AFFECT [again]
I have more thoughts on feeling. What is Affect? I argue it is feeling, art, politics, magic, and more. There's stuff about revolution and liberation too, because of course there is.
Note: Everything I write is written first to myself, about myself, and for myself. What you are reading is a window into my own internal modelling of the world, and hence it is highly subjective. If you see yourself or some useful kernel of insight that speaks to your reality in my subjectivity, then it makes the exercise even more worthwhile for me. I love to hear your thoughts and feelings about my words. You are invited to share a comment below the line in public, to reply back to the substack email in private, or to find me on instagram @liminal_resonance. I would love to connect.
Please note, this piece contains references to death and suicide.
Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge. They are chaotic, sometimes painful, sometime contradictory, but they come from deep within us. And we must key into those feelings and begin to extrapolate from them, examine them for new ways of understanding our experiences. This is how new visions begin, how we begin to posit a new future nourished by the past. This is what I mean by matter following energy, and energy following feeling. Our visions begin with our desires.
Audre Lorde
A personal account of Affect
To me, Affect is pure body energy. An internal intensity; a charge; a driving force; a libidinal spirit; a formless motion inside and of the body; a vital vivacity. It is the constantly present felt experience of being alive and of relating with the world as a sensing body.
I feel it most under my sternum and in the solar plexus. That filled, tube-like cavity in my chest is the heart of it all. When I think, I find myself in my head just behind my eyes. When I feel, I find myself first in this forward-facing anterior beacon.
From this lozenge Affect spreads down to the belly and up to the neck, rising to my jaw and descending to my groin before wriggling out into my limbs and other extremities. It oozes effusively or shifts explosively, flowing as both Pahoehoe and A’a lavas. It is a being within me and of me, like the bacteria in my gut. It can be graceful and fluid or aggressive and forceful. It can be painful and overwhelming or caressing and soothing. Its shape, sensation, and intensity vary.
Affect is in a reflexive relationship with all of my body’s perceptual systems, those facing inwards and those facing outwards. My perception shapes my Affect, and my Affect shapes my perception.
Affect does not always respond immediately. Sometimes no feeling occurs immediately following an Affect-producing event, only for a wave to hit some hours later like an aftershock. Not all relations evoke perceivable Affect either. Similar events can produce quite different Affect.
Affect can be uncomfortable or pleasurable and anywhere in between. Discomforting Affect can be comfortable and pleasurable Affect can be uncomfortable. When I relive traumatic patterns I feel deeply discomforted but also strangely relieved by their dark familiarity. Pleasure and discomfort fluctuate and merge into each other. Like everything human, Affect is four dimensional and fluid, complicated and complex.
Sometimes I wish I didn’t feel it at all. Sometimes I desire to feel more than anything else.
Affect as Art
Affect provokes in my body a desire to share — to communicate. In a culture where language has primacy and the honest body is taboo, Affect’s energetic flows and shapes are often [coded/concealed] as the language of emotion. When it prickles and grips in my chest and stomach SUDDENLY it is fear. When it softly and slowly oozes through my heartspace, neck and jowls with warmth and integrity it is happiness. When it clamps my jaws and twists my belly into a gnawing maw it is anxiety.
Emotional language does not feel sufficient to convey Affect. It is not one-thing-at-a-time, it is many-things-at-once. Anger and happiness and love and hate can all come at the same time; it is difficult to disambiguate this soup into parts.
Inside me there is one feeling, one gestalt Affect, one experience: not a neat-wheeled-list of discrete and bounded emotions. Anxiety and Excitement aren’t all that dissimilar, and when they come together (as they often do) they merge and create a compound. A new shape forms with a new texture, eerily similar to its individual constituent parts but distinct. Thoughts race to interpret and explain.
Pride + Gratitude + Serenity = Sluggy warm loose hugging pulse, chest. Unnamed.
Frustration + Awe + Anxiety + Sadness + Joy = Squeezy floating light. Unnamed.
When I autistically struggle to describe how I am feeling, I start with the output — the feeling of being in my body — and slowly, meticulously, attempt to locate the land staked out by neuronormative others and colonised with emotional language. These parcels of Affect are sometimes unintuitively bordered. It takes effort to carry out this explorative encoding, and a clear map easily read by another is not always an attainable outcome. Shared empathic intimacy is difficult to achieve with emotional language alone.
I know how I feel all the time because I feel it in abrupt and severe immediacy. I am live; so there is always the feeling of living. There is always something to feel. I cannot always speak it or explain it. It is not represented by language; it just is. If only you could plunge your fist into my chest and experience it with me.
Alas you cannot — I turn to other methods of communication.
The voice can do more than talk. It is an instrument capable of transmitting Affect through the air as vibration, in song, hum, or other non-linguistic utterances. Music produced by instruments extends this power to the hands.
Language offers more than literality. Metaphor and other poetics convey Affect that emotional language struggles to contain.
The body itself offers another lexicon and grammar. The fluid and jagged shapes we flow through with our bodies say something about the feeling flesh that forms them. Non-representational movement gets closer to the unrepresentable truth.
Starting from the body and moving outwards, the list of materials and mediums with which we can convey and mediate Affect goes on forever. That is what humans do. We make objects which express things — when we make, we make art; when we make art, we make feeling. We sculpt, shape, and infuse our inner ineffable into wood, stone, metal, and plastic. We always have. Even the Oldowan handaxe is an object that can be felt. Rock, soil, wood, and bone weep and exalt until they decay into dust — and then dust does the same.
Affect as Politics
Just as it is in reflexive relationship with perception, Affect is produced by social relations, and Affect shapes social relations.
My Affect is most aroused by external relations. It is possible for me to generate Affect through voluntary and involuntary internal processes — thought, imagination, and memory: simulacra of external relations, events, and happenings — but the intensity is a pale imitation of the Affect produced by present-moment relations. Things other than my self — people, animals, living beings, inanimate objects… — are capable of eliciting Affect at its most intense and all-encompassing.
Imagine the frisson of eye contact. A touch without contact that many autists address sheepishly, so powerful the Affect it elicits [me; I do this]. The intimacy of this intercourse is a vector for the generation of Affect.
Imagine the Affect produced by the observation of mass murder on your screens. Bodies pulled from rubble, burnt and crying children mourning the death of their family. Starving humans in wet tents. Affect of great depth and magnitude is produced in the body of empathic onlookers.
[In neither case is it a disordered or failed response to Not Feel; there is no morality to Affect.]
Affects like these can seek resolution with intensity. It can feel as if it is driving, shaping, or even compelling behaviour. The pleasure and excitement of eye contact can impel deeper connection in both bodies — a shared desire to relate further and with more intimacy. The discomforting horror of death and destruction can evoke acts of resistance and organisation, forging collective power.
Affective action prioritises immediacy and takes risks. It prioritises relational shifts — making or deepening connection, severing connection, realigning social ties — over and above maintaining the social cohesion of the status quo.
Seeking to resolve Affect, or acting in accordance with its desires — performing Affect — is an act of power. The conversion of the inner human reality into external material reality is a magical act. It is art, just like the handaxe.
It is perhaps for this reason that dominating power seeks to conceal the collective and relational nature of Affect, pathologising it as an abnormal and dangerous condition of the individual’s disordered body. Cartesian dogma ranks the mind above the body, and upsetting this constructed hierarchy is sacrilegious to this neuronormative doctrine.
[I feel, therefore I am?]
Neuronormative standards require the pious suppression [antiexpression] of Affect both in the individual and the collective bodies, particularly when it is of great intensity. Those who do not sufficiently self-suppress demands for the performance of Affect are marked as disordered, abnormal, uncivilised, or mad.
These people often face direct and indirect punishment as a result. In the UK, 18 year old Annelise Sanderson killed herself in HMP Styal after being sentenced to 52 weeks in prison for assaulting an emergency worker who attempted to intervene in a previous suicide attempt. Shell Ball, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder, anxiety and depression was sentenced to 2 years in prison for arson following the stillbirth of two babies and the death of her partner. 17 states in the USA explicitly allow involuntary incarceration of mentally ill people in jails, in a practice known as emergency detention that is often initiated by law enforcement.
Virgil Murthy1 describes those pathologised with personality disorders or who perform emotion atypically as emoatypical. The emoatypical are a serial collective who suffer significantly under neuronormative and emonormative expectations of what it means to be human. These are people often shunned from the neurodiversity movement. Emoatypical liberation is perhaps considered an unexpedient cause for AuDHDers seeking mainstream representation and popular acceptance to rally behind. However, just like the rest of the neurodivergents, emoatypical people are constructed as a collective through their relation to normative standards of humanity. They suffer [more] under the same yoke of normality.
Emonormative standards expect humans to mediate [moderate] Affect to such a degree that it must be suppressed, repressed, or sublimated in favour of an adherence to human scripts that have been produced over the course of history by dominating power. Those scripts as written and enforced produce performances of the Universal Constructed Human, upholding and reproducing the authorial relations and systems.
In a perverse cruelty, the neuronormative culture produces Affect the performance of which it then punishes as a method of control and self-perpetuation. Against the emotypical standards of dominating power, white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalist extractivism, the emoatypical performance of Affect is morally judged and somehow found to be lacking.
Affect as Revolutionary
Affective transmission between bodies has the potential to perpetuate regressive and dominating systems. More importantly though, it offers a pathway to liberation.
It is easy to see transmission networks and feedback loops of intensifying anger, anxiety and despair forming in the world around us. These relational networks and loops that form social moods have always existed. Now, social networks and interconnected information systems span the globe and uncomfortable and painful affect can quickly become a pervasive miasma across broad swathes of the planet’s 8 billion humans, as algorithms populate For You Pages with content designed to evoke the most profitable forms of Affect; anger, hatred, disgust, and outrage.
I see the potential for similar networks and loops of intensifying love, pleasure, joy, hope, and intimacy to form on local and global scales. I believe that the intentional transmission of pleasurable affect — one pleasurable Affect in particular — is a powerful and revolutionary act. Let me show you how it might work.
The Method: Transmission Networks and Feedback Loops of Love
When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other.
bell hooks
I feel Love. There is power in Love.
Seeking transmission, I act in accordance with Love. I choose to Love self and other. The energy of Love is in my movement, my expression, and my behaviour. I speak with gratitude and Love. My words are tender, my actions are caring. I feel myself in the other, the other in me. We are part of the universal chorus of consciousness. We is I and You and All. We are Indivisible.
I exude Love. I offer Love. I care deeply for the wellbeing of whoever I am in relation with. I care deeply for my own wellbeing. I care deeply for the wellbeing of all the humans I have never met. I care deeply for all the humans that I might hate. I care deeply for all the inanimate objects, all the non-human beings; for the whole universe. Cassiopeia, I love you.
I act in such a way that has the potential to generate Love in the body of the other that I am in relation with. It might not — but if it does, if there is a resonance felt: it is worth it. Risk love, courageously.
In my body I find that offering Love has intensified my own. The original Affective energy is supplemented by (what we might call in emotional language) pride, compersion, and vicarious pleasure. In other words, more Love. There is Love on the breeze in this two-person relational space.
There exists the potential for the Loving Affect to come straight back at me, as the person I am in relation with expresses their own Love. Thus forms a feedback loop, a self-intensifying weather system of pleasurable Affect that is building in our relational space.
With continued cultivation the Loving Affect builds and builds and builds as the system (the social relation) becomes more intimate and Affect can flow more freely. The system eventually becomes unstable. This is not an undesirable, scary instability though — this is a free-wheeling, Loving, powerful instability. The instability of a new system forming in a elongated moment of chaotic and beautiful inception. What if not instability births new realities? Let us orbit as free radicals.
Outside of the loop, transmission networks begin to form. These coalesce as Love propagates from person to person, looping around and broadcasting beyond. An internally pleasurable experience, an energy inside the individual body and then the relational space of just two people, has now become a social mood; a buoyant presence in the relational field; a group dynamic; something in the collective ether. An atmosphere of Love has set in on a grand scale and it sings through the air. Sing with us!
Any interaction between humans has the potential to carry this kind of Affective transmission. I feel this even in small moments of non-contact contact; someone comments on on instagram story, and I respond with an emoji. A DM exchange, an email shared, letters written back and forth. A Zoom conversation with a friend spirals outwards into a conversation with a partner, and back into a playful interaction with a cat. A hug there feeds in to a kiss here. IRL and online become hybrid; parallel and overlapping fields through which Love can pass freely between hyperlocal and global scales.
To paraphrase James Baldwin, let us mirror and magnify each other’s light. Hands held softly we spiral together, offering space for others to join, holding each other safely, gently, tenderly, firmly. As we hurtle through the universe ossified structures fall away and fresh wonders emerge. The heart of it all is Love. The choice to Love. The wavelength of Love is human scale and our bodies are receivers and transmitters ready for resonance.
This is not easy. This is not who I am even most of the time. It takes effort, courage, and energy. Capitalism profanes the divinity of choice by flooding us with decisions of survival which make the choice to Love difficult. Relations within systems of dominating power are often predicated on transactional exchanges as a matter of survival. Most of us experience material conditions that restrict the flow of Love.
Nonetheless, I believe in Love.
End
Love in whatever way you can… Move boldly into that love — deeply, dangerously and recklessly — and restore the world with your awe and wonder
Nick Cave
Affect is an experience felt within the body. However, we are equipped with numerous methods by which we can communicate and transmit Affect — seeking to convey the Affective experience is one reason why human’s seek to invent and create.
Indeed, Affect is produced relationally and experienced within collective contexts. The production and performance of Affect is contested, because Affect is magical and powerful. As a result, dominating power attempts to locate Affect solely within the individual body, and pathologises and punishes its expression in a semi-conscious effort to control and restrict the effects of Affect. This is most clearly shown by the ostracisation faced by emoatypical humans.
The performance of Affect in an intentionally relational manner may offer liberation from collective domination. The propagation of Love through feedback loops and transmission networks is one method through which the individual experience of pleasurable Affect can become a revolutionary force beyond the hedonistic pursuit of self-liberating pleasure. Material conditions work in tandem with neuronormative standards to suppress our ability to make these kinds of choices.
Affect is experience. Affect is feeling. Affect is power. Affect is magic. Affect is art. Affect is politics. Affect is beautiful. Affect is where it all begins.
Back in my body. I feel. I feel I feel I feel. What is it?! Why do I feel it?! I couldn’t fucking tell you right now. It hurts sometimes, and I wish it would stop in those moments. I have spent much of my life wishing it away, seeking respite and safety from Affect. But it means I’m alive. It means I can care, love, yearn, and desire. It means I relate - that we have the opportunity to relate. It means there is a more nourishing and nurturing future possible. This feeling is the kernel of revolution and change. Feel with me?
See also the work of Ceros at Tenderly Borderline