Times of History, Times of Nature

Temporalization and the Limits of Modern Knowledge

Anders Ekström, Staffan Bergwik

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781800733244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

As climate change becomes an increasingly important part of public discourse, the relationship between time in nature and history is changing. Nature can no longer be considered a slow and immobile background to human history, and the future can no longer be viewed as open and detached from the past. Times of History, Times of Nature engages with this historical shift in temporal sensibilities through a combination of detailed case studies and synthesizing efforts. Focusing on the history of knowledge, media theory, and environmental humanities, this volume explores the rich and nuanced notions of time and temporality that have emerged in response to climate change.

Part I

ERAS OF SYNCHRONIZATION

1

Stratigraphies of Time and History

Beyond the Outrages upon Humanity’s Self-Love

Helge Jordheim

In his recent essay on “Anthropocene time,” the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty asks why people in general and historians in particular have such a hard time thinking about “questions of geological time” mobilized by the concept of the “Anthropocene.”¹ Instead, he argues, these questions “fall out of view and the time of human world history comes to predominate,” with the effect that “we do not take into account Earth-history processes that outscale our very human sense of time,” and thus “do not quite see the depth of the predicament that confronts humans today.”² Chakrabarty goes on to offer several examples of how ongoing debates about climate change and geological periodization fail to reconnect “human-centered and planet-centered time,” as he puts it in a paraphrase from Jan Zalasiewicz.³ As Chakrabarty is well aware, this split between historical and geological time, foregrounded in the concept of “the Anthropocene,” has a long history, going back to the eighteenth century and the dissolution of historia naturalis as the main paradigm for gaining knowledge about both the natural and the cultural world.⁴

In this chapter, I will discuss how questions of geological time are coming into and out of view at different moments in the history of knowledge in Western Europe, and how they relate to historical, human-centered time. At the center of these historiographical conceptual movements are a set of theories about times in plural, multiple times, organized according to a specific spatial pattern, known as “stratigraphy.”⁵ Before we can turn to the history of stratigraphy as a theory of time and history, capable of structuring both geological and phenomenological temporalities, we need to take a closer look at one of the most forceful interventions in the history of knowledge giving shape and meaning to the entanglements between geology and human history, by some of the pathbreaking scholars in the field.

The Fourth Outrage upon Humanity’s Self-Love

In the historiography of the history of the earth, or in Martin Rudwick’s term “geohistory,” two classic studies stand out; both want to understand the impact of the radical expansion of the time frame of the existence of the planet, from a few thousand to millions and later billions of years.⁶ On the one hand, there is Rudwick’s own magisterial work, Bursting the Limits of Time, from 2005; on the other hand, there is the even bigger classic, a pioneering study in the history of science tout court, Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle from 1987. Both of them deal with what Gould refers to as “the discovery of geological time,” and what Rudwick calls “the reconstruction of geohistory.” Another thing they have in common, however, is that both of these luminaries in the historiography of the earth sciences kick off their investigations with reference to a claim made in a very different scholarly context, far removed from eighteenth-century geology—here Gould:

Humanity has in course of time had to endure from the hand of sciences two great outrages upon its naïve self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the centre of the universe, but only a speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable. . . . The second was when biological research robbed man of his particular privilege of having been specially created and relegated him to a descent from the animal world.⁷

Any reader with a general knowledge of the Western intellectual tradition will recognize this quote to be from Sigmund Freud, more precisely from his introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, delivered 1915–17. Most readers will also know perfectly well which two events in the history of knowledge Freud is referring to: first, the Copernican revolution, second, Darwin’s theory of evolution. In the next section of the original passage, Freud adds himself to the list, more precisely what he calls “present-day psychological research which is endeavoring to prove to the ‘ego’ of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind.”⁸ Picking up directly from Freud’s famous summary of Western intellectual history, Gould makes the following addition: “But Freud omitted one of the greatest steps from his list . . . He neglected the great temporal limitation imposed by geology upon human importance—the discovery of ‘deep time.’”⁹

This way of restoring geology to its proper place in the history of knowledge, alongside the other revolutions—the cosmological, the biological and the psychological—which fundamentally alter how we humans look at ourselves and our place in the universe, is striking in itself. Especially interesting is the way these four “outrages,” as Freud originally called them, all present themselves as reconfigurations of space and time. After Gould added geology, there is even a symmetry: two of them are concerned mainly with space, the space of the universe and the space of the human mind respectively, and two of them mostly with time, the evolutionary and the geological. Even more striking, however, is the way this summary is repeated, almost verbatim in Rudwick’s Bursting the Limits of Time. The first sentence of the introduction goes as follows: “Sigmund Freud claimed that three revolutions had transformed what his generation—in blissful innocence of modern political correctness—often called ‘Man’s Place in Nature.’”¹⁰ Then he goes on to explain what first Copernicus, then Darwin, and then Freud did to man and man’s self-understanding, adding only the slight caveat that “historians of science are now uneasy about calling any such intellectual changes ‘revolutions,’ except perhaps to sell their books,” thus putting some historical and intellectual distance between himself and Gould.¹¹ Then he goes on: “But anyway, as Stephen Jay Gould pointed out, Freud’s list omitted one major historical change that certainly deserves a place in the same league. Compared to the other three, it has been grossly underexplored by historians, and neglected by those who popularize science and its history . . . , perhaps because it cannot so easily be labelled with the name of any specific Dead White Male.”¹²

Even though they focus on different people and events, Rudwick and Gould are in agreement about how this moment in the history of Western knowledge should be framed and placed into a larger narrative. At stake is the “discovery of time,” more specifically, of “deep time,” when the “deep space” of astronomers was matched by the “deep time” of geologists, to borrow a phrase from a third seminal book contributing to the same story, although without the reference to Freud, by Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, published in 1965.¹³ To these discoveries of “depths,” we can add the mostly unconscious depths of the human mind. Rudwick offers his own formulation, more in line with Freudian idiom about how the human is decentered, both spatially and temporally, when he describes the “dramatic” shift from “regarding human history as almost coextensive with cosmic history to treating it as only the most recent phase in a far longer and highly eventful story, almost all of it prehuman.”¹⁴

If our interest was in finding an answer to Chakrabarty’s question about our difficulties in combining human and geological time, we apparently need to look no further. Two of the leading historians of science from the last decades seem to agree that the only way to make us appreciate the full implications of what happened in the geological “revolution” is to quote Freud and take his words as their own, adding geology to the list that already includes cosmology, biology, and psychology, or in other words, shaping this event in the history of knowledge in the mold of three previous events. The realization that the earth was not four or six thousand years old, as proclaimed by Biblical chronology, but actually several million, based on the discovery of fossils, dating of rock layers, and a better understanding of the genesis of the globe, is thus understood as an event of psychoanalytical proportions. To really integrate the deep time of geohistory into our human-centered historical worldview would then logically be as hard as bringing to the surface our own personal fears and traumas hidden deep in our unconscious mind. Both of them are called “deep” for a reason; they represent something hidden, invisible, and suppressed, but still active underneath the surface.

Whether it makes sense to theorize our inability to act upon the knowledge involved in renaming our own present, possibly even some centuries of it, “the Anthropocene,” as repression in the psychoanalytic terms, is a discussion for another time. My interest here is more historical and historiographical. In this chapter, I take this somewhat strange Freudian element of repetition in the works of generally quite original and innovative scholars as a sign that something might not be completely right with this argument and thus with the way we tend to frame this particular moment in the history of knowledge. Did the discovery of deep time at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century really have a similar effect on human self-understanding as the Copernican revolution, the theory of evolution, and the discovery of the unconscious? Presuming that Gould and Rudwick are right and that this fourth “outrage” has not been granted the same prominent place in the history of knowledge as the others, maybe this has other reasons than the historiographical and narrative ones Gould referred to. Did geological time just slip out of view again, almost before it got our attention, to use Chakrabarty’s phrase? The point here is not to compare the relative effects of different moments, “revolutions,” if you want, in the history of knowledge, nor is it to reject the effect of deep time on human knowledge and understanding. Rather I want to argue that to grasp this particular moment in the history of knowledge and the effects it has had, and still has, on the relationship between human and natural history, other forms and figures of understanding might be more useful than thinking about it as an “outrage against humanity’s self-love,” since humanity and all its relations to selfs and others might not belong on the same timeline, or in the same narrative as the breakthrough of geohistory.

At the same moment when the limits of time are burst, to use Rudwick’s phrase, historical time also splits up into multiple durations, speeds, and rhythms, allowing for different forms of subjectivity and agency.¹⁵ By consequence, what could have been an “outrage against humanity’s self-love,” displacing man from the center of time, in the same way that man had previously been displaced from the center of space, was literally disciplined by the reordering of the field of knowledge, by which man and earth, whose histories had been completely entangled in Christian historiography, were pulled apart by separate epistemologies and methodologies—what we recognize today as geology and history. These two disciplines, on either side of the gap between what C. P. Snow will later call “the two cultures,”¹⁶ based themselves on two distinct temporal frameworks or arrangements: on the one hand, the horizontal, linear, uniform, homogenous time of historical progress; on the other hand, the vertical, multilayered, heterogenous time of rock and mountain formations in the earth’s crust. Whereas the history of humanity was understood according to the first one, for example in the works of Johann Gottfried Herder and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the history of the earth was understood according to the second one. In the following, I will first explore how the collapse of broad integrated knowledge fields such as “natural philosophy” and “natural history” gave rise not just to various disciplines but to different temporal arrangements. Then, I will zoom in on the lesser known of them, at least within the humanities and social sciences, that in the nineteenth century is termed “stratigraphy,” and trace the trajectory of this specific temporal arrangement, from its origin in seventeenth century Italy, via the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rise of geohisto...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction. Dividing Times
• Part I. Eras of Synchronization
• Part II. Biocultural Times
• Part III. Time-Binding Knowledges and Visual Genres
• Part IV. Recording and Envisioning Climate Times
• Conclusion
• Index