Description
Book SynopsisSince its publication twenty years ago, Brian Massumi''s pioneering
Parables for the Virtual has become an essential text for interdisciplinary scholars across the humanities. Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the internet as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation. Renewing and assessing William James''s radical empiricism and Henri Bergson''s philosophy of perception through the filter of the postwar French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, Massumi 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, scien
Trade Review“
Parables for the Virtual has become an indispensable reference point for many of the most vigorous intellectual developments of the past decade. It points the way to a style of thought that might well lead to renewed and invigorated conceptualizations of the most varied domains. As one of the most important theory texts of the twenty-first century,
Parables remains influential, fertile, and suggestive.” -- Steven Shaviro, author of * The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism *
“Shifting focus from subjects to the situations and events that form them,
Parables for the Virtual has given those who dream futures beyond coloniality, patriarchy, capitalist extraction, and state biopower not only a different vocabulary but a range of new perceptual habits to attune to the violences that shape our world. Spurring experimental ways of living into new futures, this book is not only one of our most important theories of the event, it
is an event: it alters the reader's perception, their sense of what
might yet be.” -- Nathan Snaza, author of * Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism *
Table of ContentsPreface to the Twentieth-Anniversary Edition xi
Keywords for Affect xxxiii
Missed Conceptions xliii
Introduction: Concrete Is as Concrete Doesn't 1
1. The Autonomy of Affect 25
2. The Bleed: Where Body Meets Image 49
3. The Political Economy of Belonging and the Logic of Relation 73
4. The Evolutionary Alchemy of Reason: Stelarc 97
5. On the Superiority of the Analog 145
6. Chaos in the "Total Field" of Vision 157
7. The Brightness Confound 177
8. Strange Horizon: Buildings, Biograms, and the Body Topologic 193
9. Too-Blue: Color-Patch for an Expanded Empiricism 227
Notes 279
Works Cited 333
Index 343
