The chapter therefore risks ethnocentrism in an area which, more than most, has
been aware of difference.
Second, I have mainly concentrated on theoretical explorations of affect,
although many of these explorations are backed up by solid empirical work. That
means, in particular, that I have tended to pass by the very large amount of material
in social psychology and cognitive science. This is unfortunate since this work is
now going beyond the crude behaviourism of the past but incorporating it would
have necessitated not just a supplement but a complete new paper (cf. Davidson
et al. 2003).
Third, my approach is constrained, if that is the right word, by a specific theo-
retical background which arises from a particular time in the history of social
theory, one in which we are starting to grasp elements of what constitutes ‘good
theory’ in ways that have been apprehended before, but often only very faintly.
I will pull out just a few of the principles which are intended to produce new
conceptual and ethical resources, mainly because they are so germane to what
follows.
1 Distance from biology is no longer seen as a prime marker of social and
cultural theory (S.P. Turner 2002). It has become increasingly evident that
the biological constitution of being (so-called ‘biolayering’) has to be taken
into account if performative force is ever to be understood, and in particular,
the dynamics of birth (and creativity) rather than death (Battersby 1999).
2 Relatedly, naturalism and scientism are no longer seen as terrible sins. A key
reason for this is that developments like various forms of systems theory,
complexity theory and nonlinear dynamics have made science more friendly
to social and cultural theory. Another reason is that, increasingly, the history
of social and cultural theory and science share common forebears. For
example, since the 19 4 0s systems theory has informed both domains in diverse
ways and, consequently, we seem to be entering a period in which post-
structuralism is likely to be renewed by its forebear, structuralism.
3 Human language is no longer assumed to offer the only meaningful model
of communication.
4 Events have to be seen as genuinely open on at least some dimensions and,
notwithstanding the extraordinary power of many social systems, ‘revolt,
resistance, breakdown, conspiracy, alternative is everywhere’ (Latour 2002a:
124 ). Hence a turn to experiment and the alchemy of the contingent form
that such a turn applies (Garfinkel 2002).
5 Time and process are increasingly seen as crucial to explanation (Abbott 2001)
because they offer a direct challenge to fixed categories which, in a previous
phase of social and cultural theory, still survived though complicated by the
idea that one considered their workings in more detail. The multiplication of
forms of knowledge and the traffic between them is taken seriously (Rabinow
2003).
6 Space is no longer seen as a nested hierarchy moving from ‘global’ to ‘local’.
This absurd scale-dependent notion is replaced by the notion that what counts
174 Part III