T76

This means that they must play their own differential with capitalist economization. They must be relationally autonomous with regards to it: carving out their own eddy of processual singularity, while at the same time coupling processually with capitalism for the time being (until a tipping point is reached).

Scholium a. Otherwise they will starve.

Scholium b. In any case, they have no choice in this matter, given that complicity is an ontological condition under neoliberal capitalism (T34 Schol. c, T60). They cannot stake out a position outside the capitalist field, because it only has an immanent outside. This in no way means that they will be “all in” it. There is no position of purity from which to oppose capitalism. But by the same token, there is no being all in it (T60 Schol. a). There is power in the duplicitous positioning that is potentially creative. There is no reason in principle creative duplicity cannot immanently leverage postcapitalist difference.

Scholium c. It is not as if not exploring an alter-economy interested in, and in creative tension with, the model of financial capital will avoid complicity. All existing alter-economies interface with the dominant economy in one way or another, of necessity, as does every individual involved in them who has ever earned a wage, bought a product, opened a bank account, or benefited from a pension. The ways in which funding is conventionally obtained for collective projects (government grants, foundation grants, crowdfunding) are all deeply complicit with neoliberalism in their own ways, and come with the added disadvantage that the nonprofit status often involved in those efforts requires a legal organizational structure that repeats the basic characteristics of the corporate model (officers, board of directors, membership conceived as shareholding or stakeholding, annual meetings, etc.) and a day-to-day management structure reproducing the conventional hierarchy (at least on paper). Everyone is already practicing creative duplicity, and short of a global revolution will continue to do so. Historically, even the most radical of revolutions have been recuperated by capital. It cannot be assumed that it will be different the next time around—unless the postcapitalist future is already availably prefigured in the interim. So the issue is not whether to practice creative duplicity, but which complicit duplicities and in what way. There is no a priori reason not to explore all avenues, even the ones that the left traditionally holds under the highest suspicion. Striking a posture of purity will get nowhere. It too easily absolves one of engaging, day to day, hour by hour, with the real conditions of life, as part of an ongoing struggle reaching down to the microlevels of existence. Sustained engagement of that kind is necessary if those conditions are to be sustainably changed. “Certainly now is the time to create money designed to stoke demand for new financial tools for activists, collectives, social movements, artists, refugees, and all who struggle for a life worth living so that they might catch and keep their own value for themselves” (Beller 2017, 10).

T77

A promising lead toward constructing an escape hatch that avoids the emotional-personal capture of neoliberal capitalism, while creatively playing the affect/intensity differential in ways that processually couple with economization, but still prefiguring a postcaptalist future, carrying rewilding potential, and leveraging postcapitalist difference, might be found it the notion of intensive magnitude.

Lemma a. Exploring intensive magnitude in a postcapitalist perspective requires introducing aesthetic categories into political economy.

Lemma b. This involves rethinking causality.

Scholium a. Intensity has two imbricated aspects or dimensions, qualitative and quantitative, whose differential has been a continuing concern of these theses because it lies at the heart of economization. We place ourselves in different dimensions of the same event depending on whether we approach it from the causal point of view, or whether we consider it as “self-sufficing” (Bergson 2001, 90, 137). To underline that “causal” is not necessarily a linear concept, the word “conditioning” is a better choice. “Conditioning” extends to emergent effects of a qualitative order that are not reducible to the sum of their parts, and whose emergence is integrally relational rather than owing to a linear transmission of force. There is always a quantitative dimension to the conditioning of events, imbricated with qualitative dimensions. The nature of that imbrication must be taken into account. For example, pain, as we experience it, is self-sufficing: it directly expresses itself for what it is, just as it is, needing nothing other than itself to explain what it is and to make a definite difference in our life. It is a pure quality (Bergson 2001, 90): an immediate experiential life-quality. It is “pure” in the sense that it is irreducible to any quantification of its conditioning factors. “Reducing all qualities to quantities is absurd” (Nietzsche 2003, 91–92). The quality, self-sufficing, is supernumerary. But this does not mean that it can be understood without reference to quantity. The affect of pain is greater when its conditioning factors include a greater number of physical disturbances, meaning that the tissue damage is more extensive (Bergson 2001, 34). The number of the disturbances does not express itself directly in the felt intensity of the pain. The disturbances express themselves not quantitatively, but as a greater degree of the same quality. By degree of quality is meant its insistency: a greater degree of pain insists more on its own quality. It claims more emphasis for that quality, and backgrounds other concurrent qualities of experience behind the cry of its own expression. Insistency is a question of qualitative emphasis. A lesser pain is not less qualitative: it is more insistently purely qualitative. Its qualitative intensity, it is true, rises and falls in lockstep with the number of factors involved. But “as soon as we try to measure it, we unwittingly replace it by space” (Bergson 2001, 106). The intensity of a pain, for example, might be associated with a more extensive array of organic disturbances, or a stronger localization of its cause. Measure translates the intensity of the quality into spatial extension—which, of course, it cannot in actuality come without, even if, in the event, it cannot be reduced to it. When we measure, we are toggling between two necessary dimensions, intensity and extension, that are mutually enveloped in the event. Measure is a technique for treating those dimensions as separable. Separating the dimensions takes the intensity out of the event. Its extensive aspect is measured, and the numbers thus extracted from the event are moved into another event-domain, where they function as indexes of the event and its inherent intensity.

Scholium b. Another example makes the processual imbrication of quality and quantity more intuitive. Take two flocks of starlings on two consecutive days. On the first day, there are ten. The second day, after a major migratory influx, there are ten thousand. Now imagine a startle that flushes the starlings into flight. Think of the quality of the movement in each case. The ten thousand bank and turn, folding into and through each other with wondrous grace and beauty, thickening into swirling creases and thinning out into scatter zones, the swirling and scattering themselves folding into and out of each other with awe-inspiring topological complexity. All of this is measurable. But it would be a defiance to even try to speak of the event without employing aesthetic terms. These starlings have zest. The measure of their movements would miss the eventness of the event: its singular quality that makes it stand out as an event, backgrounding for an instant everything else. The eventness of the event is a pure quality. Now think of the ten taking flight. This is still impressive, for a landlubber species such as ours. But it is impressive in a comparatively measly way. It is not awe inspiring and does not bring words like “wondrous grace and beauty” to the tips of our tongues. This congregation of birds has less zest. The movement is qualitatively different, carrying less topological potential owing to the smaller number of contributory starling factors. The movement has its own quality, just of lesser intensity. Both takings-flight involve a number of birds. The number of birds in each case corresponds to a greater or lesser occupation of sky space. But this extensive element does not come without being enveloped in a qualitative difference that insists on itself, in an irreducibly aesthetic manner. The quality of the events are conditioned by the quantities involved, without being reducible to them.

Scolium c. In this example, the greater number corresponded to the greater intensity. This is generally but not necessarily the case. Intensity fundamentally has to do with the qualitative range of the potential enveloped, and its ability to insist on itself: to make itself presently palpable. A small number of elements may mutually cohere in movement in a way that envelops a greater intensity of potential than a larger number of the same kind of elements, depending on the nature of the elements and the manner of their concertation. This is due to the fact that the contributory subtendencies insist on themselves, as well as their integral expression insisting on itself, and the quality of the global expression is modulated as a function of that. To return to the pain example, it is well known that anxious tensing increases the intensity of pain, and that the cultivation of certain “mindful” countertendencies of attention decreases it. These techniques reach down to the subtendency level. The relation between extension and intensity is not linear. Tendencies go all the way down qualitatively, and their differentials make a difference at every level.

Lemma c. The term intensive magnitude highlights the way each event comprises a quantitative aspect (expressing itself in the extensive dimension of space) and a qualitative dimension (expressing itself in the aesthetic dimension of a purely qualitative difference of degree).

Lemma d. Placed in contrast to intensive magnitude, affective intensity tips toward the qualitative difference of degree comprising the aesthetic dimension (bearing in mind the intentional range of ambiguity encompassed in this and allied terms, as discussed in T43 Schol. c).

Scholium d. It is important not to forget the complexities of the vocabulary around affect and intensity, and to keep sight of the role of qualitative differentials (in the starling example, the differentials of flying style between the individual birds in the flock, as indexed by variations in speed, acceleration, and spacing between bodies, composing the flock’s overall manner of flying). In the light of the contrast between intensive magnitude and affective intensity, intensity can be used as a shorthand for affective intensity, since the term “intensive magnitude” takes on the role it can otherwise have of referring to the way the quantitative and the qualitative have of coming together.

Lemma e. The conditions of the event are struck by the same two-sidedness as the event itself.

Scholium e. When we refer to conditioning elements or contributory factors, there is always the dual aspect of the qualitative differentials in their aesthetic dimension (style, manner) and the quantifiable differentials (bearing on the extensive factors of speed, spacing, size). This can be prized apart if need be.

Lemma f. This is because the event is composed of subevents. Eventness goes “all the way down.”

Lemma g. An aesthetic way of referring to intensive magnitude is to use the term zest (Whitehead 1967, 258).

Lemma h. Zest is another word for vitality affect. Zest registers adventure (Whitehead 1967, 299, 304).

Lemma i. The corresponding aesthetic term for the pure quality of the event, considered in abstraction from its zestiness, is beauty (Whitehead 1967, 252–72). Beauty is affective intensity, as it verges on emotion.

Lemma j. Wonder is the affective outdoing of beauty.

Scholium f. Wonder peaks with the event’s culmination, whereas zest and adventure are integrally bound up with its unfolding. Beauty, for its part, abstracts from the event as if it were in suspense (without going so far as to separate it from its intensity). Zest, beauty, wonder, and adventure provide aesthetic categories that might pave the way for the revaluation of values to go beyond normative criteria and judgment. These are felt qualities, not rationalities or ratiocinations. They provide purely qualitative indexes for the intensive power of becoming expressing itself in the self-forming of events. No account of value can do without criteria of evaluation. These terms provide elements of a vocabulary for the evaluation of the quality of the process coming to expression. They cannot be understood as “merely” subjective (as individual and personal). They must be recognized as transindividual: as indexing the more-than-humanness of the process’s self-driving. Not being categories of judgment, they cannot be mistaken for taste, or personal preference. That they are felt qualities means that if they could be construed as judgments, they would have to be lived judgments (abductions). They come in the thick of things: unmediated. Lived judgments can only be evaluated participatorily and experimentally. Like all qualities, they are such as they are. They cannot be second-guessed. They happen as they happen, or they don’t. If they do, they make a pragmatic difference in the subsequent quality of the process as it turns over on itself for another run. Instead of being rationally judged, they must be improvised flush with events. They are a project, not a grid of analysis. Without a concerted tendential direction—also immanent to the unfolding—they are liable to run out of steam, or run afoul of themselves. The contrast discussed earlier between the bullying becoming-reactive of formative forces and their affirmative becoming-active provides a qualitative criterion for the immanent evaluation of tendential direction. Together, these go some way toward a nonnormative ethico-aesthetics for the revaluation of values (Massumi 2017b).

T78

Politically and economically, the reason to go through these intensive maneuvers is to hold fast to the fact that affective intensity is inextricably linked to potential, and that this connection is key to the revaluation of values.

Scholium a. “The affective state must correspond not merely to the physical disturbances, movements or phenomena which have taken place, but also, and especially, to those which are in preparation, those which would like to be” (Bergson 2001, 34; translation modified, emphasis added). In other words, enveloped in the quality of the event is an excess of unactualized potentials, movements that were preparing themselves to occur, were pressing to be carried out, that would have “liked to be” (little wills to ontopower), but didn’t end up making it into the event’s actual composition. Their pressing and preparing is part of the insistence of the event, even if many of the pressing potentials do not actually take part in its completion. It is the expressed quality of the intensive envelopment of these pressing potentials that distinguishes this co-motion of tendencies from the quantitative and extensive side of the event. In the starling example, each bird at every moment had to be poised for a nearly instantaneous tack or swerve. When there are ten birds, the quality of the movement is more regular and less particular, so the potential moves that must be in preparation (in preacceleration) at each instant are fewer. This is reflected in each individual’s flying style, and simultaneously in the mannerism of the flock. In the flock of ten thousand, each bird has to be braced for quicker and more variable movements. They cannot not feel this, flush with their movements. The feeling shades off into the field of emergence, to a level where the qualitative differentials between the movements an individual bird is poised for shade off into infinitesimal contrasts between potential movements. At this level of bare activity (T46 Schol. a), each bird is braced into a heightened state of affective intensity, immanent to the event. Each embodies a quantum of the event’s dipping down to the infinitesimal level of its field of emergence. Each individual expresses the global intensity of the event to a degree corresponding to the comprehensiveness of its dipping to the infinitesimal level of potential (depending on its skill, the alacrity of its reflexes, its individual physiological traits, and its health). It is not only that the overall movement of the flock is less intense: the qualitative difference in degree of intensity also goes all the way down, to the level of in-braced potential (the immanent outside). It is the manner in which it goes all the way down that correlates with the event’s intensive magnitude, regardless of the number of elements in play.

Scholium b. This in-bracing makes all the difference. But the difference it makes cannot be measured, even if the individuals composing the event can be counted. At the infinitesimal level of in-braced potential, incoming into the event, the contrasts between potential movements enter a zone of indistinction where no sooner does one begin to sketch itself than it turns over into another, then that one into yet another, in the churning of potential that is bare activity. The bare activity of the zone of indistinction describes the immanent limit of the field of emergence. At the limit, it zones into the virtual. This immanent co-motion roils into the continuing of the collective movement, as the pressing of the potentials tumbles over each individual move, and rolls over from one move to the next to globally compose the collective movement. This is the by-now familiar movement of surplus-value production. The in-bracing drives the surplus-value of life of the event (which in this case is also an instance of surplus-value of motion). The rolling over of the surplus-value of the event dynamically fuses the multiplicity of contributing factors into the singular continuing of the event: it produces the event as a continuum. Surplus-value is the power of the continuum. Derivatives, in their tendential convergence between quality and quantity (T46), effect the capitalist approach to the power of the continuum, toward the appropriation of that power for capitalist surplus-value production. An unappropriable postcapitalist version of the same convergence must be invented for alter-economic purposes.

Lemma a. Politically and economically, the notion of the fusional imbrication of multiplicity in the continuum of the event is important because the continuum is the event’s transindividuality (its continuing integrally across its individual factors) and because that transindividuality isn’t a thing but a power. It is the power of becoming of a subjectivity-without-a subject.

Scholium c. “When the continuum is the trace of a motion, the associated infinitesimal/intensive magnitudes have been identified as potential magnitudes—entities that, while not possessing true magnitude themselves, possess a tendency to generate magnitude through motion, so manifesting ‘becoming’ as opposed to ‘being’” (Bell 2013; emphasis added).

Lemma b. Power cannot fully be understood without making qualitative reference to tendency as a play of potential.

T79

Power cannot be reduced to the actual exercise of force, if force is understood as necessarily having magnitude. Tendencies are qualitative forces of event-formation. They are qualitative formative forces.

Scholium a. The qualitative goes all the way down, until it melds with event-potential. Event-potential is supernumerary: it is of the nature of surplus-value. It is also superqualitative: packing together an ultimately indistinct multiplicity of qualitative differentials in a way that does erase. Because they are not erased, each roil and tumble integrally reshuffles the field, shaking out a certain differential spread of potentials that rise back up to toward the surface of the event, where they are more distinctly felt, press harder, and thus become more accessible for actualization. There is no bedrock quantitative level from which quality emerges. The “bedrock” is the churning sea of immanent potential that is the field of life as bare activity, from which the two streams of the quantitative and qualitative spill: a potential cannot actualize without taking on extension and magnitude, but each move, each actualization, also spins off pure quality, affectively enveloping intensity. In the actualization of the event, quantity and quality are two sides of the event at every level, all the while remaining distinct event-dimensions. The qualitative on one level coils up into and is boosted onto the next. The qualitative snakes up the levels climbing the steps of its own event-dimension, culminating in the global affect expressing the quality of the event as a whole (the feeling of a degree of temperature, or the beauty of the overall topological figure of the flock of starlings). Likewise for quantity, culminating in a numerical extraction. Quality coils with quality, and quantity with quantity. Neither “causes” the other. Neither is epiphenomenal. One is not more real than the other. They are really different, aboriginal dimensions of the same event-conditioning. They co-condition the event. They do not mix, and yet their emergent effects fuse into the singularity of the event’s taking off. A suggestive image for this is the caduceus (the staff used as a symbol of the medical profession): two intercoiled snakes that do not touch, yet nevertheless rise up to take wing together.

Scolium b. “The fact is that there is no point of contact between the unextended and the extended, between quality and quantity. We can interpret the one by the other, set up the one as the equivalent of the other; but sooner or later, at the beginning or at the end, we shall have to recognize the conventional character of this assimilation” (Bergson 2001, 70).

Lemma. The potential in-braced into the event qualitatively underwrites intensity, in the currency of experience. The systematic extraction of number from the quantitative dimensions overwrites it, in the conventional coinages of science.

T80

Even though neither quantity nor quality are epiphenomenal, neither is more real than the other, and they come together in the event—still, quality is processually primary in relation to quantity.

Scholium a. Quality recoils into the immanence of potential underwriting the process. At this level, event-factors no longer count themselves out. They brace themselves in. They brace into the event, and into each other’s proximity. They move together to the limit where they enter a zone of indistinction composing a continuum whose power is beyond number. It is precisely because quality is primary in relation to quantity that potential must be captured and channeled by systems of quantification—prime among them capitalist economization.

Scholium b. The intensive excess of the qualitative over the quantitative never balances out. There is an essential asymmetry. Otherwise, process could fall into equilibrium. It would suffer from the entropy native to extensive, spatialized systems. There is a creative advance of process precisely because there is a countervailing tendency to entropy: a negentropy. This countervailing is the tendency of tendency to continuously “generate [intensive] magnitude through motion.” Think again of the heightened relational sensitivity of the individual starlings’ movements in the flock of ten thousand, and the way it packs potential into the flocking-event’s global motion, intensely animating the number of starlings. Qualitative differential is the animating force; quantification piggybacks the entropic force.

T81

The inextricability of affective intensity and potential in-forms the event with a variety of tendencies, only some of which actually play out.

Scholium a. “Variety” is a word for the qualitative dimension of a multiplicity. It denotes a differential field of qualitatively different tendencies (secondarily, it connotes a number spread, a plurality of kinds distributed in space, into which that field extensively folds out).

Scholium b. As the variety of the tendencies churn through the continuity of the event, their differentials play out into a singular affective expression: that of the global quality marking the culmination of the event. The global quality is the qualitative summing-up of the qualitative recoils leveling up into it, and at the same time descending to the immanent outside where they dip into potential, in event-powering rhythmic turnover. That rhythm is the immanent dynamic form (the self-in-forming) of the event. It is the dynamic form of a subjectivity-without-a-subject. A system’s processual turnover (T16) follows the rhythm.

T82

The rhythmic playing out of the in-forming tendencies constitutes a power of becoming, as opposed to being, that is not reducible to actual exercises of force. It is a life-driving force-beyond-force.

T83

Number, extracted, indexes quality. Quality, in-formed, indexes potential.

T84

This cross-indexing of quantity, quality, and potential, implicit in the concept of intensive magnitude, enables the force-beyond-force of the power of becoming to be mobilized.

Lemma a. This mobilization of the power of becoming is synonymous with ontopower.

Lemma b. Since the power of becoming is the power of the continuum, the mobilization must ultimately be of variety, of qualitative differentials. It must mobilize them in transindividual fashion, bearing directly on the dynamic fusion of the event. It must be transversal, concerned with the way in which the excess of potential carries across the individual contributing factors, to recoil up and down the levels composing the intensive magnitude, in a rhythm of dynamic fusion.

T85

It is conceivable that the force-beyond-force of the power of becoming (ontopower) can be mobilized in a way that makes possible an alter-economization that does not subsume surplus-value of life / surplus-value of flow under capitalist surplus-value.

Scholium a. Were this to be achieved, economization would be in the service of life-driving powers of becoming, rather than life-driving powers of becoming being in the service of accumulation.

Lemma. This would qualify the alter-economization as a counter-ontopower.

Scholium b. The fact that that power is not reducible to the exercise of force—that there is a force-beyond-force that can be alter-economized as a counter-ontopower––is critical to the revaluation of values: it points to the potential power of nonviolence (T99).

T86

In a counter-powerful alter-economy, surplus-value of life would retain its value for itself. Value would be revalued by the counter-subsumption of traditional (separative/applicative) systems of quantification under life-qualities, the latter affirmed for their pure experiential quality and for the in-formative role they play in the self-driving of life’s creative advance.

Scholium. This would capitalize on the primacy of the qualitative over the quantitative (T80), taking it back from its systematic captures: unchanneling it from them. This is the very meaning of the revaluation of values.

T87

Such a contrivance would constitute a creative process engine theoretically capable of sustaining itself economically.

T88

In order to fully avail itself of the potentials afield in today’s digital world, this invention of a creative process engine would involve a new kind of digital platform.

Scholium. The potential afield in today’s digital world pivots on the internet’s powers of nonlocal contagion and amplification, which can intensify powers of becoming stirring in the pores of the capitalist field. This can be for better or for worse (the alt-right). The inclusion in the toolbox of alter-economic counter-ontopower of digital platforms must be carried out with utmost care, and for nontechnical (qualitative, ethico-aesthetic) reasons, rather than out of any technological messianism, fascination with gadgetry, or reflex fallback to a default position. Exploring a technological avenue is a fraught proposition, but it would be simply foolish (an archaism without a contemporary function) to ignore the potential in the name of “real” sociality. Real sociality is as well-founded a concept as the “real” economy.

Lemma. New systems evolving out of the blockchain, beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum, could provide a propitious digital environment for alter-economic experimentation.

T89

The reason that the adoption of this vector of digital design of the platform would have to be carried out with utmost care is that certain regressive tendencies, of an anarcho-libertarian cast, were designed into the original blockchain concept. These tendencies have to be counteracted.

Scholium. Ideologically, the development of the blockchain was closely associated with libertarian market fundamentalism (Golumbia 2016). Not only is the conventional threefold definition of money uncritically assumed, underplaying the speculative side of cryptocurrencies (T23), it is further assumed that economic activity comes in discrete units of action. Each such unit is a transaction between two individuals. The transaction is entered into according to each individual’s calculus of its own self-interest. The freeing of the market from the control of the banks and national governments is thus little more than a transactionalist (Iocanesi 2017) liberation of self-interest. The blockchain is a technical distillation of the ideology of individual self-interest that is one of the major tendencies in-forming capitalism. It takes capitalism’s basic market ideology and tries to purify it, and objectify that purification in a technical system. It radically reinforces the concept of the market that is at the heart of capitalism, along with the transactional exchange model that is central to the concept of the market.

Lemma. Anarcho-libertarianism is anarcho-capitalism.

T90

Next-generation blockchain-inspired platforms use smart contracts to expand the notion of what a transaction can be in ways that may be able to begin to counteract the libertarianism built into blockchain.

Scholium a. An example is the conjoint “Gravity” and “Space” cryptocurrency platforms under development by the Economic Space Agency (www.esca.io). The idea is that instead of blockchaining simple exchange transactions, transactions can be made programmable and thus infinitely customizable, extending to anything that could be conceived of as a contract. “Contract” is taken in its broadest and most basic definition, as a conditional engagement where one action (or set of actions) calls for a return action, either immediately or within a designated time interval. This need not involve an exchange per se, i.e., the use of a currency as medium of exchange and general equivalent. Any proposition for an if–then call and response between actions could be programmed. The actions also need not be individual. For example, a smart contract could specify a set of actions needed to prepare a collective project for taking a step forward in its process, and what will happen when those conditions come together. A simple example would be a collaborative film production, where smart contracts could be used to bring equipment, skills, and resources together for a shoot or a promotional campaign, and once the conditions are in place, trigger these logistical operations into action. They could also be used to organize collaborative input into the creative process of the film’s conception. Even more, smart contracts could be used to decentralize decision making by enabling propositions to be made and voted upon according to pre-agreed-upon protocols. Logistics, creative collaboration, governance, and the production of value would then be intertwined through a single platform whose running would be autonomous and distributed, dispensing with the need for an executive hierarchy overhanging the process and lording over its participants. In this way, a certain commons of productive activity would be created, with an ethos of collective collaboration and a certain instantiation of direct democracy. The overall system is designed to be customizable down to the lowest level, so that unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, projects can program a dedicated domain of operations embodying their particular orientations and priorities while at the same time remaining interoperable with the general cryptocurrency environment. With this, the DAO (distributed autonomous organization) evolves into the DPO (distributed programmable organization). With that evolution, the blockchain will have to give way to a more rhizomatic architecture, such as the “holochain” (https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/difference-blockchain-holochain/2017/11/02).

Scholium b. The film production example shows significant progress in overcoming the individualism of first-generation blockchain. At the same time, the limits of it are easy to see. As soon as there is a product, self-interest comes back into the picture. The film will be marketed and make money in the dominant economy. Each individual collaborating on the project will expect a share of the profit generated. This is still a capitalist project. The production is market oriented and is aiming for the generation of profit that, in the name of fairness, would have to accrue to the members of the collective according to a pre-agreed protocol (also formalized in a smart contract). The lure of profit is a powerful attractor. It is a way of incentivizing that activates a plethora of ingrained capitalist—and tendentially individualist—attitudes and habits that could not fail to inflect what creative directions are taken, what propositions are made, and what decisions pass the vote. The creative film process would not be fulfilling itself only for the surplus-value of life it brought to the collaborators and the eventual viewers of the field. It will not be lived and enjoyed purely qualitatively, as a value in itself. In addition to producing surplus-value of life, it will also be lived for quantitative gain, and these two contrasting tendential movements might enter into potentially uncreative tension. The interference between the profit motive and the creative impetus, between collaborative energies and individual gain, would likely de-intensify the creative process by making its self-driving be driven by an outside goal.

T91

It may be possible for tokens to be used to expand cryptocurrencies beyond the conventional, individual, market-fundamentalist, transaction-based functions of money.

Scholium a. For example, instead of predesignating a certain share of the profit for each individual, individuals’ activity of creating and fulfilling smart contracts could be tracked by an accounting smart contract that allocates tokens based on how much someone contributes. The tokens could be in a cryptocurrency that interfaces with Bitcoin or national currencies, so that it could be cashed out. This could conceivably function even in the absence of a saleable end product. That would be possible if the cryptocurrency had a recognized value on the speculative cryptocurrency market, underwritten, as all currencies are ultimately in any case, by investor confidence. In other words, it would be backed by affect more than by a product-linked tie-in to the “real” economy. This would gain the collective practice a certain autonomy from the capitalist teleology of the marketable product, but would wed it to the speculative logic of the financial market, in its cryptocurrency incarnation, with all of the volatility that comes along with surplus-value of flow and its tendential levitation from the productive economy. The interference between incentivization by individual gain and the collaborative production of surplus-values of life would continue to be a factor. Tokens could also be used internally to the collaborative platform. They could be amassed and then “invested” in decisions. Propositions garnering the greatest number of tokens would get the go-ahead. This has two drawbacks. First, it sneaks back in the equation between labor-time and monetary value that lies at the basis of the capitalist exploitation of live activity: the reward of tokens would correlate to quantity of input actions, which would in turn correlate to the amount of time invested in them. Secondly, it would reintroduce structural inequality by channeling this capture of life-time into a re-hierarchization of the decision-making playing field. By putting your tokens on the table, you would essentially be buying unequal decision-making power with the capture of your contributed vitality.

Lemma. If it is possible for tokens to be used to expand cryptocurrencies beyond the conventional, individual, market-fundamentalist, transaction-based functions of money, this is something that is yet to be invented and will require a great deal of craftiness.

Scholium b. Alternative token strategies also tend to operationalize a form of value that has not been mentioned up to now, but is fundamental to capitalism: use-value. The praise of use-value is often sung in alter-economy communities as a way out of capitalism. This is dangerously naïve. Use-value, it is true, is qualitative: “it is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from it” (Marx 1976, 126). However, use-value only functions economically to the extent that it “metabolizes” as (is processually converted into) exchange-value (Marx 1976, 196–97). The threefold definition of money, and the correlation between quantity of labor-time and quantity of value, are complicit with use-value to the extent that it metabolizes as an economic factor. Measures may be taken to prevent use-value from fully metabolizing with exchange-value (as in skill-sharing networks and other sharing economies; T25). But nothing can prevent it from being haunted by money, the market, and the essentially extortionist correlation between labor-time and value. These slip back in in informal assessments of how “equal” or “fair” a sharing exchange had been, even if such assessment is discouraged. In addition, use-value is essentially normative. It is bound up with already-formed functions having conventional values in one or another systemic context (related to technical systems, productive industries, service industries, or cultural industries, with the definition of “use” varying by domain). By virtue of this systems-participation, a formed function carries a certain regulatory force, even outside its dedicated functional context, and in spite of the best efforts to break that link to power. How could the judgment of usefulness not carry such a force? All of this is part and parcel of the work paradigm so integral to capitalism (even where it is not in force in a full-fledged way as a work ethic). Tokens could theoretically be used in entirely different ways, potentially skirting around use-value, by adopting gaming models. However, gaming typically privileges a stimulus–response structure (as opposed to a creative call-and-response process) that re-performs the dominant economy’s individual transaction-exchange paradigm, even as it repurposes it for the production of a certain surplus-value of life: fun. Fun is a kind of surplus-value of life that is well-known to neoliberal capitalism and well-articulated with it, even to the point of playing a regulatory function in the life of human capital (spawning whole industries: the entertainment sector).

T92

The postblockchain cryptocurrency digital-platform route offers many avenues of response to the capitalist market, but the models now existing or under development so far are stuck in a game of whack-a-mole with it. With every blow against it in one place, the familiar myopic face of one of its constitutive principles pops up somewhere else.

T93

Although all manner of commons-centered, collective, collaborative models should be exploratorily pursued and concertedly experimented with, there is a need for projects attempting to go beyond the pale, to cross over today’s anarcho-libertarian horizon to new anarcho-communist vistas more intensely prefiguring the postcapitalist future.

Scholium. Only a project that operates, in its own processual arena, according to radically anarcho-communist, as opposed to anarcho-capitalist, principles has a chance of beginning to move beyond capitalist economization—and its attendant power formations—in a way that is maximally resistant to recapture. Intentional communities and autonomous enclaves are a traditional route for experimentation of this kind. Their limitation is that they are obliged for their survival either to opt out of the economy in a way that is rarely sustainable long term, or find ways to link back in through participation in the local economy or the creation of microbusinesses. They also tend to devalue processual excess, which expresses itself most intensely in surplus-value of flow, in favor of a regained rootedness in a regulatory ideal of “real life.” Their affective intensities often pool around figures of purist return: to “nature,” to “authenticity,” to true “community,” and to true activity (craft)—normative notions, all. Experimentation with alter-economic models employing digital currencies can potentially pioneer more sustainable and flexible ecological models, proudly impure and without return. Intentional communities and autonomous enclaves are a welcome element in an alter-economic ecology, as long as they are able to reconcile their dedication to local structure with open system. But they do not provide a general model for alter-economy.

T94

The invention of an anarcho-communist alter-economy would not only have to eschew the market as an organizing principle but conscientiously build in mechanisms to actively ward away the return of its constitutive tendencies.

Fabulation. Warding-away is a practice of conditioning (very different from causing, structuring, or systematizing). The list of necessary wardings-away is forbidding—or inspiring—depending on how you look at it. They are inspiring if they go hand-in-hand with a constructive set of speculative strategies for building an alter-economy. The strategies would bear on how conditions might be set in place that not only foster a creatively self-driving collective process but also imbue that process with immanently lived criteria, so that a participatory evaluation of the two aspects of the ethico- and the -aesthetic is performed flush with the self-running. The lived criteria, once again, are transindividual intensity and the processual quality of the process’s tendential direction. The conditioning strategies weave together into a speculative fabulation of what a collectivist postcapitalist economy might involve. They are fabulatory techniques of relation: a speculative-pragmatic "pseudo-narrative" (Guattari 2014, 37–38). In exceedingly cursory sketch form:

Speculative strategy a. Use-value. The concept of function needs to be replaced with the more plastic concept of operation, making clear that the operativity is processual. That means that the system remains constitutively open to emergent potential, in-formed by the differential play of tendencies. This involves operationalizing the immanent outside.

Speculative strategy b. Fun and games. The differential play of tendencies should be just that: play. Gaming models might enter into the larger field of play, especially if they privilege collective action rather than revolving around individual inputs. But they would not define the relational space overall. Play is a more encompassing concept than gaming. Play can take up into itself a heterogeneity of affective intensities. These are really produced through the artifice of “make-believe.” However, they are produced in an arena where the normative contexts in which they are conventionally found are under suspension (Massumi 2014c), so that the affective intensities are staged independently of their capture by function (playing pirates, for example, does not involve being at sea or making someone actually walk the gangplank—but the players have to feel that this is being done). This skirting around use-value allows the unfolding of the intensities to undergo emergent modulation. Play is an operative tendency connoting a processual openness. Events “play out” as their constitutive tendencies unfold. Systems have “play” as they test their limits. Techniques of play-relation are a serious domain for the exploration of alter-unfoldings. These may be staged in such as way as to carry an exemplary force for export to extra-play contexts, introducing a margin of play into them that allows them to test their tendential limits. Don’t make political platforms. Make play political. Make play, not ideological programs.

Speculative strategy c. Work. The assumption that participation is work would be displaced by building in interactions that have an improvisational edge to them. Having an improvisational edge is what defines play. Play should not be confined to any already-recognized arena conventionally designated as a play space within the existing norms of society. Play deploys to intensest effect in temporary autonomous zones. In addition to the multiplicity of affective intensities produced as it unfolds, participation in an improvisational interaction creates a global surplus-value of life that is lived qualitatively as a value, and comprises such sub-surplus-values as zest, beauty, wonder, and adventure. These are expressions of Spinozist joy. They accompany the becoming-more-intensely-affirmative of life-formative forces. For Whitehead, the intensity of becoming—“adventure toward novelty”—is the highest “civilizational” value (taking the word “civilization” with a large grain of twenty-first-century salt; Whitehead 1967, viii). To the extent that the collective production of improvised surplus-values of life self-drives an alter-economy, those surplus-values might be called, tongue firmly in cheek, adventure capital. Adventure capital, having to do as it does with the affirmation of a life-quality, is a directly aesthetic form of value.

Speculative strategy d. Labor-time. No correlation would be built in, or be allowed to develop, between input of time and production of value. In the postcapitalist future, time is not money. It is life. The best way of warding away the time = money equation is to keep the sense of value focused on emergent effects that add up to more than the sum of their parts and that are valued, in the currency of direct experience, for their incommensurability with their causal input or conditioning factors. This leveraging of emergent effects is precisely what is meant by improvisation. Improvisation is another word for free action: life-activity unsubsumed by the use-value of existing systematic functionings and the work model that goes along with them. The techniques of relation fostering free action combine for a pragmatics of the useless. The useless is pragmatic in that it may prefigure the invention of new operations, from which new functions might emerge that were unthinkable within the terms of existing systems.

Speculative strategy e. Individualism. Internal to the process, there would be no division into individual shares. This means that on the inside there would be no unitization of value, in terms of currency or other forms of tokens. This is done to safeguard improvisation, which is never a question of individual creativity. It is always a playing out of a differential field. The field includes suprapersonal factors—habitus, collective memory, cultural allusions, genres, genders, plus any number of nonhuman factors that prime the field and can serve as cues or contingent triggers—as well as infrapersonal factors (the dividual). The latter pertain to the co-motion of bare-active tendencies vying to take hold of the body as a vehicle of their own expression, and to increase their power to self-perform by composing with other tendencies, differentially affecting more than one body in concert through an emergent collective attunement to the stirring tendential potential. Improvisation, looked at in this way, is a transindividual machinic subjectivity, or subjectivity-without-a-subject. It operates by synergy and the fusion of a multiplicity of moves into the continuity of a transition. It expresses itself in and as an emergent collectivity marshaling the power of a continuum whose fusional taking-form cannot be reduced to the sum of its participating individuals.

Speculative strategy f. Product. No product separate from the process would guide the process teleologically. Emergent collectivity would be valued as the product. By emergent is meant that its taking-form is an event-form. This would be an occurrent value. The events might answer to any number of already-existing arenas, with which they link transversally, resonate at a distance with, or which they parasitize. Art, education, and activism are the key examples. Products might well be produced—artworks, films, books, participatory learning platforms, aesthico-political activist interventions—but they would not be treated as the product. The product would be the continuing of the creative process. Any products other than the self-driving of the creative process engine would be experienced as happy incidentals. A directly collective product of the highest importance would be the spinning-off, from the self-formative movement of the process itself, of exemplary techniques of relation. These would be ways of conditioning, triggering, and sustaining emergent collectivity. Techniques of relation would be stored as process seeds that could be replanted to move the process through another iteration. They could also be gifted to other collective processes. Their collection would be the only store of value that would animate the process. It would amount to a store of potential. The techniques would be at the same time action traces of past events and forerunners (preaccelerators) of future creative variations on them. They would be a qualitative index of the power of the process to turn itself over into its own continuance. In other words, they would index the power of its continuum. The actual items stored might take the form of suggestive action recipes, improvisational event scripts, or supports that could be used for repriming process. This could include preservation or documentation of the conditioning factors that went into past events (materials, images, sounds, words, concepts, code, media). Their collection would constitute an archive, the more multimedia in nature the better. The processual potential they indexed, as it turned over to reanimate the process in new variations, would constitute an anarchive (Murphie and Senselab 2016): an excess-over the archive fueling the continued self-production of the process as an autonomous subjectivity-without-a-subject. The anarchive is a surplus-value of storage. Through its anarchiving, the emergent collectivity would grow and prolong itself into a singular varietal culture.

Speculative strategy g. Accumulation. There would be no drive to accumulate anything other than techniques of relation and the archival elements fueling the anarchive. The digital platform involved would be open source, freely available for uptake and adaptation. The process seeds would not be proprietary. They would be meant to disseminate. This would make the project an open, dissipative system. Although it would tend toward its own continuance, it would not be afraid to die, either by its own potential-crunching volatility going off-kilter or by extreme success (exhausting the pool of potential it was effectively conditioned to mobilize). Even in death, it would live on in the process seeds it disseminated. Self-preservation would not be its aim. This willingness to risk itself would safeguard its quality of adventure, and prevent it from becoming an institution: an apparatus of capture driven by a will to systematically reproduce itself, rather than processually spin off qualitatively different versionings of itself, free to go wild. It would dedicate itself to rewilding, not reproduction. This is an aspect of the process’s anarchic disposition.

Speculative strategy h. Incentivization. There would be no incentivization by promises of quantifiable individual gain. The adventure of the ongoing collective self-improvisation would be its own incentive. The process itself would serve as a qualitative attractor for emergent-collectivity production. Attractors orient activity, immanent to a process’s self-running, rather than subordinate it to goals or preprogrammed results imposed from without. They operate by purely affective means. They do not goad, discipline, channel, obligate, or obviate. They lure. They do not premold or premodel results. They stir up self-driving tendencies predisposed to move in the direction they indicate, their attractive power inflecting them en route into producing variations on themselves. They are leaveners of event-based taking-form. Attractors are lures for the autonomous self-expression of creative process. They are echoes of futurity in the present, drawing tendencies out of the past into new adventures. They are an ever-present future-dimension of event-conditioning. They prompt tendencies to outdo themselves (exceed their own slavish repetition).

Speculative strategy i. The digital. The digital merits inclusion on the list of dangers to ward off to the extent that it lends itself to forming social or cultural bubbles fearful of the outside, or embodies a transactionalist exchange model (Strategy j). A digital platform is necessary, of course, to implement a cryptocurrency (T95). But if the digital platform is considered the process, rather than a platform of relation through which the process phase-shifts, a closed culture, and the accompanying entropy, can quickly set in. The digital platform would be conceived as a pivot for the process, spinning off creative energies into offline collaborative events. The archival action-traces of the events would be returned to the online archive. They would then be dynamized by procedures, both automated and manual, designed to render them anarchival: apt to reactivate as forerunner conditioning factors for events to come. The offline events would be where the surplus-value of life would be most intensely lived. The self-affirming value produced by the process would revolve around the production of embodied surplus-value of event. The digital platform would be the technical engine of the creative process, but not its experiential heart. The relation between the digital platform and the offline events spinning off from it would be transductive. By transductive is meant the continuing of a process across phase-shifts moving the process from one qualitatively different differential field of emergence to another, each hosting their own qualitative differentials and manners of taking-form.

Speculative strategy j. Transactional exchange. Smart contracts would be used internally for easing into the collaboration and communicating the relational ethos of the varietal culture to newcomers. They would not be contracts in the traditional sense, but more like process movers. For example, they could be used as gateways that organize a participant’s getting to know the process and being welcomed into it. This would avoid the heavy-handed disciplinary gesture of requiring acquiescence to a formal set of rules as a condition of entry (the widely used strategy that is the digital equivalent of the outmoded “social contract” so much a part of liberal democracy). They could also be used to crystallize activity and attention around emergent propositions, and to nudge them over the threshold into an eventful taking-form. In this capacity, they would replace the formal “governance” structures built into blockchain and postblockchain projects, even the most alter-economic in inspiration. There would be no membership, no formal vetting of newcomers, and no structured-in unequal distribution of power (for example, between newcomers and oldtimers, even founders). The danger of trolls and willful destroyers would be assumed as a risk of adventure. Again, if the project died for lack of adequate immune response to these threats, its disseminative nature would mean it could always reseed itself elsewhere. It would be designed to be self-grafting, rather than self-preserving and self-reproducing. The fusional process driving it would carry fissile potential.

Speculative strategy k. Decision. There would be no formal decision making, whether consensus-based or voting-based. This would be at the heart of the anarchistic aspect. Consensus-based decision making has been experimented with for many decades among alternative political and social movements and has been resurgent in recent years in the assembly-based movements coming out of the Arab Spring and Occupy. Conceived as a form of direct democracy, often under the anarchist banner, in practice it easily leads to paralysis: the despotism of the most cantankerous or the least adventurous. Since an individual (or in “consensus-seeking high majority rule” models, a small minority) can block any action, it usually leads not to anarchic adventure and effervescence, but to least-common-denominator ennui. This is not so different from the net effect of traditional majority-rule voting, which weeds out exactly the kind of outlier tendencies that an anarchic process needs to fold into its varietal culture and nurture, encouraging them to unfold and carry themselves to their highest power, in self-acting relational autonomy. Voting destroys collective process (except those whose systematic reason for being is the exercise of normative regulatory power). It stages a simulacrum of collectivity, requiring that individuals act utterly alone at the same time. What that yields is not an emergent relational spin-off effect, but a statistical aggregation-effect. This is a use of quanitification procedures that is pronouncedly de-creative. In an anarcho-communist process, decision making would be truly self-organizing. The positive orienting power of attractors would be used. Decisions would be lured into self-organizing. Anyone would be empowered to throw down a lure, in the form of a proposition for a gathering of the collective energies. Any decision resulting would be affective and improvisational rather than deliberative and procedural. If the lure fell on fertile ground and succeeded in gathering creative momentum, the proposition would move over the threshold toward actualization. This would require that propositions be offered in the spirit of a gift, without the obligation of payback: the gift freed from the dialectic of the countergift. This willingness to offer without a guarantee of return would be the core quality of the processual ethos. It would qualify the process as, fundamentally, a participation-based gift economy. The generosity expected would not be styled as a personal character trait, but as a quality of the collective process moving the individual, and moving through the individual: a surplus-value of care. No assumptions would be made about “human nature” and whether it is fundamentally “good” or “evil” by normative standards. Such debates are beside the processual point. The ethical quality of the process would pertain not to the individuals per se, but to the nature of the subjectivity-without-a-subject embodied in the always-emergent collectivity. The process would leverage the power of the impersonal (native to the immanent outside). The possibilities for distributed agency offered by interactive digital platforms are key to mobilizing the self-organizing, anarchic potential of surplus-value of care. The mechanism for the self-organizing of decision would hinge on a collective attunement on the part of the participants to the moments when the process is felt to be reaching a threshold where a proposition is ripe to tip over into its actualization in an event. An algorithmic means would have to be found to register the fluctuations in the affective intensity composed by the tendencies in play, in order to make the approach to these tipping points palpable. In other words, a digital affect-o-meter registering intensity would have to be invented.

Speculative strategy l. Humanism. The operationalization of the subjectivity-without-a-subject expressing itself in the iterative taking-form of emergent collectivity would be a processual rebuttal of humanism. Humanism’s focus is on the individual (bourgeois) person as the beginning and the end of all that is considered to matter in life. Anarcho-communist process would be transindividual: linking infrapersonal tendencies to superpersonal factors. It would be more-than-human. Here also, the digital platform can assist. Processual operators (basically, glorified bots) could be used to introduce strategic doses of contingency and whimsy into the interactions. These would be relational, both in the sense that they would be responding to qualitative differentials tendentially churning in the interactions, and in the sense that they would operate as cues or triggers that might modulate the interaction consequent to their intervention in ways that were not anticipatable, thus bringing less accessible potentials into relief. These fabulatory creatures would act as punctual potential-churns, introducing a nonhuman element of play. Their ability to play to creative effect would depend on their being tied to algorithmic analysis running in the background that would be capable of detecting and indexing creative differentials constituting qualitative tendencies. This requires effectively turning the tables on quantity, committing quantitatively based (digital) analysis to the mining not of numbers or statistics per se, but of qualitative potentials: a not derivative-unlike convergence between quality and quantity (T46), shorn of the drive to accumulation. The success of the affect-o-meter involved in decision-tipping would depend on this as well. What would be needed is what Nora Bateson has called “warm data,” in her call for the development of techniques for harvesting “transcontextual information about the interrelationships that integrate a complex system” (Bateson 2017). The invention and operationalization of warm data is absolutely fundamental to the entire economization project. The process could only create an economy that did not end up resubsuming surplus-value of life under the drive for economic surplus-value if ways are found of indexing qualitative potential by quantitative means without annulling it. The economization would have to run on affective intensities affirmed for their own value. When this is achieved, the very nature of measurement will change. Now snaking through the coils of the process, integrated into its most intimate operations, measurement has been converted into a qualitative conditioning factor, so dynamically entangled with the creative process as to contribute to changing the nature of what it measures: it becomes a dimension of the qualitative becoming running through the creative process engine. This would carry to the limit the convergence financial derivatives tend toward in the name of accumulation, falling short because of that. Existing qualitative analysis tools might be conscripted to the task, to which machine learning might also be adaptable. The economization tools would also have to pivot on suprapersonal and infrapersonal movements, and the differentials between them, rather than centering on inputs, opinions, or tendencies attributable to individual humans. All analysis would have to be carried out in keeping with the transversal modus operandi of the process and the transindividual ethos in-forming it. A critical concern would be to register the way in which subtendencies have insisted on themselves, even if they were not brought to full expression. A surplus of anarchival potential is found in the differential between these un-self-accomplished subtendential insistencies and the global emergence-effect they contributed to, if only in the way they ended up being skirted around or thwarted (the way in which they were “negatively prehended,” Whitehead would say, recalling that negative prehension “expresses a bond”; 1978, 41). These also-rans constitute a horde of leftover forerunner potentials that can be reactivated to make an eventful difference. They lurk in the process, and can be brought back to bear. Hording, not hoarding.

Speculative strategy m. Privatization. For there to be no accumulation, there would have to be no private ownership within the project. No appropriation. There would be no distribution of individual shares of any kind. Any economic value spun off would be returned to the collective process. This is the communistic aspect.

Speculative strategy n. Purity. The order of the day would be creative duplicity. Purity, and the sense of personal moral superiority that goes along with it, would not be a factor. Since all of this would be happening in a pore of the dominant society, it would be necessary for the project to find ways of processually coupling with the existing economy in order to sustain itself. Even more importantly, it would couple with other alter-economy projects operating along different lines, as well as alternative political movements of all kinds, including the burgeoning activist peer-to-peer world (https://p2pfoundation.net). The project would be a collaborative partner in an ecology of powers. Its creative process engine would function as a driver of primary resistance disseminating tendentially postcapitalist process seeds into its surrounding fields, with which it strives to enter into mutually beneficial symbiosis, all the while feeding off the dominant capitalist economy where needed, rather than feeding it, awaiting a tipping point to be reached where the alter-economic web were capable of taking over from capitalism.

T95

The crucial question is: How can a creative process engine that stays true to its mission of producing surplus-value of life for its own sake at the same time style itself an economization process capable of interfacing with the dominant economy in self-sustaining ways? That kind of complicity will be necessary transitionally, as the postcapitalist pores of the current society take the time they need to dilate and merge into an alter-world of their own. The only way this might be possible, if the present analysis holds, would be by exploiting the two-sidedness of intensive magnitude: the way in which the qualitative and the quantitative embrace each other without touching, while taking flight together in the caduceus of intensive magnitude.

Fabulation. Say that algorithmic techniques were found to index potential. What they would register would be qualitative differentials preaccelerating emergent tendencies. This would require a mode of mathematization beyond counting and statistics. The count of tendencies is largely irrelevant for processual purposes, for the simple reason that the potential in-forming them is supernumerary. To get at this supernumeracy of potential, the quantitative analysis involved would have to bear on differentials as such: spreads, contrasts, ratios, frequencies, distributions, vectors converging and diverging, varying distances. The qualitative characters of the items in the online archive (images, sounds, words, etc.) would be analyzed to extract these differentials in ways designed to be indicative of fluctuating relation. This would put the machinic finger on the pulse of the power of the continuum (T78 Schol. b) as it is in-forming a taking-form destined to separate itself out from the flow as an evental drop of processual experience. The aim would be to register the anarchival movement of surplus-value of life at the emergent level. One possibility (doubtless there are many) might be that the differentials would be rendered in the form of a topological figure that would fold into new shapes each time the pulse was taken. From the torsions of the figure, vector values could be extracted that would register the fluctuations of the affective intensities coursing through the online interactions over time. This would amount to a derivative measure of process, indexing the flow of creative activity, treated as an intensive magnitude. To ensure that the measurement captures the creative advance, certain passages across thresholds of taking-form could be given special weight: tipping points where a proposition gels, where a proposition passes into offline actualization, and where the action-traces of actualized events are returned to the online platform to further the anarchive. This is where, pragmatically, the two-sidedness of intensive magnitude comes in. Internal to the online platform, the creative process engine would continue as usual, using its suite of relationally oriented smart contracts, processual operators, and other tools, oblivious to the mathematical harvest going on in parallel. The mathematical indexing would parallel the magmatic flow of the creative advance. It would render, into a quantifiable expression, the power of its continuum as it peaks and irrupts in discrete relational events of collective experimentation, to continue its turnover across them. From the outside perspective, refracting the quantitative expression that has been extracted from the process back onto it, this “magma” of event-potential could be looked upon differently: it could be thought of as an un-unitized money mass. Say there is a cryptocurrency associated with the project. The quantifications of the fluctuations of creative potentials taking-form could be used to “mine” units of the currency. A certain number of units of currency would be minted at regular intervals, indexed to the magmatic flow and its irruption into eventful takings-form. Call the cryptocurrency “Occurrency” (in keeping with the evental nature of the project). Occurrency would not be used internal to the creative process engine. There would be a digital membrane separating the creative collaborative process from its minting of conventional economic values and, through them, its participation in the larger economic environment. Occurrency would lurk on the outside the membrane, paralleling the qualitative value-producing process as its quantitative flipside. On this side, the aspect of intensive magnitude that lends itself to quantification would be operative. Internally to the process, it would be the other side of intensive magnitude—where it dips into the playing-out of potential composed by qualitative differentials—that would be operative. The membrane would exist only to manage the two-sidedness of intensive magnitude, operating as an economizing filter. The continuum of magmatic potential would filter through the membrane, appearing for that purpose as a money mass undergoing unitization. The unitization would convert the inside flow of the process into an outside (oc)currency. Outside the membrane, Occurrency would fulfill the threefold function of money. This economization membrane would be the only way in which the creative process engine would be enclosed. In other respects, the process would be radically open—to new participants, to the external world of offline events, and to the immanent outside of creative potential. Occurrency would be liminal in relation to the creative process engine, and interstitial in relation to other alter-economic spaces. The creative process engine would exist in an environment of other alternative “economic spaces,” each with their own dedicated cryptocurrencies operating along whatever lines their collective, commons-oriented projects required. Each currency would be convertible into a surrounding currency that would be interoperable with all of them. Call it “Space.” The economic spaces would buttress each other: each would contribute a portion of the value they minted to the spaces around it, encouraging cooperation. The environment would be designed for symbiosis rather than competition. To complete the complex open system design of the environment of alter-economic spaces, there might be an underlying cryptocurrency that Space would link with. Call it “Gravity.” Gravity would participate in the burgeoning cryptocurrency market, providing an outlet through which the economic spaces cohabiting the alter-economic environment could interface with Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies, or national currencies, using Space as a transitional medium. This would create the possibility for the Occurrency minted by the creative process engine to be converted to cash value, on an as-needed basis. In this way, the project could provision itself with the goods and services it had no choice but to source from the dominant economy, but which it needed to fuel its self-driving on its own processual terms (travel, food, and accommodation for participants in the offline events, materials, etc.). The resulting economy would be an economy of abundance, because its “underlying” would be activity, and the activity, though fluctuating, would be ongoing. It would be the force of its continuing that would be harnessed. The economization would bear on the power of the continuum: a self-renewing plenum of subjective becoming, rather than an objective scarcity of resources. It is important to note that the rendering of warm data registering the movements of magmatic potential toward a determinate taking-form (an emergent decision) could be given a double expression. Inside the alter-economic space, on the platform, it could be visualized (or audiovisualized or otherwise figured) to form an affect-o-meter (T94 Strat. k) following the qualitative-relational flow in real time, or in periodic refreshings of the figure. This registering of fluctuations in the affective intensity indexing the playing out of tendencies would be an aesthetic accompaniment to the process, in the process: an immanent accentuation-differentiation of it. In a word, it would be an affective resonator. It would co-condition emergent takings-form by making the ebb and flow of the process immediately palpable. This could potentially activate the collective sensing of formative thresholds, and push them over the edge into becoming tipping points (immanent decisions). By this device, the quantification apparatus moving the process outward would converge with the creative advance of the collective qualitative becoming on the inside. The monetization occurring through the passage through the membrane would appear on the outside as the economized tip of the creative iceberg. The process would effectively bifurcate. Crucially, the bifurcation point would be twofold. It would be double-actioned: the unitizing quantification would filter the process out into its monetarization outside the membrane, while at the same time, as a function of the same registering of qualitative differentials, the affect-o-meter as immanent decision-making aid would be folding the process integrally back into itself. The process would be simultaneously refracted outward and fed it back into to its own immanent inflections, in synchronous oscillation. This would produce a single, two-way movement, on the one side toward a countable expression of magnitude, and on the other back into intensity. The complementary relation between the monetary refraction without and the self-advance of the process taking another creative turn within would be the source of confidence in Occurrency. It would “commensurate” the qualitative production of surplus-value of life that is the continuing life of the process with the monetary surplus-value spun off from it, so that the outside exchange-value of Occurrency both within the ecology of alter-economic spaces and (through Gravity) on the general cryptocurrency market would be perceived as an effective “pricing” of the “underlying asset”—which is, paradoxically, the very project of producing the incommensurable. The overall strategy would be to make the process an effective paradox (playing creative duplicity to the hilt).

Fact. The SenseLab (www.senselab.ca) has been working on just such a project since early 2016, in collaboration with the developer of Space and Gravity, the Economic Space Agency (ECSA). The creative-process engine is called the Three Ecologies Process Seed Bank (named after the book by Félix Guattari; 2014). The offline events will power an alter-university project called the Three Ecologies Institute. Like the SenseLab, the 3E Institute will operate at the intersection of art, philosophy, and activism. Its aim is to evolve collaborative techniques of relation for the collective valorization of forces of primary resistance. Its only product is the process of emergent collectivity. The ideas contained in this manifesto were developed through this project, in dialogue with a network of alter-economic thinkers in and around the Economic Space Agency. The orientation of the concepts, and in many cases their content, has been strongly in-formed by the collective making-thinking process of the SenseLab and would not have been possible without it. This particular articulation is just one among many churning in the creative cauldron of the ongoing 3E project. It does not represent a consensus (just one proposed suite of attractors) and will undoubtedly change significantly through the evolution of the collective process. Much will depend on whether the speculative adventure of inventing digital techniques for numerically expressing the play of qualitative differentials in the way just described pans out, and on the creation of a functioning affect-o-meter associated with those techniques. Much will also depend on how successful ECSA proves to be in its speculative adventure of reinventing the blockchain and smart contracts without slipping past creative duplicity vis-à-vis Silicon Valley startup culture into creative process–destroying compromise with its neoliberal and libertarian DNA. The SenseLab is hedging these potential bottlenecks by prototyping offline, analogue versions of all of the qualitative-relational operators that would compose the proposed digital platform. In fact, the digital operators are modeled to begin with on analogue strategies experimented with throughout the SenseLab’s fifteen-year history (Manning and Massumi 2014, 83–151). This builds in a margin of play in the form of platform-independence, and militates against code-fundamentalism or techno-utopianism. Crypto-failure could still topologically morph into Three Ecologies success. This is not a technological project; it is a life project.

T96

Although there is no room for purism, given the reality of complicity and the need for creative duplicity, it is crucial, in order to maintain course toward the postcapitalist future, to make room for an extremist or maximalist tendency—a limit-case attractor set that is not afraid to engage with the processual mutation that is financial capital and grapple with its new technological crypto-avatars, while implementing, in as intense and comprehensive a way possible, strategies for warding off the unwanted return of market functions, prefiguring to the greatest extent presently possible a postcapitalist future.

Scholium. The account presented here is intentionally extremist in its insistence on keeping the traditional definition of money and the individualist presuppositions of liberalism and libertarianism out of the heart of the alter-economization process by exploiting the two-sidedness of intensive magnitude. The membrane segregates the unitization/monetization necessary for interfacing with the dominant economy from the mode of operation of the creative-process engine in its own right. This is designed to shelter the purely qualitative economy growing in the tendentially postcapitalist pore of the field of life constituted by the project from creeping capitalist recolonization, while enabling it to indulge in life-sustaining practices of creative duplicity. The maximalist orientation of the present account is not meant to serve as a model. This would return to normative regulation. Rather, it is meant as a lure encouraging alter-economic experimentations to stretch their tending over the capitalist horizon toward vistas that are not yet in view, and can barely as yet be thought possible. Its function is to serve as a tensor to the postcapitalist beyond: a kind of probe-head to the future-impossible. The whole notion of running an actual economy on affective intensities affirmed purely for their qualitative surplus-value of life may well prove impossible. There is a palpable edge of madness to it. But if the oft-repeated phrase that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism captures our contemporary condition, then a touch of madness and concerted lure to the impossible is exactly what is needed if the end of the world is to be avoided—and the way we are going, it is looking likely that the end of the world will coincide with the end of capitalism, through capitalism’s own madness: its predicating its process on endless growth (which is how it figures the future-impossible that it destructively takes as its lure). The creative process engine envisioned here would not judge or oppose alter-economic spaces negotiating their creative duplicity differently, even in ways that reintroduce certain market features (such as tokens). It would enter into an ecology of practices with them. Cohabiting a symbiotic environment with them, it would act, by its very presence in their midst, as an ongoing anarcho-communist propaganda of the deed. Neither would it demand purism of the individuals participating in the project. No one would have to be “all in.” Straddling economic domains would be the rule. Ecologically speaking, a complex field of intertwined alter-economies of different kinds (sharing economies, gift economies, local currencies, collectivist intentional communities, etc.) would be the most robust. While the various pores grew and combined to form a complex, expanding, prefiguratively postcapitalist field, angles of continued participation in the dominant capitalist economy would likely be a necessity of survival for most participants. The alter-economic approach itself would enter into an ecology of practices with anticapitalist political movements choosing other grounds of action. Movements privileging the micropolitical (Massumi 2015b, 47–82) would be most symbiosis-friendly. Strategic forays into macropolitical interventions—approaches that are demands-oriented rather than prefigurative-process-oriented, and prescriptive/programmatic rather than affective/intensive—would not be shied away from on principle. Most of all, direct action tactics of refusal, blockage, and breakage would remain an essential ingredient, bolstering and defending movements of primary resistance. There would be no hard-and-fast principles, no top-down directive strategies. Pragmatism, with a view to the concertation of potentially confluent but irreducibly singular self-affirming movements, would be the order of the day—on the condition that it remained overall a speculative pragmatism tensoring toward the invention of a postcapitalist future. Different species of activism and intervention would cohabit an ecology of alter-powers, supported by a growing culture, fertilized by a relational ethos. The ideal: not purity, but creative duplicity, most ecological. Duplicity creatively practiced, not as an end in itself but as an impetus toward its own obsolescence, in approach to a global tipping point: a process-wide “turnaround” point performing the etymological meaning of revolution.

T97

The madness of basing an actual economy on affective intensities is not entirely without precedent (and may not be so mad as that).

Scholium. As discussed earlier, the financial markets, which have taken over the pilot function of the capitalist economy, run more on affect and intensification than on underlying economic “fundamentals” (T11 Schol. a; T46 Schol. b). In a sense, the alter-economic strategies advocated here are taking the most advanced sectors of the neoliberal capitalist economy not at their word (which is ambiguated by lip-service to outmoded classical-liberal economic rhetoric) but at what they do at their furthest processual reach: their own propaganda of the deed. If the financial markets can levitate themselves using affective intensities as the engine of their process, why couldn’t another kind of economy similarly bootstrap itself? One that does not just run on affective intensities but affirms them purely for the surplus-value of life they yield. One that refrains from brutally subsuming them under the profit-hungry quantification mechanisms driving capitalist accumulation. One that economizes alter-wise.

T98

If the revaluation of values expresses itself in an aesthetics of value-embodying creative adventure, it has to embrace beauty—while divesting it of its connotations of harmony.

Scholium. In the aesthetics of value, beauty would be a pure-quality word for an actualized quantum of value. As value-word, it would displace the profit-word. It would be the abstract figure of surplus-value of life. Adventure is the way beauty outdoes itself, in self-driving processual turnover. Thought of in tandem with the dynamic of adventure, beauty does not privilege the steady-state notion of harmony. Based on a play of qualitative differentials—irreducible contrasts whose tensions activate incommensurable tendencies—this kind of beauty would involve an unabstractable element of discord (Whitehead 1967, 257, 259–60, 266, 282–83). Traces of zest, adventure, and wonder troubling its pure quality would keep beauty processually honest. In the processual vitality they make felt, discord would be palpable. Dissensus—the unerasability of qualitative differentials and the incommensurability of co-motional tendencies—would be affirmed. A certain off-balancedness would accompany the process. It, also, would be affirmed. This would prevent a systemic self-satisfaction (reproduction) or structural entropy (stasis; anaesthesia) from setting in. Politically, the trick would be to prevent this constitutive imbalance from running the process aground. The process would have to be so conditioned as to metabolize dissensus, fusing its co-motion of tendencies into an iterative rhythm of creative advance, integrally expressing itself, in drop after drop of surplus-valued experience. The trick would be to make incommensurables compossible. This is precisely what an ecology does.

T99

Speaking processually, as well as ethico-aesthetically, the transition to a postcapitalist future is best achieved nonviolently.

Scholium a. Becoming-reactive is the epitome of ugliness—and violence breeds reaction. Violence is dissensual in a curtailing and destructive way, rather than creatively and metabolically. Discord as a processual virtue associated with beauty is mutually intensifying, not eliminative or limitative. If violence is used, it must first be converted into an affirmative force (Deleuze 1983, 70). The only thing to be eliminated is the becoming-reactive of forces.

Scholium b. Given the perhaps insurmountable difficulty of employing violence affirmatively, the revaluation of values would remain as tendentially nonviolent as possible. That means that nonviolence is practiced not on principle as a personally assumed moral imperative, but pragmatically as a transindividually enacted processual virtue.