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- Convenors:
-
Daniel Knight
(University of St Andrews)
Martin Demant Frederiksen (University of Copenhagen)
Fran Markowitz (Ben Gurion University)
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- Stream:
- Extinction
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 30 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel ignites discussion on the ethnographic and affective qualities of vertigo, the timespaces in which one may encounter the vertiginous and what theoretical advantages we may gain through focusing on the concept.
Long Abstract:
This session invites ethnographic and theoretical engagement with the vertiginous as ethnographic quality and theoretical concept. Contexts of dramatic social change, chronic crisis and omnipresent anticipated violence can conjure a sense of vertigo - affects of nausea, shortage of breath, anxiety, palpitations as life-worlds are sent spinning into an unnavigable vortex. A perpetually dizzying condition encompassing body, mind, individuals and institutions, the vertiginous has its more and less intense moments, but it conveys a lack of resolution, or endpoint. The vertiginous may be experienced by individuals battling long-term health conditions, someone living in a society stuck in permanent economic decline, or in a state where violence continuously seeps through the futural threshold to populate the everyday present. It takes hold when political rhetoric is at odds with material observation, in timespaces of emptiness, decay, disengagement, in complex socio-technical landscapes where technology co-exists alongside custom.The vertiginous may be experienced as time slowing down, going backwards or repeating itself in a continuous spiralling loop. It distorts perspective to create disorientation and confusion: Where and when does one belong on timelines of pasts and futures? Situations of heightened anxiety or anticipation can make the present feel elongated or uncanny, perpetually caught in the temporal ricochets between past and future. The vertiginous knocks one off balance, leading to questions of trajectory and belonging.This panel ignites discussion on the ethnographic/affective qualities of vertigo, the timespaces in which one may encounter the vertiginous and what theoretical advantages we may gain through focusing on the concept.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 30 March, 2021, -Michael Vine (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Paper short abstract:
Fieldwork in the U.S. will be used to develop the concept of the bureaucratic sublime in order to shed light on: (1) the vertiginous affects induced by the state's manipulation of administrative scale; and (2) the quotidian projects of endurance and transcendence these affects set in motion.
Paper long abstract:
In the United States, the development of laws regarding state transparency and citizen engagement have generated a series of vertiginous situations that unsettle many of the core assumptions about liberal governance. In 2014, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management released for public comment a controversial policy document guiding the development of very-large-scale renewable energy projects in the California desert. Replete with complicated maps and obtuse technical jargon, the document was over 12,000 pages long; public comment was due just 30 days after it was first circulated. In Florida, more recent controversies regarding the everyday matters of local government such as building roads and opening schools have spurred a series of marathon public meetings lasting—in some instances—in excess of 24 hours. Based on fieldwork in rural California and urban Florida, this paper will develop the concept of the "bureaucratic sublime” in order to explore: (1) the vertiginous affects induced by the settler-colonial state’s active manipulation of administrative scale; and (2) the quotidian projects of endurance and transcendence these affects set in motion. The paper will conclude with a discussion of the phenomenological politics of “transparency” that takes seriously the violence woven into apparently progressive attempts to involve citizens within the machinery of state decision-making.
Rozafa Berisha (University of Prishtina)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses how anticipation for the revival of the Kosovar mining industry manifests in the temporal experience of vertigo. The mines fold the past into the present and future, inducing the vertiginous: a sense of stuckedness and waiting, as well as hope for an ‘extractive future’.
Paper long abstract:
Personal and collective futures in the ethnically divided city of Southern Mitrovica are anchored in the mineral resources of the Trepça mine complex. A symbol of modernist progress and a driver of economic growth during Yugoslav socialism, in the last two decades the Trepça mine found itself at the crossroads of postsocialist transformations and disputed statehood of the newly independent Kosovo. Following the north-south division of the city after the war in 1999, the mine complex, formerly located on both sides of the city, became a contested area between Kosovo and Serb governed north. Today, the rundown condition of the mines combined with ownership claims by the two states prevent its reactivation.
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with Southern Mitrovica youth, this paper examines how past mining success currently evokes aspirations about development, prosperity and the reunification of the divided city. However, poised between the ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet’, due to uncertainties surrounding Trepça’s revival, the present is experienced as dwelling in a lag time marked by suspension, waiting and anticipation for mineral extraction. The mine folds the past into the present and the future that manifests in the temporal experience of vertigo; a convergence of backward- and forward-looking that induces a sense of ‘stuckedness’ and exhaustive waiting, as well as hopes for an ‘extractive future’. This paper shows how decayed extractive industries and the vertiginous experiences they generate in an impovrished post-mining city, are bound to legacies of socialism and unresolved questions of state sovereignty.
Damian Omar Martinez (University of Murcia)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I will consider individual vertigo —which gives the appearance of movement to the subject who remains still— in collective terms, with the aim of understanding how abysmal scenarios are generated in situations of collective expectation.
Paper long abstract:
After twenty years waiting for a thorough renewal plan for their neighbourhood, residents of La Paz —in Murcia, south-eastern Spain— received with exhaustion and unease the news that the City Council was using European funds to paint a few facades. ‘I fear the worst: another make-up operation’, said an activist in the neighbourhood WhatsApp group; ‘and it is only justified by the Gattopardo:’ —he continued— ‘“Change something so that everything stays the same”’. The reference to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel was not fortuitous. Previously, the city council had also painted the facades of four blocks in the neighbourhood in what politicians claimed would be a comprehensive plan to renovate the neighbourhood.
Against this background, in this paper I will think individual vertigo —which gives the appearance of movement to the subject who remains still— in collective terms, with the aim of understanding how abysmal scenarios are generated in situations of collective expectation. I will show, on the one hand, how my interlocutors can't help but yearn for an otherwise; but on the other hand, how they experience the vertiginous repetition of events as an anticipation (Bandak and Coleman 2019) that nothing will change, ‘exhausting the emergence of an otherwise’ (Povinelli 2016, 21). I will argue that this tension generates a practice of meanwhiling, which operates in the tension between ‘teleological waiting’ (the uncertainty of what might happen in the future) and ‘nihilistic waiting’ (the certainty that ‘nothing will happen’) (Frederiksen 2018, 174).
Mimina Pateraki (University of St Andrews)
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws upon Richard Serra art work “The Matter of Time”, a topological space which is experienced by the acting of every walker and discussing neoliberal employment precarity unfolds vertiginous narratives about being disoriented and confused sensing a paradoxical future.
Paper long abstract:
I’ll discuss on vertigo stories during precarious working conditions drawing upon Richard Serra work “The Matter of Time”, a public steel –manufactured art project which is located at Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Serra calls people to experience the matter of time mainly through vertigo feelings. He creates a topological space which is experienced by the acting of every walker. Being one of his walkers, I felt this art project as a challenge to think chronic crisis in Europe as a locus where different affective qualities of vertigo can be performed. While this vertigo area is mainly produced by its contingent design to be prone to deformation deliberating the artist contemporaneously encloses people to vertigo precariousness. Following Serra’s torque ellipses and spirals I ‘ll discuss on neoliberal precarious multiple vertigo challenges. Working with different people, mainly from Spain, Portugal, Malta and Greece (2017-2019), for a European project I’ ll present different stories on vertigo feeling during precarious working conditions in South Europe. My colleagues unfold vertiginous narratives about being disoriented and confused, full of dilemmas, on their life and the sense of a paradoxical future.