New School Symposium Liveblog 9

Daemian: other agencies. What are those?

Allan: there are after-effects of sustainability. Not a closed economy. Rather than thinking of sustainable practice, thinking of after-effects. When you can no longer have a fossil fuel economy you have a completely different relation to the object.

Karen: the most powerful thing about Allan's book is a most profound critique of renewable fuels. Idea that things would continue the same or replace the objects that don't work and the economy continues. For example the car is like a shell. You might be able to preserve the internal combustion engine and put a new fuel in. “Future fuels” and what that means. It's not just a matter of replacing bad things with better things (types of energy). A profound crisis in energy itself.

Cameron: the uniqueness of oil. This is what Allan has drawn out so well. But we've also bound it into forms that are ungleanable. They become un-recycable because they take so much energy to loosen the bonds. The only thing you can now do is to burn the plastic...because then you release the energy...

What happens when the city is filled with hyperobjects like Styrofoam peanuts?

Creativity itself, innovation in the way the university captures it is subsidized by the energy of oil. We have the arts thanks to the Koch Brothers. The sense that we're all just gonna return to growing apples in our backyards in Detroit.

Clive: That was what we called the dark ages...Britain in 410, the dark ages. No evidence of a potter's wheel in use. The most frightening thing he's read in a long time. It took a thousand years to get back.

Daemian: Colin Ward as a social democratic anarchist. All this retrofitting and activity from below. But without the context of a social democratic society you have the dark ages. Detroit: stuff is going on there in art and community garden is all very interesting, but at the same time as a catastrophic collapse of e.g. child mortality rates, male life expectancy.

Clive: Agamben: politics, making, sustainability Man without Content: contrast of praxis and production. Production has its limit. The will at the origin of praxis remains enclosed in a circle. It wants only itself through action. Marks a shift from praxis as will and sustainability as intention. Sustainability makes itself through the things we make. We want to device a system that works as powerfully as capitalism works in its own way.

Harvard sociologist Patterson: all that matters is how people behave well. Not whether they are really racist in their own minds. Move from intention to outer behavior.