The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (review)

Spinoza wrote that there is “no small difference” between “the gladness by which a drunk is led and the gladness a philosopher possesses,” but one wonders if this assessment was not a little hasty (91).¹ After all, so much of the last half century’s philosophical theory has the carnivalesque air—the blurry and careening mischievousness—of the slightly inebriated. Many would cite the collaborative work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, with its rowdy ingenuity and mouthy, Nietszchean nerve, as philosophy under the influence par excellence, their own stated preference for the “sober gesture, [the] act of consistency” notwithstanding (344).² And, if the development of this schizo-philosophy were not proof enough, there is a second sense in which Spinoza’s claim troubles the contemporary sensibility, because it raises the question of how one might gauge such affective “difference” across the social field separating “drunk” from “philosopher,” or, for that matter, anyone from anyone else. What would it mean for post-millennial theory to trace the ways in which our bodies “possess” or are “led” by affective flows and just what is at stake in this tracing? Here, not (just) the drunkenness, but the richness and rigor of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as their influences, Henri Bergson and Spinoza, prove most useful, as testified by many of the essays in the recent collection The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social.

Without slighting the collection’s other essayists, Patricia Ticineto Clough’s introduction is at once the volume’s most incisive and extensive entry. There, Clough lays out the terms of a considerable shift in how the social body is being figured by an increasing number of scholars in both the social sciences and the humanities, suggesting a broad movement “from a psychoanalytically informed criticism of subject identity, representation, and trauma to an engagement with information and affect” (2). Since the volume’s contributors build on an expansive neo-Spinozan formulation of affects as “bodily capacities to act, to engage, and to connect, such that autoaffection is linked to the self-feeling of being alive,” theorizing sociality anew is a knotty task (2). Clough rightly emphasizes that this paradigm shift involves more than simply valorizing process over identity or, in high theory parlance, system reflexivity over discursive subjectification. It requires attending to the new set of political problems presented by the increasingly intensified “feedback loops” in interwoven systems such as the human body, “archiving machines, including all forms of media and human memory,” as well as flows of capital, human labor, and technology (3). The essay contains many felicitous theoretical intersections, as when Clough traces, in lucid, accessible prose, connections between Deleuze’s concept of the control society, the work of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (the last of whom pens the volume’s forward), and George Caffentzis’ analysis of neoliberalism’s genesis. Thus, while the introduction contextualizes the volume’s argumentative terrain for specialized readers, it will also effectively tutors those readers who are only faintly acquainted with the organizing terms of this corner of cultural and critical theory.

Beyond the forward and introduction, the collection is less consistently rousing, but still offers numerous worthwhile studies. The most salient source of this inconsistency is the fact that exceptionally thoughtful socio-theoretic meditations are placed beside outré auto-ethnographic texts, which this reviewer (without wishing to single out any particular essay for sanction) found to be fusions of often jargon-heavy speculation, personal anecdote, and fragmentary poetry. One must acknowledge, however, that the writers of these less conventional essays are only taking the challenge of “the affective turn” seriously, incorporating the stress on affect and systemic reflexivity into their methodologies and extending a genre of inquiry going back to Antonin Artaud. Not all readers will be convinced by these experiments, whatever their pedigree or rationale, but the virtue of the overall collection does not depend on the success of its most adventurous writers, for it also offers numerous studies that...