available to reflection (Wegner 2002; T.D. Wilson 2002). These automatisms may
often feel like wilful action but they are not and they have powerful political
consequences, not least because they form a kind of psychic immune system which
means that certain issues can be avoided or perversely interpreted as a matter of
course (T.D. Wilson 2002; Milton and Zizek 2005). Equally, suppositions of
causality may become firmly entrenched. For example, it is relatively easy to
promote in populations feelings of responsibility over events for which they could
not possibly have had any responsibility at all. Affect is, in other words, a series of
highways of imitation-suggestion. As Wegner (2002: 31 4 ) puts it, we live in a
‘suggested society’ in which ‘the causal influences people have on themselves and
each other, as they are understood, capture only a small part of the actual causal
flux of social relations’. In other words, societies are thought of, quite literally, as
en-tranced, as only half-awake.^30
I will attempt to come to terms with the terms that affective contagion lays upon
the world through an attempt to show how affect can be engineered to produce
a politics which is able to act as a dark force which is part and parcel of the new
liberal settlement. My argument will be as follows. Against a background of a
general, if differential, loss of belief in formal modes of efficacy, and especially
political engagement, Western cultures are becoming increasingly prone to brief
moments of engagement tied to the affective texture of particular events shaped
by a series of political inventions made in the last 4 0 years or so. Most of the time
Western democratic cultures tend to be disengaged but they can be ‘switched on’
by particular issues with high affective resonance. Thus a growth in disengagement
and detachment (Ross 2006) is paralleled by moments of high engagement and
attachment. Part of the reason for this change in the affective time structure is,
I hypothesize, the growth of anxious, obsessive and compulsive, behaviours,
with interesting consequences of various kinds for politics and the political. Even
though notoriously difficult to define and ask questions about, all the available
surveys show that these behaviours are growing apace, filling up more and more
of the Western psychic space (cf. Salecl 200 4 and, most recently, Huddy et al.
2005).^31
What might I mean by the performatives of ‘anxiety’, ‘obsession’, and ‘compul-
sion’? Anxiety, defined by the dictionary as ‘a state of apprehension, uncertainty
and fear resulting from the anticipation of a realistic or fantasized threatening event
or situation’, can be understood as the affective reaction to an expected danger,
sometimes muddied by the concern that the reaction will not be reciprocated. The
dictionary defines obsession variously as a ‘compulsive preoccupation with a fixed
idea or an unwanted feeling or emotion, often accompanied by symptoms of
anxiety’, or ‘an irrational motive for performing trivial or repetitive actions against
your will’, or ‘an unhealthy and compulsive preoccupation with something
or someone’, thus signalling that obsession is close in nature to the other affect in
which I am interested, namely compulsion; ‘an irresistible impulse to act, regardless
of the rationality of the motivation’. In other words, the nub of anxiety, obsession,
and compulsion is a certain lack of free will: people have little or no agency over
their bodies or environments but are under the control of an affective force. That
240 Part III