{"id":178,"date":"2015-07-15T14:33:20","date_gmt":"2015-07-15T14:33:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joshuagooch.com\/?p=178"},"modified":"2015-07-15T14:35:58","modified_gmt":"2015-07-15T14:35:58","slug":"on-massumis-the-power-at-the-end-of-the-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joshuagooch.com\/?p=178","title":{"rendered":"On Massumi’s The Power at the End of the Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brian Massumi,\u00a0The Power at the End of the Economy<\/em>\u00a0(Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2015).<\/a><\/p>\n

Given the amount of self-citation in this slim volume, it is clear that Massumi wants the economic to bridge key interests in his recent and forthcoming work, most importantly questions of the ecology, the non-human, and war. Such interests, of course, lead Massumi inexorably toward a confrontation with Deleuze and Guattari\u2019s other major disciples, Hardt and Negri. One of the difficulties that I have with this book is that it tries to bury this confrontation rather than subjecting it to rigorous interrogation. Perhaps this will appear in a later work. In any case, the crucial argument with Hardt and Negri appears toward the end when Massumi insists that that the figure of the activist should supplant that of the militant. The activist, he argues, conditions the situation in which events may arise, seeding the world with radical potential; by contrast, militants try to discipline events, in effect subjecting them to a rationalization that cuts off the proliferation of potential. It should be no surprise that Massumi turns this discussion back to the divide between anarchists and Marxists, an argument that we can date to back to the 1860s with the argument between Marx and Bakunin. More on that historical period and this book in a moment. What we should note here first is that his turn to the activist fits his argument overall in that its focus falls on what Massumi calls the \u201cchurning\u201d of \u201cinfra-individual\u201d \u201cbare activity\u201d\u2014that is, the constant internal cycling of affects within an individual that do not rise to the level of consciousness. In an excellent discussion of this non-conscious affective activity, Massumi describes a human reacting to an unexpected encounter with a bull (a choice that one would assume is meant to recall the Spanish Indignacios and the horror of the 21st\u00a0century capitalism\u2019s bull market ideology). To my mind, this portion of the book can be read as a brilliant explication of Deleuze\u2019s passing reference to Sartre in his final essay \u201cImmanence: A Life\u2026\u201d The churn of affect, movement, and potential in the encounter with the bull captures what it means to constitute a plane of immanence. Indeed, anyone familiar with Deleuze\u2019s oeuvre will find the book a fascinating reworking of key texts, including a lengthy engagement with Hume and sympathy.<\/p>\n

My problems with the book, then, are not with its dazzling discussions of affective emergences and inventions, but rather with its analyses of the economic and of neoliberalism\u2014a term that seems to hold talismanic rather than explanatory qualities here. Massumi begins with Foucault\u2019s explication of neoliberalism in\u00a0The Birth of Biopolitics<\/em>, a fascinating seminar held in nearly forty years ago. As insightful as Foucault\u2019s reflections may be for their time, they do not seem an adequate basis for an analysis of the contemporary economic moment in a historical sense. That said, such an analysis does not seem to be of much interest for Massumi. This book is largely a philosophical reflection on\u2026 one model of economic thought? A political regime (which one)? An individual experience of a political economic moment in a broader cultural context? It is unclear. The discussion of economic thought often turns to Jocelyn Pixely\u2019s\u00a0Emotions in Finance\u00a0<\/em>(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), which is never explicated or situated in terms of its ideas but rather dropped in the text aphoristically, as though it represents all economic thought rather than a particular set of developments in the economic analysis of finance. There\u2019s a general suspicion of market rationality\u2014fair enough!\u2014but in a way that is so broad that it is effectively meaningless. Who defends market rationality and how they defend it, however, is not here a subject of analysis.<\/p>\n

Instead, the jumping off point is Foucault’s\u00a0notion of an entrepreneurial subject. Such is certainly an aspect of \u201cthe neoliberal subject,\u201d but it represents a particular view of that subject, one that has been crafted and constructed for us to take in.\u00a0This issue generates the book\u2019s most interesting discussion in terms of its economic content, an analysis of how neoliberalism pushes discipline beyond the individual subject to construct new forms of control. Massumi’s\u00a0term for this is \u2018priming,\u2019 which \u2018[implants] certain\u00a0presuppositions\u00a0<\/em>in the situation \u2026 and [activates] certain tendencies in the participants\u2019 (28). In my book, I\u2019ve reflected on this issue a great deal\u2014albeit in a different historical moment\u2014but I tried to continually return these questions to the interaction of subjective experience and work-discipline. In other words, I tried to highlight the ways that economic relations affect one\u2019s experience. One might see this, following Massumi\u2019s account of the bull, as trying to describe how authors create a plane of consistency in which these subjective potentials of a new set of economic relations open up. I fell back upon the language of \u2018discipline\u2019 in an attempt to reimagine a much more loose, non-institutional experience of discipline by focusing on the construction of particular kinds of discourses\u2014i.e., \u2018presuppositions in the situation\u2019\u2014to which plots and characters respond, most especially in the subjective construction of various characters\u2014i.e., \u2018tendencies in participants\u2019. Thus one of the useful aspects of his reframing neoliberal discipline as priming is that it opens up space for deviance. What remains unclear, however, is how multivocal this openness to deviance may be. It seems historically as useful for reinforcing certain tendencies as it does for the construction of resistance.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s bracket that question for the moment to examine two other fundamental notions here that could also use a little more historical reflection: pain\/pleasure, and human capital. Massumi\u2019s account of pain and pleasure builds from Hume and his understanding of the passions, and then leaps to the contemporary moment. His term for the comparison of the two is \u2018hedonic,\u2019 which is understandable if also curious since the notion of utilitarian calculus never appears once. Given the centrality of this hedonic comparison to political economy, it is difficult to see how or why we must jump from Hume in the mid-eighteenth century to the twenty-first. It is also surprising that, given the competition between passions mapped within the discussion of Hume, that there is no mention of Albert O. Hirschman\u2019s classic\u00a0The Passions and the Interest,\u00a0<\/em>which details the rise of interest as a concept through the notion of the combat between passions. Curious too is the lack of connection of the pain\/pleasure contrast to the rise of marginalism, where these tradeoffs were first rationalized using price mechanisms and generated the prevailing theory of employment that gave us the Great Depression and that Keynes dismantled in his\u00a0General Theory<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And this takes me back to the activist\/militant question. In some ways, Massumi\u2019s account here is very \u201860s\u2014that is, very 1860s. His essential response to these issues is what he calls \u201ca politics of the dividualism\u201d:<\/p>\n

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 producing 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. (35)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With such an agenda, one can see here why the activist would outweigh the militant (and again, why he includes a running comment on the competition between anarchism and Marxism). I appreciate these ideas, but they too need some additional reflection to expose points of difference from this twenty-first century moment and the closing paragraphs of Walter Pater\u2019s 1869\u00a0The Renaissance.\u00a0<\/em>This is not necessarily a critique, I suppose, especially as Pater\u2019s ideas here grew out of his reflections on William Morris\u2014and, beyond that, it is difficult not to be moved in some very Deleuzian ways when reading the Pater of the Conclusion\u2014but Pater\u2019s ideas and the rise of marginalism are also deeply intertwined. This is the argument of Regenia Gagnier\u2019s excellent\u00a0The Insatiability of Human Wants,\u00a0<\/em>and Gagnier\u2019s book kept coming to mind as I read, both because Massumi\u2019s political\/aesthetic project so insistently recalls both Pater\u2019s insistence that we should \u201cget as many pulsations into the given time\u201d through aesthetic discrimination and because his general notion of the economic seems as applicable to British marginalism as to twenty-first century notions of market rationality.<\/p>\n

The key distinction may be that contemporary economic thought accords much more importance to questions of finance than nineteenth-century political economy ever did. The introduction of the dividual in Deleuze and in Massumi is certainly of a piece of the random walk and such, but the outcome of this piece returns us to Paterian aesthetics with an emphasis on depersonalization. So we no longer try to \u2018get\u2019 pulsations as allow them to happen. But that takes us into questions of the event and decision that I\u2019ll defer for another day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brian Massumi,\u00a0The Power at the End of the Economy\u00a0(Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2015). Given the amount of self-citation in this slim volume, it is clear that Massumi wants the economic to bridge key interests in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[8,10,11,9],"class_list":["post-178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic","tag-affect-theory","tag-deleuze-and-guattari","tag-michel-foucault","tag-political-economy"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t