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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Who should own the infrastructure that generates the energy?
Mark Simpson:It's interesting to connect the idea of scale to the idea of common sense and to think about the way in which common sense itself is a kind of index of scalability.
Imre Szeman:Okay. My name is Imra Zeman. I'm the director of the new Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability at the University of Toronto Scarborough, which is one of the campuses of the University of Toronto. I'm also a professor in Department of Human Geography, which we can maybe talk about, Mark, because I don't belong in that department at all, really. I was at the University of Alberta for six years.
Imre Szeman:That's where I got to know my my colleague, Mark Simpson, who'll talk about himself momentarily. And while there, I helped to shape something called Petrocultures, which is an international research group probably best known for holding conferences, large conferences every other year. There's some other things I'm involved in, but we'll talk about that later.
Mark Simpson:Great. And, I'm Mark Simpson. I'm a professor in English and Film Studies, at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, in the heart of Alberta's petrostate. I work on the politics of mobility. I work on material culture, and I work on cultures of energy.
Mark Simpson:And, I'm a core member of the petro cultures research group that Imra mentioned, and also a cofounder of something called After Oil, which is a research collective. And both of these things are going to come up, I'm pretty sure, in the conversation that we continue to have. So, Imra, congratulations on the upcoming release of Futures of the Sun. I'm so excited to talk with you, about a host of things orbiting this publication. I wanted to launch right in, to ask you, sort of about, your interests, as they converge in this book.
Mark Simpson:Futures of the Sun is about energy and our energy futures and our energy pasts. How did you become interested in questions of energy?
Imre Szeman:The question I always get whenever I do these kinds of, podcasts or interviews, my answer should be a personal one. So my answer should be that it's because my father was in the oil industry. He was an immigrant from Hungary, left during the Hungarian Revolution, came to Canada and found his way to Alberta and found his way into the oil industry, an industry where you can make a lot of money just by learning some technical skills. He wasn't able to go to university because of his language skills. And I should say that because that would indicate a tight biographical connection to my subject, and whenever I talk to other people who are doing research on energy and oil they usually say their parents were involved in some way.
Imre Szeman:To my embarrassment, however, I I kind of only realized this about my father very belatedly. It's not that I didn't know that, but, it didn't really occur to me that that should matter till I was in my 30s or 40s. The real answer, there's kind of two dimensions to it. We can talk about the, psychological reasons for that if you like, if we have time at the very end of it. But but let's leave that aside for now.
Imre Szeman:There's two reasons, I think. So one of them is coming to the University of Alberta in, 02/2010. And in 02/2010, coming back to Alberta, but not to the place that I grew up, which was Calgary. I noticed in Edmonton that you could really see the apparatus of the oil industry in the city. It was visible.
Imre Szeman:And it caused me to reflect almost immediately on why I couldn't see that in my own home city, why it was so invisible. And that dynamic of visibility and invisibility was was something I wanted to understand right away. And I think the other reason was that it presented to me immediately a recognition, which, again, I can't believe I didn't have, which is how important energy was to the way in which human beings interacted, what they could do, what the military conflicts of the twentieth century and indeed the nineteenth century and so on. So it was kind of like this desire to understand the forces that were shaping contemporary life. And I was always in interested in those and suddenly getting the sense of that energy was important to those.
Imre Szeman:I wanted to understand that better.
Mark Simpson:So it's really interesting, the way that you frame that answer about the seemingly obvious answer around sort of familial connections. And then the other answers about a kind of belated recognition, which I think is really interesting in in relation to questions about energy. I know that the in the work that you and I both do with respect to energy, we are really interested in issues of time and the strange sorts of time signatures that, energy creates for the cultures in which we exist and the societies in which we live. Your anecdote makes me think of, you know, I don't know if I can pinpoint when I became interested in energy except that maybe it was through conversations and and experiences that I had as a result of work that you had started to do. But the belatedness for me has to do with the way in which I grew up right underneath, like, literally in the shadow of the Strathcona oil refinery here in sort of the Eastern edge of Edmonton.
Mark Simpson:And I was always aware of it, but never aware of it. And so it feels to me that the other question that is really interesting in relation to this matter of the invisibility of energy that you describe in Calgary is another dynamic of that that sort of vision question, which is sometimes the unseeability of it of energy. So that sometimes energy is visible, sometimes it's invisible, sometimes it's seen, and sometimes it's unseen. And I think that that unseenness is also then really interesting with respect to the kinds of issues you alluded to in the second part of your answer around what it enables and the forces that it enables that we often don't see as connected to questions of energy at all. So futures of the sun isn't the first thing that you've written about energy.
Mark Simpson:Your scholarship on the topic stretches back even earlier than 02/2010 when you came to the U of A and maybe even further, but at least to a 02/2007 essay that I think of as formative, called system failure, oil futurity and the anticipation of disaster. So I wonder if you could sort of talk a bit about other kinds of things you've done on this topic. How do you see the trajectory,
Imre Szeman:that connects your work on energy with contributions that you've made, say, to, post colonial theory or globalization theory or to cultural studies more broadly? Well, I see them all of a piece. I have a collection of essays that have the subtitle of globalization, culture, and energy, and oil. And I tried to link these up in the introduction. I tried to see them as a jump from one to another to another.
Imre Szeman:And, I don't think a lot of, people were convinced. I did get some comments about the introduction as as somehow I was trying to cheat and put together something that didn't belong together. Why they seemed to me to fit with one another was was not necessarily that discourses of globalization were immediately about energy. They they really weren't, and that in itself is is interesting. Or that whatever passed for cultural theory or cultural studies from the 1970s to the 2000s, not sure what has happened to it since, that certainly didn't deal with energy.
Imre Szeman:But what all of these sites dealt with and what I feel like has linked my work is that I've been interested in the narratives that contemporary societies tell to themselves about their political pasts, their current structures and strictures, and their future possibilities. So it's really about the narrative of the political as it emerges in cultural and social sites. It's how there is this powerful quotidian weight that makes everyday life just seem given and immutable. Even if we all know there's histories and things have changed, there's this sense that you can only ever have the present. Maybe you can have technological change, but you certainly wouldn't move away from single family dwellings, let's say, or from using automobiles.
Imre Szeman:And I wanted to puzzle that out. So it's about the politics of the social, it's about political change, it's about especially power and class, and I think one of the things that cuts through there is actually questions of expertise, which will come up in in Futures of the Sun again. So I do see those being linked. I think the sites are very different and I think this question of expertise runs throughout. I've noticed that I will take an expert discourse much more often than I suppose, what I'm trained in, which is literary studies or cultural studies.
Imre Szeman:I'm compelled by an expert discourse to see the type of work that it does. So that might be an analysis of Paul Krugman when it comes to globalization. It comes down to analysis of Bill Gates when it comes to Futures of the Sun. It's about the ways we're supposed to think and questioning that and interest, I guess the interest is in how come that works? How come that supposed to works so often?
Imre Szeman:I don't think I talked about the post colonial, but that's in there as well.
Mark Simpson:Yeah. So that's really, really great and insightful. And I wonder if you could sort of then try to think what you just said about questions of expertise in relation to what you opened with around the kinds of critiques you felt you got about that volume that tried to link these concepts together. You described it as that people were uncertain and and skeptical, and their skepticism seemed to imply that somehow there was a cheat. And I sort of hear the cheat as a kind of there's a getting away with something that isn't quite up to expert standards, and that expertise would require those things to be separated.
Mark Simpson:But so I wonder, like, is there a way in which the critique itself is also interestingly bound up with the question of expertise that never gets examined yet sort of persistently operates through these kinds of discourses in order to produce the givenness of the present as an inevitability? Maybe that's too forced as a question, but I just find that that's a really interesting potential juncture in
Imre Szeman:the in what you just observed. This is why I asked you to be my interlocutor. I think that you've, put together something that I'm not quite sure that I would know about. I I think that's right. I think that the other part of what I've been trying to do is really trying to make interpretation certainly dialectical but kind of more vernacular as much as I can.
Imre Szeman:So it's not that I shy away from using difficult concepts, or it's not that I just do a type of learned nonfiction, but I have always struggled against the boundaries of disciplinary knowledge. I know that everybody says that. You're supposed to say that if you're a critical thinker. But I do feel that maybe more so than most, I have not really ever found a home, in a discipline and that has worried me at times and at other times I see how that has produced a kind of capacity that I value. I started by saying I'm not at home in human geography.
Imre Szeman:I've been made very, you know, I've been made to feel at home. It's not quite that. It's just that I have no PhD in human geography. I've never taken a class in geography. Really, I'm trained in history of ideas and in social and political philosophy and continental philosophy, but I ended up doing a PhD in, I suppose, Comparative Literature, though even that is maybe a cheat.
Imre Szeman:My first job was in Globalization Studies in English. I suppose at the University of Alberta, I was in English and film, though there too I wasn't quite sure what I was doing in English. When there'd be disc discussions and debates over what to put on a Victorian literature class, I just thought, like, I don't understand why this is a problem, or I don't, I don't know what you guys are talking about, what is Victorian literature? And then I was in Communication Studies, and again I had to kind of relearn a discourse and in each of those cases there was an uncertainty, but it was a valuable uncertainty. And I've brought that to the ways in which I've tried to animate the research of others.
Imre Szeman:So I've been also creating structures that give people the capacity and the it gives them the feeling of openness that they can experiment with these things. So certainly, the way that petrocultures is structured is one of those things, but we'll talk about maybe later after oil is like that. Other initiatives that I've done, such as this thing called Banff Research and Culture, was explicitly about that, giving younger scholars the opportunity to spend three or four weeks together, sometimes five weeks together, just doing whatever they wanted to do. And as I was reading back, I was looking at Futures of the Sun and and reading it again, and I guess like any author thinking I would have wanted to change some things. It does seem to me that I'm not quite sure where one would position this in a catalog, and that strikes me as something that I value.
Imre Szeman:I'm not sure if that exactly got your answer, but I suppose, yeah, that kind of struggling against expertise is there in my work I think, and I think that that desire on the part of the critics to say, well I, I want this to be somewhere the way this is is makes me a little bit uncomfortable. Why is he writing about, issues related to globalization? Why is he writing then about literary questions that really are more like literary studies? What's going on here? And this is maybe, I I don't think I've gotten this, but this is perhaps not a serious enough scholar.
Imre Szeman:But in order to do this kind of work, we just had to get past that. I think this is true for for you as well as you've moved into this line of research.
Mark Simpson:I would agree that that's true for me, you know, and I feel I'm in an an English program, but I feel like I've always I've always existed in an English program in in a bad faith relation to the ostensible object of analysis, the literary. Your response puts me in mind of so many things. I'll I'll just say a couple of them. One is, just thinking about the way in which writers on energy that I know are influential for both of us. I'm thinking in particular here of, Timothy Mitchell and his book Carbon Democracy and the way in which part of the argument of that book, which has many threads, is to sort of track the way in which the abstracting power of a shift from coal energy to oil energy so that oil becomes ever more abstract through the course of the twentieth century is also a story about the shifting distribution of expertise away from the people who actually produce the fuel, the coal miners on the coal face, and toward those experts who manage the economy and and figure out all sorts of abstract questions around how oil works.
Mark Simpson:And that that it's not accidental that that happens according to Mitchell because of the way in which that does certain kinds of things that are generative politically for elites. The other thing I was just going to observe is that one of your favorite verbs, which I appreciate so much, is the verb to unnerve. And I think what you've said about unheimlich, unholiness of your situation vis a vis different disciplines is part of that real commitment as well as interest in that which unnerves. And so I I see that your work strives to unnerve, the givenness and the common sense of things like disciplinary expertise among many other things. But also, I think you seek out opportunities to unnerve what you feel you already know, and that's a a rare ability, I think.
Mark Simpson:Can I ask you what you mean by futures of the sun? So what does the title say for you? What is a future of the sun?
Imre Szeman:It was important for it to be plural, first off. There are many possible futures of the sun. The sun is a stand in for all renewables. It's really about what are the futures of what we think about as both the technical apparatus of renewable energy, but the types of societies that we imagine related to those renewables. What is it going to look like when we don't use oil anymore?
Imre Szeman:There does seem to me to be either implicitly, mostly implicitly, but sometimes explicitly, this expectation that energy transition will bring with it some type of social transition, and that's what's exciting about it. It isn't just that we will hopefully meet the goals that we've set for ourselves by 02/1950 to reduce c o two emissions per year, is that something else will happen as well, something more dramatic. Because just getting down to zero c o two will not address all of the accumulated c o two, and we'll have to make some kind of transition socially anyway. That'll just have to happen. So there's this possibility of different futures.
Imre Szeman:Some of them reinforcing the status quo. Renewables won't do anything. Some of them might be to reinvigorate strangely against this narrative that we tend to have, I think sort of implicitly again I would say or unconsciously. It'll reinvigorate kinds of more extreme politics. Or there might be some other opportunity.
Imre Szeman:What has always fascinated me is the way in which the transition, this giant transition that is happening from fossil fuels to something else, might be that site of a revolutionary change to what whatever that means. Right? It might not mean a gigantic change in the way that human beings live together or understand one another. But there isn't a kind of infrastructural shift like this one that has ever happened. So petrocultures is all about the degree to which modernity comes to rely on a certain kind of energy.
Imre Szeman:And that energy gives human beings the capacity to do an enormous amount of things. And they have come to take that as simply normal. We can fly across oceans. We can go to space. And this is just like, you know, something that's just whatever.
Imre Szeman:And that's changing. So every way that we have seen ourselves and understood ourselves in relation to energy is changing, is about to change. So then the futures are about what does that change mean? And that anxiety about a big scale change is a lot of what this book is about. So the futures are about what is it gonna look like?
Imre Szeman:Who is making the claims about what it's gonna look like? If there are many futures, what might some of those be? And that's what this book is about.
Mark Simpson:Great. And I might try to draw you out a little bit more on some of the things that you said because you you began to gesture toward, some of the the particular arguments that you unfold in this book. But I I think that it's worth spending some time talking in a little bit more detail about, what they constitute and how it was that you came to those and to identify those and whether there are others that you could have included, but you decided not to. So the you open the book sort of talking about the way in which there is a a kind of, common sense that's emerging around the inevitable passage from a petro culture to a kind of renewable culture or a culture of renewables. And you're you're really persuasive and provocative in thinking about the idea of that as a kind of common sense and as a kind of supposedly non ideological yet ever most ideological center of things.
Mark Simpson:And then you unfolded in relation to sort of three what seemed like sort of prominent narratives about how that inevitability will unfold. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit, in a little bit more detail about the ways of thinking the future of the sun that you offer in the book.
Imre Szeman:The reason you asked first what the reason was for these choices. Maybe I'll come back to that, but I'll just say what these three are. So when I was looking around at what were dominant claims about these futures. I I should say that when I talked earlier about assessing expertise or challenging it, I looked not to academic expertise. I tried to look at quite general discourses, so the types of things that are being discussed by the New York Times, in the New York Times let's say, not by people on the street, but certainly outside of of academia.
Imre Szeman:I want to look at something whereby elites, let's just say, are learning, and governments and officials of various kinds, are learning how they should think about something. I just wanted to put that out there because it does lead back to why I chose the things I chose. So when I was looking around and thinking about what would be three dominant narratives, because I only had time for three in a short book like this. The first one that I thought about was how we were conceding, I guess, by we, I think, environmentalists. We were conceding that the nation state was the organization that was ultimately going to make the scale of the changes necessary that we thought we needed to do.
Imre Szeman:That might sound surprising, I think, but what I was reading about a lot was this sense of environmental change at the scale and with the speed needed, it being like World War two, it being like gearing up for World War two. Or it was like the shift that happened in The US via post war Keynesianism. So these were examples of where the government put its unique powers and its unique capacity to work to achieve something, And that seemed on the part of some critics at least, an example of what could be done right now with respect to climate change. And I wanted to kind of look at that and and see how that works and what that demands that one accept, and whether that is the way to go. So I wanted to talk about nationalism and the nation state in relationship to energy transition and see what we're supposed to know about it.
Imre Szeman:I mean, some of it, I think, was all was already there, this idea of the good war. That's something that the Canadian writer Seth Klein, he has a book called that, the good war. So it's a different way of looking at what a state can do in relationship, not to war, but something else. The second one was about entrepreneurial culture. It's something I've written about before.
Imre Szeman:But this, fetish around the capacity of technological entrepreneurs, of tech bros in Silicon Valley being the ones that will lead us out of the hole that we've we've dug ourselves in, in terms of our environmental presence and our futures. And that, like every other situation, this is kind of part of the narrative that I think is out there. Like every other situation where we get ourselves into trouble, technology will manage the problem. And I get this a lot. As director of this institute, I get to meet a lot of non academics, both in government, but a lot in industry.
Imre Szeman:And they're very excited about what technology will do for climate. And then the third one is it's the opposite. It's a narrative which is saying the future of the sun will be that it looks a lot like the past. So the future is that the sun doesn't exist. It's blackened out by coal smoke or by using a lot of oil.
Imre Szeman:This is the narrative of drill, baby, drill. This is the narrative on day one of the previous Trump government. The first decision by the Trump government was to open up the border to the pipeline. That's how important it was, and that has been already put forward as something that would happen on day one in a second Trump presidency. So, two models whereby big organizations were going to lead us to a promised land, and what that would look like, what they're saying that would look like, and then one in which they're saying the promised land was the past when it comes to energy.
Imre Szeman:So those would be the three. So there's one missing that is hard to talk about. The politics of left wing environmentalism that does get to a different future, and that exists in reality right now. There aren't a lot of examples that I think could be scaled up, but there are certainly examples that I could have looked at to try to see what is in there as a practice that could be an example of where to go. I can think, for instance, of the Spanish collective Mondragon movement.
Imre Szeman:I can think of small communal uses of energy of people that go off grid. I'm not sure those are very prominent narratives, and I suppose that's what I was trying to look here. They're not filtering around in everyday life. My sample size is small for this, and that is when I take my dog for a walk to the park, and I'm talking to other people, they talk a lot about electric vehicles and they talk a lot about what a government should do and is not doing. And they might even say that they don't like what people like me are talking about.
Imre Szeman:They don't know that it's me, but they'll just say that, you know, more generally. People on the left with respect to kind of pushing the story of renewables, but they won't ponder how interesting it is that small towns all over the world now generate their own electricity and no longer rely on either governments or on grids that preexist them. So it was, I guess why I left it out was really that I didn't see it as something that right now had the capacity to be a common sense. And I suppose the way I end the book is with tips about how that might happen. So it's about what you can learn from these other common sense practices is perhaps a way to become common sense and to learn that that is a politics in and of itself.
Imre Szeman:So that you shouldn't spend only critiquing these other positions, but that there's something you can learn from the positions. Because the critique is satisfying for an academic to make careers out of it, but it's not necessarily something that gets active in the dominant narratives, in everyday narratives, in what the New York Times or even
Mark Simpson:the Wall Street Journal will report as environmental practices or addressing climate change on its front page. And they do. That's incredibly rich. And you invoked another concept that maybe we'll return to if there's time or if if we're moved to it. But that feels to me like another of the key concepts alongside time in thinking about the particular challenges around questions of changing energy systems of a shift from a petro culture to a renewable culture and that so if time is is one and the kinds of complexities of time in relation to issues of energy, scale is another.
Mark Simpson:It's interesting to connect the idea of scale to the idea of common sense and to think about the way in which common sense itself, of course. I'd never thought this in this way before, but you're absolutely right. Common sense itself is a kind of index of scale of scalability. Right? That if something arrives as a common sense, then what you know about it is that it is at scale in some kind of a way.
Mark Simpson:You anticipated the next sort of place I wanna take you in relation to your book. I hope this is okay. The place you lead us toward the end of the book and the way in which you invite us to sort of think about what we could learn from and draw on when contemplating common senses beyond simply their critique. One of the things that I find really generative in this project is the way that it arrives at this powerful and surprising or maybe powerful because surprising account of the importance of tradition and myth for left politics. And in a way, I kind of bid to say, don't concede tradition and myth to retrograde politics, but imagine actually the ways in which they might be really vital, for left politics as well.
Mark Simpson:And in making that case, you end with a powerful passage, and I and I actually just wanna sort of read it. You write, the future of the sun won't depend on the technological sophistication of solar panels and the storage capacity of batteries. It will depend on our willingness to forcefully challenge those narratives of energy transition that promise change while insisting that we keep everything exactly as it is. It will depend too on our ability to tell convincing stories about the traditions we need and want to honor, and those to which it is no longer worth paying any attention because they have gotten us nowhere. When I reread this, in preparation for this conversation today, I was struck that it recalled for me, I guess, something that our comrade, Jennifer Wenzel, has written in, an essay called forms of life.
Mark Simpson:And in that essay, she examines what she calls narrative grammar of fossil infrastructure. And so what I wonder, and as I sort of thought about this and the comparison, was whether in the argument that you make about narrative, if this is kind of a counterpart and a compliment to the argument that Jennifer is making. So she treats infrastructure as narrative. You seem to posit narrative as itself a vital form of infrastructure. And so I wonder if this comparison resonates for you, if you could reflect a little bit on that and how we sort of think about narratives at scale.
Imre Szeman:That's those are difficult questions. I think scale is important. I think scale is important when when it comes to addressing climate change, but actually when it comes to addressing any social issue, that is one that we want to change, that we want to move from one thing to another. Narratives as infrastructure versus infrastructure as narratives, I think they go together well. Jennifer is somebody that I've done a number of projects with.
Imre Szeman:I've written things with her. We don't think exactly alike, but certainly we bring different things to the same bit of writing or the same projects. So an infrastructure, depending on what one takes that to mean, whether that's a physical infrastructure or that's about, say, the way that a political system is organized or the way a bureaucracy operates, that on its own says something about what comes next, what's possible to come next. Physical infrastructure is a difficult one because the type of narrative that produces when it comes to energy makes a big demand. It makes a demand that that be different and that the infrastructure needs to change massively to produce that narrative change at the level of infrastructure.
Imre Szeman:Narrative as infrastructure is you make common you make something into common sense that is different than what it was before. And we see examples of how criticism and social movements do in fact make this possible. So many examples, one of them is the civil rights movement. One of them is about women becoming members of the human race. People who can vote, who should make as much money as men.
Imre Szeman:Queer people getting married, if that's what they wanna do. There's these kinds of ways in which they're driven those changes by narrative. Making something into common sense. Making something that is unobjectionable because there's nothing to any of those things that is demanded by the givenness of existence. Of course, you can live differently together in all kinds of ways.
Imre Szeman:Of course, injustices can be rendered just. Of course, the way that societies understand themselves is, let's say, equal or allowing for full participation of all members of society can come to be a reality. So I suppose I have those things in mind when I'm thinking about struggling by a narrative over a common sense. So common sense would be you don't use fossil fuels anymore because of what they do. A common sense might be everything you do, you think about your impact on the environment when you used to not think about it whatsoever.
Imre Szeman:And I see that in practice. I see that now in my I was gonna say over the over the course of my life. Somehow that makes me feel old. But in the last ten to fifteen years, those narratives really are there In a conservative newspaper in Canada, which is really the paper of record, it's our New York Times, The Globe and Mail, the paper of record in a country, Canada, that depends on extraction of all kinds to fuel its economy, The environment and climate change is part of a lot of its articles. So there's a recognition of something happening that needs to be addressed, and that's a change to narrative that is astonishing, amazing.
Imre Szeman:Now has that unnerved other kinds of infrastructures? I see that as less so. Perhaps what I'm saying is that the linguistic narrative is the one that's gonna fuel the infrastructural one. But when the infrastructural one starts to come, it'll reinforce the other changes. Something to that effect.
Imre Szeman:They certainly go together. I will just say that it doesn't not uniquely, but but certainly, unlike perhaps other changes, you can't address climate change on your block or in your country or on your continent. So you need to do the whole planet, and that is an issue of scale that is unlike anything that we've had so far. So you just can't do it. You can recognize it.
Imre Szeman:You can be a country or a city that has decided to ban extraction, which has happened. Again, that narrative produces outcomes. In Colombia, they have put a ban on extraction nationally. But for Colombia to do that doesn't do anything about the climate induced weather events that they might have to live through. It doesn't reduce the c o two that they exist in and what that means.
Imre Szeman:So that's why scale matters a lot. Time matters. Time matters because if the slower c o two is reduced, the slower we make the the transition, the bigger the challenge. So much so that it starts to exceed scale.
Mark Simpson:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As you were talking, it struck me that one of the things that I have learned from this bro book and I'm grateful to you for is a way to to sort of think about common sense differently. So to me, common sense is a slur.
Mark Simpson:That's how leftists tend to use it as a synonym for ideology and so all of the things that produce a kind of bad given. I think that one of the things that's really interesting in the arguments that you're making is the way in which you invite us to sort of think about how the common or the commons and common sense are actually potentially connectable rather than simply opposed. Right? Then in a certain kind of leftist tradition, common sense would be all of the bad ideology that gets produced in order to reproduce capitalism, and that that's antithetical to the commons. But you're actually inviting us to sort of maybe think about common sense as not a bad concept, but as a possibility.
Mark Simpson:It doesn't have a given content. It has capacity.
Imre Szeman:I think that's right. I think that's absolutely right. I know that initial impulse to say, no. No. Common sense is what we want to do away with.
Imre Szeman:I say we. I'll just speak about myself. If you want to change the things that you see as problematic in the present, whether that is around inequalities or racisms or inability to address climate change, then you find the common sense views of that. However, they're mixed up always, and maybe in some cases there's a common sense that we should address that. You want to move past common sense, so I get what you're saying.
Imre Szeman:Common sense, which I'm not the first to use it in this way, common sense is for that same reason that we see it as a slur. It's an incredibly powerful political position. One of my students did his PhD on the way in which the idea of the center, as described in the British magazine, The Economist, from its founding to the present, it shifted has shifted massively rightward. Now, the center is a kind of a common sense. What the economist is so good at is saying, well, let's be reasonable.
Imre Szeman:There's this position. There's this other position. We're the voice of reason. But you can see that that reason that they appeal to, which is so powerful, is marked by a position ideologically. And so I see it as a very powerful place rhetorically, narratively, to say that what I think is my positions are common sense, and I'm gonna struggle for those until the point where it's just given, it's just how it is, it's just normalized.
Imre Szeman:Again, that sounds like a slur, But if that's the site of struggle or if it's rather not seen as the site of struggle, you very quickly lose. If you have a situation as in the current US election and in other parts of contemporary neopopulism where the common sense is being articulated all the time. Those are just critiqued as opposed to something else being offered as a given. You lose the battle. So this kind of appeal to an America that's for Americans, right, even though I don't know what an American is exactly, and that anything that doesn't say that is objectionable, that's a very powerful position.
Imre Szeman:I don't wanna concede that position, I suppose. I think it's a mistake to concede that position, and there's other ways to incorporate that. I'll just say one other thing because I feel like I'm going on about this. But when I'm speaking to publics about climate change and about the capacity to potentially make changes with consequences, I'll often give them a small anecdote. So, when I go to visit my mother who is a 80 year old Hungarian immigrant who's remained Hungarian despite being in Canada for two thirds of her life, I will have to remind her over and over again to use the recycling bin.
Imre Szeman:She doesn't know how to do it. I mean, of course she does, but she doesn't have it as part of her immediate capacity. My son doesn't know how not to do it. Just would never occur to him. If he was just, you know, he was asked about that, it would be like, Oh, it's common sense.
Imre Szeman:Like, why would you even what what's there to object to? Doesn't make any sense. So, those little things do add up to just a practice that one has that matters a lot. There's a reason why the Extinction Rebellion has a book called, I can't remember the exact word, but it has common sense in the title. They're trying to appeal to common sense to just make it like, of course, you have to do this thing.
Imre Szeman:Why would you not wanna do it? So that is the reason why I feel like it's a really powerful space that if it's just a critique of common sense, you don't have anything to fill it in with. You have critique to fill it in with, and that's all.
Mark Simpson:Yeah. And that connects compellingly and powerfully with the argument about tradition and myth. I wanna take up the question of practice. You've introduced that, and I do wanna move there. But before we leave this conversation around, infrastructure, one of the things that the book opened up for me in a way that I knew but hadn't necessarily seen in quite the same terms was the asymmetrical relationship between a fuel source and its infrastructures.
Mark Simpson:And so at one point toward the end of the last chapter, you talk about how no one owns the sun so that it is common and sort of insist that that's something that we have to defend in the strongest possible terms. And one of the things that it struck me there was the way in which we often think about oil in terms of its finitude. And so as a kind of resource that requires ownership in some way. Whereas we think of renewables as things that are infinite and so exceed the possibilities of ownership or need to exceed the possibilities of ownership. And then what struck me though is that whether or not anyone owns the sun is a separate question from how it is that the infrastructure that enable us to use the sun's power come into being and how they are produced.
Mark Simpson:And this and in a way, this sort of goes back to what you were saying about how the the question of infrastructure as a material question is a difficult one. It's a it's a vexed one because, obviously, the sun might belong to everyone, but its mediation is a separate problem maybe and one that we need to sort of sort through. I I wonder if you, anyway, if you have any thoughts about that question of the role of the of the infrastructural in mediating, source that could be owned by everybody or by nobody.
Imre Szeman:Yeah. Sure. That really connects up with the book in the sense that this is about ownership. These narratives are related to ownership. It's about, I suppose, who owns it?
Imre Szeman:Who should own the infrastructure that generates the energy? You do need some type of mediator to turn any kind of natural energy into energy that can go into a grid. It's about that issue of ownership. The narratives around what the future should look like and whether it should take one form or another, whether it should take one status quo or or another, is in part to legitimate types of ownership of infrastructures that could in practice take different forms. So what I mean by that is there are wind farms being put up all over the place.
Imre Szeman:Somebody owns those wind farms. Sometimes they're national governments. Sometimes they're regional governments. Sometimes they're corporations that sell the energy to the grid, and often quite cheaply. Often, they're public private consortiums.
Imre Szeman:And this is what, Bill Gates really is suggesting is the best way forward to bring down the price of creating new forms of energy infrastructure, whereby public money already in short supply is transferred to private purses. There's that question of who's gonna own it. There's the possibility of nobody owning it, but you still need the infrastructure. And it's already the case that that question of infrastructure is one that we should be having, and we are not having it. We we're missing it.
Imre Szeman:We're belated a little bit to having it. I think of the example of, wind turbines. I'm pretty certain that only two companies on the planet make the actual generator. They're both Danish. And so when you see a wind farm, the building of the wind farm, the building of the tower is done by local industry that employ people locally for a short amount of time, but they ship in these massive transformers.
Imre Szeman:And so in a way, right now, this is a rhetorical claim, wind is owned by the Danes. Don't quote me on this. But there is that sense that ownership is part of also the fantasy of having a different type of relationship to the grid because it's about individuals having access to their own energy. You can put together solar panels, like they're plug and play, you can buy them off a shelf. So you can have your own energy.
Imre Szeman:You will find very quickly that you can't do that unless you rewire your house because you can't put the energy usually in most places in the world now back into the grid. So then the where it tends to push you is off grid. And off grid, in my experience, having lived in the hinterlands of British Columbia, off grid tends towards libertarianism, tends towards the kinds of populism that I've mentioned in here, tends towards a decrease in scale, tends towards this decision that one is taking the steps to evade that controlling system of energy that you might have been under for a long time, but it's not going towards the big communal ownership that perhaps I'm suggesting is the right way or the only way forward for a kind of energy transition that's for all of us and not just for some of us as fossil fuels always were.
Mark Simpson:Just making sure that I note this down. So the Danes own the wind. That's I got that right. Okay. Good.
Mark Simpson:Imra says the Danes own the wind.
Imre Szeman:And the Spanish own a lot of the sun. How's that?
Mark Simpson:A lot of the sun. Good. Perfect. Okay.
Imre Szeman:We can go through each power source one by one. How's that? Sure. I think the French own nuclear. Yeah.
Imre Szeman:I think that they do. Yep.
Mark Simpson:Let's turn to talk a little bit about the question of practice. In the work that you do on energy, you tend to address, the kinds of issues and questions that you do in four ways or modes on your own. And so Futures of the Sun would be a good example of that. In pairs, where you might write an essay with someone else. In big paradigm shaping readers, anthologies that bring together a number of perspectives on an issue, but then also in large collaborative multi author collectives.
Mark Simpson:And these are exemplified by, for instance, the Solarities book also with Minnesota. I wonder if you could talk a
Imre Szeman:little bit about how these four approaches differ and how they might overlap, and also what each one affords you. Each one of them are a different way of encountering an idea. So the individual writing is reflective, taking a chance on one's own. The interlocutors are textual for the most part or I suppose participant observation of people that take their dogs to the park where I take my dog. So it's very high level analysis.
Imre Szeman:It's about trying to puzzle something out on one's own. Working with somebody else, you immediately come across very different opinions. You may have read the same things. You may have read different things. Certainly, your approach and your understanding of how dynamics work changes.
Imre Szeman:And I think you're also unsettled in how you write. So what might be a phrase that I use a lot, you said, like, to unnerve is one, it may be that that needs to be unnerved. That may be a too easy go to. We all have this kind of reflexive way of talking about things or working through ideas. Maybe that's good to unnerve.
Imre Szeman:This is why I've always done that, including writing with you. It's a different process. You have to do it often live and in person. You're made to be honest with your ideas. The readers are a way of collecting material to two things, I think.
Imre Szeman:One is to help. Often a lot of young scholars have legitimacy in the field. Give them a way of seeing that they belong to this field and have dis discussions. But it's also a place where you can get a lot of singular voices, each one of them working through ideas individually. And the way that those are exciting is by seeing how all of these individual voices together do some kind of work or that they have disagreements.
Imre Szeman:They don't know it. I think that's interesting because they haven't read the other texts in the reader. And then there's the last one, which is group writing, which I don't think anybody has tried in quite the way that the After Oil group has tried. So I remember when we were first coming up with After Oil, the first collective endeavor was in 2015. And I remember that my rationale for it was a frustration around what it is that we were achieving by each one of us writing essays, critiquing energy systems individually when we were saying shadings of the same thing.
Imre Szeman:And instead, I wanted us to get together to come clean. What is it that we wanted to say? What is it that we could say together that we might share with Publix? So that was that experiment. There were 20 of us, I think.
Imre Szeman:The other thing again was this kind of expertise, unnerving of expertise, because we had artists involved. We had a former leader of the Liberal Party of Alberta involved and figure out how to write a book in three days. And it worked. We decided to do it again. I think each time we again play with the form because we don't wanna get lazy.
Imre Szeman:You can figure you know you know how to write together. You've done it once before. There's no reason that one should want to do it again after experiencing trying to write with 20 people. But if you do gain something from it, that makes it worthwhile. So we did it in a different form next time.
Imre Szeman:It was really led by Darren Barney. We did it in conjunction with the Center for Contemporary Architecture at McGill, and Darren wanted to do in less days with more people. So I can't remember exactly how many people were there, but it was I think it was 70. So Solarities, which is also with University of Minnesota Press, if you read it now, it doesn't look doesn't feel like it was 70 people writing it. But if the first one was about coming clean, the second one was about, well, what do we do next?
Imre Szeman:Where do we push ourselves? And we needed all those people, I think, because they could each tell us something specific about what their sense of this emergent something that would be renewables was about. So I couldn't have written Futures of the Sun without that book and without participating in that project because it the language didn't exist yet to base one's own critiques off of. I'm not sure I reference Solarities in this book, but it's certainly there guiding it. And we're doing the same thing again.
Imre Szeman:We have a book that we're close to finishing up, which is also about renewabilities. I see it as taking what I'm doing in Future of the Sun a step further of complicating it. But it's the same idea. It's the same idea of getting together writers and thinkers and academics from different disciplines to experiment with producing knowledge differently. In the humanities especially, we've developed a common sense that the way you do a project is you write it yourself.
Imre Szeman:That you go off to a office. You go off to a, carol. And what gives it legitimacy is the amount of time you spent on your own putting together something erudite. I suppose it's like what a novelist does. You write on your own.
Imre Szeman:It reflects you. You perhaps get praise for it. You get, capital within your discipline. And there's no reason that that should be the best way to produce knowledge. There's other ways to do it.
Imre Szeman:And especially so often in Left theory, Left politics, we talk about doing things together in a multitude of individually written books, all encouraging us all to do things together. So I suppose what this project is about, the idea is to make a different kind of common sense. That this is okay too. That in fact you get types of outcomes that you wouldn't otherwise get, and that perhaps it models the kinds of ways of being in relation to one another that we need to imagine for a better future of the sun, one that's different than the ones that I've described here. It may be about unnerving expertise, really unnerving expertise.
Imre Szeman:Like, this is what we're doing. It's about writing a book that Bill Gates could not write and not taking credit and being okay with that and even recognizing that that's important to do. I've especially valued the mode of trying to write together in this way. When we presented this method, we kind of gave the background how we do this, that people were fascinated. They immediately wanted to try something else like this out.
Imre Szeman:And it certainly has proved to be valuable. We're told by people that it meant a lot to them to come across After Royal. Solarities has gotten fantastic reviews. It does things that a book like mine can't do. And my my book does other things, and that's fine too.
Mark Simpson:Your, delineation of the After Oil projects and the volumes that have come out of them seems spot on to me. And the only thing that I might sort of add in addition to thinking about that has to do with another aspect of temporality in the first one, which was in addition to what you're saying about the problem of the limitations or the restrictions that are potentially there about everybody writing their their own individual critique about the same problem and wanting to do something that would give a different kind of perspective on that and a different kind of purchase on the problem, was also about an attempt to experiment with publication that could be fast. Right? That it sort of felt as though here's an issue that feels quite urgent and the and the pace of academic publishing can sometimes be slower. And so that was the thing that we wanted to do with the first one.
Mark Simpson:I think, also, we understood as addressing a particular issue around energy transition that didn't seem like it had yet registered widely in some sort of broader consciousness. And so it sort of felt, how is it that you animate this issue so that it registers more widely with people given that we had altogether too much knowledge already about the nature of that particular problem and the need for a transition? I found that the second one was the experiment in scaling up the number of people who are involved and then also sort of trying to do the experiment and actually thinking about what an actually existing energy transition could entail. What would be its dimensions, its coordinates, its possibilities, its complexities, its challenges, its contradictions? I found this third one is really interesting because it's about asking us to think about how a transition already suddenly seems underway and how does that change, what it might mean to try to write together about that condition and the ongoingness of that condition.
Mark Simpson:And I think one of the interesting things about the approach we've taken this time is also to make the school. So after all, school, as a gathering of people to write together and to think together, itself a kind of iterative process so that not just one meeting of the school, but several over which time we go ahead and try to produce the writing. Maybe we could just move towards some kind of a conclusion to our conversation by returning to Futures of the Sun and to talk a little bit about what you feel you've learned from the process of writing it, and and then the process of reading what you've written and sort of reflecting on what you've written that might help you see what you think comes next? And I guess I sort of think of the next in maybe two registers in terms of what might come next for what you wanna write, but also what might come next in relation to this unfolding narrative around energy transition or energy futurity or energy transformation.
Imre Szeman:So I do have two projects. One is a more specific description and discussion of energy transition and the other is a more expansive one. The first project is something that I've started here at the University of Toronto in conjunction with my colleague, Sergio Montero, who is also a director of a new institute here called the Institute for Inclusive Economies and Sustainable Livelihoods. Looks especially at the global South in terms of sustainable livelihoods and even more specifically to Colombia, Chile, Argentina. And what we have been doing, the two of us, in conjunction with some other researchers in Sweden, The UK, some other European countries, and also some countries in South America, is start to do a project on battery cities.
Imre Szeman:That's what we've been calling it. It's to try to look at what are the conditions under which battery plants are being created very rapidly around the world. There were none at scale five years ago. Now there are hundreds, maybe as many as a thousand now, either in process of being created or already created. What is interesting about this, my colleagues who are social scientists have one kind of interest, for me it's about why this has become so important as a development.
Imre Szeman:Why the battery? What does it mean to the communities that are there, but also what does it mean ideologically or conceptually? Or what is the narrative around the battery? Why is the battery something new? Not a wind farm, not a solar farm, not energy in that sense, but some kind of I suppose it's infrastructure.
Imre Szeman:It's what we were talking about in terms of infrastructure. To do certain things with renewables, you need the infrastructure of the battery. This is a five or six year project. I'm kind of there with social scientists. They seem to go and interview people and, get numbers and things like that, but they also want me along for the ride.
Imre Szeman:So the second one, which is a longer term one, I've called it Sustainability Inc, as if sustainability was a corporation. I hadn't thought about it quite this way until we had this discussion, but it is a project about expertise. And I guess I have an issue with expertise, don't I? Now that I think about it. I have a question about expertise because of how it constitutes a reality.
Imre Szeman:Experts have the power to transform ideas into reality. The the experts can be members of the professional managerial class. They can be engineers. They don't have to be experts like scientists or at any kind of high level. So Sustainability Inc.
Imre Szeman:So this emerges from my current position as director of this institute, which has sustainability in its name. And I've had a chance over the last two years since I've been to the University of Toronto to attend meetings of experts who are shaping and have been shaping language in relationship to the idea of sustainability for decades, but are especially doing so as we run up to the 02/1930 end of the current United Nations Sustainable Development Goals that they established. It was a fifteen year arc. So I go to these meetings that are made up of representatives from the United Nations, from industry, from academics, from government. They're not major people.
Imre Szeman:They're not even vice presidents when it comes to industry, but they might be somebody in the industry that is responsible for producing the sustainability report for a company, or they might be the people that write the report. Mining companies have sustainability, annual sustainability reports at this point. And so they come to these meetings to trade ideas about what is the concept of sustainability. They don't know that they're doing that. So it's not just that they have, like, one session and they go over and over the word.
Imre Szeman:That they have lots of sessions where they're trying to speak to one another and relate to one another ideas about how their organization fits into this dynamic around this concept that speaks to a much wider set of issues than the environment. So sustainability is also about gender relations, it's about access to water, it's about equalities. There's 17 of them in total. Job opportunities. So it really is this language about making everything better, fixing everything all at once.
Imre Szeman:There's nothing you couldn't put into one of these 17 goals. They've been established from the beginning on a contradiction. So, the first time this idea of sustainability was used was in 1984, I believe, or '85 at an event, the UN put together. It came out as this book called Our Common Futures. It's the Brundtland Report, the Brundtland Commission that was put together to try to create a more sustainable world.
Imre Szeman:There's a real pushback on what seemed to be an emerging idea that sustainability had to be about flattening growth or even degrowth. And so there's this agreement made that sustainability means, amongst other things, a ongoing steady state 3% increase in economies. Anybody who critiques this, and there are many people, including the current degrowth scholars, will point out that 3% means over twenty one years you have a doubling of the global economy. And indeed, it's been going at that speed and that level of, I guess, forward acceleration, even as all of this other stuff is being worked out. So I suppose I'm trying to understand, well, first of all, just the language, the discourse of it, what it looks like in different parts of the world.
Imre Szeman:A second is what these individuals think about their relationship to sustainability. So some of this will be around interviews. Some of this will be participant observation. And I kind of see it as the last thing I'm going to do. And hopefully, I'm gonna write it a little bit like nonfiction.
Imre Szeman:So this to me is a big task and a big challenge. I'd like to have it ready for 2030, but we shall see.
Mark Simpson:Both of those projects sound amazing, and I'm gonna say that I think you're gonna have to sort of speed up your schedule a little bit here because I want to read both of those. And so, you know, you might have to sleep a little less. That might feel unsustainable, but I don't care. I wanna read them. So faster, please.
Imre Szeman:I'll do my best. Thanks very much, Mark. Those were fantastic questions. I really enjoyed talking to you today.
Mark Simpson:Thank you so much for your incredibly rich and wonderful answers. I'm buzzing. This has been so fun.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Futures of the The Struggle over Renewable Life by Imre Zeman is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.