Petromelancholia and the Energopolitical Violence of Settler Colonialism in Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Crusted Snow

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Petromelancholia and the Energopolitical Violence of Settler Colonialism in Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Crusted Snow Reuben Martens (bio) I. Infrastructure, Energopolitics, and Petromelancholia A subtle, yet significant, shift in governmentality has taken place in Western societies since the mass introduction of fossil fuels, and with it the infrastructures necessary to facilitate the commodities that allow one to live "the good life"—from railroads, motorways, waste management systems, and airports, to electrical grids, wind parks, dams, pipes, wiring, and diesel generators. This change can be described as a shift from what Michel Foucault once called "biopolitics" to what Dominic Boyer has dubbed "energopolitics." Those who control energy, from its production and circulation to its consumption, are those who control life: "power over energy has been the companion and collaborator of modern power over life and population from the beginning" (Boyer, 2011, p. 5). Those who have easy and cheap access to the outputs of infrastructures are those who get to live and thrive. However, in energopolitics, biopolitics transforms into a form of thanatopolitics—a violent politics of death rather than a sustaining politics of life. Roberto Esposito, who theorized thanatopolitics in the context of the Holocaust, argued how, in the words of Christopher Breu: biopolitics is always split or double—privileging one community, nation, or group as immune, while marking another segment of the population as outside the cordon sanitaire. In the name of immunity, biopolitics turns around into thanatopolitics, justifying violence against those who are outside the sphere of protection. [End Page 193] [...] biopolitics becomes a ceaseless campaign of death. (2014, p. 17) The same is true for energopolitics: rather than focusing on life, it manifests in such ways that it will value energy over life, following neoliberal capitalist logics of unlimited accumulation, where human life is only valorized to the extent that it provides energy. The place where energopolitics reveals itself most clearly is in our dependence on infrastructure: energopolitics is about providing infrastructures that sustain life, yet without very much regard to what facilitates those infrastructures and how it does that (not to mention what lives suffer for it). This is problematic considering infrastructure's unrecognized and even invisible position in daily life. Infrastructure is not the place where we locate issues of climate change and green transition, simply because infrastructures are generally considered (in the West) not to be invested with affect and desire; they are "the object of no one's desire" (Robbins, 2007, p. 26). The temporality of infrastructure simultaneously evokes a sense of stability and a sense of emergency: "Infrastructures are apparatuses that allow things to happen; and their scale and ubiquity suggest a temporality of perdurance. Infrastructures enable, persistently, at scales greater than their elements" (Boyer, 2017, p. 174). If infrastructure breaks down and thus disrupts the workings of everyday life, we are confronted with its extreme fragility and precociousness and our fundamental dependency on it. There is firm resistance, an inertia if you will, that comes with (fossil-fuel) infrastructures and their transformation. According to Boyer, this is "because of a more basic but also invisible codependence between our contemporary infrastructures of political power and our infrastructures of energy" (2019, p. 16). This anxiety about infrastructural change, and by extension about something like a green energy transition, is not just a matter of political inertia; Stephanie LeMenager (2014) has shown how this resistance also relates to a much larger cultural sphere where Western subjects have come to identify with the luxury and affordances (e.g. the "American dream") that fossil fuel infrastructures have facilitated since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and how they have made others dependent [End Page 194] on these infrastructures against their will. Western culture has internalized the ideology that drives petromodernity; fossil fuels equal freedom, and they have become a fundamental part of not just culture but personal subjectivity too. In part, this explains the aesthetic resistance to new forms of energy infrastructure, such as wind parks and farms: their unfamiliarity triggers an uncertainty, a new relationship that has yet to be culturally solidified. LeMenager formulates this blockage and the challenges it generates as follows: The petroleum infrastructure has become embodied memory and habitus for...