Somatic concerns of mental health service users: a specific tale of affect

Theories of affect have been offered in abundance in recent times as potential remedies for the many theoretical ailments that face the social sciences. Post cognitive theories continue to grapple with new ways of thinking the unrepentantly tricky relation between the psychological and socio-material. This paper will explore some of these avenues, before arguing that theories of affect are required that can speak to specificity in terms of the challenges of embodied states. Drawing on accounts of changing medicated body states of mental health service users the paper will develop a specific empirically rooted notion of affect that sympathises with the pre-personal, relational models of ‘excess’ prominent in affect theory, but that attempts to realise a theory of affect that can speak to the concrete reality of embodied experience. Following a theoretical path that includes Deleuze and Guattari, Brian Massumi, and Michel Serres, I will work towards an empirical engagement with affect that attempts to speak to specificity, rather than generality, as attempts at the latter can often result in over-tasked theories faltering in their explanatory pursuits.

Citation:
Tucker, I. (2012) ‘Somatic concerns of mental health service users: a specific tale of affect’. Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 12(1), 23-35. DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2011.549335.