Introduction: Energy Culture: Art and Theory on Oil and Beyond (original) (raw)

On the Energy Humanities; or, What can Philosophy Tell Us About Oil? (A Preliminary Sketch)

2015

In what ways have the humanities contributed to an understanding of the importance of energy to the constitution of contemporary society? This working paper offers an overview of some of the central concerns of a new area of study that has recently come to called the “energy humanities.” It does so by looking at the ways in which the energy humanities expand on the theoretical and conceptual insights of the environmental humanities, and by probing the manner in which the energy humanities have sought to identify the blind spot of energy—especially oil—in modern systems of thought. The second half of the essay looks in detail at one dimension of the energy humanities: the encounter of philosophical theory with oil and energy. Philosophers and theorists, including Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton and Allan Stoekl, have engaged with energy to better understand the nature of modernity and to grapple with the apparent limits of environmental responses to it. One of the aims of this essay is to point to the necessity of reframing modernity as an oil modernity—as a period of human history deeply shaped by a specific energy resource in a manner that demands we add energy to our account of historical, social, and cultural developments.

Petrocultures: Oil, Energy, and Culture

McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017

Presenting a multifaceted analysis of the cultural, social, and political claims and assumptions that guide how we think and talk about oil, Petrocultures maps the complex and often contradictory ways in which oil has influenced the public’s imagination around the world. This collection of essays shows that oil’s vast network of social and historical narratives and the processes that enable its extraction are what characterize its importance, and that its circulation through this immense web of relations forms worldwide experiences and expectations. Contributors’ essays investigate the discourses surrounding oil in contemporary culture while advancing and configuring new ways to discuss the cultural ecosystem that it has created.

How to Know About Oil: Energy Epistemologies and Political Futures

As a contribution to the growing exploration of oil and energy in the humanities, the author examines what we might learn from three attempts to probe how we know oil—that is, the complex, myriad ways in which we try to name and narrate oil’s social significance—in order to understand better the opportunities and challenges of making oil and energy a more conceptually powerful part of our social and cultural understandings. The first of the energy epistemologies the author examines, Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy (2011), reframes the history of left politics in relation to shifts in dominant forms of energy. The second, Edward Burtynsky’s photo-series Oil (2011), identifies the deep social significance of oil through experiments in visual form. The third example of knowing oil and energy is the ongoing struggle over the representation of the Alberta oil sands in public and political debate and discussion. The intent of examining these three distinct attempts to know oil as an essential component of social, cultural, and political life is to see what lessons such energy epistemologies might have for a left politics committed to an energy transition that would both ameliorate environmental concerns and enable greater social justice.

Balkan, Fall 2020 Graduate Seminar: Petrocultures/Energy Humanities

Course Description: What would happen if we were to examine literary texts through the lens of energy? That is, what if we approached William Wordsworth’s Romantic ruminations on the “sublime” crafts of “men’s arts” as a praxis for thinking about the material forces of the sublime—“motion and means...on land and sea” made possible first by the winds that would move commerce across the Atlantic Ocean in the long sixteenth century and soon thereafter by coal? What if we understood colonial occupation in the context of East Africa or throughout Latin America in terms of the transnational plantation economies that would also be fueled by wind or hydropower or coal, and thus conducted postcolonial critiques of novels like Gabriel García Marquéz’s Autumn of the Patriarch or Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat accordingly? Might we then understand energy not merely in terms of the “fuel-injected” American dream featured in a Bruce Springsteen song, but instead as the very means of fueling culture? Might we then appreciate that the conventional tropes of literary expression and critique are the products of the material forces contemporary to each work? That petroleum, for example, isn’t simply a theme, but is that which enables the very production of culture? As a seminar on Petrocultures, and an introduction to the Energy Humanities, this course shall focus on the imbrications between energy and cultural production in order to understand the ways in which material forces like coal or petroleum literally fuel culture. We shall explore a wide archive of cultural works that represent, in the words of literary scholar Patricia Yaeger, the “ages of wood…coal…oil” and ultimately alternative fuel sources like wind and solar power. Writers like Ursula LeGuin, Amitav Ghosh, Kim Stanley Robinson, Muriel Rukeyser, Nawal El Saadawi. ,Paolo Bacigalupi, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Herman Melville, and many others will guide us through our new geological epoch—call it the Anthropocene or the Thermocene—illustrating the intersections of cultural discourse, political ideology, and aesthetic expression. As we also will come to learn, there is no “age of wood,” for example, without a correlative commitment to Enlightenment notions of “improvement,” whether of self or land. There is likewise no age of oil, nor of wind, without a persistent commitment to such notions of civilizational progress as we see in the paeans to industry and “enlightenment” that generally characterize popular political thought. Thus, while we end with an exploration of alternative energy—alternatives, that is, to fossilized carbon—we likewise question whether a simple shift in fuel is sufficient to the task of averting the sorts of apocalyptic scenarios presented in novels like Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker. Ultimately, we will follow the After Oil collective in asking how aesthetic forms represent (and often reinforce) energy regimes and how, in the face of an overwhelming commitment to disaster porn, we might “frame the unimaginable,” which is to say life after carbon.

ENERGY Culture Society UC Berkeley Anthro 137 Spring 2017 BRJohnston Syllabus.pdf

Catalog Description: This course will consider the human dimensions of particular energy production and consumption patterns. It will examine the influence of culture and social organization on energy use, energy policy, and quality of life issues in both the domestic and international setting. Specific treatment will be given to mind-sets, ideas of progress, cultural variation in time perspectives and resource use, equity issues, and the role of power holders in energy-related questions.

Learning form the Oil Revolution: understanding the past

2015

This project visualizes the history and current presence of oil in our everyday surroundings in order to facilitate long-term urban sustainability and energy innovation. Designers and citizens around the world want buildings and cities to be more sustainable and ecological. While their initiatives to reduce energy use are relevant, they often concentrate on individual structures rather than larger global flows, and on technological approaches disconnected from history, society, and culture. They fail to build a new ecological mind-set, a widespread popular culture of sustainability. An older culture already characterizes our cities: petroleum has shaped our modern world. To make a new world, we must first understand the pervasiveness of petroleum; how its production, consumption, and physical and financial flows have shaped cities and rural landscapes such as the Rotterdam/Antwerp area; and how oil companies, governments, and citizens co-constructed an oil-based modern culture over ...