What Is an Event?

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.
Even though September 11 hovers over this mesmerizing look into the nature of events?it was the fall of the Twin Towers that inspired Robin Wagner-Pacifici initially?the richly evocative and thoughtful story she tells scales up to the level of major historical events and it scales down to the micro-level of ruptures in individual lives. Wagner-Pacifici moves back and forth between events experienced with all their vivid, pulsating, and demanding realities, and events understood systematically and conceptually. It is an astonishing achievement: a book that works with events, and a book that builds a model for analyzing them. She makes contact with specific eventful ruptures and turning-points; she analyzes how events erupt and take off from the ground of ongoing, everyday life, and how they move across time and landscapes. What Is an Event gives us a crystalline condensation of idea, image, analysis, and act, teasing out multiple possibilities for conceiving of events in series, in ruptures, in causal mechanisms, in short and long duration, and in their reception by the public. Wagner-Pacifici peppers each chapter with brilliant, vivifying examples: from 9/11 (four air hijackings, with multiple target sites, propelling the event from rupture, to accident, to incident, to attack, to war in rapid fashion, and on to the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the memorial museum at ground zero, and so much else) to the shooting in Camus’s The Stranger to the shooting of Trayvon Martin. There is much in between. These examples take on the form of exemplars, models, paradigms. They show the productive pathways that keep events alive and coherent, and uncover the mechanisms by which forces and agents attempt to shape and move events. This book changes the conversation about how history is made.