. 2 Liberty and self-​governance were the primary principles of 1776 as the Declaration of Independence sought to free the colonies from the yoke of English rule. After the

250  Subarno Chattarji Revolutionary War ended in 1783, these principles were seen as lodestones guiding the new American nation, emphasizing the centrality of “We the people” in the American democratic experiment. 3 Zink (2019) thinks of affective communities in the following terms: “Instead of understanding social forms as the product of pre-​established rules, hegemonic norms, and imposed structures, the concept of affective communities focuses on sensual infrastructures of social encounters and on models of affective exchange that make up the fabric of the formation and transformation of the social” (p. 289). While we do see the formation of affective communities in Vuong’s 2019 novel, they are precarious at best. 4 I am grateful to Bilgin Ayata for sharing these insights in an online conversation.

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“GOOKS, Go Home!”  251 King, M. L., Jr. (2001). Beyond Vietnam. In C. Carson & K. Shepard (Eds.), A call to conscience: The landmark speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Warner Books. Liu, W. [Wen] (2020). Feeling down, backward, and machinic: Queer theory and the affective turn. Athenea Digital, 20(2), 1–​19. Liu, W. T. [William T.], Lamanna, M., & Murata, A. (1979). Transition to nowhere: Vietnamese refugees in America. Charter House Publishers. Massumi, B. (2010). The future birth of the affective fact: The political ontology of threat. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 52–​70). Duke University Press. Mattes, D., Kasmani, O., Acker, M., & Heyken, E. (2019). Belonging. In J. Slaby & C. von Scheve (Eds.), Affective societies: Key concepts (pp. 300–​309). Routledge. Nguyen, V. T. (2015). The sympathizer. Grove Press. Nguyen, V. T. (2016). Nothing ever dies: Vietnam and the memory of war. Harvard University Press. Peck, J. (Ed.). (1988). The Chomsky reader. Serpent’s Tail. Refugees: A cool and wary reception. (1975, May 12). Time. https://​cont​ent.time. com/​time/​sub​scri​ber/​arti​cle/​0,33009,917​419,00.html Röttger-​Rössler, B., & Lam, A. T. A. (2018). Germans with parents from Vietnam: The affective dimensions of parent–​child relations in Vietnamese Berlin. In B. Röttger-​ Rössler & J. Slaby (Eds.), Affect in relation: Families, places, technologies (pp. 72–​90). Routledge. Steele, B. (2013). Inventing un-​America. Journal of American Studies, 47(4), 881–​902. The New Americans. (1975, May 12). Newsweek, p. 32. Thompson, J. (2002). Ferocious alphabets: Michael Herr’s Dispatches. The Massachusetts Review, 43(4), 570–​601. von Poser, A., Heyken, E., Thi. M. T., & Hahn, E. (2019). Emotion repertoires. In J. Slaby & C. von Scheve (Eds.), Affective societies: Key concepts (pp. 241–​251). Routledge. Vuong, O. (2019). On earth we’re briefly gorgeous. Penguin Press. Yam, K. (2021, May 7). Victim of brutal Times Square anti-​Asian attack and her daughter speak out. NBC News. www.nbcn​ews.com/​news/​asian-​amer​ica/​vic​tim-​ bru​tal-​times-​squ​are-​anti-​asian-​att​ack-​her-​daugh​ter-​speak-​n1266​610 Zink, V. (2019). Affective communities. In J. Slaby & C. von Scheve (Eds.), Affective societies: Key concepts (pp. 289–​299). Routledge.

14 Affective Publics and the Figure of the Right-​Wing Writer Gesa Jessen, Jürgen Brokoff, and Tim Lörke

What role do emotions play in negotiating the political content of literature? To what extent are affective relations an integral part of public debates about whether a literary text or a writer is considered right-​wing? And how do such debates about literary authors who have been accused of being right-​wing shed light on the way affective publics deal with their own affectivities? The following analysis aims to address these questions by taking a closer look at the debate surrounding the publication of Simon Strauß’s novel Sieben Nächte (Seven Nights) that took place in the German feuilleton and partly on social media between 2017 and 2018. We hope to show how questions concerning whether the text and its author could—​or should—​be considered right-​wing became inextricably tied to more general discussions regarding the relationship between literature and politics. Changing dynamics within the publishing industry, the literary scene, and the feuilleton landscape; accusations of possible ties between the author and prominent actors of the German New Right; as well as echoes of the past controversy surrounding the political affiliations of Simon Strauß’s father Botho Strauß intensified the debate. As Busch (2022) has recently pointed out, when the category “right-​ wing” makes an appearance in the evaluation of literary texts, it usually does not refer solely to literary characteristics or attributes of the text (p. 36). Instead, Busch considers the term as indicative of a discursive field in which different actors try to form an understanding of how to perceive, criticize, and interact with literature and its political content (p. 54). In the debate concerning Simon Strauß and Sieben Nächte, these different negotiations within the discursive field were also negotiations of emotional involvement: Reviews and comments referred repeatedly to the emotionality of the text, the author, and the literary critics. Who publicly mobilized, articulated, or performed affects such as indignation, affection, or aversion (and who failed to do so); what level of emotional involvement was considered appropriate or excessive; and which emotions correlated with what political orientation all became important questions. In light of these dynamics, we see the possibility of making the concept of affective publics, as developed at the intersection of media theory and social DOI: 10.4324/9781003365426-17

Affective Publics and the Figure of the Right-Wing Writer  253 movement research (Lünenborg, 2019; Papacharissi, 2014), productive for the analysis of literary publics—​that is, publics centered explicitly around literature and structured by engagement with it. In doing so, we hope to show how these literary publics are constituted precisely through reference to, reflection over, or critique of emotions. We shall explore how different public actors engage with literature by simultaneously forming opinions about what makes a literary text and/​or a literary writer right-​wing, how to appropriately behave if a writer has been assessed as right-​wing, and how to feel about it all. We understand forming such opinions and developing and articulating feelings about literary works and authors as interlocking affective practices that negotiate relationships between different public actors and shape competing perspectives in the field of public discourse. In this context, one consideration is fundamental for our analysis: Rather than just being one among many subjects for opinion making as a practice of affective publics, literature and literary writers have been essential figures in developing notions of how publics work, what they are like, and what they are supposed to be. From Habermas’ (1962/​1990) theory of a bourgeois public sphere emerging out of the literary culture of the eighteenth century to Negt’s and Kluge’s (1977) counter concept of a proletarian public sphere, public debates about literature have mirrored that thinking by often interweaving disputes about literature with discussions about the nature of publics. Questions regarding what exactly the relationship between notions of literature and notions of publics looks like take on a new relevance in light of recent discussions about ongoing transformations of public spheres that have been described as constituting themselves increasingly through a process of mediating between pluralization and fragmentation (Ritzi, 2019). Considering these developments, Fleig and von Scheve (2019) have proposed to “conceive of contemporary publics spheres as often fragmented spaces of affective resonance that emerge from the power of language to affect and to ascribe and instill collective emotions” (p. 6). The affective constellations that arise around literary texts and their authors, especially when they address questions of political positioning, can therefore be particularly revealing when it comes to the self-​understanding of contemporary publics as complex, pluralistic, and/​or fragmented. Thus, the study of book reviews and commentaries pursued in the following can provide insights into an area of public discourse in which, even if it by no means involves a majority of the members of a society and can therefore hardly claim general validity, the affective constitution of public spheres is reflected upon and negotiated in a particularly pointed way. “A Pamphlet for the Openness of Hearts”: Simon Strauß’s Sieben Nächte In November 2017, The Guardian published an article claiming that in contemporary Germany, a “Romantic literary revival” (Oltermann, 2017) was underway. Sieben Nächte, the literary debut of Simon Strauß, the thirty-​year

254  Gesa Jessen et al. old son of Botho Strauß and newly appointed feuilleton editor of the conservative newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), appeared as the prime example of this development. The book, described in a brief summary on the dust jacket as “a true story that has been nonetheless made up” (Strauß, 2017, dust jacket), had been published in the summer of the same year by Blumenbar, an imprint of the traditionally leftist Berlin publishing house Aufbau. Aside from Sieben Nächte, the Berlin correspondent Oltermann (2017) referred to Ultra-​Romanticism: A Manifesto, an ironic-​ romantic cultural critique written by the equally young author Hiernonymi and published by the small, Berlin-​based hipster publisher Korbinian as well as philosopher Byung-​Chul Han’s lectures on Romanticism at Berlin’s University of the Arts. He viewed these as phenomena associated with an overall temperature change in the social and political climate of contemporary Germany. In opposition to the pragmatism of the conservative-​ liberal Merkel government that had, by then, been in power for twelve years, Oltermann detected an emergence of political and cultural positions that championed emotion, irrationalism, individuality, and resistance to the status quo, be it in the context of the far-​right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party or in books and lectures. Although Oltermann did not label any of the works mentioned, including Sieben Nächte, as right-​wing, far-​ right, or politically right in any way and—​perhaps with a British readership in mind—​opted for the term “anti-​liberal” instead, the publication of the Guardian article became a turning point in the way German publics related to Sieben Nächte as a political text, and it would inspire a debate about Simon Strauß as a right-​wing author. The idea behind Sieben Nächte began to develop in 2014—​ at least according to the origin story its author and his editor Tom Müller related to Oltermann three years later—​when Strauß wrote an opinion piece for FAZ called “Ich sehne mich nach Streit” (I long for quarrels). Here a twenty-​six-​ year-​old Strauß (2014) described himself as “one of the Merkel generation,” only to announce immediately afterwards his longing for a very different emotional attitude and social behavior than that he associated with the political and societal status quo: I long for a staircase that leads up from the busy square, from the people, to a room with open windows. In it nothing but a long table. At it sit prevented loners, apart from the general public, at home only in this group … Only their youth connects them, not yet thirty is the criterion … Once a month, deep into the night: taking measure from the word of others, jointly marking out the danger zones, hammering stakes into the slippery wall of one’s own opinion. I long for conflict. For fronts of opinion in questions of morality, for angry contrasts in political views. So that the leap into the trenches of the spirit is worthwhile again, one must arm oneself with sharp argumentation against the attack of the other conviction.1

Affective Publics and the Figure of the Right-Wing Writer  255 Tom Müller, editor at Aufbau, read the article and approached Strauß with the idea of a book that, as Müller told Oltermann, would offer a specific aesthetic experience akin to that outlined in “Ich sehne mich nach Streit”: “We wanted immediacy, we wanted it to be raw, we wanted it to carry all virtues and flaws of youth, the lack of moderation, and we wanted paradox and opposition” (Oltermann, 2017). Strauß’s Sieben Nächte (2018)2 is presented, particularly in the introduction “Before the Beginning” and the epilogue “Before the End,” as the result of an “offer” or “pact” between the narrator/​protagonist “S” and the stranger “T” who approaches S suggesting that he should commit the seven deadly sins during the seven eponymous nights and subsequently write about them. The indulgence of deviant, nonconformist (i.e., “sinful” behavior) is supposed to offer an escape from the confinements of a “normal” bourgeois existence awaiting S, who is about to turn thirty. The escape turns out to be only temporary. According to the epilogue, a letter from T to S, S will ultimately take “the place that was predetermined for you [S]‌in the world” and even be glad to “belong … perhaps not to the center, a bit off, probably to the left (or right?), as an honest, critical spirit” (p. 134). At this point, T also recounts that “day in late summer” when he and S first met and made their pact, and how S told him then “of a staircase that you [S] seek. The stairway to a secret club, for all those who still believe in mystery” (p. 136). Sieben Nächte, oscillating between confession and manifesto, in some way functions like that staircase: It is established as a transitory and transformative object, mediating the change from one emotional state into another, providing friction, and creating an affective community through shared transgression. Readers are implicitly invited to experience and change alongside S, who, at the end of the prologue exclaims “Come join me at the window. Close your eyes. And break the glass …” (Strauß, 2018, p. 23). At the same time, the text suggests a close connection between S and the author through the naming of the protagonist/​narrator as well as the emotional, sometimes polemic style, which is reminiscent of Strauß’s journalistic works that have been described as “brutally subjective” (Weidermann, 2017, p. 114). That passages from the older FAZ text are included verbatim in the preface to Sieben Nächte also points to a particular trait of the text: It has, in part, the character of an op-​ed piece, blurring the line between literary fiction and journalism. The inclusion of the origin story also contributes to this effect. For example, the status of T’s letter, which serves as an epilogue, remains unclear: Is it actually a piece of writing from someone else’s hand or is it part of the fiction? The fact that Strauß and Müller repeatedly spoke about their arrangement in public further undermines the demarcation between literary space and writing context. Accordingly, numerous reviewers pointed to the lack of distance between author and narrator (Schröder, 2017), noted the autobiographical coloring of the book (Scholz, 2017), or wrote of the author’s feelings as if they had been articulated directly in Sieben Nächte (Illies, 2017). The impression of immediacy and authenticity, the suggestion that someone here was writing “from the heart” and taking the risk of being

256  Gesa Jessen et al. open, honest, and raw, was an important—​and clearly calculated—​factor in the perception and emotional impact of Sieben Nächte. The impression of ambiguity between literary and social space was emphasized by Strauß’s involvement in projects that seemed to attempt the same form of community building that had been outlined in “Ich sehne mich nach Streit” and Sieben Nächte. He co-​organized the so-​called Junge Salon (young salon) with Robert Eberhardt, founder of the conservative small publishing house Wolff. On the Wolff website, the since defunct Junge Salon was retrospectively described as follows: “The Junge Salon was intended to be a counterpoint to informality and event culture, a youthful alliance, exchange, and commonality in times of glass networking and isolation”3. Strauß also co-​founded the group Arbeit an Europa (Work on Europe), a registered association that organizes meeting of “young Europeans” united by “the need for a deeper understanding, and the longing to call Europe our homeland.”4 Both projects were mentioned by Volker Weidermann, who wrote a double portrait on Strauß and Theresia Enzensberger on the occasion of their literary debuts that was published in DER SPIEGEL in July 2017. In “Auftrag: Erschütterung” (mission: unsettling) Weidermann (2017) described Strauß not only as a person “who carries you away,” but also as one “looking for opponency. Controversy. Strife,” musing: “some will associate Simon Strauß with the political right and fight against him.” Weidermann’s speculation was related to the fact that it had been DER SPIEGEL, the magazine he was now writing for, that had published Botho Strauß’s controversial essay “Anschwellender Bocksgesang” more than two decades earlier in 1993. The way Strauß and Enzensberger were portrayed here showed the magazine’s attempt to stay in touch with current literary-​cultural discourses or to help shape them once more. At first, however, Weidermann’s assessment that Strauß would be considered right-​ wing and subsequently fought against did not seem to be confirmed: The first reactions to Sieben Nächte across the established feuilletons were predominantly positive, and occasionally critics went out of their way not only to characterize the book as a dandyish zeitgeist novel but also to defend it preventively against accusations of being involved with anything political, especially the political right wing. Illies (2017) wrote an enthusiastic review for DIE ZEIT, in which he suggested that Strauß had captured the sentiments of a whole generation by connecting youthful longing with a sense of tradition: Strauß has a beautiful tone of his own, which carries the contemporary without wanting to flaunt it, but which nevertheless also knows the sound of the fathers, which comes from great depths of education and sometimes despises itself for it and then finds its way to great laconicism and simple sensuality. According to Illies, the only risk Strauß ran was that of being accused of a “certain smugness” by the feuilletons. And yet the first sentence of his review also predicted a “furor” over the book that he connected to its development

Affective Publics and the Figure of the Right-Wing Writer  257 of a new (or rediscovered) emotionality in which pathos would triumph over coolness: Pathos returns to the cutlery box of modernity, ratio as the sole explanatory pattern has lost much of its appeal in its cold brilliance, and so, fortunately, has the pose of relaxed coolness. Weidermann (2017), strongly affirming his own assessment of the potentially controversial nature of book and author, called Sieben Nächte a “battle book” in a reverent statement that turned up as a blurb on the book’s dust jacket (after Weidermann had criticized Strauß, the quote was exchanged for one by Illies): “What a passionate, fearless, tradition-​drunk, future-​hungry battle book against the detached. Against the tiredness of those who follow the beaten track. A pamphlet for the openness of hearts” (Strauß, 2017, dust jacket). Overbeck (2017), who also reviewed Sieben Nächte in DER SPIEGEL, described Strauß as “in search of a counterweight to the present,” and the results as a text he considered at times “irritatingly conservative,” but also “demanding” and “exhilarating.” Scholz (2017), who wrote one of the few early negative reviews for the newspaper taz, described Strauß’ book as lacking in poesy, consistency and originality, but linked these traits only in passing to a political orientation when he wrote: “Where right-​wing thinking once manufactured mines that explode silently, it now specializes in punchlines that don’t ignite.” Instead of resentment, or the kind of indignation predicted by Weidermann, Scholz responded to Sieben Nächte with pointed boredom. However, he made a statement that would be reiterated later in the debate with much greater vehemence by Grabovac (2018): Strauß, as a “young author,” was exactly “what literary critics around 50 would like him to be.” The mostly positive assessments of the book across feuilletons so far seemed to confirm Scholz’s observation. But there was also one clear exception: Maxim Biller. Biller’s engagement with Sieben Nächte did not follow the style of an ordinary book review. Instead, he embedded it in one of his columns, published in August 2017. Under the title “Kaddish für meinen Vater” (Kaddish for my father), Biller wrote about language, memory, Rabbi Karol Sidon, and the burial of his father, while also describing a book reading by Simon Strauß in the Berlin bookshop Ocelot. Thus, the setting in which Biller’s thoughts unfolded was already a very specific one—​namely, one that was shaped essentially by his remembrance of the Shoa. When Biller now described Strauß and the affective relationship between him and his readership as well as the visual language of Sieben Nächte with dismay and bewilderment, the effect was intensified by a juxtaposition built up throughout the column: Biller revealed himself as the son of a Jewish father whose funeral rites were performed by the Shoa survivor Karol Sidon vis-​à-​vis Simon Strauß, the son of the right-​ wing conservative writer Botho Strauß (Biller did not mention Simon Strauß by name, but referred to him exclusively as the “son of Botho Strauß”).

258  Gesa Jessen et al. The son of Botho Strauß had just written his first book, and now he read from it in front of almost two hundred excited, serious, mostly very young and very emotionally moved people. The book was first only about himself, about his cowardice and shyness. Then it was about his whole generation, the people who listened to him at Ocelot as if hypnotized. The description of a spellbound crowd listening to the charismatic writer putting great feelings for himself and others into words is followed by a change of scenery. In his flat, Biller (2017) further thinks about Sieben Nächte: Where the father had still murmured in a noncommittal abstract way about the “nonviolence” and “democratism” of the liberals of today and the “total domination of the present,” the son preferred to dream straight away about how he stood on a traffic platform at night, how he first raised his “right hand” to his forehead—​a “gesture of a field commander” he called it—​and then spoke to an invented crowd, to people who were just as shy and small as he was, how he called on them to be brave and big or whatever, and at the end he received great, roaring applause from them for his defiant petit-​bourgeois vision, and then he also raised his left hand, and the huge crowd immediately became silent like one man. Biller was dismayed to detect a fascist language, images of dominance over enraptured masses and their emotional control through bellicose gestures—​ all present in Sieben Nächte. However, as the overview of the other reviews and reactions has shown, at this point, he was rather alone in this assessment. While he read the book primarily as the testimony of right-​wing sentiments that strongly affected and communalized people, most of the other critics who wrote about Sieben Nächte in the first weeks and months after the book’s publication saw the text primarily as an expression of subjective emotionality and emphasized its status as a work of art against more politically inclined readings. This tendency was to reverse itself in the course of the reception of Sieben Nächte as we shall see in the following. “Flirting with the Right”? The Debate Turns Political After a number of positive reviews had been published in the summer of 2017, interest in Sieben Nächte seemed to wane. In November, however, the aforementioned Guardian article was published, depicting Strauß’s book as part of a broader anti-​liberal movement and therefore igniting a new debate about it. In December, Strauß gave an interview to Ingo Petz (2017) for the Austrian paper Der Standard in which he stated: “We have come to an end with some things: with the right–​left schema, with the primacy of economics over politics, with all-​encompassing liberalization.” However, it became apparent that the categories of a “right–​left schema” had perhaps not yet fully run their course a few weeks after the interview

Affective Publics and the Figure of the Right-Wing Writer  259 had been published, when an article by Grabovac (2018) in taz strongly condemned Strauß and Sieben Nächte, accusing the author of writing “pamphlets for the New Right in the guise of Romanticism.” Grabovac’s article, entitled “Treibstoff für die Reaktionären” (Fuel for reactionaries), dealt with Sieben Nächte as a literary text only cursorily and focused mostly on the embeddedness of author and text in a political and cultural landscape. One remark proved to be rather construed: He portrayed Strauß as an AfD sympathizer through a compilation of quotes that he decontextualized and reassembled to serve his point—​a fact that was quickly pointed out by commentators beneath the online version of the article. But going beyond the criticism of Strauß, his book, and his political affiliations, Grabovac above all criticized the overwhelmingly positive way the feuilleton had reacted to Sieben Nächte, as well as to Strauß’s involvement in the Junge Salon. In particular, he accused Weidermann of uncritically praising the idea of the salon and ignoring the fact that Götz Kubitschek, a prominent writer and publisher of the German New Right, had been among those invited there for discussions. Grabovac’s critique was two-​pronged: On the one hand, he reproached Strauß for serving “the agenda of the right”; on the other hand, he accused feuilleton journalists such as Weidermann and Illies of projecting their own anti-​liberal tendencies onto Strauß and Sieben Nächte by celebrating what they perceived as romantic subjectivity. Accordingly, his conclusion was also that the German feuilleton had to change its engagement with what Grabovac (2018) clearly considered right-​wing literature: The British Guardian recently published an article asking whether the new “ultra-​romanticism” of young German writers is the fuel for “anti-​ liberal thinking.” The most prominent representative of this new “ultra-​ romanticism” is, according to the Guardian, Simon Strauß. It is strange, however, that this question has not been asked in the German feuilleton. But perhaps it is also the case that people in intellectual circles have secretly longed for such home-​grown anti-​liberal thinking. Grabovac’s article prompted a flurry of new publications in January and February 2018. Six months after the publication of Sieben Nächte, the long-​ awaited controversy, or what Illies (2017) had called the “furor” over the book and its author, finally occurred. However, the debate that followed can hardly be considered one that dealt decidedly with Sieben Nächte as a literary text or Strauß as a literary author (or indeed, a public, political figure). Instead—​and here we arrive at a pattern that repeatedly characterizes current debates about the political significance of literature and art—​ articles and commentaries were now devoted above all to the self-​analysis of the debate (in some cases even to the analysis of said self-​analysis). They can be considered as public explorations of possible forms of engagement with literature—​explorations that repeatedly question, criticize, or emphasize the role affective involvement plays in debates about literature and literary authors. But first, four days after

260  Gesa Jessen et al. Grabovac’s taz article had been published, a statement on Strauß and Sieben Nächte appeared from a rather unexpected actor: The collective Rich Kids of Literature. This group of young authors and publishers was centered around the editorial teams behind the magazine Das Wetter (The Weather) and the publishing house Korbinian that had published the Ultraromantic Manifesto Oltermann (2017) had mentioned in his Guardian article. They now turned to Facebook to publish a statement under the header WE KEPT OUR MOUTHS SHUT FOR TOO LONG! Here is our statement on the appropriation of our thoughts by the writer and FAZ editor Simon Strauß and on the discussion about the seepage of right-​wing ideas into young German literature. (Ehlert & Holzmann, 2018) Not only did Ehlert and Holzmann, who wrote the statement in the name of the Rich Kids, distance themselves explicitly from any personal association with Strauß, they also demanded that “young writers and publishers with German roots” should see it as their responsibility to speak up when someone instrumentalizes the pleasure of fabrication to implant in German literature a romantic, homeland-​oriented, militarism-​glorifying, masculine mindset that, in a frighteningly similar manifestation, helped make the Holocaust possible not even seventy years ago. Their statement prompted Strauß to likewise address the Rich Kids via Facebook in a defensive and personal manner.5 Embedded within the bigger context of the debate surrounding Strauß and Sieben Nächte, the dispute between him and the Rich Kids was just a sideshow, but a remarkable one, because it left, at least temporarily, the traditional realm of the feuilleton in which the debate otherwise took place. For a moment—​and on Facebook only—​the debate transformed from a dispute between literary critics into a quarrel between writers. Uthoff (2018) contextualized this development in his taz article as the clash of two rivalling fractions within what he called the “young literary scene” whose members were in their thirties, based in Berlin, and interested in Romanticism. But whereas the Rich Kids of Literature and Korbinian, according to Uthoff, were “somewhat left-​wing” and had cultivated a hip, urban, progressive image (“a publishing house close to pop culture, under suspicion of being hipster-​ ish, at home in Kreuzberg and emotionally in Neukölln, somehow left-​ wing, completely different social backgrounds, Berlin mixture, ‘bohemian touch’ ”), the Junge Salon to which Strauß belonged, presented itself as rather conservative and elitist

Affective Publics and the Figure of the Right-Wing Writer  261 (“meets for private conversation over white wine in Berlin-​Wilmersdorf. With the reference points of German Classicism and Romanticism, the smell of the elitist, somehow educated bourgeois, appealing to an ostensibly apolitical, pure aestheticism”). Uthoff’s comparison emphasized that the conflict between Strauß and the Rich Kids was not only a personal, political, or aesthetic conflict, but also a matter of cultivating different, distinct images that helped these actors within the literary scene to occupy niches in a contested terrain. The fact that both sides now addressed each other directly on social media and distanced themselves resolutely from each other made the contours of the two opposing sides, which occasionally had been blurred before (Strauß had previously been interviewed by Das Wetter and had mentioned the Rich Kids in another interview), stand out more clearly. In a way, tensions that existed within the larger literary community and cultural landscape seemed to repeat themselves here in miniature: An engaged or activist, explicitly political, progressive, or left-​wing understanding of art rubbed against a supposedly apolitical, elitist, traditional aestheticism with right-​ wing connotations. On the same day the Rich Kids posted their statement, DER SPIEGEL published yet another article on Strauß and Sieben Nächte by Weidermann. Weidermann (2018), who had praised the book enthusiastically before, now asked critically “Is the writer Simon Strauß a trailblazer of the right?” He came to the conclusion that, yes, some elements of his writing were flirting with right-​wing sentiments. The fact that such criticism of Strauß now came from people who had previously been in personal contact with him (in the case of the Rich Kids) or who had praised his literary work (Weidermann) made it seem as if the debate really touched on something fundamental and important that affected not only general questions concerning art and politics but also personal involvement and positioning. DIE ZEIT subsequently chose the debate as the topic for its regular “Pros and Cons” format, in which two opposing statements of opinion on a current controversial issue are published alongside each other. On January 18, 2018, the question “Has the swelling controversy surrounding young Simon Strauß been completely plucked out of the air?” (Baum & Mangold, 2018) was answered by Mangold (pro) and Baum (contra). Mangold referred to Grabovac, the Rich Kids, and Weidermann, describing their condemnation of Strauß as exaggerated, and concluded: Simon Strauß is certainly not a leftist; but is everything that seeks new aesthetic ideas outside the left-​liberal corridor of opinion the same as the AfD or a preparation for the Holocaust? He complained about “denunciatory readings,” called the previous developments in the feuilleton and on Facebook a “flawless character

262  Gesa Jessen et al. assassination,” and finally warned that these developments would ultimately benefit the “real” right-​wing actors: By the way, no phrase in the right-​wing milieu has led to as much satisfaction as the talk of the “Nazi club.” The right-​wing hate sites on the net are filled with gossip every time a media issue can be identified as a “Nazi cudgel” [Nazikeule]. The way in which attempts are now being made to damage Simon Strauß unfortunately fills this AfD phrase with life. Baum, on the other hand, found it important to point out how Strauß’s right-​ wing thoughts came in the garb of a bourgeois aestheticist. She did not consider the debate, which in her eyes was also “about journalistic power, access to it, and the question of who is allowed to speak,” to be superfluous or far-​fetched: It is about flirting with the right, which is reliably received by its addressees, but also remains so approximate that it is difficult to attack. So it’s about the Alternative for Germany party’s favorite sport of saying afterwards that they were completely misunderstood, and this sport is not only mastered by the so-​called New Right, but also by people like Simon Strauß, people from a well-​off, educated middle-​class milieu. People who dream of a conservative revolution, who quote Jünger, and for whom the AfD is too vulgar, but whose concerns are apparently not so far away. (Baum & Mangold, 2018) When the pro–​ contra statements by Baum and Mangold appeared, 389 comments were posted online under the articles, some with very short, one-​ phrase statements (e.g., “character assassination” and “kindergarten”), others with longer venerations. An overwhelming majority of commentators supported Mangold, even augmented his points, articulating a great dissatisfaction with what they described as attitudes in “left-​wing hysterical circles” that had led to a “witch hunt,” “verbal book burning,” a “death blow argument,” a “grotesque insinuation scenario,” and “leftist baiting.” There was repeated speculation in the comments about what works of art would be marked as right-​wing and banned from public discourse next, and warnings that such exaggerated criticism (or “censorship” as it was called several times) would only play into the hands of the political far right. The same argument came up again and again, not only in comments but also in articles on the subject matter that were published in the following weeks and months. After Mangold had done this in DIE ZEIT, Rabe (2018) reiterated the same worries about a “fatal friend–​foe logic” that had mobilized the debate and saw the right benefiting from these dynamics: But if one gives up too lightly, the central achievement of liberal democracy, the robust good will for fairness and differentiation, one is already playing the game of those who want a very different world.

Affective Publics and the Figure of the Right-Wing Writer  263 Uthoff (2018) came to the same conclusion in his aforementioned taz article on Strauß and the Rich Kids of Literature: If you see yourself as a progressive and egalitarian thinker, you may of course find it distasteful how Strauß and Co. play on resentment and the social mood. But one should put aside the suspicion of fascism. That would only be doing the right wing a big favor. The literary scholar Hoffmann took a similar perspective in an article on literary politics of the New Right published in spring 2021. Looking back at the debate surrounding Strauß and Sieben Nächte, Hoffmann pointed out that associating actions such as eating meat or driving a car with a right-​ wing mindset (something he saw happening in Baum’s ZEIT article) would only spell success for the cultural politics of the New Right. In this context, Hoffmann (2021) also warned against what he called an “auratization” of right-​wing figures such as Götz Kubitschek and a reinforcement of the narrative that anyone who was not explicitly left-​ wing was somehow already right-​wing, because actual right-​wingers would welcome this with open arms. All in all, according to Hoffmann, the debate about Strauß had revealed not so much right-​wing tendencies within his literary work, his articles, or the German feuilleton, but rather the “counterproductivity of a ‘political oversensitivity’.” Debating the Debate and Its Emotionality Such warnings against hastily and haphazardly classifying things as “right wing” were accompanied by depictions of the left-​wing discourse as being dominated by the wrong emotional state: Either too emotional and too sensitive, too fearful of emotions, or sometimes both. Bossong’s (2018) defense of Strauß, who she called “my friend Simon Strauß” (Bossong and Strauß are both part of the group Arbeit an Europa) in taz serves as a good example for this perspective. Bossong called the “current debates … in part highly emotionalized” and accused participants of “mixing up categories of evaluation, mixing up the aesthetic, the political, and the moral.” She understood Strauß’s critics as part of a leftist discourse that remained vague in its critique, inaccurate, stuck with the same references to the 1920s over and over again, but actually lacking answers to pressing questions of the present, whereas the political and cultural right had adopted strategies of the left and thus revitalized itself (Bossong referred here to the Identitarian Movement). Ultimately, Bossong asked: “Can, should, the left now learn from the right in return?” Her answer, which she gave immediately afterwards, was: At any rate, they should not adapt forms of attack such as the political witch hunt. However, if dreaming is already part of the anti-​liberal discourse, then perhaps left politics could learn something or, in other words,

264  Gesa Jessen et al. reclaim something. Instead of merely sleeping, it could return to sober dreaming, a dreaming that is guided neither by fear nor irrationality, but by a sense of responsibility toward the future. According to Bossong (2018), the debates that had ensued had lost all “sense of proportion,” making constructive conflict impossible. Articles appearing in the following days and weeks also increasingly pointed out the unconstructive nature of the debate: Jandl (2018) called it a “sham debate” in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Bartels (2018) in Tagesspiegel even described it as “one of the most stupid, absurd, superfluous feuilleton debates of recent times.” As the focus of the analysis shifted from the book to the debate surrounding it, what was considered to be the problem at the heart of the matter changed as well: Although possible right-​wing content in Sieben Nächte or right-​wing attitudes of Strauß were still considered worthy of some criticism (Bossong, 2018, also acknowledged that there were elements in Strauß’s work—​she refers to the journalistic ones—​about which “one can argue”), criticism was now directed above all toward the handling of these topics and the engagement of different groups of feuilleton readers with the literary text and its author. The consideration that perhaps it could be precisely such a dynamic of self-​criticism or criticism of a supposedly heavy-​handed leftist interpretation that played into the hands of right-​wing actors was left largely unmentioned. Viewed purely quantitatively, however the articles and statements marking and condemning Strauß as an explicitly right-​wing or anti-​liberal author (Biller, Scholz, Grabovak, Rich Kids of Literature, Baum) had been clearly outnumbered by those that warned against such a classification early in the debate or, later on, objected to it. In the process, critics sometimes provided the very keywords and perspectives they warned against—​for example, when Mangold used terms such as “ ‘Nazi cudgel’ ” (in quotation marks) or “left-​liberal opinion corridor” (without quotation marks) to describe the controversy (Baum & Mangold, 2018). Strauß himself, commenting publicly on the debate for the first time (aside from his semipublic Facebook message to the Rich Kids), spoke of “denunciations” when talking to Gladić (2018) for der Freitag. In doing so, Strauß suggested not only that his critics had acted upon base, personal motives, but also that a more left-​leaning critical public held some kind of determining authority over all public discourses. The latter contained echoes of the popular right-​wing narrative of a narrow leftist corridor of opinions and a leftist establishment working against a more neutral or at least pluralistic public sphere. The conversation between Strauß and Gladić (who mentioned that he also knew Strauß from the Arbeit an Europa group) took place on January 22, 2018, at the Jewish History Awards ceremony, one of which Strauß received that evening for his work in the Rolf Joseph Group. In this context, they talked specifically about the dispute over Sieben Nächte and much more generally about the relationship between art, publics, and

Affective Publics and the Figure of the Right-Wing Writer  265 politics. Strauß referred to the idea that autonomous art had to be protected from politicization when Gladić finally confronted him directly with the accusation that he was right-​wing: Does it offend Strauß to be called “right-​wing”? Brief reflection. If it is right-​wing to say that art has a value, a logic of its own, beyond the politics of the day, then he is a right-​winger. But only then, says Strauß. A similar juxtaposition between a purely aesthetic, autonomous, apolitical conception of art and the political use of it also resonated in a statement published on January 15, 2018, by Eberhardt (2018), founder of Wolff Verlag, co-​organizer of the Junge Salon, and also member of Arbeit an Europa: The current debate is surprising. Couldn’t the oversensitive and denunciatory streak of some publicists be fueling the very developments they are trying to stop? For in the searches for “conservative vocabulary,” unfortunately, no distinction is made whatsoever between interests and attitudes, between aesthetic leanings and political professions. Does one who reads Ernst Jünger have to vote for a specific party? Rather not. He also does not have to cast a vote at all. What once again emerged clearly in this statement was that both sides of the conflict referred repeatedly to the affective constitution and involvement of the other as either deficient or exaggerated, as a sign of their right-​wing sentiments or their left-​wing judgments. Emotionality emerged again and again as a contested term: While some criticized the emphasis Strauß placed on feeling and sensuality beyond rationality, the other side accused those very critics of being overly emotional and sensitive. The correct handling of affects, knowing where and how intensely they should be felt and when they should be articulated, became a central element in the process of determining how to deal with Strauß and Sieben Nächte. However, no reflection took place on how exactly the correct appropriateness of feelings should be determined and measured and by whom. On February 27, 2018, a panel discussion hosted by Strauß’s publisher Aufbau brought together Strauß, Nora Bossong, Julia Franck, and Wolfram Eilenberger for a conversation “On the Political and Aesthetic in Literature.” Here Strauß and his publishers explicitly helped transform the debate from one about whether Sieben Nächte was an example of right-​ wing literature and to what extent Strauß could be considered a right-​wing author into one about different understandings of art. In this context, the negotiation of emotionality played a decisive role, as Süselbeck (2018) also pointed out in his retrospective analysis of the Strauß debate in an article on the “Affectivity of Feuilleton Debates.” However, what for Süselbeck represents an increase or intensification of emotionality in the public sphere tending toward polarization due to a changing media landscape with new

266  Gesa Jessen et al. emotional conventions, we would rather describe as a growing attention and reflection of affective relations for the constitution of public spheres. In his work on “right-​wing” as a category of evaluating literature, Busch (2022) speaks of an “increasing public sensitivity of politically provocative topics and a multiplied number of different ideologically oriented publics” (p. 54). Rather than a mere increase in emotional intensity, debates such as those surrounding Strauß and Sieben Nächte thus suggest a heightened awareness of the affective dimension in understanding and evaluating the political implications of literature. This aspect also became clear in a retrospective assessment of the debate articulated by Strauß himself. In November 2018, a year after the Guardian article had set discussions about the political content of his book in motion, Strauß gave an interview to Sedlmaier for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Here Strauß called Sieben Nächte an “invitation to become aware of one’s own situation” (Sedlmaier, 2018)—​an invitation that, in his words, had also been translated concretely into encounters and community building in the group Arbeit an Europa: “At the beginning of the year, for example, we gathered in Sicily and tried to put this gesture of longing into practice.” Asked if he had become transformed from a literary writer into an activist in the process, Strauß answered: The book and especially the reactions to it have at least set in motion a kind of intellectual activism. The book seems to trigger something—​even among those who have rejected it. (Sedlmaier, 2018) Once again, the book’s affective impact was emphasized as well as the debate it had inspired, or, in Strauß’s words, “triggered.” This “triggering” appeared in Strauß’s reflections on his book as an important and desirable part of public engagements with literature. The question that had repeatedly shaped the debate about his book Sieben Nächte and him as an author—​ namely, that of the correct and appropriate affective involvement—​is to a certain extent pushed aside here by Strauß: Any form of public affective involvement, be it rejection or appreciation, appears as a desirable mode of access to literature. By emphasizing the intensity of feelings—​rather than, for example, their partaking in forming a critical debate—​Strauß also reiterates the argument for supposedly apolitical art, or feelings beyond politics, that had been formulated both by himself and various feuilleton writers during the course of the debate. Viewed as a whole, however, the debate showed that a juxtaposition of literature that encourages feeling on one hand and literature that generates political discourse on the other hand makes little sense. Instead, the negotiation of affective involvement can be understood as a part of the political discourse, and the contentiousness of emotions as a central point in the formation of public opinions regarding the political content of literature.

Affective Publics and the Figure of the Right-Wing Writer  267 Conclusion The right-​wing writer is a fixed and recurring figure in that part of the public sphere that deals with literature in the German feuilleton as well as on social media. Building on Busch’s (2022) observation that classifying literature and literary authors as right-​wing is not indicative of certain aesthetic properties a literary text possesses, but instead a practice that embeds literature within discursive negotiations, our research has shown that references to emotions play a vital part in those negotiations. As we have seen in the case of the debate surrounding Strauß and Sieben Nächte, emotions were discussed at every stage of the debate, be it in relation to the aesthetic value or the political content of the book. From positive reviews of the book that emphasized its emotional authenticity and urgency to the question of the intertwining of emotionality and political sentiment, and to a critique of the emotional debate about Strauß as a political author, it became apparent that emotions were not only mobilized in the wake of the debate, but that this mobilization was, in turn, talked about and reflected upon explicitly. A repeatedly invoked criticism of an emotionalization of the debate is a feature that often characterizes debates about works of art in which aesthetic and political evaluations appear side by side. Negotiations in the triangle of meaning between art, politics, and emotions are by no means a new development, as a recent volume on political emotions in the arts has shown (Ekardt et al., 2021). The conflictive juxtaposition of purely aesthetic, apolitical art and committed literature is also one that has often accompanied these negotiations. However, the reflexivity of emotionality, both in literature and in the debates that accompany literature, may recently have gained a new quality, as the discussions about Strauß and Sieben Nächte exemplify. Commentaries on the debate repeatedly expressed a desire for moderation, appeasement, and a calming of emotions—​ a fear of unacceptable, unjust, excessive emotion directed not at judging literary texts as works of art, but at judging the political content of those same works of art. Here, our research shows an interesting dimension emerging in the way affective publics deal with their own emotionality: Strong affective involvement is perceived here by many voices in the feuilleton as desirable when it is tied to aesthetic judgments, but not when it is tied to political classifications. The right-​wing writer serves as a particularly volatile figure in this context. For those who perceived Strauß as a right-​wing writer, his writing held the danger of mobilizing and intensifying right-​ wing sentiments through romantic, irrational, fascistoid literary language. For those rejecting the classification of Strauß as a right-​wing writer, the accusation that he was one posed the real danger, introducing an element of politicized emotionality that they considered inappropriate for a discussion of a work of literary fiction and its author. Thus, the distinction between art as the place for subjective emotional involvement devoid of political implications and politics as the place of

268  Gesa Jessen et al. rational, emotionless discourse becomes both made and unmade in the course of the debate. A similar pattern can be observed in debates that preceded the one at hand such as the one surrounding Simon Strauß’s father Botho Strauß since the 1990s and those succeeding it such as the one that engulfed the writer Monika Maron in 2020. These examples show only a very specific aspect of the culture of public debates, which is why Radisch (2018), looking back, also described the discussions on Botho Strauß as an outdated “earthquake in the feuilleton, special section wistful men’s flower dreams from the age of fracture writing.” Nonetheless, how emotions are critiqued in the context of literary authors accused of being right-​wing shows us how an order of emotional involvement is both constructed and challenged, displaying how affective publics work. Notes 1 This and all further quotations in this chapter have been translated from German by the authors. The original German texts can be found by referring to the references. 2 Except for the quote from the first edition dust jacket, all excerpts are taken from the first edition of the paperback, published in 2018. 3 See www.wolf​f ver​lag.de/​chro​nik 4 See https://​arb​eita​neur​opa.com/​wer-​wir-​sind/​ 5 Strauß’s statement cannot be accessed publicly, but he has been quoted in the taz article by Uthoff (2018).

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15 Opening Up Ethnographic Data When the Private Becomes Public Michaela Rizzolli and Birgitt Röttger-​Rössler

Since the early 2000s, the so-​ called Open Science Movement—​ a global movement toward more openness, transparency, and sharing in science—​ has been growing. Calls from various actors, both within and outside of academia, have been made to make scientific research and its dissemination more accessible to the “general” publics in order to increase creativity and trust in science.1 Researchers from different fields, policymakers, platform programmers, and operators, as well as publishers have been at the forefront of efforts to promote this Open Science (OS). Although the basic idea of OS that scientific knowledge of all kinds (including publications, data, and software) should be made accessible to wider audiences has already existed for a long time, it has gained momentum over the course of digitization (Scheliga & Friesike, 2014; Wood, 2021, p. 106). The past decade has seen a rapid development of multiple infrastructures and digital technologies at both local2 and (inter)national levels3 that facilitate collaboration on a global scale and expand the possibilities for sharing knowledge. As Neylon and Wu (2009) put it4: The potential of online tools to revolutionize scientific communication and their ability to open up the details of the scientific enterprise so that a wider range of people can participate is clear. (p. 2) In this regard, openness refers to “a form of devotion to a wider audience” (Fecher & Friesike, 2014, p. 19). Thus, OS concerns the relationship between science and society and advocates for public engagement. Partners from across academia, public authorities, and citizens5 are being invited increasingly to participate in science on all levels. Beyond its participatory virtues, OS aims to “democratize” research (cf. Fecher & Friesike, 2014, pp. 25–​32) by making knowledge freely available to everyone, especially when it is state-​funded. Based on the assumption that not everyone has equal access to knowledge, the OS Movement strives for its more equitable participation and distribution. OS DOI: 10.4324/9781003365426-18

272  Michaela Rizzolli and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler encompasses the entire research process: From the initial idea for a research project, through the collection and interpretation of data, to the publication of research findings (and data) and their subsequent use. In line with OS ambitions, many research funding organizations support and acknowledge open knowledge practices. Among others, the European Commission (2021) embraces OS “as the modus operandi for all researchers” and requires beneficiaries of EU funding to make their research publications available in open access and to make their data “as open as possible” and “as closed as necessary.” Open, in this context, follows the idea that research data should be made accessible to various publics while recognizing that there are circumstances when access to research data must be restricted. In a similar vein, more and more journals expect authors to share their data sets publicly (cf. Crosas et al., 2018; Herndon & O’Reilly, 2016). To foster the role of OS in scientific practice, more and more universities offer OS infrastructures and provide corresponding advice or guidance to university staff. Despite the increasing availability of OS infrastructure and the rise in policies to change behavior, OS practices are not yet the norm. In 2014, Scheliga and Friesike (2014) observed wide “discrepancies between the concept of open science and scholarly reality.” According to them, many scientists across different fields endorse the idea of OS, but few are willing to put it into practice. The authors identified a series of individual (e.g., need to invest extra time and effort) and systemic (e.g., costs of providing access) obstacles to OS. Similarly, Asher and Jahnke (2013) noted that while many ethnographers agree with the principle of open access to research data, they face several ethical dilemmas that make sharing difficult. The authors reported that ethnographers often find themselves caught between the calls for greater data sharing on the one side and protecting the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study on the other side. Recent work by Mosconi et al. (2019) in the context of an INF project6 suggests that there remains a considerable gap “between the OS grand vision and researchers’ actual data practices” (p. 749), with this gap found to be much stronger in the humanities and social sciences, and particularly in qualitative and ethnographic research (p. 751), compared to natural sciences. This finding is supported by a 2016 survey on the handling of data in the ethnological disciplines by the “Specialized Information Service for Social and Cultural Anthropology (FID SKA)”7 in Germany, revealing that although a surprisingly large number of participants could imagine using data from other researchers (Imeri, 2017, p. 175), many have reservations about sharing their research data. The main concerns about sharing ethnographic data are (1) concerns about the possibilities of contextualizing ethnographic data; (2) concerns about how research data management might affect research methods; (3) the question of selecting and preparing data for archiving with researchers being particularly skeptical about sharing materials in which the

Opening Up Ethnographic Data  273 researcher’s person becomes recognizable—​as, for example, with field diaries or field notes; and (4) concerns about the conflicting ideas between protecting privacy, the processing of personal data, and research ethics (Imeri, 2017, pp. 172–​175). Overall, these findings suggest that the reasons for not sharing data are multifaceted but refer primarily to the special methodological features of ethnographic fieldwork. In an article about archiving fieldnotes, Lederman (2016, p. 258) noted that anthropologists often hesitate to share their fieldnotes not just during their careers but even after they retire. In her view, the unwillingness to share data is due to established practices and conventions of retaining “personal” materials and ethical principles in anthropology. Similarly, Murphy et al. (2021, p. 42) have reported that although ethnographers embrace the idea that sharing fieldnotes and interview transcripts encourages reanalysis, many are still reluctant to share their data. However, as the authors point out, not making ethnographic data publicly available in data repositories is met with increasing skepticism within and beyond anthropology (even when ethical reasons prevent data sharing). Even though data sharing is not yet a common practice, the “data sharing imperative” (Asher & Jahnke, 2013) is beginning to impinge on ethnographic research. So far, much research around data sharing in qualitative and/​or ethnographic research has focused on the associated ethical and methodological challenges, legal issues, and infrastructural needs. In contrast, far too little attention has been paid to how researchers feel about making ethnographic data publicly available. In what follows, we shall argue that to understand the researchers’ reluctance to share, we need a better and closer understanding of how researchers “encounter, engage with and feel about data” (Pink et al., 2016, p. 3), and data sharing. In the following, we shall first briefly explain our research question and provide an insight into the empirical basis for this chapter, in order to then discuss the results of our empirical studies and show that the handling of data is a highly affective process. Data, Affects, and Publics While data are sometimes presented as being objective and neutral, we observe that there is an essential affective dimension in how scientists handle, understand, and engage with data. In this chapter, we aim to explore researchers’ affects when producing, managing, archiving, and sharing data. We are also particularly interested in the profound transformation of the relations between the public and private that comes with OS: What can/​ should be shared and what must/​should remain private? This question is highly contested in ethnographic research and refers to the personal dimension of ethnographic knowledge production. In our understanding, affect or affectivity is always dynamic and relational—​ forming an entanglement of “affecting and being-​ affected”

274  Michaela Rizzolli and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler (Slaby, 2019, p. 109) in a particular setting. We argue that demands to enhance access to and share data give rise to manifold affective resonances and dissonances (Huber, 2019, p. 12) that take place within particular constellations or affective arrangements (Slaby, 2019) in which actors with different roles, experiences, interests, habits, and practices engage and interact. An affect-​inspired approach helps to foreground that knowledge production is interwoven inextricably with affects, and that data are therefore always affective. It further allows us to draw attention to the affective character and contested nature of the formation of publics. As Fecher and Friesike (2014) have shown, the term OS opens a “multitude of battlefields” (p. 17) ranging from the right of access to research data from public funding, across the demand for public participation in scientific research, to the development of openly available platforms, tools, and services for sharing and collaboration. Another important, though little considered, point in this context concerns the question of which public is actually targeted—​that is, to whom should the ethnographic data be made available? According to Grand et al. (2016), the shift of language from one “public” to multiple “publics” reflects the interpretation that while every person in a society is a member of the public, societies contain fluid sub-​groups that form, re-​form and overlap, depending on their interests, backgrounds, experiences and preoccupations. (p. 94) We assume that the various relevant publics—​be they the international or national scientific publics or the ones relevant in the research field as well as in relation to the particular research subject—​play an essential and always affect-​laden role here. In this chapter, we draw primarily on the results of a focus group conversation we facilitated in December 2021 with researchers from social and cultural anthropology at German universities about their attitudes toward and experiences with openness in their research practices. The focus group discussion aimed to gain a detailed understanding of how anthropologists meet the challenges and difficulties of making ethnographic data public, including the researcher’s concerns, anxieties, hopes, and aspirations toward OS and data sharing. The full transcript of this focus group discussion is accessible online without any restrictions and thus represents an open source (Behrends et al., 2022).8 This data material will be supplemented on a selective basis by the results of a qualitative interview study of various disciplines that we conducted between 2019 and 2021, as well as by some personal research experiences.9 When we quote below from the focus group interview, we use the initials of the non-​anonymized names used in the publication; for quotes from the latter interview study, we name only the profession.

Opening Up Ethnographic Data  275 Affective Data In the following, we discuss the empirical results of our interview studies along the central themes that emerged in these conversations in relation to the collecting, processing, archiving, and sharing of data. On each of these levels, the relationship between the public and the private sphere is reconfigured, bringing different affective references to the fore. Collecting Data and the Personal Quality of Ethnographic Research

Ethnographic fieldwork always involves a great deal of personal engagement, which is why the personal quality of ethnographic research material is an important concern for researchers. By the personal dimension of ethnographic knowledge production, we do not mean that everything is personal, but as Boellstorff et al. (2012) put it: “Personal experience is part of ethnographic research. However, the converse is not true: ethnographic research is not just personal experience. Nor is it simply the recording of firsthand experience” (p. 43). Overall, ethnographers build mutual and close relationships with research participants that can grow further into personal and intimate ties and even long-​lasting friendships. In this sense, ethnographic data are the result of personal, trusting relationships that have evolved over time. However, ethnographic fieldwork is not limited to positive feelings of intimacy and caring (Funk & Thajib, 2019, p. 137; Stodulka et al., 2018, pp. 522–​523; von Stetten & Brill, 2022). It also involves difficult social relations and a wide range of emotions—​among them also feelings of despair, disappointment, or anger. In short, ethnographic research entails the researcher’s active personal engagement with communities—​a highly affective process (Stodulka et al., 2019) that, in many cases, has a profound influence on the researcher’s personality. The researcher as a whole person is completely involved, and this, in turn also influences their relationship to the data they produce. When we say that those are ethnographic data, that means that they are always inherently relational data. They were obtained in relationships, which is why they do not belong to the researcher alone. And the knowledge that we produce there—​if that is in any way “data”—​also circulates again and re-​enters into constellations and relations. (MK, 2022, p. 4) I would go as far as to say that there are no raw data. All data are negotiated, the negotiated data, and there are analysed data. But there are no raw data as long as they are between people. So, I think if I take a community document, it might be raw data, but if I had a conversation

276  Michaela Rizzolli and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler with someone, if I’ve taken a photograph, if I’ve audiorecorded a ritual, it’s always negotiated. (Anthropologist, 2021) Who is it? Who is actually creating the knowledge and what does that mean? I think we should discuss that far more openly in research contexts. (JP, 2022, p. 18) The three quotes from anthropologists taken from either our focus group or our interview study point out that ethnographic knowledge always emerges in coproduction, in social interactions, and that there are no raw data that are independent of social encounters. In this context, the term “collecting data,” which is used repeatedly in the methodological literature, is inaccurate, because it implies that data are set entities that simply have to be collected by the researcher. In the field, however, there is consensus that ethnographic research is a fundamentally dialogic practice, and that the ethnographic knowledge generated in social encounters is thus highly person-​bound, fluid, and nonreproducible. However, this raises the question regarding how this dialogically created (coconstituted) knowledge is documented or becomes data. Are the insights and experiences recorded in field notes, diaries, observations, and memory protocols data? There is uncertainty about this, as the first quotation shows. The specialist literature often refers to research material as data, and our interview participants also considered their various research records to be data, but classified them as “individual” (AB, 2022, p. 4) or “personal” data (TS, 2022, p. 6), thus distinguishing them from other data genres as nonpublishable material. Overall, there is little consensus within anthropology as to “what constitutes research data and if and at what stage of processing one can or should speak of ‘data’ ” (Imeri, 2018, p. 222). We have now talked about very different, heterogeneous research materials. However, perhaps not so decisively about interviews and about fieldnotes so far, and I think that this diversity of materials is also very important. I wouldn’t have as many problems with archiving visual material or sound recordings as I would with my private field diary or these notebooks that are all in different states and were simply never made for publication. Actually, I would have a hard time there emotionally as well. (CL, 2022, p. 10) What data genres do we actually have? If we now take a broad concept of data, then we might also more quickly be able to separate them more cleanly, this “doesn’t belong to being published at all,” over “somehow you share it in the project,” up to “is actually something that could and should be used comparatively in the long term.” (UR, 2022, p. 11)

Opening Up Ethnographic Data  277 These statements refer to the existence of different genres of data and thus to different contexts and methods of data collection. For social and cultural anthropologists, for example, a large and important part of the experiences, impressions, and insights they gain through qualitative methods such as participant observation and informal conversations is recorded in a highly personal style in their fieldnotes. These consequently form personal documents and could only be depersonalized at enormous effort. At the same time, this would deprive them of a large part of their significance. Ethnologists, of course, also collect data that can be separated more easily from their personalities and are thus more able to be shared publicly: They conduct demographic surveys, measure fields, weigh crop yields, document household incomes, record linguistic terminologies, and produce visualizations in, for example, the form of drawings to illustrate complex relations or timelines. They conduct structured interviews and store these on data carriers or work with standardized questionnaires. They collect different (increasingly also digital) documents, archival materials, images, films, photos, and objects, and they use collaborative procedures in which the respective research participants generate data material themselves. This methodological diversity generates different genres of data, each of which is associated with specific challenges regarding public shareability. Related to this is the question of which data genres can be made available for which publics and which potential post use scenarios: Which data are relevant for archiving? Which data should be made available to which publics and in what form? The need to systematize these different forms of data with regard to the ability to share them in the sense of OS requirements was referred to several times in the focus group discussion: There are new genres now and they’re then called “data,” and the other is called “publications.” That multiplies the possible forms of writing and presentation. (UR, 2022, p. 20) So, for me, that boils down to the question … whether we can finally separate them: What do we actually have for data genres? (UR, 2022, p. 12) I think how to develop a systematic approach to these data genres would be a very exciting question. Then perhaps, we should also consider how to apply these forms of documentation in situ so that preparing these things is not so much work afterwards. (TS, 2022, p. 6) I believe I would already be thinking in the direction that we should make the effort to systematize these data genres, because we also share them if we want to collaborate with people in translocal contexts, and

278  Michaela Rizzolli and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler if we also want to visibly map their epistemological role in publications or the like. (TS, 2022, p. 15) These statements show that a systematization of the different data genres is still lacking and an important desideratum. At the same time, they show that the division of data genres into personal documents that cannot be shared (e.g., fieldnotes and diaries) versus materials that can be shared also affects the methodological approach and especially the documentation techniques during research. Data that are collected with the awareness that they will go on to be shared in one way or another require different recording strategies. In this regard, Imeri (2018) also speaks of carrying out research with an “internal editor” (p. 228). If ethnographers begin to write their field documents in the understanding that they will share them with others or make them publicly available, they will have to adopt a completely different form—​ already for legal data protection reasons. This fueled uncertainty among most of our respondents: What does that actually do to us and our research at the moment in time when we are already thinking about availability or about making it available? So, what does that actually do to the research project and yes, to the material that we are collecting in the first place? (CL, 2022, p. 10) Perhaps these fears stem from the fact that anthropologists are afraid of having to leave familiar terrain. They are afraid of having to give up their position regarding the subjective constitution of ethnographic research that has only recently been achieved in the history of the discipline in the context of the writing culture debate, and they are afraid that fieldnotes, as a central genre of the discipline, could thus become merely an epiphenomenon. Processing Data and the Making of Private Archives

A significant question is what happens to the fieldnotes, to all these more or less fleeting notes, over the further course of research. As a rule, ethnologists will turn their notes into detailed protocols shortly after taking them. When doing this, however, they include many aspects that were not written down but retained in memory. This elaboration of notes into more comprehensive descriptions could also be understood as a process of data creation that gives structure to fragments of information. These texts are also highly personal documents into which emotions and biographical aspects of the researcher flow just as much as life-​historical and intimate details of their local interaction partners. Several times in our discussions on this, participants mentioned the role of the information stored in the (body) memory: the influence of all that which

Opening Up Ethnographic Data  279 is not noted down on the knowledge-​gaining processes and thus on the further processing of the data as well as on the entire research process up to publication: … that actually a lot of the data—​and maybe the most important data—​ are not written down, but embodied. I would worry that people would take my field notes and then compare that with what I describe in my publications, because it’s not going to match. (OZ, 2022, p. 8) I also write a lot from memory. So, some of my work doesn’t even rely on fieldnotes in a way because one of the methods, or one of the methodologies I have developed in this writing, is to think what returns to me in a way, what I’m reminded of later on. So not necessarily taking notes in the moment, because those are very intimate settings, or they might not actually appear as research settings in the moment; but later on, through memory, they return and they become important to me, and I start writing about that particular scene or that particular research engagement. So, in a sense, a particular engagement becomes/​takes research significance after the fact in a way. So, it makes the question of data very very blurred and complex. (Anthropologist, 2021) These statements point to the complexity of academic thinking: In the preparation of and engagement with data materials, propositional, theoretical knowledge is intertwined with subjective, biographically colored experiential knowledge. A substantial part of this is stored prereflectively in the body memory. During the course of our interview study with Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) “Affective Societies” academics, the significance of this subjective, nonnotated memory for scientific cognitive processes was also pointed out repeatedly: … but part of the research process is naturally also the history of research that I have already gone through and that is stored within myself. (Recent German literature scholar, 2021) … but at the end of the day, a lot of it is stored in my head, actually just there. (Anthropologist, 2021) Scientists are seen here as a kind of “living archive” carrying important “data” that play a crucial role in the further processing and analysis of the data material. Anthropologist Lederman (2016) devoted some attention to the anthropological practice of curating fieldnotes. She notes that anthropologists have a long history of curating their field research

280  Michaela Rizzolli and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler materials in a very personal manner (see also Ottenberg, 2019). Most often, anthropologists create a “personal archive” (Lederman, 2016, p. 255) that is only shared to a small extent, if at all (cf. Schmid, 2008, p. 32). We assume that this habit is partly related to the knowledge implicitly stored in memory and partly to the fundamentally dialogical mode of anthropological knowledge production. By dialogical mode, we mean that during the data analysis, anthropologists again and again enter into dialogue with their written as well as physical (gegenständlichen) research materials and thus also with the people and stories behind these materials. The anthropologist relates the different materials, the written records, photographs, films, and objects to each other in the form of usually very personal coding systems and thus creates a personal archive. These archives are highly mutable; they can be constantly expanded, supplemented, as well as rearranged, thus enabling new insights. Especially in cases of long-​term ethnographic research, they often extend over several years or even decades. Indeed, these archives are extremely lively—​at least as long as the researcher in question is alive. With the following small vignette by Birgitt we would like to give an insight into the nature of such anthropological private archives as well as into the—​often chance-​driven—​work with these archives and their multifaceted nature. In this case, this lies in the interweaving of Birgitt’s old handwritten field notes and the memory objects she collected during one of her field stays in Sulawesi, Indonesia in 1990–​1991, as well as current social media communication with long familiar persons in Sulawesi that leads to new insights and data during a renewed field visit and thus to the supplementation of the archive.10 In 2018, while cleaning out a cupboard full of miscellaneous items from our research, the wooden truck with sandal tires that Baco had made and given to me back in 1991 fell into my hands. I looked in my fieldnotes to see if I had added anything about it; and, yes, I had noted that Baco had handed me the truck saying it was for me and then ran away very quickly. This made me wonder: Mungkin dia malu? [Maybe he was ashamed?], I noted at the time. I spontaneously took a photo of the truck and sent it to Baco via WhatsApp. Masih ingat? [remember?], I asked him. Memang [of course], he wrote a little later, and it was hebat [great] that I still had this truck, three smileys. A year later (2019), I was back in Bontolowe and was sitting with the whole family when Baco brought the conversation round to the truck and expressed his joy that I still have it. This truck was beautiful and it had made me very happy at the time, so of course I still had it along with all the other gifts from those who were children at the time, I replied. Baco grinned, he would have liked to have kept the truck himself, because it had turned out so well for him—​with the tipping function—​that’s why he ran away so quickly after handing it over. So, he still knew! Over the further course of the conversation, I learned that, in order to get the broken

Opening Up Ethnographic Data  281 sandals for the car tires, Baco had to give Aru his catapult in exchange. I was not aware at the time with which scarce resources the children made their toys. This led to the development of a long conversation with all those present about their childhood, which I recorded in detail the next day, and it continued with others in the days that followed. This example illustrates the multimodality of private archives: Records (handwritten or electronic), objects, photos, films, social media data, as well as the knowledge stored in the researcher’s memory form a highly flexible affective arrangement that enables ever new references and combinations. Behind all the archival materials collected lie complex stories that have not been written down, or only partially, or that are still ongoing. Depending on how the single components are set in relation to each other, they result in new patterns and questions. The provisional, open, and personal style of these living archives may also be the reason why anthropologists consider their data archives to be not or only partially sharable. An implicit fear seems to be that by making data available in repositories, they become fixed or solidified to a certain extent, which contradicts the open, fluid process of—​not only—​anthropological research and knowledge production. Sharing Data: Affective Concerns and Anxieties

Nowadays, it is very often the case that living ethnologists are almost the only archives that exist for certain topics or for certain groups—​and that’s something you have to deal with. You also have to consider that certain records, let’s take all the language records, such as all the language recordings of Franz Boas in North America, are of central importance today—​namely, as one of the very few sources for marginalized languages. So, we have a responsibility to reflect that. (MK, 2022, p. 9) … there is definitely information going beyond publications that would deliver new insights at a later time, or through a comparative perspective. For example, material things such as photos, or also census information that I have collected myself, or social networks. I can think of a number of pieces of information with which I think it’s not all done with the publication, even though I think there’s a lot in the publication. (JP, 2022, p. 18) … that we are very much responsible for not only publishing, but also thinking about curating and sharing data as well as considering how we can release that data somewhat from its “black-​box” character so that we can look into it again. There’s a lot in there. (MK, 2022, p. 18)

282  Michaela Rizzolli and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler In these statements, the OS demands are recognized as quite justified and reasonable. The need for further discussion is also agreed upon. However, within the focus group discussion, it was emphasized several times that there is a need to leave the decision—​what to share and what to keep private—​to the researcher. This was especially argued with regard to personal data, data that have not been created in separate/​single projects, but have grown over longer periods of time, for example, through years of repeated visits to a specific field site. I believe that it’s really important to look at what I want to share, what I want to practically leave to posterity or to other researchers, and what’s too personal. (AB, 2022, p. 4) The central and repeatedly expressed argument against the public sharing of data relates to the protection of personal data. Data protection regulations and OS requirements are seen as being largely incompatible: This is personal data on ourselves and on everyone we deal with. There’s a whole range of levels of security in the way we store that data. So, the question is how do we protect the digital data from public access while still allowing access to the relevant data for the research participants themselves. In other words, we have a special obligation to protect the data; yet, at the same time, we are now supposed to make them transparent. Of course, we can’t do both. Personally, I face this challenge by basically assuming that all collected data are initially personal data and therefore cannot be published. (UR, 2022, p. 5) This runs counter to the fundamental principles in the processing of personal data: Basically, the amount of personal data collected should be kept to a minimum, and an anonymization strategy should be in place. Researchers must treat the data collected during a project and after the end of the project with confidentiality—​regardless of whether or not individuals have given their consent to participate in the research. Data handling is therefore always strongly linked to issues of trustworthiness and responsibility. Ethnographic researchers—​as UR’s statement makes clear—​have a responsibility to those participating in their research. Particularly in the case of highly sensitive topics such as radicalization or mental health or in the case of research in sensitive security contexts, research must also be designed in such a way that the researchers themselves are adequately protected from risks and hazards. In the context of ethnographic research, then, it is always necessary to consider security from the perspective of both research participants and researchers. Thus, research data management touches not only on methodological and

Opening Up Ethnographic Data  283 legal issues, but also and always on ethical questions and implications of data management. There is also a discussion about research ethics, about how we in any way want to deal with data, with personal rights. MK has already said that data are relational. So, theoretically, we would actually have to obtain the consent of all informants regarding how we want to deal with these data. But that is often no longer possible ex post. (OZ, 2022, p. 7) As shown above, requiring informed consent in line with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—​especially in ethnographic research practice—​comes up against both ethical and practical difficulties (cf. Huber & Imeri, 2021). In the context of long-​term, participatory ethnographic research, close reciprocal relationships usually develop between researchers and actors in the field, and these are based essentially on trust. Obtaining informed consent can sometimes disrupt interaction processes in the field and cause lasting damage to the relationship with research participants—​ for example, if the topic of research is highly stigmatized in the respective local public (cf. Dilger, 2017, pp. 200–​201). Also, the form of consent—​ ideally written and signed—​is difficult to obtain in many contexts, either because such procedures are uncommon, because a request for a signature may raise suspicion and distrust, or because there is illiteracy. Thus, sharing such data—​even in limited and protected contexts—​becomes ethically problematic. Moreover, many research topics develop only over the course of research and thus cannot be presented at the outset. Consent in ethnographic research is understood and practiced more “as a permanent task and a dynamic, reflexive process of negotiation in a field-​specific form and generally without a standardized agreement” (Imeri, 2018, p. 221). However, the compatibility of a process-​based form of informed consent with data archiving seems to be only limited. The majority of respondents were also critical of the possibility of anonymization and masking of the personal material as a potential solution: If we want to make the data accessible on a large scale, this will only be possible through a systematic masking strategy, similar to what TS has indicated. But that actually undermines the intersubjective verifiability of our statements that this data publication is supposed to serve. If I have to mask and fictionalize everything in such a way that no one can be identified, then how can anyone verify whether what I have done with my data was a meaningful interpretation if I mask gender, merge people together, change locations, add other contexts, or change the professions behind these descriptions? (OZ, 2022, 7)

284  Michaela Rizzolli and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler The skepticism expressed here by one participant in the discussion about the meaningfulness and explanatory power of extensively masked data was shared widely, but there were also thoughts about finding a possible middle ground: But there may be something in between—​that is, between the published ethnography and the personal data. Right now, we’re carrying out a writing experiment on this in which we’re publishing experience reports in collaboration with research participants. It costs a lot of time and it’s a lot of work, so I don’t know how sustainable it is yet. (UR, 2022, p. 5) Maybe one form of better data management is to argue more soundly. Maybe we need to do a better job of managing our data in our publications to make ourselves more checkable, to ensure more transparency and intersubjective verifiability there. Maybe that’s where we need to become more precise, argue more accurately: What do we really think? How do we arrive at what we think? What evidence can we mobilize? (OZ, 2022, p. 17) What remained unchallenged, however, was the unease or anxiety over the inability to control new technologies and over the power of algorithms: After all, we are seeing the rapid development of the technical possibilities of big data and digital humanities. And we don’t know what we don’t know (yet)—​we don’t know what will be possible in 20 years. We don’t know if we’ll be able to unravel today’s anonymization strategies in 20 years, and it fills me with dread when I imagine what kind of information from my field might be able to be exploited politically in the future. (OZ, 2022, p. 8) … this shift, that we can no longer control it, that we can almost regularly no longer guarantee anonymity. This is not so much due to the quality of the data nor to its encryption, but to the possibilities of networking data that we can no longer control. (MK, 2022, p. 9) Several times, participants mentioned that it is extremely important to be clear about which publics should in any way be able to access ethnographic data: Our interview participants felt a primary responsibility to their research participants and “to the taxpayers who make our work possible” (MK, 2022, p. 9). Both categories are not very specific. Neither do taxpayers directly fund a project—​this happens indirectly through funding institutions—​nor are “the research participants” a clear variable. However, this was not differentiated

Opening Up Ethnographic Data  285 further in the focus group discussion. Interviewees simply articulated these affectively perceived, nonspecific responsibilities. Therefore, we would like to try to differentiate what kind of publics could potentially become relevant here. First of all, there is the academic public, which is both national and international—​something that is not insignificant, especially with regard to the language in which the data would have to be presented as well as with regard to the requirements and regulations that possible databases place on the way the material is presented. Increasingly, the governmental research authorities in different countries are requiring access to the data material as part of the research permit, and this—​especially in politically difficult contexts—​can become extremely problematic and bring the researchers into loyalty conflicts. Another unspecified public that may be meant by taxpayers is the so-​called general, interested public. But what audience is that exactly? In order to open research to a broader, nonscientific audience, the so-​called citizen science projects, for example, aim to involve citizens actively in research processes, and various forms of science communication are now assuming an increasingly important mediating function between science and the public. But here, too, the decision as to which publics are to be addressed and involved rests with the researchers, and it is usually based on affective factors. For example, in the context of her research project “The Formation of Feeling in Vietnamese Berlin”11 within the CRC, Birgitt decided to develop a storytelling project together with young Viet-​Germans (children of Vietnamese immigrants in Germany) that would make their experiences visible and open up a space for them to articulate themselves.12 This decision grew out of her affective involvement in the life stories of these young people and their struggle for recognition, belonging, and social participation. Another example from the context of the CRC is the “Affect and Colonialism Web Lab”: “It brings together researchers, journalists, activists, and artists all over the world interested in the affective dynamics of colonialism.”13 Knowledge creators within and outside of academia are brought together to collaborate and mutually engage in learning activities. The Web Lab has so far resulted in (1) a platform for short videos by a diverse community of authors, (2) a podcast series, and (3) a digital fellowship program in which two fellows work together to curate larger online exhibitions each semester. In addition to efforts to bring science and the general publics closer together, it was particularly the moral or affectively felt responsibility of a group of researchers at the CRC—​namely to involve researchers from around the world (especially from the global South) in the discourse on colonialism—​ that led to the creation of the Web Lab. Both examples refer to collaborative projects in which the participating actors produce, curate, and publish data together through their common making of films, podcasts, interviews, or artistic exhibitions, which not only erase the boundary between researchers and researched, but also invalidate the notion that there is something like raw “data” independent of social relations.

286  Michaela Rizzolli and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler However, in conventional ethnographic research, it is often extremely difficult and ethically challenging for the ethnographer to decide with whom to share the collected data. The imperative to share research data with “research participants” sounds easy but can prove to be extremely complicated. On the one hand, this group is not always easy to define; on the other hand, it is rarely homogeneous. Imagine, for example, an anthropologist, who investigates land right conflicts and therefore talks to the plantation owners—​some of whom use illegal methods to expand their lands—​and to local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that try to fight them, as well as to the ancestral owners of the land who have been cultivating it for generations, but who, in turn, also distrust the NGOs. Probably the anthropologist will be little inclined to share his or her information with the plantation owners, but possibly with the NGOs whose political commitment and mission he or she supports. The decision to share data with the NGO activists might on the other hand violate the trust of the ancestral land users, with whom the anthropologist feels particularly connected. But besides this, can anthropologists ever be sure to see through the motivations of their various interaction partners? We assume that when ethnographers have to decide with whom to share data in contexts of conflict, it is ultimately personal trust and affiliations—​that is, affective ties—​that tip the scales. However, these affective ties are influenced by the researcher’s own values and ethical commitments: Ethnographers normally do not build close personal relationships in the field with individuals whose behavior they find morally questionable, and they tend generally to solidarize with the marginalized. The decision to share data with certain groups of people is therefore influenced by different overlapping affective processes. Conclusion Of course, it makes sense and it is important to think about how to share the material you collect with the partners you are collaborating with, what allocation you have, who has what power of disposal. But these are important questions of research ethics that always have to be clarified in each individual case. I don’t think it’s a matter of making this generally acceptable, and classifying not doing it as antisocial. The question is far more how do we manage the data for whom, and handle it responsibly? (OZ, 2022, p. 17) Therefore, the question must be: In what rare but justified cases is there a public interest in enabling secondary analyses, in also feeding qualitative data into discussions, or in making them available for others to use? Even if this will not happen so frequently in our discipline, it is an inner obligation for me. (MK, 2022, p. 9)

Opening Up Ethnographic Data  287 Even though many researchers from social and cultural anthropology are reluctant to share their data, one thing is very clear: Many recognize the urgency of addressing complex and even conflicting practical, legal, and ethical challenges of OS. Although sharing ethnographic material is more of an exception than the rule, anthropologists feel compelled to reflect on their data sharing practices and their responsibilities toward different actors and publics. Ethical considerations play a central role in this. That is why data management is not just something that is required of researchers from the outside; it is also a felt obligation to take care of their responsibilities for data handling. This chapter has identified the potential challenges of data sharing in ethnographic research and—​in light of observations drawn from various conversations with researchers, it has explored the affective concerns regarding OS. The research outlined in this chapter indicates three particular areas of affective concerns in relation to the willingness to share ethnographic data: First, we have shown that sharing ethnographic data is not only difficult in terms of practical, legal, and ethical issues, but also because of the highly personal quality of ethnographic research and knowledge production. As we have seen, ethnographic research entails a great deal of personal engagement and is inseparably embedded in social and cultural relations. Accordingly, ethnographic knowledge always emerges in co-​productions, in social interactions, and is always (but not necessarily to the same extent) tied to the personality of the researcher. This plays a crucial role when it comes to sharing ethnographic materials such as notes or field diaries. A second, affective dimension concerns the provisional, open, and personal style of processing data and the making of private and living archives that are constantly changing and involve the researchers’ embodied memory—​that is, the particular history of research inscribed into the respective researcher’s body and mind. This runs counter to efforts to standardize and systemize data practices within the context of research data management. Significant in this context is the anxiety that by making data available in repositories, they somehow become fixed, which is seen as contradictory to the dynamic and open character of scientific knowledge production. These concerns were articulated not only by anthropologists, but also by our interviewees from the humanities who referred to the influence that the implicit personal research biographies (consisting of all the research already done, all the literature already read, all the excerpts and notes made, all the discussions held, etc.) have on their scientific reasoning. The third affective dimension expressed particularly by the anthropologists is the affective concerns and anxieties associated with making ethnographic data openly available. We found that most interviewees embrace the idea that researchers should not only publish their findings in the form of articles or reports, but also share some of the data. While there was some disagreement about what constitutes data and which data genres can and/​

288  Michaela Rizzolli and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler or should be shared (with whom), there was agreement that ultimately only the researchers themselves can best evaluate and decide whether or not data sharing is possible and advisable. This was asserted specifically in relation to individual data, which is data that have accumulated over a longer period of time, such as through years of repeated trips to a certain field site, rather than being created in distinct or singular projects. We assume that it is precisely long years of familiarity with a research region and the people living there that account for the high personal affective value of the surveyed and collected empirical material: The data interweave with the researcher’s biography and thus become an important personal “possession.” In addition, the trust of research participants in the researcher is another important concern for anthropologists and involves privacy and security fears, especially in relation to ongoing digitization processes. Even if ethnographers decide for themselves to make parts of their personal life accessible to the public by publishing data, they cannot assume this openness on the part of their former research participants. Many of them often cannot be asked about this afterwards or cannot estimate what this would mean de facto. Because biographical aspects of researchers and participants are intertwined in a large part of ethnographic research records, data protection regulations are widely considered to be incompatible with OS requirements and seen as largely incompatible with the methods, techniques, and ethics involved in ethnographic research. But in their conversations with us, scholars from other disciplines also mentioned an affective attachment to their research materials. They too feel that the materials they collect and/​ or produce over the course of their research—​be they excerpts of texts they have read, memory transcripts of theatre performances they have seen, collections of various artefacts related to the respective research topic, or sketches of intellectual reflections—​are highly personal and thus not publicly shareable documents: … it would really already be an attack on the/​somehow on a certain private black box of the academic researcher to say: Make these notes explicit. (Philosopher, 2021) This chapter highlighted the role that affects play in engagements with data, and it accounts for the affective dimensions of data management and sharing. We suggest that the role of affect in data creating and sharing should be further explored and discussed. By addressing affective dimensions of data archiving and sharing, research data managers can shed further light upon why some researchers or disciplines are reluctant to disclose their data. It might also help to identify their unmet needs. Hence, addressing the affective concerns is essential if OS is to move forward.

Opening Up Ethnographic Data  289 Notes 1 See “the EU’s open science policy”: https://​ec.eur​opa.eu/​info/​resea​rch-​and-​inn​ ovat​ion/​strat​egy/​strat​egy-​2020-​2024/​our-​digi​tal-​fut​ure/​open-​sci​ence​_​en 2 An example is the institutional repository “Refubium” at the Freie Universität Berlin. It allows university members to electronically publish and share documents, doctoral and habilitation theses, as well as research data: https://​refub​ium.fu-​ber​ lin.de/​ 3 An example is the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The Cloud offers a federated and open multidisciplinary environment in which European scholars, innovators, businesses, and citizens can publish, find, and reuse data, tools, and services for research, innovation, and educational purposes: https://​digi​tal-​strat​ egy.ec.eur​opa.eu/​en/​polic​ies/​open-​scie​nce-​cloud. See also the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI): www.nfdi.de/​ 4 The potential of using digital technologies to revolutionize science has also been discussed by Scheliga and Friesike (2014). They argue that the promise of online tools has not yet been fully exploited. 5 One form of public participation in scientific research is the involvement of citizens in research projects, also called Citizen Science. See, for example, “Bürger schaffen Wissen”—​the central platform for Citizen Science in Germany: www. buerge​rsch​affe​nwis​sen.de/​ 6 INF-​Project “Research infrastructures and their appropriation for qualitative-​ interpretive research practices” within CRC 1187: www.mediac​oop.uni-​sie​gen. de/​en/​about-​sfb-​1187/​ 7 www.evifa.de/​de/​ueber-​uns/​ueber-​den-​fid-​ska/​fid-​ska 8 The focus group interview was published with only minor linguistic smoothing and with the consent of all participants in the Working Paper series of the CRC 1171 “Affective Societies.” 9 Between March 2020 and July 2021, we interviewed academics at different stages of their career and various disciplines (the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences) about their attitudes toward and experiences with openness in their research practices. All interviewees were members of the CRC 1171 “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin. 10 Like many social anthropologists Birgitt Röttger-​Rössler conducted long-​term research in Sulawesi, consisting of several long fieldstays within the last 35 years. This so-​called “multitemporal fieldwork” (Howell & Talle, 2012, p. 2) not only enables her to capture social change processes on the microlevel, but above all allows very close social relationships to develop—​an aspect that contributes significantly to the affective meaning of data. 11 www.sfb-affective-societies.de/teilprojekte/A/A01/index.html 12 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRARfbaI52lTV8m2_YUyOMw 13 https://​aff​ect-​and-​colo​nial​ism.net/​

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Index

Note: Figures are indicated by italics. Tables are indicated by bold. Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by ‘n’ and the endnote number e.g., 20n1 refers to endnote 1 on page 20. #forcedconversions 139–​41 #recoverpriyakumari 137–​8 #shaheenbaghprotests 107–​8 #sheinspiresus: fueled by social media 1–​2; Netlytic.org dataset description 119; Netlytic.org visualization 119; online tweets organized around hashtags 107, 118–​21; sample profile 120 #WeHaveSpace: data and methods 154–​6; largest community in the network 158; reading for affect in tweets 161–​6; social network 156–​61, 166–​8; visualization of the 15 communities 157 #WirHabenPlatz see #WeHaveSpace #womenofshaheenbagh 107–​8, 112–​13, 118, 120–​1 @Pak_​ Hindus 141 ]init[ (digital project management and consultancy firm) 68, 75–​6 Abergil, Eden: Abergil’s photographic act of humiliation 213–​17; “Eden Abergil Is Taking a Picture with You!” 225–​6; “Eden Abergil Meme” 213–​14; “im in ur army … corruptin ur valuez” 220–​1; photgraphs 215, 216, 221, 223, 224, 227; Twibbon campaign, “Support Eden Abergil” 225; see also public shaming as contested image practice Abu Ghraib, photographs of torture 216–​17 academic public 285

administrations, corporations, and publics 69–​71 administrative publics see digital administrative publics (Germany) advertising as increasing source of income 191 AfD (Alternative for Germany) 154, 159, 254, 259, 261–​2 affect: as adaptable and constantly shifting 114; affective dimension of scientists managing data 273–​8, 286, 287–​8; and algorithmic processes 192–​5; concept focusing on relations between different bodies 219; as intensity 1–​4; as performative and citational 138; reason should tame our 196; in social media activism 138–​9; see also emotions and affects affect regulation 18 affective arrangements: BAMF’s digital public as an 79–​82; public prestructured by the administration itself 74–​9 affective atmospheres 177–​8 affective attachment as attachment to the political 204 affective community 177 affective contours of network to help migrants in COVID-​19 see (Im) Mobility in the Americas and COVID-​19 affective data: collecting data and personal quality of ethnographic research 275–​8; processing data and the making of private archives

Index  293 278–​81; sharing data: affective concerns and anxieties 281–​8 affective facts 239 affective image practices 26, 219–​20, 226–​8 affective media practices: communities emerge around shared 155; by digital hate cultures 184; by far-​right users 150, 152, 168; triggered by Abergil’s Facebook post 217 affective networking of far-​right publics: #WeHaveSpace/​#WirhabenPlatz 146–​7, 156–​9; antagonist bodies and reclaiming the “we” 164–​6; far right’s use of emotions on social media 152–​4; hashtag network 159–​61; introduction 25; irony as an affective practice 161–​2; thinking of networked publics through affect 150–​2; see also Twitter affective news 2 affective noise 202–​5 affective practices 154, 156, 161–​3, 167, 213, 226–​8, 253 affective publics: archives 101–​2, 112–​14; disciplinary perspectives 13–​18; five defining tendencies 94–​5; formation of publics 18–​21, 173–​4, 178–​80, 184; how internet memes mobilize 228; multiple publics in constant communication 60–​3; places, networks, and media 10–​13, 21–​8; and their meanings 1–​6, 96–​7, 151; see also American and un-​American, what it means to be; belonging, (in)visibility, and racialization in Ocean Vuong’s book; Sieben Nächte affective publics and the figure of the right-​wing writer see right-​wing writers; Sieben Nächte (Strauss, S.) affective publics of ethnographic museums see unhappy objects in ethnographic museums affective publics (Röttger-​Rössler) see Röttger-​Rössler, B. affective registers of racism, fear, resentment, and rage 236 Affective Societies interdisciplinary research center see Collaborative Research Center (CRC), “Affective Societies” affective temporalities of digital hate cultures: complexity of hate speech

173–​5; digital hate cultures 175–​80; digital housework of hate 184–​5; formation of affective publics 186; introduction 25–​6; inward-​targeted accumulation of hate 180–​2; methods and materials 179–​80; outward-​ targeted expansion of hate 182–​4; see also (Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-​19 affective temporality 178 affective tuning, nuancing public and private in Indian politics 109–​11 affective witnessing (Richardson and Schankweiler) 99 affectivism and visibility in the mediatization of disappearing non-​Muslim women see Pakistan; visibility/​invisibility affectivity of “Eden Abergil Meme” see Abergil, Eden affordances: of meme generators 224; of social media platforms 150–​1, 162, 177, 183 After Democracy (Papacharissi) 7 agency, marginalization, and discrimination within minority communities 143 Ahmadis in Pakistan 130–​1, 135, 146n1 Ahmed, S.: The Cultural Politics of Emotions 177, 206; on “happy objects” 22–​3; on hate 237, 238–​40, 248; The Promise of Happiness 34; on walking into room 118–​19 Alexanderplatz Demonstration 56, 57, 60 “algorithmic imaginary” 192 algorithmic publics: affect as critical leverage for influence 191–​3; algorithms and situated affects 202–​6; algorithms and their subjects 194–​5; Cambridge Analytica and psychometric manipulation 198–​202; filter bubbles and homophily 195–​8 algorithms: challenges/​threats for publics 193, 200; for connecting to transnational networks 176–​7; establish new conditions 137; irony and sarcasm not captured by automated methods 150; for modularity 156; obscurity of 185–​6; pre-​given architectures 25–​6, 72, 120, 123; subjectivity and affect drive 197; see also nudging

294 Index Alternative for Germany (AfD) see AfD (Alternative for Germany) Alvarez Velasco, S. 91, 92 American and un-​American, what it means to be 233–​6, 248–​9 American Dream and the “good life” 245–​6 American exceptionalism 234, 248 Americas see (Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-​19 Anderson, B., on affective atmospheres 177 Anderson, B. R., on ngoko in Javanese language 19 Anderson, C., “End of Theory” 200 Andrejevic, M., postdeferential political climate defined by 176 anonymity on social media 177 “Anschwellender Bocksgesang” (Strauss, B.) 256 antagonist bodies and reclaiming the “we” 164–​6 anthropology see ethnographic data; ethnography “anti-​liberal thinking” 254, 258, 259, 263–​4 antisemitism 144–​5 APPI see Asian American Pacific Islanders (APPI) Arab Spring 1–​2, 20–​1 Arbeit an Europa 256, 263, 264, 265, 266 archival silences 246–​7 archives: invisible infrastructures 113; processing data and making private 278–​81 art, devaluation and looting of non-​ European objects 41, 43–​4 Asher, A., ethical dilemmas for ethnographers 272 Asian American Pacific Islanders (APPI) 231–​2 Asians: in America as perennial outsiders 231–​2, 248–​9; enemies seen as unhuman 237–​8; visibility of body as transactional object 242–​3, 245 audiovisual recording see image testimonies Aufbau, conversation “On the Political and Aesthetic in Literature” 265–​6 Avraamidou, M. 154 Ayyub, R. see Time’s story about Bilkis Dadi Azoulay, A. 218

Backfire (Baritz) 235 bahir see ghar-​bahir binary Balme, C. B. 63, 64n2 BAMF see Germany, Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) Banaji, S., need for more understanding of hate cultures 175 Baritz, L., Backfire 235, 248 Bartels, G. 264 Baum, A. 261–​2 Baym, N. K. 151, 159 belonging, defined 241 belonging, (in)visibility, and racialization in Ocean Vuong’s book: narrative 241–​7; search for an affective public 240–​1, 248–​9; search for an alternate affective community 240–​1, 244–​5, 248–​9, 250n3 Bennett, W. L. 151 Berlant, L.: on affective commitment 26; on affluence of affects on political publics 193, 202–​6; on American Dream and ”good life” 245–​6; cruel optimism 193, 202–​6; on queer phenomenology 243; see also “crisis ordinariness” (Berlant) Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (National Museums in Berlin) 33–​4, 40–​3 Berlin 1989–​1990: theater and counterpublics 55–​7 Berlin Wall, fall of see theater publics in motion Bhat, P. 153 Bhat, R., need for more understanding of hate cultures 175 Bhutto, Z., administration declared Ahmadis as non-​Muslims 130 Big Five model 199–​200, 202 Bilkis Dadi: artistic rendering went viral on social media 117; spinning as symbolic posture 124; Time’s story on 106, 115 Biller, M. 257–​8, 264 black box concept of theater 63 Blade Runner 193 blasphemy accusations in Pakistan 135 Blickstein, T.: on affects of archival dispossession 247; on archival silences 246–​7; on racialization 233, 247 blindfolds in photos see Abergil, Eden; Hindus

Index  295 Bob, C., The Marketing of Rebellion 136 Boellstorff, T., on ethnographic research 275 Boler, M. 138 border closures and lockdowns 90–​1, 98 Bossong, N., on strategies of left and right 263–​4 boyd, d., on networked publics 17, 150–​1 Braidotti, R., on empowerment and restriction 145 brands 136, 143, 183 Breaking the Silence 218, 229n3 Brecht, B. 54, 58 Brexit 192–​3 Brock, A., Jr., on “showing receipts” 113 Brown, A., hate speech more than a legal concept 175 The Brutish Museums (Hicks) 41–​2 Burgess, J. 151, 159 Busch. N. 252, 266, 267 Bush, G. W., skirting filters to allow affective noise 202–​3 Butler, J. 237, 238 CAA see India, Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) Cambridge Analytica 192–​3, 198–​202, 205 capitalism, soft democracy vs. strong 5–​6 caste: discrimination against Christians in Pakistan 131; and role of women in India 109–​10 censorship: in 19th-​century Germany 53; exaggerated criticism as 262; and harassment in online environments 176; in Pakistan continued with social media 134–​5 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) 233 Chopra, D. 124 Chouliarki, L., on regimes of visibility 142–​3 Christians in Pakistan 130, 131 Christopher, R., on term “gook” 237 Chun, W. H. K. 196, 197–​8, 201 citizen science 285, 289n5 citizenship: affective 245; and religion 106–​7, 121–​2, 123 civic engagement sustained through media as affective public 94

class-​based differences 164–​5 code switching 242 Coleman, R., on affective temporality of social media 178 Collaborative Research Center (CRC), “Affective Societies”: on affect 3, 7, 20; “Affect and Colonialism Web Lab” 285; interview study 279 colonialism: “Affect and Colonialism Web Lab” 285; affects omitted form standard histories 246–​7; violence of American settlers 233 coloniality of ethnographic museums as emotional force 33–​5, 39–​40, 45n2; see also unhappy objects in ethnographic museums commercial antagonism driven by capitalist interests 9 communication: collapse of formerly separate forms of 16; digital age prone to distorting public world 18–​19; strategies used to arouse controversy 183–​4; Western concepts of the public sphere 15 community building, social media provide space for 176–​7 “computer-​based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans” 199–​200 “connective action” 18, 24 conservatorios for various scenarios impacting migrants 93–​5, 101 consumer public, shift from critical public to passive 15 contagion risk, migrants feared as 90–​1, 96, 98 content analysis 155 contested image practices of public shaming see public shaming as contested image practice contextualization obscured by memes 178–​9, 181–​2 continuity of the public 51–​2 co-​occurrence network of top 30 hashtags in RStudio 160 corporations: directly affect administrative publics 70, 80–​2; IT employees present in government offices and meetings 68; US public administrations patterned after private 69–​70; see also Lünenborg, M. “corporeal vulnerability” 238

296 Index counterculture publics 3 counterpublics: as antagonistic formations of different publics 16; performed as tension with imagined general public 167; role of technology in creating/​sustaining 92–​5; see also (Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-​19; Warner, M. COVID-​19: creating a hemispheric network in response 90–​7; giving voice to migrants 97–​100; policy impacts on migrants in transit 89–​90, 93–​4; shared storytelling critical of migrant condition 95; Zoom fatigue and burnout 101–​2 CRC see Collaborative Research Center (CRC), “Affective Societies” “crisis ordinariness” (Berlant) 24, 90, 98, 103n8, 244 critical race theory coopted to organize White tribal politics 167–​8 Cruel Optimism (Berlant) 193, 202–​6 cultural differences 4–​5, 7 The Cultural Politics of Emotions (Ahmed) 177, 206 data see affective data; ethnographic data data genres, need to systematize 276–​8 “data sharing imperative” impinging on ethnographic research 273 Davis, E. 138 decision trees of integration course applications 76–​7 Declaration of Independence 234–​5, 240, 248, 249n2 “deep fakes” 191 democracy: conversation not the soul of 5–​6; Habermas’ conceptualization of public a political aspiration 80; needs to be placed ahead of profit 6–​7 Deo, N., on Indian women as political subjects 110–​11 Derrida, J., on technical structure of archives 113 Deutsches Theater represented at Alexanderplatz Demonstration 56 Dey, A., on Indian feminist activism in digital dimension 114 diacritics in Germany’s Federal Portal 78–​9, 81 dialogical mode of anthropological knowledge production 276, 279–​80

digital administrative publics (Germany): administrations, corporations, and publics 69–​71; affect and emotion in public administrative spaces 67–​9; BAMF’s digital public as an affective arrangement 79–​83; BAMF’s digital publics: experience and creation 71–​9; research setting 68–​9 digital affect cultures 178 digital hate cultures see affective temporalities of digital hate cultures digital housework 184–​5 digital platforms shape way people interact 17 “digital witnessing” 136–​7 D’Ignazio, C. 108 discrimination: covert forms to adapt to affordances and regulations 149; within minority communities 143 disinformation orchestrated by far right 149 dissonance, affective publics of ethnographic museums 33–​4, 40–​2, 44 dissonant publics as challenge for democracy 17 dissynchronization 241 distrust of legacy media and platforms 9 “dog whistles” in far-​right communication 153 Dumitrica, D. 115 Duncombe, C., on “digital witnessing” 136–​7 Dwivedi, D., “outside’ determined by ‘the west’ 14 ear pendant worn by Maasai woman 35–​6, 36 Eberhardt, R. 256, 265 Ebrahimi, R. (#renaz) 179, 182–​4 Eden Abergil Meme see Abergil, Eden Eguiguren, M. M. 92 Ehlert, S. 260 Eilenberger, W. 265–​6 Ekman, M.: on far right’s use of humor as “form of negative campaigning” 153; on YouTube video activism 183 Elizabeth II (queen), ten-​day mourning ritual 11–​12 emojis 17, 79, 139, 162, 167, 182 emotions and affects: attachment to private field diaries and notebooks

Index  297 276; compared 3–​4; emotion repertoires 244–​5; highjackers use multimodal affective (media) practices 162, 167; may carry moral force 178; not primarily linked to digital technologies 18; in public discourse 4–​5, 16, 28n2, 67–​8, 151; racialized migrant populations in study of 97; in Sieben Nächte debate 255–​8, 263–​8; see also affect “emotions on the move,” affects as 138 empowerment (potentia) and restrictive forces (potestas) 129, 145, 146 empty signifier, non-​Muslim as 134 “End of Theory” (Anderson) 200 England, L., Abergil compared to 218, 226 English, passing with mask of 242 Enzensberger, T. 256 EOSC see European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Erdoğan, R. T. 149, 154 EskoTV 183 Esposito, E., rise of hate speech connected to digital affordances 176 ethics: in algorithmic processes 194–​5; principles regarding data sharing 273, 281–​6; researching hate speech 174–​5; strategic representations of an ethic of care 115, 121, 125 ethnographic data: affective concerns about sharing 272–​3, 281–​6; collecting personal data 275–​8; data, affects, and publics 14–​15, 27–​8, 273–​4; “individual” research records as nonpublishable 94, 276; Open Science (OS) and 271–​4, 277–​8, 287–​8; researchers should make decisions regarding which data to share 282, 285, 286 ethnographic museums as affective arrangements 33–​5 ethnography: dialogical mode of anthropological knowledge production 276, 279–​80; limits of Western public sphere theories in social anthropology 13–​15 European modernity: division between subject and object not shared in indigenous communities 38; objects get more attention than social and cultural contexts 43–​4

European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) 289n3 European Union regulations on data sharing 272, 283 extreme vs. radical right 152–​3 Facebook: algorithms blamed for political actions 201; Cambridge Analytica’s breach of user privacy 198, 200; debate between literary critics transformed to writers’ quarrel 260, 261–​2; only allows searches 30 days back 220; “social graph” 196–​7, 202; see also Abergil, Eden Faludi, S., on attitudes toward Native Americans 233 far-​right accounts, ten highest ranking 159 fascist language detected in Sieben Nächte 258 FAZ, opinion piece by Strauss 254–​5 FCM see forced conversion and marriage (FCM) fear, racism not just hate but 239 Federal Portal (Bundesportal): creation of categories highlights corporate and bureaucratic sentiments 75–​6; exploring the digital bureaucratic welcoming hall 72–​4; screenshot of homepage 73; see also digital administrative publics (Germany) feedback loops of memes 219 female agency: many forced conversions actually women escaping from home 132–​3, 139; suffocated by notions of honor and patriarchal structures 143–​5 feminism: consciousness through digital communication 111–​14; feminist approaches to data 109; protests defined by interrelation of digital and physical activism 114–​16 fieldnotes 273, 276–​9, 280 filters: filter bubbles 192, 195–​8, 200, 201; as replacement for content selection 205; skirted to allow affective noise 202–​4 Finland: political debate on racism 179, 182–​4; Soldiers of Odin Facebook group 177, 179–​82, 184, 185 Fleig, A., defining public spheres 253 forced conversion and marriage (FCM): emancipation and exploitation in

298 Index social media 131–​2; framing as Islamophobic tactic 147n10; see also visibility/​invisibility Franck, J. 265–​6 Fraser, N.: critique of Westphalian public sphere theory 96–​7; private vs. public sphere 70 Friesike, S., “discrepancies between the concept of open science and scholarly reality” 272 Fuchs, M.-​M., and Fuchs, S. W., on victimhood 131 Gandhi, Kasturba 106, 116–​17, 124 Ganesh, B., on “digital hate culture” 175–​6 gatekeepers missing from social media 176 German Democratic Republic (GDR): theater in 54–​7, 59–​60, 63; thousands of citizens fled across now open border 64n10 Germany: meetings as entertainment or political assembly 53; Vietnamese in 242, 245, 285; see also #WeHaveSpace; digital administrative publics (Germany); theater publics in motion Germany, Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF): BAMF’s digital publics as an affective arrangement 79–​83; BAMF’s digital publics: experience and creation 71–​9; ethnographic fieldwork inside IT department 23 Germany, Federal Press and Information Office 71, 80 Ghar–​bahir binary 106, 109–​10, 112, 116–​17, 124–​5 Ghare Baire (The Home and the World, Tagore) 109 GIFs 151, 162, 167 Gladić, M. 264 gook, term originated in Philippines 237 “GOOKS, go home”: Asians as perennial outsiders in America 231–​2; On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Vuong) 240–​9; formation of affective publics 248–​9; racialization in America 233–​6; Vietnamese refugees in the US 26, 236–​40 Graan, A., on “regimes of publicity” 14 Grabovac, A. 257, 259–​60, 261, 264

Greece, events affecting editor 1 Gregg, M. 118 The Guardian 253–​4, 258, 259–​60, 268 Gutmensch (do-​gooder) 162, 164 Haapoja, J., definition of hate speech 175 Habermas, J.: ideas of rational discourse 196, 206; on openness of the mind 5–​6; on public sphere 15, 70, 80, 253; The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 50, 51 Hacking, I., on looping effect 144–​5 hacking a hashtag subverts its original meaning 154 Hamlet/​Maschine (Müller, Berlin 1989–​1990) 23, 57–​60 Han, B.-​C., lectures on Romanticism 254 Hardt, N. 145 Hartford, home of “writers whose vast imaginations failed to hold bodies like ours” 243 hashtags: co-​occurrence network of top 30 hashtags in RStudio 160; hacking and modifying 154; hashtag co-​ occurrence analysis 155, 159–​61 hate: affective dimensions 238–​40, 244–​5; as an affective force accumulating value through circulation 177; American public sphere intimately linked with 236–​7, 248–​9; attacks on ethnic group members 231–​2; complexity of hate speech 173–​5; irony can cultivate 154; shame translates into aggression 248, 249; see also affective temporalities of digital hate cultures Hauser, G. A. 12–​13 Hein, C., Die Ritter der Tafelrunde 55–​6 Hicks, D., The Brutish Museums 41–​2 Hiernonymi, Ultra-​Romanticism: A Manifesto 254, 260 hijacking solidarity see affective networking of far-​right publics Hildebrandt, J. M. 39 Hill, A., statement on sexual harassment sidelined 143 Hindus: disappearance of Hindu women 132–​3, 137–​42; “Hindu” sterotpye 134; in Pakistan 131, 134, 138–​9; women converting to Islam or Cristianity 132–​3, 136; women

Index  299 kidnapped and converted 139–​42; see also religious minorities Hindutva 111, 112, 124 Hochschild, A. R., “deep stories” of rural Americans 19 Hoffmann, T., counterproductivity of a ‘political oversensitivity 263 Holmes, J. H., criticism of administration run as a business 70 Holzmann, K. 260 homophily 18, 197–​8, 201–​2 honor, concepts of (ghairat) 129, 133, 139, 143–​5 Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique (Mutua) 135–​6 Humboldt Forum 33–​4, 40–​3 humiliation 213–​17, 225 “hybrid media system” 16 hyper-​nationalism 91 IBM varimax rotational program and Big Five model 199 Ibs, T., October and November 1989 as “time of resolutions” for theaters 59–​60 Ida, D.: on Asia body as foreign body 245; on shame and stigma in hate incidents 232 “ideology of order” 134 IDF see Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Ihlebæk, K. 184 Illies, F. 256–​7, 259 iloikop 38, 44, 45n9 image testimonies 19–​20 imagery: of allegedly forced disappearances 139; nonviolent nationalist freedom fighter (woman) 116–​18; of older women and subaltern subjects 115–​23; of walking into room 118–​21; women of Shaheen Bagh as saviors of the constitution 121–​3; see also affective image practices images, confronting with lines of text 220–​2 (Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-​19: affective contours of network to help migrants 90–​7; background 24, 89–​90; challenges of multiple social and historical contexts 96–​7; evaluation 101–​2; polyphonic mapping 97–​100; temporality of affective publics 91–​2

immigrants see migrants incapacitation (Mühlhoff) 82 in-​degree centrality 155, 157–​9 India: affective publics and Twitter archives 112–​14; Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 106, 107, 114–​18, 121–​4; colors of national flag 122; freedom (Swadeshi) movement 106, 109, 110, 116–​17, 124–​5; “Indianness” for women of minority religions 111–​12; interviews with transnational and local activists 108–​9; National Registry of Citizens (NRC) 106, 107, 114–​18, 121–​4; see also women activists imaged through social media publics Indignados Movement, influence on Papacharissi’s research 1, 2 Indonesia, ngoko vs. krama in Javanese language 19 influencers in social media activism 137–​8, 140–​1, 143, 155, 156 information sharing, searching for solidarity with migrant populations 89–​90 information warfare regarding Ukraine 20 informed consent, limited compatibility with data archiving 283 InGe (integration business file) 68–​9, 71, 72, 74–​6, 78, 79, 81 ing’weni 35–​42, 44 (In)visibility of forced conversion 131–​3 Instagram 8, 72, 84n6, 106, 113, 117, 121, 125 integration business file (InGe) see InGe (integration business file) integration courses for German immigrants 67–​9, 74–​6, 83n2 intensity 1–​4, 9, 138, 162 international NGOs and commodification of victimhood 135–​6, 146 intimate publics 203–​6 inverting and diverting the photographic act of humiliation 220–​8 invisibility see visibility/​invisibility IRC-​Gallery 1, 173, 177 irony as an affective practice 153–​4, 162–​6, 177, 226 Islam see Muslim women in India; non-​Muslims; Pakistan Israel Defense Forces (IDF) 213, 214, 218, 221–​2

300 Index Israeli posts blocked in Pakistan 135 Israeli-​Palestinian conflict see public shaming as contested image practice Ivanov, P., on Zanzibar 14 Jahnke, L. M., on ethical dilemmas for ethnographers 272 Jamia Millia University, assault on students 121–​2 Jandl, P. 264 January 6 insurrection 239, 247 Japanese Americans, incarceration 232 Jarrett, K., on “digital housewife” 184–​5 Jefferson, T. 234–​5 Johannes, K. 39 Juergensmeyer, M., on “ideology of order” 134 Junge Salon 256, 259, 260–​1, 265 Kaiser, J. 183, 184 Kalsnes, B., on importance of moderation 184 Kalu, A., on women during the Biafra War 247 Kari, Vilma, Filipino American assaulted in Times Square 231–​2, 237, 239, 247, 249 Kenan, I. 220, 222 KhosraviNik, M., rise of hate speech connected to digital affordances 176 kidnappings: and forced conversions of Pakistan minorities 142; of Hindu girls posted on Twitter 139–​41 Kim, E., on “good” Asian 232 King, M. L., Jr. 238 Klein, L. F. 108 Klein, O. 153 Klug, B., on antisemitism 144–​5 Kluge, A., on proletarian public sphere 253 knowledge see research and knowledge production Korbinian 254, 260 Kosinski, M. 198–​9 Krieg Ohne Schlacht (Müller) 57 Kubitschek, G. 259, 263 Kumar, A., and Kumar, K., Hindus promoted in Pakistan army as exceptions 130 Kumari, Rinkle 131, 134 Kuntsman, A. 218

Laaksonen, S.-​M.: on anti-​immigrant communicative strategies 183; definition of hate speech 175 Laclau, E. 134 Lam, A. T. A., on Germans with parents from Vietnam 242 Lancaster, R. N., on testimonio genre 98–​100 Latin America see (Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-​19 Lederman, R., on fieldnotes 273, 279–​81 Lewis, R., on microcelebrity tactics 183 LGBTI persons: migrants in transit 99–​100; queer identity of Vuong’s characters 241, 243–​6, 248–​9 Lienhardt, P., on Arabian marketplace 13–​14 “life situations” 74, 76, 80 Lindgren, S. L., networks and actors always changing 167 Liu, W., on queer temporality 246 Liu, W. T., on refugee as reminder of war 236–​7 Der Lohndrücker (Müller) 55 looping process 136, 144–​5 Losh, E., on hashtags with slogans 113 “Love your Race” group 173 Lünenborg, M.: concept of performative publics 17; in conversation with Z. Papacharissi 1–​9; media and communication studies 15; social media essential to formation of affective publics 174; understanding of affect 114 lynching and torture, images indicate approval of acts of 216–​17 “Lynndie England Pose” 226 Maasai conception of unhappy objects 35–​40, 42–​3 machine learning 185, 194 Mangold, I. 261–​2 manosphere 176 manual transfer of data still needed 74–​5 The Marketing of Rebellion (Bob) 136 marketplace: communication more fleeting unless recorded 19–​20; mostly a place of economic interaction 70–​1; as “talking sphere” 13 Markham, A. N., networks and actors always changing 167

Index  301 Martí, J., Nuestra America 55, 96 Massumi, B., on affective facts 239 Mattes, D. 241, 246 Mazzarella, W., on “affect management” in Bombay 14 measurement and evaluation of individual user’s behavior 191–​2 media: capitalized structure limits open deliberation 6–​7, 9; introduction 26–​8; see also social media; technology memes: as affective image practice 26, 219–​20; inverting and diverting the photographic act of humiliation 220–​8; “meme treatment” 213, 228; photoshop images 222–​6; as purposeful misconnections 178–​9, 181–​2; see also public shaming as contested image practice; women activists imaged through social media publics memory (body), information stored in researchers’ minds 278–​81 Menchú Tum, R., testimonio 103n12 Meraz, S., on visibility in social media 140 Meyer, R. 158 microcelebrity tactics 183 Midān Moments 21 migrants: central role in study of racialized populations in study of emotions 97–​8; coming with household pets 164; as “essential workers” with no protection 91; giving voice to migrants during COVID-​19 97–​100; images unrelated to context 180–​1; migrant personhood and autonomy of migration 96–​7; sentiments related to digitalization of migration management 68–​9; Vietnamese in the US 236–​40, 241–​9; see also digital administrative publics (Germany); “GOOKS, go home”; (Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-​19 migration see migrants Mina, A. X., on meme as an invitation 219 minorities, Asians as model 232, 236 minorities’ affectivism, defined 133 Mishra, M., sample profile of #sheinspiresus 120

moderation, importance with increase of online harassment and hate speech 184–​5 Modi, N., Twitter handle offered to inspiring women 107–​8, 118–​21 Mosconi,G., on gap between OS grand vision and actual data practices 272 Mouffe, C., on consensus 6, 16 Mudde, C. 152–​3 Mühe, U. 57–​8 Mühlhoff, R., on user interfaces 81, 82 Müller, H.: “… time of art is different from time of politics… 62; Hamlet/​ Maschine 23, 57–​60; Krieg Ohne Schlacht 57; Der Lohndrücker 55; “There were no more dialogues…“ 64n6 Müller, Tom 254–​5 Musgrave, K., critical race theory coopted to organize White tribal politics 167–​8 Muslim women in India: feminist consciousness through digital communication 111–​12; protests against new laws in India 106–​7, 114; Shah Bano case 111–​12; see also staging the “women of Shaheen Bagh” Mutua, M., Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique 135–​6 Nagle, A., utilizing “public humiliation as viral entertainment” 153 Native Americans not considered human beings 233 nativism: highjacking solidarity 149, 153, 161, 163–​7; increase during COVID-​19 pandemic 96, 97 necography/​necropolitics 41–​2 Negri, A., The Savage Anomaly 145 Negt, O., on proletarian public sphere 253 networked publics: control regulatives of established public sphere fall away 19; defined 94; structured by networked technologies 17; see also (Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-​19 networks: affect theory used to elaborating character of 23–​6; of tweets #sheinspiresus visualized via Netlytic.org 119; see also social media Neubauer, L. 157

302 Index Neue Zürcher Zeitung 264, 266 Neylon, C., on potential of online tools 271 ngoko vs. krama in Javanese language 19 Nguyen, V. 238, 249 Niki 158, 165 Nikunen, K., on irony 154, 226 nonhuman bodies, dynamics unfolding between human and 34 non-​Muslims: Ahmadis declared 146n1; focus on religion but not other cultural issues 133, 134–​6; non-​ Muslim as empty signifier 134; in Pakistan’s population 130–​2; visibility online 136–​9, 142–​6; see also Hindus nonviolent resistance 106, 115–​16, 121–​2, 124–​5 North America see (Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-​19 nostalgia for pure pasts untainted by non-​White peoples 235 NRC see India, National Registry of Citizens (NRC) nudging 77–​8, 80, 113, 193 Nuestra America (Martí) 96 N-​word 179, 182, 183 Nymoen, O., on sequence and repetition 137 OAA (online access act) 75, 78 Obama campaign, affective attachment 204 Occupy Movement, influence on Papacharissi’s research 1, 2 October Revolution, replaying street events in theaters 53–​4 Oltermann, P. 253–​5, 260 On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Vuong) see belonging, (in)visibility, and racialization in Ocean Vuong’s book “On the Political and Aesthetic in Literature” conversations 265–​6 “one-​stop-​shop” 76, 77–​8, 80 online access act (OAA) see OAA (online access act) online activities replacing personal interactions: affective dimensions of public administration 67–​8; applicants become faceless while bureaucrats become anonymous 79–​82; experiencing the BAMF digital administration 71–​2

Open Science Movement (OS) 271–​4, 277–​8, 287–​8 openness 5–​6, 271 OS see Open Science Movement (OS) ostrich feather headdress worn by Maasai warriors 37–​8, 37 Overbeck, J. 257 Paasonen, S. 165–​6 Pakistan: (in)visibility of forced conversion 131–​3; affectivism 24–​5, 144–​6; dialectics of visibility 142–​4; government control of media 134–​5; international NGOs and commodification of victimhood 135–​6; religious nationalism 133–​5; social media activism 129–​30, 136–​42; see also forced conversion and marriage (FCM); Hindus; non-​Muslims; religious minorities; visibility/​invisibility Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) 134–​5 Palestinians see Abergil, Eden Pantti, M., on anti-​immigrant communicative strategies 183 Papacharissi, Z.: on affective publics 183, 228; dialogue with editors 1–​9, 22; five defining tendencies of affective publics 94–​5; on “instantaneity” on Twitter 151; on memes as structures of feelings 219; on networks requiring information 90; on visibility in social media 140 Pariser, E., on filter bubbles 192, 195–​7, 201 participants: in ethnographic research 275, 282, 295–​6; in (Im)Mobility network, nature of 92, 95–​6 patriarchal structures 109, 111–​12, 132–​3, 144–​5 performative publics, unstable character of publics in digital environments 17 personal data, need for anonymization, trust and responsibility 272–​3, 282–​4, 287–​8 personal interactions: personal quality of ethnographic research 275–​8; replacement by online activities 67–​8, 81–​3 personal publics, “#private or #public?” communication in social media 17

Index  303 “personalization” means categorization 205 Pfetsch, B., on dissonant publics 17 Piliavsky, A., on “bazaar politics” 13 places and spaces, physical and virtual: affect in public sphere 34, 114, 177–​8; “agonistic public spaces” 16; focus on places, introduction 22–​3; importance of networks, media, and virtual spaces 12–​13, 20–​1; placement of utterance in public space 113; Queen Elizabeth and Ukraine war demonstrate 12–​13; spaces of interaction have always been designed 70–​1 plurality of publics 51, 64n1 Pohjonen, M., need for more understanding of hate cultures 175 political left targeted with irony 163 political parties seeking border closures in Germany 154 political public sphere: algorithms address users affectively 192–​3; Cambridge Analytica and political campaigns 198, 201–​2; intimate publics not antipolitical 203–​6; politicians’ use of affective noise 202–​3; public sphere understood primarily as 15; rallies blamed on manipulation by Facebook’s algorithm 201–​2; role of emotions and affects 16; see also algorithmic publics politics and literature see right-​wing writers; Sieben Nächte (Strauss, S.) The Politics of De-​Secularization (Saeed) 133–​4 polyphonic mapping and affect theory 97–​100 posthumanist theories argue against all-​too anthropocentric perspective 45n6 potentia and potestas see empowerment (potentia) and restrictive forces (potestas) power relations between Israel and Palestine 217 Prenowitz, E., on technical structure of archives 113 private vs. public: data, affects, and publics 273–​8, 284–​6; data protection and OS incompatible 282, 288; distinguishing 15–​16; private postings can suddenly become public 16;

private-​public intermingling 68–​9; see also ghar–​bahir binary profit: democracy needs to be placed ahead of 6–​7; intensity leads to attention and 9 The Promise of Happiness (Ahmed) 34 propaganda, image testimonies can be tool of information warfare 20 protests against new laws in India see staging the “women of Shaheen Bagh” psychology: Big Five model 199–​200, 202; intersection with computer science 194; measurement as way to manipulate people 200; psychometric manipulation 198, 201–​2, 203 PTA see Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) public see affective publics; political public sphere; private vs. public public administration: and bureaucracies seen as rational and unemotional 69–​70; public-​private production of BAMF’s administrative publics 74–​9; social services considered emotional 70 public opinion: Pakistan government hold over 134–​5; in transnational public spheres through global media platforms 97 public participation, to whom should ethnographic data be available? 273–​4 public shaming as contested image practice: Abergil’s photographic act of humiliation 213–​17; inverting and diverting the photographic act of humiliation 220–​8; memes as affective image practice 26, 219–​20, 226–​8; viral life of the photographs 217–​18; see also Abergil, Eden public sphere: evolvement in India under colonial rule 111; Habermas on openness of mind 5–​6; public sphere theory 13–​18, 96–​7, 253 queer theory brought together with theory of public sphere 16 queerness see LGBTI persons Rabe, J.-​C. 262 racism: contesting racist sentiments 162; COVID-​19 and 91, 93–​4; early

304 Index days of digital 173; racialization in America 233–​6, 246–​7, 249; Twitter feed of Finnish debate on 179, 182–​4; see also affective temporalities of digital hate cultures Rackete, C. 157, 162 Raetzsch, C., concept of performative publics 17 rational discourse: algorithm content no longer supports 196; forced to be rational for too long 6–​7 Rauchfleisch, A. 183, 184 raw “data,” no such thing in ethnography 275–​6 reading for affect: qualitative analysis 25, 156, 164–​6; in tweets 161–​6 recording strategies impacted by data-​sharing requirements 278 reenactments of original photographs 226–​8 refugees see #WeHaveSpace; “GOOKS, go home”; migrants Reider, D., on “meme treatments” 220, 228 Reissmann, W., concept of performative publics 17 Reitschuster, B. 158 relational aspect of ethnographic data 275–​6 relationship between different publics 52 religious minorities: and citizenship based on religion 106–​7, 122–​4; confinements preventing forced Islamic converts from returning home 132–​3; idea of Islamic conversions used to cover up other crimes 132; in Pakistan 129–​32; religious reasoning often too short-​sighted 143; see also Hindus; Muslim women in India; non-​Muslims religious nationalism 133–​5, 146 repetition in social media activism 137, 140–​2 research and knowledge production: aim to “democratize” 271–​2; data fixed in repositories contradict fluid process of 281; scientists as “living archive” 279–​81, 287; see also Open Science Movement (OS) research participants: access of public vs. 282, 285; ethnographers build relationships with 275; not easy to define 285–​6

reverse image searching 180–​1 Rich Kids of Literature 260–​1, 263, 264 Richardson, M., Affective Witnessing 99 right, far, definition 152–​3 right-​wing writers: bloggers 158–​9; as fixed and recurring figure 267–​8; “right-​wing” does not refer solely to literary characteristics 252; see also Sieben Nächte (Strauss, S.) Die Ritter der Tafelrunde (Hein, C.) 55–​6 Roberts, S., on algorithms and moderation 185 “robot journalism” 191 Rolf Joseph Group, Strauss received award for work with 264–​5 “rooted cosmopolitans” 115 Röttger-​Rössler, B.: Affective Publics 1–​3, 6, 8; Birgitt’s research in Sulawesi 280–​1, 289n10; in conversation with Z. Papacharissi 1–​9; work with Vietnamese children in Germany 242, 285 Russia: invasion of Ukraine 10–​11; replays of October Revolution 53–​4 Rüter, C., Die Zeit ist aus den Fugen 57–​8 Saeed, S., The Politics of De-​Secularization 133–​4 Sanil, V., “outside’ determined by ‘the west’ 14 Sannikka (Finnish talk show) 182 Sanyal, K. A. 124 Saul’s testimonio 99–​100 The Savage Anomaly (Negri) 145 Savarna castes 109–​10 Savoy, B., on circumstances of appropriating objects 41 “scalable subject” 194–​5 “scale shift” of anti-​CAA movement 115 Schankweiler, K.: on affective witnessing 99; on image testimonies 20 Scheliga, K., “discrepancies between the concept of open science and scholarly reality” 272 Schmidt, J.-​H., on personal publics 17 Schmitt, W. M., on sequence and repetition 137 Scholz, D. 257, 264 scientists as “living archive” 279–​81, 287

Index  305 Seawatch 156–​7 Seebrücke 154, 156 Segerberg, A. 151 Seighworth, G. 118 selection and content creation by algorithm 191–​2 seven deadly sins in Sieben Nächte 255 Shah Bano case 111–​12 Shaheen Bagh see Muslim women in India; staging the “women of Shaheen Bagh” shame/​shaming: and nonbelonging 240; related to racial assault 231–​2, 249; translates into aggression 247–​8, 249; see also public shaming as contested image practice sharing as central ideology in social media logic 178 Shifman, L., definition of Internet memes 219 shock as main response to Abergil’s Facebook images 218 Sieben Nächte (Strauss, S.): affective involvement as part of the political discourse 27; critique of emotions 252–​3; debating the debate and its emotionality 263–​6; “flirting with the right”? 258–​63; “a pamphlet for the openness of hearts” 253–​8; perception of Strauss as right-​wing writer 267–​8 Slaby, J.: on affective arrangement of space 71; on downsides of political affectivity 26 slavery 234, 235 SNA see social network analysis (SNA) “social graph” 196–​7, 202 social media: activism: influences, affect, and repetition 136–​42; affective attunement in 125–​6, 178; design logics charged with corporate sentiments 80; enables both empowerment and restriction 129, 131–​2, 145, 146; personalized search engine results 196; platforms have different structures of feeling 7–​8; relevance for growth of hate speech 174, 176–​7; role in shaping archive 113; see also censorship; Facebook; Twitter social network analysis (SNA) 155–​6, 160–​1, 197–​8, 202 social services considered emotional 69–​70

Soldiers of Odin Facebook group, inward accumulation of hate 177, 179–​82, 184, 185 Sorce, G. 115 South Asian Students against Fascism-​ UK (SASAF-​UK) 108 Southeast Asian societies, emotional expressiveness 4–​5 space see places and spaces, physical and virtual spam accounts 157–​8 Der Spiegel 256, 257, 261 spinning as symbolic posture from India’s nationalist freedom movement 116–​17, 124 Staatsschauspiel Dresden resolution 59 staging the “women of Shaheen Bagh”: discourse of domesticity 118; imagery 118–​21; interrelation of digital and physical activism 114–​16; nonviolent nationalist freedom fighter (woman) 116–​17; women of Shaheen Bagh as saviors of the constitution 121–​3 staircase reference by Strauss 254–​5 Der Standard (Austria) 258 Stark, L. 194–​5, 197, 199, 205 Steele, B. 234–​5 Stein, R. L. 218 Steinmeier, F.-​W. 40–​1 stereotypes 134, 144–​5, 178–​9, 181 Stillwell, D. J. 198–​9 Stivers, C., on state bureaucracies as service to society 69–​70, 80, 81 stock photo collections of meme generators 224 Stolic, C., on regimes of visibility 142–​3 Storch, B. von 159, 163, 165 Strauss, B., father of Simon 252, 254, 257–​8, 268 Strauss, S., Sieben Nächte see Sieben Nächte (Strauss, S.) street publics vs. theater publics 52–​4 Strick, S., inquiry into “far-​right feelings” 167 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas) 50, 51 Sulawesi, ethnographic research in 280–​1, 289n10 Sundén, J. 165–​6 Süselbeck, J., on growing attention to affective relations in public sphere 265–​6 Swadeshi movement see India

306 Index Sweden, feminist activists attacked as “tolerance whores” 165–​6 The Sympathizer (Nguyen) 249 Tagesspiegel 264 Tagore. R., Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) 109 “tank man” 223–​4 Tarrow, S. 115 taz 257, 259–​60, 263 technology: affect becoming more prevalent in public sphere 34; amplifies intensity that can drive populism 3; digital interventions of the (Im)Mobility network 92–​5; see also media; individual social media by name temporality: of affective publics 91–​2, 101–​2, 112–​14; of collective affects 177–​9; of far-​right publics 150, 151; highly important element of affect-​ generating 20, 90; on Twitter 151; see also affective temporalities of digital hate cultures testimonio genre 24, 90, 98–​100, 103n9, 103n10, 103n12 theater publics in motion: affectability of theater publics 60–​3; affective dynamics of theater and street 23, 50–​4, 57–​60; Berlin 1989–​1990: theater and counterpublics 55–​7; introduction 23; Müller’s Hamlet/​ Maschine (Berlin 1989–​1990) 57–​60; three theoretical positions 51–​2 Thomas, C., opportunistic perpetuation of racial stereotypes 143 Thompson, J, on shame 247–​8, 249 “throwing back” algorithmic results on person 195 TikTok 7–​8 Time’s story about Bilkis Dadi 106, 115 Tischauser, J., critical race theory coopted to organize White tribal politics 167–​8 Title 42 98, 103n6 Titley, G., on anti-​immigrant communicative strategies 183 torture, images indicate approval of acts of 216–​17 travel allowances for integration courses see integration courses for German immigrants

traveling concept, notion of public sphere as arena for debate 14 tripartite of state, society, and economic markets 70–​1, 80 Trommeln in der Nacht (Brecht) 54 Trump, D.: Cambridge Analytica’s purported involvement in election 192–​3; contexts supporting 235; Trumpism 239; use of agressive, direct speaking style 19, 203 trustworthiness and responsibility 282 Turkish-​Greek border refugee crisis 149, 154 Twibbon campaign, “Support Eden Abergil” 225–​6 Twitter: archives and affective publics 112–​14; criticism of data as “low-​ hanging fruit” 123–​4; data analysis of networks around non-​Muslim women 137–​42; data analysis of Shaheen Bagh protests 107–​9; as an infrastructure of publicness 17; retweets (RTs) and RT button 159, 161–​2; temporarily hidden comments 185; tweets, reading for affect 161–​4; see also affective networking of far-​ right publics; social media; individual hashtags by handle Udupa, S., on targets of hate cultures 175 Ukraine, war as information war of digital images 10–​11 Ultraromantic Manifesto 260 Ultra-​Romanticism: A Manifesto (Hiernonymi) 254, 260 ultra-​romanticism as fuel for “anti-​liberal thinking” 259–​60 un-​American see American and un-​American, what it means to be uncertainty regarding impacts of data sharing 276, 278 unhappy objects in ethnographic museums: coloniality of ethnographic museums as emotional force 33–​5, 39–​40, 45n2; disaffection of German publics with ethnographic objects 40–​5; vs. “happy objects” 22–​3; Maasai conception of 35–​40 United Kingdom, critical discussions of colonial heritage 12 user interfaces 80–​1 “users’ vs. “customers” 77 Uthoff, J. 260–​1

Index  307 Valtaoja, E. (#valtaoja) 179, 182–​4 van Dijk, J., on “frictionless sharing” across platforms 178 victimhood discourse 131, 135–​7, 143, 167 Vietnam War: an imperial, racial war 247; loss of Vietnamese language 241–​2; primarily fought by poor and disenfranchised 243; refugees as reminder of 236–​7, 247; revealed fractures in American “we” 240; as un-​American? 235, 248; see also migrants visibility/​invisibility: brutality of war 20; of forced conversion and marriage (FCM) 129, 131–​4, 136–​7, 139–​40, 143–​6; high ranking on search engine central to 191; nontransparency of hate speech policies 185, 186; regimes of visibility 142–​3; of Vietnamese Americans 241–​7; see also repetition in social media activism “Voight-​Kampff test” 193 von Poser, A., on emotion repertoires 244–​5 von Scheve, C., defining public spheres 253 vulnerability: “corporeal vulnerability” 238; refugees living in 244 Vuong, O., On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous see belonging, (in)visibility, and racialization in Ocean Vuong’s book Waisbord, S., on mob censorship and harassment online 176 Waldherr, A. 160 walking into room, imagery of 118–​19

War on Terror 238 Warner, M.: concept of counterpublics 16; see also Warner, M. public as particular social form or space 14, 151; on size of publics 92 Weidermann, V. 256–​7, 259, 261 Wessler, H., on effect of emotions in public discourse 28n2 Das Wetter 261 White-​power ideology 143, 153, 167–​8, 173, 233–​6 Williams, R., on structures of feeling 8 Wolff Verlag 256, 265 women: Indian women as political subjects 109–​11; place in the Indian home 106, 112, 115–​16, 118, 121, 124; see also female agency; forced conversion and marriage (FCM); Hindus; Muslim women in India; visibility/​invisibility women activists imaged through social media publics: methods of research 24, 107–​9, 123–​6; staging the “women of Shaheen Bagh” 114–​23 Women of Shaheen Bagh as saviors of the constitution 122 Wu, S., on potential of online tools 271 Yellow Vest protests in France blamed on Facebook manipulation 201, 206 Yera’s testimonio 99 Die Zeit 256–​7, 261–​2 Die Zeit ist aus den Fugen (Rüter) 56 Zelensky, V. 11 Zink, V., on affective communities 250n3 Zoombombing 94