The affective turn: Political economy, biomedia and bodies

PT Clough - Theory, culture & society, 2008 - journals.sagepub.com
PT Clough
Theory, culture & society, 2008journals.sagepub.com
WHEN IN the early to mid-1990s, critical theorists and cultural critics invited a turn to affect,
they often did so in response to what they argued were limitations of post-structuralism and
deconstruction. As Rei Terada would suggest, there was a growing sense that
poststructuralism generally but deconstruction in particular were 'truly glacial'in the
pronouncement of the death of the subject and therefore had little to do with affect and
emotion (2001: 4). More accurately, as Terada goes on to argue, the turn to affect and …
WHEN IN the early to mid-1990s, critical theorists and cultural critics invited a turn to affect, they often did so in response to what they argued were limitations of post-structuralism and deconstruction. As Rei Terada would suggest, there was a growing sense that poststructuralism generally but deconstruction in particular were ‘truly glacial’in the pronouncement of the death of the subject and therefore had little to do with affect and emotion (2001: 4). More accurately, as Terada goes on to argue, the turn to affect and emotion extended discussions about culture, subjectivity, identity and bodies begun in critical theory and cultural criticism under the influence of post-structuralism and deconstruction. Affect and emotion, after all, point just as well as post-structuralism and deconstruction do to the subject’s discontinuity with itself, a discontinuity of the subject’s conscious experience with the non-intentionality of emotion and affect. However, the turn to affect did propose a substantive shift in that it returned critical theory and cultural criticism to bodily matter which had been treated in terms of various constructionisms under the influence of post-structuralism and deconstruction. The turn to affect points instead to a dynamism immanent to bodily matter and matter generally–matter’s capacity for self-organization in being in-formational–which, I want to argue, may be the most provocative and enduring contribution of the affective turn.
Yet, many of the critics and theorists who turned to affect often focused on the circuit from affect to emotion, ending up with subjectively felt states of emotion–a return to the subject as the subject of emotion. 1 I want to turn attention instead to those critics and theorists who, indebted to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Baruch Spinoza and Henri Bergson, conceptualize affect as pre-individual bodily forces augmenting or diminishing a body’s capacity to act and who critically engage those technologies that are
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