Neo-psychology or neo-humans? a critique of Massumi's Parables for the Virtual (2002)

Abstract

Can humanity tweak itself into a new existence?... No, if it happens it will only be through desire. Desire is the condition of evolution (Massumi, 2002, p. 123). Despite its ambivalence about the possibility or desirability of the development of ‘no longer humans’, Massumi's recent collection of essays proposes a kind of neo-psychology that constructs an idealist notion of the human that seeks to move beyond current psychological conceptualizations of people as experiencing organisms, integrated socially and ecologically via their sensory organs and their unique capacity for linguistically abstract thought. Parables ambitiously tries to invent a psychology that highlights ‘affect’, the ‘virtual’, ‘movement’ and ‘sensation’ which the author believes will oblige theorists to transcend (or to alter at least) the banal and reductionist physicalism and hedonistic psychogenesis of empirical psychology (roughly, experimental psychology, from Fechner and Wundt, through the last century). In this (largely un-stated) ambition, Parables shares with post-structuralist French philosophy a drive to invent concepts that re-theorize ‘the human’, seeing it as referring to a decentred, experiencing subject (one that seems only knowable phenomenologically). If my reading of this intention is fair, then Parables is an important (detailed and far-reaching) attempt to re-vision via Deleuze-inspired speculation what feeling (or being?) humans could be when we jettison the deterministic empiricisms of the past. In so far as these diverse and competing modern, post-Kantian psychologies assumed they were ‘about’ the one class of objects—the species Homo sapiens, they were mostly humanistic, or at least anthropocentric. Moreover, they all found a central place for pleasure/pain (e.g. Freud, behaviourism), for social inter-dependency, and for individualistic notions of narrativized ‘identity’ (Bell, 2002).