Obama and Affect

Massumi credits Reagan’s political success to an affective conjuncture of two failures: Reagan has both bad body language and bad arguments. But together he compelled strong voter allegiance. One could perhaps say something similar about the “guy I’d have a beer with” argument for Bush 2.1. Bush 2.2 I’d chalk up to the power of the fear response. (And in both cases the lack of likable Democratic candidates cannot be overlooked).

One might like to think that Obama’s popularity represents a turn to rational discourse, but this is 1) something you’d only hear from his supporters 2) not plausible as a proposition in itself: that American political discourse has turned a millennial corner to some Habermasian epoch.

Nor does it seem a full account to chalk up his affective appeal to his exceptionality as the first Black president, or to his generally appealing demeanor and speaking skill, though these are certainly mechanisms in his affective draw (just as a movie is not good just because it has a good score or good car chase; those things might be good about it without making it good).

We can begin to explain Obama’s affectivity through his role as “no drama Obama.” He doesn’t get worked up. He is passionate, but not subject to his (or others’) passions. He is master of his passions. This virtual mastery is the only kind available today. The US is facing a set of problems for which there is no solution: every course of action looks to be quite bad for the next several years, if not for decades afterwards, and fixing one problem (the economy) looks like it creates or exacerbates others (environment, debt, etc.). The first phase of this affective mode exhausted itself under Bush 2.2. The fear-anger response held at its fevered pitch for as long as possible, working itself out on a variety of scapegoats, but ultimately it is not only a war economy that is unsustainable but the affectivity of constant war. We are exhausted but our problems are no less. Actual mastery is impossible: affect offers a mode for virtual mastery. Thus for all those who are over-whelmed by our problems, individual and collective, and unable to master our emotions, Obama’s moderately inappropriate declaration that he has never been more confident about American’s future is reassuring precisely because it indicates the virtual body severed from its corporeal disrupter.

We see this in those moments when Obama truly crosses party lines: when he tells a joke. Obama can tell a joke very well. I’m not sure that another president has been able to do so better. Sometimes his jokes are at the expense of Republicans, but sometimes they actually refer to himself, indeed to his own showmanship, so everyone can join. What makes the jokes close to perfect, that is, the dimension of essence in which their relative perfection is at stake, is the timing.

Comedic timing usually refers to the relationship between two or more actors. Or, in stand up comedy, it refers to an autotelic production of humor. For Obama a joke is understood to be part of a political speech where humor is decidedly telic. A State of the Union that was side splitting but policy-less would be a failure. The timing has to do not with laughter but with applause (recalling Derrida on Heidegger’s hand as political organ, versus the mouth as speech and laugh). Obama will wait a long time if he knows that applause will come. It seems at times that the crowd has decided not to clap but then, uncertain of itself, must clap to fill the silence and then, suddenly, realizes it enjoys clapping. It has passed into the virtual body in that space where there is silence. They have been led into a teleological experience and abandoned, like a capitalist who invests all in a single company or a car that breaks down in a desert. (Incidentally this is the premise of “The Merchant of Venice”: a destruction of the investor’s virtual body when Antonio loses his ships. That body is resurrected when Shylock threatens to cut out Antonio’s heart but cannot. The unremoved heart that remains, or is transplanted from Shylock, is a virtual heart, beating life back into a virtual body). The audience then experiences the pleasure of what we might call, to borrow from Lacan, “the one who is virtual.”

But timing. That is the key to Obama’s joking in a way that Bush did not completely master, funny as he sometimes was. Obama can stretch time out. The narratological space “waiting for laughter” becomes open to intensive difference of degrees. This space opens seemingly to eternity, rubber-bands back into motion just as quickly (the applause become catapult launching another declamation). The ability to manipulate time is just what we need to appreciate why long term benefits of health care reform and environment policy outweigh present short falls, or why trillion dollar deficits cannot perpetuate indefinitely without consequence. Among other temporal problems of an informatic-financialist meta-economy.

We move not only into a virtual body as false consciousness/catharsis, but virtual body as political transformation. Since at least Marx, and I would say Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, the problem of ontologically inscribed temporal asynchronicity has been the mystery of political dialectics. Capital moves at speeds other than the human; that is why capital is the political enemy of the human. The enemies have only multiplied since. Politics is the ability to orchestrate temporalities so that one kind of being (a kind is almost always collective) can affect the flow of another kind of being. Obama provides the momentary--what a hilariously inaccurate word here--feeling that we can change our temporality to a different frequency. There is no reason we cannot do so. The question is for how long.