A throwback to V
for Vendetta, in light of our discussions of performance, democracy, and communication
in the Middle East Revolution. In the London of V for Vendetta, Thrift’s “mass
mediation of politics” is manifested in the extreme. The media is politics, and
vice versa. V hijacks the media in order to communicate to the people and prevent
the government from communicating, an act attempted by the revolutionaries in
Tahrir Square: “The building should be surrounded
from all sides,” the document reads, “and then entered so as to take control of
the live broadcast facilities and announce the people’s takeover of state TV
and radio and its liberation from the tyrannical dictator.” (Lindsey)
For
London of V runs on trust, trust in FATE. It turns out that Fate is a
performance—there is a real voice behind the information, an actual person performing—and
also the computer. Trust in Fate is based on performance—“The people actually believe that the
voice of Lewis Prothero is that of the FATE computer. Britain’s belief in the
integrity of FATE is the cornerstone of our New Order.” (30)—and in numbers—“From
your world of pure math you touch me (196)” Already, there is a tension between
the pure reason of the mathematics behind Fate and the affective relationship
that Susan has with the computer, “my love,” a love that is betrayed when the
system is hacked by V. Even the calculated moves of manipulation on the part of
government actors is grounded in affect, in this underlying affective
relationship with Fate as unifying force and with the reliance on the love and
fear of the people.
V’s manipulation of the masses also
involves emotions. In the scene where V addresses the nation via the hijacked
TV, we get the sense that he too is manipulating the masses by drawing on these
corporate impulses identified by Thrift. He speaks of law-abiding citizens as
dominos, giving the impression that he considers them “painted wooden men”
(208), emotionless. He is not speaking of “the people,” however, but rather
those in the government, who make up the”pretty empire [that] took so long to
build” that V destroys with a flick of one domino. Upon closer examination, V
sees the people as the future, the creators that make the other face of
anarchy. His treatment of the people centers on the power defined by Terranova:
“a capacity to synthesize not so much a common position (from which to win the
masses over), but a common passion
giving rise to a distributed movement
able to displace the limits and terms within which the political constitution
of the future is played out.” (Terranova 156) She, like Thrift and V, locates
the impetus for this movement in affect.
Perhaps the chaos to anarchy (really
democracy, in Ranciere’s sense of the word, that it is without leaders, and
thus a paradoxical rule of the people, do-as-you-please?) transition set in
motion by V is this distributed movement. Once the common passion has been
synthesized, the displacement is in motion and V’s role is done, hence the
suicide. The transfer of agency is reflected in what Thrift has to say on
affective politics: ‘Thus the population
is touched in ways which might be non-conscious and may well instill the
feeling that they are they originator of that thought, belief, or action,
rather than simply and mechanically reproducing the beliefs of a charismatic
other” (243).
When
V describes his love of Justice and his education by Anarchy, his new lover, he
says,“[Anarchy] taught me
that Justice is meaningless without Freedom. She makes no promises and breaks
none.” (41) But isn’t it really that she makes promises and doesn’t keep them,
but we know they can’t be kept and believe anyway? V’s relationship with
Justice, like all of ours, is cruelly optimistic, made explicit in the
personification of Justice as an unfaithful lover. The simultaneously
sustaining and dissatisfying relationship can also be seen in music:
“Persevere, Eve. Understanding music, we may hear the music that there is in
life, from its first insufficient trills…until its closing minor chords.” The
beginning is insufficient, and even the end, in minor key, is slightly off
putting. And yet it is for the music that we persevere.
As both V’s world and Fate’s world
use affect and performance to rule the people or let the people rule, where is
the difference between affective politics used for good and those used for
authoritarianism? It is in the passion, but how is that defined? And cannot it
be manipulated just as easily as it can sustain?
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