His work explores the intersection between power, perception, and creativity to develop an approach to thought and social action bridging the aesthetic and political domains.

Since 2004, he has collaborated with the SenseLab,[5] founded by Erin Manning[6] as an experimental "laboratory for thought in motion" operating at the intersection of philosophy, art, and activism.

For Massumi, this includes not only Alfred North Whitehead, the philosopher most closely identified with the term, but also Charles Sanders Peirce, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari,[7] on all of whose work he draws extensively.

[16] On the other hand, influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, it examines processes by which power effects are distributed throughout the social field, in particular through the mass production of what he termed "low-level everyday fear.

"[17] After the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Towers, his theories of distributed power focused on the doctrine of preemption promulgated by the George W. Bush administration to serve as the framework for the "war on terror."

[24] The idea that capitalist ontopower is a direct power formation that modulates the social field of emergence to capture becoming raises fundamental questions about what form political resistance and anticapitalist struggle can take.

Affect's resistance to capture leaves a "remainder" of unactualized capacity that continues in the world as a "reserve" of potential available for the next determination, or "taking-form" of experience in definitive action, perception and emotion.

Each definitive taking-form reemerges from the field of emergence after a lapse that Massumi identifies with the "missing half-second" in conscious experience experimentally verified by neuropsychologist Benjamin Libet.

[40][41] Quoting Whitehead, he maintains that "consciousness flickers"[42] Between pulses, experience returns to immanence in the zone of indistinction of the field of emergence, where it is "primed" (energized and oriented) for a next taking-form.

Direct perception, or "pure" experience, is nevertheless addressable in a mode of awareness Massumi calls "thinking-feeling"[64] (an embodied "affective attunement"[65] to relation and potential that he glosses in terms of Peirce's logical category of abduction[66]).

In this connection, he has characterized his thought as an "extreme realism," by which he means a philosophy asserting the ultimate reality of qualities of experience, conceived as irreducible to either subjective qualia or objective properties, and as defying quantification.

[69][70][71] Massumi works from Whitehead's notion of "creative advance," according to which the world is in a perpetual state of emergence characterized by the continual variation of form.

Through this two-way exchange, they see the potential to foster the emergence of new, nonstandard modes of knowledge that exceed disciplinary understanding and normative frames of perception.

[74] As Manning and Massumi understand it, the practice of research-creation is necessarily collective and relational,[75] and thus carries a "proto-political" force of immanent critique.

[78][79] Disillusioned with lobbying and traditional politics, Massumi later moved toward direct action in the context of the anti-nuclear movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In an influential essay, Ruth Leys[87] asserts that Massumi establishes a "false dichotomy" between mind and matter, and thinking and feeling, and disqualifies the first term of each couple.

Margaret Wetherell argues that Massumi draws too gross a demarcation between bodily experience and social action and establishes a starkly polarized distinction between controlled and autonomic processes.

[88] In Wetherell's opinion, Massumi detours the study of affect and emotion toward particular philosophical preoccupations in ways that are "radically unhelpful"[89] and undermine a more judicious and "pragmatic"[90] approach grounded in the social psychology literature.

Eugenie Brinkema, writing from a film theory perspective, similarly criticizes what she sees as Massumi's overreliance on the line of philosophical thinking about affect descending from Spinoza through Deleuze.