Madison Renner (Harvard University)

How events begin: Retrospective rupture and the discovery of global warming

This paper critically examines theories of “events” as cultural change processes in sociology, focusing especially on the question of how events begin. I argue that the established model of events as reactions to “ruptures” is overfit to a few extreme episodes. In attending almost exclusively to cases of conspicuous physical violence, scholars have largely taken for granted the self-evidence of “rupturing” occurrences, reifying ruptures as extra-social shocks which are automatically recognizable to actors and analysts. Advancing an alternative approach to disruptiveness as explanandum and attribution, I argue that the collective recognition of rupture can be the outcome of cultural creativity, not only its necessary cause. This suggests that an event need not be triggered by an actual felt crisis, paving the way for a clearer specification of scope conditions and raising the question of how (else) events begin. I develop some answers through an empirical investigation of an event that I argue occurred without rupture: the twentieth-century scientific discovery of the possibility of global warming. In this case cultural transformation was achieved and ascribed to the products of ordinary activity (“routine monitoring”), prompting the post-hoc articulation of an antecedent disruption (“groundbreaking discovery”) to account for change already underway. Identifying formal parallels between theories of events and theories of change in institutions and fields, I discuss some broader implications of studying the routine production of radical change.