19 Facts About Brian Massumi

Brian Massumi is a Canadian philosopher and social theorist.

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

Brian Massumi is a retired professor in the Communications Department of the Universite de Montreal.

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

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

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

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

Brian 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 sees this mode of power as paradoxically productive.

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

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

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

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

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

In collaboration with Erin Manning, Brian Massumi has developed a process-philosophical take on research creation.

Brian Massumi is the son of Rashid Brian Massumi from a first marriage to Elsie Szabo.

Disillusioned with lobbying and traditional politics, Brian Massumi later moved toward direct action in the context of the anti-nuclear movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Brian Massumi's 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.