Energo-poetics: Reading Energy in the Ages of Wood, Oil, and Wind
Balkan, Stacey
Energo-poetics: Reading Energy in the Ages of Wood, Oil, and Wind - 2021.
50
As a means of imagining a future delinked from conventional articulations of energopower, in this essay I examine three speculative-critical texts that critique fossil capitalism and which demonstrate the ways in which a simple shift in fuel may be insufficient to the task of building a just future. I first read Ursula LeGuin’s 1974 novel The Word for World is Forest as a critique of the plantation logic immanent to her fictional “New Tahiti” before turning to Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2010 Ship Breaker—set in the blasted landscapes of the southeastern US’s petrochemical belt—in order to consider how the dystopian mode may be productive for thinking about energy cultures, but might ultimately trap the reader in an imaginative impasse. I then look to Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe’s recent duograph on the wind economies of Mexico’s isthmus of Tehuantepec, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (2019), which poses questions about energopolitics, just futures, and the imbrications of energy, ontology, and power within systems of modern governance, and which I read as a form of speculative anthropology, or (per historian Dipesh Chakrabarty) “philosophical anthropology.” The duograph posits the possibility of unsettling what both authors understand as the distorted logic of the Anthropocene age, while examining putative alternatives to petroculture that merely reinforce systemic forms of social and environmental injustice on a global scale. I read each text as a possible (although not always successful) means of imagining anew—that is, for opening new horizons for thinking about energy cultures.
Energo-poetics: Reading Energy in the Ages of Wood, Oil, and Wind - 2021.
50
As a means of imagining a future delinked from conventional articulations of energopower, in this essay I examine three speculative-critical texts that critique fossil capitalism and which demonstrate the ways in which a simple shift in fuel may be insufficient to the task of building a just future. I first read Ursula LeGuin’s 1974 novel The Word for World is Forest as a critique of the plantation logic immanent to her fictional “New Tahiti” before turning to Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2010 Ship Breaker—set in the blasted landscapes of the southeastern US’s petrochemical belt—in order to consider how the dystopian mode may be productive for thinking about energy cultures, but might ultimately trap the reader in an imaginative impasse. I then look to Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe’s recent duograph on the wind economies of Mexico’s isthmus of Tehuantepec, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (2019), which poses questions about energopolitics, just futures, and the imbrications of energy, ontology, and power within systems of modern governance, and which I read as a form of speculative anthropology, or (per historian Dipesh Chakrabarty) “philosophical anthropology.” The duograph posits the possibility of unsettling what both authors understand as the distorted logic of the Anthropocene age, while examining putative alternatives to petroculture that merely reinforce systemic forms of social and environmental injustice on a global scale. I read each text as a possible (although not always successful) means of imagining anew—that is, for opening new horizons for thinking about energy cultures.
Réseaux sociaux