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.
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Notes
Letter from Matthew Boulton to James Watt, 21 June 1781, reproduced in Robinson and Musson (1969, p. 88).
Boulton & Watt v Bull (1795) 2 H BI 463, 485 (Buller J).
Boulton & Watt v Bull (1795) 2 H BI 463, 478–479 (Rooke J).
According to one early treatise, the law of patents in the United States was ‘intended to express more fully and precisely, the practical construction which had already been given to the fifth and sixth sections of the British act of monopolies, and is thus at the same time, the law of the United States, and an exposition of that of England (Phillips 1837, p. 74).
These effects are not necessarily attributable to patents themselves; patent rights are only one part of the complex story of how any particular technology becomes privative.
This dictionary definition of 1823 is cited in Mayr (1970, p. 131).
Here, Garfinkel notes that ‘EM [ethnomethodology] places heavy emphasis on “immortal”’.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Marilyn Strathern for reading a draft of this article, and to the participants in a Kent Law School summer school in Paris in 2019 for their insight and generosity.
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Pottage, A. An Apocalyptic Patent. Law Critique 31, 239–252 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-020-09278-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-020-09278-4