Abstract
While emotional language and imagery in protest esthetics are nothing new, emotions have been repressed in modern political discourse at large, as being seen as irrational if not dangerous. As new media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, are becoming central media spaces for live online broadcasting of political protests, they have become an important site of discursive struggle for researchers to take into account. This article argues that emotional language use is not merely something excessive but a central discursive resource for participants in communicating their political and social relations. The analysis in this article is based on data collected from the Twitter hashtag #kämpamalmö during an anti-fascist demonstration that took place in Malmö, Sweden in 2014. Methodologically, this article is guided by a critical discourse analytical approach, with a focus on how emotional language use allows participants to form collectivities. Empirically, the article identifies how participants make use of emotional language to negotiate and relate to and identify with objects, with the outcome of different forms of socialites. One example of this is how the city itself became a central object of negotiation, as a contested love object as well as a political “empty signifier.” Another object around which participants negotiate themselves is “love” itself, as in love for the movement and as a political object in itself.
Keywords
FUCKING
It was incredibly nice to be at the demonstration today. I
Introduction
How do we make sense of that which escapes the sound and rational in political communication? As the quotes above display, both stemming from the corpus under analysis in this article, “love” is at the center of the symbolization of a political event. How do we make sense of love, maybe one of the most shattering and intimidating as well as wonderful feelings we can experience (Butler, 2011; Illouz, 2013)? And what does it do when it is expressed in political discourse? Any social scientific inquiry into the public expression of emotions will have to take into account the socialites drawn upon as well as constituted through such discursive practices. We often take for granted that we know a lot about those who act politically in public. But what kind of subjects and objects are formed in the utterance of love, when love is intertwined with a political event? What this article aims to do is to show how different kinds of socialites—relations between subjects and objects—are entangled in the popular emotional expressions on Twitter about a specific political event.
The event that will be studied is one of traumatic characters. The background is that a group of feminists were brutally attacked in Malmö, Sweden, on International Women’s Day. The attackers had connections with one of the, at that point existing, Nazi parties Svenskarnas Parti. One week after the attack, “Skåne mot rasism” (Skåne against racism) organized a demonstration 1 under the banner “Kämpa Malmö—anti-fascism är alltid självförsvar” (Fight Malmö—anti-fascism is always self-defence). Over 10,000 people participated in the demonstration on 16 March 2014. The slogan “Kämpa Malmö” grew out of the slogan “Kämpa Showan” (#KämpaShowan) 2 through which expressions of solidarity and compassion with Showan Shattack and the others who were injured in the attack were shared on micro-blogging sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Besides this particular event, the slogan was, and is, continuously used as a hashtag in online communication about anti-fascist and anti-racist events. During the run up to the parliamentary election 2014, there were many manifestations and demonstrations against racism across the country, of which this particular one was one of the largest in terms of numbers.
It has been argued that discursive and behavioral norms have been dissolved in online environments and left room for supposedly an anomic type of expressiveness, including racist and sexist hatred, as well as other less violent emotional expressions (Hawdon, Oksanen, & Räsänen, 2015). However, as previous discursive studies have argued, even excessive utterances online, for example, hateful racist discourse, is not less ordered than other types of discursive interactions. Such language use is guarded by its own rules of engagement (Malmqvist, 2015). Another critique of networked and connective-mediated engagement is how it is structured by the immediate affective logics of capitalism (Dean, 2010) and as such sustains the prevalent power relations under capitalism. Such affective logic, it is argued, is distinct from the politically disruptive as well as transformative logic of the radical public sphere. However, it is possible to find more optimistic readings. Papacharissi (2015a, 2015b) sees “affective publics” taking form in the symbolic spaces of new media as something that is a precondition for imagining possible futures. These publics are also important as spaces through which it is possible to invite new subjects into the political sphere. Papacharissi (2015a) defines affective publics in the following way:
Resting on Boyd’s (2010) understanding of networked publics, I interpret affective publics as publics that have been transformed by networked technologies to suggest both space for the interaction of people, technology, and practices and the imagined collective that evolves out of this interaction. (pp. 125-126)
It is part of this (trans)formation of digital publics that will be under study in the following analysis: how people’s political engagement on Twitter creates imagined collectives, as well as taking interest in the conditions of such imagined collectives. I argue that the formation of these affective publics needs to be shown discursively. As such, the aim of this article is not only to explore the social and imagined collective-political aspects of the emotionally driven language use on Twitter but also to show the different ways in which this is carried out.
The study of political communication has, to a large extent, been devoid of emotion (Coleman, 2013; Dahlgren, 2009; Richards, 2007). Much of the field has been constituted through normative theories of what political acts should be, and through the advocacy of such ideas both emotion and passion have been seen as deviations from rational processes of deliberation and choice (Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2001; Jasper, 2011; Staiger, Cvetkovich, & Reynolds, 2010). Mouffe describes the tension between emotions and rationality and its relation to politics in gendered terms where “[t]he feminine, private world of nature, particularity, differentiation, inequality, emotion, love and ties of blood” (Mouffe, 1993, p. 81) has been placed outside of the public inquiry. Political bodies have not, in general, been researched and understood in terms of their emotionality, and when they are, they are often seen as illegitimate, and their claims and concerns are seen as outrageous, utopian or their rage and hope individualized (Cammaerts, 2012; Persson, 2016). More recently, however, there has been an affective and emotional turn in the social sciences at large where emotionality of politics has generated new interest in a variety of different academic fields, not least among communication scholars (Bainbridge & Yates, 2014; Coleman, 2013; Dahlgren, 2009, 2013; Dahlgren & Alvares, 2013; Gould, 2010; Jasper & Owens, 2014; Pantti & Wahl-Jorgensen, 2011; Richards, 2007; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2012, 2016). If there is a normative idea guiding this article, it is the one put forward by Coleman when he argues that “[d]emocracy depends on forms of interruptive speaking, movement and place-taking that defy the almost all-encompassing image of the public as extras on the stage of history” (Coleman, 2013, p. 194). It is this idea of democratic practice that forces us to engage analytically with emotional language in political discourse with the aim to try to understand the social as well as the political implications of such discursive practices. Such a venture needs to confront language in its own right and as such inquire the relations established discursively to further understand the ways in which emotional language use, and to a further extent, emotions as such, function as part of political discourse.
The research questions that are guiding the analysis are focusing on at least two dimensions of Twitter discourse of this particular case. The first one is broader and focuses on the different ways in which participants make use of emotional language. The second dimension is more theoretically founded and takes interest into how political subjectivities are negotiated through emotional language use, as well as how collectivities are addressed.
A Discursive Approach to Emotional Language Use
The central focus of this article is to discuss emotions in terms of their relationality and how they are used by participants to enact and sustain social relations, as well as how social relations constitute emotions within relations (Ahmed, 2004; Burkitt, 2014). As Ahmed states, “[e]motions are relational: they involve (re)actions or relations of ‘towardness’ or ‘awayness’ in relation to such objects” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 8). The understanding of emotions in this approach is that they are dialectical in their sociality, and as such is distinctive from the cognitivist “inside-out” model. But it is also different from the outside-in model, “evident in approaches to ‘crowd psychology,’ where it is assumed that the crowd has feelings, and that the individual gets drawn into the crowd by feeling the crowd’s feelings as its own” (p. 8). The object of analysis is the use of emotional language as the fabric, in which the relations between participants are shaped, as well as how emotions account for action and responsibility (Edwards, 1999). According to Edwards, the study of emotional discourse takes interest in the reporting of emotional states as part of the “rich vocabulary of psychological concepts which are an integral part of everyday discourse” (Edwards, 1999, p. 272). The analysis starts with the actual emotional language used by participants and as such it does not privilege the “basic emotions” (Tomkins, 1962). Rather than subscribing to a hierarchy of emotions where the physiological affective is privileged, it is the social significance of the emotional language shared by participants that is of focal interest. However, when adequate, the analysis has taken into account the extent to which the body is presented in emotional discourse, although the focus is not on the discursive representation of bodily states but how emotional language use functions socially on Twitter. When “emotions,” and more importantly, “emotional language” is used throughout the article, I refer to it as something performed, co-created, and enacted by people using imaginary and symbolic emotional resources. As such, we cannot assume that the emotional expressions are “the inside speaking” but we can analyze how the utterances speak about the inside of the self as well as that of others. Ian Burkitt conceptualizes this dynamic clearly:
Our love expresses our relationship to our world and specific people or things within it. It is not wrong, then, to identify feelings and emotions as occurring in the body, because in part they do so: we could not feel without a body and mind which register our feelings and are conscious of having them. The problem comes when the explanation of emotion stops there, with the feeling itself as a thing that is not connected to the wider world of relations and patterns of relationships. (Burkitt, 2014, p. 2)
Therefore, the discursive approach to emotions, as that which is employed here, must take into account how “emotional configurations inform the discursive construction and negotiation of self-identities, social relationships, and moral sensibilities” (Katriel, 2015, p. 125).
Methodological Considerations and Data
Computer Mediated Discourse and Twitter
As emotions in politics are problematic at the same time as they are attracting more and more interest, we have to stay attentive to political and media-specific structures that regulate discursive practice, as well as the possibly “minimal political” (Macgilchrist & Bohmig, 2012) utterances in discourse, that which point to the outside of discourse or to that which does not yet have a form. The aspiration of this article is to contribute to the understanding of the relationship between the type of subjects who are acting within discourse (participants as political, emotional, and social subjects), and material and symbolic aspects of Twitter discourse. Both these things are of interest here. First, the kind of subjects that discourse allows for, and second, the public discourse that is constructed through the use of the hashtag. When studying this relation, “we require what Halliday (1978) refers to as a ‘social semiotic’ perspective to account for, not only the ways in which identity is construed in discourse, but also for how that construal both affords and influences different forms of sociality” (Zappavigna, 2014, pp. 212-213). Early attempts to classify computer-mediated communication did amount to interesting yet vulnerable typologies as language use online is as context dependent as other kinds of social discursive environments, yet changing even more rapidly (Herring, 2007). Media ethnographic work has also paid attention to how people make use of Twitter in their everyday lives. Such research has shown the plurality of ways in which people use Twitter, both in terms of how it is used across different technological platforms and in terms of how diverse it is in regards to the range of topics. Such dispersed patterns of usage contribute to how Twitter has settled down slowly in terms of both expressional forms and use (Lomborg, 2014).
There is, however, socio-linguistic research on the basic ideational and interactional functions of Twitter. Zappavigna (2012), for example, has explored the linguistic functions and stylistic characteristics of Twitter, such as the diverse social and linguistic functions of the “@” or more central to this study, the different ways in which the “#” is used. The communicative qualities of the # are of imperative importance to this study. Hashtag flows are what Zappavigna (2012) calls “searchable talk,” which means that Twitter users who are employing the hashtag function make tweets searchable for others. However, this does not mean that those who are using hashtags necessarily constitute the audience. An audience is, however, addressed by the official organizers and others, where they encourage Twitter users to follow the event through the hashtag #kämpamalmö. Besides knowing little about the actual audience, it is further difficult to assess how Twitter users imagine their audience as this tends to differ among those using media apps, such as Twitter (Litt & Hargittai, 2016). This demarks an epistemological limit in what we can know about the consumption of searchable talk in this specific setting. It is open to the followers of the respective tweeter, as well as to anyone following the event either live through the hashtag stream, or those who, like me, make use of its searchable qualities afterward. What participants mark in such an instance, by using the hashtag, is to broadcast and position a flow of content where a “common public time” is unfolded, a capacity Scannell (2014) has ascribed to television. Common public time could also be a temporal figuration of what goes on in mediated events on Twitter. The liveness of Twitter has also been observed through studies on user practices and experiences where tweeting, to a large extent, has been understood as something instantaneous (Lomborg, 2014; Page, 2010). Such instantaneousness demands the users a “temporal co-presence (or near-synchronicity) of interlocutors” (Lomborg, 2014, p. 117). It is built into the interface where users are urged to contribute with information about the present, what they are doing and thinking about right at this moment. This instantaneous quality also makes it an interesting source to tap into when we want to study communicated live emotionality. Other than the specific temporal qualities of Twitter discourse in general, and the hashtag in particular, it could be argued that the hashtag makes the stream of communication public, in the sense that it has a communicative structure that is in line with what Scannell calls “for-anyone-as-someone” structure (Scannell, 2000) where a sociable self is addressed while still containing the generality of that being addressed as anyone. When one makes use of the searchable talk function of a hashtag, one cannot take for granted any specific addressee.
Data
The corpus is comprised of 634 tweets, collected through a hashtag search for 16 March 2014, the day of the event, as well as the week running up to the event. For this purpose, I made use of Twitter’s integrated search function. Only the original tweets have been taken into account and not any interactional data. They were collected 1 year later, which means that users may have removed tweets. The complete collection of tweets was first coded in terms of its emotional language use. After this basic coding, I selected those tweets that contained emotional language, and then analyzed them in terms of how participants made use of emotional language by marking the linguistic aspect and thematically sorting these in terms of the sociality produced through these features. The discursive features that were taken notice of are previously acknowledged by the critically informed discourse work, in general (Fairclough, 1995; Machin & Mayr, 2012; Van Leeuwen, 2008), and with a focus on Twitter in particular (Page, Barton, Unger, & Zappavigna, 2014; Zappavigna, 2012, 2014). In the analysis, I paid attention to use of emotional words (Edwards, 1997) at the lexical level of emotional expression, such as the way in which the emotionally felt is used to signify objects and relations. Furthermore, the analysis focused on metaphors and metonymies of emotions, either in their lexical meaning—the name of a feeling standing for something else—or that of metaphors, for example, where “rain” is signifying someone who is crying. Another important aspect that was taken into account were the ways in which social actors were represented through emotional language use. Both the ways in which tweeters represented themselves and the ways in which they represented other people, (as well as the use of collectivization, nomination, or aggregation).
The Choice of Love
In this corpus of tweets, participants also made references to emotions other than love, which is in focus throughout the analysis. Some of these emotions were anger, joy, fear, pride, and shame (directed toward racists). The lexical use of love, however, stands out in terms of both how prevalent it was in the corpus of tweets and the complexity of its social functions. The strategy has been to stay with one emotion with the aim to limit the risk of getting trapped in the ideational particularities of the different emotions that was made reference to. The advantage of this strategy is that it is possible to present the complexity of love as an example of how emotional discourse works, while some other emotions are not analyzed in depth.
Ethical Concerns
As actual language use collected from Twitter is presented in the analysis, some ethical considerations need to be acknowledged. When we are discussing the study of language online and ethics, one distinction seems to be of central importance. This distinction lies in what our interest in the data is, and especially to what extent the researcher takes an interest in the individual participants or in the particular language use of participants (Page et al., 2014). This distinction is important as there is a difference to what extent we have access to or acknowledge the more biographical and subjective core of the specific author of online language data. As Lomborg (2012) notes, research ethics first and foremost “evolve around the respect for human subjects, their autonomy, and protection from harm in the process or aftermath of research” (p. 21). This article does not show any direct interest in the authorship of the specific tweets. It is not coded in terms of the individual tweeter but in terms of the use of emotional language. Consequently, one participant may have posted several posts in the stream, but this was not taken into account by the analysis. The data presented in the findings section are translated from Swedish into English, without revealing the usernames of the participants, which makes it less convenient to track down the particular user from the presentation of the extracts, although not impossible.
The temporality of the participation on Twitter also affects how we evaluate Twitter discourse in terms of its publicness. Users on Twitter might be more or less conscious of the fact that the data they provide to the site are open to commercial as well as non-commercial inquiry and research. This uncertainty is something we should take into account if we want to be sensible researchers. Users are able to delete their tweets as well as their accounts; however, as the data for this analysis is collected at one point in time, every action any user has taken after this point in time is unacknowledged. On the other hand, what is concerned here is political tweeting using the streaming function of the # which arguably makes it more public and searchable from the point of view of the tweeter as discussed above. It could be argued that it should not be more problematic than collecting other forms of public media data without consent. There has, however, been critique directed toward such a stance (Zimmer, 2010), where attempts to anonymize the data have not been sufficient. The same occurs here to some extent. The difference in the presentation of the analysis in this article is that it does not contain any analysis of network or relations among tweeters through the use of metadata but only tweets in the stream which then are presented through examples of language use.
Findings
An Emotional Scene
In the tweets captured some days before the demonstration and early into the demonstration, tweeters started to make their presence known under the hashtag to establish affiliation by referring to the coming or ongoing demonstration and called upon others to join. Emotional language use is prevalent in this establishing of presence. As Katriel (2015) notes, discourse in general “calls forth some kind of emotional response—including indifference—on the part of listeners” (p. 124). The event “Kämpa Malmö—antifascism är alltid självförsvar” (Fight Malmö—Antifacism is always self-defence) had different slogans attached during the week before the demonstrations, where one of them was “Svart är vår sorg, röd är vår vrede” (Black is our sorrow, red is our rage). Inscribed already in the “global” discursive structure of the event, there are expectations of how participants are expected to feel about the event in which they take part. The slogan, as well as other communicative aspects, of the event could be seen as invitations to “feel publicly” (Frosh, 2011). In this sense we already have an emotional scene set, based on mourning and outrage. What will be presented in the following analysis is how participants negotiate their positions in this pre-constituted affective–discursive (Wetherell, 2012) structure.
The analysis is presented in three different thematic sections, which are presented through detailed analysis of specific extracts from the corpus of data and in elaboration with relevant theoretical concepts. The first one takes as its starting point the expression of love and shows how this specific emotional expression becomes a central discursive resource and how multifaceted it is. The second theme takes its focus on how the techno-social aspect of Twitter discourse facilitates relations from a distance and the ways emotions are an important part of distant identification. The third shows how participants draw on what they identify as others emotional states as ground for their own emotional expressions.
Ambiguities of Love in Political Discourse Enacted in #kämpamalmö
As with other emotions, love requires both subjects and objects. This relationship is always negotiated and always possibly intrusive in terms of how someone who “loves” defines its love object, and as such is all but an unproblematic “positive feeling.” To take account of love is one way to inquire how participants understand themselves in relation to others. I will present the ways in which the expression of love is used in different ways starting with “love” and its ideational content. The first way in which love is employed by tweeters is within the structure of a political strategy where “love” is the object which is strived for, as well as the object as a means of a wider struggle.
Political Love in Its Ideational Form
Extract 1.
With love as a weapon #kämpashowan #kämpamalmö @Möllan
“What should we do?! Smash racism! How? With love” #kämpamalmö
Extract 1 shows two examples of how this can be carried out. Both of these tweets refer to live events going on in the street. The first one is quoting a banner, which also can be seen in a linked Instagram photo with the slogan “With love as a weapon.” The other is within a quotation and seems to refer to a version of a popular chant that is taking place live on the street. 3 This transference of context is what usually could be described as “recontextualisation” (Fairclough, 2003), which signifies where a social practice incorporates another genres’ social and discursive practices. In these cases, love can have at least two different political meanings, where the first one is significant through its structural opposition. Where the not mentioned, hate, is in structural opposition to “love” is then what is to be countered with “love as a weapon.” Love is the means to fight and defeat racism. In this sense, “hate” is ascribed to racism and fascism. This is not completely straightforward and not the predominant use of love within the collected tweets. There might be a political reason for this, because what is the love bearing political subject? Most of all, it is unclear who or what the love object is in such a relation. On one hand, it is common to ascribe hate to racist discourse or to actions such as hate crimes or hate speech often drawing on racist or sexist language use. But, as Stephen Frosh notes, hate is the result of both the “disturbing awareness of the existence of something strange inside the self” and a channel through which this feeling can be made “tolerable by projecting that strangeness into the outside, the desired and despised other” (Frosh, 2011, p. 60). But there is something excessive and enjoyable in hatred, which binds groups together through the shared object of hate. So while love as non-hate is a way to draw boundaries to the outside, it does not really make it clear what a politics of “love” would be. Even though this extract is full of expressions of love, it is not straightforward what the role of love is in politics as it depends on our definition of love, and in this case, participants draw upon an idea of love as an emotion that harmoniously brings us together against that which is hateful. This is something different than love as a violent encounter between two subjects that shatters their subjective experience and dislocates the dual singularity into a joint singular, theorized by, for example, Badiou (2012) and others.
Before exploring how expressions of love in and for the struggle are binding actors together, we can see an example of how these dimensions are intertwined in Extract 2:
Extract 2.
So much love & warmth in this difficult time. We fight for love & compassion against racism! The struggle continues #kämpamalmö #kämpashowan
Not only the tweeter is identifying the comforting shared feeling of love in the protest but she or he also expresses the dimension in which anti-racism is a cause characterized by love, since racism is identified as something hateful. As argued above, the latter one is a more ambiguous configuration, as a fascist discourse would provide a similar room for identification in the struggling for the love for the “nation” or the “race,” and that someone from without is disturbing the ability for an “us” to love those objects (Billig, 1978). In this sense, “love” as an element of political discourse is what Laclau and Mouffe (2001) called an “empty signifier,” which becomes something that one can talk about with clarity only within a discursive field of relative stability. In anti-fascist and anti-racist discourse, it is clear that the right to universal love and compassion is something that is threatened and challenged by racism. One could argue that this characterizes love as a self-referential love within the imagined collective. Anti-racist identification is that of loving ourselves as a result of the hateful action of racists. The identification then is taking place around a “we” who are hated and as such become lovers.
Love for the Movement—Sticky Emotions
The participants are expressing love for the struggle and the demonstration in a few different ways. The ways in which this is done allow for different positions in which the uttering subject speaks as well as the composition of the collectivity addressed. In the following section, I will present how two different collectivities are constructed through the expression of love for the movement. The first one is an emotional configuration between tweeter and the participants in the demonstration, made either by tweeters who participate in the demonstration or by those who support the demonstration and its participants from a distance:
Extract 3.
Sick how much people on Möllan,
Good luck all comrades who have gathered in Malmö today.
Extract 3 shows two different expressions of love for the participants and to some extent for the tweeter himself/herself or rather to the collective they identify themselves with. In the first example, love is expressed by “<3” standing for the expression of affection and love for someone, commonly used in computer-mediated discourse as a way of emphasizing an affectionate state (Zappavigna, 2012). In the first one, there is an important live aspect, reporting that it is “sick how much people” who are present at the demonstration, combined with a gratification and the emoticon. She or he inscribes him or herself into the collective as well as addresses the collective at the same time and as such is performing collectivity on Twitter. In the second example, it is less obvious if the tweeter will join the demonstration, it might even be reasonable to guess that he will not. Nonetheless, he performs collectivity through the affectionate address where he writes that the protesters deserve love and respect, and that “together
Temporal Identifications With the City
Extract 4.
Thanks Malmö for this time, tomorrow, travelling back to Stockholm
We can see in Extract 4 how something happens when the addressee is not at the general gathering of participants, but rather, it is Malmö, and as such the city comes to stand for the demonstrating public. This is something that is characteristic for most tweets in this set of data, and it takes form in a few different ways and as such allows for different relations between subjects and the city:
Extract 5.
It was incredibly nice to be at the demonstration today. I
In Extract 5, for example, we can see how it is possible to identify a clear interdiscursivity from another local-patriotic discourse, namely that of the supporter discourse. It is important to note that the supporter group of the football team Malmö FF had one of the biggest blocks in the demonstration due to the involvement of one of the victims in the supporter environment. This is marked by the phrase “the world’s most beautiful Extract 6.
Never been this proud over the city I live in. Fuck, I love
The affection showed in Extract 6 is more cautious in its temporality if we compare it with the previous extract. It also marks the risks of strong identifications. As such, this identification is guided by radical left political discourse where strong identifications with a geographical space can be seen as problematic. Here, the past is included as differentiated from the present when the tweeter uses “never before have I been this proud of the city I live in. Fuck I love you #malmö.” What we need to account for is how such temporal differences in discourse reconfigure the collectivity involved. The collectivity of #kämpamalmö is a contingent collectivity, changing shape through emotional negotiations. Compared to the previous example where the love for the city was confirmed and reiterated, another temporality of emotions is governing to what extent it is possible to feel strongly about an object.
Malmö as a Condensation of Emotional Investment
Extract 7.
FUCKING
Another way to show this is to look at these two different tweets where the love for the city is expressed. In most of the tweets that are expressing love for Malmö, the city comes to stand as a metaphor for the anti-fascist struggle. One can imagine a difference in terms of the geographical structure between Stockholm and Malmö, where one suburb in Stockholm, Kärrtorp, 4 became the symbol for the same struggle. This makes the metaphor potentially stronger in the case of Malmö, in the sense that most of the inhabitants of the city, the non-participants are repressed in this metaphor. When the demonstration is addressed from a distance, it is “Malmö” which is addressed as we can see in the second example in the previous extract. The first one just expresses its affection with capitals, for “THIS CITY.” This could also be linked to the “relocalisation” toward which political movements have been said to move, as a way to anchor itself into the material struggle and not getting lost through the deterritorialization of globalization of capital and politics (Askanius, 2010). Previous studies have also shown how “[a]ctivists sometimes draw on emotional connections to places created by other movements” (Jasper & Owens, 2014, p. 539). In this case, the interdiscursivity of emotionality already invested in the city (as with the supporter discourse) is drawn upon by the participants.
Extract 8.
The “condensation” (Freud, 1955/2010), based on the metaphoric representation voiced in the tweets, through which Malmö comes to stand for this struggle becomes even clearer through examples where the citizens are mentioned, as in Extract 8. The tweet above addresses Malmö and “all its citizens”; even though only around 13,000 people participated in the demonstration, and it is uncertain how many of the non-participants might sympathize with it. This is, of course, not the point. The strategic function of this is to fill “Malmö,” an empty signifier with the strategic elements. The discursive importance of the hashtag as discussed in the theoretical section could be pointed to in this condensation. Obviously, this is what the organizers wish to accomplish.
Ambient Co-Presence
In this section, I will focus on the idea that Zappavigna (2014) puts forward, where she argues how discursive participation on Twitter is more about the creation and sustention of social bonds than the production and sharing of ideational content. I will show and discuss how participants construct not only political boundaries through emotional discourse but also, more importantly, a sense of affiliation with each other. According to Zappavigna, using a hashtag
presupposes that a post has an ambient audience who may share or contest the values construed by the accompanying verbiage. This interpersonal orientation arises from the main function of microblogging: proposing bonds to a set of followers (or wider ambient audience). (Zappavigna, 2014, p. 211)
The emotional address mentioned in the previous section can be seen as what Collins has termed “emotional energy” (Collins, 2001). The proposition of a bond enacted through the use of one hashtag (officially set by the organizers) is a bond that can be followed by others, and in this case being difficult to dissent from. As shown before, there is an important live as well as contingent aspect of this. Furthermore, there is a cohabitative function in this proposed bond that is open for immediate habitation.
Distant Identification
A position that tweeters in the corpus were taking is where they show affiliation from a distance by identifying with the protest. In many of these tweets, there are clear references to both the space in which the protest takes place and the space that differentiates the tweeter from it. This presence of others is visible partly because of those tweeters who are not at the demonstration and the ways in which they communicate their absence. In this sense, digital media makes it possible for users to engage in a mediation process that “an aura of intimate sociability that acknowledges distance while simulating closeness” (Coleman, 2013, p. 215). In some of the cases, it takes an apologetic form, where the tweeter presenting reasons for not being there. Twitter discourse contains the structural possibility for tweeters to legitimize their absence from a distance. The liveness and the “common time” of Twitter discourse privileges presence, but enables distant participation through co-presence, which sustains a sense of guilt, which the distant sympathizers have to negotiate around:
Extract 9.
malmö, I want to be with you. Am with you, this is from yesterday, solidarity
I got the best birthday gift
Such regret requires justification such as that presented above. Another way, in which tweeters can cover up the distance, is through expressing desire and envy as we can see in the following extract:
Extract 10.
I WANNA BE IN MALMÖ TOO!! #kämpamalmö #kämpamalmö #nonazisinourstreets
Or as in Extract 11, through distant pride where the first is in solidarity from another manifestation taking place in Gothenburg (#Göteborg), and the second is connecting #kämpamalmö with a previous, and less successful event in the city Norrköping:
Extract 11.
After a pale influx
Emotional Recognition
We have seen above that emotions mainly are expressed by an individual who is referring to his or her felt emotions about an object. Beyond this self-referring emotionality, we can also observe another way to use emotional language that will be called “emotional recognition.” In the tweets that have been thematized as enactments of emotional recognition, the sociality and intersubjectivity of the emotional expressions are something different from those where the tweeter mainly expresses his or her own emotional states. In this section, I will show how emotional language is used to relate to others through the recognition of the others feelings:
Extract 12.
The sky over Malmö cries today. I do too. The worst thing is that I know that I’m really not alone. #kämpamalmö #KämaShowan
In Extract 12, the tweeter relates her emotional state to how the city is crying, when the rain is pouring down hours before the demonstration. This is also one of many tweets where the tweeter refers to their emotions by pointing to bodily affect or symptoms. By mentioning emotional states by referring to bodily symptoms, as in this case crying, an ambivalence is brought forward as to what kind of emotion the tweeter actually refers. If her crying is caused by the collective trauma incited by Nazi violence or the pride she feels when being part of the protest is not clarified. More importantly, she writes that “The worst thing is that I know that I’m really not alone.” This could be understood as a way of inserting oneself into the social and collective in a way similar to what Burkitt (2012) calls “emotional reflexivity.” He argues that
because dialogical reflexivity is bound up in relations to others and populated by their voices, as well as the voices we identify as our “own,” the emotions entangled in those relationships animate, shape and colour the way we reflexively see ourselves and the way we consider ourselves in relation to the social context: indeed, it influences the very way in which we see the social context itself. (Burkitt, 2012, p. 471)
If we follow this argument, the participant knows that she is not alone in her emotional state, which gives legitimacy to both her own state of mind and the feelings of others. What this also points to is the way in which emotional expression works is less the transparent effect of “basic emotions,” rather they are social in the sense that there is a reciprocity where an imagined audience is addressed. Expressions of emotional reflexivity can be seen in some other configurations shown in the following extract:
Extract 13.
Such powerful #solidarity in the gigantic #demo in #Malmö today. The children also felt that greatness. Strong impression for all of us. #love #kämpamalmö)
The sisters Ellen and Maria are proud to be Malmö residents a day when 10000 gather to show its resistance #kämpamalmö
In the first example, a parent is reflecting her own feelings in the feelings of her children. In the second one, the left-wing party is expressing, on their official Twitter account, how two people from the crowd are proud about being part of the demonstration. What should be noted is how there are a variety of ways in this discourse to make your own emotions known as well as legitimate through the recognition of the emotions of others. Emotional recognition is thus a discursive strategy to legitimize one’s public emotions through feeling what others are feeling. This points to the importance of the discursive aspects of emotionality, it supports certain kinds of socialites, as well as it draws upon emotional references to other people’s expressions.
Concluding Discussion
I want to address the focal notes struck by the analysis and the ways in which it relates to the research questions. While emotion in politics is starting to find its place within the mainstream of communication scholarship what this article has tried to show, through an analytical focus on the discursive aspects of emotions, is how the social and political relations between participants in their everyday participation are configured in several different ways. With this discursive strategy, I have suggested a way “to investigate a subject who is produced by but not wholly subject to contemporary socio-cultural locations” (Taylor, 2014, p. 9), taking into account how both the structural and political locations of engagement in the media are forming the participating subjects, as well as the objects coming out of such discursive interaction.
A Negotiated Subjectivity Through Live Emotional Interaction
The analysis shows how discourse leaves room for negotiation of subjectivity, and that processes of identification and emotions in political engagement online have several functions, both politically and socially. The reasons for choosing the analytical strategy has been to understand the type of subjectivity that the mediated discourse allows for and how such subjectivities enable people to identify with each other as well as enacting engagement in possibly new ways. But the analysis is also a way to make visible the social component of strong entitlement as something beyond the excessive and to stress the importance of taking interest in the details of language use in online political engagement. It further clearly shows how the political ideational content is weaved together through complex patterns of identification, which differs among users, and where live micro-blogging becomes a space for the negotiation of different subjectivities rather than, and in some cases alongside, broadcasting clear political manifestations.
If we are considering social media through the lens of the techno-revolutionary narrative that has carried it for quite some time, it is easy to discard political engagement in social media as being impotent or co-opted by exploitative communicative capitalism, as much critical scholarship tends to conclude (Fuchs, 2013; Fuchs & Dyer-Witheford, 2012). However, as in this case, Twitter discourse often nonetheless plays an important role in mediating the voice of the “roaring public” (Coleman & Ross, 2010), where users invite other users and participants to express themselves on serious political issues. This is a space where strong emotions are allowed and where they, to some extent, become part of the political objectivity that people can share when it is difficult to share all different kinds of identifications.
Collectivities Grounded in Feelings
The emotions that are expressed in this corpus might be strong but, as the analysis shows, this does not mean they are outside the scope of the social and the political relations. This strong emotionality does allow for forms of collectivity that are enacted precisely through such emotional investment. The emotional investment that people put into objects reshapes both the subjects who are investing in objects as well as the relation between the object and other subjects. To feel in public is a way for people to discharge their own individual emotions in front of others, but it also becomes a way of being part of a public based partly on shared emotions. This becomes clear when emotional expressivity is a discursive resource in relating to the event as in the case of distant identification, with its apologetic mode of expressing their regret for not being at the demonstration, or the way in which people try to recognize their political feelings in others through emotional recognition. Even through the rapid temporality of discourse, the site offers a place where subjects can negotiate the collective memories through live self-enactment in discourse (van dijck, 2010). This negotiating public presents itself as a public who feels and who invites others to feel its outrage, love and solidarity together. What Stephen Coleman says about the performativity of voting also resonates to this protest when he says that “The main function of the social performance of voting is the formation of a mass subject which comes to imagine and recognise itself” (Coleman, 2013, p. 72).
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.