action’ (Deleuze 1988a: 28). But this is to overlook a feature of embodiment
which is crucial: effort. It takes effort for the body to be in the world, to produce
an expenditure of energy, to conserve some kind of equilibrium. But, too often,
it is simply assumed that bodies are bodies-in-action, able to exhibit a kind of con-
tinuous intentionality, able to be constantly enrolled into activity. Every occasion
seems to be willed, cultivated or at least honed. But the experience of embodiment
is not necessarily like that at all. It also includes vulnerability, passivity, suffering,
fatigue, indolence, even simple hunger (Wilkinson 2005). It includes episodes
of insomnia, weariness and plain exhaustion, a sense of insignificance and even
sheer indifference to the world. It includes tripping over, falling,^34 missing a catch
or a target, walking into an obstacle. In other words, bodies can and do become
overwhelmed. The unchosen and unforeseen exceed the ability of the body to
contain or absorb (Harrison 200 7 ). There is a sense of being unworthy of events,
and a general reluctance to take up the challenges of being. And this is not an
abnormal condition: it is a part of being as flesh. This corporeal vulnerabilityis a
crucial experience in people’s lives.
Rather than focusing on the more overt epidemics of fear or anger (cf. Thrift
2005b, 2006b), it seems crucial to me to concentrate on an underlay of reluctance
to engage, arising partly out of this corporeal vulnerability. For it seems to me that
this reluctance also has a wider political significance since it is these points of
unconscious volition (or non-volition, perhaps) which are often so crucial in
influencing the course of politics by inducing an active passivity (Eliasoph 1998).
Such tendencies have been only strengthened by the growth of the media which
makes it much easier to work on bare life, and most especially the ability to arrest
time and examine and work with it (Thrift 2001; Mulvey 2005). Delay in time
allows detail which has, so to speak, lain dormant to be noticed and worked with.
Thus, more and more action becomes deferred, often for very small periods of
time, and during this period of deferral it can be pre-treated in various ways, thus
allowing the automatisms I have discussed above to become routinely embedded
in action. At the same time, the advent of mass media has almost certainly increased
levels of anxiety by speeding up the reception of events so that giving any con-
sidered political voice to them becomes particularly difficult. Indeed, increasingly,
notwithstanding a general increase in news outlets (Bennett and Entman 2001),^35
this political voice tends to be restricted to certain widely circulated clichés of
presentation which foreground affect as a means of gaining a speedy impact, an
effect that is exacerbated by the heightened levels of competition to find presen-
tations with grip. For example, mass media images of risk nearly always focus
on suffering; ‘More often than not, “risk” is communicated for public attention
in graphic portrayals of bodies in pain and harrowing images of people in mourning
and distress’ (Wilkinson 2005: vii). In particular, an affective platform like
melodrama, which involves the generation of high levels of anxiety, has become,
through the media, an accepted affective automatism (Huddy et al. 2005; Thrift
2006a). Furthermore, the proliferation of mass media tends to both multiply and
keep this kind of affective platform in the public mind in a way which promotes
anxiety and can sometimes even be likened to obsession or compulsion.
242 Part III