Deadline Extended Call for Papers: The Affects and Affections of Media Special Issue of Explorations in Media Ecology (v. 14) Guest Editors: Eric S. Jenkins, University of Cincinnati, [email protected] Author of Special Affects (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) Peter Zhang, Grand Valley State University, [email protected] Author of numerous pieces on Deleuze and Media Ecology Media studies have often examined media as human extensions or prosthesis, an insight formulated most famously by one of the forefathers of the subfield of media ecology, Marshall McLuhan. Less attention has been paid, however, to media as the possessors and generators of intensions or intensities. The guest editors believe that the recent turn in critical theory towards affect offers an opportunity to rectify this inattention. As a concept, affect leads thinkers to consider the pre-personal, pre-subjective, and pre-cognitive, moving away from the humanistic and anthropocentric assumptions of much media theory, including the idea of media as extensions. Instead, if we understand affect in the Deleuzian sense as the capacities to affect and be affected, media themselves should be conceived as affective beings, part-subjects and part-objects who enter into relations with humans and other media alike. Indeed, the dissolving boundary between human and machine seems to demand an affective perspective not limited to analyzing human emotional capacities but expanded to consider the affects and affections of media, or even to understand human-media interactions as a part of an affective ecology. Thus papers in this special issue will explore the questions: What are the capacities to affect and be affected of various media? What fields of virtual potential do various media enable or disable? How do media affect humans and how might humans affect media? Even further, how might one medium affect another medium, sidestepping cognitive, human input altogether? We encourage papers that employ a variety of different theoretical approaches to the understanding of affect, yet all papers should consider the intersection of media and affect, seeking to elucidate new insights into the functions, operations, roles, and impacts of communication media. Likewise submissions are not limited by the type of medium, although we will prefer papers that focus on digital media. In particular, the editors are intrigued by the idea of submissions that consider affect and media from an ecological perspective or that conceive of media as existing in an affective ecology. Potential questions might include: What are the affects of various cinematic, televisual, social media or gaming modes? What concepts in media studies or media ecology might be altered or improved by an affective focus? What is the role of the media critic in an affective approach? What would an affect-oriented criticism be like? In what ways may media affect other media? Emulation? Divergence? Competition? Mutation? Transformation? Are affects unique to particular media, like Barthes’ analysis of the photograph and the punctum, or do they circulate across media? If affect can be contagious for humans, what about the human-media relationship? Does communication work by contagion or other modes of translation? Is there a human tendency to be affected by becoming-media, becoming computer-like, robot-like, etc., and vice versa? How does affect theory allow us to re-conceptualize debates over interactivity? Does the digital constitute identifiable affects or affections? Are such affects unique enough to demarcate “digital media” as an analytic category? Do media have affective or emotional tendencies or trajectories that shape human response-ability? Can a computer tend towards joy or sadness? Can media have good or bad encounters in the Spinozan sense? How has late capitalism reinvented itself by incorporating the affective power of media? What is the role of affecting and affected media in social machines (Guattari) or megamachines (Mumford)? What is the affective specificity of digital media and its role in control societies? Papers should be limited to 6,000 words with citations in the EME-Intellect house style (Harvard). Papers will be blind reviewed. Please send submissions to [email protected]. Extended Deadline: May 1, 2015.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 22:03:17 +0000
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