Introduction: Beyond Impact

TO SPEAK OF “CULTURAL IMPACT” is to use a figure of speech drawn from the physical sciences. The word “impact” started being used toward the end of the eighteenth century to refer to the striking of one body against another, but was soon employed more generally to describe the effect of any one thing on any other. The scientific usage is a product of a Newtonian worldview, which sees the universe as colliding bodies. The same assumptions inform the figurative uses of the term, as an example from Coleridge from the early nineteenth century suggests. Writing of perception, Coleridge asserted that something will have been communicated to the mind “by an impact or an impression ab extra.” Perception, for Coleridge, could be modeled on physical processes. The same assimilation of cultural life to a physical process can be found in later uses of the term. When Anne Fuchs defines the cultural upheavals that she terms “impact events” in her contribution to this volume, she similarly draws on the idea of one body physically affecting another, impact events “violent[ly] overturning” the frames through which we understand the world.

Behind both Coleridge’s and Fuchs’s use of the word “impact” is a version of perception that has its roots in the philosophy of John Locke. He himself did not use the word, preferring instead to write of sensations “imprinting” ideas on the blank piece of paper that is the mind at birth. Nevertheless, the guiding model was already that of Newtonian bodies colliding:

For the model of perception that Coleridge and Fuchs share with Locke, the mind is a thing like the retina, which things from the outside can bump into and leave an impression on. To discover that Coleridge was a Lockean is perhaps not that surprising, but to find Lockean epistemology still informing contemporary usage is less expected.