<underfire> Thrift threads

[Retort]

Thanks are due to Nigel Thrift for introducing the dimension of 
political psychology. One of us from Retort recalls the memorable but 
embattled seminar of Richard Lichtman and Terry Kupers at the Wright 
Institute in Berkeley in the mid-80s. It was clear that we were 
standing in the rubble of a grand project - the project we had first 
heard about in London from Peter Sedgwick, Victor Serge’s translator - 
of a radical, psychoanalytically informed, fully historicized, 
political psychology.  The work of the late Michael Rogin was a key 
part of that enterprise. Just how potentially explosive it was became 
clear during Rogin’s Warholian moment of notoriety upon the publication 
of “Ronald Reagan” the Movie. Mike electrified the audience at Wheeler 
Hall on the Berkeley campus with his discovery that Edward Teller’s 
plans to put nuclear-powered laser weapons into space had found an ear 
in the White House because it was an uncanny re-run of an old Reagan 
sci-fi movie script. Rogin last book, Black Face, White Noise was a 
remarkable study, greeted with silence mostly, of the political and 
racial economy of Hollywood and its relation to violence and the 
national imaginary - of film, in fact, as a political technology. 
Stephen Ducat is a continuator of Rogin's approach to political 
psychology, with two studies that speak to Nigel's concerns - Taken In: 
  American Gullibility and the Reagan Mythos, and recently The Wimp 
Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars and The Politics of Anxious Masculinity.

As for the production of spaces that dampen affect - a hugely important 
topic - in Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of 
Information two of the Retort crew questioned the production and 
sensation of the televisual body.  The screen world both induces at 
once a fascination and a passivity.  The folk coinage "couch-potato" 
recognizes the phenomenology of watching TV in domestic spaces, with 
its vaguely depressed aftertaste. Interactivity, of course, is only 
enhanced passivity.

On the other hand, mobilization rather that passivity is occasionally 
required, and it is distinctly odd, in Nigel's timeline of political 
technologies, to see, under the 1930s, national polls but nothing of 
the new political use of radio (quite different in affectual terms from 
television) or the new technics developed for the staging of political 
rallies.

Retort
San Francisco
-----------------------------------

On Dec 4, 2006, at 4:05 AM, Thrift, Nigel wrote:

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_______________________________________________
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16 October - 10 December 2006
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