This section deals with the second research question of the thesis: How does affect play a critical part in making sense of the public world, and mobilising political participation? A particular focus is given on the literature review of the significant role of varying emotions in political mobilisation and thereby its indispensable linkage with rationality in the process of political involvement. This will be explored through an analysis of teen fans’ politicisation in Chapter Seven ‘The Paradox of Fandom’.
Some scholars (Hoggett and Thompson, 2012, pp.2-3;Kuklinski, 2001, p.7) venture to differentiate affect and emotion. Yet, there seems no consensus in conceptualisation. It is understandable since the study of emotion is in its infancy despite the rapid growth of emotion research in various areas in the recent decade. In my thesis it would be meaningless to distinguish these two terms. Therefore, I will use affect and emotion interchangeably in order to mean “mediated” feelings elicited largely by differing media genres and communications.
Emotions have long been theorised as secondary to reason in politics.
Habermas (1989[1962], 1999) acknowledges the plausible role of emotions in
motivating ‘novel’ readers’ engagement in a literary public sphere. He describes how activity in the literary public sphere, involving discussions of taste and manners and the pleasurable enjoyment of conversation among equals, spilled over into the political public sphere as it became a forum for the discussion of social, economic and political questions. Nonetheless, his main argument is centred on the firm emphasis of reason and the suppression of emotion. Accordingly media research, concerned with the notion of a public sphere extensively following Habermas, ‘excessively’ focuses on the cognitive and rationalistic aspects of news and neglects affective communications as McGuigan (2010, p.25) critiques. This also reflects ‘the division of labour’ in media research as Corner (1991, p.268) and Dahlgren (1995) have underscored.
Likewise, the study of emotions had been marginalised in political scholarships in which the rationalistic, structural, and organisational models dominate as Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta (2001) elaborated in Passionate Politics. According to them, Max Weber paved the way to associate emotions with irrationality although he appreciated passion as an important element for political commitment. In general, he believed emotional actions could not be rational and vice versa, which has a bearing on social and political science traditions. In these traditions, whereas emotions were considered as crucial for understanding all political action outside institutional politics, political participants in protests were pathologically stereotyped as a mob or a crowd easily driven by anxiety and fear, anger and violence and spurred by rumours and demagogues, all of which were regarded as irrational and immature. This negatively stereotyped image of protesters is still often presented in the Korean conservative media, which is charted in the analysis of the dominant media discourse of teen activism in Chapter Seven.
In the recent decade, however, robust research in various fields including media and cultural studies has re-focused on emotion as an essential and/or rational constituent of politics. Distinctively, some political psychologists (Marcus and Mackuen, 2001;Marcus, Sullivan, Theiss-Morse and Stevens, 2005) have attempted to reconceptualise affect as inescapably linked to rationality through the concept of
‘affective intelligence’ (Marcus and Mackuen, 2001, p.41) in which affect maintains our capability to use reason ‘in precisely those circumstances when the benefits of reason are most required and most wanted’. They argue emotions – representatively anxiety and enthusiasm – can play positive roles in democratic decision-making and participation. In other words, anxiety of present or possible threat or danger facilitates
‘reflective, deliberative’ (re)consideration of contemporary information and ‘standing decisions (i.e. predispositions)’ (Marcus, Sullivan, Theiss-Morse and Stevens, 2005, p.961) and enhances political learning for new information in order to respond to the threat. And enthusiasm promotes active engagement in the democratic process.
In respect to the role of emotions in political mobilisation, Gamson’s (1992) study has much significance in my thesis. Through the analysis of mass media and focus groups composed of working people, he articulates how the components of collective action – injustice, agency and identity – are manifested and how people use resources such as media discourse, experiential knowledge and public wisdom in order to understand an issue. Particularly the collective action frame impinges on the analysis of the process of teenaged fans’ politicisation in the Chapter Seven. Injustice, as a powerful constituent of political consciousness supporting collective action, is a ‘hot cognition’ he argues. In other words, injustice is laden with ‘the righteous anger’ (or moral indignation, rage, resentment, grief) toward a concrete target of human actors (such as corporations, government agencies or specific groups rather than individuals)
who cause harm and suffering. As Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta (2001, pp.16-17) explains, in the process of transformation of such emotions as anger, indignation, hatred or fear into cognitive beliefs of unfairness, ‘demonization’ is needed. That is to say, it needs typifying an adversary’s action completely negatively, assigning immoral motives to the opponent, and augmenting the enemy’s power. As such, the experience of anger motivates people to engage in political action in order to overcome perceived injustice (Thompson, 2006).
In addition, agency is also an essential consciousness that people, as ‘potential agents of their own history’ (Gamson, 1992, p.7), can change existing conditions and terms of their daily lives through collective action. In contrast, a huge obstacle to collective agency is the sense of ‘collective helplessness’, which social structure and political culture combine to produce (Gamson, 1992, pp.59-83). In centralised, hierarchical national political and economic structures in which working people can hardly find opportunity to participate in any of the institutions setting the conditions of their daily lives, they unavoidably come to feel helpless. And a political culture engendering passivity and inaction exacerbates this pessimism. For example, the news production culture hugely dependent on a small group of power elites serves to establish their ‘self-serving’ announcements filling the news pages. It is noteworthy that he acknowledges collective significance of individual actions having no organised plan, which can be found as a characteristic of many online political actions.
The process of becoming a collective agent necessitates identification, ‘the process of defining “we”, typically in opposition to some “they” who have different interests or values’ (Gamson, 1992, p.84). The injustice element facilitates personal identification as well. In the identification process, this “they” should be demonized as a concrete target as explained above. With respect to the strategy of how working people
use media, experiential knowledge and public wisdom for their sense-making and their political engagement, Gamson stresses the concept of issue proximity – the degree to which an issue has ‘direct and immediate consequences for one’s personal life’ – as an important factor along with an interest to encourage issue involvement. The issue proximity brings out people’s existing anger, which they experience over the hardships and pains in their everyday lives, within the injustice frame. Consequently, he concludes that experiential knowledge contributes to concretising injustice with the emotion of moral indignation, and media discourse offers a tool for the framing of an issue in a broader picture as well as for the shared understanding.
As such, emotions, as the motivational ground for political action or/and as
‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild, 2012) that determine the extent and time of publicity of a particular emotion, are culturally and socially constructed and (re-)negotiated through contesting discourse framed enormously by the media. As Richards (2007, p.5) underscores, in media studies, news, conventionally regarded as the traditional, rational public sphere of political process and debates, should be also examined in the aspect of an emotional public sphere as ‘a discrete object of study’. Through an analysis of the construction of the British people’s response to Princess Diana’s death in 1997 and public debate about the fate of the British monarchy that followed, McGuigan (2005, 2010) also argues for situating affect at the centre of communication and democratic participation. In this light, Pantti and van Zoonen’s study (2006) calls for greater attention. Through a qualitative content analysis of four Dutch newspaper articles around recent political assassinations, they attempted to unveil ‘the implicit rules of feeling’, that is to say, how, which and whose emotions were reported as appropriate to which contexts. In their conclusion, they argue that the different and contradictory emotions they identified in their analysis imply that public emotions do not necessarily
have ‘a unifying effect’ by pointing to this diversity as a cause for the disruption of inclusive political, cultural citizenship and lamenting the temporality of citizens’
emotional participation.
Pantti (2010) examines how compassion and anger have been constructed and managed as a vehicle to construct social solidarity and to express criticism toward political authorities in the British disaster news coverage. Pantti employs a cultural approach, Sarah Ahmed’s (2004) model of the ‘sociality’ of emotions, in which emotions become ‘constitutive of subjectivity and of boundaries between ‘we’ and ‘them’
and function to both move us and hold us in place’. This is consistent with the collective identity frame that Gamson (1992) stresses as a crucial component of political mobilisation. In her findings, she highlights that the compassion discourse enhances a sense of moral national community and works to rebuild collective identity and promote cultural values, and stories of heroes and ordinary people’s altruistic actions build moral solidarity. The anger discourse shows ‘mediated disasters can be less consensual’ yet offers an occasional space in which ordinary people (and journalists) hold those in authority accountable for their actions.