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The Becoming of the “Event”: A Deleuzian Approach to Understanding the

Production of Social and Political “Events”

Article  in  Theory & Event · January 2009

DOI: 10.1353/tae.0.0042

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The Becoming of the “Event”: A Deleuzian Approach to Understanding the Production of
Social and Political “Events” 1

Tom Lundborg

In this paper I seek to explore further some of the issues raised by Paul Patton in his article
“The World Seen From Within: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Events”, published in the first
issue of this journal in 1997.2 In this article Patton discusses Deleuze and Guattari’s idea about
philosophy becoming “worthy of the event” by examining “Deleuze’s concept of the event”
and “how this might apply to present social and political events”.3 In a similar way to Patton I
draw upon Deleuze’s idea of the event as having a “pure” or virtual dimension as well as being
actualized in “particular states of affairs”. This is what Deleuze refers to as the “double
structure” of the event. I use this idea in combination with Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to
the role of language in A Thousand Plateaus. In doing this I try to take Patton’s discussion of
Deleuze’s concept of the event further by focusing on the question of how it can be used in
order to understand the production of social and political “events”. I argue that this production
can be understood in terms of a continuous and ongoing process of becoming, which lacks a
final point of completion as well as an absolute presence or being.

When developing this understanding of the production of social and political “events” my aim
is to move away from the idea of “representing” the meaning of “events” through the use of
language and concepts. According to this idea, the “event”, or the name that is given to an
“event”, functions as a sign or a symbol that refers to what has happened in a particular
moment in time. This sign or symbol provides a common denominator to which various aspects
of what has happened can be linked. As such, the name of the “event” is assumed to represent a
kind of unity of what has happened that locates various dimensions and aspects of what has
happened within some conceived whole. For Deleuze, however, the idea of representation is
merely a form of “illusion”, which is based on the transcendent notions of “an identical
thinking subject” and the “identity for concepts”.4 As an effect of this illusion ideas about for
example the One, the Whole, and the Subject tend to be taken for granted, providing a natural
starting point for understanding reality. In contrast to such a view, Deleuze’s “transcendental
empiricism” provides an entirely different starting point. At one point Deleuze says that the aim
of this form of empiricism “is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the
conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness)”.5 And to do this we should
never begin with ideas about some abstract unity, such as the One, the Whole, the Subject,
which then is given the task of explaining. Instead of letting the abstract explain, Deleuze
argues, the abstract “must itself be explained”.6

One way of doing so is to begin with examining the processes through which the abstract is
produced. And it is the very nature of these processes, as something that is constantly moving
rather than static that needs to be analysed. By examining these processes it might then be
possible to understand how different kinds of ideas emerge, and how notions of the One, the
Whole, and the Subject are produced. So, rather than taking these notions for granted,
Deleuze’s transcendental form of empiricism can be said to provoke an examination of how
they are produced and made possible in the first place. For this reason it can also be seen as an
interesting alternative to a representational mode of thinking about social and political “events”.
As abstract wholes, the problem is not how to represent them but to understand how they are
produced and how they are made possible in the first place. In this paper I develop one possible
way of thinking about this problem, drawing upon Deleuze’s concept of a “double structure” of
the event as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas about language and the relationship between
expression and content.

The Singularity of the Event

In The Logic of Sense Deleuze articulates the basic idea of a “double structure” of the event in
the following way:

With every event, there is indeed the present moment of its actualization, the
moment in which the event is embodied in a state of affairs, an individual, or a
person, the moment we designate by saying “here, the moment has come.” The

1
 future and the past of the event are evaluated only with respect to this definitive
present, and from the point of view of that which embodies it. But on the other
hand, there is the future and the past of the event considered in itself,
sidestepping each present, being free of the limitations of a state of affairs,
impersonal and pre-individual, neutral, neither general nor particular.7

Following this “double structure” of the event there are two interrelated sides of the event: the
actualization of events and the singularity of events. Beginning with the latter side, the event
can be referred to as something that happens immediately, without being linked to a present
moment in time, a pre-established subject, or an external background. As such, the event can
also be analysed in terms of different movements, which elude the present as well as the being
of the subject. One of the ways in which Deleuze develops this idea of the event is through a
reading of time in Stoic philosophy. This philosophy, Deleuze explains, contains two main
conceptions of time: “Chronos” and “Aion”. Whereas Chronos consists of the present as the
constitutive element of time, Aion can be said to escape the present and only let movements of
past and future remain.

In accordance with Aion, only the past and future inhere or subsist in time.
Instead of a present which absorbs the past and future, a future and past divide
the present at every instant and subdivide it ad infinitum into past and future, in
both directions at once.8

Aion thus escapes the present as a central reference point in time. Between past and future there
is no present because every instant subdivides the present into past and future. So, rather than
the “now” of the present there is the “instant” of Aion. In this way, Aion does not have a
present, which can envelop the past and the future in accordance with a fixed point of reference.
The implication of this reading of time for thinking about the event is that the event cannot be
located in the present, but only in relation to the past and the future. As such, Deleuze points
out that the event often takes the form of a “double question”: the questions of “what is going
to happen, and what has just happened”. 9 There is no underlying purpose of this double
question, and it is not raised because it requires a particular answer. Rather, it can be seen as an
expression of the “agonizing aspect of the pure event”, which highlights the difficulty of
grasping what has happened but also knowing what is going to happen. This difficulty can be
explained by the lack of a stable and present “now” as a point from which the subject can
reflect upon the past and make predictions about the future. The time of Aion, referring to what
is always already past and eternally yet to come, destabilises the notion of a pure present and
frees the event from a static location in time.

Lacking a pure present, Aion can also be said to express an “incorporeal” form of time. In other
words, time as Aion cannot be directly linked to either movements or actions of bodies that are
already present. The movements of Aion do not rely upon a relationship with the Self or the
being of a superior “I”. Without a present corporeal content, Aion expresses an “empty form of
time”: “Always already passed and eternally yet to come, Aion is the eternal truth of time: pure
empty form of time, which has freed itself of its present corporeal content and has thereby
unwound its own circle, stretching itself out in a straight line”.10 Following the incorporeal time
of Aion, there is no “being” of the subject, which can be located in a present “now”. Instead of
such a being, the empty form of time has to be grasped in terms of a becoming of the subject.
This becoming has neither an identity, nor does it exist in one place or at one time. It is a
movement “by which the line frees itself from the point, and renders points indiscernible”. 11
Deleuze describes this idea of becoming in his reading of Alice in Wonderland and Through the
Looking-Glass:

When I say “Alice becomes larger,” I mean that she becomes larger than she
was. By the same token, however, she becomes smaller than she is now.
Certainly, she is not bigger and smaller at the same time. She is larger now; she
was smaller before. But it is at the same moment that one becomes larger than
one was and smaller than one becomes. This is the simultaneity of a becoming
whose characteristic is to elude the present.12

2
This idea of becoming implies that there is no middle point, or a present, in which the subject
can be located. Becoming consists of an unlimited movement that “produces nothing but
itself”.13 And it is in this sense that becoming has to be understood as incorporeal; it is never
present as such and has no direct relationship with an already present body. In this way, the
event does not fall back on an already existing identity of the subject and is not imprisoned
within an individual or personal self. Rather, as a singularity, the event only allows “the
dissolved self, the cracked I, the lost identity” to remain.14 And even if there is an “I” that
figures in discourse it is an “I” that is cracked or fractured, as it seems to lack the necessary
tools to comprehend what happens. In this case, as Deleuze writes in reference to Maurice
Blanchot,

it is I who am too weak for life, it is life which overwhelms me, scattering its
singularities all about, in no relation to me, nor to a moment determinable as the
present, except an impersonal instant which is divided into still-future and
already-past.15

Following this “impersonal instant” the event can be read as an expression of a becoming that
escapes the present moment in time as well as the corporeal content of the subject. As such, the
event also has to be freed from an external point of view, from which it is possible to reflect
upon the meaning of what has happened as something that exists externally to the subject.

Moreover, the event can be understood as constitutive and active rather than representational
and reactive. 16 In other words, the event is not an “object” or a “thing”, which can be
represented, but rather a force that creates. Examples of this force can be related to “thought”
and “sense”, which are not ways of representing but rather active events that create. As Claire
Colebrook notes, “sense is not a faithful double of what is (not a representation) but a cut,
fissure, fibrillation or ungrounded difference – not a difference from, nor a difference of, but an
event of difference”.17 The idea of sense as an event is important in Deleuze’s philosophy
precisely because it can be seen as an expression of the productive and creative element of the
event. As an event, sense cannot for example be explained by the objects of perception. That
would simply result in a statement that tries to determine the qualities of an object by locating it
in an external metaphysical realm. So, instead of stating that “the tree is green”, the sense event
belongs to the active processes: “to green” and “to tree”. 18 And the reason for this, as
Colebrook explains, is that “we see not just what actually is, but also the seen as it might be
remembered, imagined, recalled, repeated, hallucinated”. 19 Sense, then, is “an incorporeal,
complex, and irreducible entity”, or a singularity, which can be expressed in a multiplicity of
ways without being linked to some kind of whole or “common sense”.20

Following this understanding of the event, as a force of ungrounded difference, there is also a
potential for change and transformation inherent in the event. As an event, thought involves a
process of change and transformation, which always has the potential to bring something new.
For example, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, “all of thought is a becoming, a double
becoming, rather than the attribute of a Subject and the representation of a Whole”.21 As
something that is active and creative “thinking” highlights the idea of becoming as an unlimited
movement without beginning or end. Becoming, in this sense, does not have a pre-determined
goal. It presents only a “flow of life” that can take on new paths and create new ways of
thinking and perceiving. For Deleuze, then, the task is to articulate and make thinkable this
process by which there is an event of difference that does not fall back on identity and
similarity but affirms the creative and productive elements of the event.22

This is also what Deleuze and Guattari try to do when they introduce the concepts of
“deterritorialization” and “lines of flight”. According to Deleuze and Guattari, these concepts
do not refer to ways of decoding movements and becomings by extracting them from their
context. “Deterritorialization” and “lines of flight” refer to movements and becomings as
processes without an external background or context.23 As such, they cannot be connected with
any oppositional terms or systems of representation, according to which movements and
becomings are fixed. There are no oppositions, or beginnings and ends, only the between:

Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing
to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal

3
 movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or
end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.24

Following this idea of movements there is, for example, no “thing” that then transforms into
something else, resulting in an identifiable difference between one “thing” and another “thing”.
Transformation can only be understood in terms of a movement without a pre-established
content or agency. Deterritorialization and lines of flight are expressions of this kind of
transformation. And as movements without a predetermined goal they can take on various
directions, go in unpredictable ways and create possible worlds. The event is always marked by
these kinds of movements and transformations. As such, it also escapes the idea of a
predetermined goal and stays open to different forms of creations and transformations.

Following this view, events cannot simply be attributed to the “being” of things. As impersonal
and pre-individual instants, events occur through a series of paradoxes, illustrated by questions
about what has happened and what is going to happen, and the unlimited movements of past
and future. Lacking a determinable “being”, these events cannot be identified in terms of what
is, nor can they be linked to a fixed centre of convergence. Hence, it is necessary to point out
that events do not connect through a synthesis of unification, according to which different
events are placed in a systematic relationship with one another. The connection between events
is rather one that is based on “divergence” and “disjunction”, where any kind of ideational
centre is “perpetually decentred”.25 Instead of a unity of events there is thus a multiplicity of
events, in which the different relates to the different and never to the same.26

The Actualization of the Event

So far I have discussed Deleuze’s concept of the event as a singularity, mainly by pointing to
its relation to time and subjectivity, and change and transformation. In this context, the event
can be understood as a singular force of difference, which is active and creative rather than
reactive and representational. As such, it is also a force that comes “before” distinctions
between for example subject and object, the internal and external. However, thinking about the
event as something that comes “before” such distinctions, the question then is how those
distinctions are produced and made possible in the first place. In other words, how is it possible
to explain the emergence or production of different kinds of distinctions such as subject/object,
internal/external? Here, I will address this question by looking at the other side of the “double
structure” of the event, namely the “actualization” of the event, referring to the process by
which the event is translated into a “state of affairs” or what is.

In order to understand this process it is useful to first look at how Deleuze elaborates on the
second Stoic conception of time: “Chronos”. One way of explaining this form of time is by
thinking in terms of a succession of instants, or cases. This succession refers to the way in
which instants are repeated in the present, to which both a past and a future belong. Here, the
past and the future do not exist independently of the present, but can rather be seen as parts of
the present. The present connects different instants, or cases, by weaving them together in order
to form the impression of a homogenous movement, which always goes from the past to the
future: “Chronos is the present which alone exists. It makes of the past and future its two
oriented dimensions, so that one goes always from the past to the future – but only to the
degree that presents follow one another inside partial worlds or partial systems”.27 Chronos is
thus not representing a universal order of time, but is always expressed within particular
systems. According to these systems, the present can be said to “regularize” time, by
connecting the future and the past into a seemingly coherent movement. It is a regularization of
time that “measures the movement of bodies” as it fills and limits them by inscribing a
particular content or matter.28 In this way, time is no longer “empty” but rather “embodied”,
and instead of being “incorporeal” it is “corporeal”.

The process by which the future and the past are linked to a present, and an incorporeal or
singular becoming is translated into a corporeal or personalised form of “being”, is also what
Deleuze refers to as actualization. To begin with, actualization should not be confused with
resemblance and representation, but rather has to be seen as a creative process:

4
 Actualisation breaks with resemblance as a process no less than it does with
identity as a principle. Actual terms never resemble the singularities they
incarnate. In this sense, actualisation or differenciation is always a genuine
creation. It does not result from any limitation of pre-existing possibility. (…)
For a potential or virtual object, to be actualised is to create divergent lines
which correspond to – without resembling – a virtual multiplicity.29

So, in order to escape the limits that are imposed by identity and resemblance, actualization has
to be understood in terms of a genuine creation. And according to Deleuze, it is the potential
that exists in the “virtual” that enables this creation to take place. The virtual in Deleuze’s
philosophy is not opposed to the “real”, and neither is it something artificial or simulated. On
the contrary, the virtual is more real than anything else. And the main reason for this is that the
virtual does not suppress difference in favour of identity, but refers only to the indeterminate
relations between differences, which escape the confinements of identity. As it expresses a
freer role of difference, the virtual does not fall back on the illusions of transcendence and
representation, according to which singularities are imprisoned within the “limits of worlds,
individuals, and persons”.30 Also, the reality of the virtual always continues to exist, or subsist,
despite different attempts to grasp it through a process of actualization. In this way,
actualization never leads to anything final or complete, which can be said to exist
independently of the processes from which it emerges. As Deleuze and Guattari note: “The
actual is not what we are but, rather, what we become, what we are in the process of
becoming”.31

It is therefore important to emphasise that the relationship between the actual and the virtual is
always to some extent mutual. This means that in addition to the movement from the virtual to
the actual, there is also a movement that goes in the opposite direction: “from virtuals we
descend to actual states of affairs, and from states of affairs we ascend to virtuals, without
being able to isolate one from the other”. 32 The name of this latter process is “counter-
actualization”. Actualization and counter-actualization can be said to move between the event
and a “state of affairs”, or between the virtual and the actual, but without being clearly
separable from one another:

No doubt, the event is not only made up from inseparable variations, it is itself
inseparable from the state of affairs, bodies, and lived reality in which it is
actualized or brought about. But we can also say the converse: the state of
affairs is no more separable from the event that nonetheless goes beyond its
actualization in every respect.33

Actualization and counter-actualization are thus relative processes. As such, they render the
two sides of the event both independent and inseparable at the same time. And this is precisely
the reason why the event always has to be grasped in terms of a “double structure”. Without
actualization, the event would never come into effect. And without counter-actualization, there
would be no force that makes the event continuing to exist, or subsist, as a potential for change
and transformation. “To the extent that the pure event is each time imprisoned forever in its
actualization, counter-actualization liberates it, always for other times.”34 So, rather than simply
operating on its own, the process of actualization is doubled by the potential of counter-
actualization, which in turn opens up the possibility for more actualizations still to come.

This double process can also be understood in terms of an ambiguous relationship between the
impersonal and the personal. In one case “it is I who am too weak for life, it is life which
overwhelms me, scattering its singularities all about”, and in the other case “it is my life, which
seems too weak for me and slips away at a point which, in a determined relation to me, has
become present”.35 What this ambiguity shows is that there is always one part of the event that
remains impersonal and therefore ungraspable. It cannot be grasped, actualized or realized
because it appears to have no relation to me as a person. At the same time, however, there is the
part of the event that clearly seems to belong to me as a person since it is “I” who embody it.
To illustrate this point Deleuze often refers Blanchot’s example of “death” as an event. On the
one hand death “has an extreme and definite relation to me and my body and is grounded in me,
but it also has no relation to me at all – it is incorporeal and infinitive, impersonal, grounded
only in itself”.36 Apart from having a strong connection to my body, death is a force that

5
appears to have no relation to me at all. It is not “I” who dies but rather an impersonal “they” or
“it”. This ambiguous relation between the impersonal and the personal is crucial when trying to
understand the importance of events. It shows how the event is not anything that “I” as a
subject simply can control but rather something in which “I” both disappear and then again
appear. In this way, Deleuze notes that: “Every event is like death. Double and impersonal in
its double.”37

The relationship between the personal and impersonal, the actual and the virtual can also be
explained by the relationship between the two forms of time, Aion and Chronos. In the same
way as the virtual cannot be clearly separated from the actual, the temporal actualization of the
event (Chronos) cannot be clearly separated from the future-past of the event (Aion). And
according to Deleuze, it is always the latter that interferes and refigures the former.
Consequently, the present moment of a particular actualization is never present as such but is
constantly dislocated and displaced by Aion. This means that instead of seeing them as separate,
the two forms of time must be understood in relation to each other. For this reason, Deleuze
points out that the present “does not contradict the Aion”. Rather,

it is the present as being of reason which is subdivided ad infinitum into

something that has just happened and something that is going to happen, always
flying in both directions at once. The other present, the living present, happens
and brings about the event. But the event nonetheless retains an eternal truth
upon the line of Aion, which divides it eternally into a proximate past and an
imminent future. The Aion endlessly subdivides the event and pushes away past
as well as future, without ever rendering them less urgent.38

So, instead of being a separate form of time, Chronos is always linked to Aion, with the latter
constantly dispersing and refiguring the former without ever letting it remain the same. This is
also the “agonizing aspect” of the event that Deleuze often returns to – the fact that movements
of past and future cannot be fixed in a temporal present or a separate moment in time.
Accordingly, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine what has happened in the past and
predict what is going to happen in the future purely on the basis of something that is happening
in the present. The event, in this sense, is “always and at the same time something which has
just happened and something about to happen; never something happening”.39 Before it even
appears as a separate moment in time, this “something” is pushed away by the movements of
past and future. Nothing remains static and nothing remains the same. Ideas about what has
happened might be repeated an endless number of times. But these repetitions can neither be
cemented, nor result in a static conception of one and the same “thing”. Repetitions ultimately
have the effect of displacing any such conceptions, revealing the free play of differences
without a determinable centre.

In this way, the singularity of the event, as a movement towards the past and the future, can
also be seen as a potentially disruptive force. An example of such a force is “sense” as an event,
which has the potential to disrupt or undermine notions of “common sense” or “good sense”.
Whereas the latter are based on the idea of subordinating sense to a shared understanding of
what everyone is supposed to “know” or “recognise”, sense as an event unleashes a singular
force of difference that disrupts the shared understanding of “common sense” or “good sense”.
The latter notions are thereby “undermined by the principle of their production, and are
overthrown from within by paradox”.40 This paradox, then, can be explained by the way in
which the event always goes in two different directions at once:

“Which way, which way?” asks Alice. The question has no answer, since it is
the characteristic of sense not to have any direction or “good sense”. Rather,
sense always goes to both directions at once, in the infinitely subdivided and
elongated past-future.41

Even if there are attempts to provide generalizations of “good sense” or “common sense”, the
paradox of sense makes them impossible to sustain as static elements of truth and certainty.
Hence, there is no full or complete actualization or translation of the event into a “state of
affairs” or what is. And the reason for this is that notions of what is do not exist independently
or simply on their own, but are always accompanied with a trace of that from which they

6
emerge, the singularity of the event and the virtual. For this reason the event can also be
understood as a “vapour” or a “reserve”, implying that it always remains in the background of
actualization.42

In this context, the important task is to show how the event can be “counter-effectuated” and
thereby “abstracted from a state of affairs”.43 And this is also how philosophy’s aim to “become
worthy of the event” can be interpreted.44 It is an aim that is specific to philosophy as a practice
of creating concepts. This practice has nothing to do with representation, information or
communication. Rather, it is a practice that aims to show the contingency of life itself and that
life is not simply made up of an illusion of transcendence and being, in which everything is
limited to thinking in terms of actualized states of affairs. The creation of concepts concerns the
virtual and the incorporeal dimension of life, as movements of becoming that cannot be
actualized or translated into what is. It is philosophy’s aim to open up ways of thinking about
this dimension of life, to become worthy of the events that cannot be fixed or controlled and
which for that very reason play a crucial part in our continuous processes of becoming.

The Becoming of the “Event”

Returning to the question of how to understand the production of social and political “events”,
one way of addressing this question is to analyse the “event” in terms of the “actual”, or as a
product of actualization. The “event” can then be referred to as “the moment in which the event
is embodied in a state of affairs, an individual, or a person, the moment we designate by saying
‘here, the moment has come’”.45 Moreover, as a way of bringing the multiplicity of events
together, the “event” can also be related to the idea of an independently existing object or a
coherent whole. The relationship between the singularity of events and the “event” is then
determined by the ways in which the former becomes actualized in the latter by connecting it
with a subjective point of view as well as with the being of an object. There is a movement,
then, from the singularity of events towards an actualization of those events, the outcome of
which is a particular understanding of the “event” as an “object” or a “thing”.

However, to understand the “event” as an “outcome” of actualization can be seen as

problematic if this implies that the “outcome” itself exists independently of the processes from
which it emerges, i.e. the singularity of events. To avoid this problem it is therefore necessary
to take the mutual interaction between the singularity of events and the actualization of events
seriously. In this way, the “event” has to be seen as intimately linked to the singularity of
events rather than being separated from it. The implication of this view is that the “event” never
represents an independently existing object or a complete whole, the meaning of which can be
determined by a pre-established subject and located in an external background or context.
These categories might of course exist, but only as effects of actualization. As such, they do not
exist independently of the singularity of events, but can rather be said to emerge from the
processes of actualizing those events. Brian Massumi has elaborated on this in the following
way:

The separately recognizable, speakable identities of the objects and subjects

involved in the unfolding event come into definition only retrospectively. In the
event, they are inseparable from the immediacy of the relation. Their coming-
together precedes their definition. And it is their definition that culminates the
event: only after it has run its course can the situation be fully contextualized,
accurately determined to have been a particular case of a certain general class of
happening. Coming-together, or belonging-together, takes logical or ontological
precedence over discreteness of components and, in particular, over the subject-
object separation. Subject and object are imbedded in the situational relation in a
way that cannot be fully determined in advance. As long as the event is ongoing,
its outcome even slightly uncertain, their contextual identity is open to
amendment. In other words, they are embedded in the relation as the real
potential to be exactly what they will have effectively become when the event
will have run its course. Their identities figure virtually.46

According to Massumi, the relations we perceive, between subject, object, and a particular
context can only be determined retrospectively, after the event “has run its course”. Does this

7
mean, then, that the relations we perceive have been fully determined, and thereby cemented
into what is? And does it mean that it is possible to recognise the point at which this happens,
i.e. the point at which “the event has run its course”? If the answer is a simple and
straightforward “yes” to both of these questions it would seem that only one of the processes
discussed earlier is taken into account, the process of actualization. But if the process of
counter-actualization is also taken into account everything changes. Following the latter
process there is no full or complete actualization or translation into what is. And the reason for
this is that any kind of perceivable relation does not exist simply on its own, but is always
accompanied by a trace of that from which it emerges, the singularity of the event or the virtual.
Therefore, it could be argued that the “event” is neither a complete whole, nor a static entity
that exists independently of the subject, and against an established background or context.
Rather than being static, the “event” remains open to movements and processes, according to
which it is refigured and recreated in different ways. Hence, to think about the “event” as a
static and independently existing object or a “thing” becomes increasingly problematic.
Massumi develops this point by suggesting:

When we speak of “an” object or thing, what we are referring to is a complex

interweaving of attributes and contents as subsumed under a nominal identity (a
name). “An” object subsumes a multiplicity that evolves situationally. Every
object is an evolving differential: a snow balling, open-ended variation on
itself.47

So, instead of understanding the “event” as a determinable “object” or a “thing” I want to argue
that it has to be understood as a part of an ongoing production. Consequently, instead of a
“being” of the “event” as this particular “thing”, it is more useful to think in terms of a
becoming of the “event”. Within this becoming there are two interdependent processes involved,
actualization and counter-actualization, working both with and against the notion of the “event”
as an object or a whole. So despite processes of actualization there cannot be a final point of
completion, according to which the “event” has become an independently existing object or a
coherent whole. To move away from an understanding of the “event” in terms of a static being
thus implies that there is always the possibility for change and transformation. This means that
the “event” as an object is never coherent in and of itself. Instead, the “event” can be
understood as an illusory object or whole, which seeks to incorporate the singularity and
multiplicity of events but without ever fully succeeding in doing so. The “event”, in this sense,
is produced through a never-ending encounter with change, difference and transformation.

Language and “Events”

Whilst change has to be understood in relation to the singularity of the event and forces of
difference, it could also be argued that there is another aspect of change that needs to be
considered when thinking about the production of social and political “events”. This aspect
relates to the notion of “events” as “breaking points”, which constitute a temporal order that
separates between “before” and “after”. Useful examples of this can be thought of in relation to
so called “grand” political “events” such as “9/11” or the “fall of the Berlin Wall”. With both of
these “events” there is a common view that everything suddenly has changed, and that this
change has resulted in a new world order that is different from what has been. The ways in
which this kind of connection is made, between the “event” and a fundamental social and
political change may come in different forms, depending on the conditions that determine a
particular understanding of the “event” to emerge in the first place. An important question,
therefore, is how certain conditions are created, and how they help produce a particular
understanding of the “event” in the social field. In order to address this question I will shift
focus slightly and see how Deleuze and Guattari explain the role of language in the social field.
Particularly interesting here is how they discuss a specific function of language, which they call
“order-words”.

Order-words refer to the ways in which language compels “obedience”, “gives life orders” and
forces a particular “corporeal modification” to take place. As an example of this, Deleuze and
Guattari refer to how different age categories are imposed through statements such as “you are
no longer a child”. Although the transformation from being a child into something else is
attributed to the body, the transformation itself does not depend upon an essence within the

8
body. This kind of transformation therefore has to be understood as incorporeal. In other words,
what makes the child suddenly stop being a child and become something else does not come
down to any explicit corporeal factors, but rather to the power of language in the social field to
attribute the body a particular content and meaning. And it is the order-word that performs this
task, through its immediate effect on the body. “The instantaneousness of the order-word, its
immediacy, gives it a power of variation in relation to the bodies to which the transformation is
attributed.”48 The order-word states that things are no longer the same as they once were, and
that consequently the content of the body has changed and taken on a new form as well.49 In
this way, Deleuze and Guattari point out that there are two different “formalizations” at work:
“If in a social field we distinguish the set of corporeal modifications and the set of incorporeal
transformations, we are presented, despite the variety in each of the sets, with two
formalizations, one of content, the other of expression.”50

By stressing that “content” and “expression” take on different “forms”, Deleuze and Guattari
seek to show how they also belong to different modes of dispersion. Here they refer to
Foucault’s claim that “it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what
we say”.51 As two different modes of dispersion, what is seen (content) and what is said
(expression) have no immediate connection or resemblance.52 Moreover, the form of content
never exists prior to the form of expression, which means that content should not be regarded
as a signified, no less than expression should be regarded as a signifier. It is rather the case that
they interact with one another in order to produce different mixtures or “assemblages”.53

Belonging to two separate forms as different modes of dispersion, the relationship between
content and expression is conditioned by mutual interaction. In this way, for example, the form
of expression can intervene and interact with the content, making the form of the latter modify
in certain ways:

The independence of the two kinds of forms, forms of expression and forms of
content, is not contradicted but confirmed by the fact that the expressions or
expresseds are inserted into or intervene in contents, not to represent them but to
anticipate them or move them back, slow them down or speed them up, separate
or combine them, delimit them in a different way. The warp of the instantaneous
transformations is always inserted into the woof of continuous modifications.54

When referring to “modifications” here, Deleuze and Guattari are not simply suggesting that
expression constitutes or constructs the content. Rather, by “modifications” they are referring
to the ways in which content and expression interact with and intervene in one another. To
illustrate this point Deleuze and Guattari use Foucault’s work on the prison as an example. The
prison, they point out, is a form of content. And within this content, the bodies of prisoners
enter as a substance, just like the bodies of guards and visitors. However, the prisoners are not
prisoners unless they have first passed through sentencing by a judge. The sentence itself is
carried out as a form of expression, for example by using concepts such as “delinquency” or
“delinquent”, which in this case, “express a new way of classifying, stating, translating, and
even committing criminal acts”.55 The term “delinquency” as a form of expression interacts
with the “prison” as a form of content, but without representing or signifying it. There is no
pre-established connection between “delinquency” as a form of expression and the “prison” as
a form of content. Rather, the connection between the two has to be produced, through different
processes and forces at work in the social field.

Having no pre-established connection, and belonging to two separate forms, “delinquency” and
“prison” can also enter new relations with other parts of society, through the production of new
connections. These connections emerge from the historical formation that defines the
conditions for knowledge or the conditions for seeing and speaking in particular ways. Such
conditions, however, do not rely on a prior ground, and they never result in a coherent and
single “entity”:

The conclusion we can draw is that each historical formation sees and reveals all
it can within the conditions laid down for visibility, just as it says all it can
within the conditions relating to statements. (…) [I]n both cases the conditions
do not meet deep within a consciousness of a subject, any more than they

9
 compose a single Entity: they are two forms of exteriority within which
dispersion and dissemination take place, sometimes of statements, sometimes of
visibilities.56

Content and expression, or the visible and the articulable, can thus be related to seeing
and speaking as two different modes of dispersion. Accordingly, seeing and speaking have their
own internal differences, which can be related neither to a complete whole, nor to a pre-
established subject. As such, content and expression are not static forms but constantly caught
up in different movements, constituting a world that is in an ongoing process of becoming,
where becoming applies to the meaning of objects as well as to subject-positions. However, in
the attempts to capture movements of becoming, expression and content can also take on more
established forms by constituting a “collective assemblage of enunciation”.57 The relationship
between expression and content is thereby formalized in a certain way and given a specific
character in the social field. Language is then given a purely pragmatic function to articulate
the relationship between expression and content. However, this does not mean that language
should be understood simply as the means for communication or information. Not even the
formalization of language comes down to communication or information, since expression
never re-presents the content. Trying to combine content and expression, the visible and the
articulable, the formalization of language is merely an attempt to bridge the unbridgeable gap
or the “non-relation” between their respective forms.58

So, how can Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas about the social function of language be used in
order to think further about the production of “events”? Or more specifically, how can these
ideas be used in order to think about the relationship between the singularity of events and the
“event”? It has already been noted that the “event” can be analysed as the outcome of a process
of actualization. But in addition to this it can be argued that the “event” also has to be filled
with a particular “content”. This content can for example be related to ideas about what has
happened in a particular moment in time and how that moment is attributed to the corporeal
presence of a body, where the body might be an individual as well as a collective. But it can
also be linked to the function of the order-word, which states that no longer are things the way
they used to be and so “we” have changed as well. Something has happened but we do not
know exactly what or how to describe it. Its singularity escapes any pre-fixed notions of a
general type of “events”. It requires a response, a form of expression that can establish a new
form of content. In this context, the order-word emerges as a function that seeks to bring the
two forms together and thereby establish a new form of content that eventually becomes
familiar to us and that can be related to in a certain way.

To illustrate this it is useful to return to the example of “9/11” as a “breaking point”. In the
production of this “event” a multiplicity of movements such as planes flying into buildings,
people falling, and people running on the streets without any sense of direction is eventually
reduced to a determinable and complete whole. This happens in many different ways but
arguably the most dominant one is by referring to a “terrorist attack” and “an act of war”. These
expressions were also used frequently by President George W. Bush in his many speeches
during the weeks following September 11, 2001. In those speeches Bush put a lot of emphasis
on the significance of what had happened, highlighting its uniqueness as well as its impact on
the “American people” and the rest of the “world”. For example, in his “Address to a Joint
Session of Congress and the American People”, on September 20, 2001, he made the following
description of what had happened:

On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our
country. Americans have known wars – but for the past 136 years, they have
been wars on foreign soil, except for one Sunday in 1941. Americans have
known the casualties of war – but not at the center of a great city on a peaceful
morning. Americans have known surprise attacks – but never before on
thousands of civilians. All of this was brought upon us in a single day – and
night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.59

Apart from using the expression “act of war” Bush is also suggesting that this “act” is
fundamentally different from what “Americans have known” about previous wars and attacks.
And because of its impact, it is also made clear that this “event” has changed both America and

10
the world. Americans must therefore acknowledge that “we’ve entered into a new day”60, with
a new kind of threat against our everyday lives. A transformation has thus taken place, a
transformation that is primarily expressed by the ways in which it has affected “America” or
the “American people” as a collective “body”. This particular transformation, even though it
obviously has an intimate connection with what has happened, can neither be reduced to the
actions of bodies, nor to an essence of those bodies. This means, for example, that it cannot
simply be explained by the actions of planes flying into the World Trade Center or the mixture
of bodies interacting on the streets. Rather, the incorporeal transformation that happens here
has to be linked to the ways in which transformation is attributed to the body of the “American
people” or the bodies of American “citizens”.

One of the main effects of this transformation is that “we” are expected to relate to what has
happened in a particular way. Accordingly, the impersonal and pre-individual movements of
what happens to the people involved, as well as to the ones watching it on TV, are translated
into something personal through the inscription of a collective point of view. Within this
translation, movements of planes crashing into buildings, buildings collapsing, people falling
and people running on the streets suddenly become part of something to which they now
belong, a homogenous series that links different elements or cases together. Images are
repeated endlessly, as are the texts on the TV-screens, eventually making the connection
between the images and the texts seem natural.

In the singularity of events, however, there is no such connection. Images and words do not
seem to bear any kind of resemblance. What is seen cannot be articulated in a satisfactory way
as words suddenly become inadequate when trying to make sense of what has happened. There
is a crack between words and images, and between content and expression, which leaves the
reality of what has happened in the background, as a paradox or as something overwhelming
that cannot fit with our social and conceptual frameworks. But for that very reason it can also
be understood as the most real there is, precisely because it has not yet been actualized or
translated into a state of affairs. Still remaining in the background, the virtual real is the
potential of what has not yet been determined or articulated. It hides in the background as an
unanswered question, or as something that has not yet found a way to become actualized. This
is the impersonal side of the event, which disembody the event and thereby forces the illusion
of a superior “I” to disappear in a cloud of uncertainty, leaving only the impersonal and pre-
individual instants.

There are, then, two sides of the event. Whereas one is actualized in a state of affairs the other
is impersonal and figures only virtually. In this context, attempts to produce the “event” as an
independently existing object or a coherent whole can be interpreted as a way of trying to
resolve the ambiguous relationship between these two sides of the event. And inherent in this
process there is, then, a formalization of expression, which, by assuming a direct
correspondence to the content of the “event” amounts to sameness and identity. However,
because there is no direct resemblance or correspondence between expression and content the
“event” can never be fully determined, regardless of how many attempts there are to do so. This
could perhaps give us some hope since it suggests that there is always the possibility that a new
understanding of the “event” will emerge, an understanding that breaks with the dominant way
of framing the “event” as this particular “thing”.

In Deleuze and Guattari’s semiotics this kind of resistance to a determinable form of being can
be linked to what they refer to as the “revolutionary potentiality of the order-word”. This
potentiality involves, not so much an ability to escape the order-word, as “to elude the death-
sentence it envelops”.61 It is therefore important not to treat the order-word as definite or real,
but only as an undetermined “actual”. Again, the actual is never “real”. The only “real” is the
virtual, which expresses the potentiality of something new to emerge: “‘Potential’ and ‘virtual’
are not at all in opposition to ‘real’; on the contrary, the reality of the creative, or the placing-
in-continuous variation of variables, is in opposition only to the actual determination of their
constant relations.”62

The potentiality of the order-word can thus be said to exist within its own variations. This
means that instead of merely understanding the order-word as a function of language that has
the power to formalize content and expression it must also be understood in relation to the

11
potentiality of drawing out new connections and new variations. In this sense, it might for
example be possible to show how the connections between images and words break down and
thereby alter the dominant views on how they are supposed to fit together as parts of one and
the same thing. It might also be possible to show how the paradox of sense, expressed by the
uncertainty of how to feel or how to react, disrupts the perceptions of how “we” are supposed
recognise the meaning of the “event” against the background of a “common sense” truth.

In this context, the role of philosophy is to experiment with concepts or invent new ones, in
order to show how it is possible to draw out new connections and new variations of expression
and content. By doing so the aim is to counter-effectuate events, releasing their suppressed
singularities from particular actualizations and from particular understandings of the “event” as
one and the same “thing”. Moreover, in doing this the aim should be to retain the ambiguous
relationship between the personal and the impersonal, which often gets lost in the production of
the “event” as an object or a whole.

However, the implication of the potential to refigure the content of the “event” could also be
said to have a different and perhaps more violent effect. Because the content of the “event”
lacks a static form it is also possible to change it for different purposes and in order to
legitimize various political decisions and actions to be taken. There is a politics of the “event”,
which seeks to inscribe meaning on what has happened by making it into a seemingly coherent
whole and by placing it in accordance with a particular narrative. This kind politics of the
“event” does not depend on “representing” something that is already present but can rather be
understood as a way of actualizing and thereby producing the meaning of the “event”. As
Patton notes, “event attributions do not simply describe or report pre-existing events, they help
to actualize particular events in the social field. That is why politics frequently takes the form
of struggle over the appropriate description of events.”63

Actualization can thus be seen as an integral part of the politics of producing the “event”.
Hence, the politics of the “event” is not so much a politics of representation as a politics of
creation and “experimentation”. 64 According to this experimentation there is nothing pre-
determined about the ways in which an “event” will be produced. Lacking a pre-determined
goal as well as a fixed content the production of “events” is always filled with a degree of
uncertainty and ambiguity regarding its content as well as direction. “9/11”, for example, has
no concrete being but only a becoming, according to which the content of this supposed “event”
can change and take on new forms.

Moreover, the politics of the “event” should not be seen as external to the broader political
imaginaries in which they are located. Rather, the production of “events” can be seen as an
essential part of creating those imaginaries. For example, when the “event” is produced as a
breaking point that separates what has been from what is to come it is the “event” that can be
said to provide the necessary coordinates upon which the creation of a new political imaginary
is based. Accordingly, the ways in which a particular “event” is produced can also be said to
have crucial implications for how those imaginaries are produced. For example, to talk about
“9/11” as an “attack against freedom” and an “act of war” has to be seen as crucial in shaping
the political imaginary informed by a “war on terror”. “9/11” is not just some abstract
background against which this imaginary plays out but has to be seen as playing an active and
crucial role in creating and re-creating that imaginary. In this way, the production of “events”
can be said to have an effect, not only on how to relate oneself to “what has happened”, but
also on the limits that are imposed on thought within a political imaginary, constituting the
frameworks in which we are supposed to act as political subjects.

Conclusion

When thinking about the production of “events” in terms of a becoming of the “event” the main
point is to understand the “event” in relation to different processes and movements. These
processes and movements have neither a pre-determined goal, nor can they be said to signify
something that is static or fully present. Moreover, their aim is not to uncover something that is
hidden, but rather to create and produce, drawing their power from the virtual and the
singularity of the event. The latter is a productive force, but it also has the potential to disrupt

12
that which has been produced. As such, the “event” is never static or definite, but always part
of an ongoing process of becoming.

In this way, the content of the “event” remains open, which means that a new form of
expression always has the potential to intervene and thereby refigure the content. Such an
intervention might take on different forms. The main task, however, should be to avoid getting
stuck in a representational illusion that is produced by the dominant political frameworks for
understanding the reality of what has happened. To do so, the aim must be to create new
concepts that can liberate thought from the limits of representation and the limits that are
constantly produced and re-produced in the politics of the “event”. As Patton concludes his
essay: “A practice of philosophy which would be ‘worthy’ of the event does not simply
respond to social events as they appear: it creates new concepts in the attempt to give
expression to the underlying problems or pure events.”65

This relates, then, to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea about philosophy, the aim of which is to
become “worthy” of the event. It is an aim that can be seen as increasingly important given the
significance of “events” in the discourses and practices that shape current political imaginaries.
The radical potential of Deleuze’s philosophy in this context might be explored in many
different ways. But it would have to start with some kind of appreciation of the ways in which
the singularity of events and the politics of producing “events” interact with one another, and
that separating one from the other is not in any way easy or straightforward.

NOTES
1
I would like to thank Susanna Karlsson and one anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
2
Paul Patton, “The World Seen From Within: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Events”, Theory & Event, 1:1, (1997).
3
Ibid., paragraph 2.
4
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 334.
5
Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues II: Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam, (London:
Continuum, 2006), p. vi.
6
Ibid., p. vi.
7
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. by Constantin V. Boundas, (London:
Continuum, 2004), p. 172.
8
Ibid., p. 188.
9
Ibid., p. 73.
10
Ibid., p. 189.
11
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi,
(London: Continuum, 2004), p. 324.
12
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 8.
13
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 262.
14
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 159.
15
Ibid., p. 172.
16
Ibid., p. 164.
17
Claire Colebrook, Philosophy and Post-structuralist Theory: from Kant to Deleuze, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2005), p. 175.
18
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 8.
19
Claire Colebrook, “The Space of Man: On the Specificity of Affect”, in Deleuze and Space, I. Buchanan and G.
Lambert (eds.), (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 191.
20
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 23.
21
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 419.
22
John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections, (London: The MIT Press 2000), p. 67.
23
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 305.
24
Ibid., p. 28.
25
Ibid., p. 199.
26
According to Deleuze, “multiplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organisation
belonging to the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system”, Difference and Repetition, p.
230. This idea of multiplicity can also be linked to Deleuze’s concept of difference “in itself”, according to which there is
nothing essential that binds differences together in order to form a unity.
27
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 89.
28
Ibid., p. 73.
29
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 264.
30
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 191.
31
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, (London:
Verso, 1994), p. 112.
32
Ibid., p. 160.
33
Ibid., p. 159.
34
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 182.

13
 35
Ibid., p. 172.
36
Ibid., p. 172.
37
Ibid., p. 172.
38
Ibid., p. 74.
39
Ibid., p. 73.
40
Ibid., p. 133.
41
Ibid., pp. 88-89.
42
“[T]he event is pure immanence of what is not actualized or of what remains indifferent to actualization, since its reality
does not depend upon it. The event is immaterial, incorporeal, unlivable: pure reserve.” Deleuze and Guattari, What is
Philosophy?, p. 156.
43
Ibid., p. 159.
44
Ibid., p. 160.
45
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 172.
46
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, (Durham & London: Duke University Press,
2002), p. 231.
47
Ibid., p. 216.
48
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 91.
49
Here, the “body” can refer not only to individual bodies but also to for example society or classes.
50
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 95.
51
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, (New York: Routledge Classics, 2002), p. 10.
52
“Precisely because content, like expression, has a form of its own, one can never assign the form of expression the function
of simply representing, describing, or averring a corresponding content: there is neither correspondence nor conformity.”
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 95.
53
“Content is not a signified nor expression a signifier; rather, both are variables of the assemblage.” Ibid., p. 101.
54
Ibid., p. 96.
55
Ibid., p. 74.
56
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand, (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 51.
57
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 89.
58
Deleuze, Foucault, p. 90.
59
President George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People”, September 20, 2001,
available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html, accessed on November 30, 2007.
60
President George W. Bush, “Remarks by the President at Photo Opportunity with House and Senate Leadership”,
September 19, 2001, available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010919-8.html, accessed on
November 30, 2007.
61
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 121.
62
Ibid., p. 109.
63
Patton, ‘The World Seen From Within’, paragraph 7.
64
According to Deleuze and Guattari: “Politics is by no means an apodictic science. It proceeds by experimentation, grouping
in the dark, injection, withdrawal, advances, retreats.” A Thousand Plateaus, p. 509.
65
Patton, “The World Seen From Within”, paragraph 21.

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