Biology’s Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect
By Constantina Papoulias, Felicity Callard. 2010
223 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This article investigates how the turn to affect within the humanities and social sciences re-imagines the relationship between cultural theory and science. We focus on how the writings of two neuroscientists (Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux) and one developmental psychologist (Daniel Stern) are used in order to ground certain claims about affect within cultural theory. We examine the motifs at play in cultural theories of affect, the models of (neuro)biology with which they work, and some fascinating missteps characterizing the taking up of scientific literature. While neuroscience frames the affective as part of a system of regulation that makes both self and social coherence possible, in cultural theory’s narratives, by contrast, affectivity becomes a placeholder for the inherent dynamism and mutability of matter. The article interrogates the consequences of cultural theory’s strange borrowings from neuroscience and developmental psychology in their institution of a model of subjectivity preoccupied with a lived present in excess of the hold of habit and embodied history.
Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, History, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/39cfabb8fb749ac2c1a6fd91ba2b656b14231341
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Citations in the corpus
- Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences (2015, unknown): “DOI: 10.1057/9781137407962.0004”
- The Human Sciences in a Biological Age (2013, unknown): “For another excellent critique of affect theory, on which I have drawn, see also the detailed account of the selective use of Antonio Damasio, Joseph LeDoux and Daniel Stern provided by Papoulias and Callard (2010).”
- Body, Image and Affect in Consumer Culture (2010, unknown): “The alleged ‘affective turn’ draws on the work of Spinoza, Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari, Damasio, Massumi and others (see Blackman, 2008; Buchanan, 1997; Clough, 2007, 2008; Damasio, 1994, 1999, 2003; Hansen, 2004a; Hemmings, 2005; Papoulias and Callard, 2010 [this issue]; Shouse, 2005).”
- Trends in the Turn to Affect (2015, background): “As noted, through the work of Ruth Leys and others, many of these points are finally becoming reasonably familiar in social research and cultural studies (see Callard and Papoulias, 2010; Hemmings, 2005 for similar sceptical interrogations).”