Affective Politics, Activism and the Commons: From WECH to Grenfell

This article focuses on the activism of the Walterton and Elgin Action Group who successfully campaigned against attempts by the UK Conservative government in the 1980’s to sell off their council homes to private tenders. Focusing on their inventive and creative actions, and the composition of the group not usually associated with militancy, the article takes the formation of WECH (Walterton and Elgin Community Housing) as an example of affective politics and the cultivation of a housing commons-through-difference. What was foregrounded and became important were the relations of mutual dependence and care that existed and could be mobilized to stir collective action across categories of race, class, gender, disability and age. These relations existed at the nexus of personal histories including those of migration, poverty, displacement, social exclusion, homelessness, neglect and discrimination. These histories were mobilized within an area that had a strong history of community development and activism, and amongst a diverse group of tenants who had shared, yet different histories of displacement, suffering, and struggle having been forced to live in substandard conditions with little hope for the future. The Homes for Votes scandal and the WEAG campaign hovers at the edges of the Grenfell tower tragedy in the present, making links across shared geographies and histories, particularly of displacement and suffering as well as community activism and politics, reminding us of what was and is possible beyond the devastation and neglect symbolized by the charred remains of the tower

Couze Venn: Pioneer of Cultural, Post Colonial and Social Theory

This issue is dedicated to the work of Couze Venn, who was an important figure in social. cultural and post/decolonial theory until his death in 2019 aged 79. We had initially planned this volume to be a celebration of his work whilst he was still alive to be able to see it, but events overtook us. Couze was a huge inspiration and founding influence on the journal Subjectivity, introducing throughout the different periods of his writing a distinctive focus and attention on subjectivity, which he thought through the interconnected processes of affect, individuation and relationality. He was in dialogue with many thinkers, including the work of Bracha Ettinger, Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Steigler, and many others, always looking for the traces of what he came to identify as the “compossible”

Land Cover in a Managed Forest Ecosystem: Mexican Shade Coffee

Managed forest ecosystems—agroforestry systems in which crops such as coffee and bananas are planted side-by-side with woody perennials—are being touted as a means of safeguarding forests along with the ecological services they provide. Yet we know little about the determinants of land cover in such systems, information needed to design effective forest conservation policies. This paper presents a spatial regression analysis of land cover in a managed forest ecosystem—a shade coffee region of coastal Mexico. Using high-resolution land cover data derived from aerial photographs along with data on the geophysical and institutional characteristics of the study area, we find that plots in close proximity to urban centers are less likely to be cleared, all other things equal. This result contrasts sharply with the literature on natural forests. In addition, we find that membership in coffee-marketing cooperatives, farm size, and certain soil types are associated with forest cover, while proximity to small town centers is associated with forest clearing.deforestation, managed forest ecosystem, agroforestry, shade-grown coffee, Mexico, spatial econometrics, land cover

Escuchar voces y corporización

Resumen | Este artículo presenta reflexiones sobre casi veinticinco años de trabajar sobre los temas que el fenómeno de la alucinosis auditiva presenta a los estudiosos interesados en la corporización y la salud mental. Mi interés por el tema nació de mi experiencia personal de vivir y crecer con una madre diagnosticada con serias dificultades mentales, y de la manera en que se desarrolló mi comprensión a partir de mis colaboraciones a largo plazo con Hearing Voices Network [Red de la Escucha de Voces; en adelante HVN, por sus siglas en inglés]. El artículo se sitúa dentro de los temas que surgen de la cultura psiquiátrica británica, pero tengo la esperanza de que mis reflexiones brindarán importantes sitios, vínculos, conceptos y prácticas que puedan ayudar a aquellas personas que trabajan en el área de los estudios del cuerpo en contextos más transnacionales a realzar y desarrollar sus propias prácticas analíticas y críticas. La discusión estará centrada sobre las prácticas de un movimiento de usuarios psiquiátricos, la Hearing Voices Network (HVN), que propone un desafío radical al ordenamiento de cuerpo, cultura e identidad en la producción y entendimiento de la psicopatología, y específicamente del fenómeno de la alucinosis y la audición de voces. El artículo examinará la importancia de la afectividad, la cuestión de la ‘relacionalidad ’, y de la corporización y la corporalidad (embodiment) en la comprensión de la relación existente entre los requerimientos de desempeño de la biopsiquiatría, las prácticas transformadoras de la HVN, y la generación y transformación de la subjetividad

Affect and Automaticity: Towards an Analytics of Experimentation

This article is a response to an increasing rapprochement taking place between the humanities and the sciences, and specifically between cultural theory and the cognitive sciences within the field of affect studies. The focus of the article will be on the area of automaticity research in both its past and present formations. This field of research has furnished cultural theorists with concepts and theories for animating affect and therefore provides a fruitful intersection for interdisciplinary enquiry. The article offers a strategy of incorporating cognitive science into affect theory that returns to a pre-positivist analytics of experimentation found within early psychology. When this analytics is brought into dialogue with science and technology studies and performative approaches to experimentation, the problematic of subjectivity is not displaced or elided but rather becomes a central recurring issue. It will explore what might be at stake in such strategies of appropriation and re-invention

Habit and Affect: Revitalizing a Forgotten History

Habit is an integral concept for body studies, a hybrid concept and one that has provided the bedrock across the humanities for considering the interrelationships between movement and stasis, being and becoming, and process and fixity. Habits are seen to provide relay points between what is taken to be inside and outside, disrupting any clear and distinct boundary between nature and culture, self and other, the psychological and social, and even mind and matter. Habit thus discloses a paradox. It takes up a unique position in affect modulation, which encompasses both regulation (in the form of discipline) and also extends the body’s potential for engaging the new, change and creativity. In order to understand the basis of the ambivalent duality governing understandings of habit it is argued that a genealogical approach to this question is necessary. This will be located within the recent ‘turn to affect’ and histories of conation within the psychological sciences, particularly taking the writings of William McDougall as a focus

Loving the Alien: A Post-post-human manifesto

This is an essay written for and published by Fall Semester based at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. It was part of a week long series of talks and a catalogue of commissioned essays addressing the theme of "Where do we Come from? What are We? Where are we Going? See http://www.fallsemester.org/welcome-to-fs201

Immateriality, Affectivity, Experimentation: Queer Science and Future-Psychology

This article will explore what it might mean to experiment with processes and practices which are aligned to the immaterial. Even a cursory genealogy of immateriality discloses the diverse and wide range of ways in which immaterial processes take form, sharing perhaps a concern with what can't be seen, what might be considered ephemeral, fleeting, imperceptible and sometimes not of this world. The focus on immateriality has taken up a minor role in relation to the considerable work on materiality and affectivity currently being developed across the arts and humanities. It haunts diverse perspectives, inviting us to attend to the problematic of subjectivity, and to consider how immaterial processes are performed, staged, enacted and rendered intelligible – even if such renderings are often consigned to areas tainted by their association with the anomalous, the psychopathological or the irrelevant. Hypnosis, telepathy, contagion, suggestion, imagination have all be aligned to immateriality in different ways, confounding distinctions between subject and object, past and present, human and non-human, and importantly the material and the immaterial. This article will explore some minor figures, past and present, across the arts and sciences who are taking a performative and post-human approach to what counts as immaterial within different experimental practices. The article will develop an approach to immateriality presented in my recent book, Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation (2012, Sage), and extend this in the context of imaginative and inventive ways of working with voice-hearers, extending what it might mean to hear, see and listen through another’s voice using social media in unconventional ways. The forms of mediated perception that are staged allow for an engagement with what Bracha Ettinger has termed the matrixial, and open up to the distributed and machinic forms of perception which might allow the immaterial to take form. These practices will be situated within some minor psychological archives of experimentation, which reveal the possibility of a future-psychology-yet-to-come, the traces of which remain in psychology’s largely disavowed and displaced pasts

The Haunted Life of Data

This is a pre-publication version of a chapter published in an edited book on Compromised Data. It explores the politics of data in the context of a recent science controversy, which gained a reach and traction across social media. The chapter specifically focuses on the post publication peer review of two journal articles associated with the John Bargh priming controversy

Affect, Mediation and Subjectivity-as-Encounter: Finding the Feeling of the Foundling

This article will take the subject of affect as a space of critical reflection on the limits of museums when conceived primarily as communications-media. Drawing from a range of interdisciplinary debates across media and cultural theory, including the field of affect studies and critical reflections on subjectivity, embodiment and mediation, the article will outline some core issues that might be of interest to curators and curatorial practices. The article will pose the question of what it might mean to enter into suggestive relations with another - human and non-human - by focusing upon the author's own embodied experiences of visiting The Foundling Museum in London. The article will explore what it might mean to 'find the feeling of the Foundling' to raise some critical and creative questions about the entry of affect into the arts and humanities as a way of newly conceiving of more interactive publics no longer considered primarily as consumers of meaning