Business as usual (working definition)
The maintenance and reproduction of the status quo through:
urgency, scarcity, the pressure to keep going, stick to the timetable, follow the script
hypoarousal, dissociation and disavowal
bureaucracy, politeness, niceness, calls for dialogue, idealisation of neutrality
How can we move beyond our business-as-usual responses to ambient genocide, ecological collapse, systemic oppression, rising fascism, attention extractivism and emboldened white supremacy?
In times of extreme political urgency, we long for collective feeling and collective action—for the power of the commons—yet we are often left alienated and frustrated even by our closest communities.
In order to think through what is blocking action,we have begun a series of study groups. We assembled reading lists filled with writers and artists we are inspired by, provoked by, disagree with; and we invited friends, colleagues and collaborators to help us get closer to the ugly, inconvenient and friction-ful emotions that evade our grasp. We started with anger—because we are angry.
***
This has been a year of silences. We have been finding ourselves in rooms of excruciating smoothness and niceness; conversations drifting sideways around the edges of anger; sudden, isolated eruptions met with numbness and disavowal. The determined march of business as usual in the face of the most documented genocide in history.
But we also see a silencing that arises from within—within ourselves, within our closest relationships, within our community spaces. Are we, too, afraid of our anger? Afraid to be shaken by it? Afraid to find the places where our communities cannot hold us? To discover that the lives we have built do not align with what our anger is telling us?
In the heartbreak of this dislocation, we yearn for a new relationship with our anger, individually and collectively. How can anger be a teacher, and help us to find our voices? How can we learn to trust anger, our own and each others’?
We have turned in our confusion to our queer ancestors, our elders, our teachers and our friends, and we call them into this text now, so that we can all hold this anger, together, tending to the griefthat trails in its wake, and revelling in its fierceness.
Video exhibited at the SoC Assembly 2025, gathering images lineages/manifestations/affects from the readers and study groups
Holding it together and holding it, together
“Anger unvented becomes pain unspoken becomes rage released becomes violence, cha cha cha” —Tongues Untied, Marlon Riggs
At a shared office space in Berlin, people are busy at work. The tense and silent atmosphere is suddenly broken by the sound of a mug shattering against a wall. A Black man storms out of the office kitchen, past all his coworkers, out of the building. People are shocked, there are mutters of disapproval, the shards in the kitchen are quietly gathered and thrown away. There seems to be a group consensus—the anger needs to be swept out of sight before it catches on. Later, the man is found in a café nearby. Embarrassed, he apologises and says he needs to find a therapist.
For our first study group on anger, we gathered at soft power in the middle of a Berlin heatwave. We all leaned in to listen as a friend described this scene, still shaken and moved by what she had witnessed the day before. It contained so many familiar dynamics:
The outburst that seems to come out of nowhere
The silence that follows
The turning away
Black anger met with instant disapproval
Fear of anger’s contagion
Anger narrativized as a shameful individual pathology (even by those experiencing it)
How can we unlearn the rules of white respectability and break these patterns? We invited group analyst Reem Shelhi to talk with us about her concept of affectivism, which offers us a model of how we might approach these situations differently:
“Affectivism” (which combines affect with activism) is proposed as a multi-faceted, destabilizing, decolonizing and depathologizing concept and group analytic intervention that exemplifies turning to and moving towards (rather than turning away from) the intuitively felt sense of emotional, psychological or material consequence of oppression.
[...] Affectivism aims to transform locations of disturbance into locations of discovery, espousing a curious rather than curative approach.In difficult and precarious situations, it asks us to do a double take, to think again about what just happened, within ourselves and in relation to others. As such, it is aligned with expressive rather than repressive interventions and with coherence rather than cohesion so that even the most violent or threatening forms of affect can be given room to breathe, if not to vent.
What would an affectivist response have been to the shattered mug? Our friend later learned that everyone in this man’s team was being fired. All staff were under huge pressure to finish their projects before the entire office was forced to close. Later still, she found out the reason: the office’s funding had been withdrawn due to their investigations into Israeli war crimes. Once we could see the whole picture, we understood how the smashing mug did not pose a problem—it exposed the problem.
Again and again we see the pain, anger and conflicts of the group suppressed and scapegoated, turned into an individual problem—a “problem individual”. We remember a story, heard in a podcast:
As prehistoric humans began to live in larger communities, gathering closer together in encampments and tribes, we evolved towards cuteness and niceness. Our physiology changed in ways that mirror wild animals becoming domestic: our teeth became smaller, our bones narrower, our features more delicate, our manners more gentle.This, we are told, is the work of the group: we breed out anger, collectively attacking the aggressive individuals, ostracising them from the resource of community.
It is a story that feels like a parable, read in the bones of our ancestors: the parable of the group. It is a seductive and dangerous narrative, as evolutionary hypotheses tend to be—the ineluctable pull of “scientific” reasoning upholding a particular moral fantasy of sociality, where harmony is achieved through the carceral logic of exclusion and expulsion.
We consider the shattering mug on the wall, which helps us to see how this parable plays out in the present. Is this the kind of village we want to live in—one that selects for niceness, for tameness? One that pushes anger to its edges, locating it in outsider individuals?
Instead of pushing down our fear and anger behind a mask of affability, what if we imagined a different kind of village, in an affectivist mode—one that gets alongside the angriest villager, and rages in solidarity with his pain and fear? One that asks him, not what’s wrong with you, but what happened to you? And, what happened to us?
Anger denied becomes madness projected becomes scapegoats rejected becomes silence, cha cha cha.
Orca uprising
It’s 2023. Some orcas sink yachts off the strait of Gibraltar. The memosphere goes wild, portraying them as brave protesters of climate change taking direct action against the billionaire class. Orcas become the folk heroes of the revolution. Orca comrades, orca solidarity, orca uprising. Alexis Pauline Gumbs calls them “revolutionary mother teachers”. Then some marine biologists come along and ’splain away the poetry, insisting that this behaviour is nothing but a form of play.
This story was brought into one of our study group sessions, reminding us of how different bodies invite different projections. It is easy to project aggression and war-like intent onto the actions of huge, powerful, intimidating “killer whales”. If it was packs of sea otters gathering to destroy boat propellers, would we read it as mischievous and playful, and the damage to property as unintentional? Not all destructiveness is judged harshly—who gets away with it?
Psychoanalysis shows us how groups often attempt to get rid of uncomfortable emotions by projecting them into an individual, rather than facing them collectively. As we discussed this, Doug readily identified with the orca, attracting blame in a sea of cute otters:
“That’s how I’d be read as a kid—being Black, and always being the tallest of my age group—whenever any of the kids got hurt while we were playing, I’d immediately get blamed. As if I was playing in an aggressive way. And maybe yes, I did hurt someone! But because I was a gangly, clumsy kid playing around.”
***
When we gather in groups, the fear of being ostracised—as the difficult queer, the feminist killjoy, the angry Black woman—acts as a form of social control. For marginalised people especially, it’s a double bind. There is no perfect tone. If you’re visibly angry, you will be reduced to a stereotype and your words dismissed. If you try to dodge the projections by pushing down your emotions, you find you’ve lost your voice anyway.
Quotes from the study group. We tie ourselves in knots trying to strike the perfect tone that will disarm all defences.
One strategy that is often invoked is that those of us who do not have “aggression” projected onto us so readily, can take advantage of our positionality to voice anger with less risk,on behalf of the wider group. The reality we see far more often is the same minoritised voices speaking up in anger again and again. Many of the “killjoys” in the study groups described feeling that the only way out of the double bind is through it: to accept that anger and aggression is always going to be projected onto them, and to embrace this role of the “angry one”, using it to speak up and disrupt systems of harm.
Sprinkler systems
Alice tells us:
In an experiential group I was participating in recently, someone shared this dream:
“I came to the building where this group takes place, and I was shocked to find it was on fire. I tried to alert the staff, but they just said: “Don’t worry, there’s a sprinkler system.” So I went into the group room—this room on fire—and the sprinklers came on. Then someone put on music and we were really relaxed and dancing.”
Then a woman of colour in the group responded, “I’m really glad you shared that dream, because so many times I’ve wanted to burn this fucking building down”. It left me wondering about my role in that group and others. When I’m trying to be helpful, how often am I acting as a “sprinkler system” for the anger in the group?
What role do sprinkler systems play in a world on fire?
***
School of Commons is located in ZHdK, a building of smooth concrete surfaces, mirror-like glass, and uncanny automated doors. Throughout our year with SoC, we repeatedly noticed a stereotypically “Swiss” affect permeating our shared spaces: an atmosphere of neutrality, politeness, calm, tight scheduling and rational bureaucracy that smothered emotionality and intragroup conflict. It was contagious. It crept into our thinking and creativity, our strategies for collaboration and group process. We began to use “Swissness” as a semi-joking shorthand, that kept us alert to this affect and more able to resist its influence. Of course, it is not an exclusively Swiss disease. White supremacy, colonialism, classism, ableism—globally, these systems of power thrive in an atmosphere of smothered emotions. One of the key tools for the maintenance of business as usual is the unspoken dogma: “if you can’t speak calmly, don’t speak at all.”
Last summer, I began to experience regular insomnia—a new experience for me. My heart beating too fast; my body temperature bouncing between shivering and overheating; my muscles tensing as I missed a phantom step each time I drifted off. For hours, I would try to “regulate”, to soothe my restlessness with warm showers, meditative breathing, calming music. Finally, in the early hours of the morning, my thoughts would begin to bubble up to the surface, and again and again it would hit me—“Oh! I’m ANGRY.” Then I would suddenly recognise all the interactions I’d had the day before where I’d squashed my anger down so far, I hadn’t even noticed it myself.
When you don’t give your anger back to the group, it sticks to you, makes you sick.
The language of self-regulation—which has been all over our feeds since 2020—individualises our shared emotional world. This framework, intended to help us gently take care of ourselves and each other better, has quickly been co-opted and misused as a blunt tool for tone-policing. Somatic coach Aasia Lewis critiques the pathologizing imperative to “go and self regulate” before communicating thoughts and feelings. This obsession with regulation teaches us to disregard the precious information that our bodies are trying to give us when we are dysregulated:
“Trying to keep it together all the time is an oppressive state. It takes an enormous amount of energy to appear stable when you’re organismically not. That energy can be better used to explore the turbulence and uproot the weeds of shame, doubt, and self-loathing. We have been colonized to suppress, repress, and depress the wild expression of our emotions. Decolonize by allowing safe, authentic, and full expression of your life force’s experiences.”
While hyper-arousal is policed and shamed by social norms, hypo-aroused states often pass for grounded composure in the culture of business as usual.
***
“I had a fantasy of coming here and us all feeling angry together, how good it would feel to be an angry group, in agreement. But then I could only feel my anger in the break, on my own.”
The internalised—often unspoken—rules of emotional regulation frequently impoverish our attempts to collaborate and connect. The group becomes a paper-thin relational web, as we struggle to experience one another beyond a surface level, and learn to fear the strong emotions that flare up and are quickly squashed. We seem to carry an idea of what it means to be a group, what it means to be social, that denies what Lauren Berlant calls “the familiar friction of being in relation”. This is why strategies like group check-ins, intended to create greater openness, can devolve into an exercise of covertly reassuring each other. As Audre Lorde insists, “anger is loaded with information and energy”—which the group and its members lose when anger is disavowed.
Athanasius Kircher’s 1665 engraving from Mundus Subterraneus makes us think about how a group could feel like a connected ecosystem, in touch with every layer beneath its surface. Fire is always present alongside all the other elements. It might flare up out of different volcanoes at different times, but it belongs to the whole system. How can we all tap into the same oceans and the same lava flows?
Sprinkler systems might arise from a wish for the group to survive—a fear that unmoderated conflict will damage and maybe destroy the group. Of course, some level of emotional regulation, of self-containment, supports the possibility of relating and communicating. But is the survival of a group worthwhile, when that group cannot withstand any heat at all? We think of the colonial mismanagement of forests: how fear of all-consuming flames has disrupted the cycle of transformative forest fires that lead to fertile soil and new growth. Can we move away from the bloodless image of the automated sprinkler in the smoky office building, and find a more generative relationship to the elemental forces that can rage through the group?
Anger is a gift
Anger is a fire to be tended to
We need to learn the skills of the firekeeper: to sustain a long-burning fire without burning up all of our fuel; to burn off the dead wood with care and control; to maintain balance with the elements of air, earth, water; to create a gathering point for our community.
We watch Māori MPs performing a protest haka in parliament and we feel the magnetic power of collectively expressed anger, fortified by ancestors, elders, and community solidarity.
Anger is slippery
It’s easy to misunderstand and misdirect our own anger, to punch down, sideways, or inwards instead of up. We can trust anger that has been composted, turned over for information and solidly rooted in our bodies and the earth.
Anger is loaded with energy and information
Anger is revolutionary
Lama Rod Owens teaches us that revolution is slow—a response, not a reaction. In order to burn away the oppression of business as usual, we must understand how to sustain a long, low flame. Mother Courage tells a young soldier, “your fury’s just a lightning bolt that splits the air, bright, noisy, then BANG!—all over. It was short-lived anger, when what you needed was long-burning rage, but where would you get something like that?”
Anger is an expression of hope
Anger is an offering
The folk heroes of the revolution—the orcas, the Luigi Mangiones—offer us a lightning bolt, a spark. Instead of letting them fall to the damp earth, we must learn how to build fires from those sparks.
Anger is destructive
… and destruction can be transformative. We fear anger for good reason. At some point, we must be willing to burn away our old selves, our old ways. Diane di Prima reminds us that “every revolutionary must at last will his own destruction / rooted as he is in the past he sets out to destroy”.Anger is a teacher
Thank you to all the study group participants for thinking and sharing with us: Samirah, Doug, Row, Azul, Derek, Yen, Tres, Penny, Fred, Chad, Iga, Linnéa, Alice, Liz, Maeve, Oopie, Hasan, Giulia, Reem, Hoora, Grace, Liza, Jacob
Q: “How does our perception of chaos shape our experience of it?”
A: “Here at last is the chaos I held at bay. Here at last is my strength.
I am not the water—
I am the wave,
and rage
is the force that moves through me.”
(Susan Stryker)
