Robin Wagner-Pacifici
Biographic Data
| ID | 111446 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robin Wagner-Pacifici |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robin |
| FAMILY NAME | Wagner-Pacifici |
| SIGNATURE | WAGNER-PACIFICI R |
| AFFILIATIONS | New School |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5542-2751 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 64 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 506 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 64 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Cross-temporal protests: The indexical role of monument contestation in times of unrest
This article explores the role of monument contestation, carried out via desecration and destruction, in unsettling the experience of time for people mobilizing for social justice. Drawing on 45 interviews with participants in the Chilean protests of 2019–2020 and an archival analysis of press reports and official documents, this article examines the wave of monument contestation that affected more than 64% of public monuments and the effects of …
Time and Climate Change: U.S. Media Representations of Climate Actions, Horizons, and Events (2000 to 2021)
Questions of temporality are at the heart of climate change discourse: Does one think of climate change primarily as an event happening in the present, or as something that will take place in the future? By when must we take action to prevent its worst consequences? This article presents the first large-scale assessment of the structure and evolution of temporalities expressed in U.S. media discussions on climate change (2000 to 2021). To do so, …
Capturing the Cold War Paradox
Anticharismatic Authority: Joe Biden's Approximation of the Ideal Type
Sociologists have productively theorized power and politics via typologies and genealogies. This article combines these theorizing modalities to analyze the election of Joseph Biden in the 2020 US presidential election. Thinking about presidential genealogy, the semiotics of sequence and succession favored humility over hubris in the victory of Biden after Donald Trump. As well, drawing on Weber's three types of authority (traditional, charismati…
Unsaid: Analyzing Harmful Silences
Climate change as an event
What kind of event is climate change? Theories of events inevitably begin with rupture. An event depends on the experience that the ground has dramatically shifted. Yet the ambiguity of rupture in climate change-which cannot be experienced in any one instance-makes climate change more difficult to emplot. Moreover, it is an event defined as much by how actors see the future unfolding as by its present or past. Tying the theory of events with that…
At the intersection of existence, events, and milestones: A response to “Existence theory”
This paper responds to Baert, Morgan, and Ushiyama’s article, “Existence theory: Outline for a theory of social behaviour,” by drawing out and examining the paper’s identification of the importance of existential milestones and the dangers of their elusiveness for some leading to a sense of incomplete lives. Alternative perspectives on frustrated existential milestones are proposed via a focus on the relationship between existence and events
Portraits of courage: Caught in the sovereign’s gaze
Reversing the normal vector of sovereign representation, former US President George W. Bush is engaged in an ongoing project of painting his former subjects, hundreds of portraits of wounded US veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This article explores what it means to have a sovereign observe and render in oil the very subjects he sent to war. It will track the politically vexed communicative exchanges of deference, recognition, power, …
“Talking Lords Who Dare Not Face the Foe”: Civilian Rule and the Military Notion of Patriotism in the Clinton Presidency
Temporal blindspots in Occupy Philadelphia
This paper analyzes the disjunctive temporalities of Occupy Philadelphia's political constituencies. Drawing on both an ethnographic participant observation study of the Occupy Philadelphia movement and Philadelphia's neoanarchist political communities, and on recent social scientific theorization of events, the paper argues that contradictory ideas about temporal timescales, momentum, duration, sequences, and rhythms of tactical and strategic ac…
In appreciation of John Mohr
Response to reviewers of What is an event
Let me begin by thanking my book’s three readers for their astute, engaged and intellectually expansive reviews. I have learned from them and been prompted to think both about what the book may hav
Capturing distinctions while mining text data: Toward low-tech formalization for text analysis
Sedimentation and Drift
This chapter focuses on the historical event known as 9/11, particularly on the shapes this event has taken in lower Manhattan. The concept of an event eddy is introduced. This concept captures the ways that events can get caught in uncertain oscillations of forms and flows, including, in the case of 9/11, monument construction, legal trials, civil sphere institutional initiatives, and residential reconfiguration. The chapter details how 9/11 got…
Resonating Forms
This chapter describes the processes by which ruptures take shape and form to become events: wars, revolutions, and financial crashes among them. Principles regarding the informing of events are proposed, including coalescing of forms, combinations of old and new forms, sequences of forms leading to various event trajectories, extensions, and resonances. The chapter discusses the French Revolution as an example of an event with considerable coher…
Conclusion
This chapter summarizes the lessons and advances of the book in its quest to theorize events. The book's simultaneous appeal to a detailed exegesis of forms and its realism about the enormous weight of situational contingencies is acknowledged. The chapter maintains that the machinery of political semiosis operates in the face of this radical historical contingency to nevertheless shape events, historical subject identities, relational networks, …
Political Semiosis
This chapter describes the analytical mechanism of political semiosis, introducing and specifying the representational, demonstrative (or indexical), and performative features. These features are illustrated via descriptions of the experiences and conundrums associated with event characterization, inclusion, and involvement on the morning of September 11, 2001. The coordination of the features of political semiosis can lead to a turning point tha…
Ground
This chapter focuses on the grounds of events generally, and on the grounds of elemental events like birth, death, and war specifically. The features of political semiosis appear in the constitution of eventful grounds, importantly in their temporal an spatial ontologies in ways that precondition the eruption of events. The paintings, l'Origine du Monde, by Jean-Desire-Gustave Courbet and Et in Arcadia Ego by Nicolas Poussin are analyzed for the …
Rupture
From Moral Sentiments to Civic Engagement: Sociological Analysis as Responsible Spectatorship
This article proposes an entirely different understanding of the goals of cultural sociology, arguing that the subject position of the “spectator” should replace that of the “social scientist.” It contends that cultural sociology should aspire for fidelity—to moods and experiences, to locations and dramas, and to the truth of experience—and that this fidelity can be achieved through witnessing. In order to build the case for a new kind of cultura…
What Is an Event?
Politics as a vacation
What Is an Event
Ontologies, methodologies, and new uses of Big Data in the social and cultural sciences
In our Introduction to the Conceiving the Social with Big Data Special Issue of Big Data & Society, we survey the 18 contributions from scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and highlight several questions and themes that emerge within and across them. These emergent issues reflect the challenges, problems, and promises of working with Big Data to access and assess the social. They include puzzles about the locus and nature of human lif…
Toward a computational hermeneutics
We describe some of the ways that the field of content analysis is being transformed in an Era of Big Data. We argue that content analysis, from its beginning, has been concerned with extracting the main meanings of a text and mapping those meanings onto the space of a textual corpus. In contrast, we suggest that the emergence of new styles of text mining tools is creating an opportunity to develop a different kind of content analysis that we des…
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past
The problem of commemoration is an important aspect of the sociology of culture because it bears on the way society conceives its past. Current approaches to this problem draw on Émile Durkheim and emphasize the way commemorative objects celebrate society's former glories. This article on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial deals with the way society assimilates past events that are less than glorious and whose memory induces controversy instead of con…
Theorizing the Restlessness of Events
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 spec…
Graphing the grammar of motives in National Security Strategies: Cultural interpretation, automated text analysis and the drama of global politics
Memories in the making: The shapes of things that went
Climate change as an event
What kind of event is climate change? Theories of events inevitably begin with rupture. An event depends on the experience that the ground has dramatically shifted. Yet the ambiguity of rupture in climate change-which cannot be experienced in any one instance-makes climate change more difficult to emplot. Moreover, it is an event defined as much by how actors see the future unfolding as by its present or past. Tying the theory of events with that…
Toward a computational hermeneutics
We describe some of the ways that the field of content analysis is being transformed in an Era of Big Data. We argue that content analysis, from its beginning, has been concerned with extracting the main meanings of a text and mapping those meanings onto the space of a textual corpus. In contrast, we suggest that the emergence of new styles of text mining tools is creating an opportunity to develop a different kind of content analysis that we des…
Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering
Temporal blindspots in Occupy Philadelphia
This paper analyzes the disjunctive temporalities of Occupy Philadelphia's political constituencies. Drawing on both an ethnographic participant observation study of the Occupy Philadelphia movement and Philadelphia's neoanarchist political communities, and on recent social scientific theorization of events, the paper argues that contradictory ideas about temporal timescales, momentum, duration, sequences, and rhythms of tactical and strategic ac…
Capturing distinctions while mining text data: Toward low-tech formalization for text analysis
Ontologies, methodologies, and new uses of Big Data in the social and cultural sciences
In our Introduction to the Conceiving the Social with Big Data Special Issue of Big Data & Society, we survey the 18 contributions from scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and highlight several questions and themes that emerge within and across them. These emergent issues reflect the challenges, problems, and promises of working with Big Data to access and assess the social. They include puzzles about the locus and nature of human lif…
Politics as a vacation
Resolution of Social Conflict
For generations, sociological theorists have debated the relative function, utility, and harm of social conflict and its resolution. This review identifies some of the most prominent among recent contested forms of conflict resolution as well as their social histories, worldviews, and ways of operating. In sorting out the myriad theoretical traditions and positions guiding this field, we note that the resolution of social conflict is a thing in i…
Contest time: Time, Territory, and Representation in the Postmodern Electoral Crisis
When Futures Meet the Present
In this essay, I respond to Mische’s work on projection and the research of future action. Further, I suggest a tri‐partite framework of mechanisms—one I have termed “political semiosis”—that allows historical actors to materially and figuratively reorient and realign the past, present, and future in projects of transformation
The Innocuousness of State Lethality in an Age of National Security
This essay performs an ethnography of recent documents of state lethality in the public domain: The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2002, 2006), The 9/11 Commission Report (2004), and the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq (2005). The analysis first engages an exegesis of Max Weber's sociological theory of the state, a theory that aims to yoke violence and legitimacy to the means and ends of statecraft. Weber's theo…
The dubious place of virtue: Reflections on the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton and the death of the political event in America
Anticharismatic Authority: Joe Biden's Approximation of the Ideal Type
Sociologists have productively theorized power and politics via typologies and genealogies. This article combines these theorizing modalities to analyze the election of Joseph Biden in the 2020 US presidential election. Thinking about presidential genealogy, the semiotics of sequence and succession favored humility over hubris in the victory of Biden after Donald Trump. As well, drawing on Weber's three types of authority (traditional, charismati…
In appreciation of John Mohr
Portents or Confessions: Authoritative Readings of a Dream Text
As a cultural and historical phenomenon, dreams are universally endowed with significance. Yet, their interpretations have varied widely-in the ascribed 'meanings' of dreams and in the ramifications for dreamers. In this article, we examine the social trajectory of a contemporary 'dream' that came to light in the context of a police investigation of a murder. We analyze the various institutional codes that refracted this 'dream' through their par…
Introduction to the Special Issue on Narratives of Violence
Prolegomena to a Paradigm: Narratives of Surrender
Negotiation in the Aldo Moro Affair: The Suppressed Alternative in a Case of Symbolic Politics
Negotiation in the Aldo Moro Affair: The Suppressed Alternative in a Case of Symbolic Politics
Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay
The Trouble with America: Why the System is Breaking Down
The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama
On March 16, 1978, the former prime minister of Italy, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped by the Red Brigades, and what followed-the fifty-five days of captivity that resulted in Moro's murder-constitutes one of the most striking social dramas of the twentieth century. In this compelling study of terrorism, Robin Wagner-Pacifici employs methods from sociology, symbolic anthropology, and literary criticism to decode the many social texts that shaped the eve…
The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama
The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam.James William Gibson
Narration and Identity
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past
The problem of commemoration is an important aspect of the sociology of culture because it bears on the way society conceives its past. Current approaches to this problem draw on Émile Durkheim and emphasize the way commemorative objects celebrate society's former glories. This article on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial deals with the way society assimilates past events that are less than glorious and whose memory induces controversy instead of con…
Portents or Confessions: Authoritative Readings of a Dream Text
As a cultural and historical phenomenon, dreams are universally endowed with significance. Yet, their interpretations have varied widely-in the ascribed 'meanings' of dreams and in the ramifications for dreamers. In this article, we examine the social trajectory of a contemporary 'dream' that came to light in the context of a police investigation of a murder. We analyze the various institutional codes that refracted this 'dream' through their par…
Vocabularies of Public Life: Empirical Essays in Symbolic Structure.Robert Wuthnow
Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity
In this volume, leading historians, anthropologists and ethnographers explore the relationship between collective memory and national identity in diverse cultures throughout history. Placing commemorations in their historical settings, the contributors disclose the contested nature of these monuments by showing how groups and individuals struggle to shape the past to their own ends. The volume is introduced by John Gillis's broad overview of the …
Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia versus Move
In the early 1980s, the radical group MOVE settled into a rowhouse in a predominantly African-American neighborhood of west Philadelphia, beginning years of confrontations with neighbours and police over its anti-establishment ways and militant stance against all social and political institutions. On May 13, 1985, following a period of increased MOVE activity and threats by neighbours to take matters into their own hands, the city moved from bure…
Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Yael Zerubavel
Memories in the making: The shapes of things that went
The Glory of Van Gogh: An Anthropology of Admiration
Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia
Theorizing the Standoff: Contingency in Action
This book, first published in 2000, combines original theoretical analysis with real life case studies to examine the nature of the standoff. Starting with the standoffs of Wounded Knee, MOVE, Ruby Ridge, Waco, Freeman of Montana, Tupac Amaru, Republic of Texas, the author explores the archetypal patterns of human action and cognition that move us into and out of these highly charged situations and seeks to theorize the contingency of all such mo…
Theorizing the Standoff: Contingency in Action
Pity and a Politics of the Present
Pity Has a Human Face Robin Wagner-Pacifici (bio) Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1999) With diffidence one turns on the news or opens the newspaper. Is one ever really ready to receive visions and descriptions of the horrors of war, of massacre, of civil strife, when fellow human beings are in extremis? And once absorbing the images or the descriptions - what then? Typologies may help t…
Introduction to the Special Issue on Narratives of Violence
Prolegomena to a Paradigm: Narratives of Surrender
Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory
The dubious place of virtue: Reflections on the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton and the death of the political event in America
Surrenders and Quagmires
There used to be accepted rituals for surrendering, understood by everyone. Today, it is not always clear how and when a conflict ends
The Heavy Lifting of Reasons in the World of Why
Sociology (44 works) · Political science (35 works) · Epistemology (25 works) · Law (25 works) · History (21 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Politics (18 works) · Art (15 works) · Psychology (15 works)