Cultures of Energy

Dominic and Cymene talk foot injuries, bears, and a project called "smell my box." We then (15:52) welcome to the podcast the marvelous Caroline Jones from MIT who talks about her amazing research and curatorial work on bioart, biofiction, psychology, phenomenology, neuroscience and much much more. We start with her provocative concept of “symbiontics” which points toward a change of human consciousness necessary for our survival as a species. She tells us about the works of artists like Jenna Sutela, Tomás Saraceno and Annicka Yi who have helped inspire her symbiontic thinking. We talk cultural evolution, survival of the most interdependent as an alternative to survival of the fittest, art as philosophy and politics, feminist bacteria, and the ethics of interspecies art. We turn from there to her current collaboration with historian of science Peter Galison on visibility and invisibility in the Anthropocene. We close on cybernetics, the idea that consciousness doesn’t stop at the limits of the individual mind and what we could learn from splicing a bit of sequoia genetic material into our own.  

We get to hear about Cymene’s mod years and her experience this week with “cat therapy.” And then (14:06) Dominic speaks with Cambridge environmental historian Paul Warde about his new book, The Invention of Sustainability: Nature and Destiny, ca. 1500-1870 (Cambridge UP 2018) which traces our contemporary interest in sustainable futures back to the concerns and inventions of early modern politics and economy. We start with the endemic problems of sustenance and fuel that were much on the mind of early modern European government and how they helped to shape future resource provision into a durable political problem. Paul explains how also changing was the idea that government should be responsible for resource provision in the first place and how this suggests that sustainability is an intrinsic feature of modern politics rather than a problem that is likely to be solved through particular policy interventions. We talk intergenerational ethics, the circumstances surrounding the transition from wood fuel to coal, the rise of a concept of “state” as autonomous political entity, the preoccupations of early political economy, early technoptimism, urbanization, metabolic rift and much more. We close with Paul’s thinking about energy policy today.

Dominic and Cymene talk about the country’s first robot sex brothel coming to Houston. And then (14:40) we welcome the amazing Cara Daggett to the podcast. Cara has an amazing book in press with Duke that everyone should pre-order. It’s entitled The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics and the Politics of Work and it describes how the modern conceptualization of the term “energy” only came about during the Victorian period. Cara begins by explaining how Aristotle’s conceptualization of energy as “dynamic virtue” was different from our own imagination of the relationship of energy and work as having to do with moving matter. From there we move to exploring the labor/energy nexus that proved so vital to European modernity. We talk about what empire, evolutionary theory, Presbyterianism and thermodynamics contributed to Victorian thinking about energy. We turn to entropy, decay and waste and how Victorian energy imaginaries have been extended to include much discourse on renewable energy too. We make a brief detour through the Victorian Anthropocene before asking whether it is possible to unwind energy conceptually from a soul-crushing Protestant ethic of perpetual work. We close with a discussion of Cara’s recent article on petromasculinity and the misogyny of fossil fuel use and what it was like to become a target of radical right venom. What would a feminist energy system look like? Listen on!

This week’s episode starts with some serious reflections on cracked masculinity, misogyny, 1980s culture, and the Supreme Court. But in the spirit of demanding better worlds to come, we then (15:30) welcome Darin Barney (McGill U) and Imre Szeman (U Waterloo) to talk through how best to imagine and enact positive solar futures. We start with their planning for After Oil 2: Solarity, a conference that will take place at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/) in Montreal May 23-25, 2019. Imre begins by walking us through logic behind the first edition of After Oil (http://afteroil.ca/what-is-aos/), which brought together forty people from diverse backgrounds to write a manifesto on life after petroculture. Darin then explains the concept for Solarity and how it seeks to push the speculative dimension of energy humanities farther in order to help break with the hegemony of various forms of petroknowledge. We talk about solarity as a zone of contestation, solarity as menace, solarity as emancipation from other social ills, and raise questions such as ‘what would solar theory look like?’ After hearing about their exciting plans for Solarity, we close by catching up with Imre and Darin about their own latest research projects. PS Go McGill for moving one step closer to fossil fuel divestment!

Cymene and Dominic debate whether dogs can have bullshit jobs on this week’s podcast. Then (13:46) we are most fortunate to welcome NYU’s Rosalind Fredericks to the podcast to talk about her brand new book, Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal (Duke U Press). But before getting there we ask Rozy why she thinks garbage/waste/discard studies are becoming so popular these days and what its lively interdisciplinary conversation is teaching us about value and materiality. Rozy tells us about how sanitation infrastructure first got her interested in understanding waste and how the trash strikes that took place during her fieldwork cemented her commitment to studying the politics and materiality of garbage in Dakar. We talk about the Set/Setal movement and how it utilized garbage work as a medium through which to revitalize Senegalese politics. From there we turn to the intersection of waste with Islamic ideas of purity and practices of piety, the political power of wastework, consumption and recycling, urbanization, climate refugeeism and the African Anthropocene. Rozy explains to us what she means by “vital infrastructures” and “salvage bricolage” as we turn to her new research on the work of trash reclaimers at one of Dakar’s largest dumps. We close with Rozy’s distant past life as a dumpster diver and her prize mini bottle collection.

Cymene and Dominic answer the timeless surrealist question, can raisins function as bait, on this week’s podcast. We then (9:20) welcome to the podcast Scotland’s finest son, Graeme Macdonald (currently on loan to Warwick) who explains first of all that he had nothing to do with the making of couscous sandwiches at Petrocultures 2018. But he does cop to enjoying very much working together with Janet Stewart and Rhys Williams on bringing that event to fruition. We then move on to more serious matters and Graeme tells us why he thinks interest in petrocultures is growing and how the energy humanities relate to the environmental humanities more broadly. That leads us to the entanglement of oil and modern fiction, whether there are different petrofictions in different places around the world, and if we need a new romanticism for the era of renewables. We then turn to science fiction in Scotland and its connection to the many terraforming projects that have occurred there; we talk post-oil dystopian fictions, hollow earth narratives, peat bogs and carbon sequestration, and the tensions surrounding decarbonization and Scottish devolution in the UK. We close on climate imaginaries and whether the Global North has made any progress in conceiving of post-carbon democratic life. This episode is brought to you by Buckfast Tonic Wine, the official irresponsible beverage decision of the Cultures of Energy podcast. Consider having one for the ditch but nae prezh!

On this week’s podcast, Cymene and Dominic recap their time at the marvelous Petrocultures 2018 event in Glasgow and tell tales of adventures with quinoa sandwiches and Buckfast, a curious liquor better known locally as “stab-yer-pal.” Then (13:25) we offer another edition of our Soylent Rainbow segment, talking classic ecofilms that you’ve recommended to us. This time it’s Alex Rivera’s 2008 cult film, Sleep Dealer, which brilliantly imagines a dystopian future of militarized water, reality TV drone killings and cyberlabor as the United States has invented a new way to exploit Mexican labor power without allowing workers’ bodies to cross borders. It’s a film in many ways ahead of its time that deserves a watch in 2018. We talk about its many strengths but also what we might do differently if the film were remade today. Speaking of which, Charlie Brooker, if you are out there, this is a Black Mirror episode waiting to happen!!

Dominic and Cymene report from Scotland where they have arrived for what looks to be an amazing Petrocultures 2018 event. Some talk of haggis and whiskey follows. But it’s also the anniversary of Hurricane Harvey back in Houston and to process how we feel about that (11:07) we invite our dear colleague, Lacy M. Johnson (http://www.lacymjohnson.com) into THE STUDIO to talk about where we find our heads at one year later. We talk about whether Harvey has shifted Houstonians’ willingness to accept climate change and Lacy talks about her own Harvey experience and how it motivated her to develop the Houston Flood Museum project, a virtual museum that launched this week (https://houstonfloodmuseum.org). Lacy explains why she thinks “discovery” might be a better way to think about life post-trauma rather than “recovery” and why it was compassion rather than strength that helped us through the disaster. We talk about her writing process and then turn from there to Lacy’s forthcoming book, The Reckonings (Simon & Schuster, http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Reckonings/Lacy-M-Johnson/9781501159008), a marvelous collection of essays. We spend a little extra time on her harrowing account of the 43,000 tons of nuclear waste that were dumped in a North St. Louis landfill in the 1970s and the smoldering underground fire that is edging ever closer to the site. In closing, Lacy explains why we need to give ourselves permission to feel joy in an imperfect world because joy is a form that justice takes.

Cymene and Dominic chat about the Wizard of Oz, unglacier tours, rocket toilets and motorized scooters to lead off this week’s podcast. Then (12:37) we are most fortunate to have the chance to talk about art and the Anthropocene with celebrated artist Judit Hersko (http://www.judithersko.com) who represented her native Hungary at the Venice Biennale in 1997. We talk about her earliest work about personal and collective memory and also her longstanding interests in phenomenology, materiality and lucidity and how all of these informed her later approaches to the intersection of art and science. That leads us to her trip to Antarctica and the adventures there—ranging from dinner with Prince Albert of Monaco to the aforementioned incinerator toilets—and what the whole experience taught her about the possibilities and limits of collaboration between art and science. And from there we move to the figure of the Unknown Explorer in her work and how it draws attention to the absence of women in polar history and science before the 1960s. We talk about her more recent projects thematizing Anthropocene phenomena such as oceanic acidification and atmospheric carbon and close with Judit’s advice to young artists to learn to meet your muse halfway.

Dominic and Cymene bask in 15 seconds of Icelandic limelight and discuss Madonna@60.  Then (14:28) to celebrate the premiere of our film, “Not Ok: A Little Movie About a Small Glacier at the End of the World,” we whet your appetite with the full interview with brilliant Icelandic writer and filmmaker Andri Snaer Magnason—author of Dreamland (Citizen Press, 2006) and The Story of the Blue Planet (Seven Stories, 2000)—that we did for the film. In the interview, Andri and Cymene discuss his family’s close relationship to glaciers and what glaciers have meant to Icelanders in the past and more recently. They talk about geological time and human time, why we need to see oil, addiction to destruction, what Andri talked to the Dalai Lama about, the Big Melt and much more. Tomorrow’s the big day. Wish us luck, dear listeners!