Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence - movement, affect and sensation - in favour of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In "Parables for the Virtual" Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models. Renewing and assessing William James´s radical empiricism and Henri Bergson´s philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect and sensation. If such concepts are as fundamental as signs and significations, he argues, then a new set of theoretical issues appear, and with them potential new paths for the wedding of scientific and cultural theory.Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, Parables for the Virtual tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc and Ronald Reagan´s acting career. The result is a combination of cultural theory, science and philosophy that in itself in a crystalline and multi-faceted argument. This title sould interest students and scholars of continental and Anglo-American philosophy, cultural studies, cognitive science, electronic art, digital culture and chaos theory, as well as those concerned with the science wars and the relation between the humanities and the sciences in general.