My name is Martha Broad I'm the executive director of the MIT Energy
Initiative—a little out of breath, it was a good workout getting here. I want
to welcome you to our October seminar sponsored by IHS. And we collaborate with
faculty and we're—I'm really pleased to introduce the faculty who have helped us
bring our speaker here today. Rania Ghosn is assistant professor of
architecture and urbanism here at MIT and she's of course with the School of
Architecture and planning. She has a really interesting organization practice
called Design Earth and she along with a partner have founded it. They've—they're
award-winning and she leads the office's work to engage the geographic—to open up
a range of aesthetic political concerns for architecture and urbanism. Her work
engages the geographic to open up a range of aesthetic and political
concerns and critically frames the urban condition at the intersection of
politics, aesthetics, and technological systems, be they energy, trash or farming.
She uses architecture to explore how urban systems change the earth and speculate
on ways of living with legacy technologies such as oil fields and
landfills. And I will leave it at that— it's a fascinating set of work that she
does and I'm going to have Rania now introduce our speaker. Thank you, Rania.
Good evening everyone and thank you for joining tonight's event.
It's my distinct pleasure to welcome Imre Szeman for a talk and a subsequent
panel conversation on what is petroculture. I'd like to begin by thanking
the MIT Energy Initiative for sponsoring this event and for the Department of
Architecture for hosting us. I was delighted when this past spring the MIT
Energy Initiative Director of Communications Emily Dahl and her team
expressed interest in an event that expands the Initiative's pivotal role
beyond the excellent scientific and engineering research to engage methods
and insights from humanities, aesthetics, and design and conversations on energy
and energy transitions. In 1833, Joseph Etzler, a young German engineer, published
a utopian treatise promising a paradise within the reach of old man without
labor by powers of nature and machinery. The inscription of them the frontispiece
offered an immediate gloss to the social ideal.
It reads: "toil and poverty will be no more among men. Nature affords infinite
powers and wealth." Over the last two centuries, Etzler's
world was made
possible, in part at least, by an abundant energy machine of fossil fuels—of coal
gas and oil—that are cheap, accessible, and a rich source of energy. Petroleum
and its extraction, refining, transformation, subsequent refining, and
consumption has shaped our physical and cultural environment across scales and
yet most of its technological geographies remained for most of us out
of sight and external to representation. Scholars have recently begun to address
oil's essential role in modern life and we are lucky tonight to host one of the
most important voices in this emerging field of energy humanities. How do we
think today about geographies of energy at the point when oil has shed its
developmental promises and when projections about fossil fuel depletion
and the need to manage climate change formulate the desirability of a
future energy transition? The task of making visible the oil
landscape seems important to me at least on two fronts. One is the question on how
do we live with legacy technologies such as oil fields and pipelines? In 2012, the
French philosopher Bruno Latour wrote that the real lesson of
Frankenstein was not that we should or could prevent the creation of
technological monsters, but that we should love our monsters—that creators
need to care for their creation. The age of oil invites us to revise our
disciplinary framework to think, for example, on the intertwined dimensions of
history, urban, cultural, aesthetic, literary, and environmental when
narrating the past and future of oil world capitals becomes significance. How
do we think of site such as Baku, Tulsa, Los Angeles, Houston, Dammam and
Stavanger. On a second point, the lessons of the age of oil also present telling
stories for contemporary efforts in energy diversification and transitions
to avoid possibly that the Green Revolution produced dirty matters of
geography. Much of the promotional culture of sustainable alternatives
often perpetuates a series of energy myths to quote the historian George
Basalla. Most importantly, that any newly discovered source of energy is assumed
to be without faults, infinitely abundant, and to have the potential to affect
utopian changes and society. These myths persist until a new source of energy is
deployed to the point that its drawbacks become apparent and the failure to
establish a utopian society must be reluctantly admitted. The next new
source of energy is not treated any differently. Instead, the recently
discarded energy myths are resurrected and bestowed upon the newcomer. The
transition to future energy regimes should maybe be accompanied by a reflec—
by reflection on the geographies upon which the current petroculture
rests. No little task. I'm very happy to host Imre this evening to
start to make this conversation—to move this conversation on how do we make
visible and speculate on oil significance as a prominent material and
for structural and imaginary in the early 21st century?
Imre is Canada Research Chair and cultural studies at the University
of Alberta and professor of communications and culture at the
University of Waterloo, Canada. He conducts research and teaches in the
areas of energy and environmental studies, as well as critical and cultural
theory, and social and political philosophy. Imre has been curating a
series of conversations on how we understand the questions of energy and
actively engage the social and cultural changes that are necessary to enable
energy transition, namely the transition from oil to other energy systems in our
time of uncertainty and climate change. Recent books that he's co-edited include
—and of course I forgot the couple of images that come to that—but this is the
recent books that he's recently co-edited which includes Fueling Culture,
Energy Humanities, and Petrocultures, all published within the past few months
along with others that maybe do not fit neatly into the theme of tonight's
evening, but it's been a it's been a good year so far—a few more months to go. So
these three books integrate energy and in particular petroleum as a key partof
contemporary culture. They bring together an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on
insights from literary and cultural studies, environmental history and eco
criticism, political economy, political ecology, post-colonial and globalization
study, and materialism old and new. Such collection of works investigates the
discourses surrounding oil in contemporary culture while advancing and
configuring new ways to discuss the cultural ecosystem that it has created.
They also contemplate the imaginaries and meanings when life is no longer
shaped by the consumption of fossil fuels.
Rosalind Williams and Caroline Jones have generously made the time to respond
to Imre's talk this evening. Rosalind is Bern Dibner Professor of the History
of Science and Technology and has served as program head of STS from 2002 to 2006.
Her main scholarly affiliation is the Society of the History of Technology
(SHOT) of which she served as president in 2005-2006 and from which she received
its highest award the Leonardo da Vinci medal in 2013. Her first three books—
Dream Worlds, Notes from the Underground, and Retooling—addressed the question of
what are the implications for human life both individual and
collective when we live in a predominantly self-constructed world? Her
new book, The Triumph of the Human Empire, surveys the overarching historical event
of our time—the rise and triumph of the human empire, defined by the dominance of
human presence on the planet. Caroline Jones is professor at the MIT School of
Architecture and Planning. She studies modern and contemporary art with a
particular focus on its technological modes of production, distribution, and
reception. And on that, she's responding to a talk by the artist Mark Dion
tomorrow night around his exhibition here in town at the ICA. She's published
on subjects ranging from Clement Greenberg to John Cage to new media to
biannual culture in her most recent book, The Global Work of Art. Her edited
volumes integrate the possible agency of representation and experience more
precisely in our cultural context, and these include picturing science,
producing art, sensorium, embodied experience, technology and
contemporary art, and experience cultural cognition and the common sense. She's a
fellow at the National Humanities Center and part of her project is to advance an
ongoing research tentatively entitled "Contested Visibilities and the
Anthropogenic Image," a book that she's writing in collaboration with historian
of science Peter Galison and through which she examines historical cases that
show contested moments of picturing human generated ecological catastrophe.
In a modest way, I contribute to this conversation as an educator, an urbanist,
and a designer with works on and research on energy.
These include ongoing design research on territories of oil in the Middle East or
a graduate research seminar that advances the role for designers in the
physical and cultural environment of energy. This is part of a wide array of
research here in the Department of Architecture which along with Caroline
and myself extends to environmental modeling and building technology, urban
studios from the Center of Advancement, urbanism and material research on
automated composite housing, and portable energy harvesting solar textile
kits—only to name a few. I very much look forward to how tonight's talk and
conversation will continue to grow here and without further ado please join me
in welcoming Imre Szeman to MIT.
Thanks very much for that introduction. Thank you everybody for coming today. So
when I had an idea of a different presentation than the one I'm gonna give.
When I looked at the poster that Rania sent me, this was what it was listed that
I was going to talk about and I was a little bit surprised, but what I had kind
of indicated—what I had sent to my...my respondents was actually the—
something about the first one—how you can use energy as a critical component
of cultural and literary studies. But it seemed to me that it was equally
important, and especially for people who are not already doing this work in
what's called energy humanities, to address together kind of give you some
background on these other two elements and so that's what I'm going to be
talking about today. And I'll transition at the very very end into it talking
about energy and relationship to a literature and culture. So six years ago,
about six years ago, the petrocultures research group was established with the
aim of developing a sharper understanding of the ways that we use
and abuse energy. Its immediate intention was to examine the social, cultural, and
political implications of Canada's turn-of-the-century leap into the ranks
of the world's oil superpowers. Our interest in energy arose in part as a
result of working at the research university closest to the Athabasca tar
sands. In Edmonton, where the University of Alberta is located, it's hard not to
see oil everywhere, and not only in the physical infrastructure of refineries,
but also in its social costs and consequences—labor dislocation, inflated
housing prices, alcohol and drug abuse, and rates—higher rates—high rates of
sexual violence and family dysfunction. Very quickly however, petroculture
scholars also began to grapple with other, larger questions.
What is energy for in our society? How does the availability of relatively
cheap energy affect how we socialize and relate to one another? How does energy
shape the form of culture that we inhabit and of cultural development? What
are the inequalities that come with fossil fuels and what is stopping
renewables from carrying these same inequalities forward? I have to just
mention on this last point, I feel like there's a kind of a a very strange
connection that we've made, and we imagine that if we have solar power or
other kinds of renewables suddenly there'll be all other kinds of social
inequalities will be addressed as well. I'm not sure how this kind of connection
got made but I feel like it's there in our social imaginary. We moderns still
tend to take energy as a largely neutral aspect of social life, as little more
than a dead input into the motors of a society's form and rationale originates
at a distance from coal mines and oil fields. But the forms of energy we use,
and how we use them, shape society through and through, and not just in how
we work, say in factories instead of fields, or in how we move around using
horsepower instead of horses. This is what we mean by petrocultures, the term
that gives our group its name. Petrocultures is the global culture we find
ourselves in today. It is the name for a society that's been organized around the
energies and products of fossil fuels, the capacities it engenders and enables,
and the situations in context it creates. It's not just that our physical
infrastructures depend on oil and gas, or that our social and economic practices
have been organized around easy and cheap access to fossil fuels. The
relationship to our dominant energy form is deeper, pervasive, and constitutive. To
say that we inhabit a petroculture is to say that we are fossil fuel creat—
creatures all the way down, all the way through. Our expectations, our
sensibilities, our habits, our ways of being in and moving across the world, how
we imagine ourselves in relation to nature as well as in relation to one
another, these have all been sculpted by, and in relation to, the massively
expanded energies of the fossil fuel era. To give just one example, in the
potential shift from gas to electric powered cars now promised us, what is
rarely questioned, all too rarely questioned, is the necessity of the
automobile itself. As inhabitants of a global petroculture, we have all come
to expect the mobility, freedom, and autonomy of mechanized movement by land,
air, and sea. Those parts of the world that don't yet have a car in every
garage see it as an index of economic and social progress, a sign of having
joined the modern community because at long last they are able to use energy at
the same level as those in the global north. Over the course of this century, we
will need to undergo an energy transition— a shift from an economy and
society based on energy derived from fossil fuels to an economy and society
based on a mix of energy forms. This transition, if we in fact undertake it,
will constitute the greatest experiment— the greatest social experiment— in human
history. A planned, plotted, and predetermined
shift from one kind of society to another— from the petrocultures we
inhabit today to some other form of society.
Real energy transition has to involve social, political, and cultural transition
too, with attention to how energy has shaped us and the importance of energy
to human collectivities.
We should not imagine that we carry out in our environmental duty when it comes
to energy by asserting that we all stay away from the dirty stuff and hope
scientists come up with lots of clean stuff. At petrocultures, we see this
energy transition as an opportunity for a transition too to the kind of society
many of us have long imagined—collective, equitable, and just in all of its
practices and principles. Just how might we trigger a transition like the one I'm
describing? My comments today draw, in part, on an experiment in collective
thinking and writing that petrocultures carried out in which I lead called
After Oil School. Thirty-five scholars, politicians, and artists spent four days
together mapping out how we might engage in transition which resulted in this
small book here called After Oil, which there's free copies of
up here if you're interested and you can grab at the end of the talk. And I guess
what I'm gonna be talking about connects energy transition with cultural
transition and then at the very end I'm going to turn to a discussion of
cultural analysis in relation to energy. So four parts: just what is oil? Oil
composes space and shapes culture. It modulates our lives including on the
clothing we wear, the objects we use, the buildings we occupy, the spaces we move
through, the daily routines that structure everyday existence, our habits
and perception,s our commitments and beliefs. Oil, as a metonym of the larger
fossil economy, names a way of organizing society of bring— of bringing people
together and of keeping them apart. Oil modulates everything not because of some
natural or magical property of the energy source itself. Rather, oil
expresses a social system bound up historically with the rise of modern
industry and industrial capital, including the creation of an industrial
working class, the birth of middle class opportunity and material
privilege in the West, and the mirrored acceleration of precarity and mass
unemployment across the globe. Energizing the labor process at the site of
production increased the productive capacity of workers, but it also gave
business owners a solution to the rising cost of labour. Today, we call these
phenomenon automation, offshoring, and capital deepening, yet as economic
strategies all three depend on more and more non-human energy in the form of
transportation and more efficient machinery. To describe oil in this way is
to view the problem of energy transition from an unfamiliar perspective— as the
object of a social challenge. For to transition from oil to some other energy
source will entail—whether we like it or not, whether we participate in the
process or not—it will entail the unmaking and remaking of our social
worlds. Undeniably this prospect is daunting, even overwhelming, but might its
challenges also offer surprising promise and possibility?
What is intentional transition? If oil so saturates our cultural and social
imaginary then what is one to do? What options are available to us in the midst
of this tectonic transition that is moving underneath our feet and
circulating in the air we breathe? Given that we are already deep in the midst of
transition, if perhaps not an intentional one, not an intentional and focused one,
where should we locate ourselves? The default position is a disabling one. It
is to assume that this transition is a purely technological problem that will
be resolved through technocratic solutions. Such a position assumes that
responsibility can be entrusted and hand it off to someone else.
Reinforcing this default resignation is the embedded assumption that
the market will resolve the crisis. This due.. too presumes that only—that the only
intentionality needed is that of market forces, and that
we as individuals and communities need not participate in shaping, hoping, or
imagining except along narrowly defined consumerist lines. To accept this
default position is to abdicate agency. It's to abandon to someone else the
creative act of making the world and the values that it will hold. An intentional
transition reframes the energy question as a humanistic one requiring our vote
in the matter, our intentionality, agency, and the
assertion of values and desires that we hold. As such, it begins by taking account
of where we sit historically, where we find ourselves in terms of our
infrastructural dependencie, and our effective, and indeed even our erotic attachments,
to the fossil economy. An intentional transition begins by reckoning
candidly with the problem of the path dependencies that are required for
survival in a post oil economy and with an acknowledgement of the attachment to
desires realized under the fossil economy. But it then moves beyond oil to
a reckoning with the failures, the block desires, the pain and the penury, the
inequality and injustice which the fossil economy could not resolve under
its terms of management. The principles of intentional transition— people always
ask me like "what, what do we do about it?" so I'm finally going to tell you. An
intentional transition, as I said, is premised on agency, on the conscious
participation and mobilization of people in communities. In this respect, conscious
participation cannot be reduced to the meager practice of constituencies being
brought into a discussion after the terms of the debate have already been
set. It means people being brought together to establish the framework for
the debate from the start so that its terms and its conduct conforms to their
hopes, their needs, and their values as individuals and communities.
That should be the very first one of that—that's agency mobilization.
Second: collective stewardship. An intentional transition is premised on
collective stewardship, on the avowed right of people in their communities to
own, manage, and develop the energy resources that conform to their desires
and needs, and their support for ideals for reproducing and producing the health
of their communities and the values they hold. In this sense, public control is
distinct from the prevailing tendency toward private control and increasing
private management of this epical of transition. Why can't energy be something
akin to water? Something—a good—that is managed by all of us? Third: quality. An
intentional transition has to be premised on equality, on the rights of all
peoples and communities to adequate energy resources for survival.
It's to acknowledge that life under the fossil economy did not fulfill for many
people or communities this basic human right and that the fossil economy
produced wild inequalities that left much of the world behind while
conferring the privileges of energy along unfair and wholly undesirable
racial, national, gender, and class lines. In the old world prior to transition, you
were rich because you happen to inhabit a part of the world that had oil under
it. That can't be possible going forward. Fourth: ethics of use. An intentional
transition is premised on a clear understanding of the ethical dimensions
of energy use and the hierarchy of human priorities. Intentional transition means
collectively sorting out the moral differences between the use of energy
for more elementary needs—that more elementary needs we all have for food
water and the basic essentials of life— and the surplus material and immaterial
desires that energy quite literally feeds and fuels. Fifth: sustainability. An
intentional transition has to be premised on sustainability. It distinguishes
quite clearly between accepting the risk of an increasingly obsolescent fossil economy and embracing the opportunities of an after oil economy in opportunities of an after oil economy in
which energy is thoroughly socialized and generated within a framework of
sustainability. Sixth: a redefinition of growth. An intentional transition is
premised on growth and development, but it does not take these terms as
self-evident. Instead, it redefines these much abused terms as something distinct
from business as usual. In the after oil economy, growth and development are tied
to the social values articulated above and joined to a new ethics of resilience
and sustainability. Growth and development are taken out of the hands
of the economists and given back to the people—
apologies to any economists who happen to be here. Final section: transition
desire. Some of the challenges involved in intentional transition can be
grasped by considering just one of its many dimensions—shifts in how desire is
coordinated by and in relation to the use of fossil fuels. We live, especially
in the Western world, in an era of unmatched material plenty in which
desires are indulged and encouraged encouraged no matter how trivial. A
consumerist ethos pervades our culture and for man it appears that we inhabit, in
the words of former American President President Herbert Hoover, the world of
the constantly moving happiness machine. This incredible cornucopia of the 20th
and early 21st centuries—this thing called the great acceleration, what
others called the great derangement since 1945— would have been unthinkable
without a cheap, portable, seemingly infinite source of energy in the form of
petrocarbons or oil. As we've seen our dependence on oil has had
unforeseen but profoundly dire consequences on the ecological health of
our planet. Attempts to address this crisis have
largely concentrated on advocating transition to more renewable forms of
energy, yet as critics such as the great geographer, historian, scientist, writer
about energy, Vaclav Smil, points out—as he points
out, many works, for him at least it seems unlikely that forms of renewable energy
will in the near future be able to supplement our current energy demands
let alone supplant them. Our present circumstances amount in part to a crisis
of desire whose resolution may depend less on finding new forms of energy than
on restraining, curbing, or reshaping what looks to be a limitless desire provoked
and fueled by consumerism. Such a formulation sits uneasily with the
modern temperament. And in the face of promises of unrestrained plenty the
suggestion of restraint smacks of puritanical sanctimony. Who are you to
tell me to forget forgo my desires, you might ask? Nevertheless, tackling the
question of desire need not require the suppression or even renunciation of
desire, but as many critics have argued, its redirection. If life in consume—if
if life in consumer society promises a dream of endless ease and joyful
satiation and satisfaction, its critics for a century now have pointed
out, have pointed precisely to the profound gap between this dream and
actual lived experience, noting that the actual pleasures and happiness
experienced fall fall short of those promised. To such critics the consumer
citizen appears very much akin to a dog chasing its own tail, pursuing an elusive
goal that can that it can never achieve no matter how fast it runs. Given the
frequently noted intimate connection between petroleum as primary energy
source and the deterritorialization, intenification
and acceleration of production, it is to be wondered whether the
transition from fossil fuels might itself offer new opportunities to
satiate human desires for things as a more intimate connection to local, social,
and natural communities, fulfilling work, and free time. I lied, there's one other
section. And this is back to that beginning part about culture and
relation—energy in relation to examining culture. And I guess I could speak to the—
I gave a paper to my colleagues who are gonna comment on it, but I think
this short page will will speak to that as well.
Like no other text that I've encountered to date, a book by the novelist and critic
Amitav Ghosh called The Great Derangement, links the modern novel to
the era of oil. In part, this book by Ghosh constitutes an extended and expanded
analysis of what he has called the novel's failure to take on the oil
encounter. What Ghosh has said, Ghosh is originally from India, he's puzzled why
in an era in which oil has been so important over the 20th century, there
are very few novels at all that speak about oil, that address it directly. He's
surprised that the American novel in particular seems to have no interest
whatsoever in the substance that gave it— gave the United States its power, much of
its power in the 20th century. He's surprised that it only appears as a
subject matter in some novels—in very few novels and generally in
post-colonial novels. And we can argue with Ghosh about this,
but I would say that one of the surprises that I have had as
somebody who's been more and more interested in energy is the degree to which I don't
find it represented in the objects that I'm most interested in.
Then one can run around and find like examples where counter-examples... but
they're really just minor examples given how essential this commodity has been to
our lives, to shaping who and what we are. It's interesting how this very very
dominant, important, culturally important form seems to have no interest in it
whatsoever. But Ghosh poses another question now—he asks why hasn't the
novel made climate change central to its depictions of contemporary reality? Ghosh
remarks "few indeed were the quarters that remained unperturbed over the last
few years by climate change but literary fiction and the arts appear to have been
among them." Shortlist for prizes reviews and so on betray no signs of a heightened
engagement of climate change. And indeed, that's true of the last year of
literary lists for literary prizes. We seem to be interested in the—in
narrative self development, in the unfolding of the liberal subject, in the
encounters that a subject has societally. That seems to be our fascination—with
the with this subject, with the individual, with the individual's
experience—that's what the novel has become about. And what Ghosh says about that
is that, in a way, it has to do with the fact that literary fiction, and this is a
quote from him, it derives from the grid of literary forms and conventions
that came to shape the narrative imagination precisely the period when
accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth.
The forms and conventions that he points to are ones in which the novel mirrors
developments across the humanities and social sciences—the production of the
modern worldview in which nature was moderate and orderly,
when regularity and predictability came to inform the practices of science as
much as the operations of governmentality, and when the individual is
championed over the collective in liberal philosophy as much as in the
novel's individualizing imaginary.
These are more specific claims than the production of the expansionary drive of
the... the cultural, the kind of energy unconscious that I've been narrating
here, but they articulates some of the same intuitions about the link between
culture and society and energy and name some of the limits and problems of the
literary and other representational forms when it comes to global warming.
Ghosh asks, "is it possible that the arts and literature of this time will one day
be remembered not for their daring, not for their championing of freedom, but
rather because of their complicity in the great derangement?" End quote. Is it
that they're going to be remembered for their collective imaginative failure in
the face of global warming? We need to consider a transition not just in energy
forms, but in our social forms and practices too as I've been saying
throughout this presentation. Might this include one of my objects of interests—
my object of scholarly interests—the novel and other cultural
forms that grew to life when energy was cheap and abundant? Thanks very much.
So possibly to respond to the provocation of literary and cultural
works responding to energy and energy transitions,
Rosalind do you want to follow up on literary attributes of the works? Yes, thank you. Because I want to take on Ghosh. Yeah, I think he's wrong. But actually, not about, not talking
about today's work. I double majored in history and
literature, so I'm here to tell you about, there'll be two examples from history and three
from literature, works that absolutely address these issues. And the
problem with energy is that it's everywhere and so it's hard to see. It's
not a thing; it's a relationship; it's a force and we often see the thing, but you
know it's like seeing the petroleum, but not the energy—it it doesn't have to be
petroleum in your car, anything that could drive it would work—but we see the
petroleum and that becomes what we focus on.
So first of all I just want to say there is a sub-discipline called the History
of Technology and it has a lot to say about the history of energy, but it's
often intertwined with the history of material things. Some matter and energy,
as we all know, are transferable and they go together and they often go together
in in history. But what's interesting about the history of technology is that
people who practice this also try to work in social organization so it's the
intertwining history of energy, matter, and social organization. So I...one book I
wanted to describe as an example of this has just come out, or quite recently, and
this is James C Scott's book Against the Grain that's titled after a novel, a
French novel, if you don't already know that,
subtitled A Deep History of the Earliest States. And his history of energy begins
with fire and he talks a lot about the invention of fire as being so important
in increasing human energy ability because it allows you to digest food
much more quickly. The colon can be a lot shorter in the brain can be a lot bigger.
So he describes this as kind of the beginning of human history in and of
itself is the technology of fire and he also talks about the transformation of
the landscape and claims that the age of the Anthropocene really began back as
soon as you had fire, you were transforming—you being humans—you were
transforming the face of the earth. But he also has a very interesting
description of the use of grains as opposed to other sources of food for
humans, other sources being legumes or root crop,s but he talks about the
favoritism for grains because they are more readily measured and weighed and
can be seen when they're harvested and
they're harvested all at once and you can't hide
them and therefore they're very good for states or state-based actors that want
to tax. They're much more amenable to the taxation—that is the the grains of wheat,
barley, rice, maize—than other forms of food. So he's claiming that the
extraction of energy from grains was favored because of social organization
and it was not necessarily just a sun given preference. That started me
thinking about whether fossil fuels could be thought of in a similar way. In
other words is...to make money off of fossil fuels it's a lot easier, I think,
this is my hypothesis, than looking at wind or water. Anyway, I just throw that
out of something to think about. And the work of a historian that really
gets us thinking in a new way about the history of energy. Howeve,r this is not
new and I also want to tell you or remind you maybe about the work of Lewis
Mumford called Technics and Civilization, published in 1934, where he is taking,
well let's see, Scott would call it a package,
Mumford calls it a technological complex. He's describing periods of
energy use that are coordinated with periods of material use in social
organization. And he terms them the eotechnic, the paleotechnic and the neo
technic, and in this fascinating book he describes each of these technological
complexes in the historical order and weaves in their discussion of energy,
matter, and social organization. So just for example, the eotechnic, it's about
the year 1000 to year 1750 in the West, when, and he's very generous in
describing the innovations that were made particularly in service...in harnessing
the service of wind and water, and he says as a result of these, you know,
efforts in that period, a large intelligentsia could come into existence,
also great works of art and scholarship and science and engineering could be
created without recourse to slavery. It was a release of energy, a victory for
the human spirit. This is what I like about Mumford he's, I mean he's dated in
many ways, but he's always talking about human desires as well as matter and
energy. He also talks about the material of wood and glass as being
characteristic of the eotechnic. The paleotechnic—that's the bad period;
that's fossil fuels; that's coal and iron. And then the neotechnic, he's very
positive about this or hopeful. He's writing remember right just when
electrification is taking place worldwide and he says no longer, you know,
is energy dependent on the coal mine because electricity can be produced in
very different ways. You've got much more variety; it's much more portable.
It's very optimistic, probably too much so, but it's fascinating to go back and
look at his predictions for the neotechnic phase in light of where we
are now. And it's holistic and it's exciting and that's...that's an example of
what a great historian can do. Now, what can great writers do? What does
literature add to this? Literature reveals the energy that it is often
hidden because it's mixed up with so many other human activities and matter—
materials. In other words, literature can go back to the incarnation taking the
abstraction of energy and showing how it is embodied and made tangible in human
life. Literature also sees energy whole. It sees energy from human experience
from the inside out, where many dimensions of energy use are integrated
in one life. So I'm going to give you three examples
from literature—U.S. literature—and I owe this whole part of the talk to Leo Marx.
Okay, one—Moby Dick is the oil-based novel and if you know if Ghosh doesn't
know that, he better reread Moby Dick. This is where the...with the age of sail
and wind is turning into the age of oil before your eyes because you're chasing
whales and you're chasing them for their oil. And if you really want to get
carried away with the power of what Melville does in this book, published in,
actually October 18th, I looked it up— October 18th, 1851. Go to the
tryworks scene, chapter 96. The tryworks are where on the ship
that's on the water, between the wind and the water, you have a fire and you're...
you're essentially distilling the whale blubber and extracting the oil from it
and you are feeding the fire with it— kind of leftovers of the blubber, so you
start the fire originally with the wood but from then on it goes with the whale's
own body feeding the fire. The whale supplies its own fuel and burns its own
body and this passage ends, "then the rushing Pequod"...that's the boat, the the
ship..."thus the rushing Pequod freighted with
savages, laden with fire, and burning a corpse and plunging into the darkness..
the blackness of darkness seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac
commander's soul." And if that doesn't capture tonight's news, I don't know what
does. As if, you know, just reread Moby Dick and and you've done the most
important thing. Second though, here's a book you haven't heard of, but it was
written in the 1890s. It's about Maine. It's called The Country of
the Pointed Firs. It's very quiet and the reason I bring it up is because it
focuses on where energy systems have retreated.
I mean Maine used to be a big shipping area.
It was no longer that way by the 1890s. This is a novel about a place where energy
has retreated and used to be there and is no longer. And I think we always kind
of look at where energy systems are going; I think it's also worth looking at
where they're sucking away activity and where they're, well in Leo Marx's words,
he said you know the Industrial Revolution is taking place offstage. In
other words, you're in Maine and you're seeing the results of it by the retreat
of energy from an area, and this also is very relevant. Second section of
The Times today, front-page story about small cities in the U.S. and how they're
at such a disadvantage compared to large cities—same story. Third one, again this
is the education of Henry Adams, now if you haven't done it lately, go back and
read chapter 25, The Dynamo and the Virgin, where Adams is being shown around
the Paris Exposition of 1900 by his friend Samuel Pierpont Langley, as in
Langley field. They're looking at things and Langley just goes to the energy. He
wants to go to where the force is and it begins a sequence of chapters on
force as the clue to human history— the sequence of force being what Adams
recognizes that he is seeing around 1900. And it's not just the Dynamo, it's also
all these scientific forces like x-rays that he can't understand. They're just
they're anarchistic; they're chaotic. And he asked what does this mean for
civilization? So, oh boy, I wish I could read the whole thing, but let me...let me
just say, he's bowing down to the Dynamo, worshiping it as if it were the Virgin.
And he's saying the Virgin used to be the the locus of desire because sex is
power, sex is force, but now we don't worship the Virgin, we worship the
Dynamo. What does this mean for a civilization when your worshipping
man-made force as opposed to supposedly a god-given force? Anyway, he says, you
know, he finds himself lying in the gallery of machines at the great
Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden eruption of forces
totally new. Okay, this is just a little sampling, history and literature have a
lot to say. And okay, that's all I really don't need to say myself. I'll let them
speak for me. Thank you. All right, I'm going to try and speed through this so
we can get to our own conversation. I tried to do a little bit of applied
Szemen so that we could think about the force of his argument and what he's
recommending in Energy Humanities. I should wave that book around, but I can
do it later...is that we radically rethink as historians and culture writers of
periodization. For myself, I want to introduce into the conversation the Foucauldian
and Delusion concept of visibility and invisibility, so that when
we look at a cultural object we can ask what is it making visible and what, by
extension, is it writing out or not making visible through the very same
regimes? And then finally, I was very struck in the paper that he sent, which
he didn't give, by this concept of unlike coal, petroleum's capacity to be
dissociated and to dissociate us as subjects from the source of our energy.
You know, coal was this rock you, you know, shoveled it in to something that you
were making energy out of, whereas with, you know, with electricity you have, you
know, the dissociation from the source which I thought was an extremely
interesting heuristic. So taking his idea of periodizing history differently, we
have both the materials that could periodize these epochs, but we also have
the kind of energy produced and...and once you get electricity of course,
everything is fungible, right. The source that powers the Dynamo could be steam,
could be wood even, could be coal, could eventually be oil, could be nuclear
power, and so on and so forth. But taking these periodizations, I
thought it was interesting to just plunge you into one of the great
chestnuts of Modern Art History, which is Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed and this is
dissociation in action, in a certain sense. So so posh a Roz
Williams conversation that we just had the benefit of her insights to
literature, it may be about energy, but it is also making invisible the source in
terms of the minds where the coal is being extracted, in terms of what's
happening in Wales, right, this is outside Londo,n we're seeing speed itself. Right,
we're having the ideology of speed and and kind of fluidity of motion created
for us. There's a lot more to be said, but I just want to throw this out to help us
think about these capacities of the human you know to not visualize while
they're visualizing, right, this...this complicated heuristic. Interestingly, we
can see in some of the paintings of modernism the unevenness of energy
distribution, even within the supposed you know hegemony of Europe itself, right.
We can see that in Italy, you know, the futurists are still depicting horses;
they're still struggling with the idea of animal power building their cities,
whereas in Paris by that point, you know just eight years later, you have a
sense of energy completely free-floating, completely, you know, denying its sources
and sort of ideologically producing itself as a machine turning quickly,
right, without...without source without... without material. What Szeman argues in
some of his work is that petroleum but, you know, I'm going to generalize this,
that the human discovery of different sources of energies are world making
devices. Right, that they produce worlds through their capacities of shrinking
space and time and increase these ideologies of fluid movement. In my
own domain, you know this is just what I talked about, what I find interesting
about the art of the 1960's is that you do begin to get a visualization or a
visibility for the extraction, for the stuff itself, for the material, and for
the complex social costs and institutions and infrastructures that
are built around energy extraction. And here is just, you know, two well-known
examples. Robert Smithson, the great theorist of
entropy, engaging in...in a way, returning the asphalt to the earth, in this gesture
that he does in Italy, Hans Hakka, a much more organized in his
institutional critique, creating an entire narrative around oil industries,
extraction industries, funding culture precisely to make their pollution
invisible. Right, there's a book called Oil Washing, you know, which is really
about these these cultural operations, so it's interesting that this enters the
art world specifically. But in Walter de Maria's lightning field, you know, you
have a focus on energy in a kind of pure form, so what is being made invisible
even as the energy of electrical, you know, electrical forces around the earth
are being made visible? Well if you actually go here, it's a virtual ritual
of beautiful invisiblizatio,n in a way. Right, you...you don't...you don't see the
wires that are hidden in this rustic cabin; you don't see, you know, I mean, in
other words, it's...it's all about creating a kind of technological sublime and what
James Nisbet calls this sort of...you know this energic domain,
but the art really functions by mystifying how the poles got there or
how they're attached or how they, you know, how they, where the titanium comes
from to sharpen the points and so on and so forth. And this is not, I would say, a
critique of, you know, all of art. I think we just have
to understand that art is engaged in a variety of operations where energy is
clearly an obsession of artists, but it doesn't always get us to this transition
that we need to...that we need to make. Alternative forms in...in Szeman's work are
just trivial in terms of our addiction to oil, so that's just something I want to
surface for our discussion. I think in...in the end here I just want to leave you
with two broad heuristics of the many we've talked about—a kind of critical
Anthropocene narrative, what have we done or what we have done. And here I'm just
showing you Richard Misrach's great... one of the many photographs from his
cancer series where he...he also talks about petrochemical America, and
contrast that with this idea of the utopian chthulucene, as Donna
Haraway has called it, we have to work...practice on pronouncing that, what we
might yet manage. And here I'm showing you a piece from an artist that I've
recently written about, Annika Yi, in terms of bio fiction. And I'm finding
this realm of what I'm calling bio fiction—this kind of art that, you know,
partners with bacteria in this case or might involve insect life or, you know,
might create a Brancusi sculpture for a hermit crab to take up in the case
of pier weave. I'm interested in these forms because I think they might propel
us toward this kind of radical reimagining of our place. We are symbionts
and almost nothing in our culture helps us acknowledge that and acknowledge how
dependent we are on a million other life forms, some of which are in our body,
right, we have more cells of bacteria than we have cells that are human in our
body. So, you know, in a way I leave us with this this kind of new edge of the,
let's try it again, chthulucene, you know, because it
kind of returns us to Wilson's question of how will humans...how will humans be?
How will we evolve? Will we evolve greater partnerships among ourselves and
among other species that we are symbiotically dependent on or will we,
you know, stay with our primate, our small pri—small group primate, you know,
natures so far? So these are questions that we can discuss.
I think
there will be a mic
moving around for questions from the audience.
I think we can go a bit over time, maybe overrun by a few minutes, so I think, we'd
like to take a few. I think, you know, maybe I can just start you off. I think what I was most interest in was your
last point about desire. This is very high on my list of things to think about because I was in London for
the serpentine marathon and there was a wonderful artist who's thought really
hard about all this stuff, but his main criticism of AI and of the autonom—you
know, the autonomous vehicle was that it was going to take away his autonomy. You
know, it wasn't—I think you can all hear—anyway, it was...it was...it was fascinating that as
critical as he was being and he's...and he's created all sorts of, you know,
pathways that will stop the car from moving anywhere and so on, I mean, his
critique was based on the old ideology that he should be able to drive wherever
he wants and he should be in charge and he should be, you know, Marlboro Man, you
know, on the edge of some Western universe. So I think that changing ourselves is a
really complicated and long—long job and I don't know, so that was... Yeah, yeah I thank...I thank both
of you for your comments. I'll just say in response to what you just said,
Carolyn, it's that if there's...if there's two takeaways I guess from the work that
my colleagues and I have been doing, it's one is...one is simply to say we have not
really given as much thought as we should to the degree to which energy
systems shape who we are. There have been people who have, of course, given thought to
energy systems. There's...it kind of comes up every once in a while...there's
not just the...the Mumford, there's Louis White after World War II in the field
of anthropology. He gave a lot of thought to energy systems in the way that they
shape human communities, but it seems to fade out of existence. I guess what makes
this current moment quite distinct is that we are faced with the necessity to
think about how we might be in relationship to different kinds of
energy systems as a result of an external constraint
which is that of the environment. So this is not something that we were given to
have to kind of develop a idea about previously. If we...if there was some idea,
it tended to always be the various kinds of fantasies about endless sources of
energy, utopian ideas about this moment when we reach some kind of energy source
that we'd have indefinitely still exists, of course, today in various kinds of
ideas, models of fusion or fission energy. But there's this sort of...this
sensibility that we've created a certain kind of society. We've done it globally.
We've done it in a way that our identities, our sensibilities, our
feelings, our desires are mapped into it in a very strong and powerful way. We've
done it so that it's global and now we have to think about what it means on the
other side of this system. I don't...I don't want to kind of take up all of the
time, but I will say this. Even a company like Shell, its future energy systems
unit that occasionally tries to come up with a way to kind of think about what
energy will look like...energy systems, global energy systems will look like
down the road, they have suggested that the maximum amount that we could have
per person per year would be something like a hundred Kika joules of energy.
Because there'd be such a large population of people and they're
imagining that hundred Giga joules would be mixed forms of energy so probably
still would have some fossil fuels, but lots of other...more...a bigger portion of
renewables. So that would be one third of what an average American uses today and
it would be less than an average person in China uses today. And they're
imagining 100 Giga joules would allow for decent quality...enough energy input for a
decent quality of life. They don't describe what what that might be.
This still demands a certain kind of re-figuring of our desires and it has to be
something more than just a sense that we cut...we cut down...we do less because
that's not a mode that we work well in and that just won't work. So one is this
kind of mapping and it is something that there have been moments all throughout
history when people are alert to this, but I think the current moment is
something different in something we have to attend to collectively. The other
thing I will say again is that another takeaway for me is that I do think that
it is quite difficult to represent this and the degree to which energy shapes us
into a certain kind of, for lack of a better word, society and
infects every part of us, inhabits every part of us. It's difficult to represent
it, I will say again, in literature, especially in 20th century literature,
especially post-1945 when it has the greatest degree. It seems to be difficult
to represent it because it's not there, it doesn't represent it. There are
representations of...of oil. Usually oil just stands in for being really rich. So
like in...like the TV series Dallas, which many of us might know here, they're...all
that oil does is make them wealthy and it allows JR to wear a cowboy hat or
something. It doesn't...it doesn't really have this kind of discussion about like
well how does that make us the kind of creatures we are so that we might do
something about it? It's interesting, the...the example of Moby
Dick. I think Moby Dick does do this really really intriguingly well. And it
does it in form and it does it in terms of all of the kinds of things—because
it's kind of actually dealing with that earlier transition from one energy
source to another because there's already that hint of the oil era on the
horizon—but I don't think that there, I mean, I think Ghosh says this for
different reasons, but I'm not sure we have the same kind of representative...
representational resource in literature for this moment.
There are lots of ones. I say it in an extreme way to suggest that we kind of have to
look for it. There are things in science fiction, although science fiction too
attends less to energy than one might imagine. I think art is perhaps one of
the places, I mean I have spent a lot of time with...with artists perhaps because I
see it there most powerfully in terms of the way that you're describing it,
Carolyn, where there's that pushing towards the edges of what...what the
degree to which it inhabits us as opposed to just like showing a picture
of an oil barrel. Yeah, so I think the key question is whether what will change us
resides in the realm of representation. I mean, I'm not sure that artistic
intelligence is best served by, you know, the Misrach image. It's an incredible
image; it's a horrifying image—hasn't seemed to change us,you know what I'm
saying? So I think in my thinking, I'm trying to think of what art is on the
edge of changing us from Homo sapiens sapiens to maybe homo extensors how much
symbiotica or, you know, that...that's... that's to me the challenge of this work. And I Ithink that's
something we can...we can come back to to think of if any of the agency of
literary and artistic work in that radical reimagining of a next energy
transition which would require kind of a genealogy of our past engagement with...
with the... with energy systems, with the oil novel, some of which has resided a
lot in post-colonial literature, as you as you pointed to, but I think what I'd
like to do is maybe open the floor for a series of questions from the audience
and maybe in, kind of to respect the schedule that we're operating on, take a
few questions at a time and then allow each of our panelists to respond to
these. So I'll probably take three or four questions if we have from the
audience and then... then hear back from our panelists, yeah.
Hi, so the contemporary philosopher Eugene Thacker begins his book with the
words "we are doomed" or in certain translations "we are screwed." And I wonder
if this idea of doing something about the future is itself not founded on a
certain kind of optimism with energy itself that comes to us from the dawn of
the 20th century or maybe slightly before. In other words, what Thacker calls
cosmic pessimism, is that a resource that we might deploy today to think about a
time where it's already too late?
I have certainly lived most of my life not seeing energy and it's now that the
transition is happening that I'm beginning to pay attention to a lot of
stuff like it's very obvious now that the U.S. tax code has tremendous subsidies—
I didn't know that—I've lived most of my life without knowing this kind of stuff,
right, so it's becoming clearly more visible. But generally speaking, I think
something like IOT and supply chain is making a lot of stuff visible again that
has been invisible to us. I mean, this this is generally speaking the case and
that...that could also be the case for oil. All right, I mean you could
imagine something like buying gas at the pump or maybe...maybe the
sockets in the wall and there would be signs, you know of, you know, electricity
kills and if you see what I mean. What is the, you know, countering the
alienation that we have from the generation of the energy? Yeah, so maybe
we can start there and so on the modalities of narrating the future from
techno-utopianism to kind of more cosmic pessimism and everywhere in between,
is there a more...is there more kind of productive, if I may use the term, or more
optimal genre of engaging the future. And then I guess the question on legibility
and...and making visible and the possible advantages or limits that we have in
kind of that moment of realization of the
presence of energy. So maybe Ros, we can start with.. I would just say the
question I think we're all facing is whether we have to let go of a vision of
history as progress and whether that is necessary or viable at this point. You
use the word pessimism—I think of it more as resignation or just limits...limits.
And that...and that means then what, you know, what do you care about? I do think
that's the big question that is out there and I'm...I'm not presenting an
answer, but I'm just saying I think...I think you're asking perhaps one of the...
the most fundamental question about this historical moment? Yeah, and I think, to try and bridge both
questions, I'm not ready to give up on culture. I mean, I do think that
literature and art have very powerful ways of mobilizing us, not through
explicit politics always but through mobilizing a broader aesthetic, so I've
started thinking about all of the campaigns for small changes that relied
on aesthetic judgments. For example, the to Boston ladies who decided that it was
disgusting to wear birds on your head, right. They...they worked with the Audubon
Society; it was like 1890 or something and from 300,000 birds that were being
slaughtered for the New York hat trade, you know, that essentially went to zero.
Well maybe not zero, I think you can still buy turkey feathers and things, but
that was an aesthetic judgment. Turning us against tobacco was in some sense an
aesthetic of just both empathizing with bartenders and, you know, kind of
understanding health to be secondhand smoke-elated, you know, in other words, it
was as a combination of kind of enlarging empathy
beyond individual choice and legal apparatuses, but it was also a kind of an
aesthetic that revulsion was somehow produced around that. Corsets, whale bones
and corsets, right, this was an aesthetic recoiling from something that had been
highly fashionable and darling and beautiful to being disgusting and why
would you ever do that, you know. So I'm optimistic in that sense that we can
operate culturally to enlarge the envelope as it were of our connections
and make some sort of change in that way. So, you know, there are lots of studies
about this. My own mother was like a chain smoker at one point she said, "every
time I see one of those ads, it makes me so anxious I just want to light up." Right,
so, you know, having something by the plug it says you know energy kills or
something hmm people are just like "fuck that," you know,
I want to live my life. But there other...you know, other ways of persuading and
aggregating and, you know, so it'll just be interesting to see whether we can
pull it off and if we don't, we'll be extinct, you know. It's like a very, you
know, the pessimism is justified, you know, if we can't pull it off, you know. Most
species apparently live for about three million years. That's about what we've
managed so far so, you know, maybe our time is up. But it is a challenge that,
you know, we have achieved tremendous cultural evolution, so it's a challenge
that we can now own as Imre suggested. We can have an intentional transition if
we're able to work a little more like ants and a little less like, you know,
predators.
So I'll speak about legibility first—I think that these issues are becoming
more legible at lots and lots of different registers. For a number of
weeks and even today, it is front page news—
pipelines are front page news. I never would have expected that. They're
front page news in Canada for—not just because they cross a border and not just
because a president gets involved—but because they also come into contact with
First Nations territories, which have newfound powers. And so there's kind of
interesting mixes of political legibility, environmental legibility,
future anxieties, political transitions, that are all kind of coming together. So
I...so I think that it's...it is in cultural realm that there's more attention and
feeling for the ways in which one might have to make it legible and I...and I
liked your examples a lot, Carolyn, because it may be that that legibility
isn't about showing a bunch of refineries, or it isn't like the kind of
thing that Edward Burtynsky did in his thing on oil. It might be more like doing
this kind of work. And that comes to the really great question about drawing on
Eugene Thacker's work. I guess I have two things to say to that. One, on one
register, I really think that the kind of question you asked is that the
question we need to ask. So how do we disrupt the logic—the old logic—that we
build into the solution even as we're... how do we disrupt the old logic we build
in a solution even as we're identifying that as the problem and we kind of
continue it? This is...this is a difficult thing to do and it might be the right
thing to ask ourselves over and over and over again,
in the kind of, perhaps we can do in a dialectical fashion though as opposed to
just kind of giving up. Second thing to do however, is I can't get away from the
fact that what that would not permit are questions about
energy justice. So I would like there still to be a question about energy
justice and the kind of the sense that we're doomed doesn't allow that
discussion to happen. So the energy justice question is, in very very simple
ways, are "why do I as a Canadian get to use seventy five times more energy per
day with all of the capacities and possibilities that it allows me than
somebody does in Haiti? What could possibly permit that?" If we
have, again, a repeat of the Rawlsian original position and add energy to it,
nobody in the Rawlsian original position would not make sure that they
got to use equal amounts of energy. I mean...I mean once you kind of add it to
older conversations, it kind of nudges a material element into questions
that we have about politics, ethics, and so on that I'm kind of not ready to give
up in a..in a, I guess, a less like ontological, metaphysical realm of that...
like that you're posing with Thatcher, although that's very much the kind of
direction that I would say that I...that I am conscious of as the way that you
would have to interrupt this older desire. So not to say too much, but where
this kind of doesn't work out is the following: like I'll often say, when you...
when you change habit, you change how people inhabit a space. My mother, who's an
immigrant from Hungary, doesn't know how to use a blue bin. She doesn't. I mean, you
can say to her, "put something, put this piece of paper in the blue bin" and she'll
say "oh yes, yes, yes, of course, of course." My son doesn't know how not to use it. So
that's an interesting transition of habit. Now that doesn't answer your question
in the sense that, well, he uses it a lot, is the problem, because he feels like
it's solved, so there can be more and more and more and more
more paper. And that kind of logic of the more isn't interrupted in the way that
we'd want through that..that kind of reframing of habit. So my question will
be can we have a reframing of habit that would keep that sensation that I have of
injustice that has happened around energy while doing the kind of work to
nudge aside the the eschatology that you're pointing to? Can I throw something else in there? So legibility, there're
people who think about this desperately every single day for the COP17 and the
next generations of these frameworks. And the one that I heard
recently is about planetary frameworks and so they're trying to—the economists
are literally trying to make legible the capacity of the earth system to allow
waste, in some sense, and to absorb waste and none of this has been reflected in
previous economic models, right. So the planetary framework which apparently is
a phrase that our current EPA doesn't allow you to put in your grant
application, but it's a specific approach to making visible—to making legible—the
too much question. Anyway, so I just recommend to people that they...that they
follow these constant efforts to find better ways. They used to have a
Venn diagram of, you know, people and resources and money, and it became a
Mickey Mouse with money—this like giant swollen face and then people, you know,
nothing was intersecting, you know, so the planetary boundaries
framework is a way to image planetary systems that don't allow you to
disaggregate them from their ultimate... the ultimate boundary of the planet
itself. So it's just an interesting address to this legibility question. Ros, any counter point?
No, no, just like I know what you're talking about, and
I think it's spectacular as a way of yeah, visualizing and therefore thinking. And making legible the
capacity of the planet itself to absorb our...our uses. Okay, so what we do is and
the, again, in the interest of time, is that we can continue the conversation
over the reception outside and we'll get to continue it for...for much longer, but
I'd like to thank Imre for both sharing the wealth of his work on this subject
and giving us the best of all excuses to come together here at MIT and
think of, you know, how we have kind of an obligation to think of a genealogy of
practices, literary and otherwise, on the question of energy and the environment,
to think of the legibility and the imperative of our present condition and
inevitably ask the question of the future that accompanies both of what
forms of any energy transitions, to whom, and how can broadly aesthetic practice
and the three practices contribute such reimagining. So thank you very much for
your time and hope to continue this conversation.
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