Rather than attributing value to affectual relationships, affect in the non-place and nontraditional labor can provide self-valorization through a non-dialectical perspective.

To address the theme of value-affect now, we would propose delving into one among the many themes that the introduction to this discussion has presented-that of the nexus between production and social reproduction-and investigating it according to the indications that the analysis has suggested: first, from below, and second, in the immeasurable and immense non-place. To do this, one must still refuse the temptation to go down a simple path that is presented to us: the path of reintroducing the Marxian figures of use-value and pretending to renovate them in the context of the new situation. How do the philosophers and politicians who situate themselves in this perspective proceed? They reconstruct a fictional use-value that they nostalgically oppose to the growing processes of globalization; in other words, they oppose to globalization a humanistic resistance. In reality, in their discourse, they bring to light again all the values of modernity, and use-value is configured in terms of identity. (Even when use-value is not invoked explicitly, it ends up being inserted surreptitiously.) One example should suffice: the resistance of workers' trade unions to globalization. To establish this resistance, they resurrect the territorialization and the identity of the usevalue of labor-power, and they insist on this, blind to the transformations of productivity, desperate, incapable of understanding the new power that the immeasurable and immense non-place offers to productive activity. This path thus cannot be taken. We must then search for another one. But where can we find it? We have said "from below." Up until this point, in fact, we have reasoned on the basis of a Marxian relation that led from production to social reproduction and thus from value to the biopolitical reality. In this relation-seen widely could be included also affect; affect could emerge as a power to act on the lower limit of the definition of use-value. But this end point of the deduction of the conditions of value has only determined important effects when it has been assumed abstractly as an element of the unity of calculation. Now, then, one must change the direction of the reasoning, avoid that deduction, and assume rather an induction--from affect to value-as the line of construction. This line of construction has been adopted with good results, but the findings are nonetheless not sufficient to demonstrate to us the power of affect in the radicality and the extension of the effects that now, in postmodernity, await us. I am referring here to those historiographical and dialectical schools I cited earlier-from E. P. Thompson, to the European "workerists" of the 1970s, to the "subaltern" historiographers. Now, from this theoretical perspective, affect is assumed from below. Moreover, it is presented, in the first place, as a production of value. Through this production, it is represented, then, in the second place, as a product of struggles, a sign, and an ontological deposit or precipitate of the struggles. Affect thus presents a dynamic of historical construction that is rich in its complexity. And yet it is insufficient. From this perspective, the dynamic of the struggles (and their affective behaviors) determines, in fact, in every case, the restructuring of capitalist command (in technical terms, political terms, and so on). The development of affect is closely related to a dialectic that ends up presenting its dynamic as completely circular-as a dialectic, tout court. And there is no good dialectic to separate here from the bad dialectic: All the dialectics are bad. All are incapable of liberating themselves from historical effectivity and its enchantment. The dialectic, even a dialectic from below, is incapable of presenting radical innovation in the historical process, the explosion of the power to act (affect) in all its radicality. A line of reconstruction from below must thus be added to the perception of the non-place. Only the radical assumption of the point of view of the non-place can liberate us from the dialectic of modernity, in all its figures, even those that tried to develop from below the dialectical construction of affect. What does it mean, then, to add the approach from below, the perception of the non-place, and the rupture of every dialectical instance in a path that goes from affect to value? Affect can be considered, as a first hypothesis, as a power to act that is singular and at the same time universal. It is singular because it poses action beyond every measure that power does not contain in itself, in its own structure, and in the continuous restructurings that it constructs. It is universal because the affects construct a commonality among subjects. In this commonality is posed the non-place of affect, because this commonality is not a name but a power; it is not the commonality of a constriction or a coercion but of a desire. Here, therefore, affect has nothing to do with use-value, because it is not a measure but a power, and it does not run into limits but only obstacles to its expansion. But this first definition of affect as power to act opens toward other definitions. We could, in fact, note, in the second place, that if the relationship between singularity and commonality (or universality) is not static but dynamic, if in this relationship we witness a continuous movement between the singular that is universalized and "what is common" that is singularized-well, we could then define affect as a power of transformation, a force of self-valorization, which insists on itself in relation to what is common and which therefore brings what is common to an expansion that does not run into limits but only obstacles. But this process is not formal: It is rather material. It is realized in the biopolitical condition. In the third place, then, we speak of affect as power of appropriation, in the sense that every obstacle that is overcome by the action of affect determines a greater force of action of the affect itself, in the singularity and universality of its power. The process is ontological and its power is ontological. The conditions of action and transformation are from time to time appropriated and go toward enriching the power of action and transformation. In the fourth place, we could bring together the definitions of affect as power to act in a further definition: affect as an expansive power. In other words, it is a power of freedom, ontological opening, and omnilateral diffusion. Really, this further definition could be seen as pleonastic. If in fact affect constructs value from below, if it transforms it according to the rhythm of what is common, and if it appropriates the conditions of its own realization, then it is more than evident that in all of this there resides an expansive power. But this definition is not pleonastic. We can see that, on the contrary, it adds a new concept when we insist on the positive tonality of the non-place, on the irresistibility of affect as power beyond measure, and on its consequent absolutely antidialectical character. (Playing with the history of philosophy, which deserves nothing more than such a game, one could add that whereas the first three definitions of affect are Spinozian, this fourth definition recuperates a Nietzschean effect.) In any case, the omnilateral expansivity of affect demonstrates, one could say, the moment that transvaluates its concept, to the point of determining the capacity to sustain the shock or impact of postmodernity.