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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Risk
• climbing
• embodiment
• agency
• subjectivity

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Lyng (1990) and Laurendeau (2006) both demonstrate in the case of skydivers that this sense of control is often illusory, given the magnitude of the environments that voluntary-risk takers are attempting to exert control over.

2 V-threads are holes made in walls or columns of ice by making two ice screw holes in a v shape in the ice, meeting at the deepest point of both screw holes. Rope or cord can then be passed through this hole and used to abseil from. These are typically very strong anchors, but ice quality can vary, so judgement needs to be exercised when choosing ice quality, depth and position.

3 In climbing parlance, an epic refers to a climb that becomes more about survival than stylistic purity – using any means necessary to escape the vertical space.

4 One of the most famous of these is Joe Simpson’s (1988) Touching the Void.

5 A pitch is a section of climbing corresponding to the length of the route. On an alpine route, this is likely to be between 50 and 70 metres.

6 Ice falls are sections where glaciers steepen and become more broken, fractured and unpredictable. They are often difficult or impossible to traverse.

7 Soloing in this context refers to the climbers ‘unroping’: climbing with all their safety equipment but without using it. This is a method in alpinism either to cross easy ground or to speed up the ascent, as utilising safety equipment can be time-consuming.

8 Soloing would dramatically increase their overall speed. See Bunn (2016) for an extended discussion of speed as a form of safety.

9 Frontpoints are part of a crampons that is attached to a climbing boot while ice climbing. The frontpoints are the main contact with the ice and protrude horizontally from the front of the boot so that they can be kicked into the ice to stand on.

10 Some of these factors tend to be repetitive. In fact, ANAM shows an editorial exacerbation at the consistency of lowering and abseil accidents.

11 For a discussion of cliff rock types see Howett (2004).