The Experimental Economy of Geoengineering

Abstract

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?