SPRING 2025
Energy and Exhaustion
If exhaustion is a state of using up completely, consuming entirely, is the present moment experiencing an exhaustion of (utopian) imagination? Why is it easier to imagine the most spectacularly catastrophic effects of climate change than to imagine post-growth or degrowth ways of living? Energy and exhaustion are not exclusively an issue of politics, economics, or engineering, but also a concern of culture–of the everyday–and of creative work. How are the arts, humanities, and social sciences grappling with the seemingly unstoppable need for ever-more energy input and the phenomenon of psychic exhaustion due to the relentless turnover rates of production and consumption? The “energy humanities” has tracked the intrinsic yet largely unconscious power of fossil fuels and other kinds of energy in our cultural forms, fictions, and imaginations, but also attempts to open interdisciplinary doors to post-growth ethics and psychoanalysis (the challenge of living with “sustainable” needs, e.g., Kate Soper’s “alternative hedonism”); political economy (the connections between current cultural production and consumption and the fraught politics of energy extraction, processing, distribution, ownership, labor, etc.); and cultural history (as in “quantitative” readings of modernity in terms of energy and exhaustion). This theme invites enquiries from across the disciplines into the forms of our “exhausting modernity” (Teresa Brennan), past, present, and future, and the prospects of continued living under fractured and unequal conditions of too much and too little energy.
Lectures
All lectures begin at 6 p.m. in the Daniel Family Commons unless otherwise noted.
02/03/2025 |
On the Natural History of DenialULI PLASS • Wesleyan University |
02/10/2025 |
Making it Home: Single Women and Visions of the Good Life in Television Comedies and DramadiesELIZABETH TRAUBE • Wesleyan University |
02/17/2025 |
Home/Page/Source: What She Wants Me to SeeDOUGLAS MARTIN • Wesleyan University |
02/24/2025 |
FloodSALAR MAMENI • University of California, Berkeley |
03/03/2025 |
Etiology and Revolution: Exhaustion in the Clinical Writings of Frantz FanonNICA SIEGEL • Amherst College |
03/24/2025 |
Apple's Culture IndustryMICHAEL SZALAY• University of California, Irvine |
03/31/2025 |
Getting Warmer? Telling Stories About Climate ChangeCHRISTIAN THORNE • Williams College |
04/07/2025 |
Is Counterculture Undead? Digital Fatigue and the Post-Apocalyptic ImaginationBen Haber • Wesleyan University |
04/14/2025 |
The Earth ExplicatedCameron Hu • CFH Mellon postdoc; PhD Anthropology; U Chicago |
04/21/2025 |
The Corpse in Two ConflictsDEVIN CHOUDHURY • CFH Mellon postdoc; PhD Rhetoric; University of California, Berkeley |
04/28/2025 |
At the Ends of Exhaustion, a DoorTUNG-HUI HU • University of Michigan |
05/05/2025 |
Love Perservering: On Normporn and GriefKaren Tongson • University of Southern California, Dornsife |
Spring 2025: Energy and Exhaustion
If exhaustion is a state of using up completely, consuming entirely, is the present moment experiencing an exhaustion of (utopian) imagination? Why is it easier to imagine the most spectacularly catastrophic effects of climate change than to imagine post-growth or degrowth ways of living? Energy and exhaustion are not exclusively an issue of politics, economics, or engineering, but also a concern of culture–of the everyday–and of creative work. How are the arts, humanities, and social sciences grappling with the seemingly unstoppable need for ever-more energy input and the phenomenon of psychic exhaustion due to the relentless turnover rates of production and consumption? The “energy humanities” has tracked the intrinsic yet largely unconscious power of fossil fuels and other kinds of energy in our cultural forms, fictions, and imaginations, but also attempts to open interdisciplinary doors to post-growth ethics and psychoanalysis (the challenge of living with “sustainable” needs, e.g., Kate Soper’s “alternative hedonism”); political economy (the connections between current cultural production and consumption and the fraught politics of energy extraction, processing, distribution, ownership, labor, etc.); and cultural history (as in “quantitative” readings of modernity in terms of energy and exhaustion). This theme invites enquiries from across the disciplines into the forms of our “exhausting modernity” (Teresa Brennan), past, present, and future, and the prospects of continued living under fractured and unequal conditions of too much and too little energy.