Out of Time

Abstract

Geology, for many nineteenth-century subjects, promised abundance. James Hutton’s 1788 observation that scientists could find “no vestige of a beginning—no prospect of an end” to planetary time was taken up by nineteenth-century geologists to emphasize the expansive field in which they worked (304). Explaining, in 1827, the processes that produced French volcanos, George Julius Poulett Scrope declared, “The time that must be allowed for the production of effects of this magnitude, by causes evidently so slow in their operation, is indeed immense” (165). The immensity of geological time could be daunting, as Scrope acknowledged, but it also became a resource for nineteenth-century subjects; the fascination that attended geology’s revelation of the “worlds . . . beyond worlds” that the science made visible in the planetary past contributed to its popularity on both sides of the Atlantic (Lyell 16).1 That fascination continues into the present, as evidenced in what some have called a “geologic turn” in the arts and humanities (Ellsworth and Kruse 6). In addition to the awe-inspiring geological timescale—which resurfaces in contemporary discussions of the Anthropocene—geology appears as a vitalizing resource for thinkers inspired by New Materialist thought; it is deemed capable of providing a view of reality as, in Manuel de Landa’s phrasing, “a single matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds” (21). This perspective, according to New Materialists, may aid us in our search for new ways of thinking about and acting in response to climate change. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller offers a different perspective on what geology has revealed to us. Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (2021) highlights geology’s participation in a process of diminishment—a radical foreshortening of the future. As a guide to material hidden within the