Event Theory

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

My analysis of the changed landscape of gay partying in Sydney, "Complex Events" looks at the impact of current policing practices (drug dogs) on the shapes gay partying is taking: its forms, pleasures, risks, contexts and sociomaterial implications – especially in the context of the increased use of online hook-up apps

This essay is an invitation to take up the nature and problematics of hospitality in its materiality. It begins and ends with the Marshall Islands, at the crossroads of two great destructive forces: nuclear colonialism and the climate crisis. In the aftermath of sixty-seven US nuclear bomb "tests" visited upon the Marshall Islands, the concrete "dome" built on Runit Island by the US government was an act of erasure and avoid -ance-an attempt to contain and cover over plutonium remains and other material traces of the violence of colonial hospitality that live inside the Tomb (as the Marshallese call it). Taking the physicality of the hostility within hospitality seriously, and going into the core of the theory that produced the nuclear bomb, I argue that a radical hospitality-an infinity of possibilities for interrupting state sanctioned violence-is written into the structure of matter itself in its inseparability with the void. How shall we remember you? You were a whole island, once. You were breadfruit trees heavy with green globes of fruit whispering promises of massive canoes. Crabs dusted with white sand scuttled through pandanus roots. Beneath looming coconut trees beds of ripe watermelon slept still, swollen with juice. And you were protected by powerful irooj, chiefs birthed from women who could swim pregnant for miles beneath a full moon.

Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (‘PREP’) has so far emerged as a reluctant object in much gay community discourse, primarily because of its association with the supposed excesses of unbridled sex. Its approval in the USA sparked bitter debate and a new round of sexual health moralism issuing mainly from gay community-based commentators with initial uptake much slower than expected. This article considers early gay community responses to PREP and connects them to the failure of existing HIV scientific practices to produce inhabitable sexual pedagogies.  The controversy surrounding PREP speaks to the ways in which condoms have served as a way of managing communal fears about sexual excess in the era of AIDS; providing not only a latex barrier but also symbolic reassurance that gay sex might in some way be made “safe”.  Another mode of attending to what is risky and exciting about sexual and scientific encounters might be possible in conceiving them as events.

This paper was produced for Brian Massumi's doctoral seminar on Discourse Analysis in 2004. In it I perform a Stengerian critique of Sanford Kwinter's "The Complex and the Singular," in which I show that Kwinter's Whitehead-inspired event theory is internally incommensurable with itself with respect to some of its conceptualizations, but it nevertheless useful as a way of conceiving the cyclical process of formation and change.

The killing of Trayvon Martin is easily placed in the long history of American violence against black people and amidst the related contemporary institutions that reproduce race as a structure of inequality. For that reason, both the broad outpouring of horror that the case generated when it first rose to national prominence and the polarization that soon followed pose puzzles about how white Americans understand racial subordination. This essay explores those puzzles, taking moments in the struggle over the meaning of the case as occasions that illuminate the forms of knowing and unknowing that mark white supremacy in a neoliberal era.

This essay interrogates the ways in which contemporary fiction from the subcontinent responds to the preoccupation with the spectacular event in Western philosophy, historiography, and popular media discourse. Today, this seemingly unanimous
and all-pervasive fixation with colossal moment—revolutionary,
politically progressive, or apocalyptic, terroristic ones—grips our collective global imaginary like never before. The collapse of the twin towers and the post-9/11 context of the war on terror have produced dominant discourses that accept, willy nilly, the cloying power of event-centric narratives. In this context I study Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist to suggest that contemporary literary experimentation emerging from South Asia proactively resists the catastrophic event’s magnetic power to create an inescapable force field that keeps everything constantly aligned in relation to it.

This paper examines the idea of memory being a dangerous weapon through the genre of sci-fi, specifically as the basis of a collective history for artificial life forms which poses a danger to the state, as I examine three shows: Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, and the HBO series Westworld. Furthermore, the affect of traumatic memories in artificial life parallels the ways that the state deals with post-traumatic stress (PTS) in soldiers; in this revelation I examine parallels to veteran testimonies of military atrocities. Overall, three things arise within these stories: 1) Memory is dangerous to the state; 2) The state attempts to manage and control memory; and 3) Memory can be liberatory, as it is an act of resistance.

As Deleuze and Guattari argue in A Thousand Plateaus, the State has historically had only two choices with regard to violence:(1) it can form a special part of its apparatus specifically made to deploy violence against its own populations (ie, its police force, its prisons, its judges, and its bureaucrats, who are responsible for both legalizing and “making abstract” the various forms of state violence); or (2) it can acquire an army.

In works previous to Thousand Plateaus (2005), such as Logic of Sense (1990), Gilles Deleuze stresses the importance of the impersonal as the dimension one must reach in order to counter-effectuate the Event. Impersonal, or neutrality, is a characteristic of singularities and of the Event. Although Deleuze never relates the Event to an experience, regarding experience as an event is our answer to such a question as the becoming-imperceptible or the radical affirmation of any body as a haecceity. Impersonality is a way of allowing the becoming. However, there seems to be a misuse of the notion of becoming as a process of deconstruction or transformation, underlining or enforcing the self instead of dismantling it. Patricia MacCormack's (2011) defense of the lizard-man, and the cat-man, as both bodies in-between and becoming, is such a misuse. Their and Body Art practitioners attempt of overcoming the Self and a subjectivity through the excess and extreme emphasis of turning all bodies “as aesthetic events which can experience and are experienced through zones or folds of proximity” (198) not only falls on the field of mimesis and representation, as they inflate subjectivity and a fixed Self.
Turning the body into an event calls for a re-questioning of an ethical-aesthetic êthos, one which seeks to free life (DELEUZE, 1996) through the creation of encounters, and a much radical de-personalization of the self. This de-personalization or impersonality understood as an elimination process of subjectivities and selves determined by the socius follows Deleuze's Bartleby (1993) three characteristics, plus one: a trait of expression, a zone of indeterminacy, a fraternal function and a subjective-significative nudity. This is a fundamental dismantlement through a «leap of the will», as to achieve that composition in which we are a life in the same immanent plane as everything that composes Nature (DELEUZE, 2005). This is an impersonality towards life and creation (close to asceticism), one could argue, opposed to an imposed depersonalization of death and destruction (close to death camps' bare life).
Nevertheless, for a body to become the event that it is, i.e., a body for a life, one must also address art's territory. First as an encounter (an ethic-aesthetic realm), which can produce what we call the space of the Event, following the idea of taking extra-daily practices and techniques into daily life. Art is too mediated/mediatic and mediates too much (perceptions and experiences). It is most of the time a stance for the production of the monolithic​ Self. To release both Life and Art, affects and percepts, from their shackles, one must avoid and produce actions and situations evading the alienation and fetishism of forces, close the gap of mediation between subject and object of experience. Hence, we propose to rethink Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones (1994), as a possibility of how to deterritorialize and produce encounters in daily life. A practice of immediatism: creation happening outside Art.

В  статье  автор  предлагает  оригинальную  версию  разрешения  проблемы  атомарно-сти социальных событий. Актуальность темы обусловлена тем, что именно недели-мость  позволяет  различить  событие  от  других  социальных  феноменов/процессов.  Событие, с точки зрения автора, должно иметь определенную длительность, которая является атомарной. На первом шаге автор, опираясь на широкий круг источников, включающих взгляды различных теоретиков, рассматривает проблему неделимости социальных событий в сложившейся теории событий. Автор отмечает, что логико-семантические трактовки неделимости событий получили большее распространение, чем утверждение онтологической атомарности. Далее автор подробно останавлива-ется на трактовках атомарности по наблюдению. Анализируя взгляды Д. Дэвидсона, А. Ф. Филиппова и др., автор доказывает, что в случае атомарности по наблюдению: 1) довольно размытыми выглядят критерии этой атомарности; 2) событие оказыва-ется  следствием  не  только  фигуры  наблюдателя,  но  также  его  системы  различения  и мотивов; 3) сложности могут быть связаны с пространственным фактором; 4) само событие смешивается с фактом. Также автор считает не соответствующим современ-ным тенденциям ограничение социальных событий только тем, что доступно взгляду человека.  Далее  автор  показывает  продуктивность  осмысления  события  в  качестве  объекта. В отличие от участников дискуссий, направленных на различение события и  объекта,  автор  использует  концептуализацию  объекта,  предлагаемую  объектно-ориентированной онтологией. События как объекты способны к изменениям, но со-храняют свою неделимость и стабильность, могут быть связаны не только с матери-альной, но и идеальной сферой, обладают системой различений. Предлагаемая схема позволяет утверждать невозможность негативных событий, дает основание не только говорить об атомарности события, но и подчеркивает онтологические основы этой атомарности, а также предлагает возможности мышления о социальном за пределами наблюдаемого.

Abstract:Ecological urgency requires taking the time to critique capitalist temporalities. At various timescales including daily, lifetime, macroeconomic and deep times, I argue that capitalocentric temporalities can be conceptualized as "uchronia." Fetishizing time as capitalist futurity (eu-chronos), these temporalities disconnect us from our times (ou-chronos). At stake is the contestation of hegemonic capitalocentric temporalities and a reversal of common dismissals of environmentalist critiques as "utopian." Also at stake is an exhortation for environmental thought to quit self-proclaiming a green "utopianism" detrimental to its credibility. Finally, nature and the human must be rethought beyond capitalo-telic terms and to overcome optimism and pessimism.

As the nature of contemporary performance continues to expand into new forms, genres and media, it requires an increasingly diverse vocabulary. Reading Contemporary Performance provides students, critics and creators with a rich understanding of the key terms and ideas that are central to any discussion of this evolving theatricality.
Specially commissioned entries from a wealth of contributors map out the many and varied ways of discussing performance in all of its forms – from theatrical and site-specific performances to live and New Media art. The book is divided into two sections:
Concepts - Key terms and ideas arranged according to the five characteristic elements of performance art: time; space; action; performer; audience.
Methodologies and Turning Points - The seminal theories and ways of reading performance, such as postmodernism, epic theatre, feminisms, happenings and animal studies.
Case Studies – entries in both sections are accompanied by short studies of specific performances and events, demonstrating creative examples of the ideas and issues in question.

Reality has overcome today our knowledge about the world. A new hegemony of the real has been rekindled over the last five years, in which events and multiplicities become protagonists of a new realist ontological turn. Through a theoretical journey along the contemporary theory on the event, and focusing on 21st century Spain, I propose Deleuze’s concept of “pure event” as the paradigm of our times, affected by a new prominence of the material order in the political sphere. Creative bodies, spaces, and devices join forces in an assemblage for a new utopia of social emancipation.

In contemporary artistic, media and philosophical discourses the notion of the 'event' has gained considerable currency. Since the 1990s the event has been central to a range of performative, media-based, socially and politically engaged artists' work, as well as in artists' involvement in/with non-artistic projects and practices ranging from political protest to scientific research. The growth of interest towards the potentials of art openly working with reception and/or participation as its methods has also lead to institutional commissions of this type of artistic work. For the institutions event-based art has triggered entirely new questions about the documentation and preservation of artistic practices. While the concept of the 'event' has been extensively elaborated upon in some fields – for instance, in theatre studies, urban studies and especially in philosophy, in recent art history and cultural theory, there are still few attempts of theorization. This conference sets out to articulate the meaning of the 'event' in relation to artistic, media-based and performative cultural practices. We invite presentations articulating the range of performative, conceptual, media-based, game-based, relational, participatory and other practices that can be approached as events. Elaborations on the methodological issues of studying events are also welcomed.

It is now almost a commonplace to note that after the Seattle 1999 protests against the neo-liberal market-oriented version of globalization a new coalition against global market hegemony is struggling to emerge. While this emergence may seem to have been ...

As Deleuze and Guattari argue in A Thousand Plateaus, the State has historically had only two choices with regard to violence:(1) it can form a special part of its apparatus specifically made to deploy violence against its own populations (ie, its police force, its prisons, its judges, and its bureaucrats, who are responsible for both legalizing and “making abstract” the various forms of state violence); or (2) it can acquire an army.

This article positions the concept of the event within a cosmology that affirms its status as an underlying liminality that precedes being yet is additive to the processes that constitute ontological regions. Across a number of event theories, the article shows how the event is systematically defined as an impassive extra-ontological entity that is external in its relation to being yet conditions its emergence. That is to say, the discussed event theories create a world picture in which the event is the impersonal superaddition to being. An event here is the intermediary, the interface, the groundlessness between world regions. As such, it functions as an extra-categorical element within being. Herein the impersonal event becomes the protagonist of a superadditive cosmology wherein it conditions the very emergence of constituted entities. The event becomes the impassive linkage between regions of being (Martin Heidegger), or the realm preceding, underlying, and generating being (Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze). In what follows, then, I look at the story of the event from a cosmological vantage point and explore this
pre-personal superadditive status.

This paper capitalizes on the resurgence of interest in habit within social and political theory as a key concept of our time, following the recent translation and uptake of the work of Félix Ravaisson, to push our understandings of the irreducible vitality and vulnerability of bodies. It seeks to intervene within debates on the habit-body by challenging the way in which the transitions that habit gives rise to are conceptualized. Many theorizations of the habit-body have tended to stress its ever-evolving, adaptive, affective capacities for subtle alteration and gradual, incremental change. However I argue that this lends itself to an image of the habit-body that prioritizes coherence, calculation and proficiency over other more erratic and unpredictable transitions that habit might give rise to. In response, and drawing on Borges’ short story The Zahir as its empirical lure, rather than understanding volatility as something that habit works to quiesce, this paper seeks to enroll volatility into an image of the habit-body by articulating its agitative and destructive tendencies. It does this by proffering obsession as a specific mode of habit that exhibits these tendencies towards volatility, in order to demonstrate how habit participates in some of the more unstable, precarious and heterogeneous modulations of contemporary life. Capitalizing on the ways through which habit refocuses debates on ‘distributed agency’, drawing attention to the volatilities inherent to habit helps us not only to dismantle ideas of the sovereign self, but in doing so, pluralizes the event and performance of subjectivities. This forces us to conceptualize the relations between thought, will and responsibility in a way that rethinks a radical politics through a revolution of the body over that of the mind.

In this article we place the discussions of automation in post-work imaginaries within and alongside feminist critiques and understandings of domestic technology. Structured in three parts, the first surveys debates on the future of work, showing how feminist materialist critiques of technology would lend themselves to an anti-work rather than post-work politics. The second focuses on both historical and contemporary feminist critiques of domestic automation to situate the post-work condition in this longer lineage. In the final section, we sketch the contours of a distinctly feminist antiwork imaginary drawing on Dolores Hayden's work on collective domestic settlements and Rachel Maine's work on amateur uses and repurposing of obsolete technologies in the name of a politics of pleasure.

Abstract:This article analyses the Hobbesian link between materialism and rhetoric through the metaphor of the multitude. The central claim is that it is not possible to understand Hobbes’ intended political practice, which stems from his theory of language, if we do not take the relation Hobbes describes between materialism and the eloquence of words to its logical conclusion. Incorporating materialism into a rhetorical analysis, we realize the parasitical character of the Hobbesian notion of person related to the sovereign, as well as the fiction of the sovereign that constitutes the entire cause of order by itself.

The movement opened up by Occupy Wall Street is the most exciting event on the US political left since 1968. As in'68, the current movement extends globally, encompasses multiple grievances, and is being met by violent police responses. Also as in'68, an ...

This essay probes into the possibility of encountering the Deleuzian sense-event in four Tom Stoppard radio plays, Moon (1964), Boot (1964), Glad (1966) and Artist Descending A Staircase (1972). Itself an incorporeal – an occurrence of the interface – the wonderful and strange protagonist of Gilles Deleuze's 1969 Logic of Sense is approached in apophatic gestures, with a glimpse at the various vestiges it has left upon texts. Within this exercise in indirection, ‘empty forms’ present themselves as the texts’ circulating words. Informed by and receiving infusions from two parallel flows of Deleuzian signifiers and signifieds, these entities are singled out as the texts’ pointers that open up a cleavage where the sense-event can issue forth.

Becoming Besides Ourselves continues Brian Rotman's concern with God, mathematics, and minds in a sprawling case for the reality of the imminent reconfiguration of our selves and societies by networked, motion-capture media technologies. The book argues, based on the shaping of sentience by the media environment, that alphabetic-culture's coming-obsolescence will give way to newer, better, more holistic forms of being. It is a smart book, written by a scholar undaunted by hanging world-changing claims on theory-heavy and experimental evidence of shifts in subjectivity. Yet, I found myself frustrated with its conclusions. Alphabetic writing has hard-wired into us an "alphabetic body", a cyborg-conception of those capable of thinking alphabetic-thought. As Rotman explains, "[t]he alphabet does this by imposing its own mediological needs on the body, from the evident perceptual and cognitive skills required to read and write to the invisible, neurological transformations which it induces in order to function" (15). The medium is not only the message, nor even the inert material used. Media hardware are embodied by their users as well. Appropriately, Becoming cites its affiliation with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological project, which "can be summarized as a meditation on 'the flesh that thinks'" (34). Rotman thus walks us through gesticulation, movement, vocal affect, silences and other features that attend speech presentation in order to mark constrictions on the physiological gear used to "read" the meanings of embodied encounters-to speak, watch and hear. By contrast with embodied communication, like speech and sign-language, alphabetic language abstracts gesture, and, in particular, vocal gestures. I am unfairly, of course, asking Becoming to become another book. But, it is a request made in good faith and, hopefully, in the idioms of opening, room-making, and world-making that Becoming assigns to its readers. Nudged towards a politics of difference, perhaps the advent of a post-alphabetic age will, as Rotman anticipates, "make room for other less-imprisoning, more open-ended, ecophilic, and planetmindful and ethical horizons of the human" (137).

Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 304 pp., ISBN 978-0816649907 ... Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 208 ...

1. Michael Warner's collection of essays on the notion of the public is terrific. The beautiful and evocative cover features drag queens from 1962 having a great time photographing each other. Several wear three-stranded pearl necklaces. The inside of the book delivers ...

ABSTRACT Celebrating the re-election of Barack Obama as a win for GLB equality or denouncing the focus on marriage rights as honormative misses the point. Both approaches obscure what actually happens in local sites where authority is exercised. Looking into the cracks and crevices of regulatory apparatuses generates a more complex picture. In examining contradictory rules on sex classification, for example, it becomes clear those contradictions often reflect different state projects, such as security, distribution, reproduction. Construing the election as a victory for gay rights or for homonormativy elevates grand concepts—marriage, the state—over the quotidian actions that regulate life.