My primary critique or issue with Grosz’s approach in this book is the sweeping, generalized uses of terms and concepts — i.e. art, painting, music, sensation, becoming, and also sweeping claims like “Art is of the animal.” I mean, art is a lot of things, and sometimes it is these things that Grosz describes, and sometimes it is something else, or many other things not even considered in this writing. I am generally open to the critical project of this book, I think, but have to continously locate it within a very particular area of writing about art (art as in painting and music, and in relation to the natural world), should it not become contiously bothersome that ‘art’ as it is thought of here is not forgetful or dismissive of (many) other forms of art and ways that art ‘becomes’ in the world or calls its subjects into being. Perhaps this is what happens when a philospher writes about art. [I did not have this reaction when I read Architechture from the Outside, but then again I am not an architect (and neither is Grosz).] And again (just an aside), why no allusion to Deleuze’s books Cinema 1 & Cinema 2? I’m not saying it needs to be in here, but is there no fruitful dialogue between these writings — ie - the affect image or the mirror image, etc?
“There can be no art without the materials of art, but the artistic is an eruption, a leap out of materiality, the kick of virtuality now put into and extracted from matter to make it function unpredictably. Sensations, artworks, do not signify or represent…they assemble, they make, they do , they produce” (75). The most compelling writing comes when Grosz traces the lines of the virtual and the immanent through materiality and the real and then back out into the world, or cosmos. The argument that a becoming-together or becoming-other through sensation is a compelling idea.
“Sensation has two dimensions, two types of energy: it is composed of affects and percepts. Sensation aims to extract affects from affections and percepts from perception, which is to say that it disembodies and desubjectifies affection and perception” (76). I also like this concept — would be interesting to further explore and pull apart the concepts of affect and percept as constitutive of sensation, though I do not completely agree with how Grosz frames affect here.