The Afterlife of Energy: Post-carbon and Feminist Post-work Politics
Name
The Afterlife of Energy.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
4.36 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
7235126cc389a456bd00b5b627d0750a
Author(s)
Ghosn, Rania
Vronskaya, Alla
Jia, Ruo
Pohl, Ethel Baraona
Dharia, Namita Vijay
Aidoo, Fallon Samuels
Wolff, Ilze
Date Issued
July 2, 2024
Journal
Journal of Architectural Education
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Citation
Ghosn, R., Vronskaya, A., Jia, R., Pohl, E. B., Dharia, N. V., Aidoo, F. S., … Wolff, I. (2024). The Afterlife of Energy: Post-carbon and Feminist Post-work Politics. Journal of Architectural Education, 78(2), 638–648.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
In the conclusion to her book The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work, political scientist Cara Daggett considers “A Post-Work Energy Politics” in which she examines the historical coupling of energy and work—meaning human, waged work—in an invitation to disassociate their values and futures. The exponential power of fossil fuels animated the pipedream that powerful, inorganic slaves could substitute unfree human labor, ideas that have driven European imperialism. Fossil fuel systems did not lead, however, to a world beyond work. Rather, today’s “patriarchal slave states” continue to manage the project of putting the world to work through the maximization of productivity, and the subordination of racialized, immigrant, and gendered bodies—who would work for lower, or for no, wages. “The project of work,” Daggett argues, “is in tension with the project of life.” 1 And the rise of “work–life balance” is a mere tactic of governance in which the enemy is fatigue, exhaustion, and burn-out. She suggests, in turn, an alliance between post-carbon and feminist post-work politics and asks: what might it mean for energy politics to refer to the politics of ensuring public vitality? In order to advance a feminist revaluation of work, Daggett draws on Kathi Weeks’s The Problem with Work to outline a project that makes two utopian demands. One demand articulates a paradoxical relationship between the pragmatism of (present) demands and the speculative seeds of possibility; a second demand outlines a utopian form for such politics: partial, fragmented kin to the genre of the manifesto. Daggett concludes with an invitation that “a radical planet politics, if it seeks to contest ecomodernist claims, needs its own politics of pleasure.” 2 In an echo to Daggett’s invitation, the authors of this Educators’ Roundtable were invited to contribute a short text that picks up on the possibilities of a post-carbon, post-work politics.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture
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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1080/10464883.2024.2382059
