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Turbulent Worlds
Financial Markets and Environmental Crisis

Melinda Cooper

Abstract
Focusing on the speculative methodologies used to generate models of the
financial and meteorological future, this article develops a series of theses
on the evental and atmospheric quality of contemporary power. What is
at stake in the circulation of capital today, I argue, is not so much the
exchange of equivalents as the universal transmutability of fluctutation.
Whether we are dealing with the turbulence of world financial markets or
that of complex earth systems, the non-dialectical relation can itself be
extracted, recombined and liquefied, as it were, in a dimension of its own.
In the same way that financial derivatives price the variable relation
between and across national currencies, weather derivatives now make it
possible to issue contracts on the unknowable contingencies embedded in
complex atmospheric relations. This reconfiguration of value requires a
thorough rethinking of classical sociological conceptions of debt, promise
and political violence.
Key words
biopolitics debt

environmental politics

financial markets

imperialism

Worlds in Transition
HE INTEGRATION of financial markets in the early 1970s initiated
a period of enduring and structural turbulence in world economic
affairs. When the convertibility of the dollar against gold was
replaced by floating and volatile exchange rates, the unpredictable was, of
necessity, factored into the calculus of world economic futures. Henceforth
turbulence could not be prevented; it could only be managed. The abolition
of national controls over exchange rates has not, however, signalled the
demise of imperial power as such. Rather it has engendered a qualitatively

Theory, Culture & Society 2010 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 27(23): 167190
DOI: 10.1177/0263276409358727

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new form of imperial power (neither national nor international in nature)


of which the United States has been the chief beneficiary. It is not necessary to look for some conspiracy of interests to recognize that the recurrence of chaotic instabilities in the liberalized markets of the developing
world has in fact become highly profitable to a certain kind of internationally mobile financial institution. The political theorist Peter Gowan has
argued that US imperial power is dependent on the sporadic production of
monetary and financial turbulence in the emerging economies (1999:
11524). The periodic financial crises of South East Asia and Latin
America have been far from deleterious to US financial interests, since the
threat of devaluation impels the private funds invested in states to flood
back into the US markets, where they have lowered interest rates and
fuelled successive stock market booms. Thus Gowan concludes that the
big hedge funds are not a speculative aberration of US capital but are
rather acting in the interests of its macroeconomic health, which is in turn
inseparable from the interests of Wall Street. The production of monetary
and financial turbulence, whether threatened or real, exercises an undeniable political leverage. It enables the international financial institutions to force through the privatization of state industries, welfare and
infrastructure, and to further impose forms of debt-financing (securitized
debt and short-term loans, for example) that are most volatile and most
profitable to the institutional investment funds. In the current context,
there is something both strategic and accidental about this form of political intervention, since it relies for its effects on a market-generated turbulence that can materialize in any place at any time and whose unfolding
is essentially unpredictable. That US financial markets are able to navigate
this field of turbulent relations without (until recently) succumbing to their
more dangerous side effects is a function of the exceptional status of the
US dollar. The demise of dollargold convertibility magnified rather than
restricted the reach of American financial markets the dollar, after all,
is no longer accountable to any standard of value yet continues to function
as the worlds de facto reserve currency. Liberated from the necessity of
having to pay off its own debts, the United States, alone of all nations, has
been empowered to release unlimited quantities of non-convertible dollars
into global circulation. Through the act of fiat debt creation the US is effectively able to create (and recreate) a world empire, inspiring the practical
if not willing confidence of the worlds investors in the trustworthiness of
its promises and the liquidity of its markets.1 We need not follow Gowan
in insisting that the US is destined to remain the epicentre of this economy
of turbulence in order to appreciate the suggestiveness of his argument.
Indeed, as US international influence and the oildollar connection starts
to look increasingly fragile, it is becoming conceivable that the locus of
world financial power might shift, without affecting the productivity of
turbulence per se.
Today the US-dollar denominated world of integrated financial markets
is in crisis. The recent financial turmoil has brought to an end the immunity
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of the US economy from the turbulence of world financial flows, calling into
question the willingness of global investors to sustain the liquidity of Wall
Street capital markets. Even a former chief economist of the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) has remarked that the US has experienced the kind
of precipitous decline in liquidity, credit and employment that, in recent
history, was seen only in emerging market crises (Johnson, 2009). The turbulence that could once be safely exported to the peripheries of the world
economy has now returned to haunt the heartland. For the moment, the US
is protected by the singular privilege of paying its foreign debts in its own
currency, which it is able to create at will. Nevertheless, a turning point has
been reached, not only with respect to the immunity of the US domestic
economy but also its continuing sustainability as world financial power. The
2008 report of the National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2025: A
Transformed World, expresses concern that the US is currently relying on
an exorbitant privilege which may at some point cease to exist (National
Intelligence Council, 2008).
Doubling but not quite coinciding with the financial crisis is the
growing consensus within the US political and financial class that global
environmental risk (of which climate change has become the key marker)
is not something that can be indefinitely exported beyond American borders.
However tenuous its precise connection with the phenomenon of global
warming, Hurricane Katrina can be singled out as the turning point when
climate change began to be treated seriously as a problem of imperial
management. The change in tack had as much (if not more) to do with the
growing awareness of the geopolitical costs of oil dependence as any sudden
environmentalist epiphany.
In response to these intimations of crisis, an emerging policy discourse
associated with centrist think-tanks such as the Center for a New American
Security (CNAS) and the Center for American Progress contends that
America has no choice but to revisit the kind of grand strategy initiated in
the aftermath of the Second World War. This would not mean a return to
Cold War military thinking but the invention of a new grand strategy capable
of moving beyond the oil-centric geopolitics of the Bush era (see for example
Brimley et al., 2008; Burke and Parthemore, 2008). The problem
confronting these strategists is how to navigate the US-dollar denominated
world through the extreme turbulence of financial, climate and energy crisis.
Will North American power as world power survive the end of oil? Will the
US be able to maintain its exorbitant privilege that of issuing the worlds
reserve currency in the face of geopolitical alignments between China,
Russia, Africa and the Middle East? All of these questions are connected
in more or less perverse ways to the increasingly visible effects of climate
change. As ice caps melt, formerly un-navigable ocean routes and deep-sea
ocean beds have been opened up to imperial conquest. The prospect of
climate change and dwindling fossil fuel supplies has intensified rather than
diminished territorial struggles over oil reserves and transportation routes.
At the same time, new spaces of conquest have been opened up this time,
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no longer the recesses of the earth and sea but the flow space of hydrological
currents linking ocean, freshwater, atmosphere and landmass evaporation.
The CNAS has recently launched a project on Americas role as protector
of the global commons a problematic that has historically been closely
connected to efforts to expand the American frontier.2 It defines the global
commons as the air, sea and skies the space of atmospheric circulation in
which struggles over new and old energy sources are likely to be played out.
It is not only the actual space of atmospheric circulation that the US aspires
to dominate, however, but also and more importantly, the abstract, topological space of the securitized risk markets, in which weather turbulence
plays an increasingly significant role. It is a measure of the growing political imbrication of climate, energy and economic futures that some of the
most far-reaching of current proposals for coping with climate change are
being developed in the financial sector. The Stern Review, sponsored by the
UK Treasury in 2006, promotes financial solutions to climate change not
only as a means of funding the transition from carbon-based to alternative
fuels but also as a lucrative business opportunity in itself (Stern, 2006). The
market for weather risk management extends beyond carbon trading to
include a whole spectrum of novel financial instruments designed to price
and manage the risks associated with extreme weather events, natural catastrophes and unexpected temperature fluctuations (Mills, 2008). The worlds
major weather risk markets are currently housed in the United States the
expansion of these markets would therefore seem to offer one possible exit
strategy from the liabilities of the dollaroil nexus.
The convergence of US strategic, geopolitical and financial interests
in an overarching logistics of turbulence goes some way to explaining the
recent volte-face of the US political class on the question of international
negotiations on climate change. In the build-up to the Copenhagen conference of December 2009, which is set to revise the Kyoto protocol for 2012,
the US was looking to establish its exceptional position in world politics not
by absenting itself from the negotiating table but rather by imposing itself
as world leader in the commercial and political opportunities offered by
climate change. Under the rubric of climate change security, an emerging
policy discourse insists on the necessity of responding to financial, ecological and energy crisis in the context of an integrated grand strategy of
imperial power.
My intent in this article is not to offer any predictions about the
evolving fortunes of American imperial power. Nor am I interested in adding
to the vast futurological literature on the combined financial, climate and
energy crises. I would like to focus instead on the specific futures methodology that has come to inform strategic planning in each of these domains.
What I am referring to here is scenario planning, a forecasting technique
which attempts to divine not this or that aspect of the future but the multiple
future worlds attendant on alternative actions in the present. In its
globalizing scope, scenario planning might be characterized as the practical, methodological counterpart to the power relations described by world
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systems theory.3 The scenarios method is the preferred risk-analysis


technique of global political institutions (the IMF, the World Economic
Forum, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC]) and
national institutions with a vested interest in world systemic events, most
notably the United States. It is perhaps the most ubiquitous and most consequential of epistemologies in contemporary politics. Yet it has received
surprisingly little academic attention, other than the most technocratic in
nature.4 I will begin by looking at the history of scenario planning as a
futures methodology, arguing that it was adopted by conservative thinktanks in the United States as the latters imperial power came to be aligned
with the logistics of global turbulence. I will then turn to the specific uses
of scenario planning in the weather risk markets, where financial and meteorological turbulence are coupled together in new instruments such as
weather derivatives, before turning once again to the strategic uses of
scenarios in the discourse of climate security. More generally I am interested in the suggestive resonances between scenario planning and the
philosophy of possible worlds. With its insistence on the world-creative
force of imagination, belief and confidence, possible worlds philosophy
lends itself all too readily to the operations of contemporary financial and
imperial power. It is, however, too closely invested in the operations of power
to reflect on its constitutive idealism, an idealism that blinds it to the
intimate relationship between imperialism in the speculative mode and the
pre-emptive form of political violence. In the concluding part of the article,
I will reflect on the convergence between financial responses to climate
change and the growing interest, within the US polity, in climate change as
a security concern.
Climate Change, Scenarios and Possible Worlds
It was in the context of the first oil crisis that strategists associated with
French petroleum companies Shell and ELF began experimenting with new
forecasting techniques designed to register the essentially uncertain nature
of the future. In a world economic environment in which prices were increasingly volatile, what these strategists sought to develop was a mathematically
rigorous method that nevertheless built on the non-quantitative and emotive
dimension of our relation to the future. The prospective method recognized
that degrees of wishfulness (belief, confidence and trust) play a formative
role in the realization of futures. In the words of one of its theorists, Michel
Godet, prospectives are anticipated retrospectives (1982: 296). Their
collective action is unpredictable yet, under circumstances unspecified by
the theory itself, decisive in shaping the future state of the world the world
as it will have been. In the United States, the method was adopted and
perfected by the strategist Herman Kahn in his work at the conservative
think-tank, the Hudson Institute (Aligica, 2004). It was Kahn who popularized the practice of scenario planning as a collective thought-experiment in
which specialists from different disciplines are asked to imagine and unfold
a series of alternative futures from a position of present uncertainty. The
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initial selection of alternative scenarios forms a crucial first step in this


methodology it needs to include both the more obvious and the more unexpected of futures, futures that test the limits of the imagination. The
adoption of scenario planning as a privileged forecasting method signalled
a move away from the predictive strategies deployed in the context of the
Cold War and the international economic order established at Bretton
Woods. The pre-eminent futurological methods of the 1960s (the Delphi
method, games theory, equilibrium theory in neoclassical and postKeynesian economics) shared a common investment in the possibility of
prediction. While fixed exchange rates governed the relative stability of
trade between national economies and currencies, the doctrine of mutual
deterrence established a paranoid balance of terrors between the two world
superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States. On the economic and
strategic planes alike, the configuration of powers which confronted the
United States in the period following the Second World War was one which
seemed to demand a logistics of equilibrium. Herman Kahn, who had been
a champion of these predictive methodologies, now insisted that US strategy
needed to plan for that which is more or less predictable and to hedge
against that which is uncertain, both to be able to exploit favourable events
and guard against the consequences of unfavourable ones (Kahn, 1973:
1045).5 What he now referred to as scenario planning formed the basis for
his response to such ecological treatises as the Limits to Growth report, in
which he argued that US economic growth could indeed be pursued beyond
the limits of peak oil (Kahn and Simon, 1984).
Today scenario planning is deployed extensively across a range of
disciplines, institutions and policy sciences.6 It has been adopted as a longterm planning technique by Royal Dutch Shell and other energy companies
faced with the enduring uncertainty of oil prices and the political instability of the worlds oil supply regions. International financial institutions such
as the World Economic Forum use it as a means of mapping out the uncertain futures of globally integrated financial markets. In the wake of the
financial crisis, reinsurers have called for its systematic use as a preemptive risk management tool in the securitized risk markets (CRO Forum,
2009). The applications of scenario planning are not limited to the global
capital markets however. As the natural sciences adopt the framework of
complex adaptive systems to model the dynamics of ocean currents, atmospheric turbulence and the hydrological cycle, scenario planning provides
an insight into the multiple and uncertain futures engendered by their interactions (Peterson, 2005). Thus the benchmark climate change futures
published annually by the United Nations (UN) IPCC are developed using
the scenario method. The IPCC defines a scenario as a coherent, internally
consistent and plausible description of a possible future state of the world
and rates the plausibility of each scenario in terms of the degree of confidence it inspires rather than its mathematical probability (Carter et al.,
2007: 145). Scenarios are therefore not predictions or forecasts but are
alternative images without ascribed likelihoods of how the future might
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unfold (2007: 145). The scenario method has been particularly influential
in the United States. Post-9/11, it has become standard procedure in
disaster planning and response, where it serves as a model for simulation
exercises designed to prepare for the unexpected crisis event. It is also the
method of choice for public administrations, private think-tanks and
academic research institutes interested in shaping the future of strategic
and economic decisions around energy, foreign policy and the natural environment. The National Intelligence Council publishes a scenario-based
report every four years, which offers three alternative perspectives on the
evolution of key global trends (geopolitical, strategic and economic) over the
following 15 years. As explained on the website:
Scenarios are plausible alternative views about how the future may develop.
They differ from forecasting in that they do not attempt to predict the future
based on linear extrapolations of the past. Scenarios do not seek to project
the future. Instead, they focus on the identification of discontinuities and how
these could potentially develop as a set over time.7

As a futures methodology, scenario planning is designed to foster


decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. Its focus is not risk as
such, but rather the radical uncertainty of unknowable contingencies
events for which it is impossible to assign a probability distribution on the
basis of past frequencies. Instead, it develops a semantics of counterfactual
propositions, opening up onto a pluriverse of alternative event-contingent
worlds. If x were to occur, what world would we be living in? If x had
occurred (or had not), what world would we be living in? As these discontinuous ramifications unfold, the spectrum of alternative futures is expanded
beyond the logical possibilities of simple prediction, affording us a glimpse
not only into the possible futures of the actual world but also into the proliferating pasts and futures of counterfactual worlds. Unrestrained by the principle of non-contradiction, these counterfactual worlds are able to entertain
contingencies that would be mutually exclusive in any one actual world.
The futures methodology of scenario planning bears a striking resemblance to possible worlds thinking, a philosophical current that has roots
both in Leibnizian ontology and the most pragmatic of contemporary logics.8
The problem of possible worlds lies at the very heart of Leibnizs metaphysics, tying together his early, practical observations on the combinatorial arts of probability with his later, speculative work on divine powers of
creation.9 For Leibniz, there is an internal correlation between objective
probability, mental conceivability and the greater or lesser propensity of
worlds to exist. The creatability of worlds corresponds to degrees of possibility in the mind of God. The actual world is the most perfectly conceivable in the mind of God indeed the best of all possible worlds because
it is a world absolutely free from contradiction. Contemporary possible
worlds, on the other hand, are contradiction-tolerant logics in this they
differ from Leibnizs conception. Indifferent to chronology, they are able to
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174 Theory, Culture & Society 27(23)

move backwards as well as forwards, positing futures from which a series


of alternative pasts can then be back-cast. The contemporary philosophy
of possible worlds is aligned with what is known as formal modal logic, or
the logic of possibility, necessity and contingency. It is interested in the
ways things could be, or could have been, modes of being that are rendered
by the grammatical constructions of the conditional or the subjunctive.
Relying on a methodology of counterfactual propositions, possible worlds
theories make semantic claims about the greater or lesser plausibility of
contingent or uncertain events. These propositions are of a subjective rather
than an objective nature. Contemporary possible worlds theories thus
establish a complex causal relationship between subjective expectation
(propositions about contingent events and the degree of credibility we assign
to them) and the actual creation of worlds, virtual or otherwise. The precise
ontological status of these worlds remains a matter of dispute. Is a possible
world creatable by virtue of its conceivability? And does the greater or lesser
conceivability of a world have a bearing on its propensity to come into existence? Certain of its philosophers claim that possible worlds are as real as
actual worlds, in other words, that the ways the world could be or could have
been are themselves actual states of the world possessed of their own
generative effects and sphere of influence.10 With their expansive ontological status and indifference to the law of non-contradiction, these
imaginative worlds are capable of enduring extremes of turbulence. In the
words of one philosopher, the logic of counterfactuals is that of Leibniz after
the death of God (Rescher, 1997: 121).
Claiming to conjure up worlds through the very act of promise, trust
and imagination, it is not difficult to see why the possible worlds of scenario
planning have held such an irresistible appeal for US strategists of the
neoliberal era. The philosophers of possible worlds have trouble distinguishing between the powers of speculative imagination and the actual event of
world creation. This, it might be argued, is precisely the delusion which has
beset American imperial power over the last few decades. American power,
after all, is premised on its continued ability to inspire confidence in the
creditworthiness of the dollar, which it creates at will.11 To speak of a
delusion here is not to denigrate the operative force of delusion as such.
Paraphrasing Marx, the imperial power of the US dollar is not so much a
metaphysical illusion as a real abstraction, a power to actualize the most
ethereal of relations (turbulence as the generic form of the contingent event)
into forces, qualities and quantities of the most material kind. This power
may not be precise in its effects but is nevertheless all-encompassing in its
ambitions (which is why effective challenges to US imperial power are also
so often inspired by fantasies of world dominion). It is a power that works
through the expansion of intensive as well as extensive frontiers the
continuous generation of new spheres of unpredictable, securitized risk
being the chief means through which it also seeks to realize its geopolitical
aims. Currently, the most contested of these frontiers is represented by
climate change and its attendant volatilities. I therefore now turn to an
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investigation of emerging financial markets in environmental, weatherrelated and climate-indexed products, before reflecting on the geopolitical
ambitions that function as their mirror image.
Trading Turbulence Climate Change Futures and Weather
Derivatives
The last decade has seen a rapid expansion of financial innovations
seeking to couple the economic risks of climate change with the riskdistributive capacities of the liberalized capital markets. In recent years,
the market for weather risk management has expanded beyond the more
familiar cap-and-trade credits to include a whole spectrum of novel financial instruments designed to price and manage the risks associated with
extreme weather events, natural catastrophes and unexpected turbulence.
The latter include catastrophe bonds, securities that manage the risks of
improbable but catastrophic natural events, and environmental derivatives,
financial instruments that respond to unpredictable fluctuation in the
weather. Initially, most weather contracts were designed to meet the needs
of a particular buyer and seller and were sold over the counter (OTC)
through large investment banks and insurance companies. As the market
has grown, there has been a trend toward the standardization of products
that are now traded like other derivatives through the Chicago Climate
Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which list and trade
futures and options on temperature indices for dozens of cities in the US,
Europe and Japan. As banks, insurance houses and hedge funds have
moved into weather products over the past five years, the market has
undergone a rapid expansion, to the point that the World Bank is now
pushing developing countries to adopt them as a way of managing climate
change risk. Interestingly, while the viability of derivatives as a form of
unregulated transnational money has come seriously into question over the
last year, trading in weather derivatives has been one of the few markets
to survive the credit crunch relatively unscathed.
The growth in markets for environmental risk is a direct consequence
of the internal transformations of the insurance industry over the past few
decades. The disintermediation of banking, finance and insurance in the
late 1980s and 1990s meant that insurance brokers were now able to
repackage and sell risk in the form of tradable securities. As the capital
markets became a legitimate sphere of risk-hedging for insurance companies, the worlds major reinsurers (Swiss Re, Munich Re, Allianz) began to
replace their formerly cautious investment strategies with newly designed
insurance-linked securities such as catastrophe bonds and weather derivatives (Sigma, 2005, 2006). While weather-related risk had once been
covered through indirect means, such as property insurance, the contingencies of the weather could now be directly hedged and traded in the capital
markets. The curious effect is that climate change and the critical or
singular events it may engender has become a speculative opportunity
like any other in a market hungry for critical events.
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There is of course a long history of metaphorical exchanges between


finance, meteorology and hydrodynamics. The mathematician Benot
Mandelbrot constructed an entire geometry of nature on the model of price
fluctuation in the commodity futures markets (2004). In Mandelbrots work,
the convertibility between natural turbulence and speculative finance is at
once analogical and realist. What Mandelbrot is proposing is something like
a speculative ontology of nature, in which the weather and the market are
subject to similar laws of unpredictable turbulence.12 In the current context,
such a proposition is both increasingly plausible and dangerously seductive, since it obviates any consideration of the historical process by which
environmental turbulence comes to be correlated with price and the political effects that derive from this conjunction. Today, the question of the
relationship between natural and financial turbulence is of considerable
practical interest to economists interested in pricing the weather for the
insurance industries. The irreversible, complex nature of the weather makes
it recalcitrant to actuarial models of risk management. If climate change can
be likened to an experiment in the atmospheric state of the world: we may
never be able to observe enough experiments to approximate the probability of global climate change in the relative frequency sense: such events are
inherently unique (Chichilnisky and Heal, 1993: 66). When we are unable
to calculate a probability distribution over possible future states of the
world, the risk becomes incalculable in statistical terms, and therefore uninsurable. There is no fundamental value, no equilibrium point of nature,
around which we could calibrate our predictions. In such situations, the
choice of alternatives is necessarily speculative and can only be expressed
in subjective terms, as a function of our relative degrees of confidence, belief
or uncertainty.
We recognize that there are several different options about what the impacts
of climate change are, but feel unable to choose definitely between these
alternatives. In such a case, it is natural to think of the frequency distribution of environmental changes as a state of the world, a risk, in the savage
sense: we do not know what value it will assume. (Heal and Kringstrom,
2002: 30)

The problem identified by these economists is that of decision-making under


conditions of uncertainty. Put simply, how is it possible to manage risk when
traditional insurance techniques are unworkable? How to assign a price to
the unknowable value? The authors suggest a number of alternatives. What
if we traded securities contingent on particular, unpredictable states of
nature? In other words, what if we correlated unknowable value to unpredictable nature and priced these in affective terms in the language of
confidence, trust and degrees of belief? This is in fact the solution that has
been offered by the invention of environmental derivatives, financial instruments designed to price and trade both in the uncertainties of the weather
and our own uncertainties about the future of climate change.
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Unlike other recently created climate-related instruments such as


catastrophe bonds, weather derivatives are tradable risk contracts that deal
with the possibility of adverse but non-catastrophic weather. These instruments allow businesses to protect their revenues from unexpected or
unfavourable weather conditions by transferring the risk onto the capital
markets. The most popular derivatives so far have been temperature-related
and are designed for energy producers who may be adversely affected by
unanticipated weather swings. Their pricing is based on the concept of
heating degree days (HDD) and cooling degree days (CDD), or rather on the
exposures related to these indexes. Other derivatives are linked to temperature-related germination times. Thus derivatives traded in the agricultural
sector use an index based on so-called GDDs or growing degree days.
Plants . . . and insects require a certain amount of heat to move from one
development stage to the next (for example, from seed to fruit, or egg to adult).
Before a seed or egg germinates or gestates, a certain temperature must be
reached; continued development is then a function of the temperature from
one day to the next. (Banks, 2002: 92)

Other products again are structured around physical flows (streamflow and
wind) and critical change-of-state events such as precipitation (snow, frost,
rain). Each contract involves a buyer and a seller who agree on the weather
index on which the contract is to be based, the time period and the index
threshold or strike. In a temperature-based weather swap, for example, two
companies who face opposite weather risks can enter into a contract, with
payments falling to one or the other party depending on whether the temperature moves above or below a certain threshold; while in weather-based call
and put options, the buyer receives a payment if the average temperature
over a given period falls above or below the strike threshold.13
Derivatives are contracts that allow a business to hedge against the
occurrence of unpredictable, adverse events ranging from exchange rate
fluctuation to political turmoil and extreme weather. Traded in the financial
markets, derivatives also allow investors to wager on the relative chances
of the derivatives contract itself, effectively transforming the risk-hedging
contract into an instrument of speculation. Janus-faced, derivatives merge
the actuarial and the speculative, circulating as hedging instruments and
wagers at one and the same time. A recently published manual for the derivatives trader urges the reader to adapt to the event time of the financial
markets (Webb, 2006: 910). What follows is a series of chapters introducing the investor to the complex menu of events now available for trading.
Volatile weather, exchange rate fluctuation, a turbulent political climate
all of these provide occasions for entering into a derivatives contract. So too
do the systemic catastrophe risks from financial crisis to hurricanes
which materialize once a certain, critical threshold of turbulence has been
crossed. Where the neoclassical economist discards the unexpected event
from his calculus of the future, the trader in derivatives focuses on the
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fluctuation itself and the critical points at which an unexpected event might
happen to occur. Derivatives-trading demands a particular kind of relationship to the future, one that might be characterized as speculative, as
opposed to predictive, expectation. Since the price assigned to the future is
itself a function of the collective expectations of all traders, no single
expectation can hope to offer a rational forecast.14
Prior to 1980, the bulk of derivatives trading was in commodity-related
futures allowing buyers to hedge against future price changes in a given
storable asset such as wheat or cotton, and each of these categories was
traded separately. Forwards, futures and options are all derivatives contracts
that speculate on the price volatilities of storable commodities, with differing degrees of abstraction. From the 1980s, however, these contracts were
rapidly superseded by derivative products that could be applied to nonstorable products such as financial instruments and repackaged among
themselves. Not only did futures markets begin to be dominated by transactions on financial instruments but also new types of derivative contracts
such as swaps emerged that were from the outset financially oriented and
could not be understood through the discourse on commodity derivatives
(Bryan and Rafferty, 2006: 48). In the process, it is the very relationship
between the measurable substance of the commodity its stored value
and the event-related nature of price that is reworked: where traditional
derivatives contracts traded in the future prices of commodities, financial
derivatives trade in futures of futures, turning promise itself into the means
and ends of accumulation.
In this regard, derivatives pose a number of challenges to orthodox
theories of money. If money is time, then time is no longer that which
measures the movement of commodities and the labour invested in them.
In what are called the money markets, money mediates itself and time
relates to time, becoming a function of its own fluctuation (LiPuma and Lee,
2004: 118). Thus money must be conceived within a logic of the event rather
than a dialectic of form, limit and measure (such as Hegel delineated in his
Science of Logic and Marx famously reversed in his derivation of the
commodity form). Interestingly this returns us to the very early work of Marx
the Marx who in his doctoral thesis on Lucretius referred to the clinamen
as the accidens of the accidens, an accident constitutive of entire worlds
(1975: 63, 51).
Derivatives challenge the idea that the circulation of money must be
anchored in some fundamental, underlying value, even of a conventional
kind. Indeed what derivatives trade in, according to Bryan and Rafferty, is
the very contestability of fundamental value.15 We cannot predict the unfolding of climate change and its effect on prices, even in the short term. Its
parameters of variation are unknowable. Yet we can create a derivatives
contract allowing us to wager on this very uncertainty. The derivatives
contract also challenges the causal definition of money in its relationship to
debt. If all money is born of debt, with its double reference to promise
and obligation, then what is the particular debt form of the derivative?
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Derivatives work through a process of financial leverage using debt


(borrowing) in order to generate surplus, which can then be used to borrow
an even larger amount of money.16 The generation of surplus from debt is
the classic form of capital accumulation, first identified by Marx in his
formula for interest-bearing capital M-M. Yet the leverage effect is magnified many times over in the case of derivatives, where what is being
exchanged is not simply a future claim to a given commodity, asset or risk
category but a future claim to an expansive network of fluidly interlinked
futures, at increasingly baroque levels of abstraction. By desubstantializing
and recombining risks across different asset classes, derivatives markets
engender an extreme internal sensitivity to disruptive events. When different kinds of derivative instruments are combined together, relatively small
wagers allow for an extraordinary degree of leverage over entire eventworlds. Conversely, relatively small, localized and seemingly punctual
events (a spate of foreclosures, for example) may reverberate across an
entire, interconnected network of qualitatively disparate assets, instruments
and markets, threatening also to implode a whole event-world the
financial market itself.
Theories of money as social relation have tended to assume that
modern money is vouchsafed by trust in the authority of the nation-state. In
this view, only national (or international) political institutions are capable
of issuing legitimate currency. Yet in a context where currency conversion
rates are unpredictable and beyond state control, national and international
forms of trust and authority cannot claim to underwrite cross-border transactions.17 In the absence of a single source of trustworthiness (whether gold
standard or national currency), financial derivatives have emerged as a de
facto money form, capable of straddling difference without reducing it to a
single standard of value. The derivative then is a relational value par excellence, one which no longer finds any nominal foundation in the nation-state.
For this reason, it is able to price events that the nation-state cannot or can
no longer underwrite. Foremost amongst these uninsurable events, as Ulrich
Beck (2008) has noted, is the global environmental risk.
In a globally integrated financial regime in which fixed exchange rates
have been abolished, derivatives have emerged as the new money-form, the
universal means for deciding the price of money. The absence of fundamental value or measure even of a nominal kind is a given in todays financial markets. There is no final determination to the value of value. No
equivalence across borders. No market equilibrium. Nevertheless, money
circulates. The derivative, then, can be defined as the instrument that allows
for the continuity of circulation in and across immeasurable difference. The
real abstraction of contemporary capitalist relations is not dialectic in nature
(if it ever was) but rather topological.18 Its world is one of absolute spacetime compression, in which metric distances are abolished in favour of
sensitivities at a distance and collapsible horizons. What is at stake in the
circulation of capital today is not so much the exchange of equivalents as
the universal transmutability of fluctuation. It is the event of turbulence
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180 Theory, Culture & Society 27(23)

itself that becomes tradable, even or indeed especially when its parameters
of variation are unknowable. In both cases, a reduction is involved. Where
commodity exchange reduces the world to a mass of standardized, qualitatively indifferent exchange values, what the market in derivatives extracts
from the noise and colour of the world are its event-making relations. The
turbulence engendered by connectedness. Turbulence is the event emerging
from an irresolvable relation between two or more flows that are themselves
relations. Derivatives are monetized relations of the relations of capital
(LiPuma and Lee, 2004: 86). Thus the derivative contract might respond to
the relation between two currencies, whose value is always fluctuating, or
it might respond to the relation between exchange rates themselves (the
relations of relations), or between kinds of relations, floating and fixed (as
in the swap contract). It may also express the relation between any number
of circulating flows (atmospheric, hydrological and ecosystemic), in short
the ensemble of relations that generate what we call the weather.
There is no doubt a certain elective affinity between global environmental risks and the denationalized form of promise embodied in instruments such as financial derivatives. This is not a natural affinity, however,
but rather an effect of their common abstractability. In the perspective
offered by fractal mathematics, turbulence is an absolute curvature whose
qualitative instantiation is a matter of indifference. Whether we are dealing
with the turbulence of world financial markets or that of complex earth
systems, the non-dialectical relation can itself be extracted, recombined and
liquefied, as it were, in a dimension of its own. In the same way that derivatives on exchange rates price the variable relation between and across
national currencies or interest rates, weather derivatives make it possible
to price contracts on the incalculable relations and unknowable contingencies engendered by complex atmospheric and hydrological processes.
Through this process of abstraction, derivatives do not lose but rather
gain power of another order. Up until the 1980s, standard economic
accounts described derivatives as peripheral effects of cash or spot markets,
as if the price of derivatives were literally derived from the prices of the
latter. The derivative was therefore assumed to represent (in the case of risk
hedging) or misrepresent (when it is used for speculative purposes) a fundamental value determined in the spot market and ultimately in the exchange
of storable commodities. However, the rise in financial derivatives such as
swaps makes it increasingly difficult to maintain the standard account of
price determination and causality. The derivative-market trades in events
pertaining to the money markets themselves, and in the process inevitably
occasions events of its own making. Derivatives, it might be said, generate
an atmospherics that is utterly indifferent to the qualitative nature of any
one event class (meteorogical, financial and political turbulence are entirely
convertible) and nevertheless effective at generating events of its own kind.
Market-related events on a more or less catastrophic scale have become so
endemic to the workings of capitalist relations today that it is no longer
possible to dismiss them as a surface effect of underlying or real economic
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forces. Far from restricting their movements to the space of the market itself,
financial events reverberate outward, reinvesting and remodulating
relationships among the productive forces, commodities and stocks they are
assumed to derive from (Bryan and Rafferty, 2006: 63). Indeed, it has
become apparent that in most cases, not only prices in cash and commodities markets but also in financial markets specializing in stock, interest rate
and currencies, are now subject to the extreme vicissitudes of derivatives
trading rather than the other way around.
In the era of capital market liberalization, political and economic
power lies in the art of leveraging the event, of harnessing debt accumulation to determine the shape of possible future worlds. While traditional
modes of property-right and promissory claim are not abolished, the appropriation of the event ascends to a leading role in the hierarchy of power
relations, cutting up, subsuming and recombining the risks associated with
the most abstract of economic and social relations. The leverageable event
can be of any kind financial, political or biospheric or a combination of
the risks associated with these. Yet while derivatives abstract from the
substantive nature of things and forces, they simultaneously operate at the
most intimate of material levels, investing the transversal relations that
connect and combine the entire world of priceable risk. The power of
leverage is one of potentiation through connection, the power to liquefy and
freeze relations, to potentialize and depotentialize connections, and thus to
shape (and be shaped by) the possibilities of movement of everyday life.
This is a power that operates in the future subjunctive, since the promise
of leverage is a claim over the future in all its unknowability a claim over
event worlds that have yet to actualize in space and time.19 The peculiar
powers, along with the systemic dangers of this form of leverage have been
acknowledged by recent efforts to manage the endogenous risks of derivatives markets. In the wake of the financial crisis, regulators have persistently called for the more systematic use of scenario planning as a way of
preparing for the unexpected events endemic to integrated markets (CRO,
2009: 5). It is now widely argued that the denationalization of money through
securitized debt markets requires a strategy of preemptive risk management capable of responding to contagion across multiple jurisdictions
(2009: 5).
That the pre-emptive power of denationalized money nevertheless
works to secure the imperial privilege of the US dollar is one of the structural paradoxes of the present configuration of world powers. The US is not
so much a national as a world imperial power, the magnetic pull of the dollar
being premised on the intrinsic volatility of all other currencies. There is
thus no contradiction between the denationalization of money, evidenced in
the circulation of such instruments as financial derivatives, and the premise
that the United States acts as the pivot of world power relations. This is an
exorbitant privilege that the United States seeks to preserve, precisely
through its efforts to expand beyond the limits of oil into a newly posited
sphere of abstract atmospheric relations. If this expansion is financial, I
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182 Theory, Culture & Society 27(23)

would suggest that it must also be strategic. It is by no means surprising,


then, that the growth of securitized financial markets trading in atmospheric
risks has been accompanied, in the United States, by a renewed interest in
the climate as a space of military concern. At stake here is not only the
problem of adjudicating competing territorial claims to the global commons
(previously uncolonized spaces such as the deep oceans, geothermal energy
reserves and the outer atmosphere) but also that of dealing with the nonlocalizable events of climate change turbulence as an event which may
materialize in any place at any time. Just as financial markets are moving
into the newly created sphere of weather-related risks, US strategy foresees
a future in which conflict will unfold in the turbulent space of atmospheric
flows.
Climate Change Scenarios, War Games and Ecological
Security
In July 2008, the CNAS invited 45 scientists, national security strategists,
and members of the business and policy communities from Asia, South Asia,
Europe, and North America to participate in an international climate change
war game. The simulated war game, which pitted emerging geopolitical
blocs such as China, East Asia and Russia against the United States, was
the outcome of three collectively imagined scenarios designed to explore
the security implications of global climate change. As the CNAS website
explains:
Military organizations and businesses around the world have long used such
exercises to anticipate future developments and manage risk and uncertainty
and to test how plans, strategies, and ideas may hold up in a range of
plausible futures. Generally, the lessons of these games have less to do with
the product within the game than with the process of playing. So while the
Climate Change War Game did not result in a fictitious international agreement that would cut greenhouse gases in China and transfer resources for
adaptation from the United States to India, the debates and developments in
the course of having such discussions were illuminating.20

The war game exercise was the culmination of an ongoing project to map
out the foreign policy and national security consequences of climate change
over a three-decade period.21 The latter project, convened by the CNAS and
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) throughout 2006 and
2007, brought together a group of national security specialists and climate
scientists to fashion three future conflict scenarios around climate change.
Basing its outlook on the scenario reports published by the IPCC, the group
begins with a baseline scenario of expected climate change, from which it
then derives two, increasingly dramatic visions of unexpected future
worlds.
The problematic of climate change security renews with the focus on
ecological, biological and human security which emerged during the Clinton
years, when defence specialists sought to redefine the conflict environment
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of a post-Cold War era (Dalby, 2002). The intervening years of the George
W. Bush administration have, if anything, intensified the urgency of these
concerns, so that climate change has now risen to a commanding position
within the new security concerns of the incoming administration. The failure
of US intervention in the Middle East, the rising fortunes of China and the
recent financial crisis have all underscored the fragility of an imperial
geopolitics pivoting around the dollaroil nexus. Within current US strategizing then, climate change has become a security concern not only because
it poses political risks of its own (so-called environmental refugees figuring
prominently among these) but also because it is inseparable from the larger
issues of energy security, energy transition and the exceptional role of the
US dollar within world financial flows. If the US administration now aspires
to play a leading role in the post-Kyoto international climate negotiations,
this reflects not so much on the different politics of the Democrats and the
Republicans (both parties had previously contributed to the failure of Kyoto)
but on the growing realization, right across the political spectrum, that
climate change must be incorporated into grand strategy.
What then is the strategic future imagined by these various climate
change scenarios? It is notable that none of the scenarios developed by the
CNAS and CSIS entertains any serious possibility of climate stabilization.
Instead the baseline scenario foresees a future in which post-Kyoto negotiations will lead to reductions without, however, arresting or reversing current
meteorological trends. All three scenarios look forward to a decidedly postequilibrium world, buffeted by greater or lesser degrees of turbulence. The
strategic ineffectiveness of the normal distribution of statistical events is a
given here. Pointing to the fact that even the recent history of climate change
has surpassed the worst-case scenarios of former IPCC projections, the
CNAS and CSIS outline three scenarios, the last of which describes a worldsystemic phase transition a catastrophic tipping point leading from one
metastable climate regime to another. Turbulence cannot be averted then.
The long-term strategy of the US can no longer be one of deterrence, as it
was during the Cold War. Rather the aim will be that of maintaining the
topological cohesion of a world in and through the most extreme periods of
turbulence. In complex systems theory, this property of topological cohesion
is referred to as resilience (the term, which was first used in its contemporary scientific understanding in ecosystems theory, is now ubiquitous in
strategic thinking).
If the discourse on climate security foresees a future in which the
atmosphere will be opened up as a field of conflict, this is both a return to
and a radical departure from Cold War efforts at direct intervention into the
weather. Both the United States and Soviet Union began exploring the
possibilities of geoengineering as a weapon of war at the very outset of
the Cold War, experimenting with techniques as diverse as cloud seeding,
the release of reflective particles into the atmosphere and the use of giant
shades to intercept sunlight. In retrospect it might seem surprising that as
recently as the 1960s, meteorologists were confidently anticipating the
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184 Theory, Culture & Society 27(23)

transformation of weather forecasting into an exact science and that John


von Neumann, one of the inventors of games theory, was contemplating a
complete control of the climate toward strategic ends. It is one of the ironies
of post-Second World War scientific progress that the vastly increased
mathematical capacities of computer-generated weather forecasting would
be the means of unmasking the essential unpredictability of the weather
over periods longer than a few days. It was in detailed computational studies
on the possibilities of weather prediction that Edward Lorenz first outlined
the fundamentals of chaos theory, establishing the principle of nonpredictability in non-linear complex systems.22 Chaos theory undermined
the very premise of geoengineering. The prospects, however, were sufficiently alarming that in 1976 the United Nations adopted a Convention on
the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environment
Modification Techniques. Recent publications in US foreign policy journals
have attempted to revive geoengineering as a serious technological response
to climate change. Their arguments, however, are more instructive about the
strategic risks of such an option than they are convincing about its usefulness. One article concedes that the highly uncertain but possibly disastrous
side effects of geoengineering interventions are difficult to compare with the
dangers of unchecked global climate change and that it is hardly wise to
mess with a poorly understood global climate system using instruments
whose effects are also unknown (Victor et al., 2009: 68, 69). The paradox
of this argument is that it calls for a strategic intervention into the atmosphere in order to pre-empt the worst effects of climate change, while
acknowledging that such an intervention may itself be indistinguishable
from the process of climate change that is to say, equally unpredictable,
incalculable and turbulent in its unfolding. If the authors nevertheless
entertain the possibility of a unilateral use of geoengineering, it is because
the logic of climate security discourse lies elsewhere. Recent US strategy
is less concerned about the effects of climate change as such (turbulence is
assumed) than it is about the consequences for US imperial power. The
precise when and where of turbulence is indifferent. What matters is
whether the accidental event of turbulence can be harnessed to the strategic ends of sustaining the US-dollar denominated world. This is a model of
strategic power that aspires to harness whatever happens, the event of
turbulence of whatever kind (meteorological, financial, political), however
it might evolve a power of all possible worlds.
In one sense then, the modern philosophy of possible worlds is justified in asserting that worlds are creatable by virtue of being imagined or
believed in. After all, the imperial power of the United States only survives
to the extent that the worlds investors continue to believe in the creditworthiness of its promises. The strategic and financial power of the US (the
two so closely entangled) is as much a matter of trust, confidence and indeed
faith as anything else. Yet the philosophy of possible worlds ignores the
coercion that is required to enforce the credibility of promise. In this it
remains idealist. The trustworthiness of all money is reinforced, in the last
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instance, by the threat of violence. The imposition of the US dollar as global


reserve currency goes hand in hand with a more or less overt monopolization of military force the threat, sometimes expressed openly, that any
contestation of US financial power will lead to military confrontation on a
world scale. In order to continuously (re)create world order through the preemptive release of debt, the US must also, in the last instance, wield the
power to enforce the dollars monopoly as world reserve currency. The power
to create possible worlds is both the power to issue money, through the speculative force of imagination, credibility and trust, and the power to enforce
contract through the threat, however veiled, of violence. The mutual relationship between trust and authority, faith and violence, is a couplet that
philosophers have long identified as the basis for the social power of money.
What distinguishes the imperial power of the United States today is the form,
scope and temporality of this violence. In line with its capacity to issue debt
without redemption, the imperial power of the US rests on a threat that is
pre-emptive and unlimited in scope (unlimited referring as much to its
indeterminate, non-localizable character as to its megalomania). Its theatre
of war is not simply world systemic in scope. It is also ecosystemic. In this
respect, it aspires to be world creative in the most material sense of the
term, while threatening, in the end, to destroy worlds.
Notes
1. For more detailed reflections on the paradox of US imperial power in the era of
floating exchange rates, see Panitch and Gindin (2008: 1747) and Arrighi (1994:
30024).
2. Details on this project can be found on their website: http://www.cnas.org/
contestedcommons
3. Wallerstein (2007) for example draws on the framework of complex systems
theory to describe the dynamics of world politico-economic systems. Both world
systems theory and scenario planning rely on the models of complex non-linear
systems developed in the context of second-order cybernetics. However, while
world systems theory is critical, historical and analytic in perspective, scenario
planning is pragmatic and strategic.
4. See however the illuminating analyses provided by Marieke de Goede (2008),
Lakoff (2007) and Fearnley (2005).
5. My reading of Herman Kahn departs from that of Ghamari-Tabrizi (2005) who
understands scenario planning as a contribution to the strategic thinking of mutual
deterrence and games theory. My argument assumes that Kahns own understanding of scenario planning underwent an important shift, as he rejected the equilibrium models of games theory in favour of a model of world systems in a state of
continual turbulence. There is thus a Cold War version of scenario planning and a
post-Cold War version (although the latter emerged long before the Cold War
formally came to an end).
6. See Fukuyama (2006) for a fairly representative collection of scenario exercises.
7. See: www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_global_scenarios.html
8. On this point, see for example Aligica (2005).
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9. Ian Hacking (2006) provides a longer discussion of Leibnizs theory of possible
worlds and its relationship to early probability theory. For an introduction to
contemporary possible worlds theory, see Nicholas Rescher (1997), who also offers
a comparison with Leibnizs thought. Contemporary possible worlds theory was first
developed by the philosopher Saul Kripke in the 1950s. For an overview of the
currents and controversies within contemporary possible worlds theory, see Girle
(2003).
10. David Lewis (1986) makes the most extreme claims on behalf of the ontological
status of possible worlds.
11. Throughout this article, I am assuming a certain familiarity with sociological
theories of money. Drawing on a long tradition of sociological thought, moving from
Gabriel Tarde to Georg Simmel, Geoffrey Ingham (2004) reminds us that money is
essentially a promise a future-oriented proposition whose liquidity requires a
certain level of trust among strangers. All money is constituted by a complex tissue
of promissory credit and debt relations. These relationships of trust, confidence and
obligation are of a non-personal nature, sustained only by the authority of the
institution that issues promises to pay. Creditworthiness, in short, is a function of
degrees of belief. My analysis is also informed by the more recent contributions of
Sinclair (2004), Bryan and Rafferty (2007), each of whom complicates Inghams
state theory of money in light of recent developments in finance. Without explicitly
addressing the relationship between the powers of debt and the psychology of belief,
it seems to me that possible world theory (and scenario planning) presume a certain
historically specific articulation between debt and imperial power.
12. The modern understanding of turbulence was developed in 18th- and 19thcentury fluid mechanics, which sought to mathematize the dynamics of water flow
(Darrigol, 2005). Drawing on the mathematical language of the differential calculus,
fluid mechanics formalized turbulence as a curvature tending toward a finite limit
or tangent. However, the limitations of such a formula were already visible to 19thcentury mathematicians, who pointed to the existence of mathematical anomalies
such as monstrous curves continuous, proliferating curvatures for which it is
impossible to establish a tangent or limit. In the language of the calculus, these
curves posed the enigmatic problem of continuous functions without derivatives. It
is in the late 20th century, in the work of Mandelbrot, that we find the most sustained
attempt to think through the ubiquity of monstrous curvature in nature. Mandelbrot
finds his inspiration in the many examples of natural processes that do not respect
the principle of equilibrium. Weather turbulence, the fragmented contour of a coastline, the distribution of astral dust in space. These phenomena, he argues, are the
norm rather than the exception in nature. Resituating the mathematics of turbulence in historical context, he rereads the classical conception of turbulence in fluid
mechanics as a function of the particular infrastructural and engineering problems
with which it was confronted. The classical mathematics of turbulence is concerned
with the dynamics of turbulence within bounded currents such as pipelines, canals
and chimneys (Mandelbrot, 1995: 125). The physical boundaries of flow are therefore reflected in the mathematical hypothesis of the limit to curvature. Mandelbrot,
in contrast, is interested in the problem of assigning a mathematical value to turbulence in open spaces such as the ocean. The particular conception of curvature
which he derives from such phenomena a curvature he calls the fractal is unique
in that it reproduces itself without tending to any finite limit. In mathematical terms,
the fractal is a curve without a tangent. In the language of physics, it is irreducible
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turbulence turbulence that does not conform to the principle of equilibrium. In
the context of statistics and probability theory, the fractal evokes the possibility of
savage chance or non-normalizable risk an event for which it is impossible to
establish a probability distribution. Of course, some would argue that such a
conception of turbulence is already present in ancient atomist theories such as
those of Epicurus and Lucretius. Michel Serres (2001) explores the continuities
between Lucretius theory of the clinamen and contemporary dynamics. For a philosophical reading of turbulence which attempts to complicate both Leibniz and
Mandelbrot, see Deleuze (2006).
13. For further details on weather derivatives, see the industry analyses of Banks
(2002), Labatt and White (2007) and Dischel (2002). For theoretical analyses
germane to the one I am attempting to develop here, see Pryke (2007) and Thornes
and Randalls (2007).
14. In this respect, I differ from LiPuma and Lee, who argue that the specificity of
derivatives as a money-form lies in their pertaining to risk rather than commodities or labour. All money-forms can be defined according to a particular riskrelationship. What is pertinent here is the nature of the risk at stake in the trading
of derivatives. Properly speaking, the future to which a derivative refers designates
an unpredictable or incalculable risk and therefore is no longer a risk per se
rather, it is an event. Far from precluding a consideration of labour, this requires
a rethinking of the politics of labour exploitation in terms of risk exposure and
experiment.
15. [Derivatives] turn the contestability of fundamental value into a tradable
commodity. In so doing, they provide a market benchmark for an unknowable value
(Bryan and Rafferty, 2006: 37). Contrast this statement with LiPuma and Lee, who
are always pining after the loss of fundamental values, which they locate, not
incidentally, in the realm of culture, morals and religion.
16. Although a derivatives contract does not involve an explicit borrowing of
money, the effect of borrowing is implicit in the contract itself which is effectively
a debt.
17. On the debate between chartalist or state-theories of money and the argument
that derivatives constitute a form of denationalized money, see Ingham (2004) and
Bryan and Rafferty (2007).
18. On this point, I depart from the analyses of Colletti (1973) and, more recently,
Mann (2009).
19. The Oxford English Dictionary refers to the subjunctive as a tense designating a mood; its forms can be employed to denote an action or a state as conceived
(and not as a fact) and [are] therefore used to express a wish, command, exhortation,
or a contingent, hypothetical or prospective event.
20. See URL (consulted December 2008): http://www.cnas.org/node/956
21. The outcomes of this project are published in Kurt Campbell (2008).
22. On the post-war history of numerical weather prediction, geo-engineering and
chaos theory, see Cox (2002: 21825).
References
Aligica, Paul Dragos (2004) The Challenge of the Future and the Institutionalization of Interdisciplinarity: Notes on Herman Kahns Legacy, Futures 36: 6783.
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188 Theory, Culture & Society 27(23)


Aligica, Paul Dragos (2005) Scenarios and the Growth of Knowledge: Notes on the
Epistemic Element in Scenario Building, Technological Forecasting and Social
Change 72: 81524.
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Melinda Cooper is the author of Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and


Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Washington University Press, 2008).
She currently works as a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and
Social Policy, University of Sydney, and is an Honorary Fellow of the
Centre for Biomedicine and Society, Kings College, London. [email:
melinda.cooper@arts.usyd.edu.au]

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