The Politics of Affect in Activist Amateur Subtitling: A Biopolitical Perspective

Self-mediated audiovisual content produced by ordinary citizens on digital media platforms reveals interesting aspects of the negotiation of affinity and antagonism among members of virtual transnational constituencies. Based on Pratt’s (1987) conceptualization of contact zones, this chapter examines the role played by communities of activist subtitlers – characterized here as emerging agents of political intervention in public life – in facilitating the transnational flow of self-mediated textualities. I argue that by contesting the harmonizing pressure of corporate media structures and maximizing the visibility of non-hegemonic voices within mainstream-oriented audiovisual cultures, activist subtitling collectivities typify the ongoing shift from representative to deliberative models of public participation in post-industrial societies. The chapter also engages with the centrality of affect – conceptualized from the disciplinary standpoint of biopolitics (Foucault 2007, 2008) – as a mobilizing force that fosters inter-subjectivity within and across radical subtitling collectivities. Drawing on an example of how emotions reverberate within a virtual community of amateurs subtitling the controversial BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares into Spanish, I examine how affect is generated by the practices surrounding the production and reception of subtitled material, and how the circulation flows of content through digital communication systems contributes to assembling an audience of affective receptivity.