Telluric Recollection: On the Disappearance of History in Deep Time

Since the turn of the millennium, the humanities have been progressively forced to come to terms with the materiality of a warming world, in particular the entanglement of natural environments with technical infrastructures that lies at the heart of anthropgenic environmental change, and its implications for the hithertofore seemingly impentetrable ontological wall of separation between natural and human history. In an effort to address the concomitant insufficiency of remaning solely at the discursive level, one such attempt has been to reorient the interpretative concerns of the humanities by submerging the modern subject into geological registers of deep time. This paper cautions that along with such a reorientation, however, any sense of a limit – such as a hermeneutical horizon belonging to human history – thereby disappears into the fundamental depthlessness of deep time, and the subject suddenly vanishes from the center of the global environmental drama. Ironically so, since the purported novelty of the globalization of technology is precisely the manner in which it highlights the anthropogenic dimension of global environmental change, and thus the deep time consequences of human action.