move to make more and more areas of life the subject of a new set of responsibilities
called ‘choice’. As Norris puts it:
The expansion of the franchise during the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries generated the rise of traditional channels for political mobilisation
and expression in representative government, particularly the growth of
extra-parliamentary party organizations, the spread of cheap mass-circulation
newspapers, and the establishment of traditional groups in civic society,
exemplified by the organized labour movement, civic associations, voluntary
groups, and religious organizations. By the 19 4 0s and 1950s, these channels
had settled and consolidated and were taken for granted as the major insti-
tutions linking citizens and the state within established democracies. Rising
levels of human capital and societal modernization mean that, today, a
more educated citizenry... has moved increasingly from agencies of loyalty
to agencies of choice, and from electoral repertoires toward mixed-action
repertoires combining electoral activities and protest politics. In postindustrial
societies, the younger generations, in particular, have become less willing
than their parents and grandparents to channel their political energies through
traditional agencies exemplified by parties and churches, and more likely to
express themselves through a variety of ad hoc, contextual, and specific
activities of choice, increasingly via new social movements, internet activism,
and transnational policy networks. Conventional indicators may blind us to
the fact that critical citizens may be becoming less loyalist and deferential
in orientation toward mass branch parties... at the same time that they are
becoming more actively engaged via alternative means of expression.
(Norris 2002: 222)Many of these new forms of choice politics rely on an expansion of what has
been conventionally regarded as the urban political sphere. For example, the
political nowadays routinely takes in all manner of forms of culture-nature relation
(e.g. environmental politics, animal rights politics, pro-choice or anti-life politics,
etc.). In turn, this re-definition of what counts as political has allowed more room
for explicitly affective appeals which are heavily dependent upon the media, as well
as similar appeals which endeavour to reduce these affective impacts (for example,
by referring to science, by various means of deconstruction of the ‘reality’ of an
image, and so on) (Boltanski 2002).
This brings me to the second development which is the heavy and continuing
mediatizationof politics. We live in societies which are enveloped in and saturated
by the media: most importantly, it is difficult to escape the influence of the screen
which now stares at us from so many mundane locations – from almost every
room in the house to doctor’s waiting rooms, from airport lounges to shops and
shopping malls, from bars to many workplaces (McCarthy 2001; Knorr Cetina
2001), from the insides of elevators to whole buildings – that it is possible to argue
that the screen has taken on a number of the roles formerly ascribed to parent,
lover, teacher and blank stooge, as well as adding a whole series of ‘postsocial’^16
relations which seem to lie somewhere between early film theory’s brute translation
Spatialities of feeling 183