by Paul Kurek
This post was simultaneously published as the entry for “Geology” on the conceptual history blog Komposita, which was initiated on the occasion of Reinhart Koselleck’s centennial. It follows previous cross-published posts by Jonathon Catlin, Disha Karnad Jani, and Sébastien Tremblay.
Now that the widespread interdisciplinary call to finally face our geological foundations as an overarching material and intellectual framework is getting louder and louder, it seems unavoidable that we become aware of how close our collective weight has come to exceeding our planet’s load-bearing capacity. Given modernity’s population explosion from 1 billion in the year 1800 to nearly 9 billion today, constituting a civilizational Black Hole sucking in vast masses of resources, we are already far beyond “earth’s limited carrying capacity,” as the MIT scientists behind the Club of Rome have argued since the regularly-updated publication of The Limits to Growth in 1971 (137).[1] While it has been said that we rely on the ground, we have been slow to realize that the ground does not rely on us. Given the invasive nature of the human species to the ecosystem of our planet, scientists and humanists alike are speculating about the geological composition—and human contamination—of the sedimentary layer of the Anthropocene. Responses to this urgent question are taking shape in the form of intellectual movements such as new materialism, ecocriticism, environmental humanities, and the like, whose prominent representatives include Bruno Latour, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Donna Haraway, and Ursula Heise.
A concept that appears unavoidable in this context is Reinhart Koselleck’s notion of Zeitschichten, sediments or layers of time, which is currently sparking a broad range of thinkers within the “geological turn” who engage with his work in various ways, most creatively within material history. What is truly at stake here is the collapse of nature and culture as conceptual and material opposites upon which our (un-)stable (understanding of the) world is built, which advances a further decentering of the human in any historical narrative. It is almost as if the three “humiliations of mankind” that Sigmund Freud once proclaimed—Copernicus’s cosmology, Darwin’s evolution theory, and his own psychoanalysis—are now breaking out of the depth of our unconsciousness to rearrange our collective self-understanding. As neo-materialist Timothy LeCain writes in The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past, we should see humans “less as the masters and manipulators of a static world and more as the products of a vibrant world…to escape…a dangerous overestimation of the human ability to understand and control the material things we partner with” via technology (124).
In this short piece, I highlight some of the explicit and implicit resonances of Koselleck’s concept of “sediments of time” (Zeitschichten) with the current merging of material and intellectual history in the context of the emergence of “a new cultural geology—by which I mean a range of theoretical and other initiatives that position culture in a time-frame large enough to crack open the carapace of human self-concern, exposing it to the idea, and maybe even the fact, of its external ontological preconditions, its ground,” as Mark McGurl put it in his essay, “The New Cultural Geology” (380). Especially Koselleck’s two essays “Zeitschichten” (layers of time) and “Geschichte und Raum” (history and space) (both included in Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik, translated as Sediments of Time) are worth revisiting in this context: the former for laying out the methodology of using geological metaphors in reading history, the latter for its discussion of actual geology as a metahistorical/material foundation for possible histories.
After exploring the metaphorical and material geologies of Koselleck’s work, I conclude by proposing a cultural geological framework of my own that I am currently developing in my book project, Heavy Load-Bearing Modernity: A Cultural Geology of Albert Speer’s Berlin/Germania.[2] There I employ three metahistorical modes of writing: Ge-schiebe (that which or who is pushing or being pushed), Ge-schichte (that which or who is layered or layering), and Ge-wichte (that which or who is weighing or being weighed upon).
Metaphorical
Koselleck prominently used the extended metaphor of geological layers of time throughout his oeuvre to analytically separate and dissect temporal developments and constellations:
“[S]ediments or layers of time” refers to geological formations that differ in age and depth and that changed and set themselves apart from each other at differing speeds…. By transposing this metaphor back into human, political, or social history as well as into structural history, we can analytically separate different temporal levels upon which people move and events unfold, and thus ask about the longer-term preconditions for such events.[3]
Isolating different strands of history allowed Koselleck both to analyze each layer separately, e.g. political, economic, or technological history, and also to map out their individual moments of acceleration and deceleration in relation to each other. According to Koselleck, the advantage of thinking in temporal layers “lies in [the] ability to measure different velocities—accelerations or decelerations—and to thereby reveal different modes of historical change that indicate great temporal complexity” (6/22). As a consequence, one particular history can move faster than others, or even move backwards. For example, the French Revolution was a moment of acceleration in terms of political history. Later, in Nazi Germany, one could argue that technological history accelerated but social history regressed. In Mobile Modernity, Todd Presner, who translated some of Koselleck’s work into English, called this the “immobilization” of Germanness. What scholars often took away from Koselleck’s mobile history is the ability to transcend chronological models of history in order to map out the dynamic, multi-layered, and intertwined narrative of time(s) rather than seeing time as a linear narrative. “Thus the fact that historical time is not linear and homogeneous but complex and multilayered accounts for the futility of all efforts to freeze history in order to delimit and define breaks, discontinuities, time spans, beginnings, and endings,” as Helge Jordheim wrote in “Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities” (170).
Material
While Koselleck’s engagement with geology appears mostly metaphorical, he also thinks through actual geology as the material foundation of possible histories, most extensively in “Space and History” (“Raum und Geschichte”), where he discusses the “metahistorical guidelines” (metahistorische[n] Vorgaben) of history, how the materially felt ground determines what kind of histories can possibly be written (29/90). No ground, no history. This is where his theory of history, in combination with his work on concepts, becomes so relevant today:
Measured against the five billion years since the earth’s crust became solid and against the one billion years of organic life on this crust, the ten million years or so of primate-like humans represent just a small span of time, and the two million years in which there is evidence of self-made tools appear that much shorter in comparison. Without a doubt, geological and geographical, biological and zoological—in short, metahistorical pregivens of human determinations of space have a much more pronounced effect in this period than in later phases of our history.[4]
Koselleck also extrapolates his famous theory of acceleration to his analysis of deep time in the essay, “Temporal Foreshortening and Acceleration”:
Finally, global population growth also corresponds to this finding of acceleration, compelling a turn to the open future. The increase of the world population from around half a billion people in the seventeenth century to around six billion in the year 2000 can be interpreted as facet of acceleration: this is an exponential time-curve in which humanity doubles in ever shorter periods of time. The synergy of increasing output in science, technology, and industry is at the same time the condition for the life of a world population that is growing geometrically. Thanks to acceleration, our globe itself has become a closed spaceship.[5]
At this point, Koselleck indicates the limits of this acceleration and the aforementioned Club of Rome: “The hitherto valid empirical thesis that our welfare can only be maintained through further increases in productivity, too, may well, according to the Club of Rome, reach a limit that can no longer be exceeded by raising rates of acceleration” (225/200). While the Anthropocene discussion focuses on how humanity has become a geological agent and is therefore shifting the metahistorical foundations of possible futures, “Koselleck’s historiographical approach has much to offer in questioning this quick renaturalization of the Anthropocene (as a new ‘pregiven’): he focuses on the fluidity between different layers of time and the ways the metahistorical, under specific circumstances, becomes historical,” as Erik Isberg wrote in “Multiple Temporalities in a New Geological Age: Revisiting Reinhart Koselleck’s Zeitschichten” (733). By observing that our acceleration is finite, Koselleck reminds us that we rely on the ground, but the ground does not rely on us. Besides our concerning ecological footprint and its apparent repercussions including climate change, wildfires, dwindling resources, etc., there is something deeper, ontological, or even pre-ontological, at stake here that is about to radically shift our self-understanding. This geological knowledge that has obviously been around for a while is finally trickling into the realm of the humanities and, in large measure, transforming collective consciousness. In this sense, all modern philosophy is now outdated, as philosopher Quentin Meillasseux (a disciple of Alain Badiou) has argued (372). Koselleck, with his deep roots in historiography and his simultaneous awareness of our reliance on the material world, can help us work through the collapse of the nature/culture divide at this time of confronting our geological reality, as he shows us how they are intimately connected with each other.
Cultural Geology: Ge-schiebe, Ge-schichte, Ge-wichte
Building upon Koselleck’s conceptualization of history as (metaphorical) layers that I bring together with current (neo-)materialist and geological readings of history, I argue that we, collectively, are part of geology and, thus, belong to a complex space-time-identity-continuum, found in in three interlocking modes of metahistorical writing: Ge-schiebe (that which is pushing or being pushed), Ge-schichte (that which is layering or being layered) and, most of all, part of Ge-wichte (that which is weighing or being weighed upon). With this approach I aim to capture the horizontal and vertical forces coming from the beyond, both physically and meta-physically, materially and conceptually. Under the rubric Ge-schiebe, we can, for example, capture the mobile nature of glacial soils but also the destructive forces that tear through populations, the friction between different ideologies and worldviews, and the flowing of seemingly antagonistic entities into each other to create something new. Under Ge-schichte (vertical), we can capture the chronological layering of sediments but also the complexity of narratives that build upon existing narratives, the simultaneity of histories that are sometimes (not) separated, the depth underneath the surface, and the heterogeneity of our belief-systems. Under Ge-wichte, we can capture how the soil carries the project of civilization, but also how ideologies put pressure on people’s minds and bodies, from the toil of the concentration camp worker as a heavy load-bearing body carrying stones through the camp during the Holocaust to the existential weight of being human, etc. Cultural geology is intended as an open-ended idea.
[1] The last update was published in 2022: Dixson-Decleve, Sandrine, et al. Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity. New Society Publishers, 2022.
[2] A prelude will soon be published in the form of the essay, “A Cultural Geology of Be(long)ing: Ge-schiebe, Ge-schichte, Ge-wichte.”
[3] Reinhart Koselleck, “Sediments of Time,” in Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, edited and translated from German by Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 3–9, 3. Compare Zeitschichten, 19.
[4] Reinhart Koselleck, “Space and History,” Sediments of Time, 34. Compare Zeitschichten, 90–1.
[5] Reinhart Koselleck, “Temporal Foreshortening and Acceleration: A Study on Secularization,” in Religion and Politics: Cultural Perspectives, eds. Bernhard Giesen and Daniel Šuber, translated from the German by Robin Celikates and James Ingram (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 207–29, 224–25. Compare “Zeitverkürzung und Beschleunigung: Eine Studie zur Säkularisation,” Zeitschichten, 177–202, 199.
Paul Kurek received his PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures with a Certificate in Urban Humanities from UCLA. After participating in the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, he is now a postdoctoral scholar in the Society of Fellows and assistant professor in the Department of German at the University of Michigan. His current book project is entitled Heavy Load-Bearing Modernity: A Cultural Geology of Albert Speer’s Berlin/Germania.
Edited by Jonathon Catlin
Featured image: Photo by the author. “What appears like volcanic stone is actually a piece of rusty metal that was part of the measuring instruments of the so-called heavy load-bearing cylinder left behind by Albert Speer in Germania. This device was built to test the soil’s load-bearing capacity regarding the anticipated superheavy monuments planned in Hitler’s Berlin.”
