Contagious bodies. An investigation of affective and discursive strategies in contemporary online activism

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThe paper presents an analysis of Climate Justice Fast, a campaign consisting of an international hunger strike against political in action on climate change. Within the theoretical framework of political online activism and theories of affect, we investigate the encoding and decoding of the starving activist bodies in relation to CJF. Our material consists of texts from the CJF website, activist blogs, and two online debates on a large Danish media platform. The methodological approach is discourse analytical and esthetic-affective. In our analysis we outline the different semantic significations of the starving bodies as central signifiers and we investigate the different affective responses to the hunger strike. We furthermore argue that the starved body seems to be relationally powerful, because of both its contagious ability to attune other bodies and its semantic 'wildness'.

Settling space and covering the nation: Some conceptual considerations in analysing affect and discourse

“…Current trends in social research on affect (Anderson, 2009;Clough with Halley, 2007;Gregg and Seigworth, 2010;Massumi, 2002;Thrift, 2004Thrift, , 2008 typically divide the representational from the non-representational, and much recent empirical work has followed this lead, distinguishing the energy of affect from the taming power of the discursive. As one example -in their investigation of an on-line political campaign Knudsen and Stage (2012) pick out specific 'aesthetic-affective registers' seen as distinct from discursive registers. The discursive registers are described as regulated and mediated whereas the 'aesthetic-affective' triggers what are said to be 'non-representational effects' that are seen as immediate, wild, potentially contagious, and 'semantically unruly'.…”

Vitafiction and virality: Celebrities fictionalizing the self online

“…Vitafiction is dependent on a liminal logic, a state of transition that seems to intensify the engagement of the receiver. Future research in vitafiction and virality can therefore engage further in this audience activation by exploding theories of viral contagion and affect as we see it in the work of Grusin (2010), Sampson (2012), Stage, Knudsen (2012), and Stage (2013Stage ( , 2017. Especially Anna Munster's work on the affective viral potential of "transitory experiences" (Munster, 2013) comprise an interesting study of liminal states that can give insight into new possibilities for the impact of vitafictional performances.…”

Distributed mimicry: Big Data and Predictive Analytics

“…This is particularly in the work of Gabriel Tarde (1903) who, in the early twentieth century, developed complex ideas around imitation and invention. Imitation is largely identical to mimicry and suggests how (non--conscious) contagious behaviour takes place not only through face--to--face interaction but is distributed across time and space, most commonly by the Internet and social media (Knudsen et al 2012;Thrift 2004). The related issue, as noted earlier, is that increasing accuracy of prediction with microscopic behaviours raises two questions.…”