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- Convenors:
-
Stuart McLean
(University of Minnesota)
Richard Irvine (University of St Andrews)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 26 University Square (UQ), 01/005
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
How might the perspective of geological deep time be mobilized to challenge the more restrictive spatiotemporal visions of contemporary neoliberalism and ethnonationalism, and to imagine in their place a new kind of commons? We welcome both paper presentations and creative/audiovisual projects.
Long Abstract:
Since the nineteenth century, the biological and earth sciences have shown how humans are embedded within the larger-than-human timescales of terrestrial evolution and geology. The perspective of "deep time" reveals humans themselves, their territorial boundaries, and the seemingly fixed forms of physical geography to be ephemeral presences, here today but (perhaps) gone tomorrow. More recently, proclamations of an anthropogenic climate crisis have, arguably, heightened awareness of the ways in which long-term processes of environmental change can impact human lives. Nonetheless, the present seems characterized equally by the ascendancy of more restrictive and parsimonious spatiotemporal visions: enclosure, privatizations, minutely quantified work-time, the strengthening of borders, and the narrowly exclusionary conceptions of identity and history often promulgated in contemporary "culture wars." This panel asks whether the invocation of more than human temporalities might have the potential to expose as transitory and contingent (and thus susceptible to transformation) conceptions such as ownership, private property, national identity, sovereignty, and territoriality that are currently mobilized to delimit and restrict access to both time and space. By refusing the enclosure of time, might deep time enable us to imagine new kinds of commons? Topics might include (but are not limited to): how expanded time horizons might transform the language of social and ecological description; the kinds of alliances, solidarities and collective mobilizations that deep time awareness might enable; and the work of artists and writers who have appealed to deep-time imaginaries. We welcome contributions in the form of academic papers, creative writing, performances, and audiovisual presentations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Richard Irvine (University of St Andrews)
Paper short abstract:
How does deep time shape biographical and historical time? Taking as its starting point William Drummond's poem The Giant's Causeway, this paper explores conflicting theories of geological processes and how this conflict reveals points of tension in our understanding of human life.
Paper long abstract:
Geological processes shift the ground on which human activity occurs. Differing theories of the forces driving those transformations point to divergent understandings of the world in which we live. This paper takes as its starting point the topographical poetry of William Drummond (1778-1865) and in particular his poem The Giant's Causeway. Through a lengthy meditation on basalt intrusions in Co Antrim, the poem explores various theories of earth history, pitting Neptunism and Plutonism against one another; at the same time it considers the political landscape of Ireland and the uprising of 1798. This cross-hatching of deep and historical time allows us to reflect on not only the material conditions of our existence, but also the ways by which vast spans of geological time are enrolled in nationalist struggles. To what extent do models of geology serve as social theory? Does deep time always render human politics and the day to day negotiation of social life trivial?
Nigel Clark (Lancaster University)
Paper short abstract:
Setting out from theories about the role of rifted, dynamic topography and co-operative child-raising in human evolution, I argue that childcare in modernizing Europe left profound psychosocial and systemic imprints on the modern West – with implications for how we confront environmental crises.
Paper long abstract:
Why is it that the western subject has been exceptionally prone to physical and epistemic violence? I set out from both the complex topography hypothesis which proposes that key hominin evolutionary developments took place in the rugged, geologically dynamic terrain of the East African Rift, and the co-operative breeding paradigm which argues that communally distributed childcare is a definitive characteristic of the genus Homo. Putting these approaches into conversation can help us to see how humans, over evolutionary time, negotiated the challenges of an inherently volatile Earth, though not without the intense demands of lengthy infant dependency and a lifelong struggle for affection and belonging. In short, enduring fault-lines run at once through our home planet and our human subjectivity. But both these fractures have been gouged deeper over the course of western modernity. After several million years of co-operative childcare, urban modernizing Europeans veered in the direction of separating infants from their birth parents and early institutionalized child-raising – which Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and fellow co-operative breeding theorists view as a particularly pathological arrangement. While Western child-care may have moved on, I argue that this phase of child-rearing left profound psychosocial and systemic imprints on the modern West, that have in some ways been exacerbated in the latest phase of global capitalist modernity. Confronting these impacts, I suggest, can help us to understand contemporary global environmental crises and to make sense of our current inability to respond in ways that might gift our descendants with shared and liveable worlds.
Aet Annist (University of Tartu and Tallinn University)
Paper short abstract:
Material created with the protest groups’ members engaging in actions in remembrance of loss of non-human beings to neoliberal extractive and indifference industries will be presented as affect conveyed through symbolic mourning, but also as struggle with and empowerment from the timeline of losses.
Paper long abstract:
Experimenting with the potential of participatory film making, I aim to explore the field material created with two protest groups: Extinction Rebellion local group members in the UK, preparing for a funeral procession in remembrance of the extinct species in their area, and the forest protesters in Estonia, memorialising the forests lost to rapidly in the relentless push for extensive clearcutting. Along with the affect conveyed through symbolic mourning of the non-human beings, the participants are also mapping and drawing power from the timeline of extinctions, into the past as well as future. Simultaneously acts of grieving and remembering, these actions are also clarifying the briefness of human gain against the timeline of planetary processes.
Whilst both groups broadly see neoliberalism’s ambition for maximal extraction without regard to survival of the non-human, and ultimately, of the human, as the central reason for the losses and dispossessions experienced in the present and the future, there are instructive differences between the regional and national alliances and solidarities in these two settings - which I hope to further uncover.
As the fieldwork is still ongoing and the participatory film making in its early stages, there is potential for but no guarantee of a creative contribution.
Erin Yerby (Virginia Commonwealth University)
Paper short abstract:
Does imagining a future turn upon our relation to the dead? Through recent admission of an unmarked African American burial site to the National Registry of Historic, this paper considers erasure, invisibility, and ground, as modes of thinking the deep time of the dead against dominant histories.
Paper long abstract:
This proposal turns from the present impossibility of ‘a future,’ toward the past—or more specifically, the dead—to think how sustainable visions of the future might turn upon our relation to the dead, and the earth as ‘house’ of the dead. Housing the dead—in ‘graves, coffins, urns’—grounds the living, as Robert Pogue Harrison argues; in the ancestral depths the meaning of time is “retrieved and perpetuated,” the future opened.
Recently, an unmarked Black burial ground in Richmond, Virginia— Shokoe Hill African Burying Ground—where lie an estimated 22,000 enslaved and free African Americans, was admitted to the National Registry of Historic sites. This plot of land, the effect of purposeful destruction and neglect since the mid 19th century, is marked only by absence. Historical registry requires evidence of “integrity,” defined as the presence of historical structures. Instead of arguing for the ‘integrity’ of the site, advocates maintained “while nothing of the burial ground remains above ground, the site’s integrity is that degradation and neglect itself.” It is not the recognizability of the site, but it’s erasure— an erasure of Black life and death— that marks its significance as history in the American landscape. Using the logic of historical preservation against itself, in refusing to make what is ‘integral’ turn on what remains ‘visible’ to monumental history, this case seems to open up a space for futures grounded in the deep time of the (invisible) dead—the stutter in the plot—of dominant histories within a privatizing/extractive capitalism.