Wylot, D (2020) Everywhere and all the time: accident, radical contingency, and Crash. Textual Practice, 34 (8). pp. 1345-1364. ISSN 0950-236X
Abstract
What are the politics of the accident? This essay interrogates the accident trope’s dual meaning in critical theory and popular narrative as both historically endemic and conditional for a political theory of radical resistance and ethical relation. I explore this in Paul Haggis’ 2004 film Crash, a popular narrative that plots the accident to provide an opening for a politics of possibility and ethical engagement. However, this essay critiques efforts to situate accidents, and therefore contingency, as both historically endemic and politically resistant, arguing for the difficulty of reading a specific theory of political and ethical decision into something ontologically given. Crash stretches contingency to incorporate temporality itself, and in doing so nullifies consideration of institutional histories of race and class, which aesthetically foregrounds and troubles related assumptions made by a critical mode that too quickly reads a specific politics and ethics into contingency’s deviation from necessary law. The essay re-evaluates the accident’s political and ethical coordinates through reference to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s theorisation of contingency as conditional for political meaning more generally. Accidents, it concludes, are politically and ethically mobile, if they, as Crash and theories of radical contingency contend, happen everywhere and all the time.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an author produced version of an article published in Textual Practice. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | Accident; radical contingency; popular aesthetics; Crash; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of English (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 30 Jan 2020 15:36 |
Last Modified: | 14 Dec 2020 15:26 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/0950236X.2019.1580213 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:156223 |