Brian Massumi — Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002)
Massumi argues that the dominant models for analyzing culture — structuralism, semiotics, ideology critique — operate on the level of coded positions and fixed identities, and systematically miss the dimension of pure movement, transition, and intensity. Affect, as Massumi defines it, is not emotion (which is named, coded, attributed to a subject) but the raw intensity of bodily passage — the moment before sensation becomes perception, before transition is arrested into position.
The book develops this through a series of “parables” — case studies in architecture, digital art, Reagan’s political effectiveness, and the body in motion — each demonstrating that the most politically and culturally significant dynamics operate at the level of the virtual (potential, intensity, movement) rather than the actual (realized states, fixed identities, coded meanings).
Key for OM: Massumi provides the philosophical vocabulary for the Undercapital thesis. The “that night it felt like anything was possible” phenomenology that OM identifies as a practical economic resource is precisely what Massumi calls affect — and his argument that the virtual is “real but not actual” and materially consequential is the philosophical foundation for treating undercapital as a real ninth form of capital, not mystical surplus.