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CLASS: PUBLIC
SUMMARY:Guest Lecture "Sacrified to Flow: Waste, Water and Volumetric Power in Documentary Poetry"
DESCRIPTION:Dr. Alexandra Campbell (University of Glasgow)\n\nHosted by the
  SNSF-Project "The Beach in the Long Twentieth Century"\n\nThrough a compar
 ative examination of two documentary poetic collections, Muriel Rukeyser’s 
 The Book of the Dead (1938) and Rebecca Dunham’s Cold Water Pastoral (2017)
 , this talk examines the modes through which water is configured as both th
 e ‘tap’ and ‘sink’ of extreme energy frontiers. Following Christian Parenti
 ’s claim that the ‘capitalist state has always been an inherently environme
 ntal entity’ and a distinctly ‘territorial institution’, this paper extends
  his assertion that ‘the preexisting use values of nonhuman nature are esse
 ntial to capitalist accumulation, and [that] these are found upon the surfa
 ce of the earth’ (2016), to consider the submarine and subterranean\n\nspat
 ialities of the hydro and petro frontiers. The verticality inherent in thes
 e modes of production necessitates that we expand from ‘surface’ to conside
 r the role that depth – or what social geographers have termed, volumetrics
  –  play in the ability of the State to secure and accumulate capital. If, 
 as Parenti suggests, it is the ‘modern State’s territoriality that delivers
  nonhuman nature to capital accumulation by way of place-based property reg
 imes, [the] production of infrastructure, and [the] scientific and intellec
 tual practices that make nonhuman nature legible and thus accessible’ (Pare
 nti, 166), how do the multidimensional conditions of volume and atmosphere 
 complicate or disrupt these ‘flat’ conceptions of territory? Furthermore, w
 here the infrastructural mechanisms of pipelines, tunnels, and dams work to
  filter both oil and water into states of ‘pure abstract flow’ (Blackmore a
 nd Gomez, 2021), I consider how the poetic attentions of Rukeyser and Dunha
 m work to reassert to the material liveliness of liquids as substances that
  leak, overflow, seep, diffuse, and spill and thus supersede these logics o
 f containment. By emphasising water’s material capacities to disrupt, resis
 t and suspend the linear logics of neoliberal progress, this paper examines
  how poets align the turbulence of liquidity with social conditions of resi
 stance and an outright refusal to ‘go with the flow’.\n\nThe lecture will t
 ake place on May 5th 2021, at 17.15, on Zoom. To sign up, please send an em
 ail to gudrun.jakupsstovu@ens.unibe.ch\n\nPlease feel free to circulate the
  poster among friends and colleagues that might be interested in the topic.
LOCATION:University of Bern
DTSTAMP:20211110T122607Z
DTSTART:20210505T151500Z
DTEND:20210515T170000Z
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