Events (part 2)

by ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY ​

Second path: digital events. To recap, the event is a relation. The event is a relation when it is understood in terms of analogy. The analog relation is the desire to overcome the rivenness of being by way of a continuous, proportionate, aspiration toward an image of the same self. As information or "data structure;' the givens exist as a structure of relation. Hence information combines both brute facticity of substance and the form or architecture of relation that such substance assumes. Any deeper explanations are moot, because under the standard model no substance can exist apart from form, and no form can exist uncoupled from substance. To exist means to appear as presence, and hence to relate back to one's own givenness. And the reverse too: to relate means to span a differential of states, arid thus to be outside of one's self (to ex-ist). 
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Following this logic, then, the analog event is clearly part of the architecture of being. But what of the digital event? If the analog event means the continuous aspiration toward the same, how to consider the digital?

To answer the question it is necessary to advance past simple relation and consider decisional relation. To consider event as decision is to consider the event from the perspective of willed action. (Again there is no reason to be anthropocentric; trees and bees can exhibit willed action as here defined.) 

Whenever there exists a spectrum or continuum of intensities, there exists immanence. This is why the two becoming one is an immanence, why analogy is an immanence, and why immanence implies analogy. Conversely, whenever there exists difference or discontinuous states, there ​exists the transcendental. This is why the one becoming two necessitates the transcendental; why digitality implies the transcendental, and why the transcendental implies digitality. To call relations "decisional" is to underscore the fact that they are about cutting, that they follow a deviation from the state of affairs. A synonym would be "trenchant relations" or "trenchant events:'

Such is the theory of the event provided by Badiou. For him events are trenchant deviations from the state of the situation. They interrupt and depart from being. The event is a "pure outside:' Such events are rare, relatively speaking-at least much rarer than Deleuzian events. Badiousian events are attached to subject formation, and, specifically, a set of procedures that a subject can pursue in order to become subject to truth. Badiou's theory of the event is thus properly labeled "voluntarist" in that it requires the active will of conscripted militants who seek to execute the event.

​If Lenin is the ultimate Badiousian, the ultimate Deleuzians are the heat vortexes of thermodynamic systems, or enzymes during RNA transcription. The Badiousian event deviates from the state of the situation, inaugurating new paths for a subject's fidelity to truth. The Deleuzian event subtends all matter, catalyzing action and reaction within the immanent transformations of pure becoming. 

​Now the full meaning of event as decision is becoming clear. Such events are a cutting or separation. But they are also will-dependentwhatever kind of "will" that might be, the will of gravity, the will of the sovereign, or the will of the acorn. So while event as relation implies existence, event as decision implies something else entirely: persistence or insistence. (The ultimate question therefore will be that of time: analog events focus on the present, digital events the future.) If relations are the things that merely exist, decisions are the things that persist. To cut means to insist on cutting. To be cut means to persist in the wake of the cut. And, as the transcendental demonstrates, whatever undergoes division must "insist" that it remain the same in order to persist as such. A nexus of terms thus converges: digitality, transcendental, insistence, and decision. Each works in concert with the others. 

Decisional events mean change, change in the normal everyday sense of the word. Decisional events mean action, process, or transformation. Change, as event, is a digital decision. Event as decision combines both static snapshot and active transformation. It is the realm not so much of ​data as of code, for although data exist, code insists a specific manner of execution. Executables, "machine acts:' or code-these are all euphemisms for decisional events. Hence event as decision points directly to the arenas of mediation, synthesis, language, the political, the ideas of the world, ideology, or protocol. Perhaps this is why Laruelle is so interested in the performative dimension of philosophy, in those things that "say what they do and do what they say:'4 

The givens exist, while events insist. But how exactly? There are two main force vectors at play, one moving up the chain from the data to the decision, and the other moving down the chain from the decision to the data. The downward movement is the movement of reality. Such movement flows from the event to the givens. It reveals a kind of realism, but a realism driven by pessimism and an unexplainable yearning for brute physicality. Synonyms include actualization, reification, alienation, objectification, realpolitik, and neutralization.

​Running in opposition to the movement of reality is the movement of freedom. This second vector runs from the givens to the event. It states, axiomatically, that the givens appear, naturally and spontaneously, as fodder to be encoded. It states in essence, following Badiou, that although there are only bodies and languages, it is possible to deviate from bodies and languages by way of events. To follow the movement of freedom reveals how the givens predate the event and compels the givens to engage in the event.  

​Note the counterintuitive tendency at play here. It might seem that going from the givens to the event is repressive or reactionary in the sense that the gaining of an encoded event, such as ideological interpellation, could only ever inhibit the so-called natural existence and operations of the givens, and that, by contrast, going from the event to the givens is liberating or progressive in the sense that the givens are "more real" than the artifice of the encoded event. But this is not entirely the case. The movement of freedom is, quite literally, opposed to reality. It is irreal and illiberal. The goal of the decisional event therefore is not to reduce social conditions to realpolitik, to autonomous realities, or to the various pragmatic realisms. Rather, the movement of freedom seeks an elevated artifice, an artifice constructed not simply from data, but from data as they are assembled within relational and decisional events. Laruelle calls these fictions, artifices, or performations. 

To move closer to the fully encoded event means to move closer to freedom. The entity that is the most free is the one that is the most fully folded into the supernature, the one most intimately allied with history and with the real exigencies of matter, because that is where the trenchant events lie. Using terminology from literary criticism and media studies, we can say that the movement of freedom is the movement out of the world-bound, diegetic realm and into the non-world-bound, nondiegetic realm. Consequently, the entity that is the most free is also the entity that is. closest to the sociopolitical sphere. In other words the more one pursues the decisional event, the more one is free. The greater the insistence, the greater the freedom.

Consider the famous slogan from Stewart Brand, "Information wants to be free:' We are now in a position to reconsider its deeper meaning. Data, as a given, want to be free, free as evental information. Digital freedom is thus a question of being "free from" the autonomy of data. Counterintuitively, then, the movement of freedom is driven not by liberation but by increased imbrication with the sociopolitical sphere. It is driven not by a force of loosening but by tightening, not by a newfound flexibility or laxity of structure but by discipline, not by the peace of the real but by the violence of the material. And, as Badiou says, because it tends toward the political sphere populated by political factions and political agents, the movement of freedom will always take as its goal the formation of new subjectivities.

​But Laruelle, as will become evident in a moment, offers still another alternative. He parts ways with both Badiou and Deleuze on the question of the event. For him events are not heroic, as they must be for Badiou, and they do not depart from being. Laruelle has little interest in cultivating new subject positions. Events do not create heroes-or if they do, he wishes no part in it. 5 But likewise Laruelle differs from Deleuze, for while Deleuze makes the event coterminous with being, Laruelle will additionally show that the only true theory of the event is one that withdraws absolutely from both relation and decision.6 

​Thesis VIII. Being is an evental mode; it is coterminous with the event. Before he describes the event as such, Laruelle begins with a much more prosaic description of the actually existing world. The world and the event are, quite literally the same thing; hence Laruelle speaks of them in terms of the "event-world'.

Consider the as-structure and the way in which it frames all the entities of the world as both "aspect of" and "relation to:' Consider Whitehead's prehensions and actual occasions. Consider the principle of sufficient reason, namely that an actual entity and an actual reason are coterminous. Consider simply how being is preconditioned on "reasons": rationales, relations, structures, formations, decisions, and events. And the reverse as well: wherever events pertain, one may be sure to find being. The historicity of being is also the historicity of the event.

Such a modal condition is what Laruelle calls the event-world. We can think of it as a direct extension of the standard model. "The event is not merely the result of superimposing an ontology onto a history;' Laruelle claims. "It appears whenever there is a repression, a cutting, or a collapsing of Being:'7 

There are a number of ways to demonstrate this, but the most straightforward is to return to the notion of relation as it was previously discussed. To speak of being, in the framing of the grand illusion, is to speak of the distinction between object and relation, or between data and information. By definition, being is never purely immanent with itself. Even the most immanence-focused philosophies of being, such as those of Deleuze or Henry, rely on differentials and distinctions between states or modes. In fact immanence Itself is often understood more as a resolution of division than as an always-already unified condition of pure singularity. 8

​Thus, because being is never purely immanent with itself, it must address the question of relation. It must "repress:' "cut;' "collapse;' or otherwise come to terms with distinction. Sometimes relation is more or less resolved, for example, into immanence. Sometimes relation is given a starring role in the architecture of being, as with the dialectic. Sometimes it is starved and whittled down to nothing, as with the generic. And, as in the case of continuous being, relation alights onto the surface of being, like a ripple of peaks and valleys, surging and falling. 

The event-world is the result of,a structural and synchronic digitization. But the event itself, as prevent, is neither a decision nor a relation, neither digital nor analog. Previously we said that the one is unconnected to the event, suggesting instead that the one be considered in terms of the advent or prevent. Let me now try to derive that architecture. What ​is the structure of the event-world? And how is the event-world related to the event itself? 

​To repeat: thinking the analog event means thinking the event as relation; but thinking the digital event means thinking the event as decision. Laruelle combines both arms of the event by showing how relationality as such (that is, a world of "information" in which entities form relations) is itself a decision within ontology. In other words, the most important decision is the decision to inaugurate relationality as such. The most important digitization is the digitization of the analog.

The event-world, defined as the given world in which events take place, exists itself in a relationship of digitization vis-a-vis the prevent of the one. For Laruelle the decision to establish philosophy-philosophy as reflection, convertibility, reversibility, interfacing, and so on-is a digital event. (Undoubtedly, to abstain from doing philosophy is not simply a new digitization, a new decision in silhouette. If it were, it would remain trapped as a philosophical abstention from philosophy and therefore no abstention at all! Rather, to abstain from decision means to practice an analogical science that operates, as Laruelle puts it, "according to" the one.)

​Deleuze, in a passage from Difference and Repetition, explains this scenario most eloquently: "Univocity signifies that being itself is univocal, while that of which it is said is equivocal: precisely the opposite of analogy .... It is not analogous being which is distributed among the categories and allocates a fixed part to beings, but the beings which are distributed across the space of univocal being, opened by all the forms:'9 What this means is that the relation of the one to the multiple is not a relationship of analogy. Or, to put it another way, the event of being, as the advent of the division between one and many or between being and existing, stems from a digitization (not an analogicity). For if it were not a digitization, then the worldly manifestations of the one would them - selves also have to be, by analogy, one, rather than multiple. Yet because digitization implies distinction, the one can manifest itself in the world as multiple multiplicities, which themselves nevertheless still speak in the same voice of a generic oneness. 

​The one-multiple, as evental and causal relation, is therefore a twoway split of digital and analog relations. From one aspect, digital. From another, analog. To think univocity in terms of equivocity is a movement of the digital. But to think equivocity in terms of univocity is a movement ​of the analog. Shifting the orientation of perspective is crucial. The real causes the multiple, both unilaterally and irreversibly. And the real also causes it transcendentally, and hence must do so digitally. But as multiple, the equivocal things of the world all stand in a reverse relationship of analogicity back to the one. 

​Creation is digital, but the lived existence of the created is analog. To be born is to break with the past, but to live is to act in fidelity to it. Unilateral means the one is oblivious of the two, insisting on its own oneness, but duality means the two bonds in an identity with the one. Laruelle's "unilateral duality" should be understood in precisely this way. As unilateral it follows digital distinction, while as duality it follows analog integration.  

The event as indecision and indifference. Thus far the event has been considered as either relation or decision. Now the event can be understood in completely different terms, as a kind of static preemption rooted in indecision and indifference. 10

To say that the event is an indecision is to say that the event is the suspension of the evental regime itself, the regime described previously as relation-decision. Following Heidegger, being is given from out of a primordial event. And hence, following Badiou, for beings to actuate events they must somehow echo the primordial event, supersede being a second time and leave it behind. Yet such a scenario is still too metaphysical for Laruelle, who suggests that the only properly radical theory of the event must begin not from decision (Badiou) but from the indecision of generic immanence. The only true theory of the event-a theory adequate to the one-is a theory of the event that withdraws absolutely from both relation and decision. 

So the one is not a simple object, and certainly no kind of All-One super-object. Neither is the one a relation-the warning heard time and again in Laruelle.

​The one is best understood as an event. The one is no kind of colloidal substance or "grey goo;' and likewise not an absolute reality, much less an absolute mind. Terms like realism or idealism help very little. To say that the one is an event is not to subscribe to something like ; a "process philosophy" attributed rightly or wrongly to figures like Whitehead or Deleuze. Process is very important, but it pertains to the standard model, not the static preemption of the one. So, ​because the one is, by definition, the unilateralization of process, it makes little sense to speak of it in terms of process philosophy. 

Rather, the one is the event of indifference. In withdrawing from both relation and decision, the one is mo re a question of leaving being than being itself. The one is a waning of presence, a withe ring of being. Both the givens and the given events must be abandoned; both data and information abandoned. Not so much a movement of freedom or a movement of reality, the event of the one is a movement of subtraction in which presence is whittled down to the radical anonymity of something what so ever. Indifference is incompatible with the "philosophies of difference" catalogued by Laruelle in his book of that name. These philosophies have always been d riven by a therapeutic aim. First the primordial alienation chronicled by Marx, but late r the alienation of subjective identity via difference and the deeper ontological difference embedded inside metaphysics. These a re the various sites of the grand traumas. These a re the scaffolding of a traumatized being. They inaugurate the great therapeutic crusades: Marxism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, or identity politics. 

​Deleuze's description in The Logic of Sense of the stoicism of Joe Bousquet, the French su r realist poet who was paralyzed in World War I, could not paint a better picture: "My wound existed before me, I was bo rn to embody if'11 (Indeed on this point, Badiou's subsequent theory of the event sounds like a mere echo of earlier passages written by Deleuze.)

Indifference is incompatible with all of this. There is no identity but real identity. The re is no deconstruction of the one. The fractures and traumas, which Marxism or psychoanalysis were invented to solve, a re me rely figments of a mo re general trauma, the nihilism of the reality of the standard model. Thus take caution not to think indifference or indecision in terms of trauma or fragmentation, and likewise not to structure indifference or indecision in terms of a therapeutic strategy. The vital question today is not to rehabilitate being, and certainly not to protect and promote new "health mandates" or "medical interventions;' but rather to demilitarize this life, to stand down, to de-organize and unmanage it into a condition of indifference rooted in indecision. 

​Some will label this a kind of milksop quietism. Some will view Laruelle as nothing mo re than a license to do nothing. But to view Laruelle in this way is to misunderstand the full force of insufficiency and indecision. ​The withdrawal from the standard model is as assertive as it is passive, as disruptive as it is peaceful. 

​For this reason Laruelle stands at the threshold of a new theory of the event. The question for him, as he often repeats, is not so much the decision of philosophy but the indecision of philosophy. Not so much philosophical difference but philosophical indifference. The point is not to revisit a kind of existentialism or nihilism ("Being withdraws from us"), but precisely the opposite, a kind of deterritorialization of the very terms of the ontological arrangement ("We withdraw from being"). The point is thus ultimately not a new enchantment of being-given, but the profound disenchantment of leaving-being. 

Something is out there. And "it gives." But whatever it is, it is not being as we know it today. It is, rather, a cancellation, a privative or subtractive event that brings us closer to the generic univocity of the one. (And again we should repress the urge to think of the one as a kind of proxy for God; the one is merely and modestly the undoing of the standard model, nothing more.).

​In this sense, no language of repression or liberation will help. This is not Freud in 1905 or Marcuse in 1964. This is not about muzzling or uncorking the desiring machines. Likewise it is not about finding truth in a departure from the state of the situation. If anything, Badiou is standing on his head; he must be put back on his feet again: the event is the only radical real and thus is part of being, yet leaving-being brings us closer to the "void" of the whatever.

​If information shines a light on relationships of identity and difference, and if the event-world shows a society in which information entities (humans, strands of DNA, operating systems) enter into networking relationships bound by protocological control, then the event as indecision reveals a structure of notworking relationships, a cosmological desoeuvrement, an inexistentialism, the pure event that withdraws from presence. After the movement of subtraction takes place, the pure event as prevent takes over where being once stood. Being is thus no longer the most fundamental question for thinking. Instead, the pure event whatsoever (the prevent) happens. Merely happens. 

​The event as static and final. Entities understood from the perspective of the prevent are, in this way, both static and final. Static entities belong to ​the commonality of the entire class of objects, rather than being instantiated over and over again along with individual objects. To say "static" means to say that something is generic to the class. From one perspective the static nature of entities can be contrasted to "the dynamic;' but from another perspective this logic falls apart. In fact the static is the most dynamic in that it is never instantiated in one particular appearance. It belongs to the entity at large, in its pure commonality. Not a local dynamism of the flexible instantiations of being, the static aspect of an entity is a total dynamism of the common.
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But entities understood from the perspective of the prevent are also labeled "final:' This means that their static aspect can never again be changed. Just as they are static (generic to the class), they are also final (generic to the ontological condition). As common, entities refuse further modification. Genericity, as something whatsoever, is thus both static and final. This is another way to -understand why entities are destinies determined by the one. They are radically determined by the supernatural base-determined "in the last instance" says Laruelle-and likewise destined toward their own generic commonality, as the only thing that, in the last instance, is truly their own.

The movement of something. Such are the elemental conditions of the third movement. After the movement of freedom and the movement of reality, there is the movement of something. The one is not the void (Heidegger, Sartre, Badiou). It is likewise not the "other" as defined by post-structuralism. If anything it is the "something or other:'

If the movement of freedom means politicization and the movement of reality means depoliticization, then the movement of something opens up onto a different kind of landscape, an ancient landscape, but one nevertheless still being understood and reinvented for today. Something whatsoever resides within the prevent. And from this blank spot on the map, the something whatsoever aggresses (in prevention) toward the realm of the event as mere event.

​The movement of something has absolutely no intention of taking over for the event as mere event. It has no such aspiration. In contrast to the movement of freedom, which moves from the givens to the event, the movement of something deprives the givens of their givenness and the event of its evental state. In this way the movement of something is ​never a hypertrophy of freedom. It is, if anything, a reversal of direction: to aggress toward the givens and the event through the act of standing down (leaving-being).  

​Heidegger saw this intuitively, even if he shied away from accepting its full repercussions. "The event of appropriation;; wrote Heidegger, "is that realm, vibrating within itself, through which man and Being reach each other in their nature, achieve their active nature by losing those qualities with which metaphysics has endowed them:' 12 In this way, the generic univocity of being does not mean monism exactly (unity), and it does not simply mean that being speaks as the one (univocity), but instead it means the loss of qualities, the voice of being as someone (anonymous).

The movement of something is not, strictly speaking, opposed to, beyond, under, or transcendent from either the first movement (toward reality) or the second movement (toward. freedom), either the fixation on the givens or the fixation on the event, either realism or materialism. During the movement of the impersonal, something subtracts from both movements and thus is without matter and without the real. It is both an antimatter and an irreality.

​The movement of something says: "If you have something whatever, you shall retain it; but if you have nothing, you will lose even more of nothing, up until the point of your impersonality:' So while the movement of something may resemble nihilism, it is in fact slightly different, not so much a nothing-ism but a something-ism, a quiddism. 

"In the perfect crime;' wrote Baudrillard, "it is the perfection that is criminal:'13 The prevent means both "to stop or hinder" and "from what comes before the event:' What does the prevent prevent but the catastrophe, the perfect crime of politics? The (mere) event is always the perfect crime, because its perfection is a completion of the real world. And in its perfect completion the real is eliminated. The prevent prevents the event from occurring.

​But prevent also means what comes before the event, the a priori. The realm of the prevent does not present an additive predicate to an entity. Thus the only judgments that the prevent will confirm are those traditionally labeled the "analytic a priori;' which is to say, those that come before the event and that do not present additive predicates. If the mundane event affirms a normative judgment of the form "One ought to act in such and such a way;' and the givens affirm predicated judgment of the form "a is b;' the prevent affirms the most elemental form of statement: Something is whatsoever it is. 

All the necessary topics are now on the table. We have offered a brief snapshot of Laruelle's project, including his take on the philosophical decision and the principle of sufficient philosophy. Some attention was given to the one and its actualization into the four modes of being that are contained in the standard model. Then, because the standard model is premised on the division of the one in two, we spent some time defining both the digital and analog, with an eye to how these terms relate to existing theoretical discourse. Finally, we considered the division of the one in two as an event itself, an event of decision. This entailed a discussion of other kinds of events that aren't decisions, namely relation events and indecision events.

Now the question remains: How does Laruelle withdraw from the standard model? What is Laruelle's stance on digitality? When Laruelle unilateralizes the standard model does he not also unilateralize digitality? How is Laruelle "against the digital"? And what is the future of the digital?

Admittedly the Against ... of my title is not entirely Laruellean, since "being against" reinstates the philosophical decision and the resultant amphibology between two things. But as Laruelle himself admits, given the pervasiveness of the philosophical world, it is often necessary to speak using existing philosophical language even if the goal is something other than philosophy. 

​Laruelle is against the digital, but do not assume that, in withdrawing from the digital, he will necessarily find refuge in the analog. Laruelle is just as uninterested in the analog as he is the digital. In fact, following Laruelle, it is possible to conceive of analogy as simply a subordinate mode of digitality, because analogy is still a kind of distinction like anything else. So in his withdrawal from digitality, Laruelle is charting an exodus out of representation more generally. Thus, the true withdrawal from digitality will lead to immanence, not analogy. The ultimate withdrawal from digitality will lead to the generic. 

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