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.
Early life
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.
Works 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).Yves Citton, preface, L'Économie contre elle-même. Vers un art anti-capitaliste de l'événement, French translation by Armelle Chrétien of Brian Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy (Montreal: Lux Éditeur, 2018), p. 9. His 1995 essay "The Autonomy of Affect","The Autonomy of Affect," Cultural Critique, special issue The Politics of Systems and Environments, part 2), no. 31 (September 1995), pp. 83-110. 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.An Inventory of Shimmers, Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Seigworth and Gregg (Durham : Duke University Press, 2010), p. 5.
Since 2004, he has collaborated with the SenseLab,SenseLab . Retrieved: April 17, 2018. founded by Erin ManningErin Manning. Retrieved: April 17, 2018 as an experimental "laboratory for thought in motion" operating at the intersection of philosophy, art, and activism.
Philosophy 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,Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (London: Polity, 2015), p. viii. 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 terms.Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press, 2011), p. 4, 29-30, 34-37, 85-86.
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.).
Theory of power
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.Kenneth Dean and Brian Massumi, First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (New York: Autonomedia, 1992) 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."Brian Massumi, ed., The Politics of Everyday Fear (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 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.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 neoliberal capitalism. 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
Philosophy of experience
Massumi's approach to perception and the philosophy of experience is closely tied to his political philosophy through the theory of affect.Brian Massumi, "The Political is Not Personal," interview with Brad Evans, LA Review of Books, November 12, 2017. Retrieved April 17, 2018. 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.Massumi, Ontopower, op. cit., p. 39, 204-205Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy, op. cit., pp. 6-24. 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 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.