The Book That Helped Me Think Beyond the Grid

Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation is not a theatre book. That may be why it has been so useful to me.

Theatre books often arrive with a recognizable promise. They tell us how to train, how to rehearse, how to think about the actor, how to understand the stage. Massumi does something more difficult. He asks what a body is before it has been pinned down by explanation.

The book was published by Duke University Press in 2002. Its subtitle gives the real route into the argument: movement, affect, sensation. Massumi begins by asking what the body does in order to deserve the name “body.” His answer is direct: it moves and it feels, and it does both at the same time. Movement and sensation are inseparable. A body does not first exist and then move. It exists through movement, through sensation, through transition.

That is the part of Massumi that stayed with me most strongly: his refusal to begin with position.

So much theory of identity begins by locating the body. Male or female. Black or white. Gay or straight. This or that. Inside or outside. Accepted or excluded. These categories matter politically because people are harmed, protected, recognized, or erased through them. I do not want to pretend otherwise. But Massumi helps explain why they are not enough.

A body pinned to a grid may be legible, but legibility is not the same as life.

Massumi is very sharp on this. He argues that positional models of identity often begin by subtracting movement. They freeze the body in place, then try to add movement back in afterward. The result is what he calls “gridlock”: identity becomes a set of coordinates within an already existing map. Even resistance risks becoming just another permitted move inside the same structure. The body can shift from one position to another, but the system has already defined the available positions.

This was one of the ideas that led me toward queer theory.

Queer theory, at its best, does not simply add more boxes to the form. It asks why the form was built that way in the first place. It asks what kinds of life become possible when we stop treating identity as a fixed location and begin thinking in terms of relation, potential, desire, movement, and becoming.

Massumi borrows this from Deleuze and insists that the body in motion does not coincide with a fixed identity. It coincides with its own transition. It is always in relation to what it has not yet become, not what it feels it lacks. He describes this as a real but abstract dimension of the body: not unreal, not imaginary, but not fully captured by position either. It is the body’s potential to vary.

That phrase outlined how I've been handling "objectives" and "obstacles" in scene work. A scene can be guided by the potential to vary and the forces that counter this potential.

To be off the grid is not merely to be unclassified. It is to enter a field of potentiality containing tendencies that have not yet settled into a name.

For an actor, this is familiar territory.

A scene dies when the actor arrives with all the answers already fixed. “I am angry.” “I am the victim.” “I am the seducer.” “I am powerful.” “I am broken.” These may be playable for a moment, but they can also become dead positions or one-line executions. The work comes alive when the actor enters the interval of what is forming. What is nearly happening? What desire is trying to assemble itself?

That is why Massumi’s distinction between affect and emotion matters. Emotion is affect that has been named, socially recognized, and narrated. Affect is more volatile. It is intensity before it is captured as “anger,” “shame,” “fear,” “love,” or “grief.” 

It is the ideal field of play for an étude.

The actor is affected and starts to change. The name arrives later, sometimes too late, sometimes wrongly, sometimes as a social convenience. And this is all part of the action.

Queer experience often knows this well.

Before identity becomes a word, it may be social pressure, a recoil from expectation, a refusal of available scripts, a sensation that does not fit the map. The danger is that once identity becomes legible, it is managed by the same grid that first excluded it. The gift of queer theory is not just recognition. It is the insistence that recognition should not exhaust becoming.

Massumi gives philosophical weight to that idea through his use of Deleuze. And it has shaped how I think about acting.

The actor does not represent a finished identity any more or less than they would in life. The actor enters a field of becoming. Character, then, is not an outline to fill in. It is an event to generate. The actor does not need to decide too early what the character “is.” They need to create conditions in which the actor can keep becoming in a way that directs the audience to construct the character. And this doesn't stop on preview night or after the key take. The audience and the camera wants all of that to happen as if for the first time. 

A character is always more than its explanation. That's why a story is constructed around it. It is the apparatus of its becoming.

That is the real charge of Parables for the Virtual for me. It says that potential comes before classification. And that changed how I train actors.