Energyscapes, Architecture, and the Expanded Field of Postindustrial Philosophy
-- Jeff Diamanti
Full Citation and Summary Diamanti, Jeff M. `Energyscapes, Architecture, and
the Expanded Field of Postindustrial Philosophy'. Postmodern Culture 26.2
(2016): n. pag. Web.
This article posits that the postindustrial economy of economic elasticity and
the theoretical outgrowths of its material forms are underpinned by an
intensification and expansion of energy production. This expansion establishes
itself in specific spatial forms which transform all landscapes into
energyscapes where all activity is necessarily energy-intensive. As a
corrective to toothless theoretical regimes tied to fluidity and plasticity,
Diamanti proposes a return to dialectical thinking. The author, Jeff Diamanti
is a Cultural Studies researcher and Professor of Environmental Humanities as
the University of Amsterdam. His background is in English Lit. and Film Studies
and his doctoral research was undertaken in the heart of oil country in
Edmonton, AB.
Notes
- Introduction (pp. 1-2)
- Sets the stage w/ the following premise: the "immaterial economy" is
premised-on and actively motivates the rapid expansion of energy
infrastructure responsible for climate change (pp. 1)
- Cooling, electricity as the two big supports, necessity to be always online
(pp. 1)
- Main claim: infrastructural truth of post-industrial economy involves the
inseparable processes of "energy wealth" ↑ & unemployment ↑ (pp. 1), that the
post-industrial economy reshapes all landscapes as "energyscapes" and that an
object-oriented-ontology (rather than a labour oriented one) is implied in its
operation (pp. 2)
- Energyscapes and the Infrastructures of Accumulation (pp. 2-7)
- "Energyscape" = the expanded field in which capital accumulation is provided
its energy infrastructure, optimized aesthetically and socially for growth of
capital (pp. 2)
- "expanded field" = the historical and physical settings of a process (see
Rosalind Krauss' "Sculpture in the Expanded Field) (pp. 2)
- Takes cues from Toscano and Kingle's "logistical landscapes", but goes beyond
them (pp. 2)
- The form and historical specificity of the "setting" we find ourselves in
(pp. 4)
- "setting" = "texture, rhythm, and environment" (pp. 5) not context
- Specific focus is on how all postindustrial landscapes are energy saturated
(ie. all activities are energy-intensive activities) (pp. 2-3)
- This through automation, logistics, infrastructure; all activities (pp. 3)
- Expanded field of energy is the "seamless" circuit between extraction
circulation consumption (pp. 2)
- Aesthetics of fluidity, immateriality, etc. which hide the process of
disemployment (pp. 2)
- Expressed in philosophy/cultural theories of elasticity, plasticity, and
liquidity which reject the capital-labour-energy relation (pp. 2)
- Theories of "immaterial culture" are one component, along with economic
growth and state security of an aesthetic practice that hides the real
relation (capital expansion through resource extraction), these together form a
continuous aesthetic project (pp. 3)
- The limits of the "exposure", the problem of scale, the problem of relating
global to human (pp. 2)
- Political knowledge through making visible (awareness) =/= action; this
through the ideological level belief in individual plasticity, the ability to
endlessly reinvent yourself without recourse to your own history (Boetzkes &
Pendakis) (pp. 3-4)
- This even at the molecular level in Carbon itself (pp. 4)
- The hiddenness of infrastructure through scale, active obfuscation (ie. state
actors) (pp. 2-3)
- Tie between increasing energy production and production of digital
information; acceleration since the first industrial revolution (pp. 3)
- Moves to a philosophical discussion of "plasticity" to defend a dialectical
form of thinking (pp. 4-5)
- D proposes dialectic in two directions: 1) capital-plasticity (abstract
capacity to give form) & 2) capital-plastic (the energy system that supports
it) (pp. 4)
- Critiquing postindustrial philosophies' (Speculative Philosophies, OOO, ANT)
political ambitions (pp. 4)
- Through Levi Bryant's naturalization of energy processes through
thermodynamics which naturalizes capitalism (pp. 4)
- Assertion that these de-historicize or reject historicization (pp. 4)
- Takes a position against this through reading the "expanded field" as
essentially the following: there is not autonomy of any activity, all of the
"economies" are intimately linked (pp. 5)
- There are no external forces acting since there is no edge for them to act
upon since everything is a linked component
- "Energy deepening" as root cause of postindustrial since it made possible a
series of transformations: financialization currency delinking, resource
industry expansion, cheep domestic energy, digital tech. so-called immaterial,
affective, creative economic turns (pp. 5)
- Architectural turn back to landscape at the same time as energy deepening
which was marked by ambition to design environments/the environment (pp.5-6)
- Marked by design of "processes, strategies, agencies, and scaffoldings." Not
design of buildings; from objects to settings (pp. 6)
- Response to environmental awareness on one hand, but more so from new client
requirements which were explicitly keyed to postindustrialization (pp. 6)
- Uses Tschumi's La Villette as an example of this: how programmed dpaces are
disengaged from the productive process and redesigned as "indeterminate
settings" where program is variable (pp. 6-7)
- Redefinition of landscape as a "place where matter, energy, and ideas flow"
which sits on de-industrialization (pp. 7)
- Landscape Infrastructures (pp. 7-10)
- David Gissen's assertion that turns toward research, organization, landscape,
and infrastructure are part of the same historical process which involves
theoretical changes and a representational move to maps of territory over plans
(pp. 7)
- Related to the emergence of landscape architecture as a profession (pp. 7)
- Representation change to accommodate the global scale of postindustrial
governance, production and management (pp. 7)
- Demonstration of the above assertion through Rossi, Reiser + Umemoto, DS+R's
Blur Building, Mostafavi's eco-nostalgia (pp. 7-9)
- General theme of naturalizing energy as an ecological function, shedding the
economic function of energy as underpinning the productive process (pp. 9)
- Urban life without production (pp. 9)
- Against this, spatial modulation of energy deepening as main driver of
postindustrial economy; architecture as energy infrastructure, the spatial
sites of energy production processes (pp. 9-10)
- Philosophy and the Problem of Energy (pp. 10-12)
- Charts the following philosophical move of intensive properties over
extensive action: speculation object orientation accelerationism (pp. 10)
- Energy as a cosmic force in these speculative philosophies; the visibility of
energy-capital dialectic is in climate change (its material effect) (pp. 10)
- Conceptual slippage between energy and intensity; need material history of
energy's concept across disciplines in which it takes shape (pp. 10)
- fundamental mediator of creation is labour in its mediation of energy in
creating value (pp. 10-11)
- Proposes Isabelle Stenger's critical realism as a fruitful point of departure
which can get at the material level while also operating on the history of
concepts by committing to mediation (pp. 11)
- Stengers continues tradition of engaging with gap between mechanics and
thermodynamics (see Serres and Bachelard), while thinking the two energy
frameworks as "ways of seeing" as much as formations (pp. 11)
- Stengers gets at the way energy is a strange object for science to study
since it is not directly measurable; Diamanti brings in Marx's labour theory
of value by showing that it is a measuring system for energy: labour theory of
value insists on making energy empirically measurable (pp. 11-12)
- Value and energy are tightly intertwined and that's the key which connects
capital and energy (pp. 12)
