Fossilization, or the Matter of Historical Futures

The Lifetimes Research Collective

Iterations 1, Historical Futures

In this contribution to the “Historical Futures” project, the Lifetimes Research Collective adds to the geological turn currently underway in historiography by presenting a theory of fossils and fossilizations as a way of rethinking the concept of “historical futures.” We proceed by addressing two pivotal speech acts in Western historiography, in the broad sense: the “fossil question,” which was first raised in the middle of the seventeenth century, about how a solid can end up inside another solid and the nineteenth-century Marxist slogan for the modern world, “all that is solid melts into air.” Transported into the early twenty-first century and faced with the challenges of the Anthropocene, both take on new meanings and perform new tasks. In this article, we experiment with different ways of thinking and writing fossils into more general questions of historiography and historical theory by investigating how they affect conceptualizations of historical time. Furthermore, we demonstrate how fossilizations indicate possible trajectories for new materialist speculations, distributing agency to various matters, physical and virtual, in the Earth's crust as well as in museums and video games. Finally, we ask how a theory of fossilization can be seen to decenter the human subject by exploring the processes of decomposition and solidification taking place in the human body. In this way, the arrangements of timescales and lifescales that have given rise to disciplines like history, geology, and biology are destabilized in favor of open-ended historical knowledge ventures that transgress temporal and epistemological borders.

Image: Photo by Alejandro Quintanar (3 April 2018)