Ping Pong 64: The Rumour of it All
No doubt the modern thinker Deleuze’s greatest idea is in essence his simplest idea. What if, he asks, we assumed that the world really is as we actually perceive it? If it is, what is it really? Well all the stuff about the self is clearly groundless, as one never actually encounters what one is. One is rather a myth or a story which one tells oneself about what one is like. But also all the very elaborate mental construction about the truth of things and their underlying unity would also be lost. Or perhaps better it would lose its primacy. We do not perceive unities so much as differences. It is of course the case that we can subsequently discover unity within these differences, (so we can say this and that perception relates to an underlying structure or substance) but this is not actually what tumbles into our heads in the first place. What we actually perceive, are things going on in the world: Differences happen, and we are swept up in those differences. The differences are caught up within our perceptions of events. We therefore perceive the world as a place in which things are endlessly happening.
This much is of course obvious. Bu there Deleuze gives a new twist and a highly creative one to this truism. What if, he suggests, it is actually this capacity of events to change and re-change our minds that is in fact the sole or the basic truth of the world. It is after all the case that our minds are nothing without the events which we stock it with (in the form of perceptions and then memories). What we are is therefore what events make us. What we will be will likewise evolve and change as new things happen, and as we attempt to understand the old things that have happened to us. The self-evident truth, Deleuze suggests, about out minds, is that we have got them the wrong way around. We assumed that ‘a mind’ was all about a me and its attempts to control or systematize a world, so that it can found a truth for itself. But the reality is, that the truth lies not in the efforts of a mythic self and its need for unity, but rather in events and their endless ricochet around our heads, and the heads of others. And it is these events that are the creative ones.
This move has many implications. But in the context of the current discussion two are perhaps of most importance. Firstly, the power of an event lies less in any deep truth, and more in the power to transform. Events are therefore those things which transform individuals, and make them see the world otherwise. If this is the real power of reality, the power to change, Deleuze argues, then it is a mistake to attempt to reduce the world to a handful of truths and fixed points. On the contrary, actual reality lies in the ability for things also, in the face of events to be otherwise than they were, and to recast the nature of our world. Secondly the very pitching of events is such that they cannot be effectively owned by any one individual or even by a society. What makes an event real, what gives it the truth that it has, lies in the fact that it is between perceiving entities. Something happens therefore, in a plane beyond any lived reality, and it catches up many things in its wake. They respond and respond to each other responses, and the world changes.
Events are therefore both always about change, and always pitched between things. But then Deleuze asks, what is the status of humanity and their minds in this light? The mind is the place in which different events work out their influences upon one another. We might then be inside events, but then which event we allow to form what we are, Deleuze wants to say, is a highly complex affair. Events are in a mind and through the agency of time, balanced off one with the other. They are made then to cross-relate to and inform one another. One starts to think in a certain manner, because of what happened to one in one’s childhood or yesterday or today. This thought then marches into my future, infuses subsequent events and actions, driving me to a difference or a series of ways of being different.
The stuff of reality is therefore Deleuze says, exactly what we actually perceive ‘to be’. It is not about hidden truths or hypothetical substances. Reality rather is that endless vortex of change and slipped meanings of intermeshing events in which our minds define themselves. Our role in this slippage is therefore to be an event in ourselves (or many events). Or better, there are certain events which are only conceivable because we are there. We are therefore caught up in their inception (that is, the focussing which led to their being), and active in their externalization. We are an event like any other. Moreover Deleuze argues that any individual needs to be understood in terms of a certain set of events which they peculiarly focus. We look back then into our memories and perceive a certain set of events that we reckon make us who we are. This set may actually change in time (and so who we are or how we react, evolve) but at any one time there is a set known to us and to those we care to tell. Individuals are therefore, composed of different events: Individuals house the minds, the perceiving and conceiving, in which the reality of events are given to the world; but they are also the place where events are focussed and made to affect one another. - Junction points which envelope a certain particular set of events, and the actors which make what happens real, and finally they are caught up in the medium, time, in which events’ effects are felt. It is this final element, time, which Deleuze feels is in the end critical, as it is only across the abyss of time, and the endless changes to our minds and what we thought of as mattering to us and to others, that the true power of events are felt. That is, it is in time we are re-thrown.
These five elements will no doubt feel highly abstract to those not accustomed to Deleuze. In the rest of this essay they will be fleshed out and made (hopefully) less obscure. In order to do this, I will define five quite different ‘between spaces’ - that is places between individuals (and so to differing degrees therefore collective) within which differing individualities are born.
The first of such places is our modern obsession with communication .We not only communities constantly (internet etc), but we also communicate about communication. More than that, we look to that communication for truths. What is really out there is now seen not as the province of God, or the domain of science so much as the wittering of endless bloggers. It is in their rumours and through their words that stories are initially ‘created’ and then subsequently evolve. Our events are therefore the product of a medium between individuals, a medium of perceiving, in which what is perceived are the eddies and flows of an information exchange. Parts of this exchange are then made to peculiarly resonate or are bought up short against other parts. Individuals balance rumours one against the other, or add their own local information or innovation. Rumours are therefore endlessly caught up, and made otherwise, forced into difference. Or to put it slightly differently, the somewhat onanistic joy of wittering lies in the extension of our ability to warp into events. We read them, and become a part of them, and their transfer. Our ability to perceive and then conceive them, matters to the entire exchange (without it the exchange would be nothing), and to the events that it then creates.
The second ‘between-space’ suggested above is that founded by the modern media. It is the role of the media to always run with many stories at once. Their entire power lies then less in reporting and more in endless inferring of truths. A story therefore breaks and other stories are also there. Or a story rolls over the media organization, and yet even as it breaks it is warped. It becomes not about the expenses of MP’s or the drought in Africa, but rather about whose fault it is, and what it will then lead to. Events therefore are at once forced into relations with other events in a fairly crude and immediate way. There is no fealty here, and no pause, no allowing an event simply to happen. On the contrary the power of the media and the between-space in which it functions, lies in this endless explosion of one event into others (and the discussion programmes and the comment sections which this explosion creates). Events become therefore not a thing in themselves, but rather a discussion opportunity. Or better they are reduced to a mere droplet of information (they matter because of what ‘light’ they throw on other events), which allows readymade and easily constructed (and cheap) programmes to appear relevant and powerful. A murder happens, and we worry about childcare. MPs are caught partially on the fiddle and we suddenly start to talk rather grandly about constitutional reform….The power of the media is therefore the power of the enforced junction. The make us hop between events, even as we open our ears to hear of them.
The third of the spaces mentioned above is rather a dark one. It is the power of events to convey individuality upon those individuals who are peculiarly associated with them. The power of events lies therefore in ‘brand awareness’. One needs an event (or an advert) to create instant recognition reaction in another’s mind. Moreover as each such event is never singular, but rather is always caught up in a constellation of other events, one can be fairly manipulative here. One event, a brand logo or an advert, is made to simply metamorphosize into another; buying a product. Or again, given that events are not a thing which individuals own (they are rather what owns the individual), then the ‘same’ event might be shared between folk. Designer products are therefore offered as the archetypal badge for identity. Wearing a product becomes itself the event, the element in which an individual is given (to others). Or finally of course premierships and organizations are defined by those spectacular events which they are caught up with. Declare war on the wrong country, or poison babies in the ‘Third World’, and your identity will be fixed, for at least a while.
The fourth of the points above concerned the point at which one reacts in relation to events. All actions are tricky things. They stand at the cusp of history. On the one side lie the events that have led up to this action, the event which the actions claim to be the effect of; and on the other, the effects of the events themselves. When then, one acts in a certain way, one almost always behaves like a politician behaves. One claims that in acting, one is somehow responding to what has been. One therefore justifies an action within a history, and as a result of something (as MPs say we were corrupt, we must change). And yet the action which one follows is not simply the reforming of the past system. On the contrary, the actions pursued are often only tangentially linked to what has happened. MPs are currently therefore proposing to reform the voting system in response to an expense ‘scandal’. The point then about such actions is that they are genuinely creative in their own sense. Their power lies therefore not in a reactive response, but rather though changing the rules of the game in such a way that the initial bugbear seems to matter rather less. Reforming the voting system will not make MPs less corrupt, and yet it is doing something certainly, and might well (eventually) make us mind less about a system so obviously designed to create fiddled accounts.
Well it might. It is at this point that a second aspect of action of course kicks in. The action is not only transformation then, but also obscure and uncertain. To act is therefore essentially to take a gamble. Act in the wrong way and you will be condemned. The problem of course being, that no one will know the ’wrong’ way until events have worked themselves out. Then with hindsight the wrong will be obvious for all to see (Gordon Brown really should have called an election over a year ago…). To act is therefore to throw yourself against that which will be self evident in the future and yet which is hidden now That is, it is throwing yourself or risking yourself against the reaction to that action, and the effects that it will have as an event upon the world and upon you, it initial enactor.
The last point leads into the final space, that of time. There are, Deleuze says, at any one moment deep and hidden events, waiting to break upon us all. That is, we are being endlessly swept up into as yet hidden events. These events will eventually of course feel like self-evident truths in the future. They will appear to be what is reality. They will give the stuff for our reality to come. A world war, a revolution, or environmental collapse is a storm that takes a long time to gather. Here the problem is, that at any one time, we are being gathered into very many storms, and also many empty squalls, that will go nowhere or have an effect only through our fear (and in remaining virtual if often very powerful). We live then in the legacy of futures which never come to pass (and powerful if merely virtual fears) and we are caught up in events whose actual effects we cannot tell until they break. Our realities, and our capacity to be gathered into a future, is therefore straddled by those events which are coming to pass, and those which are merely virtual (and yet in that virtuality have their power - a rumour true or otherwise of a war or global warming has a power of its own). Time is the waiting in which these events resolve themselves. That is, it is the agency, or medium through which the actual events tumble into our world, while the virtual ones have also a frequently powerful effect. Hence we react to their threat, the world changes and they never occur. Time is therefore the proving ground for the event, the domain in which it enters our mind and makes us different irrespective of whether it ever comes to pass or not. In this respect global warming is the archetypal event. It is endlessly waiting and threatening us, endlessly gathering us. We are caught up in its virtual power and forced to respond to it as if it were actual. Our ability then to live in this event in all its uncertainty and its power, to be thrown and rethrown in very many ways, is likely to be the dominant story of the next few decades. So that it will be the badge which this time wears, its individuality, for other times. Our problem now is, as it is always in events, is the problem of whether we are truly worthy of it or no. I.e., can we face up to, or are we going to ignore it? And the answer then to this question will resolve, in part, the problem of exactly what kind of event it proves to be.
A world of events is a world where what we are is thrown against the rhythm of what we perceive the world to be. The world is then centred not on us, but on that which is immediately outside of us, and which we must understand as such. It becomes always about what is another, what is between. The power of the event therefore lies in making us different, in forcing ourselves to be another to ourselves (how did I get here? Is the cry of the eventist). To be just to the event is therefore to be just to this capacity to change. And this all still leaves us with a problem. Events, that is, that which is outside that bleeds into me from beyond, are clearly very powerful. And any one society might be merely the composite of events which occur across it and yet within those events it has an effect. Or to put it another way, it used those events and their consequences in a certain way and toward a certain aim. Human societies therefore compose themselves from a cross section of events, and the way that it then uses them. It is to this cross section and the power that it involves that the next of these essays will turn.
