Suchergebnisse

This article argues that certain consistent themes are evident in police studies research (including my own) with respect to the issue of emotion. I have described these 'emotional repertoires' as paranoid in character. By this I mean that it is a milieu which overvalues order, homogeneity and stasis while being suspicious of difference, fluidity and change. It tends to split the world into good and bad parts with very rigid boundaries, and it projects negative qualities onto those groups and individuals imagined to be 'bad'. It is also a milieu which strongly displays a collective desire to order, control or, sometimes, attack outgroups onto which bad qualities have been projected. The article develops an initial theoretical framework for understanding this apparent linkage between a particular occupational milieu and a specific range of emotional orientations to the world. I argue that we might think in terms of the institutional production of affective subject positions - and use ideas taken from Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and Elizabeth Grosz for this purpose.

This article is intended to work on a number of different levels. First it is concerned with the brain-become-subject as hypothesized by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book What is Philosophy?. It is concerned with demonstrating the convergence between Deleuze and Guattari's work and the claims of some contemporary neuro-biological theories of consciousness. In particular, I will be comparing Deleuze and Guattari's hypothesis to the work of Gerald Edelman and Daniel Dennett. Second, it is my contention that the shared themes of this convergence amount to the renewal of a paradigm in the understanding of human consciousness and its relationship to the body, which I have elsewhere called `the new Bergsonism'. The emphasis in the text on themes such as duration, material connectedness and immanence, Becoming, multiplicity, selection and so on, is taken to be self-evidently Bergsonian. The primary task of this particular article is, then, to establish a careful technical demonstration of the existence of a shared set of themes and concepts. I have made this demonstration more concrete by placing it within the context of a discussion of the affective dimensions of the experience of social idiosyncrasy (as defined by Adorno and Horkheimer). My wider agenda is that this demonstration of shared themes in poststructuralism and neuro-science should contribute towards a more general attempt to establish a neo-Bergsonian paradigm at the heart of a new sociology of affect.

Contrasts modern & postmodern theories of affect in human violence, concentrating particularly on their varied accounts of ego formation & its links to paranoia, their mutual concern for the sublime & idiosyncratic, & the links they discuss between affective perturbation & the breakdown of semiosis. The work of Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno (1944) is used to exemplify the modernist/humanist approach. Their work is described as normalizing a single, reflective unified ego whose schizophrenic fragmentation is taken to be a form of paranoia. In contrast, postmodern writers such as Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (1987), William Burroughs (1983), Jean-Francois Lyotard (1986), & Slavoj Zizek (1989) are taken as roughly comparable efforts to explore the interrelations of signification, practices, & institutions. Collectively, it is suggested that these postmodern writers have produced important new understandings of the fluid links between the body, mind, & material world. It is argued that future research in this area ought to include a conceptual exploration of areas of convergence between modernist theories of ambivalence & postmodern accounts of difference. 21 References. D. M. Smith