Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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's 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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Concrete Is as Concrete Doesn't
• 1 The Autonomy of Affect
• 2 The Bleed: Where Body Meets Image
• 3 The Political Economy of Belonging and the Logic of Relation
• 4 The Evolutionary Alchemy of Reason: Stelarc
• 5 On the Superiority of the Analog
• 6 Chaos in the "Total Field" of Vision
• 7 The Brightness Confound
• 8 Strange Horizon: Buildings, Biograms, and the Body Topologic
• 9 Too-Blue: Color-Patch for an Expanded Empiricism
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Each of these nine stand-alone essays sets in motion a system of connections between "already established concepts drawn for one or another humanities discipline, or better, from many all at once." Massumi's aim is to reintroduce matter, movement, and sensation into cultural studies by founding his discussion on the semiotics of C.S. Peirce rather than the linguistic model of Ferdinand De Saussure, which drives much poststructuralist cultural theory while retaining poststructuralist insights. For example, in chapter 2 Massumi (Australia National Univ.) uses Ronald Reagan's success as a politician and experience as an actor to "rethink body, subjectivity, and social change in terms of movement." He does so by focusing on Reagan's famous line "Where is the rest of me?" and the scene that Reagan was portraying in King's Row when he delivered the line to analyze the cultural need that led to Reagan's political success. In the scene Reagan is depicting a man who awakes to find that he has lost the bottom half of his body through an accident. Massumi's exploration of the examples provides an interesting working of Giles Deleuze. Graduate and research collections. W. F. Williams Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Brian Massumi is Associate Professor of Communications at the Universite de Montreal