Brian Massumi

Massumi argues that affect and direct perception are not confined within a human subject, but are "transindividual" and spread across the "nature–culture continuum." 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.

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.

Most critical responses to Massumi's work focus on the 1995 essay "The Autonomy of Affect" and categorize him as an "affect theorist." The distinction he makes between affect and emotion, and his assertion that affect is "autonomous" in the sense that it extends beyond linguistic signification and resists cultural coding, are particular subjects of contention.

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). 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 interdisicplinary field of affect studies.

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.

Massumi is the son of Rashid Massumi (Nain, Iran) from a first marriage to Elsie Szabo (Lorain, Ohio). Massumi's early childhood was spent between Lorain, Ohio and McLean, Virginia. His teenage years were spent in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he dedicated himself to ecological activism as part of the environmental movement of the early 1970s. 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.

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 affinity groups called the Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook (CDAS), an off-shoot of the Clamshell Alliance, on the organization of two occupation attempts of the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant construction site. 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. 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.

Brian Massumi (/m ə ˈ s uː m i / ; 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.