Parables for the Virtual

Brian Massumi is Associate Professor of Communications at the UniversitE de MontrEal. He is the author of User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari and First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot.

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

"This is an extraordinary work of scholarship and thought, the most thorough-going critique and reformulation of the culture doctrine that I have read in years. Massumi's prose has a dazzling and sometimes cutting clarity and yet he bites into very big issues. People will be reading and talking about Parables for the Virtual for a long time to come."- Meaghan Morris, author of Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture "What you did subtract in order to get cozy definitions you will never get again starting from those definitions! After Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari, the great radical empiricist protest against both naive objectivism and naive subjectivism resonates again. Right or wrong is not the issue, but bringing back wonder into the most common day experiences, vitualizing any common-day experience through a 'free and savage creation of concepts': Anglo-American philosophy the killing of which Gilles Deleuze mourned is born again! After reading Brian Massumi you should never be able to listen to Sinatra or watch a football game the same way."-Isabelle Stengers, Free University of Brussels