HISTORY AND THE SPECTRE OF UNPRECEDENTED CHANGE a conversation with Zoltán Boldizsár Simon Zoltán Boldizsár Simon is a historian at Bielefeld University, Germany, whose theoretical work investigates the current human condition in the face of previously unimaginable challenges. He has written extensively on the theory and philosophy of history and on the challenges posed by technology and the Anthropocene to modern historical thinking. He is the author of History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century (2019), and The Epochal Event: Transformations in the Entangled Human, Technological, and Natural Worlds (2020). More recently, he co-conducts the collective research programme / serial publishing experiment “Historical Futures” with Marek Tamm and the journal History and Theory. This conversation with Alexandre Leskanich explores his thinking and its ramifications for understanding our unprecedented times, and to what extent our historical sensibility is shifting in the face of transformative events. Alexandre Leskanich (AL): Could you begin by giving an overview of what your main theoretical argument is, and what justifies it in your opinion? And further, how would you characterise its object? Because it strikes me that while your work is billed as a “radical theory of history”, its object is not really history but “historical sensibility”: a rather more slippery and nebulous object about which any general theory seems difficult to either establish or sustain. So, I wonder what is this historical sensibility to which you refer, and how is its existence theoretically determined? Moreover, by what means is the generalised change in this historical sensibility you 79 allege established – the change, for instance, from the “processual” to the “evental” sensibility you discuss and which forms the central contention of your book? How can a change in this alleged sensibility be discerned if the existence of the sensibility itself hasn’t been (or can’t be) satisfactorily established? Zoltán Boldizsár Simon (ZBS): This is quite a big cluster of questions! Let me begin with the question of intellectual genealogy, and let’s see how I can address the other questions from this vantage point. Formally, I have all my degrees in history, and my work falls within the scope of many historical approaches, from history of science and history of knowledge to intellectual history. At the same time, what I attempt to understand is much harder to categorise within the existing disciplinary landscape. Briefly, I try to explore what I think is an emerging new historical condition through engaging with a highly complex interrelation of technological, ecological, and socio-political prospects. Capturing the historicities and temporalities that inform such prospects and understanding them as an emerging new historical condition demands cutting across knowledge formations without subscribing to the particular prescriptive methodologies of any of them. Perhaps little wonder that, in this respect, I credit Paul Feyerabend’s work as an intellectual encounter that shaped the way I approach the object of my study. To elaborate, within the framework of my endeavour to explore an emerging new historical condition, “historical sensibility” is the analytical category I use to distinguish between different, yet distinctly “historical”, modes of sense-making; that is, between different modes of conceiving of the world and ourselves as changing over time, either as a deliberate engagement or as an implied and unconscious apprehension of the world. With the help of this category, I hope to be able to highlight the novelty of a certain historical sensibility that is increasingly becoming prominent since the end of the world wars. Whereas Western modernity dominantly conceived of the changing world in terms of developmental processes, lately we started to expect unprecedented changes to happen due to momentous game-changer events. The modern historical sensibility was processual and developmental inasmuch as it configured change over time along a deep continuity underlying an extremely diverse set of 80 processes ranging from nation building to emancipatory struggles. In contrast, the emerging new historical sensibility is evental inasmuch as it configures changes as unprecedented; that is, changes that do not unfold out of past conditions but burst out in exceptional and extreme events which, in one way or another, escape the confines of human experience. For the plausibility of talking about a new evental historical sensibility, it does not even matter if the expected unprecedented changes take place or not. What matters is that the kind of change we have come to expect lately is “unprecedented change” instead of slow, processual, continuous changes. It is this expectation of a new kind of change that I track in the post-war technological and ecological domains (and by “post-war” I mean the period from the mid-20th century onwards), for instance, in trans-humanist aspirations of escaping the biological limitations of being human, or in the work of Earth system science and its projections of passing tipping points that may result in abrupt transformations of the Earth system. I TRY TO EXPLORE AN EMERGING NEW HISTORICAL CONDITION THROUGH ENGAGING WITH A HIGHLY COMPLEX INTERRELATION OF TECHNOLOGICAL, ECOLOGICAL, AND SOCIO-POLITICAL PROSPECTS Contrary to the projections of modern political ideologies and their ways of figuring the future of human development in advance (due to a directionality attributed to their scenarios of desired change), the new reality beyond the event horizon appears unfathomable in its prospects of unprecedented change. Yet I do not wish to claim that we exchanged a modern developmental historical sensibility for the post-war evental one. What I see is their co-existence and desynchronisation, with the former one still dominating socio-political prospects in many ways (typically without visions of better socio-political arrangements), and the latter one looming large in the aforementioned technological and ecological prospects. The interrelations of these multiple and largely diverging prospects – involving differentiated human communities, global processes, planetary transformations of the Earth system, and all possible nonhumans – is precisely what we need to find out in the near future. IT IS THIS EXPECTATION OF A NEW KIND OF CHANGE THAT I TRACK IN THE POSTWAR TECHNOLOGICAL AND ECOLOGICAL DOMAINS None of this sounds like theory or philosophy of history as conventionally understood. It is neither a meaningful interpretation of the course of affairs as in classical philosophies of history, nor an inquiry into the workings of professionalised historiography as in post-war historical theory (including analytic and narrative philosophies of history). At the same time, both endeavours are part of a much broader conception of theoretical work on history as I understand it: an exploration of the manifold ways in which the world and human beings are apprehended “historically” by seeing them within one or another configuration of change over time, one or another configuration of relating past, present, and future. They are even part of the object of my research inasmuch as they all represent certain modes of “historical” apprehension of the world and ourselves. Technological and ecological prospects represent other ways and modes, as do new social justice movements, and so do many other socio-political and cultural-natural practices and their relations to each other. As no one can single-handedly carry out such work, and since exploring certain modes of “historical” apprehension does not invalidate the exploration of other ones, making sense of an emerging historical condition is, ideally, a collaborative endeavour. It’s no secret that collaborative endeavours constitute the direction towards which the humanities and social sciences are already heading. AL: Your summary points to an interest – that I think we both share – in the ways in which human beings apprehend both themselves and the world historically, and whether the ways in which we do so fulfil the promise of meaning and orientation traditionally ascribed to them. Historical knowledge (i.e. the symbolic projection of the past via the chronological incorporation of historical events into a narrative structure that causally explains their occurrence) is a contrivance intended to manage an amorphous, constantly changing world itself created by capitalism’s pullulating contingencies. To the extent that the world is already historicized, a historical “sense” having been imparted to it through the stories and categories historical knowledge belatedly provides, and to the degree these stories and categories shape human thought and behaviour, it seems plausible to say that there exists something like an emergent “sense” of history identified by Nietzsche; a “historical sentience” which “suffuses everyday life” (as identified in Martin L. Davies’s Historics: Why History Dominates Contemporary Society); and that in being socially situated persons we have a sense of also being historically situated persons. It seems right to think that individuals have always had some “sense” of the historical “times” in which they live. But “times” – as in “times of unprecedented change” – is itself (like “epoch”) a historicizing contrivance intended to coordinate elements which are in fact asynchronous; to project an overarching rationality or coherence to the existence of a vast multitude of events whose temporal coincidence makes no meaningful historical sense. So while I think the notion of a general “historical sensibility” is interesting, it might be implausible to think that the variegated and contradictory “senses” of history entertained at any given time by a vast assortment of individuals in their ordinary lives can be collectively abstracted – and then distilled – into the dual theoretical straight-jacket of the developmental vs. evental historical sensibilities. In this regard, I was reminded of Pierre Bourdieu’s comment about “projecting theoretical thinking into the heads of acting agents”, whereupon the theorist simply “presents the world as he thinks it (that is, as an object of contemplation, a representation, a spectacle) 81 as if it were the world as it presents itself to those who do not have the leisure to withdraw from it in order to think it” – which for Bourdieu displays the tendency of scholasticism to assume, in its own self-interest, that the world is as he or she conceives it. Certainly, our times seem to us unprecedented because we live them, but also because we are aware, historically speaking, that things were once very different. We have an archaeological capacity to become aware of this that is itself unprecedented in history (I’m thinking, for example, of the recent unearthing of Neolithic shafts near Stonehenge using the latest technology). Still, conceiving of change as unprecedented, unless it occurs in the ecological and technological domains, seems a difficult challenge for a culture so completely accustomed to thinking in historical terms. Many do ascribe to historical knowledge insight and authority which it seems increasingly unable to deliver. So the common recourse to historical parallels and analogies to comprehend what are in fact novel events – not to mention that such events are happening to entirely different people, with different motivations and beliefs, occupying a quite different sort of world – seems likely to exacerbate the possibility of the very “game-changer” events we might hope to avoid. THE AIM IS TO ARRIVE AT CONCEPTS THAT BETTER CAPTURE TWENTY-FIRSTCENTURY TEMPORAL EXPERIENCES THAN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY IDEOLOGIES WHICH STILL DOMINATE BOTH PUBLIC AND SCHOLARLY THINKING While reading your book I was reminded of a remark made by Günther Anders, who observed that we “inverted Utopians” are “unable to visualise what we are 82 actually producing”. To the extent that technology is continually amplifying human action beyond the point at which we can control or predict its consequences, this insight by Anders seems quite apt. I’m interested to know if you think we’re doomed to think too late, and is the developmental historical sensibility responsible for this, having lulled us into a false sense of security with its trusty processes and precedents? And in order to avoid unwanted prospective outcomes, do we need, in your view, to scrap that modern sensibility altogether and adopt the “evental” one wholesale, even if there continue to be events which are best described in developmental terms? I mean, while increasingly violent weather events and the like are sharp and sudden, aren’t most ecological processes painstakingly slow and incremental? And if so, would merely expecting unprecedented change have the desired socio-political effect? ZBS: I’d like to pick up on four themes you touched upon. The first would be our common ground. We seem to agree that the challenge today lies in recognising the unprecedented as unprecedented – without projecting over it the modern temporal grid of a developmental process. Additionally, I also think that unprecedented change and developmental processes are alternative historical sensibilities, which leads to the second theme I’d like to address. You’re right that most societies are accustomed to thinking in historical terms conventionally understood; that is, thinking in terms of developmental processes. What I try to show is that this is only one way of thinking historically, only one way to temporally coordinate asynchronous elements, as you have it. There are multiple modes of such coordination, which I try to capture as multiple historical sensibilities, the modern developmental one being one of them, while the post-war evental one – that of unprecedented change – being another. And there are many more. Third, it’s a very good and also extremely difficult question whether the category of “historical sensibility” and its modes entail abstracting from the individuals whose experience of time they intend to capture. I do not think that I project theoretical thinking into people’s heads because I do not claim that they explicitly think in terms of the categories and concepts I devise. At the same time, it would be difficult to say that my concepts and analytical © Nicole Franchy categories are merely scholarly tools that have no feedback whatsoever on that which they describe. As we are dealing with conceptualisations of experiences (and not with suspicious medical “classifications” of people), the feedback may even be positive inasmuch as the new concepts and categories are put to use more broadly as those through which we actively make sense of the world and ourselves. The aim is to arrive at concepts that better capture twenty-firstcentury temporal experiences than the nineteenthcentury ideologies which still dominate both public and scholarly thinking. Thinking in terms of those inherited ideologies is one of the major obstacles to recognising the unprecedented because all of them are conditioned by the modern idea of history, by an older type of historical sensibility. The fourth theme I want to briefly discuss is what you phrase as achieving a desired socio-political effect. I’d like to translate this into the question of motivation for action. It seems to me that in today’s societies in the West, action is taken only after disastrous, sociopolitically destabilising events are underway, despite the fact that such events were anticipated widely. Although a precautionary logic is extremely prominent today, the logic often remains untranslated into action – and when precautionary action is carried out, it often perpetuates existing injustices. Quite a double bind! AL: Indeed. Incisive as ever, H. G. Wells wrote of the misplaced complacency of our species, when in fact we are stalked by the prospect of diseases which have yet to come into existence. Appropriately, he observed 83 that “the bacilli have no more settled down into their final quiescence than have men; like ourselves, they are adapting themselves to new conditions and acquiring new powers”. Similarly astute, Paul Valéry pointed out in the 1930s that the time when events were merely localised, when their effects were subsequently confined, and when history could plausibly teach us to expect what had already been, has drawn to a close. So too has a time when there were limits to the unforeseen, when “we regarded the future as a combination of things already known”, and when, therefore, “the new could be broken down into elements that were not new”. Now, the scope of the unexpected seems boundless; the future encompasses possibilities that elude historical understanding, particularly of an ideological kind. But if we now countenance “changes that do not unfold out of past conditions”, as you put it, the notion of causation you have in mind here needs further explanation. On its face, change is caused by factors or forces which both precede and initiate it, so to what extent can there be change which does not unfold out of, or is not somehow dependent, on past conditions? No matter what the prospective change is, some account of the necessary conditions for its occurrence can be given, as Toby Ord shows in The Precipice, his recent book about existential risk. Scientific study can plausibly say whether we are right to infer from present conditions the likelihood of future events. So, without past conditions out of which change unfolds, how can it occur? The fact that we can investigate the possibility of such changes surely implies, and even depends upon, a “developmental” account of causation, such that we have some notion of what preconditions would have to be in place for such change to occur, and in what causal sequence. You’ve described unprecedented change as an event that escapes the human order of things and brings about a new reality “unfathomable” in historical terms. Indeed, the modern world, as many thinkers have observed, does operate as a crucible for the unprecedented: novelties are realised within it that its inhabitants fail to fully apprehend, because their time-consciousness is attuned to a temporal scale far smaller than is required to grasp their occurrence. The mismatch between our internal time-consciousness and the temporal scales on which events unfold in the Earth system is stark. Isn’t it the case that while it might be wise to shift our 84 thinking to conceptualise our times as unprecedented in the hope we can prevent unwanted prospects, whatever historical sensibility we adopt cannot overcome the temporal discrepancy between the individual mind and what historically happens? I suppose I struggle to see how, if unprecedented change involves events which by definition defy historical understanding, conceptualising our historical sensibility in terms of unprecedented change can help “make sense of the world and ourselves”. What am I missing here? EPOCHAL EVENTS CHALLENGE OUR MOST COMMON HUMANIST ASSUMPTIONS OF SPECIFICALLY POLITICAL EVENTS THAT WE CAN, IN PRINCIPLE, EXPERIENCE FROM BEGINNING TO END ZBS: Let me begin by addressing the question of the specificity of “unprecedented change” as a kind of change and the “event” that triggers the change. This will hopefully reveal a few things on the other questions you raise. While it’s certainly possible to think of events as unprecedented, referring to unprecedented events typically does not mean more than saying that the event occurs for the first time. Only when you consider an event in terms of its consequences can you link it with the profound transformations of “unprecedented change”. Then you have the specific kind of event interwoven with the specific kind of change: an event that separates two worlds, two incommensurable realities, a preevental and a post-evental one. So you have a certain reality, then an event that triggers unprecedented change, then another reality. I’m not sure that the core question is what causes what, and I’m more concerned with accounting for a new mode in which change occurs today, a mode in which developmental unfolding may even be effective up to the point when the event kicks in. It may be perfectly plausible to state that the event – say, the crossing of planetary boundaries – unfolds in a cumulative manner throughout hundreds of years of anthropogenic environmental degradation. But what the event itself triggers will be an abrupt change according to Earth system science, the occurrence of a sea change, and the post-evental condition does not occur as one that unfolded from the pre-evental one. Instead of unfolding, it is more like a switch: in the pre-evental setting the Earth system functions in a way that supports human life, in the post-evental setting it doesn’t – and the event is what induces the switch. In The Epochal Event, I try to capture this specific kind of event by introducing the notion of the “epochal event”. Such an event exceeds the confines of human experience in one way or another due to its extremity, which may be provided by the instantaneousness of the event such as the technological singularity, or by the duration of the event as in anthropogenic Earth system transformations. Epochal events challenge our most common humanist assumptions of specifically political events that we can, in principle, experience from beginning to end. The sciences, however, do not have difficulty considering extra-experiential events effective on a larger timescale, such as mass extinction events. And even the humanities do not have problems with postulating temporal phenomena that you cannot experience in their entirety, like modernity or capitalism. If such phenomena can be extra-experiential even in the humanities, why stick with the idea that events cannot? Even if it’s counterintuitive to a certain extent, nothing really prevents us from being able to think certain events that work at the intersection of human and physical systems – whether from the side of the humanities or from the side of the sciences. And it seems to me that this is precisely what the current crisis that collides the human and the natural worlds demands from us: to connect human and social science knowledges with natural and life science knowledges through concepts by which we make sense of the entanglement of worlds. I call these concepts that have the potential to bridge knowledge formations “connective concepts”. AL: This is an interesting clarification. Certainly, the coincidence of technology and human cognition has produced a world by definition unprecedented; one that is in crisis. One example of an event with an extra-experiential character that might trigger future unprecedented change is the opacity concerning how algorithms developed by deep learning AI technology reach conclusions and make decisions. We have automated systems running now which have effectively programmed themselves, whose thinking we don’t fully understand, and whose behaviour we cannot therefore predict. In other words, we’ve built machines which could conceivably create a new reality inscrutable to human understanding because the machines operate in ways we can’t comprehend. Here, we will have to contend with an amplified sense not just of historical discontinuity, but of disconnection which the notion of unprecedented change usefully identifies. Still, attempting to connect different types of knowledge presumes their compatibility to begin with. Bridging “knowledge formations” isn’t necessarily the same as making sense: most knowledges bear no relation to each other at all. One’s concepts might appear to connect such knowledge, but it’s not necessarily the case that one has therefore made sense of the entangled worlds you mention. As Bourdieu remarks, the world in which one thinks (i.e. as a theorist) is not the world in which one lives. It strikes me that to be talking in these terms presumes an environment amenable to theorisation; it presumes some basic alignment between mind and world which notions of unprecedented change or an evental historical sensibility seem to contradict. Your work retains a commitment to an ideal of theorisation which your own theory of unprecedented change apparently discredits, as, for example, when you assert in History in Times of Unprecedented Change that you’re interested “in an overall theory of history as a general account of both historical and historiographical change”. Finally, given its relative obscurity, perhaps it would be helpful for you to give your impression of the subdiscipline of the philosophy of history. It seems to me that too much contemporary philosophy of history now functions as a sort of affirmative back-up system or consultancy firm to promote the discipline of history, which goes on much as it always has done, albeit with an expanded sense of its intellectual mission (e.g. “Big History”). Unsurprisingly, such theoretical work typically presumes the validity and legitimacy of historical knowledge itself: as a good thing, no matter how dire the world based upon constant deference to 85 it has turned out. Here, the need to understand, the need to make sense, that lies behind the idea of history as a sense-making endeavour to know ourselves and our world, is supplemented by a further, technocratic assumption, that if we only knew enough about history we might reach the just city. But unfortunately, the sense historical knowledge makes is constantly being subverted by historical action: sometimes intentionally, often unknowingly, human beings bring into existence conditions that deflate the capacity of historical knowledge to manage them, or find in those conditions sufficient meaning. Hence the demand to keep producing more and more histories; more, and better, and “fuller” stories about who we (historically) are. Thus the issue that bothers me here is a pragmatic as much as an epistemological one: if the sheer amount of history produced, let alone the colossal amount of knowledge created about it, disallows comprehension of it as a whole, and if what happened in the past is more and more disconnected from what is happening now, why assume that studying it, theorising about it, helps make sense of anything? The redundancy of the historicizing reflex seems ever clearer. Do you think that historical knowledge still is (or was) a useful guide to human life, even in the face of the unprecedented? I ask this because your work appears to retain an orthodox commitment to history as a sensemaking endeavour which seems incompatible with the disconnection central to the change in historical sensibility you allege. Given that the value of history, let alone its theorisation, cannot simply be assumed, can you share your thoughts on history and its value? 86 work to analysing temporal disconnection and arguing for the recognition of such a disconnection between past and future on the one hand, and then suddenly to come up with the notion of “connective concepts” on the other. But it is not the temporal disconnection of unprecedented change that is meant to be bridged by connective concepts. We should find a way to affirm the temporal disconnection between past and future, because modern historical thinking is unable to do so. What we need to bridge is a gap between knowledge formations that were designed to study the human and the natural worlds separately. Such knowledges lack the conceptual tools to make sense of the collision of human/social/cultural and natural systems. Connective concepts are there to remedy this situation by capturing the entanglement of – as Karen Barad would have it – “naturalcultural” practices through concepts that resonate with both human/social scientific and natural/life scientific communities. Like Mieke Bal’s “travelling concepts”, connective ones travel across the humanities landscape, but they have the extra task to establish bridges – and not only between humanities disciplines, but also between the human and natural scientific knowledges. In the long run, a whole new knowledge regime may emerge as a more adequate study of the entangled worlds – but as of now, what we need are connective concepts. WHAT WE NEED TO BRIDGE IS A GAP BETWEEN KNOWLEDGE FORMATIONS THAT WERE DESIGNED TO STUDY THE HUMAN AND THE NATURAL WORLDS SEPARATELY I think that the theory and philosophy of history can be instrumental in carrying out such conceptual work, and a theoretical study of change over time can bring new insights to the table. This also provides, though only partly, the context of the words you quoted from History in Times of Unprecedented Change, where I declare that I am interested in “an overall theory of history as a general account of both historical and historiographical change”. By this, I do not try to retain a commitment to an ideal of theorisation. My intention is neither to capture everything in one theory (which would contradict what I said earlier about trying to raise awareness of many coexisting historical sensibilities beyond the one inherited from Western modernity), nor to elevate theory above other matters (which would contradict my approach to build a theory upon inquiring into societal practices, relations, imaginaries, and so on). ZBS: Let me begin with a clarification again. I gather now how confusing it may be to devote a large part of my I make the statement against the backdrop of the work in the theory and philosophy of history in the © Nicole Franchy 87 last half-century, which has mainly been reduced to investigating what historians are doing when they are doing history. In my conception, philosophy of history, to address another point you raise, is more than just a narrow focus on theorising historiography. What I mean is that we should study history today not only as professionalised historiography, but also as a way of making sense of the world and ourselves as changing over time, as a mode of apprehending the world as “historical”. Next, whether historical knowledge may be of use today is a highly complex issue, precisely because what I’ve said so far implies that new kinds and types of conceiving of change over time, new modes of relating past, present, and future, are emerging today – without, however, making the modern mode disappear. In emancipatory politics and social justice movements, we can hardly escape remaining committed to central tenets and premises of the modern Western idea of history. Yet an explicit commitment to modern Western historical knowledge and historical thinking is seldom conceded, largely due to the social harms deriving from many of its tenets (ideas of progress, modernization, teleology, and so on). Still, a commitment to emancipation and justice typically relies on familiar ideas of development (as gradual empowerment) over time and directionality towards a better future. The kind of historical thinking that conceives of change in such terms and the matching kind of historical knowledge remain useful as long as we remain committed to such socio-political projects. They are, however, less useful when the aim is to take action in facing unprecedented change. Then they become obstacles and even prevent you from seeing that you face unprecedented change in the first place. They simply cannot make sense of the unprecedented and cannot affirm temporal disconnection, because their essential function is to domesticate future novelty by smoothing it into a deep continuity of past, present, and future. As facing unprecedented novelties in the future and experiencing lingering injustices equally configure our present, and as these different temporalities collide in our lives in many ways, the most difficult task today would be to situate their oft-conflicting imperatives. Alexandre Leskanich is an Early Career Member of the Royal Historical Society and a copy-editor at Evental 88 Aesthetics. He is currently working on his first book, The Anthropocene and the Sense of History: Reflections from Precarious Life, under contract with Routledge. He lives and writes in London.