The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (review)

Abstract

Clough, Patricia Ticineto, with Jean Halley, eds. 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing Social. Durham: Duke University Press. $84.95 he. $23.95 sc. xiii + 313 pp.To numerous turbulent and productive turns of 1990s, Patricia Ticineto Clough adds advent of turn, which she sees as an expression of new configuration of bodies, technology, and matter insti- gating a shift in thought in critical theory brought on by transformations in economic, political, and cultural realms (1-2). In tracing genealogy of affect in her introduction through Deleuze and Guattari Spinoza and Bergson, Clough establishes affect as potential [and] often autonom- ic responses (2); different from emotion, which reflects in part product of meaning-making processes, affect exceeds consciousness: it refers pre- subjective agency, a force that delimits boundaries, determining bodily affect and be affected (2).The shift in thought that Clough describes challenges some of basic metaphors of life - from its most basic components its attendant cosmologies - such an extent that I found my studies as a biology major in college poor preparation indeed. In her chapter contribution, Karen Wendy Gilbert situates now axiomatic laws of thermodynamics as a product of nineteenth century and of industrial capitalism, and challenges widely accepted notion that matter and energy are governed by a tendency towards equilibrium or homeostasis within a closed system. The postmodern mantra about fragmented identity is revisited at molecular and cellular levels, opening up and radicalizing organism of subjectivity- - -as unified and enclosed by a discrete boundary or skin - into a concern with affect as flows of energy that pass between porous bodies in open systems or networks.This reconceptualization of body is well illustrated by Elizabeth Wissinger in her chapter on affective labor and modeling industry, where model is shown work in dynamic interaction with information and televisual technologies, making body and image available for circulation in order to feed endless demand for images ... in circulating affective energy in an affect economy. In this sense, what Sara Ahmed calls the very effect of surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds (232). Greg Goldberg and Craig Willse's contribution revisits theories of trauma, which presuppose a thermodynamic self vis-a-vis psychoanalysis, and rethinks injured soldier as an assemblage of capacities that are newly constituted through rehabilitation. Such rehabilitation is now understood as an effect/process of biopolitical control that continually calculate^], engineer^], and mutate [s] life itself (266).A subgroup of chapters are concerned with intersection of theory, body, affect, and capital. David Staple's chapter reviews transformation of capitalism from a thermodynamic model a turbulent system via flows of female labor, reconsidering concept of gift in terms of giving of time and information. Ariel Ducey's chapter on healthcare workers offers concrete examples of perpetuation of training and certification programs, which refashio[n] . …