William Connolly writes at The Contemporary Condition on "the politics of the event." What he's after is the challenge of incorporating nonlinear dynamical models into social science. Read the whole thing here.
My two cents, offered in my Massumi/DeLanda/Deleuze idiom: I think Connolly hits upon crucial distinctions among different senses of event, or maybe, between events and Events.
At first we have to distinguish 1) events as changes in a system's behavioral repertoire -- a move from one behavior pattern and another already established though momentarily latent (e.g., moving from a walk to a trot to a run) and 2) Events as changes in the repertoire itself.
And then we have another distinction with the realm of Events, between 2a) changes in the repertoire that are characteristic of systems of a certain type (an infant learns to stand, then to walk, then to run) -- let's call this "learning" or "development" -- and 2b) changes that introduce a behavior pattern never before seen -- let's call this "novelty" or "creativity" or "revolution."
I think then that all these are relations of virtual and actual, but with important differences: 1 = virtual qua latent; 2a = virtual qua developmental potential; 2b = virtual qua resource of creativity.
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