Public Spheres of Resonance

Constellations of Affect and Language

Anne Fleig, Christian von Scheve, Anne Fleig, Christian von Scheve

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429881916
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

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 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 one-to-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 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 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 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, 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 affec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: public spheres of resonance – constellations of affect and language
• 2 It’s the language, stupid!
• Part I Publics, politics, and media
• Part II Language and artistic practice
• Index