The open future in peril: the Anthropocene and the political agent of humanistically oriented historiography

Teaching history on the scale of the Anthropocene: Three ethical challenges

“…By contrast, Bakhtin's hero was Dostoevsky, the literary master of sideshadowing, able to cast shadows obliquely over his characters of an alternative present. Unlike foreshadowing where agents walk forwards into a shadow cast from the future, the multiple shadows laying across the path in a narrative of sideshadowing enables agents to experience time as a field of possibility (Retz, 2021). Their past is one in which historical agents were responsible for their actions, as they are responsible for their actions in the present and in the open futures they create.…”

“…The scale of geological time is compressed -processes that unfold over hundreds, thousands or millions of years, such as glaciation or the evolution of homo sapiens, can be comprehended as a coherent sequence (Horn & Bergthaller, 2020). Geological time is uneventful, if by 'event' we follow William James (2014) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1990) in regarding events as eventful when they exceed the circumstances that created them, when an action is taken among a field of possibilities, where agents are responsible for taking this action as opposed to that action (Retz, 2021). In contrast to the flattened vista of geological time, the temporal scales employed in history tend to be calibrated to the pace of human lives, generational change, political conflicts, and social and cultural change.…”

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“…By contrast, Bakhtin's hero was Dostoevsky, the literary master of sideshadowing, able to cast shadows obliquely over his characters of an alternative present. Unlike foreshadowing where agents walk forwards into a shadow cast from the future, the multiple shadows laying across the path in a narrative of sideshadowing enables agents to experience time as a field of possibility (Retz, 2021). Their past is one in which historical agents were responsible for their actions, as they are responsible for their actions in the present and in the open futures they create.…”

“…The scale of geological time is compressed -processes that unfold over hundreds, thousands or millions of years, such as glaciation or the evolution of homo sapiens, can be comprehended as a coherent sequence (Horn & Bergthaller, 2020). Geological time is uneventful, if by 'event' we follow William James (2014) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1990) in regarding events as eventful when they exceed the circumstances that created them, when an action is taken among a field of possibilities, where agents are responsible for taking this action as opposed to that action (Retz, 2021). In contrast to the flattened vista of geological time, the temporal scales employed in history tend to be calibrated to the pace of human lives, generational change, political conflicts, and social and cultural change.…”