The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (review)

To the numerous turbulent and productive "turns" of the 1990s, Patricia Ticineto Clough adds the advent of the "affective turn," which she sees as an expression of "a new configuration of bodies, technology, and matter instigating a shift in thought in critical theory" brought on by transformations in the economic, political, and cultural realms (1-2). In tracing the genealogy of affect in her introduction through Deleuze and Guattari to Spinoza and Bergson, Clough establishes affect as "potential bodily [and] often autonomic responses" (2); different from emotion, which reflects in part the product of meaning-making processes, affect exceeds consciousness: it refers to pre-subjective agency, a force that delimits bodily boundaries, determining "bodily capacities to affect and be affected" (2).

The shift in thought that Clough describes challenges some of the basic metaphors of life itself-from its most basic components to its attendant cosmologies-to 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 the now axiomatic laws of thermodynamics as a product of the nineteenth century and of industrial capitalism, and challenges the 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 the molecular and cellular levels, opening up and radicalizing the "organism model" 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 the body is well illustrated by Elizabeth Wissinger in her chapter on affective labor and the modeling industry, where the model is shown to work in dynamic interaction with information and televisual technologies, making body and image available for circulation in order "to feed the endless demand for images . . . in circulating affective energy in an affect economy." In this sense, what Sara Ahmed calls "the very effect of the 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-à-vis psychoanalysis, and rethinks the "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[s], engineer[s], and mutate[s] life itself" (266).

A subgroup of the chapters are concerned with the intersection of theory, body, affect, and capital. David Staple's chapter reviews the transformation of capitalism from a thermodynamic model to a turbulent system via the flows of female labor, reconsidering the concept of the gift in terms of the giving of time and information. Ariel Ducey's chapter on healthcare workers offers concrete examples of the perpetuation of training and certification programs, which "refashio[n] . . . work itself as an object or arena of stimulation and engagement"-i.e., of affect. Workers' experience of work is adjusted "through their bodies, or through the noncognitive level that in fact conditions which emotions or attitudes can even be expressed" (202).

The book is conscious of the need to "employ new writing/methods for grasping the materialities and temporalities of bodies" (4), and includes "experimental and authoethnographic" writing, which can be seen most explicitly at play in the chapters by Hosu Kim, Deborah Gambs, Grace M. Cho, Jonathan Wynn, and Jean Halley. The overall effect of these multi-genre and multi-modal techniques is somewhat mixed, and to this reader, somewhat unevenly executed. Some, like Kim's "The Parched Tongue," do interesting multi-lingual work in a prose poem-like form, defamiliarizing both English and Korean; however, at times, Kim's approach seems to verge on the prosaic and familiar. Gambs attempts to illustrate a particular process of writing, kinetic energy, and cellular awareness primarily through the excessive use of verbs and adverbs, highlighting perhaps inadvertently how difficult...