Analyze

“In bringing ethnographic attention to hot spotting as a technique of governance, we find that it provides lifesaving humanitarian interventions while operating within the racialized structures of violence that produce continual life crises. The institutional rationality of hotspotting and the encounters of care that it produces illustrate the often-contradictory role of medicine in the lives of poor people: both caring and coercive, it intertwines care and violence.” 475; “we conclude by suggesting that economic investment and return are becoming a reigning logic in the governance of poverty, generating hot spots as sites of interest for both policing and health care and decentering normative assessments of deviance, illness, and social problems” 476; “Neoliberal social assistance, as it is practiced in the health care safety net, is conceptualized as an “investment “in the population, as a strategic and targeted deployment of basic resources, one that promises to generate a return on investment for the state or health system in the form of cost savings.“ 485

"Within this latter understanding of citizen social science, listening to the field becomes an important tool to accumulate not only concerns and issues expressed by citizens (Morris-Suzuki, 2014), but also to adopt and borrow terminologies used by citizens to generate a more “socially robust science” (Bonhoure et al. 2019, Nowotny, 2003)." (p. 6)

• "If we wish to imagine and discuss aeolian futures in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec—or, for that matter, anywhere else in the world—what is needed are more and better ethnographies of the multiplicity of forces (historical and contemporary, material and anthropolitical) that are generating, inflecting, and obstructing potential futures" (193).

"Anthropological knowledge is perpetually incomplete, disrupted, uncertain, somehow less than the sum of its parts. It is the right kind of knowledge for grappling with what Anna Tsing and her collaborators have termed “a damaged planet.”"

"This is, then, a call for political theory to not so much “take ethnography seriously” as to accept ethnography’s invitation to unmake and remake itself through the process of fieldwork.  If we wish to appreciate difference within the Anthropocene, fieldwork is a much-needed supplement to any theory of power"

"Instead of an ideal dialectical process of self-realization through productive activity, “capital” signaled how the division of labor allowed labor power to congeal in such a way that it could be alienated from its source, circulate beyond the self, be appropriated and commanded by others, and thus be transformed into new social and material forms"

"The resistance to infrastructural transformation thus has less to do with the fear of blackouts or “energy poverty”—although societal paralysis and devolution continue to be conjured to delegtimate renewable energy transition—but rather because of a more basic but also invisible codependence between our contemporary infrastructures of political power and our infrastructures of energy."

"Getting wind power has less to do with land rents, let alone clean energy, than with getting running water for the village, making electricity more constant and reliable, and developing better transport linkages since the villagers had few vehicles of their own."

"So he founded the Yansa Group with the ambition to export the Danish model of “community wind” production to rural communities in developing countries in order to help democratize access to renewable energy expertise and technology and to serve as a powerful tool for community integration and development."

"Yansa-Ixtepec gives us a glimpse of how new energopolitical potentialities are struggling to come into being in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (and not only there).Yansa-Ixtepec follows the charge of Scheerian thinking, seeking to harness renewable energy sources to transform and improve the social and political conditions of humanity, to bring justice and empowerment to long-marginalized indigenous communities in the postcolonial world. But instead of finding the Ixtepec high-voltage infrastructure of national enablement, Yansa-Ixtepec’s vision has been kept off grid in more ways than one."

"Elsewhere, we hear a few truly chilling stories, like the one about an intrafamily dispute over a hectare of land for which a rental contract is being sought. A man is said to have organized the rape of his cousin in order to get her to back away from her land claim"

"

"But in the zone where aeolian politics and anthropolitics intersect, we have seen how wind development has been avidly embraced by some as a means of concentrating wealth and power in the constant game of positional advantage in the city."

"For others, meanwhile, we have seen how wind parks are excoriated as worst kind of megaproyecto development, the sinister collaboration of local caciques and transnational capitalists to complete a centuries-long project of capturing and expropriating the wealth of the isthmus."

"Something happened to energy in the nineteenth century, when physics and fossil fuels combined to birth the energy of ExxonMobil’s business-as-usual. It was more than the advent of fossil fuel systems and an uptick in energy consumption; it was also the emergence of energy as an object of modern politics. In that birth, the expansive, multidimensional figuration of preindustrial, poetic energy was captured and yoked to a mania to put the world to work. Since the nineteenth century, the human relationship to fuel has been governed by this singular ruling logic of energy, which justifies the indexing of human well-being according to the idealization of work and an unquestioned drive to put the Earth’s materials to use for a profit." Pg 4

"When energy and work are understood as historically intertwined in this way, it becomes clear that the reign of fossil fuels is not only about our addiction to fossil fuels and their exponential power. It is also about addiction to the ideology of work, as well as to a particular way of distributing, compensating, and valuing work. Wage labor and fossil-fueled capitalism are certainly part of the formula. Historically, fossil fuel addiction helped to attach humans to the project of wage labor and the advance of global capitalism. However, the attachment to work also operated on a broader and more philosophical plane than is captured by the capitalist systematization of wage labor. The embrace of energy—as science, as worldview, as labor governance—went hand in hand with a privileging of dynamism over stasis, of activity over stillness, of change over stability, to the point that the bare achievement of dynamic change was more important than the outcome of that change." Pg 100-101

“I write this conclusion in the spirit of a new planet politics, ventur- ing proposals that could help to incite a more far-reaching global move- ment, a “resonance machine” that could effectively counter what William Connolly has called the “evangelical-neoliberal resonance machine” that advances late modern capitalism and planetary destruction.15 A key argu- ment of this book has been that our commitment to growth and produc- tivity has been reinforced by a geo-theology of energy that combines the prestige of physics with the appeal of Protestantism in order to support the interests of an industrial, imperial West. While the first geo-theology of energy was particular to a northern British crew and their efforts to im- prove steam engines, this logic of energy continues to haunt human rela- tionships to fuel. The politics of energy has been captured by the ethos of work and waste, especially in the West. Historicizing energy as a modern logic of domination helps to denaturalize the energy–work connection. This does not mean that engineering equations are wrong: in many sites, energy can be successfully calculated to measure work (as matter moved). But the computing function of those units—energy and entropy—should not be allowed to stand unexamined as the basis for ethical prescriptions surrounding fuel and activity. After all, the physicists themselves remind us that energy and entropy are more epistemological than ontological. Let us affirm that the energy–work rationality is just one epistemology of energy—and not the epistemology of energy. Let us, following Wal- ter Mignolo, upset the “Western code,” which has recruited support from thermodynamics, and that code’s “belief that in terms of epistemology there is only one game in town.”16 Let us be free to multiply energy epis- temologies, metaphors, and visions concerning how we participate in and value work, production, and dynamism.” Pg 190

"The job argument has proven to be compelling, and is an incredibly difficult argument to counter, given the unquestioned importance of work to the American notion of hegemonic masculinity and citizenship. Imagine, though, if the United States had instituted the feminist, utopian demands of a basic income and shorter hours, such that full-time, tradi- tional waged work was no longer an economic necessity. It is impossible to foresee the exact outcome of such demands-making, but let us assume that, in making such demands and gaining some autonomy from the late industrial system of organizing work and activity, people were engaged in undermining the supremacy of waged work as a sign of self-worth and morality. In such a situation, the argument of “jobs, jobs, jobs” would be toothless. The threat of lost jobs only works if, in losing one’s job, one loses access to the necessities of life, to the respect of society, and to the rights of citizenship. Instead, a post-work politics pries open new pos- sibilities in countering “jobs, jobs, jobs,” possibilities in which alternative arrangements of energy and work appear more intelligible and palatable. Without the threat of lost jobs, the fossil fuel argument, at least as out- lined by the House committee, would have almost nothing else to say in support of fossil fuels." Pg 205