Engineering Affect

Street Politics and Microfoundations of Governance

Datos Bibliográficos

ID6160693
AutoresMichelle D Weitzel (0000-0002-3459-4439, New School, autor de correspondencia)
Año2019
Volumen11
Número2
Páginas203-243
Fecha de publicación2019-11-24
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaMiddle East Law and Governance (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1876-3367 • E-ISSN: 1876-3375
EditorialBrill (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1163/18763375-01102005
OpenAlexW3000619276
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas60

Affect was an essential component of the Arab uprisings, and it remains an important medium for shaping everyday politics in the Middle East and beyond. Yet while affect is beginning to be conceived as integral to studies of social movements, endeavors to control individual and collective affect in the praxis of statecraft remain understudied—despite robust evidence that affect and emotion are intimately entwined with political behavior and decision-making on a wide range of issues spanning voter preference to foreign policy. This article examines how such control takes effect, situating the sensory body as a bridge and key site of interaction and contestation for diverse projects that seek to influence behavioral outcomes via the manipulation of public space. From among the bodily senses, it singles out the auditory realm as a particularly potent generator of affect and examines the entanglement of sound, hearing, and power to foreground ways the sensory body is routinely engaged in state projects. Drawing on examples from the protests that ricocheted across the Middle East from 2010–2012, and framing these with historical antecedents from original archival work, this article bridges phenomenological experience and political outcomes to reveal how sensory inputs such as sound, wielded by elite and subaltern actors alike, are engineered for political effect. In so doing, I argue that a necessary prerequisite for grasping the role of affect and emotion in politics is a better understanding of technologies and modalities of control that go into the structuring of the sensory environment

Aesthetics · Affect (linguistics · Elite · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Framing (construction · Political science · Politics · Realm · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Communication · History · Law · Music History and Culture · Populism, Right-Wing Movements · Psychology · Social Psychology