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ON THE LIMITS OF THE EVENT
Habit, Structure, Event: recent theory would privilege the later concept over the former two. As concepts, habit and structure suggest fixity, rigidity, inattentiveness, unconsciousness-certainly not the stuff of which radical political transformation is usually made. If anything, habit and structure are typically understood to be akin to ideology. Thus, Pierre Bourdieu articulates his concept of habitus as an embodied conception of ideology in which a person's class position is marked by a series of unconscious dispositions, habits, and beliefs. Similarly, Althusser invokes the idea of structure to theorize the workings of capitalism and the reproduction of its conditions of production. Event, as a concept, on the other hand is transformational, sexy, revolutionary. It is the unpredictable, the new, the contingent, that which gives us hope in the face of capitalism's overwhelming systematicity. Certainly this is how the concept has functioned in the work of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek.1 Yet, what are the conceptual limitations that structure the concept of the event itself? What if its alterity to all structure, which makes it excellent for negating the present, also limits its ability to imagine the future. What if the emphasis on the event's novelty suggests that the concept is haunted by the very forms of capitalist innovation and novelty that it is designed to negate? What if our refusal to think beyond the event is symptomatic of the capitalist colonization of the future that Maurizio Lazzarato argues is central to the logic of financialization and debt?
If the answer to these questions is affirmative, it does not negate the event so much as mark its limits as a concept. The event is thus both necessary and insufficient. A genuine left alternative will need to think what the anti-capitalist or post-capitalist future holds after the dynamic negation produced by the eruption of the event. In doing so, we may find ourselves returning to those very unsexy terms that the theory of the event seemed to negate: habit and structure. Such is the gambit of the following essay. Rather than merely figurations of containment, ideology, and constraint, habit and structure can also be concepts around which we can organize a post-capitalist or anti-capitalist future.
IN SEARCH OF AN EXIT
Empire and...