生命的形式

IF 1.2 Q2 CULTURAL STUDIES
J. Wenzel
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引用次数: 0

摘要

本文从两个方面讨论了“生活形式”:首先,基础设施作为一种社会过程,促进了特定形式的集体生活;其次,赋予基础设施的能动性/生命力。本文考虑了能源人文学科中关于基础设施的一种未被注意到的矛盾心理:现有的化石燃料基础设施对能源转型构成了障碍,而使基础设施可见和“跟随管道”的行为被敏锐的石油批评家认为是必要的,但还不够。当冷却塔、电塔或铁路“工作”或被黑客攻击时,它们在社会和叙事上使(或阻止)发生了什么?换句话说,基础设施是否存在叙事语法?要发生多少事才会什么都没发生?在将基础设施视为一种生活形式方面,文化文本与建筑环境有何不同?中国·米萨姆维尔的故事《Covehithe》调动了文学想象力,将沉没的石油平台描绘成一种复仇和繁殖的有机体,提出了关于人类、自然和技术之间关系的新问题,以及这些生命形式所需要的关怀、责任和政治。这个奇怪的故事同时也是对死去的基础设施的记录:它的平台角色是散落在世界各地海床上的真实钻井平台。那么,什么样的想象或概念形式可以帮助我们理解基础设施的生命形式呢?这个问题在化石燃料基础设施方面尤为紧迫,这里不仅指那些加工、流通或依赖化石燃料的基础设施,还包括那些过时的、过时的、与过去联系在一起的、阻碍转型的基础设施。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
Forms of Life
This essay discusses “Forms of Life” in two senses: first, infrastructure as a social process that fosters particular forms of collective life and second, the agency/vitality imputed to infrastructure. The essay considers an unremarked ambivalence in energy humanities about infrastructure: the extant infrastructure of fossil fuels poses an obstacle to energy transition, while the act of making infrastructure visible and “following the pipeline” is regarded by incisive petrocritics as necessary but insufficient. What do cooling towers, electric pylons, or railways make happen (or keep from happening), socially and narratively, when they “work” or when they're hacked? In other words, is there a narrative grammar of infrastructure? How much has to happen for nothing to happen? And how do cultural texts differ from built environments in thinking infrastructure as a form of life? China Miéville's story “Covehithe” mobilizes the literary imagination to depict sunken oil platforms as revenant and reproductive organisms that pose new questions about relationships among humans, nature, and technology, and about the care, responsibility, and politics such forms of life demand. This weird tale doubles as documentation of dead infrastructure: its platform characters are actual rigs that litter sea beds around the world. What imaginative or conceptual forms, then, can help us grasp infrastructure's forms of life? This question is particularly urgent with regard to fossil infrastructure, which here names not only infrastructure that processes, circulates, or depends on fossil fuels but also infrastructure that is archaic, obsolete, and otherwise tethered to the past, standing as an obstacle to transition.
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来源期刊
Social Text
Social Text CULTURAL STUDIES-
CiteScore
5.10
自引率
3.00%
发文量
19
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