The Lifeblood of the Cyborg: Or, the shared organism of a modern energy corporation and a small Northern Territory town

Abstract

The Blacktip gas project, owned by the multinational corporation Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI) and located near the marginalised, Indigenous-majority town of Wadeye in the Northern Territory of Australia, is the ethnographic setting to explore the connections of energy industry projects in the age of the Anthropocene. At the core of these issues are considerations of how carbon energy industries operate, how these industries are transforming natural and social ecologies, and how the benefits and costs of the sector are circulated. Much of influential research work and government policy tend to frame these considerations within analytical methodologies of “economic development”: despite pockets of public opposition, the presence of energy projects such as Blacktip are largely taken for granted by authorities, and debates are limited to questions around business-state cooperation and wealth generation. As a methodological alternative, I apply Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage to analyse the Blacktip project as a complex network that expresses broader social power relations. I suggest the disrupting image of the cyborg – as the colonising, techno-capitalist blend of human and computer, with carbon-based energy as its lifeblood – as a modern-day assemblage that offers a new method for understanding modern energy cycles, in particular how they are structured by contemporary carbon energy industry corporations. I conclude by arguing that if dominant, taken-for-granted discourses around the benefits of projects such as Blacktip are critically challenged by the (albeit limited) analytical device of the cyborg, social and ecological alternatives can be more openly imagined.