TY - JOUR

T1 - Excess, catastrophe, and climate change

AU - Yusoff, Kathryn

PY - 2009/10/26

Y1 - 2009/10/26

N2 - This paper seeks to give expression to notions of excess within economies of climate change. The paper begins by addressing the dominance of scientific modelling in the scientific and political constructions of climate change manifested through general circulation models and scientific visualisation. Considering this 'digital earth', the paper further investigates how the unit-based accumulation of earth data has actively secured the production of political responses that have both emulated and reinstated a model of accounting (such as the Stern Review and carbon trading). Considering the rendering of digital earth as a specific assemblage of globalisation produced through digitalisation, I argue that the digital realm is productive of its own forms of excess (expressed in aesthetics and globalism). I suggest how this excessive globality reveals its own fragmentation through negative presentation. Drawing from Georges Bataille's notion of expenditure and Maurice Blanchot's writing of the disaster I seek to describe a terrain of knowledge and loss that breaks with this aforementioned circuit of accounting, and instead considers another kind of relation (Bataille's concept of expenditure) to account for the wasting of the world. The paper concludes with a Bataillean 'sketch' to consider how this excess may be recuperated as an emergent ethic within the disaster yet to come.

AB - This paper seeks to give expression to notions of excess within economies of climate change. The paper begins by addressing the dominance of scientific modelling in the scientific and political constructions of climate change manifested through general circulation models and scientific visualisation. Considering this 'digital earth', the paper further investigates how the unit-based accumulation of earth data has actively secured the production of political responses that have both emulated and reinstated a model of accounting (such as the Stern Review and carbon trading). Considering the rendering of digital earth as a specific assemblage of globalisation produced through digitalisation, I argue that the digital realm is productive of its own forms of excess (expressed in aesthetics and globalism). I suggest how this excessive globality reveals its own fragmentation through negative presentation. Drawing from Georges Bataille's notion of expenditure and Maurice Blanchot's writing of the disaster I seek to describe a terrain of knowledge and loss that breaks with this aforementioned circuit of accounting, and instead considers another kind of relation (Bataille's concept of expenditure) to account for the wasting of the world. The paper concludes with a Bataillean 'sketch' to consider how this excess may be recuperated as an emergent ethic within the disaster yet to come.

KW - Climate change

KW - Maurice Blanchot

KW - Georges Bataille

KW - Climate modelling

KW - Digital Earth

KW - GIS

KW - Disaster

U2 - 10.1068/d7407

DO - 10.1068/d7407

M3 - Journal article

VL - 27

SP - 1010

EP - 1029

JO - Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

JF - Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

SN - 0263-7758

IS - 6

ER -