Applying a concept

My seminar this year is on affect. There was a lot I needed to read (still is, more than I will ever be able to read, even if everyone stops writing right now), so it seemed like a good idea. This week: Parables of the Virtual. Massumi writes:

The first rule of thumb if you want to invent or reinvent concepts is simple: don't apply them. If you apply a concept or system of connection between concepts, it is the material you apply to it to that undergoes change, much more markedly than do the concepts. The change is imposed upon the material by the concepts' systematicity and constitutes a becoming homologous of the material to the system. This is all very grim. It has less to do with 'more to the world' than 'more of the same.' It has less to do with invention than mastery and control.

This passage caught me because of the work I've been doing on the idea of communism (obviously incited by Badiou and Zizek). I think Massumi is wrong on his own terms to say that the concept doesn't undergo a change through its application--this actually seems a necessary and unavoidable effect of feedback, the process of thinking, etc. That said, communism seems to me to be a concept that explicitly avows the change it imposes on its material (and maybe disavows the change effected on itself, a disavowal which calls out for remedy). For communism, this isn't grim at all. And it's definitely not more of the same. It's a cut through invention, mastery, and control that attempts to reconfigure and rearrange them.

Comments

[Gregg Daniel Miller]

I'd love to see your syllabus!