Ian Tucker

The Affective Atmospheres of Surveillance

The spaces that surveillance produces can be thought of as ambiguous, entailing elements that are ethereal yet material, geographical yet trans-geographical. Contemporary surveillance systems form numerous connections that involve multiple times, spaces, and bodies. Owing to their ubiquity, normalization, and yet clandestine characteristics, they seem to produce an almost unnoticed aspect of everyday life. The impacts, then, of contemporary surveillance systems appear to be particularly experienced on the margins of consciousness. Thus we find that an empirical analysis of this realm of experience is possible but requires one to look for such things as disruption, disfluency, and hesitation in the text of speech acts rather than clear representation. Through empirical analysis of narratives concerning everyday experiences of living with contemporary surveillance systems, this paper focuses on their possible affective impacts. In turn, we find it more fitting to think about the so-called “surveillance society” in terms of producing “atmospheres” rather than “cultures or assemblages,” and “affects” rather than “emotions.”

Everyday Spaces of Mental Distress: The Spatial Habituation of Home

Theorising psychological activity as a spatial product appears a logical extension of moves in social theory to emphasise the role of space and place in the consideration of experience. Catalysed by turns in social and human geographies to highlight the role of space and location in constituting psychological activity, various forms of the ‘spatialisation of experience’ have emerged. In this paper I will follow this theoretical direction in relation to the underlying destabilisation of everyday life that emerges as a product of theoretical formations that emphasise the fluidity of space. More specifically, I will take the example of the home as a central space in the ongoing activity of people with enduring mental distress. Forging a theoretical line that takes in geographies of mental health, the home, and finally, Gilles Deleuzes work on ‘repetition’ and ‘habit’, I will analyse the role of home spaces in everyday life. Key here is a concern regarding the impact of theoretical emphases on continuity, mobility, and instability on understandings of the everyday lives of mental health service users. This includes addressing conceptualisations of the home space alongside the activities of the people who occupy, and hence co-make, such spaces. The article concludes by framing ‘spatial habituation’ of the everyday as central to creating a perceivable stability, analysis of which can aid understanding of the challenges facing people suffering with mental distress.

Social media and the co-production of bodies online: Bergson, Serres and Facebook’s Timeline

Social media’s networked form of communication provides people with bodies that are combinations of embodied and technologically mediated action. This creates multiple forms of visibility within the infospheres (Terranova) of social media, which require simultaneous production of bodies in and through offline and online spaces. Bergson’s non-dualistic model of bodies as images addresses the challenges of experiencing ‘bodies online’; understood as expressions that blur the subject–object and representation–being dualisms. This article explores how socially mediated bodies are disposed for action in ways that involve negotiating communication through the mediated noise (Serres) of social media, along with managing bodies that are faced with the spatialisation of time through new features such as Facebook’s Timeline.

The Potentiality of Bodies

Theorizing embodiment has proved a major stumbling block in social psychology in recent times. Attempts have been made, such as the “discursive body” or the “regulated body,” but less attention has been placed upon incorporating a sense of movement and change within theories of the body. This paper seeks to conceptualize a potentialized body, utilizing Deleuzian theory, along with Massumi’s focus on potentiality. This is empirically driven through focus on the various ways in which mental health service users manage the somatic challenges presented by adhering to medication regimens, which involves a detailed empirical and conceptual engagement with accounts of medication taking. This culminates in the presentation of a move towards innovating social psychological engagement with embodiment theory and reveals greater insight into the difficulties presented in everyday life for service users drawn into complex medication regimen practices.

Social Psychology of Emotion

Chapter 1: Two Ancient Theories of Emotion: Plato and Aristotle Chapter 2: Hellenistic and Medieval Theologies of Emotion Chapter 3: Enlightenment Philosophies of Emotion Chapter 4: The Role of Emotion in the Development of Social Psychology as a Discipline Chapter 5: Group Psychology and Emotion Chapter 6: Biological Understandings of Emotion Chapter 7: Sociological Understandings of Emotion Chapter 8: Emotion Talk: Theories and Analysis Chapter 9: Affect Theory: Post-Structuralist Accounts Chapter 10: Digital Emotion Conclusion

Towards the Multiple Body

These texts each approach embodiment theory from a different angle. Shilling attempts to address the multi-dimensionality of embodiment theory, Crossley attempts to overcome mind–body dualism, whilst Coupland and Gwyns review places empirical data at the forefront of its endeavours. Whilst each provides valuable insight into ways of thinking about the body, they tend towards emphasizing either bodies as ‘acted upon’ or bodies as ‘actors’. The argument laid out in this review is that they (singularly and combined) fall short in illuminating a multiplex materially grounded concept of bodies as parts of knowledge-producing relations, rather than distinct entities. An example taken from Mols notion of the multiple body is put forward as an alternative concept through which embodiment theory can move forward.

Deleuze, sense, and life: Marking the parameters of a psychology of individuation

This paper offers a psychology of individuation, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of series, event, sense, and individuation to develop a way of thinking human experience that is non-reductionist and processual. Deleuze’s writing produces a conceptualization of life as multiple, novel, and yet inherently linked to the past. The desire for such an undertaking comes from the need to avoid capturing experience according to theories that prioritize one factor over others, and in doing so define psychological life as a set of intrinsic properties. Understanding individuals as the products of individuating processes introduces a philosophy of change that, although not entirely “pure,” can still be novel. A psychology of individuation potentially allows for the extraction of a virtual realm of sense that is “in between” forms of language and materiality, and which allows novelty to emerge in our social worlds. The paper concludes by discussing the potential moral benefits of conceptualizing psychological life as produced through processes of individuation.

Topology and mental distress: Self-care in the life spaces of home

This article develops a topological approach derived from Kurt Lewin to analyse the psychological life space/s produced in a mental health service user’s home. Drawing on arguments that space plays an important part in the organisation and management of mental distress, photographs of a service user’s home are analysed as topological spaces. The article argues that topological theory can contribute to community health psychology through framing psychological distress as spatially distributed, meaning individual bodies, environments and action are conceptualised as equally contributing to the organisation and management of health-related experience and activity.

Organizing the present in anticipation of a better future: Bergson, Whitehead, and the life of a mental health service user

The work of Henri Bergson has been influential on recent conceptualizations of the relationship between past, present, and future, particularly in studies of social remembering that argue that the past is a transformative process on the present. This paper will draw on some of the similarities in the temporal ontologies of Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, and utilize the latter’s work on theorizing the organization of the present in anticipation of the future. This will be used to analyse a case study of a community mental health service user, for whom the future exists as hopeful potential for a better life. The concepts of actual occasion and nexus are recruited to highlight the organized formation of the service user’s home, which enables the anticipatory perception of future life. The paper concludes by arguing for an approach to the study of mental distress that takes seriously the active role of the future on the present, and how such a process is organized as a relational phenomenon in domestic home environments.

Sense and the Limits of Knowledge Bodily Connections in the Work of Serres

The work of Michel Serres has been of significant value, yet remains under-utilized across the social sciences. In this review article the long-awaited translation of his The Five Senses (1985) is explored, with particular interest in its offerings for contemporary theories of the materiality of the human condition. Serres invites the reader into a diverse and rich world of sense, from localized sites of individual bodies to global landscapes of cities and countrysides. Not reducible to individual bodies or language, sense becomes the primary mode of relationality through which experience is produced. Such insights are explored in light of contemporary concerns regarding the constitution of bodies and materiality, which emphasize notions of movement and process. The distinction Serres makes between sense and language is argued to be valuable in terms of theories of virtuality that frame material embodiment as ineffable and beyond language. The article concludes by suggesting that Serres can aid re-attunement to sense, although not in a generalistic fashion, but as part of disciplinary specific engagements.