of screen-ic force (Balázs 19 7 0; Kracauer 1960) and film theory’s later, more
nuanced interpretation in which cognitive processes are strained through various
conventions and styles (see Thrift 200 4 ). This mediatization has had important
effects. As McKenzie (2001) has pointed out its most important effect has been
to enshrine the performative principle at the heart of modern Euro-American
societies and their political forms. This has occurred in a number of ways. To begin
with, the technical form of modern media tends to foreground emotion, both in
its concentration on key affective sites like the face or voice and its magnification
of the small details of the body that so often signify emotion.^17 Political presen-
tation nowadays often fixes on such small differences and makes them stand for a
whole. One line of movement can become a progression of meaning, able to be
actualized and implanted locally. Massumi observes this quality in Ronald Reagan:
That is why Reagan could be so many things to so many people; that is
why the majority of the electorate could disagree with him on major issues
but still vote for him. Because he was actualised, in their neighbourhood, as
a movement and meaning of their selection – or at least selected for them with
their acquiescence. He was a man for all inhibitions. It was commonly said
that he ruled primarily by projecting an air of confidence. That was the
emotional tenor of his political manner, dysfunction notwithstanding.
Confidence is the emotional translation of affect as capturable life potential;
it is a particular emotional expression and becoming – conscious of one’s side-
perceived vitality. Reagan transmitted vitality, virtuality, tendency, in sickness
and interruption.
(Massumi 2002: 4 1, my emphasis)Then, political presentation increasingly conforms to media norms of pre-
sentation which emphasize the performance of emotion as being an index of
credibility. Increasingly, political legitimation arises from this kind of performance
(Thompson 2002). And, as a final point, these kinds of presentation chime with
the increasingly ‘therapeutic’ form of selfhood which is becoming common in
Euro-American societies (cf. Giddens 1991; Rose 200 4 ). Indeed, Nolan (1998)
argues that this therapeutic or ‘emotivist’ ethos is embedding itself in the structures
of the American state to such a degree that it is becoming a key technology
of governance, both challenging and to some extent replacing the affective back-
ground of older bureaucratic ‘machine’ technologies, by, for example, recognizing
emotional labour, emotion management and emotional learning as key skills
(P. Smith 2002);
Life in the machine has made appeals to the older [traditional] systems of
meaning impossible. Instead the individual is encouraged to escape from
within and to refer to the language of emotions. The emotivist motif, then,
is the ‘dictum that truth is grasped through sentiment or feeling, rather than
through rational judgement or abstract reasoning’. It encourages a particular
ontology that replaces the Cartesian maxim ‘I think, therefore I am’ with the184 Part III