Duke University Press Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

Since 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, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multifaceted argument. This twentieth anniversary edition includes a new preface in which Massumi situates the book in relation to developments since its publication and outlines the evolution of its main concepts. It also includes two short texts, “Keywords for Affect” and “Missed Conceptions about Affect,” where Massumi explicates his approach to affect in ways that emphasize the book's political and philosophical stakes. Review "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" " 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" About the Author Brian Massumi is a Canadian philosopher and social theorist, and until recently, Professor of Communication at the University of Montreal. He is the author of many books, including Couplets, Ontopower, The Power at the End of the Economy, and What Animals Teach Us about Politics, all also published by Duke University Press.