Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation by Lisa Blackman (review)

Lisa Blackman’s latest book Immaterial Bodies draws from the rich literature that has formed around body and affect studies (Blackman is the current editor of Body and Society). It well describes how, following the turn to affect, we have witnessed the near dissolution of the subject. However, Blackman makes the case that even if the body is no longer an image or self-contained entity, subjectivity has not gone away. So what has it become? Lining up her influences from Frank’s early sociology of the body to Featherstone and Turner’s co-editing of Body and Society in the mid 1990s, Blackman sets about deftly answering this question by reentering into the current turn to affect, and almost synonymous revival of nineteenth-century crowd theory, from a unique position. That is to say, although often recast as a biomediation or assemblage, there is still a requirement, Blackman argues, to attend to this immaterial corporality and locate the subject of affect.

The risks associated with introducing a theory of subjectivity to affect studies are fully grasped by Blackman. There is always the problem of undoing all the positive work done to wrestle back the human experience of the world from the relations of interiority found in cognitive psychology and phenomenological studies. But this is not an attempt to psychologize affect (p24). Instead Blackman looks to decouple psychological processes from the self-contained subject. The study of the transmission of material affect must, as Blackman points out, account for the immateriality of what is transmitted. This post-psychological study of affect does not therefore, like many other recent accounts, move to the popular centre ground of current cognitive neuroscience to find its concepts. Blackman does something really interesting here. Rather than seeking to confirm the subject of affect through spurious references to pop science, Immaterial Bodies moves the inquiry to the margins of science, uncovering fascinating material on crowds, voice hearing, suggestibility, mental touch, rhythm and the double brain. Highlights include references to the work of Sidis (a student of James) on suggestion, Tuke’s understanding of how the psychic becomes somatic and the application of Gibbs mimetic communication to nineteenth-century ideas about telepathy, hypnosis, delusions and hallucinations.

Blackman’s dialogue with neuroscience treads carefully, avoiding positivism, and a social theory that defines itself as an inside set against an outside, all the while taking seriously the conceptual traffic between science and the humanities. Indeed, amid much neurospeculation Blackman’s book is a significant and refreshing conversation at the margins, which unpicks what it calls the neurophysiological body. Essential reading.