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Brian Massumi

2018
Minneapolis

This work

This work is the 2018 University of Minnesota Press edition. Massumi's manifesto-in-theses proposes an ethics of value grounded not in quantification or moral transcendence but in the qualitative, processual, and affective dimensions of life itself — a revaluation that seeks to wrest the concept of value from both capitalist commensuration and normative judgment, opening toward a postcapitalist ecology of powers. The theses iterate across ninety-nine numbered propositions (T1–T99), each a lapidary kernel of argument followed by scholium-style qualification, in a form that recalls both Spinoza's Ethics and the Situationist dérive. Massumi writes in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Occupy, and accelerating debates over immaterial labor, surplus value, and biopolitical capture, in dialogue with Deleuze and Guattari's processual philosophy, affect theory, Simondon's individuation, and autonomist Marxism. The work's central wager: that value is irreducibly qualitative, tied to intensity and affect as capitalism's "immanent outside" — forces that modulate but exceed systemic capture, offering leverage points for postcapitalist invention rooted in processual ethics rather than moral normativity or market commensuration.

Erin ManningShared the SenseLab milieu and relational aesthetics where Massumi's affect and process vocabulary took shape.
Manuel DeLandaReads assemblage and non-linear history in ways that often cross the same Deleuzian processual terrain.
J. K. Gibson-GrahamPost-capitalist and diverse-economies framing that rhymes with rethinking value beyond a single capitalist logic.
Kathi WeeksCritical work on work, time, and value that intersects feminist debates on reproduction and surplus.

99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto

Brian Massumi

Begin where the book begins

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