Extractivism, Datification, and Trasformative Justice

The project engages in the intersection of art, ethics, philosophy, and science, signaling the need for trans-disciplinary and militant research approaches. The workgroup focus has been to interrelate a contemporary reading to transformation in the nature of extraction and the extraction of nature. Opening reflections towards understanding the forms of actual resistance to contemporary modes of extractivism and datafication in order to build cross-geographical solidarities, and to debate the contradictions that documentation and dissemination of the present eco-social struggles imply in the terrain of mediatized contestation. This project's art and research intersection has aimed to develop a praxis that can nourish relations to life, power, and matter in non-dominant and non-exploitative forms. We developed a theoretical framework linking aesthetics and philosophy with critical geographies and political economy, to understand: How can art contribute to the production and reproduction of eco-dependent knowledge(s)? What kind of tensions or contradictions emerge in militant artistic processes that link journalistic, testimonial, and documentary work addressing the eco-social crisis with speculative filmmaking and experimental radio grounded in socio-political antagonism? What is art’s agency within the eco-social struggle for transformative and reparative potentials?

​​Our contribution foregrounds the study of energy as historical material to underline its social dimension and to emphasize this dimension as a non-commodifiable source of life. ​​ ​​We focused strongly on laying the foundations for the theoretical framework that contributes to the theorizations of Energetic Materialism emerging from Ernst Bloch’s reading of Ibn Sina’s (Avicenna) view on actuality and potentiality (Bloch, 2019). We conceptualized this study with the concept of "ecologies of flux" as an expanded struggle for potentiality through deep intersections across historical, social, political, cultural, and economic terrains. Further connecting positions of Michel Serres’ qualitative transformation in studies of dynamic systems and bridging to the radical geographies mobilized by Zapatistas’ indigenous politics. In this framework, we trace correlations in the study of global asymmetry in terms of uneven and combined development, in order to link the consortium of extractive stream flows on contemporary mechanisms of exploitation. We have also analyzed the expansion of violence around extractivist processes and studied the de-politicization around the eco-social crisis as a process of passive revolution – using Gramsci’s notion. We entered the discussion of the void in political imagination to debate what Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova (2019) put forward that future environmental devastation is unimaginable. This unimaginability leads to a void in thinking. To interrogate the notion of the void, we turn to the philosophy of flux from Lucretius (De Rerum Natura) where the void and matter are necessarily interlinked to produce forms of life. In conjunction with Ibn Sina’s proposal that potentialities are linked to the care for actualities, rather than that actuality as such contains all potentialities, we endeavor to constructively engage with the void as a mode to interrupt cultures of extraction. Fuller and Goriunova interrogate the abundant devastation of ecologies as a result of unimaginable futures, rather than focusing on political battles around sustainability as preservation. With Energetic Materialism we propose to understand the preservation of ecologies as keeping space for abundant flourishing. We elaborated on transformative ethics, as ethics of holding space for potential flourishing grounds informing our conception of transformative justice. To make devastation tangible and bring flourishing back into actuality rather than Western economic future goods (da Silva 2018), our research links indigenous resistance to ecological devastation by extractivist projects with philosophies of flux that can move varieties of ecological understandings. Our proposition has been to understand extractivism as the result of one-directional attention to environments. To analyze how capitalist conceptions of economic growth aided by datafication and algorithmic technologies of engagement and opinion engineering, impose a rhythm to the organic composition of energy by turning it into a speculative value measured in its propensity to extraction. These dynamics are further linked to anthropocentric and eurocentric conceptions of how life should be lived, which is at the heart of contemporary alienation. Further, our research has built on the critique of anthropocentric views of nature exposing the dominant theory of Anthropocene as a sort of neo-Kantian conformist déjà vu that is aligned with a necropolitical agenda of the 21st Century. We have proposed an alternative to the debate of geological temporality through Vladimir Vernadsky’s notion of Noosphere as a conceptual framework of sustainability. Vernadsky diagnosed the transformation of scientific thought into a geological force that affects material processes on a planetary scale and one able to transform the planetary biosphere “according to the interests of freely thinking humanity as an organic whole”, and sublate it into the Noosphere – a highly networked sphere of unified human knowledge. Vernadsky claimed that the transition to the Noosphere went utterly unnoticed and unreflected by humanity itself, which led to devastating consequences in the form of two world wars. Vernadsky’s work became also useful to demarcate and characterize the ideological rationale driving the present climate catastrophe: fossil-fascism. Vernadsky ​​passed away just before the Hiroshima bombing, a challenge to his cautious optimism regarding the Noosphere’s future. With cyberwar, this future has arrived and we can see its shifting battlefield now in Ukraine where the nexus of cyber and nuclear emerged as the symptomatic trace of the runaway Noosphere. Additionally, we engaged the work of Alexander Bogdanov in various capacities, with special attention Tektology and his links to cybernetics, producing a close study and multilingual reading to include a debate on the biased product of mistranslations of Bogdanov’s work. Here, we also stressed the critique of Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Achille Mbembe to denounce advanced and archaic forms of environmental racism, contributed to the critique of psychological and cognitive exploitation of Rita Segato's pedagogies of violence, and ecocidal toxicity and the inter-ethnic resistance that Mextli Yoalli Rodriguéz Aguilera’s maps. Further, we linked the epistemic dimensions of indigenous political struggle signaled by Yásnaya Elena Agilar Gil, and approached the necessity of linguistic and political translations. Building a theoretical framework for the accounting of physical and psychological extraction of material and immaterial resources at multiple and intersectional scales.

The context of our research has focused on critically disseminating mega-​infrastructural extractivism tracing intersectional resonances that link Nord Stream 2, the IIRSA-Regional Integration of South American Infrastructure, and the Transisthmic Corridor in Mexico.