Summer School 2013 "Situating Media" - Participants
Kai Enzweiler (Cologne)
Affect and Fiction: The Example of the 100 Day Campaign “Clean Up in Beijing”
The purpose of this paper is to argue that affect and fiction are intertwined. I take the Chinese campaign “Clean Up in Beijing” as an example. On May 15th 2012 the Beijing government implemented a 100 day campaign to hunt for ‘suspicious foreigners’ who had exceeded their visas, and deported them.
The cause for the campaign was a video that was widely circulated online and appears to show a foreigner caught in the middle of sexually assaulting a young Chinese woman. The video brought about a storm of protest and triggered anti-foreign sentiments among the Chinese in Beijing. However, the scene in the video is not readily identifiable.
Based on the campaign as an example for what I would dub ‘political advertising’, this paper argues that affect and fiction intertwine and through an imagined threat (it could have happened) have political effect. Following Massumi (2010), who notes that what could have been and concrete action are related, I argue based on my own ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing that the affective and the discursive dimensions cannot be separated from each other (see also Wetherell 2012).
Kai Enzweiler studied Chinese Studies, Psychology, and Sociocultural Anthropology at Frankfurt and Beijing University. His Magister thesis dealt with “Body Culture: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in China and their Media Representations.” His Ph.D. project on the relationship between affect and fiction in contemporary Beijing was started in the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities in Cologne.