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Patricia Clough with Jean Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, 328 pp., $US 23.95 paper (978-0-8223-3295-0), $US 84.95 hardcover (978-0-8223- 3911-3).
Clough is a well-established voice within extended qualitative sociological traditions. With all due respect to the contributors to this edited volume, it is to Clough's introductory essay that I believe most readers will turn. Her essay, simply entitled "Introduction," is as strong a primer for what is intended by the "affective turn" in sociology as one could wish. It is the sort of summary statement that any doctoral student preparing for a comprehensive examination in the area of qualitative sociology or the sociology of emotion should be encouraged to attend to.
As Clough writes, "The affective turn invites a transdisciplinary approach to theory and method that necessarily invites experimentation in capturing the changing co-functioning of the political, the economic, and the cultural, rendering it affectively as change in the deployment of affective capacity" (p. 3). This volume attempts to move beyond a philosophy of affect to a social science of the affects. By attending to the simultaneous engagement of the body and the intellectual, and the reciprocity between both, our understanding of the social is enhanced by the affective turn in much the same way as the linguistic turn and the postmodern turn have done previously.
Classical theorists can be forgiven for...