The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social
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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 Turn Affective The 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. “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 “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 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 The Affective Turn 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 and Academic Discourse. JEAN HALLEY is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wagner THEORIZING THE SOCIAL 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 \ . THE AFFECTIVE TURN . ......................................................................................................................................................................................................... The Affective Turn ................................................................................................................................ .......................................................... THEORIZING THE SOCIAL . ......................................................................................................................................................................................................... Edited by PATRICIA TICINETO CLOUGH, . with JEAN HALLEY . FOREWORD BY MICHAEL HARDT . Duke University Press . Durham and London . 2007 . ∫ 2007 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ON ACID-FREE PAPER $ DESIGNED BY AMY RUTH BUCHANAN TYPESET IN MINION BY KEYSTONE TYPESETTING, INC. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING- IN-PUBLICATION DATA APPEAR ON THE LAST PRINTED PAGE OF THIS BOOK. CONTENTS ................................................................................................................................ .......................................................... vii Acknowledgments . ix Foreword: What A√ects Are Good For . MICHAEL HARDT . 1 Introduction . PATRICIA TICINETO CLOUGH . 34 The Parched Tongue . HOSU KIM . 47 Techno-Cinema: Image Matters in the . A√ective Unfoldings of Analog Cinema . and New Media . JAMIE ‘‘SKYE’’ BIANCO . 77 Slowness: Notes toward an Economy of . Di√érancial Rates of Being . KAREN WENDY GILBERT . 106 Myocellular Transduction: When My Cells . Trained My Body-Mind . DEBORAH GAMBS . 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 ................................................................................................................................ .......................................................... The A√ective Turn is a collection of essays whose au- . thors have been participants in projects supported by . the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the . Graduate Center of the City University of New York 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 ................................................................................................................................ .......................................................... The essays in this volume are evidence of what Patricia . Clough identifies as an ‘‘a√ective turn’’ in the humani- . ties and social sciences. Like the other ‘‘turns’’ that . academic fields have undergone in recent decades— 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