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THE NEW TOPOGRAPHICS, DARK ECOLOGY, AND THE ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE OF NATIONS: CONSIDERING AGENCY IN THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF EDWARD BURTYNSKY AND MITCH EPSTEIN FROM A POST-ANARCHIST PERSPECTIVE
Abstract
Edward Burtynsky’s aesthetic and the New Topographic aesthetic from which it derives, I argue, should not be seen as apolitical but rather as traces of an empire in ruins and a sociality to come; that is, by employing a post-anarchist analysis, I demonstrate how Burtynsky’s photographs in his recent collection Oil, and Mitch Epstein’s images from American Power, produce an aesthetic of what Yves Abrioux calls “intensive landscaping,” or “landscaping as style, as the promise of a social spacing yet to come” (264). What Burtynsky and Epstein accomplish in their photographs related to energy in particular is “to invent relations, rather than assert ideological or cultural control” (ibid.); the place of energy extraction and transport becomes not a self-contained striation of ecological degradation, but a “place of passage,” to use Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, a depiction of wildness and civilization in contact, assembled and reformulating the landscape into something other. The aesthetic under consideration has much in common with Timothy Morton’s “dark ecology” and Stephanie LeManager’s “feeling ecological,” theories that attempt to understand the affective connections between the infrastructure of oil capitalism and ecology (“Petro-Melancholia” 27).
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The international Kyoto process and the work of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have progressively presented the evidence of global warming as the future and most urgent challenge for humanity. National and supra-national renewable energy policies are at the core of the strategies developed in order to face it. The ongoing changes in the energy mix, which include an increase in the share of renewable energy, triggers a new interest in the landscape-energy relationship. Renewable energy is widely and unevenly dispersed across the land. Their spatial impacts and decentralized energy infrastructures can be significant, highly perceptible and regarded as the re-composition of socio-technical links between landscape and energy. Landscape has become a key arena for the debate on energy policy. The reverse is also true. Energy issues might bring new dimensions into landscape policies and processes. There can be very little doubt that energy will remain the number one driver for landscape transformation in the 21st century. This editorial discusses the empirical and theoretical potential of developing research works at the crossroads of landscapes and energies, and ventures a tentative agenda for what can be termed the ‘‘landscapes of energies''. The papers gathered in this special issue all explore the evolving relationship between landscape and energy, albeit from different angles. They capture, together, some of the richness of this emerging research field.
This review presents existing data and research on the global distribution of the impacts of oil production and consumption. The review describes and analyzes the environmental, social, and health impacts of oil extraction, transport, refining, and consumption, with a particular focus on the distribution of these burdens among socioeconomic and ethnic groups, communities, countries, and ecosystems. An enviromnental justice framework is used to analyze the processes influencing the distribution of harmful effects from oil production and use. A critical evaluation of current research and recommendations for future data collection and analysis on the distributional and procedural impacts of oil production and consumption conclude the review. Key Words petroleum, environmental justice, energy policy, health impacts s Abstract This review presents existing data and research on the global distri-bution of the impacts of oil production and consumption. The review describes and analyzes the environmental, social, and health impacts of oil extraction, transport, re-fining, and consumption, with a particular focus on the distribution of these burdens among socioeconomic and ethnic groups, communities, countries, and ecosystems. An environmental justice framework is used to analyze the processes influencing the dis-tribution of harmful effects from oil production and use. A critical evaluation of current research and recommendations for future data collection and analysis on the distribu-tional and procedural impacts of oil production and consumption conclude the review.
This paper explores the contribution that the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze might offer to researchers studying social innovation in response to climate change. Since the publication of the Stern Report it has been recognized that climate change requires major changes to the way our economy is organized, but it also requires significant social and behavioral change. Can this be usefully viewed through the prism of theories of social innovation? How might such social innovation affect the life chances of the socially excluded and to what extent does it, therefore, offer a space for radical social change? The Transition Towns — a community movement in response to climate change — is used as a test-case of these ideas.
Some philosophers in recent discussions concerned with current ecological crises have attempted to address and sometimes to utilize poststructuralist thought. Yet few of their studies have delineated the ecological orientation of a specific poststructuralist. In this paper, I provide a discussion of the naturalistic ontology embraced by the contemporary French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, one of the most significant voices in poststructuralism. I interpret Deleuze as holding an ecologically informed perspective that emphasizes the human place within nature while encouraging awareness of and respect for the differences of interconnected life on the planet. I also suggest that this view may be joined with Deleuze's innovative ethical-political approach, which he refers to as micropolitics, to create new ways of thinking and feeling that support social and political transformation with respect to the flourishing of ecological diversity. Finally, I briefly show how Deleuze's ecological orientation compares to several versions of ecological theory and politics.
Jane Bennett is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and a founding member of the journal theory & event. Her recent publications include The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001)and “The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter”(Political Theory, 2004). She is working on a book that explores the ecological implications of different conceptions of materiality in contemporary political thought.
In a subversive comic book that might be titled "Style Guide for the Long Emergency" but is instead titled Fashion 2012, cartoon characters ponder the role of aesthetics in a near future that delivers the convergence of peak oil and global warming. Geologists suggest that the peak in global oil production already may have occurred, just as climate change forecasts point to the likely necessity of intensive energy consumption as we adjust to new, extreme weather. Though 2012 refers to the supposed end of the world by the Mayan Long Count Calendar, Fashion 2012 posits not apocalypse but rather "people living, global warming, economic change" (Herbst 1). "I just don't know how to dress anymore," one character muses, "They used to say 'dress for success.' With the new reality, what is success when no one is getting rich?" (9). Another thinks, "I can't afford to drive my car anymore . . . am I a failure?" (10). The small book pivots upon the brighter assertion of a third character that, "There are other things I can be" (15). But, as we turn the page, the cartoonist, Marc Herbst, introduces his own primary question, "What does that look like? . . . That is a question for artists" (16).
Artists and environmentalists both face the challenge of powering down to create smaller-scale, post-oil economies with imagination and courage. On YouTube, Rob Hopkins, founder of the "Transition Towns" movement for a sustainable post-oil future, urges us to remember that, although oil may be running out, imagination is not. "There's no reason that the imagination and ingenuity that got us up to the top of the peak in the first place is going to disappear when we have to start figuring out how we're going to get down the other side." Peak-oiler James Howard Kunstler vividly represents modes of fabrication not reliant upon petroleum infrastructures in his recent post-oil novel World Made by Hand (2008). For example: "Larry Prager was our dentist. With the electricity off most of the time, he did not have the high speed drill anymore. He got ahold of a 1920s pulley drill in Glens Falls, and Andrew Pendergast helped him rig it up to a foot treadle which Sharon could operate like a pump organ as she assisted her husband" (35). Kunstler's post-oil bricoleurs animate a sentiment of hope within a future of diminished resources, just as Hopkins's "transition tales," which he tells to adults on YouTube and to children in public libraries, intend to create feasible, if imaginary, infrastructures for post-oil possible worlds. As Frank Kaminski argues in the first article to be written about post-oil fiction, post-oil authors recognize that people need "to be moved emotionally, as well as through their senses" (n.p.). Narrative art will be a key actor in establishing the ecological resilience of the human species. By Rob Hopkins's definition, the resilient community must be flexible enough to reinvent its fundamental infrastructures, releasing itself from oil dependency to produce, largely by hand, all that it consumes. Holding a liter of petroleum, Hopkins gestures toward us with it from the visually dense YouTube screen. The pale brown contents of the glass liter bob up and down: "This liter of petroleum contains the same amount of energy that would be generated by my working hard physically for about five weeks. . . . The best place for this is to stay in the ground" (n.p.). What might that look like? The specificity of Hopkins's "five weeks" of hard human labor generates muscle memory and an emotional drag upon his salutary call for post-oil environmental imagination.
This article offers a speculative treatment of the aesthetics of petromodernity, where petromodernity refers to a modern life based in the cheap energy systems long made possible by petroleum. Literature and film serve as my means of archiving sensory and emotional values associated with North American oil cultures of the twentieth century. My glosses, which are intentionally associative to express the newness of post-oil criticism, draw upon the work of environmentally sensitive social scientists who have made comprehensive studies of the relations of emotions to so-called affective...
Agency has been central to modern conceptions of politics but it is a complicated and contested idea that seems to have fallen into both theoretical and historical crisis. I explore the underlying ideas that have grounded it, as well as some recent historical and theoretical challenges. I respond by advocating an ontological agnosticism regarding who or what exercises agency and suggest a spectrum of agentic capacities instead. Commending a phenomenological approach, I then suggest that agentic capacities emerge and interact across this spectrum. At one pole I envisage pre- personal, corporeal processes and at the other, a transpersonal, intersubjective interworld that requires a novel social ontology. I locate individual or collective agents in the middle of the spectrum where they emerge as contingent singularities. My aim here is to retain agency as a necessary ingredient of politics while eliminating the Cartesian presuppositions that have, for example, rendered the agency-structure debate irresolvable and supported a subjectivist account of agents that is no longer tenable. I show how all three dimensions of the spectrum have political significance and discuss examples to illustrate this.
Intensive Landscaping
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London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 251-265. Print.
Rethinking Revolution: Total Liberation, Alliance Politics, and a Prolegomena to Resistance Movements in the Twenty-First Century
- Steven Best
Best, Steven. "Rethinking Revolution: Total Liberation,
Alliance Politics, and a Prolegomena to Resistance
Movements in the Twenty-First Century."
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Amster, Abraham DeLeon, Luis A. Fernandez,
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The Wasteland-An Essay on Manufactured Landscapes
- Jonathan Bordo
Bordo, Jonathan. "The Wasteland-An Essay on
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Rhizome, Ecology, Geophilosophy (A Map to This Issue)
- Dianne Chisholm
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Beyond Wilderness: Robert Adams, New Topographics, and the Aesthetics of Ecological Citizenship
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Post-Anarchism: A Reader
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Systems Everywhere': New Topographics, and the Art of the 1970s
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Deleuze/Guattari and the Ada Tree
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Ecology and Machinic Thought: Nietzsche, Deleuze, Guattari
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Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape
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Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn
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Assemblage and Critical Urban Praxis: Part One
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Real Estate Opportunities': Commercial Photography as Conceptual Source in New Topographics
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Deadpan Geometries: Mapping, Aerial Photography, and the American Landscape
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Image Notes
Fig. 1 Burtynsky, Edward. Oil Fields #22, Cold
Lake, Alberta, Canada, 2001. Photograph. Edward
Burtynsky Photographic Works. Web. August 14, 2012.
<edwardburtynsky.com>.