Lisa Blackman

Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation

In this unique contribution, Blackman focuses upon the affective capacities of bodies, human and non-human as well as addressing the challenges of the affective turn within the social sciences. Fresh and convincing, this book uncovers the paradoxes and tensions in work in affect studies by focusing on practices and experiences, including voice hearing, suggestion, hypnosis, telepathy, the placebo effect, rhythm and related phenomena. Questioning the traditional idea of mind over matter, as well as discussing the danger of setting up a false distinction between the two, this book makes for an invaluable addition within cultural theory and the recent turn to affect. In a powerful and engaging matter, Blackman discusses the immaterial body across the neurosciences, physiology, media and cultural studies, body studies, artwork, performance, psychology and psychoanalysis. Interdisciplinary in its core, this book is a must for everyone seeking a dynamic and thought provoking analysis of culture and communication today.

Affect, Relationality and the 'Problem of Personality'

This peer-reviewed journal article sets out an argument regarding the importance of genealogical work for understanding concepts such as affect and suggestion.

Embodying Affect: Voice-hearing, Telepathy, Suggestion and Modelling the Non-conscious

This article takes a genealogical approach to the problem of affective communication that we find coalescing around the phenomenon of ‘affective transfer’ identified in experiences such as voice-hearing, telepathy and hypnotic suggestion. These experiences breach the boundaries between the self and other, inside and outside, and material and immaterial, and make visible some of the central issues that are important in re-thinking affect, relationality and embodiment. The article will attempt to re-engage the problematic of subjectivity by asking what a turn to affect entails within such technologies of listening and attention. This is particularly important when such turning or opening to affect engenders a conversation with traumatic memories, albeit a conversation that does not occur primarily in a verbal register. The key focus will be on the marginalized status of telepathic modalities of affective transfer throughout the histories of the development of the psychological sciences. The article uses this as a platform to consider the connections between what is occluded or excluded from the psychological sciences, and what is being silenced within work on affect taking form across the humanities. Taking us back to the practice of telepathy in the 19th century and the problem of hypnotic suggestion in the mid 20th century (the Macy Conferences), the article discloses how both function as carriers of what is being overlooked and silenced in the engagement by many affect scholars with the knowledge-practices of the psychological and neurosciences.

Psychiatric Culture and Bodies of Resistance

Psychiatric culture provides an important site for humanities scholars interested in the relationships between body, culture and identity. The problem raised in this article is how to ‘think’ the body as discursive, material and embodied without reinstating the notion that the discursive and material are two separate, preexisting entities that somehow ‘interact’. The focus of this article will be on the complex relational dynamics that exist between science and culture in the production of psychopathology. The discussion will centre on the practices of a psychiatric user-movement, the Hearing Voices Network, that provide a radical challenge to the alignment of body, culture and identity in the production and understanding of psychopathology, and specifically the phenomenon of voice-hearing. The article will consider the importance of affectivity, relationality and embodiment in understanding the relationship between the performative injunctions of psychiatry, the transformative practices of the HVN and the production of subjectivity.

Reinventing psychological matters: the importance of the suggestive realm of Tarde's ontology

Abstract This article will contribute to a growing body of writing which is considering the importance of suggestion as a neglected aspect of contemporary technologies of the self. Gabriel Tardes writings foreground this importance, which was largely repudiated by the anti-mimetic turn that characterized the social sciences at the turn of the last century. The article will discuss the context of this refusal of suggestion, through exploring how early mass and social psychology translated and re-distributed Tardes concepts of invention and imitation. The significance of this re-distribution is discussed in relation to the question of what suggestion could and might become if it is not inserted into a contrast between will and compliance.

Self-Help, Media Cultures and the Production of Female Psychopathology

This article brings together work at the intersection of critical psychology and cultural studies to explore the psychological and cultural significance of women’s magazine culture. Drawing on rhetorical psychology and Foucault’s later work on ‘techniques of the self’, it explores the complex injunctions and positionings that create the range of gendered anxieties and dilemmas produced within neoliberal relations. Self-help is discussed as a practice that condenses or brings together a range of cultural anxieties, bodily tensions, emotional economies and forms of psychopathology which are ‘already constituted’ lived realities for many of the readers engaging with these magazines. The article concludes that further engagement with critical psychology by cultural theorists will enable cultural studies to bring the body back into cultural theory and to consider the translation of cultural injunctions across the designations of race, class, sexuality and gender.

The Dialogical Self, Flexibility and the Cultural Production of Psychopathology

This article considers recent arguments on ‘dialogism’ within the discipline in order to reflect upon the coherency of the institutional position of critical psychology and the conventionalized responses which tend to characterize this position. The main focus of the article explores how arguments about the dialogical self radically reconfigure psychopathology, bringing understandings more in line with those produced across a range of social and cultural practices which ‘make up’ our lives. This shift is explored through considering arguments within science studies and cultural studies of psychiatric culture which are exploring the new forms of subjectivity and psychology being produced within ‘flexible capitalism’. The article concludes with an argument which outlines the urgent need for critical psychologists and those interested in criticality to engage with the ‘psychological’ through frameworks which do not simply reinstate an ‘anti-essentialist’ mantra.

Habit and Affect: Revitalizing a Forgotten History:

Habit is an integral concept for body studies, a hybrid concept and one that has provided the bedrock across the humanities for considering the interrelationships between movement and stasis, being and becoming, and process and fixity. Habits are seen to provide relay points between what is taken to be inside and outside, disrupting any clear and distinct boundary between nature and culture, self and other, the psychological and social, and even mind and matter. Habit thus discloses a paradox. It takes up a unique position in affect modulation, which encompasses both regulation (in the form of discipline) and also extends the body’s potential for engaging the new, change and creativity. In order to understand the basis of the ambivalent duality governing understandings of habit it is argued that a genealogical approach to this question is necessary. This will be located within the recent ‘turn to affect’ and histories of conation within the psychological sciences, particularly taking the writings of William McDougall as a focus.

AFFECT, PERFORMANCE AND QUEER SUBJECTIVITIES

This article will re-configure the historical association between queer lives and psychopathology by focusing upon the enactive potential of particular performances of queer subjectivities. These are usually live performances which through their engagement with a background of trauma, shame, loneliness and isolation afford the circulation and distribution of what will be termed, ‘unhappy affects’. These situated responses to a register of affects which have historically been associated with queer lives, open up performative possibilities for enacting queer forms of belonging and becoming. The article will foreground the importance of attending to embodiment, affect and genealogy in investigating queer adventures in the context of live performance.

The New Biologies Epigenetics, the Microbiome and Immunities

This issue is made up of a special collection of articles that have been submitted to the journal, which tackle issues that have primarily been the subject and object of the life and biological sciences; this includes pregnancy, obesity, antibiotic resistance, and immunity within the context of viruses and super-bugs. All of these issues in different ways have increasingly become the subject of theories and methods within the humanities and social sciences. This includes approaches, which work across disciplines and intellectual traditions, in order to open up the complexity of what might count as an object of knowledge within these different contexts. Each paper in this special collection is engaged in productive approaches that cut across disciplines and that enable dialogues and exchanges to take place between the social sciences, life sciences and philosophy. The articles respond to some of the new developments across the life and biological sciences, which include the field of epigenetics, the genome and microbiome and new theorisations of immunity. They engage in different ways with emergent issues, problematics, ontologies, controversies and debates within these fields. These are explored at the intersection of science and technology studies (Landecker), new materialism (Jamieson; Warins et al; Yoshizawa); and critical theorizations of immunity, which draw primarily from cultural studies of immunity, including the writings of Ed Cohen (2009), Robert Esposito (2013) and Margrit Shildrick (2010, 2015) (see Davies et al; Newman et al).