DUKELOW, Alisha
Modernist Affect Grid

In 1962, Place Ville Marie, Montreal’s cross-shaped office tower and underground shopping mall—named after the French Catholic settlement of unceded Mohawk territory that became the colonial city—opened to the public as the Commonwealth’s tallest “nerve centre” and “breathing machine.” The same year, Silvan Tomkins, the father of affect theory, published Volume I of Affect Imagery Consciousness, which exuberantly draws on the then-sensational cybernetic brain-computer metaphor. 1962 also saw the publication of Story Sequence Analysis by Magda Arnold, a luddistic and devoutly Catholic psychologist who mothered the monumental cognitive appraisal theory of emotion. Modernist Affect Grid’s essay-poems triangulate these events as they emerge amidst the Cold War tech race’s paranoid and projective ambition. 

[publiser's note]

Published by Documents - Centre for Expanded Poetics, 2022
Poetry