Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
at the End
of the
Economy
BRIAN
MASSUMI
BRIAN MASSUMI
The Power
at the End of
the Economy
3. Beyond Self-Interest 57
Your Life for My Little Finger? 58
Contiguity, Most Distant 65
The Argument from Intensity 68
The Other as Sign of Passion 73
A Freedom of the Event 79
The Flashpoint of Sympathy 84
Toward an Anticapitalist Art of the Event 93
supplements
Notes 113
Works Cited 121
Index 127
1. The Inmost End
We are enjoined to rational choice. We are taught that our freedom is one
with the freedom of choice. We are told we become who we are by how
we choose. We are assured that if we choose well, according to our own
best interests, we will end up serving the interests of all. We are told that
there is a mechanism in place to ensure this convergence between our
interests and others’. Market is its name. Its “invisible hand” adjusts best
choices to each other, its magic touch guided by the principle of competi-
tion. Competition weeds out suboptimal choices, selecting for efficiency.
Efficiencies multiply each other, minimizing effort and maximizing profit
for all. The market, we are further led to believe, is self-regulating. It has
a natural inclination toward optimization. As political subjects, we are
enjoined to vote, rationally, in its interests so that we may pursue our own,
for the general good. Rationally, the political subject coincides with the
economic subject of self-interest that we all are fundamentally, in private
pursuit of happiness. And what, if not that, gives meaning and motivation
to our lives? We are all paying guests at the tea party of choice, spreading
our favorite jam on our very own slice of the bread of life, served on the
silver platter of efficiency by the invisible hand.
But on closer inspection, a rabbit hole appears at the heart of the mar-
ket. It plummets from the apparently solid ground of rational choice to
a wonderland where nothing appears the same. Affect is its name. The
“concealed factors” of doubt, precariousness, hope, and fear—and
(why not?) love, friendship, and joy—tend to bubble back up to the
2 part 1
referred to the subject himself ” (272). At its core, Foucault says, the liberal
economic model is one of “existence itself ”: it concerns first and fore-
most a relation of the “individual to himself ” (242).
This is existence in its dissociative dimension.3 Here, in its relation
to itself, the subject circles itself more and more tightly around its in-
dividual power of choice, like a dog to sleep, wrapping itself centrip-
etally around a center of promised satisfaction. It circles in on itself,
away from the social, unmindful of noneconomic societal logics. But it
all works out for the best for society in the end, they say, thanks to the
positive synthesis of multiplier effects. Relation to oneself involuntarily
amplifies across the multiplier effects to become a systemwide social
fact. The inmost dimensions of individual existence are operatively
linked to the most encompassing level, that of the market environment
that is the economic field of life. What is most intensely individual is at
the same time most wide-rangingly social. The smallest scale and the
largest scale resonate as one, in a quasi-chaos of mutual sensitivity. To
relate self-interestedly to oneself is in the very same act to relate, invol-
untarily, to everyone else.
But there is a problem. It has to do with the future. Success, of course,
is not guaranteed for any particular act, or any particular individual. The
self-organizing of the system at the largest scale can synthesize its way
past many a microfailure. As choices percolate through the economic
field, the negative impact of individual failures is compensated for over-
all by the multiplier effects of the successes. Given the infinity of acci-
dents riddling the economic field of life and the existential blindness of
all economic actors, there is an ever-present threat of a misstep. Every
economic calculation is a calculus of risk. “Behavioral finance (psychol-
ogy) and rational actor models (the ‘rational economic man’, or rem)
rarely emphasize how uncertainty differs from risk and probability”
(Pixley 2004, 18). You can calculate risk in terms of probabilities, but
probabilities by nature have nothing to say about any given case. The af-
fect accompanying uncertainty is there in any case. Choices in the pres-
ent become highly charged affectively with fear for the uncertain future.
The present is shaken, tremulous with futurity. There is no calculus of
risk independent of an individual’s affective self-relation to uncertainty.
the inmost end 5
over any given quantity of causative input: surplus value. The more com-
plex the system is, the more uncertain the future becomes. And com-
plexification has been a constitutive tendency of the capitalist system
from its beginnings. Capitalism, always a far-from-equilibrium system,
is becoming ever more so. The same multiplier mechanism that promises future
satisfaction makes it exponentially less certain.
Why defer satisfaction if the capitalist future is constitutively uncer-
tain? But on the other hand, how can you not play it safe by deferring your
satisfaction, precisely because the capitalist future is so uncertain? This
conundrum of deferral is an expression of the paradox that neoliberal-
ism’s promise of satisfaction unnerves the rationality it extols, giving it
the affective shakes that cannot be cured. The rational risk calculations of
the subject of interest become more and more affectively overdetermined
by the tension between fear of the future and hope for success, and be-
tween satisfaction and its uncertain deferral. The embrace of rational
self-interest and affective agitation becomes all the closer. They fall all the
more intensely into each other’s orbit, to the point that they contract into
each other, entering into a zone of indistinction, at the heart of every act.
It’s a vicious circle. Positive multiplier effects can be counted on only
when individuals’ rational choices mutually reinforce each other, catch-
ing like a contagion. This is the point at which rational choice is indis-
tinguishable from “irrational exuberance” (in the legendary phrase of
US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan). This is also precisely
the mechanism that forms speculative bubbles leading to crisis.5 More
radical than the fact that the same mechanism that promises satisfac-
tion makes it exponentially less certain is the fact that the attainment
of the very satisfaction promised can itself bring on a crisis. The tired
hound of self-interest, circling in for satisfaction, traces its own private
vicious circle in its self-relating movements. Its sleep will be agitated. It
will twitch with dreams of disappearing rabbits.
System Distrust
In times of crisis, the first words out of the mouth of any economic
leader are: “we must restore trust in the system.” But as systems theo-
rist Niklas Luhmann blithely observed, under these endemic conditions
the inmost end 7
tors, then in the intervals between them, in the urgency of the feeling
of the need to respond to trends before they emerge onto a macro-enough
level and are tidily summed up in the indicators.
To act on threats before they emerge was the Bush administration’s
definition of preemption (Massumi 2007). The economy is continually
agitated by the affectively fraught, felt need to preempt it. As the neo-
liberal economy takes hold, deferral becomes less and less of an option
and preemptive action more and more of an imperative.10 This makes
the economy more affectively activating than it is effectively rationalizing.
It runs more on perturbations and cascading amplifications than deter-
minate acts of choice.
As this state of affective agitation heightens, what economic actors
often end up reacting to most directly are the agitated affective states of
other actors. This has given rise to a whole new ser vice industry, that
of “Internet mood analysis.” The Internet is trawled by algorithms that
search out affectively laden words and terminology to provide a real-
time pulse taking of the mood of the economy. One such ser vice goes by
the name AlmagaMood, whose catchy slogan is “Leveraging Big Data to
Enhance Investment Foresight.”11
It is not just economic sites that are mood-mined. It is the entire
Internet, including blogs, news sites, and the expanding Twitterverse.
The economy as a whole vibrates with the fickleness of what the pun-
dits call “social mood.” This Internet-based mood registering occurs
informally through the social media and all manner of networking. In
our networked society, with the global media reach and cross-platform
convergence of the Internet, any act anywhere resonates, potentially,
everywhere, in the economic analogue of Einstein’s “spooky” action at a
distance. Readiness-potential wave packets collapse, affectively system-
ically, in real time (or its functional Internet equivalent). Individual ac-
tions are affectively entangled at a distance. It is only the complex play-
ing out of the entanglements that decides in the end what will have been
a success and what a failure. Complexly correlated to each quantum of
success or failure, there will come to expression determinate affective
states of trust or distrust, satisfaction or frustration.
Individual economic actors are infra-connected. They are connected at
a distance, in the recesses of their affective rabbit holes. They communicate
14 part 1
mean that they are affectively grounded there. Any state of system trust
that emerges is just as affectively unjustified as it is rationally unjusti-
fied. It was not grounded in anything preparatory to action that could
be qualified as in any way trustworthy. The transactions that worked out
well and led to success proved themselves trustworthy. They became trust-
worthy, as a function of how they played out. The state of system trust
is effectively self-justifying. It “justifies itself,” Luhmann writes, in the
way that it has “become creative” (78): in the emergently creative way it
is generated as a trust-effect of the economy’s complex self-organizing.
The self-organizing emergence of the trust-effect is retroactively validat-
ing. It is affectively validating in the currency of satisfactions gained.
If enough trust-effects emerge at a sufficient rate of generation, then
however unjustified they are, the system has a chance of continuing, in a
positive orientation, trending up. Trust in the system has been restored.
The affective conditions for continued surplus-value production are in
force. Follow-on actions reinforce the trend. Positive feedback between
the systemic and infra-individual levels locks in. Positive multiplier ef-
fects bubble through the economy.
When the indicators come out, the effects are there to see, rationally
summed up in a trend. The summing up can then be projected forward
into future trends. Based on these statistical projections, a calculus of
risks and probabilities can be made. The affective-effect is now as ratio-
nalized as it can get. The rationalizing indicators stoke economic activ-
ity, reinforcing the affective conditions for growth. These feed back to
the regressive endpoints of the economy composing its plane of imma-
nence. Turning around them, they resonate transindividually across the
economic field. Feedback loop. Economically, affectivity and rational-
ity circle creatively through each other. The regress to the endpoint of
the economic and the upward progress of the economic indicators are a
single two-way movement of reciprocal feedback. They are systemically
superposed pulses of the capitalist process, together ontopowerful.
Mirroring the quantum vocabulary of the reduction of the wave packet,
Luhmann refers to the production of a state of system trust as a “reduc-
tion of complexity.” The economy cannot be micromanaged: do not
laisser-faire the government. Although the economy cannot be micro-
managed, through the feedback process it can be infra-stoked toward the
the inmost end 17
this dissociation and simultaneously overcomes it by collapsing the social into the
economic. On human capital, see Foucault (2008, 224–265).
4. Foucault (2008, 272–276) insists on the incommensurability of the subject of
law (or right) and liberalism’s homo oeconomicus, the subject of economics (subject of
interest).
5. On contagion and “market psychology,” see Marazzi (2008).
6. “Oscillatoire” is rendered as “fluctuating” in the English translation.
7. For a more detailed development of the concept of processual polarities
entering into proximity in a “zone of indistinction” and the corresponding “logic of
mutual inclusion,” see Massumi (2014).
8. In what follows, the prefix “infra’” will be used in preference to “intra.”
“Intra” connotes interiority, and thus boundedness. “Infra,” on the other hand,
connotes a threshold on an unbounded continuum, below which there is a qualita-
tive phase-shift in the nature of the phenomena on the continuum.
9. Simon Critchley, in Infinitely Demanding, uses the term “dividual” in a different
sense (2007, 89). For Critchley, it denotes a splitting of the subject, in dialogue with
the psychoanalytic concept as interpreted by Lacan.
10. On new approaches to modeling the economy that must be categorized as
preemptive (although they do not claim that title), see “A Doing Done through Me,”
n. 3, this volume.
11. AmalgaMood.com; accessed March 6, 2013.
12. On the distinction between system and process, see Massumi (2009a).
13. On becoming autonomous of system-level affective self-organizing in its po-
litical dimensions, see Massumi (2005).