Future Imperfect in Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender (1579)

Abstract

<p>Time and its necessary conceptual recalibration are pressing contemporary concerns as we struggle to account for humans' impact on the planet (Bastian 2012; Matz 2018). At this point in time, the imaginable, or anticipatable, future is imperfect. There is a sense in public discourse on the Anthropocene that all we have known-past, present, and future, temporality itself-is in peril. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has written, the concept of the Anthropocene demands that we plot human history onto the vast scale of geological or earth history (Chakrabarty 2018, 6). And Bruno Latour observes "people are not equipped with the mental and emotional repertoire to deal with such a vast scale of events" (Latour 2014, 1). This temporal scale is conceptually challenging. Chakrabarty explains, the Anthropocene "can only have plural beginnings, and must remain an informal rather than formal category of geology, capable of bearing multiple stories about human institutions and morality" (Chakrabarty 2018, 20). Such histories are not neutral, this is clear in Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin's well-known proposal that the Anthropocene began either in 1610 or 1965 (Lewis/Maslin 2015, 171-80). As they detail, each starting point implies a different causal narrative, the first following the rise of capitalism and colonialism, and the latter, the rise of nuclear power and increased technologization. Each involves an account of human-planetary relations but spotlights different protagonists. Suggesting the limits of such discrete timeframes Latour writes "We are actually in the sixteenth century" (Latour 2016, 14-18). None of these historical accounts is particularly sensitive to how concepts of anthropogenic temporality are gendered.</p>