Contribution
On the parts read: a restatement, for a general reader, of Massumi’s process philosophy, put to political use. Capitalism has become an “ontopower” that captures the emergent, “infra-individual” level of “bare activity”, and couples it directly with the transindividual, bypassing the person (p. 14). Activism works on that same level, as micropolitics.
Key insight
“There is always an excess of activity over action” (p. 29). Activity is potential not yet captured into a function, and politics, capitalist or counter-capitalist, is a matter of what captures it and how.
Assumptions
- Process ontology: “there is no outside to movement” (p. 20); objects are “movement field-effects”.
- Deleuze and Guattari’s apparatuses of capture, Whitehead’s contrast and beauty, Simondon’s transindividual, Spinozist joy as intensity.
- The genre is the interview, so claims are asserted and illustrated (Brexit, Facebook’s mood experiment, for-profit prisons), not argued from evidence.
Key results
- Movement as transformation. Displacement is “the index of a becoming”; the human is “a carrier of a movement of relational transformation” (p. 8). The neoliberal moment is “a vector of becoming coming out the far side of our humanity” (p. 9).
- The dividual. Neoliberal capital works below the individual, on the “dividual”, and couples it to the transindividual (p. 14).
- Excess of activity. “An excess of potential over capture, of bare activity over useful function” (p. 29).
- Micropolitics as co-patterning. “Micropolitics is the modulation of this dynamic differential mutual inclusion, tending toward greater field-intensities. What I mean by that is a maximally inclusive co-patterning of contrasting tendencies, co-habiting the field in a way that facilitates each fully realizing itself” (p. 64). “The co-patterning at issue is aesthetic”, Whitehead’s beauty as “an affirmation of discord”. “If this sounds utopic, it isn’t. It is just always-as-yet unknowable” (p. 64). Micropolitics “cannot be separated from macropolitics” (p. 64).
- Affect. In ch. 2, affect is “the ability to affect and be affected”; it “escapes the active-passive opposition, and it always directly operates transindividually” (p. 109). “Because you’re in the middle … you’re not in your subject position, you’re in becoming” (p. 108).
Claims
Not filled in: the note is Skimmed.
Concepts
- bare activity — formative, not yet formed movements: “ebbs and flows of desire, tendency, fear, hope” (p. 14).
- ontopower — “the power to bring to be” (p. 13).
- micropolitics — politics of the minor event “on the verge of becoming-perceptible”, oriented toward joy (p. 63).
- in-forming — the shaping passage of a formative potential between media, in ch. 3 (pp. 121, 124).
Connections
Continues the micropolitics of the 2009 interview (LIT-1905), where the aim is “a symbiosis: a cross-fertilization of capacitations”. Cites Manning’s The Minor Gesture (2016) and Relationscapes (2009).
Bearing on the record
- THEORY-1283 (Proposed) states micropolitics as co-patterning, sourced here.
- LIT-1902 quotes p. 64 exactly. The departure is one of mood. Massumi states a micropolitical aim, aesthetic and affirming discord. The parent says organizational becoming “is constituted by the micropolitics of attempting to reach” it (p. 1358). That is a stronger, descriptive claim, though “attempting” softens it. The parent’s “vector of becoming” for a person (p. 1364) extends Massumi’s use (p. 9), consistently with p. 8.
- Massumi’s “excess of activity over action” names what is not mobilized into action. The parent’s “excess action” is what is passed to another process and taken up by it. The parent’s is closer to Massumi’s “capture” than to his “excess”.
- No instruction for machine-learning practice.
Limitations
Most of the book was not read. Its political diagnoses (representation “is dead”, accelerationism, the “Capitalocene”) are opinion in interview form.
Open questions
What would show that a collective had reached, or failed to reach, “a maximally inclusive co-patterning”? Massumi calls it “always-as-yet unknowable”, which makes it hard to use as a description of organizations.
Bearing on the record’s own argument
Added 2026-10-31 by a pass connecting the readings of Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy 2024 and the works it leans on to the record’s lines. Analogies are marked as such.
Pragmatic transport
- CLAIM-496. Co-patterning that affirms discord (p. 64) describes a family that is not coherent but not failing either. CLAIM-496 names what the ideal lacks: a task against which loss is read.
Distributed agency and individuation
- QUESTION-281. The co-patterning of discord (p. 64) has the same structure as the frustration route, “organizing differences that cannot all be reconciled”. It has no dynamics.