Yubraj Aryal: Why do you think that „affect“ is more important for understanding how power operates in capitalism today, rather than concepts such as ideology and class? Are we living in a „post-ideological“ society, or a „society after ideology“? What is the fate of the ideology today?

Brian Massumi: To speak of a post-ideological society is to posit implicitly that society was effectively structured by ideology previously. This focuses the discussion on a negative claim: that a rupture has occurred. To support that claim, the received description of what one is claiming has been left must be taken as a starting point. The entire discussion remains framed in terms of the concept it is calling into question. Deleuze and Guattari do not refer to society after ideology. They make a much more radical claim: „There is no ideology, and there never was. “ What they are saying with this provocation is that the entire problem must be reframed, from start to finish. The conceptual strands that were bound together into the notion of ideology must be untied, and their connection to each other reproblematized. The presuppositions informing that construction must be reexamined.

In very broad strokes, the basic presuppositions informing the notion of ideology are that society is a structure, and that mechanisms of power defend and reproduce that structure. The structure is an organized whole composed of parts that have specifiable functions and occupy determinate positions within the whole. The relations among the parts have a coherence dictated by the structure of the whole they compose and whose general interests they serve. The coherence of the composition is a certain form of rationality, expressible as a set of mutually cohering propositions – in short, reflected in a structure of ideas. The task of the notion of ideology is to explain a thorny problem that then arises. Namely, that what is in the „general interest“ of the structure will never coincide with the specific interests of many of the subordinated working parts. It is likely, however, to coincide quite nicely with one of society's parts, or a small set of them, occupying a linchpin position. The „general interest“ is really a „dominant interest. “ Now if the structure embodies a rationality expressible in a coherent structure of ideas, why is it that the subordinated parts – call them „classes“– accept their place? Why can't they see how the rationality coheres, and what it really means for them? Why don't they get the idea? Why can't they see through the mirage of the „general“ interest, and understand it for what it is – a euphemism for the interests of a dominating class?

This is where affect enters the picture for ideological analysis. The structure of ideas must be inculcated without making it explicit. The reigning rationality must be transmitted, but occulted. The notion of ideology does not simply dismiss notions of affect. Rather, it mobilizes them in a particular way. Affect is seen as fundamentally delusional. But its illusions are useful. It provides the opening for a rationality to get its hooks into the flesh. Affect is seen as the domain of „mere“ feeling. It represents the vulnerability of the individual to larger societal forces. Power hooks into the individual through feeling, and then pulls the strings that lead the individual into deluded acquiescence to its assigned role.
This brings up a further presupposition: that affect, or feeling, is individual. Also, that affect is the opposite of rational, that it is simply the irrational. It further assumes that if individuals were not affectively misled for ideological purposes, they would have the possibility of overcoming their own irrationality, in order to begin to act in accordance with their true interests. This contains the very traditional – and, one might add, thoroughly „bourgeois“– assumption that self-interest is the primary motivating force, and that to act according to one's interests is to act rationally. It is precisely because this presupposition is lurking in the background that the critique of the dominant ideology must concern itself with the construction of the „new man“ (or whatever equivalent term is used). This is a collective project to make the general interest a reality. Individuals' ways of feeling and acting must recompose into a new rationality that abolishes the distance between individual and collective interest. Structure of feeling must be made to coincide with a new social coherence. Affect must be made to consciously coincide with the structure of ideas reflecting that coherence. The individual must come to affectively embody the collective structure, and live it in the everyday.

But how can this undoing of ideology be achieved – without inculcating a counter-ideology? How can a counter-ideology be inculcated without applying new mechanisms of power? How can those who most directly apply those mechanisms of power not become a new class, with its own special interests (the critical-ideological avant-garde turning into an apparatchik class)? How can those special interests not re-appeal to affect in an attempt to maintain the now resurgent mirage of the „general“ interest? In short, how can the dominant ideology be changed without imposing a new one that in the end reinscribes much the same structure, and works with much the same presuppositions, as the old one – and is no less a structure of domination?

It is as much for these practical reasons, as for philosophical reasons, that Deleuze and Guattari launch the rallying cry, „there is no ideology and there never was. “ Philosophically, the call is for a reframing of the problem in terms of process as opposed to structure. A process is dynamic and open-ended, composed of ongoing variations on itself. It fundamentally lacks the groundedness of a structure. Any stabilizing structuring is emergent, and self-improvised. This makes variation and change more fundamental than the reproduction of the same. The question is inverted. It is no longer: how is change possible, given the embeddedness of ideological reproduction in the social structure? Instead, the question is: how are certain regularities enabled to reemerge, across the variations, in always new forms? A process is oriented, but as an open, evolving whole. It is not self-consistent, and cannot be reduced to a structure of ideas and their functional embodiments. It is, rather, a reciprocal implication of operations. It is not functional, but operative. It is not structured, but emergently self-structuring. Deleuze and Guattari need to clear away the old baggage of ideology critique in order to think capitalist society as a dynamic process of always ongoing self-structuration.
The call to go beyond ideology is a call to attend to the evolving novelty of this self-structuration, to find ways of conceptualizing the current mode of operation of the capitalist that are equal to its complexity. Capitalism's operativity has become so complex, its „instruments“ (like derivatives and credit default swaps) have become so abstract, as to defy logic. In light of this, can it still be called a „rationality“? If it is not a rationality, how can we continue to speak of ideology – the very construction of which posits an ideational logos? What does all this mean for resistance?
The implication of Deleuze and Guattari's calling into question of ideology is that for the understanding of capitalism as a process the concept of affectivity is more fundamental than rationality. But for the concept of affect to be useful here, it must be reconceptualized. It must be rethought in a way that understands it not as individual in the first instance, but as collective (as pertaining to relation). And it cannot be reduced to „feeling“ as opposed to thinking, but rather as involving feeling in thinking, and vice versa. This requires revisiting the whole notion of rationality – and self-interest. In a process-oriented frame, the thinking-feeling of affect is always directly implicated in an operativity – it pertains more fundamentally to events than to persons. It is directly enactive. What is this enactive thinking-feeling, and what difference does it make in how we can think about capitalism as a mode of power, and about resistance?

Y. A.: What exactly is this new concept of affectivity then? If it is a mode of thinking, how does it alter our concepts of rationality and thought – which, I presume, are not equivalent? And how can this affectivity function as a resistance to powers of domination and control?

B. M.: The concept of affect that I find most useful is Spinoza's well-known definition. Very simply, he says that affect is „the capacity to affect or be affected. “ This is deceptively simple. First, it is directly relational, because it places affect in the space of relation: between an affecting and a being affected. It focuses on the middle, directly on what happens between. More than that, it forbids separating passivity from activity. The definition considers „to be affected“ a capacity. The force of a blow, for example, is a product of an impinging force meeting a force of resistance, a certain capacity to resist. That capacity is a mode of activity of the body. It is a doing, as much as the blow itself (it is the body asserting its structural integrity, bracing itself in a certain manner to absorb, deflect, dodge the blow, or even, as in martial arts, to turn its force back against its author). Reciprocally, the fist that delivers the blow does not just affect its target. It is just as much affected by the force of resistance it encounters. To hit can hurt just as much as to be hit. But the shared pain corresponds to a distribution of roles. The blow's outcome may give one party a certain advantage in a next encounter. The relative standing of the parties involved may change in a way that has lasting effects. If those lasting effects stabilize into an inequality between the parties that conditions subsequent encounters, the structuring of an emergent power structure has occurred.
The blow is what it does. What it does is trigger the eventful resolution of a differential of forces at a point of encounter. The Spinozist definition hinges affect on encounter. It is thoroughly eventful, derives structure from event. The two sides between which the encounter passes cannot simply be characterized as passive or active. The affective event does not presuppose a passivity on one side and an activity on the other. It involves a differential of modes of activity that is eventfully resolved, to structuring effect. This is very much in keeping with Michel Foucault's definition of power as a complex differential of forces, where the power to affect is strictly coincident with the power to resist, and where power effects accumulate. Power can no longer be construed as resting on an ideological ground that is predetermining. So the first step toward mobilizing a theory of affect for resistance is to understand that there is a first degree of resistance in any encounter that it is not simply passive, but already expresses a capacity, and that it is these encounters that are determining. There is no ideology as determining, in the first or last instance. Power structures are secondary effects of affective encounters, and ideologies are secondary expressions of power structures. Ideology is on the side of effects – twice over – not fundamentally that of causes.

There is a corollary to Spinoza's definition. Affect, he says, is the capacity to affect or be affected, as applies to a transition, the passing of a threshold to a higher or lower power of existence, understood as an affective readiness for subsequent encounter, unsubordinated to the roles unequally assigned by already-established power structures. The transition is felt as such. This notion of affect as involving a felt transition moves us away from the paradigm of rationality, while preserving thought. In the heat of an encounter, we are immersed in eventful working-out of affective capacities. We have no luxury of a distance to the event from which we can observe and reflect upon it. But in that immediacy of feeling absorbed in the encounter, we already understand, in the very fiber of our being, what is at stake, and where things might be tending. The feeling of the transitional encounter is imbued with an immediate understanding of what is under way, what might be coming – and what we are becoming. This is enactive understanding: it is one with the action. It is what I call a thinking-feeling.
It is clear that the affective thinking-feeling is not the thinking or feeling of a particular object – or a particular subject. It pertains more directly to the event, what passes in-between objects and subjects, than to the objects or subjects per se. It is important to emphasize that it is pre-subjective, in the sense that it is so integral to the event's unfolding that it can only retrospectively be „owned, “ or owned up to, in memory and post facto reflection, as a content of an individualized experience. Affective thinking-feeling is transindividual. It is transindividual in two senses: in the sense just mentioned, namely that it pertains directly to what is passing between the individuals involved, which is reducible to neither taken separately; and in the sense that it coincides with a becoming of the involved individuals, in that as an event it is already carrying each beyond itself, making it other than it is just now, and already more than what it was just then.
Looked at from this perspective, affect is a differential attunement between two bodies in a joint activity of becoming. What I mean by differential attunement is that the bodies in encounter are both completely absorbed in the felt transition, but they are differently absorbed, coming at it asymmetrically, from different angles, living a different complexion of affecting-being affected, transitioning through the encounter to different outcomes, perhaps structured into different roles. But all of these differences are actively, dynamically co-implicated in the event, as immediate dimensions of the event, the same unfolding event. It is the same event that is integrally lived by both – integrally but heterogeneously; synchronously but asymmetrically. The event is the integral of the differences. It is the curve of their affective integration. The arc of their thought-felt, unfolding co-implication.

Now if there is a complex transindividual thinking-feeling in a simple encounter between two bodies, how much more intensely is the transindividuality thought-felt in multi-body situations? If a simple encounter between two bodies like a blow involves resistance, and as such can be modulated as it occurs, the way martial arts modulate the affective force of a combat encounter, that means that there are affect modulation techniques accessible in the event. They become accessible to the event through reflex, habit, training and the inculcation of skills – automaticities operating with as much dynamic immediacy as the event, directly as part of the event. These automaticities cannot be reduced to slavish repetition, a lack of freedom to maneuver. In fact, as any musician will tell you, they are the necessary foundation for improvisation. You can only effectively improvise on the basis of forms of enactive knowing that operate with all the automaticity of a „second nature. “
What I am suggesting is that affect can be modulated by improvisational techniques that are thought-felt into action, flush with the event. This thinking-feeling of affect, in all its immediacy, can be strategic. Since it modulates an unfolding event on the fly, it cannot completely control the outcome. But it can inflect it, tweak it. So it is not strategic in the sense of preconceiving a specific outcome and finding the means to arrive at that intended end. It is all means – all in the middle, in the midst, in the heat of encounter. It is directly participatory, at no distance from the event under modulation. It the tweaking of an arc of unfolding, on the fly. It is therefore more akin to the deflection or inflection of an already active tendency, than the imposition of a prescribed intention, or pre-intended prescription. But the inflection of tendency can also accumulate from one encounter to the next, and lead somewhere new. It can amplify, resonate, or even bifurcate – potentially in ways that don't coagulate into a power structure, but instead keep restructuring, keep the structuring alive. This is not a „rationality. “ It's an affectivity, redolent with thought, flush with action.

Politically, this changes the whole framework. Affective techniques of thinking-feeling improvisationally are relational techniques that apply to situations more directly than to persons. They are directly collective. They are fundamentally participatory, since they are activated in situation, couched singularly in the occurrence of that encounter. They are event-factors, not intentions. My proposition is that there are relational techniques that can be practiced to modulate unfolding events in a way that takes off from the primary capacity of resistance implied in Spinozist concept of affect, and have the potential of reorienting tendencies toward different ends, without predesignating exactly what they are. This avoids the ideological trap of ending up reimposing much the same kind of power structure that is being resisted. Tendencies are oriented, but open-ended. An in-situation, on-the-fly modulation can be complexly co-inflected by any number of bodies, so that the integral of the differences in play that is what all involved become in differential attunement to the same event will always be an irreducibly collective product. It is a collective self-structuring. This is a politics beyond self-interest, but not in any „general“ interest. It is in the interests of the collectively unfolding event.
For me, this is the foundation for practices of direct democracy, lived democracy, democracy as essentially participatory and irreducibly relational, practiced as an improvisational event mechanics (to borrow the title of Glen Fuller's philosophical blog). This is a democracy whose base concept is not the supposed freedom of the individual from the collectivity, but the freedom of the collectivity, for its becoming. It is the embodied freedom of bodies to come together in thinking-feeling, to participate in differentially attuned becoming, in all immediacy and with all urgency.

Y. A.: Can a faith in „affect“ help ensure our freedom within or from such powers of domination and control?

B. M.: Affect, for me, is not a matter of faith. I would worry about any interpretation of the concept in those terms. Faith in affect would be as misguided as faith in supposedly disinterested reason. For me, the question is two-fold. On one hand, it is purely pragmatic; on the other, it is in a certain way aesthetic. Pragmatically, the question concerns powers of existence – powers to act, think, and feel. Can strategies privileging an affective approach to events increase our powers of existence? Can they help us act differently, think more actively, and feel more thinkingly? If the answer is yes – and I think it is – then they are intensifiers of existence, and produce what I call a surplus-value of life. A surplus-value of life is a surplus-value of experience: an enactively lived and immediately felt qualitative difference expressing a heightening of capacities. It is a felt excess of potential, over and above any particular state of being. That could stand quite well as a definition of aesthetic value. Affective approaches embody a pragmatist aesthetics of life's living.
There is no original state of freedom to which we can return. Affect offers nothing of the kind. However, there is always a degree of freedom offering the potential for other emergences. There are always counter-tendencies that can be joined, and moved with, proposing themselves for amplification. What a body can do is tweak the field – improvise modulations of the field of activity in a way that takes up the offer of these different-order affective tendencies. What a body can do is trigger counter-amplifications and counter-crystallizations that defy capture by existing structures, streaming them into a continuing collective movement of escape. This can only occur from within, in situation, flush with the event, in an immediacy of enaction.

In this enactive immediacy, resistance is of the nature of a gesture. Resistance cannot be communicated or inculcated. If can only be gestured. The gesture is a call to attunement. The only power it has is exemplary. It cannot impose itself. It can only catch on. Its power is to throw out the lure of its own amplification. Its power is of contagion. The gesture of resistance is a micro-gesture of offered contagion, oriented otherwise than the gestures of micro-fascism occurring on the same level, in the same field. Looked at this way, resistance has an aesthetic dimension – of allure, of style of gesture – that is not an added dimension but is absolutely integral to the very operation of resistance, one with its politicality.
There is only one a priori: participation, participatory immersion in an affective field of relation. Resistance comes of immanence. It cannot be led, as if from without. If it is, it is already coagulating into an apparatus of power poised to rise up and bear down. Resistance is immanent critique: a „critique“ that is one with its enaction. It occurs at the level on which bodies think more actively and feel more thinkingly, toward acting differently together. In this kind of resistance, there is no avant-garde. There are seeds, looking for a fertile field of attunement for their flowering. The analogy is inexact. In its role as exemplary gesture, resistance creates its own field. It gestures it into existence, by its own power of contagion. Resistance is performative of itself. It triggers its own self-organizing. Its field is always to come, flush with its own self-amplifying event.
Immanent critique, as its name implies, cannot purport to apply already-established criteria of correctness or necessity to the field of collective action. It cannot operate in the imperative, based on a prior political program or already structured set of moral precepts. It cannot justify itself by appealing to established principles. It immanently enacts its own principle, which is one with its exemplary movement. There is no ought to resistance. On what basis can we say that it is better to desire one's freedom than one's servitude? That one „ought“ to resist? An „ought“ is nothing but an already assumed servitude to a higher order of imperative. To say ought is to enact our servitude to abstract principle, and to justify our imposing it on others. It's a power move. As such, it carries seeds of domination – perhaps a new order of domination, but domination nonetheless. Resistance cannot be „oughted“ and imposed. It cannot be inculcated. It is desired, or it is nothing. Resistance is the counter-desire for the collective augmentation of powers of existence, in dynamic mutual inclusion in an intensive field of relation. There is no basis on which we can say it is „better“ in principle. But there are ways to perform its desirability – to make it more desired, more strongly tended toward, more amplificatory and exemplary. There are indeed techniques of resistance. They are techniques of relation aimed at immanent field-modulation. They are gestures already in relation, in participatory immersion, stirring toward self-augmenting relational movement.

It's an ongoing project. We are in the midst – as always – and things will only begin to become clear as we continue to experiment collectively and participatorily, on the conceptual level in our writing and thinking, and afield experimentally, in thinking-feeling gestures of invitation to collective movement, on the street and in the institutions framing our daily activities. Like the field of resistance, the clarification is to come, flush with our exemplary events. To be invented […] If faith in affect is misplaced, as Deleuze often said, „belief in the world“ is not. It's all we have: the participatory trust that the world always already offers degrees of freedom ready for amplification.

Note: This article was originally published in The Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry, Fall 2012, Vol. 7, No.18. It is reprinted here in abridged and revised form.

 

 

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