being without image

Posted by admin on January 9th, 2007 filed in theory

Despite what reads like an cringe-worthy Deleuzian cliche, I find Massumi’s “body without an image” interesting (once I get beyond his writing style, which I have to say grates on me a little). Where I begin to have trouble with this concept is when it comes into contact with what Massumi refers to as “movement-vision”:

“It is a vision that passes into the body and through it to another space. Call that infra-empirical space, what the blind-sight of movement-vision sees, the body without an image. The body without an image is an accumulation of relative perspectives and the passages between them, an additive space of utter receptivity retaining and combining past movements, in intensity, extracted from their actual terms.” (Parables for the Virtual, 57).

There is something about Massumi’s “body without an image” that makes me suspicious, confused, definitley a little uncomfortable. Although the way in which he alludes to invisibility in a manner which suggests at some kind of primacy of sensation is interesting, he appeals to Deleuzian virtuality but in doing so appears to be attempting to side step the issue (and impossibility, according to Badiou) of the virtual image. His argument brings to mind Žižek’s I Hear You With My Eyes… and his assertion that the founding principle of self-presence within the metaphysical project is the conflation of seeing-with hearing, of seeing oneself without need of reflection, with the autoaffective quality of hearing oneself speak: of seeing oneself in the mode of hearing oneself speaking. Massumi’s “infra-empirical space” seems to be grounded in Deleuzian Virtuality. It is his suggestion that the “body without an image” is seen by the “blind sight of movement vision” that rings some kind of alarm bell for me. Sight within a realm of pure relational, processual receptivity; this seems to come within sights of Zizek’s critique of the founding principle of the metaphysics of presence. Despite avoiding the problematic virtual image, Massumi retains, although not exclusively, the optical metaphor that according to Badiou (an argument that I am inclined to agree with) does not hold up. Despite being without-image this being is in fact primarily a thing to be seen in the first part of Massumi’s argument. Is this to be read as an attempt to define the Self in the face of self-less becoming, some kind of image of being in spite of an otherwise invisible relational world, as is found elsewhere in this book?

My problems with this concept being grounded in equally blurry understandings of Zizek’s writing on the metpahysics of presence and (even more blurry) Badiou’s ontology, what I am now trying to find out is where Badiou explicitly disavows images, along with the One. Is this perhaps the Lacanian influence, an aversion to the imaginary? Being less than familiar with Badiou’s work beyond The Clamor of Being and a couple of his Theoretical Writings, I am finding this a somewhat daunting task with more threatening tangents than I dare think about if I am to find something like answers in all of this…