Reading Semblance and Event

 
It came as something of a surprise when I realized that Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts is the first book Brian Massumi has published since the influential 2002 Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Surprising only because in the decade following Parables for the Virtual, Massumi has continued to be an active and influential figure on the theoretical landscape. Among numerous other pieces, for example, he has written a series of important essays on the post-9/11 affective security regime, which, taken together, have the force of a short and incisive book.
 
Semblance and Event, the fourth volume in MIT’s “Technologies of Lived Abstraction” series, which Massumi co-edits with his partner and collaborator Erin Manning, pursues a different set of concerns, focusing largely on the arts. For this book Massumi circles back to pick up a couple of pre-Parables pieces, which he weaves together with an exciting introductory essay on “Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts” and a concluding tour-de-force in “four movements,” “Arts of Experience, Politics of Expression.” The book is unevenly (or unconventionally) organized. The introduction is longer than the first and third chapters combined, all of which together are approximately the length of the second chapter, a “semblance of an interview” published in 2008 in Inflexions, an online journal. And the final chapter, which by itself could stand alone as one of those slender volumes published by Verso or Prickly Paradigm Press, is nearly half the length of the entire book. But insofar as this chapter picks up on numerous lines of thought from earlier chapters, it serves here as a powerful conclusion to the book’s overall aim of articulating an aesthetic-political philosophy through the unfolding of the concept of “semblance.” Massumi draws this concept in large part, though not exclusively, from Walter Benjamin’s concepts of “mimesis” and “nonsensuous similarity,” tracing out its implications with the help of William James, Whitehead, and Deleuze, along with the especially useful introduction of psychologist Daniel Stern’s concept of “vitality affects.” Both through particular discussions of specific works of art (including among others music, dance, painting, and media installations) and more general discussions of abstraction, linear perspective, and the diagrammatic, Massumi advocates an “activist philosophy,” which teases out not only the politicality of the aesthetic but also the aesthetics of the political. I begin this review with such a generalized description both to prepare potential readers for the experience of reading Semblance and Event and to help account for the emphases and ellipses of this review, which focuses mainly on concepts from the introduction and closing chapter.
 
When my review copy of Semblance and Event arrived in the mail I had just finished reading Graham Harman’s The Quadruple Object. Inspired by Massumi’s own commitment to relationality, one way for me to begin to think about reviewing Semblance and Event was to think about how the experience of reading Massumi differed from the experience of reading Harman. Perhaps because I had just been making my way through The Quadruple Object, Harman’s object-oriented ontology seemed in places to loom as an unnamed, shadowy adversary to Massumi’s event-oriented ontology. While Massumi does not directly engage with the texts of Harman or other speculative realists, there are several moments, beginning with the introduction, where Harman’s commitment to the ontological primacy of objects over relations comes clearly to mind. But it’s not only because I happened to read the two works next to one another that comparing the experience of reading Massumi with that of reading Harman is instructive. Indeed, from their opening sentences the two works stake out in markedly different prose styles diverging claims about where philosophy should begin. Thinking about some of the differences between the experiences of reading the two books can help illuminate some of the stakes for Massumi’s arguments in Semblance and Event as well as the two authors’ competing philosophical commitments.
 
Harman’s prose, in The Quadruple Object as elsewhere, is clear and direct—full of declarative sentences, numbered sections and claims, and illustrative diagrams. Harman presents philosophy as an agon of champions, villains, and heroes, as when he claims that “objects should be the hero of philosophy” (16). He operates in part by placing his arguments explicitly in opposition to those of the champions whom he is attempting to unseat or dethrone or knock off their horses or in relation to those whose colors he chooses to wear. At one point he likens “various forms of objects and qualities” to “the opposed armies of Korea [which] have stared each other down for over fifty years” (102). His assertions about positions with which he disagrees often consist of absolutist declarations, such as “Those who resist the notion that individual objects are the central topic of metaphysics have no other option: the object must either be undermined from below or overmined from above” (13). And at another point he likens his own philosophical ambitions to Kant and Freud (124). Thus, despite Harman’s deep commitment to objects, reading his prose can feel very much like encountering a subject- or human-centered discourse about objects, one in which philosophers champion different causes, in Harman’s case the fundamentality of objects, but in which discursive, philosophical agency remains firmly within what can often feel like an object-oriented humanism, in which the subject-object divide seems supplanted by the separation among real objects or what he calls the sensual object-real object divide.
 
Massumi’s prose, on the other hand, is alternatively fluid, dense, and fragmentary. Its effect is to produce in the reader a kind of movement or relationality similar to the relational movement for which he is arguing. On occasion one feels challenged to hold onto or reproduce these movements of thought outside of the experience of reading. Often Massumi places quotations from his philosophical forebears next to each other, in relation, with little or no exegesis or explanation, as in the second paragraph of the book’s introduction: “What’s middling in all immediacy is ‘an experience of activity’ (James 1996a, 161). ‘The fundamental concepts are activity and process’ (Whitehead 1968, 140). ‘Bare activity, as we may call it, means the bare fact of event or change’ (James 1996a, 161)” (1). Sentences or fragments with no verbs or subjects or objects are prominent, for example: “An integral synchrony of befores and afters. Unbeen, beable. Time-like, logically prior to linear time. In the limits of the present. Wholly, virtually, vaguely. Differentially. Edging into existence” (89). At first these stylistic tendencies can seem gratuitous or annoying. But the absence of subjects and verbs also works to mark the absence of the conventional SVO structure of the English sentence, which separates actors from actions and objects rather than seeing them as emerging from relationality, virtuality, potential, and so forth. Where Harman’s desire to make objects fundamental or distinct from their qualities or relations is underscored in his prose by keeping subjects, verbs, and objects grammatically distinct, Massumi’s concern with event, occurrence, movement, and relation is expressed in a prose style where the event of a sentence can be, and often is, expressed as a single word or phrase.
 
The stylistic divergence between the two works accompanies a philosophical divergence between Harman’s Heideggerian-inspired defense of the ontological primacy of objects and Massumi’s James-Whitehead-Deleuze-based philosophy of the event. Semblance and Event begins with a direct echo of the opening of Emerson’s “Experience,” which begins with the question: “Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none.” Conventionally read in the history of philosophy as an American heir to the transcendental idealism of Kant, Emerson has in the past several decades begun to be reread within a more empirical tradition leading to pragmatism and beyond, with “Experience” figuring as a key text for this revisionary project. This project took off in earnest in the 1980s with work by such diverse figures as Stanley Cavell (who challenges the “pragmatist” label even while offering a radically de-idealized Emerson), Sharon Cameron, and Cornel West.¹ In the last decade of the 20th century and the first decades of this one, this line of thought has been taken up by (among others) Jonathan Levin, Cary Wolfe, and Paul Grimstad.² Although Massumi does not engage these debates directly, in the first sentences of Semblance and Event he finds himself in pretty much the same place as Emerson: “Something’s doing (James 1996a, 161). That much we already know. Something’s happening. Try as we might to gain an observer’s remove, that’s where we find ourselves: in the midst of it. There’s happening doing. This is where philosophical thinking must begin: immediately in the middle (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 21 – 23, 293)” (1).
 
Where Massumi, like Emerson, would begin in the middle, for Harman philosophy should begin with the “naiveté” of origins, that is, with objects. Indeed objects, for Harman and speculative realists, are originary in an ontological or metaphysical sense. In Semblance and Event, Massumi implicitly distinguishes himself from such an object-oriented philosophy, focusing instead on the event. Where Harman argues that every object is singular, for example, Massumi insists that events are singular. Unlike Harman, who defines objects as distinct both from their qualities and their relations, Massumi describes the event as doubled relationally and qualitatively. When Massumi invokes Deleuze to claim that his own activist philosophy is a “nonobject philosophy,” it is difficult not to hear an invidious distinction from Harman’s object-oriented philosophy. But in contrasting Massumi’s “nonobject philosophy” with Harman’s “object-oriented philosophy” we should not lose sight of their shared opposition to the “subjectivist philosophy” that can be traced back at least to Kant. Activist philosophy, Massumi insists, is also a “noncognitivist philosophy.”
 
If activist philosophy, the concept that shares the stage with “semblance” and “event” in the book’s title, is neither an objectivist nor a subjectivist philosophy, what is it? The remainder of Massumi’s introduction takes up this question, providing a series of increasingly complex answers. In perhaps another implicit differentiation from the school of “speculative realism,” Massumi characterizes activist philosophy as “aesthetico-political” and “speculative-pragmatic.” In reading object-oriented philosophy as part of the “against-which” that Massumi’s arguments are formed from and directed towards, I don’t mean to overstate its place in Semblance and Event. Massumi has his eyes on artistic as well as philosophical works here and thereby articulates the book’s aims through both frames. By linking the “aesthetico-political” with the “speculative-pragmatic,” he also highlights the politically activist implications of his philosophy. Suggesting that “the politicality of process” is the book’s “one central concern” (13), Massumi means “activist philosophy” to operate not only in terms of, say, activist left politics but in what might best be understood as the politicality of the nonhuman.
 
Thus the “final question” posed by the introduction is “that of experience in nonhuman forms of life, and in nonliving matter itself” (25). Massumi has taken up this question before, most notably perhaps in “The Autonomy of Affect,” where he draws on Simondon and Deleuze to distinguish between the human and the nonhuman not in terms of “the presence or absence” of consciousness or reflection, but in terms of their “directness.” In Semblance and Event he draws more heavily on Whitehead to unfold the question of nonhuman perception and, implicitly again, on Emerson’s concept of “experience,” especially that of nonhuman forms of life. To answer the question of nonhuman perception Massumi follows Whitehead’s discussion of the electron as “an occasion of experience.” And although he only tangentially touches on this concern in the book, pointing his reader to a forthcoming essay for further elucidation, the introduction closes with a sustained meditation on the relations among human, biological, and physical perception. As he does elsewhere in his work, Massumi refuses any hard and fast distinctions between humans, biological nonhumans, and physical matter. He does so not to equate these different “occasions of experience,” but as a means of accounting for both their continuity with and the singularity of the “human form of life” (26).
 
Massumi deploys Whitehead’s contention that “Objectification itself is abstraction” to explain the relational process through which different objects take form as experience. Humans and nonhumans alike take forms as occasions of experience through abstraction. Massumi understands the history of humanity as a “semblance,” an “abstraction” that operates like tree-rings through our nonhuman animal body. Through “specific techniques of existence,” this nonhuman body makes all human experience co-occurrent with occasions of nonhuman experience. In concluding his introduction with the nonhumanness of the body, Massumi loops back to and updates his earlier work on affectivity—and perhaps unintentionally loops back to Emerson as well. Massumi cites Whitehead’s insistence that the body is as much a part of nature as a mountain or a river or a cloud to underscore his own point that “the body as technique of existence” is continuous with the world (27). Whitehead himself echoes the early part of Nature, where Emerson distinguishes between the “me” and the “not-me,” or between the soul and nature, insisting that the body be included with nature as part of the “not-me.” After beginning his book with Emerson in the middleness of “Experience,” then, Massumi ends his introduction very much where Emerson begins. I emphasize Massumi’s perhaps not altogether intentional Emersonianism not to accuse him, as he cites others as having done, of romanticism—a charge made and addressed in the chapter 2 interview of Semblance and Event (and which he partially embraces in terms of his commitment to intensity). Rather, despite Emerson’s loose designation in twentieth-century literary histories as an American romanticist, I call attention to Massumi’s Emersonianism in order to situate both him and Emerson within the alternative philosophical genealogy that links transcendentalism with pragmatism, even with the radical empiricism of James or Whitehead. And as the previous discussion makes evident, this is a genealogy defined largely by its insistence upon the inseparability of human from nonhuman nature through the mediation of the body.
 
Massumi criticizes the concept of the medium, which he would seek to replace with something like “technique of experience.” Asked in the interview of chapter 2 why he has shied away from talking about the concept of media, Massumi denies that this is a concept at all, because it has been confused with the digital, which is not itself a medium. Insofar as digital technology itself is often characterized as a medium, Massumi’s criticism is well taken. As I argued (with Jay Bolter) nearly 15 years ago in Remediation, while digital photography and digital cinema can both be considered media, digital technology itself cannot. To replace the concept of medium, Massumi introduces Michel Chion’s characterization of the cinematic medium in terms of “audiovisual fusion,” which Massumi feels can more adequately account for the experience of technique as an event. When media theorists (often misreading McLuhan) define media as extensions of the senses, Massumi argues, they miss the way that the senses are already prostheses of the body, are already in that sense media. However, Massumi’s acute dismissal of media theory—which oscillates between defining a medium in terms either of its technological support or its sensory modality—does not speak to the understanding of a medium in relational terms as “that which remediates.” As I have been arguing for the past decade and more, media should not be identified either with their material support or with their dominant sense modalities, but rather with the relational-qualitative processes of remediation that they undertake. Such a process of remediation always takes up both technological and sensory modalities but these are insufficient in themselves to define a medium. For a broad understanding of media, as for events, occasions or techniques of existence, remediation is key.
 
In the history of Western philosophy (from Aristotle and Plato through Kant and Hegel to Adorno and recent post-Marxian media theory), mediation has usually been understood more narrowly (albeit crucially) as a secondary concept, as something coming between the nonhuman world and the perceiving human, often as an imperfect or distorting filter between the object and the subject. Consequently, it has been understood almost exclusively in terms of logics of representation, symbolization, or ideology as preventing or making impossible the “direct and immediate” relation with the world which Massumi, following Whitehead and James, insists upon as a fundamental component of human and nonhuman experience. If, however, we start with Massumi and Emerson in the middle of things, then mediation can be seen not as secondary but as a primary event or operation; the distance between mediation and perception is narrowed considerably, and the concept of mediation becomes another way to talk about the ideas of semblance, event, and occasions of experience that Massumi’s book unfolds. Indeed, this notion of mediation as event is implicit in Massumi’s work, and his activist philosophy can be read as a useful starting point for thinking a philosophy of mediation, a philosophy which I began to sketch out fragmentarily in my earlier work on remediation and have continued to unfold both in my recent work on premediation and in my current projects focusing on the concept of mediation itself. In his final chapter, Massumi lays the groundwork for such a philosophy of mediation in the aforementioned discussion of the Benjaminian concept of “nonsensuous similarity”—particularly by bringing Benjamin together with Daniel Stern’s generative concepts of “affective attunement” and “vitality affects.”³ What I finally find most exciting about Semblance and Event is the way in which its engaging treatment of “activist philosophy and the occurrent arts” provides the initial steps for a philosophy in which the nonhuman body itself is understood as the model for, and on the model of, mediation.