Living Digital Media

Throughout this book, I will build on prior arguments that affective encounters, felt experiences, and emotioned discourse are always already present when composing digital media—for understanding how we work with it and how we live it (Anable, 2018; Jiang, 2020; kyburz, 2020; Micciche, 2017). In other words, I theorize that digital media production is a rich affective endeavor, vibrant with rhetorical-affective practices that course between bodies throughout its cycle. Affective movement is critical for meaning-making. By “movement,” I mean instances in which affects, feelings, and emotions circulate and intensify between composers, objects, and other partners involved in a digital media production.

This brief extension of Living Digital Media’s introduction animates key terms and conditions related to rhetorical circulation and affect. Affect theory sheds more light on rhetorical circulation that rhetorical-affective practices animate. Circulation is a shared term between the two theories, as both are interested in movement. Rhetorical-affective practices animate circulation that precedes the wide- and large-scale circulation that rhetoric and writing studies have interrogated and critiqued for many years. Affect theory affords us a deeper investigation into more interpersonal, embodied instances of circulation that accompany practices before a text takes off in the world—such as when we’re drafting digital media scholarship and games. In other words, small-scale and wider forms of circulation are always part of rhetorical-affective practices in addition to the circulation often associated with delivery. Practices and feelings are constantly in motion.

Closing in on Rhetorical Circulation’s Affective Resonance

In a 2020 issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Dan Ehrenfeld posits that rhetoric’s ecological turn has de-emphasized human actors who contribute to the networks, ecologies, and systems of human and nonhumans in the public sphere. His theory of “infrastructural politics” imagines “the collective forms of human action that shape rhetorical ecologies” and calls for scholars to “theorize the transformation of the networked public sphere and the roles that rhetors play [emphasis added] in this transformation” (p. 313). Studies of rhetorical circulation are implicated in such an argument, as much of our field’s recent investigations have taken a wide and distant view of bodies associated with public circulation. The same goes for studies of affect under this theoretical banner. After discussing such implicated arguments, I turn to studies that have stressed the value of embodied rhetorical circulation.

This section builds on previous discussions by focusing on how feelings are framed in recent theories of circulation, which is widely considered an extension of the fifth rhetorical canon, delivery. My aim is not to retread the rich theoretical terrain of circulation, of which our field has plenty. It’s to evoke rhetorical theories that are useful for understanding the transitory nature of feelings in relation to digital media scholarship and game development. Circulation theories help emphasize the motion of emotion, the circulation of social goods that are sticky with feelings and economies of feeling that depend on movement (Ahmed, 2005; Micciche, 2007). Rhetorical circulation and affect theories are productive theoretical partners. Affect theory underscores that digital texts shape embodied rhetorical action. When texts are in circulation, so too are bodies involved. In other words, rhetorical circulation and affect theories can (re-)attach the significance of the body to texts in circulation.

Scholars such as Collin Gifford Brooke (2009) and Douglas Eyman (2015) argue that the ancient rhetorical canons—namely, invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—must be reframed and redefined as texts are produced more exclusively in digital environments. Building on Brooke, Douglas Eyman (2015), a longtime editor of Kairos and author, notes that the canons, as well as theories of audience and kairos, are still significant to the field but have adapted with the advent of digital networks, remix culture, and more. A number of researchers have focused on one or more canons of rhetoric to study production practices that give rise to digital texts. A number of scholars have also expanded the canons by integrating rhetorical theory with cultural historical activity theory (Prior et al., 2007), feminist and avant garde theories (Delagrange, 2011), and queer theory (Alexander & Rhodes, 2015). My intention here is not to discuss each canon and its relation to digitality, but rather to focus on researchers who have reframed circulation and occasioned affectively focused questions for future research.

Although the rhetorical practices of arrangement and memory have bearing on relational affective work (Delagrange, 2011; Bowers, 2015), circulation is the scope of this section because participants of my study discussed its varying forms in relation to collaboration, revision, and delivery writ large. Studies of delivery that focus on circulation have been suggestive of collaboration and emotion, for example. Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss’ (2009) theory of “rhetorical velocity” re-situates delivery as part of a larger circulation endeavor in rhetorical production. According to Ridolfo and DeVoss, delivery is not simply a matter of distributing a text, but of composing it in such a way that it is redistributed by third parties. Rhetorical velocity, then, is a strategic way of anticipating the movement and appropriation of a text after its initial delivery. Appropriation is a concept that Ridolfo suggests but does not explicitly theorize as affectively charged. In David Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Anthony Michel’s (2012) text The Available Means of Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric, the authors delineate the cultural positions of alphabetic and visual texts, one distinction being that visual rhetoric is emotional, whereas the alphabetic is intellectual (p. 42). Showing the emotional work of combining and circulating alphabetic and visual rhetoric, Ridolfo recalls an activist group concerned with sweatshop conditions (p. 86). The group was responsible for a protest at Michigan State University. As a group member, Ridolfo composed a press release and circulated it to Michigan newspapers, hoping for “positive appropriation” via “favorable news coverage” of the group’s press release and flash dance that followed in an MSU administrative building (p. 90). “Positive,” in a sense, means emotions that do not run counter to that of the student protest group. The group saw coverage in news media, got wider attention on their efforts in the anti-sweatshop movement, and, in the end, seemed happy about the multimodal effort.

Numerous studies like the aforementioned have augmented delivery’s—and thus, circulation’s—presence in studies of digital production (e.g., McCorkle, 2012; Gries, 2015; Gries & Brooke, 2018). Much of these studies have been concerned with the text or production that circulates as well as its public impact and transformation. The same goes for scholarship concerned with the public sphere and rhetorical ecologies (Ehrenfeld, 2020; Larson & McHendry Jr., 2019; Rice, 2012), social media (Gelms, 2021; Papacharissi, 2014; Riddick, 2019), and digital activism (Wang, 2020; McVey & Woods, 2016; McDuffie & Ames, 2021). Although these studies are critical for understanding texts and social movements that take off through circulation and uptake, such studies occasion more attention to interpersonal circulation and the bodies that practice and feel the productions before they go public. My point is that rhetorical-affective practices, such as inventing texts with collaborators and sharing works in progress that will one day be delivered to public audiences, are circulatory rhetorical practices layered with feelings. Rhetorical-affective practices account for lively circulation before wide, public circulation.

As evidenced above and discussed in the methods section of this book’s introduction, Ridolfo has been an advocate for zooming in on the rhetor’s perspective and practices that contribute to wide, public circulation. These “practitioner stories” add life—and humanity—to circulation theory. Circulation studies scholars have taken up this call in substantial ways. Through interviews, John Silvestro (2023) analyzes the work of a non-profit organization that planned and executed a public event and social media conversation about women and inequality; Jon Bradshaw (2018) calls for scholars to recognize “slow circulation” by focusing on the practices of media creators in Appalachia; Ehrenfeld (2020), in his critique of rhetoric’s ecological turn, sheds light on the perspective of social media participant Tiara, who composes on Twitter to organize disability community. Ehrenfeld’s following excerpt signifies the value of collecting stories from participants.

Tiara speaks, for example, about how she uses a hashtag as a “call to arms,” a means of calling forth her community in order to contest ableist messaging. . . . When she saw an infographic about ducking and covering during earthquakes, for example, she retweeted it with a sardonic response—“I guess I’ll be crushed” (p. 316).

Among studies of rhetorical circulation, zoomed-in stories like Tiara’s are not common, but they have shown promise. My aim is to augment interpersonal circulation before circulation by building on the aforementioned studies and further tethering rhetorical circulation to theories of affect.

Toward Affective Circulation

Although some studies of rhetorical circulation have offered practitioner stories that explain the genesis of public, viral texts, relatively few have drawn on affect theory to account for, in Jenny Rice’s (2005a) words, “shocked, angry, delighted, and feeling-full bodies” that accompany circulation (p. 133). Affect theory is a rather multivalent body of scholarship that crosses disciplines such as rhetoric, sociology, philosophy, and psychology (e.g., Jiang’s [2020] treatment of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s views on affect). At risk of replicating syntheses of notable yet oft-cited scholars such as Brian Massumi (2002), Sara Ahmed (2005), and Kathleen Stewart (2007), I will say briefly that the terms affect, feeling, and emotion have been flexible and even interchangeable terms among scholars. In Moving Politics, for example, Deborah Gould (2009) offers that “efforts to make sense of events and phenomena are never without feeling [emphasis added]. Indeed, emotion incites [emphasis added], shapes, and is generated by practices of meaning-making” (p. 13). However, at their core, the aforementioned terms are concerned with moving bodies in relation to objects and environments. Working from Casey Boyle’s (2018) theory of rhetoric as a posthuman practice, bonnie lenore kyburz (2020) contends that “we are nonetheless affectively charged agents, and our attunements shape the nature of our various relations in ways that invoke care, study, and critique” (p. 93). Reflecting on these prior arguments and terms, I prefer the term feeling, the kind of in-between term that addresses the preconscious and conscious binary between affect and emotion (Shouse, 2005). Useful to me is Teresa Brennan’s (2004) definition of feeling “as sensations that have found a match in words” (p. 120). This definition suggests that when creators express their “stress,” “pain,” “pleasure” and specific affective terms such as “sad,” “happy,” and “joy,” they gesture toward felt sensations in circulation.

Delivery and circulation scholars such as Laurie E. Gries (2015) and Sean Morey (2015) have taken up affect theory in substantial ways. As Gries (2015) writes in Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics, human and nonhuman actors contribute to the Obamicon movement and its rhetorical-affective circulation. For Gries, affect accounts for “energy transfer and sense appeals that are material, autonomous, and dynamic that register in bodily experience before cognition takes place” (p. 176). Affect, in other words, is pre-linguistic. Gries’ definition of affect coincides with her principle of virality, or when things “propagate affective desires that induce unconscious collective identifications and unconscious imitative feelings, thoughts and desires” (p. 130). Put differently, her view of affect accounts for ways in which texts—such as the Obama Hope image—resonate with and move publics to action, even if publics don’t quite have words to describe their feelings behind a transformation.

Jennifer H. Edbauer’s (2005a) meditations on writing amid human and nonhuman publics further underscores emotion’s relational power. For example, what can graffiti writing do in public? “Before you can possibly get writing enough to respond, it gets you,” Edbauer argues. It is a “cull to writing, which marks a relay between rhetorical context and the affective body,” one open to relations with another body, another object (p. 142). For Rice (2005b), Lloyd Bitzer’s oft-cited theory of the rhetorical situation could not account for the public consumption and circulation of texts. Examining a text within “rhetorical and affective ecologies” de-centers the rhetor and original text, and calls attention to “ways in which rhetorical productions are inseparable from lived encounters of public life” (p. 21). Her primary case study is the “Keep Austin Weird” slogan that was distributed and circulated in response to the city’s commercial and “big-box” projects. The slogan’s message and affective energy—that of weirdness—flowed through stickers, T-shirts and advertisements. This flow means that “we find ourselves engaging a public rhetoric whose power is not circumscribed or delimited. We encounter rhetoric” (p. 23). I take Rice’s argument to mean that rhetorical encounters cultivate affects, feelings, and emotions, perhaps forming collective feelings. In public, rhetoric is alive and dynamic, not contingent on the work of any particular body but rather pulsing through moving, feeling bodies. Bound up with rhetoric, affect is atmospheric, moving from spaces to embodied sensations and back again. Thomas Rickert (2013) describes affect and emotion as “background feeling,” using that idea to theorize ambient rhetorics such as Brian Eno’s Windows startup music and Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham’s recordings in Headley Garage (p. 8). As he writes in Ambient Rhetoric, “affect is in some sense prior to language or symbolicity and [affect] has a strongly embodied, situated, and emotional trajectory” (p. 147). Put differently, affect, while unseen, depends on movement and precedes emotional expression.

In terms of bodies and circulation, affect is widely regarded as registers and sensations that transmit and circulate, often unconsciously, through bodies, objects, and the like. Melissa Gregg and Greg Seigworth (2009) define affect as a force of encounter between bodies, but it “need not be especially forceful (although sometimes, as in the psychoanalytic study of trauma, it is)” (p. 3). An encounter might not stop us in our tracks, per se. Still, we can feel something, even if we can’t describe it or put it in words just yet. As Kathleen Stewart (2007) offers in Ordinary Affects, affect is much like a charge in a circuit that courses through publics.

Affect is connected to things. Literally moving things—things that are in motion and that are defined by their capacity to affect and to be affected—they have to be mapped through different, coexisting forms of composition, habituation, and event. They can be “seen,” obtusely, in circuits and failed relays, in jumpy moves and in the layered textures of a scene (p. 4).

Stewart’s theory of affect’s mobility—moments in which bodies and things are affected—accord with Brennan’s (2004) ideas in The Transmission of Affect. Brennan also argues that affect moves through bodies and things and that entities are porous. As Brennan writes, affects “come via an interaction with other people and an environment. But they have a physiological impact. By the transmission of affect, I mean simply that the emotions or affects of one person, and the enhancing or depressing energies these affects entail, can enter into another” (p. 3). Brennan’s remarks conflate affect and emotion rather than distinguish the two. Some scholars argue that affect is social and ineffable yet made effable by feeling and emotion. Affect is amorphous and manifests through one’s object relations and embodied sensations. We sense something’s up, and we respond with feeling and emotion. We move. Working from Brennan’s ideas, Eric Shouse (2005) takes feeling to mean a “sensation that has been checked against previous experiences and labeled. It is personal and biographical because every person has a distinct set of previous sensations from which to draw when interpreting and labelling their feelings.” Converging the theories of Brennan, Brian Massumi, and many others, Shouse goes on to regard emotion as the projection of affect and feeling onto publics and bodies, suggesting that feeling is the in-between element of affect and emotion’s social capacities.

For several affect theorists, emotions are considered social, too, and are perhaps the most realized because they encompass the body and language, whether through direct words (e.g., fear, anxiety) or metaphors. For example, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed (2005) views fear as transitory: “Fear does not reside positively in a particular object or sign. It is this lack of residence that allows fear to slide across signs and between bodies” (p. 64). Emotion—from fear, to happiness, to dissent—is mobile and circulates through bodies, texts and genres, all of which exist in spaces. Ahmed’s (2010) “Happy Objects” drives this point further when she discusses positive affect as something an object in circulation accumulates: “The promise of happiness is what sends happiness forth; it is what allows happiness to be out and about. Happy objects are passed around, accumulating positive affective value as social goods” (p. 35). Ahmed’s ideas are quite useful to me as I argue that digital digital media production teems with encounters—whether stemming from objects or bodies—that accumulate affective value.

However amorphous they may be, theories of affect help me recognize that people and things are moved and assembled toward a particular text, an idea. To echo Brennan’s theory, bodies and things cultivate depressing and uplifting energies, and those energies are contagious, atmospheric. Discussions of feeling help me recognize embodied sensations that authors discuss when they talk and write about their composing experiences. Comments like “I feel good,” “I feel constrained,” “tired,” “in pain,” and so forth suggest that something affective—bodily, mentally—is happening or has happened in a digital media production cycle. Discussions of emotion, then, put feelings in more direct and recognizable terms such as fear and happiness.

Also writing under the large interdisciplinary banner of affect theory, rhetoric and writing studies scholars have paid much attention to emotion’s bodily orientations, social movements and circulation. Given its uptake and numerous citations in the field, Micciche and Dale Jacob’s (2003) edited collection A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies is a landmark of the more recent affective turn, featuring numerous perspectives on emotions and their consequences for pedagogy and research. Susan Kirtley (2003), for example, re-articulates Greek philosopher Diotima’s theory of eros, or love and movement. “In Diotima’s idea of ascension,” Kirtley offers, “eros begins in our feelings for other bodies and in the feelings and emotions present in our own bodies” (p. 62). For the teachers and students of composition, “the pleasure of writing is the journey it takes us on, and the mystery when it is sent off into the world to reach others” (p. 65). Kirtley’s passage is useful to me because it underscores the mobility of feelings that circulate with writing and writing bodies.

Affective movement and circulation are ideas extended in Micciche’s recent articles and her now-widely cited monograph Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching. Micciche (2007) amplifies prior arguments that rational, logos-centric argumentation and emotioned discourse are not strong and weak, respectively, but are rather productive partners in writing. Untangling such a dichotomy, her writing classroom exercise on “deep embodiment” invites students to speak through the voices and the bodies of authors in order to understand the writer’s rhetorical styles and emotional dispositions. As Micciche argues, “knowledge cannot be separated from the bodily world of feeling and sensation” (p. 52). Deep embodiment, that is, situates emotion in writing bodies and reinforces the notion that emotion is circulated through writing and rhetorical action. Bodily movements—a key site of affect that opens us up to relations and to affective states—and oral readings are central to emotional education, she argues. Furthermore, Micciche regards emotion as something performed and not belonging to any body. Drawing from Ahmed and others, Micciche argues that emotions are social, sticky, and swirling, especially in composition studies scholarship. In thinking about such emotions as disappointment and fear, Micciche looks to composition studies scholarship that bemoans teaching and labor issues in the discipline; in a way, fear and disappointment become sticky and contagious in the field, creating communal feelings of discontent among teacher-scholars. Micciche’s investigation bonds well with Ahmed’s position (2005) that emotions circulate through bodies and social objects, including websites and public messages. Through textual circulation, sticky feelings parlay into “economies of feeling” that imbue the discipline (Micciche, 2007, p. 54).

Affective ecologies and economies. Embodied sensations. Emotional expression. The aforementioned theorists have been gripped by relations from which feelings emerge. If emotions are relational, then they are also economical and ecological, tied to people, texts, and objects. Notice that, in the above passages, I interchange words rooted in affect, feeling, and emotion. Stemming from a range of disciplines outside of rhetoric and composition, theorists of affects, feelings, and emotions were important for this project because they call even greater attention to a creator’s body in relation to objects and fellow bodies that hold, even temporarily, feelings that shape digital media production. Recent theorists also take greater care in defining affect, feeling, and emotion, even as they interchange such words. Their theories are nevertheless important for studying practices and feelings in a digital media production cycle. The exigencies for studying rhetorical-affective practices that animate interpersonal circulation have emerged.