Patricia Ticineto Clough introduces the "affective
turn" as a significant shift in critical theory, arising from profound
changes in the economic, political, and cultural spheres during the 1990s. This
shift encompasses a new configuration of bodies, technology, and matter,
prompting a reevaluation of fundamental metaphors of life. Clough defines
affect as potential bodily responses, distinct from emotion, transcending
consciousness and influencing bodily capacities to affect and be affected.
Karen Wendy Gilbert's chapter challenges the established laws of
thermodynamics, attributing them to the nineteenth century and industrial
capitalism. She questions the prevailing belief in matter and energy's tendency
towards equilibrium within closed systems. This reevaluation extends the
concept of subjectivity from a unified and enclosed organism model to one
centered on affect as energy flows between porous bodies in open systems or
networks.
Elizabeth Wissinger's exploration of affective labor in
the modeling industry illuminates the dynamic interaction between models,
information, and televisual technologies. This interaction makes the body and
image available for circulation, feeding the constant demand for images and
participating in an affect economy. This perspective aligns with Sara Ahmed's
concept of the effects of body and world boundaries.
Greg Goldberg and Craig Willse reexamine trauma theories,
challenging the notion of a thermodynamic self in psychoanalysis. They propose
a new understanding of the injured soldier as a constellation of capacities
that undergo transformation through rehabilitation. This process is now viewed
as a biopolitical form of control, perpetually calculating, engineering, and
mutating life itself.
A subset of chapters delves into the intersection of
theory, body, affect, and capital. David Staple's chapter traces the evolution
of capitalism from a thermodynamic model to a turbulent system driven by female
labor flows. He reconsiders the notion of the gift in terms of the giving of
time and information. Ariel Ducey's chapter on healthcare workers provides
concrete examples of how training and certification programs shape the
experience of work, refashioning it as a source of stimulation and engagement.
This adjustment occurs through the body, influencing which emotions or
attitudes can even be expressed.
The book is acutely aware of the necessity for
"employing innovative writing approaches/methods to apprehend the material
and temporal dimensions of bodies" (4). It incorporates "experimental
and autoethnographic" writing styles, most notably evident in the chapters
authored by Hosu Kim, Deborah Gambs, Grace M. Cho, Jonathan Wynn, and Jean
Halley. The overall impact of these diverse genre and mode techniques is
somewhat mixed, and to this reader, occasionally executed with unevenness.
Some, like Kim's "The Parched Tongue," engage in intriguing
multilingual work in a prose-poem-like form, defamiliarizing both English and
Korean. However, at times, Kim's approach veers towards the prosaic and
familiar. Gambs endeavors to illustrate a specific process of writing, kinetic
energy, and cellular awareness primarily through an excessive use of verbs and
adverbs. This inadvertently emphasizes the challenge of animating or
representing physical and conceptual dynamics in fresh ways. Nevertheless,
Cho's "Voices from the Teum" and Wynn's "Haunting Orpheus"
are more engaging and successful in demonstrating the imperative of pushing
linguistic and generic boundaries to grasp the complexities of new ways of
understanding life—what Wynn terms "ethnographic heteroglossia".
However, experimentation with writing need not be
confined to these overt forms. For instance, one can discern the interplay of
language in both the performative style of Clough's introduction and Bianco's
"Techno-cinema." Here, there are passages brimming with linguistic
vitality, perhaps intended to express a yearning for vitality and turbulence by
surpassing or resisting the gravitational pull towards the status quo,
wrestling for meaning that undermines meaning, and reaching for language that
is yet to be born. Such passages argue that the poetics and rhetoric
accompanying significant shifts in thought may indeed need to challenge
readerly expectations. Yet, the outcome is occasionally a vexing surplus of
linguistic and communicative abundance, evoking thoughts of critiques directed
at "theory talk" and its alienating and exclusive rhetoric. As Chris
Holcomb has contended, such flights of language aren't necessarily radical
ruptures from the fundamental structures of language and communication, but can
instead be perceived as a default reliance on well-trodden techniques of
obfuscation and generalization.
No comments:
Post a Comment