MC: Jeff Diamanti: “Terminal Landscapes: Climate, Culture, and the Infrastructures of Postindustrial Capital”

I begin the masterclass by thinking my way out of my office window in Amsterdam. This means disentangling the Port of Amsterdam on the one hand, and the moraine in Kangerlussuaq in Greenland on the other, from their immediate contexts in order to position them as landscapes mediated by postindustrial energy culture. The overriding idea staged here is that postindustrial capital accelerates the energic drives associated with industrial capital, except now through an extended mediation of physical, social, and economic environments that relay most visibly and materially in the terminal landscape. These two landscapes coproduce a media ecology of the terminal, both as a staging and storing of potentiality, and materialization of the multiple tipping points distributed through anthropogenic climate change—that is, both as process and concept. As such, they become emblematic scenes that set the stage for elaboration on the project’s title. The second part of the talk offers an extended analysis of the place of energy in the infrastructural turn across the humanities and social sciences, drawing on work by Imre Szeman, Brian Larkin, Lauren Berlant, and Stephanie LeMenager to define the social, economic, and physical environment of postindustrial energy culture. 

Readings:

• Jeff Diamanti and Mark Simpson, "Five Theses on Sabotage in the Shadow of Fossil Capital." Radical Philosophy 2.02 (June 2018). 

• Dominic Boyer, “Infrastructure, Potential Energy, Revolution,” The Promise of Infrastructure eds. Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel (Duke UP 2018) .

• Jennifer Gabrys, “Becoming Planetary,”e-flux https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/accumulation/217051/becoming-planetary/