Affect in Media and Communication Studies: Potentials and Assemblages

Abstract

After a general mapping of the different understandings of affect, this article focuses on two aspects of a Deleuze-Guattarian understanding of affect which are of particular relevance for media and communication studies. The first is understanding affect as <em>potential</em>. It is through the forces of encounter that bodies are affected and that these affections then can be turned into action, into their capacity to affect. The second is understanding the perpetual <em>becoming</em> that takes place through continual encounters between bodies; with each encounter, the body changes, however slightly and subtly. The concept of <em>assemblage</em> that allows one to grasp these dynamics and complexities is discussed as an approach towards a much more complex theoretical grounding for processes of agency and power. Working with affect in media and communication studies, a three-fold strategy will be presented: to analyse how media generate affects and capitalise on them; to analyse what media do—in the sense of mobilizing potential; to analyse phenomena of mediated communication as assemblages. The article ends with challenges and new paths for conducting research on affect.

“They Got Filters”: Indigenous Social Media, the Settler Gaze, and a Politics of Hope

“…Increasingly, there has been a turn to ideas of affect to understand these more dynamic and “affiliative” publics of digitally mediated action (Hipfl, 2018). While theories of “affect” have diverse provenance (Pile, 2010), much of the recent work in media studies has drawn on broadly Spinozan conceptualizations of affect as the ability to affect and be affected .…”

“…To explore the ambivalent political possibilities of social media for Indigenous people, we draw on these insights from settler colonialism studies and recent developments in theories of affect to frame an affective politics of Indigenous social media users. Hipfl (2018) explains that “affect is not individual, it is always relational ” (p. 7, emphasis added). Affect is what binds us together, what moves us, and what makes us capable of feeling and acting upon the world.…”

“…Increasingly, media and communications studies scholars have put to work these ideas to analyze the messy, complex, and often unstable forms of political sociality now facilitated through social media. Most commonly, this work has sought to understand how affect is implicated in the production of digital “publics” (Hipfl, 2018; Papacharissi, 2016). Analyses have included how the affective force of “anger” can rally a people around issues of social justice (Blevins et al, 2019); how anti-fascist activism can be reframed and intensified through notions of “love” (Persson, 2017); and how “eudaimonic” (i.e., meaningful, joyful, and inspiring) memes can be used to “circulate joy” among Facebook publics (Rieger & Klimmt, 2019).…”

The Turn to Affect and Emotion in Media Studies

“…Brigitte Hipfl (2018) opens the thematic issue with the article "Affect in media and communication studies: Potentials and assemblages". Her essay follows traditions of cultural studies and philosophical affect research.…”

An assemblage of avatars: Digital organization as affective intensification in the GamerGate controversy

“… 2. Hipfl (2018) makes a similar distinction between ‘affects expressed by media’, understood as mediated intensities of feeling, and ‘affections’, meaning human experiences of and agential uptakes of mediated affect. …”