Anna Feigenbaum is an Assistant Professor of Communications at Richmond, The American International University in London, UK. Anna helped set up the art working group at Occupy LSX and is currently involved in Occupy Hackney, a local group of Occupy protesters linking up with existing community organisations and solidarity networks in her neighbourhood. She is currently working on the collectively authored book Protest Camps: imagining alternative worlds (Zed forthcoming 2013). For more information on the project visit www.protestcamp.org and follow @protestcamps on twitter.

Workshop Format

Feeling the Movement is an interactive workshop that looks at how feelings ‘stick to’ social movement objects (things, ideas and images) as they circulate between people via everyday conversation, social and mass media. A brief introductory talk on different definitions of affect and why they matter to social movement and media studies will open the workshop. Following this, participants will engage in a hands-on activity to collectively analyse how the circulation of ‘affect’ can shape and construct protest communities, effecting how we see ourselves in relation to social movements.

Why Look at Feelings?

People care about Occupy (especially those people made irate enough to say that they ‘couldn’t care less’). Occupy gets discussed over drinks and across the table at family dinners. It fills the chatter of public transit cars and fuel feisty letters to the editor. It trends on twitter feeds and shouts at us online from comment box after comment box. Whatever one makes of the Occupy protests, they have gotten people talking.

But people do not usually think about politics as the stuff that makes us talk. Instead we try to pinpoint and count up clear conclusions to determine political success. Impacts are measured in the number of demands that get met, in the amount of new legislation passed, legal trails won, politicians elected or ousted. Some researchers now write algorithms that try to capture and graphify outcomes, generating citation counts and tag clouds. But these methods of understanding impact can only scratch the surface of what protest camps do--and why we come to care about them.

The tools commonly used for sizing up success are not able to understand the ways that movements—and protest camps in particular-- form connections and conflicts between people. They cannot account for the convergences and divergences that grow between disparate groups struggling towards solidarity. They cannot pinpoint the winding paths and crooked travels of dialogue and debate that protest camps create, passing down stories that shape the movements yet to come.

To care about protest camps one needn’t be a protest camper. The everyday experiences of encountering the Occupy Movement come about in all sorts of settings. You can find yourself sat in front of your laptop reading friends’ facebook status updates or linked articles and all of a sudden your heart is racing a bit faster, or maybe your eyes are rolling, or you’ve found yourself feverishly lost in a frenzied clickathon. Feelings can also creep up more gently; a soft sigh, a slight smile that forms on your lips when reading a newspaper headline over someone’s shoulder on the bus.

Our responses to media images, soundbytes and status updates often involve both a cognitive critique (I don’t think that sign communicates the message well) and an affective response (as you ‘feel’ your body recoil or stiffen in response to an image). But often these two things are not discernible from each other. This affective aspect of our political reactions leads many social movement scholars and participants to argue that the emotional/rational divide is a false dichotomy and that we cannot (and should not) separate out our feelings from our thinking. This is not because we are all at base ‘irrational,’ but rather because our feelings have a lot to tell us about our politics. Some affect theorists say that feelings are ‘sticky’ and when we encounter objects (things, ideas or images) our feelings stick to them. When objects circulate and become encountered repeatedly, objects become stickier and stickier—laden with meaning and potent with feelings. For the Occupy movement we see this play out around slogans like the use of the terms ‘Occupy’ and ‘Occupation,’ and in the invocation that ‘We are the 99%.’ Heavily circulated images, from the pepper spray cop to the V for Vendetta mask, also become sticky. They grow potent, becoming vibrant with meaning. Through repetitious and broad circulation, these particular objects come to stand in for and signify Occupy as a social movement. And as we encounter these objects we ‘orient’ ourselves to them: aligning, rejecting, attaching or disassociating ourselves from them as markers of the broader protest movement. In other words, how we feel (or think-feel) in relation to images, ideas and objects gives shape to our politics.

Suggested Readings

1. Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg (2010) “An Inventory of Shimmers.” In Gregg, Melissa and Greg Seigworth (eds.) The Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 1-27. Provides a good overview of different theories of affect and their importance for thinking about politics and movement.

2. Davey D. (2011) “To Occupy or Decolonize? That is the Question… Is there an Easy Answer?” hiphopandpolitics.com available at http://hiphopandpolitics.com/2011/12/08/to-occupy-or-decolonize-that-is-the-question-is-there-an-easy-answer/ Offers a summary and some commentary on debates around the term Occupy in the US. Links, videos and comments in this post will provide further insight.

3. “Interview with Jaggi Singh and Mostafa Hennaway” (2011) McGill Daily. Available at http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2011/10/interview-with-jaggi-singh-mostafa-hennaway/ An interview with two local Montreal organisers discussing how and why the Decolonise Montreal contingent formed.

 Click here to download a PDF document of the above workshop information