Some consider that affect describes a process of change within a person; this person is affected and can affect. However, Thrift (2004) claims that ‘there is no stable definition of affect’; and Bondi (2009) Int. Encycl. Hum. Geog. 446, describes affect as a ‘feeling, disposition, or mood that exists prior to cognition or rational thought. Often referred to as a mental state, affect is also bodily or sensory and unconscious or nonconscious in character. To be affected is to feel or to be touched or moved’. Shouse (2005) MC J. 8, 6 explains that ‘feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal’—in other words, affect is our unconscious response which precedes our conscious feelings and decisions. ‘The importance of affect’, Shouse explains, is that ‘in many cases the message consciously received may be of less import to the receiver of that message than his or her non-conscious affective resonance with the source of the message’. See Thrift (2004) Geografiska B 86, 1 and Ash and Thrift (2005) Antipode 37. Pile (2010) TIBG 35, 1, 5 reviews affectual geography and is not impressed; read the conclusion to his paper.