Abstract

As human activities increasingly shape the material reality of the earth, it becomes important to embed the temporalities of human experience and history in the larger context of planetary temporalities. In this article I ask for a composition of planetary time that allows as a theoretical framework to explore the manifold relations between human and more-than-human kinds of time. In a first step, I show how the relation of geological ‘deep time’ to historical time in modern geology is dominantly constructed as a dichotomy and how this dichotomic construction troubles the Anthropocene discourse, for example in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s seminal essays. In a second step, I argue that planetary temporalities should not be reduced to the geological construction of deep time. As an alternative, I propose to conceive of planetary temporality as a plurality of ‘sympoietic times’. Thinking with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, this approach highlights the ways in which heterogenous kinds of time entangle in world-making processes that shape the earth. Finally, I show how literary representations of geological time can be seen as a reservoir of knowledge about the manifold sympoietic relations between the temporalities of human experience and the time scales of earth history.