{"title":"THE ANTHROPOCENE AND THE PLANET","authors":"Zoltán Boldizsár Simon","doi":"10.1111/hith.12303","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12303","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Dipesh Chakrabarty's <i>The Climate of History in a Planetary Age</i> is, in three respects, far more than a synthesis of over a decade of pioneering conceptual work aimed at making sense of the Anthropocene/planetary predicament and its implications for historical understanding. First, the book makes visible an intellectual trajectory in which Chakrabarty's conceptual struggles with the Anthropocene gradually move from the centrality of the notion of the Anthropocene toward the centrality of the notion of the planet. Second, it highlights the relational complexities with which one needs to grapple when trying to make sense of the current predicament. Third, and finally, the book showcases a series of often overlapping conceptual distinctions that Chakrabarty has developed while navigating these complexities. Through a discussion of the above key aspects, this review essay highlights the achievements of <i>The Climate of History in a Planetary Age</i> and critically engages with its central themes. In dialogue with the book, it pays special attention to exploring the respective benefits and drawbacks of the notions of the Anthropocene and the planet, and to the character and role of human agency in the Anthropocene/planetary predicament. Finally, the essay concludes with a few thoughts concerning the question of what kind of a reinvention of historical understanding might be triggered, respectively, by the notions of the Anthropocene and the planet.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 2","pages":"320-333"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12303","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48689973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"DĒMOKRATIA'S POSSIBLE DISCONNECTION: UNTIMELY ANTIQUITY, TEMPORAL OUTSIDENESS, AND HISTORICAL FUTURES OF POLITICS*","authors":"ALEXANDRA LIANERI","doi":"10.1111/hith.12301","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12301","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article discusses notions of possible disconnection in the post-1990s political present that are formulated as untimely articulations of the ancient Greek democratic past and of the concept of <i>dēmokratia</i>. These are modalities of transition that foreground political futurity as emanating neither from anticipation of evental change to come nor from abstract utopianism. Rather, <i>dēmokratia</i>’s projected break with the present and presentism is grounded in transtemporal confrontations and routes of historical memory. These are engagements with antiquity that take hold of and refigure the relation among past, present, and future politics, as well as the inside and outside of democracy, at a horizon of <i>Nachleben</i> (afterlife) that sustains no fixed beginning or end. I discuss these temporalities as disconnective in a sense that differs from historical futures opened up by technoscientific or anthropocenic prospects. <i>Dēmokratia</i> challenges the self-narration of present democracy as a project of the future by positing modalities of outsideness, repotentialization of the past, and interweaving of times and political languages in non-narrative terms. The outcome is a form of futurity that opens up the possibility of imagining not only a novel political subject and community but also a logic of their emergence that enables both to be incessantly reconfigured. <i>Dēmokratia</i>’s possible disconnection works against a sense of lost political futurity, but it needs to be recognized as grounded in a state of loss, insofar as political domination may also be built into future democratic principles. For this reason, it invites a reflexive problematic about the representability and translatability of disconnective political futures and communities.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 2","pages":"177-202"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44182668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"METAPHYSICS IN HISTORY: NOTES ON THE ORIGINS OF AUTHORITARIANISM AND POPULISM","authors":"Federico Sor","doi":"10.1111/hith.12296","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12296","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article contains an analysis of metaphysics in historical narrative, especially as it pertains to the study of authoritarianism and populism, and a brief exploration of the political implications of metaphysical narratives. The article engages closely with twentieth-century accounts of the origins of authoritarianism and populism and related topics insofar as they are relevant today. Some present-day authors continue to adopt some of the tropes of twentieth-century accounts, though they do so without acknowledging the uncertainties and doubts expressed by twentieth-century historians and social scientists with regard to their own paradigms. The analysis proceeds through an immanent critique, examining the internal contradictions of complex notions. The focus is on teleology and transcendentalism. Teleology occludes short-term causality, contexts, and conjunctures. It entails anachronism, or the retrospective attribution of meaning, and ontological fatalism, which renders historical explanation irrelevant. Eschewing fatalism means allowing for the causal efficiency of intervening conditions, which contradicts the premises of the teleological approach. The reification of stages (or eras) in teleological successions leads to asynchronies, or the coexistence of elements belonging to different totalities. The formulation of origins as predispositions and potentialities entails a transcendental approach. Immanently, there are no potentialities but actual existents immersed in their historical context; these can only be potentialities with respect to a transcendental being or essence. But this approach leads to irresoluble contradictions and an alienated form of history in which human agency and actors themselves are only manifestations of a beyond. The neglect of social antagonisms as immediate causes of authoritarianism entails a specific political position. The postulation of populism as transcendentally equivalent to authoritarianism carries a negative valuation of challenges to liberal democracy. With a less deterministic approach to history, analytical and normative assessments become less predetermined.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 2","pages":"225-250"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44784071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"AN APOLOGIA FOR ARTHUR LOVEJOY'S LONG-RANGE APPROACH TO THE HISTORY OF IDEAS","authors":"Nico Mouton","doi":"10.1111/hith.12298","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12298","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Arthur Lovejoy's long-range approach to the history of ideas is little appreciated and largely abandoned. The list of Lovejoy's supposed sins is long. His critics have charged that, among other things, he treated ideas as timeless entities with essences that are independent of individual thinkers, separate from specific texts, isolated from immediate contexts, and insulated from intellectual change. This article defends Lovejoy against such attacks and argues that his approach is still viable and valuable.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 2","pages":"272-295"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12298","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42582321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"EPISTEMIC WOUNDED ATTACHMENTS: RECOVERING DEFINITIONAL SUBJECTIVITY THROUGH COLONIAL LIBRARIES","authors":"HARLEEN KAUR, PRABHDEEP SINGH KEHAL","doi":"10.1111/hith.12299","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12299","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Postcolonial theorizing on empires and subjects focuses on governance and infrastructure as relevant geographies of relation. However, when governance-driven knowledge production migrates from colony to metropole, what postcolonial subjectivity formations are recovered from colonial archives, particularly if these archives are structured by epistemic difference? We theorize a wounded attachment to a colonial library, or the construction of subjectivity through colonial archival recovery, as a means of transforming a colonial library of governance into an academic discipline. Through the case study of Sikh studies, a discipline originating out of colonial governance of Sikhs, we argue that epistemic difference is transformed into epistemic distancing as a tool by which scholars pursue legibility to the Euro-American academy. We contextualize the ongoing investment in measures of academic legibility (for example, objectivity, distance, and validity) as how area and region are tied to the production of universal knowledge; these measures result in the elision of embodied knowledge as a valid framework for intellectual pursuit.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 2","pages":"203-224"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41869642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"NOSTALGIA AND (PRE-)MODERNITY","authors":"Hannah Skoda","doi":"10.1111/hith.12297","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12297","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article argues that, in the fourteenth century, there was a wave of nostalgia that was provoked by extreme structural change: this was a moment of demographic catastrophe (with famine and plague), endemic warfare, economic fluctuation, intensified urbanization, and intellectual and spiritual novelties. Yet scholars from a range of disciplines have assumed that nostalgia and modernity are intimately connected. Given these framings of nostalgia as a modern phenomenon, this article seeks to explore the implications of premodern nostalgia. It begins by setting out the arguments for the intertwining of nostalgia and modernity. Some have argued that modernity brings a sense of rupture and that this produces nostalgia. Others, relatedly, have argued that modernity seems to speed up our experience of time and that this produces a nostalgia for a slower-paced and more predictable past. I juxtapose these arguments with evidence of fourteenth-century outpourings of nostalgia across a range of contexts in England, Italy, and France. I analyze examples of nostalgia in political contexts (both radical and reactionary), nostalgia for apparently lost economic orders, nostalgia for a lost set of chivalric values, and nostalgia for disrupted social orders. I then suggest that these fourteenth-century manifestations of nostalgia were actually produced by precisely the features of the period that are usually deemed to be exclusive to modernity: it was rapid, rupturing structural change that provoked nostalgic regret. Nostalgia, then, would seem to indicate that there are features of the fourteenth century that might be deemed modern. However, rather than simply trying to therefore push back the moment of the birth of modernity, I argue that nostalgia is indicative of the problems of periodization. The presence of nostalgia across epochs—these echoes across the webs of time—suggest that lines of periodization, birthing moments, need to be treated with extreme caution. And it is appropriate that such a reminder should come from a phenomenon such as nostalgia, which is, after all, about resonances and echoes across time—resonances that are amplified, distorted, whispered even, but that all challenge and complicate any straightforward sense of either linear or cyclical time.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 2","pages":"251-271"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12297","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44852398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"WITH SPLINTERS (OR STARS) IN OUR EYES: ON READING THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL WITH MARTIN JAY","authors":"Karyn Ball","doi":"10.1111/hith.12295","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12295","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This mostly admiring review article focuses on Martin Jay's 2020 essay collection entitled <i>Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations</i>. Though it highlights details and insights from nearly every essay in the collection, the review devotes significant attention to chapter 4, which focuses on the relationship of the Frankfurt School's first-generation scholars with Sigmund Freud. The departure point for my engagement with Jay's fourth chapter is the translation of the German word <i>Trieb</i> (drive) as “instinct” throughout <i>The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud</i>. Although Jay's treatment of Max Horkheimer's, Theodor W. Adorno's, and Herbert Marcuse's recourses to Freudian psychoanalysis emphasizes their abiding commitment to Freud's theory of instinctual forces (over and against objections to his biologism), the question of whether a drive differs from an instinct does not arise. This question therefore offers an occasion to speculate on how distinguishing more firmly between instinct and drive might matter for the Frankfurt School's opposition between first and second nature. Though I praise Jay's decision to include a chapter on Miriam Hansen's Benjaminian revision of the public sphere, I also criticize his practice, in this volume at least, of consigning most scholarship authored by women to the endnotes rather than engaging with it in the main text.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 1","pages":"129-151"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12295","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43380580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"TO FLY THE PLANE: LANGUAGE GAMES, HISTORICAL NARRATIVES, AND EMOTIONS","authors":"William M. Reddy","doi":"10.1111/hith.12289","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12289","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The common Western distinction between reason and emotion (which is not found outside Western-influenced traditions) tends to obscure an important distinction between two kinds of thinking: logical and mathematical reasoning, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, what is sometimes called “situational awareness,” a kind of thinking that involves striving to take into account multiple simultaneously true descriptions of a situation. Emotion, as understood in appraisal theory (that is, as inherently cognitive and intentional), is one kind of thinking that contributes to—indeed, is crucial to—situational awareness in this sense. Intention also belongs to situational awareness. Whatever long-term goals we pursue, present action must be attuned to immediate circumstances. One is faced with an indefinite number of ways to describe what is going on at any moment, and this second kind of thinking involves striving to identify a crucial subset of these true descriptions that one can respond to via an intentional action, procedure, or plan. Maintaining situational awareness in this sense is the goal of “crew resource management” (CRM), a flight crew teamwork strategy and emotional regime aimed at ensuring airline safety. The philosophical works of Wittgenstein, Anscombe, Austin, Habermas, and Danto, among others, help explain the remarkable successes of crew resource management. This article tests this explanation's applicability to nonmodern contexts by briefly discussing the letters of Antoine de Bourbon and Jeanne d'Albret between 1551 and 1562.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 1","pages":"30-61"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12289","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47580052","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"POTENTIAL HISTORY: READING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FROM INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGES*","authors":"Rodrigo Bonaldo, Ana Carolina Barbosa Pereira","doi":"10.1111/hith.12290","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12290","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Until the beginning of the twentieth century, history, as a core concept of the political project of modernity, was highly concerned with the future. The many crimes, genocides, and wars perpetuated in the name of historical progress eventually caused unavoidable fractures in the way Western philosophies of history have understood change over time, leading to a depoliticization of the future and a greater emphasis on matters of the present. However, the main claim of the “Historical Futures” project is that the future has not completely disappeared from the focus of historical thinking, and some modalities of the future that have been brought to the attention of historical thought relate to a more-than-human reality. This article aims to confront the prospects of a technological singularity through the eyes of peoples who already live in a world of more-than-human agency. The aim of this confrontation is to create not just an alternative way to think about the future but a stance from which we can explore ways to inhabit and therefore repoliticize historical futures. This article contains a comparative study that has been designed to challenge our technologized imaginations of the future and, at the same time, to infuse the theoretical experiment with contingent historical experiences. Could we consider artificial intelligence as a new historical subject? What about as an agent in a “more-than-human” history? To what extent can we read this new condition through ancient Amerindian notions of time? Traditionally, the relationship between Western anthropocentrism and Amerindian anthropomorphism has been framed in terms of an opposition. We intend to prefigure a less hierarchical and more horizontal relation between systems of thought, one devoid of a fixed center or parameter of reference. Granting the same degree of intellectual dignity to the works of Google engineers and the views of Amazonian shamans, we nevertheless foster an intercultural dialogue (between these two “traditions of reasoning”) about a future in which history can become more-than-human. We introduce potential history as the framework not only to conceptualize Amerindian experiences of time but also to start building an intercultural dialogue that is designed to discuss AI as a historical subject.</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 1","pages":"3-29"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12290","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42295121","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"COLLINGWOOD'S WHALE, CHAKRABARTY'S CONUNDRUM, AND BRAUDEL'S BORROWED TIME","authors":"Stephan Palmié","doi":"10.1111/hith.12293","DOIUrl":"10.1111/hith.12293","url":null,"abstract":"<p>As R. G. Collingwood noted toward the end of his life, the physiologically limited “time-phase” of human observational capacity cannot but deliver a fundamentally anthropocentric and temporally myopic conception of the world as eventful, destructive, and devoid of larger, perhaps cyclical, regularities. Developing at around the same time, Fernand Braudel's project of a history of the <i>longue durée</i> of human interactions with the environment aimed to subvert the short time-phase of a history accessible to immediate human experience. Although Collingwood and Braudel aimed at a conceptual merger of natural history and human history, neither of them could have foreseen what Dipesh Chakrabarty has described as their collapse into each other, which was effected by humanity's transformation into a geophysical force that produced massive, likely irreversible, and certainly long-lasting climate change. Looking at two very different examples of a rapidly growing body of literature on an extractivist orientation as a key factor in anthropogenic ecological transformations on both local and planetary scales, this review essay suggests that an “intra-active” (in Karen Barad's sense) view of human-environmental relationality might help us conceptualize forms of temporality that are capable of superseding Collingwood's anthropocentric “time-phase.”</p>","PeriodicalId":47473,"journal":{"name":"History and Theory","volume":"62 1","pages":"152-160"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hith.12293","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44203467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}