Clough, Patricia Ticineto, and Jean Halley, eds. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social.

• Author: Hirsch, Mike
• Position: Book review

Clough, Patricia Ticineto, and Jean Halley, eds. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. 311 pages. Paper, $23.95.

The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social is a collection of works by authors affiliated with the Center for the Study of Women and Society at City University of New York between 1999 and 2006. In this text, affect, traditionally thought of as emotions or feelings, is the object of study. We are told early on, however, that this traditional understanding of affect needs revision. This collection of a dozen essays written primarily by sociologists taps into "the increasing significance of affect as a focus of analysis across a number of disciplines" (p. 1).

In his foreword, Michael Hardt asserts that affect refers "equally to the body and the mind.... They involve both reason and the passions" and "enter the realm of causality" (p. ix). In her introduction, Patricia Ticineto Clough discerns a "shift in thought--captured in critical theory's turn to affect" (p. 1). It is a "transdisciplinary" (p. 3) turn that requires a rethinking of "psychoanalytical discourse" (p. 8), the "preservation of the equilibrium or homeostasis of the bodily ego" (p. 10), and a move toward a vision of a world of endosymbios from "which novelty emerges" (p. 12) and where technology reaches "affective bodily capacities" (p. 15). For Clough, the reach of the affective turn is broad, deep, and necessary in theorizing the social in a world where there has been "a shift in governance from discipline to control" (p. 15) and where an "affect economy" has emerged in which "value is sought in the expansion or contraction of affective capacity" (p. 25).

While the foreword and introduction make strong claims regarding features of the postmodern world which engendered the need for the affective turn in social research, the essays themselves are uneven in their ability to deliver a clear understanding of the nature of affect or affective research. Several essays ("The Parched Tongue," "Myocellular Transduction: When My Cells Trained My Body-Mind," "Haunting Orpheus: Problems of Space and Time in the Desert," and "The Wire"), which Clough refers to as "experimental and autoethnographic" (p. 4), are nearly or completely devoid of social-science discourse. While interesting in and of themselves, one suspects that these essays are designed to evoke an affective response in the reader, leading to an experiential understanding of...