Laurie Green

"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''.


''Just as it is in reflexive relationship with perception, Affect is produced by social relations, and Affect shapes social relations''.


"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 or anti-expression 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.

By performing themselves with integrity they exclude themselves from the disembodied performance that capitalism forcefully extracts.

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''.



"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, colonialism, and capitalist extractivism, the emoatypical performance of Affect is morally judged and somehow found to be lacking''.



"Affect’s energetic flows and shapes are often coded and 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 and neck 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''.