Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (review)

Drifting through (and I recommend drifting rather than focusing intently—it makes for a more productive read) Brian Massumi's Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, I became excited by finding a new voice that has great potential for cinema studies (my own area of research) and theoretical discourses in the humanities in general. This is not an easy read, but it is a challenging one that forces the reader to think actively about the usefulness of interpretive language. Massumi presents the reader with a flexible, malleable approach that invites a multifarious and creative method of interpretation. Shunning the "paradigm" approach that has haunted cinema and cultural studies, he instead outlines more inventive possibilities that do not fix the critical thinker/writer in her interpretation of the cinema and its audience—or culture and its cultural products.

The aim of the book, states Massumi, is to consider the body and its capacity for movement and sensation in writings of cultural theory. Additionally, the state of affect is a crucial one. "There seems to be a growing feeling within media, literary, and art theory that affect is central to an understanding of our information—and image-based late capitalist culture." Affect is integral to postmodernism, yet the problem, as Massumi so rightly explains, is that "there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect" (p. 27). Influenced by the work of Gilles Deleuze, he sets himself the task of exploring the possibility that movement, affect and sensation "might be culturally-theoretically thinkable" (p. 4). Rather than seeking to be oppositional to traditions of post-structuralism and cultural studies, he intends, instead, to build on this body of work by also traveling theoretical and critical journeys in new directions that, above all, consider affect and the corporeal in their analysis.

Massumi's concern reflects the frustration of many academics in the humanities. We have inherited theoretical models that are stubborn, single-minded and monolithic in their attitude, often tending to homogenize the object of their study. Owing a great deal to the model of semiotics emerging in the 1960s and 1970s (via interpretations of Ferdinand Saussure's writings), the theoretical paradigms that followed—whether structuralist, psychoanalytic, feminist, ideological and so on—highlighted the mechanism of "mediation." "These were ideological apparatuses that structured the dumb material interactions of things and rendered them legible according to a dominant signifying scheme into which human subjects in the making were 'interpellated'" (pp. 1-2). In their search for the discovery of the Holy Grail of theoretical paradigms, cultural theorists sought to reduce the cultural process and the body that occupies and moves, breathes and lives within that cultural process to models that attempted to function like mathematical equations. As Massumi points out, however, society and humanity are far more complex creatures. They cannot be reduced to a sequence of diagrams or a mathematical configuration that states A + B = C. In following this line of discourse, theorists led the coming generation of humanities students on a grand parade—one that ended up at a dead-end street.

Given its emphasis on interpellation, cultural theory has allowed little scope for "modest acts of resistance or subversion" (p. 2) within the everyday. The door to rupture or revolt—states that many theorists craved—became firmly closed as a result of their own doing. In seeking to bring matter and the body, sensation and affect back to interpretation, Massumi attempts to find such ruptures—no matter how minuscule. New, fresh approaches are in order because "critical thinking disavows its own inventiveness as much as possible" (p. 12), and inventiveness is the only way out of what have become stagnant and unproductive models. But, rather than debunking and critiquing these traditions, instead, Massumi seeks alternate affirmative paths that are more productive—models that can build on the work of the past and inject new life to the achievements already attained. Inventiveness is...