Uris Hall Auditorium
Timothy Mitchell’s presentation focused on what he called “carbon democracy,” and how different ways of organizing the flow and concentration of energy shaped its possibilities. These possibilities were enhanced or limited by the arrangements of people, finance, expertise, and violence that were assembled in relationship to the distribution and control of energy. In this context, democratic politics developed with a peculiar orientation towards the future: the future understood as a limitless horizon of growth. This horizon was not some natural reflection of a time of plenty, but was the result of a particular way of organizing expert knowledge and its objects, in terms of a novel and bounded world called “the economy."
