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Accepted Paper:

100 Million years of modernity: a manifesto for fossil-bound commodity life  
Mark Jackson (University of Bristol)

Paper short abstract:

Invoking the need for a radical ontology of energy, the paper argues that our modernity is tens of millions of years old. Addressing modern consumption and urban materiality requires deconstructing thought/matter distinctions implicit in contemporary critical politics. Energy is the material vector for accessing a critical ontology of the present.

Paper long abstract:

The concept of bio-power has long recognized the historical and necessary relations between life, and the discursive productions of subjectivities, polities and bodies. Recent theoretical work on the ontological conditions of matter and life requires, however, that we extend fields of bio-political concern to apparatuses whose borders between bodies, polities, and life are delineated less in terms of bounded conditions of consciousness or human agency, and more in terms of processes of materialization. Emergent domains of bio-politics thus need to articulate radical boundary conditions in ways that disrupt, or at least question, the previous categories that make the organic-inorganic/biotic-abiotic possible. Drawing on recent work in theoretical archaeology, material geographies, and political theory, this paper will question how the traditional discursive limits of commodity politics are truncated by material assumptions of matter and life, in particular assumptions about fossil energy. Using an urban case study on the energetics of carbon life, it will address how the limits and possibilities for a commodity bio-politics become thinkable through a radical ontology of oxidized fossil life.

Panel S33
Manifestos for materials
  Session 1