THEORY OF HISTORY IN A PLANETARY AGE
Tomasz Wiśniewski in conversation with Dipesh Chakrabarty
TOMASZ WIŚNIEWSKI
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
Tomasz Wiśniewski has studied history at Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań, Poland). In July 2023, he defended his PhD thesis, “Postsecular History: Knowledge of the Past between Science, Politics and Religion.” He is interested in theory of history, philosophy of history, intellectual history, and political philosophy. He is the author of “Hayden White: A Postsecular Perspective,” Rethinking History 24, no. 3–4 (2020), 388–416. His current book project is forthcoming in Cambridge University Press’s Elements in Historical Theory and Practice series, which is edited by Daniel Woolf; his project is titled Historical Thinking in a Postsecular Age.
Dipesh Chakrabarty is a Bengali historian and professor at the University of Chicago. He has worked on the social history of modern India in a postcolonial perspective. Recently, his main area of research is climate crisis, ecology, and the Anthropocene. For many years, Chakrabarty was active in the Subaltern Studies Group, which consisted of mainly Indian scholars working on the history of colonialism in Southern Asia. His most important works are Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), and Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Recently, he published The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).
Cite this post: Tomasz Wiśniewski and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Theory of History in a Planetary Age,” One More Thing… (blog), History and Theory, October 2023, https://historyandtheory.org/omt-poznan/wisniewski-chakrabarty.
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Tomasz Wiśniewski: I would like to start this interview with a general question: How would you define the status of historiography inside and outside of academia today?
Dipesh Chakrabarty: As you can see in the Congress program, in the last fifty years, the discipline of history has been changing in two main directions. One leads away from the history of elites and toward the history of ordinary people, their struggles, working-class conditions, the history of minority groups, and the history of indigenous peoples. Academic history was born around the end of the eighteenth century, and during its 250-year life, it has been challenged at different points. My work in subaltern studies was part of that move. [1] You could call it a move toward democratizing history. The other set of challenges has come from the question of what the nonhuman is and in what relationship it stands to human history. Nonhuman history can include nonliving objects like our relationship to mountains, rivers, the ground, the land we live on, as well as our relationship with animals, plants, fish, microbes, and other forms of life. There is also the question of the nonhuman aspects of being human—for example, the sea of viruses and bacteria we swim in and our relationship to our microbiomes. History has been challenged by democratization and by all those issues coming out of environmental history: animal, bacterial, and microbial worlds, as well as the planetary and geological role of humans. In the last fifty years, history has faced multiple challenges touching the scale and scope over which we study history and the entities we consider historical actors. There are numerous ways in which the discipline is being challenged, and that is a good thing.
TW: How do you see the future of the theory of history? What are the most important new threats and new opportunities?
DC: That movement that I called the democratization of history gave rise to a particular issue that Professor Ewa Domańska mentioned in her inauguration lecture: Is academic history the only kind of history one can write? [2] This question is also tied up with what is now called decolonizing Western knowledge. Decolonization itself is a new opportunity. What is the relationship between other forms of knowing the past and the disciplinary forms of knowing and writing the past? Other new opportunities present themselves in the works of other historical sciences like geology or evolutionary biology, which are not focused exclusively on human actors. How do we learn from them? The questions of decolonization of history and disciplinary knowledge as a whole and those discussing anthropocentric versus non-anthropocentric history are some of the new opportunities that are coming up.
TW: Which recent historical readings—books, papers—do you find the most interesting and inspiring?
DC: Alan Mikhail’s work on the Ottoman Empire and how they used up all their forests and had to import wood from outside [3] or Fredrik Albritton Jonsson’s work on the relationship between water and the Industrial Revolution in Britain. [4] Another great example of humanistic attempts at writing histories of natural objects is Iain McCalman’s beautiful history of the coral reef in Australia. [5] I find those attempts fascinating because they’re trying to bring the natural world’s history into human history and discuss the relationship between them. I also find fascinating our human attempts to write animal histories. How to think about animals? How to think about their world, not just in relationship to a human one? For instance, there is Carl Safina—you’d call him a science writer, but I also read him as a historian—who has a book called Becoming Wild. [6] There’s an interesting chapter on whales where he is trying to understand whales from their point of view. He doesn’t fully succeed, but it opens up another world for us, which may help us understand the animals we live with on this planet.
TW: Your famous book Provincializing Europe could be read as an anticipation of a postsecular turn. What do you think about the possible intersections between postcolonial studies and postsecular reflection?
DC: Provincializing Europe was postsecular in that I was trying to argue that what we normally think of as superstition is probably the oldest form of religion, that the gods of superstition are always with us. Even if a god of monotheism like the Christian God died in the nineteenth century, as Nietzsche famously said, these gods of superstition never died, and I was trying to make room for them in my account. You don’t have to believe in these spirits, but sometimes you act as if you did. When I was growing up in India, I was a fan of a soccer club. When I traveled by bus to watch the match and if my club won, I hung on to the ticket. I said: that’s a lucky ticket. That’s the kind of magical thinking we all do. The argument in favor of so-called superstition was “postsecular” because Provincializing Europe was not a believer’s book, but it was not an atheist book either. I was making room for gods and spirits without saying that they are matters of belief. “Belief” was a Protestant word. You don’t have to believe in superstitions. If you asked me, “Dipesh, do you really believe that the bus ticket will get you a victory?,” I would say no. I’ve seen others do it and sometimes it works. Discussions I’ve had with people working in religious studies show that many people accepted that point. [7]
TW: Now, more than twenty years after Provincializing Europe was published, do you see some signals of development of the idea of “provincializing” by scholars from other world regions? Do you think the postcolonial framework is still sufficient for this task of provincializing, or maybe there is a need to invent some new theoretical perspectives?
DC: There’s always a need to invent new perspectives, but I think that “provincializing” has succeeded to the extent that I see people using it without mentioning me. For instance, a linguist in France wrote a book about “provincializing language.” [8] However, it is also challenged from the perspective of the decolonial people. They see me as someone accepting European modernity and not as profoundly anti-Eurocentric as they would like me to be. Globally, there’s a tension between the postcolonial moment in the 1980s and 1990s and the decolonial moment of today. The postcolonial criticism of Europe was like Frantz Fanon’s criticism—it said that Europe had many valuable things to say, but Europeans did not do the right things and they distorted their own ideas. European resources helped criticize Europe, whereas many decolonial thinkers say now that we should go back to before Europe. Those are very different epistemological conditions, and Walter Mignolo has famous essays on “epistemic disobedience.” [9] I think he would be critical of Provincializing Europe’s framework.
TW: A part of your introduction lecture was dedicated to Martin Heidegger. [10] It was something probably strange for most historians. I want to ask about the place of Heidegger in your thinking. Like Karl Marx’s thought, you draw on Heidegger’s philosophy in Provincializing Europe, but Heidegger is still present in your reflection about “the planetary.” [11]
DC: First of all, you have to understand that there have been many conceptions of the planet, but what I mean by “planetary” or by “the planet” is what Earth scientists call the “Earth system.” [12] The Earth system is not an actual object because it is put together by scientific studies of satellite measurements and seawater observations and the like. A lot of big data is put together to create a model called the “Earth system.” It is an abstract object that can have a concrete impact on your life: creating tsunamis, heat waves, droughts, et cetera. The other distinction is that, while all the other kinds of planetary thinking are related to human experience, the Earth system is not. It focuses on the role of Amazon forests, ocean currents, glaciers, and the Siberian permafrost in keeping the planetary balance. But forms of planetary thinking coming from indigenous modes of thinking are ultimately connected to what human beings see and experience. I have to say that I’m indebted to Heidegger’s resistance to “the planet,” when he said the planet is of no concern to us as philosophers, only the Earth is. Heidegger, when he said this in 1936, was saying: we have nothing to do with science. Whereas today, what I’m calling the planet, which is a creation of geologists and Earth scientists, has become an object for us because of the environmental crisis. Heidegger could afford to say: let’s leave science out of this. I don’t think we can afford to be anti-science today. Only by overcoming his resistance [could I come] to the category of the planet.
Apart from that, I have been involved with Heidegger’s ideas since I was working on Provincializing Europe. I came into Western thought through reading Marx, but when we read Marx in Calcutta, we didn’t think of him as German or even European. We thought of him as somebody who spoke the truth. He was a truth-teller. Only after I left India did I realize how European Marx is and how German or German-Jewish he is. As I became aware of Marx’s Europeanness, I also became aware that I was working within European traditions, which led to Provincializing Europe. I wouldn’t have been able to write Provincializing Europe if I had not left India, because, within India, a part of Europe was already ours. Nobody questioned it: Marx was right, Max Weber was wrong. We took sides, but nobody said: “they are both European thinkers.” Marx was universal. Provincializing Europe begins with me asking why, for someone born in India who knows nothing about Europe, Marx seemed so true. How could Marx speak about India without knowing very much about it? That was a puzzle for me. I became interested in this question of how Europeans could do this and we could not. The fact that we read them in English and not in German didn’t bother us because we thought truth has no language. Before I read Heidegger, it seemed like all these European philosophers were thinking on behalf of humanity, all humans, even for humans [who] didn’t know them.
There is a very well-known dialogue between Heidegger and a Japanese philosopher. [13] Heidegger was constantly going back to etymological roots through German, Latin, or Greek language. He was always thinking through his language. His very path of thinking is dependent on his language. Every time the Japanese person came to an English word, Heidegger said: “What is the word in your language, what does it mean?” It was as though Heidegger was saying: “go and think from within your language. I can’t think for you because I don’t know your language.” That’s what I found very attractive about Heidegger—unlike Kant or Hegel, he was not thinking for me. You wouldn’t normally expect this of a person who was a member of the Nazi Party, but his insistence on taking language seriously, taking philology seriously, was liberating. He gave me the freedom to think that to be modern is to accept a way of being in a relationship with the world through science while acknowledging that it is not the only relationship you can have. Despite all his faults, Heidegger was the first philosopher to tell me that. Heidegger gave a universal formula in such a way that it had difference built into it. He gave a way to connect thought to a place. I was trained as a historian without any deep, philological interest. I was interested in social science, so my interest was sociology and reading Marx sociologically, not philosophically. It was Heidegger who made me more attuned to language and etymologies. Reading Heidegger, I realize he’s saying that wherever you go as a human being, you are seldom the first human being to be there. Other people have lived in that place before you and they have left signs for you to read about how to live there. Language is one of the repositories of such signs.
TW: This view of Heidegger could be considered very traditional, and one can say it won’t work in the contemporary world, because we don’t have time for developing traditions. We want to have and to do everything instantly.
DC: In that sense, Heidegger was against globalization. We could make a distinction between two roles of European empire-building: the first one I call the world-making role; the other one I call the globe-making role. I see the globe-making role as destructive. Europeans captured the globe using violence. [14] That’s imperialism for me, but at the same time, there are new knowledges like physics, geology, and biology, which are also tied to empire. Without the empire, there wouldn’t have been a geology or theory of evolution, for people could go and study nature in other places only because they had the empire, right? These knowledges are deeply connected to the globe-making function but are also world-disclosing. European knowledges in India produced paleobotanists, geologists, physicists, and other people who took pleasure in those knowledge-systems. The destruction that we see today, which leaves us with no time, as you said, for developing traditions, is a crisis of the globe-making function. It puts the world together very quickly because it is technological.
TW: You are talking about globe-making and world-making in entirely different ways. What could be a position of war in this distinction?
DC: War is globe-making. I find it totally destructive—wars against the indigenous peoples, wars against other rulers, or wars within Europe. The destructive apparatus of technology that Europe developed and America inherited is an apparatus of domination and violence. It brings the world together in the interest of profit, power, and empire. The climate crisis is also a result of the globe-making function, but there are world-making functions within that. Europe gave birth to a new middle class that was totally fascinated with Europe, even among the enslaved people. Europe gave rise to Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, who embraced European thought. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon depends completely on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Merleau-Ponty is a French philosopher who read German philosophers. [15] There’s this deep connection. That’s what I’m calling world-making in the Heideggerian sense, where knowledge gives a new vision of the world. The globe-making function destroyed Europe through two world wars. 2022 is the hundredth anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land.” Returning to the poem, you’ll find the scale of the devastation of the First World War. It left somebody like Eliot feeling like this was a wasteland. Europe has created waste. The climate crisis is part of that series. At the same time, even with the climate crisis, the fact that it has opened up disciplinary borders and made the humanities and science come together, is what I call the world-making function. It discloses the world in a new way and creates new opportunities.
On the other hand, we are actually riding a complicated beast now because India and China are very populous countries, both politically populist and demographically populous, and both want to be part of the globe-making function. This is very destructive. See, the Himalayas have become the most militarized mountain range in the world. Putin’s war in Ukraine is an old imperial war. He’s fighting for territory, resources, and access to the sea. He’s almost fighting a nineteenth-century war in the twenty-first century. At the same time, he is in the market for gas and oil. These are part of the globe-making function. The globe-making role is based on the destruction of the indigenous peoples, domination of other people, and then self-slavery. In reality, the world-making and the globe-making are connected aspects of European imperial histories. I’m analytically separating them to say that Europe created universities and a new kind of non-European technological middle class during all this imperial activity. While Europe has been very destructive, it also gave us world-disclosing instruments in the shape of academic disciplines and research, and history is one of those. History understood as an academic discipline came to India through Europe.
TW: Right now, I would ask about the place of Carl Schmitt, especially his work The Nomos of the Earth, which you have mentioned in your lecture, for the contemporary humanities. [16]
DC: Another Nazi guy, extremely learned, very thoughtful. The Nomos of the Earth [17] is a larger version of what I was talking about in the lecture. He also wrote The Land and the Sea, [18] being one of the first to understand the world-historical importance of European control of the deep seas. He saw that European and global history is the story of law and economy detaching from the land. If you look at indigenous people, you’ll see that most of their law is embedded in land. If you look at the early settlers, the pioneers in America, and even the founding fathers, they all had a strong economic and cultural connection to the land. In the West, land increasingly became an abstract category that you buy and sell. This is what the historian Karl Polanyi calls disembedding of the economy in his Great Transformation. [19] The economy got dematerialized. Carl Schmitt shows how law becomes dematerialized. If you read Carl Schmitt and Karl Polanyi together, you really get great insights that capitalism flourishes because it can detach the idea of wealth from the idea of land. The land is real and finite. The stock market is imaginary and only relatively connected with some production on the ground. Similarly, ten people can enter a room and write a constitution for a nation when the law becomes utterly detached from a particular plot of land.
TW: What writings by Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, or maybe some other thinkers would you recommend for people interested in theory of history?
DC: For Carl Schmitt, the above-mentioned and The Concept of the Political. [20] For Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology is crucial today. [21] He makes a distinction between two ways of thinking. There is thinking like [that of] Max Weber, Immanuel Kant, or Karl Marx, the system-builders, and what Heidegger would call real thinking, Denken, where it is not building a system but [it is] sensitive to the language as a medium. Just a very everyday example: normally, I would say “goodbye” (in English) to you and go, but once you know that “goodbye” means “God be with you,” your relationship to saying “goodbye” changes. Heidegger does that. He changes your relationship to words. It goes back to the question we started with, magical thinking. God is always with us in words even before you have thought about whether you believe in him or not. To be human is to be able to speak to God, even before you’ve actually asked yourself, “Do I believe in God?” Heidegger brings me back to the question of being human. Then, as a historian, I can see how it shifts from one place to another. And then, what does it mean to be human in different cultures, different places? There are certain deep structures of experience. When you’re in darkness, you feel the fear of darkness. These are deeply human experiences. I’m saying this in English. If I translate, we’ll find that we’re missing some of these things. Certain things will get lost in translation, but we’ll still know what we’re talking about, because it’s actually a prelinguistic experience. Heidegger brings me back to that level of universality, which is not the universality of the capital.
Notes
[1] The leader of the Subaltern Studies Group was Ranajit Guha, who passed away on 28 April 2023. See Chakrabarty’s remembrance piece about him: “Dipesh Chakrabarty Remembering Ranajit Guha: My Guru, My Friend,” The Indian Express, 2 May 2023, https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/dipesh-chakrabarty-remembering-ranajit-guha-my-guru-my-friend-8586418/. Guha’s most important books are Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983) and Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
[2] During the Opening Ceremony of the Poznań Congress on 21 August 2022, three keynote lectures, introduced by Catherine Horel (President of CISH/ICHS) under the title “Quo vadis historiae?,” were delivered: Olufunke Adeboye’s “Where Is History Going in Africa?”; Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Capitalism, Work, and the Ground for Planetary Histories”; and Ewa Domańska’s “Wondering about History in Times of Permanent Crisis.” The lectures will appear in Storia della Storiografia.
[3] Alan Mikhail, Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) and Alan Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
[4] Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
[5] Iain McCalman, The Reef: A Passionate History (New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2014).
[6] Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2020).
[7] Chakrabarty is referring to discussions that took place during his lectures at Halle University (“The Difficulty of Being Modern: Thoughts on Global and Planetary Histories,” 25 June 2018, https://openlecture.uni-halle.de/episode/5d6926ca-9d2c-47fd-b4ea-a6c7deb72182) and at Harvard University (“The Planet: An Emergent Matter of Spiritual Concern?,” 1 May 2019, https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/the-planet-an-emergent-matter-of-spiritual-concern/).
[8] Cécile Canut, Provincialiser la langue: Langage et colonialisme (Paris: Amsterdam éditions, 2021).
[9] Walter D. Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom,” Theory, Culture and Society 26, no. 7–8 (2009), 159–81, and Walter D. Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto,” Transmodernity 1, no. 2 (2011), 44–66.
[10] Chakrabarty, “Capitalism, Work, and the Ground for Planetary Histories,” 33–35.
[11] Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, esp. ch. 3 (“The Planet: A Humanist Category,” 68–92).
[12] 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.
[13] Martin Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer,” in On the Way to Language, transl. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 1–54.
[14] Chakrabarty’s ideas here could be read as going in line with reflection of Carl Schmitt and Peter Sloterdijk. See Ethan Stoneman, “After Englobement: Carl Schmitt, Peter Sloterdijk, and the Rediscovery of the Uncompressible,” Cultural Politics 16, no. 3 (2020), 303–21.
[15] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, transl. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008). Regarding Merleau-Ponty’s impact on Fanon’s thought, see Jeremy Weate, “Fanon, Merleau-Ponty, and the Difference of Phenomenology,” in Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology, ed. Leswin Laubscher, Derek Hook, and Miraj U. Desai (New York: Routledge, 2021), 162–74.
[16] Chakrabarty, “Capitalism, Work, and the Ground for Planetary Histories,” 33.
[17] Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, transl. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2006).
[18] Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, transl. Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, ed. Russell A. Berman and Samuel Garrett Zeitlin (Candor, NY: Telos Press, 2015).
[19] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).
[20] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, expanded ed., transl. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
[21] Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, transl. William Lovitt (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 3–35.
