On being affected: feeling in the folding of multiple catastrophes

ABSTRACT

How possible is it for a life of ongoing feeling to hold, given the world’s current becomings? Much of this article will consider three of the most pervasive of the current disruptions as disruptions of living and feeling: climate change, social change, and, in more detail, what I will call a ‘third media revolution’. All three of these disruptions (and many others) are themselves multiple. They all fold through each other. Living and feeling thus find themselves in the midst of catastrophic multiplicity. This catastrophic multiplicity haunts much of what’s going on. Questions concerning what can be felt within this folding of catastrophes into each other are important contemporary questions. Feeling itself – what it is, what it does, and what the future of feeling might be – has become both a field of struggle, and a complex and open-ended question. A secondary set of questions here will concern the future of studies in relation to these questions of living and feeling – of Cultural Studies, Media Studies, disciplinarity in general, and finally ‘study’, as discussed by Moten and Harney (2013. The undercommons. New York: Minor Compositions).

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• climate change
• media studies
• digital and networked media
• cultural studies
• catastrophe

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Sarah Cefai for her limitless patience and encouragement and to Greg Seigworth and Lone Bertelsen for their editorial advice. As always, no one else is to blame for the many flaws herein.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Andrew Murphie is Associate Professor of Media and Communications at UNSW Sydney and Editor of the Fibreculture Journal and Fibreculture Book Series, both with Open Humanities Press. He writes at the junction of media, philosophy, and social organization.

ORCID

Andrew Murphie http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1593-4151

Notes

1. For example, see McKenzie Wark’s discussion of ‘third nature’, vectoralist capital, abstraction and hacking, from Virtual Geography (1994) to his more recent work, and Molecular Red (2015), on new thinking on technology and climate. Just some of the other important thinkers here for me are Donna Haraway, Matteo Pasquinelli, Tiziana Terranova, Luciana Parisi, Jussi Parikka, Massumi, Michel Bauwens’ work on P2P culture, Erin Manning, Jennifer Gabrys, Yuk Hui, Ned Rossiter, Anna Munster, Adrian Mackenzie, Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, Alanna Thain, Søren Pold, Geoff Cox, Olga Goriunova, Matthew Fuller, Lisa Parks, Wendy Chun, Tung-Hui Hu, Dan Mellamphy, and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy. Jennifer Daryl Slack writes that ‘liberated from the need to be any one thing, communication gives us permission to look long and hard at the world in order to explore how it works and … propose changes to make it better’ (2006, p. 223). The precursors of the third media revolution would include the cyberneticists as a whole, not only Wiener but Bateson, and also the like of Whitehead (see Murphie 2017).

2. For one thing, as Elizabeth Povinelli notes, ‘Nor do I think that all forms of antagonism are equivalent … at the level of socio-material organization and process class difference is not equivalent to settler-colonial difference is not equivalent to gender difference is not equivalent to racialized difference no matter that we use the term “difference” in each case’ (Povinelli et al. 2016).

3. As Erin Manning notes, acknowledging that things are different for the ‘neurodiverse’, ‘[d]espite its role as a founding gesture of humanism, of individualism, neurotypicality remains for the most part in the background of our everyday lives … so we underestimate both its force and its pervasiveness’ (2016, p. 3).

4. Moten is here discussing ‘black social life’ as such a life.

5. For Guattari, ‘grasping’ comes from a reading of Whitehead’s ‘concrescence’, which is the coming together of what are for Whitehead the basic actual occasions of process (see Bains 2002, p. 103). Grasping for Guattari is a kind of ongoing bringing together that oscillates between embodied ‘finitude’ and incorporeal infinitude. Grasping brings together diverse aspects of process (including the chaotic, the asignifying, etc). It allows, indeed guarantees, a ‘possible recharging with processual complexity’ (Guattari 1995, p. 55).

6. Abstraction itself is arguably a general condition of feeling, for example in thought as feeling, as ‘thinking-feeling’ (Massumi 2008) across events, as those events’ contrasts, or indeed as contrasts/intensities in general. Abstraction has specific and shifting constitutions through time – or, time is constituted as an abstraction of the foldings of fieldings.

7. One simple way to think the third media revolution is that it often involves that which is not easily analysed via the like of ‘multi-modal analysis’, as much of it flips rather quickly and incessantly between the intensely amodal, and the differentially/integrally shifting/combining of modalities (not to mention inventing new modalities, as momentary as these might sometimes be). Many established forms of media and communications (and cultural) analysis, premised on the first or second media revolutions, are inadequate to the third media revolution.

8. Jeremy Rifkin calls this a “third industrial revolution” (2011).

9. See https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/series/fourth-industrial-revolution

10. ‘Energy and Information … bifurcated out of the industrial machine of the 19th century … They initiated and extended two technological lineages or machinic phyla: … the one of energy as a medium of motion and the one of energy as a medium of control and communication, the paradigm of ecology and the one of cybernetics. The two regimes carried of course different energetic costs and also quite different colonial costs  … ’ (Pasquinelli 2016).

11. See also Murphie (2014).

12. Here I echo one of Erin Manning’s useful refrains.

13. ‘Affect is the infra-conditioning of every determinate activity, including that of language. The preferred prefix for affect is ‘infra-’. ‘Pre-’ connotes time sequence. But affect always accompanies, on the parallel track of potential’ (2015b, p. 212).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership Grant: Immediations; Art, Media and Event.