The poetics of extractivism and the politics of visibility

Abstract

to profit. 1 The term has emerged out of a Latin American development studies context to assume a place beside related concepts of the environmental and energy humanities such as the 'anthropocene' and 'petrocultures'. 2 Yet in some ways, extractivism is as old as modernity itself, especially if we think about the latter as a series of interrelated developments on an increasingly large scale, in which telluric matter, removed and processed, yielded the raw material of an ongoing liberatory project, a project that carried the unintended consequences of ever-intensifying environmental degradation and human immiseration. As a process of transferring raw materials from underdeveloped peripheries to a highly developed core, underwriting the uneven logic of capitalist development over its longue durée, extractivism shows no signs of disappearing in our present, when it lends itself readily to the financialization of assets and liquidity of capital associated with neoliberalism. 3 Extractivism bears a more-than-incidental role in these processes, becoming what Imre Szeman has called 'the paradigmatic mode of contemporary capitalism, a generalisable principle or practice of twentieth-first century neoliberalism that is essential for us to grasp if we are to understand capital in this new century'. 4 The term in its current sense thus names a range of practices associated with the still-dominant logic of growth and acceleration that drives late (or neoliberal) capitalism, but beyond that, it names a habitus associated with life in modern and contemporary societies, in which our agency as subjects is thoroughly energy-

Energy extractivism and water dispossession by contamination: an essay of fracking in mexican legal order

“…Certainly, the practices associated with this form of hoarding are situated throughout the period that ranges from dispossession directed by the metropolises during colonialism to internal colonization embedded in neoliberalism (Acosta, 2013). In other words, extractivism is a mechanism for transferring raw materials -with low added value-placed in peripheral markets to collection centers in central states; issue that characterizes the logic of subordination imposed by capitalism (Parks, 2021).…”

From dissonant dominance to synchronic sanctity: Relational extraction as counter‐resonance to extractivism

“…One author defines extractivism in general terms as “a mindset in which resources serve a means‐ends function, becoming commodities to be extrapolated and turned to profit” (Parks, 2021, p. 353) 7. The operative word in this definition is that of “mindset,” implying a distinctively human imaginary that moves beyond the mere process of extraction to incorporate a cultural identity from which those activities emerge and find ideological grounding.…”

Toxic Heritage

“…The idea of environmental amnesia also references the phenomenon that each generation takes their lived experience of the environment to be the norm and that people are habituated to whatever conditions they were born into (Kahn 2002;Buell 2017). But understanding affected communities' responses to environmental harm and risk requires recognizing that amnesia and habituation are entangled with the power dynamics of economic and political structures that produced the pollution (Cahill and Pain 2019;Chagnon et al 2022;Lou 2022, Parks 2021Wateau et al;Little and Akese in this collection). As the editors of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet state, people face a "barrage of messages asking us to forget -that is, to allow a few private owners and public officials with their eyes focused on short-term gains to pretend that environmental devastation does not exist … .…”