Chaired by Einar Wigen
Hilbrand Wouters: The beginning of a helix: Deep time narratives in Alfred Crosby’s environmental histories
The most controversial aspect of the Anthropocene is undoubtedly its beginning. Historians have bickered endlessly over the question whether it should start at this or that revolution, one discovery or another. But, at the very least, the Anthropocene offers the idea of beginnings in deep time; each distinct beginning providing points on a timescale from which countless stories can erupt, entangle and contradict. This paper reviews one such point, 1492, through Alfred Crosby’s Columbian Exchange (1972). Crosby’s book (and concept) powerfully revealed that supposed ‘human’ histories in the Old and New World had been mere fragments of an enormous picture, the unintentional, but often dreadful global biological homogenization following Columbus’ journeys. By considering the narrative dimension of Crosby’s work, this paper not only adds to the oft-neglected historiography of the Anthropocene, but also develops insight into narrative as a key methodological aspect of temporal expressions.
First, building on recent scholarship in historical time studies, this paper situates Crosby’s ideas within contemporary views on deep time, addressing both relevant historical and natural scientific contexts of his interdisciplinary environmental history. Next, Crosby’s explorations into uncharted historical timescapes are traced. While Crosby wandered into many dead ends as he ‘loped where even scientists fear to tread’, his narrative effectively gained a helical temporality along the way, currently viewed as the hallmark of multiscalar history. It is this development that distinguishes Crosby’s from earlier temporalities. He showed that large timescales, like Braudel’s usage of the longue durée, were not necessarily flat and continuous, but could crumble and fold. Along with other methodological innovations, Crosby’s work thus contained an inventive type of narrative, allowing him to frame existing small-scale histories in larger perspectives without slipping into relativism. The integration of multiple temporalities has recently been identified as a primary challenge for environmental historians to shake off their anthropocentrism, a challenge that emerges wherever storytellers aim to construct narratives doing justice to the diversity of the (non-)human world. By exploring the close relation between temporality and narrative through the development of an influential concept, this paper argues for scholars to become more engaged with the archive of existing narrative frameworks and actively explore the beginnings and ends our collective past offers.
Bio: Hilbrand Wouters recently graduated from the Utrecht University master program History and Philosophy of Science, with a thesis on time in post-WWII environmental histories.
Jacob Tom: Twentieth-Century Temporality: Positioning Moderation in Opposition to the Idea of Progress
Twentieth-century progress manifested in the continuation of the ‘abstract universalism’ of the Enlightenment and a push toward a relative outlook in response to this absolutism. In terms of temporality, the Enlightenment transition away from the antique cyclical outlook was dictated by the idea of historical development; an interpretation of past events as being a less actualized version of humanity. Reinhart Koselleck has commented that this drive toward actualization, fueled by the “technical-industrial transformation” of the world, had accelerated the decoupling of past and future, resulting in an increasing rate of progress away from the present into a continually better future due to “ever briefer intervals of time in which to gather new experiences.” By the end of the century, Italian sociologist, Franco Cassano had claimed that the idea of moderation could be used to reclaim peripheral cultures seen as ‘backward’ in comparison to the progress-driven West. At the heart of the idea of moderation is dialectic potential, the possibility of resolution between two opposing realities. More specifically, moderation is constituted of three features: coexisting contradictions that create a dialectic, a sense of equidistance in relation to extremes, and a slowness that is created by these former features. These are positioned directly against the conditions for the idea of progress which champions a collective singular (or universal history), the proliferation of extremes (as opposed to being in between them), and an acceleratory speed (as Koselleck has expressed). This opposition distinguishes moderation as a resource to fight back against a modernity which values acceleration above all and the possibility of expressing a distinct peripheral history of temporality in the twentieth century.
Bio: Jacob Tom is originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but has been residing in Stavanger, Norway for six years. Jacob received his MA in Literacy and Language from the University of Stavanger in 2019 and has continued onto a doctoral program in history, which includes his current work in progress about the idea of moderation in twentieth-century Norwegian literature.
Nitzan Lebovic: The time of complicity
Climate change in general, and the Anthropocene in particular, require a recalibration of all temporal relationships. My paper distinguishes complicity as the most important political-temporal form of our time. Since 1945, this concept shows our politics and ethics, neo-liberal economy with climate change, presentism with acceleration, to be entwined. The history of complicity proposes an alternative to the standard post-1945 story of democracy. Complicity will be understood here as a model for what is, but should not be, the anti-democratic moment that defines democratic politics: At worst an agent of obedience and violence, at best a support for passivity and docility. A history of the concept shows it grew from the entwinement (, plék: weave, tangle) of social unity, cultural symbols, and political legitimacy; individual, cultural and political forms all come to rely on a shortterm, present-oriented, benefit that holds them together. In the brief time I'll have I hope to discuss Complicity in four cases: The term is mentioned only briefly, and retroactively, in the Genocide Convention (1948); reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1990s); The UN Human Rights Council special report of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories (2014); and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2021).Retroactive judgment, however, has failed to acknowledge both their ambivalent nature, and historical conditions. Instead, I suggest the cases mentioned above should be reconsidered based on what the historians Dipesh Chakrabarty and François Hartog have recently called ideal types of “short-termism” and “presentism.”
Bio: Nitzan Lebovic is a Professor of History and the Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values at Lehigh University. Nitzan is the author of three monographs, two collections of essays, special issues and articles. His first book, titled The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (2013) focuses on the circle around the Lebensphilosophie and antiSemitic thinker Ludwig Klages. His second book, Zionism and Melancholy: The Short Life of Israel Zarchi (2015, 2019) shaped an alternative history of Zionism as "left-wing melancholy." His third book, A German-Jewish Time: Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan (under consideration) follows the temporal theories of four key thinkers from the Weimar Republic to the 1970s. Nitzan also edited volumes and issues about concepts such as Catastrophe, Nihilism, Political Theology.
Mauro J. Caraccioli: Natural History as Political Thought: Chronologies of Crisis and the Politics of Planetary Time