Have you ever felt like time was standing still, that you were trapped in a repeating spin-cycle? Perhaps you were suddenly aware of your presence in the present; peering down on yourself from a corner of the room, just another set of eyes watching the drama unfold in the theatre of life. You may have been clinging by your fingernails to something that is being swept away by forces beyond your control; a heart-wrenching lost cause in the face of unexpected change. There might have been times when you have been trapped in the ricochets of rapidly onrushing pasts, the inescapable present and the cliff-edge of impending futures, experiencing confusion as to where and when to turn. Time becomes elastic, the world is whirling, it feels like temporal rhythms are undergoing a tectonic shift, and material objects, sights and sounds seem uncanny. Perhaps there are signs of unstoppable epochal change, nothing will ever be the same … Out with the old and in with the something else. Or maybe the sense is one of haunting, of something past returning in a weird, unexpected way. The vertiginous takes hold.

Vertigo is a vexing, difficult to define mood or mode, where the temporal, psychological, physical, aesthetic and social collide, quake, surge and grate against each other, causing intense disorientation. It lurks in the background noise of much philosophical musing on event, where the individual meets the chaos of the world; in Ernesto de Martino (anguish and presence), Søren Kierkegaard (dizziness, anxiety, possibility), Marcel Proust (giddiness), Eelco Runia (vertiginous leaps), Jean-Paul Sartre (nausea), and Michel Serres (turbulence, surges), for starters. Much philosophical prose features a precipice or edge, often a high cliff, where people experience the urge to create new history by throwing themselves into the whirlpool of the abyss on the other side. Taking the plunge is not always a conscious choice since natural and sociocultural structure can overpower singular action. As well as the edge being a site of symbolic (in)decisiveness, one may be intoxicated by the boundary: becoming swept up in a hurricane, by the twisting trajectories of a cyclone, being forcibly squeezed to the point of ejection, or becoming lightheaded with ‘voluptuous panic’ or exhilaration in a world in spasm (Caillois, 2001: 23).

We propose that the vertiginous is more than a philosophical heuristic in its presence across a range of anthropological contexts as an embodied feeling of queasiness, a state of existential vulnerability, or an aesthetic encounter with temporality. In grounding the vertiginous in ethnographic theory, we begin to capture how our research participants see, feel, and embody phenomena that do not neatly fit into standard analytical categories or follow patterns of linear causality. As an unstructured ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, 1977: 128) that manifests in people’s shaky search for direction, the vertiginous resonates with Zygmunt Bauman’s (2006) liquid fear that expresses and struggles with confrontations between modernity and the textual, affective, and factual disruptions of postmodernity.

In his recent book, Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen (2021), Daniel M. Knight addresses how people experience intense temporal disorientation, which he depicts across different scales, aesthetics, and materialities. He attributes the vertiginous to epochal crisis, where people encounter a sudden rupture which gradually loses its eventedness and becomes a chronic condition. Vertigo is presented as inherently boundary- scale- and typology-defying; his concern is not with the duration or magnitude of crisis, for the vertiginous may be individual, shared, societal, or even global. It may last seconds, days, years – indeed, it may remain partly or wholly immeasurable. Knight argues that certain situations and events are affectively vertiginous, laced with a sense of hyperconsiousness, stuckedness, or a constantly shuddering movement. People experience nausea, dizziness, the sense of falling or light-headedness, dissociation with former Self, déjà vu, palpitations, and breathlessness: lifeworlds are sent careening.

In the context of Greece, a nation caught in a decade of crisis, Knight identifies the vertiginous through local vernaculars. People talk about ‘feelings’ and describe the textures of vertigo (‘it is like …’). These utterances feed directly from a more general anxiety about social change and precarity. Here, the vertiginous, an atmosphere or aesthetic ‘that contains inescapable affective and emotional resonances’, or a timespace ‘with a certain tone of feeling’ (Böhme, 2017: 12) transcends easily recognisable words and phrases. Vertigo is that ‘something in the air’, a cluster of ‘free floating’ intense affects, identifiable through association with a repetitive narrative trend (Lepselter, 2016: 2). As such, Knight argues that the vertiginous can be understood as an expressive modality of seeing and making sense of a world of rupture and crisis, captivity, and entrapment. In a state of vertigo, one is confounded by the dynamics of social situation or inner state, a sense of trajectory is obscured, and the lucidity of socio-historical context is obliterated in moments of acute disorientation.

Yet the vertiginous in its many forms, feelings and experiences seems to transcend crisis and its aftermath. This AT Commons Debate aims to explore the concept as a prominent marker of late-modernity in a striking range of ethnographic contexts and conditions. For instance, the vertiginous might ultimately become navigable, even if still prickly and undesirable, or can inspire imaginaries of better days and pragmatic actions, such as economic plans, peace talks and experiments for vaccines. In some cases, off-kilter lives may be embraced, recalibrated, or reappropriated (Jackson, 2019: 3; Wilderson, 2011). The vertiginous has its more and less intense moments, and can limn everyday temporalities of permanence, routine, arousal, and aspiration. In these conditions, temporal disorientation makes itself known through repetition, changes in mundane rhythms and tempos, through almostness (Shir-Vertesh and Markowitz, 2015) and perpetual striving, in a kaleidoscope of perspective distortion. The zooming in and out of scale adds textured layers to the vertiginous – trying to maintain focus as the social picture trembles, attempting to piece together where and when one belongs on timelines of pasts and futures. These negotiations may require individuals to make a choice, to act with or against the felt motion, even if this act is to shrug their shoulders at the surrounding changes (Frederiksen, 2018). The feeling of vertigo can thus both result in an ignition and an acceptance. It is in moments like these that the temporal and the affective intertwine, and where anthropological questions emerge.

Like many experiential, experimental and poetic anthropologists at least since the 1980s, our contributors here explore the vertiginous by jolting the reader through metaphor and analogy, across messy trajectories and tangled realms¹. Through the authors’ speculative and poetic styles, the reader experiences the ruptures, tremors, and shakiness alongside the researchers and their interlocutors. In addressing emergent social issues that regularly evade standard narrative, speculation opens analysis to phenomena that blur psychosocial, physical, and affective boundaries. The ultimate goal of these short pieces is to convey disruptive, jarring, and disorienting lifeworlds in accordance with the vertiginous theme.

In ironic contrast, we have structured the collection as a lexicon, playing on the vertiginous by ordering the unorderable, by creating lines in the dizzying spiral. Taken together or in its parts, the compendium expresses an evolving concept while establishing a set of keywords, musings, and aesthetic encounters (cf. Howe and Pandian, 2016). To encourage comparative deliberation, entries are presented in a fluid interpretation of a 1+1+1 format: One ‘feature’ of the vertiginous, one ethnographic setting, one theorist. Authors showcase how an engagement with the vertiginous provides a distinctive insight into anthropological theorisations of everyday temporality and existential vulnerability, bringing together observations on the vertiginous that ethnographers increasingly encounter across the globe. The essays demonstrate what a focus on the vertiginous can bring to anthropological studies of precarity where people strive to locate their fragility within the swirling maelstrom of time and history. Contributors offer a range of social situations that express these points by examining the psychosocial conditions that send senses of the orderly spinning, for better and for worse, as threat and as promise.

The inherent anti-predictability of where and when the vertiginous will form means there are limits to comparative analysis across events. Yet a striking feature of the vertiginous in the pieces that follow is how the tempo of life is altered: whether as everyday rhythms of work and play or in confrontation with narratives of progress. We witness this in relation to (in)action or in terms of anticipation sped up or slowed down, frenzied, stuck, or reassuringly familiar. Affects and narrative keywords often reverberate across contexts, articulated as a sense of epochal change, or the feeling of inescapability accompanied by a dull repetitive hum. In the vertiginous vortex, confounded by Self and social situation, trajectories may appear braided, warped, inverted; falling out, being sucked upward, becoming accelerated, or braking to a slow crawl. We invite you to think about the vertiginous with us; to ponder the siren’s song on the cliff-edge, in the whirlpool, through the blurred lines and exhilarating spirals that make up your field, your research, your life. Surely your vertiginous will not be mine, and my vertiginous will not be yours.

Endnotes

1. Particularly in the philosophy of science, metaphor and analogy dynamically link diverse bodies of knowledge that may not fit into established categories for talking or writing about the world – for instance, for striking up conversation between History, Mathematics, Physics and Contemporary Literature (Watkin, 2020). [↩]

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References

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