(R. Williams 19 7 2: 128). There is no last word, only infinite becoming and
constant reactivation.
The surprisingness of the event
But these are little more than a string of slogans. So what can be said in more
detail? To begin with, I want to argue that this is a world bowling along, in which
decisions have to be made for the moment, by the moment.^6 This is a moment-
ary world. It follows that this is a world which must be acted into. This is not a
contemplative world (though some of its practices perhaps more than in past times
value contemplative aspects). And as a world which is being acted into it produces
effects that must then be accounted for in a never-ending chain of circumstances.
The corollary of such a depiction is that this is a world which is howling into
the unknown. But it is not, therefore, a world of despair. As Bernstein (199 4 ) and
Morson (199 4 ) make clear, a world which is not ‘foreshadowed’ (that is, in which
the consequences of actions are known and time is therefore closed) is a world of
radical possibility, in which each actual event lies amidst many alternatives, in which
possibilities exceed actualities. There is, in other words, what Bernstein and
Morson call a ‘sideshadowed’ middle ‘realm’ of unactualized possibles
that could have happened even if they did not. Things could have been
different from the way they were, there were real alternatives to the present
we know, and the future admits of various paths. By focusing on the middle
realm of possibility, by exploring its relation to actual events, and by attending
to the fact that things could have been different, sideshadowing deepens our
sense of the openness of time.
(Morson 199 4 : 6)Or, to put it another way:
in Bakhtin’s terms, we might say that events must have eventness, they must
not be the utterly predictable outcome of earlier events, but must some-
how have something else to them, some ‘surplus’ that endows them with
‘surprisingness’. Otherwise people are turned into ‘piano keys or organ stops’
as the underground man writes.
(Morson 199 4 : 9)In other words, the event can be connected to potential, possibility, experi-
mentation. This is not, however, to proffer a naive vitalism. The potential of events
is always constrained. Events must take place within networks of power which have
been constructed precisely in order to ensure iterability. But what is being claimed
is that the event does not end with these bare facts. The capacity to surprise may
be latent, but it is always present because ‘in a becoming, one term does not
become another, rather, each term encounters the other and the becoming is
something between the two, outside the two’ (D.W. Smith 199 7 : xxx).^7
114 Part II