The affective turn : theorizing the social

330 Pages·2007·1.4 MB·English

by  Patricia Ticineto Clough

sociology/social theory
with a Foreword by Michael hardT
In the mid-1990s, scholars turned their attention toward the ways that ongoing political,
paTricia
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 TicineTo
responses, which augment or diminish a body’s capacity to act or engage with others. This
clough,
“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 editor
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 T
life; and from the presumption of equilibrium-seeking closed systems to an engagement with
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the complexity of open systems under far-from-equilibrium conditions. Taken together, these
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essays suggest that attending to the affective turn is necessary to theorizing the social.

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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 f
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for theories of the social and well-informed by recent rethinkings of power. Expertly framed e
by Patricia Clough’s introduction, the volume presents a diversity of voices engaged in a shared c
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exploration of the conceptual landscape stretching beyond the bend of ‘the affective turn.’”
i
—Brian MaSSuMi, author of Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation v
e
“Framed by Patricia Ticineto Clough’s stunning essay, this collection weaves together many of
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the most profound changes that have characterized not only critical scholarship in the human
u
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 r
n
‘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
The Affective Turn
paTricia TicineTo clough is Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at
the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York. She is the
author of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology; The End(s)
of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism; and Feminist Thought: Desire, Power
Theorizing The Social
and Academic Discourse. jean halley is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wagner
College in New York City. She is the author of The Boundaries of Touch: Parenting and
Adult-Child Intimacy.
Cover: Emmet Gowin, Edith in Panama, Observing and Remembering, 2001.
Unique gold toned salt print with ink and color added, on handmade Book & Crown water-
marked paper. 10⅛ x 15¼ inches. Courtesy of the artist and Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.
duke univerSiTy preSS
www.dukeupress.edu box 90660 durham, nc 27708-0660 duke
Edited by paTricia TicineTo clough with jean halley
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The Affective Turn
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CONTENTS
................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................vi13471..x.0477i..i.6.........MPHJKDAFITTSMAaDT..An.Anleo.rAhEcO√.Ioi.ytaMcTC.d√rkB.eRrewo.Shie.R noHI én.cOEN.UPwcEn.nrItdo.eNAe.aRC ai.o eoe.dwu‘vlK.rEn A‘.wslI-r.eW Sccu.AIslLCM.dcH .Meh tK:.lU Mi . i:diaE.HaeTN .Yoyn.GWrn.Ngdl. IenAE .eoBC.mRfAT d.Dm’T.ohRt.’orI.MaieY .oelNDaa.aBda.tds.n ntBne. TE:GyI. it. tsAASg.nsIo-T.sI .dmu.MoNLg√w.O.u.efsB.eC.aa i .cB.CEcong.rO.tt.RdfeeLd.is. o.i T AO. Mn.aA.nnnUg:ra aeGWEtl toGHcehogroe snCo noidni mMn Fteyhyom eroCafells
119 Women’s Work and the Ambivalent Gift
of Entropy
DAVID STAPLES
151 Voices from the Teum: Synesthetic Trauma
and the Ghosts of the Korean Diaspora
GRACE M. CHO
170 In Calcutta, Sex Workers Organize
MELISSA DITMORE
187 More Than a Job: Meaning, A√ect, and
Training Health Care Workers
ARIEL DUCEY
209 Haunting Orpheus: Problems of Space
and Time in the Desert
JONATHAN R. WYNN
231 Always on Display: A√ective Production
in the Modeling Industry
ELIZABETH WISSINGER
261 The Wire
JEAN HALLEY
264 Losses and Returns: The Soldier in Trauma
GREG GOLDBERG AND CRAIG WILLSE
287 Bibliography
303 Contributors
305 Index
vi CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
..................................................................................................................................................................TttG.hh..h.r.oe.a.e. r. dC..sA.u. e..h√.an..ae.tt..vece..t e.r.iC. .v.bf..eeo.e. n.r.eT. .tn.tu.e.h. r.r.pe. n..oa . .S.rif..ts t..u it..cah.d..i .epy.c. . .oaC.o.n.l.fl.i.t et..Wsy.c. . t.i.oUi.n.o.m. nnpie rvonoefj r easecnisttdssya Ssyouosf pc wNipehoetyorw tsae eYtd oat bhurkye-
from 1999 to 2006: the Conviction Seminar and The clear Project dedicated
to the study of mass incarceration and the conditions of life for women and
men living with criminal convictions; The Future Matters Project dedicated to
the study of culture, technoscience, and governance; and the Rockefeller Foun-
dation funded project on global capitalism, human rights, and human secur-
ing, Facing Global Capitalism/Finding Human Security: A Gendered Critique.
I want to thank the administrators at the Graduate Center for their support of
the Center for the Study of Women and Society and its projects, especially
Frances Degan Horowitz, William Kelly, Steve Brier, and Brian Swartz. I want
to thank the Ph.D. program in Sociology and the Women’s Studies program at
the Graduate Center and the faculty of the Sociology department at Queens
College who generously gave me time to be Director of the Center for the
Study of Women and Society over the past six years. I want to thank those of
the larger intellectual community beyond cuny who also participated in the
projects of the Center for the Study of Women and Society: Jonathan Cutler,
Norman Denzin, Richard Dienst, Michelle Fine, Stephano Harney, Janet Ja-
kobsen, Michael Hardt, Jill Herbert, Anne Ho√man Anahid Kassabian, David
Kassanjian, Charles Lemert, Michal McCall, Randy Martin, Barbara Martin-
sons, Brian Massumi, Mary Jo Neitz, Jackie Orr, Luciana Parisi, Jasbir Puar,
Amitabh Rai, Joseph Schneider, Joan W. Scott, Steven Seidman, Charles Shep-
herdson, Catherine Silver, Tiziana Terranova, Judith Wittner, and Angela Zito.
I want to thank all my colleagues and fast-made friends at the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton for their support while I was a member there and
to all those at Duke University Press, especially J. Reynolds Smith who has
done so much to make this book project come to completion. My warmest
appreciation to Jean Halley for her patient support throughout and to Una
Chung for her assistance in the final stages of this manuscript and so much
more. And to my family, especially my sister Virginia, my son Christopher, and
the newest member of the family, Elizabeth.
Last but not least, I thank all the members of ‘‘the book group,’’ those whose
writings are presented here, as well as those whose writings are not. The many
hours that I have spent as your teacher and the hours we have spent together
reading and writing are memorable. Filled with the joy, laughter, and occa-
sional tears that make for fresh thought, our time together has been for me an
experience of excellence in teaching and learning. It is to you that I dedicate
this book.
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOREWORD: WHAT AFFECTS ARE GOOD FOR
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the linguistic turn, the cultural turn, and so forth—this focus on a√ects consol-
idates and extends some of the most productive existing trends in research.
Specifically, the two primary precursors to the a√ective turn I see in U.S.
academic work are the focus on the body, which has been most extensively
advanced in feminist theory, and the exploration of emotions, conducted
predominantly in queer theory.∞ Like the other turns, too, however, while
extending previous research, this a√ective turn also opens new avenues for
study, casts previous work in a fresh light, and indicates novel possibilities for
politics. It might be useful, then, to take this opportunity to reflect briefly on
what a√ects are good for.
A focus on a√ects certainly does draw attention to the body and emotions,
but it also introduces an important shift. The challenge of the perspective of
the a√ects resides primarily in the syntheses it requires. This is, in the first
place, because a√ects refer equally to the body and the mind; and, in the
second, because they involve both reason and the passions. A√ects require us,
as the term suggests, to enter the realm of causality, but they o√er a complex
view of causality because the a√ects belong simultaneously to both sides of the
causal relationship. They illuminate, in other words, both our power to a√ect
the world around us and our power to be a√ected by it, along with the relation-
ship between these two powers.
Baruch Spinoza, the philosopher who has advanced furthest the theory of
the a√ects and whose thought is the source, either directly or indirectly, of
most of the contemporary work in this field, grasps the powers of the a√ects in
terms of two sets of parallel developments or correspondences.≤ First, the
mind’s power to think and its developments are, he proposes, parallel to the
body’s power to act. This does not mean that the mind can determine the body
to act, or that the body can determine the mind to think. On the contrary,