"Parables for the
Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation" serves as compelling evidence of
Massumi's exceptional mastery in navigating the intricate intersections of
science, philosophy, and culture. Despite his intentional efforts to avoid a
sense of mastery, the depth and complexity of his analyses throughout the
volume showcase a profound understanding of the subject matter.
In the introduction, Massumi
elucidates the overlapping nature of the volume's animating concepts. Rather
than positioning himself as an adversary, he presents himself as a rigorous yet
willing ally to contemporary modes of critique, particularly within cultural
studies. Massumi's consistently original analyses provide practical tools for
contemplating the body in its material dimensions, encompassing movement,
sensation, and affect. Drawing inspiration from Bergson and Deleuze, Massumi's
approach to movement emphasizes the significance of passages and becomings over
fixed and static positional coordinates.
Enumerating around fifteen
consequences stemming from his adoption of the Bergsonian perspective, Massumi
introduces sensation and intensity to intricately complicate the concept of
movement. Expanding on these ideas through Leibniz, he explores the connections
between sensation and perception, sensation and memory, and, influenced by
Spinoza, sensation and affect. Massumi argues that these relations, movements,
and intensities are all tied to the idea that "the body coincides with its
own transitions, and its transitioning with its potential". This phasing,
according to Massumi, is intricately linked to the body's feeling, emergence,
and subjectivity.
While not all conceptual
clusters are present in each essay, Massumi notes that they reappear like a
revolving cast of characters throughout the volume, sometimes joining forces or
interfering with each other in a tumble of abstract intrigue – occasionally, he
admits, barely controlled. The resulting work offers a profound exploration of
the intricate interplay between science, philosophy, and culture, establishing
Massumi as a masterful guide through these complex terrains.
This collection of conceptual
role-playing games within the book unfolds as a dynamic exploration of the body
and its sensory and affective fluctuations. The trajectory of this intellectual
journey, ranging from an examination of affect and its companions as delineated
by Deleuze and Guattari to a celebration of incorporeal materialism coupled
with radical empiricism, aligns with Massumi's overarching objective—to foster
invention and experimentation in the humanities not through the mastery of
concepts but by uncovering their singularity within carefully chosen examples.
Massumi revels in the prospect
of pursuing these examples, even embracing the possibility of failure, as a
means to set systems in motion rather than negate them. The proposed
methodology involves "creative contagion," a process of opening up
systems and interconnecting concepts across disciplines to observe the ensuing
effects, leaving readers with a unique challenge: grappling with the abundance
of ideas and potential digressions. Fully aware of accusations of
"shameless poaching" and "theft from science for the
humanities," Massumi unapologetically embraces such charges, emphasizing
his interest in the radical connectibility of concepts and the two-way
transmission of affect between science and the humanities.
Massumi sees the creation of
links between science and the humanities as a strategic move, positioning the
latter to continually renegotiate their relations with the sciences and, in the
process, reaffirm the uniqueness of their capacities. In elucidating his choice
of "parable" for the title, Massumi underscores its alignment with
the logical form of the example—an exploration of the incorporeality of the
body, the "virtual."
Delving into the introductory
pages, this analysis offers a linear exploration of Massumi's examination of
the book's central concepts. The first chapter, "The Autonomy of
Affect," establishes the foundational concepts that Massumi further
elaborates in subsequent chapters. Through a sequence of four stories, Massumi interweaves
anecdotes with empirical experiments on perception, exploring issues related to
affect, intensity, sensation, perception, expression, the virtual, and the
actual. Drawing from Gilbert Simondon, Massumi considers the multifaceted
concept of "emergence" in its intricate relations with other
conjoined concepts. Emergence, as Massumi defines it, embodies a duality—the
simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the
virtual. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the significance of
reconsidering the nonhuman (nature) beyond a mere construct of human culture,
emphasizing the need to rework the concepts of nature and culture to express
the irreducible alterity of the nonhuman in its active connection to the human
and vice versa.
In the subsequent
chapters," Massumi explores the intricate intersections of the actual and
virtual, examining their emergence through various facets of corporeality. In
"The Bleed: Where Body Meets Image", he delves into Ronald Reagan's transformative
experience as an amputee during the filming of King's Row, terming this pivotal
event as "the bleed"—a fusion of the exemplary event and Reagan's
everyday reality. This example becomes a springboard for discussing temporal
and spatial relations of the body in connection with perceptions, sensations,
and associated affects. The unity of ideal images and emotions, as well as the
partial nature of such unity, is explored in this context.
The subsequent chapters
continue to investigate the intersection of the actual and virtual through
different lenses. "The Political Economy of Belonging: The Logic of the
Relation" addresses the notion of the "in-between" by examining
the example of the "field" in various contexts, including sports,
art, politics, and the media. This exploration encompasses play and the
becoming of events. In "The Evolutionary Alchemy of Reason: Stelarc",
Massumi focuses on the creative expressions of Stelarc, an Australian body
artist, to ponder the relationship between the body as an idea and the idea as
bodily. "On the Superiority of the Analog" offers a different
perspective on the virtual and the actual, asserting that digital technologies
connect to the potential and virtual only through the analog. Massumi
emphasizes the synesthetic nature of activities and the need to think about the
cooperation of the digital and analog in self-varying continuity.
Chapter 5 sets the stage for
the subsequent three chapters. Chapter 6, "Chaos in the Total Field of
Vision," explores the tactile and haptic function of vision, while chapter
7, "The Brightness Confound," delves into anomalies of vision and
discrepancies between empirical and philosophical accounts of color fields.
Chapter 8, "Strange Horizon: Buildings, Biograms, and the Body Topologic,"
discusses the body in topological terms and explores topological design in
relation to corporeality. These chapters collectively center around the body,
its diverse sensations, their connections to movement and affect, all viewed
from the dual perspective of the humanities and the sciences.
Massumi's final chapter,
"Too-Blue: Color-Patch for an Expanded Empiricism," marks the
convergence of incorporeal materialism and radical empiricism. This chapter,
building on the preceding analyses, juxtaposes philosophical concepts with an
early-twentieth-century experiment on memory's effects on color constancy.
Massumi reflects on the singularity of experience conveyed through language,
drawing from James and Whitehead to explore how a proto- or semi-scientific object
may or may not evolve into a reliable fact within a global ecology of knowledge
practices. The chapter culminates in a philosophical narrative highlighting the
inexhaustible surprises of the real and the transformative process that
solidifies change.
These observations bring to
the forefront Massumi's meticulous examination of the various "process
lines" that offer insights into and knowledge about an event, notably the
tension between the "adoption and imposition by the experimenter of the
institutional setup of the experiment" and the "self-insistence of an
autonomy of experience". The culmination of the encounter between
incorporeal materialism and radical empiricism is evident in Massumi's scrutiny
of the limitations within research in the sciences, philosophy, and cultural
studies.
In the climactic moments of
the book, Massumi scrutinizes the process lines in science that he perceives as
adopting a moralistic stance, speaking "in the name of a universal
'we'" that covertly asserts the exclusive right to existence based on
monopoly access to the 'laws' and 'principles' 'behind' empirical reality—a
trend he characterizes as science's "becoming-theological—whether it cares
to admit it or not". He particularly criticizes classical-empiricist
fundamentalists like Edward O. White for condemning three
dimensions—philosophy, art, and cultural studies. Despite Massumi advocating
for intersections between the sciences and these dimensions, he reluctantly
concludes that few existing process lines allow for the expansion of the
empirical field he deems both possible and necessary, especially within
cultural studies.
In a polemical turn, Massumi
asserts that cultural studies, as widely practiced, falls short of singularity
at both ends of the nature-culture continuum due to its adherence to the notion
that expression is of a particularity. This deficiency, according to Massumi,
results in missing the impersonal or overpersonal excesses of ongoing
transformation. Cultural studies' lack of "processual specificity"
tends to push some of its practices toward the "soft sciences".
Massumi argues for a political ecology that emphasizes the coming-together or
belonging-together of processually unique and divergent forms of life. He
envisions cultural studies, if it finds a way to express its own processual
potential, evolving into a political ecology affectively engaged in symbiosis—a
form of amoral collective ethics characterized by a caring for belonging as
such.
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