Description
Book SynopsisViews 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.
Trade 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
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Concrete Is as Concrete Doesn’t
1. The Autonomy of Affect
2. The Bleed: Where Body Meets Image
3. The Political Economy of Belonging and the Logic of Relation
4. The Evolutionary Alchemy of Reason: Stelarc
5. On the Superiority of the Analog
6. Chaos in the “Total Field” of Vision
7. The Brightness Confound
8. Strange Horizon: Buildings, Biograms, and the Body Topologic
9. Too-Blue: Color-Patch for an Expanded Empiricism
Notes
Works Cited
Index
