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"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"

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The Affective Turn

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................................................................................ixForeword: What Affects Are Good For MICHAEL HARDT...............................................................................1Introduction PATRICIA TICINETO CLOUGH...........................................................................................34The Parched Tongue HOSU KIM.....................................................................................................47Techno-Cinema: Image Matters in the Affective Unfoldings of Analog Cinema and New Media JAMIE "SKYE" BIANCO.....................77Slowness: Notes toward an Economy of Diffrancial Rates of Being KAREN WENDY GILBERT............................................106Myocellular Transduction: When My Cells Trained My Body-Mind DEBORAH GAMBS......................................................119Women's Work and the Ambivalent Gift of Entropy DAVID STAPLES...................................................................151Voices from the Teum: Synesthetic Trauma and the Ghosts of the Korean Diaspora GRACE M. CHO.....................................170In Calcutta, Sex Workers Organize MELISSA DITMORE...............................................................................187More Than a Job: Meaning, Affect, and Training Health Care Workers ARIEL DUCEY..................................................209Haunting Orpheus: Problems of Space and Time in the Desert JONATHAN R. WYNN.....................................................231Always on Display: Affective Production in the Modeling Industry ELIZABETH WISSINGER............................................261The Wire JEAN HALLEY............................................................................................................264Losses and Returns: The Soldier in Trauma GREG GOLDBERG AND CRAIG WILLSE........................................................287Bibliography.....................................................................................................................303Contributors.....................................................................................................................305

Introduction

Each self-reproducing system in this generalized production of order out of chaos combines modulations of what could be called, broadly, the "political" dimension ... the "economic" dimension ..., and contributes in a way that could be called "cultural".... For lack of a better word, the chaotic cofunctioning of the political, economic and cultural dimensions could be dubbed the "social"-although all of these designations are fairly arbitrary at this point. -Brian Massumi, "Requiem for Our Prospective Dead (Toward a Participatory Critique of Capitalist Power)"

The increasing significance of affect as a focus of analysis across a number of disciplinary and interdisciplinary discourses is occurring at a time when critical theory is facing the analytic challenges of ongoing war, trauma, torture, massacre, and counter/terrorism. If these world events can be said to be symptomatic of ongoing political, economic, and cultural transformations, the turn to affect may be registering a change in the cofunctioning of the political, economic, and cultural, or what Brian Massumi in the epigraph to this introduction dubs the "social." The essays collected in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social explore these political, economic, and cultural tendencies and investigate how they are being rendered as a shift in thought-captured in critical theory's turn to affect.

The essays collected in The Affective Turn-written when their authors were completing doctoral work in sociology, women's studies, and cultural studies-explore the recent turn in critical theory to affect, especially the conceptualization of affect that draws on the line of thought from Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari back through Baruch Spinoza and Henri Bergson. The essays engage the insights of scholars presently working in this line of thought and who treat affectivity as a substrate of potential bodily responses, often autonomic responses, in excess of consciousness. For these scholars, affect refers generally to bodily capacities to affect and be affected or the augmentation or diminution of a body's capacity to act, to engage, and to connect, such that autoaffection is linked to the self-feeling of being alive-that is, aliveness or vitality. Yet affect is not "presocial," as Massumi argues. There is a reflux back from conscious experience to affect, which is registered, however, as affect, such that "past action and contexts are conserved and repeated, autonomically reactivated but not accomplished; begun but not completed." Affect constitutes a nonlinear complexity out of which the narration of conscious states such as emotion are subtracted, but always with "a never-to-be-conscious autonomic remainder."

In this conceptualization, affect is not only theorized in terms of the human body. Affect is also theorized in relation to the technologies that are allowing us both to "see" affect and to produce affective bodily capacities beyond the body's organic-physiological constraints. The technoscientific experimentation with affect not only traverses the opposition of the organic and the non-organic; it also inserts the technical into felt vitality, the felt aliveness given in the preindividual bodily capacities to act, engage, and connect-to affect and be affected. The affective turn, therefore, expresses a new configuration of bodies, technology, and matter instigating a shift in thought in critical theory. It is this shift in thought that the following essays engage. Taken together, the essays explore the movement in critical theory from a psychoanalytically informed criticism of subject identity, representation, and trauma to an engagement with information and affect; from privileging the organic body to exploring nonorganic life; from the presumption of equilibrium-seeking closed systems to engaging the complexity of open systems under far-from-equilibrium conditions of metastability; from focusing on an economy of production and consumption to focusing on the economic circulation of pre-individual bodily capacities or affects in the domain of biopolitical control. Taken together, the essays suggest that attending to the affective turn is necessary to theorizing the social.

This not only means thinking about affect in terms of the historical changes in Western capitalist industrial societies but also recognizing that politics, economy, and culture always have been and are presently being reconfigured differently across various regions of the world. This recognition comes not so much from a comparative but rather from a geopolitical analysis of the ongoing transformation of relations of power across international organizations, regions, nations, states, economies, and private and public spheres. The Affective Turn especially marks the way these historical changes are indicative of the changing global processes of accumulating capital and employing labor power through the deployment of technoscience to reach beyond the limitations of the human in experimentation with the structure and organization of the human body, or what is called "life itself." The...