That is exactly the moment the role of the authority of an institution, it’s epistemological and its pedagogic aspect can render alternative ways of engaging the scientist with questions of different realms. Paying attention to the history of those institutions in charge of producing ethics and sciences one doesn’t find anything but the dominance of Latin academies. segregating and separating roles, genres and categories, this has been going faster than ever since industrial revolution, one drowning himself in one field while being totally away from influences of the other realms of science. The exceptions to this, while helping us throughout the past decades, when going back to their academic roles again they hit the tall walls of Latin academies, those that one can’t see the nominalism of divisions. But bringing the institutional structure from Latin to Greek, or Madrasah (Salon of Baghdad for example) won’t be necessarily too unrealistic. Who pays for that? within that system trojan horses of the curios mind can subvert with the camouflage of submission.
just thought I need to add, that the nomos for Latin academy is the one mirroring the states’, while greek one never gives up adding auto to nomos. How does that work? well we should try it out in larger scales, but not within an already Latin system, alternatives are available from Mughal academies, Baghdad Madrasas, and Greek formats.
@joshuajnet You know I agree with your proposition but somewhere down the line the building of these institutions needs to not only be theorized but actualized. This work cannot be deferred to some imaginary other agent and imaginary other times and spaces. For this plan to actually work, we need equal number of people involved in the building of these institutions as those who make art or practice philosophy. As we know these numbers are not even near parity. So I dont think ideally i disagree with you and other new rationalists who are proposing this program. The problem remains developing sound plans (which will inevitably involve taking risks) for their actualization.
Excellent response, David.
As you pointed out, we’re in an existential crisis in which, essentially, speculative computational modeling, in a more concrete sense than ever before, is creating the world around us (though with amplifying effects we cannot completely understand or predict). In a more imaginative sense, your points demonstrate the power of discourse to shape both expectations and behaviors that, in broadcasting a message of progress, actually advance reactive past-oriented measures that presume catastrophe.
The conversation on climate change has noticeably begun to shift from “if” to “how (pervasive, irreversible, bad, etc).” In our discussion as well, there is, rightly, a presumption of (future) catastrophe. To reach our current goal of a 2 degree C cap in global temperatures, we’d have to behave in ways almost comically contrary to our current values. For example - as Bill McKibbin points out, we’d have to persuade private companies and nations that control the world’s existing oil reserves to leave over $20 trillion of estimated energy assets in the ground.
And while I won’t begin to disentangle the web of global economic interdependence, is it not so unimaginable that some countries will find economic gains from climate change? Take lands with permafrost - will they not be eager to defend a future in which formerly untractable land becomes farmable? Especially as formerly robust producers experience scorching temperatures and decreased yields?
To what extent can we call a climate the surface of all temperatures and only temperatures?
I think it can’t be overstated how important it is that we practice broader definitions of climate so that we may come closer to responsibly tempering this inevitable failure in human health protections, economic growth, and international security - to speak nothing of the radical realignment of how we understand and practice value today.
What degree of failure is acceptable (and what degree is inevitable) is another question. How will we hold ourselves accountable? What is the role of institutions, and what shape will they take?
@DADABASE Perhaps you see the re-rehearsal of these peculiarly postmodern arguments as an inoculation then?
I do think scientists can play a political role, but then what they are doing is not primarily science, but the translation of science for the domain of politics. The task functions differently, and I think its important to make that distinction, least we shift back into these debates of identifying the alienating effects of scientific discourse on the human with the ills of modern society.
In so far as the concrete constructive task is concerned - yes this has been insufficiently addressed. I know many of us are seeking to redress this in various capacities, but I’m not sure you can rush the long-game just because there are so many urgent issues now. As Nick and Alex have argued in relation to the Mont Pelerin Society model, there is the necessity of laying the groundwork and overcoming old “common-sense” notions which have become embedded in our discourse, and finding the levers when they become available. As you yourself have pointed up on many occasions, there are pernicious and destructive habits of thought amongst the left which impede any sense of planning. That doesn’t mean we cant tackle both ill-formed attitudes and plan at the same time, but I think we are still in the process of redrawing the map which the left has relied upon for so long.
I agree with you about how my concern in regards to building institutions have been insufficiently addressed. However I don’t think pointing to the crucial task of actualizing a new rationalist action plan in research & development of new institutions impedes or rushes the long-game. In fact we proudly consider what we are doing at the New Centre nothing short of addressing this very task; putting new rationalist and accelerationist theories to practice and in doing so contribute to the further development of both new theories and practices.
Years after the 2008 crisis, and no-one in the banks has been held accountable. Not even for negligence! It is difficult to disentangle guilty ingredients from the hot financial stew, but much more so without an organized political will. Without better institutions (nomos) our deepening knowledge of the world (cosmos) will continue to fall flat. The problem of better institutions, it so happens, is linked to that of better models, since these models provide impetus and fodder. Quantitative models don’t just measure but also create phenomena: in Donald McKenzie’s words, they are engines and not cameras. A digression into the models of finance and their philosophical grounds is, I hope, useful here. Elie Ayache in Blank Swan has put forward a thorough rebuttal of not just the possibility of prediction, but possibility in general. Using the example of derivatives, he points out that the theory of how trades happen has nothing to do with the practice.
Much agreed, better institutions require a reorientation to the entire logic of prediction (hegemonic in one of the central social science disciplines I was trained in), but that shouldn’t mean a curtailing of planning or strategy, but rather a reinvention of both in the form of responsive / experimental planning, which is not at all the fatalism of prediction, but the contingency of active affirmation, both disrupting current conditions of possibility and creating the space for new ones.
I’m particularly impressed by Jason’s signaling of the vital “reorientation of the entire logic of prediction,” especially with regards to the example Lahoud focuses on: climate models, and the notorious difficulty that scientists have predicting climatological behavior and mapping causality and effect. One of the things that is remarkable about Xu Borgonjon and Lahoud’s writing is the idea of how the epidemic effects of the Columbian Exchange are at one level problems of witnessing or documentation.
One of the fascinating situations is how the nomos of the Capitalocene is being challenged by anomic critique (See The Anomie of The Earth), and how what is becoming most effective–with mixed results–is the popular documentation of climatical disaster; not the scientific implorations. Local droughts, floods, and other events are working much faster than the scientific community to articulate plans and express concern in an anomic fashion, as institutional nomology is caught in its network of fractious debates and global corruption of the science by capital.
Latour argues this point in his recent essay “Agency in The Time of the Anthropocene”:
There is no distant place anymore. And along
with distance, objectivity is gone as well, or at least an older notion of
objectivity that was unable to take into account the active subject of
history. No wonder that climatosceptics are denying the reliability of all
those “facts” that they now put in scare quotes. In a way they are right,
not because all those disciplines are not producing any objects able to
resist objections (that’s where objectivity really comes from), but because
the very notion of objectivity has been totally subverted by the presence
of humans in the phenomena to be described—and in the politics of
tackling them
The aforementioned quote for me, is an inversion of Ayache’s rebuttal of possibility, as it is precisely the practice that does away with the success of better models. In other words, model as engines meet the engines of the social and navigate according to a series of qualitative and quantitative conditions that, in my estimation tend to favor the social. Thus “planning” isn’t really ever a question of modeling, but a question of will, just as climate denial is not a question of logic but a question of affect, will, desire, class, racism, etc. If, as Badiou puts it, philosophy always lags behind politics, which signals the utter supremacy of material conditions to planning. So too, from time to time, science as ‘legitimacy’ encounters its institutional monster.
So, better models in the relatively tightly controlled derivatives market might be different from the quantitative model of processes that can literally change upon arrival–take Amazonian deforestation as the East African sands sweep across the ocean to arrive at a fallow field–but they both share a certain debility to practice and materiality.
And these specific moments where the material and social challenge planning’s phenomena–no matter how well modeled quantitatively or how powerful the phenomena they instantiate be. Plans then find themselves impeded by the bulwark of social practice or minimally by the presence of agent affirmations (social and political will) and active affirmations (stochastic situations of climate, human-nonhuman interactions, bad planning, underdeveloped modeling.) (BTW, i’m stealing Jason’s term here for my own nefarious uses 
)
So instead of new cognitivisms or rationalist planning, perhaps we might turn to new materialism–an older form to be sure–which, through its emphasis on the expansion of scientific knowledges and a sense of the agential in the world, allows for both responsive reaction and experimental planning.
“The frontier of calculation can be extremely violent, eradicating preexisting values and distinctions—this tension was always at the heart of decolonization struggles. But it is also a vital part of building communities of shared inquiry, especially scientific ones.”
If we are to take Lahoud seriously here, the frontier of calculation must be articulated as a social process from the start, and not exclusively through the binary of scientific legitimacy versus political will–as Lahoud and David point out, neither really work that way.
Regarding Manuel Correa’s point I would like to offer some notes on the matter:
The question of institutions remains unclear pending a formal analysis that allows us to model the occurring relations appropriately. For this I propose class analysis.
I will propose that institutions are a property of a bourgeois state, so that in the absence of one they cannot operate. In the partial collapse of the State that Colombia suffered, institutions were coopted and infiltrated widely by a paramilitary and parapolitical network directly coordinated by a sociologically distinct group of paisa colonists whose activity was tied to the expansion of agricultural border for massive homogeneous activities (extracting, monoculture, and farming) which displaced the native inhabitants of the territories they occupied.
This created a rift with the traditional bourgeoisie, in Bogotá, with interests in international credibility that were being undermined by the excesses of their rural counterparts.
The Colombian State was always at a partial collapse, never a failed State, but never a proper one either.
What the traditional bourgeoisie is trying to do by prosecuting the political allies of the paramilitaries, is precisely to support these bourgeois institutions-in-becoming that were once almost completely lost to the paramilitaries.
One of the problems with the historical commission is that, since society cannot unite itself symbolically, neither can the Commission.
One example of this is the criticism of León Valencia that the Commission failed to identify responsibility for the conflict when in fact it arrived at several contradicting versions of responsibility that reflected the class positions of its members.
For people who believe the Colombian state was always a proper state, a representation of the concentrated will of the people, rebellion, and thus political crimes were never possible, because rebellion was inscribed in democracy itself through the act of changing governments.
For people who believe there was never a state but a paraState, rebellion was, at least at some point, justified.
Its not really clear to me how new materialism provides a better capacity for “responsive reaction and experimental planning” – I think the term can be fairly vague and depends somewhat on which particular thinkers that you are referencing, but from my understanding, is generally situated around a new focus on metaphysics, and in particular a neo-vitalist metaphysics, which highlights the agency of non-human actors or things. Vitalism has a fairly dodgy philosophical and scientific pedigree, in that it tends to lend some mysterious force to objects which escapes any attempts to describe, measure, or circumscribe it, and as such becomes a mystification of the powers of noumenal. When presented with this position, it seems impossible to develop the actual practice of science, which is concerned with explicating the mysteries of nature, or to propose any kind of rational action in response to contingencies which may arise from whatever hidden intent lurks behind the ‘agency’ of objects. Furthermore, rendering the ‘affective dispositions’ of vacuum cleaners, fire, climate, social institutions, and whatever else one wishes to identify as an object, to an equivalent flat plane ignores the the complex and hierarchical emergence of causal properties and different structures and how they interact, leaving one without orientation. It is also questionable what a politics would look like in this situation, since the various objects of the world might be getting along just fine without your human perspective - perhaps the climate actually really likes being several degrees warmer, despite how it might affect your existence. (http://sites.williams.edu/cthorne/articles/to-the-political-ontologists/)
As to models - they tend to be localizable, with upward and lower bounds, describing the limits of the phenomena to which they are oriented, and bracketing the world in some particular way. We carve nature up this way, not from some anthropocentric demiurge to perform analytic violence, but because it is computational necessity (& I mean cognitively computational, as well) to restrict what it is we are measuring if we are to take its measure. It allows us to produce knowledge about the region which we are studying, but it also means that models are limited in some respect. So yes, models can not predict every potential contingency, especially as they reach their limit, but without them we lack a means of navigating the world, which an affective relationship cannot replace. Affects are the product of some process, not a guide as to what we ought do based upon what we know. All the positive or negative feeling in the world cannot replace an understanding of what processes might produce based upon our best models.
Lastly, the division between science and politics is not a simple binary, but is a division of function. What it is that science does, and what it is that politics does are simply not the same thing. To confuse one for the other is just to mistake how different practices operate on the world.
@carlosamador + @joshuajnet hate to agree with joshua but the this is how existing new materialism(s) look like to me, a lot of scientific planning indeed :): 
Hi Joshua, I appreciate your rejoinder, but I think I can address some things in it and some of your objections, which I sense are born partially from my lack of clarity in the response and from a sense of a bit well-earned prejudice against the vitalist. This notwithstanding, I’m pretty certain that you’re working from a limited reading of materialism new or otherwise, and a type of mistaken reading of the claims of neo-materialist ontology–I would rarely assert that you can arrive at politics from any depiction of ontology.
In point of fact, I’m precisely with Thorne inasmuch as the weakness of a politics based on ontology is the sense that selection, privileging, and prioritization as acts of a politics simply don’t follow from a materialism. At worst, vitalism begs the question of the political because it purports that everything is political in its vitality but there is no politics. and as Thorne puts it:
No merely human arrangement—no parliament, no international treaty, no tax policy—could dislodge it from its primacy. It will no longer make sense to describe yourself as a partisan of fire, since you cannot be said to defend something that was never in danger, and you cannot be said to promote something that is everywhere already present. Your ontology, in other words, has already precluded the possibility that fire is a choice or that it is available only in certain political frameworks. This is the fate of all political ontologies: The philosophy of all-being ends up canceling the politics to which it is only superficially attached. The –ology swallows its adjective.
Thorne is correct on this point, but this point and the thrust of his essay is how the commitment to a particular politics emerges from ontology. And I agree that there are problems with this. This is the old “ought from an is” problem, and it’s something that New Materialism certainly has to contend with, but the assumption of vitalism is simply not my concern.
Unfortunately, your reading of new materialism limits itself to the presumption that all new materialisms are vitalist, and this is not simply the case. What materialism commits itself to is the idea that models are in some sense limited by phenomena, as you suggest, and that any bracketing is of course, a necessity, but that often that model limits the reading of the complex and hierarchical phenomena–models are first order flatteners in ways no flat ontology can actually match.
I’d suggest reading Pheng Cheah’s article on Non-Dialectical Materialism and Benjamin Noys’ critique of vitalism.
In point of fact, your misreading of my position is far more of a commitment to a flattening of the ontological than mine is. I simply believe that materialism requires a combination of ideation, modeling, and rigorous commitment to the material realm–which like it or not, in specific ways has agency. Or else have we forgotten your very point on the Earth’s climate desires.
It seems you’d like to assert an affirmative politics, when what I argued for was a step away from purely assertive politics into a more rigorous, anti-rationalist notion of materialism that nonetheless takes the political capacity to undo materialist analysis very seriously.
I simply answered without protecting science from the political, which is something science is really fucking piss poor at doing for itself. (See climate denialism, eugenics, etc.)
Now About Affect
Let’s take Newton’s own reservations about gravity were based not on an actually material observation, but rather his commitment to the fact that bodies acting upon each other at distance in a vacuum was an “Absurdity”–an affective disposition that, in point of fact, flattened the materially observable world and theoretically possible world until Einstein.
Thus, the material was misread by a model supported by an affective relationship.
Is modeling thrown away? No, but “positive feeling” definitely trumped understanding of processes emergent from a model. It seems then, that as Feyerabend, Galison, and others have discussed, we’re wise to not dismiss the affective in science too glibly.
Brief Thoughts to Conclude
Even if vitalism were really at all relevant for science–as opposed to being a philosophical trope of the Real intended for specific claims-- can we say, in every case that “science and politics” is a division of function? It seems to me that we still have not answered Feyerabend’s or Haraway’s claims that scientific and other cognition are intensely social phenomena in many cases. And to return briefly to vitalism and materialism, let’s take Elie Ayache’s own writing on the failure of probability models in the market as a “material place of an exchange,” speaks to the need to attend to matter where it literally exhausts its models is to attend to models.
Is not then, the very nature of the material, at times, to disrupt the model–as you suggest? I could give a rat’s ass about vitalism, but cause, effect, complexity, stochastic moments, or the ‘agency’ of the material is very interesting to me.
A better read would have been to attend the constant struggle between models and their limits, as I suggest, rather than to bemoan a vision of ontology or modeling that simply isn’t present in the text. It might have been also been more forceful to look at the fact that there is no exclusive scientific realm when it comes to planning.
New Rationalism tends to remind me of it’s most notable success, namely artificial intelligence:
http://barfblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/woody.allen_.robot_.sleepers.jpg
Thank you all for your generous and involved response. In this post I’m going to recapitulate the general direction that this thread has taken, and the stakes of this shift.
My response applied to Lahoud’s speculations on climate crime and tried to make more concrete why his writing remains speculative. I translated the critique of prediction (in a very different context, of financial markets) to climatology. The takeaway from my somewhat vague—I wish I could claim intention, but I can only excuse my lack of diligence—response to Adrian Lahoud’s article, was that
Because science has social effects—though, unfortunately, it’s often not socially accountable—it’s understood that we need
The question of how to build better institutions is critical, not just to this thread, but also to the format of the New Centre’s superconversations, e-flux’s supercommunity, and the individual ventures (whether as schools, libraries, stores or studios) that the participants of this thread pursue. The concerns have honed in on the concept of planning—which has proven a recurrent interest!—since more responsive institutions
What might such a form of planning look like? This question is close to my heart, and critical for the field of contemporary art (remember: we are on e-flux, responding to a piece in the Venice Biennial!), where planning is as close as you get to a blahboo (a taboo enforced by lack of interest). The value of unregulated spontaneity is undeniable—consider the abundance that this thread has generated. The importance of planning is also undeniable—consider the capacity that the framing conceit of 100 days, 100 articles, 100 responses, 100 threads, has generated.
I think there’s a middle ground between top-down planning and bottom-up responsiveness: management. The accusation that management is in fact simply domination—usually the opener in critical theory—is misplaced. The whole point of management is that it’s ambiguous where the agency lies. Management properly understood is never domination (though it is always power).
I think the “admin” of a forum is one of the best examples, since they are often unpaid but indirectly produce quality discourse (other candidates include: arts curators, music/film producers, event planners, human resources managers; I think we should never caricature those activities as creation ex nihilo). As an administrator, I have been amiss in failling to regulate the direction of this thread and allowing for a debate that verges on personal attacks—I should have erred more on the side of “planning”.
Now, to @DADABASE’s distaste for Ibiza hippies, I’d say that there is no reason beyond prejudice that scientific planning should not be fun and half-naked. The moment that technological frames are created for collective, embodied improvisation will be enormous.
I’ll have to return to the very juicy points made by @chris_, @carlosamador that touch more directly on the relation of climates and models in general. I’ll note that I’m sympathetic to a materialist account of planning, but that an actual vision of this is very difficult for me to maintain. Before I do, though, can we expand on this question?
Do Organization Studies, Management Studies or Planning Theory not count? They may not be scientific—and I will stress that it seems to me that any account of planning which does not include corporate theory, socialist history, and feminist critique is deeply amiss—administration has often been gendered female, with consequences. We shouldn’t forge that the People’s Republic of China is run by a secretary.
Thanks for the response @carlosamador, I dont have much time to respond right now, but I’ll try to get at a few of your points. I’m afraid I’m even less certain as to what you mean by “New Materialism” now - my attempt to define it based upon an awareness of principle authors working under that heading or associated with it - Bennett, Connolly, Harman, Latour, Massumi, etc., and so may have characterized a few broad themes. It would be correct to say that not all of them claim the mantle of vitalism, but many do propose an analogous sort of subjectivism of objects. In that vein, I think it is incorrect to claim that objects have “agency”, this claim ignores the distinction between causal events, and intentional practice which follows from normative attitudes. One cannot be logically reduced to other, and the attempt to do so is at best a poor metaphor.
I don’t believe the Earth has desires. I was parodying the position. As far as models being “more flattening”, I think this seriously misunderstands the multi-perspectival nature of modelling, and something that I did not mention in the more broad sweep of the new rationalist program, which is the transit from the local to the global. While it is true that some models are fairly linear ‘first-order’ (as you say) descriptions of the world, more recent methods do deal with stochastic probability, non-linearity, emergence, decentralized and robust organization, hierarchization, numerosity, and feedback which are ‘third-order’. http://www.maths.bristol.ac.uk/~enxkw/Publications_files/Ladyman_Complex_2011.pdf
As to affect, I do think affect plays a motivating role for humans, but I think it lacks the right kind of qualities to be able to do much more than to somatically motivate an investigation into ‘oughts’ from ‘is’; this is because it lacks the proper epistemic role to do so – it does not have a propositional form which would allow it to systematically engage our conceptual understanding of the world.
It seems to me you are using randomness, contingency, and complexity as though they are mysterious processes beyond any potential rational understanding, but then I fail to see how one could develop a more rigorous practice towards them.
@joshuajnet @carlosamador Finally, continental and analytic fellows really talk to each other. Go on!
@DADABASE Unfortunately, this is my idea of fun
what do other people do? I was trying to be subtle in directing the conversation but I need to go back to Management 101.
“Contingency, randomness, complexity,” can be managed by means of advanced statistical and actuarial science, but the philosophical implications of our numerical practices are still worth applying to our thinking about climate. We are all agreed that the earth has no desires—that God the Father and Mother Nature died together—though it may have agency (defined simply as impact, perhaps trivially so)
So now I really need to know what a materialist idea of ideation, modeling, in sum, planning, looks like? I am willing to think with you on a very low (no values here, just saying in terms of cognition, for example) bar for planning that simply requires organizational consistency, but by what process does matter project into the future its self, now? Of course the Humean critique of people is that we don’t do that either, and Hume does lend himself to supporting Harman’s project because of this flattening of experience, but yes, let’s say, how does matter plan (without thinking)?
Here is one possible model, perhaps. Diedrich Diedrichsen, in the publication from CCS Bard, Realism Materialism Art, which collects a lot of the thinkers working on risk and prediction (also in Collapse XIII), sometimes in a cultural context, advances a description of exploitation in materialist terms. He extrapolates from the Labor Theory of Value his notion of a “political philosophy of ecology,” emphasizing that exploitation derives from an asymmetry between the time of the laborer and the profits of the boss. If we think of the amount of grinding of plant remains between geological layers required to create oil, it’s not so hard to see this asymmetry in oil extraction as well, though rather than an asymmetry between two contracting persons it’s between a corporation and the crust.
The extension of the contractual relationships via analogy to relations of objects is problematic, it’s anthropocentric in a way that I assume both @joshuajnet and @carlosamador would object to. When we crack this nut, or find the tool that’s already done it, then we can address the proposition I raised, applying Ayache to the climate by more than analogy.
I am going to persist in thinking that some of the difficult tensions arising between materialism and rationalism can be settled with recourse to the market, “as a new logic or a new category of thought, a medium that conducts contingency ‘instantaneously’ without the apparatus of possibility and probability.”
Quantification doesn’t always mean flattening, @chris_. I think the idea that dropping quantitative measures (for a corporate example, let’s say the profit bottom line) in favor of a more varied set of definitions of the good (like, say, triple bottom lines which also account for env. sustainability and labor ethics) is kind of problematic. For one thing, it reduces the power of the complex systems that derive from super-simple metrics and schemas. When you commit to just one simple metric, a whole host of creative technologies and behaviors gets unleashed to achieve it, and I think that’s a good thing. (Here is a powerful critique of this kind of localized, small-scale politics “of the small group” that such broader thinking is often embedded in—this researcher tracks how local participatory community development has consistently failed in its goals, compared to large-scale investment-led interventions.)
What’s cool about market prices is that if you let go of the common-sense idea that their is another thing that matters more in the market, a thing called value, like the underlying factors that influence them, say how handsome the CEO is, how well they’re selling, then you can see how prices aren’t actually stable or domesticated, but able to rise and fall very easily independently of the real world conditions that supposedly control them. Ayache’s explanation is that they are written: not just set, in the way that oligopolies or monopolists can set prices (as if by free will), but set through the use of variations of a formula (called the Black Scholes Merton formula, which links volatility to price). It’s not exactly volitional, because the price is derived from a formula, but because the product then goes back into the formula (for another derivative’s price) as one of the variables, it’s also not purely passive. It kind of generates itself, in tandem with the network of all other prices. (clarifying, this is informed by the critique of probability that holds that at the basic level, the idea of the future as a kind of extended game of dice is misguided, because, not only can the dice land on one corner or edge rather than a face (the one-in-a-xillion Black Swan), it can also grow a new face (one-in-a-one-in-a-what?) @joshuajnet Actually I’d like to hear your thoughts on this since you’ve offered Ladyman’s defense of statistical complexity as a form of realism.
That’s why I think that, if the market is the surface of all prices and only prices, perhaps the climate could be thought as the surface of all temperatures and only temperatures. At any point there are infinitely many points of temperature on the Earth, and they are intimately tied to all other temperatures by contingent relations with complex models. We make a model through sampling of specific points at certain times, and then also a governing body makes predictions and identifies targets.
Now, the obvious difference to me is that it seems that markets imply some kind of a human agency—a planning, manipulating, profit-hungry agency with perhaps social goods in mind too; is this a significant difference? Another difference is that whereas profits are meant to be maximized, temperature rise is meant to be minimized. There’s a difference in the ideal movement of prices, one has a (temperature) ceiling and one has a (price) floor. But neither of these differences seem significant to me…
So, in other words, how exactly are temperatures set?
Two main questions embedded in this question are:
- how does matter set?
- and, how should we think about history, in the sense of market and seasonal cycles?
Can we derive a practice of setting (of quantities like temperatures and prices) that holds for human agents and nonhuman agents? Some limit cases that might be useful to imagine include:
- the setting of our body temperatures (in what ways volitional? systemic? and outside the paradigm of probabilities?)
- High-Frequency Trading, as an example of non-human price setting that nonetheless defies the mechanistic idea of probability.
Did the Deaths of 50 Million Indians Cause Climate Change?
Steve Russell
3/13/15
No historian seriously questions that the European invasion of the Americas resulted in millions of deaths. The serious debate has been how many millions. What if it was enough millions to change the carbon dioxide (CO2) content in the atmosphere and therefore the climate and ultimately the geology of the Earth?
Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, British geographers writing in Nature, have proposed that a massive die-off of Indigenous Peoples in the Americas has left enough permanent global evidence to define a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. In this seminal study, they examine the Industrial Revolution and the detonation of atomic bombs as potential geological markers.
The Industrial Revolution, they conclude, happened too unevenly to provide worldwide physical evidence pointing to a reasonably specific date. The atomic bomb arrived in 1945 with worldwide geological evidence of permanent change peaking in 1964.
Lewis and Maslin reject 1964 largely because the date is so recent that the changes that began in 1945 are still playing out. I would add that the international treaty banning atmospheric nuclear tests went into effect in 1963, and the geological impact of radiation can be radically changed by new countries joining the nuclear club or a war breaking out among the current members. Either of these events would destroy the geological usefulness of 1964.
This leaves the collision between the so-called Old World and New World, which Lewis and Maslin claim caused a dip in atmospheric CO2 that is measurable in many ways worldwide. All measurements point to 1610 as the low point in the dip. The cause of the dip has a great impact on historians’ arguments over American Indian body count from contact with Europeans. While this evidence does not quiet disputes about the intent of the colonists, modern Indians would consider just knowing the approximate body count from physical evidence an improvement in the historical narrative.
How do dead Indians cause lower atmospheric CO2? If we all met the stereotype of hunter-gatherers before Europeans showed up, a die-off would not have a global impact. A charitable view of that stereotype would be that it was a mistake caused by more hunter-gatherers surviving European diseases because, unlike their sedentary farmer cousins, they had very little direct contact with the colonists and therefore less opportunity to be infected.
When farmers die off, their fields go fallow. When the fields go fallow, forests take over, and forests are gigantic carbon sinks, sucking up CO2. Theoretically, if the deaths were enough to move the CO2 in the entire atmosphere, it ought to be possible to “reverse engineer” the body count. Lewis and Maslin started with body counts that match existing scholarship.
The calculation in the Nature article is that the European invasion caused the deaths of approximately 50 million people farming 1.3 hectares per person. Removal of that many people from that much land should sequester between 7 and 14 petagrams of carbon over 100 years, the difference in numbers having to do with how much of the farming was “slash and burn” agriculture, which gives off more CO2.
They suggest that maximum human mortality would happen decades after first contact in 1492 and maximum carbon uptake from the fallow farms would take another 20-50 years, suggesting a date between 1550 and 1650. Ice core CO2 measurements narrow the date to 1610.
This is not a completely abstract dispute. Lewis and Maslin are arguing for recognition of a Global Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP, less formally known as a “golden spike”) and/or a Global Standard Stratigraphic Act (GSSA). Recognition of these markers requires a consensus in the scientific community.
In 2013, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) convened a group of scholars charged to decide by 2016 whether the Holocene is over and the Anthropocene has begun. The best evidence of that is a “golden spike,” and the Nature article is aimed at convincing the IUGS that we have a consensus.
Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/03/13/did-deaths-50-million-indians-cause-climate-change-159589
This reminds me of the event described in European historiography as “the general crisis” of the seventeenth century—it’s usually, and bizarrely, described in isolation from colonialism (don’t they say that the British don’t know their history because it happened overseas?) though it clearly happens in its (carbon) shadow. Geoffrey Parker in Global Crisis expands the context to include the whole Eurasian continent; he basically traces, among other evens, the collapse of the Ming and the Thirty Years’ War to a planetary destablization event caused by falling temperatures. His account also pivots on 1610. One of his main prescriptions is more active state response—he cites the Mughal empire and the Tokugawa shogunate as rulers that effectively responded to climate change through policy and infrastructure adaptation.