ABSTRACT
This chapter explores bridge jumping and through it, the relationship between stunts and money. Beginning with early-nineteenth-century bridge jumps, I analyse their shift from a form of sport and protest to commercial performance. These ambivalently skilled and dangerous acts aestheticized precarity, highlighting the conflicted role of skill in stunts. I view the sacrificial and returning structure of bridge jumping through Joseph Roach’s theory of surrogation and Georges Bataille’s concept of sacrifice. I go on to focus on men who jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge in New York in the 1880s and 1890s and explore their actions in the context of financial recession and the currency debate. I focus on one fatal bridge jump, undertaken by a man who had previously taken part in a major protest of 1894, in which unemployed people walked to Washington to demand work. Both the protest and the bridge jump demonstrated the absurd, irrational and excessive aspects of the industrial economy, and in doing so, exposed the socially constituted nature of value and money.
