HOW TO MAKE SENSE OF THE NEW HISTORICAL CONDITION?
Taynna Marino in conversation with Marek Tamm and Zoltán Boldizsár Simon
TAYNNA M. MARINO
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
Taynna M. Marino is a PhD candidate at Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań, Poland), where she is working on a dissertation titled “Empathy Beyond Anthropocentrism and Eurocentrism in Contemporary Historical Theory.” Her research interests revolve around theory and philosophy of history, and she focuses on more-than-human and multispecies studies, postcolonial and decolonial approaches, and indigenous knowledges. She is the author of “The Role of Empathy in Bridging Western and Indigenous Knowledges: Dominick LaCapra and Ailton Krenak,” Rethinking History 26, no. 4 (2022), 569–95.
Marek Tamm is a professor of cultural history at the School of Humanities at Tallinn University (Estonia). He is the head of the Tallinn University Centre of Excellence in Intercultural Studies and of the Estonian Graduate School of Culture Studies and Arts and a member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. He works at the intersections of cultural history of medieval Europe, cultural memory studies, historical theory, and digital humanities. He coedited The Companion to Juri Lotman: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2022) with Peeter Torop, A Cultural History of Memory in the Early Modern Age (London: Bloomsbury, 2020) with Alessandro Arcangeli, and Debating New Approaches to History (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) with Peter Burke.
Zoltán Boldizsár Simon is a historian and historical theorist at Bielefeld University (Germany). He works at the intersections of the theory and philosophy of history, history of science, and history of ideas, with a focus on questions related to time and temporality, ecological and technological prospects of the future, and the current human condition in facing previously unimaginable challenges. He published the monographs History in Time of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2019) and The Epochal Event: Transformations in the Entangled Human, Technological, and Natural Worlds (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and coedited Historical Understanding: Past, Present, and Future (London: Bloomsbury, 2022) with Lars Deile.
Cite this post: Taynna M. Marino, Marek Tamm, and Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, “How to Make Sense of the New Historical Condition?,” One More Thing… (blog), History and Theory, October 2023, https://historyandtheory.org/omt-poznan/marino-tamm-simon.
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Taynna Marino: Thank you both for accepting our invitation. [1] Could you describe your trajectories and research interests?
Marek Tamm: I was trained as a historian at the University of Tartu in the 1990s, but since my history studies, I also got interested in semiotics and philosophy. I continued my MA studies in Paris at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where I was trained as a medievalist. I got my PhD in medieval history from Tallinn University and, since 2015, have been working at Tallinn University as a professor of cultural history. Even though I still consider myself a part-time medievalist, I have developed a strong interest in history and theory of history over the years. To briefly describe my range of interests, I would say that I work at the intersection of medieval studies, historical theory, and cultural memory studies.
Zoltán Boldizsár Simon: My first university degrees in history are from the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest. At that time, I also took several courses in philosophy and aesthetics, which probably explains why my profile leans toward working with different disciplines. My PhD is from Bielefeld University, and in between, I spent a lot of time outside academia while I kept on publishing in Hungarian. After my PhD, I worked at Leiden University and at Bielefeld University and have also been a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. My work, I would say, lies at the intersection of theory and philosophy of history, science and technology studies, history of knowledge, intellectual history, history of ideas, and a combination of them, depending on what I am working on.
TM: As historians with diverse backgrounds and transdisciplinary interests, how would you define the status of historiography today?
ZBS: Well, I find it very puzzling. On the one hand, there is a clear sense that the discipline is in crisis for several reasons: the drop in enrollments, the funding difficulties, the political climate—which is not necessarily friendly to the humanities in general—and many other reasons. On the other hand, there is a clear interest in relations to the past across societal practices. And what I find most interesting is that historians are quick to jump on any societal issue that pops up in which relations with the past are at stake. Historians tend to assume that there is a clear demand for academic historical scholarship wherever “history” is at stake and whenever a statue falls—and I am not sure that is the case. It seems to me that professional historians overwrite other relations to the past with their specific expertise instead of letting those relations become prominent in their own right. In other words, I think that just because there are relations to the past at stake in societal practices, this does not mean that the discipline of history is called for projecting its own understanding of how the past relates to the present and the future over societal senses of historicity. Yet, this also doesn’t mean that professionalized historiography shouldn’t intervene—it might, as it pretty much has been its societal function in the modern world. The question is whether that function is valid and/or necessary. These are very complex issues concerning the external challenges to the discipline that are not very often discussed, partly because historiography is also facing a diverse set of internal challenges to which it is expected to respond.
MT: I believe that, before we can answer the question, we should probably define the terms because there are at least two different ways to understand the concept of historiography: as the academic or professionalized history writing produced in universities and research institutes or, more widely, as the historical knowledge produced in different societal practices. In addition, we should situate ourselves in space. The historiography or historical knowledge in Europe, Latin America, China, or Russia can have very different statuses.
In the 1990s, there was a lot of talk in the Western world about the crisis of history. [2] On the one hand, we had a clear social crisis in the sense of academic overcrowding (universities becoming a kind of mass education organization) and financial underfunding (not having enough academic positions available). This resulted in uncertainty about the future of the profession of historians. On the other hand, we had an epistemological crisis: heated discussions about the status of history as a science and whether historians are producing scientific knowledge or narrative fictions. But these discussions have more or less vanished over the last couple of decades. Now we are facing different sorts of problems related to the major ecological and technological transformations in our societies. Probably the key question is whether history should remain human-centered and anthropocentric or whether history can also comprise nonhuman forms of history to become, as we would call it, the “more-than-human history.” Another major issue, for instance, is whether history is able to cope with the rapid development of artificial intelligence and to what extent future history writing will be carried out by AI.
If we take your question in a more general sense—“what is the role of historical knowledge in our societies?”—then I would not be very worried because there have been new ways to relate to the past. I have been myself recently interested in various digitally mediated relations with the past. Many people spend hours, days, and weeks in various historical digital environments. History is flourishing on digital platforms even more than before. If you think about all the historical video games, documentaries, TV series, and films available, then we have to admit the existence of a great variety of new forms of past relations and historical representations.
ZBS: This leads back to the earlier point and becomes the main question: How could we relate historiography to these other kinds of historicity present in certain societal practices and discourses? Outside academia, many people are making “history” or are engaged in establishing “historical” relations with the world. And, at the same time, even when we talk only about academic ways of “historical” apprehensions of the world, that does not necessarily mean historical knowledge produced in history departments. Other departments—and this practically means almost the entirety of the human and social sciences—also produce historical knowledge, and often they do so by means other than what the disciplinary codes of professionalized historiography would permit. It would be interesting to explore more profoundly how the “histories” produced at history departments relate to “histories” produced all across the historically oriented human and social sciences.
TM: Do you think history is in a permanent crisis, in the sense that historians always try to adapt and respond appropriately to them?
MT: I would probably not use the concept of crisis in this context because it is a normal situation that societies are in motion, and every type of knowledge production has to adapt to the new societal situations. Also, the dynamics of change in historical knowledge depend on the tempo of societal transformations. We could argue that, in this century, we are witnessing transformations we have never seen before. I have especially in mind the ecological transformations, related to human-induced climate change, the extinction of species, and various other environmental problems, and technological transformations, including advancements in human enhancement, biotechnology, and AI—and, therefore, the stakes are higher than ever. The question is, on the one hand, whether history can cope with this new situation and, on the other, whether we should change the ways of producing historical knowledge and aim for a new economy of knowledge production.
ZBS: We wrote on this on several occasions, and this, indeed, is one of the main messages we intend to put through. [3] I would like to add that “crisis” and “change” hang together. You have crises because things constantly change. Your sense of crisis derives from the possibility of change. And it is one of the big ironies that historiography (the discipline that studies change and transformation) has difficulties acknowledging that historical knowledge—or whatever counts as “history” at any time—is also changing. While new and new challenges are coming, and while, today, these challenges are linked with rapid ecological and technological transformations, the same old ways of knowledge production are kept on being fitted to these new challenges, resulting in this sense of crisis. So, every decade you will have historians saying that history is in crisis: a new challenge is coming with change, but the response does not occur that easily because historiography hesitates to adapt and concede that its protocols and ways of knowledge production also need to change.
TM: How do you see the future of historical theory? What are the main challenges and opportunities posed to historiography today?
MT: I would first say that historians are bad prophets, so it is very hard to say anything reasonable about the future of historical theory. But we can also argue that the future depends to a certain extent on our present work as historical theorists. As has already been said, the main challenge for historical theory is how to make it relevant again in making sense of our current human condition. What kind of intelligibility can historical theory bring to understanding our being in the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century? This is a question that historical theory has not addressed very much in recent decades.
ZBS: I have two things to say. The first is about the relation between the future of historical theory and the future of historiography, because the two are not necessarily intertwined. If the theory and philosophy of history mean the study of any historical sensibility or the study of the historical condition, then the future of the theory or philosophy of history is only linked with the future of historiography to an extent to which historiography is part of this larger historical condition. However, a historical condition that frames societal existence and individual lives (as well as its scholarly study) can very well exist without historiography. Ideally, historical theory should find resonance with historiography, but it is not self-evident that their future is mutually dependent.
The second thing is that the whole field of historical theory is extremely broad and entails a lot of different approaches and understandings of theory and philosophy. Ever since narrativist approaches lost dominance over structuring theoretical research, we have a lot of flourishing hubs, but none of them is dominant, and they flourish only to a certain extent. Nevertheless, the existence of multiple hubs creates the sense that something is going on in the field. Besides, this also means that the traditional distinctions used to describe the field—such as analytical and substantive or critical and speculative philosophies of history—collapse; they do not capture the variety of these theoretical and philosophical works in the twenty-first century. We think that a better way to capture what is happening in the field is to conceive it broadly, as João Ohara has also recently argued. [4] And our particular suggestion is that the theory and philosophy of history is best understood as the study of the historical condition.
MT: To put it in another way, the future of historical theory depends, on the one hand, on how much historical theorists can make themselves relevant for understanding our current historical condition, but on the other, it also depends on the abilities of historical theorists to make themselves relevant for historical research. Over the recent decades, quite a lot of theoretical discussions in the field of historical theory have been almost completely isolated from the practice of historical research. I believe there is still a challenge for historical theorists to critically analyze what historians are actually doing. In recent decades, we have seen the emergence of various new approaches in historical research: deep and global history, digital history, environmental history, multispecies history, more-than-human history, et cetera. All these new forms of historical writing need critical reflection, and the contribution of historical theorists is very needed. To put it briefly, the future of historical theory lies in developing these two main strands: the theory of historicity (making sense of our historical condition) and the theory of historiography (making sense of the practice of historical research).
ZBS: Yes, ideally, the theory of historiography and the theory of history—historical condition or historicities—are linked in multiple ways and have something to say to each other.
TM: How is this movement to reconcile the theory of history and theory of historiography—fields that, for a long time, have been apart from each other—and bring historical theory as an important driver of historiographical change connected to the emergence of a new notion of history, as argued in your article “More-Than-Human History”? [5] Do you think history still has an important function in making sense of this more-than-human world?
MT: We have to believe in the importance of historical knowledge for making sense of our current situation without excluding the possibility that, on the way, our historical knowledge might change, even radically. The specificity of the historical perspective on the world is to focus on the temporal dimension, on the change over time. Historical theorists and historians can contribute to the discussion by helping to overcome the “temporal provincialism” (as Aviezer Tucker put it [6]) of contemporary theory and philosophy. However, it requires a redefinition of the notion of history from at least two perspectives. Since the nineteenth century, when the discipline was born, history has always been understood implicitly as human history. History is about humans. Nobody else has a history. Thus, I believe that we should extend this perspective and include other forms of life in historical knowledge and develop something we propose to call “more-than-human history.” The other challenge is how to cope with different forms of temporality. The traditional idea of history has been based on a linear and progressive notion of time and a very short time span of written culture over the last five or six thousand years. Now, the question is whether history should be able to integrate deep time and multiple temporalities, something we call “multiscalar history.” [7]
ZBS: We also argue for a healthier relationship between theory and historiography. Instead of the theory and philosophy of history being the uninvited Besserwisser, talking about what historiography is doing and how it should be done better, both historiography and the theory of history could talk about change over time and the way historical thinking approaches change over time. If the relationship between the practice of history and the theory and philosophy of history is more than one talking about the other (more than theory being the bad conscience of historiography), then it should be possible, ideally again, to jointly endeavor to respond to today’s challenges and, at the same time, change the way historical thinking functions in its scholarly manifestations.
TM: What fields and modes of knowledge do you think history needs to learn from in order to produce new historical knowledge?
ZBS: We could learn a lot from other forms of collective knowledge production. It cannot simply be a copy of scientific procedures, even though it needs to be able to exchange with the sciences. In the first step, we need to find ways to create collective efforts within the conceivability of human and social scientific work. Then we could move toward venturing into a new knowledge regime attuned to approaching the concerns arising out of our own experiential horizons.
MT: To be more specific about what modes of knowledge are relevant for more-than-human history, I would include here all disciplines interested in change over time, like biology, geology, Earth System science, and other historical sciences. But the idea is less about accumulating different disciplines to produce new kinds of knowledge; rather, the ultimate goal should be to reshape the knowledge economy built in the nineteenth century that still persists in academia with well-delineated disciplines. We need a new knowledge economy or ecology in which history might change and maybe merge with other forms of knowledge production.
TM: In “More-Than-Human History,” you also mentioned that “the Anthropocene has opened a new situation for humanity, a ‘new human condition.’” [8] Could you explore this topic and explain how the concept of the Anthropocene is still valid or useful to history despite all the criticism it has undergone?
MT: I think the question can be divided into two. First, regarding whether the concept of the Anthropocene is still relevant for history, I would say yes, because historians have not yet sufficiently engaged critically with the concept. True enough, there are quite a few excellent examples of thinking historically about the Anthropocene, but much still needs to be done. The second question is whether the concept of Anthropocene, in general, is still relevant and useful. As we know, it is a difficult term because it is not yet officially recognized by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. Therefore, it might vanish in time and be replaced by other terms. I would probably not invest too much intellectual energy into discussing the limits and nature of the Anthropocene because there are definitely different ways to conceptualize the ongoing transformations, but the Anthropocene is still a good concept to think with. The most important thing is not the concept itself but the way to think about our human condition in planetary terms and across disciplines and to capture this new awareness of being a geological agent on the planet Earth.
ZBS: Or Earth System agents, as Julia Adeney Thomas suggests, and we argue so in a joint paper. [9] Parts of the human and social sciences tend to think that the job is done after some conceptual critique, but that is not how things actually work. There is still a lot to be done, and the concept will not go away just because there might be conceptual problems with it. I agree with Marek that it will not go away, and whatever the alternative term would be, it would likely be even more problematic than the Anthropocene. I think we should invest more in seeking collaborations with the sciences rather than seeking conceptual alternatives to the work of the sciences.
TM: Could you tell us about the “Historical Futures” series of articles you are currently working on with the journal History and Theory? [10] How did the idea come about, and what are your expectations for the conclusion of this project?
MT: The idea started with a simple question: How do we make sense of the past in a world where the future is not as it used to be? The key argument of the project is that we are witnessing the emergence of new modalities of the future, and they redefine our understanding of the past and produce new forms of transition from the past to the future. Some of these new modalities are so radical that they presuppose a disconnection between the past and the future. Thus, the rise of these new disconnected futures challenges the very idea of the past as we know it.
ZBS: More precisely, it challenges the very idea of a developmental trajectory from certain pasts to certain futures. However, what we mean by disconnected futures can easily be misunderstood, so it makes sense to flesh it out in more detail. Let’s have the point of departure in Reinhart Koselleck’s categories of “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation” [11] and his argument that these two—your past experiences and whatever you expect of the future—are moving away from each other in the sense that the future is increasingly different from whatever you accumulated as experience in the past. In the Koselleckian frame of Western modernity (Neuzeit), the two never come apart precisely because you have history connecting them together. Nevertheless, we argue that, in certain technoscientific and ecological prospects, the disconnection of past and future has become conceivable. Secondly, we often see it being assumed that we want to predict the future. In reality, for the project, it is irrelevant whether any of its “historical futures” come true. Instead, we argue that we need to study and situate these kinds of future prospects with other existing modes of transitional relations to understand the specificity of the novelties we are facing today as the prerequisite of being able to respond to them adequately. For that, we also need a lot of people who know better than us how these kinds of future imaginaries occur in a certain set of practices and discourses. We need to think together, which enables us to come up with something that none of us could have conceived separately—something that we do not know yet, but that is precisely what makes this project so exciting.
MT: This project is experimental because it unfolds over many years, and we can accommodate new perspectives, ideas, and understandings on the way and eventually even challenge some of the primordial arguments. It is a collective research project of knowledge in the making, and it may hopefully yield an example for other similar projects.
TM: How can a historian or theorist of history make sense of these “disconnected futures” if they are disconnected from all we know, from our “space of experience”? What kind of skills should a historian or theorist have in order to research these prospects of the future?
ZBS: I am not sure that they should have any special skills for that. What seems more certain is that the modes of expertise we have been trained in do not even enable us to recognize such disconnection. The point that we make is precisely that you cannot make sense of these kinds of prospects by resorting to historical thinking as we know it because, for modern historical thinking, these are inconceivable kinds of change over time. That said, even those who are now beginning to conceive these scenarios often make the mistake of attributing content to these futures. If one does so, then, from that moment, such futures begin to have specific contents; they cease to be disconnected. My favorite example is the “technological singularity.” Once the singularity happens, in principle, no one should have any idea what lies behind or beyond it because it is something created by greater-than-human intelligence, so with your human intelligence, you are not supposed to have any informed idea about the content of what is on the other side of that change. Yet, this does not mean we should give up on contemplating these things. One of the aporias that I am not sure we can resolve is how to think of such unprecedented change if all we can have is recourse to what we know.
MT: We also want to stress that “disconnected futures” are just one modality of the futures available in our societies. There are many others, and quite a few of them come from previous centuries, so we are witnessing an “assemblage” or “entanglement” of various modes of historical futures, including some progressive and developmental nineteenth-century modes of futures. Our project is about collectively mapping the new constellation of different modalities of historical futures.
ZBS: And how they relate to each other was the most difficult. You do not need to historicize all of them. You do not need to develop historical expertise in all of them because this whole project is also about the limits of what history can do. Only when you face the limits can you begin to see a challenge and a demand to develop new ways of expertise that can make sense of things that old ways of knowledge production fail to comprehend. I do not think that our scholarship is necessarily about having the right answers right away; it is more about posing questions that we should discuss collectively and developing new ways of studying those questions.
TM: How is the “Historical Futures” project related to the wider project of “a new historical condition” aiming to go beyond the confines of the human world and historical knowledge itself? [12]
MT: Mapping new modalities of historical futures is part of our larger research project on mapping the new historical condition in today’s world. At the heart of this emerging condition lies an ongoing redefinition of the human from ecological and technological perspectives. The human is being repositioned in a new multispecies entanglement of various life forms and also in entanglements with other nonhuman or more-than-human forms (including, for instance, AI and other technological innovations). Another important aspect of this new historical condition is something we call “the emergence of digital historicity.” As our relations with the past are increasingly digitally mediated, the question is to what extent this new situation reshapes our relation with the past and what kind of digital forms of historicity are available in our contemporary societies.
ZBS: Yes, indeed, we are now working on a book project that brings together what we have written so far and expands on it, both thematically and conceptually. The “Historical Futures” project is one of them. Then, another one is the redefinition of the human, [13] which entails the exploration of a new universalist mode of thinking and its relation to the new challenges in a differentiated sociopolitical domain. This is a work in progress, just like the digital historicity aspect that Marek mentioned. And finally, there is the new notion of history with which we would like to conclude this project, adapting our piece on more-than-human history to the frame of the book project.
TM: How do you approach this new notion of the human regarding the nature-culture distinction and anthropocentrism in historical knowledge? Are you situating yourselves in a post-anthropocentric and posthumanist perspective or perhaps a “humanistically oriented” one, as Giuseppina D’Oro calls it? [14]
ZBS: Our approach is about enabling historical thinking (by reinventing and pluralizing it) to make sense of things that the humanistically oriented mode of thinking does not enable us to make sense of. We want to develop the conceptual means for that.
MT: And these things include more-than-human, better-than-human, and nonhuman forms of life, which we believe are also critical for understanding the contemporary human condition. It is not about forgetting the human as such but about redefining the boundaries of the human and positioning the human within a wider entanglement of various forms of life.
ZBS: Basically, we try to open up a substantially redesigned historical thinking to make sense of new things. This does not necessarily entail abandoning everything (even though, to a certain extent, it does entail abandoning quite a few things, just to be clear about that). At the same time, it also needs to be clear that we are not necessarily advocates of what we study. I think that it would be a misunderstanding to assume (as it often happens in the humanities) that, just because we write about the singularity, we are singularitarians or that, just because we write about critical posthumanism, we are critical posthumanists, and so on. We study these forms of thought in order to make sense of their historicities, which are different from the ones historians are accustomed to.
TM: How do you see the intersections between technoscientific, ecological, and sociopolitical challenges? And how does your own political and social background inform the way you theorize?
ZBS: This is one of the things I talked a bit more about in the book History in Times of Unprecedented Change. [15] I think the sociopolitical domain is becoming desynchronized from the technological and ecological domains due to the emergence of temporalities and historicities in the latter domains. In modernity, the sociopolitical domain appropriated technology and put it to the service of achieving political goals. Technology was the means that was supposed to land you in a desired future. Today, however, politics finds it increasingly difficult to keep technology on a leash. On the one hand, politics lost its grand take on the future. On the other, technological futures have become another kind of disconnective futures, as we mentioned earlier. It was possible for the political domain to put technology in its service because of the shared processual temporality and shared conception of a developmental historical change underlying both politics and technology in modernity. What happens today is that technology aims to break free from political containment and even reverses the relations and appropriate politics to achieve its financial aims. For example, SpaceX gets money from NASA (which practically enables it to pursue its own aims on state funds). In return, politics try to impose regulatory mechanisms (the example here is AI alignment, ensuring that AI systems proceed as being aligned with human values). At the same time, the politics of social justice confronts both state policies and the tech industry erected on exploited human labor. All in all, there are several conflicts between political and technological temporalities that we hope to tackle in the future.
MT: It is always necessary but very difficult to analyze one’s situatedness in social, political, and geographical terms. I would underline one aspect that could be relevant for a better understanding of our joint work: we both come from the periphery of Western knowledge production—me from Estonia, and Zoltán from Hungary. We might have a different take because of this experience of having a distant position vis-à-vis of Western academia’s core institutions.
ZBS: Recently, I was reading a bit into the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, [16] and his position is interesting because, being from Southern Europe, you are not in the center of Western knowledge production, but you are also not the colonized but one of the ex-colonizers. I think our situation in East Central Europe is somehow similar, except that here the whole Global North/Global South dynamics does not work very well. I think the whole region is a bit out of these dynamics. That also reflects on many levels of situatedness within academic knowledge production because, as you can see, this region is not really at the forefront of knowledge production. I would say that, in Germany, for instance, many scholars by now know much more about what is going on in Latin America than about the world that begins over the border to Poland and Czechia. It rarely comes to Eastern Europe or other places of the world. Little wonder, I think, that our social and political situatedness is something that we do not engage in that much—no one would understand it anyways.
TM: To conclude our interview, could you share with us what recent readings or authors—historical or nonhistorical—you find most interesting and inspiring for these discussions on the future of historical theory and historiography?
MT: Generally speaking, I appreciate two kinds of scholarly books. First, books that open up new horizons for thinking, are provocative, or provide new conceptual tools to rethink the world. And among the contemporary scholars who provoke me the most are, for instance, well-known names such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Philippe Descola, Tim Ingold, and Bruno Latour. But also not necessarily academic scholars. For instance, I have always felt inspired by the Italian erudite writer and publisher Roberto Calasso. Secondly, I also appreciate scholarly books that offer me new empirical knowledge about certain problems of the past, which are well-researched and well-informed, and of course, my reading diet tends to be biased toward medieval studies. So, I would point out a few names I find particularly interesting as professional medievalists, and as the list could become too long, I limit myself to authors whose last name starts with B: Robert Bartlett, Jérôme Baschet, Patrick Boucheron, Alain Boureau, Peter Brown, and Caroline Walker Bynum. Also, I would like to mention in this context my former supervisor, Jean-Claude Schmitt.
ZBS: My reading habits are perhaps a bit more haphazard. I can more easily identify those that kick off a lot of thinking or make me realize something new is happening. These are readings like Vernor Vinge’s paper “The Coming Technological Singularity,” [17] or some Earth System science papers, and, of course, works of Dipesh Chakrabarty. Yet, I think we are also very lucky to be in a position where we can try to involve the people we think are inspiring us in the projects we put together. And these, indeed, are many of the names that Marek mentioned, together with those who were here at this conference and are involved in the other projects, from Libby Robin to Rodrigo Bonaldo. Whoever you find involved in our projects are the ones we find inspiring in one way or another, and there are many others we hope to reach out to.
Notes
[1] Tamm and Simon are often collaborating in articles, presentations, and projects, as it was the case during the 23rd International Congress of Historical Sciences (Poznań 2020/2022), where they organized the session titled “Historical Futures: Apprehensions of the Past and Anticipated Futures in the Contemporary World” (22 August 2022). Since 2021, they have also been editing the “Historical Futures” project in collaboration with History and Theory.
[2] See, for example, Joan Wallach Scott, “History in Crisis? The Other’s Side of the Story,” American Historical Review 94, no. 3 (1989), 680–92; Gérard Noiriel, Sur la “crise” de l’histoire (Paris: Belin, 1996); and Andreas Fahrmeir, “Zur ‘Krise’ der Geschichte: Anmerkungen zu einer aktuellen Diskussion,” Historische Zeitschrift 276, no. 3 (2003), 561–79.
[3] See Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, The Epochal Event: Transformations in the Entangled Human, Technological, and Natural Worlds (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Marek Tamm, “Introduction: A Framework for Debating New Approaches to History,” in Debating New Approaches to History, ed. Marek Tamm and Peter Burke (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 1−19; Marek Tamm and Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, “More-Than-Human History: Philosophy of History at the Time of the Anthropocene,” in Philosophy of History: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives, ed. Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 198–215.
[4] João Ohara, The Theory and Philosophy of History: Global Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
[5] Tamm and Simon, “More-Than-Human History,” 204–11.
[6] Aviezer Tucker, “Temporal Provincialism: Anachronism, Retrospection and Evidence,” Scientia Poetica 10 (2006), 299–317.
[7] This is the topic of Simon and Tamm’s book The Fabric of Historical Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).
[8] Tamm and Simon, “More-Than-Human History,” 204.
[9] Julia Adeney Thomas, “Introduction: The Growing Anthropocene Consensus,” in Altered Earth: Getting the Anthropocene Right, ed. Julia Adeney Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 14; Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Julia Adeney Thomas, “Earth System Science, Anthropocene Historiography, and Three Forms of Human Agency,” Isis 113, no. 2 (2022), 396–406.
[10] Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Marek Tamm, “Historical Futures,” History and Theory 60, no. 1 (2021), 3–22.
[11] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, transl. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
[12] Tamm and Simon, “More-Than-Human History,” 201.
[13] Marek Tamm and Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, “Historical Thinking and the Human: Introduction,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 14, no. 3 (2020), 285–309.
[14] Giuseppina D’Oro, “In Defence of a Humanistically Oriented Historiography: The Nature/Culture Distinction at the Time of the Anthropocene,” in Kuukkanen, Philosophy of History, 216–36.
[15] Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).
[16] Boaventura de Sousa Santos is a Portuguese sociologist known for his publications in the field of sociology of law, political sociology, epistemology, and postcolonial studies. See, for example, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (London: Routledge, 2016).
[17] Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity,” Whole Earth Review 81 (1993), 88–95.
