Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 14 Number 3, December 2013
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Massumi, Brian, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrant arts, PLACE, MIT Press, 2011. 232 pages, ISBN-10 0262134918, hardcover $20.58, softcover $13,40.
Reviewed by
Saint Vincent College
Brian Massumi’s Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurant Arts covers a lot of ground. Much of the book discusses the nature of activist philosophy, thought that exists in the middle of action. Difficult to characterize in simple terms, Massumi does a good job of describing a way of thinking that takes into account constant participatory change. His simplest example is animation. The mind fills in the movement between two still frames. In this case what is perceived is different from what is presented. While not normally considered in this fashion, activist philosophy sees this kind of perception as participatory: the mind actively fills in the gaps creating a seemless experience.
While animation is a clear example regarding continuous perception, the traditional arts maintain similar effects. Massumi writes, “We never just register what’s actually in front of our eyes. With every sight we see imperceptible qualities, we abstractly see potential, we implicitly see a life dynamic, we virtually live relation. It’s just a kind of shorthand to call it an object. It’s an event.”
A similar thing occurs when one looks at a motif of vines and leaves. A curling abstracted line creates “the sense we would have, for example, of moving our eyes down a branch of rustling leaves… It’s the same lived relation as when we ‘actually’ see leaves, it’s the same potential.” There is a difference however, between looking at nature and looking at art. Art is “purely potential… The body is capacitated, but the capacity has nowhere to else to go. It’s in suspense. [Susan] Langer calls this a ‘semblance.’” Massumi continues to describe that semblance has a certain pulsating, vital quality about it. Something that creates semblance is not static; it lives.
Massumi applies this gaze to a range of artistic practices including painting, dance and music. For example perspective in Renaissance painting imparts significant movement into and through the image. Vision is projected into the virtual space of the picture. Perspective invites the mind to fill in what might be down the road or around the bend. Sculpture can have a similar effect as the viewer imagines the “back side” of objects. What this analytical method leaves out is the historical context in which these “semblances” existed. Why was it that perspective was the method of choice for the renaissance artist? Why did the minimalists confound the critics by giving them, one might say, only semblance?
Each of these experiences is interactive and is critical to activist philosophy. “Interaction is just that: a going back and forth between actions, largely reduced to instrumental function. The lesson of the semblance is that lived reality of what is happening is so much more, qualitatively. It includes an ‘uncanny’ moreness to life as an unfolding lived relation in a world whose every moment is intensely suffused with virtuality…”
Interaction is a quality that points to the “moreness” of existence, a continuous “unfolding” of lived experience. Design motifs and perspective painting can be included under this umbrella. And indeed, the best examples should be. According to Massumi, “What interactive art can do, what its strength is in my opinion, is to take the situation as its ‘object.’ [When this is done]You’re creating ways of making the lived relation really appear.”
Massumi’s understanding of art in its various manifestations is valuable because it opens up a way of describing the “amodal” effect of different media. Not quite synesthetic, in which someone may see colors as they listen to sounds, but a more common apperception tangentially related to any one of the five senses.
This view relates closely to formalism, the aesthetic approach to art that relies on the composition, colors, textures and actual stuff of a work of art rather than on meaning or subject matter. Meaning is primarily informed by interpretation and when we talk in a formalist manner, our rhetoric is limited to description. Formalism puts aside intention, meaning and references to things outside of the work of art. Massumi does not subscribe to this form of analysis but his method does privilege experience and the potential (politicality) engendered by art over the message writ into the work by the artist.
“Artistic practices that explicitly attempt to be political often fail at it,” writes Massumi, “because they construe being political as having political content, when what counts is the dynamic form. An art practice can be aesthetically political, inventive of new life potentials, or new potential forms of life, and have no overtly political content.” In other words, the manner in which a work is made - its style and energy – and the potential it creates defined by Massumi as “politicality” are intimately linked. It is this potential, unfettered by subject matter on which Massumi focuses most of his attention.
This is all well and good. However, Massumi draws on one reference that seems to contradict his analytical position. When he asks rhetorically, “What is to be done? … with content,” Massumi reminds the reader of the same rhetorical question as it was used by Vladimir Lenin in his essay from 1902 entitled, “What is to Be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement.” In that essay Lenin seeks to advance his understanding of revolution by silencing his detractors. To a large degree, “What is to be done?” is not an essay about different views of government but a debate regarding the best way to achieve socialist goals. By bringing this up, Massumi undermines his attempt to distance content from form and its potential. To be fair Massumi does elaborate:
The speculative-pragmatic “what is to be done?” orients the question in starkly contrasting directions to Lenin’s question of the same wording. Lenin’s question begged for an answer along the (party) lines of: order from without. The force of the specutlative-pragmatic question orients toward the bringing to expression of immanent forces of existence. Lenin’s question was political in the way in which it admitted of only one “correct” solution, gesturing to quite a different sense of “force.” The speculative-pragmatic question is not a political question in the same way. It is a question of politicality.”
Massumi does not mean that there is only one “correct” way to see a work of art, its potential or to view activist philosophy. However, the author admits that activist philosophy relies on “activist” in both a political and philosophical manner. In the introduction Massumi writes, “Activist philosophy, as it is explored in this book, addresses itself as much to activisms in the familiar sense, in any domain in which they stir, as it does to art or philosophical practices... The affinity is especially close with activist practices that see themselves as simultaneously cultural and political…(emphasis added)” Activist, or activism, as this reviewer understands it, is a term most often applied to particular political positions. This suggests that Massumi sees activist philosophy as a way to support that political position not necessarily through subject matter but through artist potential – politicality.
This begs several questions: If philosophical activism is synonymous with political, cultural activism, etc., how does its message differ? Should philosophy have a “message?” What does activist philosophy free of politics look like and what would it bring to philosophy?
The politicality of each of Massumi’s examples is fascinating. Animation and perspective painting can indeed show how the mind and eye interact with a work of art. Semblance and the “moreness” of art is a compelling subject that has occupied philosophy for centuries. It is a subject that will continue. Massumi’s contribution helps to provide a method by which various arts can be approach in a like manner. Art has tremendous potential not limited by political or cultural positions.