ABSTRACT
Affect is increasingly recognised as an important means to achieve audience participation in the process of making meaning. As Dipesh Chakrabarty (2002) argues, in a world which is increasingly defined by experiential and immersive technologies, traditional ways of producing and disseminating knowledge are no longer sufficient to equip contemporary citizens. Rather than analytical didactic approaches to representation, Chakrabarty argues that it is embodied forms of knowledge apprehended by the senses rather than through analytical processes that we need to understand. This shift in knowledge production privileges performative models of democratic engagement rather than pedagogical ones. In his schema it is the body rather than the mind which is the privileged site of knowledge production. For Chakrabarty, it is the subjective, felt response that is the most relevant for contemporary forms of political engagement.
