Energyscapes, Architecture, and the Expanded Field of Postindustrial Philosophy ‘

Jeff M. Diamanti (bio)
McGill University

Abstract

This essay isolates the relationships between energy deepening, economic elasticity, and social plasticity as the key matrix driving a petroeconomy otherwise imagined as free from material constraints, and claims that energy deepening establishes itself in spatial forms, or the physical setting, of a fully saturated fossil fuel society. By moving through exemplary instances of postindustrial landscape architecture and the philosophical tradition mobilized by its theorists, this essay shows that the political economy of postindustrial energy already implies an object-oriented ontology rather than a labor-oriented one, and as such amounts to political disaster.

In a special report to the New York Times entitled “Power, Pollution, and the Internet” (2012), tech reporter James Glanz made public what was until then a bit of an industry secret: digital forms of information were not only environmentally unfriendly compared even to the thick and heavy forms they replaced; more surprising still, the so-called immateriality of information, the Internet, and our everyday engagement with it had produced a worldwide leviathan hungry for quantities of energy “sharply at odds with its image of sleek efficiency and environmental friendliness” (Glanz). Digital farms or warehouses require the energy output of thirty nuclear power plants because, whether in use or not, the information housed in these warehouses remains online (Glanz). Inside each warehouse are enormous complexes of servers, wires, and electrical circuitry (the heat from which can be visualized from space) that need constant cooling. According to Pierre Delforge of the Natural Resources Defence Council, “Data center electricity consumption is projected to increase to roughly 140 billion kilowatt-hours annually by 2020, the equivalent annual output of 50 power plants, costing American businesses $13 billion annually in electricity bills and emitting nearly 100 million metric tons of carbon pollution per year.” And because most electricity comes from coal, diesel, and petroleum products, the so-called immaterial economy is not only premised on, but actively motivates, the rapid expansion of an energy infrastructure now indisputably responsible for significant contributions to climate change.

Glanz’s report and many others like it, including Ingrid Burrington’s for The Atlantic, foreground the infrastructural and environmental costs of the Internet in order to temper the association of digital culture with weightlessness and green immateriality. My claim in this essay, however, is that the infrastructural truth of the postindustrial economy involves an equally troubling if not coterminous feature of the postindustrial, which is the inseparability of constant increases in global energy wealth since the 1970s—today’s climate crisis—and the simultaneous decrease in labor requirements across the global economy—today’s unemployment crisis. The aesthetic misrecognition of digital culture and communication as immaterial takes place in a larger context that includes the disfiguration of labor from its social ground, what I refer to as energy’s economic elasticity, and the emergence of fossil fuels as a form of social regulation, what I call the social plasticity of oil.

This essay will clarify the aesthetic economy of postindustrialization by establishing that, while development in the Fordist era was primarily designed to standardize and increase labor productivity in and around the factory, the postindustrial economy is instead premised on redefining and reshaping all landscapes as energyscapes, and all energy as economic elasticity. In the critical theory that has grown up alongside landscape architecture and ecological urbanism, intensive and extensive growth in flows of energy and information across landscapes gets recognized as an opportunity to endorse and experiment with speculative philosophies and so-called object-oriented ontologies. By moving through exemplary instances of postindustrial landscape architecture and the philosophical tradition its theorists mobilize, this essay claims that the political economy of postindustrial energy already implies an object-oriented ontology rather than a labor oriented one, and that this (along with the intellectual position that celebrates it) amounts to political disaster.

Energyscapes and the Infrastructures of Accumulation

Energyscape, in the account that follows, names the expanded field—the historical and physical settings—in which capital accumulation is provided its energy infrastructure, which is to say, where energy is optimized aesthetically and socially for the sustained growth of capital.¹ By combining energy with landscape in the settings I nominate here, I am not just referring to what Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle call “logistical landscapes” (205), such as the ports, oil patches, pipelines, and freeways captured by Allan Sekula and Edward Burtynsky. Certainly logistical or infrastructural landscapes are critical to the smooth operation of everyday life. What I am more interested in here is the aesthetic and economic saturation of postindustrial landscapes with energy intensive infrastructures, so that logistical landscapes, sites of resource extraction, industrial factories, and postindustrial cities are sewn together in an expanded field.² In order to calibrate what I have elsewhere called the peculiar carbon-capital complex, or what Andreas Malm has called “fossil capital,” the postindustrial economy makes seamless the circuit of energy extraction, circulation, and consumption. Specially planned economic zones provide the economic and logistical infrastructure required to keep postindustrial growth apace, while energyscapes—which is to say, the infrastructural and technological base of the fossil fuelled fantasies driving the immaterial, the digital, and the fluid—normalize particularly troubling features of what we might term the aesthetics of a vanishing labor force at odds with the carbon-capital complex.

At the level of cultural theory and philosophy, this aesthetic economy is expressed as a set of conceptual preferences shorn off of a form of materialism that triangulates labor, capital, and energy. These features include the liquid, plastic, and elastic preferences of political economy and political philosophy in the postindustrial era, both of which have, consciously or not, driven the concept and standpoint of human labor power into the ground, and excavated an accelerated, albeit accidental and depoliticized, unity between capital and energy in the meantime.

There is no shortage of committed attempts to expose the true environmental costs of energy-hungry infrastructures. The trouble with exposition, however, is that one can no more see a pipeline through a computer screen than one can see the caloric and affective output of a Chinese worker in a smartphone. Part of this is a problem of scale, no doubt. In the words of Peter Gross, who helped design the data warehouses that anchor the Internet, “it’s staggering for most people, even people in the industry, to understand the numbers, the sheer size of these systems” (qtd. in Glanz). Infrastructure more generally, of course, remains for the most part hidden from view, except when its contents are exposed, distributed, spilled, or sabotaged. This is why the struggle to visualize infrastructure is central to any environmentalist politics, as Nicole Starosielski explains: both because ecological devastation is a logical outcome (rather than an accident of) our global energy system and because state security blocks easy knowledge of it. When it comes to infrastructure of any kind, talk of state security and terrorism is never far away.

Environmental risk, however, is logically tied to the specifically economic function of energy infrastructures. Globally, the International Energy Agency predicts that, in order to maintain growth, energy supply will need to grow by forty-five percent between 2006 and 2030 to more than seventeen billion tons of oil-equivalent annually, seventy-three percent of which will be consumed by cities (International Energy Agency). A significant portion of that energy will be tied to the production, distribution, and consumption of digital information. Already in 2013, the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) ecosystem uses fifty percent more energy per year than the aviation industry (Mills). This accelerated correlation between economic growth and energy consumption has been steadily climbing since the Industrial Revolution. The World Bank’s estimated sixteen-fold increase in economic output in the twentieth century (“from about $2 to $32 trillion in constant 1990 dollars”) indexes a seventeen-fold increase in annual commercial energy consumption (from “22 to approximately 380 EJ”) during the same period (Smil 14). This, in a nutshell, is a statistical picture of the saturation I have in mind when I refer to the energyscapes that provide economic growth with its infrastructural fix. For while a good deal of the energy consumption that has made capital accumulation possible has been at the site of production—what World Bank experts term commercial energy—we are increasingly unable to imagine either public or private activities that do not require an enormous amount of energy mediated by an impossibly complex system of automation, logistics, and infrastructure. This colloquial fact of energy, however—that we not only use a lot of it, but are hard pressed to find spaces, activities, or ideas about the future that do not—obscures an equally implicit but perhaps more politically volatile fact about the historical shape of the capitalist exploitation of labor.

Metaphors and lexical fields clothing so-called immaterial culture have gone a long way to occlude digital culture’s spatial and historical contours. As Allison Carruth has recently suggested, most of our ecological metaphors for digital technologies, such as the “cloud” and “streaming,” mask, “willfully in some cases, what is an energy-intensive and massively industrial infrastructure” (342). The coincidence of the infrastructure of digital culture with our postindustrial energy system recedes both phenomenologically and logistically to the level of setting, rather than occupying what in literary studies gets called content. The experiences of daily life depend on an ecological characterization of infrastructure, not because some hidden truth about the Internet lurks beneath the surface of its presentation, but rather because economic growth, state security, and postindustrial culture are all contingencies of a political economy that weds the growth in value to the increase in the total energy circulating through the spaces we inhabit. Digital culture is an expression of a resource aesthetic whose ecological reality runs deep, but whose economic logic is hidden in plain sight.

Making visible the economic and ecological contents of infrastructure, however indispensable a practice, does not of necessity generate a political counterforce, precisely because the economic and ecological contradictions of a world formed by fossil fuels are intimately bound together. Energy’s economic elasticity comes in the form of the logistics revolution in shipping and manufacturing, as well as the productivity gains made through automated and energy intensive technologies, while oil’s plasticity, which is to say, its capacity not only to fuel daily life, but to give it a material shape as well, regulates and modulates the economic value of postindustrial society.

It is clear now, following Wikileaks, the BP oil spill, and other daily manifestations of what is an otherwise deep and hidden infrastructure, that knowledge of infrastructural content does not lead to its politicization (Szeman 147). This is because, to use Amanda Boetzkes and Andrew Pendakis’s useful phrasing, the fossil fuels on which life today depends provide us with not just plastic products but also plasticity as a historical “paradigm.” From the now inseparability of exchange rates and oil prices to the plastic materials of everyday life, or what Boetzkes and Pendakis call “contemporary neoliberal fantasies about the capacity of individuals to endlessly make and re-make themselves,” the world since the second half of the twentieth century is fundamentally saturated with and mediated by social, economic, and psychological plasticity. Digital culture is the example par excellence of plasticity’s two sides: on the back of enormously complicated and expensive infrastructures, and a multitude of electronic materials made from oil, comes an experience of immateriality, lightness, and global communication emancipated from the weighty limits of matter. Plastic’s materiality is world shaping, just as its immateriality—or the experience of speed, freedom, and deracinated communication—contours the social. The energy system we find ourselves in depends on this dialectic between oil’s universality, its conditioning of the possible, and oil’s material or infrastructural realism—the weighty anchor for postindustrial life as we know it. Hydrocarbons give the postindustrial world a sense of a world by unhinging it from geographical limits—a freedom expressed through the postindustrial immediacy with both itself and more industrial parts of the world that is made possible by digital communications and logistics.³ The spatial and temporal aspects of oil’s dialectic generate a setting unique to its plastic qualities—since the other name for space-time is setting—which is what, in my title, I term energyscapes: a concept that, like the land- and media-scapes it refigures, names both the form and historical specificity of the setting we find ourselves in.

Catherine Malabou’s 1996 book on Hegel and plasticity made clear the problems and possibilities of the plastic dialectic in the age of oil, while her recent turn to cerebral and cognitive plasticity has redefined the concepts of the cerebral and the imagination. For her, plasticity involves itself in our thinking about it, since at base it is “a capacity to receive form and a capacity to produce form” (9). Like many of the contributors to the collection on Plastic Materialities, Alberto Toscano turns plasticity into the concept that captures both the materiality and epistemological condition of a critique of capital today, insisting that capital accumulation depends on a constant making and remaking of locales and regions in its own image. My contribution here is to double the dialectical sense in which capital depends on plasticity, since plasticity itself is tied not just to the abstract capacity to give form, but also to the historical specificity of the energy system from which its material expression (plastics) comes. If capital remakes the world in its image, its global success in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been wholly contingent on its ability to turn fossil fuels into both its essence, by achieving growth gains through energy deepening, and its appearance, through the plasticity of postindustrial social relations and the objects that surround us. What I mean to draw out from the philosophy of plasticity and the energy infrastructure that gives form to the digital, “immaterial,” and postindustrial forms of work and communication is the context in which to critique the explicitly political ambitions of postindustrial philosophy.

Following Levi Bryant, who coined the term Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), I understand Speculative Realism, Actor Network Theory (ANT), and OOO as speculative positions connected at multiple axes. My claim here, however, is that each articulates a shared fantasy of the world in the measure that they are constitutive of a postindustrial philosophy that imagines capital as a form of energy, but not energy (and its infrastructure) as a property of capitalist exploitation.⁴ I counter this shared fantasy by establishing the indispensability of dialectical thinking in a plastic world, which is a consequence of the energy regime I am trying to foreground, since the postindustrial dialectic between energy and capital (in my account) is what cuts across the philosophical hubris of speculative philosophy. Bryant’s own attempt at providing speculative philosophy with a politics importantly grounds itself in what he calls thermopolitics: where he turns energy into a fact of nature that cuts across what he calls critical theory and its obsession with discourse, rather than treat it as a concept tied to capital, capitalism, or the economic more generally. Energy stands in as the interruption of second nature by first nature in Speculative Realism, ANT, and OOO because these positions abandon dialectical thinking, and thus any chance of mediating the historicity of energy and its relation to capital. In order to think about the historical specificity of concepts, especially ones that seem to refer to matter itself, Bryant and others would need a specifically historical materialism. Capital no doubt expresses itself as energy all the time, but only because of its unique capacity to combine what Marx in the “Critique of the Gotha Program” called natural wealth and human labor into a force severed, and therefore ostensibly autonomous, from its origin.

Postindustrial Landscapes

Articulating the setting of the infrastructural base of postindustrial society is a means towards historicizing the relationship between energy, capital, and labor. As I have suggested already, setting is neither the space nor time of a drama exclusively, but rather the texture, rhythm, and environment in which it takes place. Isolating the force that both capital and energy exert on a setting can only occur in what Rosalind Krauss famously called an “expanded field,” because energy and capital are not things in and of themselves. I am invoking Krauss’s celebrated insights into the “rupture” in art history sometime around 1970 because the transformation that concerns Krauss (the elastic logic of sculpture amidst the turn to land art) is both contemporaneous with and constitutive of the one that concerns me. At the end of her essay (which is as much about the weird things going on in the sculpture of the Smithsons, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt, Alice Aycock, and so on, as it is about historicism in criticism), she asks her audience to consider a theory that addresses “the root causes—the conditions of possibility—that brought about the shift into postmodernism” (“Sculpture”). Because she is troubled by historicism’s “genealogical trees,” Krauss wants to promote an approach that addresses “the cultural determinants of the opposition through which a given field is structured” (“Sculpture”). In the vocabulary of the expanded field of sculpture, this means that the political economy of the 1970s is not autonomous from that decade’s aesthetic economy. Krauss’s role in formative debates about the role of artists in designing the postindustrial environment, as we see in a moment, is another indication that what she meant by the expanded field had everything to do with overlapping spheres of political and aesthetic economies, in addition to the historicity of medium. This at least is what lurks behind the notion of an expanded field in the first place, even if that essay means to stick to a specifically aesthetic reading of that field until its final page. Krauss’s critique of historicism escapes medium specificity, which is why much of her work that follows the 1979 essay develops a theory of what she calls the “post-medium condition” (A Voyage 32).

My own account concerns itself with putting “energy deepening” at the heart of the expanded field of the postindustrial, and thereby to identify such deepening as a crucial component of what Krauss called the “root cause” of postmodernism. Energy deepening is a “root cause” because it made possible not only the financialization of the global economy—which, erupting on the back of the energy futures market in the late 1970s and early ’80s, impacted currency delinking, rapid expansion in resource industries, and the artificially cheap energy for consumers and businesses available for a period—but also a whole host of digital technologies that enable and shore up the so-called immaterial, creative, and affective turns in the global economy. Energy deepening, then, provides the infrastructural link between what in an older vocabulary would have been the base (postindustrialism) and superstructure (postmodernism) of our current era. When directors of the then Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) began an embargo on oil shipments in 1973 in response to the US involvement in the Yom Kippur War, it exposed the increasing saturation of global markets in the geopolitical and material properties of fossil fuels. Only two years earlier, Nixon’s recess from the Bretton Woods Agreement meant that a new standard of value was on the horizon, since the US dollar that was meant to replace gold was more vulnerable to market fluctuations than physical reserves of commodities like gold, sterling silver, or oil. In a handful of years, energy had become more than an intensive factor in the productive forces of society, and had begun to contour the very substance and landscape of the market.

Contemporaneous with energy deepening at the market level, however, was an equally dramatic turn back to landscape in architecture and urban design at the cusp of postindustrialization. The precise moment when landscape became the general frame of reference for architects is still widely debated. For architecture theorist and historian Felicity D. Scott, the ambition to “design the environment” was already made explicit during the Universitas Project hosted at MoMA in 1972. There, design curator at MoMA Emilio Ambasz invited people as varied as Krauss, Joseph Rykwert, Peter Eisenman, Octavio Paz, Henri Lefebvre, Jean Baudrillard, Manuel Castells, and Hannah Arendt to collaborate on an interim report imagining “Institutions for a Post-Technological Society.” Though the report reached only a limited audience, it nonetheless established a specifically “postindustrial conception of environment” that involved new scale, in Scott’s words, “such as systems theory, cybernetics, information theory, and semiology” (89–90). The environmental impact of the world’s being saturated with difficult-to-extract sources of energy had already begun to shape the world at a theoretical level even before the first major oil crisis, yet the spatial paradigm that emerged in response to it foreshadowed the oxymoron of postindustrialization: in order to temper the environmental costs of industrial cities, the postindustrial city would need a wholly new infrastructure hungry for energy.

In Grahame Shane’s brief history of the discipline, Kevin Lynch’s call for an “ecological approach to landscape” in his 1984 Good City Form—itself a response to Howard Odum’s 1963 Ecology—paves the way. In Shane’s genealogy, echoed by many of the key players in American landscape urbanism, the turn is expressed loudest somewhere between the Parc de la Villette competition in Paris (1984–1989) and the International Building Exhibition for postindustrial renewal in Germany’s Northern Ruhr region (1989–99)—where Leon Krier, Peter Eisenman, Elia Zenghelis, Rem Koolhaas, and Aldo Rossi submitted landmark proposals. The biggest names in the architecture world seemed, in both Shane and Richard Weller’s accounts, to confirm that architecture had broadened its ambitions to include what the discipline’s key theorist, James Corner, called “a truly ecological landscape architecture” for which architecture “might be less about the construction of finished and complete works, and more about the design of ‘processes,’ ‘strategies,’ ‘agencies,’ and ‘scaffoldings’” (qtd. in Weller 77). Art and architecture historian Kenneth Frampton’s 1995 “Toward an Urban Landscape,” in addition to Koolhaas’s landmark essay “The Generic City” and Paola Viganò’s Territories of a New Modernity, to name but a few examples, announced that the turn from architectural objects was complete, and that what now needed to be designed were landscaped settings.

Even in this origin story, what fueled the turn from objects to settings in architecture and design was not merely a raised environmental awareness, but also the site-specific demands of development initiatives explicit about the ambition to postindustrialize. In the case of Germany’s Emscher Park (the historical center of coal and steel production), the aim was, as Kelly Shannon puts it, “simultaneously [to repair] environmental damage and [to project] economic renewal” (148), while for Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette—the former abattoir district of working class Paris—the aim was to turn the city’s center of caloric production into a permanently unfolding “event.” In Tschumi’s sense of the word—a hybrid term mutated through conversations with Jacques Derrida, who collaborated and wrote extensively on the project, and Michel Foucault—“the event here is seen as a turning point—not an origin or an end—as opposed to such propositions as form follows function” (Tschumi 256). Modernism’s commitment to the concrete contours of the architectural object no longer captured the ambitions or capacity of urban design, since for Tschumi the relationship between building and landscape was interactive, always “turning.” Instead of objects in space, Tschumi sought to build an environment.

Tschumi was relatively clear about his discursive ambition at La Villette, which was to materialize a “deconstructive architecture” that would extend beyond the “drama” of object-functions (what users do in a building) to the coordinates of a “setting” (Tschumi 256). Hence inside the park are individual folies or interactive sculptures in a variety of shapes and sizes— some look like excerpts from a children’s playground, others half-finished scaffolding for a bank façade—while the total landscape of La Villette is the setting Tschumi set out to design. For Derrida, who took great pleasure in elaborating the meaning of La Villette, the folies were material equivalents to the ongoing “invention” necessary for the new economy, of which La Villette is a flag bearer (qtd. in Tschumi 257). Thus both in form and function, La Villette announced an ambition for the coming turn to landscape in architecture, which was to subtract spaces from the realm of the immediately productive (a coal mine, steel mill, or abattoir) in order to design an indeterminate setting where use, invention, and program are variable.

If what fueled Tschumi and Derrida was La Villette’s deconstructive ethos, it was only due to the theoretical weight then attached to indeterminacy in general. However, those that would look to the project as a sign of things to come in landscape urbanism—the US’s two leading figureheads, Charles Waldheim and James Corner, for instance—would see something much more interesting underway. Corner put it best (though many landscape theorists would echo him in order to distinguish their practice from classical landscape theory) when he named “terra fluxa” the new terrain of architecture and landscape. Liberated from the two axes of space characteristic of architecture’s classical domain, terra fluxa “suggests shifting attention away from the object qualities of space (whether formal or scenic) to the systems that condition the distribution and density of urban form” (Corner 28). In Corner’s eyes, architecture’s move towards landscape was also a move from objecthood to systemhood. Thus, while it looked from the outside as if architects were invited into the garden at La Villette, major firms and theorists such as Corner, Waldheim, MVRDV, Koolhaas (whose own proposal for La Villette was most inspiring for Corner), and Foreign Architect Office (FOA) understood the project to advance the already growing turn to landscape in the architectural imaginary.

This also helps explain why, just as quickly as major architects turned their attention to landscape in the ’80s and ’90s, landscape architects redefined landscape as a form of infrastructure, or more generally as a design approach to infrastructure space. Corner himself did this in the major 1997 collection Recovering Landscape, but W. J. T. Mitchell had established the inseparability of landscape and the infrastructures of power in his Landscape and Power (1994). In addition to the early influence of Deleuze on architecture and urban theory in the ’80s and ’90s, the widespread redefinition of landscape to mean a place where information, matter, energy, and ideas flow was a consequence of the gradual obsolescence of industrial infrastructures—and ways of thinking about infrastructure—upon which the postindustrial was predicated.

Landscape Infrastructures

In David Gissen’s estimation, the architectural shifts toward “research,” “organization,” “landscape,” and “infrastructure” are generally part of the same historical process:

This involves not only a turn toward specific geographical concepts and theories, but toward material and representational transformations as well. We can see this in various contemporary works that advance the territory of maps over plans, the flow of matter over subjects, and the concept of environment over that of space-time. (42)

Gissen charts the decline of design—a professional aesthetic practice tied to the modern movement, but also to the types of commodities that were necessary to generalize modernity— and the recent ascendency of the geographical as the disciplinary and political terrain of architecture. Design, in his account, was about accommodating a space-time of modern governance, whereas the geographical is about setting up the postindustrial matrix of “governance, production, and management” that are otherwise “everywhere and nowhere” (Gissen 42). Even if this geographical ethos is not universal across building practices, for Gissen, Stan Allan, Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto of Reiser + Unemoto, among many others, it defines landscape architecture’s material function in the postindustrial economy.

Several important figures in landscape urbanism have anchored their vision of the new economy to Aldo Rossi’s canonical provocation in which architecture names the mediation of matter and energy. In their field manual, which doubles as a postindustrial manifesto for energy’s material economy, Reiser and Umemoto go as far as to implicate architecture’s “substance, its scale, its transitions and measurement” with “the dilations and contractions of the energy field” (22). For Resier and Umemoto, whose built and theoretical ambition is self-purportedly to realize the full and determining potential of “material and formal specificity over myth and interpretation” (23), this alliance between the spatial aesthetics of architecture and the fluid tectonics of “the energy field” is not novel, but restores an older idea. In Rossi’s late modern version of landscape tectonics, architecture’s principle sits between the two sides of tempo in Italian, namely “both atmosphere and chronology” (Rossi 1). Thus what is architectural, as opposed to merely built, is the “fog” that “penetrate[s] the Galleria in Milan: it is the unforeseen element that modifies and alters, like light and shadow, like stones worn smooth by the feet and hands of generations of men” (Rossi 2). Though Rossi’s motivation in re-describing architecture as atmospheric in the 1980s was to design political spaces, the economic crisis that occasioned his investment in 1981 generated similar conclusions amongst other developers.

Architecture’s landscape is here reimagined by Rossi and then Reiser and Umemoto as atmospheric space (like weather) and materialist time (the smooth stones after generations of pilgrims) in order to calibrate its forms to “the energy field” it mediates. We might expect the primacy of energy and “material logics” in architecture to result in a civil engineering approach to aesthetics—that is, optimized distribution of forces—but Reiser and Umemoto generate what in 2006 is in many ways a novel materialism much closer to speculative brands of contemporary philosophy than to a new rationalism (Reiser and Umemoto 27). Indeed they most want to move past the rationalist approach to distribution of forces, which for them “precludes the productive and rich capacity of matter to define or influence geometry” (Reiser and Umemoto 74). Using Manuel DeLanda’s speculative philosophy as their cue—work that predates Quentin Meillassoux’s veritable bible for speculative realism in 2006—their novel tectonics prioritize intensive properties of matter over extensive ones.

Diller, Scofidio + Renfro’s “Blur Building” for the 2002 Swiss Expo has become notorious for its dramatization of intensity over extension. Blur, in their words, “is an architecture of atmosphere—a fog mass resulting from natural and manmade forces” (Diller et al.). Users cross a narrow bridge out into the middle of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland until they reach an enormous cloud that seems to hover autonomously between the lake and the bridge. The cloud itself is the lake vaporized through 35,000 high-pressure nozzles, guided by the building’s “smart weather system” (Diller et al.). Though the cloud itself is supported by an intricate piping, plumbing, oil rig-like structure that extends into the lakebed, its architecture is properly landscaped since it both responds to, and produces, weather systems, and reduces the visual field to a minimum in order to maximize the atmospheric. In this version of landscape architecture, figuration is abandoned in favor of a generalized and atmospheric ground.⁵

Both Reiser + Umemoto and Elizabeth Diller have tied the rise of intensive spatial properties to the dematerialized production sites central to the information economy. The new office space, in Reiser + Umemoto’s theory of tectonics, and in their major Dubai office tower “O-14,” is characterized by shrinking hardware, expanding “soft spaces” (Reiser and Umemoto 109), and a landscape designed to augment creative and non-programmed forms of work. “Against Program” is the way William J. Mitchell puts it, when he describes the spatial paradigm required to settle the digital, postindustrial economy in cities not yet ready for it. Program, in his criticism, implies a hardware priority that stunts creative use and co-opts communication between user and building, and building and system. Hence Corner’s paradigm shift, where landscape urbanism moves from “terra firma” to “terra fluxa,” is one that saturates the larger field of urbanism today, and is situated not just within the philosophical tradition of new materialism, but within the spatial coordinates of the energy-rich postindustrial economy, too.

It should come as no surprise that the peculiar qualities of energy in its material form— namely, those intensive properties emblematic of design and the theoretical preference for flows—have come to dominate the way many people think about space and its organization today. My argument so far has been that the carbon-capital complex is built on optimizing the social and economic plasticity of oil through the elasticity of energyscapes. The replacement of human labor time with a combination of dead labor in the form of machines and non-human sources of power is a governing law of economic history. Thus as human labor is freed from the factory floor and its static hardware, the absent cause of postindustrialization—namely, energy deepening at a most alarming rate—begins to saturate both theories and plans for the postindustrial setting. As global energy supply increases gradually, energy’s economic elasticity is optimized through the specifically gradient qualities of oil, including its plasticity and elasticity at the socio-cultural level and its intensity and extensity at the level of setting.

If energy has become the dominant point of reference for many designers and landscape urbanists, it would perhaps explain why landscape urbanism is at times as able to normalize the energy structures of a fossil fueled postindustrial society as it is to arm that same society with an environmentalist countertendency. This at least is the line that Mohsen Mostafavi walks in his opening remarks to the mammoth Ecological Urbanism collection. Mostafavi, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, promotes an ecological approach to urban design first defined by Félix Guattari. Initially developed in Guattari’s The Three Ecologies in the 1980s, “ecosophy” read through the lens of landscape is a commitment to developing intensive capacities across the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity (the three ecologies). Here energy is shed of its economic function, and instead promoted as an ecological force counter to capitalist modernity. Instead of programming energy-efficient spaces, Mostafavi insists that a design approach to the environmental crisis views the fragility of systems “as an opportunity for speculative design innovations rather than as a form of technical legitimation for promoting conventional solutions” (17). The fragile relationship between human energy needs and environmental sustainability is “the essential basis for a new form of creative imagining” (Mostafavi 26). And what finally proves illustrative for his vision of ecological urbanism is the informal markets of the lumpenproletariat in Lagos and Brazil, and the reclamation of abandoned brownfields for community gardens in Detroit and New Orleans. Thus when Mostafavi insists that “ecological urbanism must provide the necessary and emancipatory infrastructures for an alternative form of urbanism” (40), he means infrastructure as a form of spatial product that enables stimulating forms of postindustrial interaction: the market and the farm are economically complementary, and offer an image of urban life with both manufacture and power generation cut out.

Pop-up factories, for instance, are not part of this picture, but are presupposed by it—like the coal plants and oil refineries currently fueling the global economy. Externalizing production and hydrocarbon infrastructures at an aesthetic level is primary to ecological and landscape approaches to the problem of postindustrial energy. These “aesthetic” clues about an urban modality ecologically coded are meant, in Mostafavi’s account, to offer a picture of a design ethic able to “counter the global dominance of capitalism” (50), plausible in one obvious sense since carbon and capital appear to have been disarticulated in this view of the world. The transition out of capitalism, in ecological urbanism’s most distinguished voice, is simultaneously a transition out of petromodernity.

Whether strategically excised from the picture, or made the dominant variable in future projections, energy systems and the energyscapes they imply have become the primary concern in ecological urbanism and landscape architecture. What I have been arguing here is that this preoccupation gives a theoretical insight into the physical impact of hydrocarbon systems on the social and economic settings in which we live and on the design principles through which the carbon-capital complex establishes itself in the physical and social setting of the postindustrial. To the degree that energy in its most abstract definition is that which animates all matter, landscapes of any variety will thus also be energyscapes. What the postindustrial economy requires, however, are spatial modulations of energy deepening, since without energy deepening there is no economic growth, and without spatial modulations of energy there is no setting for expanded cycles of deepening. In addition to reimagining the spatial field of architecture as an energy field, the turn to landscape in architecture has brought with it a redefinition of architecture as a form of energy infrastructure for a new economy. From the trading floor of the energy futures markets in New York, Chicago, and London, to the ports, pipelines, and servers that facilitate the cultural conditions of late capitalism, energy deepening gives the global economy a sense of setting.⁶ The vulgar economic reality of fossil fuels is most mediated, however, where postindustrial energyscapes calibrate the spatial heterogeneity of our fossil fueled energy system.

Philosophy and the Problem of Energy

The aesthetic preference in landscape architecture and ecological urbanism for intensive properties, such as energy and information flows, and the infrastructure systems that maximize them, were necessary features of the larger project to postindustrialize key economic spaces. This, I have been suggesting, is neither an accident nor a tendency separate from the philosophical disposition that has matured during the same postindustrial transformations at the global stage. It is not an accident because the philosophical turn to intensive properties in Deleuze, Laruelle, De Landa, and Meillassoux is always a form of theoretical legitimation that gives license to the speculative characteristic of their philosophical tradition, a stance premised on a rejection of nearly all philosophies tied to industrial forms of measurement and thinking. Historically and theoretically, speculative realism and the object-oriented ontology it made possible depend on an insight into intensive properties of matter, of which energy is the most obvious, important, and economically valuable. Yet neither of these two positions, nor the political philosophy of accelerationism indebted to them, takes seriously the elasticity that energy deepening makes available for capital after oil reigns supreme—an economic elasticity so significant, in my account, because it is responsible for both the aesthetic and economic effacement of labor in the postindustrial economy.⁷ Thus, while a reading of energy as cosmic force animates much of speculative philosophy, energy’s dialectical imbrication with capitalist accumulation appears only at the register of climate change.

Here I want to be very careful not to misrecognize the political and philosophical motivation behind the conceptual preferences that animate speculative philosophies of the present, but instead to situate those preferences in an economic field equally, if not more, invested in them. Deleuze no doubt has the right idea when, in Nietzsche and Philosophy, he distinguishes between energic force and force as will, and it is in this matrix of materialism that Peter Hallward convincingly characterizes Deleuze’s philosophy “as an exercise in creative indiscernment, an effort to subtract the dynamics of creation from the mediation of the created” (3). Certainly the ambitions of Nietzsche, Whitehead, and Bergson reside in the former—in the philosophical optimization of creativity, instead of the rather more dialectical game of discerning “the mediation of the created”—and for this reason Nietzsche’s fascination with the eternal return of energy leads Deleuze not to the critique of specific forms and uses of energy (industrialized coal, oil, fertilizers, and so on), but to the celebration of creativity as such. If for Nietzsche “the world” is “a monster of energy, without beginning, without end,” and whose only will is “the will to power,” as it is famously described at the close of The Will to Power (fragment 1067), we might hazard to supply this picture of the world with what gives it its contemporaneity, to paraphrase Benjamin in thesis XIV. My intention here is to track the way the conceptual distinction between energy and intensity pans out when what is in need of conceptualization, critique, and politicization is very much the material history of energy’s concept, including its philosophical, aesthetic, and political economy. What happens to philosophical disposition when it is confronted with the urgent need to historicize the smooth synthesis of industrial energy systems with social creativity, mass unemployment, and the epistemological impasse of a fossil fuelled modernity? My claim here is that it will have a very difficult time recognizing the normative versions of its ambitions without the capacity and motivation, using Hallward’s words again, to discern forces that mediate the created, that give eternal return a sense of specificity, and so on.

What then mediates the created in a postindustrial landscape premised on untold quantities of energy, radically uneven concentrations of capital, and rapid environmental destabilization? My claim in the opening section of this essay was that capital has never before been as bound to its capacity to deepen and extend energy-intensive forms of production, circulation, and consumption as it is in the postindustrial era, a tendency largely responsible for the political and critical hostility to labor. But the expanded field of postindustrial economics that I have been posing to the tradition that celebrates the energic is not historically unique in its preference for energy in the abstract over labor as the mediation of energy and the value it helps expand.

An important predecessor to the postindustrial philosophy I have been shadowing here is Isabelle Stengers’s critical realism. Stengers’s speculative critique of empiricism and positivism makes space for, but is crucially distinct from, more ludic materialisms that today celebrate creative energy, and energy as such. What distingushes the critical realism to which I wish to return from the more recent iterations that follow from the postindustrial philosophy I have named as such is its attention to conceptual conditions and its commitment to mediation in the face of radical uncertainty. On the other side of scientific and critical realism is a critique of energy that returns us to the thermodynamic reason of capital.

In the tradition continued by Isabelle Stengers—a tradition heavily indebted to the work of Michel Serres and Gaston Bachelard—the occasion for a speculative form of philosophical realism stretched back to the heart of industrialization, or more specifically to the irreconcilable rupture between mechanics and thermodynamics. Animating the gap between a thermodynamic faith and the rational observation of mechanical force in Stengers’s account is the aesthetic economy of the former. The idea of “conversion between ‘forces’ was initially an aesthetic idea,” she maintains, “which communicated with the presentation of an ‘indestructible force’ that gave nature its permanent unity” (179). This “indestructible force” stretched back to Leibniz’s “life force” and to the post-Kantian philosophy of nature, both of which cohered in an aesthetic irreducible to scientific reason. In Stengers’s account, energy and its nineteenth-century theory requires an aesthetic understanding of universal convertibility—and this would matter later, once energy and human labor become ostensibly interchangeable in the postindustrial period—since for energy to make sense, it must be equally visible in the burning candle or the heat given off by a chemical reaction as it is in electrolysis, the electric battery, and the steam engine. Hence what energy initially establishes is not just a theory of matter’s behavior but what Stengers calls “a ‘way of seeing,’ an aesthetic” that unified not just the rhythms and tendencies of the physical world, but the disciplines charged with studying them (192).

Lurking behind the metaphysics of energy and the theory of thermodynamics is, in Stengers’s words, an energy “landscape” involving not just scientific inquiry but historically specific structures of thought (vii). And the implications for political economy—which in the 1860s was up against what would prove to be its most hostile opposition to date, namely Marxism in its most mature stage—are not difficult to grasp once Stengers extends her critique to the theory of entropy and its consequence for value standards of work. The leap of faith required for the theory of universal energy convertibility gave the industrial economy its economic doxa. At issue is the relationship between measurement and the object of measurement when energy is understood as a form of work. In the formative theses of Carnot and Claussius, the measurement of energy necessarily creates the object called energy. This is because “in the case of energy transformations … measurability is in no way a ‘given,’ it must be created, fabricated from whole cloth” (Stengers 210). Motivating this scientific form of perlocution is a conundrum introduced by the theory of entropy: namely, that not all transformations are reversible. Though the first law of thermodynamics states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, the second law eliminates any chance of equivocation between transformations since entropy names that portion of energy that permanently escapes transferability. Thus one cannot measure energy like one can measure the extensive properties of matter (length, volume, weight, and so on) because at its heart—and this is why object-oriented ontologists and landscape architects are both blind to and stimulated by energy—energy is pure intensity, with no inherent extensive properties, and thus not measurable from within a rationalism premised on extension. Unlike mechanical force, which has a source and a result that on paper can be reversed, energy “obligated the physicist to be conscious that he was a manipulator, an active participant in the definition of equivalence” (Stengers 211).

The point here is twofold. Energy (in its two faces—one positive force, the other negative entropy) is in Stengers’s words “a rather strange” object for science. It is strange because it betrays the logical forms of measurement that had, until then, defined not just scientific systems of measurement but economic forms, too. And this is the second point. The labor theory of value emerged as a logical extension of the mechanical universe, lock, stock, and barrel. Labor power, in its original formulation, was a measurable form of energy, the equivocation of which was supplied by the wage. Energy and its enigmatic theory made any measure of human energy (labor) more than a little odd, since the value of a commodity implied an economy of different states of accumulated and potential energy (labor, most obviously, but capital too). If labor is a form of energy, and energy is pure intensity evading rational measurement without the active intervention (and invention) of an observer, then the specifically economic form of rationality associated with classical political economy would require as much faith as the physicist measuring energy. Positivism, both in physics and in economics (and the money form of value is the greatest positivism of them all), was already a form of speculation, since what these fields took as their universal objects (one energy, the other labor time) troubled the very enterprise they supposedly verified.

On the cusp of the thermodynamics revolution in science, Marx was fast on the heels of the second enterprise. Capital is an enormous exercise in a type of materialist critique that intervenes, too, within the logical assumptions of the then novel science of political economy in order both to expose its fallacies and to catch a vista from within its contradictions onto what might succeed it. We might then call Marx, like Roy Bhaskar does, the first realist in the modern era. Stengers, too, comes close to recognizing the significance of energy’s historical and complimentary coincidence with the political economy of capital in the nineteenth century. Her critique exposes the way that the political economist’s aesthetic challenge of tracking the appearance of value back to its sources is the same challenge that sits at the heart of thermodynamic reason. From the perspective of Stengers’s critical realism, the enigma of value is the enigma of energy, the historical unfolding of which provides fossil capital with its resource aesthetic.⁸ Understood from within Stengers’s critique of thermodynamic reason, the contemporaneous evisceration of labor as a critical standpoint and the ludic misrecognition of energy’s inseparability from capital come as no surprise in an expanded economic field premised on both.

Footnotes

1. My preference for the word “setting” here, over and above the ecocritical nomenclature of place and space, is meant 1) to flag my sense that energy and capital modulate experiences of and ideas about setting (coded as environments) and the rhythms and scales that texture it; 2) to underscore the cultural history of what is typically understood as the environment, but what I am saying has been setting all along, and; 3) to mark my debt to Leerom Medovoi’s claim in “The Biopolitical Unconscious: Toward an Eco-Marxist Literary Theory” (and Michael Rubenstein’s sharp interpretation of it, which he was so kind to share with me). Medovoi’s Eco-Marxism stakes its position in a revision to the metaphysical binary at the heart of much ecocriticism in which, despite rigorous efforts to avoid such a schema, man and environment are figured as forever separate. “The historicizing alternative to such metaphysics,” Medovoi argues,

would be an ecocritical inquiry into the materially specific (and recent) invention of the “population/environment/capital” triad, a systemic exercise of political power that only some two hundred years ago began to develop strategies for pacifying, harnessing, and reorganizing the mutual relationships of human and nonhuman life toward the end of optimal capital accumulation. (131)

This “historicizing alternative” reads setting as both responsive to and the result of capital’s dependence on, but ideological re-presentation of, the environment. Thus

the key contribution of a Marxist ecocriticism, or an ecocritical Marxism, would be to focus attention on the recodings of setting as a mechanism through which the biopolitical environmentalization of actual spaces (as governable milieus for life) might pass into the literary (Medovoi 133),

to which I will add here the capitalization and spatialization of energy.

2. My thinking about the singularity of infrastructural circuits across distinct geographies of extraction and circulation is heavily informed by Keller Easterling’s reading of “infrastructure space” in Extrastatecraft.

3. Timothy Mitchell’s account of the economization of fossil fuels, in “Fixing the Economy,” Carbon Democracy, and elsewhere, has been formative to my understanding of where and how to isolate energy in the critique of political economy. Especially inspiring have been Mitchell’s insights about the function of fossil fuels in the conceptual history and composition of terms such as “the economy” and “the globe” (109). In Mitchell’s account, it is oil’s saturation of “currency systems” in the postwar era in particular that creates the conditions for national accounts, macroeconomic management, and a concept of boundless growth (139). This latter sense of a variegated relationship between spatiality and temporality driven by the industrialization of fossil fuels is what I am tracking in this essay.

4. In Bryant’s account, what distinguishes these speculative positions is their hostility to what routinely gets called correlationism, which assigns a determinant role to the subject that discovers an object in the world. Critical theory, very broadly understood, is in Bryant’s account opposed to speculative theory.

5. It is precisely these qualities of “Blur” that make Cary Wolfe enthusiastic for the project’s implications for a specifically posthuman architecture, in What is Posthumanism? (2009), and that alarm Mark Dorrian in “Clouds of Architecture” (2007).

6. My use of the term setting is meant to be distinguished from Jeff Malpas and Ursula Heise’s return to Heidegger’s thoughts on place—which is to say, a sense of place. I’m not concerned with Heidegger, which is why I use the term “setting” here. Thinking about the effect of fossil fueled economic growth on the physical and social cartographies is consistent with the argument that Andreas Malm makes about the production of an “abstract spatio-temporality” for capital:

the necessary material substratum for this spatio-temporality–long hidden from the view of most Marxists, however sharp their eyes have otherwise been–is fossil fuels. They represent the geological compression of the time and space required for photosynthesis hundreds of millions of years ago, when no humans roamed the planet; sui generis, their dense energy permits capital to produce its own abstract spatio-temporality for the production of surplus-value. They are incorporated into capital as its own motive force. (56)

7. In Robert Ayres and Benjamin Warr’s groundbreaking analysis in ecological economics, upwards of twelve percent of growth in the twentieth century remains unexplained so long as energy is considered an independent variable in economic growth. When they internalize energy in their measures of growth, on the other hand, continued global growth is fully explained despite lowering labor inputs (due mainly to automation) at the macroeconomic scale (Ayers and Warr 196).

8. In The Human Motor (1990) Anson Rabinbach traces the conceptual and theoretical overlap between the emergent theory of the conservation of energy in the 1840s and Marx’s turn to the concept of labor power, a transformation that Brent Bellamy and I will characterize as Marxism’s dialectical solution to the enigma of energy in our forthcoming introduction to Marxism and Energy.

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