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

Stivale, Charles J.

Digital Commons@Wayne State University

CriticismVolume 46Issue 1 Materia Media Article 82004Intersections of Science, Sensation, and CultureCharles J. StivaleWayne State University, c_stivale@wayne.eduFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticismRecommended CitationStivale, Charles J. (2004) "Intersections of Science, Sensation, and Culture," Criticism: Vol. 46: Iss. 1, Article 8.Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol46/iss1/8C H A R L E S J .  S T I V A L EIntersections of Science, Sensation, and CultureParables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation by Brian Massumi.Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. Pp. viii + 328. $21.95 paper.If we have somehow previously missed the signs (and texts) of Brian Mas-sumi’s provocative critical production, Parables for the Virtual: Movement,Affect, Sensation provides indisputable evidence of the mastery, despite hisefforts to be unmasterful, that Massumi brings to his study of the complexintersection of science, philosophy, and culture. Given the depth and com-plexity of the analyses contained in this volume, a review such as this can onlyoffer a broad outline of the rich and careful work of critical reflection con-tained therein.In the introduction, Massumi explains how the volume’s animating con-cepts overlap. In doing so, he presents himself not as an adversary but as asevere yet willing ally of contemporary modes of critique, especially culturalstudies. Massumi’s always original analyses offer practical means to thinkthrough and with the body in its material traits that include, but are not lim-ited to, movement, sensation, and affect. Bergsonian and Deleuzian in inspi-ration, Massumi’s approach to movement insists on the importance ofpassages and becomings over the fixed and static coordinates of positions.Outlining some fifteen consequences of his adoption of the Bergsonian per-spective, he adds sensation and intensity to complicate movement and thendevelops, through Leibniz, the links between sensation and perception, sen-sation and memory, and, through Spinoza, sensation and affect (14–15). Mas-sumi maintains that all of these relations, movements, and intensities concernthe sense in which “the body coincides with its own transitions and its transi-tioning with its potential” (15), and that such phasing is linked to the body’sfeeling, emergence, and subjectivity. Massumi cautions that, while not all ofthese conceptual clusters figure in each essay, they do “appear and reappearlike a revolving cast of characters, joining forces or interfering with each otherin a tumble of abstract intrigue—at times (I admit) barely controlled” (17).14502 criticism/46.1 pp. 71-190  6/14/04  10:38 AM  Page 145In short, one finds here a sequence of conceptual role-playing games inwhich the stakes are the body and its sensory and affective vicissitudes. Thearc of this “tumble”—from engagement with affect and its cronies as devel-oped in Deleuze and Guattari (chapter 1) to the paean to incorporeal materi-alism in conjunction with radical empiricism (chapter 9)—helps Massumitoward his goal of developing invention and experimentation in the humani-ties, not by mastering concepts through their application, but by seeking thesingularity of and in well-selected examples. Hence Massumi glories in thepossibility of pursuing these examples through their myriad details and pos-sible digressions, even “prepared for failure,” in order to reach “not so muchthe negation of system as a setting of systems in motion” (18). The methodproposed is one of “creative contagion,” opening the system, connecting con-cepts between disciplines to “see what happens,” to leave “readers with a veryspecial gift: a headache . . . a problem: what in the world to do with it all” (19).Well aware of being charged with “shameless poaching,” of “theft fromscience for the humanities” (19), Massumi happily but not naively embracessuch charges. His interest is in radical connectibility of concepts, the very waysin which “rhythm, relay, arrival and departure” (i.e., affect) enable a two-waytransmission between science and the humanities (20). Massumi understandsthe purpose of creating links between science and the humanities as placingthe latter “in a position of having continually to renegotiate their relationswith the sciences—and, in the process, to rearticulate what is unique to theirown capacities” (21). Finally, he explains that since his mode of analysis isbased on examples, he has chosen “parable” for his title to indicate “the genreof writing most closely allied with the logical form of the example,” a writingon the incorporeality of the body, that is, the “virtual” (21).Having thus given a close reading of the introductory pages of Massumi’sbook, I propose to follow a linear outline of how Massumi pursues his exami-nation of the book’s focal concepts. “The Autonomy of Affect” (chapter 1)both lays out the initial array of concepts that Massumi elaborates in this andsubsequent chapters and offers lucid exemplars to which these concepts canbe linked and through which they can be better understood. A sequence offour stories in this chapter relates anecdotes to empirical experiments on per-ception that raise issues about affect, intensity, sensation, perception, expres-sion, the virtual, and the actual. These stories frame the chapter’s centralreflection, in which Massumi draws from Gilbert Simondon to consider themultifaceted concept of “emergence” in its intricate relations with the otherconjoined concepts. Emergence, says Massumi, is “a two-sided coin: one sidein the virtual (the autonomy of relation), the other in the actual (functionallimitation). What is being termed affect in this essay is precisely this two-sidedness, the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the146 Charles J. Stivale02 criticism/46.1 pp. 71-190  6/14/04  10:38 AM  Page 146actual in the virtual” (35). Massumi ends this central reflection by explainingwhat is at stake in considering the nonhuman (aka nature) as more than “aconstruct of human culture, or inertness. The concepts of nature and cultureneed serious reworking in a way that expresses the irreducible alterity of thenonhuman in and through its active connection to the human and vice versa”(39; emphasis in the original here and throughout).In subsequent chapters, Massumi turns to different ways in which theactual and virtual intersect and emerge through various manifestations of cor-poreality. In “The Bleed: Where Body Meets Image” (chapter 2), he starts fromthe tale of Ronald Reagan’s life-changing experience of sensing his body as anamputee for his role in the film King’s Row (key line: “Where’s the rest of me?”).This crucial event in Reagan’s life, says Massumi, constitutes an example of “thebleed,” “a blend between the exemplary event and [Reagan’s] ordinary world”(56). This example helps Massumi to propose a broad range of issues, mostnotably the temporal and spatial relations of the body as they intersect with per-ceptions, sensations, and their attendant affects. Then, in the chapter’s final sec-tion, he links the exemplary event to questions of the unity of ideal images andemotions and to concepts that relate to the partial nature of such unity. Massumiaddresses related questions in different ways throughout the book: “The Polit-ical Economy of Belonging: The Logic of the Relation” (chapter  3) considersthe problem of the “in-between” as it concerns the example of the “field” (interms of sports, art, politics, the media) and thus also play and the becoming ofthe event. “The Evolutionary Alchemy of Reason: Stelarc” (chapter 4) takes themodes of creative expression—physical suspensions, televisual exploration ofinternal organs, prosthetic extensions, among others—practiced by the Aus-tralian “body artist,” Stelarc, as the exemplar for considering the problem: “Inwhat way is the body an idea, and the idea bodily? In what way can probing oneextend the other? ‘How is it that the body thinks itself? ’” (90; Massumi citing Ste-larc in a 1992 interview). “On the Superiority of the Analog” (chapter 5) offersa different angle on the virtual (and, necessarily, the actual), that “digital tech-nologies have a connection to the potential and the virtual only through the ana-log” (138). Providing exemplars from forms of computing, televiewing, and theweb, Massumi observes: “All the sense modalities are active in even the mostapparently monosensual activity. Vision may ostensibly predominate, but itnever occurs alone. Every attentive activity occurs in a synesthetic field of sen-sation that implicates all the sense modalities in incipient perception, and isitself implicated in self-referential action” (140). Massumi’s conclusion is thatrather than finding our location in a “digital age,” “the challenge is to think (andact and sense and perceive) the co-operation of the digital and the analog, inself-varying continuity. . . . The analog and the digital must be thought together,asymmetrically. Because the analog is always a fold ahead” (143).Science, Sensation, and Culture 14702 criticism/46.1 pp. 71-190  6/14/04  10:38 AM  Page 147In many ways, chapter 5 lays the groundwork for the three chapters thatfollow, since the discussion of the virtual and its interrelations with the sensesoccurs in different ways in each: chapter 6, “Chaos in the ‘Total Field’ of Vision”(considering, among other things, the tactile, haptic function of vision); chap-ter 7, “The Brightness Confound” (on anomalies of vision, considering the gapsbetween differing empirical and philosophical accounts regarding the field ofcolor as well as creativity); and chapter 8, “Strange Horizon: Buildings, Bio-grams, and the Body Topologic” (on the body understood in topological terms,and topological design in terms of corporeality). These are, of course, merethumbnail summaries, but I hope to convey the nexus of concerns aroundwhich each of Massumi’s analyses center: most notably, the body, its myriadsensations, their relations to movement and affect, and how all of these areviewed from the dual perspective of the humanities and the sciences.Massumi’s final chapter, “Too-Blue: Color-Patch for an Expanded Empiri-cism” (originally published in the journal Cultural Studies, in a special issueon Deleuze and Guattari in cultural studies), constitutes what he calls theoccasion in which “incorporeal materialism meets up with radical empiri-cism,” where “Bergson, Spinoza, and Simondon” (featured in chapter 1)“make way for James, who tumbles onto A. N. Whitehead and IsabelleStengers” (17). This encounter occurs following the line of analysis welldeveloped in the preceding four chapters, the persistent juxtaposition ofphilosophical concepts with an early-twentieth-century experiment on theeffects of memory on color constancy. Discussion of this empirical test yieldsquickly to the interrogation of that in-between zone of the bleed. That is, thelanguage of the experimenter’s report “operat[es] simultaneously to stan-dardize (reduce) and convey (express) an ineffable singularity of experience,”whereas the experiment’s subject “has been singularly struck by color” suchthat color “has gone over the instituted line, pushed past the mark set for it by the laboratory setup” (211). Massumi reflects on the diverse contours of this singularity of experience in order to relate a “philosophical story,” howthe unforeseen of the real, its “inexhaustible reserve of surprise [constitutes]. . . the snowballing process that makes a certainty of change” (214). Massumithen draws from James and Whitehead to consider how the proto- or semi-scientific object may (or may not) develop into a dependable fact, and howsuch birth of the technical object must be situated within a global ecology ofknowledge practices.These observations also serve to foreground Massumi’s detailed review ofthe many “process lines” that provide access to and knowledge about an event,notably the “adoption and imposition by the experimenter of the institutionalsetup of the experiment” in contrast to “the self-insistence of an autonomy ofexperience” (212). For the climax of this encounter between incorporeal148 Charles J. Stivale02 criticism/46.1 pp. 71-190  6/14/04  10:38 AM  Page 148materialism and radical empiricism lies in Massumi’s examination of the lim-its of research in the sciences and in philosophy, on one hand, and in culturalstudies, on the other. If he makes a polemical turn in the last ten pages of thebook, it is in response to what he deems to be the moralistic process line in sci-ence that would speak “in the name of a universal ‘we’ that is a thinly disguisedassertion of a restricted ‘we’s’ exclusive right to existence based on monopolyaccess to the ‘laws’ and ‘principles’ ‘behind’ empirical reality” (246–47)—inshort, science’s “becoming-theological—whether it cares to admit it or not”(247–48). Castigated particularly by classical-empiricist fundamentalistssuch as Edward O. White are three “horrific” dimensions: philosophy, art, andcultural studies. While Massumi makes a case for intersections between thesciences and all three dimensions, he concludes, reluctantly but frankly, thatfew of the process lines he describes yet allow for the kinds of expansion of theempirical field that he judges as both possible and necessary, especially in cul-tural studies, which, says Massumi, “has missed the processual boat” (253).He states, “As it is widely practiced, cultural studies falls short of singularityat both limits [on the nature-culture continuum] because it clings to thenotion that expression is of a particularity” (253). Among other things, thisresults in “miss[ing] the impersonal or overpersonal excesses of ongoingtransformation,” and cultural studies’s lack of “processual specificity” tends topush some of its practices toward the “soft sciences” (253). In contrast, heargues for a political ecology that would emphasize “the coming-together orbelonging-together of processually unique and divergent forms of life. . . .What cultural studies could become, if it finds a way of expressing its ownprocessual potential, is a political ecology affectively engaged in symbiosis-tending, . . . an amoral collective ethics, . . . a tending of coming-together, acaring for belonging as such” (255).Massumi’s book imposes considerable demands on the reader’s ability tofollow its intricate latticework of concepts. Still, the author has the singularmerit of speaking to the reader with careful attention, humor, and an ability tojuxtapose complex analyses with engaging exemplars. One caution that Iwould make is that readers not take Massumi’s analyses as a substitute forengaging directly with the many critical works and concepts that he deploys.Although I have gained immeasurably, for example, from reading the differentways in which Massumi deploys the concept of affect, I would be loathe nowto employ his work as the sole referent on this concept, when the primary textssuch as those by Spinoza and Deleuze-Guattari, among others, remain crucialfor a nuanced understanding of affect and its conceptual nexus. Furthermore,while Massumi takes issue with certain aspects of the sciences, philosophy,and cultural studies, especially in chapter 9, his analyses can properly beviewed as quite complementary to the diversity in these approaches in order,Science, Sensation, and Culture 14902 criticism/46.1 pp. 71-190  6/14/04  10:38 AM  Page 149as he himself maintains, to extend these foundations with additional contribu-tions of his own. In short, perhaps the greatest compliment one can pay to anytheorist is to be paid to Massumi, that his study will not leave the reader indif-ferent and that it will continue to provoke thought and reaction, but also hence-forth action and creative production in the complex and mutating domains forwhich Massumi’s “parables” unmistakably provide the coordinates.Wayne State University150 Charles J. Stivale02 criticism/46.1 pp. 71-190  6/14/04  10:38 AM  Page 150

Intersections of Science, Sensation, and Culture

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Intersections of Science, Sensation, and Culture

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