Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Politics

In this weekend’s reading, Executive Overspill, I was struck by one of Edbauer’s points. In point 13, on .pdf page 10, Edbauer quotes Gatens and Lloyd’s explanation of Spinoza’s “affective poles,” noting that “Joy involves an increase in activity—an increase in the striving to persist…. There is a corresponding orientation of sadness toward disengagement and isolation (qtd. in Edbauer 10).  Spinoza phrased this himself, noting that when two “bodies” come into contact they can either combine or subvert each other, and that “we experience joy when a body encounters ours and enters into composition with it, and sadness when, on the contrary, a body or an idea threatens our own coherence.” (10).

This all happens almost in ignorance of the literal or understood “meaning” of the encounter, the “semantic” and “semiotic” components that tell us how words literally form ideas that we may agree with or not agree with.  This is offered to explain why Bush Jr.(and Reagan) were so appealing to voters in spite of having incoherent sentences and frequent verbal fumbles. Think back to the story Massumi offered of the German short film about the man building a snowman, then it melting, and them him taking it to the mountains. The kids actually rated the original wordless version as the most “sad” version but also as the most pleasant.  The absence of words creates a temporary “jerk” or “point” in Massumi’s lingo that peaks intensity by making meaning unknown or ambiguous.  When the narrative is suspended, our interest is peaked (whereas having a narrator explain everything leaves no ambiguity, no pause in the narrative).  

So while our conscious minds are in an endless struggle to follow a linear narrative and “make sense” of things, our affective selves are simultaneously only stimulated by the “superlinear” inconsistencies that allow us to, sort of, fill in the blanks (here, our propensity for rationality and the reality of affective existence seem to butt heads).  That the German children felt pleasure at the sadness, the “body or idea threaten[ing] [their] own coherence” finds its parallel in the American public’s affinity for fumbling, incoherent politicians.  It is the tension, the arousal, the “intensity”, created by the suspension of the narrative (be it in a German short film, a political speech, or that moment in the horror flick where everything stops for just a moment before the killer strikes) that so arouses us.  

This helped me understand such paradoxical realities as Bush and Reagan’s popularity and my own attraction for horror films. To reuse Edbauser’s example, if Bush, in response to the legitimate question “do you still think we’ll find WMD’s in Iraq?” were to have answered coherently, “yes” or “no”, he might have satisfied the “qualified” need for coherence and narrative continuity that we seek on the conscious level, but he wouldn’t have created the “intensity” that our affects need in order to be engaged, to form a decision.  To Bush’s credit, he was successful in this regard, always sacrificing true meaning and semantic/semiotic coherence for that “Good ‘ol boy” feel of someone who you could relate to by “filling in the gaps” in the suspended narrative. And many people could relate to him, after all, he seldom said anything so comprehensible that it permitted dissent.