The power at the end of the economy

At its core, Foucault says, the liberal economic model is one of “existence itself ”: it concerns fi rst and fore-most a relation of the “individual to himself ” 242.This is existence in

B R I A N M A S S U M I

The Power

at the End of the Economy

duke universit y press durham and london 2015

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States

of America on acid- free paper ∞

Typeset in Quadraat Pro

by Westchester Book Group

the author acknowledges the

generous support of the social

sciences and research

council of canada (sshrc).

Cover art: Photograph by Brian Massumi, Flashpoint.

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data

Massumi, Brian.

The power at the end of the economy / Brian Massumi.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978-0-8223-5824-4 (hardcover : alk paper)

isbn 978-0-8223-5838-1 (pbk : alk paper)

isbn 978-0-8223-7581-4 (e-book)

1 Economics—Sociological aspects 2 Economics—Political aspects

3 Economics—Moral and ethical aspects I Title.

hm548 m37 2015

306.3—dc23 2014023497

art beyond interest joy beyond reason

1 The Inmost End 1

The Market in Wonderland 2

System Distrust 6

Collapse of the Aff ective Wave Packet 10

2 A Doing Done through Me 19

Deliberation without Attention 21

Jamming Rational Choice 24

The Primes of Life 26

Toward a Politics of Dividualism 32

Double Involuntary / Autonomy of Decision 36 Fielding the Event 43

Tribunals of Reason 48

Finessing the Event 53

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

I The Aff ective Tasks of Reason 97

II Keywords for Aff ect 103

Notes 113

Works Cited 121

Index 127

The hypothesis of a calculable future leads to a wrong interpretation of the ciples of behaviour which the need for action compels us to adopt, and to an under- estimation of the concealed factors of utter doubt, precariousness, hope and fear.

prin-—John Maynard Keynes, “The General Theory of Employment” (1973, 122)

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 effi ciency Effi ciencies multiply each other, minimizing eff ort and maximizing profi t for all The market, we are further led to believe, is self- regulating It has

a natural inclination toward optimization As po liti cal subjects, we are

enjoined to vote, rationally, in its interests so that we may pursue our own,

for the general good Rationally, the po liti cal 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 effi ciency by the invisible hand

But on closer inspection, a rabbit hole appears at the heart of the ket It plummets from the apparently solid ground of rational choice to

mar-a wonderlmar-and where nothing mar-appemar-ars the smar-ame Aff ect is its nmar-ame The

“concealed factors” of doubt, precariousness, hope, and fear— and (why not?) love, friendship, and joy— tend to bubble back up to the

surface with rowdy abandon In today’s version of free- market ideology, neoliberalism, the aff ective commotion has become so insistent that something else surfaces as well: the creeping suspicion that it is upon the groundless ground of these now not- so- concealed factors that the edifi ce of the economy is actually built Effi ciencies, we are still assured, multiply each other They lasso each other, bootstrapping the economy out of its periodic crises into a provisionally stable order that we are still entreated to consider rational But when markets react more like mood rings than self- steering wheels, the aff ective factor becomes increas-ingly impossible to factor out It becomes obvious that the “rationality”

of the economy is a precarious art of snatching emergent order out of fect The creeping suspicion is that the economy is best understood as a division of the aff ective arts.1

af-The implications of this groundless grounding in aff ective artistry are worth a look, not least for what it might say about “rational” self- interest as the guarantor of self- optimizing order, but also for the re-thinking it might necessitate of the very concept of the rational in its relation to aff ect Michel Foucault provides a provocative starting point

in his 1979 lessons on the genealogy of neoliberalism (Foucault 2008)

The Market in Wonderland

The “invisible hand” makes at least a cameo appearance in every cussion of the free market Foucault’s is no exception As its inventor, Adam Smith, conceived it, Foucault argues, the concept of the invisible hand had nothing of the godlike quality that has come to be attributed

dis-to it The whole point of the concept was that the economic system is too churningly complex for there to be any possibility of a lordly over-view upon it In his genealogy of neoliberalism, Foucault makes the point in no uncertain terms: when it comes to things economic, there is

no “total transparency” (Foucault 2008, 279) Not only is there no total

transparency— there is no transparency or totality The concept of the

invisible hand, as Foucault interprets it, is a principle of blindness in an open fi eld of ceaseless activity whose contours, always shift ing, are by nature indefi nite “Being in the dark and the blindness of all the eco-nomic agents is an absolute necessity” (297)

For neoliberals, this is actually a good thing: it makes economic eralism unavoidable It means that the economy can have no sovereign The invisible hand actually means “hands off ” The liberal’s principle

lib-of laisser- faire, Foucault quips, becomes for the neoliberals “do- not- laisser- faire government”: tie the government’s hands (Foucault 2008,

247) Foucault is quick to add that in practice neoliberalism entails a large and even expanding range of forms of governmental intervention But these are designed, paradoxically, to maintain the ability of market mechanisms to self- organize the economy free from undue government interference (175– 176) They do not operate from a position of sovereign command They are in the midst.2 Any governmental attempt from on high to weave the strands together into a well- defi ned, predictably regu-lated whole will just fray the fabric to the ripping point Government purports to act all- knowingly in the general interest, and in its hubris always fumbles Individuals, too, are under the injunction, in the name

of the general good, to act without regard for it For it is only then that the “invisible hand” can work

But it’s not a hand at all It’s an accumulation of little- handed decisions which end up serving the general good in spite of being self- interested Individual decisions, made in the darkness of self- interest, percolate through the fi eld To the extent that the results of these decisions form positive feedback loops, they give rise to mutually benefi cial multiplier eff ects and there occurs a “spontaneous synthesis” of what’s best for all (Foucault 2008, 300) The synthesis is entirely involuntary with regard to each individual (275– 276) This “rationalization” of the economy to which the subject of interest’s decisions involuntarily contribute is an emergent property of a complex, self- organizing system: a novelty and a creation, forever self- renewing The synthesis, Foucault continues, is a “positive eff ect” of an “infi nite number” of “accidents” occurring at ground level

in the “apparent chaos” (277), or quasi- chaos, of the market ment These are bound together by a “directly multiplying mechanism”— competition—which, Foucault emphasizes, operates in the absence of any form of transcendence (275– 276) In other words, the positive synthe-sis of market conditions occurs immanently to the economic fi eld The choice of the subject of self- interest rabbit- holed in that fi eld of imma-nence is “irreducible” and “nontransferable” (272) It is “unconditionally

environ-referred to the subject himself ” (272) At its core, Foucault says, the liberal economic model is one of “existence itself ”: it concerns fi rst 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 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 eff ects Relation to oneself involuntarily amplifi es across the multiplier eff ects 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 fi eld 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

in-But there is a problem It has to do with the future Success, of course,

is not guaranteed for any par tic u lar act, or any par tic u lar 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

fi eld, the negative impact of individual failures is compensated for all by the multiplier eff ects of the successes Given the infi nity of acci-dents riddling the economic fi eld 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 fi nance (psychol-ogy) and rational actor models (the ‘rational economic man’, or rem) rarely emphasize how uncertainty diff ers 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 aff ectively with fear for the uncertain future The present is shaken, tremulous with futurity There is no calculus of risk in de pen dent of an individual’s aff ective self- relation to uncertainty

over-Even in the best- case scenario, rationality and aff ectivity cannot be held safely apart Unlike the juridical subject of the law and the civil subject of society, the economic subject of interest is never called upon

to renounce its self- interest for the general good.4 Self- interestedness remains “unconditional.” It is mea sured in satisfaction We have been successful in our self- interestedness if we have attained satisfaction for ourselves What the eco nom ical ly productive subject of interest ulti-mately produces is its own satisfaction (Foucault 2008, 226) Paradoxi-cally, the mea sure of how “rationally” a subject of interest behaves can only be mea sured aff ectively, in the currency of satisfaction Rationality and aff ectivity are joined at the self- interested hip, in one way or an-other, for better and for worse “Emotions function in the core struc-tures of the fi nancial world” (Pixley 2004, 18)

The subject of interest is never called upon to renounce self- interest But it is frequently called upon to defer the very satisfaction by which its self- interest is mea sured Feeling insecure? Be reasonable Defer your satisfaction to a more secure time of life Work toward retirement But

this is a rational choice only if you trust the system’s self- organizing This

is an increasingly diffi cult sell as crises follow each other in rapid cession Each crisis is a shock to the system, at all scales Uncertainty starts to feed on uncertainty Fear builds into panic Negative multiplier eff ects take over House hold savings vaporize and national economies crumble Suspicions grow that the invisible hand suff ers from a degen-erative motor disease

suc-All signs are that the condition is congenital Crisis no longer seems

a punctual interval between periods of stability Crisis is the new mal That this should be the case only stands to reason The premise

nor-of any rational calculation is that similarly strategized actions will yield similar results But the whole point of an economy that selects for cre-ative multiplier eff ects is that multiplier eff ects are nonlinear By defi ni-tion, they are eff ects that are not commensurate with their causes, even

if the causes be known The whole point of capitalist enterprise is to

“leverage”: to extract a surplus yield of eff ect over and above what would normally be expected to follow from an investment The capitalist pro-cess is driven by the potential for, and yearning aft er, an excess of eff ect

over any given quantity of causative input: surplus value The more

plex the system is, the more uncertain the future becomes And plexifi cation has been a constitutive tendency of the capitalist system from its beginnings Capitalism, always a far- from- equilibrium system,

com-is becoming ever more so The same multiplier mechancom-ism that promcom-ises future satisfaction makes it exponentially less certain.

Why defer satisfaction if the capitalist future is constitutively 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 aff ective shakes that cannot be cured The rational risk calculations of the subject of interest become more and more aff ectively overdetermined

uncer-by the tension between fear of the future and hope for success, and tween satisfaction and its uncertain deferral The embrace of rational self- interest and aff ective 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 eff ects 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

be-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 fi rst 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

“trust rests on an illusion” (Luhmann 1979, 32) In a chaotic economic

fi eld personal relations of trust are impossible to guarantee “In ity, there is less information available than would be required to give assurance of success” (32) “Linear causal explanations come to grief ” (83) However well intentioned other parties may be, they cannot be trusted The nonlinear dynamics of the economy could well frustrate their best intentions What’s an enterprise system to do?

actual-If relying on personal bonds of trust is out of the question, there’s only one option: “depersonalize” trust Make it “impersonal” (Luhmann

1979, 93) Entrust the system “System trust” is the only answer But how does an individual trust a system that doesn’t trust itself to follow its own line? “There must be other ways of building up trust which do not depend

on the personal element But what are they?” (46) Luhmann has an nious answer to his own question You actually “shift forward the thresh-

inge-old of eff ective distrust” (75) In other words, you foster distrust as a starting

condition (88) You foster distrust, but not as the opposite of trust: as its

“functional equivalent” (71)

What on earth does that mean? It means that you “interlock them so that they intensify each other” (Luhmann 1979, 92) You bring trust and

distrust together into a zone of indistinction where they are in such

im-mediate proximity to each other that one can easily tip into the other at the slightest agitation They resonate together, intensely As actions are taken, the resulting aff ective state of the individual oscillates between them Foucault notes that the “horizon” of the neoliberal fi eld of life is one of increasing diff erentiation that is constitutively open to “oscilla-tory pro cesses” (Foucault 2008, 259).6 By diff erentiation, he is referring

to capitalist society’s overspilling of disciplinary modes of power based

on normative models imposed on the individual, and the accompanying proliferation of “minority practices” (259) When he mentions oscilla-tory pro cesses he is talking about the fl uctuation of economic indica-tors such as salaries, job creation fi gures, industrial orders, and most fundamentally prices, which mark the ups and downs of the system’s self- regulatory mechanisms But the same description applies equally well to the smallest unit of the economy, the enterprising individual,

as it does to the system as a whole On the individual level, trust and distrust interlock and intensify each other, resonating together in

immediate proximity, forming their own oscillatory system As do fear and hope, satisfaction and self- denial, all in it together.7

The individual subject of interest forming the fundamental unit of capitalist society is internally diff erentiated, containing its own popula-tion of “minority practices” of contrasting aff ective tone and tenor, in

a zone of indistinction between rational calculation and aff ectivity In

other words, there is an infra- individual complexity quasi- chaotically tating within the smallest unit The individual remains the smallest unit

agi-despite this infra- level complexity, because what resonates on that level are not separable elements in interaction They are intensive elements,

in intra- action (Barad 2007, 33).8 They are immediately linked variations, held in tension, resonating together in immediate proximity Their os-cillatory co- motion expresses itself at the level of the individual, where

it is marked by fl uctuating indicators, just as the actions of individual economic actors express themselves on the systemic level in fl uctuating indicators such as prices We call the indicators of the intra- action occur-

ring on the infra- individual level moods “Moods,” Gilbert Ryle writes, are like “the weather, temporary conditions which in a certain way collect oc-

currences, but they are not themselves extra occurrences” (Ryle 1949, 83) Moods collect infra- occurrences and sum them up in a general orienta-tion giving direction to the next level up, just as price fl uctuations collect the microeconomic decisions of individual actors and sum them up in the general orientation of the economy as a whole

This means that we need to add a whole new dimension to economic thinking Beneath the microeconomic level of the individual there is the infra- economic level At that level, an aff ective commotion intra- churns Its variations are so immediately linked that we cannot parse them out into separate occurrences The individual, speaking infra- ly, is not one

It may collect itself as one It may fi gure as one, for higher levels But in

itself, it is many Many tendencies: potential expressions and orientations

held together in tension The individual is buff eted by these tendencies’ coming turbulently together, divided among them in its relation to itself Divided among them, awaiting their complex playing- out in a shift in

general orientation, the “individual” is the dividual (Deleuze 1995, 180)

The dividual is the individual as aff ective infra- climate, in relation to itself,

commotionally poised for what may come, storm or shine, doldrums or halcyon days.9

Nothing divides and multiplies the individual so much as its own lation to the future The uncertainty is not just external, relating to ac-cidents and the unpredictable actions of others It agitates within Even

re-if you play it as safe as possible by deferring a decision until sunnier days

to come, all you have done is fi nd another way to increase uncertainty: now it is not just others’ decisions that are unknown to you but your own as well “These unknown nondecisions recur endlessly” (Pixley

2004, 33) Who knows what will possess you to decide when to decide,

or what you will decide when you do? You don’t know your future self yet You are infra- buff eted by your own unworked- out tendencies await-ing a complex playing out that is as likely to surprise you yourself as any stranger Weather forecasting is as unpredictable in the infra- climate of the (in)dividual as at other scales

The aff ective infra- climate of the dividual poised for what may come

is the rabbit hole of the economy The unknown nondecisions and not- quite- occurrences recurring endlessly in a turbulence of tendency are complex in the same way as the economy as a whole Both are like the weather, quasi- chaotic self- organizing systems This puts a whole new perspective on “rational” choice The individual, Foucault said, is unconditionally referred to itself, and this referral is irreducible and nontransferable This means that rational decision is unconditionally, irreducibly, nontransferably referred to an infra- individual zone of in-

distinction with aff ect Rationality and aff ect become “functional equivalents”

by Luhmann’s defi nition: interlocked and mutually intensifying, in a zone of indistinction, at the “forward threshold” of economic existence.Luhmann’s analysis of trust posits that this infra- level of individual complexity is directly connected to the collective, macrolevel of the economic, without necessarily passing through the mediation of the intervening microeconomic level at which the individual is but one It

is a defi ning characteristic of complex environment that the extremes of scale are sensitive to each other, attuned to each other’s modulations This is what makes them oscillatory They can perturb each other Sys-temwide changes in the weather are sure to resonate at the infra- level,

for example, in a localized patch of fog Perturbations channeling back

up from the infra- level are apt to amplify into multiplier eff ects Think

of the way a local fog can amplify into a mega traffi c jam The individual blindness of the subject of interest is the fog of the economy When mul-tiplier eff ects channel upward, the individual is not mediating between the levels in any conventional sense Self- organizing eff ects channel through the individual level on their infra- way to larger things The indi-vidual is an amplifi er mechanism for multiplier eff ects’ self- forming It channels the threshold noise of the system— the functional indistinction between rational calculation and aff ective response— into an emergent economic ordering that is as ever- changing and continually self- renewing

as the winds In a very real sense, the infra- individual is the crucible of the system

When Foucault says that the individual’s choice is irreducible, he can only mean that the individual’s tendential dividedness in relation to it-

self is irreducible The dividual is irreducible The infra- of the individual

is irreducible, in the sense that when systemwide perturbations blow down its hole, they can go no further They have nowhere else to go but

to turn around and blow back out The economy ends in the recesses

of the infra- individual, which as Foucault said is not only irreducible but nontransferable What is nontransferable is inexchangeable At the infra- individual level, the possibility of exchange comes to an end If the econ-omy is defi ned by exchange, then the economy ends in the recesses of

the infra- individual It reaches a limit, as a function of which it is organized— but which lies outside its logic Foucault speaks of this aff ective infra- level as the

“regressive endpoint” of the economy (Foucault 2008, 272)

The infra- individual is the regressive— recessive or immanent— endpoint of the economy The dividual is the noneconomic wonderland

of intense and stormy life on the brink of action that lies at the heart of the economy: its absolute immanent limit Endpoint— and turnaround

It is only ever possible to approach an absolute limit The movement

to-ward the endpoint of the economy either disappears into its own infi nite regress, or spins itself around into a movement of return

Collapse of the Aff ective Wave Packet

Returning to Luhmann’s analytic of trust, to say that trust and distrust resonate together in a zone of indistinction of immediate oscillatory proximity to each other means that what is felt in the lead- up to an eco-nomic act, as it is brinking, is neither one nor the other, neither trust nor distrust Luhmann says that what is felt is a “readiness” to feel ei-ther come next (Luhmann 1979, 79) The individual is in an infra- state

of readiness potential Trust and distrust are together as co- present

poten-tials for what might come next They are in superposition, in the sense

in which the word is used in quantum physics Though inseparable, their distinction is not erased It is held in ready reserve

The aff ective feeling of the readiness potential, Luhmann continues, presupposes a “corresponding reserve of energy which is elsewhere not determined” (Luhmann 1979, 80) In other words, the system itself, be-cause it is similarly complex and nonlinear, is in an energized state of readiness potential that is structured in a fashion homologous to the subject’s aff ective state The economy is ready and “responsive,” poised, like its individual units, for what may come, in a state of brinking agita-tion On the infra- level, the brinking is a superposition of trust and dis-trust in readiness potential On the macroeconomic level, what is held

in readiness potential are the system states of success and failure At the moment a given choice is made, the success or failure of that action is

“undetermined elsewhere.” Which way it goes will depend on actions still in tendency, as yet undecided The economic outcome depends on how these tendencies’ expressions will infl ect and amplify each other

as they turbulently play out across the economic fi eld in a cascade of caroming choices When this self- organizing pro cess works itself out, the cumulative eff ects will be “collected” and “summed up” in a system indicator Until the “mood” of the economy comes to expression in this way, success and failure will remain in a state of superposition— as will trust and distrust at the individual level The aff ective states of trust and distrust and the system states of success and failure lie at the two oscil-latory poles of the economic pro cess They are sensitive to each other They reciprocally determine each other, eff ectively connecting across

their diff erences of nature and the distance between levels through a complex, nonlinear pro cess of feedback and feedforward.

Under these conditions the subject of interest is not in a position to know how any given act it takes will turn out But it cannot not act You can only defer so long, or so much, and only in certain areas of your activity Any act you perform triggers the pro cess leading to a resolution

of the commotion of aff ective states held complexly together in tension

on the infra- individual readiness potential into a determinable outcome registrable in terms of success or failure In short, making a choice leads

to the collapse of the superposition of aff ective states To borrow the vocabulary of quantum physics, it collapses the aff ective wave packet

A particle of trust or distrust spins off into the world, where it will turb the infra- individual complexity of other (in)dividuals poising for action Again like quantum physics, the causality is recursive The de-termination of what the act will eff ectively have been, which state it will

per-be found to have per-been in, is in suspense until a mea sure ment is made The mea sure ment makes what comes what it will have been Until then, what has occurred is less an act or a choice than an as yet unresolved per-turbation The perturbation must percolate up to the level at which it is collected and bundled into overall economic indicators before it can be determined Figures are released monthly and, in the case of the most aff ectively weighted and eagerly awaited, quarterly In the meantime, par tic u lar indicators, such as the stock market or the price of oil, fl uctu-ate continuously like the batting of tiny butterfl y wings Now with the Internet the fl uctuations can be followed minute by minute or even sec-ond by second Without the quarterly indicators to contextualize them, extrapolating a trend from this passing economic wing batting is highly conjectural, to say the least Extraeconomic events, such as a po liti cal crisis in an oil- producing region of the world, can spook investors and consumers These extraeconomic perturbations are all the more aff ect-ing in anticipation The uncertainty of these so- called negative exter-nalities occurring, and what their exact fallout will be if they do occur, sends shivers through the system The shivers almost instantaneously amplify into a low- grade fever that may prove at any moment to have been the onset of a chronic illness The system is in a continual state of pathological excitability, if not because of the publication of new indica-

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

defi nition of preemption (Massumi 2007) The economy is continually

agitated by the aff ectively fraught, felt need to preempt it As the liberal economy takes hold, deferral becomes less and less of an option and preemptive action more and more of an imperative.10 This makes

neo-the economy more aff ectively activating than it is eff ectively rationalizing

It runs more on perturbations and cascading amplifi cations than minate acts of choice

deter-As this state of aff ective agitation heightens, what economic actors oft en end up reacting to most directly are the agitated aff ective 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 aff ectively 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 fi ckleness 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, aff ectively system-ically, in real time (or its functional Internet equivalent) Individual ac-tions are aff ectively 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 aff ective 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 aff ective rabbit holes They communicate

at a distance, in immanent aff ective proximity, churning in and turning

around the regressive endpoints of their respective (in)dividualities The infra- level resonates transindividually Individuals spook each other or goad

each other on, turning around what is nontransferable in them as dividuals: their infra- individual aff ective commotion They resonate, at the limit of the economy, in their dividuality As they reciprocally perturb each other, their readiness- potential wave packet collapses, correlated transindividually at a distance Quanta of trust and distrust fl y off in all directions These aff ective emissions feed up into macrolevel expres-sions of economic success or failure, which no sooner feed back down from the system’s macro level into the aff ective infra- fray

in-Given the cross- sensitivity between scales, at the limit the economic system and the subject of interest are themselves in a functional state of indistinc- tion The whole system is always going down the rabbit hole It is just as

continually reemerging, through multiplier eff ects, channeled through aff ectively infl ected individual actions, back onto its own level It does not make the trip to its own regressive endpoint and back unchanged It

becomes en route In addition to the economic system— the precarious

emergent orderings of the economy as more or less regulated by roeconomic market mechanisms, and as more or less analyzable using

mac-quantitative indicators— there is the chaotic pro cess of this back- and-

forth between levels from which economic determinations periodically emerge.12 The pro cess as a whole is neither governable nor quantifi -able It is aff ective- relational Given the paradoxical bond between the aff ectivity of the relational pro cess and the troubled rationality of its emergent orderings, the system that is the sum of the orderings is at best metastable: precariously stable, tottering between bouts of system equi-librium loss and pro cessual vertigo

Each dizzy individual’s rabbit hole of aff ect is at the immanent limit

of the economy The multitude of these regressive endpoints municate,” entangled at distance Their transindividual entanglement composes what Deleuze and Guattari would call the “plane of imma-nence” of the economy The plane of immanence of the economy is the irreducibly aff ective limit of a complexly relational fi eld It is the econ-omy at its absolute co- motional limit of tendential stirrings in uncertain readiness potential

“com-On the plane of immanence, the economic system and the subject of interest are jointly in potential, in a functional state of indistinction at the level at which action is just beginning to stir, in the incipience of what is

to come The symmetry between the infra- individual and the economic

fi eld as a whole, across their diff erence in scale, is only apparent The infra- level is in a very real sense the larger of the two, in that it germinally

includes the relation between levels, at the immanent limit Entangled in

the zone of indistinction of readiness potential, the subject and the system come together, to become together Every little act turning out from the regressive endpoint collapses the wave packet, destroying the infra- state of functional indistinction The commotion on the infra- individual level acts out It is then registered as an indexable occurrence, summing up the individual’s irreducible and nontransferable relation to itself in an eco nom ical ly signifi cant act Through the registering of the action, discernible levels bounce back into place Scales accordion back out The system re- self- organizes out of its pro cessual rabbit- holing.The individual’s self- relation, in the “dissociative” dividual dimen-sion, is the crucible of the system’s integral self- organizing Each little act helps infl ect the system’s global direction, as the economy boot-straps its future on the fl y The system’s future is also each individual’s future, as it navigates a life journey through economic successes and failures The system and its denizens become in tandem Every little act exerts a quantum of creative power, globally and locally, in accordion- playing correlation Every little choice exerts, to some degree, a power

of local- global becoming: an ontopower What has been lost to the system

and to individuals in terms of knowability, calculability, and ability is regained in resonant ontopower An ontopower, as a power of becoming, is a creative power The economic model, Foucault said, is now one of existence itself Existence itself: where being is becoming.When what is created is a state of system trust, Luhmann emphasizes that the trust is entirely “unjustifi ed” (Luhmann 1979, 78) It may be ra-tionalizable aft er the fact, but in its genesis it is rationally unfounded It did not occur as the separate result of a rational decision judiciously pre-ceding the actions that brought it into being It came fl ush with an aff ec-tive regress, and its turnabout playing- out At the limit, all economic acts are rationally ungrounded in the endpoint of the economy This does not

predict-mean that they are aff ectively grounded there Any state of system trust that emerges is just as aff ectively unjustifi ed as it is rationally unjusti-

fi ed It was not grounded in anything preparatory to action that could

be qualifi ed 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 eff ectively self- justifying It “justifi es itself,” Luhmann writes, in the way that it has “become creative” (78): in the emergently creative way it

is generated as a trust- eff ect of the economy’s complex self- organizing The self- organizing emergence of the trust- eff ect is retroactively validat-ing It is aff ectively validating in the currency of satisfactions gained

If enough trust- eff ects emerge at a suffi cient rate of generation, then however unjustifi ed they are, the system has a chance of continuing, in a positive orientation, trending up Trust in the system has been restored The aff ective 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 eff ects 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 aff ective- eff ect is now as ratio-nalized as it can get The rationalizing indicators stoke economic activ-ity, reinforcing the aff ective 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 fi eld Feedback loop Eco nom ical ly, aff ectivity 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 pro cess, 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 pro cess it can be infra- stoked toward the

emergence of trust- eff ects The instability of the economy can, at least for certain hiatus periods, be aff ectively primed into metastability: a pro-visional stability snatched emergently from far- from- equilibrium con-ditions Halcyon days Vacation days from the full destabilizing force of complexity Provisional stability: no one really knows how long the trends will hold System trust is a fragile artifact hypersensitive to perturbation.Luhmann drives the point home: “in the reduction of complexity,” resolving into a metastable state, at the immanent limit, at the heart of the pro cess, “there always lies an unstable, incalculable moment” (Luh-mann 1979, 74) It is around this unstable, incalculable, hypersensitive moment that everything begins to revolve The principle of decision at

work “cannot lie in cognitive capacity” actually involving a calculation that

guides action before the fact (79) Ultimately, there is no prospectively knowing economic act The whole pro cess actually works best, Luh-

mann maintains, if the consciousness of trust and distrust are lost, so that the reduction of the readiness- potential wave packet “becomes autonomous”

(71)— so that decision becomes autonomous The aff ective churning of the system, through which the “rationality” of the system cycles, is best left unbeknownst even to itself.13

Nonconsciousness becomes the key economic actor

It appears evident that— the ultimate ends of human actions can never, in any case,

be accounted for by reason, but recommend themselves entirely to the sentiments and aff ections of mankind.

—David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Principles of Human Morals (1912, Appendix 1)

It appears evident that the individual subject of interest can no longer be

considered an autonomous agent of calculated choice It is the act of choice that is autonomous, in the dissociative dimension of the dividual: that of

the individual, absorbed in its relation to itself, plied by superpositions

of contrasting states in a mutual immanence of functional indistinction Choice spills from the readiness potential of the subject’s aff ective blind

spot, nonconsciously This nonconscious level is nonpersonal In the

in-tensity of its immanence, the entire system at all its scales resonates in potential, carried to the absolute limit of its regressive endpoint This infra- level holds all system states in itself, immanently, in potential It dissociates itself from other individuals and other levels only the better

to supercharge itself with what, elsewhere in the system, will play as separate states, following divergent tendencies: distributions of success and failure, trust and distrust, boom and bust, satisfaction and frustra-tion, hope and fear The nonconscious infra- individual level is, at the limit, the nonpersonal superposition of all levels, in the dissociative di-mension of their distributive coming together

In the strange, hyperdiff erentiated infra- zone of indistinction tween contrasting states, who or what decides? Dividually speaking, who

be-or what chooses? Choice happens, there is no denying it And as it pens, it is creative: an ontopowerful act It is tantamount to an existen-tial decision But who or what decides? The answer is: no one—as in the

hap-French personne, which can mean both “someone” and “no one.” Decision

happens: aff ectively- systemically, in the nonconscious pro cessual tonomous zone where mutually exclusive states come together The event decides, as it happens

au-At the decisive moment, the self is no more in a state of determinate activity than it is in a cognitive state It is absorbed in a readiness potential

that is intensely overdetermined, holding, Luhmann says, “a whole range of

possible diff erences” in “sub- threshold latency” (Luhmann 1979, 73) The whole range of potentials are in it together, in their diff erence They are in

a state of mutual inclusion, on the verge, poised toward the collapse tined to resolve the overdetermination of the and- both into this- not- that determinate eff ect, registrable in a calculus of risk and probability: from intensity to statistic Such is the arc of neoliberal becoming

des-The nonconscious “sub- threshold latency,” churning with the sity of a mutually inclusive range of potentials, in co- motional intensity,

inten-deserves a name of its own: bare activity.

When we speak of the subject of interest’s “self- relation” to bare activity, or the relation of the individual to its infra- individual dimension,

“self-” has to be understood directionally It is not a substantive It notes return It is a movement What moves to the limit of the economic

con-fi eld of life’s regressive endpoint has nowhere to go but back out, into becoming What comes in, becomes out The plane of immanence of the infra- individual is, at the limit, all- enveloping, and all- emitting It is the self- relation, in this double movement, of the fi eld of life to itself “Self-”

is an adverb, not a noun It qualifi es the absorptive in- to- the- immanent- limit and ejective out- into- the- becoming movement of bare activity It connotes a vector of life eventfully folding back into the autonomous zone of readiness potential out of which its next determinate step will decide to come Self- relation in this adverbial sense is not refl exive, as

in philosophical parlance, nor it is refl ective in the psychological sense Both of these notions recognitivize the event, implying conscious recog-nition or rational calculation— precisely what Luhmann entrusted not

to be the case

All of this radically changes what is meant by choice We do have a word for a choice that makes itself There is name for a decision that wells up from a state of unknowing, yet still produces knowledge, in

eff ect For an act that has intense personal resonance, but of which it cannot be said that “I” felt it coming in full cognizance A doing done

more through me, self- relating, than by my I That eventfully brings a

cre-ative moment to life in a way that registers as a change in me that is also

world- changing That word is intuition.

The basic paradox of the economic subject of interest is that the culus” of interest is unthinkable without reference to subthreshold ac-tivity more akin to a nonpersonal fl ash of intuition than step- by- step conscious deliberation The “rationality” in the system is necessarily referred to an autonomy of decision bare- actively stirring at the aff ec-tive heart of self- relation

“cal-Deliberation without Attention

In the 1990s, the period in which neoliberal market deregulation and do- not- laisser- faire- the- government took on unstoppable momentum, management philosophy became obsessed with chaos theory The order

of the day was to learn how to surf complexity, extracting surplus value

on the fl y, in the most fl uid of conditions, in the absence of adequate knowledge for fully considered decision and the certainty it brings This

is the period in which capitalist enterprise became an “art” of decision making The management bookshelves were full of “creativity,” “gut feel-ing,” and “zen.” The alchemists of old were fabled to transmute the most inconstant of materials into gold Given the far- from- equilibrium com-plexity of the globalizing economy, a new capitalist alchemy was needed

to transmute uncertainty into profi t

Consider this in light of the neoliberal economist’s insistence, as alyzed by Foucault, that in the deregulated market the individual subject

an-of interest is no longer defi ned by its social category or anchoring in a community so much as by its enterprise activity The neoliberal indi-

vidual is what Foucault calls the enterprise- subject “If capital is defi ned as

that which makes a future income possible, this income being a wage, then you can see that it is a capital which in practical terms is insepara-ble from the person” (Foucault 2008, 224) The “worker himself appears

as a sort of enterprise”: “entrepreneur of himself ” (225, 226) The vidual becomes an enterprise, as the enterprise at all scales becomes

indi-the fundamental unit of society (225) The enterprise- individual invests actively, aff ectively, in its own life, for the future satisfaction of a higher wage, a good return on monetary investment, and a happy retirement

The denizen of the neoliberal economy is no longer a citizen It is human capital (224– 265) or, with the gravitas of Latin, homo oeconomicus Human

capital navigates the same fi eld of complexity and enterprise form of life

as its fellow corporate persons “Corporations are people too!” cried the presidential candidate (and the US Supreme Court agrees).1 As human capital, the individual’s self- management—its attempts to manage its self- relation as an investment in its own future— must become a cre-ative art of choice Correlatively the personal art of choice must become corporate, in keeping with the entanglement between levels

The management, self- improvement, and psychological literature

of the de cade of the 2000s overfl ows with theories of intuitive action and advice on how to mobilize or modulate the powers of nonconscious decision, now considered for all humanly capital intents and purposes

to be more fundamental eco nom ical ly, if not better in all cases, than ratiocination Much of the literature celebrates nonconscious decision, cheerleading for gut feeling These accounts are bolstered by studies showing, for example, that the more calculation and rational deliberation goes into making a consumer choice such as buying a new car, the less likely the choice will be to correspond to an expert cost- to- benefi t analy-sis, and the less satisfying the experience will be perceived to have been

“postchoice”— even in de pen dently of the issue of cost- eff ectiveness

In-fl uential studies have found a negative correlation between rational calculation and consumer satisfaction Nonconscious choice— intuitive “deliberation-

without- attention”—produced “better” choices This eff ect was slight for “simple” choices and pronounced for “complex” ones, which in this context are the same as “costly” choices (Dijksterhuis et al 2006)

In other words, the more there is riding on a choice, the less nal calculation can be counted upon to lead to a satisfactory decision, both eco nom ical ly and aff ectively speaking In the life of an individual, this might well lead to a viscerally felt disincentive to choose “wisely”

ratio-by conventional rational standards Somewhere along the road, it pears that the “good” consumer went out the car window with the

ap-“good” (pre–human- capital civil society) citizen.2

Economic rationalism cannot be disentangled from self- deciding fective factors— all the less where it matters most Issues of trust aside, the very question of what counts as a “success” or “failure” is subject to aff ective interference It cannot be reduced to a purely economic cost- to- benefi t analysis When the aff ective interference doesn’t come from uncertainty in the environment and the individual’s relation to others,

af-it still comes— from the individual’s decisional relation to af-itself The neoliberal wager of making self- interest the fundamental principle of the economy depends on maintaining a strict equation between life- satisfaction and rational calculus of choice The denizen of the neolib-eral world is called upon to equate the experiential value of its life— the

surplus value of life that makes each pulse of life feel that it was worth living

for itself, above and beyond the increasingly impressive achievement of just getting by— with standard quantitative mea sures of economic suc-cess It is precisely this equation that increasingly breaks down It be-comes clear that there is something in the very nature of decision that forbids it The very defi nition of “success” oscillates between aff ective and economic determinants This calls the integrity of human capital into question, and it is not just a circumstantial complication More like

a birth defect in its dna

It is oft en recognized in the literature that “gut feeling” tends to

fl ounder when dealing with abstract statistics and probabilities But we need to take this reservation about gut feeling itself with reservations For nothing will change the fact that macroeconomic indicators are sta-tistical, meaning that they carry a margin of error that makes them in-herently uncertain, dealing as statistics do with probabilities Economic forecasting projects the probabilistic uncertainty forward This means, once again, that results are undecidable with respect to any par tic u lar case On the level of individual decisions, economic forecasting is lit-tle more than a mathematical framework for intuition to work within, garnished with a gloss of scientifi city The calculus of risk is not what it’s cracked up to be, as is well attested by the regularity with which crises catch the experts by surprise, even though everyone knows that they periodically recur and are endemic to the capitalist pro cess The most learned economic number crunching is aff ectively surrounded by

a penumbra of inexpungeable uncertainty Individual economic actors

ultimately have nowhere else to go but back down the rabbit hole No amount of sophisticated modeling will expunge the hard economic fact that under complex conditions of uncertainty rational choice and aff ect- driven intuition enter a zone of indistinction To put it another way, “ra-tionality about the unknown requires emotions” (Pixley 2004, 30).3

Jamming Rational Choice

Returning to the question of the individual actor’s relation to itself, there has been a tectonic shift in experimental psychology as it has become increasingly preoccupied over the last ten to fi ft een years with poking its empirical stick at the rabbit hole of aff ect Nonconsciousness studies has become a growth fi eld in all areas, most troubling for many

in the key areas of decision and choice Most recently, rational choice theory has had to contend with the emerging domain of “choice blind-ness” theory (cb for short) In the science of choice, a ground- shaking acronymic shift is occurring from rem (rational economic man) to cb The challenge is not only to the trustability of one’s choices under con-ditions of extreme uncertainty It reaches into the smallest recesses of the most everyday of situations— and ascends to the supposedly rock- solid heights of the individual’s moral compass

There are strange doings in the tea party of choice Researchers in the psychology of consumer choice asked subjects to make a simple choice: between two varieties of tea and jam (Hall et al 2010) The tastes

of the proposed alternatives were as diff erent as can be, for example between cinnamon- apple and bitter grapefruit Participants were asked which variety they preferred The researchers then switched the variet-ies unbeknownst to the tasters Then they asked them to take what they thought was a second sample of their preferred fl avor and explain why

they liked the fl avor best Two- thirds of the time the experimental subjects did not notice the switch A cinnamon- apple afi cionado would happily ingest

bitter grapefruit— and convincingly explain his preference for it Talk about rationalization of choice

On the one hand, this “choice blindness” demonstrates the power

of perceptual priming A future sensation can be made to conform to

a past sensation to which it is fundamentally diff erent by force of

ex-pectation “Expectation” may simply consist in a lack of cues that thing has changed, so that a new event is nonconsciously equated with the previous one by entropic momentum This is what Whitehead calls the “conformation of feeling,” whereby the present moment dawns as a continuation of the “subjective form” of the immediate past (1967, 183– 184).4 The experimental subjects, poised for a taste, tasted what they were poised for The experience of the taste that isn’t what it is is a case

any-of how the most basic sensory experience can be conditioned to yield

not so much a sense- impression as a fabulation.5

This points to an experiential plasticity that belies any notion of an

under lying principle of personal preference as having the sovereign power to determine action What are experienced as satisfying quali-ties of experience are surprisingly open to situational conditioning How is a jam eater to act according to her own self- interest, as signed and sealed by the satisfaction of a preference duly attained, if what con-stitutes satisfaction is fundamentally plastic? What is the diff erence between decision and nondecision if we can be as convincing, to our-selves as to others, about being satisfi ed with an outcome we did not choose? It is not only when the nature of the outcome is in suspense, held in readiness potential, that decision and nondecision are in a state

of superposition A determinate decision, already verifi ed once by an

experienced satisfaction, can be made retroactively to enter into a state of

superposition with nondecision by a later experience

This is the recursive opposite of the collapse of the wave packet by a

future event Here a sequence of action produces the wave packet

retro-actively Undecidability is not in the suspense of a readiness potential holding the futurity of the present Rather, it is presently produced as a

recursive aff ective fact.6 Aff ectivity and rationality are entwined in a

dif-ferent way here The aff ectability of the outcome as registered in

quali-tative experiential terms— the openness of an experience’s satisfaction quotient to situational conditioning— is directly expressed in a ratio-

nalization This is another mode of the functional indistinction between

aff ectivity and rationality Were the individual really that— an individual rather than an in- the- dividual—this could not occur But it does, and this gives the dividual itself two oscillating poles, corresponding to two modes of undecidability superposing aff ectivity and rationality Both,

paradoxically, can be understood as modes of overdetermination: on the

one hand, an overfullness of diff erent states held intensely together in readiness potential; on the other, the altogether too convincing matter- of- factness of the fabulatory fait accompli

Even more troublesome for any notion of an underlying set of core preferences are studies demonstrating that under similar circumstances basic moral attitudes have the consistency of jam A similar experiment was performed in which participants were requested to fi ll out a question-naire asking them to take a position on a statement of principle such as

“to be moral is to follow the rules and regulations of society, rather than weighing the positive or negative consequences of one’s actions” (Hall

et al 2012) They were also asked to rate the strength of their conviction

on the issues Aft er fi lling out a questionnaire, they were asked to justify their position Their answers had been surreptitiously reversed A major-ity of the respondents did not notice the switch, and went on to produce

a justifi cation for the moral principle diametrically opposed to the one to which they had so recently adhered Even those reporting the strongest of convictions on an issue were susceptible to the reversal

The Primes of Life

How can people be so fi ckle? Have they no principles? How quickly they are duped! Think of the po liti cal implications! Isn’t that how fascism succeeds, by exploiting just such phenomena? Yes, in part, it certainly

is But it is worth pausing a moment before getting too moralistic about the ease with which this choice jamming occurs, lest we protest too much Who among us can profess to be immune from such condition-ing under all conditions?

Interpreted in light of the fi rst experiment, the plasticity of moral conviction shown in the second experiment appears as a higher- order

recapitulation of a perceptual dynamic The phenomenon of choice

blind-ness points to a tendency toward fabulation built into perceptual rience Or more precisely: built into the temporality of our perceptual experience The self- evidence of our present perception does not stand the test of time Our memory plays tricks on us It is becoming increas-ingly accepted that a memory is not reproduced Rather, it is regener-

expe-ated A memory is always an event, never a repre sen ta tion The event of

memory varies according to the conditions under which it is produced Personal memory is an evolving dynamic system that is predicated not

on reproduction but on re-creation In the vocabulary of cognitive

sci-ence, memory is by nature “reconstructive.” This means that the person

we are as a function of our memories is self- re- creating If it weren’t,

per-sonal growth and change would be impossible

The fabulatory element of perception as it varies over time is a ative factor in life In its absence, the individual would be an ambulant repetition- compulsion, shackled to a bedrock of past preferences and principles What would possess me to forgo my tried and true satisfac-tions? The only way for change to occur would be through the imposi-tion of modifi ed behaviors from without, either in the form of brute conformal force, or through the disciplinary inculcation of norms meant to be interiorized in such as way as to foster conformal behav-ior even in the absence of force Either way, individual choice is just as fundamentally called into question as it is by choice jamming— and the conformal foundations are just as eff ectively laid for a potential au-thoritarianism or fascism to develop by a hardening of the boundary between the normal and the abnormal into a dividing wall of exclusion

cre-In the present context, it is capital to remember that the ary inculcation of normed behavior invariably revolves around delayed gratifi cation— the very notion of which is now struck by neoliberal para-dox This is why Foucault makes a point of saying that the rise of neoliberal-ism coincides with “a massive withdrawal from the normative- disciplinary system” (Foucault 2008, 260) Under neoliberalism, the right to choose

disciplin-in accordance with one’s self- disciplin-interest becomes disciplin-inalienable: ible and nontransferable.” Satisfaction is the sign of a self- interest well served, and so becomes the human- capital mea sure of the success of the economic entrepreneurship driving the economy Its uncertain defer-ral has become under neoliberalism an irreducible and nontransferable problem The neoliberal pro cess assumes the problem Neoliberalism

“irreduc-fi nds it far more satisfying to live out the paradoxes of its own doctrine of choice— to surf the perturbational limit- zones of indistinction between aff ectivity and rationality that riddle its relational fi eld— than to return

to the normative containment of self- interest as a palliative or regulatory

principle Its passion is for deregulation It happily chooses “creative struction” over palliative care It affi rms the perturbations of far- from- equilibrium “oscillatory pro cesses” over the normative stability of regu-lated change Zones of indistinction between aff ectivity and rationality, such as deliberation- without- attention and choice blindness, are some-thing it can work with (a gold mine for new marketing strategies!) Good citizenship is altogether too unenterprising.

de-It might still be objected that the experimental examples of

fabu-latory choice blindness given above seem to have less to do with creation than with conditioning by others But what is meant by condi- tioning here needs to be examined It is not assimilable to either of the

self-two phenomena most oft en associated with the term, classical Pavlovian conditioning and Skinnerian operant conditioning The fi rst creates re-

fl ex associations between stimuli, while the second uses a rigid system

of punishment and reward to reinforce or deter target behaviors Both function in a highly controlled, closed environment and operate accord-ing to a stimulus- response model The conditioning in the examples just presented, on the other hand, were in uncontrolled, open environ-ments The tea- and- jam survey was conducted from a stall in a super-market, and in the moral convictions survey passers- by were recruited

in a city park In neither case was a stimulus- response model employed Rather, participants were brought into an interaction proposed to them

in the open environment The interaction constituted a subset of the

activity occurring in the environment In other words, a situation of counter was produced within a larger context The observed eff ects were

en-the result of how en-the encounter was set up within en-these conditions It was the situation and the encounter that were conditioned, not the par-ticipants (at least not directly) This qualifi es the experimental interven-tion as environmental in the sense discussed earlier: as acting on the rules of the game, rather than directly on the players The behavior of

the participants was modulated through the way in which the pa ram e ters

for the interaction were set in the chosen contexts The survey dure and its structure of judgment are known genres of interaction, and

proce-as such can be expected to implant certain presuppositions in the situation

(such as that a survey taker is unlikely to have studied sleight of hand

magic tricks) and activate certain tendencies in the participants (such as

a desire to cooperate with a seeker of knowledge and an eagerness to please someone in a relative position of authority).

This form of conditioning, which modulates behavior by ing presuppositions and activating tendencies in an open situation of

implant-encounter, is called priming Priming operates less through stimulus- response than through cues whose force is situational Priming addresses

threshold postures (presuppositions) orienting a participant’s entry into the situation, plus the associated tendencies that carry the orientation forward through the encounter Accordingly, it does not exercise the same kind of power as normative- disciplinary mechanisms (of which both traditional forms of conditioning are highly distilled forms) Pre-cisely because priming is orienting and activating, modulating rather than molding, it cannot guarantee the same level of uniformity of re-sult The results in the studies are impressive, statistically speaking It is stunning that the choice- blindness eff ect was observed in a majority to two- thirds of participants But that still leaves a great deal of room for deviance and variation (“minority” tendencies), and nothing in the way the study was designed can indicate anything about what made the diff er-ence In other words, deviance is left to its own devices, which is not the

case in normative- disciplinary modes of power The setup was affi rmative

in the sense that it implanted and activated in order to eff ect— rather than squelch and punish in order to negate A signifi cant minority of partici-

pants brought countertendencies to the encounter that self- affi rmed, against the statistically prevailing conditioning In other words, those who did

not display choice blindness were more self- priming than eff ectively

con-ditioned by the other’s setting of the situational pa ram e ters But then, were not the participants whose actions did display choice blindness also self- affi rming their tendencies, in the sense that they acquiesced to their own tendencies leading in that direction, and what ever countervailing tendencies they had were not allowed to determine the end result? And who would not have countervailing tendencies? Who does not harbor some degree of re sis tance to authority, or some mischievous inclination

to throw a wrench into the machinery of knowledge associated with it?

What all of this means is that priming works with the dividual Its mode

of operation presupposes a tendential undertow in the life of the dividual that is best approached affi rmatively, and whose complexity

in-is such that only a certain ratio of success can be guaranteed The dential undertow crests into determinate action, and this pro cess can

ten-be modulated by the implantation of presuppositional postures and the activation of associated tendencies The mechanisms for infl ecting outcomes must be affi rmative of the dividual, and operate in an open relational fi eld Relative consistency of results is attained by triggering

a subset of activity in the environment This special activity is set off against the surrounding activity in the open fi eld, without being divided from it by a strict dividing line It is focalized, without being segregated The ongoing activity in the environment is less excluded than it is back-grounded Priming is an art of situational emphasis In keeping with its affi rmative modus operandi, it functions by incitation or triggering, rather than punishment and reward It induces participation, rather than imposing a form It brings something to life in the situation, rather than carving away at life to make it conform to a mold Priming is an

inductive mode of power It induces It allows things to come out, rather

than battening them down It brings to be rather than making form It eff ects, rather than negates In a word, priming is a mechanism

con-of ontopower

It is of the utmost signifi cance that priming depends, on the one hand,

on the individual’s susceptibility to its own tendential infra- churnings and, on the other, on its openness to the situation— the individual’s bi-polar aff ectability Priming operationalizes the cross- sensitivity between the infra- and macropoles of the fi eld of neoliberal life It attaches its procedures to the relational event- sensitivity of the denizen of the oscil-latory neoliberal fi eld of life activity Priming is the power mechanism most closely allied to the workings of the neoliberal economy, as it lives out the paradoxes of its doctrine of self- interested choice Its eschewal

of hard- edged normative- disciplinary procedures makes it an exemplary mechanism of “soft power.” The preemptive mode of power that charac-terizes the neoliberal fi eld of life, at the hard and soft ends of the spec-trum, in war and policing as much as in relation to the market, pivots on priming Priming is the royal way to the modulation of events before they fully emerge

Specifi cally targeted, consciously applied practices of priming as in the experiment surveys just discussed, must, in order to guarantee sta-

tistically signifi cant results, be capable of setting off an area of tivity from the background activity of the constitutively open relational

subac-fi eld of neoliberal life However, there are also scatter techniques: niques for sowing primings to the wind, in the much- less- guaranteed statistical hope that when they fall it will be upon a ground conducive to

tech-a specitech-al tech-activity self- orgtech-anizing itself tech-around their imptech-act crtech-ater The Internet and mobile communication devices are the most widely avail-able tools for this They lend themselves to both deliberation- without- attention and choice blindness For deliberation- without- attention can also be induced by priming The way in which new communicational technologies prime for distributed attention, as users click their way through lengthy sequences of linked choices, sets the conditions for the intuitive decision making that the experiment on consumer choice pre-sented earlier confi rmed Who, while surfi ng, has not had the sensation

of decisions making themselves through them? At the same time, the areas of focus that occasionally stand out in the sea of clicks are prime opportunities for choice blindness to set in

None of this is in any way meant as a lament that the neoliberal ronment in general and the Internet in par tic u lar corrupt the sovereign power of individual choice, enslave desires, and produce soft - powered citizens of regretful malleability Netizens are not citizens in a degraded public sphere They are denizens of a complex neoliberal fi eld of life The point is that mechanisms of priming are distributed everywhere through-out the fi eld They are networked into it, as well as being punctually set

envi-in place locally under certaenvi-in circumstances by par tic u lar procedures of presupposition- planting and tendency- activation.7 Contemporary mar-keting strategies work at both ends, the distributed and the local They exploit the ubiquity of communications technology to sow local seeds of priming that are encountered by the units of human capital that we are at every step in our wanderings: a free- range world of cues

The very ease with which the cue- sowing can spread and proliferate

makes the habitat of homo oeconomicus a highly complex environment of

primes Under neoliberalism, priming goes feral Priming in the wild saturates the fi eld of life, forming a complex ecol ogy with more institu-tional varieties involving par tic u lar encounters consciously foreground-ing specialized activity (as was the case with the surveys) This makes