Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation by Brian Massumi

Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation Reviews

• 
  David Michael

  Completely changed my life, not just academically, but personally, socially, poetically...
• 
  Philip Cherny

  countergravitational, hyperconnectability, copresence, indeterminate givenness, overpresence, periodicity, multiplex, hypermutable, factoidal, event-space, mesoperception, trans-situational, quasi-causality, quasi-corporeality, event-transivity, transversality, ur-idea, infolding, asymmetrical symbiosis, possibilization, transindividual, emergent redivergence, combinatoric, humanity-particle, involutionary, precession, autotransformative, fabulation, extensile mutuality, worlding, peripheralization, integrative subsumption, indistinction, insensate, deactualization, incipiency, monosensual, endoreduction, superempirical, intermodal, superposition, infraempirical, protostandard, exoreferential, overcoding anexact, transpositionality, hyperspace, biogram, peri-personal, hypersurface, supermodulatory, onto-topological, translogical, endo-reduction, genitivity…
  
  Only a small fraction of the convoluted jargon deployed in Massumi's arsenal, which, paired with his liberal use of italics, conveys an overall emphatic, quasi-inspirational visionary pathos that does not grip me as much as it probably should. Maybe I'm just growing jaded after reading too many texts stylistically similar to this one, but I envision Massumi as a passionate scholar who whose excitations from his own epiphanies constantly release dopamine while triggering the urge to urinate/defecate. Not without empathy do I scoff at the author, for I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't accuse myself of making the same mistake of assuming my readers are as excited as I am about some obscure philosophical insight (or worse, merely reframing some old problem in some new way). Today's scholars might benefit from a little self-parody, perhaps even sincerity to the point of self-critical neurosis. "The sublime is a step removed from the ridiculous" Adorno says. I only need to step into the text from a slightly diff angle to parse out the "profound" insights, but I'm finding myself too turned off by the sentimental "fluff." Maybe 80% of this text is "fluff" worth skimming through while 20% is substance. I would find it more tolerable if Massumi spent less time inspiring with recycled/re-appropriated terminology and more time critically expanding on ideas that merit further explanation.
  
  My disappointment stems in part from the fact that I love the outside sources Massumi brings together—namely Deleuze, though to a lesser extent: Bergson, Simondon, James, Spinoza, Derrida, and Benjamin. I sympathize completely with the need for a discussion of virtuality centered around affect, movement, and sensation. In fact, I'd go so far as to espouse them as crucial concerns for any aesthetic or phenomenological enterprise today. Fortunately, Massumi serves as only one of several scholars applying Bergsonian/Deleuzian conceptions of virtuality to contemporary contexts (e.g. new media theorists such as Mark D. N. Hansen.) In short, I agree with Massumi's cause but not his application or his methodology. I've heard enough scholars harangue Reagan, American football, and violent video games.
  
  In passing, I'll note a few interesting points here and there worth mentioning:
  
  * The extension of Bergson's eros (the latent capacity in matter, the tendency towards life, "as if matter possesses a yearning that is causally active in seizing upon a chance opportunity for the emergence of mind." to borrow the words of Lawrence Vogel) to technological evolution—technology of the body in particular, drives towards a potential, an unknown form like a flower towards sunlight. These ideas are reflected by later technologists like Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly (
  http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiola...). From the macrocosmic perspective, technological development looks like an organic force.
  
  * The notion that VR (virtual reality) reifies the virtual implicit in actuality by making the tension between "appearance" and "reality" all the more apparent. Nowhere does this seem more apparent than in cyberspace (in Gibson's sense of a collective dream), which drives towards and impossible communion between the two. This idea is only implied by Massumi in a footnote on Stelarc's "Movatar" in pp. 274-6. On that note, Massumi rightly draws a sharp distinction between the virtual (the almost) and virtuality, which popular cultural tends to confuse.
  
  * The associations of the personal with one's sense of ownership, with volitive control: "For phenomenology, the personal is prefigured or 'prereflected' in the world, in a closed loop of 'intentionality.'" (191). Massumi somewhat obfuscates the personal in intentionality by referring to it in terms of affect.
  
  * Pages 200-1, Massumi argues that sameness (eidos) necessarily entails change, which he includes in the body: "Nothing is all and only what it is. A body present is in a dissolve: out of what it is just ceasing to be, into what will already have become by the time it registers that something has happened…A body does not coincide with its present. It coincides with its potential…Anything that endures varies. Anything that varies in some way caries the continuities of its variations."
  
  * Situating the real between the affective surprise and the effective expected: "Reality is not fundamentally objective. Before and after it becomes an object, it is an inexhaustible reserve of surprise. The real is the snowballing process that makes a certainty of change." (214) This of course comes from Deleuze, but then again the entire text is a Deleuzian project.
  
  
• 
  Alexander

  When Parables for the Virtual burst onto the philosophical scene at the turn of the millennium, it did so as if a bombshell lobbed from an alien world. Against the reigning spirit of the time which spoke in terms of signs, discourses and 'subject positions', Parables presented an alternate universe in which the interlaced notions of movement, affect, event, and sensation were to be taken seriously as vectors of philosophical investigation. While the groundwork was laid down by those like Gilles Deleuze and Gilbert Simondon in the years preceding, Massumi staked his claim to be among the first to show - really show, rather than tell - what awesome and fantastical territory both philosophy and cultural studies could find itself in when viewed through the lens of these powerful ideas.
  
  From the theatrics of Reagan to the art of Stelarc (the bloke who grew an ear on his arm - look him up), from the anomalies of science to the rigors of high theory, Parables plunges all these and more into dizzying mix of performance and argument, illustration and staging - of what? Of a world composed by the singular and the unique, the irreplaceable, ungeneralizable quality and 'glow' that marks all existence and leaves philosophy - if not us all - perennially in a state of wonder. It is to this world that Parables draws our attention, over and against those who would instead insist upon its formulaic reproducibility, its parsing into the bloodlessness of the general and the particular, deprived of the fringes of excess and the eruptions of singularities that accompany its being.
  
  At stake in fact is nothing less than a defense of the 'supra-empirical' - a defense of the reality of that which is not (yet) actual, but nonetheless undeniably real: tendencies, potentialities, virtualities and relations, which, as much as tables, chairs and planets, count among the furniture of the world. Although in some sense taken right out of the Deleuzian playbook (who referred similarly to a 'superior empiricism'), Massumi's achievement here is to give these ideas concrete grounding in the universe of the everyday - not abstraction but 'lived abstraction' is what marks the territory here. Consider his wonderful discussion of a game of football (or soccer, to please the Americans), in which every element is given dynamic standing: goalposts 'induce', the ball 'catalyses', kicks are 'expressions', fans 'individuate'; in movement, in relation - in process - a parable of the world at large indeed.
  
  Finally, a necessary word about the language here. As anyone with even a passing knowledge of Massumi will attest, his prose is... one of kind. The writing arcs from idea to idea like a lightning sprawl of electric light, threading concepts through concepts and weaving thoughts through examples in a way that can leave a reader gasping in its frenzied trail. Less though an index of Gallic grandiloquence than a surging of urgent inventiveness demanding to be made equal to the philosophical creativity within. It's anything but easy (at times, downright exhausting), but then again, it's nothing like anything else either. The fact is, reading Parables today, it nonetheless remains a beacon and a signpost for all those who continue to wonder what a philosophy of the future might yet look like.
• 
  Lidiana

  The kind of theoretical text that makes you wonder: "Interesting, but are humans this complex or are we just fooling ourselves that we are this intriguing?".
• 
  Attay Kremer

  Massumi’s Parables is kind of a unique text: while retaining an exceptionally human account of the socius and its relation to the body and motion, it still deviates wildly from the usual, formal analysis of what the body is, and virtuality of the socius. This amounts to an adoption of a Spinozo-Bergsonian perceptive from which potentiality is replaced by virtuality, displacement by motion, and knowledge by affect. In this regard Massumi’s work is joyous, important and special; a crucial contribution to theory.
  
  The position the text seeks to occupy is that of conceptual play, a series of trial, which, by negative feedback, seeks to introduce a new field of useful concept. This is a double edged sword: on the one hand it is noble and inviting, harboring a revolutionary horizon more attractive than most of what is happening in philosophical literature; on the other hand, it produces a meandering, aimless, and seemingly endless text. The parables are a nice structural idea, but they fails to provide the urgency and force that moves the text, and the reader with it, through itself. Ironically, “Parables for the Virtual” fails to do what the virtual is tasked to do — be the motor of motion, the stream of creation, of actualization.
• 
  Nana

  
  
  With regards to the intention of the author to offer the reader the gift of headache, this book is clearly successful because it made my head throb with pain. But equally I must say that I feel this headache is a gift, because it opens the possibility to review Deleuzian thought in altenative ways and has opened up many possibilities . Thank you very much, it has been received.
• 
  Jessica Zu

  Only read relevant chapters. An awesome book that proposes tons of scintillating questions and a new paradigm of thinking about humanities and science.
• 
  Braden Scott

  chapter 8 will follow me forever
• 
  Matt Sautman

  Massumi's Parables for the Virtual might be a dense text for anyone new to phenomenology, but his ideas on analogues, ideality, potentiality, the virtual, time, and space make this book well worth reading for anyone interesting in deconstructing "the [implictly universal] body's" relationship with space. Although Massumi's gestures towards some forms of alterity, this book does not interrogate the role ability, race, gender, etc. affect this relationship at any substantial length.
• 
  Nate Rennick

  Completed after reading Agamben’s Coming Community- shines when synthesizing with his definition (agambens) of the example- becomes pretty unrelenting with its sprawling connections and rapid introduction of new concepts. Still prefer affect theory pared with poetry I.e. Berlant/Stewart and Moten’s politics which provide something more concrete for the community to come
• 
  kit

  playful and intricate, pushes against the furthest edges of thought. flipping philosophy into politics, looping back into science, and extending it through the arts. recommend at least two readings of this.
• 
  Eden

  “Philosophy is the activity dedicated to keeping wonder in the world” (260). Granted, sometimes what I was wondering was "what in the world is Massumi on about?" but this is a lovely notion and indeed much of Massumi's book is strikingly lovely.
• 
  Cassey

  Heavy reading, that demands you take your time with it.
• 
  Nick Bentz

  Wild and impenetrable - most twisted, but intensely enjoyable to understand and unpack.
• 
  爾凡

  I stumble across Massumi while i am researching Deleuze, and I think Massumi gave a lucid commentary.
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/u...
  I stop in 30s page and skim though some chapter, because I found it is complex to digest upon heavily explanatory tone and repeating arguments, when I expect more illuminate insight. But I believe he is theorising virtual, affect, sensation etc, poststructural terms into psycho-cultural account, and tackle some ago question, prior-posterior question into a original dialogue that stimulate it to academic-researcher?
• 
  Gary Norris

  esp chapter 2 & 3
• 
  Peter

  Absolutely breathtakingly brilliant. Your mind will be blown.
• 
  Charles

  Review published in Criticism 46.1 (2004): 145-150