through the use of affective cues and appeals which are often founded in spatial
arrangement; think only of a book like Thomas Wilson’s (1993 [1553]) The Art
of Rhetoricand the careful attention it pays to staging as an affective key. Certainly,
as Koziak (2000) has pointed out, few canonical political philosophers and even
fewer contemporary political theorists have tackled the role of affect in politics,
even as they have spent a good deal of time challenging the supposed certainties
of liberal political theory. But that is not to say that there is nowhere to turn. Think
only of Paul Lazarsfeld’s seminal study of political communication and voter
decision-making during the 19 4 0 US presidential election, Richard Hofstadter’s
classic (196 4 ) essay ‘The paranoid style in American politics’, expounding on the
power of ‘angry minds’, George E. Marcus’s (2002) work on affective intelligence
and political judgement, Lauren Berlant’s remarkable series of works on affective
democracy and compassion, or the growing feminist literature on politics, for
example. But I think that it is fair to say that much of this interest has not been
systematic and has been bedevilled by the view that politics ought to be about
conscious, rational discourse with the result that affect is regarded as at best an
add-on and as at worst a dangerous distraction (see Thrift 2006a).
Yet politics is susceptible to and is based on many of the same subconscious
processes of imitation as consumerism. Take just the realm of political advertising.
Think only of the classic hopeful 198 4 Ronald Reagan ‘Morning in America’ ad
campaign or the scary 196 4 Johnson ‘Daisy’ ads: each of these campaigns, repeated
many times since in different variants, testifies to the influence of affect on politics
and the importance of imitation as a constituent element of affective contagion
(Brader 2006). And this is no surprise. As Popkin (1991) pointed out in the classic
The Reasoning Votera good part of politics in a mediated environment is based
on intangibles that briefly fix attention – which he calls ‘low-information signalling’
- chiefly affective short-cuts that convey just enough of the character of candidates
to voters and which are open to all kinds of manipulation, particularly via the use
of nonverbal cues like music and imagery. Such fleeting impressions, in which ‘our
brains often identify cues and respond to them without our awareness’ (Brader
2006: 1 4 ), often count for more than cogent policies and often pass as voters’
political reasoning.^39 In turn, this puts much more emphasis on the individual
politician who acts as a kind of affective bellwether. Indeed recent work in political
psychology suggests that voters can often make inferences of competence based
solely on the facial appearance of candidates, and do so remarkably rapidly – within
milliseconds (Todorov et al. 2005; Todorov and Willis 2006).
In particular there has been a wide-ranging set of changes in political technology
(Table 10.1), many of which take their cue from corporate practices of generating
engagement. These technologies supposedly make the conduct of electoral and
other forms of politics more effective but too often they confuse the consumption
of democracy with the practice of democracy (Orlie 2002; Klein 2006).
Perhaps the most obvious sign of this crossover is the new political alignment
between consumerism and politics, as ‘we watch Sharon Stone, Angelina Jolie and
Bono petitioning the corporate hierarchy at Davos for more concessions to social
and environmental concerns’ (Nelson 2006: 11). But the crossover goes far
248 Part III