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

~ (Author), Stanley Fish (Series Editor), Fredric Jameson (Series Editor)
Key Phrases: brightness confound, bug goggles, quasi corporeality, Alchemy of Reason, The Argument, Political Economy of Belonging (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"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 "What you did subtract in order to get cozy definitions you will never get again starting from those definitions! After Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari, the great radical empiricist protest against both naive objectivism and naive subjectivism resonates again. Right or wrong is not the issue, but bringing back wonder into the most common day experiences, vitualizing any common-day experience through a 'free and savage creation of concepts': Anglo-American philosophy the killing of which Gilles Deleuze mourned is born again! After reading Brian Massumi you should never be able to listen to Sinatra or watch a football game the same way."-Isabelle Stengers, Free University of Brussels

Product Description

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 oaf 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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press (June 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822328976
• ISBN-13: 978-0822328971
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #56,618 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	the reader "Ben" (Sydney , Australia) - See all my reviews

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.

15 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Bakayarou "Bakayarou" (limbo) - See all my reviews

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).