122 CONCLUSION
say that they have fleshly, biological import — does not imply that they are
natural as opposed to historical. Nor should it lead to biosocial reduction-
ism and determinism, where social inequalities inscribe the biological body
and fix themselves there, crystalizing into forms that determine experience
(see Schmitz 2012). A real, actual body, a body that experiences real illness
or actual oppression, cannot be treated as purely natural, nor as purely sym-
bolic. Rather, it must be recognized in its material- discursive specificity, or,
to put it another way, as complexly embodied (Siebers 2008).
Although bodily problems and vulnerabilities can force one into a re-
alist or materialist mode, the positive capacities of the body also demand
attention. After poststructuralism and its privileging of discourse, much
contemporary social thought is approaching nature, biology, and matter
with a sense of enthusiasm, wonder, or even vitalism. Within this scope of
thought, the turn to affect, in particular, is informed in part by depictions
of the brain and nervous systems working at levels before and below cog-
nition, which allows some of what has previously been defined as cultural
and linguistic to be understood as biological and material. Experiences that
are inadequately grasped in language may be attributable to the capacities
and excesses of the neurobiological body — its multiple material, social,
and intercorporeal agencies. Affect is social, goes the theory, without be-
ing derived from the symbolic; bodies can therefore be communicative, or
share valences, outside of subjectivity and consciousness. (Thus affect is
not exclusively human.) In many accounts of affect the body’s vulnerabil-
ity to power is similarly extended. Affect theorists, along with queer and
feminist phenomenologists, underscore how their orientations toward and
entanglements with others can change bodies. Thus attention to the body’s
capacities can help to address in ontological or realist terms the heterogene-
ity of bodily experiences, even (or especially) those queer affects that have
been deemed scientifically, legally, or socially implausible.
If contemplating illness and pain can lead to critical fatigue, theorizing
the biological body’s dynamic and social propensities can also foreshorten
epistemic cares. In response to criticisms that affect theory draws too un-
critically from brain science to ground its antirepresentationalism (Black-
man 2012; Hemmings 2005; Leys 2011; Papoulias and Callard 2010), some
affect scholars point to the dynamism of neurobiology, much as some use
neural plasticity as immanent critique of the sexed brain. The concepts of