The affective politics of the “post-truth” era: Feeling rules and networked subjectivity

This essay maps interdisciplinary lines of inquiry to assess current research on affect and emotion in relation to digital and social media, in the context of the fractured news media landscape and increasingly visible emotionality in political life. The essay sketches the context of polarized emotionality and the crisis of truth characterizing current U.S. politics, centrally engaging Arlie Hochschild's concept of “feeling rules”. We explore the limitations of “affect theory” for researching mediatized politics, contending that the stark differentiation of “affect” from “emotion” reifies the rational, autonomous, liberal conception of the subject, and is of limited value for political communications research. Instead, we emphasize the relational nature of affect and emotion, and the value of feminist politics of emotion research. Our analysis evaluates the limitations of contemporary scholarship on affect, social media, and politics in the context of the grave challenges posed by algorithmic governance and computational propaganda. We conclude by suggesting the concept of “networked subjectivity” for understanding mediatized politics, and the importance of the “affective feedback loop” within the context of the social media “culture of likes.”