Brian Massumi

Brian Massumi (born 1956) is a Canadian philosopher and social theorist.

Massumi's research spans the fields of art, architecture, cultural studies, political theory and philosophy.

His work explores the intersection between power, perception, and creativity to develop an approach to thought and social action bridging the aesthetic and political domains.

He is a retired professor in the Communications Department of the Université de Montréal.

Massumi received his B.A. in Comparative Literature at Brown University (1979) and his Ph.D in French Literature from Yale University (1987).

Massumi was instrumental in introducing the work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to the English-speaking world through his translation of their key collaborative work A Thousand Plateaus (1987) and his book A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (1992).

After a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in the Stanford University Department of French and Italian (1987-1988), he settled in Montréal, Canada, where he taught first at McGill University (Comparative Literature Program) and later at the Université de Montréal (Communication Department), retiring in 2018.

Massumi has lectured widely around the world, and his writings have been translated into more than fifteen languages.

His 1995 essay "The Autonomy of Affect", later integrated into his most well-known work, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002), is credited with playing a central role in the development of the interdisciplinary field of affect studies.

Since 2004, he has collaborated with the SenseLab, founded by Erin Manning as an experimental "laboratory for thought in motion" operating at the intersection of philosophy, art, and activism.

Massumi situates his work in the tradition of process philosophy, which he defines broadly to encompass a range of thinkers whose work privileges concepts of event and emergence.

For Massumi, this includes not only Alfred North Whitehead, the philosopher most closely identified with the term, but also Charles Sanders Peirce, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, on all of whose work he draws extensively.

He articulates process philosophy with William James's radical empiricism, which asserts the primacy of relation.

This is the doctrine that relations are real, are directly experienced, and create their own terms.

Massumi has also characterized his work as "activist philosophy" (a philosophy for which the ultimate concept is activity rather than substance ); "speculative pragmatism" (a philosophy for which present practice bears as much on future potential as on existing functions and known utilities ); "ontogenetics" as opposed to ontology (a philosophy for which becoming is primary in relation to being ); and "incorporeal materialism" (a philosophy attributing abstract dimensions of reality to the body and matter itself ).

Massumi's earliest work on the theory of power is two-pronged.

On the one hand, it examines processes of power centralization tending toward the absolutist state, which he broadly defines as fascist.

On the other hand, influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, it examines processes by which power effects are distributed throughout the social field, in particular through the mass production of what he termed "low-level everyday fear."

After the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Towers, his theories of distributed power focused on the doctrine of preemption promulgated by the George W. Bush administration to serve as the framework for the "war on terror."

Massumi argues that preemption is more than a military doctrine, but has engrained itself as an invasive mode of power operating in many forms throughout society.

He sees this mode of power as paradoxically productive.

He gives it the label "ontopower" (the power to bring to be).

Ontopower, according to Massumi, is related to but distinct from disciplinary power and biopower as analyzed by Foucault.

It is allied Foucault's concept of "environmentality."

Massumi analyzes ontopower as entwined with neoliberal capitalism.

He argues that this entwinement makes the capitalist economy a direct power formation in its own right.

The idea that capitalist ontopower is a direct power formation that modulates the social field of emergence to capture becoming raises fundamental questions about what form political resistance and anticapitalist struggle can take.

Massumi argues that there is no position "outside" capitalist power from which to critique or resist.

The potential for political action nonetheless remains, but requires strategies of "immanent critique" that counter-modulate the social field of emergence.

These forms of resistance occur at the "micropolitical" level.

The word micropolitics does not refer to the scale at which action takes place, but rather to its mode.

Massumi's approach to perception and the philosophy of experience is closely tied to his political philosophy through the theory of affect.

Massumi famously distinguishes emotion from affect.

Following Spinoza, he defines affect as "the capacity to affect and be affected."

This locates affect in encounters in the world, rather than the interiority of a psychological subject.

Emotion, he argues, is the interiorization of affect toward psychological expression.

He locates affect as such in a nonconscious "zone of indistinction" or "zone of indeterminacy" between thought and action.

This zone of indeterminacy is the "field of emergence" of determinate experience, but itself resists capture in functional systems or structures of meaning.

Affect's resistance to capture leaves a "remainder" of unactualized capacity that continues in the world as a "reserve" of potential available for a next determination, or "taking-form" of experience in definitive action, perception and emotion.

Massumi refers to this remaindering of potential across an ongoing process of serial formation as the "autonomy" of affect