Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-17T13:01:38.760Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - The action of standoffs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Robin Wagner-Pacifici
Affiliation:
Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
Get access

Summary

10:20 – An informant of established reliability in a position to know, advises that he was informed by American Indian Movement leadership that there would be a meeting at Calico at 15:30 this date and that this is where the action will be.

(From a US Marshal's log, February 23, 1973, quoted in Voices, p. 29, italics mine)

We arrive, finally, at the action of the standoff. But in announcing that “finally” I do not necessarily mean to privilege action over temporal and spatial coordinates. It is just that action seems to be where “the action is.” Of course, action is infamously difficult to account for or even to describe. Scholars seek to do it by drawing such distinctions as that between structure and agency or by tracking transformations in things as they take shape and develop in the context of cause/effect and means/ends chains. When one attempts action's actual description, though, time and space immediately move once again onto center stage. No action can be described without them. The simplest physical movement can only occur in ways that are both enabled and constrained by time and space. Such epistemological conundrums return us to the problem articulated in the first chapter of this book: how is it possible to track or trace the present, that time during which action is emerging and has not yet taken definitive (i.e. retrospective) shape?

Type
Chapter
Information
Theorizing the Standoff
Contingency in Action
, pp. 137 - 213
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×