B3 W1: Gender and Social Inclusion - The Affective Turn

Clough, P. T., with Halley, J. O. (2007). The affective turn : Theorizing the social. Durham: Duke University Press. (Introduction Clough and Foreword Michael Hardt)

“The challenge of the perspective of the affects resides primarily in the syntheses it requires.” Viiii

“affects refer equally to the body and the mind” viiii

Affects require us “to enter the realm of causality, but they offer a complex view of causality because the affects belong simultaneously to both our power to affect the world around us and our power to be affected by it, along with the relationship between those two powers.” Viiii

Baruch Spinoza: the mind’s power to think its developments are parallel to the body’s power to act p.viiii

“Spinoza maintains that mind and body are autonomous but that they nonetheless proceed or develop in parallel.” P.x

“each time we consider the mind’s power to think, we must try to recognise how the body’s power to act corresponds to it” p.x

“the body’s power to act corresponds to its sensitivity to other bodies.” P.x

“The perspective of the affects does not assume that reason and passion are the same, but rather poses them together on a continuum.” P.x

 "the perspective of the affects requires us constantly to pose as a problem the relation between actions and passions, between reason and the emotions." p.x

"the affects straddle these two divides: between the mind and the body, and between actions and passions." p.xi

Affective labour: "such labor engages at once with rational intelligence and with the passions or feeling" p.xi such as sex work, health care work, flight attendants

"affect refers generally to bodily capacities to affect and be affected or the augmentations or diminution of a body's capacity to act, to engage, and to connect, such that autoaffection is linked to the self-feeling of being alive" p2

"The affective turn throws thought back to the disavowals constitutive of Western industrial capitalist societies, bringing forth ghosted bodies and the traumatized remains of erased histories." p.3 (links to Gordon Avery 'Ghostly Matters')

"Ruth Leys proposed that trauma is a forgetting without memory, so that traumatic effects are a symptomology substituting for what was never experienced as such." p.6

"Trauma is the engulfment of the ego in memory. But memory might better be understood not as unconscious memory so much as memory without consciousness" p.6

"trauma is acted out or compulsively repeated, a seemingly wasteful but actually productive repetition. The effort to overcome the repetition fails and fails to put an end to forgetting." p.7

"the body is materialized as ghosted or haunted by a loss that is endlessly repeated, performed albeit with a possibility of difference in the interval between repetitions." p.7

The social serves "only as a site for the deployment of power in the imposition of a cultural form." p.8

Define autopoiesis: a self-maintaining body, autonomous and operationally closed

"while relating to its environment, the organism seeks homeostasis and equilibrium for itself; it is in terms of or on behalf of its homeostasis and equilibrium that the organism selects its environment. Therefore, the environment's effect on the organism is, in part, selected by the organism." p.11

"the organism is opened to the possibility of change in its organization and structure and is better understood as a machinic assemblage" p.12

"A machinic assemblage connects and convolutes the disparate in terms of potential fields and virtual elements and crosses techno-ontological thresholds without fidelity to relationships of genus or species." Keith Ansall Pearson (p.12)

"Rather than presuming matter or the nonorganic to be inert, such that form is imposed on it, matter is understood to be in-formational, that is, form arises out of matter's capacity for self-organization out of complexity." p.12

Time - it can be 'the virtual' or 'the actual' - "The virtual is not the possible that is to be realized; instead, the virtual calls forth actualisations that have no resemblance to the virtual." p.13

"Actualization is an experiment in virtuality, an affecting or materializing of a virtual series." p.13

The virtual is linked to the 'time-image'.

"The time-image gives a direct image of time and therefore differs from what [Deleuze] refers to as "the movement-image," the most important variant of which is "the action-image"." p.13

"It is not a matter of representation, but rather a matter of images moving in conjunction with each other at different angles and speeds." p.13

"the time-image points to the productivity of time, the movement of time outside the subject, and suggests a different sort of memory, or storage, which is readily linked to electronic imaging or digital technologies." p.13

What is 'the crack'? For Deleuze, "The crack is rather the potential for swerving in terms of inheritance, the potential for swerving to the future." p.13

"What the body is thought to be, Luciana Parisi and Tizina Terranova argue, is a matter of a historically specific organization of forces brought into being by capital and discursive investments." p.16

"Making an organism into a human subject, this regime of representation centers on the perception of the body mirrored, from a distance, as a whole. The investment in the body as organism makes the body a closed system drawing energy from the outside, thus drawing the body back into homeostasis and equilibrium, which leads inevitable to entropic heat-death." p.16

There has been a shift from the society of discipline, to a society of control, "Control is the effect and the condition of possibility of an investment in the reorganization of material forces, of bodily matter." p.17

How Claude Shannon theorized information, "meaning is secondary to information; information is primarily a matter of contact and connectibility, a modulation of affectivity and attention by fashioning or reducing the real through the exclusion of possibilities." p.17

How Norbert Wiener theorized information, "information was an organization or an ordering in the indifferent differences of entropy or noise, and thus was to be understood to decrease entropy." (entropy representing chaos or disorder) p.18

"To "see" matter as informational is to recognize matter's inherent capacity for self-organizing out of complexity, or to see "the imperceptible speed of matter"" p.18

"The target of control is not the production of subjects who behaviors express internalized social norms; rather, control aims at a never-ending modulation of moods, capacities, affects, and potentialities, assembled in genetic codes, identification numbers, ratings profiles, and preference listings, that is to say, in bodies of data and information." p.19

"Preindividual bodily capacities are made the site of capital investment for the realization of profit - not only in terms of biotechnology, biomedicalization, and genetics, but also in terms of a technologically dispersed education/training in self-actualization and self-control at the preindividual, individual, communal, national and transnational levels." p.21

"In the affect economy, value is sought in the expansion or contraction of affective capacity. In this sense, affect is a power or potential that cannot be limited." p.25