effective political affect?

Music: David Sylvian: Dead Bees on a Cake (1999)

Tomorrow I shall vote. After all, Matt from The National called just moments ago telling me I should do so.

I'm basing most of my voting choices on a special insert the local paper ran a couple of weeks ago. There are a dizzying number of candidates, and gosh knows I will not remember them all, however, most of those I'm voting for are predictably democrats (and some independents). A straight party vote is not wise, in my opinion, because a large number of democrats in Texas might as well be republicans. Increasingly, it seems, party affiliation doesn't reflect sentiment or disposition. Except the republications. The republication party seems to be where you go if you think something you or we never had has been or is being taken away from you. The Grand Ol' Party is the party of the Stolen or Lost Object (SLO; thankfully the "W" has left the building).

Anyhoo, that I consulted the paper says something about the type of voter I am (an academic one). Even then, I sometimes feel guilty resorting to the newspaper's reduction of positions---it's a bullet-pointed approach to voting. I suspect, however, I'm not alone in this---I ain't got the time to research in any depth the positions of candidates, especially when there are so dang many of them.

Like most of you reading this, I try to avoid paying any attention to the political attack ads that fill almost all of the commercial time on local networks. Just like 2008, the spots are relentless and nasty: they tend to feature ominous drone music (or piano tinkles reminiscent of Carpenter's soundtrack for Halloween) with snide voice-overs about how such-and-so candidate would advocate burning newborns and euthanizing your grandmother. And most of these political attack ads are just plain insulting to the average voter.

I suspect most viewers know the spots are deceitful. Every election season it is reported that most viewers find the political attack ads annoying and would prefer not to see them (certainly no one I've talked to says, "yeah! the attack ads rock!"). Unfortunately, research time and time again shows that the negative ads have a powerful impact on political attitudes---otherwise, millions of dollars would not go into creating them. The reason you and I see them is because they do something, however much we doth protest.

So, we know these ads are deceitful, and yet, they influence political disposition. What gives? This post could be sung in the key of "cynical reason": we know the ads are deceitful, but they influence us anyway. How do we make sense of this? Y'all know I'm gonna say "feelings . . . whoa whoa whoa feelings . . . ." Feelings work; feelings labor. Mood motivates. And the argument is predictable: only the category of the unconscious can explain how and why these ads are effective; we don't think they are affecting us, but they are and do.

For decades political analysts and rhetorical critics have obsessed on "good reasons" and a computational model (rational choice theory) to explain the way in which electoral politics (should) function. Recently, my colleagues in the social sciences have been moving toward a consideration of affect and its influence in the political process (the emergence of the rather inexplicable "Tea Party Movement" demands it). We all know political emotion is at the center of the political process; the problem is that this stuff is very, very hard to operationalize or square with dominant approaches. Perhaps those trained in the rhetorical-critical tradition have something to offer, and I think that something is a reading of feeling---something that is difficult to reduce to the number.

Ever since George W. Bush got into office for round two, I have become increasingly interested in political rhetoric. Most of my efforts have focused on explaining the persuasion of leaders in terms of powerful emotional appeals (love and hate) rooted in desperation, fear, and a profound need. I've reductively described the basic emotional appeals of the right in terms of the motto, "they're taking your happenis away," and the left in terms of Jesuspseak, "love your neighbor." Attack ads seem to model this formula over and over. Both sides claim to "make us whole" again. Right candidates stress the invasion of the racial other (illegals) and shipping jobs to China. Left candidates have been downplaying their "love your neighbor" appeals (since that was the basic appeal of health care reform), which doesn't leave them much to work with. They can't make the castration appeal plausibly; so, from what I can tell, they're going for the character attack (such and so is in bed with special interests and so forth). No news here, really.

But there's another form of political affect at work that bypasses the emotional appeal in its very monotony. Taking cues from my buddy Thomas Rickert, I want to suggest the political attack ad works at a kind of ambient level. These ads pretty much say the same thing over and over in different ways (hell, they even use the same stock footage and actors to portray evil Hispanic gangbangers). The snide tones of voice used in the ads communicate the same emotion: hate. It's a tonal rhetoric, a kind of rhetoric of mood that depends less on claims and more on associating images with these angry or snide tones of voice.

Even if we look at a straightforward ad that makes a direct and sustained appeal (as opposed to a series of snarky one-liners), the "argument" melts away into the absurd if one thinks about it too long. For example, last week Texas governor Rick Perry unleashed one of these ads, and it has been hard to ignore. It's pretty ridiculous from a "rational choice" perspective, but it has influence:

Bill White---Perry's democratic competition, and sadly an unlikely successor---responded by saying "professional politicians like Rick Perry in the last stages of a campaign will do anything to push emotional buttons to stay in office." White is right: this is an emotional appeal if you ignore what the widow said and listen to the piano soundtrack, a mournful and sentimental melody that signifies loss. If one focuses on the claim, that Bill White's failure to veto a "sanctuary bill" was responsible for the murder of her husband, you have to sort-of scratch your head. From the ad alone the claim just doesn't make sense: White killed her husband because he supported a bill that let illegal aliens stay in Texas? The implication, of course, is that them aliens are violent . . . it evokes the whole Arizona thing. It's painfully obvious, and I don't want to insult your intelligence by saying so, but the persuasive labor here is affective and racial.

So: these ads do not work at the level of claim. They're laboring on us in some other way---at the liminal locus of mood.

Enter John Protevi. My former colleague at LSU has recently published a book titled Political Affect, which I think helps to clear some ground for thinking about the political in the academy. His argument is complex, but the gist is that the subject is a middle-place between the biological and the cultural---a knot, if you will. He is doing very exciting work that links cognitive neurobiology and continental philosophy in a way that breaks ranks and that makes a lot of sense of things in our political life. Drawing from "real life" examples, Protevi argues that our bodies respond to messages in ways that are largely unconscious. John is one of the few folks who work with and from Deleuze's thinking in a way that doesn't collapse onto a posture (like Massumi, he extends or riffs from Deleuze, he doesn't slap the theory on to something and then say, "there!"). Or rather, he's trying to think through something we might term a tonal political posture: human bodies and brains have evolved into a sort-of open code that can be structured by the symbolic; we cannot explain the federal government's response to Katrina in terms of good reasons or rational arguments. We have to explain the sluggish response in terms of fear, in bodily dispositions that gravitate toward ready-made, social scripts that predispose behavior. Human nature has evolved to be so radically open to tinkering from the symbolic that this tinkering happens to us often unawares. It's Althusser meets Damasio, I reckon.

Political attack ads have nothing to do with rational choice or argument; this is a fact seemingly known by everyone, but pundits still talk about them as if this is where they operate, or should be operating. Texas dems have "cried foul" over Perry's ad, saying it's outrageous, but the premise of their outrage is that political ads must adhere to reasoned argument (ironically, journalists take this outrage seriously). In attack ads, the rhetorical work is done in tone, and the effect is mood. The rhetorical news, which is not really news (cue Aristotle), is that contemporary politics is about evoking mood and then supplying the words to name the mood. Therein is the persuasive labor. As Stuart Hall observed decades ago, all politics is a game of signification: evoke the feeling, then supply the name for that feeling.

Preachers, of course, have been doing this for centuries (and Kierkregaard explains in The Sickness Unto Death). The altar call or "come to Jesus" moment is the one in which the preacher identifies the pain in your heart as the absence of deity. The pain we all feel as human beings---that sense of loss we all feel as a consequence of the human condition---usually inchoate, is given a label. In this sense, religious conversion is the "caption point" at which a fantasy ("Jesus saves") attaches to a feeling and one experiences a certain sense of relief. Such is politics, especially as it has become more and more Hebraic in recent years (at the expense, of course, of Hellenic modes of deliberation). Obama is a deliberative Helene, to be sure. And in this election cycle, it's not good to be Greek.

The trick of postmodern politics is that it relies on a common assumption, that there are convictions, but convictions are not really at stake. The common assumption is that folks have a position and belief, and the politicians figure out what that belief is, and then feed it back to voters. We call this "pandering." What I'm suggesting, and what Hall termed the "politics of signification," is that an otherwise inchoate feeling is given a label, and the pleasure of having someone come up with a label for it creates assent. Feelings of losing something (or having something taken from you, which is literally the case for the jobless) are given focus by blaming the illegal immigrant. But this politics is not conscious; it works subterfuge, at a level that feels but does not necessarily make it's way to, "oh, yeah, Bill White killed this woman's husband." Ambiently, the ominous tones cue ancient hatreds as we fold the laundry or make dinner.

I recognize what I am saying is probably painfully obvious. After all, I'm just taking the arguments of others, which are more-or-less accepted, and putting on a personal touch or two. Same as it ever was, I guess. But I'm also reminded of Joyce's introduction of Bloom in Ulysses. He's taking a shit in an outhouse and reading the newspaper (given Ireland's harmonious political history, one can imagine the kinds of headlines Leo-Pee was reading). Joyce was commenting upon the literary process as one of recycling and digesting, another way of saying there's nothing new . . . . But feelings are different. Each affective tinge is experienced anew, with a sense of presence and the present. This is why each election seems novel. Voting, as Zizek has observed, is one of those true moments of contingency and radical possibility, too. Which is why, when there is political change, it is felt first. The words and names come after as we "work-through."