Abstract

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies: On the Consequence of Blur” is the introduction to its fourth installment. The piece elaborates a new approach, termed “political semiosis,” to tracking event emergence, event formation, and event deformation. This approach enables event analysts to capture the formation and flow of events as they move, take shape, intersect, and form eddies of undecidability. Taking seriously the need to calibrate the dynamic between interpretation and action in event development, political semiosis seeks to construct tools able to assess the capacities of diverse genres to carry events forward or to block events in the paths of their development