Parables for the Virtual

Brian Massumi is a Canadian philosopher and social theorist, and until recently, was Professor of Communication at the University of Montreal. He is the author of many books, including Couplets, Ontopower, The Power at the End of the Economy, and What Animals Teach Us about Politics, all also published by Duke University Press.

Preface to the Twentieth-Anniversary Edition xi Keywords for Affect xxxiii Missed Conceptions xliii Introduction: Concrete Is as Concrete Doesn't 1 1. The Autonomy of Affect 25 2. The Bleed: Where Body Meets Image 49 3. The Political Economy of Belonging and the Logic of Relation 73 4. The Evolutionary Alchemy of Reason: Stelarc 97 5. On the Superiority of the Analog 145 6. Chaos in the "Total Field" of Vision 157 7. The Brightness Confound 177 8. Strange Horizon: Buildings, Biograms, and the Body Topologic 193 9. Too-Blue: Color-Patch for an Expanded Empiricism 227 Notes 279 Works Cited 333 Index 343

"Parables for the Virtual has become an indispensable reference point for many of the most vigorous intellectual developments of the past decade. It points the way to a style of thought that might well lead to renewed and invigorated conceptualizations of the most varied domains. As one of the most important theory texts of the twenty-first century, Parables remains influential, fertile, and suggestive." - Steven Shaviro, author of (The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism) "Shifting focus from subjects to the situations and events that form them, Parables for the Virtual has given those who dream futures beyond coloniality, patriarchy, capitalist extraction, and state biopower not only a different vocabulary but a range of new perceptual habits to attune to the violences that shape our world. Spurring experimental ways of living into new futures, this book is not only one of our most important theories of the event, it is an event: it alters the reader's perception, their sense of what might yet be." - Nathan Snaza, author of (Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism)