Introduction: Mediating Affect

This Special Issue brings together seven affective mediations on the theme of mediating affect. The articles were presented in an earlier form at the inaugural Affect Theory Conference, held in Millersville (USA) in October 2015. Responding to a Call for Papers, authors were invited to take on the question of ‘media’ and ‘mediation’ in the context of the blossoming field of affect studies. Each article in turn tackles a particular trajectory of concern examined as a multiplicity – the philosophy/study of living and feeling, fear and the amplification of affect, trauma and absence, detention and compassion, memorialization and shōjo (少女) (the girl trope in postwar Japanese cinema), and whiteness and the good life. The theoretical, disciplinary, and cultural lineages are many. Developed together within the context of the project of cultural studies, the resulting Special Issue provides an opportunity to consider more deeply how ‘media-world assemblages’ (Murphie, A., in press. The world as medium. In: E. Manning, A. Munster, S. Thomsen and B. Marie, eds. Immediations. Sydney: Open Humanities Press) give rise to certain political and ethical questions. In this Issue, we encounter six different media-world formations and learn how they shift as they pulsate with affective relations. As well as introducing these relations, this Introduction canvases some of the conceptual work that has gone into ‘mediating affect’, addressing the context that underpins this bringing together of terms and seeking out ways of provoking further research

Mediating affect in John Pilger’s Utopia: ‘the good life’ as a structure of whiteness

This article proposes that whiteness should be thought of as an affective structure, theorizing whiteness in terms of optimism, possessive subjectivity and multiculturalism. The article shows how the optimism of ‘the good life’ [Berlant, L., 2011. Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] is linked structurally to whiteness in the construction of the Australian nation-state. In this context, Utopia [2013. Film. Directed by John Pilger. Australia: Antidote Films] specifically identifies whiteness as an affective structure. The article develops by unpacking this claim. First, I consider how the affective structure of the Australian nation-state is encountered through the mutual mediation of ‘media’ and ‘place’. I focus on the example of the film's journey to Rottnest Island – formerly an island prison, now the destination of holiday makers – to highlight how the optimism of arrival links whiteness to the present. Second, I develop an analysis of the affective surfaces of whiteness by analyzing the film's encounter with ‘White Man faciality’ [Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1987. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press] and Indigenous ‘slow death’ [Berlant, L., 2011. Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press]. Through producing a series of faces, Utopia portrays whiteness as a deflective surface that propagates the ‘onto-pathology’ of white Australia [Nicolacopoulos, T. and Vassilacopoulos, G., 2014. Indigenous sovereignty and the being of the occupier: manifesto for a white Australian philosophy of origins. Melbourne: Re.press]. Utopia also portrays whiteness as an absorptive surface in which Aboriginal self-possession – including, in the form of life – disappears. The film emphasizes the loss of Aboriginal life through illness and suicide linked to incarceration, overcrowding and state-induced impoverishment. The article concludes by locating media (including Utopia) within the tension between absorption and deflection as a tension between the different spatial actions of the affective relations that mediate whiteness

Lauren Berlant on Genre

There is no doubt that the writing of Lauren Berlant is influential in media and cultural studies as well as across gender and feminist studies and other work in critical, cultural and materialist traditions. Given the complexity of Berlant’s work and its integral refusal of taxonomic and hegemonic terms, it can be difficult for the reader to coherently grasp the singularity of even their most powerful concepts. This essay attempts to think with Berlant’s conceptualisation of genre without displacing the concept from their work through representational summarisation. The essay is part close reading, part exegesis and part experimentation – I hope just as Berlant would have wished. Rather than aim for an even description that accounts for Berlant’s various interventions in a measured way, the method of this essay is to think-write with the ellipsis, to undertake a translation that puts to one side the fantasy of mastery but still seeks to deepen our understanding of the intended meaning of Berlant’s texts. For Berlant, intended meanings would be about what something brings into the world. At minimum, this is my best effort at partaking in a cultural studies pedagogy that foregrounds the practice of critical thinking as world making. The essay then offers an invitation to the reader to learn from Berlant’s work about what the theoretical concept of genre can do. Just as this abstract does, the essay moves in and out of convention, where the sociality of affect does its work to congeal, to disturb, to make sense and make senseless. To move on

Trust, Mistrust and AI: Intimacy, Consent, Affect

Trust might take as its object another person, or a social reputation, a specific technology, or a corporation. Trust’s affects take form in these specific relations, as belief or ideation, as knowledge, confidence or ‘ontological security’, though might also be more loosely felt, such as in the trust that things will turn out all right. Institutions of intimacy, such as sex, friendship, family and the romantic relationship, are powerful organisers of people’s perceptions of trust—of who, how and when to trust. Equally, it is through the institutions of intimacy that we learn to consent. For example, we cannot be forced to trust, but must consent to trust. The increasing mediation of intimate relationships and encounters by AI technologies, from social media algorithms to location services, are in turn mediating social perceptions and affective realities of trust. This workshop considers the role of intimacy and consent in furthering our understanding of how uses of automated decision-making (ADM) within intimate life are pivotal to the wholescale remediation of social life more generally. Such a challenge requires thinking about the dynamic between trust and mistrust, when trust itself becomes an object of scrutiny. Within the context of ADM, what are the limits and possibilities for taking up a theory of trust as sensory, affective, embodied, and immanent within social relations? How do notions of transparency, prediction, and efficacy address mistrust? How does consent conjoin with trust and mistrust in the arrival of ADM in intimate relations? This online workshop jointly hosted by the UNSW Media Futures Hub and the ARC Centre of Excellence on ADM+S Centre investigates the affective and embodied dimensions of trust and mistrust. Discuss will cover themes such as: > ADM + trust and mistrust + the social encounter > ADM + trust and mistrust + prediction > ADM + trust and mistrust + transparency > ADM + trust and mistrust + consent > ADM + trust and mistrust + believability > ADM + trust and mistrust + control Led by Dr Sarah Cefai (Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths), this workshop will take the form of a 2-hour discussion guided by provocations by ADM+S and Media Futures Hub scholars: Associate Professor Emma A. Jane in Arts and Media, UNSW Associate Professor in Media and Communications Tanja Dreher, UNSW Associate Professor in Criminology Maria Giannacopoulos, UNSW Dr Emma Quilty, Research Fellow in the Department of Human Centred Computing, Monash University These provocations will be presented in dialogue with a limited number of academic texts that will be circulated to participants in advance

Do We Consent To This? Lessons from Contemporary Media on the Cultural Concept of Consent

Leverhulme Research Fellowship Application 2023-24

Humiliation and the affective obligation of the social: Putting the social back into social media

This paper examines the nature of the bond, contract, or trust that animates ‘the social’ in social media. Drawing on my research into the affective and discursive structure of humiliation, this examination is based on the premise that this bond is at stake in the reanimation of the social by social media: it is this bond that humiliation breaks. But humiliation too makes the social anew, in its threat and its consequences. The patterning of humiliation as an affective cluster not only results from but underpins many of the social media contexts we encounter. This means that a deeper understanding of the social in social media must realise both the affective nature of social bonds as well as the structures of identity from which these bonds stem. The paper therefore revises our conceptualisation of this bond in social and cultural theory given the specific ways in which social media mediate affect, as well as anticipates the technological determinism we risk in the disciplinary trend towards the study of data and the algorithm. By ‘putting the social back into social media,’ we must grapple with the role of the social articulation of algorithmic cultures in changes to the cultural politics of identity

Tracking the con in con-sent: Reflections on the hyper-aesthetics of sex in consent culture

In their recent book, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth, Matthew Fuller and Eyal claim that ‘hyper-aesthetic images are not part of a symbolic regime of representation, but actual traces and residues of material relations and of mediatic structures assembled to elicit them’ (2021, p.81). This paper mobilises this claim to better understand the fields of power that are operating through the ascent of consent culture. From a cultural perspective, enthusiastic consent clearly relays a range of feminist lineages. For instance, consent effectuates a postfeminist sensibility, while it complicates the illusory power of self-determined femininity. Current models also impute sexual agency in normatively gendered terms and fashion conservative politics of sexuality, among other shortcomings, as discussed by Katherine Angel (2021), Joseph Fischel (2019), Laura Kipniss (2017), and more. To further understand the implications of the current formations of consent, this paper considers our cultural fascination with the “con,” suggested by a recent spate of programmes and films such as Fyre (2019), Tinder Swindler (2022), Inventing Anna (2022), Hustlers (2019), and The Hustle (2019), in relation to “consent,” not as a ‘symbolic regime of representation,’ but as indexes of a hyper-aesthetics of sex—the production of images that are actual traces and residues of material relations. In so doing, this paper takes heed from the sociological observation, made in the US, that everyday conceptions of consent foreground that which consent should defend against against—deceit (Sommers 2020)

Experiments in Feminist Aesthetics—Stories, Genres, Politics of Consent

This project is a philosophical, cultural and community enquiry into cultures of consent as a case study of feminist form. The focus on feminist form brings to fruition my long-time enquiry into the relationship between forms of expression, social change, and the purview of theoretical knowledge. In particular, the project undertakes a deep examination of the aesthetics of writing and audio-visual culture to further longstanding debates in feminist epistemology about the relations between knowledge, power and feminist liberation, as well as uses of feminist, queer and critical immanent theory to understand the specific relationships among writing, media, and the structures of feeling agitated by feminist movement. Consent is a major emergent cultural category whose politics require urgent understanding from a critical feminist perspective. This project offers a set of innovative interventions into the cultural concept of consent in three ways: through the production of (1) new theoretical knowledge, (2) media and cultural analysis, and (3) community action research. (1) Theoretical Knowledge – Reconceptualising Consent as a Cultural Concept This project takes a fresh look at consent through moving beyond single-discipline thinking in political theory and law and the overarching Western metaphysics that imagines the ‘presence’ of consent as a thing that can be established, engaging with postcolonial, decolonial, queer and feminist literature to produce a new genealogy of the non- and inter-disciplinary antecedents and underpinnings of the contemporary cultural concept of consent. Incorporating a theorisation of consent through media theory, including the conceptualisation of the technicity and automation of digital consent, and the transformation to cultural consent shaped by digital media culture, the project produces a new account of what is at stake consent. Locating consent as a structure and infrastructure of feeling radically reimagines the political basis of consent, claiming an alternative, radical philosophy for consent that revises key concepts of agency, experience and the political. Outputs in the public domain • ‘Feminist Aesthetics of Resistance’ (2022) [5981 words] • ‘Is Consent a Retroactive Formation? Temporalising Consent in Contemporary Feminist Culture,’ Console-ing Passions (2022) • ‘Stupid in the Moment: Excavating the Patriarchal Nonconscious of Humiliation,’ Affect and Social Media #4, University of East London (2019) Planned Outputs • Monograph chapter: ‘Consent.’ Aesthetics of Obligation: Essays on the Feeling of Being Obliged • Authored article: ‘Between Representation and Ethics: Consent as Radical Philosophy.’ Radical Philosophy (2) Media & Cultural Analysis – Consent as a Media & Cultural Practice The project offers a new account of consent’s vernacular—the stories consent tells, its genres, and their politics. Through media and cultural analysis of consent’s aesthetics, the project reveals the 'consent scripts' that guide expectations of intimate life, and how these are shaped jointly by consent’s institutionalisation (e.g. through policy), technologization (e.g. through digital media infrastructures) and discursive representation (i.e. through neoliberal governmentality). This work offers an account of the everyday affective experience of commonsense perceptions of consent and how they are produced by relations among jurisprudence, media discourses, and technology as material and affective infrastructures, revealing the politics of consent as a media and cultural practice. Outputs in the public domain • 'Consent’s Data Cultures' / 'Gender, Digital Culture and Consent,' Workshop & Symposium at The University of Queensland (2022) • ‘Tracking the Con in Con-sent: Reflections on the Hyper-Aesthetics of Sex in Consent Culture,’ Bodies in Flux, Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (2022) • ‘Is Consent Good for Women? A Feminist Symposium on Consent Culture,’ Goldsmiths & Birkbeck (2022) • ‘Content after content warnings: Notes on the trigger,’ Digital Intimacies #7, University of Queensland (2021) • ‘Humiliation and the affective obligation of the social: Putting the social back into social media,’ Understanding the Social in a Digital Age: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Media, Technology, and the Social, University of East Anglia (2019) • ‘Status-Visibility: On the Uses and Abuses of #humiliation,’ Capacious: Affect Inquiry / Making Space, Millersville University (2018) Planned Outputs • Cefai, S. (ed.) (in progress) Consent: A New Cultural Concept • Cefai, S. ‘The Capacious Cultural Politics of Consent.’ Social Media + Society (SAGE) I have submitted an application for a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2023-4) to support (1) and (2). (3) Community Action Research – Stories We Can’t Tell Through undertaking Community Action Research I develop an applied approach to the aesthetics of consent, using experimentation with feminist form to examine the aesthetics of consent and how these mediate consent as a site of social struggle and change. In particular I draw on my expertise in feminist life writing and theoretical storytelling to make available new accounts of how cultural mediations of consent mobilise affect (e.g. shame, anxiety) and feed the mediated forms of expression (e.g. entitlement, permissibility, trust and mistrust) that shape consent’s affective structure. As Community Action Research, the project targets what is referred to as the “culture of silence” around rape, sexual assault, harassment, and other abuses of power in the university as a workplace, disrupting, problematising and reworking from within the language of institutionalised intimacy. The research tells the university stories its subjects can’t tell through conducting an innovative participatory interview methodology. Utilising my skills as a theoretical storyteller, I give form to the formless by working across journalism, theoretical fiction, feminist theory and cultural critique. Outputs in the public domain • ‘Why Men Cry Rape,’ https://sarahcefai.substack.com/ (2022) [2500 words] • ‘Exit Wounds of Feminist Theory,’ The Future of Media (2022) [6860 words] • ‘The Flood,’ After Progress (2022) [5543 words] • ‘The Humiliation of “Sex with Optimism”: Fieldnotes from Tinder,’ Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Enquiry (2018) [6847 words] Planned Outputs • Non-discipline specific cross-over monograph: Stories We Can’t Tell

Is consent a retroactive formation? Temporalising consent in contemporary feminist culture

“You know where you’re into it and then you’re just suddenly not sure. I thought about calling a taxi but [pause], I felt like I owed him”–EastEnders, 2018 We consent to that which is intimate to us. In the current mediatised discourse, the right to consent faces forward—we give our consent to an event or occurrence that hasn’t happened yet. The legal rights framework is subtended by a tacit model of consent, which becomes the special preserve of rape and sexual offences legislation when tacit consent is transgressed by particular forms of social action. This model of consent is presumptive in terms of gendered bodies and behaviours, but not subjects. This paper considers what we can learn about the limits of consent as a feminist concept given the temporality of what is exchanged in its moment of transgression. Drawing on feminist theory, affect study and cultural anthropology, the paper conceptualises consent as a temporally disjunctive mode characterised by the sublimation of exchange by a relation of power. That is, the paper explores what it would mean to think through consent as that which is given only after it has been taken, and therefore to consider consent as a retroactive formation. The paper explores this argument through close readings of the gendered aesthetics of sexual exchange in various examples from contemporary feminist media culture

Analysing ‘Media Lives’: Time, Change and Dynamics of Media Literacy

Since 2005 Ofcom have conducted a qualitative, small-scale, longitudinal study on media literacy. The study is commissioned to the Knowledge Agency whose reports are available online (http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-dataresearch/media-literacy/adults/). At the beginning of 2015, we spent 3 months viewing and analysing the interview archive of the study, seeking to understand how both generational and biographical factors are at play in people’s media practices. We identified a subsample of 4 participants whose stories and circumstances over time were particularly relevant to the questions we had about the social and cultural aspects of media practice. This report reflects our observations based on this analysis. The findings, interpretations and conclusions expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or views of Ofcom