Table Of ContentPalgrave Studies in the History of Science
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Zoltán Boldizsár Simon
The Epochal Event
Transformations in the Entangled Human,
Technological, and Natural Worlds
Zoltán Boldizsár Simon
Bielefeld University
Bielefeld, Germany
Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology
ISBN 978-3-030-47804-9 ISBN 978-3-030-47805-6 (eBook)
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P : O c c
reface n Onnective OncePts
Human activity confronts us today with our cognitive limits. The recogni-
tion that human agency achieved a planetary character, that is, the recog-
nition that our activity became a natural force that transforms the condition
of the Earth system, is at the edge of our understanding. Facing the sheer
scale and the immense consequences of human actions and capacities does
not come easy to most of us. Little wonder that the new situation triggers
contradictory responses. Only in the climate context, responses vary from
climate change denial to apocalyptic fatalism, from lifestyle choices of
reducing carbon footprints to large-scale plans of geoengineering, and
from technology blaming to techno-saviorism.
In a cacophony of voices, scholarly responses represent only a fragment
of possibilities. Even if the natural sciences brought the issue to a broader
awareness in the first place, their voice becomes one among the many
when it comes to responding to the situation. Together with humanities
and social scientific responses, they constitute a larger family of responses
with a specific socio-cultural function to fulfill: scholarly responses do not
simply confront us with the limits of understanding; they also try to over-
come the very limits they identify. In other words, scholarly responses aim
at gaining an understanding of that which seems to defy understanding—
especially in situations we experience as crisis.
This book attempts to sketch a specific type of scholarly response. It
aims at developing an understanding of our recent anthropogenic plane-
tary crisis by creating concepts through which we conceive of the world
and ourselves. So far this is nothing surprising. Many would agree that
v
vi PREFACE: ON CONNECTIVE CONCEPTS
theoretically oriented work in what we still call today the humanities and
the social sciences is, to a large extent, conceptual work.
The specificity of this book’s approach lies in the intention to encour-
age developing concepts of a peculiar kind. Let’s call them connective con-
cepts. As our current crisis consists of the collision of human and the
natural worlds through advanced technologies, the adequate concepts
through which we apprehend ourselves and the world must be ones that
somehow capture the collision of worlds or reflect on that collision. Such
concepts are connective inasmuch as they have the potential to link,
bridge, and connect knowledge formations that were originally developed
to study the human and the natural worlds separately. In order to live up
to their potential, they need to travel.
As Mieke Bal pointed out two decades ago, concepts “are not fixed”;
“they travel – between disciplines, between individual scholars, between
historical periods, and between geographically dispersed academic com-
munities.”1 The different forms of travel Bal indicates are supposed to
testify the flexibility of concepts. How do connective concepts relate to
Bal’s traveling concepts and their flexibility? On the one hand, connective
concepts are flexible to the extent that they, too, travel across disciplines
and their meanings are constantly being renegotiated. On the other hand,
connective concepts also gesture toward the opposite end by seeking
points of connection and shared meanings through potentially the entirety
of the scholarly landscape, thereby enabling a broader exchange on the
collision of worlds. As compared to traveling concepts, connective ones
have an extra job to do. Whereas Bal’s notion of traveling concepts is pri-
marily a reflection on the work of the humanities (even if she does not
exclude science from the travels), connective concepts, by definition, may
link not only certain disciplines, but, in the most desirable although sel-
dom cases, also the work of the humanities and the work of the sciences.
At times when we both unintentionally act into and deliberately manip-
ulate and engineer what has previously been thought of as the order of
nature, concepts that merely travel are less useful than concepts that also
connect. To stand a chance to comprehend the big picture, our partial
knowledges must be effectively bridged by certain concepts. In fact, even
the question of how exactly we understand the collision of the human and
the natural worlds—whether it makes up one world, whether we keep
thinking about them as distinguishable (and if yes, the way in which we do
exactly), or whether we somehow manage to think of it as one world with
PREFACE: ON CONNECTIVE CONCEPTS vii
analytically distinguishable constituents—will likely be decided by the
concepts we create to capture their entanglement.
The collision of worlds is already enhanced into a large-scale connective
concept, even a master concept, if you like: the Anthropocene. Yet, as of
now, the Anthropocene is also a contested concept in a transdisciplinary
debate, invested with several potentially conflicting meanings. The chap-
ters of this book will devote a great deal of attention to exploring the
perplexities and conflicts in debating the concept. What I would like to do
here is to indicate four points about connective concepts by taking a start-
ing point in the notion of the Anthropocene. Let me introduce the points
in the shape of four brief theses.
1. Connective concepts entail a cluster of conceptual innovations. Game-
changing conceptual innovations hardly concern stand-alone con-
cepts. Rather, they involve a larger cluster or web of interrelated
notions, some of which are newly coined, while others are old ones
invested with new meanings. In the case of the Anthropocene, its
fate as a master concept is tied to the development of further con-
cepts that either reinforce or challenge its plausibility. Hence the fact
that the Anthropocene already comes within a rapidly expanding
web of concepts that intend to capture the current “planetary” and
“anthropogenic” crisis.
2. Connective concepts require mutual knowledge transfer. Concepts
typically emerge locally and become connective ones over the course
of multiple interactions. The Anthropocene as a connective (master)
concept is, for instance, the creation of Earth system science, just as
well as most of its surrounding concepts. The humanities and the
social sciences have begun to rapidly adopt these concepts among
their conceptual tools, renegotiate their meanings, and develop their
own concepts that either function as new surrounding and related
concepts to the scientific ones or as conceptual alternatives. This is
necessary, and conceptual work in this direction is unlikely to halt
anytime soon. As seen from the other side, however, the conceptual
innovations of the humanities and social sciences struggle to find
their way to the scientific vocabulary to a comparable extent. Mildly
put, at the present stage it is only in a limited sense that we can
meaningfully talk about a mutual knowledge transfer in making
sense of the collision of worlds. The reasons are manifold, and some
of them will be touched upon in more details in the chapters that
viii PREFACE: ON CONNECTIVE CONCEPTS
follow. What needs to be noted here is only the fact that the ideal of
mutuality in knowledge transfer can easily fall short in practice. Yet,
the lack of full mutuality does not mean that partial mutuality is of
no value. Under the condition of contested meanings—and con-
cepts discussed across the disciplinary landscape are extremely prone
to such contestation of meanings—partial mutuality is already
a success.
3. With respect to their reach, first-order and second-order connective con-
cepts can be distinguished. Given the distance from the ideal situation
of achieving a high degree of mutuality in knowledge transfer, it
makes sense to distinguish between two levels in which connective
concepts may work. On the first level, one can find those first-order
connective concepts that resonate with both the natural and life sci-
ences on the one hand and the human and social sciences on the
other. Such concepts are, I believe, what we need, what we are short
of, what we bitterly contest even when we have them, and what may
be seldom and extremely difficult to intentionally develop. As an
example of a truly transdisciplinary reach, one can think of not only
the Anthropocene but also the notion of anthropocentrism, fiercely
debated in the humanities and the social sciences as well as in the
natural and life sciences.2 Second-order connective concepts have a nar-
rower reach. They work, respectively, within the confines of the
natural and life sciences on the one hand and the human and social
sciences on the other. Arguably, much of the conceptual innovations
that emerge locally in disciplines of the human and social sciences
acquire such reach at best. They may resonate broadly enough
within humanities and social scientific scholarship, but they hardly
find their way to the scientific vocabulary. This is especially true of
concepts put forward as alternatives to the Anthropocene, such as
the Capitalocene or the Chthulucene.3
4. Connective concepts are recognized as such only after the fact and by
being used as connective ones. The above categorization of connective
concepts does not entail that each individual concept must live up to
the fullest possible reach within one of the categories. It means only
that connective concepts are typically made use of within the respec-
tive scopes associated with them. As the phrasing of the previous
sentence already indicates, concepts are defined as connective by
virtue of being used as such. Concepts may or may not be developed
with the explicit intention to function as connective ones, but
PREFACE: ON CONNECTIVE CONCEPTS ix
intention is not what decides their connective character. Nor is the
decisive factor anything like an inherent feature of the concepts
themselves. We are the ones who invest concepts with a connective
character, and we do that only after the fact, only after the formation
of the concepts, by actually putting them to use across the disciplin-
ary landscape as conceptual bridges.
This book is an effort to develop such a connective concept: the epochal
event. The concept reflects the emerging societal experience of time that
epochal changes are taking place all around us. Against the backdrop of
the technology-driven collision of the human and the natural worlds, it
attempts to capture the transformative character of threshold events that
trigger previously unimaginable epochal transformations.
Bielefeld , German y Zoltán B. Simon
Leiden, The Netherlands
nOtes
1. Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2002), 24.
2. In the larger debate on anthropocentrism, the humanities are typically advo-
cating an anti-anthropocentric stance. Chapter 4 engages with the question
of anthropocentrism in more details.
3. More on these alternatives in Chapter 3.
BiBliOgraPhy
Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2002.
