Floating Bodies - Adrian Lahoud
Floating Bodies - Adrian Lahoud
Floating Bodies - Adrian Lahoud
Fig. 7. Atmospheric The Sahel is one of the most heavily researched climatic zones in the world
carbon absorption by because it was the first to undergo significant and initially inexplicable cli-
plants. The fluidity of
climate change is poorly matic variation at timescales longer than a decade — longer therefore than
understood through
cartographic forms of
the El Niño Southern Oscillation cycle of seven years. 14 The droughts
representation. As this brought more than deprivation. An institutional apparatus of international
still from a visualiza-
tion demonstrates, the
aid agencies, donor organizations, financial institutions, medical missions,
amount of vegetation and other bodies united by concern, contractual obligation, and a lega-
in the Sahel changes
Towering some fifteen kilometers above the surface of the earth, the for- Fig. 6. Biases in the
dramatically with the cy of colonial politics arrived soon after. Then, with the waning of the
Atlantic Inter-tropical
mation of these cells is held in check by the stability of the atmosphere in Convergence Zone (ITCZ)
seasons, especially the drought in the ’90s and the recovery of the Sahel from its extended period
monsoon rains which
the area. Much like the crystallization processes where small irregularities in seasonal interannual
sweep up and down the of desiccation, a second wave of expertise converged upon the region:
variations for a coarse
in structure initiate the cascading process of molecular transformation, and a high resolution,
continent. These oscilla-
tions repeat but they do
meteorologists, climate scientists, anthropologists, and ethnographers.
only if a certain threshold of instability is exceeded can the process of cell coupled climate model.
This visualization
so differentially as the Like an epistemic force field, every problem in the environment would
patterns shift and adjust
genesis begin. 10 As tropical ocean temperatures rise, the threshold for effectively shows the
according to annual and
soon attract new forms of knowledge around it. If a complex causal chain
movement of the ITCZ,
this instability also rises because it depends on a temperature differential especially the insta-
decadal time scales due stretching over five thousand kilometers threads industrial activity in the
to variations in anthro-
between warm and cold seawater. 11 bility of different Sea
pogenic forcing. The Ruhr Valley to the number of water droplets hitting the ground in Senegal,
Surface Temperatures
Rain results from this instability. In the fertile equatorial region (SST) as they meet and
variability of this redistri- Darfur or Burkina Faso, then another thread can be constructed in the
bution poses a continual
called the Intertropical Convergence Zone, this effect is organized intermix along a shift-
challenge to populations opposite direction. If the first thread weaves through the atmosphere
ing equatorial line. The
around a conflict between mechanisms working at two different scales. temperature differences
that must find ways to and the ocean, this second thread links distant territories across the
earn a livelihood from
In the first, the increase in the mean ocean temperature makes the indicated here by a red-
the land such as farmers surface of the earth. The two threads touch when the rain hits the earth.
green color spectrum
and pastoralists. Image
threshold for convection difficult to reach. In the second, a local increase are a critical factor in the
source: NASA/Goddard
This moment of contact rests on a plurality of causes that must conspire
in terrestrial radiation increases evaporation and precipitation. The winner strength of the African
Monsoon, which depends
Space Flight Center, 2009. in just the right way to produce an effect, be it drought or rain, or a delayed
drives rainfall in West Africa. 12 on differentials in SST
for its intensity. Source:
Let us put this another way. Every single event of fossil fuel com- Tom Delworth and Keith
bustion in Europe conspires to send a small stream of aerosol particles Dixon, National Oceanic
Atmospheric Administra-
into the atmosphere. If these particles are emitted in the right kind of tion (NOAA)/Geophysical
weather system, they will be carried high into the atmosphere and trans- Fluids Dynamics Labora-
tory (GFDL), 2008.
ported along air currents toward the Atlantic Ocean. Here, suspended
thousands of meters above the seas, the particles will interact with
incoming and outgoing solar energy, changing the temperature of the
seas below. This affects evaporation levels in the sea and transforms
moisture supply to the atmosphere. The shift in moisture supply in turn
affects the location, timing, and intensity of the wet season that brings
annual rain to the Sahel.
If it is the case that activity in one part of the globe triggers a cli-
matic bifurcation in another then mapping, understanding, and repro-
ducing this system of gradients and differentials constitutes more than
a particularly intractable problem in thermodynamic calculus, particle
transport, or physicochemical interaction. What it becomes instead
is the medium through which a future political claim will be made and
a present crime prosecuted.
We are in a different world of proof than that of the archetypical …when a concurrence of causes produces an effect, these causes have
smoking gun. to be studied one at a time, and their laws separately investigated […]
— Jack Weinstein, Major General in the US Air Force 32 since the law of the effect is compounded of the laws of all the causes
which determine it.
Because the mechanics of climate form a complicated transport sys- — John Stuart Mill 34
tem, redistributing the effects of pollution according to a process that
is nonlinear and transboundary, the space of violation is separated Because any event, climatic or otherwise, is irreducible to a single expla-
from the space of its repercussion. Those least responsible for carbon nation, one way to imagine each event is as an outcome of causes conspir-
emission will be most susceptible to drought and rising sea levels. 33 ing, or more simply as other events intersecting. In turn, because each
Edmund Locard’s principle that “every contact leaves a trace” — cause is also an event in itself with its own private network of precursors,
the very cornerstone of modern forensics — still applies, but with one it is impossible to fully explicate any single event since this would mean
impossible catch: the contact and the trace drift apart, carried away following an infinite network. This is not really a problem, however, since
on ocean currents and diffused into the atmosphere. The earth’s cli- some causes will contribute to the event’s character more than others.
mate loosens the bond between cause and effect; it breaks the link By disturbing this network of relations we can test which connections
between attribution, responsibility, and, potentially, justice. In the are relevant: an easy way to imagine this is to think about cutting threads
elongated space-time between the crime and its consequence, myriad on a web — if the web stays the same shape the thread was not structurally
forces intervene — clarifying them becomes not only a scientific priori- important. To “explain” an event is to set out causes with regard to a con-
ty, but also a political and ethical one. text; implicit in this idea is that any reliable explanation will attend to the
Furthermore, because the cause is in some way coextensive with most relevant of causes — effectively pruning back unimportant threads
everyday life, and because its consequence often occurs beyond our in order to limit the potentially infinite space of explanation. 35 In turn, this
everyday experience of that life, the consequence is no longer recog- means that any explanation is always indeterminate since it rests on a net-
nizable or even proximate to its cause. We are summoned, then, work of amputated relations which are implicit or presupposed without
to address a problem whose consequences we may never experience. being stated, either because they are thought not to bear upon the event
Testimony, institutions of justice, their jurisdictions and modes significantly, or because they are commonly understood and do not need
of political, legal, or financial redress emerge from events that are repeating. The Latin phrase ceteris paribus, meaning “all other things being
more historically/experientially familiar. Unlike many indigenous equal” — or, less literally, “in the absence of disturbing factors” — refers
cosmologies, Judeo-Christian ethics is finally circumscribed by the to this method first described by Mill and found within different forms
horizon of human experience; Western ethical systems drawn from of reasoning, of isolating causal factors from a complex network. 36
the Enlightenment and forming the basis for Western law have little Let’s now consider the way some climatic zones produce a morphologi-
purchase on events beyond this horizon — events that are impercepti- cally distinct type of weather pattern. The pattern exists in series, repeating
ble without sophisticated technical mediation. In order for an alter- annually over each wet season or, as with the El Niño cycle, every seven years;
native ethico-legal reasoning to secure itself, a new kind of aesthetic none of these forms are identical and yet they share a recognizable structure.
and epistemic space must be established. This fragile tethering Then let’s suppose that at some point in time, a mutation — that is to say
of different ways of knowing calls for a style of thought that is more a signal — emerges from the noise of “normal” morphological variability
attentive to shifting sites of veridiction, matters of sense and intelligi- (the norm is in itself entirely contingent, the invocation of nature’s end —
bility. Much is at stake in holding this diverse series together if it means anything it points only to the difficulty of establishing a baseline
(as we will see when we turn to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Con- or reference in the sea of temporal variation). In attempting to identify this
ference in the conclusion of the essay); displacing violence from the mutation, different causal factors will be isolated step-by-step in a simulation
battlefield to the forum already required no less. Before this, howev- to see if a correlation can be found between a specific cause and this specific
er, it is worth considering climatological reasoning and the question mutation or, as in the words of the previous analogy, a thread whose loss
of scale a little more closely since it is here in the calculus—in fact, changes the shape of the web. However, correlation in itself does not give
in the very mathematics — of the model that the political insists causation — it doesn’t say anything about the process that makes these vari-
on re-inscribing itself. ables relate. In order for causation to be determined, first there must be proof
518 Floating Bodies Forensic Architecture in collaboration with SITU Research Ecologies 519