Climate Realism: The Aesthetics of Weather and Atmosphere in the Anthropocene Edited By Lynn Badia, Marija Cetinić, Jeff Diamanti, 2020
This book sets forth a new research agenda for climate theory and aesthetics for the age of the A... more This book sets forth a new research agenda for climate theory and aesthetics for the age of the Anthropocene. It explores the challenge of representing and conceptualizing climate in the era of climate change.
In the Anthropocene when geologic conditions and processes are primarily shaped by human activity, climate indicates not only atmospheric forces but the gamut of human activity that shape these forces. It includes the fuels we use, the lifestyles we cultivate, the industrial infrastructures and supply chains we build, and together these point to the possible futures we may encounter. This book demonstrates how every weather event constitutes the climatic forces that are as much social, cultural, and economic as they are environmental, natural, and physical. By foregrounding this fundamental insight, it intervenes in the well-established political and scientific discourses of climate change by identifying and exploring emergent aesthetic practices and the conceptual project of mediating the various forces embedded in climate.
This book is the first to sustain a theoretical and analytical engagement with the category of realism in the context of anthropogenic climate change, to capture climate’s capacity to express embedded histories, and to map the formal strategies of representation that have turned climate into cultural content.
Part 1. The Climate of Representation
1. Ecological Postures for a Climate Realism
Amanda Boetzkes
2. Anthropocene Arts: Apocalyptic Realism and the Post-Oil Imaginary in the Niger Delta
Philip Aghoghovwia
3. Fire, Water, Moon: Supplemental Seasons in a Time without Season
Anne-Lise François
Part 2. The Subject of Climate
4. Indigenous Realism and Climate Change
Kyle Powys Whyte
5. Realism’s Phantom Subjects
M. Ty
6. Geologic Realism: On the Beach of Geologic Time
Kathryn Yusoff
Part 3. Realism and the Critique of Climate, or Climate and the Critique of Realism
7. The Poetics of Geopower: Climate Change and the Politics of Representation
Ingrid Diran and Antoine Traisnel
8. Perplexing Realities: Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene
Barbara Herrnstein Smith
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Papers by Jeff Diamanti
In the Anthropocene when geologic conditions and processes are primarily shaped by human activity, climate indicates not only atmospheric forces but the gamut of human activity that shape these forces. It includes the fuels we use, the lifestyles we cultivate, the industrial infrastructures and supply chains we build, and together these point to the possible futures we may encounter. This book demonstrates how every weather event constitutes the climatic forces that are as much social, cultural, and economic as they are environmental, natural, and physical. By foregrounding this fundamental insight, it intervenes in the well-established political and scientific discourses of climate change by identifying and exploring emergent aesthetic practices and the conceptual project of mediating the various forces embedded in climate.
This book is the first to sustain a theoretical and analytical engagement with the category of realism in the context of anthropogenic climate change, to capture climate’s capacity to express embedded histories, and to map the formal strategies of representation that have turned climate into cultural content.
Part 1. The Climate of Representation
1. Ecological Postures for a Climate Realism
Amanda Boetzkes
2. Anthropocene Arts: Apocalyptic Realism and the Post-Oil Imaginary in the Niger Delta
Philip Aghoghovwia
3. Fire, Water, Moon: Supplemental Seasons in a Time without Season
Anne-Lise François
Part 2. The Subject of Climate
4. Indigenous Realism and Climate Change
Kyle Powys Whyte
5. Realism’s Phantom Subjects
M. Ty
6. Geologic Realism: On the Beach of Geologic Time
Kathryn Yusoff
Part 3. Realism and the Critique of Climate, or Climate and the Critique of Realism
7. The Poetics of Geopower: Climate Change and the Politics of Representation
Ingrid Diran and Antoine Traisnel
8. Perplexing Realities: Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene
Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum presents these scenes of transformation as sites through which post-industrial capitalism distributes fossil fuels into the world. Diamanti uses this concept to redefine the post-industrial landscape by revealing the global flows of exchange and storage that precede the distribution of fossil fuels into the world as social form. Advancing a new media theory of energy, fossil fuels and other finite resources become new types of distributable media. Through this line of thinking, the book makes solid connections between media technologies and energy cultures that help to shape a radical critique of the current energy infrastructure that characterises global capitalism.
Arguing that this infrastructure rests on millennia of compact matter, centuries of colonial violence, and decades of technological development, Diamanti's analysis deepens our understanding of the environment as a 'terminal landscape' through case studies of oil companies, countries, artworks, and historical events. Using his under-examined typology of global energy further theorises and politicises the climate crisis for scholars and activists alike.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/climate-and-capital-in-the-age-of-petroleum-9781350191839/
Materialism and the Critique of Energy brings together twenty-one theorists working in a range of traditions to conceive of a twenty-first century materialism critical of the economic, political, cultural, and environmental impacts of large-scale energy development on collective life. The book reconceives of the inseparable histories of fossil fuels and capital in order to narrate the historical development of the fossil regime, interpret its cultural formations, and develop politics suited to both resist and revolutionize energy-hungry capitalism.
Examples of the new fields of critical research included in the book range from Marxist-feminism and an energy-critique analysis, test cases for a critique of “electroculture,” an analysis of the figurative use of energies in both political struggle and the work of machines, and the intersection of Indigenous labor and the history of extractivism. Materialism and the Critique of Energy lays the foundation for future study at the intersection of history, culture, new materialism, and energy humanities.