An Unnecessary Divorce: Integrating the Study of Affect and Emotion in New Media
Abstract: Rhetoric and composition scholars’ almost exclusive reliance on Brian Massumi’s definition of affect has spurred a theoretical and practical divorce between “affect” and “emotion” in our field. This article returns to Lynn Worsham’s Going Postal and argues that to fully scrutinize and respond to what she calls “pedagogic violence,” affects and emotions must be theorized in tandem, especially as violent rhetorics increasingly spread through new media. Through a close reading of Massumi’s work, consideration of alternate affect theories, and discussion of Aristotle’s systematic theory of emotions, I illustrate how inseparable affects are from emotions. I examine the affects and emotions at work in a contemporary example of pedagogic violence—police brutality toward African Americans—and suggest new media not just contributes to but also disrupts violent rhetorics, damaging emotional educations, and negative affective relations, which I explore through a brief analysis of Twitter.
Following the murder of nine people during a Bible study in Charleston, SC, President Obama, repeating Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “we must be concerned not merely with who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers.” Nearly two decades ago, Lynn Worsham called this system “pedagogic violence”{1} and described how our schooling in emotion contributes to an increase in seemingly random violence, through the “hidden curriculum” of emotions like grief, bitterness, rage, apathy, and shame that are embedded in our social, economic, and familial structures (216). It is this system and philosophy that produces someone like Dylann Roof, the man who, after nearly an hour of Bible study in the basement of a historic Black church, killed three men and six women during a moment of prayer. His alleged online manifesto{2} asserted he had “no choice.” The manifesto details Roof’s education in white supremacy, and the “event that truly awakened” him: the Trayvon Martin case. After reading the Wikipedia article about the case, Roof googled “black on White crime,” and he wrote, “I have never been the same since that day,” since he found the website of a prominent white supremacist group. Eventually he realized, “Someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.” Roof’s manifesto reveals a deranged logic for justifying his killing spree but also a grim journey from everyday Internet searches to racist ideologies to violence.
Since Worsham’s “Going Postal” was published, pedagogic violence seems to have only proliferated. “[S]eemingly random acts of unmotivated savagery” continue across the U.S., but the role that media play in schooling us in emotion has changed the way we learn about, participate in, and respond to these acts of savagery (Worsham 214). Today in the U.S., nearly two-thirds of people own smartphones and even more use social networking sites—an almost tenfold increase in the last decade.{3} Citizen-reporters who share cell phone videos and instantaneous Twitter reporting have changed the way we encounter “going postal.” The result seems to encourage a more collective way of national grieving, yet rapidly updating media, with posts often expressed and consumed in isolation, can make emotions seem “free-floating and impersonal,” as Fredric Jameson has called feeling in the postmodern age (16). In these digital platforms, condemnations of violence and prayers for the dead circulate, though seemingly detached from their producers and recipients. Rhetoric and composition scholars have worked hard to respond to Worsham’s claim that “our most urgent political and pedagogical task remains the fundamental reeducation of emotion” (216). Following the work of a burgeoning interdisciplinary study of emotion,{4} scholars have redefined emotion’s role in our field (Brand; McLeod; Jacobs and Micciche), studied the impacts of specific emotions (Schell; Jacobs; Lynch; Bouson), and reread emotions in classical/historical texts (Gross; Engbers; Walker), but the mediation of emotions and its role in shaping our affective relations and (re)education has not been adequately addressed.
When affect theory became popular in the field in the early 2000s, it seemed to promise a better way of explaining feelings and emotions in new media because, as Byron Hawk claims, “affect moves us toward relations among bodies, which is critical to understanding (discourse in) network culture. Like language, new media make new affections and new relations possible” (843). However, despite great hopes for affect theory’s contributions to rhetoric and composition, it was never fully absorbed and it is still often considered “impractical theory talk,” which Jenny Edbauer Rice has detailed (Metaphysical 135). This lack of integration, I contend, stems from scholars in the field defining affect primarily as precognitive, impersonal, and unstructured. This definition, which is often attributed to Brian Massumi, would seem to have little to offer a discipline chiefly concerned with intentional communication and persuasion. In this article, I argue that scholars’ almost exclusive reliance on Massumi’s definition of affect has propelled a theoretical and practical divorce between “affect” and “emotion,” creating two rich but disconnected bodies of scholarship in our field. If we are concerned with “the system, the way of life, the philosophy” that produced someone like Roof, we need a better understanding of how pedagogic violence is perpetuated in new media. Theorizing affects and emotions in tandem elucidates how these violent rhetorics circulate and reproduce. After reviewing how affect has been defined in rhetoric and composition and conducting a close reading of Massumi’s writing on affect, I consider additional renderings of affect that make its rhetorical work more visible, including its cyclical relationship with emotion. Through analysis of police brutality and African American schooling in fear, I argue that affective theories of accumulation, contagion, and rearticulation, combined with Aristotle’s systematic theory of fear, provide a fuller, more complex explication of a contemporary example of pedagogic violence. Despite being distinct concepts with unique capacities, “affect” and “emotion” are both central in the way media shape our feelings, experiences, and worldviews. Finally, I turn to what has been called “Black Twitter” to discuss how new media—with its own affects and potentials—can function as a way to disrupt pedagogic violence.
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