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Forms of Energy and Cosmopolitics of Labor: a panel with Rice University professors Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer

(co-sponsored by )

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Sucro Carbo Petro: A Genealogy of Modern Energy

Dominic Boyer

This talk discusses the evolution of the high energy growth paradigm of northern modernity through the overlapping energy regimes of new world plantations (sucropolitics), machinic industrialism (carbopolitics) and plastic mobilization (petropolitics). This genealogy of modern energy helps us to better understand the fossilized logics of fossil fuels that seek to amber us in an ecocidal, genocidal trajectory. In conclusion, I discuss some strategies for confronting a gerontocratic sucro/carbo/petrostate with what I term “decompositional politics” (Boyer 2023).

Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist, media maker and environmental researcher whose work has helped shape the interdisciplinary field of Energy Humanities. Recent books include Energopolitics (Duke UP, 2019), which analyzes the politics of wind power development in Southern Mexico and Hyposubjects (Open Humanities Press, 2021), an improvisational philosophical collaboration with Timothy Morton concerning politics in the Anthropocene.

Winds: Energy and Elemental Forms Across México

Cymene Howe

What can the wind tell us about the world? In many conventional wisdoms it portends change. But it is also, from many cosmological points of view, a foundational property in elemental systems of being. In more contemporary configurations of energetic extraction, wind serves as a kinetic laborer. In this presentation, wind is offered as a speculative form and elemental figure with multiple potentials. Across the lands of Oaxaca, México—which serves as a case study here—wind takes up ontological capacities that range from the economic to the philosophical.

Cymene Howe is Professor of Anthropology and Founding Co-Director of the Science and Technology Studies Program at Rice University.  Her most recent books include Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke 2019), Anthropocene Unseen (Punctum 2020), Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions (Punctum 2023) and The Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory.