The affective turn : theorizing the social / edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough, with Jean Halley ; foreword by Michael Hardt.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 287-301) and index.

Foreword : what affects are good for / Michael Hardt -- Introduction / Patricia Ticineto Clough -- The parched tongue / Hosu Kim -- Techno-cinema : image matters in the affective unfoldings of analog cinema and new media / Jamie "Skye" Bianco -- Slowness : notes toward an economy of différancial rates of being / Karen Wendy Gilbert -- Myocellular transduction : when my cells trained my body-mind / Deborah Gambs -- Women's work and the ambivalent gift of entropy / David Staples.

Voices from the Teum : synesthetic trauma and the ghosts of the Korean diaspora / Grace M. Cho -- In Calcutta, sex workers organize / Melissa Ditmore -- More than a job : meaning, affect, and training health care workers / Ariel Ducey -- Haunting Orpheus : problems of space and time in the desert / Jonathan R. Wynn -- Always on display : affective production in the modeling industry / Elizabeth Wissinger -- The wire / Jean Halley -- Losses and returns : the soldier in trauma / Greg Goldberg and Craig Willse -- Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index.

"In the mid-1990s, scholars turned their attention toward the ways that ongoing political, economic, and cultural transformations were changing the realm of the social, specifically that aspect of it described by the notion of affect: pre-individual bodily forces, linked to autonomic responses, which augment or diminish a body's capacity to act or engage with others. This 'affective turn' and the new configurations of bodies, technology, and matter that it reveals, is the subject of this collection of essays. Scholars based in sociology, cultural studies, science studies, and women's studies illuminate the movement in thought from a psychoanalytically informed criticism of subject identity, representation, and trauma to an engagement with information and affect; from a privileging of the organic body to an exploration of nonorganic life; and from the presumption of equilibrium-seeking closed systems to an engagement with the complexity of open systems under far-from-equilibrium conditions. Taken together, these essays suggest that attending to the affective turn is necessary to theorizing the social."-- Publisher description.