Simon Probst

With the increasing interconnectedness of nature and culture in the Anthropocene, new narratives about humanity’s past, present, and future have been emerging. This is associated with a restructuring of cultural memory in the context of Earth history. To contribute to a better understanding of these changes, this paper takes recourse to approaches from Memory Studies. In a post-humanist extension of Memory Studies, the so-called archives of nature (sediments, fossils, ice cores, tree growth rings, corals) are described as the material basis of a natural-cultural memory. The concept of natural-cultural memory refers to the totality of cultural practices and institutions which make the archives of Earth history accessible and thereby constitute a culturally significant time horizon. A crucial question here is how the interplay of cultural archives and the archives of nature as repositories of the past contributes to the specific functioning of natural-cultural memory and which commonalities and differences are constituted in the process. The article develops the general outline of a theory of natural-cultural memory through a comparative analysis of Esther Kinsky’s poetry collection Schiefern (2020) and Robert Macfarlane’s travelogue Underland. A Deep Time Journey (2019). As a result, it becomes clear how literary texts of the ›self-conscious‹ Anthropocene reflect on memory processes in a deep-time context, albeit its continuity is threatened by the cumulative effects of human activities.

As human activities increasingly shape the material reality of the earth, it becomes important to embed the temporalities of human experience and history in the larger context of planetary temporalities. In this article I ask for a composition of planetary time that allows as a theoretical framework to explore the manifold relations between human and more-than-human kinds of time. In a first step, I show how the relation of geological ‘deep time’ to historical time in modern geology is dominantly constructed as a dichotomy and how this dichotomic construction troubles the Anthropocene discourse, for example in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s seminal essays. In a second step, I argue that planetary temporalities should not be reduced to the geological construction of deep time. As an alternative, I propose to conceive of planetary temporality as a plurality of ‘sympoietic times’. Thinking with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, this approach highlights the ways in which heterogenous kinds of time entangle in world-making processes that shape the earth. Finally, I show how literary representations of geological time can be seen as a reservoir of knowledge about the manifold sympoietic relations between the temporalities of human experience and the time scales of earth history.