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The Affective Turn

Duke University Press

Introduction

Each self-reproducing system in this generalized production of order out of chaos combines modulations of what could be called, broadly, the "political" dimension ... the "economic" dimension ..., and contributes in a way that could be called "cultural".... For lack of a better word, the chaotic cofunctioning of the political, economic and cultural dimensions could be dubbed the "social"-although all of these designations are fairly arbitrary at this point. -Brian Massumi, "Requiem for Our Prospective Dead (Toward a Participatory Critique of Capitalist Power)"

The increasing significance of affect as a focus of analysis across a number of disciplinary and interdisciplinary discourses is occurring at a time when critical theory is facing the analytic challenges of ongoing war, trauma, torture, massacre, and counter/terrorism. If these world events can be said to be symptomatic of ongoing political, economic, and cultural transformations, the turn to affect may be registering a change in the cofunctioning of the political, economic, and cultural, or what Brian Massumi in the epigraph to this introduction dubs the"social." The essays collected in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social explore these political, economic, and cultural tendencies and investigate how they are being rendered as a shift in thought-captured in critical theory's turn to affect.

The essays collected in The Affective Turn-written when their authors were completing doctoral work in sociology, women's studies, and cultural studies-explore the recent turn in critical theory to affect, especially the conceptualization of affect that draws on the line of thought from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari back through Baruch Spinoza and Henri Bergson. The essays engage the insights of scholars presently working in this line of thought and who treat affectivity as a substrate of potential bodily responses, often autonomic responses, in excess of consciousness. For these scholars, affect refers generally to bodily capacities to affect and be affected or the augmentation 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-that is, aliveness or vitality. Yet affect is not "presocial," as Massumi argues. There is a reflux back from conscious experience to affect, which is registered, however, as affect, such that "past action and contexts are conserved and repeated, autonomically reactivated but not accomplished; begun but not completed." Affect constitutes a nonlinear complexity out of which the narration of conscious states such as emotion are subtracted, but always with "a never-to-be-conscious autonomic remainder."

In this conceptualization, affect is not only theorized in terms of the human body. Affect is also theorized in relation to the technologies that are allowing us both to "see" affect and to produce affective bodily capacities beyond the body's organic-physiological constraints. The technoscientific experimentation with affect not only traverses the opposition of the organic and the non-organic; it also inserts the technical into felt vitality, the felt aliveness given in the preindividual bodily capacities to act, engage, and connect-to affect and be affected. The affective turn, therefore, expresses a new configuration of bodies, technology, and matter instigating a shift in thought in critical theory. It is this shift in thought that the following essays engage. Taken together, the essays explore the movement in critical theory from a psychoanalytically informed criticism of subject identity, representation, and trauma to an engagement with information and affect; from privileging the organic body to exploring nonorganic life; from the presumption of equilibrium-seeking closed systems to engaging the complexity of open systems under far-from-equilibrium conditions of metastability; from focusing on an economy of production and consumption to focusing on the economic circulation of pre-individual bodily capacities or affects in the domain of biopolitical control. Taken together, the essays suggest that attending to the affective turn is necessary to theorizing the social.

This not only means thinking about affect in terms of the historical changes in Western capitalist industrial societies but also recognizing that politics, economy, and culture always have been and are presently being reconfigured differently across various regions of the world. This recognition comes not so much from a comparative but rather from a geopolitical analysis of the ongoing transformation of relations of power across international organizations, regions, nations, states, economies, and private and public spheres. The Affective Turn especially marks the way these historical changes are indicative of the changing global processes of accumulating capital and employing labor power through the deployment of technoscience to reach beyond the limitations of the human in experimentation with the structure and organization of the human body, or what is called "life itself." 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. It also sends thought to the future-to the bodily matter and biotechnologies of technoscientific experimentation.

The affective turn invites a transdisciplinary approach to theory and method that necessarily invites experimentation in capturing the changing cofunctioning of the political, the economic, and the cultural, rendering it affectively as change in the deployment of affective capacity. The authors of the essays collected in The Affective Turn have made use of theory and method both to grasp the changes that constitute the social and to explore them as changes in ourselves, circulating through our bodies, our subjectivities, yet irreducible to the individual, the personal, or the psychological. Irreducible because the shift in thought that The Affective Turn elaborates might itself be described as marking an intensification of self-reflexivity (processes turning back on themselves to act on themselves) in information/communication systems, including the human body; in archiving machines, including all forms of media technologies and human memory; in capital flows, including the circulation of value through human labor and technology; and in biopolitical networks of disciplining, surveillance, and control.

As self-reflexivity becomes internal to these systems, an ongoing and readily available feature of their functioning, it is increasingly realized in feedback loops, which shoot off with varying speeds, in multiple directions, and in multiple temporalities, emerging by chance and out of control-the chaos that, as Massumi proposes, is at this time the condition of possibility for the social. System self-reflexivity shifts from seeking homeostasis and equilibrium to seeking control and freedom in complexity in systems under far-from-equilibrium conditions. In introducing the essays, then, I want to give some sense of the chaotic processes that presently constitute the social. I also want to revisit the various intellectual discourses that the authors and I explored together in order to refind the capacities of critical theory to address the reconfiguration of technology, matter, and bodies-captured in the affective turn.

FROM TRAUMATIZED SUBJECTS TO MACHINIC ASSEMBLAGE

In 1999, I taught a course entitled "Psychoanalysis and Social Theory," which I organized around a list of readings meant to move us through psychoanalytic discourses on trauma, melancholy, and loss and allow us then to turn to Gilles Deleuze's work on time, bodies, images, and memory. I wanted students to examine the ways bodies are thought in relationship both to trauma and to technoscientific productions of bodily capacities beyond the human body's organic-physiological constraints.

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A number of the essays that follow might be described as experimental and autoethnographic as each essay reflects the subjectivity of the writer. But what is more important is the way the essays render changes in processes of embodiment, that is, employ new writing/methods for grasping the materialities and temporalities of bodies. On the one hand, the essays touch on a psychoanalytically oriented account of trauma in order to welcome bodies haunted by memories of times lost and places left. On the other hand, the essays engage technoscientific experimentation in exploring the disjointed temporalities of experiences that cannot be known for certain, cannot be placed once and for all, but which repeatedly pressure the subject with bodily effects.

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Grace M. Cho's essay, "Voices from the Teum: Synesthetic Trauma and the Ghosts of the Korean Diaspora" is a performed movement from a psychoanalytic understanding of trauma to Deleuze's notion of machinic assemblage. Cho's essay focuses on the traumatic history of Korean women from Japanese colonization to the U.S. diaspora. She treats the diasporic body as an effect of a transgenerational haunting and as a composed machinic assemblage. Diasporic bodies, she proposes, carry a vision, a machinic vision, of what they did not see and what an earlier generation saw but could not say they saw. Cho shows the diasporic body as it acts out being haunted, repetitively and melancholically, in a constant movement toward the traumatic experience of an earlier generation, her mother's. Hosu Kim's essay, "The Parched Tongue," focuses on the production of trauma in terms of a body without organs, a body that does not privilege the organism, and thereby lets loose body parts for a machinic assemblage. One body part in particular constitutes the focus of Kim's "Parched Tongue": the mouth, its ability or failure to shape words. In the aftermath of the move from Korea to the United States, the mouth of the diasporic body holds a cracked tongue, having become parched with envy in an economy of English. It is made to gather all sensations, the effects of the history of the American Dream gone nightmarish, the textualization of which invents: a broken English gone poetic.

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It is not surprising that students and I first began to engage the shift in thought in critical theory and the attendant intensification of self-reflexivity through a discussion of psychoanalysis-the self-reflective methodology of choice of critical theory just before the turn of the century. Nor is it so surprising that this engagement would lead us to move through trauma studies, and the queering of melancholy and loss, in order eventually to think about technoscience and rethink technology, time, and the ontology of bodily matter. After all, in the last years of the twentieth century, critical theory came to focus on trauma, loss, and melancholy borrowing from psychoanalytic discourse. That it did so at the turn of the century might well be expected, but what is nonetheless important to notice is how psychoanalytic discourse about trauma could so ably serve as a summary rendition of the epistemological crisis in Western thought, which critical theory instigated, at the same time that psychoanalysis could offer an opening to the future of thought in the ontology it proposes for bodies, temporality, memory, and materiality.

Even before the turn of the century, critical theory had been engaged with psychoanalysis, especially with a Lacanian understanding of the subject, which emphasized the human being's entrance into subjectivity and language through a subjugation to the symbolic law of the father-the oedipal law that demands that the infant-child submit to symbolic castration, to a loss of wholeness, a loss of what Jacques Lacan had referred to as the imaginary wholeness of the mirror stage. While the subject does submit to the law, as Lacan argued, there also is a refusal of the law, so that the subject is shaped around a lack in being, a castration both avowed and disavowed in the unconscious, which sends unconscious desire along a chain of signifiers in a blind search to recapture what is lacking. The subject is shaped around a void, a real that is always already lost and only leaves traces of its loss as traumatic effects.

It is in the Lacanian understanding of the subject that trauma is linked to the "Real," which is equated with the "unassimilable," presenting itself in analysis, as Lacan put it, "in the form of the trauma, determining all that follows, and imposing on it an apparently accidental origin." For Lacan, the Real is unassimilable because it is nonsymbolizable. It is that which is in excess of the symbolic, an exclusion or void interior to the symbolic but not reducible to the symbolic or the imaginary. Rather, this interior exclusion or void in the symbolic constitutes the very condition of possibility of the symbolic, what will surface seemingly accidentally as an origin of subjectivity, identity, meaning, and materiality.

Critical theory was not only influenced by Lacan's understanding of the subject and unconscious desire. The Lacanian understanding of the interrelationship of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic also took hold in critical theory as it explored a more general treatment of the unassimilable. Critical theory turned psychoanalysis into a provocative and productive way of thinking politically about subjectivity, identity, meaning, bodies, and reality. For one, it retraced the unassimilable presenting itself in thought, finding the traces of the unthought of authorized knowledge. It did so often on behalf of those excluded from authorship or the authority of knowledge.

In taking up trauma, critical theory was able to transition from the deconstruction of the Subject of Western modernity to the production of multiple subjectivities and multiple modernities expressed in new forms of history, often presented at first in autobiographical experimental writings by diasporic subjects. These experimental forms of writing render the traumatic effect of the long exclusion from writing, which haunts the writing as a motive force. These writings are traumatizing as they call into question the truth of representation, the certainty of memory, if not the very possibility of knowledge of the past.

Just as experimentation in autoethnographic writing was being elaborated in critical theory and cultural criticism, trauma was being discussed in terms of its effects on memory, its producing in the subject the incapacity to retrieve the past, or to speak truth about it. In her take on various debates over the effects of trauma, 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. It cannot be said that there is repression of what is experienced. There is no repression and therefore no possibility of projection or displacement onto the other. Instead, trauma is drawn back into the ego. The ego is overrun by the object or event, fixating the ego.

The ego is put into something like a trance state, what Leys has referred to as the ego's "mesmerized immersion in the object," a "fascinated attention" to the object or the event. There is a coalescence of the ego with the object or event of fascination, such that it might be said that there is no ego, surely not one distinguishable from the object. 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 and therefore, incorporated memory, body memory, or cellular memory. As a surfacing of a difficulty in remembering or in being certain about the truth of memory, the body becomes a memorial, a ghosted bodily matter.

(Continues...)

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