Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In the June 1940 issue of Fats and Oil Studies, the agricultural economist Karl Brandt published a stately infographic depicting the “weight of a blue whale in terms of elephants and oxen.” At the top of the diagram is a handsome drawing of a blue whale in profile, its body submarine-straight, its mouth slightly agape. Below the whale, 25 diminutive elephant silhouettes march in three neat rows. Underneath the elephants, an orderly herd of 150 little black oxen graze, heads down, in lockstep. The comparison of whales, elephants, and oxen is inherently strange. Why these animals? Why not whales, dolphins, and tuna? Or whales, swine, and sticks of margarine? For that matter, where are the rhinoceroses? Are animals truly fungible in this way? The more one stares at this diagram, the more it obscures as much as it reveals.In some ways, this mystery of transmutation is at the heart of Jamie L. Jones’ Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling. In the conventional narrative of American energy production, the heyday of Yankee whaling peaked and came crashing down in 1860, with the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania. Whereas Americans once used whale oil to light everything from houses to streetlamps to the headlights of locomotives, oil from the ground became the emblematic energy source of the modern era. Yet, Jones writes, this very narrative of “energy transition”—the notion of “energy as a unified field of labor, production, and circulation based, not on the conditions of a specific resource's extraction, but on the consumption of its abstract product—is a myth. In fact, it is a dangerous myth about energy, a myth that palliates us into believing that all energy resources are ultimately the same. Or, at the very least, the myth makes it convenient to ignore the material origins and consequences of energy” (13).To counteract this seamless, slippery narrative, Jones argues that “fossil modernity,” her term for the era marked by the use of fossil fuels rather than previous forms of power, did not erase the whaling era. Rather, whaling lived on in cultural forms such as postcards, tourism, lectures, museum exhibits, and traveling whale shows. Although these cultural forms no longer necessarily relied on the killing of whales, they still allowed a contiguous aesthetic, imaginative, and affective experience of energy consumption from the era of whale oil to the era of petroleum. “The US whaling industry was one of the conditions through which fossil modernity emerged,” writes Jones, and “whaling culture scaffolded fossil fuel culture” (5). Like its central topic of whales and energy, Jones’ book is expansive and intricate. And like whales and energy infrastructures themselves, the various parts of Rendered Obsolete are so densely interwoven as to make unraveling them an uneasy enterprise. The book does not lend itself to simple schematics.With this in mind, and insofar as a book review is, itself, a kind of rendering—a boiling down of a lively, dynamic entity into its rude, component parts—it seems appropriate to eschew a chapter-by-chapter breakdown, in favor of an infographic, economical approach, in the tradition of Karl Brandt. First, and most prominently, the book consists of roughly 33 percent (by weight) reflections on, and analyses of, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). As Jones notes, by taking on Melville's twisty, polymorphous, contradictory tome, she is venturing into a well of deep ink, if not opening a Pandora's barrel of whale oil—one characterized by countless interpretations, analyses, and dissections by previous scholars. Nevertheless, Jones’ reading of Moby-Dick as a book fundamentally about energy transition is original, stimulating, and convincing. Jones does an excellent job showing that it is enervation that drives the book's narrator, Ishmael, to the sea in the first place; that anxieties about energy (physical, psychical, economic) haunt Melville's novel; and that the “revival” of Melville's magnum opus in the mid-twentieth century was part of a much larger American reckoning with the nature of fossil fuel extraction and industrial capitalism.The second major element of Rendered Obsolete (a good 20 percent, concentrated in a rich and juicy band around the book's midsection) concerns the embodied appreciation of whales and whale-related artifacts. These parts of the book mine twin histories of a whale carcass, embalmed in 1880 and nicknamed “The Prince of Whales,” and its conceptual counterpart, the decommissioned whale ship Progress, displayed at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Both specimens made their way from the shores of the Atlantic into the cities of the Midwest where they awed, bored, and sometimes disgusted audiences. In addition to these two major historical oddities, the inventory of cetacean artifacts accumulated throughout Rendered Obsolete also includes scrimshaw, pamphlets about whaling, postcards, statues of whalemen, and silent film recreations of nineteenth-century whale hunts.More ephemeral, though still present throughout Jones' analysis, is the concept of “quaintness,” which comprises, let's say, 27 percent of the book. Following Sianne Ngai's call to examine “minor aesthetic categories,” Jones describes “the quaint” as a way of “aestheticizing power in decline-or, perhaps more to the point [. . .] a way of aestheticizing exhausted resources, industries, and people” (74). For communities like Nantucket, the transition from whale hunting to oil drilling was a source of depletion, poverty, sadness, and trauma; but for middle class vacationers from the new economic engines of the eastern United States (transported to “quaint” communities like Nantucket by rail and steamship, the very technologies made possible by whaling communities’ decline) the end of whaling offered energetic rejuvenation in the face of the grinding exhaustion of fossil modernity (80–86).The remainder of the book consists of interstitial discussions of the scholarly tools and conceptual frameworks that Jones uses to navigate the arcs of the whale-to-petroleum continuum. An incomplete inventory of these waystations includes ocean studies, media studies, media archaeology, energy studies, energy archaeology, new materialism, Indigenous studies, histories of sensation and emotion, art history, environmental studies, animal studies, infrastructure studies, and, of course, American literary studies. Diving more attentively into the benthic depths of its pages, readers of Rendered Obsolete will encounter bright, bioluminescent flashes of such mysterious entities as Henri Bergson, Carl Schumpeter, Plato, the ship of Theseus, “ruin porn” in Detroit, John Ruskin, Karl Marx, and, inevitably, Michel Foucault.Taken as a whole, Rendered Obsolete successfully delivers on its mission of sketching the affective dimensions of energy transition. While other recent scholarship has documented the ways in which capital from the decline of whaling fed the development of railroads and cotton mills, the stories contained in Rendered Obsolete vividly demonstrate that new energy regimens also feed new forms of cultural production. As Jones points out, displays of whale bodies and whaling ships like “The Prince of Whales” and the Progress would not have been possible at the height of American whaling. In the 1850s, an intact whale would have been more valuable as a source of oil than as a source of entertainment, and the idea of a whaleship sitting on display for gaping grain-belt audiences would have been preposterous. For that matter, as Jones notes, the businessmen who purchased the Progress and brought it to Chicago made their fortunes in fossil fuels. The newer industry was literally consuming the old—but in doing so, it was also perpetuating whaling in the American imagination.At the same time, the frequently scattershot way that Jones uses history and theory can be distracting. One wonders, for example, how Allan Sekula's claim that the ocean has been “forgotten” by modern scholarship, which Jones briefly invokes, might be important for understanding the transition from sailing ships to locomotives as major means of transportation (87). It's an intriguing suggestion, but without deeper analysis, we are left to speculate. More importantly, the rapid brushstrokes can leave glaring lacunae. In Jones’ discussion of the “Prince of Whales,” for instance, we read that “the violent collision of old and new infrastructures represented by the whale's journey overlays the longer and deeper violence of Indigenous genocide and erasure caused by settler colonialism in the North American West” (105). This seems like a weighty claim that warrants more elaboration, but the argument moves on to other topics at a rapid clip, leaving a sense of genuflection towards a serious body of criticism without much real engagement.The rapid-fire presentation of sources, approaches, and tangents often runs counter to Jones’ central argument. If, indeed, it is dangerous to believe that “all energy resources are ultimately the same,” and if the antidote to this pernicious myth comes from carefully attending to the specifics of energy transition, then what are we to make of the fact that quick, theoretical elaborations of almost any sort can seemingly be brought to bear on turning whales into fossil fuel; wind into steam; industrial ruin into aesthetic experience?To give just one example, the capstone of Jones’ otherwise sensitive history of the Progress is a rather abrupt pronouncement that the ship on display at the Columbian Exposition “was marked by its otherness, cast by the strange racial logic of the fair as an Indigenous or racially othered body, on exhibit in order to be performatively dominated and surpassed” (113). But are all forms of alterity really so similar that a boat can become “logically” equivalent to a human body? Were the experiences of Native people in human zoos on Chicago's Midway, or the Black Americans denied entry to the fair except on special days, or, for that matter, the colonized people that Frederick Douglass spoke so forcefully about in his “Dedication to the Pavilion of Haiti” at the very same exhibition—really comparable to an old whaleship bobbing in a lagoon near Lake Michigan? Without more specific historical evidence, this quick-and-easy conclusion, and others like it throughout the text, can come to seem like pro forma cant, flattening the particularities of real humans’ experiences into one-size-fits-all theoretical constructions of otherness, violence, and extractive capitalism. This is exactly the opposite of the particularity demanded by the book's argument—an echo of, rather than an antidote to, the rhetorical trope that distinct forms of energy (and, for that matter, information, capital, power, labor, and a host of other modern concepts that “circulate” in transhistorical currents) are easily interchangeable.These curious whorls and eddies aside, Rendered Obsolete represents a strong attempt to carve a new path in the study of energy transition. If its exuberant exploration of the afterlives of American whaling sometimes slips into apples-and-oranges (or whales-and-oxen) comparisons, it nevertheless serves as an effective reminder that energy is not immaterial, not easily fungible, but rather inheres in the stormy affective and aesthetic experiences of real human beings.
Source: The New England Quarterly
DOI: 10.1162/tneq_r_01060
Author: Michael Rossi
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4408177807