Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 1/2023

tarting from the ambiguity of humanist and post-humanist concepts, the place occupied by the social as a political dimension in these critical-theory constructions and especially in ecological and new ontological approaches is examined. Two classical categories seem crucial for the investigation: oikonomia and koinonia. While the former denotes the political order (dispositif), the structure as provided by law but also by utopian notions of salvation addresses the latter, that which constitutes the sociality of the social as such and provides social coherence. Posthumanistic theories, so the thesis, tend to lose sight of the conoistic dimension. To be sure, they extend the social by including the nonhuman and nonsocial, such as artefacts, things, technologies, and so on, but by thinking preferably in terms of networks and by postulating a symmetry of their interrelationality, they miss the essential incommensurability between interpersonal relationships and the more formal and diagrammatic concept of network-relations. The argumentation carried out on the abstract level of philosophical validity criticism, however, has immediatepolitical consequences. For neglectingwhat makes the social social as well as misappropriating the essential differences between relation and relationship corresponds directly to the current political crisis of the social.

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.

The article scrutinises the transformation of perceptions of the past in the time span between the late tenth and the late twelfth century. In doing so, it takes issue with the argument that much of medieval historiography was based upon imperfect knowledge of the past and, as a consequence, must be subjected to severe criticismof the facticity of the information it provides. Dudo of St Quentin’s and Saxo’s narratives of the Norman and the Danish pasts are examined for evidence to the effect that medieval historiography allows access to perceptions of the past as related to the groups in its focus. Both texts also reveal changes of patterns of transmitting perceptions about the past from grouprelated property to freely circulating knowledge.