Pedro Neves Marques the Earth as Stakeholder After Ww3

8/3/2019 Pedro Neves Marques the Earth as Stakeholder After Ww3

1/20

THE EARTH AS STAKEHOLDER AFTER WW3

Pedro Neves Marques 2012

[email protected]

skype: pedronevesmarques

Abstract

By articulating media strategies deployed by Ronald Reagan whilst of

his 3rd

presidential mandate (see essays endnote) with the recent

Fukushima nuclear accident, an analysis is made of the reciprocitybetween ecology and economics. This analysis takes into account not

only Ecological Energetics, as defined by A.G. Tansley or Howard

Odum, but also how the Earth may be, in fact, participating actively in

the contemporary financial markets. Accordingly, two main questions

are raised: one related to political representation; another to temporal

measurement. If the mutual mimicking between ecology and economics

is structural to both fields, political ecology must look at the how the

role of diagrammatics and statistical projection affects the passage from

biopower to ontopower (Brian Massumi), but also at the consequences

of financial abstraction to paradoxes in cosmopolitical participation.


2/20

1.

The Secret History of WW3

On the 27th January 1995, slightly after 7 p.m., World War 3 erupted. It lasted four

minutes, no more no less. On television, ABC, NBC and CNN all reported the

escalation of events, speculating on the war more than actually being able to grasp it

while it lasted, fleeting as it had been. Yet, insurgencies in Pakistan against the

Kremlin sufficed to warm up the tension between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., and it

did not take long at least less than four minutes for the Soviet deep-water fleet to

approach the eastern coast of the Unites States, and for seven MiG 29s to be shot

down over the Bering Strait. No later, an armistice had been signed and agreed upon.

Despite its scale, and scarce yet precise media coverage, as an event it passed

unnoticed. World War 3 was over almost before anyone realised it had begun. No

one saw it. And it was barely commented on.

Invisibility was not the consequence of its short duration though, nor of the

most surgical of air strikes, but rather of a concerted governmental plan, marking the

success of the strategies applied in Ronald Reagans third mandate. To the point that

the war was, in fact, only the result of the curious character of the Reagan third

term.

As his successors term in office drew to its unhappy close, the necessary constitutional

amendment was swiftly passed through both Houses of Congress, with the express purpose of seeingthat Reagan could enjoy his third term in the White House. In January 1993 more than a million people

turned out to cheer his [Reagans] inaugural drive through the streets of Washington, while the rest of

the world watched on television. If the cathode eye could weep, it did so then.

Hence it was that Ronald Reagan, the most photogenic actually mediagenic,

as we shall see of American presidents since John F. Kennedy, held the post for a

third exceptional mandate of a by then exceptionally old president. Yet,


3/20

the Iran/Iraq threatened to embroil Turkey and Afghanistan. In defiance of the Kremlin, the Asiatic

republics of the USSR were forming armed militias. Yves Saint Laurent had designed the first chador

for the power-dressing Islamicised feminists in the fashionable offices of Manhattan, London and

Paris. Could even the Reagan presidency cope with a world so askew?

There were serious doubts about it.

At this time, in the summer of 1994, Ronald Reagan was a man of eighty-three, showing all the signs

of advancing senility.

Old as Reagan was, or precisely due to it, the most media driven of linkages

between a human body and broadcasting technologies was thus put forward as vital to

such presidential 3rd mandate. In advance of fear upon the Presidents failing

capacities,

and to reassure the nervous American public, unsettled by a falling stock market () the White House

physicians began to release a series of regular reports on the Presidents health.

With increasing detail as time passed on,

precise details of Reagans blood pressure, his white and red cell counts, pulse and respiration were

broadcasted on TV and had an immediately calming effect.

It caused such fervour on Republicans and Democrats alike, such was the

quality of the live feed and the relevance of its referent, that even if

a small number of senior military personnel in the Nato and Warsaw Pact high commands, as well as

President Reagan, Mr Gorbachev and their aides, and the submarine officers who decrypted the nuclearlaunch codes and sent the missiles on their way (into unpopulated areas of Alaska and eastern Siberia),

were well aware that war had been declared, and a ceasefire agreed four minutes later,

the general public couldnt have been more distracted from the tension building up

between the United States and Russia over the military movements at the border of

Pakistan. To the extent that the worlds stock markets showed a memorable lift and

interest rates fell. That is why when finally the tension burst into war, the

broadcasted symbiosis between human life and media technology ended up winning


4/20

over the American audiences. It wouldnt be far from the truth to say that Reagans

media campaign outdid history thus the secret history of World War 3.

The visual mechanics of such symbiosis, as well as their development in the

media over time, were somewhat complex. Reagans

brave, if tremulous, heartbeat drew its trace along the lower edge of the screen, while above it

newscasters expanded on his daily physical routines, on the twenty-eight feet he had walked in the rose

garden, the calorie count of his modest lunches, the results of his latest brain-scan, read-outs of his

kidney, liver and lung function.

Soon after the charts began to run

below all other programmes, accompanying sit-coms, basketball matches and old World War 2

movies.

Moreover,

a third of the nations TV screens was occupied by print-outs of heartbeat, blood pressure and EEG

readings.

To sum, a whole complex diagrammatic was developed in prediction of the

aesthetics of current multitasking screens, segmenting monitors into diverse, though

simultaneous, areas: the Presidents flatulence and REM sleep patterns playing 24/7

along with footage from Iraq, New York, Brussels or mundane life in Dallas. Just as

Euronews came to broadcast images of life and world events withNo Comment, or

similarly to how Bloomberg Television came to define the visuals of simultaneous

totality and segmentation, a portrait of contemporary holism the stock exchangerates sliding, looping from the parts to a whole along with commentaries on world

news so American media rose high to the demands, willed or unwilled, of a most

extreme ontological collapse. It is just that while Bloomberg testifies to the

temperamental, psychologically influenced, flows of the world economy, of banking

and corporate systems, Reagans media campaign practiced from 1993 onwards the

physiological combination of human life and media. What we did not realize then is

how Bloomberg might already testify, in its apparent abstraction, to much more than

such bio-media combination.


5/20

2.

The Fukushima Accident

If it is true that the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, Japan, in April of 2011,

repositioned, for the time being, the field of nuclear energy, it is no less true how it

exemplified a most intertwined relation between the Earth (its whims) and the

economy of the global market(s). More than global then, at that moment markets

rather proved to be of earthly characteristics extending their reach as much

horizontally across the global sphere as vertically from geological layers to aerial

heights, in a convergence that can only prove disastrous, or at least maniac. If we

have, as Nobel prize winner Paul Crutzen suggested in 2002 and is now being

generally accepted in Geology, long entered the era of the Anthropocene, so the Earth

and the human economy have for long equally began a most radical intertwinement.

The rise in mankinds demography and its consequent impact to physical

sedimentation, thermodynamic perturbation and radical oceanic and biotic changes,

are considered the main reasons behind the scientific passage from the Holocene to

the Anthropocene, placing the transition, even though traditional agricultural

manipulation of landscapes, around the Industrial Revolution.1 Yet, if we are to study

(historically) changes in the ecosphere and such Mankind-Earth symbiosis, we must

also be (presently) aware of the reciprocal projection found in the hybridity between

human and non-human economies. For as Reza Negarastani has recently elaborated

on, and Deleuze and Guattari already pointed at, it is precisely from this double axis

of global horizontal reach and capitalistic vertical depth that the geo- in geopolitics

might also prefix to a geo-economy.2

1 See Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Alan Smith, et al., Are we now living in the Anthropocene?, GSA Today,

V. 18, N. 2 (2008).

2 For Reza Negarastani, see Cyclonopedia, Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: Re.Press, 2008).

For Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, seeA Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Massachusetts:

The University of Minnesota Press, 1987/2005) and What is Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press,1991/1994).


6/20

In the spring of 2011, far in the East, when radiation began to leak it was

immediately on air: media sprawling Geiger levels to global reach, decoded from the

virtual world of internet blogs to public spaces by way of freshly contaminated

printing press, newspapers and magazines. Already in those early hours, if not with

cybernetic immediacy, stock market ratings oscillated: numbers accelerated and

plunged. Whether in large led panels at the entrance to major banks and stock

exchanges or in the fractal window sharing of Bloomberg Television, virtually all

percentages and numbers testified to the same: radiation leaked as fast to mainstream,

and not so mainstream, media as to the abstraction of quantifying numbers and the

prospective insight of the economy. While whole masses of population were being

evacuated from the contaminated area, and water desperately pumped into the awaken

reactors in a surgical attempt to cool the reactors down, major corporate investments

in the area, the Japanese currency itself, crashed.

Yet, if the first logical answer to the disaster was an economic blow to

companies involved in the construction of nuclear power plants and nuclear energy

investors stepping back with mistrust at the recent theres no other way motto

driving nuclear energy in contrast to renewable energies the accountability of such

companies in the market quickly gave place to psychological panic and an overall

irradiation of nervousness. From

shares in the companies like GE heavily involved in the design and construction of the power

plant fell sharply as soon as news of the damage and radiation leaks broke. As the debate turned to the

safety of nuclear power plants in the U.S., analysts, expecting construction delays at new plants, cut

expectations for shares of companies that build and run American power plants, along with companies

that mine the nuclear fuel uranium,3

to

the impact of the earthquake and tsunami dragged down stock markets. The benchmark

Nikkei 225 stock average plunged for a second day Tuesday, nose-diving more than 10 percent to close

at 8,605.15 while the broader Topix lost more than 8 percent. To lessen the damage, Japan's central

bank made two cash injections totalling 8 trillion yen ($98 billion) Tuesday into the money markets

after pumping in $184 billion on Monday. Initial estimates put repair costs in the tens of billions of

3 Nuclear Safety Debate Hits Stock Markets, The Huffington Post (03/16/2011).


7/20

dollars, costs that would likely add to a massive public debt that, at 200 percent of gross domestic

product, is the biggest among industrialized nations,4

besides,

DOLLAR GAINS AS FINANCIAL LEADERS INTERVENE The Group of Seven rich

nations, stepping in together to calm global financial markets after a tumultuous week, agreed to join in

a rare concerted intervention to restrain a soaring yen.5

It did not take surprisingly long for such psychological alarm to turn into

individual greed, to the extent that

the rating agency Standard & Poors has placed a negative outlook on the creditworthiness of

Japan, opening the door to a downgrade in a few months, in fear that the consequences of the

earthquake of March 11th

will complicate the fiscal situation in the country.6

The contagion, its velocity and promiscuity (between the economy, the accident and

human psychology) should not be a surprise, given that the economy, the accident (its

prospect) and human psychology form a system of feedback loops in world formation.

As a whole, the blow to the Japanese economy and to foreign and local investment inthe country, along with the radioactive contamination of Fukushimas fields and

coastline, and the subsequent revision of investment on nuclear energy, proved an

exemplary demonstration of environmental economy. Environmental in the sense of

relational, gathering the imaginary spheres of the human and the earthly, of the virtual

and of the concrete, into a one/fractal space of representation and accountability.

An article from the period, publish in the newspaper El Pas, stated,

we just had the best proof possible of the interdependence in which we live today.

Interdependence that will force us to take new steps towards the creation of institutions ofplanetary

reach capable of laying the foundations for a worldwide government, even if such expression might

4 Eric Talmadge and Shino Yuasa, Japanese Government Warns Those Nearby Nuclear Plant To Stay Indoors In

Order To Avoid Radiation, The Huffington Post (03/15/2011).

5 Japan Earthquake 2011: Government Considers Burying Fukushima Nuclear Plant Amidst Power Concerns,

The Huffington Post (03/18/2011).

6 S & P amenaza con rebajar la nota de solvncia de Japn, El Pas (27/04/2011). The translation from Spanish ismine.


8/20

sound utopian. Indeed, the Japanese disaster has been followed by speculation on the yen, linked in

turn to market speculation about the prospects for reconstruction, which will require huge liquidity. At

the same time, the nuclear crisis leads immediately to a rise in oil prices which automatically affects all

economies in the world.7

If worldwide the economy demonstrated, with optic-fibre velocity, the panic

driven obsession with the instability of globalization, it is precisely the careless usage

of the term planetary in the above quoted paragraph, instead of worldwide or

globally for example, which might prove meaningful. In other words, while the

disaster at Fukushima engrained ever deeper the synergetic becoming of subjectivity

in Japan with nuclear power, furthermore it embedded the growing sense of a

confluence between the planets metabolism with mankinds economical,psychological and philosophical affairs.8 In this way it not only collapsed the

difference between the impact of macro and micro events to the mood of

interconnected markets, but moreover between who and whatis in and out of

economic fluctuation. If it is so, the Fukushima accident may have raised two

interlinked questions: one related to political (but also visual) representation; another

to temporal measurement. That is, the extent to which globalization rather than

compressing time, of homogenizing it, may actually connect all sorts of distinct

temporalities, not only culturally but also ontologically, in relational time: from Man

to animal, vegetational and inorganic types.

3.

The Managerial Ethos in Neo-Liberalism

If the accident at Fukushima made visible the expansive field of participation in the

human economy, Reagans media campaign collapsed the distinction between modes

of making politics, and moreover between who and what actually intervenes in

7 Jean-Marie Colombani, Ms all del drama, El Pas (21/03/2011). The translation from Spanish, and the italics,

are mine.

8 From this perspective, and given the above news reference on rating agencies, it could prove of interest to regard

rating agencies, such as Moodys or Standard & Poors, as mediators in the psychological balance between theeconomy and the Earth.


9/20

politics. Rather than exemplifying a synchrony between the economy and geology,

climatology, and so on, Reagans strategy enacted a confusion between politics and

physiology, bringing it closer to biotechnology than rhetoric. Reagans involvement

with media overrode not only the gap between the private and the public, but rather

more importantly it exemplified such overlap by way of an immediate intimacy

between the body and its diffusion by way of live codification. An immediacy

through which human(s) and broadcasting and diagrammatic technology participate in

a continuous feedback loop of affections, stimulus and response. Reagans

experiments constituted thus a whole human/technological symbiotic politics, where

speech acts contribute to the political as much as cellular, metabolic and sanguine

dynamics do.

The case brings to mind more recent presidential campaigns, particularly the

2009 Obama-McCain race. For the media, the life and mortality of both candidates, or

put otherwise, the public visibility of their frailty, was made into an election issue.

While John McCain was repeatedly accused of being too old to run for presidency9

a matter already raised in the 2000 republican race, to which McCain promptly

answered with the release of almost 1,500 medical and psychiatric records Obamas

speech safety system hauntingly reminded us of John and Robert Kennedys

assassination, contributing, beyond charms and new blood, to such often commented

on resemblance. The life of the president is in need of constant monitoring. If in

McCains case medical records sufficed for the electorates self-assurance, the

publics affection (or despise) for Obama was represented in the bullet proof glass

panel three large sections measuring approximately 2 by 6 meters in total set

between the candidate and the audience at each public appearance. It served as a

consoling separation. The presidents body, or the necessity of its constant

monitoring, became a physical forth wall between he and his voters, who are forced to

cope with a caged stage in recognition of the imperative of bodily, and visual, safety.

In the case of Obama, the transparent frame seemed then, as now, to televise the

president, to metamorphose him into a holographic image the polished dream of

Americas rebirth made possible only by projection. Curiously, the same material,

according to its manufacturers American Defense Systems, Inc. a mixture of space

9 In fact, Ronald Reagan faced the same comments when of his 1984 presidential campaign. At the time of thepresidential race he was 73 years old.


10/20

age materials including glass, ceramic, crystal and polymers, is also being deployed in

the U.S. military as transparent protection for the windows of vehicles thus

overlapping the monitoring of the presidents body with the assurance of safe

American expansionism, as well as the wished for transparency between the

electorate and the president with the scanning of the territory under democratic

ideals.

More curiously still, it was not Obama but actually Reagan who first made use

of the presidents safety shield. Transparency and protection (be it financial or

military, at individual, institutional or corporate level) are allied concepts under neo-

liberal rhetoric. Deleuze may have defined postmodern politics as the age of

surveillance, a society of control10, but the procedure is a two way street applying also

to rulers. In a mundane version of seventeenth century absolutism Louis XIV was

available daily for the court to analyse his routine so the presidents bodily designs

are under vigilance: by technologys accuracy and the audiences judgment, even

interest via media ratings. To the extent that vigilance may very well define the field

of political reciprocity between the ruler and the ruled. While power controls by

opening its elected body to critical exposure just as it opens all fields of society to

the competitive quantification of economics the public exercises power over the

elected by the free scrutinization it is liberally allowed. If Reagan made his politics

neo-liberal economics, it is equally true how neo-liberalism bio-rigged Reagans

politics. During the 1980s, Reaganomics freed markets from the state, and in parallel

made biopolitics synonymous with a complete exposure of the individual. While

leftist protesters found a new strategy in the motto the personal is political, Reagan

translated it, already in the 1980s and with more efficacy still in the 1990s, into the

more appropriately neo-liberal the private is political. Just as with vigilance, so the

personal factor in the periods individualization of politics opened itself to usage both

by the political Left and Right with direct consequences to ballot campaigns. Under

the Culture Wars the personal became a tool subverted at the hands of

conservatives, opening the private life of politicians to public scrutiny age, sex and

health included while putting private property centre stage in issues regarding the

management of society.

10 Gilles Deleuze, Control and Becoming,L'autre Journal1 (1990) 169-182.


11/20

Reagan, nonetheless, literalized the logic, in an exemplary technological

symbiosis, to the point where bodily organs, metabolic dynamics or cardiac endurance

become tools in the political arena. By his third presidential race and mandate it was

clear how Reagans team already regarded biopolitics differently, translated and

transmitted in its pure, though coded, transparency at national level by media. Taking

the shape of diagrams transmitted live for an audience, such moving image expressed

in broadcasted details (of the passage of organic time) the ways for a particular body

to conduct politics through its immediate expression and transmission, in other words,

through its bare, though coded, appearance. It is as such that Reagans program

passed from a politics of the body the government of self and others to the rather

more accurate constitution of Reagons body as managerial tool. In order to place the

particularity of individual bodies at the centre of contemporary management, thus

making Reagans third presidential mandate successful to the point of an invisible

waging of war one further element was nonetheless vital, namely affection: of and

for the body.

While, around that same period, biogenetics struggled with the clarification

between what is proper to human life (and human rights) and life beyond private

property e.g. stem cells or vegetal components in Amazonia so Reagans

broadcasted bodily insides were his yet other.11 They were a generic transmission,

personalized for the reason of an efficacy of the models instrumentality. Reagans

case is a combination between body and image, more precisely between the bodys

coded expression [statistics] and the images source. In fact, for Reagans exemplified

symbiosis to be effective it was necessary that it was his and not someone elses body

what was broadcasted. It was on Reagans health that the population got hooked on,

precisely because it was Reagans health and not someone elses. This was a

consequence of the personalization of the linkage, as well as of its relation to the

management of desire. Again, it was the private that made the relation, between

Reagan and the audience, political. Yet, if a constituting affect produced the outcome

of such relation, Reagan sufficed as a symbol. An image made instrument for the

managing of affection, not as the structure itself, Reagan could henceforth be

generalized. As such, the key for the experiments success may very well have been

expectancy: the projection even more than the result of the broadcasting.

11 See Laymert Garcia dos Santos,Politizar as Novas Tecnologias (So Paulo: Editora 34, 2003) chapter 1.


12/20

Reagans third mandate made of the 1980s ontological turn in economics an

experiment between the body and its image, diagrammatics and futurological

statistics. Out of such experiment came a blurring of who and what was, whilst of

those last four years of presidency, actually enacting politics. Still, all elements

branched out of Reagans body, multiplying, coding, converting it into something

closer to the procedures of financial economics than usual political practice.

Fukushimas accident, nonetheless, may have indicated why the homo- in homo-

oeconomicus the concept ranging from an optimization of all spheres of private life,

to an individual centred management and its translation into code may prove

outdated, and therefore in need of substitution for a more proper cosmopolitical

translation: a cosmological economics.

4.

The Earth as Stakeholder

If Reagans media campaign enacted a symbiosis between the human body and media

technology extending to the management of biopolitics and the economy, the

Fukushima accident highlighted, in its own way, how ecology may define systems

reaching well beyond its apparent scope in a radical linkage between biology and

economic projection, geology and the production of capital, democracy and the Earth.

Just as Reagans body broadcasted itself live through numbers and charts, so the Earth

made itself heard through statistical abstraction when of the Fukushima accident. By

way of a shock to the economy, the Earth, at that moment, redistributed the territory,

not only locally in Japan but also globally, by way of its effective participation in

global politics as an active economic agent. Moreover, it did it live on T.V. and on the

Web. To a certain extent, the Earth, following a momentary thermodynamic

agreement, played its role as a major stakeholder in global economics, awakening

interest in the management of the Earth itself, that is, the exploitation and distribution

of its resources.

As is known, a stakeholder is, in general, regarded as an individual or group

with an interest (a stake) in the viable management of a particular association I use

the word here both in its meaning of business and of attachment or assemblage. That


13/20

is, someone or something that can affect, by way of direct or indirect investment, and

be affected by the management of a business or activity. Usually a stakeholder is

considerably human though the category includes businesses, corporations and

national states under the logic of legal personality. The paradox here is the range of

such legal status. If a person is commonly considered human, and if a company or a

corporation can be legally considered a person, are not such abstractions-legally-

turned-persons in fact human? And if such legalized person-human-abstractions have

a stake in the economy, local or otherwise, cannot other non-human-human-entities

also have their own? Put simply, why can a particular corporation be considered

legally human while the Earth, a particular gathering of overlapped ecosystems,

cannot? For once taken the human as a legal category, it is the scope of inclusion of

non-human entities under the logic of the human that is expanded. And once

(eco)logically extended the range of the human category, equally the Earth can have a

stake on specific interests. Consequently, a first consideration becomes in which

degree is the Earth a stakeholder: is it a primary or secondary stakeholder? A second

consideration being if the interest of the Earth in the economy presents it as human,

and if so what shape does it take and what consequences for humanity, or, inversely,

if it extends the economy and finance to the non-human the latter being apparently

self-explanatory, given that having a legal personality implies the attribution of

personhood to a non-human entity.12

Surprisingly to most ecologists, who have historically tended to reduce the

economic side of ecology to a quantification and optimization of ecosystemic ratios of

production and consumption [Natural Economics13], or more recently to the green

turn in economics, the Earth might in fact not speak (to us) solely through biology or

metaphorical association, but rather by way of its direct involvement in the global

economy and in the financial system. The economic shaping of ecology has a long

12 The debate on the scope of humanity as portrayed here seems to reduce itself to strictly legal matters. I would

see this side of the debate as its poor, given current discussions in anthropology, sociology and the appliedsciences. To keep with the anthropological debate it seems more poignant to me the perspective built around

Native American cosmologies, particularly by way of such notions as Perspectivism or Multinaturalism proposed

by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and others, where humanity is considered as generalized constituting a commonculture (from Mankind to animals, vegetation and even inorganic components). For more information on such

debate see Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,A Inconstncia da Alma Selvagem (Sao Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2002) orMtaphysiques Cannibales (Paris: PUF, 2009), among several other essays.

13 For an overview of Natural Economics, see Donald Worster,Natures Economy, A History of Ecological Ideas(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977/1994) particularly chapters 5 and 6.


14/20

genealogy, attached to, yet extending beyond, the common organizational prefix of

eco-. Management, in fact, may very well be the most defining element of ecological

studies, particularly in its ecosystemic framing. If by the late 1920s Charles Elton was

already studying ecological communities metabolically, that is, as food chains, a

decade afterwards A.G. Tansley and Raymond Lindeman would change the

ecological currency to energy proper, that is, energy being the material substance

deriving from food relations, be these photosynthetic or predatory.14 More

importantly, such energy exchange would be described in proper economic terms,

with roles administered between producers and consumers (of first and second class),

and energy complying with stocks and supplies, and the general rule of offer and

exchange. For Tansley, the notion of ecosystem portrayed more accurately than the

notion of organism such metabolic exchange and passage of energy, the devouring

even, between agents within particular systems of relation: for using the ecosystem,

all relations among organisms can be best described in terms of the purely material

exchange of energy of such chemical substances as water, phosphorus, nitrogen and

other nutrients that are constituents of food.15In its turn, taking from ecosystemics,

Lindeman would later conceptualize the exercise of ecology as the quantification of

the production and loss of energy, the average ratio of its passage throughout the

ecosystem, its accumulation and surplus. Henceforth, the goal in ecological

human/non-human relations defining ecosystemics would be the study of an adequate

management of ecosystems: the maintenance of the natural tendency of ecosystems to

lead towards equilibrium, as already pointed out by Tansley. Ecology, for such

longstanding branch of its studies, is, still today, a full-blown science of natural

economics; it is a bio-economics.

It was in these terms that ecology projected modern economics, class

segmentation and distribution of labour forces included, on biological relations. In

1980, Daniel Simberloff would correctly warn ecologists of recognizing the strength

with which a basic philosophy, even an economic one, structures our perception of

apparently unrelated phenomena, and, more concretely, of a willed modelling of

14 See A.G. Tansley, The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts,Ecology, Vol. 16, N. 3 (1935) 284-307; and

Raymond Lindeman, The Trophic Dynamic Aspect of EcologyEcology, Vol. 23, N. 4 (1942) 399-417.

15 Donald Worster on A.G. Tansley,Natures Economy, A History of Ecological Ideas, 302.


15/20

ecology in accordance with an Adam Smith type of economics.16 Yet, as an answer,

Simberloff himself followed economic tendencies, replacing closed systems by a

more up to date neo-liberal model based on individual creativity and competition.

Ecosystems might very well tend towards self-regulation, yet these were stochastic

and unpredictable, chaotic even. Yet again Simberloffs critique only abstracted

ecology more. If by the 1980s probability studies had already become the essence of

ecology, since its neo-liberal contamination projection and futurology that is, the

tracing of tendencies out of chaos became the rule. Long economic, ecology at last

turned financial.

Besides the economic history of ecological energetics and the mirrored

becoming between ecology and economics namely, ecology portraying natural

systems under economic rules (ecology having been moulded by modern and

postmodern economics) and economics learning from ecosystemic thinking what of

the Earth, in all of its processes, in all of its never unified, always multiple

associations, yet always named as such: the Earth? We may have projected the human

economy on the Earth, and on Nature terms so often taken as equivalent in their

exteriority but might it not rather be the Earth (natural systems) that is projecting

itself on our human generated economy? Fukushima, as a dialogical highpoint, would

affirm it as such. With each tidal wave, each radiation leak, each directional wind, the

natural world spoke graphically: by way of flow charts, in codified streams, but also

practically in dictating the success or failure of business and interest groups, of the

banking system, even, at street level, on wage cuts and social reform. It is not only us

who are bioengineering the Earth, but also reciprocally the Earth that is engineering

the expressive techniques of the economy. To a certain extent, it is this mutual

mimetism and hybridity that traditional political ecology, even more its

environmentalist section, has not understood: while it has tried to preserve Nature,

Nature has grown ever closer to us, it has become human, and following humanity,

become financial and diagrammatic. But where do we find the tipping point in such

hybridity? Is it we who have created Nature graphically, who wish to read it

statistically, who desire to monitor its immensity as we would Reagans body? Or is it

16 Daniel Simberloff, A Sucession of Paradigms in Ecology, Synthese, Vol. 43, No. 1 (1980) 28.


16/20

the Earth that has found in systems thinking, cybernetics and statistics, that is, in its

cooption, a vehicle for expression?

The case seems to send us back to a matter of representation, one of the most

enduring and well know issues in the history of political ecology. But it is the sense of

the word itself what may have changed: from the concern with the ways through

which the Earth, ecosystems, vegetation and animals, the biosphere, can be voiced, to

a confrontation with the paradox that the Earth does not need to be voiced, that it is

not mute, nor fragile, nor detached from humanity, much less from human affairs.

Representation, in these terms, is concerned with how nature participates directly and

by itself, to what is it attached, how is and can nature be involved in decision making

processes, rather than being concerned with the environmentalist obsession that the

Earth is always in need of spokespersons. To speak in name of, instead of with, places

by necessity that which is spoken outside of politics it treats the subject solely as

subject of discussion. If, following Bruno Latour, all of mediation already implies

an agency from that which is mediated, the problem then with an environmentalist

type of mediation is how it fundamentally disempowers the agency and language(s)

through which the Earth speaks itself.17 This is not to say that it might not need its

comrades, supporters, associates, but rather again, that it is the meaning of mediation

and representation itself what must be taken differently. Besides the awareness that to

draw a line of separation between an outside and an inside is an illusion; that as we

tend to man-make natural systems, natural systems make us, reciprocally and to a

hybrid indeterminacy. This reciprocity may be, in fact, the lesson of the economic

history of ecological energetics. Representation should be concerned both with

methods of participation and with constitutions and the constitution of subjects and

subjectivity. If so, Latour may indeed be right, and the case one of parliamentary

politics.18 Yet, how is parliament to deal with the rogue expression and the financial

implications of Fukushima?

17 Bruno Latour,Politics of Nature (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2004).

18 In this respect, Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers may very well be the most prolific and poignant voices. For

Latour, see The Politics of Nature (2004) and From Real Politik To Ding Politik or How to Make Things Publicin Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (MIT Press: Center forArt and Media Karlsruhe and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005) 14-41, among several other books and

articles. For Isabelle Stengers see herCosmopolitics I&II(University of Minnesota Press, 2010-11) among severalother books and articles.


17/20

5.

In conclusion: ontopolitics

It is not without purpose that I have been addressing Fukushima as an

accident. For Brian Massumi, the accident is not one example among others. In

todays environment, given indeterminacy at impact, every event strikes with the self-

overflowing attack-force of the accident.19 The Earth is ever present, it comes from

everywhere, it is a whole orchestration, a complex system that includes us. But it is

through the accident that it appears; it is how it participates in the affairs of Mankind

and in the transformation of ecosystems; how it procures agreements and pushes

resolutions. At Fukushima it used its full force, fullest intensity/extensiveness and

complexity, including its human component invariably. The Earth may have a stake

(in general well-being, the economy, bioengineering, and so on), but it is not

necessarily an actor. And if it is political it is so on the basis of its dispersion and

multiplicity. It is hard to represent. Hence why it is strategic and why it forms, given

its generic quality, the basis for an ontopolitical substitution of biopower. In fact, says

Massumi, its appearance is simultaneously generic in the full-spectrum of the

accident and singular in its preciseness. Faced with this singular-generic quality of

the Earths participation, preemptive power takes hold in the shape of environmental

power rejoining naturing natures [the unpredictable, change-bringing, singular-

generic] force of emergence, to ride it out, to highjack it. Full spectrum preemptive

power is an ontopower that highjacks naturing natures force of emergence by

counter-mimicking the accident.20. By co-opting natures singular-generic

appearance, power not only manages territories of being [biopolitics] but also forces

the individual to inhabit the fear of natures holistic threat, that is, natures mode of

expression.21

19 Brian Massumi, National Enterprise Emergency, Theory, Culture and Society, N. 26 (2010) 162.

20 Idem, 167.

21 Idem.


18/20

If economics grew in correlation with ecosystemics, so power builds itself as

such. And just as economics deepened in probabilism, so ontopower grows in it; it

embodies becoming, it creates futures in the shape of projections. This is how it

occupies totality and becomes diffuse. Whenever the Earth strikes, ontopower is

already there to disguise any attachment of the Earth with us humans by continuously

placing threat outside again. In this sense, ontopower and economics are close allies.

But while the economy, particularly financial markets, oscillate by reason of

themselves, that is, of their own psychology (a fear of the future), ontopower

capitalizes on economic fear: after the tsunami comes financial loss and world

instability. In a receding (developed) world, both physically and virtually, the

economy no longer looks forward with hope and prospects of revenue, but rather with

fear of loss and bankruptcy. It hallucinates aggression, invasion and attack. In a world

now facing the end of growth, that is, of growth understood as the engine of the

economy, such fear takes the shape of impotency, of a restlessness leading to panic

and a despaired, yet no less strategic, manipulation of capital. 22 That it might be so

does not mean that the financial markets have understood the present moment on

the contrary: somehow the markets have not let go of the growth paradigm, much less

of prospects and predictions, of futurology. The reason is that they cannot, precisely

due to the correlation between probabilism and ontopower. For just as ontopower

capitalizes on financial fear, markets transform their own incapacity, the fear of

coming gloom, into ontopower. Growth, from here on, is the imagination of new

spaces, spaces for occupation.

Example: the financial stress propelled by the accident at Fukushima answers

to such strategic, more than ideological perhaps, attachment to the necessary illusion

of growth. After Fukushima, Japan will not be able to keep its economy growing,

rather it will recede, its debt increase, international business relocate, find new

havens, new markets, new labour. The accident is the excuse for restructuring.

22 Modern culture has equated economic expansion with the future, so that for economists, it is impossible to

consider the future independently of economic growth. But this identification has to be abandoned and the conceptof the future rethought. The economic mind cannot make the jump to this new dimension, it cannot understand this

paradigm shift. This is why the economy is in crisis and why economic wisdom cannot cope with the new reality. Also: In the 1990s the overall economy expanded euphorically while the net economy was expected to usher in

the prospect of infinite growth. This was a deception. Even if the general intellect is infinitely productive, thelimits to growth are inscribed in the affective body of cognitive work: limits of attention, of psychic energy, of

sensibility. Franco Berardi, The Future After the End of the Economy, e-flux journal30 (2011) http://e-flux.com/journal/view/269#_ftn1


19/20

Everything has to start over again, but then again differently. Even though the

management of the actual (by way of projections) is increasingly central to the

economy, the financial markets do not care about the present, rather preferring to spin

uncontrollably, though methodically, into a laboratorial future.

Speculation is perhaps the most important word at the beginning of this

century. Ranging from market mechanics to military strategy, from users creative

demands in an all-inclusive market to the radical return to metaphysics in philosophy:

the Speculative Turn ranges all of society. Long gone are the days of postmodern

revolution, of revolving endlessly in a multicultural present. Out of such miasma, we

are now living in a projection, in folding and unfolding relations, in what is in relation

to what will come already as known, already projected, already analysed. In

promise since Darwin and Mendels materialist-probabilistic revolution in ecology,

the current dominance of statistics over life permeates our speculative inclination.23

Yet, as the techniques of probability teach us, to see ourselves once more looking

forward to the future would be mistaken. The future no longer comes. Rather it is

generatedin the now. Just as temporality, under a managerial-ecosystemic paradigm

might be shifting to a time of hybrid relations, so the future is ever present in

speculation. We speculate on the qualities of an overlap.

If the Earth, or nature, indeed plays a main role in these news forms of

modulation, in order to gain political control over these it seems vital to comprehend

natures immanence and modes of representation. To grasp Earths whims when these

manifest, but also before these manifest, that is, at pace with the inhabitation of

disaster, the instrumentalisation of time, the creation of scenarios, the live feed of

diagrams. The task does not seem easy, particularly because the accident, as a mode

of expression of the Earth, appears as absolutely non-democratic. The Earth always

appears as the Martian, the terrorist. Unfortunately for Latour, it is not bound to

parliament, unless parliament is reshaped anew.

With this in mind, consider Reagans most effective media strategy one last

time: the broadcasting of his own organs as political tools, or to be correct as

probabilistic. An ever-present presence, a live feed, feeding the affective imagination

of a nation. Yet, a present presence living out of a speculation on death, on an ending

23 Daniel Simberloff, A Succession of Paradigms in Ecology (1980) 03-39.


20/20

just as the earthly face of disaster. Ontopower is always apocalyptic. From the

prosumer takeover of industries crumbling old hierarchies of representation, to the

fear of radiation in a moment of debate over self-sustaining energy production,

ontopower is the fear of threat produced for production. But it must also affirm new

spaces of invention. For the new spaces of political ecology, ontopolitics can be a

barrier but also a frontier. The economy is indeed right: the ontological is political.

But in its fear of loss of control, of contamination and implosion, it is also wrong.

While projecting itself forward, the economy still clings to the past, to past structures.

It is conservative in thought though not in shape. It opens itself to the cosmos while

wishing, with full force, to keep it outside, to deny it proper modes of representation.

Political ecology, nonetheless, can make this paradox (of ontological collapse and

representation failure) prolific. If ecology and economics have for long mimicked

each other, political ecology might just have do it once more now.

* This essay takes as starting point, and assumes as veritably true, the events narrated by J.G. Ballard in

his short story The Secret History of World War 3. The tale can be found in The Complete Stories of

J.G. Ballard(New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009).

Documents

Pedro Neves Marques the Earth as Stakeholder After Ww3