SOCI 350 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Brian Massumi, Gilles Deleuze, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Document Summary
Return human body and physical matter to the centre of social theory. Sociologists/anthropologists have fixated too much on language and systems of representation and not enough on moving, sensing, feeling material bodies. Identify a stagnation in cultural theory following freud, butler, durkheim, foucault solely preoccupied w/ representational processes. Representational process classify, codes, symbols, meaning, proxies, language sociologists fixated on this. Affects: states of the body by which the power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained. Against descartes world is composed of two mutually exclusive substances; physical substance and mental substance: our existence, our humanity is derived from our capacity for conscious reflective thought. Monist thought the world was composed of singular substance. [ ] a substrate of potential bodily responses, often autonomic, in excess of consciousness. ~patricia clough. The preconscious nascence of responses to stimuli. ~rob shields. A domain of intensity, indeterminacy and above all the potentiality, which the signifying logic of culture reduces or qualifies".
