Affect is Ordinary.

There is nothing outside of the affective text

Affect is ordinary, that is the first fact. The vape smells. The tobacco smells. Each smell oozes from clothes differently. The whisky burns. The base and beat of the music can be felt as much as heard thumping through the walls and floors of the Victorian factory turned nightclub. The smell is just a smell, the taste, just a taste. The thud of the bass is a vibration.

These are all ‘pre-personal intensities’, as affect theorists say. They do not, in and of themselves, ‘mean’ anything. They have effects, they affect, us and other things, in ways that are utterly heterogeneous to any meanings we may ascribe to them. The plastic, battery and chemical being of my daughter’s vape has more effects and consequences than occur to me, or her. The disgust response in me is affective and also emotional, as is her nicotine addiction response. I might not ever have felt (the affect) disgust that I do, whenever I see or smell a vape, were it not for so many bad (emotional) memories and associations. Affect, in this sense, when it becomes personal, after it is pre-personal, cannot be divorced from feelings, nor feelings from meanings.

I used to love the smell of tobacco, even of second or third-hand smoke; I loved fresh tobacco, old smoke, stale smoke. Now, it makes me wretch. Whisky (or indeed, whiskey, as I tended mainly to drink Irish) always burns. We repress the pain, deny it, pretend it never happened.

When I was 14, I puked so bad after drinking two different quarter bottles of cheap whisky in about an hour that I thought, the next day, I’d never touch the stuff again. The day after that, my girlfriend who hadn’t been present for the big vom-fest turned up with a half bottle of cheap blended whisky. I fought through the burn and drank with her, because it would be rude not to. I would later go on, through my life, to say that I liked whisky/whiskey, but that I was a bit scared of it. I do. I am. I also came to associate it heavily with death. Funerals. To me, whiskey mainly means bereavement. Mainly my dad. And seeing my brother pass out on the stairs after his funeral. None of this can be separated out.

Scholars have spent much time reflecting on the affective dimensions the big musical event – the sound system, the rave, the illegal gathering, the happening. The coming together of the group, coming up together, bouncing together, shared energy, shared passions, experiences, affects. Yes, ok. I have been there. But long before that, well before attending a rave as a punter, before ever taking a pill, I would work at these events as a bouncer, a doorman. Indeed, I worked as stage crew and/or security for gigs of all shapes and sizes, all genres of music, all sorts of gatherings and vibes. Yes, the music thuds through you; yes, you might tap your feet or involuntarily move to the beat. But not necessarily and certainly not always. The music can be an irritant, the happening a pain, the multitude a bunch of arseholes. Even when you’re working for an act or a genre you really like.

And vice versa. I worked the pit at a heavy metal gig. I had never even been to a heavy metal gig before. I didn’t like heavy metal. The entire event was stressful. I hated every second. The powers that be wanted us to stop stage diving. The band and the audience wanted precisely the opposite. We fought all night and knew that we were, essentially, letting everyone down.

I was exhausted. Drained. I had hated every second. The next day, I borrowed an album and listened to the band. I loved it. I still love that band, and have fond memories of the event. Go figure.

My friend Gabriela Méndez Cota recently observed to me that, within recent scholarly, intellectual and (inter)disciplinary academic history, ‘In some cases, an affective turn was triumphantly declared without further argument or evidence of a genuine, rigorous engagement with Continental philosophy and psychoanalytic praxis’. I agree. ‘Affect’ somehow became the watchword for that which for some reason just simply replaced and superseded poststructuralism’s fixation on words and languages and meanings and institutions. Not many people said why or how this was so.

Some people did. There was some brilliant work. The first examples that just flashed into my mind were John Protevi’s Political Physics, which moves from Derrida to Deleuze very persuasively, and Liz Grosz’s Volatile Bodies, which moves from Foucault to Deleuze.

But people sometimes tended to taxonomize and polarise, as if Derrida and the other language-meaning-institution-focused poststructuralists were doing something fundamentally different to Deleuze and the emergent field of affect studies. As if Deleuze and Lacan could be opposed. But that’s all completely wrong. I was present at the ICA in London in 1996 when Derrida, in front of hundreds of assembled conference-goers said very clearly and without ambiguity, ‘I never disagreed with a word that my friend Gilles Deleuze ever said’.

So, what does this mean? Or, if you prefer, how does this feel? What effects does it have? To me, it means this. There is nothing outside of the affective text. Affect is ordinary – that is indeed (to borrow the phrase of Raymond Williams again) ‘the first fact’. But this does not mean affect is univocal, or has the same effects.

The vape disgusts me. But I understand it doesn’t disgust everyone, not even those nearest to me. The tobacco smells. I feel indifferent to it, until it is lit. If someone smokes near to me, they disgust me. I made this happen. When I finally managed to quit smoking after several failed attempts, I realised that the only way I was going to make this work was if I decided to regard it as disgusting, as a killer, sapping life from those who puffed away, calcifying them, drying them out, with damp rot around the edges, and killing those closest to them. I scrutinized their greying skin, their smell. I listened to their coughs, their rattles. I made them disgust me, so that I could fully disidentify and escape. A complete change of affects, as Sloterdijk puts it, is essential to secession. A conscious decision. A matter of interpretation.