ABSTRACT
When do we know that something that happens is an event, that is, ‘produce[s] a rupture in the given order’ (Isin 2012 : 131)? How can we be informed about an event while it is ongoing, as we are trying to capture the transformative moment? Eric Hobsbawm, in the wake of a controversy about the French Revolution gave a pretty simple answer. Rejecting the revisionist interpretation of this event, he sided with contemporaries, because they ‘were not concerned with historical analysis for its own sake [and hence] tended to emphasize what they saw as new and dynamic, rather than what they regarded as relics of the past due to move to the margins of social reality’ (Hobsbawm 2004 [1989]: 477). This view tacitly implies a rejection of the notion that an explanation can outweigh the experiences of the actual players. Accordingly, even the lack of adequate words to describe the new social reality could not take away from the discovery of contemporaries that what they were experiencing was a new reality. Thus, when the existing epistemological frameworks no longer satisfy the search for an explanation we may hear, as Roy did a decade ago, ‘another world that is on her way’.
