Culture in the Web of Life: Geopower and the Planetary Metabolisms of Capital
In recent years, the concept of geopower has emerged to illuminate the relationship between the cultural, political, and material processes that place the earth in the service of capital. Yet, many current theorizations have primarily focused on direct interventions such as terraforming and geoengineering, leaving unattended the expansive and indirect socio-ecological impacts of the global extractivist capitalist system as a whole. In this presentation, I call for an expanded understanding of geopower through the eco-Marxist lens of “metabolism” as articulated by scholars like Jason W. Moore, Fernando Coronil, and Martín Arboleda. By conceptually aligning geopower with global metabolic flows of nature-into-capital and capital-into-nature, it can more effectively be theorized as the set of material and cultural processes that channel the energies of the earth into the specific arrangements that transform them into capital. While these mechanisms may not always seem directly linked to environmental transformations, they often shape wider developments like deforestation, urbanization, and extensive infrastructure projects. In these dynamics, I argue, culture—understood as a vast field of practices, institutions, and ideologies, within which “the aesthetic” is only one restricted moment—plays a central role. To illustrate this point, I will refer to intersections between cultural forms and projects of resource extraction across the global south, focusing on the case of the Venezuelan oil-financed cultural field of the 1970s and 80s. By reframing the notion of geopower in relation to the role of culture within capitalism’s metabolic flows, I seek to shift the discussion back toward the networked dynamics of capitalist extraction, abstraction, and value creation.
The Aesthetics of Geopower: Imagining Planetary Histories and Hegemonies (CFP and more info here).
Organized by Simon Ferdinand and Colin Sterling.
Keynotes: Macarena Gómez-Barris and Federico Luisetti.
University of Amsterdam, April 4-5, 2024.
Workshop:
Latin America and the Geological Turn: Inhuman Becomings and Earthly Memories
The heightening of the ecological crisis in recent decades has not only reshaped the global political agenda but has also triggered a major revolution in the humanities and sciences and in the way we think about our relationship with the Earth. Since the Anthropocene thesis placed humans as one of the main geological forces of the planet, new terrestrial vocabularies have proliferated in the humanities, aiming to address the concomitances between natural and human history that shape our present era. In this new light, this workshop invites us to reflect on the scope of this “geological turn” in Latin American cultures, emphasizing Indigenous contributions to a new differentiated vision of the terrestrial. Based on recent works on the geological codification of history and its socio-cultural and technological formations (Grosz, Yusoff, Povinelli, Rivera-Garza, Latour, Parikka), the goal of the workshop is to open a discussion on past and emerging forms of geological thinking that reverse the mutism of the matter. To this end, we are interested in analyzing the literary, collective and multimedia archives that connect the deep time of geology with the diverse political, social and corporeal experiences of the region: How to interpret the geological life of the Anthropocene within the framework of Latin American extractivist economies and diverse animist cosmovisions of the Earth? What are the artistic expressions of this emerging sensibility towards the fossil? What is the role of the inhuman in the humanities?
With Erin Graff-Zivin, Leila Gómez, and Jorge I. Quintana-Navarrete.
Organized by Estefania Bournot, Azucena Castro, and Sebastián Figueroa.
Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Annual Conference, Vancouver, Canada, May 24-27, 2023.
Image: Clemencia Echeverri, Sub-Terra
Organized Panel:
Ecologías políticas en la poesía latinoamericana
Las poéticas de los territorios indígenas de Abya Yala, el Caribe y las comunidades afrolatinas tienen hilos sólidos de poesía que elaboran relaciones entre humanos y no humanos más allá del pensamiento dicotómico de los paradigmas culturales occidentales. La poesía de la tierra y la ecopoesía proponen modos inexplorados de parentesco con lo no-humano y expresan preocupaciones sobre la degradación ambiental. Este panel se propone reflexionar sobre las formas en que la poesía latinoamericana y caribeña produce documentos y elabora redes de relaciones que generan ecologías políticas e intervienen en imaginarios dominantes. Consideraremos las maneras en que la ecopoesía enfrenta el cambio climático y la degradación ecológica en la obra de Verónica Gerber Bicecci, las ontologías anti-jerárquicas en la epistemología vegetal de Marosa di Giorgio, las relaciones multiespecies en la poesía cosmopolítica de Juan Carlos Galeano y Solmi Angarita, la crítica de los impactos socioecológicos de la forma-mercancía en la poesía de Raquel Salas Rivera y Hugo García Manríquez, y la poética de la respiración en el Antropoceno en la poesía de Marília Floôr Kosby y Diego Moraes.
With Azucena Castro, Ximena Briceño, Valeria Meiller, Nuno Marques, and Vera Coleman.
Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Annual Conference, Vancouver, Canada, May 24-27, 2023.
Image: Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, ABRA
Invited Talk:
A Darker Side of Petromodernity: The Political Ecology of Oil in Nature-Exporting Societies
This talk examines the socio-ecological impacts of oil in the Global South, with a focus on extractive capitalism and petroleum dependency in Latin America. From a political ecology and environmental humanities perspective, the talk focuses on three key themes: the ontology of petroleum, the relationship between state power and international capital in the context of oil-exporting nations, and the place of the Global South in the global fossil economy. Drawing from Venezuelan cultural and environmental history, the talk sheds light on the “darker” side of petromodernity and the challenges of achieving climate justice in postcolonial and resource-dependent nations.
Neubauer Collegium’s symposium on “Fossil Capitalism in the Global South” at the University of Chicago on May 5th.
Invited Talk:
Ecopoetry and Capitalist Valorization in the (Post)Colonial Caribbean
In 2017, after an already debt-ridden Puerto Rico was hit by hurricane Maria, the island became the target of vulture funds, cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, and other financial mechanisms of disaster capitalism. However, the finance- and climate-induced crisis also made clear the extent to which Wall Street has always been, in the words of Jason W. Moore, “a way of organizing nature, differently but no less directly than a farm, a managed forest, or a factory.” In this talk I examine how the poetry of Raquel Salas Rivera moves beyond the critique of finance capital in order to address the totality of the capitalist ecology from the perspective of the colonial frontier. I concentrate on the book lo terciario / the tertiary (2019) to argue that Salas Rivera not only seeks to map the world-ecology, but also traces what Moore calls the “double internality” of nature and humanity, with a special focus on toxicity, sacrifice zones, and the unstable status of objects in the Capitalocene. In the last section of the paper I discuss the question of Puerto Rican independence through the queer futures and alternative sovereignties that are implied in Salas Rivera’s cries to “drown the colonizers” and “devour the colony.” Without ignoring that nothing unsettles sovereignty more than finance capital, I show how the poetry of Salas Rivera, together with the work of other boricua anthropologists, activists, and artists, are able to imagine a diasporic and queer sovereignty from which to resist and heal from the repercussions of extractivist and ecocidal colonial violence.
Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh, April 8, 2022.
Invited Talk:
Caracas: Ecology of an Urban Apocalypse
In this invited talk I offer a comprehensive history of the political and urban ecology of Caracas. I analyze the relations between nature and society in the context of the rapid and violent urbanization of the capital, focusing on the place of politics, oil, and cultural production. I argue that the series of ecological transformations that define the history of the city are best understood as part of the global flows of money, energy, and nature that shape peripheral forms of development at the margins of what Fernando Coronil called the "international division of nature". I look at different cultural examples, including the francophile architectural aesthetics of the government of Antonio Guzmán Blanco in the 19th century, the impacts of the Plan Rotival in the 1930s, the role of kinetic art in the expansion of urbanization during the 1970s oil boom, and the place of urban photography and photobooks in the cataloguing of emergent subjectivities in the city.
University of Wisconsin-Madison, April 1, 2021. Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
Invited Talk:
Poetry for the End of the World
In this invited lecture I discuss my approach to the relations between poetry and the aesthetic and political challenges posed by the Capitalocene and the present ecological crisis. I talk about the social and philosophical dimensions of the idea of the "end of the world" as it relates to deep changes in the ways of experiencing existence. I argue that poetry can offer a valuable creative, but also critical tool, to make sense of the new and weird planet that we have now. I further defend that this new "world" that poetry could help to build must be thought from a careful engagement with the history of colonialism and the negative impacts of modernization and globalization, which are at the root of the current ecological crisis. In the last part I read and comment on poems from by book El próximo desierto.
Villanova University, November 5, 2020. Sponsored by the Latin American Studies Program.
Also available as a podcast on Spotify.
The Aesthetics of Geopower: The Guri Dam and the Capture of Venezuelan Modernity
In the 1970s, during the energy crises that so deeply transformed the global economy, Venezuela experienced the most memorable oil boom of its history. The new bonanza allowed for massive modernization projects aimed at integrating the country’s natural resources into the capitalist world market. In this context, the state—working with transnational mining, fossil-fuel, and hydroelectric energy corporations—bolstered the artistic and cultural field by financing museums, public artworks, and specific artistic styles like kinetic art. The Guri Dam (the country’s first megadam and currently the fourth-largest in the world), incorporated inside its turbine halls two Chromatic Environments made by artist Carlos Cruz-Diez. Alejandro Otero’s Solar Tower, a 50-meter-tall concrete and steel rotating tower, was placed outside the dam’s massive walls. In this presentation, I will bring the concept of geopower (which refers to the capacity of institutions and technologies of power to place the biosphere in the service of capitalist accumulation) into the realm of cultural studies, to explore how kinetic art, far from a simple complement to the modernization ideology, materialized a way of organizing nature (e. g., sunlight, water, the wind) in order to extract from it the greatest possible value. I concentrate on the monumental pieces by Cruz-Diez and Otero to argue that the works and discourses of kinetic art played a fundamental role in the design of Venezuelan modernity by constructing nature as free-flowing work/energy that needed to be captured through technological and aesthetic procedures.
Presented at the 4th Annual Conference of the World-Ecology Research Network (WERN). Helsinki, Finland. August 17, 2018.
Una economía mayamera: Petróleo, espacio y consumismo en Venezuela
En los años setenta, mientras en Latinoamérica proliferaban las más cruentas dictaduras militares, los venezolanos viajaban de compras a Miami los fines de semana y, solo en 1977, invirtieron más de dos mil millones de dólares en condominios y casas vacacionales en el sur de Florida (Petras y Morley 14-15). Para Ana Teresa Torres, en esos años “los venezolanos deliramos ante nuestra propia realidad, y todos parecíamos vivir en el Magic Kingdom” (Kohut 59). En esta presentación abordaré dos momentos del imaginario fílmico venezolano que capturan la bonanza petrolera de los setenta y el posterior descalabro económico de los años ochenta. El documental Mayami nuestro (Carlos Oteyza, 1981) y la película Adiós Miami (Antonio Llerandi, 1984) ofrecen perspectivas complementarias para entender el alcance de la crisis sufrida por el país a partir del fatídico “Viernes negro”. Mientras en Mayami nuestro vemos cómo la riqueza de los venezolanos incluso hizo posible el desarrollo de Miami, la película de Llerandi muestra el inevitable colapso de una economía que rayaba en el delirio. Propongo entender el petróleo como una fuerza material productora de un espacio global que conecta íntimamente a Venezuela con Miami. Asimismo considero necesario trascender la crítica del consumismo de la bonanza para evaluar la compleja dinámica del gasto, entendido —a partir de Bataille— como un fenómeno regulador de los excesos de riqueza/energía dentro de una sociedad. Estas observaciones me permitirán encontrar en el imaginario mayamero de los setenta y ochenta una manifestación cultural de la expansión global del capitalismo fósil.
Presented at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Annual Conference. Barcelona, Spain. May 24, 2018.
Panel: “Espacios (trans)nacionales y modernidades instantáneas”, sponsored by the Venezuelan Studies section (SVS).
Session Organizers: Maria G. Colmenares (Universidad Central de Venezuela) and Vicente Lecuna (Universidad Central de Venezuela, Brown University).
Territoriality and Representation in Posthegemonic Times
The current debate about Latin American politics is characterized by two distinct theoretical standpoints: on the one hand, a “posthegemonic” idea of politics (Jon Beasley-Murray), which favors a deterritorialized form of agency and views the state as an apparatus of capture that neutralizes the creative power of the multitude; on the other hand, a “postsubaltern” position that argues in favor of identity politics and the reformulation of the state in order to build—in the words of John Beverley—“a people-state, or a state of the people.” However, a closer look at the recent struggles of the Yukpa indigenous people to recover their ancestral lands in the Sierra de Perijá, in northwestern Venezuela, reveals a deadlock that the affective and deterritorialized strategies of the multitude cannot fully resolve, at the same time complicating the possibility of building a “people-state” without first deconstructing some of the principles of identity politics. This presentation examines posthegemony theory and postsubalternism—with special attention to the place of land—in an attempt to demonstrate how some key Latin American struggles still demand a form of territoriality that can ultimately serve as a guarantee for political representation.
Presented at the congress “The Aesthetics of Politics and the Politics of Aesthetics in Contemporary Venezuela,” organized by the Venezuela Research Network and hosted by University of Cambridge (Cambridge, UK). September 19, 2014.