"Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color. To perceive in the everyday: a thinking of the world's varied ways of ...affording itself." -fromThought in the ActCombining philosophy and aesthetics,Thought in the Actis a unique exploration of creative practice as a form of thinking. Challenging the common opposition between the conceptual and the aesthetic, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi "think through" a wide range of creative practices in the process of their making, revealing how thinking and artfulness are intimately, creatively, and inseparably intertwined. They rediscover this intertwining at the heart of everyday perception and investigate its potential for new forms of activism at the crossroads of politics and art.
Emerging from active collaborations, the book analyzes the experiential work of the architects and conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins, the improvisational choreographic techniques of William Forsythe, the recent painting practice of Bracha Ettinger, as well as autistic writers' self-descriptions of their perceptual world and the experimental event making of the SenseLab collective. Drawing from the idiosyncratic vocabularies of each creative practice, and building on the vocabulary of process philosophy, the book reactivates rather than merely describes the artistic processes it examines. The result is a thinking-with and a writing-in-collaboration-with these processes and a demonstration of how philosophy co-composes with the act in the making.Thought in the Actenacts a collaborative mode of thinking in the act at the intersection of art, philosophy, and politics.
Events are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. But how do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much as what is actually ...present? InSemblance and Event, Brian Massumi, drawing on the work of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and others, develops the concept of "semblance" as a way to approach this question. It is, he argues, a question of abstraction, not as the opposite of the concrete but as a dimension of it: "lived abstraction." A semblance is a lived abstraction. Massumi uses the category of the semblance to investigate practices of art that are relational and event-oriented -- variously known as interactive art, ephemeral art, performance art, art intervention -- which he refers to collectively as the "occurrent arts." Each art practice invents its own kinds of relational events of lived abstraction, to produce a signature species of semblance. The artwork's relational engagement, Massumi continues, gives it a political valence just as necessary and immediate as the aesthetic dimension.
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 its expanding field 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’.
National Enterprise Emergency Massumi, Brian
Theory, culture & society,
11/2009, Letnik:
26, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The figure of today’s threat is the suddenly irrupting, locally self-organizing,
systemically self-amplifying threat of large-scale disruption. This form of threat,
fed by instability and ...metastability, is not only indiscriminate, it is also
indiscrimin able; it is indistinguishable from the general
environment. The figure of the environment shifts: from the harmony of a natural
balance to the normality of a generalized crisis environment so encompassing in its
endemic threat-form as to connect, across the spectrum, the polar extremes of war and
the weather. Michel Foucault characterizes the dominant contemporary regime of power,
coincident with the rise of neoliberalism, as ‘environmental’: a governmentality
which will act on the environment and systematically modify its variables. Its
actions, he emphasizes, are not standardizing since the shift in the figure of the
environment has moved it out of reach of normalization. Given the indiscriminateness
of the environment’s autonomous activity, environmentality must work through the
‘regulation of effects’ rather than of causes. It must remain operationally ‘open to
unknowns’ and catch nonlinear, transversal phenomena before they amplify the
stirrings to actual crisis proportions. What systematicity is this? And: does power’s
becoming-environmental mean that, politically, we are dealing with natural subjects?
Where Foucault’s question ends is where, today, we must begin, in light of how the
recomposition of power whose dawning he glimpsed in 1979 has since played out. In the
context of Foucault’s theories of power, the question amounts to asking: is this
still ‘biopolitics’?
‘If there is one thing we can learn from John Ruskin, it is that each age must find its own way to beauty’ writes Lars Spuybroek in The Sympathy of Things, his ground-breaking work which proposes a ...radical new aesthetics for the digital era. Spuybroek argues that we must ‘undo’ the twentieth century and learn to understand the aesthetic insights of the nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin, from which he distils pointers for the contemporary age. Linking philosophy, design, and the digital, with art history, architecture, and craft, Spuybroek explores the romantic notion of ‘sympathy’, a core concept in Ruskin’s aesthetics, re-evaluating it as the driving force of the twenty-first century aesthetic experience. For Ruskin, beauty always comprises variation, imperfection and fragility, three concepts that wholly disappeared from our mindsets during the twentieth century, but which Spuybroek argues to be central to contemporary aesthetics and design. Revised throughout, and a new foreword by philosopher Brian Massumi, this is a new edition of a seminal work which has drawn praise from fields as diverse as digital architecture and speculative realism, and will continue to be influential as it wrests Ruskin’s ideas out of the Victorian era and reconstructs them for the modern age.
Such As It Is Massumi, Brian
Body & society,
03/2016, Letnik:
22, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
C.S. Peirce begins his 1903 lectures on pragmatism from the premise that the starting point for pragmatic philosophy as he envisions it must not be a concept of Being but rather of Feeling. ...Pragmatism, he explains, will be ‘an extreme realism’. Its first category will be ‘immediate consciousness’ conceived as a ‘pure presentness’ whose self-appearing is elemental to experience. Firstness cannot be couched in terms of recognition, cannot be contained in any first-person accounting of experience, and most of all can in no way be construed as being ‘in the mind’ of a subject, however the subject is conceived. This article follows some of the byways of Peirce’s thinking on this constitutive field of experience prior to subject/object determinations, making links to James’s ‘pure experience’, Whitehead’s ‘critique of pure feeling’, and Deleuze/Guattari’s ‘being of sensation’.
Author(s): Brian Massumi
Title (English): Affect in the Key of Politics
Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter 2011)
Publisher: Research Center ...in Gender Studies - Skopje and Euro-Balkan Institute
Page Range: 37-44
Page Count: 8
Citation (English): Brian Massumi, “Affect in the Key of Politics,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter 2011): 37-44.
In this interview, Brian Massumi discusses the possibility of a collective practice of experimentation beyond the infernal alternatives between the state authoritarianism and a narrow and ...exclusionary notion of freedom based on the individual, reinforced by the Covid-19 pandemic. This requires diagnosing the mix of forces at play, in other words, examining the interlinkages of various modes of power. Analysis of the ecology of powers then invokes a positive project that is inventing an aesthetics of the earth. An aesthetics of the earth is a call for a more-than-human relational ethics, which takes place in intricate co-composition with the earth and its emergent strata of all kinds: viral, bacterial, vegetal, animal, human, technological. Thus, from the ecology of powers to an aesthetics of the earth, Massumi proposes a politics of potential that is diagnostic rather than prescriptive yet encourages experimentation towards a postcapitalist future at this critical juncture of our epoch.
Massumi presents the notion of affective facts and how they function, relating it to the changing functioning of reality and how we perceive what is real. He explores the politics of preemption, ...treated as a manifestation of a new type of power – ontopower.
PDF
