Why am I looking at the event?
To begin rather vaguely I want a concept of situation. During my thesis I have done fieldwork in situations where very different knowledge systems, conceptual systems and metaphysics come together – specifically the metaphysical systems of the Yolŋu people of North East Arnhem Land and the metaphysical system of the Western academy. Each of these situations have entailed very specific circumstances and specific practices – research workshops, fixing cars, teaching children are some.
Throughout my research I have read much about fieldwork, research method, knowledge making and multiple knowledges, many of which argue for some sort of sensitivity to situatedness and specificity and I am trying to draw this into a thread: Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges, Katherine Pyne-Addelsons moral passages, Bruno Latour’s collectives, Helen Verran’s microworlds, Gille’s Deleuze’s events, Lorraine Code’s ecological communities, John Law’s method-assemblges, Ann Marie Mol’s waiting rooms and work benches. I’m not sure if I can draw a thread, but I feel they all have something to say about knowledge work as a practice which is at once philosophical, active, local, multiple, ethical, and generative. They also all relate to the question of empiricism: that knowledge including concepts and conceptual framings, to some extent, come from experience.
So I am beginning with Deleuze’s event. I begin here as I am out to be surprised, shaken into thinking in new ways. I have hardly read Deleuze and have the impression that he is trying something that strikes thinkers as very unfamiliar. Here’s a quick list of what I have read (and I must thank Glen at Event Mechanics for putting me onto this list).
By Gilles Deleuze – Negotiations, Logic of Sense, Difference and Repetition
By Michel Foucault – Discourse on Language, Theatrum Philosopicum
and I had Manuel De Landa’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy on my shelf so I flipped through that too.
What have a learnt about the event?
Is what ways is the event unique?
In what ways have I possible come across the event before?
Hi Christian, very cool! For your purposes also checkout Gomart and Henion’s ‘event-network theory’ in the edited collection ANT and After, also Latour’s Reassembling the Social (where he valorises Gomart & Henion’s approach).
Gomart and Henion (1999) ‘A sociology of attachment: music amateurs, drug users’ Law & Hassard eds. Actor Network Theory and after.
“They also all relate to the question of empiricism: that knowledge including concepts and conceptual framings, to some extent, come from experience.”
In my dissertation I worked hard to come up with a rigorous account of ‘know how’ within car enthusiast circles as a practical knowledge that is formed within events of enthusiasm. The key point here is the interplay between knowledge acquired as the enthusiast body is mobilised into action through the basic enthusiast event of translating the contingency of a problem (something is wrong, broken, etc and I don’t know how to fix it or I don’t know exactly what the problem is, ie an intuitive half-grasped symptomology) into the contingency of a challenge (I don’t know what the problem is, but I’ll fix it; I do know what the problem is and I am fixing it). There is an affective movement here from inaction to action and from the open multiplicity of an unknown problem to the open multiplicity of a known challenge. By mobilising one’s enthusiast body you increase your capacity to act.
Hi Glen,
thanks for your extra references – I’ll look into them. Sorry it’s been a while to get back to you. Re your dissertation, I think I’ll need some more thinking time to fully appreciate your abstract. I spent much time working on cars in Arnhem Land during fieldwork and at some point I’ll write about it. At present I was helpfully reminded to think of my four post as concepts lying around just like tools on a dirty cloth next to car you are working on, to be picked when needed. Hopefully have some more car stuff for you soon.
Christian