The Power at the End of the Economy 9780822375814

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the power at the end of the economy

BRIAN MASSUMI

The Power at the End of the Economy

duke university press

durham and london

2015

© 2015 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Typeset in Quadraat Pro by Westchester Book Group

the author acknowledges the generous support of the social sciences and research council of canada (sshrc).

Cover art: Photograph by Brian Massumi, Flashpoint.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Massumi, Brian. The power at the end of the economy / Brian Massumi. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-5824-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-5838-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-7581-4 (e-book) 1. Economics—Sociological aspects. 2. Economics—Political aspects. 3. Economics—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title. hm548. m37 2015 306.3—dc23

2014023497

for art beyond interest joy beyond reason

contents

1. The Inmost End 1 The Market in Wonderland 2 System Distrust 6 Collapse of the Affective Wave Packet 10 2. A Doing Done through Me 19 Deliberation without Attention 21 Jamming Rational Choice 24 The Primes of Life 26 Toward a Politics of Dividualism 32 Double Involuntary / Autonomy of Decision 36 Fielding the Event 43 Tribunals of Reason 48 Finessing the Event 53 3. Beyond Self-Interest 57 Your Life for My Little Finger? 58 Contiguity, Most Distant 65 The Argument from Intensity 68 The Other as Sign of Passion 73 A Freedom of the Event 79 The Flashpoint of Sympathy 84 Toward an Anticapitalist Art of the Event 93 supplements

I. The Affective Tasks of Reason 97 II. Keywords for Affect 103 Notes 113 Works Cited 121 Index 127

1. The Inmost End

The hypothesis of a calculable future leads to a wrong interpretation of the principles of behaviour which the need for action compels us to adopt, and to an underestimation of the concealed factors of utter doubt, precariousness, hope and fear. —John Maynard Keynes, “The General Theory of Employment” (1973, 122)

We are enjoined to rational choice. We are taught that our freedom is one with the freedom of choice. We are told we become who we are by how we choose. We are assured that if we choose well, according to our own best interests, we will end up serving the interests of all. We are told that there is a mechanism in place to ensure this convergence between our interests and others’. Market is its name. Its “invisible hand” adjusts best choices to each other, its magic touch guided by the principle of competition. Competition weeds out suboptimal choices, selecting for efficiency. Efficiencies multiply each other, minimizing effort and maximizing profit for all. The market, we are further led to believe, is self-regulating. It has a natural inclination toward optimization. As political subjects, we are enjoined to vote, rationally, in its interests so that we may pursue our own, for the general good. Rationally, the political subject coincides with the economic subject of self-interest that we all are fundamentally, in private pursuit of happiness. And what, if not that, gives meaning and motivation to our lives? We are all paying guests at the tea party of choice, spreading our favorite jam on our very own slice of the bread of life, served on the silver platter of efficiency by the invisible hand. But on closer inspection, a rabbit hole appears at the heart of the market. It plummets from the apparently solid ground of rational choice to a wonderland where nothing appears the same. Affect is its name. The “concealed factors” of doubt, precariousness, hope, and fear—and (why not?) love, friendship, and joy—tend to bubble back up to the

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surface with rowdy abandon. In today’s version of free-market ideology, neoliberalism, the affective commotion has become so insistent that something else surfaces as well: the creeping suspicion that it is upon the groundless ground of these now not-so-concealed factors that the edifice of the economy is actually built. Efficiencies, we are still assured, multiply each other. They lasso each other, bootstrapping the economy out of its periodic crises into a provisionally stable order that we are still entreated to consider rational. But when markets react more like mood rings than self-steering wheels, the affective factor becomes increasingly impossible to factor out. It becomes obvious that the “rationality” of the economy is a precarious art of snatching emergent order out of affect. The creeping suspicion is that the economy is best understood as a division of the affective arts.1 The implications of this groundless grounding in affective artistry are worth a look, not least for what it might say about “rational” selfinterest as the guarantor of self-optimizing order, but also for the rethinking it might necessitate of the very concept of the rational in its relation to affect. Michel Foucault provides a provocative starting point in his 1979 lessons on the genealogy of neoliberalism (Foucault 2008).

The Market in Wonderland The “invisible hand” makes at least a cameo appearance in every discussion of the free market. Foucault’s is no exception. As its inventor, Adam Smith, conceived it, Foucault argues, the concept of the invisible hand had nothing of the godlike quality that has come to be attributed to it. The whole point of the concept was that the economic system is too churningly complex for there to be any possibility of a lordly overview upon it. In his genealogy of neoliberalism, Foucault makes the point in no uncertain terms: when it comes to things economic, there is no “total transparency” (Foucault 2008, 279). Not only is there no total transparency—there is no transparency or totality. The concept of the invisible hand, as Foucault interprets it, is a principle of blindness in an open field of ceaseless activity whose contours, always shifting, are by nature indefinite. “Being in the dark and the blindness of all the economic agents is an absolute necessity” (297).

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For neoliberals, this is actually a good thing: it makes economic liberalism unavoidable. It means that the economy can have no sovereign. The invisible hand actually means “hands off.” The liberal’s principle of laisser-faire, Foucault quips, becomes for the neoliberals “do-notlaisser-faire government”: tie the government’s hands (Foucault 2008, 247). Foucault is quick to add that in practice neoliberalism entails a large and even expanding range of forms of governmental intervention. But these are designed, paradoxically, to maintain the ability of market mechanisms to self-organize the economy free from undue government interference (175–176). They do not operate from a position of sovereign command. They are in the midst.2 Any governmental attempt from on high to weave the strands together into a well-defined, predictably regulated whole will just fray the fabric to the ripping point. Government purports to act all-knowingly in the general interest, and in its hubris always fumbles. Individuals, too, are under the injunction, in the name of the general good, to act without regard for it. For it is only then that the “invisible hand” can work. But it’s not a hand at all. It’s an accumulation of little-handed decisions which end up serving the general good in spite of being self-interested. Individual decisions, made in the darkness of self-interest, percolate through the field. To the extent that the results of these decisions form positive feedback loops, they give rise to mutually beneficial multiplier effects and there occurs a “spontaneous synthesis” of what’s best for all (Foucault 2008, 300). The synthesis is entirely involuntary with regard to each individual (275–276). This “rationalization” of the economy to which the subject of interest’s decisions involuntarily contribute is an emergent property of a complex, self-organizing system: a novelty and a creation, forever self-renewing. The synthesis, Foucault continues, is a “positive effect” of an “infinite number” of “accidents” occurring at ground level in the “apparent chaos” (277), or quasi-chaos, of the market environment. These are bound together by a “directly multiplying mechanism”— competition—which, Foucault emphasizes, operates in the absence of any form of transcendence (275–276). In other words, the positive synthesis of market conditions occurs immanently to the economic field. The choice of the subject of self-interest rabbit-holed in that field of immanence is “irreducible” and “nontransferable” (272). It is “unconditionally

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referred to the subject himself ” (272). At its core, Foucault says, the liberal economic model is one of “existence itself ”: it concerns first and foremost a relation of the “individual to himself ” (242). This is existence in its dissociative dimension.3 Here, in its relation to itself, the subject circles itself more and more tightly around its individual power of choice, like a dog to sleep, wrapping itself centripetally around a center of promised satisfaction. It circles in on itself, away from the social, unmindful of noneconomic societal logics. But it all works out for the best for society in the end, they say, thanks to the positive synthesis of multiplier effects. Relation to oneself involuntarily amplifies across the multiplier effects to become a systemwide social fact. The inmost dimensions of individual existence are operatively linked to the most encompassing level, that of the market environment that is the economic field of life. What is most intensely individual is at the same time most wide-rangingly social. The smallest scale and the largest scale resonate as one, in a quasi-chaos of mutual sensitivity. To relate self-interestedly to oneself is in the very same act to relate, involuntarily, to everyone else. But there is a problem. It has to do with the future. Success, of course, is not guaranteed for any particular act, or any particular individual. The self-organizing of the system at the largest scale can synthesize its way past many a microfailure. As choices percolate through the economic field, the negative impact of individual failures is compensated for overall by the multiplier effects of the successes. Given the infinity of accidents riddling the economic field of life and the existential blindness of all economic actors, there is an ever-present threat of a misstep. Every economic calculation is a calculus of risk. “Behavioral finance (psychology) and rational actor models (the ‘rational economic man’, or rem) rarely emphasize how uncertainty differs from risk and probability” (Pixley 2004, 18). You can calculate risk in terms of probabilities, but probabilities by nature have nothing to say about any given case. The affect accompanying uncertainty is there in any case. Choices in the present become highly charged affectively with fear for the uncertain future. The present is shaken, tremulous with futurity. There is no calculus of risk independent of an individual’s affective self-relation to uncertainty.

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Even in the best-case scenario, rationality and affectivity cannot be held safely apart. Unlike the juridical subject of the law and the civil subject of society, the economic subject of interest is never called upon to renounce its self-interest for the general good.4 Self-interestedness remains “unconditional.” It is measured in satisfaction. We have been successful in our self-interestedness if we have attained satisfaction for ourselves. What the economically productive subject of interest ultimately produces is its own satisfaction (Foucault 2008, 226). Paradoxically, the measure of how “rationally” a subject of interest behaves can only be measured affectively, in the currency of satisfaction. Rationality and affectivity are joined at the self-interested hip, in one way or another, for better and for worse. “Emotions function in the core structures of the financial world” (Pixley 2004, 18). The subject of interest is never called upon to renounce self-interest. But it is frequently called upon to defer the very satisfaction by which its self-interest is measured. Feeling insecure? Be reasonable. Defer your satisfaction to a more secure time of life. Work toward retirement. But this is a rational choice only if you trust the system’s self-organizing. This is an increasingly difficult sell as crises follow each other in rapid succession. Each crisis is a shock to the system, at all scales. Uncertainty starts to feed on uncertainty. Fear builds into panic. Negative multiplier effects take over. Household savings vaporize and national economies crumble. Suspicions grow that the invisible hand suffers from a degenerative motor disease. All signs are that the condition is congenital. Crisis no longer seems a punctual interval between periods of stability. Crisis is the new normal. That this should be the case only stands to reason. The premise of any rational calculation is that similarly strategized actions will yield similar results. But the whole point of an economy that selects for creative multiplier effects is that multiplier effects are nonlinear. By definition, they are effects that are not commensurate with their causes, even if the causes be known. The whole point of capitalist enterprise is to “leverage”: to extract a surplus yield of effect over and above what would normally be expected to follow from an investment. The capitalist process is driven by the potential for, and yearning after, an excess of effect

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over any given quantity of causative input: surplus value. The more complex the system is, the more uncertain the future becomes. And complexification has been a constitutive tendency of the capitalist system from its beginnings. Capitalism, always a far-from-equilibrium system, is becoming ever more so. The same multiplier mechanism that promises future satisfaction makes it exponentially less certain. Why defer satisfaction if the capitalist future is constitutively uncertain? But on the other hand, how can you not play it safe by deferring your satisfaction, precisely because the capitalist future is so uncertain? This conundrum of deferral is an expression of the paradox that neoliberalism’s promise of satisfaction unnerves the rationality it extols, giving it the affective shakes that cannot be cured. The rational risk calculations of the subject of interest become more and more affectively overdetermined by the tension between fear of the future and hope for success, and between satisfaction and its uncertain deferral. The embrace of rational self-interest and affective agitation becomes all the closer. They fall all the more intensely into each other’s orbit, to the point that they contract into each other, entering into a zone of indistinction, at the heart of every act. It’s a vicious circle. Positive multiplier effects can be counted on only when individuals’ rational choices mutually reinforce each other, catching like a contagion. This is the point at which rational choice is indistinguishable from “irrational exuberance” (in the legendary phrase of US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan). This is also precisely the mechanism that forms speculative bubbles leading to crisis.5 More radical than the fact that the same mechanism that promises satisfaction makes it exponentially less certain is the fact that the attainment of the very satisfaction promised can itself bring on a crisis. The tired hound of self-interest, circling in for satisfaction, traces its own private vicious circle in its self-relating movements. Its sleep will be agitated. It will twitch with dreams of disappearing rabbits.

System Distrust In times of crisis, the first words out of the mouth of any economic leader are: “we must restore trust in the system.” But as systems theorist Niklas Luhmann blithely observed, under these endemic conditions

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“trust rests on an illusion” (Luhmann 1979, 32). In a chaotic economic field personal relations of trust are impossible to guarantee. “In actuality, there is less information available than would be required to give assurance of success” (32). “Linear causal explanations come to grief ” (83). However well intentioned other parties may be, they cannot be trusted. The nonlinear dynamics of the economy could well frustrate their best intentions. What’s an enterprise system to do? If relying on personal bonds of trust is out of the question, there’s only one option: “depersonalize” trust. Make it “impersonal” (Luhmann 1979, 93). Entrust the system. “System trust” is the only answer. But how does an individual trust a system that doesn’t trust itself to follow its own line? “There must be other ways of building up trust which do not depend on the personal element. But what are they?” (46). Luhmann has an ingenious answer to his own question. You actually “shift forward the threshold of effective distrust” (75). In other words, you foster distrust as a starting condition (88). You foster distrust, but not as the opposite of trust: as its “functional equivalent” (71). What on earth does that mean? It means that you “interlock them so that they intensify each other” (Luhmann 1979, 92). You bring trust and distrust together into a zone of indistinction where they are in such immediate proximity to each other that one can easily tip into the other at the slightest agitation. They resonate together, intensely. As actions are taken, the resulting affective state of the individual oscillates between them. Foucault notes that the “horizon” of the neoliberal field of life is one of increasing differentiation that is constitutively open to “oscillatory processes” (Foucault 2008, 259).6 By differentiation, he is referring to capitalist society’s overspilling of disciplinary modes of power based on normative models imposed on the individual, and the accompanying proliferation of “minority practices” (259). When he mentions oscillatory processes he is talking about the fluctuation of economic indicators such as salaries, job creation figures, industrial orders, and most fundamentally prices, which mark the ups and downs of the system’s self-regulatory mechanisms. But the same description applies equally well to the smallest unit of the economy, the enterprising individual, as it does to the system as a whole. On the individual level, trust and distrust interlock and intensify each other, resonating together in

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immediate proximity, forming their own oscillatory system. As do fear and hope, satisfaction and self-denial, all in it together.7 The individual subject of interest forming the fundamental unit of capitalist society is internally differentiated, containing its own population of “minority practices” of contrasting affective tone and tenor, in a zone of indistinction between rational calculation and affectivity. In other words, there is an infra-individual complexity quasi-chaotically agitating within the smallest unit. The individual remains the smallest unit despite this infra-level complexity, because what resonates on that level are not separable elements in interaction. They are intensive elements, in intra-action (Barad 2007, 33).8 They are immediately linked variations, held in tension, resonating together in immediate proximity. Their oscillatory co-motion expresses itself at the level of the individual, where it is marked by fluctuating indicators, just as the actions of individual economic actors express themselves on the systemic level in fluctuating indicators such as prices. We call the indicators of the intra-action occurring on the infra-individual level moods. “Moods,” Gilbert Ryle writes, are like “the weather, temporary conditions which in a certain way collect occurrences, but they are not themselves extra occurrences” (Ryle 1949, 83). Moods collect infra-occurrences and sum them up in a general orientation giving direction to the next level up, just as price fluctuations collect the microeconomic decisions of individual actors and sum them up in the general orientation of the economy as a whole. This means that we need to add a whole new dimension to economic thinking. Beneath the microeconomic level of the individual there is the infra-economic level. At that level, an affective commotion intra-churns. Its variations are so immediately linked that we cannot parse them out into separate occurrences. The individual, speaking infra-ly, is not one. It may collect itself as one. It may figure as one, for higher levels. But in itself, it is many. Many tendencies: potential expressions and orientations held together in tension. The individual is buffeted by these tendencies’ coming turbulently together, divided among them in its relation to itself. Divided among them, awaiting their complex playing-out in a shift in general orientation, the “individual” is the dividual (Deleuze 1995, 180). The dividual is the individual as affective infra-climate, in relation to itself,

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commotionally poised for what may come, storm or shine, doldrums or halcyon days.9 Nothing divides and multiplies the individual so much as its own relation to the future. The uncertainty is not just external, relating to accidents and the unpredictable actions of others. It agitates within. Even if you play it as safe as possible by deferring a decision until sunnier days to come, all you have done is find another way to increase uncertainty: now it is not just others’ decisions that are unknown to you but your own as well. “These unknown nondecisions recur endlessly” (Pixley 2004, 33). Who knows what will possess you to decide when to decide, or what you will decide when you do? You don’t know your future self yet. You are infra-buffeted by your own unworked-out tendencies awaiting a complex playing out that is as likely to surprise you yourself as any stranger. Weather forecasting is as unpredictable in the infra-climate of the (in)dividual as at other scales. The affective infra-climate of the dividual poised for what may come is the rabbit hole of the economy. The unknown nondecisions and not-quite-occurrences recurring endlessly in a turbulence of tendency are complex in the same way as the economy as a whole. Both are like the weather, quasi-chaotic self-organizing systems. This puts a whole new perspective on “rational” choice. The individual, Foucault said, is unconditionally referred to itself, and this referral is irreducible and nontransferable. This means that rational decision is unconditionally, irreducibly, nontransferably referred to an infra-individual zone of indistinction with affect. Rationality and affect become “functional equivalents” by Luhmann’s definition: interlocked and mutually intensifying, in a zone of indistinction, at the “forward threshold” of economic existence. Luhmann’s analysis of trust posits that this infra-level of individual complexity is directly connected to the collective, macrolevel of the economic, without necessarily passing through the mediation of the intervening microeconomic level at which the individual is but one. It is a defining characteristic of complex environment that the extremes of scale are sensitive to each other, attuned to each other’s modulations. This is what makes them oscillatory. They can perturb each other. Systemwide changes in the weather are sure to resonate at the infra-level,

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for example, in a localized patch of fog. Perturbations channeling back up from the infra-level are apt to amplify into multiplier effects. Think of the way a local fog can amplify into a mega traffic jam. The individual blindness of the subject of interest is the fog of the economy. When multiplier effects channel upward, the individual is not mediating between the levels in any conventional sense. Self-organizing effects channel through the individual level on their infra-way to larger things. The individual is an amplifier mechanism for multiplier effects’ self-forming. It channels the threshold noise of the system—the functional indistinction between rational calculation and affective response—into an emergent economic ordering that is as ever-changing and continually self-renewing as the winds. In a very real sense, the infra-individual is the crucible of the system. When Foucault says that the individual’s choice is irreducible, he can only mean that the individual’s tendential dividedness in relation to itself is irreducible. The dividual is irreducible. The infra- of the individual is irreducible, in the sense that when systemwide perturbations blow down its hole, they can go no further. They have nowhere else to go but to turn around and blow back out. The economy ends in the recesses of the infra-individual, which as Foucault said is not only irreducible but nontransferable. What is nontransferable is inexchangeable. At the infraindividual level, the possibility of exchange comes to an end. If the economy is defined by exchange, then the economy ends in the recesses of the infra-individual. It reaches a limit, as a function of which it is organized—but which lies outside its logic. Foucault speaks of this affective infra-level as the “regressive endpoint” of the economy (Foucault 2008, 272). The infra-individual is the regressive—recessive or immanent— endpoint of the economy. The dividual is the noneconomic wonderland of intense and stormy life on the brink of action that lies at the heart of the economy: its absolute immanent limit. Endpoint—and turnaround. It is only ever possible to approach an absolute limit. The movement toward the endpoint of the economy either disappears into its own infinite regress, or spins itself around into a movement of return.

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Collapse of the Affective Wave Packet Returning to Luhmann’s analytic of trust, to say that trust and distrust resonate together in a zone of indistinction of immediate oscillatory proximity to each other means that what is felt in the lead-up to an economic act, as it is brinking, is neither one nor the other, neither trust nor distrust. Luhmann says that what is felt is a “readiness” to feel either come next (Luhmann 1979, 79). The individual is in an infra-state of readiness potential. Trust and distrust are together as co-present potentials for what might come next. They are in superposition, in the sense in which the word is used in quantum physics. Though inseparable, their distinction is not erased. It is held in ready reserve. The affective feeling of the readiness potential, Luhmann continues, presupposes a “corresponding reserve of energy which is elsewhere not determined” (Luhmann 1979, 80). In other words, the system itself, because it is similarly complex and nonlinear, is in an energized state of readiness potential that is structured in a fashion homologous to the subject’s affective state. The economy is ready and “responsive,” poised, like its individual units, for what may come, in a state of brinking agitation. On the infra-level, the brinking is a superposition of trust and distrust in readiness potential. On the macroeconomic level, what is held in readiness potential are the system states of success and failure. At the moment a given choice is made, the success or failure of that action is “undetermined elsewhere.” Which way it goes will depend on actions still in tendency, as yet undecided. The economic outcome depends on how these tendencies’ expressions will inflect and amplify each other as they turbulently play out across the economic field in a cascade of caroming choices. When this self-organizing process works itself out, the cumulative effects will be “collected” and “summed up” in a system indicator. Until the “mood” of the economy comes to expression in this way, success and failure will remain in a state of superposition—as will trust and distrust at the individual level. The affective states of trust and distrust and the system states of success and failure lie at the two oscillatory poles of the economic process. They are sensitive to each other. They reciprocally determine each other, effectively connecting across

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their differences of nature and the distance between levels through a complex, nonlinear process of feedback and feedforward. Under these conditions the subject of interest is not in a position to know how any given act it takes will turn out. But it cannot not act. You can only defer so long, or so much, and only in certain areas of your activity. Any act you perform triggers the process leading to a resolution of the commotion of affective states held complexly together in tension on the infra-individual readiness potential into a determinable outcome registrable in terms of success or failure. In short, making a choice leads to the collapse of the superposition of affective states. To borrow the vocabulary of quantum physics, it collapses the affective wave packet. A particle of trust or distrust spins off into the world, where it will perturb the infra-individual complexity of other (in)dividuals poising for action. Again like quantum physics, the causality is recursive. The determination of what the act will effectively have been, which state it will be found to have been in, is in suspense until a measurement is made. The measurement makes what comes what it will have been. Until then, what has occurred is less an act or a choice than an as yet unresolved perturbation. The perturbation must percolate up to the level at which it is collected and bundled into overall economic indicators before it can be determined. Figures are released monthly and, in the case of the most affectively weighted and eagerly awaited, quarterly. In the meantime, particular indicators, such as the stock market or the price of oil, fluctuate continuously like the batting of tiny butterfly wings. Now with the Internet the fluctuations can be followed minute by minute or even second by second. Without the quarterly indicators to contextualize them, extrapolating a trend from this passing economic wing batting is highly conjectural, to say the least. Extraeconomic events, such as a political crisis in an oil-producing region of the world, can spook investors and consumers. These extraeconomic perturbations are all the more affecting in anticipation. The uncertainty of these so-called negative externalities occurring, and what their exact fallout will be if they do occur, sends shivers through the system. The shivers almost instantaneously amplify into a low-grade fever that may prove at any moment to have been the onset of a chronic illness. The system is in a continual state of pathological excitability, if not because of the publication of new indica-

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tors, then in the intervals between them, in the urgency of the feeling of the need to respond to trends before they emerge onto a macro-enough level and are tidily summed up in the indicators. To act on threats before they emerge was the Bush administration’s definition of preemption (Massumi 2007). The economy is continually agitated by the affectively fraught, felt need to preempt it. As the neoliberal economy takes hold, deferral becomes less and less of an option and preemptive action more and more of an imperative.10 This makes the economy more affectively activating than it is effectively rationalizing. It runs more on perturbations and cascading amplifications than determinate acts of choice. As this state of affective agitation heightens, what economic actors often end up reacting to most directly are the agitated affective states of other actors. This has given rise to a whole new ser vice industry, that of “Internet mood analysis.” The Internet is trawled by algorithms that search out affectively laden words and terminology to provide a realtime pulse taking of the mood of the economy. One such ser vice goes by the name AlmagaMood, whose catchy slogan is “Leveraging Big Data to Enhance Investment Foresight.”11 It is not just economic sites that are mood-mined. It is the entire Internet, including blogs, news sites, and the expanding Twitterverse. The economy as a whole vibrates with the fickleness of what the pundits call “social mood.” This Internet-based mood registering occurs informally through the social media and all manner of networking. In our networked society, with the global media reach and cross-platform convergence of the Internet, any act anywhere resonates, potentially, everywhere, in the economic analogue of Einstein’s “spooky” action at a distance. Readiness-potential wave packets collapse, affectively systemically, in real time (or its functional Internet equivalent). Individual actions are affectively entangled at a distance. It is only the complex playing out of the entanglements that decides in the end what will have been a success and what a failure. Complexly correlated to each quantum of success or failure, there will come to expression determinate affective states of trust or distrust, satisfaction or frustration. Individual economic actors are infra-connected. They are connected at a distance, in the recesses of their affective rabbit holes. They communicate

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at a distance, in immanent affective proximity, churning in and turning around the regressive endpoints of their respective (in)dividualities. The infra-level resonates transindividually. Individuals spook each other or goad each other on, turning around what is nontransferable in them as individuals: their infra-individual affective commotion. They resonate, at the limit of the economy, in their dividuality. As they reciprocally perturb each other, their readiness-potential wave packet collapses, correlated transindividually at a distance. Quanta of trust and distrust fly off in all directions. These affective emissions feed up into macrolevel expressions of economic success or failure, which no sooner feed back down from the system’s macro level into the affective infra-fray. Given the cross-sensitivity between scales, at the limit the economic system and the subject of interest are themselves in a functional state of indistinction. The whole system is always going down the rabbit hole. It is just as continually reemerging, through multiplier effects, channeled through affectively inflected individual actions, back onto its own level. It does not make the trip to its own regressive endpoint and back unchanged. It becomes en route. In addition to the economic system—the precarious emergent orderings of the economy as more or less regulated by macroeconomic market mechanisms, and as more or less analyzable using quantitative indicators—there is the chaotic process of this back-andforth between levels from which economic determinations periodically emerge.12 The process as a whole is neither governable nor quantifiable. It is affective-relational. Given the paradoxical bond between the affectivity of the relational process and the troubled rationality of its emergent orderings, the system that is the sum of the orderings is at best metastable: precariously stable, tottering between bouts of system equilibrium loss and processual vertigo. Each dizzy individual’s rabbit hole of affect is at the immanent limit of the economy. The multitude of these regressive endpoints “communicate,” entangled at distance. Their transindividual entanglement composes what Deleuze and Guattari would call the “plane of immanence” of the economy. The plane of immanence of the economy is the irreducibly affective limit of a complexly relational field. It is the economy at its absolute co-motional limit of tendential stirrings in uncertain readiness potential.

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On the plane of immanence, the economic system and the subject of interest are jointly in potential, in a functional state of indistinction at the level at which action is just beginning to stir, in the incipience of what is to come. The symmetry between the infra-individual and the economic field as a whole, across their difference in scale, is only apparent. The infra-level is in a very real sense the larger of the two, in that it germinally includes the relation between levels, at the immanent limit. Entangled in the zone of indistinction of readiness potential, the subject and the system come together, to become together. Every little act turning out from the regressive endpoint collapses the wave packet, destroying the infra-state of functional indistinction. The commotion on the infraindividual level acts out. It is then registered as an indexable occurrence, summing up the individual’s irreducible and nontransferable relation to itself in an economically significant act. Through the registering of the action, discernible levels bounce back into place. Scales accordion back out. The system re-self-organizes out of its processual rabbit-holing. The individual’s self-relation, in the “dissociative” dividual dimension, is the crucible of the system’s integral self-organizing. Each little act helps inflect the system’s global direction, as the economy bootstraps its future on the fly. The system’s future is also each individual’s future, as it navigates a life journey through economic successes and failures. The system and its denizens become in tandem. Every little act exerts a quantum of creative power, globally and locally, in accordionplaying correlation. Every little choice exerts, to some degree, a power of local-global becoming: an ontopower. What has been lost to the system and to individuals in terms of knowability, calculability, and predictability is regained in resonant ontopower. An ontopower, as a power of becoming, is a creative power. The economic model, Foucault said, is now one of existence itself. Existence itself: where being is becoming. When what is created is a state of system trust, Luhmann emphasizes that the trust is entirely “unjustified” (Luhmann 1979, 78). It may be rationalizable after the fact, but in its genesis it is rationally unfounded. It did not occur as the separate result of a rational decision judiciously preceding the actions that brought it into being. It came flush with an affective regress, and its turnabout playing-out. At the limit, all economic acts are rationally ungrounded in the endpoint of the economy. This does not

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mean that they are affectively grounded there. Any state of system trust that emerges is just as affectively unjustified as it is rationally unjustified. It was not grounded in anything preparatory to action that could be qualified as in any way trustworthy. The transactions that worked out well and led to success proved themselves trustworthy. They became trustworthy, as a function of how they played out. The state of system trust is effectively self-justifying. It “justifies itself,” Luhmann writes, in the way that it has “become creative” (78): in the emergently creative way it is generated as a trust-effect of the economy’s complex self-organizing. The self-organizing emergence of the trust-effect is retroactively validating. It is affectively validating in the currency of satisfactions gained. If enough trust-effects emerge at a sufficient rate of generation, then however unjustified they are, the system has a chance of continuing, in a positive orientation, trending up. Trust in the system has been restored. The affective conditions for continued surplus-value production are in force. Follow-on actions reinforce the trend. Positive feedback between the systemic and infra-individual levels locks in. Positive multiplier effects bubble through the economy. When the indicators come out, the effects are there to see, rationally summed up in a trend. The summing up can then be projected forward into future trends. Based on these statistical projections, a calculus of risks and probabilities can be made. The affective-effect is now as rationalized as it can get. The rationalizing indicators stoke economic activity, reinforcing the affective conditions for growth. These feed back to the regressive endpoints of the economy composing its plane of immanence. Turning around them, they resonate transindividually across the economic field. Feedback loop. Economically, affectivity and rationality circle creatively through each other. The regress to the endpoint of the economic and the upward progress of the economic indicators are a single two-way movement of reciprocal feedback. They are systemically superposed pulses of the capitalist process, together ontopowerful. Mirroring the quantum vocabulary of the reduction of the wave packet, Luhmann refers to the production of a state of system trust as a “reduction of complexity.” The economy cannot be micromanaged: do not laisser-faire the government. Although the economy cannot be micromanaged, through the feedback process it can be infra-stoked toward the

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emergence of trust-effects. The instability of the economy can, at least for certain hiatus periods, be affectively primed into metastability: a provisional stability snatched emergently from far-from-equilibrium conditions. Halcyon days. Vacation days from the full destabilizing force of complexity. Provisional stability: no one really knows how long the trends will hold. System trust is a fragile artifact hypersensitive to perturbation. Luhmann drives the point home: “in the reduction of complexity,” resolving into a metastable state, at the immanent limit, at the heart of the process, “there always lies an unstable, incalculable moment” (Luhmann 1979, 74). It is around this unstable, incalculable, hypersensitive moment that everything begins to revolve. The principle of decision at work “cannot lie in cognitive capacity” actually involving a calculation that guides action before the fact (79). Ultimately, there is no prospectively knowing economic act. The whole process actually works best, Luhmann maintains, if the consciousness of trust and distrust are lost, so that the reduction of the readiness-potential wave packet “becomes autonomous” (71)—so that decision becomes autonomous. The affective churning of the system, through which the “rationality” of the system cycles, is best left unbeknownst even to itself.13 Nonconsciousness becomes the key economic actor.

2. A Doing Done through Me

It appears evident that—the ultimate ends of human actions can never, in any case, be accounted for by reason, but recommend themselves entirely to the sentiments and affections of mankind. —David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Principles of Human Morals (1912, Appendix 1)

It appears evident that the individual subject of interest can no longer be considered an autonomous agent of calculated choice. It is the act of choice that is autonomous, in the dissociative dimension of the dividual: that of the individual, absorbed in its relation to itself, plied by superpositions of contrasting states in a mutual immanence of functional indistinction. Choice spills from the readiness potential of the subject’s affective blind spot, nonconsciously. This nonconscious level is nonpersonal. In the intensity of its immanence, the entire system at all its scales resonates in potential, carried to the absolute limit of its regressive endpoint. This infra-level holds all system states in itself, immanently, in potential. It dissociates itself from other individuals and other levels only the better to supercharge itself with what, elsewhere in the system, will play as separate states, following divergent tendencies: distributions of success and failure, trust and distrust, boom and bust, satisfaction and frustration, hope and fear. The nonconscious infra-individual level is, at the limit, the nonpersonal superposition of all levels, in the dissociative dimension of their distributive coming together. In the strange, hyperdifferentiated infra-zone of indistinction between contrasting states, who or what decides? Dividually speaking, who or what chooses? Choice happens, there is no denying it. And as it happens, it is creative: an ontopowerful act. It is tantamount to an existential decision. But who or what decides? The answer is: no one—as in the

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French personne, which can mean both “someone” and “no one.” Decision happens: affectively-systemically, in the nonconscious processual autonomous zone where mutually exclusive states come together. The event decides, as it happens. At the decisive moment, the self is no more in a state of determinate activity than it is in a cognitive state. It is absorbed in a readiness potential that is intensely overdetermined, holding, Luhmann says, “a whole range of possible differences” in “sub-threshold latency” (Luhmann 1979, 73). The whole range of potentials are in it together, in their difference. They are in a state of mutual inclusion, on the verge, poised toward the collapse destined to resolve the overdetermination of the and-both into this-not-that determinate effect, registrable in a calculus of risk and probability: from intensity to statistic. Such is the arc of neoliberal becoming. The nonconscious “sub-threshold latency,” churning with the intensity of a mutually inclusive range of potentials, in co-motional intensity, deserves a name of its own: bare activity. When we speak of the subject of interest’s “self-relation” to bare activity, or the relation of the individual to its infra-individual dimension, “self-” has to be understood directionally. It is not a substantive. It connotes return. It is a movement. What moves to the limit of the economic field of life’s regressive endpoint has nowhere to go but back out, into becoming. What comes in, becomes out. The plane of immanence of the infra-individual is, at the limit, all-enveloping, and all-emitting. It is the self-relation, in this double movement, of the field of life to itself. “Self-” is an adverb, not a noun. It qualifies the absorptive in-to-the-immanentlimit and ejective out-into-the-becoming movement of bare activity. It connotes a vector of life eventfully folding back into the autonomous zone of readiness potential out of which its next determinate step will decide to come. Self-relation in this adverbial sense is not reflexive, as in philosophical parlance, nor it is reflective in the psychological sense. Both of these notions recognitivize the event, implying conscious recognition or rational calculation—precisely what Luhmann entrusted not to be the case. All of this radically changes what is meant by choice. We do have a word for a choice that makes itself. There is name for a decision that wells up from a state of unknowing, yet still produces knowledge, in

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effect. For an act that has intense personal resonance, but of which it cannot be said that “I” felt it coming in full cognizance. A doing done more through me, self-relating, than by my I. That eventfully brings a creative moment to life in a way that registers as a change in me that is also world-changing. That word is intuition. The basic paradox of the economic subject of interest is that the “calculus” of interest is unthinkable without reference to subthreshold activity more akin to a nonpersonal flash of intuition than step-by-step conscious deliberation. The “rationality” in the system is necessarily referred to an autonomy of decision bare-actively stirring at the affective heart of self-relation.

Deliberation without Attention In the 1990s, the period in which neoliberal market deregulation and do-not-laisser-faire-the-government took on unstoppable momentum, management philosophy became obsessed with chaos theory. The order of the day was to learn how to surf complexity, extracting surplus value on the fly, in the most fluid of conditions, in the absence of adequate knowledge for fully considered decision and the certainty it brings. This is the period in which capitalist enterprise became an “art” of decision making. The management bookshelves were full of “creativity,” “gut feeling,” and “zen.” The alchemists of old were fabled to transmute the most inconstant of materials into gold. Given the far-from-equilibrium complexity of the globalizing economy, a new capitalist alchemy was needed to transmute uncertainty into profit. Consider this in light of the neoliberal economist’s insistence, as analyzed by Foucault, that in the deregulated market the individual subject of interest is no longer defined by its social category or anchoring in a community so much as by its enterprise activity. The neoliberal individual is what Foucault calls the enterprise-subject. “If capital is defined as that which makes a future income possible, this income being a wage, then you can see that it is a capital which in practical terms is inseparable from the person” (Foucault 2008, 224). The “worker himself appears as a sort of enterprise”: “entrepreneur of himself ” (225, 226). The individual becomes an enterprise, as the enterprise at all scales becomes

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the fundamental unit of society (225). The enterprise-individual invests actively, affectively, in its own life, for the future satisfaction of a higher wage, a good return on monetary investment, and a happy retirement. The denizen of the neoliberal economy is no longer a citizen. It is human capital (224–265) or, with the gravitas of Latin, homo oeconomicus. Human capital navigates the same field of complexity and enterprise form of life as its fellow corporate persons. “Corporations are people too!” cried the presidential candidate (and the US Supreme Court agrees).1 As human capital, the individual’s self-management—its attempts to manage its self-relation as an investment in its own future—must become a creative art of choice. Correlatively the personal art of choice must become corporate, in keeping with the entanglement between levels. The management, self-improvement, and psychological literature of the decade of the 2000s overflows with theories of intuitive action and advice on how to mobilize or modulate the powers of nonconscious decision, now considered for all humanly capital intents and purposes to be more fundamental economically, if not better in all cases, than ratiocination. Much of the literature celebrates nonconscious decision, cheerleading for gut feeling. These accounts are bolstered by studies showing, for example, that the more calculation and rational deliberation goes into making a consumer choice such as buying a new car, the less likely the choice will be to correspond to an expert cost-to-benefit analysis, and the less satisfying the experience will be perceived to have been “postchoice”—even independently of the issue of cost-effectiveness. Influential studies have found a negative correlation between rational calculation and consumer satisfaction. Nonconscious choice—intuitive “deliberationwithout-attention”—produced “better” choices. This eff ect was slight for “simple” choices and pronounced for “complex” ones, which in this context are the same as “costly” choices (Dijksterhuis et al. 2006). In other words, the more there is riding on a choice, the less rational calculation can be counted upon to lead to a satisfactory decision, both economically and affectively speaking. In the life of an individual, this might well lead to a viscerally felt disincentive to choose “wisely” by conventional rational standards. Somewhere along the road, it appears that the “good” consumer went out the car window with the “good” (pre–human-capital civil society) citizen.2

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Economic rationalism cannot be disentangled from self-deciding affective factors—all the less where it matters most. Issues of trust aside, the very question of what counts as a “success” or “failure” is subject to affective interference. It cannot be reduced to a purely economic costto-benefit analysis. When the affective interference doesn’t come from uncertainty in the environment and the individual’s relation to others, it still comes—from the individual’s decisional relation to itself. The neoliberal wager of making self-interest the fundamental principle of the economy depends on maintaining a strict equation between lifesatisfaction and rational calculus of choice. The denizen of the neoliberal world is called upon to equate the experiential value of its life—the surplus value of life that makes each pulse of life feel that it was worth living for itself, above and beyond the increasingly impressive achievement of just getting by—with standard quantitative measures of economic success. It is precisely this equation that increasingly breaks down. It becomes clear that there is something in the very nature of decision that forbids it. The very definition of “success” oscillates between affective and economic determinants. This calls the integrity of human capital into question, and it is not just a circumstantial complication. More like a birth defect in its dna. It is often recognized in the literature that “gut feeling” tends to flounder when dealing with abstract statistics and probabilities. But we need to take this reservation about gut feeling itself with reservations. For nothing will change the fact that macroeconomic indicators are statistical, meaning that they carry a margin of error that makes them inherently uncertain, dealing as statistics do with probabilities. Economic forecasting projects the probabilistic uncertainty forward. This means, once again, that results are undecidable with respect to any particular case. On the level of individual decisions, economic forecasting is little more than a mathematical framework for intuition to work within, garnished with a gloss of scientificity. The calculus of risk is not what it’s cracked up to be, as is well attested by the regularity with which crises catch the experts by surprise, even though everyone knows that they periodically recur and are endemic to the capitalist process. The most learned economic number crunching is affectively surrounded by a penumbra of inexpungeable uncertainty. Individual economic actors

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ultimately have nowhere else to go but back down the rabbit hole. No amount of sophisticated modeling will expunge the hard economic fact that under complex conditions of uncertainty rational choice and affectdriven intuition enter a zone of indistinction. To put it another way, “rationality about the unknown requires emotions” (Pixley 2004, 30).3

Jamming Rational Choice Returning to the question of the individual actor’s relation to itself, there has been a tectonic shift in experimental psychology as it has become increasingly preoccupied over the last ten to fifteen years with poking its empirical stick at the rabbit hole of affect. Nonconsciousness studies has become a growth field in all areas, most troubling for many in the key areas of decision and choice. Most recently, rational choice theory has had to contend with the emerging domain of “choice blindness” theory (cb for short). In the science of choice, a ground-shaking acronymic shift is occurring from rem (rational economic man) to cb. The challenge is not only to the trustability of one’s choices under conditions of extreme uncertainty. It reaches into the smallest recesses of the most everyday of situations—and ascends to the supposedly rocksolid heights of the individual’s moral compass. There are strange doings in the tea party of choice. Researchers in the psychology of consumer choice asked subjects to make a simple choice: between two varieties of tea and jam (Hall et al. 2010). The tastes of the proposed alternatives were as different as can be, for example between cinnamon-apple and bitter grapefruit. Participants were asked which variety they preferred. The researchers then switched the varieties unbeknownst to the tasters. Then they asked them to take what they thought was a second sample of their preferred flavor and explain why they liked the flavor best. Two-thirds of the time the experimental subjects did not notice the switch. A cinnamon-apple aficionado would happily ingest bitter grapefruit—and convincingly explain his preference for it. Talk about rationalization of choice. On the one hand, this “choice blindness” demonstrates the power of perceptual priming. A future sensation can be made to conform to a past sensation to which it is fundamentally different by force of ex-

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pectation. “Expectation” may simply consist in a lack of cues that anything has changed, so that a new event is nonconsciously equated with the previous one by entropic momentum. This is what Whitehead calls the “conformation of feeling,” whereby the present moment dawns as a continuation of the “subjective form” of the immediate past (1967, 183– 184).4 The experimental subjects, poised for a taste, tasted what they were poised for. The experience of the taste that isn’t what it is is a case of how the most basic sensory experience can be conditioned to yield not so much a sense-impression as a fabulation.5 This points to an experiential plasticity that belies any notion of an underlying principle of personal preference as having the sovereign power to determine action. What are experienced as satisfying qualities of experience are surprisingly open to situational conditioning. How is a jam eater to act according to her own self-interest, as signed and sealed by the satisfaction of a preference duly attained, if what constitutes satisfaction is fundamentally plastic? What is the difference between decision and nondecision if we can be as convincing, to ourselves as to others, about being satisfied with an outcome we did not choose? It is not only when the nature of the outcome is in suspense, held in readiness potential, that decision and nondecision are in a state of superposition. A determinate decision, already verified once by an experienced satisfaction, can be made retroactively to enter into a state of superposition with nondecision by a later experience. This is the recursive opposite of the collapse of the wave packet by a future event. Here a sequence of action produces the wave packet retroactively. Undecidability is not in the suspense of a readiness potential holding the futurity of the present. Rather, it is presently produced as a recursive affective fact.6 Affectivity and rationality are entwined in a different way here. The affectability of the outcome as registered in qualitative experiential terms—the openness of an experience’s satisfaction quotient to situational conditioning—is directly expressed in a rationalization. This is another mode of the functional indistinction between affectivity and rationality. Were the individual really that—an individual rather than an in-the-dividual—this could not occur. But it does, and this gives the dividual itself two oscillating poles, corresponding to two modes of undecidability superposing affectivity and rationality. Both,

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paradoxically, can be understood as modes of overdetermination: on the one hand, an overfullness of different states held intensely together in readiness potential; on the other, the altogether too convincing matterof-factness of the fabulatory fait accompli. Even more troublesome for any notion of an underlying set of core preferences are studies demonstrating that under similar circumstances basic moral attitudes have the consistency of jam. A similar experiment was performed in which participants were requested to fill out a questionnaire asking them to take a position on a statement of principle such as “to be moral is to follow the rules and regulations of society, rather than weighing the positive or negative consequences of one’s actions” (Hall et al. 2012). They were also asked to rate the strength of their conviction on the issues. After filling out a questionnaire, they were asked to justify their position. Their answers had been surreptitiously reversed. A majority of the respondents did not notice the switch, and went on to produce a justification for the moral principle diametrically opposed to the one to which they had so recently adhered. Even those reporting the strongest of convictions on an issue were susceptible to the reversal.

The Primes of Life How can people be so fickle? Have they no principles? How quickly they are duped! Think of the political implications! Isn’t that how fascism succeeds, by exploiting just such phenomena? Yes, in part, it certainly is. But it is worth pausing a moment before getting too moralistic about the ease with which this choice jamming occurs, lest we protest too much. Who among us can profess to be immune from such conditioning under all conditions? Interpreted in light of the first experiment, the plasticity of moral conviction shown in the second experiment appears as a higher-order recapitulation of a perceptual dynamic. The phenomenon of choice blindness points to a tendency toward fabulation built into perceptual experience. Or more precisely: built into the temporality of our perceptual experience. The self-evidence of our present perception does not stand the test of time. Our memory plays tricks on us. It is becoming increasingly accepted that a memory is not reproduced. Rather, it is regener-

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ated. A memory is always an event, never a representation. The event of memory varies according to the conditions under which it is produced. Personal memory is an evolving dynamic system that is predicated not on reproduction but on re-creation. In the vocabulary of cognitive science, memory is by nature “reconstructive.” This means that the person we are as a function of our memories is self-re-creating. If it weren’t, personal growth and change would be impossible. The fabulatory element of perception as it varies over time is a creative factor in life. In its absence, the individual would be an ambulant repetition-compulsion, shackled to a bedrock of past preferences and principles. What would possess me to forgo my tried and true satisfactions? The only way for change to occur would be through the imposition of modified behaviors from without, either in the form of brute conformal force, or through the disciplinary inculcation of norms meant to be interiorized in such as way as to foster conformal behavior even in the absence of force. Either way, individual choice is just as fundamentally called into question as it is by choice jamming—and the conformal foundations are just as effectively laid for a potential authoritarianism or fascism to develop by a hardening of the boundary between the normal and the abnormal into a dividing wall of exclusion. In the present context, it is capital to remember that the disciplinary inculcation of normed behavior invariably revolves around delayed gratification—the very notion of which is now struck by neoliberal paradox. This is why Foucault makes a point of saying that the rise of neoliberalism coincides with “a massive withdrawal from the normative-disciplinary system” (Foucault 2008, 260). Under neoliberalism, the right to choose in accordance with one’s self-interest becomes inalienable: “irreducible and nontransferable.” Satisfaction is the sign of a self-interest well served, and so becomes the human-capital measure of the success of the economic entrepreneurship driving the economy. Its uncertain deferral has become under neoliberalism an irreducible and nontransferable problem. The neoliberal process assumes the problem. Neoliberalism finds it far more satisfying to live out the paradoxes of its own doctrine of choice—to surf the perturbational limit-zones of indistinction between affectivity and rationality that riddle its relational field—than to return to the normative containment of self-interest as a palliative or regulatory

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principle. Its passion is for deregulation. It happily chooses “creative destruction” over palliative care. It affirms the perturbations of far-fromequilibrium “oscillatory processes” over the normative stability of regulated change. Zones of indistinction between affectivity and rationality, such as deliberation-without-attention and choice blindness, are something it can work with (a gold mine for new marketing strategies!). Good citizenship is altogether too unenterprising. It might still be objected that the experimental examples of fabulatory choice blindness given above seem to have less to do with selfcreation than with conditioning by others. But what is meant by conditioning here needs to be examined. It is not assimilable to either of the two phenomena most often associated with the term, classical Pavlovian conditioning and Skinnerian operant conditioning. The first creates reflex associations between stimuli, while the second uses a rigid system of punishment and reward to reinforce or deter target behaviors. Both function in a highly controlled, closed environment and operate according to a stimulus-response model. The conditioning in the examples just presented, on the other hand, were in uncontrolled, open environments. The tea-and-jam survey was conducted from a stall in a supermarket, and in the moral convictions survey passers-by were recruited in a city park. In neither case was a stimulus-response model employed. Rather, participants were brought into an interaction proposed to them in the open environment. The interaction constituted a subset of the activity occurring in the environment. In other words, a situation of encounter was produced within a larger context. The observed effects were the result of how the encounter was set up within these conditions. It was the situation and the encounter that were conditioned, not the participants (at least not directly). This qualifies the experimental intervention as environmental in the sense discussed earlier: as acting on the rules of the game, rather than directly on the players. The behavior of the participants was modulated through the way in which the parameters for the interaction were set in the chosen contexts. The survey procedure and its structure of judgment are known genres of interaction, and as such can be expected to implant certain presuppositions in the situation (such as that a survey taker is unlikely to have studied sleight of hand magic tricks) and activate certain tendencies in the participants (such as

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a desire to cooperate with a seeker of knowledge and an eagerness to please someone in a relative position of authority). This form of conditioning, which modulates behavior by implanting presuppositions and activating tendencies in an open situation of encounter, is called priming. Priming operates less through stimulusresponse than through cues whose force is situational. Priming addresses threshold postures (presuppositions) orienting a participant’s entry into the situation, plus the associated tendencies that carry the orientation forward through the encounter. Accordingly, it does not exercise the same kind of power as normative-disciplinary mechanisms (of which both traditional forms of conditioning are highly distilled forms). Precisely because priming is orienting and activating, modulating rather than molding, it cannot guarantee the same level of uniformity of result. The results in the studies are impressive, statistically speaking. It is stunning that the choice-blindness effect was observed in a majority to two-thirds of participants. But that still leaves a great deal of room for deviance and variation (“minority” tendencies), and nothing in the way the study was designed can indicate anything about what made the difference. In other words, deviance is left to its own devices, which is not the case in normative-disciplinary modes of power. The setup was affirmative in the sense that it implanted and activated in order to effect—rather than squelch and punish in order to negate. A significant minority of participants brought countertendencies to the encounter that self-affirmed, against the statistically prevailing conditioning. In other words, those who did not display choice blindness were more self-priming than effectively conditioned by the other’s setting of the situational parameters. But then, were not the participants whose actions did display choice blindness also self-affirming their tendencies, in the sense that they acquiesced to their own tendencies leading in that direction, and whatever countervailing tendencies they had were not allowed to determine the end result? And who would not have countervailing tendencies? Who does not harbor some degree of resistance to authority, or some mischievous inclination to throw a wrench into the machinery of knowledge associated with it? What all of this means is that priming works with the dividual. Its mode of operation presupposes a tendential undertow in the life of the individual that is best approached affirmatively, and whose complexity

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is such that only a certain ratio of success can be guaranteed. The tendential undertow crests into determinate action, and this process can be modulated by the implantation of presuppositional postures and the activation of associated tendencies. The mechanisms for inflecting outcomes must be affirmative of the dividual, and operate in an open relational field. Relative consistency of results is attained by triggering a subset of activity in the environment. This special activity is set off against the surrounding activity in the open field, without being divided from it by a strict dividing line. It is focalized, without being segregated. The ongoing activity in the environment is less excluded than it is backgrounded. Priming is an art of situational emphasis. In keeping with its affirmative modus operandi, it functions by incitation or triggering, rather than punishment and reward. It induces participation, rather than imposing a form. It brings something to life in the situation, rather than carving away at life to make it conform to a mold. Priming is an inductive mode of power. It induces. It allows things to come out, rather than battening them down. It brings to be rather than making conform. It effects, rather than negates. In a word, priming is a mechanism of ontopower. It is of the utmost significance that priming depends, on the one hand, on the individual’s susceptibility to its own tendential infra-churnings and, on the other, on its openness to the situation—the individual’s bipolar affectability. Priming operationalizes the cross-sensitivity between the infra- and macropoles of the field of neoliberal life. It attaches its procedures to the relational event-sensitivity of the denizen of the oscillatory neoliberal field of life activity. Priming is the power mechanism most closely allied to the workings of the neoliberal economy, as it lives out the paradoxes of its doctrine of self-interested choice. Its eschewal of hard-edged normative-disciplinary procedures makes it an exemplary mechanism of “soft power.” The preemptive mode of power that characterizes the neoliberal field of life, at the hard and soft ends of the spectrum, in war and policing as much as in relation to the market, pivots on priming. Priming is the royal way to the modulation of events before they fully emerge. Specifically targeted, consciously applied practices of priming as in the experiment surveys just discussed, must, in order to guarantee sta-

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tistically significant results, be capable of setting off an area of subactivity from the background activity of the constitutively open relational field of neoliberal life. However, there are also scatter techniques: techniques for sowing primings to the wind, in the much-less-guaranteed statistical hope that when they fall it will be upon a ground conducive to a special activity self-organizing itself around their impact crater. The Internet and mobile communication devices are the most widely available tools for this. They lend themselves to both deliberation-withoutattention and choice blindness. For deliberation-without-attention can also be induced by priming. The way in which new communicational technologies prime for distributed attention, as users click their way through lengthy sequences of linked choices, sets the conditions for the intuitive decision making that the experiment on consumer choice presented earlier confirmed. Who, while surfing, has not had the sensation of decisions making themselves through them? At the same time, the areas of focus that occasionally stand out in the sea of clicks are prime opportunities for choice blindness to set in. None of this is in any way meant as a lament that the neoliberal environment in general and the Internet in particular corrupt the sovereign power of individual choice, enslave desires, and produce soft-powered citizens of regretful malleability. Netizens are not citizens in a degraded public sphere. They are denizens of a complex neoliberal field of life. The point is that mechanisms of priming are distributed everywhere throughout the field. They are networked into it, as well as being punctually set in place locally under certain circumstances by particular procedures of presupposition-planting and tendency-activation.7 Contemporary marketing strategies work at both ends, the distributed and the local. They exploit the ubiquity of communications technology to sow local seeds of priming that are encountered by the units of human capital that we are at every step in our wanderings: a free-range world of cues. The very ease with which the cue-sowing can spread and proliferate makes the habitat of homo oeconomicus a highly complex environment of primes. Under neoliberalism, priming goes feral. Priming in the wild saturates the field of life, forming a complex ecology with more institutional varieties involving particular encounters consciously foregrounding specialized activity (as was the case with the surveys). This makes

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it a necessity for individuals to learn to navigate their way through that environment, and cultivate tendencies for dealing with the churning of tendencies and the way it issues into actions that cumulatively determine the direction of their life. In other words, they are obliged, consciously or not (mostly not), to self-manage their prime encounters: to tend their tendings. This is done through the patterns of navigation, access, and encounter they weave, and the cumulative effect can be significantly inflected by how their openness to chance encounter and sensitivity to relation is modulated by those patternings. This means that the neoliberal denizen is ultimately as self-priming as it is conditioned by the machinations of others. What direction its life takes is a complex collaboration playing out between its own dividual tendencies, conditionings of its behavior by other individuals and by situational setups, and accidents of chance encounter. Choice and nonchoice enter an active zone of indistinction. Everything still turns around dividuating tendencies, because everything that happens recurs to bare activity. Everything feeds back into the mutually inclusive regressive endpoint of the economy infra to the individual, or resonates with it at an entangled distance. Neoliberal life oscillates around the zone of indistinction between affectivity (affectability) and rationality. In that zone, there is nothing so clear as the alternative between choice and nonchoice, freedom and constraint. What there are instead are degrees of freedom: autonomies of self-effecting decision whose emergent movements of expression are liable to modulation by priming mechanisms; tendential playings-out that may be induced or inflected, but whose outcome is statistical; situational sensitivities and openness to relation that deliver the dividual to conditioning, but never divest it of the power to surprise.

Toward a Politics of Dividualism When the supposed sovereign power of choice is called into question, the reaction is often that an indignity has been done to personal freedom—as if this notion could have survived unscathed the combined onslaughts of psychology, philosophy, and marketing, to name just a few of its historical nemeses. The indignation is based on the assumption that the

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opposite of rational choice is “irrationality,” the ultimate enemy of freedom. Irrationality is typically equated with “emotion,” making affectivity enemy number two. But as we have seen, the opposition between the rational and irrational is no longer sustainable, if it ever was. Neoliberalism’s pivoting around zones of indistinction between rationality and affectivity, its alloying of them as functional equivalents at critical points in its process, requires doing away with the duality. Instead, they must be seen as co-operating modes of activity that separate out under certain circumstances, no sooner to reconverge, feeding back and forward into each other with all the restlessness of bare activity. Only that bipolar oscillatory process as a whole can be seen as determining in the last instance. Except that it’s not a last instance. It’s a first and last and all-over instance: an irreducibly multiple and relational fielding, at the inmost endpoint of the economy as at its furthest reaches. Fears of irrationalism construe the inability of an individual to choose wisely as the problem. But what if the problem were instead the received idea that grounding decision in personal choice is freeing? What if the problem is less the individual’s affective inability to control its “impulses,” or even the conditioning of its actions by others, than the fact that the freedom of choice is imposed. In both experiments, participants were called upon to judge. The imperative of rational choice calls upon the individual to act as if it were a rational animal all the way down. It attempts to lodge the individual’s experience on the level of ratiocination, as if the spectrum of an experience could be reduced to the narrow bandwidth of conscious cognition, and perception were only a transparent window on a representation of the world from which the subject stands back in sovereign judgment. This amounts to an attempt to defuse the infra-individual level of bare-active tendency and any emergent autonomy of decision. It is a denial of nonconscious activity and of the dividuality for which it churns. The dividual infra-complexity of life can be backgrounded, but it cannot be entirely defused or denied. Its tendency is to reassert itself, across its silencing. The dividual rises, sometimes all the more insistently the more it is sidelined. All of this is neglected by the doctrine of rational choice and the simplistic opposition between rationality and affectivity on which it ostensibly relies.

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All of this is studiously neglected—and then the failure of someone to exercise rational choice as wisely as a judge is greeted by ejaculations of scandalized surprise. This is precisely what both experiments did. They generated their surprise results against the backdrop of the implicit assumption of rational choice. In both cases, the experimental subjects were required to justify their choices. What an odd request, to justify a taste. In everyday life, your response to the question “milk or sugar?” is rarely answered with “why?” The imperative to be rational about a matter of taste is likely to have distracted the subjects from their powers of deliberation-without-attention with which matters of taste are habitually approached. Interference was produced between the playing-out of the tendencies with which the most basic sensory experience is laden, and the duty to cogitate as if our perceptions were somehow fundamentally neutral and we stand back from our own tasting to hold it in judgment. As if the value of the tasting, its satisfactoriness, were separable from its occurrence, and the full-spectrum experiential immediacy of that event. In the consumer choice experiment, participants’ powers of deliberation-without-attention were activated by complexity in the problem posed by the high-cost item of the car. By admitting complexity into the situation as an active factor, the experimental setup invited the tripping into action of an autonomous decision-making power deciding through the experimental subjects. This “surprisingly” demonstrated the limits of consciously deliberative rational choice: it only works well under conditions of simplicity, in this case (as in most) coinciding with a lowering of the stakes. The fact that rational choice works best where it matters least indicates that rationality only effectively separates out under carefully controlled conditions where the ambit of life is reduced. It assumes, and demands, the reduction of vitality, a limiting of life’s amplitude. Looked at this way, rationality is a limitative mode of power. Reason is an antiontopower. The question then arises: given this choice, why choose rational choice? What justifies that? Choosing antiontopower over ontopower is clearly not itself a rational choice. It is more a matter of inclination. But then, doesn’t that make it a desire? Oops. Enter the zone of indistinction again: rationality is a desiring tendency; as a desiring tendency, it is as much a mode of affectivity as . . . affectivity is rational,

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given the intense situation that the life environment as a whole harbors uncertain conditions of complexity. If neoliberalism acted more on its doctrine of self-interested, rational choice than on the paradoxes it generates, it would miss its historic calling as an economic regime of ontopower. Microeconomic considerations of the actual process of individual choice join macroeconomic considerations of complexity and uncertainty, and together they lead to the inescapable conclusion: any politics of individualism unparadoxically predicated on an economy of self-interested personal choice, taking it for granted that units of human capital are rational animals, has missed the boat. That being the case, why not entertain the alternative of a politics of dividualism? A politics of dividualism would affirm complexity, and the oscillatory autonomies of decision that come with it. It would find ways of tending tendencies, in order to navigate the zone of indistinction between choice and nonchoice in such a way as to effect modulations of becoming that produce self-justifying surplus values of life: pulses of life experienced as worth the living by virtue of the event they are, immanent to the event, as a function of its immediate experiential quality, without any tribunal of judgment hanging over them, sovereignly purporting to justify them extrinsically. These immanent event-values are not reducible to individual satisfactions, because they emerge from the oscillation between the dividual and the transindividual. Their emergence turns around the dividual, otherwise primed than by the doctrine of rational choice and the paradoxes through which it neoliberally expresses itself. A politics of dividualism would operate in the unquantifiable currency of intensity, as opposed to satisfaction. It would draw on the positive creative power of fabulation incumbent in perception, tending not only the tendencies dividually churning at the endpoint of the economy, but also to their situational openness and cross-scale sensitivities. This would be a directly qualitative, relational, and situational politics. It would see no contradiction between conditioning by others or by the collective texture of encounters, and the power of self-modulation each individual infracarries in the playing-out of its dividual tendencies among themselves. It would define decisional autonomy as the cooperation of the orienting influence of situational conditioning and the spontaneity of tendential

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self-modulation, practicing at their dynamic intersection a political art of decision. It would seriously experiment with the notion that freedom is impersonal: that it is at its highest power when decisions move through me, rather than being legislated by my all-too-cognitive, self-deceivingly “rational” I. It would involve care and sensitivity—care for the event of encounter, sensitivity to dividual-transindividual complexity. The role of the conscious, cogitating I would be to recognize the rationality of affectivity, and to contribute to its own modulation by forces moving through its microlevel from the infra to the trans. It would experience itself more as collaborator than master of these forces. It would practice strategic self-surrender to them. (For more on this, see Supplement I.)

Double Involuntary / Autonomy of Decision Before going further in the discussion of what a dividual politics might look like, it may help to summarize some of the implications of neoliberalism’s unleashing of complexly self-organizing “oscillatory processes.” Foucault highlights the key points. The subject of interest, he says, is “doubly involuntary” (Foucault 2008, 277). “The individual’s enjoyment is linked to a course of the world that outstrips him and eludes him in every respect” (277). Each individual is “dependent on an uncontrollable, unspecified whole of the flow of things and the world” in which “the most distant event taking place on the other side of the world may affect my interest, and there is nothing I can do about it” (277; emphasis added). “Economic man,” Foucault continues, is situated in what we would call an indefinite field of immanence which links him, in the form of dependence, to a series of accidents [Involuntary No. 1: perturbations striking the dividual; emergent trust/ distrust effects], and, on the other hand, links him, in the form of production, to the advantage of others [Involuntary No. 2: amplification; multiplier effects registering success/failure] . . . The convergence of interest thus doubles and covers the indefinite diversity of accidents . . . so we have a system in which homo oeconomicus owes the positive nature of his calculation precisely to what eludes his calculation. (277–278)

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Foucault makes it clear that for him the subject of interest, as human capital, cannot be understood in Marxist-humanist terms as “living labor” (225). If the denizen of the market environment lives in a field of immanence that is constitutively open to “oscillatory processes” (259), then the individual is an immanent oscillatory point in “a machine-flow complex” (225).8 The subject of interest is not humanistic but machinic. In order not to stream with the flow entirely at random, the decisions moving through have to machine cuts into the flow. Etymologically, that is what “decide” means: to cut (Whitehead 1978, 43). In Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary, the very definition of “machine” is that which cuts a flow, and in doing so releases a quantum of subjective-systemic effect, as described in the above discussion of trust (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1–8). The microeconomic level of the individual actor is thus sandwiched between Involuntaries nos. 1 and 2, or the infra and the trans levels, respectively. The trans level is the macrosystemic level, understood from the angle of its implication in a process that is more inclusive than the system itself in that the process includes not only system-being but becoming. Under conditions of irreducible complexity where a range of potential differences are mutually included in each oscillatory point at every moment, it is precisely the autonomous cut of the event of decision that makes something determinate come to pass, and come to be. The theorist who invented the concept of human capital, T. W. Schultz, proposed “an all-inclusive concept of technology” that would include “the innate abilities of man” (Schultz 1971, 10). Homo oeconomicus, Foucault agrees, is more appropriately classified as a live-wire technology than a biological species. Innately, it is an “abstract machine” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Abstract, because the oscillatory point at which its abilities come through to decisive effect is a superposition of differences too overdetermined to be specifically this or that as yet, in actually determined fact. The subject of choice is an abstract machine exactly at the point at which, and to the precise extent to which, it is a decider of complexity: it is an orderer out of quasi-chaotic intensity, in convergent co-operation with what eludes its calculations. This line of thinking is much closer to Deleuze’s later account of the mode of postindustrial capitalist power he named “control” than it

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is to Foucault’s own concepts of biopower and biopolitics of the late 1970s, elaborated in the period directly preceding The Birth of Biopolitics. Deleuze’s short essay on control can be read as a capsule formulation of the “environmental” mode of power to which Foucault passingly alludes (Deleuze 1995; translation modified in all quotations from this essay).9 Deleuze says that in the control society, the individual is “undulatory, launched in orbit, on a continuous beam” (Deleuze 1995, 180). It “surfs” the flows, rides the waves. When surfing, your technology, the surfboard, has to slice the wave to ride it. It cuts in, to extract a quantum of forward momentum. The subject of interest as human capital does the same thing with economic flows. It cuts into the flow of labor to extract a quantum of forward life-momentum called a wage. It cuts again with its wage, this time into a flow of goods whose purchase extracts a quantum of life-satisfaction rewarding all the pain and sacrifice that has gone into energizing the forward momentum, encouraging one to stay on the wave. Behind closed doors, it may also, depending on how it invests its sensual desires, cut into the flow of sexed bodies in such a way as to extract a quantum of progeny: a reproductive human-capital investment for its own future well-being (intergenerational caregivers for when the old machine starts going to rust).10 The subject of interest as human capital surfs its future in a range of ways, cutting into the flow of the days of its life to extract forward momentum from each of its investments in life-activity, endeavoring to sustain the momentum to the end as best it can. At every cut, it slices into its own nature—for it changes as it carries itself forward, becoming as it goes. It does not divide without changing in nature (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 33, 483). It does not cut without continuously becoming. “In the society of control, the enterprise has replaced the factory” (Deleuze 1995, 179). We are no longer in the disciplinary regime. The enclosed spaces producing and enforcing the norms of the well-disciplined life have developed cracks, and leak in all directions. For decades we have been experiencing a “generalized crisis of all of the sites of confinement, the prison, the hospital, the factory, the school, the family” (Deleuze 1995, 179). It is not at all that institutions of the disciplinary regime have disappeared. If anything, they have multiplied, and some,

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like the prison, have ballooned to unheard-of proportions, particularly in the United States. It is less that they have disappeared than that the disciplinary regime they deploy within their enclosures no longer defines the overall field of power. The “massive withdrawal from the normative-disciplinary regime” that Foucault was sensing already in the late 1970s is best conceived as a resituating of disciplinary institutions within a larger ecology of regimes of power whose overall mode of power is of another cast (Massumi 2009a). “New forces knocking at the doors” of disciplinary enclosures have integrated them into a larger field. The passages through them and relays among them multiply and intensify. They are integrated as hard segments in the general conditions of flow, like boulders in a snowmelt flood. Swirling around them and in the cracks between them pass other movements, following other logics: “ultrarapid open-air forms of control” (Deleuze 1995, 179). It is these open-field effects that characterize the overall field of power. These are “environmental effects”: emergent effects snatched on the fly from the complexifying flow. This capturing of effective energy from the flow occurs immanently to the field, in the “autonomy” of the openair “environmental spaces” (Foucault 2008, 261). In the environment, many a disciplinary enclosure is set down, but none with the power to close itself to the field, so as not to keep on rolling over on itself. Deleuze gives another name to the regime of control: the “enterprise regime” of power (Deleuze 1995, 182).11 An enterprise, he says, “is a soul, a gas,” a lightness of being (179). A gas: the enterprise-subject’s matter is dissipative rather than frictional. Enterprise-being dissipates in the playing-out of its own gravity-defying lightness. It remains buoyant because rather than project an internal force outward, it borrows the energy of its outside and takes it into its own movement. It buoys itself on the quasi-chaotic air currents of the rapidly changing climate of life. Constantly banking, shifting, turning, churning with the flow, the life of the enterprise-subject continually assumes new shapes. It is dissipatively self-structuring, changing in nature as it goes. Its dynamics are nonclassical, far-from-equilibrium. They have no disciplinarily fixed form or “normal” structure. The enterprise-subject is a protean node of decisional autonomy, on the move in environmental spaces that are

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themselves moving, autonomous, and self-deciding, in the same way the weather is—and every bit as moody. Disciplinary power molded the resistant body into normative shape. Control society does not mold, it modulates. A modulation is “like a selfdeforming molding that is continually changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from point to point” (Deleuze 1995, 178). It is pulsing, liquid. It is waveform, in continuous transformation. Correlatively, the enterprise-subject is “undulatory” (180). The enterprise regime’s control society is populated at every scale by “the coexisting metastable states of a single modulation” process (179). Globally, it is “a universal deformer” (179), not unlike a synthesizer. The small-scale (in) dividuals populating the enterprise regime are themselves populated by coexisting metastable states, wavily correlated to the larger modulations of the environment, to which, in their surf-a-thonic shape-shifting, they are moodily isomorphic. All of this marks “a technological evolution” accompanying the shift from second-generation to third-generation machines. But “more profoundly [it is] a mutation of capitalism” (180). The enterprise regime is capitalism become “essentially dispersive,” waftingly dissociative in its self-relation, continually varying across the full range of its differentially correlated levels, integrating them wholesale into the same universal deformation. It is capitalism most becoming, given itself over to gaseous matter and decisional soul, in dividuality and multiplier effect, to the deregulated market (181). The discussion of deliberation-without-attention and choice blindness added an essential dimension to this portrait of the neoliberal field of machinic life: the fact that punctual mechanisms of modulation can intervene at the nodal point where tendential infra-individual complexity of the dividual and the transindividual complexity intersect—where the subject of interest experiences its I, in a conscious registering of the force of the movements passing through it. At this intersection, decisional effect can be strategically leveraged. The cut can be modulated locally, as well as dispersively (as through the Internet and mobile communications). Once again, the basic mechanism of this modulation is priming, of which there are many forms. All involve conditioning the situation, ad-

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dressing the putative subject of interest from the angle of its constitutive openness to its own outside: from the angle of its relational sensitivities across scales, at the point where the feedback and feedforward between the dividual and the transindividual cross at what is experienced as the individual level. At that microlevel, priming works positively to induce emergent effects through cueing (or the lack thereof ). Situational cues implant presuppositions and activate dividual tendencies. The presuppositional seeding of the field modifies the relative force of the multiple tendencies that are always churning on the infra-level, weighting the decision that is coming in certain directions, toward emergent determinations. The leveraging of effect by priming is inciting and orienting, rather than disciplining and punishing. It is inductive, a “positive” power in the sense in which Foucault uses the term. Conscious cogitation can always enter into the equation at this nodal point, but is never fully determining. It is the oscillatory process as a whole, as nodally modulated, that ultimately decides. All factors, including conscious cogitation, are cofactors in what always amounts to an exercise of processual autonomy producing complexly correlated subjective and systemic effects. In the experiments presented above, choice blindness was the result of one form of priming. The priming consisted in withholding cues that would have signaled a change in the situation while implanting presuppositions through the form of encounter of the exercise, which placed participants in a certain posture and activated tendencies favoring the “conformation of feeling” between the two tastings. In this experiment, as in the deliberation-without-attention experiment, participants were postured as subjects of interest called upon to exercise rational choice. The result varied depending on the complexity of the consumer choice. The least complex choice was generally accomplished with nothing untoward happening to call the cogitational consumer prowess of the subjects into question. Deliberative rational choice, however, collapsed with the complex, higher-stakes choice. Participants who used their gut feelings to decide made better economic decisions by standard measures and, even aside from the question of cost effectiveness, obtained greater satisfaction from the choice. These participants were obliged to make their choices while distracted (Dijksterhuis et al. 2006). With deliberative cogitation thus disenabled by the setup of the situation, the

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field was open for intuition to play a dominant role. Intuition took control of the situation. Intuition’s taking control was a coming pivotally into play of an autonomy of decision: a doing done through me. This is not so simple as a passivity on the part of the subject of interest. The subject’s situatedness becomes one of the deciding factors of what transpires. The double involuntary of the feedback and feedforward between the dividual and the transindividual funnels through the situation, and is conditioned by the presuppositions and tendential orientations it highlights. Deleuze’s theory of the control society construes the neoliberal field of life as a regime of power in its own economic right, one that operates through modulation. What the tripping into action of intuition demonstrates is that control’s modulation can itself be modulated. It would be nonsensical to say that control can be controlled. But it is eminently reasonable, intuitively speaking, to say that its movement of becoming can be inflected. The undulatory process of becoming oscillating the relational field can not only be surfed. The neoliberal denizen isn’t limited to passively riding the waves, even if it cannot be the sole proprietor and master of its action. It can make a splash, and experience the “gaseousness” of its “soul” as its own spray. A situational splash of activity can add to and alter the wave pattern: ripples on the surface of universal deformation. Under the far-from-equilibrium conditions of the field of relation, it is always possible that a small splash might amplify into a significant wave. If the neoliberal field of life is a regime of power, a situational splash deforming its surface in ways that goes against neoliberalism’s dominant tendencies is a counterpower. If there is counterpower, there can be a politics of neoliberalism’s economization of life, in spite of its fieldwide systemic reach and ontopowerful processual mutability. But counterpower cannot be found by returning to the subject of interest, for example in an attempt to rationally convince it to choose resistance in accordance with its “true” interests. Counterpower cannot rely on a programmatic politics of cognitive persuasion. That strategy actually takes neoliberalism’s key doctrine of the subject of interest as rational chooser at its cynical word—ignoring the accompanying paradoxes that make neoliberalism

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the formidable, undulatory regime of power it is. An effective counterpower politics must engage neoliberalism where it draws its power: in its paradoxes, infra to its undulations. Counterpower must operate immanent to contemporary capitalism’s paradoxical field, in resonance with the economy’s inmost end. This means operating, like neoliberalism, as an ontopower. An immanent counterontopower: what other alternative is there, given the globalization of capitalism’s neoliberal regime of power? There is no getting outside it. Immanence is not an option: it is a condition of life, and the seat of becoming. The biggest paradox of all is that countering ontopower with ontopower, immanent to its field of relation, requires practicing intuition as a political art.

Fielding the Event Intuition is not some mystical inner sense. It does not connote a deeper or more authentic relation to self. And it is not the opposite of rationality. There is a large body of studies on priming in which an image or word flashes by too quickly to be consciously registered, in the halfsecond or so when a perception is in readiness potential, just stirring in emergence, not yet having taken definitive form. This is the infamous Libet lag, in which experience is absorbed in its own formation, immanent to its own arising, at its inmost end, about to spill forth in a formed perception and a corresponding action: experience at the level of bare activity. It has been shown that at this level the meaning of unregistered words inflects the interpretation of following words that are perceived consciously, demonstrating that a highly elaborated cognitive function like reading can be performed nonconsciously (Massumi 2002, 29–31, 195–197; Sklar et al. 2012). It has also been shown that multistep mathematical operations can even occur in this way (Sklar et al. 2012). It is not that rational operations are absent from this level. It is that they are performed in the forming of perception. They are not performed secondary to perception, in a manner reflective upon it. They are performed nonreflectively, absorbed in the immediacy of perception’s emergence, in too short a lapse for them to be separate operations. Their operativity, their mode of activity, is enveloped in the movement of perception’s

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arising. They figure in perception’s genesis, in-mixed among its formative factors. Coming flush with perception’s coming to be, they figure as ontogenetic factors of immediate experience. C.S. Peirce speaks of this in terms of “perceptual judgment” (Peirce 1997, 199–201; Peirce 1998, 155, 191–195, 204–211, 226–242). A perceptual judgment expresses itself in an action that is inflected in a way that would seem to indicate that a separate act of judgment had preceded and deliberately oriented it, when it has actually occurred in conditions under which no separate act of calculation could possibly have been performed. Intuition involves perceptual judgments. It is not, however, reducible to them. It is not just a faster ratiocination. For there are other modes of activity coenveloped with perceptual judgments at the ontogenetic level of bare activity. Multiple tendencies are activated at the same time, and these cannot be separated from the “calculations” of perceptual judgment. Take this example of how a presuppositional field works, loosely based on the work of linguist Oswald Ducrot (Ducrot 1980, 69–101). You enter a field without noticing a rather crucial detail in the situational conditions: there’s a bull at the other end. The moment the bull makes it presence felt, before you have had time to think consciously, even to the extent of registering the bull in a fully formed act of recognition, you are braced. You are braced into the necessity of living out the situation, for better or for worse. You have no choice about that. You’re in it. Your life is entirely absorbed in the immediacy of the brewing event. You’re taken into the incipience of an event you have no power to decide not to participate in. But the event has not yet played out, so there may be ways it might be inflected that will make a difference—one as fundamental as the difference between health and injury or even life and death. As you are braced into the event, the field changes. It becomes a field of potential. Without having had the time to consciously think it through, potential lines of escape appear to you. You prefiguratively feel yourself avail yourself of them, in buds of actions poised to play out. Incipient actions come together, in an immediate feeling of the alternatives they offer. You have been braced into a field of potential composed of a multiplicity of paths of action. Your life is in that multiplicity, splayed

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between alternatives. Which to choose? No time to ponder. There is only time to act, and perhaps not even that, successfully. No sooner has the field of potential proposed itself than you have already assessed the alternatives. You have registered the distance between you and the bull, between you and the fence following different paths, without consciously puzzling it through. You have comparatively registered the time necessary for each potential escape, without actually having had any time to calculate the comparisons. You have considered which gestures will incite the bull and which will cause it to pause, without actually deliberating on bull behavior. Your body launches into movement, following what you viscerally feel to be the best course, with a rush of feeling you could never separate out from the situational assessments and the calculations that you didn’t actually have the time to make—or from the experience of the movement itself. You have performed an embodied thinking-feeling in movement, all in one splash. Your dawning realization of the presence of the bull included all of this. You escape. In effect, you have made a life-saving choice—without having performed anything like a separate act of choice. You have acted “rationally,” without the ratiocination. You have gained your freedom from the bull, without exercising freedom of choice per se. This embodied thinking-feeling in movement is intuition. Far from a mystical state one enters at a whim, it is an intense involvement in a highly conditioned, nonoptional event. Intuition does not have an object. It has a fielding. It comes with a field potential that is movingly thoughtfelt before its elements are consciously registered as the objects of a fully formed perception, and is immanent to what occurs as a function of that field. The immanence of this thinking-feeling can be parsed out, retrospectively, into different aspects or elements. But each of them can only figure because the others are there for it to figure with. They are mutually included in the energizing of the event, as cooperating factors in its playing-out. One aspect is the immediate registering of the imperatives of the situation. These are the nonconscious presuppositions implanted in the field as you brace into it, making the coming event nonoptional. This is the aspect of perceptual judgment: conclusions about the situation that premake themselves as the premises of an event and as the

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energizer of the movements composing it. A second aspect is the taking form of a field of potential holding within itself a multiplicity of paths of action, corresponding to different outcomes. These potential alternatives come together in the immediacy of the situation, as a single complex. Their coming-together in all immediacy in-forms the perceptual judgment with an array of hypothetical unfoldings. This aspect of immediately lived hypothesis is what Peirce calls abduction. Both of these aspects, perceptual judgment and abduction, come with yet another aspect: tendency. The imperatives of the situation registering in perceptual judgment actuate a tendency—to stay alive. The abductive registering of hypothetical unfoldings inhabiting the perceptual judgment bifurcate that dominant tendency into an array of subtendencies. These fight it out among themselves, in a time too short for them to actually interact with each other as separable actions/reactions. Rather, they come together in commotion: in immanent co-motion. For each is an incipient action path: a poising for movement; an orientation toward a terminus. That’s a fourth aspect: bare activity, as a coming-together in readiness potential of what can actually only terminally unfold as a parting of the ways. Only one path will come about. The co-motion of tendencies works itself out, and one issues forth into action, as of its own accord. This is a fifth aspect: cut. A decision has been moved to make itself; you are moved to embody it. The decision comes through you. Which leads to another, utterly crucial, aspect: all of this is felt to matter. The tendential commotion only works itself out due to the forward pressure exerted by the fact that the coming event is intensely felt to matter. It is the affective intensity of the situation that powers its playing out. In the end, it will have all been about desire, from the beginning. You effectively desired to survive. You wanted it. Or rather: the eventful decision that moved you by moving through you affirmed that tendency in you. “In you”: in the dividual sense. All of this has occurred not on the individual level, but in-thedividual. The autonomy of decision that expressed itself in your actionpath effectively has a will. More precisely, it is a will: its autonomy is a willing willing itself to occur in the local arena of a situated subfield of the overall field of life, uncertainly oscillating between the poles of the dividual and the transindividual. Here, affective involvement is the func-

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tional equivalent of will. Affectivity and will are in a zone of indistinction— which includes aspects which would be considered eminently rational were they separable from the zone of indistinction with affectivity, in its functional equivalence with will. But they did not occur separately. The “rational” aspects of the event—judgment, hypothesis, comparative evaluation of alternatives, decision—were mutually included in the event along with all the other co-operating factors. In the event, they came as perceptual judgment, abductively thought-felt hypothesis: tendential auto-evaluation. Decision inseparable from the embodied fact of movement. The rational aspects came fused into the singular complex that was the playing-out of this event. Because of the effective dominance of the aspect of affective involvement, the fusional complex can be qualified overall as affective. But it is in fact more an event complexion: a complex of cocomposing factors, including ones we may categorize as rational.12 You can think of the event’s complexion as its unfolding’s immanent oscillation between all of its contributory factors, already resolving into an action-path in an interval smaller than the smallest perceivable: in the infra-instant of bare activity, turning out; in a regression to the inmost end, turning instantly about. Every event is complexioned, exhibiting its own signature fusion of affectivity and rationality. Events of decision that we experience as rational choices, seemingly without the motive force of affect to move them, envelop in their complexion all the infra-aspects just described, including the functional equivalence of affective involvement and will. They just ignore or deny them. For as we will see with Hume, there is no purely rational reason to make any particular choice, or even to make a choice at all. Reason has no motivating force. For one thing, its rational calculations could go on forever. Reason ruminates, in a way that can never fully digest itself. The rumination may come closer and closer to a rationally justifiable conclusion, but left to its own devices it would never actually reach one because there will always remain a logical possibility that some crucial factor had been overlooked or miscalculated. Rationality, practiced as if it effectively had decisional autonomy, is the functional equivalent of doubt. It is haunted by its own version of the “stopping problem” in computer programming. Ultimately, the cut has to happen. And it can only happen if something cuts into the rumination, to cut it

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off. Calculatio interruptus. This is the feat of affect. It will always occur at a point which, from the point of view of rationality’s constitutive indigestion, can only be arbitrary. Rationality is in no way the opposite of affect or emotion. As Pixley remarked, rationality positively requires emotion. Rational choice only works if it arbitrarily surrenders itself to an autonomy of decision that is one with an affective willing. Ratiocination chews its cud. Affect cuts to the quick. In the final analysis, this makes the outcome of every event an affective fact.

Tribunals of Reason None of this prevents structures of rationality from building, and settling into the world, evolving what become critical functions, as the field of relation wraps itself around them. Structures of rationality make themselves indispensable, including, of course, for the economy. This process requires the creation of relatively closed milieus capable of filtering the noise of the overall field of relation. Setting up boundary conditions prereduces incoming complexity, controlling the destabilizing power of field-perturbations. The result is an eddy of relative stability (a less provisional metastability) in which rational procedures can institutionalize themselves in a way that guarantees a regularity of result. Technoscience, of course, is the most outstanding example (and bureaucracy the basest). Technoscience’s boundary conditions are patrolled by what Bruno Latour calls “tribunals of reason”—mechanisms of judgment pronouncing certain phenomena and modes of activity as admissible for rational proceduralization and rejecting others as irremediably “irrational” (Latour 1987, 183–184). The result is less an enclosure than a set of transactional parameters regulating both the interactions occurring internal to milieu and the coupling of the work of the internal milieu to the forces of the outside: a differential network. The control of field-perturbations is not only exerted at the boundary. It is repeated inside the network, in the proceduralization of its signature activities.13 Activity is painstakingly formatted for the production of the promised regularity of result. The scientific method’s procedures for ensuring “controlled experi-

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ments” fulfill this role for technoscience. They amount to disallowing field-interferences by isolating which contributory factors will be allowed to express themselves, so that they can be effectively treated as independent variables, making them more manipulable. From these basic building blocks, complexity is then built back up toward—as if the world were an edifice rather than an “unspecified whole of flow,” and as if the ordering of the world rode a one-way elevator to the upper stories (at the very top of which is perched the penthouse of analytic reason). In a word, a highly strategized, and standardized, practice of event-conditioning is set in place. Reason’s stopping problem is pragmatically solved on the elevator ride up. Criteria for what constitutes acceptable results draw the procedural finish line, imposing the paradoxical but eminently practical mechanism of a regularized arbitrary cutoff point. In science, the main criterion of acceptability is reproducibility. The reproducibility of results caps the filtering out of the singularity of unbidden field-effects, making them, against all odds, predictable (more or less and under certain, relatively closed, fieldconditions). A second criterion is falsifiability (the bureaucratic counterpart of which is the right to appeal). The scientific method’s principle of falsifiability is of particular significance here. It expresses the fact that the entire rational structure is built not on overcoming reason’s riddling with doubt but, quite the opposite, on its institutionalization. Given reason’s constitutional inability to expunge doubt, any structure of rationality that does not build doubt into its edifice will end up crumbling. Doubt will return, in the form of cracks fatally undermining the edifice (such is the fate of the totalitarian bureaucratic State). Better to build it in constructively than attempt to disavow it. This strategic openness to doubt constitutes the liberalism of structures of rationality, and is the vector by which they are able to settle into the great open neoliberal world, negotiating a self-protective settlement with its far-from-equilibrium fickleness. That, and the fact, in the case of technoscience, that its regularity of results feeds the capitalist process’s voracious appetite for product development and constant turnover. For any structure of rationality to produce a regularity of results and on that basis to settle in and make itself indispensable, it cannot in point of fact completely filter out what it brands “irrational.” For

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technoscience, the “irrational” boils down to uncontrolled complexityeffects and the intuitions of perceptual judgment and abduction which alone are capable of fielding them. As science studies has amply shown, the everyday practice of science does not in fact suppress the superposition of modes of activity found at the germinal level of any and all action-perception. Laboratory life is a “mangle of practice”—a site of complex “intertwinements” among a plurality of active factors (Pickering 1995, 23). The “mangle” is irreducibly relational. Active factors mutually “capture” each other, in an emergent “reciprocal tuning” (20). This differential attunement gives the lie to any simple notion of intentionality, understood as a calculated rational choice exercised by an individual decider (17–20). Every rational structure is rationalizing. It is rationalizing in both senses of the word. First, in the sense that the construction of its edifice resides on the shifting ground of the mutual inclusion of modes of activity whose “reciprocal tuning” cannot be considered rational as a whole—but from whose unspecified whole rational results are procedurally extracted. Second, in the sense that it must excuse itself of this germinal sin of relational openness by explaining the mangle away (think of the scandalized reaction on the part of many scientists to science studies’ poking its nose into the relational complexity of the everyday workings of the laboratory). Rationalizations aside, the mangle cannot not be negotiated, in order for any enduring settlement to be arrived at. Yet for reasons of institutional pride of place (i.e., for purposes of power positioning in the larger relational field), the guards of the tribunal of reason are duty-bound to occult it, or at least background it. The filtering out of complex relational effects can actually hinder the course of science. Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis revolutionized the scientific understanding of the origin of multicellular life by reintegrating relational complexity-effects and then accomplishing the feat of extracting from them a scientifically admissible notion—that of endosymbiosis (or immanent intertwinement; see Margulis 1999). “She simply refused not to believe her own intuition” (Archibald 2012, r6). The most far-reaching advancements in scientific understanding invariably involve dipping back into the superpositive “chaos” of the affective wave packet, in order to extract a rationalizable complexity-effect, and

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to formulate it in such a way that it can gain admission to controlled experimentation as an independent variable lending itself to reproducible results (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 130–131, 202). This construction of independent variables as building blocks for a larger structure makes science’s achievements as much inventions as discoveries. These are not mutually exclusive terms (Stengers 1997, 146; 2000, 80–81; 2011, 306). The creativity proper to science as a structure of rationality is a function of its typically disavowed fishing in the pond of singularity. Nobel Prize–winning microbiologist Barbara McClintock was unabashed about this. She described her scientific process, which led to crucial advances in the understanding of genetics, as revolving around her ability to use “empathy” to intuitively “descend” into the complexity of the internal milieu of the cell (Stengers 1997, 115). It is a rarely spoken secret of science that perceptual judgment and abduction are prime factors entering into the mangle of its everyday practice. One of the most important implications of this for the present essay is that it requires the statement made earlier that “gut feeling” fails when it comes to probabilities to be amended. Philosopher Michael Strevens has written on the central role of “physical intuitions” in scientific discovery (Strevens 2013). Probabilities are difficult to handle intuitively in general—which is to say, in the abstract. However, in the singularity of embodied situations, as in the bull example, our understanding of the regularities of causal relationships, as ingrained in our body’s sensorimotor habits, kicks in. This is accomplished not, as Strevens understands it, by the automatic application of “rules of inference.” It is not a separable, cognitive operation, as Strevens himself admits, although without drawing the necessary implications of that insight for his cognitivist vocabulary: you just “see what will happen next,” directly, without actually performing calculations (Strevens 2013, 1; emphasis added). This perceptual ability, by the account developed here, arises from the complex relation between the modes of activity constitutive of the life of the body, cocontributing to an outcome through their mutual inclusion in the unfolding event, on the germinal level of bare activity, in the production of an emergent perceptual judgment. It results from the co-operation of the sense modes, at the core of which in many situations is an effective fusion of vision and proprioception, with sound

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a close second in terms of its superpositional trigger happiness (Massumi 2002, 58–61, 179–184; 2010, 95–97, 112, 124–125, 137, 143–144). The irreducibility of “physical intuition” to the cognitive category of inference or the application of rules is well understood by anyone (or anyone’s dog) who has played Frisbee. The flight of the Frisbee is oriented, but subject to modulation on the fly by an irreducibly complex playing-out of atmospheric conditions: in a word, the wind. The complexity of the dynamics of Frisbee flight are already so complex that a rule-based calculation of the curve of the Frisbee’s path, even without unexpected affections of the wind, can be accomplished only by calculus (Lynn 1999, 23–25). And yet I and your average dog, neither of whom has studied calculus, can catch it more often than not. We catch as if we had carried out a complex operation of calculus. And not only that, we instantaneously correct for perturbations occurring en route. We do not simply activate or sensorimotor habits. We exceed them. We surf them. All of this requires an amendment to the earlier statement that “multistep” arithmetic operations can be performed nonconsciously. The multistep operations are not performed in multiple steps. They are performed in one go, as if they had come consecutively—but, as it happens, fused into a perceptual judgment. Perceptual judgment is capable of packing the multiple into the dynamic unity of an occurrence. We catch the Frisbee because of this capacity of perceptual judgment. But not only perceptual judgment. We also rely on perceptual judgment’s capacity to extrapolate itself into a perception not just of what is presently occurring, but of what is coming next. We abductively live out the intuitive hypothesis of where the Frisbee is wafting, shifting our posture and position on the fly in attunement with the disk’s modulations, all as smoothly as the wind. When we catch the Frisbee, in spite of the incalculable complexity of its chance-inflected flight path, what we have done is effectively perceive chance (Massumi forthcoming, ch. 4). Strevens calls this “tychomancy” (the divining of chance). What humans can do that dogs cannot is extrapolate further, into theoretical constructs capturing the perception of chance for science, and its signature activity of regularizing results. Strevens studies in depth the central role of “physical intuition” in such scientific advances as Maxwell’s discovery of the probability distribution of the molecular

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movement of gases. This discovery laid the foundation for “statistical mechanics, this theoretical scaffold that now supports a great part of all physical inquiry” (Strevens 2013, 7). In other words, the capacity of science to operationalize probabilities is actually an outgrowth of intuition’s abductive prowess. Cannot the same be said of statistics as a whole? However, the more general and abstract the realm of probability, the more extenuated becomes the role of perceptual judgment, to the point that it is all but lost in domains of such large-scale, open-system complexity as the economy. This prepares the way for the following discussion of Hume’s theory of the limits of reason, as well as the roles it can play in its relation to affectivity. The crucial point here is that structures of rationality live by what escapes them. They feed on affective-relational intuition. What positive power they possess is extracted from perceptual judgment and abduction. Rationalities are apparatuses of capture of affectivity. As we will see, so are emotions. A rationality is not unlike a collective structure of emotion ( just vastly more proceduralized). That is why we become so easily invested in them. It must be said that little of this applies to economics. The status of economics’ rationality as a “science” is widely and rightly contested. The true status of the “dismal science” is more a fusion of wishful thinking and market boosterism than of perceptual judgment and abduction. The tribunal of reason has not been kind to it. Denizens of the neoliberal field are largely left to their own abductive devices.

Finessing the Event Now, back to the paddock. Add a Frisbee to the bull. We can be the wind. We can throw the bull a curve. I mean, we can throw it a gesture that inflects its course, just as a gust inflects the path of the Frisbee. Make the bull gaseous. Wind it onto another path. When the field of potential arose with the dawning of the event, it did not just include paths of escape. It also included potential gestures that might immediately modulate the relation between you, the intruding field perturber, and the territorial bull. If performed with just the right accent, a relational gesture of that kind can alter the complex of action-

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paths coming into force. A potential line of escape might appear that wouldn’t otherwise have been activated. Thus in the heat of the event, a potential is coined. It is invented, not as an independent variable extracted from the event: as an immanent point-modulation of the integral field. A differential path deviation appears out of nowhere. Or rather, it punctually emerges out of the full-spectrum complexity of the event. The change in the field of potential takes effect as a function of how all the elements have happened to come together toward the coming event, but it was triggered by one factor among them. A punctual gesture catalyzes a modulation of the whole of the field of action-potential. The gesture would come to nothing if it did not factor into its own performance the potential of the event in all of its contributing factors. It works by finessing the way they come together. Even an almost imperceptible tweak, a slight turning of the eyes or subtle change in posture, can pivot the bullish relational field around itself, catalyzing it into a change of state. The modulatory gesture is a catalytic event converter. In its inventiveness, it is a punctual whole-field resynthesizer. This is the positively creative kind of fabulation referred to earlier: the invention of potential flush with the event’s dynamic form of expression, movingly one with its unfolding. Finessing the relation: the fabulatory art of the event. Now take all of these considerations, subtract the bull, move into a different kind of situation implanted with presuppositions we would tend to call political. What would political fabulation think-feel like? What gestures might catalyze a whole-field change of state? Answer that question, and you have intuition as a political art of the event. One thing is clear: such an art of politics would not be grounded in the personal freedom of choice of the individual subject of interest. Rather, it would pivot on the relational fabulation of affective facts. It would register that freedom is not chosen: it is invented. It is invented—in a way that is not easily distinguishable from a discovery. This political-intuitive invention is a necessity of life. There is a need to escape the presuppositions of the field of relation into which we are collectively braced. Not by opposing them with an alternate utopian universe where individual choice is finally enabled and allowed free rein (as if such a thing were conceivable, given the web of interdependen-

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cies and cross-sensitivities that are part of the warp and woof of life). Not by rationalizing the entire field of life through the good graces of a tribunal of judgment acting from on high (were such a thing possible, even if it were desirable). Rather, by immanently event-converting this rabbit-holed neoliberal world in which we churn. By inventively gesturing neoliberal life toward a whole-field change of state.

3. Beyond Self-Interest

It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. It is not contrary to reason for me to chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. It is as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledged lesser good to my greater good . . .  —David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1984, 2.3.3, 463)

Politically, things are never as simple as a bull in a ring. Capitalism’s fences don’t keep its bullishness in, or the movements it’s most afraid of out: unofficial or unregistered flows of goods and people, unregistrable financial flows, and systemically imperceptible forms of capital. Unofficial and unregistered flows include the smuggling of legal and illegal commodities, such as drugs, and the press of refugees and undocumented workers. Unregistrable flows include highly abstract forms of financial capital, such as derivatives and credit default swaps, whose complexity defies calculation1 and at times even makes tracing ownership impossible (this has been a problem in the wake of the US subprime mortgage crisis). Systemically imperceptible forms of capital include neocurrencies, like Bitcoin. Capitalism is afraid of these movements to the extent that it tends to its own metastability, counter to its dominant tendency of irrationally exuberant passion for reckless liquidity. But at the same time these movements are its indispensable crutches, and its cutting edge (its profit hedges, and its probe-heads of futurity). Hence porosity is the order of the day. Through the pores, distant events resonate and correlate. To paraphrase Foucault, the neoliberal denizen is complexly dependent on an uncontrollable, unspecified whole of the flow of things and the world in which “the most distant event taking place on the other side of the world may affect my interest, and there is nothing I can do about it” (Foucault 2008, 277).

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Given the cross-scale sensitivity of the dividual to the transindividual and considering the troubled equation between choice and satisfaction, a question arises that is as challenging to neoliberalism’s founding figure of the subject of interest as the question whether rational choice actually works. What if by events that “affect my interest” we don’t just understand events that can go against my interests? What if events occur that affect my commitment to my own interest? After all, for what good reason should a nonpersonal autonomy of decision that does itself through me do what it does for me? Given the resonant sensitivity of infra-individual oscillatory processing, is there any a priori reason why decisions pivoting on the individual should cut the flows of the unspecified whole of relational activity for my benefit? Given the transindividual attunement of my dividual dimension to that of others elsewhere in the economic-relational field of life, why should the decisions moving through me not benefit a distant me, even to my me’s disadvantage? On the other hand, what prevents decisions that I do manage to make, against the odds, according to my own best rational interest, from harming others? In the long run, the theory goes, everybody benefits. But who can deny the collateral damage that occurs along the way, as inequalities grow and whole swathes of the earth’s population are consigned to misery? What if the long run gets lost along the route and dead-ends in yet another crisis? What if the neoliberal promise of prosperity and satisfaction for all runs permanently off course? From the present perspective, with no end in sight of the last crisis years later and the threat of irreversible climate change and the attendant global upheavals hanging over our heads and with international efforts to reverse it foundering for fear that it will harm the neoliberal economy (never mind the people it theoretically benefits), the question is more: what are the odds that it won’t run permanently off course?

Your Life for My Little Finger? The two-pronged question of what ensures that choices are made in accordance with the decider’s self-interest and, when that is the case, what prevents the choices made here from doing immediate harm elsewhere before multiplier effects have had a chance to bubble through the rela-

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tional field, in theory to everyone’s satisfaction, were of central concern to the early theorists whose thought informed the doctrine of the subject of interest. They sought to respond to them by turning to moral philosophy. Turning instead to politics—as will be suggested here—was excluded on the one hand by their mistrust of the State, and on the other by the fact that non-State-based collectivist politics are pointedly incompatible with the economic individualism they advanced. Foucault cites Adam Smith’s elder, David Hume, on these points, rather than Smith’s own Theory of Moral Sentiments. This is presumably because the radicality of Hume’s position on the relation between rationality and affectivity is more resonant with the unspecified whole of the flow of things and the world of today’s neoliberalism, and involves a significantly different view of how self-interest plays out. Foucault cites a famous passage from Hume’s Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals on the decisional impotence of reason: It appears evident that—the ultimate ends of human actions can never, in any case, be accounted for by reason, but recommend themselves entirely to the sentiments and affections of mankind, without any dependance on the intellectual faculties. Ask a man why he uses exercise; he will answer, because he desires to keep his health. If you then enquire, why he desires health, he will readily reply, because sickness is painful. If you push your enquiries farther, and desire a reason why he hates pain, it is impossible he can ever give any. This is an ultimate end, and is never referred to any other object. Perhaps to your second question, why he desires health, he may also reply, that it is necessary for the exercise of his calling. If you ask, why he is anxious on that head, he will answer, because he desires to get money. If you demand why? it is the instrument of pleasure, says he. And beyond this it is an absurdity to ask for a reason. It is impossible there can be a progress in infinitum; and that one thing can always be a reason why another is desired. Something must be desirable on its own account, and because of its immediate accord or agreement with human sentiment and affection. (Hume 1912, Appendix 1)2 It is an absurdity, Hume says, to push the questioning further. To do so would tip it into an infinite regress. We’d end up in a black hole from

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which something monstrous, something more ugly and destabilizing than the merely unreasonable, might pop out. Not just a white rabbit. Beyond unreasonable lies the realm of what does not accord with human affect. Somewhere in the infinite regress that we must avoid there lies the limit of what is affectively unthinkable: what we as humans think to be unfeelable. Viewed from the lip of the rabbit hole, this impossible limit of human feeling is abject. But what if we do push past, in spite of that horror we feel as putative subjects of interest, to the “regressive endpoint” of human sentiment? What if we confront the abject question, Why should I prefer my pleasure over pain? So what if I prefer your well-being to mine? If the ultimate ends of human action can never, in any case, be accounted for by reason, then “it is not contrary to reason to chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or a person wholly unknown to me” (Hume 1984, 2.3.3, 463).3 And in any case, aren’t there even more horrific monstrosities that arise from selfinterest? For neither is it “contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger” (463). What prevents an individual from skirting around the human endpoint and spiraling into the beyond of its own self-interest? On the other hand, what prevents human self-interest itself from being taken to abject and monstrous extremes? Hume’s explanation of why the endpoint is not regressive, and why the choices made there both serve the individual’s interests and rebound for the common good, appeals to “natural sentiment.” It is simply a characteristic of human nature to prefer pleasure to pain in all circumstances. One of the things that human nature obtains most pleasure from, Hume continues, is the approbation of others: what pleases others pleases us, and we benefit by the affective synergy because conventions of mutual benefit emerge from it (“general rules” of conduct, “custom,” “habit”). The reason that what pleases others pleases us has nothing to do with reason. It is in no way a calculation. Rather than a calculation, it grows from an “affectation.” We are directly, affectively touched by the pleasure and pain of others. We literally feel their pleasure and pain through a direct “communication of sentiments” due to our natural faculty of sympathy, “which makes us partake of the satisfaction of every one” (Hume 1984, 2.3.5, 407). “ ’Tis sympathy which is

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properly the cause of the affection” that establishes the communication between myself and others (2.3.5, 408). It works like this: When any affection [of another, causing pain or pleasure] is infused by sympathy, it is at first known only by its effects, and by those external signs in the countenance and conversation, which convey an idea of it. This idea is presently converted into an impression, and acquires such a degree of force and vivacity, as to become the very passion itself, and produce an equal emotion, as any original affection. However instantaneous this change of the idea into an impression may be, it proceeds from certain views and reflections, which will not escape the strict scrutiny of a philosopher, though they may the person himself, who makes them. (Hume 1984, 2.1.11, 367–368) The word “idea” should not mislead. For Hume, an idea is a type of perception.4 This account of the transformation effected by sympathy is entirely compatible with the earlier discussion in this essay of perceptual judgment and abduction if the process is understood as a mutual inclusion in the same event of differing modes of activity: affection, perception, impression, idea, passion. “Affection” is meant in the simple sense of a being-affected: an undergoing. A perception of another’s affection gives rise to an idea of the other’s pain or pleasure. The idea strikes me, and the force of the strike converts the idea into an impression. This yields a vivacity of feeling, which generates a passion—which I directly experience as an affection in me, of myself. All these modes must be seen as co-occurring “instantaneously,” fused into a single event occurring at a nonconscious level of immediate experience. The “communication” of the affective force of the other’s experience into an affectation of my experience is no less direct for being multimodal. In the instant, the modes involved are in superposition—as are the other and me, in shared undergoing. The “views” and “reflections” are immanent to the sympathetic perception’s arising.5 Hume’s concept of passion encapsulates this occurrent comingtogether. He defines passion as the “double relation of ideas to impressions” (Hume 1984, 2.1.5, 338). A passion is when an affecting impression, and its “instantaneous” reflection in a simultaneously arising idea of the affection, fuse as two aspects of the same perceptual immediacy of

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experience. The event is then a double relation between thinking and feeling, in the sense that a two-way circuit is established between them. In virtue of this, a passion can give rise to a sympathy, just as sympathy generates a passion (3.3.1., 627). In the back-and-forth, acquired tendencies may be created that work to mutual benefit (the “artificial virtues” of social convention; 3.3.1, 628). But already in the immediacy of the event, the thinking-feeling fusion launches a tendency: a self-driving of oriented activity. Tendency is part of the very definition of passion. With a passion comes a vivacious “facility for transition”: activity more easily circulates among the modes of activity that come together in perception, and because of that can more readily transition into an acting out.6 Passion is already an incipience of action in readiness potential. This means that perception is not only a thinking-feeling: it is an already-almostdoing thinking-feeling. It is a germinal fusion of action and perception: an incipient action-perception. More radically, not only social conventions but whole new passions may emerge from the “double impulse” provided by the emergence of the first-order passion (2.1.4, 336). Passion upon passion, in inventive proliferation, growing in a communicative contagion of actionable affectability. Hume’s favorite word for what the force of passion does is “actuate” (for example, 2.2.2, 393). Actuate: activate. The theory of perception, in its relation to understanding, is an activist philosophy. It would not be stretching it to equate the superpositional process of undergoing just described with “bare activity” coming to determinate expression. The bare activity that is the germ of experience’s taking form is inseparable from sympathy. Bare activity can be summed up as the tendency for tendencies to form and settle into the world, as a function of sympathy. There is no mediation by the faculty of reason involved in the thinking-feeling process of sympathy. No subject of interest steps in. There is just the inventive complexity of the perceptual event, passing through me on the way to further transitions. The workings of reason come after the perception’s genesis and the generative event, in the reflections of the philosopher in a moment of pause, or perhaps in the reflections of the person who was affected in all immediacy and now thinks back on the encounter at a remove. In the latter case, reason can inflect the process only if the thinking included in the feeling was for

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some reason off the mark. After all, “external signs” can be ambiguous. One way the process goes off the mark is when the perceived effect in the other’s countenance or conversation that triggers the sympathetic process is erroneously attributed to the wrong object. For example, you might hurt someone by something you say, but you misconstrue which comment it was that caused the affection. The other way an error occurs is when the tendency that arises with the newly minted passion falls into the wrong groove, so that it is insufficient as a means of effecting the impassioned transition (Hume 1984, 2.3.3, 463). These errors are “false judgments”—false perceptual judgments.7 Reason’s only role is as a reflective corrective to false perceptual judgments (see Supplement 1). Hume has no patience for the standard rhetoric of the “combat of passion and reason” (Hume 1984, 3.1.3, 460–462). How could they enter into hand-to-hand combat when they really don’t even touch? Reason holds itself at a reflective remove from the inventive life-process that comes flush with perception. Because of this, reason has no motive force. That is why it can’t dictate that I should not prefer disaster for an other to a scratch on my little finger, or that I should not prefer my own pain to pleasure, potentially acting to the benefit of a faraway other against my own self-interests. “Reason alone can never produce any action, or give rise to volition” (3.1.3, 460). There is simply no common ground between rationality and affectivity that can become a battleground. “A passion is an original existence, or, if you will, modification of existence, and contains not any representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification” (460). A thinking that contains a representative quality is what is referred to these days as a cognition, and as such belongs to reason. Passion, containing not any representative quality, is noncognitive. As a modification of existence, it is a becoming. Put the two together, and you get a noncognitive becoming. As the processual hub around which tendencies grow, and grow into conventions of behavior that orient life activity, passion in and of itself is tantamount to a volition: its noncognitive becoming is an ontopower. This is where the issue of choice comes back in. Although a passion is a volition, it is not a choice: it is at the hub of a process that runs its course automatically, in the instant, without any intervention by a deciding subject. The process is self-deciding. Choice comes out between passions.

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It comes from passions entering into combat with other passions, tendencies with opposing or elsewise-oriented tendencies, in bare activity. “Nothing can oppose or retard the impulse of passion, but a contrary passion” (460). In bare activity, passions duke it out among themselves, flush with perception, imbued with nonconscious thought, already potentially readying an issue in action. This affective thinking-feeling is not the opposite of rationality. It is not reducible to the simple negation of rationality. It may be nonrational, but it is not irrational. The passion with which it comes is an “original existence.” It is an original, tendentially self-affirming existence, and as such must be described in positive terms as its own ontopowerful process. Does that sound like a moral philosophy? If you add to this account the idea of priming and other forms of event-conditioning and the wholesale modulation of the relational field effected by eventconditioning—including the potential for new, emergent action-paths to be invented—then what you have is much more like a politics: a fundamentally affective politics. In the affective politics implied, rational choice has no foundational role or reality. Fundamentally, it’s not about choice—it’s about sympathy. And sympathy is in the immediate communication of affections between individuals: it is transindividual.8 This means that the individualism of self-interest also has no foundational role, despite Hume’s own attempt to save it. At any rate, Hume doesn’t seem convinced by his own argument that preferring pleasure to pain is an incontrovertible “natural sentiment” and that the approbation of others is naturally a pleasure, and that together they block any ungrounding approach to the regressive limit of the dividual, thus exorcising the possibility that out of the complex and uncertain oscillatory process of which the dividual is the inmost endpoint a decision might make itself that by the conventions of society would fall to an unacceptable extreme: either the callous extreme of preferring the destruction of the whole world to a slight discomfort of a little digit, or the opposite extreme of choosing my own total ruin to the slightest discomfort of a person on the other side of world who is totally unknown to me. Untempered by self-interest, sympathy would seem to move us naturally in the latter direction. In its own processual terms, there is no reason why a contagion of feeling of the kind Hume theorizes would not issue in

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actions expressing a preference for someone else’s well-being over my own. With reason unable to give a motivation for why this should not be the case, the field would seem to be affectively weighted at least as much in this direction as toward callous disregard. Only systematic event-conditionings priming for self-interest could disarm this tendency, and they have their work cut out for them if they are to overcome in all cases the possibility of an “unnatural” outcome flowing from the formative role of sympathy in the very genesis of perception. It is no wonder neoliberalism keeps itself so busy touting the virtues of self-interest and implanting the presupposition that its denizens are subjects of rational choice, making all manner of maneuvers aimed at instilling transitions that make self-interested rational choice the dominant tendency. It is also no wonder—given reason’s Humean impotence, on top of the necessary blindness of the subject of interest that Foucault sees as freeing the invisible hand of the market—that this tendency of neoliberalism to foster tendencies of self-interested rational choice leads to the paradoxes of decision described earlier, as exemplified in deliberation-without-attention and choice blindness. Oddly, given his skepticism toward religion, Hume appeals to the trump card of the “Supreme Will” to save some semblance of a solid foundation for self-interested choice, in what can only be read as an implicit admission that the argument from natural sentiment needs otherworldly reinforcement and is in the end no more convincing than its rival, the argument that there is a combat of affectivity and reason and that reason wins.9 Invisible hands, it seems, have a finger in many liberal pies, of both economic and philosophic confection. What do invisible hands do when their finger gets scratched?

Contiguity, Most Distant A key part of Hume’s theory of the moderating, regulatory effect of natural sentiment is the argument by similarity: “we find, that where, beside the general resemblance of our natures, there is any peculiar similarity in our manners, or character, or country, or language, it facilitates the sympathy” (Hume 1984, 2.1.11, 368). Where there is difference, the familiarity

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bred by “contiguity” creates the conditions for sympathy (2.1.11, 369). According to these arguments, there is a hierarchy of sympathy based on established patterns of belonging, according to general kind (for example., the human solidarity of membership in the same species and class solidarities) or owing to the particularities of frequentation (family, community, nation): resemblance / familiarity / contiguity-based solidarities. Although it may be generally the case that sympathy is preferentially structured in this way, there are enough exceptions to the general rule to raise once again the question of what might happen if the constant conditionings aimed at implanting this hierarchy were not in force. Under neoliberalism’s “massive withdrawal” from the normative-disciplinary regime of power, hierarchizing conditionings of sympathy lose their anchoring in easily controllable enclosures. They are forced to operate in an open, oscillatory environmental field. This biases them toward the extremes. In order to retain resemblance / familiarity / contiguity-based criteria for sympathetic belonging, affective primings are necessary to suppress or demonize the perception of difference. Given the proliferative nature of capitalism, and its ontopowerful tendency to augment differencings (the better to invent niche markets), virulent primings tending toward fascist contagion are required to shore up the sense of identity and reimpose boundaries. This can be seen in the rise of the far right in the United States, beginning with the formal setting in place of the financial mechanisms of the neoliberal economy starting in the late 1970s, and now affecting all areas of Europe, in particular since the destruction of what remained of the social democratic model by the crash of 2007/8 and the subsequent policies of austerity brutally imposing an abrupt transition to a fully fledged neoliberal model. On the other hand, and at the same time, unleashed from the normative-disciplinary hegemony over the field of relation characterizing the previous phase of capitalism, sympathetic tendencies uninclined toward resemblance / familiarity / contiguity-based hierarchies readily multiply, and go feral, against the grain of “natural sentiment.” These feral “participations against nature” take a number of expressions.10 Against general resemblance of kind, the early 2000s have been marked by a sea change in perceptions of species difference. There has been a passionate upsurge of concern, academic and activist, in non-

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human forms of life, inventive of new cross-species tendencies in the playing out of sympathy. Parallel to this, the geography of the field of relation has been fundamentally changed by the Internet and social media, redistributing perceptions of contiguity and familiarity. Viral contagions rage on a daily basis, irrespective of distance or prior familiarity. In the network society, what is farthest away can hit closest to home. Conversely, one’s immediate surroundings may seem oddly far away, affectively distanced by the intensities of experience communicated by free-roaming viralities.11 Examples of feral sympathy become a major social-media trope: images of “random acts of kindness,” tales of “paying it forward,” unexpected odd-couple bonds between individuals who have nothing in common or between animals of different species, cultural oddities that strike with sympathy-clinching affection in ways those experiencing it could never justify by any prevailing standards of tastes, to name just a few. On a more mainstream note, the media rhetoric of the everyday “hero” who actively accepts the possibility of his or her own total ruin in preference to the misfortune of another, has become an inescapable daily presence, particularly since 9/11. On the callous extreme of lack of sympathy for others, we see, in addition to what a normative point of view would consider “antisocial” actions by individuals, widespread collective attitudes that are actually based on what is purported to be “rational” economic reasoning. These are perhaps best understood less as a lack of sympathy per se than a sympathy for the market, of the kind corporate persons and enterprisesubjects are primed to feel—and to feel to be accordance with their own best interests as well as ultimately, in the long run of accumulating multiplier effects, to be in the common good. Most notable among these market sympathies or passions for the capitalist process itself—capital desires—are callousness toward the disadvantaged, expressed in policies to roll back social benefits for the love of the bottom line, and attitudes toward climate change and other ecological devastations. Do not the unapologetically obstructionist climate politics of some of the most economically developed countries, in particular Australia, Canada, and the United States, amount in the long run to preferring the destruction of the whole world to an economic scratch on the finger of the market’s invisible hand?

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Given this situation, the argument that natural sentiment grounds the passions in self-interest—but also trustably regulates sympathy according to principles of resemblance in kind, familiarity, and contiguity— seems disingenuous. Trustably? No reason to get started on that again. If this principle of “human nature” was ever in force, its force is noticeably enfeebled in our day.

The Argument from Intensity The relative flattening out of the bell curve of sympathy, as the extremes of the spectrum gain currency, should not be understood to imply that more people become personally invested in taking pleasure in the pain of others, at the callous extreme, or, at the other extreme, in experiencing pain in deference to others’ pleasure. It is not a question of sadism or of masochism. And it should be clear by now that affectivity has to do not with personal, subjective investments, but rather with autonomies of decision that can only be said to reside in the relational field in its unspecified, oscillatory whole—or to be more precise, in the movements of dividual-transindividual cross-scale sensitivity traversing the relational field, communicating affections in a way that decidedly cuts the flows at each pass, effecting singular events of perceptual judgment that issue into action. The problem is the very notion that the hedonic factors of pain and pleasure ultimately ground choice, and orient sympathy’s production of passion-fueled, self-willing tendency. The alternative to grounding decision and volition in the hedonic distinction between pain and pleasure is to introduce the category of intensity into the affective picture. Intensity is nonhedonic. It is not a subjective state expressing an affective investment of the person. It is a dimension of events into which the life of the body is braced. The intensity of an event is the bracingness of its qualitative tenor: what Hume calls its “vivacity” or “liveliness.” Hume always speaks of the vivacity of a phenomenon in terms of degrees. Intensity is not binary, like pain/ pleasure, but lies on a continuum. Hume never speaks of vivacity as a state, always as a force. The vivacity or intensity of an impression or an idea makes it more affecting, and thus more forcefully effective as an generator of passion and tendency. The concept of intensity is a strange

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one by the usual hedonic standards. It is the notion of a qualitative force immanent to events that gives them their power to effect transitions: their decisional power to make a cut that continues the flow of events. Intensity is what affective volition feels like. Its motive force is clearly not beholden to self-interest. It is in the ser vice of the liveliness it is. It’s all about vitality, as a self-affirming value, expressed as a power to effect transitions in the world. An event of uncommon intensity produces a surplus value of life: a boost of vitality that is communicated by sympathy, and tendentially spreads, affirming itself in and as a power of contagion. Intensity lies at the basis of ontopower. It is the qualitative force boosting of becoming. For as we saw earlier, new passions, corresponding to emergent tendencies, invent themselves through the affective process of sympathy’s playing out. Whitehead adds an essential element: contrast (Whitehead 1967, 252–264; 1978, 162–163, 279–280). What determines the intensity of an experience, he says, are the contrasts it holds together. In other words, an intensity is a measure of the mutual inclusion of what under other circumstances tends to separate out. Certain events suspend the contrariety of what is normally present as mutually exclusive terms. The more such contrasts an experience is capable of holding in itself, the more intense it is. Because the “terms” are actually tendencies. Objects, perceptual forms and qualities of all kinds, operate as triggers for the coming activity, already incipiently stirring in the dawning of an experience. They figure as signs of an emergent passion potentially coming to determine a tendency (recall that Hume’s account of the genesis of passion in sympathy began with the strike of a sign). The terms that are held together in their contrast, but minus their contrariety, stand in the incipient experience for copossible tendencies that elsewhere, in other experiences, will refuse to cohabit. They are present as compossibilities: copresent alternatives as to which transitions might potentially follow. Or to return to the bull example, as alternative action-paths, experienced all at once and in their difference from each other, in the form of immediate perceptual judgments and the abductions into which they no sooner extrapolate (lived hypotheses directly experienced in the genesis of the perception). It is the packing into the event of a greater array of compossible tendential unfoldings that intensifies it. Simply put, the

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more contrasts are held in readiness potential, the more full of life the experience is—the more bracingly bare-active it is, the more lively, the more vital. The more surplus value of life it produces. The more ample its affective wave packet. It was asserted earlier that a politics of affect would be a political art. Whitehead defines the achievement of intensity as definitive of the aesthetic dimension of existence (Whitehead 1978, 109, 197, 213, 244, 279– 280). Art would then be the practice of packing an experience with contrasts and holding them in suspense in a composition of signs: contriving for the affective wave packet not to collapse, for an intensive interval. This is achieved through the way in which the event of perception is conditioned: which presuppositions are implanted and how; which tendencies are activated, in what rhythm, and in what abductive tension; and what new passions and emergent tendencies potentially arise from that tension. It is in this sense that an artwork is creative: in the manner in which it potentially invents new passions and tendencies. It is not the artist who is creative. Creativity is not a subjective state. It is a manner of activity, passing through the life of the artist. It always expresses as an inventive event. An affective art of politics would similarly pack experience with contrasts, at the strike of a sign or a composition of signs. It would also hold the actuated tendencies in suspense, trying not to allow the affective wave packet to collapse in a way that would determine quanta of satisfaction and success to sort out—at least not right away, or in any way assimilable to a calculus of interests. Once again, interest is not fundamentally ingredient to the event’s occurrence. Sympathy is the mode of the event. However, as new passions and tendencies emerge and settle into the world, interests will inevitably grow up around the settlements. Far from interest being primary, it is intensities of experience that give rise to interests. Interests are the settled creatures of intensity. They are invented by affective means foreign to their own dynamic of avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. Hume, and the neoliberals, got it backward. Satisfaction does not come at the end, arrived at by following one’s own interest. It comes en route, in the self-affirming value of the process itself. It comes in the immediate experience of a qualitative “more” to life, a surplus value of life that is lived intensely, such that its very living is its own reward. To

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call this “satisfaction” is to belittle it, so different it is from hedonic satisfaction, and so much more vital. Spinoza’s term is best: joy. Joy is much more than a pleasure. It registers the invention of new passions, tendencies, and action-paths that expand life’s powers, flush with perception. It registers becoming. It is an immediate thinking-feeling of powers of existence, in passionate intensification and tendential increase. Joy, understood in this sense, does not map onto pleasure.12 It can carry a mix of pleasure and pain, or any number of contrastive emotions. It doesn’t map onto any particular emotion either, or onto any particular contrastive emotional pairing. It is the liveliness factor of all hedonic and emotional categories. It is not an emotion: it is vitality affect (Stern 1985, 53–61; Massumi 2010, 43–44, 111, 152–153; Massumi 2014, 9, 25–29). There is an infinite variety of vitality affects. Every event of perception has its own vitality affect, with its own qualitative tenor and tendential force—its own degree of intensity. In this sense, every experience is its own joy. An emotion is a subjective state. A joy is a dividualtransindividual expression of life’s potential inventiveness. Whitehead goes so far as to say that the increase in intensity is the ultimate aim of life—even of the “universe” (Whitehead 1967, 201; 1978, 107). Hume also understands his account of the affective genesis of experience in aesthetic terms. But in keeping with his time, he considered the fundamental category of the aesthetic to be taste, not intensity. He understood the object of taste to be beauty (a “gilding or staining of the object”), not the thinking-feeling of powers of existence under increase. In keeping with his doctrine of the nonrelation between affectivity and reason, he does not assimilate taste to judgment. He maintains an affective account of it. But for him that means consigning it, and with it the aesthetic as a whole, to the hedonic binary of pleasure and pain. He does, however, recognize taste as a motive force. Suggestively, he also recognizes it as “a productive faculty” that “raises in a manner a new creation.” But the manner of creation it raises is a “sentiment” attached to the attainment of a new pleasure, or a familiar pleasure of rare “gilding.” This obviates any politics of the aesthetic, returning his thinking to the realm of moral philosophy, albeit of a thoroughly constructivist slant stripped of any foundational “ought” and excluding any appeal to a priori

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categories of judgment. (All quotations in this paragraph are from Hume 1912, Appendix 1.) If joy must be distinguished from pleasure and satisfaction, and divorced from taste, it must also be saved from a final indignity: being mistaken for instant gratification. It is true that instant gratification is an activity that is entered into for its own sake, and is self-affirming. But it is consuming, not creative. It is really just one-half of neoliberalism’s paradoxes of self-interested satisfaction. Instant gratification (get it while you can, before the next crisis wipes you out) and the deferral of satisfaction (the “rational” calculus that it would be wiser in the long run to defer gratification) are two sides of the same neoliberal coin. They are an infernal alternative: the “choice” between them binds you to the presupposition that you are effectively a subject of interest, whichever way you choose to go.13 It binds you to the hedonic dynamic of life in its neoliberal expression, and as such is catastrophic from the point of view of the intensification of existence. Satisfaction, associated with consumption, is deintensifying. Instead of holding the contrariety of contrasts in tension, it suspends the tension—thus losing the contrasts. It relieves tension, stilling tendency in a moment of entropic equilibrium that seems to offer succor in the oscillating seas of the stormy economic field of relation. Consumptive satisfaction is the antiaesthetic of capitalism. This is not to say that there is no possibility of joy arising in capitalism. There are intensities aplenty, and joys may even be found in consumption. The intensities potentially register countertendencies, and the joys of consumption are had by making a creative art of it, against the equilibrium-seeking impulse toward entropic satisfaction, instant or deferred. This can be seen, for example, in fan cultures, diy cultures, hacking cultures, and culture-jamming activities, all of which turn consumption back around into productive activity. In all of these cases, a dividual-transindividual dynamic is affirmed and inflected, even if it is not explicitly thought of in those terms. The “subject” of the practices is collective, and the collective tendency is to invent new tendencies, in viral contagion. The object of consumption is reactivated, and reactuates, as a sign of passion (a sign that strikes in such a way as to give rise to a passion, and potentially to the invention of new passions to follow). Sympathy reasserts its rights as a force of existence. There are stirrings

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of joy. It is in virtue of this collective reaffirmation of sympathy-based passion as a “productive faculty” and a joy that arts of consumption register countertendencies. This does not constitute as politics per se, but neither is it business as usual.

The Other as Sign of Passion To move sympathy further toward the political, it is sufficient to reconsider the role of the other in Hume’s account of the genesis of sympathy. His account begins when a sign of an affection undergone by the other strikes me, triggering a passional process in which the affection communicates itself to me. In order to contain the movement of sympathy within the ambit of “natural sentiment,” Hume is obliged to interpret the sign as a sign of the other’s pain or pleasure. This needs to be revised in light of all of the ways just enumerated in which the affective process triggered by the sign overspills the hedonic dimension of experience. Conveyed with the affection, mutually included in its vivacity, are incipient actions and buds of tendency. The sign of the other actuates these. Your passion is the movement of their actuation. You are braced into a complexity of unresolved contrasts and alternate outcomes, all intensely thought-felt flush with the perception. The vitality affect of the event is the registering of this complexity, as exceeding any particular pole of contrast, contrastive pair, or determinate outcome. The multiplicity of modes of activity, further multiplied by the copresenting of alternate runnings of each, produces an untenable tension. The tension is the churning of the dividual, in bare activity. Only an issue in action will resolve the tension. Only one action can effectively unfold. This need for a reduction of the affective wave packet itself produces an additional tension: between the bracingness of the instant and the future resolution, in the course of which the experience will be determined to distance itself from the germinal vivacity of its overfullness with contrast, incipiency, and tendency, as well as the vaguely but vitally sensed possibility of the invention of new passions and their attendant tendencies. The sign of the other that triggers this affective process and its passional playing-out has a double sense, corresponding to the two tensions, that of the arising of a field of overfull potential, and that between

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the arising and its resolving playing-out. What the sign of the other stands for points in two directions. In one direction, it points to the actuated landscape of potential just described. This is not the landscape that the other inhabits. It is not another’s home territory. Rather, it is the landscape that inhabits the other: the array of copresent passions and tendential actionperceptions actuated by the sign the other emits. The landscape of potential does not inhabit the other so much as it comes between the other and me, actuated in the communication of affectability that moves instantaneously from the other to me, and in the so moving directly moves me. It inhabits this moving relation. The moving-relation is in the hyphen of the dividual-transindividual: my life is braced into bare activity by the transindividual movement of transition. The strike in the infraaffection of the dividual and the transaffection from the other are one: two instantaneous poles of the same relational movement. However, since it is the other that emitted the sign that triggers the movement, our engrained associative habits of perception are apt to assign the other as cause of the event. The landscape of potential is then attributed to the other, and the tendency is then to construe it as belonging to the other. The affective communication now no longer appears as an immediate relation bringing about a transition between events: the other’s affection and its eventual issuing forth in my actions as a function of sympathy. It is experienced instead as the transmission to me of a content of the other’s life. As if the other and me were separate interiorities— rather than cross-sensitive, transcorrelated (in)dividualities. The landscape of potential is then experienced as the sign of a possible world that is subjective in nature.14 It is upon this basis that love and hate arise. Spinoza defines love as a “joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause” and hate as “a sadness with the accompanying idea of an external cause” (with sadness defined as a diminution of the powers of existence enveloped in intensity, and interpreted in the present essay as lying on the same continuum as joy rather than being its opposite; Spinoza 1985, 3, p13, schol., 502). It is also upon this basis that the linking of sympathy to Hume’s good friends, resemblance, familiarity, and contiguity, occurs. The interiorization of the affective event coincides with the transition from immediatelythinkingly-feelingly-lived to reflectively-thought. A potential is bracingly

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experienced. It is nonconscious. A possibility, for its part, can be consciously cogitated upon. Love and hate give rise to endless ruminations: scenarios of conquest and revenge, the stratagems by which they might be obtained. Obtained—as satisfactions. It is also here that the hedonic duality between pleasure and pain kicks in in a way that begins to structure one’s life in what almost inevitably plays out along conventional lines—too often embarrassingly clichéd lines—due to the relentless priming dedicated toward just this end. Love and hate are emotions corresponding to the interiorization of the affective event as a hedonic subjective content amenable to conventional formatting. As with all emotions, this containment of affective intensity is never complete. All emotions carry a remainder of intensity, to which they owe their vivacity—as well as their etymology (“e-mote”: to move out of oneself, as in the phrase “to be beside oneself ”). There is a quantum of joy even in hatred. Intensity cuts across the hedonic duality, on a transversal path of its own. Thus in one direction, the sense of the sign of the other is a landscape of potential that tends to be translated into a possible world. Enveloped in the strike of the sign, mutually included with the potential it actuates, there is a world of subjective emotion in the key of possibility. This points in the second direction, to the second sense of the other as sign of passion: possibility points to the future. The strike of the sign affectively braces me for an unfolding in the course of which passions will be produced, tendencies will duke it out, and actions will issue. All of this occurs in the instant, nonconsciously, in perceptual judgment and abduction, in infra-trans cross-sensitivity, through what Simondon calls an unmediated “communication of subconsciouses” (Simondon 2005, 249). The trans communication correlates my affective dividuality—my “preindividuality” in Simondon’s vocabulary—with that of another. Our preindividualities differentially participate in the same event, as immediately linked polarities defining its strike. Enveloped in this transindividual correlation between preindividualities is the translation of the potential actuated in the event into the key of cogitative possibility. The bifurcation from affection to emotion, from joy to love, from in-between intensity to subjective content, and from perceptual judgment and abduction to reflective rumination, is included in the affective wave packet of the event’s readiness potential, in tendential bud. The

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future may unfold according to either path, affect, or emotion—or even following both, on parallel tracks. Simondon speaks of the “affectivoemotive” in order to encompass this coming-together of this bifurcation (Simondon 2005, 247). From this perspective, on either or both tracks, the sign of the other is a sign of my relation to my own future. This is why the sense of the other as sign of passion is double: in the event, it is both the immediate moving-relation, irreducibly infra-trans, and my own affectivo-emotive self-relation across the change the event will bring to my life. My infra-trans relation to the other is my relation to myself, under two different but co-occurring aspects, in the two contrasting keys of life’s polyphony: potentiation and possibilization.15 When we speak of a politics of affect, or a politics of dividualism against neoliberal individualism, we are speaking of holding the event to the key of potential, to the extent possible. We are talking about making an abductive practice of perceptual judgment, bringing into relief the other as a sign of passion in ways that tend less easily to bifurcate toward conventionalized emotions and the general rules of social behavior they facilitate based on resemblance / familiarity / contiguity, as linked to the hedonic opposition between pleasure and pain. We are talking about intensity of moving-relation. We are talking about joy. We are talking about passion as an ontopower primed for open-road becoming, veering off the beaten paths of conventional settlement. We are talking about the feral potential of sympathy, unleashed from the domination of self-interest and the exclusive aim of personal satisfaction. We are talking about life, enlivened, with its full charge of infra-trans cross-sensitivities. We are talking about the aim of life toward intensity, toward the production of qualitative surplus values of experience. We are talking about relations to the other that are immediately self-relations to the future. We are talking about reclaiming the future for collective potential. Not forgetting that capital itself is defined in relation to the future. Capital is not a quantifiable sum of money. It is a potential quantitative increase in the future of a sum of money invested now. This potential increase is surplus value. Surplus value is “realized” in profit taken (rather than being rolled forward back into investment capital). Profit, of course, is countable. Although surplus value is not in itself quantitative, it is quantifiable in the form of profit. Capitalism is the capture of

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the future for the production of quantifiable surplus value. Capitalism is the process of converting qualitative surplus value of life into quantifiable surplus value. To the extent that our lives come to be dedicated to this conversion, our futures are captured by the capitalist process. We are consigned to live out our lives as human capital, subjects of interest dedicated to the aim of obtaining pleasure rather than suffering pain—and suffering, as a result of that, the paradoxes of self-interest. As subject to those paradoxes, we are infernally burned by the alternative between instant gratification and the deferral of satisfaction. Given all the uncertainty associated with those paradoxes, we are beholden to exercise our gut feeling to make our choices—but to do it in a way that brings the same result a rational calculation would, knowing full that this is impossible for us, creatures that we are of the double involuntary of the neoliberal field of relation, becoming in a rhythm with its oscillatory process, affectively exposed to the ebb and flow of the unspecified whole of the world. This depresses us. To the point that some have made depression the emblem of the times (Berardi 2011). If we weren’t in depression already, the thought of depression as the emblem of the times is in itself enough to depress anyone.16 Apologists for the human-capitalization of life respond with . . . “happiness economics.” Happiness economics deals with the paradox of self-interest produced by the tension between the “rational” imperative to defer satisfaction to maximize one’s human capital in the long run and the moment-to-moment need to act now, in fear and uncertainty, in the thick of the neoliberal field of relation’s far-fromequilibrium conditions. The paradox is that the tension between the two can easily lead a unit of human capital to throw up its all-too-visible hands and say, why not get what I can while I can? Instant gratification is better than working my life away for a pension that will be “austerity’d” away before I can ever collect it. You can always bank on bankruptcy— and start the process all over again. In our capitalist day and age, isn’t the subject of interest really just a polite term for the subject of debt in any case? (Lazzarato 2012). Or on a less callous note: I’m going to concentrate on my quality of life, put time into my family and kids, my art or sports or pastimes, the kinds of things I experience as having a value in

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themselves, and take the risk of being caught short later—which given the fact that the subject of interest is really the subject of debt is just as likely to happen anyway if I “rationally” calculate. Happiness economics responds to this by purporting to have discovered “the happiness equation” (Powdthavee 2011, 11). The happiness equation is a method for putting a monetary price on the intangibles of experience from which we derive satisfaction. These are, in the main, modes of relation we consider the quality of our lives to hinge on, and to define “who we are” more than what we do for a living. Friendship and camaraderie, love and life partnering, and personal health are at the top of the list. If economics can manage to quantify these relational values, it will have achieved the conversion of the citizen into an effectively satisfaction-fueled subject of interest, and of qualitative surplus value of life into quantitative surplus value. It will have completed the monetization of existence that is the project of human capital. Affectivity will finally be subsumed to rational calculation. Unfortunately for these latter-day prophets of neoliberalism, outside economics and aside from its popularizing cheerleaders, as few believe in this “equation” as believe in the well-groundedness of rational-choice theory. The work of happiness economics is made even more difficult by the paradoxical fact that studies consistently find that levels of self-reported happiness and life satisfaction rise as incomes and standards of living rise above poverty level—but then level off and begin to decline beyond a fairly comfortable middle-class socioeconomic status (see, for example, Potro and Rustichini 2013). This strange anomaly of the “happiness index” even has a name: the Easterlin paradox. It’s not just that money doesn’t necessarily make you happy—it’s statistically guaranteed to make you less happy the more you have of it. The rebound effect on the dividual level is the associated fact that nonconscious priming with images of money makes the following experience less satisfying (Quoidbach et al. 2010). This is even the case for chocolate, the fabled pick-me-up of today’s depressed units of human capital. The soothing pleasure of consuming chocolate and the taste of money don’t mix. Why not let the qualitative surplus values of life that are lived for their own worth stay what they essentially are, as corroborated by just about anyone’s gut feeling: unquantifiable? What about an intensity politics, as

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against a happiness economics? Going that non-neoliberal route would involve tweaking and amplifying tendencies that intuitively understand the other as a sign of passion, and the relationship to the other that is immediately a self-relation as an actuation of collective potential. It would involve as well inventing new tendencies that enable infra-trans crosssensitivities to settle into frequentable action-paths in the world, as alternatives to the infernal alternatives of capitalism. Such a politics would be less grounded in the macropolitics of party programs or ideologybased critique and resistance than it would pivot on affirmative affective practices of event-conditioning and priming. It would not be conducted in the name of any individual’s self-interest, or even in the name of any resemblance / familiarity / contiguity-based group interest. It would reside in the intensive-collective affections of the unspecifiable whole of the relational field, oscillating itself toward a possible world of its own abductive invention, beyond neoliberal capitalism. Its power would be of affective contagion, for an ever-always qualitatively-more to life. Any human act accomplished at the level of transindividuality is endowed with an indefinite power of propagation that confers upon it a virtual immortality. (Simondon 2005, 249)

A Freedom of the Event There are inklings of this potential for non-self-interested becomings in one of the most abject figures of contemporary capitalist culture: the “ordinary hero.” The ordinary hero is thoroughly recuperated into rhetorics priming for resemblance / familiarity / contiguity-based politics. Ordinary heroes instill pride in country and community. Anyone might turn out to be one. She might look just like me. There might even be one living next door. We are all bathed in their second-hand glow. Their self-sacrifice elevates us. They achieve immortality. (The proof of it is that the pious celebrations of their martyrdom never end.) We feel our own lives have been given meaning. They will have been worth living thanks to our belonging to their kind. The ordinary kind: just human. Or is it, the American kind? But what about the “first responder” kind? Or the neighborhood-of-origin kind? All of the above—in a most satisfying confusion of structural levels.

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Of course, the immortality is purely symbolic, not “virtual” (in a contagion of readiness potential rolling across the transition between events). Furthermore, the satisfaction to be had in the structural confusion of macro levels energizes a politics that easily settles into a defense of group self-interests perceived to be under attack. The production of the ordinary hero is a working part of the politics of “terror.” It has its own powers of affective propagation, revolving around the operative logic of preemption (Massumi 2007). Ordinary heroes help implant in the field of relation an affective media-borne politics that mass-converts intensity into emotion, in the politically useful register of fear, in oscillatory opposition to the contrasting emotion. That contrasting emotion is not trust, but the politically as well as economically useful emotion of chest-beating “confidence” (Massumi 2005). Who can forget the first responses of the time’s most prominent public figures to the 9/11 attacks: 1) keep shopping, for love of country!17 and 2) hate those swarthy foreign terrorists and hang on! because we’re going on the preemptive attack. Don’t lose confidence! This affective politics reinforces warlike tendencies toward neoconservatism, in tight processual embrace with the neoliberal economy (Massumi 2009a). And yet . . . the ordinary hero did “choose” to feel something that is ordinarily unthinkable. And she did it in the heat of the event, launched instantaneously into action by the sign of the life-threatening affection of the other. Heroic individuals are invariably portrayed as not consciously choosing. They rush headlong into the towering inferno, without pausing to ruminate for even a millisecond. They abduct themselves into risking their own life, braced into the intensity of an event that is far bigger than their small lives. The transition from the (in this case indexical) sign of the other’s predicament to a decisive issue in action is accomplished in no time at all. The “heroic” cut into the flow of the event happens so quickly that the strike of the sign, its registering in an impression arousing an affection producing a passion actuating a tendency issuing into action—all of that barely registers. Or rather, only bare-actively registers, in the dividual recesses of a soon-to-be heroic life (in other words, a selfless death). A nonconscious decision has been made. The hero has been infra-trans’d into action. The choice was made through her—by the relational event. Those who survive almost

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invariably describe it that way: I just ran into the wreckage, without even thinking about whether to do it or not, I just had an image of others on the brink of disaster, their lives about to be incinerated and the heart ripped out of their loved ones. A world of possibility about to go up in smoke. So much potential, about to be buried in rubble. What choice did I have? In other words: “I” didn’t do it—sympathy did it. I was but its volitional vehicle, fueled by the other as sign of passion. The ordinary hero is moved by the relation of sympathy as a motive force, in the functional equivalent of volition. He didn’t do it—the event did it, in the playing out of the double sympathetic tension of the relation-to-the-other-that-is-a-self-relation that is one with its occurrence. It just happened. Yes, these ordinary heroes are just like you or me. There is nothing extraordinary in their makeup that separated them out from us by nature before the event. Their distinction is to have acted on gut feeling without a moment’s hesitation in the heat of the event. It is the event that made them extraordinary. They can only claim to have been bathed in the glow of its exceptional nature. They are haloed by the glow only because they surrendered themselves to the event. They opened their lives to it, such that what was to become of them, who they would be in the end, coincided with its “interests”: its freedom to play itself out as it will. If these are indeed just circumstantially extraordinary ordinary people, then all of us have it potentially within us to do this. We must all be susceptible to the tendency, to one degree or another. We all have it in us— in the inmost recesses of our dividuality—to surrender ourselves to the event. To “choose,” through an autonomy of decision deciding through us, for our life’s potential to coincide with the freedom of an event, against our own considered choice, beyond our own best interests. How intense is that? Of course, we all also have in us the contrasting tendency to selfpreservation and the self-interested pursuit of happiness, guaranteed for US citizens by the Constitution. But there is another constitution: that of bare activity. That constitution is not just institutionally powerful. It is ontopowerful. At the “endpoint” of the subject of interest, the two tendencies, to coincide with the freedom of an event and to assert our personal freedom as subjects of interest, duke it out, mutually included

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in the superpositions of bare activity. When the event-conditions are such that the tendency to self-interest comes out of the churning of bare activity on top, the conventional social settlements clinch back into place, and the action-paths followed pass for the results of a “rational calculation.” In affective fact, as we have seen over and over again in this exploration of the paradoxes of self-interest, it is still the event that has decided, through an autonomy of decision, issuing out of the double involuntary of the oscillatory complexity of the field of relation. Selfishness is an achievement of the relational field’s neoliberal tendency. When that tendency comes out on top, we live up to the systemically desired vocation as human capital that has been presuppositionally implanted in the economy, and is continually reprimed. When the contrary tendency comes out on top, we have participated in an alter-economic ontopower—even if our action is in the next instant recuperated by the neoconservative politics in processual embrace with the capitalist economy. For a brief moment that passed faster than the smallest consciously thinkable interval, we lived a counterpowerful affection. This occurred in a cross-sensitivity braced into action by an event whose scale dwarfs the human scale. Far from engaging our “natural sentiment,” the event’s deciding was nothing less than monstrous. Even if the setting is not as physically out of scale as the World Trade Center towers, it will still have been excessive. The sense of it is still out of sync with the human scale of the everyday decisions passing through our ordinary lives: it is something that it is humanly unthinkable to feel, and humanly unfeelable to think. You could say that it’s sublime, if such is your philosophical inclination. You could also say it’s wondrous—in a paradoxical, down-the-rabbit-hole kind of way. Or maybe, just quirky. In any case, what has occurred has issued from the “regressive endpoint” of the human: that “interior alterity” at our sympathetic endpoint (Lapoujade 2010, 68). It has come of something nonpersonal stirring at the inmost endpoint of the relational field, at the limit of the human capital we all are now—that is, that we all are to the extent that we are human and in the thrall of the paradox of our “natural sentiments.” To the extent that a freedom-of-the-event has lived itself out through us, we have lived a counterpower: a participation against nature. The tendency

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in that direction is as much a part of our nature as any other. It is beyond the pale of “our” nature. It is an against-the-grain expression of the inhuman part in us, issuing into action. It is, simply, “nature,” with no possessive—self-possessing. It is nature defined as the bare-active reserve of actionable potential in the world (Massumi 2009a), issuing in excessive becomings expressing an autonomy of decision. At bottom, nature is the world’s tendency to grow feral again. Pat patriotic rhetoric aside, the ordinary hero, seen from the angle of the dividual in its transindividual cross-sensitivity, is an expression of the inhuman and the nonpersonal in us. If “heroism” is a virtue, it is a nonpersonal and nonhuman virtue of the relational event. However recuperated, it is a sign of the potential for feral becomings, done through me, beyond the human capital pale, churning out from the inmost end of the relational field of life. It’s a bit kitschy to call a self-deciding nonhuman virtue of the relational event “heroism,” especially when the same tendency can take any number of minor expressions, so as to pass almost unnoticed. For example, anywhere a gratuitous act of generosity or kindness or feral connection comes about, without the vehicle it moves through even pausing to think about it, a minievent has sympathetically decided itself, cutting modestly into the flow of everyday life. “Ordinary” events can express a freedom-of-the-event just as much as “ordinary hero” events, but moving through with little or no fanfare. Pat humanistic rhetoric aside, these events are also just as much expressions of the inhuman in us. Freedom-of-the-event comes in all sizes and in various degrees of vivacity, or affective force. The variety is as infinite as that of vitality affect. However small the splash, however fleeting or fading, the vital intensity of a freedom-of-the-event still surpasses that of the grandest of self-interested gestures. As well, by the way, as that of even the most celebrated of acts of altruism performed with the aim, conscious or not, of obtaining the satisfaction of others’ approbation, or of achieving symbolic immortality. Such gestures observe the resemblance / familiarity / contiguity-based conventions constitutive of the human settlement. They are, in effect, if not in actual point of fact, “rationally calculated.” This, notably, excludes charity and the philanthropic spirit from the politics of sympathy implied by this analysis. Sorry, Bill Gates: you’re within the human pale after all.

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The Flashpoint of Sympathy Of course, it is in the exceptional event that the affective politics of intensive contagion is most palpable and forceful. It is of the nature of sympathy as a qualitative force that it can act instantaneously at a distance, on the wings of a sign. It doesn’t have to exert a measurable force, and it isn’t inclined toward the rational calculation of starting at point A and moseying to point B in a linear and orderly fashion. The strike of the sign of passion triggers, in all immediacy, at whatever distance: it is the flashpoint of an event. “The most distant event taking place on the other side of the world may affect my interest, and there is nothing I can do about it.” More radically, the slightest sign of passion flashing at a distance may affect my vital intensity—and there is much that the self-deciding event of sympathy can do with that. The distance doesn’t have to be geographical. It could be between conventional categories of belonging—age, class, gender, religion, species—separated from each other by a social gulf sinking gaps of remoteness into proximity. The communication of affection at the heart of the sympathetic event is by transindividual nature nonlocal. It can reverberate across the relational field, faster than the speed of conscious calculation. It is as double-involuntarily contagious as a sneeze or a maniacal laugh. It can skip causal intermediaries, and pop up somewhere else, in no time flat. Or, its taking-effect can be suspended, because signs can be archived. This suspension is not the same as a deferral. The event is suspended in the sign’s readiness potential—the semiotic equivalent of bare activity. This is not a mediation. It is an archiving of affective immediacy. The time of the affective event’s taking-effect is no more linear in time than its moving-relation is in space. It is only answerable to its own rhythm, which emerges as a whole-field effect from the way in which the relational field has been primed and conditioned. The affective event is not site specific. It is whole-field-relation-specific. It is not pinnable to a particular place—yet it effectively takes place. Neither is it pinpointable in clock time—even though the emission of its triggering sign is as punctual as the chiming of a clock. Its punctuality is that of a flashpoint: an explosion, an instantaneous amplification, sending out wave upon

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wave of impulse, such that it makes and takes its own time. The sympathetic event occurs in different dimension to metric time and space: the pulsed time of the bare activity, churning and turning around with nonlinear readiness potential. The conditioning of the event, although a requisite of its occurrence, is not its cause. Events of complexity are not answerable to causal determinism. The complexity of the oscillatory field opens the field for chance emergences. But that is not all. The undecidability that comes of these emergent complexity-effects is compounded by the spontaneity of intuition: abductive thinking-feeling, making the cut, flush with the event.18 As we saw earlier, abduction can lead to the invention of new actionpaths. That inventivity is already at the affective core of perception’s genesis, which as we saw with Hume involves the production of passions and tendencies, and from these still more of both, in a cascade of decisional cut and ongoing transition. Emergence is one thing. Invention is another. They piggyback on each other. Together, they are doubly ontopowerful. There is no cut-and-dried distinction between them. There is, however, a difference of degree. Invention carries a stronger charge of passional volition. It has a momentum fueled and refueled by pulses of passion carrying the event through transitions across which its qualitative force affectively changes and qualitatively evolves. Invention is the event deciding itself to become. It is what the event wants, when it wills itself change. Flash, 2011: a self-immolation in Tunisia ignites passionate protest. The affection skips, across a geographical distance and a suspensive interval of bare activity, to Egypt. Passionate protest reignites in Tahrir Square. From there it reverberates across the globe. A permutation on the event pops up again halfway across the globe, riding on the wings of media signs. Occupy Wall Street takes place, making an anomalous political time for itself: a slow time of otherwise coinhabiting public space; slow-mo explosion of potential. Next North American stop: Montreal. Without any advance warning, a student movement amplifies into the largest student strike in Canadian history and, not stopping there, bleeds into a repotentialization of previously flagging, if not yet moribund, community-based social movements (Barney et al. 2012). There was no specific causal connection from one event in the series to

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the next, but there was a nonlocal linkage that was immediately, unmistakably thought-felt. The events were affectively entangled at a distance, one becoming the trigger-sign for the next, all resonating together in their belonging, differently in each case, to the same series. The event-contagion did not produce a spreading conformation. Quite the contrary, what propagated were differencings. Each event along the way, in addition to being stoked by the affective strike of the signs of the passion of the other trans-ing itself in at a distance, was also infra-stoked by an event occurring immanently to a more restrained field of relation: infra-trans coconditioning. For each new occurrence in the series, there were what Simondon calls “germinal forms.” These are affections occurring immanent to a field of relation that already has a certain consistency, including a texture of conventional belongings (for example, along national, religious, and party lines). All fields of relation textured by such resemblance / familiarity / contiguity-based constituencies are riddled with internal structural tensions. The germinal affection is a small event that catapults the relational field into a far-from-equilibrium oscillation, exacerbating the tensions and necessitating a resolution that does not conform to any of the already arrived-at solutions on offer from particular constituencies sharing the field. The germinal affection-event catapults the relational field toward a critical point, where it must either fragment into a turf fight between constituencies or pass, as an unspecified whole of flow, over a threshold to a new consistency. The passing of the threshold occurs in dividual-transindividual feedforward and feedback. No cause can be isolated. The germinal affection-event is catalytic (given the conditions), not causally determining. The effect it produces cannot be predicted: it must be invented. The rallying cry is always “freedom.” Freedom, as we saw earlier, is not owned as a right, it is not consumed as a good, it is not chosen as an option: it is what is invented. The amplification of the germinal affection-event into a crisis—a whole-field oscillation poised to cross the threshold to a new consistency—makes the field of relation intensely problematic. It urgently re-poses the problem of freedom, requiring the invention of a new solution: a new mode of freedom. The solution can only come from a fabulatory playing out of the tendencies actuated by

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the strike of the sign of the other’s affection. In the sudden uncertainty of the field, these tendencies are of many kinds—including countertendencies that reenergize, or passionately invent themselves on the spot, in an instantaneous transition in place. If a countertendency takes the ascendance, regime change, even revolution, may ensue. What began as a germinal microevent has then amplified into the most far-reaching macropolitical change imaginable. When this happens, who has decided? Political militants who had long been agitating for regime change or revolution, following their own ideological platform, are invariably caught flat-footed and are relegated to playing catch-up. If they are successful, that is exactly what they do with the potential released: catch it, capture it. It is not they who cause the revolution. Revolutions are catalytic, complexly coconditioned and eventfully self-deciding, in dividual-transindividual oscillation. It is the programmatic actions of the militants that invariably betray the revolution—for the simple reason that, however inclusive their ideology, in the affective commotion of the event, with its overcharge of contrastive tendencies, they ultimately only amount to a constituency. They themselves soon become the vehicles for the production and defense of resemblance / familiarity / contiguity-based solidarities, effectively reestablishing boundaries and patterns of exclusion. Every revolution is betrayed. The detonative potential released runs its course and is captured and recontained, if not by its partisans, then by its opponents, and if not by its opponents, by a newly minted constituency that the event itself has invented. The minting of a new postrevolutionary constituency that betrays the force of the revolution is typically assisted by the hero worship of the figure of the militant, now safely dead. This is not an argument against revolution. It is a reminder that affective events of change have a life cycle. They rise, and they subside. They live, on a wave of surplus value of life that they themselves produce. And they die. It is a reminder that this should be factored in from the very beginning. It is not just the onset of the event that needs to be conditioned, but also its passing. What comes germinally modulates what happens after. Anarchist-oriented movements have always, rightly, reproached Marxist and other vanguardist movements of forgetting this, in their

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misplaced faith that the exclusions and hierarchies of the old order will simply “wither away” with the capitalist State. The history of the twentieth century should have taught us by now that if the germinal conditions are not tended counter to this, the exclusions and hierarchies are apt to return in what can be an even more virulent form (as was the case with the “actually existing socialism” of the centralized industrial-State capitalism of the Soviet Union). The anarchist slogan that the mode of revolutionary activity must “prefigure” the society to come is not infantile idealism. It is the affective cry of revolutionary realism. Revolutionary realism is an active recognition that when affective events of change die, they lay themselves to rest having accomplished a level of transindividuality. The transdividual contagion, to paraphrase Simondon, endows the event with a virtual immortality. The potential released remains in reserve, as what Whitehead would call a “complex eternal object”: a pure potential for the mutual inclusion of a diversity of contrasts, minus the requisite conditions for its determined return (Whitehead 1978, 271). After a suspensive interval, the potential is certain to reactuate, perhaps at a far-flung taking-place, at a time-taking of the next event’s making. That is: if the conditions are given, again. This transmission of the gift of the conditions for change should be abductively built into the movements leading up to the event. A revolution ultimately betrays itself only if it proves less worthy after its death than it was necessary at its onset. Setting the conditions for the event in a way that is already a regiving of them beyond the event is not the prerogative of the militant. It is the problem of the activist. The conditions pass through bare activity. Only activity acts on activity, just as movement only arises from movement, and affection from affection. Freedom is action upon action. Activism is catalytic sign-action upon the unspecified whole of a tensional field of activities already tendentially stirring. The militant indoctrinates and inculcates; the activist modulates and induces. The militant raises consciousnesses and punishes recalcitrance; the activist seeks to catalyze what Simondon called a sympathetic “communication of subconsciousnesses” (in the present vocabulary, affective nonconsciousnesses or dividualities). The militant works in the cognitive medium of judgment; the activist tweaks in the affective mode of perceptual judgment. The

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militant jumps over the stopping problem to “rationally” calculated conclusions; the activist jump-starts abductions. The militant strives to replace self-interest with class interest; the activist relationally moves beyond interest. Some of the events of 2011 passed the threshold to revolution, or at least regime change, as in the case of both Tunisia and Egypt. In Egypt, the transition was betrayed, the embryonic invention of freedom aborted by recapture. The whole-field macropolitical threshold of change was not reached in the case of Occupy Wall Street, in spite of the fact that it induced its own extensively propagating event series of Occupies of all description. Neither was it reached in the case of the Quebecois “Maple Spring” (although electoral regime change did occur). But these movements are no less “immortal” for that “failure.” They remain successful on the “micropolitical,” or affective-event-contagion level (Massumi 2009b). The micropolitical is no more mutually exclusive of the macropolitical than affectivity is of rationality. It is a question of co-occurring modes of activity, constituting intertwined dimensions of events. The Quebec student movement of 2011/12, unlike Occupy Wall Street, did have a specific macropolitical objective: to block an announced tuition increase. That objective was attained when the government was forced to call an election due to the unrest, and lost. The movement, however, had a micropolitical momentum that exceeded this macropolitical aim: toward not only a tuition freeze, but past that objective for free education and, even further, for an end to the neoliberalization of the university. This momentum developed, in the case of the largest and most radical student association, into an explicitly anticapitalist manifesto issued in the lead-up to the election in an attempt to prevent the movement from slipping into wholesale recapture by representative macropolitics. It is of the nature of micropolitical affective-event movements that do have stated macropolitical objectives to exceed them. It is this excess-over the macropolitical that gives macropolitical movements their intensity, and it is in their intensity that their power lies (their ontopower). The movement did subside after the electoral win—which amounted to little more than a change in the faces fronting essentially the same, fundamentally neoliberal policies, given certain strategic differences. Thus the movement died by its own success. Failure is not the only way to fail.

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“Micro” is a misnomer. The concept has little to do with scale, and everything to do with cross-scale sensitivities and relational contagion. All the events of 2011/12 were micropolitical successes in spite of their macropolitical failures, in that they released a charge of potential that continues to percolate through the relational field, in ready reserve to jump-cut to new taking-places and making-times, given the conditions. They held a more-to-life, an excess of surplus value of life, in reserve. They released a quantum of affective-evental “immortality.” Occupy Wall Street, for example, reactuated a tendency to “direct democracy,” reinvented. It invented a new collective figure of freedom: the reclaiming of the public square (not the public sphere) for directly embodied cohabitation (not mediated speech); the open-assembly model of indefinitely inclusive whole-field participation; practices favoring the communicative contagion model, as in the example of the “human megaphone”; the refusal to assign a leadership subset that would fragment the relational field and reproduce familiar structures of hierarchy; the refusal of representation in favor of immediately affecting, effective speech (performative speech, or the use of the linguistic sign as affection-event trigger); and as part of the refusal of representation, a reluctance to enumerate a platform of demands that would make the movement insertable into existing macropolitical structures of conflict resolution and negotiation. This is a formidable invention, undoubtedly with many afterlives to come. And with many prelives, in anarchist and autonomist event series. “Given the conditions”: it is paramount to remember that the conditions include singularity. The affection-event trigger in Tunis was utterly singular, to the point that it has a proper name: Mohamed Bouazizi. Bouazizi’s singular act of self-immolation was explosive by virtue of the lay of the relational land in Tunisia, implanted as it was, and as is always the case, with an ensemble of presuppositions and tendencies that are utterly unique. Every event has its own affective complexion. For Occupy Wall Street, it was a signature composition of signs, including the economic trope of the “1 percent,” the counterpowerful prestige of the Anonymous brand, and the mischievously symbolic leer of the Guy Fawkes mask. The cascade of affective events occurs through a multi-

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plier effect, not unlike the kinds of multiplier effects that neoliberalism vaunts. The difference is that counterpower contagions multiply the singularity of serially linked events. Neoliberal multiplier effects return to the same old figure of human capital: the subject of interest as enterprise-subject, caught in the paradoxes of rational choice. Neoliberalism thrives on producing new variations on the enterprise-subject. This is a remarkably multiple-singular sameness. But a sameness it is nonetheless, in the sense that all of the variations revolve around an endlessly reproduced equation between corporate entities and individual entities. The “corporations are people too” aspect of neoliberalism imposes a single model of (non)personhood that operates across scales, but only in the register of private interest. The collective level and the individual level are required to share a formal identity: that of the person as enterprise-subject. They are required, formally, to conform to that overarching model. Amid the diversity, in and through the proliferation of singularities whose emergence its far-from-equilibrium oscillatory processual fielding fosters, neoliberalism strives to hook every enterprise fish in its swell with a formal equation whose aim is to hold it all together in the capitalist orbit of the tendency to produce quantitative surplus value. Counterpower contagions affirm the multiple-singular, unhooked, or hooked only on the problem of the reinvention of the freedom of events. Unhooked from the enterprise-subject, they do not impose that equation—or any other equation. They pose the differential problem of a diversity of tendencies mutually included in the same affective wave packet, without prejudging what might issue. To the extent that they live up to their vocation of living out the full complexity of the event, they are tendentially anticapitalist by nature: fabulations of anticapitalist freedom; open-range becomings; becomings-feral, potentially beyond the human, let alone human-capital, pale. “Machinic” autonomies of decision. In capitalist lingo: incalculable “externalities.”19 The idea that counterpowerful tendencies to capitalism stir immanent to its field should not be confused with the “accelerationist” position often attributed (erroneously) to Deleuze and Guattari. According to the accelerationist model, the tendencies of capitalism should be

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pushed to the utmost extreme, in order to precipitate a crisis to end all crises. The capitalist tendency toward the production of ever greater surplus value, through ever faster turnover, is precisely what has created the far-from-equilibrium conditions in which it operates. Push this manic tendency further, the thinking goes, and the whole, constitutively unstable, balancing act will come crashing down. The problem is that even crises from which the capitalist process is able to recover occasion endless misery. It is difficult to imagine what degree of joy might possibly rebound from the final crash. Deleuze and Guattari do not subscribe to this analysis, which ignores a distinction that is as crucial to their thought as it is to the present account: the distinction between qualitative surplus value of life and quantitative capitalist surplus value. It also ignores a second, equally crucial, distinction: between consumptive activity (revolving around hedonic satisfaction) and creative activity (aiming for intensification). The forecast final crash would come from overproduction in the name of overconsumption. These are essentially capitalist virtues, and remain so at whatever extreme they are taken to.20 The tendencies immanent to the capitalist field that Deleuze and Guattari argue hold the germs of revolutionary potential are not capitalist tendencies. They may become so, through recapture, as has sadly been the case for many of the tendencies of the 1960s. But in their own stirrings, in their bare-active budding, they are tendentially anticapitalist in the most fundamental of ways: in that they affirm the production of qualitative surplus value of life for itself, as a value in itself (or more precisely, of the event). In a word, they are micropolitical in the sense just defined. They tend not toward self-interested satisfaction, but relationally eventful joy. They are not consumptive. Rather, they are open-endedly creative. They do not calculate rationally. They invent abductively. They do not strategize the next step. They fabulate a jumpcut. They are catalyzed and cascade, leaving “immortal” remainders of newly constellated potentials that “want” nothing more than to return, in an autonomy of self-decision, as the functional affective equivalent of volition. They are dividual, in cross-sensitivity with the transindividual. They are their own self-affirming and self-effecting infra-trans desire.

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Capitalist society can bear many manifestations of interest, but no manifestation of desire. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 379; translation modified)

Toward an Anticapitalist Art of the Event Capitalist power, it was said earlier, is an ontopower: a positive power of becoming, a creative power operating relationally between the oscillatory poles of the dividual and the transindividual (its own individualist rhetoric notwithstanding; or more precisely, withstanding all too well its paradox). Ontopower, it was also said, can only be countered by ontopower. Further, it was asserted that this requires practicing intuition as a political art. “Art,” because a countercapitalist ontopower brings into relief the aesthetic dimension of life, defined by Whitehead as the invention of modes of compossibility among normally mutually excluding contrasts, in accordance with life’s “ultimate aim” of intensification. Intuition as a political art was said to be an art of finessing the event: tweaking its conditions, in order to modulate its tendings and their issuings into determinate action, toward the collective fabulation predicated on a qualitative alter-economy of directly lived life-value. This is an eminently pragmatic undertaking. It involves experimenting with practices of event-conditioning. What kind of perceptual judgments produce an expanding landscape of potential? How can presuppositions be eventfully implanted in the relational field to tend it for intensification? What compositions of signs of the passion of the other are apt to induce a sympathetic event of singular-multiple contagion, beyond the human pale of self-interest? What kinds of primings lend themselves to the emergence of contrastive compossibilities? How can relations be moved in such a way as to give rise to new passions? And the new passions to new tendencies? And the new tendencies to the invention of new settlements that do not, too quickly or too harshly, relimit the potential released? How can these settlements be so constituted as to desire their own surpassing, in a next freedom-of-the-event in an ongoing series, contagiously overcoming the containments into which each event in the series inevitably subsides? How can all of this be accomplished abductively, in the immediacy of the event? How can the

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affective nonconscious be politically operationalized, without fostering a fascism? How do you orient the political art of intuition toward the serial reinvention of freedom? How do you learn to self-prime in this direction, in cross-sensitive collaboration with the primings at large in the relational field, given the limits of reflective reason? In short, how do you machine transindividual autonomies of decision, given their . . .  autonomy? And in a way as resistant as possible to capitalist recapture? There is only one answer to these questions: there is no general answer to them. The purpose of raising them is not to prefigure a solution but rather to point to the need for a proliferation of practices aimed at developing techniques of relation that answer to this problematic delineated by the unanswerability-in-general of such questions. Although unanswerable in general, the problem is singularly stageable. It is eminently possible to set in place conditions that reactivate the problematic field these questions gesture toward. When that is done, with sufficient art—with sufficient technique leavened with a healthy dose of relational intuition—an affective event may well be occasioned. There is no way around a trial-and-error approach. Each event is the affective germ of a series of events that belong to each other, at a distance and across suspensive intervals. Practices of the political art of the event are experimental practices that want nothing so much as cascading company, commotionally taking-place as they serially make their own time. The events need not be dramatic. And they need not wait for an exceptional conjuncture of catalytic conditions. Ordinary events can release potential, in their own intensely modest way. They can seriate, in the tensional gaps of the texture of the everyday. Micropolitical events, ostensibly occurring on a small scale, always have the potential to ignite and amplify. It happens when least expected. In any case, militating for revolution also only ever works when it is least expected—on the back of a self-deciding event-contagion whose trigger conditions are by nature beyond militantism’s consciousness-raising ken. And when it does succeed on its own steam, it is because it is capable of causal forcing—and thus already carries the germs of its own betrayal in its programmatically calculating macropolitical genes. So: no need to wait for the “right” conditions. There are no right conditions, only singular conditions. Experimentally tweak them. Emit signs

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of passion. Catalyze whatever events lie in your dividual-transindividual reach. Make joy. Take joy in what qualitative surplus values of life are potentially ready for the living where you are. Make a micropolitical commotion, and nudge it toward abductive action. Surrender yourself artfully, in a relation to others that is your self-relation to the future, in an activism of the event.21

supplement i

The Affective Tasks of Reason

After holding rationality’s invisible fingers to the flame for so many pages, it is time to give it its due. Reason, there is no denying, has a crucial role to play—provided it reins in its own hubris and takes Hume’s word for it that it has no motive force (“reason alone can never produce any action, or give rise to volition”; Hume 1984, 3.1.3, 460). By Hume’s reckoning, reason has two tasks. The first task is critique, understood in the very specific sense of the identification of errors of perceptual judgment. These can be thought of as objective illusions: incongruities effectively built into the relational conditions of an occasion of perception that embed a defect in its genesis. Whitehead’s favorite example is taking an object in a mirror to lie behind it. Objective illusions are not simple glitches. They are the positive product of life’s entropic tendency to the conformation of feelings: habitual presuppositions (for example, the regularities of perspective) that feed forward into a new situation because the usual cues are in force, while countercues that something is amiss, although also present, fail to take effect. Objective illusions are a conditioned failure to register the full singularity of the situation. They result in the newly arising occasion being likened, in its essential traits, to previously known situations. The new situation is erroneously experienced as being more similar to a class of other events than it is different in its own occurrence. In its critical role, reason can exercise its historically acquired taste for foundations or grounds by returning perceptual judgment to its grounding in singularity, in cases where it strays too far toward the perceptual pole of the conformation of feelings. This task requires reason to overcome its also historically acquired and, perhaps, even more strongly engrained passion for generality, and the classificatory logic that sustains it. Thus reason must concurrently conduct a self-critique of its love of the general idea.

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An objective illusion is precisely the form in which general ideas are effectively found in the world. Traditionally, “rationality” has aggrandized them—amplified them—rather than regrounding them in the singularity from which they come. The “subject” is the most widespread and processually significant of these rationally aggrandized objective illusions. The second task that Hume allows reason is corrective: to evaluate the efficacity of a means a tendency has decided upon to further itself along its chosen orientation, toward its desired terminus. This task allows reason to indulge in another of its loves: the passion for causality. “Rationality” traditionally favors explanation through the identification of local, antecedent causes, whose linear effects are proportional to the transmitted impetus. This is perfectly adequate to relatively closed, simple systems, on certain levels of reality (those answering to the classical laws of thermodynamics). Under conditions of complexity, many forms of rationality have upped their game to include structural or formal causes. This gives up on the locality of an isolatable cause, but retains a certain linearity of effect: for example, transitions between ages, epochs, or paradigms. Still further down the road toward complexity, systems theory and complexity theory itself have had to rationally recognize the reality of recursive causality: feedback. Once feedback is allowed, there is a boomerang effect that crushes any illusions that might have remained that linear cause-effect relations are generally salvageable: feedforward. Feedforward rebounds on the very concept of tendency. Tendency is a passionate orientation governing movement toward an attractor, or desired terminus (using “desire” in the subjectless sense developed in this essay of an autonomy of decision affirming its own affective motive force). The emergent, nonlinear complexity-effects of feedback/feedforward operating together can alter or even reinvent the terminus. This is what it means to invent a tendency. Given the natural disposition of the world to becoming, this reinvention of tendential termini is more often the case than not. The terminus, as William James observed, “ninety times out of a hundred” remains “virtual” (James 1996, 69, 71–72). It is not the terminus: it is a singularly multiple constellation of superposed, potential terminal states, together in contrast, and under constant reformatting. There is only one thing a tendency, as an affective volition, wants more than to reach its terminus, and that is to continue—to affirm

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its reality as a tending-toward (as opposed to an arrival, which is a very different animal). Tending-toward is constitutively open ended, by nature implicated in movements of invention. Reason’s means-testing task is therefore much more complicated than it might seem at first. Rationality cannot presume to be capable of handling this corrective role in isolation, because what needs its evaluations are tendencies, whose open-ended emergent complexity is precisely the kind of thing that is beyond rationality’s ken. The first thing reason needs to do to make itself worthy of this task is to conduct another self-critique, this time of its passion for causality. Like reason’s love for generality, its attachment to causality is a glorification of habit: a product of the engrained expectation of a certain result based on the regularity with which like results were experienced in past occasions perceived to be of a similar kind.1 Rationality’s overwrought attachment to traditional models of causality is thus another result of the objective illusion that consists in unperceiving the singularity of situations, specifically as regards the self-relation to their own future of the tendencies presently running through the situation’s perceived configuration. The two selfcritiques of reason must be intimately coupled. Together, they must disabuse reason of its instinctive distrust of affectivity and intuition. Thus disabused, reason can proceed to its second task. In order to succeed at its corrective task, reason must enter into the closest of cooperation with abductive experience. It must processually embrace what its hubris too often leads it to regard as its “irrational” opposite. It must become a fellow traveler of the kinds of relational experimentations described at the end of part 3. It must lovingly accompany them, recognizing that the “means” it can test, and help construct, are techniques of relation: experimental setups for producing felicitous conditions for the inventive exercise of abduction, in the infra-transindividual mode in which it natively operates. When reason abandons its hubristic belief in its power to be a motive force, and its overweened sense of its own grandiosity, when it surrenders itself to co-operation with affectivity, it actually gains something it can never attain by itself: creativity. The fact that reading and multistep mathematical operations can occur nonconsciously means that highly elaborated, rational techniques can feedback/feedforward into the germinal

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level of experience, to operate flush with perception’s genesis. Consciously elaborated means of action can become nonconscious, as part of a process whereby practice becomes perception (Massumi 2002, 189, 198). The results of cognition and rational cogitation go down the rabbit hole that is the regressive endpoint of life, turning around from which life arises anew. There, rationality enters through its own results into superposition with the other modes of activity churning there, including, of course, those which give rise to perceptual judgments and abductions. Rationality actively enters into mutual inclusion with affectivity—effectively enfolding into the affective wave packet. As enveloped in bare activity, reason becomes ontopowerful. By association, at least: in co-operation. It becomes a contributory co-operative factor of becoming. At this point, rationality has lost all pretense of passing final judgment, alone from on high. It loses its grim enjoyment for imposing “correctness”: for normalizing situations through the imposition of general ideas, and for disciplining processes in the name of causality. It has found joy. It has lost its prescriptive vocation and thrown its lot in with intuition. It has agreed to be in the ser vice of spontaneity. In the phrase “practice becomes perception,” emphasis should be retained on the word “practice.” A “corrective” function is not one that imposes a “correctness” on an activity from without. A corrective works immanently to a process to tweak it along from within. The mode of the corrective is not judgment but trial and error: in other words, the iterative restaging of event conditions that progressively explore the reserve of potential in an event, as part of a continuing series of events, affectively interlinked at a distance. Trial and error assumes no posture of correctness. It enters the event-contagious stream with tweak-effective technique. Technique is applied to the catalytic conditions of the relational field whose characteristics are repeated and varied across the stream of the punctual events composing a series. A corrective contributes to steering the stream. If you want a metaphor for reason’s mode of activity in its becoming-creative, it would be more nautical than juridical. Reason, in co-operation with intuition, is not a judge. It is more like a rudder. All of this depends on rationality accepting the humbling fact that it does not have to be opposed to passion, and enter into heroic combat with affectivity. It has to distance itself from its own history. In experienc-

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ing the joy of ontopowerful invention, rationality will come to accept the fact that it is itself a passion after all. Just one of a contrary humor historically, overly enamored of its own hubris, and strangely overestimating of its own tendential force. When reason reconciles itself to its own passion, it can finally tend to the relational future of creative co-operation. This entails admitting that its loves for generality and causality were always already passions—albeit of a limitative calling, acting to curtail more inventive and expansive passions, thus figuring as passionate factors of antibecoming. Reason must admit its own passionate nature, in order to convert itself from its limitative exercise into a force for becoming, in an immanent self-overcoming internal to its own critical/corrective exercise. Now reason is in a position to return the favor affectivity has always done it, in allowing structures of rationality to live for so long off of the limitative capture of its positive force for invention, without so much as a thanks. As a passion, the becoming-creative of reason is liable to conversion into emotion, as is the case for all affect. As oriented to the relational future, reason is in processual embrace with the process of sympathy. The emotions into which it is most helpful for its passion to convert, in pursuit of its second affective task, are concern and generosity: care for the relational event. But this should not be allowed to obscure the ontopowerful fact that these emotions are essentially personalized expressions of the potential for the relational event. At bare-active bottom, at the inmost endpoint rearising of life, they are nonpersonal virtues of the event (Manning and Massumi 2014, 108–110).2 Mission: affectively-rationally live the generosity of the event. Tend it, and enjoy.

supplement ii

Keywords for Affect

This supplement is a mosaic of passages drawn from a number of previously published essays, edited for this publication. Threshold. The concept of affect as mobilized here is adapted from Spi-

noza via Deleuze. Spinoza speaks of the body in terms of its capacity for affecting or being affected. These are not two different capacities— they always go together. When you affect something, you are opening yourself up to being affected in turn, and in a slightly different way than you might have been the moment before. You have made a transition, however slight. You have stepped over a threshold. Affect is this passing of a threshold, seen from the point of view of the change in capacity. Body. It is crucial to remember that when Spinoza talks about affect he is talking about the body. What a body is, he says, is what it can do as it goes along. This is a totally pragmatic definition. A body is defined by what capacities it carries from step to step. What these are exactly is changing constantly. A body’s ability to affect or be affected—its charge of affect or power of existence—isn’t something fixed. Depending on the circumstances, it goes up and down gently, like a tide, or maybe storms and crests like a wave, or at times simply bottoms out. Tendency—Intensity. For Spinoza, the body is one with its transitions.

There is no the body. There is a continuous bodying. Each transition is accompanied by a variation in capacity: a change in which powers to affect and be affected are addressable by a next event and in how readily addressable they are, or to what degree they are present as futurities. That “degree” is a bodily intensity, and its present futurity is a tendency. The Spinozist problematic of affect offers a way of weaving together concepts of movement, tendency, and intensity.

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Qualities of Life. The feeling of the transition as the body moves from

one affect, or power of existence, to another has a certain separability from the event it is bound up with, in that the transition itself is distinct from the capacitation activating the passage. What is felt is the quality of the experience. The account of affect will then have to directly address forms of experience, forms of life, on a qualitative register. Affective Return. The felt transition leaves a trace, it constitutes a memory.

Consequently, it can’t be restricted to that one occurrence. Its quality of experience is bound to return. It has already returned, in some capacity. It was already part of a series of repetitions, to the extent that the body has a past. Event. The affective capacitation of bodying as it’s gearing up for a passage toward a diminished or augmented state is completely bound up with the lived past of the body. That past includes what we think of as subjective elements, such as habits, acquired skills, inclinations, desires, even willings, all of which come in patterns of repetition. This doesn’t make the event any less rooted in the body. The past that the body carries forward in serial fashion includes levels, such as genetic inheritance and phylogenesis, that we think of as physical and biological. There is a reactivation of the past in passage toward a changed future, cutting across dimensions of time, between past and future, and between pasts of different orders. This in-between time or transversal time is the time of the event. This temporality enables, and requires, you to rethink all of these terms—bodily capacitation, felt transition, quality of lived experience, memory, repetition, seriation, tendency—in dynamic relation to each other. Freedom. There’s a population or swarm of potential ways of affecting or

being affected that follows along as we move through life. We always have a vague sense that they’re there. That vague sense of potential, we call it our freedom, and defend it fiercely. But no matter how certainly we know that the potential is there, it always seems just out of reach, or maybe around the next bend. Because it isn’t actually there—only virtually. But maybe if we can take little, practical, experimental, strategic measures to

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expand our emotional register, or limber up our thinking, we can access more of our potential at each step, have more of it actually available. Having more potentials available intensifies our life. We’re less enslaved by our situations. Even if we never have our freedom, we’re always experiencing a degree of freedom: wriggle room. Our degree of freedom at any one time corresponds to how much of our experiential “depth” we can access toward a next step—how intensely we are living and moving. Its horizon varies at each transition, and new degrees of freedom can emerge. It’s all about the openness of situations and how we can live that openness. And you have to remember that the way we live it is always entirely embodied, and that is never entirely personal—it’s never all contained in our emotions and conscious thoughts. Emotion. Because affect concerns the movements of the body it can’t

be reduced to emotion. It is not subjective in the sense of belonging to a subject to which the body belongs. Which is not to say that there is nothing subjective about it. Spinoza says that every transition is accompanied by a feeling of the change in capacity. The affect and the feeling of the transition are not two different things. They’re two sides of the same coin, just like affecting and being affected. This is one sense in which affect is about intensity—every affect is a doubling. The experience of a change, an affecting / being affected, is redoubled by an experience of the experience. The two together give each event a unique subjective form. It gives the body’s movements a kind of intensive depth that stays with it across all its transitions, accumulating—in memory, in habit, in reflex, in desire, in tendency. Emotion is the way the intensive depth of that ongoing experience registers personally at a given moment. It is only on the level of emotion that this subjective form of the affective event comes to be experienced as belonging to a subject separate from the event. Containment. An emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic

fixing of the quality of an experience that is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits,

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into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized. It is crucial to theorize the difference between affect and emotion. The Autonomy of Affect. Affect is autonomous to the degree to which it

escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is. Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage are the capture and closure of affect. Emotion is the intensest (most contracted) expression of that capture—and of the fact that something has always and again escaped. Something remains unactualized, inseparable from but unassimilable to any particular emotional expression. That is why all emotion is more or less disorienting, and why it is classically described as being outside oneself, at the very point at which one is most intimately and unshareably in contact with oneself and one’s vitality. If there were no escape, no excess or remainder, the universe would be without potential, pure entropy, death. Structures of all kinds, emotional and otherwise, live in and through that which escapes them. Their autonomy is the autonomy of affect. The autonomy of affect is its participation in the virtual: potential remaindered by the past, left in reserve for the future. Its autonomy is its openness. Its openness is to the escape hatch of its own futurity. Vitality Affect. The escape of affect cannot but be perceived, alongside

the perceptions that are its capture. This side-perception may be punctual, localized in an event (such as the sudden realization that happiness and sadness are something besides what they are). When it is punctual, it is usually described in negative terms, typically as a form of shock (the sudden interruption of functions of actual connection). But it is also continuous, like a background perception that accompanies every event, however quotidian. When the continuity of affective escape is put into words, it tends to take on positive connotations. For it is nothing less than the perception of one’s own vitality, one’s sense of aliveness, of changeability (often signified as “freedom”). One’s “sense of aliveness” is a continuous, nonconscious self-perception (unconscious selfreflection or lived self-referentiality). It is the perception of this selfperception, its naming and making conscious, that allows affect to be effectively analyzed.

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Remainder (Excess). You can think of affect in the broadest sense as what remains of life potential after each or every thing a body says or does—as a perpetual bodily remainder. Looked at from a different angle, this perpetual remainder is an excess. It’s like a reserve of potential or newness or creativity that is experienced alongside every actual production of meaning in language or in any performance of a useful function—vaguely but directly experienced, as something more, a more to come, a life overspilling as it gathers itself up to move on. Shock (Cut/Flow). Affect is about shock, but it doesn’t have to be a drama. It’s really more about microshocks, the kind that populate every moment of our lives. For example, a change in focus or a rustle at the periphery of vision that draws the gaze toward it. In every shift of attention there is an interruption, a momentary cut in the mode of onward deployment of life. The cut can pass unnoticed, striking imperceptibly, like a prime, with only its effects entering conscious awareness as they unroll. This is the onset of the activation that marks a coming transition. This onset of experience is by nature imperceptible. Microperception. This is one way of understanding “microperception,” a concept of great importance to Deleuze and Guattari. Microperception is not smaller perception, it’s a perception of a qualitatively different kind. It’s something that is felt without registering consciously. It registers only in its effects. There is always a commotion under way, a “something doing” as James would say. There is always a somethingdoing cutting in, interrupting whatever continuities are in progress. For things to continue, they have to recontinue. They have to rejig around the interruption, toward a new transition. At the instant of rejigging, the body braces for what will come. It in-braces, in the sense that it returns to its potential for more of life to come, and that potential is immanent to its own arising. Worlding. You can sometimes feel the in-bracing itself, most noticeably in startles or frights. Before you can even consciously recognize what you’re afraid of, or even feel that it is yourself that is the subject of the feeling, you are catapulted into a feeling of the frightfulness of the situation. It only dawns on you in the next instant that you’d better figure out

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what might have done the catapulting, and what you should do about it. It is only then that you own the feeling as your own, and recognize it as a content of your life, an episode in your personal history. But in the instant of the affective hit, there is no content yet. All there is is the affective quality, coinciding with the feeling of the interruption, and of the coming transition. That affective quality is all there is to the world in that instant. It takes over life, fills the world, for an immeasurable instant of shock. Microperception is this purely affective rebeginning of the world. Bare Activity. The world in which we live is literally made of these reinau-

gural microperceptions, cutting in, cueing emergence, priming capacities. Every body is at every instant in thrall to any number of them. A body is a complex of in-bracings playing out complexly and in serial fashion. The tendencies and capacities activated do not necessarily bear fruit. Some will be summoned to the verge of unfolding, only to be left behind, unactualized. But even these will have left their trace. In that moment of interruptive commotion, there’s a productive indecision. There’s a constructive suspense that I call bare activity. Potentials resonate and interfere, and this modulates what actually eventuates. The concept of affect is tied to the idea of modulation occurring at a constitutive level where many somethings are doing, most of them unfelt. Or again, felt only in effect. No less real for passing unfelt. Affective Politics. Politics, approached affectively, is an art of emitting the

interruptive signs, triggering the cues, that attune bodies while activating their capacities differentially. Affective politics is inductive. Bodies can be inducted into, or attuned to, certain regions of tendency, futurity, and potential. They can be induced into inhabiting the same affective environment, even if there is no assurance they will act alike in that environment. A good example is an alarm, a sign of threat or danger. Even if you conclude in the next instant that it’s a false alarm, you will have come to that conclusion in an environment that is still effectively one of threat. Others who have heard the alarm may well respond differently, but they will be responding differently together, as inhabitants of the same affective environment. Everyone registering the alarm will have been attuned to the same threat event, in one way or another. It is the sum total of the

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different ways of being interpellated by the same event that will define what it will have been politically. The event can’t be fully predetermined. It will be as it happens. For there to be uniformity of response, other factors must have been active to prechannel tendencies. Politics of conformity pivoting on the signaling of threat, like the politics that held sway during the Bush administration, must work on many levels and at many rhythms of bodily priming to ensure a relative success. And again, there will be minor lines that won’t be emphasized or come out into relief or be fully enacted but that everyone will have felt in that unfeeling way of negatively prehending. Those are left as a reservoir of political potential. It is a potential that is immediately collective. It’s not a mere possibility. It’s an active part of the constitution of that situation, just one that hasn’t been fully developed, that hasn’t been fully capacitated for unfolding. This means that there are potential alter-politics at the collectively inbraced heart of every situation, even the most successfully conformist in its mode of attunement. You can return to that reservoir of real but unexpressed potential, and recue it. This would be a politics of microperception: a micropolitics. The Obama campaign’s recueing of fear toward hope might be seen as targeting that micropolitical level, interestingly, through macromedia means. Affective Attunement. Say there are a number of bodies indexed to the

same cut, primed to the same cue, shocked in concert. What happens is a collective event. It’s distributed across those bodies. Since each body will carry a different set of tendencies and capacities, there is no guarantee that they will act in unison even if they are cued in concert. However different their eventual actions, all will have unfolded from the same suspense. They will have been attuned—differentially—to the same interruptive commotion. “Affective attunement”—a concept from Daniel Stern—is a crucial piece of the affective puzzle. It is a way of approaching affective politics that is much more supple than notions more present in the literature of what’s being called the “affective turn,” like imitation or contagion, because it finds difference in unison, and concertation in difference. Because of that, it can better reflect the complexity of collective situations, as well as the variability that can eventuate from what might be considered the “same” affect. There is no

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sameness of affect. There is affective difference in the same event—a collective individuation. Pure Experience. Calling affect, or that felt moment of bodily moving on, intersubjective is misleading, if “intersubjective” is taken to mean that we start from a world in which there are already subjects that are preconstituted, or a pregiven structure of subject positions ready for subjects to come occupy. What is in question is precisely the emergence of the subject, its primary constitution, or its reemergence and reconstitution. The subject of an experience emerges from a field of conditions that are not that subject yet, where it is just coming into itself. Those conditions are not yet necessarily even subjective in any normal sense. Before the subject, there’s an in-mixing, a field of budding relation too crowded and heterogeneous to call intersubjective. It’s not at a level where things have settled into categories like subject and object. It’s the level of what William James called pure experience. When I say that it all comes back to the body, I don’t mean the body as a thing apart from the self or subject. I mean that the body is that region of in-mixing from which subjectivity emerges. It is the coming together of the world, for experience, in a here-and-now prior to any possibility of assigning categories like subject and object. That affective region we were talking about is not “in between” in the intersubjective sense. And it’s not intentional in the sense of already carrying a subject-object polarity. It’s a brewing, the world stirring. It’s a coming event, through which such categories will return. Belonging. In affect, we are never alone. That’s because affects in Spi-

noza’s definition are basically ways of connecting, to others and to other situations, of affecting and being affected. They are our angle of participation in processes larger than ourselves. With intensified affect comes a stronger sense of embeddedness in a larger field of life—a heightened sense of belonging, with other people and to other places. Aesthetic Politics. Advocating affective politics is advocating aesthetic

politics. I think about the connection between affective politics and aesthetic politics in terms of Whitehead’s idea of “contrast.” Contrasts are tendential unfoldings that are held together in the same situation. They

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are alternate headings that come together in the instant, even though their actual unfoldings are mutually exclusive. Their mutual exclusiveness is a kind of creative tension: an intensity. The contrasts between headings interfere and resonate, and this commotion modulates what may come. Whitehead defines the aesthetic in terms of this intensity of contrasts. The aesthetic act extends the creative tension of contrast that characterizes the emergence of every action. It prolongs the suspension of the cut, the commotion of interference and resonance, gives it duration, so that it passes the threshold of perceptibility and is consciously felt as potential. This prevents the heading from being an automatic feedforward to the end, like a reflex response to a stimulus. Resolution is suspended. The termini in play remain virtual ends. Their mutual exclusivity is still informing the situation, contributing to what it might be, but the tension doesn’t have to resolve itself to be consciously felt and thought. Aesthetic politics is irresolute. It is commotional. It’s the thinking-feeling of the virtual incompletion of definitive action. Affective Alter-Politics. This might not sound political, at least in the way we usually understand the political. But it is, because the virtuality is of an event to come, and as we have seen, the event always has the potential to affectively attune a multiplicity of bodies to its happening, differentially. Aesthetic politics brings the collectivity of shared events to the fore, as differential: a multiple, bodily potential for what might come. Difference is built into this account. Affective politics, understood as aesthetic politics, is dissensual, in the sense that it holds contrasting alternatives together without immediately demanding that one alternative eventuate and the others evaporate. It makes thought-felt different capacities for existence, different life potentials, different forms of life, without immediately imposing either a choice—or a compromise— between them. Ecology of Practices. The political question, then, is not how to find

a resolution. It’s not how to impose a solution. It’s how to keep the intensity in what comes next. The only way is through actual differentiation. Different lines of unfolding bring the contrast into actuality, between them. The political question is then what Isabelle Stengers

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calls an “ecology of practices.” How do you tend this proliferation of differentiation? How can the lines not clash and destroy each other? How do they live together? The “solution” is not to resolve the tension through a choice, or to find a general compromise, but to modulate the tension into a complex symbiosis. A cross-fertilization of capacitations that live out, to the fullest, the intensity of the event of their coming together.

notes

1. The Inmost End 1. Art: the then US Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, underscored the centrality of the creative factor in an October 2001 speech where he credited the economy’s ability to bounce back from the “shock” of 9/11 to a “different kind of efficiency” that is none other than the superflexible “creativity of our system” (Greenspan 2001b). Greenspan liberally employed the affective vocabulary of “shock” to the system in the immediate post-9/11 period (see, for example, Greenspan 2001a). Of course, 9/11 was not the first or last shock to affect the market. 2. William Connolly makes this same point: “The state does not manage markets much directly, except through monetary policy, but it takes a very active role in creating, maintaining, and protecting the preconditions of market selfregulation. . . . So neoliberalism solicits an active state to promote, protect, and expand market processes” (Connolly 2013, 21). According to Foucault, the original neoliberal project was for “a government from which nothing escapes . . . but which nevertheless respects the specificity of the economy” (Foucault 2008, 296). The dream was that this balancing act would be ensured by a well-functioning civil society. The breakdown of that dream (Hardt 1995) led to a transition to a new form of governmentality, which Foucault glimpses in an isolated passage and to which he gives the name “environmentality” (Foucault 2008, 259–260). Environmental mechanisms are precisely aimed at the “preconditions” of economic activity that Connolly refers. In Foucault’s words, they modulate the “rules of the game” from within rather than directly target the actions of the players from above. They operate on a supposedly leveled playing field, neither from on high in a sovereign manner, nor structurally coupled with a separate sphere operating according to its own noneconomic juridical principles. In the present essay, environmentality is taken as a starting point. On environmentality, see Massumi (2009a). Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that this fundamentally changes the nature of the State, henceforth more essentially a “model of realization” for how capitalism will implant itself in order to traverse the national territory than a sovereign ordering of the national territory’s interiority (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 454–459). 3. On the dissociation of the social and the economic, see Foucault (2008, 200–201). It is the concept of “human capital” (touched on later) that existentializes

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this dissociation and simultaneously overcomes it by collapsing the social into the economic. On human capital, see Foucault (2008, 224–265). 4. Foucault (2008, 272–276) insists on the incommensurability of the subject of law (or right) and liberalism’s homo oeconomicus, the subject of economics (subject of interest). 5. On contagion and “market psychology,” see Marazzi (2008). 6. “Oscillatoire” is rendered as “fluctuating” in the English translation. 7. For a more detailed development of the concept of processual polarities entering into proximity in a “zone of indistinction” and the corresponding “logic of mutual inclusion,” see Massumi (2014). 8. In what follows, the prefix “infra’” will be used in preference to “intra.” “Intra” connotes interiority, and thus boundedness. “Infra,” on the other hand, connotes a threshold on an unbounded continuum, below which there is a qualitative phase-shift in the nature of the phenomena on the continuum. 9. Simon Critchley, in Infinitely Demanding, uses the term “dividual” in a different sense (2007, 89). For Critchley, it denotes a splitting of the subject, in dialogue with the psychoanalytic concept as interpreted by Lacan. 10. On new approaches to modeling the economy that must be categorized as preemptive (although they do not claim that title), see “A Doing Done through Me,” n. 3, this volume. 11. AmalgaMood.com; accessed March 6, 2013. 12. On the distinction between system and process, see Massumi (2009a). 13. On becoming autonomous of system-level affective self-organizing in its political dimensions, see Massumi (2005).

2. A Doing Done through Me 1. For US presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s infamous pronouncement, see Rucker (2011). The Supreme Court’s Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission decision of 2010 extended the individual right of free speech to corporations and used the assertion of a homology between individual personhood and corporate personhood to strike down campaign contributions limits as a violation of the personal right to free speech guaranteed in the US Constitution. 2. Of course, not all commentators in the literature of nonconscious decision making give up entirely on rational choice, but there is a consensus that it is in crisis. Some commentators emphasize the need to manage the biases of gut choice (such as the difficulty mentioned below of responding affectively to probabilities) by training of our rational-choice skills. Others emphasize the need to create propitious conditions for intuition to work on its own to best advantage. Here is a list of some of the best-known titles in the popular literature on the prowess and problems of nonconscious decision making: Sources of Power (Klein); Strangers to Ourselves (Wilson); Blink (Gladwell); Nudge (Thaler and Sunstein); Predictably Irrational (Ariely); How We Decide (Lehrer); The Power of Pull (Hagel, Brown, and Davison); and Thinking

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Fast and Slow (Kahneman). All of these titles with the exception of Wilson highlight economic reasoning. For the contrarian position, emphasizing the limitations of intuition, see The Invisible Gorilla (Chabris and Simons). For an analytical philosophy discussion of nonconscious thought and emotion, see Gut Reactions (Prinz). 3. There are post-2007/8 crash currents of thought that argue that the lesson to be learned from that event is that the although economy is a far-from-equilibrium system, the science and mathematics of complexity can lead to better macroeconomic forecasting than the still dominant rational choice-based modeling, just as it has led to better weather forecasting. Although this cannot expunge uncertainty (as all who have unwisely made a decision they lived to regret about what to wear the next day based on the weather report can attest), the assertion is that this could restore trust in the system by assisting government regulators and largescale financial players in avoiding the exceptional economic tipping-point event. According to this logic, the fundamental cause of economic failures like the 2007/8 crash is “a failure of some very sophisticated financial institutions to think like physicists” (Weatherall 2013, 223). See also Buchanan (2013). These analyses, which fight to save neoliberalism from itself, actually effect a significant displacement: the founding category shifts from the “subject” of interest to the laws of complex “nature.” This very vacillation can be seen as a constitutive tension of the “environmentality” of the power regime associated with neoliberalism (Massumi 2009a). For a radical critique of the notion of probability and its associated category of possibility, as they play out in traditional economic modeling, see Ayache (2010). Ayache calls into question the very concept of prediction, arguing that there is an essential contingency to the financial markets and, given its rampant financialization (Marazzi 2008, 101–145), of the neoliberal economy as a whole. A new discourse concerning the predictability of extreme events occurring in a far-from-equilibrium system has recently made a major splash (Cavalcante et al. 2013). A closer look suggests that what is being promised is actually less prediction than preemption. The authors studied compound oscillatory systems, composed of two coupled oscillatory subsystems. They observed that the frequency of extreme crisis events where the oscillation of the system suddenly and dramatically departs from its pattern—famously dubbed “black swans” by Nassim Taleb (2010)—does not in fact follow the power law upon which probabilistic analyses of complex chaotic systems are based. The power law states that extreme events will be exponentially less frequent than smaller, less deviant events. Cavalcante et al. observe that, while still rare, extreme events are in fact more frequent than the power law distribution would allow. They call these overeager black swans “dragon kings.” Their theorization is based on studies of what might be called a simple complex physical system: two chaotic electronic circuits, each an oscillatory system in its own right, coupled to form an integrated oscillatory system exhibiting chaotic behavior of its own. They found that extreme events occur when the two oscillatory subsystems are most closely synchronized. What precipitates them is noise (thermal noise in the case of electronic circuits), creating a “slight parameter mismatch” throwing the oscillations

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out of their accustomed orbit. The system then goes on an “excursion”: it dramatically departs from its phase space, exhibiting behaviors unlike any seen in the usual pattern of chaotic oscillation. They found that if they monitored the system in real time, they could identify “hot spots”: incipient dragon kings about to go on a fiery excursion. Further, they found that if they added counterperturbations to the perturbation of the noise, the dragon king could be grounded. The event’s wings are clipped, and it fails to take off. This is not so much prediction ahead of time as it is detection in real time. The response is not preventive but preemptive: it hinges on producing the basic problem (systemic perturbation) but under conditions of incipience in which this adding more to the problem counteracts it: “ We basically kill the dragon king in the egg. The countermechanism kills it when it is burgeoning” (Grossman, 2013). (On the difference between prediction/prevention and detection of incipience/preemption and on the productive or counterproductive nature of preemption, see Massumi 2007.) Cavalcante et al. have applied the model derived from these studies to financial markets and the economy as a whole. Although there is some skepticism among experts as to whether conclusions based on such a simple complex system can be extrapolated to a system as infinitely complex as the economy, it is easy to see the analogy. The synchronization of oscillatory subsystems corresponds to a financial panic or period of “irrational exuberance.” The noise triggering an anomalous excursion of the system away from its usual chaotic parameters into an extreme event or major crisis corresponds to the interference/resonance between affectivity and rational choice. The excursion corresponds to an economic crisis—or a self-catalyzing political event challenging the established order, such as those discussed later in this book. Despite the claims of predictive power that this preemptive approach to economic modeling makes for itself, it is not at all clear that it is in contradiction to Ayache’s point of view that “absolute contingency” is fundamentally at work in the economy. What is “noise” if not an irruption of contingency? In any case, Ayache and Cavalcante et al. concur on the constitutive weakness of probability-based models, and that claims (or hopes) for their predictive value are overwrought. It is significant that Cavalcante et al.’s preemptive model that calls probability into question is rigorously based on “thinking like a physicist.” 4. The conformation of feelings is close to what Kahneman calls the “anchoring” of perceptual judgments (Kahneman 2011, 119–128). 5. Assuming that there is such a thing as a sense-impression that doesn’t have an element of fabulation, or hallucination, in its makeup. Given the necessary ingredience of nonsensuous elements in the constitution of experience, it is doubtful that such a thing exists. See Massumi (2013, 17–19, 33). 6. On affective facts in relation to the politics of preemption, see Massumi (2010). 7. For an analysis of network culture from a point of view compatible with this account, see Mackenzie (2010), in particular 145–168. 8. In the English translation, “machine/flow” is translated as “machine/stream,” losing the pointedly Deleuzo- Guattarian reference to Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari 1983).

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9. In The Birth of Biopolitics Foucault in fact only mentions the word “biopolitics” twice, once in the beginning, to say that he intends to talk about it, and once toward the end, to admit that he didn’t (Foucault 2008, 22, 185). This leaves the distinct impression that what he felt he needed to do could not easily sit within those categories. See Massumi (2009a) for an argument that the environmental regime of “ontopower” is irreducible to biopower, and must even be analyzed as beyond “governmentality” as it is presented in The Birth of Biopolitics (with the exception of the “environmental” aside on 259–260). 10. On the neoliberal interpretation of marriage and family as an investment in reproductive human capital, see Foucault (2008, 243–246). 11. The English translation has “business system” where Deleuze writes “régime d’entreprise.” “Business” is substituted for “enterprise” throughout the translated essay. 12. Simondon sums up in one sentence many of the characteristics of affect as presented here: its fusional unity enveloping a plurality of factors including movement, judgment, and action, its willful autonomy, its autoevaluation or its creation of life-value over and above the components that condition its occurrence: “Every affectivo-emotive movement is at the same time preformed judgment and action: it is in reality bipolar in its unity: its reality is that of a relation that possesses its own self-positing value vis-à-vis its terms” (Simondon 2005, 248–249). 13. This description of structures of rationality is meant to resonate with the earlier discussion of the place of disciplinary institutions in the “control society” or the “enterprise regime of power.” Structures of rationality are closely allied, both historically and in constitutive tendency, to disciplinary enclosures. They are a crucial ingredient to disciplinary “dispositifs” in all their forms. This is not to say that all structures of rationality are disciplinary in Foucault’s sense (this is clearly not the case for science). It is just to say that structures of rationality have been faced with the same challenges from their immersion in the modulatory open field of the “environmental regime” of power as the disciplinary institutions with which they are so often in symbiosis.

3. Beyond Self-Interest 1. In the world of derivatives, “price is synonymous with absolute contingency. No wonder it is the natural instrument of absolute speculation” (Ayache 2010, 186). 2. Quoted in part by Foucault (2008, 287n14; discussion on 284–285). 3. Quoted in part by Foucault (2008, 287–288n15). 4. “All ideas are borrowed from impressions, and . . . these two kinds of perceptions differ only in the degrees of force and vivacity, with which they strike upon the soul” (Hume 1984, 2.1.11, 369). The definition of the idea as a kind of perception comes in the very first sentence of the Treatise: “All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call impressions and ideas” (Hume 1984, 1.1.1., 49).

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5. Deleuze develops a nonsubjectivist, nonpersonalist account of Hume’s theory of knowledge consonant with this reading (Deleuze 1991, 22–36). According to Deleuze’s reading, Hume’s “impressions” do not strike in the “mind.” Rather, their strike gives rise to the mind. The mind is “activated,” and the regularities of relation and association that structure it “qualify” that activation. The subject “becomes” as a result: “When Hume speaks of an act of the mind—a disposition [or tendency]—he does not mean that the mind is active but that is activated and that it has become subject” (Deleuze 1991, 26). This makes the “mind” not a thing or substance but a mode of activity, or of actuation. The “associations” at the basis of our understanding, of causality for example, are therefore not operations conducted by the mind but qualities of its becoming. They operate nonsubjectively, in the genesis of what comes to regard itself as a subject. 6. The fusion of the impression and the idea—the immediate “reflection” coming flush with the impression, and itself constituting an impression (an “impression of reflection;” 1.1.6, 63)—gives rise to a “facility” for a particular “transition” to be made, owing to this “double impulse” coming all at once (2.1.5, 338). Hume uses “impulse” as a synonym for “tendency” to transition (see 1.3.11, 180). 7. Whitehead’s theory of error in Symbolism is consonant with Hume’s (Whitehead 1985, 6–7, 19, 21). Whitehead’s analysis of perception in this book revolves around a reading of Hume, and generates concepts of immediate, affect-based, noncognitive understanding similar to the concept of “thinking-feeling” in the present account. On false perceptual judgments, see also Whitehead (1964, 153–155). 8. For an extended discussion of sympathy, transindividuality and politics, see Massumi (2014). On transindividuality, see also Combes (2013, 25–50). On sympathy, see Lapoujade (2010, 53–76). 9. An individual’s power of volition, as expressing the preference for pleasure or pain “founded in the nature of things,” is “ultimately derived from that Supreme Will, which bestowed on each being its peculiar nature, and arranged the several classes and orders of existence” (Hume 1912, Appendix 1). 10. On “unnatural participations,” see Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 240, 258, 260). These participations are “unnatural” in the sense that they go against the grain of what might be normatively considered natural, not in the sense that they lie outside the realm of nature. Nature is replete with them (see Massumi 2014, Supp. 1). 11. For a study of contemporary virality working from the thought of Gabriel Tarde, see Sampson (2012). 12. Simondon also emphatically resists the reduction of affectivity to its hedonic dimension: “One can no more equate affectivity with pleasure and pain than equate a sensation with lines and angles.” “Affection,” he continues with Spinoza unmistakably in mind, orders itself according to a bipolarity that is not directly mappable onto the pain/pleasure dichotomy: “joy and sadness” (Simondon 2005, 257). Nietzsche develops a similar point of view in the Late Notebooks (2003); see in particular 40 [42] p. 46; 11 [71–72] pp. 210–211, and 11 [83] pp. 214–215.

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13. On capitalist power as centrally involving the imposition of “infernal alternatives,” see Pignarre and Stengers (2011, 23–30). 14. On the other as possible world, see Deleuze (1990, 308–309). 15. On the relation between the preindividual and the transindividual, see Simondon (2005, 247–255) and Combes (2013, 35). On potential and possibility, see Massumi (2002, 9). 16. For a critique of this disempowering effect of Berardi’s analysis of contemporary capitalist culture and an alternative view of depression, see Manning (2013b). 17. New York’s mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11: “Show your confidence. Show you’re not afraid. Go to restaurants. Go shopping” (Murdock 2001). President Bush took up the refrain. In a year-end news conference, he segued seamlessly from a pep talk on the “war on terror” to a pep talk on the importance of maintaining economic growth as part of the national effort: “I encourage you all to go shopping more” (Bush 2006). 18. On the difference between spontaneity on the one hand and chance and contingency on the other, see Massumi (2014, 48–49, 110n59). 19. “Positive externalities” are beneficial multiplier effects that “result from phenomena of social interdependence” (Rosa and Aftalion 1977, 268; quoted in Foucault 2008, 264n27). They easily amplify beyond reason or measure. This is because they “fall outside the realm of property relations and are thus resistant to market logic” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 155). They are experienced in directly qualitative terms, as nonprivatizable enhancements of the “quality of life,” for example the “conviviality” of an urban environment. They make themselves most intensely felt, as Hardt and Negri observe, precisely where economists would say that people fail to act “rationally,” but the market nevertheless tries to recuperate their actions and subsume them to its logic. Prices skyrocket, for example. In the inner-city real estate market, following reurbanization trends fueled by relatively well-heeled consumers in search of “quality of life.” “Market distortions” result from the market’s attempt to quantify the unquantifiable. These distortions can lead to “market failure” (155). Positive externalities can tip into being negative for the market when they are privatized and marketized. This is one of the ways capitalism approaches its own limit, immanent to its operation. Hardt and Negri call the qualitative immanent limit that expresses itself in market terms as the playing out of positive externalities the “common.” In the aesthetic event vocabulary of this essay, the immanent qualitatively lived limit of capitalism is a “joy.” Positive externalities are not common, if that is taken to mean generally held, or even equally accessible as a resource. Joy is event-based, and never common: always singular-multiple. Neither are positive externalities necessarily “convivial”—but are always transindividual. They are not “social” in any usual sense, being inhumanly intuitive-sympathetic. They are not irrational calculations, but self-deciding autonomies of indefinitewhole-field self-relation approaching a threshold. 20. The attribution of an accelerationist position to Deleuze and Guattari ignores the entire analysis of the capitalist “axiomatic” that occupies much of the

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last chapter of Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). The capitalist axiomatic is a complexly open systematization of the “decodings” and “deterritorializations” that capitalism produces as a far-from-equilibrium, oscillatory process fostering emergence. The axiomatic recaptures these processual emergences for the capitalist system. It captures them for the production of quantitative surplus value, toward ever-accelerating turnover—production for production’s sake, in symbiosis with consumption for consumption’s sake. The capitalist system is not a structure, but a complex, ever-changing set of abstract procedures for “conjugating” the decoded and deterritorialized flows that ply its relational field. It is an “abstract machine” that operates as the ultimate “apparatus of capture”—one capable of capturing singular emergences. Its operations of capture “displace the limit” of capitalism. Every time capitalism approaches its limit and is on the point of crashing once and for all, it finds a new way to capture the inventive, affective-volitional energies (“desires”) that have begun to escape from it, and to use them to fuel its own passage across a threshold of consistency to a new phase of its own process, systematized in a new configuration of its axiomatic. This self-recuperative mechanism is one of the constitutive tendencies of capitalism. A tendency that affirms affective-volitional relational movement for itself—not for production or consumption’s sake—is by nature anticapitalist. Its self-affirmation of qualitative becoming launches a movement of escape, tendentially extending beyond the limit—which is ultimately that of interest. On the capitalist axiomatic and the singular-multiplicity immanent to the capitalist relational field, see also Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 460–473). For some of the debates around accelerationism, see Moreno (2013). Deleuze and Guattari conduct an ongoing critique of the concept of interest throughout ch. 4 of Anti-Oedipus. 21. For an account of the modest experimentations in the micropolitical art of the event practiced since the mid-2000s through the activities of the SenseLab in Montreal, see Manning and Massumi, “For Thought in the Act” (2014, 83–134).

Supplement 1. The Affective Tasks of Reason 1. On habit as the principle of the association of ideas at the basis of causal understanding, see Hume (1984, 1.3.6, 154–55). 2. On “concern” as a character of the event, see Whitehead (1968, 167).

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index

2007/8 economic crash, 66, 115n3 9/11 attacks, 67, 80, 113n1, 119n17 abduction, 95, 99; event and, 89, 93; invention and, 79, 85, 92, 99; perceptual judgment and, 46, 50–53, 61, 69, 70, 75–76, 100; thinking-feeling and, 47, 85 abstract machine, 37, 120n20 accelerationism, 91–92, 119n20 action. See activity activism, 88–89; event and, 95 activity, 2, 20–22, 33, 46, 48, 50, 61–62, 88–89, 100; affect and, 117n12; body and, 51; event, 82, 93; incipient, 14, 44, 69, 73; life-, 38; mind as, 118n5; priming and, 29–32; rationality and, 43, 63, 97; relation and, 58; sign and, 75. See also activism; bare activity; interaction actual: affect and, 106; contrast and, 110–111; potential and, 104–105; self and, 20 aesthetic: event, 119n19; intensity and, 70; life and, 93; politics, 71, 110–111. See also art affect, 1, 4, 10–19, 24, 61, 73, 103–112, 117n12, 118n12; choice and, 22, 116n3; decision and, 20, 68, 98; economy and, 22–23, 78; event and, 58, 74–75, 84–90, 94; individual and, 7, 21–22, 30, 33; perception and, 118n7; politics and, 54, 64, 70, 76, 79–80, 83; preemption and, 116n6; probability and, 114n2; rationality and, 2, 5–6, 8–9, 14, 25–28, 32–34, 36, 48, 53, 59–60, 63, 65, 71, 97–101; selforganization and, 114n13; self-relation and, 21; volition/will and, 46–48, 92, 120n20. See also emotion; intensity; nonconsciousness; sympathy; vitality affect alternatives, 44–47; infernal, 72, 79 anarchism, 87–88; event and, 90 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari), 116n8, 120n19

art, 70; affect and, 2, 113n1; micropolitics and, 120n21; politics and, 43, 93–95. See also aesthetic attunement, 52, 108–109; affective, 109–111; difference and, 50; transindividual and, 58 Ayache, Elie, 115–116n3 bare activity, 20–21, 32–33, 46–47, 70, 80–83, 88, 101, 108; capitalism and, 92; dividual and, 73; event and, 84; experience and, 43; perceptual judgment and, 44, 51; passion and, 64; rationality and, 100; sympathy and, 62, 85; transindividual and, 74. See also activity becoming, 20, 42, 79, 83, 98; human capital and, 38; dividual and, 35; event and, 69, 91; immanence and, 43; joy and, 71; mind and, 118n5; ontopower and, 15, 93; passion and, 63, 76; rationality and, 100–101; system and, 37 behavior, 1, 27, 45; condition and, 28–29; individual, 32; social, 76 belonging, 86, 110; sympathy and, 66 Birth of Biopolitics, The (Foucault), 37, 117n3 body, 45, 103–111; habits and, 51; intensity and, 68 bodying, 103–104 Bouazizi, Mohamed, 90 Bush, George W., 109, 119n17 calculation, 51–52, 57, 60; choice and, 37; economic, 4; irrationality and, 119n19; perceptual judgment and, 44–45; rational, 5–6, 8, 10, 17, 20, 22–23, 47, 77–78, 82–84, 92; subject of interest and, 36 capitalism, 5–7, 21, 57, 66–67, 79, 88, 94, 113n2, 119n16, 119n19, 119–120n20; anti-, 91–92; counterpower and, 42–43; enterprise and, 40; power and, 93, 119n13;

128

index

capitalism (continued) process and, 16, 23, 49; satisfaction and, 72; surplus value and, 76–78. See also economy; human capital; neoliberalism causality: mind and, 118n5; rationality and, 98–101 Cavalcante, Hugo, 115–116n3 chaos: pattern and, 116n3; process and, 14; quasi-, 3–4, 8–9, 37, 39; theory, 21 choice, 11–12, 19–22, 26–27, 30, 45, 111–112; freedom and, 1, 33, 45, 54; gut feeling and, 41, 77, 114n1, 114n2; heroism and, 80–81; power of, 4, 15, 31–32; rational, 1, 5–6, 9, 13, 24, 32–35, 41, 47–50, 58, 64–65, 91, 114n2, 115–116n3; passion and, 63–64. See also decision; deliberation-withoutattention; priming choice blindness, 19, 24–26, 28–29, 40, 65; priming and, 31, 41. See also nonconsciousness cogitation, 21, 36; affect and, 79; conscious, 41; event and, 100; passion and, 63; perception and, 34; possibility and, 75; rationality and, 100; readiness potential and, 80 cognition, 43, 100; affect and, 106; conscious, 33; decision and, 17, 20; intuition and, 51–52; judgment and, 88; rationality and, 36; science and, 27. See also consciousness co-motion/commotion, 8, 107–109; affect and, 2, 12–13, 87; contrast and, 111; economy and, 14; infra-individual and, 15; intensity and, 20; micro politics and, 95; tendency and, 46 complexity, 21–22, 29, 34–35, 46, 48–49, 52; calculation and, 57; capitalism and, 120n20; choice and, 41; conditions and, 24; contrast and, 73; dividual and, 36; effect and, 50; event and, 47, 53–54, 62; field and, 85; infra-individual, 8, 40; political art and, 94; rationality and, 98; science and, 115n3; subject of interest and, 36–37; tendency and, 99; trust and, 16–17 compossibility, 69, 93 concern: event and, 101, 120n2 condition, 21, 27–29, 48, 66; abduction and, 99; affect and, 117n12; choice and, 34; decision and, 37; dividual and, 32; event and, 45, 49, 64–65, 79, 82, 85–88, 93–94; field of, 110; individual and, 33; perceptual

judgment and, 44; priming and, 31–32; relation and, 84, 97; singularity and, 90; situational, 25–26, 35, 40; uncertainty and, 24 Connolly, William, 113n2 consciousness, 21, 36, 105; activity and, 100; calculations and, 84; choice and, 34; cogitation and, 41, 94; cutting and, 107; experience and, 33; intuition and, 45; microperception and, 107; perception and, 106; potential and, 111; priming and, 32, 43. See also cogitation; cognition; nonconsciousness; thinking-feeling contagion, 5–6, 66–67, 69, 109, 114n5; event and, 86, 89, 91, 94; intensity and, 84; passion and, 62; tendency and, 72 content, 74, 108; the other and, 74; singularmultiple, 93; subjective, 75, 105 contiguity, 65–68; human and, 83; interest and, 79; militant and, 87; the other and, 76; politics and, 79; relational field and, 86; sympathy and, 74 contrast, 70, 110–111; complexity and, 73; mutual exclusion and, 69, 93; mutual inclusion and, 88; satisfaction and, 72; tendency and, 87 control, 66; field and, 48; modulation and, 40; society, 37–39, 42, 117n13 co-operation, 51; choice and, 37; rationality and, 99–101 corporation: choice and, 22; personhood and, 91, 114n1 corrective: rationality as, 63, 99–101 creativity, 21; art and, 70; capitalism and, 92; choice and, 19, 22; consumption and, 72; contrast and, 111; destruction and, 28; economy and, 3, 16, 113n1; excess and, 107; fabulation and, 35, 54; memory and, 27; power and, 93; rationality and, 99–101; science and, 51; self-, 28; trust and, 16 Critchley, Simon: on dividual, 114n9 critique: perceptual judgment and, 97; self-, 97, 99; rationality and, 101 cueing, 97, 108–109; expectation and, 25; priming and, 29, 31, 41 cut, 47, 58, 107–109, 111; decision as, 37, 40, 46, 85; event and, 80, 85; flow and, 68–69; life and, 83; subject of interest and, 38

index decision, 9, 17, 19–24, 31, 41, 58, 64; autonomy and, 17, 32–42, 46–48, 68, 91, 92, 94, 98, 119n19; cutting and, 46, 85; event and, 37, 82–85, 87, 94; indecision, 108; individual, 3, 50; nonconscious, 80, 114–115n2; self-, 63, 87, 92, 119n19; undecidability, 11, 25, 85. See also choice; rationality Deleuze, Gilles, 117n11, 118n5; control society and, 37–39, 42 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 14, 19, 37, 107, 113n2; capitalism and, 119–120n20 deliberation-without-attention, 21–24, 28, 34, 40, 65; priming and, 31, 41. See also decision denizen: market and, 36; neoliberalism and, 22–23, 31–32, 42, 53, 57, 65; system and, 15. See also human capital desire, 31, 38, 46, 104–105; capitalism and, 67, 93, 120n20; infra-trans and, 92; rationality and, 34, 59; tendency and, 98 difference: action-path and, 69; affective politics and, 109; attunement and, 50; contrast and, 111–112; event and, 86; oscillatory process and, 7; potential and, 20, 37; sympathy and, 65–66 discipline: enterprise and, 39; power and, 7, 29, 37–40, 66; priming and, 41; rationality and, 100, 117n13; system and, 27, 29–30. See also control distrust, 7–8, 10–14, 17, 19, 36; expression of, 13; rationality and, 99. See also trust dividual, 8–10, 15, 19, 25, 32, 46, 64, 114n9; activism and, 88; affirmation and, 30; condition and, 32; economy and, 13; enterprise and, 40; event and, 81; happiness and, 78; heroism and, 80; the other and, 74; politics and, 32–36, 76; tendency and, 29; tension and, 73; and transindividual, 35–36, 40–42, 46, 58, 68, 71–72, 74, 83, 86–87, 92–93, 95. See also individual; infra-individual doubt, 1, 47; rationality and, 49 Durcrot, Oswald, 44 economy, 1–17, 20–22, 33–35, 53, 59, 65, 113n2, 114n4, 115–116n3, 119n17; alter-, 82, 93; counterpower and, 43; happiness and, 77–79; human capital and, 38, 113–114n3; neoliberalism and, 30, 58, 66, 80, 82; preemption and, 114n10; rationality and,

129

23–24, 48, 67, 115n2; relation and, 72, 78; shock and, 113n1; subject of interest and, 38. See also market; neoliberalism; system effect: affective-, 16; complexity and, 50; decision and, 40; microperception and, 107; modulation and, 108; system and, 41; taking-, 84; trust-, 16. See also multiplier effect Egypt: event and, 85, 89 Einstein, Albert, 13 embodiment, 105; and decision, 46–47; and thinking-feeling, 45 emergence, 85, 108, 110; capitalism and, 120n20; contrast and, 111; dividual and, 35; effects, 41; passion and, 62; priming and, 43; process and, 14; self-organization and, 16 emotion: affect and, 32–33, 61, 75–76, 105–107; intensity and, 80; joy and, 71; rationality and, 24, 48, 53, 101 endpoint, regressive: dividual and, 64; economy and, 10, 15–16, 32–33, 35; life and, 100–101; regressive and, 13–15, 19–20, 60, 82; subject of interest and, 81. See also infra-individual Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Hume), 59 enterprise, 21–22, 40, 117n11; control and, 38–39; power and, 117n13; -subject, 67, 91 environment: activity and, 30; affective, 108; closed, 28; discipline and, 39–40; economy and, 9; externality and, 119n19; life and, 34; market, 3–4, 37; neoliberal, 31; ontopower and, 117n9; open, 28; power and, 66, 117n13; uncertainty and, 23. See also field environmentality, 113n2, 115n3; and control, 38 event, 35–36, 43–48, 53–55, 68–69, 79–85, 115–116n3; aesthetic, 119n19; affect and, 57–58, 104–106, 109–112; concern and, 120n2; condition and, 49, 64–65; decision and, 20, 37; micropolitics and, 120n21; the other and, 74, 76; of perception, 70; priming and, 30; readiness potential and, 75–76, 100; relation and, 101; thinkingfeeling and, 62; vitality affect and, 73 experience, 25, 34, 43, 104, 107, 116n5; affect and, 71, 73; of change, 105; contrast and, 70; incipience and, 69; individual, 33, 41; intensity and, 67; joy and, 71; life and, 23, 70, 76; lived, 104; nonconscious, 61;

130

index

experience (continued) perception and, 26, 61–62; potential and, 74–75; rationality and, 99–100; satisfaction and, 78; situation and, 97; subject and, 110 expression: emotional, 106; event and, 54; joy and, 71; macroeconomic, 14; movements of, 32; nonhuman, 83; nonpersonal, 83; potential and, 8, 14, 101; tendency and, 11; of trust, 13 externalities, 12, 91; 119n19 fabulation, 25–26, 93, 116n5; capitalism and, 92; choice blindness and, 28; event and, 54; freedom and, 91; perception and, 27; power of, 35 failure, 4, 11–15, 19, 23; economic, 14–15, 115n3; macropolitics and, 89; multiplier effects and, 36; objective illusion and, 97. See also success fascism, 26–27, 94; contagion and, 66 fear, 1, 4–5, 19, 109; activity and, 77; of future, 6 feedback, 32, 98; economy and, 16; feedforward and, 11, 33, 42, 86, 99; positive, 3 feedforward, 111; feedback and, 11, 33, 42, 86, 99; objective illusion and, 97; tendency and, 98 feeling, 25, 41, 97, 107–109; contagion of, 64; human, 60; perceptual judgment and, 116n4; transition and, 104–105; system and, 12. See also affect; emotion; thinking-feeling field, 2–4, 41, 50, 55; of activity, 88; of complexity, 22; economic, 11, 14, 16; -effect, 49; environment and, 66; of immanence, 36–37; of life, 7, 20, 31, 42, 46, 58; neoliberalism and, 40, 77; potential and, 44–45, 53–54, 73; of power, 39; rationality and, 48–49. See also environment; relational field flow, 39, 57, 59; affect and, 107; complexity and, 49; cutting and, 68–69; economic, 38; life and, 83; machine and, 116n8; relational field and, 86 force, 27, 53, 58, 97; affect and, 47, 61, 83; enterprise and, 39; event and, 69; of existence, 72; intensity and, 68; passion and, 62; perception and, 117n4; on discipline, 117n13; on enterprise, 21; on individual,

9; on neoliberalism, 2–4, 27, 113n2; on subject of interest, 36–37 freedom, 106; activity and, 88; choice and, 1, 33, 45, 54; degrees of, 32; event and, 81–83, 91, 93; fabulation and, 91; impersonal, 35; invention of, 86, 89, 94; market and, 2; personal, 32; potential and, 104–105; of speech, 114n1 future, 4, 6, 9, 16, 104; body and, 108; capitalism and, 57, 76–77; economy and, 15; event, 25; human capital and, 38; possibility and, 75; potential and, 106; relation and, 101; satisfaction, 22; self-relation and, 95; tendency and, 99, 103. See also past; present Gates, Bill, 83 generality: and rationality, 97–101 gesture, 53–54; contiguity and, 83; invention and, 55 government: and laisser-faire, 3, 16, 21; and markets, 113n2; regulation, 115n3 Greenspan, Alan, 6, 113n1 Giulianni, Rudolph, 119n17 gut feeling, 21–23, 51, 78, 81; and choice, 41, 77, 114n1, 114n2. See also affect; decision; deliberation-without-attention; feeling; nonconscious habit, 60, 104–105, 120n1; body and, 51; perception and, 74; presupposition and, 97; rationality and, 99; taste and, 34 happiness, self-interest, and, 81 happiness economics, 77–79 hate, 74–75 hero, “ordinary,” 79–80, 81, 83, 87 hope, 1, 6, 19, 31, 109 human, 59–60; activity and, 79, 82; affect and, 60; contiguity and, 83; humanism, 36–37; nature and, 68; self-interest and, 93. See also dividual; human capital; individual; nonhuman human capital, 22–23, 27, 35–37, 113–114n3; becoming and, 91; capitalism and, 77–78; economy and, 38; neoliberalism and, 82, 91, 117n10; priming and, 31. See also subject of interest Hume, David, 118n7; choice and, 47; experience and, 71; intensity and, 68; interest and, 70; knowledge and, 118n5; mind and, 118n5, 118n6; passion and, 61, 69, 85;

index rationality and, 53, 57, 59–60, 63, 97–98; self-interest and, 64–65; sympathy and 73–74; tendency and, 118n6 hypothesis, 1, 52; abduction and, 46–47; lived, 69 idea: impression and, 68, 117n4, 118n6; perception and, 61 illusion, objective, 97–99 immanence, 3, 19, 43; event and, 35, 47, 55; infra-individual and, 10, 13, 20; intuition and, 45; limit and, 17, 119n19; plane of, 14, 16; potential and, 107; rationality and, 101; subject of interest and, 36–37 impression, 61, 118n5; affect and, 80; idea and, 68, 117n4, 118n6 in-bracing, 107–109 incipience, 116n3; action and, 14, 44, 46, 62, 73; experience and, 69. See also preemption individual, 3–4, 8–11, 20, 23–25, 27, 29, 32–33 46, 50, 58, 74; action, 13–14; choice and, 22, 27, 33, 35; control and, 38; economy and, 13–15, 23–24, 59; enterprise and, 21–22, 40; neoliberalism and, 76, 91; personhood, and 114n1; priming and, 30–31; relation and, 15, 19, 23–24; self-interest and, 60, 79; subject of interest and, 19, 21, 36–37, 54; trust and, 7, 12; volition and, 118n9. See also dividual; infraindividual; preindividual; transindividual individuation, collective, 110 induction: activism and, 88; priming and, 30, 41; tendency and, 32 infra-individual, 8–11, 13–16, 19, 32, 35–37, 40–41, 99; individual and, 20; oscillatory process and, 58; readiness potential and, 12. See also dividual; individual; microeconomics; transindividual infra-trans, 75–76, 79–80; desire and, 92; event and, 86. See also infra-individual; transindividual intensity, 7–9, 67–73, 76, 103, 105–106, 110–111; activity and, 92; contagion and, 84; content and, 75; decision and, 20; discipline and, 39; dividual and, 10, 35; event and, 45, 80, 83, 112; externality and, 119n19; immanence and, 19; life and, 76, 93; passion and, 84; politics and, 78–79; power and, 89; quasi-chaotic, 37; situation and, 34; thinking-feeling and, 73. See also affect; resonance

131

interaction, 28, 48; body and, 106; intraaction and, 8. See also activity interest, 70, 89, 120n20; affect and, 58; capitalism and, 93; contiguity and, 79; event and, 81; neoliberalism and, 91. See also choice; intensity; self-interest intuition, 21–23, 41–43, 45, 50–51, 114–115n2; abduction and, 52–53; complexity and, 85; physical, 51–52; political art and, 93–94; politics and, 54; priming and, 31; rationality and, 99–100; sympathy and, 119n19. See also perceptual judgment; thinking-feeling invention, 54; abduction and, 79, 85, 92, 99; capitalism and, 120n20; event and, 87; freedom and, 86, 89, 94; gesture and, 55; interest and, 70; life and, 71; ontopower and, 85; passion and, 62, 73; rationality and, 63, 101; science and, 51; tendency and, 98– 99 invisible hand, 1–3, 5; and market, 65, 67. See also laisser-faire irrationality, 32–33, 48–50, 99; calculation and, 119n19; capitalism and, 57; exuberance and, 6, 116n3; and passion, 64. See also emotion; rationality James, William, 107, 110; on terminus, 98 joy, 1, 71–75, 95, 118n12, 119n19; capitalism and, 92; invention and, 101; rationality and, 100 judgment, 33–35, 43, 47; affect and, 117n12; love and, 75; militant and, 88; rationality and, 48, 100; taste and, 71–72. See also perceptual judgment Keynes, John Maynard, 1 knowledge, 21, 29, 118n5; decision and, 20 Lacan, Jacques, 114n9 laisser-faire, 3, 16, 21. See also invisible hand; neoliberalism Latour, Bruno, 48 law, 5; power, 115n3; subject of, 114n4 liberalism, 113n4; economic, 3–4; and rationality, 49. See also neoliberalism Libet, Benjamin, 43 life, 38, 50, 54, 71, 97, 80–81 100–101, 104, 107–108, 110–111; affect and, 117n12; body and, 51; dividual and, 33; economy and, 4, 20, 58, 83; enterprise and, 22, 39;

132

index

life (continued) environment and, 34; externality and, 119n19; immanence and, 43; individual and, 22; intensity and, 76, 105; multiplicity, 44; neoliberalism and, 30–32, 42, 55, 72; nonhuman and, 66–67; priming and, 30–32; surplus value and, 23, 35, 69–70, 77–78, 87, 90, 92, 95; vitality and, 34; will and, 46 limit, 19–20; capitalism and, 120n20; of dividual, 64; of economy, 10, 14–15; human capital and, 82; immanence and, 17, 119n19; rationality and, 53. See also threshold love, 74, 75 Luhmann, Niklas, 17, 20; on readiness potential, 11; on trust, 6, 9–11, 15–16 machinic: decision and, 91; flow and, 116n8; life and, 40; subject of interest and, 37 macroeconomics, 9, 115n3; and complexity, 35; and expression, 14; indicator, 23; and readiness potential, 11; and transindividual 37. See also economy; microecomomics; transindividual macropolitics 79–80, 87, 94; failure and, 89– 90. See also micropolitics; politics Maple Spring (Quebec), event and, 85, 89 Margulis, Lynn, 50 market, 1–4, 14, 28, 32, 37, 113n2, 114n5, 115–116n3, 119n19; enterprise and, 40; invisible hand and, 65, 67; neoliberal, 21; shock and, 113n1; sympathy and, 67. See also economy Marxism, 36, 87 Maxwell, James Clerk, 52 McClintock, Barbara, 51 memory, 26–27, 104–105 metastability, 48; capitalism and, 57; economy and, 16–17; enterprise and, 40 microeconomics, 8–9; choice and, 35; individual and, 37. See also economy; infraindividual; macroeconomics micropolitics, 109; capitalism and, 92; commotion and, 95; event and, 94, 120n21. See also macropolitics; politics militant, 87–89, 94. See also macropolitics; politics

mind, 118n6; becoming and, 118n5 modulation, 36, 40–42, 52–54, 64; activism and, 88; affect and, 108; becoming and, 35; behavior and, 28–29; contrast and, 111; economy and, 9; priming and, 30, 32; tension and, 112. See also oscillation; resonance mood: analysis, 13; of economy, 11, 13; weather and, 8, 39 movement, 20, 103, 120n20; affect and, 117n12; of becoming, 42; body and, 105, 110; capitalism and, 57; decision and, 47; enterprise and, 39; of expression, 32; relation and, 73, 76, 84; subject of interest and, 40; tendency and, 46, 98–99; thinkingfeeling and, 45 multiplicity: activity and, 44–46, 73; body and, 111; fielding and, 33; singularity and, 91, 93, 119n19 multiplier effect, 3–6, 9–10, 58; economy and, 14, 16; enterprise and, 40, 67; event and, 90–91; externality and, 119n19; neoliberalism and, 91; success and, 36 mutual exclusion: contrast and, 69, 93, 111; decision and, 20; invention and, 51; micropolitics and, 89 mutual inclusion, 61, 114n7; affect and, 73, 91; contrast and, 88; event and, 45, 47, 51, 81–82; intensity and, 69; potential and, 20, 37; rationality and, 50, 100; regressive endpoint and, 32; sign and, 75 natural sentiment, 60, 64, 65–66, 68; event and, 82; sympathy and, 73 nature: bare activity and, 83; human, 60, 68; laws of, 115n3; participation and, 66, 82, 118n10 Negri, Antonio, and Michael Hardt, 119n19 neoliberalism, 2, 6, 40, 42, 49, 55, 70, 72, 89, 115n3; becoming and, 20; denizen and, 53, 57; economy and, 3, 12–13, 21–23, 58, 66, 78–80, 113n2; human capital and, 91, 117n10; individual and, 76; oscillatory processes and, 36; ontopower and, 43; paradox and, 34–35; priming and, 30–32; relation and, 77, 82; relational field, 27; self-interest and, 59, 65; subject of interest and, 58; zone of indistinction and, 33. See also capitalism; liberalism Nietzsche, Friedrich, 118n12

index noise, 10, 115–116n3 nonconsciousness, 33, 43, 52, 99–100; activism and, 88; choice and, 19, 22, 24; decision, 20, 22, 24, 80, 114–115n2; economy and, 17; event and, 25, 61; passion and, 64; perception and, 106; politics and, 94; potential and, 75; presupposition and, 45; priming and, 32, 78. See also consciousness; deliberation-without-attention; priming nonhuman, 66–67; expression, 83 nonpersonal: decision and, 58; event and, 101; expression, 83; heroism and, 83; intuition and, 21; knowledge and, 118n5; nonconsciousness and, 19; relational field and, 82 Obama, Barack, 109 object, 69, 97; consumption and, 72; intuition and, 45; subject and, 110; taste and, 71 objective illusion, 97–99. See also rationality Occupy Wall Street, 85, 89, 90 occurrence, 97; affect and, 117n12; commotion and, 15; event and, 70; infra-, 8; perceptual judgment and, 52 ontopower, 15–16; alter-economy and, 82; bare activity and, 81; biopower and, 117n9; capitalism and, 66, 93; choice and, 19; intensity and, 69, 89; invention and, 85; neoliberalism and, 35, 42–43; passion and, 63–64, 76; priming and, 30; rationality and, 34, 100–101. See also power; preemption oscillation: complexity and, 82; dividual and, 46; economy and, 9, 11; environment and, 66; event and, 47; field and, 85; neoliberalism and, 32–33, 42; oscillatory point, 37; relational field and, 86; system and, 115n3; trust, and 10. See also modulation; resonance oscillatory processes, 7, 28, 36–37, 41, 77; capitalism and, 120n20; dividual and, 64; infra-individual and, 58; neoliberalism and, 91. See also oscillation; process; subject of interest other (the): passion and, 76, 81, 93; sign and, 73–80. See also passion pain: affect and, 60–61, 118n12; intensity and, 68; interest and, 70; joy and, 71; plea-

133

sure and, 63–64, 75–77; rationality and, 59; satisfaction and, 38; volition and, 118n9 paradox, 25–26, 49; choice and, 27, 30, 35, 91; counterpower and, 42–43; decision and, 65; happiness and, 78; natural sentiment and, 82; neoliberalism and, 34–35, 71; of self-interest, 77, 82; subject of interest and, 21 passion, 61, 63, 68–70, 95; invention and, 85; joy and, 71; market and, 67; the other and, 81; rationality and, 97–101; sign of, 72–76, 84, 86, 93–95; tendency and, 62–64, 85 past: of the body, 104; occasions, 99; and potential, 106; sensation, 24 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 43, 46 perception, 33–34, 43, 51, 61–65, 69–71, 117n4, 118n7; activity and, 50, 62, 74, 100; affect and, 85, 106; contrast and, 111; event and, 106; fabulation and, 26–27, 35; intuition and, 45; micro-, 107–109; the other and, 74; priming and, 24; rationality and, 63, 99–100; thinking-feeling and, 73. See also idea; passion; perceptual judgment; sympathy perceptual judgment, 44–47, 68, 97, 118n7; abduction and, 50–53, 61, 69, 75–76, 100; activism and, 88–89; feeling and, 116n4; potential and, 93; rationality and, 63. See also intuition; judgment; perception personal. See nonpersonal perturbation, 9–10, 27–28, 36, 48, 52; counter-, 116n3; economy and, 12–13; system and, 16 philosophy, 32; activist, 62; management, 21; moral, 59, 64, 71 Pixley, Jocelyn, 4, 5, 9, 24, 48 pleasure: affect and, 59–61, 118n12; happiness and, 78; intensity and, 68; interest and, 70; joy and, 71–72; pain and, 63–64, 75–77; sympathy and, 73; volition and, 118n9 politics, 59, 67, 71, 78–80, 108–111, 118n8; affect and, 64, 70, 84; bio-, 37, 117n3; capitalism and, 57, 82; of dividuality, 32–36, 76; fabulation and, 54; intuition and, 43, 93; neoliberalism and, 42; nonconsciousness and, 94; sympathy and, 73, 83. See also macropolitics; micropolitics possibility, 109, 115n3; the other and, 75; passion and, 73; potential and, 76, 119n15; preemption and, 116n6. See also potential; probability

134

index

potential, 19–20; affect and, 104, 108; body and, 106; contrast and, 111; event and, 44, 94, 100, 111; expression and, 8, 101; field of, 44–45; invention and, 54; life and, 81, 107; nature and, 83; the other and, 73–76, 79; perceptual judgment and, 93; politics and, 109; possibility and, 76, 119n15; pure, 88; revolution and, 92. See also freedom; readiness potential power: activity and, 25; affect and, 46, 79–80, 103–104; bio-, 37; capitalism and, 93, 119n13; choice and, 4, 15, 31–32; control and, 38–39; counterpower, 42–43, 82, 91; decision and, 22, 34, 44; discipline and, 7, 29, 37–40; enterprise and, 117n13; event and, 69; joy and, 71; law and, 115n3; macropolitics and, 89; priming and, 24, 30, 41; rationality and, 34, 99; relation and, 50; of self-modulation, 35; transindividual and, 79; of volition, 118n9. See also ontopower; preemption practice: affect and, 79; collective, 72; ecology of, 111–112; event-conditioning and, 49, 93; everyday, 51; minority, 7–8; perception and, 100; priming and, 30; science and, 50 prediction, 15, 115–116n3. See also forecasting preemption, 115–116n3; economy and, 12–13, 114n10; politics and, 80, 116n6; power and, 30. See also incipience preindividual, sign and, 75. See also dividual; individual; infra-individual; transindividual present, 25; choice and, 4; perception, 26, 99. See also future; past presupposition, 28–30, 44, 65, 70; choice and, 72; cueing and, 41; event and, 90; habit and, 97; nonconscious, 45; politics and, 54; priming and, 31; relational field and, 93 priming, 29, 43, 75; affect and, 66, 79; body and, 109; compossibility and, 93; condition and, 64; cueing and, 41; cutting and, 107; decision and, 32; deliberationwithout-attention and, 31, 40; microperception and, 108; nonconsciousness and, 32, 78; ontopower and, 30; passion and, 76; power of, 24; relation and, 84; relational field and, 94; self-interest and, 65

probability, 115–116n3; affect and, 114n2; gut feeling and, 23; intuition and, 51; risk and, 4, 16, 20; science and, 52–53. See also possibility process, 14–15, 30, 62–63, 110, 114n12; autonomy and, 41; capitalism and, 5, 16, 23, 49, 67, 120n20; decision and, 20; economy as, 11, 17; neoliberalism and, 27, 33, 42; rationality and, 99–100; satisfaction and, 70; science and, 51. See also oscillatory process rationality, 59; affect and, 8–10, 14, 25, 27–28, 36, 53, 63–65, 71, 89, 97–101; calculation and, 5–6, 17, 20, 22, 47, 77–78, 82–84, 92; choice and, 1, 5–6, 24, 32–35, 41, 45–48, 50, 58, 91, 114n2, 115–116n3; control society and, 117n13; decision and, 21, 35–36; doubt and, 49; economy and, 2–3, 13, 15–17, 23–24, 67; event and, 47; externality and, 119n19; intuition and, 43, 99; life and, 55; passion and, 64; science and, 51; sympathy and, 62; tenancy and, 98. See also irrationality readiness potential, 11–15, 17, 20, 26; bare activity and, 46; choice and, 19, 25; contagion and, 80; contrast and, 70; event and, 75; passion and, 62; perception and, 43; satisfaction and, 77; sign and, 84; sympathy and, 85. See also potential; superposition reason. See rationality regressive endpoint, 13–15, 60; economy and, 10, 16, 20, 32; event and, 47 relation, 4, 7, 27, 32, 40, 42, 50, 54, 81, 97, 104, 116n6, 119n19; affect and, 14, 53, 59; economy and, 14, 58, 72, 78; event and, 80, 83, 92, 101; individual and, 8–10, 15, 19, 23–24; intuition and, 43; movement and, 74, 76, 84, 120n20; neoliberalism and, 77, 82; politics and, 35; rationality and, 59, 99; subject and, 110; technique of, 94, 99. See also relational field; self-relation relational field, 30, 54, 58–59, 79; capitalism and, 120n20; decision and, 68; economy and, 14; event and, 82–86, 90; heroism and, 80; neoliberalism and, 27, 33; ontopower and, 43; presupposition and, 93; priming and, 94; technique and, 100. See also field; relation

index representation: affect and, 90; memory and, 27; perception and, 33 resonance, 7–8, 32; contrast and, 111; event and, 57; ontopower and, 15; potential and, 108; system and, 19; transindividual and, 13, 16. See also affect; intensity; modulation; oscillation revolution, 87–88; militant and, 94; potential and, 92 risk, 6, 16; calculation and, 23; life and, 80; probability and, 4, 20 Romney, Mitt, 114n1 Ryle, Gilbert, on moods, 8 satisfaction, 4–5, 8, 16, 25, 27, 75; activity and, 92; affect and, 6; choice and, 58–59; consumer, 22, 41; experience and, 78; expression of, 13; future, 22; individual, 35; joy and, 70–72; life-, 23, 38, 78; politics and, 80; self-interest and, 27, 77, 92; sympathy and, 76 Schultz, Theodore W., 37 science, 49–53, 117n13; choice and, 24; cognitive, 27; economics and, 53; techno-, 48–50 self-interest, 1–6, 23, 25, 58–65, 68, 77–83, 93; choice and, 27, 30, 34–35; intensity and, 69; satisfaction and, 71, 92. See also choice; dividual; interest; subject of interest self-organization, 31, 114n13; economy and, 3–5, 9, 16; effects and, 10; process and, 11, 36 self-relation, 20–22, 40, 99, 119n19; future and, 76, 95; the other and, 78, 81. See also relation shock, 5, 106–109, 113n1. See also affect sign, 69–70; activity and, 88; of the other, 73–80; of passion, 72, 76–86, 93– 95 Simondon, Gilbert, 76, 86, 88; affect and, 117n12, 118n12; preindividual and, 75 singularity, 49, 51, 90, 97–99; emergence and, 120n20; multiplicity and, 91, 93, 119n19 situation, 28, 45–46, 105, 107, 109–111; condition and, 25, 35, 40, 44; cueing and, 41; everyday, 24; intense, 34; politics and, 35, 54; priming and, 29–30; singularity of, 97, 99 Smith, Adam, 2, 59 social: behavior, 76; category, 21; economy and, 113–114n3; externality and, 119n19

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society, 5; capitalist, 7; civil, 22; control, 37–39, 42, 117n13; and enterprise, 21; networked, 67 Spinoza, Benedictus de, 71, 74, 103, 105, 110; affect and, 118n12 spontaneity, 3, 35, 85, 100, 119n18. See also intuition State (the), 49, 59, 113n2; and capitalism, 88 Stengers, Isabelle, 111 Stern, Daniel, 109 Strevens, Michael, 51, 52 subject, 3–4, 110, 118n5; body and, 105; of choice, 37; consumption and, 72; effects and, 41; enterprise-, 21, 67, 91; feeling and, 107; objective illusion and, 98; self-relation and, 20; sign and, 74; system and, 15. See also subject of interest subject of interest, 59–60; activity and, 11; calculation and, 6; capitalism and, 77; choice and, 41, 72; citizen and, 78; decision and, 3, 42; economy and, 5, 10, 14, 21, 36–38, 114n4; freedom and, 81; human capital and, 91; individual, 8, 19, 21, 54; machinic and, 37; neoliberalism and, 40, 58, 65, 115n3; rationality and, 62. See also human capital; individual; self-interest; system success, 11–14, 19, 23, 27, 30, 36, 70, 109; micropolitics and, 89–90. See also failure superposition, 11, 52; affect and, 12, 25, 61; bare activity and, 82; difference and, 37; economy and, 16; infra-individual and, 19; rationality and, 100; science and, 50. See also readiness potential surplus value, 5–6, 21; capitalism and, 16, 76–78, 92, 120n20; of experience, 76; intensity and, 69; of life, 23, 35, 70, 87, 90, 92, 95; neoliberal, 9 Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (Whitehead), 118n7 sympathy, 60–69, 72–74, 118n8; event and, 70, 84–85, 93; force and, 84; heroism and, 81; intuition and, 119n19; politics and, 73, 83; potential of, 76; rationality and, 101. See also passion; perception system, 19, 36–37; capitalism and, 57, 120n20; chaotic, 115n3; disciplinary, 27–30; economic, 5–17, 115–116n3; effects and, 41; memory and, 27; nonhuman and, 67; process and, 114n12; rationality and, 21, 98;

136

index

system (continued) trust, 7–8, 15–16. See also economy; infraindividual; subject of interest Taleb, Nassim, 115n3 Tarde, Gabriel, 118n11 taste, 34, 41; aesthetics and, 71; joy and, 72 technique, 100; priming and, 31; rationality and, 99 technique of relation, 94, 99 technology, 40; communication, 31; and control, 38; and human capital, 37; science and, 48–50 tendency, 8–9, 11, 19, 62, 104; activity and, 31, 88; bare activity and, 33; body and, 105, 108–109; capitalism and, 91–92, 120n20; countertendency, 29, 72–73, 87; dividual and, 32–35, 41; event and, 47, 65, 90; intensity and, 68– 69, 103; joy and, 71; mind and, 118n5, 118n6; passion and, 62– 64, 73, 79, 85, 93; perception and, 70, 74; perceptual judgment and, 44, 46; presupposition and, 28–31; rationality and, 97– 99, 101; self-interest and, 81–82. See also intensity tension, 6, 73, 115n3; affect and, 12; choice and, 112; condition and, 70; intensity and, 111; relational field and, 86; satisfaction and, 72; sympathy and, 81; tendency and, 8 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 59 thinking-feeling, 71, 73–74, 111, 118n7; abduction and, 47, 85; event and, 62, 86; fabulation and, 54; movement and, 45; passion and, 64. See also intuition threshold, 10, 114n8, 119n19; affect and, 103; capitalism and, 120n20; forward, 9; macropolitics and, 89; perception and, 111; priming and, 29; relational field and, 86; sub-, 20–21. See also limit

transindividual, 118n8, 119n19; decision and, 94; dividual and, 35–36, 40–42, 46, 58, 68, 71–72, 74, 83, 86–87, 92–93, 95; individuals and, 14; infra-individual and, 13, 37, 99; power and, 79; preindividual and, 119n15; sympathy and, 64, 84. See also individual; infra-individual; macroeconomics transition, 103–105, 107–108 trust, 5–17, 19, 23, 36–37, 68; choice and, 24; politics and, 80. See also distrust Tunisia, event and, 85, 89, 90 uncertainty, 9, 21, 46; affect and, 4; conditions of, 24, 34; environment and, 23; macroeconomics and, 35; relational field and, 87; self-interest and, 77 United States Supreme Court, 22, 114n1 virtual: affect and, 106; event and, 80, 88; potential and, 104; power and, 79; terminus and, 98, 111 vitality, 106, 118n11; intensity and, 69; life and, 34, 70. See also vitality affect vitality affect, 71, 83; event and, 73. See also affect; vitality volition, 63, 68; affect and, 69, 92, 120n20; heroism and, 81; passion and, 85; power of, 118n9 wave packet, 25; affect and, 10–17, 50, 70, 73, 75, 91, 100 Whitehead, Alfred North, 25, 71, 88, 97, 118n7; on aesthetics, 70, 93, 111; on contrast, 69, 110 will, 118n9; affect and, 46–48 worlding, 107–108, 110 zone of indistinction, 6–11, 14–15, 19, 24–25, 27–28, 32–33, 34–35, 46–47, 114n7