Between concepts and thought: digital technologies and temporal relationality
| Author | Oliver Kessler,Marc Lenglet |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117820948199 |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117820948199
International Relations
2020, Vol. 34(3) 413 –431
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117820948199
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Between concepts and
thought: digital technologies
and temporal relationality
Oliver Kessler
Universität Erfurt
Marc Lenglet
NEOMA Business School
Abstract
This article advances the argument that the acceleration of practices introduced by digital
technologies also impact key concepts of social theory. Digital technologies not only give rise
to new concepts, but they also reconfigure our entire socio-political conceptual vocabulary.
In particular, this acceleration reorganises the relationship between the spatial and temporal
dimensions of political concepts. As a consequence, our spatially defined understanding of
authority, hierarchy or relation underestimates the repercussions of shifting temporalities. This
article pursues this shift from space to time and outlines how temporal relationality is gradually
impacting the representations and images we live by.
Keywords
algorithms, authority, concepts, hierarchy, responsibility, temporal relationality
Introduction
The purpose of this special issue is to explore the meaning of potential global challenges
of the next century for the discipline of International Relations (IR). Just imagine this
question was posed 100 years earlier, in 1920. Say an early IR scholar ‘Ms X’ was asked
back in 1920 what she may think the most important challenges would be in the forth-
coming 100 years. Her contribution eventually could have wondered about the current
Corresponding author:
Oliver Kessler, Universität Erfurt, Nordhäuserstr 63, Erfurt 99089, Germany.
Email: oliver.kessler@uni-erfurt.de
948199IRE0010.1177/0047117820948199International RelationsKessler and Lenglet
research-article2020
Article
414 International Relations 34(3)
move to institutions with the League of Nations; she might have wondered about the
future of finance after the most recent collapse of the Gold Standard; she might also have
wondered about the consequences of nationalism or the possible demise of the British
Empire. Yet everything that is so natural for us today was beyond imagination: nuclear
weapons, mass tourism, natural degradation, the rise of China, smartphones, comput-
ers, space travel, electric cars – not to speak of all the new financial instruments that
burgeoned in the 1970s and have since then led the march towards the ‘capitalization of
almost everything’.1 Many aspects of our very mode of existence, the debates we are
having, the problems we are facing and the aspirations we are pursuing – were beyond
collective imagination in 1920.
The same holds true today. Everything we can say about the next 100 years will likely
be ridiculed in light of future developments. Existence in 2120 will certainly look utterly
different from what any of us is able to imagine today. Maybe we do face annihilation
through mini nuclear weapons or a natural cataclysm, maybe we will fight wars with and
through fully automated weapons systems, maybe we are slightly moving towards a ‘Star
Trek’ future where mankind has overcome its perils and developed some higher form of
being. However, and to quote Keynes here: ‘We simply do not know’.2 At the same time,
to accept our inability to foresee long-distance future events is very liberating. It allows
taking seriously the question put before us in this special issue – ‘how should we hold
things together as we think into the future?-while refraining from IR’s typical manoeu-
vres: for example, of pretending that we can predict the future because we ‘have’ the
right philosophy of ‘science’ at hand. Neither are we somehow better positioned simply
because we work with the ‘right’ approach or ‘ism’. All of our IR questions vanish and
become insignificant when looked upon from 2120. This contribution thus is an attempt
to leave our personal comfort zone(s) and engage in a more speculative endeavour and
we are definitely not interested in providing any rationale or evidence to show that future
developments will have proved us right. Instead we want to explore the kind of challenge
we face given current developments.
In light of the global challenges and the future outlook of human inter-connectedness,
we believe that we find ourselves at a watershed. Just like ‘Ms X’ was unable to actually
have the adequate concepts to predict our digitalised, financialised and globalised world,
we do not know what products will constitute global value chains in the future; we do not
know whether we will still have computers or if we will surpass this stage of technologi-
cal development. So far so good. However, there is something more going on. We assume
that we are about to enter a second Sattelzeit or ‘saddle time’, to make use of Reinhart
Koselleck’s concept. For him, ‘saddle time’ allows highlighting a structural break in the
sense of a reconfiguration of the entire socio-political conceptual apparatus in the mid-
eighteenth century. Saddle time thus signifies both a reorganisation or change in the
organising principle of social relations and a reconfiguration of semantic fields.3
We contend that we are about to enter another such structural reconfiguration and are
about to witness another reconfiguration of our entire socio-political vocabulary. Key
concepts such as agency, structure, authority, power and others through which we make
sense of our individual and shared practices will have to be revised in the light of current
and future developments. Hence, we are convinced that we will not only see the advent
of new concepts, but also a reconfiguration of our already existing ones, including the
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