Insistence

Gilles Deleuze, borrowing from Maurice Blanchot’s distinctive vocabulary in The Space of Literature, offers death as the ultimate example of the event. In this paper, I propose reversing the current of concept-metaphor against a certain performance theory of sovereignty and ask, not what the concept-metaphor death does for the thought of the event, but what the concept-metaphor event does for the thought of death on the hunger strike in order to explore the divide between the space of dying and the space of politics, which are incompatibly distinct and yet inextricably linked. Revealing an irreducible anachrony between two deaths — the passage of time that separates dying as pure potentiality from death as a radically contingent event that comes either too early or too late — I argue that the political efficacy of hunger striking depends less on the consummation of death in the immediacy of an ecstatic moment than on the prolongation of this interval of time by potentially endless repetitive enactments, which imply both finality and incompletion.

Randomness, Causation, and Divine Responsibility

Many theists seem committed to the idea that God is responsible to some substantial degree for the occurrence of every contingent event. In this chapter, I explore questions about divine responsibility in cases of free human action and indeterministic processes in nature, with special attention to Michael J. Zimmerman’s work on the nature of shared responsibility.

Perception, Action, and Intrinsic Motivation in Infants’ Motor-Skill Development

Perception, action, and intrinsic motivation play an essential role in early development, promoting the creation and refinement of new and more complex forms of behaviors as infants try a range of sensorimotor patterns in their environment. I use the example of infants’ reaching to illustrate how goal-directed action emerges from the intersection of seemingly distinct visual and proprioceptive-tactile-motor spaces that form in the early months following birth. The intersection of these two spaces begins with a casual contingent event involving vision and action: when the hand happens to contact a target. This event, which marks the onset of reaching, provides new behavioral value, reinforces the motor action, and intrinsically motivates infants to attempt to reproduce the behavior. Subsequent repeated cycles of perception and action lead to the exploration of a range of motor responses and a progressive alignment of the visual space with the proprioceptive-tactile-motor space, ultimately fostering the selection and refinement of increasingly successful and refined reaching patterns. Extensive hands-on experience in the environment and learning about the immediate outcomes of actions play a critical role in shaping behavioral development.

From self-censorship to contention: Shame triggered participation in the 2013 Gezi Protests

Focusing on journalists’ professional behaviors during the 2013 Gezi Protests in Turkey, this article offers a theoretical framework for understanding the transformation of inertia into contentious action. Accordingly, the emotion of shame triggers contention when it is experienced with a contingent event that generates hope for change. In Turkey, journalists working in the mainstream media extensively practiced self-censorship before the 2013 Gezi Protests and felt ashamed of themselves. This feeling became a trigger for joining public protests, resigning and/or producing non-compliant news stories when Gezi offered them an opportunity for social change. This argument builds on the sociology of emotions and events, and is inductively derived from 20 in-depth interviews conducted with journalists. The article presents the social context in which shame arises and the place of this emotion in generating contention. Through this research, the Gezi Protests assert their continuing relevance for understanding the relationship between repression and contention, especially in countries hit by the current wave of authoritarianism.

A path-dependent analysis of the effect of location on the development of new universities

This article examines the effect of location on the development of new universities. The study was conducted in seven new higher education institutions (HEIs) established in India during 1996–2008. I collected the data by conducting semi-structured interviews with 73 faculty members in the HEIs and from official documents, media reports and opinion pieces about the HEIs. Using the conceptual framework of path dependency, I investigated the tensions and challenges faced by the HEIs in their initial years. I find the placement of the HEIs in their respective locations to be a contingent event that can make the development of HEIs path dependent. I find that the initial conditions and decisions of the HEIs were influenced by the location and led to reactive sequential events in their initial years with effects that were hard to shake off, making their development path dependent. I show that having to develop their infrastructure and constrained by resources, the HEIs started their academic programmes first, followed by their research activities, and outreach and regional engagement.

Breaking States

This chapter forms the core of the argument, tracing the ideological roots of ‘regime change’, identified as an underlying form of security-seeking. Though it took the structural fact of American power and the contingent event of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to make the assault on Saddam possible, it was also conditioned by the rise in the previous decade of a set of ideas about liberalism and security. Those ideas bred a ‘common sense’ that presented disputable ideas as obvious: that 9/11 was a harbinger, not an aberration, warranting high-risk and radical measures; that designated ‘rogue’ actors are undeterrable aggressors who we cannot live with; and that given the obvious ‘arc’ of history towards democracy and capitalism, Western power can be applied to transform whole regions if only Westerners have the will.

“A Sensitive and Difficult Task”

This chapter explores the hiring initiative as a historically, politically, and socially contingent event; and covers the period of greatest racial instability within ASNE, roughly 1977 through the 1980s. During the 1970s, public consciousness about lingering discrimination was heightened, as were a sense of racial and ethnic pride among nonwhites, and feminism among women. But the rising momentum of pro-equality efforts was checked by political cross-current. Many white Americans of the late 1970s, even if they believed opportunities for nonwhites were unjustly unequal, objected to the use of quotas to enforce equality, and the frequency of the term “reverse discrimination,” which referred to the denial of opportunities for whites to compensate nonwhites for past injustice, attested to the growth of an anti-affirmative action backlash.

Performing Peace: Gandhi's assassination as a critical moment in the consolidation of the Nehruvian state

The consolidation of the Nehruvian state's sovereignty after Independence is traced here as a contingent event which was tightly linked to the impact of Gandhi's assassination and the mourning rituals which followed his death in 1948. The Congress was able to use the funeral, mortuary rituals and distribution of Gandhi's ashes to assert the power of the state and to stake the Congress Party's right to sovereignty. This intersected with localized and religious expressions of grief. Gandhi's death therefore acted as a bridge, spatially and temporally linking the distant state with the Indian people and underscoring transitions to Independence during the process of postcolonial transition from 1947–1950.

Stalin's populism and the accidental creation of Russian national identity

This article argues that the formation of a mass sense of Russian national identity was a recent, contingent event that first began to take shape under Stalin. Surveying the new literature on Russian nationalism, it contends that elite expressions of “Russianness” and bureaucratic proclamations of “official nationality” or russification should not be conflated with the advent of a truly mass sense of grassroots identity. Borrowing from an array of theorists, it argues that such a sense of identity only becomes possible after the establishment of necessary social institutions – universal schooling, a modern army, etc. Inasmuch as these institutions come into being only after the formation of the Soviet Union, this article focuses on how a mass sense of Russian national identity began to form under a rapid and unpredictable series of ideological shifts that occurred during the Stalinist 1930s and 1940s. This article's major contribution is its description of this development as not only contingent, but accidental. Drawing a clear line between russocentric propaganda and full-blown Russian nationalism, it argues that the ideological initiatives that precipitated mass identity formation in the USSR were populist rather than nationalist. In this sense, Stalinism has much more in common with Perónism than it does with truly national regimes.