From Spectacle to Simulation: The Aestheticisation of Political Power in Kerala (for readers from the academic world)

 

• How do we understand politics in an age where visibility determines power? Drawing on thinkers like Benjamin, Debord, Baudrillard, Rancière, and Mirzoeff, let us explore how elections in Kerala are increasingly shaped by spectacle, simulation, and affect, transforming democracy into a sensory and mediated experience.
• Politics today is not only about governance - it is about appearance, performance, and circulation. This blog theorises the aestheticisation of political power in Kerala, asking how images reshape perception, participation, and democracy itself. 

(for readers from the academic world)

Aestheticising Power: Rethinking Political Culture in Kerala’s Elections

What if power today is not exercised primarily through force, policy, or ideology - but through appearance?
What if politics does not merely persuade or govern, but stages itself, inviting citizens to see, feel, and experience power before they evaluate it?

To ask these questions is to shift our attention from politics as a system of ideas to politics as an aesthetic formation - a field where power operates through images, performances, and affect. In contemporary Kerala, especially during elections, this shift is increasingly visible. Politics is not only debated; it is designed, performed, and circulated.

This is what theorists have described as the aestheticisation of politics.

From Power to Appearance

The concept of aestheticisation of politics is most famously articulated by Walter Benjamin, who argued that modern political regimes could transform power into spectacle - organising masses not through structural change, but through sensory participation. Politics becomes something to be seen, felt, and experienced.

The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values. (Benjamin, 1935)

Kerala’s election culture today offers a compelling site to revisit this idea.

Consider the proliferation of:

• elaborately staged campaign events

• visually striking roadshows with music, lighting, and choreography

• carefully framed public meetings designed for television and digital circulation

These are not simply communication strategies. They are techniques of power.

Power, in this sense, does not only reside in institutions or policies. It is enacted through appearance - through the ability to command attention, structure perception, and produce affect.

The Spectacle as a Form of Power

Building on Benjamin, Guy Debord conceptualised modern society as dominated by the spectacle, where social relations are mediated through images.

The spectacle is the uninterrupted conversation which the present order maintains about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence. (Debord, 1970)

In Kerala’s elections, the spectacle is not an addition to politics; it is one of its primary forms.

Rallies in various cities are organised with an acute awareness of their visual afterlife. A speech is crafted not only for those present but for its circulation as clips across platforms. A roadshow is designed as a moving image, meant to be captured, shared, and replayed.

Here, power operates through:

• visibility

• repetition

• affective intensity

The spectacle does not merely represent power - it constitutes it.

Simulation and the Displacement of the Real

If spectacle foregrounds visibility, Jean Baudrillard complicates the picture by arguing that contemporary politics operates through simulation.

The pleasure of an excess of meaning, when the bar of the sign falls below the usual waterline of meaning: the nonsignifier is exalted by the camera angle. There one sees what the real never was (but "as if you were there"), without the distance that gives us perspectival space and depth vision (but "more real than nature"). Pleasure in the microscopic simulation that allows the real to pass into the hyperreal. (Baudrillard, 1981).

Political actors are increasingly encountered through:

• viral video clips

• WhatsApp forwards

• meme cultures

These representations acquire a life of their own. A leader’s image can become more politically significant than governance itself.

Power, then, is sustained through continuous image production, where the boundary between reality and representation collapses.

Performing Power

Drawing on Erving Goffman and Judith Butler, we can understand politics as performance.

We have been using the term 'performance ' to refer to all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers. It will be convenient to label as ' front ’, that part of the individual's performance which regularly functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance. Front, then, is the expressive equipment of a standard kind intentionally or unwittingly employed by the individual during his performance. (Goffman, 1956)

Leaders enact roles:

• the accessible representative

• the development-oriented administrator

• the ideological speaker

These are strategic performances through which power is made visible and credible.

As anthropologist Victor Turner suggests in his studies of ritual social drama, social action requires a performance which is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation. (Butler, 1988).

Power is not simply possessed; it is performed into existence.

Affective Power: Governing Through Feeling

Chantal Mouffe reminds us that politics is affective.

This recognizes that affects and desire play a crucial role in the constitution of collective forms of identification, and that they are the motivating forces of political action. I submit that this recognition of the crucial role of the affects and of the way they can be mobilized is decisive for envisaging democratic politics. (Mouffe, 2018)

Kerala’s campaigns mobilise:

• pride

• nostalgia

• fear

• anger

Power operates through emotion, not just argument. Citizens are not merely persuaded; they are moved.

Power, Visibility, and the Right to Look

The question of visibility is central to understanding aestheticised power. Jacques Rancière’s notion of the distribution of the sensible shows that politics is about what can be seen and heard.

The first possible meaning of the notion of a ‘factory of the sensible’ is the formation of a shared sensible world, a common habitat, by the weaving together of a plurality of human activities. However, the idea of a ‘distribution of the sensible’ implies something more. A ‘common’ world is never simply an ethos, a shared abode, that results from the sedimentation of a certain number of intertwined acts. It is always a polemical distribution of modes of being and ‘occupations’ in a space of possibilities. (Rancière, 2000)

Extending this, Nicholas Mirzoeff offers a crucial insight into visual power:

This ability to assemble a visualization manifests the authority of the visualizer. In turn, the authorizing of authority requires permanent renewal in order to win consent as the ‘normal’ or everyday because it is always already contested. The autonomy claimed by the right to look is thus opposed by the authority of visuality. (Mirzoeff, 2011)

As Mirzoeff suggests, visuality is a mechanism through which authority determines what is visible - implying that control over visibility is a crucial form of power.

In Kerala’s election culture, this becomes strikingly evident:

• posters, banners, and cut-outs dominate physical space

• digital platforms determine reach and visibility

• algorithmic circulation privileges certain voices

To be visible is to be politically real. To remain unseen is to be excluded.

Aestheticisation, therefore, is not merely about beauty or spectacle - it is about who controls the field of perception itself.

Media, Image, and the Manufacture of Consent

The insights of Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jacques Ellul reveal how this system is sustained.

The more strongly the culture industry entrenches itself, the more it can do as it chooses with the needs of consumers-producing, controlling, disciplining them. (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002)

In contemporary politics, communication becomes:

• repetitive

• standardised

• affect-driven

Ellul’s analysis of image culture deepens this critique:

If we remained at the stage of verbal dialogue, inevitably we would be led to critical reflection. But images exclude criticism. The habit of living in this image-oriented world leads me to give up dialectical thought….It is so much easier to give up and let myself be carried along by the continually renewed wave of images. (Ellul, 1981)

This insight is crucial.

The dominance of images does not merely enhance politics - it transforms its cognitive structure. It replaces:

• dialogue with display

• critique with reaction

• thought with stimulus

In Kerala’s election culture, campaigns function as media ecosystems, where:

• slogans repeat across platforms

• visuals circulate continuously

• political meaning is compressed into images

Power is exercised through the creation of a total environment of perception, within which certain narratives feel natural and inevitable.

Rethinking Power in Contemporary Democracy

What emerges is a redefinition of power.

Power today includes:

• control over images and appearances

• the ability to stage and perform credibility

• the capacity to generate affect

• dominance over systems of visibility and circulation

Citizens engage as:

• voters

• viewers

• participants in affective communities

• circulators of content

Democracy is not only practiced - it is experienced.

Conclusion: Seeing Power Differently

To understand contemporary political culture, we must learn to see power differently.

Power today does not only command or govern - it appears, performs, circulates, and feels.

The aestheticisation of politics reshapes democracy into a sensory and mediated experience, where meaning is produced as much through images as through ideas.

In an age where visibility is power, politics becomes a struggle not only over governance, but over perception itself.

Recognising this transformation allows us to ask:

• How is power made visible?

• Who controls what is seen?

• How does image reshape thought?

In answering these questions, we begin to understand not just politics - but the aesthetic life of power.

References

Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. Simulations. MIT Press, 1983.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production.” 

Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, from the 1935 essay New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in 

Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, Dec. 1988, p. 519.

Debord, Guy. 1970. The Society of the Spectacle. Princeton UP, 2020.

Ellul, Jacques. 1981. The Humiliation of the Word. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 

2021.

Goffman, Erving. 1956. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor, 

1959.

Horkheimer, Max, and Adorno, Theodor. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford 

UP, 2002.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “The Right to Look.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 37, no. 3, 2011, pp. 

473–96.

Mouffe, Chantal. “The Affects of Democracy.” Eurozine, 23 Nov. 2018, 

www.eurozine.com/the-affects-of-democracy.

Rancière, Jacques. 2000. The Politics of Aesthetics. A&C Black, 2013.

Feeling Politics: Rethinking Elections as Affective Economies (for readers from the academic world)

(for readers from the academic world)

What if your political choices begin before your thoughts? Not in debates. Not in manifestos. But in a smile, a colour, a feeling.  From Sara Ahmed to campaign posters —this blog explores how emotions circulate, stick, and shape political belonging in Kerala’s electoral culture.

Beyond “Political Science”: Feeling, Affect, and the Hidden Life of Elections in Kerala

In academia, we often encounter the term Political Science—a label that carries with it an aura of rigour, method, and intellectual discipline. The word science lends authority, suggesting measurement, objectivity, and systematic inquiry.

But what if this very word — science — quietly limits how we understand politics?

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, science is:

“the careful study of the structure and behaviour of the physical world… by watching, measuring, and doing experiments.” (Cambridge Dictionary)

This definition is valuable. It foregrounds method, evidence, and analysis.
Yet, it also reveals a silence.

Where, in this framework, do we place emotion?

The Missing Variable: Emotion in Political Life

Political life is not lived in laboratories. It unfolds in:

• Conversations over tea

• WhatsApp forwards

• Street debates

• Silent, personal reflections before voting

As Jennifer Wolak and Anand Sokhey observe:

“People’s day-to-day experiences with politics come mostly through the news they consume as well as the political conversations they take part in.”

Voting, for most, is a singular act.
But feeling politics is a daily experience.

Similarly, T. M. Shah reminds us:

“Politics is inherently intertwined with human emotions.”

And yet, much of what we call Political Science continues to privilege:

• Rational choice

• Institutional analysis

• Policy evaluation

while affect — the emotional charge of politics — remains under-theorised or sidelined.

Politics as Felt Experience

To say this plainly:

Politics without emotion is a myth.

Every political formation — whether protest, resistance, or electoral mobilisation — is sustained by:

• Anger

• Hope

• Fear

• Pride

• Belonging

These are not secondary to politics.
They are its very condition of possibility.

As Sara Ahmed writes:

In such affective economies, emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities—or bodily space with social space—through the very intensity of their attachments. Rather than seeing emotions as psychological dispositions, we need to consider how they work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective.

Emotion is not noise in the system.
It is the system through which alignment happens.

Elections as Affective Economies

If we take emotion seriously, elections begin to look different.

They are no longer just contests of:

• Manifestos

• Policies

• Ideologies

They become affective economies — spaces where emotions circulate, accumulate, and acquire value.

Ahmed again offers a powerful insight:

Emotions work as a form of capital…. I am using “the economic” to suggest that emotions circulate and are distributed across a social as well as psychic field. I am borrowing from the Marxian critique of the logic of capital. I am identifying a similar logic: the movement between signs converts into affect.

The marxist concept of ‘commodity fetishism’ adds to our understanding of the use of rhetorics to add value to a political system:

Another way to theorize this process would be to describe “feelings” via an analogy with “commodity fetishism”: feelings appear in objects, or indeed as objects with a life of their own, only by the concealment of how they are shaped by histories, including histories of production (labor and labor time), as well as circulation or exchange.

In Kerala’s vibrant political culture, this circulation is particularly visible—not only in speeches and debates, but in something more subtle:

IMAGES

When Politics Feels: Enter the Image

Scroll through an election season — on hoardings, WhatsApp, or Instagram — and something curious happens.

Before we think, we feel.

A face smiles. Colours glow. A slogan repeats.
And almost imperceptibly, we are already inside a mood.

These are not just images.

They are what we might call affective machines — visual forms that organise emotion, memory, and identification.

Colour, Warmth, and Affective Stickiness

Consider the familiar palette in many Kerala campaign visuals:

• Reds

• Oranges

• Yellows

• Soft glowing gradients

These colours do more than signal ideological traditions.
They produce atmosphere.

• Warmth

• Familiarity

• Optimism

Ahmed’s concept of affective stickiness becomes useful here:

“Emotions stick to objects… shaping the surfaces of bodies and worlds.”

Colour becomes a surface where feeling accumulates.
The image doesn’t argue — it warms.

From Collective Politics to the Face

Older political imagery often centred:

• Workers

• Movements

• Crowds

Now, the frame narrows.

A single face — composed, smiling, familiar — takes centre stage. Such political figures emerge not just as leaders, but as affective anchors.

This shift resonates with Guy Debord’s observation:

“All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.”

But in today’s media ecology, representation does not remain distant.

It becomes affectively lived.

The face is not just seen.
It is felt.

Two Images, Two Affective Worlds

If we place different campaign visuals side by side, what emerges is not simply a contrast of political messaging — but a contrast of affective architectures.

These images stage distinct emotional worlds — each offering a different way of feeling politics.

Warmth vs Cool Authority

Some visuals radiate warm tones — reds, oranges, yellows — producing:

Comfort

Intimacy

Reassurance

Others rely on cooler palettes — blues and sharp contrasts — producing:

Clarity

Control

Decisiveness

One embraces.

The other commands.

Paternal Presence vs Assertive Leadership

In one mode:

Soft smile

Relaxed posture

Familiar presence

Authority becomes care.

In another:

Raised hand

Upright stance

Direct gaze

Authority is performed.

One says: “I am with you.”

The other says: “Follow me.”

Aura vs Structure

Some images diffuse power through light and atmosphere.

Others organise it through hierarchy and structure.

This recalls Louis Althusser:

“Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects.”

The image itself becomes a call to position oneself within power.

Continuity vs Mobilisation

Some visuals stabilise:

Timelessness

Continuity

Legacy

Others activate:

Urgency

Eventfulness

Action

One reassures.

The other mobilises.

Mood vs Interface

Some images function as moods — painterly, immersive.

Others function as interfaces — structured, directive.

One is felt.

The other instructs.

Two Emotional Logics

At their core:

One produces warmth, trust, belonging

The other produces confidence, strength, alignment

This contrast can be read theoretically:

Sara Ahmed → affective stickiness

Guy Debord + Louis Althusser → spectacle and interpellation

Affect in Motion: The Feeling of Progress

Even in still images, there is movement:

• Light streaks

• Radiant flows

• Diagonal compositions

These produce what we might call affective momentum — a sense that things are moving forward.

Here, Gilles Deleuze offers a crucial insight:

But these image affections or ideas form a certain state (constitution) of the affected body and mind, which implies more or less perfection than the preceding state. Therefore, from one state to another, from one image or idea to another, there are transitions, passages that are experienced, durations through which we pass to a greater or a lesser perfection,

The image captures this passage.

To align with it is to feel part of a future already unfolding.

Slogans That Don’t Argue—They Land

Election slogans are often minimal:

• “Again”

• “Forward”

• “With you”

They do not explain policy.
They do not construct arguments.

Instead, they function as affective triggers.

As Roland Barthes notes:

“The images are more imperative than writing, they impose meaning at one stroke, without analysing or diluting it.”

The slogan doesn’t persuade.
It lands—immediately, emotionally.

Intimacy, Power, and the Everyday

The smiling, relaxed posture of leaders produces what we might call curated intimacy:

• Power appears close

• Authority feels familiar

• Governance seems personal

This reflects Michel Foucault’s idea:

“Power is everywhere… because it comes from everywhere.”

In campaign imagery, power circulates not through force, but through affect — through smiles, gestures, and visual proximity.

Hyperreal Politics: The Smooth Surface

Look closely:

• Skin is flawless

• Lighting is perfect

• No trace of tension or contradiction

This is not realism.

It is what Jean Baudrillard calls hyperreality:

“The simulacrum is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.”

The airbrushed image becomes more persuasive than lived reality.

Politics shifts from complexity → perfection.

From Posters to Atmospheres

Political visuality today exceeds the poster.

It extends into:

• Reels

• Videos

• Landscapes

Consider the widely circulated Lakshadweep visuals of the Prime Minister:

• A solitary figure in vast nature

• Slow movement, silence, expanse

Here, politics becomes an environmental affect—a feeling of calm, awe, and timelessness.

As Brian Massumi writes:

“Affect is autonomous… it escapes confinement in the particular.”

The feeling exceeds the frame.
It lingers.

Rethinking Political Science

What does all this mean for Political Science?

It suggests that the discipline must expand:

• Beyond measurement → toward experience

• Beyond rationality → toward affect

• Beyond analysis → toward feeling

Because politics is not only what we know.
It is also what we feel.

Conclusion: What Do Political Images Ask of Us?

Campaign visuals today do not simply communicate messages.
They construct worlds of feeling.

They do not ask:

What do you think?

They ask:

What feels right?

And perhaps the task before us — as scholars, citizens, and viewers—is not to dismiss these images, but to read them differently.

To ask:

• What emotions are being produced?

• What histories are being softened?

• What futures are being made to feel inevitable?

Because in the end, politics is not only debated in parliaments or classrooms.

It is also lived—quietly, persistently—
in the textures of feeling that surround us every day.

References

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press, 2004.

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Press, 1971.

Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. Fontana Press, 1977.

Baudrillard, Jean. "Simulacra and Simulation." University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Cambridge Dictionary. “Science.” https://dictionary.cambridge.org/

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Zone Books, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. City Lights Books, 1988.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Vintage, 1978.

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press, 2002.

Shah, T. M. "Emotions in Politics: A Review of Contemporary Perspectives and Trends." International Political Science Abstracts, 74(1), 1, 2024. 

Wolak, Jennifer, and Anand E. Sokhey. "Enraged and engaged? Emotions as motives for discussing politics." American Politics Research, 50(2), 186–198.