#affect-itself

The point we want to make is that the objective existence of bodies whose energies can be measured and administered under capitalism should be understood in the context of the effects of historically specific modes of administration and measurement. This is not to say that the body is simply a construction, but rather that bodies and techniques of administration and measure all arise out of dynamic matter as parts of a network of capital and scientific discourse. Given this, we are proposing that the body-as-organism is generated by a system of measurement and administration that does not adequately characterize the workings of capitalist economy and governance at this time.

...affectivity is central to the present relationship of measure and value. Whereas measure had previously provided a representation of value, now affectivity has become a means of measuring value that is itself autoaffective, producing affect in a multiplier effect across metastable levels of matter. This is to think in terms of affective measure, to understand measure and affect not simply as related, but as occurring simultaneously in relations of metastability. [...] As such, the value of an action or commodity is affective rather than its being a matter of known effects or a calculated intentionality. In an economy of affect-itself, value is that which endlessly unfolds from all action and this is the nature of its measure: it feeds forward and backward across all levels of matter – what we have described as matter measuring itself.

...we are proposing that capitalist productivity is not just in the state of a flexible ‘accumulation by dispossession,’ as David Harvey (2003: 137-182) would have it. Along with financialization, privatization and the management and manipulation of economic crises, capitalism meets a threshold beyond which a plane of investment and accumulation is laid out in the domain of affect-itself, along with what is referred to as the real subsumption of life itself, for which the relationship of governance and economy is reenvisioned

Active information is measure in matter, an in-forming, where the measure and the measured constitute a specific case of the undivided wholeness of the implicate order […] Matter is a process of self-informing raw energy, an explication of the implicit with a remainder. [...] Drawing on the thought of the implicate order, active information and quantum potential, our conceptualization of affect signals an investment in the emergent at every level of matter and as such, a dissolution of the distinction between organic and non-organic life.

Instead of looking to the body-as-organism to actualize labor-power, we are proposing that a dynamic, indeterminate matter is presently being configured in capitalism with corresponding techniques of administration aimed at a level below, above, or perhaps beyond that of the bounded body-as-organism [...] We are proposing that there is an abstracting of affect to affect-itself, which disregards the bounded-ness of the human body, thus troubling the conceptualization of the body as the body-as-organism

We are moving beyond the laborer’s body assumed in the labor theory of value – what we will refer to as the body-as-organism – in order to speculate about the ways in which capital is setting out a domain of investment and accumulation by generalizing or abstracting affect to affect-itself […] labor power must be treated in terms of an abstraction that would be befitting not only organic and non-organic bodies but bodies that are beyond the distinction altogether, that is, bodies that are conceived as arising out of dynamic matter or matter as informational.