Emotion Online

Theorizing Affect on the Internet

J. Garde-Hansen, K. Gorton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349329069, 9780230283770
• eBook ISBN: 9781137312877
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Entreprise Applications
• Index: Social Sciences

Travelling through theories of emotion and affect, this book addresses the key ways in which media studies can be brought to bear upon everyday encounters with online cultures and practices. The book takes stock of where we are emotionally with regard to the Internet in the context of other screen media.

Part I

Theoretical Approaches

1

Theorizing Emotion and Affect

Towards an understanding of emotion and affect

Scholars attempting to cover the history of research on emotion often chart a course through work by Aristotle, Baruch Spinoza, Sigmund Freud, and William James. These names become anchoring points in a chronological overview of emotion as a concept. Of course, like all broad-brush attempts to survey such a vast and complicated area, they leave out several other important scholars, such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Silvan S. Tomkins, and Raymond Williams. This chapter is not intended as a history of the concept of emotion. Several books have been written already that successfully move through the theoretical development of the term. Robert C. Solomon’s (2003) What Is an Emotion? Classic and Contemporary Readings ([1984] 2003), for instance, provides an excellent historical overview alongside written work from Aristotle to Martha Nussbaum. The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (2006) by Daniel M. Gross is a radical reading of similar writers. Jennifer Harding and E. Deidre Pribram’s Emotions: A Cultural Studies Reader (2009) offers recent work within the fields of cultural and critical studies, and Jerome Kagan’s What Is Emotion?: History, Measures and Meanings (2007) charts a sophisticated course through the history of emotion in fields as diverse as anthropology, psychology, and neurobiology. Instead, this chapter will draw out some of the key definitions and ideas, particularly as they will later concern the issue of emotion and affect in online media culture.

William James posed the question ‘What is an emotion?’ over a hundred years ago. Robert C. Solomon begins his excellent collection on classic and contemporary readings of emotion with James’s question; he remarks that ever since James uttered this in the British journal Mind, people have been debating and revising their answers ([1984] 2003, 1). Most scholars begin their study of emotion with Aristotle and Spinoza. For example, Harding and Pribram commence their reader with ‘disciplinary developments’, which also include work from Williams (‘on structure of feeling’, 1961), from Alison Jaggar’s ‘Love and knowledge’ (1989), and Grossberg’s ‘Postmodernity and affect’ (1988. Contributions from anthropology, geology, and sociology, such as those of Lila Abu-Lughod (2002) and Catherine Lutz (1986), also figure as pivotal in the study of emotion. Emotions in Social Life: Critical Themes and Contemporary Issues (1998), edited by Gillian Bendelow and Simon J. Williams, maps the sociological landscape of research on emotion to consider issues of ‘the mediation of emotional experience’, ‘emotion as a way of seeing’, ‘emotions and health’, ‘ageing and emotions’, and ‘sexuality, intimacy and personal relations’.

A renewed focus on emotions, particularly within critical and cultural theory, has led to books and collections that examine particular feelings and states of being, such as David L. Eng’s and David Kazanjian’s Loss (2003), which considers the remains of the body, space, and ideas. Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2005) examines negative emotions such as envy, anxiety, and paranoia to reflect on the ‘ugly’ side of the way we feel. In so doing, she exposes the political and cultural underpinnings of such emotions and their gendered and racial overtones.

There has also been a regeneration of interest in the emotions in neuroscience and philosophy. Dylan Evans and Pierre Cruse’s Emotion, Evolution and Rationality (2004), for example, highlights pivotal work in neuroscience from scholars such as Antonio Damasio, Andrew D. Lawrence, and Andrew J. Calder, as well as philosophical work from Finn Spicer and Peter Goldie. The reader interested in exploring the history and application of the concept in greater depth would do well to consult the texts cited above. For our purposes, it is only necessary to interrogate the main theorizations of emotion and affect that fall within the purview of media and cultural studies.

So where do we begin in terms of defining emotion?

In basic terms, emotion is seen as something that people express about the feelings they have, whether the feelings refer to a state of being or to a physical condition. Emotions can be individual or can be expressed by the masses, and people often refer to the emotional climate/atmosphere of events such as funerals, weddings, or riots. These public gatherings capture an emotional mood and can have positive or adverse affects on individuals. Emotion is defined in various ways, but is generally seen as a sociological expression of feelings. It is not as often associated with the body, although it might describe a particular response to feelings such as a blush or clammy hands. Therefore, for this book, emotion should be understood as something that can be distributed and exchanged through psychic and physical contact, but also by social and technological means. Sara Ahmed argues, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), for instance, that emotions are simultaneously psychic and social, individual and collective: ‘The emotions are not “in” either individual or social, but produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and the social to be delineated as if they are objects’ (Ahmed 2004, 10). Such a definition will be important for our close readings in Part II, because here Ahmed is articulating the tension that could inform an idea of networked individuality. For now though, it is enough to acknowledge the way in which emotion is being theorized as a joining or jointing of the individual and the social.

In his work on art and emotion, Derek Matravers argues that ‘an emotion is a complex state; it has both cognitive and affective components’ (1998, 4). In so doing, he reminds us that there is often an intellectual response and a physiological response to emotion – or, in some cases, just one or the other. Jerome Neu expands on this notion of an embodied and mindful approach to emotion and applies it to the act of crying. In A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing (2000), he muses on the question ‘Why do we cry?’ and answers, ‘because we think’ (2000, 14). However, he then goes on to reflect upon the times we might hurt ourselves by accident (he uses the example of stubbing a toe) and cry, and yet we may not have an intellectual thought in correspondence to those tears. This moment of question to something so outwardly simple as crying leads him to pursue and unpack the complexity of emotions and the role of emotions in our lives.

Sociologists have long been interested in the concept of emotion. Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Managed Heart (2003 [1983]) and The Second Shift (1990) are considered as landmark texts, along with David D. Franks and E. Doyle McCarthy’s collection entitled The Sociology of Emotions (1989). More recently, Simon Williams’s Emotion and Social Theory (2001) expertly maps the terrain to consider ‘Why emotions, why now?’ He considers the debates between emotion and reason, biology versus society, the ‘lived’ body, and ‘transformations of intimacy’ that have dominated discussions regarding the concept of emotion within sociology. Usefully for our close readings in Part II, he also considers digital/virtual emotions and argues that ‘Events are reported in such as (sic) way that clear appeals are made to news-consumers as to the “appropriate” emotional response regarding these tragedies, from school minibus crashes and the murder of innocent children to the carnage of Northern Ireland’ (2001, 122).

In the light of Williams’s insight on the mediation of emotion, it is noteworthy that sociologists of memory have become equally involved in the study of emotions and, in particular, of emotional responses to trauma, terrorism, torture, and war during the last century (see Radstone & Hodgkin’s Memory Cultures: Memory, Subjectivity and Recognition, 2005). Not surprisingly, within the emergent field of memory studies (driven by research into commemoration, mourning, remembrance, and reconciliation), emotion is seen as a collective response dominated by the thinking of Maurice Halbwachs’s The Collective Memory ([1950] 1992) or Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History and Forgetting (2004). Less attention is paid to personal memory such that it is the deterministic nature of ‘collective memory’ that ‘confines and binds our most intimate remembrances’ (Halbwachs 1992 [1950], 53). Thus, suggesting memory makes a social container for emotions. Grief, shame, anger, and jealousy become private emotions in the face of collective responses to genocide, the Holocaust, political repression, or physical and psychological abuse.

Therefore, emotion, as a concept, has been pivotal in trauma and memory studies, where debates may rage regarding the harnessing of emotions such as suffering or grief for political or ideological purposes. Adrian Kear and Deborah Lynn Steinberg’s Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief (1999) pinpoint ‘emotion’ (the lack of it in the case of the Royal Family and the abundance of it in the case of Diana’s mourners) as the pivotal tipping point for breaking down the private/public class divisions in the short period directly after Princess Diana’s death. We shall turn our attention to the theorizations of the role of media in harnessing, projecting, and collectivizing emotions in the following chapter. Although it is important to underscore that memory studies has become more interested in the power of media to shape, control, and affect audiences’ emotions around memorable and newsworthy events (see Garde-Hansen 2011), our book will be more concerned with ordinary emotions in people’s everyday encounters within online media culture.

The affective turn

Like the concept of emotion, affect has been defined in various ways, though affect seems to attract more confusion in the way it is used. In its basic definition, the noun affect means the conscious, subjective aspect of an emotion; and generally this refers to a physical response from the body, a blush or tear, for instance. Some argue that emotion refers to a sociological expression of feelings whereas affect is more firmly rooted in biology and in our physical response to feelings; others attempt to differentiate on the basis that emotion requires a subject while affect does not; and some ignore these distinctions altogether. Elspeth Probyn suggests: ‘A basic distinction is that emotion refers to cultural and social expression, whereas affects are of a biological and physiological nature’ (2005, 11).

In her excellent collection, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Patricia T. Clough (2007) reminds us that the ‘affective turn’ refers to a shift in thought and to a synthesis of understanding. Affect asks us to think of both the body and the mind and of rationality and irrationality or of the passions (ix). ‘[Affects] illuminate [ ... ] both our power to affect the world around us and our power to be affected by it, along with the relationship between these two powers’ (2007, ix). Staiger, Cvetkovich and Reynolds point out that the ‘affective turn’s sources and lineages are many, and its hybrid formation is part of its strength’ (2010, 5). Together, these ideas show what is at stake for audiences, users, and consumers of media, who have long been in positions of oscillating between empowerment and disempowerment in relation to the messages, ideas, and communications they give and receive. What is important to note in terms of ‘affect’ rather than ‘emotion’ in relation to media, is that both Clough (2007) and Cvetkovich’s (2003) ideas resonate with a notion of liminality or hybridity. That is, there is a sense of being on the interface in some kind of technosomatic way, which we shall explore in more detail in Part II.

In her work on the ‘cultural politics of emotion’, Sara Ahmed argues: ‘Affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects’ (Ahmed 2010, 30). Here affect is a sort of glue that binds and connects those ideas, values, and objects, and as such we might come to view media objects that transmit ideas and values as affective in their very nature. Some media objects (a pop song, a children’s TV programme, a video game, a photograph, or a news report) just stick to and with us throughout our lives. Moreover, and this will be crucial in the following chapter, where we focus more upon audience, affect also functions as a collective energy that initiates and sustains gatherings of people or ideas. Ben Highmore offers a more physiological interpretation, writing, ‘Affect gives you away: the telltale heart; my clammy hands; the note of anger in your voice; the sparkle of glee in their eyes’ (Highmore 2010a, 118). Here affect is more of a bodily response that is visible and palpable and as such could be measured.

In her work on ‘ordinary affects’, Kathleen Stewart (2007) puts forward another way of thinking about affects, and argues, ‘Affects are not so much forms of signification, or units of knowledge, as they are expressions of ideas or problems performed as a kind of involuntary and powerful learning and participation’ (40). Here affect is conceived more abstractly and complexly as ‘varied, surging capacities’, ‘that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies and emergences’ (2). Affect is, then, more about becoming than being, a form of expressive learning and participation, just as finding something online to cry about may say less about us and more about what we could be. For our purposes, this formulation offers a practical application of how media audiences and online users cannot help but be affected, because online there are things that happen ‘in impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters and habits of relating, in strategies and their failures, in forms or persuasion, contagion, and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment and agency, and in publics that catch people up in something that feels like something’ (Stewart 2007, 2).

Interpretations such as Stewart’s have had a great influence on the social sciences in their attempt to understand the materiality of space, time, and place in a lived way, because she describes a process by which ordinary affects ‘pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas and social worldings of all kinds’ (2007, 3). For example, Elizabeth Wissinger suggests, ‘The concept of affect resolves some of the difficulties of treating forces that may only be observable in the interstices between bodies, between bodies and technologies, or between bodily forces and conscious knowledge’ (2007, 232). Again the notion of in-between-ness and liminality is structured into the definition of affect and makes coming to full interpretations of emotion online increasingly impossible. Wissinger sees affect as the bridging of gaps that are otherwise unseen and the traversing of spaces that we live in but do not always observe closely.

These definitions illustrate the various ways in which affect is used within cultural and critical theory and demonstrate the slipperiness of the term and its usage within academic study. In their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth also make reference to affect’s messy in-between-ness, arguing that ‘There is no single unwavering line that might unfurl toward or around affect and its singularities, let alone its theories’ (2010, 5). It is this messy in-between-ness that emerges and reemerges throughout our research of online cultures in the close readings in Part II, not only in the way in which such cultures are inhabited by users, but also in the ways such cultures are produced in their relation to offline and traditional media cultures. Thus, to borrow from Gregg and Seigworth, there is no single and unwavering line that might unfurl toward or around online life and culture and their singularities either.

The affective turn can be traced to a return to the body or ‘a demand for the concrete’ (Highmore 2010a, 119). The two dominant locations for this return are in feminist theory and in philosophical renderings of the body via Spinoza (1993 [1677]) and Deleuze (1988). Silvan Tomkins (see Sedgwick 1995; Demos 1995), a radical American psychologist, is often seen as one of the primary originators of the concept of affect within the humanities. The affective turn has been pivotal to the production of nonrepresentational theoretical approaches in the social sciences. Nigel Thrift’s (2008) work in cultural geography grew out of a dissatisfaction with representational approaches because the latter drove too deep a wedge between the object of study and the process of study, and because they missed not only the bulk of everyday life in practice, but also its richness. Other key expressions of nonrepresentational geographies (Anderson & Harrison 2010; Harrison 2007, 2008; McCormack 2007) have explored affect, emotion, body, and self as key themes. Although this book will not be explicitly applying nonrepresentational theories from cultural geography, we will be drawing upon some of these ideas within Part II, largely because Thrift’s approach to affect takes into consideration the rich performative accounts of being-in-landscape and opening up embodied practices with nonhuman objects, artefacts, and technologies (see Jones & Garde-Hansen 2012).

For the most part, we will be drawing upon the humanities (arts, cultural studies, and sociology) for our understanding. Tomkins argues that ‘Reason without affect would be impotent, affect without reason would be blind. The combination of affect and reason guarantees man’s high degree of freedom’ (1995, 37). Here affect works in combination with reason, instead of straddling reason and passion. Tomkins theorises affect in relation to Freud’s theories of drives and offers an alternative way of understanding human motivations and passions. He designates affects as a primary motivational system and considers shame, interest, surprise, joy, anger, f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Introduction
• Part I Theoretical Approaches
• Part II Close Readings
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index