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.
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