What Does Lauren Berlant Teach Us About Networked Affect?

Abstract

Lauren Berlant’s profound legacy for affect theory, cultural studies, queer theory and adjacent fields centers on their socio-sensory attunement to the role of media, popular culture, and the aesthetic in shaping everyday experience within late capitalist America and far beyond. And yet, within the pervasively digitalized media cultures of the twenty first century, it is curious, perhaps, that Berlant rarely engaged directly with digital culture, nor has their work (with notable pockets of exception) been drawn on widely in accounts of networked media within media theory, digital humanities, or critical data studies (Pedwell 2023b; see also Azhar and Boler 2023). The central claim orienting this introductory essay, however, is that the uncommon instances in which Berlant does address digital technologies explicitly are instructive and, moreover, that there is much to be gained from mining Berlant’s rich oeuvre for what it teaches us about the changing relations among affect, subjectivity, digital culture, and ‘the political’ amid the intersecting crises of the present. The most significant lessons Berlant’s work imparts in this vein, we will argue, concern the affective workings and implications of mediation, genre, and infrastructure in our digital age—lessons which prompt us to confront the ineradicable persistence of uncertainty, ambivalence, and vulnerability within human-technology relations, alongside the vital role of transitional infrastructures in the emergent ethico-politics of networked affect.