糖心TV

Guest Speaker: Romain Chouffart, The Arctic Institute

Chair: Daniel Matthews, University of 糖心TV Law School

Title: 'Arctic, Autonomous, Artificial: Thinking of Normative Climate Exosomatisation'

Abstract: As the material premises of polar order withdraw because anthropogenic climate change, technological proposals have appeared to manufacture the environment, to re-create the conditions for flourishing ecosystems, and broadly to help in the fight against the worst of the climate crisis. In essence, what these proposals seek to do is to manufacture the substrate that governance has always presupposed with the promise to hold in place the body on which the law is set to rest. This paper reads that promise through Bernard Stiegler鈥檚 idea of exosomatisation, the externalisation of vital functions into technical organs, and argues that such interventions also externalise normativity. For instance, The freeze-thaw cycle of Arctic sea ice already performs normative work of certain kind. It times passage, distributes access, sets thresholds into space before the law, or rather before legal temporalities, can exist. When autonomous technologies take over that cycle, the normative ability migrates with them, and the scientific and technical knowledge about how much ice there ought to be, where, and for whom, becomes inscribed into infrastructure that executes it continuously, without deliberation and without a subject.

This paper argues that this a conceptual mistake to think of geoengineering governance, and all its ramifications, as being about the legal regulation of a new technology. Rather, it is more effective to understand it a contest over where normativity resides and whether autonomy, read as auto-nomos, can be recreated artificiality where the nomos derives not from a subject but by a made thing. The instinct at this point is often to work against the artifice, as if an autonomous nature had been surrendered to machines. In that respect, the paper also reads exosomatisation through the additional theoretical lens of Xenofeminism to suggest that nothing about autonomy was ever natural. The planet to which law would defer is already an object in which artificiality is the condition of planetary governance. To defend a self-regulating earth system against its artificial double is potentially the most counter-productive naturalising move.