David Wills (bio)
Brown University

A review of Krell, David Farrell. Derrida and Our Animal Others: Derrida’s Final Seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2013.

Over the past twenty years David Krell has often eschewed the standard format of scholarly publications in favor of, for example, philosophical fiction (Son of Spirit; Nietzsche: A Novel); or books that allow themselves a more informal tonality and a type of modest pedagogical ambition, as in the case of Derrida and Our Animal Others. He dedicates his first two chapters to summarizing the Beast and the Sovereign seminars that Derrida gave in 2001–2003. The three following chapters discuss The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida’s critique of Heidegger on the animal, and Heidegger on apophantic discourse. A conclusion then proposes some directions for future research.

Yet Krell’s modesty is accompanied by a forceful denunciation of the parlous state of current intellectual effort, particularly as it participates in the “flatten[ing] and banaliz[ing of] our powers of expression” as a function of the “waxing illiteracy of our time” (158). Thus, whereas he mourns the loss of academic rigor and the sidelining of work within the literary and philosophical humanities, he finds those disciplines to be complicit in their own demise, descending to “rather vapid self-righteous discourses on biopower and biopoliticking,” or contributing to “exchanges within and without the walls, in our departments and colleges as well as at conferences, [that have] become increasingly mindless, overhasty, and testy” (93, 149).

A major aim of Derrida and Our Animal Others is therefore to hold up the late work of one philosopher as a shining example of how research and pedagogy should be conducted, even though Krell knows full well that the style of Derrida’s teaching and writing can produce reactions of impatience and charges of obfuscation. Krell is one of those (as am I) who have no doubt that Derrida’s work is to be admired and emulated, and his book is therefore replete with observations and commentaries that demonstrate the philosophical acumen and pedagogical strategies of the series of seminars—and writings around those seminars—that turned out to be Derrida’s final major undertaking before his death in 2004. One might, in that respect, call Krell’s book unapologetically partisan: for example, he finds Derrida’s somewhat contentious, even combative critique of Agamben in The Beast and the Sovereign “utterly devastating,” “exactly right” in substituting a philology of “rhetorical flourish” for the deconstructive reading he promotes (15).

So modest, in one sense, is Krell’s project of presenting philosophical thinking and teaching as it should be, that he is content to have the blow-by-blow commentary of “The Beast and the Sovereign” seminars, their “themes” and “theses,” fill well over a third of his book. Each sub-chapter in that first section begins with an annotated summary of the topics covered in each of the twenty-three seminars, including bibliographical sources. The same the section concludes with the admonition (tongue-in-cheek, I presume) concerning what “the granting agencies” could have done “for philosophy instead of against it”: i.e., “they could have used that money to fly dozens of us to Paris” (75). That summary even finds fit to discuss typos that appear in the English translations, restricted almost exclusively to incorrect German usages such as the scharfes ‘s’ (8n). Krell’s book is, in that way, about nothing if not attention to detail, and Derrida is especially valued for being the paragon of minutiae-minding (even if he was himself capable of typos and other inaccuracies).

“The Beast and the Sovereign” summaries lead into a similar discussion of The Animal That Therefore I Am, although by this point in Krell’s book, and for the remainder, Krell’s commentaries become more exegetical, as he expands the scope of his analysis to embrace a number of other topics, or to expand on—even gently critique—Derrida’s approach. For example, Krell attends to Heidegger’s concept of Benommenheit as developed in his1929–30 seminar, and he discusses Lacan’s translation of Heidegger’s essay on “Logos” from 1951. Krell is at his strongest when it comes to his exhaustive knowledge of the Heideggerian corpus, and he similarly demonstrates a laudable erudition when he turns his attention to classical Greek. If only for that philological richness, Derrida and Our Animal Others is a treasure, what we might call a thesauretical treasure.

The soft approach of Krell’s project persists into his “Conclusions and Directions for Future Research,” the final chapter, whose title has to be an ironic comment on the bureaucratization of academic work—one imagines trying to fit the chapter into the three-centimeter space provided for such reflections on a grant application or sabbatical report form. That informal tonality makes this a book that one reads with considerable interest and a widening smile. It allows for some digressive, even peculiar asides —for example, on Willem Defoe (53) or on wine (125) —and for many self-reflexive moments of allow-me-if-I-mays, or self-deprecation concerning the foolishness or awkwardness of what is being proposed (165). At one point he sums up a series of reflections with the sentence: “Thought-provoking questions or suspicions—to which I have no replies and no anodynes” (122). But none of that prevents serious conceptual developments such as his proposing an idea of “pantology,” an “everythinging” (137) that might better understand, or be better related to Heidegger’s equilibrium—if that is what it is—of revealing and concealing. And in such passages this reader had his own form of revelatory moment. The “pantology” discussion occurs in the chapter on Heidegger’s “Logos” essay, in which Krell analyzes extensively the sense of logos as legein (from gleaning to reading), and the moment just referred to is followed and reinforced by a series of excellent paragraphs that move through Heraclitus and Plato all the way to Hegel and finally Melville’s Pierre, one of whose characters hears “the busy claw of some midnight mole in the ground” (138–9).

Krell can sometimes be such a mole, which is an admirable animal other, as Nicholas Royle has superbly detailed). One of the tunnels that David Krell persistently digs through is the story of the “missing third” of Derrida’s “Geschlecht” essays, which he mentions in a couple of notes (27, 101) before dedicating a brief discussion to it as part of his directions for future research, maintaining that “among the ‘missing links’ in Derrida’s oeuvre none is as potentially important” (148). For Krell, that link is constituted in particular by certain presumptions concerning Derrida’s reading, in “Geschlecht III,” of Heidegger’s reading of Georg Trakl, and the belief that the essay will open to us a new intersection of—for want of better terms—the personal and the political, an intersection that reveals an earlier (1984–85) casting of issues that will resurface in the final seminars.

I say that Krell has “belief” in the importance of the missing essay in the sense that, one imagines, he hopes being able one day to write a book like this one on the “Geschlecht” series, which indeed forms a fascinating confluence of Derrida’s ideas. But I say “belief” also to recall the trust, faith or credence that Derrida holds to be the basis of every utterance and every communication, a question that gets particularly thematized, in “The Beast and the Sovereign” seminars, via Robinson Crusoe’s praying. Krell’s belief in the importance of the missing “Geschlecht” essay can be interpreted as his prayer or entreaty that the lines of communication to that essay be kept open, and, more generally, that we continue to trust in what new work by, and commentary on, Derrida might bring forth. But does Krell himself have that faith? In the closing pages of Derrida and Our Animal Others he asks whether it is “possible to take seriously Derrida’s claim that every statement or assertion, even the sparklingly clear statement of explicit argumentation, is preceded by a silent plea” (161). Yet that is indeed what Derrida claims, and he expects it to be taken seriously. No message whatsoever could be sent out, across the adestinational void that he has insisted on elsewhere, unless it were accompanied by or inhabited by the structure of such a plea, praying to arrive, to be heard, to be entertained (un entretien is an interview in French) by “another” who is similarly praying. Put perhaps too crassly, for it is not reducible to interpersonal communication: no communication without some form of trust, without there being faith or “prayer” (and of course the more or less blind faith one puts in God to hear one’s prayers is the paradigm of that operation). Given that, what I read as Krell’s hesitation to take this idea of Derrida’s seriously is somewhat surprising, as if he were somehow struggling with the idea even as it presents itself to him as a grand avenue for future work and thinking.

Yet the fact of a type of surprise should be understood as a positive feature of Krell’s writing, and of the modesty of the project of Derrida and Our Animal Others. It is as if, in writing this and other books, those written and those still to come, Krell were both praying and being attuned to what reaches him from another, not stridently declaring what he knows to be the case, but rather preferring to proffer these comments and reflections for whomever wishes to listen, even as he listens to what might come back to him from what he has written. Such readiness for surprise has nothing to do with philosophical naivety but represents instead an openness and ethics of academic exchange that we would do well to emulate.

Works Cited

• Derrida, Jacques. Beast and the Sovereign Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009.
• —. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
• Royle, Nicholas. “Mole.” L’animal autobiographique: Autour de Jacques Derrida. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Paris: Galilée, 1999. 547-62.

Rick Elmore (bio)
Appalachian State University

A review of Lorimer, Jamie. Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2015.

Jamie Lorimer’s Wildlife in the Anthropocene is a bold, provocative, and compelling rethinking of wildlife conservation in the age of the anthropocene. Lorimer’s book is driven by the conviction that “the Anthropocene challenges the modern figure of Nature that has become so central to Western environmental thought, politics, and action” (1). In the anthropocene, Lorimer argues, the natural world is hybrid, nonlinear, and multiple in contrast to its traditional essential, circular, balanced, singular, and holistic image (2). Lorimer’s work takes its place alongside that of Val Plumbwood and Timothy Morton in arguing that the concept of Nature no longer helps us think the state of the world, presenting us with the need “to develop and illustrate a multinatural approach to conservation after the Anthropocene” (5). Lorimer develops “an alternative ontology of wildlife that environmentalists might use in place of Nature for conservation” (20). What excites Lorimer about the notion of “wildlife” is its inherently non-anthropocentric, differentiated, and ever-changing character; wildlife being a concrete instance of the multinatural, always “becoming” character of the natural world. Wildlife and the “ontological politics” associated with it “flags the degree to which any management decision is a biopolitical act,” a managing of life at the level of populations (33). In light of this biopolitics of conservation, Lorimer provides a wide ranging and thorough review of recent literature in conservation, philosophy, geography, and ecology, one that marks the complex transdisciplinary nature of conservation ecology, while proposing a fundamentally “optimistic,” clear, nuanced, and practicable way forward for conservation ecology.

The first chapter sketches Lorimer’s ontology of wildlife, drawing inspiration from sources in ecology, ethnology, and conservation biology, as well as from the “vital materialisms” of Latour, Deleuze, Haraway, and Bennett (21). It is the thinking of this later group, and particularly Deleuze, that most influences Lorimer’s ontology, “a concern for difference … [and] becoming” lying at the heart of his account (32). Adopting Deleuze’s distinction between “difference” and “diversity,” where difference concerns becoming and diversity concerns the given, Lorimer argues that much work in conservation focuses on given, “extant diversity,” capturing the diversity of an ecosystem at a particular historical moment and then universalizing and essentializing this snapshot as the basis of its conservation efforts (32). The central problem with this approach is that it “renders the present eternal at the expense of the generative processes that keep ecology alive” (33). To resist this focus on givenness, Lorimer proposes his “generative” ontology that, like many process and vitalist ontologies, takes the process of becoming as the reality of existence. However, the originality of Lorimer’s account is that it shows “wildlife” to be the reality of ontology. As he writes near the end of Wildlife in the Anthropocene, “Wildlife is […] multinatural. It is immanent. It is difference—where difference is intensive, concerned less with the diversity of current forms and more with the unruly potential to become otherwise” (181). In “wildlife,” Lorimer finds a more concrete, intuitive, and accurate figure for characterizing existence as a process, capturing the dynamic and substantive nature of reality in a less abstract sense than “difference” or “becoming.” For Lorimer, ontology is wildlife, and he develops the essential features of “wildlife” around four themes: “hybridity, nonhuman agency, immanence, and topology” (21).

Hybridity recognizes a complexity to the world that challenges any thinking of nature, “wilderness,” or “the human” as discrete or fundamentally separable entities, suggesting that all existence is always already an assemblage, a mixture. Noting Donna Haraway’s work on interspecies interactions, Lynn Margulis’s theory of symbiogeneis, and Kathryn Yusoff’s geological work on the essential biochemical entanglement of the bio and the geo, Lorimer argues that one simply cannot conceive ontology as dealing with discrete, essentializable, and more or less self-sufficient entities (21–25). What is important about the hybridity of ontology is that it undermines the applicability of categories like “purity” and “authenticity,” as well as disrupting conservation ecology’s reliance on an essential, pure, or authentic notion of nature to ground its conservation efforts. This lack of purity and ontological hybridity highlights, Lorimer argues, the underappreciated role nonhuman agency plays in ecology and ontology.

There is a long-standing, transdisciplinary critique of anthropocentrism that rethinks the privilege and distinction between “the human” and “the animal.” Yet Lorimer argues that the power of these critiques is measured by their ability to offer an alternative account of nonhuman agency. Lorimer takes actor-network theory (ANT) as a pioneering discourse of this kind of agency, the shift to a “flat ontology” in which all “actants” have a “generalized symmetry” in their ability to act providing the ground on which to develop a full blown account of nonhuman agency (26). Lorimer expands this account of nonhuman agency in the second chapter by developing the concept of “nonhuman charisma.” However, the importance of this ontological hybridity and non-human agency is that it pushes us towards a commitment to ontological “immanence.”

Following the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Lorimer describes “immanence” as “an ecological assemblage composed of a single substance and characterized by emergent properties, rather than transcendence essences” (28). Immanence marks reality as composed of a single “matter” but a “matter” lacking any essential nature, immanence “suggest[ing] a speculative and multinatural ontology, sure of the existence of matter but perpetually uncertain as to what matter might become” (28). On Lorimer’s account, reality is a real, substantial plane of immanence that is never fully captured in any process, representation, or conception of it, and this constitutive, real “uncertainty” or “wildness” grounds both Lorimer’s critique of any essential, univocal, or clearly differentiated “topological” categories (for example, “alien/native, situ/ex situ, and wild/domestic”) and his insistent deprivileging of “the human,” since material immanence must be ontologically anterior to the very differentiation between the human and the nonhuman. Overall, it is these two basic assertions that Lorimer is most intent on establishing, his generative ontology of wildlife seeming not unlike Manuel DeLanda’s ontology of assemblages, even though he only mentions Delanda in a footnote (28). Although Lorimer’s account of ontology is somewhat schematic, it is justified not simply because Lorimer’s project aims to develop an account of conservation ecology rather than simply an ontology, but also because the goal of Lorimer’s ontology is to show how conservation ecology and particularly conservationists themselves are products of the very systems they study, a goal that does not require an exhaustive account of the ontological relationships between humans and the natural world. Additionally, Lorimer’s insistence on the central role humans have to play in conservation allows his ontology to side step the specter of anthropocentrism that often haunts immanent or flat ontologies.¹ Hence, Lorimer’s ontology presents reality as a wild, uncertain, complex, and immanent “assemblage,” in which nonhuman agency holds far more causal efficacy than human actions, and it is this final characteristic that marks the realism of Lorimer’s ontology, the deprivileging of human consciousness and thought unseating the basic idealism of the traditional, anthropocentric account of nature. This is admittedly a fairly minimal notion of “realism.” However, the primary strength of Lorimer’s ontology is its explication of the role of nonhuman agency in shaping reality.

Having argued that the fundamental litmus test of any ontology of immanence is its ability to account for nonhuman agency, Lorimer turns in the second chapter to argue that nonhuman species “configure” our “perception and subsequent evaluation” of them (39). More specifically, Lorimer expands the concept of nonhuman charisma, a notion long used in conservation ecology to “describe a set of species that have popular appeal” (39). Nonhuman charisma describes not just the aesthetic aspects of the nonhuman world that draw our attention but also “the material properties of an organism […] and the feelings engendered in proximal, multisensory encounters between a conservationist and their target organism” (40). Charisma, in a variety of forms, “ecological,” “aesthetic,” and “corporeal,” is the mechanism that circumscribes, directs, and structures the processes and forms of difference that grab our attention, move our bodies and minds, and call to us emotionally. Following the ethnological work of Jakob von Uexküll, Lorimer argues that “the physiological and phenomenological configuration of the human body puts a range of filtering mechanisms on our experience of the world that disproportionately endow certain nonhumans with ecological charisma,” our fairly limited range of sensory, olfactory, acoustic, and electromagnetic capabilities structuring what processes, objects, and entities can appear, move, and interest us. Appreciating the agency of the natural world requires the recognition that the world does not call to us or affect us evenly because of the physiological and phenomenological realities of human life. One of the key results of this recognition of ecological charisma and human enthnology is that it shows the inherently biopolitical nature of conservation ecology.

Once one recognizes the essential role of nonhuman charisma in shaping conservation ecology, one sees that conservation is best understood as “a biopolitics,” a concern for the health, diversity, and flourishing of ecosystems at the level of population (58). Lorimer argues that the popular notion of biodiversity is an archetypal example of this biopolitics: “biodiversity conservation seeks to secure the future health and diversity of life” through “panoptic knowledge, comprehensive accounting, and efficient, instrumental management” (58–59). The promise of biodiversity is to “secure the full diversity of life at the interconnected scales of genes, species, and ecosystems,” allowing for a maximal flourishing of life through panoptic knowledge and rational use of resources (75). This vision of conservation must obviously confront the realities of limited funding and incomplete knowledge, realities that necessarily force conservationists to prioritize certain projects, species, and ecosystems over others. For Lorimer, however, this is not the primary complication with this approach to conservation. Rather, he argues that biodiversity, while claiming to be driven by a rational interest in the maximal flourishing of life, is, in fact, governed by a “species ontology” guided by the kinds of nonhuman charisma outlined above.

The third chapter presents a case study of nonhuman charisma and its affective influence on conservationists and the science of conservation ecology by showing how it directs existing biological knowledge in the UK. For example, birds account for 65% of the total existing biological record, dwarfing all other categories (the next closest group, Vascular plants, sit at 22%). Similarly, with the exception of butterflies and beetles (which collectively amount to 3.6% of the existing record), “invertebrates have been largely neglected,” accounting for only 8% of the total existing biological record (73, 75). This distribution supports the notion that ecology and conservation have not been primarily driven by a rational, panoptic logic but have rather been directed by nonhuman charisma: the fact that we can see and hear birds more easily than other less dynamic and quieter entities explains their domination of the existing records. In addition, Lorimer contends that even “common definitions of species […] favor the classification of higher-order animal species with greater ecological charisma—for example, those that reproduce sexually and are more easily differentiated by the human eye” (69).

Lorimer spends most of the rest of the book showing in detail how his ontology of wildlife and its concomitant notion of nonhuman agency allow us to think differently about existing conservation practices, particularly the dominant models of “composition” and “rewilding” ecology. Lorimer turns in later chapters to two elements unique to contemporary conservation ecology: the media representation of animals as an affective logic “mobilized to cue strong emotional responses” (120), and the “commodification of conservation” in the “selling of privatized encounters to save nature” (143).

For Lorimer, the mediatization and commodification of conservation are underappreciated yet profoundly powerful elements in current conservation practice, increasingly structuring how we both understand and enact conservation efforts. These two sites also develop the role of affect and nonhuman agency central to Lorimer’s account, showing how the general experience of conservation is mediated by representations and capital. In particular, a focus on these sites acknowledges that most individuals in contemporary industrial societies rarely encounters the animals, areas, or processes to which conservation is directed except through print, online, and television media or relatively expensive ecological tourism (119). This gives these forms of media and commercialization immense power to shape most people’s understanding and relationship to conservation. Lorimer looks at the role of “[s]entimentality, sympathy, awe, and curiosity” in wildlife films as particularly fecund sites at which our “preferences” for some species and processes are cultivated (136). This is a logic that obviously establishes and privileges certain charismatic, “flagship” species, yet it is also a site that has the potential to “open thinking and feeling spaces for the mobile, mutable, and emotional dimensions of difference […] and thus push for different, more convivial political/ethical sensibilities towards (non)human others” (124). Hence, this media logic is not simply a negative fact of contemporary conservation but a site that conservationists should be thinking through directly.

In the eighth chapter, Lorimer takes up the growing field of urban ecology. He is particularly interested in the way urban ecology contests the figuration of nature as “protected spaces,” and in “the spatial and topological dimension of conceiving wildlife” (162). What are wild spaces? What makes them wild? And how does changing our conception of nature change our conception of wilderness and wildlife? One of the primary changes wildlife offers to our thinking of conservation is to contest the importance of the figure of the “island” as the spatial model of conservation, a change that also contests the practice of “fortress conservation,” in which, in the name of protecting areas, inhabitants of those areas are evicted or regulated (163). Hence, urban ecology offers us a way of thinking a more “open-ended conservation,” which Lorimer characterizes as “a fluid topology of wildlife,” one that recognizes the dynamic, moving character of wilderness. Lorimer is quick to acknowledge that this model is “playing with fire,” replacing “a qualitative model” of stability with a “quantitative model” of changing magnitudes and rhythms (176) Yet, for him, urban ecology offers the clearest existing model for a rethought ontology of the natural world as becoming.

In his conclusion, Lorimer frames his new ontology and thinking of wildlife and ecology as a response to the anthropocene. He suggests that the dominant models of conservation (composition, rewilding, control, fortress, etc.) must be rethought, not simply because they can be made to work better but also because, as his book shows, current forms of conservation ecology start from a thinking of nature and the conservationist’s relationship to nature that fail to acknowledge deeply enough the affective, charismatic, nonhuman, and ontologically “wild” character of the world. Hence Lorimer ends by outlining what he calls a “cosmopolitics for wildlife”: a conservation ecology that acknowledges that “[l]ife in the Anthropocene is too strange to be human and afforded rights. It is too social and multiple to be objectified and given a price. And it is too feral to be pure or risky to be liberated in the wilderness” (179). He compares this cosmopolitics to the notion of the “rambunctious garden” developed in the urban ecology of Emma Marris, and follows Marris in the conviction that the “novel ecosystem of the Anthropocene” requires a thinking of ecology that is, because of the role of nonhuman agency, more “exuberant and unruly” than previously thought.

Lorimer also stakes out several concrete implications of his cosmopolitics, not the least of which is that, given his conviction that conservation is inherently biopolitical, there is no one “Natural” way “of cutting up” the diversity of life, meaning that, for him, “there are legitimate reasons for conservationists to submit animals to pain and death and even to let animal cultures and species go extinct” (188). In this sense, conservation, for Lorimer, always appears as a mode of “biosecurity”: “nurturing relations and cultivating abnegations in order to enable companionship between humans and other species,” a project that is not without its violences nor without a certain figuring of “the human” and “the animal” (190). Lorimer proposes that the immense role of nonhuman agency shows conservation to be at root a “democratic” and necessarily “public” endeavor, as this recognition forces the acknowledgement that reality, ecology, and conservation are “the property of a more-than-human citizenry unable or indisposed to participate in relations of commodified consumption” (192). While charting the way in which a conservation ecology based on an ontology of multinatural wildness and becoming might seem to cohere all too well with the flux and flow of a neoliberal understanding of the world, Lorimer insists convincingly that Wildlife in the Anthropocene is a book that, while not denying that the anthropocene is a “disaster,” encourages us to ask what possibilities might still remain for the practice of conservation ecology.

Footnotes

1. Brassier provides an excellent summary of this problem.

Works Cited

Brassier, Ray. “Deleveling: Against ‘Flat Ontologies’.” Under Influence – Philosophical Festival Drift (2014). Eds. Channa van Dijk, et. al. Omnia, 2015. 64–80. Web. 12 Sep. 2016.

Ellie Anderson (Bio)
Muhlenberg College

A review of Despret, Vinciane. What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? Trans. Brett Buchanan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2016.

Vinciane Despret’s lively book offers an introduction to issues relevant to the field of animal studies. Interdisciplinary in nature, What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? incorporates a wide variety of approaches, including scientific studies, anecdotal reports from animal breeders, caretakers, and trainers, as well as insights from ethology, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. The playful style and structure of the book make for an engaging read that succeeds in unsettling assumptions about anthropomorphism, the treatment of animals in a variety of clinical and non-clinical settings, and the possibilities for responsible relations between humans and non-human animals. What Would Animals Say joins recent scholarship that focuses on community between humans and their animal others as well as on the epistemological and ethical issues that arise from interspecies relationality. In the wake of the first wave of animal studies, which largely centered on utilitarian arguments valorizing the similarity between humans and non-human animals on the basis of shared capacities, much scholarship in the past decade has pivoted toward more poststructuralist approaches that insist not on showing in what ways animals are like humans, but rather on respecting differences between humans and animals while also emphasizing their interdependence. A series of questions then arises, which include: Can people understand animals on their own terms? Can we feel for and with animals, or does this always entail assuming that they are just like us? Originally published in French in 2012, the English translation of Despret’s book participates in scholarly discussions about these timely questions, joining Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet, Kelly Oliver’s Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human, Cynthia Willett’s Interspecies Ethics, Lori Gruen’s Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals, and Jane C. Desmond’s Displaying Death and Animating Life: Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday Life.

Despret’s book topples several prejudices about relations between animals and humans, especially by demonstrating that the amateurish and anecdotal are among the richest sites for conceptualizing these relations. Anecdotes from “lay amateurs”—that is, non-scientists who work with animals, including animal breeders, caretakers, and trainers—are often discounted by science for their purported unreliability and overdetermination by anthropomorphic frames of reference. According to scientists, the anecdotes offered by amateurs hastily interpret animal behavior through the naïve lens of anthropomorphism. For instance, Despret mentions Portuguese cow breeder Acácio Moura, who claims that his cow behaves like a “diva” during contests by preening for the camera, and the well-known elephants of northern Thailand who make paintings with their trunks. Scientists accuse amateurs of making unjustified assumptions about the intentions of these animals while interpreting their behaviors on models of human capacities and needs. Does the cow mean to show off for the photographers? Does the elephant mean to paint a work of art, or is she being manipulated by her caretaker who tugs on her ear to solicit each stroke? Such questions are, for Despret, not the ‘right questions’ to which the title of the book refers (2). They rely on outdated models of individual agency and willfulness that in fact hold neither for humans nor for non-human animals. Despret encourages her readers instead to consider these animal activities in light of agencements: relational agencies between individual beings that are inseparably interwoven with those of their companions and that render the question of intention useless. In this regard, Despret’s work has intersecting poststructuralist, sociological, and pragmatic undertones. In discussing a debate about whether or not a viral photo on the Internet showing chimpanzees in Cameroon “mourning” the death of one of their own attested to “real” mourning, Despret dismisses this line of thinking as misguided. The right question, she says, citing William James, is not “is it really mourning?” but rather, “what does this mourning ask of us?” (170). That is, Despret is not looking for clear answers about whether or not our modes of interpretation of animal behavior are correct. She argues convincingly that these clear answers cannot be verified anyway because of the overdetermination of our relations with animals in the laboratory as well as in the field or the home. Thus, the kinds of questions that would lead to clear answers allowing us to categorize animal behavior are misguided, because our very categories are always already human ones. The “right questions” are instead those that lead to responsibility for our companion species and to curiosity about the situations that frame our interpretations of our relations with them.

When we do not confine ourselves to metaphysical questions about the agency, subjectivity, and language of animals, but rather ask what each situation asks of us, we are, according to Despret, involving ourselves in a play of reciprocal curiosity, ethical responsibility, and provisional interpretations that are subject to correction and change. To argue that humans can have no answers to the question “what does this ask of us?” because we can never be in the position of the animal is to cut off interspecies relationality at the root. If the fact that humans can never understand animal behavior outside of our frames of interpretation means that we should not try and get close to them, then we are relegating ourselves to having no genuine relation to them. Moreover, we are neatly drawing the line of sameness and difference along the species boundary, presuming that humans can always put themselves in the position of other humans while overlooking the ways in which responding to the needs of other humans, even when they speak the same language and share the same customs, already requires translation and interpretation. To be sure, translation and interpretation are required when relating to animals, and can be undertaken in better and worse ways. Yet, according to Despret, we need not, and cannot, demand absolute certainty with respect to the needs, desires, beliefs, and intentions of animals. We can only respond to particular situations and do our best to understand what they ask of us, a task that does not require assuming that the human(s) and non-human animal(s) share the same interpretation of a situation or behavior.

In this vein, the book shares a clear lineage with Haraway, whose When Species Meet Despret frequently cites. On both thinkers’ views, humans and other animals are best figured as “companion species.” The basis for relations between humans and non-human animals is neither their similarity nor their difference. That is, Despret and Haraway reject the utilitarian strain of animal studies, inaugurated by Singer, that makes animals a locus of human concern insofar as animals suffer like humans, and also set aside Levinasian fears of violating the alterity of the other by interpreting animal behavior through a certain assimilation of it to our own. Rather, Despret and Haraway claim that animals and humans develop attunement through their relations to each other as companion species. Despret writes: “What these breeders related—and I also heard this from dog trainers—can be said in a few words: animals and people have succeeded in becoming attuned to what matters to the other, to act so that what matters to the other also matters to oneself” (34). On Despret’s view, we do not need to provide arguments for how and why animals and humans might have the ability to become attuned to one another in spite of their differences: we are already attuned to one another. This mutual attunement of companion species is a far cry from the conditions of the laboratory and the industrial farm, where the difference between animals and humans is used as an excuse not to care for, about, and with them. Communion across species only appears as an impossibility in the sterile conditions imposed by contemporary science and capital.

What Would Animals Say is at its most effective in its treatment of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism. The question of whether the human treatment of animals assumes that they are like us is central to animal studies and links up with current philosophical debates about alterity. Despret has treated anthropomorphism in her earlier work, most notably in Thinking Like a Rat. In What Would Animals Say, Despret rejects the prejudice that considers the scientific method innocent of anthropomorphizing animals while taking amateur practices to fall into its trap. She shows that the exclusion of anecdote and the “manic suspicion with regard to anthropocentrism appear as the mark of a true science” (40). In a Foucauldian spirit, Despret shows that the experimental science that finds its legitimacy in the exclusion of anecdote is nonetheless subject to its own forms of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. This is most visible in the way that scientists frame the very questions that then lead to hypotheses and experiments. Take, as one of a number of examples that Despret uses to illustrate this point, studies on animal self-awareness undertaken by Helmut Prior, Ariane Schwarz, and Onur Güntürkün on magpies, and by Frans de Waal, Joshua Plotnik, and Dania Reiss on Asian elephants. Both of these studies were counted successes in showing that animals were able to “recognize” themselves in mirrors and must therefore have self-recognition. Despret, however, argues that the manipulated conditions of the laboratory contaminate any generalizable results that can be claimed here. What the experiment shows, she writes, is that “magpies (some magpies, more specifically, magpies raised by hand) and some Asian elephants (roughly thirty years old and raise in a zoo) can, in some very specific and exceptional circumstances for magpies and elephants…develop a new competency” (101). These experiments do not show that animals are self-recognizing, but rather that they are capable of developing a behavior that humans identify as self-recognition under certain rarefied conditions.

What is to say that sight and reflection would be the primary modes of measure for a magpie’s or an elephant’s self-recognition? The idea that the observational and manipulated conditions of experimentation have effects on, and even overdetermine, the results of an experiment is familiar from the philosophy of science. Despret’s application of it to the question of understanding animal behavior is a highlight of the book, made forceful by her vivid use of example. Despret concludes from the many studies she describes that “anthropomorphism is always there, for what could be more anthropomorphic than an apparatus that requires an animal to deny his own habits to privilege those that the researchers think humans themselves do in the experience of learning?” (94). Science should not seek to deny its culpability in anthropomorphism or anthropocentrism and cut itself off from the anecdotal discourse of amateurs, but rather acknowledge its own perpetuation of anthropomorphic prejudices and respond to animals in richer ways. Humans interacting with animals should not try and remove interest from the picture, because actively developing mutual interest is essential to the development of interspecies trust and understanding. Despret cites the research of Daniel Hestep and Suzanne Hetts, which explains that most scientists try to make themselves as insignificant a part of the environment as possible (139). This approach cultivates disinterest on the part of the animal and the appearance of disinterest on the part of the observer, which is in many cases misguided. Despret notes the naïveté in assuming that, just because researchers try and make themselves invisible, animals will overlook their presence in their environment, behaving as they would were the observer absent and lacking any curiosity as to the identity of their new neighbor: “the researcher is the one who poses the questions, and they are often a far cry from imagining that the animals themselves may be posing just as many questions of their own, and maybe even the same questions as the researcher!” (16). Asking the “right questions” requires the imaginative work of wondering what the animal might be wondering. It requires the development of mutual trust on the basis of interest in companion species. These activities, for Despret, have “nothing to do with identification,” and are possible without presuming equivalence and certain knowledge of the other’s motivations (17).

Despret’s book is unconventionally structured as an assembly of chapters that can be read in any order. Following the letters of the alphabet, each chapter title names a topic and asks a question, including “A for Artists: Stupid like a painter?,” “J for Justice: Can animals compromise?,” and “Y for YouTube: Are animals the new celebrities?” Readers may choose, Despret stipulates in an introductory note (“How to Use This Book”), to read the chapters in order or at random. Within each chapter, the reader can also find frequent references to other chapters (with a curious parenthetical graphic of a finger pointing to the title of the relevant chapter). This structure points to the strongest and weakest aspects of the book, which is a grab-bag of ethical and epistemological questions regarding animal-human interactions. This disorienting structure forces the reader to take responsibility for how she engages with the text, and gives rise to the experience of frequently questioning whether one is going about this reading in the “right” way. This questioning illuminates Despret’s insistence throughout the book that asking the “right questions” is a continual process of interaction and uncertainty. Moreover, Despret states that there is no “right way” to read the book (xvii). Rather, the chapter structure invites the reader to respond to the book in a manner that feels reciprocal and engaging. This experiential dimension highlights the interactive approach to relations between humans and non-human animals that Despret defends throughout, in which she shows the insufficiency of theoretical frameworks that make animals passive victims with mechanical and programmatic reactions, predictable automata who yield their labor and lives to humans in the laboratory or abattoir.

While the structure of the book complements Despret’s approach to her subject matter, it gives rise to some problems and shortcomings. For one, Despret finds herself in the awkward position of continually having to reintroduce the thinkers, studies, and concepts she cites, because the reader could in principle be reading the chapters in any order. This is done with varying degrees of success in the chapters, sometimes rendering ideas unclear and leaving them undeveloped. Take, for example, the use of Konrad Lorenz. Lorenz and the science of animal behavior that he founded, ethology, appear in four chapters in the book. In the first, “B for Beasts,” Lorenz is mentioned in passing for the “model of breaking down” by which he describes the conditions of deprivation studies of animals in the laboratory (8). The reader is not properly introduced to Lorenz until “F for Fabricating Science,” where he is named as the founder of ethology and treated in a few pages in succession. Lorenz then reappears in “R for Reaction” without a reintroduction, and makes a further flash appearance in “U for Umwelt,” where Despret writes briefly about “Lorenz’s jackdaw” (162). I took Despret at her word and read a number of chapters out of alphabetical order, stumbling upon the “U for Umwelt” chapter before the others wherein Lorenz was described. In this chapter, Lorenz’s study of the jackdaw is not explained at all, leading me to believe that she must have introduced it in another chapter. However, it turned out that a basic exegesis of Lorenz’s work with the jackdaw could be found nowhere in the book. Even in Despret’s most involved description of Lorenz, in “F for Fabricating Science,” Lorenz is introduced as if to an insider audience who must already be familiar with his work, even though the reader has not received any information about Lorenz’s practices with the animals he studies. She writes:

It’s true that the image one retains of Lorenz is that of a scientist who adopts his animals, swims with his geese and ducks, and speaks with his jackdaws. This image is faithful to his practice but less so to his theoretical work. On the basis of Lorenz’s theoretical propositions, ethology will engage in a resolutely scientific approach: ethologists who follow his approach will have learned to look at animals as limited to ‘reactions’ rather than seeing them as ‘feeling and thinking.’ (39)

This oblique style of writing fails to set up the stakes of Lorenz’s theoretical investments as well as the way that Lorenz’s work might be in conflict with these investments. Moreover, it fails to highlight Despret’s intervention into this approach to animal behavior. Structured differently, the book could pose Lorenz (and ethology) as a key player in Despret’s account of the failures of animal studies: while Lorenz’s practices with animals reveal the deep interconnectedness of companion species and the complexities of anthropomorphism in human relations to non-human animals, his commitment to the abstract and sterile conditions of the traditional scientific method overlooks this interdependence and denies the subjective experience of animals (39). However, the book’s peripatetic form relegates Lorenz and the science of ethology to cameo appearances that remain two-dimensional. This issue not only emerges in Despret’s treatment of other figures, ideas, and practices, but also goes for Despret’s own contributions. The book contains moments of original insight, but does not sufficiently build or expand on them. The same ideas are cited frequently—the work of Haraway and sociologist Jocelyne Porcher showing up at critical junctures—without being satisfyingly expounded or highlighting Despret’s original contributions. I suspect that this is largely an issue with the structure of the book, which prevents Despret from establishing and building upon her arguments beyond each brief chapter.

Despret consciously rejects a serial development of a cohesive line of argument. She notes from the very beginning, “I hope that one will be surprised not to find what one is looking for or what one expects” (xvii). This intention corresponds to her insistence that reframing interspecies relations leads to mutual surprise (49). Yet, in reading the book, one is surprised not to find much in the way of argument. Brimming with rich anecdotes and thoughtful questions, the book nonetheless leaves the reader wanting more in the way of original theory and critique. For all the playfulness of the book, Despret remains cautious when it comes to risking her own speculations or proposals. This will not be an issue for lay readers, but might limit the book’s effect on scholarship within animal studies. In sum, What Would Animals Say is a dynamic book that brings together an impressive variety of interdisciplinary research and succeeds in reframing traditional notions of anthropomorphism and interspecies relations even as its unconventional structure prevents it from satisfyingly marking its original contribution to the field of animal studies.

Works Cited

• Desmond, Jane C. Displaying Death and Animating Life: Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday Life. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016.
• Despret, Vinciane. Penser comme un rat (Thinking Like a Rat). Versailles: Éditions Quae, 2009. Gruen, Lori. Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals. Brooklyn: Lantern Books, 2015. Print.
• Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.
• Oliver, Kelly. Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human. New York: Columbia UP, 2009.
• Willett, Cynthia. Interspecies Ethics. New York: Columbia UP, 2014.

Jennifer Wenzel (bio)
Columbia University

“The mouth of this river forms the best harbour I have yet seen; being wide, deep and free from shoals, with a fine situation for a town and fortifications where ships may lie close along the shore, the land high, with a good air and fine streams of water”: so observed Christopher Columbus on November 12, 1492 (124–25). The report of this promising scene concludes Columbus’s inventory of the resources he found at the newly-named Rio de Mares: gold, spices, cotton, aloe, and mastic to be traded, as well as pliant souls to be converted. It’s a curious kind of inventory, not so much a list of current stock as a vivid projection of what could be. I take it as a seminal instance of what Mary Louise Pratt has aptly called an “improving eye,” in which a European explorer’s survey of the landscape offers a prospect both spatial and temporal: a vision of a “Euro-colonial future,” with “resources to be developed, surpluses to be traded, towns to be built” (61). What both Columbus’s inventory and Pratt’s analysis of eighteenth and nineteenth century travel writing tell us is that a resource logic is also a resource aesthetic. From the “beginning,” if you will, Columbus’s judgments—the best harbor, good air, fine streams and situation—are at once economic and aesthetic. You can just picture the scene, no? (Perhaps you’ve seen it in a vacation brochure.) The profitable and the beautiful are brought into alignment, envisioned as one and the same. This emphasis on aesthetic rather than merely economic value in the logic of improvement serves to “presuppose — naturalize — a transformative project embodied in the Europeans” (Pratt 59). Europeans might not have been the first to gaze upon these beckoning landscapes, but they were (so the logic goes) the first to discern in them what they were meant to become. The gap between the actual and the possible is bridged with a teleology. In this Afterword, I trace a kind of pre-history of (post)modernity, taking the improving impulse evident in Columbus’s prospect as a blueprint for capitalist modernity—a map of the future that, in its very immateriality, bears a complex yet instructive relation to the uneven territory of our present.

Anatomizing the forms of desire and coercion at work in the improving eye, Raymond Williams puts the link between economy and aesthetics more baldly than Pratt when he observes that, in reading conventional histories of English landscape,

you might almost believe—you are often enough told—that the eighteenth-century landlord, through the agency of his hired landscapers, and with poets and painters in support, invented natural beauty. And in a way, why not? In the same ideology he invented charity, land-improvement and politeness, just as when he and his kind went to other men’s countries, such countries were ‘discovered’. (120)

Elsewhere in The Country and the City, Williams links the agricultural and infrastructural aspects of “improvement” or “cultivation” more explicitly with their social, cultural, or moral aspects, “which were historically linked but in practice so often contradictory” (115). He identifies the false promise in the tautology: “improvement is or ought to be improvement” but seldom is (116). Thus the anger with which Aimé Césaire tallies the murders, stolen resources, and ruined lifeworlds attributable to the European “civilizing mission” in his Discourse on Colonialism: “They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileages of roads, canals, and railroad tracks…. I am talking about millions of men torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their life (43). In the exchange from which this passage is excerpted, Césaire offers a counter-inventory of what Columbus and his successor-improvers have wrought.

Although he was concerned more with morality than with aesthetics (and, above all, with economic value), John Locke was another key theorist of “improvement” in its manifold senses. “In the beginning,” Locke writes in “Of Property,” “all the world was America” (V.49), by which he means that the entire earth was unimproved waste land gifted by the Creator to humankind for them to labor upon and make productive. “Waste” is a crucial word for Locke, in a quite different sense than it is for us today. For him, it primarily signifies land awaiting the infusion of labor—through which the gift of the earth to “men in common” becomes private property (V.34, V.25). The only possible limit to this divinely-ordained process of enclosing waste land that Locke recognizes is that agricultural produce might spoil before it can be used—i.e., go to waste. The crucial innovation that resolves this contradiction between “letting waste and making waste” (Ince 43) is money: “a little piece of yellow metal, which would keep without wasting or decay” (Locke V.37). Money helps to cheat the time of nature by enabling accumulation without spoilage, the industrious improvement of waste land without the sin of wasted produce. Locke’s optimism about the potentially limitless wealth to be made from waste is, as political theorist Onur Ulas Ince writes, a “progressive and acquisitive gaze that perceives the world as a reservoir of potential value to be extracted and accumulated” (46). Like Columbus, Locke is a prophet of accumulation: looking upon waste, he can see what will be. Not to extract and accumulate that value would be a sin—to contravene the intention for which the gift of the earth was given.

All of this might be dismissed as so much bourgeois political economy. And yet, notice how closely John Steinbeck’s defiant demur to the logic of improvement in The Grapes of Wrath echoes the moral economy of waste and the aesthetic of the improving eye, even as it lays bare their barrenness. Columbus’s prospect at the mouth of the Rio de Mares in Cuba finds its California counterpart in fallow land along the roadside, “lying there to be seen and coveted” by Okie migrants fleeing the merciless bankers and unforgiving winds scouring the Great Plains in the 1930s:

the good fields with water to be dug for, the good green fields, earth to crumble experimentally in the hand, grass to smell, oaten stalks to chew until the sharp sweetness was in the throat. A man might look at a fallow field and know, and see in his mind that his own bending back and his own straining arms would bring the cabbages into the light, and the golden eating corn, the turnips and the carrots. (234)

Out of mere “good green fields” the narrator brings forth a sensuous vision of bounty and beauty, the product of physical exertion and unalienated labor, a displaced small farmer’s embodied dream of what could be. A “homeless hungry man” driving this road “could know how a fallow field is a sin and the unused land a crime against the thin children” (234). As in Locke’s moral economy, waste land is a sin—affirmed both by a furtive squatter “steal[ing] a little richness from the earth” and by the sheriff’s deputy who finds his secret garden—and productive labor is the foundation of landed property: “A crop raised—why, that makes ownership” (235). But the private property regime dominated by the “great owners” whose aim is to produce profit rather than food is also shown to be a form of theft: the most rapacious one, with the force of law behind it. Who steals richness (in whatever form of value) from whom?—from deed-holders of thousands of acres lying waste, from hungry children, from Native Americans, from the earth itself. And theft is but one of the deadly sins that might be committed over the land lying fallow for the Okies to covet. Agricultural production is not only aestheticized but also sexualized, as hunger is re-figured as illicit erotic desire: the “good green fields” evoke “lust” and “temptation” for the farmer-fathers (234). To resist such temptation, however, is its own form of transgression against an alternative moral and legal code: a sin against the subsistence imperative, a crime against the children.

The spectacle of the 1930s Dust Bowl, with the native grasslands of the American prairie relentlessly ploughed under for cash crops until the topsoil simply blew away, rendered starkly visible the ecological limits to growth that Locke refused to see. It’s an iconic instance of how the castles in the air promised by the improving eye dissolve into catastrophe: massive swirling dust clouds of the very topsoil on which plant and herbivorous life depends. The dramatic sense of catastrophe is appropriate here, if we take the logic of improvement as a narrative arc and follow it to the bitter end with which we late moderns are all too familiar: not beckoning waste land awaiting improving labor, but wasted land—land (and lives) laid waste. And we know, too, that waste in this latter sense, as toxic or otherwise unwanted byproduct, can itself beckon as a new occasion for profit-making: as waste in Locke’s originary sense, as prospect. (This is to put the resource-to-waste-to-resource cycle that Amanda Boetzkes observes in her article in a broader context.)

Perhaps the narrative mode appropriate to our historical moment is not future projection (as in the glittering promises of improvement) but instead confession: an inventory of past sins, a record of resource exhaustion, a belated reckoning with externalities. Consider something like William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just to Say,” a twelve-line poem that takes the implicit form of a pre-emptive Post-it^® note on the refrigerator: don’t go looking for the yummy plums in here because I ate them already. In “Tarhands: A Messy Manifesto,” a meditation on Canadian indifference to the environmental costs of bitumen extraction in the Alberta oil sands, Warren Cariou adapts Williams’ non-apology apology as a “Letter for a time capsule to be opened in 2112”:

This is just to say
we’ve burned up all the oil
and poisoned the air
you were probably hoping to breathe.
Forgive us.
It was delicious
the way it burned
so bright and
so fast. (31)

In both poems, the consummation of intense sensuous pleasure is cited as an implicit justification for expropriation, yet the record of such pleasure would presumably only make the addressee’s loss of anticipated future enjoyment harder to bear. Give up your dream for that resource; I realized mine already and it was so totally worth it (to me). This dynamic reveals the hollowness of the social promise of Locke’s moral justification for accumulation, the “commonwealth” which he understood as increasing the “common stock of mankind.” Indeed, Locke begins with eating as a literal act of incorporation to explain how labor creates individual property in land: whatever I eat, you cannot.

Both the improving eye à la Columbus and these confessional poems invoke a future, but they construe it differently: the improving eye implores the present with the promise of a better future, while the confessions address an impoverished future, one that is downstream, in the aftermath. Their trajectory is resource exhaustion rather than improvement, subtraction rather than addition. Yet in both the progress narrative of accumulation and the narrative of diminishment and decline, aesthetic judgment serves to legitimate and naturalize appropriation. I have argued that a resource logic is also a resource aesthetic by demonstrating how the logic of improvement joins its accounting of facts on the ground with prodigious imaginings of what will be. It’s a trick of the eye that allows Columbus to look upon a river mouth and imagine a bustling harbor town, or Steinbeck’s farmers to gaze longingly on empty fields and feel in their bones the satisfactions of labor and sustenance they might bring. One might conclude, then, that a resource aesthetic may be mere ideological cover for appropriation and exploitation—that “improvement” in its myriad senses is the friendly face of ruthless extractivism.

The question that gives me pause is whether extractivism might have its own aesthetic. The logic of improvement rests on an agricultural or organic premise of development, addition, bringing forth. But what of the logic of extraction, which seems, by contrast, a logic of emptying out or subtraction? How does a mining company see? What tricks of the eye enable its work? The extracting eye, I want to suggest, peers through space rather than time: to keep one’s eye on the prize in this context means to home in on what’s valuable, to espy the buried ore precious enough to make it worth the digging up. Paydirt. In mining parlance, the technical term for the layers of dirt and rock that must be excavated to get down to the valuable minerals below is overburden. Overburden is everything lying on top of the buried resource (or underground infrastructure, like pipelines or tunnels), as well as the pressure exerted by that everything on what’s beneath it. Overburden is topsoil, sand, and clay; sedimentary rock; surface water and groundwater. Everything in the way of paydirt. Overburden, I want to suggest, is an aesthetic judgment as well as an economic one: a way of seeing and a way of imagining what can’t be seen. Like that apocryphal line attributed to Michelangelo, that he simply carved away everything that didn’t look like David, mining is a subtractive mode of sculpture: everything that doesn’t look like money is cut away as overburden. Only through a trick of the eye could one look upon a landscape—whether forest or farmland, muskeg or mountain, prairie or permafrost—and see it all as overburden.

The implications of overburden in a broader, metaphorical sense are not difficult to grasp: overburden is the everything-else that stands in the way of resource extraction. In ecological terms, paydirt is the enemy of topsoil and groundwater; when the paydirt is fossil fuels, it’s the enemy of atmosphere and oceans too. But the implications are broader still. Mary Louise Pratt reminds us that even as the improving eye sketches a future prospect, it empties out an extant landscape and lifeworld that is already “lived as intensely humanized, saturated with local history and meaning, where plants, creatures, and geographical formations have names, uses, symbolic functions, histories, places in indigenous knowledge formations” (61). Pratt’s subject is the European colonial encounter, but her account of an intensely inhabited landscape placed under improving erasure can describe any place under threat of being under-mined.

This is, I think, what Warren Cariou has in mind with regard to Alberta oil sands (or tar sands) extraction in his allegorical tale of Tarhands, who “rose up out of a swamp with a nation on his back.” The people, who had wakened Tarhands and knew he was hungry, “shoveled all kinds of everything at him: trucks, roads, steam, pipes, trains, muskeg, lives, methamphetamines, rivers, pastahowin, laws, futures. He ate as fast as they could shovel, and sometimes he was almost satisfied” (18). In Cariou’s dark rendering of the upheavals underway in northern Alberta, overburden is both the “all kinds of everything” that goes into the insatiable maw of mining, and the pressure that this everything exerts: the burden of carrying on your back a whole nation whose dream of development has been staked (once again) on resource extraction.¹ In Alberta, recent technological innovations like steam injection are being used to extract bitumen from oil sands with a much smaller surface footprint than the usual (albeit, in oil industry terms, unconventional) practice of open pit mining, which Naomi Klein has described as a “terrestrial skinning” in which “vast, vivid landscapes are being gutted, left monochromatic gray.” In Klein’s metaphor, what the industry sees as overburden is the earth’s skin, which, when intact and healthy, is a vibrant shade of green. Steam-assisted gravity drainage, as the industry calls it, would seemingly reduce the scope of what is deemed overburden in the technical sense, thereby minimizing this flaying of the earth. In a broader sense, however, and given the links among fossil fuels, climate change, and the increased risk of massive wildfire, it’s hard not to see the fires of 2016 that ravaged northern Alberta and Fort McMurray—the epicenter of the oil sands industry—as a kind of aftermath, in the literal sense of a second harvest (or, following Klein’s skin metaphor, a debridement). Everything that extraction had spared (what boreal forests and muskeg that remained “untouched”) and everything it had built (boomtown neighborhoods and the promise of a better life) were revealed to have been overburden after all. The spectacle of monstrous flames in the rearview mirrors of fleeing Albertans and transient oil workers are perhaps a 21^st century counterpart to the monstrous dust clouds the Okies fled nearly a century earlier.

Read most broadly, overburden offers another way of understanding the costs of a resource logic taken to its furthest conclusion. Overburden is distinct from mine tailings, the often toxic residue (i.e. waste product) that remains after the ore has been extracted. Overburden is perfectly good stuff that just happened to be in the way: Mary Douglas’s dirt in the way of paydirt. It is, in other words, closer to waste in Locke’s originary sense of the beckoning origin of accumulation. As critics including Teresa Brennan, Fernando Coronil, David Harvey, Leerom Medovoi, and Rob Nixon as well as the contributors to this special issue have shown, capitalist accumulation reduces both humans and nonhuman nature to “resources” whose value is calculated solely in economic (or latterly, biopolitical) terms. If neoliberalism is understood as having largely dispensed with the promise of improvement as a social good (rather than a strictly individual project with individual benefits), then we might say that the very things that the logic of improvement and enclosure once promised as ends—civilization, civil society, the state, the commonwealth as a social compact to protect citizens and their property—now appear as an intolerable commons, an unproductive waste (in Locke’s originary sense) in need of privatization, resource capture, and profit-stripping. It’s all overburden.²

Once upon a time, Marx told us of that “bewitched, distorted and upside-down world haunted by Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre, who are at the same time social characters and mere things” (969). In the upside-down world of overburden, Monsieur le Capital is at the controls of a gargantuan earthmover, scooping up in its maw Madame la Terre and “all kinds of everything” and dumping it upside-down (Cariou 18). As with the tricks of vision at work in the commodity fetish, to see the earth as overburden requires a kind of X-ray vision whose image renders negative everything but profit.

The aesthetic of overburden is the inverse of improvement: improvement turned upside-down and inside-out.

Overburden is us.

Footnotes

1. Canada is perhaps the exception that proves the rule that James Ferguson observes about the contemporary divergence between the developmentalism of “‘seeing like a state’” (in James Scott’s formulation) and the extractivism of “seeing like an oil company”: oil extraction in twenty-first century Africa, Ferguson tells us, occurs largely in “secured enclaves, often with little or no benefit to the wider society.” Such enclaves separate the multinationals not least from “the follies of planned improvement by states” (377–78).

2. Indeed, note the language of excavation in Christophe Clapham’s account of the fate of African states under neoliberal globalization in Africa and the International System: The Politics of State Survival (1996): “Deprived of both capable staff and economic resources, states quickly became ‘hollowed out’” (qtd. in Ferguson 379).

Works Cited

• Cariou, Warren. “Tarhands: A Messy Manifesto.” Imaginations 3.2 (2012): 17-34. Web. 25 Oct. 2016.
• Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. Print.
• Columbus, Christopher. “Journal of the First Voyage to America, 1492-1493.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 3rd ed. Vol. 1. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 117-123. Print.
• Ferguson, James. “Seeing like an Oil Company: Space, Security, and Global Capital in Neoliberal Africa.” American Anthropologist 107.3 (2005): 377-82. Web. 25 Oct. 2016.
• Ince, Onur Ulas. “Enclosing in God’s Name, Accumulating for Mankind: Money, Morality, and Accumulation in John Locke’s Theory of Property.” The Review of Politics 73 (Winter 2011): 29-54. Web. 25 Oct. 2016.
• Klein, Naomi. “Addicted to Risk.” 8 Dec. 2010. Talk.
• Locke, John. The Second Treatise on Civil Government. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1986. Print.
• Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 3. Trans. David Fernbach. New York: Penguin, 1991. Print.
• Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.
• Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.
• Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973. Print.

A Conversation with Brent Ryan Bellamy, Stephanie LeMenager, and Imre Szeman

Brent Ryan Bellamy (bio), Stephanie LeMenager (bio), and Imre Szeman (bio)
University of Alberta

“The world itself writes oil, you and I write it.” —Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil

I sat down with Stephanie LeMenager and Imre Szeman to talk about “Resource Aesthetics,” the topic of this special issue of Postmodern Culture, in Vancouver, B.C. during the 2015 Modern Language Association annual meeting. LeMenager and Szeman were both early proponents of critical work on oil and energy from within the humanities. Their work has helped to shape the ways scholars continue to think about the impasse between our rampant, energy-hungry economic system and the flourishing of human and more-than-human life on the Earth. I wanted to ask them how they each got started in this field and where they think a compelling place to start thinking about energy, culture, and politics would be now.

What strikes me about this conversation, retrospectively, is the way that placing energy at the heart of one’s analysis produces such unexpected, generative outcomes. Certainly, it raises methodological questions. Where does one locate energy’s impacts? Why take up one form of energy, oil, and not another, nuclear or coal? When does one (de)limit the importance of energy to one’s thinking? How best to report the impacts of energy on social life? What is to be done with the infrastructural remainders of our carbon saturated world?

Our conversation also deals in the practical outcomes that would result from taking energy into account. On the one hand, focusing on energy enables a different kind of politics to emerge. For instance, a politics that concerns infrastructure and planning seems possible in light of the costs of energy’s transport and logistical systems. Moreover, rather than asking “What kind of political world do we want?” we might start asking “How do we want to use energy?” On the other hand, centering energy in the curriculum deeply affects our pedagogy and its outcomes. Once baffled by the limits to imagining the world differently, students can now come prepared to address practical questions related to energy on a manageable scale. What strikes me about the following exchange is the way it hinges on sharing knowledge about pipelines, fossil freight trains, and energy grids as much as on devising new ways of engaging in research and conversation that start from the point of where we are now rather than where we would like to be.

BRB: You are both early voices in the field of thinking about energy and culture. Could you tell me a little bit about the origin of your interests in studying oil and energy? How did you come to this research work, and what drew you to the field?

SL: I felt personally involved in what it means to live with petro-modernity because of a family connection to oil that had been a powerful imaginary throughout my young life, and then there was the fact that the neighborhood in California where I was living at the time of writing was being fracked. Also, on a more positive note, the peak oil literatures that were coming out in the early twenty-first century, even in the form of design plans from my former city of Ventura, California, were incredibly interesting to me and created design scenarios that seemed to foretell a different energy future and insist on a different political possibility. But as I began to pursue these interests—in my own neighborhood, in my own immediate history—I started to realize that for me the way to talk about global climate shift, the way to talk about the privatization of water and a lot of resource issues that are at the forefront of our minds, the way “in” was oil and more broadly fossil fuel culture, and the way that fossil fuels have been naturalized into an everyday. I realize I am close to Matt Huber’s work in this regard (see Huber Lifeblood), but it was an interest that developed individually for me as well—it just seems to me that the most compelling way to talk about global climate change and its multiple collateral damages and to potentially act within this infinitely complex scalar problem is to center our inquiries around oil, and more broadly energy.

IS: My interest in the cultures of oil originates in two places. Like Stephanie, the first is a personal one. I grew up in Calgary, Alberta, which is one of the centers of the oil industry in Canada. It’s the place where all of the administrative offices of oil corporations are located. My father worked not in administration but as a pipe fitter and boiler maker, working on pipelines and sour gas plants as a welder. I went to high school in downtown Calgary, a place where working class kids and the children of those living in the affluent areas, like Mount Royal, came together as a result of the Calgary Board of Education’s allotment of school spaces. One of the things that I became aware of very quickly while growing up in Calgary is the gap between the kinds of things my father and the fathers of my friends did—mine was one of the workers who actually went out and created the apparatus of oil. Oil culture has always been in the back of my mind as something that needed to be dealt with if we were ever to understand how politics truly operates in Canada.

The other place where my interest in oil culture can be marked is an article I was asked to write for a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on the topic of system failure (see Szeman “System Failure”). It was left very wide open as to what we could do under this general rubric. The more I thought about what constituted system failure and what might result in the end of the current system of liberal capitalism and perhaps produce a political opening, the more I realized that one of the unspoken elements of contemporary life was the importance of energy. If we were to trace the significance of energy for the system of capital, we might understand how irruptions or shifts in the former might cause uncertainty or problem in the latter, and do so in a way that current political movements seem unable to do. Questioning the necessity or givenness of current systems of energy is a way of provoking or anticipating another system of energy, another system of collective, social life.

BRB: I want to pick up on something Stephanie said about the moment of looking at those peak oil plans. It seems to me that there is an interesting connection between the recognition of a limit and speculation, in a different sense than trying to figure out where we could find more oil. I mean in the sense of a different future that could be lived, something Imre is interested in as well. Like a mapping of oil and capital, the thing about the plan is that it is a form that lets you think through the (im)possibility of transition. I find that really compelling.

SL: Yes, I do too, and I think that there is so much emphasis right now in Environmental Studies or Environmental Humanities on speculative fiction as a form that might somehow open up dystopian narrative toward a different kind of activism and a different kind of imagination. When I look at design plans, like the one that was created for a post-oil Ventura, my former town, for instance, there is a lot of speculation that goes into that kind of architectural, engineering, and infrastructural planning. The idea of scenario design is not one that is limited to literary studies and in fact doesn’t even come from literary studies. So, I looked at those plans and I thought how exciting it was that people with real expertise could imagine a city where 75% of the food that was consumed would come from within 100 miles, where almost all the water that was used for industrial or domestic purposes was greywater, it seemed very clear looking at those peak oil plans that solutions are not that far from the plausible, and yet I think we tend to get caught up in an idea of political malfunction and even a failure of will. Whatever the mistakes or ideological shortcomings of peak oil activism, it was also a watershed moment for design, I think.

BRB: Let’s move from maybe these two, overlapping ideas, the blueprint of what the future could look like and a way out of our fossil fuel reliance, to come at the structure of things. I think these play nicely into my next question, which has to do with the title of this special issue: “Resource Aesthetics.” I am wondering what you find most productive or provocative in thinking about oil in a specifically aesthetic register, or in such a way that includes questions based in form, representation, or figuration. Are there other facets of sensation and the sensorium besides vision that, to you, can offer us particular purchase on oil as substance and problem?

IS: I think Stephanie will be better at answering this question than I will. She certainly writes about this in Living Oil quite a bit. I guess the first thing I want to say is that when I think about resources I want to play things off against one another: I want to insist on the importance of their sheer materiality, their character as something we can’t possibly avoid or get away from. Why? I think sometimes it’s too easy for those of us working in the critical humanities to insist on the importance of representations—to point out that there is no such thing as society, or a city, or anything, outside of the systems of representation that have made these an element of our social imaginaries. I don’t disagree with this; but I still think that insisting on the sheer materiality of natural resources demands that we ask different kinds of questions. A resource like oil is not something that we can think our way around or beyond. We can’t simply figure a different way of viewing it or position it in a different kind of aesthetic and so unnerve it. Resources are material in ways that, in part, evade aesthetics, evade representation. There’s a double movement in thinking about aesthetics and resources that I want to keep alive: one in which we recognize their sheer necessity and blunt reality, and another in which we try to bring them into representation. You can witness this in the work of all of those who work on energy humanities or petro-cultures. We first say: why haven’t resources been figured more prominently given how important they are for capitalist modernity? And second: we begin the work of tracking down the aesthetic or epistemic registers where representations of resource culture do arise. I wouldn’t want our attention to the latter to make us forget that initial resistance, which seems so important to how resources mean in and for modernity.

SL: I’ll take a slightly different tack here and say that if we think about aesthetics in a really fundamental sense as being about how we as embodied beings experience the world and how the world experiences us in return, then aesthetics can be a means to what we might think of as relationality or as a relationship with matter as such. When I started writing Living Oil I wasn’t expecting to make any kind of declamations about media or mediatization, but I really became interested in the ways in which certain infrastructural features that are normative in the US or Canada certainly—like freeway systems, like suburban malls, like subdivisions—are themselves a mediatized mode of representing life to ourselves and in turn are representing as aesthetic agents. That kind of intense relationship with the world that makes a path for us into the everyday is where I tend to locate the most exciting aesthetic exploration. Some of that is present in my work, and it has precedence in work by artist-geographers like Matt Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, or some of the civically engaged artists in Los Angeles like the Los Angeles Urban Rangers, who work with, in many ways, deprivatizing public spaces and deprivatizing corporate spaces, giving those spaces the materiality in fact they always already possess and radiate. So I re-thought what I meant by aesthetics when I got into the question of oil and became very focused on aspects other than vision—I don’t think the visual is by any means the most important way to understand what “aesthetics” is and does. I think the tactile is incredibly important—the world of plastics that Roland Barthes wrote about as being ubiquity itself—there’s a world of a certain kind of smoothness and a certain kind of suppleness that is for many people in wealthier nations normative; it is also destroying our oceans. The question of the aesthetic can be a politicized one and it also has been taken up with a great deal of attention to the micro scale by people who are associated with the new materialist philosophy, think about theorists like Stacy Alaimo or Jane Bennett—that new materialist focus on the porousness of bodies and their material exchange that Alaimo calls transcorporeality—that’s a part too of what the aesthetic problem is here and it’s one that keeps leading back to the material, which is so hard to get at. We can’t think our way around it and yet how can we not think with it?

BRB: It’s interesting to me—especially now that you’ve mentioned the question of scale—that “material” and “matter” appear in both of your answers but these terms operate differently for each of you. To put it bluntly one seems to be an old materialism and the other a kind of new one. Perhaps one point of contact, at least in terms of interest, is infrastructure.

SL: I think in both of our answers there may be an interest in recovering bodies and even forms of labor that may be more explicit in Imre’s answer, but the erasure of laboring bodies of various kinds is part of the problem that energy as metaphysic presents to us.

IS: Edward Renshaw wrote an article in 1963, I think in the Journal of Political Economy, in which he figured out a basic statistic: over the preceding century (1850–1950), what were the shifts in the sources of the energy used? He discovers that in 1850 that 6.8% of energy consumption on the planet was from fossil fuels—a number that immediately gives us a different idea of the Victorian Era and pace of industrialization than we typically have. By 1950 he estimates 90.8% of the work output was from fossil fuels. That’s an incredible shift, one that is mirrored by another: the laboring body of humans and of animals became a distinctly minor part of overall work output between 1850 and 1950. The explosion of fossil fuel use generates, among other things, an abstraction of work from the body, pushing the world of energy away from the ready-to-hand of daily, phenomenal experience. This growing abstraction has significance for aesthetics as well as labor. If you live in a world in which you have to collect your own firewood, you have an idea of what warmth is and what it means for your body. The minute that disappears, however, and heat comes into your house as if by magic, one no longer possesses the capability to experience, phenomenologically and aesthetically, an earlier moment when energy was linked more directly to the body. Many of us live in a world in which energy abstracts us from life, at least with respect to many of our life activities: mobility, movement, heat, and food.

I worry that such claims can come off as bad anthropology underwritten by a bad Heideggerianism. And yet, I think we can’t deny that it’s this kind of violent abstraction that’s built into oil modernity, a kind of abstraction that’s manifest in suburbs and highways, but also in every other act of the modern. There are still parts of the world that don’t experience this degree of abstraction, where there are different ideas, capacities, and relations to the material world. So, maybe one of the things we’re talking about here is an increasing abstraction that becomes an element of our chosen aesthetics, which then become hard to work around, hard to think past.

SL: Yes, hard to think past. But as I’ve said, I also think aesthetics can be understood as a series of methods and movements that push us back toward embodiments and specificities and sites. I think as long as we don’t take an Arnoldian view of aesthetics in relation to civilizational “bests” etcetera, you know Beauty with a capital B, the aesthetic mode of analysis—really the aesthetic mode of action—has a tremendous potentiality. In some ways, I’m gesturing back to the early days of Cultural Studies, here, and also toward Social Practice art. I can think of a couple of relevant books to think with here, not just books like Huber’s Lifeblood or my book or the various works that Imre has done including his wonderful collaborative photo essay on the tar sands, but something like Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital (2009), another great example of what is a social, political, but also an aesthetic analysis of the erasure, in many respects, of animal bodies and then of the process of critical re-embodiment to some degree.

BRB: Now, I’m just thinking about the anatomical image of the beaver that Shukin looks at in her introduction. You have abstraction at play there too, in the separation between the icon and animal and the way that Maclean’s Magazine, where the image comes from, labels the beaver’s anatomy “Canada in Depth”—a grandiose national abstraction! Here, in the midst of considering abstraction, I want to ask about where you locate a starting point for researching oil culture. This question builds on something you write in your book, Stephanie: that “compelling oil media are everywhere. Films, books, cars, food, museums, even towns are oil media. The world itself writes oil, you and I write it” (LeMenager 2014, 11). That’s why I say “starting point”—if oil is so ubiquitous in the number of ways we have already been tracing out in the conversation then what impact do specific oil media have on our understanding of resource aesthetics? In what ways do our starting points matter, if they matter at all?

SL: For me, site specific work is really important, and so when I started thinking about how to get into the everywhere, the everything of oil, I wanted to go initially local, but I also wanted to think about tracing specific flows and hovering over particular kinds of transhipment or even particular ports. And in this I think I am similar to other people who have written about oil, I think about Timothy Mitchell—an entirely different book in the larger arguments that came out of it (see Mitchell Carbon Democracy)—but like my own work a book interested in following the supply lines, creating site-specific genealogies of what we might call petro-modernity. I was inspired by people in my region in LA at the time, like Matt Coolidge, I was inspired by Nicola Twilley, a New York based artist who has done recently the “cold chain” or Perishable Project with Coolidge through the CLUI (Center for Land Use Interpretation). That project traces refrigerated foods throughout North America, hovering at particular sites of storage and transhipment—this kind of conceptual geographical work that begins with ground-truthing in specific places was what inspired my method of environmental cultural studies, I would say— and I started in Santa Barbara because I was teaching in Santa Barbara and I wanted to know it vertically, you might say, from the underground up. There had been a very important, historically important oil spill there that created a certain kind of cultural environmentalism which was, in a sense, in a decadent phase by the time I wrote about it. I wanted to talk about how oil had impacted a certain sociality in that region—an environmental sociality—how it had begun to create the radicalization in one sociologist’s view of an affluent class of people and then how that “radicalization” of the affluent in turn spun off into a very specific and in some sense consumer-oriented form of environmental politics. So I like looking at regional and local resource chains and then the social worlds that grow up and interact with them, are developed from them, and produce them. I think those relationships make a world. And I also think it’s important to be site specific, because then you can see you work roll over into various kinds of activism. Where you start is incredibly important. Everybody is going to choose a different place to start. In a way there is no site that isn’t relevant. Whether you are in a resource region that is an affluent one, a very wealthy one, whether you’re in one that’s extremely injured by its resource destiny, in a sense—I don’t actually believe in resource destinies but some politicians do—the implications for the epistemological reach of the project, the possibilities for activism, the aesthetic affordances that a project might have are all about where you choose to start. I chose to start in a particular place that was relevant to me and that I could in some respects ground-truth through interviewing and through photography and really looking at my environment. That’s what I wanted. It was a method that came out of conceptual geography and art and not out of literary cultural studies per se.

IS: By “where do you start?” do you mean “where do you start your analysis?”

BRB: Yes, I guess if we are hoping to go back to an earlier point about rendering visible, whether that is to get a better grasp of resources for people already compelled to find solutions to these problems or whether it’s to get people thinking about them in the first place, where do you start your analysis?

IS: One of the reasons that I am attracted to work like Stephanie’s is that it shows me a critical path that is somewhat different than how I would go about things. It reminds me to pay attention to the distinct type of work that people are doing in relation to resources. To start with, it reminds me of the importance of activist work, that people care about where they live and work, and that they are (of course) able to understand the significance of oil when it arises in their particular situation. When I am here in Vancouver, I find it very hard not to think about the protest against Kinder Morgan near Simon Fraser University and what that has meant for that community of students and scholars in the last few months. It isn’t where I would necessarily start my analysis of energy—from looking at this particular protest, that is—but that’s just a difference of training and conceptual orientation. Where does one start? I guess I agree with Stephanie that one generates different answers to the questions about oil modernity depending on what you want to analyze. One place you could start is in Titusville, Pennsylvania, which I would say is the historical starting point of oil modernity, and you figure out what comes next. Starting historically is one way to go. I’m not saying that’s where I start, but when I think about a scholar like Timothy Mitchell, he starts at a moment when energy was still visible to the bodies that could interrupt its movement, and what intrigues him, in part, is that that becomes increasingly difficult—impossible!—when we move from coal to oil as our dominant energy source.

Stephanie is right; “The world itself writes oil,” which means, in the period of modernity, that oil is written absolutely everywhere. And yet one of the places to start for people doing literary criticism is to ask why oil and energy tend not to be in literature when one sees oil everywhere. Patsy Yeager, for instance, talked about the ways in which, despite the importance of the road in American Literature, oil doesn’t really figure into narratives of the road. She talks about how in Kerouac’s On the Road the protagonists don’t even really stop for gas. On the one hand this seems like a silly demand—Kerouac, of course, can write about whatever he wants, and we needn’t draw conclusions about the nature of modernity as a result of missing elements in the road novel! After all, he doesn’t write about exchanging windshield wiper fluid either, and we would never read anything major into that absence. But there is, of course, something distinct about oil, as we’ve been pointing to throughout this interview.

Starting points: Patsy, Jennifer Wenzel, and I have just finished editing a book called Fueling Culture, which is made up of 101 short essays on energy, on oil primarily, each linked to a keyword. What I found fascinating about putting the book together is that it seemed that you could start almost anywhere when talking about oil and generate a whole worldview in the process, whether starting with the word Lebenskraft in the German philosophical tradition, or by reflecting on the Greek word energeia, which leads one to recognize (for instance) the word “energy” doesn’t start to be used in the English language with its current meanings until the late 1850s. Or you could start by talking about comic books. My colleague at the University of Calgary, Bart Beaty, describes how difficult it was for illustrators of American comic books to figure out how to visualize the energy of the post-WWII world of superheroes, i.e., nuclear energy, gamma radiation, and the like, because this is energy you cannot see it. Jack Kirby’s solution to this problem—bright colored lines and spheres filled with intent —generated a visual vocabulary for energy with which we are all familiar.

The world writes oil. What this means is that we need many people starting from many different points to get us to understand how that world works, what that has meant for us and what that might mean down the road. When we say what it means for us, I want to insist again strongly that what it means to be modern is to be creatures of oil. We spend a lot of time talking about all kind of things that name what it is to be modern: the expansion of rights, accumulation through dispossession, and the globalization of the world. It is telling that up until recently we haven’t made oil and energy part of this story, and we have to. Just as those other narratives require many starting points, so must the one about oil as well.

SL: I would just add to what Imre has said, well first of all, in Lolita, the gas station is a very important site. It is true with Kerouac, and I agree with Patsy. Really, Kerouac was writing a lot about nostalgia for public transit, for buses, for shared transport, for hitchhiking. There was a world of the 1940s that was longed for and missed in Kerouac.

IS: The world of pre-Eisenhower highway infrastructure.

SL: Right, a pre-Eisenhower, more public culture of mobility, which itself is interesting as a comment on oil culture, I think. And then, in Lolita, the gas station is written with a pop sensibility, very much akin to the work of Ed Ruscha in his small books, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and Thirtyfour Parking Lots (1967). It’s also almost always metonymically connected with rape. So oil has generated quite a few literary artifacts, but again it’s not always as visible as it might be. Oil is not crudely visible—so to speak. It’s certainly visible through infrastructure. There are layers of mediation that have to be considered to bring its visibility to the surface or to make it felt. But I think there are a lot of different places one can look for it. I had a conversation with Amitav Ghosh last year, last spring when he visited Oregon. He was frustrated that although he wrote an essay that in many ways began a whole critical movement around Petro-culture and petro-fiction, there hasn’t been more writing about what fossil fuel culture, and the automobile in particular, is meaning for south Asia. So that would be another interesting question to ask in terms of where to start. Where to start in terms of global elision, colonial or postcolonial forgetting. To say that oil is everywhere is to some degree a provincial statement on my part, because it is really about certain parts of the world that have experienced modernity in a certain way while in other parts of the world that particular experience of modernity may be happening more recently, has happened more recently, or may not exist. I do think coming at oil from a multi-sited, multi-disciplinary perspective is absolutely necessary. You can make a conversation that’s more exciting and ultimately more about political possibility beyond oil.

BRB: Again, infrastructure plays such an important role in the way we come to understand these starting points. Whether we begin with the regional or with the absent presence of petrol itself, the built spaces of petro-modernity shape our sense of starting points. I agree we need these launching points to be multiple. What is your sense of how petro-modernity plays out in non-North American spaces and on the registers of everyday life?

IS: To start, it’s interesting that the automobile has retained its role as an index of modernity.

SL: Yes.

IS: I was in Beijing recently and one of the strongest desires of the emergent middle classes is to own a vehicle. It may have one of the best mass transportation systems in the world, built very, very quickly by the central government at great cost, and expanding all the time. It’s exceptional. It’s hard to be in Beijing and complain that public transportation is terrible. It’s very cheap and readily accessible. But it doesn’t make a difference: everybody still wants a car. Despite all of the difficulties, despite the fact that you can’t really drive it because there are already too many people on the various ring roads, ensuring that there is almost always a traffic jam on every major highway, despite it being very expensive, having a car is still the index for finally fully reaching modernity. Despite everything else—you could have a very, very fancy phone, work in a tall skyscraper, I don’t know what else, be surrounded by computers everywhere—it doesn’t make a difference: the car rules. It’s odd that this crude mechanical creature continues to have so many fans. Middle class Chinese not only want cars—they want SUVs! Even if they might feel some guilt about this desire, they give into it because they imagine it as a safe space for their families. And so I think Ghosh is right: even if it hasn’t arrived everywhere, one of my fears is that the automobile will be retained as an index of what it means to finally have arrived in the twenty-first century, despite all we know about the social and environmental traumas it inflicts.

SL: I love what you said just now about the family and how that particular idea of modern family locked into automobility is a Western or global Northern expression. One of the first articles I read that excited me and pushed me toward writing Living Oil was Mimi Sheller’s article on car culture (for Theory, Culture, and Society) where she was talking about the ways in which automobility creates a whole assemblage of gendered being. I became frustrated while writing Living Oil by how much of what I think of as progressive modernity—feminism, environmentalism even, as it has been expressed in the U.S. in particular—is actually tied to assumptions, but also objects and paths, that have been created by fossil fuel energy. So it’s not just the things that we associate with environmental injury or evil, but also certain kinds of progressive politics and progressive identity relations or assemblages of identity that are very much locked into these objects and prostheses—the automobile being the foremost one.

BRB: I am curious about the relationship in your thinking between fossil-fueled capitalism and the specific political regime that we might name modernity or liberal democracy. How might we endeavor to reckon and to map fossil capital with respect to political contexts configured otherwise? You both seem focused on petro-culture as a feature and symptom of Americanized modernity. How would your perspectives shift in view of, and how would they account for, different coordinates, for instance in the case of Saudi Arabia’s non-liberal, a-modern fossil capitalism? And we could also add any number of other examples here—Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Kazakhstan, Sudan, Venezuela, and so on.

SL: I actually prefer the term petro-modernity to the term petro-culture, and use “petro-modernity” to explicitly describe a certain US/North American mode of living which is largely aspirational, in the sense that its imagined rewards have been realized by very few people, globally, as Imre was just mentioning. My book is about the end of the American century, by which I mean a very specific ideological, economic, and cultural hegemony—if not empire. So of course it would be an entirely different book if it were located elsewhere. Fortunately such books, and articles, and documentaries, and poems about fossil-fuel capitalism worldwide are being made. They are even being made in languages other than English, thank god! The flurry of cultural production around fossil fuel cultures counters the more apolitical musings of Anthropocene thought, where we imagine ourselves as fossil trace. I am not waiting for the apocalypse to get me out of the political morass that climate change both indicates and underwrites. In other words, I want to keep talking about oil, and certainly in a global context.

IS: As many political commentators have pointed out, the presence of oil and the riches that it creates help to support all manner of totalitarian regimes of power and privilege. And it continues to do so. The sheer amount of value generated by oil, and the remarkable capacity for small groups of elites to control this value, has generated enormous amounts of power—from Rockefeller to Putin, and from Nigeria to Angola to any of the places you mention in your question. Michael Klare and other commentators (see Salas 2009 and Gustafson 2012) have attended to the ways in which the presence of oil appears to undermine or disable democratic state practices. If the presence of oil appears to benefit the bottom line of GDPs (however unequally that wealth is distributed), when it comes to politics it is the lead actor in the drama known as the resource curse.

It’s true: I don’t spend much time studying these parts of the world (at least I have not done so to date). In part, this is because what I hope I have been attending to in my work is the larger, hidden narrative of the power produced by oil and of resources more generally. Modernity and liberal democracy should not be conflated in the way that you seem to do in your question. Modernity can take a range of political forms (which I take to be one of the lessons of, for instance, Susan Buck-Morss’s Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West). Analyses of non-liberal fossil capitalism are generally underwritten by a liberal narrative, one that would deem the political transformation of Nigeria into Norway to be a success that solves the problem of oil. Far from solving the problem, however, this approach doesn’t even pose the question of the role played by fossil fuels in producing modernity!

If my emphasis has been on Western modernity, it’s precisely because of the “problem solved” character with which fossil fuels are treated in relation to the West. The group EthicalOil.org has made a name for itself by pointing out that, despite what critics say, Canadian oil from the oil sands is ethical. Why? Well, Canada is one of the only oil nations to have a democratic government! Problem solved regarding the use of fossil fuels! And so fossil fuels disappear. They don’t need our attention anymore. Fossil fuels can play a role in propping up totalitarian regimes. But the argument being advanced here is that they needn’t have this role: fossil fuels can be a great resource for countries that know how to figure them into economics and politics. Part of the argument here is, of course, for the need for governments to leave the oil business to private industry.

What’s missing in Ethical Oil’s account of the link between oil and politics? In a word: everything. To begin with, there’s no concern about how the fossil fuel economy creates power and money within liberal democracies. There’s no interest in the unequal access to power within countries, which both determines and is determined by race, class and ethnicity. And there’s no interest in unequal access to energy between countries. I won’t even mention the lack of attention to the environmental impacts of fossil fuel economies or the lack of concern about the capacity for fossil fuel economies to continue on into the twenty-first century: it’s obvious that neither really matters in such accounts.

BRB: Right, and another problem with Ethical Oil is that it is simultaneously laughable and incredibly powerful. Despite the cringe it elicits from the left, it still catches a hold of some underlying truth about oil economies. IS:

Indeed. Liberal democracy isn’t totalitarianism; but it’s not real democracy either. The power of extant liberal democracy is that, in a Francis Fukuyama-esque manner, it puts itself forward as having resolved the drama of modern politics. Problem solved! In the process, what gets lost is both the nature of this form of politics and the specific role of oil in making it possible—the latter is far easier to see in the case of totalitarian regimes. The work of Timothy Mitchell has been so important to the study of energy because he shows how “carbon-energy and modern democratic politics were tied intricately together” (5). For Mitchell, democracy is an apparatus of modern governmentality—“a mode of governing populations that employs popular consent as a means of limiting claims for greater equality and justice by dividing up the common world” (9). Fossil fuels produced industrial modernization and mass society, as well as the various political forms that are used to govern these societies. One of the most important and least well-understood roles played by the energy of fossil fuels is the production of a politics “with a particular orientation towards the future: the future was a limitless horizon of growth. This horizon was not some natural reflection of a time of plenty; it was the result of a particular way of organising expert knowledge and its objects, in terms of a novel world called ‘the economy’” (143). This is a long answer to your question: in short, at the heart of petro-modernity, political contexts that seem to be configured otherwise are in fact variations on a common theme: the enduring power of oil in shaping human affairs.

BRB: In light of the connection between fossil fuels and modernity, how do you teach resources and energy? What are the sorts of challenges you and your students face? Is there anything they do not get, surprisingly, or do get right away? Do they find thinking and talking about oil comes naturally to them, or does it seem difficult? What lessons do they find particularly hard to take? What do you find surprising when teaching about resources and energy?

SL: I have an energy unit in my introductory course for undergraduates and I also cannot help but talk about questions of energy in the Cultures of Climate Change class that I have taught as a graduate seminar recently. I think Imre and I both have been influenced by Allan Sekula’s work. One of the things I love that Sekula did in Fish Story is his account in the very beginning about how his inspiration for writing it came from growing up in San Pedro, a port, and from being continually made aware of the materiality of shipping—that accidents happen, et cetera—so that the finance capital that was first associated with the high seas comes to ground, for him, in the maritime ports. But that is also true about oil. I think we all live next to some railway, pipeline, oil refining facility, liquefied natural gas facility, oil or coal port facility that powerfully materializes what energy capital is and how it bulks up the world, and the dangers it carries, particularly in trains that are not retrofitted to carry the kind of crude matter that comes from the Bakken Shale and other shale and sand deposits. My students, when they start thinking about how close they are to accident, and at the same time how close they are to the very stuff of capital, want to talk about it. There’s a lot to talk about. There’s a lot to map. There’s a lot to explore. It’s not a conversation that’s always about despair either because, certainly for Environmental Studies students who have taken classes across fields in sciences, as well as in social science and humanities, they are thinking very creatively about renewables and other forms of cleaner energy. So I have my students do a speculative fiction in which they sketch sustainable worlds of the near future, and almost always they begin with ‘this is the kind of grid that I want to see’ or ‘this is the kind of energy system’ or ‘I want this kind of density so that energy resources will not be overspent.’ I think it’s a great teaching topic in many different registers, both for the speculative aspects of it and the technological creativity and innovation that can be attached to it, but also to get people living in place more dynamically and self-consciously and thinking again about what it means to be so close to accident and at the same time so close to the stuff of capital.

IS: One might expect students to give into despair and throw up their hands and say ‘what can we possibly do?’ There is something interesting and unique about energy. Given the fact that we are making claims that we are absolutely shaped by our energy sources—that oil is necessary for modernity, and, as it is running out, we might no longer have the modernity that is in our bodies and beliefs as much as in our infrastructures—one might expect students to think: ‘what can possibly be done to create some utterly new way of being and belonging?’ Strangely, this doesn’t disable students. There is something about the materiality of oil that allows them to imagine forms of change that would be very hard to do if one was just doing a class on democracy or collectivity. Oil gives students a concrete problem and object to work with when they are imagining environmental and political futures. Framing the problem of contemporary collective life as one about the use and abuse of energy offers a much more concrete way to describe those futures. Students say, ‘Ah! If it’s oil modernity, then energy is a place where one can intervene to reshape modernity in some ways.’ If oil modernity shapes our experience of things, we must then be able to fundamentally reshape it via oil: modernity and its various discontents offer a bigger target than just oil, but because this target is co-equivalent with contemporary life itself, it actually renders students unable to imagine new futures (how the hell do you change everything?). Not so when we approach it all along the vector of energy.

Examining the present through the socio-political dynamics of energy produces a fascinating class dynamic. I teach a course called Resource Fictions at the graduate level. For one thing, I found that the students come from a broader range of disciplines than is usual in a class offered by the Department of English and Film Studies. The students contribute in distinct and productive ways, drawing on their very specific fields of research. They all read Stephanie’s work or the work of others, and say ‘Oh my gosh, I didn’t really grasp the degree to which we have to attend to this particular problem of energy.’ And they feel troubled by it, alert to it, and alarmed by it. But they are not overwhelmed by it, at least not in a way that they are in some of the other classes I teach. Brent was in a graduate class I taught on collectivity in which I concluded the semester by screening Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple (2006 Dir. Stanley Nelson Jr.). I wanted us to think about different forms of collectivity and what the end result of alternative modes of belonging can be (what happened in Jonestown is tragic; the People’s Temple started out in a much more intriguing place—an origin that is too quickly forgotten and cancelled out by its crazed conclusion). When the lights went up, many of my graduate students were crying: they felt undone not only by the story of Jim Jones, but also by what it seemed I was suggesting about the impossibility of new forms of collectivity—though that certainly wasn’t my intention!

SL: I want to take your class now!

IS: Consider the difference between imagining a new collectivity and imagining a different energy future. The models of the latter are quite powerful in the way that they grab people’s attention. Nobody will say ‘no’ if the city of Edmonton introduces street lights that use less energy because each incorporates a small solar panel. No one is going to object to that. No one will rush to City Hall to say: ‘No way, those old lights were so much better!’ in a way that they might over trickier social issues such as gay marriage or access to abortion. And I really do believe that different systems of energy introduce alternate modernities, even if on the sly. I don’t believe that we can have neoliberal capitalism run on wind or solar power.

SL: It’s actually a kind of interpellation.

IS: I’d just like to add one more thing: At the 3rd Annual Cultures of Energy Symposium held at Rice University in April 2014, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson had his class display posters of their work—in the way that students might do at a science conference, even though not all were scientists—about some solutions they would take to very specific things. I thought they were all incredible. I could not believe the sophistication of the alternative energy projects mapped out by these eighteen- and nineteen-year olds. None of them had the slightest hesitation about either the need or the possibility of the energy shifts for which they argued. I will often say ‘to change oil modernity we have to change absolutely everything all at once,’ which is perhaps as effective rhetorically as it is limited politically. The students were well aware of how difficult it is to make systemic change in the U.S. if one names it as such. So what they did in their projects—whether knowingly or not—is to map a problem that is lived by everyone: how we use energy. Even those who deny climate change would embrace plans to use less energy. Again: there’s a way to articulate a global, post-national politics via energy that might be impossible via nation-to-nation climate accords, as nations are modes of belonging built around difference and competition in ways that don’t easily map onto ways of acting that have to be agreed upon globally.

SL: I would say that students are much more solution-focused than faculty tend to be on these issues. Also, on the other side of the apparent invisibility of oil, we might imagine intervention or re-mapping of systems because there are identifiable routes—such as train routes, even though they try to obscure those in the U.S. But there are symbols that are fairly easily read that mark which trains are oil trains, which trains are not; there are coal trains now running along rivers in Oregon and the dust from the coal is polluting the rivers, affecting the salmon runs—because you can identify points potentially where interference might occur, people, students and otherwise, start to realize how communities of activism or civic investment can coalesce and interventions might be made. I think the pipeline communities have been a really great example. Emily Ferguson, the Ontario activist, has talked about pipeline citizenship. It’s almost like a new version of bio regionalism, where we’re thinking in terms of the energy shed—one that was imposed upon us, not that came about organically—but how do we live in that energy shed? How do we re-identify ourselves as a citizenry living with that and then begin to shift our own behaviors so as to potentially make our lives safer and cleaner? There is a lot of very productive local imagining and imagining in social media—that I think maybe you were talking about with those posters, Imre—where I can identify real agency, whereas when I try to talk about climate change with my students, I get students weeping and I get despair. Or I get people telling me they just don’t want to hear about it at all. And of course I myself can become overwhelmed by sadness when faced particularly with climate-related issues such as ocean acidification or, more broadly, the sixth extinction. It’s an interesting place where pedagogical friction happens— where I’ve realized most powerfully that environmental pedagogy can be a kind of grief work, yes, but that productive grieving requires what I’ll call supportive infrastructure: we need to be able to think in terms of systems that we can identify and interact with.

BRB: I have often felt that having the right concept for a particularly nagging social or ecological ill helps to alleviate my sense of the pain it generates. The lived experience of being a pedestrian in Edmonton, Alberta, for instance, is the experience of being a person in a built world that is totally against you. To chalk it all up to fossil capitalism and the path dependency of petroculture offers a small sense of relief, yet recognizing this feeling makes me think that stopping inquiry there is not enough. How can we, as researches, use this kind of revelatory moment and also move beyond comfortable explanatory systems? In what ways has your approach to researching energy and, critically, to teaching it pushed you beyond your disciplinary boundaries? Has your focus on oil, in particular, meant that you had to reconsider your methodology and your pedagogy?

IS: There’s no question: doing research on and teaching about energy has forced me to contend with disciplines outside of my comfort zone. And this goes well beyond what normally constitutes interdisciplinarity—as when an English professor dips their toe into continental philosophy. The disciplines of energy today are geology, engineering, economics, and, to a certain degree, history. Those of us who have been advocating for an energy humanities are, in effect, arguing that other disciplines need to contend with the worlds produced by different forms of energy at different times. To do this effectively means understanding how energy has been figured (or not figured, as the case may be) to date, and this means contending generously and expansively with other disciplines.

But let me provide some further nuance to this answer—which is an expected one, no doubt (who these days affirms disciplinary boundaries?). I’ve had very little commitment to any given discipline to begin with; indeed, I’ve spent a good part of my career railing against the prescribed limits produced by our standard division of university research. So much energy has been expended either on defending or attacking disciplines that I think we forget that disciplinary division is a feature of a system as much as (or even more than) what is demanded by the issue or question under investigation. The system in question? The university—a bureaucratic, biopolitical space of knowledge transfer and a mechanism for the assignation of social and cultural capital. It’s hard to have encountered the work of Pierre Bourdieu and not be left questioning the real reasons for fields of study that emerge within disciplines, as well as the structure of the disciplines themselves; and we all too often fail to position the university within the structure of modern governmentality outlined by Michel Foucault, in which it acts as a structure for the organization of large, complex populations.

The problems and questions that emerge out of the concatenation of energy and politics are what interest me; these shape my research and my teaching. The how of methodology and pedagogy has to be driven by the problem in question, and not the pre-established orientation of this or that discipline, or even a mix of disciplines (which for critico-theoretical communities too quickly acts as a confirmation of the legitimacy of method and/or the problem under consideration). The problem at the core of all of my interrogations of petro-cultures is the capacity for socio-political change. We are faced with a deep, structural threat to the continuity of the modern: the energy source that enables it is (of necessity) in short supply, and the use of it is making the planet uninhabitable. These are immediate, material threats, which are well understood. Can these threats be used as a way of engineering a transformation that fundamentally alters not only our energy systems but also the socio-political systems they sustain? Is there a way to use this material threat as a way to engender social justice? Energy and social justice can seem far apart. My task, and the task of others interested in the politics of energy, is to show just how deeply they are in fact connected. Whatever research and pedagogic methods I employ start from here.

SL: Along similar lines to Imre’s tracking of the problem, for me the focus on oil demanded a breaking of the fourth wall. I felt I had to look at the world around me and move out into communities beyond academia. Which isn’t to say that my book intends to place itself far beyond literary and cultural studies—it has simply opened from the inside out via newer fields like eco-media and infrastructure studies. I had learned from the work of former colleagues like Lisa Parks—and from my fan-like following of the Center for Land Use Interpretation—that you have to go outside. To get into the affective worlds oil creates, the feeling of places it has injured, boosted, busted, I had to do some ground-truthing. This meant talking with people, recording the oral histories of activists in the case of my first chapter, which treats the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. I talked with neighbors in Ventura, California, where I then lived, who had worked in the oil industry or who were at that time combating fracking in our neighborhood; I joined anti-fracking efforts, talked with the Environmental Defense Center in Santa Barbara, I went to Fort McMurray, where I sat in cafes and talked with people, with cab drivers, with the wife of an oil sands worker, with other energy tourists. I learned as much as could be learned about Port Arthur, Texas, on a day of driving around there and trying to engage people in conversation— none of this was grant-funded, by the way. It was simply what I could do on very little time and my own money to feel that I had gotten some sense (literally, a sensory knowledge) for the places oil extraction and production has shaped and is shaping, places I had read about but felt I couldn’t write about with integrity if I hadn’t gone there, met people who lived “in” oil differently than I myself do, as an academic. The weight of what oil has meant to modernity, what I call petro-modernity, affected me quite personally. For me to write about oil essentially meant researching a sprawling social novel that I will never complete—and which came out as an academic book. I felt that the oil story was, and is, the story of the end of America, America the idea (which intrudes into many global places) at its best and worst.

BRB: It’s immensely interesting that the pedagogy of energy is so closely linked to the politics of energy, both in an activist sense and in a cognitive mapping sense. To use a turn of phrase from Imre’s work, the question of how to know about oil seems to generate both a knowledge set and a view towards politics.

IS: It may be that what Mitchell has mapped for us is the trajectory of a certain kind of politics that has now come to an end.

SL: Yes.

IS: And there is another politics that is in the process of emerging—one that Mitchell perhaps cannot see. If part of the politics that he’s imagining is based in labor and the movement of labor against capital and the state, I think vis-à-vis energy that that is gone. The workers who are in energy industries tend to be much more invested in those industries than they are in defining themselves as laborers against capital. Then-Premier of Alberta Ed Stelmach’s increase in royalty rates in 2007 was greeted with criticism from corporate head offices and oil field workers, who protested in front of the legislature (see “Alberta oil workers”). There’s an investment on the part of those who are part of the industry that they continue to make money from oil.

But this isn’t to say that there aren’t multiple sites at which exist the forms of awareness about resources that might yet generate a ground for a new politics. It’s a relatively new situation in the history of political movements to be against infrastructure. I can’t help but be intrigued by a mass movement against a pipeline, that is, against what was a previously invisible bit of infrastructure. This is a more promising politics about oil than one which starts from the position that we shouldn’t use oil whatsoever. The latter is an impossible position. It doesn’t get us anywhere. We can’t immediately step out of oil modernity because we don’t like it and into something else, for all kinds of reasons. But we certainly can begin to figure that infrastructure and its apparatus in ways that we haven’t before, at least not to any significant degree. As you were talking, Stephanie, it seemed to me Mitchell tells about one kind of politics about fossil fuels and not other, emergent politics of resources. Just because we can’t stop coal shipments in their tracks doesn’t mean that infrastructure has ceased to be a productive site of political action.

SL: Right. I would say, too, Keystone XL aside for a moment—although this might play into that as well—that the digital mapping tools that are available to us now, in combination with social media, have created a generation of people much more aware of infrastructural realities and infrastructural intensities, and also maybe empowered to feel a little bit like ‘I get to choose my own infrastructure,’ you know, ‘I get to DIY my infrastructure,’ or ‘I can do it on the computer.’ I’m thinking again about Emily Ferguson, this young woman out of McMaster, who ends up mapping line 9 late at night, over a series of nights, through Google maps. She ends up doing something no one had ever seen before because Enbridge wasn’t putting this out to the public. As a geography student, an undergraduate, who happens to be able to use Google mapping tools, she calls a new public into being. There are ways in which our worlds are revealed to us and are seemingly more manipulable now (even as we see our traditional political systems gridlocked), and I think this has created for us the potentiality for a new kind of politics. Specifically, I’m talking about politics around energy. I think Mitchell is great in that he actually lays down the infrastructure as that which affords particular kinds of political formations, movements, and alliances, but now we are in a different phase.

IS: It may be, just to follow up on this, that climate change is one of those hyper-objects that we can’t figure, and so the tendency is to feel that we can’t act on it.

SL: Or simply to not know what to do.

IS: Yes, or not know what to do. I think that when it comes to infrastructure and energy, we know that energy relates to climate directly, and that there might be possibilities to mobilize change around energy use that there aren’t around the abstraction we name climate change.

SL: Exactly.

IS: The use of older structures like borders with new political objects like pipelines generates a politics that I’m not sure we fully understand. The fact of the border allows for an intervention into our oil system, since it’s not only a “not in my back yard” scenario that is being played out with Keystone XL or pipelines in Canada that traveling from Alberta to the West and East Coast. The border—national, territorial, First Nations—enables bigger, planetary concerns to be critically examined, and does so in a way that has proved to be unexpectedly powerful and effective.

SL: Yeah. I think it’s in some respects a reiteration of the bio-regionalist politics of an earlier moment, but I guess I’d have to substitute something for bio-. Not quite sure what yet.

IS: Well, we’ll have to figure this out.

Works Cited

• “Alberta oil workers rally against royalty hikes.” cbc.ca 17 Oct. 2007. Web. 22 July 2015.
• Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000. Print.
• Gustafson, Thane. Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012. Print.
• Huber, Matthew T. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013. Print.
• LeMenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. New York: Oxford UP, 2014. Print.
• Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy. New York: Verso, 2011. Print.
• Renshaw, Edward. “The Substitution of Inanimate Energy for Animal Power” Journal of Political Economy 71.3 (1963): 284–292. Print.
• Ruscha, Ed. Thirtyfour Parking Lots. L.A.: National Excelsior Press, 1967. Print.
• —. Twentysix Gasoline Stations. L.A.: National Excelsior Press, 1963. Print.
• Salas, Miguel R. Tinker. The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture and Society in Venezuela. Durham: Duke UP, 2009. Print.
• Shukin, Nicole. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. Print.
• Szeman, Imre. “System Failure: Oil, Futurity and the Anticipation of Disaster.” South Atlantic Quarterly 106.4 (2007): 805–823. Print.
• Szeman, Imre, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger, eds. Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment. New York: Fordham UP, Forthcoming 2017. Print.

Jonathan Beller (bio)
Pratt Institute

Abstract

The selfie and fractal celebrity have become the obverse of what Sylvia Federici calls the system of global apartheid. These results of a financialized attention economy index a shift in the character of both labor and the commodity form towards screen mediated code-work and networked valorization. We can thus rewrite the labor theory of value in relation to image and code, and hypostasize the totalitarian aspirations of capitalism in the notion of “the world computer.” While traditional ontologies are devoured by the new order of value production and extraction, remainders that may be resources for transformation, exit, and defense persist everywhere.

To be in the photographic universe means to experience, to know and to evaluate the world as a function of photographs. —Vilém Flusser

Pixel Programming and the Geopolitics of the Selfie

The megalomania, abjection, and fractal celebrity ascendant with digital platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, and many others are practically familiar—we have felt the repercussions of their practice. The younger people are, the more immersed, the more affected they are: primarily but not exclusively in the Global North, students and non-students are driven to physical and psychic extremes to manage and perchance control the information throughput. Race, gender, body-image, clothing, homework and course selection, community, career, politics, futurological imaginaries, sexualities, and psychic worlds are renegotiated, networked as they are with fleshwounds, anorexia, washboard abdominals, Bentleys, $200K watches, brutal beatings, catastrophic accidents, two-headed animals and thigh-gaps.¹ No one is left untouched. For the two billion-plus users of these platforms, new currencies have emerged— domain-specific forms of wealth, measured in “likes,” that not so surprisingly turn out to be convertible.² As college students are hired for their “Friend” lists, and people trade Instagram micro-celebrity for versions of modeling careers, we recognize that the fractal logic of celebrity offers a payoff to successful pixel programmers up and down the food chain.

But as with classical factory work, dissymmetrical exchange still determines the payoffs offered to content providers by the big image-combines in return for their shareholders’ ownership of the background monetization of the photopolitical social metabolism. In the reigning future now current, everyone may be famous for fifteen minutes a day, but the billionaires, though few and far between, are billionaires practically forever.

Navigating a present in which, as Vilém Flusser presciently told us, all activities aspire to be photographed entails a radical reprogramming of not just subjectivity but also social relations, including forms of connectivity, community, and solidarity; the environment; and the linear time of what was known as history. The effects of the photograph run from the psychological to the anthropocenic, from Adorno’s quip that advertising is “psychoanalysis in reverse” (qtd. in Silverstone 132)³ to Sean Cubitt’s definition of mediation as “the primal connectivity between human and non-human worlds” (276). This terrain of the “technical image” is also that of attention economy and attention economies that would turn everyone else into a means for one’s own celebrity. Justin Bieber’s infamously insensitive remark upon his visit to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam—“Truly inspiring to come here. Anne is a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a Belieber”—is an eloquent testimony to the one-dimensionality and historical disarticulation that oft times comes with fractal celebrity’s dissymmetrical, narcissistic, and megalomaniacal absorption of attention.⁴

Fortunately, from Tahrir to Madrid to Taksim to Ferguson to Palestine, we can observe other modes of pixel programming besides those composed in the key of fractal versions of charismatic fascism, and therefore, other ways of organizing the attentional product. Not the least of which in the US right now is Black Twitter. @Nettaaaaaaaa (Johnetta Elzie), @Tefpoe (War Machine III), @deray (Deray Mckesson), and many others are working to change the way the US understands racism and the everydayness of the legacies of slavery, focusing attention on the diurnal experiences of racism and police violence. On the academic front, intellectuals and activists make their marks and assemble the ranks, challenging settler colonialism, carceral society, police brutality, imperialist war, structural violence, homophobia, hetero-patriarchy, racial capitalism, and other ills even as they face threats, law suits, and institutional ostracism. Among the ways these challenges are offered is the demonstration that status quo violence is presupposed and perpetuated by the knowledge base and ways of knowing. The focus, solidarity, documentation, community building, pedagogy, outcry, and organizing of protest, new knowledge, and counter-affect made possible by numerous activists using social media broadly understood cannot be underestimated. Here, in the spirit of Negar Mottahedeh’s and Jodi Dean’s more affirmative take on selfie dialectics, we sense that the cybernetic outgrowth of social media is also an outgrowth of the commons, of something like what the early Marx might have called species-life and species consciousness—a welling up “from below” of liberatory aspirations, or, more dialectically perhaps, a repository of modes of struggle and a transmission of subaltern becoming.⁵ One can in fact participate in platforms like Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, and others to create a sustaining environment for, for example, gender queer engagement becoming, anti-Zionist activism, #blacklivesmatter and much else. These are obviously scenes of cultural production with their own specific and often alternative relation to the logistics of attention economy. However, there is a war over the utility, meaning, potentials, and proprietary control of these technologies and performances (to say nothing of the conversion of all semiotic exchange into a medium of advertising or other types of value-extraction). My point is obvious, in a way: present media technologies of value-extraction/creation are also social, historical, and bio-synthetic outgrowths, which is to say, they are part of political economy and thus sites of struggle.

We must not forget, then, that alongside the new modes of fandom and personality/community generation, the planet, overlaid with social media that threatens to turn the socio-symbolic, the semiotic and the political into a subroutine of capital accumulation, is increasingly blighted by too many recent and ongoing apartheids, genocides, and holocausts. Of course I am thinking about Palestine, Darfur, Rwanda, Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Central America and Syria, the global situation of refugees, and also about the dispossessed population of what Mike Davis called, almost a decade ago, “the planet of slums” (a billion people living in slums, two billion people living on less than two dollars per day—most of them young). This form of radical dispossession—itself the dialectical antithesis of celebrity for the subject—is not an accident, and no amount of “liking” is going to fix it. Silvia Federici, in a significant revision of Davis’s notion of the planet of slums, has spoken of “the system of global apartheid” to describe this situation in which a dispossessed population equivalent to the population of planet Earth in 1929 stands as a new type of historical achievement (70). This pointed reformulation invoking “apartheid” underscores the econometrics, cartographics, mediations, and modes of racialization that actively and concertedly—systematically—constitute one third of the people on “our” planet as simultaneously a global underclass and a racial Other in relation to “the Free World.” For me, the system of global apartheid names a post-industrial, post-colonial, post-modern, “post-racial” form of dispossession in which all of these words following “post-” still function under forms of disavowal and erasure. In imagining an alternative future that can break with a ubiquitous new modality of classification and the new forms of racialization and racism that function through re-structured economies of dispossession and disappearance (evolving in direct relation to new economies of possession and appearance), we must do far better than (re-)assuring ourselves in our own fractal celebrity (if you have any) that, were things otherwise, the two billion or more dispossessed members of the media platform Earth, reduced in one and the same movement to media of signification for the meanings of others and to invisibility to the point of extinction, would also have been “Beliebers” in our best media-selves. The sad truth is that things are as they are in part because we have way too many beliebers—beliebers in the celebrity-form itself.⁶

… One could indeed wonder: Is “the selfie” the other side of global apartheid?

Computational Capital: The New Calculus

Towards the practical end of producing critique within the infrastructure of belief sustaining both Global North-style believers (I’m going to give Justin a break and use the “v” instead of the “b”) and global apartheid, I am interested in what I think of as the archive of the visible and the logistics of visualization. This will help us cast doubt on “the Good Americans,” “the Good Europeans,” and “the Good Cosmopolitans” in the same way that Nazism casts doubt on the good of “the Good Germans.” While the older modes of visualization persist (meaning the history of visuality as organized by print, painting, photography, cinema, mathematics, optics, the built environment and the commodity-form, as well as the not altogether separable vectors of race, gender, class, colonization, industrialization, and imperialism), it is necessary to consider the dual emergence of digital culture and the omnipresence of the screen/image itself. Despite suggestions regarding the decreasing importance of visuality in the face of computation, the omnipresence of the visual interface that is the screen/image as mis-en-scène for social becoming is at once incontrovertibly occasioned by the development of digital computers (along with their codes, and their structural and indeed infra-structural inequalities, about which more anon), and remains an indispensable feature of their command-control functionality.

Although digital-visual technologies continue to structure visualization along psychoanalytic, fetishistic, classist, racist, sexist, and nationalist spectacular lines, no analysis of this increasingly complex relation between image and code—one that has encroached, fatally perhaps, on self and world—could even approach completeness without an understanding of digital culture as itself an extension of the logic of financialization. This new computational matrix I call (somewhat unimaginatively) Digital Culture 2.0, since the first globally aspiring digital culture—and this is an argument—was that of capitalism itself. An historical schema then: in the span from capital to finance capital we move from Digital Culture 1.0 to Digital Culture 2.0. One result among many in this long history of economic and computational convergence is that financialization has given us the pathway called the selfie—a specific mode of commodity calculus amidst a new calculus of commodities.

Today the bios is confronted by the programmable image—the selfie is but one example, albeit one that puts the face back in the interface. The long twentieth century has been characterized by the penetration of the life-world by images, restructured linguistic function, the machinic ramification of the psyche, and the re-ordination of fundamental vectors of social participation and power. The visual turn meant that images and then computers became the dominant mnemotechnical devices, overcoming language-based archives and what Kittler called precisely “the bottleneck of the signifier” (Kittler 4). But it has been a mistake to imagine (if anyone has) that all the agency of social transformation resides in the development of media technics. Photography, cinema, and computation were themselves developments of capital, and this in a dialectical way. To invoke dialectics here means that visual and computational culture developed in a context of social struggle (sociality) over the means (and meanings) of production, caught between what might be hypostasized as opposing vectors of expropriation, domination, and control on the one hand and pursuits of pleasure, community, welfare, justice, liberation, and plenitude on the other. Today’s instrumentalization of the subject-function (as consumer, gamer, drone pilot, debtor, citizen, alien, etc., ad infinitum), along with the pulverization of psychic life that results from multiple fragmentary, fractal instantiations of “subjective” agency induced and required by broad-spectrum networks, is both symptom and result of a Digital Culture 2.0 in which images have become, in addition to a kind of anti-linguistic vernacular, also archive, calculus, worksite, and code. (Post-)Modern consciousnesses, such that they are, bear the signature features of these technical transformations that are themselves part of a history of struggle for liberation and autonomy while also being part of the apparatus that secures domination, precarity, and radical unfreedom. Consciousness itself, integrated in myriad ways with the fixed capital of digital media, is at once entrepreneur, worksite, toxic externality, and resource. Thus, in the context of this special issue of PMC, resource aesthetics from the perspective of this article would indicate the aesthetic (and kinesthetic) dimensions and practices, broadly conceived, that now accompanies some moment of nearly every transaction with the environment–an externality, that as Cubitt teaches us, was centuries (of colonialism) in the making.

The general form of the new calculus is as follows: the accelerated mathematics of capital that have long been generating real abstractions (the basic money-form but also more advanced forms of money) out of the materiality of living formations (forms of life) today number-crunch not only behind and beyond but also in and through the screen-image. The screen-image has become the paradigmatic means by which capital bio-processes its programs, although the corporate-sponsored state with its law, police, military, borders, walls, and banks clearly continues to have a part to play as medium and screen infrastructure. The commodity form and capitalist production have evolved in terms of complexity, but as we shall see, the intervals between the discrete moments of production still require “human” input, or what was once paradigmatically thought of as labor.

“The image of capital” is not a single image—neither Marilyn Monroe, the American Flag, a Jackson Pollack, Apple Pie, nor a UNICEF poster child. If capital had its way, “the image of capital” would be all of them. Capital would position labor power within the enclosure that is the generalized encroachment of capitalized images on all aspects and moments of life, within the general movement of social relations towards the image—that is, within a formation already immanent in Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967): “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation” (12). It would place us within, in short, the becoming imaginary of the world (the bottomless overlays of imaginaries) and the virtualization of reality that seems to forever place the Real in quotation marks. It is in and from such a condition, one that Vilém Flusser would call “magical,” that we wage our struggles. Therefore it is within the emergent totality that Flusser calls “the universe of technical images,” now being taken to another level by ubiquitous computing and the rise of what I call the world computer, that we receive our programming and wager our counter-programs.⁷ These wagers, the struggles with capitalist informatics, are everywhere, but the results are nonetheless desperate, mournful, bloody, or material for all that.

Famously Marx discerned what was effectively the calculus of the commodity form when he showed that the commodity was the summation of the value of labor-time and raw materials. This allowed him to demonstrate precisely that profit came from the expropriation of labor-time through its unequal exchange for the wage. While circulation meant the exchange of value equivalents, production was the dissymmetrical exchange between labor and capital, where capital extracted surplus value. Marx made the distinction between C-M-C (commodity-money-commodity) and M-C-M (money-commodity-money)—that is, the distinction between the exchange of equivalents in simple circulation (C-M-C) and the movement of capital accumulation—where the latter formula, which was really M-C-M′ (M′>M), contained within it profit: the dirty secret of the dissymmetrical exchange between capital and labor that extracted surplus value through wage-labor during commodity production. Within the relation known as wage-labor, workers brought their commodity (labor power) to market and received less value from capital than they produced for capital. The workers’ unpaid labor time (surplus labor) became the capitalists’ profits, generating M′ from the original M when the commodity produced by wage-labor was sold on the open market. The worker went home with subsistence wages; the capitalist went home rich.

This relation of alienation, along with the commodity form itself, was, in retrospect, already a mode of digitization, the translation of qualities into quantities, of subjective, sensual labor and use values into exchange values, of subjective time and objective qualities into numbers. Under this process of viral digitization, the countryside was emptied as the urban proletariat grew; cities expanded along with factories and tenements as vast fortunes were created; traditional societies were liquidated; colonial states erected; spices, gold, and slaves shipped; armies conscripted; people slaughtered. To coin a phrase: “all that was solid melted into air, everything that was sacred was profaned.” Much ink has been spilled over the consequences of emergent capital’s evolutionary if not revolutionary transformation of the human species during the five hundred years leading up to the twentieth century. Colonization, Industrialization, Imperialism, Modernity, World Wars, the great metropoles…while profits and corpses mounted, material life was besieged by its inexorable conversion into the numerical denomination known as price. In brief, this is the history of the first great phase of quantification: Digital Culture 1.0, with humanity consequently positioned as standing reserve.

With post-Fordism, virtuosity, attention economy, cognitive capitalism, semio-capitalism, and the like, it would seem that another evolutionary (if, again, not revolutionary) moment is well underway. In writing about these changes in the bio-mechanical interface with capital (the movement from factory to screen), first in terms of the cinematic mode of production and more recently as “Digital Culture 2.0,” I have contested the ruling idea that simply because commodification no longer exclusively incarnates itself in industrial objects, value has become “immeasurable.” I have suggested rather a distributed, screen-based, cybernetic interface with fixed capital—it being understood today that the logistics of value extraction are increasingly ambient, informatic, and, in a certain sense with respect to the harvesting of metadata, metabolic.

The case for the immeasurability of value has not been so much argued as assumed. Here is Antonio Negri’s early and highly influential formulation: “My first thesis, a deconstructive and historical thesis, is that measuring labor, and thus ordering it and leading it back to a theory of value, is impossible when, as today, labor-power is no longer either outside or inside capitalist command (and its capacity to structure command)” (80). Negri continues,

We have thus far posed a number of affirmations: (1) that the measure of labor-value, grounded on the independence of use-value, has now become ineffectual; (2) that the rule of capitalist command that is imposed on the horizon of globalization negates every possibility of measure, even monetary measure; and (3) that the value of labor-power is today posed in a non-place and that this non-place is s-misurato (immeasurable and immense)—by which we mean that it is outside of measure but at the same time beyond measure. (83)⁸

Digital metrics had not evolved to their current levels of granularity when Negri wrote this article in 1999. Indeed his own analysis unconsciously forecasts the emergence of a new metrics of subjectification:

The latent recognition that political economy gives to the fact that value is now an investment of desire constitutes a real and proper conceptual revolution…. [T]his revolution in political economy is revealing in that it involves dominating the context of the affects that establish productive reality as the superstructure of social reproduction and as the articulation of the circulation of the signs of communication. Even if the measurement of this new productive reality is impossible, because affect is not measurable, nonetheless in this very productive context, so rich in productive subjectivity, affect must be controlled. Political economy has become a deontological science. In other words, the project of the political economy of conventions and communication is the control of an immeasurable productive reality. (87)

However, while this view of the immeasurability of productivity became the accepted one in post-Marxist and autonomist circles (and an unnecessary detour in what appeared obvious to rampant internet boosterism), some of us always saw measure in monetization itself and, as I show in this essay, so did Marx. As we shall see, the positing of a field of valuation with pricing already posits and over time effects the emergence of metrics both of measure and of extraction, importantly for us, in the form of “likes,” financial derivatives, and metadata.

Part of this confusion arising from the intensification of the role of affect and linguistic command in postmodern capitalism stems from a category mistake regarding the nature of the commodity. It was a mistake to imagine that because the industrial object was comprehended as a commodity, the commodity-form is properly (necessarily) an object—and that the value of anything that is not strictly speaking an object (or can be objectified in the form of an object) is immeasurable. The object, as it turns out, was a moment in the historical development of the commodity-form. The corollary confusion accompanying the movement from the commodity object to the dispersed, disbursed, distributed commodity regards the movement from factory production in the case of the former “objectivity” of the commodity, to distributed production in the social factory in the case of the latter. Industrial production created commodified objects in the factory to be sold at markets, while distributed (digital) production creates derivative “objects” in the social factory—that are also commodities—to be sold on attention markets. They are also produced via attention in distributed fashion, meaning to say distributed production in a society that has literally become a factory of the imaginary. The new, distributed image-objects are mediated and indeed inseparable from franchises, platforms, brands, and other modes of associative transmission.

As financial markets have long presumed through options, commodities can be constituted through derivative forms (in all senses of that word) of enterprise and still be treated as the commodity-form by capital. What is effectively being priced is a social relation, one summed up in the idea of risk. Indeed it is arguable that the derivative was always implicit in the commodified object—from the moment that its dual identity of use value and exchange value was posited by capital. The history of the logistics of the commodity-form is one first of composition and then of decomposition, one of integration and then of derivation. We are most familiar with the integration of labor in the production process (the summation over time of the labor-time in an object), since the commodified object, as site of proprietary intelligibility, sale, and therefore of valorization of capital’s profit in money, naturalized the derivative component in the form of the object itself in the moment of price. However, following the moment of the commodity’s composition (as object), the value (quantity of abstract universal labor-time) as price in money of a particular commodity was indeed derived from the integral that was the summation of values contained in that commodity. If the cost of a production run of commodified objects was the summation of the cost of labor-time (the integral of cost of work over time times time) plus the total cost of raw materials and fixed-capital (machine) amortization, then the object’s price was the derivative price of the value of the total amount of labor-time inherent at the moment of (which is to say “in”) a particular object over the total number of objects produced plus that of the appropriate fraction of raw materials and machine amortization utilized per object. In the same sense that in basic Newtonian mechanics an object’s displacement is a derivative of its velocity, the price of the commodity as object was itself a derivative of the general movement of capitalized object production at a particular point (an evaluation of a particular moment of value in the fluid movement of values in general), and only in this way was it possible for the market to compute the relative price of an object in relation to the general equivalent. These mathematics were practiced before they became conscious and it was the great contribution of Marx—one on par with those of Newton and Leibnitz—to derive some of the rules by which a calculus of value could be configured. Later the volatility of price was formalized (and itself priced) by options traders.

The rise of modern financial derivatives and the metrics of attention represent the developing conceptualization and cognition of relations that were already practical and practiced. Just as the Romans didn’t need Newton to have an adequate sense of how long it took to get a chariot from point A to point B, buyers of Model Ts did not need derivatives to pay for their cars. Henry Ford’s statement “You can have any color you want so long as it’s black” was an acknowledgement of the possibility of options and the necessity of limiting options for the purposes of market heuristics. Options in consumption practice and hence options allowing for risk management with respect to sales (on the consumer side, commonly called preferences) were in this case effectively reduced to near zero for consumers (or more precisely approximately two—buy it or don’t). From this perspective of the purposeful delimitation of options in a world in which options were becoming immanent, marginal utility theory, which proposed that a particular commodity would be worth slightly more to one buyer than to another, was already a theory of derivatives that acknowledged a secondary market of risk management in the domain of social difference (aesthetics, taste, and the semiotics thereof, along with other aspects of “utility”). The development of options (both in commodity fashion and finance) allows for purchasers to make a bet on the currency of their own read of market value. This includes a calculus of their particular needs amidst the play of values and implies a pursuit of tailor-made contracts. The metrics follow these wagers, but the calculus is not free—it requires work and demands a program. The structural and historical point here is that the development of the calculus of commodification, which has moved away from factory and object as paradigm to that of the deterritorialized social factory and distributed consumption, dialectically transformed the possibilities of both spatial and economic movements beyond the option-less Model T. From the space-time of the Model T and the industrial factory has emerged the space-time of spacecraft and the virtuosity of the social factory: Google, nanotechnologies, satellites, drones, fiber-optics, ambient computing, algo-trading and the like run the myriad options so that the products of the social factory can be efficiently consumed to produce … capital.

Financial derivatives and digital media platforms—monetized on bank and shareholder speculation facilitated by attention metrics—are among the new calculi of value. They are not as different from the speculative leap into buying early commodity-forms as we may imagine. These digital metrics, media of risk management that are also modes of extending the logistics of quantification and valuation, emerge directly from and in turn facilitate new distributed forms of commodity production in the social factory. The new metrics adequate to distributed processes of production and value accumulation (from Apple’s global commodity chains to Mechanical Turk’s cellularized labor, Walmart’s product tracking, Facebook’s social interface, and Ethereum’s crypto-currency) are far more complex than, say, the assembly-line output counts on the factory floor, and more complex again than the consumption of labor-power objectified in what appeared as a clear-cut “object” (purchased with money received in exchange for what appeared as a clear-cut “wage,” but that bit on the wage is another paper); they require the movement of the exponentially more complex pathways and calculations of capital into the (nano-)second by (nano-)second operations of discrete state machines, that is, digital computers—as well as the new modes of sociality that post-Fordist theory has been at pains to describe. This convergence of the calculus of value production with new modes of sensual interface and with the provision of sensuous labor—and thus with production itself—that is made possible by computation marks the rise of a new phase of the capitalist mode of production, one that we might denominate as the computational mode of production. The computational mode of production describes the dynamic function of a regime of valuation that I have come to understand as Computational Capital. This shift in the mode of production takes us beyond the bourgeois era—and indeed beyond the cinematic one as well—towards a convergence of the computations of capital with the operations of the universal Turing machine.

Elsewhere I have endeavored to show that computational capitalism finds its lineage directly in racial capitalism. As a few of my examples above about the negotiation of social difference as an informatic enterprise would imply, this relation to racialization and social difference is not ancillary but central.⁹ Here however, if one wanted to come up with an answer finally to those who claim that in post-Fordism value has become immeasurable, one need go no further than Marx’s discussion of “the price-form” in Chapter Three of Capital, “The Circulation of Commodities,” to understand how to proceed.

Things which in and for themselves are not commodities, things such as conscience, honour, etc. can be offered for sale by their holders, and thus acquire the form of commodities through their price. Hence a thing can, formally speaking, have a price without having a value. The expression of price is in this case imaginary, like certain quantities in mathematics. On the other hand, the imaginary price-form may also conceal a real value-relation or one derived from it. (197)

Marx’s comparison of the relation of price to value with both real and imaginary numbers tells us that, as in mathematics, whether a value is “real” or “imaginary” (-i), it can be treated according to mathematical rules; that is, it is subject to mathematical operations that yield practical results. It is worth recalling that, utilizing imaginary numbers, made acceptable by Leonhard Euler in the 18^th century and developed by Carl Friedrich Gauss in the 19^th, mathematics predicted the existence of the Higgs boson and, lo and behold, equipment designed by the same mathematics found it. Whether the Higgs boson is real or not is somehow beside the point, since mathematics mediated by technics and “nature” produces mathematical effects that are internally consistent— verifiable in their own terms (and then photographed, of course). Here we say that the derivation of value in finance is both an instrument of measure and a means of production; mathematicians use imaginary numbers to produce real (or is it virtual?) solutions. Put more simply, we might say that, in the context of capital circulation, the price-form posits the commodity form. The price-form allows the mathematics of the commodity-form to operate even in the absence of classical rational(ized) production. When, for example, capital buys off someone’s conscience, it does so for a reason—that too is a cost of production. Today perhaps the same could be said about a situation when capital buys off someone’s consciousness wholesale—or that of an entire society.¹⁰ These are costs of production and have a systemic rationale. In the mesh, such rationales may restructure the ontology of that which is rationalized.

When Marx wrote Capital, conscience and consciousness were not the obvious market products of what today have come to be known as disciplinary societies, control societies, or mediological ones—despite the fact that Marx lucidly grasped German idealism’s notion of consciousness as at once precisely the product of alienated labor and the disavowal of the material basis of socio-economic organization of material practice as the social basis of bourgeois idealism. In The German Ideology, Marx writes, “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas … and hence the ideas of their dominance” (67). Today, however, there can be no doubt that those once presumably divine, biological, organic, psychological or quintessentially human properties composing the general intellect are inexorably bound up in the material exigencies of regimes of production—indeed, as we are at pains to demonstrate, the financialization that is digital culture presupposes the productive capacities of cognitive, neurological, and/or attentional practices.¹¹ Given this massive shift towards the computational ramification of the general intellect, it seems imperative to derive the “real value relation” priced by the market of diverse modes of attention gathering, social media practice, linguistic practice, and other human activities that fall outside of traditionally recognized forms of wage-labor but that are required for social production and reproduction. The (re-)organization of the productive powers of the general intellect requires the integrated organization of many moving parts: matter, consciousness, computation, and, as you will have already guessed, the programmable screen/image.¹²

M-I-C-I′-M′

In recognition of the paradigm shift in the character of both labor (towards attention and neuronal process) and the commodity form (towards integrated distribution based upon a rentier model of the general intellect), which is another way of invoking the shifting character (sublation) of subject and object in post-Fordism, I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce a slight modification into the general formula for capital: M-C-M′. As noted, the value that will generate this second, greater quantity of money is classically acquired in the production process, that is, in capital’s dissymmetrical exchange with labor through the medium of the wage. As we have seen, it is the worker’s unpaid labor that provides surplus value to capital and thereby creates the increase from M-M′ during the cycle of commodity production culminating in market valorization.

Let’s now rewrite the general formula for capital as M-I-C-I′-M′—where M is still money, but I is Image and C is Code. C here, as Code, is to be understood not as a stable entity but as a discreet moment in the movements of the discreet state of a computer—we could say, of all networked computers, and, with a nervous nod towards what may be the emergent integration of the totality of computation, perhaps of “The Computer.” By replacing commodity “C” with IC-I′ (which reduces to commodity “C” at Fordist speeds in which an object is simply the material manifestation of the information laboriously imposed upon the materials that was required to make it), we register the sublation of the commodity form as object by the matrix of information. I-C-I′ indexes the movement between appearance, praxis, and digital-informatic substrate, as when, for example, one uploads an image on Flickr, tweets, makes a purchase on Amazon.com, trades a stock, “likes” the red Ferrari. In reality, I-C-I’ might represent many iterations of I-C’-I’’-C’’’-I’’’’-C’’’’’-I’’’’’’… etc. Holding those types of units fixed for a moment, it now appears that value production may take place anywhere in the circuit or more often network that mediates between M and M′—the interval formerly indicated by the commodity “C”. That is, at any moment along the circuit from monetized capital investment to monetized profit, a value-productive transaction is possible—each movement or modification generates new data. Automated “labor,” that is, work done by computational machinery alone, is not labor but machine amortization. Labor, and more to the point surplus labor, formerly understood to be extracted solely as surplus value in the waged production of commodities (that is, the portion of unpaid factory labor, objectified in the commodified product that provided profit when sold), now appears to have multiple forms and insertion points: there are today many more ways not to pay for labor. The labor of production is, in short, distributed across multiple sites: e.g., hundreds of thousands of software writers, tens of millions of historically devalued (mostly female, mostly Asian) hands, billions of screens attended to by billions of operator-functionaries such as ourselves, and finally the whole media-ecology and economy of images and information broken down into ever smaller granular units that structure perception, proprioception, and the very conditions of planetary survival and widespread premature death. Commodities, now fully algorithmic in that they seamlessly integrate use values and exchange values and script the realization of use values as means for the production of further exchange values, are constructed through the juridical and practical organization of proprietary pathways through the vast database of the world computer (the sum total of all code and the infrastructure that runs it).

The emergence of the world computer, which in my own view is already “super-intelligent” and effectively “self-aware” (even if difficult to recognize as conscious by one of its “conscious organs”), is the key to the absorption of distributed life activity by the calculus of capital (see Bostrum). At every (infinitesimally small) moment, the Universal Turing Machine that contains—not simply in theory, but indeed as is posited both in theory and by capital to contain—all actually existing discreet state machines is in a discreet state. The modification of each state is the direct or indirect result of social process. The technical elaboration of the logistics of informatics in the medium once known as life is the necessary other side of capital’s absorptive accumulation of life-activity as value.

In the movement from the factory to the social factory, commodities no longer have to be materialized as goods in object form (although they still can be, but even these goods are also combinatories of brands, images, franchises, and other financialized informatic-semiotic vectors); they exist and are produced as integrated value-formations. Some of what is bought (by us) with our screen-labor is the use of the platform itself, but as we saw with the branded self and fractal celebrity, the utility and the logic exceed the domain of any particular platform and compose a cultural logic—The Cultural Logic of Computation, as David Golumbia eloquently puts it, part of the control exercised by Digitality as Cultural Logic,” as Sebastian Franklin gleans it. The rest of the labor, also sedimented as data but not returned to us either as utility or proprietary stake, is absorbed, gathered, scraped, accumulated, captured—in short stolen through the meta-data equivalent of primitive accumulation—and then bundled and sold to angel investors, shareholders, or advertisers, or seized by governments, police and secret police forces, etc. Our modification of the discreet state of the global computer—remunerated at work, unremunerated as dispersed life activity (but actually remunerated at a discount in social currency, viability, know-how, stupefaction, connections, etc.)—generates modifications of what I am calling the code through our use, indeed through our inhabitation, of networked media machines. Since this enclosure by new-media capital posits and extracts forms of labor that are also now explicitly forms of communication, the expropriation of labor is also an expropriation of communication and hence an expropriation of individual consciousness, semiotic capacity, and democracy. From the days of Prudhoun’s “property is theft” to industrialized wage-labor and then to the computerized expropriation of the cognitive-linguistic, the institutionalized theft of the creative product of individuals has always been anti-democratic. Given the present context where everyone is enjoined to participate and add their voice, perhaps capital, as the antithesis of democracy, has never functioned more contradictorily than it does today. Consciousness is theft. There may be democracy, but not for us, or so says capital’s current foreclosure of (and on) History and the historical imagination.

The expanded notation “I-C-I′” represents the integrated productive activity formerly denominated by “C.” This description befits the shift from the paradigm of the factory to that of the screen-based social factory, and understands material objects pressed into the service of capital as themselves media. It recognizes that the very function of these mediations enacts the computational colonization of the subject, the human, and the bios. It also asserts, in an extension and Marxification of Flusser’s notion of the universe of technical images, that in Digital Culture 2.0, commodity production has now become paradigmatically a transaction in the movement from Money to Image/Code and back.¹³ This is not a linear process as with the assembly line, or even simply a global process as with the global commodity chain paradigmatically signified by Nike in the late ’80s and ’90s. It is a networked process of vectoral connections, presided over by what Ken Wark deftly calls “the vectoral class” (72).

One immediate consequence indicated by this formula is that the Image has become and remains a paradigmatic worksite of capitalism. Print, as Benjamin pointed out in the “Work of Art” essay, is here only a special case, though a particularly important one (your reading of this article, very likely on a screen, is a special case of image processing). Furthermore, taking Flusser’s surprising example, in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, of the shoe as a form of encoded information, we can see even more clearly that the social product itself, to say nothing of the commodity form, has, from our present perspective at least, always had both an image component and an informatic component—even if the senses had not yet undergone sufficient dialectical development to re-cognize negative entropy as such (that is, order itself as image and information), even if the senses had not yet become, as Marx might say, “theoreticians.”¹⁴ The commodity-object was a proto-image and proto-information. Whether it was some purportedly Platonic form of the shoe guiding the shoemaker to encode that information in the leather and then allowing that information to be recognized in the medieval shop and consumed until the medium gave out on the cobblestone street, or it is some ultra-provocative media-hyped aesthetico-ballistic property of a gender imaginary guiding an aspirant selfie-maker to wager yet another possibly sexy skin-shot for fractional-collective valorization, the relation between image and code/commodity is here operative. McLuhan might have said, the differences are a matter of media, and of the sense ratios: leather was tactile, facilitating walking and agrarian labor, while digital images are haptically virtual, facilitating corporeal organization by visuality, electrified consumption, and possibly in the case of our example, masochistic lust. Correct, but from the standpoint of political economy, also incomplete: the differences from informatic medieval shoe to informatic post-fordist booty are also a matter of an intensive programming of behavior in as much as the regime of images is part of the developmental program of capital expansion. This program works its way through the psyche and the built environment towards cybernetics and the bio-/necro-political in order to stave off the falling rate of profit and augment capital’s self-valorization—its autonomy and impunity. It is capital’s “answer” to revolutionary attempts to throw off its yoke. Here with new media we find the makings of a new order of imperialism—a kind of computational colonialism characterized by omniveillance, scripted behavior, and its own specific distributed practices and mentalities.

As it turns out, our efforts here to conceptualize the informatic absorption of social practice necessary to post-industrial capitalist expansion go back at least to the mid-twentieth century. I’ll give an historical example to concretize what I have said somewhat. In a brilliant essay entitled “Italian Operaismo and the Information Machine,” Matteo Pasquinelli rediscovers the work of Romano Alquati, “one of the first authors of Italian operaismo,” and finds “a conceptual bridge to connect Marx with cybernetics” (52) in Alquati’s 1963 text.¹⁵ In his argument regarding the rise of cybernetics and information, Pasquinelli convincingly shows that a passage of “Alquati could be understood avant la lettre as the very first postulate of cognitive capitalism that operaismo will start to develop only many decades later” (55). Building a powerful argument that the current conjuncture of capitalist informatics should be properly understood as a “society of meta-data” (64), Pasquinelli, with a Marxist theory of value firmly in mind, explains: “Alquati introduces the concept of valorizing information to describe the flow running upstream and feeding the cybernetic circuits of the whole factory. Such a valorizing information is continually produced by workers, absorbed by machinery, and eventually condensed into products” (54). His essay offers us a few tantalizing passages from Alquati’s text, including the means to understand Alquati’s term “valorizing information.” As Alquati’s essay is otherwise untranslated into English, I (somewhat shamelessly) reproduce Pasquinelli’s translation here:

Information is the essential to labour-force, it is what the worker—by the means of constant capital—transmits to the means of production on the basis of evaluations, measurements, elaborations in order to operate on the object of work all those modifications of its form that give it the requested use value. (Alquati 1963 [121] qtd. in Pasquinelli 54)

The productive labour is defined by the quality of information elaborated and transmitted by the worker to the means of production via the mediation of constant capital, in a way that is tendentially indirect, but completely socialized. (Alquati 1963 [121] qtd. in Pasquinelli 55)

Cybernetics recomposes globally and organically the functions of the general worker that are pulverized into individual microdecisions: the ‘bit’ links up the atomized worker to the figures of the Plan. (Alquati, 1963 [134] qtd. in Pasquinelli 55)

As Pasquinelli summarizes,

In other words, operating as a numerical interface between the domain of labour and capital, cybernetics transforms information into surplus value…. Alquati’s important insight is a continuum merging management, bureaucracy, cybernetics, machinery and the division of labour: cybernetics unveils the machinic nature of bureaucracy and, conversely, the bureaucratic role of machines as they work as feedback apparatuses to control workers and capture their know-how. With Alquati we visit the belly of an abstract machine that is a concretion of capital no longer made of steel. (55, emphasis added)

What is left out of this astonishing account, and what is absent more generally from the writings of Italian Operaismo is the history of the industrialization of visuality as an equally significant—and in my view historically necessary—pathway for the direct cybernetic absorption of cognitive and affective activities by fixed capital. The cursory treatment of visuality by many of the theorists of cognitive capitalism is closely related to the mistaken notion of value’s immeasurability discussed earlier. As I argued in these digital pages in “Cinema, Capital of the Twentieth Century” (1994) and in a book, The Cinematic Mode of Production (2006), cinema brought the Industrial Revolution to the eye. Notions found in Christian Metz’s discussion of the three types of cinematic writers that together with the audience formed a feedback loop between the cinema and spectator’s metapsychology, or Jean Luis Commoli’s view that the queues around the block invented the cinema, offered early testimony to the cybernetic role of visual culture in the increasingly financialized integration of bodies and machines. The understanding that looking was posited as labor also meant the buildup of fixed capital from its harvest of new forms of attentional labor, and suggested that the history of visual technologies is an open archive capable of documenting the real subsumption of cognition, perception, and sociality by capital. Capital does not capture the cognitive-linguistic without industrializing vision. Thus, to redeploy Pasquinelli’s fine phrase in relation to visuality, screen images were for a long time “concretions of capital no longer made of steel.” The industrialization of visuality must be understood both to drive and to complement the industrialization of ratio-cognitive processes, from Babbage’s Analytic engine (contemporary with the birth of photography), to Norbert Weiner’s account of cybernetics as the machinification of low-level decision-making and “discrimination” (contemporary with the birth of television), through to Olivetti mainframes (precursors to the birth of the internet) and the now more obvious convergence of visual and discursive cognitive process today in social-media capitalism.

Virtuality and “Remaindered Life”: The Labor of Watching, the Factory Code, Autonomization, and De-ontologization¹⁶

“The new industrial revolution which is taking place now consists primarily in replacing human judgment and discrimination at low levels by the discrimination of the machine,” writes Norbert Weiner, the father of cybernetics, at the twilight of the industrial era (New Media 71).¹⁷ He could just as well have been thinking (as Flusser did only a few decades hence) about the automation of certain aspects of thought and of perception in the visual domain by means of the quantum functions of the camera. Indeed it is not certain that the camera was not thinking Weiner. Paul Virilio has shown that exhibit A of cybernetics, Weiner’s anti-aircraft gun, a fusion between human operator and machinic weapon with pre-calculated trajectories enabling targeting was already a kind of camera. And we must admit that even the discursive “virtuosity” of the locuter, theorized by Paulo Virno as an extension of social cooperation scripted by capital, emerges in a media-ecology equally dependent upon the production and absorption of cognitive-affective processes prescribed by programmatic visualization and decision making. These machinic and linguistic reformations organized by visual protocols, mark the capture and displacement of human agency as well as a reorganization of the cultural terrain first sensed as a full-blown sea change in the notion of Postmodernism.

However, the reorganization of culture and ground by capital’s transformation of the senses has been a long time in the making. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, in “The Production of Relative Surplus Value” chapter of Volume I, Marx observed the emergence of new industrial jobs that remarkably consisted in watching the machinery.

In many manual implements the distinction between man as mere motive power and man as worker or operator properly so called is very striking indeed. For instance, the foot is merely the prime mover of the spinning-wheel, while the hand, working with the spindle, and drawing and twisting performs the real operation of spinning. It is the second part of the handicraftsman’s implement, in this case the spindle, which is first seized upon by the industrial revolution, leaving to the worker, in addition to his new labour of watching the machine with his eyes, and correcting its mistakes with his hands, the merely mechanical role of acting as the motive power. (495-6, emphasis added)

Notably, this emergence of visual labor in “the fragment on machines,” in which industrial manufacturing is conceived (borrowing from one Dr. Ure) as a “vast automaton” for which the workers become but its “conscious organs,” rests upon the discipline and regimentation imposed by the increasing automation of steam driven industrial capital. Again, this time in “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” Marx writes,

The technical subordination of the worker to the uniform motion of the instruments of labour, and the peculiar composition of the working group, consisting as it does of individuals of both sexes and all ages, gives rise to a barrack-like discipline which is elaborated into a complete system in the factory and brings the previously mentioned labor of superintendence to its fullest development…‘To devise and administer a successful code of factory discipline, suited to the necessities of factory diligence, was the Herculean enterprise, the noble achievement of Arkwright!’ (Ure, 15) … In the factory code the capitalist formulates his autocratic power over his workers like a private legislator and purely as an emanation of his own will, unaccompanied by the division of responsibility otherwise so approved by the bourgeoisie, or the still more approved representative system. The code is merely the capitalist caricature of the social regulation of the labor process and becomes necessary in co-operation on a large scale and the employment in common in instruments of labor. (549–50, emphasis added)¹⁸

The code is merely the capitalist caricature of the social regulation of the labor process. Software studies might pause here and take a deep breath. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the labor of watching, of making adjustments with one’s hands, and the emergence of what was already the recognizable outlines of executable code were, we could say, in the works. Already here we witness the labor of superintendence, the labor of cooperation organized by code. The requirements were there; it was a matter of formalizing the mechanism. In the 1844 manuscripts Marx said that “industry was the open book of human psychology,” is it any wonder that just over one hundred years later Turing suggested the likelihood that the laws of human behavior were governed by a rule-set?

From the standpoint of capital, the role and indeed the fate of the two formerly distinct tracks, the visual and the verbal, is combined, in the reprogramming of behavior by the labor process. Their integrated emergence as modes for the organization of value-productive activity is bound together just as their codification through juridical prescription, scientific inscription, and police execution is inseparable again from the histories of money, imperialism, labor, class, gender, sexuality, and racialization that consciously or not informed their organization and thus their encryptions, transmissions, and valuations. This history is one of a broad-spectrum colonization of media, one that makes clear that by the time the medium is the message, the message is capitalist exploitation.

For criticism, we note in passing, it is perhaps only vis-à-vis such a broad-band, interdisciplinary and indeed anti-disciplinary approach as sketched above that one might fully glimpse the modality of the network of encroachments of informatics, of code, of programmable images, on the life-world. To avoid platform fetishism (and to begin to decolonize media studies), it should become discursively impossible to separate the above terms fully and render any one of them autonomous. No race without class, no cinema without gender and imperialism, no computation without capital, no wealth without murder. Logically, it is thus also impossible to extract these “objects” of analysis from historical process or to separate any of these from violence: The violence of abstraction, of codification, is not merely metaphorical. An argument for the full autonomy of any of these discursive sedimentations amounts to a disavowal of the violent history of their formation as interoperable with one another, and hence amounts to an automated (and often automatic) reproduction of that violence. Media Studies bound to platform fetishism leads to a processing of data in the fascist sense, as do strictly disciplinary approaches more generally.

The cybernetics that are the very condition of digitality and computational capital place us not only in a post-Fordist but also a post-human moment. If biopolitics (necropolitics) and the technics thereof have become the measure of all things formerly social, then “Man” most certainly is not. Neither can “man,” nor “woman” as Donna Haraway clearly indicated in her 1985 “Cyborg Manifesto,” remain the gold standard of Marxism, Socialism, or Socialist Feminism. This demotion of “man,” “woman,” and “the human,” not necessarily a bad thing for all constituents, is significant not only as a symptom of a mammoth transformation of the mode of production and reproduction to computation in the cybernetic interpenetration of image, code and financialization, but also because “the human” (along with God, Gold, and Truth) no longer appears available to function as ground (see Haraway). During the twentieth century the dollar went off the gold standard, representation went off the reality standard, and capital went off the human standard—three outmoded interfaces that were at the same time metrics (methods of account) rendered clunky if not obsolete by informatics and digitization. Today, in a near total de-grounding of metaphysical assurances, standards are ones of protocol interoperability, and the old terms are reduced to forms of user-interface. Indeed, as Allen Feldman has brilliantly shown, metaphysics and operative, on demand restructuring of ontologies, is a medium of (permanent) war.

In the list of gold, reality, and human as standard, the last, it should also be admitted, seems irredeemable, given that “the human” is an idea built upon racial exclusion of colonized and enslaved peoples. Some might argue that the jury is still out, but racism, colonialism, apartheid, and genocide were part of the human operating system of Digital Culture 1.0, and as I’ve argued elsewhere, the enslaved and the colonized were the first content providers for capital’s platform known as “Humanism.” Nowadays with the continuation of these value-extractive programs by other means (though the old means certainly persist), the distributed, indeed trans-species, and in fact in the broadest sense the trans-media cybernesis that characterizes the computational mode of production blurs the neat distinctions between human and technology, between biology and semiology, between inside and outside—for better and for worse. As mentioned at the outset of this article, these mutations in the protocols of valuation are themselves the result of struggle just as the earlier essentialist algorithms (Human, God, Gold, Reality) were both forcibly imposed and forcefully resisted. Value does not become measureless, but the imposition of the value form breaks up the received ontologies of prior modes of life as it imposes and legitimates universal exploitation for the purpose of infinite accumulation. Given some clarity on the macrological character of the dialectic of capital accumulation and radical dispossession, it seems obvious, even trivial that the new computational metrics being put in place have a bearing on “representation” and “politics,” domains that are themselves no longer conceivable as autonomous to the degree that they are being subsumed by the operating system of computational capital.

Some questions arise: With the real subsumption of humanity as a standard of value, how to confront the full autonomization of capitalist valuations? With the shattering of the sovereign subject in multi-tasked distributed production that deploys ontologies as algorithms (American, male, Chinese, female), we are forced to ask exactly who or what is exploited in the social factory? In whose name and on whose behalf are we making the revolution? Looking towards the horizon one must also ask: is there a Communist Computing?¹⁹ In my view, these are questions of poesis and programming. With these questions in mind, we may see that it is not value that has become immeasurable, as Negri thought, but rather that which Neferti Tadiar calls “remaindered life” (“Life-times” 796): the fragments and dimensions of persons and peoples, of experience and aspiration that literally fall out of an economy (and its representations and political programs) in which, over the past century, product, semiotic, measure and value are increasingly unified. Remaindered life is immeasurable and unaccounted for because the metrics themselves are instruments of capitalization through the financialization of the schema of information. This immeasurability, this being beyond number, is what Negri was probably reaching for (and what Tadiar is able to name) in his mistaken claim that value was immeasurable. With respect to what is immeasurable, the words that conclude Borges’s 1941 “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a story about encryption if there ever was one, seem prescient. Knowing that the newspapers will pick up the story, the spy Yu T’sun murders an Englishman, who could have taught him much about his own history, to send a message (the Englishman’s name is that of the town to be bombed) to German military intelligence. Bearing witness to the remnants of informatic war, and writing from his English prison cell, he melancholically reflects on his deeds, his losses, and his relation to his German commanding officer for whom he foreclosed his alternative paths in order to send a message—“He does not know (no one can know) my innumerable contrition and weariness” (29, emphasis added).

It is tempting to say that this remaindered life, already present in Borges and resultant from the logistics of communication in the context of world war, is a new antithesis that is and will be the resultant form of the synthesis of capital and labor in the network of M-I-C-I′-M′, which, with its colonization of the life-world, would put labor and capital in lock-step ordained by the value form itself and simultaneously externalize non-capitalist experience beyond the horizon of representation. We are being pushed towards a non-productive fugitivity and forms of endurance and survival.

The insistent call of a politics beyond politics (since “politics” is now a subroutine of financialized semiotics) results from the near total colonization and capture of sign systems by a formation of capital that is increasingly autonomous. On the autonomization of the value form, this from Capital:

In simple circulation, the value of commodities attained at the most a form independent of use values, i.e., the form of money. But now, in the circulation of M-C-M, value suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own, and for which commodities and money are both mere forms. But there is more to come: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it now enters into a private relationship with itself, as it were …. Value … now becomes value in process, money in process, and, as such, capital. It comes out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and multiplies itself within circulation, emerging from it with an increased size, and starts the same cycle again and again. M-M, ‘money which begets money.’ Lastly, in the case of interest-bearing capital, the circulation M-C-M′ presents itself in abridged form, in its final result without any intermediate stage, in a concise style, so to speak, as M-M′, i.e., money which is worth more money, value which is greater than itself. (Capital 257–8)

Two things to conclude here as a result of capital’s colonization of the life-world, which is to say, its artificial intelligence: first, money’s shimmering presence, its pyrotechnics, its metaphysical, psychotropic, cybernetic effects (which might be abstracted and understood as the financialized precondition for the identity of identity and non-identity) are the effects of its “concise style,” and a consequence of its role in structuring, which is to say programming, the metabolism of society—the latter word is Marx’s. Second, what has happened in the past long century, particularly with the visual turn, the capture of the cognitive linguistic and the consequent evisceration of classical metaphysics (an imposition of the same “concise style” that required the placing of “being” under erasure, and along with the rise of simulation and virtuality, required the evisceration of traditional metaphysical essentialisms by the screens of capital), is that, under the authority of the autonomization of the value form, the number and type of intervals from M-M′ have undergone an exponential expansion. The wholesale rewiring of space-time at all operative levels by the protocols of a unified operating system (the invisible hand) synonymous with and indeed authored by capital logic in deadly struggle with revolutionary innovation from below withers away old world metaphysics (as well as the old world itself), utilizing methods of ramification and incorporation through enumeration—the assignation of number to any quality whatever.

The computational mode of production has encroached upon the world. The general procedure was and is the recursive loop image-code-financialization, though at an earlier stage in capital development this was simply called commodification. This procedure, along with the ability to reverse engineer a desired effect back to a fragmentary process could be traced back to Gutenberg, and the scientific revolution, and industrialization–all of which, whatever else they were, pace McLuhan, were vehicles of capital expansion. The expansion and intensification of this procedure of image-code-financialization through a recursive feedback loop with the bios, its extrinsic and intrinsic development, strives to encompass both the macro and micro infinities of space-time. As we have seen, with computational capital’s exponential growth of the circuits from M-M′, through the organization of image and code and the development of these as worksites, the forms of the commodity and the forms of labor have been transformed, along with the very mode of the presencing (or non-presencing) of both the human and being.

Amidst all this semio-material re-ordination, two fundamental conditions remain as results of the autonomization of the value-form: designated hypostatically they are private property (the accumulation of capital) and violence (the accumulation of dispossession). As Marx wrote in Capital, “There is not one single atom of… value that does not owe its existence to unpaid labor” (728). Today we might understand that these “atoms” of value are life-quanta, stolen moments of life-time that result in the antithesis of democracy. We red-flag in passing the symptomatic rise of interminable war, massive environmental destruction, worldwide precarity and everyday fascism as inescapable aspects of capital’s broad-spectrum, increasingly fine-grained informatic praxis of command/control. And, with Tadiar, we gesture towards the remainder, that which falls away from the calculus of capital, as a direction of insurgent investigation.

Elsewhere I hope to reconsider the space of the interval from M-M′—along with the politics, such that they are, of the production of “interest,” a term that itself indicates a convergence in accord with the new calculi of value operative within the domain of images and codes.²⁰ The interval from M-M′ is the interval of speculation, creativity, exploitation—and also and always of struggle. We do not yet know if that sovereign interval that has presided over so many nightmares can be meaningfully transcended or only momentarily suspended.

Footnotes

1. A moment’s attention to the gendered logic of the hegemonic selfie is in order—nicely analyzed in Sarah Gram’s blogspot discussion of Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl (2012) and the selfie. Quoting Tiqqun, Gram writes, “‘the young girl is the model citizen of contemporary society,’ an identity colonized by capital.” Gram suggests that the young girl is the hollowed-out commodity par excellence, imprisoned by its own self-production. Gram tracks the schizoid drives of obligation and shame in this commodity-self production mediated by the self-image, or the selfie, and writes, “We elevate the work women do on their bodies to the utmost importance, and then punish the outcome of that labour. That is how hegemony works.”

2. Riffing on Vilem Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography to title her project Towards a Philosophy of the Selfie, Columbia University student Maya Meredith, in a section entitled “I point and shoot, therefore I am,” micro-blogged a quotation from Virginia Heffernan’s Wired article on Instagram:

Now that superstylized images have become the answer to “How are you?” and “What are you doing?” we can avoid the ruts of linguistic expression in favor of a highly forgiving, playful, and compassionate style of looking. When we live only in language—in tweets and status updates, in zingers, analysis, and debate—we come to imagine the world to be much uglier than it is. But Instagram, if you use it right, will stealthily persuade you that other humans—and nature, and food, and three-dimensional objects more generally—are worth observing for the sheer joy of it.

Meredith comments on this notably language-replacing visual platform:

But to me, this brave new world is troubling. Haven’t endemic racism, classism, homo- and transphobia, and sexism already revealed to us the problems with basing communication purely on visual cues? The world of social media photography, with its purely like-based system (no thumbs-downs here as on YouTube) seems to be the ultimate self-affirmer, but this universal positivity lulls us into a false sense of security. I don’t want to see the ability to decode eroded any further than it already has been.

Meredith’s project has inspired my own.

3. Adorno is alleged to be quoting Leo Lowenthal.

4. Had Anne Frank, who would have been eighty-seven this year (2016), not caught the last train to Auschwitz, she would have been a Belieber. Perhaps it’s easy to the point of being uncool to pick on Bieber’s low-hanging fruit, but we need to ask: is this particular cut ‘n’ mix fantasy of historical redemption symptomatic of a generalized narrowing of the range of empathy, of experience? Is a cyborg “sharing,” in which all one’s machine-mediated posting, friending, and liking serve to procure dopamine and extend one’s fan-base, to be the new infrastructure of solidarity?

5. For some excellent quick reads, see Rebecca L. Stein, Adi Kuntsman, and Negar Mottahedeh. See also Dean.

6. Like it or not, the reigning econo-metrics of the celebrity-self, fractally reproduced and scaled from Barack Obama and Miley Cyrus to the loneliest anorexic teen, are structural and financial. If, for example, one sees Obama, in his capacity as the president of Empire, as the expropriation of Black radical imagination rather than the expression of it, then the word “audacity” in his titular phrase “the audacity of hope” has a sinister irony to it—at least for those who suffer the collateral damage of drone strikes, US foreign policy, and financial practices, and the domestic policies of the security state that include racial profiling, the prison industrial complex, immigrant detention, and border “fences.” This critique would not be focused on Obama’s integrity but on the structural limits of celebrity-mediated politics. As a structural feature of finance capital, the celebrity/celebutant—itself the fractalization of the charismatic dictator and the Hollywood celeb—posits everyone else as expropriable sensual labor, a source of attention in a mode of self-branding that capitalizes on the hopes and aspirations of others. “Fandom as free labor,” as Abigail de Kosnik, calls it, is fundamental to the (“personal”) brand as financial vector. Knowing that this accumulation of alienated subjectivity powers the celebrity subject gives one pause regarding the actually existing mediations of “democracy.” In a post-civil rights, post-Ferguson, white-supremacist US presumably presided over by Obama, it suggests the limits of politics organized by celebrity capitalism and threatens to make audible the ironic (and structurally cynical?) declension of Obama’s widely admired title The Audacity of Hope (2006).

7. It is noteworthy that the world computer is a phrase that has emerged among crypto-currency programmers (Ethereum) during the course of the three years that it has taken to write this essay and bring it to pixilated press.

8. To Negri’s great credit and in a manner characteristic with the originality of his thought, the challenge to measurability of value comes “from below” as innovative affective powers that exceed the metrics of (and thus are devoid of recognition by) political economy. One unattributed example he gives (though Silvia Federici comes immediately to mind) is housework. The second is as follows:

This case deals no longer with the traditional paradigms of classical economics but with a really postmodern theme: the so-called economy of attention. By this term, one refers to the interest in assuming in the economic calculation the interactivity of the user of communication services. In this case, too, even in the clear effort to absorb the production of subjectivity, economics ignores the substance of the question. As it focuses attention on the calculation of ‘audience,’ it flattens, controls, and commands the production of subjectivity on a disembodied horizon. Labor (attention) is here subsumed, stripping it from value (of the subject), that is, from affect. (79)

One could wonder where he got that example—perhaps his sources come from below as well.

9. Jonathan Beller, “Texas-(s)ized Postmodernism: Or Capitalism Without the Dialectic,” Social Text 127 (Summer 2016). See also “Fragment from The Message is Murder,” Social Text 128 (Fall 2016).

10. This latter can be sold individually or in lots, piecemeal or, on occasion, all at once. In reality, such purchases are contracts, contracts for products that require labor over time to produce.

11. For some of the details of the increasing resolution of these dynamics, see, for example, Nielsen and Pernice.

12. This shift in the mode of production also implies an ontological shift—a shift in the mode of being of things (and of the status of “the thing”). The being of the universe has a new character within the meta-universe (multi-verse) of commodified knowledge that renders it—it is arguable whether or not any knowing exists beyond such an epistemic horizon, at least for us. You will no doubt notice that we are thus rapt by an inversion in which the mode of knowing trumps the essence of any object: all being, from the subatomic to the cosmic, is enframed by commodification. The implication in short: existence is given up to us through the calculus of the commodity-form—the medium is, after all, the message. If we wanted to embrace fully the logical and perhaps practical collapse of all non-commodified worlds into fully commodified representation even at the level of style, we might be tempted with regard to the total colonization of subjectivity by computational capital to write that what’s true for the selfie is true for the otherie too. But let’s resist such dissonant totalitarian foreclosure.

13. Though I do not have time to develop this here, these are moments of material production riding on the back of use value. Use has not disappeared; it has, from the standpoint of capital, become merely theoretical. The particular use is a matter of indifference, for capital, and in fact lies beyond its episteme as a structural and practical necessity, but the positing of a ground, an ultimately determining instance, a limit and a threshold, is still functional.

14. A shoe and a piece of furniture are valuable because they are information-carriers, improbable forms made of leather or wood and metal. But information is impressed into these objects and cannot be detached from them. One can only wear out and consume this information. This is what “makes” such objects, as objects, valuable, i.e., “able” to be filled with value. In the case of the photograph on the other hand, the information sits loosely on the surface and can easily be conveyed to another surface. To this extent the photograph demonstrates the defeat of the material thing and of the concept of “ownership.” (Flusser 51–2)

While I disagree with Flusser regarding the defeat of ownership (indeed this entire essay is about its persistence), his insights into the post-industrial rise of informatics in the universe of the technical image are notably rich. Here we can see that the commodity is treated as image and information by virtue of its negative entropy (its improbability)—despite the historical fact that the senses had not yet developed sufficiently to produce the concept of information or make these imagistic aspects of negative entropy legible as such. Fredric Jameson’s now classic reading of the peasant shoes painted by Van Gogh would indicate, however, not only that as early as the end of the nineteenth century such a thing as shoes contained information, but also that that information was modified by use and could be rendered both visible and legible. (parenthetically cite page numbers?)

15. Pasquinelli refers to Alquati’s Composizione organica del capitale e forza-lavoro alla Olivetti, Part 1. Quaderni Rossi 2 (1962) and his Composizione organica del capitale e forza-lavoro alla Olivetti, Part 2. Quaderni Rossi 3 (1963).

16. I borrow the term “remaindered life” from Neferti Tadiar. See her “Decolonization, ‘Race’ and Remaindered Life Under Empire.”

17. Directly linking the history of computation and television to cybernetics, Weiner wrote “(a) the use of television had shown us a way to represent two or more dimensions on one device and (b) that the previous device which measured quantities should be replaced by a more precise sort of device that counted numbers” (New Media 67). Nam Jun Paik tells the history thus:

Newton’s physics is the mechanics of power and the unconciliatory two-party system, in which the strong win over the weak. But in the 1920’s a German genius put a third-party (grid) between these two mighty poles (cathode and anode) in a vacuum tube, thus enabling the weak to win over the strong for the first time in human history. It might be a Buddhistic “third way,” but anyway this German invention led to cybernetics, which came to the world in the last war to shoot down German planes from the English sky. (New Media 229)

18. Marx cites Dr. Ure’s Philosophy of Manufactures (1835).

19. The interrogation of the seeming autonomy of the value-form arises from the perception of over-expropriation and the intimation of the possibility of constructing alternative constituencies. Los Indignados, Occupy, Podemos, Tsipras’s people-backed refusal of debts imposed by the Imperial EU are all examples of nascent uprising.

20. Jonathan Beller, “Informatic Labor in the Age of Computational Capital,” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 5.1 (Spring 2016).

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• —. “Decolonization, ‘Race,’ and Remaindered Life under Empire” Qui Parle Vol. 23, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2015), pp. 135-160. Print.
• Wark, McKenzie. Telesthesia: Communication, Culture and Class. New York: Wiley, 2012. Print.

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.

Works Cited

• Ayres, Robert and Benjamin Warr. “Accounting for Growth: the Role of Physical Work.” Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 16 (2005): 181–209. Print.
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• Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. “Towards a Speculative Philosophy.” The Speculative Turn. Melbourne: re.press, 2012. 1–17. Print.
• Carruth, Allison. “The Digital Cloud and the Micropolitics of Energy.” Public Culture 26.2 (2014): 339–364. Print.
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• Glanz, James. “Power, Pollution, and the Internet.” New York Times. The New York Times Company, September 22, 2012. Web. May 11, 2015.
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• —. A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000. Print.
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• Malm, Andreas. “The Origins of Fossil Capital: From Water to Steam in the British Cotton Industry.” Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013): 15–68. Print.
• Medovoi, Leerom. “The Biopolitical Unconscious: Toward an Eco-Marxist Literary Theory.” Mediations 24.2 (Spring 2010): 122–39. Web. May 10, 2016.
• Mills, Mark P. “The Cloud Begins with Coal: Big Data, Big Networks, Big Infrastructure, and Big Power.” National Mining Association. August 2013. Web. May 2, 2015.
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• Mitchell, William J. “Against Program.” Architecture Theories of the Environment. New York: Routledge, 2013.
• Mostafavi, Mohsen. “Why Ecological Urbanism? Why Now?” Ecological Urbanism. Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2010: 12–54. Print.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.
• Power, Nina. “Decapitalism, Left Scarcity, and the State,” Filip 20 (Spring 2015): n. pag. Web. May 28, 2015.
• Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1990.
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• Rossi, Aldo. A Scientific Autobiography. Cambridge: MIT P, 1981. Print.
• Diller, Elizabeth, Ricardo Scofidio, and Charles Renfro. “Blur Building.” Diller Scofidio + Renfro, n. d. Web. April 12, 2015.
• Scott, Felicity D. Architecture or Techno-Utopia. Cambridge: MIT P, 2007. Print.
• Shane, Grahame. “The Emergence of Landscape Urbanism.” The Landscape Urbanism Reader. New York: Princeton Architectural P, 2006. 55–68. Print.
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• Smil, Vaclav. Energy Transitions. Oxford: Prager, 2010. Print.
• Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics I. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Print.
• Toscano, Alberto. “Plasticity, Capital, and the Dialectic.” Plastic Materialities. Durham: Duke UP, 2015. Print.
• Toscano, Alberto and Jeff Kinkle. Cartographies of the Absolute. Winchester: Zero Books, 2015. Print.
• Tschumi, Bernard. Architecture and Disjunction. Massachusetts: MIT P, 1996. Print.
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Carolyn Elerding (bio)
The Ohio State University

Abstract

This essay interprets digital petroculture’s aesthetic of invisibility in two ways. First, the ubiquitous intangibility of software simulation in everyday life is framed in terms of the Marxist concept of “realization” in circulation. Second, the “cloud’s” remote storage and processing of data is understood as a system of rents. These two processes reinforce the invisibility of the vast material resources consumed in order to perpetuate digital culture. After discussing the roots of this invisibility in enlightenment techno-science and its perpetuation through education, the essay argues that attempts to address social inequalities through cultural design should also engage with environmental issues.

Software, computation, code, and data now permeate nearly all sociocultural production, as demonstrated by not only the digitally augmented financial crisis and the ubiquity of cloud computing, but also the online empowerment of historically marginalized groups through the relative accessibility of social media and other digital tools.¹ Though currents in digital studies undergo constant negotiation, many researchers and theorists across the humanities and social sciences agree on the importance of the aesthetic dimensions of computing as an expression of cultural value. While emphasizing computation’s unique medial specificity, for example, theorists have nevertheless compared it aesthetically with language, narrative, theatre, cinema, and architecture, among other arts and media.² Many cultural theorists of media technology further insist that processes hidden from view require as much investigation as, for instance, images onscreen. Software, like any technology, is a cultural object with both direct (i.e., visual, aural, and gestural) as well as less sensuous aesthetic properties that, like the obfuscatory principle of invisibility on which this essay focuses, express cultural values at least as powerfully.³ Software provides such diverse affordances that concrete limitations, such as digital culture’s reliance upon electricity and therefore carbon combustion, recede from awareness, and, as David Berry points out, this ubiquitous and polymorphous cultural effect is quickly naturalized.⁴ In this way, software culture both exemplifies and obscures petroculture: by appearing to volatilize or virtualize materiality, abstracting it into a simulation that, because less or differently tactile, visceral, or sensory, seems—but is not—less embodied and situated. The argument of this essay is that the remarkable aesthetic of invisibility and immateriality characterizing carbon-based energy consumption in general is also expressed through two fundamental aspects particular to computational culture, both linked complexly to the principle of modularity in digital engineering: 1) the fluid ubiquity of software and simulation in everyday activity, which exemplifies Marx’s discussion of “realization” in circulation, and 2) the remote storage and processing of data in the networked “cloud” infrastructure, a material system that, I argue, is based in large part on rents.⁵ My purpose is to explore ways in which the stubborn invisibility of material relations subtended by carbon fuel combustion is supported by the nonsensuous expressiveness of computing, an aesthetic rooted in enlightenment techno-science and reproduced socially through schooling.⁶ Despite its palpable material infrastructure and the often negative consequences of digitalization, especially for vulnerable populations, the software bodies of computing and the cloud are also camouflaged by spuriously “values-free” aesthetics characterizing techno-science, education, and all other “discourses of sobriety,” as Bill Nichols has aptly categorized them (3).

Revealing harmonies and unisons emerge in the counterpoint produced by reading petroculture and the digital together socioeconomically. Accounting for the cultural force of computation requires us first to expose the strange concealment of everyday contemporary life and capital’s basis in cheap carbon fuels, and this is true in two senses: not only does computing require electricity, but digital culture is also closely related to petroculture aesthetically. Petroculture is naturalized and ubiquitous to the point of invisibility: “petromodernity has enveloped the Euro-American imagination to the extent that ‘oil’ has become implicitly synonymous with the world” (LeMenager 60–61). The cloud and other forms of digital technoculture also recede from perception, remaining hidden in plain view. Both analog and digital petrocultures take on ontological significance. The centrality of energy to governmentality necessitates an expansion of Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics, as Imre Szeman proposes (“Conclusion: On Energopolitics” 455).⁷ Digital code has become as important as language in human activity, assuming the cosmological role of “lingua franca of nature” (Hayles). Recent conceptualizations of the “Anthropocene” link humanity’s inscription in the geological record through air, soil, and water pollution inseparably to petromodernity as well as to globalizing enlightenment humanism (Szeman, “Conclusion” 458–59).⁸ However, these critiques have only begun to explore the role of digital technology and media in petromodernity as a specifically energopolitical issue. Although new materialist approaches, particularly Jussi Parikka’s work on media and the Anthropocene, attend to the pollution and social inequality generated by the manufacture and disposal of digital technology, they address energy consumption only glancingly, if at all. The same is true of many politically incisive analyses of media technology and social difference produced by postcolonial feminist theorists.⁹ Energopolitics remain largely under erasure.

Digital culture and petroculture participate together in what Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling,” a shared—if less than conscious—belief system (128–35). Peter Hitchcock has described oil as “deeply embedded in the ways a society represents itself to itself” (81). Like oil, to extend Hitchcock’s claim, the digital remains strangely invisible, though it pervasively shapes contemporary life and representation.¹⁰ Hitchcock argues that imagining and working towards a world without oil requires comprehension of “oil ontology,” oil’s obscured manner of articulating modernity (81). Imre Szeman meanwhile insists that the issue is relatively unsubtle, a case of denial or complacency (“Literature” 324). I would add, as Nick Dyer-Witheford argues, that “greenwashing,” or the well-known practice of using corporate publicity to portray environmentally harmful products or processes as ecologically sound, also subverts critiques of oil, coal, and digital electricity consumption (113). While each of these factors contributes a layer of obfuscation to the invisibility of petroculture and of its role as the basis of digital culture, what sets Hitchcock’s insight apart and demands further elucidation is the involuntary quality of oil’s constitutive “encounter as missed encounter” with the social world, its aspect as the unstable ground of advantaged Western subjectivities and as a traumatic and therefore unnamed condition for possibility (97). Computational culture shares oil’s black-boxed ontology, its constitutive encapsulation from view, on the basis of structurally parallel relationships with techno-scientific practice, a primary site of social construction and erasure in industrial culture.¹¹ For instance, a black box encloses unresolved (if esoteric) disagreement over oil’s geologic origins, controversy attributed to modern experimentation’s version of a hermeneutic circle. The proper comportment of a test can only be evaluated based on the researcher’s advance projections of what the correct outcome should be, with predictions often fueled by corporate sponsorship and various unacknowledged ideologies more than by values conventionally attributed to enlightenment techno-science, such as rationality or provision for the public good (Collins and Pinch, The Golem at Large 76–92; Cole). However, to many a layperson as well as to most scientists this process of social construction remains screened from view.¹² Similarly, as I will explain, cultural values informing early computer programming practices were hard-wired into computation’s obfuscatory ontology in the name of science and technological progress. Petroculture and the digital are linked by a vast and robust structure of feeling rooted in techno-science and related progress narratives, as well as by a close material relationship based on the world of code’s reliance upon electricity commonly derived from carbon combustion.

The Material Shadow of the Cloud

As Daniel Tanuro writes, Marxist theory has tended to overlook the crucial distinction between renewable and non-renewable energy sources. Since in Marx’s day industrial capitalism was in its infancy, the environmental consequences of choosing particular energy sources were largely indiscernible (Tanuro 95). Contemporary Marxist theorists have nevertheless been among the few clear-sighted critics of the effects of digital political economy on the environment. Writing in 1999 (with great fidelity to Marx), Dyer-Witheford proffers a lucid analysis of the scope of the impact of digital technology on the environment and of the cynicism of industrial greenwashing campaigns, the ferocity of which indexes the considerable threat environmentalist movements pose to capital (Cyber-Marx 113).¹³ The oxymoronic corporate image of digital technology thus remains one of impossibly non-polluting capitalist expansion in which unregulated competition appears as the sole means of general survival. Dyer-Witheford goes on to explain how the project to increase energy efficiency, ostensibly in response to challenges from environmentalists, actually serves as a corporate pretext for increasing profits and more effectively exploiting natural resources (114)—nor, as I explain in more detail below, does it reduce pollution. Environmental crises are quickly and easily masked by notions of necessity and progress, both under the banner of techno-scientific capitalism. The result is technological development (or merely planned obsolescence) without structural progress toward social equality.

However, without arguing that simulation is inauthentic or inherently undesirable, I am more interested in the technologically mediated “remodeling” of nature that Dyer-Witheford critiques: “shifting from stripping nature to synthesizing it, recreating a world of artificially generated resources to substitute for the gutted planet left in the aftermath of industrialism” (113). Immersion in the ubiquitous processes of digital abstraction hides approaching destruction from view. The thorough digitalization of culture makes an ontology out of simulation, a process Lev Manovich has called, in a much more cheerful key than Dyer-Witheford’s critique, “softwarization” (Software). More soberly, Chun contemplates software’s invisible regulation of representation, and Wark, writing in the 1990s, sees the digital as producing a “third nature.”¹⁴ Katherine Hayles, meanwhile, describes ubiquitous computation as cyclically and cumulatively reinforced and compounded through expectations of more complete digitalization (30). Increasingly energy-intensive means of exploring possible futures using immersive Internet communications technologies and digital media produce impressions of immateriality in the present.

The mythology of the “cloud”—the infrastructure for selling space or collecting rents on hard drives pooled and accessed remotely, indispensable to the streaming and sharing of audio and video—handily perpetuates this ideology of immateriality.¹⁵ Quentin Hardy writes that the cloud provides and encourages expectations of unprecedented levels of instantaneity, ubiquity, and immersive multimedia realism through scaling and—most importantly—sharing processing capability, though the cloud is commercial or proprietary and will soon be owned, controlled, and designed by a small number of companies. Nevertheless, since, as Hardy explains, anyone who can afford to do so may lease cloud storage or, with a computer and Internet service, gain access free of charge, the cloud is experienced, particularly by the advantaged, as public or open.¹⁶ It is crucial to understand that the cloud is not public in a material sense of being socially owned and democratically operated, though its public availability to users and its accompanying rhetoric of openness and freeness (along with confusion caused by the erosion of public institutions and services, and hence over meanings of the term “public”) perpetuate an impression of democracy. The projection of an image of immateriality is pivotal here. As Andrew Blum illustrates, by representing data as non-physical, the cloud metaphor permits companies to perform openness and yet avoid sharing specific information about where and how particular data is stored, and the duplication and storage of data in multiple locations (in order to minimize loss and the cost of bandwidth due to distance) both contribute to a sense of placeless immateriality as well (240). The cloud, however, is fundamentally physical and machinic, comprised of a network of “massive warehouses” that are basically “huge hard-drives” (Blum 255).

Conventional usage of terms like “ecology” and “ecosystem” in media theory to describe media “environments” begins to seem cynical in light of the consumer and industrial energy expenditure required to experience digital technology as weightless. While cloud service providers have expanded the availability and efficiency of flexible remote storage in addition to preventing the negative effects of network demand surges, they require coal- and oil-based electricity in far greater quantities than most users realize (Hardy). Astra Taylor has consolidated research on the pollution produced by digital technology manufacturing in a comprehensive and sobering analysis of the aggregate energy costs of cloud computing (178–183). Among most individual users in general, however, there is little sense of the spatial and energy requirements of data. Oddly, even Blum brushes past the issue of fuel consumption, despite the otherwise detailed texture of his book-length account of visiting and touring data storage centers in the US (227–62). Marxist categories, however, help to elucidate this point. Not only are Internet profits extracted from unpaid user labor, but also the entire process is fueled by extravagant amounts of carbon combustion.¹⁷ Thus, in addition to rendering social media and the Internet more genuinely social—that is, publicly owned and operated—both should be reconfigured and regulated to minimize environmental harm.

David Harvey argues that Marx, particularly in Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, provides previously overlooked but significant points of departure for materialist analysis of digital economy. Harvey figures indirect value extraction online in terms of Marx’s space- and land-based notion of rents (Harvey, Glaeser, and Pinsky). Like Terranova, Harvey proposes that user labor is fundamental to the valorization of companies such as Google. He focuses principally on the extraction of rent from intellectual property, much of which is user-generated content or tracking information, as it is monetized through sales of information to marketing agencies by corporate owners who retain indefinite rights to it, a process, I would add, facilitated by controlling physical storage. Harvey reinforces the close analogy with land by describing Google’s institutional configuration and economic process, as well as similar practices associated with other services, as “economies of dispossession,” invoking the traumatic displacement of serfs during the historical transition from agrarian feudalism to the formation of towns in medieval Europe during the mercantilist period in the history of capitalism.¹⁸

The analogy of the digital with the geographic is reinforced by another aspect of data’s materiality: By deriving such extensive profits from its unpaid laborers, who greatly exceed its paid workforce in number, and through such frictionless circulation, Google makes an unprecedented contribution to social stratification. In Volume II of Capital, when Marx critiques Ricardo and to a greater extent Smith for not exposing the social relationships surrounding the three “original sources of all revenue” (wages, profit, and rent), he theorizes land as the basis of private property, and writes that once all the land in a country has become private property, the basis for capitalism is in place (439–49). If online spaces are analogous to geographical ones in the manner Harvey proposes, the consequences are clear: Google and similar companies secure or enclose (and here one might envision another black box) as much virtual property as they can while users produce and belabor it for free, generating vast corporate profits.¹⁹

Waste, Modularity, and Realization

Many of the millions of data centers now located throughout the world constitute gigantic facilities occupying hundreds of thousands of square feet, containing astronomical numbers of servers (hard drives), and requiring almost unthinkable amounts of energy for computing and cooling and for charging backup battery systems (to prevent centers from slowing or crashing, which can happen in a fraction of a second), as well as to compensate for the normal dissipation of electricity from the necessarily extensive wiring involved (Blum, 227–262; Glanz; Hardy). In the US as of 2012, data centers were responsible for two percent of all electricity consumed. Presently, many of the servers do little more than burn electricity derived from coal and oil, consuming as much as thirty times more energy than needed for the services they intermittently provide. The data center is a nexus of wastefulness due to the infrastructural redundancy required to meet contemporary users’ expectations—or anticipated expectations.²⁰ Though, overall, corporations using their own private cloud architectures and local data centers currently account for most of the energy usage in question, some data companies estimate that three quarters of the data they store is produced by individual consumers whose Internet usage, at work or leisure, requires extensive processing. Users habituated to instantaneous access have quickly become unwilling to settle for less. Likewise, business concerns rely on the same convenience in order to function competitively. In both cases, the perceived threshold of necessity rises incessantly. In order to meet these expectations, online companies run servers at full capacity at all hours.

Maintaining constant readiness requires a great deal of energy—equivalent to the output of about thirty nuclear power plants as of 2012. Typically, “utilization” rates remain between six and twelve percent, meaning that servers in data centers tend to use only this small fraction of their computing potential when they are functioning—this in addition to merely idling most of the time in preparation for a potentially overwhelming surge in Internet traffic. In addition, software applications (or, as is often the case, obsolete versions of them) are frequently left running indefinitely without regard for demand, let alone material ramifications. Data centers’ reliance upon auxiliary energy sources is mirrored in their function as a “backup service” for large energy utilities, which prize their patronage because data centers require a steady supply of power at all times, including at night when other customers use little, thus permitting utilities to avoid risk and purchase resources in advance more frugally.

Modularity, a central principle in software and hardware design, is highly valued as a source of efficiency but is nevertheless directly related to the issue of poor processing utilization in data center hard drives. It also, I argue, building upon Tara McPherson’s work on software modularity in relation to social inequalities, establishes and reinforces the previously noted perceptual gap subtending the invisibility of digital petroculture. Modularity, a principle for managing complexity by “chunking” programming into relatively independent, interchangeable, and yet interconnected parts, was at first a matter of necessity in computer engineering. It soon became an aesthetic value that promoted simplicity and “invisibility” on behalf of users (McPherson, “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?” 146).²¹ As is well known, early operating systems were easily overwhelmed, tending to crash when tasked with multiple applications or even simply when turned on or off. Operating a minimum of applications on each continuously running server thus remains an entrenched practice even when it is no longer necessary. Though technological development, like art, is frequently presented as operating autonomously from other cultural and socioeconomic contexts, in cultural studies of science and technology its relation with society is recognized as complexly dialectical, a matter of co-construction. McPherson investigates the way that the aesthetics of the UNIX operating systems that so extensively shaped today’s digital socio-technological systems, including Windows and the Internet, reflect significant transformations in cultural perceptions of both race and computing that were under negotiation during the period of UNIX’s development (“U.S. Operating Systems” 21–37). I wish to demonstrate a similar relationship between digital design and environmental consciousness.

UNIX was conceived as a modular array of utilities to be used together in a variety of configurations connected efficiently, but also cleanly separated, by uncluttered and streamlined interfaces—hence the strong emphasis in its widely influential design philosophy on limiting each program to performing a single task. This elegant principle has led, perhaps paradoxically, to what I am identifying as the excesses of cloud ubiquity, connectivity, and supposed immateriality. McPherson explains how the frequent recurrence and high estimation of this early conception of the principle of modularity in discourse related to UNIX’s development served as a main impetus behind UNIX’s eventual omnipresence in contemporary computing. It also functioned as a systematic “privileging of the discrete, the local, and the specific” (25). McPherson argues that computational culture’s modular sense of elegance and efficiency shared conditions of possibility with two related but mutually antagonistic broad social movements. On the one hand, during the period of UNIX’s initial design in the late 1960s, anti-inequality activism ignited throughout the world. These efforts included the anti-colonial, feminist, Marxist, and anti-racist movements. On the other hand, here focusing particularly on racial inequality in the US, McPherson notes the emergence during this period of an attempted colorblindness that has been criticized for facilitating covert racism (24). Comparing this form of modularity with the “lenticular logics” of 3-D postcards from that period that display a different image upon rotation, as well as to early UNIX engineering, McPherson identifies a central organizing principle of the technological milieu of the postwar era: its “logic of the fragment or the chunk, a way of seeing the world as discrete modules or nodes, a mode that suppresses relation and context. As such, the lenticular also manages and controls complexity” (25).²² Before McPherson’s comparative interpretation of UNIX and its early cultural context, these social and techno-social movements had never been studied together, despite the proliferation of interdisciplinary research. This, McPherson explains, is an effect of the cultural modularity wrought by UNIX aesthetics and through the permeation of daily life by computing. Another lenticular logic of modularity is revealed as McPherson connects “the deeply siloed departments that categorize our universities” as well as broader epistemological phenomena with the modularity of UNIX-derived computation, noting a tendency toward compartmentalization that has intensified—again, counter-intuitively, given the placeless and timeless ideology of immateriality characterizing the cloud—with the expansion of digital culture (“U.S. Operating Systems” 23–24).

If digital form subtly obfuscates racism and other forms of inequality, it also operates culturally to divert awareness away from the closely related issue of environmental devastation, the effects of which are far more severe for those already enduring the material consequences of the colonial legacy of inequality. McPherson, unsurprisingly in light of the cultural phenomenon of petro-invisibility in media studies, does not mention environmental movements, but nevertheless discusses a relationship between the modularity of digital technology and a structure of cultural blindness (25). The commonly accepted rules guiding programming today still reflect the values that emerged in and surrounding UNIX and, it should be added, also mirror the values of techno-science more generally as a discourse of sobriety. These aesthetic and functional values include simplicity, cleanliness, clarity, minimalism, extensibility, and most pertinently for the purposes of social critique, modularity or composition based on flexible and connectible parts: “These rules implicitly translate into computational terms … an approach which separates object from context, cause from effect” (“U.S. Operating Systems” 26–27). Like the absent presence of oil, the digital’s self-presentation hides, but also reveals, symptomatically.

Modularity corresponds precisely to the misrecognition pervading, and preventing critical awareness of, digital culture as petroculture. It participates in the partitioning separating experiences of, on the one hand, deregulated and virtually unlimited consumer, corporate, and institutional access to processing, away from, on the other hand, the significant contribution to climate change made by data storage centers. As with black-boxing, the goal of this logic of encapsulation is to manage complexity by hiding it from view, placing it out of the reach of the average, nonexpert user-consumer. As Anne Balsamo argues, the relationship between culture and technology is itself black-boxed, with prior contributing events removed from visibility as though they never took place, creating a “persistent blind spot” to the cultural ramifications of technology (4). Perceptions of technology as entirely separate from material sociocultural processes enable a widespread and dangerously naive faith in the deterministic power of technology to ensure social progress. A more accurate, if hopeful, perspective on the historical relation between technology and society would be that those who design technology help to shape the future (Balsamo 5–6), potentially, I would add, including genuinely sustainable infrastructure and equipment. In the meantime, a seamless web of simulations of users’ actions dominates perception, safely insulated from any indication of dirtiness or guilt, coal and oil, or blood. The user’s self is represented with a difference, with different consequences and, perhaps, in the immediate future, fewer of them. An avatar brings one closer to a world of powerfully flexible, constructed simulations. In the case of Internet connectivity, it also draws near the personas of other users with the privileges of access. However, it simultaneously distances one from the material, embodied, embedded underpinnings of the processes one engages in.

What is to be done? Clearly, from the point of view of capital, potential energy savings do not outweigh the risk of profit loss from an interruption in instantaneous access. Meanwhile, the demand for more processing and storage keeps pace with the drive to streamline overhead costs with cheap petro-electricity in a top-speed race downhill from the peak of oil production. Remembering the eruption of previous market bubbles leads some to fear the precarious unsustainability of this level of energy consumption (Glanz). Solutions are, in many cases, ready-to-hand, but a competitive industrial culture of risk aversion and, especially, secrecy—related in part to the discretion required for handling others’ data—renders environmentally oriented improvements slow to arrive and difficult to negotiate. Though some of the largest consumers of energy for data centers, such as Google and Facebook, have attempted to design more energy-efficient systems within their storage operations (and Amazon, for instance, has begun building its own private wind farms), it is unclear to what extent these strategies have yielded energy conservation. All the while, data markets expand in tandem with the Internet’s rapid saturation of global territory. Alternative approaches to data center management and design, though not widely in use, have demonstrated eighty percent improvements in processing utilization (and therefore energy efficiency) by scheduling large tasks in advance, and other options exist for protecting servers against the risk of interrupted service due to powering down while not in use (Glanz).

Here, again, the material social effects of digital technology become salient. Techniques intended to conserve energy amount to consciously regulating the use of collectivized resources, rather than relying on automatic equilibration, as in free-market economics. The data storage industry is largely ungoverned, so much so that the US federal government, for instance, has reported its inability to ascertain how much energy it uses in its own data centers (Glanz). All the while, the demand for energy grows. According to some predictions, within six years cloud-related technology will comprise nearly ninety percent of the purchases in the Internet communciations technology market (Hardy). Thus, cloud computing, though a form of collectivization—in theory an efficient means of pooling data storage and power usage—is transposed by the unregulated market dynamics of neoliberal global capitalism into an almost unimaginably wasteful sociotechnical juggernaut accruing irreversible momentum and lubricated by the aesthetic legacy of petroculture. What Glanz describes as the “settled expectations” of corporate and individual consumers for anything, anywhere, anytime could, as I hope that my discussion makes clear, help to determine the unfortunate fate of the biosphere.

As Hitchcock argues with respect to oil ontology, the primary task for a response to digital petroculture’s sublime wastefulness is adequate representation (81). Marx’s notion of “realization” offers traction for conceptualizing digital political economy, especially in thinking through the costs of social media and other apparently free online services.²³ In this regard, Marx’s unfinished work in Volume II of Capital usefully articulates the distinction between production and consumption that theorizations of “prosumption” have blurred in response to economies of user-generated content for social media platforms. Marx concentrates on the junctures at which capital, more or less continuously, metamorphizes from one into another of its various forms: money, means of production, commodity, and so forth. As Harvey’s reading emphasizes, the flow of capital through its cycle of metamorphosis can be blocked—these are the points, I would add, at which the cloud, suddenly no longer everything, everywhere, and all the time, can fall back to earth, re-spatialized and -materialized. Harvey summarizes that value and profit under capitalism can only be “realized,” can only exist in any meaningful way, through a purchase, without which circulation ceases (62–63). Whereas in Volume I of Capital, Marx depicts capitalism as a smoothly functioning process for the purpose of demonstrating the labour theory of value, in Volume II he presents the flow of capital as a precarious and highly particularized ongoing series of simultaneous and transient events. Costly interruptions in circulation can be caused by shortages of effective demand (demand plus ability to pay), by a severe shortage of or price increase in labor or, most salient for the focus of the present essay, by shortages of resources such as energy. Web 2.0 social media’s so-called prosumption in the cloud, increasingly the “business model” of privatized, digitalized education as much as in other sectors (NMC), shapes capital by effectively aggregating its various phases and by distributing it ubiquitously. This renders the notion of market “liquidity” almost inadequate—“vaporization” would be a more suitable metaphor. Yet, the cloud’s material shadow remains, despite its cultural invisibility.

Petroschooling and the Digital

Modern culture relies on carbon combustion for the expansion and replication of its governmental, economic, and sociocultural forms, and one of petro-enlightenment’s most characteristic manifestations is in digitalized schooling. Distance education and online classes completed on campus have conventionally provided important services to students with limited access or scheduling constraints, but in recent years the aggressive expansion of online education has rightfully become controversial, not least because of its often close relationship with privatization. Formal online education, with its ambiguously material apparatuses based on social media designs (and the often overlooked fine print bundled into their user agreements), seems to offer students and institutions simple and inexpensive solutions to a wide range of problems.²⁴ With the development of Web 2.0’s most celebrated characteristics—interactivity, customizability, and economies of user-generated content—online pedagogy increasingly emulates and employs social media, in itself no bad thing. However, the social reproduction of the ideological milieu of the cloud through the schooling industry is as dangerous to institutions as it is to the environment.²⁵ Increasingly, academic decision-makers look to Silicon Valley for answers to administrative questions. Successful digital technology enterprises are now often viewed as archetypes that the so-called business models of historically non-profit academic institutions should emulate. Furthermore, the aesthetics of online education, particularly in some of its more “cutting” or “bleeding” edge manifestations,²⁶ are increasingly indistinguishable from entertainment media—unsurprisingly, given that education in general is already greatly commodified under neoliberal privatization. As a result, leisure-time consumerism, commodity entertainment, and corporate-sponsored socializing are seen as the new basis for techniques and practices of learning and teaching. While this pedagogical emphasis on popular culture as opposed to elite humanism is in many ways long overdue, it often reflects market dynamics. As with social media, in the context of “e-learning” (fully online pedagogy as well as the use of digital communications devices in physical classrooms) many different forms of value are derived through processes of virtualization via the technological reproduction of an existing social already influenced by mainstream commodity culture. These processes of extraction operate both directly as rent (tuitions, subscriptions, and other fees), as well as through private purchase of equipment or personal devices for infrastructure, and less directly by more subtle means, including data exchange for advertising and surveillance purposes. The process of value extraction in academic sectors reinforces class stratification by marshaling massive quantities of value into the corporate domain via accelerated and intensified realization.

Digital programming or simulation enables automation of what was previously done, supposedly more expensively, by living, and often skilled, labor. In this sense also, the democratization of automation in the form of free digital media technology serves to reinforce inequality, in contradistinction to the project of enlightenment as commonly understood in the west since the eighteenth century.²⁷ Furthermore, the greater visual and procedural sophistication of image-rich and customizable online services (such as the popular educational presentation tools, Prezi and PowToon) require considerable amounts of energy. While innovation and cycles of competition may, despite streamlining workflow, lead to a greater demand for labor, at least initially, such does not seem to be the case in e-learning. Some institutions have begun experimenting with online approaches to reduce overhead costs such as instructional labor (University 29–32). Therefore, critiques of labor displacement and energopolitics should become central in digital humanities and other critical pedagogies that would explore new potentials for digitally mediated interactivity that all participants, instructors as well as students, could experience as meaningful and intentional.

Despite unresolved disagreement over the significance of digitalization and regardless of growing campus movements demanding divestment from carbon-based electricity, the resource politics of institutional learning are hardly mentioned in critical university and education studies, let alone in literature on e-learning. However, David Blacker devotes several pages of intensive critique to the subject, proposing the term “petroschooling” in response to John Bellamy Foster’s work on Marx’s conceptualization of the metabolic relation between human life and the rest of the natural world (38–51). In short, Blacker contextualizes learning materially as well as socioculturally, placing his strongest accent on ecology: “the material infrastructure that makes possible our current school system rests, like so much else, on the alarmingly precarious basis of cheap and abundant fossil fuels” (45). Though Blacker focuses on primary and secondary schooling in the US, the implications of his analysis are equally sobering when applied to higher education in the US and in countries with comparable postsecondary systems. Summarizing the societal and educational consequences of resource depletion, Blacker emphasizes the school system’s dependency on the elaborate petroleum-based transportation system as a means of transporting staff, faculty, students, and supplies (44). Blacker also notes the energy inefficiency of the architecture of many school buildings as well as the role that industrialized agriculture, with its fuel-consuming machines and fertilizers derived from petroleum, has played in releasing children from the burden of farm labor and thus enabling them to attend factory-style schooling (44–47). By inference, the stakes are potentially even higher for postsecondary education, which depends on publishing industries, frequent travel for conferences and research, a wider geographic draw, and more, all reliant upon communication and mobility fueled largely by carbon combustion.

Unlike most decision-makers as well as pundits, Blacker does not seek salvation in the digital cloud, and hardly mentions the e-learning bubble, though he proposes that the Taylorist face-to-face institutional form will soon be replaced with other configurations, particularly in rural areas (and, one might add, in failed urban school districts) (45). As the timely formulation of an adequate response to large-scale crisis is unlikely, Blacker predicts that the already compromised tradition of universal petroschooling will become untenable. Higher levels of education, in particular, require more energy on every level and, from administrative and governmental points of view, now represent a poor investment as less expertise and skill is needed due to intensified mechanization (46–50). Here, Blacker’s critique adjoins those of cultural theorists of media. The introduction of new technology is often paramount to the proletarianization of those most vulnerable, whose access is attenuated or narrowly circumscribed to their extreme disadvantage, and whose consequent “critical ambivalence” towards digital technology deserves recognition as a pivotal form of expertise, though it is frequently dismissed as an indication of obtuseness (Eubanks, 10–11, 99).²⁸ Digital petroschooling often becomes enlightenment humanism on life support—humanities, perhaps without humans, but still reproducing humanism, including its well-known flaws.

Meanwhile, “magical thinking” (Eubanks) about digital immateriality assumes a variety of sometimes contradictory forms shaped by those who benefit from uncomplicated access. Internet communications technologies and digital media evoke freedom, choice, convenience, openness, cleanliness, costlessness, and innocence. Not just online, but in any technologically mediated classroom (which, increasingly, describes nearly all of them, at least to some degree), these values are reproduced through pedagogy, not only through the instructors’ interaction with students and pupils’ relations with one another, but also by means of the often obscure aesthetics of digital petroculture. The drive to virtualize schooling, even by merely rewiring the conventional “bricks and mortar” classroom, controls perceptions of new possibilities and promotes optimistic technological determinism.

Conclusion: Ecocultural Digital Design for and as Education

The process of technological innovation involves complex social negotiations through which meaning as well as the matter of the world are created, invoked, constituted, and made intelligible by design participants: it is a place where discourse and materiality meet, where the limits of each are constituted, tested, refined, expanded, and reified. As such, it is the place where the technological imagination is most fully engaged in the praxis of technocultural reproduction. (Balsamo 16)

If some of the aesthetic politics of digital petroculture and their stakes in education have been made clear in this essay, it should also be emphasized that online petroschooling presents possibilities for energopolitical and economic resistance, just as it has become a promising zone in which to explore and value oppressed and marginalized identities through critical pedagogies. A different and differently technologically mediated politics of knowing is possible, and its aesthetics should occupy pride of place in design and in design education, alongside rigorous exposure to critical humanities and social sciences.

In designing for culture, as Balsamo has influentially conceived it, the specific outcomes are not projected beforehand; rather, the goal is to implement from the first moment a collaborative process that promotes inclusion and equality through practical engagement in technological design combined with cultural critique (7).²⁹ Similarly, I wish to contend that integrating detailed environmental awareness into the design process might achieve beneficial results: “Through the practices of designing, cultural beliefs are materially reproduced, identities are established, and social relations are codified. Culture is both a resource for, and an outcome of, the designing process” (Balsamo 11). First steps might involve imagining what environmentally astute cultural design of digital technology, and what designing beyond the obscured petroculture subtending digitalization, could yield. Some problems for ecocultural digital design to consider include how the benefits of “peak” digital mediation might be extended without using carbon electricity (and this would require using far less energy than is used now), and what “designing for difference” to include differing abilities and postcolonial and gender critiques would look like from an environmentalist point of view, and vice versa. The digital must be recognized as a false transition away from oil, one that erases, in multiple ways, the need for a plan to protect the world’s most vulnerable from the climate and resource disasters that are likely to arrive and, in fact, for many have already begun. As things stand, digital design and practice, including petroschooling, remain among Western enlightenment humanism’s misfirings, covering up and even catalyzing much of the inequality integral to the capitalism upon which it has always relied, capitalism based largely on the consumption of carbon fuels.

Footnotes

My thanks to the editors. To the growing number of scholars elaborating the fields of petrocultural critique and environmental humanities, my solidarity.

1. For a comprehensive analysis of the global sociopolitical significance of digital technology, see Dyer-Witheford’s Cyber-Proletariat.

2. Manovich argues for software’s medial specificity. In addition, Manovich joins Berry, Chun (Programmed Visions), Cox, and Wardrip-Fruin in pointing toward analogies between software, language, metaphor, narrative, and literature. And finally, while Manovich links software very closely with cinema, Laurel compares it with theater, while Kitchin and Dodge relate it to architecture.

3. I follow current practice in decolonial feminist cultural studies of science and technology in arguing that technologies are cultural objects in the sense that they are, at least potentially, politically reflexive processes of techno-social and broadly multidisciplinary construction, expression, and negotiation among users and designers— past, present, and future. Briefly put, anything constructed may be deconstructed and reconstructed differently; thus, socio-technological process is always fertile with possibilities for change (Balsamo 9–15). For another influential discussion of the social implications of technology, see Chun, “Race and/as Technology.”

4. A number of recent studies address the widespread lack of recognition and understanding of the material underpinnings of digital culture, its energy requirements in particular. These include the methodologically diverse essays edited by Parks and Starosielski; The Marvelous Clouds, in which John Durham Peters interprets the natural environment as media, as well as vice versa; Parks’s “Energy-Media Vignettes” in the online journal Flow; and Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud, an archaeology of cloud computing as material culture.

5. Referring to the system of networked remote data storage as the cloud has foregrounded its less spatial and physical components: electrical signals and protocols, for instance. The most directly tangible part of the cloud is the rapidly growing system of servers and other hardware infrastructure that permits this remote and secure storage of data. The cloud relies on hard drives that are always running, usually idling, often on a sublimely vast scale (imagine hundreds of thousands of servers on a “farm”). As I will emphasize, it is the often wasteful cloud computing of Internet and communications technology corporations like Google, Facebook, and YouTube, rather than the aggregate cloud storage of individual users and small businesses, that contributes most substantially to the cloud’s electricity usage.

6. Rather than the historical period associated with eighteenth-century Europe, I use the term “enlightenment” to designate a widespread project of democratizing reason and knowledge that paradoxically tends to lead to instrumentality. In this, I follow Horkheimer and Adorno. The Internet expresses enlightenment ideals in concrete form through its expanding networks of communication and information storage.

7. Szeman adopts the term “energopolitics” from Dominic Boyer (“Conclusion” 462).

8. On the Anthropocene, see especially Parikka (Medianatures) and Wark (Molecular Red).

9. See, for instance, Balsamo, Chun (“Race” and Programmed), Nakamura, Nakamura and Chow-White, and Wajcman.

10. In 1992, Amitav Ghosh noted the cultural inscrutability of oil, and Hitchcock is among those who have investigated this question further.

11. For a thorough and influential explanation and critical appropriation of the techno-scientific concept of black-boxing, see Latour (6).

12. Of this topic, Thomas P. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, originally published in 1965, remains one of the best explanations.

13. Although not the focus of this essay, greenwashing is a form of obfuscation additional to but also related to those elaborated by Hitchcock, LeMenager, and Szeman, since even those who recognize it tend to overlook the energopolitical dimensions of the digital.

14. Several theorists have used the phrase “second nature” to refer to the sociocultural effects of human civilization reconfiguring the natural world.

15. In this essay, I focus on the cloud’s spatial properties rather than on the production of value through a version of labor or social reproduction (by means of indirect monetization of user-generated data) or on the complexities of circulation and intellectual property that characterize the Internet. As compelling, central, and intertwined as these other aspects of capitalism are, they have been treated at length by scholars such as Tiziana Terranova, Tim Jordan, and Jonathan Sterne, and there is no lack of acknowledgment or continuing refinement of the discourse related to them—Kylie Jarrett’s work on user-generated content as a form of social reproduction is particularly useful.

I have focused instead on ways in which the cloud’s material infrastructure enables the establishment of privatized rather common online space: space that has been enclosed and leased to individuals, corporations, and governments, and this has suggested other analogies with land, rents, and especially with the exploitation of the natural environment. A number of scholars are working to expand the referential frame of capitalism along these lines. Jason Moore, for instance, explains in Capitalism and the Web of Life (2015) that capitalism, particularly its establishment and expansion, cannot be defined solely in terms of the relationship between profit and wage-labor (and nor can the important reframing provided by social reproduction fully make up the difference, due to its emphasis on humanity rather than on biological life in general) (52–55). The history of capitalist, and colonial and imperialist, expansion is one of, among other things, dispossession from traditional embeddedness in nature. Displacement from access to land as the means of survival was followed by the instantiation of both the rent and wage-labor systems (ibid.). In Moore’s view, capitalist accumulation is the production of a different kind of space and temporality than was experienced before, and it involves a dialectic of relations of exploitation and appropriation, both in the sense of primitive accumulation as well as appropriating the “work/energy” of natural processes (8–18). On this point, in addition to Caffentzis (14) and Lefebvre (10–11), Moore acknowledges the influence of feminist materialists, such as Donna Haraway (34–35). The resulting milieu is experienced as an immersive spatial location as much as a temporal process, and I suggest that the same is true of online space facilitated by the cloud. As Jody Berland also argues, “the nineteenth-century idea of an endlessly receding horizon advanced by America’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ reappears in the twentieth-century vision of a new respatialized frontier in cyberspace, and fuels twenty-first century ideas about transformation through digital technologies” (19).

Focusing on labor and production has often led Marxists to overlook environmental concerns (Tanuro).

16. For an incisive discussion of the “critical ambivalence” towards technology experienced by less advantaged individuals and communities, see Eubanks.

17. As Terranova points out in “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” the term “labor” has been complicated—correctly—for partaking of various oversimplifications. As one reader of this article has suggested, the terms “input,” “time,” and “work” might serve well in its place. Yet, like Terranova, I nonetheless continue to use the term “labor” in a broad and ecumenical sense to describe the basic process, whatever form it takes, of contributing to the generation of value, and I do so in order to emphasize the impact on temporal experience, a limited life resource easily commodified and devalued in the flexible and precarious post-Fordist milieu. Today, many users create unremunerated online content for all to enjoy that is subsequently monetized for advertising purposes, and on this basis the global economy is rapidly transforming, such that Google and Microsoft have become some of its most significant influences. Hence, in my media analyses I utilize the ideas of free labor and indirect value extraction.

18. Harvey introduced the idea of “accumulation by dispossession” in his 2003 article “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession.” In a debate with Edward Glaeser and Seth W. Pinsky hosted by the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center in December 2013, Harvey linked the concept with the Google search engine (“What”).

19. Other quasi-spatial iterations of primitive accumulation include a popular online business model sometimes referred to by its critics as “astroturfing,” where services initially offered for free are later leased for a fee after the associated habitus is established.

20. For instance, services one would probably never imagine to ask for are provided automatically through networked devices with little opportunity for opting out. Fuchs argues in “Google Capitalism” that replacing the opt-out clauses in user agreements with opt-in clauses would provide an effective means for reducing indirect value extraction through data mining, and I would add that they could also be used to prevent unnecessary transmission of data-intensive graphics through ICTs instead of relying on liberal subjectivity to recognize and make the decision consciously.

21. Grounded in many years of interdisciplinary scholarship in digital studies, critical race theory, and gender studies, McPherson’s reflections on modularity’s co-constructive relationship with its social context lead to a strong association with “the covert” as a means of containing social unrest. The following quotation summarizes her position:

Modularity in software design was meant to decrease “global complexity” and cleanly separate one “neighbor” from another (Raymond 85). These strategies also played out in ongoing reorganizations of the political field throughout the 1960s and 1970s in both the Right and the Left. The widespread divestiture in the infrastructure of inner cities can be seen as one more insidious effect of the logic of modularity in the postwar era. … Let me be clear. By drawing analogies between shifting racial and political formations and the emerging structures of digital computing in the late 1960s, I am not arguing that the programmers creating UNIX at Bell Labs and in Berkeley were consciously encoding new modes of racism and racial understanding into digital systems. (Indeed, many of these programmers were themselves left-leaning hippies, and the overlaps between the counterculture and early computing culture run deep, as Fred Turner has illustrated.) … Nor am I arguing for some exact correspondence between the ways in which encapsulation or modularity work in computation and how they function … in emerging regimes. Rather, I am highlighting the ways in which the organization of information and capital in the 1960s powerfully responds—across many registers—to the struggles for racial justice and democracy that so categorized the United States at the time. Many of these shifts were enacted in the name of liberalism, aimed at distancing the overt racism of the past even as they contained and cordoned off progressive radicalism. The emergence of covert racism and its rhetoric of color blindness are not so much intentional as systemic. Computation is a primary delivery method of these new systems, and it seems at best naïve to imagine that cultural and computational operating systems don’t mutually infect one another. (“Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?” 149)

In short, McPherson’s insight is comparable to analyses that interpret the onscreen media of the Internet or cinema as engagements, though often symptomatic ones, with their social contexts.

22. McPherson explores this “lenticular logic” in greater detail in Reconstructing Dixie.

23. In Volume II of Capital, Marx introduces the idea of “realization” in the first chapter, particularly section 4, “The Circuit as a Whole” (131–143). Realization (of surplus value) refers to the conversion of commodity capital back into the money form but also into the form of profit.

24. I have published a more expanded cultural analysis of the political economy of online higher education in Mediations (see Elerding).

25. Corporate philanthropy has sponsored extensive research warranting the claims of cloud mythology on behalf of education: Preparing for the Digital University by George Siemens et al. and The Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Commission by New Media Consortium are only two of many examples.

26. In Programmed Visions Chun uses the term “bleeding edge” to describe the rate of obsolescence typifying new media.

27. Some media and software theorists, such as Manovich (Software 16), argue to the contrary that technology is available to anyone. Postcolonial feminist media theorists like Nakamura (“Indigenous Circuits”), boyd, and Eubanks have thoroughly critiqued this claim in their research and analyses of the sociocultural differences that shape participation online and in digital tech communities.

28. Collins and Pinch discuss a related principle, the porous boundary between “learned” and “lay” expertise, throughout The Golem and The Golem at Large.

29. In “Designing for Difference,” McPherson explores possibilities for applying Balsamo’s approach in digital humanities research and pedagogy. Here, closely related to her previous work on modularity, McPherson’s critical focus is the profoundly problematic and very common “notion of the ‘bracketing’ of identity or other signs of culture that might prevent one from accessing the technical nature of the computer[,] … the tendency to describe computation as a series of levels increasingly abstracted from culture” (179).

Benjamin Bratton is also known for theorizing alternative approaches to design and design education. In “On Speculative Design,” Bratton envisions design cultures that would conceptualize temporality differently from the cycles of commodity production.

In addition, in “New Ancestors: A Conversation with McKenzie Wark,” Gean Moreno and Wark discuss the importance of “broadening the technological imagination” through anti-commodification design.

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Amanda Boetzkes (bio)
University of Guelph

Abstract

This essay argues that efforts to recuperate the ecological damage of industrial waste as a profitable resource obscure the broader procedures by which human bodies, substances, energies, and desires are also yielded as resources in an economic model of indefinite expansion. The “cradle-to-cradle” proposition for a zero-waste society thus corresponds with the expanding scope and complex operations by which lives are deprived of plenitude and starved of excess, so that suffering and need become potential resources themselves. Through the artworks of Thomas Hirschhorn, Melanie Bonajo, and Tara Donovan, this essay shows that the ideal of zero-waste conceals the wasting of human and ecological life on which the economy is predicated.

What counts as a natural resource is now indistinguishable from its deployment and distribution through global systemic procedures that are economically, aesthetically, and ecologically charged. It seems no substance, object, energy, or territory is exempt from being evaluated for its potential use and exchangeability for economic growth. Thus land, water, oil, plastics, and profit achieve a kind of equivalence as resources proper. Even waste is recuperated for its potential resourcefulness, so that the concept of a “resource” subscribes to a paradigm and ideal of “zero-waste.” Waste contravenes both a capitalist prohibition against energy expenditures that do not lead to profit, and an ecological imperative for resource conservation. What defines a resource, then—with its accompanying technologies of extraction, its forms of exchange, distribution, and social values (“resourcefulness”)—is borne out first through the triangulation of a restricted global energy economy (a system that relies on corporeal deprivation and suffering), and second, through a correlate ecological crisis defined precisely through the foreclosure of biodiversity. Resource systems gather the dissociated vectors of industrial exploitation, the penury of capitalism, bodily depletion, and ecological consequences of an economic system that refuses to engage complex strategies for wasting.

The notion of resource has developed into a global armature by which substances, bodies, and energies are absorbed into a broader techno-corporeal machine that precludes physical sustenance, and destines the planet to ecological collapse. This essay examines how industrial waste has been considered a resource in its own right, and how the resourcing of waste ultimately renders invisible the forms of labor, energy expenditure, and ecological consequences on which the global resource system relies. Such a predicament is particularly evident in the “cradle-to-cradle” model of production that takes its foundational principles from industrial design. First proposed in 2002 by chemist Michael Braungart and architect William McDonough, cradle-to-cradle was an approach to design practice by which industrial and commodity production would be chemically altered but also stewarded through the economy in such a way as to maximize material reutilization to a point of zero-waste. It distinguished itself from what it called the “cradle-to-grave” model, which assumes that materials are simply used to the point of exhaustion, and products retired into landfills or other forms of waste dumping. However, in order to achieve the zero-waste ideal, the authors would rely on an alternate model of economy according to which companies take financial responsibility for the distribution, return, and upcycling of their production. The model aspires to eliminate waste by turning it into a resource economy. Thus cradle-to-cradle is not merely a recycling system; its functioning requires an alternate infrastructure of bi-directional exchange. The question is whether this alternative could be compatible and coextensive with the prevailing global economy.

The drawback of cultural ideals of eliminating waste and their relationship to the prevailing resource paradigm comes into view when works of contemporary art visualize a process of machinic heterogenesis by which bodies, energies, substances, and desires are absorbed into a manifold autopoietic system in which industrial waste is absorbed for profit. I discuss the way art relies on energy slaves, and on physical desire, deprivation, and ecological damage by examining three works of contemporary art that visualize this autopoietic system and its effects: Thomas Hirschhorn’s Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake (2000), which foregrounds the restrictions of the resource economy and its reliance on bodily deprivation; Melanie Bonajo’s After Life Against the World (2012), which shows the stultified desire to free the body from its imbrication in the waste-resource complex; and Tara Donovan’s Untitled (Plastic Cups) (2006–2015), which generates a future ecological perspective on the resource-waste predicament. Taken together, these three works expose the paradoxical aesthetic of the current resource paradigm, in which the ideals of a wasteless society are hinged to corporeal and environmental systems that are always already wasted. They visualize the dilemmas of such systemic closure, and the extent to which the ideology of zero-waste is tied not only to the deferral or prevention of bio-corporeal nourishment, but to broader notions of systemic impoverishment as well.

Technical Nutrients and Zero Waste

North American postminimalist artists of the late 1960s and ’70s made visible the connection between waste production and industrial resource extraction. Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, and Robert Morris used industrial waste materials such as ore, slag, and textile remains, among other forms of debris, to create sculptures that succumbed to a state of deformation. The postminimalist aesthetic foregrounded the material excesses of the industrial cycle that would persist across time. Smithson in particular situated art in lifeless postindustrial landscapes, so that he could imagine a time in which all matter had reached an entropic endgame. His work Spiral Jetty (1970), for example, was installed in the Great Salt Lake in Utah, not far from an abandoned oil drilling complex. The landscape was otherwise desolate. Smithson documented the construction of the sculpture as a kind of formation in reverse, whereby a dump truck deposited basalt rock into the lake to build up the 1500-foot spiral armature of the sculpture, but the sculpture was nevertheless destined to be abandoned to the rising and falling water levels of the lake. In these future wastelands, the return to form and the structural integrity of the artwork were impossibilities. Industrial production led to the irreversible wasting of matter.

The postminimalist vision of modern industry was clear: resource-based economies were bound to particular forms of surplus materials—wastes—that sediment and cannot return into the economic cycle of production, exchange for profit, and consumption. Yet recent decades have seen a preoccupation with the return of waste into the economy, particularly in efforts to reincorporate it through the “Four Rs’” (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Regulate). The rise of the discourse of eco-efficiency in the 1980s saw efforts on the part of individuals, municipalities, and industries to take responsibility for the waste they produce and to come up with strategies for sustainable waste disposal or reintegration into economic circulation. Cultural theorist Gay Hawkins astutely summarizes this predicament in her Deleuzian reading of contemporary waste management. In the past, she explains, garbage was handled through practices of elimination and expulsion, that could be understood as spatial acts of passing from one side of a boundary to another in ways that produce and perpetuate the cleanliness and order of the subject (whether through an elimination from the individual sphere or through practices in which it passes from within social circulation to an exterior cursed zone, as per Mary Douglas’s insightful hypothesis in Purity and Danger [1966]). The elimination model reached its apex in the postwar era with the rise of disposability culture, when commodities were produced with a view to quick and easy discard. Hawkins argues, however, that disposability as such is a technical and spatial fantasy; not only is the prospect of waste disappearing a logical impossibility, but waste is also increasingly visible, “a landscape in its own right” (Hawkins 10). The politicization of environmental responsibility charges waste with a new moral valence, whereby waste is never simply eliminated but rather enters into a reorganized set of relations in connection with the subject, and with social space more broadly. The question remains, however, what kinds of forces generate the desire and will to preserve waste within social circulation. How do these desires relate to global patterns of waste handling?

Michael Braungart—renowned chemist, founder of the EPEA (Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency), and former Greenpeace activist—suggests that the efforts of industries to implement the Four Rs have proved misguided from the start. In Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, Braungart and his co-author, architect William McDonough, propose a major overhaul of the systemic relationship between resources and consumer products. The book outlines a biomimetic model of resource circulation. The authors wage substantive critiques of sustainability, among them the fact that most efforts to recycle have actually led to a downcycling of materials, by which they lose both use value and exchange value. The downcycling of materials such as plastics, metals, and chemicals can increase environmental contamination because of the widening dissemination of downgraded materials. The continual circulation and redistribution of industrial wastes in a closed system means that not only has Smithson’s vision of a postindustrial landscape slowly succumbing to the pull of entropic disorder been reified, but this landscape is not a discrete space and time outside of human history. Rather, it is an integral part of the world because it has been incorporated into the very processes of economic development. The systemic closure of recycling leads to a paradoxical condition in which production, consumption, and wasting are integrated processes that deplete planetary resources. The culture of sustainability has distributed the planet’s resourcefulness in such a way that it has become a self-exhausting system, both economically and ecologically.

Braungart and McDonough’s treatise on waste is exemplary in that it proposes a new model of economy in order to grapple with industrial waste. Ultimately, however, it generates a lacuna insofar as it relies on industrial design (technological innovation) to take strides towards ecosystemic balance, and an elaborate management system to organize the distribution, tracking, and replacement of commodities. In the midst of these overlapping systems—a designer economy and an ecology of waste—there is little understanding of the energies that drive and perpetuate economies and how these are connected to ecological imbalances. This oversight perpetuates forms of invisibility as the historical paradigm of resource-harvesting transforms into a global system of waste circulation. It is therefore worthwhile to see how such invisibilities occur, and what they obscure.

Braungart and McDonough’s “cradle-to-cradle” model of resource use relies on a principle of circulating “nutrients” rather than matter per se. The authors suggest that since the Industrial Revolution, the resource industry has developed two metabolic systems: the biosphere and the “technosphere.” The biosphere, a familiar concept in the life sciences, functions on a principle of zero-waste, which is to say that in nature all spoilage turns into primary nutrients—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen—that are reabsorbed by the soil and its microorganisms and therefore generate growth and diversity. By contrast, the processes of extracting, altering, or synthesizing substances from the Earth’s crust generate new material flows of industrial mass that are toxic to the soil and cannot be broken down. In fact, these new materials were designed for ever-greater flexibility and durability in some cases, and built-in obsolescence in others (though only with a view to diminishing use value, not to proper biodegradation). Braungart and McDonough offer the designation “technosphere” for the circulatory system of these new flows, and characterize its metabolic system as “cradle-to-grave” to signal the uni-directionality of these new substances. The authors identify the conflation of technical and biological materials in the manufacture of consumer products as the fundamental problem of the emergence of the technosphere. They argue that the reason for increased pollution and amassment of waste is the production of “monstrous hybrid” products that cannot be salvaged, separated and properly recycled into their respective systems. They take the example of the conventional leather shoe; where at one time leather shoes were tanned with vegetable chemicals that would biodegrade, in the past half-century vegetable tanning has given way to tanning with chromium, a toxic chemical that is cheaper to produce but often harmful to workers exposed to it during manufacture and to the environments in which the manufacturing wastes are dumped. After the shoe has finished its life, it is returned to a landfill in which both its biological and technical materials are lost. In a similar vein, conventional rubber-sole shoes contaminate the atmosphere and soil with lead and plastics as they start to wear down and leave particles in their wake (Braungart and McDonough 99).

Braungart and McDonough’s main argument concerns the production of waste, but they do not condemn consumption as its primary cause. They posit that while the confusion of flows between the biosphere and the technosphere is the core problem that generates waste (and multiple forms of environmental toxicity), waste can be rethought in terms of biological and chemical nutrients. Thus, the tragedy of waste is not that it is inherently contaminating, but rather that its nutrients have not been recovered in their respective spheres. The authors propose a biomimetic system of industrial design in which organized nutrient recovery replaces waste:

To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things—products, packaging, and systems—from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist. It means that the valuable nutrients contained in the materials shape and determine the design: form follows evolution, not just function. … With the right design, all the products and materials manufactured by industry will safely feed these two metabolisms, providing nourishment for something new. … Products can be composed either of materials that biodegrade and become food for biological cycles, or of technical materials that stay in closed-loop technical cycles, in which they continually circulate as valuable nutrients for industry. (Braungart and McDonough 104)

The book offers a number of solutions to the cradle-to-grave problem of waste, such as new chemical designs that respect the biosphere/technosphere distinction (such as nutritious biological textiles, or a synthetic commercial carpeting with a durable bottom and detachable top that could be upcycled for its technical nutrients). The book itself is printed on a prototype for a synthetic plastic paper that is waterproof, durable, and can be recycled into technical nutrients. More than offering design solutions, however, it advances an economic foundation for the zero-waste model. The book’s technosphere designs require a new exchange infrastructure by which technical nutrients could be recovered and upcycled. For example, in order for the cycles of the technosphere to succeed, a “product of service” concept would have to be implemented. Instead of products being bought, owned, and disposed of by consumers, technically nutritious products (such as cars, televisions, carpets, computers, and refrigerators) would be reconceived as services rented for a defined user period (Braungart and McDonough 111):

Under this scenario, people could indulge their hunger for new products as often as they wish, and industry could encourage them to do so with impunity, knowing that both sides are supporting the technical metabolism in the process. Automobile manufacturers would want people to turn in their old cars in order to regain valuable industrial nutrients. Instead of waving industrial resources goodbye as the customer drives off in a new car, never to enter the dealership again, automobile companies could develop lasting and valuable relationships that enhance customers’ quality of life for many decades and that continually enrich the industry itself with industrial “food.” (Braungart and McDonough 114)

Herein lies the dilemma of waste and its relationship to the resource paradigm. The authors cannot conceive of the technosphere’s metabolism without also invoking a major economic reconfiguration from a product-consumer-based exchange to a highly regulated economy of temporary use and recovery, in which the use of objects is nested within limited exchange contracts. Industry itself would be geared not towards extraction and manufacture but towards nutrient management. In other words, to advocate for a cradle-to-cradle metabolic system, the authors undertake a shift in voice from a practical account of the capacities of postindustrial design to a utopian vision of an economy based on nourishment and richness, that is enabled by its overcoming of the exchange for profit model. It is utopian rather than practical insofar as it accounts neither for the primacy of profit accumulation as an existing condition of the prevailing economic metabolism, nor for the fact that the disruptive movement of energy from human systems to ecological systems is fundamental and cannot be resolved technologically. The cradle-to-cradle model risks becoming an impossible fantasy of a middle ground between the desire for the accumulation of resources and an endless supply of nutrients.

The Northern Chinese village of Huangbaiyu in Benxi Province makes a curious case in point. In partnership with Deng Nan, the daughter of former Chinese statesman Deng Xiaoping, William McDonough’s architectural firm was commissioned to implement the principles and designs of cradle-to-cradle and transform Huangbaiyu from an agriculture-reliant village into an eco-village. The village was organized to be a model for the Chinese government’s more ambitious goal of centralizing rural communities, seizing farmland, and moving over half of its 800 million peasants to the cities (Toy). The firm planned to relocate disparate farm plots to a central area, where homes would be built of straw and pressed earth, and rigged with solar panels and other energy conversion technologies. The local residents were encouraged to exchange their current homes and land for one of the centralized eco-houses. The land could therefore be consolidated for more efficient yields and farming development. In lieu of tinder or bottled gas, residents would use biogas provided by a biogasification plant owned by the village chief, Dai Xiaolong. By 2006, forty-two of the planned two hundred houses had been built, but none were occupied, despite government pressures on locals. Furthermore, the eco-village functioned primarily as a private enterprise, having been funded mainly by the village chief, with only a fraction of the endeavor supported by the Chinese government. Not only were residents of the village unable to afford the cost of the eco-village housing, but they saw no practical benefits to changing their livelihood in agriculture for a centralized eco-communal lifestyle (Toy).

McDonough’s experimental village demonstrates the way that the techno-utopianism of a zero-waste ecological model works at cross-purposes with historical forms of sustainability (such as decentralized rural agriculture) even though it attempts to lower the cost of energy. In effect, Huangbaiyu remained a stalemated project because it could not intervene into the prevailing assemblage of labor, or yield an investment of human life to animate it or support its functioning. Moreover, the resistance on part of the inhabitants was due in no small part to the fact that the eco-village would have deprived each of them of land and individual sustenance, not to mention cost them all their savings or put them into debt. Thus, Huangbaiyu became a zero-sum game for those who would opt into it, much as it was a zero-waste city. In this sense, the energy and maintenance costs of such a system remain unaccounted for, as do its claims to genuine sustainability.

Machinic Heterogenesis of the Global Waste System

If waste is incorporated into global systems of economic circulation, and if efforts to re-pattern those systems to contain or eliminate both biological and industrial wastes are thwarted because they cannot channel the invisible energies that power economic growth, then the question arises, what is the source of these energies? How can the economy’s energies be understood in relation to systemic imbalances, particularly in their depletion of human bodies for the expansion and growth of the global capital? To answer these questions, we can consider contemporary art’s preoccupation with waste and forms of energy depletion and expenditure. Thomas Hirschhorn’s installation Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake is a poignant example of a global economy that is at once a wastescape and a restricted system that thrives on human deprivation. The installation visualizes a deprived and suffering human population bound up in a paradoxical resource economy that prohibits waste while wasting itself through the cycle of diminishing returns of material wealth. Moreover, Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake conveys this corporeal condition precisely through the use of complex industrial materials. The construction orbits around a “world cake” set on a wood plank frame and covered with media images taped to cardboard frames depicting global resources (food, water, and energy) and the multitudes of people who depend on them. Each slice is wrapped tightly in colored plastic and weighted down by chains of buckets that are poised to catch every last crumb—an astute depiction of how an excessive figure such as a luxurious cake can be inverted to become an image of penury. The big cake is a figuration of wealth, but it is also a limited resource from which everyone must draw to survive. Books about global resources and the world’s destitute are chained to the central armature so that titles spring forward from a tangle of images and materials: The Economics of the Labor Market; Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine; The African Poor: A History; Your Money or Your Life! The Tyranny of Global Finance; The Rwanda Crisis: A History of Genocide. In addition, four monitors sit on top of the cake, airing documentary footage of war, food, cooking, and labor.

Fig. 1
Thomas Hirschhorn, Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake, 2000. Copyright Thomas Hirschhorn. Courtesy of Thomas Hirschhorn and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

Spreading foil appendages attach the cake to twelve altars, each featuring a novelty spoon made of foil and dedicated to a “failed utopia”: Mies van der Rohe, the 1937 Nazi Degenerate Art Show, Malevich, Rosa Luxembourg, guns, fashion, the moon, Rolex Swiss watches, the Chicago Bulls, Nietzsche, a city (Venice), and a country (China). Like the big cake, these altars feature information, images, and literature that articulate the global vision of each utopia. The spoons appear to be dipped in blood, which pools at the bottom of each altar. All the information and attention devoted to the utopia is therefore haunted by the struggle to fulfill hunger. As Hirschhorn puts it: “I want to make a new work about the world condition, the World State. The World State is about the need to eat or the possibility of not eating. The World State is unjust, inconvenient, confused, fucked-up, shitty. Everyone has to eat.” Evidently, the impoverished state of the world’s people underwrites what Hirschhorn calls the “World State.” For all of the plenitude of each altar—its array of substances, information, and affectively-charged images—a subtext of desperation and human suffering underwrites the utopia.

Many critics have been interested in Hirschhorn’s capacity to visualize the scope and history of modern globalization. Benjamin Buchloh praises Hirschhorn’s pavilions, altars, constructions, and monuments for their alternative spatial demarcations that integrate themselves and thus mimetically follow the systems of global exchange. Hirschhorn’s impoverished materials, which make his works look like an “amateurish bricolage,” are negative ready-mades—the containers and wrapping materials in which objects have been packed, shipped, and distributed (Buchloh 47). They are composed of the traces of the global system of production posited as waste. In other words, Hirschhorn represents global capitalism in an excremental phase, precisely as a waste system, or rather as a system in the process of wasting itself. Waste here is not a homogenous base matter sedimented at the endpoint of industrial processing as it is in Robert Smithson’s earthworks and non-sites. There is no transgressive waste to throw a wrench in the works of a cultural superstructure. There is no possibility to be jarred out of the symbolic system of representation that preserves and supports the economy. Instead, the installation is interpenetrated by flexible and enduring substances that appear as disposed materials but nevertheless permeate the channels of global exchange: aluminum, nylon, adhesives, plastics. Waste is continuous with the economy of the world state, and cannot be eliminated from it because it has been so completely incorporated. As Buchloh describes, Hirschhorn creates a mechanomorphic carnality that fuses derma and techne, and extends into tentacles of monstrous hypertrophic growth (Buchloh 48).

Buchloh’s description derives from Felix Guattari’s exegesis on machinic heterogenesis in Chaosmosis. Guattari describes how technology grounds itself in living machinic systems in ways that are axiological, gathering and patterning social collectivity, semiotic relations, bodies, and desires. Ultimately, he outlines how the world is entirely mediated by and through an apparatus of machinic systems that function autopoietically, though this apparatus deploys itself in different registers of alterity. It installs itself in “Universes of virtuality beyond its existential territory, in constellations of incorporeal Universes of reference with unlimited combinatories and creativity” (Guattari 44). Its domains of alterity include the alterity between different machines and different parts of the same machine; the alterity of an internal material consistency; and the alterity of scale, or fractal alterity, which establishes a play of systematic correspondences between machines at different levels. Guattari strives to reconcile value and machines: to see values as immanent to machines, and machines as enunciative of values. He locates “machines of desire” and aesthetic creation within assemblages of subjectivation, and they are thus “called to relieve our old social machines which are incapable of keeping up with the efflorescence of machinic revolutions that shatter our epoch” (55). Machinic heterogenesis (the proliferation and development of zones of alterity, and axiological complexions within these zones) counterbalances the capitalistic homogenesis of generalized equivalency that appropriates machines into a singular economic instrument of power.

Hirschhorn’s treatment of the global resource economy links the ideologies of the world state to material substances and a precarious corporeal metabolism in which human bodies are bound up in procedures of diminishing returns of energy. He therefore exposes multiple registers of alterity within processes of machinic heterogenesis, making them visible for an ethical consideration of the human desire for sustenance and the condition of hunger within the homogenous waste economy. Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake visualizes the way that utopian dreaming succumbs to the economic impetus for accumulating human energies and is underpinned by the necessity of profit, which becomes a form of endless hunger that pre-empts a balanced metabolic cycle of need, provision, waste, and biodegradation. Hirschhorn shows a zero-waste economic system that requires hunger in order to perpetuate itself, thus foreclosing nourishment from the start.

Metabolisms within Economies

From this perspective, then, it becomes possible to see how Braungart and McDonough inadvertently pattern their technological solution to waste on a system of capitalist homogeneity that subsumes its ecological intentions into an economic instrument that deploys human energies in order to expand indefinitely. They make two intertwined assumptions that, while inaccurate, nevertheless explain why the forms of waste of industrial resource systems are misunderstood and difficult to visualize. First, they assume that the technosphere can be patterned on the biosphere in order to generate a zero-waste paradigm, and that this will succeed because ecosystems are fundamentally balanced and balancing. Second, they assume that the global economy is founded on a fair and rational exchange system that would support and complement a biomimetic waste system in all its dynamic complexity, when in fact the energetic imbalance of the economy predetermines biomimesis to homogeneity and failure. For all its pretensions of a more sophisticated form of sustainability, the zero-waste paradigm reiterates the metabolic rift at stake in nineteenth century labor, in which the biosphere is presumed to be a harmonious system, while industrial labor introduces imbalance and waste.¹ The prospect of separating the technosphere from the biosphere rests on the belief that there is a natural balance to be found and recuperated. But if, as McKenzie Wark argues, homeostasis is an unattainable ideal—nature is in the first place unstable, and always already understood in its agonistic encounter with human labor (200)—then the apparent dilemma presented by industrial waste is the following question: how can two opposing systems be reconciled within, on the one hand, a resource economy in which human labor has an antagonistic interaction with homeostatic nature that generates technospheric (industrial) waste, and, on the other hand, a resource economy that segregates and processes this excess in order to preserve that same ecosystem that the first disrupts? Paradoxically, the cradle-to-cradle system preserves its ideal of nature—articulated in its primary tenet that the biosphere and the technosphere can and should be separated—by insisting on the intensification of infrastructure and management of an economy that fundamentally and metabolically disrupts this ideal. This model does not ask where the infrastructure of upcycling will draw its energy, nor crucially, whether this energy will require another form of labor power that may potentially entail new types of waste. On what energy would this new infrastructure be “nourished”? While it suggests a revolution in design, urban dwelling, and low-cost energy technologies, the cradle-to-cradle system does not challenge the prevailing economy of resource harvesting, consumption, and profit at the expense of “energy slaves”—possibly human ones—that are sacrificed for the ideal of natural balance.

The source of the energy required to transform the resource system into two discrete spheres is uncertain. The utopian goal is the “nourishment” of both in such a way as to supply each with infinite and perpetual value. The confrontation between nature and labor-power seems to have disappeared from the equation, and the “imbalance” of waste is apparently resolved. In this way, the cradle-to-cradle model is underpinned by a contradictory capitalist economy. In Fredric Jameson’s description, the political causality for technological change is not the ingenuity of inventors, but rather labor unrest itself (58). In response to worker demands for higher wages and better working conditions, the capitalist introduces new machinery. Hence the contradiction: while the progress of capitalism produces ever-greater misery for workers, class struggle is responsible for the greater productivity of capitalism. The zero-waste model of product-design and consumption assumes that there are technological (particularly chemical) solutions to the problem of environmental toxicity. But the technological solution nevertheless remains nested within an imbalanced economic system. In resolving the problem of waste through the management of nutrient cycles, the authors do not account for the energy cycles that already power the economy’s expansion, which include the struggles of the labor force to nourish themselves even as they fuel the system’s production, and the complete denial of nourishment for the unemployed who ensure a standing reserve of potential employees that keep the standard level of wages as low as possible.

Jameson proposes unemployment as the primary condition through which to understand the paradoxical energy system of the economy. Not only is global unemployment structurally inseparable from the accumulation and expansion of capitalism; it is a state of fundamental dysfunction, misery, and idleness on which the system relies. Unemployment flattens out “multiple situations … of naked life in all the metaphysical senses in which the sheer biological temporality of existences without activity and without production can be interpreted” (Jameson 151). What better definition of waste than this state of dysfunctionality that produces a cross-section of beings, confines them to corporeal uselessness, and binds them to its own degenerating materials? As Jameson argues, the capitalist system is a unity of opposites. It is both open and closed, so that on the one hand it operates by openness and expansion (accumulation, appropriation, and imperialism), while on the other hand it stagnates and dies if it remains stable and cannot expand. It therefore must “interiorize everything that was hitherto exterior to it” (Jameson 146). This means that even an ecologically sound proposal to upcycle products through the successful recirculation and management of nutrients is on a continuum with a larger system—an assemblage—that absorbs all sources of energy for the purposes of its own expansion, while relying on a state of impoverishment and waste that appears on a register seemingly unrelated to planetary health—unemployment. But as Jameson insists,

those massive populations around the world who have, as it were, ‘dropped out of history,’ who have been deliberately excluded from the modernizing projects of First World capitalism and written off as hopeless or terminal cases, the subjects of so-called ‘failed states’ (a new and self-serving pseudo-concept), or of ecological disaster or of old-fashioned survivals of allegedly immemorial, archaic ‘ethnic hatreds’, the victims of famine whether man-made or natural—all these populations at best confined in camps of various kinds, and ministered by various NGOs and other sources of international philanthropy—our reading suggests that these populations, surely the vessels of a new kind of global and historical misery, will look very different when considered in terms of the category of unemployment. (149)

Hirschhorn’s visualization of global capital encompasses both a zero-waste scenario and global hunger as coextensive facets of the same system. Given Jameson’s commentary, we might also see how Big Cake enacts global capital’s instrumentalization of zero-waste technologies as the dispersal of the condition of “unemployment” across people, objects, and substances that are fused together within the system’s absorption and wasting of life, even as it spreads and disseminates its impoverished bio-techno materiality.

This disturbing situation remains unseen, however, because of the strength of the belief that zero-waste systems are biomimetic, that biomimetic systems promote biodiversity and life in their self-regulation, and that their distribution of energy is non-hierarchical and non-disruptive. In this sense, the zero-waste model relies on a common analogy between ecological balance and a market ecology, in which the lives of organisms, individuals, and collectives are “naturally” born and returned to the balance of the whole. Because the processes of expending and absorbing energy are part of symbiosis, the terms of cycling and recycling nutrients are accepted as metabolic and not economic per se. George Bataille’s theory of economy takes this hierarchical transfer of energy as essential to the character of an economy and of societies (see Bataille). Whether that transfer occurs through predatory consumption or organized rituals of sacrifice, the absorption of energy always comes at the expense of a violently sacrificed being or object. Such a model of energy transfer acknowledges that the relationship between resource systems and their earthly sources may be agonistic precisely because symbiosis itself is a chaotic and capricious system. The harmony of the biosphere is fundamentally indifferent to human values. To maintain energy within an expanding human economy, however, requires a hyper-vigilance toward the ways that energy escapes the system. Cradle-to-cradle might simply be a biotic metaphor for hermetically sealing the energies that drive capitalist development while turning a blind eye both to the current ecological condition that takes the complexity of dynamic anthropogenic change as a given, and to the psyche of desire and consumption that underlies the expansion of the economy.

Where Hirschhorn synthesizes the contradictory relationship between the material plenitude of global capitalism and the starving multitudes that rely on its energy, the Dutch artist Melanie Bonajo brings this dilemma to the scale of the individual body in its relationship to consumer products. She shows how the material realities of the economic mechanomorph converge on the body and its desires for sustenance, fulfillment, and access to an energy reserve that will provide it with homeostasis as well. Her works frequently stage her body in tension with household objects in domestic scenarios. Bonajo describes her household furniture as a “condensation of material energy,” speculating how long she could live off that energy, and describing how she dreams of burning everything she has (Bonajo). Her photograph series imagine this cathartic fantasy of escaping the capitalist grid, but they also invoke a palpable sense of suffering and self-destruction, as though to sacrifice oneself would be a kind of autopoietic response to the perpetuation of the economic system that absorbs the energy of bodies through their own processes of impoverishment. Bonajo’s only option is to remain bound to her material objects, particularly her furniture.

Consider Figure 2, After Life Against the World (2012): a woman lies on a layer of toilet paper rolls, decorated by birthday candles and lipsticks, on top of her kitchen counter.

Fig. 2
Melanie Bonajo, After Life Against the World, 2012. Copyright Melanie Bonajo. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Her surface morphology is remolded by a layer of ambiguous substance that looks like clay but stands in as icing, given the positioning of the candles on top. The fridge below is conspicuously open so that one can scan the food inside. The woman could be read as a redistributed and feminized version of Hirschhorn’s Big Cake. Bonajo presents an ambivalent scene of a body regulated between capitalist plenitude (she recreates herself as a cake–we can even see the flour on the floor as evidence of this process) and physical powerlessness (she is naked, smothered by inert substance, lit up, but lying down and caught in an axis of shelving supports, each placed like a geometric compass, in a play on Leonardo’s Vetruvian Man). Bonajo thus articulates the constricted dilemma of symbiosis with an always-hungry and expanding energy system. The woman does not sit down to eat the food in her fridge, but is instead delivered up on the counter as an energy reserve in her own right.

Bonajo’s mobilization of the body as an object to be consumed and its positioning in relation to furniture and other commodities, calls to mind Graham Harman’s provocative account of tool-being. I have been arguing that bodies and energies are incorporated into the global economy and become unseen forms of waste; Harman argues that the world is an empire of equipment, and that existence or being is not an exclusively human experience, but is integral to a broader tool-being. He writes,

Every being is entirely absorbed into this world-system, assigned to further possibilities in such a way that there could never be any singular end-point within the contexture of reference. In this strict sense, the world has no parts. Beings are not only tool-beings in some limited private way; rather, they should be utterly swallowed up into a single system of tool-being, a total empire of equipment. (43)

Where Guattari observes an expansive system of machinic heterogenesis that is put under duress by a homogenous capitalist machine, Harman describes an all-encompassing global equipment to which human beings find themselves adjoined. Bonajo exposes the adjoinment and the co-implication of body and furniture in an energy system that provokes the desire to expend oneself into and as an integral part of the global equipment of that system.

Ecological Deprivation and the Wasting of Biological Life

The conjunction between the global economy, its appropriative energy system, and its internalization of waste takes on a geological scale when understood in relation to climate change. Tara Donovan’s landscapes of Styrofoam and plastic objects speak to this new register of the industrial resource economy. Donovan recapitulates the restriction of the closed resource system and the impossibility of regeneration, with a particular focus on petrochemical materials such as plastics and other polymers, which irrevocably displace the elemental substance of the planet itself in her work. For example, Donovan’s Untitled (Plastic Cups) (2006–2015; Fig. 3) is a vision of anthropogenic change in which thousands of plastic cups stacked at different levels create the illusion of a glacial topography of undulating snow banks.

Fig. 3
Tara Donovan, Untitled (Plastic Cups), 2006–2015. Plastic cups. Dimensions variable. Copyright Tara Donovan. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.

The installation takes the viewer from the scale of an individual object (the single plastic cup) to the phenomenon of global warming through its strong visual associations with Arctic landscapes and glacial melt. More strongly, it is haunted by the concept of the Anthropocene: the era of human carbon history and its devastating ecological effects, including the extinction of innumerable species and the sedimentation of carbon and nuclear toxicity, all of which is measureable in geological strata. Importantly, this era is not simply an imminent crisis, but one that will predetermine the very fabric of the planet in the future. The waste of the industrial resource economy has an unshakeable perpetuity; it is a hyperobject “massively distributed in time and space,” as Timothy Morton argues (1). Donna Haraway forges a connection between the Anthropocene and the concept of the “Capitalocene,” in which the crisis of anthropogenic changes to the planet are not fundamental to the human species per se, but rather to the historic economic system and its reliance on carbon fuels. The Capitalocene acknowledges that the geological time frame entails a conjunction of registers from a human system to planetary systems. The planetary impact of the Capitalocene becomes measurable and visualizable through the specific forms of waste that the system produces. As an entity, it has a flat organismic toll; species and biotic life, human energy slaves, whole nations, and human civilization itself have all been squandered in Donovan’s portrayal of the planet’s future. Yet this toll is evident only in the multitudes of plastic cups, a veritable graveyard of consumer products. There are no inhabitants in this landscape, which may not be capable of sustaining life at all. Despite the impressive number of cups and their plenitude as a totality, they are all empty, with no possibility of ever being used for their original function: being filled to quench thirst. The technological sophistication of the disposable plastic cup has become a scene of dysfunctionality in which the “unemployed” products are frozen in a standing reserve of organized but useless human garbage.

Donovan’s installation therefore discloses a different register than Hirschhorn’s Big Cake, with its conflicted and roiling waste system that barely sustains life, albeit through the violent competition for scarce resources and diminishing returns of “nutrients.” This is an alternative view of the impoverishment stemming from a system that feeds off the desire for sustenance from a limited source of energy. It is instead an ecological extension of that system as a catastrophic waste of life. Donovan lays bare the global equipment of the capitalist energy system and the permanent waste it produces from the perspective of geological time. Energy has dissipated and life has disappeared while earthly material is displaced with petrochemical objects. The installation encompasses the endpoint after the biosphere and technosphere have coingested one another, producing a figuration of emptiness, lifelessness, and entropy. Donovan’s vision is therefore akin to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in its forecasting of the future of industrial production as entropic stasis. More pointedly, she articulates this landscape of ruins through a multitude of objects that are interlocked, nested in one another and carefully placed to generate a gestalt. Thus the remains of the expended system are also indexes of its existence as a complex equipment that extended itself into every object it produced and recuperated every object into itself. The corporeal energies that powered this closed system have disappeared, leaving only the inanimate objects that were once the tools and appendages through which it yielded its energy.

Vision across the Registers of Waste

Hirschhorn, Bonajo, and Donovan each visualize facets of an industrial resource system that functions as an autopoietic energy-economy of diminishing returns. The very inhabitants and operators of the system are denied sustenance, while the system is powered by the hunger of those beings that feed off it. This energetic depletion of life permeates the registers of economy—object production and consumption, individual and planetary metabolism—to produce a state of totalizing waste in the future. The real waste generated by such a system remains invisible to cradle-to-cradle models of product design and consumption that rely on technological innovation, and zero-waste proposals do not grasp the scale of waste produced by the industrial resource complex. The wasting system of the global energy economy is massively distributed in time and space, stretching across registers of human and biotic life. The artists considered here advance a critical visuality insofar as they articulate forms of connection between unacknowledged or invisible waste and the system that produces them. They expose and elaborate the coextensiveness of human and ecological wasting with the system’s diminishing energy levels. Most importantly, their works force us to consider waste more broadly, not as merely systemic pollution, but in energetic terms as well. Both human and biotic life become energy resources for the economy, and the spoilage of that system. In that case, we must ask what the axiological underpinnings of zero-waste are, and what they must become in order to address the real ecology of waste.

Footnotes

1. Marx describes the ways in which agricultural technologies introduced a molecular imbalance in cycles of nature (see Foster, Clark, and York).

Works Cited

• Bataille, George. The Accursed Share. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Print.
• Bonajo, Melanie. “Interview Melanie Bonajo.” i heart photograph. Blog. 18 Mar. 2008. http://iheartphotograph.blogspot.de/2008/03/interview-melanie-bonajo.html. Web. Accessed September 26, 2016.
• Buchloh, Benjamin. “Detritus and Decrepitude: The Sculpture of Thomas Hirschhorn.” Oxford Art Journal 24.2 (2001): 41-56. Print.
• Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark, and Richard York. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010. Print.
• Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996. Print.
• Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159-165. Print.
• Harman, Graham. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court, 2002. Print.
• Hawkins, Gay. “Plastic Bags: Living with Rubbish.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4 (2001): 5-23. Print.
• Hirschhorn, Thomas. “Artist’s Statement.” Paris, 1999.
• Jameson, Fredric. Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One. New York: Verso, 2011. Print.
• McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: North Point P, 2002. Print.
• Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013. Print.
• Toy, Mary-Anne. “China’s first eco-village proves a hard sell.” The Age. 26 August 2006. Web. 3 June 2016.
• Wark, McKenzie. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. New York: Verso, 2015. Print.

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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• —. “The Highway of the Atom: Recollections Along a Route.” Topia 7 (2002): 99–115. Print. Village of Widows. Dir. Peter Blow. Toronto: Lindum Films, 1998. Film.
• Wenzel, Jennifer. “Taking Stock of Energy Humanities.” Reviews in Cultural Theory 6.3 (February 2016): 30–34. Print.

Nicole Shukin (bio)
University of Victoria

Abstract

After Fukushima, a tiny handful of “refuseniks” defied the government’s orders to evacuate a twenty-kilometer zone around the damaged reactors in the region. Rather than relocating to temporary shelters, several refuseniks remained in the zone to care for livestock who had been abandoned, and whose market value had been ruined by exposure to radiation. This essay formulates their defiance as an “art of dying” in order to amplify its potential to undermine resilience as a resource of the biopolitical and nuclear state, and to open up the possibility of a post-capitalist animality within the nuclear ruins.

Introduction: “After Fukushima”

The recent disaster referred to in shorthand as 3/11, that is, the meltdown of several nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in east Japan triggered by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, isn’t only a compound catastrophe that realizes the lethal gamble of nuclear energy. Despite the slash or tear in the historical calendar that 3/11 seeks to rend, the disaster shorthand paradoxically places 3/11 in lineage with the earlier rupture of 9/11. Far from the isolated event that a catastrophe ostensibly signifies, 3/11 throws the serialization of disasters in neoliberal times into relief, including even the anticipation of a sequel. Other resource or energy accidents prior to 3/11 may have similarly appeared exceptional in their scale and deadliness, yet the contingent singularity of each disaster is belied by an iterability that links them within a chain of neoliberal catastrophes to which we are becoming accustomed: Fukushima, Deepwater Horizon, Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez, Bhopal, and so on.

What characterizes this chain of disasters as neoliberal isn’t simply the unaccountability of resource multinationals whose aggressive economic activities are enabled, to a historically unprecedented degree, by a state that now “secures, advances, and props the economy” rather than protecting against its excesses, as Wendy Brown puts it (64). While “the socialization of risk accompanying the privatization of gain” is certainly illustrated by 3/11, this dynamic does not describe the full impact of neoliberalism (Brown 72). Following Brown, who herself builds upon Foucault’s lectures on the subject, the fuller achievement of neoliberalism is the enlargement of “economy” into an all-pervasive epistemology and ontology, raising “the market itself to a principle of all life or of government” (Brown 61). The economy is “detached from exclusive association with the production or circulation of goods and the accumulation of wealth” and attached to an array of arch-organizing “principles, metrics, and modes of conduct, including for endeavors where monetary profit and wealth are not at issue” (Brown 62). For Foucault and Brown, neoliberalism constitutes a “governing rationality” (Brown 9) capable of revolutionizing the very meaning and matter of life and death by virtue of stealthily implanting market reasoning into every sphere of existence, “from mothering to mating, from learning to criminality, from planning one’s family to planning one’s death” (Brown 67). It is no surprise, then, that even an environmental and social catastrophe like 3/11 gets reconstituted as a neoliberal object lesson and growth opportunity. Far from memorializing an unrepeatable tragedy, 3/11 betrays something about the ontological power of a hegemonic form of economic reason to systematically make allowances for, and subjectively condition us to accept, serial catastrophes as an inevitability of life in the twenty-first century.

Yet as Brown also notes, neoliberalism is neither inevitable nor homogeneous; how it manifests in the nuclear nation of Japan before and after Fukushima is clearly different from “the neoliberalism of the 1970s” or from “neoliberalism as an experiment on and in the Third World” (49). Neoliberalism “ranges and changes temporally and geographically” (49), a global phenomenon that is “ubiquitous and omnipresent, yet disunified and nonidentical with itself” (48). More crucially, how the seeming inevitability of a neoliberal nuclear industry and its ontological conditions and effects are contested after Fukushima is overdetermined in nationally and historically specific ways for the Japanese. After all, Fukushima represents both “the unthinkable return of radiation” in Japan (Lippit, “Instead”) and, as Anne Allison notes in Precarious Japan, a post-War quagmire of precarity arising from unprecedented forms of precarious labor, social insecurity, and environmental contamination (13). The nuclear nation’s exposure of its own population to radioactive risk through the “peaceful” production of atomic energy needs to be placed in historical relation with the specific forms of precarity accompanying neoliberalism in Japan as well as with the earlier acts of total war suffered by the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.¹

Jean-Luc Nancy notes that when he was asked to speak to what it means to philosophize “after Fukushima,” the question evoked for him Adorno’s declaration that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz, and he voices a concern that co-conjuring Auschwitz and Fukushima in this way risks minimizing the incommensurability of two separate horrors (1). Worried by the sinister rhyme of Fukushima with Hiroshima, Nancy cautions against confusing “the name Hiroshima–the target of enemy bombing–with that of Fukushima, a name in which are mingled several orders of natural and technological, political and economic phenomena” (13). And he recalls the insistence by philosopher Satoshi Ukai that “‘Fukushima’ does not suffice to designate all the regions affected (he names the counties of Miyagi and Iwate) …” (13).

Yet Nancy nonetheless probes for an actual commensurability that does require linking and thinking such different disasters together. Auschwitz can be likened to Hiroshima, proposes Nancy, when both are recognized as disastrous precursors of Fukushima, acts of annihilation made possible by the fusion of technoscientific rationality and a globalized system of general equivalence into a devastating combine that begins self-proliferating interests and ends in chilling indifference to the living. Regarding what is common to Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Nancy has this to say:

The significance of these enterprises that overflow from war and crime is in fact in every instance a significance wholly included within a sphere independent of the existence of a world: the sphere of a projection of possibilities at once fantastical and technological that have their own ends, or more precisely whose ends are openly for their own proliferation, in the exponential growth of figures and powers that have value for and by themselves, indifferent to the existence of the world and all of its beings. (12)

The subsumption of all spheres of existence, values, and activities into a “regime of general equivalence” (a market economy in which money, according to Marx, renders all things commensurable or exchangeable) in combination with a technological civilization whose “fantastical” projections become self-serving ends with no relation to existence: this co-proliferation of indifferent technology and indifferent equivalence is, in Nancy’s view, the continuous disaster within which Fukushima calls to be understood. He writes, “the regime of general equivalence henceforth virtually absorbs, well beyond the monetary or financial sphere but thanks to it and with regard to it, all the spheres of existence of humans, and along with them all things that exist” (5). To imagine philosophy, not to mention a future, “after Fukushima” requires, then, the possibility of existing aside or apart from an order of real subsumption that technologically metastasizes to the point of enfolding even disasters into capitalist chains of equivalence. At the same time, however, alternatives to global capitalism would need to emerge out of the impossibility of any “after” that could cleanly break with a history of capitalism whose technological infrastructures, toxic burdens, and radioactive traces are now irremediably insinuated into everything animate and inanimate. Thanks in particular to the radioactive resources and wastes of the nuclear economy, material life is laced with the poisonous legacy of a global nuclear industry to such an extent that even if capitalism were to be overthrown tomorrow, it would necessarily be lived as a deadly trace long into the future. In other words, any imagination of a life after capitalism, after Fukushima, will have to contend with its nuclear ruins.

In what follows, I therefore grapple with the lethality of neoliberal nuclear power in relation to a meltdown that began before 3/11 and that will persist interminably into the future. The term “meltdown” is my own shorthand for the disastrous equivalence or indifference discerned by Nancy. The unfathomable fallout from the ongoing meltdown in Japan confronts us, more particularly, with a nuclear sublime that has led other philosophers like Jacques Rancière to revisit Kant’s formulation of the sublime as the “imagination’s incapacity to present a totality to reason, analogous to its feeling of powerlessness before the wild forces of nature” (Aesthetics 89). Confronted with the sublime meltdown in Japan, I seek to direct attention to a resource that may not at first appear critical to comprehending the nuclear restart currently underway in Japan and the continuing production of nuclear energy despite (or, as we’ll see, because of) the “lesson” of Fukushima.² From the location in Canada where I write, the resource economy that might appear most pressing to engage is uranium mining. After all, the Canadian-based Cameco Corporation is a key supplier of uranium to Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), owner of the damaged nuclear reactors in Fukushima prefecture. When it comes to the resources of the nuclear economy, it would be equally tempting to excavate for the longer history of Canada’s role as a supplier of uranium through its part in the Manhattan project, recalling the national sacrifice of indigenous land, labor, and health in the mining of the uranium used in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.³ Much, no doubt, can also be said about the missing materiality of nuclear fuel after Fukushima, and about TEPCO’s attempt to locate the fuel rods in its ruined reactor No.1 by using muon tomography to produce images of a sublime core too deadly to be approached by humans (muon tomography uses the cosmic radiation of subatomic particles to penetrate matter and generate images) (“Muon”). However, as central as the mining of uranium and the sublime materiality of atomic fuel may be to the resource politics and aesthetics of nuclear power, I contend that this lethal form of energy is also heavily reliant upon a less obvious resource: that of human resourcefulness itself, or human resilience.

Resilient subjects constitute the positive, biopolitical “double” of deadly energy run amuck, given the phenomenal energy they release in reaction to/with catastrophe. As many critics of the burgeoning neoliberal interest in human and ecological resilience have noted, resilient subjects are in the first instance a product of adversity. “[C]ore to any definition of resilience,” write Brad Evans and Julian Reid, “is the ability to react and adjust positively when things go wrong; that is, resilience occurs in the presence of adversity” (32). Although resilience gets fetishized as a resourcefulness inherent to human nature and the ecosystems in which humans are embedded, it demands to be critically interrogated as a contingent form of biocapital that is shocked into existence by neoliberal catastrophe, which is to say, catastrophe allowed for and managed by an economic rationality now installed within every sphere of life. Resilience is exploited as a potent resource of flexible labor and life accustomed to the chronically precarious conditions of unlimited growth. If resilient subjectivity is accidentally produced by sudden disaster, it is also consciously cultivated and valorized by corporate and state institutions that have a stake in individuals’ and populations’ ability to subjectively manage objectively unbearable conditions of life. The capacity of resilient subjects to acclimatize to new thresholds of life and death that have been stretched beyond previously imagined limits emerges as an enabling condition of the reproduction of global capitalism and as a means of averting politicization of adversity. In short, resilient subjects constitute a resource that is invaluable in socially mitigating the deadly effects of disaster and in conditioning or preparing individuals and populations to weather future shocks that promise to be as, if not more, lethal.

By identifying capitalism with a logic of proliferation that amounts to a death drive in its indifference to “the existence of the world and all of its beings” (12), Nancy risks overlooking the degree to which the necropolitics of disaster are imbricated with the biopolitics of resilience. To put it another way, what Fukushima compels us to consider is the degree to which the inhuman rule of equivalence banks on the passionate resilience of living beings that cling to life in the face of disaster. The resilience of life-forms and life systems that, more than just surviving adversity, emerge with increased tensile strength, having learned an extreme lesson in the value of adaptability and flexibility, constitutes a species of biocapital. It does so by enabling an inflexible rule of equivalence to continuously (and disastrously) overcome not only what Marx termed “natural barriers” to capitalism (410), but also the self-impairing barriers capitalism poses to itself by damaging the very ecological conditions of life.⁴

I broach the biocapital of human resilience by focusing on a tiny but telling handful of people who defied government orders to evacuate the twenty-kilometer area around TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, choosing to stay behind in unmitigated exposure to radiation. These so-called “refuseniks,”⁵ several of them bachelor farmers whose irrational stasis contrasts starkly with the mobility of thousands of nuclear refugees who relocated to temporary shelters according to the (hypocritical) biopolitics of population health and safety, arguably represent a radical rather than resilient fatalism. Their recalcitrance potentially undermines the biocapital of human resilience even as it is susceptible to recuperation by a nuclear industry and nuclear nation that would expose biological life to lethal experimentation and exploit the adaptability of those living subjects who survive. In the defiance of the handful of people who refuse relocation, the possibility of an “after Fukushima” may be glimpsed, in at least two senses. Firstly, the refuseniks show that an ontological counter-experiment from below is possible, a post-capitalist existence lived aside or apart from (yet in acute exposure to) the neoliberal nuclear economy. They ironically rehabilitate a sacrifice zone into a time-space of living and dying that opens an aporia within common sense. Secondly, the refuseniks appear to reject the available subject positions, particularly the resilient subjectivity that correlates with a neoliberal history of catastrophe and that sensibly agrees to cope with deadly capitalism. They do so, arguably, through what I call an art of dying, one that evades the pincers of both the biopolitical and the nuclear state by refusing the logics that mitigate and rationalize catastrophic capitalism.

The art of dying involves disabusing oneself and others of the illusion that the subjects of catastrophic capitalism are anything but the living dead. Yet the art of dying simultaneously robs capitalism of its sublime power, its threat, by both carrying on banal everyday life in an area declared exceptionally dangerous and by choosing a solidarity with dying that changes the subjective experience of that threat. Finally, as the comments of several refuseniks show, the art of dying takes the form of an identification or kinship with the animality of fellow creatures written off as useless once their convertibility into capital is ruined by radiation, an identification particularly with livestock that was supposed to have been culled in obedience to a government advisory but that largely ended up being abandoned to starvation in the panic of evacuation. Rejecting the self-preserving common sense of human relocation and other biopolitical strategies of building immunity to radiation, those who stay behind complicate the neoliberal language of resilience that enables deadly capitalism to have a future. But again, any “after” Fukushima or any post-capitalist existence that Fukushima’s refuseniks may germinate in the nuclear ruins is a ghostly hollowing out of a system by those who frontally face the blunt reality that the nuclear sublime ultimately makes all earthlings into the living dead. I ask, among other things, whether those residents of Fukushima who refuse to evacuate can be understood in terms of “the already dead” as elaborated by Eric Cazdyn (4), and if so, how the already dead might thwart the biocapital of resilient subjectivity and materialize the imagination of a future after, or aside from, capitalism.

In interrogating resilience as a resource of the nuclear sublime through the foil of Fukushima’s refuseniks, it becomes apparent that human resilience represents only the edge of a more specious terrain of biocapital. This terrain comprises the even greater resourcefulness of interconnected life-forms placed under severe duress that struggle to salvage basic conditions of life and, in the process, capitalism’s ecological conditions of existence. As James O’Connor emphasizes, “conditions of production” are now identical with ecological “conditions of life,” which means that any life-preserving resilience on the part of organisms or ecosystems effectively serves the reproduction of the system of capitalism (308). If the defiance posed by a scattering of refuseniks keeps open the alternative of a post-capitalist subjectivity or, more accurately, a post-capitalist animality, their example is again constantly at risk of being recuperated as a neoliberal object lesson in the value of stoically weathering deadly environments.

The Nuclear Sublime and Aesthetic Politics of (In)Visibility

The aesthetic concept that suggests itself most readily in relation to the ungraspable totality of meltdowns like Fukushima and their effects on earthly bodies is, unsurprisingly, that of the sublime. In The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (2006), Joseph Masco troubles the fetishization of what he first called the “nuclear sublime” by asking: “What kind of cultural work is performed in the act of making something ‘unthinkable’?” (2). In relation to a Cold War American culture that was simultaneously building the atom bomb and rhetorically projecting nuclear war as unthinkable, he proposes that “to make something ‘unthinkable’ is to place it outside of language, to deny its comprehensibility and elevate it into the realm of the sublime” (3). The sublime, in Masco’s view, is ultimately an aesthetic ruse that functions to divert attention away from “the everyday social and material effects of the U.S. nuclear production complex” (4).

However, the invisibility of radiation together with the incomprehensible complexity of a system of global capitalism suggest a politics of the sublime beyond that of an aesthetic strategy of diverting attention. As Gabrielle Hecht has noted, nuclear power is a political ontology that constitutes material histories, geographies, and bodies, not to mention reorganizes the very substance of life and death (320). Masco himself illustrates the ontological politics of the nuclear economy when he notes that trace amounts of radiation from U.S. nuclear testing during the Cold War continue to be found in virtually all living tissue. “Every person on the planet now receives a certain amount of radiation each day produced by the cumulative effects of above-ground nuclear weapons tests and radioactive releases from within the global nuclear complex” (26). With the nuclear sublime, aesthetic politics become inextricable from the ontological and biological struggle of life-forms over their very conditions of survival and existence. And it is the question of what this struggle might look like, and how the living might ontologically resist rather than resiliently adjust, that becomes key to an aesthetic politics.

I’ve already suggested that the sublime disaster of the nuclear meltdown is historically supplemented by the biocapital of resilient subjects who manage to survive in increasingly lethal environments. Invoking Kant’s analytic of the sublime, Brad Evans and Julian Reid propose that the neoliberal philosophy of resilience “teaches us to live in a terrifying yet normal state of affairs that suspends us in petrified awe,” which is to say, in a de-politicized attitude before neoliberal catastrophe, dutifully soldiering on and powerless to imagine the possibility of future emancipation (16). Against this attitude of stoic acceptance, which ultimately lays the subjective conditions for unbounded capitalism, and against the negation of any possibility of making sense of or cognitively mapping a terrifying totality, Rancière proposes an aesthetic politics that would open an aporia of another kind within what he terms the “distribution of the sensible” (Politics 7). Unlike sublime terror, this aporia is produced from below, by the energy of emancipatory subjects who, unlike resilient subjects, refuse to accept continuous endangerment as their chronic lot. Rancière takes issue with Lyotard’s reversal of the Kantian notion of the sublime in the latter’s contention that matter itself (rather than supersensible ideas or reason, as in Kant’s third Critique) constitutes a sublime, inhuman “Thing” that exceeds human comprehension, and whose unrepresentability is the negative subject of postmodern art. For Rancière, Lyotard’s formulation of the sublime is tantamount to a renunciation of material history and social struggle by virtue of reducing humans to a passive posture of speechlessness before the unrepresentable. Rancière’s concern is not unrelated to the problem Evan and Reid have with neoliberal lessons in resilience designed to acclimatize subjects to the inevitability of insecure, dangerous life. As Stephen Zepke notes,

Rancière objects to how Lyotard’s sublime and avant-garde event refuses to link art’s specificity to a future emancipation, but connects it instead “to an immemorial and never-ending catastrophe” …. This, Rancière continues, “transforms every promise of emancipation into a lie” and makes “resistance” an “endless work of mourning.” (9)

Lyotard’s fault, in Rancière’s stringent view, is that he “disconnects artistic modernism from the ‘grand narrative’ of the emancipation of the proletariat and reconnects it to that of the extermination of the Jews” (qtd. in Zepke 10). In the context of Fukushima, such an aesthetic of the sublime would, in Rancière’s reading, consign people to being victims and witnesses of ongoing catastrophe rather than emancipatory actors able to intervene in material history to change its course.

The aporia of dissensus or disagreement, which Rancière formulates in place of the sublime, strikes or breaks differently into a given “distribution of sense.” As Rancière puts it, the creative struggle of people produces a radical “fissure in the sensible order by confronting the established framework of perception, thought, and action with the ‘inadmissible’” (Politics 85), introducing new claims previously deemed unthinkable or impossible. The unrepresentable, in other words, is converted into the politically possible through acts of dissensus that open a polity to “the part that previously had no part” (to echo Rancière’s terminology, 12). Rancière’s theorization of disagreement poses a stark challenge to the ontological compliance or agreement with catastrophe that is cultivated by neoliberal cultures of resilience, and his work insists that it is a positive ontology of creative existence and struggle for equality that is ultimately at stake in aesthetic politics.⁶

With this tense bundling of positions on the sublime in view, I turn to the twenty-kilometer exclusion zone declared around the Fukushima Daiichi plant following the nuclear meltdown, and to the scattering of humans who defied orders to evacuate. The occupation of this deadly geography by residents who, against common sense and governmental reason, insist on residing in homes and on farms rendered alien by radiation compels consideration of the aesthetic politics of the nuclear sublime as a political ontology involving nothing less than an art and politics of living/dying. Whether their disagreement amounts to dissensus in the Rancièrian sense, or whether it will be recuperated as resilience and as a resource of nuclear energy futures, remains to be seen. But by way of approaching this question, I want to briefly trace how the refuseniks’ irrational act of living in exposure to deadly radiation compares with other responses to the nuclear sublime that are more readily recognizable as aesthetic, possibly because in striving to make invisible radiation visible, the politics of the latter continues to inhabit a representational rather than an ontological register.

Akin to the resource aesthetics of the film documentary on Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of industrial mega-projects, Manufactured Landscapes (2006), a great deal of political art after Fukushima has revolved around the invisibility of the nuclear economy and the seemingly limitless threat of nuclear materials and wastes (recall that the half-life of a radioactive isotope like plutonium is 24,000 years, and the plutonium leaking from the Fukushima Daiichi plant will still be energetic in half a million years). The description of the Arts Catalyst’s Actinium exhibit on nuclear culture remarks on artists’ efforts to make the invisible or the concealed visible: “Artists are making the nuclear economy increasingly visible by rethinking nuclear materials and architectures, decay rates and risk perception, questioning the 20^th century belief in nuclear modernity” (“Actinium”). Both the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and the Japanese government have been scathingly accused of minimizing the amount of radiation released into the atmosphere, land, and ocean; understandably, many citizen groups and activists have sought to demystify the company’s and government’s pictures of the disaster in order to expose its hidden magnitudes. Thus an explosion of political art inside and outside Japan, from films like “The Radiant” by the Otolith group (2012) to Japanoise concerts to art exhibitions like Ken and Julia Yonetani’s display of uranium chandeliers, entitled Crystal Palace: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nuclear Nations (2012), has sought to politicize the meltdown by making its impacts visible or audible, antagonizing nuclear nations like Japan and a global nuclear economy that exploits radiation’s invisibility to downplay its material effects.

Despite its interventions, however, political art devoted to critical visibility arguably can go only so far in producing a fissure or dissensus within the given distribution of sense, for the simple reason that visibility as a political means and end is imbricated in the very history and technologies of nuclear power that it would contest. The pursuit of visibility inadvertently participates in the logic of “the enlightened earth” that nuclear energy disastrously escalates. Masco invokes the words of Horkheimer and Adorno to sound the underlying resonance between Enlightenment thought and the rationalities driving nuclear energy and culture: “The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant” (qtd. in Masco 1). As ideologically entangled as the pursuit of critical visibility may at times be in forms of enlightenment reason, the deeper complicity is material and literal. After all, Japan’s “peaceful” nuclear energy program exists to power an electrical grid that supplies current to human populations now existing in a “24/7” order of illuminated wakefulness. In 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary observes that late capitalism has effectively removed the “off” switch on electricity-powered lights, computers, and electronic devices, eroding the distinction between day and night. Electricity powers a perpetual, illuminated daytime and a “surplus” wakefulness, by which Crary refers to forms of surplus value generated by people who continue to consume and produce in what were previously the off-hours of the human sensorium, once closed to capitalist value-making in the unproductive state of sleep. The pursuit of critical visibility is complicated not only by this nuclear-powered hegemony of electricity and light over downtime and darkness; it gets even more complicated when one considers the intimate relationships between the modern histories and techniques of photography, cinema, and nuclear science. In 1896, the year the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered X-rays, the French physicist Henri Becquerel discovered spontaneous radiation by accident during an experiment on phosphorescent light. Becquerel had sprinkled uranium salts on Lumière photographic plates and happened to notice that the plates generated a photograph even though they hadn’t been exposed to an external light source such as the sun. In this way, Becquerel discovered the existence of invisible rays immanent to physical matter itself, rays strong enough in this case to produce visual images. As Thomas Pringle puts it, with radiation’s image-making effects it seemed “as though the earthly matter itself was reaching out and participating in photographic processes” (136).

The point, however, is that in both their means and ends photography and nuclear science share a history as well as material resources and techniques, particularly “exposure” of bodies to light, either in the form of visible or invisible rays. In the historical relation that he charts between radiation and celluloid film, Pringle elaborates on this shared logic, noting that with the atomic light released by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, human biology itself was treated “as a kind of film” exposed to lethal light (142). Television and cinema have also been implicated in nuclear technologies and imaginaries; Jean Baudrillard contends that the

homology of the nuclear and of television can be read directly in the images: nothing resembles the control and telecommand headquarters of the nuclear power station more than TV studios, and the nuclear consoles are combined with those of the recording and broadcasting studios in the same imaginary. (53–54)

And Akira Mizuta Lippit reads postwar Japanese cinema in relation to what he terms the “avisuality” or excess visuality unleashed by atomic light (Atomic 82). Writes Lippit: “the atomic explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki turned these cities, in the instant of a flash, into massive cameras; the victims grafted onto the geography by the radiation, radiographed” (50). The desire for total visibility becomes, in Lippit’s analysis, simultaneous with the “thanatographics” of nuclear annihilation (50).

Understanding the task of political art after Fukushima as a making visible of the invisible therefore risks leaving the exchanges, homologies, and agreements between visibility, visuality, and nuclear power untroubled. The artist who seeks to illuminate catastrophe must be careful not to perpetuate it inadvertently by replicating the physicist’s, photographer’s, or even bomb’s pursuit of irradiated matter in this ongoing history of energy and light. Tokyo Electric Power Company, as I already mentioned, is using the inhuman in-sight of muons to penetrate and produce images inside its No. 1 reactor. Poison and cure become exchangeable in a nuclear pharmakon that relies on the invisible rays of radiographic matter to supply visual data of radioactive fuel that cannot be approached by any living body without reducing it to cinders.⁷ TEPCO’s accountability for the sublime meltdown takes the form of an exercise in generating visual evidence of the fuel rods’ location, ironically perpetuating Japan’s reliance upon an atomic imaginary and science at the very moment when a mass movement to decommission the nation’s nuclear reactors is at its strongest. If dissensus with nuclear power is to be found in Fukushima prefecture, in Japan, and beyond, it thus will arguably need to be of a kind that opens a fissure in this distribution of the sensible wherein the politics of visibility and atomic energy trade insights and techniques.

The politics of visibility also risk dovetailing with the politics of human biocapital in extreme acts of visual witnessing, such as video journalist Tetsuo Jimbo’s foray into the twenty-kilometer exclusion zone to capture images of the inside. With a camera and Geiger counter on his car dash measuring levels of radiation exposure as he drives into the zone, kamikazi style, Jimbo’s “Inside Report from Fukushima Nuclear Reactor” (2011) is spiced with a sense of suicidal daring that adds risk-value to his footage. Reporters like Jimbo risk their health (even if it is as much the perception of risk as actual risk that is excited by forays into the exclusion zone) in a way that raises the stakes of visuality. He undoubtedly exposes himself to the dangers of extreme radiation, but this endangerment is dramatized for political effect and carefully monitored. Visibly clocking the duration and degree of exposure becomes something of a cliché and caché in this genre of extreme reportage, and suggests that entrepreneurial acts of visual witnessing may already be trading tropes with a neoliberal culture of resilience that promotes disaster as an opportunity.

This is not to say that political art or activism that seeks to make intensities of radiation visible isn’t a crucial response to chronic government deception after 3/11, as well as a potent means of agitating for political change. The work of citizen science groups to crowdsource radiation data and generate detailed maps, for instance, has been invaluable in helping people in Japan navigate irradiated life after 3/11. However, by living in at once more extreme and more unspectacular exposure to radiation, the refuseniks embody a different aesthetic politics, one that is closer to the Rancièrian formulation of aesthetic politics. In embodying a “form of life” that is barely intelligible, or that doesn’t make sense in relation to the governing rationality of human life and health, one that involves an art of dying, they cause an ontological perturbation within political common sense.⁸

The Art of Dying

Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper describe resilience as nothing less than “a governmental philosophy of nature and society” (145), and they trace a genealogy of the concept from its neoliberal variations back to C. S. Holling’s seminal definition of ecological resilience: “a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables” (Holling 14). The resource of resilience has clearly yielded value for those invested in Japan’s nuclear economy, considering how rapidly initial government plans to decommission all of the nation’s nuclear plants after 3/11 have been reversed. Neither the terrible ongoing meltdown in Fukushima nor the massive waves of anti-nuclear protest inside and outside Japan have been able to end a nuclear economy whose arsenal now includes a governmental philosophy of resilience that subjectivizes people into making the best of catastrophe. The rootedness of the concept of resilience in eco-systems theory suggests that it serves the survival of large-scale systems that seek to capture crisis within a feedback loop of self-improving information. If meltdown and mass protest aren’t capable of catalyzing radical change, how could I possibly suggest that a handful of stay-behinds in the exclusion zone might somehow jam the loop or hold the clue to a possible life “after Fukushima” in their art of dying? In suggesting this, don’t I run a risk of preposterously fetishizing a handful of individuals who are far from politically mobilized (in contrast, for instance, with the mobilization of the Mother’s Movement against nuclear power by Japanese women), who lead largely isolated lives in the zone, and who could easily be seen as the most vulnerable and politically resigned of all who managed to escape with their lives following 3/11?

There is much to support this other reading. Yet if the image of resistance one seeks is “political” in the narrow sense, then it will be impossible to see much at work in the aesthetic-ontological act of staying behind in the exclusion zone. Even looking for something “at work” is already a misdirection, since the kind of protest against the nuclear sublime and its accompanying cultures of resilience that, I propose, can be glimpsed in the zone is more akin to the unproductivity of the state of sleep that, Jonathan Crary worries, is increasingly eroded in late capitalism; the refuseniks represent something like the resourcelessness of a nighttime that used to limit how far capitalism could reach into and resourcify the human sensorium. Much as Eric Cazdyn says about “the already dead,” the refuseniks “do not constitute a political movement in the traditional sense. Rather, they portend a political consciousness that can inspire and inform political movements” (9). Tellingly, even as I write these words the Japanese government is planning to make the deadness of the exclusion zone productive again, whether by using it as a graveyard for radioactive waste materials or as a test site for drones and robots.⁹ So if the refuseniks belie the ostensible totality and inevitability of global capitalism by installing another ontology within its nuclear core, and if this ontology can be understood as analogous to the reemergence of a time (night) and an activity (sleep) not yet annexed into the 24/7 daytime of production and consumption, theirs is paradoxically a protest that will last only as long as it takes for the nuclear wasteland to be re-subsumed into the business of equivalence.

Many critics have noted that the seeming deadness of exclusion zones for humans and for capitalist value-production is belied by the explosion of feral and wild animal life in nuclear sacrifice zones such as those in New Mexico, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima (Broglio). Immediately following 3/11, the area around the Fukushima Daiichi plant was a radiation ecology weirdly teeming with life, with the singular exception of one species (humans). Significantly, a solidarity with the life in the zone written off by the market and the state is expressed by refuseniks when explaining their reasons for defying evacuation orders. In the first of two film documentaries entitled Nuclear Nation (2012), made nine months after the meltdown, Atsushi Funahashi follows some of the more than 1,400 residents of the town of Futaba who were evacuated and temporarily resettled at Kisai High School in Kazo City. Nuclear Nation also documents the defiance of some of the people who refused to evacuate, including farmers like Masami Yoshizawa. The brief but charged remarks of Yoshizawa, in particular, suggest to me the possibility that the so-called refuseniks might embody an unsettling subjectivity that runs counter to the biopolitical grain of the times, one that resembles that of “the already dead.”

The film first shows Yoshizawa distributing feed to his herd of cattle while talking about his decision to stay behind. He points to the cows: “They’re surviving proof of what happened. Of course, we are, too. Lots of people escaped, but we couldn’t, nor did we want to.” His next words suggest that the desire to stay in place, in unmitigated exposure to radiation, springs from a shared spirit of animal defiance rather than from a passive or resigned subjectivity: “These guys are protesting the nuclear accident too,” he nods at the cows. Yoshizawa ignored a government order to cull his cattle, and while many livestock animals starved to death in the days and weeks following 3/11, Yoshizawa refused to abandon his livestock to starvation. A 2012 article in The Guardian, “Fukushima’s rebel farmers refuse to abandon livestock,” relates that other farmers similarly ignored evacuation orders, and for similar reasons (McCurry). A mini-documentary on the rebel farmer Naoto Matsumura, entitled “Alone in the Zone,” importantly reveals a tendency to sentimentalize, indeed fetishize, men whose love of animals inspires such sacrificial devotion. Other media stories describe Matsumura as the “world’s most radioactive man” (Miller), and again demonstrate how highly susceptible the so-called rebels are to being recuperated as figures of super-resiliency. The heroicization of lone bachelor farmers like Matsumura excites depoliticized pathos in a way that could culturally undercut the anti-nuclear politics of another explicitly gendered movement that mobilizes for change outside the zone, namely, the Mothers Movement.

Yet one of the most succinct expressions of radical kinship with animals and animality captured by Funahashi in Nuclear Nation, and spoken by Yoshizawa, is not so easily dismissed:

I can’t sell these cows. Keeping them, feeding them, incurring expenses. What’s the use in that? I was conflicted. But my mind’s made up. I’m committed to letting these cows live. My destiny is linked with theirs.

The farmer’s words are charged, particularly the word “destiny” that simultaneously evokes the deadly exposure to radiation that he finally chooses in solidarity with his cattle and the aporetic anticipation of a future in which he has no longer agreed to reproduce the known universe of capitalist value-making and human exceptionalism. What does it mean to link oneself ontologically to the fate of creatures whose existence, previously circumscribed by their exchange-value as biological property or “animal capital” (Shukin), is suddenly void of value? Yoshizawa no longer owns three hundred “head” of cattle, exactly, although in the film this is the number of animals he says he continues to tend; the relationship of human ownership radically shifts when he begins to “incur expenses” without any hope of return on investment. Although the farmer has not evacuated the region, he has evacuated economic reason by fatalistically identifying with animals that, paradoxically, only have a chance of dying after Fukushima. When I say that they only have a chance of dying, let me emphasize that phrase’s double valence: Yoshizawa both identifies with the pathetic fate of animals that have been abandoned to radiation and anticipates the unexpected future that opens up of living with animals who only now have a chance of dying, once radiation poisoning has ruined them for the economy of slaughter. Only now, in other words, do his cows have a chance of living past the age at which they would normally have been sent to market. The ontological art of dying I’m attributing to recalcitrants like Yoshizawa is therefore one that emerges out of a kinship with animal death, out of the possibility that one’s death need not be finally decided either by the market or by the biopolitical rationality of a state. While there’s no doubt that this kinship or identification is prone to exciting a depoliticized cult of animal love in the nuclear wasteland, there is also a chance that it could ignite the possibility of materially imagining post-capitalist community.

Cazdyn’s theorization of “the already dead” is helpful in elucidating an art of dying opposed to the resilient subject’s adjustment to continuous catastrophe. For Cazdyn, “[t]he paradigmatic condition illustrating the already dead is that of the medical patient who has been diagnosed with a terminal disease only to live through medical advances that then turn the terminal illness into a chronic one” (4). As he notes, “[t]he disease remains life threatening, still incurable, even though it is managed and controlled, perhaps indefinitely” (4). Although Cazdyn doesn’t refer to the governmental philosophy of resilience per se, his likening of a catastrophic system of global capitalism to a terminal illness that is managed as a chronic condition as opposed to being radically contested speaks closely to the resource, or biocapital, of resilience. Rather than some zombie state cooked up by popular culture, the already dead, as he formulates it, is an ontological refusal to accept the unlivable conditions of capitalist life as a chronic condition. “It is only when the living remember that they are already dead that the possibility for liberation emerges,” he proposes (190). Cazdyn’s formulation of the already dead is unwittingly echoed by Evans and Reid’s invocation of death in their more explicit critique of resilient life: “Resilience cheats us of … [the] affirmative task of learning how to die. It exposes life to lethal principles so that it may live a non-death” (13). Yet Evans and Reid, while challenging neoliberal and biopolitical rationalities that have effectively monopolized the meaning and substance of life and death, finally propose an “art of living” rather than an art of death in response (175). Moreover, the art of living they elaborate hinges upon a

reconstituted understanding of the human as a fundamentally political subject; one empowered by its hubristic belief in an ability to secure itself from those elements of the world it encounters as hostile to its world, rather than being cast in a permanent condition of resilient adaptation to a biologized understanding of the nature of the world as such. (43)

Neither Evans and Reid nor Cazdyn consider how ontological protest against the capitalization of life might involve other animals. The art of dying in kinship with other animals that emerges in the Fukushima exclusion zone, however, suggests that it is precisely when humans are biopolitically reduced to resilient organisms and radiation experiments that it becomes crucial that animality be occupied as a counter-practice.

Foucault suggests something along these lines in The Courage of Truth (1983–84), when he says of the cynical mode of life (most infamously modeled by the Greek philosopher Diogenes, who shamelessly chose to live in the open like a dog) that by virtue of being “indexed to nature, and only nature, [it] ends up giving a positive value to animality” (282). More than just a “material model of existence” (283), Foucault proposes, “[a]nimality is an exercise. It is a test for oneself, and at the same time a scandal for others” (283). The art of dying after Fukushima involves confronting the deadliness of the nuclear economy with a “practice of animality” in this sense (288). As Cazdyn writes, “[t]he already dead refuse … either to die or to be alive until these categories can be remade to accommodate the unique and new existence the already dead experience” (198). Most importantly, perhaps, the question of the already dead is inseparable from the problem of trying “to imagine what comes after globalization” (Cazdyn 161). As Cazdyn declares, “[i]f you find this difficult, if not impossible, then perhaps it is because imagining what is beyond globalization is like imagining what comes before or after time–a mind-bending exercise indeed” (161).

Lessons from Fukushima

The governmental philosophy of resilience seeks to turn catastrophes like Fukushima into “lessons” that teach subjects, markets, and states how to better brace themselves for a future of chronic disaster. The neoliberal coding of catastrophe as a learning opportunity is emblazoned in a string of news articles that echo a 2013 piece entitled “Lessons From Fukushima, Two Years On.” The article opens like this: “Companies have valuable lessons in transparency to glean from the Fukushima disaster, [sic] said the author of an independent report on the accident that famously called it ‘Made in Japan’” (Yee). The callousness of branding disaster is blended with the moral imperative of positive thinking in discourses of resilience that turn disasters like Fukushima into learning opportunities. Positive thinking, and feeling, becomes a trait of resilient subjectivity and a resource of the nuclear economy. Consider the Japanese Health Ministry’s decision to raise the legal allowable limit of yearly radiation exposure in the Fukushima region to a level twenty times higher than it was prior to the meltdown.¹⁰ The health of Japan’s human population is governed through a capricious metrics that can be adjusted to minimize the effects of radiation, and to “encourage” new thresholds of biological resilience by virtue of adjusting subjective perception of the threat. Despite its visible arbitrariness, the manipulation of the allowable limit of exposure carries an expert power of veridiction that works to establish deadly radiation as an acceptable reality, absorbable by and rendered compatible with a body’s, and a population’s, conditions of life. Mere weeks after the nuclear meltdown, Shunichi Yamashita, a Fukushima Radiation Health Risk Advisor, delivered a public talk that crystallizes the moral imperative for people to think and feel positive in the wake of disaster. In his talk he helps to hail the depoliticized, resilient subject into being by reassuring the Japanese that so long as they keep “smiling” they won’t suffer any negative effects from radiation, whereas if they are not able to put a happy face on the situation they’ll be prone to its negative effects (“Unbelievable”). Yamashita’s advice reveals how the language of emotional as well as physical resilience downloads responsibility for the nuclear disaster onto the psychosomatic subject’s powers of feeling.

By contrast, farmers like Masami Yoshizawa resist harvesting positive lessons of this kind from the meltdown. Instead, they ontologically link their present and future existence to that of livestock animals whose market value has been ruined by radiation, and whose lives and deaths are much harder to resourcify either symbolically or materially. Although seemingly irrelevant to the sublime machinations of the global nuclear economy, the scattering of people who swim against the biopolitical tide of evacuation and self-preservation at least begin a defiant practice of animality that could change everything.

Footnotes

1. Nancy writes: we “must begin by calling into question the distinction … between military and civilian” (18). To this end, he invokes the philosopher Osamu Nishitani, who wrote a text one month after 3/11 entitled “Where is Our Future?” As Nancy notes, “Osamu Nishitani could speak, on March 19, 2011, of a state of ‘war without enemy.’ A war without enemy is a war against ourselves. The problem posed by the ‘peaceful’ use of the atom is that of its extreme, and extremely lasting, harmfulness” (16).

2. Japan’s more than fifty nuclear reactors were decommissioned after the Fukushima disaster, and intense public protests appeared to be successfully averting the resumption of nuclear energy in the country. Devastatingly, however, the current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has since begun rebooting the nuclear nation, and in April 2015 the Japanese courts approved the first restart of a nuclear power station in the country.

3. For a history of Canada’s exploitation of the Dene people in the mining of uranium on their territory, see van Wyck.

4. In his formulation of an ecological Marxism, James O’Connor contends that Marx failed to consider how “‘natural barriers’ may be capitalistically produced barriers, that is, a second capitalized nature” (160).

5. I first came across reference to the “refuseniks” in Gilhooly.

6. It would be worthwhile to bring Rancière’s notion of dissensus up against the nuclear sublime in relation to another nuclear disaster, that of Chernobyl. As Adriana Petryna notes in her study of Chernobyl, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl (2002), damaged life has been strategically mobilized as a biological resource by many survivors of Chernobyl, and in a manner that, I’d suggest, interacts in complicated ways with neoliberal discourses of resilience. Writes Petryna, human “biology, scientific knowledge, and suffering have become cultural resources through which citizens stake their claims for social equity in a harsh market transition” (4).

7. Muons are apparently atomic particles harmless to humans, animals, and plants, and benign in their radioactive powers.

8. As Rancière puts it in The Politics of Aesthetics, aesthetics is political not when its subject matter is political, but when it involves “the invention of new forms of life” (25).

9. See Humber and “Fukushima.”

10. The allowable radiation exposure limit before March 11, 2011, was one millisievert per year. For children in Fukushima, the limit has been reset to twenty millisieverts. Adam Broinowski notes that Japan’s “systematic program to adjust official radiation limits and to underestimate the dangers to health” has facilitated a deadly plan to begin resettling evacuees back in the exclusion area.

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ELLIE ANDERSON is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Muhlenberg College. She is co-author of “Feminist Perspectives on the Self” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and has previously published on Simone de Beauvoir in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.

BRENT RYAN BELLAMY is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He works on energy futures and speculative fiction. He has published articles in Mediations, Paradoxa, and the edited collection Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (Wesleyan UP, 2014). He has work forthcoming in Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham UP, 2017) and in Time, Globalization and Human Experience (Routledge, 2016), and has a co-edited, special collection, Marxism and Energy (MCM Prime, 2017), due out early next year. He is currently completing a monograph titled Remainders of the American Century: Post-Apocalyptic Novels in the Age of U.S. Decline.

JONATHAN BELLER is Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. Books and edited volumes include The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle; Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle and the World-Media System; and Feminist Media Theory (a special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online). Among his current book projects are The Programmable Image and The Message is Murder. Beller has been a fellow at the Barnard Center for Research on Women and Gender, serves on the editorial collective of Social Text, and is the director of The Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt.

AMANDA BOETZKES is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on the intersection of the biological sciences with visual technologies and artistic practices of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. She is the author of The Ethics of Earth Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and co-editor of Heidegger and the Work of Art History (Ashgate Press, 2014). She is currently writing a book entitled, Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste, which analyzes the use and representation of garbage in contemporary art, and how waste as such is defined, narrativized and aestheticized in the age of global capitalism.

JEFF DIAMANTI is a postdoctoral fellow with the Petrocultures Research Group at the University of Alberta and is the Media@McGill postdoctoral fellow in “Media and the Environment” as of fall 2016. He is co-editor on a number of collections and companions on energy, climate, and political theory, including After Oil (Winter 2016), a special issue of Reviews in Cultural Theory on “Envisioning the Energy Humanities” (March 2016), and Marxism and Energy (forthcoming 2016). He has articles forthcoming in Resilience and Western American Literature, and he is working on a monograph titled The Long Transition: Energyscapes and the Infrastructures of Impasse as well as a co-edited collection on Climate Realism with Lynn Badia and Marija Cetinić.

CAROLYN ELERDING is a PhD candidate in Comparative Studies at Ohio State University, where she studies culture, media, and technology and has been awarded the 2016–2017 Presidential dissertation fellowship. Her essay “Mass Online Education: Dialectic of Enlightenment 2.0” was published in Mediations after winning the Sprinker essay prize in 2013. For the 2017 MLA Convention in Philadelphia, she has organized a panel called “Materiality, Difference, and Digital Labor.” She is a member of FemTechNet and the Fembot Collective, two organizations that emphasize decolonial feminist frameworks in cultural studies of science, technology, and media, as well as pedagogy.

RICK ELMORE is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Appalachian State University. He researches and teaches in 20th century French philosophy, critical theory, ethics, social political philosophy, environmental philosophy, and new realisms. His articles and essays have appeared in Politics & Policy, Symplokē, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, and The Aesthetic Ground of Critical Theory (Rowman and Littlefield) among others. Rick’s work is guided primarily by the question how political, ethical, and environmental systems and institutions situate themselves in relation to violence, that is, to issues of inclusion, exclusion, power, force, law, policing, and normativity.

STEPHANIE LEMENAGER is Barbara and Carlisle Moore Professor of English and Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. Her publications include the books Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (2014), Manifest and Other Destinies (2005) and (as co-editor) Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century (2011). Her forthcoming collection Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities (with co-editors Stephen Siperstein and Shane Hall) addresses climate change pedagogy. She is a founding editor of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities.

MICHAEL O’DRISCOLL is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta and Co-Editor of ESC: English Studies in Canada. He teaches and publishes in the fields of critical and cultural theories with a particular emphasis on deconstruction and psychoanalysis, and his expertise in 20th Century American Literature focuses on various forms of material culture, including poetry and poetics. He is Editor of Jackson Mac Low’s Complete Light Poems and Co-Editor of After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory and a special journal issue on The Event of the Archive; he is Co-Author of A Bibliography of the Black Sparrow Press. He has published in journals such as Modernism/modernity, Contemporary Literature, Studies in the Literary Imagination, and Mosaic.

NICOLE SHUKIN is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Victoria, and faculty member of the interdisciplinary graduate program in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought (CSPT). She is the author of Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and her work has appeared, among other places, in volumes like Animal Life & the Moving Image (Palgrave 2015), Material Cultures in Canada (Wilfrid Laurier Press 2015), Against Automobility (Blackwell 2006) and Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Edinburgh 2000).

MARK SIMPSON is Associate Professor and Associate Chair (Undergraduate Programs) in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, where he also co-edits ESC: English Studies in Canada. He specializes in US culture, particularly in the decades around 1900, and also in material culture studies, materialist theory, and mobility studies. He is the author of Trafficking Subjects: The Politics of Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (Minnesota, 2004), the co-editor of a special 2010 issue on “Traffic,” and the co-editor of a forthcoming essay collection on the shared ecology of liberalism and literary history in modernity. He has essays published or forthcoming in journals such as Cultural Critique, The Canadian Review of American Studies, Nineteenth-Century Prose, and Essays on Canadian Writing, and in collections from presses such as Oxford, McGill-Queen’s, and UBC.

IMRE SZEMAN is Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. He conducts research on and teaches in the areas of energy and environmental studies, critical and cultural theory, and social and political philosophy. Forthcoming books include Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham UP, 2017; co-editor) and The Energy Humanities Reader (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017; coeditor). He is currently completing work on On Empty: The Cultural Politics of Oil, a book that maps the complex and contradictory ways in which oil has come to be positioned in our social imaginaries.

JENNIFER WENZEL is a scholar of postcolonial studies and environmental and energy humanities at Columbia University, where she is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. She is the author of Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal, 2009) and co-editor (with Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger) of Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham, forthcoming).

DAVID WILLS is visiting professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His publications include books on film theory, and on Thomas Pynchon, as well as Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction (Stanford, 2005) and a three volume analysis of the originary prostheticity of the human: Prosthesis (Stanford, 1995), Dorsality (Minnesota, 2008) and Inanimation (Minnesota, 2016). He has translated works by Derrida (Right of Inspection, Counterpath, The Gift of Death, and The Animal That Therefore I Am), and is a founding member of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project. He is completing a book entitled Killing Times: the Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty.