- Designing the Earth Layer
By way of summary, we note that energy ecologies can confound state geographies because they work both below and above the scale of states ’ formal capacities to sense and observe which, in principle, extend only up to the limit of horizontal looping borders. Ecological emergencies suggest new geopolitical design based on data and energy jurisdictions, ones that can augment the nation-state, if not also demote it or defer it. In doing so, they substitute a politics of anthropic subjects for one of carbon flows, energy flows, and their effects, and in this regard, politics is partially refocused from the qualification of elections to the quantification of electrons. But this shift cannot by itself design for less violence, as any sovereign force, including The Stack, requires a continuing supply of disruption to renew its assignment to enforce force as such. As in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the failure of a state to maintain even basic infrastructural protection can ultimately serve to renew its charter to expand and regularize protection against an external enemy, now cast as a hostile climate provoked into unpredictable patterns and requiring a new bulwark of collective mitigation and enforcement. These are less geodesign programs of curation and creation than of a militarization of chemistry, a different and unwinnable type of warfare. <sup>73</sup> It frames the unspoken-for public face of a quantified landscape not as our open perch within a particular astronomic neighborhood, but as a frontier of dangerous and vengeful toilets dotting plots of Earth as yet unmapped until brought inside as mere agriculture.
Instead of fighting a ubiquitous ecological enemy with higher-resolution countermeasures, a key aspect of the design program is to invent better economic technologies for valuing and evaluating what is inside and outside as such. Our ecological emergency is an exceptional state of things largely built out of unaccounted-for transactional externalities, neither legal nor illegal per se, but that nevertheless cannot be expunged from the physical world that a sovereign state tries to see, name, and count. In relation to Foucault ’ s identification of a sovereignty of markets, that sovereignty is partially held in the right to identify whether an externality is in fact external, and so whether the exception needs to be accounted for. <sup>74</sup> Determining what is and is not accounted for — addressed as being inside or outside the economy — is also a determination of what that sovereignty is accountable to. Today this works by the normal sorting of what is and is not an externality, not only to a given transaction but also to the core reason of an economic model that might be validated or invalidated thereby. For those models and for what they do and do not claim in total, the right to deny identification is as essential as the right to assign it. For an emergent governance of ecologies, that includes a right of denial regarding the existence and extent of climate change itself, and in gradient degrees, this death wish spans all vestigial Anthropocenic political theologies. It claims an equivalent right to adjudicate ecological emergency not by omniscience but by a kind of blindness, and in this case, that blindness is a form of unreason willing to see only what it has already seen, but not what actually appears to it now. It is a sovereign decision drawn from inverse hallucinations: not seeing what is actually right there in front of you. It arranges for both an absolutized surveillance, as well as the right not to see what appears in the lens, and so in this regard, “ seeing like a state ” or “ seeing like a market ” also means protecting blind spots as needed.
Earth Layer
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