<underfire> Political Sensations

[Brian Holmes]

Nigel Thrift's post is a great way to kick off the last week of Under 
Fire, by pointing to what appears to be the driver of the calamitous 
sequence of recent world events: namely, nothing other than democracy, 
ever-tantalizing as an ideal, ever-disappointing as a reality, and in 
most cases pretty damn difficult to distinguish from "mere appearance," 
i.e. spectacle. What's so compelling to me about Thrift’s work on the 
subject of political affect is the chance it provides to cut through the 
broad categories of "spectacle" and "control society," in order to get 
to some of the techniques whereby affects are elicited, attached to 
specific themes, and made to circulate through society with the 
expectation of getting more-or-less predictable results. This is 
popularly called manipulation, we all know it exists, we know it has 
largely destroyed the promises of self-government; and Thrift gives us a 
look into some of the mechanisms that underly it, while also also 
evoking (perhaps a bit more tenuously) the prospect of counter-tactics 
and strategies that would not just be manipulation in reverse.

For those who might be interested, Thrift has a university homepage with 
a small download section: www.geog.ox.ac.uk/~kstraus/thrift. 
Unfortunately it doesn't have his most interesting article on affect, 
called "Intensities of Feeling," and published in Geografiska Annaler 
86B, 2004. Try finding that among the other hot items on your local 
newsstand! (If you can't, I could send it to you.) The thesis is that 
despite our huge civilizational investment in distinguishing between 
verifiable objective reason and murky subjective emotion, and despite 
the well-founded Enlightenment preference for logical argument over 
emotional rhetoric, the continuing refusal to seriously consider the 
role of affect in public life has become tantamount to “criminal 
neglect.” Since September 11, this claim doesn’t seem to need much 
explanation or defense.

In our time, political affect circulates mainly through the 
technological mediation of TV, as well as radio, the movies, Internet, 
cell phones and so on. Curiously enough, what springs to mind when I 
think about a critical discussion of political affect - setting aside 
for the moment a lot of philosophical and literary references that would 
be difficult to discuss in a short post - are a number of films and 
videos which go strongly in the direction of discovering how emotions 
are evoked and swayed in contemporary democracies. Many of you probably 
know these videos and films, but others not, and they may also give us 
some good reference points for discussion.

The first is a great, ongoing video-art piece by Antoni Muntadas and 
Marshall Reese, called "Presidents and Elections," which archives TV ad 
campaigns from the time of Eisenhower to that of Bush Jr., by means of 
two commercials for each side per presidential election. You can get it, 
for example, at a place like the Video Databank in Chicago (but it's 
expensive, only a public screening makes sense). It's a fantastic 
intellectual and affective shock to see all these different forms of 
tele-suasion montaged into a single continuous sequence.  While the 
earlier commercials definitely reveal the "paranoid style in politics," 
what I found amazing was the quantum leap taken by Reagan, whose lushly 
produced spots are EXCLUSIVELY about eliciting a feeling of expansive, 
virile, trustworthy, wild-western fatherliness. Political argumentation? 
Forget it.

The second amazing video, for anyone who never saw it, is a famous 
tactical media document released by Brian Springer in 1995, called 
“Spin.” Download it at www.illegal-art.org/video/index.html#spin. Not 
long before the Bush-Clinton race in 1992, Springer realized that 
satellite TV technology had a hole in it: you could capture the raw news 
feeds that the major channels were sending between their production 
studios. And since the practice of TV interview teams is to leave the 
camera rolling between the commercial  breaks, you could go behind the 
scenes of practically any live broadcast and see what the players were 
saying when they knew thought they were off the air. In addition to some 
incredible shots of the candidates - Clinton, a veritable stage maniac, 
beaming regionally pitched messages to campaign sites all over the 
country, or a tired and distraught Bush Sr. talking with Larry King 
about the virtues of a new tranquilizer! - what you get out of “Spin” is 
a rare look into the techniques and technology of satellite TV, whose 
global reach has made the circulation of political affect into a 
planetary phenomenon.

The third thing I'd like to mention is actually a piece of television: a 
4-part documentary by the infamous BBC director Adam Curtis, called 
"Century of the Self," which focuses on the invention of public 
relations by Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, who moved to the US 
in the 1910s. You can get these films on the net: 
www.archive.org/details/AdaCurtisCenturyoftheSelf_0 (the addresses of 
the other 3 parts are on this page). The genius of Bernays is to have 
realized that the notion of the unconscious opened up a whole field for 
stealth intervention: "If we understand the mechanism and motives of the 
group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses 
according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent 
practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a 
certain point and within certain limits" (from the book "Propaganda," 
1928). "Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society," Bernays 
added, "constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling 
power of our country." Among the clips of Bernays (whom Curtis actually 
managed to interview at around the age of 100) is footage of his famous 
staged event, "Torches of Freedom," which was all about creating a huge 
new market by having “debutantes” perform the emancipating gesture of 
lighting up a smoke in the midst of a public demonstration. To concoct 
his campaign, which appeared as a spontaneous event and was picked up as 
such by the national papers of the time, Bernays went to A.A. Brill, the 
first practicing American psychoanalyst. Brill supplied the central 
image of the torch of freedom, as well as the further notion that women 
smoke cigarettes to protest against the inhumanity of male domination, 
and that the cigarette also gives their lips a bit of erotic 
titillation. And the papers and magazines loved it. Women's liberation 
in the service of the tobacco industry! Sometimes, as Freud would have 
said, a cigarette is only a cigarette - but never for public relations.

Curtis tries to follow the changing ways that psychological theory has 
informed mass manipulation over the course of the 20th century. In the 
third and fourth parts of his documentary he  suggests that a turning 
point was reached by American society in the late sixties, when Freudian 
depth psychology, now fully integrated to both corporate and state 
strategies, was widely rejected by the public. They looked instead to 
self-fulfillment through uninhibited individual expression in encounter 
groups, like those promoted in California by “est,” or Erhard Seminars 
Training. Curtis thinks that a whole new style of PR and a whole new 
generation of advertisers (Jerry Rubin is the prime example) sprang from 
this new sixties imperative to express all individual desires, rather 
than repressing them into the unconscious. He claims - surprisingly for 
those who think of the Tories as cultural conservatives - that the 
political success of Thatcherism lay precisely in a newfound capacity to 
address individuals in their desire to express their own originality, a 
desire mainly fulfilled through more sophisticated forms of consumption. 
The implication (but watch out, Curtis is long on implication and short 
on proof) is that this new kind of political address, which abandons any 
focus on collective goods or on the commonweal, derives from what you 
might call the “surface psychology” of self-expression. At this point 
golden-tongued rhetoric, aided by the tools of statistical analysis and 
psychology, has again become the central “art” of politics. The end of 
the film looks at the way the demographic analysis of individual 
affective response to aesthetic and symbolic contents presented in focus 
groups has been used to structure successful political campaigns, first 
by Clinton and then by Tony Blair.

This brings me to the last film I want to mention: “Our Brand Is Crisis” 
(2005) by Rachel Boynton, a very precise look at the way that Gonzalo 
(“Goni”) Sanchez de Lozada’s successful 2002 campaign for the Bolivian 
presidency was “engineered” (to recall Bernays’ famous term: engineering 
consent) by the US political consulting firm of Greenberg Carville Shrum 
(GCS). These are exactly the people who got Clinton elected in ‘92 and 
then teamed up with the British pollster Philip Gould to elect Tony 
Blair (oh, I know, you thought the British voters elected Blair...). The 
film is about sophisticated political rhetoric based on analysis and 
mediated by technology, for the central goal of profit. Boynton shows 
the GCS consultants in action in Bolivia, shaping a campaign for the 
Bolivian-American businessman “Goni,” who speaks Spanish with a gringo 
accent and basically believes in the endless virtues of neoliberal 
globalization. The title comes from one of the moments of frank cynicism 
that Boynton managed to catch on film (probably she was allowed to do so 
because of the way “The War Room,” about Clinton’s first campaign, had 
lionized Carville and helped make him into a TV star in his own right). 
“If we’re going to win this election,” explains GCS advertising 
consultant Tad Devine, “I think it’s because we will have chosen the 
right frame. The frame for us is, you know, crisis.... That’s our 
brand.”  Boynton shows how prototype TV spots are created out of a 
basic, fear-driven narrative - “there’s a crisis in this country, and it 
could get much worse, but Goni has a plan to solve it” - and then how 
those spots are tested in focus groups, which the American consultants 
watch with the aid of a translator, then use to refine the image and the 
message. Goni does win in 2002 - but what we’ve seen from the very start 
of the film is the real crisis and violent revolt that grips the 
impoverished country just one year later, driving Sanchez de Lozada out 
of the country and ultimately leading to the current leftist government 
of Evo Morales. With all the scrupulous precision that Curtis’s work 
lacks, the film shows the creation of political affect in a real 
situation, where intensities of feeling can be momentarily channeled but 
not durably contained within an opportunistic frame. Well worth looking 
at. You can probably find it at a video rental near you (or download it 
by Bit Torrent, but it might take 2 days...).

The point of all this pre-viewing is to say that there are many 
materials out there to inform us, not only about political affect and 
its manipulation, but also about when, where, why and for whom political 
affect is generated. As the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler says, we 
live in a society shaped by “service capitalism,” which develops through 
the production and use of “technologies of the mind.” Stiegler writes, 
“this service capitalism makes all the segments of human existence into 
the object of the continuous and systematic control of attention and 
behavior - the object of statistics, formalizations, rationalizations, 
calculations, investments and comodifications... the service businesses 
are everywhere and they deal with everything: they have become the 
principal actor of public life” (from the book “Reenchanter le monde: La 
valeur esprit contre le populisme industriel,” 2006). So the first 
point, in my opinion, is indeed to develop a much more “systematic” 
knowledge, as Nigel says in his post, about what Bernays in 1929 had 
already called “this invisible government which is the true ruling power 
of our country" (except of course that now it would be the true ruling 
power of our world). The task of “Knowing Capitalism”  - to quote the 
title of one of Nigel’s excellent books - would be to know more about 
precisely the kinds of manipulatory services that constitute such an 
invisible governance. But that title is totally ambiguous, because it 
also suggests how smart capitalism has become, how it integrates every 
kind of critique through a vast information-gathering and learning 
apparatus, how it is infinitely flexible and metamorphic. I still think 
the other point would be to find out what can be done about the 
manipulation of political affect, because otherwise things are not 
looking too well, as most of the previous posts on this forum have gone 
to show.

So the question I would like to ask Nigel is this: What about activism, 
what about intervention, and what about the forms of affect-generating 
performance that you mention as being worthy of closer consideration? Do 
you see knowledge and know-how about about non-manipulatory, but 
nonetheless effective kinds of affective expression and exchange being 
developed anywhere in society? And does your work on affect lead you to 
any conclusions about the need for specific kinds of practice, of 
institutional transformation, perhaps of legal or constitutional change 
as well?

In France, Stiegler and his colleagues in the association Ars 
Industrialis are calling for a European industrial system that would 
orient the production of aesthetic and relational tools and the 
development of services away from the manipulatory and alienating 
directions that they have massively taken, and towards a situation where 
their use fosters a greater capacity for cooperative social relations, 
able to help us confront the very daunting problems of the twenty-first 
century. That’s a utopia, of course: but it is being given serious 
philosophical attention in a continuous stream of publications by 
Stiegler, relayed and amplified by the activity of the association, with 
the aim of ultimately influencing public policy; none of which I think 
is negligible. At the other extreme, in the realm of concrete, 
grassroots practice, for at least a decade a new wave of so-called 
“tactical media” has sought to take hold of the networked technologies 
of expression and use them to amplify and refract the force of affective 
gestures, in ways that do not necessarily imply the virile sense of 
self-confidence and firmness of purpose which traditionally 
characterized political militancy. I think that the early interventions 
of Cindy Sheehan, and particularly her staging of a candle-light vigil 
outside Bush’s ranch in Texas, are a great popular example of this, as 
you can see by looking through the blogs that still show all the ways in 
which her emotional and symbolic displays were taken up by people all 
over the United States, breaking the ice for a rising rejection of the 
man who, more than any former president even including Reagan, seemed to 
have a lockdown on the circulation of political affect through the 
population of the USA. And what I am really curious about, both in terms 
of Nigel’s research and that of everyone else on this list, is where in 
the contemporary societies do you see new, more democratic forms of 
affective politics developing - and what do they feel like?

all the best,

Brian Holmes