"Цветовое" управление страной через базовые аффекты (Массами)
это вам не манипуляция сознанием. Это свихнувшиеся начальники ради
"управления стадом" вгоняют его в состояние быдла и потом - поехали
по"основным инстинктам человека"
Речь идет о технологиях управления инстинктами человека,которому можно
разрушить рефлекторные цепочки ,лежащие под основой самых базовых
эмоциональных реакций,таких как страх
технологии вовсю работают каждый божий день. У них - "светофор системы
алерта". У нас, видимо, "оранжевая угроза" , как сто лет назад - красная
если есть желающие перевести - будьте добры
Уже есть отклики и обсуждения и этой статьи, тоже в Альманахе
positions 13:1 Spring 2005 32
Fear (The Spectrum Said)
Brian Massumi
That momentary paralysis of the spirit, of the tongue and limbs, that
profound
agitation descending to the core of one's being, that dispossession of
self we call
intimidation. . . . It is a nascent social state that occurs whenever we
pass from one
society to another. -Gabriel Tarde
The future will be better tomorrow. -attributed to GeorgeW. Bush
In March 2002, with much pomp, the Bush administration's new Department
of Homeland Security introduced its color-coded terror alert system:
green, "low"; blue, "guarded"; yellow, "elevated"; orange, "high"; red,
"severe."
The nation has danced ever since between yellow and orange. Life
has restlessly settled, to all appearances permanently, on the redward
end
of the spectrum, the blue-greens of tranquility a thing of the past.
"Safe"
doesn't even merit a hue. Safe, it would seem, has fallen off the
spectrum of
perception. Insecurity, the spectrum says, is the new normal.1
The alert system was introduced to calibrate the public's anxiety. In
the
aftermath of 9/11, the public's fearfulness had tended to swing out of
control
in response to dramatic, but maddeningly vague, government warnings of
an impending follow-up attack. The alert system was designed to modulate
that fear. It could raise it a pitch, then lower it before it became too
intense,
or even worse, before habituation dampened response. Timing was
everything.
Less fear itself than fear fatigue became an issue of public concern.
Affective modulation of the populace was now an official, central
function
of an increasingly time-sensitive government.
The self-defensive reflex-response to perceptual cues that the system
was
designed to train into the population wirelessly jacked central
government
functioning directly into each individual's nervous system. The whole
population
became a networked jumpiness, a distributed neuronal network
registering en masse quantum shifts in the nation's global state of
discom-
.ture in rhythm with leaps between color levels. Across the geographical
and social differentials dividing them, the population fell into
affective attunement.
That the shifts registered en masse did not necessarily mean that
people began to act similarly, as in social imitation of each other, or
of a
model proposed for each and all. "Imitation renders form; attunement
renders
feeling."2 Jacked into the same modulation of feeling, bodies reacted
in unison without necessarily acting alike. Their responses could, and
did,
take many forms. What they shared was the central nervousness. How it
translated somatically varied body by body.
There was simply nothing to identify with or imitate. The alerts
presented
no form, ideological or ideational and, remaining vague as to the
source,
nature, and location of the threat, bore precious little content. They
were
signals without signi.cation. All they distinctly offered was an
"activation
contour": a variation in intensity of feeling over time.3 They addressed
not
subjects' cognition, but rather bodies' irritability. Perceptual cues
were being
used to activate direct bodily responsiveness rather than reproduce a
form or
transmit definite content.
Each body's reaction would be determined largely by its already-acquired
patterns of response.Thecolor alerts addressed bodies at the level of
their dispositions
toward action. The system was not in any direct way a subjective
positioning device. It was a body-aimed dispositional trigger mechanism.
Bodies would be triggered into actions over the exact nature of which
the
governmental emission of the perceptual cue had little direct control.
Individuals
would inevitably express their attunement to the affective modulation
in their own unique ways. It was in a second moment, through the
diversity of the resultant actions thus triggered, that each would
position
him- or herself subjectively in relation to others. Any moment of
re.ection
that might come would come after, in discussion or retrospective review.
The
system addressed the population immediately, at a presubjective level:
at the
level of bodily predisposition or tendency-action in its nascent
state.Acolor
shift would trip each body's tendencies into an unfolding through which
its
predispositions would regain determinate form in particular actions
attuned
to a changed situation. Each body's individuality performed itself,
reflexively
(that is to say, nonreflectively) in an immediate nervous response. The
mode
under which the system operated was cued directness of self-expression,
in
bodily action. It was less a communication than an assisted germination
of
potentials for action whose outcome could not be accurately determined
in
advance-but whose variable determination could be determined to occur,
on hue.
The system was designed to make visible the government's much advertised
commitment to .ghting the "war" on terrorism it had so dramatically
declared in the days following 9/11. The collapse of theWorldTrade
Center
towers had glued the populace to the TV screen with an intensity not
seen
since the assassination of President Kennedy in the medium's early days,
and in its recent history comparable only to the Gulf War show. In a
time
of crisis, television was once again providing a perceptual focal point
for
the spontaneous mass coordination of affect, in a convincing rebuttal of
the
widespread wisdom that as a medium it was falling into obsolescence as a
consequence of the Internet's meteoric rise in the late 1990s. Any
ground
television may have lost to theWeb as an information source and as the
pivot
point for family entertainment was recouped in its resurgent role as the
privileged
channel for collective affect modulation, in real time, at socially
critical
turning points. Television had become the event medium. The terror alert
system sought to piggyback on television as social event-medium,
capturing
the spontaneity with which it regained that role. To capture spontaneity
is
to convert it into something it is not: a habitual function. The alert
system
was part of the habituation of the viewing population to affect
modulation
as a governmental-media function.
This taming of television's affective role accomplished anumber of
further
conversions. For one, it yoked governmentality to television in a way
that
gave the exercise of power a properly perceptual mode of operation.
Government
gained signal access to the nervous systems and somatic expressions
of the populace in a way that allowed it to bypass the discursive
mediations
on which it traditionally depended and to regularly produce effects with
a directness never before seen. Without proof, without persuasion, at
the
limit even without argument, government image production could trigger
(re)action. But what public government function gained in immediacy of
effect it lost in uniformity of result. If skillfully played, the system
could
reliably determine people to action, but the nature of the trigger, or
inducer,
as an activation contour lacking definite content or imitable form meant
that it could not accurately determine what actions would be signaled
forth.
In a sense, this was an admission of political reality: the social
environment
within which government now operated was of such complexity that it made
a mirage of any idea that there could be a one-to-one correlation
between
of.cial speech or image production and the form and content of response.
The social and cultural diversity of the population, and the
disengagement
from government on the part of many of its segments, would ensure that
any initiative relying on a linear cause-effect relationship between, on
the
one hand, proof, persuasion, and argument and, on the other, the form
of a resultant action-if in fact there was to be any-was bound to fail,
or to succeed only in isolated cases. The contradiction-friendly
pluralism
of American politicians' public address is evidence that this has long
been
recognized in practice (the fact, for example, that a George W. Bush
will
address car workers in his down-home, Texas-transplant drawl as a man of
the people looking out for the struggling families of Middle America,
then
tell a fund-raising dinner that his "base" is the "haves and have-mores"
4).
Addressing bodies from the dispositional angle of their affectivity,
instead
of addressing subjects from the positional angle of their ideations,
shunts
government function away from the mediations of adherence or belief and
toward direct activation. What else is a state of alert? Orienting for
the indeterminacy
of pure activation assumes that the nature of the actual responses
elicited will be finally determined by off-screen co-factors that are
beyond
politicians' ken, and not for lack of effort but because they are highly
contingent
and therefore highly changeable. The establishment of the alert system
as a linchpin in the government's antiterror campaign is an implicit
recognition
that the production of political effects, if they are to be direct and
widespread, must unfold in a manner that is nonlinear and co-causal;
that
is to say, complex. The perceptual mode of power set in place by the
yoking
of governmentality to television in this affective way couples
governmental
functioning with the contingency native to complex systems, where input
does not necessarily equal output, because all manner of detourings,
dampenings,
amplifications, or interference patterns may occur in the playing out
of the signal.With affect, perceptually addressed, chance becomes
politically
operational. A political uncertainty principle is pragmatically
established.
It practically acknowledges that the systemic environment within which
power mechanisms function is metastable, meaning provisionally stable
but
excitable, in a state of balance but ready to jog.5
The necessity for a pragmatics of uncertainty to which the color system
alerts us is related to a change in the nature of the object of power.
The
formlessness and contentlessness of its exercise in no way means that
power
no longer has an object. It means that the object of power is
correspondingly
formless and contentless: post 9/11, governmentality has molded itself
to
threat. A threat is unknowable. If it were known in its speci.cs, it
wouldn't
be a threat. It would be a situation-as when they say on television
police
shows, "we have a situation"-and a situation can be handled. A threat
is only a threat if it retains an indeterminacy. If it has a form, it is
not a
substantial form, but a time form: a futurity. The threat as such is
nothing
yet-just a looming. It is a form of futurity yet has the capacity to .ll
the
present without presenting itself. Its future looming casts a present
shadow,
and that shadow is fear. Threat is the future cause of a change in the
present.
A future cause is not actually a cause; it is a virtual cause, or
quasicause.
Threat is a futurity with a virtual power to affect the present
quasicausally.
When a governmental mechanism makes threat its business, it is taking
this
virtuality as its object and adopting quasicausality as its mode of
operation.
That quasicausal operation goes by the name of security. It expresses
itself
in signs of alert.
Since its object is virtual, the only actual leverage the security
operation
can have is on threat's back-cast presence, its pre-effect of fear.
Threat, understood
as a quasicause, would qualify philosophically as a species of .nal
cause.One of the reasons that its causality is quasi is that there is a
paradoxical
reciprocity between it and its effect. There is a kind of simultaneity
between
the quasicause and its effect, even though they belong to different
times.
Threat is the cause of fear in the sense that it triggers and conditions
fear's
occurrence, but without the fear it effects, the threat would have no
handle
on actual existence, remaining purely virtual. The causality is
bidirectional,
operating immediately on both poles, in a kind of time-slip through
which a
futurity is made directly present in an effective expression that brings
it into
the present without it ceasing to be a futurity. Although they are in
different
tenses, present and future, and in different ontological modes, actual
and
virtual, fear and threat are of a piece: they are indissociable
dimensions of
the same event. The event, in its holding both tenses together in its
own immediacy,
is transtemporal. Since its transtemporality holds a passage between
the virtual and the actual, it is a process-areal transformation that is
effected
in an interval smaller than the smallest perceivable, in an
instantaneous looping
between presence and futurity. Since it is in that smaller-than-smallest
of intervals, it is perhaps best characterized as infra-temporal rather
than
transtemporal.
AsWilliam James famously argued, fear strikes the body and compels it
to action before it registers consciously. When it registers, it is as a
realization
growing from the bodily action already under way: we don't run because
we
feel afraid, we feel afraid because we run.6 He means "consciously
afraid."
We have already begun to experience fear nonconsiously, wrapped in
action,
before it unfurls from it and is felt as itself, in its distinction from
the action
with which it arose. Activation is a better word than action, because
fear
can be, and often is, paralyzing. When it is, in the place of action
there is
agitation, a poising for action, the taut incipiency of action that may
fail
to take definitive form. Where a specific action does unfold, its onset
still
will have been in an indistinction with affect, in that vague
feeling-actingcoming-
on, in a durationless moment of suspense in the time slip of threat. It
will have been a shock to the system, whose immediacy disconnects the
body
from the ongoing flow of its activities while already poising it for a
restart.
Fear at this level of pure activation in the time slip of threat is the
intensity
of the experience and not yet a content of it. Threat strikes the
nervous system
with a directness forbidding any separation between the responsiveness
of
the body and its environment. The nervous system is wired directly to
the
onset of the danger. _The reality of the situation is that activation_.
If an action
triggers, the activation follows, prolonging the situation along a line
of flight.
The fear follows down the line, gathering into itself the momentum of
the run, using that accumulation to fuel each successive footfall,
moving
the activation through a series of steps. The fear snowballs, as the
reaction
runs its course. The fear is a dynamic ingathering of action assuring
the
continuity of its serial unfolding and moving the reality of the
situation,
which is its activation, down the line of fright.7 The experience is in
the fear,
in its ingathering of action, rather than the fear being the content of
an
experience. At the starting line, the affect of fear and the action of
the body
are in a state of indistinction. As the action unfolds, they begin to
diverge.
The action is linear, step-by-step, and dissipative, it exhausts itself.
It runs its
course along the line of flight. The affective intensity, on the other
hand, is
cumulative. It snowballs as the action unfolds, and when the running
stops, it
keeps on rolling. Its rolling on after the running unwraps it from the
action.
It comes out into itself. It is only now, past action's stop-point, that
it registers
as a feeling of fear as distinct from its acting out. What registers
distinctly
with that feeling is the reality of the situation-which was and remains
fundamentally affective in nature. The reality of the situation is its
affective
quality-its being an unfolding of fear, as opposed to anger, boredom, or
love.
To say that at this level the experience is in the fear, rather than the
fear
being the content of an experience, is to say that its
momentum-gathering,
action-driving, reality-registering operation is not phenomenal. It is
the inwhich
of experience; in other words, experience's immanence. But on the
stopbeat,
the experience comes out, into itself, registering its quality. Its
unfolding
then continues, along other lines. For it is only with the luxury of the
pause
that the body can begin to distinguish the details of the situation,
previously
lost to shock. It can look around, seeking to identify clearly the cause
of the
alarm, and take in the surroundings in case further action is necessary.
It
begins to perceive-to divide the situation into component parts, each
with a
location relative to the others and each with a recognizable constancy
of form.
Objects in spatial con.guration begin to appear, distinguishing
themselves
fromthe fear in which they were enveloped. This enables
re.ection.Whatjust
happened is placed under retrospective review and mapped as an objective
environment. The location of the threat is sought by following the line
of
flight in reverse. The cause of the fright is scanned for among the
objects in
the environment. Directions of further flight or objects that can serve
for selfdefense
are inventoried. These perceptions and re.ections are gathered up
in recollection, where their intensity will ultimately fade. It is at
this point, in
this second ingathering toward lowered intensity, in the stop-beat of
action,
that the fear, and its situation, and the reality of that situation,
become a
content of experience.
The unfolding reality of that fearful feeling has become the feeling of
that
fear enfolded in perception.8 The perception has been wrapped in
re.ection,
and the re.ection, in turn, has been taken up in memory. In
recollection,
the affective unfolding has folded back in, at a different level, in a
different
mode, after passing a threshold marked by the exhaustion of the action
with
which the feeling grew. The threshold is a conversion point, on a number
of counts. It is where the nonphenomenal in-which of experience turns
phenomenal,
passing into the content of experience, its immanence translated
into an interiority. At the stop-beat, the affective quality of the
event comes
out in its purity from action, but as it does, it becomes quanti.able.
It had
been, in its indistinction with action, the totality of the situation.
The situation
has now branched, the affect separating from the exhausted action
by virtue of its continuing. The situation further divides into a
collection of
perceived objects, then again into re.ections distinct from the
perception,
and recollections of some or all of those components. The fear that came
out
in its affective purity at the stop-beat is retrospectively but one of a
number of
ingredients of the experience. It is a countable component of an
experience.
That experience, which began as the dynamic unity of feeling in action,
is
now a collection of particular elements. The whole has become divisible,
and
what the experience was globally now counts in it as one of its parts.
As a
content of experience, this fear becomes comparable to other fear
incidents
in other recollected situations. It can now be counted as a greater or
lesser
fright. Where once it was intensity, it now has magnitude. It still
quali.es the
situation, but its quality is now quanti.able, in two ways: it counts as
a one
among a number, and it can be assigned a relative magnitude. In
intensity,
it could only be lived through the body. As bodily lived it was
unrefusable, a
direct and immediate activation. It was compelling, and its compelling
was
one with the propelling of an action.Nowit has taken its place as one
content
of the experience among others. It can be approached inactively as from
the
outside. It can be set alongside the other components and compared to
them.
As a quality, it still retains a certain ungraspability. Thus the
objects to whose
perception it led, whose appearance, as it happened, was a
differentiation of
the fear, now seem more solid and dependable than it. Retrospectively,
they
take on a larger share of the recognized reality of the event. The
emotion
is sidelined as the event's merely subjective content. Yet another
branching
has occurred, between the subjective and the objective. This bifurcation
structures recollection.
If the event is recounted, the narrative will place the objective
unfolding
of the occurrence on a parallel track with its subjective registering,
as if this
duality were operative from the onset of the event, rather than an
artifact of
its self-differentiating unfolding. The personal history of the
narrating body
will have to negotiate this duality, presenting a public face allied
with the
content, de.ned as objective, in contradistinction to the subjective
content,
de.ned as private. The private content may not be recounted, or may be
edited for reasons of tact or to avoid embarrassment. The emotional
content
may then waver and even start to break away from its anchoring to the
objective
narrative. The two-track narrative of the event may lose its
parallelism.
Unanchored, the vivacity of the emotional content diminishes, to the
point
where the emotion can be second-guessed: "I wasn't really scared-just
startled."
The emotion pales, as if it could be separated even as it happened from
the immediacy of bodily response, and as if the subject of the
experience
could choose to have it or to pass it up. To treat the emotion as
separable in
this way from the activation-event from which it affectively sprang is
to place
it on the level of representation. It is to treat it, fundamentally and
from the
start, as a subjective content: basically, an idea. Reduced to the mere
idea of
itself, it becomes reasonable to suppose that a private subject, in
representing
it to itself, could hold it and the aleatory outside of its arising as
well as the
body in live-wire connection with that outside, at a rational,
manageable
distance. It makes it seem comfortably controllable.
A startle without a scare, however, is like a grin without a cat. The
separation
between direct activation and controlled ideation, or affect in its
bodily
dimension and emotion as rationalizable subjective content, is a
re.ective
wonderland that does not work this side of the mirror. James is quick to
make the discomforting point. "Where an ideal emotion seems to precede
[or occur independently of ] the bodily symptoms, it is often nothing
but a
representation of the symptoms themselves. One who has already fainted
at
the sight of blood may witness the preparations for a surgical operation
with
uncontrollable heart sinking and anxiety.He anticipates certain
feelings, and
the anticipation precipitates their arrival."9 What he calls a
representation
here is clearly a re-presentation: the heart-sinking is the anticipation
of the
emotion, in the same way that he argues that in a case like running in
fear,
"our feeling of bodily changes as they occur is the emotion" in its
initial
phase of emergence.10 Anticipation is similarly a triggering of changes
in
the body. That affective reactivation of the body then develops
unrefusably
into a reemergence of the fear. What we sloppily think of as the idea of
an
emotion, or the emotion as an idea, is in fact the anticipatory
repetition of an
affective event, precipitated by the encounter between the body's
irritability
and a sign. In the surgical example, the blood functions as a sign of
fear. Like
a red alert, it directly activates the body. But the context obviates th
e need to
run. You are in a condition to react to the blood precisely because you'
re not
the one under anesthesia on the operating table. This is also a reason
why
actually running away would be somewhat off the point. The particular
nature of the context inhibits the acting out of the movement. The
activation
of the body, however, was already that movement in incipient form. The
failure of the movement actually to express itself does not prevent the
development
of the emotion proper, which should rightly phase in, on pause,
after the action's actualization. Here, the body gives pause in advance,
due
to contextual constraints. In this context, the emergence of the emotion
preempts
action. Actual action has been short-circuited. It is in-acted: it
remains
enveloped in its own activated potential. The development of the emotion
is
now bound entirely to potential action. It can regenerate itself without
the
detour through actual movement: it can be enacted through in-action.
Part of the affective training that the Bush color alert system assures
is the
engraining in the bodies of the populace of anticipatory affective
response to
signs of fear even in contexts where one is clearly in no present
danger. This
signi.cantly extends the purview of threat.Analert about a suspected
bombing
plan against San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge (one of the early alert
episodes) can have direct repercussions in Atlanta. As a plus, the
enaction of
the affective event in inaction has obvious political control bene.ts.
The purview of threat is extended in another way as well. When an
emotion becomes enactable in anticipation of itself, independent of
action,
it becomes its own threat. It becomes its own virtual cause. "I am told
of a
case of morbid terror, of which the subject confessed that what
possessed her
seemed, more than anything, to be the fear of fear itself."11 Whenfear
becomes
the quasicause of itself, it can bypass even more readily any limitation
to
contexts where a fearful action is actually called on and, in so doing,
bypass
more regularly the necessity to cycle through an unfolding of phases.
The
phases telescope into each other, in a short circuit of the affective
process. The
affective event rolls ever more tightly around the time slip of threat,
as fear
becomes its own pre-effect."We see plainly how the emotion both begins
and
ends with what we call its effects."12 Fear, the emotion, has
revirtualized. Its
emergence as an end effect has threateningly looped back to the
beginning
as its cause. This marks another turning point. Now, fear can
potentially
self-cause even in the absence of an external sign to trigger it. This
makes
it all the more uncontainable, so much so that it "possesses" the
subject.
It wraps its time-slip so compellingly around experience that it becomes
experience's affective surround. Without ceasing to be an emotion, it
has
become the affective surround of existence, its in-which. Self-caused
and allaround:
at once the ground and background of the experience it now tends
to take over. Call an emotion that has revirtualized in this way, to
become
self-caused ground and enveloping background of overtaken existence, an
affective tone or mood (as equally distinct from action, vitality
affect, pure
affect, and emotion proper).
Fear's intoning revirtualization does not mean that it will never again
feature narratively as a contained emotion. Efforts to contain it will
in fact
have to be doubled in order to mitigate the subject's possession by it.
But
it is a vicious circle. The more successful the efforts, the more the
subject's
existence is wed to the process. Having fear as a subjective content
against the
background of fear revirtual becomes a way of life. However many times
fear
is contained, it will always also exceed the containment because its
capacity
to self-regenerate will continue to loom and that looming will de.ne the
surrounding mood. Any particular fear clearly featured as an emotional
life
content will stand out against that comparatively vague or generic
affective
background from which it emerged. It will be clearly redundant: wherever
it actually occurs as emotion, it will already have been as affective
tone.
Everywhere, fear double-features: as vaguely and clearly featured; as
generic
and particular; as ground of existence for itself as a way of life.
Fear, in its
quasicausal relation to itself, has become redundantly self-suf.cient-an
autonomous force of existence. It has become ontogenetic.13
This autonomization of fear is a next natural step from its preemption
of action in the sign-response short circuit. Its development is
conditioned
by the independence that preemption enables from actual contexts of
fear.
When fear itself is frightening, its capacity to self-cause means that
it can
even trigger in the absence of any of its external signs. Politically,
fear's
autonomization risks undoing the control gained in that phase: fear can
now
run away with itself. It has the capacity to be self-propelling. This
ups the ante
of unpredictability.Wherefear unleashed can lead is any alert emitter's
guess.
While the signs of dangermayno longer be necessary for the triggering of
the
affective event of fear, their repetition and multiplication seeds the
conditions
for their own overcoming. They prepare the (back)ground.
It is only super.cially that self-propelling fear can forego sign
action. According
to Peirce, "every thought beyond immediate perception is a sign."14
When fear is of fear itself, the retriggering of its affective process
hinges on
a thought-sign. This triggering still entails bodily activation. "There
is some
reason to think that, corresponding to every feeling within us, some
motion
takes place in our bodies. This property of the thought-sign, since it
has no
rational dependence upon the meaning of the sign, may be compared to
what
I have called the material quality of the sign; but it differs from the
latter
inasmuch as it is not essentially necessary that it should be felt in
order that
there should be any thought-sign."15
Consider that the only way to regain control over one's possession by
fear once it has become self-propelling is to not feel it. "Put a
stopper on
the gush," as James indelicately puts it. In a word, suppress it. We are
all taught how as children. "When we teach our children to repress their
emotions, it is not that they may feel more."16 The emotion doesn't
build up
volcanically because fear as self-propellingly in need of being
controlled is
not a sulphurous content but a revirtual cause. It has no substance to
build
up (only efficacity to intensify). So it is not that they may feel more,
"quite
the reverse. It is that they may think more" (ibid.). To suppress
emotion
is to produce more thought-signs, in an even tighter short-circuit. Now
it
is not only actual action but the feeling itself that is bypassed. The
bodily
activation continues necessarily to occur. But there is no "more" of it
to build
up either. It is not quantitative. By Peirce's reckoning, it is a
material quality
of the body (a mode of its irritability). It may pass unfelt. The
thoughtsign
is now intensively coupled with an incalculably qualitative unfeeling on
which it has "no rational dependence." Fear is coming to revolve more
and
more tightly around the logical vanishing point of an unexperience where
matter and quality are one. This vanishing point lies at the very limit
of
the phenomenal. Fear's passage to this limit carries its virtualization
close
to as far as it can go. Fear's quasicausality can cycle in the shortest
possible
circuit, with the fewest actual requisites or intervening phases,
between the
qualitative-material unconscious and the thought-sign. This intensifies
its
efficacity, reinforcing the autonomy of its ontogenetic powers.
What Peirce means when he says that there is no rational dependence on
the meaning of the sign is that "there is nothing in the content of the
thought
which explains why it should arise only on occasion of . . . determining
thoughts."17 In other words, there is no need for the thought-sign of
fear to
have any rational connection to contexts in which thoughts logically
relating
to it might occur. "If there is such a relation of reason, if the
thought is
essentially limited in its application to these objects [objects with
which it
is logically connected by context], then the thought comprehends a
thought
other than itself."Without a relation of reason determining it, the
thought
may still occur, but when it does, it comprehends only itself. Fear has
selfabstracted.
It has become exclusively self-comprehending. It has become the
autonomous thought of itself. It can now boldly go wherever thought can
reach. And thought can reach wherever attention goes.Unfelt bodily
motion
(what Peirce calls "sensation") and attention are, he says, "the sole
constituents"
of thought. "Attention is the power by which thought at one time
is connected with and made to relate to thought at another time . . . it
is the
pure demonstrative application of a thought-sign." In the case of a
thought
determined by and comprehending only itself, the thought to which
attention
demonstratively links it at one time as to another is-itself. In
thought,
fear becomes intensively self-relating, independent to the extreme of
actual
context, or even other thoughts. It demonstratively signs itself.
This implies that techniques of attention applied against the background
of the affective tone of fear revirtual may purely and demonstratively
regenerate
thought-signs of it, along with the unfeeling of its corresponding
bodily activation. Fear has attained a summit of virtualization, almost
fully
autonomized (contingent only on the vagaries of attention) and
abstracted
from its actions, contexts, external signs, logical content or meaning,
and,
last but not least, its own feeling.
We have now entered the wonderland world where the startle can come
without the scare: body activation without the feeling James insists
that it is.
We have passed to the other side of the affective mirror where fear
"re.ects"
only its own Cheshire-cat-like occurrence, at the phenomenal vanishing
point, where it is without.
Fear can now operate as the nonphenomenal background of existence, or
outside in-which of experience, in its role as the affective tone or
generic
context for a way of life. It can also still be contained, featuring as
a particular
life's phenomenal content. In addition, it can function purely
selfdemonstratively,
as a self-sufficient thought process unencumbered by the
bodily activation still necessarily accompanying it. Which of these
modes,
or which combination of them, will be in operation at any given point
will
depend on the regime of external signs in play, the nature of the
contexts
through which they multiply, the acquired skills of suppression
impressed
on the bodies populating those contexts, and the techniques of attention
in
operation (for example, as associated with the media, in particular as
they disseminate
themselves more widely and .nely through the social .eld, assisted
by miniaturization and digitization).
In this journey through fear,we have cycled, more than once, from
virtual
cause to virtual cause, the degree of virtuality increasing at each
loop. In a
first loop, we saw a self-differentiating unfolding into a variety of
modes:
from activation to feeling-in-action, from feeling-in-action to pure
expression
of affect, from pure expression of affect to branchings into perception,
reflection, and recollection, then on to affective containment. The
process
then continued, looping back into itself, through and in excess of
itsowncontainment.
It attached itself to signs, then to thought-signs. At each cycle, its
quasicausal powers expanded. Its modes of expansion emerged
sequentially,
as phases of a continuing process. But beyond the threshold of affective
suspense in the .rst loop, the emergence of the modes was additive. The
branching was onto levels of operation that were in cooperation,
potentially
working with or in some cases on each other. Although the phases emerge
sequentially, they operate conjointly to form a complex, multilayered
formation.
The overall process is at once additive and distributive.
If the different phasings unfolded from the initial activation, their
full
variety must have already been in it, in their incipiency-in potential.
The
intensity of that activation was the immanence of their potential.
Rather
than layered in a structure, they were immediately, virtually,
co-occurring.
In the feeling-in-action of the .rst run, they were all coursing
together, in
a state of actual indistinction from each other. They were actively
fused, in
dynamic superposition. This means that in any reactivation of the event
by a
virtual cause, the variety of modes become re-fused. They roll back into
one
another in shared potential. They dephase or dedifferentiate, then phase
back
out or re-unfold.18 Another occasion of experience self-differentiates
into an
unfolding variety. Experience regenerates itself. The strike of another
actual
threat will initiate a reemergence. But, given fear's emergent
self-re.ective
capacity to be its own beginning and end, or to be the threat of itself,
so,
too, may any sign of the threat's potential effect (as in the sight of
blood).
A thought-sign may also initiate a recurrence, even if it is not
logically the
thought-sign of a threat or a fear (given the thought-sign's
independence
from its rational determinants). Once fear has become the ground of
existence,
every change can regenerate its experience under one or a combination
of its species. Every shift in attention against the background mood of
fear
may carry the ontogenetic charge of an alert triggering a regeneration
of
experience and its variation (what Benjamin termed "shock").
George Bush's color alert system is designed to exploit and foster the
varieties
of fear while expanding on their ontogenetic powers. It assumes the full
spectrum of fear, up to and including its becoming-autonomous as a
regenerative
ground of existence, in action and in-action, in feeling and without
it with thought. This refocusing of government sign-action on complex
affective
modulation is a tactic of incalculable power. It allies the politics of
communication with powers capable of "possessing" the individual at the
level at which its experience reemerges (dispossessing it of its own
genesis).
In other words, affective modulation operates co-optively at what
Gilbert Simondon
calls the "pre-individual" level. By pre-individual he does not mean
"within the individual" but rather "at the limit between the subject and
the
world, at the limit between the individual and collective."19 That limit
is the
body activatable-the bodily irritability that is the generic "material
quality"
of human life.
For "action and emotion to be in resonance with each other" in the
affectively
self-regenerating ways just described "there must be a superior
individual
that encompasses them: this individuation is that of the collective."20
When an individual life overflows its containment in private narrative
and
representation-as each life tends affectively to do-the living runs
straight
to the limit of the collective. There it irritably rejoins the potential
from
which it arose, toward a next iteration of its many-phased ontogenesis.
"The
subject can coincide with itself only in the individuation of the
collective."
This is because that limit is where the phases fold into each other
toward a
next deployment. It is there, in that immanence, that a life coincides
with its
affective potential. For better or for worse.
Thealert system is a tool for modulating collective
individuation.Through
the mass media, it addresses itself to the population from the angle of
its
potential to reindividuate differentially. The system recenters
government
sign action on Gabriel Tarde's nascent social state of intimidation in
order
to induce its collective individuation to pass from one form of society
to
another. All for the better, Bush says. The future, he promises, will be
better
tomorrow. America will be a stronger and safer place.
But tomorrow's future is here today, as virtual cause. And America is
neither stronger nor safer than it was yesterday. If anything, it is
more
precarious than ever because the form under which the promise of
tomorrow
is here today is ever-present threat. This hinges its actualization on
nonlinear
and quasicausal operations that no one can fully control, but which, on
the
contrary, are capable of possessing each and every one, at the level of
his or
her bodily potential to be individually what will have collectively
become.
The outcome is anything but certain. All that is certain is that fear
itself
will continue becoming-the way of life. The grounding and surrounding
fear that the system helps develop tends toward an autonomy that makes
it an ontogenetic force to be reckoned with. That reckoning must include
the irrational, self-propelling mode of fear-based collective
individuation we
call fascism. Although there is nothing in the content of any thought
that
explains why it should arise, the passage to a society of that kind is a
potential
that cannot be excluded. The Bush administration's fear in-action is a
tactic
as enormously reckless as it is politically powerful.
Confusingly, it is likely that it can only be fought on the same
affective,
ontogenetic ground on which it itself operates.
Notes
1 "The future will be better tomorrow" is one of the many "Bushisms"
circulating in the
press and on the Internet. This one appears to be apocryphal. It seems
actually to belong
to Dan Quayle, vice president under George Bush Sr. As regularly
attributed to GeorgeW.
Bush, however, it squarely belongs to his corpus. For an interactive
time line of alert levels
since the inception of the system through March 2004, see
www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2004/
.ghting.terror.
2 Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York:
Basic Books, 1985), 142.
3 On the concept of the activation contour, see Stern, The
InterpersonalWorld, 57-59.
4 George W. Bush addressing the Al Smith Memorial Dinner, New York,
October 19, 2000.
This scene is memorably included in Michael Moore's .lm Fahrenheit 9/11.
5 On metastability, see Gilbert Simondon, L'individu et sa genиse
physico-biologique (Grenoble:
Million, 1995), 72-73, 204-5; and L'individuation psychique et
collective (Paris: Aubier, 1989),
49, 230-31.
6 "Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions is that the
mental perception of
some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this
latter state of mind
gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that
the bodily changes follow
directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of
the same changes as they occur IS
the emotion. Common-sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep;
we meet a bear, are
frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike.
The hypothesis here to be
defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that one mental
state is not immediately
induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must .rst be
interposed between, and
that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry,
angry because we strike,
afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble,
because we are sorry, angry,
or fearful. . . . it makes us realize more deeply than ever how much our
mental life is knit
up with our corporeal frame, in the strictest sense of the term."William
James, Principles of
Psychology, vol. 2 (New York: Dover, 1950), 449-50, 467.
7 On affect as "the primary ground for the continuity of nature," see
Alfred North Whitehead,
Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1938), 183-84; and Brian
Massumi, Parables for the
Virtual (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 208-18.
8 This formula was suggested by Whitehead's theorization of "the sensa
as quali.cations of
affective tone." The experience, he writes, "starts as that smelly
feeling, and is developed by
mentality into the feeling of that smell." This applies as well to the
"affective tones" we call
"moods," which must be considered "direct perceptions . . . on equal
terms with the other
sensa." In other words, philosophically, the theory of affect and
emotion and the theory of
perception strictly coincide. The concept of affective tone will be
discussed later in this article.
Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 246.
9 William James, "What is an Emotion?" in Essays in Psychology, vol. 13
of TheWorks ofWilliam
James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 177.
10 James, "What is an Emotion?" 170.
11 James, "What is an Emotion?" 177.
12 Ibid.
13 On fear as ground of existence and way of life, see Brian Massumi,
"Everywhere YouWant
to Be: Introduction to Fear," in The Politics of Everyday Fear, ed.
Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 3-38.
14 C. S. Peirce, "Pragmatism," in The Essential Peirce: Selected
Philosophical Writings, vol. 2
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 402. (Emphasis added.)
15 Ibid. (Emphasis added.)
16 James, "What is an Emotion?" 179.
17 All quotations in this paragraph are from C. S. Peirce, "Some
Consequences of the Four
Incapacities," in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992),
44-46.
18 On dephasing, see Simondon, L'individu et sa genиse
physico-biologique, 232, 234-35.
19 Simondon, L'individuation psychique et collective, 109.
20 All quotations in this paragraph are from Simondon, L'individuation
psychique et collective,
108.
