Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Post-Contemporary Interventions) [Paperback]

Brian Massumi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 9, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0822328976 | ISBN-13: 978-0822328971

Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence—movement, affect, and sensation—in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In Parables for the Virtual Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models.
Renewing and assessing William James’s radical empiricism and Henri
Bergson’s philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. If such concepts are as fundamental as signs and significations, he argues, then a new set of theoretical issues appear, and with them potential new paths for the wedding of scientific and cultural theory. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with new distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, Parables for the Virtual tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan’s acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multi-faceted argument.
Parables for the Virtual will interest students and scholars of continental and Anglo-American philosophy, cultural studies, cognitive science, electronic art, digital culture, and chaos theory, as well as those concerned with the “science wars” and the relation between the humanities and the sciences in general.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Have you been disappointed by books that promise to bring ‘the body’ or ‘corporeality’ back into culture? Well, your luck is about to change. In this remarkable book Brian Massumi transports us from the dicey intersection between movement and sensation, through insightful explorations of affect and body image, to a creative reconfiguration of the ‘nature-culture continuum.’ The writing is experimental and adventurous, as one might expect from a writer who finds inventiveness to be the most distinctive attribute of thinking. The perspective Massumi unfolds will have a major effect on cultural theory for years to come.”—William Connolly, Johns Hopkins University

“It is not enough to describe Massumi’s book as a brilliant achievement. Seldom do we see a political thinker develop his or her ideas with such scrupulous attention to everyday human existence, creating a marvelously fluid architecture of thought around the fundamental question of what the fact of human embodiment does to the activity of thinking. Massumi’s vigorous critique of both social-constructionist and essentialist theorizations of embodied practices renews the Deleuzian tradition of philosophy for our times.”—Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago

“This is an extraordinary work of scholarship and thought, the most thorough-going critique and reformulation of the culture doctrine that I have read in years. Massumi's prose has a dazzling and sometimes cutting clarity, and yet he bites into very big issues. People will be reading and talking about Parables for the Virtual for a long time to come.”— Meaghan Morris, author of Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture

"After Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Guattari, the great radical empiricist protest against naïve objectivism and naïve subjectivism resonates again, bringing wonder back into the most common day experiences. After reading Brian Massumi you will never listen to Sinatra or watch a soccer game the same way again."—Isabelle Stengers, Free University of Brussels

From the Publisher

"This is an extraordinary work of scholarship and thought, the most thorough-going critique and reformulation of the culture doctrine that I have read in years. Massumi's prose has a dazzling and sometimes cutting clarity, and yet he bites into very big issues. People will be reading and talking about Parables for the Virtual for a long time to come."— Meaghan Morris, author of Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture

"Have you been disappointed by books that promise to bring ‘the body’ or ‘corporeality’ back into culture? Well, your luck is about to change. In this remarkable book Brian Massumi transports us from the dicey intersection between movement and sensation, through insightful explorations of affect and body image, to a creative reconfiguration of the ‘nature-culture continuum.’ The writing is experimental and adventurous, as one might expect from a writer who finds inventiveness to be the most distinctive attribute of thinking. The perspective Massumi unfolds will have a major effect on cultural theory for years to come."—William Connolly, Johns Hopkins University

"After Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Guattari, the great radical empiricist protest against naïve objectivism and naïve subjectivism resonates again, bringing wonder back into the most common day experiences. After reading Brian Massumi you will never listen to Sinatra or watch a soccer game the same way again."—Isabelle Stengers, Free University of Brussels

"It is not enough to describe Massumi’s book as a brilliant achievement. Seldom do we see a political thinker develop his or her ideas with such scrupulous attention to everyday human existence, creating a marvelously fluid architecture of thought around the fundamental question of what the fact of human embodiment does to the activity of thinking. Massumi’s vigorous critique of both social-constructionist and essentialist theorizations of embodied practices renews the Deleuzian tradition of philosophy for our times."—Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (April 9, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822328976
• ISBN-13: 978-0822328971
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #111,306 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 35 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars integrated brain exercise August 18, 2006

By the reader

Format:Paperback

While many philosophical texts can lay claim to a good cerebral work-out Massumi makes sure you don't forget that the body and sensation are very much part of this process. As he says "There is no thought that is not accompanied by a physical sensation of effort of agitation, (if only a knitting of the brows, a pursing of the lips, or a quickening of the heartbeat). This sensation, which may be muscular,...tactile, or visceral is backgrounded. This doesn't mean it disappears into the background. It means that it appears as the background against which the conscious thought stands out: its felt environment." These musings on the sensations and functioning of the body are not without larger consequence. Massumi elequently re-introduces movement, dynamism into the static and spatially orientated positional grid that is the basis of much analysis.

26 of 37 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Massumi is great November 28, 2005

By Bakayarou

Format:Paperback

This is one of the best, most thought-provoking books I own. The essay on Reagan and the virtual is fascinating, as is the essay on the color blue. The guy blows me away. He doesn't just slavishly repeat Deleuzo-Guattarianisms like you might expect. He takes from them and then participates in the creativity that they inspire. I particularly like the way that he uses such real things to discuss the "philosophical." Indeed, Massumi does express a higher empiricism (one unencumbered by prefabricated categories and other forms of abstraction).

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Go-to Guide for Cultural Theory and Complexity May 13, 2011

By Squeak

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Massumi, noted translator of Deleuze and Guatarri's 'A Thousand Plateaus,' puts cultural theory in a radical new light. Approaches based on discourse, ideological critique, even many facets of post-structuralism, rely on notions such as positioning that map bodies onto a static cultural terrain. Ideological systems may inform how we make sense of the world, but they do not themselves sense. Movement, sensation, and affect are frequently lost among these cultural theorists.

Massumi's method, though imposing at first (his writing reflects the complexity of his philosophy), is actually very ordered. Each chapter, excluding the fifth, is basically a close reading (a "parable") illustrating novel sets of relations among movement, sensation, and affect. And the subjects of his readings are refreshingly novel too. Chapter 2 focuses on Ronald Reagan, the reciprocity between his affective character as president and his failure as an actor. Four chapters (1,6,7,9) examine experiments on vision and perception; in an amusing one (Ch 6), a pilot anesthetizes his 'ass' and loses all sense of orientation during flight. In Chapter 8, Massumi discusses his own experience of mistaken orientation in an office building, drawing on studies of synesthesia to highlight his reorienting mechanisms. Chapter 4 looks at performance artist Sterlac's body-as-object exhibitions. And Chapter 3 provides an incredibly insightful vision of soccer, and the 'transduction' of its affects into television and domestic violence.

The applicability of his work is wide. Research on embodiment and affect will find an indispensable guide that moves well beyond 'the body' and Foucault. Process philosophers, Deleuzian scholars, visual studies, social research on mobility, feminists looking to complicate the personal is political axiom, queer theorists seeking to complicate notions of performativity, all will find some critical use in this book. More generally, those interested in issues surrounding complex systems, though Massumi does not directly take up complexity theories, will recognize many familiar terms used in novel contexts. Thinkers such as Michael Hardt, William Connolly, Jane Bennett, Manuel DeLanda, and John Protevi resonate with Massami's theory. But 'Parables for the Virtual' is a singular accomplishment, standing apart from Massumi's other fine work.