Affect bleeds in feminist networks: an “essay” in six parts

The ev-ent-anglement attempts to use technology to collectively cut/paste+bleed our abundance of digital fragments with principled, self-aware, grounded gestures that add up to more. Among many other concerns, it considers how or if affect flows (and perhaps stays) within on/offline queer/feminist spaces because I am concerned that many of our current digital practices are not yet as grounded as we deserve. We experience entangled events with people, places, technologies, and things that register affect. We try to save and pass some of this on for ourselves and others using more technologies. What sticks in the network? What chips? What stays clear as the light of day and what lives best in the shadows? What registers in, across, and between the many media forms where we effortlessly cut/paste innumerable fragments of ourselves and others? Who uses us? What is lost? How do we account for what seeps out or bleeds between networked relays of affect? Basically: is affect in Montreal different from #affect in #Montreal?

Abstract

This essay is one of many attempts to document and process a year-plus long feminist digital media project: ev-ent-anglement. The essay has an irregular construction in six sections to hold and honor the practices, concerns, and findings of the project that all aim to mark the power and violence left usually unregarded after the common and willy-nilly, usually corporate-abetted, movement of digital fragments of ourselves. The ev-ent-anglement, including this essay as one iteration, attempts to mark that every simple cut/paste in a digital environment has an unseen but sometimes felt consequence: a violence and a power. It asks: could this gesture have different meanings or purposes in other formats, environments, and communities? Is affect in Montreal similar to #affect in #Montreal? The essay suggests that perhaps with a dataset made with and for feminist social networks, with a dataset made to feel, our cut/pastes might maintain and pass on some of their original affect. That is to say, principled collections and ethical cuts within coherent datasets might allow for affect to both move and stay within feminist networks.

Keywords:

• Event
• entanglement
• affect
• cutting
• montage
• feminist
• digital media
• cut-ups

Notes

The ev-ent-anglement attempts to use technology to collectively cut/paste+bleed our abundance of digital fragments with principled, self-aware, grounded gestures that add up to more. Among many other concerns, it considers how or if affect flows (and perhaps stays) within on/offline queer/feminist spaces because I am concerned that many of our current digital practices are not yet as grounded as we deserve. We experience entangled events with people, places, technologies, and things that register affect. We try to save and pass some of this on for ourselves and others using more technologies. What sticks in the network? What chips? What stays clear as the light of day and what lives best in the shadows? What registers in, across, and between the many media forms where we effortlessly cut/paste innumerable fragments of ourselves and others? Who uses us? What is lost? How do we account for what seeps out or bleeds between networked relays of affect? Basically: is affect in Montreal different from #affect in #Montreal?

1. When I sent drafts of this “essay” to the editors of this special edition it had twenty cut-ups. Every time I sent it to them I explained that I would understand if they couldn’t publish it, given its ever-more-strange and ever-less-academic-journal-like form. I was genuinely surprised that I kept getting authorized to go forward. Quite late in the process of production it became clear that its strange structure was okay but the piece was too long, given how much room the photos take up. We decided that the best solution would be for me to cut some of the cut-ups. Three in all ended up being departed along with four photos and some accompanying text. Some of this is gone for good, but some will now sit, ghost-like and even more detached, here in the shadows. A great quote about stickiness from Ane Laukkanen: “I use the concept of ‘Egyptian feeling’ as a named, circulated and sticky emotion, where the cultural, political and biological aspects of emotions merge together.” This caption by me: When seen paired with Figure 13, I am overtaken by both uncanny mirrors and unruly excess. And this marvelous and meaningful quote: “Insofar as affect, as movement, designates the doubling of an image, utterance, perception, or sound into itself as something else, we can account for the affective discharge of reflexivized communication. The additive dimension of communication for its own sake designates an excess. This excess isn’t a new meaning or perspective. It doesn’t refer to a new content. It is rather the intensity accrued from the repetition, the excitement or thrill of more” (Jodi Dean).

2. Ev-ent-anglement, across its many iterations, relies upon a through-line of linked feminist/activist methods/beliefs. Each of its iterations, including this one, starts and is made from traditions of feminist/queer groundwork:

•	Using collaborative processes of doing and knowing as feminist methods of linking that acknowledge difference and power.
•	Acknowledging one blended live and digital space that has its own bleed.
•	Understanding events as co-productions in time/space/knowledge/affect that entangle things, people, and ideas that might be recorded and also shared.
•	Committing to knowledge that is rooted in bodies and practices, as well as ideas and machines.
•	In doing. Different from but related to receiving or thinking, doing theory looks and feels different from reading it.
•	Seeking experiences and their technologies outside the corporate.
•	Enjoying that everything cannot be saved. The event is gone and something remains.

3. I have also written about the ev-ent-anglement in these publications. “Ev-Ent-Anglement Cells: Network, Affect, and Feminist DH in Highland Park,” with Laila Shereen Sakr and Brian Getnick in Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Werimont, eds. Screening Mechanisms: Feminist, Anti-Racist, Postcolonial, and Queer Digital Humanities (Minnesota forthcoming) and “#cut/paste+bleed: Entangling Feminist Affect, Action and Production On and Offline,” in Jentery Sayers, ed. Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities (forthcoming).

4. A perfect caption for Figure 1. But the two were randomly cut/paste together, with the bleed showing only back here (and maybe felt there?).

5. One of my anonymous readers for this publication wrote: “the foundational metaphors of cutting and bleeding could be enhanced, or at the very least, I’d urge the author to consider accounting for the complexity of associations that both of these metaphors inspire. Although the author mentions that cutting may refer to an act of (gendered) self-injury and survival in situations of disempowerment, it also evokes a number of different associations that might be just as productive—the relationship between cutting and deconstruction, for example, or the act of cutting up men, cutting the cord, or cutting the flesh (i.e., cuts of meat). This lack of depth is especially pronounced when it comes to the metaphor of the bleed. Does bleeding not equally resonate with acts of injury, death, crime, policing, or risk? Do we not bleed internally as well as externally? Can we not refer to blood pacts, the blood and the soil, or to bloodletting? And why are the sacrificial methods of bleeding left untold—the religious, devotional or the spiritual?” And to her, I say: yes! It’s true. I lost control of my metaphors, as well as my objects; I got messy, even as I tried to tame the project, making it all hold together with ungainly stitches. I’m glad to let these questions sit here—seeping below—and also show themselves elsewhere, through the cut-ups and other awkward connections. I hope that in the doing, theories and practices of Internet culture are known and felt in new ways.

6. The violence of this cut comes from disjuncture. An abrasion in form and content. The first groupings have enjoyed a natural flow—elegance, eloquence birthed from a nimble collective intelligence. The bleed—this space here that eases out, through the use of language, the rough transitions between the machinic cut/pastes that randomly connect fragments from Montreal—indicates the violence, the power, ownership, and uses of the definitive disruptions of social media that are expertly hidden in the effortless cut/pastes of the digital.

7. The artificial flow of this cut/paste of two images is not entirely contrived. These two images come from Dayna McLoed, who proved to be one of my most active Montreal interlocutors, so linking them through a random cut/paste makes an easy sense on its own. And, we were all at the same place at the same time: Montreal and its almost-same-time digital renderings on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and ev-ent-anglement.com. It was intense and coherent: intellectually, socially.

8. I do not think of Facebook as a shadow archive. It is glaring, bright, screaming, tight. Joy from a distance. But TL’s words address something else entirely; not Facebook. They were cut/paste violently with my hands and scissors and moved to join a different image using my computer and machinic process. Now context-less, they serve to worry for all Internet fragments, stripped of the place they started, ripped of the affect they stored, generating new feelings and meanings, thus ruining fun even as this creates other intensities. Jodi Dean writes about Facebook: “People enjoy the circulation of affect that presents itself as contemporary communication. The system is intense; it draws us in.” In grave contrast, I worry about how hard and cold it is here, where the cut/pastes are not seamless and where the stakes are made clear. Less to enjoy—unnatural, complicated, dense—but somehow, yet, some say, full of “feminist joy”?

9. Down here, in the underworlds, is a shadow I can work in: an inorganic form and process that somehow still stays true to connections, vernaculars, goals, methods, and processes of people who share(d) space with difference (intellectually, politically, socially, culturally, artistically, sexually).

10. We just might be able to stitch together fragments of ourselves, outside the logic of capital, when we are linked-by-choice within coherent communities that share an explicit, flexible, intellectual, bodily, social, spatial practice.

11. I will admit, I love my cut-ups. I really do. Our cut/pastes are generative for me because place, context, complexity, time, shared goals, and vernacular are live in the network, even as we take account of the bleed: the productive, painful violence that is the cost of movement, connection, and cutting. The cut-ups produce a “feminist feeling space” (words gifted to me that work) that travels with complexity and clarity between shadow, paper, digital, professional, and personal archives, rendering something (again) at once like and also different from #AffectiveEncounters in #Montreal. I worry that only I can feel this love, and decide that’s okay. I forgive myself and the project. I have felt that much of ev-ent-anglement has been a (productive?) failure: too complicated, too sprawling, too diffuse, too different, too weird, metaphors left to run amok. And yet, experimental intellectual activism sometimes allows us to see, or to render, what is otherwise obscured by the protocals of more controlled participation. My participants, connected by my methods and desire—and their own—collectively produced alternative ways to think about, see, and feel affect in a/our network. Or maybe they didn’t or couldn’t. I tell you, I love it even so.