Architectures of the Unforeseen: Essays in the Occurrent Arts by Brian Massumi (review)

Contrary to what the contents page of Massumi’s latest book suggests, it does not consist so much of five parts—three chapters plus a seemingly less-important introduction as well as “Concluding Remarks,” likewise of less importance. Rather it consists of three equivalent parts— the introduction and the conclusion, plus the middle, which is a large chunk subdivided into three chapters of what I would like to call “applied Massumi.” This chunk is dedicated to Gregg Lynn, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Simryn Gill, of whom only the first is, strictly speaking, an architect (a digital one). The others are subscribed as, respectively, an interactive media artist and a mixed-media installation creator. All three of them, however, share a certain connection with architecture, hence the book’s title. With occurrent arts, Massumi alludes to the process-based aspect of their art, or processual design, in which any object is just a temporary phase on its way to another.

Although the book in essence is nonlinear in its approach, let’s nevertheless begin with the book’s introduction because, despite its modest indication in the contents page (smaller font, deceptive roman page number), it’s about 11 pages long and, to me, Massumi actually performs the most important work of the book right there. Immediately in the first sentence he indicates that these texts are not so much about the named protagonists but rather that these are cases of “writings-with.” This immediately struck a note, as in my own writing on art I also prefer to write parallel to (the work of) artists I appreciate because they tackle problems in a way that interests me. Massumi offers here a theoretical approach of this wish by talking about writing from “a region of critical overlap,” where “two processes, strangers to each other, can intimately overlap in a problematic that is constitutive for both, without coming in any way to resemble each other in form or even sharing content.” In doing so “they fashion their own [content], reciprocal to their singular taking-form. They may perturb each other or attune, interfere or resonate, cross-fertilize or contaminate, but each will ultimately incorporate the formative potential in their own problematic way, so that the overlap is also a forking” (pp. vii–viii). And here we enter, almost inevitably, Massumi’s well-known universe of Deleuze and Guattari when he refers to their notion of “aparallel evolution: the intimate art of keeping a formative distance” [1].

In his “writing with” Lynn, Lozano-Hemmer and Gill, Massumi namely enters into his own personal realm in which he can revel in and develop a thinking alongside these artists’ work that is embedded in and developed alongside the thinking and writing of his usual compagnons. Apart from Deleuze and Guattari, from whom he in the Concluding Remarks also develops the notion of (being at) the outside, we thus encounter, among others, Bergson, Simondon and Whitehead. In what could be called the applied part, it should therefore not be surprising that there’s a clear recognition of the found critical overlap by way of keywords such as process, event, becoming, immanence—such as when indicating that “the status of the art practice for the philosophizing is that of a non-philosophical field immanent to philosophy’s becoming” (p. xii).

The interaction or what Massumi calls “processual fellow-traveling” with (the work of) Lynn, Lozano-Hemmer and Gill took place in different time frames and is partly still ongoing. In the case of Lynn this goes back to the mid-1990s, with Lozano-Hemmer even to the end of the 1980s, while that with Gill took place over a limited period of two months. Where the encounter with Lynn’s work would eventually leave Massumi’s “process to similarly spin off, orphaned by Lynn’s while irreversibly correlated to it, a wasp in the abstract embrace of an intimately distant orchid...