Kristin Asdal & Tone Huse: "The great economization of the Ocean: Following cod and doing empirical economy"

Abstract:

In this talk, Kristin Asdal and Tone Huse discuss how the ocean, in the years proceeding WWII, has been harnessed to become a space of ever-intensifying capital investment and innovation. As their entity, object and being to think with, they follow the Atlantic cod – “the white gold of the ocean” – throughout its aquatic habitats and into economy and capital circuitries.

Asdal and Huse describe the ocean’s great transformation by looking at how nature is wrested into the economy. They also show how nature, in turn, resists, adapts to, or changes the economy. These “co-modifications”, Asdal and Huse argue, are best studied through what they coin “empirical economy” – an approach for the study of economy that insists that we can best understand how nature is economized by staying close to the empirics of how economizations are done. Through what practices, by use of what tools, apparatuses, agencies, and so forth do economizations in fact unfold? And what “versions of economization”, as they call it, can be detected as the outcome? An innovation economy is one of the “versions of economizations” that their book displays and analyze.

In this talk, Asdal and Huse approach this by looking more closely at how markets and capital are modified and equipped to perform work extra to that which is usually captured and emphasized in conventional economic theory. Markets, they show, are ordered so that they can do other-than-economic work and valuations, such as that of securing the quality of cod flesh, or the quality of life along the coast. Capital, on its hand, is modified so as to carry distinct qualities and operate by logics that exceed that of monetary exchange and the accumulation of monetary values. It can, for instance, be asked to be both risk-willing and patient, to be capital that can be lost, but that easily comes again.