Event+(Hubbell)


 * Event**

The event is the singular fact or phenomenon, which is problematic in communication because of dissemination, citation, and originality.
 * Overview**

Derrida uses “event” to refer to texts: 1) “Without exhausting all the implications and the entire structure of an ‘event’ such as this one, an effort that would require extended preliminary analysis, the conditions that I have just recalled seem to be evident; and those who doubt it need only consult our program to be convinced. (p. 2)
 * Explication**

To refer to performances: 1) “I take things up here from the perspective of positive possibility and not simply as instances of failure or infelicity: would a performative utterance be possible if a citational doubling [//doublure//] did not come to split and dissociate from itself the pure singularity of the event?” (p. 17) 2) “You cannot deny that there are also performatives that succeed, and one has to account for them: meetings are called to order (Paul Ricoeur did as much yesterday); people say: ‘I pose a question’; they bet, challenge, christen ships, and sometimes even marry. It would seem that such events have occurred. And even if only one had taken place only once, we would still be obliged to account for it.” (p. 17) 3) “…the long list of ‘infelicities’ which in their variety may affect the performative event always comes back to an element in what Austin calls the total context.” (p. 14)

And both at once: 1) “Proposing a text, as is again here the case, a writing and signatures, whose //performance// (structure, event, context, etc.) defines at every moment the oppositions of concepts or of values, the rigor of those oppositional limits that speech act theory endorses by virtue of its very axiomatics; offering the performance of a text which, by raising in passing the question of truth (beyond Austin's intermittent impulses in this direction) does not //simply// succumb to its jurisdiction and remains, at this point, qua textual performance, irreducible to ‘verdictive’ (as Austin might say) sentences of the type.” (p. 43)

The event is problematic because of its iterability. Citations are evidence of iterability, and events can be iterable because they follow a generic structure, which is itself iterable (see quote 1). Evidence of iterability in events also comes from an event’s citations of language (see quote 1). Another iterability is apparent when an event is disseminated (see quote 2). Even the attempt to avoid an event can be an iteration of the event (see quote 3). 1) “We should first be clear on what constitutes the status of ‘occurrence’ or the eventhood of an event that entails in its allegedly present and Singular emergence the intervention of an utterance [//enonce//] that in itself can be only repetitive or citational in its structure, or rather, since those two words may lead to confusion: iterable.” (p. 17-8) 2) “The //sur-number [surnombre] of La dissemination// already marked this pluralization that fractures the event, even of the unique, while at the same time causing it to //occur// [//arriver//].” (p. 108-9) 3) “The speech acts of the //Reply// do their utmost, apparently, to insure that this confrontation will not have taken place and, moreover, that it shall not (ever) take place, or at least not quite; and yet they produce it, this confrontation that they sought to avoid, that they declare to be non-existent without being able to stop themselves from participating in it, from confirming and developing the event through the very gesture of withdrawing from it.” (p. 35)

Since events are iterable, their singularity and originality are false. The iterable event cannot have a clear intention “animating” it because this intentionality cannot be present in the entirety of the event, i.e., the intentionality of an event is an illusion of the false originality of the event. The originality of the event is a predetermined structure for Austin and Searle, evidence that their unproblematized belief in events leads them to find the existence of such events: “By no means do I draw the conclusion that there is no relative specificity of effects of consciousness, or of effects of speech (as opposed to writing in the traditional sense), that there is no performative effect, no effect of ordinary language, no effect of presence or of discursive event (speech act). It is simply that those effects do not exclude what is generally opposed to them, term by term; on the contrary, they presuppose it, in an asymmetrical way, as the general space of their possibility.” (p. 19)

Event and context together, in Derrida’s communication, present significant problems for the methodologies of discourse and textual analysis. McGee offers a way to deal with these problems in rhetorical analysis, a subset of textual analysis.
 * Discussion**

McGee’s (1990) correction for the methodological problem is to acknowledge that the object of analysis is at best a “fragment” of text and context. The fragment draws text and context together in a tenuous relationship while admitting in a Derridean sense that the fragment cannot be completely known.

Derrida, J. (1988). //Limited Inc//. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP. McGee, M. C. (1990). Text, context, and the fragmentation of contemporary culture. //Western Journal of Speech Communication 54//(Summer). Pp. 274-289.
 * References**

Biesecker, B. (1999). Rethinking the rhetorical situation from within the thematic of difference. In //Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader//, J. L. Lucaites, C. M. Condit, & S. Caudill, eds. New York, NY: Guilford Press. pp. 232-246. [A treatment of rhetorician's discussions of context and agency in conversation with Derrida's concept of difference]
 * Further Reading**

Iterability Signature Context
 * See Also:**
 * Communication**
 * Deconstruction**