ENGL 583 A1: Energy|Culture

M. Simpson

A key insight in the Energy Humanities as a burgeoning zone of inquiry holds that energy is not just brute input but also social relation: a matter of values, habits, practices, affects, and beliefs that, at first glance, might seem completely unrelated to questions of energy -- a matter, that is, of culture. In this seminar we will use this insight as a point of departure in order to investigate important conceptual, historical, and methodological debates in the Energy Humanities and to study cultural materials across a range of forms and modes to learn what they might teach us about energy as social relation, thereby considering the ways in which we do, or do not, see, feel, and act in response to the simultaneously material and immaterial powers of energy to shape or indeed render culture and society. The term “render” is key here, providing a hinge between figure and matter, sign and substance, concretion and abstraction: the reckoning of energy and the energies of reckoning.

In this age of anthropogenic climate change, energy as topic and problem will necessarily foreground fossil fuels, precisely because these fuels saturate everything: the petroculture we continue to inhabit mediates all other facets of contemporary life. From this emphasis, however, we will strive to extend energy as concept and paradigm to encompass such things as bio-matter and geo-matter, attention and affect, information and data, commodity production and financial speculation, and so on. Key terms for (and so theoretical perspectives on) our endeavor will include: aesthetics; affect; materiality; temporality; mediation; capital. A prime aim in this course is to consider what happens—to imagine what could become possible—when taking up energy as focus yet also frame: as at once object and analytic.

The syllabus will prioritize readings in critical and cultural theory, but will also features as “pivots” selected aesthetic materials drawn from fiction, film, photography, and performance art. While these “pivots” will speak most directly and self-evidently to specific topics on the syllabus, they will also serve to articulate points of connection across many topics—whether by putting concepts, issues, and debates from earlier readings in new light, or by anticipating concerns in readings to come, or both. Engaging with this range of materials will allow us to consider the ways in which and the ends to which the matter of energy as a problem of culture might inflect or even reorient the practice of critical and cultural inquiry today.

Potential readings may include (selections from) the following preliminary, provisional list:

After Oil Collective Solarities: In Search of Energy Justice (2022)
Dominic Boyer and Imre Szeman, eds. Energy Humanities: An Anthology (2017)
Jeff Diamanti Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum (2022)
Amitav Ghosh The Great Derangement (2016)
The Red Nation The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth (2021)
Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel and Patricia Yaeger, eds. Fueling Culture (2017)