CATHERINE MALABOU

THE BRAIN OF HISTORY OR THE MENTALITY OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

Abstract: How is it possible to account for the double dimension of the “anthropos” of the
Anthropocene ? At once both a responsible, historical subject, and a neutral, non-conscious and
non-reflexive force? According to Chakrabarty, the “anthropos” has to be considered a geological
force; according to Smail, it has to be considered an addicted brain. A subjectivity without being for
the former, an emotional and dependent biological and symbolic entity for the latter. As an in
between solution, I propose a rereading of the concept of “mentality” proposed by Braudel and his
followers from the Annales School. The mental would be intermediarily located between the
inorganic and the neural, thus helping to fill the gap between two opposed concepts of history, that
are both implied in the current redefinition of ecology.

Key words : species, brain, mental, numbness, long term temporality

Editor’s note : Catherine Malabou is a professor at the Cetre For Research in Modern European
Philosophy at Kingston University, UK. Her last book is Before Tomorrow, Epigenesis and
Rationality, tbo Polity Press, May 2016.

The present essay is a response to the highly challenging topic on which Ian Baucomb and
Matthew Omelski asked me to elaborate : “For your contribution, they wrote, we would be
particularly interested in an essay that investigates the intersection of philosophy and neuroscience
as it relates to climate change” (pers.comm. october 2015). After some time, I decided to explore
the link between the current constitution of the brain as the new subject of history, and the type of
awareness requested by the Anthropocene.

An immediate answer to Baucomb’s and Omelski’s challenge would have been the
exploration of relationship between the brain and the “environment”. It is of course a widespread
idea in global change literature that “the Antropocene idea abolishes the break between nature and
culture, between human history and the history of life and earth” (Bonneuil, Fressoz 2016 :19), that
is also between “environment and society” (Bonneuil, Fressoz 2016 : 37). The blurring of these
frontiers of course necessitates to study the profound interaction between the sociological and the
ecological, and to see them as parts of he same metabolism. I believe this notion of “interaction” to
need a closer analysis though, and to render necessary a preliminary analysis of the specific concept
of history in which it currently takes place.

If the Anthropocene acquires the status of a true geological epoch, it is obvious that such an
epoch will determine the historical representation as well as the social and political meaning of the

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events occurring in it. In other terms, this new geological era will not and cannot have the neutrality
and a-subjectivity characteristic of geological eras in general.

The Anthropocene situates the human being itself between nature and history. On the
one hand, it is still of course the subject of its own history, responsible, and conscious.
Consciousness of history, or “historicity”, is not separable from history itself. It entails
memory, capacity to change, and, precisely, responsibility. On the other hand though, the
human of the Anthropocene, defined as a geological force, must be as neutral and indifferent
as geological reality itself. The two sides of this new identity cannot mirror each other,
which causes a break in reflexivity.
The awareness of the Anthropocene then originates in an interruption of consciousness.
Such is the problem. I intend to ask whether such an interruption opens or not the space for a
substitution of the brain for consciousness. I will proceed to a confrontation between two different
points of view on this question. According to the first, the Anthropocene forces us to consider the
human as a geological agent purely and simply. Such is Dipesh Chakrabarty’s position. I will refer
to his two now famous articles (Chakrabarty 2009, 2012). According to the second, understanding
the Anthropocene necessarily leads to confer a central role to the brain, and thus to biology. This
approach is that of Daniel Smail as developed in his book On Deep History and the Brain (Smail
2008). I will show how their two approaches may be seen as complementing one another, and will
introduce in the debate, as a medium term and under a new form, some important and unjustly
forgotten elements brought to light by some prominent French historians from the Ecoles des
Annales — like those of “mentality” and “slow” or “long term” temporality.

Chakrabarty denies any metaphorical understanding of the “geological”. If the human has
become a geological form, there has to exist somewhere, at a certain level, an isomorphy, or
structural sameness, between humanity and geology. This isomorphy is what emerges — at least in
the form of a question — when consciousness, precisely, gets interrupted by this very fact.
Human subjectivity, as geologized so to speak, is broken in at least two parts, revealing the split
between an agent endowed with free will and the capacity to self-reflect, and a neutral inorganic
power, which paralyzes the energy of the former. Once again, we are not facing here the dichotomy
between the historical and the biological, we are not dealing with the relationship between man
understood as a living being and man understood as a subject.
Man cannot appear to itself as a geological force, because being a geological force is a
mode of disappearance. Therefore, the becoming force of the human is beyond any phenomenology,

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and has no ontological status. Human subjectivity is in a sense reduced to atoms without any atomic
intention, and has become structurally alien, by want of reflexivity, to its own apocalypse.

*
A major common point between Chakrabarty and Smail is the necessity to consider that
history does not start with recorded history, but has to be envisaged as deep history. Chakrabarty
declares: “species thinking (…) is connected to the enterprise of deep history” (Chakrabarty 2009:
213). Let’s recall the definition of deep history proposed by Edward Wilson to whom both
Chakrabarty and Smail refer : “Human behavior is seen as the product not just of recorded history,
ten thousand years recent, but of deep history, the combined genetic and cultural changes that
created humanity over hundreds of [thousands of] years” (Wilson 1996 : ix-x).
According to Chakrabarty, biological “deep past” is certainly not deep enough though. In
that sense, therefore, a “neurohistorical” approach to the Anthropocene remains insufficient.
Neurocentrism is just a version of anthropocentrism. Focusing on the biological only, Smail would
miss the geological dimension of the human: “Smail’s book pursues possible connections between
biology and culture — between the history of the human brain and cultural history, in particular, —
while being always sensitive to the limits of biological reasoning. But it is the history of human
biology and not any recent theses about the newly acquired geological agency of humans that
concerns Smail” (Chakrabarty 2009 : 206). The human recent status as a geological agent
paradoxically draws the historian back to a very ancient past, a time when the human itself did not
exist. A time that has thus to exceed “prehistory”.
One will immediately argue that Smail, in his book, is precisely undertaking a
deconstruction of the concept of prehistory. Clearly, the notion of deep history represents for him
the result of such a deconstruction. Deep history then substitutes itself for prehistory. According to
the usual view, history starts with the raise of civilization, and departs from a “buffer zone” between
biological evolution and history proper — such a buffer zone is what precisely is called prehistory.
If history must be understood, as Wilson suggests, as the originary intimate interaction between the
genetic and the cultural, it starts with the beginning of hominization, and does not require any “pre”
zone” (Smail: 2008).
Smail’s approach is clearly an epigenetic one, which forbids to assimilate “hominization”
with the history of consciousness. Epigenetics is a branch of molecular biology that studies the
mechanisms that modify the function of genes by activating or deactivating them without altering
the DNA sequence in the formation of the phenotype. Epigenetic modifications depend on two
types of causes: internal and structural on the one hand; environmental on the other. Firstly, it is a
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matter of the physical and chemical mechanisms (RNA, nucleosome, methylation). Secondly,
epigenetics also supplies genetic material with a means of reacting to the evolution of
environmental conditions. The definition of phenotypical malleability proposed by the American
biologist Mary-Jane West-Eberhard is eloquent in this respect: it is a matter of the “ability of an
organism to react to an environmental input with a change in form, state, movement, or rate of
activity” (West-Eberhard 2003:34). Contemporary epigenetics reintroduces the development of the
individual into the heart of evolution, opening a new theoretical space called “evo-devo” –
“evolutionary developmental biology.”
In his book How Things Shape the Mind, A Theory of Material Engagement, Lambros
Malafouris shows how epigenetics has modified the usual view of cognitive development, thus
constituting cognitive archeology a major field in historical studies. “Cognitive development, he
writes, is explained as the emergent product of these constraints [from genes and the individual cell
to the physical and social environment]. In this context, the view of brain and cognitive
development known as probabilistic epigenesis (…), which emphasizes the interactions between
experience and gene expression (…), is of special interest. The unidirectional formula (prevalent in
molecular biology) by which genes drive and determine behavior is replaced with a new scheme
that explicitly recognizes the bidirectionality of influences between the genetic, behavioral,
environmental, and socio-cultural levels of analysis” (Malafouris 2013:40).
This new scheme requires, as Malafouris brilliantly shows, a materialist approach of the
interaction between the biological and the cultural. Hence the subtitle of the book : “A theory of
material engagement”. The epigenetic crossing and interaction in question here take place though
things, through matter, that is also through the inorganic. It is a “non-representative” vision of
interaction, which requires no subject-object relationship, no mind seeing in advance what has to be
made or fabricated. Mind, brain, behaviour and the created object happen together, are part of the
same process. “The cognitive life of things is not exhausted by their possible causal role in shaping
some aspect of human intelligent behavior ; the cognitive life of things also embodies a crucial
enactive and constitutive role” (Malafouris 2013 :44). Therefore, to explore the relationships
between the brain and its “environment” is a much wider and deeper task than to study the role of
the “human” in its “milieu”, because precisely, it lays fondation, for an essential part, on a non-
human materiality, and cannot be limited either to a biological kind of enquiry. In that sense,
ecology to come acquires a new meaning : “this new ecology cannot be reduced to any of its
constitutive elements (biological or artificial) and thus cannot be for by looking at the isolated
properties of persons of things. The challenge for archeology, in this respect, is to reveal and
articulate the variety of forms that cognitive extension can take and the diversity of feedback
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relationship between objects and the embodied brain as they become realized in different periods
and cultural settings (…)” (Malafouris 2013 :82).
Malafouris then argues that this ecology should be understood a a result of the
“embedment” of the human brain. “The term ‘embedment’, Malafouris writes, derives form the
fusion of the terms ‘embodiment’ — referring to the intrinsic relationship between brain and
body— and ‘embeddedness’ — describing the intrisic relationship between brain/body and
environment” (Mafouris 2010 :52).
To conclude on that point and go back to our initial discussion, we can see that Smail’s and
Malafouris’ approaches to brain/environment relationship are not “strictly” biological, but include,
as a central element, the inorganic materiality of things. As Smail declares: “The great historical
disciplines, including geology, evolutionary biology and ethology, archeology , historical linguistics
and cosmology, all rely on evidence that has been extracted from things. Lumps of rocks, fossils,
mitochondrial DNA, isotopes, behavioral patterns, potsherds, phonemes : all these things encode
information about the past” (Smail 2008:57). Further: “History would be something that happens to
people rather than something that people make” (Smail 2008:57).
Deep history, conjoined with archeology of the mind, or “neuroarcheology”, would then
extend the limits of the “brain” well beyond reflexivity and consciousness, well beyond
“historicity” as well. As archeological, the brain/environment relationship is already also
geological.
*

It remains clear though that Chakrabarty would not be entirely convinced by such an
argument though. Even if non anthropocentric, even if thing- and inorganic matter- oriented, even if
including at its core a neutral, a –reflexive, non-representative type of interaction as well as
cognitive assemblages, the conjoined point of view of deep history and archeology of the mind still
take the “human” as a point of departure. At least the “living being”, and the process of
hominization that is inseparable from the evolutionary perspective. Chakrabarty’s perspective is
very close to that of French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux in his book After Finitude.
Meillassoux argues for a “non-correlationist” approach to the “real”, that would not lay foundation
on the subject-object relationship at all, and would totally elude the presence of the human on earth
as a point of departure. There exists a mode of exploration of deep past (of the extremely deep past)
that does not even consider the emergence of life in general as a “beginning”. Deep past then
become an “ancestrality” devoided of any “ancesters” : “I will call ‘ancestral, Meillassoux writes,
any reality anterior anterior to the emergence of the human species — or even anterior to any
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recognized form of life on earth” (Meillassoux 2008 :10). The archive, here, is not the object, not
even the thing, not even the fossile, but what Meillassoux calls the arche-fossil : “I will call ‘arche-
fossil’ or ‘fossil-matter’ not just materials indicating the traces of past life, according to the familiar
sense of the term ‘fossil’, but materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality or event ; one
that is anterior to terrestrial life. An arche-fossil thus designates the material support on the basis of
which the experiments that yield estimates of ancestral phenomena proceed — for example an
isotope whose rate of radioactive decay we know, or the luminous emission of a star that informs us
at to the date of its formation” (Meillassoux 2008 :10). The world Meilassoux talks about is the
Earth as being totally indifferent to our existence, anterior to any form of human presence — be it
neural, be it neutral.
Again, these affirmations resonate with Chakrabarty’s, who claims that the notion of
“geological”, in the expression “geological agent”, forever remains outside human experience.
“How does a social historian go about writing a human history of an unhabited and unhabitable vast
expanse of snow and ice ?”, he asks when talking about the Antarctic (Chakrabarty 2012 :12). A
decorrelated subject cannot access itself as decorrelated. “We cannot ever experience ourselves as a
geophysical force — though we now know, that this is one of the modes of our collective
existence” (Chakrabarty 2012 :12). Chankrabarty’s analysis adds something important to
Meillassoux’s thesis, for the reason that it takes into account the experience of the impossibility to
experience decorrelationism. We can conceptualize it, but not experience it. “Who is the we ? We
human never experience ourselves as a species. We can only intellectually comprehend or infer the
existence of the human species but never experience it as such. There could be no phenomenology
of us as a species. Even if we were to emotionally identify with a word like mankind, we would not
know what being a species is, for, in species history, humans are only an instance of the concept
species as indeed would be any other life form. But one never experiences being a concept”
(Chakrabarty 2009 :220).
At this point, a major issue appears, that relaunches the discussion and the necessity to come
back to Smail’s analysis. First, we don’t see what a species can be outside the biological point of
view. Why keep that term ? Second, I don’t understand why the fact of becoming a geological form
would have to remain entirely conceptual, and not produce a kind of mental phenomenon. “Climate
scientists’ history reminds us (…) that we now also have a mode of existence in which we —
collectively and as a geophysical force and in ways we cannot experience ourselves — are
‘indifferent’ or ‘neutral’ (I do not mean these as mental of experienced states) to questions of
intrahuman justice” (Chakrabarty 2012 :14, emphasis mine). Before coming to the political
consequences of such a statement, I would like to ask why precisely why could we not be
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susceptible to experience mentally and psychically the indifference and neutrality that have become
parts of our nature ? Deprived of any empiricality, mental or psychic effects, the assumption of the
human as a geological force remains a pure abstract argument, and in that sense, it appears as an
ontological or metaphysical structure. Just like Meillassoux, Chakrabarty ends up failing to
empiricize the very structure that is supposed to detranscendentalize, so to speak, the empirical.
Why could, why should there be any intermediary locus of experience between consciousness and
suspension of consciousness ?
The brain asks for recognition at that point ! Is not the brain, on which Chakrabarty remains
totally silent, an essential intermediary between the historical, the biological, and the geological ?
The site of experience we are looking for ?
*
This brings us back to Smail and to one of the most important and interesting aspect of his
analysis, the theory of addiction. Smail insists on the fact that the constant interaction between the
brain and the environment is essentially based on brain-body states alterations. The brain maintains
itself in its changing environment by getting addicted to it, and we have to understand “addiction”
in the proper sense, that of a “psychotropy”, a signicant transformation or alteration of the psyche.
These altering effects result from the action of neurostransmitters “such as testosterone and other
androgens, estrogen, serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin, prolactin, vasopressin, epinephrine
and so on. (...) Produced in glands and synapses throughout the body, these chemicals facilitate or
block the signals passing along neural pathways” (Smail 2008 :113).
Such chemicals, which determine emotions, feelings, affects in general, can be modulated
according to the demands of the behiavorial adaption they make possible. Adaptation, here, is two-
sided. It is of course adaptation to the external world, but it is also the adaptation of the brain to its
own modifications.
All important changes in deep history, like the passage of an age to the other, has always
produced new addictive processes and chemical bodily state modulations: “A neurohistorical model
offers an equally grand explanatory paradigm, proposing that some of the direction we detect in
recent history has been created by ongoing experiments with new psychotropic mechanisms that
themselves evolved against the evolutionary backdrop of human neurophysiology. The Neolithic
revolution between the 10,000 and 5,000 years ago transformed human ecology and led to
fundamental and irreversible changes in demographics, politics, societies and economies. In this
changing ecology, new mechanisms for modulating body states emerged through processes of
undirected cultural evolution” (Smail 2008 : 187). We have to understand that “the expansion in
calories available for human consumption, the domestication of animals useful as sources of energy,
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the practice of sedentism, the growing density of human settlements — such were the changes
characteristic of the Neolithic revolution in all parts of the world where agriculture was partially
invnted: Mesopotamia, Africa, China, Mesoamerica, and other sites. All these changes created, in
effect, a new neurophysiological ecosystem, a field of evolutionary adaptation in which the sorts of
customs and habits that generate new neural configurations or alter brain-body states could evolve
in unpredictable ways” (Smail 2008:155).
From this, we get that obviously, “civilization did not bring an end to biology” (Smail
2008 :155). Again, deep history reveals the profound interaction of nature and history through the
mediation of the brain as a both a biological and cultural adaptor. Human practices alter or affect
brain-body chemistry, and in return, brain-body chemistry alter or affect human practices. Brain
epigenetic power acts as a medium between its deep past and the environment.
“The mood-altering practices, Smail declares, behaviors, and institutions generated by
human culture are what I refer to, collectively, as psychotropic mechanisms. Psychotropic is a
strong word but no wholly inapt, for these mechanisms have neurochemical effects that are not all
that dissimilar for those produced by the drugs normally called psychotropic or psychoactive” Smail
2008:161). Further: “Psychotropy comes in different forms: things we do that shape the moods of
others; things we do ourselves; things we ingest” (Smail 2008:161).
We can distinguish here between autotropic and allotropic psychotropic, that is addictive
substances and practices acting on the self, and addictive practices acting on the other, political
addictive practices. Among the former are “coffee, sugar, chocolate, and tobacco” (Smail
2008:179), which first began circulating in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. “(...) All of these
products have mildly addictive or mood-altering properties” (Smail 2008 :179). To these one will
also add later alcohol and drugs.
Smail recalls that the current meaning of the term “addiction” emerged in the late XVII th
century. “Earlier, the word had implied the state of being bound or indebted to a person — to a lord
for example, or perhaps to the devil” (Smail 2008:183). This old meaning helps us understand what
allotropy is. Psyhotropic addictive chemical mechanims can also be induced in subjects out of
power excess and abuse of domination. Stress, and more generally affective states of dependence,
all that Spinoza calls “sad passions”, are essential aspects of this psychotropy, caused in contexts of
dominance. The crossing point between modularity and change precisely coincides with the
crossing point between biology and politics : “humans possess relatively plastic or manipulable
neural states and brain-body chemistries”, so that “moods, emotions, and predispositions inherited
from the ancestral past” can be “violated, manipulated or modulated” (Smail 2008:117).

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 According to Smail, autotropic and allotropic addictive processes automatically mark the
point of indiscernability between biology (chemical substances and mechanisms) and culture
(being-in-the-world). We find again the idea that the brain is the mediator between the two
dimensions of (deep) history, natural and historical.
How can we extend these remarks to the current situation ? First, they lead us to admit that
only new addictions will help us to lessen the effects of climate change (eating differently,
travelling differently, dressing differently…). Addictive processes have for a great part caused the
Anthropocene, and only new addictions will be able to partly counter them. Second, they force us to
elaborate a renewed concept of the addicted subject, of suspended consciousness and intermittent
freedom. Third, they allow us to argue here that the neutrality Chakrabarty talks about is not
conceivable outside a new psychotropy, a mental and psychic experience of the disaffection of
experience. Such a psychotropy would precisely fill the gap between the transcendental structure of
the geological dimension of the human and the practical disaffection of historical reflexivity.The
man of the Anthropocene cannot but become addicted to its own indifference. Addicted to the
concept it has become. And that happens in the brain.
The motif of a narcolepsy of consciousness, as both cause and effect of the technological
destruction of nature, had already been interestingly and importantly suggested by Marshall Mc
Luhan. His analyzes seems perfectly fitting the framework of the current ecological crisis.
Technological development coincides for him with an extension of nervous system to the very
limits of the world : “After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and
mechanical technologies, he writes, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages
we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we
have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time
as far as our planet is concerned” (Mc Luhan 1964:52). The extension of the nervous system to the
world has a double contradictory effect, it acts as a pain killer (a “counter-irritant”) to the extent that
it suppresses all alterity, at the same time and for the same reason, it has a destructive power. Such
is the structure of our “narcotic culture”. Every technological device is a prolongation of the brain
and the organism, and Mc Luhan characterizes this prolongation as a process of “auto-amputation”
that precisely helps lower the pressure and creates anxiety, thus putting at work an economy of
pleasure as “numbness”.
One might argue that the world about which Mc Luhan talks, the world to which the nervous
system extends its frontiers to is an image, a reflecting surface, whereas the split Chakrabarty
analyzes as the separation between the human as a historical agent and the human as a geological
force, confronts two definitely heterogeneous entities that cannot reflect each other at all.
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Nevertheless, if we look closely what Mc Luhan says about mirroring, narcissism, and the
projection of one’s own image, we see that reflection is for him immediately suspended by a
spontaneous petrification, a geologization precisely, of both the gaze and the image. About the myth
of Narcissus, Mc Luhan writes : “As counter-irritant, the image produces a generalized numbness or
shock that declines recognition. Self-amputation forbids self-recognition” (Mc Luhan 1964:53).
Indifference and neutrality, once again, can be mental phenomena, even when their
manifestations may seem totally alien to any mental or internalizing structure. Again, I don’t think
that the neutralization of consciousness due to its “geologization” can happen without the
intermediary of brain processes resulting from its interaction with the world. I have tried to show
elsewhere that indifference had become the global current “Stimmung” (Malabou 2008).
Such an interruption of consciousness or awareness, this indifference, directly challenge the
concept of responsibility, which is of course central in our debate. How can we feel genuinely
responsible for what we have done to the earth if such a deed is the result of an addicted and
addictive slumber of responsibility itself ? It seems impossible to produce a genuine awareness of
addiction (awareness of addiction is always an addicted form of awareness). Only the setting of new
addictions can help breaking old ones. Ecology has to be a new libidinal economy.
Here are some of the issues that political discourse on climate change, conferences like the
one, the COP, that recently took place in Paris do not genuinely take into account, to the extent that
the official ecological discourse, when it exists and is held by politicians who are not necessarily
official ecologists, is still a discourse of awareness, “historicity” and responsibility. This of course
does not mean that the human is not responsible for global warning. The anti-global warming
movements themselves of course have their share of responsibility in global warming itself.
Ignoring is a way to indirectly aggravate it. Nevertheless, the type of responsibility requested by
the Anthropocene is extremely paradoxical and difficult to the extent that it implies the
aknowledgment of an essential paralysis of responsibility.

Chakrabarty would no doubt argue that these last developements remain caught in the
correlationist frame. They would still be human, all too human. Don’t they let aside the issue of
nature as such to only take into account humanity’s techno-scientific power and its psychotropic
causes and consequences ?
“The traditional concept of history, Chakrabarty writes, implies a disavowal of the fact that
nature can have a history. It presupposes a strict border between pure contingent facts (natural ones)
and events understood as acts of agents. Croce, for example, claims that “there is no world but the
human world” (Chakrabarty 2009:203). French historian Fernand Braudel, in his book The
10
Mediterranean, of course rebelled against such a vision by taking into account the specific
temporality of the Mediterranean natural environment, the soil, the biopshere, etc. Nevertheless, this
time of nature is still seen as purely repetitive and mechanical, deprived of any agency or eventual
power, it “is a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles” (Chakrabarty 2009:204). Such a
contention is not sustainable any longer, because the age of the Antrhopocene teaches something
already wide spread in the “literature of global warming” : “the overall environment can sometimes
reach a tipping point at which this slow and apparently timeless backdrop for human actions
transforms itself with a speed that can only spell disasters for human beings” (Chakrabarty
2009:205).
*

What can we answer to this ? It is obvious that Braudel hasn’t thematized or even perceived
the historicity of nature, its mutability and ability to transform itself. In The Mediterranean and the
Ancient World (Braudel 2001), the analysis of climate is definitely poor, as Braudel does not say a
word, or at least nothing significant, about ecology. In that sense, Chakrabarty is right to challenge
the cyclical vision of natural time that still governs Braudel’s notion of nature’s time and space. It
seems to me though that Chakrabarty does not see how helpful Braudel nevertheless can be for our
discussion. It is true that what Braudel calls the “geohistorical time”, the archaic natural time, does
not change. The “very long term” time, made of thousands of years, the geological time proper,
seems to be deprived of any capacity to transform itself. But it is striking to note that the two other
levels Braudel distinguishes, that of economic and social time (middle term duration) and that of the
event (short term temporality), are also contaminated by the first level’s immobility. And here is the
interesting point. Braudel has perhaps failed to take into account the historical force of nature, but
he certainly very early and accurately perceived the irrevocable naturalization of human history,
that is of economic, political, and social time. He described better than anyone else the narcolepsy
of historical temporality, to such a point that he got accused of de-politizing it.
Deconstructing the privilege of the event, Braudel showed that a geological principal, that of
a blind slowing force, was operating at all layers of time. In that sense, he anticipated something
from the current situation, to the extent that he announced that historical consciousness had to
aknowledge its own naturalization and suspension by entering the reign of immobility. In that sense,
what Chakrabarty sees as a result (the human transformed into a geological force because of climate
change and the entry into the Anthropocene), Braudel saw as a beginning (history has always
already slowed down, thus preparing itself to its own neutralization by nature). What he said about
capitalism is extremely interesting in this respect. He argued that material life progresses by means
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of “slow evolutions”. Advances occur “very slowly over long periods by the initiative or groups of
men, not individuals (…), and in countless and obscure ways” (Braudel 1973: 258). Great technical
revolutions infiltrate society “slowly and with difficulty… to speak of revolution here is to use a
figure of speech. Nothing took place at break-neck speed” (Braudel 1973: 442).
One might object again here that long term temporality presupposes an essential passivity
and unchangeability of nature, that it can’t account for a sudden constitution of nature itself as a
historical acting agent, like the one we are currently witnessing with the Anthropocene. This is true.
But the problem, as we have seen all along, is that approaching the historical force of nature
paradoxically leads us to slow down, to face the suspension of consciousness, the numbness and
slumber of our responsibility. It is in a certain sense like exchanging roles, nature becoming
historical and the anthropos becoming natural. This exchange constitutes a new form of human
experience, and this Braudel helps us to conceptualize.
The third generation of the Annales School in France : Marc Ferro, Jacques Le Goff,
Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie still increased the part played by the very long term temporality. As one
of them declares : “Time is fully human, and yet, it is as motionless as geographic evolution”
(Dosse 1987 :165). Braudel’s work found itself extended and prolongated by the introduction of an
important concept that emerged at that time in historical science, that of “mentality”, closer to the
psychological than to the intellectual. The taking into account of slow time, long term time, gave
way to an “history of mentalities” (histoire des mentalités). Based on “material culture”, that is on
the similarities between the mind’s rythms and natural cycles, history of mentalities provided its
readers with descriptions and analyses of uses, repetitions, habits, and representations. i Philippe
Aries declared that history of mentalities situated itself “at the crossing point between the
biological and the social” (Aries 1981, Dosse 1987:198).
As we already noticed, this crossing point between the biological and the social does not
mean that the biological must be taken as a point of departure, or that the human as a living being
should become the origin of historical research. The history of mentality also includes, as one of
essential dimension, the materiality of inorganic nature, the soil, the rocks, the mountains, the
rivers, the Earth. A mentality is a hybrid concept that comprehends not only the psychic and the
social, but also the originary likeliness of the mind and the fossil, the inscription of naturality in
thoughts and behaviours. Mentality, in that sense, is rooted in the brain and not in consciousness.
“The human reduced to its “mental” is the object rather than the subject of its own history
(l’homme réduit à son mental est objet de son histoire plutôt que sujet)” (Dosse 1987:206). Jean
Delumeau, author of the important La Peur en occident (Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western
Guilt Culture, 13th-18th Centuries), writes, while playing with the multiple sense of the term
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“natural”: “Fear is natural” (Delumeau 1990, Dosse 1981:206). As a consequence of all previous
analyses, we may consider history of mentalities to be the first form of environmental studies in
France. Could it be that a new form of histories of mentalities, that would bring together the
geological, biological and cultural current dimensions of historical (non)awareness, may open a new
chapter of these studies ?

What seems to me challengeable in Chakrabarty’s is the claim of an impossibility to

phenomenalize the geological becoming of the human. This “species” the human has become
remains a pure void concept until it can be filled with intuition, that is with an empirical and
sensuous content, if not with awareness. A renewed and reelaborated concept of mentality might
precisely help providing the missing content of this form. There necessarily exists a mental effect of
the numbness and paralysis of consciousness, a mental effect of the new narcoleptic structure of
humanity’s (impossible) reflection on itself. We have seen, with Smail and Mc Luhan, that this
mental effect was a neural one in the first place. Again, it is not a matter of thinking the brain “in”
its environment, it’s a matter of seeing the brain as an environment, as a metabolic place.
Therefore, I prefer using the term “mental” rather than “neural”, because “mental” immediately
evokes the merging and mingling of different registers of materialities. In that sense, for us getting
used to the new condition of the human as a geological agent will of course require a new mentality,
that is new addictions, new bodily adaptations to an inorganic and earthly corporeity, a new natural
history. A history, still, nevertheless.
Reading Braudel and his followers helps us perceive that the narcolepsy of consciousness
constitutes an irreducible dimension of history. Long term temporality, immobility, very slow
evolution show that deep history has always been inscribed at the heart of history, as this numbness
of time and action that submits cultural evolution to a geophysical rythm. Braudel is perhaps not a
thinker of climate change, but he his a great theoretician of a new form of Marxism that binds the
critique of capital to a study of the irreducible naturality, neutrality and passivity of time. The
critique addressed to the historians of long term duration and mentalities were about the same that
the ones currently addressed to Chakrabarty, all pointing, in both cases, at a supposed depolitization
of history. François Dosse wrote that with the Ecole des Annales, in the end, “history ha[d] negated
itself”. He wished that “the event” might come back in order to wake up time from its geological
slumber (Dosse 1981:258) … He could not foresee that with the Anthropocene, long term

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temporality would precisely acquire the status of an event — which would free the attempt at
thinking ecology and politics differently.

Aries, Philippe. 1982. The Hour of Our Death, The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward
Death over the Last One Thousand Years. Translated by Helen Weaver, New York : Vintage
Books.

Bonneuil, Christophe Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste. 2016. The Schock of the Anthropocene. Translated by
David Fernbach. London :Verso.

Braudel, Fernand.
The Mediterranean and the Ancient World. 2001. Translated by Sian Reynolds.
London:Pinguin Books.
Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism (The Johns Hopkins Symposia in
Comparative History). 1977. Translated by Patricia Ranum, Baltimore : Johns Hopkins
University Press.
On History, 1980. Translated by Sarah Matthews. Chicago : The University of Chicago
Press.
Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800. 1973. New York: Harper and Row.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh.
2009. “The Climate of History :Four Theses”, Critical Inquiry
Vol. 35, No. 2. 197-222.
2012. “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change”, New Literary History,
Baltimore : John Hopkins University Press, vol. 43, Number 1, Winter 2012, 1-18.

Delumeau, Jean. 1990. Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th-18th
Centuries tr. Eric Nicholson. Chicago:The University of Chicago Press.

Dosse, François. 1987. L’Histoire en miettes, Des Annales à la nouvelle histoire, Paris:La
Découverte.

Malabou, Catherine. 2012. The New Wounded, From Neurosis to Brain Damage. Translated by
Sreven Miller. New York: Fordham.

Malafouris, Lambros.
2010.“Metaplasticity and the Human Becoming: Principles of Neuroarcheology”,
Journal of Anthropological Science. Vol. 88. 49-72.
2013.How Things Shape the Mind, A Theory of Material Engagement. Boston: MIT
Press.

Mc Luhan, Marshall. 1964 (1990). Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man, New York : St
Martin’s Press.

Meillassoux, Quentin. 2008. After Finitude: An Essay On the Necessity Of Contingency. Translated
by Ray Brassier, London:Continuum.

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Smail, Daniel Lord. 2008. On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley : University of California
Press.

West-Eberhard, Mary-Jane. 2003. Developmental Plasticity and Evolution. New York: Oxford
University Press.

Wilson, Edward. 1996. In Search of Nature. Washington D.C: Island Press.

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