How, amidst a crisis of sovereignty and identity, did once-rejected national symbols become meaningful to Kosovo’s Albanians? Having declared independence in 2008, a 2014 study found that less than one-third of Kosovo’s citizens identified with their newly adopted state symbols. As meanings are always shifting, depending on the contexts in which their forms appear and the actors involved, theories of social construction have focused on the representational aspects of meaning-making: the ways in which the forms stabilize (or destabilize) the constructs they depict. Instead of focusing on the representational—the determinable, measurable, and rational aspects, this article investigates the discursive mechanisms that mobilize meanings and configure contexts, extending Robin Wagner-Pacifici’s alternative theory of events. Through discourse and semiotic analysis, it tracks Kosovo’s new flag and anthem through the construction, crisis, and transformation of three social realities: political independence, national identity, and the world of international competitive judo, illuminating how changing meanings change, shifting contexts shift, and how to interpret actors’ fleeting emotions. In the Kosovo case, the construction is the crisis, as well as the change.
In 2008, a giant yellow sculpture of the word 'NEWBORN' was built to celebrate Kosovo's independence. Every year, the designer repaints it to express a new theme, but his messaging is often challenged by anonymous pranks and other interventions. Creating uncertainty over NEWBORN's legitimacy and who has the right to repaint it, these contestations are significant because they echo the uncertainty over the Kosovo state, whose sovereignty is also in dispute.By analysing the relationship between the politics of the sculpture and the politics of the state, the article argues that the disruptions to NEWBORN not only reflect but also reconstitute Kosovo's sovereignty. Although it is generally viewed as the capacity of a state to self-govern, by conceptualising sovereignty as recognition, authority and agency, the article demonstrates how citizens' agency transcends the state and the basis of its rule.
From extraordinary transformations, such as wars, political transitions, and cultural revolutions, to everyday encounters with birth, love, and death, events fundamentally impact the ways individuals and groups experience social life (p. x). 'Much of events' eventfulness', Robin Wagner-Pacifici writes, 'has to do with their uncertainty, their indeterminate quality' (p. 22). Especially during times of upheaval, how do we know when we are in an event? How can actors determine their proximity, role, and capacity for agency? How can scholars better interpret what is at stake as an event unfolds? Wagner-Pacifici's most recent book, What Is an Event? provides a new theoretical framework to analyse events, whether in their early, inchoate stages or in their commemorationswhen we assume them to be over. For Wagner-Pacifici, however, events are never really 'over'they are 'mobile-relentlessly so' (p. 11). Despite the way we recall them, events do not 'begin' and 'end' in the same fashion as narratives. Events constantly undergo different transformations, as they 'live in and through' different 'forms and flows'. 'The handoffs from one form to the next keep events alive' (p. 11). For example, the event we collectively understand as the Holocaust is widely considered to have begun in 1933, with the rise of the Nazi Party and it is considered to have ended in 1945, with the Allies' liberation of the camps. But even intuitively we know that the event of the Holocaust was in the making long before the Nazi's came to power, and we know that the event continues to resonate long after the liberation of the camps. Despite the linear trajectories and turning points, we ordinarily use to make sense of events, events themselves continue to morph and take new forms as contexts shift, actors intervene and different events transpire. Wagner-Pacifici's approach to events enables a new way of thinking about memory, as this perspective fundamentally shifts the way we conceptualize the past. 'This book was propelled into life by an event, the event that became known as 9/11 (or September 11) in the United States. The shadow of 9/11 is cast over the book and pervades its pages', Wagner-Pacifici admits in the opening sentences of the preface (p. ix). Published in the wake of the 2016 US election of Donald Trump, a book about events is now more necessary than ever. Each of the six body chapters, 'Political Semiosis', 'Ground', 'Rupture', 'Resonating Forms', 'Fragmenting Forms', and 'Sedimentation and Drift' are fusions of theory and empirical research. She integrates and develops her theoretical framework through close reading of different events, 'both real and imagined' (p. x), including historical events such as 9/11, the French Revolution, the Paris Commune and the 2008 Financial Crisis, as well as events depicted in paintings such as Et in
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