Infrastructures of Feeling: Digital Mediation, Captivation, Ambivalence

Abstract

This paper proposes a concept of infrastructures of feeling, building on Raymond Williams’ work on structures of feeling and contributing to current work on digital media/tion, affect and time. It draws on empirical research conducted over the past decade on these themes, including art-making workshops with young people and interviews with digital media professionals. In the first part of the paper, I intro-duce the concept of infrastructures of feeling and what it might offer to understandings of the contem-porary period. In the second part, I develop its affective and temporal dimensions. I suggest that today’s digitally mediated feelings are non-unified, contested, ambiguous and ambivalent and that they indicate a condition of middleness, or being in midst of form/ation and transformation. In the third part, I consider some of the implications of this argument for cultural politics, including for rethinking distance/ resence and what resistance might look and feel like.