Cultural diagnosis outperforms polling at sensing electoral affective shifts

Evidence

Always ignore the polls, wrote Jeremy Gilbert late on election night: You get a better sense of what’s going on in the electorate by sniffing the wind, sensing the affective shifts, the molecular currents, the alterations in the structures of feeling. Listen to the music, watch the TV, go to the the pubs and ride the tube. Cultural Studies trumps psephology every time. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1843

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Raymond Williams’s ‘structures of feeling’ and Fisher’s own recurring claim that culture is political early-warning radar rather than epiphenomena.
• DEEPTHINKING: Genuinely dense: a counter-epistemology of politics that treats affective currents and everyday culture as more legible than data — sits for a while.