Refrains for Moving Bodies

Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces

Derek P. McCormack

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780822355052
  9780822354895
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822377559
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory

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, Félix 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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Affective Spaces for Moving Bodies
• Chapter One. Transitions: For Experimenting (with) Experience
• Chapter Two. Rhythmic Bodies and Affective Atmospheres
• Chapter Three. Diagramming Refrains: A Chapter with an Interest in Rhythm
• Chapter Four. Ecologies of Therapeutic Practice
• Chapter Five. Commentating: Semiconducting Affective Atmospheres
• Chapter Six. Moving Images for Moving Bodies
• Chapter Seven. Choreographing Lived Abstractions
• Chapter Eight. Promising Participation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index