Ser un Creao

With regard to question two, all evental theorists agree that true events are separate from everyday occurrences. Many happenings transpire constantly which do not rise to the level of event. This is because events shake up the foundations of the everyday and prescribe new foundations in their wake. They are a rupture with the previous circumstances, and yield new ideas, practices, and institutions that become the state’s foundation going forward. Alain Badiou’s Being and Event describes the event as “a singular multiple”⁴⁸⁰ irreducible to any situation and about which “ontology has nothing to say.”⁴⁸¹ It is a “radical transformational action” that “originates in a point” known as an “evental site.”⁴⁸² Evental sites are obscured and singular places within the state, and what counts as an evental site is contingent upon the state itself such that there are no permanent evental sites. It is also worth noting that events will at times take on the state of the situation rather than the situation as such. The difference between the situation and the state has to do with what is presented (the situation) versus what is

represented (the state). For Badiou, events are incomprehensible until an “interpretive

intervention”⁴⁸³ arrives. This theory stays largely consistent throughout Badiou’s corpus. There are some differences in terminology (e.g. Badiou does not use the term “interpretive

intervention” in Logic of Worlds, but says the event “sets off the stepwise recasting of the

480 Badiou, Being and Event, 181.

481 Ibid., 190.

482 Ibid., 176.

483 Ibid., 181.

transcendental of the world”⁴⁸⁴), and new ideas that complement those in Being and Event (e.g.

Badiou’s typology of subjects), but in general this explanation of event does not change.

Interpretative interventions declare the event to be part of a new state by re-describing the rules determining what exists. The insight that leads Badiou to describe events in this manner is the fact of multiplicity, or the idea that there exist no ones or unities within the world.⁴⁸⁵ There are only the unities that we declare. Yet as any declared unity is incapable of capturing the totality of things (since no totality exists to be captured), there is always a remainder—what Badiou calls the void—which escapes our declaration of something as a unified being.⁴⁸⁶ Events occur when a multiple within the state is not fully presented, or when there are parts of it outside the state. The inability of the state to explain this partially presented multiple means that the state must be changed to fully present this multiple within the state. At that point, something may happen that reveals a need to develop new rules about what exists (i.e. what can be declared as a “one”). Events come from people within the state considering and reacting to the void revealed by this partially-presented multiple. Standing in between the state and the void, events demonstrate the need for an original or radically transformed state to be developed which follows a new logic incompatible with the old one. Those who recognize the need for a new logic, by remaining faithful to this need and disseminating the new logic, actively work against the extant state. As Badiou says, “one can again think fidelity as a counter-state: what it does is organize, within the situation, another legitimacy of inclusions. It builds…a kind of other situation, obtained by the division in two of the primitive situation.”⁴⁸⁷ The event is a caesura that originates from a particular place without conforming to it, and prescribes a new logic that

484 Badiou, Logic of Worlds, 577.

485 Badiou, Being and Event, 23.

486 Ibid., 66-67.

487 Ibid., 236.

through the actions of militants leads to a new state with new beings and practices. As Oliver Marchart writes, “A political organization of militants (i.e. the subject in the field of politics) is nothing but the collective product of a process of fidelity towards an event…A truth is produced by the decision of a subject to remain faithful to an event.”⁴⁸⁸ Within the field of evental thought it is the ideas of caesura and incompatibility, more than any other, that are used to describe revolutions.

Like Badiou, other evental theorists emphasize the disconnect events produce and the incommensurability of the preceding and subsequent states. Michel Foucault says of revolutions that they both “belong to history” but also “escape from it,”⁴⁸⁹ while in On Revolution Hannah Arendt describes them as new beginnings that interrupt preconceived notions of continuity.⁴⁹⁰ But whereas Badiou is concerned with the declaration of the event, Foucault tries to understand events through a study of their effects. Foucault sees a difficulty in trying to unravel events, as they do not come in the form of a single break but as a contemporaneous collection of several transformations which may take centuries to unfold.⁴⁹¹ For example, Foucault says that the French Revolution acts as a “complex, articulated, describable group of transformations that left a number of positivities intact, fixed for a number of others rules that are still with us, and also established positivities that have recently disappeared or are still disappearing before our eyes.”⁴⁹² While it is a difficult task to pinpoint an event in space and time, it can be tracked through its effects on society in the form of the discursive formations and regimes of power that grow out of it. No matter what happened at the time of the event, it is possible, by studying texts

488 Marchart, Post-Foundational Thought, 123-124.

489 Michel Foucault. “Useless to Revolt” in Essential Works of Michel Foucault Volume 3: Power, ed. James Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2001), 449.

490 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), 18-19.

491 Michel Foucault. Archeology of Knowledge trans. (Routledge; New York, 2002), 193.

492 Ibid., 195.

written before and after it, to see how the event changed the state. Notable events develop new and incommensurable dispositifs, or frameworks for knowledge⁴⁹³, that present us with entirely different orders.⁴⁹⁴ Because the statements, ideas, and objects found within these orders obtain meaning from their differences with others, in a new framework the same statement will not necessarily mean the same thing it meant in the old. There is no common measure that allows us to judge one framework right or wrong, but progress is possible when a new framework can explain what were before considered anomalies without erasing the explanatory power of earlier viewpoints.⁴⁹⁵ Thomas Kuhn takes a similar position about radical shifts in science. He

describes shifts as “reconstructions of the field from new fundamentals”⁴⁹⁶ that occur in periods where there are significant anomalies unexplainable by science’s theoretical assumptions. Like Foucault and Badiou, Kuhn claims every new paradigm is incommensurable with earlier ones, for models and statements do not mean the same thing in one paradigm as they do in another.⁴⁹⁷ Fred Evans explains the notion of incommensurable paradigm by saying “We could possibly translate the Newtonian’s idea of the conservation of mass into Einstein’s language about the conversion of mass into energy (e=mc²). But we could not do so without considerable distortion of the translated position.”⁴⁹⁸ Like Foucault, Kuhn does believe paradigms can be preferred over others by their ability to solve more problems than earlier ones.⁴⁹⁹

These thinkers differ in the degree to which they conceive of the event as unified.

Badiou provides it with the greatest sense of unity, saying it is a recognized multiple that prescribes a new set of operations for a new state. For him, the event is very clearly delineated

493 Ibid., 94.

494 Ibid., 111-2.

495 Ibid., 168-8.

496 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 85.

497 Ibid., 204.

498 Fred Evans, Multivoiced Body, 186.

499 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 169.

from the situation that came before. Kuhn sees events as more ambiguous, as the anomalies produced by the failure of a paradigm are not readily separated from that old paradigm. It takes time to develop a conceptual and perceptual system that allows events to be seen. There needs to be a process that brings about the event.⁵⁰⁰ Foucault says the unity of the event is a function of the contemporaneity of numerous transformations, which over a period of time aggregate to produce a massive effect. Any unity the event has is contingent. Badiou recognizes the event more easily, as for him it occurs all at once in the form of a new multiple (that is, a being whose parts have never been recognized previously as all belonging to the same entity). It is wrestling with the effects of that multiple, and how to be faithful to it, that take time. By contrast, the events Foucault describes take years, if not centuries, to be realized. Kuhn thinks they can be relatively quick or excessively long to develop, depending on how quickly a new paradigm can be developed and spread throughout society.⁵⁰¹ As Ian Hacking writes, Kuhn became

“lukewarm about [the notion of] discontinuity, holding, plausibly enough, that even if some revolutions occur in a trice, many others do not…The new-world problem is not about working in a new world after a moment or a week of illumination and transformation.”⁵⁰²

The event is an important tool for thinking revolution as it erases the idea that there are necessary meanings or figures that constitute the state. Instead, the state comes from processes that draw connections, create relationships, and narrate themes in many different ways. When these connections, relationships, and themes are shown to be significantly inadequate, events create new ones. Events present the foundations of social contract theory and Marxism as functions of these processes, and thus alterable given the right circumstances.

500 Ibid., 62.

501 Ibid., 86.

502 Ian Hacking, “Working in a New World” in World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science, ed. Paul Horwich (Cambridge; MIT Press, 1993), 276.