Helge Jordheim
In ‘World Scientist’s Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice’, published in the journal BioScience in December 2017, 15,364 scientists from 184 countries joined forces to issue a warning that mankind has unleashed what they refer to as a ‘sixth mass extinction event’, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated by the end of this century (Ripple et al. 2017). The first ‘notice’ came in 1992. Due to mankind’s presence on the planet, causing pollution, resource depletion and global warming, large populations of vertebrates, invertebrates and plants are dying out, and since 1992 this ‘mass extinction’ has been speeding up. Both textually and graphically the article tracks the time that has passed between 1992 and 2017, around a third of an average human life span and a period of time that can easily be included in the term ‘present’. In his famous book on ‘presentism’, François Hartog dates the beginning of the ‘present’ at 1989, when the ‘modern regime of historicity’ collapsed together with the Berlin Wall (Hartog 2003: 11–29). To reconceptualize the present as the ‘sixth mass extinction event’ caused by human presence on the Earth opens it up to a very different scale of time – initially in a purely numerical way: That mankind is the sixth event means there have been five others before us. Together these events span 540 million years. The fifth mass extinction event took place 66 million years ago and was caused by the impact of an asteroid; the third and biggest – a volcanic eruption – happened 251 million years ago and killed 96 per cent of life on Earth. The sixth mass extinction event is happening now and is caused by human overpopulation and overconsumption (Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo 2017) – in other words, it is our present. Clearly, this is a claim about biological, geological, even cosmological change; but it is also a claim about history – about the past, present and future of human societies.
In this chapter I will attempt to make sense of the ‘World Scientist’s Warning to Humanity’ as a way of thinking about history and historical time, which at the same time fundamentally questions the modern regime of historicity and demands a reconceptualization of the entire past–present–future nexus (Hartog 2003: 28). A key to understanding this shift, I argue, is by returning to a discipline and a knowledge practice that for almost 300 years has been gone from historiography – chronology.
In the ongoing revaluation of the role of time and temporality in the social and human sciences, chronology is systematically accorded the role of the negative, against which multiplicities of temporal experiences, practices and narratives are allowed to stand out. Chronology means time-reckoning or the metrics of time – or, in the OED definition, ‘the science of computing and adjusting time or periods of time, and of recording and arranging events in the order of time’. In the context of ‘the temporal turn’ (Hassan 2010), chronology has become the symbol for linear, homogenous, singular and quantifiable time, deployed in order to control and discipline the physical, biological and the human world – and not least, to discipline history.
Attacks on chronology have taken their cue from a wide range of thinkers and theorists, from Bergson, Benjamin and Certeau to Ricoeur and Agamben, who all appear to agree that chronology is nothing but ‘a way of making use of time without reflecting on it’, as Michel de Certeau puts it (1986: 216; see also Bergson 2001; Benjamin 1973; Ricoeur 2004; Agamben 1993). Many of these attacks are summed up in a recent contribution by the historian Stefan Tanaka, entitled simply ‘History without Chronology’, in which he argues that ‘when chronology is used, history becomes a field of study that organizes pasts in relation to a metric that highlights, guides, and perpetuates a system of the recent several hundred years of the thousands of years of happenings on the earth and that has little room for the temporalities at the human or global levels’ (Tanaka 2015: 170). As much as I share many, even most of Tanaka’s ambitions to break with modernist temporal homogeneity, my point in this chapter is to make the opposite claim about chronology: that at present some of the most decisive influences and inspirations for revaluating our understanding of time and temporality, beyond the time-discipline of capitalism, famously described by E. P. Thompson (1967), come from chronology. Contrary to Tanaka’s view that chronology closes history down, and closes it off from most of what is happening on Earth, I argue that chronology represents a force for opening history up to other scales of time and other scales of life, different from the ones contained in the concept of ‘historical time’ deployed in modernist historiography and experience of history.
In the work to historicize mankind as ‘the sixth extinction event’, that is to document the pasts, presents and futures mobilized by this concept, the timescales of modernist historiography come up short. On the one hand, the concept prompts us to look back into an all but endless past, made up by other extinction events and the time that has passed between them, encompassing millions of years; on the other hand, it envisions a future, in which the openness, endlessness and teleology of the modernist dogma of progress is efficiently revoked by the idea of extinction, dying-out, the end of many forms of life as we know them. In between deep past and imminent end, we inhabit a present no less ‘monstrous’ than the one theorized by Hartog (2003: 217), but belonging to a regime of historicity in which chronological concepts and conceptualizations – of duration, periodization, beginnings and endings – are radically different.
Another striking example of how chronology, or rather, different and conflicting chronologies intervene in the political and social fabric of the present, comes to the fore in the revision of the geological timescale, which has caught the cultural imagination of people across the globe (Zalasiewicz et al. 2011). In his recent essay, Dipesh Chakrabarty maps the many uses and effects of the concept of ‘the Anthropocene’ on different fields of knowledge, especially on historiography (Chakrabarty 2018; see also Quenet 2017). Even though both Chakrabarty and Quenet recognize the role of chronology in the attempts to arrive at a different label for the present period in Earth’s history, neither of them pays much attention to what the Anthropocene debate does to the reckoning, or the metric of time in general – how quantifiable time, periodization, beginnings and endings emerge as an all-dominating point of contention. Chakrabarty comes closest to drawing a similar conclusion when he latches on to a remark by the earth system scientist Jan Zalasiewicz, who chairs the International Commission on Stratigraphy’s Working Group, that geological time and the geological timescale, of which the Anthropocene is part, is ‘simply time – albeit in very large amounts’ (quoted in Chakrabarty 2018: 6). Later on in the article Chakrabarty engages with the ideas of the German historian Lucian Hölscher, who insists that what he calls ‘empty time’ is both a ‘potential bond of life’ and ‘a common ground for historical narratives, for keeping history as universal reality together’ (Hölscher 2014: 591). Still, these reflections about the emergence of ‘empty time’ and ‘simply time’ do not spur any general argument about the return of chronology to historiography in the face of climate change and global warming. This is the argument I will present in this chapter.
In modernist historiography, ‘historical time’ is taken to encompass around 6,000 years at the most, often no more than 2,500 (Smail and Shyrock 2011); it is organized around periodizations like the ‘Middle Ages’, ‘modernity’ or ‘post-war’ (Jordheim 2012) and temporal concepts like ‘growth’, ‘recession’ or ‘crisis’. None of these timescales or concepts, however, can account for what it means to be an agent or a force on a planetary scale. The idea of humanity as ‘the sixth mass extinction event’ evokes a timescale that radically disrupts ‘history’ as we know it, placing mankind – us as humans – at the sixth spot in a series of events that go back 540 million years and aligning us temporally with asteroids and volcanic eruptions. In light of this radical challenge to history in general and to what François Hartog and Aleida Assmann refer to as ‘the modern regime of historicity’ in particular (Hartog 2003; Assmann 2013), the belief that chronology is nothing but a stable, pre-defined system according to which time can be measured and controlled, can no longer be upheld. On the contrary, today, I argue, the most radical challenges to history as we know it come not from the perception of events and processes, from what we are used to calling ‘social or historical time’, but from chronology, in our attempts to establish durations, rhythms, speeds and periods in the history of Earth.
If this is true, the kind of transformation I am referring to in this chapter can better be grasped as a return of chronology, than a return to chronology. Humanity as a ‘sixth mass extinction event’ puts chronology back on our historians’ plates whether we like it or not. This approach, however, makes us forget that chronology is not just, not even primarily, a fact of history, but a specific form of knowledge and scholarship, which for almost 1,000 years dominated Western historiography, before it got first devaluated and then banished 250 years ago. Until chronology was turned into a homogenous, stable, disciplined and disciplining system at the end of the eighteenth century, it served as a name for a multivocal, multidisciplinary, and not least multitemporal practice, which gave rise to some of the most productive tensions and conflicts in the early modern res publica literaria (Colliot-Thélène 2003; Wilcox 1987).
Chronologies existed in plural, and the struggles to align them or to establish a standard made up highly vibrant intellectual projects. Neither Chakrabarty nor Hölscher and Zalasiewicz take into account that the last time ‘simple’ or ‘empty’ time came to dominate the practice of historians, theories and methods were framed by the discipline of chronology, also referred to as ‘computus’, practised by people like Joseph Justus Scaliger and Johann Albrecht Bengel – only that this quantifiable and quantified time was really neither simple nor empty, but invested with contentious claims about Christian faith and political allegiance. As I will discuss below, this potent mix of chronology and ideology led to the separation between chronological time and historical time at the end of the eighteenth century. But today this separation can no longer be upheld, nor can the belief in time as simple, empty, uniform and singular, in accordance with modernist dogma (Benjamin 1973). Chronology is splitting up again, in a way that allows for conflicting durations, periodizations, speeds and rhythms, thus making it a force for multiplying, not unifying our ways of thinking about pasts, presents and futures. This shift of time-reckoning from the periphery to the centre of historiography demands a rethinking of chronology as a knowledge practice.
Among the most widespread temporal practices in the human and social sciences are the proclamations of ‘turns’ and ‘returns’. Since Richard Rorty announced the ‘linguistic turn’ in 1967, in reference mainly to language philosophy in the tradition from Wittgenstein and Carnap (Rorty 1967), one turn has been superseded by the next: the cultural turn, the material turn, the iconic turn, the practical turn, the affective turn, etc. There has even been something as all-encompassing, and explicitly Kantian like a ‘spatial turn’. According to Robert Hassan, this ‘spatial turn’ is currently succeeded by a ‘temporal turn’, which puts time back into the analysis of social phenomena, even foregrounds it (Hassan 2010). Anthropologists, sociologists and human geographers insist in different ways that time is part of the social, indeed that time is social and material, ‘enfolded’ into everything, as Bruno Latour puts it (2002; Bastian 2013). Of course, this ‘temporal turn’ in the social sciences has implications for historical understanding as well (for example in Rosa 2005 and Latour 1993) and found an echo in Ethan Kleinberg’s proclamation that we are witnessing the emergence of ‘a new metaphysics of time’ (Kleinberg 2012: 1–2).
As a temporal practice, ‘turn’ fits well with a general idea of scientific progress. Although it clearly evokes the idea of a change of direction and a shift of gaze, and thus seems to contradict any Popperian idea of linear progress, ‘turn’, in terms of a somewhat attenuated version of Kuhn’s ‘revolution’, still warrants newness and innovation in scholarship. A ‘return’, on the other hand, breaks with illusions of progressivist linearity and pushes a more circular view of scholarship, in which it is possible, even recommendable, to return to earlier positions and paradigms, to solve or at least throw new light on current issues.
Turns and returns to chronology as a knowledge practice can usefully be discussed in the context of Anthony Grafton’s impressive study of the life and work of Joseph Justus Scaliger, the French philologist and chronologist, one of the most prominent academics in early modern Europe. Grafton begins his study of Scaliger’s chronological work by describing the status of the discipline of chronology in Europe in the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment: ‘[I]t won the interest of many of the most innovative European thinkers and gave rise to sophisticated debates. It probably enjoyed more esteem than disciplines now much better known like textual criticism […] and epigraphy’ (Grafton 1993: 4). In his two-volume study, Grafton dedicates the first volume to philology, the second to chronology, although he is also well aware that they remain entangled (Grafton 1983 and 1993). Much of Scaliger’s work in chronology is based on his philological reconstruction of Eusebius’s Chronicon, especially its Egyptian and Babylonian sources. But chronology permeated early modern intellectual and material culture in a variety of ways: ‘Europeans plastered their walls and filled their travelling-packs with calendars and charts of world history. They produced and consumed majestic books, tiny monographs, and even “machines chronologiques” that laid out the structures and details of historic time’ (Grafton 1993: 4). Even beyond the remits of the res publica litteraria, he concludes, the study of chronology ‘formed part of the fabric of common life’ until the eighteenth century (Grafton 1993: 7).
Proclaiming a ‘Turn to Chronology’ in the first chapter of the book, Grafton does not only refer to Scaliger’s life and career, but also to his own contemporary moment. Indeed, some of the Renaissance solutions to chronological problems, he argues, have ‘paradoxically become novel and relevant once again’ (Grafton 1993: 18). In reading Grafton’s incredibly detailed, truly congenial exploration of Scaliger’s chronology, it is hard to recognize this relevance and novelty, except as an exceptionally learned contribution to the study of ancient and Renaissance chronology. Today, however, we are in a position to re-evaluate Grafton’s claim. As illustrated by the warning that humanity is the ‘sixth mass extinction event’, the question of co-ordination of human life with various natural phenomena as well as the dating and periodization of events and processes in natural history have again moved to the forefront of history. The natural phenomena in question are not so much the movements of the sun and the moon, but resource depletion, global warming, and extinction of large populations of vertebrates, invertebrates and plants.
Between Scaliger’s turn to chronology and the present return to the same, chronology as a knowledge practice in its own right has been more or less gone from historiography. In the second half of the eighteenth century when philology – Scaliger’s other favoured discipline – came into its own as an academic discipline, chronology faded away and was replaced by other ways of organizing and relating to historical time. Or, rather, chronology became the more or less stable unquestioned temporal framework into which philologists and other historians could place their written sources and texts. As Grafton points out, the interest in chronological texts and dating practices, especially pertaining to Antiquity, persisted throughout the nineteenth century, but only as a highly specialized field, with little impact on historical scholarship as a whole (Grafton 1993: 16–17).
Alongside philology, and in the same period, another discipline was on the rise, especially in the German area, namely ‘history’, Geschichtswissenschaft, the theoretically and methodologically elaborated study of past events, peoples, nations and cultures (Muhlack 1991). History in the modern sense was premised on the rupture with the chronological tradition. In historiography and theories of history, this shift has come to be symbolized by a quote from Immanuel Kant, later picked up by Reinhart Koselleck and others. Originally, the way Kant put it to paper in his 1789 Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht [Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View], the sentence has a somewhat convoluted structure, and is put in the form of a German irrealis: als ob sich nicht die Chronologie nach der Geschichte, sondern, umgekehrt, die Geschichte nach der Chronologie richten müßte – ‘as if it wasn’t chronology that had to conform to history, but the other way around, that history had to conform to chronology’ (Kant 1907: 195). Koselleck rewrites Kant in a way that emphasizes and amplifies even more the break with chronology: ‘As Kant said at the time: Until now history has adapted to chronology. From now on, however, chronology will have to adapt to history.’ And Koselleck adds: ‘This was the program of the Enlightenment: to organize historical time according to criteria that were derived from history itself’ (Koselleck 1979: 321–2). And in another essay he goes on to list these criteria, or rather these concepts, according to which historical time can be organized: der Fortschritt, die Dekadenz, Beschleunigung oder Verzögerung, das Noch-nicht und das Nicht-mehr, das Früher- oder Später-als, das Zufrüh oder Zuspät, die Situation und die Dauer – or, in English, although some of these time-labelling words are almost untranslatable, ‘progress, decadence, acceleration or deceleration, not yet and not anymore, before or after, too early and too late, situation and duration’ (Koselleck 1979: 133).
Returning to Kant, what prompts his confrontation with practices of chronology is a footnote in another text written and published at the same time, Die Streit der Fakultäten [The Conflict of the Faculties], in which he takes up a work by the theologian Johann Albrecht Bengel, a well-known scholar of Greek and the editor of a critical commented edition of the Greek New Testament. In his Ordo Temporum from 1741, Bengel develops a chronology, in terms of a mathematical system of years and centuries, based solely on biblical sources and especially on the Apocalypse of St. John (Kant 1907: 62). According to Bengel’s chronological calculations, Christ was born in 3939 Anno Mundi, after the Creation of the Earth. But in order to account for the numerus septenarius Bengel finds a way to make 3939 divisible by the holy number seven, by using so-called ‘apocalyptic periods’ and by deducting the ‘years of rest [Ruhejahre]’ etc. (Kant 1907: 62). After going through all of Bengel’s calculations, Kant sighs: ‘What can we say? Did the holy numbers decide the way of the world?’ (Kant 1907: 62). In other words, can the world be synchronized to Christian dogma, as expressed in the chronologies of the Bible? And is this really the task of a universal historiographer?
Of course, Kant’s rejection of this possibility has been the rejection of every other historiographer and theorist of history since the late eighteenth century. Indeed, it is possible to claim, as Donald J. Wilcox does in his path-breaking book on pre-Newtonian chronologies, that the emergence of modern historiography rests on this shift: when Newton’s absolute time, singular, mathematical and independent of ‘anything external’ – including Christian dogma and holy numbers – found its way into history writing and became the precondition for historicism (Wilcox 1987: 16–50). In other words: Kant’s claim that the principles for organizing history must be found in history itself is premised on the existence of a stable, uniform and homogenous chronology, in which the struggles to find the right time to celebrate Easter or establish the age of Metusalech are solved once and for all and have given way to an absolute metrics.
On closer inspection, however, the separation of history from chronology is hardly as clear-cut as that, even in Kant. His remark about chronology and history and who should conform to whom is taken from the first book of part I of Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, on the Erkenntnisvermögen, ‘the cognitive faculty’, more specifically, from paragraph 37, in which he discusses what he calls Bezeichnungsvermögen, ‘the faculty of using signs’ – he even gives it a Latin heading: ‘Facultas signatrix’. Signs can according to Kant be put in three groups: ‘arbitrary (artificial), natural, and prodigious’ (Kant 1907: 192). Among arbitrary signs, Kant mostly discusses language. But what is important here are the two others. Kant’s exploration of natural signs is namely an exploration of time, since what interests him about natural signs is the way their relationship to reality is either ‘demonstrative or rememorative or prognostic’, referring the present, the past or the future (Kant 1907: 193). ‘Demonstrative signs’, according to Kant, include a patient’s pulse, or smoke from a fire, ‘rememorative signs’ involve tombs, mausoleums and ruins. The natural signs that he finds most interesting, however, are the signs pointing towards the future, the ‘prognostic signs’, which he organizes in two groups: astronomic signs, which are pure superstition, and medical signs, which are based on knowledge and experience. And finally, this last category of natural, future-directed signs brings him to the ‘prodigious signs’, Wunderzeichen, which are no longer ‘natural’ but appear when ‘the nature of things is turned upside down’, like comets, solar and lunar eclipses, and northern lights, taken by superstitious people to predict the ending of the world (Kant 1907: 194). At this point the main text of §37 on the faculty of using signs ends, and Kant starts an appendix, in which the reference to chronology can be found. Already in Kant, however, what stands out is how the need to discuss chronology is linked to certain rare, dramatic and ominous events in nature, which to a certain extent prefigures the discussions about the Anthropocene and humanity as the ‘sixth mass extinction event’.
In the appendix, Kant draws on what he has said about prodigious signs and superstition, and begins in the following way: ‘We should, furthermore, take note here of a strange way in which man’s imagination plays with him by confusing signs with things, or putting an intrinsic reality into signs, as if things must conform to them’ (Kant 1907: 194). Here it is again, the word from the quote, ‘conform’, sich richten – and the signs; actually the only signs Kant is interested in here are numbers. What Kant means by chronology, then, is a knowledge practice, in which numbers are confused with reality and used to foresee the future. And the number most likely to bring about this kind of confusion in time-reckoning is, of course, the number seven. Kant goes on to list examples from different systems of knowledge and beliefs, in which the number seven ‘has acquired a mystical importance’, and he adds: ‘even the creation of the world had to conform to it’ (Kant 1907: 194). And finally, he concludes, in Judeo-Christian chronology, it has gone so far that the various computations of number seven not only ‘comprise in fact the period of the most important changes (from God’s call to Abraham to the birth of Christ), but even determine a priori, as it were, the precise limits of that period’ (Kant 1907: 194–5). For this reason we can say that history is made to conform to chronology, and not the other way around. In other words, Kant’s criticism of chronology is based on a theory of numbers as something between natural signs that are granted purchase not only on future but, indeed, and more interestingly, also on past reality, and Wunderzeichen, signs of wonder, that are understood as warnings about the end of the world. Looking back at this moment in the history of the relationship between history and chronology, we might recognize something like an uncanny symmetry between Bengel’s belief in the numerus septuarius and Koselleck’s claim that in the Sattelzeit the ‘criteria’ of historical time emerges from history as such. Isn’t progress also a sign, in Kant’s sense, much like a number, no more or less intrinsical to history than the 7+7 Stufenjahre, or the 70 Jahrwochen that governs Christian chronology, according to Kant? As Bengel was searching history for patterns of seven, modern historians search history for signs of progress – when one culture, one people or one field of knowledge and practice advance to the front of history and others are struggling to catch up.
My point here is not to deny the difference between pre-modern and modern ideas and practices of history, aligning myself with Latour’s famous claim that ‘we have never been modern’ (Latour 1993); rather, my interest is in exploring what might be the conditions for a ‘return to chronology’ in the present. In my argument, the gesture of return responds to a specific moment in the history of historical experience, often identified as the collapse of ‘the modern regime of historicity’ (Hartog 2003; Assmann 2013). The past–present–future nexus is put under pressure by two sets of changes: by processes of ‘social acceleration’, which, according to Hartmut Rosa, have brought about their dialectical opposite, an experience of standstill (Rosa 2003: 18; Rosa 2005: 402–7), of being stuck in a ‘monstrous present’ (Hartog 2003: 119); and, more importantly, I argue, by events and processes that can no longer be understood, explained and periodized by the timescales of modernist historiography, but demand a radical revision of what we understand by ‘history’.
Examples can be found in different sets of lifetimes, geological, cosmological and technoscientific: At present, humans are being recast as ‘geological agents’, and thus placed on a timescale that outlasts ‘history’ in the modernist sense by millions of years (Zalasiewicz et al. 2011; Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo 2017). At the same time, populations across the globe are currently outliving the cultural and social structures put in place to care for a much younger population. In Europe the proportion of people older than 65 is approaching 25 per cent (Oeppen and Vaupel 2002), and in Japan the average life expectancy of women is now 86.5 years, the highest in the world (Christensen et al. 2009). Not least, ‘history’ is challenged by the projection of radically different, technoscientific futures, both infinitely long and infinitely short, multiplied, and entangled, emerging both in science and fiction. Genetic engineering, quantum physics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) all envision multiple possible future worlds that are absolutely discontinuous, out of sync with ‘history’ (Harari 2016). These processes unfold in different fields of knowledge and indeed on different scales of life; what they have in common, however, is that they do not really register in the standard timescales of modernist history, dealing mainly with written sources, technology and state-building, and hardly looking beyond the last 6,000 years of human history (Smail and Shyrock 2011). After the rise of historicism, chronology has been reduced to a tacit presumption, hardly to be questioned unless someone comes up with a new theory of modernity or reinvigorates earlier speculations about an ‘axial age’ (Eisenstadt 1986). To return to chronology means to return to a historiographical practice that is able to think about timescales and periodizations in the plural, to try out different durations, periodic structures and rhythms, compare them and map out their similarities and their differences, or, if you like, their synchronicities and their non-synchronicities.
Bengel’s struggles to establish the correct age of the world as well as the correct year of the birth of Christ by mathematical procedures are interwoven with Christian dogmatics; hence, alternative chronologies were disqualified as dogmatically wrong or even heretical. His Ordo Temporum is a prime example of this kind of chrono-dogmatics, which is also what Kant rejects in his discussion. It serves as a reminder that the metrics of time is not just a neutral, technical and mathematical practice, but also a tool for controlling the people in a society, by convincing them that time moves according to a specific rhythm – and so should their lives and bodies. By contrast, in the works of less dogmatic, more inventive chronologists, such as Scaliger, the inherent multiplicity of chronology and the many possible pasts and futures, going back not only to Greek Antiquity, but also to the Egyptians and the Babylonians, become a source for creativity, experimentation and innovation.
As illustrated by the juxtaposition of Scaliger and Bengel, and as argued by Wilcox (1987: 221–51), returning to chronology means returning to a paradigm of multiple temporalities, which has since been expelled from discussions of history. In Tanaka’s essay, chronology functions as a placeholder for uniform, unquestioned time to be disposed of in order to make room for the temporal multiplicities of history: ‘One way to use time, but not chronology in history,’ Tanaka writes, ‘is to recognize multiple timescales.’ And he goes on: ‘Here time is still linear, but it recognizes the multiple scales that are connected to natural – physical and biological – and social phenomena’ (Tanaka 2015: 169). Agreeing with Tanaka’s ambition to recognize and reclaim multiple timescales, my argument here is that ‘chronology’ might be a better tool for achieving this goal than ‘history’, which is still very much confined to a modern temporal regime.
What I propose is to see chronology not as an absolute, homogenous, metric system, into which events in the past, present and future can be placed, but as a knowledge practice in its own right – not something that is there, but as something we as historians and social scientists are involved in and produce. Around the same time as Kant wrote his dismissal of chronology, Edward Gibbon showed far more interest in this particular element of historiography, at least if we are to believe his posthumously compiled memoirs, published in 1796. None of his ‘vague and multifarious reading’, he recounts, could teach him ‘to think, to write, or to act’; instead he opts for a ‘rational application to the order of time and place’:
[F]rom Stranchius I imbibed the elements of chronology: the Tables of Helvicus and Anderson, the Annals of Usher and Prideaux, distinguished the connection of events, and engraved the multitude of names and dates in a clear and indelible series. But in the discussion of the first ages I overleaped the bounds of modesty and use. In my childish balance I presumed to weigh the systems of Scaliger and Petavius, of Marsham and Newton, which I could seldom study in the originals; and my sleep has been disturbed by the difficulty of reconciling the Septuagint with the Hebrew computation.
Gibbon 1966: 43
In the eyes of the young Gibbon, chronology represents a field of theories and methods that any historian worth his salt needs to engage with. Among the most useful works he counts Annales Veteris Testamenti, published by bishop James Ussher in 1650, in which Creation is dated to the first part of the night that preceded 23 October in the year of the Julian Period 710, as well as Christoph Hellwig’s Theatrum Historicum, in which the entire world history was represented in tables designed to prove the headstart of sacred rather than pagan history (Jordheim 2017). As soon as he tries to measure his own ambitions as a historian-chronologist with the works of Scaliger and others, however, Gibbon must admit that he not just overstepped, but indeed ‘overleaped’ the boundaries for what was useful and even modest, possibly in a religious sense.
In The Measure of Times Past, Wilcox welcomes the return of the ‘rhetoric of relative time’ in works by twentieth-century thinkers and artists in fields as diverse as physics, painting, poetry, psychology and philosophy (Wilcox 1987: 3). In these works he recognized the demise of the ‘absolute time line’, which was introduced by Isaac Newton and then migrated into history in the eighteenth century (Wilcox 1987: 16). During the twentieth century, however, this ‘fall of absolute time’ remained a purely theoretical shift, whereas history continued to be written, as if time were an absolute, homogenous and stable system. My claim then is that it took the recognition of global warming and mass extinction as historical events and experiences for the rhetoric of relative time that had dominated pre-Newtonian chronologies to find its way back into historiography.
In the works of Scaliger, Bengel, and even Newton, questions of time and time-measurement kept oscillating back and forth between fields of knowledge that we today consider to be separate disciplines. In a similar fashion, ongoing debates about dating and periodization transgress borders between disciplines and raise questions about the beginning and ending of mankind as well as our role on Earth – not, however, in the framework of Christian dogma, but in the context of a form of natural history, in which man is put back into the long history of life on the planet.
In historiography, ‘deep history’ and ‘deep time’ have become names for timescales, which have in common that they go far beyond the periodizations that traditionally guide historical inquiries. Since ‘the time revolution of the 1860s’, when geology took human history into a limitless time before Eden, Andrew Shyrock and Daniel Lord Smail argue, the history of humankind has been haunted by a ‘fragmentation of historical time’ (Smail and Shyrock 2011: 3). Historians are still largely in ‘the grip of sacred history’, in which mankind emerged from Eden around 6,000 years ago, ignoring completely close to two million years of human history, or rather, leaving it to archaeologists, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists (Smail and Shyrock 2011: 3). In a methodological perspective, this temporal ‘straightjacket’ (Smail and Shyrock 2011: 5) – which also serves to exclude an entire continent, Africa, from historiographical interest – was supported by the choice of a specific kind of source as well as a specific set of scholarly procedures: the analysis of written documents, accompanied by serious and sustained Quellenkritik. The part of the history of mankind that had no documents, in other words, everything older than 6,000 years, disappears from sight. In much present historiography this extremely short, quasi-Biblical chronology is made even shorter by the relentless interest of historians in progress, modernization and political and economic development, hence, in the last 300 years of human history.
On the contrary, to write ‘deep history’, in Smail’s terms, means ‘bundling together the Paleolithic and the Neolithic’ – that is the Old Stone Age, which began approximately 2.5 million years ago, and the New Stone Age, ‘the period between the shift to agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago and the invention of bronze tools’ – ‘with the Postlithic’, meaning ‘everything that has happened since the emergence of metal technology, writing, and cities some 5,500 years ago’ (Smail 2008: 1–3). And he adds, in a wishful, rather than analytic mode, evoking the dreams of early modern chronology: ‘The result is a seamless narrative that acknowledges the full chronology of the human past’ (Smail 2008: 3). The return to chronology taking place in Smail’s work is accompanied by an early modern dream about the homogeneity and continuity of history, about the ‘seamlessness’ and ‘fullness’ of time, which was handed down from Eusebius to Scaliger and to Engel and which resurfaces in some of the dreams of the ‘deep time’ of history.
Among scholars who agree that we are currently in the Anthropocene and that humanity has become a geological ‘force’ or ‘agent’, which has taken the earth into another period of its history, the question of dating remains highly contested. Alternatives range from the invention of agriculture, expansion and colonization by Europe, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Acceleration, to the first testing of the atomic bomb. In an article from 2014, Zalasiewicz, together with a large group of authors, including Paul Crutzen, who first coined the term, ask ‘When did the Anthropocene begin?’ They sum up their arguments in the following way:
We evaluate the boundary of the Anthropocene geological time interval as an epoch, since it is useful to have a consistent temporal definition for this increasingly used unit, whether the presently informal term is eventually formalized or not. Of the three main levels suggested – an ‘early Anthropocene’ level some thousands of years ago; the beginning of the Industrial Revolution at ~1800 CE (Common Era); and the ‘Great Acceleration’ of the mid-twentieth century – current evidence suggests that the last of these has the most pronounced and globally synchronous signal. A boundary at this time need not have a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP or ‘golden spike’) but can be defined by a Global Standard Stratigraphic Age (GSSA), i.e. a point in time of the human calendar. We propose an appropriate boundary level here to be the time of the world’s first nuclear bomb explosion, on July 16th 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico; additional bombs were detonated at the average rate of one every 9.6 days until 1988 with attendant worldwide fallout easily identifiable in the chemostratigraphic record. Hence, Anthropocene deposits would be those that may include the globally distributed primary artificial radionuclide signal, while also being recognized using a wide range of other stratigraphic criteria.
Zalasiewicz et al. 2015: 196
Not yet a reversal of Kant’s statement about chronology and history, the paragraph illustrates how chronological procedures are reinstalled at the core of historiography, raising questions about the quality of time (‘geological’), periodization (‘the Anthropocene time interval as an epoch’), beginnings and origins (‘July 16th 1945’), computation (‘the average rate of one every 9.6 days’) and claims for universality (‘the most pronounced and globally synchronous signal’). In spite of the almost mythological search for the ‘golden spike’, however, the evidence and arguments for different chronological options are not found in mystical numbers like the numerus septuarius, or in Christian dogma, but in the ‘chemostratigraphic record’, that is ‘Anthropocene deposits’ containing a ‘radionuclide signal’. In other words, the spiritual truth of Christian providence has been replaced by the material truth of the stratigraphical composition of the Earth, and, thus, theology by earth systems science. The point of this analogy is not primarily to bring out the metaphysics of science, but rather to emphasize how both of these disciplines – theology and earth system science – impact human history, and that their impact takes the form of questions of dating, periodization and time-measurement, in other words of chronology.
In conclusion, returning to chronology should not be understood as a return to an early modern knowledge practice, nor should it be taken as a full-fledged historical analogy. Rather, the point of this chapter has been to discuss how new forms of presentism – evoking the present as the scene of a mass extinction event, or of the emergence of humanity as a geological agent – destabilize the modernist principles of time-reckoning and open historiography up to a plurality of competing chronological practices. In the next step, these practices will transform completely the conceptions of subjectivity, agency, and even events in history, as past, present and future humans are inscribed into time frames and timescales that differ radically from the 6,000 years of modernist historiography. In this way the return to chronology will lead to new turns, decentring both the present, the human subject and Western civilization, and giving rise to different narratives of life on the planet.
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