[On November 06, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory hosted a seminar with Dipesh Chakrabarty, Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar and Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Below are reflections on the event from Pronoy Rai (Geography).]
“Discussions with Dipesh Chakrabarty”
Written by: Pronoy Rai (Geography)
After Dipesh Chakrabarty’s thought-provoking lecture the night before, the seminar provided an opportunity for students and faculty to engage with him on his work on the “climate of history” as well as his previous work in subaltern studies.
On the question of methods, Chakrabarty problematized the normative understanding of continuity in history. For Chakrabarty, the role of historical contingency in understanding our past or “long present” is significant. Since “contingency appends probability (of events happening),” Chakrabarty asked us to understand history by “zooming in” and “zooming out.” For example, would Marx have imagined the problem of anthropogenic climate change when he was writing Capital? Although Marx inhabited a space shaped by industrial capitalism he also critiqued classical political economy. This was just one of the many arguments that Chakrabarty offered to suggest that critical theory as usual is insufficient to deal with the challenges posed by climate change.
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[On November 4, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory hosted "Climate Change and the Human Condition," a lecture by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar at UIUC and Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Below are reflections on the event from Brandon Jones (English).]
"Rifts of Scale: Humans and Hyperobjects in the Era of the Anthropocene"
Written by: Brandon Jones (English)
In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton coined the term “hyperobject” to refer to “materials from humble Styrofoam to terrifying plutonium” that “will far outlast current social and biological forms… hyperobjects outlast us all.” (He furthers this concept in his most recent book that carries his influential term as its title: Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.) Climate change is perhaps the most quintessential and pressing example of a hyperobject, as its global environmental effects push the limits of what is temporally and spatially imaginable. For Morton, to act ethically and politically in a world where climate change cannot be ignored requires us to think bigger than we ever have before: “To tackle pollution, climate disruption, and radiation, we must think and act big, which means thinking and acting collectively. This will take conscious input. We will have to choose to act and think together.”
Dipesh Chakrabarty both borrowed fruitfully from Morton’s analysis of hyperobjects and complicated it in ways that are extremely important for questions of social injustice, economic inequality, political agency, and human history in the age of the Anthropocene. If Morton and his colleagues in object-oriented philosophy show us how to think ethically about objects and hyberobjects in a way that acknowledges and appreciates their inaccessibility to human experience, Chakrabarty reminded us that in the case of climate change, this insight cannot but be a problem for activity on the human scale.
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