An Apocalyptic Patent
- PDF / 434,041 Bytes
- 14 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 38 Downloads / 199 Views
An Apocalyptic Patent Alain Pottage1 Accepted: 18 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract It was originally suggested that the Anthropocene began in 1784, the date of James Watt’s patent for the rotative steam engine. Patent dates are interesting artefacts. They owe their existence to the chronopoietic technique of patent jurisprudence, which generates temporal sequences out of synchronous states of knowledge. This may not be geological time, but it informs the experience of time that is proper to the culture whose deposits of Pu-239 now mark the onset of the Anthropocene. Patent jurisprudence makes a crucial contribution to what might be called the ethos of the Anthropocene: the sense of society as having an inexhaustible capacity for innovation, for endless self-renewal. And, as it turns out, the steam engine yields some interesting insights into this mode of enchantment. Keywords Anthropocene · Enchantment · Innovation · Patent jurisprudence The end of the world has already occurred. We can be uncannily precise about the date on which the world ended. It was April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine, an act that commenced the depositing of carbon in the Earth’s crust – namely, the inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale. (Morton 2013, p. 7) Dismissing Timothy Morton’s ‘hyperbole’, Andreas Malm observes that the emergence of the fossil economy and its role in our coming climate catastrophe could hardly be ascribed to the act of procuring a patent: ‘None of this can be a matter of invention. A patent is but a piece of paper, however symbolic’ (2016, p. 29). Patent lawyers and scholars of the patent system, each in their own way, would grant greater agency to the paperwork. But even those who take a maximalist view of the role of patents would hesitate to say that the condensing steam engine would not have been invented, or that carbon dioxide (CO2) would not have begun to accumulate in the Earth’s atmosphere, had Watt not taken out a patent or had the institutions of patent law simply not existed. Patent texts have * Alain Pottage [email protected] 1
Law School, SciencesPo, 75007 Paris, France
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
A. Pottage
agency, but they were not the vehicles by which humanity became Anthropocenic. Yet, the hyperbolic aspect of Morton’s claim is precisely what captures the attention of those with a mundane, technical, understanding of what patents do. What if one were indeed to approach the history of patent jurisprudence from the perspective of climate catastrophe? If from the vantage point of the Anthropocene socio-historical agency appears in a very different light, and if the moment brings with it a new and still inarticulate sense of responsibility, how might one begin to recollect the history of patent jurisprudence from that perspective? Morton’s reference to Watt paraphrases an early manifesto for the Anthropocene: The Anthropocene could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped
Data Loading...
