Species, Entropy, and Anthropocene: Too Big for a Human History?

I'd like to discuss Dipesh Chakrabarty's essay, "The Climate of History," and in particular to critique the way that Chakrabarty brings science to bear on history. In many ways he anticipates this critique, noting that historians will very likely be uncomfortable with the enmeshing of a polyvocal, properly globalized historical method into a sort of geologic history. However, I would claim that the problem with his argument is not that he wishes to bring a discussion of climate change into the historical arena, leading to incommensurate timescales. It is rather the literal, scientistic and explanatory approach that he advocates for how to think about climate change in the second half of his piece that is problematic. This can be illuminated by looking at a similar set of references to entropy in Pamela Zoline's short story, "The Heat Death of the Universe."

First, I'd like to highlight part of Chakrabarty's essay which I think is the most helpful entry he offers into thinking about climate change and history:

In no discussion of freedom in the period since the Enlightenment was there ever any awareness of the geological agency that human beings were acquiring at the same time as and through processes closely linked to their acquisition of freedom. […] This distance between the two calendars, as we have seen, is what climate scientists now claim has collapsed. The period I have mentioned, from 1750 to now, is also the time when human beings switched from wood and other renewable fuels to large-scale use of fossil fuel—first coal and then oil and gas. The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use. Most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive. 

So, has the period from 1750 to now been one of freedom or that of the Anthropocene? Is the Anthropocene a critique of the narratives of freedom? Is the geological agency of humans the price we pay for the pursuit of freedom? In some ways, yes.

Space and time prevent me from taking issue with Chakrabarty’s assertion that he is the first to raise the historical relationship between “freedom” and the geological implications of an “ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use,” but this line of questioning is interesting, difficult, and worthy of investigation. What, indeed, does the scientific understanding of the costs of industrialization— in this case, climate change— mean for a western ideal of subjecthood that relies upon the time, comfort and convenience afforded by a constant supply of energy from an external, inhuman source? Much of this uncertainty, no doubt, will be clarified by the future of economic and technological development. If the idea of “freedom” nourished by philosophers since 1750 is possible in a world of uncertain weather, mass extinction, and the limitations of alternative energy sources, then climate change will not appear to be a “critique” of narratives of freedom. On the other hand, if what we consider to be “freedom” becomes all but impossible in a climate-changed future, then what Chakrabarty terms “the mansion of modern freedoms” will topple, and with it (most likely) the tradition of academic historians to whom Chakrabarty’s essay is addressed. 

What I would like to question, however, is Chakrabarty’s insistence that climate change means that the history of human “species-being” must be thought simultaneously with a more traditional history of capital. “Species,” he writes, “may indeed be the name of a placeholder for an emergent, new universal history of humans that flashes up in the moment of the danger that is climate change.” This quotation in particular raises concerns, drawing as it does upon Walter Benjamin’s well-known “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Chakrabarty’s choice of essay title (“Four Theses”) suggests that he wishes to emphasize this reference. Compare Benjamin’s version: 

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was.” It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. 

For Benjamin, what “flashes up at a moment of danger” is describable as a “memory,” or “an image,” because using such a short duration of time as the unit of history avoids the pitfalls of historicism’s progress narrative, which (per Benjamin) “contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history.” This approach “rightly culminates in universal history. […] Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time.” This is all to say that “universal history,” which is precisely what Chakrabarty argues “flashes up in the moment of danger that is climate change,” is being critiqued by Benjamin for the precise reason that it glosses over the specific injustices which Benjamin says we “cannot contemplate without horror.” He describes universal history as follows: 

Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and […]without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

I have taken this digression because it seems that Chakrabarty’s misreading of Benjamin is symptomatic of his desire to think “simultaneously on both registers, to mix together the immiscible chronologies of capital and species history.” His reason for this mixing of traditional and species history seems to boil down to the following: as a species, we’ve had certain geological effects (per scientists). As a species, these effects will have consequences to us. From the perspective of science, both of these premises are true. However, it is not the case that “species” is the only category one might use to make this point: I don’t believe that Chakrabarty has proven that climate change is unthinkable in a more complex view of history. 

I’d like to illustrate Benjamin’s critique of the treatment of history as “homogenous empty time,” filled with causes and effects and explanations, by turning to “The Heat Death of the Universe,” a short story by Pamela Zoline. The story follows “vivacious and witty young wife and mother” Sarah Boyle through a single day in her role as a California homemaker. The narrative describes cleaning, errands, a birthday party, and her children’s bathtime, all a manic and despairing prelude to what appears to be a nervous breakdown in the tradition of The Yellow Wallpaper. These domestic tasks are interwoven with various academic and intellectual themes from Bach to dadaism, and prodigious attention to the scientific notion of entropy, which Sarah uses to explain her own experiences, as in the following passage: “Housework is never completed, the chaos always lurks ready to encroach on any area left unweeded, a jungle filled with dirty pans and the roaring giant stuffed toy animals suddenly turned savage. Terrible glass eyes.” The constant need to upkeep her domestic space makes her, in her own narration, the agent of "negative entropy," a property that cyberneticist Norbert Weiner attributes to life as a process. 

(49) INSERT SIX. WEINER ON ENTROPY. In Gibb's Universe order is least probable, chaos most probable. But while the Universe as a whole, if indeed there is a whole Universe, tends to run down, there are local enclaves whose direction seems opposed to that of the Universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for organization to increase. Life finds its home in some of these enclaves.(50) Sarah Boyle imagines, in her mind's eye, cleaning, and ordering the great world, even the Universe. Filling the great spaces of Space with a marvellous sweet smelling, deep cleansing foam. Deodorizing rank caves and volcanoes. Scrubbing rocks.

This passage is, from a scientific perspective, merely absurd. However, if we examine it from a historical perspective, especially as it chimes with a few other moments in the narrative, we can read “Heat Death of the Universe” as a compelling account of what it feels like to participate in an historical narrative without being included in it. For example, at one point Sarah considers 

… that there are things to be hoped for, accomplishments to be desired beyond the mere reproductions, mirror reproduction of one's kind. The babies. … The wooden Russian doll has bright, perfectly round red spots on her cheeks, she splits in the center to reveal a doll smaller but in all other respects identical with round bright red spots on her cheeks, etc.

By taking another scientific concept, reproduction, and ironically juxtaposing it with a more colloquial notion of “mirror reproductions,” as in Russian dolls, the text reveals the distance between the biological fact of reproduction (a service performed by females of the human species) and the cultural expectations of a reproductive role. Sarah is expected to maintain a “sameness”— i.e. the “homeostasis” of her home, the cultural conformity of her children — against the tendency of home, family, and so on to descend into a more probable chaos. In other words, if Sarah does her labor as well as possible, her efforts will go unnoticed. Her unacknowledged role in history is to produce the illusion of a “stable home” to come home to. 

This is a narrative, in other words, of what it means to participate in the law-like, “explicable” nature of history while simultaneously being denied a role in history. This idea is made particularly poignant when Sarah attempts to make sense of her situation by annotating it:

Washing the baby's diapers. Sarah Boyle writes notes to herself all over the house; a mazed wild script larded with arrows, diagrams, pictures, graffiti on every available surface in a desperate/heroic attempt to index, record, bluff, invoke, order and placate. On the fluted and flowered white plastic lid of the diaper bin she has written in Blushing Pink Nitetime lipstick a phrase to ward off fumey ammoniac despair. "The nitrogen cycle is the vital round of organic and inorganic exchange on earth. The sweet breath of the Universe." On the wall by the washing machine are Yin and Yang signs, mandalas, and the words, "Many young wives feel trapped. It is a contemporary sociological phenomenon which may be explained in part by a gap between changing living patterns and the accommodation of social services to these patterns." Over the stove she had written "Help, Help, Help, Help, Help."

Though the description of her own situation on the wall — "many young wives feel trapped"— has an easy, social science explanation which ought to make sense of what is going on, it is evident that Sarah still feels trapped. To describe the nitrogen cycle does little for the smell of urine, and to  note that her misery is ‘the result of social forces’ does nothing to resolve her predicament. As Benjamin suggests, the march of the large narrative of history obscures at least as many stories as it manages to tell.

In conclusion, I’d like to bring this back to the notion of “species history” that Chakrabarty advocates. It’s all well and good to acknowledge a scientific reality, which is always a generalization. Science, because it aims to say things that are repeatable and generalizable, is good at generating causes, effects, broad explanations of “why things are what they are.” Those things are useful in their own contexts. But what Chakrabarty is advocating is that historians try to think something like climate change from the perspective of the species. He justifies this by saying that we’re all in the same boat at the beginning and end of the story: we have “stumbled into this” as a species, and we are all at risk of destruction of our environment. 

But to set the beginning and the end at such a large scale automatically forecloses the possibility of answering some of those interesting questions he asked at the beginning. What is the role that the use of fossil fuels — in different ways by different individuals and groups — had in a time of struggles for individual and collective freedom? How must we read these events now that we know these resources of energy were limited and destructive? What are the stories, in other words, of the lives touched by this set of circumstances? 

Species; Anthropocene: these broad, general terms bring with them a sense of finality and closure which is not only inaccurate, but obstructs further analysis that may actually serve a productive function. Geologists can suffice themselves with declaring the anthropocene, as that is what their discipline is meant to do. Historians, if they are to address the issue at all, would do well to start with the idea of anthropo-scenes.