2

Introduction
The Affective Character of Publics

Margreth Lünenborg and

Birgitt Röttger-​Rössler

The news on the first day of 2023 started with the war in Ukraine, just as
we have become used to every day—​at least in Europe—​since the beginning
of the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022. The breaking news on New
Year’s Day was that Ukraine had succeeded in a major missile attack on a
Russian position in Makiyivka (Donbass) and that dozens (89) of Russian
soldiers had been killed. Russia confirmed the strike. According to media
reports, the attack had been possible because the young Russian recruits,
freshly arrived in their temporary accommodation, were texting and talking
on the phone with their families on New Year’s Eve. The conspicuously high
volume of mobile data made it easy for the Ukrainians to locate their pos-
ition. This reveals the close—​and in this case deadly—​intertwining of digital
and analog spaces. Soldiers billeted in temporary accommodation contact
their families at the turn of the year, thereby sending signals that betray their
physical location—​and they pay for this with their lives. However, “locating”
concrete spaces with the help of modern technology is not just a factor in the
immediate context of armed conflict, but also in war reporting. For example,
geodata on successful attacks are used to distinguish strategic false informa-
tion (i.e., “fake news”) from actual events. Video material produced by people
living in war zones can also be used to make the way women, men, and chil-
dren suffer in war both visible and felt throughout the world—​a “collateral
damage” that was barely noticed in earlier wars. But here as well, verification
through locational and weather data plays an essential role in distinguishing
propaganda from documentary information. Such verification processes of
fact checking and debunking are becoming increasingly important in jour-
nalistic reporting: Complex circumstantial evidence is used to check whether
images depict an actual event and thus “confirm” that they are not digital
manipulations and propaganda. At the same time, they are becoming an inte-
gral part of strategic warfare: information warfare. A war of digital images to
gain public attention and credibility has become an extension of the physical
conflicts.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a major event that has been covered
closely by the media for almost one and a half years now. It is seldom for

DOI: 10.4324/9781003365426-2
 Introduction 11

political events to receive such uninterrupted attention for such a long time.
The constant media interest is promoted not only by the threatening proximity
of this war to the rest of Europe, but also by the character of the Ukrainian
President Zelensky. He works with the media in extremely targeted and skillful
ways, knowing how to command a constant virtual presence at the broadest
range of political gatherings. This is how he prevents the war from being “for-
gotten” or from losing the significance of the threat it poses. Zelensky system-
atically exploits the available digital networks to actively engage in politics,
to reach agreements, and to negotiate military support. Hence, he thereby
shifts or expands the political stage into the virtual sphere. He always knows
how to intensify affect in his respective audience. In his daily video messages
to the Ukrainian people, which are also disseminated far beyond Ukraine and
translated into different languages, he performs the character of the resilient
Ukrainian nation. In postheroic times, he appears as an “approachable leader”
who maintains personal contact with “his people” and thus generates courage,
bravery, and resilience. By weaving in strongly emotionalizing narratives,
he ensures their dissemination: be they heroic narratives such as that of the
singing soldiers trapped in the Mariupol steelworks or praise for the civilian
heroes who bravely endure all hardships in their daily struggle to rebuild what
has been destroyed. Physical places, virtual spaces, and digital networks are
indissolubly intertwined. They are central elements of this war of resistance
with which Ukraine seeks to secure continued support.
In 2022, one event briefly pushed the invasion of Ukraine out of the
headlines of most European newspapers along with public and commer-
cial broadcasting channels: The death of the British Queen Elizabeth II on
September 8, 2022 at the age of 96 after reigning for 70 years. Her death
and the subsequent public mourning rituals received the highest international
media attention, not just because of the structure of the Commonwealth of
Nations, but, above all, because of the British Queen’s charisma of stability,
reliability, royal nobility, discipline, and devotion to her task along with
her political unassailability. The ten-​day-​long, meticulously choreographed
mourning and funeral ritual included the journey of the coffin through
London and the four-​day laying out of the Queen in Westminster Hall to
grant the people an opportunity to say their goodbyes. This opportunity
was taken up intensively. In queues stretching several kilometers along the
Thames, hundreds of thousands of people waited, often for over 30 hours
and in many cases in pouring rain, to move slowly toward Westminster Hall
and say goodbye to the Queen in her coffin. They wanted to show her respect;
she deserved to be honored; she had been the one constant that had held
the kingdom together; she had been a strong and venerable woman. These
were the most frequent answers given by those waiting when questioned by
journalists.
These queues along the Thames, the mountains of flowers laid spon-
taneously before Buckingham Palace after the announcement of her death,
and the crowds along the streets as the coffin was driven past illustrate the
12 Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler

significance of concrete places for sharing emotions and especially grief. The
sensory comprehension of death was demonstrated powerfully in the way
those waiting fell silent as they drew closer to Westminster Hall and in the
tears they eventually shed before the coffin. The ten-​day ritual formed a fully
localized event. Although broadcast worldwide through the accompanying
media coverage, these other locations did not become an integral part of the
event. Instead, the nation of the United Kingdom was evoked performatively
at the symbolic sites of the British monarchy in a ceremony established
decades ago with a high potential of affective intensity: The media showed
the global audience a people united in mourning their Queen.
Critics of the monarchy did not queue up to pass the coffin. They
communicated their responses to each other vehemently in other places—​
primarily on digital platforms. But nowhere did they disrupt the pompous
national staging. The funeral service was simultaneously a transnational
event, as evidenced by the presence of heads of state and crowned heads from
all over the world. They came to take part and did not just send messages
of condolence. This also shows the significance of physical co-​presence in
symbolic places. Nonetheless, the Queen’s death also gave rise to critical
discussions about England’s colonial heritage in a number of the 14 coun-
tries belonging to the Commonwealth of Nations. In countries including
Australia, New Zealand, and Trinidad and Tobago, there were calls for
future independence from the British crown. Commentaries pointed out
repeatedly that it was respect for the integrative power of the Queen’s per-
sonality that had so far prevented an active break from the Commonwealth.
Whether this affective relationship with the monarch actually functioned as
some sort of political glue remains to be seen. Whatever the case, her death
is also viewed as a caesura in the political structure of the Commonwealth
of Nations.
We chose these two vignettes to introduce our book, because they point to
the importance of not only physical places but also virtual spaces, networks,
and media in the affective formation of publics while also illuminating how
these dimensions intertwine in specific ways depending on the particular
occasion. The individual contributions in this volume use concrete case
studies to investigate the interplay of places, networks, and media in con-
stituting publics—​each focusing on one of these dimensions. But before we
turn to the structure and the individual contributions to this volume, we
first want to outline the two disciplinary perspectives from which we, as
editors, approach the formation of publics, so that we can subsequently out-
line our shared understanding of publics and the public sphere as relational
structures that are always generated affectively (Hauser, 1999, p. 61). Our
joint understanding of publics can best be described with Hauser’s (1999)
definition as:

a discursive space in which individuals and groups associate to discuss

matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common
 Introduction 13

judgment about them. It is the locus of emergence for rhetorically salient

meanings.
(p. 61)

Disciplinary Perspectives: Anthropology and Communication Studies

Social and cultural anthropology, which forms Birgitt’s disciplinary back-
ground, deals comparatively little with the formation of public spheres in any
explicit way. This discipline-​specific reservedness is related to the fact that the
dichotomization of the public and the private sphere as well as the idea of the
political human as rational agent that dominates Western discourses has long
been rejected by anthropologists and Southern theorists (Dwivedi & Sanil,
2015; Srinivasan et al., 2019) alike as inadequate for describing the complex
and tense interplay of the hidden, the secret, the personal, and the political.
This critical rejection of the Western theoretical canon led to a general neg-
lect of the topic, which has only recently begun to regain more scholarly
interest in the context of the increasing role of (digital) mass communication
as a constitutive part of social life across the world (Graan, 2022). With its
traditional focus on small local lifeworlds, social anthropology offers dense
accounts of opinion-​forming and decision-​making processes on the local
level that cannot be described appropriately using the vocabulary of Western
public sphere theories. “Where is the public sphere?” asks, for example, the
social anthropologist Piliavsky (2013) in her study of the “bazaar politics” in
a provincial town in North Rajasthan in which literacy is sparse, electricity
unreliable, and the internet only accessible for very few people. She shows
that the marketplace is the key “talking sphere” (Narayan, 2011, p. xxv), the
principal site for political negotiations: the place where news, rumors, and
opinions circulate; alliances are made or unmade; and political decisions take
shape (2013, p. 105). But the apparent resemblances between the bazaar and
the public sphere are misleading. According to Piliavsky, the bazaar just looks
like an arena for open critical debates, but is nothing of the sort, because the
local population does not believe that political decisions can be made in the
open. On the contrary, visibility is seen as a threat.

Secrecy is the predominant value and seclusion the main force that
structures discussions. Thus the logic of the public sphere is turned upside
down. What metropolitan theorists see as the virtue of transparency …
Rajasthani villagers treat as a threat to exposure, which inhibits expres-
sion, conversation, and ultimately the making of political choice.
(Piliavsky, 2013, p. 105)

Real conversation and decision-​making, she shows in her study, take place
offstage, behind closed doors. The same can be observed in other parts of
the world; see, for example, Lienhardt’s (2001) ethnographic description
of the Arabian marketplace (suq) as a place where people avoid visibility
14 Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler

and discuss political topics only within closed circles of consociates. Or see
the work of Ivanov (2020), who demonstrates in her ethnographic study
of Zanzibar that the Western understanding of the public sphere cannot be
transferred to the Islamic cities of the Swahili coast. Like Piliavsky, she asks
“where is the public sphere” (Ivanov, 2020, p. 91) and shows that conceal-
ment (Verhüllen) constitutes an affectively anchored key social principle that
is reflected in bodily practices (covering and veiling), linguistic practices (cir-
cumlocution, ambiguity through formulaic, aesthetic uses of language), and
architectural structures (pp. 92–​157).
However, the general value placed on secrecy, seclusion, and conceal-
ment in Rajasthan, Zanzibar, and other local worlds contrasts with the nor-
mative ideal of political transparency and participation that characterizes
the national politics of democratic states such as India and Tanzania. This
apparent contradiction sheds light on the fact that the notion of the public
sphere as an arena of open critical reasoning and debating constitutes a trav-
elling concept. The ideal of open debates led by rationally arguing citizens is
meanwhile—​despite its very specific, eighteenth-​century European bourgeois
origin—​considered to be an indispensable component of modern democra-
cies around the world. However, it is important to acknowledge the specific
historical calibration of the ideas “public,” “critical,” and “public sphere”
and to notice “their fraught and for the large part occluded relationship with
the outside of the ‘west,’ where the ‘outside’ was also determined by ‘the
west’ ” as Dwivedi and Sanil (2015, p. 3) articulate.
As already indicated, an “anthropology of publics and the public sphere”
has only recently begun to establish itself as a new field of research within the
discipline.1 This new subfield aims to study how practices and structures of
mass communication mediate and generate broader forms of social and pol-
itical organization. How do publics emerge? How do they normalize some
identities and marginalize others? How do some publics become dominant
and shape political agendas? How do multiple publics intersect or clash? In
taking on these questions, anthropologists attend to “regimes of publicity” as
Graan (2022, p. 13) calls them. According to him, the concept implies, that “a
public’s imaginaries, infrastructures, norms, ideologies, and metadiscourses
are all interconnected and combine to regiment and characterize publicity
in that instance” (p. 13). Like media anthropology, the anthropology of
publics and the public sphere focuses on such media as text, image, video, or
sound, but it foregrounds—​theoretically and methodologically—​the circula-
tion of media as a social process. In line with the literature scholar Warner
(2002), representatives of this new field of research understand a public as
a particular social form or space that emerges through the “circulation of
discourses as people hear, see, or read a message and then engage it in some
way” and thus create a “mutual awareness” among each other (Gal, 2006,
p. 173; see also Graan, 2022, p. 1). Anthropological works on publics have
investigated how media circulation enacts forms of social difference and
exclusion (Yeh, 2018), mediates political expression (Lempert & Silverstein,
 Introduction 15

2012), or enables young people to articulate themselves and negotiate the

contradicting demands placed on them (Kurfürst, 2021)—​to mention just
a few topics. What is striking, however, is that in all these studies, affects
and emotions always resonate implicitly, but are hardly ever theorized and
explored systematically. Among the few exceptions is the work of Mazzarella
(2003), who studied the branding strategies of an advertising company in
Bombay as a form of “affect management”—​that is, as strategic communica-
tion aiming to elicit affective resonances in the target groups. Yet this analysis
remained rather superficial; only later did Mazzarella (2010) deal with affect
theory in more detail. In general, however, the emerging anthropology of
publics and the public sphere has not yet made use of approaches in emotion
and affect theory, whereas these are well established in social anthropology.
In summary, what anthropology has to offer for an interdisciplinary reflec-
tion on the affective formation of publics is, besides its profound knowledge
of local worlds and the resultant critique of Western concepts of the public
sphere, methodological approaches that make it possible to examine circu-
lating media discourses and their effects on concrete localized lifeworlds. In
short, anthropology demonstrates that place matters.
Media and communication studies, to which Margreth belongs, started
from the other end. Concepts of the public sphere and its now unquestioned
diversification into a variety of often competing publics are at the heart
of communication studies. There is a vast body of literature discussing its
normative foundations, its essential necessity for democracy, as well as its
different facets in regional as well as historical perspectives. Because it is
impossible to summarize all these debates in a few paragraphs, we shall just
trace the central strands of debate in the theory of publics and conclude by
presenting novel approaches that attempt to grasp the formation of publics
in digital media environments. Compared to the anthropological concepts
described above, the understanding in communication studies has been nor-
mative, universalistic, and essentialist. The famous Habermasian model of
the bourgeois public sphere, which originated in European coffee houses
of the eighteenth century (Habermas, 1991), is still considered a milestone
today, and it serves as a contrasting background against which the delibera-
tive character of public discourse is measured. Whereas Habermas himself
considered the shift from encounter publics in the eighteenth to a mediated
public sphere in the nineteenth and its full blossom in the twentieth century
as a shift from a critical public to a mostly passive consumer public, the
media sphere was nonetheless expected to deliver the forum for debates on
matters of public concern (Wessler, 2018). Based on these assumptions, the
public sphere in communication studies is understood primarily as the polit-
ical public sphere: the arena in which citizens have the opportunity to discuss
issues of common concern based on rational discourse.2
It was feminist researchers as well as scholars addressing questions from
non-​Western perspectives who criticized this universalist claim and its nor-
mative underpinnings (Benhabib, 1992; Fraser, 1990). Distinguishing the
16 Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler

public from the private with all its gendered implications as well as neglecting
the exclusion of large parts of society from the arena of deliberation triggered
criticism and contradiction. Bringing together queer theory and the theory on
the public sphere, Warner (2002) introduced the concept of counterpublics—​
that is, antagonistic formations of different publics struggling simultaneously
for hegemony. Publics, in his understanding, emerge in their “dependence on
the co-​presence of strangers” (p. 76). Such a performative understanding of
(counter-​)publics introduces embodied experiences as an essential part of their
emergence. And he adds that publics do not appear as a casual, self-​evident
effect of assemblies; but rather, “publics are only realized through active
uptake” (p. 87). This understanding of a performative, embodied, and con-
flictual arrangement of publics has inspired research ranging from gender and
queer studies to social movement research and political sciences—​interested
in the dynamic and often conflictual arrangement of public formations. These
approaches are explicitly aware of the role of emotions and affects in public
gatherings and as a part of the media communication about such events.
Political scientist Mouffe (2013) argues that an “agonistic” understanding of
politics, which is distinct from the ideal of deliberation aimed toward con-
sensus, should also be understood in this sense, because:

the kind of rational consensus which Habermas’s approach postulates is a

conceptual impossibility because it presupposes the availability of a con-
sensus without exclusion, which is precisely what the hegemonic approach
reveals to be impossible.
(p. 69)

Agonistic thinking is based on the knowledge about contradicting interests

and positions. Mouffe explicitly strengthens the role of passion as an essen-
tial part of doing politics. When she reflects on “agonistic public spaces”
(pp. 68–​70), she is describing exemplary artistic interventions in public space
that refuse the commodification of art and expose power relations instead.
Whereas in communication studies, the normative approach to delib-
erative qualities of media discourse is still strong and has inspired a large
variety of empirical studies, the media environment has changed fundamen-
tally. Given today’s “hybrid media system” (Chadwick, 2013), the former
distinction between encounter publics and media publics is blurred along
with the seemingly clear lines between private and public forms of communi-
cation. Supposedly private postings can become part of a contentious public
debate out of the blue. In media-​saturated societies, personal communica-
tion is as much mediated as public communication was in the predigital age.
Technologies of data tracing and image and sound identification make every
text, image, and video discoverable, creating archives of public memory that
draw heavily on personal data. The collapse of formerly separate fields of
communication has produced entirely new perspectives on publics, their
emergence, their structure, and their legitimacy.
 Introduction 17

boyd (2011) has introduced the term networked publics to describe:

publics that are restructured by networked technologies. As such, they are

simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies
and (2) the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection
of people, technology, and practice.
(p. 39)

As a core difference compared to other types of publics, affordances of digital

platforms shape the ways people interact on these platforms. She identi-
fies four characteristics of these affordances that are persistently shaping
networked publics: the persistence of online communication, its replicability,
its scalability, and its searchability. Taken together, they have produced a
“collapse of contexts” (p. 50) through a fundamental decontextualization of
content as mere bits.
Based on an analysis of Twitter as an infrastructure of publicness, Schmidt
(2014) uses the term personal publics to characterize the overarching nature
of communication in social media: “#private or #public? Communication on
Twitter is both and neither at the same time” (p. 3). He understands personal
publics as an ideal type—​in contrast to “traditional publics”—​that is based
on personal selection criteria, addresses an audience established through one’s
own (digital) network, and uses a mostly conversational way of speaking in
which there is no strict separation between sender and receiver. Schmidt does
not address the emotional character of such personal publics, but one could
add that informal language, the use of emojis or memes, and the constant
switching between intimate, private, and public information create a specific
emotional style in such personal publics.
With the concept of performative publics, Lünenborg and Raetzsch (2018)
and Reißmann et al. (2022) have developed a concept and an empirical
approach to its validation that emphasizes the dynamic, fluid, and unstable
character of publics in digital environments. Traditional media institutions
such as journalism can no longer automatically claim the authority to decide
on the relevance of issues for society, and the relational arrangement between
a multitude of speakers has replaced the traditional gatekeeper role. This
dynamic unfolding of performative publics makes it possible to shift the
layers of the public sphere and provide visibility and attention to private
individuals without the need to resort to complex media institutions.
Based on the analysis of political communication, Pfetsch (2018) and
Pfetsch et al. (2018) identify dissonant publics as a challenge for democ-
racy. Negative campaigns, increasing political polarization, dissonance,
and disconnection are described as characteristics of current internet-​based
forms of public communication. Although the characterization of dissonance
describes mainly moments of loss and crisis in the public sphere, it also partly
refers to affective modes of this communication, including hate speech as well
as empathy and solidarity mobilized via networked communication.
18 Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler

Although this listing of current concepts in public sphere theory is by no

way complete, it offers a smooth transition to the affective characteristics and
dynamics of publics that will be reflected in the next section.

The Affective Formation of Publics

The close interconnection of affect and publics is not particularly surprising,
nor is it a fundamentally new insight. Emotional rhetoric has always played
a significant role in political contexts when it comes to mobilizing people
in order to convince them of the importance of something or someone. Yet,
in political science and communication studies, emotional rhetoric or the
emotional/​affective in itself are still seen dominantly as an irritation, as a
threat to deliberation, to “objective” argumentation. However, deliberation
and factual argumentation are by no means free of emotion and affect, but
are part of an emotional order that demands “calm” debating. Such a regu-
lation of emotions established as a feeling rule is especially valid for political
debates in the context of Western democracies, but it is also characteristic for
the educated bourgeoisie: the style of debate in academia. In other words,
rational deliberation in liberal public spheres is by no means free of affect,
but demarcates a particular affective position—​namely, that of inhabiting
the “rationality” of acting as a calmly pondering person (see also Berlant,
2011). In other words, strict forms of affect regulation have dominated pol-
itical performances just as much as seemingly neutral ways of news produc-
tion referred to as “objective reporting.” In many societies, however, such
an imperative of deliberative argumentation has never been valid. Rather,
in political speeches in particular, it was and is important to convince the
respective audience through explicit emotional rhetoric—​that is, to affect it.
The power of the spoken word is described vividly in several ethnographies
of egalitarian “small-​scale societies” in which no formal offices and positions
of power exist, but political influence is acquired through brilliant, affecting
speech and economic generosity (see, e.g., the big man system in New
Guinea: Godelier & Strathern, 1991). In our opinion, it is too short-​sighted
to link the increased emotionalization of public and political discourse pri-
marily to the emergence of digital technologies. Although, on the one hand,
new forms of transnational activism can be brought into being through “con-
nective action” (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012), it seems altogether more likely
that the multiple publics that have always existed in parallel in a society now
gain new forms of visibility as a result of these technologies. On the other
hand, it should not be overlooked that many people connect primarily with
like-​minded people and move only within their own social and communica-
tive spheres—​that is, they do not perceive the many other voices and publics
in their respective societies. But here as well, one might ask whether this is
fundamentally new. Choosing like-​minded people as friends and interlocutors
was described as social homophily long before digital networks started to
exist. What digitization definitely brings with it is a lasting irritation of the
 Introduction 19

idea of the public sphere and its classic mass media: Radio, TV, and print. As
Srinivasan et al. (2019) note:

Our digital age appears to be prone to distorting the public world with its
capacities for filter bubbles, echo chambers, fake news, bots and hacks.
This is no agora, no polis. There are no rational coffee house deliberations
in earshot, no laudable unifying imaginaries through the circulation of
unchanging printed texts.
(p. 3)

In networked publics, the control regulatives that have characterized histor-

ically established structures of the public sphere largely fall away: Everything
hits at the same time and generates “noise.” Hierarchies of relevance, for
almost two centuries organized by journalists as gatekeepers, have been
questioned radically. The distribution of content on digital networks is ultim-
ately unlimited and almost uncontrollable. The cacophony of voices becomes
generally accessible through the net—​at least it is possible for everybody
to access them—​accompanied by different emotional styles and modes of
expression. This polyphony thus also becomes more accessible to the empir-
ical social scientist as already existing media texts, and it does not have to
be gathered through interviews or surveys. For example, in his analysis of
Indonesian political cultures, Language and Power, Anderson (1990) talks
about ngoko, the lower Javanese language level that allows for a more imme-
diate and emotionally expressive form of political communication than com-
munication on krama, the highest and formalistic language level of Javanese,
which is also the language of official political speeches and print media.
He points out that ngoko is hardly accessible to the researcher, because the
mere presence of a foreign, white researcher “kramanizes” the situation
(p. 154). This shows that the ngoko style of the common Javanese is seen as
an inferior, uneducated, and rough mode of communication that people try
to hide in the presence of persons perceived as upper class. However, digital
chat groups make the ngoko style more easily accessible and documentable
for researchers. Taking this knowledge as a backdrop for thinking about the
success of populist politicians such as Donald Trump, who virtuously use an
aggressive, direct, unpolished, and often offensive style of speaking, allows us
to see that this style can touch so many people because it differs clearly from
thoughtful and often abstract rhetoric. Hochschild’s (2016) “deep stories”
of rural Americans who feel like “strangers in their own land” also point to
this connection.
In contrast, communication taking place in direct co-​presence (face-​to-​
face) in physical places such as marketplaces or meeting places is generally
more fleeting and of limited range, unless these encounters are recorded (i.e.,
documented audiovisually). This is where cell phone testimonies or camera
witnessing (Andén-​Papadopoulos, 2014) become relevant today that record
where no professional media producer is present. Especially in the context
20 Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler

of political conflicts, these “image testimonies” are becoming increasingly

important. Think, for example, of the Egyptian Uprising in 2011 that has
been called “the Twitter revolution” especially by Western researchers.
Schankweiler et al. (2019), who reflected on the circulation of audiovisual
accounts of witnessing from an affect-​theoretical point of view, argue that
the special efficacy of image testimonies lies in their ability to affect, to move,
and to mobilize people (pp. 6–​7). Building on the theoretical work of the
Collaborative Research Center “Affective Societies”—​as we do with this
book—​they conceive affects as relational phenomena that unfold in inter-
action between human and nonhuman bodies and are not reducible to indi-
vidual mental states or corporeal comportment. In other words: “affect can
only be understood as a relational dynamic between actors and the com-
plex socio-​material environments in which they are embedded” (Röttger-​
Rössler & Kolesch, 2018, p. xiii). In their analysis, Schankweiler et al. (2019)
describe witnessing and testifying as relational acts based on affectivity that
create ties between events, people, and testimonies. According to them,
image testimonies “not only serve as vectors of affectivity, but also play a
major role in communicating affect” across social worlds (p. 7). Temporality
proves to be a highly important element of affect-​generating within these
processes of image circulation: The image testimonies are circulated instant-
aneously, in “real time” on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social
media platforms, and this gives the viewer the impression of being a direct
witness to the event depicted. The many visual testimonies of ordinary citi-
zens that reach us daily from Ukraine impressively demonstrate the affecting
potential of images in times of crisis and war. As stated at the beginning of
this introduction, the brutality of war for the civilian population, which used
to receive little attention as mere collateral damage, is now visible in detail
to everyone across national borders. But such images simultaneously become
the object of falsification and propaganda. The affective intensity of “being
there” becomes a strategic tool of information warfare.
But even if digital and analog spaces are becoming increasingly intertwined,
physical places continue to be of great importance, not just because the
entire world has not been digitized across the board, but, above all, because
the physical co-​presence of people in concrete places remains an important
momentum of public formations. Political protests take place on streets and
squares, they unfold their effectiveness through the co-​presence of numerous
people, even if today they are often organized via digital tools of networked
communication (see also Breljak & Mühlhoff, 2019, pp. 7–​8). The unbroken
importance of physical co-​presence in political movements relates directly
to processes of affective resonance that unfold in the complex interactions
between people and their spatial environment. The importance of phys-
ical places for the affective formation of publics in protest movements is
illuminated in the microscopic analysis by the political scientists Ayata and
Harders (2018) of the Egyptian Uprising in 2011 that culminated in the occu-
pation of Tahrir Square in Cairo for 18 days. They show that the occupation
 Introduction 21

of the square constituted a fundamental rupture in the political and spa-

tial routines of the authoritarian regime. The square had been turned by the
protesters into a different,

out of the ordinary, affective space with new layers of relational affect
… while previous layers, such as the memory of colonial domination,
authoritarian display of power, and violent defeats remain inscribed and
haunt the materiality of the square.
(p. 118)

Ayata and Harders conceptualize the complex and multilayered interactions

and practices unfolding on the square during the occupation as “Midān
Moments.”

Midān Moments are periods out of the ordinary time, in a delineated

space, which is characterized by intensive affective relationality through
the bodily co-​presence of protesters and their practices on this space.
(p. 118)

A midān (Arabic, literally square) is a well-​defined place, a locus of mundane

everyday practices embedded in a city as a socially produced multiscalar site.
The term “moments” was chosen in order to stress the directness and instant-
aneousness of relational affect. According to the authors, a Midān Moment
combines two temporal registers:

the immediacy of, for instance, an affective atmosphere, which imposes

itself in a matter of seconds and can lead to an immediate rupture of the
well-​known; and the emergence of new ways of feeling.
(p. 119)

With their notion of Midān Moments, Ayata and Harders conceptualize the
linkage between place, space, temporality, and affect as essential for produ-
cing “transformative events” that have the power to disrupt, alter, or vio-
late the taken-​for-​granted political routines and social relations (see also
Schwedler, 2016).
Having introduced some examples of our interdisciplinary work at the
Collaborative Research Center “Affective Societies,” we shall now give an
overview of the contributions collected in this volume.

Structure of the Present Volume

The aim of this volume is to investigate the affective characteristics of diverse
publics from different disciplinary viewpoints. Our overarching interest is
in how—​under the current conditions of increasingly digitally networked
communication—​ forms of the public can be captured empirically and
22 Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler

described using the theoretical lens of affect theory. The book takes a closer
look at three closely intertwined areas: Places, networks, and media.
But before these three sections begin, we start with a dialogue with Zizi
Papacharissi who first coined the concept of “affective publics” in 2015.
Together we reflect on the historical contexts of its emergence and the fun-
damental changes in political and social circumstances since then. Whereas
her introduction of the concept was inspired by the democratic uprising in
the Arab region and protests in Europe at that time, political contexts have
now shifted radically. Today, “dark participation” (Quandt, 2021), whether
in the form of hate speech or conspiracy narratives, is now a priority topic
in communication research and public discourse. The conversation with
Zizi Papacharissi offers a contextualization of the emergence of “affective
publics” as well as a shared reflection on its usefulness for future research.

Part I Places

Human communication is always bound to places, even if it is completely

detached from concrete physical sites and carried out in a mediatized or
exclusively digital form. Analog and digital spheres, however, are increas-
ingly intertwined: They overlap, expand, irritate, and transform each other.
The chapters in the first part of this book explore these interconnections and
their affective underpinnings. They focus on concrete physical places—​such
as museums and their storerooms, urban squares and streets, or adminis-
trative offices—​and examine the social meanings connected to them either
analogically and/​or digitally. Building on a notion of place that refers to the
elaborated social and cultural meanings people invest in or attach to a specific
locality or site, the authors investigate what emotional orders and affective
arrangements and dynamics characterize these places, and they analyze to
what extent affects and emotions change through expansions and shifts in
digital space. In doing so, they also rethink the concepts of place and space
that are often used interchangeably.
The first contribution to this part, written by the social and cultural
anthropologists Paola Ivanov, Laibor Moko, and Jonas Bens, is “Unhappy
Objects: Colonial Violence, Maasai Materialities, and the Affective Publics
of Ethnographic Museums.” It deals with displaced objects from Maasai
communities in northern Tanzania that were brought to Europe in colo-
nial contexts and are currently part of the collections of the Ethnologisches
Museum in Berlin. Building on Sarah Ahmed’s conception of “happy objects,”
the authors interpret these objects as “unhappy objects” in accordance with
the indigenous conception of ing’weni, which understands these entities as
“subjects” with agency that bring misfortune to both Maasai and German
society and are thus able not only to create unhappiness for different publics
but also to be unhappy themselves. This conception is compared with the
emotional debates about ethnographic museums in European publics, espe-
cially about the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. The analysis reveals that Maasai
 Introduction 23

conceptions gesture toward colonialism as a contemporary phenomenon,

whereas European affective publics tend to deny the full scope of ongoing
colonialism.
The second contribution by Matthias Warstat, “Theater Publics in
Motion: Affective Dynamics of the Theater and the Street, Berlin 1989,”
uses the example of Berlin theater in the political shift of 1989 to explore
how theater publics are mobilized when they come into contact with other
publics such as street publics or digital publics in times of social upheaval.
He uses an affect-​theoretical viewpoint to discuss how theater publics can
be defined and located between individual performances and the general
discourses of a society. His analysis focuses on Heiner Müller’s produc-
tion Hamlet/​Maschine, produced at the Deutsches Theater Berlin in 1989–​
1990, whose actors took part in demonstrations for regime change in East
Germany such as the legendary Alexanderplatz demonstration on November
4, 1989. However, within this process, frictions and ruptures between the-
ater publics and street publics emerged. This contribution examines these as
an affective interplay between distance, proximity, competition, and mutual
reinforcement.
The third contribution by the anthropologists Thomas Götzelmann and
Timm Sureau, “Digital Administrative Publics: Affective and Corporate
Entanglements in Germany’s New Federal Portal,” is based on ethnographic
fieldwork inside the IT department of Germany’s Federal Office for Migration
and Refugees (BAMF). The authors examine the transfer of public services to
the digital space—​services that were previously located in offices and involved
direct contact between civil servants and applicants. Special attention is paid
to the production of the Federal Portal (Bundesportal), a web-​based plat-
form for (non)citizens to apply for governmental services. The authors argue
that the development of government IT projects leads to the formation of
new “administrative publics” that change the relation between “applicants”
and “bureaucrats” dramatically. They reduce direct reciprocity, and shape
affective relations through market logics in well-​designed digital spaces. The
study exemplifies the affective tensions that accompany such processes of
delocalization or “displacement” as well as the sometimes overt, often subtle,
affective, and emotional effects of governmental practices on “publics.”

Part II Networks

Any forms of publics always trace back to and are dependent on social
interactions between people that usually take place in direct human con-
tact. Thus, anything that is given a public stage in whatever form—​as an
utterance, action, image, or film—​ initially has its starting point “off-
stage.” Such performative expressions have their origins in very different
social constellations—​be they political associations, secret societies, reli-
gious groups, local or transregional interest groups, transnational diaspora
communities, or much more. Frequently, the beginnings of larger public
24 Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler

movements are characterized by small, closed, and intimate circles of persons

or even just individuals; and often, these beginnings remain hidden (Shryock,
2004). “Connective action” as a form of digitally networked protest (Bennett
& Segerberg, 2012) is also based on social interactions in which affects
are mobilized to form the driving force behind public protest. In digitally
networked media, the positions of senders and receivers change constantly,
and either personal communication can unexpectedly reach a large public
(“go viral”), or the offline behavior of individuals can be rendered visible by
the digital vigilantism of netizens and labeled as morally reprehensible. Both
are thus becoming digital events. Moreover, as highly aggregated data, mass
private communication also represents a form of the public that is access-
ible to economic interests (targeting) or political influence (surveillance). The
contributions in this part of the volume address the networked character of
current publics and examine the affective contours of their respective devel-
opmental histories. Hence, affect theory is used here to elaborate the char-
acter of networks based on concrete empirical studies.
This section is opened by Chapter 6 from the anthropologist Ulla
D. Berg, “(Im)Mobility in the Americas and COVID-​19: The Emergence of a
Hemispheric Affective Counterpublic.” Reflecting on her own research col-
laboration, she describes how, at the critical moment of the coronavirus dis-
ease 2019 (COVID-​19) crisis, a network of 45 researchers from 19 countries
working on the Americas emerged. Faced with sudden immobility due to the
pandemic, the network built a cross-​national, transdisciplinary collaboration
using different platforms to provide migrants in the Americas with up-​to-​date
information and make their voices heard publicly. As a network of care and
solidarity, the scholar activists intervened to oppose the new border regime
that was detaining thousands of migrants in transit or locking them up in
detention centers. The temporality unfolding with the global public health
emergency pushed for the unfolding of (Im)Mobility, the hemispheric net-
work of engaged researchers. As a polyphonic map, migrants’ testimonies
are heard and provide a “crisis ordinariness,” as Berlant (2011) expresses it.
Chapter 7, titled “Women Activists Imaged through Social Media
Publics: The ‘Feisty Dadis of Shaheen Bagh’ as Political Subjects,” is co-​
authored by media scholar Radhika Gajjala with Anna DeGalan, Debipreeta
Rahut, Syeda Zainab Akbar, and Jhalak Jain. The team of authors, com-
prising both feminist researchers and activists, analyzes the prominent case of
older “subaltern” women in 2019–​2020 who were protesting nonviolently in
the Muslim-​majority Delhi neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh against the new
citizenship law (CAA/​NRC). The chapter combines social media analysis,
visual analysis, and interviews with activists. Bringing the findings together,
the authors offer critical insights into the complex arrangement of ghar (the
private) and bahir (the public) that produces competing affective publics by
global activists.
Anthropologist Jürgen Schaflechner contributes with Chapter 8 on
forms of (in)visibility of non-​Muslim women in the Islamic Republic of
 Introduction 25

Pakistan. He focuses on forms of activism circulating around the alleged

forced conversion of Hindu women to Islam. In “Affectivism and Visibility
in the Mediatization of Disappearing Non-​Muslim Women in Pakistan,” he
analyzes the ambivalence of new forms of visibility through social media
that simultaneously produce novel structures of exclusion and exploitation.
Schaflechner uses the term affectivism to describe forms of activism with
affectively charged messages that enable counterspeech while producing new
forms of discrimination—​an inherently ambivalent activism. Thus, his case
study sheds light on the dialectic of visibility produced in digital networks
including empowerment (potentia) and restriction (potestas).
Chapter 9 in this section deals with the conflictive potential of digital
networking. Communication scholar Ana Makhashvili analyzes how affective
intensities that play out in digital networks of solidarity are appropriated by
far-​right actors. German Twitter users mobilized a network of solidarity using
the hashtag #WirHabenPlatz (We have space) in response to the massive vio-
lence by border police at the Turkish–​Greek frontier in 2020, after Turkish
President Erdoğan opened the borders to the European Union. “Hijacked
Solidarity: Affective Networking of Far-​Right Publics on Twitter” details
how the hashtag was hijacked almost immediately by far-​right actors aiming
to contest the claim of solidarity. Drawing on social network analysis and
qualitative methods of “reading for affect,” the chapter reveals the affective
media practices used to mobilize the hashtag public and transform it into a
site of contested sentiments.
This is followed by Chapter 10 by Finnish media scholar Kaarina
Nikunen on hate in digital networks. In “Affective Temporalities of Digital
Hate Cultures,” Nikunen analyzes the types of hate speech visible on digital
networks and is particularly interested in their temporal structures. By
distinguishing between inward hate speech in the Finnish far-​right group
“Soldiers of Odin” and outward hate speech on Twitter in which racism is
discussed, she decodes the modalities and intensities of the spread of hate as
a core element of affective publics. Presentness and immediacy are described
as key aspects of affective temporality. But this focus on anticipation and
premediation that mobilize affect must include a simultaneous sense of past
and future in the present, the author argues. The two case studies show the
different kinds of rhythms and intensity in which hate speech is organized
and circulates. Kaarina Nikunen finally reflects on the consequences of these
different temporalities for the moderation and governance of platforms. She
criticizes the lack of transparency in platform governance when noticing how
one of her examples simply disappeared without further explanation.
In Chapter 11, media scholar Tobias Matzner theorizes the role of
algorithms in affective publics. In “Understanding the Affective Impact of
Algorithmic Publics,” he describes algorithms as structural and essential elem-
ents of digital media that constitute publics. This role is most evident in social
media in which algorithms select the content shown to users based on a var-
iety of parameters such as social demographics, previous usage, engagement,
26 Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler

or tracking technology. Matzner thus understands algorithmic publics as the

algorithmic selection and production of content, which, in turn, is based on
algorithmic measurement of user behavior. While critically engaging with
the argumentation of seemingly affectively based concepts such as Pariser’s
idea of the “filter bubble” and Cambridge Analytica’s collection of Facebook
data, which was then sold for political advertising, he instead proposes to
use Berlant’s concept of affective commitment as a critical lens to examine
the power of algorithms.

Part III Media

The third part of the volume focuses not only on the specifics of different
media such as memes, literature, and theater but also on digital media and
research data. The individual contributions ask which emotional orders char-
acterize the respective media and which specific affective spaces of resonance
they generate. Although media can be described as traditional institutions of
“the public sphere,” their meaning, outreach, and formation have changed
profoundly in digitally networked communication environments; and such
media publics reveal forms of shifting, displacement, niche formation, and
convergent entanglement. In this section, the authors deal with questions
about the affective nature of media publics and analyze the consequences
of novel media figurations for an affect-​theoretical understanding of current
publics. They further discuss the significance that the ubiquitous availability
of digital media has for these traditional media as historically established
institutions of publics.
The first contribution to this section is by the art historian Verena Straub
who examines the role of memes in the affective formation of publics. In digital
media environments, forms of public humiliation and shaming of political
opponents become a core element of communication strategies, especially in
times of crisis and conflict. “Contested Image Practices of Public Shaming: A
Case Study of an Internet Meme in the Israeli–​Palestinian Conflict” delivers
an in-​depth visual analysis of an internet meme that emerged in response to
a public scandal involving a former Israeli soldier. In 2010, under the title
“Israel Defense Forces, the best days of my life,” Eden Abergil posted several
selfies on Facebook in which she posed mockingly in front of handcuffed
and blindfolded Palestinian prisoners. Eden Abergil’s humiliating pictorial
act became the starting point for numerous photoshopped montages that
were also disseminated on social media and were used, conversely, to shame
the soldier. The participatory practices of meme production invite specific
types of affective engagement. Their potential to trigger involvement and
to mobilize in this case produces heterogeneous and contradictory forms
of meaning. Analyzing the formal and aesthetic quality of text and image,
its conversion by “memeing,” and the media infrastructures that allow the
meme to circulate, Verena Straub offers insights into the affective qualities
of memes.
 Introduction 27

Chapter 13 in this section deals with a “classical” public sphere, namely

literature. In his contribution “ ‘GOOKS, Go Home!’: Vietnamese in the
United States,” literary scholar Subarno Chattarji deals with the affective
publics inhabited by Vietnamese Americans. In analyzing the novel On Earth
We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by the Vietnamese–​American writer Ocean
Voung, he shows how through his sensory apprehension and articulation of
landscapes and memories of pain, trauma, dislocation, love, and loss, the
author constructs publics that are quite distinct from the “model-​minority”
myths of success associated stereotypically with Vietnamese Americans.
Through his fine-​grained analysis of this award-​winning book, Chattarji
reveals that the narrator’s queerness, poverty, precarity, and refugee status
bring into play a complex sensorium of feelings and realities. He thus points
out how intersecting marginalities constitute individual lives and commu-
nities, and how “crisis ordinariness” (Berlant) shapes everyday life in the
United States at the same time as these lives are haunted by memories of
Vietnam and the war.
Literary scholars Gesa Jessen, Jürgen Brokoff, and Tim Lörke analyze the
affective charge of the public debate surrounding German authors suspected
of being in some way right-​wing. In “Affective Publics and the Figure of
the ‘Right-​Wing Writer’,” they trace the debate around Simon Strauß’s first
novel Sieben Nächte (Seven Nights) that was pursued in the feuilletons of
German newspapers as well as in social media and at public events in 2017–​
2018. They ask about the role of emotions in negotiating political content
in literature. In distinguishing between literary emotionality and political
emotion, the authors look particularly for the affective categories related to
text and author. By highlighting frictions and tensions in affective publics,
they identify the alleged right-​wing writer as a mobilizing figure in public
discourse.
In Chapter 15, “Opening Up Ethnographic Data: When the Private
Becomes Public,” anthropologists Michaela Rizzoli and Birgitt Röttger-​
Rössler address the question of how social scientists deal with the so-​called
“open science movement” that has been expanding in recent years. Newly
developed open science infrastructures not only provide researchers novel
opportunities for data sharing but also enable digitally mediated forms
of exchange and collaboration between scientists, research partners, and
different publics. Based on an interview study—​mainly, but not exclusively,
with social anthropologists—​the authors highlight the role that emotions
and affects play in researchers’ engagements with data and the sharing of
data. The authors nuance the argument that the growing demand for open
science provokes ambivalent feelings within researchers due to the affective
ties they have developed with their research participants, research theme,
and time and thus also with “their” research data. Data, they argue, are
always charged with affects, and data sharing thus takes place within specific
affective arrangements involving researchers, research participants, methods,
data, and digital infrastructures.
28 Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler

With these interdisciplinary and truly global contributions, which

address current affective formations of publics empirically in very different
constellations and in a variety of places, we hope to contribute to a more
nuanced understanding of affects and emotional performances as a core element
of publics—​be they digitally established, on-​site, or entangled between the two.
Publics as embodied, performatively elicited constellations are not disappearing
as a consequence of emerging digital technologies. Focusing on the affective
structure of public formations enables us to diversify our understanding of
publics going far beyond the political as such. Understanding affects as a rela-
tional category brings to the fore the diversity of public formations consisting
of quite specific relations between people, their environment, media, and digital
technology. This is indispensable in Affective Societies.

Notes
1 See Graan (2022) for a very good and detailed overview of this new subfield of
anthropology.
2 Whereas this focus on rational discourse was understood for a while as a fun-
damental rejection of any kind of emotion in public discourse, Wessler (2018,
pp. 133–​134) has argued that emotions do not have a quality-​reducing effect per
se, but can be conducive to discourse under certain conditions if they can be justi-
fied or if they promote empathy for opposition groups.

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