Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Technologies of Lived Abstraction). Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Technologies of Lived Abstraction)

Events are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. Buthow do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much aswhat is actually present? In Semblance and Event, Brian Massumi, drawing on thework 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, aquestion of abstraction, not as the opposite of the concrete but as a dimension of it: "livedabstraction." A semblance is a lived abstraction. Massumi uses the category of the semblance toinvestigate practices of art that are relational and event-oriented -- variously known asinteractive art, ephemeral art, performance art, art intervention -- which he refers to collectivelyas the "occurrent arts." Each art practice invents its own kinds of relational events oflived 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 aestheticdimension.

Brian Massumi is Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences at the University of Montréal. He is the author of Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation and A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (MIT Press, 1992).