Media and Passion

Writing about web page http://www.kom.lu.se/forskning/konferenser-och-natverkstraffar/media-and-passion-international-conference-2013/

Academics from all over the world gathered to discuss ‘media and passion’ at the University of Lund, Sweden on 21^st March 2013. The keynote panels of Profs Stephen Coleman and John Corner, Leeds University, UK, and Prof Joke Hermes, Inholland University, Netherlands and Dr Gavan Titley, National University of Ireland, covered topics as diverse as emotions of voters, moral sentiments and politics, discourses of art and culture reviewing, and the new kinds of people who are saying what they think and feel about culture and news. My own paper was concerned with ‘Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect in Kony 2012’ and was drawn from the forthcoming co-authored book Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect on the Internet (Palgrave, 2013), written with Dr Kristyn Gorton, Department of Television Studies, University of York. Much of the conference revolved around dualisms (which were never fully effaced or escaped from): elite versus popular passions; goodness versus evil (of media, of culture, of politics, of criticism); apathy versus compassion; affect versus rational thought; old versus new media; passivity versus participation. In panels covering communities of passion; subjectivity and audiences; political culture; press and passion; popular culture; passion and the ‘political’; music and internet; and affective media, participants encountered the multitudinous possibilities for exploring the relationship between mass media, digital media, mobile media and emotion, affect, passion, sentiment, expression, fandom, love, compassion, care, regard and feeling. That the papers covered everything from blogging, to TV, to political journalism, to viral campaigns, from gaming to opera, and music to hobby websites, shows that the field of ‘emotion studies’ (if there is such a thing) is in a nascent state.

There are key theorists of emotion and these were sometimes mentioned but not always, and again this suggests that media and passion cannot yet call upon an agreed canon of literature to review. Sara Ahmed’s Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004); Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2007); Laurent Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) were cited. These have offered erudite if sometimes frustrating readings of the emotionality of texts. For the empiricists among the conference crowd, the Internet, with its archiving power, has perhaps offered the best opportunity for researchers to ‘capture’ the representation and construction of emotion long enough for them to qualitatively and quantitatively research it. But this comes at a price. Not everything emotive online may be worth researching. As snapshots of cultural activity, re-snap-shotted by researchers as examples of something (not always sure what), emotion, passion and affect can become reiterated as without temporality and context. We are always unsure of how to geo-locate and tie down what we see online into everyday real world experience (policy or practice). So we stay on the surface of the textual (discourse, ideology, performance).

This lack of temporal and (to some extent) spatial approaches to studying emotion and passion as they circulate in personal, local, national and global economies (or commodity chains) can lead to a kind of cultural study of feeling that is dislocated from history, historiography, memory, and place. It may mean that media studies researchers need to be even more interdisciplinary than they think they are. In societies where public space and the public sphere are becoming defined by the repression of emotion or of too much commoditized emotion, the online sphere seems to provide a space where technologies offer creative opportunities for fandom, obsession, passion, excitement, happiness, silliness and nonsense. This has attracted researchers of culture, community, society, media and politics because the increasing public facing intimacy of people’s lives appears to broaden opportunities for ethnographic and netnographic research.

Here is the rub though? How to research emotion, passion and affect? What methodologies to use? Should we be empirical and scientific? How will the duration of emotion be researched? How can we understand the expression of passion diachronically on and offline? What opportunities for critically reflecting upon their passions are the observed users, audiences, fans and participants afforded within culture and by researchers? These questions were not really asked as the field of research is still in the phase of working out what to research. While some argued that not all forms of mediatized passion were of value, others believed that, as passion is popular, all forms of passion were worthy of academic attention. The final issue that (as far as I was able to ascertain) was not dealt with was the implication of the researcher’s passion with respect to the object of study. Slavoj Zizek (2012 [online]) has argued of the Occupy Movement, that the protesters may be in danger of falling in love with themselves. Likewise, as academics now feel much freer than ever (in the light of popular culture studies, fan studies and participatory media studies) to research the things we love and are in love with. To what extent should the researcher critically reflect upon their inability to separate themselves from their projects?

Teresa Brennan in The Transmission of Affect (2004) discusses at length the impossibility of separating the self from all kinds of atmospheres, surfaces, objects, screens, non-humans and humans who transmit affect. In all the papers, including my own, academics were trying to make visible passion, emotion and affect just long enough to analyse it. Yet, the ‘the transmission of affect does not sit well with an emphasis on individualism, on sight, and cognition’, that is ‘based on the notion that the objective is in some way free from affect’ (Brennan 2004, 19). So what of the researcher’s emotional capital as they seek to construct (subjective/objective) knowledge about all sorts of passions within a knowledge economy? For example, as Prof John Corner discussed the opening out of review culture to new kinds of voices (some rude, some appreciative) critiquing TV, film and the arts, it did occur to me that academic conferences never allow a range of voices to review their merits. It would be impossible to have a ‘rate my academic conference’ tab on a website that allowed anyone to post their comments regardless of whether they had actually attended the conference or not. Researchers step into popular passion projects at their peril.

In The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) Sara Ahmed posits ‘affective economies’ as a useful way of discussing the emotional capital that underlies how we construct our understanding of the world. She argues that ‘affect does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced as an effect of its circulation’ (Ahmed 2004, 45-46). When, where and how affect circulates has become very interesting to marketers, global companies and media businesses. Affect, is also circulating more widely and freely in the academy. Those in ‘white coats’ (to coin an emotive phrase) may be the ones to whom media, culture, heritage and leisure industries go to for insights on passion and serendipity. As with ‘memory studies’ a decade ago, ‘emotion studies’ may need to think about staking some real territory. Yet, it became clear from the conference that we did not all feel the same way about the purpose of the research we were presented with. Just as emotions circulate within media economies, so too do the theories, paradigms and methodologies to research them circulate almost too freely and resist being pinned down. They do not necessarily move from one person/researcher to another in a straightforward manner. As Sara Ahmed explains: ‘even when we feel we have the same feeling, we don’t necessarily have the same relationship to the feeling’ (2004, 10).

Joanne Garde-Hansen : 25 Apr 2013 20:45 |  Tags: Affect Emotion Media Passion |  Comments (2) |  Report a problem