Baucom - 2014 - History 4° Postcolonial Method and Anthropocene T

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Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 1(1), pp 123–142 March 2014.

© Cambridge University Press, 2014 doi:10.1017/pli.2013.13
History 4°: Postcolonial Method and

Anthropocene Time
Ian Baucom
Duke University
The essay opens by situating Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent work on climate change
and the anthropocene (the new geological period of time in which humans have
become a planet-reshaping “force of nature”) together with a broader contemporary
discourse on the human/nonhuman in relation to Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean
Paul Sartre’s 1960s debate on the nature of history and the dialectic. Although not
explicitly advanced under the sign of that debate, these recent discourses, I suggest,
share and extend some of its crucial features, taking something from both sides.
From Sartre: the call for a search for critical method adequate to addressing Marx’s
observation that we make our own history, but not under circumstances of our
own choosing. From Lévi-Strauss: the argument that “history” is inadequately
addressed by the “historian’s code,” that the situation of our time encompasses
multiple scales and orders of time: most significantly, an array of “extra-historical,”
“infra-historical,” and “supra-historical” registers of human/nonhuman time. From
there, I return to Chakrabarty, to discuss the ways in which his work takes up
those twin challenges. I pursue this reading by considering the relation between his
earlier conceptualization (in Provincializing Europe) of History 1 and History 2
and the new theory of history emerging from his work on climate change, which
I call History 3. I conclude by suggesting that despite its enormously rich considera-
tions of the multiscaled temporality of the anthropocene, Chakrabarty’s recent work
also sometimes bends the time of climate linear in the progress toward catastrophe,
thereby bypassing the full possibility of a multitemporal ontology of the present that
would include the persistence into the anthropocene of History 1 and 2. I suggest,
therefore, that while drawing on his recent work, we need to continue in a search
for a method adequate to the situation of our time; a time that knots together
(minimally) Histories 1, 2, and 3; a time that I am provisionally calling History 4°.
Keywords: anthropocene, historian’s code, climate change, methodology, post-

colonial theory
Ian Baucom is professor of English and Director of the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University
and president of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. He works on twentieth-century
British literature and culture, postcolonial and cultural studies, and African and Black Atlantic literatures.
He is the author of Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (1999, Princeton
University Press), Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (2005,
Duke University Press), and is co-editor with David A Bailey and Sonia Boyce of Shades of Black:
Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain (2005, Duke University Press). He has edited special issues of the
South Atlantic Quarterly on Atlantic studies and romanticism, and is currently working on two new book
projects, provisionally entitled Reading a Letter: Republicanism, Empire, and the Archives of the Atlantic
and History 4°: Search for a Method.
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124 IAN BAUCOM
While I was gathering notes for this essay, the New York Times published a
front-page story under a bleak headline: “Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone,
Raising Fears.” In the dire news it communicated, the efficiency with which it shared
that news, and the hybrid mathematics of time it drew on for that communiqué,
that story provides an unfortunately perfect place with which if not quite to begin
then at least to preface what I hope to discuss. “The level of the most important
heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide,” the Times account opens, “has
passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported on Friday, reaching a concentration
not seen on the earth for millions of years. Scientific monitors reported that the gas
had reached an average daily level that surpassed 400 parts per million … a sobering
reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control
are faltering.”1 From those opening sentences on, the news gets worse, and worse in a
distinctive way, not only tending toward a catastrophic result, but moving in that
ruinous future direction through a distinctive marshaling of moments, periods, and
timescales that have made climate reporting one of the outer frontiers of a new theory
of historical time.
As the story continues:
The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this
high for at least three million years. Carbon dioxide above 400 parts per million was first
seen in the Arctic last year … [but] the average reading for an entire day surpassed that
level … for the first time in the 24 hours that ended at 8 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time [on
May 9, 2013,] …. From studying air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists know that
going back 800,000 years, the carbon dioxide level oscillated in a tight band, from about
180 parts per million in the depths of ice ages, to about 280 during the warm periods
between…. For the entire period of human civilization, roughly 8,000 years, the carbon
dioxide level was relatively stable near that upper bound. But the burning of fossil fuels
has caused a 41 percent increase in the heat-trapping gas since the Industrial Revolution.
Indirect measurements suggest that the last time the carbon dioxide level was this high
was at least three million years ago, during an epoch called the Pliocene. Geological
research shows that the climate then was far warmer than today, the world’s ice caps were
smaller, and the sea level might have been as much as 60 or 80 feet higher. Experts fear
that humanity may be precipitating a return to such conditions—except this time, billions
of people are in harm’s way.2
These are not the sorts of dilemmas that as a literary scholar I was trained to address.
Not only because as I completed my graduate training and began my career in the
mid-1990s, the looming planetary crisis of climate change had not yet become a
matter of broad common recognition and concern, but because, even within the
deeply historically minded field of postcolonial studies I was then entering, the
modes of conceiving of historical time that these two recent stories treat as virtual
1 Justin Gillis, “Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears,” New York Times, May 10, 2013,
accessed October 14, 2013, at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/science/earth/carbon-dioxide-level-
passes-long-feared-milestone.html.
2 Gillis, “Heat-Trapping Gas.”
HISTORY 4°: POSTCOLONIAL METHOD AND ANTHROPOCENE TIME 125
commonplace were largely inconceivable—not only in their dizzying jumps between

temporal scales (from a particular hour on a particular day; to the approximately sixty
years in which we have been keeping accurate measurements of carbon dioxide
emissions; to the segment of time since the industrial revolution; to “the entire
[8,000 year] period of human civilization”; to the 800,000-year history of Antarctic ice;
to the three million years since the epoch of the Pliocene), but in the theory of
historical periodization enabling those scale-shifting moves. Although I have for some
time accepted the force of Frederic Jameson’s dictum that “we cannot, not periodize,”
until very recently it would not have occurred to me that postcolonial study, critical
theory, or the humanities disciplines in general needed to periodize in relation not
only to capital but to carbon, not only in modernities and post-modernities but in
parts-per-million, not only in dates but in degrees Celsius.3
Like multiple scholars in the humanities, as the crisis of climate change has
become as starkly apparent as these news accounts reveal, I have, however, begun to
wrestle with precisely such questions. Like many colleagues in postcolonial studies,
I have been doing so in relation to the pioneering work of Rob Nixon, Ramchandra
Guha, Elizabeth Povenilli, and, more centrally still, with one particularly influential
publication in mind: Dipesh Chakrabarty’s 2009 Critical Inquiry essay, “The Climate
of History: Four Theses,” the text in which Chakrabarty frankly indicates that “all my
readings in theories of globalization, Marxist analysis of capital, subaltern studies, and
postcolonial criticism over the last twenty-five years, while enormously useful in
studying globalization, had not really prepared me for making sense of this planetary
conjuncture within which humanity finds itself today.”4 In consequence of this
admission, Chakrabarty counsels at least two key things: first, that we reapprehend the
fundamental period of time we inhabit as that of the Anthropocene, the new geolo-
gical era (christened by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen) in which humanity has
become a devastating, planet-reshaping force of nature; and, second, that within such
a moment, the function of engaged critique must pivot from one focused on infra-
human concerns for the struggle of freedom to one focused on the trans-human
category of species.
I have addressed that turn in Chakrabarty’s thought in an earlier essay, and I want
to extend that investigation here, now by asking where his work, and a surrounding
critical discourse on climate and the Anthropocene, fit within a yet-more-extensive
set of contemporary theoretical debates on the human and the nonhuman, the natural
and the postnatural, the historical and the extra-historical.5 In doing so, I further
want to consider the deep methodological challenges these exploded conceptions
of history, nature, and the human put to a body of critical theory (and a tradition
of critique) that has long understood its vocation as simultaneously descriptive
and transformative; as oriented to mapping the situation in which we find ourselves
and to making something emancipatory of that situation; as committed, in the
terms of Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” not only to “interpret[ing] the world” but
3 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso,
2002), 29.
4 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” in Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009), 199.
5 See Ian Baucom, “The Human Shore: Postcolonial Studies in an Age of Natural Science,” in History of
the Present, 2:1 (Spring, 2012), 1–23.
126 IAN BAUCOM
“to chang[ing] it.”6 To do that, however, I first need to go back a little way, fifty years
to be precise, to an earlier moment of critical debate structured by a surprisingly
consonant set of theoretical reformulations and methodological dilemmas; a moment
that does not in any simple sense produce our theoretical contemporaneity (as Foucault
has taught us, genealogy is a far less stable thing) but which does, nevertheless, stretch
our understanding of that contemporaneity’s “periodicity”; a moment, by sheer
happenstance, almost exactly coincident with the advent of what has come to be called
“the great acceleration”—the post-1950s speed-up in carbon accumulations and global
warming on whose ever-faster upward-climbing “Keeling Curve” the New York Times
story was reporting.
In “History and Dialectic,” the concluding chapter of his 1962 volume, The Savage
Mind, Claude Lévi-Strauss famously outlined the operations of what he called the
“historian’s code,” the ordering principle by which the historical discipline seeks to
bring human experience into a dialectical and potentially total relation with its fields
of circumstance (or, as I will be stressing, its “situation”). The innocuous key to the
historian’s code, Lévi-Strauss argues, is chronology, and the fundamental materials of
chronology are dates. This apparently simple “chronological coding,” he indicates,
however, “conceals a much more complex nature than one supposes when one thinks
of historical dates as a simple linear series.”7 That is so for several reasons. Partially
because not all dates are alike, either in their concentration of distribution along
the “linear” axis of time or in the type of time they variously denote. In the first
instance, “we use a large number of dates to code some periods of history; and
fewer for others…. [T]here are “hot” chronologies which are those periods where in
the eyes of the historian numerous events appear as differential elements; others
on the contrary, where for him [sic] … very little or nothing took place.”8 In the
second instance, not only are dates thus unevenly distributed across “hot” and
cold chronologies, each date stands within its particular chronological domain not
merely as an abstract, declarative, ordinal number, but as a performatively inflected
“member of a class”: “[thus] the date 1685 belongs to a class of which 1610, 1648 and
1715 are likewise members; but it means nothing in relation to the class composed
of the dates: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th millennium, nor does it mean anything in relation to
the class of dates: 23 January, 17 August, 30 September, etc.”9 That is so not
simply because one class of dates denotes years, one millennia, and one days, but
because each of these classes corresponds, in turn, to a “lower-” or “higher-powered”
“scale” of history, with “biographical and anecdotal” history (measured, like diaries,
in days) at the “bottom” of the scale and other “times” such as “the middle ages,
antiquity, the present day” (measured variably in decades, centuries, and millennia)
unevenly distributed across “different [scales of] power” above the diurnal zone of
biographical time.10
6 Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. 1 (Progress Publishers,
Moscow, USSR, 1969), 13–15.
7 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 258–259.
8 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 259.
Consequently, what at first appears as a straightforward “general [historical]

code” consisting in the sequencing of “dates” “ordered as a linear series,” in fact
articulates a highly complex procedure for managing, coordinating, and synthesizing a
heteronymous array of “classes,” domains, powers, and scales, “each furnishing an
autonomous system of reference.”11 From this as-fully-disciplinary as dialectical
operation of the historian’s code, Lévi-Strauss observes, the simultaneously:
discontinuous and classificatory nature of historical knowledge emerges clearly. It
operates by means of a rectangular matrix:
………….
………….
………….
………….
………….
………….
where each line represents classes of dates, which may be called hourly, daily, annual,
secular, millennial for the purposes of schematization and which together make up a
discontinuous set. In a system of this type, alleged historical continuity is secured only by
dint of fraudulent outlines.12
Lévi-Strauss’s fundamental purpose in mounting this critique was of course less a

denunciation of historical method per se than a rejection of what he took to be the
false equivalence Jean Paul Sartre had established between the “historian’s code” and
the “human order” in The Critique of Dialectical Reason, particularly in the long
introductory chapter (“Search for a Method”) in which Sartre had sketched his
“progressive-regressive” method. In its elaborate reworking of Marx’s famous dictum
from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (“men make their own history, but
they do not make it just as they please, they do not make it under circumstances
chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given, and transmitted
by the past”), Search for a Method had sought to effect a certain reconciliation between
existentialism and Marxism by pledging fidelity to the proposition that the task of any
properly dialectical philosophy of freedom (like any properly dialectical philosophy of
history) lay in articulating the relationship between the domain of human action and
the domain of historical necessity, the realms of making and of circumstance, of the
actor and the “situation.”13 The error of Marx’s inheritors, Sartre suggested (the error

13 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: Cambridge Texts in The History of Political
Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
128 IAN BAUCOM
existentialism was uniquely equipped to correct), was to have abandoned the original
complexity of this “difficult synthesis” in favor of a reductive privileging of the
objective over the subjective element within history, of the “situation” over “man’s”
capacity for “going beyond a situation”—thus abandoning the knowledge of “what
[man] succeeds in making of what he has been made.”14 To correct the errors of this
“superficial,” “dishonest,” and “lazy” Marxism, Sartre proposed his progressive-
regressive method whose “first moment” as David Sherman notes, “is really the
regressive element, [which] works backward to analyze the particular historical factors
that have gone into the construction of subjectivity, while the second moment, the
progressive element, involves the way in which subjectivity synthesizes and transcends
these factors in pursuit of its future projects.”15 Through the consequent “‘inter-
nalization of the external’ and the externalization of the internal … the subject,
through its actions, freely makes the history that has made him [sic]” and so, as
Sherman summarizes, allows Sartre to claim that he has found a way to “discard
neither freedom nor history.”16
For Lévi-Strauss, the problem with this lay not in Sartre’s turn to Marx but in the
internal flaws of the progressive-regressive method and, more vitally, in the false and
total equivalence it established between the human order and the historian’s code. Far
from resolving the relation between the human and the situation, freedom and
necessity, Sartre’s method, Lévi-Strauss maintained, had fundamentally misconstrued
the nature of humanity’s dialectical entanglements. Minimally, this flowed from
Sartre’s misunderstanding of the true nature of historical time, which, Lévi-Strauss
indicates, Sartre continued to treat as a linear arrangement of equivalent dates rather
than as that matrix of scales of “power” (each with its own “autonomous system of
reference)” he had outlined. Moving ever further “backward to analyze the particular
historical factors that have gone into the construction” of a singular subjective posi-
tion, Sartre’s method promised to place the human actor first in the day of his or her
making, then in the year, then in the decade, then in the century—until the operation
had been completed, and an entire historical “situation” had been established as that
zone of necessity from which a human actor, having been made, might then find the
conditions for a progressive (re)making of what has been made.
To promise this, however, Lévi-Strauss argues, is simply to obscure that biography
is neither periodicity nor epochality, that coming to the end of the line of any single
subject-situating “class” of dates, the regressive method finds itself obliged to leap
levels from one domain of power to another while, nevertheless, obscuring the fact
that any leap has been made or that in making that leap it has found itself obliged to
mix or elide the distinctive modes of intelligibility giving each scale of history its
marked character. The biographical subject of days and years, to put things another
way, is not simply, next and evenly, the subject of a period-milieu measured in
decades, then (and equally) the subject of a modernity, or a Renaissance, or an
antiquity measured in centuries, thereafter, and finally, the subject of an enframing
14 Jean Paul Sartre, Search for A Method, Hazel E. Barnes, trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1968),
45, 91.
15 Sartre, Search for A Method, 48, 53. David Sherman, Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity
(New York: SUNY Press, 2008), 261.
16 Sherman, Sartre and Adorno, 261.
epoch of human “historical time” measured in millennia and set off (from the dawn of
the invention of agriculture) from “prehistory.”17
Biography, period, era, and epoch (to name but four of the historical code’s
“classes” of power) may be (indeed must be) related, but they are not the same, and
the progressive-regressive method entirely fails to account for their difference.
This, though, does not yet touch Lévi-Strauss’s central argument and critique.
For even if Sartre had produced an account of the diversified logics and orders
of power of the multiple scales of historical time and a theory of their relation to
one another, he still would have erred, the anthropologist suggests, by assuming
that the problem of the human is exhausted by an examination of the relation of
singular existence[s] to the grid of intelligibility the historian’s code makes available.
I say “exhausted” advisedly, and it is worth pausing over that point. For Lévi-Strauss’s
critique, to reiterate, is not a critique of history tout court. It is not a critique
of Sartre’s desire to put the human in a dialectical relationship with material
structures, processes, or events (Lévi-Strauss accepts the need to do so, provided one
can simultaneously mark the internal heterogeneity of history’s scales of power,
intelligibility, and order). Rather, he wished to insist, Sartre’s mistake was to treat the
historical matrix as if it were the unique and total matrix of human “circumstance”
and, therefore, to reduce the challenge of dialectical reason’s accounting of human
being to a matter, first, of emplotting the “human” as one or other point within the
grid of history:
........
........
........
and then of tracing the multiple vectors of relation between the human and the orders
of historical time to which it could be observed to belong.
In contrast to that history-exclusive-model, Lévi-Strauss maintains, a fully
dialectical account of humanity must both attend to “history” and address what the
historical code fails to hold within its grid. And to do so, he insists, philosophy must
find an epistemology for simultaneously working through the historical and for
“getting outside history.”18
Not once, but twice.
First, he says, we must find a route for exiting history “to the bottom … that is to
say to an infra-historical domain in the realms of psychology and physiology.”19 And
secondly, we must get outside history to “the top … into the general evolution of
organized beings, which is itself explicable only in terms of biology, geology and finally
cosmology.”20 Lévi-Strauss in this way, as I parse it, proposes adding to the historian’s

130 IAN BAUCOM
code an infra-historical and a supra-historical domain that collectively (and in their

mutual exchanges with the historical domain) realize a dialectic of human existence
that could be schematized thus:
Infra-Historical Domain
Psychology
Physiology
Historical Domain
........
........
........
........
........
Supra-Historical Domain
Biology
Geology
Cosmology
It is only by accounting, simultaneously and continuously, for the relation between the
scales of circumstance proper to “historical” time, and the infra-and supra-historical
domains of psychology, physiology, biology, geology, and cosmology, Levis-Strauss
thus argues, that one can truly provide an adequate account of the human dialectic of
freedom and necessity, of the actor and the situation, of that full range of “properties”
from which the human situation is composed.21 To accomplish this, one must add
to the historian’s code a heteronymous order of knowledge; an order of thinking
and knowing capable of blending psychology, cosmology, biology, physiology, and
geology; the order that Lévi-Strauss identifies as “savage.” And for that, he insists,
philosophy requires as a supplement to the science of history the science of anthro-
pology, a science not only descriptive but imitative of the savage mind’s “intransigent
refusal … to allow anything human (or even living) to remain alien to it”; a science
that discovers in that openness, in that willingness to “undertake the resolution of the
human into the nonhuman,” in that capacity to effect “the reintegration of culture in
nature and finally of life within the whole of its physico-chemical conditions,” the “real
principle of dialectical reason.”22
I have started with “History and Dialectic” for several reasons. If the first, and most
obvious, is that almost exactly fifty years after Lévi-Strauss set the terms of his debate
with Sartre in this way, he seems to be on the point of a conclusive victory, then I do
not mean by that that we are on the verge of a return to structural anthropology
(though there are, certainly, signs of the emergence of a range of structural biologies
across numerous spaces of contemporary intellectual life) or that we have been living
unaware, in all the years since 1961, in a long Sartrean moment that is finally coming
to an end (though, as James Chandler has noted, in his brilliant analysis of the Sartre-
Lévi-Strauss debate, in the line from Marx, to Sartre, to Fred Jameson, there has been
perhaps a greater Sartrean influence on postexistentialist, materialist epistemologies
than we sometimes recognize).23 Rather I wish to call attention to the uncanny pre-
cision with which, in staging his quarrel with Sartre, Lévi-Strauss anticipated not only
the emergence of the “geological” as a figure of contemporary critical theory but a far
broader major current of critical discourse predicated on the imperative of getting
thought materially “outside history.” And although it is absolutely the case that that
contemporary discourse has been shaped by the transition from structuralism to post-
structuralism in the intervening years, it is nevertheless remarkable (perhaps in a way
analogous to the remarkable persistence of categories of Saussurian structural lin-
guistics into the problematics of deconstruction) that this contemporary turn outside
history has been directed in exactly the two directions Lévi-Strauss counseled:
“beneath” history and “above it.”
On the recent materialist turn “beneath” history—the turn toward what Lévi-
Strauss identified as the conjoined infra-historical domain of “psychology and
physiology”—I have in mind, to take just one example, the explosive recent turn
toward the neuronal (to neuro-politics, neuro-economics, neuro-philosophy, neuro-
humanities); the turn toward the borderlands of brain and mind, of affects and
emotions, of synapses and desires; the turn toward that zone of “plasticity” that in its
capacity, as Catherine Malabou has it to “give shape to,” “take shape from,” and
“explode the shape of” human consciousness has come to demarcate a newly visible
psycho-physiognomic terrain of the modern dialectic of freedom and necessity: a turn
that in that sense (and this is a point to which I will return) does not so much obviate
Sartre’s motivating Marxian problematic of the subject and the situation, of making
and being made, as extend that problematic in materially new and previously
unrecognized directions.24 To revise Marx’s dictum: here the brain is history; or, as
22 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 245–247.

23 See James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic
Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), particularly the Introduction and Chapter One.
24 Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? trans. Sebastian Rand (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2008), 5 and throughout. For additional influential recent work in the neuro-
humanites see also: Catherine Malabou, The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity,
trans. Carolyn Shread (Boston: Polity Press, 2012); Catherine Malabou and Adrian Johnston, eds, Self and
Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (New York: Columbia University Press,
2013); Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007):
Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of Mind
132 IAN BAUCOM
Daniel Lord Smail has it, the evolutionary history of the brain is the deep history that
is our circumstance, the history we must confront if, in Malabou’s suggestive for-
mulation, we wish to “do” something with our brain, if we wish to make something of
what it has made us.25
On the corresponding and simultaneous material turn “above” history—the
contemporary supra-historical turn toward Levi-Stauss’s “general evolution of
beings … explicable only in terms of biology, geology, and cosmology”—the field of
recent debate is as crowded and brightly lit as the skies of the cosmos. To list but a
very few of the more prominent names: Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour,
Tim Morton, and Quentin Meillassoux have all, of late, in overlapping and discrete
ways, sketched a series of companionate, vibrant, thing-political, enmeshed, and
ancestral zones of strangely-strange, biotic, non-human, geological, and cosmological
“actants” without whose consideration any future raising of the question of the human
and its fields of circumstance (its “situation”) will prove inadequate.26 The constellation
of projects these scholars’ works have outlined, to repeat, does not converge on a single
new line of materio-epistemological insight—and Meillasoux in particular, together with
the more general speculative-realist, non-correlationist, object-oriented philosophy he
alternately articulates and is made to stand in for certainly occupies a registrably disjunct
place relative to these other scholars’ pursuit of a post-Kantian but, still, co-relational
account of the “human” as one form of speciated-being, among others, within the
evolutionary, ecological, geological, and cosmological order of things.
Despite these differences we can discern within this bundle of critical thought
(both in its infra-historical and supra-historical domains) the collective working out
of something like what Foucault called a dispositive: the coming into operation of
“a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble” nevertheless characterized by “a system of
relations” giving rise to an internally driven and singular “formation which has as its
major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need.”27
That need, in Latour’s terms, is the need of finally having done with the “bicameral
parliament” of modern thought; the need to finally move beyond the false conception
that there is a domain of nature on one hand and a domain of politics (and culture
and history) on the other; the need to frame an understanding of the non-
oppositionality of nature and culture; to articulate, as Haraway has it, a theory of
nature-cultures; or, indeed, as Lévi-Strauss had it in “History and Dialectic” (in a
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and
the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006); Lisa Zunshine, ed. Introduction to Cognitive
Cultural Studies (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); William Connolly, Neuropolitics:
Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2002); and Antonio Damasio, Looking
for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harcourt Books: 2003).
25 See Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain.
26 See Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Catherine Porter,
trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004): Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto:
Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003); Jane Bennett, Vibrant
Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Timothy Morton, The
Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Quentin Meillasoux, After Finitude: An
Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum Books, 2008).
27 See Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh” (1977) interview. In Power/Knowledge Selected
Interviews and Other Writings (ed. Colin Gordon), 1980: 194–228.
significant turn from his earlier work) to finally “undertake the resolution of the
human into the nonhuman” and “the reintegration of culture in nature”—and,
thereby, to supersede the critical and philosophical dominance of the historian’s code
as sole arbiter of the human condition.28
If one mildly paradoxical reason to return to the Sartre/Lévi-Strauss debate is,
therefore, to discern the ways in which it can be seen to throw into visibility an at least
five-decade-old period of critical time (spanning the transition from late-stage struc-
turalism to late-stage post-structuralism) predicated on the shared urge of getting
thought outside history—and so (to begin to close the circle to my prefatory point of
beginning) to observe the ways in which a discourse on the anthropocene (dateable, in
one sense, from Crutzen’s initial published use of the term in a 2000 newsletter of the
International Geosphere-Biosphere program [no. 41]) belongs, coincidentally, to that
more extensive, if increasingly “hot,” chronology of critical time running, minimally,
from the 1960s to the present—then the other and more fully paradoxical reason for
beginning here is that even as the discourses on and of the anthropocene, the neuro-
logical, and the ecological finally begin to shift us into a time after the dominance of the
“historian’s code,” that shift, as I have already intimated, does not so much dissolve the
problem Sartre’s neo-Marxian project was designed to address as massively expand it.
If Sartre’s dilemma, in other words, was to find a mid-twentieth-century exis-
tentialist response to the nineteenth-century Marxist question of whether a human
project of freedom could survive the “difficult synthesis” of the subject and the
situation, then this extra-historical turn (across its multiple domains) has again found
itself obliged to pose the question of the human, and of freedom, though now at a yet
higher order of philosophical complexity. It has found itself again wrestling with the
question of what shape freedom (or as Mallabou has it, the “alter-global”; or as
Morton and Latour prefer it, “democracy”; or as one might yet more generally state it,
the fashioning of the future) might take when we consider the problem of future-
fashioning as arising not only from the foundational Marxian dialectic of the subject
and the (historical) situation but from within a second dialectic of the “situation” as,
itself, multi-dimensionally “infra-historical,” “historical,” and “supra-historical.”29
Supplementing the cultural, economic, sociological, and political conception of
“circumstance” that the historian’s code makes available, this second-order dialectic
finds the situation of the human both collapsing inward and exploding outward,
veering simultaneously synaptic and planetary. Ramified into the force-field of those
spaces, the question of how to go “beyond” the “situation” (the question of how to
“succeed in making [something] of what has been made”) does not, thus, so much
leave behind the Sartrean question (or, really, the Marxian/historical materialist
question) as multiply and disperse its urgency across the neurological, nomological,
geological, and cosmological fields. Recurring, multiplying, expanding in this way, that
question thereby highlights the need not merely for an answer (or a set of answers) but
for a method of coming to answer, a method for thinking the relation of the “human
order” to all these domains (individually and in common). To Sartre’s search for a
28 Latour, Politics of Nature, 49 and throughout; Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, 1 and
throughout; Lévi-Strauss, Savage Mind, 246, 247.
29 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 5.
134 IAN BAUCOM
method, I am thus suggesting, the compound of discourses forming the extra-

historical dispositive I have been tracing in its five-decade development from Pensee
Sauvage implies the need for another: a new search for a method that will take as its
starting point an investigation of the multi-scaled, ontologically plural, simultaneously
historical, infra-historical, and supra-historical “situation” in which we find
ourselves—and from which we might take the cues toward the task of our own project
of freedom and democracy.
It is because Chakrabarty’s “Climate of History” (like Sartre’s Search for a Method,
and Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte”) directly foregrounds the
dialectic of freedom and the situation, because he directly stakes a claim to have
outlined a new method of history for this expanded historical “situation” and because
he has offered a provisional mode of responding (through the “negative universal” of
our species-being) to what that situation is making of us, that I want to concentrate on
his recent work.30 I want to do so with a particular set of questions in mind. To the
extent that Chakrabarty does advance this new historiographic method (one that, with
a nod to his earlier work, I will call the method of “History 3”), is that method
simultaneously adequate to the particular circumstance it understands itself to address
(the “circumstance” of climate change) and to that larger post-humanist situation of
which I am suggesting it is a part? And if it is not alone adequate, what does this
History 3 have to learn from its companion others? What might it gain by looking to
these companion species of thought engaging like and unlike dilemmas of the extra-
historical, like and unlike collapses of the binary of human and natural history?
Before turning to those questions, let me pause, however, to survey in some
slightly greater detail the particular critical situation to which Chakarbarty’s new
method seeks to respond; the determinate “planetary conjuncture” against which it
immediately invites itself to be measured; the coming situation, as a November 2012
World Bank report warns, of a 4°C world.31
The full title of the report is “4°—Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World
Must be Avoided.”32 It is one of many similar documents that have been produced
between Climate Change 2007, the Fourth Assessment Report of the United Nations’
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the 2013/14 “Fifth
Assessment Report” whose first working group document was released this September.
Like virtually all of the documents produced within this truly “hot” period of
climate discourse, it makes for chastening reading, if only for the simple clarity of the
danger-threshold it identifies: the 4°C world (that is, the world whose average mean
temperature is 4°C higher than average preindustrial temperature levels) it desperately
warns us we must not allow to come into being, but which, if current “emission
trends” continue, may become our world “within this century.”33
30 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 222.

31 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 199.
32 “4˚—Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4˚C Warmer World Must Be Avoided,” A Report for the
World Bank by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics, November
2012, http://climatechange.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/Turn_Down_the_heat_Why_a_4_degree_
centrigrade_warmer_world_must_be_avoided.pdf), accessed October 14, 2013.
33 “Turn Down the Heat,” 1.
What does it look like, that 4°C world that the future and present are already
beginning to inherit from our carbon-era “past”?
Whatever else it will be, the World Bank report indicates, if it is to come into being it
will be a world changed comprehensively and disastrously across almost every sector of
analysis. It will be a world in which “extreme weather events” will intensify both in
frequency and in scale, with “heat waves such as [the one] in Russia in 2010 [which killed
an estimated 55,000 people] likely to become the new normal summer.”34 A world in
which, for “regions such as the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East, and the
Tibetan Plateau, almost all summer months are likely to be warmer than the most
extreme heat waves currently experienced.”35A world in which, as warming “strengthens
the [planetary] hydrologic cycle … [and] dry regions … become drier and wet regions …
wetter,” there will be increased mass flooding in some regions of the globe (much of the
Northern Hemisphere, East Africa, and South and Southeast Asia), and the simultaneous
sprawl of aridity and desertification in other zones, leading to “dramatic reductions
in global agricultural production,” with “35 percent of [all sub-Saharan African]
cropland … expected to become unsuitable for cultivation.”36
It will be a world in which melting Greenland, Antarctic, and Artic Sea Ice
“will likely lead to a sea-level rise of 0.5 to 1 meter, and possibly more, by 2100,
with several meters [and possibly significantly] more to be realized in the coming
centuries.”37A world in which coastal communities around the world, and a “highly
vulnerable” archipelago of cities in Mozambique, Madagascar, Mexico, Venezuela,
India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam will, in consequence, find
themselves exposed to extreme floods” and “coastal inundation.”38 A world in which
such “large scale extreme” flooding “events” will drown people, collapse buildings,
“induce nutritional deficits” due to the loss of arable land, and increase “diarrheal and
respiratory diseases ” by introducing “contaminants and diseases into healthy water
supplies.”39 It will be a world in which, even as such coastal flooding exerts massive
impacts on human health, compound chronic “changes in temperature, precipitation
rates, and humidity [will further] influence vector-borne diseases (… malaria and
dengue fever) as well as hantaviruses, leishmaniasis, Lyme disease, and schistoso-
miasis” and exacerbate respiratory disorders and heart and blood vessel diseases due to
“heat-amplified levels of smog.”40
Farther out to sea, the oceans will intensify their rate of acidification, leading to a
significant loss in biodiversity in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean marine
ecosystems; correspondingly dramatic reductions of fishery yields; and the widespread
dissolving of coral reefs: with “profound consequence for [the reefs’] dependent
species and for the people who depend on them for food, income, tourism, and
shoreline protection.”41
34 “Turn Down the Heat,” xv.

36 “Turn Down the Heat,” 15, 26, 62.
38 “Turn Down the Heat,” xvi, xv.
39 “Turn Down the Heat,” xvii.
40 “Turn Down the Heat,” xvii.
136 IAN BAUCOM
And these, the World Bank report indicates, are just some of the likely linear
effects of warming. If the temperature mean climbs from 2°C, to 3°C, to 4°C, it more
ominously warns, “lurking in the tails of the probability distributions are likely to be
many unpleasant surprises … [as] extremes, including heat waves, droughts, flooding
events, and tropical cyclone intensity, are expected to respond nonlinearly … [leading
to an] evolving cascade of risks,” including “large-scale displacements of populations,
with manifold consequences for human security, health, and economic and trade
systems”; “the risk of crossing activation thresholds for nonlinear tipping elements in
the Earth System”; and, as the report notes in a concluding gesture toward just how
much the damage might exceed its probability calculations and risk scenarios, “the
likelihood of transitions to unprecedented climate regimes ….”42
What will a 4°C world look like? In the language of the eschatological and
apocalyptic tradition on which Slavoj Zizek has recently drawn, it looks like a world of
“the end times”: a world possessed of a “new heaven and a new earth.”43 Or almost so,
and not at all. If the image of a 4°C world that the cascading series of post-IPCC-
Fourth-Assessment Reports has made increasingly, stunningly, visible is an image of a
post-catastrophic, post-apocalyptic world, that world is decidedly not (as the pro-
phetic vision of the new heaven and the new earth promises) one that finds itself on
the point of entry into a redressed polity and order of life. Rather this is a world of the
long catastrophe; a world, in Giorgio Agamben’s terms, that finds itself at best entering
the moment of “ultra-history”; a world in the long interregnum between the accu-
mulating certainty of the devastated and the uncertainty of the new.44 To regard the
4°C world is, thus, not so much to regard a “new earth” as, in Bill McKibben’s
evocative neologism, to encounter a new “eaarth”: a world radically different from
what we have heretofore understood the planet to be.45
How, then, are we to make sense of this world, this eaarth? What is the method
for the difficult synthesis of subject and circumstance, of the actor and the situation,
when humanity’s co-actants, strange strangers, and companion species now include
heatwaves, cyclones, ocean deserts, Antarctic ice, activation thresholds, nonlinear
tipping elements, Keeling curves, carbon parts-per-million—all those “hyper-objects”
as Tim Morton has named them; all that “vibrant matter” as Jane Bennett has so
resonantly put it.46 What is the method sufficient not only to plotting the
co-relationship between these human and non-human forces of nature but to finding,
in that method, in that new outline of critique, both the fashion of the future and a key
to its democratic refashioning? What indeed, if anything, does critical method, does
critique, have to say to the looming sovereignty over the planet, of carbon, of the
hydrologic system, of melting Antarctic ice?
Charkrabarty’s response, as I have indicated, is, if not quite to address the dilemma of
philosophy’s adequacy to these new “regimes” of climate sovereignty, then at least to
42 “Turn Down the Heat,” 60.

43 Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times (New York: Verso, 2011).
44 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
45 Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Times Books, 2010).
46 See Tim Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
begin to respond to these questions of method by proposing for this coming 4°C world
what I am calling History 3. The first step toward this new method, he argues
(in similar spirit, if different effect, to the line of thought stretching from “History and
Dialectic” to The Companion Species Manifesto, The Politics of Nature, Vibrant Matter,
and The Ecological Thought), is to collapse “the age-old humanist distinction between
natural history and human history,” to take as a starting postulate that we have
entered an era in which human and natural forces have merged and human action
has taken on the qualities of a “force of nature” in shaping the long-term geological
future of the planet.47 His immediate corollary to that point is that postcolonial
studies require a fundamental rethinking of many of the key values underlying prior
methodological commitments, key among them its anti-universalism, inadequate now,
he suggests, to a universal challenge of planetary existence, and so, at least provi-
sionally worth replacing with a new “negative universal,” flashing up in that moment
of danger that is climate change: the new universal of “species” being.
This is well known and already widely commented on.48 What might be less
recognized is that even as the new historical thought of the anthropocene requires
setting on hold long-standing critiques of the universal, its full methodological
implications also seem to demand leaving behind, as an outmoded relic of self-
enclosed “human history,” an equally foundational investment in and critique of post-
Enlightenment projects of human freedom running through much postcolonial
and allied bodies of critical theory; a counterplay of Enlightenment and subaltern
conceptions of freedom, justice, and democracy that, indeed, lay at the core of
Chakrabarty’s celebrated study of the complex inter-animation of what he previously
called History 1 and History 2.
By History 1, as he details in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference, we should have in mind an Enlightenment-inspired, progressive
theory of history (classically associated with a post-eighteenth-century “historicism”)
and an attendant politics of rights-based citizenship and democracy; a theory and a
politics, he takes pains to indicate, that postcolonial theory cannot simply reject
but must, instead, mark as simultaneously “indispensable and inadequate.”49 It is
“indispensable,” he argues, for at least two reasons. First, because the project of
securing full and equal rights of participatory citizenship and the protection of the
individual against the power of the state, has been and must remain one of the key
elements of any vibrant anti-imperial and postcolonial politics. Second, because the
analytic procedures through which Marx derived those categories of his thought, such
as “abstract labor,” from which he was able to derive not only a descriptive account
but a critique of capital, depend on the universalizing conceptual legacy of History 1. If
we are to have universal critiques of capital and its role in the modern projects of
empire—which we must, Chakrabarty argues, if for no other reason than that
47 Chakrabarty, “Climate of History,” 201.

48 See in particular Ato Quayson, “The Sighs of History: Postcolonial Debris and the Question of
(Literary) History, in New Literary History, 43:2 (Spring 2012) and the other essays in this special edition
responding to Chakrabarty’s “Climate of History” and Robert Young’s “Postcolonial Remains” (published
in the previous edition of the journal, New Literary History, 43:1 [Winter 2012] 19–42).
49 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 6.
138 IAN BAUCOM
“Grasping the category ‘capital’ entails grasping its universal constitution”—then on

this ground also we cannot do without History 1.50
Thus indispensable, History 1 is also, he insists, “inadequate.” For at least three
reasons. First, because the teleological code underpinning History 1’s “historicism” has
repeatedly posited “historical time as a measure of the cultural distance … assumed to
exist between the West and the non-West” and has, so, furnished endless alibis for the
imperial civilizing mission.51 Second, because although History 1 equates modernity
with a narrative of unilinear global progress, with an abstract, analytic, and entirely
secular epistemology, subaltern politics (even as it assumes the indispensability of
rights-based democratic norms) “has no necessary secularism about it.” “It refuses to
“take the idea [of a] single, homogeneous, and secular historical time for granted”;
“continually brings gods and spirits into the domain of the political.”52 And third,
because in addition to the “analytic” critique enabled by the universal protocols of
History 1, postcolonial politics thus require a “hermeneutic” critique arising from
these subaltern “life-forms” and their insistent acts of interrupting the secular politics
of History 1 and interweaving with its Enlightenment ideals alternate “imaginations of
socially just futures for [the] human.”
In addition to History 1, Chakrabarty therefore concludes, we require an addi-
tional concept of history: one that recognizes that “historical time … is out of joint
with itself”; that the human is not “ontologically singular”; that “gods and spirits [are]
existentially coeval with the human”; that to an abstraction-driven critique of capital
(and empire) we require this coincident, affectively rich, and anthropologically
differentiated order of critique.53 His name for that concept is History 2, a form of
history that, crucially, is not the binary “other” of History 1, or its archaic antecedent,
but is “better thought of as a category charged with the function of constantly
interrupting the totalizing thrusts of History 1.”54 In their relation with one
another, History 1 and History 2 do not, therefore, express an antinomy. Rather,
Chakrabarty argues, they reveal that the time of democracy (the time of the struggle
for “socially just futures”), far from expressing a single, universal, and unidirectional
chronology, exists as a set of “time-knots” in which “we live”—time knots braiding
together the secular and the nonsecular, the universal and the particular, the analytic
and the hermeneutic, Enlightenment and subalternality in intertwining and separating
projects of emancipation and justice.
The question I am now asking is what becomes of this complex interplay of
History 1 and History 2 in the turn to the crisis of climate? What becomes of their
undecidable complementarity in History 3’s new theoretical accounting of the advent
of the anthropocene? [It is, perhaps, again worth stressing that “History 3” is my term
for Chakrabarty’s new approach and not his own.]
At first glance, History 1 and History 2 seem to survive the transition to this
urgent new methodological regime, particularly as Chakrabarty’s new historical
method acknowledges the continuing relevance of attempts to address the role of
50 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 70.

52 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 14–15.
capital in precipitating the catastrophic rise of carbon emissions. As he indicates in his

third thesis: “Analytic frameworks engaging questions of freedom by way of critiques
of capitalist globalization have not in any way become obsolete in the age of climate
change. If anything, as [Mike] Davis shows, climate change may well end up
accentuating all the inequities of the capital world order if the interests of the poor and
vulnerable are neglected.”55 Between the continued relevance of a global/universal
critique of capital and the need to account for the differential exposure of the
vulnerable and poor to the devastating effects of climate change, there then seems to
be room within History 3 for both Histories 1 and 2.
That is not what Chakrabarty, as I understand him, seems finally to be arguing,
however. History 1 and History 2 may not be “obsolete,” but they are also not fully
incorporated within his new method. Like the “theories of globalization, Marxist
analysis of capital, subaltern studies, and postcolonial criticism,” which, he indicates,
have ultimately proved inadequate to “making sense of this planetary conjuncture
within which humanity finds itself today,” they are instead more hauntologically prior
to this new approach: reappearing in his argument as the residue (or, in an ironic twist
of Robert Young’s terms, as the “remains”) of a “[still]-present historiography of
globalization” that gives every appearance of being on the way to becoming obsolete as
the walls of “human history” are “breached”; a historiography that exists in a condition
of fundamental “difference” with (and quasi-historicist anteriority to) “the historio-
graphy demanded by anthropogenic theories of climate change.”56 The grounds of that
difference are, for Chakrabarty, multiple. Key among them, however, is that although
both History 1 and History 2 can be experienced, the new geophysical form of “human
collectivity” brought about by the anthropocene escapes our capacity to “experience.”57
By which, as he makes clear, it escapes our capacity as humans to experience what
it means to breach the boundaries of human ontology, to traffic with (and as) the
non-human, to have become humanly non-human and non-humanly human.
This is a remarkably complex argument, all the more remarkable because, in
advancing it, Chakrabarty seems not only to be moving from the older Marxist
materialism with which his work has long been in conversation to the “new materialism”
articulated by Bennett and others, but because, in doing so, he seems to bypass some
of the vital insights of his prior analysis of the inter-animation of History 1 and
History 2—particularly the insight that human history has never been ontologically
singular; that it has always involved the traffic between the human and the nonhuman.
Perhaps another way of phrasing things might have been that the crisis of the
anthropocene does not so much demand that we brace ourselves for looking beyond
the undecidable interplay of History 1 and History 2 but, instead, that we expand our
sense of the ontological plurality of the human; that to those supernatural actors and
agents with whom Chakrabarty had earlier seen the human to be coeval, we must now
also recognize the post-natural actors, agents, and actants of cyclones, heatwaves,
and melting ice; that perhaps we do not so much need a History 3 as an expanded
History 2, yet more extensively interrupting and modifying History 1.

56 Chakrabarty, “Climate of History,” 216, 221.
140 IAN BAUCOM
That, however, is not the direction he takes. Rather, as he turns his attention
to the challenges that the transformation of human being into species being puts to
the question of freedom, he suggests that the time has come for a fundamental
reconsideration of the linkage between philosophical critique and the grand modern
project of freedom. And, entirely consistently, he does so not because he wishes to
return to or intensify his earlier investigation of the mutually modifying exchanges of
Enlightenment and subaltern conceptions of freedom but for a devastatingly empirical
set of reasons. Because, as he puts it: “The Mansion of modern freedom stands on
an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use. [Because] most of our freedoms so far have
been energy-intensive.”58 Because “whatever our socioeconomic and technological
choices, whatever the rights we wish to celebrate as our freedom, we cannot afford to
destabilize conditions (such as the temperature zone in which the planet exists) that
work like boundary parameters of human existence.”59
Despite their parsimony, the consequences of these statements are far-reaching.
At the very least, they lead to a series of assumption-troubling questions. “[H]as 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?” To all these queries, he
responds, “In some ways, yes. As Edward O. Wilson said in his The Future of Life:
‘Humanity has so far played the role of planetary killer, concerned only with its own
short-term survival. We have cut much of the heart out of biodiversity …. If Emi, the
Sumatran Rhino could speak, she might tell us that the twenty-first century is thus far
no exception.’”60 Central to all these questions, and to Chakrabarty’s response, is the
mournful but resolute understanding that although History 1 and History 2’s projects
of freedom (Enlightenment, subaltern, or some co-modifying hybrid of the two) may
have posited freedom as the endpoint of history, such freedom has instead proven to
be the portal to something else, something catastrophic. Indeed, the tragic secret
knowledge of what I am calling Chakrabarty’s History 3 (the reason this historio-
graphic method may feel obliged to keep History 1 and History 2 outside itself) may
well be that modernity and postmodernity’s great projects of freedom (Enlightenment
and counter-Enlightenment) are the catastrophe leading into one of Agamben’s
periods of “ultra-history”; the catastrophe leading to another end of history; to an
image of the end metonymically figured not only by the image of a single vanishing
species, but by virtually all the tipping-point, threshold-crossing, cascading images of
the 4°C world: the image of death, the image of extinction.
This, finally, to my mind, is the key to the code of this new method: that even as it
foregrounds the question of freedom, it does so no longer in order to orient us toward
a future measured against the promise of freedom but, instead, to direct us to (and
desperately against) a future marked by the threat of extinction. In doing so, it no
longer tries to derive “socially just visions of the future” from the promise of coming
democracy but from a collective, planetary, being-toward-death. That does not mean
giving up on justice, but it does mean that for this manner of conceiving history,

justice must be construed in an entirely different mode. How so? In at least this way:
whereas for the enlightened and subaltern political projects of History 1 and History 2
(projects for which the subject appears under the alternating/overlapping guise of the
“citizen” and the “peasant”), justice comes to occupy the contested and undecidable
zone between what the law mandates and what “forms of life” create; for a historical
method oriented toward extinction and emerging under the sign of a subject
appearing in the guise of “species,” justice leaves behind law and anthropology
and now occupies itself with questions of ontological transformation and survival
(questions of how, justly, to survive a transformed ontology of being).
From freedom to extinction; from the citizen and the peasant to the species; from
law and forms of life to ontology—these, I am suggesting, are the deep code of the
transition from History 1 and History 2 to History 3.
Let me be clear. I believe there is significant value in this transition, significant
value in attempting to imagine an ontological politics for the deep future of the planet
under the sign of species. In my first effort to consider the anthropocene as the new
situation of postcolonial studies, that is very much what I tried to do. What I now
want to ask is whether the power of that insight is such that this is the sole choice now
available to us. Whether an orientation to extinction is unitary or whether it might
contain within itself other orientations: if not toward freedom as it has been construed
in major currents of occidental political theory from the Enlightenment onward, then
perhaps, as Chakrabarty’s mildly open formulation glancingly hints toward “some”
other “ways” of conceiving freedom; or perhaps, as Latour and Morton, in their
different fashions have it, toward a radicalized concept of democracy as the mesh of
“strange strangers” or the “parliament of things”; or perhaps, as Jane Bennett has
expressed it in a brilliant recent essay on the anthropocene, toward a renovated
conception of the Spinozan “conatus,” toward a reimagined “endeavor to persist in
being”—now not through the will to security but through “the will to belong,” “as one
species on the planet among numerous others.”61
If there is space for such multiplicity within the political being of the anthro-
pocene, space for more than the “negative” universality of species being, room for the
possibility that extinction is not the sole copula between the subject and this situation
(room, as Bennett has it, for alternate “projections of a fittingness between humanity
and the future”), then, to take another vital point from Chakrabarty’s work, that will
be because our conception of politics is bound up with our conception of the nature of
historical time; because, recognizing this, we have warrant to extend his foundational
insight that neither human ontology nor the ontology of time is singular but plural;
warrant to maintain that time (including the time of the anthropocene) continues to
be out of joint; that the time of time-knots is not over.62
Or—to move backward from Chakrabarty to the text by Lévi-Strauss with which
I began—let me put it this way. If there is reason to believe that both the history and
61 Chakrabarty, “Climate of History,” 210; Morton, The Ecological Thought, 59–97; Bruno Latour, We
Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 142 and
ff.; Jane Bennett, “Earthling, Now and Forever?” in Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material
Conditions of Contemporary Life, Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, eds. (New York: Punctum Books,
2013), 245–246.
62 Bennett, “Earthling,” 246.
142 IAN BAUCOM
the politics of the anthropocene are not unidirectionally oriented but pluridirectional,
that will be because, once again, the historian’s code remains inadequate to an
accounting of our “situation”; because the anthropocene is more than a name for a
new chronology, more than a new set of historical dates, now measured long-hand in
millennia rather than in mere decades or centuries, but, still, like the chronologies
of old, moving inevitably, teleologically, in a single direction; because this new
supra-, ultra-, or extra-historical moment we inhabit is one that is again composed of
multiple scales, orders, and classes of time (abstract, hermeneutic, ontic) and multiple
corresponding orientations to the possibility of the (just) future fashioning of those
times. To revise my earlier suggestion: perhaps it is not a matter of returning, in
expanded form, to the weave of History 1 and History 2, but of slip-knotting them
together, with History 3, into one more braided order of time: an order perhaps
adequate to the temporal and ontological multiplicity of the 4°C world; a fourth order
of history, measured both in dates and in degrees, in times and temperatures; an
historical, infra-historical, and supra-historical order that I am provisionally calling
History 4°.

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123

Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 1(1), pp 123–142 March 2014.

History 4°: Postcolonial Method and

Keywords: anthropocene, historian’s code, climate change, methodology, post-

commonplace were largely inconceivable—not only in their dizzying jumps between

Consequently, what at ﬁrst appears as a straightforward “general [historical]

Lévi-Strauss’s fundamental purpose in mounting this critique was of course less a

11 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 260.

17 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 260.

code an infra-historical and a supra-historical domain that collectively (and in their

21 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 248.

22 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 245–247.

method, I am thus suggesting, the compound of discourses forming the extra-

30 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 222.

34 “Turn Down the Heat,” xv.

42 “Turn Down the Heat,” 60.

47 Chakrabarty, “Climate of History,” 201.

“Grasping the category ‘capital’ entails grasping its universal constitution”—then on

50 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 70.

capital in precipitating the catastrophic rise of carbon emissions. As he indicates in his

55 Chakrabarty, “Climate of History,” 212.

58 Chakrabarty, “Climate of History,” 208.

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