10 Turbulent passions
Towards an understanding
of the affective spaces of political
performance
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Because its dopaminergic neurons fired synchronously across the synapses of its
caudate nucleus, triggering motor contractions propelling the organism forward,
while emitting ‘cluck’ distress signals, to a goal predetermined by its hippocampal
mappings.
(Standard e-mail neuroscience joke)The cultural process, as the supra-natural growth of the energies of things, is the
manifestation or embodiment of the identical growth of our energies. The border-
line at which the development of specific life-content passes from its natural form
into its cultural form is indistinct and is subject to controversy.
(Simmel 1990 [1900]: 44 8)Someone possesses my soul and governs it. Someone directs all my actions, all my
movements, all my thoughts. I myself am nothing but a terrified, enslaved spectator
of the things I am accomplishing.
(Guy de Maupassant, cited in Peters 1999: 10 4 )If human beings suddenly ceased imitating, all forms of culture would vanish.
(Girard 198 7 : 7 )Testing my faculties I found a stealth
Of passive illness lurking in my health
(Gunn 1965: 392)Introduction
This final chapter provides an investigation of the affective realm of political feeling,
understood as the history of the development of a series of affective technologies,
and follows on from Chapters 7 and 8). In particular, I want to understand what
might be best called ‘motivational propensity’ or ‘disposition’, the means by which
masses of people and things become primed to act. This requires, most particularly,
an understanding of affect, since such a propensity must include at its heart moods
that we (howsoever defined) cultivate.^1