Experimentalists

May 15th, 2008

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Posted by ChrisG at 1:16 pm

Last week I attended this short conference up at Lancaster Uni, which apart from the occasional professional Deleuzo-Baudrillardian trying to stop everyone thinking with the aid of a thick mulch of jargon, threw up some gems (by the by, on the jargon front, Jamie has nailed the subterranean meaning of that annoying term “robust” which, along with “resilient”, accounts for a sizeable proportion of NuLabour’s nulanguage output).

Particularly interesting was a brave attempt to think about geo-engineering as an ethically justifiable response to climate change from Nigel Clark, which took on the concept of precaution head on, and did so by recognising that the root of the concerns that underlie precautionary measures is knowledge of finitude and vulnerability, but then pointing out how the human condition is therefore necessarily one driven by the urge to experiment. Central to his argument was an anthropological study of the burning practices of a tribe of Australian Aborigines who, over the course of 7000 or so years, perfected controlled burning as a response to the natural occurrence of wildfires.

So, land management of this sort is a kind of experimental nomad science (in Deleuze’s sense), that is, a science that proceeds on the basis of tacit knowledge, slow habituation of practices, and the kinds of skill that cannot be communicated in the form of rules but have to be learnt by the apprentice alongside the master in a kind of “do with me” fashion. Clark’s bold (and ultimately unjustifiable) move then was to link this practice with modern forays into geoengineering, identifying the experimentalism underlying the managed burning with the “experimentalism” underlying attempts to manage climate change by intervening in complex natural systems.

His presentation therefore ended up by effectively making an argument from retrospective historical necessity of a type which is not unfamiliar to anyone who can recall the typical mid-90s Monsanto booster’s argument for genetic modification, or the arguments more generally of transhumanists for increased technological modification of what, as humans, we’re “given”. These arguments (essentially, arguments in favour of a particular future) always operate by implicitly or explicitly offering a spectacularly total reading of history, which, at the extremes, attributes all human activity within the world to a single cause (such as the transhumanists’ “desire for increase in performance”, or whatever). Once this interpretation has been given, then the future starts to take on the appearance of a necessary reflection of our previously hidden teleology: “this is something we’ve always done, so it’s a familiar (even definitive), human activity; the point now is to do it better“. From this point of view, the widespread use of cheap carbon fuels stands as one of the more widespread forms of experimental geoengineering we’ve engaged in recently as a species.

Like the Deleuzo-Baudrillardian scribbling in his copy of “Postscript to the Societies of Control”, Clark ended up brandishing a fetish: whose experiment, we might ask? And with who, we might also ask where and when? The specificity of what is being done is all-important. The temporality involved in the processes of learning engaged in by the Aborigines of Clark’s example cannot be compared with the times of innovation and venture capitalisation that will drive any future developments in geo-engineering, driving them faster than knowledge of their effects will ever be able to develop.

Because that’s one of the crucial points about contemporary capitalism: action has to outstrip knowledge because there’s profit to be extracted from the uncertainty opened up by action. To claim that experimentation is essential to the human condition is therefore to emphasize only a portion of the story: it’s not definitive in all times and all places, and the times and places where experiment might be avoided in favour of precaution cannot simply be turned into sites of the emergence of another microfascism of the sort that readers of Deleuze and Foucault used to be dead keen on evoking at every opportunity.

Experimentation is a social relationship, and can therefore be inflected in different ways according to how ir expresses power: it can become habituated as a communal practice, it can be adopted as an individualist practice of, say, dandyism, or it can be utilised as a method of extracting surplus value whilst re-distributing the risks and uncertainties of investment, a way of moving faster than the law, regulatory agencies and even scientific knowledge itself.