http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17530350.2015.1039459#_=_

The Experimental Economy of Geoengineering

Simon Factor
Journal of Cultural Economy

Published online: 03 Jul 2015

DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2015.1039459

Will the practical application of geoengineering technologies inadvertently
bring about the catastrophic futures they are meant to pre-empt? And is
such elicitation of unpredictability as unintended as it might appear – the
accidental consequence of the extension of a modernist attitude to control
and domesticate nature? To grasp what is at stake in such questions, this
paper traces out the marginal history of ocean geoengineering, its
correlative ‘green’ economy, and through the deployment of algae as an
inventive world-remaking device, their co-formation of the earth as a site
of unbounded experimentation – of what I call experiment earth. My argument
here is that such methods of geoengineering inject disturbances into the
algae-ocean-earth system that do not seek control, but to elicit surprise
and explicate the mechanisms of the complex permutations of their
unpredictability, where new forms of knowledge and value are created not
through the application of preconceived ideas or a process of
commensuration, but through the harnessing of anticipation and the
generation of surprise. How, I ask, are we to understand the lineaments of
a pre-emptive ‘green’ economy that is premised on not just managing, but
speculatively materially recomposing the non-linear chemical and ecological
constitution of the earth’s metabolism? And what, from this vantage point,
is the earth becoming?

keywords : geoengineering; experiment; green capitalism; pre-emption;
inventive methods

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