Public Spheres of Resonance: Constellations of Affect and Language [1 ed.] 1138608459, 9781138608450

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Public Spheres of Resonance

To understand the profound changes in the modes of public political debate over the past decade, this volume develops a new conception of public spheres as spaces of resonance emerging from the power of language to affect and to ascribe and instill collective emotion. Political discourse is no longer confined to traditional media, but increasingly takes place in fragmented and digital public spheres. At the same time, the modes of political engagement have changed: discourse is said to increasingly rely on strategies of emotionalization and to be deeply affective at its core. This book meticulously shows how public spheres are rooted in the emotional, bodily, and affective dimensions of language, and how ­language – in its capacity to affect and to be affected – produces those ­dynamics of affective resonance that characterize contemporary forms of political ­debate. It brings together scholars from the humanities and social sciences and focuses on two fields of inquiry: publics, politics, and media in Part I, and language and artistic inquiry in Part II. The thirteen chapters provide a balanced composition of theoretical and methodological considerations, focusing on highly illustrative case studies and on different artistic practices. The volume is an indispensable source for researchers and postgraduate students in cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, and political science. It likewise appeals to practitioners seeking to develop an in-depth understanding of affect in contemporary political debate. Anne Fleig is professor of Modern German Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. Christian von Scheve is professor of Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin.

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.

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 21st 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. 3 Affective Societies Key Concepts Edited by Jan Slaby and Christian von Scheve 4 Analyzing Affective Societies Methods and Methodologies Edited by Antje Kahl 5 Affect and Emotion in Multi-Religious Secular Societies Edited by Christian von Scheve, Anna Lea Berg, Meike Haken, Nur Yasemin Ural 6 Public Spheres of Resonance Constellations of Affect and Language Edited by Anne Fleig and Christian von Scheve For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Affective-Societies/book-series/RSAS

Public Spheres of Resonance Constellations of Affect and Language

Edited by Anne Fleig and Christian von Scheve

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Anne Fleig and Christian von Scheve; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Anne Fleig and Christian von Scheve 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 A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978 -1-138 - 60845- 0 (hbk) ISBN: 978 - 0 - 429- 46653-3 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

Contents

List of contributors

vii

1 Introduction: public spheres of resonance – constellations of affect and language 1 A N N E F L E IG A N D C H R I S T I A N VON S C H E V E

2 It’s the language, stupid! 17 K AT H R I N RÖ G GL A

PART I

Publics, politics, and media

29

3 Affective publics: understanding the dynamic formation of public articulations beyond the public sphere 30 M A RGR E T H LÜ N E N B ORG

4 Resonant networks: on affect and social media 49 SUSA N NA PA A S ON E N

5 The sentimental contract: ambivalences of affective politics and publics 63 BR IGI T T E BA RGE T Z

6 Rhythm, gestures, and tones in public performances: political mobilization and affective communication 81 BR I T TA T I M M K N U D SE N

7 Affective dynamics of public discourse on religious recognition in secular societies 98 C H R I S T I A N VON S C H E V E A N D ROBE RT WA LT E R- JO C H U M

vi Contents PART II

Language and artistic practice

117

8 Put a spell on you: poetry, politics, and affective resonance in the age of the algorithm 118 A N NA GI BB S

9 German ‘Sprechtheater’ and the transformation of theatrical public spheres 135 F R I E DE R I K E OBE R K ROM E , H A N S RO T H , A N D M AT T H I A S WA R S TAT

10 The Alphabet of Feeling Bad: environmental installation arts and sensory publics 151 A N N C V E T KOV IC H

11 Affect and accent: public spheres of dissonance in the writing of Yoko Tawada 173 M A R ION AC K E R , A N N E F L E IG , A N D M AT T H I A S LÜ T H JOH A N N

12 Affect(ive) assemblages: literary worldmaking in Fatma Aydemir’s Ellbogen

189

C L AU DI A BR E GE R

13 Theory’s affective scene: or, what to do with language after affect 210 M IC H A E L E NG

Index

223

Contributors

Marion Acker is a doctoral researcher at the Collaborative Research ­Centre “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on autofictional narratives of belonging in contemporary transcultural ­German-language literature. Brigitte Bargetz is assistant professor of political science at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her main research areas include affect theory, theories of the political, feminist and queer theory as well as critical theories of the everyday. Claudia Breger  is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, United States. Her research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century culture, with emphases on film and theater; literary, media, and cultural theory; and the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race. Ann Cvetkovich is Director of the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Her main research interests are feminist and queer theory, affect theory and public feelings, trauma and public memory, and archival studies. Michael Eng  is assistant professor of philosophy and faculty affiliate in gender, women’s, and sexuality studies at Appalachian State University, United States. He specializes in contemporary continental philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophies of race, gender, and disability. Anna Gibbs is professor of Text and Writing in the School of Humanities and Creative Arts at Western Sydney University, Australia. She writes across the fields of textual, media, and cultural studies with a focus on affect and mimesis, fictocriticism, and feminism. Britta Timm Knudsen is associate professor of Culture and Communication at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. Her main research areas covers affect studies and methodologies, heritage and memory studies, tourism and experience economy.

viii Contributors

Margreth Lünenborg is professor of Media and Communication Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on hybrid forms of journalism and public communication, gender media studies, and media and migration. Matthias Lüthjohann is a doctoral researcher at the Collaborative R ­ esearch Centre “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin. His research ­interests lie in literary studies as well as in the sociology of culture ­(governmentality studies, feminist and gender theory, affect studies). Friederike Oberkrome is a doctoral researcher in theatre studies at the Collaborative Research Centre “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität ­Berlin. Her research is concerned with contemporary forms of narration and historicity in theatre and spatial aesthetics in the arts since 1945. Susanna Paasonen  is professor of Media Studies at University of Turku, ­Finland. Her research focuses on new media, affect theory, popular ­culture, and sexuality. Kathrin Röggla  is a freelance writer and author of prose, essays, theater plays, audio dramas and a documentary film, and curator of an exhibition. For her literary works she received numerous awards. She is a member of the Darmstädter Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, the ­Bayerische Akademie der schönen Künste, and the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, whose vice president she is since 2015. Hans Roth is a doctoral researcher in theatre and performance studies at the Collaborative Research Centre “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on the affective economy of solidarity and ridicule in post-migrant theater. Robert Walter-Jochum is a lecturer in German Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. Until 2018, he worked in the project “Feelings of Religious Belonging and the Rhetorics of Injury in Public and in Art” at the CRC “Affective Societies” as a postdoctoral researcher. Among his research interests are “literature and affect”, “literature and religion”, theory of autobiography and narratology. He has mostly worked on contemporary and 18th-/19th-century literature from Germany and Austria. Matthias Warstat is professor of Theatre Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Main research areas are contemporary theatre, modern theatre history (19th and 20th centuries), applied theatre, social and political aspects of performance.

Chapter 1

Introduction Public spheres of resonance – constellations of affect and language Anne Fleig and Christian von Scheve

The second decade of the 21st century has brought substantial transformations of the public sphere that are closely linked to broader and enduring processes of social and cultural change. Globalization has not only fostered the spatial and transnational mobility of goods and human beings, but also of less tangible things such as capital, communications, commerce, languages, cultural repertoires, and social practices. Transnational migration certainly is among the most profound changes witnessed in contemporary societies. Often propelled by causes such as armed conflict, flight and expulsion, poverty and deprivation, it reacts to global economic inequality and contributes to cultural diversity, both of which pose challenges to receiving societies and countries of origin. The financial crisis since 2007 and the European debt crisis since 2008 have had repercussions on a global scale, posing almost unprecedented economic and financial challenges to many countries and acting as amplifiers of the manifold other challenges societies are facing. Digitalization has changed profoundly how people work and communicate with each other, how commerce and finance are carried out, and how basic social institutions operate. Digitalization is often seen as a catalyzing agent for the many other transformations that are taking place at an accelerated pace. All of these developments are driving social and political change on a significant scale. The rise of populist parties, not only in Europe, but also in the United States and many other countries, is but one particularly noteworthy development, as are mounting contestations of the idea of liberal, open, and democratic societies. Lively political debate and public controversies are raging over questions of how societies are supposed to cope with transnational migration, how global financial capitalism and rising inequalities can be kept in place, how climate change can be stalled in favor of sustainable societies and practices, and how the many distinct cultural identities and lifeforms can be preserved and recognized. These controversies could simply point at the well-established workings of a political culture that emphasizes open debate, public deliberation, and the exchange of arguments. However, what is really striking in view of these

2  Anne Fleig and Christian von Scheve

controversies is that it is not just the broad range of critical and pressing issues that are being addressed at the same time, but that the style of the debate is in itself changing and becoming a matter of discussion. This holds especially true for language as a matter of speech itself (e.g., Butler, 1997) and for the affective dynamics in political mobilization amplified through social media. The public sphere – in the singular, pertaining to all communications and exchange that are publicly accessible – continues to be the most important space where these changes and developments and their implications for social coexistence, belonging, and solidarity are debated and negotiated by various actors. Traditional views have portrayed the public sphere as a locus of communicative rationality, deliberation, and the exchange of different arguments. Importantly, language in this view is primarily understood as a medium but not – as we and the contributors to this volume argue – as a key to create affective publics with voices, words, or images resonating with each other, building a public space in itself. In doing so, this volume builds on and further extends scholarship that has criticized understandings of the public sphere as a primarily normative concept, instead advocating a perspective that is more strongly rooted in descriptions of empirical reality (e.g., Papacharissi, 2015). Politics and political debate are increasingly characterized by processes of group polarization, that is, the essentializing and uncompromising antagonization of interest and identity groups, but also by the ambivalence of affective movements and uprisings (Ayata & Harders, 2018; Gould, 2009). In conjunction with this, a new style of “post-truth” or “post-factual” (populist) politics has emerged that is less bound by facts, evidence, and science-backed policy insights, but rather relies on intuitions, gut feelings, and simplistic views of complex challenges for purposes of political persuasion (Hendricks & Vestergaard, 2018). Along with this, the discursive arenas and media of these controversies have changed profoundly through processes of digitalization and, most importantly, the advent of new social and networked media in which mostly uncurated many-to-many communications have substituted the oneto-many communications, agenda settings, and gatekeeping of traditional journalism. But also traditional news outlets have been accused of riding this train, allegedly relying more on features and advocacy journalism than on straight news. A common and widely discussed feature of these developments is that they are supposed to employ various strategies of emotionalization and are said to be deeply affective at their core. Furthermore, many political commentators and academics lament that this emotionalization and affectivity is not yet properly understood and that this gap prevents societies from addressing issues of polarization, populism, and illiberalism. The present volume addresses these issues and concerns in a twofold manner: On the one hand, it acknowledges the demand that affect and emotion need to be better understood, in these debates and elsewhere. On the other hand, it firmly rejects the view that affect and emotion are in any way novel or recent

Introduction 3

additions to political debate and public discourse. Instead, the contributions assembled in this volume share a view that affect is fundamental to human social coexistence and that no discourse or debate can be conceived of as “affect free”. Admittedly, we concede that there is, at present, a heightened attention toward the affective and the emotional and that they recently have become more reflexive and attracted increasing attention in social and political life very generally (Illouz, 2007). Also, specific publics and forms of public articulation and protest are especially geared toward affect and the incitement of emotions. But the public sphere – and its contemporary multiplicities – are, and have always been, spaces of affect and emotion as much as spaces of rational deliberation. Importantly, conceptions of the public sphere as arenas of calm communicative deliberation are not solely due to corresponding characterizations on the side of theorists of the public sphere (e.g., Fraser, 1991; Habermas, 1989; for a general overview see Ferree, Gamson, Gerhards, & Rucht, 2002), but also on the side of theorists of affect. On the side of theories of the public sphere, the scientific debate for a long time centered on questions concerning the structure and function of the public sphere and its role for deliberative democracy as bound by a national polity. Taking Habermas’s (1989) historical account and normative theory of the public sphere as the main reference point, scholars have extensively quarreled with issues concerning its (implicitly) Western conception; its tendency to exclude women, minorities, and non-citizens; its functionalist core in terms of supporting the demos; its territorial and national or even nationalistic bias; and its assumption of the unity of a public sphere (Fraser, 2007, pp. 9–10). Fraser (2007) has summarized these strands of critique as pertaining either to assumptions of the legitimacy of public political opinion or to its efficaciousness in terms of ultimately being translated into legislative action. But this critique usually also articulates a further concern, one that has often stayed implicit. This is the assumption that Habermas’s model of the public sphere rests on acts of “communicative action”, action that is rational insofar as it strives for understanding and, ultimately, consensus. This assumption has forcefully been questioned by scholars of radical democracy, such as Laclau (2005) and Mouffe (2018), who echo Fraser’s notion of counterpublics as arenas of marginalized voices who are not only marginalized in terms of social and economic inequality, but also because of their “aesthetic-affective modes of discourse” (Dahlberg, 2005, p. 111). These modes of discourse are thought to be related to everyday communications and to include “rhetoric, myth, metaphor, poetry, theatre, and ceremony”, as Dahlberg (2005) notes. Critics of Habermas’s account of the public sphere contend that these modes of discourse stand in opposition to his model of communicative rationality and that they are, among other things, the reasons why specific groups are excluded from political discourse in the public sphere. Young, for example, argues that non-Western and female subjects are excluded because they, more so than Western and

4  Anne Fleig and Christian von Scheve

male subjects, rely on aesthetic-affective modes of communication (Young, 1996, p.  124; see also Dahlberg, 2005; Warner, 1991). This is of course an important aspect of criticizing a specific normative conception of the public sphere. First, this relates to the argument of exclusion, and, second, to aesthetic-affective modes of discourse that are just as important to understanding and achieving consensus as is communicative rationality (Brader, Marcus, & Miller, 2011). We contend, however, that this critique is misguided in two important ways. First, it hardly acknowledges the genealogical character and historical bounds of Habermas’s argument situated in 18th-century Europe, which is at least as pronounced as the normative thrust of his argument. In this sense, we also need to acknowledge the ambiguity of Habermas’s concept of the public sphere (von Mücke, 2015, p. XXII): The term “sphere” refers to a physical and virtual space and an institutional setting alike, experienced by writers, readers, speakers, and audiences in public places, for example, salons, taverns, and coffee houses. Habermas in his own writings emphasizes the affectivity of socially and spatially situated dialogue, conversation, and debate. The critique is misguided, second, in that the very opposition of thought, deliberation, and rationality, on the one hand, and affect and emotion, on the other hand, are fundamentally at odds with decades of research on how thought, decision-making, deliberation, affect, and emotion are constitutively linked (e.g., Tappolet, 2016). Any form of discursive exchange therefore bears both deliberative and affective aspects, although certain performative and communicative styles will emphasize one over the other, as has been shown for populism (Moffitt, 2016). As Young puts it: There is no place in his [Habermas’s] conception of linguistic interaction for the feeling that accompanies and motivates all utterances. In actual situations of discussion, tone of voice, facial expression, gesture, the use of irony, understatement or hyperbole, all serve to carry with the propositional message of the utterance another level of expression relating the participants in terms of attraction or withdrawal, confrontation or affirmation. Speakers not only say what they mean, but they say it excitedly, angrily, in a hurt or offended fashion and so on, and such emotional qualities of communication contexts should not be thought of as non- or prelinguistic. (Young, 1987, p. 72f.) The present volume therefore extends existing criticisms of conceptions of the public sphere as a domain of deliberation and communicative rationality. First, it specifically seeks to address the affective modes of discourse and how they are deeply inscribed into language-based communications. ­“Affective modes” generally refer to those modes of discourse characterized

Introduction 5

by bodily, emotional, material, sensory, and enactive aspects of exchange and communication instead of focusing on issues of thought and deliberation. Second, it aims to understand the affective dynamics of speech and writing as a complex framework of bodily practices, linguistic norms and rules, different types of texts, and their respective audiences. In doing so, the volume seeks to bring together two strands of research that have hitherto remained – by and large – unconnected: accounts of the public sphere that emphasize the importance of affect and emotion for public political deliberation and works in cultural studies (and parts of the social sciences) that have developed sophisticated theories of affect (see, for related efforts, Dahlgren, 2018; Papacharissi, 2015). Part of the challenge in bringing together these lines of inquiry lies in the fact that affect, at least in the cultural studies heritage of the concept, has traditionally been portrayed as a prelinguistic, non-discursive dimension of the social, in itself being “asocial” but not presocial (Massumi, 1995, p. 91). Evidently, part of the very idea of the “affective turn” (Clough & Halley, 2007) and the “material turn” (Latour, 2005) was to understand the social and the cultural not primarily through language and discourse. Instead, scholars were increasingly intrigued by the idea of bodily and material forces and intensities shaping our world. The pioneering scholarship in this tradition drew strongly on insights from psychology and the neurosciences that had discovered the “primacy of affect” (Zajonc, 1982) and the importance of preconscious bodily processes for thought, feeling, and behavior. But this, as many critics have argued (Hemmings, 2005; Leys, 2011; Wetherell, 2012) and recent work in the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin has shown (e.g., Kahl 2019; von Scheve, 2017; Slaby & von Scheve, 2019), came at a price. Although a fruitful and welcome correction of existing bias toward an overreliance on linguistic categories in the humanities and social sciences, the two turns sometimes missed the mark in their rather bold disregard for language as a social phenomenon. Since then, a range of more reconciliatory approaches has gained foothold. These approaches propose perspectives on affect that are not in stark opposition to language and discourse, but rather emphasize how they are mutually constitutive (Ahern, 2018; Butler, 2015; Riley, 2005). This includes, among other things, writing and literary language, where recent developments in affect theory have suggested a variety of ways in which language and affect become tightly intertwined, producing resonances between text, body, and world (Fleig, 2019; Gibbs, 2015; Richardson, 2016). For one, the pragmatics of language in as much as they involve context, conversation, bodily interaction, and speech acts, are an inherently bodily endeavor and the intensities and potentialities for action to which the concept of affect refers, become most evident looking at language in use, be it in speaking or writing, from casual conversation to literary texts. Second,

6  Anne Fleig and Christian von Scheve

language itself has the power to affect beyond knowledge, representation, and semantics. Engaging the world through signs and language is a highly specific way of engagement that differs notably from engagement through the senses. From a structuralist viewpoint, language as a medium of ­engagement with the world impinges and channels how one is affected by the world, irrespective of, though not independently from, its semantics. Third, language and discourse are integral to action, as is evident in speech acts or social practices, and action always bears a bodily and thus affective dimension. Language and discourse therefore contribute to the formation of bodies and their potential to affect and to be affected in socially meaningful ways. Fourth, language, like affect, has to be understood as genuinely relational in its capacity to convey meaning and to produce structures of feelings with regard to social categories, such as race, class, and gender. Meaning in this sense is also not restricted to propositions and denotations, but crucially involves connotative, associative, and bodily sources. Finally, the public sphere, albeit in many accounts leaning heavily on text and language, is also made up of a universe of images, symbols, and objects with the capability to affect beyond deliberative and representational logics. New media and online social networks consist of large amounts of audiovisual material, much of which becomes part of political debate. The present volume therefore aims at bringing together these two lines of hitherto disparate scholarship to advance our understanding of public spheres from a perspective that emphasizes the emotional, bodily, and affective dimensions of language in public political debate. In this sense, the volume joins critics of exclusively normative views of the public sphere and proposes to conceive of contemporary public spheres as often fragmented spaces of affective resonance that emerge from the power of language to affect and to ascribe and instill collective emotions. The book’s title Public Spheres of Resonance departs from the basic assumption that language in its capacity to affect and to be affected, through different speech acts or even single words, establishes dynamics of affective resonance, in both consonant and dissonant ways. Resonance as an analytical concept originates in the physics of mechanic or acoustic vibration and oscillation and has recently been adopted, often in a somewhat metaphorical sense, in cultural studies and the social sciences. Rosa (2019), for example, proposes a concept of resonance in the tradition of critical theory that refers to an emancipatory world relatedness as opposed to an “alienated” way of being in the world. Erlmann (2010) has examined the role that resonance and aurality play in modern conceptions of rationality, and Paasonen (2011) uses the concept of resonance to portray the affective qualities of online pornography (see also Paasonen, this volume). Given that the research on affective resonance is still in its infancy, it is important to us that resonance does not necessarily imply a normative notion of belonging or sameness. Here, we rather use the concept to refer to a

Introduction 7

specific kind of relational dynamics of affecting and being affected that also includes, for example, non-belonging and dissonance. Closely linked to the concept of affect, our understanding of resonance emphasizes the “reciprocal modulation” (Mühlhoff, 2019, p. 189) of intensities of affect between different kinds and types of actors. Resonance is thus a genuinely relational and processual phenomenon of “coupling” or “entrainment” rather than a phenomenon of state or unilateral transmission (see Mühlhoff, 2019, for a detailed exposition). In line with this understanding, affective resonance is conceived of not only as interrelating a number of human and/or non-­ human actors, but bears a significant formative potential. Being affectively entrained and coupled in resonant ways potentially changes and transforms actors’ very modes of being and existence. In other words, affectively resonant couplings and relations hardly leave the actors’ involved unchanged. They are thus not conceptualized as fixed entities, but as mutually affecting and thus forming and (re-)configuring each other. Although Mühlhoff (2019) applies the concept primarily to face-to-face encounters and small groups, he does not rule out that resonance can occur in larger-scale networks, media spaces, or online interactions. This conjecture is particularly relevant for understandings of public spheres as spheres of affect, in which the concept of resonance is of twofold interest. On the one hand, public spheres can be conceived of as spaces that enable or facilitate, and at times also prevent, the emergence of resonance among actors. In this sense, public spheres form the backbones or infrastructures of public communication and interaction, both of which are preconditions for resonance to occur. On the other hand, the very fabric and makeup of public spheres is directly implicated in the emergence of resonance in that particular publics, for example, on social media or in public places, are more or less conducive to establishing affective resonance. Moreover, public spheres can in themselves be elements of resonant couplings, not merely facilitating resonance but being fundamental parts of resonant relations. Importantly, given our understanding of resonance, this implies that different (types of) public spheres that are elements of resonant relations, or facilitate/prevent resonance, have a substantial formative potential for social and communal life. As already suggested by Habermas (1989), public spheres are not just arenas in which social life is represented or negotiated, but they are arenas that constitute social life. The chapters assembled in this volume thus capitalize on the role of language in establishing or preventing resonance in a broad range of public spaces – mediatized, material, digital as well as analog – that form a multitude of distinct and often overlapping and mutually constitutive public spheres: transient spheres during protests or gatherings; the episodic public spheres of theater and various performing arts; channels, rooms, and groups on social media networks; broadcast and journalistic media; literature and literary spaces; websites and Internet blogs.

8  Anne Fleig and Christian von Scheve

The book brings together authors from broad disciplinary backgrounds in the humanities and the social sciences who investigate affect and affective resonance not only with regard to spoken language, but in view of different types of texts as the constituencies of different public spheres and counterpublics in which the terms and conditions of social coexistence are reflected and negotiated, for instance, politics, media, and the arts. In doing so, the chapters focus on issues of belonging, the recognition and accommodation of difference, equality, and participation and explore how affect interferes with, undermines, or fortifies established and esteemed rules of political engagement. The volume thus makes a threefold contribution to the existing literature. First, it extends and further develops traditional conceptions of public spheres in that it emphasizes the non-deliberative and non-argumentative dimension of public debate. It acknowledges the emergence of multiple public and counterpublic spheres not only in traditional spaces and media of debate, but also in digital spaces and networked media. Second, it brings together scholarship on affect and emotion that has often been confined to the humanities and the social sciences, respectively. For example, emotions have been an essential part of studies on social movements in the social sciences, whereas affect has been a fundamental part of aesthetics, literature, and media studies, with only little cross-fertilization happening between those approaches, although the conceptual overlap is obvious. Third, the volume advances affect theories to more comprehensively account for the role of language and discourse. The contributions to this volume refrain from portraying affect as diametrically opposed to language, but instead argue that discourse, practice, performativity, and affect form a tightly connected field of mutual influence.

Structure of the volume The contributions are the outcomes of the Second International Conference of the CRC Affective Societies, held at Freie Universität Berlin in April 2017. The chapters therefore not only present an innovative body of research from different disciplines, but also reflect upon and extend the lively and fruitful discussions at the conference. Continuing the conference’s overall narrative, we have organized the chapters in this volume into two main parts, each of which is opened by a brief editorial introduction. Preceding these two parts, we have invited renowned artist Kathrin Röggla to reflect on issues of affect and language in public spheres from a genuinely artistic point of view. Kathrin Röggla is the author and director of numerous theater and radio plays, performance events, of prose and political commentary, having received a number of prestigious awards for her work. Since 2015, she is vice president of the Academy of Arts, Berlin. Her opening chapter for this volume, It’s the language, stupid! – the English translation of her conference’s opening

Introduction 9

lecture – begins with reflections on affect in democratic political debate. Using the case of the court trial against the “National Socialist Underground”, a German neo-Nazi terrorist group uncovered in 2011, she illustrates the unexpected affective charging of formally strict legal language. Passing through different examples, Röggla argues that the effects of language in the age of populism become more and more visible as the established norms and conventions of public debate and articulation tend to dissipate. Finally, she reminds us that, after all, it is still language that profoundly defines us and that we should thus have a keen eye on it. Par t I: Publics, politics, and media The chapters in Part I of the book, “Publics, politics, media”, then address foundational issues in conceiving of publics and counterpublics as genuinely affective publics. In her chapter Affective publics: understanding the dynamic formation of public articulations beyond the public sphere, Margreth Lünenborg argues for an inclusion of affect and emotion into an appropriate understanding of today’s conflictual, dynamic, and often antagonistic constellations of publics as “affective publics”. Critiquing understandings of the public sphere that stand in a Habermasian tradition, she discusses the limits of an exclusively rational concept of public discourse. In particular, Lünenborg argues for an understanding of public spheres that emphasizes digital, networked forms of mediated communication that no longer privilege established institutions, such as journalism, to frame relevant issues of political debate, but rather empower a broad range of actors to articulate their interests. In her view, these performative publics emerge along specific temporal dynamics and attract attention or lose relevance over short periods of time. This fluid and almost ephemeral character of emerging publics challenges traditional concepts of public discourse and their established hierarchies. Instead, their affective dynamics are characterized by antagonistic powers. On the one hand, they reflect emancipatory articulations, as is evident, for example, in feminist hashtag activism. On the other hand, they also characterize and propel anti-liberal and antidemocratic discourse, as is evident in contemporary right-wing populism. The following chapter continues this line of argument, even further capitalizing on digital publics. In doing so, Susanna Paasonen introduces the concept of Resonant networks, the title of her chapter, as a constitutive ­element of public spheres. Resonance echoes connotations of richness and significance, of strong emotions, and of systems mutually oscillating at self-sustaining frequencies. Importantly, for Paasonen, resonance first and foremost refers to instances of affecting and being affected: to connectivity and contact between objects, ideas, and people as they impinge on one another. As a dynamic relation of varying intensities and speeds where the affective and the emotional stick and cohere, resonance in her view gives

10  Anne Fleig and Christian von Scheve

shape to online connections and disconnections, proximities and distances between both human and non-human bodies. In her chapter, Paasonen explores the affordances of the notion of resonance in analyzing the networked circulation of data and the affective intensities it entails. More specifically, her contribution deploys resonance in unpacking the notions of virality and memes in ways that both detach them from biological premises and make it possible to account for their power to affect the people engaging with them. In the third chapter of this first part of the volume, A sentimental contract: ambivalences of affective politics and publics, Brigitte Bargetz develops the figure of the sentimental contract in order to identify crucial affective moments of politics and publics and their powerful repercussions. She starts from the assumption that modern Western thought has largely excluded affect and emotions from politics and publics and sought to delegitimize emotions and those characterized as emotional. In response, feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholarship has critically engaged with these attributions, exclusions, and delegitimizations and unfolded both the significance and power of affect and emotion. This scholarship, she argues, has shown how Western modern dichotomies such as rationality/emotionality, public/private, culture/nature, and mind/body have contributed to create a hierarchical order and to mobilize and fortify the patriarchal Western capitalist state. Following this critique and in reference to Lauren Berlant’s work on national sentimentality, Bargetz aims at showing that and how the figure of the sentimental contract alludes to an ambivalent affective politics in terms of belonging, solidarity, and political promises and how it may help analyzing and criticizing contemporary reconfigurations of affective politics and publics. Britta Timm Knudsen in her chapter Rhythm, gestures, and tones in public performances: political mobilization and affective communication takes up the lead on affect and political power, drawing on the case of 18-year-old Emma González, a survivor of the Parkland school shooting in Florida, USA, that caused the deaths of 17 students and staff members and the injury of 15 persons on February 14, 2018. Analyzing two of Emma González’ speeches, she investigates how González’ particularly endangered body transformed into the political leadership of the anti-gun movement March for Our Lives. In doing so, her chapter focuses on the symbolic breakdown and affective outbursts out of language that are capable of “electrifying” and attuning audiences politically. Looking at a largely forgotten archive of affect – the works of linguist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva – the chapter aims at contributing to a methodological toolbox capable of reading affect in language. Investigating rhythm, tone, and gestures in language, Timm Knudsen shows that it is possible to detect paraverbal, nonverbal, and performative elements in language below the level of the sign and to thus contribute to a better understanding of political mobilization.

Introduction 11

This focus on how public forms of language and affect can be investigated methodologically is taken up by Christian von Scheve and Robert Walter-­ Jochum in their chapter Affective dynamics of public discourse on religious recognition in secular societies. Their chapter focuses on public debates about the status and recognition of religious minorities in contemporary Western societies. These debates frequently evoke the notion of “religious feelings”, although it is hardly ever clear what these feelings are and who actually experiences them. Drawing on analyses of selected debates in German public discourse, the chapter proposes a theoretical and methodological approach to understand invocations of religious feelings primarily as elements of the affective dynamics of public discourse on religious recognition in secular societies. The chapter draws on the links between language, recognition, and affect and on existing studies on religious feelings and injury to suggest four analytical perspectives on understanding the affective dynamics of public discourse: First, the use of emotion words and concepts in language, second, the recourse to religious feelings as a novel kind of discourse operating beyond the established political language, third, varieties of hate speech, and fourth, the phenomenal experience of feelings and emotions. Par t II: Language and ar tistic practice Part II of the volume, “Language and Artistic Practice”, then focuses on those publics that are generated and maintained by different artistic practices like literary writing, performances, music, or theater plays. To characterize and better understand the performative quality of language, Anna Gibbs in her chapter Put a spell on you: poetry, politics, and affective resonance in the age of the algorithm highlights the mode of sound and spell in political songs like Laurie Anderson’s Empty Places performances of 1989/1990 that consist of catchy hooks and rhythms trying to seduce rather than to persuade. Gibbs argues that a refrain or ritornello attunes to an affective state, resonates with it and amplifies it, renders it contagious, and reperforms it until it becomes habit. But not only political or literary language works in the mode of the spell: This chapter demonstrates that all ­language is rather about action than about truth. Here, the work of language in the U.S. ­election of 2016, where Donald Trump campaigned on rhetoric rather than record, represents an extreme, but not an exception. Her chapter examines the affective powers of language as it interfaces with human and the non-human agencies of viral media, the algorithm, and the image. The following chapter traces changing publics with regard to the German tradition of “Sprechtheater”, a term which cannot be easily translated into English. It means “speech theater” or “spoken theater” and serves as a kind of umbrella term for different types of dramatic theater, as they are distinguishable from opera, musical, and dance. Historically, though, the concept is closely connected to the development of a “national theater” in Germany

12  Anne Fleig and Christian von Scheve

in the 18th century. In their chapter German ‘Sprechtheater’ and the transformation of theatrical public spheres, Friederike Oberkrome, Hans Roth, and Matthias Warstat show how the affectively highly charged concept of the “national theater” was related to language and speech. This special relationship was first challenged no sooner than in the second half of the 19th century with Richard Wagner’s nationalistic vision of a theatrical “Gesamtkunstwerk”. Although from then on many projects of the historical avantgarde have constantly attacked the idea of a “Sprechtheater”, they argue that the concept has been preserved in Germany until far into the 20th century, particularly in rather bourgeois, identity-oriented theater discourses. Against this backdrop, the chapter discusses which conflicts but also new spaces of experience the traditional relationship of theater and language can create nowadays in the context of theater and migration. It focuses on recent changes and diversifications of the theatrical public sphere, in which, for instance, the experience of multilinguality takes center stage and draws on the audience’s various relationships to the connection of language, identity, and memory. The search for a vocabulary of political feelings lies at the heart of Ann Cvetkovich’s chapter The Alphabet of Feeling Bad: environmental installation arts and sensory publics. Based on her collaboration with Berlin-based artist Karin Michalski on the video/installation The Alphabet of Feeling Bad (2012), Cvetkovich asks for a vocabulary of affect providing a place of language and affect in the public sphere. Their video/installation develops an abecedary of political feelings and has been exhibited in Berlin, Karlsruhe (Badischer Kunstverein), and Sweden (Umea and Goteborg), as well as being distributed in print and audio media. The project aims to create affective and sensory, rather than rational publics, by making space within the public sphere for a range of feelings, including negative ones, often confined to private and intimate experience. While questioning these oppositions, the chapter also discusses how The Alphabet of Feeling Bad’s expanded vocabulary of affect has served as a point of departure for writing workshops and salons that provide public forums for collective experiences of “feeling bad”. The issue of multilinguality is also taken up in the chapter Affect and accent: public spheres of dissonance in the writing of Yoko Tawada by Mari­on Acker, Anne Fleig, and Matthias Lüthjohann. Drawing on both Yoko Tawada’s literary writing and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia, the authors try to rethink the relationship of language and affect and the notion of a public, democratic dialogue that consists of different voices and opinions placed in different institutions. Often, as in the influential theory of Jürgen Habermas, this dialogue is understood to be an encounter of partners with equal rights relying on the democratic rationality of consensus-­ oriented discussion. Focusing on Tawada’s essay “Akzent” (2016), they argue that Tawada develops a perspective that goes beyond the limited notions of affect-free rationality and “unaccentuated” voice. The chapter demonstrates that language, in literature as well as in public, is at least twofold:

Introduction 13

words in their affective relational entanglement respond to other words and become themselves part of the responses that follow their articulation. It is for this reason that dialogical engagement is never free of affect, dissonance, and polemic. To go beyond an opposition of language and affect is also the aim of Claudia Breger’s theoretical approach in her chapter Affect(ive) assemblages: literary worldmaking in Fatma Aydemir’s Ellbogen. She proposes a syncretic model that allows to investigate the multifaceted productivity of affects in the literary communication circuit. Drawing on a dialogue between notions of worlding and worldmaking in contemporary affect and narrative theory along with Bruno Latour’s proposals for intertwining ontology and rhetoric, Breger conceptualizes both composition and reading as multidimensional, processual assemblages of entangled affects and tropes, sensations, and cultural memories. Her chapter details these ideas in a reading of Fatma Aydemir’s novel Ellbogen (2017), with a particular focus on the novel’s literary deployments of hate speech, on fictionality as a reassembly of piecemeal actuality, and the distribution of nonsovereign agency in the loops of literary worldmaking. The chapter is framed with a discussion of the productivity of such literary worldmaking – as a reconfiguration of the sensible in Jacques Rancière’s sense – within a broader public sphere conceptualized as a realm of affective circulations. The final chapter by Michael Eng takes different traces of the opposition between language and affect or rational discourse and publics of feelings on a new, self-reflexive level, highlighting the neoliberal University itself as a complex player in the public sphere. His chapter Theory’s affective scene: or, what to do with language after affect provides a critical assessment of the affective turn in the humanities and social sciences that has emerged as a supposed antidote to the linguistic and cultural turns of previous decades and presents itself as a sign of intellectual progress. Eng argues that we are no longer stuck in language or culture, as we are – with the discovery of affect as the new theoretical object – finally back to the real matter of things. In addition to hearing such claims as expressions of an affective attachment (“Gefühlsbindung”) to Theory, his chapter regards them as harboring a desire to reassert the authority of the critic against the neoliberal University’s dismantling of humanistic research. It takes the University as a central, yet often overlooked (at least in the current U.S. situation), site of the public sphere, and the affective turn as a moment in the public sphere’s contestation.

Conclusion and acknowledgments Taken together, the 13 chapters in this volume contribute to a novel understanding of public spheres as spaces of resonance made-up of specific constellations of affect and language. The chapters go beyond established normative conceptions of public spheres as arenas of language-based

14  Anne Fleig and Christian von Scheve

deliberation and the rational exchange of arguments, instead ­emphasizing that language in itself bears a significant potential to affect and to be ­affected. It is a key medium in establishing – or preventing – affective resonance through which human and non-human actors become entangled. The volume therefore not only adds to recent conceptualizations of “affective publics” (Papacharissi, 2015), but also makes a notable contribution to affect theory in cultural studies and the social sciences. This contribution highlights the close interplay of affect, language, and discourse, an interplay that in many strands of affect theory has rather been disregarded. As editors, we are convinced that an understanding of public spheres as spaces of affective resonance is desperately needed to better come to terms with recent social and political developments, in particular issues related to ­political populism, polarization, and the various contestations of liberal democratic societies. This book would not have been possible without the support of a range of people and institutions. The book is the outcome of the Second International Conference of the CRC Affective Societies, held at Freie Universität Berlin in April 2017, and we thank all speakers, attendees, and discussants of this conference. The conference could not have taken place without the generous financial support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the CRC Affective Societies, for which we would like to express our sincere gratitude. Moreover, we thank the editors of the series Routledge Studies in Affective Societies, Birgitt Röttger-Rössler and Doris Kolesch, who have supported the project from its very beginning. We would also like to thank Tatiana Kozlova and Larissa Hesse for their tireless work on formatting and editing the manuscripts and Claudia Czingon for her support in coordinating the project. Tamar Blickstein deserves a thank you for her careful and thorough language editing. We also thank our editorial team at Routledge, especially Emily Briggs, Elena Chui, and Lakshita Joshi for supporting the book from its early conception to the final production process. Last but not least, we would very much like to thank our colleagues at the CRC Affective Societies for their contributions to and comments on the volume, in particular Jan Slaby and Jürgen Brokoff.

References Ahern, S. (Ed.). (2018). Affect theory and literary critical practice: A feel for the text. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ayata, B., & Harders, C. (2018). Midān moments, conceptualizing space, affect and political participation on occupied squares. In J. Slaby & B. Röttger-Rössler (Eds.), Affect in relation: Families, places and technologies (pp. 115–133). London: Routledge. Brader, T., Marcus, G. E., & Miller, K. L. (2011). Emotion and public opinion. In R. Y. Shapiro & L. R. Jacobs (Eds.), Oxford handbook of American public opinion and the media (pp. 384–401). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Introduction 15 Butler, J. (1997). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2015). Senses of the subject. New York: Fordham University Press. Clough, P. T., & Halley, J. (Eds.). (2007). The affective turn: Theorizing the social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dahlberg, L. (2005). The Habermasian public sphere: Taking difference seriously? Theory and Society, 34(2), 111–136. Dahlgren, P. (2018). News media and the emotional public sphere: Public sphere participation online: The ambiguities of affect—Commentary. International Journal of Communication, 12, 2052–2070. Erlmann, V. (2010). Reason and resonance: A history of modern aurality. New York: Zone Books. Ferree, M. M., Gamson, W. A., Gerhards, J., & Rucht, D. (2002). Four models of the public sphere in modern democracies. Theory and Society, 31(3), 289–324. Fleig, A. (2019). Writing affect. In J. Slaby & C. von Scheve (Eds.), Affective societies: Key concepts (pp. 178–186). London: Routledge. Fraser, N. (1991). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 109–142). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fraser, N. (2007). Transnationalizing the public sphere: On the legitimacy and effi­ hapiro, & cacy of public opinion in a post-westphalian world. In S. Benhabib, I. S D. Petranovich (Eds.), Identities, affiliations, and allegiances (pp.  45–66). ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibbs, A. (2015). Writing as method: Attunement, resonance, and rhythm. In B. T. Knudsen & C. Stage (Eds.), Affective methodologies: Developing cultural research strategies for the study of affect (pp.  222–236). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gould, D. (2009). Moving politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s fight against AIDS. ­Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Habermas, J. (1989). Structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (T. Burger, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hemmings, C. (2005). Invoking affect: Cultural theory and the ontological turn. Cultural Studies, 19(5), 548–567. Hendricks, V. F., & Vestergaard, M. (2018). Postfaktisch: Die neue Wirklichkeit in Zeiten von Bullshit, Fake News und Verschwörungstheorien. München: Blessing. Illouz, E. (2007). Cold intimacies: The making of emotional capitalism. Oxford: ­Polity Press. Kahl, A. (Ed.). (2019). Analyzing affective societies: Methods and methodologies. London: Routledge. Laclau, E. (2005). On populist reason. London: Verso. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leys, R. (2011). The turn to affect: A critique. Critical Inquiry, 37(3), 434–472. Massumi, B. (1995). The autonomy of affect. Cultural Critique, 31(2), 83–109. Moffitt, B. (2016). The global rise of populism: Performance, political style, and representation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mouffe, C. (2018). For a left populism. London: Verso. von Mücke, D. (2015). The practices of the enlightenment: Aesthetics, authorship and the public. New York: Columbia University Press.

16  Anne Fleig and Christian von Scheve Mühlhoff, R. (2019). Affective resonance. In J. Slaby & C. von Scheve (Eds.), Affective societies: Key concepts (pp. 189–199). London: Routledge. Paasonen, S. (2011). Carnal resonance: Affect and online pornography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. New York: Oxford University Press. Richardson, M. (2016). Gestures of testimony: Torture, trauma and affect in literature. London: Bloomsbury. Riley, D. (2005). Impersonal passion: Language as affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rosa, H. (2019). Resonance: A sociology of our relationship to the world. Oxford: Polity Press. Slaby, J., & von Scheve, C. (Eds.). (2019). Affective Societies: Key Concepts. London: Routledge. von Scheve, C. (2017). A social relational account of affect. European Journal of Social Theory, 21(1), 39–59. Tappolet, C. (2016). Emotions, values, and agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Warner, M. (1991). The mass public and the mass subject. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 377–401). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. ­London: Sage. Young, I. M. (1987). Impartiality and the civic public: Some implications of feminist critiques of moral and political theory. In S. Benhabib & D. Cornell (Eds.), Feminism as critique: On the politics of gender (pp. 56–76). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Young, I. M. (1996). Communication and the other: Beyond deliberative democracy. In S. Benhabib (Ed.), Democracy and difference: Contesting the boundaries of the political (pp. 120–136). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zajonc, R. B. (1982). On the primacy of affect. American Psychologist, 39(2), 117–123.

Chapter 2

It’s the language, stupid! Kathrin Röggla

Words resounded, he thundered, she inveighed, interjections here, invectives there and even heckles from one corner, occasionally vague answers took up space or a garrulous interval atmosphere prevailed, sometimes there was only halting information after no-confidence votes, resulting in turn in confidence ballots, someone smirked here, another acted out verbal sulking as a matter of course. I collected these conditions of public speech from Roger Willemsen’s book Das Hohe Haus, a book about a year  – it was 2013 – in the Berlin Bundestag.1 The book set out how the parliamentarians had to react to each other, even if they were rummaging in their handbags like Angela Merkel, almost disappearing inside them, even if they were sending text messages and chatting elsewhere, in short: doing anything but listening to each other. Despite all that, it happens right here, the swearing in of the staff, it’s here that someone or other lets slip some word or other that could be called a semi-act or full act of insolence, it’s here that tempers rise and at the same time a state of habituation, of the everyday, settles in. The MPs’ rhetorical flippancies tell exactly that story. It is only an apparent contradiction that the high art of verbal abuse, of derision, the joke, the ironic volte-face, the expanded vulgar provocation lives and thrives in such a basal way in this place of debate and public speaking, while at the same time being almost swallowed up in the thunder of our everyday speech. And yet I too was surprised, as though still hoping for pure argument in the debate. Affect dominates the scene, I might almost have said, were it not for rhetoric, political positioning. But perhaps, not expecting that affective aspect, I emphasized it in my perception. Perhaps because political public speaking in our democracy is permeated by an imperative of Enlightenment, by a Habermasian idea of the exchange of arguments, and because emotion is divided off from that idea in our discursive judgment? It is clear, in any case, that this form of affect must

1 Editors’ note: The German Federal Parliament.

18  Kathrin Röggla

be a different form to what we now attribute to right-wing populism, currently enjoying something akin to sovereignty over affect in the public eye. At least, we impute that its representatives are some kind of champions of the affective, ascribing them with a particularly ­manipulative way of dealing with emotion that we do not believe we encounter in “normal” political life. Sure, this attribution is concerned with the extent of that affect and above all a certain emotional effect of speech. TV election debates involving rightwing populists display a new measure of below-the-belt insults, insinuations, verbal attacks, verbal injuries; indeed, we can watch how deliberately a script of aggressive conversational techniques is adhered to, developed by Neuro-Linguistic Programmers (NLP) just as by Internet trolls, for the pure exposure and destruction of the opposing party, a script that fits perfectly into the concept of the personality show currently characterizing our public politics. The call for affective politics from the left has been voiced for some time now, and along with it a call for more rousing rhetoric to reach more people emotionally, as though the rhetoric had not been emotional previously and had not reached anyone – and with one eye on France I no longer know anyway whether left and right is any more than one big foncusion, to quote Ernst Jandl. The affective work, however, was already happening at the site of parliamentary action – that much was clear to me from Willemsen’s book. I had a comparable and yet significantly different experience when I recently attended the National Socialist Underground trial at Munich’s higher regional court. I couldn’t believe my own ears. Had I ended up at a literary festival? In the sequence of applications from the defense and the public prosecutor, I experienced first concrete poetry, then an espionage novel, followed by an avuncular narrative tone, rounded off by a bizarre collection of stylistic howlers, owing to one defense lawyer’s copy-andpaste approach. The murmuring from the spectators in the gallery was the strong audience reaction to be hoped for at such performances. What I’d expected, however, was sober lawyers’ German, that is, legal language, or at least the autopoetic system the sociologist Niklas Luhmann untiringly told us about, which must display some form of rhetorical coherence. What I experienced was multilingualism and emotional upheaval in words and deeds, so to speak: a very affect-laden performance. Perhaps an expression of the famed and feared dedifferentiation of subsystems of society? Though my surprise felt analogue to that on reading Roger Willemsen’s Das Hohe Haus, it was different after all, because this form of public speech has to work with formally strict legal language, has to work more closely with it than political rhetoric does. At the same time, it made it all the more visible how much the affective can combine with formal stringency. Here, emotionality bent itself around the imperative for legal objectiveness, wrapped itself around it, so to speak, was permeated by it, had to be measured by it.

It’s the language, stupid!  19

All of you here presumably know the formulations in court, for instance, perhaps: Yesterday’s application does not constitute a request to present evidence in accordance with §§ 244 section 3 and 245 section 2 of StPO. The court is therefore not required to hear the expert in accordance with § 245 section 2 of StPO. An application to present evidence in accordance with these provisions is the serious request made during the main trial to present evidence of a statement pertaining to a question of guilt or legal consequence by means of certain items of evidence… and so on – that was a written formulation that elicited a very emotional oral reaction when read aloud. In other words, Beate Zschäpe’s2 original defense lawyers argued so emotionally over a formal aspect that one might describe it as a remarkable miscasting of the emotional (such behavior is perfectly standard for them, an attorney explained to me) – expressing rage over formalities rather than facts – and the court is not fully occupied with formalities. Their approach, that is, their performative use of the affective (everyone went out to smoke together in the break, like actors, not really angry, only performing), might make a rewarding research subject in itself for scholars interested in affective societies. In this context, in any case, colloquial German becomes a special language, remaining marked as consciously colloquial. In addition, speaking and acting rest more strongly on one another in the legal context than they do in political communication – through their consistency. Every description in this context is a clearer action, namely that of constructing truth with consequences for future constructions of truth, evident in each verdict or application. The court reminded me of what I learned from Judith Butler: that language acts – and in a sense always balances, in this action – along the boundary to justiciability. Language can literally hurt. It has a complex link to the physical. Complex, I have learned all over again, because over the past 20 years theater focused attention on anything but language: the body, the image, acoustics, performance, the authentic. The post-­d ramatic can be understood as the absolute supersession of the linguistic paradigm, although that’s not quite correct. Language has, at least, been declared a minor matter to some extent in the performing arts, as though it had nothing to say for itself, were nothing but a vehicle for scandal society, a barren material that does nothing much, its only action that of manipulation. We have to mistrust it, this implies, so it cannot really tell us anything. So it will come as no surprise that this process was accompanied by a loss of significance for storylines, or for storylines on stages, especially 2 Editors’ note: Beate Zschäpe is a German right-wing extremist and was a member of the terrorist group National Socialist Underground.

20  Kathrin Röggla

stories told through language, as I constantly experienced empirically in my research with management consultants, risk managers, politicians, psychologists, lawyers, and bankers, whose key working material is language itself. It is language with which we negotiate the world, I thought, but I was confronted by a classification of theater texts as old school – although we’re still all working away with language, just in a different way. The many projects that came about in the theater weren’t working without language. It was more the function of the author that was fading, becoming more like linguistic arrangers of material found by documentary means or developed performatively, part of something that might be called an authentic statement within a performative arrangement; at most, linguistic and discursive spaces that were never allowed to be entirely closed in. Authenticity, instead, came to be an increasingly coveted commodity, and as such, colloquial languages entered the repertoire, languages that stand only for themselves and are not allowed to venture any further. Authenticity, the empiricism of the expert who speaks directly and as such cannot act through language, because she’s on stage and doing something else there: representing herself. At the same time, the expert had to perpetually negate that act, never appearing to be an actor. Despite the new drama currently emerging, authenticity is still in great demand, though it sometimes seems to me that the desire for it superimposes whatever is being negotiated within it. It has always been slightly more important for the person to be “genuinely” and “really” there in the moment. No wonder language-based directing has been pushed out of the limelight; the time of “reciting” texts began on the less authentic stages and those tied to the literary canon; anything that appeared literary was modulated as gauntly as possible, pruned down to a series of everyday gestures. As though composition and staging might appear all too highbrow, certain to fail to achieve the desired effect – that of having one’s finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. It was best for playwrights to do the directing themselves, making directing the aim of their artistic work – I remember a seminar in Vienna that was such a mishmash that the dramatist could be anything at all: social media expert, concept artist, director – but for heaven’s sake, one thing she shouldn’t be was literary. Perhaps, though, I shouldn’t devote quite so much space to my affronted feelings as a writer, prompted partly by the turn away from language in the arts and humanities, the pictorial turn that has long since been succeeded by the performative turn and possibly, now, by the affective turn. Perhaps there’s no need for me to fear too much for the legitimation of my work, simply because it’s still language. It’s the language, stupid – that essentially determines us, just differently than as claimed in structuralism and its successors. Perhaps, there is also no longer that single, all-determining lens that may well be so attractive for scholars.

It’s the language, stupid!  21

At the same time, you see, the idea suits me just fine of understanding language as a part of something, not as a central and dominant expression, more as a subaspect always aimed at other statements and forms of perceiving and communication, or a subaspect contained within that; as a connecting and in-between medium rather than a guiding or solitary medium; a widely branching medium that exists everywhere, but can appear in a wide range of aggregate states and often in conjunction with something else. Language no longer occurs on its own, so to speak. It is surrounded, but it’s actually always present in public statements. Language is form and at the same time a rather odd meta-medium, and actually it’s not a medium at all, by definition; it has no place but is always embodied very differently. But the actual location of language is always between people, in any case, because I don’t speak a language purely for myself; even if I’m speaking to myself I divide myself in two, multiply myself. Language moves from inside to outside. Where the English phrase is “watch your mouth”, the Germans say more accurately: “hold your margins!” Or, “hold your hatch”, as though there were these borders or doors between inside and outside. We know it’s not that simple, though – we can’t hold our margins, the hatch is never shut, language is always outside already. No existing line divides it into two spheres – where would outside begin? Where someone could potentially answer? Where the words are directed at another person? Where does that directing begin? And how did the words come about inside me, or did they ever stop coming into me? Language is thus simultaneously an innermost formulation and an outermost expression. It is a landscape of and for connections. Its functioning is mysterious – my couple of semesters of linguistics was enough to make that much clear. Language is a reservoir of complexity. It is multimedia, neither the written nor the spoken word is dominant within it; both are in constant contact, relating to one another; its state is neither purely offline nor exclusively online. “There is no connection between picture and caption” is the provocative final line of Eran Schaerf’s radio play and media artwork Sie hören Nachrichten (You’re Listening to the News). The artist took the line from a legal context, and of course we know the opposite is true. There are constant connections between picture and caption; the emotional power of certain images of war is evoked above all by their captions, which are what opens up the semantic space in the first place. Images don’t argue solely for themselves, they are interpreted, the caption’s statement often not only commenting but ascribing. And, texts no longer stand solely for themselves either. They are now surroundings, in constant contact with one another, as social media makes absolutely clear. We cannot evade language, despite Instagram and Snapchat, places that suggest we can do without language entirely, suggesting we exchange arguments and ideas via images. Suggesting we can practice storytelling without using words. And those places may

22  Kathrin Röggla

well exist, but the word is all the more rampant all around them, even the abbreviated language of the WhatsApp dialogue. Without language there can be no affect, at least no social affect, without story no empathy – that’s what we can break it down to. In this age of populists and autocrats, the effect of language is suddenly becoming more visible because the common sense of what can be said publicly has entered a crisis, with language suddenly becoming part of a cultural assault from the right. Beginning with Jörg Haider’s famous “sayings” down to the constantly tweeting president, more is being said, more conspicuously, through language-based short forms. And yet there are still the aforementioned dialogue strategies, which are multiplying a certain asociality, the point of which is to prevent any objective discussion. NLP trainers like the Austrian Walter Ötsch are now offering counterstrategies, intended to interrupt but not really capable of returning a conversation to an objective level. The art of speaking boils down to undermining one’s discussion partner with determination. In our teaching of public speaking, we are definitely unlearning the negotiation approach, we ourselves are gaining an increasing knowledge of Machiavellian strategies, the manipulative and destructive side of conversation; we are learning to factor in the loss of credibility so consciously that such a loss doesn’t happen in the first place – a remarkable volte-face of linguistic action. By going beyond the bounds of common sense, one can evoke a certain action character related to the heroic hero, a character who dares and wins. What we are also presumably unlearning is that sentences have to be finished, that there might be an answer we don’t already know off by heart. We are unlearning that there are different communication directions. Our focus is on our own expressions, on personal style. Our individual language in the social media apparently tells us a great deal about ourselves, at any rate, because it’s all about visibility, permanent and constant visibility, in fact we already prefer writing on social media to reading it, we tweet and blog to our hearts’ content (I’m using the word “we” here to be deliberately provocative). All this is in the context of an increasing written influence on oral language and an increasing oral influence on written language. These two interrelated states of language are becoming ever more ­interlocked – interestingly, this is accompanied by a high level of emotionalization, or rather affectization. It is astounding how increasing medialization can create all the more the impression of authenticity and emotionalization. This is easiest to recognize in what we call youth languages: the more quotation and unactual speaking, the more authentic a speaker is considered. All the posing – air quotes always at the ready – and the quotation culture, the more levels of performance possibilities exist; all this leads to a greater affective development.

It’s the language, stupid!  23

Language and speaking are evidently subject to a historical process and are in flux. In a hundred years’ time, they will not be what they are today, and they are certainly not now what they were a hundred years ago. You know that very precisely, I know it perhaps rather less precisely, but I maintain that knowledge with a certain precision (that was almost a fake Karl Kraus quote), and that’s precisely the reason why I’m speaking here today. Artists work with imprecision, with blurred lines. And blurring would presumably be another counterconcept to the rational vocabulary of ideas. It has been art’s job to bring the affective argument to the table, for many years. An argument that in this context, in turn, is more concerned with complexity of levels of perception, perceptive and understanding. Intensity is, after all, also a dynamo for complexity. Perhaps, art can help in a specific way to develop a critique of the dialectic of enlightenment, our reemerged and abiding subject in this time of bubble cultures and the allegedly post-factual society. It does so via forms. And that includes examining the work of the affective. The affective turn, that is, so I’ve been told. Or, to put it another way: What communication used to do for societies is now to be done by ­empathy – acting as glue, as a connecting substance. I learned this, for instance, in Fritz Breithaupt’s Kulturen der Empathie. Empathy requires narration, the book tells me; it contains an inherent temporality. It needs the production of not only similarity, but also dissimilarity. To create empathy, one requires a scene: the mental construction of a setting. Perhaps, one even occupies a third position. Empathy would then be not a matter of putting oneself in another person’s place, but putting oneself into one person’s relationship to another. And what do those two people do? They talk! Let’s listen to them talk! If we develop these forms of mindreading more consciously, we become faster than the characters themselves. Let’s anticipate what comes next! Let’s exaggerate – empathy is above all the art of exaggeration, first and foremost of exaggerating similarity. One extrapolates a similarity and produces dissimilarities only on the margins. “The dark side of empathy” seduces us into loss of the self, into black-and-white thinking; it makes us empathize with the wrong people or perhaps even turns us into vampires. Our identities, at any rate, are not as clearly drawn as our USP society would have us believe. So let’s turn to “Generation Snowflake”, which apparently already exists at universities. The casual stroll between the juridification of language and personal feelings, that argument to beat all arguments, raising one’s own hurt feelings to a yardstick for all, the potential for injury, the unfortunate play on the figure of the victim that began 20 years ago, as the director of the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts, Wolfgang Engler, shows in his recent book about authenticity. A new form of censorship, albeit only flourishing in certain biotopes and non-existent in other sectors of society,

24  Kathrin Röggla

but a phenomenon that nonetheless may represent a form of social power, certainly in its administrative manifestation. The theater scholar and dramaturg Bernd Stegemann goes as far as to refer to political correctness as a courtly language, emphasizing the social schism that characterizes it. No wonder it is theater people who are daring to take delicate stock of it. To begin with, the idealistic attempt to avoid causing hurt by anticipating injury and taking it away on the idea level was due to the fact that there was ­apparently no perception of, but above all no awareness of stark asymmetries, that participation was being organized and affirmative action was being demanded. Now, it is in many respects an argument against play, against any encounter and the crossing of any boundary, claiming these have a potentially hurtful character. The act of critical evaluation itself has unfortunately become part of a dynamic from the right. The right-wing cultural assault has quasi co-opted this thinking process. “Don’t talk about political correctness!” I was advised at an Ivy League university. “You’ll only make problems for yourself.” If we were to draw a map of affective public speaking, it would show, on one side, the courtly language of political correctness, which attempts to make language into a pacified democratic space that excludes nobody, a true fiction of uniform participation, and, on the other side, the affective language of the right-wing populists. In between would be the moralisms of the center-ground political parties, which Roger Willemsen portrayed so well in Das Hohe Haus. The idling engine of political speech that comes up against partially comical scurrilities in parliamentary debate. But where shall we draw the areas that might connect political rhetoric with litany, and the latter with lists and registers? Not only Hubert Fichte but also right now the French dramatist Valère Novarina have shown us how these two can get entangled. No one would classify religious speaking techniques as politics, but it’s astounding what a list of birds’ names or Novarina’s imaginary character names can do, how names of towns and rhetorical abbreviations, recited litany like, can take effect, and how a form of counter semantics can creep into a linguistic formula, into this language occurrence of lists. The characters are: The Theantrope, the Eaterer Olam, Sponx and Zephir, the Illogician, the Say-Yes-Machine, the Make-True-­Machine, the Mental Openings, the Countersubject, Vox Spermutabilis, Subterranean Man, the Hundredfold Manikin, Irma Grammatika, the Pebble Guard, His Chair, the Material Judge, the Thing Deceiver, Hans von Clay and his solid ego, Robler, Ms Nihil, the Human-Achieved Human, the Harum-Scarum Actor, the Destroyer Child, the World Champion of Emptiness, the Psalmists of the Earth Meal, the Celluloid Child,

It’s the language, stupid!  25

the Subjectless Existence, the Person with Triple Basis, the Vivipare Mother, the Netherhole Child, Hans the Roper, Einar the Eater of Open Matters, the Last Remote Person, the Death Generalizing Machine, the Usher with Two Thousand Names, the Legal Loophole Repair Machine, the Lost Subject, the Body Figure, Hans Eaterly, the Denying Eater, the Pothare Swallower, the Child Empty of Herself, the Queen of Spades, the Loud Empty Vessel, the Eaters of All in All, the Carpet-­ Biting Child alone against them all. (From: “L’Acte inconnu” in: Scenes 12, p. 119) Novarina’s texts are also about upheaval – one of his titles, in fact – ­ pheaval in language. Writers like him, people say, push language to its u boundaries, doing so by syntactic means, deferral of semantics, malapropisms, neologisms, speedy switches between levels, gestural exaggeration. But does such a limit to language really exist, or do these processes not make use of central characteristics of language? In 2017, I met Valère Novarina at the Berliner Ensemble and sat down with him and the German poet Ulf Stolterfoht, another expert on lists, litanies, and the art of the category, to think about derailing languages. What does this derailing mean, I wondered, does it even exist? What rails does language have that it might slip off? In German, we use the term derailment (“Entgleisung”) to mean a lapse, a gaffe, going off track, and of course the first thing that comes to mind is various Trump quotes; all of us connect them to a certain linguistic performance that shifts speaking out of rhythm, steers the social situation of language off the rails. One might say there is nothing but derailing languages all around us – derailing politicians like Trump and Erdogan, Putin and derailing languages – derailing language is part of politicians’ job description, so to speak. And we promptly go off the rails with them. Derailing is contagious. It infects broad sectors. One can resituate debates, one can perhaps put something in language back on the rails (what rails though?), get it going again. The dynamic can be interrupted but got back on track. But what would be a desirable track? And are there side tracks? Counter tracks? These questions remind me of an essay by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who was interested in stuttering as a literary phenomenon, the stuttering of language, an essay that in reality is thus a declaration of war against structuralism and against the all too symmetrical understanding of language, presumably the root of the evil. He sees stuttering not as a mental defect on the part of the speaker, as something extraterritorial to language, but as an inherent component of language, which of course changes the whole context. As we know, Deleuze focused on the ways in which language is allowed to escape, the witch’s flight on which she is allowed to dart off in the form

26  Kathrin Röggla

of stuttering. As part of a minoritizing movement, writers are for him always foreign within their own language, creating a foreign language which they cut out of their own language, an unknown language out of the always known and familiar one, in which one stammers, stutters, murmurs. The different processes of literary stuttering – which Deleuze traces here using the examples of the poet Gherasim Luca and also Samuel Beckett, Dante, Osip Mandelstam, Charles Péguy, Raymond Roussel, and Andrei Bely, and which range from bloc formation to the disjunctions of speech – open our eyes to a complicated linguistic system, as though literary language showed itself via stuttering. One can do it with intact words, or by pulling them apart, letting rhizomatic growths flourish in the middle of sentences, placing parentheses. There is syntactic stuttering, vertical and horizontal. Stuttering also opens our eyes to the exterior of language. Where does language reach to, what does language have to do with music, or painting? What about stuttered memory? Deleuze makes it clear that his understanding of stuttering is far removed from style issues, instead going deeper, above all when it comes to burrowing beneath stories, and that’s what we want to do, we writers. But the fascinating thing about Deleuze’s text seems to me to be the realization of how stuttering sets one’s native language off balance, thereby defeating the idea of language as something that is in balance. What kind of project would it be to describe it as balanced, in a society that seems to be constantly off-balance? Perhaps, one really ought to approach language from a different side, not via the linguistic aspect, but from its gestural, performative side, focusing on what makes language as a communication medium. As such, let’s head back to the courtroom! What can one do there with stylistic howlers, for instance, and how are they appropriate tools for emotionalizing the situation? How does their absurd inherently flawed nature, their failed style, make all the more emotional impact? Indeed, the daily routine of a court is full of intertwinings of the most diverse languages, which don’t blend smoothly into another but display rifts, mistakes, linguistically flawed changes of register. Or, on the theatrical stage, which we all know is right next door to the courtroom! Just recently, a play by the dramatist and artist Miro Slobokova was staged in Vienna (Diese Mauer fasst sich selbst zusammen und der Stern hat gesprochen, der Stern hat auch was gesagt), playing with the motif of system failure. Slobokova’s text shows, by means of flawed style, sudden changes of consonants, false pronunciations, reallocations – continent becomes a continentent, for example, career becomes careered – a little heavy on the puns, but certainly capable of distorting to the point of recognition – her text shows how many social rites and programs, how ways of speaking become dysfunctional. The play once again called my attention to a key linguistic strategy of influencing and gaining attention. The poetics of the flaw.

It’s the language, stupid!  27

From stuttering via stumbling, via the absence of sentence ends, miscarried denotations, dyslexia, and disloyalty to spelling, to typical transfer mistakes from learning foreign languages, catachresis, stylistic flaws – we find a richly planted field of linguistic mistake culture. Perhaps, there are grey zones between the latest witty corruption and the authentic word? Perhaps, one ought to see language as something one almost cannot understand at all. Perhaps, the gap between not understanding and understanding a language, a gap that always exists – as we rarely or perhaps never understand anything “entirely” – perhaps that gap harbors great opportunity? The larger it is, the more effort we listeners have to put in. Tomer Gardi’s book Broken German illustrates in prose how, through the staging or performing of mistakes, this gap is kept permanently open, a disturbance, a search begins – an attempt to correct language, to understand it. The constantly invoked question of where the deviation is and whether there might be a deeper meaning within it creates an odd gymnastic reading activity. The semantics of the search for language, prompted by its foreignness, are of a vibrating nature. They remind us, in a kind of bodily manifestation of language through the mistake and the faulty in its hegemonic embeddedness, of language’s coercion and at the same time its suppleness. As such, when reading, one has to not only understand the language, but also understand the mistake and the faulty elements, a double process that is wonderfully melancholy and comical. Gardi’s book is one of the most beautiful I have read over the past months, full of counter-music to the tragedy of its occurrence, its so-called story. Here, empathy comes about through the flaws and through my input as a reader, into putting the mistakes right. And mistakes are infectious, as are pictures; linguistic images are contagious, they can occupy a person. Language remains a transmission medium. It’s hard to immunize against it, as most people know from reluctantly adopting formulations carried over from English to German, or suddenly seeing ridiculous neologisms like “unique selling point” built into their language. The linguistic process is a constant transmission process of ideas, affectively loaded images. They create their own temporality. It’s just the way the Karl Kraus quote suggests: Certain words can look at us more foreignly the longer we stare at them. Incomprehension can come to us; it can creep up on us slowly. The temporality in the perception of language, however, is a very remarkable and in my opinion less observed ­phenomenon – I’m not sure whether it’s still the case in linguistics, but instant understanding is usually assumed. I can only say: I don’t believe in that. Words and phrases can have aftereffects. They can suddenly wake up again inside us and keep us busy; they can drive us to distraction. We’re full of language, once one starts taking it seriously. Full of body, but also full of language. This regenerating effect of language has the characteristic of sending us into a temporal ambivalence. Certain sentences never stop, so

28  Kathrin Röggla

to speak. And perhaps it’s that very temporality that ought to make us stop and think and that might give us the key to looking at the affective. After all, it releases the momentary affect from its solitary position. It makes it pass over into the architecture of emotionality that makes social interaction more likely in highly complex societies. Or, less likely. We should keep an eye on it!

Part I

Publics, politics, and media

Part I of the volume comprises two general threads running through the five upcoming chapters by Margreth Lünenborg, Susanna Paasonen, ­Brigitte Bargetz, Britta Timm Knudsen, and Christian von Scheve and Robert-­ Walter Jochum. First, each of the chapters emphasizes the political nature of different publics and counterpublics. The chapters unequivocally emphasize that, in particular, the political dimension of public spheres cannot be fully understood without accounting for its genuinely affective dynamics. The second thread running through these chapters relates to the idea that language is a crucial dimension of the interlinking of affect and politics. In this sense, the chapters go well beyond the established approaches that have either capitalized on the role of emotions in politics and public discourse or maintained that the very notion of affect is tied to its being independent from language. Previous works, predominantly in social movement studies but also in other areas of inquiry, have laid the ground for understanding public spheres and political mobilization in terms of affect and emotion, both in view of the political, for example, rhetoric and discursive, strategies of emotionalization and the cohesive effects of emotional solidarity within groups and movements. The chapters in this first part of the volume add a perspective to these accounts that capitalizes not so much on culturally classified and categorized discrete emotions, such as fear, anger, rage, or indignation, which are often at the heart of social movements. Instead, they highlight the more “primordial” bodily affections, the not yet culturally categorized and named ways of affecting and being affected by political views as they become evident in and through language. This perspective necessarily requires developing concepts of affect that retain notions of relationality, bodily efficacy, and intensity, but at the same time highlights that these dimensions are inextricably linked to language and discourse.

Chapter 3

Affective publics Understanding the dynamic formation of public articulations beyond the public sphere Margreth Lünenborg

The concept of the public sphere as developed by Jürgen Habermas (1991 [1963]) has to be perceived as a crucial landmark to understanding the development of modern Western democracies and the very notion of enlightenment as an idea. In its original German meaning, “the public sphere” refers to two elements: (1) the “sphere” as a physical and virtual space and as an institutional setting, principally open to strangers and (2) its capacity to foster reasoned public decision-making (Koller, 2010, p. 263). According to the second aspect, the very constitution of the public sphere is based on rational discourse and deliberation, which in turn produces a dichotomous structure of public versus private relying on structural forms of exclusion. While such a normative understanding of “the public sphere” has been criticized for several reasons, I will focus here on the limitations of a purely rational understanding of public discourse. I draw on feminist and postcolonial critique to elaborate a performative, fragile, and dynamic understanding of publics and counterpublics. In so doing, I shall highlight that emotions and emotional discourse are constitutive elements of public concern. Today’s convergent, digital, networked communication technologies demand a more complex and dynamic mode of characterizing public articulations than in the past. Terms like “networked publics” (boyd, 2011) or the “hybrid public sphere” (van Dijck & Poell, 2015) try to capture these characteristics. I will discuss how the plurality and polyvocality of speakers and modes of articulation changes the conditions of becoming public. Based on practice theory concepts, publics will be conceptualized not as static entities, but as an ongoing process acted out by citizens using (digital) media practices. Drawing on affect theory here offers new insights. The capacity to affect and to be affected can be understood as a relational characteristic of bodies – human and non-human. Understanding these affective dynamics as constitutive building blocks of the formation of publics, I use the term affective publics introduced by Zizi Papacharissi (2015) to capture their dynamic, contingent, and unpredictable character. Affective publics thus can be regarded as modes of relational interaction among citizens and between citizens and (digital media) technology, enabling and restraining public

Affective publics  31

articulations. This chapter takes a closer look at the temporal as well as spatial character of these interactions, and of how they allow for collective involvement and solidarity as well as for excluding limitations. The final section of this article discusses these characteristics of affective publics through the example of #120decibel a hashtag and offline activism established by nationalist, right-wing women of the “Identitarian Movement” [Identitäre Bewegung] to publicly campaign against so-called “sex crimes of migrants against German women” (120db.info/en/). The case offers the opportunity to observe the ambivalent dynamics of affective publics that deploy public emotions like outrage, disgust, and fury to build solidarity based on xenophobic exclusion. While language still is a core part of such constitution of publics, visual elements, such as videos, stills, or memes, are becoming increasingly relevant by explicitly going beyond r­ ational discourse.

Going beyond Habermas and the public sphere In his book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1991[1962]), Habermas conceptualized “the bourgeois public sphere” as a mode of public communication principally open to all laypeople, and potentially engaging everyone. Habermas describes how the bourgeois public sphere arises in a very specific historic moment of the 18th century, when modes of public articulation are embedded in a class system of rising capitalism in Western Europe. Thus, the theoretical concept of a European public sphere is closely linked to – and partly seen as a precondition of – the emergence of the ­nation state, including its respective class and gender structures. Habermas positions the public character of communication in a realm between the private sphere and the sphere of public authority, “that is, between society and the state” (Koller, 2010, p. 264). The dichotomist distinction between public and private is essential for recognizing this communicative character. In its beginnings, located in coffee houses and literary debates, the emancipatory character of the public sphere lies in opposition to state regulations. Yet this emancipatory quality is at the same time limited by its constitutional class and gender-based exclusions. Far beyond the historic moment of emerging European nation states, the concept has gained success as the very foundation of democracy itself. In an idealized normative perception of deliberation, the success of the very best argument is expected to be reached. Even within passionate debate, it is by refraining from emotional influences that the power of the best argument gains momentum. Such a rationalistic conceptualization of discourse privileges specific actors, positions, and arguments and hinders others, as critical gender and race studies have pointed out. Thus, the concept of the public sphere encompasses normative assumptions about the structure of public discourse as primarily deliberative and as legitimizing democratic structures of governance.

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This character of the public sphere has been regarded as both popular and problematic at the same time. Certainly, “the romantic notion of a public sphere composed of individuals speaking face to face or communicating via small-circulation print media” (Dahlgren, 1991, p. 8) has little capacity to explore current complex structures and networks of communicative interaction in modern democracies, even before the ubiquity of digital communication. Yet, the normative notion that the best argument wins has nevertheless stayed vital. With the English translation of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas, 1991), a critical discourse about the alleged universalism of a public sphere began to take shape (Calhoun, 1992). Craig Calhoun (2002) has pointed out that the public sphere is not only a mechanism for debate and deliberation, but also a space for building solidarity and a sense of belonging. As such, the public sphere both builds on emotions and produces them. In particular, feminist critics such as Nancy Fraser (1992) and Seyla Benhabib have objected to the “unexamined normative dualisms” (Benhabib, 1992, p. 95) that had informed Habermas’ conception of the public sphere. Feminist researchers also critiqued the concept’s unawareness and eschewal of gendered categories. For instance, they noted that the concept’s basic division between the intimate private sphere and the political public sphere legitimizes gendered structures of exclusion (see also Fraser, 1989, pp. 113–143). The unexamined, gendered division between “public man, private woman” (Elshtain, 1981) was a crucial argument against the universality of the idea of the public sphere as intensely discussed in critical feminist research (Klaus, 2001; Sheller & Urry, 2003; Weintraub & Kumar, 1997). In fact, Lauren Berlant (1997, 2008) later argued for an “intimate public sphere” explicitly referring to the popular culture discourse constituting what she loosely termed “women’s culture”. It was thus the late English and mostly U.S.-American reception of the Habermasian concept of a public sphere in the early 1990s that generated critiques of the concept’s gendered, class, and racial patterns of exclusion. Against Habermas’ unifying and nationally oriented view of the public sphere, scholars have also underlined that counter-publics and deliberately oppositional social formations needed to be taken into account as well (­Castells, 2007; Couldry, 2000). According to such an approach, the production of a public sphere entails an ongoing struggle over meaning. As such the public sphere is a contested field of power relations and inequalities, instead of a unifying entity. Opposing the idea of a “common mind” (­Taylor, 2004), scholars like Chantal Mouffe (2005) have argued for an “agonistic public” where conflicting positions are maintained rather than resolved. Mouffe criticizes the idea of deliberation, which aims at achieving consensus through the (rational) exchange of arguments, as an illusion. Instead, she insists on the antagonistic character of opposing social, political, and economic interests that cannot be overcome by debate and deliberation, but remain antagonists in ongoing passionate discourse.

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While these streams of feminist critique mostly address the theoretical limitations of the concept, postcolonial critiques have raised additional concerns. For instance, postcolonial studies challenged the idealization of rational discourse and deliberation as features of a secularized, Western notion of the public sphere. By addressing bodily practices such as piety, postcolonial researchers have argued for an explicit focus on the corporeal, sensual, and religious dimensions and practices relevant to the constitution of publics (Hirschkind, 2006; Mahmood, 2012; Martín-Barbero, 1993). Against the basic assumption of Habermas’ idea of rational deliberation, these critics argue for taking emotive and affective bodily practices into ­account when considering modes of public articulation. Such a claim for ­acknowledging the constitutive power of emotions in organizing sociality has been made in political science (e.g., Bargetz, 2015; Nussbaum, 2001, 2015) as well as in communication studies (Barnhurst, 2011; Papacharissi, 2015; Peters, 2011; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2018). By not seeing emotions as contradictory to rational thinking, an inclusive understanding of public communication comes to the fore. Peters (2011) criticizes an “undertheorized” approach to emotion in journalism studies, determining a constitutive part of emotion in journalisms’ history while “the diversity of emotional styles … and attempts to involve the audience have become more explicit” (Peters, 2011, p. 297). Such a plea “for … placing emotion at the heart of our understanding of politics” (Richards, 2010, p. 304) makes a normative argument for establishing “a healthier emotional sphere” (p. 309) by including emotional patterns of news making and strategies of emotionalization in public communication to reach a broader audience. However, my argument on ­“affective publics” goes beyond that mere addition. The ubiquitous appearance and accessibility of digital networked communication technology calls for a fundamentally new understanding of the emergence and establishment of public articulations. The rise of networked, convergent, and increasingly mobile media technologies has weakened traditional distinctions between audiences and publics and between consumers and producers. Such distinctions appear more and more inadequate to capture processes of public communication that emerge through circulation rather than distribution and broadcasting (­Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013; Livingstone, 2005). Peter Dahlgren (2005) argues that the previously distinct encounters of citizens with media, as well as encounters among citizens, now take place within the same communication networks. This situation accounts for the “sprawling character of the public sphere” online, where “group communication can have attributes of both mass communication and interaction” (Dahlgren, 2005, p. 149f). An adequate understanding of publics needs to account for the fluid, unstable, fragile, and dynamic character of publics constituted via hashtags (e.g., #MeToo, #TimesUp, #blacklivesmatter, #MeTwo). This includes the coordination of online- and offline-activities, such as flash mobs, as well

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as forms of “connective action” (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012) that organize transnational forms of protest via networked communication. A public “does not maintain a regular address” (Brouwer & Asen, 2010, p. 1). The ongoing pluralization of media formats and technologies challenges the established hierarchy of communicative actors. The normative concept of deliberation entails a regulated system of privileged actors, particularly journalism as an institution delivering information of social relevance to be mentioned first. However, no such hierarchical structure is at work in ­today’s dynamic and somewhat chaotic array of diverse speakers and ­observers in mutual constellation. In hybrid media systems (Chadwick, 2013), the ­coexistence of traditional media institutions and personalized networked media establishes conflicting settings of articulation. In such settings, the tone, modality, volume, and dominance of speakers in a given public is part of an ongoing struggle. In introducing the concept of “affective publics” here, I do not mean to argue for a technology-driven understanding of new communication settings. Rather, I want to stress that “affective publics” demand an analytic approach to describing and understanding ongoing turbulences and new opportunities in public articulations (Lünenborg, 2019). Affect theory helps capture these seminal shifts based on dynamic forms of interaction between (media) technology and human actors. This is because affect theory offers a framework for reconceptualizing the relations between individual actors and institutions, as well as between technology and (human) agency. Building on a relational understanding of affect (Slaby & Röttger-Rössler, 2018), I consider publics as performative, processual, and thus affective. I will show how such an understanding goes beyond the inclusion of emotional aspects of public communication.

Understanding publics and counterpublics – the performative character of publics It would be shortsighted to regard the public simply as an institution. Publics cannot be reduced to particular organizations such as the media or particular “spheres”. Decentering publics from the confines of deliberation widens the view. Publics come into existence through modalities of communication between very different kinds of actors, networks, and groups in societies. Michael Warner offers a performative understanding of publics as emerging in their “dependence on the copresence of strangers” who pay attention to individual articulations (Warner, 2002, p. 76). Given the modalities of public articulation nowadays found in social media, Warner’s argument about the necessary copresence of articulation and attention becomes even more salient. Individual articulations can originate from a personal context, but are simultaneously accessible to others. Articulation and attention are indispensable components of publics, or in ­Warner’s words, “publics are only realized through active uptake” (p. 87). Such a performative understanding emphasizes the “doing” of publics instead of its normative

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character addressed by deliberation. Following Couldry (2004, 2012), this looking for “doing publics” can be understood as part of a practice theory-­ based social analysis interested in an “open set of practices relating to, or oriented around, media” (Couldry, 2004, p. 117). By analyzing routinized and iterative practices with media, it becomes possible to identify patterns of emerging performative publics. Understanding publics as performative emphasizes that they are temporally and situationally sustained in the mediated and localized copresence of actors (Fischer-Lichte & Wihstutz, 2013). Following Mustafa Emirbayer and Mimi Sheller, publics have “crucial bridging functions between distinct networks configured over wide spatial as well as temporal spectrums” (Emirbayer & Sheller, 1999, p. 156). This emphasis on the spatiality and temporality of publics is becoming increasingly relevant as aggregation, searchability, and live feeds create their own temporalities and networks of followers. Co-presence – which might be localized physically or might be mediated and thus become translocal – then implies an evolving and changeable social relation between actors and spectators, wherein differing levels of agency, social hierarchies, and gendered speaker positions become apparent and can be challenged. The performativity of publics is analogous to the performativity of gender, since it is based on a “stylized repetition of acts” that “[constitute] social temporality  … through sustained social performances” (Butler, 1990, pp. 140–141). In the iteration of gendered, communicative acts, performativity exposes negotiations over the terms that regulate social hierarchies. Performativity here describes “that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains” (Butler, 1993, p. 2). Thus, a public must be “brought into being” through practices and actions; a public does not exist as an entity “prior to the expressions and activities” in which it is brought forth (Butler, 2010, p. 147f; 2015). Conceiving of publics as performative highlights that the co-constitution of actors and spectators creates alternating positions rather than exclusive ones. This reflexivity of speaker and audience positions captures the particular modalities of public articulation that are embedded in everyday practices of digital networked communication. Online communication is then inherently performative because it demands actors to negotiate predefined functionalities of media platforms within their specific social environment (van Dijck, 2013). It renders palpable how personal communication becomes a “practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint” (Butler, 2004, p. 1). Such a performative understanding highlights the relevance of the ­temporal dynamics involved in the constitution – as well as the vanishing – of publics. This process merits careful attention. A characteristic feature of current networked communication is that “new temporalities and spatialities for public participation” are beginning to alter the constitution of publics, as users of social networks switch between personal and public modes of communication and contribute to the spontaneous emergence

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(and often quick dissolution) of publics (Sheller, 2004). “Socially mediated publicness” (Baym & boyd, 2012) is becoming a default mode of communication online that further complicates the empirical basis of identifying publics. This is especially so with the embedding of digital communication media, such as mobile telephony and social networking sites in the domain of quotidian user practices. The frequency, dynamism, and intensity of a multitude of communicative actors being connected as “networked publics” (boyd, 2011) require analytic approaches which take the mutual influence of actors into consideration. These “networked publics” describe “a space constructed through networked technologies” and “the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice” (boyd, 2011, p. 39). It is important to emphasize that networked publics are spaces and communities at the same time: “Publics provide a space and a community for people to gather, connect, and help construct society as we understand it” (boyd, 2014, p. 9). These forms of connecting, gathering, and constructing sociality are established in their own temporal ­dynamics – ­becoming visible as “shit storms” as well as waves of solidarity (e.g., Bruns  & Hanusch, 2017). In such a way, temporality itself becomes constitutive of publics. The agency inherent in these kinds of publics is no longer located in individual actors or technologies. Rather, it lies beyond human capacity in a way that is best captured in the interactive relation between media technology and a network of actors.

Affective publics – dynamics of protest and outrage In social movement research, the role of social media is critically assessed for different functions such as mobilization of followers, organization of actions, and the articulation of joint demands. Examples like Occupy Wall Street (#ows) have also shown that a multiplicity of roles and functions become available as actors perceive each other as joining a common interest (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Boler, Macdonald, Nitsou, & Harris, 2014). Social movement research is beginning to investigate “how political subjectivity is negotiated in digital media ecologies” (Kaun, Kyriakidou, & ­Uldam, 2016) and the conditions under which unstable associations of actors come to establish structures of contestation (Dolata & Schrape, 2015). Yet, the focus remains indebted to the “intrinsically political nature” of participation (Carpentier, 2015, p. 9). Forms of protest have changed with digital networked media due to the loosing relevance of institutional preconditions and individual articulations cannot always be neatly distinguished as private or public. Even private articulations can become starting points of joint (public) action. Particular sites (both physical locations and communication platforms) serve as catalysts of communality and contention. Personal networks of individuals here are crucial for “sensitizing prospective activists to a protest issue” (Passy & Monsch, 2013, p. 43). There is a marked shift from researching

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institutionalized movement structures to researching individualized “citizen media practices” (Keller, 2012; Stephansen, 2016). This shift in research objectives acknowledges a certain deinstitutionalization of political activism while investigating the new modalities of public articulation and contention that emerge from networks of actors, quotidian practices of communication, and the circulation of common symbolic repertoires­(­Bailey, Cammaerts, & Carpentier, 2008; Cammaerts, Mattoni, & McCurdy, 2013). Lance Bennett’s and Alexandra Segerberg’s (2012) notion of a shifting from “collective action” to “connective action” exactly marks this point. In addition to this established work on social movements, recent research on forms of hashtag activism has shown how public protest turned out to be effective without necessarily relying on a complex institutional background. So-called ad hoc publics come into existence almost without any formal prerequisite, and they can disappear again quite quickly (Bruns & Burgess, 2011). Online activism which reacts to everyday forms of sexual harassment, for instance, is increasingly becoming the focus of research (Drüeke & Zobl, 2016; Keller, Mendes, & Ringrose, 2016; Maireder & Schlögl, 2014; Scharff, Smith-Prei, & Stehle, 2016). Even before the ongoing and global attention to #MeToo, diverse forms of digital feminist activism like Hollaback! #BeenRapedNeverReported, or #aufschrei (German for “outcry”) relied on translocal publics, emerging and growing dynamically in a limited period of time without any formal hierarchical structure. The performative character of this hashtag activism is indicated by the temporal dynamics based on affective flows that are part of this very form of digital mobilization (see further examples in Lünenborg & Raetzsch, 2018, pp. 26–28). In the context of the so-called European refugee crisis, diverse forms of protest and public articulation have become visible, for example, in the “affective resonances between #refugeeswelcome and #refugeesnotwelcome movements” ­(Pilipets & Winter, 2018, p. 152). Analyzing the production and circulation of digital memes as “affective modalities of repetition, movement, and transformation” (Pilipets & Winter, 2018) offers insights into the constitution of publics through the irony and satire at work in these polysemic memes. It is especially humor and irony that organize and enable feelings of belonging to a critical interpretive community while opposing dominant forms of discourse and political decision-making. Switching anger and outrage into joy is part of affective practices relying on high levels of digital literacy and creative subversion. In such a way, Kalviknes Bore, Graefer, and Kilby (2018, p. 529) highlight humor and irony as a core means of organizing emotional engagement by “encouraging [the user] to challenge systems of inequality and oppression in contemporary society”. Analyzing visuals presented in and around the Women’s March in January 2017 (responding to Donald Trump’s inauguration), they argue that “digital resonances and interactions between the image, digital platforms and users, work to amplify and intensify affective laughter” (p. 538). While these affective entanglements

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produce feelings of belonging as a matter of emotional attachment, they also become a “commodity of a new form of affective capitalism” (p. 529). These different types of protest show how mediatized modes of articulation and participation form publics – however tiny, fragile, and short-lived they turn out to be. Public forms of articulation and participation diversify and increase through such routinized everyday practices with digital media. These include affective media practices embedded in networked technologies, such as producing and circulating a meme, posting a message, liking and sharing as well as commenting others’ posts. Such affective media practices shift gradually from personal to public communication and become part of affective publics. The affective character of these practices becomes apparent in the blurring of established dichotomies between private and public traditionally associated with the public sphere. Navigating a continuum between personal and public communication, such practices combine formal and informal modes of speaking, switching constantly between producing and consuming of information. In these forms of media practices, affective dynamics come into play, since established forms of regulating and self-regulating access, modes of speaking as well as modes and range of addressing, have lost their assertiveness. In the 20th century, journalism was convincingly described as the “most important signifying system of modernity” (Hartley, 1996, p. 36). As such, journalism organized gate-keeping as the professional mode of selection, priming, and framing of information. Today, however, digital networked and convergent communication works without any gate. As the multiplicity of speakers and their diverse forms of articulation have become publicly visible and audible, they have caused unprecedented and contingent dynamics that can be described as affective formations. The affective formation of publics allows for a new understanding of actors as citizens. In this light, affective publics are not opposed to discursive structures, but entail an ongoing interrelation between arguments and emotions, between technological affordances and social appropriation. Most of the research in this field is driven by the normative idea of more inclusive publics that offer diverse citizens the opportunity to articulate their interests and thus feed their perspectives into ongoing discourse, especially at moments of political change. Papacharissi (2015) offers such an understanding in her analysis of the Egyptian uprising in 2011. Studying the Twitter feed, she points out that, “The affective rhythms of news storytelling on #egypt reproduced and reinforced feelings of community for an existent public of indignant citizens who had had enough” (p. 62). Her reference to rhythms draws attention to the temporal structure of affective publics, where a single articulation becomes part of a flow produced by retweets and mentions. The intensity of such kinds of repetitions, modifications, and rearticulations does not serve the interest of information, but contributes to an affective stage of togetherness, solidarity, and belonging. Such an “affective flow”

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(p. 15; Wetherell, 2012) produces its own intensity and temporality, sometimes referred to as “contagious” (Papacharissi, 2015, pp. 18–21). There are risks to such a recourse to biological terminology, drawn largely from Brian Massumi’s (2002) ontological understanding of affect. One of these is the risk of leaving affect outside of agency. Contrary to that view, I have argued here for an understanding of agency as emerging in the interaction between human actors and (digital) technology itself. However, affective publics are by no means devoted to the production of solidarity and empathy alone. A comparable type of intensity can be observed in “networks of outrage” (Puschmann, Ausserhofer, Maan, & Hametner, 2016) where Islamophobic groups on Twitter perform a close network of sources, producing mutual affective attunement. Claudia Alvares and Peter Dahlgren (2016) raise this concern in their discussion about the literature on right-wing populism and its relation to media. Opposing traditional normative perception, “publics can espouse anti-democratic values while nevertheless remaining ‘publics’. Such publics constitute a risk for democracy due to the possibility of mobilisation and ‘self-education’ through violent actions” (Alvares & Dahlgren, 2016, p. 54). Contrasting the largely rationality-based idea of a public sphere with the complex hybrid structures of current digital media environments reveals the plural, polyvocal, and agonistic diversity of publics. Relying on the interactive and mutually shifting relation between those previously distinguished as communicator and audience or as sender and receiver, current formations of publics are highly dynamic, temporally fluid as well as limited, and they require only little institutional infrastructure. These novel conditions of public articulation enable new forms of participation based on everyday media practices that are widely welcomed as amplifiers of new democratic formations. However, the increasingly affective dynamics of public articulation also shape rather extreme voices, threatening an inclusive and participatory concept of affective publics while relying on intensified affects themselves.

From # KoelnHbf to #120db – affective dynamics in the entanglement of racism and feminism In response to the extensive flight and migration processes to Europe and especially to Germany since the summer of 2015, right-wing authoritarian actors are increasingly articulating themselves and raising questions of ­national identity as a subject of public debate. After initially positive attention to war refugees, which was publicly celebrated as a welcoming culture, a fundamental shift took place with the discursive event of the “Cologne New Year’s Eve 2015/16”. The assaults and sexual attacks against women in public space, combined with the inability of the police to guarantee public safety, were the starting point for the establishment of a racist perpetrator

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narrative: The threat posed to the white, German woman by the sexually hyperactive, uncontrollable Arab man was the subject of a variety of media images and public debates (Dietze, 2016; Dürr, Märkl, Schiavone, & ­Verhovnik, 2016; Hark & Villa, 2017). The events on New Year’s Eve in Cologne represent a crucial example of challenged structures of public articulation. Notably, many reports about the events appeared first on social media and in online interactions before they were even addressed by national news media. Journalism drawing on institutional expertise – in this case, the police – failed to act adequately as a witness of public concern and has been accused of suppressing important information. At first, journalists and social media users focused mainly on the perpetrators and violence as dangers to public order. The Twitter hashtag #KoelnHbf and the event it stood for became a “projection canvas” for fear in the wake of migration (Dürr et al., 2016). In her analysis of German public service television, Ricarda Drüeke (2016) shows that the highly stereotyped representation of male and migrant perpetrators was often sustained by fear-provoking imagery. In news coverage on television, she identified almost exclusively official sources (police, politicians) who were used to frame the debate. Although Haller (2017) argues differently in terms of journalistic capacity in the coverage of the case, he points out that the events in Cologne instigated a decisive reflection within journalism about its own modes of communication and its portrayal of migrants. Scholars have noted the persistence of racism in migration discourse (Castro Varela & Mecheril, 2016; Hark & Villa, 2017), including forms of “ethnosexism” (­ Dietze, 2016). ­Existing research on media coverage of the case focuses mainly on print and television news (Hemmelmann & Wegner, 2016; Wamper & Jäger, 2017) not taking into account how new forms of publicness were created by non-­ professional actors. The events in Cologne show how journalism, as a particular form of “performative discourse”, failed in its “ability to simultaneously describe and produce social phenomena” (Broersma, 2013, p. 33). This specific failure can be attributed to an increasing plurality of voices and to the affective modes of articulation emerging in networked and digital media, of which journalism is no longer unquestionably the most significant. Individual visibility and intervention, as well as public articulation and contention, have become default modes of communication online. It is thus necessary to address the specific performativity and affective dynamics of such communication as an underlying character of media practice in general. This means critically assessing how new actors adopt journalistic practices to articulate their positions publicly, especially when they are marginalized in mainstream discourse. Nancy K. Baym and danah boyd have described the partial breakdown of constitutive categories in networked communication, such as private and public, as a form of “socially mediated publicness” – a cultural condition

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where personal communication and public articulation coalesce and overlap (Baym & boyd, 2012). This new condition highlights a need to reassess the role and function of journalism in such an environment, where situational and dispersed articulations of individuals equally appear as formative instances of publics. In conceiving of such publics as performative, I  want to highlight that the co-constitution of speakers and spectators creates not ­exclusive but alternating positions in communicative relations, which are typical of and widely embedded in quotidian practices of online communication (Lünenborg & Raetzsch, 2018). Such performative and ­affective publics expose modalities of public articulation which are structured alongside gendered positions (Drüeke & Zobl, 2016; Klaus & Drüeke, 2017; Lünenborg & Maier, 2013). Confrontations between (networks of) actors around issues like #KoelnHbf then need to be regarded in their intersectional dynamics, as negotiations over inclusion and exclusion, that take place through dialogue as well as through deviant forms of communication (e.g., hate speech). Understanding such conflictual dynamics requires analyses of how media practices are enacted by quotidian users (e.g., in blogging, commenting, tweeting, or liking). Based on these convergent structures of articulation, gender issues have become a new public site of struggle arguing for the need to defend the ­German (and Western) forms of modern and liberal gender relations against the non-modern rest. In January 2018, the hashtag #120db was started by members of the “Identitarian Movement”, an extreme right-­protest group founded in Austria and drawing attention by public forms of protest based on close networking with alt-right activists in Germany and Austria. The #120db campaign includes a website, a YouTube video, and a Twitter ­account simultaneously published in German and English drawing attention to ­allegedly undocumented sexual violence committed by migrants and refugees (www.120db.info; see for more details, Sorce, 2018). Under the ­slogan “the real outcry: break the silence and start acting” the campaign refers to the hashtag #aufschrei (outcry) published in 2013 which caused intense public debate in Germany about everyday sexual harassment. #aufschrei had enabled a form of grassroots media practice where thousands of women published their individual experiences with sexual harassment in everyday life including in their workplace, at school, in public transportation, or in medical examinations (Drüeke & Zobl, 2016; Maireder & Schlögl, 2014). The hashtag #MeToo globally continued and intensified this feminist discourse on everyday sexual violence. Using similar narrative patterns, the hashtags organized public attention by sober descriptions enacting individual testimonies as affective witnesses. This unexpectedly powerful campaign can be seen as part of a self-proclaimed fourth wave of feminism (Baer, 2015; Scharff et al., 2016). As a form of digital feminism, it is linking personal offline life experiences to public online articulation which allowed new translocal networks that take up everyday experiences and express agency at the same time.

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It is these kinds of translocal networks and affective witnessing that were adopted and captured by right-wing actors of the “Identitarian movement” in 2018, changing the pattern fundamentally: Relying on networked digital communication structures, the campaign was organized professionally, but pretended to have emerged as a grassroots movement. Declaring that a pocket alarm with a sound volume of 120 decibel is part of the necessary accessories of German women today, the activists elucidate, “120 decibel is the name of our movement, which will sound the alarm and warn against imported violence. Join the movement and use the hashtag #120db to tell us your experience with violence, alienation and sexual abuse” (120db.info/en). In the video, a group of women give seemingly personal testimonies, repeating the same statement several times: “My name is Anna, my name is Mia, I was stabbed in Kandel, I was raped in Malmö, I was tortured in Rotherham”. Pretending to be a personal testimony, these staged statements claim to offer generalized experience: “I am any woman, it could be me”. Instead of giving personal testimonies, the statements offer a choreography of performed accusations. The sound of consternation combined with visuals of young white women made up with care placed in neatly middle-class living room surroundings – including lighted candles, bookshelves, and carefully arranged coziness – produce an imagined German (and Austrian) community of “Us” opposed to the threatening “Others” offending the safety of women’s middle-class coziness. Accompanied by soft piano tremolo, the well-elaborated statements build up a collective feeling, before being contrasted with the upcoming threat. While these women proclaim agency to speak up for themselves, they address the need for public intervention against the threatening “Others”. German and European authorities are accused of not carrying out their duties, while the notion of a feminist power to act is contested: “You are preaching feminism and women’s rights, but you are the true enemy of women.” Accusing the authorities of not securing (white) women’s lives, the self-proclaimed “daughters of Europe” declare their resistance and call “mothers, sisters, women” to resist as well. After being uploaded by the “Identitarian Movement”, the video was then blocked on YouTube for a time due to its racist character, before being uploaded by several users again. Such an ongoing struggle for visibility is part of the affective dynamics played out online and offline at the same time. Accompanying the diverse online activities, offline activism has become part of the campaign as well. The activists organized a so-called women’s march (in which predominantly right-wing authoritarian men participated), stormed the stage of a #MeToo debate during the Berlin film festival ­Berlinale in 2018, and intervened with theatrical performance (“dead girls don’t lie” by positioning female bodies on a piece of canvas). In so doing, these activists used established protest practices – mediated as well as corporeally copresent – to intervene in public discourse. These articulations try to establish new readings of feminism based on racialized distinctions between legitimate (white, German, European) and illegitimate (non-white)

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bearers of rights. The affective dynamics of this kind of protest are based on four levels: (1) The use of racial distinction is staged as a breach of taboo, which is supposed to make real threats visible. (2) The corporeal staging and visibility of women creates a notion of normality through the image of secure middle-class settings. Thus, without being named as such, this very ­m iddle-class security becomes subject to current societal changes and expectable insecurities. (3) The contrasting “Other” stays largely unsignified and unmarked. Since the threat (and the threatener) is not specified explicitly, it remains completely open to individual imagination. Male, non-white, non-Western, non-civilized, wild – all these characteristics of the imagined Other are available for application. (4) The campaign combines verbal and visual representations in multimodal communication on diverse social media platforms. In so doing, the campaign addresses and creates emotions of outrage, offense, disgust, indignation, and insult. By becoming visible as part of well elaborated and embodied practices, these emotions become a legitimate part of public articulation. Sara Ahmed has elucidated a definition of what she calls the “organization of hate”: It is the emotional reading of hate that works to stick or to bind the imagined subjects and the white nation together. … The emotion of hate works to animate the ordinary subject, to bring that fantasy to life, precisely by constituting the ordinary as in crisis, and the ordinary person as the real victim. (Ahmed, 2004, p. 43 italic in original) The campaign #120db, as shown above, draws precisely on these patterns, producing the ordinary middle-class way of life as in crisis. By replicating the longstanding motif of a white woman threatened by a black man, the campaign situates itself within a long continuity of established racist narratives. At the same time, the campaign presents women who are obviously well-­educated and eloquent, and who do not want to be reduced to the role of victims. The positive attribution of power that the protagonists ascribe to themselves stands in unresolved contradiction to the staged threat to the white woman. Affectively, this contradiction creates oppositional positions that become visible in numerous comments. Such comments, on various digital platforms, include sharply formulated contradictions as well as euphoric a­ pproval and congratulations for the courage to make such public statements. It is precisely this effective management of attention which characterizes the dynamics of the campaign. Provoking offense as well as support becomes an essential mechanism in current affective publics. Compared to the normative notion of the Habermasian public sphere, the dynamics, contingency, and unpredictability of public discourse in today’s affective publics has unquestionably increased tremendously. It is now up to the multitude of actors to cope with this new complexity and its affective involvement.

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Affective publics  45 Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex”. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2010). Performative agency. Journal of Cultural Economy, 3, 147–161. Butler, J. (2015). Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Calhoun, C. J. (1992). Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Calhoun, C. J. (2002). Imagining solidarity: Cosmopolitanism, constitutional patriotism, and the public sphere. Public Culture, 14, 147–172.Cammaerts, B., Mattoni, A., & McCurdy, P. (2013). Mediation and protest movements. Bristol: Intellect. Carpentier, N. (2015). Differentiating between access, interaction and participation. Conjunctions: Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation, 2(2), 7–28. Castells, M. (2007). Communication, power and counter-power in the network society. International Journal of Communication, 1, 238–266. Castro Varela, M. do M., & Mecheril, P. (Eds.). (2016). Die Dämonisierung der ­Anderen: Rassismuskritik der Gegenwart. Bielefeld: transcript. Chadwick, A. (2013). The hybrid media system: Politics and power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Couldry, N. (2000). Inside culture: Re-imagining the method of cultural studies. ­London: Sage. Couldry, N. (2004). Theorising media as practice. Social Semiotics, 14, 115–132. Couldry, N. (2012). Media, society, world: Social theory and digital media practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Dahlgren, P. (1991). Introduction. In P. Dahlgren & C. Sparks (Eds.), Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere in the New Media Age (pp. 1–24). London: Routledge. Dahlgren, P. (2005). The internet, public spheres, and political communication: ­Dispersion and deliberation. Political Communication, 22, 147–162. Dietze, G. (2016). Ethnosexismus: Sex-mob-narrative um die Kölner Silvesternacht. Movements – Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies, 2(1). Dolata, U., & Schrape, J.-F. (2015). Masses, crowds, communities, movements: ­Collective action in the internet age. Social Movement Studies, 15, 1–18. Drüeke, R. (2016). Die TV – Berichterstattung in ARD und ZDF über die Silvesternacht 2015/16 in Köln. Berlin: Gunda-Werner-Institut für Feminismus und Geschlechterdemokratie der Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. Retrieved from https:// www.boell.de/de/2016/11/18/die-tv-berichterstattung-ard-und-zdf-ueber-die-­ silvesternacht-201516-koeln. Last accessed March 5, 2019. Drüeke, R., & Zobl, E. (2016). Online feminist protest against sexism: The German-­ language hashtag #aufschrei. Feminist Media Studies, 16, 35–54. Dürr, S., Märkl, D., Schiavone, M. L., & Verhovnik, M. (2016). Die Kölner ­Silvesternacht in Medien und Öffentlichkeit. Sexuelle Gewalt in der öffentlichen Debatte. Communicatio Socialis, 49(3), 283–296. Elshtain, J. B. (1981). Public man, private woman: Women in social thought. Oxford: Robertson. Emirbayer, M., & Sheller, M. (1999). Publics in history. Theory and Society, 28, 143–197.

46  Margreth Lünenborg Fischer-Lichte, E., & Wihstutz, B. (2013). Performance and the politics of space. New York: Routledge. Fraser, N. (1989). Unruly practices: Power, discourse, and gender in contemporary social theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fraser, N. (1992). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 109–143). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Haller, M. (2017). Die „Flüchtlingskrise“ in den Medien: Tagesaktueller Journalismus zwischen Meinung und Information. Frankfurt am Main: Otto-Brenner-Stiftung. Retrieved from https://www.otto-brenner-stiftung.de/wissenschaftsportal/ informationsseiten-zu-studien/die-fluechtlingskrise-in-den-medien/ Hark, S., & Villa, P.-I. (2017). Unterscheiden und herrschen: ein Essay zu den ambivalenten Verflechtungen von Rassismus, Sexismus und Feminismus in der Gegenwart. Bielefeld: Transcript. Hartley, J. (1996). Popular reality: Journalism, modernity, popular culture. London: Arnold. Hemmelmann, P., & Wegner, S. (2016). Flüchtlingsdebatte im Spiegel von Medien und Parteien. Ein Überblick. Communicatio Socialis, 49(1), 21–38. Retrieved from http://ejournal.communicatio-socialis.de/index.php/cc/article/view/1162/1160 Hirschkind, C. (2006). Ethical soundscapes: Cassette sermons and Islamic counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Jenkins, H., Ford, S., & Green, J. (2013). Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning in networked culture. New York: New York University Press. Kalvisknes Bore, I.-L., Graefer, A., & Kilby, A. (2018). This pussy grabs back: ­Humour, digital affects and women’s protest. Open Cultural Studies, 1(1), ­529–540. doi: 10.1515/culture-2017-0050 Kaun, A., Kyriakidou, M., & Uldam, J. (2016). Political agency at the digital crossroads. Media and Communication, 4, 1–7.Keller, J., Mendes, K., & Ringrose, J. (2016). Speaking ‘unspeakable things’: Documenting digital feminist responses to rape culture. Journal of Gender Studies, 27(1), 22–36. Keller, J. M. (2012). Virtual feminisms: Girls’ blogging communities, feminist activism, and participatory politics. Information, Communication & Society, 15, 429–447. Klaus, E. (2001). Das Öffentliche im Privaten – Das Private im Öffentlichen: Ein kommunikationstheoretischer Ansatz. In F. Herrmann & M. Lünenborg (Eds.), Tabubruch als Programm: Privatheit und Intimität in den Medien (pp. 15–35). ­Opladen: Leske+Budrich. Klaus, E., & Drüeke, R. (Eds.). (2017). Öffentlichkeiten und Gesellschaftliche Aushandlungsprozesse. Theoretische Perspektiven und Empirische Befunde. Bielefeld: transcript. Koller, A. (2010). The public sphere and comparative historical research: An introduction. Social Science History, 34(3), 261–290. Livingstone, S. (2005). On the relation between audiences and publics. In S. ­Livingstone (Ed.), Audiences and publics: When cultural engagement matters for the public sphere (pp. 17–41). Bristol: Intellect. Lünenborg, M. (2019). Affective publics. In J. Slaby & C. v. Scheve (Eds.), Affective societies: Key concepts (pp. 319–329). Abington: Routledge.

Affective publics  47 Lünenborg, M., & Maier, T. (2013). Gender media studies: Eine Einführung. Konstanz: UVK. Lünenborg, M., & Raetzsch, C. (2018). From public sphere to performative p ­ ublics: Developing media practice as an analytic model. In M. Lünenborg, C. ­Raetzsch, & S. Foellmer (Eds.), Media practices, social movements, and performativity: Transdisciplinary approaches (pp. 13–35). London: Routledge. Mahmood, S. (2012). Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. with a new preface by the author. (Reissue paperback). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Maireder, A., & Schlögl, S. (2014). 24 hours of an #outcry: The networked publics of a socio-political debate. European Journal of Communication, 29, 687–702. Martín-Barbero, J. (1993). Communication, culture and hegemony: From the media to mediations. London: SAGE. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mouffe, C. (2005). The democratic paradox. London: Verso. Nussbaum, M. C. (2001). Upheavals of thought: The intelligence of emotions. ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (2015). Political emotions: Why love matters for justice (First Harvard University Press paperback ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. New York: Oxford University Press. Passy, F., & Monsch, G.-A. (2013). Do social networks really matter in contentious politics. Social Movement Studies, 13, 22–47. Peters, C. (2011). Emotion aside or emotional side? Crafting an ‘experience of involvement’ in the news. Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, 12(3), 297–316. Pilipets, E., & Winter, R. (2018). Repeat, remediate, resist? Digital meme activism in the context of the refugee crisis. In J. Wimmer, C. Wallner, R. Winter, & K. Oelsner (Eds.), (Mis)Understanding political participation : Digital practices, new forms of participation and the renewal of democracy (pp. 158–178). New York: ­Taylor & Francis. Puschmann, C., Ausserhofer, J., Maan, N., & Hametner, M. (2016). Information laundering and counter-publics: The news sources of islamophobic groups on Twitter. In: Workshops of the Tenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media: Technical Report WS-16-19 (pp. 143–150). Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. Richards, B. (2010). News and the emotional public sphere. In S. Allan (Ed.), The Routledge companion to news and journalism (pp. 301–311). New York: Routledge. Scharff, C., Smith-Prei, C., & Stehle, M. (2016). Digital feminisms: Transnational activism in German protest cultures. Feminist Media Studies, 16, 1–16. Sheller, M. (2004). Mobile publics: Beyond the network perspective. Environmental Studies, 22, 39–52. Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2003). Mobile transformations of ‘public’ and ‘private’ life. Theory, Culture & Society, 20, 107–125. Slaby, J., & Röttger-Rössler, B. (2018). Introduction: Affect in relation. In J. Slaby & B. Röttger-Rössler (Eds.), Affect in relation – Families, places, technologies. ­Essays on affectivity and subject formation in the 21st century (pp. 1–26). New York: Routledge.

48  Margreth Lünenborg Sorce, G. (2018). Sounding the alarm for right-wing #MeToo: “120 Dezibel” in ­Germany. Feminist Media Studies, 18(6), 1123–1126. Stephansen, H. C. (2016). Understanding citizen media as practice: Agents, processes, publics. In M. Baker & B. B. Blaagaard (Eds.), Citizen media and public spaces (pp. 25–41). New York: Routledge. Taylor, C. (2004). Modern social imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.van Dijck, J. (2013). Social media platforms as producers. In T. Olsson (Ed.), Producing the internet: Critical perspectives of social media (pp. 45–62). Göteborg: Nordicom. van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2015). Social media and the transformation of public space. Social Media + Society, 1, 1–5. Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2018). Emotions, media and politics. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Wamper, R., & Jäger, M. (2017). Der Fluchtdiskurs in deutschen Medien 2015 und 2016. Duisburg: Duisburger Institut für Sprach- und Sozialforschung. Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Public Culture, 14, 49–90. Weintraub, J., & Kumar, K. (1997). Public and private in thought and practice: ­Perspectives on a grand dichotomy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. ­London: SAGE.

Online sources 120 Decibel. (2018, March 21). Home. [Youtube channel]. Retrieved from https:// www.youtube.com/channel/UCA6oE9NjSftIB1sHR6rz-Og 120 Decibel. (2018, March 21). The real outcry. Retrieved from http://www.120db. info/en/ 120 Dezibel. (2018, March 21). [Twitter feed]. Retrieved from https://twitter. com/120dezibel 120 Dezibel. (2018, March 21). [Blog]. Retrieved from http://www.120db.info/blog/ 120 Dezibel. (2018, August 27). Der wahre Aufschrei. Retrieved from http://­ www.120db.info/

Chapter 4

Resonant networks On affect and social media Susanna Paasonen

In an era of clickbait journalism, Twitter storms, and viral social media campaigns varying from social protest to commodity promotion, it has become strikingly clear that networked communications are not merely about critical rational exchange or functional information retrieval, but equally – and perhaps even more explicitly – an issue of affective exchanges and connections of both the fleeting and more lasting kind. As argued in this chapter, the notion of affective resonance provides a means of accounting for encounters with the world in which bodies move from one state to another, and possibly become transformed in the process. This conceptualization is hardly specific to online phenomena as such, and it is used here to explore affective encounters between people, networks, interfaces, apps, devices, digital images, sounds, and texts in the context of social media. Moving from my own considerations of resonance in connection with online pornography to examinations of the role, both pronounced and not, that affect has played in Internet research, this chapter asks how affect matters and makes things matter in a contemporary media landscape driven by the quests for attention, viral circulation, and affective stickiness.

Things to do with resonance In academic conference jargon, resonance refers to arguments and points that somehow relate to, or echo those previously made by others, possibly in ways difficult to precisely pin down. The notion of resonance carries multiple meanings across disciplinary boundaries and discursive contexts varying from linguistics to physics, chemistry, astronomy, electronics, and medicine. According to the more literal thesaurus definitions, “If something has a resonance for someone, it has a special meaning or is particularly important to them”. Resonance then refers to the “power to evoke enduring images, memories, and emotions” as well as to the “intensification and prolongation of sound, especially of a musical tone, produced by sympathetic vibration”. Connected to a “quality of richness or variety” and to “a quality of evoking

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response”, resonance further stands for “oscillation induced in a physical system when it is affected by another system that is itself oscillating at the right frequency”.1 Across these different definitions, resonance is descriptive of instances of connection, motion, and amplification that are generative of importance, feeling, meaning, and memory and that entail “adjacency, sympathy, and the collapse of the boundary between perceiver and perceived” (Erlmann, 2010, p. 2). Despite its interdisciplinary applications, the notion of resonance has, possibly for obvious reasons, been largely connected to studies of sound and noise within humanities inquiry (see Erlmann, 2010; Goddard, Halligan, & Hegarty, 2012). My own work with the concept draws on long-term research on pornography, the studies of which have historically been dominated by a focus on the politics of representation drawing from feminist film theory. In studies of pornography, visual concepts have oriented attention toward relations of power, practices objectification and identification, as well as toward the routines of representation through which hierarchies connected to identity categories such as gender, race, and class are amplified and further bolstered. While there are good reasons to focus on the visual when analyzing contemporary pornography that is largely consumed in the format of online video clips, this emphasis has its conceptual limitations in accounting for the genre’s force and appeal connected to the power of different kinds of bodies to affect and be affected. In order to examine the affective appeal of online porn, I turned to the notion of resonance to address its visceral, often ambivalent grab, as well as the ways in which its depictions of bodies moving from one state to another can set the bodies of those viewing into motion, from sexual arousal to disgust, shame, interest, amusement, and any combination thereof (see Paasonen, 2011). In the course of this exploration, resonance became a means to describe the ways in which users attach themselves to site interfaces, images, sounds, videos, texts, tags, and search terms and how they perhaps come to recognize some of the sensations conveyed on the screen in their own bodies. With resonance, I wanted to tackle the interactive and material nature of such encounters and attachments, their dynamics and appeal. Used in this vein, affect refers to instantaneous intensities of feeling that emerge in encounters with the world and precede cognitive processing. Emotions become identified, recognized, and labeled through affective intensities that lend them both force and quality. More than a technical term, resonance is descriptive of instances of being moved, touched, and affected by that which is tuned to “the right

1 See https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/resonance; https://en.­oxford dictionaries.com/definition/resonance; https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Wave+resonance; http://www.dictionary.com/browse/resonance.

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f­ requency”. In other words, it entails instances of attunement as momentary connections and impact. Without a frequency for bodies to resonate with one another, no connection can be formed, sensed, or made sense of. In addition, all resonance alters in form and intensity over time in ways that render generalizations based on the material, formal, or representational aspects of bodies difficult, if not impossible. As Baruch Spinoza (1992, p. 133) pointed out in his Ethics, “[d]ifferent men can be affected in different ways by one and the same object, and one and the same man can be affected by one and the same object in different ways in different times”. Resonance is then a means of addressing the oscillating registers of affect that alter in their qualities, rhythms, speeds, and intensities. There is immediacy and unpredictability to resonance as it possibly bleeds away into blandness (Berlant, 2015), disaffect (Petit, 2015), and boredom as an experience void of qualities (Goodstein, 2005). It should in fact be noted that the boundary between resonance and dissonance is not necessarily a clear one and that the two may well intermesh. Resonances can be experienced as disturbing, unpleasant and revolting kinds of dissonances, or something that become sensed as ambiguous amalgamations of mixed feeling that both titillate and repel. The motions of human bodies moving onscreen and the motions occurring in the bodies of those watching remain key to the resonances of online pornography, yet these extend equally to media technologies, devices, storage formats, networked connections, representations, online platforms, labels, terms, tags, and categories connected to sexual likes as nodes in an actor network that comprises the “product” of online porn. Online pornography materializes – becomes sensible – in assemblages of bodies of flesh, membrane, and mucus; plastic, silicone, copper, and steel; data, code, text, and iconography. Considered in this vein, the resonances emerging in ­encounters with online pornography are in fact far from being particular to just this specific media genre. Resonant frequencies and “sympathetic vibrations” can be discovered by accident just as they can be knowingly sought out when browsing through social media updates, when glancing through magazines and newspapers on offer at a newsstand, or when examining the currently available and recommended content on Netflix. Resonances then come across as intensities and events in a broader series of encounters with the world as a means of explaining the appeal, stickiness, and force that some media content holds. I argue that, as a dynamic event where the affective, the somatic, and the cognitive stick and cohere, resonance helps in understanding online connections and disconnections, proximities and distances between human and non-human bodies well beyond the genre of pornography. Following this line of thought, the remainder of this chapter examines some of the applications of resonance in studies of networked communications, and in those of social media in particular.

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Affect in Internet research Despite its debt to the highly rational framework of informatics drawing from cybernetics, as one of its influential disciplinary background strands, considerations of affect are certainly not alien to, or entirely novel within Internet research. The field has been long engaged with online communities revolving around specific interests, as in connection with practices of fandom, play, sexual exploration, and peer support (e.g., Baym, 2000; ­Sundén, 2003). Such connections were discussed as affective already in Howard Rheingold’s (1993, p. 5) early influential definition of virtual communities as “social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace”. A possibility for contact, communication, and exchange does not, however, automatically result in, or fuel, a sense of togetherness or belonging: community building, whether online or offline, involves acts of exclusion, and even those of policing, given that there can be no “us” without “them” and no inside without an outside (see Joseph, 2002). Online communities may well be crafted out of hate and be animated by the intensities of ­v iolence (Kuntsman, 2007). Furthermore, online communication regularly involves an uneasy balancing of the sharp flames of anger and aggression in ways requiring boundary maintenance, moderation, content filtering, and other forms of intervention. The intensities of aggression emerging from trolling and other forms of intentional provocation of users may well provide sources of enjoyment for some while remaining frustrating and enraging to others (Paasonen, 2015). It then follows that a scholarly focus on affect should not be confined to “good vibrations” and pleasurable exchanges, just as investigations into resonance ought not exclude dissonances from their agenda. Positive, negative, and ambivalent affect blend into each another on online platforms, shift and slide, and range in their intensities and impact. It can be argued that much of the appeal of social media owes precisely to such intermeshing of positive and negatives affective strands that layer into mutable and possibly sticky tapestry within which user attention travels and halts, where shivers of interest emerge from patterns of boredom, and where amusement and offence frequently bleed into one another. From flame wars to the thrills of online romance, the intensities of sexual arousal sought out by browsing for online porn, the fascinations of online shopping, or the pleasures catered by meme culture, networked communications point to the shortcomings of analytical frameworks based on theories of the public sphere as one premised on rational critical exchange. Online publics and communities, when these do emerge, are affective ones, brought together by intensities of feeling, as indirectly suggested by Rheingold already some 25 years ago – and, one might add, the same applies to such

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movements offline and in the current context of the online/offline binary being increasingly artificial to draw. Following Zizi Papacharissi (2015), affective publics involve shared articulations of emotion that bring forth more or less temporary sense of connection, which, with a contagious kind of intensity, can fuel political action. Her key examples of such political ­potential involve the Occupy movement and uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East since 2010, the public demonstrations of which were centrally orchestrated, and the intensities of which virally spread through Twitter. More recent protests such as the 2017 and 2018 Women’s Marches in the United States, and elsewhere, have been similarly organized through mainstream social media while the multi-platform movement of #MeToo has, since October 2017, galvanized discussions on sexual harassment, violence, and mundane sexism on a global scale. Following Papacharissi, a hashtag such as #MeToo is an open-ended framing device that allows for “crowds to be rendered into publics; networked publics that want to tell their story collaboratively and on their own terms. These networked publics come together and/or disband around bonds of sentiment” and convene “across networks that are discursively rendered out of mediated interactions” (Papacharissi, 2015, p. 308.). Affective hashtag publics emerge from, and are mobilized through, shared displays of sentiment, assembling “around media and platforms that invite affective attunement, support affective investment, and propagate affectively charged expression” (Papacharissi, 2015, p.  308). The action they support is connective but not necessarily collective, given the degree to which it involves ­articulations of personal feeling, experience, and investment woven together in the use of hashtags (Papahcarissi, 2015, p. 315). As an affective formation, #MeToo is “textually rendered into being through emotive expressions that spread virally through networked crowds” (Papacharissi, 2015, p. 320). The hashtag connects together experiences from violent rape to occasional catcalling in ways that both help in framing them as interconnected operations of sexism within a hierarchical, unequal gender system, and to a degree ­dilute and erase essential differences between them. In her discussion of bestselling fiction, Eva Illouz (2014) deploys the notion resonance to explain how cultural products manage tapping into structures of feeling. Following Raymond Williams (1977), structures of feeling are ephemeral and possibly difficult to translate into language even when acutely felt. As social experiences “in solution”, structures of feelings involve “particular linkages, particular emphases and suppressions” that come sensible as common qualities of life characteristic to specific generations, contexts, and locations (Williams, 1977, pp. 133–134). For something to resonate, it needs “not only to address a social experience that is not adequately understood, named, or categorized but also to ‘frame’ it in adequately explanatory ways” (Illouz, 2014, p. 23). That which resonates strikes a chord and, in doing so, makes it possible to articulate that which is otherwise too ephemeral or hard

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to express. For its part, the hashtag #MeToo has evident resonance in setting bodies into motion, in driving public debate, in pushing for collective change, and in offering means to articulate personal experiences as patterns in a broader social fabric. Building on John Protevi’s (2009) discussion on political affect, #MeToo makes it possible to connect the somatic, as that which is immediately and corporeally felt, with the social so that personal affectations gain the potential of fuelling political engagement on a collective level. Equally drawing on Williams, Papacharissi (2016, p.  321) interprets affective publics organized through Twitter hashtags “as structures of feeling, comprising an organically developed pattern of impulses, restraints, and tonality”. The rhythms and communicative practices of particular social media platforms shape the ways in which public formations of sentiment may take shape, how they are able to spread and to become shared. Moving through Twitter and Facebook, and spreading via YouTube and news media internationally, #MeToo has involved viral force – as well as a visceral grab – that has lent it with liveliness exceeding the appeal of any singular tweet or public exposure of misconduct. Such viral activist campaigns possibly leading to dramatic confrontation and public debate are prime examples of how affect drives individual and collective action through resonant intensities of outrage and anger that grow and fade in networked communications. At the same time, there are obvious analytical shortcomings to limiting considerations of networked affect, or those of affective resonance, solely to moments of peak intensity such as those involved in social protest and revolt. There is no reason to limit considerations of bodies being moved from one state to another through affective resonance to dramatic scenes of becoming and transformation, yet investigations into affect have – well beyond the field of Internet research – notably often clustered on transformative events rather than on mundane, ubiquitous, or miniscule oscillations of sensation. A ­focus on instances of heightened impact comes at the expense of blindness toward the more banal encounters and minor resonances that comprise the main flow, and pull, of social media, as well as that of everyday lives more generally. The resonances of online content sought up by exploring cute animal pictures or online celebrity gossip can, following Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2000, p. 142, pp. 184–185), be understood as enjoyable, simple, and mundane microflow experiences that, practiced for the sake of enjoyment, offer momentary escapes from the sensations of boredom and anxiety that otherwise haunt everyday lives. By doing so, microflow experiences – from ­coffee breaks to office banter, or checking one’s Facebook newsfeed – increase people’s sense of aliveness, interest, and energy (Csikszentmihalyi, 2000, pp. 146, 169–170). As minor as they may be, microflow events move bodies from one state to another and affect their capacities of being in the world. In a more new materialist phrasing, such routines and experiences increase

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and affirm one’s life forces and potentials to act. In his discussion of microshocks, Brian Massumi (2015, p. 53) describes them as affective encounters with the world entailing a change in focus: “In every shift of attention, there is an interruption, a momentary cut in the mode of onward employment of life”. While remaining largely imperceptible in their instantaneity, microshocks, as moments of sensory commotion, may also become registered as interruptions (Massumi, 2015, p. 54). Combined, these two distinct – yet also mutually resonant – formulations of microevents help to foreground engagements with social media as both intentional pursuits driven by a quest for pleasure (i.e., microflow events) and as ­ unpredictable encounters, affectations, and transformations that are impossible for an individual to foresee or to control (i.e., microshocks). As events, their scale is minor and quotidian, and their recurrence is constant. As  networked communications and social media have grown integral to people’s daily rhythms, the microevents that they cater, or at least promise, have become ubiquitous in their immediately availability and virtually endless supply.

Click me! Although affect has been central to all kinds of networked exchanges throughout the history of the Web, and well before, it has not necessarily been elaborated or fully conceptualized as such. More recently, affective resonances ranging from “articulations of desire, seduction, trust, and memory; sharp jolts of anger and interest; political passions; investments of time, labor, and financial capital; and the frictions and pleasures of archival practices” have nevertheless grown increasingly recognized as topics of interest within Internet research (Paasonen, Hillis, & Petit, 2015, p. 1; also Karatzogianni & Kuntsman, 2012). This rise in interest connects to how social networking sites, initially recognized as allowing for “public displays of connection” (Donath & Boyd, 2004), have become identified as tapping into affect for the purposes of targeted advertising and corporate value building (see Coté & Pybus, 2007; Dean, 2010; Paasonen, 2018). In the course of this, affect has grown manifest as both a fuel and a resource in social media economy that tries to convert affect to data which, similarly to all data, can be analyzed, manipulated, and turned into monetary profit. Once affect is not seen as merely a social glue or an additional attractor in user engagement but rather as something central to the profit mechanisms of social media, it becomes crucial to investigate both these mechanisms and their connections to the broader network of interests and intensities emerging in networked exchanges (also Terranova, 2004; van Dijck, 2013). Online platforms of all kinds aim to optimize the volume of visits, shares, likes, and returning users in order to both amp up the price of their advertising schemes and to collect user data for the purposes of targeted ­advertising

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(and, as is most likely, for further selling this data to third parties). Operating through targeted advertising rather than membership fees of the kind used in 1990s Web cultures, social media basically aims to engage users; inspire them to post, share, and comment; and to frequently return back to the same platforms. Here, affect emerges as that which manages to capture attention in the ever-shifting landscape of diversion and distraction. Writing on blogging, Jodi Dean (2010, p. 95) argues that affect accrues “from communication for its own sake, from the endless circular movement of commenting, adding notes and links, bringing in new friends and followers, layering and interconnecting myriad communications platforms and devices”. Dean sees affective intensity as driving user motions across posts and applications as they search for distracting thrills and more lingering affectations. When checking Facebook news feeds, trending tweets, or the top tags of Instagram, most content flows by without little attention or ­i mpact. When something does grab attention, it leaves some kind of impression, no matter how momentary or minor this may be. This “something” can be conceptualized as instances of resonance that become highly valuable within the attention economy of social media as encounters where something sticks rather than merely slides by. Theresa Senft (2008) has introduced the notion of the grab to describe the visual and tactile dynamic of visual exchanges online. “The grab” belongs to a media landscape characterized by user-generated content and the blurred lines of users and producers that differs in its operating principles from those of broadcast and print media. Once images, videos, stories, and webcam streams are made available online, they are out of control as users grab images, link and embed them to other sites, share them, and frame them with comments of their own. The notion of the grab can be equally extended to discussions beyond the visual dynamics of online exchanges to the ways in which we, as users, are “grabbed” as our movements are tracked with the aid of cookies and Internet Protocol addresses, and as our routine tasks are automatically saved and analyzed as data. Users grab the images and technologies by which they are grabbed in return. Sites aim to grab their users while users grab video clips, share and circulate them, and as the content continues to grab new users and hold old ones in their clasp. That which grabs captures attention through instances of resonance that can be weak or strong, momentary or enduring. Depending on the qualities of register involved, users may turn away from the site or application, move even closer to it, or blink in confused disbelief. Easy, and optimally vast, circulation is pivotal to the profit mechanisms of social media following the imperative, “if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead” (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013, p.  1). Spreadable media content “gains greater resonance in the culture, taking on new meanings, finding new audiences, attracting new markets, and generating new value” through acts of

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reuse, reworking, and redistribution (Jenkins, 2007). Social media content is readily spread both from one platform to another and within the same one, and the relative success of any post is easy enough to track through the shares, likes, and comments made. All kinds of campaigns, from advertising to activism, aim at virality where content – hashtags, posts, images, video clips, animated GIFs, or something else – gains certain liveliness through its networked sharing, circulation, variation, and multiplication. Basically, ­virality is descriptive of how online content spreads across platforms and geographical terrains in ways that are not for any single individual or group to plan, to control, or to achieve. In the optimized visibility, attention, spread, reach, and volume of redistribution that virality entails, it remains something of a ubiquitous goal. Virality, in short, speaks of success within the attention economy of social media. A viral image or video gaining such liveliness is generally one single file – one thing – yet, following Limor Shifman’s (2012) typology, it can be part of a meme. Shifman defines memes first, as a group or collection of texts that share common characteristics of content, form, or stance. Second, memes have been created with awareness of each other (in other words, they are markedly intertextual). Third and perhaps self-evidently, memes are circulated, imitated, and transformed through online platforms. While most memetic content remains relatively dead as uploads that hardly no one clicks on, shares, or likes, some of it gains virality in the speed in which it gets picked up and in the scales that it spreads. Here, networked media function not merely as passive platforms or instruments for the distribution of man-made content but as crucial to how such content emerges, to how it is encountered and responded to, to how it materializes on different devices, screens, apps, and sites across physical distances, in how it becomes sensible, and possibly resonates. The networks that provide viral content with its semblance of liveliness are comprised of actors both human and not, and it is only within this ecology that memes can emerge and prosper. Meme, then, is a multiplicity that emerges and multiplies in resonant networks. Like most of contemporary pornography or the #MeToo movement, meme culture is part and parcel of online attention economy living off on spreadability (see Crogan & Kinsley, 2012; Webster, 2014). Users upload files that are then discussed and commented upon, spread, and redistributed as mash-ups and other remixes. In order to inspire circulation, files need to be somehow sticky. In the context of online attention economy, sticky content is that which grabs users “by the eyeballs” (Dery, 2007, p. 135), makes their distracted movements across sites and apps to momentarily come to a halt and encourages further engagement. This is explicitly the key aim of socalled clickbaits that feed, and live off, Facebook and Twitter traffic generated through eye-catching headlines and visuals promising affective jolts, shivers of amusement, interest, and fascination. The central role of affective

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intensities applies equally to fake news as it does to memes or viral activist campaigns. Similarly to Tony Sampson (2012, p. 14), I frame virality and stickiness in terms of affectivity, which he identifies as “mesmeric fascinations, passionate interests and joyful encounters”. I would nevertheless add that the registers of dismay, disgust, anger, and outrage may just as well play a key role in how people engage with online content and set in viral circulation of varying lengths and speeds. Outrage alone involves considerable capacity to set bodies into motion, as the virality of the #MeToo movement well illustrates.

Qualities of encounter The stickiness and circulation of online content to the point of it growing viral can, following Sara Ahmed (2004), be understood as intimately connected to the creation of affective value. For Ahmed (2004, p. 41), who builds loosely on Marx’s theory of capital, affective value increases, or ­accumulates, through the circulation of objects and signs. As pointed out above, from the perspective of social media platforms, content that grabs is valuable in its stickiness that makes users pay attention and engage. Links and sites that are sticky in the sense of attracting both new and returning users can be seen as sticky also in the sense discussed by Ahmed – that is, as layered with affect. As an image, a hashtag, or a video clip circulates on social media and evokes novel shares and variations, it increases in affective value and stickiness that then helps to capture the attention of new users. Without such circulation and variation, stickiness may fade fast and its ­affective intensities evaporate: resonance, after all, comes in different speeds and scales. The qualities of resonance alter across different encounters, just as they do among different subjects interfacing with the same content. Some content flows by, some remains inaccessible or uninteresting, while yet other grows magnetic with affective intensity. Viral content can circulate with considerable tenacity or disappear after brief visibility. The online resource site “Know Your Meme” alone encapsulates the constant circulation of microevents in its ever expanding, descriptive accounts of memes past and present. Memes can be funny, shocking, offensive, disgusting, odd, plain silly, or merely peculiar, but they may equally involve degrees of social commentary and criticism. In other words, politics, titillation, ambivalence, and pleasure are not mutually exclusive but rather strands in the horizontal texture of social media traffic. This horizontality corresponds with the intermeshing of positive, negative, and ambivalent affective qualities of varying intensity. Memes operate centrally through humor that is not necessarily benign, kind, separable from irony and satire – or from misogyny and racism, given

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the degree to which these run rife across all kinds of online cultures from the markedly geeky to the exclusively political (see Highfield, 2016, pp.  17–18; Phillips, 2015, pp. 96–97; Roberts, 2016, p. 151). The edge necessary for online content to grab attention and to invite comments, likes, shares, and modifications owes to the affective intensities it engenders, whether these are sensed as pleasant, offensive, or blatantly disturbing. In other words, the question is one of resonance, dissonance, and myriad amalgamations thereof. The range of affective intensities involved, combined with the multimodality of the content shared, makes it possible to expand Papacharissi’s discussion of affective publics as primary textual formations of public storytelling. Memes operating with image and text, often making use of ready-made templates, reaction GIFs generated from video clips, similarly to emojis used for displaying sentiment, connect to textual communication such as tweets, and possibly expand the exchanges toward unpredictable directions. Memes can fuel political campaigns and, in doing so, contribute to their viral appeal. But memes may just as well gain stickiness from undermining, questioning, or mocking such campaigns. Most of the memes connected to the markedly non-humorous #MeToo movement are political in their tone and many have been focused on highlighting the camaraderie between Hilary Clinton and Harvey Weinstein, the film producer whose long-term habit of sexually harassing younger female actors was made public in the autumn of 2017, marking the beginning of the hashtag public. Some memes mock the women speaking out and question their motives and the veracity of their accounts with what appears to be a general rightwing, anti-feminist agenda. Other memes connect Weinstein with Bill Clinton and the several accusations of harassment squared against him while yet others focus on mocking Weinstein’s physical appearance and unpalatable behavior. Visual memes comment on the virality of #MeToo but do not necessarily lend their support to the movement’s aims, goals, or key spokespeople. Online exchanges allow for affective resonance to connect bodies toward collective action, yet this is hardly automatically or generally the case. The trajectories of movement and action that these bodies can take are notably diverse, as rife with tension. And, as #MeToo memes indicate, conflict never looms far away in online communication. In instances of resonance, the representational and material properties of social media content meet the layered, personal, and corporeal histories of the viewing subject. In the context of online pornography, resonance connects to sexual preferences, orientations, fantasies, traumas, embodied memories, and cultural imageries of all kinds. Viral social media content and memes tend to operate with intertextual references and subcultural connotations. The affective rushes and jolts they give rise to are likely to clash with one another and to resist being pinned down into clearly distinct categories. Meanwhile, their temporality is often attached to current events, ranging from the fleetingly instantaneous to the stuff that grabs, lingers,

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and reverberates for some time to come. In his study of the micro-blogging service, Tumblr, Alexander Cho (2015, p. 44) deploys the notion of reverb to describe how “affect channels and circulates in social media environments”. As an extension of resonance, reverb allows for understanding “how intensity interacts with refrain over time and as a function of repetition” (Cho, 2015, p. 53, emphasis in the original). Instances of resonance render things interesting, desirable, and important while their reverberation affords them with temporal extension. Circulation of social media content evokes specific kinds of networked resonance that contribute to its affective stickiness, the intensities of which grow, linger, and fade away at varying speeds as user attention and interest perpetually circulates, moves, shifts, and relocates. Without resonance, connections fail to be formed; no stickiness accrues; no bodies are affecting or being affected by one another; and no affective intensity of the kind necessary for mobilizing collective action, online or offline, emerges. Without affective resonance of some kind, things simply do not matter – and without reverb, attachments to them remain faint, fleeting, and momentary.

References Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Baym, N. (2000). Tune in, log on: Soap, fandom, and online community. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Berlant, L. (2015). Structures of unfeeling: Mysterious skin. International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 28(3), 191–213. Cho, A. (2015). Queer reverb: Tumblr, affect, time. In K. Hillis, S. Paasonen, & M. Petit (Eds.), Networked affect (pp. 33–58). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Coté, M., & Pybus, J. (2007). Learning to immaterial labour 2.0: MySpace and ­social networks. Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, 7(1), 88–106. Crogan, P., & Kinsley, S. (2012). Paying attention: Towards a critique of the attention economy. Culture Machine, 13, 1–29. Retrieved from http://culturemachine. net/index.php/cm/article/view/463/482 Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Beyond boredom and anxiety: Experiencing flow in work and play (25th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Dean, J. (2010). Blog theory: Feedback and capture in the circuits of the drive. ­Cambridge: Polity. Dery, M. (2007). Paradise lust: Pornotopia meets the culture wars. In K. Jacobs, M. Janssen, & M. Pasquinelli (Eds.), C’lick me: A netporn studies reader (pp. ­125–148). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.Donath, J., & Boyd, D. (2004). Public displays of connection. BT Technology Journal, 22(4), 71–82. Erlmann, V. (2010). Reason and resonance: A history of modern aurality. New York: Zone Books. Goddard, M., Halligan, B., & Hegarty, P. (Eds.). (2012). Reverberations: The philosophy, aesthetics and politics of noise. London: Continuum.

Resonant networks  61 Goodstein, E. S. (2005). Experience without qualities: Boredom and modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Highfield, T. (2016). Social media and everyday politics. Cambridge: Polity. Illouz, E. (2014). Hard-core romance: “Fifty shades of grey,” best-sellers, and society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Jenkins, H. (2007, April 24). Slash me, mash me, spread me… Confessions of an Aca/Fan. Retrieved from: http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/04/slash_me_mash_ me_but_please_sp.html Jenkins, H., Ford, S., & Green, J. (2013). Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning in a networked culture. New York: New York University Press. Joseph, M. (2002). Against the romance of community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Karatzogianni, A., & Kuntsman, S. (Eds.). (2012). Digital cultures and the politics of emotion: Feelings, affect and technological change. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kuntsman, A. (2007). Belonging through violence: Flaming, erasure, and performativity in queer migrant community. In K. O’Riordan & D. J. Phillips (Eds.), Queer online: Media, technology & sexuality (pp. 101–120). New York: Peter Lang. Massumi, B. (2015). The politics of affect. Cambridge: Polity. Paasonen, S. (2011). Carnal resonance: Affect and online pornography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Paasonen, S. (2015). A midsummer’s bonfire: Affective intensities of online debate. In K. Hillis, S. Paasonen, & M. Petit (Eds.), Networked affect (pp. 27–42). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Paasonen, S. (2018). Affect, data, manipulation and price in social media. Distinktion: Journal of social theory 19(2), 214–229. Paasonen, S., Hillis, K., & Petit, M. (2015). Networks of transmission: Intensity, sensation, value. In K. Hillis, S. Paasonen, & M. Petit (Eds.), Networked affect (pp. 1–24). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Papacharissi, Z. (2016). Affective publics and structures of storytelling: Sentiment, events and mediality. Information, Communication & Society, 19(3), 307–324. Petit, M. (2015). Digital disaffect: Teaching through screens. In K. Hillis, S. Paasonen, & M. Petit (Eds.), Networked affect (pp. 169–183). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Phillips, W. (2015). This is why we can’t have nice things: Mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Protevi, J. (2009). Political affect: Connecting the social and the somatic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual community: Finding connection in a computerized world. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Roberts, S.T. (2016). Commercial content moderation: Digital laborers’ dirty work. In S. U. Noble & B. M. Tynes (Eds.), The intersectional Internet: Race, sex, class, and culture online (pp. 147–160). New York: Peter Lang. Sampson, T. (2012). Virality: Contagion theory in the age of networks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

62  Susanna Paasonen Senft, T.M. (2008). CamGirls: Celebrity & community in the age of social networks. New York: Peter Lang. Shifman, L. (2012). An anatomy of a YouTube meme. New Media & Society, 14(2), 187–203. Spinoza, B. (1992). The ethics, treatise on the emendation of the intellect and selected letters. In S. Feldman (Ed.), S. Shirley (Trans.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Sundén, J. (2003). Material virtualities: Approaching online textual embodiment. New York: Peter Lang. Terranova, T. (2004). Network culture: Politics of the information age. London: Pluto Press. van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Webster, J.G. (2014). The marketplace of attention: How audiences take shape in a digital age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 5

The sentimental contract Ambivalences of affective politics and publics Brigitte Bargetz

Recently, affective politics have gained momentum through the so-called affective turn (c.f. Bargetz & Sauer, 2015; Clough & Halley, 2007; Koivunen, 2010). This interest in affect, however, is not only an academic endeavor but also resonates in different and nuanced ways within the realm of politics itself.1 It is funny that hardly anyone advocates for thinking these days. That all of us, young and old, are always only addressed through our feelings. And these are always void of politics. Whenever we are supposed to feel, we are left with depoliticization, literally with the sound of politics being flushed down the toilet. Depoliticization is gaining momentum and producing monstrosities – with Brexit being its most fantastical to date. (Detje, 2016, author’s translation) Since the vote on Brexit, Trump’s victory at the polls, and his “regime of alternative facts”, we have witnessed the emergence of a vibrant yet worried debate about the risks and dangers of affective politics. It is said that a post-truth era has begun where feelings rather than facts have come to dominate politics, especially – though not exclusively – in right-wing populism. “Even a monkey knows: feelings ≠ facts” is a caption to an image posted on Facebook during the 2017 March for Science in London, showing a (stuffed animal) monkey holding a banner with this slogan. As a mass demonstration that took place in over 600 cities worldwide, the March for Science was undoubtedly an impressive anti-right-wing populist move against the restriction and discreditation of science. Yet, what does appealing to “facts” and “truth” actually mean? Have we now come to dwell in a new space of resonance where “feelings trump facts” (Ioanide, 2015)? How might we understand the nostalgia for a past where truth and reason were

1 I would like to thank Claudia Brunner for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter and Erika Doucette for her careful English proof-reading.

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(seemingly) predominant? What does this longing for reason and rationality imply, when considering the feminist and postcolonial insight that what has historically been framed as political reason is also a product of power relations and has been instrumental to a differential “distribution of emotions” (Bargetz, 2015, p. 580)? To fear and to critique the decline of publics and politics with the irruption of the affective is not exactly as new. In the 1970s, Richard Sennett and Eva Illouz almost 30 years later addressed, albeit differently, a loss of certain political qualities of the public. Richard Sennett (1977) speaks of the “tyranny of intimacy” that disintegrates the public and evokes what he calls the “fall of public man”. Eva Illouz (2007) criticizes the prevalence of a therapeutic culture that transforms both the public and the private. She argues that the simultaneous emotionalization of the economy and the rationalization of the intimate create a new form of capitalism that she calls “emotional capitalism”. In this article, I take up their concern with affective publics and politics yet with a different theoretical trajectory. In the late 1990s, Lauren Berlant contests the “notion and norm of political rationality as the core practice of democracy in the United States” (2005, p.  47) in both conceptual and historical terms. Alternatively, she acknowledges “a scene for the orchestration of public feelings – of the public’s feelings, of feelings in public, of politics as a scene of emotional contestation” (Berlant, 2005, p. 47). Speaking of “the epistemology of state emotion”, Berlant identifies a significant “rhetorical affectivity” (2005, p.  46) of the conservative Bush administration at the time, which, however, is belonging to a longer U.S. history. The “right-wing government”, she claims, has appropriated people’s feelings of being overwhelmed and paralyzed and tried to “represent the public in a moral-emotional way, bracketing representation of the more socially conflictual debates about who deserves what resources” (Berlant, 2005, p. 73). Emphasizing the power of moralizing politics, Berlant’s considerations resonate with Stuart Hall’s (1979) reading that moral panics aided the populist mobilization in Great Britain in the 1970s and their acceptance of the move toward “authoritarian populism”. Following Berlant, I will engage with affective politics in this chapter and offer insights into how political power, and more specifically state power, operates. In order to do so, I develop the figure of the sentimental contract in reference to Berlant’s longstanding work on national sentimentality, which she employs in her analysis and critique of liberalism. Interrogating a merely rational understanding of publics and politics, she explores instead how the nation also operates as an affective public. I would like to expand these insights by rereading them through the lens of political theory, which leads me to develop the figure of the sentimental contract. While Berlant used this term at some points too (Berlant, 2000, pp. 35, 44) to bring home her critique of the liberal state and certain principles of liberalism, she never fleshed it out to create a broader political concept.

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My interest in the sentimental contract here, however, is neither to defend nor to preserve a contractarian approach. I draw on the notion of the contract because it is one of liberal theory’s main concepts and serves as an ideological anchor point for the Western modern nation-state. Elaborating on the figure of the sentimental contract, I aim to develop a multilayered framework for theorizing (neo-)liberalism2 in terms of affect and emotion. Such an analysis and critique of the affective dynamics of (neo-)liberalism seems urgent in order to better understand the historical present. Moreover, it can help to contest and prevent an overly simplified demand to return to rationality, while maintaining the capacity to critique (neo-)liberalism, also in its contemporary modes. For unfolding my understanding of the sentimental contract3 as a way to theorize affective publics and politics, I begin by contextualizing this figure within two interrelated debates: the feminist critique of the public/private dichotomy as well as various understandings of affective publics. I continue with a brief elaboration on some critiques of the social contract in order to clarify my reference to the contract, before delineating, in the following, three aspects of the figure of the sentimental contract. I conclude by sounding out some theoretical and political impacts of this figure and how the sentimental contract may help us to better grasp affective publics and politics. In this contribution, I refer to a broad understanding of affect and emotion without drawing a sharp distinction, as for instance, Brian Massumi (1995) suggests. In line with a queer feminist strand of affect theory (c.f. Ahmed, 2004; Berlant, 1997, 2008; Cvetkovich, 2012), I understand feelings, affect, and emotion as deeply imbricated in the political and social and emphasize at the same time bodily, psychic, and cognitive dimensions.

Affective publics and politics The feminist critique of the public/private dichotomy Addressing national sentimentality, Berlant maps out the formation of national feeling structures in the United States since the 19th century, when a new form of “affective space” gained significance: “a space of attachment and identification that is not saturated merely by ideological or cognitive content but is also an important sustainer of people’s desires for ­reciprocity with the world” (Berlant, 2008, p. x). Understanding the public as being

2 I use the notion of (neo-)liberalism in order to emphasize the relation between liberalism and neoliberalism in terms of sentimental politics. However, I cannot elaborate here in more detail on the particular differences. 3 I have been working on the figure of the sentimental contract for quite some time, which is also why some of my considerations have already been discussed and presented elsewhere (c.f. Bargetz, 2014, 2018). While I have highlighted four dimensions of this figure in a recent publication in German (Bargetz, 2018), in the following I have reworked my understanding, emphasizing instead three dimensions.

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fabricated through bonds and relationalities corresponds to a long history of feminist debates that have criticized the public/private dichotomy (c.f. ­Elshtain, 1981; Pateman, 1983; Prokhovnik, 1999; Sauer, 2001). In this vein, Birgit Sauer proposes the notion of a “liberal dispositive of separation” (2001, p. 184, author’s translation) to describe the dichotomies of public versus private and of politics versus feeling, anchored in the political institutions of Western modernity and a liberal understanding of the state. In the course of Western Enlightenment, politics have been established as a rational, masculine mode of agency within a de-emotionalized public sphere and as a counterpoint to the emotional and irrational feminine private sphere. However, feminist and postcolonial research has identified this dichotomy as both a political construct and a powerful political instrument for producing and perpetuating Western modern power relations. On the one hand, the segregation and hierarchization of the two spheres, legitimated by (supposedly) affective differences among other things, has provided the condition and justification for a bourgeois, white, and masculine political realm and has served to mobilize and secure the patriarchal capitalist state (Sauer, 1999). In this sense, affect and emotions indicate not only a gendered but also a racialized and class demarcation line of Western capitalist politics. The nation-state’s colonial politics has also placed attributes of emotionality, irrationality, and passivity onto the colonized “others” and used them as grounds to legitimize colonialism and the state’s exploitation and exclusion of colonized “others” (c.f. McClintock, 1995). These mechanisms of affective defamation furthermore function by superimposing such attributions, when, for instance, “feminization” or “hypermasculinization” become criteria for racialization. On the other hand, feminist and postcolonial research has also identified the dichotomy as something of a fiction by unveiling the state’s emotions in the past and present (c.f. Fassin et al, 2015; Fortier, 2010; Navaro-Yashin, 2012; Sauer & Penz, 2017; Stoler, 2004) – as I also explore further below. In this vein, Ann Stoler questions the assumption that reason is the “hallmark of the colonial” (2004, p. 4). Because Dutch colonial politics of the 19th century were less invested in a “rule of reason” (Stoler, 2004, p. 4) than in the “management” of “affective states”, in “assessing appropriate sentiments” and in “fashioning techniques of affective control” (Stoler, 2004, p. 5). There was, as she emphasizes, a “discursive density around issues of sentiments and their subversive tendencies, around ‘private’ feelings, ‘public moods,’ and their political consequences, around the racial distribution of sensibilities, around assessments of affective dispositions and their beneficent and dangerous political effects” (Stoler, 2004, p. 4f.). Affective publics The feminist critique not only problematizes the hierarchical and politicized separation of the public and the private but also highlights the relations and connections between the two. For Regina Becker-Schmidt, dichotomies

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function as “opposites” that create distance and simultaneously render “mutual dependencies […] invisible” (1998, p. 101, author’s translation). This mode of interrelation is also brought forward in Berlant’s work and especially in her concept of national sentimentality. It is manifest in her notion of an “intimate public” (Berlant, 2008, p. viii), with which she urges us to think beyond two separate and separable spheres. Berlant has been part of the Public Feelings Project, a group of critical academics, activists, and artists formed in 2001 that sought to capture liberalism and neoliberalism in their affective forms and to formulate a critique of these political variations of affect (Cvetkovich, 2007, p. 465). The slogan “Depressed? It might be political”, designed by Feel Tank Chicago – a “cell” (Cvetkovich, 2007, p. 460) of the project founded among others by Berlant – relays a continuation and extension of the feminist debates that coined the slogan “The personal is political!” (see also Cvetkovich, this volume). However, emphasizing affective politics in this way does not mean uncritically embracing affect in terms of the political and thereby running the risk of romanticizing affective publics and politics. Rather, the aim is to expand the scope of analysis to better grasp the power of feelings both within power relations and as an affective force and agency. Affect is neither good nor bad, but a mode of orientation and relationality. Just as publics and politics are affectively mediated, affect and feelings are also negotiated in publics and politics. Berlant refers to the “citizen of liveness”4 who “is moved rather than moving” by electronically mediated events (2005, p. 49). While this notion should stress the paradoxical situation of the “privately experienced collective event” (Berlant, 2005, p. 50), a more recent work by Zizi Papacharissi discusses “affective publics” as social media’s ability to provide both a space for facilitating “political formations of affect” (2015, p. 7) and political mobilizing. She argues that the stories relayed on media platforms like Twitter potentially create forms of collectivity and belonging and thus also contribute to “mediat[ing] the feeling of democracy” (Papacharissi, 2015, p. 32) (see also Paasonen, this volume). Already in the early 2000s, Ann Cvetkovich and Ann Pellegrini put forth the notion of “public sentiments” (2003, p. 1) in an effort to challenge the idea that affect and feelings are merely private. Doing so they suggested to move beyond a binary concept of public feelings as “neither inherently subversive nor inherently conservative” (Cvetkovich & Pellegrini, 2003, p. 2). Conceiving of affective publics and politics entails understanding that power relations are not only produced but also felt or affectively perceived in the temporalities of the everyday (Bargetz, 2014). Cvetkovich, for instance,

4 Berlant (2005, p. 49) explains, “Liveness shapes the consumers of mass media into a public that has become such by encountering events marked by others as making the collective experience of now, ‘now’ being a space- and time-making event deemed important as the present moment of a future history”.

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proposes a “racialised understanding of depression” (2012, p. 121) that does not place depression merely within a personal or individual framework, but as an explicitly political question and as an effect of past and present power relations. Taking hegemonic feeling structures into account, Paula Ioanide (2015, p. 66), too, considers everyday practices as bearing traces of the past and as embodied actions of history. Referring to a case of sexualized police brutality against a Haitian man in New York in the late 1990s, she shows how histories of racialized masculine oppression and exploitation are rearticulated in this case of state violence. The case illustrates how political affect is woven into the invisible fabric of the everyday and how it translates and rearticulates past and present social hierarchies and differences. Affective states, or what I would call “feeling politics” (Bargetz, 2014, p. 292), express not only present but also past relations of power and domination. Affects articulate a connection between everyday feelings in the present and violent relations in the past – at time, even if one has not experienced them personally. While feminist scholarship has emphasized that the personal is political since it is both a space and an expression of power relations, theorizing affect as traces of the past, here, not only means to transcend the personal, but also to reach beyond the present (Bargetz, 2014). To consider affective publics and politics as entangled rather than as separate entities also indicates going beyond a merely rational understanding of the political: both in terms of disembodied publics and an instrumental idea of affect (Gould, 2009). Reminiscent of Berlant’s emphasis on the corporeal affective through the notion of “visceral politics” (Berlant, 2005, p. 47), contemporary affect studies highlight politics’ bodily dimensions (Hynes & Sharpe, 2009). Whether it be within social movements’ collective mobilization of “passionate politics” for organizing (Hennessy, 2013) or “moving politics” (Gould, 2009), the “love of the commons” (Hardt & Negri, 2009; Hennessy, 2013) or the “passionate politics” of affective identifications with political parties (Mouffe, 2005), scholars have shown that portrayals of publics and politics that disregard affective dynamics and stick to so-called rational politics can only ever provide partial and inadequate insights into their functioning. As Michael Hardt remarks, political projects are “not only (and not even primarily) a matter of reason and interests but instead an engagement with our power to be affected in all its messiness and, sometimes, its ugliness” (2015, p. 222).

The orchestration of the public: the social contract For criticizing the liberal dichotomy of public/private and thinking politics beyond reason and rationality, the feminist critique of the social contract has been crucial. Obviously, I refer to the social contract and to the wellknown political idea of early Western modernity most prominently advocated by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques

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Rousseau. The social contract is an imaginary contract whereby individuals transfer part of their power to a sovereign entity in exchange for protection. Feminist scholars, most notably Carole Pateman (1983, 1988), have convincingly shown that the social contract is a “sexual contract” (Pateman, 1988) as well as a “heterosexual contract” (Wittig, 1991). The social contract not only regulates the political domination of men over women, it also defines heterosexual desire and sexual difference by inscribing both sexes “as biological truth within the body” (Preciado, 2003, p.  10, author’s translation). In addition, the social contract is also a “racial contract”, as Charles W.  Mills (1997) has outlined. The premise of a racial contract paved the way for a fundamental, maybe even foundational contradiction of Western modern democracy: namely that the emerging Western democratic state is based upon equal rights, autonomy, and freedom while at the same time being a capitalist and colonial state that relies on expropriation, massacres, and subjugation through slavery. The social contract ensures both the transfer of an individual’s power to the state and its subjugation under state rule. In this vein, Gabriele Wilde aptly states: The liberal illusion that all citizens have a fundamental interest in this contract, be it out of self-preservation and the desire for security, for wealth and protection of property, or equal treatment and justice, was at least as important in constituting the state and building civil societies as it glosses over the truth with its modern theories of the contract, that is, thereby justifying state rule and subjugating its citizens under state rule. (Wilde, 2009, p. 31, author’s translation) Even more, the Western modern social contract warrants and legitimizes the subordination of different subalterns. While it has been built upon the purpose of establishing equality, critiques show that this idea is by no means neutral, objective, or universal but is rather shaped by interlocking modes of masculinism, sexism, racism, and classism. Regardless of its manifold nuances, the social contract is also an “emotional contract” (Sauer, 1999, p. 214, author’s translation), even in contradictory ways: reason as opposed to emotion has been deemed both the basis for the social contract’s legitimacy and something of a fiction. The contract’s “control of emotions” (Sauer, 1999, p. 214, author’s translation) not only excludes emotions from politics but also designates very specific emotions as the foundations of political institutions. In this vein, “envy, aggression and fear” have become equally important as “comradeship” as a “typically masculine form of emotional attachment within politics” (Sauer, 1999, p. 214, author’s translation). Likewise, the Western modern nation-state is fundamentally grounded in emotions, since the social contract promises to overcome the Hobbesian

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fear of everyone engaging in a war against everyone. In this sense, Albert O. Hirschman deems the social contract as a response of a “somber view of human nature and of a general belief that the passions are dangerous and destructive” (1997, p. 27) which were prevalent in the 17th century and that neither a moralizing philosophy nor religion were able to restrain. Instead, a strategy he calls the “countervailing strategy” (Hirschman, 1997, p. 31) has gained importance, which is found in the social contract too. It entails the idea that some passions, “such as the aggressive pursuit of riches, glory, and dominion”, (Hirschman, 1997, p. 31) can be neutralized by other passions, such as the fear of death. This conception of “countervailing passions” (Hirschman, 1997, p. 41) has further unfolded and solidified in a time when positive passions have been defined as interests and as the opposite to negative ­passions. Contrasting good interests with bad emotions not only guides the state-forming gendered, heteronormative, racialized, and classed public/private dichotomy, it also fashions and aides in establishing the liberal and economically crucial notion of interest. From this perspective, the social contract also lays an emotional basis for the emergence of capitalism. Or, as the subtitle to Hirschman’s book tells, “political arguments for capitalism before its triumph” also rest upon (adapted) passions. Certainly, the legitimacy and constitution of current liberal states are no longer in need of an imaginary social contract, as Wendy Brown (1993) convincingly argued in the 1990s. In her more recent work she nevertheless emphasizes that the social contract remains a powerful tool for Western modern liberal societies, because it has remained “ideologically and discursively constitutive” (Brown, 2010, p. 109). My proposal to take up Berlant’s notion of national sentimentality to elaborate on a figure that I call the sentimental contract closely follows Brown’s line of argument. I neither assume a contractarian approach nor am I looking for (new) social contracts of the present.5 Rather, I consider the sentimental contract as a critical figure since the social contract is a key notion in liberalism and since a critique of the affective modes of (neo-)liberalism is also at the core of Berlant’s concept of national sentimentality. Apart from this, the figure of the sentimental contract enables the emphasis to be placed on a state-theoretical perspective. In referring to sentimentality, I am therefore less concerned with the “homo sentimentalis”, which Eva Illouz uses in creating a striking insight into a new, therapeutic “emotional capitalism” (2007). While Illouz’s orientation toward sentimentality aims at a critique of capitalism, the figure of the

5 C.f. Mills’s (1997) analysis of the social contract as a potentially normative reference point for the formation of an antiracist society; Preciado’s (2003) ironic appropriation of the contract as a contrasexual contract that seeks to resolve heteronormative privileges and power relations; Pateman’s (1988) discussion of sexual contracts, or Angela McRobbie’s (2009) more recent diagnosis of a postfeminist sexual contract which she considers as a containment of feminist demands.

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sentimental contract seeks to bring forth both a critique of the nation-state and of capitalism. As Hirschman has convincingly pointed out, state and capitalism link to repressed and intensified passions.

The sentimental contract In the following, these critiques of the social contract serve as a framework for my rereading of Berlant’s concept of national sentimentality with regard to three aspects: (1) to participation and citizenship, (2) the question of the liberal subject, and (3) the foundations of the political. Par ticipation and citizenship: politics of pain With the figure of the sentimental contract I, first, emphasize a specific politics of pain. Assessing an “unfinished business of sentimentality”, B ­ erlant (2008) discusses the political and legal problems involved in rendering pain a core political mode. For Berlant, national sentimentality exists when painful feelings, suffering, and trauma become crucial principles for the nation-state, and more explicitly, citizenship, as she concludes is true for the United States from the mid-19th century onward. In her view, a “trumping power of suffering stories” (Berlant, 2000, p. 34) became established in U.S. history, which rendered suffering the “true core of national collectivity” (Berlant, 1999, p.  53) and made struggles for participation subject to the condition of having experienced injuries. “[A]bolition and suffrage”, she claims, have worked “to establish the enslaved Other as someone with subjectivity”, who was not primarily defined “as someone who thinks or works, but as someone who has endured violence intimately” (Berlant, 2000, p. 34). Such politics of pain have also become apparent in the Supreme Court’s stance on abortion in the second half of the 20th century. Here, the right to abortion is not considered the right to one’s own body but is traced back to the “suffering” and “undue burden” of “heterosexual femininity” (Berlant, 2000, p. 40). Sentimental politics of suffering shapes how some subjects are legally subject to the state but also people’s struggles for participation and citizenship, thereby creating, as Berlant criticizes, a “universalization of pain” as “a new pathway to citizenship” (2005, p. 51). In particular, she (2000, p. 41) challenges the “legal emergence” of a politics of trauma that has been promoted by a “group of activists from within (mainly academic) legal studies who speak from feminist, gay and lesbian, anti-racist, and anti-exploitation movements”; here “subaltern pain” is taken as quasi “universally intelligible” in order to make pain count politically for demanding legal reparation. Without generally dismissing pain as political mode, Berlant takes up Wendy Brown’s insights when she argues that such politics risk subordinating other forms of demanding political rights to a regime of pain. Or, as Sara Ahmed (2004, p. 32) terms it following Brown, taking pain and suffering as a

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premise for political rights risks fetishizing the wound. Underscoring suffering might lead to victimization, making suffering equated with subalternity. Thus, on the one hand, a politics of suffering enforces a mode of passivity which subordinates self-determination to a politics of victimization; on the other hand, such politics ties agency to victimhood and makes suffering the favored mode of political agency. In order to sustain this mode of agency, constantly renewing this victimhood is needed. Finally, such “economies of suffering” (Berlant, 2008, p. 12) may split up those in marginalized positions who then risk finding themselves immersed in struggles over a “hierarchy of oppressions” (Lorde, 1983, p. 9) or an “oppression Olympics” (Martínez, 1998, p. 5). Or, as Berlant writes, it enforces “to divide further dominated populations by inciting competitions over whose lives have been more excluded from the ‘happiness’ that is constitutionally promised by national life” (2000, p. 32). Following Jack Halberstam (2014), one could also call this a “politics of the aggrieved”. Such politics not only reduces structural differences to hurt feelings through a rhetoric of suffering and trauma, but also contributes to dividing up political allies into hierarchies of pain. The liberal subject: politics of guilt Speaking of a sentimental contract, second, I highlight a political mode of affective recognition and individualization. Berlant’s elaborations on national sentimentality challenge a politics that functions as a moral safeguard mechanism for privileged individuals under the guise of empathy. I was sympathetic to the cultural politics of pain in the United States until I felt the violence of its sentimentality: presented as a collective refusal to bear any longer a population’s collective suffering, public sentimentality is too often a defensive response by people who identify with privilege, yet fear they will be exposed as immoral by their tacit sanction of a particular structural violence that benefits them. (Berlant, 2000, p. 33) This is a politics of empathy which is both individualizing and a mode of violence. I call this a defensive, self-centered politics of guilt, taking my cue from Audre Lorde (1984). Lorde deems guilt a particular, inward-oriented feeling and “another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication” (1984, p. 130). By mainly pointing to the person itself, to “one’s own actions or lack of action” (Lorde, 1984, p. 130), guilt does not suggest changing social power relations and is ultimately unsuitable for emancipatory politics. I argue that the sentimental contract indicates such a politics of guilt which fuels risks of individualization and desolidarization. This is also the case when Berlant cautions us about scenarios whereby

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the privileged appropriate pain: “National sentimentality operates when relatively privileged citizens are exposed to the suffering of their intimate Others, so that to be virtuous requires feeling the pain of flawed or denied citizenship as their own pain” (Berlant, 2000, p. 35). When the privileged take on the pain of others as their own, they divert the attention away from those they empathize with and toward their own feelings. Consequently, they ignore or even silence and erase the subjects suffering, while keeping their own supremacy and privilege intact. In turn, the empathy from the privileged person receives more attention than the explicit suffering of those affected. This mode of sentimental politics closely connects to Berlant’s critique of replacing the question of social transformation with a “passive and vague civic ideal of compassion” (Berlant, 2008, p. 41), thereby encouraging the view that “a nation can best be built across fields of social difference through channels of affective identification and empathy” (Berlant, 2000, p.  34). Chandan Reddy’s expression of “humanizing tears” (2012, p.  279) is elucidating here. It helps to analytically grasp the problematic mode of articulating compassion as a way of “becoming human”. Such politics promote a passivating politics, an affective politics of recognizing differences and inequalities – be it through experiencing compassion in front of the television or through articulating commitment and solidarity via digital media. As such, these acts can become a mere “fantasy of virtual participation” (Nyong’o, 2012, p.  40). This happens, as Tavia Nyong’o argues, when the “transmission of affects” (2012, p. 46) is favored over achieving the political goal of combating the structures of pain and suffering in the long term. In view of the figure of the social contract, I call these modes of individualization, depoliticization, and appropriation a politics of recognition, following Nancy Fraser (1995), or more precisely, a politics of affective recognition. I consider this a mode of affective citizenship (see also Ayata, 2019) that articulates empathy, yet without seeking political struggles through solidary or collective demands for political and socio-economic participation. At best, this mode of affective citizenship fosters patronizing discourses of rescue and help by promoting private welfare and donation or “affective remuneration” (Dowling, 2016, p. 453). Such affective politics also aid or at least contribute to legitimizing and compensating for the state’s withdrawal of social rights and the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state. At the same time, dependencies are created and affectively mobilized, for instance, by demanding the recipients of affective recognition to be grateful. Foundations of the political: politics of promises With the figure of the sentimental contract I, third, flesh out a specific politics of promises. While pain and suffering should enable access to the fabric of the nation-state, as outlined above, such politics ignores the fundamental

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inequality that not everybody has equal opportunities to publicly articulate their wounds or to be heard doing so. Rather, the nation-state enforces a “differential distribution of precarity” (Butler, 2009, p. 25) or a differential “distribution of emotions” (Bargetz, 2015, p. 580) that not only divides populations but also reaffirms privileged positions within dominant power structures. In this vein, the sentimental contract both embraces and further maintains the liberal lie, that “‘underneath’ we are all alike” (Berlant, 2008, p. 100). At the same time and despite these instances of political pain, the sentimental contract also reveals a political organization beyond pain. As ­Berlant observes, “feeling good becomes evidence of justice’s triumph” (2000, p. 35). Happiness and painlessness constitute an implicit norm within the sentimental nation-state as much as they function as the basis of the nation-state’s legitimacy and as an affective-ideological appeal through the power of promises. It is a political mode that simultaneously presupposes, establishes, and legitimizes governing (through) happiness. As Berlant describes in terms of national sentimentality, “In its traditional and political modalities, the sentimental promises that in a just world an expressive consensus would already exist about what constitutes material uplift, amelioration, emancipation, and those other horizons toward which empathy directs itself” (2008, p. 56). A picture of a national or nation-forming consensus is drawn and propagated, rendering it a supposedly coherent feel-good state that lies beyond political struggles or state violence. This is certainly a precarious consensus since it not only makes differences and relations of domination invisible but also defines consensus and political harmony as the ultimate democratic condition. In Berlant’s words, “the object of the nation-state in this light is to eradicate systemic social pain, the absence of which becomes the definition of freedom” (2000, p. 35). From a radical democratic point of view the sentimental contract nurtures a logic of “harmony” (Rancière, 1999, p. 28), an “idyllic state” of “consensus democracy” (Rancière, 1999, p 95), and thus a “postdemocratic” (Rancière, 1999, p. 144) or a “postpolitical” (Mouffe, 2005, p. 1) constellation. At the same time, the underlying painful and violent constitution of the sentimental feel-good state, also to be framed as “political pain” (Löffler, 2012, p. 221), is obscured. The politics of happiness propagated by the liberal feel-good state implies that a specific – gendered, heteronormative, racialized, and classed – nation-state as well as specific – equally gendered, heteronormative, racialized, and classed – modes of (re)-production and subjectivation both express and become part of a desirable, successful, and ultimately happy way of life. While some pain and suffering are politically recognized, the pain produced by these norms and normalizations remains unacknowledged. Such politics of harmony and consensus embody a consensus that has been violently produced, yet remains invisible within this sentimental mode. The sentimental contract is, thus, about the constitution of the liberal (nation-)state that is based on and simultaneously (re-)produces (specific)

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promises of happiness. This mode is already visible within the social contract’s yearning for a safer and more peaceful social order. Speaking of the sentimental contract can unveil a sentimental confidence, because both the promise and the underlying fear nourish and ensure the maintenance of the social order. However, as Berlant (2011) argues in her more recent work, the sentimental promise also entails a “cruel optimism”. It is cruel and exhausting because the things that seem desirable contribute to making these desires ultimately unfulfillable, or in Berlant’s words, “the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially” (2011, p. 1). Additionally, the sentimental confidence, nurtured within these politics of promises, embraces a certain political temporality. It comprises a future oriented, yet currently unrealizable hope for a “better” life. Political optimism requires a future, any future that might not be more drowning in the present. More than anything, this is the lure of the sentimental contract, the mechanism by which consent is secured to a variety of long term subordinations. (Berlant, 2000, p. 44) Within this rhetoric of promise, the change of the present is “sacrificed” for the hope of a better future. Or, as Ahmed (2010, p. 34) pointedly writes, happiness is “what would come after”. This affective force of governing (through) promises – promises of participation, belonging, well-being, prosperity, happiness, protection, and security – produces and generates consensus to specific commitments and conditions, including inequalities, as well as it keeps people attached to these fantasies.

The sentimental contract as a critical figure for theorizing affective publics and politics I take the figure of the sentimental contract to argue for theorizing affective publics and politics and to propose a specific concept that enables political theory to be reframed in affective terms.6 By acknowledging a sentimental contract, the liberal separation of politics and feeling becomes questionable. However, the figure of the sentimental contract also clarifies that while affective politics interrogate this liberal separation some of these politics may also run the risk of serving a (neo-)liberal political logic. Many of the affective dynamics I have elaborated on in this chapter discuss affect under (neo-)liberal signs. Against this background, I would like to emphasize

6 This is most certainly a U.S.-American figure since the affective politics exposed have been primarily developed within the U.S. context. However, it does not mean that the politics elaborated through the figure of the sentimental contract are necessarily limited to the United States.

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an ambivalent understanding of affective publics and politics, which helps avoid juxtaposing feelings as either emancipatory or oppressive and instead points to a non-dichotomizing politics. It is also in this sense that I understand Berlant’s claim to go beyond “trying to posit feeling as the bad opposite of something good called thinking” (2000, p. 35). Speaking of “the female complaint” (Berlant, 2008), which is also one of the titles from her trilogy on national sentimentality, she brings up the image of the mourning woman, which has had a long history until today. Using this image of the female complaint, Berlant identifies a negatively and derogatory perceived attribute without simply refusing or romanticizing it. Instead, she searches for the specific conditions of possibility embedded in these powerful gendered attributions. And it is in this vein that I argue for considering sentimentality as a political modality. This is ultimately a feminist approach: not (only or p ­ rimarily) because it discusses the affective dynamics of gender and sexuality; but because it takes sentimentality – that has often been excluded and dismissed as a gendered, racialized, and classed mode restrained to the private – ­politically into account and thus allows for a critique of androcentrism and eurocentrism. Sentimentality as an affective political mode does more than critique hegemonic gender relations. Referring to sentimentality places affective politics within the context of social critique and enables us to excavate a certain complexity of different forms of power relations as well as to describe experiences in a broader political picture. Engaging with happiness, pain, or empathy and therefore with feelings – and even more so with gendered, sexualized, racialized, and classed feelings – that are o ­ ften dismissed or merely delegitimized within political theory allows for a more complex analysis of power, not least within its (neo-)liberal modes. It contributes to the capturing of power mechanisms, political configurations, and modes of functioning that are often overlooked and can therefore also expand a political theory’s repertoire that is sensitive to power relations. As I have shown, the figure of the sentimental contract points to the affective forms of specific political power mechanisms and can help identify certain modes of (neo-)liberal politics. These modes of affective politics involve victimization, division, particularization, hierarchization, privilege, self-­assurance, paternalism, moralization, ignorance, othering, subalternization, passivation, attentism, and future orientation. While the figure of the sentimental contract allows for considering these (neo-)liberal dynamics of individualization, depoliticization, and desolidarization, it also shows the necessity to give prominence to a politics of dissent and political struggles. It helps to engage, rather than to mask, traces of power and consequently aids in imagining emancipatory politics. Taking the sentimental contract as a basis of Western modern politics enables us to unveil the mystification inherent in postdemocratic and postpolitical politics of consensus (Mouffe, 2005; Rancière, 1999). It allows consensus to be understood as an affective production and thus as an instrument for safeguarding and legitimizing hegemonic politics.

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This is also why merely referencing to reason and a politics of rational deliberation has to remain politically unsatisfactory. Such undertaking would not only ignore some important power relations but would also keep us stuck in debates on whether affects and emotions are politically good or bad, enabling or disabling, productive or dangerous. This is a limited perspective that risks universalizing and substantializing affect and emotion as well as it risks remaining within a liberal logic by politically demonizing or romanticizing them. Instead, an ambivalent perspective on affective politics and publics is capable of pointing beyond such easy oppositions and thus avoids the associated (neo-)liberal masculinist, heteronormative, racist, and classed pitfalls. Stressing the figure of the sentimental contract in terms of an ambivalent understanding of affective politics does more than simply categorizing affect as either good or bad. Such an approach allows us to understand feelings and their discursive mobilization both as embedded in power relations and as critical emancipatory forces. It is concerned with capturing affect beyond political decisiveness as a mode of both criticizing and transgressing political and theoretical boundaries (Bargetz & Sauer, 2015, p. 95). The sentimental contract connects to the queer feminist and postcolonial critique that has identified the paradoxical inclusive exclusion of feelings in politics and has problematized the political mechanisms and effects of affective politics. Feminist and postcolonial critiques have helped us to shed light on emotional ascriptions, affective de/legitimizations as well as hegemonic and marginalized sentimental scripts and their complex effects. Following the critique of dichotomies as they make dependencies and relationalities invisible, the figure of the sentimental contract aims to take affective politics into account and to consider them as aspects that generally constitute life. Therefore, it is not a question of either simply propagating or criticizing a passivating victim politics by linking the right to citizenship to the experience of injuries: neither as lack and weakness nor as grounds of patronizing interventions. Pain, sentimentality, vulnerability, anger, or empathy is not politically bad on their own, but rather constitutes modes of living. Speaking of the sentimental contract means analyzing these modes of living as specific moments of relations of power and domination. However, the extent to which politics of sentimentality are inscribed within contemporary affective politics has to be clarified depending on the specific context and ultimately decided on the basis of concrete analyses. Thus, the political theory of affect I suggest here – one that aims at grasping the complexity of publics and politics without being bound to a liberal ­understanding – has to focus on the relation between politics and feelings within historically specific affective political practices, processes, and (institutionalized) politics. It is in this sense that the figure of the sentimental contract enables affective mechanisms of the state to be taken into consideration and can therefore broaden the spectrum and understanding of contemporary, and especially affective, modalities of power.

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References Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ahmed, S. (2010). Happy objects. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 29–51). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ayata, B. (2019). Affective citizenship. In J. Slaby & C. von Scheve (Eds.), Affective societies: Key concepts (pp. 330–339). London: Routledge. Bargetz, B. (2014). Mapping affect: Challenges of (un)timely politics. In M.-L. Angerer, B. Bösel, & M. Ott (Eds.), The timing of affect (pp.  289–302). Zürich: diaphanes. Bargetz, B. (2015). The distribution of emotions: Affective politics of emancipation. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 30(3), 580–596. Bargetz, B. (2018). Der sentimentale Vertrag: Eine politische Theorie der Affekte und das unvollendete liberale Projekt. Leviathan, 46(1), 37–58. Bargetz, B., & Sauer, B. (2015). Der affective turn. Das Gefühlsdispositiv und die Trennung von öffentlich und privat. Femina Politica: Zeitschrift für feministische Politikwissenschaft, 24(1), 93–102. Becker-Schmidt, R. (1998). Trennung, Verknüpfung, Vermittlung: Zum feministischen Umgang mit Dichotomien. In G.-A. Knapp (Ed.), Kurskorrekturen: Feminismus zwischen Kritischer Theorie und Postmoderne (pp. 84–125). Frankfurt a. Main: Campus. Berlant, L. (1997). The queen of America goes to Washington City. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berlant, L. (1999). The subject of true feeling: Pain, privacy and politics. In S. ­Austin & T. R. Kearns (Eds.), Cultural pluralism, identity politics, and the law (pp. ­33–47). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Berlant, L. (2000). The subject of true feeling: Pain, privacy and politics. In S.  Ahmed, J. Kilby, C. Lury, M. McNeil, & B. Skeggs (Eds.), Transformations: Thinking through feminism (pp. 33–47). New York: Routledge. Berlant, L. (2005). The epistemology of state emotion. In A. Sarat (Ed.), Dissent in dangerous times (pp. 46–78). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Berlant, L. (2008). The female complaint: The unfinished business of sentimentality in American culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brown, W. (1993). Wounded attachments. Political Theory, 21(3), 390–410. Brown, W. (2010). Walled states, waning sovereignty. New York: Zone Books. Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war: When is life grievable? London: Verso. Clough, P. T., & Halley, J. (Eds.). (2007). The affective turn: Theorizing the social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cvetkovich, A. (2007). Public feelings. South Atlantic Quarterly, 106(3), 459–468. Cvetkovich, A. (2012). Depression: A public feeling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cvetkovich, A., & Pellegrini, A. (2003). Introduction: Public sentiments. The Scholar and Feminist Online, 2(1). Retrieved from http://sfonline.barnard.edu/ps/ printint.htm Detje, R. (2016, June 28). Wollt ihr ewig fühlen? Die Zeit. Retrieved from http:// www.zeit.de/kultur/2016-06/brexit-jugend-protest-internet-polemik

The sentimental contract  79 Dowling, E. (2016). Valorised but not valued? Affective remuneration, social reproduction and feminist politics beyond the crisis. British Politics, 11(4), 452–468. Elshtain, J. B. (1981). Public man, private woman: Women in social and political thought. Oxford: Martin Robertson. Fassin, D., with Y. Bouagga, I. Coutant, J.-S. Eideliman, F. Fernandez, N. Fischer, C. Kobelinsky, C. Makaremi, S. Mazouz, & S. Roux (2015). At the heart of the state: The moral world of institutions. London: Pluto Press. Fortier, A.-M. (2010). Proximity by design? Affective citizenship and the management of unease. Citizenship Studies, 14(1), 17–30. Fraser, N. (1995). From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a ‘post-socialist’ age. New Left Review, 1(212), 68–93. Gould, D. B. (2009). Moving politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s fight against AIDS. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Halberstam, J. (2014). Triggering me, triggering you: Making up is hard to do. Bully Bloggers. Retrieved from https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/15/ triggering-me-triggering-you-making-up-is-hard-to-do/ Hall, S. (1979). The great moving right show. Marxism Today, 23(1), 14–20. Hardt, M. (2015). The power to be affected. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 28(3), 215–222. Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hennessy, R. (2013). Fires on the border: The passionate politics of labor organizing on the Mexican Frontera. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hirschman, A. O. (1997). The passions and the interests: Political arguments for capitalism before its triumph. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hynes, M., & Sharpe, S. (2009). Affected with joy: Evaluating the mass actions of the anti-globalisation movement. Borderlands e-journal, 8(3). Retrieved from http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol8no3_2009/hynessharpe_affected.pdf Ioanide, P. (2015). The emotional politics of racism: How feelings trump facts in an era of colorblindness. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Illouz, E. (2007). Cold intimacies: The making of emotional capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Koivunen, A. (2010). An affective turn? Reimagining the subject of feminist theory. In M. v. Liljeström & S. Paasonen (Eds.), Working with affects in feminist readings: Disturbing differences (pp. 8–28). London: Routledge. Löffler, M. (2012). Politischer Schmerz: Kalküle der Staatsgewalt zwischen Notwehr und Schutz? In R. Voigt (Ed.), Staatsräson. Steht die Macht über dem Recht? (pp. 207–223). Baden-Baden: Nomos. Lorde, A. (1983). There is no hierarchy of oppressions. Bulletin: Homophobia and Education, 14(3/4), 9. Lorde, A. (1984). The uses of anger. In A. Lorde (Author), Sister Outsider: Essays and speeches (pp. 124–133). Berkeley, CA: The Crossing Press. Martínez, E. S. (1998). Seeing more than black and white. In E. Martínez (Ed.), De colores means all of us: Latina views for a multi-colored century (pp.  4–20). ­Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Massumi, B. (1995). The autonomy of affect. Cultural Critique, 31(2), 83–109. McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial context. New York: Routledge.

80  Brigitte Bargetz McRobbie, A. (2009). The aftermath of feminism: Gender, culture and social change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mills, C. W. (1997). The racial contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mouffe, C. (2005). On the political. London: Routledge. Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2012). The make-believe space: Affective geography in a postwar polity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nyong’o, T. (2012). Queer Africa and the fantasy of virtual participation. Women’s Studies Quaterly, 40(1–2), 40–63. Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. New York: Oxford University Press. Pateman, C. (1983). Feminist critiques of the public/private dichotomy. In S. Benn & G. Gaus (Eds.), Public and private in social life (pp.  281–303). London: Croom Helm. Pateman, C. (1988). The sexual contract. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Preciado, B. (2003). Das kontrasexuelle Manifest. Berlin: b_books. Prokhovnik, R. (1999). Rational woman: A feminist critique of dichotomy. London: Routledge. Rancière, J. (1999). Disagreement: Politics and philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Reddy, C. (2012). Political tears. Southwestern Law Review, 41, 275–279. Sauer, B. (1999). ‘Politik wird mit dem Kopfe gemacht.’ Überlegungen zu einer geschlechtersensiblen Politologie der Gefühle. In A. Klein & F. Nullmeier (Eds.), Masse – Macht – Emotionen: Zu einer politischen Soziologie der Emotionen (pp. 200–218). Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Sauer, B. (2001). Die Asche des Souveräns: Staat und Demokratie in der Geschlechterdebatte. Frankfurt a. Main: Campus. Sauer, B., & Penz, O. (2017). Affective governmentality: A feminist perspective. In C. Hudson, M. Rönnblom, & K. Teghtsoonian (Eds.), Gender, governance and feminist analysis: Missing in action? (pp. 39–58). London: Campus. Sennett, R. (1977). The fall of public man. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Stoler, A. L. (2004). Affective states. In D. Nugent & J. Vincent (Eds.), A companion to the anthropology of politics (pp. 4–20). Oxford: Blackwell. Wilde, G. (2009). Der Geschlechtervertrag als Bestandteil moderner Staatlichkeit: Carole Patemans Kritik an neuzeitlichen Vertragstheorien und ihre Aktualität. In G. Ludwig, B. Sauer, & S. Wöhl (Eds.), Staat und Geschlecht. Grundlagen und aktuelle Herausforderungen feministischer Staatstheorie (pp.  31–45). BadenBaden: Nomos. Wittig, M. (1991). The straight mind. In R. Ferguson, M. Gever, T. Minh-ha, & C. West (Eds.), Out there: Marginalization and contemporary cultures (pp. 51–57). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chapter 6

Rhythm, gestures, and tones in public performances Political mobilization and affective communication Britta Timm Knudsen

In March 2015, we witnessed a spectacular attack on colonial traces in public space at the University of Cape Town when Chumani Maxwele, a student and activist, threw human feces on the statue of British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes, and with that gesture ignited the student social movement of Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) (Knudsen & Andersen, 2018). The continued development, political demands, and further actions of RMF gave that gesture a political meaning and direction. On other occasions, mobilization happens through the sight, sound, and feeling of one singular body that bears witness to or performs the symbolic breakdown of structures. For instance, think of the last speech held by Nicolae Ceausescu, Communist leader of Romania, on December 21, 1989, during which – literally – he was overthrown by the masses who started booing during his speech and entering the building he was speaking from. In doing so, they were contesting Ceausescu’s subject position as a political leader. That moment is the moment of the beginning of the Romanian Revolution, and you can detect this in his facial expressions of astonishment and incredulity, and in the way he stumbled over his words, trying in vain to call to order. At yet other occasions, bodies that have been tortured, murdered, or subjected to self-inflicted harm due to impossible political situations become martyrs and icons of unjust politics. Such bodies thus become capable of fomenting political enthusiasm locally and globally. In this article, I will draw on the case of Emma Gonzalez, a survivor of the Parkland school shooting in Florida that caused the deaths of 17 students and staff members and the injury of 15 persons on February 14, 2018. Through the analysis of two of Emma Gonzalez’ speeches (2018a, 2018b), I will analyze how her particular endangered body transformed into a political leadership of the anti-gun movement March for Our Lives. My analysis focuses on the symbolic breakdown and affective outbursts out of language in language that are capable of electrifying and attuning audiences politically. By reinvigorating a largely forgotten archive of affect – the works of linguist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva – my aim is to contribute to a methodological toolbox capable of reading affect in language and to contribute to a better understanding of political mobilization.

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Affect and language and affect in language The rising interest in affect that has been labeled the “affective turn” (Blackman & Venn, 2010; Clough, 2007; Gregg & Seigworth, 2010; Thrift, 2008; Wetherell, 2012) points to rediscovery of the extralinguistic body as a critical corrective to the predominant linguistic turn in the humanities and social sciences throughout the 20th century. The linguistic turn for arts and culture peaked at various moments in the 20th century. It happened in the 1910s and 1920s as structural linguistics and Russian formalism ruled, and again in the 1960s, leaning on the burgeoning field of deconstruction and poststructuralism. It arguably culminated in the 1980s discussions on postmodernism and with the linguistic textual paradigm that expanded into the socio-cultural and political sphere as a whole. One way of treating the relationship between language and extralinguistic forces and energies is to give predominance to the latter as a phenomenologically basic claim regarding the relationship between bodies and worlds, in which the world is not what I think but what I live (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p.  xii). The presiding scholarship on affect has tends toward a non-­ representational, prelinguistic point of departure, as in the works of Brian Massumi (2002, 2009, 2011), Teresa Brennan (2004), Patricia Clough (2007), and Nigel Thrift (2008). Specifically, these works treat affects as precognitive and prelinguistic intensities hitting the body beyond or alongside discursive patterns. They thus regard affects as universal and decontextualized emergences, and as intensities without any given content per se. Another group of social and humanities scholars begin by opposing the very dichotomy between affects and cultural schemes. As well-trained social constructivists, such scholars maintain that there is no such thing as precognitive experience. Instead, they stress that all affects are contextualized experiences. They tend to focus on the roles of power, agency, exclusion/ inclusion, and historical contexts in producing affects and their political consequences. This group is large and includes explicit critics of the precognitive “camp” (Blackman, 2012; Leys, 2011; Wetherell, 2012) as well as predominantly feminist discourse-oriented scholars (Ahmed, 2004; Berlant, 2011; Butler, 2009; Gregg, 2011; Gregg & Seigworth, 2010; Ngai, 2005) who look at strategic uses of affect to keep someone or something out of or in place within a given political logic or system. The obvious danger of the non-representational school of thought is that it argues independently of context and, in so doing, stipulates how bodies react in a universalist homogenized manner. On the other hand, the danger of the more discursively informed affect theory is that its discourse analysis tends to converge with the analysis of affective layers, thus deflecting the analytic focus away from affects themselves. A too reductive understanding of the affective layers could prevent other explanations or forms of channeling to emerge. Moreover, such an approach risks overlooking

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more-than-representational entanglements and assemblages having the capacities to move beyond existing discourses, into the wilderness of the not yet. This chapter takes a closer look at the relationship between language and affect in order to look at affect in language, but without reducing affect to language. I intend to zoom in on the body-text assemblage in two of Emma Gonzalez’s public performances in order to find out how the extralinguistic features ignite audiences in this assemblage in particular. A forgotten affective archive: Julia Kristeva Rereading linguist, semiotician, novelist, and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s works from the 1970s and the 1980s, we find a methodological-­analytical heuristic for reading presymbolic traces in texts. Although Kristeva is mostly interested in literature, I consider her theoretical architecture of texts as a general theory of affective processes in linguistic communication, which includes the communication in all kinds of media. As a Bulgarian immigrant, she arrived in Paris in the mid-1960s and immediately became part of Tel Quel, a literary journal and intellectual movement in France. Her theoretical inspirations were first and foremost the Russian formalists. These included Mikhail Bakhtin and Roman Jakobson, but also Emile Benveniste, due to his focus on enunciation and, in particular, his work on linguistic markers of the subject of enunciation. Another strong inspiration for Kristeva was psychoanalysis. She took interest in the early psychogenesis of the infant and argued that the subject carries non-linguistic traces and memories of its own coming “into” and “out of” language on different individual scales. These traces become affective resources against language as symbolic structure. A third source of inspiration was the Marxist and Hegelian dialectical legacy, whose philosophy of history is one of antagonistic forces that clash and move history and societies forward. The Marxist and Hegelian legacy was important in Kristeva’s case, as it was this inspiration that partly explained the title of her doctoral thesis: La Révolution du langage poétique (1974). That title reflected the book’s fundamental attitude toward the traces and memories of extralinguistic experiences in language: those traces have the power to inspire insurgences, and moreover, are themselves proofs of resistance against the symbolic structure as system. Kristeva explored the affective realms extensively in her four most important books. In Revolution in Poetic Language ([1974]1984), she developed a rich comprehensive framework for talking about affective eruptions in language and explored how these eruptions emerge in modernist poetry. In another highly important and more popular publication, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), she investigated the notion of rejection, both as a poetic force in J.F. Céline’s prose and as a core anthropological concept. Tales of Love in French Histoires d’amour (1983) took its point of departure from the psychoanalytic couch and from her patients’ narratives of lack of

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love. Evolving the concept of the imaginary father who appears as an ideal, and to whom subjects are bound by love rather than obedience, she tried to offer a solution to the suffering in cultures and societies without fixed codes of ideals. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia ([1987]1989) looked into the affective resources of melancholia, such as the oxymoron of Black Sun that she also primarily investigated in literary works of authors like Marguerite Duras. One can outline several basic claims that Kristeva made about affect in these early works, which position her as a key reference for contemporary affect theorists and analysts. First, she stated that affects can only be detected in language and symbolic structures, since access to prelinguistic processes is bound to emerge in systems of representation. This claim aligns Kristeva with the feminist discourse-oriented camp of affect scholars such as Sara Ahmed, Laura Berlant, and Margaret Wetherell. Second, she claimed that affective layers in language do not stem from the same source as cognitive and cultural schemes. They originate from primary processes and basic impulses of ingestion/rejection and attraction/ repulsion. As such, they are traces of pre-imaginary endless flows, movements, vocal, and kinetic rhythms. These processes are shared between all human beings, but their access to symbolic systems vary according to their socio-political and cultural contexts and differences across individual, gender, class, and race conditions. This feature aligns Kristeva more with scholars interested in non-representational layers, because there is absolutely no convergence between affects and emotions in her depictions of affects as primary processes. To Kristeva, affects are markers of pure intensity, devoid of signification and cultural content. Third, Kristeva considered these affective eruptions as resources with the capacity to “break up”, alter, and resist ruling symbolic systems. This focus on the revolutionary potential of affects as resource places her among “optimist” theorists such as Massumi and Thrift, since she presupposed that these affective eruptions can profoundly change the symbolic systems in which they intervene. In order to read for affects, one could use the distinction Kristeva proposes between symbolic and semiotic layers in language. The symbolic layer of language, which Kristeva (1974, p. 83) calls the “pheno-text”, signifies language as system of representation with addresser, addressee, and a message being conveyed. Toril Moi describes its functioning as “to denote language that serves to communicate, which linguistics describes in terms of ‘competence’ and ‘performance’” (Moi, 1986, p. 121). However, the semiotic layer of language, or Kristeva’s “geno-text”, serves to “transfer drive energies that organizes a space in which the subject is not yet a split unity that will become blurred, giving rise to the symbolic” (Moi, 1986, p. 121). Thus, Moi notes that Kristeva’s geno-text is “a process, which tends to articulate structures that are ephemeral (unstable, threatened by drive charges, ‘quanta’,

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rather than ‘marks’) and non-signifying (devices that do not have double articulation)” (Moi, 1986). The overall aim of this dichotomy is to present a non-representational understanding of writing as system of ‘presentation’ within language (Moi, 1986, p. 4). Such an aim distinguishes Kristeva again from the discourse-oriented affect theorists who confine themselves to looking for affect that “sticks to” the representational level of language (Ahmed, 2004). In scrutinizing the geno-textual level, we can gather enriched fuel for our methodological endeavor to read for affects at extralinguistic levels. Using a more Peircean understanding of language, we could say that Kristeva addresses indexical layers in language. In 1947, French author J.F. Céline (1894–1961) formulated an affective poetics with these words: “to re-sensitize language, so that it quivers more than it reasons – THAT WAS MY AIM”1 (J.F. Celine, Letter to Hindus, 15 Mai, 1947, Cahiers de l’Herne, p. 113, my translation, as cited in Kristeva p. 225). According to Julia Kristeva, Céline’s poetic drive is very close to semiotic geno-textual pulsations and forces. This is not a result of spontaneous writing, but of a long-term labor over the artistic procedures in language. He needed 80,000 pages in order to fill 800 pages of manuscript. Kristeva outlines a number of affective strategies that Céline used, and we can categorize those into three groups that all treat non-representational layers in language. 1 The first category is about rhythm, and how energy and eruptions below the sign are capable of changing rhythms in language. Work on rhythm below the sign concerns, for example, the use of punctuation. The three points of suspension – exclamation marks, question marks, and dashes – are visible marks of logical and syntactical ellipses that influence the rhythm and breath of a sentence. The lack of a full stop gives sentences a parataxical structure, with a few subordinated sentences having the paradoxical effect of both being said and written in one breath while also being cut up in small pieces. It is a form of writing that is written in the same breath, while also being short of breath. Yet another form of rhythmic disruption below the sign is the use of onomatopoeia, for example, to express the infernal noise of war. In this case, onomatopoeia becomes likewise a discharging strategy: bric et broc!, broum! trrzzt! trrrzt!, bring!…crrac! (J.F. Céline Rigodon, pp. 812–13, 823, as cited in Kristeva, 1980, p. 237). Here language is used in its iconic capacity to sound like the world. This stands in

1 I am strictly referring here to Celine’s texts as they are analyzed within the methodological framework of Kristeva. Kristeva never mentions the anti-Semitic pamphlets that Céline also wrote as she most probably considered his political preferences to be another matter than his literary production as she academically was part of the poststructuralist declaration of the death of the author from the early days of poststructuralism.

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contrast to online communication, for example, where language is often brought to express corporeal tensions that come out as interjections (Stage & Thode, 2018). The use of emojis in online communication seems also to be an iconic and often quite conservative use of extralinguistic e­ lements (Stark & Crawford, 2015). Yet the sheer number of those emojis holds the possibility of rupturing symbolic structures (Knudsen & Stage, 2015a; Stage & Thode, 2018). 2 The second category concerns the mood of language, or how intonation and tone in language can create atmospheres. One form is the intonation of suspense that leaves out components such as conjugated verbs. The affective tone of these sentences lies in what is not communicated directly, and thus, in what could potentially lie in the voids and omissions. In short, this affective tone is found in the ghost-like present of indirect communication. For instance, “eight days of holiday in Tréport…” indicates a subject affectively remembering either with melancholy or joy. The affect – without any precise content – is not explicitly said, but rather indicated (with the help of the three points of suspension). Another form is the intonation of exclamation indicating a boiling over with all that is beneath and beyond language: “The widows and infants imploring the sea!” Again, we see the use of punctuation to stress the affective mood and tensions, and the sentence has the quality of an interjection. In oral and performed communication, intonation and tone in language could equal the voice, its frequency (light or dark), its note, strength (low inaudible voice to screaming), speed, and quality as such. In order to analyze the voice in situations of oral communication, I will make use of the term known in rhetoric and linguistics as the paraverbal sound side of communication (Onsberg, 2009). 3 The third category concerns gestures in language in the form of syntactical and morphological peculiarities disturbing logics, such as spatial and temporal organization in sentences. Reversing the logical order of, for instance, theme (topic) and rheme (evaluation of the topic) in a sentence, such as “It’s disgusting that the incident …” that place valorizing judgments either in the beginning (pre-jection) or at the very end of sentences (ejection) gives language a disrupted syncopated rhythm. Repetitions, rhymes, and the extensive use of anaphores are affective poetic resources in language that in fact – as Kristeva states in a very early text on the gestures and practices of communication (Kristeva, 1968) – indicate bodily gestures in texts that precede the text. Kristeva stresses the high relevance of a science of gestures that for her forms part of a semiotic layer of language. In my case of an audiovisual recording of a public speech in 3D so to speak, the analysis of the nonverbal – in the form of what the body expresses without words (gestures, facial expressions, tics, eye contact with audiences) – is also an important part of the whole situation of communication.

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To read for affect, according to Kristeva, is to read for rhythm, tone, and gestures in language. In unmediated and mediated forms of communication, we can add paraverbal and nonverbal elements. These elements, together with the “text in situation” that comprise reactions from audiences, enhance our capacity to read for the potentials of political change in a given situation. Kristeva reads high modernist poetry and prose in order to “extract” a condensed version of what poetic production looks like in culturally communicable form. Nevertheless, her theory of the poetic function of language is a general theory that is not confined to literary genres. As Roman Jakobson stated in his 1960 essay “Linguistics and Poetics”, poetry, or the poetic function in language, cannot be confined to literary studies alone. Rather, he stressed that poetry is an integrated part of a general linguistics that detects the meanings of particular discourses within the universes of discourses. Jakobson’s essay describes six functions in verbal communication: the emotive, the referential, poetic, phatic, metalingual, and conative function. Kristeva shares the same ambition: making general claims about the poetic function of verbal communication, and adding to this function’s more developed forms of expression. Yet another step taken by our poststructuralist ancestors is to be taken into consideration here regarding the text in an expanded field of semiotic signification. Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, just to name a few, taught us how to read institutions, buildings, and cultural habits – such as gift exchange of compositions of meals – as utterances within discourses. And Roland Barthes definitely entered the realm of affects with his considerations of the punctum effect in photography as well as the third meaning in Eisenstein’s film stills (Oxman, 2010). Regarding the topic at hand, it is remarkable that Barthes takes up the affective dimensions of signification that arise when we shift from purely linguistic signs to visual forms of communication in order to look at ­“dimensions of the image that can be seen but not described, sensed but not linguistically signified” (Oxman, 2010, 71). What I am proposing here is to turn the gaze toward social media’s audiovisual forms of communication by focusing on the case of Emma Gonzalez’ public speeches recorded on YouTube. As I shall argue, in these recordings “both the addresser and addressees are present, visible producers and co-­ producers of those messages.”

Social media, affects, and political mobilization I thus draw from Kristeva’s work a relatively robust reading strategy to detect affective resources in audiovisual texts. Politics and media have a long history (Thompson, 1995), but politics and social media have very quickly become inseparable. Social media must be considered as an integral part of social and political activities (Papacharissi, 2016, p. 310) although the politics come in manifold forms. Sometimes social media serve as a platform for

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organizing offline events, rallies, and activities, and sometimes they are the space in which contestation takes place. Social media have two primary characteristics that both afford and change political communication profoundly. Social media – and here ­YouTube – offer virality, speed, and dissemination of information in relation to social movements and to political formations of any kind. Social media are capable of connecting people across spaces. A lot of concepts are available to discuss the connective affordances of social media. Do they create networked communities around already existing communities? If so, this would support the widespread thesis that social media are profoundly hemophilic, meaning that we only seek out like-minded people in our online activities, confirming already established communities, hierarchies, and group formations (Bruns, 2008; Burgess & Green, 2009). Or, do we witness occasional formations of looser and more momentary forms of connectivity between bodies and infrastructures that attune and awaken publics to produce ­political change in specific contexts? (Knudsen & Stage, 2015a; Stäheli, 2012). The mobilization factor is dependent on social media’s abilities to spread and connect rapidly. According to Dean and Papacharissi, “media cannot produce communities but they may produce ‘feelings of community’” (Dean, 2010, p. 22; Papacharissi, 2016, p. 310). And as Papacharissi further argues, depending on the context, these affective attachments can result in political movements capable of generating new or renewed communities. In this sentence lies a softer and maybe more realistic expectation when it comes to political change through the mobilization of social media. The change still very much depends on cultural, political, systemic, and legislative change in the concrete context within which it develops. The second characteristic of social media is that affects play a predominant role within them (Dean, 2010; Hillis, Paasonen, & Petit, 2015; Knudsen & Stage, 2015a,b; Kuntsman & Karatzogianni, 2012; Papacharissi, 2015; Sampson, Maddison, & Ellis, 2018; Van Dijck, 2013). Looking more narrowly at the role of affects in understanding social media, we can distinguish at least three approaches. First, we have an approach that stresses the immediate and spontaneous character of much Internet communication. This approach leans on speed and (for some) easy accessibility to stress these platforms’ nature as “archives of feeling” (Benski & Fisher, 2014; ­Garde-Hansen & Gorton, 2013). To these scholars, online communication offers a particularly interesting source of material for affect research. Second, some researchers look at online communication as a political communicative space of its own, with often polarized deliberations going on. Although antagonisms prevail in these deliberations, one must acknowledge the agonism and democratic potential of these online encounters. In this sense, affects play the role of shattering and dispersing publics, creating wings of allies and opponents in sometimes fierce and dirty confrontations. Nevertheless, as a communicative space, it constitutes a democratic arena of

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deliberation in which markers of passion and intensity support or challenge recognizable discourses and positions. Third, affects in social media are studied as soft structures of feeling pervading the entire media environment. There is good reason to opt for Julia Kristeva as an affective archive in order to analyze the relationship between affective forms of communication and political mobilization. With her methods for close reading of non-­ representational markers of affect, Kristeva offers a toolkit to read for affects in all sorts of archives of feeling. This gives a much more precise methodological framework than just pointing to soft structures of feeling as the affective architecture of social media. On top of this, looking at affective layers as resources troubles the divide between affects as markers of spontaneity among social media users and affect as strategically managed and engineered for economic or political reasons (Adey, 2008; Massumi, 2009). The lack of demarcation between a spontaneous and a more engineered use of affects in communication translates well to the case of Emma Gonzalez’s recordings. This is captured in the way Emma Gonzalez makes use of performance strategies in her speech in order to persuade and mobilize audiences, yet she has to counterbalance those tactics with expressions of spontaneous grief.

Analysis of a body-text-assemblage: the case Emma Gonzalez’ appearances on YouTube Emma Gonzalez and March for Our Lives The March for Our Lives movement that began in the immediate aftermath of the Parkland shooting of February 2018 in the United States has already turned into a genuine political movement.2 The movement, which took off on March 24, 2018, has precise goals and strategies such as reducing the number of arms, banning weapons of war and high-capacity magazines in guns, expanding systems of control on who can acquire a fire arm, and working on intervention programs to address the roots of violence. It is too early to tell whether this movement will have a long life or succeed in changing U.S. gun policies. These policies continuously give political and cultural weight to the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, that reads, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”. Nevertheless, the Parkland student activists have already changed the landscape of the gun debate (Beckett, 2018). I argue that political mobilization depends on scenes of affective outbursts in momentary breakdowns of symbolic structures. I will thus look at

2 March for Our Lives. Retrieved from https://marchforourlives.com.

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how March for Our Lives started, by examining the performances of one of the founders of the movement, Emma Gonzalez, who survived the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. I will look at two public performances in particular. The first is an 11 minutes speech that took place at an anti-gun rally in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, only two days after the mass shooting. The second is a shorter speech held on March 24 in Washington, DC, as part of the first March for Our Lives rally against gun violence. This manifestation had global echoes in cities in Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and Denmark. Gonzalez’s public performances published on YouTube, together with her activities on Twitter @Emma4Change, went viral. In the space of two weeks, they gathered more followers than the opponent, the NRA (National Rifle Association) spokeswoman Dana Loesch namely 767,100 versus 766,700.3 Julia Kristeva’s framework is useful for analyzing the affective resources at play in the two recorded performances of Emma Gonzalez, as I shall presently discuss. Gonzalez was, at the time, an 18-year old high school senior of Cuban descent (her father fled Cuba in 1968), and a declared bisexual president of her school’s Gay-Straight Alliance for three years. She has a shaved head in both performances, with only a shadow of hair visible, and appears in a black tank top in the first occasion. In the second appearance she is dressed in full combat uniform, so to speak: a green army jacket full of badges with political statements from March for Our Lives such as “We call BS”, ripped jeans and boots, a leather necklace, and two tiny golden earrings. My analysis of the affective resources put to use in the communication focuses on rhythms, tones, and gestures both inside and outside language meaning, as well as the body language and interaction modes that the speeches entail. Emma Gonzalez is an eyewitness in Paul Ricoeur’s sense of the word (Ricoeur, 1972). She was a primary eyewitness to atrocious events during which she herself was in danger. This eyewitness position has to evolve into a witness bearing position, which means that the unbearable and unspeakable event has to somehow transform into narratives. My point here is that this eyewitnessing body that transforms into a speaking body leaves traces of the unbearable and unspeakable in the language and body language of that particular body. This adds to the legitimacy of such a body. Further on, Gonzalez’s testimony is an utterance that lies at one and the same time in the realms of the political and the juridical (it bears the indexical markers of truth). What such a body and testimony assert is often something that intervenes in a space of political struggle (Ricoeur, 1972, pp. 110–11). Formulated in affective terms, we could say that the eyewitness’ body is affected in ways

3 Parkland student surpasses NRA in Twitter followers less than two weeks after school shooting. Retrieved from https://people.com/crime/parkland-shooting-survivor-emmagonzalez-more-twitter-followers-nra/.

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that alter that body forever. It is the affectedness of that body that enables it to bear witness for the future. As Ricoeur notes, “the witness is a man who has identified with the just cause that crowds and people in power hate, but for which he risks his life” (Ricoeur, 1972, p. 115, my translation). One can see here that, although the eyewitness is positioned differently than just any political actor, the struggle to get through with the testimony is always political, and the risk of losing is forever present. Emma Gonzalez’s body is affected by what she has witnessed. So much so that it is signified and covered with “sticky affects” (Ahmed, 2004). She is as young as the rest of the target group of school shooters, but her sexual orientation as well as her father’s immigrant status makes her part of minority groups that potentially disturb and frighten majority groups according to the political climate. These features weaken her status as “a grievable life” (Butler, 2009). Strong politicized reactions are manifold in the YouTube entries below the uploaded videos. These reactions comment, for instance, on her wearing Cuban flags, her indecisive gender (“Is it a he or a she”?), or her being “a leftist puppy” and “a tragedy actor” with “crocodile tears” or a performance that “looks too scripted. Sorry!” Just an exact repetition of what has just been said. On top of that, she enters a political arena explicitly by quickly converting victimhood into political performative actions and claims, saying “the victims need to be the change we need to see” (0:47, March 24, 2018). It is for reasons such as these that Gonzalez came to be defined as a target of political dissent, despite her status as a victim. The paraverbal and verbal affective resources in language Before entering the affective analysis, it is important to stress that Emma Gonzalez’s speeches – like Céline’s texts – are far from being spontaneous. Indeed, they are heavily charged with knowledge about gun control in other countries, about the historical situation and current debates in the United States concerning gun politics, and about attitudes and statements of various politicians on the issue. As Gonzalez herself states, “We need to make sure that our arguments based on politics and political history are water tight” (2:11, February 17, 2018). Any members of the audience at the public events in Fort Lauderdale or in Washington, DC, as well as the audiences watching the YouTube recordings of these events, were met by a speaking body that was “the change we need to see”. A large part of the communication between the body on stage and the audience happens below the sign in an extralinguistic realm. We see a full repertoire of gestures of her affected body. We see the flowing and wiping away of tears; we see closed eyes and agonized facial expressions; and we hear coughs, sniffs, fast respiration, and the quivering of her hands holding the speech on paper.

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Yet other affective resources lie in the tonality, frequency, and notes of her voice. Her voice rises, cracks, and often finishes nearly in screams. At one point it even burst into a singing mode: “I already know” (7:36, February 17, 2018), a rhetorical answer to her own question on how much money the president of the United States receives from the NRA. We hear multiple other voices alter the tonality of her own voice. At one point she adopts the voice of an Iowa Republican senator’s low and male seriousness, blaming the FBI: “It’s a shame that FBI does not make background check on these mentally ill people” (9:58, February 17). Emma Gonzalez also uses syntactical ruptures as an affective resource in enumerating the victims and what they would never do again: “complain about piano practice”, “joke around”, etc. As the list of victims progresses, we just hear the names and the repeated verb and adverb “would never” (1:56–2:10, March 24) as if the syntactical unfinished feature of the sentences in itself signals the void of the future that will not arrive. The tonality of these abbreviated sentences expresses and produces grief, sorrow, and emptiness. But the most powerful of the affective resources she uses in her language and performance is by far rhythm. Rhythm appears in the accelerated speed of her voice while adding up all the facts about the lack of gun control in the United States. But more importantly, a control of rhythm is observable in the staged interruptions during her speeches. At the very beginning of the speech at Fort Lauderdale, Gonzalez announces a moment of silence, like the one they had in the House of Representatives. And she finishes the moment after 15 seconds, by saying thank you. In her speech at the March for Our Lives rally at Washington, DC, she stages an interruption - 6 minutes 20 seconds long - within her speech, as a silent reenactment of the mass shooting’s time-lapse at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. This long silence could be seen as a grassroots memorial she orchestrates together with the audience (Margry &Sánchez-Carretero, 2011). Grassroots memorials are everyday responses to insecurities and sudden deaths that people do not accept, and as such, they are political statements that “something needs to be done” (Margry & Sánchez-Carretero, 2011, p. 36). In addition to their ritual characteristics as tools to deal with traumatic death, grassroots memorials also serve as strong sources of potential action and as antidotes to feelings of helplessness among survivors. In the case of Gonzalez’s ­silent reenactment, the memorial does not materialize. Instead, it stays immaterial in a virtual form that is possible to revisit. The primary feature of reenactments is that they are experiential and haptic. Such is the case, for example, in the creation of kinetic empathy: feeling like, through reenacting body movements, trails, deeds, and so forth (Thrift, 2008). This is also the case in sympathetic imagination, or feeling for and imagining how through producing knowledge about the reenactment (Weissman, 2004). The long interruption of silence in Gonzalez’s speech is an arrhythmic (Lefebvre, 2004) rupture of speech; that is, an interruption working below

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the sign, and rupturing the traditional form of political speeches. Encircling the ruptures by speech and continuous social action, the situation is left in full control, with the conviction that something has to be done. As such, the rupture of linguistic rhythm (silence instead of words) is what politicizes the scene of communication. The interaction modes Emma Gonzalez states that everyone present at her high school on February 14, 2018, is altered. Reenacting the duration of the mass shooting in a commemorative gesture serves both to ritually keep the memory of the dead alive and to politically mobilize wider publics. Through Gonzalez, we are forced into a temporal duration of the mass shooting that we experience through the affected body of the speaker. And what are the reactions of the audience present in Washington, DC? We hear some screams, a­ pplauses, and a few outbursts, but silence is soon restored. A wave of “never again”, “never again”, “never again” takes shape, but it, too, eventually dies. ­Finally, a single male voice cries out, “I love you Emma”, followed by a renewed silence. A small alarm clock rings; time is up and Gonzalez finishes her speech. Through the staging of this rupture in symbolic systems of communication, it seems Gonzalez is granted the symbolic position of the political leader of March for Our Lives. Emma Gonzales’ body has a double function of being a body that is overwhelmed by its own affective memories, which keep appearing out of control. Yet it also appears as a body entirely in control of her political means, and who is prepared to use them for the anti-gun cause. Gestures in language play important interactive roles. Examples can include repetitions of single words such as “mine, mine, mine, mine” (1:51, February 17) in attempt to characterize individualism and non-communal thinking in the political culture of American society. Other instances include slogans such as never again, shame on you following the sentence “To all politicians who are taking donations from the NRA”. These gestures in language act as valorizing rhemes that turn into rimes. It is through their recurrences that they attune the political community. The most important slogan that demonstrates the generational aspect of this uprising is “We call BS” (BullShit) as an answer to a whole sequence of sentences such as “They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence” (10:56, 17 February) and “They say that us kids don’t know what we are talking about, that we are too young to understand how the government works” (11:24). All the We call BS is supported by the gesture of a raised right arm and fist. The public present at the event responds to the call for BS. In that way the slogan enters into the public mind as a denunciation of corruption and failed responsibility, and a call out against a calculated and condescending attitude toward young people. Furthermore, BS is popular language, akin to the kind of slang and four-letter words that populate Celine’s texts.

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Conclusion It would be difficult to position Julia Kristeva as an affective archive in the “camps” of non-representational theories, rather than in those of the more discursively informed affect theorists and analysts. While Kristeva argues that affects can only be detected in language, she also insists that affects stage the limits of language as well as the sites where those limits are transgressed. This raises the very important question of what political role these disruptions take. In order to address that issue, one could revisit Judith Butler’s discussion of “Subversive bodily acts” (Butler, 1999). The core question for Butler is whether and how paternal and symbolic law can be challenged by the semiotic as a pre-discursive libidinal multiplicity launching a “strategy of subversion that could become a sustained political practice” (Butler,  1999, p.  103). Butler also asks whether semiotic expressions are only smaller “itches” on the symbolic surface that do not in themselves present alternative political, socio-cultural futures for bodies. Butler ends her paragraph on Kristeva by stressing the more inside-out character of Kristeva’s revolutionary poetics: If subversion is possible, it will be a subversion from within the terms of the law, through the possibilities that emerge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected permutations of itself. The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its “natural” past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities. (Butler, 1999, p. 119) In Butler’s version of Kristeva’s semiotic, its function is primarily to point to the openness of the symbolic system, which Butler calls the paternal law. In my opinion, Butler here reads Kristeva in a very Butlerian manner. In Butler’s two-step argument, I believe it is true that semiotic outbursts in themselves are not stable building blocks for alternative futures. In that sense, they are not politically performative of the ideal. The expressions attacking the symbolic or paternal law are destructive rather than constructive stepping stones. But I would not interpret Kristeva’s pointing to semiotic subversion as merely a way of confirming the openness of the system, which is a point of great abstraction. I would, on the contrary, argue that what Kristeva achieves is to put on display the spectacle of cracks and fissures that hopeful bodies are capable of performing in their attacks on the paternal law. These attacks have highly different political outcomes, depending on the contextual factors. What they are good at is mobilizing and attuning publics to change, whether staged or not. Through the case of Gonzalez, I have demonstrated the importance of Kristeva’s perspectives on rhythm, tone, and gestures in language that primarily are to be found below the sign. I have added to Kristeva’s approach a set of paraverbal, nonverbal, and performative elements. Arising in particular

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situations of communication, these performative elements stress the speaker’s capacity to use body language, tone, and modalities of the voice, as well as a whole range of performative expressions. In using these elements, speakers can react to and comment affectively on the situation while unfolding a whole political program, such as a full-fledged set of arguments and strategies for the anti-gun fight in the United States. Looking at the movement’s web page in September 2018, the movement has definitely taken considerable shape, mobilizing through a range of actions in cities all over the United States. What this movement will achieve regarding long-term change in gun policies is not easy to say. But a new political gendered voice of the very young in the United States – from a declared bisexual woman – lets itself be heard. Gonzalez, voice mobilizes politically through affective resources, and in so doing, has now taken the shape of a serious alternative to current U.S. gun politics.

References Adey, P. (2008). Airports, mobility and the calculative architecture of affective control. Geoforum, 39(1), 438–451. Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Beckett, L. (2018, May 11). ‘It doesn’t stop’: Parkland students’ pain still raw three months after shooting. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian. com/us-news/2018/may/11/parkland-f lorida-students-school-shooting-threemonths-later Benski, T., & Fisher, E. (2014). Internet and emotions. London: Routledge. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blackman, L. (2012). Immaterial bodies: Affect, embodiment, mediation. London: Sage. Blackman, L., & Venn, C. (2010). Affect. Body and Society, 16(1), 7–28. Brennan, T. (2004). The transmission of affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bruns, A. (2008). The future is user-led: The Path towards Widespread Produsage. The Fibreculture Journal, 11. Retrieved from http://eleven.fibreculturejournal.org/ fcj-066-the-future-is-user-led-the-path-towards-widespread-produsage/ Burgess J., & Green J. (2009). YouTube: Online video and participatory culture. ­Cambridge: Polity. Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war: When is life grievable? London: Verso. Clough, P. T. (Ed.). (2007). The affective turn. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dean, J. (2010). Affective networks. Media Tropes eJournal, 2(2), 19–44. Garde-Hansen, J., & Gorton, K. (2013). Emotion online: Theorising affect on the Internet. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gonzalez, E. (2018a, February 17). Florida student to NRA and Trump: ‘We call BS’. CNN. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxD3o-9H1lY Gonzalez, E. (2018b, March 24). Emma Gonzalez’s powerful march for our lives speech in full. Guardian News. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=u46Hz TGVQhg&t=339s

96  Britta Timm Knudsen Gregg, M. (2011). Work’s intimacy. Cambridge: Polity. Gregg, M., & Seigworth, G. J. (Eds.). (2010). The affect theory reader. Durham, NC: Duke University.Hillis, K., Paasonen, S., & Petit, M. (Eds.). (2015). Networked affect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jakobson, R. (1960). Linguistics and poetics. In T. A. Sebeok (Ed.) Style in language (pp. 350–377). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Knudsen, B. T., & Stage, C. (2015a). Global media, biopolitics and affect: Politicizing bodily vulnerability. New York: Routledge. Knudsen, B. T., & Stage, C. (Eds.). (2015b). Affective methodologies: Developing cultural research strategies for the Study of Affect. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Knudsen, B. T., & Andersen, C. (2018). Affective politics and colonial heritage, Rhodes Must Fall at UCT and Oxford. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 25(3), 239–258. Kristeva, J. (1968). Le geste, pratique ou communication? Langages, 10, 48–64. Kristeva, J. (1974). La Révolution du Langage Poétique. L’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Kristeva, J. (1980). Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Essai sur l’abjection. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Kristeva, J. (1983). Histoires d’amour. Paris: Denoël. Kristeva, J. (1987). Soleil Noir. Dépression et Mélancolie. Paris: Gallimard. Kuntsman, A., & Karatzogianni, A. (Eds.). (2012). Digital cultures and the politics of emotion. New York: Palgrave. Lefebvre, H. ([1992]2004). Rhythmanalysis: Space, time and everyday life. London: Continuum. Leys, R. (2011). The turn to affect: A critique. Critical Inquiry, 37(3), 434–472. Margry, P. J., & Sánchez-Carretero (Eds.). (2011). Grassroots memorials: The politics of memorializing traumatic death. Oxford: Berghahn. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2009). Of microperception and micropolitics. Inflexions, 3, 1–20. Massumi, B. (2011). Semblance and event: Activist philosophy and the occurent arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phénomenologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. Moi, T. (Ed.). (1986). The Kristeva reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Ngai, S. (2005). Ugly feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Onsberg, M. (2009). Fremførelse. In C. Jørgensen & L. Villadsen (Eds.), Retorik. Teori og praksis. København: Samfundslitteratur. Oxman, E. (2010). Sensing the image: Roland Barthes and the affect of the visual. SubStance, 39 (2), 71–90. Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. New York: Oxford University Press. Papacharissi, Z. (2016). Affective publics and structures of storytelling: Sentiments, events and mediality. Information, Communication & Society, 19(3), 307–324. Ricoeur, P. (1972). L’hermeneutique du témoignage. Archiv de Filosofia, 42, 35–61. Sampson, T. D., Maddison, S., & Ellis, D. (Eds.). (2018). Affect and social media: Emotion, mediation, anxiety and contagion. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Stage, C., & Thode, T. (2018). The language of illness and death on social media: An affective approach. Bingley: Emerald.

Rhythm, gestures, and tones  97 Stark, L., & Crawford, K. (2015). The conservatism of emoji: Work, affect and communication. Social Media + Society, July–December, 1–11. doi:10.1177/ 2056305115604853 Stäheli, U. (2012). Infrastrukturen des Kollektiven: Alte Medien – neue Kollektive. Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, 2, 99–116. Thompson, J. B. (1995). Media and modernity: A social theory of the media. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Thrift, N. (2008). Non-representational theory: Space, politics, affect. London: Routledge. Van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. New York: Oxford University Press. Weissman, G. (2004). Fantasies of witnessing: Postwar efforts to experience the holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion. London: SAGE.

Chapter 7

Affective dynamics of public discourse on religious recognition in secular societies Christian von Scheve and Robert Walter-Jochum

Debates about the status and recognition of religious minorities in contemporary Western societies frequently evoke the notion of “religious feelings” or “religious emotions”, although it is hardly ever clear what these feelings and emotions are, who actually experiences them, and what their social and individual consequences are. In this chapter, we seek to develop a conceptual framework that capitalizes on sociological and cultural studies’ theories of affect and emotion to better understand the dynamics of these debates and their repercussions for the politics of integration and recognition. Focusing on the case of ­Germany, the debates in question commonly center on, first, (immigrant) Muslims and their religious practices and beliefs and, second, on the value and reach of secular institutions, in particular the freedom of speech and expression, and the protection from blasphemy. In recent years, the public sphere in Germany has arguably been transformed by debates and movements related to these questions. Right-wing populist movements or political parties and the threat of terrorism seeking justification in the realm of religion have been crucial for these developments. In the wake of these transformations, the tone and intensity of public debates have also changed, in particular, when it comes to discussions of the modes of social coexistence in view of cultural and religious diversity. Feelings like fear, hate, or indignation uttered and attributed to oneself or others in public discourse have come to fuel affective dynamics that seem to challenge the long established and taken-for-granted discursive and ­political practices. These affective upheavals of public discourse can thus be regarded as a phenomenon deeply rooted in larger public and political developments whose resonances can be identified looking at the affective dynamics within discourse itself. They are paradigmatic examples for what others have termed “affective publics” (Lünenborg, this volume; Papacharissi, 2015) or “emotional publics” (Rosas & Serrano-Puche, 2018). Drawing on analyses of selected debates in German public discourse, we suggest that when it comes to issues of freedom of expression, emotions are almost exclusively (self)attributed to collective religious subjects as being

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(unduly) affected and suffering from “hurt” religious feelings. In contrast, the secular subject is frequently portrayed as rational, deliberate, and largely free from emotional bias. Interestingly, in view of the German discourse, the “religious” and the “secular” in these debates seem to stand synonymously for “immigrant” (often Muslim) and “native” (predominantly Christian or secular) populations. This picture changes when it comes to the accommodation of Islamic practices, such as the wearing of headscarves, Zabihah, or circumcision. Here, non-Muslims are portrayed by referring to notions of outrage and indignation as consequences of being exposed to these practices, whereas the Muslim subject is constructed as appalled and indignant over questioning the legitimacy or appropriateness of these practices. This argument is developed by first illustrating pertinent issues in the current public debate in Germany regarding multiculturalism, recognition, and the accommodation of religious diversity. In a second step, we discuss recognition as an inherently affective concept and outline how the nexus between affect and recognition is mediated by language. We then review existing works that have been dealing with questions of affect and emotion in multireligious societies, in particular, with regard to blasphemy and the religious-secular divide. In what follows, we first propose four analytical perspectives that contribute to an understanding of these affective dynamics and, second, provide examples from our own research. We close with a conclusion and a discussion of the proposed approach.

Multiculturalism and recognition Research on multiculturalism and religious plurality has been looking primarily at different kinds of tensions between liberal secular values and religious practices, traditions, and convictions of various sorts. Although this research fundamentally deals with matters of cultural and religious pluralism, issues related to Islam and the accommodation of Muslims have dominated in both the public and political debates as well as in the scholarly discussion (Adida, Laitin, & Valfort, 2016; Fetzer & Soper, 2005; Koenig, 2005). This conflict, on the one hand, involves calls for the legal and cultural recognition of Islam and its related practices (as regards, e.g., education, architecture, or apparel). On the other hand, it concerns the refusal, in particular, of group rights for religious or cultural minorities or the restriction of individual rights with reference to a liberal-secular ideal of the modern state (Nussbaum, 2012). These debates have long incited controversy in Germany, especially with regard to Islam and the “new visibility” of religion (Casanova, 1994; Hjelm, 2015). Liberal constitutions and multicultural policies invoked over the past 30 years have placed “the individual and collective practice of religion under special protection” ever since, as Joppke (2013, p. 410, our translation) notes. At the same time, however, substantial concerns about political and cultural

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essentialism, misrecognition, discrimination, and exclusion have remained (Modood, 1998). Political actors have frequently criticized representatives of religious communities for not recognizing basic principles of a liberal and secular constitutional state. For their part, religious leaders continuously allege that Islam and its practices are not being recognized by German ­politics and society, much in contrast to other, more privileged religions (Fetzer & Soper, 2005). In addition to the legal and political implications (which multicultural policies and shifts in the understanding of citizenship have more or less been successful since the 1980s; see Vertovec & Wessendorf, 2009), these conflicts are characterized by the fact that subjective feelings are increasingly brought to bear. The importance of categories such as feelings, injury, piety, or tactfulness, which are ascribed legal significance in many cases, is demonstrated by vivid debates about the freedom of expression and blasphemy, the wearing of headscarves, and gender equality (Joppke, 2013; Mahmood, 2009). All of these are hardly ever restricted to the rational and deliberate exchange of arguments, as normative accounts of the public sphere would ideally have it. On the contrary, polemical and personal escalations and references to subjective sensitivities clearly show that the contest over hegemonic interpretative patterns regarding belonging, difference, and recognition is conducted in a rather confrontational manner, especially concerning religious matters. The “shrill dissonances” (“schrille Dissonanzen” in German, Habermas, 2001, p. 14) of this public controversy may also be attributed to the fact that there are conflicting estimations of the relationship between secular nation-state regulations and policies, on the one hand, and the demands for legal and cultural recognition, on the other. In this specific political and cultural constellation, the principle of mutual recognition, which is constitutive of social coexistence in a liberal state, runs the risk of being invalidated. An overly rigid secularism denies the intrinsic right to religious convictions, languages, and practices, which, however, also persists under the conditions of a secularized public sphere (Nussbaum, 2012). This refusal can be perceived by members of religious communities as an injury vis-à-vis their convictions, feelings, and identities. It can also be exploited for political reasons to construct such feelings at a collective level (George, 2016). This can eventually lead to social closure and a questioning of the very foundations of social life, which becomes articulated in concepts of willful disintegration and segregation, carrying corresponding semantics of delineation. Despite its notable relevance, however, hardly any systematic analyses have been carried out on the subjective and affective dimensions of this struggle for religious recognition.

Language and recognition While cognitively dissonant encounters with other denominations and religions (Habermas, 2001, p.  14) have attracted substantial attention, the

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emotional and affective basis of religious struggles for recognition has mostly been neglected. This is all the more surprising, since different facets of research on multiculturalism and multicultural recognition emphasize self-relations, social interactions, and identities – and reciprocal and affective recognition play a central role, along with cultural (Taylor, 1993), legal (Kymlicka, 1995), and structural (Fraser, 1996) differences. How can we then understand this nexus between recognition and emotion in public discourse? As a starting point, Honneth’s (1992) theory of recognition can be instructive because it specifically focuses on the affective dimension of recognition and, simultaneously, the conflict-ridden downside of misrecognition, that is, forms of disrespect and denied recognition (Honneth, 1992, p.  212) and the attendant feelings of humiliation (Habermas, 2001, p.  11). According to Honneth (1992, pp. 213–214), experiences of disrespect are so deeply rooted in the affective experience of human subjects that it is ultimately the catalyst for the struggle for recognition. This is because the experience of disrespect is usually accompanied by negative emotional responses like anger and contempt (Honneth, 1992, p. 219), which give the struggle for recognition its fundamentally affective character. Although (“positive”) intersubjective theories of recognition offer an appropriate conceptual framework for the analysis of religious feelings and injury, they nonetheless tend to neglect matters concerning the structural and discursive production of such feelings. On the other hand, (“negative”) theories of intersubjectivity (e.g., Butler, 2001) allow addressing the asymmetry and power-relatedness of the conditions for recognition that are expressed in hegemonic discourses and structural-institutional power relationships (cf., Celikates, 2007; Jaeggi, 2006). However, neither mutual nor asymmetric recognition have been studied empirically in the context of discursive struggles for religious recognition in view of their affective structure. To understand this linguistic-discursive dimension of the affective ­dynamics of struggles for religious recognition in public discourse, theories of “linguistic disrespect” (Herrmann, Krämer, & Kuch, 2007) and the rhetoric of injurious speech are particularly instructive. These theories can contribute to conceptualize issues of the emotional and affective structure of recognition from a linguistic and discourse-analytical perspective. They offer a valuable understanding of disrespectful and injurious speech not primarily in terms of its contents, but rather in terms of its performative as well as material structure, that is, the performative and bodily character of hurtful utterances (Brokoff & Walter-Jochum, 2019; Butler, 1998; MacKinnon, 1994; Matsuda, Lawrence, Delgado, & Crenshaw, 1993). These works generally take recourse to speech-act theory and are located at the intersection of legal and political-institutional discourses. As an analytical heuristic, the theoretical distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts (Austin, 1962) seems particularly promising in this regard. From a perlocutionary standpoint, potentially injurious language may be ascribed to the violent effects of hurtful speech that are legally taken to be an incitement

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of hatred and violence. From an illocutionary standpoint, however, it may be ascribed to the violence and affective power of language itself (Bens, 2019). In other words, it is (allegedly) the words themselves that can “affect” and “harm” the addressee. This is all the more significant given the understanding of affectivity in these works, since injurious language itself is taken as a “bodily action” (Butler, 1998, pp. 21, 200). The rhetoric of hatred, as influenced by “strong affects”, is an adequate example of language characterized by bodily forces and affects (Gehring, 2007, p. 213). Although analyses of this affective dimension of injurious speech in the context of religious recognition are largely absent from the literature, studies that connect “religious sentiment” (Baatz, Belting, Charim, Kermani, & Saleh, 2007, p. 26) – particularly on the side of Muslims – to the establishment of new fields of discourse are productive in this regard. This research goes beyond the established (Western) political language to look at the production of identity and the formation of “transnational” (Baatz et al., 2007, p. 30) affective communitization.

Religious emotions, hurt feelings, and the principles of the secular state Although the larger discursive structures and affective dynamics of struggles for recognition have not yet been investigated in detail, religious ­emotions, injury, and hurt feelings have frequently been discussed in relation to the principles of the liberal secular state. In many Western countries, religious practices, such as the wearing of headscarves or ritual circumcisions, have led to conflicts with legal norms and the cultural self-understanding of the secular state for some time. Furthermore, artistic confrontations with religious issues have given rise to public conflicts with religious communities, as the example of the controversy over the “Mohammed caricatures”, published in 2005 in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, demonstrates. These conflicts are often carried out with reference to “religious emotions” on the side of (parts of) the Muslim community. To understand the role of religious emotions in conflicts over the accommodation of Muslims and Islamic practices, it is imperative to distinguish between religious emotions as an “emic” and “etic” concept, to borrow analytical terminology from anthropology (e.g., van de Vijver, 2015). Emic concepts in this case refer to the ways in which a term or concept is used within a certain culture or context, that is, the public discourse on Muslim integration and accommodation. Etic concepts, on the other hand, are researchers’ analytical concepts that may or may not be in alignment with the field’s emic concepts. “Religious feelings” or “religious emotions” as emic concepts are supposed to be experienced qua religious identity, denomination, or belonging and thus are held to be a yardstick of cultural difference, symbolic boundaries, and recognition. Looking at the respective discourse, the actual religious

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dimension of emotions is often neglected in favor of some ethnic, national, or cultural category membership, that is, religious emotions are broadly attributed to individuals that have immigrated to Germany from countries with a predominantly Muslim population or have ancestral ties with such a country. Furthermore, religious emotions are supposed to arise in view of a variety of situations and eliciting conditions, first and foremost in view of political or artistic references to Islam in ways perceived as criticizing, ridiculing, or derogative. This includes artistic expressions and representations regarding Islam as well as political discussions on the legal status of certain Islamic practices, such as the wearing of headscarves. Religious feelings and emotions as an etic, that is, scientific category have a long and broad history that can be reviewed here only in a fragmentary fashion (see the essays in Corrigan, 2008a for an excellent overview). The sociological and more broadly the social scientific literature has been attending to the concept of religious emotions in at least two highly distinct ways. On the one hand, religious emotions have classically been investigated as specific modes of phenomenal experience related to religious beliefs and practices, transcendence, and the sacred more generally. Corrigan (2008b) notes that the classical writers that have been concerned with the nexus of emotions and religion, such as Rudolf Otto, Friedrich Schleiermacher, William James, or Émile Durkheim, held that “human emotionality was a constituent element of religious life” (Corrigan, 2008b, p. 7) and that some kind of feeling is indeed essential to religion. The more recent research in this tradition has primarily been concerned with accounting for the large amount of scholarship on emotion that has been developed in philosophy, psychology, and parts of cognitive science over the past decades to better understand the role of emotion in religion (e.g., Riis & Woodhead, 2010). In an attempt at identifying and categorizing the different aspects of religious feelings and emotions, Järveläinen (2008) has suggested that they can be characterized according to their “cognitive objects” a “depth condition”, as well as a “pragmatic condition”. The cognitive object refers to the objects of religious experience (e.g., “the divine”) as in other kinds of emotional experiences and basically represents the intentionality of religious emotions. The depth condition takes up ideas from Schleiermacher and Otto and ­emphasizes the relationality of religious emotion, that is, the idea that they rest upon a perception of relatedness (e.g., “dependency” in Schleiermacher’s account). Finally, the pragmatic condition highlights that religious emotions depend on practices and culture. On the other hand, religious feelings have for a long time been investigated in the context of issues related to blasphemy and freedom of speech. In this tradition, religious feelings have rather been considered feelings that arise when confronted with blasphemous acts, where blasphemy is generally considered as “great disrespect shown to God or to something holy” or as “something said or done that is disrespectful to God or to something holy”,

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as the Merriam-Webster1 notes. In modern times, blasphemy has almost ­always been considered in relation to legally imposing limitations on the principle of free speech, and since Mill’s argument in On Liberty, this limitation is hardly ever justified by claims for freedom from religious offence. In many cases, these limitations rather apply to speech that is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action” (Danchin, 2010, p. 7). Irrespective of this, the European Court of Human Rights holds that “the right to free speech may be limited on the basis of the right to respect for one’s religious feelings and the freedom to hold and practice a religion” (Dacey, 2012, p. 66; EuroParl, 2013, p. 52). The main reason, however, why blasphemy in many societies today is a criminal offence is not the protection from offence and the injury of “religious feelings” (see, e.g., Ramdev, Nambiar, & Bhattacharya, 2016; Statman, 2000) but rather because it is a suitable means for the incitement of religious hatred, group defamation, and social upheaval (e.g., Frevert, 2016). This second perspective is particularly informative when investigating blasphemy in the context of issues pertaining to multiculturalism, recognition, and the accommodation of Muslims in liberal-secular societies (e.g., Dacey, 2012; Grenda, Benke, & Nash, 2014; Ross, 2012). A notable part of this research has identified the “static secular-religious binary” and the “purportedly incommensurable divide between liberal and Islamic values” (Danchin, 2010, p.  8) as questionable points of departure for successfully addressing the questions and challenges. In particular, Mahmood (2009) has argued that the religious in these constellations can only be understood in relation to the secular and that it is imperative to understand “what constitutes religion and a proper religious subjectivity in the modern world and what practices may be necessary to make this kind of injury of religious pain not mute but intelligible within the discourse of liberal rights” (Danchin, 2010, p. 10). In Mahmood’s (2009) perspective, this does not only include an understanding of different subjectivities and forms of subjectivation, but also the embodied nature of the religious and the secular subject more generally and the “affective structures” that these subjectivities entail and how they constitute embodied sensitivities toward specific ways of being harmed or injured.

Four analytical perspectives Investigating the affective and emotional dynamics of debates that involve religious sensibilities clearly needs to go beyond a classical understanding of religious emotions as a specific kind of individual experience. Instead, these dynamics are at play at different levels that need to be taken into account to

1 http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/blasphemy

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form a comprehensive picture. This includes the field of public discourse in which claims for cultural and religious recognition as well as for the principles of the secular state are articulated and negotiated. This also includes an understanding that is not bound to specific religious denominations, but rather emphasizes multiple relations between “the religious” and “the secular” as two substantially interlinked categories. And finally, this understanding also needs to account for the collective and political dimensions and repercussions of affect and emotion in these debates. To achieve this understanding, we suggest four analytical perspectives which we outline in the following. First, the role of religious feelings – and affect and emotion more g­ enerally – in contemporary discourse on multiculturalism, recognition, and the accommodation of Muslims can be accounted for by looking at how emotions are explicitly made the subject of this discourse. The controversy over a German “Leitkultur” (1998–2000 and again much more forcefully since 2015 in view of the accommodation of refugees mostly from Islamic societies), debates regarding caricatures of Mohammed since 2006, or the discussions about whether Islam and its related practices are an integral part of German society (2010) all prominently feature articulations, attributions, and evaluations of feelings and emotions. In particular, the controversy over the Mohammed caricatures demonstrated the significance that is ascribed to religious feelings and their injury, as well as their potential for transnational mobilization. Also in the debates about the wearing of headscarves or about the participation of Muslim girls in physical education classes, affective categories such as tactfulness, piety, and shame are frequently invoked. These invocations carry a range of different semantics, from expressing subjective or collective experiences of actors who articulate these emotions to debates about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of certain emotions (see D’Arms & Jacobson, 2000, for a philosophical discussion), to the attribution of specific emotions to different actors, groups, or abstract entities. These articulations not only carry normative and moral judgments, but also contribute to processes that outline different forms of subjectivity, such as contouring a specifically “religious” or “secular” subject. Second, in addition to identifying the ways in which emotions appear in the debates in question, it seems worthwhile to look at the extent to which the recourse to religious feelings qualifies as an entirely novel kind of discourse that operates beyond established political language. This kind of discourse might well make an original contribution to the construction of boundaries and cultural identities and the formation of affective communities (Zink, 2019), that is, the emergence of communal bonds based on comparable ways of feeling and being affected in view of specific events and situations. At the same time, these affective communities would produce social exclusion and demarcation. This perspective to some extent rests on the assumption that emotions can be collective, that is, that they are shared by many individuals

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in response to some idea, act, or object (von Scheve & Ismer, 2013). It would also open up the possibility to investigate emotions, individual or collective, as deliberately and strategically produced by speakers in a discourse. The  concept of “emotional regimes” (Reddy, 2001) reflects these usually ­political attempts to establish norms and rules of emotions in specific domains of social life. Religious emotions are thus not only relevant in view of how they are elicited and constructed, but also with regard to their political and cultural repercussions (e.g., Mahmood, 2009). Third, the affective characteristics of the public discourse on multicultural recognition give rise to the task of differentiating, at a conceptual level, the linguistic-discursive forms of the expression of “negative emotional reactions” (which Honneth established with a view to social relations and misrecognition), as they often feature in what is widely known as “hate speech”. Conceptually, the distinction between indignation, contempt, and hatred seems to be particularly relevant to better understand this discourse: while indignation is a relatively direct, although culturally mediated response that is often connected to forms of political commitment (thus also having a positive connotation), contempt and hatred represent negative modes of affective responding. In the case of contemptuous speech, feelings of cultural superiority often tend to prevail. By contrast, in the case of hateful rhetoric, it is necessary to look at whether and to what extent it is based on (unacknowledged) experiences of helplessness, despair, and a lack of opportunity. Toward this end, a “functional” account of hate speech can be informative. The (overlapping) analytical understandings of hate speech that are essential to this discourse include, first, hate speech as it is primarily understood in Anglo-American countries in terms of the legal category of “hate speech”, referring to forms of discriminatory speech on the individual, group, and institutional level. Second, hate speech can be an affective (and defensive) response to the challenges and issues of globalization and cultural plurality. Third, hate speech can be conceived of as speech deliberately used for the purpose of the incitement of hate and group defamation. This is reflected in a linguistic and discourse-analytical point of view, according to which two dimensions of hate speech can be distinguished that also have different legal and political significance. On the one hand, the deliberate evocation of hatred through language aims at bringing about certain effects and outcomes (perlocutionary dimension). On the other hand, words themselves can be “permeated” with hatred, which they “enact” on the linguistic level at the very moment of expression (illocutionary dimension). A fourth analytical perspective that may contribute to comprehensively grasping the role of religious feelings and emotions concerns the ways in which debates about multiculturalism and religious difference are actually affectively experienced in people’s everyday lives. This, in particular, concerns groups of actors who are addressed in the respective discourse and their subjective interpretations of these debates and their consequences for

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cultural identity and the sensing of community belonging, be they migrant (minority) groups or groups affiliated to a culturally or discursively constructed majority. On the one hand, one can assume that the discursive negotiation of the status of religion in German society frames and transmits – as per the specific frames or patterns of interpretation – conflicts of recognition (e.g., Snow & Benford, 1988). Discourse analysis, however, provides little information about how the addressed groups and actors (Muslims for most part of the discourse, but also other actors involved) affectively experience debates about, for example, the Mohammad caricatures or the wearing of headscarves in everyday life. Indeed, a closer look at the subjective experiential world seems especially worthwhile given the fact that emotions such as indignation, injury, or insult are frequently attributed in discourse to the Muslim population as a collective emotional state and as evidence of the moral dubiousness of political or legal decisions. Hence, developing an understanding of whether and how denied religious and cultural recognition or critique of Islam and Muslims are interpreted as being disrespectful or offensive and produce affective dissonances is an important cornerstone of the proposed analytical approach. This includes an examination of how the relevant debates change people’s identification with (transnational) religious communities, on the one hand, and with liberal-secular principles and notions of citizenship and national identity, on the other hand. Also, it seems important to consider what circumstances other than a specific public discourse (e.g., biographical socialization) influence the experience or denial of affective recognition. Given these analytical perspectives, there is a broad range of potential methodological approaches and concrete methods to address the affective and emotional dynamics of debates over religious sensibilities. In our own research (Berg & Ural, 2019; Ural, 2019; Walter-Jochum, Berg, & Ural, 2018), we have subscribed to different methods of discourse analysis. They allow for an analysis of publicly negotiated interpretations and classifications regarding religious emotions and collective notions of recognition and the commensurability of religious practices under the aegis of a secular legal system. Depending on the approach to discourse one takes, this strategy might essentially focus on how religious and secular subjects are constructed in discourse as part of a larger secular-religious dispositif, as in the Foucauldian understanding of discourse (e.g., Diaz-Bone, 2015). This is also mirrored by analytical approaches inspired by speech-act theory as well as by poststructuralist accounts that capitalize on linguistic utterances regarding their performativity. Works discussing the connection between language and violence, as briefly summarized above, are examples of this perspective. An approach to discourse might also include, however, different forms of subjectivation or approximations thereof, rendering social actors and their subjective and intersubjective experiences part of the analysis (e.g., Keller, 2013).

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Investigating affect and emotion in debates over religious sensibilities This section seeks to provide a range of examples from ongoing research of how the four theoretical perspectives outlined above can be used to investigate ongoing public debates over religious sensibilities and cultural recognition. Our intention here is not provide in-depth accounts of specific debates, but rather to outline a broader overview of possible approaches at investigating the role of affect and emotion in these debates. Furthermore, these examples provide concrete accounts of how publics can be understood as decidedly “affective publics” (Dahlgren, 2018; Negt & Kluge, 1993; Papacharissi, 2015). Looking at the present controversies over the accommodation of Muslims and Islamic practices in Germany, our own research has primarily attended to religious emotions as discursive phenomena in the sense that political, civic/secular, and religious actors talk and write about these emotions and their potential injury in different public spheres. In these speech acts, the emphasis lies on the “vulnerability” and the “safeguarding” of self- or other-attributed religious emotions and on the rhetoric of indignation, contempt, and hatred and their repercussions for social integration, multicultural accommodation, and experiences of belonging. Our examples are primarily drawn from commercial news media as key arenas in which political debate becomes publicly accessible (e.g., Butsch, 2007). Blasphemous speech “Religious emotions” in an emic understanding are emotions that are discursively attributed to members of religious communities or individuals with a specific religious faith and supposed to arise in view of situations or events (speech acts, legislations and court rulings, artistic expressions) that call into question, ridicule, or misrecognize people’s religious identity, beliefs, and convictions. In contemporary German debates, questions concerning Islam are almost exclusively discussed in conjunction with issues and challenges related to cultural and ethnic differences and immigration, which is why the lines between “being a Muslim” and “being an immigrant” are constantly blurred. Our own research shows that in most of the recurrent public debates, in particular, those concerning the freedom of speech and expression, “religious emotions” are hardly ever publicly discussed in connection to acts of blasphemy, although they can be analytically framed as blasphemous and are indeed frequently interpreted as such by parts of the Muslim community. Quite the contrary, actions that are supposed to incite religious emotions on the side of Muslims are often, but not exclusively, portrayed as either speech acts or artistic expressions falling under the rubric of the freedom of expression, or are characteristics or actions of secular state institutions. This is evident in the debates following the publication of

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Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission (Walter-Jochum et al., 2018), in the news coverage and debates in the aftermath of the attacks on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in 2015 (Berg & Ural, 2019), and in the debates concerning the public broadcasting of the satirical poem Schmähgedicht (vituperative criticism) by German TV-Comedian Jan Böhmermann, dedicated to the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Ural, 2019). Considering actions of secular state institutions, the controversies regarding the legal status of male circumcision in Germany or the wearing of the so-called Burkini at French public beaches come to mind (von Scheve & Ural, 2019). In these cases, the debates center around the claim that in a secular society, religious believers need to come to terms with and accept values like the freedom of speech and expression, gender equality, and a certain understanding of the relationship between the (female) body and the public, which can possibly lead to hurt and injury. It is hardly ever blasphemy in the narrower sense that is at stake here. However, these civil liberties and values are often portrayed as being incompatible with Islam, since Muslims are allegedly unable to cope with their “religious feelings”, being injured by others on the grounds of the freedom of art and expression. This is an interesting observation insofar as in the few cases in which religious emotions are discursively expressed by or attributed to members of other faiths (e.g., Christians), believers’ demands for the protection of their religious feelings are hardly ever framed as calling into question the fundamental institutions of the liberal-secular state. Rather, these claims are interpreted in the “classical” frameworks of blasphemy and quickly set aside with remarks that protection from offence is to be weighed less important than freedom of speech. Hence, the present discourse in a certain way contributes to inflating alleged differences between Muslims and principles of the liberal-secular state, and at the same time constitutes a specific construction of the Muslim subject within this state, one that is not only overly “responsive” to certain speech acts and other actions (so are other religious subjects), but is at the same time fundamentally at odds with foundational principles of the liberal-secular state. Affect: religious and secular A second interpretation of these extant debates concerns the discursive constitution of “the religious” and “the secular”. In line with the works of, for instance, Mahmood (2015) or Asad (2003), it becomes obvious how “the religious” is viewed and constructed only in conjunction with “the secular”. Taking serious insights that the secular does not constitute a “neutral” baseline from which a liberal-secular state views and appraises practices and belief systems within its legal and political reach, but instead is in itself an outcome of specific historical constellations that have led to ideas of the separation of state and religion, mostly in the Christian world, debates over

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religious sensibilities and cultural recognition can be interpreted from at least two different angles. On the one hand, when speakers in discourse, representatives of Muslim communities or organizations as well as the critics of religion and Islam, ascribe religious pain and injury to “the Muslims”, they tend to do so in view of a secular “other”, either subjects or state institutions, which are – ­w illingly or not – portrayed as calm, deliberate, and free of affect. In contrast, the Muslim subject is constructed as one with undue religious sensibilities from the perspective of representatives of the secular state (see Berg & Ural, 2019; Ural & Berg, 2019; Walter-Jochum et al., 2018). Affect and emotion hence are characteristic of the religious subject, and it is certainly no coincidence that being “overly emotional” has historically been attributed exclusively to women in states of hysteria, that is, in almost pathological conditions. Likewise, taking historical framings seriously, “the emotional” in the Western world is traditionally seen as and sometimes even defined in its opposition to, reason and rationality (Barbalet, 1998). On the other hand, in cases in which representatives of certain faiths demand changes in legal regulations, in particular, concerning freedom of speech and expression that put religious sensibilities under special protection and shall contribute to the recognition of Muslims, the secular subject is portrayed as highly affected and emotional. Politicians as well as (self-proclaimed) representatives of the liberal state tend to voice outrage, indignation, and anger in view of these demands. This likewise applies to cases in which certain religious practices are supposed to be recognized, even though they might clash with legal rulings and existing religious privileges in some cases, such as the wearing of certain kinds of headscarves by public servants, circumcision, or the building of mosques (von Scheve & Ural, 2019). When Muslim representatives demand legal recognition and cultural accommodation of these and other practices, “secular affects” are frequently aroused in critics of these demands. Within the realm of the New Right, resorting to feelings of fear related to Islam or an alleged Islamization of secular societies can be observed as an important political strategy based on feelings associated with the secular state and its principles ­(Diefenbach & von Scheve, 2019). From speech acts to collective emotions A third interpretation arising from our suggested analytical perspectives rests on the distinction between the concepts of affect and emotion. On the one hand, the examples illustrated above are exclusively discursive in nature, that is, they reflect what is said and written about the recognition and accommodation of Muslims and Islamic practices in the liberal-­secular state and about the emotions and sensibilities that go along with this. On the other hand, this is hardly telling in view of what people actually feel and experience in view of these debates. Analyzing discourse reveals what speakers

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say how people are affected by these debates, which might be an adequate representation of their actual feelings and emotions – or not. In fact, these statements and attributions can be interpreted first and foremost as political strategies to legitimate or delegitimate certain claims in the struggle for recognition and political power, making the public sphere a realm of affective negotiations with an impact going beyond discourse itself. This might be effective in two ways. First, an audience, for instance, legislators or citizens, might take these attributions of emotions for granted and make decisions or take actions based on these appraisals. Second, an audience might take up and incorporate these attributions of emotions and make them their very own emotions. People might be affected by certain acts and events in rather fuzzy ways, harboring diffuse feelings and sentiments. Discursive attributions can channel these diffuse feelings, linguistically categorizing them into discrete emotions, such as fear, indignation, shame, or resentment, that carry widely shared cultural meanings. In the sociology of emotion, this “taking up” of emotions has been discussed in theories of collective emotions (von Scheve & Ismer, 2013), collective emotional orientations (Bar-Tal, 2001), or emotional regimes (Reddy, 2001), to name but a few. This would be one way in which discursive attributions of emotions have consequences for different forms of social action, for instance, issues related to integration, belonging, or collective behavior, such as participation in social movements. Zink (2019) has argued that this contributes to the emergence of “affective communities”, that is, the formation of social collectives that are similarly affected by discourse. This line of reasoning can be extended by applying a frame of reference that is more clearly geared toward a Foucauldian understanding of discourse. Although the status of social actors is debated within this frame of reference, the concept of subjectivation includes the notion that discourse always contributes to the formation of subjectivities. Following this understanding, it seems obvious to not only focus on explicit statements concerning the emotions that actors might or might not experience, but also on the consequences discourse brings about for forms of self-understanding and self-relatedness. In this regard, it is imperative that forms of subjectivation also encompass a bodily dimension, for which it is not so much language and conceptual thought that matter, but ways of being affected in a non-­ categorical or non-representational sense (e.g., Slaby, 2016; von Scheve, 2017).

Concluding remarks In this chapter, we have outlined an analytical approach at investigating the affective and emotional dimensions of contemporary debates in many Western societies concerning religious sensibilities and cultural recognition. These conflicts and controversies are often analytically framed as cognitively dissonant encounters, although there are abundant references to feelings and emotions in these debates, for instance, regarding hurt feelings and

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religious injury. This is surprising since these conflicts are often discussed within the framework of theories of (multicultural) recognition, many of which consider recognition – and misrecognition – to be inherently affective phenomena. Looking at these debates from an emotion-focused perspective can draw inspiration from related scholarship, for instance, on blasphemy and religious hatred and on relations between the secular and the religious. Based on these insights and a discussion of select existing approaches, we have suggested four analytical perspectives to investigate the affective dimension of these debates: the explicit articulation of emotion in discourse; conceiving of these debates as a novel kind of discourse beyond established political language; understanding the “functional” aspects of hate speech by emphasizing the linguistic-discursive specifics of the articulation of negative emotional reactions; and the extra-discursive repercussions of these debates for actors’ subjective phenomenal experiences. To illustrate these perspectives, we have provided insights into some of our own research on the subject matter, capitalizing on blasphemous speech, religious and secular affect, and collective emotions. Further developing these perspectives and analytical examples that predominantly focus on discourse and language, general conceptions of how language may affect bodies beyond linguistic meaning and conceptual thought seem a promising avenue for future inquiry. Butler’s (1998) work on hate speech is already path breaking in this regard. Likewise, the work by Denise Riley (2005) on Language as Affect, Marion Acker’s, Anne Fleig’s, and Matthias Lüthjohann’s chapter in this volume, and the distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts discussed above can be instructive here. Given this conceptual background, the material dimensions of discourse are likely to play a vital role in these (and other) public controversies, since it matters whether one is confronted with something that is written in a newspaper article or with a massive material-­discursive setting comprised of very different media, as it has been the case, for example, in the context of the Je suis Charlie-movement following the attacks in 2015. In such cases, the affective resonance of the public debates we discussed points at a phenomenon that reaches far beyond the discursive realm, transforming the ways in which groups and individuals interact and thereby shape politics and society. It thus seems necessary to account for this material dimension of discourse in a more comprehensive fashion to better grasp discourse’s affective potential. Challenges of course arise from an understanding of discourse as a predominantly language-based phenomenon. However, discourse also includes actions, objects, or images, and their potential to affect bodies in different ways has been more comprehensively theorized as of yet. Whether caricatures of Mohammed or the artistic ridiculing of the Pope during the Cologne carnival actually elicit specific (­religious) emotions is debatable. However, that these portrayals affect bodies in specific ways can hardly be questioned. Needless to say, different bodies will be affected in

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different ways, but as Wetherell (2012) and Seyfert (2011) have suggested, bodies “learn”, during enculturation and socialization, to be affected in specific ways. In our view, these “ways of being affected” (as a dimension of subjectivation) form the backdrop for any political or strategic attempt at inciting collective (religious) emotions.

Acknowledgment This chapter is based on collaborative work in the project “Feelings of religious belonging and the rhetorics of injury in public and in art”, funded by the German Research Foundation within the Collaborative Research Center 1171 “Affective Societies”. The authors wish to thank Anna L. Berg, N. Yasemin Ural, Jürgen Brokoff, and Aletta Diefenbach, for their contributions and discussions.

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114  Christian von Scheve and Robert Walter-Jochum Butsch, R. (Ed.). (2007). Media and public spheres. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Casanova, J. (1994). Public religions in the modern world. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Celikates, R. (2007). Nicht versöhnt: Wo bleibt der Kampf im “Kampf um Anerkennung”? In G. W. Bertram, R. Celikates, C. Laudou, & D. Lauer (Eds.), Socialité et reconnaissance (pp. 213–228). Paris: L’Harmattan. Corrigan, J. (Ed.). (2008a). The Oxford handbook of religion and emotion. New York: Oxford University Press. Corrigan, J. (2008b). Introduction: The study of religion and emotion. In J. ­Corrigan (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of religion and emotion (pp. 3–16). New York: Oxford University Press. D’Arms, J., & Jacobson, D. (2000). The moralistic fallacy: On the ‘appropriateness’ of emotion. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 61, 65–90. Dacey, A. (2012). Future of blasphemy: Speaking of the sacred in an age of human rights. London: Continuum. Dahlgren, P. (2018). Public sphere participation online: The ambiguities of affect. International Journal of Communication, 12, 2052–2070. Danchin, P. G. (2010). Defaming Muhammad: Dignity, harm, and incitement to religious hatred. Duke Forum for Law & Social Change, 5(2), 5–38. Diaz-Bone, R. (2015). Die Sozio-Epistemologie als methodologische Position Foucaultscher Diskursanalysen. Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung, 1, 43–61. Diefenbach, A., & von Scheve, C. (2019). Islamisierung des Abendlandes‘: Zur Struktur der Angst vor dem Islam als mobilisierende Emotion im Rechtspopulismus. In A. Besand, B. Overwien, & P. Zorn (Eds.), Politische Bildung mit Gefühl: Vom Umgang mit Gefühlen und anderen Kleinigkeiten im Feld von Politik und politischer Bildung. (pp. 43–60) Berlin: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. EuroParl. (2013). Religious practice and observance in the EU Member States. Directorate General for Internal Policies, Policy Department C: Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs. PE 474.399. Brussels: European Parliament. Fetzer, J. S., & Soper, J. C. (2005). Muslims and the state in Britain, France, and ­G ermany. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fraser, N. (1996). Justice interrupts. New York: Routledge. Frevert, U. (2016). Vom Schutz religiöser Gefühle: Rechtspraxis und -theorie in der Moderne. In H. Landweer & D. Koppelberg (Eds.), Recht und Emotion I: Verkannte Zusammenhänge (pp. 321–347). Freiburg: Karl Alber. Gehring, P. (2007). Über die Körperkraft von Sprache. In S. Herrmann, S. Krämer, & H. Kuch (Eds.), Verletzende Worte: Die Grammatik sprachlicher Missachtung (pp. 211–228). Bielefeld: transcript. George, C. (2016). Hate spin: The manufacture of religious offense and its threat to democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Grenda, C. S., Benke, C., & Nash, D. (Eds.). (2014). Profane: Sacrilegious expression in a multicultural age. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Habermas, J. (2001). Glaube und Wissen. Frankfurt a. Main.: Suhrkamp. Herrmann, S., Krämer, S., & Kuch, H. (Eds.). (2007). Verletzende Worte: Die Grammatik sprachlicher Missachtung. Bielefeld: transcript. Hjelm, T. (2015). Is God back? Reconsidering the new visibility of religion. In: T. Hjelm (Ed.), Is God back? Reconsidering the new visibility of religion (pp. 1–16). London: Bloomsbury. Honneth, A. (1992). Kampf um Anerkennung. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp.

Affective dynamics of public discourse  115 Jaeggi, R. (2006). Anerkennung und Unterwerfung: Zum Verhältnis von positiven und negativen Theorien der Intersubjektivität: Presentation at the conference “Anerkennung und Demokratie”, University of Bern, December 2006. Retrieved from https://www.philosophie.hu-berlin.de/de/lehrbereiche/jaeggi/mitarbeiter/ jaeggi_rahel/anerkennungunterwerfung Järveläinen, P. (2008). What are religious emotions? In W. Lemmens & W. Van Herck (Eds.), Religious emotions: Some philosophical explorations (pp. 12–26). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Joppke, C. (2013). Islam in Europa: Integration durch Recht und ihre Grenzen. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 65, 409–435. Keller, R. (2013). Doing discourse research: An introduction for social scientists. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Koenig M. (2005). Incorporating Muslim migrants in western nation states: A comparison of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Journal of International Migration and Integration, 6(2), 219–234. Kymlicka, W. (1995). Multicultural citizenship. New York: Oxford University Press. Lünenborg, M. (2019, this volume). Affective publics. In A. Fleig & C. von Scheve (Eds.), Public spheres of resonance. Constellations of affect and language. New York: Routledge. MacKinnon, C. A. (1994). Nur Worte. Frankfurt a. Main: Fischer. Mahmood, S. (2009). Religious reason and secular affect: An incommensurable divide? Critical Inquiry, 35(4), 836–862. Mahmood, S. (2015). Religious difference in a secular age: A minority report. ­Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Matsuda, M. J., Lawrence, C. R., Delgado, R., Crenshaw, K. W. (1993). Words that wound: Critical race theory, assaultive speech and the first amendment. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Modood, T. (1998): Anti-essentialism, multiculturalism and the “recognition” of religious minorities. Journal of Political Philosophy, 6(1), 378–399. Negt, O., & Kluge, A. (1993). The public sphere and experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Nussbaum, M. (2012). The new religious intolerance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. New York: Oxford University Press. Ramdev, R., Nambiar, S. D., & Bhattacharya, D. (Eds.). (2016). Sentiment, politics, censorship: The state of hurt. New Delhi: SAGE. Reddy, W. (2001). The navigation of feeling: A framework for the history of emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press. Riis, O., & Woodhead, L. (2010). A sociology of religious emotions. New York: ­Oxford University Press. Riley, D. (2005). Impersonal passion: Language as affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rosas, O. V., & Serrano-Puche, J. (2018). News media and the emotional public sphere. International Journal of Communication, 12, 2031–2039. Ross, R. (2012). Blasphemy and the modern, “secular” state. Appeal, 17, 3–19. Seyfert, R. (2011). Atmosphären – Transmissionen – Interaktionen: Zu einer Theorie sozialer Affekte. Soziale Systeme, 17(1), 73–96.

116  Christian von Scheve and Robert Walter-Jochum Slaby, J. (2016). Relational affect. Working Paper SFB 1171 Affective Societies 02/16. Retrieved from http://edocs.fu-berlin.de/docs/receive/FUDOCS_series_000000000562 Snow, D. A., & Benford, R. D. (1988). Ideology, frame resonance, and participant mobilization. International Social Movement Research, 1, 197–217. Statman, D. (2000). Hurting religious feelings. Democratic Culture, 3, 199–214. Taylor, C. (1993). Die Politik der Anerkennung. In C. Taylor (Ed.), Multikulturalismus und die Politik der Anerkennung (pp. 11–66). Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Ural, N. Y. (2019). Recht auf Satire – Recht auf Beleidigung? Recht, Sprache und Affekt im ‚Fall Böhmermann‘. In J. Brokoff & R. Walter-Jochum (Eds.), Hass/ Literatur: Literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zu einer Theorie- und Diskursgeschichte (pp. 397–416). Bielefeld: transcript. Ural, N. Y., & Berg, A. L. (2019). From religious emotions to affects: Historical and theoretical reflections on injury to feeling, self and religion. Culture and Religion, 20(2), 207–223. van de Vijver, F. J. R. (2015). Emic–etic distinction. In C. S. Clauss-Ehlers (Ed.), Encyclopedia of cross-cultural school psychology (pp. 422–423). New York: Springer. Vertovec, S., & Wessendorf, S. (2009). Assessing the backlash against multiculturalism in Europe. MMG Working Paper 09-04. Göttingen: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. von Scheve, C. (2017). A social relational account of affect. European Journal of Social Theory, 21(1), 39–59. von Scheve, C., & Ismer, S. (2013). Towards a theory of collective emotions. Emotion Review, 5(4), 406–413. von Scheve, C., & Ural, N. Y. (2019). Affective dynamics of conflicts between religious practice and secular self-understanding: Insights from the male circumcision and “Burkini” debates. In R. Patulny, S. Khorana, R. Olson, A. Bellocchi, J.  McKenzie, & M. Peterie (Eds.), Emotions in late modernity (pp. 297–310). ­London: Routledge. Walter-Jochum, R., Berg, A. L., & Ural, N. Y. (2018). Michel Houellebecqs Soumission und „die Muslime“ im französischen und deutschen Diskurs darüber. In E. Gredel, H. Kämper, R. M. Mell, & J. Polajnar (Eds.), Diskurs – kontrastiv. Diskurslinguistik als Methode zur Erfassung sprachübergreifender und transnationaler Diskursrealitäten (pp. 176–191). Bremen: Hempen. Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Zink, V. (2019). Affective communities. In J. Slaby & C. von Scheve (Eds.), Affective societies: Key Concepts (pp. 289–299). New York: Routledge.

Part II

Language and artistic practice

Part II of this volume comprises six chapters by Anna Gibbs, Ann Cvetkovich, Friederike Oberkrome, Hans Roth and Matthias Warstat, Marion Acker, Anne Fleig and Matthias Lüthjohann, Claudia Breger, and Michael Eng. The chapters concentrate on those publics that are generated and maintained by a range of artistic practices, for instance, writing, performances, music, or theater plays. In these practices, the power of language to affect beyond knowledge or representation becomes an essential point of reference to reflect on the affective dimension of spoken and written words that resonate with each other as well as with different audiences, creating publics of their own. Previous works have primarily highlighted the functions and contributions of literature and theater for the formation of the public sphere since the 18th century, sometimes even conceiving of artistic practices as an ideal model of the public. The upcoming chapters in this second part of the volume especially focus on the bodily and performative dimensions of these practices, many of which aim at transforming or undermining rather than at representing a certain state of affairs, thereby reflecting the differences between spoken and written words or between listening and reading. All of the chapters share the assumption that these differences are important to think about language as affective, bodily and relational, on the one hand, and about the democratic struggle for articulation and representation, on the other hand. To understand the rhetoric and performative quality of language and its power to affect allows us to think of publics in a different and innovative way. It opens up new understandings of participation going beyond traditional perspectives on publics and politics, as the contributions to the first part of the volume argue. These novel understandings are particularly important since public spheres of resonance promote different modes of political participation – those that are compatible with established forms of debate and those which are at odds with them, for instance, political populism.

Chapter 8

Put a spell on you Poetry, politics, and affective resonance in the age of the algorithm Anna Gibbs

what if language is the suppression of vitalist vocal co-movement by the military-industrial complex? What if language is the market? – Lisa Robertson, 3 Summers, p. 70

In the short quotation serving as epigraph above, Lisa Robertson refers to a present in which Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States, his infamous tweeting since then and his campaign’s manufacture of fake news, is still only on the horizon. Robertson’s poem focuses on the relationship of language to the assemblage of the military-industrial complex and the market, rather than on the political figure as a relay point in these operations. (I use the term “assemblage” here rather than “arrangement”, as some translators have done, because I think its resonance with the term “assemblage” in the art context, where the elements of construction are always heterogeneous, is an important reminder of the heterogeneity of assemblages more generally). But before turning to the main subject of this chapter, that is, the role of language in this assemblage and what this might mean for contemporary poetry and poetic resonance, I want to return for a moment to the early days of affect theory, when the attention paid to political figures, their faces, and their speech was formative in what was eventually to become the affective turn. For it was around the figures of Ronald Reagan in the United States (Massumi, 1993), Pauline Hanson in Australia (Gibbs, 2001), John Howard, again in Australia (Angel & Gibbs, 2006) and later, Angela Merkel in Germany (Bleeker, 2008) – and indeed others – that ideas of affect as a medium and of the role of affect contagion in the ­creation of social attitudes and political possibilities was developed, and these ideas remain central to thinking about the affective resonance of language. American performance artist Laurie Anderson was in advance of all this work, as art is so often in advance of theory in coming to grips with the present. Her piece ­“Politics and Music”, performed around the world in 1990 as part of the show “Empty

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Places”, anatomized the way sonic textures and timbres became crucial carriers of affects which they then linked to particular meanings, from militarism in the case of the rhythms of Mussolini’s speeches, to desire in the form of a nostalgia for something ungraspable in a lost past in the case of Reagan (Anderson, 1990, p. 21): … And when Reagan wanted to make a point, he would lean right into the mic and get softer and softer until he was talking like this. And the more important it was, the softer and the more intimate it would get With lots…. and lots …. of… pauses. Like he was trying to remember something that happened a long time ago. But he could never really quite put his finger on it. And when he talked he was singing to you. And what he was singing was “When You Wish Upon a Star.” In the voices of political figures, language acts, as it always does, in the mode of the spell. Its first work is to enchant, and to seduce, and it only secondarily aims to persuade. Importantly for any consideration of language in relation to affect, what Laurie Anderson’s work made clear was the way that words can perform their spell-weaving magic relatively independently of semantic meaning and through the way they couple with other media, in this case, most immediately, the human voice. Like Anderson’s work, the affect theory of the nineties appears at a moment when figures of leadership take on new significance as they are routinely mass mediatized. Their faces, voices, and contagious affective presences are at this time amplified by television, but in the early nineties images and clips of these figures are not yet circulating virally in social

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media. This was a moment – after the feminist reclaiming of affect as a way of knowing equal in importance to cognitive and rational modes – in which the darker powers of affect became clear, operating as they did through the examples of these right-wing figures and in concert with the televisual medium to create (or at least attune to and amplify) various social moods and to capitalize on them for political purposes. In this context, the public sphere was thus exposed as anything but a space of rational debate in the service of a contest of ideas. Instead, it could be viewed as space in which emotion held sway, where inchoate feeling could be captured and directed, most obviously, but not only, by political figures who were able to resonate with and even orchestrate public emotions, or simply, to sing us lullabies to keep us asleep and dreaming while they went about their business. Such figures, it should be said, were recognized not as the origin of affect, but as relays in a larger process of communication and flow, such that, while their operations and their capacities to attune to, resonate with, amplify, and modulate affect required analysis, what must ultimately be privileged in such analyses was relations rather than their terms (Gibbs, 2011). Yet the implicit view of the social as non-rational was not without precursors. The 19th-century sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1962), whose work, drawn on by Deleuze and Guattari (1980), was rediscovered in the context of the affective turn, foregrounded the irrationality of publics, and emphasized reading (especially of newspapers) as a site for the affectively based mimetic processes he views as a form of suggestion by virtue first and foremost of the repetition the news engenders (Gibbs, 2011). Tarde’s work, like the work composing the later affective turn, concentrated more on the way the new media of the day (for him, newspapers) served as a locus of affective transmission and a site of resonance than on the affective or resonating qualities of language per se. In fact, language has a paradoxical relationship with media: while it is relatively independent of any particular medium, it nevertheless has to couple with a medium of some kind to come into being, to materialize. We might say that media are then what make language come to matter (in both senses of that term). But here a further complication arises. Once these media tended to be understood simply as physical platforms (paper, screen, the various technologies of sound recording, braille), each of which reconfigures the sensory ratio as it solicits predominantly vision, hearing, or touch, respectively. But the materiality of media is more complex than we once imagined. No longer conceivable as simply the dumb materiality of an object, nor even its embodied energy, the materiality of media lies not in the hardware alone, but in the way the hardware is made to connect and work with the whole assemblage of technical, social, and cultural relations – including language use – that composes its actual operations. It is the machinic assemblage that is actually the medium, and it is the particular work of language in it, rather than language per se, that matters.

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Today, 20 years after the beginning of the affective turn and the rise of the new materialisms, language can no longer be thought of – as it once was – as defining of the human, nor even any longer as its primary mode of subject formation. Language is losing its grip on the subject and with it also its once privileged purchase on the world. As both Guattari (1992) and Lazzarato (2014) argue, language is increasingly being outflanked by more machinic modes of subjectivation which produce “dividuals” (which, unlike subjects, don’t support identification, are pre-personal, precognitive, and preconscious). In these days of ubiquitous data mining and the domination of the design of the future by Facebook and Google, we are constantly required to swipe, tap, and push buttons so that we become small cogs in direct articulation with the larger suprapersonal assemblages of finance, commerce, the social, and the political. We articulate as dividua directly with them, but we are not in control of them, since they operate at the informational level at speeds beyond the threshold of human apprehension. Language, Lazzarato’s (2014) work makes clear, acts as an operator in a non-signifying semiotics, now conscripting us at the sensory and affective level of habit into a machinic enslavement to our devices. When it comes to news, headlines still grab us by the affect, as it were, only now they are actually clickbait capitalizing on the affect of interest and the disposition it opens to some kind of approach. Or, words encode our media profiles for the commercial purposes of entities like Facebook or Airbnb, while Google takes our words as we enter them in Search, hijacking them as data – or, rather, capta (Drucker, 2011) and turning them into terms for marketing, effectively privatizing and monetizing the commons of language. Even scholarly publishing is now increasingly enclosed behind digital paywalls. Much of what was once part of the public sphere has now been privatized and enclosed in an historical process whose contemporary ramifications have been well described (e.g., Andrejevic, 2000; Linebaugh, 2014). Language is now not only the language of the market, but a part of the larger assemblage with which the market articulates: that is, the military-industrial complex with its spyware (as Lisa Robertson fears), and the world of artificial intelligence where human reading is superseded by machine reading and language might be designed merely to facilitate this. From a human perspective, we habitually conceive of language as central to thinking, valuing it as the “privileged tool for disclosing, refining and developing a conceptual system”, a “practice whose criterial activity is the deployment of rhetorical tools of mind” (Turner, 1991, p. 217). Yet at the same time, we frequently forget that rationality actually derives from non-rational poetic thought, not the other way round (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). As Turner writes, from the perspective of cognitive science: Our view of category connections as primary and imaginative connections as parasitic is backward: it is the imaginative connections that are

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primary; these imaginative mappings create category structures; such structures can become entrenched so that the imaginative mappings are no longer perceptible to consciousness. (Turner, 1991, p. 121) The supramodality of language – its weak relation to each of the other senses – enables it to translate between them and allows us to think metaphorically. Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield (2000) argues that it is the capacity for metaphorical thought that is most at risk in digital culture. This kind of thought is central to processes of human invention, she argues, “By virtue of its capacity to map one thing on to another in ways that violate common sense (as when objects are personified), metaphor makes us see the world differently” (Greenfield, 2000, n.p.). Words, writes Alphonso Lingis, map out relations in the dense tissue of nature. They focus our attention, they lead us to see contexts, sequences, interactions… Words work an artistry on things, that of metaphor and metonymy. They reflect qualities, halos, colors from other things onto this thing… They endow things and events with names, titles, nicknames. (Lingis, 2005, p. 440) Words create relations between things. This is the key to their importance for human thinking. Yet this kind of poetic thought requires a non-­ instrumental relationship to language very different from that proposed by machine language, or even by the pervasive contemporary genre Guillory (2004) calls informational writing, composed of bureaucratic ejecta of all kinds and which are designed, along with the budgets and graphs and dot points that accompany them, to plug us into larger bureaucratic and financial machines. Paradoxically, perhaps, nowhere is language more enchanting than where it pretends not to be – in all the modes of apparent neutrality, objectivity, and rationality that compose informational writing. And the rise of a globalizing technical English presents yet another challenge to our view of the centrality of language to cultural memory and cultural knowledge. After all, we never simply speak “language”: we speak German, or Japanese, or Walpiri, or Pitjatjanjara – languages that have each arisen in coevolution with particular ways of doing and being in the world, giving rise to a diversity of forms of knowledge whose importance parallels that of biodiversity. Where Deleuze and Guattari (1980) emphasized the deterritorialization of English by the entry of other languages into it, especially through what they call “minor writing”, technical English represents a reterritorialization which neutralizes the subversive potentials of particular languages. The powers of language to understand and act on the world are being outstripped by the increasingly manufactured virality of the image: “photos

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and videos are becoming more central to how we share than text”, Mark Zuckerberg proclaims as he announces that “the camera needs to be more central than the text box in all of [their] apps” (cited in Thompson, 2017). Linguistic powers are outstripped too by the techniques of visualization required to render data of every kind intelligible. On the upside for imaging, however, it can make us aware of the non-human agencies of things, as Lazzarato (2014) argues about Pasolini’s films, and at the microscopic and telescopic levels they can reveal aspects of the world beyond unaided human vision, as in the work of Jean Painlevé’s science films (Gibbs, 2015); but against this, the whole of Lacan’s work could be read as a reminder of the limits of seeing as a form of knowing (Drucker, n.d.). Most of all, though, the powers of language are outflanked by those of the algorithm. Predictive analytics now not only shape what we find when we search, but use “nudge” techniques to shape our so-called choices. Or, they identify individuals who might commit a crime and turn them into targets in advance of any actual criminal action by them. An extensive literature charts the impact of the algorithm on the world (see, e.g., Pasquale, 2015; Striphas, 2015). Most importantly, however, the algorithm changes what counts as knowledge: in many fields, human hypothesizing and modeling is no longer as important as what is produced by machine learning. This means that the algorithm is no longer designed to look for something particular, requested by human beings, but now rather operates on the basis of its own logic from the available data, so that what comes to count as knowledge of the world no longer corresponds to human sensory capacities, to human ways of knowing, or to human forms of knowledge. This no doubt frees us from the limitations human sensory and cognitive specificity to act on the world in new ways, but arguably also means that we have less actual understanding of what we are doing, as David Weinberger (2017) points out. Concomitant with the rise of the algorithm, we also see a transformation in subjectivity: the subject now becomes an entrepreneur of the self: simply a form of human capital in what is increasingly a gig economy. The Western world has historically associated agency with expression, but given the various features of the present described above, we must wonder whether “language”, and more particularly, writing as the quintessential technology acting as a support for literary and scholarly production as well as for subject formation more broadly, can continue to hold a privileged position in our culture? Can writing remain both the privileged locus of rationality and the authentic expressive reservoir of the individual in the Western imaginary? If we start not from the notion of “language” entailed in a view of it as the privileged site of the production of subjectivity, but instead with what Maurizio Lazzarato (2014) calls the “event-generating dynamics” of the ethico-political assemblage that constitutes the domain of enunciation (a domain extending well beyond human interlocution to complex assemblages of the human and non-human), we can see that language must now

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be thought as infrastructural, providing support for the refrains that compose what Guattari (1992) calls the “existential” dimension of subjectivity, and organizing them by means of what he terms the “semiotic triad” of reference, signification, and representation. This existential dimension is the realm of non-­signifying semiotics. It corresponds roughly to what the cognitive sciences call the sub-symbolic: a realm of modality-specific sensory and affective parallel processing operating analogically on continuous dimensions, and mostly outside awareness. It is a dimension at once singular, and as Stern’s (1985) work shows, transindividual, being intersubjectively shaped in infancy and persisting thereafter, as the generative, ever-­changing ­matrix of intersubjectively produced experience. Our attachment to language is shaped by the sensory and affective qualities of this existential dimension. Words take on affective qualities and colorings by virtue of the emotional context in which we learn a “mother tongue”, and because of this, language can also act as a portal into the existential dimension, which must be touched and moved for any form of political transformation to be possible. So we might ask not how to preserve the privilege of language, but rather how to use words to attune to the existential dimension, where they might resonate to make something happen? How can we use words as a point of entry into a larger semiotic to produce change, be it a break, a rupture, a mutation – or perhaps simply to jam its machinery? Perhaps, poetry does have a particular role to play here, for poetry is the genre par excellence in which the affective and sensory qualities of language are foregrounded and the felt qualities of meaning take priority over or even détourne denotation. It is still poetry that works the pre- and paralinguistic, sensory, and affective qualities of language to resonate with the existential dimension of experience, even in the face of the exhaustion of the lyric form whose work this once was, now followed by that of conceptual writing and by what Johanna Drucker (2012, p. 9) has called the “end of the era of the individual voice”. We now inhabit a “computational present” (Kittler, 1999), where the non-inscriptive technologies of transmission (telegraphy, telephony, wireless) which give rise to an ethos of liveness, work in concert with the inscriptive, recording technologies (e.g., gramophone, film, and the typewriter) that emphasize preservation and memory (Kittler, 1999). Performance and an associated sense of “liveness” are being revivified in electronic art where the animation of images (and the production of writing as image) is producing vitality as a key value in tune with a broader cultural shift from aesthetics to event-based views of culture. Yet language has a particular role to play in this by virtue of its intimate relationship with the human body, its capacity to mimic its individuated rhythms, and forms of socialized being, and, through the language arts, to conjure into being imagined realities and to produce “reality affects” (Hansen, 2004). However, when Guattari proposes that aesthetic experience furnishes us with a pragmatics of relationship

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“between the discursive and the existential, the actual and the virtual, and the possible and the real” (Lazzarato, 2014, p. 211), he accords no special privilege to language. To explore the particular work of language – and especially poetry – in furnishing the pragmatics of relationship Guattari suggests is needed, I want now to loop back again through the beginnings of affect theory with its focus on mediatized political figures to arrive first at American poet Eileen Myles’ write-in presidential campaign during the U.S. election of 1991–1992, when she stood as an “openly female” candidate, and then to one of the afterlives of that first campaign in the 2016 election campaign that propelled Donald Trump to power. Myles’ work during this period was at once poetry, durational performance art (April 1991–November 1992) and real campaign. It was an aesthetic project that in setting itself up in a mimetic relation to the actual campaign, thereby made itself real. Every time she read her poetry at colleges and readings, it became part of the campaign. She set up a mailing list through which she sent out a series of campaign letters and sold badges and stickers and monthly subscriptions to her newsletters. It became increasingly serious as the campaign went on and audiences responded: “people kept asking me, ‘What’s your platform?’ So I got a platform. What’s your economic plan? So I got an economic plan”, she explains in an interview (Benjamin, 2015, p. 2). The work grew in the process of doing it as Myles began progressively to understand how what she was doing constantly opened new possibilities. In particular, she discovered how she could extrapolate consequences from the difference inevitably generated by her act of mimesis. So when she became depressed, that immediately became part of the performance: “I’m going to tell you exactly how I’m feeling while I’m running for office. So it was PMS, and depression, and weird things in my building” (Parker, 2015, p. 192). Her enfolding of the specifically female experience of the everyday into the performance of candidature became a brilliant exposure of candidature as a masculine performance art masquerading as universal and defining what was to be taken seriously and what belonged to the sphere of the political. It made real again the famous feminist slogan of the 1970s: “the personal is political”. The transmedial nature of the work (as poetry, performance, and political statement) helped it resonate. “And it went like wildfire; [she says] I was on MTV, I was in these magazines, and I toured in 28 states” (Parker, 2015, p. 191). Her own campaign speeches crystallized around the reading of one work in particular, “An American Poem”. Actually written in the 1980s, this poem had now found its moment – or better, in Myles’ revivification of it, it made the moment. As Myles has said, it is “[t]he poem [that] makes the politics” (in Parker, 2015, p. 192). Drawing on the coincidence of her physical resemblance to the Kennedy family, and her Bostonian accent, and parodying the dynastic born-to-rule phenomenon of the Kennedy family,

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the conceit of the poem is that she is one of them, and therefore a legitimate contender to the presidency: “Yes,/I am a Kennedy./And I await/your orders”, the poem proclaims before explaining that “Every woman in my/ family looks like/ a dyke but it’s really/ stepping off the flag/when you become one” (Myles, 2015). If Myles – a lesbian and a poet – can be a Kennedy, then couldn’t we all be Kennedys, as the poem asserts? “[W]e are all Kennedys./ And I am your President”, it insists (Myles, 2015). The language of the poem appears straightforward and, perhaps, somewhat unpoetic, but its rhythms are incredibly carefully crafted. In an interview not long after the end of the campaign, she speaks of the attention she paid to political speeches, watching videos of a variety of different ones, paying attention to timing, and to visual cues (Kellner, 1998). This mimetic process involves abstracting cross-modally from these performances: “[B]ecause if I couldn’t hear it, I couldn’t write it….”, she has said (Kellner, 1998, n.p.). And elsewhere she explains: ….there is something very generative and formal about my process that I’ll know what it’s about but the how is the thing that I’m waiting for. And sometimes it’s visceral and sometimes it’s historic, but I’ve got to find it, and that’s my search. It’s very animal. You kind of find it with your body in a way. The writing is a cerebral act, but the way is kind of visceral. (Parker, 2015, p. 184) As this statement makes clear, Myles’ poetry is in touch with the existential dimension into which her own body provides a portal, and her campaign performances used this dimension as a point of entry into the larger semiotic, working precisely at the machinic intersection of the discursive, the existential and the assemblage by virtue, first and foremost, of their direct entry into electoral politics, to produce a new affective disposition in the audiences to which she performed. Guattari’s ideas about the pragmatics of relationship are developed by Lazzarato in reference to Bakhtin’s work on speech genres. For Bakhtin, it is the speech situation, rather than language as such, that is what matters. While language is the medium of communication in the speech situation, that situation is also composed of the relationships between utterances, the relationship of utterance to reality and to the speaker, as well as the relationship between utterances of the past and future utterances, as Lazzarato (2014) reminds us. The speech situation, then, is actually a complex network of implication, presupposition, and anticipation. Myles’ campaign performances seem to furnish a beautiful example of how the pragmatics of relations in the speech situation might work in practice and they might also help elucidate the work language plays in such an operation. Bakhtin developed his theory of dialogism in relation to the novel and in opposition to poetry,

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but Myles’ poem seems to hover between the genres of campaign speech and conversation while still being poetry: its rhythms are produced by declarative statements and pauses surrounding rhetorical questions, as well as brief reflective moments of something like soliloquy. Myles’ particular style  – her mode of prosy poetic invention – is crucial to her intervention, but her partly-­i mprovised performances (which included talking as well as reading) perfectly demonstrate the Bakhtinian predomination of context or situation over text in his theory of dialogism (1986, 1992). While such performances are of course asymmetrical and do not allow the same kind of reciprocity in turn-taking as in ordinary speech genres, they are no less dialogic for that, for the performance and the audience response entail constant reorientation on each side in ongoing response to the other. We might say that these are “sympoetic” performances, to borrow Donna Haraway’s (2016) term. That is, they involve a relational making with – especially if we consider that the “what” that is created is a new situation, a new affective disposition rather than a fixed and final textual object. They compose and constantly restructure a field of affective responsiveness and empathic entanglement in the in-between of interaction, back and forth between reader and audience as looping affect escalates and deescalates, intensifies, or modulates what happens in the performance. Here, meaning as the force of expression is produced from within the dialogic relation. The reading as live performance is different every time: the perlocutionary dimension of the speech act (its effects on the listeners) takes precedence over the illocutionary dimension of the “reading” and is not supplementary to the enunciation, but constitutive of it. The meaning of the poem is actually subtly rewritten with every reading, and in this process performance is not only live but alive, a living process in which the poetry audience also becomes a political audience and vice versa. During her campaign, Myles performed and audiences responded and she responded to this responsiveness. This transitivity in performance is the collective subject of enunciation produced through ongoing interactive attuning between performer and audience, such that the subjective state becomes the referent which can materialize and resonate in different modalities: ­facial or vocal expression, movement, gesture, or posture can all share the same contouring of intensity, timing, and shape which can be cross-modally matched rather than simply imitated, that is, replicated in the same modality (Stern, 1985). Myles worked discursively at this momentary threshold to a nondiscursive point of subjectivation taking shape as surprise, affirmative joy, and laughter. It seems to me the production of enjoyment-joy, to use Tomkins’ (1962) terminology, was critical to the work’s success and to its contagious spread. Tomkins (1962) calls joy the affect of communion, and part of the power of Myles’ performances was their generation of a sense of shared experience. They set in motion a specifically affective resonance, of a kind that potentially creates new dispositions, opening the space for other

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possibilities and allowing affect to take form as contagious feeling. Their production of surprise (which overturns the taken-for-granted) opened the way to a joyful experience of the work that could at once generate solidarity, communicate a transformative sense of agency and possibility, and perhaps provoke thought, begging the question why not? Why not a woman in the White House – even a working class one, even a queer one, even a low-­income poet? However, Myles’ performances do also make use of deliberate and tactical misattunement – moments where she is ahead of her audience, which work as a kind of affective retuning, a modulation of affective intensity – in a game she has referred to as “bait-and-switch”: “putting something out and it turning into something else” (Parker, 2015, p. 188). What is paramount in her work at these moments is the production of affective intensities in which truth and meaning are opened to ambiguity, and such multivalence comes also to multiply the potential fields of affective resonance. It is important to distinguish between resonance and virality here. By contrast with the slower tempo of resonance, virality – characterized by the speed as well extent of its spread – is increasingly designed and manufactured – often algorithmically manufactured. Both the “fake news” and the targeted Internet campaigning of Cambridge Analytica in the recent U.S. presidential campaign drew on data mining, psychometric and descriptive psychographic analyses to capitalize on existing affects and attitudes, seeking to produce a confirming resonance in its targets. Myles’ performances, however, resonated and spread without going viral in the sense we now understand that term, entangled as it is with the advent of social media. Part of this seemed to be due to an electricity already in the air. Myles was running at a moment when there was a real prospect of change, of the defeat of the Republican president George H. Bush, by the charismatic Democratic candidate Bill Clinton. I had just arrived to spend six months in San Francisco and when I saw Clinton speaking on television during a well to do artsy lefty and pretty straight party, I couldn’t believe these people were actually serious about him as any kind of political savior. His spell failed to work on me at all. I couldn’t take him seriously. To my Australian ears, his speeches were “bullshit” in the sense defined by Harry Frankfurt, where “the orator intends [his] statements [regardless of what they are ostensibly about] to convey a certain impression of himself … What he cares about is what people think of him” (Frankfurt, 2005, p. 18). The people at the party were horrified by my failure to get it. But I certainly “got” the liberating joy of the end of the incumbency of George H. Bush on the night of the election when he was clearly defeated and his effigy was burned at a huge street party in the Castro – still at that time a neighborhood dominated by the gay community which found refuge and a life there. But, for Myles, the critical political difference would have been to elect a woman, even as her own self-presentation at the reading at the Small Press Distribution bookstore (then in Berkeley) where I first encountered her

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work, seemed to multiply the possibilities contained by that term, since she in no way conformed to the perfectly styled, polished, and prepped image demanded of the women who stood for the major parties. In recent years, however, Myles has begun to use the non-gender specific pronoun “they”, not so much because they themselves are trans in the sense of having transitioned or passed over from one gender to another, but rather because they actually contain a multiplicity of genders: “For me, it’s transitioning in language, just acknowledging that I feel like I experience myself as a multiple. It seems like something I can ask for and do” (Wichtel, 2018, n.p.). (I have been using the female pronoun up until this point to reflect the politics of the time during the write-in campaign). Nevertheless, in the light of the last campaign where inherent misogyny played such a large part, whatever else one might say about Hillary Clinton as a candidate, their recent work still insists on the symbolic power of a woman in the White House. Even so, the poem “Momentum 2016”, commissioned by the Clinton campaign as part of the “Artists for Hillary” program, concealed an ambiguous acrostic reading: “Hillary you’re my man”, it reads (Myles, 2016). This perfect piece of equivocation all at once affirms support for Clinton, points to the problem of politics as a male-dominated sphere in which she can only appear as a “nasty woman”, and also, ironically, to the very problem some voters have with Clinton as being really too much of a man, in the sense of being too intimately entangled with a certain boys’ club, a web of male-dominated corporate and military connections: There’s probably a million reasons why Bernie Sanders is a better candidate, [Myles has commented] but I’m supporting Hillary because I just want to see a woman sit in the White House once before this empire falls down. And if a woman brings it down, I think that would be cool. I hope she blows it up. (Rothkopf, 2016) While the social media advertising of the Trump campaign was precisely targeted from the top down courtesy of Cambridge Analytica and its access to Facebook data, the affective resonance of Myles’ performances of her minoritarian writing in their own write-in campaign – a kind of writing from below – was more open to contingency. As it turned out, this was part of its strength, enabling its resounding and resurgence at a later date. Myles’ work from the nineties was given another life by the coincidence of the most recent presidential campaign with the republication of “An American Poem” in their selected poems I Must Be Living Twice (2015), and their subsequent book tour, which meant interviews, trips to Australia and elsewhere, and YouTube videos of a plethora of their readings. At the same time, there was the broadcast of the cult television series Transparent, which featured Myles’ poetry as well as a poet and teacher character supposedly based on them.

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Such transmedial relays and the looping feedback they generate play a crucial part in the resonance of aesthetic practices, including writing, today. The transmedial promiscuity – or plasticity – of language, its capacity for coupling and conjoining is key to the survival of the kind of literate subjectivity we once valued and which most digital environments now militate against (Gibbs, 2018). The experience of silent reading (especially literary reading) as deep absorption and reflection, a conjuring of images “under authorial instruction”, in effect a “dreaming by the book” as Elaine Scarry (1997) – referring to the reading of fiction – termed it, was born of the book as an object to designed to be held in human hands. The form of the book also provides a site and support like no other for learning to read in the strong sense in which reading becomes a powerfully affective experience, one where the text, like a musical score (Drucker, 2003) needs to be realized by human performance to come fully to life and reading must then also be thought as a writing, as the work of Roland Barthes did so much to make clear. The book is a score for the performance of reading, facilitating back-scanning, continual immersion, dipping in and out, peaking ahead to endings or leafing through an index without quite knowing what we’re searching for. This functionality of the book facilitates engagement, curiosity, exploration, and immersion, all fundamental features of literate and especially literary subjectivity. By contrast, the documents which now dominate e-environments are dividua, and, as Alan Liu points out, they are “deformational because they atomize molar structures [for example, book, collection, or scholarly work] into modular, remixable components geared to industrial efficiency and postindustrial flexibility” (Liu, 2008, n.p.). They produce readers as users and promote increasingly “extensive” reading processes which make for “less individuated reading experiences, and, consequently, less individuated interpretations and a less palpable sense of shared textual experience among a community of readers” (Huisman, 1998, p. 147). Beyond the experience of silent, individual reading, however, facilitating discovery and augmenting the resonance of particular works, public poetry readings have long played a crucial role in building readerships and forging communities from them. Now the mediatization of readings on YouTube and Facebook has come to comprise an important vector in the way poetry resonates through small, loosely connected poetry communities and in some cases spreads beyond them. In addition to the webcasts and videos of readings, a multitude of poetry apps now enable a wider public to engage with poetry writing. Yet at the same time, it is claimed that fewer and fewer people seem to be reading poetry (see, e.g., McCooey, 2009), and we are also seeing signs of a profound transformation of reading practices in the widespread skepticism about the distraction and anomie produced by much networked online experience. Perhaps, it is the case that online platforms constantly threaten to reduce such work to what is able to be mined for data, or alternatively to content, especially content designed to solicit

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human engagement, and which requires looking rather than reading in any strong sense. But they also serve to connect poetry scenes to wider social and cultural milieus, both through the figure of the poet as they cross contexts (poet and performer and novelist and feminist and presidential candidate and queer cultural icon, and so on) and the way they touch on the real or – in the case of Myles’ work – enter directly into it. And, by the same token, such contexts might also enter directly into the work, as Myles makes clear in an anecdote about the way tweets can enter into other forms of writing: I write about art as well as fiction and poetry, so I was writing this essay about a visual artist. I was at this [visual artist’s] performance and suddenly my girlfriend texted me. Then suddenly, this guy texted me about coming to some other event, and I just thought it was so apropos in my essay for a catalogue to include the texts exactly as is. They’re sort of performed as poems inside of the essay because of the way they were a smaller window in a larger spread of language. They took us out of a space and returned us back to the space, which is what texts do all the time, or what a tweet does. (Benjamin, 2015, p. 1) Intermedial performance like Myles’ are one way – among others – of ­keeping readerships for poetry as a language art alive and resonating through other fragments of the shattered public sphere, as the afterlife of their campaign of 1992 in that of 2016 suggest. This is a gesture revivifying a particular historical moment in the present, and one that continues to resound, bringing the feminism of the nineties into direct contact with the feminism and queer activism of today, as women assembled in February 2017 to protest against the policies likely to be enacted by Trump’s administration and in 2018 the #MeToo moment resonates around the world. And yet, there is a sense in which this kind of resonance has always been what writing produces. Perhaps, Myles herself sums it up best: I think every piece of writing is an expression of your true community. A piece of writing is one thing after another, and you are moving associatively in time, putting moments next to each other, passages that you think are in real congress. It’s your club. Every piece of writing is a club, and it attracts another club to you. It’s sticky. (Conrad, 2012) What has changed today is the speed and reach of such affective resonance, now amplified and even manufactured by digital media. Contemporary experimental writing has responded to the age of the algorithm with “conceptual writing” (writing driven by the invention of procedure, the practices of appropriation and reframing, and an indexical rather than representational

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relation to the world). However, Johanna Drucker (2012) argues that, as critique famously did before it, conceptual writing has run out of steam, and speculates that the “emergent agency” arising from collectivities and aggregation rather from than the individual voice will provide the basis for what happens next. This would indeed be consonant with our contemporary existence in complex symbiosis with digital systems in which human sensory, affective, and cognitive capacities are constantly repurposed, and with our growing awareness that the human has in any case always existed as “event and advent rather than agent” (Grosz, 2005) in networks beyond the human. Yet the name of the author is likely to continue to exist as the “anthropomorphic façade” (Angel & Gibbs, 2006) of the writing assemblage. Both the renewed popularity of live performance and the pervasiveness of the human face in the mediascape suggest that the faces and bodies of writer-­ performers and political leaders alike will also continue to perform such work, leaving open a place for work like that by Eileen Myles.

References Anderson, L. (1990). Politics and music. In L. Anderson (Author), Empty places (pp. 15–22). München: Schirmer/Mosel. Andrejevic, M. (2000). Surveillance in the digital enclosure. The Communication Review, 10(4), 295–317. Angel, M., & Gibbs, A. (2006). Media, affect and the face: Biomediation and the political scene. Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture, 38(2), 24–39. Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (V. W. McGee, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1992). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Benjamin, T. (2015). Hold a feeling: An interview with Eileen Myles. Rookie Mag. Retrieved from http://www.rookiemag.com/2015/11/eileen-myles/ Bleeker, M. (2008). Being Angela Merkel. In E. van Alphen, M. Bal, & C. Smith (Eds.), The rhetoric of sincerity (pp. 247–262). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Conrad, C. A. (2012). Eileen Myles: My need to say. Bomb Magazine. Retrieved from https://bombmagazine.org/articles/eileen-myles-my-need-to-say/ Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). Mille plateaux. Paris: Minuit. Drucker, J. (2003). The virtual codex from page space to e-space. Philobiblon. ­Retrieved from http://www.philobiblon.com/drucker/ Drucker, J. (2011). Humanities approaches to graphical display. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 5(1). Retrieved from http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/ 5/1/000091/000091.html Drucker, J. (2012). Beyond conceptualisms: Poetics after critique and the end of the individual voice. The Poetry Project Newsletter, 231, 6–9. Drucker, J. (n.d.). Dark Interface and the infinitely Grand Objet a. Retrieved from https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/drucker/JD_papers/0_DarkInterface.pdf

Put a spell on you  133 Frankfurt, H. G. (2005). On bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gibbs, A. (2001). Contagious feelings: Pauline Hanson and the epidemiology of ­affect. Australian Humanities Review, 25. Gibbs, A. (2011). Affect and audience. In V. Nightingale (Ed.), The Handbook of media audiences (pp. 251–266). London: Blackwell. Gibbs, A. (2015). Mimesis as a mode of knowing: Vision and movement in the aesthetic practice of Jean Painlevé. Angelaki, 20(3), 43–54. Gibbs, A. (2018). Language as a life form. In C. Braddock (Ed.), Animism in art and performance (pp. 91–109). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Greenfield, S. (2000). Brain story. London: BBC. Grosz, E. (2005). Time travels, feminism, nature, power. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Guattari, F. (1992). Chaosmose. Paris: Galilée. Guillory, J. (2004). The memo and modernity. Critical Inquiry, 31, 108–132. Hansen, M. N. B. (2004). The digital typography of Mark Z. Danielewski’s ‘House of Leaves’. Contemporary Literature, 45(4), 605–636. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. ­Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Huisman, R. (1998). The written poem: Semiotic conventions from old to modern ­E nglish. London: Cassel. Kellner, A. (1998). With Eileen Myles. Index Magazine. Retrieved from http://www. indexmagazine.com/interviews/eileen_myles.shtml Kittler, F. (1999). Gramophone, film, typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books. Lazzarato, M. (2014). Signs and machines: Capitalism and the production of subjectivity (J. D. Jordan, Trans.). Boston, MA: MIT Press. Linebaugh, P. (2014). Stop, thief! The commons, enclosures and resistance. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Lingis, A. (2005). Contact. Janus Head, 8(2), 439–454. Liu, A. (2008). The end of the end of the book. Michigan Quarterly Review, 48, 499–520. Massumi, B. (Ed.). (1993). The politics of everyday fear. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McCooey, D. (2009). Marginalia: The Public Life of Australian poetry. TEXT Special Issue 4. Retrieved from http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue4/­ mccooey.htm Myles, E. (2015). An American Poem. In E. Myles (Author), I must be living twice: New and selected poems (pp. 134–138). New York: Harper Collins. Myles, E. (2016). Momentum 2016. i-D. Retrieved from https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/ article/7xbzvg/exclusive-eileen-myles-explains-their-impassioned-new-poem-forhillary Parker, M. (2015). Interview with Eileen Myles. The Literary Review: Women’s Studies, 57(4), 178–193. Pasquale, F. (2015). The black box society: The secret algorithms that control money and information. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

134  Anna Gibbs Robertson, L. (2016). 3 summers. Toronto: Coach House Books. Rothkopf J. (2016). A look back at Eileen Myles’ revolutionary, ‘openly-female’ write-in presidential campaign. The Slot. Retrieved from https://theslot.jezebel. com/a-look-back-at-eileen-myles-revolutionary-openly-femal-1752734234 Scarry, E. (1997). Dreaming by the book. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux. Stern, D. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant. London: Karnac. Striphas, T. (2015). Algorithmic culture. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18­(4–5), 395–412. Tarde, G. (1962). The laws of imitation (E. Clews Parsons, & P. Smith, Trans.). Gloucester: Mass. (Original work published 1890). Thompson, B. (2017). Facebook and the cost of monopoly. Stratechery. Retrieved from https://stratechery.com/2017/facebook-and-the-cost-of-monopoly/ Tomkins, S. (1962). Affect, imagery, consciousness 1. New York: Springer. Turner, M. (1991). Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Weinberger, D. (2017). Our machines now have knowledge we’ll never understand. WIRED. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/story/our-machines-nowhave-knowledge-well-never-understand/ Wichtel, D. (2018). How Eileen Myles won a battle for personal pronoun ­plurality. NOTED. Retrieved from https://www.noted.co.nz/currently/profiles/eileen-myleswon-their-battle-for-personal-pronoun-plurality/

Chapter 9

German ‘Sprechtheater’ and the transformation of theatrical public spheres Friederike Oberkrome, Hans Roth, and Matthias Warstat

What is – or what was – Sprechtheater? Today, the term ‘Sprechtheater’ is used only reluctantly even by people involved with German theater, and it is all the more difficult to translate into other languages. In essence, it means something like ‘spoken theater’, ‘theater of speech’, or ‘speaking theater’. Such a concept seems problematic even at first glance, given that a theatrical performance is in most cases much more than speech and that it is precisely the specific mediality of theater to be more than spoken words. All relevant contemporary approaches to performance analysis agree that theater is not only a linguistic, but also a gestural, visual, and physical event. Nevertheless, the term ‘Sprechtheater’ is still common in Germany. What does it mean? First of all, it serves as a generic concept allowing us to distinguish certain forms of theater from other genres like opera and music theater, dance and dance theater, puppetry and object theater. Second, the concept points to the tremendous importance of language for theater in the German-speaking countries since the 18th century. Third, the concept indicates the extent to which the project of a German national theater, which also dates back to the 18th century, was based on language and speech. The ‘national theater’ discourse was rooted in an inherently heterogeneous milieu of bourgeois intellectuals who were committed to the development of a German-language drama and thus also to German as a theater language. Although the troupes of the mid-18th century already often played in German, the major European theater languages such as Italian, English, and French still dominated when it came to a theater based on dramatic literature. In later decades, the demand for more German on stage became highly affectively charged in the context of the national movement. From today’s point of view, it is above all the problems and shortcomings of the ‘Sprechtheater’ – concept that stand out: The distinction of genres – for example, between ‘Sprechtheater’, ‘music theater’, and ‘dance’ – is increasingly difficult in the face of an indisputable dissolution of boundaries between the arts. Hybrid forms are common, and transgressions are becoming the main feature of whole artistic formats. Such contemporary hybridizations also reshape, retroactively, our understanding of the past. Have the

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boundaries between genres not long been artificial constructs? And was the variety of hybrid forms in the 19th century not just as pronounced as ­today? A second complex of problems, which is of primary interest for us in this paper, are the exclusions that a generic term such as ‘Sprechtheater’ entails. The mechanisms of exclusion that are inherent in this discourse are felt and deplored even more today than before. For example, people with an immigration background are significantly less likely to appear on theater stages in Germany than in dance performances or in opera. Measured by their population share of more than 20%, they are still markedly underrepresented in the theater. In the meantime, however, productions have begun to appear which tackle this problem by implementing aesthetic strategies of multilingualism. Multilingualism has the potential to transform established theatrical dispositifs. In what follows, we will discuss multilingualism on the stage especially in its affective dimensions: How does a plurality of languages affect the spectators of a performance? Is linguistic diversity able to bring forth new orders of speech that can alter theater audiences and, ultimately, transform entire theatrical public spheres? If it is no longer only one language that is center stage, will this also multiply and deepen the affects and impulses passing between the participants of a performance? Multilingualism in the theater is describable first and foremost as a formal and material quality. Spoken language belongs per se to the multilayered materiality of theater performances, and once these begin to include vocabularies and sounds from multiple languages, the result is a significant increase in complexity. For the audience, this complexity can lead to experiences of incomprehension. Things are said or occur in the performance space that at least parts of the audience are unable to decode. The experience of incomprehension is not without consequence for the aesthetic perception of the staging. One must keep in mind that it is precisely in contemporary, postdramatic theater forms that experiences of incomprehension are already widespread. Perhaps multilingualism serves above all to ensure that such experiences are distributed more democratically in the performance. For while in German-language dramatic theater, it is always those who can’t speak or understand German that remain in a state of incomprehension, in performances that are structured multilingually, the relevant experiences (disorientation, exclusion, but perhaps also a kind of enjoyment in the pure sensuality of non-decodable noises) are shared by all. Multilingualism could thus give a certain democratic inflection to theater. Theatrical multilingualism is situated in the long history of the relationship between theater, democracy, the public sphere, and language, a history whose German context will be briefly recapitulated in the following section. The second part takes the performance In Our Name (Gorki Theatre ­Berlin  2015) as the exemplary basis for a discussion of how reflexive strategies of multilingualism can open up conditions for novel, playful, and ­diversified theater publics.

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National theater as ‘Sprechtheater’ In mid-April 1898, a number of professors of German philology met with renowned members of the German Bühnenverein, an association of theater directors and high cultural officials, in the prestigious Apollo Hall of the Royal Theatre (Königliches Schauspielhaus) in Berlin. Theodor Siebs, a philologist at the University of Breslau, had initiated the conference with the aim of developing general guidelines for the pronunciation of the German language on stage. The theater practitioners were represented by the director of the Court Theatre of Schwerin, Carl von Ledebur, and the general director of the Royal Theatre in Berlin, Bolko von Hochberg, among others. The pronunciation dictionary Deutsche Bühnenaussprache, edited by Theodor Siebs, was published in the very same year. It soon became the authority on the correct pronunciation of German on stage, but also far beyond the theater. The book is still available today, in its 19th edition. ‘The Siebs’, as the work is called in short form, claims to codify a uniform pronunciation of the sounds of the German language. It thus seeks to push back against or even eliminate dialectal vocalizations and colloquial pronunciation variants. No sooner than the preface does it become clear that the ambition of the authors went far beyond a standardization of speech on the stage. The book should serve, much more generally, “as a kind of handbook for the exemplary pronunciation of German”. In the following decades, the authors actually succeeded in also establishing their book as a guideline for teachers in schools. In this respect, the 1898 conference in the Royal Theatre is an example of how theater in Germany served as a starting point for linguistic normalization (cf. Pachale, 2018, pp. 84–109). The heyday of such efforts falls within the decades after the founding of the German Reich in 1871. A unification of pronunciation was meant to express the unity of the new state. Unison in language was also seen as an important step toward a truly unified national identity. From the beginning, the idea of a national theater for Germany had been shaped by demands from the realm of language politics. The so-called national theaters, which were founded in the last third of the 18th century in many larger cities, including Berlin, Vienna, Hamburg, Mannheim, and Frankfurt, did not see themselves as representatives of a national state that still for a long time remained outside the imaginable. Once again, the reference to the language was decisive. In the new ‘national theaters’, Italian opera and French drama were to be (more or less) replaced by German-­ language plays. From Gottsched to Lessing to Joseph II, the most influential theater reformers of the 18th century sought to cultivate a German-language repertoire, which in many places had yet to be developed. An intellectual like Johann Christoph Gottsched, professor of poetics in Leipzig, whose idea of theater was very much guided by the model of classical French tragedy, was nevertheless able to vehemently advocate German-language authors at the same time. When in the following decades, many court theaters

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changed their names to ‘national theater’, this was meant as a commitment to German-language authors as the core of the repertoire offered. In order to understand the still-dominant monolingualism of contemporary theater in Germany, it is important to know that the majority of city and state theaters see themselves in the tradition of the former national theaters. The project of a national theater, however, was directed not only against other languages, but also against dialectal variants of one’s own language. Theodor Siebs’s pronunciation dictionary is only the endpoint of a much older movement aimed at establishing a national identity across the borders of the individual states of the empire by homogenizing the language spoken in public. The theatrical public sphere, linguistically normalized and unified, was meant to serve as a model for a united German public. The German language on stage and its correct articulation were so affectively charged because they were at the center of the national movement’s identity politics. The stage language project was about overcoming the cultural and political fragmentation of the empire, and about the creation of a common public sphere, in which all participants were to be able to speak the same language. Thus, language politics and identity politics were closely linked, and only this explains why discussions about correct pronunciation on stage could be conducted with such vehemence and passion. In the preface to his pronunciation dictionary, Theodor Siebs (1969, p. 9) puts it as follows: The influence of the stage pronunciation on the broader circles of our nation, which we so much hope for, also has a political significance: Every good German, to whom the mutual interpenetration of our tribes is dear, will be glad about this further step towards a perfect agreement. The political ideal of a normalized pronunciation was affiliated with an aesthetic ideal. In his Rules for Actors (established in 1803, Goethe (1998, p. 860f) had disqualified any dialectal vocalization on stage as lacking in beauty or unaesthetic: If a provincialism intrudes in the middle of a tragic speech, the most beautiful poetry is blemished, and the ear of the spectator is offended. Hence it is primary and most necessary for the aspiring actor to free himself from any mistakes of dialect and to reach a perfect and pure pronunciation. No provincialism is suited for the stage! There, only the pure German mode of speaking, as trained and refined by taste, art, and scholarship, may rule. The complete purification and refinement of speech, understood in the sense of an eradication of any individual, regional, or ethnic coloring, was an essential element of the aestheticization that Weimar Classicism sought.

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Of course, the practice of speaking in the theaters of the 19th century was different from what the ideologues of a purified artistic speech wished for. On the one hand, the plurality of dialects on stage for the most part r­ emained, as Eduard Devrient lamented in his History of German Acting, published between 1848 and 1874. On the other hand, the demand for a p ­ urified artistic speech, which was to be voiced on stage, could be understood in very different ways. One could even say: The more decidedly a uniform stage language was demanded, the more disputed was the question of how this stage language should actually sound. The competition in the first half of the 19th century between so-called Burgtheaterdeutsch and the ‘Weimar declamation tone’, two different styles of theatrical speaking, is legendary. In fact, another facet of the ‘provincialism’ deplored by Goethe was that ideas about the ideal sound of a national artistic language diverged greatly from region to region. Furthermore, the proposed artistic languages were not necessarily pleasant to the ear of the listener. Very often, this style of speaking was in practice perceived as “hollow and overdone”, as the ­Viennese theater historian Birgit Peter (2004, p. 16) confirms. In her research on ‘Burgtheaterdeutsch’, Peter has also encountered the phenomenon that the existing descriptions of this style give anything but a uniform picture. Apparently, ‘Burgtheaterdeutsch’ was not a fixed system, but emerged only from changing “antagonisms” and “demarcations” (p. 17). The demand for a homogeneous artistic language was widespread, but the diverse participants in that discourse held very different views on what this language should be. The myth of a unified language of the theater became a point of intersection of opposing affects and projections. The subsequent history of the German ‘Sprechtheater’ cannot be pursued in detail here. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that there were already important counter-positions in the 19th century, occupied by individuals who refused to understand a German national theater in the sense of a ‘Sprechtheater’. For Richard Wagner, for example, it was clear that only a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ combining music, dance, and poetry, and thus bringing together both the arts and the people, could be an adequate basis for a national theater. Although lacking an equally pronounced national sense of mission, after 1870 numerous projects of the historical avant-garde emerged which challenged the primacy of language in the theater. From the perspective of today’s debates on multilingualism on stage, it is important to recall these traditions: It is not self-evident that speech is dominant on stage, and it is not at all self-evident that speaking on stage has to be done in a national language and/or in a homogenous way. A theatrical public sphere does not have to be based on language. By taking recourse to the multimediality of theatrical expression, such a public sphere could easily distance itself from the attachment to a codified national language. However, there have been renaissances of the ‘high tone’ in the theater in various historical phases. A  particular

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sacralization of the speech on stage was under way in the Nazi period, especially in the years after 1936. The revival of a pathos of speech on stage at that time can be understood as an attempt to find an exit strategy from the failed ­Thingspiel-movement of the early 1930s. This conservative tone of theater speech, for which Gustaf Gründgens is a well-known example, continued in part after 1945 in the Federal Republic. It went unquestioned until the 1960s and 1970s, when city and state theaters attempted to gain new audiences and to thereby widen their respective theatrical public spheres. The question of the relationship between theater and the public sphere can be posed in two different ways (cf. Balme, 2014). On the one hand, one can ask what, in different eras and contexts, theater has contributed to the public sphere in a broader sense, meaning to those – ideally – freely ­accessible debates in which a society negotiates its political affairs and problems. With respect to this more general idea of the public sphere, it is noteworthy that today, theater is one of the few remaining forums within this sphere which as a rule still presupposes bodily copresence. This lends the question of the relationship between body and speech in theater a particular political weight: How does language correlate with the attributions and identifications to which the body is exposed in the theater, and to what extent can speech open up possibilities for distancing oneself from such attributions? On the other hand, however, one can also ask how theaters themselves create their own very specific theatrical public spheres. Theater does not create a public, but instead, depending upon its various forms and formations, many diverse publics. What is unique about theater as an art form is that the shaping of such publics takes place in performances, in the interaction between actors and spectators; hence, this shaping can itself be perceived as part of the theatrical form. Thus these public spheres are characterized by the particular mediality of theater. They do not necessarily have to be discursive, and certainly don’t have to be monolingual. On the contrary, it is readily conceivable that non-linguistic and at the same time highly affective forms of communication prevail in such specifically theatrical public spheres. It is also easy to imagine that in such public spheres, several languages can be related to one another and can actually interact with one another in new ways. Thus, the coexistence of languages could even become a model for an alternate mode of coexistence among the speakers.

Staging multilingualism in the contemporary theater Against the background of its historical affiliation with homogenization and nation building, German Sprechtheater can be regarded as an institution that preserves a ‘monolingual paradigm’ (Yıldız, 2012) in German ­municipal theaters. In keeping with this modern principle of monolingualism in Europe, “individuals and social formations are imagined possessing one ‘true’ language only, their ‘mother tongue’ and through this possession

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to be organically linked to an exclusive, clearly demarcated ethnicity, culture and nation” (Yıldız, 2012, p. 2). There is, of course, a long history of questioning these boundaries and shortcomings of German Sprechtheater, at least since the decisive implementation of dialect in dramatic naturalism or modernist language experiments in DADA performances. Also, multilingualism is not a completely new phenomenon in German theater, especially under the banner of migration and globalization and in the context of postcolonial and intercultural theater (see Keim, 2008). But in comparison to theater in other migratory societies, there has been relatively little effort to stage the diverse multitude of languages and manners of speaking in a municipal theater.1 The production In Our Name by Sebastian Nübling, which premiered in November 2015 at the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, can thus be regarded as a rare example. Similar to authors like Yoko Tawada, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Emine Sevgi Özdamar, whose literary texts unfold a post-monolingual perspective on language (cf. the contribution by Acker, Fleig, & Lüthjohann in this volume), In Our Name questions the monolingual heritage of German Sprechtheater through its multilingual texture and its remarkable (re-)organization of theater space. Both aesthetic strategies correspond to the general thematic focus of the performance, which dealt with “the long summer of migration” (Hess et al., 2017) in 2015 and was critical of its hegemonic framing as a ‘refugee crisis’.2 In Our Name is based on a collage of various types of texts. Most prominent are parts of Elfriede Jelinek’s theater text Charges (The Supplicants), a play frequently staged and discussed in reaction to the refugee movements to Europe in 2015.3 Echoing and alluding to Aeschylus’ tragedy The Suppliants, Jelinek wrote her play in reaction to public protests by refugees in Vienna, who called for better living conditions in their refugee accommodation and improvement of asylum law. Despite its topical subject matter, Charges (The Supplicants) is a multilayered and allusive textual cluster,

1 Since 2008, the diversification of German theaters has been encouraged and discussed under the heading of post-migrant theater. For an introduction to this development, see Sharifi (2017), who also draws a comparison to theater landscapes in other European countries. 2 The performance was the focal point of the second “Berliner Herbstsalon”, a festival hosted by the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin which dealt with the transformation of Berlin’s urban society through flight and migration. In Our Name opened the Herbstsalon and was performed for no less than 11 nights during the two-week festival. For the program, see Gorki Sonderheft Herbstsalon. Retrived from https://issuu.com/maximgorkitheater/docs/ gorki_herbstsalon_zeitung_v11_rz_ei. 3 Nicolas Stemann’s first performance of Charges, which premiered on May 23, 2014, in Mannheim, prompted a major debate concerning the legitimacy of a ‘choir of refugees’ and the racial logics of in- and exclusion in German theater. For a detailed analysis of this debate with reference to the organizational field of German Sprechtheater, see Voss, 2017, pp. 165–176.

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interweaving philosophical and mythical motives with current political topics and snippets from public media discourses on flight and refugees (see Pelka, 2016, pp. 149–174). In addition to passages from Jelinek, In Our Name also contains excerpts from Aeschylus’ tragedy itself, as well as many non-­ dramatic texts: it includes documentary material, like the protocols of an expert hearing concerning the asylum law in the German Bundestag; several short anecdotes and reflections written by the performers themselves; and public hate speech from social media. Consequently, In Our Name could be described as a multivoiced or multilingual performance on the basis of its assortment of textual material alone. By coupling Jelinek’s polyphonic and dynamic linguistic style with the language of lawmaking and juridical order, the play intertwines two completely different forms of language. This textual assemblage then functions as a point of departure for a theatrical negotiation of who speaks and what is spoken In Our Name. Obviously, the negotiation does not unfold in the mode of realistic roleplay but is instead accompanied by two major modifications of the traditional framework of German Sprechtheater. First, the performers speak in a multitude of different languages, including Arabic, Polish, Farsi, Turkish, Hebrew, and Serbian. This strategy challenges the assumed principle of comprehensibility at the core of traditional Sprechtheater. Second, director Sebastian Nübling eliminates the conventional separation between auditorium and stage by removing the rows of seats, transforming stage and audience space into a single, integral performance area. Thus, the traditional manners and sites of speaking and hearing are merged. As we will argue, such a confusion of the viewing dispositif goes beyond affecting solely the ephemeral relations between actors and spectators; rather, it challenges the very mode of theatrical publicness. In doing so, In Our Name contributes to an institutional reflection on what ‘Sprechtheater’ could mean today. At the beginning of the performance, the audience disperses across the empty theater hall as well as on a grand staircase that reaches from the auditorium up to the stage. The 15 performers who are partly ensemble members of the Maxim-Gorki-Theatre, partly actors who recently had to flee their birth countries,4 remain mixed in with the larger audience until this dispersal is complete. One after the other, they emerge from the crowd and begin to speak in the aforementioned languages. Meanwhile, they cross the theater space, roll down the fully occupied staircase, or jump up the walls acrobatically, thereby forcing the spectators to frequently change their positions. Their voices rise from different locations in the theater space, reciting short passages from Jelinek’s Charges and Aeschylus’ Suppliants.

4 These actors, Maryam Abu Khaled, Ayham Majid Agha, and Karim Daoud, have been engaged since November 2016 in the newly founded Exile Ensemble, residing at the Maxim Gorki Theater.

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Figure 9.1  I n our Name, Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, 2015.  © Ute Langkafel, MAIFOTO, reprinted with permission.

These passages are either jointly whispered toward the bystanders, articulated in a distinct manner via microphone, or shouted chorally. The highly dynamic and rhythmic way of speaking, acting, and moving constantly modifies the forms in which the audience is affected: At times, spectators find themselves distanced from the events, then they get stuck right in the middle of a cluster of people (Figure 9.1). At times, they can easily follow the action, then they completely lose track of it. These instants of non-understanding and incomprehensibility5 evoke a state of confusion on the side of the spectators, who cast seeking glances back and forth, trying to locate the mingled voices. While the audience is forced to move several times throughout the performance, only a few people freely take up the opportunity to wander around; the majority try to keep in place and remain silent, avoiding nearly all involvement by drawing back to the corners of the theater hall. In some reviews, these states of confusion and non-understanding have been interpreted as a quite bold and simplifying representation of the situation of refugees coming to Germany. For instance, critics assumed that spectators themselves were meant to be put in the emotionally unstable and

5 Although German and/or English surtitles are shown throughout the performance, this opening scene explicitly refrains from using them.

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highly precarious position of a ‘displaced person’ (see Höbel, 2015) or perceived the staged multilingualism as a rather utopian model of democratic deliberation in which everyone can speak in his or her own language (see Laudenbach, 2015). What both these readings ignore, however, is the institutional background of a monolingual history of German Sprechtheater which the performance targets. From this point of view, both readings seem rather onesided, for they take the confusing vocal and spatial setting to be merely an artistic metaphor for the performance’s political context of flight and exile. But beyond such compassionate purposes, the spectators are repeatedly confronted with speeches that critically address them as members of the German society, on whose behalf asylum and refugee policy is made. And more importantly, the spatial and linguistic components of the performance self-reflexively interrogate the respective forms of collectivity and publicness in German Sprechtheater. Thus, In Our Name does not suddenly suspend the monolingual paradigm of Sprechtheater in favor of a democratic, multilingual utopia, but instead explores latitudes for a transformation of theatrical public spheres beyond a nation-unifying, centralized manner of speaking. We will elaborate upon this in what follows. Given the suspension of the classical viewing dispositif (‘Guckkastendispositiv’), the associative dramaturgical arrangement in lieu of a coherent plot, and the overlapping of stage performance and reality, In Our Name can be classified as postdramatic theater (Lehmann, 2006) in the broad sense of the term. Since the 1980s, postdramatic theater forms have radically questioned the theatrical mode of representation associated with the dramatic paradigm and its traditional prioritization of literary text. Postdramatic theater forms depart from this model to reevaluate the specific mediality of theater, reflecting the basic theatrical situation as one of co-presence of actors and spectators. However, Sebastian Nübling’s decision to suspend the conventional form of theater in a darkened auditorium also initiates a reflection on the institutional restrictions at work in theater. In this regard, In Our Name recalls staged aesthetic interventions in the White Cube, commonly referred to as Institutional Critique – a conceptual art form strongly associated with American artist Andrea Fraser, among others. In her video installation Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, a paradigmatic example of Institutional Critique, Fraser takes on the role of the fictional museum guide Jane Castleton, who is giving a tour in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. During this tour, she not only offers information on the art works presented, but also critically engages with the entirety of the museum’s architecture (from toilets to exit signs) and parodies the rhetoric of art communication.6 The video installation Museum Highlights thus reframes the institutionalized practice of a guided tour from an internal perspective, namely from

6 For an extended description of the work, see Fraser (1991).

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within the museum surrounding that is being critiqued, and lays bare the organizational principles and paradoxes of the art institution. The multilingual staging and the transposition of stage and auditorium in In Our Name provoke an intimate confrontation with racialized bodies and voices and can in this regard be classified as institutional-critical strategies. They contradict the monolingual paradigm and the unmarked voyeuristic dispositif that remains the norm in German Sprechtheater. Moreover, these variations address the audience not as a homogenous community, but as a heterogeneous and dynamically organized collective. Instead of assuming one dominant language to be shared by all audience members and sticking to conventional spatial arrangements, the dispersive and polyglot techniques constantly renegotiate the position of the individual spectator in relation to the audience. Am I expected to actively engage in the performance? What spatial possibilities and/or language skills do I have to do so? Where can I  stand or sit without disturbing anyone? And how do I position myself with respect to these ‘charges’? These questions revolve around the relation between audience members, performers, and the institutional framework, ­illustrating the institutional critique In Our Name provokes: it neither offers a solution to the burning political issue of flight and asylum, nor can it be regarded as a supplement that compensates for the failures of parliamentary policy making. By reversing the common principles of Sprech­theater, instituting a shared space for action, and multiplying the spoken languages, it instead charges the institution of theater itself. With what? With having hardly questioned the historical terms and conditions that still determine the ways in which German society can(not) appear as diversified on a municipal or state-theater stage. Yet, this performative scenario not only critiques the institution from within, but also opposes different scenarios of public speech. The performance alternates between instances of hate speech cited from social media, a reenacted stand-up comedy performance, a Q&A session between actors and spectators, and extracts from parliamentary debates on asylum legislation. The restaged expert hearing of the Committee on Internal Affairs of the German Bundestag7 that prepared a tightening of asylum law serves as a vivid example. In this scene, four ensemble members of the Maxim Gorki Theatre are grouped around four microphones in the middle of the room and repeat snippets from the respective protocols. In contrast to the previous part of the performance, in which the spectators were dispersed among the theater hall and the grand staircase, the audience is now encouraged to

7 Cited are protocols stemming from the 42nd meeting of the Committee on Internal Affairs of the German Bundestag see https://www.bundestag.de/blob/376132/771517dadac 850b8d6b142c6bb03692e/protokoll-data.pdf

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Figure 9.2  In our Name, Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, 2015.  © Ute Langkafel, MAIFOTO, reprinted with permission.

assemble around the actors in the middle – a setting reminiscent of public or even parliamentary debates (Figure 9.2). The speech acts are taken from the minutes of the debate and demonstrate rather impressively the linguistic character of legal German. Far from a communicative medium, this abstract language of law figures a way of speaking saturated with expectations and requirements that draw a disturbing picture of the bureaucratic management of asylum.8 The performance suggests thereby a kinship between the exclusiveness of German Sprechtheater and other political or societal institutions. Although this scene relies on documentary material and provides a critical take on practices of lawmaking and bureaucratization, it neither conjures an authentic reconstruction of the respective event nor offers a p ­ olitical

8 As a negative foil, it even evokes what Alison Jeffers, in scrutinizing the ‘role’ of the refugee imposed by this institutional framework, termed a ‘bureaucratic performance’: namely that sort of behavior ‘required of asylum seekers in their dealings with law courts, immigration authorities and various other government agencies’ (Jeffers, 2008, p. 218). The relation between juridical power and theater is not only a central feature of documentary theater but becomes crucial and even precarious in the context of asylum and immigration policies negotiated on stage. For an examination of documentary theater performances and their relation to bureaucratic and/or governmental practices in German theater, see Oberkrome, 2018.

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alternative in the form of a theatrical supplement to the “bad ­politics” being made. The documentary scenario gradually transforms into a highly artificial, chaotically orchestrated manner of speaking when the four actors simultaneously repeat their texts, such that neither a single statement nor a particular voice can be distinguished. Due to this incomprehensible carpet of sound, the theatrical and the juridical frames mutually subvert each other. In so doing, the language of lawmaking is not so much transferred into the theater as it is absolved from its binding qualities, passing into the mode of the documentary. Citing and alienating legislative speech to expose the exclusiveness of this public realm exemplifies the manifold strategies through which the performance cross-fades different manners of public speaking and plays them off against each other. Regarding the display of various spoken languages, it becomes even more apparent that such a playful reframing of public speech serves as the post-monolingual feature of In Our Name. Instead of exposing monolingualism as an artificial construct and returning to multilingualism as its ‘natural’ counterpart (Yıldız, 2012), the performative constitution of any language in use is repeatedly brought to the fore. In a short scene, for example, the actresses Maryam Abu Khaled and Anastasia Gubareva teach each other the correct pronunciation of the first sentences of Jelinek’s text in German and Arabic. While this scene refers to the general learnability of language through verbal interaction as well as to the normative ideal and pedagogic mission of Sprechtheater in Germany, other aesthetic strategies enhance and expose the theatrical qualities of language. Thus, many of the performers do not speak in the language “corresponding” to their respective migratory background, but instead in languages they themselves do not master. A similar pattern can be observed in the ostentatious involvement of the prompter. During the performance, he is addressed several times by performers allegedly having difficulty with their lines. Obviously hesitant and unsure of the correct phonetic pronunciation of, for example, Farsi, he stammers and pauses while trying to help them out as best as he can. Instead of displaying and then performing multilingualism, these passages denaturalize language, highlighting the tension between its pragmatic and contingent dimensions. Language cannot be reduced to principles of understanding and mastery; it also encompasses moments of misunderstanding and uncontrollability. These moments of disorientation draw on the social-relational qualities of speaking, which demand some kind of responsivity and an attunement toward the other. The confusing lingual and spatial dimensions of the performance highlight the sensual aspects of verbal communication and not its rational-argumentative components. This shows that language – especially in theater – is not only about making sense of the world, but also about sensing the world and getting in touch with each other. The multilingualism displayed in In Our Name emphasizes the relational and transgressive dimensions of language as establishing sociability

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beyond mutual understanding. It follows from this that languages cannot be conceived of as ultimately bound to a specific person or a group of people. Rather, they can be adopted and transformed by all their many speakers. Through this self-referential use of multilingualism, the performance undercuts an essentialization and standardization of languages and their speakers, positioning them in a loosely linked, interdependent network of communication. This should not be mistaken as a naïve plea for a diverse and tolerant society, tending toward an idealization of polyphony. Rather than simply integrating different languages, which would amount to merely pluralizing the norms of monolingualism,9 the performance sets up a scenario in which plural constellations of understanding, misunderstanding, and non-understanding emerge. By cross-fading and criticizing different modes of theatrical and public speech, In Our Name overcomes a phantasm of the greatest possible intelligibility and all-encompassing understanding.

Conclusion In light of the history of German Sprechtheater, it became clear that it not only promoted an aesthetic ideal, but also operated on a pedagogical level and was closely linked to the political agenda of unifying the German nation. While Sprechtheater was part of an emancipatory bourgeois project back then and was considered an agent in the public sphere, its normative implications and mechanisms of exclusion are today brought to the fore critically. To illustrate this criticism, we analyzed the aesthetic strategies of Sebastian Nübling’s production In Our Name. Unsurprisingly, it differs significantly from its predecessors: By virtue of the self-referential use of multilingualism, it stages a specific scenario of a democratic and diverse society. But through insisting on the mode of play, the performance seems at the same time to be fully aware of the aporia that the theatrical interaction of languages cannot simply be equated with other forms of social encounter. This is due not least to the fact that theater audiences today are still very much affiliated with certain socio-economic milieus. What theater can do, however, is cite, alienate, compare and contrast, or allude to different formations of what a public might be and reflect on their common understanding. On that note, In Our Name makes perceptible that although speaking in many languages involves processes of repulsion and generates experiences of limitation, it does not suspend mutual dependency. Hence, this manner of performing multilingualism shows that unification is neither a basic condition nor a necessary purpose of being together at all. Instead, what it allows us to experience is a multifaceted theatrical public sphere, one that alludes to a playful sociability beyond

9 Makoni and Pennycock (2005) argue for a disinvention of monolingualism instead of its pluralistic replacement through multilingualism.

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static positions, without promising unrestricted accessibility or perfect mutual understanding. The concept of the theatrical public sphere here reveals itself to be an example of multiple artistic or aesthetic public spheres which cannot be equated with “the” public sphere in the Habermasian sense. In the kind of publics that emerge around artworks and in performances, what appears is not an enduring, stable, comprehensive structure, in which a society fosters intellectual exchange and prepares political decisions. Instead, theatrical publics (in the sense that we are using the term here) are sites of short-lived intensifications of communication and interaction, emerging out of the here and now of individual performances (although they can, of course, transgress these boundaries discursively). Like all artistic publics, they can be described as social, political, and aesthetic structures. They are not per se distinguished from other publics through a particular affective intensity or through particularly sensual-concrete forms of community formation. Rather, the specificity of theatrical publics lies in a certain mode of communicating and interacting, one which can be seen in exemplary fashion in In Our Name: these publics are not stable, but instead emerge and dissolve in the rhythm of production and reception. The often rigid link between speaker and language, actor and action, body and embodiment here appears loosened. Speakers can be emancipated from their language, actors from their actions, bodies from their embodiments in a playful way. In this gradual detachment of communication from those communicating, of interaction from those interacting, spaces for freedom appear, albeit ones whose potential should not be overestimated. For at the same time, theater publics are subject to certain limitations which will immediately come to mind for all those who would like to use theater’s potential politically. To this day, theater draws primarily upon highly limited social milieus, while leaving out broad portions of society. Within these milieus, there often exists a measure of consensus with respect to relevant and disputed political issues which does not adequately represent the controversies and divergences in public opinion. Even after the (partial) dissolution of the strictly fictional framing of dramatic theater, the stage continues to be received primarily as a space of fiction, within which conflicts, ambiguities, and confrontations can be more readily tolerated than in daily life. Multilingualism is a good example of this: the partial incomprehension accompanying a diversity of languages can be perceived in the theater as a form of enrichment and as the basis of aesthetic experience. In daily communication, however, it remains jarring and is lamented as a ‘language barrier’.

References Balme, C. B. (2014). The theatrical public sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fraser, A. (1991). Museum highlights: A gallery talk. October 57, 105–122.

150  Friederike Oberkrome et al. Goethe, J. W. (1998). Ästhetische Schriften 1771–1805, ed. by F. Apel et al. (Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 18). Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Hess, S., Kasparek, B., Kron, S., Rodatz, M., Schwertl, M., & Sontowski, S. (Eds.). (2017). Der lange Sommer der Migration. Berlin: Assoziation Assemblage. Höbel, W. (2015, November 14). Wir Herumgeschubsten. Der Spiegel. Retrieved from http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/theaterinszenierung-ueber-­fluechtlingekriegshorror-und-armut-a-1062823.html Jeffers, A. (2008). Dirty truth: Personal narrative, victimhood and participatory theatre work with people seeking asylum. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 13(2), 217–221. Keim, K. (2008). Spielformen der Mehrsprachigkeit im zeitgenössischen deutschen Theater – performative Transformation oder Affirmation national definierter Theaterkultur? In E. Kotte & J. Joachimsthaler (Eds.), Kulturwissenschaft(en) in der Diskussion (pp. 29–46). Offenbach: Meidenbauer. Laudenbach, P. (2015, November 15). Anfall von Heimat. Süddeutsche Zeitung. Retrieved from http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/theater-anfall-von-heimat1.2737880 Lehmann, H.-T. (2006). Postdramatic theatre (K. Jürs-Munby, Trans.). London: Routledge. Makoni, S. & Pennycook, A. (2005). Disinventing and (re)constituting languages. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies: An International Journal, 2(3), 137–156. Oberkrome, F. (2018). Reframing the document(ary): Exploring asylum policies on stage. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 23(2), 259–273. Pelka, A. (2016). Das Spektakel der Gewalt – Die Gewalt des Spektakels. Angriff und Flucht in deutschsprachigen Theatertexten zwischen 9/11 und Flüchtlingsdrama. Bielefeld: transcript. Peter, B. (2004). Mythos Burgtheaterdeutsch. Die Konstruktion einer Sprache, einer Nation, eines Nationaltheaters. Maske und Kothurn, 50(2), 15–27. Sharifi, A. (2017). Theater and migration – Documentation, influences and perspectives in European theatre. In M. Brauneck (Ed.), Independent theatre in contemporary Europe: Structures – Aesthetics – Cultural policy (pp. 301–416). Bielefeld: transcript. Siebs, T. (1969). Deutsche Aussprache. Reine und gemäßigte Hochlautung mit Aussprachewörterbuch. In H. de Boor, H. Moser, & C. Winkler (Eds.), Berlin: De Gruyter. Voss, H. (2017). Doing refugee in Nicolas Stemanns Die Schutzbefohlenen zwischen Ästhetik und Institution. In G. Pfeiffer & B. Peter (Eds.), Flucht – Migration – Theater: Dokumente und Positionen (pp. 165–176). Göttingen: V&R. Yıldız, S. (2012): Multikulturalität – Interkulturalität – Kosmopolitismus: Die kulturelle Andersmachung der Migrant/-innen in deutschen Diskurspraktiken. ­Seminar – A Journal of Germanic Studies, 48(3), 379–396.

Chapter 10

The Alphabet of Feeling Bad Environmental installation arts and sensory publics Ann Cvetkovich

A is for Anxiety and for Alienation. A is also for Acedia, a medieval word for the lethargy of spiritual despair. B is for Backward, as in Feeling Backward. Or left out or like a misfit. Feeling Backward can also mean looking to the past to make connections with people from other times who might have been queer and who can become our fellow travelers. C is for Capitalism, as in “You might be suffering from Capitalism.” But saying that capitalism is the problem doesn’t always help me get up in the morning. D is for Depression, for Despair, for Doubt, for Disappointment and for Dread. E is for the Everyday because feeling bad is a very ordinary and Everyday experience. F is for Failure, which is not always a bad thing since the Failure to be normal can be good. F is also for Feeling Bad. The Alphabet of Feeling Bad is about creating new vocabularies but sometimes very simple

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statements like “I feel bad” are the best way to describe our feelings. G is for Grief. I don’t think that needs an explanation. H is for Happiness. Happiness is a tricky term. Because the things that are supposed to make us happy often don’t succeed in doing so. It’s important to question what counts as Happiness and make room for feelings of Unhappiness that express the desire for a different kind of world. H is also for Hopelessness, which is one of the deadliest forms of feeling bad. Depression comes from the Hopelessness of being unable to imagine a future. The cultivation of Hope is an important struggle especially because there are so many good reasons to lose Hope. I is for Impasse. I often feel like I don’t know what to do or like I’m stuck. Being at an Impasse is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it’s important to dwell in the space of not knowing what to do. J is for Jaded and for Jealousy. Jealousy can be a political disappointment, the failure of feminist dreams of sisterhood. We want to learn to accept Jealousy as part of collective life. K is for Killjoy. Feminists are often called Killjoys. The Killjoy is the person who resents other people’s pleasure or remains stubbornly unhappy in the midst of their joy. Sometimes it’s important to be the Killjoy – to say “Fuck you – I am not feeling it. Your version of happiness is really problematic for me.” L is for Loneliness. Is it possible to share the feeling of being

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lonely or alone as a way to make new forms of collectivity? M is for Melancholy and also for Melodrama. I like Melodrama because it often provides a public forum for women who are feeling bad. N is for Normalcy, which we want to challenge. We want to embrace feelings that are considered abnormal. N is also for Numbness. Sometimes feeling bad means feeling numb because we feel like we don’t have any feelings when there is no public space for them. But Numbness is a feeling too. And feeling numb can protect us from feeling too much. O is for Occupy, which has become the name for a political movement. But sometimes we are so distracted, or pre-occupied, by feeling bad that we don’t have time for politics. How can we bring together the emotional and political meanings of Occupy? How can paying attention to our feelings become part of our political movements? P is for Precarity, a word that has been used to describe those who fall outside of material and economic systems of support. Precarity could also describe how feeling bad puts many people, even those who have material privilege, in a state of emotional Precarity. P is for Passivity, which is another feeling that shouldn’t be easily dismissed. We are often told that in order to be good activists we have to get rid of our Passivity. What if radical Passivity were also a way to get things done?

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P is also for Public Feelings, the name of the group I’ve been working with for some time. Our goal is to pay attention to feelings as a shared experience not a private or individual one. We dream of being able to have our feelings together in order to feel a little less lonely and more public. Q is for Queer, of course. And for the idea that there is no feeling that is too Queer. Let’s have more words for feelings that seem strange or Queer! R is for Rage. R is for Revolution. And R is for Respite. For the desire to take a break to have some time out to stop when you are burned out. There is so much pressure to keep up and to keep moving and sometimes we just need to slow down. S is for Slow Death. Slow Death describes how the daily routines of living with structural inequalities, and the things we are attached to, can wear us out. S is also for Shame, which is a very important queer feeling. T is for Trauma. U is for Utopia. In my version of Utopia, there is plenty of room for bad feelings. V is for Vulnerability, which is another feeling that has gotten a bad reputation. I want to welcome Vulnerability as the way in which we make ourselves open to ourselves and to others. Vulnerability can be the foundation for connection. W is for Weariness and for the War on Worries.

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Instead of the War on Terrorism, let’s have the War on Worries in which we battle against the demons that make us feel bad and wage war on the sensations of racism, sexism and homophobia. X is for Extreme as in Extreme feelings. X is also for Exhaustion. Y is for Yawn and also for Yell, which are two different ways of expressing feelings. And Z is for Zest. Zest is energy, vitality, life force. We want to cultivate Zest including the energy of feeling bad.1 The preceding text derives from my video collaboration with the Berlin-­ based artist Karin Michalski, the first version of which was produced for a group show called “A Burnt-Out Case?” at nGbK gallery in Berlin in 2012 (see Figure 10.1). Karin was interested in the work of the collectives with which I have been associated, Public Feelings and Feel Tank, which have aimed to bring feelings, including the concept of “political depression”, into the public sphere. For this project, a collaboration that also included the artist Renate Lorenz, she proposed that I help her write an “alphabet of feeling bad”, an abecediary of key terms from “Anxiety” to “Zest” that would extend the inquiry into political depression and negative affects that had first brought us together.2 To make the video that was part of the first installation of The Alphabet of Feeling Bad, I performed a live version of the abecediary for the camera by adlibbing explanations for a cowritten list of

1 In addition to its life as a video installation, The Alphabet of Feeling Bad has also been published in multiple print forms. This version of The Alphabet’s text was published in I is for Impasse: Affecktiv Queerverbindungen in Theorie_Aktivismus_Kunst, von Bose, Ulrike, Köppert, Michalski, & Treusch (2015). The original adlibbed live performance for film was adapted to a written document for a second text-based video installation of the project for Words Needed in Umeå, Sweden, in 2014. A print version of the Words Needed text was distributed as part of a 2014 installation of the video at Counterparts in Göteborg, Sweden, and a slightly different version is part of the package for the audio recording, an unhappy archive (Baumann & Michalski, 2016). I would like to thank Karin Michalski for inviting me to collaborate with her on The Alphabet of Feeling Bad. Her creative work has allowed me to see my own thinking and writing in new ways. I’m also grateful to Eva Söderberg and the other members of the Mid Sweden University research group for the opportunity to present the Public Feelings writing workshop that led to an earlier version of this essay, which was published in Walking Beside: Challenging the Role of Emotions in Normalization. See Cvetkovich (2014). 2 I had previously worked with her on an interview for a zine she made called “Feeling Bad – Queer Pleasures, Art & Politics”.

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Figure 10.1  P  roduction still from The Alphabet of Feeling Bad (version 1). Courtesy of Karin Michalski.

words while sitting on a bed modeled after the feminist artist Tracy Emin’s installation, My Bed (1998), which brought the messy space of sexual and emotional intimacy into public view. In the second version, a text adapted from a transcript of that live performance was projected onto a wall of ice in Umeå, Sweden, and then in the more intimate space of a Göteborg hotel room, where viewers could lie on the bed and watch the video projected onto the ceiling. I have been happy to see ideas from my book Depression: A Public Feeling and its fellow travelers in queer feminist affect theory, such as Sara Ahmed, Heather Love, and Lauren Berlant, circulate in this way – for people to respond to theoretical work affectively, spatially, and collectively through embodied encounters and transformations of public space.3 Seeing affect theory transformed into an art project that takes the form of an environmental installation has also facilitated my thinking about affective public spheres. Exploring what happens when affects that might be understood as private or intimate or that might be pathologized as antisocial or a-political make their way into the public sphere has been part of my work with Public Feelings groups. These groups have been especially interested in how collective moods and feelings, such as anger or grief and mourning, can have political consequences. Our work on the category of

3 See Cvetkovich (2012), Ahmed (2010a, 2017), Love (2007), and Berlant (2011).

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“political depression” was a way to explore how negative affects, such as depression, might be central to political life not only as forms of impasse or blockage that need to be acknowledged and even embraced but also as grounds for political collectivity. Slogans such as “Depressed? It Might Be Political!” have been greeted with enthusiasm because they provide public space for despair and hopelessness as political affects, making it possible to name and share them rather than consigning them to shame, which so often pervades and erodes activist circles. The notion of an affective public sphere constitutes a critique of the rational public sphere, a concept that has tended to underwrite the assumption that the affective responses are “irrational” and compromise public life. Rather than fostering forms of public discourse and democracy based on the exchange of ideas in language, affective public spheres embrace a more embodied collectivity that includes sensory communication in a range of nonverbal forms, including affective ones. Under the rubric of political depression, for example, people are invited to show up in public without words, without having to know what they think or even feel, and without the pressure to articulate solutions to the world’s problems. Installation artists have been a good resource for exploring what affective public spheres might be and do because they make publics literal by designing spaces and environments for conversational forms of social interaction and because they choreograph different ways in which bodies can interact in public space. Art projects also facilitate discussions of the distinctions between affect and emotion that have emerged as affect has displaced or added to emotion as a category (that is tied to rational communication or verbal exchange). They do so by lending themselves to sensory and physical conceptions of bodies in space whose movements and feelings are integral to thinking and speaking. If the public sphere is not solely based in linguistic exchange but includes other modes of relating that are affective in the sense of embodied, sensory and tactile, the capacity to move bodies in space as part of the public sphere is important to conceptions of radical democracy. Sharing feelings, including negative ones, in public, can transform the public sphere, including models of rational communication that are often the foundation for conceptions of democracy based on the exchange of ideas. In my work on questions of affect and the public sphere, I have been fortunate to work in close collaboration with artists whose ability to create environments that facilitate different kinds of social relations has helped my own thinking. Central to Depression: A Public Feeling was the craftbased installation work of Allyson Mitchell and Sheila Pepe. By creating immersive environments that people can get inside, these artists literally produce new feelings (feelings as both affect and emotion but especially material forms of touch and sensation). And these feelings form the basis for new kinds of collectivity, what Sheila Pepe calls “common sense”, affective rather than rational public spheres where embodied experience is the

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ground for forms of sociality that are shared rather than individualized.4 In writing about these projects, but, more precisely, thinking and feeling alongside these artists with whom I’ve had ongoing relationships, I have also found myself ruminating on embodied and affective methods. My thinking emerged from the process of actually being in and interacting with the spaces these artists created and hence a form of affective inquiry that was sensuous, embodied, and tactile. Thinking becomes a practice of engaging with the material world – of feeling and touching both people and things – and it’s one way, in the words of Depression: A Public Feeling, “to make room for crazy thoughts to become intellectual projects and communities and movements” – or affective publics (Cvetkovich, 2012, p. 20). Immersive installations and environments appeal to the senses rather than assuming that social interaction takes place between “talking heads” who exchange words. Even if these environments also enable conversation to take place, they also challenge the idea of language as the only or privileged means of communication within the public sphere or for radical democracy by understanding social exchange to be embodied and by creating sensory publics. The Alphabet of Feeling Bad offered me a new opportunity to consider art installations as affective public spheres not only because, as a collaborator, my thinking has been integral to the project but also because it uses language very explicitly and thus raises anew the question of the relation between language and affect in the public sphere. It makes use of the talking head – my own in fact! – that is central to the documentary aesthetics that help produce the rational public sphere, but the performative aspects of the project suggest a different understanding of genres such as the lecture, the speech, and the political exchange, one that acknowledges affective and embodied states. Being placed in a messy unmade bed, rather than a chair, even for the activity of talking, makes the body more present; moreover, the use of a bed as a location breaks conventional boundaries between public and private spheres, allowing for rest, sleep, and embodied activity alongside of talking. Across its multiple iterations as video, installation, book, and audio recording, The Alphabet of Feeling Bad is centrally concerned with questions of language and its relation to affect. It explores the languages and vocabularies we might need for articulating public conceptions of affect, engaging with variations between technical and vernacular terminologies, and with the value of theoretical vocabularies or concepts in addition to individual stories. Although it has its origins in the recorded performative lecture of a person who is talking, it has also been presented as a text – thus

4 For more on the “queer commons” as a category of affective public sphere, see Butt and Millner-Larsen (2018).

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experimenting with the performance and transmission of language in a variety of ways, both embodied and disembodied. As a mediated, rather than live, performance, it has been installed in a range of ways that engage the viewer or reader’s body (and allow language to be received in embodied ways), including the bed on which I performed, the beds provided for viewers in gallery spaces and hotel rooms, and the snowy street that was the scene of outdoor projection. It thus suggests that the exchange of words is always an embodied practice – that body/mind, reason/emotion, and affect/ language are entwined. My own participation in the project further underscored the affective and sensory dimensions of thinking and talking because my reflections here are based not just on writing the text of The Alphabet of Feeling Bad but on performing it and conceiving of the text as circulating in embodied and affective ways for others as well. My embodied experience of the project afforded me an affectively based research method through which to explore ways of naming and sharing negative affect (or feeling bad) in the public sphere. Art practices, especially those such as Alphabet that foster immersive environments, have in turn inspired my own experiments with writing as embodied practice and with the production of language for circulation in the public sphere. While I embarked on these projects with an interest in how affective and embodied experience can displace or critique verbal exchange, the actual practice of working with language and affect together revealed them to be productively entangled.

Behind the scenes As what Karin describes as an “experimental interview”, The Alphabet of Feeling Bad has been a good way to combine scholarship and art, not least of all because it carries my work and those of my fellow queer affect theorists into different venues – the gallery and the street rather than the university, and Europe rather than the United States – and without my having to be present. The video has been screened as a continuous loop composed of two of the different versions, and it has now been part of exhibitions in London (in Visualising Affect at Lewisham Arthouse in conjunction with Goldsmiths College), Zurich (at Les Complices), Karlsruhe (at Badischer Kunstverein for an exhibition called An Unhappy Archive), and other locations around Europe. Although we did some initial brainstorming via email to generate words for each of the letters of the alphabet, the project was mostly finalized during a trip I made to Berlin for a one-day shoot in which I “performed” the alphabet by reciting the list along with brief explanations of each of the terms. I didn’t quite realize until I got to the studio (where a queer version of Tracey Emin’s “My Bed” was set up as my stage) that Karin wanted me to explain

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the words not just recite them, and the resulting live/filmed performance is a combination of script and improvisation, which was filmed while I recited slightly different versions of the alphabet three times in one long take of 45 minutes! It was quite grueling to move between the skeletal script and the performance while the camera was running – if it had just been a live performance whose results were ephemeral, I would likely have been more relaxed. I also collaborated with Karin on a second version for a video installation project called Words Needed curated by Anna Linder in Umeå, Sweden, which was a European Capital of Culture for 2014. For that version we turned the script into a text – white words on black background – which was projected on a wall of snow in the middle of one of the city streets – right next to a shopping mall called Utopia! – as part of the festival’s opening ceremonies in January. This second version has also been exhibited in Göteborg as part of Counterparts (curated by Anna van der Vliet), an exhibition designed to transform public space in the context of fall 2014 elections in Sweden. For that installation, the video was projected onto the ceiling of a hotel room, and spectators could lie on the bed to watch it, thus echoing the location of my own performance/interview and creating a more intimate public space for shared feelings. This second version of Alphabet, as the title “Words Needed” suggests, is suggestive for questions about the relation between language and affect in so far as the conversion of the live performance into a text places a more literal emphasis on the words of the abecediary. Creating a single image for each letter of the alphabet foregrounds the words (which may register more immediately than the longer explanations) and creates a public sphere in which the sharing of words is a way to share public feelings and affects. While I think of The Alphabet as fundamentally an affective project, it is also very centrally a linguistic one and the process of creating both keywords and text has been another way of writing and communicating affect theory. For example, in further iterations of the project that are more print based, such as the publication of the text in the collection I is for Impasse: Affecktiv Queerverbindungen in Theorie_Aktivismus_Kunst (2015), and on the sleeve of the LP record, an unhappy archive, that features an audio version of The Alphabet, the project’s focus on words is emphasized. In these print versions, the form of appearance of the abecediary keeps the focus on the word as an object that invites affective investment. Laid out on the page (or in the installation) in a verse-like form that accentuates each term’s status as representative of a letter of the alphabet, the words become talismans or material objects. The record sleeve further underscores this materiality since the text is imprinted on a container for the LP, also a material object that is the medium through which the audio version can be played (see Figure 10.2). The record album was part of an elaborate print package that included photos from the installations and a pamphlet featuring Sara Ahmed’s essay, “Feminist

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Figure 10.2  A n Unhappy Archive with audio recording of The Alphabet of Feeling Bad in LP format. Photograph courtesy of Karin Michalski.

Killjoys”, thus further enabling the material circulation and exchange of The Alphabet’s new vocabularies for public feelings (Ahmed, 2010b).

The abecediary as theory pedagogy The Alphabet of Feeling Bad project has been a way to create theory by performing it. And since the activity of performing was impromptu and thus improvisatory, the results are less deliberate than many forms of writing or even academic public performance where the thinking is so often planned in advance. It is also a way of teaching theory, and the genre of the abecediary enhances the use of the keyword, another pedagogical genre for theory. Theory often takes the form of vocabularies and conceptual terms that provide tools for thinking – whether the classic Marxist keywords, such as base, superstructure, and structure of feeling, defined by Raymond Williams, or terms to describe the shifting state of political economy such as postmodernism, late capitalism, or neoliberalism, or in the current moment of the affective turn, distinctions between emotion and affect (which have sometimes generated anxious discussion) or the new significance attached to words such as mood and atmosphere. Keywords morph and change in significance, rather than remaining constant, and one way to generate new ways of thinking is to develop new vocabularies.5 The Alphabet of Feeling Bad seizes upon

5 In recent years, the keyword collection modeled by Raymond Williams (1985) has proliferated as a genre for new areas of cultural studies. See, for example, Keywords for American

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and expands this capacity for theoretical invention through linguistic innovation by offering a capacious sense of what kinds of terms can function as keywords. It complements affective public spheres that bring feelings such as depression into public view by naming affective states not just abstract concepts and by displacing the clinical terms of biomedical science with everyday vernacular. As a site of linguistic intervention, it also proceeds from a sense that our relation to language is affective not just intellectual – that keywords are a site for the circulation of affect as we negotiate identities and critical debates – and search for words that will make us feel better. Sometimes disparaged as jargon by its detractors, theoretical terms often call out for definition. The abecediary is thus a way to bring people in – an adaptation of the children’s genre to make the technical language of theory accessible and to forge new public cultures. Yet Karin also cites The Alphabet’s sources in versions of the abecediary in classic videos from the experimental tradition such as John Baldessari’s Teaching a Plant the Alphabet (1972) and Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), which explored the arbitrary and oppressive process of language acquisition and the lesson as a form of negative pedagogy. Acknowledging this critique, our version explores the abecediary’s potential as an activist or grassroots educational form, seeking to craft a lecture or a lesson that can be transmitted to and taken up by anyone (not just remaining in the hands of the experts). I am speaking not only as a professor or scholar but as someone whose knowledge of feeling bad comes from experience and who is creating a vocabulary that provides strategies for living. As part of an exhibition called An Unhappy Archive (a term used by Sara Ahmed in The Promise of Happiness) at the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, The Alphabet screened alongside wall displays featuring books by queer affect theorists such as Sara Ahmed, José Muñoz, Lauren Berlant, and Heather Love, as well as my own work, making even more explicit the film’s intellectual sources and enhancing its pedagogical and political functions.6 In our rendition of the abecediary, theory’s keywords also become more accessible because they are offered up through forms of instruction that are attuned to affective modes of instruction (as indicated by the bed that

Cultural Studies (which includes my entry on “Affect”), Keywords for Asian American Studies, Keywords for Disability Studies, Keywords for African American Studies, and Keywords for Environmental Studies. See Burgett and Hendler (2014), Schlund-Vials et al. (2015), Adams et al. (2015), Edwards et al. (2018), Adamson et al. (2016). 6 Books that were displayed on the walls as part of the An Unhappy Archive exhibition include Ahmed (2004, 2006, 2010a), Berlant (2011), Chen (2012), Cvetkovich (2012), Doyle (2013), Freeman (2010), Halberstam (2011), Love (2007), Muñoz (1999, 2009), Probyn (2005), and Sedgwick (2003). For a discussion of queer feminist affect theory by Cvetkovich, Love, Freeman, and Berlant, see Wiegman (2014).

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replaces the classroom or lecture hall to offer a more intimate space of learning where feelings are encouraged). It was important for me that the list include not just the technical vocabulary associated with particular theorists, whether old guard or new queer theorists, but that it also endorse everyday language as a form of theoretical vocabulary. Some words are, of course, major theoretical concepts from fellow travelers in queer affect theory – such as Heather Love’s Feeling Backward, Lauren Berlant’s Slow Death, and Sara Ahmed’s Killjoy and her critical account of Happiness – but the explanations are brief enough to remain accessible and drift into the public sphere without becoming a full-on lecture.7 But other words, such as Vulnerability, Loneliness, Rage, and, of course, Feeling Bad, are more ordinary or vernacular terms. The resulting list is thus quite varied – from high to low, from common to obscure. Indeed, the process of finding words for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet suggests that the vocabulary of feeling bad is infinite – that there are many ways to feel bad and many ways to describe feeling bad. And it also suggests that negative feelings need to be named and finds a way to make that naming a public process. The Alphabet of Feeling Bad makes public both experience and vocabulary for it that might be private or ­stigmatized – and suggests that there is no feeling too shameful or private – or inarticulate – not to be shared with others.

Keyword as magic portal In our Public Feelings work, we have used the term portal to describe the keyword – to indicate its associative powers and its capacity to enable an opening onto new ideas and new worlds or to facilitate a crossing from one world to another.8 Used in the context of the Internet to describe the rapid transfer from one source of information to another, portal also carries psychoanalytic connotations of an unconscious logic at work in defining the meaning of terms. I sometimes think of keywords as talismans or fetishes that have magic powers; we can get attached to our favorite theory words in the same way that a child learning the alphabet may fixate on a beloved word, especially when it is associated with an image, although usually the word is a proper name or noun not an abstract concept. Understood as having the potential to carry an affective charge, the keyword, especially when part of an abecediary, establishes a close relationship between language and affect and lends itself to materialist understandings of language as the

7 See Love (2007), Berlant (2007), and Ahmed (2010a, 2017). 8 I would like to acknowledge Randy Lewis, my Public Feelings colleague at the University of Texas, for providing this term.

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bearer of affect. Attached to specific memories and chains of association, words can be the site for “an archive of feelings”, and this can be true as much for theoretical terms as for explicitly affective terms, especially for cultural theorists, who often have strong attachments to particular books, writers, and critical vocabularies. When I reflect back on the improvised nature of the original performance of The Alphabet, I can see my own predilections at work. There are, for example, some words, such as Grief, Shame, and Trauma, that are so obvious or so common to me (Cvetkovich, 2003, 2012) that I don’t offer much explanation for them because they belong to vast critical and theoretical bibliographies that I didn’t have the energy or patience to unpack in the moment of performance. So I say, for example, “Grief – I don’t think that needs an explanation”. In other cases, with terms such as Vulnerability and Precarity that have also drawn a lot of theoretical attention, I say a bit more because of my investment in vulnerability’s centrality to social and political life. There’s also a difference between the keywords that many theorists share, such as Melancholy or Utopia, and ones that are identified with particular people. I did my best with concepts such as Slow Death or Killjoy but felt myself pausing slightly to ventriloquize Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed, not quite sure what it meant to take on their vocabulary without acknowledging them by name but also wanting to declare a shared sensibility. (And The Alphabet is also a way of signaling their relevance for a public discussion of feeling bad.) Some terms were also more personal: Dread, one of my favorite affect words from George Eliot, Melodrama, in recognition of my work on 19th-century popular genres (Cvetkovich, 1992), and Numbness, always a point of reference for me in thinking about affect as force or energy (Cvetkovich, 2012). My favorite moments are the ones where the keywords are a way of encoding my own intellectual and affective histories. For example, the words Yell/Yawn and Zest (which I linked with vitality) come from my experience with co-counseling (also known as Reevaluation Counseling), which prioritizes the physical discharge of feelings; my inclusion of them represents a secret nod to other ways of sharing bad feelings besides talking about them as I do in the video. And Karin requested that we include the word Jealousy, and I liked our invocation of the challenges of feminist collective process in defining it as “political disappointment, the failure of feminist dreams of sisterhood”. These are not universal definitions but ones that suggest particular experiences and collectivities. They are not meant to be binding for others but instead an invitation to create other vocabularies or to define terms in other ways so that everyone can have their own alphabet of feeling bad. In favoring a proliferation of terms for affective states, including vernacular ones, The Alphabet sidesteps theoretical approaches to affect

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that demand precise distinctions between affect, emotion, and feeling.9 In keeping an open approach to the vocabulary of affect, it also lends itself to understandings of affect as nonverbal forms of energy, vibration, and materiality that are associated with affect theory. Although an abecediary is fundamentally linguistic or verbal, placing it in circulation through forms of environmental installation also ensures that its verbal components are embedded in other media and nonverbal forms of sociality.

Feeling bad as negative affect Uniting the list and central to all of the terms is the interest in “negative affects” indicated by the rubric of feeling bad, which in English at least is a very colloquial term whose meaning derives in part from its lack of precision. Bad is close to sad but not quite the same, and it also carries the hint of bad as wrong, as though feeling bad were a sign of deviance or nonnormativity. Feeling bad is also ambiguous with respect to distinctions between the physical and the psychic, since saying “I feel bad” can apply to either and can mean that one feels sick in a way that can’t be diagnosed or pinned down. This lack of specificity feels transgressive with respect to both scholarship, which depends on precision, and good writing, where the vague and the colloquial are to be avoided. As something one can’t quite name, feeling bad also conveys the increasingly important sense of affect as mood, atmosphere, or sensibility. Karin’s uptake of feeling bad as a category has been important affirmation of my own persistent desire for a category that is more capacious than technical or historical terms with complex genealogies such as melancholy or depression.10 Feeling bad is the vernacular counterpart to negative affect, which has become ubiquitous of late in discussions of queer affect and which, even as it seeks to challenge norms, has far more legitimacy and respectability as a theoretical concept. And even as the abecediary proliferates specific terms for feeling bad, the generic term remains central. When I went back over my own transcript to make the text, I was also struck by how often I had repeated the words “making room for” or “making space for” various versions of feeling bad. These phrases indicate our desire to create conceptual space for those feelings and their terminology. But the process whereby The Alphabet “makes room” for feeling is also quite literal since the video’s installations expand what counts as public space, as

9 See, for example, my entry on “Affect” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Burgett and Hendler (2014). 10 See Love (2010).

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does the bedroom set, which is a reminder that the theorist has a body and is not just a talking head. Hence bringing affect and language together in the public sphere, or reckoning with language as affectively charged, makes for a different kind of public sphere. The Alphabet makes space for negative affects of all kinds, not just depression or feeling bad, and suggests that the public sphere emerges from the circulation of those affects, which might take the form of moods or atmospheres that don’t readily produce actions or even coherent statements. Transforming understandings of politics as statements of position (that fall into a spectrum from left to right or progressive and conservative), The Alphabet suggests that the embrace of feelings leads to other forms of communication and sociality, and also leaves room for forms of anti-sociality that have been the focus of queer affect theory.

Feeling bad now Ultimately then, The Alphabet of Feeling Bad is not about teaching definitions but about opening up keywords (and affects) to more personal vocabularies and definitions that can be shared and about making feelings less lonely and isolating. It uses keywords as points of contact that bridge gaps between private and public experience, and between isolation and collectivity. In my own work, practices of writing, including collective ones generated in workshops, have been another way in which the production of language to describe affective states has facilitated the creation of affective public spheres. Inspired by The Alphabet, I have orchestrated events in which the participants provide words that name or describe their current feelings and we use them as points of departure for collective writing and discussion. Language thus serves as a way to share feelings and to give them a shape. In some cases, a collective mood is evident from the cumulative vocabularies that are generated; in other cases, an outlier term can serve as a provocation. The writing workshop is also a way that new thinking can begin in the company of others and where seemingly stray or idiosyncratic thoughts and feelings can become the raw material for research projects. In my own practice, the spirit of The Alphabet has been manifested in small gatherings or “salons” in which participants circulate or read aloud short pieces of writing. Public Feelings arose in response to the affective and political afterlives of September 11, 2001 in the United States but seems all the more relevant in the time of the Trump presidency. In the current moment, the sharing of political feeling seems both necessary and fraught, especially given the renewed vigor with which right-wing politics divorce fact from feeling in favor of the latter, to which those on the left respond with appeals to reason and truth. In recognition of these tensions around affective politics, I have wanted to renew the public feelings work that inspired Depression and The

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Alphabet of Feeling Bad. In the month after the election in November 2016, I facilitated groups in which I invited my closest colleagues to share their thinking, including their feelings. Seated together around a table, the customary format for the academic seminar, we aimed to shed for a moment the obligation to make strategic public statements, to anticipate or respond to other people’s feelings, especially students’, or to offer an analysis based on professional expertise. The format is a simple one – each person in the circle has equal time to contribute a statement about what they think but in a way that leaves room for personal experience, including affective responses. This practice is by no means unique to Public Feelings – it can be found in feminist consciousness raising, therapeutic support groups, grassroots politics, and testimonial culture, but I have also found that it interrupts business as usual in academic settings. The results in the circles I gathered from among my closest colleagues at UT, which included a significant number of queers and immigrants, were illuminating – often singular and nuanced points of view that combined felt responses and professional analysis not readily available in the public sphere. In a small group, people’s words carry a weight that requires attention; even among a relatively compatible and connected set of people, there are sometimes contradictions between their experiences and my own that require processing. Sometimes the words just have to sit there because there is no appropriate or immediate response. To lighten the load, we have sometimes closed by asking people what has given them hope – a walk, a book, a person, art. As important as the exchange is the fact of coming together as a group. In my own case, the group became a place to work out a public feelings conundrum that haunted me in the wake of the U.S. elections – the comments from friends of color that they couldn’t bear to see white women cry, in part, because it seemed to belie the fact that white women voted for Trump. Or, that it was news to some people that we live in a racist and hostile world. Or, that crying was too weak, too victim like, and required bucking up and getting to work. Here’s the piece that I wrote.

White women’s tears “I can’t bear to see another white woman cry”. So says a close friend, echoing what I’ve heard from other people of color directly and indirectly as, in the wake of the election, I try to do the public feelings work of asking people, both individually and in groups, how they are feeling. “No really I mean it – how are you feeling?” – hoping to build to some sense of what’s going on from the varied responses of my circle of queers, immigrants, academics, artists. Or, not build – not try to come to any grand conclusions at this early stage but just sit with the immediate responses and contradictions jostling alongside one another. People of color are angry that white people

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failed them and they bring out the statistics to back it up: my friend Sharon wants a T-shirt that says 94% of black women voted for Hillary; someone else points out that even if 33% of Latina/os went the other way, a significant majority voted Democratic. So what about the 53% of white women who voted for Trump? Is that why the ones who didn’t are crying? I cried – and in public too – the day after the election during our weekly meditation gathering to protest the campus carry legislation that makes guns legal on our campus. Only after we had meditated together could I feel it enough to cry rather than stay numb. I didn’t care who saw me. In an effort to get some traction on the problem of white women’s tears, I bring it up at one of my Public Feelings gatherings and end up hurting the feelings of my dear white woman friend who has been crying. Oh no, that’s not what I meant! I’m just wondering if we are going to be able to stay in the room together … to be able to stand hearing people of color say they are mad at or disappointed by white people. To let white people have their states of shock and grief. To give space to the people of white working class origins for whom the blanket attacks on people like them are hard to take. To listen to immigrants of various origins grappling with what it means to live in the United States – I ask a fellow Canadian if she is thinking of leaving –and she barks back “hell no, I’m staying to fight” as though anyone who might wonder is a coward. Are the lessons of political depression any different now than they were after 9/11, or in the Bush era, or even for that matter during the Obama presidency where there were plenty of disappointments from health care to climate change to Syria to Guantanamo to Standing Rock to dead black bodies on the streets? Always the dialectic of hope and despair must be negotiated without any predictable formula, the tools of survival and resilience mustered from within the experience of struggle. I’ve been getting inquiries from around the world – a publisher in Turkey is interested in translating my book because it would be relevant to the political situation there, a journalist in Egypt asks me questions for a story about how to survive a failed revolution. She wonders whether political depression can really displace clinical depression given her many friends and colleagues who are struggling with serious mental health problems in the aftermath of Tahrir Square, and especially the violent suppression of dissidence.11 And an artist friend in Sweden just emailed this morning to say that she is making a poster that features a line I wrote for an art installation called The Alphabet of Feeling Bad: “in my utopia there will be plenty of room for bad feelings”.12 The uptake of public feelings, and more specifically political depression, in these widely different contexts suggests that

11 See Antoun (2017). 12 The poster was part of Linder’s multifaceted Queer Moving Images project, which included the Words Needed exhibitions and publications that featured The Alphabet of

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people are in need of affective public spheres and languages and vocabularies that will enable bad feelings to circulate – and as part of the political process not its blockage or failure. The category of political depression continues to resonate – but people are struggling with the idea that dwelling in depression can be productive. I’m not sure I meant that exactly – only that we had to acknowledge depression, despair, hopelessness, and be willing to feel it, as part of the political process. Let the tears fall where they may – if white women need to cry, we should cry, although it’s not the responsibility of people of color to take care of us. I want to think about the shape of feelings, about not just sadness and anger but other vocabularies. Borrowing from W.E.B. DuBois’s claim that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line”, I’ve been attuned to what I call the “affective color line”, the difference that race makes to affective experience and the ways that race is experienced as affective difference.13 In the creative nonfiction I’ve been reading and teaching, the affective color line manifests as the wound versus the weight. In the feminist literature, suffering, especially sexual assault, is wound, puncture, penetration, trauma, drawing from the model of Christian sacrifice. For Gloria Anzaldúa, the border is una herida abierta, an open wound, although claiming the borderlands for queers and immigrants, the atravesados, suggests that a wound can be an opening.14 But in Claudia Rankine’s lyric essay Citizen: An American Lyric, the experience of everyday racism that is now getting shorthanded as microaggression is a weight, baggage that gets piled on and carried around in a body that drags and sags.15 I’m feeling the wound and the weight. Sometimes I cry, sometimes I sigh.

Common feelings/feeling in common The process of shared feeling is messy since people may not be ready to listen to other people’s feelings when they are still sorting through their own. The utopian vision of a circle of radical sharing through language has to “make room for feeling bad”. And if it is not to be coercive, there must be

Feeling Bad. For further information about Queer Moving Images and Words Needed, see https://annalinder.se/ 13 See Du Bois (2015, p. 1). 14 See Anzaldúa (2012, p. 25): “The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country – a border culture”. 15 See Rankine (2014, pp. 63, 59): “The world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard;” “To live through the days sometimes you moan like deer. Sometimes you sigh. The world says stop that. Another sigh. Another stop that. Moaning elicits laughter, sighing upsets. Perhaps each sigh is drawn into existence to pull in, pull under, who knows; truth be told, you could no more control those sighs than that which brings the sighs about”.

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room for withholding, for silence, for nontransparency, for antisocial feelings and conflict, that is, for bad feelings and for feeling bad. Simple as the format is, the results are partial, contradictory, and unpredictable. The goal in creating environments of intimate exchange, such as The Alphabet of Feeling Bad or writing workshops, is not so much consensus or analysis but a chance to tune in to or generate a mood without the pressure to diagnose or synthesize. In recent discussions, for example, a sense of being overwhelmed or torn in multiple directions has been a common observation, and the languages and vocabularies that describe those felt states reference a bodily sensorium. The abecediary’s and the writing workshop’s keywords can be talismans or portals for body-mind feelings, and for generating environments or scenes for a collective performance of thinking and feeling together. Such gatherings model a radical democracy in which the embodied and affective nature of verbal expression is embraced and in which there is plenty of room for bad feelings and for feeling bad.

References Adams, R., Reiss, B., & Serlin, D. (Eds.). (2015). Keywords for disability studies. New York: New York University Press. Adamson, J., Gleason, W. A., & Pellow, D. N. (Eds.). (2016). Keywords for environmental studies. New York: New York University Press. Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. New York: Routledge. Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2010a). The promise of happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2010b, Summer). Feminist killjoys (and other willful subjects). The Scholar and Feminist Online 8:3. Retrieved from http://sfonline.barnard.edu/polyphonic/print_ahmed.htm. Accessed August 24, 2019. Reprinted in Baumann and Michalski (2016). Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Antoun, N. (2017, January 25). The politics of the personal: January 25 through the lens of depression. Retrieved from https://madamasr.com/en/2017/01/25/feature/ society/the-politics-of-the-personal-january-25-through-the-lens-of-depression/ Anzaldúa, G. (2012). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (4th ed.). San ­Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Baldessari, J. (Director). (1972). Teaching a plant the alphabet. [Video]. New York: Electronic Art Intermix (EAI). Baumann, S., & Michalski, K. (2016). An unhappy archive. Zurich: edition fink. [Artist book with LP recording]. Berlant, L. (2007, Summer). Slow death (sovereignty, obesity, lateral agency). Critical Inquiry, 33(4), 754–780. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Burgett, B., & Hendler, G. (Eds.). (2014). Keywords for American cultural studies, second edition. New York: New York University Press.

The Alphabet of Feeling Bad 171 Butt, G., & Millner-Larsen, N. (Eds.). (2018, October). The queer commons. GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, 24(4), 1–140. Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. ­Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cvetkovich, A. (1992). Mixed feelings: Feminism, mass culture, and Victorian sensationalism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Cvetkovich, A. (2003). An archive of feelings: Trauma, sexuality, and lesbian public cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cvetkovich, A. (2012). Depression: A public feeling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cvetkovich, A. (2014). Writing with The alphabet of feeling bad. In E. Söderberg & S. Nyhlén (Eds.) Walking beside: Challenging the role of emotions in normalization (pp. 37–51). Forum for Gender Studies Working Papers. Sundsvall: Mid Sweden University. Doyle, J. (2013). Hold it against me: Difficulty and emotion in contemporary art. ­Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. (2015). The souls of black folk. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Edwards, E. R., Ferguson, R. A., & Ogbar, J. O. G. (Eds.). (2018). Keywords for ­African American studies. New York: New York University Press. Emin, T. (1998). My bed. Tate Gallery. London. Freeman, E. (2010). Time binds: Queer temporalities, queer histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Love, H. (2007). Feeling backward: Loss and the politics of queer history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Love, H. (2010). Feeling bad in 1963. In J. Staiger, A. Cvetkovich, & A. Reynolds (Eds.) Political emotions: New agendas in communication (pp. 112–133). New York: Routledge. Muñoz, J. E. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. New York: New York University Press. Probyn, E. (2005). Blush: Faces of shame. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rankine, C. (2014). Citizen: An American lyric. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press. Rosler, M. (Director). (1975). Semiotics of the kitchen. [Video]. New York: Electronic Art Intermix (EAI). Schlund-Vials, C. J., Trinh Võ, L., & Scott Wong, K. (Eds.) (2015). Keywords for Asian American studies. New York: New York University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. von Bose, K., Ulrike, K., Köppert, K., Michalski, K. & Treusch, P. (2015). I is for Impasse: Affecktiv Queerverbindungen in Theorie_Aktivismus_Kunst. Berlin: b-books. Wiegman, R. (2014). The times we’re in: Queer feminist criticism and the reparative “turn”. Feminist Theory, 15(1), 4–25. Williams, R. (1985). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. New York: ­Oxford University Press.

172  Ann Cvetkovich Galleries, exhibitions, and websites Karin Michalski http://www.karinmichalski.de nGbK Gallery (Berlin, Germany) http://ngbk.de Les Complices (Zurich, Switzerland) http://www.lescomplices.ch Visualising Affect (Lewisham Arthouse, London) http://visualisingaffect.weebly. com, http://www.lewishamarthouse.org.uk An Unhappy Archive (Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany) http://www. badischer-kunstverein.de/index.php?Direction=Programm&Detail=552 Axe Grinding Workshop (Tate Modern, London) http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/ tate-modern/conference/axe-grinding-workshop Words Needed (Umeå European Capital of Culture 2014, Sweden) http://umea2014. se/en/event/words-needed/ Counterparts (Institute for Contemporary Art and Ideas, Gothenburg, Sweden) http://www.icia.se/en/exhibition/counterparts/ Gallery September (Berlin, Germany) http://www.september-berlin.com/exhibition/ review/73/en D21, Gallery (Leipzig, Germany) https://d21-leipzig.de/archive/index.php/­ausstellun gen--/225.html Mic Drop, Exhibition, & Performance Festival (Innsbruck, Austria) https:// micdropfestival.tumblr.com/ Get Well Soon! Cultural Center (Potsdam, Germany) www.getwellsoon-exhibition. tumblr.com Station 21, Art Space (Zurich, Switzerland) http://www.station21.ch/ Konsthall C (Stockholm, Sweden) http://www.konsthallc.se/

Chapter 11

Affect and accent Public spheres of dissonance in the writing of Yoko Tawada Marion Acker, Anne Fleig, and Matthias Lüthjohann

Es ist nicht meine Aufgabe, eine regionale Färbung, einen ausländi­ schen Akzent, einen Soziolekt und einen Sprachfehler medizinischer Art voneinander zu unterscheiden. Stattdessen schlage ich vor, jede Abweichung als eine Chance für die Poesie wahrzunehmen. Es kommt mir komisch vor, dass ich von einer „Abweichung“ spreche, denn ich bin nicht sicher, ob es überhaupt den „Standard“ gibt. Im Sprach­unterricht in Japan habe ich gelernt, dass das reinste Hochdeutsch in Hannover zu finden sei, und zwar auf einer Theaterbühne und nicht irgendwo auf der Straße. [It is not my task, to distinguish between a regional twist, a foreign accent, a sociolect or a speech impediment of a medical type. Instead I propose to perceive each deviation as a chance for poetics. I think it’s strange that I’m speaking of a “deviation”, because I’m not sure if there is a “standard” at all. In the language courses in Japan I learned that the purest standard German was to be found in Hannover, namely on the theater stage and not somewhere on the street.] (Tawada, 2016, p. 23f.)

In this central passage in her essay “Akzent”, Yoko Tawada rejects the differentiation between dialects, accents, and linguistic “mistakes”. Turning her attention toward the interaction between “Standard” (norm) and ­“Abweichung” (deviation), she recalls the notion of “Hochdeutsch” (standard German) as she first encountered it in the language classes she attended in Japan. Born in 1960 in Tokyo, Tawada has been living in Germany since 1982. Having published stories, novels, and poems as well as plays and essays in both Japanese and German, she frequently engages in questions concerning the encounter of different languages and cultural practices. One crucial point that Tawada makes in passing is that Hochdeutsch is intimately connected to the realm of the theater: Rather than “auf der Straße” (on the street), one would find “das reinste Hochdeutsch” (the purest standard German) on the stage of Hanoverian theaters. Tawada invokes the literary and political tradition of drama-based theater, which emerged in the

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Enlightenment era, as well as its twofold legacy, which has not ceased to shape contemporary society: Not only did it provide a model for the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere, it also provided a powerful normative framework for the discourse on the German nation.1 Crucially, however, Tawada makes clear that the norm of standard German, the idea of “das reinste Hochdeutsch”, remains exactly that: an idea of purity, which abstracts from the linguistic diversity of everyday life. Likewise, she points out that language, as a social practice rather than a normative idea, is always embodied by its speakers and cannot be confined to the “Theatergebäude” (theater building). Here Tawada introduces the notion of accent: Aber es gibt keinen Menschen, der in einem Hannoveraner Theater geboren wurde und nie das Theatergebäude verlassen hat. Also gibt es keinen Menschen ohne Akzent, so wie es keinen Menschen ohne Falten im Gesicht gibt. Der Akzent ist das Gesicht der gesprochenen Sprache, und ihre Falten um die Augen und in der Stirn zeichnen jede Sekunde eine neue Landschaft. Der Sprecher hat all diese fernen Landschaften durchlebt […], und das zeigt sich in seiner Aussprache. Sein Akzent ist seine Autobiografie, die rückwirkend in die neue Sprache hineingeschrieben wird. [However, there is no single person, who was born in a Hanoverian theater and never left the theater building. So there is no human being without an accent, just like there is no human being without wrinkles on the face. Accent is the face of spoken language, and its wrinkles around the eyes […] are drawing a new landscape every second. The speaker has lived through all of these landscapes […], and that shows itself in her/his pronunciation. The speaker’s accent is her/his autobiography, which is retroactively inscribed into the new language.] (Tawada, 2016, p. 24) Tawada highlights the difference between speech and writing, yet at the same time she also blurs this distinction: Tawada’s notion of accent as “das Gesicht der gesprochenen Sprache” (the face of spoken language) foregrounds the bodily aspects of speech. Nonetheless, as the speaker’s ­“Autobiografie”, her or his accent is “hineingeschrieben” (being inscribed) into every new language.

1 While the first aspect has been at the heart of the seminal studies by Reinhart Koselleck (1959/1973), Raymond Williams (1961) and Jürgen Habermas (1962/1990), the latter is stressed by more recent scholarship on the historical formation of monolingualism in European societies since the 18th century (Bonfiglio, 2010; Yildiz, 2012; Gramling, 2016). As the chapter by Friederike Oberkrome, Hans Roth, and Matthias Warstat in this volume elaborates, the role of the national theater has been of immense importance in this process.

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Situating our argument: thinking the difference between spoken and written language In this chapter, we want to explore Tawada’s notion of accent and the productive tension it provokes between spoken and written language. We see this tension already indicated in Tawada’s way of using contrasting titles: While the essay’s title is “Akzent” (accent), the collection in which it appears is called “akzentfrei” (accent-free). Taking Tawada’s reflection on language and accent as a starting point, we want to sketch out an understanding of language that is both receptive for the pragmatic and social character of speech and the affective relational entanglement that it performs. In order to elaborate on that, we can draw on the concept of heteroglossia as it has been put forward by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). With its emphasis on the “different tongues” (hetero-glossia) interacting within that ensemble of speech which we commonly refer to as “one language”, Bakhtin’s theory provides a vigorous critique of linguistic standardization and monolingualism. Focusing on the processes of dialogic interaction, both in literary writing and everyday speech, we find B ­ akhtin’s thought to be very close to Tawada’s. On the other hand, we think that ­Tawada’s notion of accent and her emphasis on the necessary accentedness of speech can provide an important turn to Bakhtin’s pragmatic account – a turn which shows an affinity to the theoretical “affective turn” (Clough & Halley, 2007; Gregg & Seigworth, 2010) in literary and cultural studies. This way, thinking language and affect with Tawada, we can approach the theory of the public sphere and the critical discussion that this concept has sparked from a different angle. Like Jürgen Habermas, we maintain that the emergence of the public sphere in European societies has been prepared by the literary practices of Enlightenment. We also agree that the structure of the public sphere is closely linked to the structure of language itself. Based on Tawada’s and Bakhtin’s insights into the agonistic multiplicity of different languages, voices and accents, however, we question the Habermasian notion of language as being inherently consensus orientated. The idea of undistorted, rational communication that underlies and shapes his theory of the public sphere is inadequate when it comes to the dissonant character both of language and of democratic politics: By ignoring the bodily, material, and affective qualities of speech, Habermas’ normative idea of an “ideal speech situation” renders invisible the eminently political struggle over who is to be apprehended as a subject of speech in the first place. In the concluding part of this chapter, we will try to further develop some of the implications of this criticism by returning to Tawada’s text. Our thesis is that the tension between written and spoken language, the standard of literary Hochdeutsch and multiple accents, allows for words, parts of speech, and accented voices to sound with and against each other and to create a field of polyphonic dissonance. Tawada’s text reflects on accent and

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simultaneously allows to experience the difference between writing’s very own “accentlessness” and the pronunciation and articulation of speech. Thus it equally creates a distance in relation to the literary norm of monolingualism and Hochdeutsch (standard German), on the one hand, and in relation to the individual accent of speakers and readers, on the other hand. This distance, we want to argue, provides the condition for a kind of affective dissonance: it reflects on individual accent and is open for common participation.

Accent, language, and affect: reading Tawada and Bakhtin together Unlike in the case of the abstract standard of Hochdeutsch, Tawada understands accent to have both an individual spatiotemporal dimension and a bodily dimension. Using “Falten” (wrinkles) as a tertium comparationis, she likens the skin, as it covers the human face, to the accent of spoken language: “Also gibt es keinen Menschen ohne Akzent, so wie es keinen ­Menschen ohne Falten im Gesicht gibt. [So there is no human being without an ­accent, just like there is no human being without wrinkles on the face]”2 (Tawada, 2016, p. 24). Tawada’s formulation is a negation: She rejects the idea of a totally smooth, unwrinkled skin as well as that of an unaccented voice. Moreover, however, the reflection on language and skin serves to emphasize the role of individual bodies and speakers. Rendering Tawada’s sentence in positive terms makes this explicit: Language, in so far as it is embodied by a human speaker, that is, language as speech, is always accented – and, in turn, every speaker speaks with an accent. In other words, accent is what is common to all speakers, including native speakers. By further exploring the link between skin and language, Tawada even turns the facial skin into a metaphor for speech: “Der Akzent ist das Gesicht der gesprochenen Sprache, und ihre Falten um die Augen und in der Stirn zeichnen jede Sekunde eine neue Landschaft. [Accent is the face of spoken language, and its wrinkles around the eyes […] are drawing a new landscape every second]” (p. 24). Speech’s “Falten” (wrinkles) change constantly, inscribing the “Autobiografie” of the speaker. Accent, as the face of spoken language, hence also refers to an individually embodied aspect of language.

2 Tawada’s metaphoric in this quote easily links itself to poststructuralist theory: On the one hand, it recalls Roland Barthes’ famous formulation in A Lover’s Discourse: “Language is a skin. I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words” (1978, p. 73). On the other hand, it also resonates with Gilles Deleuze’ and Félix Guattari’s dynamic understanding of “smooth” and “striated” spaces and their interest in “how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces” (1987, p. 500).

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The biography of the individual as a speaker of different speech genres is articulated in her or his accent: “Gäbe es keinen Akzent mehr, bestünde die Gefahr, dass man schnell vergisst, wie unterschiedlich die Menschen sind. [If there was no accent any longer, there would be the danger to forget easily how different people are]” (p. 25). This does not mean that this biography would be disclosed in one’s speech. Rather than a representation that could be ‘read’ like a coherent narrative, Tawada’s notion of accent as an autobiographical inscription evokes dimensions of experience, affect, and feeling, which cannot easily be rendered in a linear, transparent narrative fashion. If accent is representing the speaker’s affective biography, it does not do that in a way which could be decoded. Tawada’s metaphorical integration of embodiment (skin), speech, and writing (the inscription of one’s autobiography) rather relies on a sense of biographic temporality which is not necessarily linear and, likewise, a sense of representation which does not imply stable meaning: “jede Sekunde eine neue Landschaft [a new landscape every second]” (p. 24). Importantly, this dynamic notion of the speaker’s affective biography as well as the fundamentally twofold character of accent, common to all and yet individually different,3 relies on a pluralistic and multilingual understanding of language. The spatial metaphor of the facial skin with its myriads of wrinkles already hints at it: The wrinkles are caused by the multiple movements of the face, articulating very different feelings and pointing in very different directions. Tawada, however, also makes explicit references to translingualism. Right at the beginning of her essay, she humorously reflects on the ways in which her own Japanese accent affects not only her pronunciation of some German words, especially those which bear few vowels, but also her affective relationship to them: Words with many consonants, for example, tend to sound “verärgert” (angry) or “abweisend” (dismissive, p.  23). Accent, here, is linked to a dissonance which is caused by the different sonic characteristics of the two languages. As the longer quotation at the beginning of our chapter shows, Tawada regards this form of polyphonic dissonance as a “Chance” (p. 23). For the tongue, as the bodily organ of articulation, speaking with an accent means to articulate a plurality of languages at once: “Wer mit Akzent spricht, kann mehr als eine Sprache

3 Again, the link to poststructuralist and deconstructionist theory can be made: We find Tawada’s understanding of the twofold character of accent especially akin to Jacques Derrida’s autobiographical reflections on the Monolingualism of the Other, proposing to have “but one language – yet that language is not mine” (1998, p. 1), and Jean-Luc Nancy’s relational ontology of “being singular plural” (2000). Significantly, however, Tawada’s account does not show a similar ­“obsession” with Hochdeutsch as does Derrida’s text with “pure French” (Chow, 2014, p. 23) and, unlike Nancy’s philosophical account, stresses the historical conditions of the relationship between accent and norm.

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gleichzeitig auf die Zunge legen. [Who speaks with an accent, can place more than one language on their tongue at the same time]” (p. 26). It is at this point that we feel that Tawada’s essay is resonating with Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theory, especially his concept of heteroglossia or dialogism. Translating both as ‘different languages’ as well as ‘different tongues’, heteroglossia describes the “authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes shape” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 272). This “dialogized heteroglossia” is a common practice, “anonymous and social as language”, yet it is “simultaneously concrete, filled with specific content and accented as an individual utterance” (p. 272). Bakhtin’s theory of language is based on a pragmatic perspective: language for Bakhtin is language in use, it is a social-relational activity, a “lived event” (Gardiner, 1992, p. 191). Bakhtin emphasizes the primacy of speech’s situatedness and its social entanglement against its reduction to an abstract principle or system of communication: Any language use is heteroglossic, always charged with different meanings, intonations, voices, and accents. Accordingly, Bakhtin, very similar to Tawada, argues that there can be no such thing as a ‘pure’ unitary language in social life. It is important to note, however, that the relationship between these different articulations of speech is one of contestation and struggle. In this vein, Tawada is contrasting different publics and their languages: the accented German spoken on the street and the Hochdeutsch of the theater stage. In doing so, she evokes a sphere of contestation in which, in Bakhtin’s terms, two fundamentally different “forces of language” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 270) are at work: While the forces of standardization, purification, and unification are closely linked to the realm of the theater, the public sphere of the street seems to be a – potentially subversive – space of linguistic diversity. In Tawada’s case, the text itself becomes an arena of struggle between spoken and written literary language: Her essay both adheres to the established norm of standard language and challenges it at same time by emphasizing its constructedness. While for Bakhtin the opposition between these forces is rather firmly tied to literary genres, with the “discourse in the novel” emphatically forming the epitome of heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1981), Tawada’s notion of accent productively confronts the traditional hierarchy of genres and its spatial connotation. Conceptualizing language as consisting of heterogeneous “speech genres” (1986), Bakhtin stresses the fundamental role of intonation and tone. With regard to the “expressive aspect” of language as well as its accentedness, Bakhtin makes a clear statement: “There can be no such thing as an absolutely neutral utterance” (1986, p. 84). From the perspective of language as a social phenomenon, words and sentences belong to “nobody” and have no “author”. However, as Bakhtin writes, we [still] hear those words only in particular individual utterances, we read them in particular individual works, and in such cases the words ­already

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have not only a typical, but also […] a more or less clearly reflected individual expression, which is determined by the unrepeatable individual context of the utterance. (p. 88) Bakhtin theorizes this type of relationality as a dialogic one: an utterance follows upon another word and is always entangled in a speech situation. In this sense, one could say that in communication, words and sentences as well as whole utterances affect each other and form a process of articulation which cannot be reduced to a level of ‘purely’ semantic signification. Bakhtin first developed this form of dialogic relationship in an analysis of ­Dostoyevsky’s novels (Bakhtin, 1984), which was then translated into ­English as heteroglossia or polyphony. From the beginning, however, Bakhtin rejects the binary opposition of literature and everyday life and instead proposes the dialogic nature of language as an element common to both. In this ­respect, he speaks of a dialogic relationship between words in a general sense: The “dialogic overtones” of an utterance are constitutive for its “style”: the dialogical “process of interaction and struggle” is crucial for any form of language (Bakthin, 1981, p. 92).

Accent, affect, and the public sphere Tawada’s and Bakhtin’s insights into the role of accent and the unavoidable accentedness of words in concrete speech situations have far-reaching political implications. This becomes more evident, when they, in turn, are brought into dialogue with political theories of the public sphere. In many of these theoretical accounts, most notably in Habermas’ influential version, dialogue is understood as a consensus-driven, collective deliberation, modeled more or less explicitly after the exchange of written language in the Enlightenment ‘republic of letters’. We follow Habermas on his notion that the emergence of the new bourgeois public sphere in the 18th century is made possible by the literary practices of that era (Habermas, 1990). The emergence of a common realm in which authors and their books compete vis-à-vis a critical reading public provides the model for what Habermas then describes as the organizing principle of democratic public discourse, namely the “zwanglose Zwang des besseren Arguments [unforced force of the better argument]” (1984, p. 119). According to Habermas, this principle guarantees that public discussions move toward the rational solution of problems. Habermas makes clear that he does not think of this governing norm of Enlightenment discourse as something already achieved, but underlines that the “ideale Sprechsituation” (ideal speech situation) works as a regulative idea (1984, p. 119; 1990, pp. 182–194; 1992a, pp. 435–450). Nevertheless, his understanding of the historical evolvement of the literary public and its effects on the emergence of liberal democracy relies on an assertion concerning the very nature of language use: At the

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heart of the ways in which modern literature is organized in 18th-century society, Habermas assumes an orientation toward rational consensus which then goes on to form the blueprint of the public sphere and which therefore is constitutive for the advent of modern democracy (1990, pp. 97–99). Upon the publication of the translation and the resurging discussion of Habermas’ study in the English-speaking world, feminist theorists quickly voiced concerns about the implicit assumptions in Habermas’ argumentation. Seyla Benhabib, while agreeing on the general normative model of deliberative democracy, analyzed how Habermas operates with a public/ private distinction that follows the tradition of liberal contract theory and its gender binary: The speakers in the “ideal speech situation” rely on the exclusive structure of the public sphere, in other words, “women’s oppression and exploitation in the private realm” have to be regarded as the very precondition for the existence of the public (Benhabib, 1992, p. 93; Habermas, 1990, p. 19). In addition, Nancy Fraser criticized the ways in which Habermas’ concentration on the bourgeois public sphere fails to be able to come to terms with the various “nonliberal, nonbourgeois, competing public spheres”, like that of the American women’s movement of the 19th century (Fraser, 1992, p. 115). Fraser’s criticism has thus given rise to an ongoing discussion on the plurality of public spheres and counterpublics (Warner, 2002). Significantly, the feminist critique of Habermas also challenges the normative exclusion of affect and emotion from public discourse: The ­“feeling that accompanies and motivates all utterances” (Young, 1985, p. 395) has been rendered invisible in his account and, with it, the gendered binary of emotion versus ratio. Habermas, in a reply to his critics, acknowledges these material and practical conditions of the public: Bourgeois publicness is articulated in discourses that provide areas of common ground not only for the labor movement but also for the excluded other, that is, the feminist movement. Contact with these movements in turn transformed these discourses and the structures of the public sphere from within. From the very beginning, the universalistic discourses of the bourgeois public sphere were based on self-referential premises; they did not remain unaffected by a criticism from within […]. (Habermas, 1992b, p. 429) Looking closer at the formulation, however, Habermas’ way of taking into account the feminist criticism turns out to be rather one directional: He attributes the transformatory powers of “publicness” not to the social movements themselves, as it were, but to the “self-referential premises” which he understands to be at work “within” the bourgeois public sphere from “the very beginning” (p. 429). This way he maintains that the core principle of rational discourse stays untouched by the material and affective struggles, which in fact are a central part of those movements (Gould, 2010). From this

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perspective, the most important question – the question of who emerges as a ‘rational subject’ in the designated public sphere – does not even arise. This structural neglect is intricately intertwined with the relationship of Habermas’ notion of ‘rational’ language use and the concept of the nation, which it adheres to. As Benedict Anderson puts forward in his study on the construction of the nation as an “imagined community” in 18th- and 19th-century Europe, the role of language and especially that of literature has been of immense importance (2006, pp. 44–45). For Anderson, “print languages” (p. 44) fostered the emergence of a vernacular republic of letters in 18th-century Europe.4 Similar to Habermas, Anderson highlights writing and the exchange of printed text within a commercial system. They provide the conditions of possibility for bourgeois communication beyond the confines of local varieties: “Speakers of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, or Spanishes, who might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation, became capable of comprehending one another via print and paper” (p. 44). However, Anderson stresses that these “unified fields of exchange and communication” also nurtured a distinct form of national belonging: In the process, they gradually became aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged. These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community. (p. 44) Enlightenment’s constellation of writing, print, and literature, that is, the literary public, from this perspective, has also been a powerful agent in ­nation-building processes culminating in the naturalized connection ­between “nation-ness” and “private-property language” (p. 68). Following Anderson, in a recent philological study, Yasemin Yildiz describes this form of linguistic standardization as the “monolingual condition” (2012): Governing not only literary and political discourse since its institutionalization at the end of the 18th century, it also deeply affects the practices of subjectivation. One’s so-called mother tongue ties oneself to the community one is born in and links this form of attachment to the nation-state, suggesting that the language of one’s mother is also ‘naturally’ the language of the state

4 In his wide-ranging historical study on the Invention of the Native Speaker, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio elaborates how this connection is simultaneously e­ xplicitly spelled out in the philosophical discourse around 1800, especially by Rousseau and Herder (Bonfiglio, 2010, pp. 127–141).

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one ‘belongs to’ (Yildiz, 2012, p. 9). Yildiz analyses the relationship between language and nation as an “affective knot” (p. 10), since it operates on a level that does not only deal with discrete meanings of speech acts but rather structures the ways in which language can be used in the first place. In fact, it is in this regard that Bakhtin’s critique of the idea of pure, ­‘unaffected’ and ‘unaccented’ speech can be connected to the criticism against Habermas. In contrast to Habermas, Bakhtin, as we have stated above, is stressing the polyphonic and dissonant dimensions of dialogue and organizes his concept of heteroglossia around an open and agonistic relationship between different words and parts of speech (Gardiner, 2004).5 This agonistic polyphony is at odds with the normative conception of an ‘ideal speech situation’ that removes language from the contexts of its actual usage. While Habermas claims that in order to reach mutual understanding “different speakers may not use the same expression with different meanings” (1992c, p. 87), Bakhtin holds that “there are no words with meanings shared by all” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 401).6 Because of the agonistic multiplicity of meanings and the inherent dissonance within a single utterance, language inevitably exceeds and sometimes even counteracts the speaker’s intentions. Habermas’s demand for clarity and purity of meaning is guided by the notion of intentional language use and therefore eventually reveals a possessive attitude toward language. Bakhtin, by contrast, assumes that we have only limited control over language. The model of his understanding of dialogue is not a principle of rational consensus but rather the embodied dynamics of “living discourse” and “social struggle” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 331). As both poststructuralist readers of Bakhtin and those in the tradition of critical theory have noted, this liveliness of language is not so much a naïve vitalism but expresses a radically pragmatic understanding; one that takes as its point of departure the incoherence, ambivalence, and entanglement of concrete embodied utterances (Gardiner, 1992, pp. 102–108). In this respect, it is very close to Tawada’s notion of accent as the face of spoken language. Accent is not a mere coloring or a modification of a given chain of signs which in their essence are imagined to be independent of their articulation. The affective dynamics of accent are crucially involved in the complex process of meaning production. Regarding the question of the public,

5 This is vividly reflected in Bakhtin’s account of modern prose: “The art of prose is close to a conception of languages as historically concrete and living things. The prose art presumes a deliberate feeling for the social and historical concreteness of living discourse, as well as its relativity, a feeling for its participation in historical becoming and social struggle; it deals with discourse that is still warm from that struggle and […] still fraught with hostile intentions and accents […]” (1981, p. 331). 6 Furthermore, novelistic dialogues are precisely characterized by their capacity to “push to the limit the mutual nonunderstanding represented by people who speak in different languages” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 356).

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this perspective on the pragmatics of accent can be fruitfully linked to more recent interventions in the field of political philosophy. In her reflections about the precariousness of life and the differential distribution of vulnerability, ­Judith Butler turns her attention to related questions: In order to be regarded as a subject and to be taken into account on the public scene, Butler argues, it is not enough to rely on the processes and arenas of rational argumentation. Instead, it is a matter of the ways in which bodies, parts of speech, and life itself are framed and become perceivable as subjects in the first place (2009, p. 51). In a similar vein, Jacques Rancière understands what he calls the “distribution of the sensible” to be the preconditions for any form of political deliberation (2006, p. 12). Taking into account its regulation of accent, monolingualism can be understood as an integral force in the distribution of the sensible and the affective framing of speech. As Butler notes, “the demands of monolingualism” have restricted the public sphere, rendering invisible those whose “language was not considered a language at all” (Butler, 2015, p. 204). Against this backdrop, in his theory of the political, Rancière emphasizes dissent understood as being sensual and affective rather than discursive. For Rancière, it is not so much the argumentation and the processes of coming to a conclusion which are at the center of modern democracy. Rather, it is the struggle over the usages of words, the subject status of speakers, and the participation in common questions that constitute democratic politics in an emphatic sense (1999, p. xii, p. 58). To disagree, in this understanding, is not primarily a speech act taking place in a designated public space, which has already been established. On a more fundamental level, disagreement is a process that tries to bring about a public space of contestation and struggle in the first place, inevitably involving and even relying on the material and affective dimensions of embodied speech (p. 50). If we understand the usage of words in the way suggested by Bakhtin, namely as an open, agonistic dialogue which involves a variety of senses, we can see how the political disposition which Butler and Rancière have in mind ties in with the pragmatics of accent: The monolingual condition and its regulation of accent govern who appears as the ‘rational’, ‘neutral’, and therefore ‘legitimate’ subject of political discourse.

Distance, play, and dissonance At this point, it is important to keep the different genres and modes of ­articulation of speech in mind. Bakhtin speaks of writing and literature as forming their own group of speech genres. As much as we argue for language as a social ongoing, we also want to be attentive to the characteristics of written language and especially literary texts. Emphasizing diversion, even dissent, the notion of dissonance seems to be able to capture both, the ­accented heteroglossia of speech and the manifoldness of affect. At

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the same time, however, we find in Tawada’s reflection on accent ways of ­reconsidering questions of representation and common participation that go beyond a simple rejection. Returning to Tawada’s essay, we can now locate the normative dimension of an accent-free public discourse in the wider historical framework of the monolingual paradigm. On the one hand, Tawada’s writing is inevitably part of this framework. Her essay is written within the norms of standard German, and the title of Tawada’s essay collection could be interpreted as a hint at this dimension: “akzentfrei” (accent-free) in this regard would point to the difference between voice and language that is established by the medium of writing. In writing, one could interpret Tawada, speech is ‘freed from’ the accented voice of its author. This does not necessarily imply but can include the standardization of writing by the norm of Hochdeutsch: Writing Hochdeutsch, in this sense, can be understood as being open, even potentially common to all speakers, regardless of their individual accent, precisely because of its regulation by transparent, learnable norms. If writing is understood to be “akzentfrei” (accent-free), this marks a difference between this mode of articulation and accent as the face of spoken language. However, this does not mean that Tawada reintroduces a notion of speech which would be originally ‘unmarked’. As we have tried to show in our reading of Bakhtin, the standard itself is but one, equally accented force among others in the contested sphere of embodied speech. Rather than strictly opposing writing and speech, and reiterating related gendered oppositions like the public and the private or the mediated and the immediate, Tawada’s writing vividly enacts and works through the struggle it thematizes: namely, the tension between what one might call the accentlessness of literature ­(“akzentfrei”), on the one hand, and the accented voices of both author and reader, on the other (“Akzent”). In the following passage this might become clearer: Die Konsonanten “r” und “l” zum Beispiel bringe ich durcheinander. Sie sind für mich eineiige Zwillingsschwestern. Hier einige Übungen für ­einen besseren Umgang mit ihrer Verwechselbarkeit: “Durch das lustvolle Wandern in der Natur wandelt Herr Müller seine Gesinnung.”  –  “Der Rücken eines Ponys ist niedrig und deshalb niedlich. Wäre er doppelt so hoch, wäre er halb so niedlich.” – “Kein Bücherregal ist illegal, egal welche Bücher da stehen, genauso wie kein Mensch illegal ist, selbst wenn er mit einem Akzent spricht.” [I mix up the consonants ‘r’ and ‘l’ for instance. For me they are similar twin sisters. Here are some exercises for better handling their interchangeability: ‘By sensually wandering [Wandern] in nature Mr. Mueller is changing [wandelt] his attitude.’ – ‘The back of a pony is low [niedrig] and therefore it’s cute [niedlich]. If it was half as high, it would be half as cute.’ – ‘No bookshelf

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[Bücherregal] is illegal no matter what books are in it, just like no human being is illegal, even if she/he is speaking with an accent.’] (Tawada, 2016, p. 23) By referring to her own accent, Tawada invites the reader to alter the ­ ronunciation of the text: We have to read the “Übungen” (exercises) in a p way that mixes up ‘r’ and ‘l’: only then are we able to get Tawada’s pun. ­Performatively drawing our attention to accent itself in this way, Tawada allows us to read differently and to interact with accent in a playful manner. The crucial point about this movement taking place between “Akzent” ­(accent) and “akzentfrei” (accent-free) is that it allows for a different reading of the title of the volume: akzentfrei, we want to suggest, does not so much refer to the norm of standard German, but rather hints at the difference between written and spoken language and the tension that this difference creates with regard to accent and voice. Playfully experiencing this tension cuts across the dichotomy of accented voice and writing: Tawada’s writing provokes the voice, one could say, as well as her voice is inciting herself to reflect on accent in the medium of writing. Far from denoting an idea of immediacy and presence, voice and accent become an object of aesthetic experience only in the reflective modus of Tawada’s essay. In-between the accented voice of everyday discourse and the rather different mode of articulation that is writing standard German, Tawada allows for the ‘playful’ interactions of text, accent, and pronunciation. Therefore we have to be careful, if we want to relate Tawada’s prose to the political dimension of the pragmatics of accent: Tawada’s reflection on accent does not presuppose something like a fixed identity. On the contrary, the identity of accent, voice, and subject is precisely what is undermined in the passage above. Crucially, the way she puts accent and affect at the center of her essay counteracts traditional notions about the supposed purity and directness of the voice – and the political implications attached to them. In her ‘exercises’ Tawada explicitly reflects upon the political connection between legality, the status of citizens, and that of literature. Quoting the well-known activist slogan ‘Kein Mensch ist illegal’ (no one is illegal) she establishes a link to the status of literature in democratic societies: “Kein Bücherregal ist illegal. [No bookshelf is illegal]”. Mixing up ‘r’ and ‘l’ the essay connects ‘Regal’ and ‘legal’, the institution of the law, and the realm of fiction. Again, we are reminded that the constraints exercised by ‘legal citizenship’ and the nation-state are historically connected to those of literature. Yet, Tawada also highlights the freedom of speech, and more precisely the freedom of the printed word, as important agendas of that historical era. Between the freedom of speech and the idea of the ‘mother tongue’, as a technology of regulating national belonging, literature emerges as an ambivalent phenomenon. It is important to see, however, that the experience

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and reflection of this tension is made possible by the literary text. The playful aspect in Tawada’s essay and the distancing movement which it involves hence also affect the relation between literature, accent, and the public. Following Rancière, this can be regarded as another important political characteristic of modern literature: By marking a difference to the naturalized order of the everyday, the playful experience of art allows for a renegotiation, a redistribution of the sensible order of things and people. The distancing moment in literature, involving, one could add, the ­“Akzentfreiheit” (freedom from accent) of writing, therefore, is associated with an egalitarian mode of articulation in the public. Those who raise their voice, despite being regarded as not ‘legitimately’ in the position to speak, show that the ability to articulate speech is common to all. Drawing upon Friedrich Schiller’s ideas concerning the Aesthetic Education of Man (Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, 1795), Rancière argues that the aesthetic experience of literature has a similarly egalitarian potential: Literature unfolds its politics by making apparent that, like the accented use of language, the experience and reflection of literary language is a practice potentially common to all. One might think that Rancière comes close to Habermas, but their conclusions are very different: Whereas Habermas sees literature and the literary public as a model for democracy and its political public, Rancière regards the distribution and redistribution of the sensible as political itself. Reading Tawada’s essay, one is made attentive to the fact that the affective modalities of language, its accent and embodiment, have to be regarded as being involved in this process. By participation in both at the same time, her text has a distancing effect on the standard language as well as on the accented voices of the every day. This type of literary heteroglossia locates both modes of articulation as different speech genres on the same level; thereby it undermines the hierarchy between accent and standard and its excluding effects on the public sphere. The dialogic overtones of the written words, their accents, ‘sound against each other’ (dis-sonare) allowing to critically reflect on the affective regime of monolingualism. This makes the critique against Habermas more precise: Dissonance in this sense does not only refer to a form of antagonism that is spelled out in clear-cut statements, but includes the affective and sensible dimensions of articulation: accent as the face of spoken language. To experience and reflect on this dissonance, however, involves the distancing mode of Tawada’s text: Articulating a critique of monolingualism’s order of the sensible involves participating in literature’s very own ‘accentlessness’. The tension between “akzentfrei” and “akzent” lies at the heart of Tawada’s essay and is constitutive for its form of dialogicity. What invokes affective dissonance in its political dimension is the way in which Tawada arranges this tension: Against overlooking the pragmatics of accent in the theories of the public sphere, Tawada is thus stressing a moment of polyphonic agonism, which is a chance for democratic public discourse, precisely because it attends at the same time to the plurality of accent and the commonality of language. We have to be

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attentive to this kind of dissonance, if we want to reconceptualize the public sphere as a contested, agonistic space both in terms of its affective and material composition as well as its discursive function. This, of course, is an ongoing process, open to different perspectives and voices – with no “last word” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 170).

References Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the rise and spread of nationalism (revised ed.). London: Verso. Bakhtin, M. (1981). Discourse in the novel (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). In M. Holquist (Ed.), Michail Bakhtin: The dialogic imagination. Four essays (pp. 269–422). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics (C. Emerson, Ed. & Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, M. (1986). The problem of speech genres (Vern W. McGee, Trans.). In C. Emerson & M. Holquist (Eds.), Michail Bakhtin: Speech genres and other late essays (pp. 60–102). Austin: University of Texas Press. Barthes, R. (1978). A lover’s discourse: Fragments (R. Howard, Trans.). New York: Hill & Wang. Benhabib, S. (1992). Models of public space: Hannah Arendt, the liberal tradition, and Jürgen Habermas (pp. 73–98). In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bonfiglio, T. P. (2010). Mother tongues and nations: The invention of the native speaker. Berlin: de Gruyter. Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war: When is life grievable? London: Verso. Butler, J. (2015). Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chow, R. (2014). Not like a native speaker: On languaging as a postcolonial experience. New York: Columbia University Press. Clough, P. T., & Halley, J. (Eds.). (2007). The affective turn: Theorizing the social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia II (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (1998). Monolingualism of the other; or, the prosthesis of origin (P. Mensah, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fraser, N. (1992). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 109–142). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gardiner, M. (1992). The dialogics of critique: M.M. Bakhtin and the theory of ideology. London: Routledge. Gardiner, M. (2004). Wild publics and grotesque symposiums: Habermas and Bakhtin on dialogue, everyday life and the public sphere. The Sociological Review, 52, 28–48. Gould, D. (2010). On affect and protest. In A. Cvetkovich, A. Reynolds, & J. Staiger (Eds.), Political emotions: Affect and the public sphere (pp. 18–44). New York: Routledge. Gramling, D. (2016). The invention of monolingualism. New York: Bloomsbury.

188  Marion Acker et al. Gregg, M., & Seigworth, G. J. (Eds.). (2010). The affect theory reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Koselleck, R. (1973). Kritik und Krise: Zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt [Critique and crisis: Enlightenment and the pathogenesis of modern society]. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. (Original work published 1959) Habermas, J. (1984). Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (1990). 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]. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. (Original work published 1962) Habermas, J. (1992a). Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des R ­ echts und des demokratischen Rechtstaats [Facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy]. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (1992b). Further reflections on the public sphere. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 421–462). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1992c). Moral consciousness and communicative action (C. Lenhardt, & S. Weber Nicholsen, Trans.). London: Polity. Nancy, J.-L. (2000). Being singular plural (R. Richardson, & A. O’Byrne, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rancière, J. (1999). Disagreement: Politics and philosophy (J. Rose, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, J. (2006). The politics of aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible (G. Rockhill, Trans.). London: Continuum. Tawada, Y. (2016). akzentfrei. Tübingen, Germany: konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke. Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counter publics. New York: Zone Books. Williams, R. (1961). The long revolution. London: Chatto & Windus. Yildiz, Y. (2012). Beyond the mother tongue: The postmonolingual condition. New York: Fordham University Press. Young, I. M. (1985). Impartiality and the civic public: Some implications of feminist critiques of moral and political theory. Praxis International 5(4), 381–401.

Chapter 12

Affect(ive) assemblages Literary worldmaking in Fatma Aydemir’s Ellbogen Claudia Breger

Upon hearing about my current work at the intersection of affect and narrative theory, students and colleagues often ask me, with any combination of surprise, skepticism, and puzzled curiosity: (How) can you actually study affect in literature? In film or theater, sure, but language and writing do not seem to lend themselves to investigations through the lens of affect. As indicated in the introduction to this volume, there is a larger context to these questions: the 21st century “Episteme of the Affect” (Brinkema, 2014, p. xi) has overall been articulated as part of broader philosophical and methodological shifts beyond the earlier “linguistic turn” and its associated emphases on discourse, rhetoric, representation, and ideology. To a degree, this emphasis on moving beyond the realm of language (and often toward concepts from the “harder” sciences) has united competing branches of affect theory, including not only cognitive/neuroscientific models but also Deleuzian affect studies and the phenomenological conceptualizations inspired by Eve Sedgwick’s later work.1 However, the differences between these approaches – and the heterogeneities within each of them – also facilitate alternative takes. My work develops these alternative impulses toward a syncretic model that opens up affect studies for textual analysis while simultaneously challenging literary studies – in particular narratology – to take seriously the affective layers of literary worldmaking processes.2 My larger methodological framework for doing so is explicitly intermedial: I emphasize that signification and rhetoric are active forces not only in language but also in cultural practices across media, while detailing how different types of signs work in their

1 In the “Deleuzian” camp, see, for example, Massumi (2002, pp. 4, 8); analogously, see Sedgwick (2003, pp. 6,108). An alternative to the apparent anti-linguistic consensus is provided by much of the work associated with the Public Feelings group (see, e.g., Staiger, Cvetkovich, & Reynolds, 2010), which inspires my own modeling with their early investigations of affect in relation to rhetoric and genre. 2 See Breger (2017a, 2017b). For a seminal early narratological plea to that effect, see Warhol (2003); in more recent literary studies, for example, Felski (2015, p. 176) (drawing on Marielle Macé).

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entanglements with affect, including the linguistic ones that co-constitute (what I call) literature’s affect(ive) assemblages. As I conceptualize them, these assemblages encompass the communicative circuits of composition as well as reception. The model thus facilitates questions about literary poetics as well as scholarly methodologies, and lay practices, of reading.3 In my chapter for this volume, I present this model with an eye on its implications for literature’s workings in the public sphere, reflecting on some of the political ­i mplications – and the potential productivity – of specific reading and writing practices in the face of current transnational predicaments, in particular the new hegemonies of unabashed hate in our moment of right-wing populisms. My literary case study for this endeavor is Fatma Aydemir’s literary debut Ellbogen (“Elbow”, 2017), a novel that presents a unique contribution to current debates around political affect, immigration, and gender by exploring the emergence of violence in a group of marginalized female Berlin teenagers, more commonly stereotyped as victims and bystanders than as perpetrators. But first, I need to back up by briefly outlining competing notions of affect (and emotion) and the indicated predicaments for the study of affect(s) in literature. In the vast field of cognitive and neuroscientific approaches, those closest to my modeling are syncretic studies at the intersection of cognitive theory with narratology and cultural studies. Reflexively complicating the straightforward adoption of scientific paradigms, they have refuted the universalist implications of otherwise influential evolutionary perspectives and probed intersectional analyses of emotions – for example, anger – in cultural texts as “inseparable from factors such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and religion” (Kim, 2013, p. 1; see also, e.g., Keen, 2015). A crucial emphasis of these cognitive perspectives has been on questions of character empathy, including careful reassessments of its potential in the public sphere (see, e.g., Keen, 2007). A concern (articulated by Sue Kim herself) is the focus on emotions as distinguished from affect: cognitive theory’s dominant “appraisal” model conceptualizes emotions as dependent on “higher order” evaluations of events, effectively assimilating them to rational process, against the backdrop of less specified, primarily biological and more or less universal “lower order” modes of affective response.4 I therefore turn to Deleuzian approaches for their interest in the “autonomous” weight, and productive instability, of affect largely foreclosed by cognitive models. Unfortunately, Deleuzian scholars have tended to theorize this weight and instability by instead hyper-dramatizing the gap between body and conscious thought, or affect and language along with the

3 In fact, writing and reading overlap insofar as writing entails lifeworld reading (as I detail below) and “interpretation” can be seen as active “co-production” (Felski, 2015, p. 174; her emphasis). 4 Kim (2013, pp. 16, 26); see, for example, Carroll (2008, pp. 149, 151) on this distinction of emotion from affect.

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social, ideology, and the subject. Inverting the values of the cognitive terminological distinction, Brian Massumi’s influential definition of affect as (asubjective, asymbolic, excessive) “intensity” sharply distinguishes it from “emotion” as the “subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience.”5 As Massumi describes his interest in “questions of ­ontology” – or bodily becoming – as one in “process before signification” and beyond cultural “mechanisms of ‘mediation’”, he brackets not only language in the narrow sense but also signification more generally.6 Just like its cognitive counterpart, this oppositional mapping undertheorizes affect’s own socio-symbolic entanglements and thereby constrains how we can conceptualize its political workings in the public sphere.7 “[N]ot ownable or recognizable”, Massumi insists, affect is “resistant to critique” (Massumi, 2002, p. 28). Instead of lamenting the degradation of the “public sphere” under conditions of contemporary neoliberalism, Massumi asks us to affirmatively operate within the “complex neoliberal field of life” (2015a, p. 31). The underlying ontological wager is that as a force of life, or collective becoming, affect is at least virtually on the side of solidarity. The “feral potential of sympathy”, or (animal) feeling with others, he stipulates optimistically, is unleashed in contemporary society insofar as neoliberalism withdraws “from the normative-disciplinary regime of power”, to the effect of undoing sympathy’s “enclosures” within “established patterns of belonging”, such as “family, community, nation” (2014, p. 36; 2015a, pp. 76, 66). While this claim entails a welcome counter-emphasis to cognitive tendencies of postulating the stability of hegemonic group identities, evidence for Massumi’s hope currently seems difficult to detect. He himself acknowledges as much by speculating that the process of loosening traditional identity structures also triggers attempts to “reimpose boundaries” through “virulent primings tending towards fascist contagion”, as seen in the “rise of the far right in the United States” (2015a, p. 66) – or in Europe. But Massumi’s resistance to qualifying affect, or attending to its socio-symbolic mediations, makes him refuse any theoretical approach to the question of how politics can mobilize affect “without fostering a fascism”: “There is no way around a trial-and-error approach” (2015a, p. 94).

5 Massumi (2002, pp. 27–28); see also (2015a, p. 105). In part, there is also a “counter-­ assimilation” of mind to affect in Massumi’s more recent work (see 2015a, pp. 43, 47). Massumi’s interviews, on the other hand, have drawn these distinctions in less polarizing ways, which is helpful for my syncretic modeling (see 2015b, p. 4). 6 Massumi (2002, pp. 1, 5, 7). Curiously, signification is identified with “arrest” here (p. 7). Alternatively, however, Massumi also argues for “a semiotics willing to engage with continuity” (2002, p. 4). 7 As detailed in the following, my own (inclusive) use of the notion of affect therefore foregrounds a principally continuous spectrum of affectivity, sensation, and feeling between the poles of Massumi’s unqualified affect and the cognitivists’ specific, more or less conscious experiences of emotion.

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From my angle, this is almost as unsatisfactory as the alternative suggested by a range of other scholars who have altogether turned their backs on affect in response to the recent ascent of hateful political populisms. Implicitly or explicitly returning to more traditional concepts of a public sphere ideally governed by reason, they have encouraged us to “think beyond the affect” (Badiou, 2016) or deploying “rational/sensible critique” against “impulsive feelings.”8 Building blocks toward a third path are indicated by Lauren Berlant’s insistence that “the public sphere is not rational; it is rhetorical” and Jacques Rancière’s investigations of how the polity is based on specific “distribution[s] of the sensible”, that is, arrangements not only of sense but of perception and sensibility.9 Developing these ideas, I argue, we can think with the affect by taking seriously the affective dimension of the public sphere, or the ways in which it is constituted by complex entwinements of affect with signification and power in different media. By carefully tracing these complicated, often incongruous affect(ive) entwinements, we can make them accessible to a critique that is, in turn, transformed as we cultivate its affective dimensions (see Felski, 2015, p 3). Instead of the cliché poses of modernist distance that have come under attack in ongoing debates about scholarly reading and writing practices, we can “embrace a wider range of affective styles” (Felski, 2015, p. 3) and methodologies of “critical proximity” (Latour, 2005, p. 253; see Latour, 2004) with the goal of carefully disentangling the affective assemblages of contemporary art and culture, including literature. The opposition against signification and resistance to qualifying affect in Deleuzian approaches10 does help to account for my interlocutors’ puzzled questions about studying affect in art and culture, or literature in particular, insofar as its linguistic mediations are evident whereas audiovisual media have often been theorized via notions of immediate contact. Following Massumi, it seems, literature would once more only give us access to emotions, which are, however, not of much interest to Deleuzians. As Brinkema summarizes sharply, affect’s capacity to break open emotion’s subjective and ideological capture merely registers as a force of disruption in relation to a work of art, rupturing a text rather than co-constituting it and indexing “abstract agitations instead of any particular textual workings” (2014, p. xiii, see xii). But as I argue, the productive force of affective intensity – or plural, layered affects – in the composition and reception of literature can be conceptualized as soon as we abandon the resistance against qualification

8 “vernünftiger Kritik”; “unreflektierte[…] Gefühle[…]” (Emcke, 2016, pp. 38–39; see similarly Metz and Seeßlen, 2018). 9 Staiger, Cvetkovich, and Reynolds (2010, p. 2; with reference to Berlant) and Rancière (2010, p. 36). 10 As Marie-Luise Angerer (2007) notes, this oppositional rhetoric comes at the expense, not least, of the some of Deleuze’s own more nuanced proposals (p. 66).

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and mediation and instead link affect to social processes of signification and subjectivation along with questions of poetics and aesthetics (rather than just media specificity).

The force of a kick, attached to words: Ellbogen’s world(mak)ing assemblage The intensity inscribed into and activated in the process of reading Ellbogen is indicated by how several reviewers compared the text itself to the act of violence at its diegetic center: the novel “has an impact like a kick into the stomach”, or even, minus the rhetorical marker of comparison, “is a kick into the stomach”, thus doubling the elbow stomach blow or the subsequent foot kicks that the angry adolescent protagonist and her friends deal to the male, majority German student who had come on to them in a Berlin train station, and whom they end up killing by pushing him onto the tracks.11 That such insistence on intensity and forceful impact easily mixes with ideological discourse becomes evident as the second reviewer proceeds to develop his claim into a fuller interpretation, echoing hegemonic tropes of contemporary immigration debates: “More precisely, two kicks. One for misogynist Turkish society. And one for the dishonesty of oh-soliberal ­Germans”.12 Even apart from the charged juxtaposition of Turkish misogyny and (falsely) liberal Germany, the equation of the text to an act of violence indicates a reductive interpretation. Other readers, including most of the students in the fall 2017 undergraduate seminar in which I first taught the novel, have emphasized that the text creates understanding for the protagonist short of making us share her hate and anger, and the author herself, an established journalist for the left-wing daily die tageszeitung, describes her writing rationale in the analytic terms of wanting to know where violence comes from, or more precisely, how different forms of physical and structural violence interlock (Aydemir, 2017b). But none of this means that the text does not have the affective force of a kick. My proposal for bringing the diverging emphases together in modeling literature’s entwinements of affects, significations, and the social draws on two alternative Deleuzian concepts, those of assemblage and worlding, and explores resonances between such worlding assemblages and other notions of worlds, worlding and worldmaking, that circulate through various corners of contemporary theory and aesthetics. Along with cognitive narratology, this includes a range of (post-)phenomenological positions, which

11 “‘Ellbogen’ hat Wucht wie ein Tritt in die Magengrube” (Möller, 2017)/“ist ein Tritt in den Magen” (Bovermann, 2017). 12 “Genauer, zwei Tritte. Einer für die misogyne türkische Gesellschaft. Und einer für die Verlogenheit der ach so liberalen Deutschen” (Bovermann, 2017).

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can mediate between Deleuzian and cognitive perspectives in key respects.13 A further prominent resource for my syncretic endeavor is Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory. Like Massumi’s affect theory, Latour foregrounds ontology but simultaneously, he dedramatizes the “gap” with language by demonstrating that both “world” and “[k]nowledge” are “articulated”, or subject to mediation processes (Latour, 1999, p. 69; 2013, p. 87). Latour’s (2005) scholarly methodology for tracing these processes takes on a political dimension as he orients it at the project of assembling a “common world” (p. 189), or, for the context at hand, a radically broadened public sphere permeated by controversies and populated not by rational humans but an ensemble of nonsovereign actors. Developing these heterogeneous impulses, my model, in a nutshell, conceptualizes literary world(mak)ing as a process of multidimensional, “multivectoral” assemblage: a performative process of configuring affects, associations, (imagined and physical) bodies, discourse scraps, experiences, evaluations, objects, perspectives, perceptions, topoi, and tropes through mental operations as well as graphic notations. The process unfolds through the distributed, nonsovereign agency of multiple participants in the communicative loops of composition and reception, including but not limited to authors, narrators, characters, and readers. In Deleuze, an assemblage is defined as the process of making complex, multiple connections between “interwoven forces” (entangled while radically heterogeneous) (Puar, 2005, pp. 127–128) including “bodies” but also “utterances, modes of expression, and whole regimes of signs” (Deleuze, 2006, p. 177). In entwining ontological and rhetorical processes, the concept thus accounts for the ways in which affects attach to words in the processes of writing and reading, as flesh-andblood humans imagine diegetic bodies. By describing the literary worldmaking process in the communicative loops between authors and readers as a “multivectoral” assemblage, I emphasize that it is not exhausted by plot (as in many traditional definitions of narrative) or the operations of metonymy and metaphor (through which it was characterized in Saussurean linguistics).14 Rather, we need to account for the vertical, horizontal, and orthogonal vectors of affect and association, or (in Eve Sedgwick’s words) the “‘multiple assemblies’” of affect as attached to words, “things, people,

13 See below for detail. Daniel Yacavone (2015) works through some of the scattered philosophical genealogies of worldmaking concepts, although not the Deleuzian notions of worlding I prominently include here. The heterogeneous reference points of narratological worldmaking concepts include Paul Ricoeur (1984–1988), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2014 [1945]), the possible worlds of analytical philosophy (see Ryan, 2001) and Nelson Goodman’s (1978) constructivist account (see, e.g., Herman, 2009). Deleuzian affect studies’ worldings take inspiration from Spinozist philosophy but alternative affect studies approaches have also been shaped by Merleau-Ponty (e.g., Ahmed, 2006) as well as (via queer studies) Hannah Arendt’s political reworking of Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology (see Arendt, 1998; Warner, 2000). 14 Massumi (2002) turns against Saussurean linguistics in particular (see p. 4).

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ideas”, and “activities” in the processes of intertextual association, memory, and fantasy (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 100 [quoting Tomkins], p. 19). The concept of world(mak)ing describes these processes from the angle of their creative, form-giving productivity. Despite their different emphases, both Deleuzian notions of worlding and cognitive concepts of worldmaking tend to acknowledge the interplay of ontological and semiotic dimensions.15 But the concept of worlding also counteracts Deleuzian emphases on disruption: understood as a process of “linking things” in “sensing them out” (Stewart, 2010, p. 342), worlding highlights how affect’s “interrupting” force simultaneously induces a “rebeginning of the world” (Massumi, 2015a, pp. 107–108). In short, it provides me with a way of conceptualizing how embodied affects, and affectively charged objects, memories, experiences, and other associations do not just “disrupt” or “break into” texts as a force of immediacy, but circulate, stick in, and co-constitute rhetorical processes of composition and reading in layered transactions including (but not limited to) characters, narrative agents, audiences, and authors.

For example: hate speech The process can be concretized with respect to the practices of hate speech that form a significant component of Ellbogen’s (Aydemir, 2017a) narrative voice. Just in the initial pages of this novel, the character narrator Hazal introduces us to the “spaz” that is her younger brother, the “sluts that call themselves my girlfriends” and “my uncle, this vulture” along with the store detective who catches her with minor and (as she insists) unintentional shop lifting in the opening scene.16 When the detective uses the word “we” in a disciplinary threat, Hazal dissects his collectivity claim with a tirade of associations ranging from “we, the ugly Berlin store detectives who hunt little Kanaken” to “we disgusting, dandruff-skinned, unwashed men” going home every night to their “potato” mom, who is “a hundred years old” but refuses to die “so that we don’t inherit her dusty Nazi stuff”.17 While potato

15 See, for example, Seigworth and Gregg (2010, pp. 3, 11); Goodman (1978, pp. 6–7). Cognitive narrative theory has helped overcome structuralist emphases on the linguistic by resituating narrative worldmaking “in an organic frame of embodied … experientiality” (Fludernik, 1996, p. 322; see Herman, 2009; Ryan, 2001). 16 “Spasti” (p. 8); “Nutten, die sich meine Freundinnen nennen” (p. 11); “dieser Geier” (p. 12). 17 “Wer ist bloß dieses Wir? […] wir, die hässlichen Berliner Ladendetektive, die kleine Kanaken jagen … Oder wir ekelhaften, schuppenhäutigen, ungewaschenen Männer …, die wir… wieder ganz alleine nach Hause gehen zu unserer hundert Jahre alten Mami, die… einfach nicht sterben will, damit wir ja nicht ihr verstaubtes Nazizeug erben können, warten, bis die alte Kartoffel schläft…” (p. 15). The notion “Kartoffel” as a derogatory term for ethnic Germans became popular in immigrant communities in the 2000s (see Kemper, 2016); it forms a counterpart to the “Kanak” label for immigrants claimed as a self-description (but never fully resignified) in the wake of Feridun Zaimoğlu’s Kanak Sprak (see below).

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and Kanak mark oppositional, racialized positionalities, just about everyone in Hazal’s multinational immigrant circle takes turns calling others and being called an “Opfer” (“victim”, resonant with “loser”, see, e.g., p. 25), the ultimate insult in a world without solidarity, where force and success rule unfettered from ethical orientations. Ellbogen has been marketed as a successor to Feridun Zaimoğlu’s 1995 Kanak Sprak (here 2004), which forcefully attempted to resignify the hate speech term as a basis for a new collective identity through a series of stylized first-person protocols inspired by the aesthetics of hip-hop.18 The reviewer who characterized the novel itself as a kick follows up on the comparison, but also emphasizes the difference between both texts: In Ellbogen, “the linguistic experiment has been called off”, displaced by “literary emergency: Hazal issues plain announcements; Aydemir writes plain sentences”.19 A fuller narratological description might include that the affective charge of hate speech is unfolded through Ellbogen’s narration exclusively by the main protagonist, mostly in the present tense, minimizing temporal distance between the experiencing and the narrating instance. At moments – including the rant against the detective – Hazal’s discourse even takes the form of an untagged interior monologue, invisibilizing narrative mediation altogether. Where Kanak Sprak artfully probed identity through its crafting of explicitly rhetorical poses of narration, Ellbogen “plainly” traces the affective processes through which hate speech makes worlds.20 This aesthetics of (relative) transparency is not to be confused with an actual absence of mediation. “To say something is to say differently”, Latour reminds us of the rhetoricity of all language use, “it is to comment, transform, … translate, transpose, that is to say metamorphose, change form, yes, if you insist, ‘metaphorize’” (Latour, 2013, p. 139; Latour’s emphases). Another reviewer paraphrases Aydemir to the effect that she found “her own sound”, close to her own language with its “raw and aggressive tone”, but actually quotes her with the statement that she crafted the novel’s language with the goal of plausibility (Usta, 2017). Elsewhere, Aydemir also comments on wanting to make the text accessible to different audiences, including those not used to reading but also those easily annoyed by youth-cultural jargon (Aydemir, 2017b). In other words, the novel’s “clear” language is carefully designed to reach heterogeneous publics.

18 Some copies of the novel were sold with a sticker quoting Zaimoğlu’s endorsement: “Eines der wahrhaftigsten Bücher. Ein Wahnsinn von einem Roman” (see, e.g., http:// poesierausch.com/2017/01/30/fatma-aydemir-ellbogen/). 19 “Zwei Jahrzehnte später ist … das sprachliche Experiment abgeblasen, der literarische Ernstfall eingetroffen. Hazal macht klare Ansagen, Aydemir schreibt klare Sätze.” 20 The stylistic difference does not amount to a full-fledged opposition regarding the workings of hate speech in the text. Kanak Sprak did trigger significant controversy; even its comparatively playful literary poses mediated real affects and experiences (see Breger, 2012, pp. 108–110).

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Notwithstanding this insistence on mediation, conceptualizing the process through the notions of assemblage and worlding allows me to underline that the processes of writing and reading entail not “merely” rhetoric: While the text “is” not the kick, words can hurt for real by way of the affects attached to them via associations and memories in the loops of literary communication.21 Precisely through processes of rhetorical mediation, Latour insists, “language” returns us “to reality”, in a process of productive reference.22 In underlining how literary worlds are permeated by affective lifeworld realities as they are composed and received by flesh-and-blood bodies, the proposed model allows me to take the ontological impulses of contemporary affect studies seriously without marginalizing the rhetorical processes through which literary or other artistic forms of worldmaking proceed. The bodily intensity that a particular word or scenario may stir in me as a reader (as well as in the author, similarly or differently) forms an integral part of literary worldmaking. Highly personal, and too complex and instable to be reliably determined by anyone’s positionality (as a queer white academic or a female Turkish German journalist), these affective responses are no less socially mediated in that they layer associations of other texts and media images with those of real-life objects or memories. The responses of Ellbogen’s readers to the prominence of hate in its narrative voice are certainly co-inflected by our respective Kartoffel or Kanak status, but also by the degree and regularity with which these, or analogous, terms of abuse have, or have not, shaped our lives (co-dependent again on specific configurations of class background, generation, geography, and family history), as well as the ways in which each of us is affectively able, or refuses to, acknowledge any resonances in experience.23 In turn, such affective responsivity is facilitated or blocked not just by social and biographical dispositions, but also by public regimes of reading, including the divide

21 The proposed conceptualization, I argue, thus solves the dilemmas Judith Butler ran into while theorizing the impact of hate speech from the angle of linguistic performativity in the 1990s. In underlining the gap(s) of mediation toward a model of nonsovereign agency in speech (to which I fully agree), Butler ironically ended up reinscribing oppositions between language and bodily affectivity in ways counter to her own earlier work (Butler, 1997, see, e.g., pp. 4, 11). Despite these limits, the currently fashionable charge that the “linguistic” approaches of the postmodern 1990s forgot about the body is not appropriate; Butler’s indications, for example, of how the “force” of a “name” is in the “historicity” of “memory or … trauma” (Butler, 1997, p. 36) have enough overlap with my model to advise theoretical adjustments rather than sharp disavowals of (capital T-)“Theory” before the affective turn. 22 Latour (2013, p. 141); on productive reference, see Latour (2013, pp. 73–76). Against restrictive definitions of reference as “reproduction” or “mimetic resemblance”, Latour conceptualizes it as the effect of continuity achieved through a “discontinuous series of markers”, or the “­mediation” of a “network” (Latour, 2013, p. 76; Latour’s emphases, pp. 77–78; see p. 92). 23 The other side of the coin is, of course, the possibility of overeager, politically inappropriate relation that has been castigated as cultural appropriation. The latter is, however, better conceptualized in terms of power than cultural identity.

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between academic criticality norms and (popular or “paraliterary”) “practices of readerly identification” (Emre, 2017, p. 3). In the case of Ellbogen, several critics writing for traditional, high-cultural outlets insisted on distance. From her pedestal of abstract judgment, the reviewer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, for example, forecast a sad outlook “for a human being who denies others their humanity”, suggesting that the author does not seem to care about creating “sympathy for this Hazal”.24 In contrast, the interviewer for the social media-friendly online journal jetzt stipulates that “each of us experienced many of Hazal’s worries and feelings in puberty … : her boredom, her anger, her shame”, and the reviewers on goodreads, where Ellbogen received an average rating of 4.0 stars, record a range of (characteristically mixed) feelings, with apprehension about the hate speech balanced by appreciation for how they were able to relate to (some of) Hazal’s experience.25

Fictional worlds with open borders: configuring lifeworld experiences Unsurprisingly, perhaps, a number of professional critics were much more willing, or eager, to connect the novel’s world back to the author’s experiences in her social group. Finding “much that is recognizable from the life of people with migration backgrounds in German cities”, they described the text as “the record of a brutalization that Aydemir traces in an almost documentary fashion … a mixture of personality profile and oppressive milieu study”.26 These responses indicate an apparent risk taken by my insistence on actuality’s intrusion into literature: does the proposed model not encourage the all too well-known tendency of reading texts written by minority authors – or anyone marked as different from the authorial norm of educated white heterosexual masculinity – in documentary rather than aesthetic terms (critically see Adelson, 2000)? In foregrounding the work of affect as a crucial part of what ties literary worldmaking to the lifeworlds surrounding it, however, my point is not to downplay the force of fictionality, or artistic composition and inventive imagination, in a clandestine or unabashed return to some realist norm or classical sociological approach.

24 “Was kann aus einem Menschen werden, der anderen Menschen ihre Menschlichkeit abspricht? […] Die Autorin legt nicht besonders großen Wert darauf, dass uns diese Hazal … sympathisch wird” (Diener, 2017; with a different accent, see also Scheper, 2017). 25 “viele von Hazals Sorgen und Gefühlen kennt jeder von uns aus der Pubertät …: ihre Langweile, ihre Wut, ihre Scham” (Schlüter, 2017, https://www.goodreads.com/book/ show/33234663-ellbogen). As of June 27, 2018, the book has 190 ratings on this portal. 26 “viel Wiedererkennbares aus dem Leben von Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund in deutschen Großstädten” (Bayer, 2017); “das Protokoll einer Verrohung, die Aydemir auf beinahe dokumentarische Weise nachzeichnet… eine Mischung aus Psychogramm und bedrängender Milieustudie” (Albath, 2017).

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In response to her critics’ representational demands, Aydemir forcefully insists on fictionality: Ellbogen’s point is “not to document a milieu but to tell a story” (in Usta, 2017) and “Hazal does not exist in reality”, even as the story is “based in things I know, and on people I have met”.27 The point of my model is, rather, to indicate a way out of the vicissitudes of such anti-representational defense by describing the embeddedness of fiction into lifeworld experience programmatically. Literary worlds, I argue, are always open worlds with porous boundaries. Made from real-world materials and figures in an inclusive sense – again including the affective charges attached to embodied memories and fantasies entangled with discourse scraps and intertextual associations – literary worlds are not usefully characterized in the terms of autonomy, totality, or discreteness that prominent theories of fictionality and narrative worldmaking have held on to even in the age of cultural studies.28 Acknowledging literature’s lifeworld relations bolsters the claim to literature’s participation in the public sphere: rather than treating its communicative circuit as a more or less closed system with its separate logic or rules, I emphasize how literature operates and imaginatively engages in the surrounding world in a myriad of ways, and on different levels. This embeddedness principally includes the composition and reception of counterfactual worlds along with realist ones – even science fiction and fantasy tend to unfold layers of political allegory – and it does not cash the fiction-­versusnonfiction distinction, even as I insist that fictional worlds are not categorically different from documentary assemblages in that they also entertain a rich network of connections with the outside world.29 In the spirit of Latour’s concept of productive reference, I treat the distinction between fictive and nonfictive discourse as a matter of degree: as assemblages of imaginatively reconfigured real-world materials and figures, fictional worlds are tied to surrounding life worlds in a more piecemeal (in the sense of both “fragmentary” and “unsystematic”) fashion than those of science or literary documentary.30 In Ellbogen, this piecemeal anchoring

27 “Natürlich basiert das alles auf Dingen, die ich kenne, auf Leuten auch, die ich kennengelernt habe” (Aydemir, 2017b). 28 See, for example, Ryan’s insistence that “fictional texts do not share their reference world with other texts”, even as this “autonomous fictional world” can “present some degree of overlap with the real world” (Ryan 1997, pp. 167–168). With Michael Heim, Ryan defines a world as “a felt totality or whole” (Ryan, 2001, p. 91). Yacavone (2015) helpfully qualifies the “autonomy of aesthetics” as “a certain separation” along the lines of phenomenological bracketing technique (p. xv), but even with that qualification, I suspect that phenomenological non-separation is by and large as crucial for actual reception processes as separation. 29 Ryan (1997) characterizes nonfiction through this network (p. 166). 30 While “factual” and “fictional” narratives are “made of the same material, the same figures”, we “authorize beings of fiction to . . . to ‘carry us away’… into another world”, whereas documentary beings are forced to return by “chains of reference” woven from disciplinary protocols of “procedure” (Latour 2013, pp. 251–252). For a fuller development

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in contemporary lifeworld realities includes references, for example, to “Hartz”, Germany’s combined long-term unemployment and welfare system controversially introduced in the early 2000s (Hazal comments that her mother is too proud to rely on this income, locking her into her unhappy marriage, p. 44) and the attempted 2016 military coup in Istanbul that Hazal stumbles into after fleeing Germany in the wake of the train station violence. However, the novel’s unsystematic creative assembly of real-life fragments also includes things less “certain” than such historical background facts: “matters of concern” perhaps in Latour’s (2005) terminology, “loudly disputed” if nonetheless “real” (p. 114), such as the experiential impact of growing up in an immigrant community in Berlin Wedding, raised by parents who “have always had to fight in Germany”.31 This, to be sure, is the take of aunt Selma, Hazal’s only relative with a university degree – in social studies. If Selma’s perspective presents a diegetic echo of milieu studies, her “babbling” from “her world” does not resonate smoothly in Hazal’s own, or communicate how it feels to grow up between a father throwing things against the wall, including on one occasion her head, and a mother “cowering in her gray hate chair”.32 Fragmentary and uncertain, the real-world links cast by the novel’s affective assemblages invite sensitive exploration instead of quick conclusions. The real-world backdrop of Hazal’s world also includes the intertextual components of potent media images, which are blatantly ideological, if not yet therefore easy to disentangle from one’s own affective reality. Ellbogen foregrounds this dimension of worldmaking when Hazal tries to stir compassion in the store detective by articulating fear of being beaten by her parents. “This is not real”, she then thinks, “no, this is a bad German film running on ZDF [the second national German TV program, C.B.] at night. The poor, poor Turkish girl; just the head scarf is missing. I put my hands on my face and begin sobbing. And promptly I am crying for real and don’t even know why” (p. 17).33 Immediately before the attack on the student a few days later, Hazal will conclude that she did not just play “the crying Turkish girl …. This girl, that’s me” (p. 120).34 To be sure, this insight forms late in a night of excessive drinking in which the young women have been denied access to the cool club (identified by critics as the real-world Berghain venue) where they

31 32 33

34

of the idea of piecemeal reference in dialogue with recent narratological debates on fictionality, see Breger (2017a). “Tante Selma labert irgendwas… dass meine Eltern in Deutschland auch immer nur am Kämpfen gewesen sind” (p. 247). “in ihrer Welt” (p. 247), “in ihrem grauen Hass-Sessel kauert” (p. 40, see pp. 12, 205). “Das hier ist nicht echt, nein, das ist so ein schlechter deutscher Film, der abends auf ZDF läuft. Das arme, arme türkische Mädchen, fehlt nur noch das Kopftuch. Ich lege die Hände auf mein Gesicht und fange an zu schluchzen. Und schon heule ich wirklich und weiß nicht einmal, warum”. “Ich habe nicht das weinende türkische Mädchen gespielt … Dieses Mädchen, das bin ich”.

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wanted to celebrate Hazal’s 18th birthday, and following a fight with her closest friend, who charges her with not standing up for herself and her friends.35 Even if we accept the belated self-identification as an experiential truth, it hardly implies that the bad film on ZDF was portraying Turkish German lifeworlds accurately after all. It does imply, among other things, that media images have an affective impact and contribute in piecemeal fashion to the performative configuration of experiences into individual and collective identifications. Thwarting simple theater-versus-reality binaries, “the work of emotion” sticks “signs to bodies”, and worlds are made in the affective encounter with “cultural histories and memories” (Ahmed, 2004, pp. 7, 13). Phenomenological perspectives such as Sara Ahmed’s account of emotional “world making” contribute a crucial layer to my modeling: as indicated above, they help me to mend the polemic fault lines between Deleuzian and cognitive paradigms by facilitating a close-up on (diegetic as well as extradiegetic) affective processes as engrained in the body but nonetheless mediated by sedimentations of real and imagined histories, and not dependent on conscious cognition but also not categorically foreclosed to perception.36 From the composition angle, Ellbogen explores this spectrum of affective processes between nonconscious affect and conscious perception through the ways in which Hazal’s narrative voice facilitates a poetics of description: not actually direct interior monologue throughout, it often takes the form of a present tense narrator report, indicating mediation activity, if short of full-fledged evaluation.37 “I feel as though I had to puke”, Hazal traces her bodily sensations in the opening encounter with the detective, “everything is warm and spins”, or later in the run-up to the encounter with the student: “Rage. Mine is so huge that it does not fit inside me. It threatens to explode my skin…. My rage touches Elma’s rage, boils and grows together with hers…”38 Hazal’s experience of affective intensity exceeds the boundaries of properly contained subjective feeling;39 and her descriptions often indicate that she cannot fully conceptualize it, including but not limited to

35 Otherwise, the erotic connection between the two girls accounts for some of the most positive feelings recorded by Hazal, along with the excitement about her budding Internet romance with Mehmet in Istanbul (see, e.g., pp. 206, 47). 36 Ahmed (2004, p. 12, see pp. 5–8). Ahmed’s interest in subjectivity and historicity makes her opt for the terminology of emotion, but her use of the category emphasizes many of the features I find productive in concepts of affect, including the insistence on instability (Ahmed, 2004, p. 11). 37 On description as a complex methodology, see Marcus, Love, and Best (2016). 38 “Mir ist als müsste ich kotzen, und zwar direkt vor die Füße des Ladendetektivs. Alles ist warm und dreht sich…” (p. 14); “Wut. Meine ist so groß, dass sie nicht in mich hineinpasst. Sie droht meine Haut zu sprengen… Meine Wut berührt Elmas Wut, kocht und wuchert gemeinsam mit ihr” (p. 114). 39 It is, however, not therefore asubjective or necessarily collective along Massumi’s lines: with respect to her friend Ebru who embraced religious observance Hazal also traces the loneliness effects of affective intensity (see pp. 93, 251).

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moments of traumatic dissociation between body and consciousness: “My heart is beating terribly loudly. It has probably been doing so the entire time, but I notice only now”.40 Nonetheless, the novel’s first-person composition gives Hazal room to make sense of her affective responses, if inconsistently and often belatedly. Toward the end of the novel, she embarks on her own attempt of understanding the violent outburst, in response to the rash explanations delivered by media headlines on similar incidents: “‘Motif: belligerence [Streitlust, literally: lust for fighting].’ I wonder how the people who write such things know the reasons”.41

“Following the actors”: rethinking agency in the literary public sphere Attending to how Hazal’s voice thus mediates her affective processes underscores the need for a thorough rethinking of agency in the literary communication loop. This is the last larger conceptual component of the proposed model to be unfolded here. From the angle of affect, literary worldmaking comes into view as a constitutively nonsovereign activity: as “overtaken” or “other-taken”, shaped “by forces that are not of our own making” (Latour, 2005, p. 43; his emphasis). As indicated above, Latour’s project of assembling a “common world” entails the conceptualization of a democratized public sphere, inhabited by “assemblages” of humans and non-humans in “actor-network[s]” (Latour, 2005, pp. 189, 7, 46). While Latour’s actors are anything but classical agents of rational deliberation, he emphatically insists that each of them makes a difference as “a full-blown mediator” in the processes of articulating worlds; and his posthumanism differs from its Deleuzian equivalents in how actor-network theory urges us to “follow the actors themselves” (128, 61). This insistence resonates with how (post-)phenomenological affect scholars have brought nonsovereign actors into view: recognizing the ways in which “‘I’ and … ‘we’ are shaped by contact with others” in the circulation of affects does not preclude us from giving weight to people’s attachments and perspectives, or from asking questions about ethical orientations within the network.42 In transposing these impulses into the communicative loops of literature, my model distributes nonsovereign agency across the spectrum of participants, including (if not limited to) characters and narrators along with

40 “Mein Herz pocht schrecklich laut. Das tut es wahrscheinlich schon die ganze Zeit, aber ich bemerke es erst jetzt” (p. 125). 41 “‘Streitlust als Motiv’ […] Ich frage mich, woher die Leute, die sowas schreiben, die Gründe kennen” (p. 178). 42 Ahmed (2004, p. 10); see Latour (2005, p. 236). Latour has distanced himself from phenomenology, but for the focus on human intentionality and consciousness that has been overcome in contemporary perspectives (see Latour 1999, p. 9). Cognitivists, however, tend to read “for intentions” (Herman, 2013, p. 25).

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audiences and authors.43 Thus, I take all of their contributions to the imaginative process at hand seriously, even as I emphasize how each actor’s worldmaking is assembled from mutually entangled discourse elements and affective charges, conscious and unconscious fantasies, personal and public memories along with representational protocols (such as genre norms) in the case of authors and audiences.44 This distribution proposal, which facilitates an ethics of tracing a multiplicity of perspectives, implies a challenge to most available accounts of the literary communication loop insofar as they privilege either author or readers as more, if not fully, authoritative in their relations with narrative instances and diegetic characters. Thus, narratologists tend to posit sharp power differentials between more or less sovereign authors and their narrators, especially in accounting for the ways in which many modernist and contemporary texts deploy “unreliable” narrators.45 It is another question, to be sure, whether flesh-and-blood authors are seen to live up to these implied artistic standards of author, or implied author, reliability and control, especially – again – if they fail to embody hegemonic images of (white, masculine) sovereign authorship. One of Ellbogen’s reviewers indicatively doubts Aydemir’s compositional command over the material at hand as soon as the second, Istanbul-based part of the novel branches out beyond the description of Hazal’s “milieu” toward a fuller account of contemporary histories (Bartels, 2017). More regularly, however, reviewers slammed Aydemir’s narrator: too “simple” in design to facilitate a truly political novel (Scheper, 2017), guided by “instinct” with her limited “introspective capacity” (Albath, 2017), she does not even seem to merit a diagnosis of full-fledged unreliability; and when Hazal does start reflecting on her actions more fully toward the end of the novel, one reviewer accuses Aydemir of smuggling in her own, 30-year old journalist voice (Bartels, 2017). Of course, Hazal is by definition “other-taken” by Aydemir in the rhetorical configuration at hand, but can we professional readers also imagine the opposite force vector playing out? Can we allow for the possibility that the author lets herself be affected by the (imagined but unsystematically referential) voice of her character, of whom, a reviewer notes, she speaks “very warmly” as of someone who in some respects could be her “best friend”?46

43 More so than most people interested in Latour, I overall foreground human and human-­ like actors, although I explore also the agency of fictional objects at moments. But even just taking seriously the idea that humans and human-like literary figures are networked creatures rather than sovereign actors, I insist, is of much consequence to our understanding of literature. See also Felski (2015, pp. 163–165), who includes characters and narrators as non-human actors. 44 Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) is to be cited as another precursor to these conceptualizations, although he holds on to a vocabulary of actor autonomy despite his insistence on how words are “shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents” (p. 276, see 315). For a rereading of Bakhtin, see Acker/Fleig/Lüthjohann in this volume. 45 For a sophisticated account of unreliability, see Phelan (2005). 46 “mit großer Wärme;” “meine beste Freundin” (as cited in Henneberg, 2017).

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Can we develop an egalitarian perspective on their network entanglements by taking Hazal seriously as a nonsovereign actor and interpreter of her own affective responses? Hazal’s commentary suggests that she understands some things – for example, the interference of class in her personal r­ elationships – better than others – such as the attempted coup that she has no context for, not having followed Turkish politics –, and her partial insights serve as (sometimes flawed and throughout imperfect) guides for readers orienting themselves in the narrative world. Aydemir herself does not claim a position of sovereign understanding, as emphasized by the Joan Didion quote with which she opens the acknowledgments: “If I knew the answer to any of my questions, I would have never had the need to write a novel.”47 One of the first newspaper articles Hazal finds on their own act of violence states that the reason for the attack was “still unclear”. With reference to the stereotypical media narratives she had encountered earlier, she cynically quips: “What the heck is unclear? We were belligerent, we hate German students. It is all evident, can be explained in one sentence, one single word: Lust. Or hate. Or migration background”.48 Once we bracket these rash equations, letting ourselves be guided by Aydemir’s questioning through Hazal’s voice, we encounter uncertain, layered genealogies and affective complexities rather than straightforward explanations: Can one “inherit rage”, Hazal wonders, or is it more apropos to blame “life”, “men”, if not “rich and clean and beautiful girls” (p. 202)? Is “shame much shittier than fear”,49 as she insists repeatedly, remembering how at age seven, her mother had first threatened her with a knife and then made her apologize in the store for stealing a lipstick? Or, is it rather the assemblage of both that characterizes her life, as if orienting it toward the attack on the student (see pp. 126–127, 184, 205, 270)? The novel’s tracing of these phenomenologies of negative affect invites us to take their complexity seriously, along with the uncomfortable circumstance that Hazal’s experience of guilt is at best uneven (“he deserved it!”, she claims, “because guys like him run around thinking the world belongs to them”). For a few days following the attack, she feels liberated, “as though not every stone on my way was predetermined”.50 Knowing better may be easy but will not do. The novel’s networked poetics develops this point in assembling Hazal’s perspective with that of Selma, whom Hazal does trust initially (after all, Selma is unmarried at 30), but

47 “‘Wüsste ich die Antwort auf irgendeine meiner Fragen’, schrieb Joan Didion, ‘hätte ich nie das Bedürfnis gehabt, einen Roman zu schreiben” (p. 272). 48 “Was soll denn daran unklar sein? Wir hatten Streitlust. Wir hassen deutsche Studenten. Ist doch alles klar, ist doch in einem Satz, mit einem einzigen Wort zu beantworten: Lust. Oder Hass. Oder Migrationshintergrund” (p. 181). 49 “Scham ist nämlich viel beschissener als Angst” (p. 10). 50 “weil er es verdient hat!” (p. 243): “Weil solche Typen herumrennen und meinen, die Welt gehört ihnen” (p. 244); “als sei nicht schon jeder Stein auf meinem Weg vorherbestimmt” (p. 245).

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who fails to connect with Hazal while visiting her in Istanbul. When Selma asks her about her dreams, Hazal has trouble even making sense of the question. Eventually, she responds that as a kid, she wanted to be a doctor, but Selma’s subsequent attempt to lure her into a fantasy of doing something with her life – a university degree, after facing the legal consequences of the attack? – backfires: Hazal is so certain about her lack of agency that she angrily feels “as though I was the aunt and had to explain to little Selma how things work. University studies, I believe I have to puke”.51 As a university educated reader, I want Selma to be heard, but I have to acknowledge that for Hazal, Selma’s suggested solution entails a vicious affective cycle: “Apparently I am supposed to apologize and bashfully stare at my shoes, like back then in the supermarket”.52 Having run off, Hazal’s future remains suspended, as the novel ends with her hiding out on the street during the night of the military coup. This lack of closure frustrated many of the nonprofessional readers who reviewed the novel in Internet forums such as goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com) and lovelybooks (https://www.lovelybooks.de). Although I personally appreciate the absence of a final verdict on Hazal, the ethos of tracing multiple perspectives in the circuits of literary worldmaking encourages me to take their voices seriously, acknowledging the potential productivity of a heterogeneous, more egalitarian literary public sphere that encompasses these forums along with major newspaper feuilletons. The readerly desires fueling the demand for closure probably include fantasies of retribution, but perhaps they also challenge us to think harder what future(s) we actually can imagine for Hazal. The ethos of tracing multiple perspectives does not, however, require me to accept all, or any, reader perspective without qualifications: as Latour (2013) argues, we can aim to “share the experience of the values” held by our informants while “offering to modify the account” (p. 8; his emphasis). Some of the (presumably majority German) voices on these portals deploy unfortunate clichés of Hazal being suspended between two cultural worlds, indicating the force of hegemonic discourses in their readerly sensemaking. A more dramatic challenge to Latour’s methodology of tracing controversies with the goal of opening up a more inclusive public sphere is implied in one interviewer’s question whether Aydemir was afraid that the novel could be appropriated from the right in the current climate of populist backlash. Aydemir’s answer is closer to her heroine’s rage than to Latour’s prescriptions for displacing critique with respect and diplomacy: “Nazis can go fuck themselves”.53

51 “Es fühlt sich so an, als wäre ich die Tante und müsste der kleinen Selma erklären, wie die Dinge laufen. Studieren, ich glaube, ich muss kotzen” (p. 233). 52 “Ich soll mich wohl entschuldigen und verschämt auf meine Schuhe starren, wie damals im Supermarkt” (p. 270). 53 “Nazis können sich ins Knie ficken” (as cited in Usta, 2017).

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But political “rages”, Latour (2005) concedes, “have to be respected” as well (p. 249). Importantly, I have not seen any indications of the rightwing appropriation feared by this particular reviewer. Instead, many of the novel’s nonprofessional reviews indicate the kind of affective reflexivity overwhelmingly articulated also by my students: the novel made them feel “uncomfortable” but also “pensive”; they were “shocked”, “distressed” (mitgenommen), “overwhelmed”, “speechless” but also willing to slow down judgment and follow Hazal’s experience of feeling that one does not stand a chance in life.54 In conclusion, this reception indicates the potentially significant productivity of literary worldmaking assemblages such as Aydemir’s in the contemporary public sphere: through their affective interventions, they can, in Rancière’s words, contribute to a reconfiguring of the sensible, that is, of public norms as grounded in structures of perception and experience. As I have argued, such interventions into “Public Feelings” (Staiger, Cvetkovich, & Reynolds, 2010, p. 2) are not necessarily as straightforward as suggested by more traditional conceptualizations of literary empathy and sympathy. Perhaps, responding to contemporary hegemonies of hate requires stirring up mixed – incongruous, ambivalent, complicated – ­feelings. But the communicative loops of literary worldmaking, I have sought to demonstrate, can facilitate precisely such complex processes in tracing and stirring unstable affectations, complicated orientation processes, and conditional alignments between nonsovereign actors. In studying these affective processes in literature, contemporary humanities scholarship makes its own contribution to envisioning a broader, more egalitarian if not therefore more harmonious, or rational, public sphere.

References Adelson, L. A. (2000). Touching tales of Turks, Germans and Jews: Cultural alterity, historical narrative, and literary riddles for the 1990s. New German Critique, 80, 93–124. Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Albath, M. (2017). Fatma Aydemir: ‘Ellbogen’. Ein geklauter Lippenstift, dann stumpfe Gewalt. Deutschlandfunk Kultur. Retrieved from http://www.deutschland funkkultur.de/fatma-aydemir-ellbogen-ein-geklauter-lippenstift-dann.1270.de. html?dram:article_id=377882 Angerer, M.-L. (2007). Vom Begehren nach dem Affekt. Zürich: Diaphanes. Arendt, H. (1998). The human condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Aydemir, F. (2017a). Ellbogen. Roman. Munich: Hanser. Aydemir, F. (2017b, March 5). “SWR: Kunscht!” SWR Fernsehen. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhiakpAzseg:

54 https://www.lovelybooks.de/autor/Fatma-Aydemir/Ellbogen-1413418823-w/; https://www. goodreads.com/book/show/33234663-ellbogen.

Affect(ive) assemblages  207 Badiou, A. (2016, November 15). Reflections on the recent election: November 9, 2016, UCLA. Verso blog. Retrieved from https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/ 2940-alain-badiou-reflections-on-the-recent-election Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. M. Holquist (Ed.) (C. Emerson, & M. H. Austin, Trans.). Texas: The University of Texas Press. Bartels, G. (2017, February 12). Gegen den Rand: ‘Ellbogen’ von Fatma Aydemir. Der Tagesspiegel. Retrieved from https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/ellbogenvon-fatma-aydemir-gegen-den-rand/19378988.html Bayer, F. (2017, January 29). Kartoffeln kommen nur am Rande vor. Spiegel online. Retrieved from http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/fatma-aydemir-roman-ellbogenueber-18-jaehrige-tuerkin-im-wedding-a-1131653.html Bovermann, P. (2017, February 3). Diese Wut gehört ihr. Süddeutsche Zeitung. Retrieved from http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/deutsche-gegenwartsliteraturdiese-wut-gehoert-ihr-1.3362316 Breger, C. (2012). An aesthetics of narrative performance: Transnational theater, literature and film in contemporary Germany. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Breger, C. (2017a). Affects in configuration: A new approach to narrative worldmaking. Narrative, 25(2), 227–251. Breger, C. (2017b). Affect and narratology. In D. R. Wehrs & T. Blake (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of affect studies and textual criticism (pp. 235–257). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brinkema, E. (2014). The forms of the affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Butler, J. (1997). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. New York: Routledge. Carroll, N. (2008). The philosophy of motion pictures. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Deleuze, G. (2006). Eight years later: 1980 interview. In D. Lapoujade (Ed.), Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995 (pp. 175–180). (A. Hodges, & M. Taormina, Trans.). New York: Semiotext(e). Diener, A. (2017, March 26). Ihr zügelloser Hass: Roman ‘Ellbogen’. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Retrieved from https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/ rezensionen/belletristik/ellbogen-von-fatma-aydemir-zuegelloser-hass-14935871. html Emcke, C. (2016). Gegen den Hass. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer. Emre, M. (2017). Paraliterary: The making of bad readers in postwar America. ­Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Felski, R. (2015). The limits of critique. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fludernik, M. (1996). Towards a ‘natural’ narratology. London: Routledge. Goodman, N. (1978). Ways of worldmaking. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Henneberg, N. (2017, April 21). Das Zentrum der Welt liegt am Leopoldplatz: Fatma Aydemir im Porträt. Der Tagesspiegel. Retrieved from https://www.tagesspiegel. de/kultur/fatma-aydemir-im-portraet-das-zentrum-der-welt-liegt-am-leopoldplatz/ 19696074.html Herman, D. (2009). Basic elements of narrative. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Herman, D. (2013). Storytelling and the sciences of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Keen, S. (2007). Empathy and the novel. New York: Oxford University Press. Keen, S. (2015). Intersectional narratology in the study of narrative empathy. In R.  Warhol & S. S. Lanser (Eds.), Narrative theory unbound: Queer and feminist interventions (pp. 123–146). Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

208  Claudia Breger Kemper, A. (2016, December 5). Wir Kartoffeln. Zeit Magazin 48. Retrieved from https://www.zeit.de/zeit-magazin/2016/48/schimpfworte-kartoffel-beleidigungjugendsprache Kim, S. (2013). On anger: Race, cognition, narrative. Austin: University of Texas Press. Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? Critical Inquiry, 30(2), 225–248. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, B. (2013). An inquiry into modes of existence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marcus, S., Love, H., & Best, S. (2016). Building a better description. Representations, 135(1), 1–21. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2014). What animals teach us about politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2015a). The power at the end of the economy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Massumi, B. (2015b). Politics of affect. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2014). Phenomenology of perception. (D. A. Landes, Trans.). London: Routledge. Metz, M., & Seeßlen, G. (2018). Der Rechtsruck: Skizzen zu einer Theorie des politischen Kulturwandels. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. Möller, C. (2017): Review of Ellbogen. WDR 5. Retrieved from: Mein-Literaturkreis. de. https://www.mein-literaturkreis.de/blog/buch/fatma-aydemir-ellbogen/ Phelan, J. (2005). Living to tell about it: A rhetoric and ethics of character narration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Puar, J. (2005). Queer times, queer assemblages. Social Text, 84(5), 121–139. Rancière, J. (2010). Dissensus: On politics and aesthetics. S. Corcoran (Ed., Trans.). London: Continuum. Ricoeur, P. (1984–1988). Time and narrative. Vols. 1–3 (K. McLaughlin, & D. ­Pellauer, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ryan, M.-L. (1997). Postmodernism and the doctrine of panfictionality. Narrative, 5(2), 165–187. Ryan, M.-L. (2001). Narrative as virtual reality: Immersion and interactivity in literature and electronic media. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Scheper, M. (2017, March 3). Fatma Aydemir: Ordentlich Milieu drübergeschnoddert. Zeit online. Retrieved from https://www.zeit.de/kultur/literatur/2017-03/ fatma-aydemir-ellbogen-roman Schlüter, N. (2017, January 30). Interview mit Fatma Aydemir: ‘Das Leistungsdenken ist bei Migranten total ausgeprägt’. jetzt. Retrieved from https://www.jetzt. de/literatur/interview-mit-fatma-aydemir Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Seigworth, G. J., & Gregg, M. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 1–25). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Affect(ive) assemblages  209 Staiger, J., Cvetkovich, A., & Reynolds, A. (Eds.). (2010). Political emotions: New agendas in communication. New York: Routledge. Stewart, K. (2010). Afterword: Worlding refrains. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 339–353). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Usta, S. (2017, February 20) ‘Nazis können sich ins Knie ficken.’ Fatma Aydemir über ‘Ellbogen’. www.intro.de. Retrieved from https://www.intro.de/kultur/ fatma-aydemir-uber-ellbogen-nazis-konnen-sich-ins-knie-ficken Warhol, R. (2003). Having a good cry: Effeminate feelings and pop-culture forms. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Warner, M. (2000). Interview with Annemarie Jagose. Genders 31. Retrieved from http://www.iiav.nl/ezines/IAV_606661/IAV_606661_2010_52/g31_jagose.html Yacavone, D. (2015). Film worlds: A philosophical aesthetics of cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. Zaimoğlu, F. (2004). Kanak Sprak: 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (6th ed.). Hamburg: Rotbuch.

Chapter 13

Theory’s affective scene Or, what to do with language after affect Michael Eng

In this essay, I attend to the desire that I see animating the affective turn as it has taken place in the U.S. academy over the last decade. While this turn has been productive for bringing to the forefront the role affect plays in cohering different modes of social subjectivity, and especially as a site where capital extracts labor from such subjects, “affect” has become one of the chief watchwords – a shibboleth, perhaps – for research in the humanities and the interpretive social sciences in U.S. scholarship. As with, say, the term “performative” before it, it is enough nowadays to simply say “affect”, and this implies that whatever one is talking about is important and good. Now we can certainly add a number of other current watchwords to the list, such as “queer” and “materialism”, which I would argue have come to function similarly across the current theoretical scene. And though it will always be necessary to critique academic fads, my focus in this essay will be less on affect’s fashionable employment as a term in current scholarship and more on the affective turn’s enabling presuppositions. Specifically, I want to analyze the way discourses of the affective turn have framed their interventions as breaks with prior intellectual movements, such as the cultural and linguistic turns. As I will show, what is deficient about this framing is that it reenacts the very same inflationary logic that the discourses of the affective turn accuse those prior turns of perpetrating, and it does so by ignoring those turns’ very warning about conceptual inflation (Derrida, 2016, p. 6). In addition, this essay also considers the larger institutional horizon against which the affective turn has appeared within the U.S. higher educational context and what the affective turn’s emergence indicates about the contemporary neoliberal University’s place in the public sphere. In particular, I want to ask whether theoretical discourses can be thought of as forms of speech within the public sphere. If so, to what extent does the ­affective turn function as a means of speech for the critic in neoliberalism? Ultimately, I  want to work toward a question concerning what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy (1989) have called ‘our’ affective

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tie (Gefühlsbindung) to Theory and the implications of this affective tie for modes of speech that are possible within institutions. My discussion proceeds in three parts: I begin with a brief rehearsal of how discourses of the affective turn have announced their appearance in opposition to the linguistic turn. In keeping with my focus on the affective turn’s emergence in U.S. scholarship, I attend to two specific publications published in the early 2000s (Clough, 2007; Gregg & Seigworth, 2010) that announced the affective turn’s official arrival on the theoretical scene in the humanities and interpretive social sciences in the United States. Of particular interest to me is the way that the two volumes’ introductory essays paint a picture of humanities and social sciences scholarship as having fallen into a form of political impotence due to what these volumes say are these fields’ commitments to the critique of representation. The desire for political agency that can be seen animating the discourses of the affective turn introduces the question of theoretical desire in general. To elaborate on this question, I read the affective turn’s self-­authorizing gestures from my first section through critiques of the affective turn by Clare Hemmings (2005) and Ruth Leys (2011), and in combination with Robyn Wiegman’s (2012, 2014) recent work on disciplinary object formations. Hemmings and Leys expose the metaphysical assumptions at play in the affective turn’s conceptual framing, which allows me to use Wiegman to ask about the demands and expectations that discourses of the affective turn place on affect as a theoretical object. Together, their interventions set the scene for me to consider the extent to which the turn to affect functions as a means by which the critic in the contemporary neoliberal U ­ niversity shores up their authority – and reasserts their speech – in a time of renewed attacks on the value of the humanities and the interpretive social sciences. In my concluding section, I link Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s invocation of an affective attachment to Theory to Félix Guattari’s conception of the institutional unconscious in order to call for a relation to language that can confront adequately the discourse of affect. Though my concern in this essay is largely that of uncovering what might be called the affective turn’s political unconscious, I want to emphasize that my motivation for doing so is not wholly negative. Ultimately, I want to submit that, if viewed critically – which is to say, if viewed as the discourse it is – the affective turn presents an opportunity to interrogate the constellation of desires and forms of speech that buttress the University’s own unreflective participation in reproducing the public sphere as it is currently constituted. But in order to take advantage of this opportunity, it is imperative to begin with critically assessing the desires that give rise to the affective turn and the forms of speech around which it coheres. As long as these remain sequestered from confrontation, they will only serve to set the scene for the next academic fad, and we will not be able to meaningfully transform the public sphere’s existing configuration.

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The turn to affect and the break with the linguistic turn From the viewpoint of many of its proponents, the affective turn announces an involvement with the body and a promise to correct the body’s exclusion from the history of Western thought. Because of its materiality and contingency, the body has been considered an unreliable basis upon which to ground philosophical truth, which, since Plato, has been projected as unchanging and transcendent. Since the affective turn has appeared relatively recently on the critical scene, we are led to believe that the history of the body’s exclusion runs right up to the 20th century and includes those intellectual movements that have immediately preceded the turn to affect. In his foreword to The Affective Turn (2007), a collection of essays edited by Patricia Clough, Michael Hardt classifies the linguistic and cultural turns of the previous decades as participating in the body’s exclusion. In contrast to those prior turns, he says, the affective turn “introduces an important shift” by “refer[ing] equally to the body and the mind” (Hardt, 2007, p. ix). Invoking Spinoza’s theorization of affect, Hardt states that by synthesizing both “reason and the passions”, not only does affect allows us “to enter the realm of causality”, it also delineates an altogether more complex conception of causality than the traditional mind-body dualisms of modern thought (Hardt, 2007, p. ix). Affect places us firmly in the world, both in terms of being able to be affected by it, as well as being able to affect it (Hardt, 2007, p. ix). Implicit, then, in Hardt’s rendition of the affective turn is the commonplace view that language and representation, the foci of the linguistic and cultural turns, exist outside “the realm of causality”. Hardt’s characterization of the affective turn as a corrective to those prior turns thus unquestioningly legitimates those positions that held that the linguistic and cultural turns’ preoccupations with representation and ideology confine critical thought to the imaginary, where nothing is really real and from within which we are unable to affect the world. In this way, the shift toward affect that Hardt describes can be understood as a response to Jacques ­Derrida’s famous phrase “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (“There is no outside the text”/“There is no outside-text”) and the tradition of deconstructive criticism his declaration heralded (1967, p. 227; 2016, p. 145; Arac, Godzich, & Martin, 1983). While deconstruction met an enthusiastic response in the United States (albeit primarily in English and literature programs), others soon felt anxiety at the prospect of being locked into an inescapable idealism. And by the late 1990s and early 2000s, ­articulations of fatigue with the linguistic and cultural turns (if not with Theory altogether) began to emerge on the U.S. critical scene (Latour, 2004; Sedgwick, 2003). In her introduction to The Affective Turn, Clough affirms Hardt’s characterization of the affective turn, but where Hardt simply intimates the

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limitations of the prior turns he names, she goes into greater detail contextualizing the affective turn’s development from out of previous theoretical pursuits. One of these pursuits was the psychoanalytic treatment of trauma ubiquitous in U.S. academic discourse in the 1990s. For Clough, this treatment represents an early occupation with affect, but in her estimation, it suffered from a number of fatal oversights: The first was in working with a conception of the body as something individualized, contained, and discrete (Clough, 2007, p. 11); the second has to do with a self-imposed limitation on how psychoanalysis can talk about (i.e., represent) trauma. Since, according to Clough, its conception of the body insists on a fixed distinction between nature (as body) and culture, or, in other words, between matter and form, psychoanalysis can only understand trauma as an experience that repeatedly happens to the body, which the body is unable to overcome (Clough, 2007, pp. 7–8). Thus, the psychoanalytically conceived traumatic body is trapped in a fatal affect, which can only yield a form of expression that retreads without end a traumatic wounding, providing no opening for transformation or change. All attempts at writing about trauma from the basis of the psychoanalytic conception of the body, Clough claims, can only reproduce a voice afflicted by absence and loss (Clough, 2007, pp. 4–5). Against this supposedly mistaken view, Clough invokes the Deleuzian conception of the body (from his reading of Spinoza and from his collaborations with Félix Guattari) as a “machinic assemblage” composed of a concentration of forces and relations that includes the inhuman as much as the human, the inorganic as much as the organic. The Deleuzian body is not a rationalized, atomic unit, but a networked site open to being affected as much as it affects other bodies. Under the Deleuzian body, trauma is no longer a final interruption of the body, but a moment in the body’s process of perpetual becoming (Clough, 2007, p. 11). Another collection that delineates the field of affect studies is The Affect Theory Reader (2010), edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Following right after the publication of Clough’s volume (and notably also from the same university press), The Affect Theory Reader is similarly based in a Deleuzean-Spinozist approach to affect. In their introduction, Gregg and Seigworth invoke the phrase from Spinoza’s Ethics made famous by Deleuze and elaborated by Deleuzean affect theorists such as Brian Massumi: “[N]o one has yet determined what the body can do”.1 Gregg and Seigworth’s invocation is intended as much as a comment on the open-­endedness of affect as on the status of affect studies itself. Spinoza’s theorization of

1 Spinoza (1985), Book III, Proposition II, Scholium. Quoted in Gregg and Seigworth (2010), p. 3. Cf. Massumi (2002), which is cited prominently in both Clough (2007) and Gregg and Seigworth (2010).

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affect as pertaining to an infinite capacity for the body to be affected and to affect other bodies serves as the basis upon which Gregg and Seigworth submit affect as both an opening onto difference as well as a concept of existence that resists any final conceptualization. “There is no single, generalizable theory of affect”, they write, “not yet, and (thankfully) there never will be” (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010, p. 3). Because of its infinite openness, affect is characterized as a perpetual “inbetween-ness”, and as such, is a name for “those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement” (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010, p. 1). “Indeed”, Gregg and Seigworth say, “affect is persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations” (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010, p. 1). Like Hardt’s and Clough’s remarks in The Affective Turn, Gregg and Seigworth cast affect as anchoring the human in (non-linear) causality and processes of becoming, but in a way that cannot be captured by the supposed law-like structures of consciousness and rationality. Here again, affect means contingency, possibility of the new, and ultimately, freedom. In contrast to The Affective Turn, which assembles a particular set of ­papers written by Clough’s students that amounts to a very specific approach to affect, The Affect Theory Reader offers a more comprehensive genealogy of the turn to affect across the disciplines composing the humanities and social sciences. Nonetheless, a few themes remain consistent between the two collections: In addition to the association of affect with the non-cognitive and its identification with becoming and freedom, the idea that the turn to affect constitutes a simultaneous turn away from the linguistic turn “and its attendant social constructionisms” appears in Gregg and Seigworth’s introduction as well (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010, p. 7). Like Clough, who has an essay in The Affect Theory Reader also, Gregg and Seigworth maintain that affect promises the possibility of fashioning “a much wider definition for the social and cultural” (presumably less deterministic) than what was allowed under the linguistic turn (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010, p. 8). What the various articulations of the affective turn share, then, is a metaphysics of causality animated by a speculative desire for a new kind of social ontology. As critics of the affective turn have wondered, however, it is not clear whether the affective turn provides actual evidence of this new social ontology or constitutes a mere dogmatic assertion of the power of affect to transform the social. In the next section, I review what I consider to be two of the more salient critiques of the affective turn as they appear in the writings of Clare Hemmings (2005) and Ruth Leys (2011). Together, they interrogate the theoretical desires at work in the discourses of the affective turn, underscoring especially the fact that the affective turn is before all else a theoretical discourse.

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Affect and the desire for theory As Hemmings notes, in addition to reversing the mind-body hierarchy (but still retaining the hierarchy), the affective turn works with an unquestioned ontology of affect. It conceives affect as essentially disruptive and good, and as essentially good because it is disruptive (Hemmings, 2005, pp. 549–551). Confirming also that this valuation of affect takes place as a response to what is judged by many as the domineering and nihilistic critique of poststructuralist theory, particularly deconstruction, Hemmings questions the idiosyncratic character of the causal freedom affect is taken to manifest. She interrogates in particular the claims put forward by Eve Kosoksky Sedgwick (1990, 2003) and Brian Massumi (1996, 2002) in their respective scholarship promoting affect, which are taken as guiding texts for affect theorists. For example, Hemmings questions Sedgwick’s claim for affect as that which escapes linear causality, and she is suspicious of Massumi’s description of affect as autonomous, showing how these conceptions betray “an attitude or faith in something other than the social and cultural … [a] trust that there is something outside culture” (Hemmings, 2005, p. 563). Though she does not give a name to this faith or trust, we might recognize it as the reappearance of the Kantian belief in noumenal causality, the idea that human freedom resides in a realm altogether distinct from, yet nonetheless connected to, natural causality. It is thus curious that such a reappearance should be welcomed by contemporary critical discourse, as it cordons off human freedom into a space of the ineffable and the mystical and invites a patently uncritical epistemological quietism.2 In her critique of the affective turn, Leys also questions the characterization of affect as non-rational, asignifying, and pre-personal, saying that this expresses a metaphysical assumption regarding the mind’s separation from the body, as well as “a false dichotomy between mind and matter” (Leys, 2011, pp. 457, 443, 445). However, she then builds further on Hemmings’ observation of affect theorists’ automatic equation of affect with newness and ‘the Real,’ particularly as the real site of politics and locus of political transformation (Leys, 2011, p. 451). As Leys summarizes, “[t]he whole point of the turn to affect by Massumi and like-minded cultural critics is thus to shift attention away from considerations of meaning or ‘ideology’ or indeed representation to the subject’s subpersonal material-affective responses, where, it is claimed, political and other influences do their real work” (Leys, 2011, pp. 450–451). By demarcating the space of politics as solely the space of affect, affect theorists not only require a devaluation of language; they also perpetuate modern thought’s investment in a mind-body dualism, where

2 Cf. Wolfendale (2014).

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language, as mind, is conceived as incapable of affecting affect, which in this context stands for the body and the material world at large. This is to say that the story the affective turn tells is an old one indeed. Yet the story is older still. What both Hemmings and Leys touch on in their respective criticisms of the affective turn is what I would identify as Lacoue-Labarthe’s (1998) more general critique of Western metaphysics’ speculative ambition to have access to, and ultimately master, the really Real. This is an ambition that, for Lacoue-Labarthe, is literally typified in the figure of mimesis. For Lacoue-Labarthe, mimesis is a figure (Gestalt) for the reality of becoming, which exceeds metaphysics and challenges it, but also serves as the object metaphysics brings under its control in order to establish its authority and identity as Philosophy. Seen in this light, it should not be surprising that the affective turn has emerged alongside other materialist turns that have captured the contemporary theoretical imagination, such as new materialism, speculative realism, object-­oriented ontology, ­actor-network theory, sound studies, and so on. Affect now joins matter (of the ‘agential’ and ‘generative’ kind), as well as ‘processes’ and ‘assemblages’, as the latest cherished (i.e., fetishized) objects of philosophy’s materialist – which is to say, anti-representational and anti-­ theoretical – gaze.3 But it is important to note that the theoretical strategy remains consistent across these contemporary turns: their objects are to be valued because they upend all existing epistemological paradigms, and these existing ­paradigms  – ­representation, visuality, humanism, Theory ­itself – stand in need of overturning precisely because they block access to the really Real.4 What all of these contemporary turns share, then, is the very same fundamental assumption that animates philosophy’s self-image: that it and it alone can have access to the really Real. Thus, whether affect is the degraded, threatening outside to philosophy that Plato projects in his critique of mimesis, or it is the site of human finitude, as it is in Spinoza, affect is still that which philosophy authorizes itself to theorize. The materialist desire for affect is therefore still a theoretical desire – a desire of and for Theory. However, at stake in this desire for Theory, I would argue, is less the theoretical object than the subject of Theory – the theoretical subject, the subject who is authorized to theorize, the subject who theorizes itself as authorized to theorize. At stake is a fundamental narcissism at the heart of the theoretical enterprise itself. And to the extent such a relation remains inseparable from the critical/theoretical project, any assessment of the affective turn must include an assessment of the theorist’s affective attraction and attachment to Theory.

3 For an overview of these new materialist objects, see Dolphijn and van der Tuin (2012). 4 Cf. Eng (2017) for how this theoretical strategy plays out in the context of the sonic turn.

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It is precisely this narcissistic attraction and attachment to Theory that Robyn Wiegman (2012, 2014) is responding to in her recent investigations into the ways disciplines identify and choose the objects they decide are proper to them. For Wiegman, this narcissism appears within a general, desperate struggle to survive in the contemporary neoliberal University. Wiegman’s Object Lessons (2012) interrogates what she calls “identity knowledges – Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, Queer Studies, Whiteness Studies, and American Studies – in order to consider what they have wanted from the objects of study they assemble in their self-defining critical obligation to social justice” (2012, p. 3). Her central premise in that work is that critical projects place a demand upon the object with which either they identify (e.g., Ethnic studies), or from which they disidentify (e.g., Whiteness Studies, 2012, p. 4), and this demand brings with it an ethical cost to the object. Wiegman deploys the term object with both its psychoanalytic and Foucauldian inflections. On the one hand, the object is a vehicle of fantasy and desire (2012, p. 20); on the other hand, it is what a disciplinary discourse formulates as proper to it as part of cohering the proper subject authorized to know it (2012, p. 329). In both senses, the subject instrumentalizes the object – uses it and uses it up – in order to consolidate its position as subject (Wiegman, 2014, p. 18). In both Object Lessons and her article “The times we’re in: Queer feminist criticism and the reparative ‘turn’” (2014), Wiegman makes it clear that the subject that is at stake is the contemporary critic, particularly their existence (or lack thereof) in the contemporary neoliberal University. Wiegman links the reparative turn she identifies in what she calls queer feminist criticism to the affective and new materialist turns that now occupy the current theoretical horizon, but for Wiegman, it also names a specific itinerary within these turns that, in her words, tries to recover sustenance from “what hurts” (2014, p. 11). Notably, Wiegman reconstructs the distinction Sedgwick, drawing on Melanie Klein, makes between reparative reading, which seeks a position of reparation in relation to the injuries of the past, and paranoid reading, a mode of interpretation that constantly has its antennae up for what The Real Issue Is, perpetually fearful (paranoid, really) that it (and, by extension, the paranoid critic) is getting duped.5 The distinction between paranoid and reparative reading maps respectively onto the distinction between the supposed hyper-alert, meta-level critiques of deconstruction and poststructuralist thought and the micro-attentive care bestowed upon collective feeling and everyday objects in affect theory and new materialism.

5 See Sedgwick (2003), though it is important to note that a main part of Wiegman’s analysis is to restore the writing and publication history of Sedgwick’s formulation of the distinction between paranoid and reparative reading in order to rewrite the accepted version of queer theory’s genealogy (Wiegman, 2014, p. 12).

218  Michael Eng

However, the object of reparative reading is one that, by definition, stands in need of repair; as a result, “the reparative turn”, according to Wiegman, “quite significantly rewrites the critic’s value as the consequence of the ­object’s need” (2014, p. 16). So, why would critics in the contemporary neoliberal University need to rewrite their value via the object? To most, if not all, faculty working in the humanities and interpretive social sciences in the United States currently, such a question is an obvious joke. It has become a routine requirement for those disciplines in the U.S. academy to have to argue for their legitimacy and continued existence in the contemporary neoliberal University. I know a similar condition has afflicted these disciplines in the United Kingdom in the enactment of austerity measures. In the United States, this has been occurring for a number of decades, and there is no sign the situation is going to change, especially in the age of Trump. But as Wiegman reminds us, many of these attacks accuse us of bringing about our own irrelevance, what with our celebration, during the heyday of poststructuralism and identity knowledges, of the groundlessness of social construction, the dismantling of “people”, “nation”, and “culture”, not to mention the deconstruction of the human itself (2014, p. 18). I hope it is becoming clear that the claim I am pursuing is that the affective turn appears not only as a continued attachment to the theoretical enterprise, but, like any theoretical object, as also a means to reassert one’s theoretical subjectivity, or even to reassure one that one is still a theoretical subject in the contemporary neoliberal University. The turn to affect, in other words, cannot be separated from the discursive operation that gives the subject a voice and that allows the subject to identify as this voice. The question I wish to pose is whether this voice is adequate to respond to the institutional pressures that condition it, or whether it is a simulacrum of speech and therefore part of the machinery by which the contemporary ­neoliberal University both reproduces itself and masks its role in reproducing capital. In order to answer this question, and to uncover the politics of ­affect to which this question points, I believe it is necessary to attend to the ways the affective turn reveals a line of continuity between philosophical and capitalist speculation.

The politics of affect By arguing for the need to attend to the politics of affect, I am saying that it is important to keep in view the desires that underwrite the identification of affect as a legitimate object of theoretical and disciplinary discourse, and to see that, contrary to the claims of affect theorists, the determination of affect as a theoretical object involves an inextricable relationship to language. To be clear, I am not arguing against the legitimacy of theorizing affect as such. As the 2016 U.S. presidential election reminded us all too

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poignantly, the study of affect – especially a study of its adjuncts, such as intoxication, contagion, and mimicry – is needed more than ever. For the mystery of how Trump voters identified, and continue to identify, with a candidate with whom they have nothing in common persists. But it is precisely on this point that Lacoue-Labarthe’s (1990, 1998, 2003) writings on the figure (Gestalt) in philosophical speculation connect to the work he and Nancy (1989, 1990, 1997) undertake investigating the role of the figure and figuration (Gestaltung) in the mythology of fascism. One trait that connects both philosophical and political figuration, of course, is a desire for mastery. From Philosophy’s inaugural ­injunction  – gnothi seauton (know thyself) – to its modern echoes in Cartesian rationalism (cogito ergo sum), first philosophy has always been a project of self-mastery. As Lacoue-Labarthe (1998, 2003) demonstrates in his work on onto-­typology, the narcissisms of Philosophy and Theory not coincidentally repeat themselves as figures – types – throughout the history of Western thought – in the form of Socrates, Zarathustra, Oedipus, A ­ céphale, the worker, the student, etc. It is through this fundamental act of figuration, through onto-­typology, Lacoue-Labarthe argues, that Philosophy and ­Theory master their chosen objects. Philosophy’s onto-typological compulsion is thus a form of mythological writing that coheres not only the boundaries of a specific kind of speech, but also designates the ideal subjects authorized to carry that speech. This onto-typological structure consequently marks the institution of Philosophy as at once political and also indistinguishable from National Socialism’s drive toward political mastery through mythological figuration (Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1990). In their works Retreating the Political and “The Unconscious Is Destructured Like an Affect”, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy demonstrate why affect cannot simply be one theoretical object among others. They also show why exclusive focus on affect as a theoretical object without attention to the theoretical subject is deficient. The reason, as we have touching on, is that affect, particularly the affective tie that is “originary sociality”, is the condition of identification (Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1989, p. 191). Simply stated, affect is the exteriority that produces the interiority called the subject; consequently, one does not so much as identify with affect as become formed through it, and it can only appear in its retrait – in its retreat or withdrawal. Affect’s retrait, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe explain, marks it as both an ambivalent object and also a dissimulating one (Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1989, p. 198). It is ambivalent because, as the condition of subjectivity, it will always evade the subject who seeks to approach it. Relatedly, by refusing to be an object for the theoretical gaze, affect undoes – that is, dissimulates – the subjectivity of the subject who requires that there be an object that it can know and against which its consciousness can be opposed. Dissimulating both itself and the subject that it forms, affect causes the subject panic, provoking the subject to theorize affect through the figure, to

220  Michael Eng

seek shelter in the figure, in order to master it and in order to secure its status as subject. In this way, Narcissus is that figure standing behind the figures of Socrates, Zarathustra, Oedipus, and those others listed above. Affect is thus no ordinary theoretical object; it is rather the theoretical o ­ bject, the object that gets the speculative/theoretical project off the ground. Theory, as in the seeing that is theoria, is the subject’s response to affect (Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1989, p. 201). As those who are familiar with Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s work in this context know, and as others will have perhaps discerned in the above summary, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy are engaged in a sustained éxplication or Auseinandersetzung with psychoanalysis, particularly in terms of psychoanalysis’s appeal to affect to theorize the political. Insofar as psychoanalysis tries to explain the political in terms of affective identification with the figure – Narcissus, Oedipus, the Father – it only offers vague gestures to affect while also masking its affective attachment to theory. Rather than providing theoretical clarification, psychoanalysis’s parade of figures reveals affect as an impasse to which psychoanalysis, as a disciplinary subject, can only respond theoretically (Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1989, pp. 200–201). Psychoanalysis theorizes away its inability to achieve mastery over affect through its theorization of the figure. Consequently, the political is left unexplained, and the social-political implications of psychoanalysis’s affective attachment to Theory go unexamined. So where might this leave us with respect to the affective turn? Should we simply abandon it because it remains unconscious with respect to the political desires that motivate it, even as it attempts to account for the political, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy show with psychoanalysis? Though I have been engaged in a critical assessment of the affective turn’s enabling discourses throughout this essay, I want to suggest that the contemporary turn to affect nonetheless offers an opportunity to intervene in the configuration of the public sphere. However, not because affect is the object proper to the public sphere’s constitution, as discourses of the affective turn maintain, but because attending to the question of affect can help us expose the occlusions that take place when we simply take it up as the next new theoretical object. As I have been suggesting, one enabling occlusion of the contemporary affective turn is that of the subject’s affective tie to Theory itself and the subject’s use of Theory to secure its status as subject. In order to get at what is stake in the affective turn, then, we must place into question the theoretical enterprise as such, and specifically the desires that animate it. Affect can help us answer the problem of why we are captured by theoretical discourse. At the same time, in order to attend properly to our affective attachment to Theory, we need to reflect critically on our relation to discourse. But, of course, neither Theory nor discourse appear in a vacuum. They require institutions. And as Michel Foucault (1972) explains, the primary role institutions play is in the production and maintenance of disciplinary discourse; institutional discourses produce both objects of knowledge as well

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as the subjects destined to know those objects. The speech those subjects assume, in turn, is of course an institutional one. Thus when affect appears on the theoretical scene of the contemporary neoliberal University, I think the question we need to ask is, ‘What do we speak when we speak the language of affect?’ From my viewpoint, there are at least two possible answers to this question: The first, as I have been arguing, is a speech that secures the theoretical subject and obscures its self-affective investments. In other words, the language of affect is an institutional speech. When this speech appears within the contemporary neoliberal University, where in the United States at least both students and faculty these days are disciplined to comport to their work as venture capitalists, it cannot be separated from capitalist speculation. In such speech, theoretical and capitalist speculation become one. In such speech, the dream of reification is realized. As I have argued elsewhere (Eng, 2012), following the work of Guattari and Jean Oury on institutional analysis, this is a simulacrum of speech amounting to a loss of speech, an “institutional schizophasia”. The second possible answer to the question of what we speak when we speak the language of affect is one that I can only gesture to in this concluding statement. But it would be a speech that would be aware of its role in perpetuating what Guattari (1984) calls the “institutional unconscious”. The institutional unconscious, as Guattari conceives it, is typically an expression of its death drive (what Nietzsche named nihilism) – its desire not to desire, its desire not to become other to itself. In the age of the neoliberal University, the only desires the University sanctions are those for capitalist subjectivity – its own, as well as those of the subjects it produces. In order, then, for affect to open onto the really Real that it promises, we need a speech that attends to the really Real of the institution – from the University to the institution known as Theory. Only then will we be able to entertain a real possibility of thinking the constitution of the public sphere.

References Arac, J., Godzich, W., & Martin, W. (Eds.). (1983). The Yale critics: Deconstruction in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Clough, P. T. (2007). Introduction. In P. T. Clough (Ed.), The affective turn (pp. 1–33). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Derrida, J. (1967). De la grammatologie. Paris, France: Les Éditions de Minuit. Derrida, J. (2016). Of grammatology (14th anniversary ed.) (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dolphijn, R., & van der Tuin, I. (Eds.). (2012). New materialism: Interviews and cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Eng, M. (2012). Institutional schizophasia and the possibility of the humanities’ “other scene”: Guattari and the exigency of transversality. Deleuze Studies, 6(2), 328–352.

222  Michael Eng Eng, M. (2017). The sonic turn and theory’s affective call. Parallax, 23(3), 316–329. Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). New York: Pantheon. Gregg, M., & Seigworth, G. J. (Eds.). (2010). The affect theory reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Guattari, F. (1984). Molecular revolution: Psychiatry and politics (R. Sheed, Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hardt, M. (2007). Foreword: What are affects good for? In P. T. Clough (Ed.), The affective turn (pp. ix-xiii). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hemmings, C. (2005). Invoking affect: Cultural theory and the ontological turn. Cultural Studies, 19(5), 548–567. Lacoue-Labarthe, P. (1990). Heidegger, art, and politics: The fiction of the political (C. Turner, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Lacoue-Labarthe, P. (1998). Typography: Mimesis, philosophy, politics (C. Fynsk, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lacoue-Labarthe, P. (2003). Oedipus as figure (D. Macey, Trans.). Radical Philosophy, 118(March/April), 7–17. Lacoue-Labarthe, P., & Nancy, J.-L. (1989). The unconscious is destructured like an affect (Part I of “The Jewish people do not dream”) (B. Holmes, Trans.). Stanford Literature Review, 6(2), 191–209. Lacoue-Labarthe, P., & Nancy, J.-L. (1990). The Nazi myth (B. Holmes, Trans.). Critical Inquiry, 16(2), 291–312. Lacoue-Labarthe, P., & Nancy, J.-L. (1997). Retreating the political. S. Sparks (Ed.). New York: Routledge. Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry, 30(2), 225–248. Leys, R. (2011). The turn to affect: A critique. Critical Inquiry, 37(3), 434–472. Massumi, B. (1996). The autonomy of affect. In P. Patton (Ed.), Deleuze: A critical reader (pp. 217–239). Oxford: Blackwell. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. Berkeley, CA: University of ­California Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Spinoza, B. (1985). Ethics. In The collected works of Spinoza. Volume I. E. Curley (Ed. and Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wiegman, R. (2012). Object lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wiegman, R. (2014). The times we’re in: Queer feminist criticism and the reparative “turn”. Feminist Theory, 15(1), 4–15. Wolfendale, P. (2014). Object-oriented philosophy: The noumenon’s new clothes. ­Falmouth: Urbanomic.

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. abecediary as theory pedagogy 161–3 Abu Khaled, Maryam 142n4, 147 Academy of Arts, Berlin 8 accent: affect and 176–9, 179–83; language and 176–9; and public sphere 179–83 Acéphale 219 actor-network theory 194, 202, 216 Aesthetic Education of Man (Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen) 186 affect(s): accent and 176–9, 179–83; in debates over religious sensibilities 108–11; and desire for theory 215–18; in Internet research 52–5; in language 82–7; language and 82–7, 176–9; political mobilization and 87–9; public sphere and 179–83; religious and secular 109–10; social media and 87–9 affective assemblages 189–206 affective dynamics: in entanglement of feminism 39–43; in entanglement of racism 39–43 affective modes; 3, 40, 70, 162 defined 4–5 affective politics: feminist critique of public/private dichotomy 65–6; sentimental contract as critical figure for theorizing 75–7 affective publics 9, 30, 65–8, 66–8; dynamics of protest and outrage 36–9; feminist critique of public/private dichotomy 65–6; sentimental contract as critical figure for theorizing 75–7 “affective remuneration” 73

affective resonance: in age of the algorithm 123, 131 “affective turn” 5, 13, 20, 23, 63, 82, 118, 120–21, 161, 175, 197n21, 210–16, 218, 220 The Affective Turn 212, 214 The Affect Theory Reader 213–14 “agonistic public” 32 Ahmed, Sara 43, 58, 75, 84–5, 156, 162–4, 162n6, 194n13, 201, 201n36, 202n42 “Akzent” 12, 173, 175–7, 184–6 algorithm: affective resonance and 123, 131; poetry and 123, 131; and politics 123, 131 The Alphabet of Feeling Bad 12, 151–70; abecediary as theory pedagogy 161–3; behind the scenes 159–61; common feelings/feeling in common 169–70; feeling bad as negative affect 165–6; feeling bad now 166–7; keyword as magic portal 163–5; white women’s tears 167–9 Alvares, Claudia 39 “An American Poem” 125, 129 Anderson, Benedict 181 Anderson, Laurie 11, 118, 119 androcentrism 76 Anzaldúa, Gloria 169 Apollo Hall of the Royal Theatre (Königliches Schauspielhaus) 137 “Artists for Hillary” program 129 Asad, T. 109 #aufschrei (outcry) 37, 41 “authoritarian populism” 64 Aydemir, Fatma 13, 189–206

224 Index Bakhtin, Mikhail 12, 83, 126, 127, 175–9 Baldessari, John 162 Baym, Nancy K. 40 Becker-Schmidt, Regina 66 Beckett, Samuel 26 #BeenRapedNeverReported 37 Bely, Andrei 26 Benhabib, Seyla 32, 180 Bennett, Lance 37 Benveniste, Emile 83 Berlant, Lauren 10, 32, 64 Berliner Ensemble 25 Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (Kristeva) 84 blasphemous speech 108–9 body-text-assemblage 89–93; Emma Gonzalez and March for Our Lives movement 89–91; interaction modes 93; paraverbal and verbal affective resources in language 91–3 Böhmermann, Jan 109 “bourgeois public sphere” 31 Breithaupt, Fritz 23 Brennan, Teresa 82 Brexit 63 Brinkema, E. 192 Broken German (Gardi) 27 Brokoff, Jürgen 14 Brown, Wendy 70–1 Burgtheaterdeutsch 139 “A Burnt-Out Case?” 155 Bush, George H. 64, 128, 168 Butler, Judith 19, 94, 112, 183, 197n21 Calhoun, Craig 32 Cambridge Analytica 128–9 Cartesian rationalism 219 Castleton, Jane 144 Ceausescu, Nicolae 81 Céline, J.F. 83, 85 Charges (The Supplicants) (Jelinek) 141–2 Charlie Hebdo 109 Cho, Alexander 60 Citizen: An American Lyric (Rankine) 169 citizenship: affective 73; legal 185; participation and 71–2; politics of pain and 71–2 climate change 1, 168 Clinton, Bill 59, 128 Clinton, Hilary 59, 129

Clough, Patricia 82, 212–14, 213n1 collective emotions: from speech acts to 110–11 Committee on Internal Affairs of the German Bundestag 145 communicative rationality 2–4 “connective action” 34, 37 Corrigan, J. 103 Couldry, N. 35 counterpublics 3; publics and 34–6; understanding 34–6 “countervailing passions” 70 “countervailing strategy” 70 Court Theatre of Schwerin 137 “cruel optimism” 75 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 54 cultural diversity 1 Cvetkovich, Ann 67 Dahlberg, L. 3 Dahlgren, Peter 33, 39 Dante 26 Das Hohe Haus (Willemsen) 17, 18, 24 Dean, Jodi 56, 88 Deleuze, G. 25–6, 120, 122, 176n2, 192n10, 194, 213 Depression: A Public Feeling 156 Deutsche Bühnenaussprache 137 Devrient, Eduard 139 dialogism 126–7, 178 Didion, Joan 204 digital communication media 36 digital feminism 41 digitalization 1–2 digital networked communication 30, 33, 35 dissonance: distance and 183–7; play and 183–7 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 179 Drucker, Johanna 132 Drüeke, Ricarda 40 DuBois, W.E.B. 169 Duras, Marguerite 84 Durkheim, Émile 103 Dutch colonial politics 66 “economies of suffering” 72 Egyptian uprising 38 Eisenstein 87 Eliot, George 164 Ellbogen (Aydemir) 13, 189–206; configuring lifeworld experiences

Index 225 198–202; fictional worlds with open borders 198–202; hate speech 195–8; literary worldmaking in 189–206; rethinking agency in literary public sphere 202–6; world(mak)ing assemblage 193–5 Emin, Tracy 156 Emirbayer, Mustafa 35 “emotional capitalism” 64, 70 “emotional contract” 69 “emotional regimes” 106 emotions: in debates over religious sensibilities 108–11 empathy 22–3, 27, 39, 72–4, 76–7, 92, 190, 206 Empty Places performances 11, 118–19 Engler, Wolfgang 23 Enlightenment 17, 23, 30, 174–5, 179, 181; Western 66 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip 25, 109 Erlmann, V. 6 Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts 23 Ethics (Spinoza) 51, 213 “ethnosexism” 40 eurocentrism 76 European Court of Human Rights 104 European debt crisis 1 European public sphere 31 European refugee crisis 37 European theater languages 135 Facebook 54, 56, 57, 63, 121, 129–30 “fake news” 128 FBI 92 Feeling Backward (Love) 163 Feel Tank Chicago 67 feminism: affective dynamics in the entanglement of 39–43; digital 41; fourth wave of 41; of nineties 131 feminist critique of public/private dichotomy 65–6 “Feminist Killjoys” 160–1 “feminization” 66 Fichte, Hubert 24 forgotten affective archive 83–7 Foucault, Michel 87, 220 fourth wave of feminism 41 Frankfurt, Harry 128 Fraser, Andrea 144 Fraser, Nancy 3, 32, 73

Gardi, Tomer 27 Gay-Straight Alliance 90 “Generation Snowflake” 23 “geno-text” 84 German Bühnenverein 137 German “Leitkultur” see “Leitkultur” German Sprechtheater see Sprechtheater gestures: in language 86; in public performances 81–95 global economic inequality 1 global financial capitalism 1 globalization 1, 106, 141 Goethe, J. W. 138–9 Gonzalez, Emma 10, 81; appearances on YouTube 89–93; and March for Our Lives movement 89–91 goodreads (Internet forum) 205 Gottsched, Johann Christoph 137 Graefer, A. 37 Great Britain 64 Gregg, Melissa 213 Greenfield, Susan 122 Gründgens, Gustaf 140 Guattari, Félix 120–2, 124–6, 176n2, 211, 213, 221 Gubareva, Anastasia 147 Guillory, J. 122 Habermas, Jürgen 3, 7, 12, 30; and the public sphere 31–4 Habermasian public sphere 43 Haider, Jörg 22 Halberstam, Jack 72 Hall, Stuart 64 Haller, M. 40 Hanoverian theaters 173 Hanson, Pauline 118 Haraway, Donna 127 Hardt, Michael 68, 212 hate speech 13, 195–8 Hemmings, Clare 211, 214 Hesse, Larissa 14 heteroglossia 12, 175, 178–9, 182–3, 186 “heterosexual contract” 69 “heterosexual femininity” 71 “hierarchy of oppressions” 72 Hirschman, Albert O. 70 Histoires d’amour 83 History of German Acting (Devrient) 139 Hochdeutsch 173–6, 177n3, 178, 184 Hobbes, Thomas 68 Hollaback! movement 37

226 Index “homo sentimentalis” 70 Honneth, A. 101, 106 Houellebecq, Michel 109 Howard, John 118 hurt feelings: religious emotions and 102–4 “hybrid public sphere” 30 “hypermasculinization” 66 “Identitarian Movement” 41 I is for Impasse: Affecktiv Queerverbindungen in Theorie_ Aktivismus_Kunst 160 illiberalism 2 Illouz, Eva 53, 64, 70 I Must Be Living Twice 129 informational writing 122 In Our Name 136, 141–2, 141n2, 143, 144–9, 146 Instagram 21, 56 Institutional Critique 144 interaction modes 93 Internet research: affect in 52–5 “intimate public sphere” 32 Ioanide, Paula 68 Islam 99–100, 103, 105, 107–10 Islamophobic groups 39 Jakobson, Roman 83 James, William 103 Jandl, Ernst 18 Järveläinen, P. 103 Jelinek, Elfriede 141–2 Je suis Charlie-movement 112 Joppke, C. 99 Joseph II 137 journalism 2, 9, 33–4, 38, 40–41 Jyllands-Posten 102 Kalvisknes Bore, I.-L. 37 Kanak Sprak (Zaimoğlu) 196 Kant, Immanuel 68 Kennedy, John F. 125–6 Kilby, A. 37 Killjoy (Ahmed) 163 Kim, Sue 190 “Know Your Meme” site 58 #KoelnHbf 39–43, 40, 41 Kraus, Karl 23, 27 Kristeva, Julia 10, 83–7 Kulturen der Empathie (Breithaupt) 23

Lacan, Jacques 123 Laclau, E. 3 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 210–11, 216, 219–20 language 2; accent and 176–9; affect and 82–7, 176–9; affect in 82–7; paraverbal affective resources in 91–3; and recognition 100–2; thinking difference between spoken and written 175–6; verbal affective resources in 91–3 Language as Affect (Riley) 112 language-based communications 4 La Révolution du langage poétique (Kristeva) 83 late capitalism 161 Latour, Bruno 5, 13, 194, 196, 197, 197n22, 202n42, 203n43, 205–6 Lazzarato, Maurizio 121, 123 “Leitkultur” 105 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 137 Leys, Ruth 211, 214–16 liberalism 64, 65n2, 67, 70 liberal subject 72–3 Linder, Anna 160 Lingis, Alphonso 122 “linguistic disrespect” 101 linguistic turn: turn to affect and break with 212–14 “Linguistics and Poetics” 87 literary public sphere: rethinking agency in 202–6 literary worldmaking: in Ellbogen 189–206 Liu, Alan 130 Loesch, Dana 90 Locke, John 68 Lorde, Audre 72 Lorenz, Renate 155 Love, Heather 156 lovelybooks (Internet forum) 205 Luca, Gherasim 26 Luhmann, Niklas 18 Machiavellian strategies 22 Mahmood, S. 104, 109 malapropisms 25 Mandelstam, Osip 26 many-to-many communications 2 March for Our Lives movement 10; Emma Gonzalez and 89–91 March for Science 63 Marx, Karl: theory of capital 58

Index 227 Massumi, Brian 39, 55, 65, 82, 84, 191, 191n5, 191n6, 192, 194n14 “material turn” 5 Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin 141–2, 143, 146 Maxwele, Chumani 81 memes 10, 31, 37, 57–9 Merkel, Angela 17, 118 #MeToo movement 33, 37, 41–2, 53–4, 57–9, 131 Michalski, Karin 12, 155, 156, 161 microaggression 169 Middle East 53 Mills, Charles W. 69 Mitchell, Allyson 157 “Mohammed caricatures” 102, 105 Moi, Toril 84 “Momentum 2016” 129 monolingualism 138, 140, 147–8, 174n1, 175–6, 183, 186 Mouffe, Chantal 3, 32 Mühlhoff, R. 7 multiculturalism: and recognition 99–100 multilingualism 18, 136; staging in the contemporary theater 140–8 multimodal communication 43 Muñoz, José 162 Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk 144 Muslims 98–9, 102, 104–5, 107–10 Mussolini, Benito 119 My Bed 156, 159 Myles, Eileen 125–32 Nancy, Jean-Luc 210–11 nationalistic bias 3 national sentimentality 70 National Socialist Underground 9, 18 national theater as ‘Sprechtheater’ 137–40 neoliberalism 65, 67 neologisms 25 “networked publics” 30, 36 networks: resonant 49–60 Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) 18, 22 New Right 110 North Africa 53 Novarina, Valère 24, 25 NRA (National Rifle Association) 90, 92–3 Nübling, Sebastian 141–2 Nyong’o, Tavia 73

Obama, Barack 168 Object Lessons (Wiegman) 217 Occupy Wall Street (#ows) 36, 53 Oedipus 219–20 one-to-many communications 2 #120db 39–43, 41 On Liberty (Mill) 104 online activism 37 online communication 35, 41, 52, 59, 86, 88 online pornography 6, 49–52, 59 “oppression Olympics” 72 orchestration of the public 68–71 Ötsch, Walter 22 Otto, Rudolf 103 Oury, Jean 221 Özdamar, Emine Sevgi 141 Painlevé, Jean 123 Papacharissi, Zizi 2, 30, 38, 53, 54, 59, 67, 88, 98 paraverbal affective resources in language 91–3 Parkland school shooting in Florida 10 participation and citizenship 71–2 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 123 “passionate politics” 68 Pateman, Carole 69 Péguy, Charles 26 Pellegrini, Ann 67 Pepe, Sheila 157 Peter, Birgit 139 Peters, C. 33 “pheno-text” 84 Philadelphia Museum of Art 144 Plato 212 play: dissonance and 183–7; distance and 183–7 poetry: in the age of the algorithm 118–32 polarization 2 political communication 19 political mobilization: affects and 87–9; social media and 87–9 “political pain” 74 politics: of affect 218–21; in the age of the algorithm; of guilt 72–3; of pain 71–2; of promises 73–5 “Politics and Music” 118 populism 2, 4 postmodernism 82, 161 Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Kristeva) 83

228 Index “primacy of affect” 5 The Promise of Happiness (Ahmed) 162–3 Protevi, John 54 ‘provincialism’ 139 public communication 7, 31, 33–4, 38 Public Feelings Project 67, 155 public/private dichotomy: feminist critique of 65–6 publics: affective 36–9, 66–8; counterpublics and 34–6; orchestration of 68–71; performative character of 34–6; understanding 34–6 public sphere 31–4; accent and 179–83; affect and 179–83; defined 30; Habermas and 31–4 Putin, Vladimir 25 “racial contract” 69 racialized masculine oppression 68 racism: affective dynamics in the entanglement of 39–43 radical democracy 3, 157–8, 170 Rankine, Claudia 169 rational politics 68 Reagan, Ronald 118–19 “reciprocal modulation” 6 recognition: language and 100–2; multiculturalism and 99–100 Reddy, Chandan 73 Reevaluation Counseling 164 religious emotions: blasphemous speech 108–9; hurt feelings and 102–4; and principles of the secular state 102–4 “religious feelings” 11, 98–9, 101–6, 109 religious minorities 11, 98 religious recognition 98–113; affective dynamics of 98–113; four analytical perspectives 104–7; hurt feelings and 102–4; investigating affect and emotion in debates over religious sensibilities 108–11; and principles of the secular state 102–4; public discourse on 98–113; religious emotions and 102–4 religious sensibilities: investigating affect and emotion in debates over 108–11 resonance: defined 49; things to do with 49–51 resonant networks 49–60; affect in Internet research 52–5; qualities of

encounter 58–60; things to do with resonance 49–51 Retreating the Political (LacoueLabarthe and Nancy) 219 Revolution in Poetic Language (Kristeva) 83 Rheingold, Howard 52 Rhodes, Cecil John 81 Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) 81 rhythm: in public performances 81–95 Ricoeur, Paul 90–1, 194n13 right-wing populism 9, 18, 39, 63, 190 Riley, Denise 112 Robertson, Lisa 118 Röggla, Kathrin 8 Romanian Revolution 81 Rosa, H. 6 Rosler, Martha 162 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 68–9 Roussel, Raymond 26 Rules for Actors (Goethe) 138 Russian formalism 82 Russian formalists 83 Sampson, Tony 58 Sauer, Birgit 66 Scarry, Elaine 130 Schaerf, Eran 21 Schiller, Friedrich 186 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 103 Schmähgedicht 109 Second Amendment 89 Sedgwick, Eve Kosoksky 189, 215 Segerberg, Alexandra 37 Seigworth, Gregory J. 213 semantics 6, 24–5, 27, 100, 105 Semiotics of the Kitchen 162 Senft, Theresa 56 Sennett, Richard 64 sentimental contract 71–5; affective publics and politics 65–8; as critical figure for theorizing affective publics and politics 75–7; foundations of the political 73–5; liberal subject 72–3; orchestration of the public 68–71; participation and citizenship 71–2; politics of guilt 72–3; politics of pain 71–2; politics of promises 73–5; social contract 68–71 “sexual contract” 69

Index 229 sexual violence 41 Seyfert, R. 113 Sheller, Mimi 35 Shifman, Limor 57 Siebs, Theodor 137 Sie hören Nachrichten (You’re Listening to the News) 21 Slobokova, Miro 26 Slow Death (Berlant) 163 Snapchat 21 social contract 68–9, 68–71 social hierarchies 35 “socially mediated publicness” 36, 40 social media 2; affects and 87–9; political mobilization and 87–9 social media content 57, 59–60 social networking sites 36 social networks 6, 35–6 social rites and programs 26 Socrates 219–20 speech acts: from, to collective emotions 110–11 sphere: defined 4; see also specific entries Spinoza, Baruch 51, 212–3, 213n1, 216 spoken language: difference between written and 175–6 Sprechtheater 11, 141n3; common principles of 145; exclusiveness of 146; history of 139–40; monolingual history of 144; national theater as 137–40; pedagogic mission of 147; publicness in 144; staging multilingualism in contemporary theater 140–8; traditional framework of 142 Stegemann, Bernd 24 Stern, D. 124 Stolterfoht, Ulf 25 structuralism 20, 25 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas) 31 “subaltern pain” 71 Submission (Houellebecq) 109 Tales of Love 83 Tarde, Gabriel 120 Tawada, Y. 12, 173–9, 182, 184–6 Teaching a Plant the Alphabet 162

Tel Quel 83 theatrical multilingualism 136 theatrical public spheres 140 theory: affect and desire for 215–18; of capital 58 Thrift, Nigel 82 Tomkins, S. 127 tones: in public performances 81–95 transnational migration 1 Transparent 129 Trump, Donald 11, 25, 37, 63, 125, 129, 166, 168, 218–19 Tumblr 60 turn to affect and break with linguistic turn 212–14 Turner, M. 121 Twitter 38–41, 39, 53–4, 57, 67 Twitter @Emma4Change 90 “The Unconscious Is Destructured Like an Affect” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy) 219 An Unhappy Archive exhibition 162 United States Constitution 89 “universalization of pain” 71 verbal affective resources in language 91–3 viral social media content 59 virtual communities 52 “visceral politics” 68 Vliet, Anna van der 160 von Hochberg, Bolko 137 von Ledebur, Carl 137 Wagner, Richard 12, 139 Warner, Michael 34 Web cultures 56 Weimar Classism 138 Weinberger, David 123 ‘Weimar declamation tone’ 139 Weinstein, Harvey 59 Western capitalist politics 66 Western democracies 30 Western Enlightenment 66 Western Europe 31 Western modern democracy 69 Western modernity 66, 68 Western modern liberal societies 70 Western modern nation-state 65, 69

230 Index Western modern social contract 69 Wetherell, Margaret 84, 113 WhatsApp 22 Wiegman, Robyn 211, 217 Wilde, Gabriele 69 Willemsen, Roger 17, 18, 24 Williams, Raymond 53, 161 Women’s March 37, 53 world(mak)ing assemblage: Ellbogen 193–5 Words Needed (video installation project) 160 written language: difference between spoken and 175–6

Yacavone, Daniel 194 Yildiz, Yasemin 181–2 Young, I. M. 3–4 YouTube 41; Emma Gonzalez’ appearances on 89–93 Zaimoglu, Feridun 141, 195n17, 196, 196n18 Zarathustra 219–20 ZDF (second national German TV program, C.B.) 200–1, 200n33 Zink, V. 111 Zschäpe, Beate 19 Zuckerberg, Mark 123