A concept for tracking how differences gather force and become felt as shifts in movement, attention, and capacity within an assemblage, prior to being named as fixed emotions or meanings.
In postqualitative, posthumanist, and new materialist work, intensity names the dynamic charge of a situation: the gradients, thresholds, and modulations that course through bodies, texts, tools, and environments as they come into relation. In affect theory, Massumi describes intensity as the impersonal, pre-personal surge of change that exceeds and precedes emotion, where relations take on momentum and potential. For Deleuze & Guattari, intensities flow across assemblages and strata, composing zones of proximity and distance that condition what can happen next. Ahmed shows how intensities stick to bodies and objects as “affective economies,” circulating in ways that make some proximities attractive, others aversive. Bennett and Barad point to the material vibrancy and agential intra-actions through which intensities arise, reroute, and sediment as worldly capacities. In other words, intensity is not a private feeling; it is the palpable pressure of a scene coming to matter.
Narratively, think of intensity as the difference that makes a difference before a story or label settles: a room becomes tense as screens light up with AI outputs; a prompt is issued and attention tightens; a feedback exchange loosens or constrains possibilities. These are not only psychological moments but also material arrangements where interfaces, policies, histories, and bodies tune one another. Intensity helps notice these shifts without prematurely translating them into categories, keeping analysis with the live gradients through which practices and concepts take form.
Intensity aligns with postqualitative commitments to follow processes rather than stabilize variables. It foregrounds the “how” of becoming: micro-shifts in pacing, texture, and force that compose a phenomenon. Methodologically, this orients inquiry toward attunement and tracing: capturing rhythms in situated events, noticing thresholds where something tips, and designing apparatuses that can register subtle changes in tone, timing, and orientation. It is in line with posthumanist and new materialist emphases on distributed agency and material-discursive performativity, since intensities emerge through intra-action among humans, tools, discourses, and environments. Treating intensity as a unit of analysis reframes evidence: fieldnotes might dwell on pauses, hesitations, accelerations; artifacts are read for their conductive properties; interviews are engaged not only for what is said but for how momentum gathers or dissipates in the telling.
Intensity provides traction for understanding the lived and affective dimensions of AI-entangled writing classrooms. It helps track how interface cues, prompt designs, and feedback practices amplify or dampen students’ and instructors’ capacities to experiment, revise, and take risks. Consider the intensity spike when an LLM produces an unexpectedly elegant paragraph: curiosity rises, caution might also rise, time compresses as attention narrows, and the social field subtly reorients around the output. Conversely, a flat or generic response can diffuse intensity, leading to disengagement. Attending to these modulations clarifies how creativity and authorship are not simply beliefs but effects of ongoing tuning within a pedagogical assemblage that includes prompts, rubrics, revision histories, model parameters, institutional narratives, and embodied dispositions.
Intensity also illuminates how value gets enacted in assessment: rubrics, originality reports, and interface affordances conduct particular intensities (urgency, vigilance, excitement) that shape what counts as “good writing.” Instructors’ reflective notes can be read for intensifying and de-intensifying moves, e.g., when they re-sequence activities to open space for exploratory drafting before AI consultation, or when they constrain model use to recalibrate attention toward invention and source engagement. Through this lens, classroom design becomes a practice of modulating intensities to cultivate capacities for inquiry, judgment, and ethical responsiveness.