It is a common feature of process-oriented philosophies to underline the formative role of nonconscious perceptions in emergent experience. This talk will propose a set of concepts for understanding this subthreshold incipience of experience, drawing from the work of such authors as A.N. Whitehead, Henri Bergson, C.S. Peirce, Raymond Ruyer and Suzanne Langer, as well as recent empirical research on perceptual “priming.” Special attention will be given to the interrelatedness of the senses at this level, with the emphasis on the often neglected sense of proprioception. Notions of “schema” and “body image,” which tend to overlay onto the emergent level of experience cognitive and perceptual models derived from conscious perception, will be avoided in favor of a vocabulary privileging the categories directly concerned with incipient activity (activation, animation, potentiation), orientation (tendency), and affect (directly lived quality of activity). The concepts proposed will revolve in particular around models for emergent experience modeled loosely on musical notions, as in the case of Bergson, Ruyer, Langer.
About the Author
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Brian Massumi
Brian Massumi is professor of communication at the University of Montreal. He specializes in the philosophy of experience, art and media theory, and political philosophy. His most recent publications include Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (with Erin Manning; University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2014) and Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (MIT Press, 2011). He is also the author of Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002), A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (MIT Press, 1992), and First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (with Kenneth Dean; Autonomedia, 1993). His translations from the French include Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. With Erin Manning and the SenseLab he participates in the collective exploration of new ways of bringing philosophical and artistic practices into collaborative interaction, most recently in the frame of the "Immediations: Art, Media, Event" international partnership project for which he serves as co-director.