Brent Ryan Bellamy (bio), Michael O’Driscoll (bio), and Mark Simpson (bio)
University of Alberta

On May 10, 2016, as the May Day wildfires ravaged the city and environs of Fort McMurray, Alberta, and neighbouring municipalities swelled with the 90,000 residents forced to flee their homes, Postmedia News (Canada’s go-to media source for neo-liberal spin) ventured to lift the collective mood with a type of silver-lining headline: “Good news everyone! Wildfires deemed no threat to Fort McMurray radioactive waste site” (Graney). Good news indeed, although perhaps compromised in its goodness by some unsettling details in the accompanying story: for instance, that the waste site now deemed safe from fire holds 43,500 cubic metres of uranium ore residue and contaminated topsoil; or that the tomb of this waste, housed beneath the city’s centrally-located Beacon Hill neighborhood, is effectively in midtown; or that the construction of the site in 2003 served to contain spillage occurring all the way back in the 1940s and 50s, a fact and a timeline meaning that the atmosphere within which Fort McMurray grew exponentially in the second half of the twentieth century was literally one of unaddressed radioactive contamination. In this regard, one might read the exclamation mark in Postmedia’s headline as doubly punctual, driving home the affect requisite to the story itself while also demarcating sharply the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of radioactivity. Never mind the uncertainties of the radioactive past, the headline’s exclamation seems to say: trust instead in the security—the inviolability—of our collective radioactive future.¹

That the “good news” on offer in this story was genuinely news will not only index popular ignorance about the storage of radioactive waste in Fort McMurray—it will also prove symptomatic of profound historical amnesia: the widespread forgetting or indeed failure to know that this northern city, well before becoming a global centre for bitumen extraction, was once a key hub in the transport of uranium. The radioactive materials were sourced in the 1940s from the world’s first uranium mine, located at Port Radium, on the shores of Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, and after transport by train from Fort McMurray and refinement in Ontario, were shipped to Los Alamos, New Mexico where they were used to develop the world’s first atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945 that bomb killed 100,000 people instantly in the city of Hiroshima and left tens of thousands to die of radioactive poisoning in the months that followed. The uranium mines were worked by members of the Sahtu Dene First Nation, who hauled and ferried the ore in forty-five kilogram burlap sacks, exposed to the radioactive dust that coated their lungs, contaminated their water, and infiltrated their homes. Declassified documents have since shown that the U.S. and Canadian governments never informed the workers of the risks involved (Nikiforuk); Deline, the nearby Dene town on the shores of Great Bear Lake, would become known as “the village of widows.”²

We choose to begin our special issue on “Resource Aesthetics” with this amnesiac history because the prospect of Fort McMurray’s radioactive waste site conjoins a host of concepts, issues, problems, and motifs that animate, variously, the essays to follow. The story turns on dynamics of visibility, of what can and cannot be seen. It highlights the inescapable entanglement of distinct energy sources and regimes under modernity—in this case, the overdetermined petro-system supplemented by nuclear-fuel residuals. It indicates the spatiotemporal complexities of extraction’s practices as of its legacies. It intimates a capacious repertoire of aesthetic figuration indispensable to the generation and deployment of energy as hegemonic resource. And it marks the inextricability of energy as power from social and political power, most significantly with respect to an ongoing capitalist history of settler-colonialism (crucial for us to acknowledge, writing as we do from Treaty 6 territory) in which resource extraction and the violent, even genocidal project of clearing away Indigenous peoples go hand in hand.³ For all these reasons, Fort McMurray’s radioactive waste site demarcates a complex zone where “resource” and “aesthetics” come together as sedimented, remediated historical practice. The site’s rich strata—sedimentations of nuclear, oil, and labour energies, buried under the picturesque banality of rolling grassland—vividly illustrate the multilayered dimensions involved in unpacking “resource” and “aesthetics” together as a conceptual matrix or, better yet, as a scorched site of ideological and political contest.

The contributions collected here seek to bring the term resource aesthetics into critical circulation. The resource logic of capitalism presupposes (and prevails as we accept) that resources have no aesthetic whatsoever—that they constitute pure, brute inputs. Against such presupposition, we take as axiomatic the insight so incisively articulated by Jennifer Wenzel in her Afterword to this issue: “a resource logic is also a resource aesthetic.” Our contributors explore and examine the aesthetics of resource culture in order to describe the ways in which we do or do not see, feel, and act in response to the abidingly material power of resources: not merely inputs, but forces, relations, and practices that fundamentally shape or indeed render culture and society. The term “render” is key, functioning through what Nicole Shukin has memorably theorized as its “double entendre” or “double logic” to provide a hinge between the figural and the material—between representation as resource and resource extraction as process (20, 88).⁴ In the age of anthropogenic climate change, resource aesthetics must begin with the petrocultural—the tottering hegemony of fossil capital—precisely because fossil fuels saturate everything: the resource aesthetics of petroculture mediate all other resource aesthetics conceivable in contemporary life. We would nonetheless insist that resource aesthetics as concept or indeed paradigm also extends to encompass such things as bio-matter and geo-matter, attention and affect, speculative investments and energy futures, history, memory, critique, and of course labour. Our project aims to reckon what happens—to imagine what could become possible—when we take up resource aesthetics as cultural practice yet also critical method: as at once object and analytic.

The etymology of “resource” is complex and, arguably, conflicted. A loanword from the French, the term reverberates with meanings concerned with personal capacity alongside monetary reserves and with renewal and restoration in the wake of adversity, emergency, or failure. This overlapping concentration of senses shadows the two commonplace definitions prevailing today. One operates abstractly to describe the means of satisfying a need. People who are resourceful will be able to use the objects around them in order to resolve some immediate problem or deficiency. The other replaces abstraction with concretion, as found in the conventional way in which people talk about natural resources—fish, timber, minerals—as material commodities that are relatively unprocessed. Marx describes resources in these terms, defining resources as “objects of labour spontaneously provided by nature”: “fish caught and separated from their natural element, namely water, timber felled in virgin forests, and ores extracted from their veins” (Capital 284). In this iteration, resources form the basis for what has come to be known as the staples thesis in economic development: a theory of export-led growth in which raw materials get sent away to be processed and repackaged for sale on the market. Thus if “the object of labour has, so to speak, been filtered through previous labour,” for Marx, “we call it raw material” (Capital 284).

How might resource, in the terrain of critical theory, be most productively thought? The answer could well be found in the term’s historical embeddedness. Neither commonplace sense of resources—the practical or the figurative—will serve on its own to convey what we have in mind for the term, precisely because these senses are inextricable, mutually constitutive. A word whose etymology returns us to the idea of rising up, resurgence, or restoration, “resource” is itself both material for extraction and a figure of abstraction. In the words of Neil Smith, “capital stalks the earth in search of material resources; nature becomes a universal means of production in the sense that it not only provides the subjects, objects, and instruments of production, but is also in its totality an appendage to the production process” (Smith 71). As a result—and here Smith quotes Marx—“it ‘appears paradoxical to assert, that uncaught fish, for instance, are a means of production in the fishing industry. But hitherto no one has discovered the art of catching fish in waters that contain none’” (ibid.). Thus when we invoke the term “resources” here, we mean to recall the processes of extracting and abstracting as naturalized from the standpoint of capital. For Jason Moore, in his widely cited Capitalism in the Web of Life (2015), resources are the inputs that keep capitalism going, that bring what he calls “Cheap Nature” in the form of “a rising stream of low-cost food, labor-power, energy, and raw materials to the factory gates” (53). Resource likewise denotes finance and money, so, for us, it is also operative in the abstractions of the computerized world of financialization and cloud computing. The vast banks of data stored on servers—kept cool by lake or ocean water, powered largely by coal— provide another touchstone for the resourceful (see Mills, The Cloud Begins with Coal). Production, on the one hand, and circulation, on the other, overwrite what we deem to be resources. In this issue, we recognize that, whether concrete and natural or cognitive and digital, resources are resources for the valorization process of capital.

As a term and a concept, “aesthetics” likewise involves valorization, though ostensibly (or at least conventionally) from the other way around. Yet to the extent that capital supplies the hinge, for aesthetics as for resources, the two come to meet on the material terrain of value. Consider the vividly materialist understanding of the aesthetic offered by Terry Eagleton in “The Ideology of the Aesthetic,” his early attempt (later more fully explicated in his volume of the same name) to rescue aesthetics “from [the] otherwise somewhat discreditable current of bourgeois thought” (337). Here Eagleton makes a claim for the emergence of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and the discursive tradition that follows as a formative materialism that ultimately moves towards a discourse of the body in relation to the world: “the aesthetic,” he tells us, is “the first stirrings of a primitive, incipient materialism, politically quite indispensable” (328) to the project of ideological critique. Rather than serving primarily as a study of art, of the beautiful, of the natural, for Eagleton the aesthetic has always been a study of social submission and a hegemonic mechanism, a political unconscious whose structures of feeling enforce a highly efficacious “lawfulness without law” (330). As a kind of Lacanian Imaginary, the aesthetic then “will secure the consensual hegemony which neither the coercive state nor a fragmented civil society can achieve” (332).

In very much the same vein, Jacques Rancière offers a provocative take on such aesthetic consensus with his theory of the “distribution of the sensible.” The language of his central definition emphasizes the correlations we have in mind: “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it” (12). The simultaneity of inclusion and exclusion at stake in Rancière’s theory—whereby the aesthetic’s universalizing appeal or indeed general equivalence necessarily coexists alongside its dissymmetrical availability and distribution—constitutes the double bind so decisive for the production of value under any aesthetic regime, and thus makes the aesthetic a site of inescapably social and material contest. Exemplary of such contest is the hierarchy of senses inscribed by the modern distribution of the sensible in which visuality and its prevailing aesthetics have come to organize the perceptual field—delineating commonality in the very process of delimiting differences. Within this distributive logic, vision is at once hegemonic and a resource, and each because of the other—precisely because, as Jonathan Crary argues compellingly, “[s]o much of what seems to constitute a domain of the visual is an effect of other kinds of forces and relations of power” (2–3). For Rancière (making a point about art specifically that, to us, holds more general valence) aesthetics refers to “a mode of articulation between ways of doing and making, their corresponding forms of visibility, and possible ways of thinking about their relationships” (10). There is, in our estimation of the aesthetic, no dallying with the sublime, no question of the beautiful, no separation of the art object from the commodity form that characterized the earliest understandings of the aesthetic object in a nascent modernity; rather, the aesthetic here is proximate to the absolute banality of existence in keeping with Fredric Jameson’s reports on the structural function of the aesthetic in postmodernity (Postmodernism 4). As Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle remind us, “capitalism as a totality is devoid of an easily grasped command-and-control-centre. That is precisely why it poses an aesthetic problem, in the sense of demanding ways of representing the complex and dynamic relations intervening between the domains of production, consumption and distribution, and their strategic political mediations, ways of making the invisible visible” (24–5). In the rigorous, capacious terms outlined by these thinkers and others, the aesthetic accounts for the knotted density yet disbursed intimacy of our unremarked assumptions about the world and the lines of force and power with which they are enmeshed.

A focus on the entanglements of resource logic and aesthetic discourse invites more careful consideration of the manner in which each term might inflect its other when brought into relation. Resource aesthetics can be said to provoke the contradictions between the instrumental and the beautiful, the literal and figurative, extraction and its representation, in a way that might return the question of visibility to a consideration of the material requirements of aesthetic production, while at the same time insisting on the aesthetics of resource extraction and the recognition of infrastructure as form. Or, to put that another way, by thinking the figural iterations of resources and the literal face of aesthetics, the aesthetics of resources alongside the aesthetic as resource.⁵ Naming the imbrications of aesthetics and resource refuses the classical notion of a discourse of aesthetics set apart from economics and politics and, at the same time, refuses a notion of resource extraction that is somehow exempt from the mediation of an aesthetic ideology (to use de Man’s term) that would seek to bring into alignment the functions of resource extraction and the built forms of everyday modern life. One might, for example, describe the petrocultural moment of high modernism as a recession of the aesthetic in which the marriage of form and function renders form invisible—oil, in the exemplary instance, is the form that disappears (a claim resonant with Stephanie LeMenager’s contention in Living Oil that, in the early to mid 20th century, “oil became an expressive form, although often hidden as such, in plain sight” [66]). If modernism, as a recognizable practice of what LeMenager calls “petromodernity” (67), seeks an alignment between form and function, then in that alignment what disappears from view is the aesthetic that effortlessly normalizes the brute inputs of energy that is fossil fuel. The pure trajectory of the pipeline, the distant gleam of refineries, the smooth surface of the blacktop, and the gentle curve of the fintail all recede into the seamless operations of carbon dependency.

The result of the saturations of petroculture is the double disavowal of an aesthetic that cannot be seen as such, that constitutes oil as oil and yet does not register on the level of culture. The recession of oil’s form, in other words, indexes an aesthetic ideology. Against this ideology, we would insist on what is, more realistically, the historically poor fit between oil and world in modernity. Resource aesthetics are, on those terms, a matter of critical method, of interpretation, of what, defining aesthetics in Resistance to Theory, Paul de Man calls “a phenomenalism of a process of meaning and understanding” (7): for de Man ideological critique is a matter of deconstructing the presumed correspondence between the idea and its manifestation, or “the embodiment of significance within the sensuously apparent” (Loesberg 89). Disrupting the seamless space between form and function, resource aesthetics as critical method challenges the aesthetics of symmetry that underlie resource extraction: a phantasmatic aesthetics of exchange without waste or excess mirroring the belief in a balance of nature that will always right itself regardless of humanity’s incursions.⁶ At the same time, to regard the aesthetic through the lens of resource extraction is to reframe the aesthetic as an appreciation of its material condition: to destabilize the presumption that aesthetics is a study of only what is visible and to insist that attention to the sensible must necessarily extend beyond the visual province of conventional aesthetic discourse.

Thus conceived, resource aesthetics will recollect the question of what Fredric Jameson famously termed cognitive mapping—a practice that, as Toscano and Kinkle contend, ventures dialectically to reckon the contours of capitalism with and against the dynamics of the visual: “The shift between different regimes of economic practice can also be traced in terms of forms of envisioning, which is also to say forms of abstracting—in the sense of selecting, extracting, and shaping material for cognition and action” (37). We can find a vivid instance of this kind of methodological reckoning in Andreas Malm’s account of what he calls “the historical totality of the fossil economy” in his recent, groundbreaking book, Fossil Capital (5). Seeking to historicize a contemporary moment enthralled by the looming catastrophe of human-induced climate change, Malm turns to the onset of the fossil economy in England’s early-nineteenth-century cotton industry. He shows how the shift in industrial energy source from water to coal-fired steam—occurring at a point when water was more potent as a source of energy and so more profitable than steam—emancipated cotton capitalists from the geographical constraints of water-as-energy and enabled them thus to locate their factories in densely populated urban zones where they could command and exploit labour more efficiently and intensively. Key for Malm within this energic shift (and, we would add, to the resource aesthetic operational for it) is the capacity of energy-intensive fossil fuel to abstract space and time, and so to launch the formal or generic conditions of possibility for the fossil economy, as a totality, to emerge:

The more capital tries to extract itself from the absolute, concrete qualities of space and time, the deeper must be its exploitation of the stock of energy located in their exterior. The abstract spatiotemporality of capital is just as entwined around nature as what came before it—only a very special segment of nature, with a spatiotemporal profile harmonizing with its own. Capitalist growth … is a set of relations just as much as a process, whose limitless expansion advances by ordering humans and the rest of nature in abstract space and time because that is where most surplus-value can be produced. (308; italics in original)

The force of Malm’s intervention is thus to insist on the inextricability and co-constitutiveness of two orders of power typically—we might even say obsessively—disarticulated under petromodernity’s prevailing ways of seeing and knowing: the power of energy source (fossil fuel) and the power of social system (capitalism). For “‘fossil fuels’ … are, by definition, a materialization of social relations. No piece of coal or drop of oil has yet turned itself into fuel, and no humans have yet engaged in systematic large-scale extraction of either to satisfy subsistence needs: fossil fuels necessitate waged or forced labour—the power of some to direct the labour of others—as conditions of their very existence” (19). Framed in terms of the concept important to this special issue, Malm intervenes at the level of resource aesthetics to propose a different approach to figuring history and, with it, a different approach to figuring the now: not, as some accounts of postmodernity would have it, by the triumph of spatialization, but instead by “the revenge of time”—“the rolling invasion of the past into the present” (6, 10).⁷

Understood in the ways we have been outlining, resource aesthetics as critical method can find traction within and across a considerable range of fields, debates, and paradigms. Questions of landscape and terrain might make resource aesthetics relevant, as an approach, to inquiry in cultural geography, ecocriticism, environmental humanities, and geocriticism, for example. Anthropology and biopolitical theory might both make use of a resource aesthetics perspective to examine biocapital’s human resources, as exemplified for instance by the illicit organ trade, undocumented and migrant workers, or precarious populations as global surplus labour. Mobility theory and communications studies could draw on resource aesthetics when analyzing infrastructure and circulation: the pipeline, the freeway, the cargo container, the electrical grid, the telecomunications network, and so on. To the extent that resource aesthetics concerns matters of figuration as well as extraction, and points toward dynamics of surface and depth, it could well hold unexpected significance within recent lively debates about styles of critical reading (paranoid, reparative, surficial, distant) in literary studies. We could go on; the larger point, though, is that resource aesthetics as critical method holds capacious potential for theory and practice across contemporary disciplines. The essays that follow might reverberate, in one way or another, with some of the connections outlined here, and they might suggest additional connections we do not name. For our purposes, however, the valence of resource aesthetics as method holds most significance—as this issue’s essays will attest—for two fields in particular: the energy humanities, an emergent field, and Marxist critique, a resurgent one.

Energy humanities offers both a proper name for already existing research on energy resources, regimes, and their histories and futures across the humanities and human sciences and a horizon of possibility for fresh researchers just beginning to take up energy-related questions. Running parallel to cultural studies and the environmental humanities, energy humanities approaches energy systems as social and cultural phenomena. Rather than read energy inputs as external to the social or the economic, researchers in the field treat energy as an embedded component of modern life so as to reframe its problem in terms of impasse, one that confronts modern societies, as Jennifer Wenzel argues, “not merely despite our knowledge about energy, but also, at least in part, because of our knowledge about energy” (“Taking Stock” 33).⁸ Those working on the energy question in this emergent field thus strive not only to name an impasse particular to late capital but also to address this problem of knowing, precisely in order to furnish activists, artists, researchers, and politicians with the means to push fully fossilized social relations towards energy transition. Furthermore, the transition they envision does not limit itself to replacing high-density energy resources with more dispersed or radioactive ones, but rather opens onto questions about the kind of world we collectively wish to inhabit. Such questions prove inescapably material and intensely abstract all at once—and as such lend themselves well to the perspectives and capacities we claim for resource aesthetics as method. Resource aesthetics, that is to say, offers energy humanities a particular view on to the world as it has been made and as it might be remade.

While the aesthetic has long been a category for Western Marxism (to use Perry Anderson’s canonical framing), energy, as electricity, force, or movement generated from particular resources, seems to present a sticking point for a Marxist critique of political economy. Such difficulty is especially pronounced if energy, in the form of oil, coal, or even nuclear or hydro power, seems synonymous with labour. Marx could not have been clearer about this, even in his notebooks, where he writes,

Capital which consumes itself in the production process, or fixed capital, is the means of production in the strict sense. In a broader sense the entire production process and each of its moments, such as circulation—as regards its material side—is only a means of production for capital, for which value alone is the end in itself. Regarded as a physical substance, the raw material itself is a means of production for the product etc. (Grundrisse 690)

Energic inputs to the production process necessarily then seem to rest on the side of constant capital, that is fixed capital, that is not variable capital, that is not labour. Herein lies the rub: labour requires energy. Moreover, as Marxist-feminism has rightly been demonstrating since the 1970s, the energy labour requires is by no means limited to the caloric.⁹ From the standpoint of Marx’s critique, the energy required in the production process is not the source of value: labour itself is. On an abstract level, this tenet seems to hold, but when looking at the historical contingency of capitalism it would not be difficult to mistake energy inputs, and fossil fuels in particular, as the drivers of the motor of capitalist production. It appears that energy-hungry machinery has replaced labour power and that it demands ever more resources as it goes on. We do not wish to come down on either side of this question, but instead to highlight its consequences. For us, it seems that the labour theory of value stands at the heart of one of the most powerful explanatory tools we have available to us today, yet lacks a proper account of energy—of fuel, of resource. Returning the aesthetic to the question of energy offers a means to define capital’s domination of resources and articulate a non-productivist-based social relation.

The contributions that follow take us on a tour from the gritty dirt of resource extraction to abstractions that attempt to address financialization and the energy demands of our screen culture. At the very outset of this dialogue, Nicole Shukin powerfully questions the centrality of the visual to a project of defining and figuring resource aesthetics; “The Biocapital of Living— and Art of Dying—After Fukushima” speaks to the risk of critical practice that strives only to make visible the invisible. Aligning such practice with the nuclear project itself, Shukin turns instead to the dissensual recalcitrance of those refusing to leave the contaminated zone after nuclear meltdown for evidence of an art of dying that might thwart the biocapital of resilient subjectivity, one of neoliberalism’s most indispensable resources. In “Resource Systems, the Paradigm of Zero-Waste, and the Desire for Sustenance,” Amanda Boetzkes (more enthusiastic than Shukin about the power of critical visualization) examines three recent examples of installation art that make visible contemporary capitalism’s paradoxical capacity to idealize wastelessness by commodifying waste as resource—a productive aesthetic that obscures while perpetuating and proliferating the generalized wasting of bodies and ecologies.

Carolyn Elerding and Jeff Diamanti expand from a shared premise: that any association of digitality with immateriality is delusional. In “The Materiality of the Digital: Petro-Enlightenment and the Aesthetics of Invisibility,” Elerding works through the energo-politics of supposedly immaterial digital technologies, arguing that as cloud computing obscures strategies of primitive accumulation in digital space, so the aesthetics of digital design—and modularity in particular—reinforce those forms of misrecognition that characterize the damaging compartmentalizations of petroculture. Meanwhile Diamanti’s “Energyscapes, Architecture, and the Expanded Field of Postindustrial Philosophy” identifies, in the infrastructural turn in contemporary architecture, the inseparability of ever-increasing energy wealth (otherwise called “climate crisis”) from ever-decreasing global labour requirements (otherwise called “unemployment crisis”) by means of a critique that defines New Materialism’s ontologies as post-industrial philosophy.

Jonathan Beller offers an account of the digital attentive to the contemporary screen-image as productive resource, arguing in “The Programmable Image of Capital” that the convergence today of value’s calculus with new forms of sensuous interface and labour—a convergence made possible by digital computers and media platforms—signals the emergence of the computational mode of production as a new phase in the history of capital. The conversation between Brent Ryan Bellamy, Stephanie LeMenager, and Imre Szeman deliberates on the results of taking the critical questions posed by energy and its resource aesthetics into the heart of one’s pedagogy and politics. Finally, taking overburden as its conceptual pivot, Jennifer Wenzel’s afterword literally brings us crashing back to the ground. In her account of the logistics and aesthetics of resources, improvement and overburden supply the coordinates of a way of seeing the unseen (future development, hidden profits) that ultimately determines value and meaning as predicated on the normative fit of the ambitions of capital and what does or does not come into view.

These diverse contributions on “Resource Aesthetics” thus take up some of the most pressing and contested issues in contemporary resource culture: toxicity and waste, materiality and immateriality, finance and code, the politics of labour and the labour of politics, energy, perception, and capital. They aim to recalibrate or indeed reconstitute the resource question as a resolutely aesthetic problem for materialist theory today. Offering what we hope is an original and welcome intervention in social and cultural theory, the collection confronts the present conjuncture of fossil capital with concepts and methods that might advance the project of dismantling the hold of such capital on our social world.

Notes

1. The waste site was not the only radioactive source of media fascination and concern in early May: as several headlines broadcast, government authorities also worried about the security of radiographic instruments used to inspect welding work and to gauge the density of roadways— that is, to reckon the integrity of the built infrastructure of Canada’s extractive industry (The Canadian P 2016). Such radiographic devices exhibit a curious unidirectionality and a certain self-reflexivity. Making visible the otherwise invisible, they remain invisible themselves, only detectable by similar devices sensitive to their level of radioactivity. Much could be observed about the dialectics of visibility and invisibility, of observation and occlusion, materialized in these tools—with considerable import for the concept of resource aesthetics framing this special issue.

2. This haunting phrase supplies the title for Peter Blow’s 1998 documentary film about this history. For searching critical engagements with these events and their legacies, see Van Wyck’s 2002 essay “The Highway of the Atom” and his 2010 monograph of the same name.

3. The hidden-in-plain-sight quality of resource aesthetics, as we describe it here, resonates with the ongoing effacement or removal of Indigenous peoples, especially as resource extraction becomes a mechanism for claiming Indigenous lands. Consider, for instance (to focus only on examples from the Canadian context with which we are most familiar), the planned and ongoing operation of chromite mining and smelting in what is known as the ring of fire in Treaty 9 (Nishnawbe Aski Nation), otherwise called the James Bay lowlands; or the struggles over bitumen extraction and development in Treaties 6, 8, and 10 spanning Northern Saskatchewan and Alberta; or the contest over pipeline expansion in the un-ceded Coast Salish and Haida Territories.

4. As Shukin contends, “[t]he double entendre of rendering is deeply suggestive of the complicity of ‘the arts’ and ‘industry’ in contemporary capitalism” (20). Animal Capital, the book in which Shukin makes this argument, is focused on animality and zoopolitics rather than the energy question—yet we feel her insight into rendering’s double logic bears as readily on the latter in ways and to ends that we hope our concept of resource aesthetics can begin to tease out.

5. See, for example, Marriott and Minio-Paluello’s The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London and also Nadia Bozak’s The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources.

6. One thinks here, in slightly different terms, of Benjamin’s famous claim that humanity’s “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (Illuminations 242). Our theorization of the aesthetics of symmetry will also resonate with Timothy Mitchell’s historicizing account of the emergence of ‘the economy’ as a discrete modern entity: “its object was not the material forces and resources of nature and human labor, but a new space that was opened up between nature on the one side and human society and culture on the other—the not-quite-natural, not-quite-social space that came to be called ‘the economy’” (Carbon Democracy 132).

7. Because Malm argues quite polemically that the contemporary moment—riven by anxieties about climate crisis, the unfolding manifestation of a durational, accumulative history of carbon combustion—constitutes “an epoch of diachronicity” (8), we are tempted to suggest that his account of the totality of the fossil economy involves a form of cognitive mapping against itself, at least with respect to that method’s characteristic correspondence to the supposedly spatializing turn under late capitalism.

8. Wenzel’s piece concludes a dossier that Brent Ryan Bellamy co-edited with Jeff Diamanti (also a contributor to this special issue of Postmodern Culture) titled “Envisioning the Energy Humanities” for Reviews in Cultural Theory and available at http://reviewsinculture.com/archive/volume-6-issue-3/.

9. Many thinkers, from Sylvia Federici, Leopoldina Fortunati, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and the Italian Marxist-feminists to Maya Andrea Gonzalez, Marina Vishmidt, and Lise Vogel, among many others, have articulated the free gift to capital that the normalization of gender offers.

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