What Is an Event?

by Robin Wagner-Pacifici

Overview

We live in a world of breaking news, where at almost any moment our everyday routine can be interrupted by a faraway event. Events are central to the way that individuals and societies experience life. Even life’s inevitable moments—birth, death, love, and war—are almost always a surprise. Inspired by the cataclysmic events of September 11, Robin Wagner-Pacifici presents here a tour de force, an analysis of how events erupt and take off from the ground of ongoing, everyday life, and how they then move across time and landscape.

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:	9780226439785
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	03/24/2017
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Robin Wagner-Pacifici is the University in Exile Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of a number of books, most recently The Art of Surrender: Decomposing Sovereignty at Conflict’s End, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

Why a Book about Events? 2

Advances and Limitations of Existing Scholarship 3

Form and Flow 10

1 Political Semiosis 16

Inside or Outside 17

Deconstructing Political Semiosis 19

Summary 31

2 Ground 33

L'Origine du Monde: Birth 35

Et in Arcadia Ego: Death 39

Background 41

Ground as Surface, Point, of Contact, Scene of Action 47

Underground and Overground 49

3 Rupture 55

Suspended Animation 55

Time: and Space in Rupture 59

Event and Series: The Financial Crisis of 2008 71

"The Trigger Gave" 76

4 Resonating Forms 84

Violence and Event Formation 86

The French Revolution 87

Jacques-Louis David: Eventful Moments and the Pause 97

5 Fragmenting Forms 105

The Representational Uncertainty of the Paris Commune 105

Styles and Genres of the Paris Commune 113

Formal Fault Lines of II Quarto Stato 113

6 Sedimentation and Drift 122

9/11 124

Sedimentation and the Official Report 126

Insiders and Outsiders 133

Event Spaces 134

9/11 in Lower Manhattan 135

Conclusion 153

Notes 157

Bibliography 191

Index 205

Editorial Reviews

What Is an Event? is an attempt by one of contemporary sociology’s most brilliant practitioners to theorize the process by which we come to perceive and narrate particular stretches of history as ‘events.’ Drawing on official documents, novels, paintings, and personal narratives, Wagner-Pacifici examines the way we conceptualize beginnings, pauses, turning points, trajectories, as well as the historical background from which events such as shootings, stock market crashes, and revolutions ‘emerge’ or ‘erupt.’ The result is a remarkably ambitious sociological theory of the ‘shape’ of the past.

Rutgers University Eviatar Zerubavel

What Is an Event? is a sustained meditation about what Wagner-Pacifici has called the ‘restlessness’ of events. She develops a ‘political semiotics’ of the event, elaborating and classifying the speech acts and other symbolic performances that attempt to comprehend, represent, steer, deflect, or bring to an end events—but that often have the effect of pushing them unpredictably forward. Anyone interested in the dynamics of history will have much to learn from this remarkable book.

William H. Sewell

What Is An Event? is an intellectual treat. Charting how and why events matter, it animates a wide range of cultural texts—from seventeenth century paintings to twenty-first century violence, from political revolutions to financial crises—and demonstrates how they transform across time and space en route to taking their place at the forefront of historical and social thought. Eloquently phrased and elegantly formulated, the book showcases Wagner-Pacifici’s theoretical sophistication, singular analytical acumen, and splendid prose. This is Wagner-Pacifici at her finest.

Barbie Zelizer

"Robin Wagner-Pacifici’s What Is an Event? is a powerful and beautifully crafted attempt to lay the groundwork for both a definition of an 'event' as well as a methodological approach for studying events as social researchers. Perhaps most audaciously, it intimately ties ontology and methodology...the book’s generative strength is in the kind of theoretical and empirical work it potentially opens up."

Iddo Tavoryn Journal of Sociology

Once again, Wagner-Pacifici brings together art, philosophy, and sociology in probing, sophisticated, and deeply illuminating sophisticated ways. Her new social theory sheds new light on empirical events that have remained mysterious even as they continue to transform our social world in fateful ways.

Yale University Jeffrey C. Alexander

"Robin Wagner-Pacifici’s What Is an Event? is a powerful and beautifully crafted attempt to lay the groundwork for both a definition of an 'event' as well as a methodological approach for studying events as social researchers. Perhaps most audaciously, it intimately ties ontology and methodology...the book’s generative strength is in the kind of theoretical and empirical work it potentially opens up."

American Journal of Sociology - Iddo Tavory