This paper re-examines the sociological study of resistance in light of growing interest in the concept of affect. Recent claims that we are witness to an 'affective turn' and calls for a 'new sociological empiricism' sensitive to affect indicate an emerging paradigm shift in sociology. Yet, mainstream sociological study of resistance tends to have been largely unaffected by this shift. To this end, this paper presents a case for the significance of affect as a lens by which to approach the study of resistance. My claim is not simply that the forms of actions we would normally recognize as resistance have an affective dimension. Rather, it is that the theory of affect broadens 'resistance' beyond the purview of the two dominant modes of analysis in sociology; namely, the study of macropolitical forms, on the one hand, and the micropolitics of everyday resistance on the other. This broadened perspective challenges the persistent assumption that ideological forms of power and resistance are the most pertinent to the contemporary world, suggesting that much power and resistance today is of a more affective nature. In making this argument, it is a Deleuzian reading of affect that is pursued, which opens up to a level of analysis beyond the common understanding of affect as emotion. I argue that an affective approach to resistance would pay attention to those barely perceptible transitions in power and mobilizations of bodily potential that operate below the conscious perceptions and subjective emotions of social actors. These affective transitions constitute a new site at which both power and resistance operate.
Taking the bare bodies that starred in the recent Air New Zealand in-flight safety demonstration and advertising campaign as its starting point, this paper stages an encounter between bareness and security in order to think about how affective atmospheres might be engineered and manipulated within spaces of aeromobility. From a representational perspective the bare bodies appeal to a particular economy of truth through the unveiling of the corporation, parodying the bareness that is a central technique associated with airport securitisation. But the bareness in the in-flight safety demonstration generates a different kind of intimacy between the corporation and the passenger that facilitates the emergence of affective atmospheres which hinge around fun and lightness. In light of theorisations that invoke the corporation as a model of the control society we finish by drawing out some of the tensions that hinge around figures of veiling and unveiling to demonstrate how affect necessarily exceeds its capture and engineering.
The work of Deleuze and Guattari has inspired social scientists for some decades, yet it is only of late that Guattari's sole-authored work has emerged as a unique force in its own right. This paper explores what Guattari's work has to offer to the analysis of the problematic of 'life' and, more specifically, to the idea of bioethics. While much of the critical discourse on biopower in recent years has worked from the perspective of reflecting on the truth claims of the life sciences, Guattari's schematisation of 'assemblages of enunciation' in Chaosmosis offers an opening to the more ethicoaesthetic potentials of this thing we call life. I argue that the discourse of bioethics can begin to work productively once it is taken outside the scientific paradigm to which it currently remains bound. Rather than seeking to reflect on its object-life-bioethical thinking might aspire to become more experimental as a mode of thinking more sensitive to life's creative evolution.
Cities are indeed places of everyday racism, experienced as ethnocentrism, prejudice and ethnic-based hatred. Drawing on an Australia-wide telephone survey of respondents' experiences of 'everyday' racism in various contexts, conducted in 2006, we examine forms of racist experience, as well as the contexts and responses to those experiences for Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, Australia's main immigrant-receiving cities. Results show that between 1 in 10, and 1 in 3 respondents, depending on their background and situation, experience some form of 'everyday' racism. However, this particular aspect of urban incivility is shadowed by everyday good relations. There is what might be called a 'geography of cultural repair' and cultural maintenance within the cosmopolitan city. There is strong support for anti-racism policy. Where action is taken in response to racism, it is determined by everyday confrontations and attempts at direct reconciliation. Formal complaints and reports are much rarer forms of anti-racism. In this paper, we advocate a pragmatic on-going, agonistic politics of cultural exchange and tolerance. Racism and anti-racism
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