Below is a theme summary, with annotated bibliography at bottom. For IG posts related to this theme, see the ContinuityChange category archives, or the recent posts at right.
Theme Summary
Do you imagine the global condition as one of continuity—where cultural, economic, biophysical, and other patterns persist over time—or is it one of change? Maybe both: as the saying goes, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”: roughly, the more things change, the more they remain the same. But this is only one view of change over time: another would be the famous quote of Marx, “All that is solid melts into air,” which Marshall Berman coined as the title of his treatise on modernity (1983).
If Berman is correct, the global condition today is fundamentally about disruptive change, reaching to the very foundations of what was once thought to be solid. A number of scholars have built on this notion of rapid and disruptive change during late modernity: examples include Marc Augé’s “supermodernity” (1995), Zygmunt Bauman’s “liquid modernity” (2000), and of course, postmodernity. Stasis, then—at least, any notion of a world in balance or equilibrium—would seem to be a thing of the past. Yet all sorts of institutions persist over time: consider time itself, now generally measured on an annual scale via the late 16th century Gregorian calendar, a minor refinement of the much older Julian calendar. The integrative French Annales School of history emphasized structural continuities over time in what they termed the longue durée.
The relationship between continuity and change in our world concerns more than the realms of culture and politics. In the physical and life sciences, change is understood as a given, but the form this change takes can appear quite stable to radically unstable. A classic discussion concerns the debate over uniformitarianism in the physical sciences—the principle that the physical processes we observe can be generalized in time and space. Uniformitarianism, popularized by geologists such as Charles Lyell in the late 18th and early 19th century, generally included the gradualist assumption that things change little by little, in contrast to less stable models such as punctuated equilibrium or full-on catastrophism, preferred by Stephen Jay Gould (e.g., 1965) and other contemporary critics. Nonetheless, uniformitarianism and gradualism had a profound influence on early notions of the earth system and its biota—including, among other examples, Darwin’s theory of evolution. And even the most dynamic biophysical processes may be patterned in a way that belies mere change: for instance, a chaotic system may nonetheless unfold around a relatively stable attractor, as demonstrated in the classic work of Robert May (1976).
Clearly, some degree of change is validated in our collective experience of the global over time: the World Bank, for instance, provides a wide range of indicators at the country and global scale over the last three decades, suggesting both a restless planet and quite differential trends in different parts of the world. The reality of change leads one to ask: has it been for better or worse? One way to address this question would be to consider the role of narrative in how we understand change. For instance, the historian William Cronon (1992) described two quite different narratives of environmental change: a progressive narrative, in which the moral arc trends upward toward improvement over time, and a declensionist narrative, which as its name suggests involves a decline over time as things get worse. Perhaps, if one assumes a consistent (say, declensionist) narrative of change, then the famous French saying above makes sense: yes, there is change, but it remains unchangingly bad (or good, or some other stable characteristic).
Ultimately, continuity and change over time are inseparable in our everyday experience; in fact, it seems impossible to define one without reference to the other. Yet we can imagine that the relationship between the two may differ profoundly from place to place, and from experience to experience, suggesting that any idea of the global that overgeneralizes it in terms of continuity or change is, well, overgeneralized.
Annotated Bibliography
Note: All abstracts below are unmodified from article source database or Google Books.
Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso.
Abstract: An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computer and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge calls ‘non-space’ results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Auge uses the concept of ‘supermodernity’ to describe the logic of these late-capitalist phenomena—a logic of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating and lucid essay he seeks to establish and intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity. Starting with an attempt to disentangle anthropology from history, Auge goes on to map the distinction between place, encrusted with historical monuments and creative social life, and non-place, to which individuals are connected in a uniform manner and where no organic social life is possible. Unlike Baudelairean modernity, where old and new are interwoven, supermodernity is self-contained: from the motorway or aircraft, local or exotic particularities are presented two-dimensionally as a sort of theme-park spectacle. Auge does not suggest that supermodernity is all-encompassing: place still exist outside non-place and tend to reconstitute themselves inside it. But he argues powerfully that we are in transit through non-place for more and more of our time, as if between immense parentheses, and concludes that this new form of solitude should become the subject of an anthropology of its own.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Wiley.
Abstract: In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a ‘heavy’ and ‘solid’, hardware-focused modernity to a ‘light’ and ‘liquid’, software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history. This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life – emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community – and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning. Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman’s two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.
Berman, Marshall. 1983. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. Verso.
Abstract: This book develops the idea that Modernity’s defining characteristic is that of continual reassertion of ambivalence. In light of this argument the author revisits writers such as Goethe, Marx and Dostoevsky adding new dimensions to them all as well as to our understanding of Modernity.
Cronon, William. 1992. “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative.” The Journal of American History 78 (4): 1347–1376. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2079346.
Abstract: Abstract N/A.
Gould, S. J. 1965. “Is Uniformitarianism Necessary?” American Journal of Science 263 (3): 223–28. https://doi.org/10.2475/ajs.263.3.223.
Abstract: Uniformitarianism is a dual concept postulating uniformity of rates of geologic change and time and space invariance of natural laws. The first is false and inhibits hypothesis formation, the second belongs to science as a whole and is not unique to geology. The first concept, titled substantive uniformitarianism, is incorrect and should be abandoned; the second, titled methodological uniformitarianism, is now superfluous and is best confined to the past history of geology.
May, Robert M. 1976. “Simple Mathematical Models with Very Complicated Dynamics.” Nature 261 (5560): 459–67. https://doi.org/10.1038/261459a0.
Abstract: First-order difference equations arise in many contexts in the biological, economic and social sciences. Such equations, even though simple and deterministic, can exhibit a surprising array of dynamical behaviour, from stable points, to a bifurcating hierarchy of stable cycles, to apparently random fluctuations. There are consequently many fascinating problems, some concerned with delicate mathematical aspects of the fine structure of the trajectories, and some concerned with the practical implications and applications. This is an interpretive review of them.