(Massumi 2002), or the careful prepping of Bill Clinton’s body language in key
television appearances (D. Morris 1999).
Third, political campaigns are increasingly treated as forms of marketing. This
tendency is only strengthened in first-past-the-post systems where the outcome
of any election is disproportionately influenced by a few swing voters whom it is
important to locate and communicate with, against a background of increasing
speed that I noted above. Thus, polling techniques have become a key to many
political campaigns, techniques that can gauge intensity of feelings and the general
quality of mood. Parties and other pressure groups have adopted a series of these
practices: all manner of polls, focus groups,^41 voter databases, geographical infor-
mation systems, customer relations management software, targeted mail and
e-mail, and so on, especially to target particularly passionate constituencies
(Reynolds 2006).^42 In the USA, since the 19 7 0s these techniques have become
far-advanced. In each case, the goal is to identify a susceptible constituency as
accurately as possible through continuous polling^43 and to boost affective gain by
making voters feel differently, for example by finding wedge issues. But, more than
this, increasingly it is about rapidly identifying individuals and their interests and
concerns as exactly as possible, thereby turning them into ‘intimate strangers’,
celebrities for the passing moment.
Fourth, a whole array of corporate internet-related techniques, from websites
to blogs have been used to tap in to and work with voters’ concerns. The idea is to
maintain constant contact with voters and to mobilize their concerns to political
ends.
Fifth, the political process, in an odd simulation of the original ambitions of
democracy, becomes a continuous one, based on a model of permanent tracking,
which can be used outside elections as well as in, according to the play of events.
In the ‘permanent campaign’, a term first used by Pat Caddell in 19 7 6, media time
and election time begin to merge, and techniques for campaigning and governing
gradually coalesce. The aim, it might be hypothesized, is to produce a semi-
conscious onflow of political imitation-suggestion that is unstoppable and which
can be played into in order to produce affective firestorms which can be modulated
by the new technical means now available, against a general background of increas-
ing lack of formal political engagement in the population as a whole. Free won’t
rather than free will, if you like (Nunn 2005).
Political life in democracies is a life constantly stirred by the media. It is
increasingly characterized, therefore, by individual-level cultivation of anxiety,
obsession, and compulsion, against what may – and I emphasize, may^44 – be a
general increase in the level of political anxiety brought about by these develop-
ments, stemming especially, from the sheer ability to keep various anxieties,
compulsions and obsessions in play, paralleled by an increased speed of response
(Connolly 2002); ‘all speed, no direction. If this heaviness mixed with speediness
were analogised to a mental state, the diagnosis would be profound depressive
anxiety’ (W. Brown 2005: 11). Accordingly, political time is reshaped. It becomes
an increasingly anxious business, burrowing into more and more of the ‘biological’
determinants of affect for sustenance and ‘contentless content’.
250 Part III