Processual Creativity and Partial Incorporations

Abstract

Brian Massumi and Félix Guattari conceptualize the creative processual force of life that shapes the passages from the potential to the actual dimensions of experience. Throughout these passages, bodies, environments and their relational modes of felt perception crystallize into form. What the conceptual vocabulary of Massumi and Guattari offers is a tool box to register the processual creative forces that are predetermined towards a coming into shape of a body-environment (subjectivity), as well as to take into account the forces deflecting from capture. The relevancy of their concepts is in that they index the more-than-human operations of the forces that shape the production of subjectivity: their concepts express the forces that by being potential and more-than concrete are beyond registering of individual human consciousness. Considering that subjectivity is produced through the potential ingression of partial incorporations – brewing of body-time-spaces – this paper is a proposition to think-feel the entanglements of process philosophy and somatic practices. Moreover, having in mind that processual creativity is a force distributed beyond the human, it needs to be as well thought as an autonomous doing ‘of’ the world. Therefore, the concepts offered by Massumi and Guattari overspill the disciplinary containment of the art disciplines and become an ethico-aesthetic paradigm ‘of’ the world, one in which the resistance to the capture of the production of subjectivity goes hand in hand with the invention of ways to think-feel how bodies and environments become. Article received: April 25, 2020; Article accepted: July 1, 2020; Published online: April 15, 2021; Original scholarly paper