Abstract
Savransky takes up the challenge of providing a characterisation of an ethics of adventure. To do this, the chapter elucidates the nature of ‘relevance’ as an event and investigates the complex temporal and ethical requirements that events pose on practices of social inquiry. While many traditions of social inquiry consist in reducing the becoming of events to pre-existing historical and social conditions, Savransky argues that an ethics of adventure characterises a mode of social inquiry that seeks not to explain, but to orient itself by, and towards, events. Thus, adventures are defined by a double challenge, which is at once temporal and ethical—that of inventing ways of inheriting the past while becoming exposed to possibilities concerning the future.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Another way of saying this is that the present is nothing but the transition between events (See Chap. 7).
- 2.
This is not to be taken to mean that history is erased with every event, or that the actual world poses no constraints on how the future might be shaped. What this means is that the continuity of history, or indeed, of any experience for that matter, is not a given, but itself an achievement—a process whereby events conform to previous events. In Whitehead’s (1978: 35) words, ‘there is a becoming of continuity but no continuity of becoming’.
- 3.
At most, the only event that such a form of historiography does take seriously—for some reason—is an inaugural, cosmic-like event such as, say, ‘capitalism’, which ipso facto becomes the subsequent determining cause of everything that follows (Sewell 2005).
- 4.
In fact, in his On History, Braudel (1982: 31) himself explicitly acknowledges his debt to Lévi-Strauss, arguing that ‘for better or ill, [structure] dominates the problems of the longue durée’.
- 5.
Interestingly, in the latter genealogy, a child learning to walk might perhaps be conceptualised as what Paul Veyne (1984: 19) would call a ‘non-event’. A non-event is not the absence of an event but ‘an event not yet recognized as such—the history of territories, of mentalities, of madness, or of the search of security through the ages.’
- 6.
It should be noted that ‘Shakespeare’ here names the event of the work itself and not the author, of whom we know close to nothing (Bloom 1999: 718). Indeed, the difference between the former and the latter is the very difference between a pragmatics of the event and a theory of genius. Although a reading of Bloom certainly makes both readings possible—and I am emphatically interested in the former rather than the latter—it is not at all clear to me what his own position on the matter is, considering that he has dedicated yet another monumental book to the question and history of Genius (2003).
- 7.
For it ‘is highly probable’, Deleuze (2004: 170) suggests, ‘that resignation is only one more figure of ressentiment, since ressentiment has many figures.’
- 8.
To the extent that history and event, as I have shown above, implicate each other reciprocally, to attempt to explain away an event by historicising it is something of a paradoxical operation. For although it mobilises historicism as a method, thereby suggesting that everything has a history, it implicitly shares the metaphysical assumptions of those it seeks to ‘debunk’, namely, that only that which has no history is, in a complete sense, true and real.
- 9.
It is arguably for this reason that Henri Bergson (see especially his ‘The Possible and The Real’ in Bergson 2007) and, later, Gilles Deleuze, are generally critical—although not always, as this chapter shows—of the notion of ‘the possible’ and argue instead for a concept of ‘the virtual’. Needless to say, the way in which I have been employing the notion of the possible here is closer to their use of the term ‘virtual.’
- 10.
And I shall have more to say about such critical operations in the next chapter.
References
Bensa, A., & Fassin, E. (2002). Les sciences sociales face à l’événement. Terrain: Revue d’ethnologie de l’Europe, 38, 5–20.
Bergson, H. (2007). The creative mind. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
Bloom, H. (1997). The anxiety of influence: A theory of poetry. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bloom, H. (1999). Shakespeare: The invention of the human. London: Fourth Estate.
Bloom, H. (2003). Genius: A mosaic of one hundred exemplary creative minds. New York: Warner Books.
Boland, T. (2013). Critique is a thing of this world: Towards a genealogy of critique. History of the Human Sciences, 27(1), 108–123.
Braudel, F. (1982). On history. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Certeau, M. (1997). The capture of speech & other political writings. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Connolly, W. (2011). A world of becoming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Cortázar, J. (2011). From the observatory. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books.
Daston, L. (2009). Science studies and the history of science. Critical Inquiry, 35(4), 798–813.
Daston, L., & Park, K. (2003). Wonders and the order of nature, 1150–1750. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. (2004). The logic of sense. London: Continuum.
Deleuze, G. (2007). Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995. New York: Semiotext(e).
Deleuze, G., & Parnett, C. (2006). Dialogues II. London: Continuum.
Dosse, F. (2010). Renaissance de l’événement. Un defí pour l’historien: entre sphinx et phénix. Paris: PUF.
Foucault, M. (1981). The order of discourse. In R. Young (Ed.), Untying the text: A post-structuralist reader (pp. 48–78). London: Routledge & Keegan Paul.
Foucault, M. (1984b). Politics, polemics and problematizations: An interview with Michel Foucault. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault reader (pp. 381–390). London: Penguin.
Fraser, M. (2009). Experiencing sociology. European Journal of Social Theory, 12, 63–81.
James, W. (1956). The will to believe and other essays in popular philosophy. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. London: Roultedge.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). Structural anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
Nora, P. (1972). L’événement monstre. Communications, 18, 162–172.
Sahlins, M. (2005). Culture in practice: Selected essays (pp. 293–351). Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.
Savransky, M. (2014a). Of recalcitrant subjects. Culture, Theory & Critique, 55(1), 96–113.
Serres, M. (1982). The parasite. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Serres, M. (1997). The troubadour of knowledge. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.
Serres, M. (2013). Times of crises: What the financial crisis revealed and how to reinvent our lives and future. London: Bloomsbury.
Sewell, W. (2005). Logics of history: Social theory and social transformation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Stengers, I. (1997). Power and invention: Situating science. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Stengers, I. (2000). The invention of modern science. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Stengers, I., & Pignarre, P. (2011). Capitalist sorcery: Breaking the spell. Baisngstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Strathern, M. (2000). Audit culture: Anthropological perspectives in accountability, ethics and the academy. London: Routledge.
Veyne, P. (1984). Writing history: Essay on epistemology. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Weber, M. (2009). From Max Weber: Essays in sociology. London: Routledge.
Whitehead, A. N. (1968). Modes of thought. New York: Free Press.
Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and reality: An essay in cosmology. New York: Free Press.
Whitehead, A. N. (2004). The concept of nature. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Savransky, M. (2016). An Ethics of Adventure. In: The Adventure of Relevance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57146-5_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57146-5_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-57145-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-57146-5
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)