Ruth Ozeki’s novel, framed around the diary of a Japanese-American teenager and her relationship with her great-grandmother, uses dementia as a metaphor for the inherent slipperiness of time. The novel, through both its structure and affect, moves the reader between different pasts, presents and futures while constituting memories as ever changing and ephemeral. Time, as Ozeki demonstrates in her book, is not the fixed, stable thing we conceive it to be. Discourses of time frame the ways we think about ourselves, our relationships and the social world around us. Dementia disrupts what would otherwise be taken-for-granted as either biologically anchored, remembered time (Brockmeier, Questions of meaning: Memory, dementia, and the postautobiographical perspective. In L. C. Hyden, H. Lindemann, & J. Brockmeier (Eds.), Beyond loss: Dementia, identity, personhood (pp. 69–90). Oxford University Press, 2014) or what Adam (Time and the environment. In The international handbook of environmental sociology. Edward Elgar Publishing, 1997) describes as the western hegemonic reliance on ‘clock time’. Instead, her book brings multiple and competing constructions of temporality to the fore. Similarly, the author Stefan Merrill Block, in his novel The Story of Forgetting (2008), reflects upon another elusive yet inescapable component of identifying dementia in individuals and families, that of emotions—what it feels like to be diagnosed with or to live with the effects of dementia. As Block illustrates, questions of emotion are rarely explicitly addressed or ameliorated by the kinds of explanations, treatments or interventions offered by clinicians or scientists, hence his retreat into the world of fiction. Ozeki and Block reflect upon two distinct yet connected analytical themes or ordering practices (Law, Material semiotics. SAGE Research Methods Foundations. SAGE Publications, 2023) that are central to a sociology of dementia diagnosis and that make up the core of this chapter: emotions and time. Through engaging with memory clinic consultations and interviews with memory clinic staff, this chapter highlights how both temporality and affective relations mediate and are productive of processes of assessment and diagnosis. Engaging with time and emotions as ordering practices, through which dementias are produced (Law, Material semiotics. SAGE Research Methods Foundations. SAGE Publications, 2023; Moser, On becoming disabled and articulating alternatives: The multiple modes of ordering disability and their interferences. Cultural Studies, 19(6), 667–700, 2005), this chapter shows how it is possible to account for the constitution of care and its implications for staff, patients and families.

Affective Relations: Time, Uncertainty and Care

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发表日期：

2025年

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Alexandra Hillman

摘要

Ruth Ozeki’s novel, framed around the diary of a Japanese-American teenager and her relationship with her great-grandmother, uses dementia as a metaphor for the inherent slipperiness of time. The novel, through both its structure and affect, moves the reader between different pasts, presents and futures while constituting memories as ever changing and ephemeral. Time, as Ozeki demonstrates in her book, is not the fixed, stable thing we conceive it to be. Discourses of time frame the ways we think about ourselves, our relationships and the social world around us. Dementia disrupts what would otherwise be taken-for-granted as either biologically anchored, remembered time (Brockmeier, Questions of meaning: Memory, dementia, and the postautobiographical perspective. In L. C. Hyden, H. Lindemann, & J. Brockmeier (Eds.), Beyond loss: Dementia, identity, personhood (pp. 69–90). Oxford University Press, 2014) or what Adam (Time and the environment. In The international handbook of environmental sociology. Edward Elgar Publishing, 1997) describes as the western hegemonic reliance on ‘clock time’. Instead, her book brings multiple and competing constructions of temporality to the fore. Similarly, the author Stefan Merrill Block, in his novel The Story of Forgetting (2008), reflects upon another elusive yet inescapable component of identifying dementia in individuals and families, that of emotions—what it feels like to be diagnosed with or to live with the effects of dementia. As Block illustrates, questions of emotion are rarely explicitly addressed or ameliorated by the kinds of explanations, treatments or interventions offered by clinicians or scientists, hence his retreat into the world of fiction. Ozeki and Block reflect upon two distinct yet connected analytical themes or ordering practices (Law, Material semiotics. SAGE Research Methods Foundations. SAGE Publications, 2023) that are central to a sociology of dementia diagnosis and that make up the core of this chapter: emotions and time. Through engaging with memory clinic consultations and interviews with memory clinic staff, this chapter highlights how both temporality and affective relations mediate and are productive of processes of assessment and diagnosis. Engaging with time and emotions as ordering practices, through which dementias are produced (Law, Material semiotics. SAGE Research Methods Foundations. SAGE Publications, 2023; Moser, On becoming disabled and articulating alternatives: The multiple modes of ordering disability and their interferences. Cultural Studies, 19(6), 667–700, 2005), this chapter shows how it is possible to account for the constitution of care and its implications for staff, patients and families.