Jonas Bens, Aletta Diefenbach, Thomas John, Antje Kahl, Hauke Lehmann, Matthias Lüthjohann, Friederike Oberkrome, Hans Roth, Gabriel Scheidecker, Gerhard Thonhauser, Nur Yasemin Ural, Dina Wahba, Robert Walter-Jochum, M. Ragıp Zık

#### The Politics of Affective Societies

#### Editorial

The series **EmotionCultures** is a collection of works centered around current questions raised in interdisciplinary and innovative research on emotions. At the core are empirical studies from Social and Cultural Anthropology that analyze processes of social and cultural modeling of emotions – always in close theoretical as well as methodological connection to various other disciplines. Key topics concern the generation of emotional codes in interaction with socio-cultural, historical, and political structures. Thus, this series ranges from the socialization of emotions in childhood to their transformation with increasing age. It incorporates reconfigurations of emotions against the backdrop of changing life conditions. Furthermore, a particular focus rests upon the emotional dynamics inherent to processes of migration, globalization, and transnationalization.

The series is edited by Birgitt Röttger-Rössler and Anita von Poser.

Editorial Board: Prof. Dr. Helene Basu Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Fuchs Prof. Dr. Douglas Hollan Prof. Dr. Heidi Keller Prof. Dr. Christian von Scheve Dr. Maruška Svašek

Die Reihe **EmotionsKulturen / EmotionCultures** versammelt Arbeiten, die sich aktuellen Fragestellungen der Emotionsforschung aus einer innovativen transdisziplinären Perspektive annähern. Im Mittelpunkt stehen vornehmlich empirische Studien aus dem Bereich der Sozial-und Kulturanthropologie, die – in jeweils enger theoretischer und/oder methodischer Verzahnung mit weiteren Disziplinen – Prozesse der sozialen und kulturellen Modellierung von Emotionen und Affekten untersuchen.

Zentrale Themenspektren betreffen die Genese emotionaler Ordnungen in ihrem Wechselspiel mit sozio-kulturellen, historischen und politischen Strukturen. Die Reihe spannt dabei den Bogen von der Sozialisation von Emotionen in der Kindheit bis zu deren Transformation im Alter und schließt damit auch konfliktive Rekonfigurationen des Emotionalen vor dem Hintergrund veränderlicher Lebensbedingungen mit ein. Ein besonderer Schwerpunkt liegt auf den mit Migrations-, Globalisierungs- und Transnationalisierungsprozessen verbundenen emotionalen und affektiven Dynamiken.

Die Reihe wird herausgegeben von Birgitt Röttger-Rössler und Anita von Poser.

Jonas Bens, Aletta Diefenbach, Thomas John, Antje Kahl, Hauke Lehmann, Matthias Lüthjohann, Friederike Oberkrome, Hans Roth, Gabriel Scheidecker, Gerhard Thonhauser, Nur Yasemin Ural, Dina Wahba, Robert Walter-Jochum, M. Ragıp Zık

# The Politics of Affective Societies

An Interdisciplinary Essay

This book was made possible by the Collaborative Research Center »Affective Societies« funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG-SFB 1171).

#### Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (BY) license, which means that the text may be be remixed, transformed and built upon and be copied and redistributed in any medium or format even commercially, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Creative Commons license terms for re-use do not apply to any content (such as graphs, figures, photos, excerpts, etc.) not original to the Open Access publication and further permission may be required from the rights holder. The obligation to research and clear permission lies solely with the party re-using the material.

First published in 2019 by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

© Jonas Bens, Aletta Diefenbach, Thomas John, Antje Kahl, Hauke Lehmann, Matthias Lüthjohann, Friederike Oberkrome, Hans Roth, Gabriel Scheidecker, Gerhard Thonhauser, Nur Yasemin Ural, Dina Wahba, Robert Walter-Jochum, M. Ragıp Zık

Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: bisgleich / Photocase.de Layout: Marcos Freire de Andrade Neves Proofread by Tamar Blickstein Typeset by Marcos Freire de Andrade Neves Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4762-4 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4762-8 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839447628

# **Contents**

**Preface** | 9


**Bibliography** | 113

**List of Authors** | 123

# **Preface**

This book is the outcome of the working group "Affect, Emotion, and Politics" in the Collaborative Research Center "Affective Societies" at Freie Universität Berlin. In this group, academics from different disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences – anthropology, film studies, literary studies, philosophy, political science, sociology and theatre studies – have worked together to bring their research on emotions, affect and politics into dialogue. In our work, we refer to insights from sometimes very different affect and emotion research undertaken in the social sciences and humanities. We were eager to find out what an affective societies perspective on the political can look like and we aspired for this interdisciplinary dialogue to amount to more than the sum of its parts. The result of this endeavour is this collaborative essay.

# **1. Introduction**

The Politics of Affective Societies

It has become a common lament of our time that democratic discourse and decision-making are increasingly less rational and more affective. The rise to power of anti-intellectual right-wing nationalists; the renaissance of racist resentment in public discourse; the proliferation of 'fake news' that people believe no matter what; the crisis of credibility in the sciences, be it on climate change or other matters – these and similar developments are described by social and political theorists as symptoms of how the politics of the gut triumph over the politics of the intellect. Recent works on affect and politics have argued that contemporary societies are becoming increasingly affective (Massumi 2015), and have highlighted the ways Western democracies are plagued by a "populist moment" (Mouffe 2018) and a "monarchy of fear" (Nussbaum 2018). This perspective challenges more traditional approaches that analyse modernity as a process of rationalization culminating in the triumph of liberal democratic governance based on rational deliberation.

Some interpret this increase in affectivity as a "regression" (Geiselberger 2017) to a pre-modern state, and regard the model of Western democratic governance as threatened by nationalist and nativist "retrotopias" (Bauman 2017). Others identify this rise as a specific structural characteristic of Western late modernity (Reckwitz 2018). Both, however, concur that an *increase* of affect, of emotion mark the politics of contemporary societies. For better or worse, these narratives suggest that the time of rational deliberation and orderly procedures belongs to the past. In our contemporary modernity, politics itself has become affective. That which had been 'repressed' and 'controlled' in modern societies – affect, emotion, passion, desire – now takes centre stage.

In the context of these diagnoses, affect and emotion tend to appear as synonymous with affective states such as anger, hatred and fear. However, these portrayals of affect and emotion also hint at larger and more diffuse semantic fields: the uncontrolled, even uncontrollable, the 'wild' and 'uncivilised', the chaotic masses, the raging mob. This surely is what makes the diagnosis of an excess of affect so powerful in the present, in light of rising demonstrations of right-wing violence and general resurgence of right-wing politics across the political landscapes around the Globe.

In this essay, we take affect seriously both as a concept in social theory and as a tool for understanding the present. We thus argue for an approach that respects both of these modes of thinking without conflating or converging the two all too quickly. Such an approach allows us to develop our understanding of affect and emotions as central qualities of the social at large. However, this endeavor calls for a broad perspective. It requires us to think of all social interactions, practices, structures and actions as having to do with feeling, attachment, attunement and sense, in the broadest meanings of these words. Societies are always *affective societies* (Slaby/Scheve 2019). The title of this essay reflects that perspective: Rather than 'the affective politics of contemporary societies', as the aforementioned accounts of the present might have it, we want to interrogate the politics of affective societies' against the backdrop of this broad social theory. The gist of our argument is as follows: If indeed there is a change in the ways politics and the political are presently taking shape – and we tend to agree that there is –, this change is best understood qualitatively in terms of changing affective relations, rather than as a simple quantitative rise. Our sensitivity to this qualitative dimension leads us to a certain skepticism vis-a-vis 'grand' theories that currently seem to dominate the debate.

Sociologist Andreas Reckwitz (2018), for instance, argues that an increase in affect has noteworthy implications for the history of modernity. He takes the tendency towards universalization – what he calls 'doing generality' – as the dominant modus operandi of *classical* modernity, and argues that these processes of universalization specifically work in conjunction with dynamics of rationalization. By contrast, he identifies *late* modernity as displaying an alignment towards the singular – 'doing singularity' – which is driven by new dynamics of increasing affection. Even though Reckwitz' complex sociology of late modernity does provoke a productive perspective on our present, we remain wary of the opposition between rationality and affect that characterizes this theoretical framework. We take up Bruno Latour's (1993) skepticism towards modernity's self-description as an epoch governed – and haunted – by rationality and reason. We are inclined to agree that "we have never been modern", and also tend to proclaim that: "we have never been rational". From our perspective, the notion that modernity has turned affective does not lead us very far.

A similar narrative can be found in the latest book of political theorist Chantal Mouffe (2018), although it is based on different theoretical premises and empirical observations, and is restricted to a much shorter period of time. Focusing on the changing political hegemonies in Western Europe after 1945, Mouffe identifies two dominant paradigms of liberal democratic governance: a social-democratic consensus based on Keynesian economic principles in the post-war decades, and a neoliberal consensus that replaced it around the 1980s. The financial crisis of 2007-2008, Mouffe claims, made manifest the incipient disintegration of the neoliberal paradigm, and led to what Mouffe calls a "populist moment." While Mouffe regards the period of neoliberal politics as one of affect-less post-politics, she identifies an increase in affect as one of the main elements of the current populist moment. However, in contrast to Reckwitz, who displays a neutral or even slightly worried attitude towards this re-emergence of affect, Mouffe explicitly welcomes this populist moment and its presumably increasing potential for affection. This attitude stems from her conviction that new modes of affection are required to overcome the post-politics of neoliberal governance, and that this is the only available path towards a potential radicalization of democracy. In that sense, her political theory is also based on a conceptual juxtaposition of affective and non-affective modes of politics.

In contrast to this broad trend in contemporary debate, we contend that affect and emotion are present in all kinds of political practices – including the rational ones. We therefore suggest that one should analyse current developments qualitatively, in terms of changing modes and calibrations of affective and emotional registers rather than focusing on an increased quantity or scale of affect. But before we proceed with presenting the consequences for thinking politics, we will use this first chapter to briefly discuss the contemporary debate on "the political" in the context of normative democracy models, in order to pinpoint where we think that common accounts get it wrong.

So, how do the leading paradigms in political thought conceive the connection between politics and affect? Within this debate, deliberative democracy models in the tradition of liberal political theories (Ryan 2012) stand opposite to antagonistic democracy models in the tradition of post-foundational political theories (Marchart 2007).

Within the liberal tradition, models of deliberative democracy highlight that a minimum moral consensus is needed for democratic institutions to work under conditions of pluralism. This consensus can best be achieved by reason-based and affect-less deliberation under free and equal conditions. Therefore, the core task of politics is to establish and achieve acceptable decision-making procedures that allow the best arguments to succeed. To this end, models of deliberative democracy traditionally focus on the *procedural* aspect of politics. They ask which procedures and institutions are necessary for the realization of a collective rationality. The focal point of liberal thinking is thus the endeavor to organize the political public by way of instituting a rational decision-making procedure.

Post-foundational theorists, in contrast, build on Martin Heidegger's (1975: 22) distinction between the ontological and the ontic (the ontological difference). They insist on the existence of the political beyond the legal-procedural and consensus-orientated logic of politics. Post-foundationalists accuse liberal theory of putting forth the wrong ideal about the formation of free and equal citizens, and of failing to acknowledge what contingency and plurality really imply. Political subjects cannot simply shed the particularity of their way of life once they enter the public stage. Instead, this particularity is the precondition for communication in the first place. Therefore, a functioning democracy (which still should have a commitment to freedom and equality) needs a vital clash of competing positions. Thus, instead of stabilization and order, they focus on the 'absent ground' that both exceeds and defines regular politics. This absent ground is a feature identified with an antagonism that can never be fully integrated into a legal-procedural structure (Marchart 2018).

While we will not review this debate at length, we believe that it illustrates some of the key strands of thinking on the relationship between emotions and the political. Liberal political thought places reason at the centre of its normative conception of political space. This focus is exemplified by the contractualist tradition of John Rawls (1971) and the deliberative approach of Jürgen Habermas (1989). As a consequence of this reason-centered model, affect and emotions (implicitly conceptualized as antithetical to reason) remain a blank space in these theoretical frames. Implicitly and sometimes explicitly, liberal political thought regards the presence of emotions in the political space as endangering political processes of deliberation that should be governed by reason.

By contrast, post-foundational theorists such as Chantal Mouffe are more amenable to the idea that the presence of emotions in the political space is suggestive of the presence of the political. Mouffe's (2000) populist democratic theory is a case in point. "Passions" (Mouffe's preferred term) indicate the presence of antagonism, the struggle between 'us' and 'them', as the integral core, the defining feature of the political. In contrast to liberal theories, which place the core role in deliberative decision-making on the individual, Mouffe sees the crucial role of collective identities in politics. Based on strong anti-essentialist convictions (Laclau/Mouffe 1985) she maintains that such identities cannot be conceived of in terms of sociological categories alone. Rather, they are performatively constituted in processes of identification, which are themselves crucially driven by passions.

However, Rawls, Habermas and Mouffe tend to agree on the role of affect in the political in one important way. All three associate emotions and passions with spontaneity and activity rather than with routine and habit. They only differ in their normative assessment as to whether the disruptive and spontaneous are desirable in the political space or not. Liberalism tends to see the disruptive and spontaneous as a danger for the normative-processual order of the political process. In contrast, post-foundationalism prefers active disruption over orderly process, as it locates the emergence of the political in the spontaneous antagonistic struggle. Affect and spontaneity figure here as ways of undoing normativity, in order to then re-negotiate.

Some currents in liberal political theory have attempted to overcome these quite opposing views on the role of emotions in the political. This is usually achieved by arguing that the presence of emotions in the political sphere is not good or bad *per se*, and that what matters more is the kind of emotions at stake and the extent to which they further or hinder political discourse.

Most notably, Martha Nussbaum (2013) argues that emotions play an important role in liberal democracy. Taking up the criticism from feminist scholarship (see e.g. Bargetz/Sauer 2010) on the exclusion of emotion from politics, Nussbaum argues that liberalism carries an implicit conception of political emotions. For Nussbaum, emotions are political in the sense that their presence in the public space has the power to advance the functioning of political and democratic processes by facilitating better cooperation and deepening the striving for social justice. However, as she has recently emphasized (2018), emotions also have the power to destabilize a political system. As a consequence, Nussbaum sees it as the major task of liberal democratic governance to shape and cultivate valuable or good emotions among its citizens, as doing so leads to a bettering and strengthening of political culture. The good emotions are those that connect with feelings of tolerance, openness to the ideas of others, kindness and moderation. Nussbaum identifies emotions like hope and love as playing such a foundational role for liberal democracy. By contrast, she identifies negative emotions as those that weaken tolerance among citizens and erode their identification with democratic institutions. In particular, she singles out negative emotions like fear, anger, disgust and envy as deeply problematic for democratic self-governance: "Fear all too often blocks rational deliberation, poisons hope, and impedes constructive cooperation for a better future." (Nussbaum 2018: 1)

However, Nussbaum's preference for emotions she considers as good for democracy are not approved by all. Post-foundationalists seem to be in favour of other emotions in the political sphere, including some that are characterized as "negative emotions" (Mihai 2016) by many liberal theorists. The post-foundational focus on antagonism at least implicitly suggests certain other emotions to be most relevant in the political space: indignation, anger and other affective and emotional modes that make antagonism manifest, and that invigorate political struggle. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2017), who share some of the insights of post-foundational thought, comment on the kinds of affective modes they ascribe to their envisioned political subject of social transformation, the "multitude":

A Prince is emerging at the horizon, a Prince born of the passion of the multitude. Indignation at the corrupt policies that continually fill the feeding troughs of bankers, financiers, bureaucrats, and the wealthy; outrage at the frightening levels of social inequality and poverty; anger and fear at the destruction of the earth and its ecosystems; and denunciation of the seemingly unstoppable systems of violence and war. (2017, xxi)

We agree with Nussbaum and her post-foundational counterparts that political formations correspond to specific emotional repertoires, and that political formations get into trouble when these emotional repertoires lose their stabilizing force. However, we are skeptical regarding a clear-cut classification of politically good and bad emotions. Moreover, since Nussbaum champions a universalist understanding of emotions, she is blind to the constitutive ambivalence of political affectivity, and thus cannot properly account for the historic and cultural variability of political affect and emotions. On the other hand, Hardt and Negri's vitalist account of social change puts too much emphasis on the exceptional, emergent, and self-evident status of political affect.

As this brief overview shows, there is disagreement about the role of emotions in politics within the field of political theory, and especially within the contentious debate between liberalism and post-foundationalism. Some question whether the presence of emotions indicates a problem for the political process, as implicitly is the case for Rawls and Habermas, while others disagree about the presence of the political per se, as is explicitly Mouffe's case. Meanwhile, those who acknowledge that emotions play an integral role in the political, nevertheless disagree about the kinds of emotions that are desirable for a political space in good working condition (Nussbaum: love; Hardt/Negri: indignation). But despite these disagreements, we believe that one can identify at least three basic assumptions present in all these theories, albeit to different degrees. They can be articulated in three dichotomies that form the basis for theorizing the connection of emotion and affect as well as politics and the political across different theoretical camps.

A first common dichotomy in this realm is the categorial differentiation between the rational and the emotional. This dichotomy presumes that emotions are either present in the political space, or entirely absent from it. In the absence of emotion, rational discourse governs political processes. The second dichotomy differentiates between those emotions that are 'good', and those that are 'bad' for the political sphere. The third dichotomy is between affect and judgment: Here, judgment frameworks, which play an important role in the political, are aligned with ideas of the rational and orderly. On the other hand, affect is associated with notions of rupture, subversion and, in essence, the vital energies of 'life' itself. As a result, judgment often comes in the form of routines and habits, whereas affect epitomizes spontaneity. This is not only evident in traditional social theory, which tended to concentrate on the normative side of this opposition, but also in more recent studies on affect with their preference for vitalism and event.

In this book, we tend to reject all three dichotomies as a basis of our thinking on affect, emotion and the political. In the following chapters, we present material from the research projects we have been engaged in for some time now. Our guiding principle has been to take a bottom-up approach to understanding how affect and emotion shape the workings of the political. Doing so, we maintain, demands a certain theoretical openness, and a readiness to tackle the field beyond the limits of current debates in political theory. As a basis for approaching our case studies, we thus propose working concepts for affect and emotion, as well as for the political, that do not presuppose these three dichotomies.

We make frequent use of the terms 'affect' and 'emotion' to make our arguments. There are two aspects we would like to highlight in relation to this terminology. The first aspect points to our interdisciplinary background. 'Affect' is the older of the two terms and has a long tradition in the humanities. More recently, it has often been used in the wake of cultural studies-oriented affect research that is in discussion with the critical neurosciences and philosophy. Affect studies has gained some prominence in the humanities disciplines such as literary studies, film studies, theatre studies and art history (Gregg/Seigworth 2010). The term 'emotion' was not used much before the 19th century, and is more common in social science research, often in discussion with psychology. Traditionally, such research has been carried out in anthropology, sociology, and political science (Greco/Stenner 2008). We use both terms to highlight the interdisciplinary discussion we develop in this book.

Secondly, and more importantly, we deploy a broad understanding of both 'affects' and 'emotions', which can include notions others describe with terms such as 'passions', 'sentiments', 'feelings', 'sensations', 'desires' etc. Our use of affect and emotion in this way reflects the complex and intertwined genealogy of these concepts that we cannot revisit at length here. We propose a much broader understanding of the workings of affects and emotions than that typically treated in the political theory literature we have reviewed – especially concerning the binary pre-assumptions they seem to carry. Before providing a preliminary idea of our affective societies approach, let us briefly address what we find problematic about each of the three dichotomies.

First, both the emotion and the affect research deconstruct the idea that the rational and the emotional can and should be separated. On the one hand, the idea of emotions as containing cognitive appraisals is an integral theoretical assumption of social science emotion research. In this view the neat separation of cognitive processes (rational) and biological processes (emotional) makes no sense (Röttger-Rössler/Markowitsch 2009; Bens/Zenker 2019; Scheve/Slaby 2019; Thonhauser 2019). On the other hand, the concept of affect as a relational phenomenon emerging between bodies makes it impossible to think about a moment without affect (Slaby 2016; Slaby/Mühlhoff 2019). A body's capacity (to affect and to be affected) does not coincide with a fixed set of feelings and emotions, but shapes and affects all modes of existence – with 'the rational' being one of them. In our second chapter we present some material that speaks against the assumption of a divide between rational and emotional politics. Instead, we argue that in the practice of making things public and private, the political space is always affectively co-produced.

Second, we are skeptical about the notion that theory can serve as the basis for determining which emotions further political processes and which foreclose them. Building on the principle that affect and emotions are omnipresent phenomena in all human interaction, we contend that, in the context of politics, all kinds of affective relations and emotional experiences can emerge. It would be hasty to presume in advance which of these affective and emotional phenomena cultivate or hamper political processes. The reverse is true as well: affect theory, in the line of Spinoza and Deleuze, forces us to acknowledge that 'the political' and its associations and dissociations (commonality and antagonism) occur in various contexts. We suggest that questions about the relation between affect and the political cannot be resolved beyond the level of practice. Before drawing any conclusions based on such questions we must first ask how various modes of affect and emotion operate in our research material. Assessing which modes of affect and emotion are 'good' or 'bad' for political processes is a normative determination one should only make after grounded research, and not before. In our third chapter, we argue instead that the affective dynamics that constitute the political always create ambivalences and that both conflict and consent are affective modes of political engagement.

Third, since we hold that affects and emotions cannot be reduced to particular domains, we also argue that they cannot be narrowly localized within moments of spontaneity, dynamism, movement and rupture. Social science research on emotion and sentiments (Frijda 1994; Bens/Zenker 2019) and certain strands of affect research (Stewart 2007; Bargetz 2016) have directed us to localize affect and emotions in the routine of the everyday and the mundane. That also means that any divide which associates affect with critique on the one side, and rationality with normative judgment on the other, becomes porous. In our fourth chapter we make the argument that judgment, like critique, is always affectively constituted.

In order to be able to trace the workings of affects and emotions in the political, we propose a slim working concept of the political. Although we have taken the theoretical debates between liberal theorists and post-foundational theorists as a starting point for our discussion, we find it prudent to refrain from hastily positioning ourselves vis-à-vis these debates on the nature of the political. However, we contend that even the most precarious concept of the political needs to encompass at least three key dimensions: power, normativity, and publicness.

The first dimension is power. We take relations of power to be inherent to all social relations and all human interactions. For the political to emerge, however, power relations need to be 'negotiated' (although not always explicitly). A minimal condition for the political to emerge is that inherent power relations are made manifest in their contestability. As such, the political foregrounds the conflictual nature of the social, and usually involves an element of contestation. This leads to the second dimension of the political, which is its (often implicit) relation to normativity. The political usually entails negotiating, debating, or at least positioning oneself with regard to 'right' and 'wrong' or 'good' and 'bad' in a given context. Finally, politics need publics in which such contestation and negotiation can take place. These publics can be actual or potential, they can be addressed by speech or action, and they can appear as present or imagined within cultural performances, texts, films and works of art. Yet in all cases, publics involve the manifestation of power relations and their normative evaluation.

We start our investigation of the political from these three dimensions, of power, normativity and publicness. Taking these dimensions as our point of departure allows us to keep our theoretical scope open enough to broach domains that are usually not treated in works on politics, thus enabling us to trace the political from its mundane everyday iterations to the grand scale. Moreover, restricting our notion of the political to these dimensions allows us to move beyond an exclusive consideration of liberal-democratic societies, and towards a conception of the political that can traverse all kinds of societies and social settings.

What we generally propose is a certain theoretical openness and a more grounded approach to theorising the role played by affect and emotions in the workings of the political. As such, we situate our research projects within the theoretical framework we call *affective societies*. By affective societies, we explicitly do not mean to suggest that societies have become increasingly affective in recent years as the result of certain historical developments (like the shift to late modernity or the crisis of neoliberalism). Nor do we suggest that some societies are more prone to affectivity than others, as in traditional Western representations of a rift between the rational West and its affective others. On a very basic level, the concept of affective societies implies the opposite: namely, that affect and emotions are present in all human interaction and in all aspects of the social. What changes is not the absence or presence of affects and emotions, but rather the modes and calibrations of the affective and emotional registers that emerge. In our final chapter, we argue that our affective societies approach has specific implications for a political ontology, political epistemology and political ethics. In this respect, we see this book as a contribution to understanding the role of affect and emotions in our contemporary politics, and as a means to stimulate a deeper appreciation of the intricate relationship between affect, emotions and the political more generally.

# **2. Making Things Public and Private**

The Affective Co-Production of the Political Sphere

What constitutes a public? How does it come into being? How is it related to the private? Who belongs to the public and who does not? And how do different publics distinguish themselves from each other? Questions about the formation and effects of publics have always been a major concern in political theory. In this chapter, we provide a perspective on the role of affective and emotional dynamics for the constitution of public spheres. We propose that affect and emotions are integral parts of the formation, reformation and transformation of publics – an idea that consequently cross-cuts sharp oppositions between public and private.

In his widely recognized work on the constitution of publics, Jürgen Habermas (1989 [1962]) conceptualizes the bourgeois public sphere as a collective medium which operates at the interstices of official political representation and private persons' individual articulations. Habermas does not presuppose a direct opposition between the *oikos* and the *polis* as it is known from Greek political thought (see Arendt 1958: 22-78) but argues that the public emerges out of the private: historically, the bourgeois public sphere comes into being through persons meeting in coffeehouses and salons to engage in rational-critical debate about political issues. As a result of technological progress in printing and the more widespread distribution and circulation of newspapers and books, "the public of the now emerging public sphere of civil society" emerged that "from the outset was a reading public" and "the abstract counterpart of public authority" (Habermas 1989: 23). While public political power had previously been centred and embodied in the person of the monarch, the emergence of the public sphere created a space in which the bourgeoisie could develop an independent understanding of itself and defend its political interests. Habermas is interested in the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere in the 18th century because he observes an erosion of critical publics in late modernity. His aim is to identify ways of re-conceiving a critical public (in his case in the 1960s) and his theory of communicative action is based on the premise that an autonomous bourgeois public sphere of the classical kind does no longer exist.

This normative dimension of Habermas' concept of the public sphere has provoked criticism. The feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser, for instance, questioned the implicit exclusion of marginalized perspectives in Habermas' model of the public. Thus, she especially criticizes his ideal of the public sphere as "an arena in which interlocutors would set aside such characteristics as differences in birth and fortune and speak to one another as if they were social and economic peers" (Fraser 1990: 63). For Fraser, such an abstraction is a-political, because the "social inequalities among the interlocutors were not eliminated, but only bracketed" (ibid.). The political would instead emerge in moments when the hegemonic discourse and its suppression of difference are challenged. As soon as one brings the question of social position as well as women's and working-class men's 'private' life into play, it becomes visible that the emergence of several subaltern counterpublics (Fraser 1990: 67) is a characteristic feature of the formation of a political public. According to Fraser, Habermas' ideal has one important limit: there is not one but many public spheres.

The literary scholar Michael Warner (Warner 2002) has built on this criticism from a queer perspective. He shows that public spheres do not only come into being by a common interest or collectively articulated concern but ultimately depend on the performance of social identities, including various forms of embodiment and mediated repertoires of action and interpretation. Thus, Warner moves beyond a mere understanding of a public as discursive arena and considers the basic of affective dynamics and emotional repertoires to the constitution of (queer) publics.

We take this debate on the formation of political publics and the realm of the public sphere in political theory as a starting point for this chapter. If one follows Fraser's idea of counterpublics and Warner's plea for the role of affect and emotions in constructing publics, one can see that there is a tendency to locate emotions and affectivity on the side of subaltern, marginalized or alternative publics. It would seem as if hegemonic publics would not require affect and emotions to maintain themselves. In this chapter we will not follow these distinctions from the outset but refer to materials from our diverse research contexts such as scientific knowledge production, legal processes at court, public discourse on religious feelings, documentary media practices in indigenous communities or theatrical explorations of migration history. We want to discuss more broadly how personal and public concerns interact on an affective level. Moving beyond a mere focus on subaltern counterpublics, we want to question the premise that it is only these marginalized forms of public that rely on the circulation of emotions and are characterized by a high degree of affectivity. Rather, this chapter highlights that the affective and the rational are co-constitutive for the emergence of intimate and public spheres.

# **ORDINARY POLITICAL AFFECT IN NEW URBAN 'INDIGENOUS' DOCUMENTARY CINEMA**

In Mexico, there is a lively scene of young independent filmmakers who come from communities that, in the Mexican national context, are considered 'indigenous' – a term that refers to descendants of the original inhabitants of the Americas before the arrival of the European colonialists. One of them is María Arias from the rural metropolis San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas. Although she speaks Tsotsil and associates herself with the Tsotsil-Maya and Tseltal-Maya speaking communities of the region, she, like many of her colleagues, is not always comfortable with the label 'indigenous filmmaker', since she feels it to be a racializing, homogenizing and stigmatizing category that is imposed on her from the outside.

Figure 1. Still photo of María Arias' film Tote – Grandfather. The filmmaker María appears herself as a protagonist in her film, here (photo) while having conversations with her grandfather. Image: María Arias.

In many ways, Arias belongs to a new scene of urban filmmakers that was preceded by an earlier local documentary and media activists' movement. It was in the early 90s that indigenous community activists from the rural region around the city began to produce documentary video. During the armed Zapatista revolt of

1994 and later on, those videos played a crucial role in bringing local perspectives in Chiapas to the political fore.1 The very activists themselves conceptualized video as a political weapon to articulate community demands, to gain visibility, and to denounce structural racism, exploitation, violence and violations of citizen rights of indigenous people (Gledhill 2012). The video-makers referred to themselves as videoastas comunitarios (engl. community filmmakers) and produced with and on behalf of their community and its political organisations (Halkin 2006; Jiménez Pérez/Köhler 2012; Wortham 2013; Leyva Solano/Köhler 2017). It seems that those emotionally charged films were made in order to generate and disseminate political affect (Ahmed 2004). Examples are the films by Mariano Estrada and José Alfredo Jiménez, which portray political marches of indigenous people demonstrating for their citizen rights, or communities massacred by paramilitary pro-governmental groups.

Since about 2010, however, a new generation of young urban university educated independent filmmakers with middle class backgrounds has emerged in San Cristóbal de las Casas. They distinguish themselves from the former classic political media activists, and one would associate their films more with the independent documentary art scene than with the struggles of distinct anti-hegemonic political activists. María Arias' films, for instance, tell first and foremost highly personal and intimate stories. They portray community life and cosmology, traditions, feasts, local medicine and healers, traditional music, and important protagonists of a community. The way these ordinary events are aesthetically presented makes it possible to present highly relevant political perspectives locally and nationally, told through the circumstances of people like María and her family (John 2016). In this way, the filmmakers touch upon feelings and politics of social inclusion and exclusion. Racism and marginalization, as well as the resistance against it, are implicit key motives in many of the local filmmakers' works, although these issues are often embedded in a wider narrative telling an ordinary story. Thus, one can say that these works, while dealing with the ordinary, negotiate affective politics of belonging and indigeneity.

<sup>1</sup> In 1994 the Zapatista uprising took place in Chiapas. The indigenous Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) took over five important district cities in Chiapas and other smaller towns of the region. After 12 days of fighting peace talks began and the demands of the EZLN were negotiated. The social Zapatista movement and its militant organisation the EZLN are still active, however, since the rebellion of 1994 not actively involved in armed struggles. The Mexican government militarised the region heavily and initiated a so-called low-intensity war (Gledhill 2012) against those communities sympathising with the Zapatista movement (Speed 2007, Leyva Solano 2017).

Another current tendency is to produce films on issues of migration and the new urban indigenous life-worlds in the city. The filmmakers apply "affective media practices" (Kummels/John forthcoming) to intervene in and transform the affective atmosphere of the urban environment and the feelings of indigenous people in the city. At the same time, they also aim to impact the affective relationship that people in the rural communities have with their own cultural difference and its stigmatization in the national context where they are often treated inferior by the Ladino society.2 Taking the new urban documentary scene in southern Mexico as a case study, we argue that the presentation of affective local atmospheres can open up a public sphere in a deeply political manner by making visible "ordinary affect" (Stewart 2007). Very intimate emotions and even banalities of a day-today life can be linked to political ideologies and political regimes of power, inclusion and exclusion.

Several of the urban independent filmmakers have recently produced autobiographic films, such as María Arias, thematising the issue of a manifold and contested belonging: both to an ethnic community and to an urban social sphere. María Arias highlights that she wants to represent indigenous protagonists in an assertive and dignified manner, and that she considers it an important political statement that she produces most of her films in indigenous languages:

[...] we started to be conscious about what aspects we want to show and which things we do not want to portray. No longer we want to show dirty faces, poor barefoot people, no longer we want to show that, because this image has damaged us, this generated prejudices against us, no? Well, no longer… Now, we want to represent other things, we want to re-appreciate our communities through the 'image', and I believe one can see that in our works, well, at least we are trying to achieve that. (Interview conducted and translated by Thomas John, Mexico 2017.)

Taking into consideration the national context of misrepresentation of ethnic minorities in Mexico (Leyva Solano 2005; López Caballero 2009, 2016; Gleizer/López Caballero 2015), we can consider María Arias's simple and ordinary but dignified and aesthetically appealing images of protagonists belonging to ethnic minorities an affective political statement.

<sup>2</sup> The latter are usually called mestizos (Engl. mixed person) in Mexico. The national society defines itself ideologically as "la raza Mexicana" (Engl. the Mexican race) which is constituted by mestizos, meaning people descending from the mix between former European settlers and the pre-Colombian original multi-ethnic population (López Cabellero 2009: 176).

For instance, her work *Tote* (Grandfather) is on the surface a film about her grandfather and his way of life. But at the same time, the film is about the encounter between María and her grandfather, and ultimately about herself and her feelings within the family context and her wider social environment. The film starts with an intro-sequence of María driving a car through the city, leaving the city, and driving at bumpy roads of the countryside, to end up at the farm of her grandfather. This sequence is continuously shot with an over-the-shoulder shot, which evokes a subjective perspective. Meanwhile we hear her speaking in voice-off. She tells us that she does not really feel that she belongs to the city, even though she lived there the longest period of her life. She narrates that she was born in the Tsotsil community Chenalhó and still considers herself as a part of it. However, her parents decided to send her to the city at the age of eleven to live there with her uncles, to be able to visit the school in the city and learn about the way of life of the city, since they thought this is better for her. Her parents did also educate María and her siblings in Spanish, and María learned Tsotsil on the streets and in school from other kids, but not at home with her family:

I never understood why my parents did not speak Tsotsil with me. Since both of them are Tsotsil and since we grew up in a Tsotsil community, why did they prefer to speak Spanish with me? I'm trying to comprehend, that this was a result from a lot of discrimination which they suffered while learning Spanish themselves. It was an act of love to decide not to speak Tsotsil with us. They did not want us to suffer what they have suffered. They wanted us to learn proper Spanish. They wanted to get us out of the community, so we could grow up in the city. To my own daughters I speak in Tsotsil. In Tsotsil. I think this is the only way we can still feel as a part of the community. If we stop one day to speak Tsotsil, we would be totally alien and strange at that place (quoted and translated from Spanish from the film *Tote – Grandfather*)

María reflects those circumstances critically, while also trying to understand the behaviour of her parents. She mentions further details that help the audience to grasp her subjective perception of a contested belonging: The people of the rural community and even her own relatives would not really consider her a part of the community, since she does not know many things of the community and because she does not behave like a 'proper woman' of the community.

She stayed with her grandfather for ten days, accompanied by her small filmteam consisting of a cameraman and a sound recordist. In her film she appears often next to her grandfather in front of the camera. María asks him about his childhood and youth. It turns out that life back then was not easy. He had to work under hard conditions, and he also mentions how he and his family were exposed to forced labour, and to the violence and arbitrariness of the ladino farmers and big landowners. María explained in a conversation why it is so important for her, against the backdrop of the Mexican national and societal context, to represent protagonists like her grandfather and make their perspectives visible:

[...] I think that the local [film] production is really important to crush stereotypes, because certainly there are stereotypes about us and the indigenous communities. We know that yet. It is what we have seen in television, in soap operas and films: always it is the 'Indigenous', "the Indio", who does not know how to talk correctly, who doesn't know to… who walks and moves different, who looks different, dresses up different, who is moreover totally dirty. This is the common image of the 'Indigenous', and the indigenous women are in television always something… like for example servants, like this we see them in television, and in films, that is the stereotype! (Interview conducted and translated by Thomas John, Mexico 2017.)

*Tote* describes the daily routine and the rural life world of María's grandfather. It is slowly edited, with long contemplative shots. We see her grandfather working the cornfields, herding his cows, and María having casual conversations about life, the past, partnership, love, marriage, education, the family, and the daily routine at the farm. She is getting to know her grandfather, who is not dirty, not a servant, but working his land, harvesting, looking after his cows and bulls. In his conversation with María, he explains that he definitely prefers this life and that he would not like to live in the city. He is depicted by María as a counterpart to the stereotype she referred to in the above quotation in which she speaks of her perception of the mass media's representation of the "indio" (engl. Indian).

For the greater part of the film María shows her grandfather at work on his farm. We also see María's step grandmother working with him, we see her preparing food on the open fire in the kitchen, and how she shows to the "city girl" how to hand-bake tortilla bread. Cinematographically, María represents her grandfather and the aesthetics of his life world in a very dignified way, and most of its audience would probably agree that it is a nicely shot film with well framed images and a pleasant rhythm of editing.

Figure 2. Still photo of María Arias' film Tote – Grandfather. Image: María Arias.

However, within these ordinary events and conversations represented in the film, a space is opened up for the political negotiation of belonging. This is mostly done through the representation of María's subjective feelings towards her grandfather and her mother, which is shown both in the conversations María has with her family members, as well as by María's voice-over narration. Sharing the personal accounts of family member's biographies, the filmmaker situates the feelings of herself and her family members in the historical and political context of indigenous people in Mexico. In this way, she implicitly points to how structural marginalization, inequality and racism affected their feelings towards their own cultural and ethnic background, such as to one's own language as well as the rural lifestyle and its social practices. María shows how this influenced the way she was brought up by her mother, separated from her community and alienated from people such as her grandfather. She in this way sheds light on how patterns of internalized racism have been evolving within her family biography. María's mother, after having suffered from years of discrimination in the city as an 'Indio woman from the village', looked down somewhat on the 'simple' life of her father and wished something better for her children. She also tells María of the rude and violent upbringing she experienced at the hands of her father. However, in situating her grandfather in the violent, exploitative and abusive historical context of his own youth, María provides a meta-perspective on love, violence and education in her family. The micro-politics of the family are here interwoven with wider historical and political contexts. María is highly aware of that:

The newer generation [of filmmakers] began too, and continued to speak about resistance, well, many of our works speak about a form of resistance. They talk about psycho-historical traumas, that we have in our communities, the racism, the exploitation, these are topics still very present in us, in our works. Even though our works might be very autobiographic, very aesthetic, and very narrative, but they maintain to have this role of denouncing, of resistance and protest, well, even though most of our works do have a rather artistic vision, no? Yet it is an artistic movement, too, and yet our works are at films festivals. (Interview conducted and translated by Thomas John, Mexico 2017)

In her film, however, she does not explain a lot, and terms such as "resistance" or "psycho-historical trauma" are not used. The film is composed to present different fragments of personal accounts in order to trigger affective associations about the people and their affective perceptions of their social environments. María Arias stated that her films are meant to provoke emotional reflections in other people and families who experience similar situations of disaffection between each other and between themselves and their cultural ethnic origin. She also said that she hopes that her film might be a "mirror" for other people, to reflect on themselves and encounter responses on their issues.

What María Arias' work shows is how a new generation of indigenous filmmakers in Mexico are working on the creation and modulation of a political public. To constitute this public, they do not resort to classical genres of political activist filmmaking, but use the affective force of emotionally charged private narratives. We suggest understanding this process of making the private public as an intriguing feature and key component of the affective co-constitution of political publics.

#### **PERFORMING INTIMATE PUBLICS IN KAHVEHANE**

Let us now move from Mexico to Berlin, where we can study similar dynamics of the affective co-constitution of the public and the private or the intimate in the context of German-Turkish migration history. One can often find small signs in the window corners of Anatolian coffee houses in Berlin stating: "Access for club members only!" Many of these coffee houses (*kahvehaneler*) have been opened in the aftermath of the recruitment agreement between Germany and Turkey in 1961 when, contrary to lawmakers' expectations, many guest workers did not return to Turkey but gradually moved their lives to Germany. In public debates about the current state of Germany as a migration society, former guest workers and their follow-up generations are still repeatedly framed as not belonging to Germany, respectively belonging to a parallel society (Yildiz 2013: 10). One could argue that such a hegemonic position is not really contested, but rather supported by signs like the ones found in the windows of Anatolian coffee houses. Drawing a line between inside and outside, between a private, 'inner circle' and a wider public, these signs provoke speculations: What happens behind the doors of Café Gediz, Başkent or Karadeniz?

The theatre parcours *Kahvehane – Turkish Delight, German Fright?* set out to counter those speculations by opening various *kahvehaneler* in the Berlin districts of Kreuzberg and Neukölln to a wider public. Curated by the documentary film maker Martina Priessner and the theatre director Tunçay Kulaoğlu, the project was part of "Dogland", the 2008 opening festival of Ballhaus Naunynstraße, a local theatre in Berlin-Kreuzberg that focuses decidedly on post-migrant issues and engages artists and performers from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, onstage as well as backstage. Conceptualised as a walk through the (former) immigrant districts of Kreuzberg and Neukölln, the theatre audience, divided in small groups, moved through six of twelve participating *kahvehaneler*. Equipped with a map, they were to explore a concrete urban area in which German-Turkish migration history is sedimented and becomes visible – a fact that still tends to be neglected. Thus, *Kahvehane* included the theatre's more or less direct urban environment and set the scene for places usually unknown to the theatre audience by performing artistic works in situ.

This idea ties in with the historical tradition of coffee houses in the Ottoman Empire, where different forms of performance such as readings, puppet shows, recitals by *aşık* (a kind of troubadour or poetry maker) or *karagöz* performances that ridiculed European manners were an elementary part of the coffee house culture (see Kömeçoğlu 2015: 154). The tradition of *kahvehaneler* in Turkey dates back to the 16th century: in addition to the bazaar and the mosque, coffee houses offered a public space of conviviality in which only Muslim men met. As Uğur Kömeçoğlu argues, the *kahvehane* for the first time provided a venue which was neither limited by religious nor by economic duties. The coffeehouse milieu, in which people from different social classes came together, stood for an inclusive social model in which every man could participate according to his personal knowledge and experiences (see Kömeçoğlu 2015: 152). As "schools of knowledge" (*mekteb-I\_rfann*), the old *kahvehaneler* "included literary, religious and political activities, but also leisure activities, games (chess, manala and halma), performances, storytelling, puppet shows, music and even the use of drugs" (2015, 153f.). From the government's point of view, however, the coffee houses were observed with skepticism. As semi-public venues, they were suspected to be places in which political protest could develop and be organized (see Ceylan 2006: 181).

Such readings of the Turkish coffee house echo Habermas' idea of the salon as a birthplace of a bourgeois public. Since the 20th century, coffee houses in Turkey have, similarly to their Western European counterparts, increasingly lost influence as places for political expression and art practice, not least due to the competition from cinema, theatre and opera as art forms on the rise. However, they are still important places for social interaction. In Istanbul, for instance, *kahvehaneler* were founded in large numbers as meeting places for inland migrants who moved from the villages to the cities, and allowed them to keep contact and cultivate traditions.

According to Rauf Ceylan, these foundations can be interpreted as the result of a similar process of migration. Thus, Ceylan emphasizes in particular the role of *kahvehaneler* as places of belonging in Germany: pushed to the margins of society and hardly represented in the cityscape, let alone in public life, the coffee houses offered meeting places for social exchange (see Ceylan 2006: 190). Nowadays, people with migratory backgrounds from different generations still meet there on a daily basis to foster social relationships and to maintain cultural traditions (Kleilein 2013: 403). Thus, *kahvehaneler* are not only an integral part of the history of public life in Anatolia, they also historically link Turkey and Germany (respectively Europe). However, this transcultural and historical dimension of the *kahvehane* hardly plays any role in public discourse on migration and integration in Germany.

"Turks forbidden!" – such bans, hung on the doors of German pubs, were common practice in the 1960s and are an example of how Turkish guest workers were denied access to the social life of the cities. Such an exclusionary gesture stands for a quite common attitude towards Turkish guest workers at that time. Guest workers were, as the name suggests, mainly regarded as guests, only briefly present and soon to be gone.3 Against this background, the founding of Anatolian coffee houses in Germany not only sustains a connection to the homeland or represents a gesture of belonging; it is also a reaction to concrete social exclusions based on ethnicity. "Access for club members only!" vs. "Turks forbidden" – both signs indicate certain practices of demarcation and prejudgement that are, as we have seen so far, entangled in many ways. Therefore, an approach towards the topic of *kahvehaneler* in Germany should consider both their transcultural historicity as well as their differing assessments within German migration society.

<sup>3</sup> Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film *Fear Eat Soul Up* (*Angst essen Seele auf*, 1974) to a huge extent takes place in a pub. It is one of the first prominent movies dealing with the everyday discrimination of guest workers.

Such an approach is, more or less, the route that the theatre parcours *Kahvehane – Turkish Delight, German Fright?* takes. It explores the conflictual borderland between the supposedly delightful private migrant spaces and their fearful hegemonic perception by a performative exploration tour across Anatolian coffeehouses in Berlin. To illustrate the entanglements and contradictions between personal migrant experiences and different forms of publics in a bit more depth, let us consider Michael Ronen's audio play-installation "Selo's Gastarbeiter" as an example. It was set up at a table in Café "Gediz. Selo'Nun Yeri" (Flughafenstraße 15, Berlin-Neukölln) while the day-to-day business continued. When the small group of people arrived, an intermediary took them to a round table in the middle of the *kahvehane*, prepared with a deck of cards and a pair of headphones for each participant. The card game, however, showed pictures of people, places or Turkish national symbols instead of the usual suits. Once the participants sat down, they were served tea and asked to put on their headphones. Acoustically shielded from the rest of the hustle and bustle in the coffeehouse, a male voice introduces them to the (only partially) virtual setting of visiting Café Gediz:

Your name is Ibrahim, 38 years. You've lived in Germany for 10 years. After a big fight with your wife, you came here today. If only someone could distract you! Take a deep breath. Now open your eyes. To your left is your good friend Emre, to your right young Hakan, opposite to you your unemployed friend Ahmet. (See Winter 2012)

Calling the participants into the 'roles' of former migrant workers for the duration of the performance, "Selo's Gastarbeiter" conveys parts of the life stories of Ibrahim, Emre, Hakan and Ahmet, who after various workstations now run coffeehouses in Berlin or visit them regularly as guests. The participants listen to their personal narratives via headphones and follow the instructions given to them, so that one "suddenly converses in Turkish, lets oneself be yelled at or hits the table in [inflicted, the authors] anger with one's hand" (Winter 2012). The audio play not only requires the participants to re-enact a significant part of their daily business in the *kahvehane*, but also to relate to the lives of Ibrahim, Emre, Hakan and Ahmet. For instance, they are requested to put those cards on the table which are connected with 'their' memories of illness or unemployment, but also with happy moments; they are questioned about 'their' childhood memories of Gediz, the place in Turkey the coffeehouse is named after: Do you remember the sun over there, the smell of goats hanging in the air, or the barking of dogs in the streets? Yet, none of the listeners can possibly have those memories, because it is not their life stories being told. Rather, the listeners are placed in a different life story, which they in turn can only imagine on the basis of their own subjective experiences. This increased distance, which has to be permanently negotiated within the framework of the radio play, makes the similarities, but also the differences, all the more apparent.

From an outside perspective, the participants on the one hand re-enact the common behaviour of coffee house guests by playing cards and drinking tea. On the other hand, as members of the majority society, their presence at least irritates the everyday arrangement of Café Gediz. Within the framework of the radio play, the listeners are familiarized with the personal stories of former guest workers and thus gain an intimate insight into a chapter of German history that is otherwise probably rather closed to them. Even if the distances on both sides cannot, or even shall not be reduced, "Selo's Gastarbeiter" contributes to a better, historically grounded understanding of the coffee houses and their guests.

Following this paradigmatic example, the theatre walk "Kahvehane" can be described as a performance of intimate publics, as Lauren Berlant (2008) has outlined. This term obviously echoes the famous political distinction between private and public in modernity which Berlant conceptualizes not as opposite, but as deeply intertwined and mutually dependent. Rooted in feminist and queer theory (see Bargetz/Sauer 2010) and based on the idea of counterpublics, Berlant's approach radically questions the need of bracketing the self within the public domain, which is usually referred to as collective and rationally grounded. Based on the conviction that "publics presume intimacy" (Berlant 2008: vii), she aims at rethinking the public sphere precisely through dimensions of affective embodiment and intimate social relations and vice versa. A public sphere is always based on intimate and personal investments, just as every form of public sphere influences one's own intimate experiences.

The *kahvehane* itself can be understood as a sphere of intimate publics, located at the margins of German majority society, only open to 'club members' and offering a place of exchange between peers and like-minded people. However, the valuation of Western European salons and the devaluation of Turkish coffee houses seems hardly supported by their historically similar role in the formation of Bourgeois publics, which, on the one hand, leads to a hasty condemnation of the coffee houses. On the other hand, the course curated by Martina Priessner and Tuncay Kulaoglu also immanently criticizes the seclusion of the coffee houses. By allowing works of different artistic genres to take place there and thus opening up the venues to a broader public, they tie in with the tradition of the *kahvehaneler* as places of political discussion and artistic production.

*Selo's Gastarbeiter* can also be described in Berlant's terms: Through the exchange of personal experiences, anecdotes and objects within the Sonosphere (Pinto 2014: 38f.) of the audio play, this performance establishes an affective network between the coffee house guests. Although the audio play, as well as the theatre walk as a whole, brings together people from different social and ethnic backgrounds, it does not simply constitute a community of spectators that watch others; rather, the audio play virtually and actually initiates a change of positions that blurs the boundaries between the conceptions of the intimate and the public. Because it doubles the actual intimate public of Café Gediz and transfers it into the virtual intimate public of the audio-play, *Selo's Gastarbeiter* allows for multiple disruptions to occur. Herein, the theatre audience appears as a third element that appropriates the unfamiliar personal narratives while interrupting the everyday routine of Café Gediz. It is this performative interruption that blends the theatrical and the migratory intimate publics and politicizes both through the affective co-production of dissociative relations between theatregoers and coffeehouse guests. In multiplying the relationships between the usual intimate public of Anatolian coffeehouses in Berlin and the theatre public of Ballhaus Naunynstraße, the theatre walk Kahvehane re-politicized these places through mediating between marginal and recognized forms of intimacy and publicity.

The case of independent filmmakers in Mexico as well as the case of the theatre walk "Kahvehane" through Anatolian coffee houses in Berlin make manifest how the mobilization of affect and emotions plays a crucial role in establishing and reshaping publics – at least on the micro-level. While this could still be interpreted as supporting the thesis that affect and emotions mainly play a role in the formation of marginal counterpublics, we would like to argue that highly visible and mediatized discursive publics are also deeply structured by affective and emotional dynamics. Discussions on religious politics in Europe can serve as an example.

#### **LAW AND AFFECTIVE ORDER: POLITICS OF SECULAR AFFECT**

The public controversies following the terrorist attacks on the journalists of the political magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris showed how difficult it is to decide what exactly religious and moral injury entail. How can we decide whose injury (or, the violation of rights and freedoms) deserves recognition and protection, and whose must be left out? Such decisions appear as negotiations between legal norms. Secular liberal law is designed as a set of rights within a nation state for every single citizen. As such, secular law constantly shapes and defines the contours of norms, such as "public order, health and morals" in the European Convention on Human rights (ECHR). In this way, secular law comes to determine what counts as sayable or unsayable, as performable or un-performable. In so doing, it also simultaneously redraws the boarders of private and public or religious and secular as intrinsically interdependent categories, or as Agrama put it, as "two hands mutually drawing each other into existence" (2012: 1).

A rich literature has already addressed Muslims' religious feelings and how to prevent their offense and injuries. Instead of concentrating on the private feelings of Muslim subjectivities, we assess the role of public sentiments as (secular) affect in order to understand how the law makes and unmakes restrictions of Muslim practices in Europe. As such we are in conversation with recent inquiries into the existence and construction of secular bodies, affect and emotions (Mahmood 2009; Fadil 2009; Hirshkind 2012; Amir-Moazami 2016; Scheer et al. 2019) on the one hand, and into the feminist and phenomenological branches of affect theory (Ahmed 2004; Berlant 2011) on the other. Law is not neutral towards or independent of feelings towards certain human and non-human bodies that are produced in public space through practice and discourse. To illustrate how affect can destabilize legal regulations, one can point to the example of two Islamic controversies in Germany and in France: circumcision and burkini bans. Such controversies serve as a "privileged methodological tool for studying the discord that simultaneously confronts and binds the different actors together" (Göle 2013: 8). Both bans were quickly revoked, but the affect and emotions generated through and with those controversies about Muslim bodies and practices are still in effect. These rapid legal changes expose the paradoxes inherent to liberal freedom of religion, of consciousness and of expression, as they pertain to public order and sentiments – all key concepts in the justifications of the bans.

A good case in point was the controversy over ritual male circumcision in Cologne, Germany, in 2012. A regional criminal court decided a case in which it saw an exercise of religiously motivated circumcision ["*religiös motivierte Beschneidung*"] as amounting to a criminal offence due to unlawful infringement of bodily integrity ("*Körperverletzung*"), according to §213 of the German Criminal Code (StGB). After a four-year-old Muslim boy faced complications due to his circumcision, state prosecutors in Cologne filed a criminal charge against the physician who had performed the circumcision, for causing bodily injury. This decision was then discussed at length by various actors, not only in Germany but also in Turkey and Israel, as part of public concern over the rights of Muslims and Jews in Germany. Talk shows were organized to discuss the pros and cons of child circumcision, bringing together doctors, psychologists, lawyers, rabbis, pious and secular Muslim public figures – either as defenders or opponents of the decision. In those discussions, defenders of the ban frequently called on religious actors to think rationally and not emotionally about the issue. Yet when religious actors were invited into these discussions – usually as the only opponents of the ban present there – talk show hosts would typically ask them to talk about their feelings, experiences, and immediate reactions to the decision. In her convincing article on the circumcision debate, Shirin Amir-Moazami has demonstrated how secular actors discursively use "self-differentiation as a mode of unmarking the secular through the gaze on the marked body of the other"; namely, of the religious body (2016: 166).

While the circumcision debate focused on bodily practices in relation to young males, the burkini ban in France was concerned with the female body, usually of adult age. In July 2016, the far-right mayor of Cannes issued a municipal decree temporarily banning the use of the burkini, a bathing suit that covers large parts of the body, mostly worn by Muslim women on the beach. The decree categorized the burkini as being "of a nature that creates risks of disturbing the public order (crowding, skirmishes, etc.)".4 The mayor justified his decision by invoking the state of exception measures in France, drawing parallels between the terrorist attacks that took place in Nice two weeks prior, in which 86 people were killed. The mayor classified the Islamic garment as a political symbol and a provocation. This decision was reproduced in around 30 municipalities, by conservative and socialist mayors alike.

The bans on circumcision in Germany as well as on the burkini in France rapidly became a national and international affair, involving the highest politicians in both states and stimulating comments on the ban's legitimacy among world media outlets. Manuel Valls, then prime minister of France, pronounced his sympathy and support for the mayors of Cannes and other municipalities – at the same time emphasizing that he would not support a nationwide application of this law. The German chancellor Angela Merkel was also involved in the circumcision debate. Contrary to Valls, however, she positioned herself against the ban. Secularism as a fundamental value of both states (*Säkularismus* in Germany and *laïcité* in France) was placed at the core of polemical debates. Two prominent intellectuals in both countries reacted to the discussion: Jürgen Habermas and Jean Baubérot criticised the ban, highlighting the necessity of dialogue and public discussion.

Despite the ambition to construct the secular as a neutral concept free of emotions, both the circumcision ban and the burkini ban were frequently justified through dominant feelings of love and fear. The self-proclaimed "non-religious Jewish doctor" Gil Yaron, for instance, wrote in an article on the circumcision rituals' reasoning, written as a response to her sister who desired to go against tradition by not allowing her son to be circumcised: "If my Jewish education leads

<sup>4 …</sup> De nature à créer des risques de troubles à l'ordre public (attroupements, échauffourées, etc.)

to a point that my son asks me one day as a mature and convinced Jew to get him finally circumcised, I will then fulfill his wish with love, pride and pain. But not before."5 Yaron suggests that he can only exercise his duty as a father through sensing love, with pride and pain, when faced with his son's mature decision of becoming a convinced Jew, which can only come after a certain age. A parent's love and respect for the child's bodily integrity, and for the genuine willingness of the child, emerged as commonly raised secular arguments during the debate. This example shows how feelings of love, pride and pain play a crucial role, in both "religious" secular reasoning.

The burkini ban mainly revolved around public sentiments other than pride, love and pain. In an interview, Jean Baubérot took for granted that the people are allowed to be shocked to see women wearing a burkini at beaches, but that this feeling was not a good enough reason to ban it.6 On the other hand, the experts of laïcité and Islam in France argued that such affective reactions "are motivated by the feelings of fear that arose after the attacks".7 Much of the media debate was dominated by how the burkini scares and provokes people as a political symbol.

The ordinary emotional registers of the secular – love and desire for the bodily integrity of autonomous liberal subjects as well as contempt and fear of Islam – dominated the debate in both countries. These emotional registers, however, became destabilized when discursive elements were introduced in the debate that belonged to other liberal orders, namely Jewish and Women's emancipation. One can argue that both bans were rapidly overturned because emotions of shame became stronger and more dominant than the initial anti-Muslim inclinations.

In Germany, the possible prohibition of circumcision rapidly started to revolve almost exclusively around Jewish practices. Although it had been a Muslim circumcision that was at the centre of the Cologne court case, banning male circumcision was related to a dormant anti-Semitism within Germany as well as to the Shoah. This reference to the historically coded affective registers of the genocide, newly emerging through the ban of Jewish practices, drastically changed the discursive landscape. Angela Merkel said that Germany was ridiculing itself as a

<sup>5 &</sup>quot;Wenn meine Erziehung zum Judentum dazu führt, dass mein Sohn eines Tages als mündiger, überzeugter Jude von seinem Vater fordert, ihn endlich zu beschneiden, dann werde ich seinen Wunsch erfüllen, mit Liebe, Stolz und Schmerz. Aber nicht früher." Gil Yaron, "Unsere seltsame Tradition", FAZ, 21.07.2012.

<sup>6</sup> Sabrina Champenois, "Burkini: On peut être choqué sans pour autant interdire", Libération, 16.08.2016.

<sup>7 &</sup>quot;Ces réactions sont motivées par le sentiment de peur surgi après les attentats", Burkini: La France cherche à rendre l'Islam invisible, ARTE Info, 18.08.16, https://info.arte.tv /fr/burkini-la-france-cherche-rendre-lislam-invisible.

"comedy nation" ["*Komikernation*"] and that she did not want Germany to be the only nation where Jews cannot live their tradition.8 

In France, the discursive landscape markedly altered with the emergence of an iconic image showing three armed policemen standing at the beach in Nice forcing a woman in a modest garment to remove her clothing. In the mainstream and social media those images began to be compared to the images of a police officer issuing a ticket to a woman because of her bikini at the beach in Italy in 1957. Through references to women's suffrage and feminism, the controversy gained legitimacy as an issue of women's rights while partially freeing itself of the grammar of terrorism, political symbolism and provocation. In the burkini affair, shame began to play a prominent role in the affective vocabulary. "They want to take her clothes off. But they are removing their uniforms! The police of shame" was a comment by the president of CCIF (Collective against Islamophobia) Marwan Muhammed that found support within the anti-racist feminist milieus.9

The anti-Muslim legal regulations in those contexts were rapidly revoked because they became discursively related to affective registers of extremely unpleasant historical experiences. Through this discursive shift, anti-Muslim legal bans came to be associated with the "Jewish Question" in Germany and with the "Woman Question" in France. The making and unmaking of legal rules of religious practice depend on how discursive alliances and associations are created and sustained. The common medial and scholarly focus on the religious feelings of Muslims is only one half of the story. One should not ignore that the secular, as a discursive formation, is affectively grounded. It is critical to note the hierarchies that differently shape the way religious and secular affect gain legitimacy. To avoid making these hierarchies invisible, one must make this affective grounding of the secular visible, and avoid depicting emotions only in the religious singular body.

In considering how affect and emotions discursively constitute the public sphere, it is important to note that they are not confined to specific arenas of public debate, such as religion. We argue that, on the contrary, affect and emotions play a role in constituting any kind of political public and any kind of discursive position within it – even if in different modulations. This includes, as we would like to demonstrate next, politicizing academia.

<sup>8 &</sup>quot;Merkel –Wir machen uns zur Komikernation", die Welt, 16.07.2012.

<sup>9 &</sup>quot;Ils veulent lui retirer ses vêtements. Mais qu'ils retirent leurs uniformes! La police de la honte", Indignation après le contrôle d'une estivante ôtant sa tunique sur une plage de Nice, Europe1, 24.08.2016.

#### **THE AFFECTIVE CO-PRODUCTION OF SCIENTIFIC OBJECTIVITY IN THE POLITICAL SPHERE**

"You, Ladies and Gentlemen, are defending reason against the brutalisation of our public debates!"10 With these words, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier addressed scientists during his speech at the National Academy of Sciences in Halle in February of 2018. Two sets of expectations become manifest in this sentence: On the one hand, the diagnosis that current public debates have become rougher in tone, marked by outrage on all sides and characterised by mutual insults. On the other hand, the hope that with the power of better argument scientists are able to compete with this phenomenon in a level-headed and reasonable fashion. These two sets of expectations are based on a dichotomy of affectivity and reason: While brutalisation is driven by affect and emotions, reason is characterised by objectiveness and distance to emotion. This dichotomy is assigned a distinct value: affect-driven brutalisation is considered negative and must be avoided while reason is considered positive and must be promoted. This raises two questions: First, is it really the case that affectivity and reason are mutually exclusive? Second, how can or should scientists do justice to this kind of expectation?

Contrary to the described expectations and the widespread academic self-image according to which affect and emotions have no place in science – beyond the possibility of becoming the object of research – matters turn out to be much more complicated. While it is claimed that affective and emotional dynamics in research must be prevented, disciplined or even neutralised, many if not all scientists would agree that scientific practices are by no means free of emotions and affect. Enthusiasm for one's object of research, curiosity for and excitement about new insights, and affective engagement in disputes are all considered academic virtues. Most scientists would concede that they are afraid of being embarrassed for mistakes in argumentation or happy about the recognition of their work by peers. Affect and emotions possess a different relevance in various sectors or stages of scientific practice and consequently come into view in different ways: While possibly being extremely significant and utilisable as an epistemological resource in data collection processes or in the context of data analysis processes, they are largely hidden for the purposes of publication, and in part even explicitly written out of publications in obedience with the demand for factualness and objectivity, despite the fact that internal scientific negotiations are characterised by affect and emotions as well.

<sup>10</sup> Kathrin Zinkant: "Listen to the scientists", Süddeutsche Zeitung, dated 15 February 2018.

It is, however, remarkable that for the purpose of publicly transferring knowledge and the public presentation of science, emotions are included yet again: Science is not only supposed to inform – it must also stir up interest, be exciting, activating, touching and even enthralling. The following excerpt from the introduction of a current US-American scientific journal serves as an illustration of this observation: It is, however, remarkable that for the purpose of publicly transferring knowledge and the public presentation of science, emotions are included yet again: Science is not only supposed to inform – it must also stir up interest, be exciting, activating, touching and even enthralling. The following excerpt from the introduction of a current US-American scientific journal serves as an illustration of this observation:

The stories of science are told many ways, in many places. Scientists share the ups and downs of the research process over raucous conference cocktails and long hours on the road, across lab benches and conference call lines, and around campfires after long days in the field. These stories underlie every scientific paper yet rarely appear alongside the tables and graphs. To read the often dull, sometimes tedious reports that fill the scientific record, you'd never know that science is a human endeavor, like any other, shaped by tragedy, comedy, and (mis)adventures. In this issue of PLOS Biology, we highlight the deeply human side of research in a new collection, 'Conservation Stories from the Front Lines.' These narratives present peer-reviewed and robust science but also include the muddy boots and bloody knees, ravaging mosquitoes, crushing disappointment, and occasional euphoria their authors experienced. We deliberately sought stories of triumphs and tragedies, successes and failures, and invited a diverse group of scientists to submit contributions written in their own voices. Rather than cling to a standard structure, we asked authors to choose their own format to best present their ideas, experiences, results, and conclusions in a style that is compelling, concise, and accessible.11

This quote demonstrates that affect and emotions are a significant part of the scientific production of knowledge. Scientists share stories of the ups and downs of their research with each other privately, but generally do not include them in their fact-based publications. The objective of this journal issue is to change all this: "we aim to make the human side of scientific research visible". To this end, "the muddy boots and bloody knees, ravaging mosquitoes, crushing disappointment, and occasional euphoria" will be accompanying the robust results of research, including the individual voices of single researchers telling of the disappointments,

<sup>11</sup> Editorial of Special Issue "Conservation Stories from the Front Lines Collection" of PLOS Biology Journal. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2005226. Published: February 5, 2018.

elations, triumphs and tragedies which are fundamental to scientific research. This clearly shows: Reason and affectivity are not automatically mutually exclusive.

However, does the subjective-affective experiential dimension of scientific research not undermine science's general claim to objectivity, one might wonder. To this, the editorial of the special issue responds:

Scientists are increasingly recognizing the need to find new ways to effectively engage with a diversity of audiences. Here, we've revisited the historical version of scientific communication by turning peer-reviewed papers into evidence-based, scientific stories. We don't know where this experiment will go—perhaps it will end with this single collection. But conceivably, it could catalyze further experiments with peer-reviewed scientific narratives. We hope it does. As we grapple with emerging crises wrought by a changing climate and plummeting biodiversity, we'll need to explore every possible avenue for sharing the best available science with audiences far beyond the academy.

It becomes evident that it is particularly important for publishers to search for new ways of addressing different and non-scientific audiences. The extent of social problems, in this case climate change and reduction of biodiversity, appears so great to them that scientists should use any opportunity to effectively address as wide a public audience as possible. At this point, at the latest, science turns political: when it impacts society in order to create changes.

Since scientific knowledge plays an important role for all kinds of public opinion formation processes, it is frequently furnished with the claim of critical potential and represents the attempt to modify practice. In this sense, all knowledge transfer and scientific communication can be considered political. The goal is to inform, enlighten, create consciousness or mobilise in order to initiate social change. The fact that scientists today are supposed to actively dedicate themselves to the objective of making their research accessible to a wider public is an explicitly stated social and scientific-political expectation. To that extent, not only the requirements of the scientific profession are changing, but there are also institutionalisation processes for the formation of appropriate communication forms.

The task of scientific communication is to present highly complex, factually objectified contexts which rarely exhibit clarity, in a short and concise, generally comprehensible manner in order to create interest. A frequently recommended (and disputed) procedure for scientific communication is to tell touching, powerful and transformative stories which create resonance, establish connections and make it possible for people to relate to the narration. For this purpose, the editorial of the special issue suggest that affect and emotions (as became evident in the first quote) should not be seen as an addition to the 'hard facts'; rather, they form an essential part of scientific knowledge production. They are no (longer) hidden in the example, but instead actively utilised to affect people, legitimise research, anchor it more in the everyday lives of people and thereby increase the probability of social change.

This example shows that making science political is an endeavour that is at its core connected to the endeavour of making science affective for publics. The power of affect and emotions, it seems, is to open up contained and compartmentalized expert publics to a more general public. This project of creating such a discursive opening is achieved by deploying affect and emotions. Politicizing a non-political discourse means not least making it affective.

#### **THE POLITICAL TRIAL AND THE REGULATION OF AFFECT**

The divide between law and politics can serve as another case study to carve out what we mean by the affective constitution of the political public. Many would agree that the law is about impassionate judgment. Justitia is blind, and that means that she is not swayed by emotion. While some see this as an ideal the law must aspire to, others criticize the law exactly for its neglect of emotion. A strand of research called law-and-emotion scholarship has emerged to investigate the relationship between law and emotions, united by the project to debunk legal ideologies of the un-emotional law (Bandes 2001). The law, so the law-and-emotion scholars, is deeply embedded in affective and emotional dynamics. Instead of striving to cast affect and emotions out of legal proceedings, these dynamics should be systematically investigated.

Such investigations into the role of emotion in the law are an integral part of an affective societies approach to the humanities and social sciences as we are proposing it. However, when we interrogate the law about its role in the politics of affective societies, a more basic question emerges that goes beyond finding emotion in legal proceedings. How can the law itself, and its public proceedings, be seen as devices to affectively modulate the political?

Law and politics are often seen as opposites, or at least as opposing ends of a spectrum. Politics is dominated by power and interests, driven by passionate argument, and tends to implement the practical. The law is dominated by rules and regulations, driven by dispassionate judgment, and tends to strive for the ideal. Most theoretical thinking on the political is oriented towards this divide between law and politics, but with different emphases.

Marxist theorists of law and state have tended to prioritize the political over the legal and tried to line out how much the legal is determined by political operations (Paschukanis 1929; Althusser 1970). In this critique, most of these Marxist thinkers have conceded that there is a relative autonomy of the legal sphere, but there is a need to politicize the law and make its political workings visible. Chantal Mouffe's (2000) work on the political is a more recent example for this line of thinking. She criticizes modes of juridifying political questions, not least because it takes the passions out of politics, and she makes a plea for politicizing the legal. The recent critique of the "juridification of politics" by Marxist anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff (2006) are based on a similar thinking.

Liberal theorists of law and state, Rawls (1971) and Habermas (1992) for instance, have, in turn, tended to balance the legal and the political. Their thinking also accepts the relative autonomy of both realms, but they see the law's potential of taming the more disruptive modes of political processes. The 'juridification of politics' is not so much a fighting word, but a necessary strategy to set the ground rules for meaningful deliberation in democratic societies.

Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, this law-and-politics debate appears as a debate about regulating affect. The way the relationship between law and politics is framed points to the question of how the political sphere should be affectively regulated. What both sides in this debate disagree on is the measure between the affective mode of excited deliberation and calm deliberation. While Marxists tend to be more on the side of excitement, liberals are more on the side of calmness. These leanings tend to correspond with respective preferences for more or less law. Consequently, whether you are on the side of politics or on the side of the law, a mixing of the two modes becomes problematic. The phenomenon of the political trial addresses precisely this problematic mixture. A "political trial" arises when the legal form of the criminal trial has become a political affair. Political trials are highly publicized. Prime examples are large international war crimes proceedings such as the Nuremburg and Tokyo tribunals after World War II, or the trials held before the International Criminal Court. But there are also national criminal trials that are political in this sense, such as the military tribunal against Saddam Hussein after the Iraq War in 2003, the trial against Muhammed Mursi after the military coup following the Arab Spring in 2011, the trial against the neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Breivik in Norway beginning in 2012, the anti-terror trials after the attempted military coup in Turkey in 2016, and many others.

Regardless of whether theorists follow a more Marxian or a more liberal thinking on the relationship between law and politics, both criticize political trials. Hannah Arendt (1963) has most famously criticized the trial against the German Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem for going far beyond the individual guilt or innocence of one person. Famously, she criticized bringing in witnesses who provided passionate and heart-breaking accounts of the horrors of the Holocaust. Such an affective mode was obviously not fit for a man who represented "the banality of evil" rather than the monster the Israeli institutions wanted to portray him as.

More recent critiques of International Criminal Court (ICC) proceedings in the African context, such as the one by Kamari Clarke (2006), likewise criticize such political trials – but with a different emphasis. In these trials, according to Clarke's critique, the socio-political structures of violence in Africa are neglected. The legal logic of individual criminal responsibility makes invisible the political dynamics of global inequality that bring about violence in Africa. The ICC as a legal institution is wholly unfit to address these issues, and the "tribunalization of African justice" promotes specific emotional regimes that give preference to legal solutions over political solutions (Clarke 2019).

Recent theory of the political trial has highlighted the performative power of legal proceedings (Ertür 2015). Criminal trials are performative in a double sense. First, they have the form of a theatrical performance, which carries a specific affectivity (cf. Bens 2019). Second, they are performative in the sense of Austinian speech act theory (Austin 1956). That means that in trials, actors not only talk about a social reality as it transpired outside the courtroom, but the use of legal language is in itself a social practice that contributes to the construction of this reality (Derrida 1989; Butler 1997). Legal actors usually try to make invisible this performative dimension of trials. They paint trials as rule-determined events processing social reality as it is rather than as theatrical events having the capacity to change the social world.

This, following Basak Ertür's (2015) claim, is different with political trials. A trial is political to the extent that its performative dimension is openly admitted. Political trials 'put up a show' and have the explicit goal of changing social reality. They are conducted to show the public audience what is acceptable political action and what is criminal conduct. From the perspective of an affective societies approach, Ertür's claim can be modified and extended. What makes trials political is that their capacity to publicly affect is openly admitted. Political trials are, and also shall be, affect-regulation-machines. They shall affectively interfere with collective perceptions of justice and injustice and promote specific sentiments (Bens/Zenker 2019).

The legal actors engaged in conducting political trials seem to be very aware of this dimension of collective affect regulation. During a study of affective and emotional dynamics at the International Criminal Court, conversations with staff showed that the topics of affect and emotions in relation to their work are seen as crucial. On the one hand, the legal actors frequently pointed out that the trial shall 'take out the emotions' and 'focus on the facts'. As such, they see the political trial as a device that shifts the collective mood into a more calm and balanced mode. But that is by far not its only function. Asked more broadly about the role of affect and emotions for political trials, those involved in conducting these proceedings often found it desirable that the existence of such trials scares potential perpetrators of mass violence. It was also said that the victims of mass violence needed the emotional closure that comes with perpetrators being brought to justice. These opinions reflect, albeit in terms of affect and emotions, long debates in the theory of criminal justice. Deterrence and retaliation, categories deeply inscribed into theories of why crimes are punished, are outlined here in their affective dimension.

Discussions about the role of law in politics, or the role of politics in law, can be read as discussions about the kinds of affective modes that should be desired in the public sphere. The law and its proceedings can then be seen as a device to regulate collective sentiment. The political sphere emerges as an affective arena that can be modulated by introducing legal proceedings into it. The political trial in one central device to attempt such affective regulation. Differentiating what is legal from what is political can then be seen as a strategy of constituting the political sphere as a public of specific affectivity. What this perspective deconstructs is the idea that the public sphere can either be emotional or rational – and that one can pick what one likes better according to one's theoretical preferences. The question is rather: what kind of affective register does one believe should govern the political public. The "if" question transforms into a "how" question.

\*\*\*

The formation of some kind of public is an integral part of any political process. In this chapter, we have argued that affective and emotional dynamics are of prime importance in the formation of a political public. The affective societies perspective we are proposing is skeptical of the public-private-divide insofar as it is constructed as a divide between an emotional private realm and a rational public realm. Instead, our case studies indicate that it is only through constant boundary crossings that both realms can be constituted in the first place. Political films become public through private stories; Turkish coffee houses become public through intimate familiarization with them; the hallmarks of non-emotional publics (secularism, science, law) all depend, in their constitution and their publicity, on emotional and affective dynamics of production, maintenance and transformation. The making of public and private and the constant boundary-making between them is not a question of allowing or banning emotions, but rather a question of modulating the affective dynamics that pervade all realms of the social.

# **3. Conflict and Consent**

The Political Ambivalences of Affect and Emotions

There are two distinct ways affect and emotions shape processes of politicization, within a context of social movements and political collectives. Following Hannah Arendt or Jürgen Habermas, one approach sees the political mainly as providing an environment of commonality, leading to an affective atmosphere of consent. Political collectives come into being because people are united for a common cause, concentrating on affective modes and emotions that reinforce in-group thinking. On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are political theorists following Carl Schmitt or Chantal Mouffe. For them, the political is ultimately an antagonistic endeavour, concentrating on opposition and disruption. In their line of thought, another set of affective registers is at work: affective dynamics of disruption, forcing people to position themselves against the status quo or even against clear-cut opponents or enemies (for an analysis of these two paradigms of political theory, see Marchart 2007).

Consequently, these two orientations conceptualize affective modes of politicization in quite different ways: the Arendtian, liberal, consensus-oriented thread is more likely to emphasize emotions such as love or compassion, feelings of commonality, and tolerance (see Nussbaum 2013, 2017). The same is the case for 'associative' post-foundational theorists such as Richard Rorty and Jean-Luc Nancy, for whom the political also seems to emerge from acts of self-referential foundation, for instance when a collective re-defines its sense of commonality (Rorty 1989) through solidarity and compassion. Yet, for others such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, communitization remains always bound to articulations of dissent and antagonism, wherein political affect is imagined as repulsive and aggressive 'passions' (Mouffe 2005, 2013).

Against these prioritizations of particular affective modes and emotions in various strands of political theory, the cases presented in this chapter sustain the view that emotions are politically ambivalent. In addition to that, they explore in concrete terms how emotions and affective modes become politically relevant and how political emotions are reproduced. Finally, the ambivalence of affective phenomena with regard to varying political positions is explored. These multiple ambivalences come into view as we attend equally to the disruptive as well as consensual aspects of affective phenomena and the ways these aspects interplay.

In fact, we argue that emotions, at least the ones we focus on, engender consensual as well as oppositional tendencies, rather than being linked to just one of these aspects. The political potential of affect and emotions lies precisely in this ambivalent interplay of collective association and dissociation. Emotions do not have a universal political nature, nor are affective registers as such reserved for certain (emancipatory, hostile, populist etc.) constellations of the political. As the following four case studies demonstrate, the relation between politicization and affective modes is both highly context-specific and unstable.

The first two case studies focus on affective modes of indignation or outrage, which in recent literature concerning social movements are often regarded as important emotions for the political, for instance by post-Schmittian theorist Chantal Mouffe. According to Mouffe, outrage and indignation clearly belong to the camp of conflict-orientation, and are thought of as automatically leading to political action. As we argue in the present chapter, this impression is rather one-sided. Starting from an anthropological comparison on the socialization of political anger in Germany and Madagascar, it becomes clear that emotional orders such as indignation are highly culturally dependent and can serve different goals in different circumstances. This observation is reaffirmed in our second case, an analysis of the emotionalization strategies of theatre maker Milo Rau. By investigating the affective economy of indignation at the heart of Milo Rau's political theatre, we demonstrate that the workings of a political emotion are highly dependent upon (collective) interpretation – and thus a single case may give way to very different, multi-layered and even opposed political dynamics.

In light of this context-specific ambivalence, the other two case studies take a closer look at specific appropriations and modulations of certain affective registers in processes of politicization. One of them deals with image practices of irreconcilable Turkish resistance movements since 2013, where similar visual repertoires tend to appear in quite different political contexts. While a normative approach would probably pass over such volatile appropriations of affective registers, an affective societies perspective is able to genealogically reconstruct the emergence of such paradoxical overlappings. We then conclude with another case pertaining to contemporary German theatre, Jilets Ayşe's humoristic intervention in Falk Richter's "Am Königsweg". Although laughter and humour are rarely considered in theoretical debates on political emotions, this controversial performance shows how subversive comedy provokes but also reflects on relations of conflict and community. Thus, these two final cases both emphasize the common thread of this chapter: Before generalizing or undermining the political potential of certain affective dynamics, the immanent ambivalence of affective modes in the realm of the political has to be carefully examined.

### **LEARNING INDIGNATION AND OTHER FORMS OF POLITICAL ANGER**

Indignation, or moral outrage, is frequently addressed or propagated as a political emotion. Most prominently, indignation is associated with the political domain of protest movements. For instance, indignation figures prominently in public discourses and media coverage on protests. The term has even become eponymic in case of the large-scale protests in Spain in 2011/2012, commonly referred to as *indignados*. Likewise, in the social sciences indignation is commonly described as a prime factor in mobilizing, performing, and legitimizing collective protests (e.g. Nepstad/Smith 2001; Tejerina et al. 2013; Jasper 2014). Based on such a close association between indignation and political protest, promoting indignation in itself is often seen as a means of political activism, for example in Stéphane Hessel's tract *Indigenez-vouz*! (2011), or in Milo Rau's theater of outrage, which we will examine in the course of this chapter.

Thus, there is a widespread understanding that indignation is not only a political emotion, but also a *favourable* political emotion. Moreover, indignation appears to be rooted in a universal human capacity that only needs to be incited and sustained in order to achieve (desired) political momentum: "all people have the capacity to feel indignation." (Nepstad/Smith 2001: 173). In contrast to this view, we argue that, while anger in the most general sense may be universal, indignation as a particular form of anger is valued, socialized, and learned only in particular socio-political contexts. This claim is supported by a comparative ethnographic case study of emotion socialization in a kindergarten in Berlin and a rural community in Southern Madagascar. Before presenting them, it is necessary to roughly sketch some characteristics of indignation.

Despite the salience of indignation in research on political movements, the question of what makes indignation particularly politically pertinent is hardly addressed in a systematic way – perhaps because it appears to be self-evident. A general feature that is often mentioned is its close connection to normativity or morality: In the recent review *Constructing Indignation* (2014) Jasper describes indignation as a "morally grounded form of anger" (2014: 208) or as "righteous anger" (2014: 211). From a cross-cultural perspective, however, this definition is hardly sufficient to delineate indignation from other forms of anger. For instance, with regard to Madagascar (Lambek/Solway 2001) or Micronesia (Lutz 1988), some emotions which clearly depart from indignation have been described as 'just' or 'righteous anger'. Far from driving political protests from below, these emotions are believed to motivate people in power to punish subordinates for norm violations and, by this virtue, rather resemble emotions like 'wrath'.

To delineate indignation from other modes of righteous anger, we propose to consider its double relation to normativity. First, indignation responds to and addresses some form of injustice or immorality, as many other forms of anger do. Secondly, indignation itself is considered a legitimate, sometimes even morally expected reaction to injustice, which is not true for all other modes of anger, especially not if they are associated with aggression and violence. This hints to another important feature of indignation: In contrast to violent modes of anger such as rage or fury, indignation does not imply direct, aggressive action against the alleged wrongdoers or accused party. Rather, by proclaiming an issue of injustice to the public, for instance in the form of collective protests, a third party, be it the society at large or a specific governmental body, is invoked to take action. Based on this peculiar feature of third-party-involvement, indignation can be considered a righteous form of political anger. However, it has to be noticed immediately that, by this feature, indignation is hardly a universal mode of righteous anger. Instead, it is closely intertwined with specific norms, according to which non-violent collective protests are considered legitimate, and with particular political structures, entailing, for example, social or governmental bodies that can be addressed as a third party.

The first case on the rural commune of Menamaty in Southern Madagascar represents a socio-political context which hardly fosters indignation, albeit other forms of political anger. This will be shown on three levels: interactions with legal authorities, emotion concepts, and emotion socialization (for a detailed analysis of anger in Southern Madagascar, see Scheidecker, 2017a). For the village population, interactions with Gendarmes are fairly common in the region, whereas other political institutions of the nation state are either completely absent or of marginal relevance for the lives of the villagers (see Scheidecker 2014, 2017). The usual pattern of intervention by Gendarmes appears to be outrageous: A villager who is suspected of cattle theft or any other breach of state law is arrested, physically abused for several days and then released, after a ridiculously high amount of ransom money has been payed to the Gendarmes by the relatives of the captive. Most of the men in the region have gone through this procedure at least once, many have lost most of their fortunes as a consequence. However, no chorus of outrage, no collective outcry is to be observed among the villagers. Mostly, the Gendarmes are feared. Yet sometimes villagers manage to take vengeance on particular Gendarmes who have maltreated them. The same villagers may collaborate with other Gendarmes in order to take revenge on a neighbour. In general, Gendarmes are admired for their power, and parents wish for their sons to become one of them. The lack of indignant protest in this context is particularly noteworthy as, in other contexts, instances of police brutality and power abuse are among the most typical occasions for collective indignation and mobilization.

The observations on the level of villager-police interaction correspond with the conceptual level. Although a highly elaborate repertoire of around 20 conceptually distinguished anger emotions is in use among the population of Menamaty, no concept could be found that resembles "indignation" or "moral outrage". The anger emotions that come closest to indignation, at least on a structural level, can be labelled retaliatory anger. They serve to sanction equally or more powerful actors from the wider social context, mostly outside the family, for violent acts that are perceived to be unjust. However, the way this is accomplished clearly differs from the workings of indignation. The sanctioning act is not conferred to a third, more or less neutral party by announcing the injustice in one way or another. In contrast, it is directly executed by the affected actor or, if (s)he is unable to do so, by close relatives. Moreover, instead of making the norm transgression and the sanctioning of it public, retaliatory anger is usually realized in a concealed manner, for example, by an act of poisoning or black magic, in order to avoid another strike-back, particularly if the target person is more powerful. The cluster of retaliatory anger, consisting of *may-fo*, *mangapoko*, *kinia*, *kakay*, and *lolom-po*, is internally differentiated according to intensity and the forms of retaliation. The only English concept that would fit into this cluster, thirst for revenge, seems to be rather dated and negatively connoted. In Menamaty, however, retaliatory anger enjoys a status of righteous anger.

This privileging of retaliatory anger is clearly prefigured through child rearing practices and particular contexts of emotion socialization. Children are actively discouraged from appealing to a third party after having been maltreated by another child. To give an example: Children of around one year, who had a conflict with another child, sometimes turned crying to their mothers, obviously hoping to get support. In these cases, the mothers put a stick into the hand of her child and encouraged him/her to take vengeance at the other child. In several cases older children, who felt seriously mistreated by another child and ran crying to their parents, were corporally punished for their coward behaviour and thus pushed to retaliate. These and many more practices fostering retaliatory anger are embedded in particular social contexts that further promote retaliatory anger instead of indignation: Most importantly, egalitarian and hierarchical social spheres are neatly separated. As soon as children reach two years, they spend most of the day in a peer group without any surveillance by adults. Even if adults observe major conflicts within the children's group, they usually do not intervene. This policy of non-interference is commonly established on the fact that interventions into the constant fights between children would drive the adults mad, and more importantly, it would transfer the conflicts into the realm of adults since everyone would take sides with his or her child.

To conclude this case, we come back to the interactions with Gendarmes. As exceptions to the patterns described above, several city-dwelling relatives of the villagers claimed to respond with indignation (in French) to what they framed as abuse of power by the Gendarmes. In several cases in which their relatives from the rural community were arrested, they tried to solve the issue by appealing to a third party, the local court. Furthermore, one of them has founded an association for the rural population to collectively bring the Gendarmes' misconduct to public attention. These young men also blame their relatives for negotiating directly with the Gendarmes and are trying to convince them to protest against their action, however, with little success. As a more sustainable strategy, they endeavour to establish schools in their native villages since this, they reason, would enable the next generation of villagers to see the Gendarme's actions as what they are: outrageous violations of the law.

After having argued that indignation does not emerge naturally everywhere, a second case will be presented to shed some light on the social conditions and practices that foster indignation in children. The case is a kindergarten in Lichtenberg, Berlin. In this institution, most children spend between six and ten hours every working day in a group of fifteen to twenty similarly aged children, and two to three teachers. Before moving to particular socialization practices, it should be noted that educational institutions such as kindergartens or schools in general provide some fundamental conditions for the working of indignation: In the kindergarten or classroom, a collective of children is gathered on a regular basis and put under the surveillance of an, ideally neutral, authority (the teacher) who may intervene and sometimes sanction if cases of norm transgressions are brought to his/her attention. Such a social constellation, that corresponds to the tripartite structure of indignation, differs clearly from the social environment of the children from the first case, who spend most of their time beyond direct surveillance of caregivers.

In the kindergarten at stake, several norms and values ensure that teachers actually intervene if children have been treated unfairly: First of all, the teachers are obliged by law never to leave the children unattended, and to prevent any harmful interaction. Furthermore, the teachers share the understanding that the kindergarten is the primary place for children to learn *Sozialverhalten*, that is, to interact in a considerate way with each other and to follow social norms. Probably the most consistently sanctioned norm is non-violence. Finally, the teachers are expected to respond sensitively to the children's emotions, especially to negative ones such as anger. Taken together, these norms and imperatives may give rise to particular interaction patterns that prefigure the logics of indignation.

To give an example: On a hot summer day a new play of water (*Wasserspiel*), which has been installed in the garden of the institution during the summer break, was introduced to a group of fifteen five-year-old children. Before they were allowed to play on it, the two female teachers explained in detail several new rules connected to the play: The water pump may be operated only by one child at a time, the other children have to queue and wait for their turn; it is not allowed to splash each other or to put sand into the water basin, etc. If a child infringes on one of these rules, (s)he will be excluded from the game. After some time of playing, when the teachers had begun to relax and started to chat with each other in some distance, a boy pushed away a girl who was operating the water pump. She started to scream in protest and then she ran together with two of her friends to the teachers and told them in an upset way that the boy had jumped the queue. While accompanying one of the teachers back to the water play, the affected girl pointed several times in a characteristic indicting manner to the boy. Under the witnessing eyes of the whole group, the teacher repeated the rule and the corresponding sanction and then sent the boy to "have a brake" at the bench where the teachers were sitting.

Incidences following this pattern (norm violation announcement to the teachers intermediation or sanctioning of the blamed child) were among the most frequent episodes of intense negative emotions that could be observed in the kindergarten. While children of five or six years already seemed to have learned the routine of verbally announcing norm violations in a somewhat dramatic way to the teachers, even if they had not been affected by it themselves, younger children were encouraged in several ways to do so. In the group of three-year-olds, children mostly just started to cry when they had been treated badly by another child. If the teachers had observed the incident, they usually tried to clarify the situation by soothing the affected child, by asking the violator to apologize and by reiterating the general norm of non-violence. If teachers just noticed that a child was crying, they invited him or her to verbally express the reason for it, which mostly turned out to be a rude peer. Thus, children are encouraged from early on to turn actively and in an emotionally dramatic way to authorities in case of peer-to-peer conflicts.

Based on these two cases, we question the claim on indignation to be a favourable political emotion: In general, it is acknowledged that indignation entails a number of features that make it particularly politically pertinent, especially in the context of protest movements. However, the reasons for that are not to be found in a universal human capacity that only needs to be mobilized in order to achieve political momentum. Rather, indignation is political because it is socialized in particular societies as a valued political capacity. Consequently, in other socio-political contexts, indignation may be irrelevant altogether, while alternative forms of 'political anger' may be fostered instead. Regarding the question of political favourability, two levels need to be differentiated: Indignation in general may be valued as a righteous form of anger, or it may be disregarded, depending on the political system it is embedded in. Indignation may also be valued or rejected in its particular manifestations, depending on which norms and values are being promoted and which social group is promoting it.

### **THE POLITICAL IN (P)REENACTMENT: MILO RAU'S TRIBUNALS AS A THEATRE OF OUTRAGE**

The (culturally determined) dynamics of indignation or outrage as a political phenomenon can be observed in several artistic tribunals the Swiss director and theatre producer Milo Rau has put into practice during the last years. Especially his Moscow Trials (from 2013) and his Congo Tribunal (from 2015) may be interpreted as (p)reenactments (Czirak et al. 2019) of justice.12 These tribunals are set up in circumstances deemed to deny justice to those who are given a voice during the performances, e.g. miners and local population in Congo on the one hand, and dissident artists or political activists in Russia on the other hand. We aim to show in which way an affective groundwork dominated by emotions of outrage and

<sup>12</sup> Reenactments can be understood as repetitions of past events within literature, media, art, and theater. In contrast to other forms of repetition, reenactments do not solely historicize or actualize their topics, but generate temporal, spatial and affective tension between the horizons of past and present. Today, many performances no longer only deal with the revision or replication of a historic event but orient themselves towards an imagined future and set out to experiment with fictitious time(s) and space(s), thus opening up perspectives of 'preenactment'. In adopting the specific notation of (p)reenactment, Czirak et al. (2019) "emphasize the fundamental interconnectedness and interdependence of pro- and retrospection as well as the instability of each temporal perspective".

indignation is at work in these performances, thus opening up a path from theatrical performance to political activism. In line with the preceding argument on the cultural dependence of an affective setting of outrage or indignation, it becomes clear that Rau's performances employ a Western concept of the emotion, especially visible in the installation of theatrical courts (and, for that matter, a theatre audience) serving as the "third parties" necessary to enable a classical Western conception of indignation. The cross-cultural transfer of this model is, we argue, an effect which is hardly reflected by Rau and his coworkers, thus making the performances essentially directed to a western audience mostly consisting of leftliberal, urban milieus which are already politicized and to whom the concept of indignation employed is highly familiar. In positioning the western third-partylogic as the central way of dealing with conflict in the realm of the performances, they tend to convey a quasi-colonial idea of solving conflicts in a predominantly western fashion.

In conceiving of Rau's tribunals as a "theater of outrage", we refer to a text central to these days' discourse evolving around political activism: the manifest or memorandum *Time for Outrage!* (original: *Indignez-vous!*) 13 written by the Berlin-born member of the French Résistance and United Nations diplomat Stéphane Hessel in 2010, a text which had notable appearances in protest campaigns all over Europe, the US, and Latin America, most notably in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008.

Hessel's text centres on the relevance of outrage as an affective state leading to political action. As the title of Hessel's text – *Indignez-vous!* or *Time for Outrage!* – already states, the text employs a notion of affectivity as the most important cornerstone of political action. "Outrage", Hessel writes, "was the principle motive of *Résistance*" (Hessel 2011: 9). And he continues: "My wish for every one of you is a reason for outrage. It is precious. If you are in outrage about something, as I was about the madness of Nazism, you get active, strong and engaged. You join the stream of history, and this stream of history takes its course thanks to the engagement of the many – towards more justice and freedom" (Hessel 2011: 10). For Hessel, outrage is an affective state letting individuals unite within a collective of activism towards justice and freedom (a claim highly disputable in different ways: first, as a look at the use of outrage as a uniting affect in right-wing populism makes clear nowadays, it can easily be used for other purposes and is by no means morally linked to justice and freedom; and second, its functioning in the way Hessel claims depends on culturally trained processes, thus diminishing the

<sup>13</sup> The French original of Hessel's text employs the notion of indignation which is then translated to English as "outrage". For the given argument, the two notions are used interchangeably.

scope of its workings). Thereby, outrage features as a moral emotion, affectively driving the individual from her or his personal emotion of injury to a morally grounded activity together with others who feel and think alike. Hessel's notion of outrage can therefore be understood as a classic case of relational affect getting political relevance in uniting people and forming an affective collective, just as theorists of the turn to affect like Sara Ahmed (2004) or Judith Butler (1997, 2015) have asserted (cf. also von Scheve 2016; Slaby 2016). What unites people's spirits on their way to political engagement is an affective dynamic fostered by the moral emotion of outrage – thus, to foster political engagement it seems indispensable to also foster the outrage in order to create a powerful political collective acting for justice and freedom. An affective economy of outrage can be put in place to promote political change.

Clearly relating to these lines of thought, Milo Rau published his manifesto titled *What is to be done? Critique of Postmodern Reason* (Rau 2013) in which he relates his way of working in theatre to a political project of activism. *What is to be done?* borrows its title from the well-known memorandum written by Lenin in 1901 which formed the base of his theory of the communist party as the vanguard of the working class. In Rau's understanding of Lenin, this text indicates the necessity to move beyond critique and start acting – a necessity he brings to the fore again in 2013 and under the conditions of our time. For Rau, this means criticizing the ubiquitous form of postmodern critique which, in his view, does not have the potential to spark political change anymore. Instead, political players on the conservative or repressive side seem to have adopted elements of postmodernism and use them for their own purposes, as he tries to show with regard to conservatives in Russia. Leftist thought had turned into a "postmodern mainstream cynicism" (Rau 2013: 38, our translation) which would not lead to political action on the left anymore but had for long been incorporated into a mainstream that lead to the exclusion of many in the societies of the north, but also of the whole global south. So, while for Lenin it seemed important to motivate the working class to pursue the goal of the socialist revolution instead of just remaining interested in ameliorating their own position within the political and economic system currently at work, Rau claims to perform a similar task today: he wants to motivate the left and the "global Third Estate" to move on from a toothless postmodern criticism and start acting. His appeal centres on the establishment of a form that is neither only realistic or only critical, but of an "utopian dialectic" which is "realistic in an unrealistic way" (Rau 2013: 66, our translation), which acts, although all the postmodern doubts remain in place and let acting seem not very promising.

As we have seen in Hessel, outrage here figures as the root of political activism. Even more important is his idea that it may provide the glue bringing people together to let their emotions lead into an affective activist collective necessary to promote their interests and ideas. In Rau's work, outrage figures as a means giving a voice to those who, in present political institutions and discourse, are not heard. Their own outrage may lead them to act – and the outrage of those concerned with the fate of the silent may foster helpful alliances necessary to be successful. Outrage thus is not only framed as an emotion coming up in individuals, but also as part of an affective dynamic creating a political subjectivity in the first place and promoting a relation to the world and the other as an understanding of affect in terms of contemporary affect theory would have it.

Rau's tribunals, in the two cases we face here, are given the position of an embodied staging of a political and juridical alternative under circumstances where there is no such thing as a lawful legal framework of free courts that could guarantee the rights and freedoms of the people living in the countries in question. The lack of an efficient and lawful judiciary system is a common point of the cases which differ in their subjects: While *The Moscow Trials* centre on three cases of free speech or the freedom of art – the attacks on two exhibitions critical of the interplay of the Russian state and the orthodox church as well as the well-known case of Pussy Riot's "punk prayer" –, in the case of the *Congo Tribunal* the question of the interplay between corruption, violence and economic interests on a global scale is at stake, discussed in three cases on the profits a Canadian mining company could make during wartime, the difficulties of international regulations of conflict minerals and the failure of peacekeeping missions to prevent rebels from slaughtering civilians in a mining town.

Both tribunals comprise features of reenactment as well as preenactment (for the terminology, see Roselt/Otto, 2012, and Czirak et al., 2019): Reenactment seems an appropriate term for the investigation and research taking place before and during the tribunal – the research necessary to make clear what is at stake in the performance and the results of the hearings with extensive testimonies by a large number of experts and witnesses involved. For the economy of outrage in place here, the telling of the fates in question is of utmost importance: Outrage results from the stories which come to the fore in the trials and are depicted by witnesses, who have themselves been victims or offenders in the events reenacted. In putting the people directly concerned on stage, the performance can build on the outrage of those directly affected or elicit the outrage of those watching respectively, building on a theory of outrage that comprises a third party that can be appealed to (in this case, the public of the theatre production at hand, as well as the tribunal that is put on stage).

On the other hand, preenactment, or the embodied staging of a future alternative, is what allows the tribunals to come into existence in the first place: The performers act as if there existed a real juridical framework with the power to guarantee a fair trial, thereby preenacting a situation in which this is the case. In the performance, participants taken from "real life" act in the manner of a real trial within a fictional realm. But to make a real trial possible beyond theatrical fiction, political change is needed. To foster this political change, the tribunals are designed to mark a starting point in sparking off the outrage of those still silent and also allowing for (international) attention for the cases discussed, thereby trying to produce a collective of outrage comprising stakeholders in Congo and Russia, but also supporters in the realm of a "worldwide left". By bringing together the different conflicting parties and showing the openness of discussion, those who attend the trial get a sense of what a just trial could look like – and their outrage about the current circumstances in place may be sparked through this embodied alternative. The logic behind the preenactment in this case is to show the differences between the status quo and a lawful and fair world for which political change is necessary.

To reach its goal of fostering political change through collective outrage, Rau and his production company, the International Institute of Political Murder (IIPM), rely on three layers of communication which we want to sketch briefly to characterize part of the affective structure of the tribunals.

The first layer comprises those who interact in the trials: Rau relies on a specific mixture of actors here. On the one hand, the performance collectives are formed by people directly concerned: artists, their lawyers and their attackers in the case of the Moscow Trials, miners, politicians, NGO representatives and employees of international mining corporations in the Congo case. Here, the communication within the performance builds on existing forms of outrage, but it also fosters new outrage among those who are not yet politicized in a western sense of the term, which seems to be the case with some of the actors from Congo. At this level, Rau's performances seem to deliver "development" or a special form of political education to the ones directly concerned – a program which is not without ambivalence concerning the role the western theatre people play in these cases as they act on the grounds of their own cultural terms without considering local logics of political action which might well work beyond the given concept of outrage employed here.

A second layer of affective communication is concerned with the "in-group" of "western intellectuals" and "theatre people" itself. Here, communication is directed towards the ways in which outrage is necessary and possible in the realm of theatrical communication. This kind of "preaching to the choir" has been theorized as an integral part of affect-based political activism by Lauren Berlant (2011). On the other hand, this way of communicating with peers – also underlined by the fact that Rau's projects are often set up as co-productions of several different European theatres being part of the larger field of independent theatre companies throughout Europe – may seem rather problematic as it does not escape the dangers of postmodern self-reference Rau attacks in *What is to be done?*. Especially in events and media surrounding the tribunals this danger is obvious. In accompanying panel discussions, "scenic congresses", in using "experts" from the west as "witnesses" in the trials and with the employment of fellow journalists or scientists as actors, a certain in-group communication is created that does not reach any external goals but serves to reassure those taking part in this communication. "We" are talking among "us" and are reassuring each other of our own outrage and our will to use it positively – and thereby we are affirming ourselves as morally acting beings.

A third layer of communication to foster outrage is directed at a greater public, aimed at via mass media communication. Here, the multimedia aspect of Rau's tribunals deserves to be mentioned. Beside the performances at place in Moscow or Bukavu and Berlin respectively, Rau's IIPM produces films and books on the projects and accompanies them with excessive online and media presence before, during and after the performances to reach a much wider audience. Rau himself uses a scandalizing rhetoric directed at affective intensity, not only by portraying the cases at stake as phenomena with a worldwide impact, but also by overstating their relevance through a hyperbolizing presentation. Thus, the cases at stake in Moscow become "the end of free Russia" and Rau aims at confronting "the arts" and "the religion", "the true" against "the dissident" Russia, as the IIPM writes on its website. *The Congo Tribunal*, on the other hand, is depicted as centring on a "'Third World War', [that] has claimed up to six million lives" and "one of the most decisive economic division-battles in the era of globalization". In its massive media presence, the IIPM and Rau aim at creating interest in the subjects concerned and outrage about the cruel or at least adverse fates of the people affected – a way to spark international solidarity through common action beyond a cheap expression of feelings (something that may or may not be reached by the performances).

The three layers of affective communication sketched out here underline the tribunals' special structure in an economy of outrage. In preenacting a different juridical world, based on the moral principles of justice and freedom, they form the core of a contemporary kind of political performance art in that they draw the consequences of problems Rau detects in the postmodern critique which has joined the western mainstream. Instead of remaining on the sidelines of the world's conflicts, Rau proposes to enter the political arena by constructing embodied and performative alternatives like the tribunals in Moscow and Congo. As a look at the communications employed shows, outrage is the fuel to keep the engine of these affective machines running. In building on a culturally determined notion of outrage, Rau's performances, on the one hand, support the political as consonance (in the ingroup), and on the other hand, underline dissonances (in fostering indignation within groups and towards out-groups). The transcultural impact of the performances, however, remains questionable, as they centre on a concept of outrage culturally rooted in Western thought and are – considering the number of people involved – mainly directed at a Western, left-liberal milieu.

As the example of Rau's tribunals confirms, political affect and emotions are highly dependent on the context and collective experience. Affective phenomena may give way to different ends of politicization due to the engagement and interaction of different communities. In addition to in-group and out-group affect, analysing ways in which politicization takes place can also offer interesting insights from an affective societies perspective. Below, a case-study from Turkey shows how the appropriation and modulation of politically-charged visual elements contribute to the ambivalence of political affectivity.

#### **POLITICAL MOVEMENTS IMAGES AS AMBIVALENT AFFECTIVE REGISTERS**

Recently, Turkey has witnessed extensive use of images through social media during two major events of its political and social history: The Gezi Movement of 2013 ("Gezi"), a social movement carried by massive popular participation, and the Anti-Coup Resistance of 2016 ("Anti-Coup"), a popular mobilization that was supported by the government after an intra-state conflict. They have stark differences in their political orientation and agenda. They relied, however, on similar tools of politicization. Both mobilizations encouraged and partly relied on the production and circulation of images online, particularly in the form of photograph and graphic element, the latter appearing mostly as illustration. This case-study looks into visual appropriations in a larger sense, as images often become part of the political struggle due to their affective qualities to foster politicization. Going beyond a mere appropriation analysis between two events, it is aimed to show that certain image patterns may act as politically ambivalent affective registers; meaning similar affective registers may serve even opposite political agendas.

Before proceeding with Gezi and Anti-Coup of Turkey, we should remember that photography has been involved in documenting moments of political mobility since the Paris Commune of 1871 (Memou 2017). The first examples of displaying such resistance offered a different insight than engravings and paintings, which were the popular visual accounts till then. As the cameras and printing technologies evolved, photography became a means to record what is happening at that very moment. It was seen as proof, a mere display of reality. With the involvement of journalism, photography gained a crucial and active role for political struggle around the world by communicating the feeling of the moment, mobilizing public emotions, and inspiring a sense of commonality, as well as antagonism. Some protest images, such as *Tank Man* of 1989 (Figure 3) are considered to be among the 100 most influential images of all times (TIME 2016). The photograph bears highly affective qualities and stayed inspirational for various political mobilizations afterwards as well.

Photograph by Jeff Wiedener / AFP. Screenshot via http://jeffwidener com/content/1989- beijing-lone-man-edited/lightbox/. Figure 3. "Tank Man" of Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

Illustration (or "graphic design" as a larger field visual production) has an even longer history of political engagement, starting as early as the 17 th century in the form of cartoon and pictorial satire. The 20 century, however, saw a more inten- th sive use of illustrations in politics, both as a propaganda tool, creating in-group and out-group feelings, and as critical form of art (Lavin 2001). The latter version in particular included much humour that will be further analysed in the last part of this chapter.

Technological advancements affected graphic design no less than photography. Well-integrated with other forms of visual production today, illustration is a popular component of the visual sphere of political contention. It has been a common practice to make illustrations out of the photographs of already-celebrity ideological leaders, states-people, and iconic political influencers. However, the photographs of ordinary participants of social movements and of moments from street protests and actions have rarely served as a basis for illustrations. The photographs of non-renowned people involved in the political struggle have been kept as photographs and appeared so on printed media, with few exceptions such as the *Tank Man* which was sketched several times, mostly as cartoon.

Figure 4. "Cindy Sheehan protesting against the U.S. military invasion of Iraq". Anonymous. Screenshot via http://ww2.onvacations.co/tiananmen-square-politicalcartoon/.

*Tank Man* established itself as one of the most recognizable images of the political iconography (Hariman/Lucaites 2007). It is widely attributed to individual strength capable of resisting institutional power. The editorial cartoon above (Figure 4) is an appropriation of the well-known scene for an anti-war campaign in the USA in 2004, during the Invasion of Iraq.14

Appropriations and modulations of visual repertoires capitalize on certain affective potential of images. This form of visual production was much apparent in Turkey's 2013 Gezi and 2016 Anti-Coup. Gezi is named after Istanbul's Gezi Park, which the government intended to transform into a shopping mall. The plans had to be put on hold as a reaction to one of the quickest and biggest civic response in recent Turkish political history. An early-circulated photograph (Figure 5) that helped grow the movement showed the moment of a protester, being peppersprayed in the face.

Figure 5. "Lady in Red" by Osman Örsal / Reuters. Screenshot via https://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2013\_protests\_in\_Turkey\_,\_Woman\_in\_Red\_image.jpeg.

Although the protester's identity was later revealed, she was hardly known by any other name than 'the lady in red', and that's how she became one of the icons of the Gezi. The photograph shows her legs, arms, neck, and hair uncovered, which can be interpreted as a proof of her secular beliefs (Kluitenberg 2015), particularly

<sup>14</sup> The woman who stands in front of the tanks is Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in action. We know her name and Crawford, the town where she held a protest, thanks to her solid activism but also due to the media's interest to create a celebrity figure and political hero.

in a country where religion has been instrumental for body politics (Gambetti 2014) and clothing style a societal polarization factor. Along with police brutality, the casual appearance of the woman in red has been a point of empathy for several people. As Anna Schober-de Graaf (forthcoming) argues, such images of ordinary people "help disseminate public positions" and popularize dissent. In addition to depicting injustice frames (Olesen 2013), they nurture indignation and mobilize public emotions particularly towards policemen, which are seen as representing state's abuse of power. In this vein, the woman in red photograph was particularly influential in bringing more protesters in the streets in the first days of Gezi, yet its impact was to augment through illustrations.

Figure 6. "Lady in Red" as "Venus" by Gaye Kunt. https://www.behance.net/gallery/9293941/Venus.

Figure 7. "Lady in Red" as "Grows as he sprays" by Murat Başol. https://www. deviantart.com/muratbasol/art/kirmizili-kadin-397625122.

The illustrations (Figures 6 and 7) show us a crystallization of certain references, present in the original photograph, such as her casual look bearing a cloth bag and her vulnerability to a police attack. A practice that is evident in these examples is that they clean the "background noise" of the photograph before presenting us a relation between the oppressor and the oppressed. Through these illustrations, we see a female body that stands still and resists against the brutality of the oppressor, and particularly of a man. The images of a dissident female body contributed greatly to mobilizing public emotions, and women have been fairly prominent throughout the movement. In illustrations, individuals, buildings, and physical space are replaced with various elements that might help the image resonate better with the public, while capitalizing on the emotional heritage of the photograph and accentuating certain affective qualities (Zık forthcoming). This also includes eliminating deterring effects of the photograph such as the absence of daylight.

Figure 8. "Standing man" in Taksim Square, back view. Anonymous photograph. Screenshot via https://twitter.com/bulent\_peker/status/346751279986515969.

Figure 9. "Standing man" in Taksim Square, front view. Anonymous photograph. Screenshot via https://twitter.com/dumanistminik/status/346751943768694784.

The lady in red was one of the first photographs to be appropriated as illustrations. Among several images that followed this line, "standing man" has been a very influential and popular one (Figures 8 and 9). In the late afternoon of June 18, when the Gezi Park had been recently evacuated by the police after a three-week sit-in of the protesters, a man was seen standing still in the middle of Taksim Square, just by the park. Found immediate response on social media, his photographs presented a crucial feature of indignation that is to appeal in a completely peaceful way instead of an aggressive response to police brutality, which could be more associated with rage or anger and easily delegitimized. As standing and not doing anything in a public area would hardly provide any justification for the use of brutal force, it quickly evolved into a popular individual but at the same time collective action. People could be randomly seen protesting the government on the streets of any town, simply by standing still. As the standing man became another symbol of the movement, the photographs were soon to be appropriated as illustrations.

Figure 10. "Standing" man pixelated. Anonymous illustration. Screenshot via http://everywhere-taksim.net/banners-posters/?nggpage=4.

Figure 11. "Standing man". Illustration by Dilem Serbest. https://www.behance.net/ gallery/9360451/Duran-Adam-Standing-Man.

The simplicity and calmness of the action can be observed in these illustrations (Figures 10 and 11). They are to a certain extent free from 'visual noise' and make other qualities more salient. The illustrations hail the anonymity of the person, although his identity has already been revealed. The Turkish flags and the image of M. Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938), who is the founding president of modern Turkey and respected much by some for modernist establishments, are removed in illustrations. Although these visual markers (Vergani/Zuev 2013) existed in Gezi as symbols of nationalism, patriotic love, as well as secularism, they were only part of several banners, flags, and posters affiliated to a wide spectrum of ideologies and communities. The illustrations focus on the personification of indignation by making the standing man figure more salient, crystallizing the ordinariness, and associating it with a widest possible public.

In order to commemorate the resistance, several news platforms and visual web archives publish image collections from the protests on the anniversaries of the first sit-in at Gezi Park on May 28. Social media users post humorous slogans and captions from the days of the protests, as well as a selection of photographs and graphic elements. The visual (as well as textual) legacy of Gezi is still present in the critical voice against the government, although there are continuous efforts to criminalize it and depict it as an act of terrorism.

Such efforts were solidified when the country was hit by a military coup attempt in 2016.15 The public resistance, which was initiated by President Erdoğan when he called upon people to take the streets, succeeded in neutralizing the attempt. Several photographs from street clashes were circulated immediately on social media, followed by a variety of graphic elements in the aftermath. As Gezi was condemned by the government and lined up with the coup plotters, the visual sphere became a space of contention.

Figure 12. "Man stops a tank" at Istanbul Atatürk Airport. Photograph by İsmail Coşkun / IHA. Screenshot via https://twitter.com/NegarMortazavi/status/754101615947284481.

<sup>15</sup> On 15 July 2016, Turkey was alerted by a military coup threat, whose impact has been extremely hard on the country. Having bombarded the parliament and blocked the streets of major cities with tanks and soldiers, the military found a massive resistance, with thousands of people standing physically against firepower. Several hours of street clashes left more than 300 casualties behind with thousands injured. The country was ruled under state-of-emergency until July 2018.

Having been taken by Ismail Coşkun of Ihlas News Agency in the night of July 15, the photograph (Figure 12) shows a half-naked man standing in front of a tank at the gate of Istanbul's Atatürk Airport. It was mostly referred to as an icon of bravery and quoted on social media platforms as "Be not the man who stands; be the man who stops [the tank]" while being attached to the photograph of the standing man of Gezi. Refusing the visual code that was produced within Gezi as a pacified but dissident individual body, this is an urge to the production of an active national body. The translation of the photograph to illustration depicts it clearly.

Figure 13. "Man stops the tank" in Turkish flag. Anonymous illustration. Screenshot via https://www.facebook.com/gazete15temmuz/photos/a.1160949617357672/1160949620691005.

Figure 14. "Man walks against the tank". Illustration by the artist in signature. Screenshot via https://www.yenisafak.com/foto-galeri/diger/15-temmuz-karikaturleri-2023757?page=7.

In both illustrations (Figures 13 and 14), the bald head of the man and the tank make a direct reference to the original photograph. An obvious addition to the image is the Turkish flag, which aims at galvanizing this individual resistance as a heroic act in the name of the nation by accentuating such a visual marker. Unlike the individuality of the passive standing man, this active male body is a collective one. The call for restoration of dissident bodies can be noticed in various other visuals throughout the Anti-Coup imagery. The images of women of Gezi cannot escape it either.

The 'woman in black chador', who covered her back with a Turkish flag as she took a determined walk towards a cheering crowd ahead, was another popular photograph (Figure 15) that was taken in the immediate aftermath of the failed coup attempt. The illustration (Figure 16) moved her out of this context. The white background of the illustration makes the black chador much more identifiable. The woman is reminiscent of Nene Hatun (1857-1955), who is known as a national heroine due to her bravery during Russo-Turkish war of 1877, according to Turkish historiography. By singling her out of the photograph, the illustration crystallizes the determinacy, endurance, and sacrifice of the Anti-Coup in an ideal female body, which is fully covered and dedicated to the collective good of the whole nation.

Figure 15. "Woman in black chador with Turkish flag". Photograph by Elif Öztürk / Anadolu Agency. Screenshot via https://twitter.com/lemyezelif/status/757486857714331652.

Figure 16. "Woman in black chador with Turkish flag". Illustration by Merve Çirişoğlu. https://twitter.com/mervecirisoglu/status/758328555445030912.

Translation of photos to illustrations brings individuals and their actions to prominence, while keeping their anonymity and help create nameless heroes. This allows the movement to build a collectivity through a unified group of politicized individuals. The woman in chador joins to a group of individual nameless heroes, who initially appear in photographs and stand out in the Anti-Coup.

Figure 17. "Heroes of Anti-Coup". Illustrations by Merve Çirişoğlu. Anonymous collage. Screenshot via https://twitter.com/EvetPartisi/status/825088538081366018.

Figure 18. "Invincibles of Gezi". Anonymous illustrations and collage. Screenshot via https://twitter.com/TheCapulzadee/status/347260840346537984.

Circulated widely on social media, the collage that features four heroes of Anti-Coup (Figure 16) aligns with the arrangement of The Invincibles ("Yenilmezler" in Turkish) of Gezi (Figure 18). Two from the Anti-Coup, 'the man who stops the tank' and 'the woman in black chador and Turkish flag' are joined by others, whose photographs were also influential throughout the demonstrations against the putsch. The collage seems to have followed a pattern that was introduced by Gezi, promoting several ordinary people figures of dissent through the protests, with 'the woman in red' and 'standing man' included. Continuation of such pattern in illustrations does not only show the intention to appropriate visual codes and transfer affective registers, but also to restore the dissident bodies which emerged in Gezi.

Through the cases presented above, it can be observed that politically opposing mobilization circles may attend to similar visual practices that help disseminate political positions. This similarity goes beyond the use of visuals as a medium for communication and outreach, extending to common visual repertoires, narratives, and trends. The ambivalence of affective registers driven by these visuals is not limited to similarity of practices, but also nuanced with certain differences. This can be observed in the use of common visual markers, such as the Turkish flag. While the strength and vulnerability of individuals are salient in Gezi visuals, where flags are removed during reframing of photographs into illustrations, Anti-Coup tends to put emphasis on national identity symbols, adding them extensively. Thus, the same visual marker, which is actually in use by opposite political circles at various levels, may evolve into a symbol speaking to different affective registers.

The examples of photographs and illustrations from Gezi and Anti-Coup show how politically engaged visual practices evolved within the contemporary movement scene, while showing the contextual ambivalence of affect in processes of politicization. Snapshots of happenings started to be translated into contours and colours, with particular 'enhancement' done in affective features. The practice goes beyond the appropriation and modulation of certain existing icons, such as the use of a well-known figure or building on a symbol of unity, by bringing in the imageries from an adverse context and making it a constitutive element of political contention. As a result, similar visual codes and patterns serve to mobilize contrasting public affects, and thus, create an interplay between associative and dissociative concepts of the political.

#### **HOW HUMOUR DESTABILIZES THE WORKINGS OF THE POLITICAL**

Usually, politics is thought of as being inherently serious and not funny. There are, of course, formats such as the popular German TV-cabaret "Heute Show" that address political issues in a satirical way. However, such formats seem to draw on the distinction between a 'regular' form of politics and their 'irregular' way of turning it into comedy. Nevertheless, an argument can be made that one should conceive of humour as always related to specific political communities: A person's sense of humour and his or her way of laughing are to a high degree determined by cultural codes, they have a communicative function and they are realized in collective social practices. Moreover, phenomena such as wit and comedy also unfold a paradoxical and self-reflexive play of both fulfilling and violating common rules and expectations. By producing incongruities between specific rules and their transgression, humour practices serve as an outstanding indicator for the implicit and explicit cultural norms and routines within which they are embedded (Wirth 2003; Wirth 2018).

Investigating the concrete political dynamics which practices of humour facilitate and reproduce is a complicated matter, as they not only depend on the various forms and settings of those practices of humour, but also on different contexts within those practices. Depending on the concrete situation, the same joke might lead to very different affective reactions, ranging from an ephemeral communitisation in collective laughter to an aggressive and hurtful rejection of ridiculous behaviour. It is this relation of 'laughing at' and 'laughing with' (Schürmann 2010), of a 'comedy of degradation' and a 'comedy of appreciation' (Greiner 2006), that complicates an unambiguous notion of humour's politicality.

In terms of theoretical approaches, one can observe striking parallels between the two traits of 'association' and 'dissociation' in political theory (Marchart 2007) and two similarly different approaches in philosophies of humour and laughter: there is an Adornian line of humour criticism according to which mechanisms of self-affirmation and distinction are essential for all practices of joking and mockery. By contrast, there is a Bachtinian line of carnivalesque transgression, which emphasizes the subversive dimensions of humour (Roth 2018). Looking at the widespread use of irony and satire in protest movements and marginalized groups, where humour is mobilized to subvert social orders and to criticize prejudices, the Bachtinian line seems particularly persuasive and is also very compatible with post-foundational and radical democratic political thought (Nover 2015). From this perspective, humour appears as a powerful medium for critical politicization, because it "familiarizes us with a common world through its miniature strategies of defamiliarization" (Critchley 2002: 18). Yet, as the philosopher Simon Critchley admits in his book *On Humour*, one cannot attribute this political potential to humour as such, since "not all humour is of this type, and most of the best jokes are fairly reactionary or, at best, simply serve to reinforce social consensus." (Critchley 2002: 11). Through the use of racist, misogynist and homophobic jokes, humour can also function as a medium for ideological reinforcement and the reproduction of stereotypes. However, a simple equation of laughter and reactionary affirmation is not plausible either. It thus becomes clear that humour is always politically ambivalent in terms of 'association' and 'dissociation', of consent and dissent, of affirmation and subversion (Billig 2005; Müller-Kampel 2012, Petrović 2018).

Against this theoretical background, how can reactionary and transgressive humour practices be differentiated? Regarding this question, Simon Critchley claims that different humour practices correspond to different modes of commonality and conflict. According to Critchley, racist jokes and antiracist mockery of stereotypes not only differ in their political context or object but are also driven by different affective registers. However, matters turn out to be more complicated, as the evaluation of affective dynamics is itself an integral part of humour practices. Concerning the well-received case of ethnic and transcultural humour (Leontiy 2016; Göktürk 2017), a critical inversion of clichés can also be perceived as a reinforcement of a self-referential consensus on the stupidity of racists. More controversially, what some consider a hurtful mockery about ethnic differences might be framed by others as a legitimate defamiliarization from the boundaries of so-called 'political correctness'. The question of how forms of comedy give shape to collective relations, which norms and positions they subvert or affirm, is, thus, controversial and ambivalent from the beginning.

Given this affective ambivalence, the following example of stand-up comedienne Idil Baydar illustrates how both political poles of 'association' and 'dissociation' come into play in humour practices. The case under question is Baydar's performance in Falk Richter's recent production *Am Königsweg*, 16 where she appears in her clichéd role of Jilet Ayşe. A condensed analysis will show how this case creates a paradoxical interplay of conflict and commonality, resulting in contradictory readings of its political potential.

Baydar's presence in *Am Königsweg* is remarkable in itself, as she and her character Jilet Ayse are not part of Elfriede Jelinek's allusive and complex play which, as is typical for Jelinek, neither contains characters nor a coherent plot.But Baydar's participation is not completely out of place either, since Falk Richter's staging is in general marked by a generous use of various theatrical means and additional material. Thus, the performance's quite opulent aesthetics consists of pop cultural references to Sesame Street and Charlie Chaplin's *The great dictator*, permanent video screenings, an exalted and physically intense acting style, multiple song-interludes by the performers and a deliberately overloaded stage design with both trashy objects and rather usual requisites.

Such an excessive but also self-referential panorama of theatrical means is common for Richter's work as well as for contemporary German theatre. The appearance of Idil Baydar, however, is rather unusual, as her work belongs to the realm of popular culture. Baydar first used her fictional character 'Jilet Ayşe' on her YouTube channel and later in two cabaret solo programs. Herein, she appropriates many well-known features of German ethno-comedy: similar to characters of typical 'culture-clash'-comedians such as Kayar Yanar or Bülent Ceylan, Jilet

<sup>16</sup> Am Königsweg (2017): Director: Falk Richter, Text: Elfriede Jelinek. World Premiere: 28 October 2017, Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg.

Ayşe is an exaggerated collection of prejudices about the language, the habitus and the dress style of young women with a Turkish migratory background. In accordance with her ironic self-description as 'Germany's worst integration nightmare', Jilet Ayşe appears as an overweight underclass person in glaring Adidas tracksuits and with a penchant for unsuccessful hairstyles. In addition to this provocative and ostentatious play with racialized and gendered stereotypes, another key principle of Baydar's style is a shrill and aggressive way of addressing the audience, for example in sentences like "If you won't let us participate in being German, then we'll screw up your grammar!". She insults Germans as 'potatoes' who are on the verge of extinction due to a lack of reproduction, but also moans about the conformity of 'Abitürken' (Turkish migrants with high school degree), who would do everything to become accepted by German majority society.

As becomes clear, the comedy of Jilet Ayşe has less to do with a 'decent and ambiguous allusion to' than with bringing together two kinds of explicitness that are incompatible in their common use. On the one hand, there is an opulent and grotesque display of prevalent stereotypes about people with a German-Turkish migration background that Jilet Ayşe embodies all at once. On the other hand, her performance of racial and ethnic prejudices just is the basis to criticize those who are not directly affected by such marginalizations since they are part of the white majority or the 'well-integrated' migrants.17

The basic idea behind Baydar's appearance in *Am Königsweg* is to appropriate her polemical style for the political issue of the performance that mainly deals with Trump's presidency and the crisis of leftist and liberal thought. As director Richter puts it, he wanted to juxtapose the rather self-referential theatrical means of the performance with a more direct form of performative speech.18 This juxtaposition of Baydar's comedy and the aesthetics of *Am Königsweg* characterizes the various appearances of Jilet Ayşe in the course of the performance.19 Baydar has three solo-scenes that are spatially distanced from the other stage events as she stands

<sup>17</sup> In this regard of decisively engaging with stereotypes as stereotypes within hegemonic relations, Baydar's humor differs from large parts of German ethno-comedy.

<sup>18</sup> See https://www.rbb24.de/kultur/beitrag/2018/05/interview-falk-richter-theatertreffen -berlin-am-koenigsweg.html.

<sup>19</sup> It is worth mentioning how Baydar makes fun of her scenic outsiderism right at the beginning. In her first appearance, Baydar recites a passage from Jelinek's text in a quite usual, unironic manner. Suddenly, she breaks off this lecture abruptly, turns to the audience and asks with a triumphant smile: "Not bad for a female Canak [Kanakenweibchen], eh? Wow, I swear, you guys almost believed me." Thus, instead of hiding her different way speaking and breathing techniques compared to the professional stage actors, she satirically turns that difference to the outside.

alone on the ramp while the stage front is closed or she appears on a side balcony. In these scenic interventions, she plays some parts of her program *Ghettolectual*, combined with improvised audience conversation. For instance, she asks who in the audience does not come from a family of academics and reacts to the very few answerers. The monologues are presented Ayşe-typically in an exaggerated dialect and accompanied by an ironic-aggressive grin. They deal with racism in the writings of "Immanuela Kant and her Homeboy Hegel" or with structural parallels between the Erdogan enthusiasm of many German Turks and the success of the extreme right-wing party AfD in East Germany: "What do people do, when they have a lot of time and feel worthless?"

With regard to Critchley's humour theory, the political dimensions of this intervention seem quite obvious. Baydar clearly aims to destabilize the common sense of the German migration discourse through a paradoxical combination of critical reflections on the historical and social conditions of racism with a parodistic enactment of ethnic stereotypes. In the reviews, this approach was widely received positively – as was the staging as a whole. Authors praised that the performance avoided a bold and simple Trump-bashing among like-minded people, because Baydar's polemics precisely pointed to the ongoing distinctions and projections within the white middle-class audience. According to these reviews, the spectators were made aware of the fact that they are by no means beyond the social developments that facilitate the right-wing upswing (see Hartmann 2017; Schreiber 2017).

While this reading emphasizes the defamiliarizing or 'dissociative' aspects of Jilet Ayşe, the character's funny potential can also be examined in terms of 'association' and even affirmation. By turning racist ways of thinking and prejudices into comedy, a space of collective aesthetic experience is created for the audience, a space embodied and appropriated by laughing communities, expressing their common distance to such absurd demarcations. Understood as a means of ephemeral communitisation, Baydar's comedy enables political bonds among the spectators – at least as much as it confronts them. Given these affirmative aspects, the aforementioned positive reviews of Jilet Ayşe's intervention seem to lose their ground. Because one can also draw a rather critical conclusion of the performance's affective dynamics, as it happened in Jakob Hayner's quite negative review in *Theater der Zeit* (Hayner 2018). With apparent aversion towards the ongoing laughter of the premiere audience, Hayner argued that Jilet Ayşe's performance facilitated a certain bourgeois-intellectual superiority over a 'Sozialtypus*'* (social type) who doesn't go to the theatre. This, of course, is a completely different perception of Baydar's involvement in *Am Königsweg*: While other reviewers perceived it as an impulse for critical self-reflection and as a successful satire of racism, Hayner frames it as a constellation of closure and normative self-affirmation, driven by similar mechanisms of demarcation and domination. And where it was appreciated elsewhere that Ayşe polemicized against the social position of the audience, its prejudices and privileges, Hayner raises the suspicion that the audience's laughter is a self-satisfied expression of moral integrity.

Apparently, these contradictory readings approach the affective dynamics of humour differently. While the positive evaluations consider any affirmative dynamics as a mere derivate from Baydar's confrontative attitude, Hayner's negative evaluation strongly focuses on the aspect of consent and collective affirmation and questions the importance of Baydar's polemic. Herein, both the performance and the reviews give a powerful example for the ambivalent interplay of political 'association' and political 'dissociation' in humour practices. Instead of simply approving or rejecting Baydar's comedy, the two readings constitute it in a chiasmatic way as driven by either communitisation or subversion.

What follows from this ambivalent constitution of Baydar's polemical intervention? Again, there are two possible answers. The first one is to assume an affective equilibrium of subversion and affirmation in Baydar's performance by counterbalancing the emergence of both communitisation and dissent in audience reactions and reviews. Along these lines, one might argue that the conflicts and asymmetries emphasized by Baydar tend to disappear in collective laughter, meaning that all affective dissonances articulated through her polemical and provocative attitude become transformed into a constellation of togetherness and harmlessness. This perspective resonates with Hayner's criticism, which sees all subversive dimensions neutralized by corresponding affirmative dimensions. An alternative reading, however, avoids such a simple equation of subversion and communitisation. Instead of counterbalancing these two poles analytically, this point of view considers Baydar's comedy as a means to provoke a processual transition between them.

As described, Jilet Ayşe's drastic display of stereotypes of German-Turkish migrants comes together with a clear and blatant criticism of the audience's implicit prejudices. Ayşe's humorous potential lies in this paralogical, comic encounter of exaggeration and repulsion. Thus, a shared sense of humour here is clearly more than just a matter of stimulus and response, of consent or dissent, of inside or outside: it depends on a productive aesthetic evaluation of these incongruities. Accordingly, this comic experience is not congruent to an ethnized and stereotypical 'comedy of degradation'; it is a confrontative reflection of such ridicule. One-sided and 'equilibrist' interpretations of *Am Königsweg* tend to ignore this space of reflection opened up by Ayşe's intervention. By emphasizing this reflexive dimension, however, one does not neglect the affective ambivalences of inclusion and exclusion at display in Baydar's comedy. Such a reading works the other way around: It highlights that Baydar unmasks the unequivocal coordinates of political inclusion and exclusion within forms of racial and cultural essentialization.

\*\*\*

This chapter has illuminated how affect and emotions shape and are shaped by the formation of political collectives, as well as processes of politicization. As a starting point, we took the fundamental distinction in political philosophy between an associative line following the workings of Hannah Arendt and a dissociative line closely related to the work of Carl Schmitt. Whereas in the Arendtian tradition, the political occurs when new forms of consensus and communitisation emerge, the Schmittian line conceives of conflict and struggle as the fundamental features of the political.

From an affective societies perspective, however, affect and emotions cannot be easily reduced to just one of these alternatives. Following an understanding of affect as reciprocal dynamics of affecting and being affected, affective relations always possibly imply tendencies of both resonance and dissonance, of consent and conflict. Our aim in this chapter was to investigate these political ambivalences – an approach that differs from a decontextualized notion of political emotions, where emotions like bitterness, indignation or sympathy appear as ontologically fixed in their political potential. In contrast, we assume that emotions, understood as cultural repertoires, are historically situated in a complex interplay of social association and dissociation.

The first example of indignation extrapolated this by comparing emotion repertoires and practices of child rearing in two contexts, a nursery in Germany and a rural community in Madagascar. By analysing the different cultural registers of anger and the ways they are socialized, it turns out that indignation is not a universal capacity for protest, but rather a specific emotion repertoire that is socialized only in some contexts.

Something similar was observed in our second case study, dealing with the theatre of Milo Rau and its affective strategies of politicization. Again, the political potential of emotions proved to be highly context-specific. Milo Rau's rhetoric of outrage is embedded in quite complex layers of communication in order to lead to political effects. Consequently, specific affective strategies serve as a 'fuel' of politicization only within certain affective economies – and even then, a successful and stable building of political collectives is by no means guaranteed.

In addition to their cultural and social predetermination, affect and emotions are also politically ambivalent for an almost opposite reason: as the third analysis showed, affective registers can also appear as indifferent to their political use. The Gezi protests and the anti-coup resistance were definitely opposed in political terms; the visual practices of these movements, however, seemed similar and sometimes almost identical. Thus, the political value of such visual patterns is neither fixed once and for all, nor can it be regarded as arbitrary, as long as they make sense for political communities. The example of the iconographic 'tank man' made clear that generating political meaning via visual material is an open process of concrete appropriation and reinterpretation.

This fundamental instability of affective registers has also become evident in the last analysis which considered the inclusion of stand-up comedian Idil Baydar in Falk Richter's performance *Am Königsweg*. The controversy about the effect of her appearance indicates that Baydar's fierce polemic against everyday racism is by no means free of political ambivalence. Producing a kind of 'second order' comedy, Baydar's character Jilet Ayşe at the same time forces the audience to recognize ethnized stereotypes and enables them to distance themselves from such prejudices. Baydar thus explicitly creates an ambivalent relation to discriminating forms of ridicule and stereotyping.

All the examples thus demonstrate the complex interplay between conflict and consent and therefore also the blurred policy of affect and emotions. Humour or indignation have no political meaning in themselves: they acquire their concrete political contour neither on an ontological level nor on the level of an indifferent observer, but only from an embedded perspective and therefore within social relations and practices. It is in this realm where affect is created and experienced, encoded and decoded, appropriated and reflected. And this is where the question of political affect proves as being indispensable from questions of political judgement.

# **4. Judgment and Contestation**

The Affective Life of Norms

People often feel their way to finding the moral path. What is right should also feel right. However, it is not that simple. Norms easily become a matter of contestation, in everyday disputes just as well as in forms of political protest. And it is not always enough to feel one's way through; what feels right often ends up being morally questioned by others, or what feels wrong to oneself might be the normative ideal in society. The feelings of suspense and confusion about normativity, its negotiation as well as the various attempts to reconcile what feels right with some dominant normative framework point towards the issue at the centre of this chapter: Contestations of normativity and their affective engagements. The social life of normativity is neither simple and 'rational' nor is it opposed to affect and emotions – instead, normativity itself is highly affective. Injustices, power relations or solidarity is nothing that is only experienced rationally, but they come, many times, with intense feelings (Gould 2010). Accordingly, affect and emotions play a decisive role in practices which are directly linked to normativity and reflect on it: either practices which set out to enact certain norms, like those of judgment, or practices which contest and challenge specific norms, like the practices of critique (cf. Bens/Zenker 2019).

Looking closely at both practices of judgment and practices of critique, the following contributions explore the workings of norms with regard to their affective dimension. This perspective on normativity is inspired by more recent work on the role of affect and emotions (Brennan 2004; Berlant 2008). Like the two previous chapters, it also considers works that go against the grain of some widespread assumptions in social and cultural theories. In particular, theories of modernization have presented norms as forces or laws, which work on the social rather than within it. A prominent example is the process commonly referred to as rationalization, famously captured in Max Weber's account of modern bureaucracy and capitalism as the "stahlhartes Gehäuse der Hörigkeit" (Weber 2016: 487). Long mistranslated as 'iron cage' (re-translated as "steel-hard casing" cf. Weber 2011), the notion refers to the historical formation of norms such as 'efficiency' and 'instrumentality,' that are perceived to be 'unemotional' and work like a container that structures the manifold dynamics of social life from an outside. Of course, Weber's account is more complex; in fact, it does include a whole variety of different 'spheres of value' and normative frameworks, some of which give prominence to affect and emotions. Yet, Weber's powerful metaphor has a polemic dimension and, rather against his own idea of sociology, his critique of rationalization, resonating with other prominent accounts of modernization, has unfolded something like an affective afterlife itself. Later accounts have adopted the opposition between 'rational norms' and 'affective life'; very often this narrative has indeed served as the groundwork for vigorous critiques against regimes of petty-bourgeois conformity, for instance, or against the repressive, binary organization of sexuality.

Over the course of this chapter, we want to challenge the dichotomy between norms and affect. Instead, we conceptualize their relation as one characterized by tensions and dynamics. This relation can be antagonistic, creating oppositions when, for example, feelings about what is right go against structure. Or it can be a relation of commonality, for instance, in feelings of solidarity. Exploring the affective life of norms also means inquiring into the ways norms find their way into people's affective regimes, and how politics and the political are enacted and embodied in social practices. Throughout this chapter, we aim to examine the emotions that accompany the norm, the affect that consolidates people's normative frameworks. We seek to deconstruct the binaries of "rational norms" and the affective realm as well as the emotive judgment that is constantly coupled with its contestation.

The case studies in this chapter therefore represent different layers of tensions. Focusing on practices that are deeply entangled with normativity, practices of judgment and of contestation, our contributions seek to bring to the fore their eminent affective dimensions. Practices of judgment rely on a normative framework that is far from clearly spelled out. On the other hand, we will see that the complex phenomena of aesthetic judgment can be foreclosed by a discursive logic that refers to the very different norms of public political debate. Reconciliatory attempts between affect and norms occur as inner dialogues and self-reflection among people in the same community, and among marginalized groups and the wider society – often negotiating and subverting hegemonic normative frameworks. Finally, contestation in its visceral and bodily form can happen briefly – as an impulse – or it can induce lengthy societal dialogues that might not be resolved. Their sites can vary greatly from everyday encounters to exceptional events.

One vivid example of what it can mean to feel normativity, and even to get a reflexive feeling for normativity, is provided by our relation to language. A central aspect of learning a language lies in 'getting a feeling' for what is 'proper' language and what is the 'proper use' of that language in a certain situation. This capacity to feel what is 'right' and what is 'wrong' spans across those domains which are often perceived to be very basic and somewhat resistant to change, like grammar and syntax, but it also includes less prominent, yet often both highly socially determined and determining domains like register, vocabulary and pronunciation. In these latter instances, to feel an irritation when hearing someone else, or in turn to cause an irritation and to feel that one's way of speaking is that cause, means to feel the normativity of language. These normative frameworks can be very different and, at times, even incommensurable – the language of the classroom is very different to that of the schoolyard; the language of the *Bürgeramt* to that of the subway – yet they always operate on an affective level. As this chapter seeks to show, this includes the discursive practices of aesthetic valuation and critical judgment as well as the negotiation of political critique and, crucially, the bodily dynamics involved in these articulations. We will try to exemplify this in the discussion of judgment, which runs through all of our case studies: whether as the problem of not being able to make an aesthetic judgment and facing an impasse, or as the problem of aesthetic judgment being strictly aligned with projects of social distinction and therefore threatening to foreclose aesthetic experience; whether as the problem of 'translating' felt judgments into a viable vocabulary of political critique, or, this will be our closing example, on the other hand, as the bodily articulation of judgment *in actu*.

#### **MONOLINGUAL AFFECT AND AESTHETIC VALUE: TOMER GARDI AT THE BACHMANN-PRIZE**

If language is one significant way norms are felt, the arrangement of language in literature marks a somewhat special case, one which appears to be quite different at first glance. Very often, what irritates our feeling for language in every-day life can be observed to be framed and indeed experienced rather differently when we encounter it in a literary text. One could even go so far as to say that, to a certain degree, the literary irritation of our 'normal' feeling for language is at the very heart of aesthetic experience. Yet, there is a difference between this kind of irritation, aesthetically valued as it is, and other forms of irritations, which nevertheless can also be provoked by a literary text. Here one could think of, for instance, James Joyce's experiments with language and form, which provoke the reader's feeling for language aesthetically, but which also caused some serious provocations beyond the aesthetic when they first appeared in print. The difference between these notions of irritation can appear as a very marked one, but it can also be subtle and difficult to negotiate – especially when one is prompted to make a judgment.

When Tomer Gardi read his contribution at the Bachmann-Prize in 2016, his performance caused an irritation of that latter kind. Reading an excerpt from his novel *Broken German* (2016), his text challenged the event's procedure: Given the experimental nature of his text, written in 'broken German', the jury's discussion was dominated by an elephant in the room: the question, whether or not an author needs to be able to speak 'proper German' after all. The idea that literary authorship and aesthetic value are tied to the 'natural mastery' of the 'mother tongue' has been thoroughly criticized on the discursive level of literary criticism. Accordingly, the jury's discourse was deeply shaped by this deconstruction of ideas such as sovereign authorship or national literature. The politics of monolingualism, which strictly tie authorship and aesthetic value to a national language community, have become the object of critique for quite some time now. Yet, as this contribution wants to show, the affective life of this monolingual norm still has a ghostly presence at institutions like the Bachmann-Prize. 20

The Austrian prize for contemporary literature, named after the famous author Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), follows a singular procedure. Since its foundation in 1976 the prize has been awarded annually. The event, however, is different from other award ceremonies: The reading performances of the shortlisted authors as well as the subsequent critical assessment by the jury are both broadcast live on Austrian and German national television (ORF, 3Sat). This procedure places an emphasis on both the performance of the reading itself as well as on the discussion of the jury, which finds itself in the rare position of being prompted to come up with an elaborate response immediately after listening to the reading. Although the jury members have the chance to read the text shortly beforehand, this situation very much presents aesthetic judgments in the making. Thus, the ways in which this form of aesthetic criticism has to justify itself can become themselves discernible and negotiable on the stage of the Bachmann Prize.

When the Israeli author Tomer Gardi read his contribution at the Bachmann Prize in 2016, his performance and the ensuing jury discussion in many ways resembled an exception to the Prize's standard procedure. Gardi's text does not

<sup>20</sup> The following attempt to analyse the ways in which texts are valorised as 'literature' is inspired by a pragmatist sociology of critique and a 'post-Bourdieusian' approach to valuation in the art field (cf. Boltanski 2011i; Beljean, Chong and Lamont 2015; Vatin 2013). For an in-depth analysis of Tomer Gardi's novel *broken german* (2016) which pays special attention to the text's multilingualism see Vlasta (2019).

adhere to some of the grammatical, lexical, and syntactical conventions of standard German, as the very first sentences he read made clear:

Am Ende von diese Flug verlieren ich und meine Mutter unseren Koffern. Bei der rollenden Gummiband stehen wir, da mit den Anderen. Schlafentzugt, nikotinhungrig, erschöpft, als die Koffern uns vorbei langsam rollen. 21

The narrative voice, identified with the protagonist of the episode, unmistakably uses German language; yet at the same time it is far from the standard variety of German taught in schools that is characteristic of literary texts. This use of a German informed and inflected by other languages and therefore constitutively multilingual was at the centre of the jury's discussion. More than anything, much more than the text's plot or its formal aspects, the discussion turned out to be about the status of this particular 'broken German' – and the status of its speaker, the author Tomer Gardi, who was always present. In this context, one of the jury members reflects:

Figure 19. Stills from the television broadcast of the Bachmann prize. Source: ORF/3Sat.

Engl. Translation: …first of all, I'm not sure, whether or not he speaks German, we didn't… [talk to each other]. At this point, Gardi intervenes with a direct answer, something very unusual at the Prize. The camera turns around, as he repeats: 'I speak German, yes, hello!'

<sup>21</sup> The videos as well as a pdf file of Gardi's text can be found online at bachmannpreis.orf.at/stories/2773156/. Latest download November 30th, 2018.

It is important to note that the jury member's argumentation is not one of deliberate exclusion, nor is it driven by nationalist sentiment. Quite the opposite, in the still resonating context of the 2015 summer of migration and its media coverage, all contributions to the discussion can be regarded as advanced liberal positions. These positions are informed by poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques of traditional Western categories such as the nation or the author subject. As one of the jury members was quick to reflect, their quest for the author's linguistic competences proved to be quite at odds with some of the staples of this critical discourse: The deconstruction of the author, the concentration on the text's dynamics and the rejection of a naturalized 'national literature'. Yet, by introducing himself to the jury and the TV cameras, Tomer Gardi still manages to irritate this discourse and thereby responds to the elephant in the room.

If it is indeed obvious that the author reads, writes, and speaks German – how else could he participate in the Prize? – Gardi's intervention brings to the fore that knowledge about the type of relationship towards the language of literature is highly relevant for the process of evaluation. This type of relationship can be situated in the normative framework of what Yasemin Yildiz has called the "monolingual paradigm" (2012). Following Benedict Anderson's seminal study on how the development and spread of print led to an "imagined community" (1991) of writers and speakers of the same language, the monolingual paradigm describes the naturalisation of the relationship between language and nation in the field of modern literature. At the time the literary field reached a 'relative autonomy' (Bourdieu 1995), literary authorship was deeply tied to the ideas of the 'mother tongue' and a 'national literature', thereby forming an "affective know" (Yildiz 2012: 10). Romanticism's idea of a male original author-genius worked in conjunction with the autonomy of art and that of the nation state, and formed a powerfully prevailing standard configuration for the production and evaluation of literature. The indicated relationship between author and language here is one of sovereignty: For texts to be valorised as 'literature', and writers to be regarded as 'original authors', the perceived 'mastery' of one's 'mother tongue' establishes itself as the very precondition.

In 2016, however, the jury's rather uncomfortable discourse showed that the monolingual norm had been problematized, since, the jury members were influenced by critical theory's deconstruction and rejection of monolingualism's categories and dichotomies. Certain jury members' discussion about the impact of 'the postcolonial' on European literature also attests to that influence, although it was awkwardly out of place in the case of Gardi, who was born in a Kibbutz at the Lebanese border and later moved with his parents to Vienna. Simply put, in 2016 national belonging and the sovereign mastery of an author's 'mother tongue' could not be mobilised as criteria for critical assessment of literature quite so easily.

Yet, monolingual affect still played a decisive role in the jury's discussion. This becomes especially evident when looking at how Gardi's text is contextualised in the canonic literary tradition. Many avant-garde texts have purposefully 'broken' or 'played with' the rules of German grammar and syntax, introduced neologisms and unfolded an aesthetics of estrangement of the sort mentioned above. Some commentators were quick to link Gardi's writing to that tradition, describing his discourse as a *Kunstsprache* (art language). Defending Gardi against those who reject his text for its deviance from standard German may be benevolent. Yet the *Kunstsprache*-argumentation cannot cease to reproduce a particular binary of aesthetic judgment and its temporal structure. In this evaluative framework, mastering the rules, understood as something an author 'naturally' does, precedes the artist's transgression, which is only ever valorised after the fact Ascertaining whether or not Gardi masters German 'as a native' became quintessential information for the jury. The difference between the 'natural mastery' of one's 'mother tongue' on the one hand, and the sovereign alteration and transgression of the rules on the other hand, emerges as the sine qua non distinction for passing aesthetic judgment.

To sum it up in simple terms: The old adage that one must first master the rules to be able to break or play with them' haunts the discussion at the Bachmann Prize. The norm to 'master the rules of language' stays implicit. Yet as the elephant in the room, the presence of monolingual affect has deep political implications. If one can only ever become the master of one's 'mother tongue', literary authorship in a particular language is then the privilege of 'native speakers'. The imagined community of the nation thus is tightly linked to the notion of sovereign authorship. The jury's inability to form an aesthetic judgment is due to the fact that this connection is contested today. Their impasse therefore expresses a double bind: On the one hand, after the critical deconstruction of the categories which traditionally underlie literary criticism, and which centred on the notion of sovereignty, a justification of aesthetic value in terms of autonomy and national belonging is out of the question. Yet, on the other hand, determining the very nature of the author's relationship to language still proves crucial for making an aesthetic judgment. To envision – or better, to sense and feel – this relationship as one of sovereignty adheres to the same normative framework that was deconstructed. The jury's debate about whether or not Gardi 'masters' German is indeed a moratorium on whether he qualifies as an author of literary texts in the prestigious avant-garde tradition. As such, the Gardi case vividly captures the persistence of the politics of monolingualism at the beginning of the 21st century, and their ongoing affect on the processes of aesthetic valorisation.

If this first case study revolves around the affective and political preconditions as well as implications of withholding aesthetic judgment, the second example aims at demonstrating how the activity of making judgments is bound up with the emergence of different, and often conflicting, public spheres. Taking the experience of cinematic images as its subject, it analyses how aesthetic judgment connects processes of affective exchange between bodies to the circulation of ideologies and world-views in political discourse. Finally, the contribution inquires into the status of the political for a society that is construed, theoretically, as an "affective society".

#### **ON THE POLITICAL POTENTIAL OF AESTHETIC JUDGMENT**

If one posits the political problem of living together in terms of affective relationality, it follows that our conception of the function of public discourse has to be reformulated. If one wants to leave behind easy dichotomies between rational and emotional (that is, irrational) exchange, discourse cannot be treated exclusively in terms of a more or less accurate representation of facts. Instead, one has to take into account its affective dimensions, its power to move and agitate people and to transform opinions. This provokes questions like the following: How are the fantasies and images generated that drive the affective dynamics of public discourse? And what role do media, especially cinema and television, play in this regard? This section will be concerned with outlining the interplay between discourses on migration and the production of audiovisual images in the case of the so-called "Turkish German cinema". It aims to show, in exemplary fashion, how the relations between discourse and images are produced in a plurality of different competing and conflicting publics where affectively charged encounters between cinematic movement-images and socioculturally situated practices of perceiving these images take place.

The emergence of these relations can be understood as a practice of making aesthetic judgments. One can argue that aesthetic judgment and taste are insufficiently understood if taken only in their function to (re-)produce social distinctions. Instead, the "aesthetic disposition" (Bourdieu 1984) that manifests itself in judgments has a genuine political purpose: it makes visible the fact that cinematic images (or other works of art) are not self-evidently "readable" in a commonly shared manner. Rather, the way audiovisual images intervene into the affective dynamics of a society depends on practices of seeing and hearing (cf. Goodwin 1994), which in turn contribute to the establishment of potentially very diverse kinds of communities and publics.

The public and academic debates around the TV film *Rage* (German: *Wut*, Züli Aladağ 2006) are exemplary for what can be called the discursive production of "Turkish German cinema". The film deals with a violent conflict between Can, a young Turk living in Germany, and the members of a bourgeois German family, ending in the German father's killing of Can. The film's broadcast on television was initially postponed when critics on the left denounced it as racist. Soon, conservative politicians demanded the decision be reversed, as the "truth has a right to be shown" (Prager 2012: 109) – meaning the "truth" that there is a danger emanating from young migrants in Germany. Eventually, the film was broadcast at a later hour, accompanied by a talk show discussing the problem of young criminal migrants. To counter these various acts of discursive usurpation, academic debate on the film has insisted on the complexity of its staging and has claimed that it critiques "both sides": the criminal Can and the family he attacks (cf. Berghahn 2009; Prager 2012; Güneli 2013; Figge 2016).

But the problem remains: in the face of strong conservative support for the film's supposed "message" (migrant youth represent a serious social problem), it appears unsatisfactory to defend the film against the accusation of racism, no matter how legitimate this defence may be. Both alternatives (affirmation or critique of the film) seem to lead to misunderstanding: both impose a reading that unduly objectifies the movement-images of the film to extract a statement about society, whether this statement is understood as progressive or as reactionary. This dilemma, one might argue, is inherent in the term "Turkish German cinema" itself, as this term groups together films based on the ethnicity either of their makers or of the fictional characters represented in them. As soon as this paradigm of representation is introduced, the films can be judged in terms of how accurately they fulfil their supposed social function. How exactly does this dilemma come about and what are its driving forces?

Reading the film as "Turkish German Cinema" is intricately linked to the emergence of the dilemma of aesthetic judgment. In order to understand why one and the same film might give rise to so blatantly conflicting readings, and in order to gain insight into the political function of these readings, which are neither arbitrary nor simply expressions of ignorance or difference in opinion, it is helpful to briefly reflect on the way cinematic images (including films shown on TV) relate to the perceptual activity of spectators. Cinematic movement-images are far from artefacts. As Vivian Sobchack (1992) emphasizes, the experience of film consists in two interlocking acts of perception: one carried out visibly on the screen, one happening invisibly in the darkness of the auditorium. Hence, spectators do not only relate to the world they see and hear before them, but always also to the manner in which this world appears. Spectators do not surrender passively to what they see and hear but rather actively embody the way the fictional world unfolds before their eyes and ears. Their perception is being stylized according to the manner in which the cinematic images realize a specific way of being-in-the-world.

Still, in order for a film experience to emerge, it is not enough for spectators to become affectively involved in a composition of expressive registers (light, colours, sounds, movement, dialogue, textures, etc.). In the course of being affected by what they are seeing and hearing, they develop a feeling for their own bodily involvement. It is on this level that something like the feeling of sharing a common world may emerge – a sense that one is not alone in perceiving the world in this specific way. With reference to Richard Rorty (who in turn refers to Kant's idea of a *sensus communis*), this feeling can be understood as a "sense of commonality" (Rorty 1998: 101). It is also on this level that the concept of aesthetic judgment can be introduced – with the *sensus communis* referring to a public sphere at which a judgment like "this is beautiful", or "this feels wrong" is aiming. Such a statement only makes sense if it is addressed to others, who are presumed to share the same world with the one who is rendering the judgment. In this perspective the cinematic movement-image can be understood as a matrix for processes of community-building (cf. Kappelhoff 2018).

The *sensus communis*, as Hannah Arendt emphasizes in her interpretation of Kant, is not simply common sense understood as sound reasoning. It is rather "an extra sense – like an extra mental capability […] – that fits us into a community. […] The *sensus communis* is the specifically human sense because communication, i.e., speech, depends on it" (Arendt 1992: 70). On the basis of the *sensus communis*, all individuals in their physical and sensory existence gain access to a commonly shared world through an individual subjective sensibility. Thus, following Arendt, the political does not begin with factual problems and differences (such as the distinction between rational and irrational), but rather with the possibility of living together at all. This position corresponds well to the project of our essay as a whole, namely, to question some of the binary distinctions introduced customarily into the study of politics and affect. According to Arendt, the core of the political does not lie in actions, but rather in that public sphere to which these actions refer, a sphere that gives every action space and meaning (cf. Grotkopp 2017: 59–60). It is in this sphere that actions (as well as works of art) become visible in the first place.

As Arendt emphasizes, works of art depend for their existence on being accessible to communication – on expressing something in terms that are "generally communicable" (Kant as quoted in Arendt 1992: 63). This communication is nothing other than the realm of public discourse constituted by the activity of judgment. Since this judgment always implies others, spectators – who are rendering judgment – exist only in the plural. And the only thing these multiple spectators share is their ability to judge. The rendering of judgments (without prematurely equating political and aesthetic judgment), then, has to be regarded as a prerequisite for the emergence of a sense of commonality upon which a community can potentially be based. The encounter between audio-visual images and an audience can create a public sphere, in which a plurality of differing and potentially conflicting aesthetic judgments coalesce around a shared aesthetic experience.

What follows from this is that processes of community-building can easily come into conflict with each other. The example of *Rage* demonstrates this: competing descriptions of "one and the same" film as either racist, a bearer of truth, or a complex work of art, testifies to the coexistence of emphatically divergent ways to make sense of aesthetic experience. This divergence, in turn, corresponds to conflicting senses of commonality. The affective experience provided by a film's dramatic structure does not determine a specific reading of the film's narrative, let alone a political statement about the social relevance of depicted fictional events. The political potential of cinematic images therefore does not lie in the representation of more or less desirable models for living together. Rather, it lies in the way such models are experienced affectively and evaluated emotionally through aesthetic judgments. In this way, such models are made publicly accessible – and contestable. In the encounter between screen and audience, a (potentially public) space of experience emerges in which the film's manner of unfolding a fictional world is referred back to the concrete social and cultural circumstances in which the spectators' lived-bodies are situated.

The creation of such a space depends on an act of appropriation (de Certeau 1984), in which seemingly passive consumers take the products provided by an all-pervasive capitalist system to bring forth something that is potentially new. Such an appropriation can respond to the composition of affective intensities inherent in a film's staging; it can aim at emphasizing the plurality of perspectives offered by a film's poetic strategies; or it can attempt to highlight one specific perspective over several possible others. Such is the case with the label "Turkish German cinema" and with most approaches that operate within its discursive logic. This comprises not only those approaches that follow a more or less easily identifiable political agenda (left or right); also, the majority of academic discourse effectively works to objectify the cinematic movement-image by treating it as a text and making it say something. With the help of specific practices of "professional vision" (Goodwin 1994), sensory phenomena are made readable and utilizable for a number of purposes, not least of all the constitution of (professional, but also cultural and political) communities. This procedure of objectification involves arresting the image and evaluating it according to its represented content. This content may be a narrative (a young criminal Turk harassing a German family), a model of sociality (Güneli), or a structure of racism (Figge) – in each case, the act of actually perceiving these audiovisual movement-images and being affected by them is cancelled out and disappears from the analysis. Aesthetic judgment is transformed into the interpretation of a political message.

The term "Turkish German cinema" lends itself to projects that, wittingly or unwittingly, enforce a certain idea about what the reality of Turkish-German social relations looks like, and how it should (or should not) be shown on the screen. However, defending a film like *Rage* against the charge of racism by demonstrating its aesthetic complexity can only serve to reinstate the divide between a supposedly enlightened academic discourse and the public sphere. This approach is doomed to fail because it misunderstands the nature of the public sphere as a rational exchange of arguments – which is precisely the model we aim to challenge with our collection of vignettes. Such an approach does not recognize that the cinematic image does not harbour a definite truth but depends on being affectively embodied and appropriated by spectators.

In contrast to this stance, focusing on the affective basis of aesthetic judgment suspends the objectification of cinematic movement-images and makes it possible to consider their unique way of shaping our fantasies: by addressing us not only as cultural and social beings, but at the same time as bodies that affect and can be affected. An analysis based on this principle will focus on the way cinematic images become entangled with diverse media practices of appropriation and objectification. These practices can themselves be describes as affective, as they not only rely on the embodiment of affective intensities but also aim to evoke feelings of outrage, approval, fear, or pleasure. From this perspective, the activity of making aesthetic judgments does not only fulfil the function of (re-) producing social distinctions. It also points to the multiple and often contradictory ways through which people inhabit shared worlds and make sense of their experience. Reducing it to the first function would ignore the affective potential – the potential for creating something unforeseeable – inherent in the encounter between screen and audience.

The affective navigation of felt contradictions – that is, the activity of rendering judgments – is relevant not only with regard to works of art. Moreover, it becomes political not only in the form of a pronounced conflict between different communities. As the next section shows, the case of religious communities provides a powerful medium for the negotiation of affective dissonances. Organized religion offers not only advice on preferred attitudes towards the world, but also a set of affective practices through which these attitudes might be embodied and shared.

### **DOING JUSTICE TO GOD AND THE WORLD – A SHIA RITUAL IN CONFLICT**

A young Shia sheik is about to finish his sermon. He was talking about the emotional challenges and duties that those who are well-off face towards the existence of others living in dire poverty. He then starts to read out one of the traditional stories about Imam Hussein, prophet Mohammad´s grandson who died in the year 680 for his faith in the battle of Karbala (today Iraq). The story is sad, but also inspiring for recounting acts of adamant faith and sacrifice in light of domination and oppression. This brings the sheik to conclude and emphasize how important stories like these are to bind the Shia community together emotionally. He then starts to sing in Arabic, his community joins in and they say a prayer together. Now the traditional lamentation of *Matam* starts. Around fifty young women and men dressed in dark clothing stand up. A man comes to the front and starts to sing a song of lament in Farsi. The community again joins him in soft tones striking their right fist or flat hand on their chests. The room fills with the muffled rhythm of the chest-beating, the wailing melody, and timid sights of moaning, accompanied by gently moving bodies.

This is a scene from a young urban and multicultural Shia community in New York City that observes one of their most important rituals: the ten-day long *Muharram*. As any other religious ritual, enacting the *Muharram* not only means reproducing a symbolically rich and long-standing narrative. It also means working towards specific emotional experiences. In the case of the *Muharram* this traditionally is the commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, and comprises a multi-layered repertoire of emotions: from mourning loss and praising God, to cultivating the strength to fight injustices.

But what happens now if – as in this case – a young urban Shia-American community tries to intertwine and connect this age-old emotional repertoire of commemoration with contemporary economic inequality? One might be inclined to think that from felt injustices in the past it is a rather short and easy path to a staunch critique on the widening socio-economic gap in the present. But, as this case study will show, in this community, performing the *Muharram* under the topic of economic inequality rather gives rise to an interactional dramaturgy of emotional conflict and contradiction – ultimately hindering the community from articulating economic inequality as a blatant injustice of contemporary society that requires action.

The community is part of an inter-religious centre for Muslim encounters at a New York university. In contrast to many ethnically organized Muslim communities in the city, the centre practices and cherishes a multicultural and inclusive approach to community service. Members come from a vast variety of ethnic, confessional, national and linguistic background. Being students or young professionals from a middle to upper-middle class background, most of them are first- or second-generation Muslims with South Asian migration background. By constantly trying to connect the Islamic traditions with everyday experiences, the centre also aims at building a community for young Muslims that enables them to experience their religion as part of American culture – an understanding many young American Muslims struggle with due to discrimination in post 9/11 America (Kabir 2014; O'Brien 2017). So even though the imam and most members are Sunni, the centre also serves to a significant Shia community, giving them the opportunity to observe their Shia specific rituals such as the *Muharram*.

The *Muharram* goes back to the so-called *Battle of Karbala* in the year 680 AD. For many, this battle also marks the definitive break between Shiites and Sunnis of Islam. In the battle was an encounter between the two concurring parties of the right to succeed the prophet Mohammad. Within ten days, the far more powerful second caliph of the Umayyad dynasty Yazid I killed prophet Mohammad's grandson Imam Hussein together with his family and companions. Both Sunnis and Shiites regard the dead as martyrs. But since Shiites consider Imam Hussein as the legitimate successor to Prophet Mohammad, the battle and its subsequent narratives play a far more central and tragic role in Shia history.

Shia Muslims traditionally commemorate the tragedy of Karbala each year at the first ten days of the Islamic month of *Muharram* culminating on its tenth day in the *Day of Ashura*. In this American student community, observing the *Muharram* means gathering for these ten days in the evening hours for around four to five hours. Following the bottom-up approach of the centre, the ritual is organized from members for members. This way, they aspire to create an experimental, inclusive and participatory observance of the *Muharram*, adapting and embedding the traditional elements of the ritual to the American and multicultural setting of the community. For example, in order to really affect the community members, they perform most of the practices of the commemorations in English. At the same time, some recitations remain in Arabic and members can use other languages for their contributions such as Farsi, Urdu or Hindi.

Traditionally, the *Muharram* involves several different practices. Besides the acts of collective praying and mourning, a major part of the ritual is also reserved for aesthetic and artistic performances. These commonly include big public processions, theatre plays and recitations of poems that display and recount the tragedy of Karbala. The New York community follows this idea at the beginning of their gatherings. Members recite traditional poems, but also share self-written poems and other reflections about how the *Muharram* informs their lives today. Furthermore, the ritual also serves to transmit and debate religious knowledge. To follow this tradition and to keep up with the experimental and participatory aspiration, the New York community chooses to hold the *Muharram* each year in light of a specific topic. Each year they invite a different Islamic clergyman who gives a series of sermons on a chosen topic and discusses it with the members. That year they invited a young American Shia scholar who suggested to observe the ritual in the light of "poverty – a challenge for humanity" – a topic whose socio-political dimension is readily apparent. The question arises: How does the community enact both the narrative of Muharram and find an answer to this "challenge of humanity"?

During the ten days, an unequal world emerged as part of recounting the stories of the *Muharram*, from Shia theological reflections as well as from the community member's own experience on economic privilege and poverty. Some members, like Cecilia, a young Hispanic-American convert, included inequality in their artistic contributions. In Cecilia's self-written poem she compared the "revolutionary personalities" of Che Guevara and Imam Hussein and explained how both talk to her "revolutionary heart" for their unconditional commitment to justice. Che Guevara worked against various forms of "isms, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism", whereas Iman Hussein together with his companions proved tremendous courage to fight for the cause of god against a giant regime of oppression. But whereas Che Guevara only saw this world, Imam Hussein's fight for justice was ultimately motivated by his "love" for "Allah" and thus intensified this "lucha" by adding a transcendental spirit to it. Referring to Che Guevara and connecting his legacy to the symbols of the Muharram, Cecilia evoked ideas such as solidarity with the poor, equality and radical social change, and filled the room with a semantic of revolution, indignation, and injustice as well as a call for action.

Most important were, however, the lectures from the sheik. Every day he illuminated a different theological aspect of economic inequality which then became the basis for follow-up discussions and chats during dinner time. The sheik also contributed to an affection of injustice and indignation towards inequality. Being foremost governed by this-worldly and un-Islamic principles, he said, egoism and materialism would cause a tremendous suffering both for rich people who suffer from empty hearts and for the poor who struggle with hardship. Several times, the sheik called for action. Muslims would have a religious duty to give, he reminded the audience. This would entail alm-giving (*zakat*) and cultivating compassion for the poor.

At one point, Karim, a young Shia student from the centre, shared his thoughts and feelings:

I don´t know… it´s just so horrifying to see all the suffering in the world, when I am back in India, you see the kids on the streets, … in lumps, … but also here in America, such a wealthy nation, but … how to deal with all the beggars? Working families buying their dinner with food stamps. ... I mean… […] we as Muslims praise giving. But also, where is God, … I don´t know.

Karim expressed his negative emotions in the face of suffering, which he recognizes in either bodily exposure to scarcity or an unworthy standard of living in a wealthy context. He further raised the question of responsibility to act and connected it with the Muslim practice of distribution. Articulating an unequal world as an injustice meant for the community to acknowledge at one point that the world was imperfect, to identify power relations and violated norms, and to address responsibility. This also filled the ritual with negative feelings about the world, such as anger, frustration or despair for the felt injustice. However, Karim ended his reflection with: "Where is God, ... I don´t know." This points to an orientation which was also present during the ritual and which encompassed emotions, ideas and norms about the world that thwarted the indignation. For example, even though the sheik condemned the current state of the world, he, at the same time, presented theological ideas that relativized inequality as unjust. For instance, he said that an ideal Islamic order also knows inequality: "Poor and rich are both people of God. The goal is never equality, as for example in socialism."

Furthermore, notions of God as almighty and merciful were also important symbols during the ritual, but they attenuated the negative feelings towards the world. At one point the sheik said:

We cannot always see the wisdom in [the hardship of poverty]. But we know: He is allpowerful and all-merciful. He is all-wise. So, if he has chosen to cause some pain, then I should try to understand it.

God is almighty because everything derives ultimately from him, including the inequality. And he is merciful, because he loves his creation and thus ultimately everybody can experience God´s love and mercy if he or she only follows the path of god. But seen from this perspective, inequality turns from an issue of injustice to a foremost spiritual challenge. Thus, engaging in the unequal world was for the community constantly connected with praising God in his almightiness and mercifulness, and focusing on the spiritual connection to him. This orientation towards God also brought with it a different set of feelings. Anger, indignation or despair were then not righteous emotions towards God's creation. Instead, love, acceptance and cultivating spirituality appeared as ways to engage salvation in the hereafter. In this effort, however, lay a different affective mode, one of reconciliation and accepting the conditions for what they are; that is, a zeal to cultivate a positive attitude towards the world, being compassionate, thankful and fulfilling the religious duty of giving according to one's social standing in the world. The sheik concluded: "We have the choice to become [these] spiritual people. That is the goal. God's system is not unbalanced. Social justice is important, but more important is to become godly, spiritual people. Our goal is to become godly people".

How to think and feel about inequality as a Shia? How does the faith require action in an American context? Many times in Shia history, the justice-sensitive ideas of the *Muharram* have played a role in political strategies (Aghaie 2004). But this small community of Shia Americans hesitated to perform the *Muharram* as a collective affective moment of injustice towards inequality. Interactive situations are multi-vocal and complex. In that sense, a gathering like the Muharram can never be reduced to one specific collective meaning, emotion or problem that produces social order and coordination (Goffman 1964). However, concentrating here on the political and its interplay with affect and emotions, our suggestion is to recognize how engaging inequality through both the prism of social justice and a spiritual relation to God, made this ritual an ambivalent one: On the one hand, a collective expression of indignation and unease and, on the other hand, one of love, gracefulness and reconciliation with the world. A consequence of doing justice to both orientations and affective modes ultimately hindered the community from expressing a clear-cut judgment on economic inequality as an insupportable injustice.

This collective incapacity or dilemma of two rather contradictory emotional regimes is known as the problem of theodicy, and lies at the heart of many religious traditions: How can suffering happen if God is good and almighty? In explaining this dilemma, an urban Shia American community is likely to have more mechanisms in play than this theological problem. It is also likely that the overall individualistic culture (Bellah et al. 1996) or the fact of being a discriminated minority (Grewal 2013) may prevent the community from wanting to sound too political. A missing voice of injustice might also have to do with class and one's own privileges. However, ultimately, this ambivalent discourse hindered the community from creating a moral and affective common ground for collective action.

This account shows how a multitude of subtle emotions, idealized norms, as well as perceptions of the world may create contradicting or parallel voices, symbols, and orientations that block a straightforward judgment on a political matter. However, such collective expressions should not be condemned as 'irrational', even less so due to their religious dimension. It appears more appropriate to us to read these observations and interpretations of the Muharram as a common everyday struggle to bring affect and ideas to awareness and to find the right words and vocabularies. It proves the multi-layeredness of affective engagements with the world, and thus of the political itself – which sometimes comes with conflict, speechlessness or contradiction.

#### **THE AFFECTIVE IMPULSE TO PROTEST**

Social movements theorists often take for granted the assumption that political protests result from rational grievances that translate into people's readiness to engage in such movements. Even when studying the role of emotions in protest movements, they often rationalize these affective and emotional dynamics (Gould 2009). In juxtaposition, activists often describe their participation in such protest movements as affective impulses. Following an affective societies approach to the political, an understanding of how reason and affect work together is needed in order to view the protestor not only as a rational actor but also as a thinking, sensing, feeling and remembering being. This could help in examining how reason and affect intertwine in processes of politicization, and opens up a new way of thinking about the seemingly sudden political impulse to participate in a protest, especially under authoritarian regimes where organized political action is not always possible.

The following is a data excerpt from an Egyptian activist detailing the moment when he first heard the chants of protestors and decided to join the mass protests of 25th of January 2011.

I woke up to the sound of many people shouting as one. Not shouting but chanting, a very strong chant. A chant I have not heard before. I did not know what they were saying exactly, but of course, I knew what they wanted. I felt my entire body shaking and I was moved. Their sound was as beautiful as the call for Eid prayers. But with Eid prayers, you can get lazy and miss it but going down this time was mandatory. It was the fastest I would ever jump out of bed and maybe the happiest. In a blink, I was jumping out of bed looking out of the window at the people and opening my closet to grab something to wear. I opened the closet and stood there, what should I wear? I do not have revolutionary clothes… I put on my clothes and ran to the door… My mom stopped me: "S. do not hurt yourself, you know how much I need you". I promised her not to get hurt but I did not know if I would be able to keep that promise… I went down.

What makes one jump out of bed to participate in a protest? What makes one run towards danger and not away from it? How much rational thinking was involved in this decision? There is definitely sensing (hearing the chant), feeling (moved by the chanting), a corporeal reaction (his body shaking), remembering (the sound of Eid prayers), knowing (what the people want even if he cannot understand exactly what they are saying) and a momentarily decision to act (he jumped out of bed and went down). This is just a sample of many other narratives that describe the decision to join the mass protests as an 'impulse'. An impulse that we are not able to fully comprehend, but which was nevertheless experienced as 'rational', even 'logical'. Below is another quote from a protestor that highlights the interplay between rationality and emotionality during the protests.

Taking to the streets was an impulse. I was there and I saw it and I understood the logic behind it. Those were people who were facing death fearlessly. It's like you did some sort of filtration and put the most decent people together in one place and gave them high hopes, empowerment and collective hope and that affected those around them as well. I do not think of this as romanticizing; it was pure logic. If a social experiment was conducted where this was all repeated, they will definitely create a Utopia. For me, there were magical moments. But it was also logical. People didn't take to the streets to demand the downfall of the regime, but then someone started chanting and everyone joined in the chants. People were collectively encouraging and empowering each other. And of course, the courage of one individual is different from that of 10 people. Ten individual cowards can walk together then suddenly together they become very courageous. At the beginning, we really didn't know what will happen. There were no guarantees to our safety of any kind. Afterwards, when the danger and threat of gatherings and sit-ins being attacked or dispersed passed, everything was different from how it was during the 18 days. People took to the streets and found safety in being together.

The central question becomes: What makes one run away from or towards action? One thinks, senses, feels and acts, and sometimes concurrently. However, what if one, drawing from one's memory and relevant pool of information, does not have the corresponding association? It is sensible to assume that one simply would not move. To be clear, the argument is not about the ignorant masses who only need to be educated to move. Rather, the point is that not everyone can see the car (sense); and even if they do, they do not necessarily feel the same way about it (danger); and even if they do, they might think and act differently based on their memories and varying pools of information. The protestors saw the car, but they did not walk away; rather, they walked right towards it. Perhaps this was the case because they perceived a greater danger (Mubarak's regime), or because they were simply called to action drawing from their memories and relevant pools of information, realizing that this was the opportunity and that they needed to act. All happened within an instance. The protestors saw the car coming and acted intuitively, not irrationally, but beyond reflected reason. This is what makes political uprisings so unpredictable, especially under authoritarian regimes where organized actions are suppressed.

This is not at all meant to suggest that a political impulse is a sudden relapse of judgment. The following is a narrative about a march of protestors who had to travel from one governorate to Cairo to join the revolution. Some of them have never left their villages before; some of them did not even know where Tahrir square is.

While we were trying to enter Cairo, the roads were blocked, so we were dropped off by the exit of the ring road. Someone asked where we were going and if we were going to Tahrir Square. Most people answered that they were heading there and there was a suggestion that we should go there in a march. And indeed a march started from there until Shubra metro station. We took the subway until Sadat metro station. A lot of people did not know Tahrir Square; they went there for the sake of the revolution, they didn't normally go there or go to Cairo in the first place.

These excerpts indicate that the temporality of the political impulse to act is variable. It could be a momentary impulse, or it could motivate actors to move beyond all obstacles and fears to participate in political action. It all depends on the intensity of the moment and, as the excerpts have also shown, on the relational dynamics of the collective.

Hence, there is a need for an understanding of political impulses that goes beyond rational thinking, and that can help us learn more about political action. We need to take into consideration that the political actor is not just a rational agent, but a thinking, sensing, feeling and remembering being. Moreover, we need to account for the crucial role context and memory play in informing our political decisions. This allows us to see the constitutive contextuality and temporality of an impulse, which is central in explaining the unpredictability of political uprisings.

\*\*\*

The felt quality of norms is part of their affective power; it is how they become entrenched and internalized. Therefore, contesting hegemonic norms can be a painful process: One might reject norms with which one disagrees on an affective level, at times without rationalizing the process. In this context, emotions might be an emancipatory tool forms contest dominant norms, and affective, bodily sensations might form the foundation of collective political action. At the same time, however, emotions might be used as a way to regulate and enforce norms. For instance, shaming can be an effective tool to oust those who do not adhere to social norms. The interplay between emotions, affect and norms is part and parcel of their creation, perpetuation, subversion, and contestation. Affect, emotions and norms can constitute and reinforce one another, or affect and emotions can be used as a tool to dismantle normative frameworks or to recreate new ones with different affective entanglements.

Starting this chapter with a second look at the binary opposition between normativity and affect that informs some powerful traditions in social theory and critique, our contributions inquired into these messy and sometimes rather subtle entanglements. In this sense, we understand the practices of judgment and contestation, which were at the centre of these analyses, as practices that attempt to make sense of these entanglements. This should not be reduced to purely rational or discursive reactions, however, as if sense would exclusively refer to a rational operation after affect. Instead, to sense a situation or to get a feeling for something from the start involves the negotiation of norms. Feeling one's way, in this regard, implies a complex dynamic of sense-making; it might mean to enact normativity, to silently struggle with it, or to affectively reflect upon it.

The affective life of norms appeared in various ways throughout this chapter. In the case of monolingual affect, it made itself felt as an elephant in the room; something actors could not quite put a finger on or articulate, but which nevertheless made its normative force felt in the discussion. In fact, this feeling provided a structuring element for the negotiation of aesthetic value. In our theoretical argument, judgment also figured as a way of forming communities through aesthetic experience. The case of "Turkish German cinema", however, showed how the politics of labelling and the polarized public discussion about migration foreclose these situations of aesthetic experience. Instead, making sense here implies discursive frameworks of identity and tries to align judgments accordingly. This is an example of how the aesthetic dimension of judgment, which might assemble heterogeneous communities of taste, might also become effectively disentangled from the workings of normativity. In a similar way, the Shia ritual of Muharram also entailed a fraught relation between affective experience and discursive articulation: Here, it was rather the case that strong normative claims – claims of social critique in a particular vocabulary – were not made due to the actor's conflicting affective engagement with the normative frameworks of religion and social justice. Whereas the affective practices of contestation and critique, in this regard, lie in the shared experience of this negotiation and its complex sense of community, contestation and protest can also have a more impulsive side. The impulse to protest, in the case of the Egyptian activist, was crucially involved in lifting bodies up and getting them on the streets, thereby making a strong case for the visceral and material dimensions of normativity.

Coming back to the politics of affective societies, our reflections on the affective life of norms, despite their very different foci, have something in common. They are all inquiries into that which is not yet articulated, which is somehow foreclosed or unfolds a ghostly presence. As such, they locate politics and the political within the social practices of judgment and contestation, and in their relation to normativity. Our argument attends to the messiness and unevenness of these relations, to the attempts at making sense and to how sense can be imposed on a situation. These foci are highly relevant to the diagnoses of contemporary crisis discussed in the introduction. Rather than focussing on the notion of an increase in the intensity of affect, as if it could be located on a quantitative scale, our aim was to inquire into the various qualities of affect as a form of relation – a relation that always implies a political dimension.

This includes a good deal of elaborate silence, of non-articulation or of sensed, rather than well-defined obligations. Simply put: The affectivity and messiness of norms is not something positive, as the traditional juxtaposition between 'norms' and 'feelings' might imply. Likewise, it has not been our attempt to debunk the workings of normativity by showing that, behind its orderly appearance (Weber's "steel-hard casing"), normativity would prove to be affective and lively. This would reinstate the model of critique that favours 'affective life' over 'non-emotional norms'. Just as we are skeptical towards the crisis-diagnosis of a dramatic increase of affect, and would rather look for a change in quality, a change in ways of making sense, with regards to the politics of affective societies, we are also cautious of this post-romantic model. After all, the cases in this chapter show that it is exactly their 'affective life' that makes norms so pervasive and powerful. This goes for monolingualism just as it goes for solidarity.

# **5. Conclusions**

Affective Societies and the Political

We are now in a position to address the popular diagnosis which holds that the political realm is currently experiencing a sharp rise in affect and emotionality. As stated in the introduction, we agree that significant changes are transpiring that require further investigation. In this sense, we consider the ever-growing scholarly literature and media discourse on the current crisis of liberal democracy to be justified. It is justified as an indicator for the widespread experience of rapid transformations impacting many aspects of everyday life. For instance, the pressing questions of climate change and global warming are not only an urgent environmental problem but also an economic one, with implications for the wellbeing – and even the existence – of human civilization. Recent technological advancements in robotics and automation threaten low-wage, unqualified labour, while neoliberal work models render the middle classes increasingly precarious. Internet and social media are accelerating our capacity to gather private information, making it very easy to effectively control populations. Current democracies appear illequipped to respond to these challenges. Moreover, they do not adequately recognize new forms of identification and belonging, and have thus been unable to fulfill the demands of identity politics for new subjectivities. These developments have surely contributed to the rise of authoritarian nationalisms in the USA, Europe, Turkey, Brazil, the Philippines and many other countries. While the discourse on the current crisis of democracy is an important indicator of these shifts, it has not satisfactorily diagnosed the nature of the crisis and the socio-economictechnological transformations that underlie it.

To be sure, we are not in a position to fare any better in accounting for the complexity of current developments. Our case studies do not qualify us to provide a general diagnosis of current transformations, not even on the changing role of affect and emotions in the political realm. Our studies are widely scattered across different social, political and cultural contexts, both within and beyond Western liberal democracies, and it is impossible to say whether they point to a general, globally aligned affective shift in the political. Moreover, our case studies lack the historical depth and magnitude necessary for developing hypotheses about historic changes in the affective and emotional composition of the political realm.

Fortunately, generating such hypotheses was not the aim of our endeavour. On the contrary, the key idea of affective societies guiding our project opposes striving for such grand theory. Instead, it provides reasons to be skeptical that a comprehensive, all-encompassing picture of current socio-political, economic, and technological transformations can be given, and it urges caution about easy explanations for complex and multidimensional dynamics. However, that does not mean that the perspective we are advancing is without theoretical consequences or explanatory power. In this conclusion, we summarize what an affective societies perspective on the political implies in terms of an ontology, an epistemology, and an ethics of the political.

#### **ON ONTOLOGY**

The idea of affective societies provides a framework for thinking about the social and the political in terms of affective relationality. The claim that interactive dynamics of affecting and being affected form the core of all socio-material relations allows us to see that politics and the political have always been affective, and necessarily so. However, we do not seek to formulate a metaphysics of affect (Massumi 2002, Thrift 2008). The aim of our research is not to establish yet another grand theory, this time about affective politics. Rather, it is to introduce a plurality of disciplinary perspectives on research about a subject that is itself plural and multiple to the highest degree. The theoretical approach that we adopted and carved out in the course of our inquiries, what we called the 'affective societies perspective', is rather ill-suited for grand theory. It provides a 'thin theory' of the social. It is precisely this modest social theory that compelled our cautious stance with regard to the diagnosis that what we are witnessing in current politics is an increase in affect. Rather than offering such a grand theory, we set out to inquire into some empirical cases that necessarily provide a limited epistemological scope. This corresponds with our proposition that research on affect and emotion should always proceed from a plurality of affective modes. Indeed, this plurality extends not only synchronously across and within cultures, but also diachronically through history.

An affective societies perspective on the political allows us to examine how affective dynamics open political spaces, structure them in ambiguous and conflictual fashions, and close them again by channelling political decisions which, themselves, are always normative and capable of leading to political action. In chapter 2, we showed that publics are made by drawing on affective dynamics and eliciting emotions. In chapter 3, we focused on the (often implicit) negotiation processes that those political publics entail. We showed that such processes involve a range of ambiguous emotional registers, making it impossible to distinguish a priori between political and a-political, progressive and reactionary, or 'good' and 'bad' emotions. In chapter 4, we highlighted the connections between affectivity and normativity that such processes of public negotiation imply. These connections point directly to how the problem of living together is framed discursively and experientially. This interplay depends on and registers all kinds of tendencies over a broad spectrum of social and cultural phenomena: the news cycle of network TV, internet, and newspapers; therapeutic interventions into the lives of individuals; the discourse on justice in the prosecution of war crimes; transformations in the poetics of genre cinema; the negotiation of behaviour in spiritual communities; or the everyday practices of child-rearing. In their very different ways, all these phenomena influence, or are influenced by, the development, articulation, or fixation of emotional repertoires. These repertoires, in turn, mediate the perspectives of individual actors.

#### **ON EPISTEMOLOGY**

Based on these thin ontological commitments and their relevance for our case studies, we are able to comment on the current crisis literature. Our general claim is that political processes have not become more emotional, nor will they ever become less affective. This is, of course, a theoretical claim that is based on our understanding of affect and emotions as co-constituting phenomena of all societies and social domains, including the political. Such a claim may not be very satisfying in itself, as it cannot be verified by our case studies. Nor does it shed light on the phenomenological fact that current political transformations in Western democracies are widely experienced as an increase in affect. Thus, we need to say more about the consequences of the affective societies approach in terms of social diagnostics.

While we cannot address this issue head-on, the core idea of affective societies allows us to reframe the question. Instead of examining the reasons and consequences of an alleged affective intensification in the political realm, we propose to pursue the following question: Can we locate any shifts in the political workings of affects and emotions that may explain this perception of the political as increasingly affectively charged? We do not believe that taking this rise for granted helps elucidate what these shifts are or how they operate; on the contrary. Rather, we suggest focusing the attention on current developments, such as the emergence of new modes of affectivity and emotional communication that transgress the common, well established feeling rules (Hochschild 1983) that govern the emotional repertoire of the political realm. Because these new modes differ from what is considered the normal workings of politics, they attract special attention and are experienced as particularly forceful.

Thus, our affective societies perspective implies an epistemological thesis: Affect is usually experienced, or at least experienced most forcefully, when it is encountered as the 'affect of others'. When people experience society as increasingly affective, this is an indicator that affective relations and emotional repertoires are changing. Since affect is, so to speak, everywhere, it only becomes noticeable when its modalities shift. As long as modes of emotion and affect conform to established and expectable patterns of the political, they hardly enjoy any special attention. It is only when emotional and affective aspects of the political disrupt normative patterns that they come into view as affectivity and emotionality per se. In other words, the affective nature of the political makes itself manifest whenever a tension arises. Such tension may arise when one's contribution to society's wellbeing appears to be disregarded by others; it can creep up slowly in the act of reading while encountering an odd phrase; it may result from being disembedded from one's familiar surroundings. Whatever the case may be, such tension manifests affectively.

Several of our case studies demonstrate that certain modes of affect and emotion are perfectly compatible with the established vision of politics as a rational procedure, while others are not. Scientists, for example, may express enthusiasm about their research project, curiosity for their colleges' insights, excitement about their new findings or embarrassment about failures, without compromising the overall image of science as a rational undertaking. Furthermore, particular emotion concepts may already be infused with more or less political credibility. Indignation, for instance, which is sometimes characterized as rather disruptive, is frequently considered a 'good' or appropriate emotion, and is often even demonstrated by politicians themselves. For instance, in the context of a peaceful protest, few observers would consider the public expression of indignation as a problematic emotionalization, but rather as the normal working of a healthy liberal democracy. However, things would look rather different if emotions such as rage, resentment or even hatred were ascribed to the same protesters. Such an interpretation would most likely support the diagnosis that the political arena is overly emotionalized or affectively charged. Thus, emotions like indignation, which tends to be considered as justified or righteous anger, may appear to be compatible with deliberative political procedures without necessarily feeding into an impression of the political as unduly emotional. Other emotions, such as rage, resentment or hatred, are more readily understood in juxtaposition to rational political procedures, and thus may reinforce an image of the political realm as overly affectively charged.

However, it is crucial to consider the political and cultural context as well as the political and social positions of the involved actors. These contexts critically determine whether particular emotional manifestations are experienced as a general affective intensification or not. In some contexts, public indignation may be widely considered as a dangerous affective mobilization, while in others, rage and the threat of direct retribution may be part of normal political negotiations. A tendency that can often be observed is that one more easily ascribe (irrational) emotional motivations to the political claims of the opposite camp than to one's own political claims. And if new, hitherto marginal groups, be it migrants or lowerclass workers, increasingly enter into the political arena, they may appear to more established groups as mostly emotionally driven. Thus, the particular display and feeling rules of a given political arena influence whether political expressions are perceived as emotionally charged or not.

#### **ON ETHICS**

Scholars are not immune to this epistemological situation. On the contrary, the current literature on the crisis of liberal democracy is a particularly suitable example of the pattern just described. Scholars are commonly trained to produce research that is unbiased by emotions, and tend to represent themselves within their scholarship as emotion-free agents. Yet the very premise of emotion-free neutrality overlooks the fact that all knowledge production – whether academic or nonacademic – is affective. By contrast, they experience, and therefore assess, the transformation of socio-political conditions as an excess of affectivity or emotionality on the part of those who, presumably, obstruct the functioning of liberal democracies. Some scholars even go so far as to suggest that the only way for supporters of democracy to regain their power is by taking control over the field of emotional attachments that they consider to be manipulated by the right-wing. This particular approach to the current power struggle over public sentiments is a strong focus of the crisis literature's research agenda. Yet, paradoxically, this same crisis literature tends to overlook its own affective engagements or sensibilities. We, on the other hand, contend that, any researcher who experiences and declares the current situation as an ultimate crisis is necessarily bringing her own affective situatedness into the question. Contrary to this literature on crisis, we argue that it is essential for researchers of political crisis to explicitly account for the affective arrangements within which they research and produce this knowledge.

We do not, by any means, want to give the impression that we find fault in the drive towards a diagnosis of the present. We do not find this to be a futile project; on the contrary. Engaging in a reflection on the present and its genealogy is precisely what we understand to be the critical work of the humanities and the social sciences today. While we have shown our skepticism about characterizations of an unprecedented 'increase' in affect, we also decidedly welcome and recognize the importance of giving an account of the present. We believe it is urgent to turn our attention to our own present by fostering what Michel Foucault (1984) called an 'ethos of critique.' Our aim in this essay has been to provide some clues and examples that can help to push this critical project further. In this context, it is important to note that we are not exactly advocating relativism when we emphasize that affective dynamics and their normative evaluation are context dependent. We do claim that it is impossible to evaluate the normative character of affective and emotional modalities beyond the sense they receive within specific affective arrangements and repertoires of emotion. Yet we do not support the claim that no morally relevant distinction can be made. On the contrary, our findings point to the necessity of weighing conflicting alternatives against each other and making normative judgments. This suggests that political agents must often take the risk of making morally charged political decisions. They need to make these decisions within a given space of political possibilities that is always affectively co-constituted. And in doing so, they must run the constant risk of getting it wrong.

What does this scenario mean for the role of the social sciences and humanities? To broach this question, we must consider the status of critique in these disciplines. Within some parts of the humanities and social sciences, and quite notably within affect studies, the very notion of critique has recently come under scrutiny. This scrutiny is worth our attention, as it entails a number of conceptual consequences. The critique of critique, as it were, has highlighted the prevalence of certain styles and habits of thought, and raised a number of important questions. For instance: does the aim of critically 'debunking' or 'demystifying' one's object of study end up preventing researchers from getting a real sense for the complexity and richness of the material we study? Is engaging in critique not a powerful marker of social distinction, and if so, what are the consequences of lifting the scholar above his or her object in this way? More fundamentally, does the critical impetus to point out the social construction of the world risk "running out of steam" (Latour 2004)? If so, what does this mean at a political moment shaped by actors who seek to 'relativize' climate change or to casually propagate 'alternative facts'? We share many of these troublesome and still very timely questions, and they clearly inform the 'thin' approach of the 'affective societies perspective'. While some have celebrated the category of affect as a way out of these questions, and sometimes even as a way out of critique, we rather understand affect as a lens through which to better understand the practice of politics, including critique.

\*\*\*

Addressing the political from the perspective of affective societies implies a threefold claim. First, this perspective contains the ontological premise that affect is everywhere, since it considers affective relations as constitutive of all societies and social domains. This ontological premise may not in itself prove particularly convincing or informative. Yet the methodological angle it enables proves highly relevant for envisioning an approach to social theory that can foster a diagnostic of the present. Secondly, this ontological premise entails a particular epistemological claim: namely, that affect usually goes unnoticed when the workings of the social and the political follow commonly established patterns. By contrast, according to this view, the experience of an increased affective intensity occurs when there is a felt difference vis a vis the established pattern, for example in the form of a shift or a tension between emotional repertoires. When we observe how affective dynamics open, structure, or close political spaces, it becomes apparent that morally charged political decisions cannot be avoided. Thirdly, there is an ethical implication to consider for political agents, who must make normative judgments and engage in political action within an ambiguous field of contesting forces. This bears implications for scholars in the social sciences and humanities, who cannot comport themselves as if they were unaffected by prevalent affective modalities. Scholars are increasingly compelled to acknowledge their own stakes within all kinds of affective relations – political and otherwise.

# **Bibliography**


Gardi, Tomer (2016): Broken German, Graz: Droschl.

Geiselberger, Heinrich (2017): Die große Regression: Eine internationale Debatte über die geistige Situation der Zeit, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.


# **List of Authors**

**Jonas Bens** (Dr. phil., Dipl.-Jur.) is postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Collaborative Research Centre "Affective Societies" (DFG-SFB 1171) at Freie Universität Berlin. He specializes in political and legal anthropology. His latest book publications include *Gerechtigkeitsgefühle: Zur affektiven und emotionalen Legitimität von Normen* (transcript, 2017) and the forthcoming *The Indigenous Paradox: Rights, Sovereignty and Culture in the Americas* (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).

**Aletta Diefenbach** (M.A.) is a sociologist, and works as a research fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre "Affective Societies" (DFG-SFB 1171) at Freie Universität Berlin. She works on religion as a public force in the United States and in Germany.

**Thomas John** (M.A.) is an anthropologist, and works as a research fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre "Affective Societies" (DFG-SFB 1171) at Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses and media ethnography and visual anthropology. In his dissertation project he is concerned with a local art scene of independent documentary filmmakers in Mexico.

**Antje Kahl** (Dr. phil.) is a sociologist, and works as a research fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre "Affective Societies" (DFG-SFB 1171) at Freie Universität Berlin. She is currently heading the method lab at the CRC "Affective Societies" at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include methods and methodologies, sociology of knowledge, science research, medical sociology, sociology of the body, death and dying.

**Hauke Lehmann** (Dr. phil.) is a film scholar, and works as a research fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre "Affective Societies" (DFG-SFB 1171) at Freie Universität Berlin. His doctoral thesis as a film scholar is concerned with the poetics of affect of New Hollywood cinema. His research focuses on theories of cinematic affectivity and cinematic temporality.

**Matthias Lüthjohann** (M.A.) works as an assistant researcher at the Collaborative Research Centre "Affective Societies" (DFG-SFB 1171) at Freie Universität Berlin. As a PhD student in German literary studies he is especially interested in the history of transcultural literature, the cultural sociology of critique and monolingualism's affective presence in late modernity.

**Friederike Oberkrome** (M.A.) is a theatre scholar, and works as a research fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre "Affective Societies" (DFG-SFB 1171) at Freie Universität Berlin. She is writing her doctoral thesis on the return of the messenger report in contemporary theatre, namely as a documentary form of representation in the context of flight and migration. Her research interests focus on theatre and spatiality, interrelations between theatre (studies) and art (history) and documentary aesthetics.

**Hans Roth** (M.A.) is a theatre scholar, and works as a research fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre "Affective Societies" (DFG-SFB 1171) at Freie Universität Berlin. His PhD project focuses on the political ambiguities of ridicule and solidarity in ethnic humor and postmigrant theatre. Other research interests include the affective economies of theatre and media, the theatricality of society and the theatre of Bertolt Brecht and its controversial legacy.

**Gabriel Scheidecker** (Dr. phil.) is an anthropologist, and works as a research fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre "Affective Societies" (DFG-SFB 1171) at Freie Universität Berlin. As social and cultural anthropologist his research focusses on emotion socialization in Madagascar and within the transcultural context of Vietnamese Berlin.

**Gerhard Thonhauser** (Dr. phil.) is a philosopher, and works at the Institute of Philosophy at TU Darmstadt. Until recently, he was an Erwin Schrödinger Fellow of the Austrian Science Fund working at the Collaborative Research Centre "Affective Societies" (DFG-SFB 1171) at Freie Universität Berlin. He holds a PhD in philosophy and M.A.s in philosophy and political science from the University of Vienna. His research focuses on social and political philosophy and theories of emotion from a phenomenological perspective.

**Nur Yasemin Ural** (Dr. phil.) is a sociologist, and works as a research fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre "Affective Societies" (DFG-SFB 1171) at Freie Universität Berlin. She studied in Turkey, Germany, France and Canada. She obtained her PhD in Sociology at EHESS Paris. Her thesis focused on Muslim minorities and politisation of religion in France and Germany. She has taught on immigration, secularity and Islam in Europe.

**Dina Wahba** (M.A.) is a political scientist, and works as a research fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre "Affective Societies" (DFG-SFB 1171) at Freie Universität Berlin. Dina is a women's rights activist who worked with several local, regional and international organizations such as International Rescue Committee (IRC), UN Women, the League of Arab States and Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML). She worked on a number of gender issues such as sexual and gender based violence, leadership, political participation and empowerment. Dina worked in several countries among them United Kingdom, South Sudan, Egypt and most recently Germany.

**Robert Walter-Jochum** (Dr. phil.) is a literary scholar, and works as a research fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre "Affective Societies" (DFG-SFB 1171) at Freie Universität Berlin. Within the project "Feelings of Religious Belonging and Rhetorics of Injury in Public and in Art" he does research in the field of hate speech in/and (contemporary) literature. He has also published on German and Austrian Literature, on autobiography, "literature and religion", and "literature and emotions".

**M. Ragıp Zık** (M.A.) is a sociologist, and works as a research fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre "Affective Societies" (DFG-SFB 1171) at Freie Universität Berlin. Focusing on contemporary visual practices in political struggle, his project follows a critical approach to concepts of digitality, iconography, and affect. He has previously researched on artistic practices, collective memory, and resistance cultures. He currently serves as a board member at the International Sociological Association's Visual Sociology Research Committee.

# Cultural Studies

 Gundolf S. Freyermuth Games | Game Design | Game Studies An Introduction (With Contributions by André Czauderna, Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman)

2015, 296 p., pb. 19,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-2983-5 E-Book: 17,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-2983-9

 Andréa Belliger, David J. Krieger Network Publicy Governance On Privacy and the Informational Self

February 2018, 170 p., pb. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4213-1 E-Book: 26,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4213-5

 Nicolaj van der Meulen, Jörg Wiesel (eds.) Culinary Turn Aesthetic Practice of Cookery (In collaboration with Anneli Käsmayr and in editorial cooperation with Raphaela Reinmann)

2017, 328 p., pb., col. ill. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3031-2 E-Book available as free open access publication ISBN 978-3-8394-3031-6

#### All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!

# Cultural Studies

 Martina Leeker, Imanuel Schipper, Timon Beyes (eds.) Performing the Digital

Performativity and Performance Studies in Digital Cultures

2016, 304 p., pb. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3355-9 E-Book available as free open access publication ISBN 978-3-8394-3355-3

Suzi Mirgani Target Markets – International Terrorism Meets Global Capitalism in the Mall

2016, 198 p., pb. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3352-8 E-Book available as free open access publication ISBN 978-3-8394-3352-2

 Ramón Reichert, Annika Richterich, Pablo Abend, Mathias Fuchs, Karin Wenz (eds.)

 Digital Culture & Society (DCS) Vol. 3, Issue 2/2017 – Mobile Digital Practices

January 2018, 272 p., pb. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3821-9 E-Book: 29,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3821-3