COLLINGWOOD'S WHALE, CHAKRABARTY'S CONUNDRUM, AND BRAUDEL'S BORROWED TIME

Stephan Palmié

Review essay on History 4° Celsius: Search for a Method in the Age of the Anthropocene, by Ian Baucom, and The Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, by Bathsheba Demuth.

History and Theory 62, no. 1 (2023)

As R. G. Collingwood noted toward the end of his life, the physiologically limited “time-phase” of human observational capacity cannot but deliver a fundamentally anthropocentric and temporally myopic conception of the world as eventful, destructive, and devoid of larger, perhaps cyclical, regularities. Developing at around the same time, Fernand Braudel's project of a history of the longue durée of human interactions with the environment aimed to subvert the short time-phase of a history accessible to immediate human experience. Although Collingwood and Braudel aimed at a conceptual merger of natural history and human history, neither of them could have foreseen what Dipesh Chakrabarty has described as their collapse into each other, which was effected by humanity's transformation into a geophysical force that produced massive, likely irreversible, and certainly long-lasting climate change. Looking at two very different examples of a rapidly growing body of literature on an extractivist orientation as a key factor in anthropogenic ecological transformations on both local and planetary scales, this review essay suggests that an “intra-active” (in Karen Barad's sense) view of human-environmental relationality might help us conceptualize forms of temporality that are capable of superseding Collingwood's anthropocentric “time-phase.”