Productivity and Critique : Massumi

If you want to adopt a productivist approach, the techniques of critical thinking prized by the humanities are of limited value. To think productivism, you have to allow that even your own logical efforts feedback and add to reality, in some small, probably microscopic way. But still. Once you have allowed that, you have accepted that activities dedicated to thought and writing are inventive. Critical thinking disavows its own inventiveness as much as possible. Because it sees itself as uncovering something it claims was hidden or as debunking something it desires to subtract from the world, it clings to basically descriptive and justificatory modus operandi. However strenuously it might debunk concepts like “representation,” it carries on as if it mirrored something outside itself with which it had no complicity, no unmediated processual involvement, and thus could justifiably oppose. Prolonging the thought-path of movement, as suggested here, requires that techniques of negative critique be used sparingly. The balance hasto shift to affirmative methods: techniques which embrace their own inventiveness and are not afraid to own up to the fact that they add (if so meagerly) to reality. There is a certain hybris to the notion that a mere academic writer is actually inventing. But the hybris is more than tempered by the self-evident modesty of the returns. So why not hang up the academic hat of critical self-seriousness, set aside the intemperate arrogance of debunking – and enjoy? If you don’t enjoy concepts and writing, and feel that when you write you are adding something to the world, if only the enjoyment itself, and that by adding that ounce of positive experience to the world you are affirming it, celebrating its potential, tending its growth, in however small a way, however really abstractly – well, just hang it up. It is not that critique is wrong. As usual, it is not a question of right and wrong (nothing important ever is). It is a question of dosage. It is simply that when you are busy critiquing you are less busy augmenting. You are that much less fostering. There are times when debunking is necessary. But if applied in a blanket manner, adopted as a general operating principle, it is counterproductive. Foster or debunk. It’s a strategic question. Like all strategic questions, it is basically a question of timing and proportion. Nothing to do with morals or moralizing. Just pragmatic.

Massumi : Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002)