Connolly on the Event

William Connolly's new Blog post on the event, emergence, and creatitvity;

We are mesmerized by its combination of uncertain origins, messy modes of self-amplification, and fateful possibilities. Sometimes an event fills us with hope, sometimes foreboding, sometimes with despair. But how should we grasp the very idea of an event? What about those of us located within departments of the human sciences, such as political science, economics, sociology, anthropology and geography? Each unexpected event, in fact, creates a flurry of discussion in the human sciences between those who think politics can be comprehended in classic categories of explanation and prediction, those who wish they could believe that but actually doubt it, those who adopt qualitative or interpretive approaches, and those, most recently, who think that attention to the event carries you into territory that is not entirely reducible to any of these dominant perspectives. These conversations go on between us and within us when a fateful event occurs.