Mediated Emotions and Politics of Dissent
Kassandra Rothenstadt Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium krothens @ vub. ac. be
Abstract: The present theoretical exploration constitutes a part of a larger doctoral research which seeks to analyze the role of emotion and affect in politics of dissent and the extent to which‘ new media’ technology impacts and / or reconfigures the dynamics of the two as well as of contemporary power relations. Specifically, the study seeks to critically assess the widely celebrated claims about the‘ online’ medium’ s democratic and liberating potential along with the role that has been assigned to emotion and affect in political activism‘ on’ and‘ offline’. The research takes as its case study the Occupy movement as an example of political activism, which has been ignited by powerful emotions of indignation and shaped by‘ online’‘ mediascapes’ operating as part of global cultural flows( Appadurai 1990). This exercise will permit to evaluate the possible consequences for the emotion‐action dynamic that is so essential to political engagement. The question that is now being increasingly asked is how institutionalized powers appropriate the medium, thereby subverting its liberating potential. McLuhan in his day warned against the numbing effects of the media, while many contemporary academics and political commentators insist that it might be another form of“ opium for the people” and a social control tool used to placate dissent by homogenizing and manipulating emotions, thought, and ultimately behaviour. Thus, the concepts that this study aims to theoretically scrutinize are‘ online mediascapes,’‘ political activism,’‘ emotion’ and the‘ power dynamics of political engagement.’ This analysis will draw mainly upon cultural‐philosophical and media‐theoretical perspectives, but also on sociological and critical perspectives. By following such a trajectory, it enables to grasp online mediascapes as well as emotions in their institutional and technological sense as‘ moulding forces’ of communicative action, thereby permitting to research them empirically as part of the mediatisation process.
Keywords: emotions, online political activism, mediascapes, occupy movement, power relations
1. Introduction
The year 2011 has been labelled the year of the‘ indignant’ as protests swept the globe in a new exercise of people power and in which media played an undeniable part. Indeed, the emergence of new and interactive communications technology has reshaped media environments and cultural space in a meaningful, profound way seeming shifting the power balance in support of human agency rather than of social structure. Mediated experiences or‘ mediascapes’( Appadurai 1990) circulate in space and time at an unprecedented speed, and spaces for collective emotions have increased and are no longer territorially or politically bound. This‘ new media’ technology offers new transnational ways of participation and activism with new spaces for construction of communities, identities and shared experiences.
The last couple of decades after the fall of communist system in the former Soviet Union have also witnessed an increased proliferation of the neo‐liberal logic, which culminated in a profound crisis of capitalist ideology. In this same period a multitude of factions of dissent have come to the fore, one of which is the Occupy movement, which seek to problematize and challenge the neoliberal hegemony and strive to find creative spaces for alternative visions of the future. These creative spaces, however, have been catalysed at their inception by powerful emotions of indignation and discontent. Thus, the Occupy, like the other movements in the past year, can be said to have been born out of two elements: powerful emotions of political indignation and the affordances of virtual technology. As modern times are characterised by authoritarian capitalism, which relies on manufactured sentiment and media, Thrift( 2008) suggests that‘ online’ political activism could provide an alternative to this,“ a possible rematerializing and energizing of democracy through the creation of intensive environments. And intensive environments as political scenes are not only ideologically pre‐planned, but open to a different kind of reactions / participation”( p. 4).
The Occupy movement represents a particularly interesting case study because it has been perceived to embody precisely this rematerializing of democracy as it attempts to articulate an alternative vision for the future to authoritarian capitalism through the revival of direct, community‐based and deliberative models of democracy, employing affective and discursive strategies organised over an‘ online’ as well as an‘ offline’ public sphere. Although the emergence of Occupy Wall Street was a much‘ messier’ process in terms of media use than it was presented in mass media( Gerbaudo 2012), it was nevertheless, as Castells put it,“ born digital”( 2012, p. 171). Initially, it was set in motion by emotional cries of outrage expressed in various blogs, namely, Adbusters, AmpedStatus and Anonymous, among others. It took some time, however, to gather momentum
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