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Brian Massumi (; born 1956) is a Canadian philosopher and Social theory. 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.
His work with local and national environmental organizations on issues of wilderness preservation and land use, clean energy, and water conservation culminated in an internship in Washington, D.C., with The Wilderness Society, where he specialized on the issue of shale oil development. Oil Shale, Mining and Energy. Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Mines and Mining of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-Third Congress, Second Session, on H.R. 12014 and Related Bills. Congressional Record, Serial 93-46 1974, Statement of Brian Massumi, The Wilderness Society, pp. 113-116.Brian Massumi, "Oil Shale Country," Not Man Apart (Friends_of_the_Earth magazine), vol. 4, no. 6 (June 1974), p. 12.
Disillusioned with lobbying and traditional politics, Massumi later moved toward direct action in the context of the anti-nuclear movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. During this period, he worked within a network of anarchist called the Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook (CDAS),L.A. Kauffman, Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism (London: Verso, 2017), pp. 62-64 an off-shoot of the Clamshell Alliance, on the organization of two occupation attempts of the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant construction site. "2500 Protestors are Driven Back at Seabrook Facility," New York Times, October 7, 1979. Retrieved April 27, 2018. "1,500 Repulsed Trying to Take Nuclear Site", New York Times, May 24, 1980. Retrieved April 27, 2018.Brian Massumi, "Not All Rhode Island Clams are in the Ocean," The New Paper (Providence, R.I.), vol. 1, no. 25 (September 13–20, 1978, p. 3. Massumi received his B.A. in Comparative Literature at Brown University (1979) and his Ph.D. in French Literature from Yale University (1987). 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 particular area of focus was a planned prefigurative community, the Seabrook Freestate, that was established on squatted public land near the construction site in advance of the second occupation attempt to serve as a model for the anticipated occupation.Brian Tokar, "May 24: Where Did We Go Wrong?" . Retrieved April 17, 2018.Kauffman, Direct Action, op. cit., p. 140 Although these efforts failed, Massumi has remarked on the lasting influence that their model of direct action and direct democracy has had on his thinking.Citton, preface, L'Économie contre elle-même, op. cit., p. 42.
Since 2004, he has collaborated with the SenseLab, SenseLab . Retrieved: April 17, 2018. founded by Erin Manning Erin Manning. Retrieved: April 17, 2018 as an experimental "laboratory for thought in motion" operating at the intersection of philosophy, art, and activism.
Massumi has also characterized his work as "activist philosophy" (a philosophy for which the ultimate concept is activity rather than substanceMassumi, Semblance and Event, op. cit., pp. 1-28Brian Massumi, The Principle of Unrest: Activist Philosophy in the Expanded Field, (London: Open Humanities Press, 2017), p. 101); "speculative pragmatism" (a philosophy for which present practice bears as much on future potential as on existing functions and known utilitiesMassumi, Semblance and Event, op. cit., p. 85-86, 179.Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 157.); "ontogenetics" as opposed to ontology (a philosophy for which becoming is primary in relation to beingBrian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 8-10.); and "incorporeal materialism" (a philosophy attributing abstract dimensions of reality to the body and matter itselfMassumi, Parables for the Virtual, op. cit., pp. 6, 11, 16-17, 76.Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Power, and the State of Perception ((Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 49.).
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.Brian Massumi, "Fear (The Spectrum Said)," Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, special issue, "Against Preemptive War," vol. 113, no. 1 (Spring 2005), pp. 31-48. Revised and resprinted in Massumi, Ontopower, op. cit., pp. 171-188.Brian Massumi, “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption," Theory and Event, vol. 10, no. 2 (2007). Revised and reprinted in Massumi, Ontopower, op. cit., pp. 3-20Brian Massumi, "The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat," The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 52-70. Revised and reprinted in Massumi, Ontopower, op. cit., pp. 189-205. He sees this mode of power as paradoxically productive. He gives it the label "ontopower" (the power to bring to be).Massumi, Ontopower, op. cit.Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015) Ontopower, according to Massumi, is related to but distinct from disciplinary power and biopower as analyzed by Foucault. It is allied with Foucault's concept of "environmentalism."Brian Massumi, "National Enterprise Emergency: Steps Toward an Ecology of Powers," Theory, Culture & Society, special issue Michel Foucault and Biopower, vol. 26, no. 6 (2009): 153-185. Revised and reprinted in Massumi, Ontopower, op. cit., pp. 21-59. Massumi analyzes "onto power" as entwined with neoliberalism. He argues that this entwinement makes the capitalist economy a direct power formation in its own right.Brian Massumi, 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
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."Capital Moves," The Principle of Unrest, op. cit., chapter 1, pp. 7-71.Massumi, 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value, op. cit. The potential for political action nonetheless remains, but requires strategies of "immanent critique" that counter-modulate the social field of emergence.Massumi, Politics of Affect, op. cit., 71, 106-107, 110 "On Critique," Inflexions: A Journal for Research Creation, no. 4 (January 2011), pp. 337-340 Retrieved April 18, 2018.Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy, op. cit., pp. 79-95 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, " Of Micropolitcs and Microperception," Inflexions: A Journal for Research Creation, no. 3 (October 2009), pp. 183-275 Retrieved April 18, 2018. Revised and reprinted in Massumi, Politics of Affect, op. cit., pp. 47-82.Massumi, The Principle of Unrest, op. cit., pp. 63-65
Affect's resistance to capture leaves a "remainder" of unactualized capacity that continues in the world as a "reserve" of potential available for the next determination, or "taking-form" of experience in definitive action, perception and emotion.Massumi, "Keywords for Affect," The Power at the End of the Economy, op. cit., pp. 103-112.Brian Massumi, "Too-Blue: Color-Patch for an Expanded Empiricism," Cultural Studies, 14:2 (April 2000), pp. 253-302. Reprinted in Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, op. cit., chapter 9, pp. 208-255. Massumi refers to this remaindering of potential across an ongoing process of serial formation as the "autonomy" of affectMassumi, "The Autonomy of Affect," op.cit.
Affect is implicated in all modes of experience, including language experience, as an accompanying dimension of becoming.Massumi, Semblance and Event, op. cit., chapter 4, pp. 105-179. Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 34-35, 45-59. The process of the taking-form of experience is "pulsed." Each definitive taking-form reemerges from the field of emergence after a lapse that Massumi identifies with the "missing half-second" in conscious experience experimentally verified by neuropsychologist Benjamin Libet.Massumi, "Autonomy of Affect," op. cit.Massumi, "Perception Attack," Ontopower, op. cit, chapter 2, pp. 63-92. Quoting Whitehead, he maintains that "consciousness flickers"Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 267; cited in Massumi, Ontopower, pp. 95-96. Between pulses, experience returns to immanence in the zone of indistinction of the field of emergence, where it is "primed" (energized and oriented) for a next taking-form.Massumi, Ontopower, op. cit., chapters 3 and 4.Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy, op. cit., chapter 2. This occurs at the nonconscious level of "intensity" of experience.
Massumi argues affect plays a role in politics because it shapes how people respond collectively before rational decision-making. Affect can mobilize crowds or create atmospheres of fear, joy, or unrest.
In his later work, Massumi develops the concept of "bare activity"Massumi, Semblance and Event, op. cit., pp. 3-5.Massumi, Ontopower, op. cit., pp. 45-49.Massumi, The Principle of Unrest, op. cit., pp. 14, 29-34. to aid in the analysis of the affective field of emergence in which modes of activity that divergently express, for example as "mental" versus "physical,""action" versus "perception," or "rational" versus "emotional," are in what he calls a state of "mutual inclusion."Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about Politics, op. cit. (for which "co-motion," "superposition," and "reciprocal presupposition" are synonyms in Massumi's vocabulary). Mutual inclusion is the logic of immanence, which does not obey the law of the excluded middle.
The concept of mutual inclusion in bare activity has consequences for the theory of perception. It focuses the theory of perception on the interfusion of the senses (cross-modal relay or synesthesia)Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, chapters 6 and 7, pp. 144-176Brian Massumi, "The Art of the Relational Body: From Mirror-Touch to the Virtual Body," Mirror-Touch: Thresholds of Empathy with Art, ed. Daria Martin. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 191-209. and "amodal perception" (experience that is not in any particular sense mode and is in that sense "abstract").Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, op. cit., 168-171.Massumi, Semblance and Event. Massumi ties amodal perception to the "proprioception" experience of movement perception,Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, chapters 2, 6, 7, 8Massumi, "The Art of the Relational Body," op. cit. and argues that the experience of movement is primarily in relation to objects.Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, op. cit., Introduction, pp. 1-22Massumi, Semblance and Event, op. cit., pp. 105-127.
Massumi's emphasis on amodal perception gives modes of abstraction ("nonsensuous perception") a direct role in the emergence of experience. This troubles the distinction between the concrete and the abstract.Massumi, "Introduction: Concrete Is as Concrete Doesn't," Parables for the Virtual, op. cit., pp. 1-22. Massumi analyzes the constitutive role of abstract dimensions of reality in terms of the "reality of the virtual," expanding on Bergson's theory of the virtual as reinterpreted by Gilles Deleuze.Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, op. cit."Envisioning the Virtual," The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality, ed. Mark Grimshaw (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014), pp. 55-70. He argues that the virtual, paradoxically, is itself actualized, in the form of a supplement of experience that he calls a "semblance."Massumi, Semblance and Event, op. cit. A semblance in Massumi's vocabulary is the direct experience of the abstract "dynamic form" of an event. It carries a sense of vitality ("vitality affect") uniquely associated with the event. This supplementation of sensuous experience constitutes a "surplus value of life."
Massumi's theories reject representational accounts of thought and perception, as well as any mind/body dualism. The latter is replaced by the integral event of "bodying,"Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about Politics, op. cit., p. 103-104. coinciding with the "movement of thought."Massumi,"Movements of Thought," The Principle of Unrest, op. cit., chapter 2, pp. 72-111 His emphasis on the nonconsciousness of the field of experience challenges the model of cognition in favor of a theory of "direct perception."Massumi, Semblance and Event, op. cit., p. 11. Direct perception, in his account, is performative and emergent. It expresses and transmits affective powers that exceed cognitive apprehension. Direct perception, or "pure" experience, is nevertheless addressable in a mode of awareness Massumi calls "thinking-feeling"Massumi, "The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens," Semblance and Event, chapter 2, pp. 39-86 (an embodied "affective attunement"Brian Massumi and Erin Manning, "Affective Attunement in the Field of Catastrophe," in Massumi, Politics of Affect, op. cit., chapter 4, pp. 112-145 to relation and potential that he glosses in terms of Peirce's logical category of abductionMassumi, The Power at the End of the Economy, op. cit., 43-56.).
Massumi argues that affect and direct perception are not confined to a human subject, but are "transindividual" and spread across the "nature–culture continuum."Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about Politics, op. cit.Massumi, "What a Body Can Do," Politics of Affect, chapter 6, pp. 177-204. This qualifies his thought as a variety of panexperientialism, and distances it from phenomenology. In this connection, he has characterized his thought as an "extreme realism," by which he means a philosophy asserting the ultimate reality of qualities of experience, conceived as irreducible to either subjective qualia or objective properties, and as defying quantification.Brian Massumi, "Such As It Is: A Short Essay in Extreme Realism.," Body & Society, vol. 22, no. 1 (March 2016), pp. 115-127.Brian Massumi, "Virtual Ecology and the Question of Value," General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, ed. Erich Hörl (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 345-373.Massumi, 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value, op. cit.
In collaboration with Erin Manning, Massumi has developed a process-philosophical take on research creation.Manning and Massumi, "Propositions for Thought in the Act," Thought in the Act, op. cit., pp. 83-152 Research creation is a category in Canadian academia akin to what is called "art-based research" in Europe.Erin Manning, "Against Method," The Minor Gesture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), chapter 1, pp. 26-45. Manning and Massumi extend the concept beyond the university and the specific domain of art. They advocate for an "ecology of practices" that explores how philosophical concepts formed in language can be "transduced" into other modes of experience in a way that furthers creative practice, and reciprocally, how the understanding that already imbues non-language based modes of experience can be brought to explicit expression in ways that further conceptual research. Through this two-way exchange, they see the potential to foster the emergence of new, nonstandard modes of knowledge that exceed disciplinary understanding and normative frames of perception. This affirmation of "minor" modes of thought and experience allies Manning and Massumi's vision of research-creation to the neurodiversity movement.Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016).
As Manning and Massumi understand it, the practice of research-creation is necessarily collective and relational,Brian Massumi, "Collective Expression: A Radical Pragmatics," Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation, "Radical Pedagogies" special issue, no. 8 (Spring 2015), pp. 59-88; revised and reprinted in Massumi, The Principle of Unrest, chapter 3, pp. 111-144. and thus carries a "proto-political" force of immanent critique.Brian Massumi and Erin Manning, "Immediation," in Massumi, Politics of Affect, chapter 5, pp. 146-176.Brian Massumi, "Collective Expression: A Radical Pragmatics," Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation, "Radical Pedagogies" special issue, no. 8 (Spring 2015), pp. 59-88; revised and reprinted in Massumi, The Principle of Unrest, chapter 3, pp. 111-144. Manning's SenseLab is conceived as a laboratory for the collaborative exploration of research creation in its philosophical, aesthetic and political dimensions.
In an influential essay, Ruth LeysRuth Leys, "The Turn to Affect: A Critique," Critical Inquiry, vol. 37, no. 3 (2011), pp. 434-472. asserts that Massumi establishes a "false dichotomy" between mind and matter, and thinking and feeling, and disqualifies the first term of each couple. This separates the body from subjectivity, and plays into scientistic frameworks assimilating the body to inert matter. Leys argues that this undermines intentionality and rationality, which in turn makes it impossible to account for ideology or to programmatically resist it. Leys further argues that Massumi's account of the "missing half-second" negates free will.
Margaret Wetherell argues that Massumi draws too gross a demarcation between bodily experience and social action and establishes a starkly polarized distinction between controlled and autonomic processes.Margaret Wetherell, Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding (London: Sage, 2012), p. 65. In Wetherell's opinion, Massumi detours the study of affect and emotion toward particular philosophical preoccupations in ways that are "radically unhelpful"Wetherell, Affect and Emotion, op. cit., p. 3. and undermine a more judicious and "pragmatic"Wetherell, Affect and Emotion, op. cit., p. 3. approach grounded in the social psychology literature.
Eugenie Brinkema, writing from a film theory perspective, similarly criticizes what she sees as Massumi's overreliance on the line of philosophical thinking about affect descending from Spinoza through Deleuze. She sees Massumi imposing a "split"Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of Affect (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 306. between affect and emotion that cuts affect off from signification, leaving it merely "formless" and "outside structure."Brinkema, The Forms of Affect, op. cit., p. 30.
His work on theory of affect has been influential in film studies, while most notable polemics include Sven Lütticken and Hito Steyerl.
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