Energy Matters: Latin America and the Cultural Critique of Energy Open Access

Abstract

Energy consumption has reached an all-time high. Since the oil crisis in 1973, energy consumption by households, industry, and agriculture has doubled. Additionally, natural resource extraction has increased by almost 400 percent since 1970, mainly due to industrialization, urbanization, and population growth. A recent report by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) sees oil and gas demand rising long after 2030 and calls for trillions in new fossil fuel sector investment.¹ By 2050, the European Union will demand upward of ninety times more rare earths elements for digital technologies and renewable energy infrastructure than today, and according to the United Nations’ Global Resources Outlook report, extraction of raw materials will rise by 60 percent in 2060.² Most of those materials will be mined, extracted, and captured in resource-rich regions throughout the Global South, including Latin America. Since the colonial era, the region has been a significant supplier of coal, copper, gold, iron, oil, silver, and various nonmetallic minerals, and it has one of the largest reserves of proven petroleum and lithium on the planet. As geopolitics and foreign capital investment push hard to shape the new geography of energy transition and digital transformation,³ Latin America continues to play a crucial role in the development of energy-focused extractivism and its contestation through decolonial and local epistemologies and sociocultural resistance.

The five articles in this collection advance case studies that contribute to an emerging Latin American cultural critique of energy and the environment. They explore various modes of examining, looking at, and interpreting the intersections between energy, societal practices, and culture in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela.⁴ The academic inquiry and speculative research featured here share a common goal of questioning the conventions and beliefs that influence our relationship with various material sources of energetic power found in Latin America. From coal and petroleum to hydropower and lithium, “Energy Matters” charts the contrapuntal dynamics that extend from the dirty world of fossil fuel extraction to the green future posed by hydroelectricity and strategic mining to develop infrastructures for renewable energies to mitigate global warming. Our authors draw attention to specific aspects of the form and character of cultural representations approaching old and new energy regimes deeply rooted in the violent plunder, accumulation, concentration, and devastation dynamics of extractivism. Each essay explores the “capacious meaning of energy” to lay bare the matter underlying its production, consumption, and sociocultural construction.⁵ As Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore point out, energy qualifies as a thing insofar as it is transformed from part of the web of life into a commodity to be bought and sold.⁶ The socioenvironmental problem of energy has always been deeply bound to the material origins of the commodity form.⁷ Commodification obscures human labor and land put to work through the systematic concealment and detachment of a good from its source and labor conditions of production.⁸ Tracing the socioecological lives of commodities allows us to uncover and de-essentialize the commodity.⁹ However, as Denise Ferreira Da Silva notes, “matter and energy are equivalent,” particularly in postcolonial, nature-exporting societies such as Latin America. The extraction of matter from the earth and the human and more-than-human work that sustains it has its historical bedrock in “colonial juridic mechanisms and racial symbolic tools—the ‘means of production’ or the ‘raw materials’ it uses for accumulation” that are reiterated today by the nation-state and the global and planetary dynamics inherent to capitalism.¹⁰

Departing from Marx’s understanding of the metabolic rift, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark have described capitalist commodification as the robbery of nature. According to Marx, capitalist production disrupts the metabolic interaction between humans and the earth by preventing essential elements from returning to the soil.¹¹ The robbery of nature and the metabolic rift rest on value as the production of profit rather than the satisfaction of living needs. It poses a contradiction between metabolic interchange and the economic value form of commodities, where the circuit of the latter depends on the constant production and exchange of goods embodying natural-material use values.¹² The commodification of nature leads to its alienation, as it is viewed as an external commodity for exploitation and profitability rather than an integral part of human existence. Driven by the pursuit of profit, commodification is facilitated by social dynamics of material abstraction, fetishization, and mystification, where nature and humans are reduced and obscured to quantifiable units for labor, extraction, value, and trade, intensifying exploitation. Marx understood this social production of material life under capitalism as a particular mode of sociality: “The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life.”¹³ Beverley Best adds that “capital, in its reproduction as both a system of exploitation and a mode of domination, is a dynamic of social content and social form that is also a mode of representation—the production of particular distorted appearances that stabilize into a generalized ‘common sense.’”¹⁴ How we make sense of capital’s modes of sociality and representation is at the core of “Energy Matters.” We contend that Latin America is central to the global energy supply chain and the sociocultural construction, representation, and mediation of energy sources as crucial components of planetary, social, and economic systems.

Latin America has been deeply affected by the social, racial, ethnic, and gendered legacies of colonialism, frequently historicized and thematized from the social sciences within the framework of the radical socioeconomic inequalities pervasive in the region.¹⁵ This Latin American condition has been exacerbated by industrialization and modernizing policies of the twentieth century that resulted in significant environmental and social transformations in both rural and urban areas. One of the most relevant contributions of the dependency theory formulated in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s was its analysis of the unequal international specialization of the economy, where the periphery was confined to developing export-oriented agricultural and mining activities as a continuation of the colonial legacy. In these exchanges, industrialization of the periphery is only possible under the condition of low wages, which, along with the increase in productivity, determine the consolidation of unequal exchanges.¹⁶ Although social changes in the region have tended toward relevant progress in terms of social, ethnic, and gender inclusion in recent decades, socioenvironmental issues are still a pending debt.

Extractivism has played a major role in this history, as it transformed the colonies and later republics into nature-exporting societies, supplying the needs of metropolitan centers and structuring capitalism as a global economy.¹⁷ In the twenty-first century, this dynamic has been updated under the label of neoextractivism, driven by the rise of the Chinese and East-Asian economies and the commodities supercycle putting into question the geometries of power inherited from classical world systems.¹⁸ This has led to the accelerated expansion of commodity frontiers. According to Maristella Svampa, neoextractivism is a particular feature of Latin America, coinciding with the profound transformations brought about by the commodity consensus—that is, the large-scale export of primary goods that resulted in economic growth and increased consumption around the years 2000–2014.¹⁹ Neoextractivism opens a window to examine both the socioecological crisis rooted in the project of modernity and the historical configuration of geological extraction fueled by the social metabolism of capital and the unbridled consumption of raw materials and energy.

However, neoextractivism is not a mere technical relationship with nature. As Fernando Coronil showed when studying the deep impact of oil revenues in Venezuelan society, extraction encompasses both the production of goods and the formation of the social and political agents involved in that process.²⁰ Viewed as both objects and subjects of history, Coronil explains that “commodities are shown to be not merely products of human activity, but active forces that constrain and empower it.”²¹ In a single field of analysis, this unifies the material and cultural orders within which human beings form themselves while constructing their world. Neoextractivism not only commodifies nature to turn it into energy but also shapes the organization of society, the formation of states and political regimes, cultural patterns, and collective subjectivities and imaginaries. This resonates with the formation of the geosocial strata Kathryn Yusoff describes as “geological extractions constitute a geopolitical field that organizes social fields—from the globalizing geopolitical power of oil and gas extraction to the specific ways in which the bodies of indigenous women are trafficked to become the social-sexual frontier of that extraction.”²² Latin American situated energy and cultural scholarship has noted this as well, particularly groundbreaking studies by Miguel Tinker Salas. Analyzing the oil fields on the shores of Venezuela’s oil-rich Lake Maracaibo, Tinker Salas describes how US transnational oil companies provided not only the technology to drill the earth and extract oil from the subsoil but also housing and schooling infrastructure, leisure activities, and a structured, corporate way of living that altered the social fabric of the nation. Tinker Salas argues that these practices shaped generations of Venezuelans for whom the petroleum industry fueled the imaginaries of a middle-class lifestyle, something deeply rooted in an early ideological configuration of Venezuela and its natural body as a land of inexhaustible material richness.²³ In that regard, Manuel Silva-Ferrer addresses the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of extractivism to note how the configuration of Venezuela as an oil-exporting and rentier nation defined patterns of cultural development associated with boom-and-bust periods similar to those suffered by fluctuating commodity prices.²⁴

The pieces gathered in this special section bring to the fore how coal and oil extracted from the subsoil in Colombia and Venezuela, water turned by mega-dams into hydropower in Brazil, and lithium extraction resulting from massive brine evaporation in Argentina and Chile have significantly influenced the daily practices that emerge from an energy-hungry world. To apprehend this influence, we follow Coronil’s proposal of a comprehensive view of capitalism and the international division of labor “as being simultaneously an international division of nations and of nature (and of the geopolitical units, such as the first and third worlds, that reflect changing international realignments).”²⁵ This envisages “a global, non-Eurocentric conception of [the international division of labor’s] development” placed “within a unified temporal and spatial matrix” that is not free of historical inequalities in power and development among national states.²⁶ By being attentive to what Thea Riofrancos describes as the “constitutive territorial unevenness of global capitalism [and] the fractal structure of cores and peripheries . . . relentlessly reproduced via the ever-expanding extractive frontier,”²⁷ “Energy Matters” proposes a situated cultural critique of energy to reposition Latin America from the periphery to the center of petromodernity and energopower.²⁸

The interdisciplinary field of the energy humanities has explored these concepts to understand how energy resources, systems, and use patterns shape the material, social, and cultural conditions of modern life. Cross-fertilizing methods and perspectives stemming from the social sciences, arts and humanities, and natural sciences, the energy humanities have deepened the study of the intertwining of humanity and forms of energy to trace ways of being, understanding, behaving, and belonging in relation to the consumption of energy.²⁹ From literary, visual, and material renderings of petrocultures to theoretical and political engagements with energy cultures more broadly, scholarship in this field has generally explored and elucidated the structures and functions of what Imre Szeman describes as the “epistemologies of energy,” or the ways societies have narratively, visually, and conceptually figured the almost unconscious centrality of energy to establishing modern and contemporary social habits and cultural imaginaries.³⁰ In order to deepen a critical engagement with the energy unconscious that runs through global modernity and comprehend the ways in which its derived products, infrastructures, and conceptual frameworks exert demands on and shape human actions and decisions, it is imperative to formulate new accounts of energy’s historical and cultural function. To do so implies a full consideration of overlooked regions of extraction in order to enhance, question, and decolonize the empirical focus and location from which such a critique is produced and reproduced.

How might a Latin American cultural critique of energy reconceive the relevance of cultural history and aesthetics considering the energy regimes that underwrite it? “Energy Matters” argues that the hegemonic narrative that defines modern progress as the combination of the expansion of human rights, liberal freedoms, scientific and technological innovations, and the rise of the capitalist industrial economy cannot be fully understood and grasped without illuminating the role of Latin America in the formation of energy matter, infrastructures, subjectivities, and cultural practices.³¹ If energy culture has come to signify the social habits and cultural imaginaries that have emerged out of the shared uses and abuses of energy around the world, artistic and cultural practices in Latin America are fundamental to enhance the critical capacity of such effort. As Gabriela Merlinsky and Paula Serafini have shown, Latin America has a robust tradition of cultural production and artistic praxis rooted in groundbreaking work by social movement organizations, environmental historians, and political ecologists.³² These artistic and cultural practices work against the normalization of accumulation regimes that exploit life and aim to make visible alternative subjectivities that have been oppressed by conventional or fixed epistemological paradigms.³³

Aesthetic practices play a crucial role in shaping and regulating what can be perceived, said, and done within cultural and political realms. Jacques Rancière refers to this as the “distribution of the sensible,” or the “system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.”³⁴ These distributions influence perceptions and reinforce ideologies, maintaining hierarchies, inequalities, and systems of exclusion by determining who participates in public discourse, who receives attention and recognition, and whose voices are marginalized or silenced. But these distributions are not merely reflections of existing power structures. In 1900s Venezuela, poetry functioned as a sociocultural probe to examine the changes and consequences of oil extraction, exploitation, and use on daily life. As Gina Saraceni argues in this special section, poetry systematically showed how petroleum-powered modernity spanned out across the nation, something of great concern to Venezuelan elites who pondered the reach of petroleum in different shapes and forms of social and natural life. The changes infused in Venezuelan society and its natural and built environment due to oil export revenues were channeled through the employment of poetic language as a means to describe, imagine, and dramatize the utopian potential of petromodernity.

While aesthetic practices often reproduce and reinforce power and ideological structures, they can also provide a different sensorium to create new material rearrangements of signs and images.³⁵ Gabriel Rudas Burgos’s article explores how contemporary Colombian visual and performative artists put into crisis conventional depictions of nature and energy as landscape, serving power and control dynamics over territories and resources. Working through different materials and media—for example, coal, satellite images, and concrete—artists subvert the controlling perspective that traditional landscapes have historically posed by challenging how nature is violently forced into the cycle of capitalist energy consumption and its global warming effect. If, as has been epistemologically proved without equivocation, capitalist accumulation and consumption are the key drivers of global warming, then the circulation of images, as Kevin Cole and Daniel James point out, is one of the main forces propelling this consumption.³⁶ While film and photography have been an essential addition to capitalist imaginaries—fixing images of desire, commodity fetish, and the everyday life of mass consumption society—they have also been effective in attempts to construe collective subjects and halt ecological violence.³⁷ In another contribution to this special section, Jamille Pinheiro Dias shows how contemporary film and photographic production have composed visual archives of the multiple life forms affected by hydropower development in Brazil. Despite its classification as a source of clean energy, the overlooked consequences of hydroelectric dams—for example, displacement of populations, greenhouse gas production, and ecological disruption—are brought to light by documentary films and photography collections challenging the biases of the ethical implications of hydropower production and clean energy discourses in the region.

Carolyn Fornoff has also noted how Latin American artists have shown sustained self-awareness of their intimate relation to matter and the cultural and economic modulation of nature that imprints aesthetics. As Fornoff puts it, they bring to the fore the contradictions inherent to making anti-extractivist art within institutional and sociopolitical contexts circumscribed by extractivist capitalism. Deploying a reflexive extractivist character, cultural production not only functions as a means of representation but becomes “a form of critique that calls attention to itself—to its materiality, financing, institutional structuring, or participation otherwise in the circuits of commodities and capital it seeks to illuminate or diagnose.”³⁸ In Argentina, filmmakers have adopted a reflexive extractive character when dealing with lithium extraction. Lithium has become a fundamental component in producing electric batteries for computers and electric vehicles and is one of the commodities driving the so-called energy transition rooted in the massive extraction of minerals and the expansion of the capitalist extractive frontier.³⁹ Paul Merchant’s article explores film as a tool that prompts critical reflections on global resource consumption inequalities, enacting new forms of socioenvironmental activism. The film presents a dialectic by representing diverse cinematic temporalities to portray lithium extraction’s environmental devastation and Indigenous land defense and resistance, while also addressing its materiality and reliance on lithium-ion batteries to foster a dialogue beyond cinematic representation. Gesturing toward a critical and nuanced understanding of the energy transition, it advocates for innovative methods to puncture the irrationality of extractive practices, energy transition narratives, and the exchange value circuits of industrial production that sustain them. In his essay, raúl rodríguez freire devises a fictional ethnography to follow the journey of a lithium atom through time and space, focusing on the extractive enterprise deployed by SQM, a Chilean-transnational mining and industrial chemicals company operating in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. The historization and political implications of this journey serve to track the mineral through the market’s demand and supply value chain, showing the unreasonableness of extractive processes and the seemingly indecipherable circuits that constitute the lithium atom’s passage from geological matter to fetishized commodity.

The Latin American cultural critique of energy highlights the potential of culture as a form of political ecology.⁴⁰ It opens critical spaces to illuminate the multifaceted dimensions of energy, its dominant discourses, and hegemonic narratives. In engaging with the modes by which coal, hydropower, oil, and lithium are grasped by a multiplicity of discursive, visual, speculative, and historical forms, the essays presented next advance conceptualizations and theorizations informed by regional, national, and global socioenvironmental and sociocultural histories. Taking energy seriously in relation to a Latin American cultural critique of energy demands sustained approaches to advance material and historical engagements and explore new forms of being, ethics, and politics in relation to the circuits of industrial production on a logistically hyperconnected planet, as well as the geological materiality of our daily life cemented on the robbery of nature. As our authors show, even though energy is conceptualized as a global network that enables capitalism, technological development, and contemporary subjectivities, the experience of such a network differs depending on where energy is produced and consumed, and to what degree energy and its infrastructures are a common good benefiting the many. In doing so, they offer pieces of a larger issue, signaling the centrality of Latin America for a deeper comprehension of energy, and how Latin American cultures and societies are deeply affected by and entangled with the infrastructure and ontological dimension of energy and the materialities that make energy possible.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Imre Szeman for providing a preface for this special section. By connecting developments in the energy humanities with the Latin American cultural critique of energy, Imre’s opening offers an overview of “Energy Matters” and its contribution to the field. We thank the Latin Americanist scholars who expressed interest, provided abstracts, and contributed manuscripts to this special section. We thank the editorial team of Environmental Humanities for assisting in the production of the section and the reviewers and readers of the essays for their invaluable insights and comments. We thank Eleonora García Larralde for her proofreading support. Finally, we are grateful for the financial support provided by the British Academy in the realization of this special section.

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