Putting the Event in its Place: Territories, Bodies, Thresholds

Abstract

The purpose of our paper is to re-conceive the event and the site of the event as a relational environment of immanence occupied by invention in its processual emergence using the work of Deleuze and Guatarri, Massumi, Simondon and Whitehead. The event is usually understood as an activity “taking place” in a bounded container—a room—explicated in terms of Euclidian geometry and a Newtonian conception of space and time. This place within absolute space expresses potential for activity where naming its purpose conditions its teleological intent and functionally defines the event it can contain. Instead, we propose a conception of the space of the event as the locus of inclusion created by neighbourhoods of relational participation as process. This allows us to understand the event as a dynamic cohesion composed of the inter-penetration of immanent co-arisings of territorialities and bodies which constitute an individuated spacetime. Territorialities are understood as active, conditioned expanses of relation that go beyond the internalism/externalism debate: they are mappings of fuzzy-bounded, gradated zones of relational intensities. Bodies (human and non-human alike) are no longer pre-constituted static entities mechanically interacting with each other; they become dynamic individuations of a reciprocal, recursive relational causality within fields of experience. At the intersection of overlapping territorializations and bodies, thresholds must be crossed for the operative-self-solidarity to take place. Thus, the event becomes an immanent, coherent whole, where the process of coming-to-being requires a spatio-temporal convergence, a contemporaneous coming together of territories and bodies within the associated milieu.