Anticipatory History
Anticipatory history
By Caitlin DeSilvey, Simon Naylor & Colin Sackett (editors)
Other contributors: Tim Birkhead, David Bullock, Chris Caseldine, Stephen Daniels, Tim Dee, Phil Dyke, Tom Freshwater, Toby Goaman-Dodson, Gareth Hoskins, Alex Hunt, Hayden Lorimer, David Matless, Shaun Pimlott, Lucy Veale, Justin Whitehouse & Victoria Whitehouse. Axminster: Uniformbooks. 2011. 78 pp. £9.00 paper. ISBN 978-0-9568559-2-3.
Anticipatory History is a lexicon of Williamsian ‘keywords’, a terminological toolkit for addressing the metaphors and materials of landscape change. The book seems intended to be used as much as thought about. However, its alphabetical ordering and mini-essays, definitions and narratives do not undo its theoretical working.
Driving the assemblage is the idea of a future-orientated history - to the side of Hayden White’s proposal for a ‘progressive history’ that looks on the past as resources for the sustenance of future human and ecological communities rather than for the delineation of former events or a genealogically legitimised present. Sharing White’s futurism, but sidestepping its grandeur, DeSilvey and Naylor instead propose in their Introduction a ‘re-vision-ist history’ that interrogates the way that the past is envisioned “in place”, at least partly to inform more effectively, by looking backwards as much as futuristically, ‘anticipatory adaptations’ (interventions that entangle with latent environmental vulnerabilities before the impact of climate change is felt).
Anticipatory History folds apocalyptic-thinking back on itself, re-locating loss of species, erosion and climate change to the past as much as the future, while challenging ideas of stability and constancy curled up inside conservation and retreat, pointing to the dynamism that has moulded places that are valued and defended. Against permanence and for process, ‘anticipatory history’ proposes itself as better equipped for future changes, responsive without regret or lament, telling stories (while discussing their effects) about specific, vibrant and volatile landscapes and about future ‘plausabilities’ for their adaptation to sustainable futures.
The individual sections are varied in kind as well as content, addressing both particular processes and theories of process: coastal squeeze, the principles of commons, compost-pheasants, depredations at Chernobyl, intuitive mapping, hidden collections, ‘re-wilding’ and Cobra Mist. Varied too in affiliation to the spinal thesis; some of the contributions are at odds with its reflexive materialism. The section on ‘Longue durée’, for example, wanders off into the mystical long grass. Here and there are remnants of a more conservative historiography.
Here the book exposes the means of its making - emerging from a research network of artists, curators, film makers, academics and biological recorders in partnership with the National Trust, part of the AHRC Landscape and Environment programme – all the better to expose meaning-making elsewhere. The tension created for its reader by the book’s fractured form and the overlaid and sometimes colliding trajectories of its contributors makes the moments of recognition/discovery all the sharper: 'palliative curation', body as temporal boundary, extermination of non-favoured species, recent agricultural landscapes mistaken for pre-human ones, how a recent modernity is sentimentalised, fixed, universalised and then 'wiped clean' (romantic antiquarianism chiming, unconsciously, with the ideology of revolutionary [shock] capitalism), remnants as useful objects of leverage for asymmetrical future effects, the potential of site-specific arts, and erosion-revelation.
Crab Man
Go here for all Crab Man / Mytho's other reviews
By Caitlin DeSilvey, Simon Naylor & Colin Sackett (editors)
Other contributors: Tim Birkhead, David Bullock, Chris Caseldine, Stephen Daniels, Tim Dee, Phil Dyke, Tom Freshwater, Toby Goaman-Dodson, Gareth Hoskins, Alex Hunt, Hayden Lorimer, David Matless, Shaun Pimlott, Lucy Veale, Justin Whitehouse & Victoria Whitehouse. Axminster: Uniformbooks. 2011. 78 pp. £9.00 paper. ISBN 978-0-9568559-2-3.
Anticipatory History is a lexicon of Williamsian ‘keywords’, a terminological toolkit for addressing the metaphors and materials of landscape change. The book seems intended to be used as much as thought about. However, its alphabetical ordering and mini-essays, definitions and narratives do not undo its theoretical working.
Driving the assemblage is the idea of a future-orientated history - to the side of Hayden White’s proposal for a ‘progressive history’ that looks on the past as resources for the sustenance of future human and ecological communities rather than for the delineation of former events or a genealogically legitimised present. Sharing White’s futurism, but sidestepping its grandeur, DeSilvey and Naylor instead propose in their Introduction a ‘re-vision-ist history’ that interrogates the way that the past is envisioned “in place”, at least partly to inform more effectively, by looking backwards as much as futuristically, ‘anticipatory adaptations’ (interventions that entangle with latent environmental vulnerabilities before the impact of climate change is felt).
Anticipatory History folds apocalyptic-thinking back on itself, re-locating loss of species, erosion and climate change to the past as much as the future, while challenging ideas of stability and constancy curled up inside conservation and retreat, pointing to the dynamism that has moulded places that are valued and defended. Against permanence and for process, ‘anticipatory history’ proposes itself as better equipped for future changes, responsive without regret or lament, telling stories (while discussing their effects) about specific, vibrant and volatile landscapes and about future ‘plausabilities’ for their adaptation to sustainable futures.
The individual sections are varied in kind as well as content, addressing both particular processes and theories of process: coastal squeeze, the principles of commons, compost-pheasants, depredations at Chernobyl, intuitive mapping, hidden collections, ‘re-wilding’ and Cobra Mist. Varied too in affiliation to the spinal thesis; some of the contributions are at odds with its reflexive materialism. The section on ‘Longue durée’, for example, wanders off into the mystical long grass. Here and there are remnants of a more conservative historiography.
Here the book exposes the means of its making - emerging from a research network of artists, curators, film makers, academics and biological recorders in partnership with the National Trust, part of the AHRC Landscape and Environment programme – all the better to expose meaning-making elsewhere. The tension created for its reader by the book’s fractured form and the overlaid and sometimes colliding trajectories of its contributors makes the moments of recognition/discovery all the sharper: 'palliative curation', body as temporal boundary, extermination of non-favoured species, recent agricultural landscapes mistaken for pre-human ones, how a recent modernity is sentimentalised, fixed, universalised and then 'wiped clean' (romantic antiquarianism chiming, unconsciously, with the ideology of revolutionary [shock] capitalism), remnants as useful objects of leverage for asymmetrical future effects, the potential of site-specific arts, and erosion-revelation.
Crab Man
Go here for all Crab Man / Mytho's other reviews