Events (part 1)

by ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY 

​What is an event? The question is typically answered in one of two ways: events are relations, or events are decisions. Depending on context, events often appear as either relations or decisions. In one sense, an event is a relation between two moments in time, or between two states of affairs. Likewise a relation is only a relation by virtue of being able to be actualized into an event.

​Yet in another sense, an event is a decision. As a more or less conscious action, it must be willed into existence by someone or some kind of catalyzing agent. Following this line, an event is simply the mirror image of a desire, aspiration, affordance, or drive: overladen snow desires the avalanche; an enzyme aspires to catalyze a chemical reaction; a person decides to jump. 

Relation means to bring back. Decision means to cut off. So the question may be rephrased: Is an event a bringing back, or is an event a cutting off? In other words, does the event bring something back into being or cut something off from it? 

For his part, Deleuze is satisfied with the event never deviating from the material world (after all, he is opposed to classical metaphysics), while Badiou's event breaks from being. In Deleuze the event consists of intensive or extensive transformations within the furious plane of immanence (see Furienmeister, The Furie, the . frontispiece of this chapter). But for Badiou the givenness of being is fundamentally profane and therefore must be superseded by a voluntaristic deviation. Badiou's voluntaristic event is an instance of the generic. but, as I suggest here, even if Badiou's t​he event as either relation or decision.

​To say that events are relations is to say that events remain within the core substrate of being. Here an event is not a deus ex machina descending into the scene from somewhere beyond, modifying or rescuing the world. All changes to the world are immanent to the world. An event is not different from a relation; on the contrary, an event is simply a new relation. Actuate an event to make visible a new relation; identify a relation and one will have identified the aftermath of an event. Again, this is the kind of universe described by Deleuze. Events are immanent to material processes. In fact, events are these processes themselves and therefore cannot be distinguished from them. Events as relations are workaday events. They are not particularly special and there is no miracle in their being occasioned. The election of the first black president of the United States is an event, but so is cellular mitosis, and so is choosing to have coffee instead of tea at the breakfast table. 
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To say that the event is a decision is to say that an event is wholly different from the basic ontological categories of object and relation. An event is not merely a relation. It leaves the world behind and, from an alternate vantage point, actuates a transformation in the state of the situation. It is the principle through which a specific kind of world changes into a different kind of world. Such is the universe described by Badiou, in stark contrast with Deleuze. For Badiou, events are external to worlds. As such, events are always special, like miniature miracles. 

Choosing coffee or tea never rises to the level of the event, for such a pseudo-choice does not effect a change in the state of the situation. Event as decision means that the event itself must be so affecting, so seductive, so total, so cataclysmic that it tears apart the fabric of the world, so that new objects and new relations, and indeed new aftershock events, will come into existence.
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So, on the one hand, the event as relation describes a vitalist, processoriented, or superlative materialism. The world consists of countless, endless events wrought by the inexhaustible wellsprings of life known as the desiring machines. But, on the other hand, the event as decision describes a voluntarism, a labor willed into existence by the militant subjects of the holy warriors, the activists, the campaigners, the evangelists, ​the committed. (One need not be anthropocentric on this point; flowers and fawns can and will be their own kind of holy warriors, can and will exude a desire, just as much as humans do.) 

Is the fabric of the world good in itself? Or does something stink here? Is the good a deviation from this life or merely a reconfiguration of it? Deleuze, while hardly ever trafficking in moral platitudes, must still claim that the fabric of the world is good in itself, because he locates events in the world. Badiou, by contrast, must claim that the fabric of the world, which he calls the "state of the situation;' is wanting, since Badiou's events are deviations from the world.

​Indeed these philosophical modes carry their own theological tendencies, many of them Christian or pseudo-Christian. Heidegger's Ereignis is a thinly veiled creationism, is it not? And Badiou's event is a kind of miracle, the rapture that grants a departure from this profane world. Deleuze, for his part, illustrates a form of non-Christian, heretical creationism, in which the new issues forth from pure immanence (not from the word or the spirit). And for his part Laruelle's return to the One smacks of a mystical neoplatonism. 

​First path: analog events. The previous chapter asserted that, properly speaking, there is no such thing as an analog event. But that was something of a white lie, a temporary placeholder until the question could be addressed in greater detail. In order to make any sense of the event, it is first necessary to step back for a moment and mediate further on the concept of givenness, particularly as it was formulated in Theses I and II, that the real is given over to a mediation divided from it. 

The "things that are given" can be truncated to the "givens;' or more technically the data. Data are the very facts of the givenness of Being. They are knowable and measurable. Data display a facticity; they are "what already exists;' and as such are a determining apparatus. They indicate what is present, what exists. The word data carries certain scientific or empirical undertones. But more important are the phenomenological overtones: data refer to the neutered, generic fact of "the things having been given".

​Even in this simple arrangement a rudimentary relation holds sway. For implicit in the notion of the facticity of givenness is a relation to givenness. Data are not just a question of the givenness of Being, but are ​also necessarily illustrative of a relationship back toward a Being that has been given. In short, givenness itself implies a relation. This is one of the fundamental observations of phenomenology. 

​Even if nothing specific can be said about a given entity x, it is possible to say that, if given, x is something as opposed to nothing, and therefore that x has a relationship to its own givenness as something. X is "as x"; the as-structure is all that is required to demonstrate that x exists in a relation. (By contrast, if x were immanent to itself, it would not be pose sible to assume relation. But by virtue of being made distinct as something given, givenness implies non-immanence and thus relation.) Such a "something" can be understood in terms of self-similar identity or, as the scientists say, negentropy, a striving to remain the same. 

​So even as data are defined in terms of their givenness, their nonimmanence with the one, they also display a relation with themselves. Through their own self-similarity or relation with themselves, they tend back toward the one (as the most generic instance of the same). The logic of data is therefore a logic of existence and identity: on the one hand, the facticity of data means that they exist, that they ex-sistere, meaning to stand out of or from; on the other hand, the givenness of data as something means that they assume a relationship of identity, as the self-similar "whatever entity" that was given. 

​The true definition of data, therefore, is not simply "the things having been given:' The definition must conjoin givenness. and relation. For this reason, data often go by another name, a name that more suitably describes the implicit imbrication of givenness and relation. The name is information. 

Information combines both aspects of data: the root form refers to a relationship (here a relationship of identity as same), while the prefix in refers to the entering into existence of form, the actual givenness of abstract form into real concrete formation.

Heidegger sums it up well with the following observation about the idea: ''All metaphysics including its opponent positivism speaks the language of Plato. The basic word of its thinking, that is, of his presentation of the Being of beings, is eidos, idea: the outward appearance in which beings as such show themselves. Outward appearance, however, is a manner of presence:' 1 In other words, outward appearance or idea is not a deviation from presence, or some precondition that produces presence, ​it is precisely coterminous with presence. To understand data as information means to understand data as idea, but not just idea, also a host of related terms: form, class, concept, thought, image, outward appearance, shape, presence, or form-of-appearance. An entity "in-form" is not a substantive entity, nor is it an objective one. The in-form is the negentropic transcendental of the situation, be it "material" like the givens or "ideal" like the encoded event. Hence an idea is just as much subject to information as are material objects. An oak tree is in-formation, just as much as a computer file is in-formation.

All of this is simply another way to understand Parmenides's claim about the primary identity of philosophy: "Thought and being are the same"; or as rendered by Heidegger: "For the same perceiving (thinking) as well as being:'2 Thus, as a way to deepen the original description of the standard model, we may now reiterate the gist of Theses I and II using new vocabulary: Being is the same as being in-formation. The standard world is an information world. There is no such thing as "raw" data, because to enter into presence means to enter into form. Information is part and parcel of the standard model. And this is why explorations into formlessness are always so profound, often bordering on disorientation, shock, or horror. 3

​For these reasons it is indeed possible to think the event as analog event. Following Deleuze, analog events illustrate an immanent relation. Not pure immanence per se, but a relation of givenness that strives toward immanence. (The analog is always "aspirational" in this sense.) Information is the ultimate analog event: a "something" is given and enters into a relation with itself as specific identity of the same, in the same proportion, in the same way and manner, in a continuously variable immediacy with itself. The analog event par excellence therefore is nothing more than the event of self-similarity. 

Yet this is only the most elemental description of the analog event. Broader, more prosaic phenomena can also be understood as analog events. In fact all phenomena are given within a world and thus derive their fundamental identity via such relation to givenness. These kinds of events are not rare. They include all manner of continuous differentiation, autopoiesis, and individuation. Frogs and birds and subatomic particles are thus analog events as such by virtue of their consistency as objects. 

​But is there a contradiction? It depends on whether the term analog is interpreted strictly or loosely. In the previous chapter we observed a strict interpretation: there are no analog events (only analog prevents) because analogicity means a full integration and collapse of the two into the one. Yet now a loose interpretation is also available: analog events are indeed possible because analogicity means a provisional reconciliation of the two into a relation of pseudo-identity as one. In other words, within the standard model-which is by definition the realm of digitality, distinction, separation, differentiation-analog events do exist precisely because objects persist as self-similar. Objects may morph and change, of course, but the analog event is the event of championing reconciliation over rivenness and union over division. The analog event is the event of the same. 

excerpt from the book: ​Laruelle: Against the Digital (Posthumanities) by ​ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY 

​pdf of the book here

​thanks to ​https://non.copyriot.com ​for the book