Telluric Recollection: On the Disappearance of History in Deep Time

Abstract

Since the turn of the millennium, the humanities have been progressively forced to come to terms with the materiality of a warming world, in particular the entanglement of natural environments with technical infrastructures that lies at the heart of anthropgenic environmental change, and its implications for the hithertofore seemingly impentetrable ontological wall of separation between natural and human history. In an effort to address the concomitant insufficiency of remaning solely at the discursive level, some scholars have sought to reorient the interpretative concerns of the humanities by submerging the modern subject into geological registers of deep time. This paper cautions that along with such a reorientation, however, any sense of a limit – such as a horizon of understanding belonging to human history – recedes into the modal void of deep time, with the unfortunate side-effect that questions of human agency and responsibility have a tendency to get lost in the more-than-human networks of the earth’s geophysical forces. This is ironic, given that the purported novelty of the so-called ‘Anthropocene’ condition is to highlight the anthropogenic dimension of global environmental change, and thus the deep time consequences of human action.