Signifying Nothing: 'Culture,' 'Discourse' and the Sociality of Affect

Abstract

My contention in this paper will be that the vectors which these two terms – ‘culture’ and ‘discourse’ - have travelled on converge in a conceptual space that is still difficult to delineate using the vocabularies of mainstream cultural theory, but which is crucial to any effective understanding of the dynamics of culture in the twenty-first century (or, for that matter, any other century), and which is exactly that being opened up by the search for a cultural theory which can properly address the experiential dimension of ‘affect’.