Volume 31, Number 2, Spring 2018 • Materialism and the Critique of Energy Published twice yearly, Mediations is the journal of the Marxist Literary Group. We publish dossiers of translated material on special topics and peer-reviewed general issues, usually in alternation. General inquiries and submissions should be directed to [email protected]. We invite scholarly contributions across disciplines on any topic that engages seriously with the Marxist tradition. Manuscripts received will be taken to be original, unpublished work not under consideration elsewhere. Articles should be submitted electronically in a widely-used format. Manuscripts should not exceed reasonable article length, and should be accompanied by an abstract of up to 300 words, including six keywords. Articles will be published in MLA endnote format, and should be submitted with the author’s name and affiliation on a separate cover page to facilitate blind peer review. 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For archives and further information, visit http://www.mediationsjournal.org This selection © 2018 by Mediations Mediations 31.2, Spring 2018 Materialism and the Critique of Energy 5 Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti: Phantasmagorias of Energy: Toward a Critical Theory of Energy and Economy 21 Andreas Malm: Long Waves of Fossil Development: Periodizing Energy and Capital 45 Katherine Lawless: Mapping the Atomic Unconscious: Postcolonial Capital in Nuclear Glow 59 Amy Riddle: Petrofiction and Political Economy in the Age of Late Fossil Capital 79 Amanda Boetzkes: The Political Energies of the Archaeomodern Tool 99 David Thomas: Keeping the Lights On: Oil Shocks, Coal Strikes, and the Rise of Electroculture 129 Alberto Toscano: Antiphysis/Antipraxis: Universal Exhaustion and the Tragedy of Materiality 149 Oxana Timofeeva: Afterword Reviews 153 Thomas A. Laughlin: Anthropocene Marxism 161 Jordan B. Kinder: “In the Heat of this Ongoing Past”: Three Lessons on Energy, Climate, and Materialism 169 Stacey Balkan: Aesthetics and Activism 177 Contributors “Editors’ Note.” Mediations 31.2 (Spring 2018) 1-2. www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/editors-note-vol-31-no-2 Editors’ Note The editors are pleased to present this special issue, Materialism and the Critique of Energy. Each of the essays here appears in an edited volume by the same name forthcoming from MCM’. As Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti put it in their introduction: though the “environmental problem of energy” is often “framed as a consequence of bad consumer habits,” it is in fact “deeply bound to the material origins of the commodity form.” And because the current ecological crisis is so deeply bound to the production and consumption of the commodity, it cannot be solved with the “techno-future vision” of energy-transition experts who imagine a future rescued through engineering. “The core contradiction of today’s economic system,” they write, “is and always has been tied to its facility with energy.” Thus, “a critical standpoint on the conditions of political, economic, and ecological possibility requires a new account of energy’s historical function” — of its relation to production and consumption of commodities, to the accumulation of value. The key insight of this collection of essays, and of the larger volume, is that our relation to fossil fuels — and all forms of energy — is its relation to the production and extraction of value. Collected selection from the book are several approaches to the problem of energy and its relation to history and art. Andreas Malm, for example, lays out a long history of the relation between capitalist expansion and energy consumption, while Amanda Boetzkes tracks the ways energy consumption circulates in some contemporary art. Turning to the novel, Amy Riddle too looks at the relation between aesthetic forms and the political economy of energy. Katherine Lawless explores the “materiality of an energy unconscious” through a history of nuclear power. And David Thomas explores the relation between energy systems and energy cultures through the lens of Raymond Williams. Finally, Alberto Toscano turns to the concept of “exhaustion” and what the tragedy of materiality to “connect contemporary debates on the consequences of climate change to theorizations of the multiple crises of social reproduction.” Taken together, these essays offer a snapshot of the intervention that dialectical materialism might make in contemporary debates of the Anthropocene, and why theorizing energy is indispensable to understanding our current regime of accumulation and the existential threat it poses Davis Smith-Brecheisen, for the Mediations editors Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti. “Phantasmagorias of Energy: Toward a Critical Theory of Energy and Economy.” Mediations 31.2 (Spring 2018) 1-16. www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/critique-of-energy Phantasmagorias of Energy: Toward a Critical Theory of Energy and Economy Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti The critique of energy sits between two fields that condition the present — environmental catastrophe and capitalist crisis. Marx wrote that the past “weighs like a nightmare” on the living.1 With global warming and the interminable crisis of capital, it is not just the past but the future, too, which strikes fear into the human mind. During the ongoing industrialization of the planet under capitalism, fossil fuels have been the dominant source of energy to power economic expansion and political domination.2 The very fabric of today’s climate crisis is knit from the exhaust of intensive and extensive waves of capital accumulation. Typically framed as a consequence of bad consumer habits, the environmental problem of energy is and always has been deeply bound to the material origins of the commodity form — what it takes to make a thing and what it takes to move it. Today, the lion’s share of emissions come from transportation and production sectors of the industrial economy. By almost every projection, the simple reproduction of existing systems of production and distribution, to say nothing of their growth, will doom the planet to a host of ecocidal developments — from rising sea levels and ocean acidification to desertification in some places and more intensely concentrated rainfall in others. Against the weaving of such catastrophic tapestries, pundits of the coming energy transition spread solace with the techno-future vision of a world that could be different than the one currently soaked in hydrocarbons. Yet these proponents of technologically smoothed energy transition miss the forest for the trees: the question is not simply one of engineering, but instead how to overcome the deep roots of capitalism’s ever-growing energy dependence. Whether for the requirement of aggregate economic growth or the expansion of new horizons of value, capitalism has been historically and logically bound to ever-increasing quantities of energy. The core contradiction of today’s economic system is and always has been tied to its facility with energy. A critical standpoint on the conditions of political, economic, and ecological possibility requires a new 2 Bellamy and Diamanti account of energy’s historical function, which is to say, a new account of energy’s relationship to the production, distribution, and accumulation of value. This issue of Mediations, draws its articles from the edited collection Materialism and the Critique of Energy (MCM´ Press, 2018). Both develop a critical standpoint, first, by revisiting the entangled conceptual and material history of capital and energy at the foundations of materialism and, second, by clarifying the stakes of a critique of energy for contemporary critical theory and politics.3 While the condition of climate change today has occasioned a groundswell of interest in energy regimes and environmental systems, only the materialist critique of energy found at the heart of Marxism can explain why capitalism is an energy system and hence offer a clearer sense of a way out of its fossil-fueled inertia.4 This collection distills a form of energy critique both sensitive and hostile to the many forms of inequality, injustice, and exhaustion that populate the contemporary political landscape. Materialism has a long history. Though materialism’s roots as a philosophical project stretch further back than the nineteenth century, we are concerned with its turn toward the material structures that began shaping social life in a quickly industrializing Europe. Current understandings of both energy and materialism were forged in the furnace of coal-powered innovation. The coeval emergence of industrial capitalism and self-consciously materialist thought is not mere coincidence; nor can their historical emergence be explained as simple causal determination. Rather, we argue, their emergence must be understood dialectically, beginning with a critical recognition: the materialist tradition that emerges out of this moment is already terminologically and epistemologically connected to the industrial flares of a fossil-fueled