The Limits of Risk: Exploring the Subject/Object Divide and its Breach in a Climbing Accident

Bunn, Matthew

Abstract

This article explores an auto-ethnographic account of a climbing accident. Climbing communities invest large amounts of time in identifying ‘risks’, that is, making the chances of involvement in a serious or fatal accident more calculable and controllable, and hence less likely. However, little attention has been given to understanding the post-risk state. Rather risk discourses are intended to sustain a sense of control over vertical spaces; spaces that greatly exceed the abilities of the human. Accidents, then, represent a substantial threat to this production of an orderly line between subjectivity and objectivity. While a climbing accident is not necessarily a threshold in the sense of a permanent or irreversible shift of being, it nevertheless reveals where such a threshold lies. This phenomenological account of the accident as a post-risk state offers a fruitful space for furthering accounts of agency, subjectivity and their borders into the ‘inanimate’ world of the objects.

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1469-588X

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Taylor & Francis

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DOI

10.1080/00141844.2019.1659841