Out of Time

Abstract

Out of Time Dana Luciano (bio) Geology, for many nineteenth-century subjects, promised abundance. James Hutton's 1788 observation that scientists could find "no vestige of a beginning—no prospect of an end" to planetary time was taken up by nineteenth-century geologists to emphasize the expansive field in which they worked (304). Explaining, in 1827, the processes that produced French volcanos, George Julius Poulett Scrope declared, "The time that must be allowed for the production of effects of this magnitude, by causes evidently so slow in their operation, is indeed immense" (165). The immensity of geological time could be daunting, as Scrope acknowledged, but it also became a resource for nineteenth-century subjects; the fascination that attended geology's revelation of the "worlds . . . beyond worlds" that the science made visible in the planetary past contributed to its popularity on both sides of the Atlantic (Lyell 16).1 That fascination continues into the present, as evidenced in what some have called a "geologic turn" in the arts and humanities (Ellsworth and Kruse 6). In addition to the awe-inspiring geological timescale—which resurfaces in contemporary discussions of the Anthropocene—geology appears as a vitalizing resource for thinkers inspired by New Materialist thought; it is deemed capable of providing a view of reality as, in Manuel de Landa's phrasing, "a single matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds" (21). This perspective, according to New Materialists, may aid us in our search for new ways of thinking about and acting in response to climate change. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller offers a different perspective on what geology has revealed to us. Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (2021) highlights geology's participation in a process of diminishment—a radical foreshortening of the future. As a guide to material hidden within the [End Page 434] earth, geology supported the development of a new energy regime founded on coal. But the greater the efficiency with which this finite natural resource was located and extracted, the closer its endpoint loomed, in a future that many Victorians believed would not be long in arriving. At that point, they feared, the new energy regime would collapse in on itself, much like a mine cave-in. Miller quotes William Stanley Jevons, author of a tract about the "probable exhaustion" of British coalmines, who pointed out that in contrast to farms, "in a mine there is no reproduction, and the produce once pushed to the utmost will soon begin to fail and sink to zero" (qtd. in Miller 9). In place of a vitalistic embrace of the possibilities of "matter-energy," then, Miller highlights the exhaustibility of the geological matter that (literally) underlies modern life. The exhausted future posed a melancholy limit to the optimism of an energetic, fossil-fueled modernity. Such concerns have, of course, been replaced today by the fear that fossil fuels will not run out soon enough. Indeed, a 2015 study estimated that if all the fossil fuels we know about are extracted and used, average global temperatures will rise by an estimated ten degrees Celsius—and that's a conservative estimate, one that does not include the possibility of future oil or coal discoveries.2 In this light, one might almost feel nostalgic about the belief that the earth's storehouse of fossil fuels would soon run out. But the accuracy of nineteenthcentury exhaustion prognoses isn't the point. The relationship between Victorian energy culture and the future it was expected to generate—the belief that a rapidly industrializing and modernizing society was "draining the future to power the present"—is worth investigating, according to Miller, regardless of whether that specific future came to pass; those discarded fears resonate against our present, as we contemplate and negotiate our own potentially diminished future (63). The exhaustion anxiety that nineteenth-century extractive culture generated is of interest, then, because of the black border it drew around an emergent energy-intensive regime. In the world the nineteenth century gave birth to, "intensive energy consumption," as Cara New Daggett points out, "is necessary to the good life" (1). But that life, from the proto-exhausted perspective, is surrounded by death—the post-animate matter dug...