PARABLES FOR THE VIRTUAL: Movement, affect, sensation
by Brian Massumi.
Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2002.
Paper, pp.328.
ISBN 0-8223-2882-8 (hardback), ISBN 0-8223-2897-6 (paperback).
Reviewed by Angela Ndalianis
angelan@unimelb.edu.au
We have all been there. You see a film that blows your senses away and
makes you feel as if your very being has somehow magically been transformed,
Someone else sees the same film and not only dismisses it as mind-numbing
spectacle, but considers it to be ideologically problematic.
Let us consider another scenario. One film theorist provides an interpretation
of a film that understands it as paradigmatic of the oppressive power
of global corporatism. Another film theorist interprets the same film
and sees it as a masterful contestation of late-capitalist logic and
ideologies. How do we weigh out the discrepancies of such varied positions?
Our response to and understanding of the cinema can be a very private,
sensory and subjective thing. Its affective power can engage us in ways
that move beyond the processes that come into play when we connect with
and comprehend something on a cognitive level. Likewise, a viewers
individual experiences, her understanding of the cinemas conventions,
the significance of specific experiences of her life, the nature of
the audience that shares the auditorium space next to her: all of these,
and many other elements, can affect the impact that a film can have
on this viewer. Yet, just as it avoids stepping beyond certain theoretical
traditions, film theory, on the whole, fails to take such random factors
into consideration. It also tends to ignore one of the cinemas
most powerful strategies: its affective charge, its capacity for moving
its spectator on emotional and sensory levels. And when the latter is
considered, its understood in denigratory ways - as a sign of
a cinema that offers escapism.
Drifting through (and I recommend drifting rather than focusing intently
- it makes for a more productive read) Brian Massumis Parables
for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation I became excited in 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 read that forces the
reader to think actively about the usefulness of interpretative language.
Massumi presents the reader with a flexible, malleable approach that
invites a multifarious and creative method to 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 Masumi 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
travelling theoretical and critical journeys in new directions that,
above all, consider affect and the corporeal in their analysis.
Massumis concern reflects the frustration of many academics in
the humanities. We have inherited theoretical models that are stubborn,
singular-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 70s (via interpretations of Ferdinand
Saussures 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 students
of the humanities on a grand parade - one that ended up at a dead-end
street.
Given its emphasis on interpolation, 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 the key: why not hang up the academic hat of critical self-seriousness,
set aside the intemperate arrogance of debunking - and enjoy?... If
you don't enjoy concepts and writing and don't feel that when you write
you are adding something to the world, if only the enjoyment itself,
and that by adding that ounce of positive experience to the world you
are affirming and celebrating its potentials, tending its growth, in
however small a way, however really abstractly - well just hang it up
(pp.12-13). This is a lesson that Robert Rays has learned in his surrealist
take on the Andy Hardy films, and in his compilation of essays, How
Film Theory Got Lost.
Beginning with Deleuzes writings on movement and becoming, and
travelling the path of Henri Bergsons analysis of Zeno's paradoxes
of movement, Massumi emphasizes that the continuity of movement is one
that is not measurable or easily defined. The movement that unravels
throughout an individuals life is not a fixed or static one that
can be clearly mapped into a theoretical paradigm. For example, while
Althusserian critique may speak of the subject that is interpellated
by ideological state apparatuses (the aim of the theorist
being to decode the nature of that interpretation), an understanding
of this same subject through the lens of Bergson or Deleuze would teach
us that, at any point in a life, there are multiple possible endpoints.
Viewed retrospectively, movement signifies that the subject undergoes
a series of qualitative changes that are effected by a passing
event; positionality is an emergent quality of movement
(pp.7-8). Within this, issues of gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity,
for example, occupy facets of the travelled path. As such, critical
theory and the body of the spectator need not be limited to pursuing
one, fixed interpretative path. Movement is dynamic, and its emergent
potential is ever-present. The process of change is cumulative and,
no matter how minor a change or rupture, its effect, in the big scheme
of things, can be dramatic.
In Deleuzes The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis: University
of Minneapolis Press, 1989), the dynamics of movement and sensation
maintains a rhizomatic logic that also riddles Massumis book.
Integral to Deleuzes understanding of the fold is the system of
Leibnizian monads or units that fold into one another, existing
as part of a complex and unified whole. Deleuze states that monads designate
a state of One, a unity that envelops a multiplicity, this multiplicity
developing, the One in the manner of a series- its implications
and explications, are - particular movements that must be understood
in a universal Unity that complicates them all, and that
complicates all the Ones (1993, 23). As Deleuze makes clear, the monad
is the term that Leibniz ascribes to the soul or to the subject
as a metaphysical point (1993, 23); drawing on the Neoplatonic
tradition, in many of his writings - including his Monadology - Leibniz
tackled the immense task of comprehending the interrelationship between
the material nature of the everyday and the immaterial nature of the
supernatural, as embodied in the soul and God. Matter and soul comprise
a Unity that also envelops multiplicity.
For Leibniz (whose influence on Massumi becomes clear as the reader
immerses herself further into the book), the world is an infinite and
converging series and, while each monad contains a segment of the series
and has a logic in its own right, it also embodies the unified structure
- all monadic possibilities. This is a world of dynamic movement and
multiple emergent paths. There is a prolongation, states
Deleuze, or continuation of convergent series, one into the other
and this is the condition Leibniz labels 'compossibility(1993,
50). For Leibniz, the compossible embodies the ultimate power of God
who conceives and chooses the world (Deleuze 1993, 51), who makes
choices with regard to following one series path over another.
The compossibles, therefore, are the paths that God chooses to effect
creation and the universe as humans finally experience it. To draw upon
Deleuzes example, in the world of compossibles Adam was a sinner,
Caesar was an Emperor, and Christ the Saviour (60). However, compossibles
become realities or lived events because they compete with incompossibles.
Incompossibles comprise the series that diverge, and that from
then on belong to two possible worlds (60). They exist at the
point of convergence where divisions occur in the monadic series. Paralleling
current theories on quantum mechanics and parallel universes - but driven
by a religious foundation - Leibniz expounded a theory of multiple possible
worlds that progress as series; Gods selection - the compossibles
- constitute the existing world as it finally comes into being. The
incompossibles are all those other paths that are rejected: where Adam
was not a sinner, where Caesar was never Emperor, and where Christ was
only a man. By positing an infinity of possible worlds,
however, Leibniz perceives our world to be the only existing world because,
given it constitutes Gods final choice, it is considered to be
the best of all other possible scenarios that are finally rejected (Deleuze
1993, 61).
Massumi, like Deleuze, however, reveals more of an affiliation with
the neo-baroque. In a passage in The Fold Deleuze points to an inherent
difference between the baroque (the period Leibniz was writing) and
the neo-baroque. Like the writings of Luis Borges, in particular his
Labyrinths, the neo-baroque does not prioritize compossibles. To phrase
it another way, the path of one original or best
(singular) version is non-existent in the world of the neo-baroque.
Like chaos theory and quantum mechanics, this is a world of multiple
possibilities that intersect at certain points and diverge at others.
All divergent series co-exist and struggle for equal status, therefore
rendering the incompossible (the narrative path that existed in another
dimension but wasnt chosen to exist in this one) obsolete. All
worlds can exist and discover their emergent potential. Rather than
such a system possessing a universal or monolithic point of view, instead,
an infinite number of movements can unravel as the subject travels her
journey in life (Deleuze 1990, 25).
To drag Leibnizs spiritual down to the level of the material,
Each individual and collective human level has its own peculiar
quantum mode (p.37). The emergence of existence is
such that, by its very nature, it resists homogenization, creating its
own being - its own compossible - with regard to identity, sexuality,
politics etc. This also has significance for the cultural thinker who,
Massumi explains, should not be limited to a closed system or theoretical
paradigm. In fact, Massumi challenges cultural theorists to take an
active stance in initiating movement in new directions. With and intensity
of sensation that would make Deleuze and Spinoza proud, Massumi states
that to adopt a productive approach, the techniques of critical
thinking prized by the humanities are of limited value; they therefore
have to be abandoned (p.12).
In a few passages that I became especially fond of, he asserts that
Invention requires experimentation. The first rule of thumb
if you want to invent or reinvent concepts is simple: don't apply them
(p.3) - even if, in the process, you affirm your own stupidity
(p.18). The idea is to aim for an open system that draws
not only on diverse aspects of the humanities - philosophy, psychology,
literary theory, politics, anthropology (p.18). Shameless poaching
from science I advocate and endeavor to practice and in moving
beyond the system of humanities it is possible to force a change
in the humanities (p.20). By placing the critical body in movement,
it is perceivable that critical theory will move beyond the stagnant
swamps that enclose it, finding new, exciting avenues that offer innovative
approaches that address the affective charge of the individual and cultural
body. And what is the reader left with? a very special gift: a
headache that prompts its own infectious virus, one that spreads
a creative contagion (p.19).