Engineering Affect

Abstract

Affect was an essential component of the Arab uprisings, and it remains an important medium for shaping everyday politics in the Middle East and beyond. Yet while affect is beginning to be conceived as integral to studies of social movements, endeavors to control individual and collective affect in the praxis of statecraft remain understudied—despite robust evidence that affect and emotion are intimately entwined with political behavior and decision-making on a wide range of issues spanning voter preference to foreign policy. This article examines how such control takes effect, situating the sensory body as a bridge and key site of interaction and contestation for diverse projects that seek to influence behavioral outcomes via the manipulation of public space. From among the bodily senses, it singles out the auditory realm as a particularly potent generator of affect and examines the entanglement of sound, hearing, and power to foreground ways the sensory body is routinely engaged in state projects. Drawing on examples from the protests that ricocheted across the Middle East from 2010–2012, and framing these with historical antecedents from original archival work, this article bridges phenomenological experience and political outcomes to reveal how sensory inputs such as sound, wielded by elite and subaltern actors alike, are engineered for political effect. In so doing, I argue that a necessary prerequisite for grasping the role of affect and emotion in politics is a better understanding of technologies and modalities of control that go into the structuring of the sensory environment.

Signifying dissent: The sensory semiotics of protest

“…Sound travels, ‘inherently spatial, moving as a wavelength through bodies, ricocheting off hard surfaces, echoing through urban corridors, and propagating loudly or softly in accordance with the technologies that produce it and acoustic conditions that enable it’ (Weitzel, 2019: 209–210). Protest sounds can be ‘small’, such as the chiming sounds accompanying some Extinction Rebellion events, or when protesters at the Black Lives Matter rally in Melbourne in June 2020 thumped their chests in unison to mimic the sound of a heart beating.…”

“…When protesters’ backs press on the ground to perform death and drowning as a consequence of sea level rise, such a ‘physical synchrony’ or ‘entrainment’ (Weitzel, 2019: 219, 220) builds a collective sensory atmospheric of touch. When dragging protesters out of a blockade, shoving them away or down, or hitting them in the face, the ‘police hand’ ruptures the tactile synchrony of a protest in order to restore subordination through tactile control.…”

The State of the Sublime: Aesthetic Protocols and Global Security

“…Such work has led to fruitful discussions about the manipulation of aesthetics and affect, such as Weitzel's study of the ways in which the Israeli armed forces manipulate the sonic as a core part of their strategy. 12 While acknowledging the significance of this work, we seek to shift the emphasis towards a focus on the ostensibly unintentionally and unnoticed political, apolitical or depoliticising aesthetic regimes that are '"benignly" woven into our lives' by mundane, yet pervasive, and mostly commercial designs. 13 Third, we extend existing work that focuses on the politics of the sublime.…”