Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces

In Refrains for Moving Bodies, Derek P. McCormack explores the kinds of experiments with experience that can take place in the affective spaces generated when bodies move. Drawing out new connections between thinkers including Henri Lefebvre, William James, John Dewey, Gregory Bateson, F lix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze, McCormack argues for a critically affirmative experimentalism responsive to the opportunities such spaces provide for rethinking and remaking maps of experience. Foregrounding the rhythmic and atmospheric qualities of these spaces, he demonstrates the particular value of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the "refrain" for thinking and diagramming affect, bodies, and space-times together in creative ways, putting this concept to work to animate empirical encounters with practices and technologies as varied as dance therapy, choreography, radio sports commentary, and music video. What emerges are geographies of experimental participation that perform and disclose inventive ways of thinking within the myriad spaces where the affective capacities of bodies are modulated through moving.

Author: Derek P. McCormack
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 02/07/2014
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.80h x 6.00w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9780822355052

About the Author

Derek P. McCormack is University Lecturer in Human Geography at the School of Geography and Environment, University of Oxford, where he is also a Fellow of Mansfield College.