ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the affect and culture, which underscore the need to put scholarship on affect and culture in continuing conversation with each other. Affective cultures are extremely diverse and wide-ranging in size. Americans, foreigners, and immigrants constitute an affective culture, which means the individuals become activated, charged, and mobilized through a distinct rhetorical concept: doxa, or common belief. Affective cultures are forged, distributed, and sustained by the work of rhetoric, whether in writing, speech, image, sound, performance, and so forth. The affective culture of heterosexual men might engage with the object and signification to learn their place in society: men are valued as men for their muscular physique and ability to attract women. The idea of affective cultures as they are grounded in ideology, affect, and doxa/belief provides an opening into understanding the power of rhetoric often referred to as rhetorical consequentiality.