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Overview
What Is an Event? ranges across several disciplines, systematically analyzing the ways that events emerge, take shape, gain momentum, flow, and even get bogged down. As an exploration of how events are constructed out of ruptures, it provides a mechanism for understanding eventful forms and flows, from the micro-level of individual life events to the macro-level of historical revolutions, contemporary terrorist attacks, and financial crises. Wagner-Pacifici takes a close look at a number of cases, both real and imagined, through the reports, personal narratives, paintings, iconic images, political posters, sculptures, and novels they generate and through which they live on. What is ultimately at stake for individuals and societies in events, Wagner-Pacifici argues, are identities, loyalties, social relationships, and our very experiences of time and space. What Is an Event? provides a way for us all—as social and political beings living through events, and as analysts reflecting upon them—to better understand what is at stake in the formations and flows of the events that mark and shape our lives.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226439815 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
What Is an Event?
By Robin Wagner-Pacifici
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-43981-5
CHAPTER 1
Political Semiosis
It might seem easy to determine if we are inside or outside an event. Maybe we think that if we learn about a particular incident via several layers of mediation (the telephone, the radio, the television, the computer screen, the smartphone screen), it means that we are outside the event. Maybe we think that if we are physically distant from the site of rupture (if there is a localized site), it means we are outside. Maybe we think that if we are distant in time from the moment(s) of rupture, it means we are outside. But these determinations are neither easy to make nor clear. Our actual relation to an event can never be assumed or taken for granted.
Like everything else about events, the relationships of individuals, institutions, and collectivities to them are made. And these entities have relative degrees of power in determining their relations to events. Available categories of instigator, perpetrator, participant, victim, witness, and spectator are useful — to a degree. But these categorical identities are charged and ambiguous in their own turn, and no one is simply free to claim them as desired. Especially in the initial phase of an event, such things are just unknown. As promised, the varying political semiotic dynamics of event flow and form will be identified at both the micro and the macro levels — from individuals to nation-states. I begin with the confusions and conundrums of a high school student in Lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001. His experiences highlight the cognitive and existential dilemmas involved in determining what, where, and who is inside and what, where, and who is outside an event.
Inside or Outside
Sam Faeder was a sixteen-year old student at Stuyvesant High School, four blocks from the World Trade Center, on September 11, 2001. In his recounting, the first indicator of anything out of the ordinary came at around 9:00 a.m., when the school principal's voice came over the intercom speaker in each classroom. The principal called the students' attention to an unusual occurrence, announcing that there had been an accident. It seemed that a small plane had crashed into the Twin Towers of the trade center complex. Students reacted with puzzlement and some murmured expressions of sympathy for the pilot, but the nature of the interruption in their day was not dramatic. Then the teacher in Sam's classroom turned on a television (a second electronic medium of communication). Sam writes: "The class gasps. The live news feed shows the World Trade Center tower burning. I am transfixed by the screen. Breaks from normalcy are rapidly occurring." Nevertheless, the students continued with their schoolwork while the television remained on in the background. Still watching, Sam then saw the second plane come into view onscreen. This brought him to his feet. Students looked at one another with uncertainty about what they had or hadn't seen. The news reporter continued to frame the event as an accident, but one now with an apparent systemic cause — an electronic equipment malfunction of some kind: "We have another copy [of the video], there is the second plane, another passenger plane hitting the World Trade Center. These pictures are frightening indeed. These are just minutes between each other, so naturally, you will guess, you will speculate, and perhaps ask the question, if some type of navigating equipment is awry, that two commuter planes would run into the World Trade Center at the same time." Reflecting on the reporter's hypothesis of equipment failure, maybe in the airplanes' radar system, Sam realized for first time since the morning's events began that he could actually look out the window of his classroom and judge for himself what might be going on. In other words, he remembered that his school was proximal to, perhaps inside, the core zone of the event. And in looking out the window he confirmed that the day was sunny and that radar would not have been necessary to avoid crashing into the towers.
It was at this moment that Sam realized the crashes were purposeful attacks. The time was 9:15 a.m. The principal then came back on the intercom, but persisted in calling the event an "incident." Sam perceived multiple contradictions as the interruptions continued:
Another dichotomy between the message and structure of the announcement. The school pushes forward in official time. The bell sounds, and I pick up my backpack and move into the large orchestra classroom on the south side of the school. I see my friend Geoff coming out of the classroom I am now entering. I tell him I cannot believe what's happening, how crazy this whole morning has been. He looks slightly surprised and says, "What do you mean. The accident?" I realize that Geoff does not know about the second plane or the possible terrorist attack. The television was not turned on in his classroom. Without television, Geoff still lives in the world created by the school's administration. Incidents, regular class time, and single engine airplane accidents.
Soon after, Sam entered another classroom and watched another television, this time transmitting scenes of the Pentagon burning: "I turn around and look out the window, realizing where I am. I see the base of the north tower of the World Trade Center a few blocks behind the grassy field by the south side of Stuyvesant High School. I can only see the base of the tower because I am on the street level. Two army helicopters land on the grass. I turn back to the television and see a long shot of the towers burning. I call my parents and leave messages. I tell them I'm okay and that we're staying in the building." Suddenly, the lights in the room began to flicker, and the entire room began to shake. A large piece of a building smashed into the ground outside the window, and smoke billowed toward the window. It was only at this moment that Sam fully realized his material proximity to the event, realized he was, perhaps, even in the core of the event. Oddly, he was still also thinking in spectatorial terms — with and through the television and other mass media. For in this moment he was also reminded of the movie Total Recall, with its giant cloud smashing a scientific facility on another planet.
Once again, the principal came back on the intercom, this time acknowledging that there had been a terrorist attack on New York City and Washington, DC. He ordered the students to return to their homerooms "at the bell," which still indexed and directed a "normal" day in the institutional life of a high school. From his ninth-floor homeroom, Sam saw one of the Twin Towers still standing, the other apparently hidden behind a massive cloud of smoke (in reality, that tower had already collapsed). Finally, the Principal announced that everyone should exit the school building and head north up the West Side Highway to a meeting point for families. As he walked, Sam encountered a police officer who told him that both towers were gone.
This riveting and self-reflexive account is one that most people would call firsthand. The firsthand account is one that communicates a direct experience, from whatever subject position. Sam's narrative is riveting partly because of its substantive drama, but also because it so clearly exposes the synaptic network of mediations by and through which Sam seeks to determine the what, where, and who of the event, including his own position inside or outside it. So it is a first-, second-, and third-hand account all bundled together. The mediations are multiple — several electronic devices (intercom, television, telephone, school bells); the authoritative voice of the principal, with his multiple speech acts (declarations, reassurances, confirmations, and directives); the other students, with their reactions and their own variant information or misinformation; the windows of the classrooms, with their views of the weather, the towers, the helicopters, and the falling debris; and the fictional templates of disaster movies that manage to make sense of the situation in their own ways. Sam's account also explores the way in which consciousness slowly and unevenly determines when a situation is routine, when it is a manageable disruption, and when it is an emergency, or an "event." Sam is turned in one direction and another (literally and figuratively) as he sits down, stands up, gazes at the intercom speaker or the television, encounters friends, decides to pivot to look out the window, runs to the center of the room as it shakes, exits the school building, and walks north. Sam's experience is highly condensed in time and space, yet it contains worlds of perceptions, cognitions, evaluations, and emotions.
Grabbing and keeping the attention of historical subjects, whether they understand themselves to be part of an event or not, is a complex enterprise that encounters incomprehension and resistance of varied sorts. It's time to identify the processes by which event uptake is made possible in precisely such a world, one characterized by distraction and resistance but also by the kinds of reframing susceptibilities to which Sam was subject over the course of a single hour. All the relevant processes are carried out by the elements of political semiosis: performatives, demonstratives, and representations. And in introducing and describing each element, I'll revisit Sam's case and introduce others for the light they shed on political semiotic actions in situ.
Deconstructing Political Semiosis
There are three basic features of political semiosis — a performative feature, a demonstrative feature, and a representational feature. They work together to shape and mobilize events. In this chapter, I describe each of these features in turn. But it is important to note that there is no logic to the order in which they appear, no set sequence to their interactions. They are uniquely and contingently activated by event subjects in any given case (though conventions undergird their appearances and operations). Further, while they have distinct ontologies, any particular act can be received, and can thus function, as an occasion of one or another of these features at any given moment of an event's unfolding. This state of uncertainty or undecidability about the status of specific acts is key to the operations of events generally, and many examples of such mutability will be presented.
Performative
I begin with the performative feature. Events are mobilized by and constituted of speech acts, or their performative equivalents, that materially change the social and/or political world, including the identities of the actors, the relationships among actors, and the relationships between actors and institutions. The foundational analytical reference here is to the theory of performative speech acts associated with the philosopher of language J. L. Austin, most notably in his signature book, How to Do Things with Words. Austin originally proposed that performative speech acts are those that change the social world in and through their utterance. A typical example is the statement "We find the defendant not guilty," spoken by a jury foreman to a judge at the end of a trial. Another example is "I now pronounce you husband and wife" (or husband and husband or wife and wife) spoken by a legitimate authority at the conclusion of a marriage ceremony. These statements made at a certain time and place, by a certain authorized speaker, in a certain procedural order, and with a certain attitude do literally change the world of social identities, destinies, and relations.
Austin's analysis of performatives would grow more complex and ultimately incorporate all speech. Along the way, he would adopt a more precise vocabulary for performative speech acts that distinguished among locutions ("the act of 'saying something' in [the] full, normal sense"), illocutions ("performance of an act in saying something as opposed to performance of an act of saying something"); and perlocutions ("what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading"). The relations among these three angles of vision onto the actions of performatives become important when considering the contingent realities of real-world speech situations. Austin's initial classification of illocutionary acts included five basic categories of speech that he coined: verdictives (findings, acquittals), expositives (affirmations, concessions), exercitives (orders, commands, openings), behabitives (apologies, protests, felicitations), and commissives (vows, promises). This typology, however disorderly, overlapping, or contested, is a useful starting point for the project of delineating event forms and their capacities.
For example, it's useful to explore the statuses of Sam's high school principal's speech acts under the rubric of Austin's speech act model. The principal starts with an unscheduled request for the students' attention (coming at a different point in the day from his usual announcements). Next comes his assessment that the plane collision with the Twin Towers was an accident. This is followed later by his instruction to move along to the next class without disruption in the schedule, and then by his subsequent warning to stay in the building to avoid falling debris. His final speech act is one of ordering the students to evacuate and walk north. This collection is replete, then, with verdictives, expositives, and exercitives. But knowing the categories of illocutions uttered tells us only part of the story. We also need to know what the speaker and his listeners make of them, and what they then do with them.
Part of this other half of the story regards what Austin describes as "the things which are necessary for the smooth or 'happy' functioning of a performative" (including the sincerity and authority of the speaker and the uttering of the illocutions in the proper times, sequence, and places). Such felicity conditions have to be met for performative acts to be successful. Further, the effectiveness of performative speech acts depends on their uptake by social agents (both individual and collective) in structured and institutionalized, but also essentially open and contingent, social worlds. Thus, performatives always pivot on the forces of institutional rules and social conventions on the one side, and the contingent actualities of uptake on the other. Interactional uptake is critical for bridging the existential and empirical pathway between, for example, an illocutionary warning and its perlocutionary success in deterring or warding off some action. Sam and his classmates had to determine if and how to believe and follow the assessments, warnings, and orders of their school's principal. In Sam's case, he had alternative speech acts (from the television or his friends) and his own visual perceptions to contend with and gauge in conjunction with those of his principal.
Performative interactions involve constant chances for misfires, mismatches, or disjunctures as illocutions and perlocutions misalign in practice. Warnings may go unheeded; orders can be ignored. Such lack of alignment between illocutions and perlocutions opens up possibilities for change, redirection, or stalemate. Social agents performing performatives depend on other agents acknowledging and heeding these speech acts, and such things are never guaranteed. Often it is quite the reverse, as when uptake is denied or deferred as a function of skepticism, ingrained habits, or resistance. In eventful processes, great things can be at stake in performative uptake, including the identity and fate of individuals and collectivities: citizenship, nationality, rights, and obligations all hinge on vows and oaths, judgments, surrenders, declarations, and decrees — and on their recognition and reception.
Of the three features of political semiosis (recalling that the other two are representations and demonstrations), performatives have the most apparent and direct impact on identity. And identities are definitely at stake in events. For example, when the justice of the peace declares, "I now pronounce you husband and wife," the identities of the individuals standing in front of him or her do immediately change in obvious and consequential ways. It is important to recognize the multiple and latent identities that all individuals contain, identities called into action or into existence by, among other things, performative speech acts that successfully connect illocutions and perlocutions. Part of Sam's dilemma was to determine, partly through the aegis of his principal's speech acts, what his identity was during that hour or so of uncertainty about what was happening at the World Trade Center. Was he a spectator, a witness, or a victim of this event-in-the-making?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from What Is an Event? by Robin Wagner-Pacifici. Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceAcknowledgments
Introduction 1
Why a Book about Events?
Advances and Limitations of Existing Scholarship
Form and Flow
1 • Political Semiosis
Inside or Outside
Deconstructing Political Semiosis
Summary
2 • Ground
L’Origine du Monde: Birth
Et in Arcadia Ego: Death
Background
Ground as Surface, Point of Contact, Scene of Action
Underground and Overground
3 • Rupture
Suspended Animation
Time and Space in Rupture
Event and Series: The Financial Crisis of 2008
“The Trigger Gave”
4 • Resonating Forms
Violence and Event Formation
The French Revolution
Jacques- Louis David: Eventful Moments and the Pause
5 • Fragmenting Forms
The Representational Uncertainty of the Paris Commune
Styles and Genres of the Paris Commune
Formal Fault Lines of Il Quarto Stato
6 • Sedimentation and Drift
9/11
Sedimentation and the Official Report
Insiders and Outsiders
Event Spaces
9/11 in Lower Manhattan
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index