event mechanics

The ugly scenes of Australian PM Julia Gillard and opposition leader Tony Abbott being whisked away has certainly captured the attention of journalists and commentators. I don’t have much to add to Ben Eltham’s piece in New Matilda except to point out that there is a slippage in the way these events are being discussed around definitions of ‘violence’.
Julie Gillard is reported as describing the event as ‘turning to violence’:

The Prime Minister said she respected the right to protest, but the activists went too far.
“What I utterly condemn is when protests turn violent the way we saw the way we saw the violence yesterday,” she said.

The AFP deals with ‘risks’ however. If they ever had to deal with actual violence, then they would largely have failed in their primary responsibility. This is not a criticism of the work of the AFP at all. Rather it is a description of their work in protecting Gillard and others. You can see the slippage here in this Daily Telegraph piece where the journalist describes it as a ‘violent clash’ but Assistant AFP Commissioner Outram describes the event in terms of an awareness of risk:

Assistant Commissioner Outram said police had begun an investigation into yesterday’s violent clash between police and protestors.
He said some activists could face charges of assault or breaching public order.
“The AFP are looking into whether criminal offences have been committed,” he said.
“And an investigation is underway.”
It’s believed the protestors arrived at the restaurant looking for Mr Abbott after an earlier comment about the Aboriginal tent embassy.
The protestors were angered that he may have wanted their unofficial settlement torn down.
Assistant Commissioner Outram said a risk assessment was conducted before Ms Gillard arrived at the restaurant and police had no reason to believe she was in any danger.
“And in our view when the Prime Minister arrived there was no significant risk,” he said.
“Before the Prime Minister arrived the risk was low.”

To give a better idea of this process of identifying and mitigating the impact of risks, here are some of Outram’s other comments (as reported in the Herald Sun):

“We had no information or reason to suspect there was going to be any problem,” he said.
Police officers had acted appropriately, he said.
“Our first priority yesterday was the security of the Prime Minister,” he said.
[...]
Asked whether the Lobby restaurant, which was near the tent embassy, was the most appropriate venue for the prime ministerial event, Mr Outram said: “The AFP doesn’t select the venues – we manage the risks around the venues.”
[...]
“The AFP members on the ground yesterday took a decision and formed a view there was a threat and a risk to the safety of the Prime Minister and it was essential to remove the Prime Minister from that threat and risk as quickly as possible and that’s what happened.”

There is a slippage here that collapses ‘threat’ (ie the risk of violence) with ‘violence’ without there being a question of whether or not there was any actual ‘danger’. This observer from the Canberra Times states it clearly:

Neither Julia Gillard nor Tony Abbott were in any direct danger from Aboriginal protesters yesterday, but those concerned for their security must be appalled that they were allowed to be put in the situation they were in.
[...]
After a brief siege, security personnel decided, probably rightly, that Gillard and Abbott should be removed from a scene which would probably not calm down and, might get worse. By now they had the advantage of having significant numbers of ordinary police also on the scene. These were quite capable of clearing a way for a dignified exit.
Instead, the appearance was given of the Prime Minister being used as a battering ram by a close security officer. It appears that Gillard’s loss of the horizontal owed more to her stumble and loss of shoe – and by the security officer’s retrieving her as she fell. Yet it – and the faces on some of those around – illustrate an appearance of panic and not of control.
At no stage did it appear that Gillard made contact with any protester, or that any lunged towards her.
The stumble was a function of the extrication , not crowd pressure.
Yet reasonably close behind the Prime Minister was Abbott – at no stage in any appearance of danger.
He was grinning, in what some will claim, probably unfairly, was Gillard’s discomfort. And around him were a number of police, had he been in any danger.

I am not commenting on the legitimacy of any actions by any party (police, protesters, politicians, etc.), what I emphasising is the way ‘risk’ as perceived by AFP staff on the ground was manifest, how this ‘risk’ became a ‘threat’, and how this ‘threat’ is reported in the news as ‘violence’.
It is a clear example of what Brian Massumi calls the ‘Birth of the Affective Fact’. There are a few version of this paper around, the link is to one online from a conference (edit: link fixed). In his discussion of the overlapping power relations of the mode of governmentality in the War on Terror and ‘security’ as a mode of governmentality, Massumi writes:

[T]he interaction of the modes of power in play are dedicated to managing threat to ensure security, for which there is no objective measure, any more than there is of a mood.
[...]
So what is an affective fact? The mechanism is quite simple:
Threat triggers fear. The fear is of disruption. The fear is a disruption.
The mechanism is a capacity that affect itself has to self-effect. Paradoxically, as with command, its self-effecting produces certainty, even when the trigger is the opposite, the looming uncertainty of ill-defined threat. You’re not left cringing, wondering what may come. As soon as there is any sign of threat, its most feared effects have already begun to materialize. If an elaborate security apparatus has already been put in place, drawing the state-of-the-art in disciplinary and biopolitical response, the nascent disruption can be nipped in the bud. The repercussions of the feared event have been controlled. The event as been preempted. Preemption is not prevention. Prevention corresponds to neoliberal Cold War politics. Preemption does not prevent, it effects. It induces the event, in effect. Rather than acting in the present to avoid an occurrence in the future, preemption brings the future into the present. It makes present the future consequences of an eventuality that may or may not occur, indifferent to its actual occurrence. The event’s consequences precede it, as if it had already occurred. It event remains virtual – future-past — but is real and present in its effects. The present reality of its effects mean that it can be responded to pragmatically all the while remaining virtual.
The best way for governmental action to get a handle on threat is to be ready for it by directing where its effects will be felt. This is the function of the alarm. The alarm signals the threat, triggering fear. This induces the affective time-slip that is of a piece with preemption. Governmental intervention in the security sphere is no longer corrective, but inductive — this time in the sense of inducing the event it to which it responds. The emission of signs of alarm become its instrument of choice.
Signing threat to induce fear to control its effects snatches certainty from the jaws of uncertainty. The security equivalent of the logical tautology is the certainty of the affectively self-fulfilling prophesy, falling on secured ground.

The AFP focuses on threats, and so they should! They seem to have no mind for disruption and the danger of disruption. I wonder if this is part of the training? There is a danger in the threat of disruption actualised in the threat presented by possible dangers.
It will be interesting to see how the AFP uses the language of affect in their investigation into these events, using words such as ‘mood’ and ‘feel’, and how this is constrasted with a post-hoc risk assessment in terms of the capacities of polie, the capacities of protesters, the probabilities of various forms of action, the shifting field of probabilities as various forms of action were taken and so on.

I think OOO and onticology specifically addresses this problem better: what must the world be like for us to relate and have knowledge about it? Indeterminate, non-specified clumps of matter and energy just don’t work. But neither do we simply know things are they are, either, as knowledge is simply a subset of a larger, more significant distinction drawn by onticology: relation. Otherwise you risk making humanity an essential ingredient in being itself—that doesn’t make sense, either. There is something between pure materiality without form or structure and transcendental idealism. Namely, the partially translatable individual entity.

Joseph C Goodson replies to my comments about withdrawal and OOO. Making sense, indeed.

Let me flip Joseph’s warning regarding humanity as an essential ingredient in being itself. Is there a dimension of Reality that only humans have access to? What is this dimension of Reality? Meillassoux has carried out a fine service for so-called correlationists. Of course we relate to nothing other than matter and energy, while at the same time it is not as simple (or complex) as a relation directly with matter and energy, as this is unintelligible to us. Sure, scientistics can produce elaborate experiments to reduce the number of variables so as to work at relating directly to matter and energy. Do they apprehend matter and energy? No, they attempt to come up with a description that ‘fits’ the particular singularities at play in a particular composition of matter and energy as isolated in their experiments.
In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze describes ‘sense’ as the contraction of singularities that renders bodies and mixtures of bodies sensible and therefore intelligible to humans. A ‘description’ is a particular series of singularities. In his Discourse on Language, Foucault described his ‘archeological project’ in terms of examining a series of these descriptions for particular epistemes — what he called discourse events — and critically analysing the composition of singularities on the side of human intelligibility. The distribution of singularities, and series of singularities as they are never (ironically) ‘single’, he described as a distribution of statements. Bruno Latour’s project has been, in part, to expand this critical analysis to examine the practical, social and institutional, that is, extra-discursive, distribution of singularities that exist in great chains of relations and which are essential for the reproduction and production of such descriptions. An ‘incorporeal transformation’ (from A Thousand Plateaus) is to use a different description (sense + knowledge + sociality) for a given series of singularities that combines it with another series of singularities, which in Deleuze and Guattari’s example, renders a person as a convict. You get the jist? As if Reality is only objects and thoughts about them (the so-called ‘correlationist’ position), and not a baroque distribution of singularities across every fold of the cosmos…
On the non-human side of this composition are singularities that belong to the cosmos, and exist for humans as they exist for any subject whatsoever; Whitehead called these singularities ‘eternal objects’. I’ve described the singular point that humans describe as a ‘boiling point’ here, as part of an explanatory post on the concept of the virtual; this is the relevant section:

Think of the boiling point of water. Humans have measured the boiling point and have figured out that it is 100C. The boiling point is real; you can actually witness water boiling, but on the other hand, depending on the energy introduced into the water-boiling system only small amounts of pure water at sea level will boil instantly and turn into steam. (If there is a large amount of energy released into a system, such as a nuclear weapon, then larger bodies of water will boil and evaporate instantly. Instantly still not being ‘instantly’, it still takes some time for this to happen, relative to our human frame of reference, it is an ‘instant’.)

In all other situations, the boiling point is virtual because it is actualised in different ways according to the variable constraints that move the water-boiling system from the ideal model (small amount of pure water at sea level pressures). Super heated water, for example, is water that has had extra energy added to it (heated) beyond the boiling point, but kept under extreme pressures. The boiling point remains virtual, it is not actualised, but the variable constraint of pressure (nominally at sea level) has not been fulfilled.

‘To boil’ is an event. Depending on the conditions, it is repeated in different ways. It would be impossible to exhaust the number of ways to boil water. That is, for example, we could never run the infinite number of experiments required to capture the infinite multiplicity of differentially repeated events of boiling water (or the critical point of a phase state at which water vaporises into steam). This is not the inifinity of extension, but the infinity between one and zero. It is the intensive multiplicity of Bergson’s duration. The reduction of this multiplicity, and that which renders the boiling point intelligible to humans, are counter-intuitively extra singularities of sense (Deleuze), knowledge (Foucault) and sociality (Latour). Others have expanded on this.

For example, Massumi bypasses this series of proper name philosophers to draw on others and has explicated the singularities of experience, which, to continue the example, are those singular points of qualities that belong to the event ‘to boil’ that are differentially repeated. My singular ‘experience’ of boiling water occurs, for example, everytime I boil the kettle for my morning (and mid-morning and mid-afternoon) coffee. I experience particular qualities of sound and vision, and if I am unlucky heat. These specific actualisation of singularities (mostly vision and sound, less so heat) require my specifically human perceptual apparatus for this specific event of experience. They experience of the fly in my kitchen, for example, has a better sense of the air currents produced by the steam expanding and heating air.

Latour’s work to connect human and non-human sociality has rightly indicated that I also include the virtual singularities actualised by the kettle itself (and kitchen and power supply and so on) of sufficient electrical contact between the plug and the mains socket and again in the kettle’s switch, of sufficient integrity belong to the kettle, and so on, that combine in certain ways to give the kettle agency in the event (it, literally, does ‘work’ in every sense of the word).

Tim Morton has described water boiling from an OOO perspective here. He writes:

Think of a kettle boiling. What is happening? Electrons are quantum jumping from lower to higher orbits. This behavior, a phase transition, emerges as boiling for an observer like me, waiting for my afternoon tea. [...]
It would be wrong to say that the water has virtual properties of boiling that somehow “come out” at the right point. It’s less mysterious to say that when the heating element on my stove interacts with the water, it boils. Its emergence-as-boiling is a sensual object, produced in an interaction between kettle and stove.

And from a previous post:

The tendency is to see it as some kind of underlying causal mechanism by which smaller components start to function as a larger, super component.
If true, this would seriously upset the OO applecart. Why? Because objects are ontologically primary entities, not some process such as emergence. In an OO reality, emergence must be a property of objects, not the other way around. Thus it seems likely that in OOO emergence would be a sensual feature of objects. In other words, emergence is always emergence-for or emergence-as.
In other words, emergence implies 1+n objects interacting in what Graham Harman call the sensual ether. This ether is the causal machinery, not some underlying wires and pulleys.

So my simple response is: Is water boiling a quality of electrons “quantum jumping from lower to higher orbits” and therefore a ‘critical point’ is a quality of electrons? Or is the “ontologically primary entity” or ‘object’ of water and not the electrons? Or should we describe it as a ‘phase state’ proper (thus including all attendent and involved ‘objects’)? (Ether! What?!) This could be extended further to analyse the singularities involved in ‘waiting for tea’, which introduces another series of singularities contracted into habit and memory that ‘possibilises’ relations of futurity as protension.

Here is the crux of the issue: There is no withdrawal, there is only ever an addition of singularities, and because there is only ever the addition of singularities, objects are not ontologically primary entities. The reality is not of a withdrawn object, but the reality of the object is a reality that always exceeds the object (and and and).

I’ve briefly discussed the prospect of running a virtual reading group for Brian Massumi’s Semblance and Event with various people on Twitter. So far there is interest from Andrew Murphie, Matt Wall-Smith and Troy Rhoades. Any other takers?

Edit: Hollman Lozano is in.

I am imagining an event not unlike the kinds of ‘blog festivals’ that used to be hosted across a number of blogs 4 or 5 years ago. The basic structure of these events was organized around a series of relatively long engagements with a set text posted to the ‘host’ blog for that week. The schedule is circulated ahead of time to encourage readers to also prepare for that week’s ‘host post’. This mode of blog-based discussion also provides everyone the opportunity to lead discussion for a given week, which is a more organized (productive) and democratic/collaborative.

Now we need to agree on a schedule and a timeline. I suggest a basic fortnightly schedule with a post followed by a predetermined respondent a week later, with other participants (or whoever) posting/responding as they liked. I volunteer to go first if there are no other takers.

In terms of content, there is a spectrum from writing up notes on the text with limited commentary to reflecting on the arguments/themes/concepts of the text in the context of one’s own project. I am happy to read any engagements. I try to write somewhere in the middle, but more on the note-writing end. What do others think?

Also, there are a number ways to engage with the text and segment it in a suitable fashion. Following the structure of the book is the simplest method. Rather more complex is to read Massumi in a ‘Deleuzian’ way, isolating the problematics that he is engaging and for which he is developing concepts (‘semblance’, ‘fusion’, etc) to address (not ‘solve’ as much as reproblematise). Again, I think any engagement, appropriately contextualised, should be welcomed. Lastly, diversity of mode should also be welcome (text, image, video, audio, etc.).

So I’ve been reading Brian Massumi’s new book Semblance and Event. Here are some notes on the “Introduction: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts” followed by an edited comment of mine (after the large block quote) I left on Levi Bryant’s blog in response to a post about whether or not atractors do anything. I think Levi’s interpretation of ‘attractors’ (via Delanda) will be very useful staking out the differences between object-oriented ontologies and event-oriented ontologies. I am definitely in the EOO camp as the title of my blog suggests.

Massumi begins with a discussion of the event as ‘bare activity’. ‘Bare activity’ refers to a minimalist ontological account of activity as event (“the just-beginning-to-stir of the event coming into its newness out of the soon to be prior background activity it will have left creatively behind”).

Then explores the event in the opening section in terms of (list numbers are arbritrary):
1) self-creation of novelty (Whitehead)
2) channeling of general activity to special activity (Whitehead)
3) the emergence of a purity (James) or “pure feeling” (Whitehead)
4) the doubling of the event into co-occurent relational and qualitative dimensions.

(Note: Interesting that Massumi is offering a process philosophy reading of Deleuze’s work; compare with Badiou’s reading that emphasises the “synthesis of past and future,” in Deleuze’s definition of the event as “always that which has just happened and that which is about to happen, but never that which is happening.” It is important to note that “that which is happening” does not necessarily correlate with “activity” as such. I have always struggled to understand what Deleuze meant by this, particularly his discussion of Aion in TLoS. It makes sense that we never experience the infinitive as such, otherwise it would be an experiential variation of infinite regress. Why do we need an infinitive, then?)

Disjunctive relations (a “separative transition across a threshold of becoming”) and conjunctive relations (“how the before and after of a threshold passed mutually include each other in the same event, as ‘pulses’ of the same change”) are both always present.

(Note: From a Spinozist position it is interesting that Massumi refers to James’s description of conjunctive relations as “a “tendency” or “striving” that continues across threshold over marked by resistances and obstacles.” For Spinoza, the capacity of the connatus to strive was amplified or diminished by active and passive affections.)

(Note: So ‘conjunctive relations’ will need to be further unpacked if it is defined in terms of the way ‘the before and after of a threshold’ mutually include each other in the same event, thus address my confusion earlier in Massumi’s introduction regarding ‘bare activity’ and Deleuze’s distinction between what has just happened/about to happen with what is happening.)

The ‘onward phasing’ of the event is modulated by the ‘ingression’ of ‘bare active relation’. (Note: Use of ‘ingression’ is curious here as it was used by Whitehead to describe how eternal objects ‘ingressed’ in actual occassions. So is a ‘bare active relation’ simular in some ways to ‘eternal objects’? I’ve always understood Whitehead’s ‘eternal objects’ as similar in effect (as effect) to singularities as described by Deleuze. See discussion in The Fold, for example.)

Massumi positions ‘activist philosophy’ as distinct from object-based philosophies.

Activist philosophys emphasis on the occurrent makes it a fundamentally nonobject philosophy. Deleuze enters the fold of activist philosophy when he says that “the event of alteration” is “one with the essence or the substance of a thing” (Deleuze 1988b, 32). This is another way of saying there is no essence or substance to things other than the novelty of their occurrence. “I have, it’s true, spet a lot of time writing about this notion of event: you see, I don’t believe in things” (Deleuze 1995, 160). He believes in the world as process (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 2–5; Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 20). Whitehead is on much the same page: “a well-marked object is not an inherent necessity for an event. Wherever and whenever something is oging on, there is an event” (Whitehead 1964, 78). Nature itself, the world of process, “is a complex passing of events” (Whitehead 1964, 166). The world is not an aggregate of objects. To see it that way is to have participated in an abstraction reductive of the complexity of nature as passage (Whitehead 1964, 74-98). To “not believe in things” is to believe that objects are derivatives of process and that their emergence is the passing result of specific modes of abstractive activity. This means that objects’ reality does not exhaust the range of the real. The reality of the world exceeds that of objects, for the simple reason that where objects are, there has also been their becoming. And where becoming has been, there is already more to come. The being of an object is an abstraction from its becoming. The world is not a grab-bag of things. It’s an always-in-germ. To perceive the world in an object frame is to neglect the wider range of its germinal reality.

My comment on Levi Bryant’s blog makes a similar point in the context of Levi’s discussion of singularities:

[Levi's interpretation of Delanda's definition of attractor] is a major point of difference from those interpreting Deleuze, Whitehead and others in a way congruent with, for example, Massumi’s work.

Aren’t you worried about leaving out massive parts of reality, i.e. what actually happens in the world, from your ontology then? This has been my central criticism since reading Harman’s book on Latour.

An ‘attractor’ (or I prefer ‘singularity’, usually mutiple singularities) characterises a threshold within a system, such as the system of OOO that is based on naming a composition of singualrities/events as objects or actors because they pass a certain threshold of non-human coherency/consistency in their object-based eventhood. You actualise that OOO-threshold singularity differently to the way I do, for example.

There is an excess here that is not accounted for by only focusing on actors without incorporating a ‘sense’ of the acts, where an ‘act’ is only one possible dimension/slice/configuration of a singular event. (Does it even make sense to talk about act-less actors? Then there are all kinds of problems around what the ‘act’ is.)

I like Ian Bogost’s keynote diagra address from a few years ago where he breaks down a game into a ‘mess’ of constituent potentialities characterised by the object relations (code-for-hardware, etc.) for engaging with a different, but related state of affairs.

With the tea boiling example we couldn’t possibly exhaust the different dimensions of the event, but it is irrelevant as these different dimensions (different POV, ways of incorporating it into wildly divergent perceptual apparatuses ‘insect media’ etc) are still arranged by the singularities.

Wouldn’t that mean that singualrities have a radical importance for OOO in that without them you couldn’t characterise an object as an object without them, as the qualities of an object are qualities-for-a-subject, but the singularities are empirically transcendental. The singularities of a object (transductive threshold of water boiling) come to characterise an event (making tea) by modifying the behaviour of the system (Levi + kitchen + colleague’s dirty teaspoons (i.e. further series of singular points) + etc).

‘Attractor’ already involves a space-time fold of the cosmos into a subject (human or otherwise), so I’d imagine it would be rejected by OOO. Surely Delanda use of the term is drawing on a particular terminology to make a point about singularities.

In Bruno Latour’s now relatively famous paper “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” he launches into a scathing critique of most of the methodology that defines cultural studies:

When naive believers are clinging forcefully to their objects, claiming that they are made to do things because of their gods, their poetry, their cherished objects, you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as naive believers are thus inflated by some belief in their own importance, in their own projective capacity, you strike them by a second uppercut and humiliate them again, this time by showing that, whatever they think, their behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don’t see, but that you, yes you, the never sleeping critic, alone can see. Isn’t this fabulous? Isn’t it really worth going to graduate school to study critique?
[...]
One thing is clear, not one of us readers would like to see our own most cherished objects treated in this way.

Now some contemporary thinkers embrace this line and turn their attention to ‘objects’ so as to resuscitate the dignity of objecthood. Objects can no longer be defined as a function of relation with subjects, they say. Perhaps they are concerned about their own existence as relatively powerless, but functioning objects in various social systems? By discovering the dignity of objects they will also discover dignity for themselves?

I turned in a different direction for the argument in my dissertation, which having completed now four years ago is practically historical in relation to my current thinking. As I was dealing with enthusiast cultures that organized around cars I did not want to fall into the trap of a neo-Freudian account of enthusiast practice that reproduced the fetishistic dimensions of enthusiast engagement. This was an intellectual decision, as it would have been too easy to follow this ‘common sense’ neo-Freudian line of scholarship.

Instead I turned to investigating enthusiasm itself. What is it about ‘enthusiasm’ that mobilizes enthusiast bodies into action? I still don’t know. I focused more on the event-based structure of enthusiasm, that which produced a processual cadence essentialized by Latour above as ‘cherishing’. I thought about enthusiasm as an event, a virtual structure of relations differentially repeated with any number of different objects and subjects. The motor for this event was not ‘in’ the objects or the subjects, but the process of becoming-together between the contingencies of challenges that mobilized enthusiasts into action as enthusiast practice and affective contours that constitute the enthusiast habitus and encourage communication across them as they are activated in positive and negative ways. ‘Positive’ and ‘negative’ in the sense of scholarship on affect where positive affections increase one’s capacity to act, while negative affections diminish one’s capacity to act. Enthusiasm is a positive affection.

Enthusiasts would dismantle, modify and repair the ‘black box’ of the automobile. They would produce an experience-based practical knowledge — ‘know-how’ — deployed to overcome challenges and establish a reputation in subcultural and masculine economies of respect. The contingencies that characterized the challenges of enthusiast practice could also be regarded as ‘problems’ for non-enthusiasts. A challenge is not an object; it is a virtual and processual structure characterized by the limit of understanding of the enthusiast, but one that is open to the future. A challenge is not yet a problem as the translation of the singular coordinates of a challenge into that of a problem means that the processual structure of the challenge has been conditioned into possibilities for solution. A challenge becomes a problem in discourse and in a backformed comprehension of the possibilization of the contingency into a field of solutions. (Massumi describes something similar, but not the same, with sport and play in Parables of the Virtual.) This is why ‘know-how’ is acquired by doing and maybe showing, but definitely not by talking or teaching in any conventional sense (unless ‘talking’ or ‘teaching’ are constituent elements of a specific challenge). Deleuze described a somewhat archaic version of this process when he argued that the Stoic sage “identifies” with the quasi-cause:

The Stoic sage “identifies” with the quasi-cause, sets up shop at the surface, on the straight line which traverses it, or at the aleatory [contingent] point which traces of travels this line. The sage is like the archer. However, this connection with the archer should not be understood as a moral metaphor of intention, as Plutarch suggests, by saying that the Stoic sage is supposed to do everything, for the sake of attaining the end. One rather acts in order to have done all that which depending on one in order to attain the end. Such a rationalization implies a late interpretation, one which is hostile to Stoicism. The relation to the archer is closer to Zen: the bowman must reach the point where the aim is also not the aim, that is to say, the bowman himself; where the arrow flies over its straight line while creating its own target; where the surface of the target is also the line and the point, the bowman, the shooting of the arrow, and what is shot at. This is the oriental Stoic will as proairesis. The sage waits for the event, that is to say, understands the pure event in its eternal truth, independently of its spatio-temporal actualization, as something eternally yet-to-come and always already passed according to the line of the Aion. But, as the same time, the sage also wills the embodiment and the actualization of the pure incorporeal event in a state of affairs and in his or her own body and flesh. (146)

In a sense (pun intended), Deleuze’s description of the Zen-like actualization of the archer and his attendant technologies of archery is when he is at his most Foucauldian. Foucault’s ‘discourse events’ are the spatio-temporal actualization of a pure event that defines the limits of intelligibility and authority as it is distributed into what is sayable and what is visible for a given body of knowledge. Foucault made this discovery in the archive, where the processual dimension was already backformed into discourse. Michel de Certeau repeats this while discussing what he calls ‘know-how’ in the Practice of Everyday Life for non-discursive situations. The on-going process of actualization that produces a distribution of subjects and objects and normative subject-object relations is the ‘grid’ that Deleuze discusses in the Fold as always already intervening in chaos. While this is all very interesting, I am sure, it seems to have even less relevance for contemporary thought than does a rigorous if futile investigation into the dignity of objects.

Kant’s discussion of enthusiasm is interesting at this point and perhaps more so is Lyotard’s discussion of Kantian enthusiasm. I don’t mean the version of Kant’s enthusiasm that is most commonly discussed with regards to Kant’s positive comments about the enthusiasm of spectators for the French revolution as proof of the moral judgment of the revolution as ‘good’. I mean in the context of Lyotard’s interpretation of a practical rationality that relies on enthusiasm as its impetus for ‘striving’. Enthusiasm signals a failure of ideas, it triggers an inflammation in the powers of imagination to overcome this failure. The concept of enthusiasm I developed many years ago extracts the virtual coordinates of this process as the processual differential repetition of the enthusiast body as it continually encounters challenges.

Of course, the Enlightenment project in part was defined by the work of Kant and others to rescue ‘rationality’ from all kinds of mystical and religious enthusiasms. The contradiction is that we need enthusiasm so as to achieve great things. Hence the problem, recast slightly, of the critique of critique. It was meant to be self-evident once the limits of rationality and conditions of possibility had been sufficiently laid out; the ‘naive’ believers (as Latour calls them) would simply come to their Enlightened sense. Instead critique itself poses a challenge that is not simply overcome with enthusiasm, the challenge posed by critique serves as another opportunity to differentially repeat enthusiasm itself. Witness political discourse, no minds change, only banal discriminations performatively reproduce themselves.

I don’t agree with Latour’s solution: “a multifarious inquiry launched with the tools of anthropology, philosophy, metaphysics, history, sociology to detect how many participants are gathered in a thing to make it exist and to maintain its existence. Objects are simply a gathering that has failed — a fact that has not been assembled according to due process.” Should we treat all enthusiasts of a given reality, of a given distribution of possibilities, as if they need to resuscitate the dignity of ‘cherished’ objects? No, they are working to actualize a particular world, an entire distribution of subject-object relations. Evangelicals name the Apocalypse as quasi-cause. Harnessing enthusiasm does not involve critique, it involves assembling challenges to mobilize (enthusiast) bodies into action. Increasing their capacity to act, rather than diminishing their capacity to act with ‘solutions’ to their banal everyday problems.

I started writing this post thinking about why Latour’s argument for turning to matters of concern is relevant for journalism, but it became something else. Apologies!