Nigel Thrift: Political Sensations
Social life seethes with passions, fields of force moving back and forth through bodies and things, kept alive by cascades of imitation and suggestion. Warfare is one of the most passionate of human pursuits, releasing the full range of affects to greater or lesser degree according to circumstance. Indeed, some of the best research on the passions has been carried out with soldiers on battlefields, capturing the way in which bodies and spaces are affectively intertwined.
The current international political situation shows the power of passions all too well. The different passions that sweep the political scene are a part of how we reason politically. Thus, to ignore the affective, passionate element of reason is to delete much of what reason consists of.
My own interest in affect as a political force has been concerned with the way in which passions motivate and inform democratic political life. I will use this posting to expand on this theme, because it is so relevant to what has been going on in recent years. I am not, of course, claiming that addressing the importance of affect on political life is something new. Politicians routinely ask the ‘how do they feel?’ question, recognising just how important that question is, and are continually being accused of preying on the people’s hopes and fears, the two emotions that they are most likely to appeal to. In the Greek polis, it is at least arguable, a la Sloterdijk, that the most important innovation was the production of a space that could dampen emotions sufficiently to produce a time structure of waiting one’s turn to speak. In any case, even before Aristotle declared that we are all political animals, underlined the importance of emotions for good moral judgement, and drew attention in the Rhetoric to emotion as a key component of political oratory, the arts of rhetoric had been a staple of political life These arts are, in part, precisely about swaying constituencies through the use of affective cues and appeals which are often founded in spatial arrangement; think only of a book like Thomas Wilson’s (1553) The Art of Rhetoric and the careful attention it pays to staging as an affective key.
All that said, few canonical political philosophers and even fewer contemporary political theorists have tackled the role of affect in politics, even as they have spent a good deal of time challenging the supposed certainties of liberal political theory. But that is not to say that there is nowhere to turn. Think only of Paul Lazarsfeld’s seminal study of political communication and voter decision-making during the 1940 US presidential election, Richard Hofstadter’s classic essay ‘The paranoid style in American politics’, expounding on the power of ‘angry minds’, George Marcus’s work on affective intelligence and political judgement, Lauren Berlant’s remarkable series of works on affective democracy and compassion, or the growing feminist literature on politics, for example. But I think that it is fair to say that much of this interest has not been systematic and has been bedevilled by the view that politics ought to be about conscious, rational discourse with the result that affect is regarded as at best an add-on and as at worst a dangerous distraction.
Yet politics is susceptible to and is based on many of the same subconscious processes of imitation as other affective fields (e.g.consumerism). Take just the realm of political advertising. Think only of the classic hopeful 1984 Ronald Reagan ‘Morning in America’ ad campaign or the scary 1964 Johnson ‘Daisy’ ads: each of these campaigns, repeated many times since in different variants, testifies to the influence of affect on politics and the importance of imitation as a constituent element of affective contagion. And this is no surprise. As Popkin pointed out in the classic The Reasoning Voter a good part of politics in a mediated environment is based on intangibles that briefly fix attention - which he calls ‘low-information signalling’ - chiefly affective short-cuts that convey just enough of the character of candidates to voters and which are open to all kinds of manipulation, particularly via the use of nonverbal cues like music and imagery. Such fleeting impressions, in which, as Brader puts it, ‘our brains often identify cues and respond to them without our awareness’, often count for more than cogent policies and can often pass as voters’ political reasoning. In turn, this puts much more emphasis on the individual politician who acts as a kind of affective bellwether. Indeed recent work in political psychology suggests that voters can often make inferences of competence based solely on the facial appearance of candidates, and do so remarkably rapidly – within milliseconds.
In particular there has been a wide-ranging set of changes in political technology (Table), many of which take their cue from corporate practices of generating engagement. These technologies supposedly make the conduct of electoral and other forms of politics more effective but too often they confuse the consumption of democracy with the practice of democracy.
Table: Technological Change in the Political Sphere
1930s national polls (Gallup, Harris, Quayle)
1940s audience research
1969 first intensive polling firm
Mid-1970s telephone polling and focus groups and direct mail fundraising
1976 on permanent campaign
1992 dial groups
1980s daily tracking polls
1990s one-on-one sessions in shopping mall offices
2003 use of Web in Howard Dean campaign to organize monthly meetups (Create own crowds). Decentralized campaign using websites. Use of email and blogs instead of focus groups and such to gauge opinion. House meetings.
Five processes seem particularly important to study. So, to begin with, and most obviously, there has been a mass mediatization of politics. It is something of a cliché to note the influence of the media on politics but this has now become pervasive, based especially in the interaction between techniques like opinion polling and media presentation (, the result of an increasing familiarity with television technique, growing professionalization of the presentation of politics (as symbolized by growing numbers of consultants and the fame of formative guru-cum-inventors like Lee Atwater, Dick Morris, and Karl Rove), the burgeoning of available media outlets and the subsequent expansion of political programming, and increased media access. When a New Labour spin doctor recently declared that ‘what they can’t seem to grasp is that communications is not an afterthought to our policy. It’s central to the whole mission of New Labour’, this is no longer a partisan point – it is typical of the modern mediated Western democracy. Second, political actors are increasingly treated as commodities to be sold, in part, perhaps, because so many citizens lack the attention span or inclination to follow political issues and tend to invest their trust in the low-information signals emanating from iconic figures instead. Such marketing involves more and more use of the small signs of affective technique structured as various kinds of performance of style: a politician’s ability to perform in public becomes a crucial asset but it is very often a performance in which unexpected emotions are bleached from the process because of the dangers of ‘expressive failure’. Spontaneity has to be carefully structured. So, for example, the practices of celebrity are becoming more and more common in the political arena. Think only of the way in which Ronald Reagan’s face has become an abiding source of contemplation by political commentators because of the affective power of its ability to convey comfort and avuncular authenticity and warmth and even serenity or the careful prepping of Bill Clinton’s body language in key television appearances. Third, political campaigns are increasingly treated as forms of marketing. This tendency is only strengthened in first-past-the-post systems where the outcome of any election is disproportionately influenced by a few swing voters who it is important to locate and communicate with, against a background of increasing speed that I noted above. Thus, polling techniques have become a key to many political campaigns, techniques that can gauge intensity of feelings and the general quality of mood. Parties and other pressure groups have adopted a series of these practices: all manner of polls, focus groups, voter databases, geographical information systems, customer relations management software, targeted mail and e-mail, and so on, especially to target particularly passionate constituencies. In the United States, since the 1970s these techniques have become far-advanced. In each case, the goal is to identify a susceptible constituency as accurately as possible through continuous polling and to boost affective gain by making voters feel differently, for example by finding wedge issues. But, more than this, increasingly it is about rapidly identifying individuals and their interests and concerns as exactly as possible, thereby turning them into ‘intimate strangers’. Fourth, a whole array of corporate internet-related techniques, from websites to blogs have been used to tap in to and work with voters’ concerns. The idea is to maintain constant contact with voters and to mobilize their concerns to political ends. Fifth, the political process, in an odd simulation of the original ambitions of democracy, becomes a continuous one, based on a model of permanent tracking, which can be used outside elections as well as in, according to the play of events. In the ‘permanent campaign’, a term first used by Pat Caddell in 1976, media time and election time begin to merge, and techniques for campaigning and governing gradually coalesce. The aim, it might be hypothesized, is to produce a semiconscious onflow of political imitation-suggestion that is unstoppable and which can be played into in order to produce affective firestorms which can be modulated by the new technical means now available. At the same time, it is worth remembering that these are also the arts of not swaying constituencies. Sometimes what is needed is to ‘reduce the juice’ by inducing apathy in its many forms. But apathy, as Nina Eliasoph wonderfully shows, can involve a whole series of denials, omissions, suppressions and evasions which add up to much more than a simple absence of thought and action.
The technologies I have outlined were undoubtedly born in the United States but they are now diffusing to all democracies at greater or lesser speeds, following an increasingly insistent media logic. The case of Italy is the most extreme. There, Silvio Berlusconi was able to turn a potent mixture of marketing and celebrity into a politics. The case of the UK is also instructive. Since 1992, something like a permanent campaign has been in operation there, the result of its adoption from US sources by New Labour. Whilst it does not run at quite the intensity of its North American counterpart, the result of a slightly longer electoral cycle, still nearly all of the techniques found in the United States permanent campaign have gradually made their way across the Atlantic, fuelled by the hiring of US-based consultants at various times.
Following on from these themes, I am pursuing two main interests which seem to me to be worthy of discussion. One is in how institutions generate paranoia, a condition which works in part because it feels good. The paranoid frame of mind strikes me as one of the greatest dangers to rational political thought, yet it is currently rampant across much of the political spectrum, closing down imaginative resistance. The fact that history is not a product of conspiracy and that political events are often highly contingent is something that paranoia casts aside.
The second interest is in political activism. There is a view of the political activist that is nicely summarized by Michael Walzer: ‘self-confident and free of worry, capable of vigorous, wilful activity’. This is very much the activist as hero, even as soldier. But clearly there are other ways of proceeding. Crucially, activism involves a whole range of affective dispositions. So, for example, how might it be possible to understand other forms of bravery and courage than that of the hero and even boost them? To investigate this problem, I have been considering the vast archive of performance which seems to me to be extraordinarily valuable as a means of both understanding affective states and creating new affective mixes which would better allow us to think how we think/feel the political.
> Nigel Thrift
The current international political situation shows the power of passions all too well. The different passions that sweep the political scene are a part of how we reason politically. Thus, to ignore the affective, passionate element of reason is to delete much of what reason consists of.
My own interest in affect as a political force has been concerned with the way in which passions motivate and inform democratic political life. I will use this posting to expand on this theme, because it is so relevant to what has been going on in recent years. I am not, of course, claiming that addressing the importance of affect on political life is something new. Politicians routinely ask the ‘how do they feel?’ question, recognising just how important that question is, and are continually being accused of preying on the people’s hopes and fears, the two emotions that they are most likely to appeal to. In the Greek polis, it is at least arguable, a la Sloterdijk, that the most important innovation was the production of a space that could dampen emotions sufficiently to produce a time structure of waiting one’s turn to speak. In any case, even before Aristotle declared that we are all political animals, underlined the importance of emotions for good moral judgement, and drew attention in the Rhetoric to emotion as a key component of political oratory, the arts of rhetoric had been a staple of political life These arts are, in part, precisely about swaying constituencies through the use of affective cues and appeals which are often founded in spatial arrangement; think only of a book like Thomas Wilson’s (1553) The Art of Rhetoric and the careful attention it pays to staging as an affective key.
All that said, few canonical political philosophers and even fewer contemporary political theorists have tackled the role of affect in politics, even as they have spent a good deal of time challenging the supposed certainties of liberal political theory. But that is not to say that there is nowhere to turn. Think only of Paul Lazarsfeld’s seminal study of political communication and voter decision-making during the 1940 US presidential election, Richard Hofstadter’s classic essay ‘The paranoid style in American politics’, expounding on the power of ‘angry minds’, George Marcus’s work on affective intelligence and political judgement, Lauren Berlant’s remarkable series of works on affective democracy and compassion, or the growing feminist literature on politics, for example. But I think that it is fair to say that much of this interest has not been systematic and has been bedevilled by the view that politics ought to be about conscious, rational discourse with the result that affect is regarded as at best an add-on and as at worst a dangerous distraction.
Yet politics is susceptible to and is based on many of the same subconscious processes of imitation as other affective fields (e.g.consumerism). Take just the realm of political advertising. Think only of the classic hopeful 1984 Ronald Reagan ‘Morning in America’ ad campaign or the scary 1964 Johnson ‘Daisy’ ads: each of these campaigns, repeated many times since in different variants, testifies to the influence of affect on politics and the importance of imitation as a constituent element of affective contagion. And this is no surprise. As Popkin pointed out in the classic The Reasoning Voter a good part of politics in a mediated environment is based on intangibles that briefly fix attention - which he calls ‘low-information signalling’ - chiefly affective short-cuts that convey just enough of the character of candidates to voters and which are open to all kinds of manipulation, particularly via the use of nonverbal cues like music and imagery. Such fleeting impressions, in which, as Brader puts it, ‘our brains often identify cues and respond to them without our awareness’, often count for more than cogent policies and can often pass as voters’ political reasoning. In turn, this puts much more emphasis on the individual politician who acts as a kind of affective bellwether. Indeed recent work in political psychology suggests that voters can often make inferences of competence based solely on the facial appearance of candidates, and do so remarkably rapidly – within milliseconds.
In particular there has been a wide-ranging set of changes in political technology (Table), many of which take their cue from corporate practices of generating engagement. These technologies supposedly make the conduct of electoral and other forms of politics more effective but too often they confuse the consumption of democracy with the practice of democracy.
Table: Technological Change in the Political Sphere
1930s national polls (Gallup, Harris, Quayle)
1940s audience research
1969 first intensive polling firm
Mid-1970s telephone polling and focus groups and direct mail fundraising
1976 on permanent campaign
1992 dial groups
1980s daily tracking polls
1990s one-on-one sessions in shopping mall offices
2003 use of Web in Howard Dean campaign to organize monthly meetups (Create own crowds). Decentralized campaign using websites. Use of email and blogs instead of focus groups and such to gauge opinion. House meetings.
Five processes seem particularly important to study. So, to begin with, and most obviously, there has been a mass mediatization of politics. It is something of a cliché to note the influence of the media on politics but this has now become pervasive, based especially in the interaction between techniques like opinion polling and media presentation (, the result of an increasing familiarity with television technique, growing professionalization of the presentation of politics (as symbolized by growing numbers of consultants and the fame of formative guru-cum-inventors like Lee Atwater, Dick Morris, and Karl Rove), the burgeoning of available media outlets and the subsequent expansion of political programming, and increased media access. When a New Labour spin doctor recently declared that ‘what they can’t seem to grasp is that communications is not an afterthought to our policy. It’s central to the whole mission of New Labour’, this is no longer a partisan point – it is typical of the modern mediated Western democracy. Second, political actors are increasingly treated as commodities to be sold, in part, perhaps, because so many citizens lack the attention span or inclination to follow political issues and tend to invest their trust in the low-information signals emanating from iconic figures instead. Such marketing involves more and more use of the small signs of affective technique structured as various kinds of performance of style: a politician’s ability to perform in public becomes a crucial asset but it is very often a performance in which unexpected emotions are bleached from the process because of the dangers of ‘expressive failure’. Spontaneity has to be carefully structured. So, for example, the practices of celebrity are becoming more and more common in the political arena. Think only of the way in which Ronald Reagan’s face has become an abiding source of contemplation by political commentators because of the affective power of its ability to convey comfort and avuncular authenticity and warmth and even serenity or the careful prepping of Bill Clinton’s body language in key television appearances. Third, political campaigns are increasingly treated as forms of marketing. This tendency is only strengthened in first-past-the-post systems where the outcome of any election is disproportionately influenced by a few swing voters who it is important to locate and communicate with, against a background of increasing speed that I noted above. Thus, polling techniques have become a key to many political campaigns, techniques that can gauge intensity of feelings and the general quality of mood. Parties and other pressure groups have adopted a series of these practices: all manner of polls, focus groups, voter databases, geographical information systems, customer relations management software, targeted mail and e-mail, and so on, especially to target particularly passionate constituencies. In the United States, since the 1970s these techniques have become far-advanced. In each case, the goal is to identify a susceptible constituency as accurately as possible through continuous polling and to boost affective gain by making voters feel differently, for example by finding wedge issues. But, more than this, increasingly it is about rapidly identifying individuals and their interests and concerns as exactly as possible, thereby turning them into ‘intimate strangers’. Fourth, a whole array of corporate internet-related techniques, from websites to blogs have been used to tap in to and work with voters’ concerns. The idea is to maintain constant contact with voters and to mobilize their concerns to political ends. Fifth, the political process, in an odd simulation of the original ambitions of democracy, becomes a continuous one, based on a model of permanent tracking, which can be used outside elections as well as in, according to the play of events. In the ‘permanent campaign’, a term first used by Pat Caddell in 1976, media time and election time begin to merge, and techniques for campaigning and governing gradually coalesce. The aim, it might be hypothesized, is to produce a semiconscious onflow of political imitation-suggestion that is unstoppable and which can be played into in order to produce affective firestorms which can be modulated by the new technical means now available. At the same time, it is worth remembering that these are also the arts of not swaying constituencies. Sometimes what is needed is to ‘reduce the juice’ by inducing apathy in its many forms. But apathy, as Nina Eliasoph wonderfully shows, can involve a whole series of denials, omissions, suppressions and evasions which add up to much more than a simple absence of thought and action.
The technologies I have outlined were undoubtedly born in the United States but they are now diffusing to all democracies at greater or lesser speeds, following an increasingly insistent media logic. The case of Italy is the most extreme. There, Silvio Berlusconi was able to turn a potent mixture of marketing and celebrity into a politics. The case of the UK is also instructive. Since 1992, something like a permanent campaign has been in operation there, the result of its adoption from US sources by New Labour. Whilst it does not run at quite the intensity of its North American counterpart, the result of a slightly longer electoral cycle, still nearly all of the techniques found in the United States permanent campaign have gradually made their way across the Atlantic, fuelled by the hiring of US-based consultants at various times.
Following on from these themes, I am pursuing two main interests which seem to me to be worthy of discussion. One is in how institutions generate paranoia, a condition which works in part because it feels good. The paranoid frame of mind strikes me as one of the greatest dangers to rational political thought, yet it is currently rampant across much of the political spectrum, closing down imaginative resistance. The fact that history is not a product of conspiracy and that political events are often highly contingent is something that paranoia casts aside.
The second interest is in political activism. There is a view of the political activist that is nicely summarized by Michael Walzer: ‘self-confident and free of worry, capable of vigorous, wilful activity’. This is very much the activist as hero, even as soldier. But clearly there are other ways of proceeding. Crucially, activism involves a whole range of affective dispositions. So, for example, how might it be possible to understand other forms of bravery and courage than that of the hero and even boost them? To investigate this problem, I have been considering the vast archive of performance which seems to me to be extraordinarily valuable as a means of both understanding affective states and creating new affective mixes which would better allow us to think how we think/feel the political.
> Nigel Thrift