Patricia Ticineto Clough

The Affective Turn : Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies

Taking the biomediated body to be a historically specific mode of organization of material forces, invested by capital into being, as well as elaborated through various technoscientific discourses, the article traces these investments and the discursive productions of the biomediated body, linking it to an ongoing reconfiguration of governance and economy.

The New Empiricism Affect and Sociological Method

This article offers a review of the relationship of methodological positivism and post-World War II U.S. sociology, especially its transformations in the last three decades of the twentieth century. With this as context, sociological methodology is rethought in terms of what cultural critics refer to as infra-empiricism that allows for a rethinking of bodies, matter and life through new encounters with visceral perception and pre-conscious affect. Thinking infra-empiricism as a new empiricism at this time means rethinking methodology in relationship to the changing configuration of economy, governance disciplinarity and control in the early twenty-first century.This article offers a review of the relationship of methodological positivism and post-World War II U.S. sociology, especially its transformations in the last three decades of the twentieth century. With this as context, sociological methodology is rethought in terms of what cultural critics refer to as infra-empiricism that allows for a rethinking of bodies, matter and life through new encounters with visceral perception and pre-conscious affect. Thinking infra-empiricism as a new empiricism at this time means rethinking methodology in relationship to the changing configuration of economy, governance disciplinarity and control in the early twenty-first century.

Comments on Setting Criteria for Experimental Writing

In response to a call for discussion of criteria for judging ethnographic experimental writing, the author felt it necessary to address the relationship of politics and experimental writing. Given that recent experimental writing was initiated with the critique of traditional ethnographic writing in sociology and anthropology that was part of the larger criticism of the authority of Western discourse, she wanted to speculate on the future to which experimental writing points and for which it prepares ethnographers to think politically. For her, this is the primary value of experimental writing: It links ethnographers to the future of politics and to the politics of the future. It is in terms of this two-way link that experimental writing might be judged.

Feminist Thought: Desire, Power, and Academic Discourse

1. The Hybrid Criticism of Patriarchy. 2. The Matrix of Feminist Criticism. 3. From Feminist Criticism to Standpoint Epistemologies. 4. Engendering African American Criticism. 5. Formulating a Feminist Politics of De-colonization. 6. Queer Embodiments of Feminist Theorizing.

Afterword: The Future of Affect Studies

In his foreword to The Affective Turn, titled, ‘What Affects Are Good For’, Michael Hardt answers the implied question by suggesting that a consideration of affect, or an engagement with the affective turn, can productively and beneficially lead scholarship and research to straddle the divide ‘between the mind and body, and between actions and passions’ (2007: xi). The articles in this Special Issue on affect also address the question ‘What are affects good for?’ Offering various and suggestive responses, the essays lead us beyond Hardt’s first question, raising other questions that may well set the agenda for future scholarship and research in affect studies, but also in body-studies and in cultural studies generally. I want to focus on three questions raised by the articles concerned with: first, the relationship of the humanities, the sciences and the social sciences; second, the relationship of affect, subjectivity and sociality; and, third, the relationship of methodology, performance and aesthetics.

Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death

Under the auspices of neoliberalism, technical systems of compliance and efficiency have come to underwrite the relations among the state, the economy, and a biopolitics of war, terror, and surveillance. In Beyond Biopolitics , prominent theorists seek to account for and critically engage the tendencies that have informed neoliberal governance in the past and are expressed in its reformulation today. As studies of military occupation, the policing of migration, blood trades, financial markets, the war on terror, media ecologies, and consumer branding, the essays explore the governance of life and death in a near-future, a present emptied of future potentialities. The contributors delve into political and theoretical matters central to projects of neoliberal governance, including states of exception that are not exceptional but foundational; risk analysis applied to the adjudication of “ethical” forms of war, terror, and occupation; racism and the management of the life capacities of populations; the production and circulation of death as political and economic currency; and the potential for critical and aesthetic response. Together, the essays offer ways to conceptualize biopolitics as the ground for today’s reformulation of governance. Contributors. Ann Anagnost, Una Chung, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Steve Goodman, Sora Y. Han, Stefano Harney, May Joseph, Randy Martin, Brian Massumi, Luciana Parisi, Jasbir Puar, Amit S. Rai, Eugene Thacker, Cagatay Topal, Craig Willse

On the Relationship of the Criticism of Ethnographic Writing and the Cultural Studies of Science

In the wake of the Sokol Affair, there has been a halt to discussion of the broad implications of cultural studies of science. Here these implications are considered in relationship to the critique of ethnographic writing. In treating the latter as part of the cultural studies of science, the author aims to link the critique of ethnographic writing and the cultural studies of science to changes in technology, especially the development of teletechnology. She also hopes to show that both the critique of ethnographic writing and the cultural studies of science have ontological implications fitting the age of teletechnology.

The Technical Substrates of Unconscious Memory: Rereading Derrida's Freud in the Age of Teletechnology

In a rereading of Jacques Derridas writings on Freud, I trace the connections between his treatment of differance and his treatment of technology and unconscious memory. I focus on the challenge which Derridas writings pose for a certain idea of history, including the history of technological development, and I locate that challenge in Derridas deconstruction of the opposition of nature and technology, the human and the machine, the virtual and the real, the living and the inert. In proposing that these opposed elements are better thought of as deferrals of each other and that, therefore, neither of the opposed elements can be ontologically privileged, Derridas writings offer a shift in ontological perspective befitting the age of teletechnology. In all this, Derridas writings show that Freuds treatment of unconscious memory is still relevant, even while Derridas writings offer a thought of unconscious memory that goes beyond Freuds, that is to say, goes beyond thought of the unconscious when it is conceived narrowly as a possession of the individual subject. Rather than referring unconscious memory to the individual subject, Derrida returns unconscious memory to thought and its technical substrates. It is in doing so that Derridas writings propose an ontological shift.

Book Review: A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity by Manuel DeLanda London and New York: Continuum, 2006:

For some time now scholars have turned to Gilles Deleuze’s thought as a resource for rethinking the social and have engaged his explorations of mathematics, biology and physics to this end. In A New Philosophy of Society, Manuel DeLanda, long known for his elaborations of Deleuze’s references to mathematics and the sciences, has joined this group of scholars and for the first time uses a Deleuzian framework for rethinking the social. DeLanda’s elaboration of Deleuzian thought for a new philosophy of society differs strikingly, however, from the deployment of Deleuzian philosophy by those scholars who have gravitated toward Deleuze’s thinking on ‘societies of control’ (see Deleuze, 1995; Hardt and Negri, 2000; Massumi, 2005; Parisi, 2003; Parisi and Goodman, 2005a, 2005b; Terranova, 2004). For these scholars, the philosophical legacies of Hume, Spinoza, Bergson and Nietzsche on which Deleuze drew in his engagements with biology, physics, technology and mathematics, are worth reviving in this particular moment when radicalized neoliberal governance and a global capitalist economy are characterized by a tendency toward control; that is, where the deployment of power is shifting from an emphasis on the formation of the subject (or the nation-state) through disciplining the individual body, to an emphasis on the distribution of life chances or life capacities across populations. These may be informationally or statistically derived human populations, but also may include populations of capacities affixed to databases (no longer linked tightly or only to the nation-state). If control is about the flux of vitality or affective capacity, its capture for exchangeability in a global market and its regulation by governance (from local to global and in interaction with digital technology) with the aim of surveillance and the securitization of risk – what has been connected to ‘real subsumption’ in Marxist discourse – then Deleuze’s writings about control do not just offer insight for rethinking contemporary governance and economy. These particular writings also suggest that Deleuzian thought generally gives philosophical support for engaging information, digitization, nonlinear mathematics, molecular biology and quantum physics as central to contemporary global capitalism and neoliberal governance, because these contribute to and provide insight into the diagram for societies of control. In this sense, scholars who have been drawing on Deleuzian thinking about control point to the usefulness of Deleuzian thought to the present, and at the same time point to what

Gendered Security/National Security Political Branding and Population Racism

DOI 10.1215/016424722010010