{"id":2129,"date":"2021-03-11T11:14:46","date_gmt":"2021-03-11T16:14:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/abolition1313\/?p=2129"},"modified":"2021-04-27T15:53:05","modified_gmt":"2021-04-27T19:53:05","slug":"daniela-gandorfer-how-energy-injustices-mean-differently","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/abolition1313\/daniela-gandorfer-how-energy-injustices-mean-differently\/","title":{"rendered":"Daniela Gandorfer | How \u201cEnergy Injustices\u201d Mean Differently"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Daniela Gandorfer<\/a><\/h2>\n

In Bertrand Russell\u2019s 1925 work T<\/em>he ABC of Relativity,<\/em> we find a chapter called \u201cThe Abolition of \u2018Force\u2019,\u201d which argues that force, in the Newtonian sense, serves as a convenient shorthand and does not coincide fully with the physical realities. \u201cSome forces,\u201d namely \u201cthose exerted by a rope or string, by bodies colliding, or by any kind of obvious pushing or pulling,\u201d he writes, \u201cseem intelligible to our imagination,\u201d while others don\u2019t. This intelligibility, Russell emphasizes, is not simply a problem for the realm of physics, but also for that of the social and political. For \u201c[i]f people were to learn to conceive the world in the new way, without the old notion of \u2018force\u2019, it would alter not only their physical imagination, but probably also their morals and politics.\u201d<\/p>\n

By beginning my post with this passage, I do not mean to compare Russell\u2019s call for the \u201cabolition of force\u201d with historical abolitionist movements in the U.S., or even to abolition<\/em> as used in the context of the Abolition Democracy<\/em> seminars. In fact, I consider comparison and analogy (as I emphasize in my presentation) to be sense-making devices that risk falling into representational modes of thought, inattentive to the onto-epistemological entanglements of the concepts it puts into relations of oppositionality or similarity. Additionally, for brevity\u2019s sake, I will also not engage further with questions as to whether force (or: Newtonian force, F=ma) is a useful notion or whether, as quantum physicist Frank Wilczek writes, \u201cenergy\u201d would \u201cfrom a logical standpoint\u201d serve its purpose equally well.<\/p>\n

Instead, what I wish to emphasize here is that concepts are not simply conceptual, but material. And, in thinking with arguments by contemporary abolitionists, that in order to re-imagine different worlds, different modes of thinking relationality<\/em> are required.<\/p>\n

In regard to the importance of investigating concepts as part of an (re-)imagining and inhabiting of a different world I am also thinking-with Angela Davis\u2019 critique of a particular concept of U.S. democracy, Allegra McLeod<\/a>\u2019s extraordinary essay on \u201cEnvisioning Abolition Democracy\u201d and the on-the-ground reconceptualization and prefiguration(s) of justice, Leah Aronowsky\u2019s<\/a> critical elaborations on the Gaia concept, Reinhold Martin<\/a>\u2019s concept of line in his most recent blog post, and Alyssa Battistoni<\/a>\u2019s reference to Latour\u2019s recourse, yet again, to Carl Schmitt\u2019s enemy\/friend concepts. I understand their arguments also as a shared call for both critical investigation and re-conceptualization(s) as crucial parts of an abolition democracy project.<\/p>\n

Returning to the fact that concepts are never only conceptual I want to add here that re-conceptualizations \u2013 whether considered as theory or as practice, whether in a seminar room or on the streets of NY \u2013 are not to be understood as exclusively epistemological, but rather as onto-epistemological concerns. This is the case because, as I argue elsewhere, modes of thinking \u2013 of sensing and sense-making \u2013 are practices of mattering and un-mattering, making possible specific modes of existence and preventing others from coming into being. Addressing the violence(s) inherent to dominant modes of sensing and sense-making, then, means attending to those modes and to how they exclude that which remains unthinkable \u2013 that is, rendered thoughtless, senseless, nonsensical; not only unrecognized and unrepresented, but unrecognize-able and unrepresent-able \u2013 from mattering. To be clear, this kind of inability to imagine different worlds, to sense how modes of existence can matter differently, to sense and make-sense of different kinds of relationality and sociality is neither an excuse nor is it excusable. It is an act of violence. As Patricia J. Williams<\/a> writes:<\/p>\n

[I]n so many confrontations between vigilant civil patrollers and blacks imagined to be \u201cout of place,\u201d between citizens and police; all these killings, particularly (but not exclusively) of African American citizens; and particularly by (but not exclusively) white police officers. Over and over again, there is something vexed about the seeing. Not an incapacity to see, but more of a perceptual problem. We\u2019re all seeing the same thing. We see it once. Then we see it again. Then again and again and again. And we still can\u2019t decide what we\u2019re seeing or if we\u2019ve even seen anything.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Returning to the rich conversations in the course of the Abolition Democracy<\/em> seminars and the many voices from whom I have the privilege of learning, it seems of utmost importance, especially but not only at universities and other sites of academic knowledge production, to address and decolonize the proprietary<\/em> mode of thought (taking place, object, energy, land) still left unquestioned by many legal, political, critical, as well as scientific theories. Those modes of thought have their long histories \u2013 histories of proclaimed progress and histories of colonialism, racism, imperialism, fascism; histories that inhabit legal and non-legal concepts, even, as Karen Barad<\/a> argues, the concept and notion of ontology itself.<\/p>\n

Questioning ontological and<\/em> epistemological assumptions, understanding concepts as matterphorical<\/em><\/a>, that is, as onto-epistemological expressions of (un)mattering(s), is crucial for imagining different worlds. If the possibilities for relationality<\/em> are informed by, for example, an atomistic worldview, the Cartesian dualism, and Newtonian notions of force and causality, then how can world not determined by subject-object, subject-subject, and object-object relations (with all their attached notions of property, individualism, capital, defense, enemy, etc.) even be imagined? In a way this also speaks to Moten and Harney\u2019s note of caution that abolition does not take an object<\/em>: \u201cnot abolition as the elimination of anything, but abolition as the founding of a new society.\u201d Overcoming the current limits \u2013 guarded not only by academic journals but by checkpoints, walls, face recognition technologies, police and military units, private security forces, energy policies \u2013 of what \u201csocial,\u201d \u201cdemocracy,\u201d and \u201csocial democracy\u201d can mean<\/em> and imagining abolition democracy as \u201cfounding a new society\u201d requires looking closely and critically into the injustices already inscribed into the dominant and enforced assumptions about what and how the world is \u2013 and not only, as Latour argues, the \u201cCritical Zone.\u201d As McLeod shows, contemporary abolitionists argue that \u201cour present imaginative and institutional resources are constrained by the parameters of our highly unequal world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nuclear colonialism, global warming, environmental racism, among other phenomena, have exposed, over and over again, that energy is neither one, nor ever neutral, ahistorical, apolitical. It matters (differently). Energy injustices render certain modes of existences possible while preventing others from being, often even from coming into being. We will hear from Bernard Harcourt and Noah Smith-Drelich<\/a> about how this pertains to the Standing Rock Sioux\u00a0Tribe and my co-panelists\u2019 work shows in detail how global warming and the fossil-fuel industry are complicit in precisely these processes of (un)mattering.<\/p>\n

What I, and the Logische Phantasie Lab<\/a>, the research agency Patricia J. Williams, Zulaikha Ayub, and I co-direct, can offer in conversation with the works mentioned is attention to the question of how<\/em> law has to be re-conceptualized in order to attend to energy injustices differently<\/em> and to become response-able to injustices in their entanglements: Energies and inertias, gas exchanges and respiratory arrest, the force applied to George Floyd\u2019s neck and the pressure of a thinning atmosphere, toxicities and radiation penetrating indigenous bodies over generations (to come) and spaceships discovering colonialism all over again. Law, too, is built on the aforementioned onto-epistemological assumptions about the world and finds its limits in those modes of sense-making. It is in our matterphorical investigations<\/em> into energy injustices, including breathing injustices<\/a>, that we aim to articulate a different right to breathe.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Daniela Gandorfer In Bertrand Russell\u2019s 1925 work The ABC of Relativity, we find a chapter called \u201cThe Abolition of \u2018Force\u2019,\u201d which argues that force, in the Newtonian sense, serves as a convenient shorthand and does not coincide fully with… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2322,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38976],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-11-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/abolition1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/abolition1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/abolition1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/abolition1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2322"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/abolition1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/abolition1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/abolition1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/abolition1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/abolition1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}