How can we go from a more or less diffuse sense of being affected, of ‘feeling it’, in these times of crisis and conflict, to concrete forms of literacy, mutualism, and infrastructure? Manuela Zechner outlines a plural politics of affectedess and thinks about how we may develop understanding and counterpower in the face of socioecological crisis and its local, geopolitical, psychosocial and biophysical effects.
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‘Literacy’ here means not just reading but also rooting: understanding the source of effects and symptoms, the root cause of problems: from rising costs of living (food, housing, water, transport), rising social and geopolitical tensions (far right / war), rising levels of illness and stress, and rising incidence of extreme weather events – as both social and ecological matters. A politics of affectedness in this sense is not about a contest of who is most affected, but about:
1) understanding that we are always already affected, in ways that may seem ‘social’ only but are socioecological; and to understand who profits from this (i.e. learning to read rising costs of living as entangled effect of climate crisis and neoliberal profiteering). This is about translating economic signals into social and ecological ones, understanding how and why certain forms of economic hardship or profiteering occurr and how they connect to the deteriorating conditions for life on our planet.
2) looking to those who are affected in the most harsh ways, be it in more visibly social or ecological manner: those struggling to afford food due to rising prices, those displaced by industrial and infrastructural projects that serve the economic elite (even when under the auspices of ‘green’ investment), those who lose their homes in floods, those who face conflict as a consequence of drought and social tension. Looking to them not as poor others of heroes of survival, but as people and communities that put up fights those of us in less dire straits can learn from, and be in solidarity with. This means local as well as regional and global solidarity. It also means reckoning with war and migration, as the need to reinfoce socioecological internationalism and support networks.
3) to insist that it’s not just the material ways of affectedness that matter, but also the psychic, mental, relational and collective forms of affectedness – that being depressed, miserable, anxious and angry is also part of being affected. That illness, as suffering to do with body and/or mind, is deeply linked to socioecological crisis as it plays out and is handled today in our capitalist societies. If we identify our discomfort and suffering as a common problem – whether it’s air pollution, noise pollution, mental health problems from being exposed to toxic algorithms, endocrinological problems likely deriving from environmental toxins, and so forth – and as common cause that can lead us to demand more research into feminized, environmental illness, lead us to build ties between our own citizen and expert research into ecocide and wellbeing, lead us to block the building of infrastructures in our villages or neighbourhoods, and so forth.
Ecosocial literacy to build agency from affectedness
Correspondingly, to develop literacy – intelligently, carefully, candidly – across those three levels can mean many things.
1) At the level of translating economic signals into socioecological ones, it means becoming able to read price signals, harvest and temperature statistics, insurance policies and costs (as much property becomes uninsurable in the wake of rising risk, especially where the frontlines of affectedness by extreme weather run) – teaching ourselves and each other to read across economy, ecology and society. For this we need Marxism, feminist economics, climate and related science, and perspectives on degrowth and mutualist care that point to other ways of going about handling risk and damage.
2) At the level of looking to those who are affected (including ourselves), it means finding ways to look within as well as beyond our communities and identify contexts where we can meaningfully ally and support. Rendering ourselves able to see, susceptible to perceive and identify things like poverty, conflict, stigmatization, displacement, violence – allowing sense signals to go through even when they are uncomfortable and jarring. It can mean crossing the lines of our comfort zones and usual patterns of communication: going up to someone who reaches into a bin to chat or offer some support, to build solidarity funds in our schools for those families whose kids somehow never join the school trips, or ask those who look lost and confused if they need directions or advice (and if those people is us, it means to learn to ask for directions, help, solidarity). Exposing ourselves to the ways in which others are affected always implies becoming more affectable ourselves potentially, which in turn means becoming both more strong and vulnerable at the same time. It means to gain agency from allying in formal and informal ways, from formulating ideas and demands, and organizing mutual aid in a broader collective way.
3) Then there is the level of taking psychic, mental, and relational forms of affectedness seriously and demanding the possibility of loving and caring socio-ecological relations for all. Basic respect for people and nature, not having to do harm (when our jobs force us to destroy ecosystems or harm people, for instance), reducing competitive dynamics (from education to work and online life) as well reducing alienation and isolation via algorithms and logics that push individualization, extraction and polarization (social media, social benefits and welfare schemes and criteria, state narratives of othering, designation of sacrifice populations and zones). Those are concrete ways in which we can struggle against the top-down impositions of suffering, forms of suffering and triage, and the logics of sacrifice overall.
With it comes a questioning of definitions of illness/well-being – from the questioning official diagnostic designations of gender dysphoria as illness (as Paul Preciado does in his book Dysphoria Mundi), to buen vivir and other redefinitions of the good or good enough life. Imagine our own manuals for naming suffering and care, just like the clinical DSM books of the pharmacoindustrial complex but full of diagnoses and recommendations for doing away with affectations like sexist, racist, ablist stigmatiztion, with environmental and social harm, with lack of care and consent, with repression and authoritarianism – full of socio-ecological, multiply biophysical and materialist cures and demands: more resources, more hands in soil, more fresh air, more touch, more common wealth, more assembly… This level of a politics of affectedness is about reading our symptoms as political-ecological-social signals, and socializing them in struggle and invention, to create other kinds of conditions. Literacy, in this sense, is never just about a distant reading: it’s about a close reading, one that touches and shudders as it gets close, then moves away again to consider; and so on.
Agency and conditions for transforming and be transformed
To be affected means to be impacted, moved, shaped, touched by something – that something reaches us in a way that is sensed and felt. To be affected is, therefore, always also to be transformed, even if in subtle ways. The philosopher Spinoza had a nice way of thinking about affect, as something by which our body’s strength of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained – and by extension also our subjective and collective capacity. When something affects us – whether it’s heat, love, a threat or an illness – it impacts what we are able to do, as bodies and assemblages of bodies. Spinozas old question of what a body can do, and what increases and descreases its capacity to act, is as relevant as ever. Affect – as many later philosophers from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to Brian Massumi, Isabelle Stengers and many others have continued to show – is a key political notion. Affectedness here means to be affected, the conditions that goes with affect.
There are different temporalities to how we are affected: slow, fast, sudden, continuous. Some of those are more perceptible than others, and each require different forms of attention, care and politics that can analyze and transform them. A hurricane opens different needs and potentials for acting and producing change than does the slow poisoning of our bodies via toxins in food or water, and this is something we need to have in mind when we organize.
The slow and ongoing dimension of affectedness requires strategies of longer-term organizing on the ground an in communities, building campaigns and platforms and linking up with researchers, journalists, unions and other actors that can help us raise awareness for a form of socioecological affectedness. We are challenged to articulate a politics and forms of syndicalism based on where and who we are, to make explicit our own needs and desires for change in a concrete context, possibly build our own infrastructures and institutions. Socioecological syndicalism can be to do with affectedness by chronic illness, by rising rents or costs of living, by the steady degrading of ecosystems, and so on.
Organizing around affectedness by events requires us to build more rapid forms of response and infrastructure, but also challenges us to be clear about the structural conditions leading some to be more affected by an event than others – even within the same place. We have a lot to learn from previous events and ancestral catastrophes, shaped by colonialism and racism (as Elizabeth Povinelli and the Karrabing Collective show) as well as the patriarchy and class (as Silvia Federici shows). No event arises out of nowhere: it is always shaped in time and space. Differential affectedness shows most brutally through catastrophic events – remember the Covid-19 pandemic – whilst in the ongoing everyday it tends to be more concealed and normalized.
Institutions and infrastructures of affectedness
Slow or fast, ongoing or event-like: infrastructures and institutions make a lot of difference when it comes to how we end up being affected. Most public institutions originated from mutualist forms of support and syndicalism established by communities to prevent harm. Privatization has undermined that – remember the Covid-19 pandemic, remember the economic crisis of 2008 – and pushed us to set up new commons to support life and build another paradigm of care-for-all. Now we have an extra challenge: we’re no longer alone, we humans. Humanism is over, as it turns out we can’t live without the other living ones. How do we need to reimagine institutions if they are to include not just social interest but also broader forms of life and ecological care? What is the subject of an institution that thinks not only socially but ecologically? And also, of syndicalism that’s both social and ecological?
A politics of affectedness built around imagining and demanding other forms of institutional and mutualist care needs to radically reclaim institutions and infrastructures for those who reproduce lives. Just as early working class institutions set out to build dignity and counterpower for the workers and communities that capitalism feeds off, we’re now challenged to imagine institutions that produce dignity and agency for all those that reproduce life, be they human or nonhuman. Can we have institutions that also ‘represent’ beavers, rivers, lagoons, forests, glaciers, insects? Maybe not ‘represent’, but make present? We likely need to experiment with infrastructures and institutions on more autonomous terms, before we manage to transform large institutions. Our coming socioecological institutions need to link to an ecological politics of grassroots infrastructures as simple configurations and contraptions built to hold off the worst of damage and harm.
Speaking of beavers: when in Czechia, a beaver colony quickly and unbureaucratically built a dam in a protected area where authorities since years sought permits to build flood protection, they were pragmatic. More-than-human and earthcare counterplanning build infrastructures pragmatically, on the basis of community and entangled needs. The acampada tent camps that popped up all over Spain, the Middle East and the US during the 15M/Arab Spring/Occupy movements, they were infrastructures in this sense, responding to a need for people to find each other, to break with corrupt and unjust political and economic systems – and, in time, to build other forms of institution that would structure their redefinitions of what is political into municipal and national governments, as well as cooperatives and community infrastructures.
Our current times of war and crisis make it easy to forget the urgency and potentials of articulating the social with the ecological – when we feel threats to our lives and communities, human-to-human easily and understandably become our priority. And yet we can’t revert back to the social thinking of the 20th century, because the biophysical conditions of our planet urgently demand us to switch into another paradigm, and modern humanism is likely beyond repair. There is going to be a lot of mess in transition, a lot of contradictions to address and basic work to do. We need a politics of affectedness – or whatever we’ll call it – that builds from many little tents, dams, blockades and solidarity clinics, carefully growing their forms of mutual sustenance into a new larger picture of what we hold in common.
Note from the editors: This text was written on the occasion of the Common Ecologies Autumn Gathering 2025. It draws on the author’s forthcoming book “The Plot is on Fire”. With a nod to Bue Rübner Hansen as ongoing partner in conversation and thinking.