The Principle of Unrest: Activist Philosophy in the Expanded Field

The Principle of Unrest: Activist Philosophy in the Expanded Field

by Brian Massumi
The Principle of Unrest: Activist Philosophy in the Expanded Field

The Principle of Unrest: Activist Philosophy in the Expanded Field

by Brian Massumi

Paperback

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Overview

There is no such thing as rest. The world is always on the move. It is made of movement. We find ourselves always in the midst of it, in transformations under way. The basic category for understanding is activity - and only derivatively subject, object, rule, order. What is called for is an "activist" philosophy based on these premises. The Principle of Unrest explores the contemporary implications of an activist philosophy, pivoting on the issue of movement. Movement is understood not simply in spatial terms but as qualitative transformation: becoming, emergence, event. Neoliberal capitalism's special relation to movement is of central concern. Its powers of mobilization now descend to the emergent level of just-forming potential. This carries them beyond power-over to powers-to-bring-to-be, or what the book terms "ontopower." It is necessary to track capitalist power throughout the expanded of emergence in order to understand how counter-powers can resist its capture and rival it on its own immanent ground. At the emergent level, at the eventful first flush of their arising, counter-powers are always collective. This even applies to movements of thought. Thought in the making is collective expression. How can we think this transindividuality of thought? What practices can address it? How, politically, can we understand the concept of the event to emergently include events of thought? Only by attuning to the creative unrest always agitating at the infra-individual level, in direct connection with the transindividual level, bypassing the mid-level of what was traditionally taken for a sovereign subject: by embracing our "dividuality."


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781785420443
Publisher: Open Humanities Press
Publication date: 06/06/2017
Series: Immediations
Pages: 148
Product dimensions: 5.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Brian Massumi is Professor of Communication at the University of Montreal. He specializes in the philosophy of experience, art and media theory, and political philosophy. His most recent books include Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (2015), Politics of Affect (2015), and The Power at the End of the Economy (2014).
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