Political Sensibilities, Affect, and the Performative Space of Voting

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Notes

1. This work was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2007–11). The article is dedicated to filmmaker Vanalyne Green – who made it difficult (for many) but possible at all for me.

2. See Junling Hu, ‘Trend of Democratic Countries in the World’, Democracy in the World, <http://www.democracyw.com/2011/07/trend-of-democratic-countries-in-world.html> [accessed 10 November 2014]; Samuel P. Huntington, ‘How Countries Democratize’, Political Science Quarterly, 124 (Spring 2009), 31–69; Jean Grugel, Democratization: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Adrian Leftwich, Democracy and Development: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 6–10.

3. See Disaffected Democracies: What’s Troubling the Trilateral Countries, ed. by Susan J. Pharr and Robert D. Putnam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 7–13; Paulina Tambakaki, ‘Citizenship and Agonism’, At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries 74 (2011), 19–35; Paulina Tambakaki, ‘Rethinking Europe’s Democratic Crisis’, Open Democracy, 2001 <https://www.opendemocracy.net/paulina-tambakaki/rethinking-europes-democratic-crisis> [accessed 10 November 2014].

4. Helen Lewis, ‘“I decided not to vote once”: Jeremy Paxman Backs Russell Brand’s Apathy Over Politics’, New Statesman, 5 November 2013 <http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2013/11/i-decided-not-vote-once-jeremy-paxman-backs-russell-brands-apathy-over-politics> [accessed 10 November 2014].

5. In Russell Brand, Revolution (London: Century, 2014), Brand reflects on some of his provocative comments from the Paxman interview. The book became an instant national bestseller. For a critical review, see Sophie Gilbert, ‘Russell Brand’s Revolution Isn’t About Revolution’, The Atlantic, 5 November 2014 <http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/russell-brands-revolution-isnt-about-revolution/382373/> [accessed 10 November 2014].

6. Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 22–23. See also Barbara Clark Smith, ‘Beyond the Vote: The Limits of Deference in Colonial Politics’, Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 3 (Fall 2005), 341–62 (pp. 342–43).

7. Hannah Arendt, On Violence [1969] (London: Harcourt, 1970), p. 52.

8. Sheldon Wolin, ‘Political Theory: From Vocation to Invocation’, in Vocations of Political Theory, ed. by Jason Frank and John Tamborino, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000), pp. 3–22 (p. 20).

9. Exceptions were Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy; Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe: ZKM and Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005); Jack Barbalet, ‘Secret Voting and Political Emotions’, Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 7 (Summer 2002), 129–40.

10. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. by Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). See also Ben Anderson, Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); Nigel Thrift, ‘Spatialities of Feeling’, in Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), pp. 171–97. These (and other) studies are part of ‘a broader movement of developing “non-representational” ontologies’, as Clive Barnett argues in ‘Political Affects in Public Space: Normative Blind-Spots in Non-Representational Ontologies’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33 (April 2008), 186–200 (p. 186).

11. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

12. Clough and Halley, Affective Turn, p. xi.

13. Brian Massumi in Mary Zournazi, ‘An Interview with Brian Massumi’, International Festival <http://www.international-festival.org/node/111> [accessed 10 November 2014].

14. Mona Domosh, ‘Toward a More Reciprocal Enquiry’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2.1 (2003), 107–11 (p. 107). See also Joan W. Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry, 17 (Summer 1991), 773–97.

15. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

16. Norie Neumark, ‘Doing Things with Voices’, in Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media, ed. by Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson, and Theo van Leeuwen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), pp. 95–118 (p. 97).

17. Irit Rogoff, ‘Smuggling – An Embodied Criticality’, EIPCP (2006) <http://eipcp.net/dlfiles/rogoff-smuggling> [accessed 10 October 2014], p. 1. See also Elin Diamond, ‘Introduction’, in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. by Elin Diamond (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 1–12.

18. Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. vii; see also Nicholas H. Wolfinger and Raymond E. Wolfinger, ‘Family Structure and Voter Turnout’, Social Forces, 86 (June 2008), 1513–28.

19. Stephen Coleman, How Voters Feel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. viii.

20. Coleman, How Voters Feel, p. 2. For a notion of the modern election as a ritual that communicates the central paradoxes, such as multivocality, ambiguity, or ambivalence, of liberal democracy, see Mark Brewin, ‘The Freak Election Bet and the Performance of the Democratic Paradox’, The Communication Review, 9 (September 2006), 37–62 (pp. 38–42).

21. Coleman, How Voters Feel, p. 2.

22. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 19.

23. Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 11.

24. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. by Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 140.

25. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible [2000], ed. and trans. by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), pp. 12–19.

26. Jacques Rancière and Davide Panagia, ‘Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière’, Diacritics, 30.2 (Summer 2000), 113–26 (p. 116). See also Chantal Mouffe, who argues that ‘the condition of possibility of the political community is at the same time the condition of impossibility of its full realization’, ‘Citizenship and Political Identity’, October 61 (Summer 1992), 28–32 (p. 30).

27. Rancière and Panagia, ‘Dissenting Words’, p. 124, emphasis added. For a similar definition of those ‘who have no part’, see Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy [1995], trans. by Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 123.

28. Rancière, Dissensus, pp. 141–42.

29. Lawrence Grossberg, ‘Postmodernity and Affect: All Dressed Up With No Place to Go’, in Emotions: A Cultural Studies Reader, ed. by Jennifer Harding and E. Deirdre Pribram (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 69–83 (p. 81).

30. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 6. See also her critique of Habermasian ‘deliberative democracy’ with its emphasis on reason, rationality, and non-friction, and her own contrasting model of ‘agonistic pluralism’, in ‘Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?’, Social Research, 66 (Fall 1999), 745–58.

31. Rancière, Dissensus, p. 141.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid. p.2. This dis-sensual function of art (or aesthetics of politics) is not ‘politicized art’, nor ‘an institutional overturning. It is an activity that cuts across forms of cultural and identity belonging and hierarchies between discourse and genres, working to introduce new subjects and heterogeneous objects into the field of perception’, as Steven Corcoran writes in his Editors Introduction to Dissensus. It is also not ‘art becoming life’ or ‘everything is political’. Since to reduce art and politics thus, ‘to want to make politics and art disappear as singular processes’, as Corcoran points out, ‘is to miss the singular effects that they bring about and to return them to the logic of consensus.’ (p. 3).

35. Jacques Rancière, ‘Rene-Rancière – The Politics of Aesthetics’, ARTicles (5 May 2006, n.p.) <www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/001877print.html≥ [URL no longer active].

36. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation [1981] trans. by Kristin Ross, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).

37. Joseph J. Tanke, Jacques Rancière: An Introduction (London: Continuum, 2011), p. 35. Telemachus, a Greek mythological figure, spends the first four books of Homer’s Odyssey trying to gain knowledge of his father.

38. Anna Gibbs, ‘After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony and Mimetic Communication’, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 186–205 (p. 191). Gibbs makes no mention of Rancière, although her thinking with regard to mimesis is very similar.

39. For further information on Davies’s projects, see ‘Here We Vote – Project Statement’ <http://herewevote.tumblr.com> and ‘Ludgate Hill Polling Station, Birmingham: A Series of Drawings Detailing a Proposed Polling Station Building in Birmingham’ <http://issuu.com/bryandavies/docs/davies_bryan_polingstation> [accessed 10 November 2014].

40. Cp. Coleman’s question addressed to a Leeds citizen, if a cup of tea or a bun after voting or a bouncy castle for the children would make the elective ritual more attractive (unpublished interviews 2007–08).

41. Among these reforms was (a) the general vote for any young man, from the age of 21 (with a few exceptions, such as mental illness or criminal punishment), (b) the secret ballot, (c) no property qualification for Members of Parliament, (d) equal constituencies for equal representation, etc., Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 1–22.

42. Bryan Davies, ‘A New Polling Station’, <http://issuu.com/bryandavies/docs/davies_bryan_polingstation>[accessed 10 November 2014] Image 7/33.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Rancière and Panagia, ‘Dissenting Words’, p. 125.

47. For a detailed analysis of the term ‘modest witness’, see Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 23–39.

48. Rancière, Dissensus, p. 39.

49. On the evolution of my piece, see Brenda Hollweg, ‘How Voting Happens: Video-Essayistic Practice as Object-Oriented Fabulation, Journal of Media Practice 15.3 (2014), 157–75.

50. Dwight Conquergood, ‘Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research’, The Drama Review, 46.2 (Summer 2002), 145–56 (p. 146). He also makes a reference to Michel de Certeau, who called this ‘the elocutionary experience of a fugitive communication’, The Certeau Reader, ed. by Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 133.

51. For an argument on the polling station as heterotopia, see Elizabeth Cowie, ‘What More Do You Want From Voting: The Road to Voting’ (forthcoming).

52. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1–14 (p.14).

53. A similar experience is fleshed out in Peggy Phelan and Irit Rogoff, ‘“Without”: A Conversation’, Art Journal, 60.3 (Autumn 2001), 34–41 (pp. 36–37).

54. Lincoln Dahlberg, ‘The Habermasian Public Sphere: Taking Difference Seriously?’, Theory and Society, 34 (April 2005), 111–36 (p. 115).

55. Rancière and Panagia, ‘Dissenting Words’, p. 116.

56. The Making of… The Road to Voting. A maquette for an archive, by Bauman Lyons Architects (Irena Bauman & Kerrie Mckinnon, 2010). This film is available from: <http://lutube.leeds.ac.uk/finbho/videos/12056> [accessed 14 December 2014].

57. John Law and John Urry, ‘Enacting the Social’, Economy and Society, 33 (February 2004), 390–410 (p. 393).

58. Ibid, p. 403.

59. Marie-Aude Baronian and Mireille Rosello, ‘Jacques Rancière and Indisciplinarity’, interview with Jacques Rancière, trans. by Gregory Elliott, Art & Research, 2007 <www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/jrinterview.html> [accessed 10 November 2014]. For his use of the term, see also Jacques Rancière, ‘A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Rancière’, Parallax 52 (July–September, 2009), 114–23.

60. Majid Yar, ‘“Hannah Arendt”, Article Entry for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’, n.d., <http://www.iep.utm.edu/arendt/#H2> [accessed 10 November 2014].

61. See Rancière, Dissensus, p. 38; also Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997); Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Post-Modernism in Contemporary Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992); or Iris M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

62. Coleman, How Voters Feel, p. viii, emphasis added.

63. Grossberg, ‘Postmodernity and Affect’, p. 82.