Notes
Boyer, Dominic and Imre Szeman. “The Rise of Energy Humanities: Breaking the Impasse.” University Affairs (12 February 2014) Web.
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. Penguin: New York, 1994. Print.
Yaeger, Patricia. “Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale-Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power and Other Energy Sources.” PMLA 126:2 (2011): 305-10. Print.
Archives (page 2 of 6)
Science fiction writers construct an imaginary future; historians attempt to reconstruct the past. Ultimately, both are seeking to understand the present.—Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (Oreskes and Conway 2014, 10)
Throughout this essay, I will use the nation-state terms of the era; for the reader not familiar with the political geography of Earth prior to the Great Collapse, the remains of the United Kingdom can be found in present-day Cambria; Germany in the Nordo-Scandinavian Union; and the United States and Canada in the United States of North America. (Oreskes and Conway 2014, 15)
Once the financial capital of the world, New York began in the early twenty-first century to attempt to defend its elaborate and expensive architecture against the sea. But that infrastructure had been designed and built with an expectation of constant seas and was not easily adapted to continuous, rapid rise. Like the Netherlands, New York City gradually lost its struggle. Ultimately, it proved less expensive to retreat to higher ground, abandoning centuries’ worth of capital investments. (Oreskes and Conway 2014, 47)
Asimov, Isaac (1983). “The Nightmare Life without Fuel.” Science Fiction: The Future edited by Dick Allen. New York: Harcourt Brace Javonavich. 34-36. Print.
[1] André Jansson and Amanda Lagerkvist (2009) uses the term retroactive futurity in passing to explain a particular form of nostalgia. I use the term here to negotiate the way Oreskes and Conway’s text negotiates temporality.
Before I begin, there are many people I would like to thank. Today, I will restrict myself to those who helped directly with the writing of this presentation and those present here today, and leave the rest for the Acknowledgements of my dissertation itself. Thank you to Alexandra Carruthers, Marija Cetinic, Jeff Diamanti, and Katie Lewandowski for helping me as I prepared this talk. Thank you to Dr. Janice Williamson, our fearless chair, to Dr. Priscilla Wald, Dr. Natalie Loveless, Dr. Mike O’Driscoll, Dr. Mark Simpson, and Dr. Imre Szeman for taking the time to read my work—I eagerly look forward to our conversation. Thank you also to those of you here to listen today. I hope you find it lives up to your expectations. The title for my talk this morning is:
“On the map, their destination had been a stretch of green, as if they would be living on the golf course. No freeways nearby, or any roads, really: those had been left to rot years before. Frida had given this place a secret name, the afterlife, and on their journey, when they were forced to hide in abandoned rest stops, or when they’d filled the car with the last of their gasoline, this place had beckoned. In her mind it was a township, and Cal was the mayor. She was the mayor’s wife” (Lepucki 2014, 3).
“I keep the Beast running, I keep the 100 low lead on tap, I foresee attacks. I am young enough, I am old enough. I used to love to fish for trout more than anything” (Heller 2012, 3).
She says her goal “is to connect the coasts and the north-south borders with great corridors of wild land—farms, forests, suburbs reclaimed by nature. One day there will be no more cities—their shells will be ghostly interruptions of the new nation, which will be composed of rural communities linked in all directions. Even if we aren’t here, the land will be: My money will keep it safe. When the rain comes back—ever the optimist—this is where her utopia will be” (Amsterdam 2009, 125).
“its multiple mock futures serve the…function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come” (Jameson 2005, 288).
“In a world whose basic coordinates are under constant flux from eruptions of ecological crisis to the emergence of genomic science, from the global realignments of religious fundamentalism to the changing parameters of liberation theology, from the ongoing unfoldings of antiracist activisms worldwide to the struggle for LGBTQ rights, the estrangements of SF in all its forms, flavors, and subgenres become for us a funhouse mirror on the present, a faded map of the future, a barely glimpsed vision of alterity, and the prepped and ready launchpad for theory today” (Canavan and Wald 2011, 247).
Lepucki, Edan. California. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2014.
This is the text of paper that I delivered at the Science Fiction/ Fantasy Now conference at University of Warwick in August. Thanks to Mark Bould, Valerie Savard, and Rhys Williams.
The first shot of Michael Madsen’s documentary film Into Eternity (2010) captures the border between the snowy Finnish woods and what appears to be a transformer station in grayscale. The shot draws a visual comparison between the skeletal trees, standing silently, and the vertical structures interlaced with cables in the background. Several large stones sit in the foreground of the shot. The only sound comes from the low rumble of bass drum. The shot fades to black and a new shot fades in. The camera tracks down a well-lit concrete tunnel and the title fades into focus “Into Eternity: A Film for the Future by Michael Madsen.” A few more rumbles of the bass drum sound as the camera rounds a corner, revealing a narrowing of the tunnel that fades into pitch black in the back ground. Here, the voice over beings:
I would say that you are now in a place where we have buried something from you to protect you and we have taken great pain to be sure that you are protected. We also need you to know that this place should not be disturbed and we want you to know that this is not a place for you to live in. You should stay away from this place and then you will be safe. (Madsen 2010)
We might argue that the writer who treats fuel as a cultural code or reality effect makes a symbolic move, asserts his or her class position in a system of mythic abundance not available to the energy worker who lives in carnal exhaustion. But perhaps energy sources also enter texts as fields of force that have causalities outside (or in addition to) class conflicts and commodity wars. The touch-a-switch-and-it’s-light magic of electrical power, the anxiety engendered by atomic residue, the odor of coal pollution, the viscous animality of whale oil, the technology of chopping wood…(Yaeger 309-310)
This tunnel feels like a time capsule sometimes. When you arrive in the morning it may be sunny, almost like summer outside. When you come out at the end of the day, it may have snowed like hell. The weather will have completely changed and you think “how long do I actually spend in that tunnel?” And likewise: you go to work and it is dark, and when you come back up after work it is dark. And it feels like time has stopped. (Madsen 2010)
Notes
Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. New York: Pantheon, 1985. Print.
Brill, Michael. “An Architecture of Peril: Design for a Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Carlsbad, New Mexico.” Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter (3 June 2014) Web (Fall 1993).
Bruckner T., I.A. Bashmakov, Y. Mulugetta, H. Chum, A. de la Vega Navarro, J. Edmonds, A. Faaij, B. Fungtammasan, A. Garg, E. Hertwich, D. Honnery, D. Infield, M. Kainuma, S. Khennas, S. Kim, H.B. Nimir, K. Riahi, N. Strachan, R. Wiser, and X. Zhang. “Chapter 7: Energy Systems.” Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Eds. Edenhofer, O., R. Pichs-Madruga, Y. Sokona, E. Farahani, S. Kadner, K. Seyboth, A. Adler, I. Baum, S. Brunner, P. Eickemeier, B. Kriemann, J. Savolainen, S. Schlömer, C. von Stechow, T. Zwickel and J.C. Minx. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Carrington, Damian. “Pandora’s Promise: Pro-Nuclear Movie Blows up Yesterday’s Myths.” The Guardian (8 November 2013) Web (6 June 2014).
Ferguson, Francis. “The Nuclear Sublime.” Diacritics14:2 (Summer 1984): 4-10. Print.
“Finns more Positive towards Nuclear,” World Nuclear News (15 February 2010) Web (5 June 2014).
Fjaestad, Maja. “Nuclear Waste and Historical Time.” Technology and Culture 54.2 (April 2013): 371-372. Print.
Flisfeder, Matthew. “Nuclear.” Fueling Culture: Energy, History, Politics. (New York: Fordham UP, forthcoming). Print.
Hardt, Michael. “Two Faces of Apocalypse: A Letter from Copenhagen.” Polygraph 22 (2010): 265-274. Print.
Hasted, Nick. “Into Eternity,” Sight & Sound 20.1 (December 2010): 66. Print.
Hitchcock, Peter. “Oil in an American Imaginary.” New Formations 69.4 (2010): 81-97. Print.
Into Eternity: A Film for the Future. Dir. Michael Madsen. International Film Circuit, 2010. Film.
“IPCC Digested: Just leave the fossil fuels in the ground.” NewScientist (1 October 2013). Web (28 July 2014).
Jameson, Fredric. Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One. New York: Verso, 2011. Print.
Jowett, Julie. “Fossilised Myths: Fresh Thinking on ‘Dirty’ Coal.” Guardian Weekly(17-23 March 2006): 5.
Knechtel, John. Fuel. Cambridge: Alphabet City Media, 2009. Print.
Kramer, Gary M. and Michael Miller. “Around the Circuit: Tribeca Film Festival, 22 April-2 May 2010.” Film International 8.3 (2010): 92-96. Print.
Makdisi, Saree. “Empire and Human Energy.” PMLA 126.2 (2011): 318-320. Print.
Mitchell, Timothy. “Carbon Democracy.” Economy and Society 38:3 (2009): 399-432. Print.
Moisey, Andrew. “Considering the Desire to Mark Our Buried Nuclear Waste: Into Eternityand the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.” qui parle 20.2 (Spring/Summer 2012): 101-125. Print.
Montgomery, Scott L. “Nuclear Power: New Context Changing Views.” The Powers that Be: Global Energy for the Twenty-First Century and Beyond. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. 127-148. Print.
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013. Print.
Munch, Edvard. The Scream. 1893. Oil, tempera, and pastel on cardboard. National Gallery, Oslo.
Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Print.
“Nuclear Power in Finland.” World Nuclear Association. (April 2014) Web (5 June 2014).
Orwell, George. 1984. London: Penguin Books, 2008 (1949). Print.
Pandora’s Promise Dir. Robert Stone. Vulcan Productions, 2013. Film.
Pirttilä, Mikko and Sarita Schröder. “Mankala Energy Production Model under Threat?” International Law Office. (16 May 2011) Web (5 June 2014).
“Radioactive Waste Management.” World Nuclear Association (November 2013) Web (6 June 2014).
Robbins, Denise. “3 Myths from Pro-Nuclear Film Pandora’s Promise.” EcoWatch: Transforming Green (8 November 2013) Web (6 June 2014).
Schell, Jonathan. The Fate of the Earth & The Abolition. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. Print.
Smith, Michael. “Advertising the Atom.” American Technology Ed. Carroll Pursell. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. 209-237. Print.
Szeman, Imre. “System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster.” South Atlantic Quarterly106.4 (Fall 2007): 805-823.
Van Riper, A. Bowdoin. “Into Eternity.” Film & History 43.1 (Spring 2013): 99-102. Print.
Yaeger, Patricia. “Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources.” PMLA 126.2 (2011): 305-326. Print.
*** The following is a paper I delivered at MLG-ICS 2014 on a panel titled “Discourses of Carbon Culture” with Bob Johnson and Jeff Diamanti (you can read Jeff’s paper here www.analogouscity.com). This paper is also based on an entry I wrote for Fueling Culture: Politics, History, Energy edited by Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger (Fordham UP, in progress).***
Let me repeat, we are dealing with a potentiality, the realization of which depends on prevailing circumstances. The emergence of a new style is dependent on many external influences; and there is also a double internal danger which, in the history of literature, has often marked periods of transition. There may be reluctance, on the one hand, to accept the logic of some new subject-matter; there may be a timid hanging-on to traditional styles, an unwillingness to give up old habits. There may also be, on the other hand, a tendency to overemphasize abstract aspects of new subject-matter (‘in history,’ wrote Hegel, ‘every new phenomenon emerges first in abstract form’). Abstraction thus gains the upper hand. Concrete realities—the exploration with the help of the new consciousness of as yet unexplored subject matter will be neglected or considered of secondary importance.—Georg Lukács, Realism in Our Time (1971: 115-116)
Lukács disqualified the sciences as fetishes of the particular, unable to grasp the totality, over which only the non-science of philosophy had dominion…But climate science is not such a science. And curiously, it takes as its object totality in a quite different sense: the totality of metabolic processes that take place on a planetary scale, and in particular the contribution of collective human labor to those processes.—McKenzie Wark, “Four Cheers for Vulgar Marxism”
Maps of energy presents that do not foreground energy: Noel Burch and Allan Sekula’s exploration of container ships and the global circulation of commodities in The Forgotten Space (2010), Max Brooks’s depiction of social totality through circulation and exchange figured as contagion in World War Z (2006), or Steven Soderbergh’s chart of global flows and borders, whether figured through the drug trade or the spread of disease and the development of vaccines, in Traffic(2000) and Contagion (2011).
Postcolonial film and writing: in the recent short film Pumzi (Wanuri Kahiu 2010), water sovereignty and labor as a clean energy source clash with the protagonist’s discovery of uncontaminated soil. Jennifer Wenzel’s description of petro-magic-realism in Ben Okri’s story, “What the Tapster Saw,” combines “the transmogrifying creatures and liminal space of the forest in Yoruba narrative tradition” and “the monstrous-but-mundane violence of oil exploration and extraction, the state violence that supports it, and the environmental degradation that it causes” (Wenzel 2006: 456).
Science fiction energy futures: when Kim Stanley Robinson discusses terraforming in the Mars Trilogy (1993,1994,1996) he shows that petrorealism need not be only about oil, but should be able to hold together the complex of various forms of energy, their scales, and temporalities.
Actual accounts of the petro-present: James Marriot and Mika Minio-Paluello’s travelogue The Oil Road: Journey from the Caspian Sea to the City of London (2012) maps the oil present spatially, economically, and ecologically. Their figure of the “oil road,” reviewer Adam Carlson notes, “gives us a powerful tool for representing the totality, for seeing through the haze, to make sense of both the physical Oil Road, and the Carbon Web – the political, social and economic, the superstructure of the infrastructure” (Carlson 2013).
Interactive documentary and documentary/videogame hybrids: Offshore (Brenda Longfellow, Glen Richards, and Helios Labs 2013) and Fort McMoney(David Dufresne 2013) offer an immersive petrorealism. The former depicts an oil rig modelled on the Deepwater Horizon, which viewers explore at their own pace and direction by navigating an eerie maze of stations and compartments; in the latter, viewers travel to Fort McMurray, Alberta and explore the town – they can follow bottle collectors, visit the Oil Patch, and vote on important town issues.