Semblance and Event

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? In Semblance 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." Massumi argues that traditional art practices, including perspective
painting, conventionally considered to be object-oriented freeze frames, also organize events of
perception, and must be considered occurrent arts in their own way. 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. Massumi investigates occurrent art practices in
order to examine, on the broadest level, how the aesthetic and the political are always intertwined
in any creative activity.