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    The Affective Turn
    Theorizing the Social

    Patricia Ticineto Clough (Edited by), Jean Halley (Edited by)

    9780822339250

    Paperback / softback, published 12 July 2007

    328 pages
    23.5 x 15.6 x 2 cm, 0.499 kg

    “Framed by Patricia Ticineto Clough’s stunning essay, this collection weaves together many of the most profound changes that have characterized not only critical scholarship in the human sciences for the last thirty-five years or so but the social, political, and economic changes that describe the world as ‘glocal’-the entwined and so-fast linking of the stubborn and material ‘hereness’ of life as lived and breathed, on the one hand, and an array of forces and practices spanning place and time marked by terms such as technoscience, telecommunications, flexible accumulation, and molecularization, on the other.”-Joseph Schneider, author of Donna Haraway: Live Theory
    “From the trauma of cultural displacement to the political economy of affective labor, the essays brought together here examine the many facets of affect, focusing on its consequences for theories of the social and well-informed by recent rethinkings of power. Expertly framed by Patricia Clough’s introduction, the volume presents a diversity of voices engaged in a shared exploration of the conceptual landscape stretching beyond the bend of ‘the affective turn.’”-Brian Massumi, author of Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation
    “This volume attempts to move beyond a philosophy of affect to a social science of the affects. By attending to the simultaneous engagement of the body and the intellectual, and the reciprocity between both, our understanding of the social is enhanced by the affective turn in much the same way as the linguistic turn and the postmodern turn have done previously. . . . I highly recommend the opening essay to those wishing to frame the affective turn in their own work.”
    - Scott Grills (Canadian Journal of Sociology)

    “The innovative essays in this volume . . . demonstrat[e] the potential of the perspective of the affects in a wide range of fields and with a variety of methodological approaches. Some of the essays . . . use fieldwork to investigate the functions of affects-among organized sex workers, health care workers, and in the modeling industry. Others employ the discourses of microbiology, thermodynamics, information sciences, and cinema studies to rethink the body and the affects in terms of technology. Still others explore the affects of trauma in the context of immigration and war. And throughout all the essays run serious theoretical reflections on the powers of the affects and the political possibilities they pose for research and practice.”-Michael Hardt, from the foreword

    In the mid-1990s, scholars turned their attention toward the ways that ongoing political, economic, and cultural transformations were changing the realm of the social, specifically that aspect of it described by the notion of affect: pre-individual bodily forces, linked to autonomic responses, which augment or diminish a body’s capacity to act or engage with others. This “affective turn” and the new configurations of bodies, technology, and matter that it reveals, is the subject of this collection of essays. Scholars based in sociology, cultural studies, science studies, and women’s studies illuminate the movement in thought from a psychoanalytically informed criticism of subject identity, representation, and trauma to an engagement with information and affect; from a privileging of the organic body to an exploration of nonorganic life; and from the presumption of equilibrium-seeking closed systems to an engagement with the complexity of open systems under far-from-equilibrium conditions. Taken together, these essays suggest that attending to the affective turn is necessary to theorizing the social.

    Contributors. Jamie “Skye” Bianco, Grace M. Cho, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Melissa Ditmore, Ariel Ducey, Deborah Gambs, Karen Wendy Gilbert, Greg Goldberg, Jean Halley, Hosu Kim, David Staples, Craig Willse , Elizabeth Wissinger , Jonathan R. Wynn

    Acknowledgments vii
    Foreword: What Affects Are Good For / Michael Hardt ix
    Introduction / Patricia Ticineto Clough 1
    The Parched Tongue / Hosu Kim 34
    Techno-Cinema: Image Matters in the Affective Unfoldings of Analog Cinema and New Media / Jamie “
    Skye”
    Bianco 47
    Slowness: Notes toward an Economy of Differencial Rates of Being / Karen Wendy Gilbert 77
    Myocellular Transduction: When My Cells Trained My Body-Mind / Deborah Gambs 106
    Women’
    s Work and the Ambivalent Gift of Entropy / David Staples 119
    Voices from the Teum: Synesthetic Trauma and the Ghosts of the Korean Diaspora / Grace M. Cho 151
    In Calcutta, Sex Workers Organize / Melissa Ditmor 170
    More Than a Job: Meaning, Affect, and Training Health Care Workers / Ariel Ducey 187
    Haunting Orpheus: Problems of Space and Time in the Desert / Jonathan R. Wynn 209
    Always on Display: Affective Production in the Modeling Industry / Elizabeth Wissinger 231
    The Wire / Jean Halley 261
    Losses and Returns: The Soldier in Trauma / Greg Goldberg and Craig Willse 264
    Bibliography 287
    Contributors 303
    Index 305
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