ABSTRACT
Conversations about the energy transition in the United States that are cast in terms of moving America away from its “addiction” to fossil fuels often proffer a sort of Edenic paradise where the wind and the sun provide all the power we need, and then some. All that is necessary in this scenario is that we harvest this sun and reap this wind. Bucolic pastoral verbs motivated for deeply industrial processes. Rarely is a wholesale swap of a fossil-fuel modernity for a renewably powered (alter-)modernity figured as a technological problem. This is possible, I argue because even when advocates of this transition speak of energy in terms of the abundant excesses of the sun, they continue to rely upon the energetic logic of oil to structure both imagination and rhetoric. In this way, a post fossil-fueled world-an imagined future-continues to be premised even in the imagination upon crude thinking (or, thinking with the logics of oil). To make this argument I adopt Kenneth Burke’s notion of apposition or the formal modification of terms by other terms of the same type (i.e., my sister, the king). The essay thus moves through many parallel and similarly structured segments, each of which could almost stand alone, to arrive at a series of surprising conclusions about bodily mass, George Bataille, global warming, “natural-feeling” energetic ratios, and categorical slippages. My central claim is that contemporary Americans have become, quite literally over the twentieth century, creatures formed from the excesses of oil. Creatures that would maintain their bulk without the excesses of oil. As such the sun, as fuel source, becomes in its rhetorical deployment a mode for keeping everything as it is under the guise of a radical transition of energy regimes.
