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.  

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.