of media communication (Gillmor 200 4 )), on understanding diversity as a strength
in composing will, on the importance of political timeliness (W. Brown 2005), on
new forms of piety (Goodchild 2002; Braidotti 2006), and on a thoroughly healthy
anxiety about losing the future – but it would be difficult to argue that they form
a definitive political resource as yet. Yet, taken collectively, these different ingre-
dients seem to me to be building towards new forms of sympathy – new affective
recognitions, new psychic opportunity structures, untoward reanimations, call
them what you like (Cruz 2005) – forms of sympathy which are more than just
a selective cultural performance^46 and which will allow different, more expansive
political forms to be built (and equally new forms of sympathy, of course).^47 When
that resource finally crystallizes as contrary motion, however, one thing will be
clear. It will have to take affect, imitation-suggestion and entrancement in to its
workings as more than incidental to what the political is and how the political is
conducted.
That insight, in turn, suggests that much more thought needs to be given to a
biopolitics of imitation. And it also suggests that the outlook is not necessarily as
gloomy as often painted. Whilst the forces ranged against democratic expression
are many they do not all run one way. New technologies allow highly performative
aggregations at a distance that were not possible before and that can actually be
used in local ways too. Many of these techniques were originally used to aggregate
and mobilize the passions of ‘long tails’ of consumers (Anderson 2006) but they
have now moved over into the political arena.
Take the example of the new net politics that is currently the subject of much
comment. In the USA, organizations like MoveOn.org^48 and Redeem the Vote
and United for Peace and Justice, all organized around web sites, have shown that
it is possible to produce a politics of political imitation which is effective and
can have real political bite. In particular, using web tools it is possible to produce
highly disaggregated political performances, like vigils, quickly and with very little
infrastructure: for example, in March 2003 a wave of anti-war candlelight vigils
involving one million people in more than six thousand ceremonies was organized
in six days by just five staff people. It is possible to produce constant and rapid
monitoring of media content: political blogs like Daily Kos and Instapundit.com
have more than a million visitors a day and themselves represent a kind of perma-
nent political campaign. And it is possible to raise finance fast, for example through
large-scale political mapping projects like Fundrace which not only allowed
ordinary people to draw on geocoded information heretofore only available to
consultants but also allowed them to check on each others’ political proclivities
and who was donating what to which party (Abrams and Hall 2006). What we
see here is a new kind of political domain in which political issues can take light
very quickly, a distributed intelligence fuelled by an excitement born out of the
direct translation of conception into action and a constant impassioned debate.
Both left and right have laid claim to this domain of heightened enthusiasm but
the point I want to make most strongly is that it is a passionate domain, dripping
with affect. Its speed and imitative capacity allow it to simulate the kinds of expres-
sive interchanges that populate everyday life and provide a political form which in
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