Description
Book SynopsisAn archaeology of Western energy culture that demystifies the role that fossil fuels play in the day-to-day rituals of modern life. Spanning the past two hundred years, this book offers an alternative history of modernity that restores to fossil fuels their central role in the growth of capitalism and modernity itself, including the emotional attachments and real injuries that they generate and command. Everything about usour bodies, minds, sense of self, nature, reason, and faithhas been conditioned by a global infrastructure of carbon flows that saturates our habits, thoughts, and practices. And it is that deep energy infrastructure that provides material for the imagination and senses and even shapes our expectations about what it means to be fully human in the twenty-first century. In Mineral Rites, Bob Johnson illustrates that fossil fuels are embodied today not only in the morning commute and in home HVAC systems but in the everyday textures, rituals, architecture, and artifact
Trade ReviewLiterary and cultural critic Bob Johnson provides a language with which to make sense of these complex, embodied, everyday experiences of extracted energy.
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Public BooksThe subtitle of
Mineral Rites is particularly apt, for it truly is a work of rhetorical archaeology – Johnson peels back the layers of what we know (or think we know) about the fossil fuel industry to reveal the mind-bogglingly expansive scope of how the fossil economy reaches out and affects peoples' lived experiences in vastly different ways . . . As a cautionary tale, it is a veritable punch to the gut that leaves us gasping for air.
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Material CultureTable of ContentsPreface. A Postcard from the Birthplace of Oil
Acknowledgments
Introduction. The Mineral Moment
1. Mineral Rites: The Embodiment of Fossil Fuels
2. Carbon's Social History: A Chunk of Coal from the 1912 RMS Titanic
3. Energy Slaves: The Technological Imaginary of the Fossil Economy
4. Fossilized Mobility: A Phenomenology of the Modern Road (with Lewis and Clark)
5. Coal TV: The Hyperreal Mineral Frontier
6. Carbon Culture: How to Read a Novel in Light of Climate Change
Epilogue. Carbon's Temporality and the Structure of Feeling
Notes
Bibliography
Index
