through being continuously updated, but they are tied closely to events. It is no
surprise then that, at this point in time, event-oriented marketing has become so
important. Increasingly, the idea is to tie commodities into the affective landscape
of consumers by tracking their lives through a parallel information landscape. This
landscape has speeded up the ways in which commodities can be inserted into the
lives of consumers, thereby producing more consumption opportunities in a
continual semiconscious onflow. Thus, time itself is shaped so that it becomes
more and more like an analogue of the kind of political time that Machiavelli
wanted to construct, a time that is ‘importantly psychological in its effect, capable
of producing different responses – panic, fear, boldness, lassitude – according
to the seeming imminence or remoteness of a danger or possibility’ (W. Brown
2005: 8).
To summarize, corporations are in the business of making hormonal splashes
through increasingly close contact with consumers, contact predicated on the
development of new forms of the media which allow individual-level relation-
ships to be constructed, as opposed to the kinds of relationship dictated by the
mass audiences of old (Bennett and Entman 2001). Corporations are not only
delineating the affective field and starting up new affective cascades but also add-
ing in to the field by producing new combinations, new sensings if you like, that
add in new affective shadings. The result is that they have found powerful new
means of not only confabulating intentions (that is, revising what actors thought
they intended to do after the action, especially the inference of desires) but of
working on intention itself, before it necessarily comes to fruition. The coalface
is, in other words, the invention of inventions that can shape subconscious
intentions.
The political arena
Bush is the product. Rove is the marketer. One cannot succeed without the
other.
(Moore and Slater 2003: 11)In this penultimate section, I want to argue that these corporate impulses are now
spilling over into political life.^36 Now, it can hardly be said that affect has never
played a visible part in political life. Politicians routinely ask the ‘How do they
feel?’ question, recognizing just how important that question is, and are continually
being accused of preying on the people’s hopes and fears,^37 the two emotions that
they are most likely to appeal to (Brader 2006). In the Greek polis, it is at least
arguable that the most important innovation was the production of a space that
could dampen emotions sufficiently to produce a time structure of waiting one’s
turn to speak (Sloterdijk 2005b). In any case, even before Aristotle declared that
we are all political animals, underlined the importance of emotions for good moral
judgement, and drew attention in the Rhetoricto emotion as a key component of
political oratory, the arts of rhetoric had been a staple of political life (Koziak 2000;
Chilton 2003). These arts are, in part, precisely about swaying constituencies^38
Turbulent passions 247