Saturation, Articulation, Autonomy: The Poetics of Logistics & Petroleum

Lecture by Fred Carter (Researcher with the Infrastructure Humanities Group at the University of Glasgow)

1:00 PM – 2:30 PM

Centre for Social Innovation (Annex) / 720 Bathurst Street

Traversing materialist critiques of energy, crisis, and aesthetic autonomy, this talk examines how the form of radical poetry encounters shifts in the production, supply, and exchange of petroleum after 1973. In the long aftermath of energy crisis, it traces the interlocking logics of fossil-fuelled accumulation and global logistics that underwrite contemporary circuitries of just-in-time production, as they come to be articulated through the poetic figure of parataxis. My object, borne out in readings of Tom Raworth’s cult collection ACE (1974) and the open-ended archival project Shanzhai Lyric (2015-2025), is to demonstrate how oil saturates the circulation of capital and cultural production across this period, and how logistical supply, in turn, comes to articulate the historic and aesthetic forms of petroculture.

Fred Carter is a postdoctoral researcher with the Infrastructure Humanities Group at the University of Glasgow. He is a recent fellow of the Rachel Carson Centre, Munich, and director of the practice-based research residency FieldARTS. Recent work is published or forthcoming in Society + Space, Postmodern Culture, and Textual Practice.