T51

In general/reductive mode, as in a thermometer reading, quantifying capture and conversion index the conditions leading to the formation of an event-derivative as surplus-value of life, but do so in a way that peels off into other domains, where other orders hold, and other system circuits move. From the vantage point of this separation, it can fold back down. It can be applied and reconnect. This indicative-applicative operation of separation-connection is the mark of the second-order event-derivative.

Lemma. Second-order event-derivatives can also be called “degenerate” event-derivatives (in Peirce’s sense of that term).

Scholium. The surplus-value generated by a second-order event-derivative is of another order than that of surplus-value of life. The quantitative event-derivative effects a conversion from qualitative surplus-value of life to surplus-value of information. It is the anticipated ever-more of information that drives the production of knowledge. Surplus-value of information is the technical analogue of the surplus-value of life, which it parallels in another register, exploiting the same conditions of emergence. When the results of the quantification are reapplied in regulatory fashion to the field of emergence, another event transpires. The second-order derivative folds back onto the field of emergence to reprime it. This regenerates a primary event-derivative or surplus-value of life, and the cycle repeats. Since the application is generally reductive, and the channeling regulatory, the intensity of the reprimed surplus-value of life is lesser (it effectively envelops fewer contributory factors, straddles fewer differentials, covering less of a spread). The lesser intensity of the reduced surplus-values of life produced when second-order event-derivatives re-event themselves in the field from which they derived is what earns them the label “degenerate.” Peirce uses this word to denote a less intense mode of a category fundamental to process (for example, when a relation, or “thirdness,” can be decomposed into a triangle of dual relations, or a “secondness” can be understood as a collection of individuals, these are degenerate forms of their respective categories in relation to a nondecomposable integral of three, or so close an embrace between two that they cannot be separated without their natures being destroyed). Even financial derivatives feed the formation of second-order event-derivatives, when they derive profit and feed it into other forms of capital and sectors of the economy, thus registering the effect of their exemplary mutant flows in the mainstream economic numbers.

T52

Capitalist surplus-value continually spins off degenerate event-derivatives, and in a way that constitutes an exercise of power.

Scholium a. When the metrics associated with profit and capitalist surplus-value are reapplied to the field of life, the regulatory effect is the formatting of life as “human capital,” or the individual as entrepreneur of himself. Life activity is maximally channeled in keeping with demands of capitalism’s self-driving. Life activity becomes maximally subsumed under the capitalist process. The reductive effect is to convert the individual into an embodied quantum of capital, living to appropriate its own punctual profits (predominantly in the form of a yearly salary or an hourly wage). To the economic data-point there now corresponds a quantum of human life. The individual generates private profit, as part of a conversion cycle between its activity in the field of life and the system-wide quantification process. This conversion cycle drives the individual life as human capital. Ideally, the profit made is not all spent, but more importantly invested (in such forms as real estate and pension contributions). This feeds it forward into capitalism’s self-driving. The feedback between the drive of human capital and capitalism’s self-driving annexes the life of the individual to the capitalist process, as a quantized subset of it. It pools the individual life as an eddy in the great capitalist stream. The individual life is now a degree of capitalist power participating in capitalism’s systemic power to animate itself (its self-driving dynamism; its machinic vitalism).

T53

The capitalist process is a more-than-human subjectivity.

Scholium a. Something that has developed the systematic power to animate itself, that has a self-driving dynamism, that exhibits a vitality of becoming, qualifies as a subjectivity. A subjectivity is defined by its power to self-produce and vary. Subjectivities are always open systems. Their self-driving is self-relating: they phase through thresholds of transition across which they qualitatively vary. Each phase gathers up the last into its own ongoing, which is always already prefiguring, or better “preaccelerating” the next (Manning 2009, 5–7, 13–29). The phases are in a relation of differential mutual inclusion in nonlinear time, constituting a distributed, fundamentally noncognitive memory. The memory has two aspects: memory of the past (already realized potential stored in trace form) and memory of the future (the leftover of potential effectively fed forward for subsequent phases, preaccelerating them). The past memorial aspect is seen in capitalism in its motley preservation of formations from the past. This is important for understanding the heterogeneity of the power formations composing its ecology of powers, in which past formations are retained as “archaisms with a contemporary function” pressed, in one way or another, more or less directly, into the service of surplus-value production (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 240, 251, 257–58).

Lemma a. Subjectivities are composed by tendencies.

Scholium b. Tendencies are proto-subjectivities: they are self-driving and self-orienting. The tensions between the qualitative differentials composing the field of emergence govern tendencies.

Lemma b. Capitalism is a subjectivity without a subject.

Scholium c. In capitalism, there is no peak-level integration. Rather than peaking out or plateauing, capitalism’s self-integration no sooner weaves itself than folds back down into its field of emergence. It is in perpetual, self-relating processual turnover on its own conditions of emergence. In this perpetual subjective becoming, there is no subject “become.” To think otherwise would be to hypostasize process (as is done, for example, when “society” is treated as if it were a holistic actant, an existing entity over and above the individuals and other factors composing it; or when a complex, distributed, relational process is treated as a “hyperobject”). This principle must be applied to the concept of class as well. The “capitalist class” is not an entity. It is not a holistic actant. It is a distributed systems operator whose special calling is to field the turnover of the capitalist process around its own cyclic self-constitution.

Lemma c. What we call a subject is an integration of tendencies that is capable of being taken for and treated as a holistic actant. This is a matter of perspective.

Lemma d. Applied to the human subject, the more adequate perspective is to treat the individual as a dividual: a composition of proto-subjective tendencies in tension and concertation.

Scholium d. The individual human-capital subject is an integration of a differential array of subtendencies. At the same time, the multiplicity of human-capital subjects cohabiting the field of life are themselves subtendencies composing the higher-order integration of the capitalist system. The capitalist process moves through the levels. It is transsubjective and transindividual. If we restrict our attention to the self-consistency of the movements of becoming of a quantum of human capital (its phased self-driving, on its own level, as its own phenomenon), we are considering it as a subject. If we consider it from the point of view of the transsubjective movement of the capitalist process through it, we are seeing it as a fractal region of capitalism’s subjectivity-without-a-subject (that is, as a dividual). The expression of a subject’s fractality (dividuality) can be muted on its own level, creating the effective fiction that it is a discrete, separate entity. The job of discipline and morality is to model such effective fictions. They obscure the fact that, from the processual subjectivity-without-a-subject point of view, all subjects are transsubjective and transindividual. That is a necessary aspect of their composition, and a necessary dimension of their being in becoming.

Lemma e. There is no such thing as a peak-level subject. Accordingly, there is no such thing as a sovereign subject.

Lemma f. The role of affect as an “externality” immanent to and a formative factor in the capitalist field (T11) must be radically rethought in dividual terms, as a function of transindividual subjectivity-without-a-subject (Massumi 2014b).

Scholium e. The subject’s sandwiching between processual levels means that it is always in some way subsumed by the powers of integration moving through it. This means that the subject is an effect of power. It is the dependent effect of a higher integration. This is etymologically included in the word itself: sub-jacere, “under-throw.”

Scholium f. These considerations of subjectivity are crucial for the imagineering of the postcapitalist future, and for the design of alter-economy projects meant to preaccelerate it. They change everything when it comes to issues of decision and “governance” (a fetish word for alter-economy projects involving cryptocurrencies based on developments coming out of blockchain technology). The intersection between the subject and transindividual subjectivity-without-a-subject is the intersection between creativity and decision. Everything depends on how that intersection is finessed.

T54

In the ecology of powers, regulatory operations that implant norms into the field of emergence constitute exercises of biopower.

Scholium. Biopower exerts a force of normalization. It attempts to direct what is arising from the field of emergence down regulated channels. To succeed in revaluing value, fully reaffirming the differential intensity of the field of life, the postcapitalist future will have to decouple value from normativity. It will have to grapple with disciplinary power and biopower. However, this is a necessary but not sufficient condition, because:

T55

There are also postnormative, nonregulatory foldings-back onto the immanent outside that are less modeling or channeling than inciting. With them, power moves beyond biopower to ontopower (Massumi 2015a).

Scholium. Ontopower operates by preemption. Preemptive operations dip into the field of emergence, taking the co-motional potential stirring there as their object. This is potential that has not yet taken determinate form. It is flush with the field of emergence. There is a margin of indeterminacy as to which existing modes of existence it might feed, or what forms of life it may emerge into. It is proto-formal: still a formative force whose conclusion is not foregone. It remains highly charged with the force of futurity. Because of this ontological indecision, the form-takings that will eventuate are struck with a high level of contingency. This makes the pokings of potential by preemptive mechanisms far less directive than normative channelings. Preemption flushes out takings-form of life potential. It is incitatory, piggy-backing on the movements of emergence astir in the field. On the systemic level of neoliberal capitalism, these formative movements are captured in the fluid, eddying, ontogenetic (becomingful) form of human capital. There is much to be said about preemption that exceeds the limits of these theses. Suffice it to say that preemption cannot be glossed over, and also must be grappled with, through the invention of counter-ontopowers.

T56

With ontopower, power exceeds regulatory functioning. It is not for nothing that neoliberalism is obsessed with deregulation. Its power relation of human capital tends, at its intensest, toward the ontopowerful. Neoliberalism is integrally bound up with biopower (or rather, biopower is integrally bound up with it) but at its ontopowerful cutting edge, it is aspirationally postnormative.

Scholium a. An eddy of capital is just as self-driving, in its own small swirl of activity, as the capitalist economy as a whole. A quantum of human capital is actually less a separate subset than a fractal region. Since it is as manically self-driving as the overall movement that is the capitalist system as a whole, it runs on excess energies, and its excess energies can run away with it. The paradox of capitalism (speaking here specifically of neoliberal capitalism) is that its regulatory interventions in the field of life are wont to overspill, spinning off, as if by design, deregulated movements, even aberrant movements—escapes. Its exercises of biopower are applied as-if in order to overspill into ontopower. The regulatory force of the exercise of biopower gives the field of life a healthy modicum of stability that prevents the escapes from tipping over into irrecuperable crisis, or from heading off in postcapitalist directions. Ontopower takes processual precedence over biopower, with its intensified powers of production: its power to flush life out, inciting it into taking its own form, boosting it to self-produce as human capital (the word “produce” here takes on similar connotations as carried by the word “producer” in the entertainment industry). Human capital, at its intensest, is the most direct mode of capture of the movements of excess fostered by ontopower. Biopower is commonly defined as a power over life (operating statistically on individuals as biosocial beings, and especially on populations of biosocial beings). Ontopower is less a power-over life than it is a power-to generate a more of life, a more-than of life. This is another way of saying that it is ontogenetic, a power not over beings but of becoming as such. Rather than channeling movements in the field of emergence, it modulates the bare activity (T46) constitutive of the field. Neoliberal capitalism, through its regulatory interventions, multiplies norms. At the same time, it unleashes an overspilling of the norms through its formatting of life as human capital.

Scholium b. This can be seen in the endemic, systemic corruption neoliberalism fosters (Hardt and Negri 2004, 178–79), as exemplified in such fractal personifications of capital as the Martin-Shkreli quantum (and before that, the Michael-Milken) and the Donald-Trump quantum (and before that, the Sylvio-Berlusconi). But it can also be seen in a proliferation of the movements of escape of the kind discussed earlier, which take an unexpected turn and wind up affirming qualities of life as values in themselves, embracing primary surplus-value of life, out from under its subsumption. These mutant turns reconstitute an immanent outside that undermines the system, as a function of the very process feeding it.

T57

The movements of escape composing neoliberal capitalism’s immanent outside constitute a primary resistance to capitalism.

Scholium. The escapes that spin off from human capital involve the production of primary event-derivatives: an autonomy of creative advance, in immersive relation; an autonomous excess of relation releasing a quantum of ontopower unsubsumed by the capitalist process. Process rewilding.

T58

Notwithstanding the ubiquity and effervescence of movements of primary resistance that ontopower spins off, ontopower lies at the heart of neoliberal capitalism. It is what most characterizes it as a formation of power, as it lives itself out to its intensest, in pursuit of its aimed-at power-effect: the ever-intensifying economization of the field of life. Capitalism’s heart, paradoxically, lies at its limit, where its system re-processes.

Scholium. The capture of ontopower by preemptive mechanisms is the dominant mode of power under neoliberal capitalism, in the sense that it is the most intense, dynamic, and self-driving of its modes. Neoliberal capitalism builds itself on what systematically escapes it. For every quantum of autonomous creative advance, for every eventful quantum of primary surplus-value of life released, a corresponding quantum of capitalist surplus-value is prone to be captured for the system in the form of human capital. The two movements asymptotically converge in human capital, trending to its extreme. This word “extreme” is meant in the same sense as in the phrase “extreme sports”: as thriving on intensities of risk and moving-with volatility and the contingencies it throws up. Capture and rewilding go processually hand-in-hand.

T59

The antagonism between the rewilding of potential and its preemptive capture as human capital is the driving antagonism of capital under neoliberalism, replacing the contradiction between the worker and the capitalist (and pivoting on the creditor-debtor relation as arena of struggle).

Scholium. This is not to say that the worker-capitalist antagonism has disappeared, or that class is no longer a factor in neoliberalism. The still-ongoing struggle in the 2010s in the United States for the fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage, and the struggles over pension and health benefits playing out in such hot spots in the neoliberal wars as Wisconsin and Illinois in the United States, belie any such conclusion, as does the relentless push on the part of the Republican Party to increase the already gaping inequality in the system (Picketty 2014) by continuing to redistribute wealth upward to the richest tier, with the effective collusion of the Democratic Party (by its inability to offer an economic alternative). What it means is that the worker-capitalist dialectic can no longer be said to structure the capitalist field as a whole. This is precisely because it is an opposition, and oppositions are structural. Capitalism is not a structure. It is a system, constitutively open onto its immanent outside (ultimately, it is a process). An open, process-worthy system has no “whole” (“process-worthy” in the sense we say a ship is sea-worthy). It has global integrations of proliferating differentials. The integration emergently adds itself to the multiplicity of its conditioning factors, which it does not erase but rather supplements (“the many become one, and are increased by one”).

T60

Given the processual embrace between the escapes of primary resistance and the captures of human capital, there is no getting outside of complicity.

Scholium a. Because capitalism is effectively universal (potentially in force everywhere), piggy-backed on every move affirming qualitative surplus-value of life in and for itself, there is the potential for a corresponding capture of capitalist surplus-value. This, however, does not mean that everything we do is “in” the capitalist system, in the sense of being completely determined by it. There is no “all in” the capitalist system, precisely because its process dips into an immanent outside (T11) in order to capture the potentials brewing there. Capitalism is aspirationally all-taking. But that does not mean that everything is completely given to it. The origination of potential belongs to its immanent outside. As an open system, it is to its outside that capitalism owes its own, derivative, creative powers. The mechanisms of capture of the capitalist process must reach into the immanent outside in order to extract a profit, and to generate a quantum of capitalist surplus-value to self-drive the system onward to an ever-next extraction. Once again, there is always a remainder of potential left over after this operation. The operation is a capture of autonomy. The neoliberal individual is a pivot point for both the generation of movements of escape and for their capture. The individual under neoliberalism is powerfully complicit with capitalism by its very nature, and by the same token, it is in primary resistance to it, also by nature (by virtue of its dividuality and the transindividuality that runs through it).

Lemma a. Complicity is an ontological condition under neoliberalism. It cannot be avoided, but it is not all-defining. It should not just be critiqued. It should be practiced strategically, in ways aimed at always upping the ratio of escape over capture.

Lemma b. In working toward a postcapitalist future, the key is not critique.

Scholium b. Critique is important, but not as a policing of ideological or analytic correctness. In that role, it is a normative mechanism that goes against the grain of the creative advance of capitalism, but in exactly the wrong way: in a way that does not effectively connect to its processual nature. Because of this, it misses the boat. It is already outrun by capital before it even finishes touting its own correctness. Critique practiced as if it were a primary resistance is self-defeating. This does not mean that it has no role, just that its role is not the sovereign role it too often arrogates for itself. Its role is the more modest one of assisting movements of escape by helping them scout out the terrain of the field of emergence, and to shield them by responding to arguments aimed at disarming them. Critique can provide backup for their primary task of self-affirming their qualitative difference, of carrying themselves to higher, tendentially postcapitalist, powers. It cannot, and should not, direct them.

Lemma c. There is a need to embrace creative duplicity: emergent ways of strategically playing the ontological condition of complicity, to tendentially postcapitalist effect.

Scholium c. Don’t bemoan complicity—game it. Don’t critically lord it over others with your doctrinal prowess—get creatively down and dirty in the field of play.

Lemma d. Alter-economy projects need to consciously build in, and build on, creative duplicity.

T61

It is important to note that there are directly qualitative modes of normative power, and to build in resistance to these as well.

T62

It is even more important not to overestimate their power.

Scholium. Like the regulatory operations of biopower, qualitative modes of normative power figure importantly in the neoliberal ecology of powers. But the same thing has to be said of them as was said of worker/capitalist contradiction: they do not structure the capitalist field overall. Their dominance was a passing phase in the more-than human movement of capitalism, which has since undergone phase shifts carrying it into biopower, and beyond biopower into ontopower. This complicates what we mean when we speak of capitalist “oppression.”

T63

The most well-known and best-studied qualitative mode of normative power is disciplinary power.

Scholium a. Classical disciplinary mechanisms attempt to model individuals in conformity with a pregiven set of moral characters or ethical dispositions that ought to guide their life activity. This is a process of normation (the best example of which is religious inculcation). Very different is normalization (Foucault 2007, 56). With biopower, normation shades over into normalization, losing its claim to dominance. Biopower is often equated with disciplinary power, but it is important to offset it from classical discipline, not least because it operates at its core by quantitative means. It is best considered a transitional form between classical disciplinary power and ontopower. But this transitional character does not mean that it doesn’t have its own, self-affirming, qualitative difference. Under biopower, the norms are statistically derived, in a second-order quantitative treatment of the field of life that pools and systematizes the raw numbers. The results are reapplied to the field of life, through government and through the media, in the name of quality of life. Biopower is transitional in this sense as well, in that it explicitly combines a fundamental anchoring in quantitative analysis with a qualitative agenda. It attempts a double conversion, of the qualitative differentials of the field of life into statistical quantifications, and from these quantifications back into making a qualitative difference in that field. For example, the regulatory norms of healthy living are derived from measurement-data mined from the field of life and statistically processed. The results are then applied back down onto the field in a way meant to channel—rather than directly model—the population’s ways of moving through life, with the aim of improving their quality of life. This is a “channeling,” because even though the norms have a certain imperative force, they are not imposed wholesale. There is always a certain optionality to them. With regard to the individual, they are applied as guidelines or nudges (a concept that won Richard H. Thaler the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics; Thaler and Sunstein 2009). They are also applied environmentally, which is to say in ways that modify the surrounding conditions of life, so that the guidelines suggest themselves implicitly, and the nudges go without saying. Biopolitical norms touch on some of the most intimate and everyday life movements, tendencies, habits, and concerns of the population. To the extent that they insinuate themselves into the very warp and woof of the life environment, they tend toward a becoming-immanent to the field of life, thus shading into ontopower. The norms are not straightforwardly applied. Their application has a curve to it. The treatment of the data yields a curve capturing the distribution of variations occurring in the field. The region where most data-points fall is deemed the normal range. We’re talking bell curve. The normal range is not pre-given. It is derived, and it can change. It changes as the norms are reapplied to the field in ways that effectively channel life activity in what are considered healthier directions (or fail in that mission). The bell curve for things like heart health, the incidence of cancer, and life expectancy change, and the norms are adjusted accordingly. The bell curve also changes as escapes from the norm, such as the North American opioid epidemic of the 2010s, run away with a significant portion of the population and alters its morbidity and mortality. In disciplinary normation, on the other hand, the norm is meant not to change, because it is based on purportedly timeless moral qualities of uprightness, or in less rigid varieties, on ethical precepts of goodness. They do change, of course, as escapes inevitably pool together into streams of cultural change in spite of normation. But each successive classical disciplinary modeling acts as if this hadn’t happened, in denial of the fundamental fact of history (change).

Lemma. A rule-of-thumb guide: disciplinary power models, biopower channels, ontopower modulates.

Scholium b. This is only rule-of-thumb because in the capitalist field these modes of power form combinations and hybrids (T65, T66, T67 Schol. c). As part of the ecology of powers, they are under continual, intercorrelated mutation. Their ratios and degree of intensity are continually shifting. It is to be assumed, given any particular period or empirical formation, that it is a question of a distinctive mix with unique compositional characteristics. Within that composition, the modes of power commingle as so many constitutive tendencies, as much in tension as in concert (in differential confluence). A processual-ethical evaluation (T6 Schol.) of the heterogeneous tendencies, their tensions, and their manner of coming together in spite of their tensions is necessary to understand the force of the overall power dynamic.

T64

It is important to factor into the mix classical disciplinary modes of power because even though they are archaic in the sense that they had their heyday in an earlier historical age and no longer characterize the overall regime of power today under neoliberal capitalism, they are still very much with us. They are archaisms with a contemporary function.

Scholium. The contemporary function of resurgent normation is to try to moderate, if not stave off, the relativizing power of biopower’s normative drift and its segue into the deregulating drive of neoliberal capitalist ontopower. Even more so, their aim is to stanch the escape from capitalist ontopower back toward the primary resistance of self-rewilding surplus-value of life. The processual intensification—the increase in powers of self-driving, or autonomization—is a trauma and a horror to normativity. It is passionately an affront to normation-based modes of life. But it is not without its horror for biopolitical normativity as well, in spite of its becoming-environmental flirting with it. Normation-based archaisms with a contemporary function are reaction-formations to what neoliberal capitalism’s dynamism of creative destruction has unleashed. Such developments as the rise of the religious right in the United States, to name just one of the fundamentalist movements agitating all of the world’s religions (including of course Islam, and now even Buddhism, as seen in Myanmar), are reaction-formations against neoliberalism which take a moralizing route: the affirmation of other-worldly values underwriting a rigid image of the upright moral character.

T65

Liberalism, in the social or political sense rather than the narrow economic sense, is also, in its own way, an archaism with a contemporary function.

Scholium. Attempts to revive the figure of the individual as responsible member of civil society embodying norms of “pro-social” behavior (the “tolerant neighbor,” the “decent citizen”) are also reaction-formations to the quasi-chaos of the excessive self-driving of the capitalist process under neoliberalism. They are not as rigidly moral as their religious-right nemeses, but still qualify as disciplinary. They oppose a soft disciplinarity to the right’s hard discipline. They take the normative ethics route of inculcating a “good” disposition. Liberalism works by gently molding the character more than outright modeling it, as moralistic normation does. It appeals and appeases, strokes and pats on the back, to mold the social putty of the individual into the kind of well-regulated behavior in the public sphere that shores up the correspondingly well-regulated behavior of the liberal democratic state. Liberalism tries to stabilize the biopolitical bell curve by suspending quasi-disciplinary good-conduct weights from the top of the curve to prevent it from wobbling so much, and hold it better in place. The desired effect is to stanch the flow of primary resistance, channeling away from the radical temptation of extraparliamentary contestation and from the exuberance of the form of rewilding that goes by the name of queer, back into the well-oiled electoral wheels of the normative nation-state. The liberal nation-state is supple enough that it can try to coax these escapes back into its fold, by adding a special normative dispensation (for example gay marriage and other newly won, recognized rights) rather than out and out eradicating them. These are soft captures. Soft capture is the originality of liberalism, in its composing with discipline and biopower (liberalism does everything in its power not to recognize ontopower, but nevertheless co-composes with it through the normalization of the state of exception, which opens the door to the proliferation of preemptive mechanisms; Massumi 2015a). Liberalism, of course, composes with neoliberal capitalism, even as it works to attenuate its quasi-chaos (joining forces with human-capital narratives of personalization; T67 Schol. c). Its soft captures are, in effect, market extension mechanisms. They add to the neoliberal economy through the codification of new and proliferating niche markets. The originality of liberalism’s soft captures drives what creativity liberalism has left at this late date in it history. Around them, the escapes continue, and even proliferate. Liberalism leaks.

T66

The alt-right recognizes the archaism of both of these reaction-formations (liberalism and classical moralism), and with a vengeance. It counters them with a proto-fascism that has unpredictable powers of contagion.

Scholium. At its fringes, the alt-right is alienated from the “establishment” conservatism of the religious right (as ensconced in the “mainstream” wing of the Republican Party in the United States) as well as from liberalism, for whose softness it nurtures a special hatred, in no small part because of the way it makes room for new rights, and the proliferation of leaks it grudgingly tolerates. The alt-right is not conservative in any traditional sense. It is neo-reactionary: it embraces its role as a reaction-formation, and plays it to the hilt. It bears a special kinship with archaisms-with-a-contemporary-function operating with hard-discipinary normation—especially as regards the patriarchal model of masculinity. But it can in no way be reduced to those classical normative moralisms. The alt-right prides itself on its in-your-face “political incorrectness.” It tends to superimpose that model of dominant masculinity onto the charismatic leader, and the figure of the charismatic leader onto the head of state, and assimilate both to the everyday figure of the bully (Reid 2017). Its superimposition onto the nation-state structure annexes notions of ethnicity to the model of masculinity. The result is a racism as intense, if not more intense, than the misogyny that goes along with masculinist supremacism. The proto-fascist quality of this formation inheres in its powers of contagion: its power of unregulated becoming. This proliferative power makes the alt-right a strange alloy of the classical disciplinary regime and ontopower; of extreme top-down oppression, unleashed from traditional standards of moral uprightness, and emergent primary resistance. It is beyond the scope of these theses to plunge further into this morass in a way that would do justice to its creativity and complexities. No alter-economic project, however, can afford to ignore it. No account of the ecology of powers can dispense with an analysis of proto-fascism and fascism: this short gloss is meant only as a placeholder for that analysis.

T67

Another directly qualitative mode of power, related to the other modes, is the capture of affect as emotion.

Scholium a. This capture is constitutive of the personal, as the proprietary dimension of the individual subject considered (and considering itself) as a discrete, separate entity. Personalization is a synonym for the capture of affect for the constitution of the proprietary dimension of the subject. Personalization bears a privileged relation to economization. Arguably, it does not exist outside processes of economization. Certainly the subject as we know it (commonly referred to as the “bourgeois individual,” mini-sovereign of its own private domain) is a creature of capitalist economization and does not exist outside of it. It is clear that the subject as separate, self-subsisent entity, rather than a self-avowedly integrally-relational being-becoming, does not exist in indigenous societies. Neither did it exist, for entirely different reasons (having to do with the ferocity of the integral subsumption of all movement under a regime attempting by any means necessary to peak out in a maximally sovereign oversubject) in non-European despotisms or the monarchisms of Europe as tendentially driven by their processual ideal (attractor state) of the absolute monarchy (Dean and Massumi 1993). It will necessarily be the case that the personal, pseudo-sovereign subject will have to go extinct in the postcapitalist future, in favor of dividuating transsubjective movements of creative-relational self-decision, carried to their highest power. This is what Nietzsche meant when he spoke of the overcoming of the human by its own more-than-human powers of becoming. It is also what Foucault referred to when he spoke of “Man” as “a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault 1994, 387). The “human” and “Man” are the collective categories under which the process of personalization has subsumed its would-be sovereign individuals.

Lemma a. The postcapitalist individual will be processually more-than-human and culturally post-Man.

Scholium b. A distinction needs to be made between personalization (the proprietary capture of affect toward the constitution of a purportedly sovereign, separable all-too-human subject) and personification. A personification is an expression of nonhuman forces. It is a bundling together of a selection of pre-personal tendencies bubbling at the dividual level, bumped up to a higher level in such a way that their composition takes on a rhythm or consistency (but not a self-sufficiency or wholeness) of expression. “Processual figure” is another word for a personification. “Persona” is another. These are really just other names for “subject” in the broad, processual sense discussed above (T53), as grasped from the angle of a consistency of emergent expression. They are surplus-values of expression. The Trump persona is a notable contemporary figure of the capitalist process (T56, T71). There are also precapitalist and—undoubtedly—postcapitalist modes of personification (T69).

Scholium c. One of the main conduits of the personalizing capture of affect in emotion is narrative. Narrative can operate in many modes, to different power effect, and can foster escape (T70). However, there is a complicity between certain modes of deployment of narrative and neoliberalism’s personalization dynamic that make it a central operator of capitalist power’s production of well-channeled human capital. For lack of a better term, this mode of narrative deployment can be called “aspirational.” Aspirational narrative is what puts the speculative, future-looking aspect fundamental to the definition of capital into the movements of human capital in a way that helps prime those movements for capitalist surplus-value accumulation along well-oiled paths. It does this by equating capitalist surplus-value with deferred surplus-value of life. Make yourself competitive on the job market as a versatile entrepreneur of yourself, and reap the benefits later in the form of an affluent quality of life in your middle years (who knows, if you play the field well, you might even be able to retire early; don’t neglect your self-funded pension plan). Self-drive and accumulate, at all costs. In the process, tend to yourself. Tend your self, so you don’t burn out. Self-help literature and media is the growth market in aspirational narrative. But the aspirational mode of generic narrative also ripples across other narrative forms populating the media, from Hollywood into its digital beyond. It is pervasive in marketing, fast becoming through social media a veritable mode of being rather than a separate sphere of activity. Under neoliberalism, the individual has a great degree of autonomy in constructing its own aspirational narratives. Each construction largely falls under the sway of a generic narrative serving as a template. The narrative freedom available to the neoliberal individual is to appropriate and customize a generic narrative, toward its own human-capitalist self-molding. The individual is tasked with continuously folding itself into an aspirational narrative arc, and its arc into its self. When generic narratives are imposed in straight disciplinary manner, as in racial or gender stereotypes, it is experienced as an oppression. By contrast, the aspirational exercise of narrative power is misrecognized as a freedom. The individual expresses its “freedom” by recognizing itself in its custom-tailored—“personal”—generic narrative. The aspirational relation of the future to the past is figured as a stepwise becoming more like oneself. The master trope, explicitly or implicitly, is self-actualization. Self-sameness is projected into the future as the achievement of a continuing labor of therapeutic or self-molding self-recognition. Self-sameness becomes, paradoxically, a matter of becoming. The sense of self-sameness involved is demonstrably fuzzy. Aspirational narratives are always so constructed as to allow a certain drift or lack of focus. Their frequent failure to sharpen into focus or remain on track is not disavowed, but it is not allowed to undermine the sense of self-recognition. After all, self-actualization is a work in progress, and part of what has to be self-lovingly recognized are one’s own weaknesses and inconsistencies. This builds a certain plasticity into the sense of self (sameness), not inconsistent with the general operation of channeling the future in capitalist directions. Not only does it form personal life entirely as a future-looking function of surplus-value production, each variant potentially becomes a new generic template, auguring an emergent niche market. The generic arcing toward self-actualization exerts a moderating influence on the self-driving of human capital as it surfs the quasi-chaotic flows of the capitalist field, holding it to forms largely articulable with the archaism-with-a-contemporary function that is liberalism. Classical discipline, illiberal at heart, is much less plastic. It imposes narratives to model the individual in avowedly rigid ways. Although narrative is always a part of how discipline works, it is not the primary mode in which it operates. It employs narrative as means among others, adjutant to its primary mode, which is inculcation according to a model rather than channeling as a function of a deformable generic template. There is always a certain plasticity in narrative, even under a classically disciplinary regime. But in classical discipline, the plasticity is incidental. Under neoliberalism, it is essential and operationalized. Narrative channeling under neoliberalism is by and large an operator of self-acted personalization, conducted with self-referential reverence rather than other-world-directed rectitude: a piety of the personal requiring heart and soul participation, but in the form of buy-in rather than belief (making it, in effect, a heartfelt cynicism). In the final analysis, what is narratively afoot is a plastic form of self-normalization consisting in a quasi-disciplinary channeling hybridized with ontopower. The disciplinary part is that the generic narrative arcs stand as models (self standard). The “quasi-” part is that the models are self-applied and operate as deformable self-moldings (self-channeling). This edges into ontopower, as the whole process gets under the skin of a life’s movement, exerting an immanently incitative (aspirational) force of personal ontogenesis, plastically inscribed in the general province of the same (self-becoming). This is the neo/liberal regime of self–soft capture. At its ontopowerful extreme, human capital bursts out of this narrative envelope into a personification of the deregulated flows of capital as such (T56). When it does so, it performatively embraces its dividuality in a quasi-chaotic mode more intensely, and idiosyncratically, expressive of the tenor of the capitalist process as a whole.

Lemma b. An emotion is a unit of personalizing narrative. Human capital’s generic self-molding is composed of emotional pearls strung together in a self-actualizing necklace circling the person.

Scholium d. This is not all emotion is. As always, there is an excess-over any capture: a surplus of affect that is fed forward as surplus-value of life, moving the life-process forward. Emotion is shot through with affect. It carries intensity. Its narrative development, in all of its modes, is motored by affective intensities, whose lively expression narrative channels into its own proceeding. The unitization of affect as emotion is a narrative coding of affect. Affect as such is neither unitizable nor codable. It is more-than-narrative. That is why narrative can be escaped—and why escape can be narrative. When narrative fosters escape, it is affectively escaping its own coding. It is overspilling emotion, to rejoin the excess of intensity moving through it.

T68

Being more-than-narrative, affect is extra-personal.

T69

A postcapitalist future will have to operate beyond the personal, to reclaim affect and intensity, by whatever means necessary.

Scholium. There may well be different understandings of personhood, constructed according to other principles, for example along animist principles, as articulated in contemporary anthropology in relation to indigenous cultures (Viveiros de Castro 2014; Kohn 2013). These only exist in a systematic way in noncapitalist societies. However, in a certain way they are very much with us in capitalist culture: as prefigured in forms of escape, ephemeral and precarious, bidding for the noncapitalist future. More sustainable modes of divergent personification—alter-personhoods—retaining a certain animism will have to be invented for the postcapitalist world. These will be in escape both from the generic narratives of neoliberal personalization, and from the more deregulated, less self-integrated, more ontopowerful personifications of capital with which neoliberal personalization coexists and co-operates (T56, T58, T71 Schol. a). Conceptual tools for alternate notions of the person exist within Western culture in the work of C. S. Peirce and A. N. Whitehead. Alter-personhoods are postcapitalist subjects that processually embrace their self-driving subjectivity-without-a-subject to affirm the intensities of surplus-value of life.

Lemma. The capitalist process is as much, if not more, an enterprise of the production of subjectivity as it is of the production of goods (Guattari 1995). This is a power that can be turned against it.

T70

The invention of post-capture affective process for the postcapitalist world does not have to dispense with narrative. It can qualitatively convert it, for example by practicing it in the mode of fabulation.

Scholium. Fabulation (Manning forthcoming; Deleuze 1989: 126–55; Guattari 2014, 37–38) alters the balance between memory of the past and memory of the future. Aspirational narrative caresses the past with self-love (all the more so if the past was full of self-loathing). Fabulation does not mythologize the past. It weights narrative away from memory of the past toward memory of the future. This changes the ratio of self-recognition to self-becoming in favor of the latter. It backgrounds self-recognition, subordinating it to the surprise of becoming. Fabulation is the resingularization of narrative. The dominant affective tenor shifts from the familiarity of self-sameness to the wonder of self-producing creativity. Wonder is the name for emotion’s outdoing by affect’s opening to creative advance. In the postcapitalist future, as important as the withering of the State will be the withering of emotion (that is, the reaffirmation of affective intensities out from under the arc of personalization).

T71

Under neoliberalism the narrative capture of affect is generally normalizing or singularly pathological—or both at the same time, in oscillation.

Lemma. It is this oscillation that characterizes neoliberal capitalism as “postnormative” in its overall processual reach.

Scholium a. The deregulation tendency of neoliberal capitalism extends to the emotional composition of the person. Its subjects’ self-fashionings have a tendency to run away with themselves, in spite of their generic narrative channeling. This actually occurs when the grand narrative of “individualism” that is so much a part of neoliberalism (even though its process is always taking away with its invisible subjectivity-without-a-subject hand what its system gives with its more perceptible individualizing handshake) is taken too much to heart. Enabled by the general conditions of plasticity that are a part even of the most generic personalization, hyperindividualism can push beyond the pale to breed downright idiosyncrasies. This can result in hypereffective human-capitalist entrepreneurs of themselves who capitalize on their borderline abnormality, including some embodying cartoonish exaggerations of generic narrative norm (harvesting internet surplus-value of flow, for example, through their personal YouTube channels). It also breeds monsters, when the individualism gets overly “rugged” (although what passes for ruggedness nowadays seems to be more a severe reactivity: an extreme sensitivity immediately turned around into aggressive backlash against any perceived source of injury). Donald J. Trump’s overbearing glee in his breaking of the norms of good conduct, and neoliberal embrace of corruption, exemplifies this. The idea of the “good citizen” doesn’t even ring a bell for this hypercapitalist. Neither does narrative coherence. Narrative self-actualization is a regime of self-referential truth, that of the subject becoming more like itself. At the extreme, that becoming rushes headlong, and headstrong, into the borderline world of a “post-truth” regime. Shards of narrative are produced in profusion. But they are always refracted through the distorting prism of a hypermasculinity exaggerating its generic template to absurd dimensions. Emotivity flies off its hinges. The absurdity is such that it is hard to take a figure such as Trump seriously as a person. This is reflected in the colloquial use of his name as a common noun: the Donald. Perhaps the Donald embodies a certain, hypercapitalist, overcoming of the person. He is certainly not an emotionally integrated one. Perhaps he embodies an immanent alter-personhood describing the limit of neoliberal capitalist subjectivity. If so, even though it takes the personal movement of the process of capitalism down an approach to the limit, it is unlikely to bring the entire process to a tipping point. This is because the hypermasculinism of his persona gestures to generic figures of the masculine, as a condition of its hypering of them. This enables more everyday, less deregulated capitalist subjects to recognize themselves in him in spite of his excesses and in spite of their having no basis for an identification with him. By what criterion is there a sameness between a billionaire born into wealth and privilege and a middle American in the Rust Belt with the fear of God in them about falling into poverty (if they are not already in it)? Weirdly, Trumpians are recognizing their own difference in his distorted mirror. They are seeing what they experience as their own exceptionalism: what makes them special as Americans vis-à-vis the hated un-American Americans (that is, their own rugged individualism—or reactivity). The hate list includes “liberal progressives” (who conspiratorially control the “mainstream media” and the “deep state” establishment), immigrant “job-stealers,” and “entitled” African Americans. Traditional theories based on identification with a “charismatic leader” (bumbling, orange-tinged, militantly ignorant, gaffe-happy Trump, charismatic?) cannot begin to account for his phenomenon.

Scholium b. An affective analysis is necessary, which is beyond the scope of the present account. Such an analysis would have to account for the way in which the Donald-person (or persona) is wholly and completely a media figure—as an immediate mode of existence. What is a media figure in today’s field of life? How can it be both a media figure and an immediate mode of existence? A concept of “immediation” will have to be developed to bridge this gap (Manning, Thomsen, and Munster forthcoming). The analysis will also have to grapple with the inherent polyvalence of the media figure (another reason theories of identification employing a traditional notion of personhood don’t work). In this case, that polyvalence manifests in the way in which the Donald’s deregulated limit-case person spins off normativity effects among some followers, while replicating its own monstrosity among others: how he kingpins an oscillation between the normative and the pathological (or sociopathic). The normative swing has to do with the way in which the refractions of self-recognition passing through his media figure rebound on and stoke the reaction-formations discussed earlier (T54–T56), in their more traditional religious-right or rightwing conservative versions. The pathological and sociopathic swing has to do with how these same refractions seed neo-reactionary mini-me monsters. It depends on what soil they fall (how they fall back on the field of emergence, like fungal spores). The analysis of the Donald as affective-refractor mechanism will hinge on the paradox of the becoming-reactive of affirmative life forces, in potentially so potent a way as to make a veritable contagion, even of the most extreme versionings, a real viral possibility. In other words, the question of fascism, once again, cannot be avoided in any project for the revaluation of values, which can only be predicated on the affirmative becoming-more-intensely-active of formative forces.

T72

The creation of postcapitalist alternatives needs to find creative ways to play the affect/intensity differential that counter the modes of capture of creative tension that are a part of the contemporary ecology of powers, avoiding in particular the personalizing capture of affect in emotion endemic to the capitalist economization process that goes along with it.

Scholium. Emotion underwrites personalization. Personalization, under neoliberalism, feeds normativity, human-capital self-channeling, and emotive swings toward a postnormative becoming-reactive of affirmative life forces, in strange oscillation and many a proliferating variation (among them, approaches to the limit where personalization approaches verge on and in some cases actually tip over into inhuman—monstrous, sociopathic—personification). Given the potency, polyvalence, and ubiquity of these operations, the merest emotional appeasement of the personal threatens to derail the deployment of postcapitalist potential.

T73

This is not to say that depersonalization is the answer.

Scholium. Depersonalization is the simple dialectical opposite of personalization. It is itself a kind of reaction-formation. It breeds monsters of its own (tending toward psychosis). It threatens to simply dis-integrate the person. The postcapitalist subject will not be an unintegrated person but a whole new animal. What is needed is an integral alter-formation.

T74

To begin with, what is needed is actually much more modest: an escape hatch.

Scholium. The postcapitalist future will grow in the pores of the capitalist field of life, in much the same way Marx said that capitalist society grew in the pores of feudalism. This resonates with what today is called prefigurative politics (the idea that our resistances to capital and power today must endeavor to embody embryonically the qualities that will characterize the postcapitalist future), The immediate task is to craft temporary autonomous zones that might release postcapitalist potential into the wild, to proliferate. These are not just vacuoles. They are full of hyperdifferentiation: a plethora of qualitative differentials in creative tension. They are not disorganized, but rather full to overflowing with alter-organization. The concept of alter-economic temporary autonomous zones as connected to the revaluation of values envisioned here is in dialogue with the original term (Bey 2003), but with differences of approach and emphasis, particularly as regards creative duplicity.

T75

To be at all sustainable, even temporarily, the autonomous zones must be able to interface with the existing economy. To do so, they must practice creative duplicity in relation to quantification and economization.

Scholium. Otherwise they will be crushed.