- Hardcover: 328 pages
- Publisher: Duke University Press (1 Aug 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0822328828
- ISBN-13: 978-0822328827
- Product Dimensions: 24.1 x 15.6 x 2.7 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 5,332,396 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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"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 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' 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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4 reviews
28 of 34 people found the following review helpful
integrated brain exercise
18 Aug 2006
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.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
The Go-to Guide for Cultural Theory and Complexity
13 May 2011
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.
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.
25 of 36 people found the following review helpful
Massumi is great
29 Nov 2005
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).
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