Superconversations Day 19: David Xu Borgonjon responds to Adrian Lahoud, "Nomos and Cosmos"

[dxb]

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

the frontier of calculation must be articulated as a social process from the start.

Because science has social effects—though, unfortunately, it’s often not socially accountable—it’s understood that we need

updated institutions that mediate between the implications of our expanding knowledge and those who deploy it for political purposes.

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

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,

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?

there is no exclusive scientific realm when it comes to planning.

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.

[DADABASE]

@dxb Is this your idea of fun while doing planning?

[joshuajnet]

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.

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.

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.

[samir_sellami]

@joshuajnet @carlosamador Finally, continental and analytic fellows really talk to each other. Go on!

[dxb]

@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)

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

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.

[Esther]

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

[dxb]

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.