12 Events and their construction

In this chapter, we will analyze the role played by political technologies in the construction of political events (Clough, 2000, p. 189-190). In order to develop this problematic, we will begin by analyzing methodological problems. Derrida’s concept of the supplement that opens this chapter, draws attention to the incompleteness that’s at the heart of the recognizability of phenomena, which is in need of exterior supports to reach perceptual awareness. And more radically, Derrida thinks what we may assume to be self-evident, immediately available, in short, present, is in fact the very supplement of the ideas and devices we bring to access situations. The quality of presence, then, is the supplement of supplements.

For political analysis which carries the weight of inhabiting a space of thinking where the very tools of thinking are questioned because of their entanglements with political structures, it is a methodological necessity to keep an ear out for subtle, and perhaps, unwarranted naturalization of power-ridden discursive categories—e.g., American population—through their reproduction in scholarly analysis (Abrams, 1988). This collapse or merging between administrative and scholarly categories most often happens around the borders and definition of populations. If political reality, for instance, in terms of different centers or nodes of power from which power effects disseminate, do not neatly correspond to the structure of a centralized administrative body, upon what architecture of power can scholarly research ground itself to meet and communicate with its reader? Is it always necessary to refer to networks of power in the negative as the other of the state? One answer to this conundrum is critical commentary. The very critical elaboration of terms of analysis in the process of their utilization offers a pedagogical as well as political function, as the inner tension of building blocks is not kept away from view but rendered integral to the analysis.

While after the 1990s it has become commonplace to refer to non-governmental organizations as major actors in international political theory even in its neorealist paradigm where the nation-state with its national interest is still seen as the definitive factor of the international system, the dynamic chart of networked power is still eclipsed in the primary understanding of the political map, as based on discrete sovereign states. What’s urgent for political theory is to de-link the notion of sovereignty in order to account for its ad-hoc manifestations. This performative character of sovereignty—that eschews formalization insofar as circumstantial moves fulfill a sovereign role in excess of nation-states—manifests most often during the making of the event of a pandemic. Transnational circulation of not only the virus, but also strategies of containment as well as public feelings digesting what’s formulated as a public health crisis, invite the conceptual capacities (Clough & Issevenler, 2016) of the notion of the event, whereby political geography and populations are constantly, in different conjunctures, reconfigured and redefined.

We must begin with a philosophical uncertainty—not-knowing in the Socratic style, where the absence of knowledge opens up a space for rethinking one’s assumptions in place of practical familiarity with the subject-matter and in place of an aesthetic sense of conviction and attachment to the images as a reflection of reality.

What is often appears to us as the most naturally present phenomenon—for instance, the objective reality of the pandemic—begs a differentiating questioning of its coming into being. The reformulation of objectivity as an event serves this purpose. As media-events, the most relevant qualities of political phenomena are the fact that they operate through exposure and, in particular, are disseminated across populations with great speed. This move’s usefulness for the contemporary media-saturated environment is explained by sociologist Patricia Clough:

This problem of the graphicness of history is stated by cultural critic, Walter Benjamin, in his reflections on the use of historical materialism as a social scientific methodology. The accessibility of historical knowledge depends on what we do with our given material, data, perceptions, and experiences. Images do not state the truth as long as the frame through which they are seen, singled out and put under analytic light is not also part of the research process.

In this chapter, we will deconstruct the event of the global pandemic (2020-2023) in several registers with a focus on relations of power. Drawing from process philosophy, we will propose a performative conception of power that eschews generalization insofar as incompressible data enters into every instantiation of the assemblages that make up political realities. Our style in this chapter will be eminently deconstructive in order to stay close to the sense of ontological incompleteness of any phenomenon insofar as phenomenal character is necessarily imbued with the qualities of specific theoretical apparatuses in each instance—in sharp contrast to a secure sense of presence that undergirds positivistic and representational sociopolitical research.

Derrida uses the concept of the supplement to draw attention to the ways in which presence always requires an extra but necessary component that allows communicability and an image of the complete message. In this chapter, turning towards what’s often represented as a case of public health, we will offer critical commentaries on biopolitical and post-biopolitical apparatuses and gestures, performances of sovereignty and the transformation of mourning as supplements through which we will navigate the borders of the event. These explorations will contribute to a non-totalized, perhaps a cubist, picture of the pandemic as an event.

Events, technologies and political methods

From the beginning of this work on the premises of political sociology, we kept open the problematic relationship between theory and data, thinking and being, politics and society, where each term presupposes the other, while also without always making it impossible to sequence their effect on one another in different contexts. The goal of deconstruction is not necessarily to drive research to a dead-end but to open up the possibility of reordering congealed distributions. Thus, instead of thinking that knowledge helps us represent the world, we might consider that ways of knowing prefigure what we may experience as real. Conversely, events may have such power over categories of knowledge that a crack may open in the systems of mainstream or critical thinking.

Most fundamentally, political thinking has to reckon with how categories of thought do in fact lead to radical changes in being and not only in its representation (Schmitt, 1956). If time is an inherent quality of being, what emerges as a consequence of time might affect the very nature of what’s possible. Political philosophies and mathematical ideas lead to unforeseen possibilities, they incite processes unintended even by their progenitors. The state preserves socio-cultural activity while the very emergence of the state reflects socio-economic processes of wealth extraction and accumulation. Therefore, deconstruction means both the blurring of the given orders between ideas and realities, as well as the dynamic re-sequencing of such orders.

While in this work we offered field-work as the fertile ground from which to substantiate and challenge theoretical claims and mainstream orthodoxies (Greenhouse, Mertz, Warren; 2002), the very demarcation of the field, which is supposed to offer a chance of stabilization, is inevitably haunted by theoretical postulates that draws out its limits. In this chapter, to offer the deconstructive event analysis as a political sociological methodology, we will draw on the ethnography of scenes and compositions of reals (Stewart, 2014),offering it as a counter-hegemonic writing method that threads—perhaps like an algorithmic timeline—a serializing temporality whereby form and content are in constant interplay (Issevenler, 2023).

If the ethnography’s self-criticism led only to a move from the study of supposedly non-historical nonwestern cultures to all-encompassing historical time to document truth-effects of specific relations of power, this would leave extra-temporal the apparatus that makes it possible to think historical time. This set of apparatus stands in excess of any periodization while being presupposed and called for historical determinations. Any sense of unity regarding the research field—which is usually framed thanks to the embodied presence of the researcher during an extended period—any sense of relatedness of observations and aggregation of insights derived from the study of a specific culture is dependent upon prior affordances of media that offers a platform and conditions how multiplicity is gathered (Heidegger, 1977). This transcendental yet temporal function of media complicates the safe-grounding of research in the field, as a field cannot be defined irrespective of the apparatus.

In Benedict Anderson’s pioneering materialist, media-based study of the maintenance of national consciousness and sensibilities, national culture does not precede the technology that allows its circulation, expression, and production. It is thanks to cultural technologies such as newspapers, periodicals, museums, maps—and, more recently: radio, television, and the internet—that a community is experienced as a group in the subjectivity of its members who do not directly meet one another. The media-induced sense of simultaneity performs as a group-forming function (Anderson, 1991).

Thus, in this chapter, the digital being of the pandemic is analyzed not in terms of materials that provide a representation about it and which can be analyzed as discourses; rather, these supplemental technologies are taken to be constitutive of its very evental  character. The theory of event and the historical/technical environment in which it has been taken by critics will be discussed alongside ethnographic vignettes drawn from digital timelines (mainly X/Twitter) as the moving cite of the observations.

Painting new political genres

These instances include moralized graphic visualizations of national case numbers, new genres of political performances by scholars and official bodies alike, humorous takes on different class receptions of the quarantine, the reports of postponed depression among medical workers, the use of the military as an agile logistical capacity, and news reports on the impossible choices that were made by paramedics. In this regard, experimental anthropologist Stewart’s (post-)ethnographic writing is one of the main sources to format and serialize this theme. In her writing of an ethnography of scenes which include street and website views, public/ordinary affects in their transiency, and their non-totalized form are explored. Ethnographic writing is not driven by representational authority but continues the pursuit of lines of emergence as in her mourning-essay entitled New England Red. In this essay, “Red” pulls together strands of becoming across human and nonhuman geographies. The space of writing offers a sensory yet non-fixed vantage point of inquiry in the context of an impossible return to the original connection to maternal environment (Stewart, 2015). Thus, nonrepresentational commentary on ethnographic material produces a surplus that is not a substitute for an observed reality but a critical expansion of it.

Works Cited

Anderson, B. R. O’G. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Rev. ed.). Verso.

Benjamin, W. (1999). The arcades project (H. Eiland & K. McLaughlin, Trans.). Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Clough, P. T. (2000). Autoaffection: Unconscious thought in the age of teletechnology. University of Minnesota Press.

Clough, P. T., & İşsevenler, T. C. (2016). Worlding worlds with words in these times of datafication. Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 5(4), 6–16. https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2016.5.4.6

Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1967)

Greenhouse, C. J., Mertz, E., & Warren, K. B. (Eds.). (2002). Ethnography in unstable places: Everyday lives in contexts of dramatic political change. Duke University Press.

Issevenler, T. (2023). Ashes to ashes, digit to digit: The nonhuman temporality of Facebook’s Feed. Subjectivity, 30(4), 373–393. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-023-00173-8

Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary affects. Duke University Press.

Stewart, K. (2015). New England Red. (Ed.) Philip Vannini. Non-representational methodologies. New York: Taylor & Francis.

Schmitt, C. (2009). Hamlet or Hecuba: The intrusion of the time into the play (D. Pan & J. R. Rust, Trans.). Telos Press Publishing. (Original work published 1956)