We are delighted to repost Brian Massumi’s latest essay, first published on his new Substack.

The maturation of the modern nation-state coincided with a progressive becoming-immanent of power to the social field. Concepts such as disciplinary power, governmentality, and biopower – to name just the trio invented by Michel Foucault – were developed to describe the dispersal of power into the smallest capillaries of the social body. Increasingly networked communicational channels innervate the field of life, delivering provocations that play the nervous systems of the citizenry like the strings of an abstract harp: tweaks, pokes, primings. Impingements continuously interrupt the flow of everyday life, micro-segmenting attention. In the cracks between pokes to attention, the body is braced by incursions of the outside and other. The nascent thought that begins to stir with every movement of feeling is stoked by each successive hit, only to be short-circuited by the cut to the next: co(m)motion of feeling suffused with incipient thinking. In the fits and starts, the feeling-thinking body is tensed and tenderized, both. Fraught in the middle, the body is in jeopardy of capture, of being inducted and adjoined. The modalities of power that trawl the social field have an in, and they plug in: to the life of the body at the infra-level, underside its capacities to execute action and direct thought with the self-sovereignty and self-sufficiency that we have been led to believe define us as autonomous subjects of decision.

The becoming-immanent of power has thrown sovereignty and decision to the winds, dispersing it to the far corners of the social field. Power becomes distributive. Many a voice announces the obsolescence of the state and the death of the sovereign, long since beheaded. They speak too soon. Just as the movement of power’s becoming-immanent passes the threshold where it forcefully registers, a strange phenomenon occurs. The head of state, it is just as forcefully evident, is firmly back on the shoulders of a preeminent person. A preeminence who fascinates by the nostalgic lilt of his Hollywood voice in counterpoint with a debonairly faltering body, or rivets attention through the rhythms of his alternatively athletic and clod-hopping body image intercut by falterings of language, or beams pulses of grievance from vengeful eyes peering from a practiced, clenched-jaw, brow-knit expression of a complainer-in-chief exempted from the rules of cogent discourse. From Reagan to George W to Trump, the imperial center is reoocupied, with a pageantry deceptively reminiscent of the god-king monarchism that preceded and prepared the way for the modern nation-state. Power is back in the preeminent person. Front and center, the personality of power returns. With a vengeance. But also with a difference. The fact that when the lineage that goes from Reagan to Trump also goes from the B-grade movie actor to the uber-kitsch reality star, invested with an exceptionalism that exonerates him from the rigours of coherent discourse and well-reasoned policy purporting to observe a standard of truth, is symptomatic of a startlingly new variation on an old regime. The personality of power is an archaism with a contemporary function.

Point 1

All contemporary state-based power formations have no choice but to navigate the tension between these two inverse dynamics, power diffusing and power re-centering. Each must invent a solution to this disparity. Contemporary fascism must be understood from this angle, as inventing its own unique working resolution of what, in the abstract, is a contradiction.

Point 2

Contemporary fascism’s solution, in the person of Trump, is to fashion the preeminent person at the head of state as a central node in the circulation of signs, in a very particular configuration, to very particular effect. Trump is the disturber-in-chief: he throws off a continuous stream of provocations that strike anxious bodies braced throughout the social field, impinging at the emergent infra-level of their nascent thinking-feeling, in the interstices of their spasmodic attention. The aim is scatter-shot, like unguided missiles flying hit-or-miss. The hope is that the hits will resonate, creating ripples that spread, perhaps to crest, self-amplifying into the tipping point of a registerable event, relatively small or large, spreading widely or more localized in bubbles. The strikes fall on the sensitive ground of a quasi-chaotic social field in a perpetual communicational churn. The tipping points draw order-out-of-chaos effects to the choppy surface. Policy does not direct the strikes. It follows them, capturing the order-out-of-chaos effects and capitalizing on them.

Point 3

The emission of sign strikes is not unidirectional. What comes out from the center of the person of the leader, returns to him. An echo chamber forms between Trump’s tweeting (or “truthing”) and those of his followers. Trump will pick up a provocation from Fox News or the right-wing infosphere and tweet it back. It will then return to him. Round and round, in spirals. In the eddy, it becomes impossible to assign a definite source. The subject of speech blurs across a multiplicity of bodies. Discourse becomes effectively indirect, without an assignable subject of the statements. It becomes irreducibly collective. Trump becomes the central node in a far-reaching collective assemblage of enunciation. His preeminent eye overlooks the field. His bloated I arrogates emergent effects rippling its surface to his credit. Adoring crowds have been known to chant his words back to him, retaining the first person diction. I he cries, and they take up his I in their chant, producing the bizarre formation of a first-person chorus of reported speech.

Point 4

The person of Trump is this collective first-person. Trump is not reducible to Donald, the male hominin in the red tie and blue suit. His personhood is entirely bound up in the supplementation of his individual status through the cycling and relay, eddying and return, stirring the churn. Trump is a collective person, without exaggeration and without metaphor. You could call his collective personhood a media figure, as long as it not forgotten that Trump has no separate existence outside his media-borne supplementation by others. He does not only revel in the adulation of the crowd. He needs it to hold him in existence as the person he is. Everything he does is designed to preserve his nodal centrality as if it were a matter of life or death. Witness his desperate clinging to the presidency through the ignominious end of his first term to his aspirational third term. His I lives off siphoning the energies of others. Others are little underpersons to his grand nodal overperson, adjoined to him through the spiral dynamic relaying the center to the periphery and spiralling the periphery back to the center, in a collective stir.

Point 5

There is an affective tone to the circulation of signs swirling around the preeminent person: fear, and anger against anyone or anything fear-inducing. In other words, reactivity. The braced social body is cocked to react by a prevailing atmosphere of threat, ready to trigger to sign-impingements from the outside and other. Contemporary fascism swirls with an affective regime of reaction. The regime of reaction cannot be accounted for in psychological terms. The reaction-triggering hits strike in the interstices, in the cracks in attention, below the psychological level, on the sensitive underside of thinking-feeling infra- to the person’s ownable executive actions and considered cogitations, boggling them from within, at the formative level. They then transmit through media networks transindividually, from underside to underside, in what amounts to a direct “communicatiom of subconsciousnesses” as a constitutive force of personing. New conceptual tools must be honed to understand the constitutive infra/transindividual dynamic of the regime of reaction that stokes the complex, multileveled apparatus of collective personhood in fascist directions.

Point 6

The triggered reactions are pre-conditioned to move in certain directions by the saturation of that atmosphere by racist, sexist, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-immigrant –in a word, anti-other – presuppositions and posturings saturating social discourse. These ambient judgments, ready to snap, are a necessary part of the machinery. But they are not a sufficient condition. Their snappings into action are predominantly triggered, and correlated and coordinated overall, by a certain performative operation actuated from the center occupied by the preeminent person.

Point 7

That performative operation can be simply called decision: sovereign decision, in the vocabulary of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. Decision, he says is a purely performative “ascription” of enemy status, one that takes effect simply by being stated. This performative act is not based on a personal feeling or judgment, and follows no norm or preparatory chain of reasoning. It moves outside the law, in and as a state of exception to it. It picks up a collective feeling of threat. The preeminent person is the pick-up, like a transducer receiving a weak signal and reimparting it charged and amplified. In that movement, the preeminent person coincides with the collective. He is not acting as an individual, but as a singular channel of collective affect. His person, absorbed in this movement, is a singular personality ofpower, not a particular personality with power. The decisions Schmitt had in mind were grand and the threat existential, with the ascription of the enemy marking a transition from business as usual to a situation in which the citizenry is inducted into a willingness to kill or die in defense of their way of life, adjoined to the performative dynamic. Trump is a knock-off of the Schmittian sovereign. His petty nonstop tweeting of grievance and censure during his first term stirred the atmosphere of fear and anger, seeding its social media clouds to rain a constant drizzle of enemy mini-ascriptions. The performative effect was distributed, coming in drips and drops. It could, however, pool into larger currents through the nodal relay of reaction spiralling around Trump. It could spread in a contagion, and sometimes eddy, amplifying into dramatic outbreaks, as on January 6, 2021.

Point 8

Trumpian decision is “fascisizing.” It stirs reactive tendencies, spreads and amplifies them, ascribing enemies, hardening borders against them, and priming for outbursts of attack. It is a lightning rod for fascisizing tendencies. Under the right conditions, at a certain confluence, the tendencies can cross a tipping point to a full-fledged fascism. Trump’s second term has taken a significant step toward that tipping point: where rule by exception becomes the rule.

Point 9

Rule-by-tweet is now paralleled by an equally ad-libbed rain of executive orders autocratically bypassing to the extent possible the legislative and judicial branches of government, claiming exception from the law and the constitution. The executive orders draw the ascriptive force of the centrifugal movement of Trump’s social media storming back to the center, like an atmospheric swirl into the eye of a hurricane. The winds of reaction take on strength. The performative ascription of the enemy blows with the force of law. This adds a frankly dictatorial dimension to the nodal function of Trump’s personality of power. The gap between Trumpian decisional cloud-seeding by social-media grievance-bombing and Schmitt’s directly dictatorial performative channeling contracts. The poke of the thumb on the keypad and the flourish of the signature sharpie on sovereign paper pivot around each other in close operational embrace, co-storming to mutually reinforcing reactive effect. The exceptional, and personal, nature of this reinforcement effect is attested to by the fact that while less than a third of Republicans profess support for authoritarian rule in general, fully 57% support authoritarian rule by Trump.^[1]

Point 10

Trump the decider does not legitimate his policies with cogent arguments and appeals to the reason of state. He does not do legitimation. He takes license. He takes license based on his personal exceptionalism: “only I can do it.” Trump is the law. Echoing Napolean he pronounces, “he who saves the country does not violate any laws.” When his supporters adhere to his actions, it is not from ideological belief. It is from affective adjunction to the dynamic of his personality of power. They do not cheer him on from a mediated distance. They directly vibrate in his rhythms, their thinking-feeling inducted into his commotion at the constitutive infra-level of what makes them who they are. They do not identify with him, so much as they recognize their own exceptionalism in his. His taking license gives them leave to take license in turn. They fashion themselves mini-centers of Trumpian decision orbiting around and resonating with his preeminent nodal centrality. They come into themselves as nodes of dispersal in a collective individuation swirling through and around him. A contagion of enemy ascription ensues, potentially intensifying to the point of civl war.

Point 11

The situation overall is post-normative. This does not mean that the norm disappears. Quite the contrary, it hardens and its application to bodies and lives becomes all the more ruthless. Here, post-normative means that the norm no longer guarantees a true correspondance between its content and the content of those whose lives it overcodes. That conformal truth relation is no longer the point. The norm is the Man-Standard (white, male, heterosexual, of European descent, native born, speaking a major language, embodying human capital). In these Trumpian times, its protagonists display anomalies. It is enforced, for example, by surprising large numbers of prominent women who, far from trad wives, are high-powered career women in the public eye. Among its manosphere enforcers, we find Milo Yiannopoulos. He is himself un-hetero – living in a gay marriage. Andrew Tate is a particularly grievous case. He is unwhite – biracial. Commentators often point out that Trump’s own persona integrates what are stereotypically considered feminine characteristics of cattiness and vulnerability, to the point that his has been described as an “ornamental” masculinity. The law-abiding, morally upright, stoic paragon of traditional manhood he is not. The norm can presently reconcile itself with what, by its letter, would be in deviance from its conformist prescriptions. On the side of the enforcees, those to whom the Man-Standard is applied, there is similarly no requirement that they actually embody the characteristics corresponding to their assigned enemy status. Thousands of immigrants are rounded up for deportation, some to be disappeared into overseas black sites, with not the slightest attempt to verify their status. Legitimate visa holders and even US citizens are admittedly caught in the dragnet. It is simply not the point to apply the norm in a true and consistent manner. The point is the reactive pursuit of punishment and retribution following upon enemy ascription, and furthering it. The operation is not moral-political. It is affectivo-political. It is a collective indulgence in reactivity. The norm wavers, even as it hardens. It is as if the center of the bell curve oscillates between a hypo- pole where it covers for deviances in its enforcers, and a hyper- pole where it slides into exaggerated, even cartoonish performances that one would be forgiven for mistaking for self-satire. Overall, Trump supporters do not identify with him as the upright image of Man-Standardized normativity. They adjoin their lives to the post-normative oscillation around him, toggling their affective register to a setting along the sliding scale: such as becomes them.

Point 12

Full-fledged fascism sets in when both movements grow in intensity in lock-step: the centrifugal movement of diffusion out to adjoined mini-centers of decisional license distributed throughout the social field and the centripetal back-flow to the postnormative disturber-in-chief occupying the radiating zone of exception at the preeminent center. An exacerbation occurs due to an inherent tension in the attack reaction triggered by enemy ascription. The field of life has been refigured into an infinite threat environment. Potential enemies abound. Vague, menacing presences teem. Even the slightest hint of an impingement from the outside and other is reacted to with fear and aggression. A frenetic hunt for enemies lurking in the shadows ensues. In the fog of the threat environment, tenuous connections and performative prejudgments are all a body has to go on. Conspiracy theories proliferate, fueling a mania for enemy ascription. Neighbors become candidate enemies, and the space beyond the border of the nation becomes a vaguely perceived but intensely felt reservoir of injurious infiltrations and incursions skulking on the doorstep. The centrifugal-centripetal spiralling inflames into a cycle of frenetic attack on internal enemies coupled with outward attack to pacify what lies beyond the borders through expansionist aggression. As this double movement intensifies, feeding on its own energies like a fire stoked by the strengthening winds of reaction, the murderousness of the attempt to eliminate danger can turn suicidal. At the limit, the fascist state is a suicide state.

Point 13

The aspect of the fascist dynamic pertaining to the production of reactive mini-centers of Man-Standard-bearing decisional license is microfascism. Microfascism is a fundamental feature of a fascisizing situation. It is always present in the social field, stirring even in the absence of a preeminent center to adjoin to. When there is no actual center, there is still the virtual attractor of a potential center effectively luring the emergence of an orientation toward it. This lure governs fascisizing tendency. It is present everywhere the reactive axis is present that yokes the commotion of the infra-reaction to sign-strikes delivering perturbing impingements of otherness to attack-happy enemy ascription. Which is everywhere. All the time.

Point 14

Everybody wants to be a fascist. No one is immune to reaction. Fascisizing tendencies do not observe the right-left dichotomy. There are microfascisms of the left as much as of the right. Full-fledged fascism, however, is the specialty of the right. This is because of its preferential processual coupling with deregulated capitalism, with its worship of private property and profit and its adjoining of persons to its dynamic in the present-day form of human capital. When fascisizing tendencies of the left fledge and take flight, they tend to emerge into other forms of authoritarian centralism.

Point 15

Given the ever-presence of fascisizing tendencies, no historical period and no country is completely immunized against it. Fascism is always at least micropresent, scattered here and there in bits and pieces, itching for the lightning rod of an exceptional personality to catalyze around. Its onset is always conjunctural, and the conjuncture always includes a good dose of chance. The catalyzing of fascisizing tendencies toward full-fledged fascism cannot be predicted with accuracy. Furthermore, the form the maturing fascism will take will always display unique characteristics. There is no set typology of fascism to judge it by. It cannot be modeled based on a template derived from historical examples. Its empirical study cannot translate into a warning system for it. That is why so many people, including specialists of fascism, did not see it coming with Trump. The problem of fascism is that it is not empirical. It is super-empirical: catalyzing around a virtual attractor in ways that exceed the given conditions. Fascism’s tendency is to recur, but (like all historical formations) always in new and emergent complexion. The antidote for it is to be in constant search of diagnostic tools for ferreting out the microfascism from which it grows at its first stirring, and to be in constant collective practice of constructing the positive conditions for anti-fascist life – the countervailing conditions militating against reaction by welcoming the constitutive force of impingements from the outside and other.

^[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/28/gop-trump-poll-authoritarian-actions/