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Historicity and Ecological Violence

In this event, presenters will discuss questions of historicity, ecology and destruction in dialogue with Hu's article, "Fracking and Historicizing: On Deepened Time in West Texas," published this month in Cultural Anthropology.

Abstract

This article draws on ethnographic research in the oil fields of West Texas to reflect on the imperial-modern compulsion to historicize—to explicate more and more of the world in terms of contingent, indeterminate historical process. A century ago, petroleum drilling turned West Texas into a vast extractive zone and simultaneously historicized the desert plain as a former reef. Today, I show, fracking moves to shape and accelerate the region’s geological processes on the logic that the Earth, now burdened with historicity, is somehow too slow. This confluence of events highlights a common moral-political undertow shared across the “deep” historiography of the Earth and the “shallow” historiography of the human. Conceptually and concretely, both historiographic operations reorder their objects as open-ended processes that modern powers may adjust and modulate. From West Texas, the question arises: Does modernity wreck the planet by historicizing it?

Short biographies

Cameron Hu is Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��. He is an anthropologist of technoscience, capital, environment, and critical theory, with a focus on the geopolitics of fossil fuels, planetary science, and corporate empire. His recent work is published or forthcoming with Cultural Anthropology, Social Studies of Science, Society and Space, Political and Legal Anthropology Review Online, Migrant, and several edited volumes and exhibition catalogues. He is currently finishing Knowing Destroying, a global ethnography of the American fracking renaissance. With the collective LiCo, he produces fictions, films, and installations examining the choreography of mental and environmental life, most recently for Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam) and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin).

Katherina Kinzel is Assistant Professor in the history of philosophy at Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��. She works on German historicism, critical theory, and the role of historicity and abstraction in the constitution of modern rationality.