Parables for the Virtual
eBook - PDF

Parables for the Virtual

Movement, Affect, Sensation

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Parables for the Virtual

Movement, Affect, Sensation

About this book

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," in which Massumi explicates his approach to affect in ways that emphasize the book's political and philosophical stakes.

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Yes, you can access Parables for the Virtual by Brian Massumi in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Critical Theory. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Contents
  3. Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition
  4. Keywords for Affect
  5. Missed Conceptions
  6. Introduction: Concrete Is as Concrete Doesn’t
  7. 1. The Autonomy of Affect
  8. 2. The Bleed: Where Body Meets Image
  9. 3. The Political Economy of Belonging and the Logic of Relation
  10. 4. The Evolutionary Alchemy of Reason: Stelarc
  11. 5. On the Superiority of the Analog
  12. 6. Chaos in the “Total Field” of Vision
  13. 7. The Brightness Confound
  14. 8. Strange Horizon: Buildings, Biograms, and the Body Topologic
  15. 9. Too-Blue: Color-Patch for an Expanded Empiricism
  16. Notes
  17. Works Cited
  18. Index