Interconnectedness

The Catastrophe as a Social Context of Interconnectedness

The "catastrophe" should not be misunderstood as a limited and self-acting event, which triggers correspondingly peculiar actions ("100 deaths/1 h/1 sq km trigger 1 catastrophe alarm") and which is distinguished from other events in the range of the "normal" by the fact that the "correspondingly peculiar actions" (rescue operations, e.g.) as "extra-normal" (1) help to neatly distinguish the "catastrophe" from the "normality" and (2) end up with it again (as if one had been temporarily 'somewhere else', namely on a sea of plagues).

There is no sociology A of normal social processes and in addition - superimposed by some defined events - a reserve sociology B for catastrophic social processes. The catastrophe is analyzable as an extreme case of the possible Social Entanglements, insofar: always something normal.

The shaggy braid of social causes and effects is always intertwined with cause-effect strands, which appear to many participants as non-human and thus as non-social. Simply one says here: with natural causes. But the collective term "nature" for such a class of causes and effects is misleading, as soon as one believes to be able to save the sociological analysis in this respect (so that the neighboring scientists have a 'field for themselves').

There is no natural cause-effect sequence which is not

Both are "social": the Inclusion and the Exclusion of social definitions of "natural" processes. This, in turn, is the result of the fact that people relate to each other historically, that they pretend or conceal facts or assertions to each other - once or recently - that they agreed or deceived each other about their knowledge of nature and society - possibly all unconsciously. Either way - they always judge in Social Entanglement.

So, from this point of view, there is no pure "natural" catastrophe. Whether a snowfall is a catastrophe depends on facts that people pretend to each other (e.g., equipment), or on assertions they make (e.g., an emergency call).

Rapidly a fortiori further concluded: Even less therefore is our 'second nature', the materialized relational structure of society called "technology" something non-social (cf. BORRIES 1979). Thus, definitorially, there can be no pure technical catastrophe. Technical entanglements are coagulated social ones. Finally, "war" is not an alien-dark cause of catastrophe. It is a historically common, possibly catastrophic form of social interdependence.

So it is not "nature", "technology", "War" that cause catastrophes, breaking into the social-normal (the "society") from 'Outside' – but there are critical interconnections between people and their efforts to create Meaning, which in extreme cases are catastrophic.

CLAUSEN, Lars (ed.), 1983. Einführung in die Soziologie der Katastrophen. Bonn: Osang. Zivilschutz-Forschung, Bd. 14. ISBN 978-3-7894-0090-2, p. 43–44.