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REVIEW ESSAY

Melissa Autumn White

Critical Compulsions: On the Affective Turn

A Review of Clough, Patricia Ticineto with Jean Halley, eds. 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Manning, Erin. 2007. Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Orr, Jackie. 2006. Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
I cant decide whether you represent our future or our demise.1

[T]he question of the future is an affective one; it is a question of hope for what we might yet be, as well as fear for what we could become.2

The question of the present is also an affective one. This review essay brings together a cluster of books that, in a nest of arcs, contribute to what Patricia Ticineto Clough has aptly dubbed the affective turn. Why this (re)turn to affect? Why now?

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The signal light for the affective turn in critical theory has, in fact, been flickering for some time. A short, far from exhaustive list of some of the books that palpably announce what might even be thought of as a theoretical clamour (Obert 2006: 1) for feeling, include Sara Ahmeds The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), Brian Massumis Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002), Elspeth Probyns Blush: Faces of Shame (2005), Denise Rileys Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2005), Teresa Brennans posthumously published The Transmission of Affect (2004), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris consideration of affect in their Deleuzo-Marxian Multitude (2004) and Empire (2000), Sianne Ngais Ugly Feelings (2005), Lauren Berlants recent work on cruel optimism and her edited volumes Intimacy (2000) and Compassion (2004), Anne Cvetkovichs beautifully titled An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Franks earlier engagement with Tomkins Affect Theory in Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins in Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (1995; republished in Sedgwicks 2003 Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity), and perhaps most recently in Jasbir K. Puars much anticipated Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalisms in Queer Times (2007). Along with these texts, an international group of scholars facilitated by Sneja Gunew at the University of British Columbia has been working for the last few years toward what they call a decolonization of affect theory.3 In excess of these texts, the collaborations of Feel Tank Chicago and Public Feeling cells in Austin and New York have been bringing together artists, activists and academics since the turn of this century to politicize the privatizing or alienating effects of emotion. The movement of affect as a theoretical object beyond its provenance (and prevalence) in psychoanalysis and trauma studies into social theory more broadly demands a deft synthesis and deconstruction of the binarization of modes of circulation and representation, the psychic and the social, the biological and the political, the technological and the aesthetic. Michael Hardt, in his foreword to Cloughs The Affective Turn, astutely suggests that the precursors to the (re)turn to affect in the humanities and social sciences can be found in feminist considerations of the body and queer theorys investments in structures of feeling such as shame and pride (Williams 1961; Probyn 2005). The affective turn might equally be thought to emerge from the technopolitics of late capitalism, and the convergence of cyber, multimedia, information, and science studies with studies of the body, matter, being and time. Indeed, [t]he affective turn ... expresses a new configuration of bodies, technology, and matter instigating a shift in thought in critical theory such that attending to the affective turn is necessary to theorizing the social (Clough 2007: 2). The turn to affect is occurring at a time when critical theory is facing the analytic challenges of ongoing war, trauma, torture, massacre, and counter/terrorism (1). These themes (and their effects) run through the essays gathered in The Affective

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Turn: Theorizing the Social. Taken together, the essays consider affective labour and its relations to national and global political economy, the materialization of social difference in the geopolitical marking of populations as with and without value, and the intensifying convergence of necropolitics (Mbembe 2003) with biopolitics. Predominantly written by authors completing PhD studies in sociology, cultural studies and womens studies the essays Clough brings together collectively develop a thread of thought that turns from psychoanalytic approaches to subjectivity, identification and trauma towards Deleuzian notions of assemblage, information flows and affect (1-2). This volume thus contributes to a mode of theorizing that makes useful distinctions between the oft-conflated concepts of feeling, emotion and affect. Where emotion might be thought of as a capture of affectan intensity owned and recognized by the subject (Massumi 2002: 28), and feeling closely linked to the perception and movement of sensation, Clough et al. draw on Deleuze (and ultimately Spinoza) to consider affect as intensity related to a capacity and potential to act. In a Spinozan sense, affect refers to the power to act, the simultaneous power to affect the world and to be affected by it. The essays collected in this volume engage with a shift from thinking power in Foucauldian terms (discipline and representation) to that of control and information, or the ways in which bodies themselves have become informational matter (think of the human genome project). Clough contends that the present moment of late capitalism has ushered in a biopolitical shift toward what Deleuze has called societies of control (Clough 2007: 17).4 As she explains in an earlier article, in the societies of control:
The target of control is not subjects whose behavior expresses internalized social norms; rather, control aims at a never-ending modulation of moods, capacities, affects, potentialities, assembled in genetic codes, identification numbers, ratings profiles and preference listings; that is to say, bodies of data and information (including the human body as information and data). Control works at the molecular level of bodiesand not necessarily, or only, human bodies. Control points to the increasing abandonment of socialization and education of the individual subject through interpellation to, and through, national and familial ideological apparatuses. (Clough 2003: 360)

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Building on these insights, the essays in The Affective Turn demonstrate the ways that a turn to affect can deepen and extend analyses that work at the level of representation, subjectivity and identity politics through a recognition that the global majority are living not (only) in relation to rights-bearing personhood, but, as Jasbir K. Puar puts it, are coming under control as part of one or many populations, not as individuals but as dividuals (Puar 2007: 205, emphases added). With this in mind, the essays in Cloughs edited volume are creative and literary works firmly situated within critical political economy, advancing tender

and nuanced analyses of some of the most devastating and difficult contemporary transcultural and geopolitical manifestations of late capitalism. With a less clearly articulated set of political commitments, Erin Manning also works with/from Deleuze in Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty, which takes as fundamental to her fascinating exploration of tango the question What can a body do?
[E]verything from a dance of solitudes to a nomadic movement of cultural displacement to a fierce locator of national identity. [Tango] is a dance of encounter and disencounter, a voyeuristic embrace of repressed sensuality and a complex network of (mis)understood directions. (Manning 2007: 2)

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With an original thesis that a consideration of touch might offer resources to rethink politics beyond the territorializations of the nation-state through a focus on becoming bodies in relation, Manning considers tango as a political gesture [...] of the between (17). That is to say, in the moments of reaching toward one another, in the confusion of leading and following that tango invokes (to lead is also to follow the others response to the lead), a rethinking of the politics of belonging might be invoked. She writes beautifully of tango as born of disillusionment and disorientation, the music and dance of migration and immigration, of love and loss and as lending its name to all forms of exile and post-national attachments (17). There is a kind of political promise, perhaps, in tango that Manning wants us to listen very carefully for. But the listening by the end of the text has ultimately become a very strained one given the often muted development of the political implications of her many progressions. In a way, a continual deferral to Massumis interpretations of Deleuzes music (affective and theoretical compositions) covers over the potentially radical and intricate work that this text sets out to do. The strengths of The Politics of Touch lie in its insistence on ontogenetics over ontology, its partial genealogy of tango and its many provocations to rethink the body-in-relation, as well as its suggestiveness about how an attentiveness to the sensing body might reconfigure and/or disrupt state-based political theory. For example, in her introduction, Manning astutely observes that:
To be qualified politically within the nation-state system is to reside within the iterable bounds of citizenship. In this system, territory and identity are conflated, assuring strict narratives of national identity that frame the grids of qualification that permit us to speak authoritatively about the state as the organization of space and time. Yet, touch exceeds the state, calling forth that which cannot be securely organized. (xxi)

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Certainly, touch exceeds, and might even unsettle, the state; for theory to become meaningful, however, some constraints or contours are required around free flows of thought. As Andr Green suggests, affectand by extension, affective writingmay well constitute a challenge to thought (Green 1977: 129), but,

particularly in terms of critical theory, affect ought also to prompt thought. Crucial contours then might take the form of reflexivity, or an auto-interpretation of association, or be expressed in terms of grounded political critique (of, for example, war, neo-imperialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, immigration regimes, capitalism). While Manning suggests, repeatedly, that her project in The Politics of Touch counters a state logic and is positioned to subvert the convergence of territory and identity through a Deleuzian deterritorialization of the body and a privileging of ontogenics over ontology, there is an unmistakable vacuousness to this text that might have been avoided had the political been more fleshed out, or specified. At the outset of chapter four, for example, Manning writes that what a body can do exceeds linguistic signification (86) and that, with this declaration, she intends to extend on Judith Butlers seminal work in Bodies that Matter (1993) on the performativity of sex and gender as inherently embedded in regimes of signification. She suggests that while she intends to remain cognizant of the centrality of language to politics, the chapter under consideration will explore the ways in which bodies touch at languages sensual limits (Manning 2007: 86). Almost as soon as she says she will do this work of extension, however, she seems to drop Butler even as she argues that the sharing of touch in Argentine tango can also cross heterosexualized gender boundaries which makes it potentially all the more compelling (88). While the relations of touch, and specifically the confusion of leading and following (i.e., the following or listening that leading requires) in tango might disrupt what are understoodwithin a heterosexist socio-political grid to be articulations of masculinity and femininityto iterate it this way is also to reproduce the hegemony of the heteronormative. That is, to read tango within this logic as against this logic cant avoid repeating precisely what it might otherwise undo. Here is where a careful engagement with Butler could be fruitful. Manning, however, seems content to display admittedly interesting ideas without having the patience to develop them further. There are countless examples of this kind of impatience throughout her text, so much so that one is left wondering if the movement referred to in the subtitle of The Politics of Touch might well describe the writing one encounters in the textone continually on the move, dropping threads as quickly as they are picked up. This might give us pause to consider the difficulty of developing (adequate) theory, and the politics of knowledge production as counter-hegemonic. While Deleuze and Guattari are known for developing and lauding the political importance of schizoanalysis, their work is highly rigorous even in the continual leaping off that it does. In other words, schizoanalysis ought to be understood as a collaborative praxis rather than a style that can be readily appropriated. The caution I am raising here is not unlike Timothy Brennans recent critique of what he sees as the worrisome appeal of Derridas mode of address; his critique, as I understand it, is not so much of Derridas thought, or of the fact that Derridas writing is

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appealing, but of the political economy of translation, publication and the rush to academic knowledge production that obscures (if not obliterates) the difficulty of his work, and allows the stylistic elements to be appropriated in politically dangerous ways.5 In contrast to Mannings methodology, Jackie Orr develops an experimental writing praxis that is as creative as it is rigorous in her distinctive Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder. Orr successfully develops a kind of collage/montage approach to telling more than one story at a time that she attributes to Dadaist and surrealist modes of disruption (Orr 2006: 29). Her genealogical approach to collective and individualized forms of panic and the production of panic disorder combines multi-media archival research with personal narrative, and demonstrates the ways that, as she puts it, [e]ffective collage is also affective, opening up emotional, sometimes contagious, not fully conscious forms of feeling (ibid.). As she self-reflexively suggests:
[T]he stylistic composition of Panic Diariesits commitment to performative writing as one possible, one imperfectly political, form of social science scholarshipis as much a part of the story I tell here as the historical plotlines. It is an extended experiment with social science writing as also a literary project. [] Performing sociology as a creative project helps to stage the social as creative force. If society is always more or less a work of art, could sociology really be anything else? (28)

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In order to tell the stories of Panic Diaries, Jackie Orr had to think carefully about how panicked bodies might be able to be heard; that is to say how to de-subjugate the knowledges of these symptomatic bodies (19). It is these ethicopolitical considerations that lead her to develop an unrepeatable methodology of writing. Her exemplary fifth chapter, to offer one instance, draws on notes that she kept in a diary of her time as a research subject for a clinical trial of the antipanic attack drug Xanax, and these notes are crosscut with a partial genealogy of the techno-sociological production of what has come to be commonly known as panic disorder. Extending Foucaults methodological and philosophical approaches to the body, Jackie Orrs work on an affective disorder, that has moved from a collective and contagious phenomenon to an individualized and medicalized dis-ease, has much to contribute to feminist theory and sociological critiques of science, medicine and psychiatry. Her unique contribution also sets the bar high for developing affective modes of expression. Experimental modes of writing certainly run across the texts under review here. The cadence of thought has affective effects, and in an unprecedented moment of academic and independent publishing, authors no doubt feel an increasing pressure to produce knowledge that is not only cutting edge, but might also carry the capacity to engender a pause for thought, a capturing (and politicization) of attention that in late capitalism is ever more elusive. Meanwhile the neoliberal

restructuring of the university is imposing limits on politicized knowledge production through a political economy of research funding that will increasingly require those of us in the social sciences and (especially) the humanities to justify our work as relevant to administering the world (away) (Clough 2007: 28). Against this, texts like those gathered together along the affective turn may, as Patricia Clough reflects of her volume, always be marked as inadequate, which is to say:
Inadequate confrontation because the disciplines, having gone professional, can only judge what is not already marked for their easy assimilation as inadequate, unprofessional, even unethical or criminal. The essays that follow go right ahead and step out into an inadequate confrontation with the social, changed and changing, which exceeds all efforts to contain it, even our efforts to contain its thought in the affective turn. So we have what is left, the remains of learning together, encouraging us to be braver, more creative and even less adequate next time. So we leave you not only with our honoured ghosts but with bodies, and bodily capacities, affective capacities to act, to attend, to feel, to feel alive. (28-29, emphases added)

To feel alive, and to revive critical theory through the affective turn, may be a kind of compulsion that we ought to strive to protect and nurture. No, the turn to affect will not be a panacea for all that ails the left, but far from a demise of critique, it is a promising point of departure toward rethinking the relations between life and death, and our fundamental dependency on one another. We do not even know what a body can do, and yet for too many people, in too many places, the shots are firing all around.
Notes 1. Carrie to Samantha, Sex and the City, Season 2, Episode 11. 2. Sara Ahmed 2004: 183-84. 3. One of the outcomes of this reading group was an international colloquium hosted by Sneja Gunew and the Centre for Research in Womens Studies and Gender Relations entitled Decolonizing Affect Theory: Is Affect Multicultural? at UBC, 25-27 June 2006. 4. See Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control, October 59(1992): 3-7. 5. Brennan discussed this at length in his keynote address at the Transnationalism, Activism, Art conference held at the University of Toronto, 9 March 2007. References Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York and London: Routledge.

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Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York and London: Routledge.

Clough, Patricia Ticineto. 2003. Affect and Control: Rethinking the Body Beyond Sex and Gender. Feminist Theory 4(3): 359-64.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. Postscript on the Societies of Control. October 59:3-7.

Green, Andr. 1977. Conceptions of Affect. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 58:129-56.

Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15(1): 11-40. Obert, Julia. 2006. Can the Subaltern Feel?: Affect Beyond the Colonial Canon. Report on the International Colloquium, Decolonizing Affect Theory: Is Affect Multicultural? University of British Columbia, 25-27 June 2006. Probyn, Elspeth. 2005. Blush: Faces of Shame. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalisms in Queer Times. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Williams, Raymond. 2001 [1961]. The Long Revolution. Broadview Press.

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