Review: Brian Massumi, Architectures of the Unforeseen: Essays on the Occurrent Arts

Abstract

Perhaps it is best to dispense with a few necessary admissions. Selfimplicating, yes; a desire for the reader to temper their expectations, maybe. ‘Why is he writing this?’, you might ask (see one response below) deploying a concatenation of language(s) that are both inside and outside at the same time. Indeed. So much has yet to be written on the enmeshment of interiorities to be formulated within architecture. Yet within this call and response to an elegant densification of meanings in and around a collection of essays, of perambulations among spaces close and proscriptive, virtual and haptic, we find one who started thinking about this volume from the back to the front, a kind of delinquent recto–verso that has since become one intriguing mode by which to regard Brian Massumi’s challenging collection of essays, Architectures of the Unforeseen.