emotive ‘I feel, therefore I am’. This emotivist understanding of the self shapes
the way in which individuals participate and communicate in societal life. In
the contemporary context, as Jean Bethke Elshtain observes, ‘all points seem
to revolve around the individual’s subjective feelings – whether of frustration,
anxiety, stress, fulfilment. The citizen recedes; the therapeutic self prevails’.
(Nolan 1998: 6)Thus, a series of heterogeneous knowledges of performance move to the centre
stage in modern societies which constitute a new ‘disaggregated’ mode of dis-
cipline, an emergent stratum of power and knowledge. These knowledges
construct power in a number of ways – by delivering messages with passion, for
example (indeed, it is often the force with which passion is delivered which is more
important than the message), by providing a new minute landscape of manipu-
lation (Doane 2002), by adding new possibilities for making signs, and generally
by adding new openings out of the event. But, most importantly, they provide
a new means of creating ‘fractal’ subjects challenged to perform across a series of
different situations in a way which demands not so much openness as controlled
flexibility.^18 As McKenzie puts it:
The desire produced by performative power and knowledge is not moulded
by distinct disciplinary mechanisms. It is not a repressive desire: it is instead
‘excessive’, intermittently modulated and pushed across the thresholds of
various limits by overlapping and sometimes competing systems. Further,
diversity is not simply integrated, for integration is itself becoming diversi-
fied. Similarly, deviation is not simply normalised, for norms operate and
transform themselves through their own transgression and deviation. We can
understand this development better when we realise that the mechanisms
of performative power are nomadic and flexible more than sedentary and rigid,
that its spaces are networked and digital more than enclosed and physical,
that its temporalities are polyrhythmic and non-linear and not simply
sequential and linear. On the performative stratum, one shuttles quickly
between different evaluative grids, switching back and forth between divergent
challenges to perform – or else.
(McKenzie 2001: 19)A third development is closely linked to mediatization and the rise of perfor-
mance knowledges. It is the growth of new forms of calculation in sensory registers
that would not have previously been deemed ‘political’. In particular, through the
advent of a whole series of technologies, small spaces and times, upon which affect
thrives and out of which it is often constituted, have become visible and are able
to be enlarged so that they can be knowingly operated upon. Though it would be
possible to argue that outposts were already being constructed in this continent
of phenomenality back in the seventeenth century with, for example, the growth
of interest in conditioning the military body through practices like drill, I would
argue that the main phase of colonization dates from the mid-nineteenth century
Spatialities of feeling 185