AJS Volume 115 Number 5 (March 2010): 1351–86 1351
᭧ 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0002-9602/2010/11505-0001$10.00
Theorizing the Restlessness of Events1
Robin Wagner-Paciﬁci
Swarthmore College
This article offers a theoretical and methodological system for a
sociological analysis of the restless nature of historical events. This
system, political semiosis, is able to identify and assess the performative
speech acts, the demonstrative orientational speciﬁcations,
and the mimetic representations required to advance historical transformations.
The features of political semiosis structure the ﬂow of
historical events by managing the speciﬁc media and generic forms
that are the vehicles through which events take shape. Political
semiosis provides a method for analyzing both the circulation and
the materialization of events. The exemplary case of September 11
illuminates this approach’s capabilities.
Everything as it moves, now and then, here and there, makes
stops. The bird as it ﬂies stops in one place to make its nest,
and in another to rest in its ﬂight. A man when he goes forth
stops when he wills. So the god has stopped. The sun, which
is so bright and beautiful, is one place where he has stopped.
The moon, the stars, the winds, he has been with. The trees,
the animals, are all where he has stopped, and the Indian thinks
of these places and sends his prayers there to reach the place
where the god has stopped and win help and a blessing.
(Quoted in Le´vi-Strauss 1963, p. 98)
PROLOGUE
The 21st century has had a turbulent beginning. For the United States,
the inaugural decade of this century has brought crises of national security,
1
I wish to thank the following individuals and the AJS reviewers for helpful comments
and criticisms on previous versions of this article: Jeffrey Alexander, Ronald Breiger,
Wendy Espeland, Roger Friedland, Pier Paolo Giglioli, Bruce Grant, Wendy Griswold,
Miche`le Lamont, and William H. Sewell, Jr. Audiences at Yale University’s Center
for Cultural Sociology, the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communications,
Northwestern University’s Culture and Society Workshop, Bryn Mawr
College’s Center for Visual Culture, the University of Bologna’s Dipartimento di Dis-
American Journal of Sociology
1352
war, civil liberties, the rule of law, and the economy. Attempts to take a
sociological sounding of this eventful period are ﬁrst obliged to locate and
analyze the events generating and carrying these crises forward. And this,
in turn, requires theoretical and methodological choices about how to look
at events.
For example, where and how do we look at the numerous actions we
call “September 11”? Even as we face the task of determining whether
and how these actions colligate into a historic event, as social scientists
understand events, we also face the task of actually demarcating them.
Do we bind the event by limiting it to acts perpetrated on that one day
in 2001, a day in which startled news commentators progressed unevenly
from describing airplanes ﬂying into buildings as “accidents” to describing
them as “incidents” and then as “terrorist attacks”? Do we bind the event
by limiting it to acts taking place in the air on that day, or do we include
acts taking place in buildings in two major U.S. cities and on the ground
in one rural ﬁeld in Pennsylvania? Do we include speech communications
occurring in these spaces or those transmitted (as images and discourse)
across electronic media? The sociological tracking of this event involves
following its contours across time and space as, with great difﬁculty,
September 11 came to take intelligible shape.2
As an event, even as an event understood conventionally as a distinctly
unique historical break, September 11 pressed at the limits of recognition
by constantly shifting its grounds, both literally and metaphorically. Its
multiple actions confounded many categories, including those of foreign
and domestic threat, hijacking and suicide bombing, crime and war. The
9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on
Terrorist Attacks upon the United States reﬂects on these confounding
cipline della Comunicazione, the American Sociological Association’s 2007 Theory
Section’s “Extreme Theory” session, Harvard University’s Culture and Social Analysis
Workshop, and the City University of New York’s Sociology Graduate Center provided
valuable feedback. Direct correspondence to Robin Wagner-Paciﬁci, Department of
Sociology and Anthropology, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania 19081.
E-mail: rwagner1@swarthmore.edu
2
Le´vi-Strauss claims that the multiply embedded quotation that appears at the opening
of this article articulates a Native American cosmology “according to which things
and beings are nothing but materialized forms of creative continuity” (p. 98). It seems
appropriate here to point out that the quote was originally drawn from an oral transcription
of a Dakotan chief by a Miss Fletcher of the Peabody Museum, which was
in turn reproduced in an article by James Owen Dorsey in the Smithsonian Institution’s
Eleventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, then reproduced in E´ mile Durkheim’s
Elementary Forms of Religious Life, and reproduced in Le´vi-Strauss (1963, p.
98). While the origins and transmissions of the quotation itself may be said to mirror
the restless movement that it describes, it also inspires a sociological analysis of the
restless movement of historical events through time, space, and cultural informing—
an analysis this article aims to develop.
Restlessness of Events
1353
categories, noting, for example, that “the September 11 attacks fell into
the void between the foreign and domestic threats. . . . No one was
looking for a foreign threat to domestic targets. The threat that was
coming was not from sleeper cells. It was foreign—but from foreigners
who had inﬁltrated into the United States” (9/11 Commission 2004, p.
263). Thrusting these difﬁculties of recognition and categorization into
high relief, September 11 presses on the more general need to revisit our
sociological phenomenology of events, to theorize events on the move.
Political efforts to bind September 11 as an event consist of, among
other things, ofﬁcial state documents. Such documents as The 9/11 Commission
Report have attempted to assay and direct the course of this event
in its descriptions, explanations, and prescriptions.3
I read such documents
of statecraft and political policy as both evidence and incarnations of
historical events. The 9/11 Commission Report itself conjures up a world
of misrecognized and undermined political and territorial boundaries in
which the disorientation of a vulnerable superpower is manifest in the
report’s multiple runs at explaining how the actions of September 11,
2001, were able to occur. Understanding the mechanisms by which the
unfolding acts of signiﬁcation in and of such ofﬁcial reports operate is
critical to fully understanding events as complex, mobile social processes.
The case of what has become known as September 11 is introduced
here as an exemplar of such social processes becoming historical events.
As such, while this article does not pretend to develop a full-scale analysis
of September 11, its eventful trajectory will be highlighted as exemplary.
Social and political agents across a range of domains (political, judicial,
mass media, military, and aesthetic) have asserted diverse characterizations
and interpretations of September 11. Ofﬁcial reports represent only
one stream in a river of documents, speeches, and images. These characterizations
have rhetorical and material consequences in that they variably
constitute the event for the relevant publics and pave the way for
speciﬁc actions and institutionalizations. Thus, social and political agents
3
After signiﬁcant pressure was put on President George W. Bush by the families of
the victims of the attacks on September 11, he agreed to establish the National Commission
on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States in 2002. After almost two years
of investigations, interviews, and hearings, the commission published its ﬁndings, The
9/11 Commission Report, in 2004. Released both on the Internet for free and as a
bound paperback book by W. W. Norton for $10 in bookstores, it quickly became a
best seller. The 567-page report details the events of September 11, incorporating
analyses of the Federal Aviation Association, the New York Police and Fire Departments,
and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, among others. It also
details the histories of al Qaeda, the phenomenon it terms “New Terrorism,” counterterrorism,
American intelligence agencies, the Clinton administration’s actions (and
inactions) on terrorism, and the Bush administration’s actions (and inactions) on the
same, and it ﬁnally ends with a series of proposals.
American Journal of Sociology
1354
have alternately incorporated within September 11 the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq, the legitimization of the torture of “enemy combatants,”
and the militarization of public health structures and activities.4
Where September 11 begins and ends is no small question. It is not
sociologically sufﬁcient to see this question as one of divergent framings
or interpretations. The more radical claim here is that the business of
event framing is part and parcel of the continuing effect ﬂow of events.5
Here a suggestive and kindred concept of “scene” derives from the dramatistic
framework of the great social theorist Kenneth Burke (1945).
Identifying the relevant rhetorical “scene” for particular events or social
movements is, according to Burke’s famous pentad heuristic, tantamount
to establishing the relevant political context and the legitimate domain
of cognition and action (1945, p. 3). As social and political actors struggle
over the right interpretations of events (and thus simultaneously struggle
over the event trajectories), they assert diverse relevant scenes. If, for
example, the scene of September 11 is the “war on terror,” (rather than
that of international crime) the purview of those charged with responding
to September 11 extends to wherever and however the war on terror is
fought. Burke’s framework provides a powerful way to understand the
worldviews within which eventful acts take place and take meaning. But
it is not capable of tracking events in the making. For this, sociological
analysis of effect ﬂows must identify speciﬁc semiotic mechanisms by and
through which events are so constituted. This article offers a framework
for identifying these mechanisms.
EVENT BOUNDING AND UNBOUNDING
Social and political actors seek to identify discrete political and historical
events and entities. They also seek to distinguish between events and
entities (sometimes referred to as “structures” in social scientiﬁc analyses).6
4
Rosner and Markowitz (2006, pp. 58–59) analyze the United States’ public health
response to September 11 and its absorption into a military frame: “September 11
helped galvanize the nation against terrorism, and the anthrax outbreaks in October
2001 . . . thrust public health and public health agencies into the national spotlight.
But these episodes also stimulated inﬂuential people inside and outside government
to see prevention, surveillance, and disease reporting . . . as integral to the country’s
national defense system.”
5
Thanks to an AJS reviewer for this concise phrase.
6
Sewell, in his appreciative engagement with the work of Marshall Sahlins, notes that
Sahlins took issue with the way in which, “for a certain anthropology, as for a certain
history, it seemed that ‘event’ and ‘structure’ could not occupy the same epistemological
space. The event was conceived as anti-structural, the structure as nullifying the event”
(Sewell 2005, p. 199).
Restlessness of Events
1355
In and with their documents, speeches, gestures, and images, actors want
to be able to bind and map these phenomena, to determine their beginnings
and endings. Recent sociological studies of boundaries, surveyed to
great effect by Pachucki, Pendergrass, and Lamont (2007), have productively
analyzed “multidimensionality in collective identity formation;
conceptualizing multiple, interacting boundaries; how the diversity and
topology of social networks reciprocally inﬂuence boundary processes;
how different types of cultural capital contribute to the production of
ethno-racial boundaries; how organizational and institutional structures
inﬂuence boundary processes” (p. 344). Boundaries are thus being investigated
as multidimensional and dynamic, but few scholars concerned
with boundaries have investigated the dynamic mechanisms of event
bounding and unbounding.
Typically, scholarly studies of events and theorizing about events have
come from the ﬁeld of history, not sociology.7
As Sewell (2005, p. 197)
writes, “In the traditional division of labor in the human sciences, events
were relegated to history, which specialized precisely in recounting the
unique and contingent.”8
Exceptions to this disciplinary division of labor
include, importantly, Abrams (1982), Grifﬁn (1993), Brubaker (1994, 2004),
Sewell (1996, 2005), and Abbott (2001). Abrams was among the ﬁrst to
claim the legitimacy of the sociological purchase on events by highlighting
their constructed nature, characterizing the event as “a primary construct,
relatively full of empirical content, mediating action and structure” (1982,
p. 193). Brubaker goes even further, claiming that structures are themselves
eventlike: “Contingent, conjuncturally ﬂuctuating, and precarious
frame[s] of vision and basis for individual and collective action” (1994,
7
Such sociological studies concerned with historical events have rarely focused on
questions regarding the category or concept of event itself, even as they have engaged
speciﬁc methodological choices regarding event analysis. Signiﬁcant studies of particular
events and comparisons of events include Erikson (1976), Skocpol (1979), WagnerPaciﬁci
(1986), Vaughan (1997), and Klinenberg (2002).
8
Anthropologists also have not generally focused on events in their analyses, or they
have done so in a way that actually downplayed the socially rerouting consequences
of events. Exceptions have included Sahlins, of course, but even his work is assessed
as fundamentally about structure rather than about, as anthropologists Daniel Hoffman
and Stephen Lubkemann write, “causal markers of shift in social course” (2005, p.
317). In their introduction to a special issue of Anthropological Quarterly, “West African
Warscapes,” they seek a new anthropology of events, not surprisingly of violent events
in particular. They contrast this project with anthropology’s alternative tendency: “If
history as a discipline has primarily focused on rupture as the marker of its ‘events,’
anthropology’s paradigmatic ‘events’ were ‘rituals’ (Van Gennep 1909)—where even
rebellion (Gluckman 1963) could be examined for its contribution to social and cultural
continuity” (Hoffman and Lubkemann 2005, p. 317).
American Journal of Sociology
1356
p. 9).9
In this article, I want to move with and beyond these insights to
closely examine the mechanisms by which events form, reform, and deform.
Further, the article will shed light on a paradox of events understood
sociologically—you cannot have an event without boundaries, and you
cannot deﬁnitively bind an event.10
The concept of the speciﬁable event itself reﬂects an important aspect
of sociological interest in them—that is, that events have signiﬁcant and
durable transformational effects.11
The key question is this: how is it
possible to hold together an open, ﬂuid sense of events (with its recognition
that events do not settle into one interpretive frame) and a conviction
that events do durably transform structures and relations? In order to
approach this question, I want ﬁrst to purposely explode the concept of
the bounded event, remove events from their disciplinarily narrow historical
frame, and develop the concept of the restlessness of events. By
doing so, I also aim to reconceptualize (without entirely rejecting) the very
idea of “uniqueness” that clings to the scholarly assessment of events. I
will argue that events exist only by virtue of speciﬁc inhabitations or
informings and that their existence is intrinsically restless.12
Ultimately,
9
In the context of a discussion of cognitive practices regarding ethnicity, Brubaker
writes, “Rather than take ‘groups’ as basic units of analysis, cognitive perspectives
shift analytical attention to ‘group-making’ and ‘grouping’ activities such as classiﬁcation,
categorization, and identiﬁcation, public and private, through which they are
sustained from day to day” (2004, p. 45). These activities can be productively viewed
from the perspective being developed here as those involved in demonstratives, performatives,
and representations. Abbott’s (2001) conceptualization of event is developed
in his book, Time Matters. Grifﬁn (1993) interrogates the causal explanations in
historical narratives by employing the formal method of event-structure analysis in
his article, “Narrative, Event-Structure Analysis, and Causal Interpretation in Historical
Sociology.”
10
Of course, historical subjects and analysts alike “bind” events all the time, as we
put ruptures and transformations “in the past.” The motivations for such binding are
multiple, with various degrees of self-consciousness. For example, Sewell binds the
event of the taking of the Bastille as “beginning with popular resistance to the dismissal
of Necker on July 12 and as ending with the Assembly debates of July 23 that authoritatively
interpreted the assault on the fortress as a legitimate revolution” (1996,
p. 878). He goes on to state that this temporalization of the event of the Bastille is
motivated by his focus on a particular structural transformation: “The articulation of
popular sovereignty with crowd violence to form the category of revolution” (p. 878).
Thus, this is claimed as a bound event for, and only for, this conceptual exegesis
concerned with the historical category of revolution.
11
Many thanks to William Sewell, Jr., for insisting on this important characteristic of
events understood sociologically.
12
While the focus here is on the dynamic relationship between the continuous and
discontinuous aspects of historic events, the recognition of the need to assess the deep
structures of cultural informings of events takes seriously Griswold’s (1987, p. 3) definition
of cultural objects as “shared signiﬁcance embodied in form.”
Restlessness of Events
1357
the subject of this article is the relationship between the intelligible forms
taken by events and their fundamentally restless existence.
Events take shapes. Gestures, declarations, maps, documents, exchanges,
images, and symbols are simultaneously the concrete material
and the formal hosts for the relay of actions that get identiﬁed as events.
It is the very mobility of events, the handings-off from one inhabitation
to the next, that brings them to life and keeps them alive. When philosopher
Arthur Danto probes the issue of what constitutes a “full description”
of events in historical writing, he approaches a consideration of
event mobility, only to turn the discussion into a historicist preoccupation
with emerging criteria of relevancy for inclusion in such descriptions.
Danto writes that, with new criteria of relevancy, a “description of E[vent]
at t Ϫ 1 may become richer over time without the event itself exhibiting
any sort of instability” (1985, p. 155). Alternatively, I argue that events
are, in their essence, essentially unstable and that only a theory of event
restlessness and a methodology that can adequately capture and analyze
the handing-off process can hope to analytically track events and account
for their meaning and persisting consequentiality.
ACCOUNTING FOR EVENTS
Historical transitions are composed of eventful transactions that have
consequences for individual and group identities and life chances. The
question of what makes an event historic has been answered sociologically
by Sewell, who has argued that only events that “change the course of
history,” giving birth to “multiple, overlapping, and relatively autonomous”
structures, should count as historic (1996, p. 842). In Sewell’s famous
study of the invention of revolution at the Bastille, he draws directly
from Giddens’s concept of the dualism of social structures: “Structures
. . . shape practices, but it is also people’s practices that constitute and
reproduce structures” (1996, p. 842). Thus, structural persistences, as well
as structural transformations, are constituted of practices. But the practices
that make events are themselves only inductively drawn into Sewell’s
analysis—in the case of the French Revolution, this includes mobs searching
for grain and guns, the king’s reluctant recognition of and capitulation
to the National Assembly, the abolition of feudal privileges, and the
slaughter of the ofﬁcials de Launay and Flesselles. These are actions that
proceed in diverse modalities across diverse domains. And a theory of
events must be able to account for both the conjunctural contingency of
such practices and their elemental conditions of operation. This requires
an apparatus that considers the speciﬁcities of the modalities, the diverse
American Journal of Sociology
1358
domains, and their interrelations. It is just such an apparatus that this
article attempts to construct.
The question of what makes an event historic has been answered philosophically
by Hegel (1827–31), in his contention that historical breaks
are generally afﬁliated with violent eruptions of social and political contestation
(Hegel 1999). I would argue that violence indeed inheres in
history, not just in the Hegelian sense in which there is no history without
struggle or difference, and in which that struggle is interpreted as a succession
of wars and victors. It inheres as well in the naming, appropriating,
and displacing of this violence as cultural artifacts do the work of constituting
history. This work of constituting history takes enormous effort.
Events must force their way into historical subjects’ ﬁelds of attention
and action, and while violence is not an essential ingredient of all historic
transformations, it is a condition of many of them. Great things are at
stake, including the remaking of social and political identities and the
redistribution of power and resources. Sociological analysis of events compels
an understanding of them from, as it were, the inside. Thus, answering
the question “What makes an event historic?” needs to be supplemented
by the question “What makes an event an ‘event’?”
It was while studying the conventions, ceremonies, and exchanges of
military surrenders that I made the theoretical discovery that the transactional
events ending war consisted of several essential structural features
(Wagner-Paciﬁci 2005). Of course, there are inﬁnite variations in the deployment
of those features, and the variations in the case of military
surrenders speciﬁcally had signiﬁcant historical consequences: more or
less humiliation for the vanquished, more or less magnanimity from the
victor, more or less deﬁnitive change of identities and fealties, more or
less freedom for those defeated. Nevertheless, these structural features are
all necessary and distinct in the ways they intervene in and remake the
world in such historically transformational moments. And each feature
has its own distinct logic of practice. The framework I am developing to
characterize these features, or mechanisms, is one I call political semiosis.
Political semiosis offers a method for capturing the restless conveyance
of power and meaning in the eventful constitution of history.
WHAT IS POLITICAL SEMIOSIS?
All historic transitions must include three features: a performative feature,
a demonstrative feature, and a representational feature. In other words,
every transition requires, ﬁrst, a speech act or its performative equivalent
that materially changes the social and/or political world. For example,
pronouncing the statement “I surrender” and appending a signature to
Restlessness of Events
1359
an ofﬁcial surrender document are performative speech acts that constitute
termination actions ending war. This feature of successful surrenders and
other historical transitions is termed performative, after Austin’s speech
act theory. Austin (1975) identiﬁed a particular species of speech acts that
literally change the social world in and through their utterance. Some
common examples include the utterances “I now pronounce you husband
and wife” and “I ﬁnd the defendant guilty.” Austin originally contrasted
performative speech acts with what he termed constative speech acts,
those acts seeking to represent the world outside of language itself (“The
sky is blue” and “I went to the store”) but not directly intervening in and
remaking that world.
All sorts of what Austin called “felicity conditions” have to be met for
performative acts to be successful (sincerity, the proper authorities articulating
them in the proper times and places), but they are understood to
be uniquely consequential kinds of speech. The effectiveness of performative
speech acts depends on their uptake by social agents (both individual
and collective) in structured but essentially open social worlds.
Thus, in describing the operations of performatives, Austin (1975) differentiated
between their illocutionary force (“the performance of an act in
saying something” [p. 99]; “acts [such as ordering or warning that] invite
by convention a response or sequel” [p. 117]) and their perlocutionary
force (“what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as
convincing, persuading, deterring” [p. 109]). Thus, performatives always
pivot around the forces of convention and the actualities of uptake. Austin
writes that “illocutionary acts are conventional: perlocutionary acts are
not conventional” (p. 121). For example, orders and verdicts must draw
from conventional templates and formulas, but deterrence or persuasion
of social agents in real-life situations cannot be accomplished simply by
appeal to convention. Thus, interactional uptake is critical for bridging
the existential and empirical gap between, for example, a warning and
successful deterrence. Constant possibilities for mismatches or disjunctures
between illocutions and perlocutions provide spaces for change or
redirection. Historic events take shape in just such spaces, junctures of
stability and instability.
Thus, the speciﬁc content of a performative speech act is only as signiﬁcant
as its context-dependent speciﬁc force. Social agents performing
performatives depend on other agents acknowledging and heeding these
speech acts. There is an essential real-time dynamic here between interpretation
and action that opens up a space of contingency and change.
And this dynamic relies for its production on the other two features of
political semiosis.
The second feature of political semiosis is the demonstrative feature.
Less familiar as a linguistic and semiotic function than the performative
American Journal of Sociology
1360
or representational features, demonstrative terms typically index and distinguish
proximal and distal entities and relations (in English, for example,
“this,” “that,” “these,” and “those” are demonstratives). Demonstratives
also include the deictical features of speech—pronouns and adverbs of
time and place like “here,” “there,” “now,” and “then”—drawn from the
linguistic theory of deictics (shifters or ﬂoaters). These are elements of
language that shift in their referent according to who is uttering them in
any given moment of a communicative interaction. I write “I,” for example,
right now, but you say “I” when you are making a comment on
this article in a few moments. “I” is thus a shifter, utterly reliant on context
for its meaning.
The demonstrative feature in political semiosis builds from this original
linguistic function to call attention to the situated nature of all events.
No event can occur outside of context, even as the context itself is constantly
shifting. Demonstrative features operate to highlight possible and
necessary orientations within and toward situations. This feature is fundamental
for multiple types of orientation, including political orientation
and reorientation. Event actors and spectators, individuals and collectivities
alike, must get their bearings in ongoing situations as relations and
identities are in the process of transformation—they must determine what
is ahead and what is behind, what is close up and what is far away, what
is central and what is marginal. In other words, every transition requires
that the parties to it are oriented in time and space and oriented to each
other. They need indexing and directions.13
Collective shifters like “we” and “they” become particularly charged in
historical transitions in which identities change or in which the identity
differences are being highlighted or elided. Drawing on an example from
President George W. Bush’s televised conference call with New York
Mayor Rudolf Giuliani and New York Governor George Pataki on September
13, 2001, immediately after the attacks of September 11, we ﬁnd
several confounding deictical shifts in Bush’s use of pronouns: “Our nation
must be mindful that there are thousands of Arab-Americans who live
in New York City, who love their ﬂag just as much as the three of us
do, and we must be mindful that as we seek to win the war that we treat
Arab-Americans and Muslims with the respect they deserve” (emphasis
added).14
The “we” appears to be ultimately inclusive of all Americans,
13
Deictical misrecognitions come back to haunt actors experiencing historic events.
For example, The 9/11 Commission Report notes, “To us, Afghanistan seemed very far
away. To members of al Qaeda, America seemed very close. In a sense, they were
more globalized than we were” (9/11 Commission 2004, p. 340).
14
For the full transcript of this televised phone call, see “We Will Rebuild,” American
Rhetoric Web site, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/gwbush911calltonewyork
.htm.
Restlessness of Events
1361
as the nation’s perspective is that initially invoked. Yet Arab Americans
and Muslims (assumedly also U.S. citizens who are Muslims) become
unaccountably “they” and thus are outside the boundary of this collective
“we” even as “they” are shown respect.
Note also here how the word “war” slips into President Bush’s statement
of solidarity with Arab Americans. Two days after the airplane attacks,
as the individual hijackers’ identities were just emerging, President Bush
was already referring to winning “the war.”15
How is this term to be
interpreted? How does its assertion participate in the constitution of the
event September 11? War metaphors are frequently deployed in social
and political crises—so its appearance here does not immediately draw
attention to itself. It might operate as a (metaphorical) representation of
the emerging state of affairs. Yet it might also stake a performative claim
if it has effects as an authorized assertion that the attacks of September
11 are being absorbed into a war frame rather than a crime frame. Attention
to the dynamic between illocutionary and perlocutionary force
allows us to raise these questions, questions that touch on recognitions
(or misrecognitions) of conventional declarations of war and their displacements.
The statement “This is war” should succeed as a performative
only when it is uttered by a legitimate political authority in a serious way
and when it is recognized as such by the relevant publics of political and
military authorities. Only then does such a statement actually declare war
rather than simply represent a situation as warlike.16
Other demonstrative features, such as adverbs of space (“here,” “there”),
can also be used to locate and demarcate a “homeland” and thus a proper
space of war. Indeed, such features appear at critical moments in the
ofﬁcial 9/11 Commission Report. The report approaches its conclusion by
inverting the disturbingly misrecognized voids between foreign and domestic
threat announced in its initial chapters. It ﬂips these voids inside
15
See Chang and Mehan (2008) for a sophisticated analysis of the discourse by way
of which the nature and scope of that war crystallized in the two years following the
September 11 attacks, eventuating in the invasion of Iraq by the United States–led
coalition.
16
Hallett (1998) provides a detailed and thoughtful analysis of the way in which formal
declarations of war have generally fallen into desuetude. Among other important features
of his analysis is his speciﬁcation that “the power to declare war is emphatically
not the power to initiate or start a war. . . . It is the power to compose a text, to draft
a document, to write a denunciation” (p. xi). This speciﬁcation points precisely to the
way in which speech acts have unique logics that can have speciﬁc consequences.
These consequences have been recognized by such authoritative bodies as the U.S.
State Department, one 1971 document of which notes that “formal declarations of war
are often deliberately avoided because they tend to indicate both at home and abroad
a commitment to total victory and may impede settlement possibilities” (quoted in
Hallett 1998, p. 37).
American Journal of Sociology
1362
out by declaring that America is actually everywhere: “9/11 has taught
us that terrorism against American interests ‘over there’ should be regarded
just as we regard terrorism against Americans ‘over here.’ In this
same sense the American homeland is the planet” (9/11 Commission 2004,
p. 362). The planet thus becomes the “here” of America, theoretically
extending the space of a defensive war to encompass the globe.
Finally, demonstrative elements of eventful transactions also guide actors
and witnesses to direct their attention inward toward central exchanges
and interactions, as well as outward toward the relay of generated
forms. In this aspect, they resemble what Latour (2002) calls “sets of
instructions.” For example, he writes that “an isolated scientiﬁc image is
meaningless. . . . It is a set of instructions to reach another one down
the line. A table of ﬁgures will lead to a grid that will lead to a photograph
that will lead to a diagram that will lead to a paragraph that will lead
to a statement. The whole series has meaning but none of its elements
has any sense” (p. 14). Interested agents are directed to follow the series
in order to take and make meaning. Additionally, the transformational
mimeses embedded in these series of images, graphs, and discourses introduce
the third feature of political semiosis, that of the representational.
Every eventful transformation involves representational features—copies
of the event, or aspects of the event, need to be generated and sent
outward into the wider world of audiences and witnesses at a distance.
Even the “original” documents signed and stamped and the “original”
handshakes beginning or ending such things as battles are, in this sense,
copies, as they take their forms from templates developed in the past and
brought to bear on this emergent event. The representations thus recruited
in the enactment of the world-changing performatives participate in the
event dialectic of convention and change. But representations of the performatively
produced transformations are generated as well. Thus we ﬁnd
copies of “original” exchanges, attacks, signings, and handshakes in the
form of paintings, plays, poems, journalistic renderings, photographs,
ﬁlms, monuments, and novels. These copies attempt to stabilize and sediment
the historical transition in the face of uncertainty, distance, and
resistance.
Representational copies are no less critical elements of eventful transactions
than are performatives and demonstratives. For no event can live
for more than an instant without copies, and no event escapes representational
transformation. Representations invariably participate in the production
and redirection of the event’s meaning. In a profoundly social
sense, all ideas about permanent form taking are futile, and there is an
inevitable dialectic between sedimentation and redirection of forms and
meanings. The representational feature draws on theories of mimesis—
pictures and other symbolic renderings aiming to represent the world as
Restlessness of Events
1363
it is (or was, or will be). It also draws on the circulatory power of the
copy, reiterating an event or identity across time and space. Indeed, power
itself is associated with such ubiquity (more about this below).
The features of political semiosis thus possess different ontological and
epistemological logics (logics involving reliance on conventions and templates,
the relationship of speech to the world outside speech, repetition,
uptake, mimesis, and so forth). But they operate conjointly to produce
the event. Performatives transform the world but are only effective
through the operations of representations and demonstratives. Effectiveness
via uptake is key here and can never be assumed in advance, even
on the basis of all Austinian felicity conditions being met (sincerity, authority,
conventionality, and contextual appropriateness). As the empirical
examples presented here begin to show, events always involve complex
and contingent interactions of social agents engaging and deploying performatives,
demonstratives, and representations.
In spite of their different logics, all three features are fundamentally
relational—that is, they work through relations. One way of assessing
these relations is to characterize the features of political semiosis in terms
of their differential stances on the stability of the world and their relation
to it.
Thus, when apprised from the actors’ points of view (actors comprising
both central participants and spectators), representations assume a world
that has, at least provisionally, stabilized (even if it is a defunct or anticipated
stabilization), thus making it available to representational, mimetic
forms. Actors in this world are idealized as having ﬁxed points of view,
temporarily immobilized by a world similarly ﬁxed in its representation.
Social and political agents in historical transactions continuously generate
copies or repetitions, even as these reproducing copies are paradoxically
implicated in projects of event binding. In an analysis with afﬁnities to
the one being developed here, Abbott (2001) plays the concepts of entity
and event off each other by highlighting the role of repetition. He writes,
“If ‘the world is a world of events,’ in Mead’s ringing phrase, then what
distinguishes entities is their property of repetition, of being events that
keep happening in the same way” (p. 273). Of course, the point here, and
one with which Abbott would agree, is that no event ever keeps happening
in the same way, as all “entities,” or event repetitions, incur displacements
of time, space, social context, and medium. As well, it is important to
underline the fact that repetition is critical to all three features of political
semiosis, not just the representational.
Demonstratives assume a world stabilized in time and space or about
to be stabilized, a world in which orientation is possible (this includes
reorientation). Actors in this world can move, can change their direction,
their angles of vision and attention, to attend to or turn away from sites
American Journal of Sociology
1364
of action as well as points of stability. The demonstrative feature likewise
often engages repetition. For example, Derrida draws attention to the way
that the events of September 11, 2001, had quickly become known by the
repeated invocation of the date on which they occurred (“September 11th”)
and how this temporal indexing highlighted the work of deictics. Derrida
noted that “for the index pointing toward this date, the bare act, the
minimal deictic, the minimalist aim of this dating, also marks something
else. Namely, the fact that we perhaps have no concept and no meaning
available to us to name in any other way this ‘thing’ that has just happened,
this supposed ‘event’” (quoted in Borradori 2003, p. 86; emphasis
added). The public is deictically directed, over and over again, to that
calendar date, a characterization that appears resistant to inscription in
any larger political epoch.
Finally, the illocutions and perlocutions composing performative speech
acts moderate a dialectic of stability and instability, repetition and change.
When actors utter or inscribe orders, declarations, warnings, or verdicts,
they repeat phrases that have conventional meanings, but they do so in
order to reconﬁgure their worlds, changing identities (constituting enemies
from friends, the guilty from the innocent) and relations. Performatives
assume a world in the process of destabilization and restabilization. Actors
in this world intervene in the world to alter it and/or undergo these
transformations through their orders, declarations, vows, signatures, and
so forth.
By highlighting and intervening in the relative stability or instability
of the world, the features of political semiosis also highlight and manage
the complex of temporalities at work in events.17
As Abrams (1982) asserted,
events themselves highlight time. This is captured in his somewhat
oxymoronic phrase deﬁning an event as “a portentous outcome.” Abrams
goes on to write that an event “is a transformation device between past
and future; it has eventuated from the past and it signiﬁes for the future.
. . . And its identity and signiﬁcance are established primarily in terms
of its location in time, in relation to a course or chain of other happenings”
(p. 191). The analysis being developed here provides a way to track the
temporal ﬂuctuations of events without reifying these temporalities in
17
Ermakoff’s recent study of political capitulation by legitimate legislatures under
stress acknowledges and addresses the complex of temporalities at work in events with
great effect, though they are put to somewhat different purposes than those being
developed here. His study foregrounds the motivational factors at play in collective
decisions, and he thus has “shifted back and forth between different temporal frames
to capture the different types of motivations at play” (2008, p. 324).
Restlessness of Events
1365
projects of periodization (even as the event protagonists aim precisely to
draft such periodizations for their own purposes).18
Performatives, demonstratives, and representations engage multiple
temporal orders and orientations. They highlight Koselleck’s claim that
“in actu, all temporal dimensions are always intertwined, and it would
contradict experience to deﬁne the ‘present’ as for instance, one of those
moments that accumulate from the past into the future—or, conversely
that slip as intangible points of transition from the future into the past”
(2002, p. 30). Actors constituting and caught up in events aim to cut the
past off from the future through their deployments of performatives. In
turn, performatives rely on representations of the remembered past or the
imagined future to achieve uptake. And the demonstratives highlight the
relative distance from or proximity to the past (“then”) and the differentiating
present (“now”).
To summarize thus far, participants in historic transactions must be
brought to attend to or orient toward situated times and spaces of transition,
must heed the illocutionary acts (e.g., warnings, exhortations, declarations,
and promises) and absorb the perlocutionary force (e.g., persuasion,
mobilization, and deferral) of the emergent performatives, and
must be able to refer to and remember these acts via a (re)reading of its
subsequent representations.
POINTS OF REST
However provisional and contingent the contours of historic events may
be, their points of “rest” are hard won. It is the cultural work of the
performatives, demonstratives, and representations to exile the mutability
and dynamism of events as events appear to take the form of hard facts.
The cultural informings that occur via the mechanisms of performatives,
demonstratives, and representations work to solidify and sustain the
event’s boundaries, the desired trajectory being from the mutable to the
provisional to the stabilized. Institutions themselves, particularly those
with a strong charge of charisma, can be understood as attempts to “ﬁx”
the dynamism of events. Viewed from this perspective, institutions can
be alternatively understood as being elements of events, as constituting
18
For a brilliant cognitive sociological critique of the historical project of periodization,
see Zerubavel (2003). Zerubavel identiﬁes many consequences of periodization for
historical consciousness, including “distort[ing] actual historical distances by essentially
compressing those within any given ‘period’ while inﬂating those across the mental
divides separating such conventional segments from one another” (p. 8).
American Journal of Sociology
1366
the pathway of events, or as being the residue of events—or, returning
to the crucial role of ongoing repetition, all three at once.19
Regardless of such aims and pretensions toward stabilization, historic
events are rampant and generative. In fact, they are veritably protean in
form, appearance, and consequence. Historic events are bodied forth
through and in a variety of media and genres. They can be termed restless,
insofar as they must take perceptible form, and insofar as these forms are
necessarily multiple, reiterated, and situated. Events are shape-shifters,
now appearing as letters and treaties, now paintings and maps, now
political constitutions, now dramas, now physical gestures like handshakes
or laying down of arms, now dream narratives, now signatures, now
institutions. Once set in motion (and motion is a key term here), historic
events are essentially a relay of signs and symbols, gestures and exchanges,
images and texts. How, exactly, do events live in and through such a
variety of cultural forms—reiterative and reconﬁguring at the same time?
Theorizing this emergent constellation is difﬁcult on several levels. A
theory must be able to track events through their various forms.20
It must
be sensitive to the variable signiﬁcations of those forms and their combinations,
and it must take account of the pathways of ﬂows of power
and meaning as multiple constituencies contend for control. The restlessness,
or instability, of the ﬂows of power through historic events is
intermingled with their mutability of meanings, and they are so in ways
that must always be empirically discovered.
Power plays an important role here, and political semiosis must account
for ﬂows of power in its elaboration of the restlessness of events. The
provisional shapes and trajectories taken by events are motivated—social
and political actors draw from available templates, media, and genres to
perform, demonstrate, and represent the condition of the world they hold
to be true (a truth that may be desired or abhorred). Struggles over the
19
Analyzing Weber’s exegeses of the relations between charisma and institution building,
Eisenstadt (1968, p. xxi) claimed that “the test of any great charismatic leader lies
not only in his ability to create a single event or great movement, but also in his ability
to leave a continuous impact on an institutional structure—to transform any given
institutional setting by infusing into it some of his charismatic vision, by investing the
regular, orderly ofﬁces, or aspects of social organization with some of his charismatic
qualities and aura.”
20
This focus on the varieties and speciﬁcities of the modalities by which events are
constituted recalls Koselleck’s analysis of events in the practice of conceptual history,
particularly his idea of “advance work”: “A history does not happen without speaking,
but it is never identical with it, it cannot be reduced to it. For that reason, there must
be further advance work and performative modes beyond spoken language in order
for events to be possible” (2002, p. 25).
Restlessness of Events
1367
accumulation of power take the form of struggles over the event signiﬁcations
that emerge and circulate.21
POWER
Two quite disparate social theorists, Parsons (1969) and Foucault (1980),
theorized power itself as, primarily, a circulating medium. For them,
power was not and could not be a static, hypostasized entity. Rather, it
realized itself only in and through action. But the recognition of power’s
circulation reads differently in the work of the two theorists: it is generally
benign and collectively effective for Parsons, and it is generally colonizing
and controlling (though not without crucial elements of desire) for Foucault.
The focus on circulation is a theoretical breakthrough in both renderings.
But the circulatory nature of power is emphasized over any thorough
examination of power’s stopping points. This is a more general
problem with the processual vision of power. The necessary moments of
crystallization of power (wherein new relationships and structures take a
recognizable and durable shape) are analytically dismissed as either mere
precipitates or as generically “symbolic.” So the question is how can a
theory of power hold on to the processual insight that power is not an
inert entity that gets transferred and also claim an analytical purchase
on the congealings of power, the artifactual points of rest of the forms it
takes?
With his speciﬁc focus on transformations in and of violence in the
process of civilization, Elias claimed that it was the work of culture to
inscribe and displace violence. Political semiosis provides access to the
important subcategory of historic events that have violence as an essential
element. It is able to track projects of displacing violence through such
things as reorientations (demonstratives), declarations (performatives),
and memorializations (representations). The palpable sense of precipitant
and incipient violence suffuses a great many historic events. The performatives,
demonstratives, and representations that constitute these events
engage with that violence even as they attempt to end it, stave it off,
excoriate it, or justify it.
This ontological divide between violence and its cultural apprehension
(apprehension understood complexly as anxiety, understanding, and seizing)
relies on several orders of contingency. One type of contingency involves
that discussed earlier between the illocutionary acts (e.g., com-
21
It should be noted that the approach to power here is decidedly cultural, sharing
deep afﬁnities with Elias’s (1978) analyses of the interplay between violence and ﬁgurations
of civilization. Many thanks to Miche`le Lamont for pointing out the homology
between political semiosis and the ﬁgurational sociology of Elias.
American Journal of Sociology
1368
mands to surrender) and their (contingent) perlocutionary effects (e.g.,
persuasion to lay down arms). Another is the related dynamic between
conventions and the unconventional. Performatives may be viewed in this
light, as conventions activated and deployed in the service of the unconventional.
The event itself may be viewed as a rupture built from a
complex mix of convention and unconvention, with public comprehension
often lagging behind.22
This project of making violent ruptures comprehensible, the project of
making them “events,” can only occur, then, through the aegis of meaningful
acts of signiﬁcation. And here is one paradox of such informing.
Cultural objects cannot really “contain” trauma and violence, as violence,
in its shocking physicality, is paradoxically a disembodying experience.
Sociologist Harvie Ferguson presses on this point when he writes, “Warfare
is a real presence, not a system of signs. It is not something to be
understood, but imposing itself as an absolutely objective reality, constitutes
an inescapable event. . . . The incommensurability of combat with
‘normal’ experiences renders the whole process of collective memorializing
an invention; it is war re-invented, not remembered” (2004, pp. 14, 21).
Warfare and other struggles over power and resources that involve violence
and force actually highlight the fundamental and essential work of
political semiosis. The move from the shock of violence to its cultural
and social inscriptions requires adoptions of and adaptations to available,
comprehensible cultural genres and media. While force may be a precondition
of the ability to direct the trafﬁc of demonstratives, performatives,
and representations, even actors and institutions that claim monopolies
over violence must claim monopolies over violence.23
And they
inevitably do so in the context of available media and forms of claims
making, of competing claims, and of resistance.
GENERIC BUILDING BLOCKS OF POLITICAL SEMIOSIS
In spite of the proliferation of and contestation among the forms carrying
events forward, historical subjects manage to track events, even as they
22
Writing again of September 11, Derrida states, “The event is ﬁrst of all that which
I do not ﬁrst of all comprehend . . . the fact that I do not comprehend: my incomprehension”
(quoted in Borradori 2003, p. 90).
23
Weber’s famous sociological deﬁnition of the state renders this difﬁcult and essential
dynamic as that between force and legitimation. He writes that the state is “a human
community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical
force within a given territory” (1958, p. 78).
Restlessness of Events
1369
are themselves constituted and reconﬁgured by them.24
Historical subjects
are directed toward spaces and times of transaction and transformation
and are encouraged and/or forced to reﬂect on them as they appear in
their variety of forms. Sociologists perform a different sort of tracking,
one that accounts for the speciﬁc meanings that inhere in the very forms
events take. The tripartite process of political semiosis can itself be activated
only through the aegis of the speciﬁc generic forms in which
performatives, demonstratives, and representations are enacted. Key here
is the insight that performatives, demonstratives, and representations are
built out of generic forms. These generic forms, in turn, are variably
capable of conjuring (or performing) the historical world. And assessing
these capabilities is a crucial step toward addressing what Sewell terms
“the problem of articulations between diverse semiotic modalities” (2005,
p. 340).25
For all of the centrality of the concept of genre in both the humanities
and the humanistically inﬂected social sciences, it is difﬁcult to pin down
the meaning of the term itself. There are, of course, genres of art (e.g.,
painting, sculpture, photography), of literature (e.g., novel, poem, epic),
of modes of communication (e.g., conversation, lecture, debate), and of
human transaction (e.g., gift, contract, sacriﬁce), and there are subgenres
within each of these. Genre has proven to be a useful but admittedly
labile term, expanding and contracting as beﬁts the contexts of its invocation.
Literary theorist Franco Moretti understands literary genre as
intersections of structure and ﬂow, history, and form: “Janus-like creatures,
with one face turned to history and the other to form, genres are . . .
where ﬂow and form meet” (2003, p. 76). Here, the term will signify shared,
recognizable form (in much the same manner that Griswold [1987] understands
cultural objects generally), unless it is otherwise speciﬁed.
A ﬁrst step, then, is to identify these different genres and analyze their
capabilities—in other words, analyze how they differentially operate as
vehicles for the demonstratives, performatives, and representations. These
capabilities generally concern the ways these genres intervene in and
24
This particular duality of actor participation in events is precisely captured in the
following statement from Armstrong and Crage’s study of the making of the myth of
the Stonewall riots: “Our research also illustrates that meaning-making is constitutive
of events—people simultaneously participate in and interpret events” (2006, p. 745).
25
Sewell provides an interesting example from his own work on the French Revolution,
which involves the very concept of revolution: “The articulation between the semiotics
of urban crowd behavior and the semiotics of the theory of popular sovereignty changed
the meanings and potentialities of both, reinforcing at once the power of the crowd
and the ideology of popular sovereignty. This articulation, which created the new
political category ‘revolution,’ turned out to be irreversible” (2005, p. 342).
American Journal of Sociology
1370
construe temporalities, spatialities, and relations, among other existential
conditions.
Narratives, pictures, and maps, for example, are three prevalent genres
in event formation. Discursive narratives are built on and sustain diachrony.
They recount stories of individual or collective transformation that
navigate a diachronic path between certainty and uncertainty, conﬂict
and resolution. Within the narrative genre, there are many variations on
this theme of transformation over time. For example, Zerubavel identiﬁes
archetypal historical narratives that variably frame the course and meaning
of these transformations: “Both rise-and-fall and fall-and-rise narratives
. . . always involve some dramatic change of course. . . . It essentially
entails a major redirection of a historical trajectory, sometimes even
a complete reversal. Turning points are the mental road signs marking
such perceived transitions” (2003, p. 19). Event narratives manage these
variations as they emerge and are either taken up, retooled, or rejected
by their recipients.
Alternatively, paintings deriving from a Renaissance tradition of ﬁgurative
perspectivalism are based on synchronic vision, as parts and whole
relate in a single presented moment. One traditional informing of historical
events is the history painting, an example of which is the famous Surrender
of Breda, painted in 1635 by Diego Velazquez (Wagner-Paciﬁci
2005; ﬁg. 1). History paintings like this one are representational “portraits”
of an event, usually commissioned a few years after the fact. And the
“facts” of the event are, literally, on view. The victor and the vanquished
are identiﬁable. If the theme is military, and it often is, someone is positioned
higher; someone lower. Victors are triumphant, and the vanquished
are despondent and disoriented. Someone offers a sword or a
key; someone receives it. Nevertheless, variation is the norm here as well—
in The Surrender of Breda, the differences and distances between victor
and vanquished are muted, the key remains suspended in midair, and the
distracted soldiers’ indexical focus is confounded in spite of the centrality
of the key exchange.
Maps are particularly complex genres. They highlight the copresence
of representational, demonstrative, and performative features. Maps claim
to mimetically copy the world “out there,” reproducing it in cartographic
form; they direct the attention of the viewer to prominent and shifting
dimensions of up and down, here and there, close and far away, center
and periphery (orienting viewing subjects in terms of political centers,
routes of exchange and military maneuvers, and boundaries); and they
alter the world by (re)naming the cities, rivers, and territories of that
world and inscribing their political boundaries.
The crystallized “facts” offered up by narratives, paintings, and maps
(among other genres), these formal points of rest for the restlessly evolving
Restlessness of Events
1371
Fig. 1.—The Surrender of Breda by Diego Velazquez
event, are unsettled by their own internal complexities and by the inevitable
handings-off from one informing to another. Narratives of rise and
fall, history paintings of surrenders, and maps with royal seals or governmental
imprimaturs alike harbor their own ambiguities and participate
in complex networks of promises, oaths, agreements, signatures, treaties,
prayers, and diaries. Even as these genres provide the material for the
representations, demonstratives, and performatives that direct the trafﬁc
of events, their shape takings should not be reiﬁed. A general theory of
the restlessness of events must account for the continuous transformations
of events, as actions and interpretations unfold across time, space, diverse
media, and variably receptive publics. It must, as well, be able to account
for the discontinuous stopping points as events take recognizable shape
as “entities.”
It is useful to compare the approach being developed here to other
recent work tracing the boundaries of events. Such comparisons can highlight
the distinctly different ways of assessing the speciﬁc forms events
take. Sociological work in network analysis, for example, has very occasionally
been concerned with events. A study by Bearman, Faris, and
American Journal of Sociology
1372
Moody (1999) of what is termed “casing” reveals a similar preoccupation
with the meaning of events in the making. The authors write, “The meaning
of an event is conditional on its position in a sequence of interrelated
events, which we conventionally call a case” (p. 502). Further, in order
to identify the implications of redundancy in what they term “event structures,”
they locate a ready-made data set of life stories of Chinese villagers
that originally appeared in a 1965 book by Jan Myrdal and set about to
locate redundancies in the narratives. The methodological claim is to thus
be able to discern a “case” out of a set of redundancies in the narratives,
overlaps sufﬁcient to limn the boundaries of historical events. This approach
is sophisticated and provocative in its pursuit of a probabilistic
method for predicting (“casing”) the past. But several critical things are
elided in the naive approach to narratives in the article. The assumption
of the article is that sociologists know what we mean when we deploy
the term “narrative” and when we assess found narratives. It also assumes
that we understand the generic capabilities of narratives to conﬁgure
historical events. Beyond noting that life stories have “weak theoretical
structures” as opposed to formal histories, the authors do not give attention
to genre conventions of storytelling or chronicling generally or to local
conditions of the narrative formation and solicitation.26
On the other hand, in his discussion and deployment of the analytical
technique event-structure analysis, Grifﬁn usefully highlights and works
with the epistemologies of historical narratives. He writes that narratives
“are analytical constructs (or ‘colligations’) that unify a number of past
or contemporaneous actions and happenings . . . into a coherent relational
whole” and “are made up of the raw materials of sequences of social
action . . . in a particular temporal order for a particular purpose” (1993,
p. 1097). Nevertheless, Grifﬁn’s preoccupation with causality leads him
to focus on the issue of the accuracy of speciﬁc historical narratives, as
opposed to the issue of the generic opportunities and constraints of narrative
(a genre existentially bound to the diachrony of language). A deeper
speciﬁcation of the particular capabilities of genres such as narratives,
speciﬁcations developed by scholars in the humanities, is necessary to
track event mobility, mobilization, and colligation.
On this point, disciplinary boundaries have prevented social scientists
26
For recent sociological work on the role of narrative in the ﬁelds of social movements
and law and society that does take the generic conditions of narrative seriously, see
Ewick and Silbey (1998) and Polletta (2006).
Restlessness of Events
1373
and humanists from beneﬁting from each other’s studies.27
Sensitivity to
generic capabilities in sociology has been most keen in studies of collective
memory and commemoration, in which the variable and consequential
commemorations of events are the primary objects of analysis (Olick 1999;
Polletta 2003).28
But even memory studies, with their sensitivities to the
power of interpretation and the interplays of past and present concerns
and blind spots, cast events as essentially ﬁnished.
Finally, part of the problem of the underspeciﬁcation of the cultural
genres comprising events can be tied to the preoccupation with causality.
The claim here is not that all questions about causality in eventful transformations
of social and political processes and institutions are irrelevant;
it is rather that they may be premature. In other words, even the most
sophisticated comparative historical analyses of the path-dependent processes
involved in social and political transformations, even those with a
sensitivity to the diverse temporal structures involved in these processes,
do not have a sufﬁcient understanding of the ways in which the paths
themselves function to constitute these transformations. If the pathways
can be understood to consist of performatives, demonstratives, and representations
that themselves are constituted of variable genres (speeches,
sworn statements, handshakes, legal opinions, paintings, maps, and parades),
the meaning-making and world-altering capabilities of these genres
of action and the multiple ways they interact must be delineated before
their consequential participation in path-dependent sequencing arguments
can be assessed.29
27
A fruitful line of inquiry that addresses this oversight is that of Breiger’s analysis
of homologous quantitative methodologies used by practice theory. Breiger recognizes
the ways that speciﬁc quantitative methods have their own capabilities, as well as the
ways they involve structures and events. He writes, “When it comes to quantitative
methods . . . we often assume . . . that styles of quantiﬁcation are entirely irrelevant
to the theoretical and ideological struggles. . . . [Jonathan] Culler identiﬁes as a major
problem for the theory of poetry the relation between the poem as a structure made
of words (a text) and the poem as an event (an act of the poet, an experience of the
reader, an event in literary history). Likewise, it is important to recognize that quantitative
methods consist of a formal structure (a mathematics) and an event (an application
to a dataset, a linkage to another mathematical structure, an incorporation
within a social or cultural story)” (2000, pp. 109–110).
28
Olick, in particular, has developed a sophisticated understanding of the contingent
work of genre in ofﬁcial commemorative discourse in the Federal Republic of Germany.
He extends literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s approach “with its axiomatic emphasis
on dialogue and on genre as its central mechanism . . . that simultaneously takes into
account its conjunctural (politics of commemoration), developmental (history of commemoration),
and dialogic (memory of commemoration) dimensions” (Olick 1999, p.
384).
29
Pierson has written on the question of divergent temporalities at work in macrosocial
processes and has developed a compelling argument about the importance of path
dependency in historical and political transformations. In this, he exhibits a sensitivity
American Journal of Sociology
1374
Of course, the pathway of an event is never one-dimensional and
linear—even as social and political actors consider the respective demonstratives,
performatives, and representations, there is also the signiﬁcant
problem of identifying the accumulated effect of multiple modalities at
work at the same time. The question of colligation here suggests a need
for speciﬁcation of historical technologies of communication and circu-
lation.30
Modern mass-mediated communication travels in an instant,
makes representations ubiquitous, and inserts the public into private,
intimate domains of ofﬁces and homes. Organizational forms (bureaucracy,
democracy, hierarchy) are also key in these mediation processes. A
necessary preliminary step toward analytically grasping such colligation
effects is to identify the internal logics, the generic capabilities of the
individual media. While recognizing the reality of events moving simultaneously
through multiple modalities, the event analyst is nevertheless
compelled to break into this dynamic network at a speciﬁc point, regardless
of its complexity. And perhaps the most productive place in which
to enter the system in action is at a very point of a handing-off, a point
at which the restlessness of events and the circulations of power and
meaning are most visible.
SEMIOTIC ARTICULATIONS AND DISARTICULATIONS
Given that different genres enable performatives, demonstratives, and
representations differently, they may be more or less effective and more
or less coherent at different circulatory event junctures. The restlessness
of events is a function of the ongoing interpretive and interactional competitions
and contestations among principal actors and witnesses. Such a
characterization of events reﬂects the apprehension that on top of their
existential inadequacy in permanently shutting down the motor of the
social and cultural production of events, speciﬁc emergent signiﬁcations
may not quite work or may work only with particular participants or in
particular contexts. Thus we look not only for articulations between diverse
semiotic modalities to make sense of the shapes being taken by
to the importance of extant social capacities for understanding the trajectory of these
processes, without, however, fully exploring the distinct ontologies of those capacities.
He writes, “The stock of available resources in social life—material, technological,
organizational, and ideational—changes dramatically over time” (2000, p. 82). The
features of the political semiotic work with these resources to advance historical events.
30
The work of art theorist Jonathan Crary, speciﬁcally his books, Techniques of the
Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1992) and Suspensions
of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (2001), is valuable here. In
these works, he has explored the technologies constituting modern visual culture, with
their attendant transformations of perception.
Restlessness of Events
1375
events but also, and especially, for disarticulations to locate event fault
lines. In fact, the transformational potential of events is best seen in these
disarticulations.31
Thus, when Latour speaks of “sets of instructions” that
move down the line from a table to a ﬁgure to a grid to a photograph,
and so forth, he grasps but does not highlight the ways that these constant
handoffs are managing the unsettled shock wave of an event (in his example,
a scientiﬁc event).
Sociological tracking of the dislocations and disarticulations of recent
transformational events is both easier and harder than tracking those
emerging in the distant past. It is easier because of real-time access to
multiple modalities of signiﬁcation. We have the powerful experience as
citizens, social actors, and political subjects of living through the event
(and of being reconstituted by it). Tracking is harder in that, as sociologists,
we are attempting, in medias res, to gauge the likelihood that it will, in
fact, turn out to be a transformative historic event as Sewell has deﬁned
it.
In this regard, some analysts might say that it is too early to claim that
September 11 has changed the course of history by transforming structures.
Nevertheless, as this article has begun to reveal, the political semiosis
framework provides a mechanism for tracking the ﬂow of this
event in the making as performatives (declarations of a war on terror,
legislation enhancing surveillance of national and international communication,
pronouncements of a new preemptive war policy and a new
governmental security agency—i.e., the Department of Homeland Security),
demonstratives (identiﬁcations of “us” and “them” in the war on
terror, the American homeland indexed as coterminous with the planet),
and representations (ubiquitous renderings of the World Trade Center
towers, narrative accounts of the attacks that place blame on particular
parties, circulations of videos and photographs of terrorist hostages and
American prisoners) have transformed social and political structures.
Close attention to semiotic disarticulations in this process can provide
access to the uneven and contingent nature of the structural transformations
wrought by September 11. A close reading of the ﬁrst chapter of
The 9/11 Commission Report reveals a point of politically consequential
semiotic disarticulation.
31
Such an approach to disarticulations among the speciﬁc signiﬁcations that manage
the essential performatives, demonstratives, and representations of events aligns with
Sewell’s claim about the consequences of the durative quality of historical events but
engages it at the level of semiosis. Sewell writes, “In spite of the punctualist connotations
of the term, historical events are never instantaneous happenings: they always have
a duration, a period that elapses between the initial rupture and the subsequent structural
transformation. During this period, the usual articulations between different
structures become profoundly dislocated” (1996, p. 845; emphasis added).
American Journal of Sociology
1376
The 9/11 Commission was administered by an executive director, Philip
Zelikow, a lawyer and professor of law and diplomacy at the University
of Virginia, who was a former colleague of Condoleezza Rice and had
actually served in both Bush (George H. W. and George W.) administrations.
Zelikow immediately asked his friend and sometime coauthor, the
historian Ernest May, to be the commission staff’s senior advisor. May
was the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard and
a consultant to the Ofﬁce of the Secretary of Defense and the National
Security Council.
Zelikow and May decided, in consultation with the actual commissioners,
that their report should be written in the form of a historical
narrative. In his memoir of his experience with the commission, May
wrote, “Typically, government reports focus on ‘ﬁndings’ and array the
evidence accordingly. None, to our knowledge, had ever attempted simply
to produce professional-quality narrative history. None, certainly, had
been conceived as international history, not just American history. None
had aspired to deal not only with the immediate past but also with the
long background that would be needed if, as we said to each other, the
report was to remain the reference volume on September 11 sitting on
the shelves of high school and college teachers a generation hence” (2005,
p. 3).
This initial decision about how to construct the report points to a crucial
and illuminating semiotic dilemma. That is, there is a semiotic undecidability
in the report’s implicit statement, “This is history” (similar in nature
to the undecidability in the statement “This is war”). How should this
statement, one that subtends, motivates, and shapes The 9/11 Commission
Report, be interpreted? Should it be interpreted as a performative speech
act, a demonstrative indexical device, or a representation of an external
state of the world? Can this statement be all three at once? Can it oscillate
back and forth among them? Answering this question has signiﬁcant
implications for the political consequentiality of such a statement, of the
report itself, and for the evolution of September 11 as an event.
To argue that in making the statement “This is history” the report is
making a performative speech act means that the statement has the illocutionary
intent and perlocutionary effect of declaring the event (in this
case, that of September 11) to be history. In other words, if successful as
a performative, the event is ﬁnished, and September 11 is in the past.
Alternatively, the claim that “This is history” is a demonstrative act highlights
the report’s involvement in efforts of periodization—that was then,
this is now. September 11 belongs to history. And, in a further deictical
gesture, the report’s future position on a high school teacher’s shelf identiﬁes
a collectivity’s later. Finally, the claim that “This is history” is a
representational act highlights the way the report is (simply) representing
Restlessness of Events
1377
how the post-9/11 world came to be, charting a chronology via the representational
conventions of the discipline of history.
What is the signiﬁcance of these alternative interpretations and this
semiotic undecidability? Part of the signiﬁcance lies in the relation between
these uncertainties and the commission’s actual political power.
What kinds of power are required to make any or all kinds of political
semiotic intervention? Does and can the commission and its report reﬂect
the world, direct the world’s attention, and/or change the world? Can
“history” be declared, narrated, and located? While the theory of restless
events being developed here cannot answer these questions—only the
eventual empirical social and political forces mobilizing, directing, and
absorbing the events can do so—it can certainly illuminate the stakes in
such claims.
The 9/11 Commission Report promises to be one place of rest for the
event that is (or was, or will be) September 11. But it is typical in being
a rather restless place of rest, with all of its representations, demonstratives,
and performatives vibrating with uncertainty about how to selfinstitutionalize.
On the one hand, the report seeks to neutralize the event
that is proposed as historical. On the other hand, the report seeks to
manage and shape the event that is, reluctantly, recognized as ongoing.
GENRE DILEMMAS AND SEMIOTIC DISARTICULATIONS
The 9/11 Commission Report is composed of narratives, photographs, and
diagrams. The photos are of Osama bin Laden; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed;
the 9/11 hijackers; the World Trade Center towers, with smoke
billowing out after the crashes of the airplanes; the Pentagon after the
attack; and the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, ﬁeld crash site. The diagrams
are of the ﬂight paths of the four airplanes, the internal stairwells, the
radio repeater network, the external footprint of the World Trade Center
towers, and, in the ﬁnal section of the report that presents recommendations,
a proposed organizational chart of a reorganized U.S. intelligence
community. The narratives recount the details of the loadings, takeoffs,
and hijackings of the four planes, along with life histories of the hijackers
and the story of conﬂicts in the development of U.S. national policy toward
terrorism in both the Clinton and the Bush administrations. Of course,
in accordance with May and Zelikow’s plan, the overarching frame of
the report is one of a rather conventional historical narrative, in spite of
the copresence of other semiotic forms.
In a multilayered consideration of temporality in social processes, Abbott
(2001, p. 227) recalls that for George Herbert Mead, “It is by the
happening of events that we know time.” The obverse is also true—it is
American Journal of Sociology
1378
by the accomplishing of time that we know events. Ofﬁcial reports framed
as narrative would appear to be committed to temporal sequentiality
through their reliance on language—one event follows another sequentially,
if not causally (though we tend to read narrative sequence as cau-
sality).32
But causal reasoning and reckoning are not always desirable.
Causality runs counter to alternative mandates (both cognitive and political)
to construe other temporalities—for example, that of simultaneity.
Given its existential investment in linguistic diachrony, narrative has great
difﬁculties when attempting to represent simultaneity. All discursive organizings
of events are implicated in sequentiality; some are more explicit
and self-conscious of their own constitutive strategies and limitations.
These genre dilemmas have not yet been adequately theorized.33
Sewell
anticipates such a theory in his own appreciative assessment of the work
of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins: “Sahlins’s meditation on the coming
of Captain Cook to Hawaii shows that to narrate an event meaningfully,
the historian not only must recount happenings in time, but must also
break from narration—that is, temporarily suspend time in order to analyze,
in a synchronic discursive mode, the skein of relationships that
deﬁne the nature and the potentialities of the objects and persons about
which a story may be told” (2005, p. 219). But given that no discourse
can fully escape diachrony, what actually happens when the representational,
demonstrative, and performative limitations of narration to constitute
alternative temporalities and relationships are reached? Such limits,
and the experience of them, identify the points of disarticulation in the
restless transmission of an event. These are the points where one genre
hands off to another, one perhaps better equipped to accomplish alternative
logics of time, space, or relationships.
Take, for example, the ﬁrst, riveting chapter of The 9/11 Commission
Report, “We Have Some Planes.” This initial chapter struggles to narrate
the four nearly simultaneous (occurring between 7:59 a.m. and 8:42 a.m.)
aircraft hijackings on the morning of September 11, but it can only do
so by way of the critical, if unsatisfying, literary device of “meanwhile.”34
In seriatim, the chapter painstakingly chronicles each plane’s loading of
passengers, loading of baggage, takeoff, cockpit communication, and so
forth. The four sequential narratives of the four airplanes force readers
to endure the metaphorical use of “meanwhile,” a device that keeps re-
32
For a deﬁnitive philosophical interrogation of the relationship between narrative
and temporality, see Ricoeur’s three-volume work, Time and Narrative (1984–88).
33
A recent article by Abbott (2007) begins to examine the details and consequences of
speciﬁc generic framing structures for the sociological imagination.
34
For an important historical analysis of the development of the modern concept
“meanwhile,” see Anderson (1991).
Restlessness of Events
1379
turning them to (essentially) the beginning of the tale and the beginning
of that fateful day and forces them to relive it through the changes of
venues described—now Boston, now Washington, D.C., now Newark. In
the report’s narrative, each ﬂight begins on a clear September morning,
and each goes through the process of screening and boarding passengers.
Each plane’s detailed fate is presented as an integral and separated whole,
each equally deserving of its own narrative rendering (as is, the reader
may intuit, each respective set of victims). No one sequence of events is
privileged over another, as each plane gets its due.35
But the effects of these equal and autonomous descriptions are paradoxically
troubling for the reader. This is so because, with each description,
the resetting of the narrative clock induces a futile and irrational
hope that “this time” at “this airport,” the terrorists will ﬁnally be prevented
from boarding. And yet they are not. The separate stories of ﬂight
boardings and takeoffs signal multiple missed opportunities for government
intervention and preemption (at the moment of check-in, the moment
of security control, the moment of boarding, the moment of the
invasion of the cockpit). In fact, the serially presented separate narratives
give the illusion of the kind of narrative sequence in which early events
play an obvious role in those events coming later (here, the possibility of
learning from earlier oversights in boarding procedures, for example). Of
course, given the compressed time frame, the near simultaneity of these
four ﬂights, there was no learning, no possibility of using acquired knowledge.
Here is where the copresence in the report of genres operating on
the basis of synchrony is important. When the mini-narratives of the ﬁrst
chapter are complete, the text is interrupted by a graph. It is actually a
bare-bones series of maps/graphs with ﬂight paths and time lines of the
four planes in four contiguous boxes on two contiguous pages (ﬁg. 2). For
a reader of the report, there is a strange feeling of relief upon seeing these
diagrams, a feeling of a tragic event occurring “all at once” that settles
and subdues the question of hope once and for all. The graph operates
as an oddly restful moment in the chapter. The multisited event can be
absorbed at a glance, as it has now obviously become one consolidated
event rather than a congeries of events, each with its own logic and
(potentially different) trajectory. The conﬁguration of the (nearly) simultaneous
takeoffs is better managed by a synchronic genre of a pictorial
graph than by a narrative.
35
Northwestern University student Juliet Litman (2007) claims that The 9/11 Report:
A Graphic Adaptation, a graphic novel by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon, did engage
a ranking scheme that put Flight 11 literally above the others in the pictorial space
of its pages, largely because it was the ﬁrst plane to take off and the ﬁrst to hit the
World Trade Center.
American Journal of Sociology
1380
Fig. 2.—Flight-path diagrams and time lines (9/11 Commission 2004, pp. 32–33)
Style is substance here. A key principle of the drafters of the report
was to establish balance and blamelessness—neither the Bush nor the
Clinton administration was to be identiﬁed as more responsible for the
security lapses that thwarted any preemption of the attacks. And neither
administration (nor, for the most part, any of the major intelligence or
relevant federal agencies) was to be singled out for blame.36
The generic
inability of the dramatic and nerve-racking narrative of the ﬁrst chapter
to be convincing in its depiction of the simultaneity of the four attacks
might have opened up a space for blame—even if a largely irrational
space. The supplement of the graph is much more successful at its representational
task because of its generic capabilities and thus is arguably
more successful in deterring blame.
EVENT RESTLESSNESS DEFINED
The examples offered in this article begin to illuminate the differential
capabilities (and limitations) of different genres by way of which the
features of political semiosis mobilize events. The theoretical program
here is to map the work of performatives, demonstratives, and represen-
36
Vaughan writes that “the report gave an even-handed treatment to the lack of pre-
9/11 preparedness of relevant agencies. None were prepared, none were blamed. Their
goals and resources had gone in other directions” (2006, p. 301).
Restlessness of Events
1381
tations, pursuant to the recognition of both the facticity and the restlessness
of the circulations of power and meaning in the performance
of history. It seeks to trace the shapes of events as they evolve through
these various informings and handings-off, with greater or lesser uptake,
greater or lesser resonance, greater or lesser staying power.
Continuity and discontinuity play off each other dynamically, necessarily
summoning into action a variety of media and genres. As events
migrate and congeal, participants, witnesses, and spectators perceive and
participate in the trajectories of power. But, as I have already argued,
power’s nature is to circulate and to reiterate in the face of inevitable
interpretations and challenges by social and political actors. So the forms
of power and meaning constituting events are restless in several ways.
First, there is the restlessness of movement itself, as the event inhabits
many genres in its expansive and multifaceted trajectories. Further, genres
are restless because they can get stressed, inappropriately used, or over-
used.
Literary critic Susan Stewart (1991) writes about “distressed” literary
genres, ones that refract particular surpassed epistemologies of authority
and temporality. Among the distressed genres that she examines are the
epic, the proverb, the fable, the fairy tale, and the ballad. She writes that
they “all mime the oral mode of production and project the authority of
the oral world. But these imitations just as surely suffer from an inauthenticity
of presentation, a loss ensuing from the very periodization that
is the foundation of their aesthetic” (p. 7). Importantly, these distressed
genres are deployed in moments that, according to Stewart, are in need
of political closure and deﬁned meaning. Of course, they are not always
deployed successfully. And, being distressed, their artiﬁce is often selfconsciously
on display.
Scholars like Taylor (2007) and Scheppele (2005) have, from the diverse
disciplines of performance studies and legal studies, made a similar claim
about the generic format of the “hypothetical scenario” as it has played
out recently in debates over torture (debates that are themselves part of
the event ﬂow of September 11). In this case, the artiﬁce on display in
the “ticking-bomb scenario,” in which torture is justiﬁed as a means of
preventing disaster, consists in imagining a scene suffused with representational
certainty (the captured suspect has complete knowledge; torture
successfully elicits truthful information), demonstrative immediacy (the
bomb is imminent), and performative legal opinions and commands authorizing
torture. Such a decontextualized formula is easily reproduced
and is transportable from context to context; in fact, it demands constant
reiteration to fuel its imagined preemptive intervention into the persistently
dangerous world of the war on terror. But it wears its artiﬁce too
obviously, as its immediate referents conjure cinematic action heroes
American Journal of Sociology
1382
rather than authorized agents of the state. As well, ironically, the unstable
world it conjures up is strangely ﬁxed in its unrelenting alternation between
dystopian visions of constant menace and utopian visions of absolute
deliverance.
On the other hand, obsolete and transposed forms and genres can sometimes
give depth to newer ones. For example, newer genres can productively
evoke older ones, thereby creating hybrid or evocatively resonant
images or ideas. Belting (2005), in his program for a new iconology, notes
that “the framed easel picture, when it came into use, still contained the
memory of the icon whose basic shape, a framed and a movable panel,
it continued to employ while it changed in meaning and visible structure
altogether” (p. 10). Older genres can themselves morph into something
new by extending their formal reach. Wagner-Paciﬁci and Schwartz (1991)
have argued that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial did just that in proposing
itself as a war memorial at the same time that it broke with all
previous design guidelines for such objects.
So, to brieﬂy reprise: events are restless because the media and genres
constituting the essential representations, demonstratives, and performatives
inevitably proliferate. Second, they are restless because the recruited
forms get misused, stressed, overused, or recycled. Genres are
existentially implicated in the circulatory work of displacement (of violence
and coercion ﬁrst and foremost) and announce the unlocalizability
of power even as they seek to demonstrate, perform, or represent it. Meanwhile,
with all these circulations and handing-offs from documents and
treaties to handshakes and paintings, meaning accrues. But the meaning
is always provisional, open to reinterpretation as successive and coterminous
iterations carry the event differently and as audiences regard,
contemplate, and are transformed by their varied manifestations. The
same “event” captured in different media, even the same “moment” of the
same event captured in different media can suggest diverse meanings and
consequences, as already seen in the case of the narrative and graphic
moments of The 9/11 Commission Report.
CONCLUSION
It is the claim of this article that the framework of political semiosis offers
an analytical apprehension of precisely such colligations and disarticulations,
along with the diverse meanings and trajectories of events in
which they play a role. I want to argue further that the performance of
historic events relies on this very restlessness of events, is established,
routinized by its nomadism. The lives and trajectories of transformational
historic events, of politics, war, diplomacy, and statecraft, are captivating
Restlessness of Events
1383
and confusing precisely because they are both in motion and, often appearing
unmovable, also at rest. Social and political actors struggle to
make sense of the very events that constitute and reconstitute their own
and others’ social and political identities. They participate in the complex
dialectic of rupture and form—heeding, warding off, countering, or absorbing
the river of performatives, demonstratives, and representations
carrying events forward.
As sociologists, our interest in events regards the ways they resonate
socially and politically and the ways they relate to other events and other
moments. As such, we must pay attention to their formal habitations,
their paths of transmission, and their provisional boundaries. The restless
“handoffs” from one genre to another, the constant action of the representations,
demonstratives, and performatives do several things: (1) they
keep events alive (as opposed to their sinking into incoherence and/or
oblivion); (2) they highlight the inability of any one genre to contain or
ﬁx events, highlighting the limits of their generic-speciﬁc capabilities; (3)
they highlight the competitive work of social and political actors deploying
diverse political semiotic features; (4) they are a mechanism for the necessary
reiterations that allow events to be recognized as entities; (5) they
manage a paradox of events—the paradox that it is not the crystallization
of forms that accomplishes stability but rather their circulation; and (6)
they prevent us from ever permanently getting our bearings in the social
and political world, keeping us and that world open to reorientation and
reinterpretation.
There are inevitable moments of reckoning for subjects of historic
events, moments of realization that the very contours of the social and
political world have been transformed. These moments constitute pauses,
pauses of greater or lesser duration and greater or lesser consequence.
The pauses are stops along the pathways of restless events, the forms that
the performative, demonstrative, and representational acts have shaped
and enacted. Analyzing historic events requires that we both bore deeply
into these forms and that we follow their paths as they reconﬁgure the
world.
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