Vertigo and urgency : affective resonances of crisis
Abstract
Crisis provokes a sense of urgency often experienced as vertigo – the intense disorientation as to where and when one belongs on the temporal timeline of pasts and futures. The nauseating affects of urgency can be located in both crisis as sudden rupture and as chronic condition – the former a cliff-edge moment where a schism in historical continuity induces dizziness and a sense of falling, the latter defined by inescapability and suffocating captivity. This article presents the relationship between crisis, urgency and the concept of vertigo, offering insights from philosophy and social theory. Further, based on ethnography from crisis-ridden Greece, it explores how vertigo orients collective timespaces and affectively fosters imaginative relationships with the imminent future.
Citation
Knight , D M 2022 , ' Vertigo and urgency : affective resonances of crisis ' , Social Anthropology , vol. 30 , no. 4 , pp. 37–53 . https://doi.org/10.3167/saas.2022.300404
Publication
Social Anthropology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0964-0282Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright: © The Author(s) 2022. Published on behalf of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. This article is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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