Mediating energy: rhetoric and the future of energy resources

Discourse regarding the societal role of "energy" and the "energetic" has implications for environmental politics and the future of energy resources. This dissertation offers rhetorical analyses of three media case studies on energy resource futures. I argue that such energy resource texts constitute a politics of common sense around the necessitated expansion of energy production. This political position manifests discursively by emphasizing the central societal role of energy in building the mobile, modernist world. This central role emphasizes energy's mediating function as an immaterial force that enlivens modern society and the automobile human subject. My first chapter, along with outlining the three case studies and their political thread, elaborates on these articulations between energy and media, energy and modernity, movement, and mobility, and energy and rhetoric. The three analysis chapters offer close readings of media case studies in order to elaborate on rhetorical strategies that highlight these various articulations to energy resources. Chapter Two examines commercial advertising campaigns from three major oil companies: Brazil's national company, Petrobras; Royal Dutch Shell; and ExxonMobil. I examine how these campaigns associate movement, mobility, and energy as the purview and purpose of the oil company. Chapter Three turns to the pronuclear documentary, Pandora's Promise, as an exemplar case study for the relationship between modernization and theology in contemporary ecomodernist discourses. Chapter Four analyzes the relationship between the United Nations and the television series Revolution. I argue that linking energy poverty campaigns with a dystopian narrative about the sudden loss of electricity has implications for how people understand the humanitarian role of energy access. The concluding chapter further examines these humanitarian implications. Universalizing discourses that link energy expansion to human progress has implications for critical cultural studies, rhetorical theory and criticism, and energy politics.

MEDIATING ENERGY: RHETORIC AND THE FUTURE OF ENERGY RESOURCES by Brian Cozen A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Communication The University of Utah December 2015 Copyright © Brian Cozen 2015 All Rights Reserved The Univers i ty of Utah Graduate School STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Brian Cozen has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Danielle Endres , Chair 5/18/2015 Date Approved Kevin M. DeLuca , Member 5/18/2015 Date Approved Glen Feighery , Member 5/18/2015 Date Approved Robert W. Gehl , Member 5/18/2015 Date Approved Robert Stephen Tatum , Member 5/18/2015 Date Approved and by Kent A. Ono , Chair of the Department of Communication and by David B. Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT Discourse regarding the societal role of "energy" and the "energetic" has implications for environmental politics and the future of energy resources. This dissertation offers rhetorical analyses of three media case studies on energy resource futures. I argue that such energy resource texts constitute a politics of common sense around the necessitated expansion of energy production. This political position manifests discursively by emphasizing the central societal role of energy in building the mobile, modernist world. This central role emphasizes energy's mediating function as an immaterial force that enlivens modern society and the automobile human subject. My first chapter, along with outlining the three case studies and their political thread, elaborates on these articulations between energy and media, energy and modernity, movement, and mobility, and energy and rhetoric. The three analysis chapters offer close readings of media case studies in order to elaborate on rhetorical strategies that highlight these various articulations to energy resources. Chapter Two examines commercial advertising campaigns from three major oil companies: Brazil's national company, Petrobras; Royal Dutch Shell; and ExxonMobil. I examine how these campaigns associate movement, mobility, and energy as the purview and purpose of the oil company. Chapter Three turns to the pronuclear documentary, Pandora's Promise, as an exemplar case study for the relationship between modernization and theology in contemporary eco-modernist discourses. Chapter Four analyzes the relationship between the United Nations iv and the television series Revolution. I argue that linking energy poverty campaigns with a dystopian narrative about the sudden loss of electricity has implications for how people understand the humanitarian role of energy access. The concluding chapter further examines these humanitarian implications. Universalizing discourses that link energy expansion to human progress has implications for critical cultural studies, rhetorical theory and criticism, and energy politics. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………...iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………..……….vii CHAPTER ONE. ENERGY RESOURCES AS THE ENERGETIC CAPACITIES OF THE MODERN WORLD..……………………………………………………………………...1 Energy Resource Futures and the Politics of Common Sense………………….....6 Energy as Media(tion)………………………………..…………………………..12 Energy Determinism and Rhetorical Modernism: Producing the Automobile Subject……………………………………………………………………15 Energy Rhetoric: Energy and Rhetoric as Capacities……………………...…….21 Reading Media Texts…………………………………………………………….25 Chapter Previews………………………………………………………………...29 Notes……………………………………………………………………………..31 TWO. THE IMMUTABLE ENERGY MOBILE: OIL COMPANY ADVERTISEMENTS AND THE MOBILITY PARADIGM…………………...……...34 Circulating Discourse: Mobility Systems and Human Movement………………37 Contemporary Oil Company Advertisements……………………………………43 Immutable Energy Mobiles: The Oil Company Mobilizes Your World………...48 Conclusion………………………………..……………………………………...70 Notes……………………………………………………………………………..74 THREE. PRONUCLEAR ADVOCACY: PANDORA'S PROMISE AS MODERNIZATION THEOLOGY.…………………………….……………….………77 Modernization Theology as Rhetorical Heuristic…….………………………….82 The Eco-Moderns Hold a Revival…………………………………………….…87 Pandora's Promise's Path to Salvation as Modernization Theology……………97 Conclusion………………………………..…………………………………….117 Notes……………………………………………………………………………122 vi FOUR. FACTING FICTION: REVOLUTION, THE UNITED NATIONS, AND CULTURAL POLITICS OF ELECTRICITY………..………………………………...125 Revolution and the Circulation of its Energy Access Thematic………………..128 Revolution Meets the United Nations: Framing the Millennium Development Goals in Terms of Energy………………………………………………131 Fears, Futures, Orientations: Articulating the Lost Electric Sublime with Energy Poverty…………………………………..……………………………...138 All is Lost: The UN Meets Revolution's Dystopian World…………………….141 Conclusion………………………………..…………………………………….162 Notes……………………………………………………………………………166 FIVE. CONCLUSION.…………………………..……………………………………..170 Summary of Major Themes………………………………..…………….…......171 Implications of Primary Themes…..………………………………..…………..178 Conclusion………………………………..…………………………………….188 Notes……………………………………………………………………………190 REFERENCES………………………………..………………………………………..191 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In September 2014, in the midst of writing this dissertation, a blackout kept eighteen hundred Salt Lake City residents, including myself, without power for several hours. The experience brought into focus the relational dependencies, and constitutions, of energy in modernized lives. During the blackout I walked around my neighborhood, strolling along streets with lights on one side and complete darkness on the other. I have tried to write and think in this metaphorical space between: to understand the produced desires for modern industrial energy, while acknowledging the political ramifications of embracing that side as a humanitarian good uncritically examined. First, I acknowledge the energy-intensive practices and environments that have in part constituted who I am and, as such, speak through the pages that follow. To the people who have influenced these pages, offering specific names also shades over the significant experiences left unsaid. This list is partial and limited. My acknowledgements do little justice to the gratitude I have for all that, and for all who, inspired along the way. To Danielle Endres, whose guidance traces back well before the start of this dissertation. Thank you for all of the direct contributions offered over the course of my doctoral work. Also, thank you for the opportunities you have given me, including the various collaborative research projects. While none of the dissertation was directly funded, multiple projects through Dr. Endres' grants, particularly those that took me to energy related conferences, undoubtedly permeated my thinking. Thank you in particular viii to the National Science Foundation for their generous funding on the largest and most recent of these grants. I would also like to thank the generous contributions of the James A. Anderson Research Award for allowing me to not (overly) worry about finances while I completed this dissertation. I would also like to thank my committee, Kevin DeLuca, Glen Feighery, Robert Gehl, and Stephen Tatum, for all of their insights that further pushed my thinking. Also thank you to all other faculty and staff at the University of Utah's Department of Communication, especially to Jessica Tanner whose commitment led me through all of the logistical obstacles one must maneuver past to get to this point. Thank you to all of my friends who have directly or indirectly offered support while I worked on this dissertation. From help translating Portuguese to general respites, I could not have gotten through this experience without the social networks and emotional strength you all supplied. I tried to compile a list of names but realized it was a futile attempt to name everyone whom has helped, and so I hope you see your presence in this paragraph. That said, I'd like to extend particular gratitude to Megan O'Byrne, Nicholas Paliewicz, and the greatest Klezmer clarinetist of all time, Ryan Yuré. Finally, thank you to my family. To my older sister, Heather Cozen, for all her successes in life that provided templates for my own goals and aspirations. Thank you for always setting the bar so high. And to my parents, Dennis and Shirley Cozen, none of this is without you. My appreciation for all you have done grows everyday. CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: ENERGY RESOURCES AS THE ENERGETIC CAPACITIES OF THE MODERN WORLD Questions regarding the political and economic futures of energy resources also raise theoretical concerns as to what it means to live in the world. To theorize life is also, often, to theorize "energy," or the energetic vitality of the planet. Alongside discourses on what it means to live energetically run parallel discursive arguments about the essential nature of the energy resources that make a vital world possible, specifically as they facilitate one's everyday experiences. For instance, in ExxonMobil's recent commercial, "Enabling Everyday Progress: Egg," the advertisement juxtaposes a woman boiling an egg with a montage of the corporation finding and exporting the energy required to transport the eggs, to heat the stove, and so on (ExxonMobil, 2014b). Here, ExxonMobil constructs its persona less around supplying oil and more around supplying the infrastructural capacity to convert that oil into the heated water that boils one's egg. Energy converts the world to meet one's specificities. The logic of energy resources focuses on such concentrations of power: of assembling the power of the environment by converting it into that which makes the world (and its human subjects) go. Energy resources, therefore, are often attributed with mobilizing the action of the modern world. Rhetorical theorists interested in social action and change often theorize 2 such potentiality while ignoring energy resources. Theorizing energy resources and rhetoric together can draw out social logics and how they help legitimate future-oriented decisions, particularly as they manifest in arguments for expanded energy production. Past research has examined cases related to energy resource rhetoric (Cozen, 2010; Crable & Vibbert, 1983; Dionisopoulos & Crable, 1988; Endres, 2009a, 2013; Hearit, 1995; Kinsella, 2005; Kinsella, Kelly, & Kittle Autry, 2013; Livesey, 2002; Medhurst, 1987; Peeples, Bsumek, Schwarze, & Schneider, 2014; Sovacool, 2008; Todd & Wood, 2006). However, most theory in the rhetoric of energy resources focuses on how rhetorical concepts can help explain particular cases, such as corporate ventriloquism in coal campaigns, nuclear colonialism, technical communicative discourse, and the metaphorical trope of magical powers in nuclear energy issues, and didactic framing, capitalistic agency, and the press release genre in oil company discourse (Bsumek, Schneider, Schwarze, & Peeples, 2014; Endres, 2009b; Farrell & Goodnight, 1981; Mechling & Mechling, 1995; Plec & Pettenger, 2012; Smerecnik & Renegar, 2010; Wickman, 2014). I want to submit the question, what happens when we rhetorically examine discourse at the level of "energy"? Instead of simply exploring oil case studies, or nuclear case studies, or electric grid case studies, how might rhetoric theorize ways in which energy's function in society gets understood or conceptualized through discourse? Placing energy resource discourse in such a comparative perspective can help scholars understand the communicative elements that legitimate or silence discussions and future directions regarding energy resource politics and how energy functions in society. I am arguing that, often, energy discourses-as a primary site of struggle in which grand narratives of modernity are sutured in attempts to build new unitary conceptions of 3 the world-constitute an understanding of the world in which expanding energy production is taken as a given. The contingent social logic (cf. Laclau & Mouffe, 2001, p. 142) of expanded energy production in effect encourages a continued acceleration of energy development and its attendant problems, particularly fossil fuels and their impacts on human health and climate chaos, even when such discourses are arguing against the continued expansion of fossil fuels per se. While I focus on a current hegemonic rhetoric, I invite others to consider alternative hegemonic articulations that account for global social justice imperatives while also opening up the possibility for energy futures that a) minimize expanded extractive practices; b) generate alternative social practices that allow for less energy consumption; and c) build logics for alternative energy resources that do not further legitimate all energy resources under an "all of the above" logic. Beyond anti-fossil fuel activism, which critiques but does not necessarily create, antagonizing the linkage between energy use and positive social practices may open challenges to consumptive logics and their legitimation of production practices. In turning to how this politics of expanded production manifests discursively, I argue that energy resources are often conceptualized as the animating presence that ignites the modern world. I define "modern" as discursive elaborations (and their material effects) related to the promises of and commitments to human rights, universal reason, and technological pursuits (see Grigg, 2007, p. 314). In this dissertation's case studies, my analysis reveals how energy resources get framed as the constitutive mediator that enlivens the mobile world of modernization, or the large-scale development projects legitimated under modernity. In this framework energy resources are, in many ways, the rhetorical moment of a modernization project: the world has the capacity or potentiality 4 to do work, but it is not "doing work" until it is converted into energy resources and mobilized for something like electrification. Such work, in turn, mediates the capacities of the modernist subject, perpetually seeking emancipation from the constraints of the world in the service of greater freedom of movement. In that way, I argue that energy rhetoric points to a modernist, mobile ontology, what I am calling "rhetorical modernism." Rhetorical modernism asks: how is the (perpetual motion) narrative of modernity produced and reproduced through discourse? In sum, energy resources are attributed with mediating the energetic capacities of people and the world; in this framework, to support modernization projects around energy resources is to support human vitality and progress. Articulating expanded productions of all of the above energy sources has implications for the terms of energy futures debates and what important questions are effaced or deemed illegitimate. This dissertation offers three sets of media texts that encourage an expansion of global energy consumption. Discourse legitimating expansions in energy production, whether from energy regimes resistant to fundamental change or from the United Nations, have implications for energy futures transitions.1 Each case emphasizes energy resource production's centrality to modernization, or to large-scale development projects, as well as such projects' rhetorical promise of human progress. Via close reading, I examine these discursive justifications for expanding energy production and their rhetorical consequentiality. The three studies are particular cases and do not represent all discourses regarding energy futures. That said, the cases do exemplify various strategies regarding the naturalization and desire for expanded energy production. The first two case studies mobilize arguments for expanding particular forms of energy resources, while the third case study argues for the expansion of electricity 5 across the globe. Each situates energy sources in relation to a broader conception of energy, or in relation to master narratives involving global development, human progress, and so on. In what follows, I explain the three case studies through the political and articulatory linkages that conjoin them under the same logic: the future of energy as one of expanding production. Articulation theory and a politics of common sense (cf. Angus, 1992) helps guide a general framework from which I analyze how the chapters' media case studies will conceptualize energy resources, articulations structuring the next three sections: between 1) media and energy; 2) modernism, mobility, and energy; and 3) rhetoric and energy. First I explore the relationship between energy and media to suggest that energy resources are conceived as mediators of an outside object world. I subsequently consider linkages between energy and movement, mobility, and modernization, or how the rhetorical construction of an unfettered modernist subject requires the mobilization of communication technologies and transportational networks, or "mobility systems," themselves requiring a steady flow of energy to enliven them (Urry, 2007). In turn, energy resources are discursively constructed as the mediator of modernization. Next I link contemporary rhetorical theory and energy resource texts, specifically in their emphases on (rhetorical and energetic) capacities and mediation that ignite this modernist ontology of movement. After offering these articulations, I explain the methodological framework through which I will analyze these media texts. I conclude by previewing the chapters, which reflect upon various themes, characteristics, and implications of energy discourse's "rhetorical modernism" or its promise of forward progress through energy resource expansion. 6 Energy Resource Futures and the Politics of Common Sense Articulation theory points to the struggle over meaning, and hence not merely the breakdown of grand narratives but their re-creation as well. At a moment in which climate change threatens to unravel grand narratives of unlimited growth and a guiding productivist logic (cf. Smith, 1998), numerous energy discourses articulate anew a hegemonic universal (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001)-around global development, human progress, and the imperialist belief that westernized modernity is the aspiration of the whole world. Each of these grand narratives, particularly as they are articulated in energy resource discussions, is immersed in discursive struggles that both collapse and recover modernist mythologies. While I focus on three specific case studies instead of general public discourse, these cases illustrate rhetorical strategies that exemplify some of the circulating rhetoric regarding energy resource futures. The case studies in this dissertation a) call forth energy resources as a central component of reality; b) link energy resources to a series of discourses regarding modernization, mobility, and dynamic capacities; and c) cohere for audiences immersed in particular practices. In this section, first I describe the case studies and how they cohere together, and second I elaborate on the political implications of their shared, articulated themes. Annually, the International Energy Agency (IEA) puts out a World Energy Outlook (WEO) report. The Agency began in 1974 to address how its OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) member countries would secure and stabilize oil futures. Since then the IEA has expanded its focus, with one such illustration in these annual reports and their coverage on oil, other energy sources, and various topical foci. The 2014 version highlighted its usual emphasis on energy futures 7 scenarios data, fossil energy and other forms of, and two topical sections: one on the role of nuclear energy, and the other on energy access and development in sub-Saharan Africa (IEA, 2014). As the foreword begins, "few propositions gain unanimity as readily as the case for rapidly developing sub-Saharan Africa's energy infrastructure; while few issues are so controversial between nations as the place nuclear power should take in future global energy supply" (IEA, 2014, p. 3). Aligning these seemingly disparate elements, within a report historically grounded in westernized oil politics, points toward a political, common sense logic of the future of energy resources in which various elements can and cannot be considered, or are or are not articulated. The expansion of "modern forms of energy" (p. 3), as articulated by the WEO report, is the grounds on which energy futures can currently be thought. While the report includes scenarios that project no policy intervention, scenarios that incorporate policies already proposed, and a scenario to meet emissions goals of four hundred fifty parts per million (450 ppm) of carbon in the atmosphere, the underlying assumption takes increased demand as a given.2 As laid out by the three areas in the WEO 2014 report (oil, nuclear energy, and global electricity access), this dissertation aligns three seemingly disparate media case studies along the same unitary logic of equivalence. The first case study analyzes three oil company campaigns: an interactive magazine feature titled "Mobility" from Brazil's national oil company (NOC) Petrobras; select components from Royal Dutch Shell's campaign Let's Go; and commercials that preceded the "Egg" ad from ExxonMobil's Energy Lives Here campaign. These corporations discursively construct energy resources and the present and projected futures of transportation and electrification primarily powered by fossil fuels. Fossil fuels here are identified as the primary source of human 8 movement through a mobile, and mobilized, modern world. The second case study focuses on the film, Pandora's Promise (2013), a pronuclear documentary. In the face of inevitable, unintended consequences such as Japan's Fukushima Daiichi explosion and aftermath, nuclear energy stands in as the peril and promise of modernization. The film argues that nuclear energy is necessary because the rest of the world demands expanded energy production in order to unleash their energetic capacities, and because fossil fuels are no longer viable in the context of climate chaos; therefore, we must commit faith that nuclear energy's scientific and technical advances will see us through its promises more than its peril. The final case study offers a vision for what it would mean to not have access to energy and its affordances. Revolution (2012 - 2014) was a dystopian television series about the global, sudden loss of electricity. During the second season, the United Nations (UN) collaborated with the show to promote their campaigns such as Sustainable Energy for All. I analyze the stated comments from the series creators to foreground how the series encourages those invested in the show to reflect on their own dependencies on energy. This process of reflection supports viewing one's own practices as natural and unequivocal social goods. Turning to these promotional campaigns for oil, nuclear energy, and electricity access-the latter case study's origins explicitly, though not exclusively, tied to sub- Saharan Africa3-I argue that a key political articulation in energy futures discourse is the linkage between energy production and human progress. Laclau and Mouffe (2001) speak of a "hegemonic universality," the political process in which "a particular social force assumes the representation of a totality that is radically incommensurable with it" (p. x, emphasis in original). Such universalities are constructed into a "partial fixation" in 9 which energy production acquires meaning through its articulation to the "nodal points" of human progress and vitality (p. 112). This political articulation produces, as Angus (1992) puts it, a politics of common sense that recovers a grand modernist narrative: that the future of energy is one of continuously expanded production. These case studies illustrate arguments that naturalize this necessitated expansion, a unitary logic of equivalence "making possible relations of representation strictly unthinkable" (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001, p. x). As such, discussions of energy futures scenarios debate at the level of how the world will expand production-via various sources, technologies, and policies-and not whether expanded production is indeed the answer to social justice, human betterment, and ecological sustenance. In sum, while the three case studies cover far-reaching categories of energy futures discussions, topically they all coalesce at the moment of the WEO 2014 report and, thematically, at the moment of this partial fixture that assigns meaning to energy production, broadly conceived. Along with the rhetorical act of articulating elements and their linkages, there is also the question of what it means to be articulate or for a particular discourse to cohere with (and [re]constitute) subject positions. Drawing from Stormer (2004), what are the historical practices that enable energy rhetorics to function, or to resonate-that is, to not just be articulated (or spoken) but to be understood as articulate (or coherent) (cf. Latour, 1999)? Contexts enable symbolic forms to be taken up as articulate. Making sense (being articulate) requires a context in which a text registers with the series of discourses and material infrastructures that precede it. For instance, scientific claims are articulate because of previous theories and the mobilization of various networks such as the laboratory. I argue that justifications for energy futures make sense (at least for particular 10 audiences) because of an immersive energy present, in which bodies constantly move in environments powered by energy resources. Texts speak forth energy futures that resonate for particular audiences by cohering with a present collection of hypermobile, energy-intensive practices. Bodies move in immersive contexts powered by energy resources. Discursive justifications for energy futures make sense because of this energy present and how one's bodily experience in its environment coheres with what is stated (and the historical practices that enable their statements). This articulation, in turn, mobilizes the fruition of particular energy futures. When considering articulation in terms of the spatiotemporal contexts that make things understood as articulate or cohere together, the openness of the social field (cf. Laclau & Mouffe, 2001) is tempered by what Angus (1992) calls the a priori process of thematization. Angus (1992) builds articulation theory for critical communication studies that focus on how texts are situated within a constitutive social order, an order also constituted by these internally generative communicative practices. "The field of common sense" (p. 537) develops through the active linking of elements as well as through thematization, or the foregrounding and backgrounding of contexts. People take up this hegemonic logic around energy resource futures in part because it "makes sense" through their situated practices and experiences. This process of sense making is inherently political. DeLuca (1999b) emphasizes how the political struggle to fix meaning and context is "constructed, maintained, and transformed" through rhetoric (p. 44), which for Mumby (1992) includes "the specific communicative practices through which hegemonic meaning systems are maintained, reproduced, and transformed" (p. 574). What are the foregrounded contexts that assign meaning to energy resources? What 11 are the limits, or antagonisms, of the social order built around energy and its meaning structures? And how can the analysis of specific communicative practices point to a constitutive, and iteratively generated, social order? The political struggle for sustainable energy futures must continue to antagonize the points of tension within the grand narratives recovered around the thematic, energy-as- social-good, in that this unitary rhetoric does produce power relations and subordinate positions and, as such, should not merely be taken as given. The political impetus found in mobility and spatial studies is instructive (Cresswell, 2010; Massey, 1994, 2005; Shome, 2003; Soja, 2010). This research considers how to think of organized movement in space as always a relational, political concern, and questions universalizing discourse around mobility as an unquestioned good. As Sheller (2008) states, "mobilities are never free and unfettered," but striated or marked, and that, "universalistic language," which legitimates future-oriented policy decisions, "often masks differential processes" (pp. 257-258). So too, energy resource expansion is always marked, while universal discourses of energy access and the electric sublime guide future-oriented political rhetoric, as seen with the United Nations' campaigns (chapter four), or desired for nuclear energy (chapter three) (Carey, 1989; Czitrom, 1982). The next three sections in this introduction chapter expand upon the articulated moments that partially fix the meaning of energy resources and, as such, encourage a politics of common sense that assumes the necessity of expanding production. This articulation situates debate at the level of how humanity should expand production, whether by efficiencies in oil, nuclear as replacement to coal, or global campaigns to extend modern energy and, by extension, modern subjectivity. These articulations include 12 linking energy as mediation, energy as igniting the mobility of the modernist subject, and the dynamism of the world in process (i.e., its "energetic" quality) in terms of energy resources. Such unities are important to analyze in order to discover potential antagonisms, limits often unaddressed in political struggles today.4 Energy as Media(tion) Linking media with energy highlights the mediating function of energy resources. The subtitle of this dissertation, Mediating Energy, follows four ways of linking energy to media: one, as the power source of media forms; two, as naming media forms as the justification for energy resources' expanded production; three, as the topic of media content; and four, as a medium that organizes social relations. The first three articulations in this section-energy's mediating function named in discourses such as media content-refer to the key elements by which this dissertation's case studies articulate the social role of energy resources. The fourth articulation between media and energy points to what is missing from this framework and suggests implications to such silences. First, energy resources are the material circulation igniting communication and transportation. In other words, they are the power source for contemporary forms of mediation: cars, public transit, smartphones, iBeacons, and other systems of transportation and communication technologies. Energy mediates mobility systems at their point of consumption and animates these systems (Urry, 2007). While oil has powered the world of car and airplane transport, electric forms of mobility mean that energy resources for electrification (including those of transportation, such as electric cars) power contemporary forms of mediation. Natural gas, coal, nuclear, oil, renewables: 13 each in various capacities heats the generated steam that animates the electric grids, which animate the connective capacities of digital networks and infrastructures-such as with location-aware technologies-for the synchronized movements of people, goods, and ideas. This first articulation between media and energy is primarily a function of material practices: energy infuses media forms. Second, since this material practice is built on contingent social logics,5 linking media systems to energy highlights the discourse or topoi used for normalizing expanded energy production. To speak forth this linkage is a rhetorical, political move. Energy resources exist as a mediating, material presence in everyday practices, but such practices always have a discursive element. The first articulation's emphasis-on the materiality of mobility systems and mobile people, with energy resources as the dematerialized mediator that ignites these processes-is justified in its powering the social world, rhetorically grounding arguments for expanded production of energy resources. Conceiving energy resources as that which animates the mobility systems of communication technologies and transportation media names energy resources as the mediator of modernizing systems. Energy resources constitute the social but are named as an immaterial force, infusing things and people in the world with their vitality, yet distinct from this materiality or object world. Energy resources serve as ignition: of systems, and of the people that use these systems to move through the world. To name this mediating function as necessary highlights energy resources as a social good in that said resources animate and give meaning to the world. Third, media content focused on the topic of energy resources are a key site for this naming of energy sources as the key driver or force of the modern world. In that way, 14 this dissertation emphasizes three media case studies about energy futures: recent oil company advertising campaigns, a pronuclear documentary, and a United Nations television collaboration, each aimed at mobilizing expanded energy production and access. I consider these cultural texts as themselves, amid a sea of intersecting and divergent articulations, constitutive of epistemological, ontological, and hence political ways of incorporating a sense of energy resources as they exist in the world and mediate one's sense of self. I argue that these narrative media case studies, as "specific communicative practices" that maintain and reproduce "hegemonic meaning systems" (Mumby, 1992, p. 574), point to how discourses are rendered articulate, or how they make sense or cohere for those in which a mediated, energy-intensive world and an automobile subjectivity resonates. Through Sloop's (2009) definition of rhetoric as a "mediating energy," outlined in the methodology section, I examine how media case studies are part of the flow of mediation in the rechanneling of meaning structures. Such media content, in other words, enters the flow of discourse defining automobile subjectivity ignited by, dependent upon, and in turn supportive of energy resource mobilization. The fourth and final articulation between media and energy is how energy itself functions as a medium that "is both implicated within and mediates contemporary social relations of power" (Sharma, 2008, p. 462, emphasis in original). Noting what is emphasized and silenced by this dissertation's case studies helps critically examine the implications of these silences. Energy resource production places subjects in interdependent relationships between production and consumption. These textual case studies highlight the democratic claims of energy at points of consumption. Consider how 15 Cross' (2000) notion of the "myth of mobility" was predicated on a steady supply of oil; ways of life need their resource extractions. While the case studies reflect on these optimistic claims of energy as social organizer, they silence energy production's imperial and militaristic relations (Yergin, 1991), or the ways in which nation-states' democratic claims, grounded in the supply and circulation afforded by oil, are also predicated on authoritarian control in exporting countries (Mitchell, 2011). Similarly, they obfuscate the discourse surrounding labor relations around energy regimes. Here, the way Sharma (2008) describes taxicabs as media helps inform energy's social relations.6 Sharma (2008) theorizes the taxicab as a medium to highlight the "environments in which social life unfolds" (p. 458) and the channels mediating the spatial and temporal relationships between subjects and capitalistic exchange. Therefore, the taxi is a medium that moves bodies, goods, and information, constituting the jet setter and the cab driver as productive subjects of capital circulation. I argue that the material circulation of energy resources- in the harvesting and moving around of energy-similarly mediates social relations. This power relationship form of mediation is minimized in the following case studies and is often ignored in discourse about energy futures, but is evident, for instance, in arguments against oil-based wars or activism against coal. Energy Determinism and Rhetorical Modernism: Producing the Automobile Subject Modernity's promises ground strategies of the energy resource rhetoric analyzed in the three case studies. In emphasizing the de-materialized mediating aspect of energy resources, my case studies situate energy resources as the grounding for what I term a 16 "rhetorical modernism," or the discursive promise of a modernizing world. Energy resources are conceived as the capacity of the modernist narrative, igniting its mobility systems and the mobile subjects enabled by such systems. This section highlights articulations between modernization and mobility, and movement and the modernist subject, as it exists in these case studies focused on energy resources. The result is an energy determinism in which energy resources are associated with the perpetual motion narrative of modernity. This section considers how discourses on energy resource production frame the automobility of the modernist subject, animated through energy resources and energy companies. Rhetorical modernism functions as the primary strategy in such energy rhetoric, in which the assembling of the mobile world under a project of modernization, ignited in and through the assembling or harvesting of energy resources, denotes the promise of this discourse. Discourses on energy resource production tap into an understanding of the automobile modernist subject, a subject position defined in relation to the assembling of the world for the purposes of greater autonomous movement (see Featherstone, 2004). Such discourses frame this automobility as enabled, maintained, stabilized, and ignited by the presence of both energy resources and the (corporate) entities that supply these resources, and framed as the constitutive center of mediation and becoming. The rhetorical production of the modernist subject, in terms of energy resources, becomes an "automobile subject" invited to incorporate a) a sense of self as defined via movement; b) mobility systems as enablers of movement; and c) energy resources as the mediating power of that movement. Emphasizing energy resources, then, reinforces a commitment to the teleological promise of modernity, specifically around the quest for unfettered 17 motion as human progress (Rajan, 2006). From this perspectival lens of energy rhetorics, mobility functions as modernism's ontology. Themes of movement and mobility are present in other discussions of modernity as well. Much research emphasizes the fundamental role of movement in what it means to be alive, such as research that focuses on how bodily, kinesthetic awareness builds from engagements with an active environment (Abram, 2010; Seamon, 1979; Sheets-Johnston, 2011; Tuan, 1977). To link movement to modernity's ontology of mobility, however, is to universalize the means of motion. While the embodied brain may be wired to adapt kinesthetically, the world(s) in which brains adapt, and the relations in which they engage, are both culturally situated and rhetorically produced. To move in a world of transportation and electrification, or of "mobility systems," is to move within a culturally bounded system of organized movement (Urry, 2007). The rhetorical promise of modernity situates particular forms of motion as tied to human progress. As Schivelbusch (1977/1986) addresses the lingering consequences of the railway, "the notion that communication, exchange, motion bring to humanity enlightenment and progress, and that isolation and disconnection are the obstacles to be overcome on this course, is as old as the modern age" (p. 197). The Enlightenment promise of forward progress is embodied in the modernist subject governed in line with a larger economy of motion, such as the railway system, in which building the modern world is understood as promising the removal of obstacles to unfettered motion (Cresswell, 2006; Ferguson, 2000; Lepecki, 2006). Discursive emphases on energy production similarly reproduce the hypermobile and automobile subject as a universalized ontological condition. Modernization projects 18 involving energy production promise a causal energy determinism in which more energy means greater freedom of movement. The promise of mobility is the underlying social imaginary guiding the humanitarian discourse of energy resource futures, in which energy access is seen as the benevolent carrier of human progress. Mobile necessities, then, guide the Foucaultian table on which to discuss energy, or the logics of possibility in energy discourses (Foucault, 1966/1970). In parallel, energy rhetoric promises to ignite modernity's "general economy of mobility," hailing its subjects to constitute themselves as emblematic displays of this hypermobility (Lepecki, 2006, p. 16). It is through repeated cultural discursive practices that such subject positions are articulated, fashioned toward modernist projects that utilize particular habits for optimizing efficiency (Bennett, Dodsworth, Noble, Poovey, & Watkins, 2013, p. 5). One such project includes the ethos of perpetual economic growth in large-scale modernization projects, typically conflated with expanding energy use. This perpetual motion narrative gets reproduced in "rhetorical modernism" discourse. I take the position that the contemporary moment features a "structure of feeling" (Williams, 1977) related to both modernism and postmodernism, or the discursive struggles between rearticulating and disarticulating master cultural narratives. In an endnote regarding his elaboration of articulation theory, DeLuca (1999a) conceived of postmodernism within Williams' phrase, whereby the subject is decentered, there is a dissolution of the grand narrative, there develops an awareness of limits, and where Nature no longer stands in as a grand referent (pp. 346-347). However, such a structure of feeling is contingent and enters into a field of articulations in which discourses also attempt to rearticulate (the fictions of) eternal truths and master mythologies- 19 articulations that continue to have rhetorical force (p. 341). A contemporary postmodern condition does not define a definitive rupture in which the promises of modernism are forever unraveled, but identifies a long progression in which such promises have been opened up to contestation and struggle (Hall, 1996). This postmodern condition is not just about challenges to grand narratives, but their recoveries as well. Postmodernism is not the end of modernism, but the (rhetorical) struggle over modernism. As illustrated in the case studies, energy resource discourses in particular rearticulate rhetorical modernism, in which discursive practices reinforce the promise of a forward moving teleology and universalize a human desire for hypermobility, even (and perhaps especially) in the face of its challenges. Stabilizing rhetoric is particularly evident in energy resource rhetoric, in which the immanent presence of energy stabilizes the world that one a) controls; and b) desires to move through. Whether this desire or control is constantly undermined by the actual agency of objects and the environment is less a matter of an anti-humanism as it is a reinforcement of the mythology of the fiction of the autonomous human, or the automobile human. While producing the hybrids that undermine the logic of the "Modern subject" (Latour, 1991/1993), the process of modernization simultaneously reproduces a desire for modernist subjectivity. In this context energy resource production appears with its linear narratives of human progress, on the path of time's arrow. Discussions of the future of energy maintain this teleological progress narrative, where the enchantment of infrastructures are stabilized by energy resources (Harvey & Knox, 2012).7 Ultimately, such discourses invite the reproduction of modern sensibilities through rhetorical practice. In discourse, harvesting and circulating energy stabilizes this unstable world and, in turn, 20 enables the energetic or dynamic capacities both of the world and of the subjects that move through that world. In discourse such as found in the three case studies, energy resources function as the mediator enabling the energetic vitality of En/light/enment progress and the modern automobile subject. Automobile subjectivity is delicate, unstable, and must be continuously reproduced. Automobile subjectivity is a rhetorical process in which mediating background processes are incorporated into a sense of self through learned governance (Furness, 2010). Namely, discourses regarding networked infrastructures at least attempt to suggest that one's autonomy is defined in the middle space between one's movements and transportation and communication technologies. Burnett (2004) refers to this agentic middle space, between individual subjects and their media devices, as "incorporation." The rhetoric of autonomy and mobility here depend upon the naturalization of background processes and the belief that the incorporation of these background processes into one's ability to move is itself autonomous movement (Burnett, 2004; Furness, 2010; Thrift, 2004). I prefer Burnett's (2004) term of incorporation to McLuhan's (cf. Sloop, 2009) prosthetics or extensions, in that incorporation suggests a process in which the mediated world gets taken up as a part of one's agentic sense of self. Persuasive appeals for energy futures reinforce the mythology of the fiction of the automobile individual-if one that requires, desires, and fears the loss of the mobilized modern world. Discourses regarding energy resources sometimes highlight how losing energy would not simply induce fear around the loss of the object where the object is some detached entity, but fear of the loss of the self as incorporated with and defined through these dependencies. Energy resources, in turn, supply a rhetoric of stability, amid 21 constant chaotic flows (see Bencherki, 2012). The world of hybrid productions is not simply a simultaneous result of the modernist effort to deny them (Latour, 1991/1993). They also define a sense of autonomous movement as subjectivity when they are incorporated and controlled. The teleological promise of energy is that it offers that control, or channeling of energies, for the modernist subject on the move. Energy Rhetoric: Energy and Rhetoric as Capacities "Energy" therefore names a suturing logic of modernity, which in turn lends to a politics that justifies expanding energy production. In rhetorical theory, scholars often articulate the word "energy" to definitions of rhetoric. I want to suggest that if we link "energy resources" to rhetoric-in part by paying attention to when the term "energy" is associated with "rhetoric"-we can see how energy resources rhetorically name the capacities of the world, both in the empirical work or ignition of mobility systems and through associations of dynamism (and other synonyms) to the word "energy." Energy discourses such as the ones in the subsequent case studies are at least in part rhetorically persuasive through the meanings they place on energy resources: as doing work, housing a capacity for action,8 and as the represented moment of the dynamic qualities of the object and human world. Etymologically, "energy" denotes material work (ergon). In modern times, this work specifically refers to that work which ignites the communication and transportation infrastructures that move people, objects, and ideas. As "the capacity to work," energy resources are empirically observable in their effects, or the work they provoke to move the world. Representations of energy resources often highlight this work done in the 22 world: energy-as-gasoline does the work of a car's powerful engine; energy-as-nuclear holds the promise of an immensely concentrated form of power.9 This represented work also manifests as the mobilization of the material, circulating infrastructures of the modern world. Energy resources, and the corporate entities that supply them, are framed as the constitutive center of mediating infrastructures and objects, as seen in the example of the ExxonMobil "Egg" commercial mentioned in the introduction (ExxonMobil, 2014b). Similarly in Chapter Four, when Revolution character Aaron Pittman reflects on the world he lost because of a global loss of electricity, he ponders the mobilizations of a standard breakfast, or the food miles of the sugar, butter, and so on to make a cookie. Such energy rhetorics frame energy resources as enabling the material world-the physical manifestations of the world's capacity to work-by working for the communication and transportation infrastructures that move the world. Rhetorical theory tends to ignore how energy resources are discursively framed as the necessary "work" embedded in technological environments yet, in a similar vein, rhetorical theory has often attempted to conceptualize rhetoric as work. As numerous scholars have emphasized definitions of rhetoric around what rhetoric does (as opposed to what it is), this emphasis on the doing implies that rhetoric is empirically observable in the consequences invited by rhetorical discourse (Blair, 2001; Lucaites & Condit, 1999; Warnick, 1992). Asking what rhetoric can do-its capacities for action, in a dynamic world of change and contention-keeps rhetorical inquiry responsive to present conditions. Rhetoric, therefore, names the contingent processes of a world continuously made and the discursive mobilizations that act in an open-ended social field. Together, as rhetoric does work in the world, the rhetoric of energy resources emphasizes how energy 23 acts to move, shape, and form the social. In this formulation, energy resources are doing the work of the world's capacity, unleashing its potentiality. While rhetorical theory tends to ignore energy resources, it does employ the language of energy. In that a definition of energy is "the capacity to work," many times we see the term energy used to describe rhetorical capacity, such as in Catherine Chaput's phrase "rhetorical energy" (Chaput, 2010). Others utilizing the language of energy to explain rhetorical theory include Edbauer (2005), Hawhee (2006), Kennedy (1992), and Meyer and Girke (2011). In trying to theorize this capacity of the world to unfold, disclose, and change-and rhetoric as that capacity-"energy" often connotes for such theorists the capacities and dynamism of rhetorical action. By turning to discourse on energy resources, I suggest, we can see how such resources are named as the source and ignition for energetic qualities, or rhetorically name the capacity for the vibrancy of the modern world and modernist subject. Representations of energy resources give name to the energetic capacities of the world and human bodies, which in part note such representations' rhetorical efficacy. In asking how the energetic-as dynamism, vibrancy, and liveliness-is represented in energy resource rhetoric, I am also asking how the energetic is named via energy resources. Dynamism, vigor, and other synonyms of "energy" are all ideas that are given meaning through discourse. Energy resource rhetorics, then, associate these ideas of the energetic with a particular source: the realized capacities of energy resources. The subsequent case studies represent energy resources through such associated qualities. For instance, in Chapter Two, Petrobras' campaign includes a competition in which photographers were invited to "show us the energy around you." "Energy" here links 24 "energy resources" (or the work of Petrobras as the competition's sponsor) to any associations one might have with "the energy around you." The submitted photographs, therefore, often depicted lively moments of a body in motion: jumping, smiling, and so on. In Pandora's Promise, the smiling, staring faces of children of color in the Global South include a light bulb and a lamppost in the mise-en-scène. Here, along with a paternalistic sense of development, smiling children represent vitality, and electricity represents the source of such energetic qualities. Similarly, in the United Nations PSA that accompanies Revolution's Season Two DVD, "United Nations: The Mission Continues," Nepalese villagers smile next to a light bulb as the narrator comments on how such artificial light causes these villagers to "smile from your mouth to the eye" (Warner Bros., 2014c). The wide, vibrant smile is directly associated with the supply of electric light. A primary visual theme across each of these case studies is that of the aurora. Throughout ExxonMobil's "Energy Lives Here" campaign (Chapter Two), in One World imagery in Pandora's Promise (Chapter Three), and in the United Nations' PSA (Chapter Four), each example visually represents the idea of energy resources' ambient presence through the light displays of an aurora. In the aurora's immersive qualities, softly engulfing the modern world, it depicts energy as both all encompassing and the otherwise unseen pulse of the world on the move. In Energy Lives Here in particular, objects emanate with this vital force placed onto energy resources' circulating flow. Energy resources here visually represent the "rhetorical ecologies" of a modern, mobile world that unlocks one's energetic potential (Edbauer, 200510). The aurora visually represents an otherwise indefinable quality of energy resources, or an energetic quality one is 25 invited to see in the work it does-the powering of mobility systems-and that work associated with vitality-the glow of the aurora, the lit face of the child next to a light bulb. These embracing qualities also suggest a spiritual component in which the divine associations of energy resources imbue the life world, a transcendental meaning to energy resources that will be explored in detail in chapter three and touched upon in chapter four. Energy resources, in these cases, do not merely work but inspire and enliven. In each of these examples, energy resources are named as the source or "separate force that can enter and animate a physical body" (Bennett, 2010, p. xiii). To energy resource discourse, the "things"11 of mobility systems have the capacity for work because of energy resources. However, in this framework, energy is not a thing with its own "vibrant materiality" but a de-materialized force that mediates12 things and (human) bodies (Bennett, 2010). It is rhetorically constructed as an external entity that ignites and affects bodies. In such a framework, energy resources power the world, but their materiality is erased as if they were outside the world: as if their purpose were to keep enlivening the object world that really matters. In turn, a further level of mediation includes the object world empowering the human: the need to keep enlivening one's automobile subjectivity. Reading Media Texts The subsequent analysis chapters examine case studies that conceptualize energy resources as a stabilizing and numinous mediator through which humans mobilize the modern world. Such discourses resonate with hypermobile experiences that intersect in the mediating space of rhetoric: between bodies and bodily prosthetics, and the symbolic texts that attempt to frame these practices (Burnett, 2004; Sloop, 2009). My guiding 26 frameworks are: a) Sloop's (2009) rhetorical materialism; b) Ahmed's (2004) theory that discourse attributes people and objects as the source of one's feelings; and c) articulation theory as a politics of rhetorically constituted common sense (Angus, 1992; Laclau & Mouffe, 2001). I utilize these frames to ask how close reading can point to ways in which articulations are mobilized and, in turn, enter into the flow of understanding reality by naming associations to energy resources and leaving an impression (Ahmed, 2004; Sloop, 2009, p. 70).13 The particular articulations, as elaborated in previous sections of this introduction, came about inductively from these case studies. In analyzing these media texts, I primarily draw on Sloop's (2009) definition of rhetoric and Ahmed's (2004) theory of discourse as naming emotions. Symbolic narrative constructions are articulate or cohere towards a field of discourse already in process and are fragments within these larger articulations (Latour, 1999; McGee, 1990; Stormer, 2004). Cultural discourses are themselves material acts that circulate with bodily practices and experiences. Sloop (2009) defines this process as rhetorical materialism, in which talk of bodies and subjectivity-or of energy resources as the mediator for bodies and subjectivity-itself reshapes meaning. For Sloop (2009), rhetoric is "the energy or flow mediating between bodies, body prosthetics," also described as environments, "and ‘semiotic conditions,'" and subjectivity is the effect of this rhetorical process (p. 70). Media texts are themselves a social practice or function as cultural performances, made articulate via how they map onto or circulate with bodily experiences (Labanyi, 2010; Sloop, 2009). I conceptualize media content as a part of the flow or circulation that attempts to rechannel or reinforce that flow in its particular symbolic mobilizations (Harold, 2004). 27 The bodily experiences of hypermobile subjects, and their automated repetition in mobile practices, are given voice in and through discursive texts (Ahmed, 2004; Bennett et al., 2013). According to Ahmed (2004), texts work by attributing others-objects, people, collectives-as sources of emotions. This framework considers how texts help circulate an economy of feelings that orients one to identify objects as causes of emotions.14 Turning to energy resource texts, in this framework, interrogates the process of defining energy as the (re)source of various attributes and, in turn, of one's relationship to the energy object. One's experience or contact with energy resources, in discourse and in everyday experience, works to name the centrality, and justify the expansion, of energy resources. Ahmed (2004) borrows the word "impression" from David Hume to argue that a subject both takes an orientation towards objects (or forms an impression) and that objects impress upon us. First, texts work to build orientations to objects, and to form impressions on such things as energy resources. Second, the contact one has with others and objects, and the histories we bring into experiences, press upon us and influence our relationship with others. Each are part of the circulating flow of meaning and orientation toward something like energy's social role in our lives and, in turn, one's political leanings regarding energy futures. A strategy among the energy resource texts analyzed here includes putting a name to the "energetic" qualities of mobile practices: namely, "energy resources," described in the previous section as work in the world, dynamic, and a numinous all-encompassing quality. These texts attempt to impress upon their audiences a sense of the central mediating function of energy resources; in turn, contact with energy resources in everyday experience includes these discursive elements and helps frame the meaning of 28 these experiences. Energy rhetoric as such mediates between the symbolic and mobile bodies' everyday experiences with the digital world. This dissertation reads texts that align automobile subjects to a named source of energetic attributes: energy resources. These texts encourage audiences to think about energy resources in their lives and for that experiential basis to sway their stance on energy futures politics. That is a stated goal of Pandora's Promise director Robert Stone, who ends his DVD commentary by stating that he hopes the film "has left an impression" and, from there, one will be motivated to act (Robert Stone Productions, 2013a). In other words, Stone hopes the film offers an orientation toward nuclear energy politics, in which one is invited to support its expansion and to get others to support it as well. Further, energy as social practice, or one's everyday experience immersed in energy dependency, also leaves an impression. Feelings about one's social dependencies, and sense of self as an automobile subject, are attributed to energy-as-object through discourses that articulate energy resources to a series of linkages. I explicitly analyze impressions in one of my chapters: how Revolution's dystopian narrative encourages particular ways for the show's actors and producers to read the UN collaboration. That is, the collaboration impresses ways to conceptualize energy futures upon those involved in Revolution in part through how the series, as a circulating discourse, has already named their fears and dependencies. Media content, in its rhetorical materialism, has the capacity to circulate and shift ontological meaning. This dissertation offers a close reading of three recent examples in media in order to examine some rhetorical strategies in the political struggle to shift and/or reinforce meaning around energy resource futures. Be it oil politics, nuclear energy politics, or electricity access politics-all three seen in the World Energy 29 Outlook 2014 and covered in the following cases-each reinforces an "all of the above" logic that naturalizes expanding energy production across sources. Chapter Previews In the first analysis (Chapter Two), I examine a recent genre of oil company advertising that elaborates on the relationship between movement and mobility. Campaigns from Petrobras, Royal Dutch Shell, and ExxonMobil emphasize the relationship between one's bodily movements and, in turn, the body's dependence on particular mobility and energy infrastructures. The campaigns rely upon a sense that movement is the modernist ontology, but they conceive of that movement through the corporations' stabilizing presence. This presence unleashes the qualities of energy resources that in turn naturalize the desire for and assumed inevitability of modernization projects across the globe, universalizing the global narrative of hypermobility further taken up in the next two cases. Chapter Three analyzes a recent pronuclear documentary, Pandora's Promise. The film situates nuclear energy as both the only viable alternative to fossil fuels and as the next step on the linear narrative of technological progress. The film employs a faith-based strategy, modernization theology, to encourage one's commitment to this teleology of forward progress. This modernist promise remains a mobile ontology: that it is the electrified social practices of the modern world that are the undeniable social goods everyone wants. To meet these demands while avoiding climate chaos, the film attempts to build a pronuclear narrative as a long-term commitment to modernism, based off of a claim of energy determinism: that increased energy will enable a good quality of life, but 30 we must remain faithful to its promise. In the last analysis chapter (Chapter Four), I further this thematic on energy access as an unequivocal social good. The chapter analyzes the television series Revolution (2012 - 2014) as well as materials from a collaboration that series creators had with members of the United Nations' energy access campaigns. The series invites audiences to experience the show's dystopian narrative from the perspective of immersion in the technological environment of intensive energy resource mobilization. This invited perspective, if taken up, influences the ways in which the collaboration gets incorporated into an understanding of energy futures. A lack of bodily capacity-the loss of the incorporated, mediated self-is then input onto the loss of energy, specifically electricity. This invited relationship both reproduces one's own automobile subjectivity as well as suggests that others are not fully modernist subjects. In the concluding chapter (Chapter Five), I summarize themes explored in the preceding chapters. For instance, I return to the question of capacities and potential in understandings of energy resources. Mapped onto energy politics, theorizing the world as "energetic" encourages articulations in which the whole world demands the same social practices and energy expansions, and to not have these mediators is to lack. This "energetic determinism" suggests that energy resources cause quality of life, and that quality of life as energetic capacities are defined through energy resources. From such themes, I explore implications for critical cultural theory, rhetorical theory and criticism, and energy politics. 31 Notes 1 As discussed later, Geels (2014) advocates for studies of the strategies, in part discursive, of incumbent energy systems. Geels includes nuclear energy among these "existing regimes." Nuclear energy, however, also positions itself as a (or the) solution for a post-carbon future. I have chosen a pronuclear case study to examine existing discursive regimes regarding expanding production and modernist teleological promises. However, I do not wish to so readily accept Geels' lumping of nuclear energy with other existing dominant regimes but to recognize the energy source's internal and external contradictions as interesting and worth exploring. 2 See Shove and Walker (2014) on futures scenarios and their assumed demand projections. 3 The PSA "United Nations: The mission continues" (Warner Bros., 2014c) a case study of a Nepalese village, attests that the collaboration was by no means exclusively focused on sub-Saharan Africa. That said, the work of the UN as it relates to the Revolution collaboration includes key figures involved with African politics. Bahareh Seyedi, an instrumental figure in the UN-Revolution collaboration, previously worked at the UN's Country Office in the West African country Burkina Faso. Derk Segaar, who offered stories influential in the series' creation of a warlord character, spoke from his experience in Sudan's Darfur region. Additionally, at the time of the collaboration the head of the Sustainable Energy for All initiative was Kandeh K. Yumkella, who is from Sierra Leone. While not directly involved in the collaboration, Yumkella's tenure further points towards the linkages between the UN's energy access focal points and involvement in sub-Saharan Africa. 4 See the preface to Laclau & Mouffe (2001) for a critique of the Left and its "sacralization of consensus" (p. xv) in the fifteen years between their first and second editions. 5 Laclau and Mouffe (2001) distinguish between articulation and mediation. Mediation assumes the joining of two self-contained entities, while articulation includes the contingent calling forth of elements as assumed, fixed entities (p. 94). I am pointing to how mediation is an articulated concept: namely, the production of the autonomous mobile subject calls forth a sense of the stable human subject, the stable mobility system, and the energy that flows (or mediates) between them. This articulation, of mediated entities, reproduces a sense of the self-contained subject moving through the built world. As Laclau and Mouffe (2001) put it later, this sense of autonomy is "the result of precise 32 articulatory practices constructing that autonomy. Autonomy, far from being incompatible with hegemony, is a form of hegemonic construction" (p. 140, emphasis in original). 6 I elaborate on Sharma's emphases for two reasons. One, Sharma's explication of the power relations embedded in and through media channels reflects what I want to say about energy production in the conclusion. Two, Sharma's emphasis on the taxi-a shared mode of transport across classed subjectivities-points towards other articulations of media and energy. Such an emphasis on the spatial production of media covers a wide range of communication research, from mediatization to the mobility turn (Couldry & Hepp, 2013; Wiley & Packer, 2010). 7 Latour (1991/1993) also situates his book by stating that researchers tend to study the magic of other cultures but not one's own. In energy rhetoric, energy resources are often positioned as the stabilizing magic through the reliquaries of mobile devices. Such theological themes will persist throughout the chapters. 8 This sense of "housing" is to suggest that energy resources hold potential energy that, when converted to work, ignite the kinetic energy of the world. 9 See Mitchell's (2011) description of fossil fuels as "great quantities of space and time… compressed into a concentrated form" (p. 15). 10 Edbauer (2005) offers the term "rhetorical ecologies" that threads "energies" with similar concepts: "To say that we are connected is another way of saying that we are never outside the networked interconnection of forces, energies, rhetorics, moods, and experiences" (p. 10). 11 Here I nod toward thing theory (Brown, 2004). Differentiated from "objects," a "thing" identifies objects as agentic. I want to suggest that, in energy rhetoric, energy resources are named as the source of the "thing's" ability to "do" or work energetically: You could imagine things…as what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects-their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems. (Brown, 2004, p. 5). Energy resources represent or domesticate this "thingness" of objects by naming this presence. This capacity in turn ignites the automobile subject's ability to move through the world. In an essay on emotion, affect, and materiality titled "Doing things," Labanyi (2010) places emphasis on each word in the title: the capacity for doing work in the world (doing things) and the nonhuman as equally capable of such work (doing things). Labanyi (2010) also offers a useful overview of some research on affect theory. In reflecting on research that utilizes the language of energy, this dissertation recognizes much of this research as instructive. However, I am not positing a theory of affect so much as a theory of energy resources, in which such rhetorics represent or discursively domesticate the supposedly non-representable (affect) through naming energy resources as the source or grounding of the ineffable, the dynamic, the numinous: in short, the energetic. 33 12 Research on mediation, be it in rhetoric, mobility studies, or media studies, often gives primacy to the processes of mediation, and Urry (2007) calls on research to start with mediators as constitutive (e.g., Couldry & McCarthy, 2004; Packer & Wiley, 2012). However, there remains a tension in such theorizing, in that it tends to dematerialize the mediators. One may start with something like energy, but that does not necessarily mean that energy remains the emphasis. Similarly, one may start with the heuristic of mobility producing the social, but such mediation may still be theorized as an outside entity that permeates the social world more than that social world itself. See Merriman (2012) for a useful discussion. 13 As such, I primarily employ a textual reading of three case studies. While I am interested in questions of context-how social order guides the interpretation of texts, and how contexts are foregrounded and backgrounded (Angus, 1992)-I am not interested in drawing causal claims to how a majority of audiences responded to these texts. In that way, this dissertation does not offer audience analyses but suggests ways in which discourses might circulate among audiences. It is my contention that they do indeed circulate, and I offer examples in each case study. However, I am less interested in evidence that a majority of audiences have taken up a text in a particular way than to point to a) ways in which logics of energy can seep into (as well as extend from) naturalized understandings of energy in society, ways that do not necessarily have linear, direct correlates to audience interpretations; and b) how, particularly in chapters three and four (among nuclear scientists and through the UN, respectively), circulation in specific channels can trace the import of a text more than its overall popularity among a wider-reaching audience. Indeed, divergent attitudes towards Pandora's Promise reflect Ott's (2010) analysis of the film V for Vendetta; different texts resonate positively with some people's experiences and negatively with others. In sum, my reading of these media texts is not meant to suggest a singular way in which audiences take up these discourses. More so, I am interested in how various discursive strategies can function as the naturalized, resonating ambience in which audiences may incorporate such discourses into a universalized sense of self as it intersects with energy use. 14 Ahmed's argument is not that objects (or people) are indeed the source of emotions but that they are named as such. CHAPTER TWO THE IMMUTABLE ENERGY MOBILE: OIL COMPANY ADVERTISEMENTS AND THE MOBILITY PARADIGM "Mobility systems," the network of infrastructures that move people, goods, and ideas, continuously evolve (Urry, 2007). For instance, computerized cars and "mobility on demand" services involve location-aware technologies that connect road, car, driver, and on-demand customizations (de Sousa e Silva & Frith, 2012). These mobility systems shift and evolve regionally, as global urbanization and challenges of sustainability clash with the perpetual yet locally distinctive increases in demands placed on these systems. Amid a growing academic and business concern over "mobility," a catchall encompassing key social issues such as economic efficiency demands placed on infrastructures or arguments regarding the human right to movement, comes a perhaps unexpected voice: the oil company. Contemporary oil company advertising relies upon the circulating discourse of contemporary mobility systems by ostensibly offering the oil company as a stable presence amidst the flux of a chaotic world in constant motion. In the rhetoric of oil company advertising, containment and motion join together in the deployment of mobility systems for the harnessing of human movement. These advertisements tap into an understanding of human life as defined through movement. Movement, as quality of life, is championed yet channeled, ignited and realized through 35 the corporate entity and the energy resources these oil companies supply to mobility systems. In contemporary oil company advertisements, energy resources offer needed stability to the fluid mobility systems that power human life through movement. The oil corporation functions in these advertising campaigns as an immutable entity, resolute and stable in a world of constant flux. To understand this stated relation between the flexible mobility system and the stable presence of the oil company, I argue that oil corporate advertising discourse positions the companies' supply of "energy" on two levels. One, energy resources supply the power that ignites and sustains the workings of mobility systems. Two, the concept of "energy" does not merely denote a resource base but also connotes an elusive quality of human vitality. First, autonomous human movement is increasingly understood through the enabling mechanisms of mobility systems in the form of transportation networks and communication channels. These systems include the smart phone that connects people, QR codes that link person to information, and deal notifications based on location-aware and proximity technologies that connect people to goods. Energy resources, such as oil, power these mobility systems. Second, energy resources, as support for mobility systems, in turn mediate the movement deemed essential to life, both as sustenance and as quality. In other words, movement does not merely denote the act of living but also connotes what it means to live well, and energy-hungry mobility systems enable a good quality of life by unleashing human motion. Oil company advertisements articulate energy resources with discourses regarding mobility systems as the enablers of such motion. The campaigns position oil companies as what I will call immutable energy mobiles. I have previously examined how oil companies' advertising rhetoric employed 36 an affirmative discursive shift that defined them less as oil companies and more as energy companies (Cozen, 2010). Here I argue how they are now positioning themselves as mobility companies, more specifically as immutable energy mobiles. As Latour (1987) argued, "immutable mobiles" are networked, logistical systems that enable the transformations of any field bringing together objects and ideas "that can be mobilised, gathered, archived, coded, recalculated and displayed" (p. 227). Logistical infrastructures stabilize and combine to mobilize ideas, objects, and innovations. Such mobiles, as entities, enable the generative capacities of change and innovation. I use this idea of immutable and combinable mobiles to identify the argumentative framework through which oil companies situate themselves as mobility companies. By assembling resources (i.e., oil), these companies argue they are the underlying driver (i.e., energy) that mobilizes your (i.e., universalized viewer's) life of movement. The oil corporation offers its immutable systems to generate innovations not simply for advances in energy efficiencies, but also for making advances in mobility systems that enable human motion. In this chapter, I argue that recent oil company advertisements highlight the primacy of movement to life in order to argue that the contemporary social issue of mobility, understood as infrastructural mobilizations, falls under its purview. The rhetoric of the immutable energy mobile, as seen in the following advertisements, places the human at the center of social concerns. The corporation mobilizes energy for your individual, autonomous movement, conjoining energy resources with human energy in motion. On the one hand, these campaigns highlight mobility as a system of stable organizational components that channel movements of people, goods, and ideas, maintained through the presence of energy resources. On the other hand, mobility as a 37 discursive heuristic employs associations with the moving body's dynamic or energetic potential. We all move. But, the argument follows, we move through a container: the mobility systems that are stabilized by the power sources provided by the immutable energy mobile. In sum, energy resources ignite mobility systems that then enable the energetic vitality of human motion. The immutable energy mobile is the stable presence that powers these mobility systems and in turn ignites human movement. In sum, this chapter argues that contemporary oil company advertising campaigns employ a) a sense of the mobile body as dynamic; b) an understanding of autonomous movement as enacted through mobility systems; and c) energy resources as the stabilizing force powering these mobility systems and, in turn, powering dynamic human motion. In what follows, I analyze oil company advertising campaigns through this conception of the immutable energy mobile. First, I outline how contemporary discourses constitute an understanding of autonomous movement as enabled through mobility systems. Next, I turn to analyses of recent Petrobras, Shell, and ExxonMobil campaigns to illustrate this strategy of the immutable energy mobile. In conclusion, I consider the implications of this strategy-of tapping into the energetic dimensions of life and movement to declare the stable presence of the oil company-for understanding the social practices of energy resources (Shove and Walker, 2014). Circulating Discourse: Mobility Systems and Human Movement In this section, I claim that digitized networks or mobility systems are increasingly understood as enabling the dynamic qualities of a human body in motion. These associations between mobility and the moving, sensing body are often deployed in 38 advertisements emphasizing mobility as a concept and, as I will analyze in the next section, are explicitly adopted in oil company advertisements. Energy supplies both mobility systems and the movement that is essential for life. The oil company advertising rhetoric therefore suggests that oil companies supply the energy resources that power both mobile bodies (movement) and their enabling contexts (mobility systems). In drawing these parallels between energy, mobility systems, and human movement, the subsequent analysis of oil company rhetoric can best be conceived in the context of what I term a "mobility meme" (cf. Johnson, 2007). Circulating, parallel discourses regarding mobility systems also function as the rhetorical topoi used by oil companies. The proliferation of the term "mobility" in popular terminology suggests a larger discursive formation in which the mobilization of infrastructures, networks, ideas, and objects are all understood as enabling autonomous human movement; oil companies claim to empower such movement through their stable supply. This discursive "mobility meme" disseminates in a series of articulated practices across numerous empirical texts. Mobility is a concept that has disseminated in academia,15 business settings, and popular advertising discourse and, in this dissemination, reflects what Thrift (1994) labeled a mobility structure of feeling characterized by material shifts in light, power, and speed all revolving around transportation and communication developments (Thrift, 1990). The language of mobility also circulates in media culture. These discourses include those related to transportation, such as MIT's Mobility on Demand, Taxi Mobility, Mobility Transport Services, or BMW's film Reinventing Mobility (TEDxBoston, 2009; http://www.taximobility.com/; http://mobilitydispatch.com/; Eurotuner, 2011). Other linguistic examples include those 39 related to information mobility, such as campaigns from Ricoh,16 IBM,17 and Goldman Sachs on SanDisk's "Mobility Revolution" (BillionDollarProduce, 2011). In addition, research centers like DEMAND, MOVE, and SMART include "mobility" as the "m" of each acronym (http://www.demand.ac.uk/; https://sites.google.com/site/movenetworkch/; http://www.um-smart.org/). Last, contemporary sloganeering for mobile phones often suggest its namesake: to be mobile with its user. For instance, in AT&T's 2014 slogan, "Mobilizing Your World," each word highlights particular associations attached to the mobile phone (see SingAlongSongs, 2014). The world is organized, assembled- mobilized-under your control. AT&T acts as an immutable mobile that brings together the (cellular) network to facilitate your "media on the move" (Drotner, 2005). Mobility in this case and in all these examples denotes "the movement of people, ideas, objects and information" (Urry, 2007, p. 17, emphasis in original). The companies or other institutional entities are the stable presences that operate, manage, and direct the seamless connection of those movements; they act as the stable presences or immutable and combinable mobile that enable such movements. This emphasis on movement is a central component to mobility discourse, as this discourse constructs an understanding of mobility systems as enabling the automobile subject's movements through the world. Often in discourse, the technologically mediated world of mobile phones and other mobile dispatches defines autonomous human movement (e.g., Sloop & Gunn, 2010). Mobility, or the assembling of tools for the mobile subject, promises to enable a sense of control as one moves through the chaotic world.18 These mobile tools range from the mobile phone to the car, to the ways in which communication technologies get incorporated into the contemporary logic or articulations 40 of the car. For example, take the Buick Enclave commercial, "Landing." A nuclear family is about to land into snowy conditions and record low temperatures. As the wife sits tense during landing, the husband uses his phone's remote function to heat up the car to 82 degrees. By the time the family enters the car, the snow has melted off the car and everyone takes a deep sigh, their anxieties relieved by their digitally connected vehicle (AmericanAutoFans, 2013). The father is the mobile tool user, wielding the mobilized world for his and his family's needs (see Parks, 2004).19 In mobility discourse, the primacy of organizing one's movements legitimates the stabilizing of such connected environments. So that one's dynamic self can move, the argument follows, the mobilization of stable infrastructural networks must be in place. The production and consumption of energy resources governs these movements and stabilizes the functioning of a technologized urban environment. Amid challenges of climate change and stresses on supply, it is the stability of the company or immutable energy mobile that acts as the constant presence or stabilizing force in a dynamic world that celebrates the mobile body. In this context, "mobility" demarcates the (attempted, practiced and/or discursive) management, domestication, and differentiation of mobile practices and, primarily, of efforts (consciously or not, human-centered or not) to synchronize the movements of people, goods, ideas, and information (Morley, 2011; Urry, 2007). It is a rhetoric of alignment that attempts to harness and bring into order the unruly movement of worldly bodies. Mobility discourses celebrate movement while stabilizing it as well by channeling, directing, and championing the networks that harness movement. An analysis of movement and mobility is best served when conceiving of each as dynamic processes that operate together discursively. On the one hand, some research 41 categorized under the mobility paradigm emphasizes non-representational theories and their primacy of movement (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987; Fenske, 2007; Merriman, 2012; Thrift, 1996). Massumi (2002), for instance, offers the dynamic unfolding process of the mobile, sensing body as "movement-affect-sensation" (see Fenske, 2007; Shubin, 2011). On the other hand, research that attempts to delimit mobility studies, consciously or not, often tends to render movement inert and pliable in order to highlight "mobility" as a dynamic conceptual category (Adey, 2010; Cresswell, 2006). However, discursively conflating the dynamism of mobile concepts with mobility systems risks naturalizing particular systems as the source of the vibrant world. We should be careful not to erase an understanding of movement as force, excess, immanence, and other such intensities, in part because the persuasive appeal of mobility systems discourse often comes from the naming or representing of these systems as the source of such elusive qualities. These qualities often take on an energetic character, in which the mobility meme discourse often highlights the dynamic attributes of a subject wielding control over this mobile, modern world. The energy company advertisements analyzed next particularly highlight energy resources as the mediating source of such energetic qualities. To ground some characteristics present in the oil company campaigns, I end this section with a couple more examples in mobility advertising discourse that illustrate movement as a dynamic unfolding process and systems as the enabler of that dynamism. First, in a commercial for the Blackberry Z10 device, the camera moves with various scenes in motion, all set to the backdrop of the Tame Impala song, "Elephant." The aesthetic form is one of movement, with the idea that one's experiential bodily movement/sensation will register with these representational elements, as the camera, 42 music, and bodily motions all synchronize and move sequentially, left to right. "Keep moving," Blackberry's slogan, is a particular "epistemology of movement" that only makes sense when an understanding of movement, as sensed physical hopping from one source of information to the next, is attached to digital devices (Parks, 2004). To move, but also to keep up: the speed of the rhythms-movement of camera, sound of music, duration of shot-all bundle together under the thematic of the slogan (CooleWerbung, 2013). The immutable logistics of the world enable your movements and your auto mobility. Second, ads for wearable fitness trackers capture the concept of mobility as a networked assembly to contain and ignite human movement. A wave of products and platforms such as the FitBit utilize the language of movement to mediate, track, and represent the body through a network or mobility system that one proactively monitors. This is corporeal movement managed, represented, and mediated, incorporating all of the various devices or objects that move with one to synchronize one's rhythms into consistent habits. The commercial on the Nike FuelBand website states: "Our minds, our bodies, and our experience all tell us that movement is life. And that the more we move, the more we live…But, unlike sport, life doesn't come with convenient ways of measuring movement. So, we developed one" (Nike, 2014). The visuals in general are of intensive sporting activities of all kinds. One of the gentlest images, the camera at the point of view of an adult swinging a child at a beach, occurs when the narrator proclaims, "that movement is life." There is pure joy on the child's face: that movement-sensation one can see in the felt, whisking breeze of the ocean/bodily motion. Associated with the digital tracker, the suggestion is that such (bodily) movement takes mobility (systems). 43 In sum, this mobility meme suggests a contemporary moment in which movement, as the vitality of the automobile modern subject, is understood and represented as enabled through mobility infrastructures. The idea that human movement-as-life requires such digitized mobility systems is the base on which oil company advertising situates its argument. This assumed requirement allows for the conflation between the company that supplies energy resources and that company as powering one's physical movement. When physical movement is understood through these digitized systems, oil companies can argue that they supply the energetic capacity for both the mobility system (through energy resources) and the human on the move (through the continuously powered mobility systems) (cf. Parks, 2004). As mobility serves movement, the energy-mobility company will serve movement with its stabilizing supply of energy resources and technological efficiencies. Contemporary Oil Company Advertisements This chapter's analysis covers three recent oil company advertisement campaigns that highlight the articulation between energy and mobility. In this section, I discuss the rhetorical force of these three corporations and describe their campaigns under subsequent analysis: Petrobras, Brazil's national oil company (NOC), and its 2011 multiplatform and magazine issue on mobility; sample webpages and commercials from Royal Dutch Shell's campaign Let's Go; and ExxonMobil's Energy Lives Here advertisements. These corporations were chosen for their global reach and the fact that they offer a range of national and international oil companies (NOCs and IOCs) that are major players in global oil production. I briefly summarize the companies and their 44 advertisements' reach before analyzing how all three of them manifest links between movement and mobility under the banner of energy. In terms of proven reserves, though these numbers oscillate, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and Petrobras were all around the top five oil companies in the world in 2014; in that year, all three totaled roughly thirty billion barrels in proven oil reserves, nearly a trillion dollars in revenue, and roughly $60 million in profit (Ausick, 2014).20 Global oil production is often divided into OPEC and non-OPEC producers, as well as NOCs and IOCs (Downey, 2009). Ausick (2014) lists Petrobras among private oil companies, though the integrated energy company is a partially state-owned company with deep-and as recently revealed, corrupt-ties to the Brazilian government (Horch, 2015). ExxonMobil and Shell both have operations spread throughout the world and similarly Petrobras, while tied to the Brazilian government, exercises both a national and international presence, a dual image the company cultivates. Along with promoting its cultural investments in Brazil, the magazine issue under analysis includes a page titled "Petrobras Around the World" that illustrates how their integrated operations (such as exploration, refining, and distribution) span across six continents (Petrobras, 2011a, pp. 64-65). In all, while the world oil market is dominated by state-owned monopolies, these three remain major players in terms of energy futures and represent an international presence both in terms of their business activities and their public voice or advertising reach. Their international emphasis is important in a world in which oil demand from OECD countries is diminishing and from non-OECD countries is growing; for every barrel of oil removed from the former, two are added to the latter (IEA, 2014). The 45 Petrobras campaign suggests how the non-OECD world positions itself, for national and international audiences, as developing infrastructural capacities or modern mobility systems.21 The Shell campaign champions the mobility of this globalizing world that primarily runs on oil. And the ExxonMobil campaign offers an American narrative of mobility, in which transport and electricity-and oil and gas-are conflated together as the fossil power that fuels electric-mobile systems. In this context, the three companies produce a social logic around oil production, encouraging an investment in said social logics or in what oil supplies. Oil discourses exist globally, and speak forth this global imperative for expanding oil: to develop the whole world on a modernizing path. Emphasizing social logics, like mobility and movement, attempts to legitimate the presence of oil production activities around the globe. Each campaign analyzed below offers key ways in which oil companies not only attempt to extend their public image as energy companies, but also as mobility companies (Cozen, 2010). First, Brazil's Petrobras is a publicly traded joint stock oil corporation and one of the world's largest integrated national oil companies, and in 2011 was particularly optimistic in its projections (O'Keefe, 2011). That year, the company's magazine, Petrobras, featured an issue on "Mobility" (Petrobras, 2011a).22 The interactive online version of the magazine includes hyperlinks to online videos, extra content, and affordances to share content with others. This issue includes written articles, a cover story focused explicitly on mobility as an urban infrastructural challenge, and an online video addressing the relationship between mobility and movement through the stabilizing presence of energy supplies and oil companies like Petrobras (Barbosa, 2011; Petrobras, 2011b). This issue inaugurated two new developments related to Petrobras Magazine: 46 first, it introduced Petrobras' new global website; and second, it changed its format to an ISSUU clip, an online service that simulates the feel of reading a printed magazine while incorporating interactive features. The issue also offers a forum for Petrobras to champion its recent breakthroughs in new offshore oil drilling production that drills below water, rock, and salt layers. At the time, this breakthrough was a major development in the world oil market (O'Keefe, 2011), and as such the issue's global circulation intersected with Brazil's and Petrobras' burgeoning centralized position in projected oil reserves. In this context, "Mobility" denotes not merely its cover story, but also connotes the issue's theme and the desired persona of Petrobras within global oil and economic politics. The topics for the issue highlight the ways in which Petrobras mobilizes ideas to mobilize resources for the social, modern world. Much of the articles' contents coalesce in the final page in an art project that asked lomographers to visualize the thematic question, "What is energy to you?" (Petrobras, 2011a, back cover). In the spring of 2010, while other oil companies were keeping a low profile amid the unfolding disaster of the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion, Royal Dutch Shell took on an aggressive set of two advertising campaigns. Bush (2010) details Shell's long-defunct Energy Galaxy campaign as well as their still running Let's Go campaign. Shell's Let's Go is a multimedia campaign aimed at mobilizing future-oriented decisions regarding energy production. Shell has deployed the tagline "Let's Go" in various media platforms over several years, including numerous commercials aimed for different national audiences. Currently on Shell's website, the campaign includes commercials of people around the world sharing how their mobile practices require energy, all metonym for the larger "Global Energy Mix" (Shell, n.d.a; n.d.b; n.d.c). Leni is an elementary-aged 47 student in the US who worries that lack of energy would keep her from watching movies with her baby brother; Elcimar is a manager of a Brazilian soccer stadium who worries over whether energy supply will meet sports fans' increasing demand; and Madame Lu is a restaurateur in China who worries about maintaining all of the flows of foods, goods, and energy that allow her restaurant to function.23 Shell emphasizes these and other individual narratives, such as the British-produced advert located in Kuala Lumpur called "Kim," to highlight how Shell powers people's daily mobile lives around the world (Shell, 2010b). This work includes "Smarter Mobility," or the mobilization and ignition of infrastructure further illustrated in the interactive video, "The Sound of Energy" (Shell, n.d.e; n.d.g). These advertisements have circulated in different countries and in various online venues, including the oversaturation of the "Sound of Energy" advertisement preceding various YouTube videos (see Cheong, 2010; Shell, 2012b). The largest publicly traded oil and gas company in the world, ExxonMobil, circulates American-themed advertising that maintains its nationalistic persona even if its investments extend well beyond the United States (Coll, 2012). ExxonMobil is a consolidation of the previously dissolved Standard Oil, recombining Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon) and Standard Oil of New York (Mobil). While the language of mobility is less prevalent in the U.S. than, say, the European Union, the oil company that most champions an American conception of energy has the idea of mobility in its namesake. While their current campaign, Energy Lives Here, is not as explicit in the language of mobility and movement as the preceding cases, its rhetorical maneuverings link the energy resources it provides with mobile consumption and the circulating rhythms of the urban environment. In late 2009, ExxonMobil announced its purchase of XTO, which 48 effectively made the company's natural gas reserves nearly on par with their oil reserves (Coll, 2012). Due to these recently expanded ventures,24 ExxonMobil began to heavily promote natural gas as the fuel of the future, able to power transport, digital devices, and the combination of the two (ExxonMobil, 2011). Energy Lives Here extends these promotional efforts, in which a U.S.-focused form of mobility (communication and transportation hybrids) meets a U.S.-specific energy politics (the explosion of natural gas as a supplement to ExxonMobil's historical focus on oil). While not directly correlated, the campaign suggests how, as mentioned in the introduction chapter, increasing global oil demand primarily occurs in the developing world, and therefore developed world promotional campaigns will likely increasingly emphasize "all of the above" rhetorics. Energy Lives Here includes a minute long introductory video, a series of "energy quizzes," and other commercial videos that tell its audience how "energy lives" both here in the (developed) world and in the expertise and deployed resources of ExxonMobil (ExxonMobil, 2014a). The campaign employs an inventive visual scheme, specifically a visual light display, to thread together a relationship between the usually unseen energy sources and the mobile lives they empower. The campaign has continued with the Energy Lives Here tagline and has circulated nationally in such venues as the October 2014 Major League baseball playoffs, and has been recognized in the industry for its innovative themes (Shaw, 2013). Immutable Energy Mobiles: The Oil Company Mobilizes Your World In this section, I analyze how oil companies rely on the circulating discourse of the "mobility meme" already present in communication technology and transportation 49 discourses. These companies construct their personas as mobility companies, where energy is inextricably aligned with mobility and movement. In their contemporary advertising rhetoric, these companies frame their societal role as assembling a logistical framework to support the mobile world made of transportation networks, digital technologies, and the circulation of people, goods, and ideas. The three oil company campaigns argue that the companies perpetually supply the energy sources that empower the spatialized networks that in turn enable a person's everyday movements. Further, transport and communication "cannot be split apart" (Thrift, 1990, p. 453). They are both part and parcel to spatialized world building, each reliant on the other and each functioning as enabling (and constraining) this "movement in space" (Sterne, 2006, p. 11925). These campaigns suggest how the companies' support of movement in space is beginning to refer not simply to transport systems but communication ones as well. These stable if not sedentary mobility systems support one's dynamic bodily movements, emphasizing an understanding of movement as the key sensorial action of an animate body (Massumi, 2002). The oil company ads represent the social body in harmony with physical bodies and all their complicated, energetic qualities, desires, and capacities (Lefebvre, 1992/2004). Petrobras e Mobilidade: "O homem ou os meios de transporte?" Throughout Petrobras Magazine's Issue 60, "Mobility," the individual human, "homem,"26 is at the center of the relationship between mobility as an organizational challenge and justifications to meet this challenge (Barbosa, 2011; Petrobras, 2011a; Petrobras, 2011b). The campaign suggests that "movement" is dynamic and belongs to 50 people and that "mobility" is the stability of networks that enable movement. Objects and ideas are mobilized for the dynamic, ever-shifting needs of people as they move through the world. This section will discuss how the magazine's content highlights movement as people-oriented. Petrobras' focus does not deny nonhuman movement, but instead argues that the constant becoming of the world needs to be harnessed, mobilized, and contained so that people can move freely. Petrobras' construction of its role as a combinable and immutable mobile reveals how the mobility company harnesses ideas and technologies to stabilize these systems for the circulation of the individuated collective. The issue's cover story argues for foregrounding the dynamic movement of individuals as enabled by the stability of managing systems (Barbosa, 2011). Drawing on numerous metaphors of stillness and movement, the article makes the argument that systems in place, and the energy company powering its rhythms, allow for a person's dynamic movements through the world. When the systems fail, they mirror Harvey and Knox's (2012) discussion of the promise of road infrastructures, an enchantment reinvigorated by the desire to see these projects through their ecological and political obstacles for the eventual promise of improving the circulation, and livelihoods, of people (and goods). The cover story emphasizes the challenges to managing these systems in order to reinforce the desire for overcoming these challenges in the name of human movement. The article begins with an image of rush hour: "Everything around you seems to be standing still," as "everything conspires so that there is no movement around you" (Barbosa, 2011, para. 1). Traffic jams and the "complex mix of" transportation vehicles and infrastructures seem like "one of the most insurmountable dilemmas of the modern 51 world" (para. 2), a problem of urban planning that extends back to the first bus system in the 17th Century (para. 3). Social, economic, and environmental problems continue to increase (para. 3). But if you "look again," then you see how "everything is moving," including the world on its axis: "If there is life, there is movement" (para. 2). The intrinsic social problems cannot refute this vital need for movement. To rethink mobility "in favor of life" is to make these objects and networks "work for us, and not against us" (para. 2), lest "we, the people - who should be the reason for and object of mobility - we stay…stationary" (para. 3, ellipsis in original). Therefore, a stable mobility system "enchants" by unleashing the life force of movement inherent in people (Harvey & Knox, 2012). At this point, the article explicitly draws on academic mobility research and experts, framing mobility studies as a distinct field that tackles the same social problems Petrobras faces (Barbosa, 2011, para. 4). Petrobras' assembly of expert voices attempt to think through how fuel innovations can play a part in stabilizing mobility systems for the movement of people. The article first quotes a professor of transport engineering, Ronaldo Balassiano, who extensively researches mobility issues. The article explains how Balassiano's words "always prioritize the human" (para. 4). Barbosa (2011) paints a picture of Balassiano's kinesthetic virtues, describing him as "in a hurry," "fir[ing] out" information "like a bullet train" (para. 4). The professor stands in for the burgeoning "field of mobility," defined as focused on systems or "the search for innovative projects capable of managing the increasing demands of movement and of accessibility in big cities" (para. 6). These demands of movement expand as life extends quantitatively and qualitatively. Mobility as a field is defined as the capacity for managing such movements 52 efficiently and sustainably. Building from these academic conceptions of mobility, Barbosa names Petrobras' development of efficient fuels as managing mobility and sustainability needs together (para. 6). Energy futures are vital to sustaining the ever-shifting demands and challenges of the world, all while (em)powering individuals. In the ISSUU-enhanced version of the magazine, the article also includes a blurb on the World Energy Council as a source for further discussions on transport and mobility. Outside of these two energy-related examples, the cover story primarily keeps the focus on a) the desire for movement; and b) the social challenges of keeping people on the move. As such, Petrobras answers the challenge. A supplemental video further emphasizes that the stable presence of Petrobras harnesses another component of the organized mobilization of movements: that of ideas (Morley, 2011; Urry, 2007). Along with Balassiano, a collection of expert voices in various academic, governmental, and other fields appear in the video, representing different interests (Petrobras, 2011b). For example, an antique car collector discusses his love/hate relationship between people, cars, and the city. The comment highlights the frustrations with traffic conveyed in the opening to the cover story, but also suggests the desire for planning transit journeys as efficiently as possible (Peters, Kloppenburg, & Wyatt, 2010). This example shows how infrastructures frustrate and delight (Harvey & Knox, 2012). Others in the video consider the challenges of public transport systems and on-demand car services, like Brazil's Zazcar, in becoming successful services only when they can avoid hindrances and meet the human desire for unfettered movement. On this point, Balassiano discusses displacements in all of our movements, requiring a system in place that offers the capacity to move. To meet the universalized demand for movement, 53 Petrobras (2011b) assembles these expert ideas about the future of mobility and, in particular, the need for an emplaced if flexible system of numerous transportation means responsive to all the displacements of our movements. Pedro Rivera, an urban designer opening the interviews, highlights an interest in polyrhythmia, in which the social body meets the ever-evolving requirements of the human body (Lefebvre, 1992/2004). Rivera suggests we need roads for different rhythms and speeds (Petrobras, 2011b). He critiques the sustainability of linking freedom to cars, but this only questions how we will build from there. The video presents the oil company, while attached to the car in that it supplies its fuel source, as less invested in the car per se. More so, the company is committed to a multiplicitous, effective system of transport, trying to enable the dynamic qualities of people's mobile lives through a system that can enable and manage these polyrhythms. Therefore Rivera's final comment, on building the future we want, aligns with Petrobras' purported position: "The future must be of permanent building, because every day what is around us is changing. The city, society, everything is changing all the time. The future must be a continuous process of trial, error and experimentation, never certainties" (Petrobras, 2011b). In the rest of the video, and of the magazine issue, this process of trial and error is concerned with how to manage or domesticate a world of change: to render the world pliable for human movement. The video uses strategic lexical ambiguity in its enigmatic axioms, such as the Portuguese text that opens the film: "Mobilidade: Ainda assim se move," subtitled as "Mobility: And yet it still moves" (Petrobras, 2011b). The Portuguese verb is in the reflexive voice, leaving the subject intentionally vague. It could also mean "And that's how one moves," "Even so one moves," or "Nevertheless one moves."27 Within this 54 polysemous space, the video along with the article explicitly emphasizes the movement of people as the "it" that deserves attention. People move, and mobility systems must not serve the vehicles, but the people in all their dynamic complexity. The video suggests that Petrobras is leading a rethinking of mobility, through new energy sources, sustainable transport, and attitudinal shifts with "man [sic]-and not vehicles-the priority" (Barbosa, 2011, p. 21). Under this conception, any sensed displacement between mobility systems and human movement can eventually be resolved if we place the movements of people first. As the video proclaims, as had the article nearly verbatim, "mobility needs to work in our favor, not against us" (Petrobras, 2011b). The video offers facts of the larger mobilization of objects, ideas, and information, such as how many roads have been built or how many cars appear each year, but only to render it part of the background environment that enables human movement. All other mobilizations, including that of energy resources, are subsumed under the agency of people. For instance, in relation to roads and cars, the accompanying text asks: "They take us where?" (Petrobras, 2011b, bold in original). Later, it enigmatically asks: "Where do we COME FROM?/Where are we GOING?" (Petrobras, 2011b, emphasis in original). The emphasis on "we" suggests that the first question to ask is about humans' everyday practices and desires for movement, and then later we solve the problems that enable these desires. Movement further implies vibrancy. The video ends with the following phrases: Quem se move? [Who moves?] O Homem Ou os meios de transporte? [Man or the means of transport?] As pessoas nunca ficam no mesmo lugar [People never stay in one place] Os lugares são as pessoas [Places are the people] (Petrobras, 2011b) The emphasis is fully placed on the immanent movement of people and, hence, mobility systems must be developed for that vital quality of life. It is people who move, or who are 55 constantly in process; as such, it is the mobility system that must be subservient to that larger effort. Similarly, the front insert page of the magazine includes a definition of mobility that includes various synonyms for mobility and movement. This definition begins: "n. [mobility] the act of being mobile. To be within a world that turns incessantly" (Petrobras, 2011a, cover insert). The definition continues: "It is movement; volubility; inconstancy; velocity" (Petrobras, 2011a, cover insert). In each definition or related synonym of mobility, these key terms associate with the chaotic world in which one attempts to live/move. Movement implies dynamism, vibrancy, and force; "volubility" quantifies rapid, energetic talk; "inconstancy" means frequent change; and the definition of "velocity" suggests a trajectory. To elaborate and combine, the world turns incessantly, suggesting rapid change; people move, offering ever-present challenges. Therefore, the means of transport need flexible stability, able to be an evolving system that stabilizes the contexts in which people move in unexpected ways. People do not stay in one place, so the production of space needs to be sufficiently stable and responsive to service this dynamism. Therefore, the argument goes, while environments are constantly changing, we must keep building systems to align them with the primacy of human movement. The text of the video focuses on the individual who is mobile and the energy company that is immutable, ever-present amid these challenges. Yet, while always a background presence as the authorial voice, Petrobras is largely an absent referent, only making a guest appearance at the very end. The final comment in the video comes from the one interviewee explicitly tied to Petrobras, Carlos Vinícius Massa: "Petrobras monitors all this evolution and is preparing to provide the energy needed for the vehicles of today and 56 the future" (Petrobras, 2011b). Petrobras suddenly appears in this comment: as there and ready for the larger question of mobility or, here, the flow of transportation. Similarly, in the cover story, Petrobras is there to promote fuel innovations that can make all these circulating people move in cleaner and more reliant vehicles. The cover story ends with Massa, the metonymic spokesperson for Petrobras, stating: "We contribute to urban mobility by producing fuels which are perfectly suited to new motoring technologies" (Barbosa, 2011, para. 6). In these examples fuel and mobility, or energy and managing movements, are aligned to support human movement. Petrobras in this rhetoric enables movement amid mobility challenges, by mobilizing scientific researchers, ideas, and technologies. Along with enacting this role by bringing together such voices and ideas in the video, subsequent articles of the issue highlight ways to reduce pollution, maintain labor capital through Brazilian institutional research investments, and most challenging of all tackle the technological obstacles presented by the pre-salt layer of oil extraction (Petrobras, 2011a). To illustrate the technical challenge of the pre-salt layer, the cover image of the magazine depicts a man-in- motion running along the ocean floor as he pushes against the water pressure. Petrobras' efforts are both reflective of and in service of such human motion, regardless the difficulties. Be it running or drilling underwater (under rock, under salt), Petrobras' energetic efforts power through to move the world. The headline on the final page of the magazine issue states exactly that: "Energy that moves the world" (Petrobras, 2011a, back cover). The page promotes Petrobras' joint photographic exhibit with Lomography, the largest Lomowall in Latin America, which asked photographers to visualize "how people see 57 energy" (Petrobras, 2011a, back cover). The project, which marked the launch of Petrobras' global website, mobilized photographers from around the world. The lomography website that invited photographers to the project asked, "what moves you? What drives you to succeed? What energizes you? We want to see what the energy around you is like!... Show us what powers you, what motivates you, what pushes you forward!" (Salas, 2011). The call for photographs continued, conflating movements, sensations, motivational drives, and mobility systems under this trope of energy: Whether it's the alarm clock that wakes you up in the morning, or your daily run, we want to see what the energy around you is. Is there a bicycle or even a car you find fascinating, or the smile of a dear friend? (Salas, 2011). In this project "energy" functions as the movement-sensation that "energizes you," be it the mobile run or the sensation of another's smile (Massumi, 2002). Energy, then, is movement; the energy company, as an immutable energy mobile, stabilizes the mobility systems-the "bicycle or even a car"-so that movement, as life, can flourish. In all, the magazine issue claims that mobility, as an academic research area focused on the urban challenge of transport systems, is really about the movement-i.e., dynamism-of people. The immutable stability of Petrobras enables such life activity: "if there is [Petrobras], there is movement" (Barbosa, 2011, para. 2). Let's Go With the Tune of Shell While Petrobras' campaign highlights its leading role in Brazil's global positioning, the private international corporation Royal Dutch Shell mobilizes the whole world through its energy supply. Shell's "Future of Energy" webpage begins, "energy is vital to our daily lives [and] helps us…fuel transport and power communication channels 58 across the world" (Shell, n.d.f, para. 1). To sustain human movement, the Shell campaign Let's Go argues, we must continue to expand the mobility systems and fossil fuel energy that ignites it, along with any other source that can help. Their call to "broaden the world's energy mix" is essentially a long-term investment in expanding this vision of mobility infrastructures that legitimates Shell's role as accelerating its fuel supply for the ever-changing world today, and laying inroads to not replace, but add to this mix as we move into the future (Shell, 2012a). Shell emphasizes a call to action ("Let's Go") to mobilize solutions to the energy and mobility challenges that the world faces. In turn, the campaign highlights individuals' stories to suggest that it is the autonomous human's daily movements or rhythmic (and rhythmed) activities that legitimate all this mobilization. In their corporate webpage on "Smarter Mobility," Shell articulates a definition of mobility that links moving peoples and objects to vitality: Mobility - the movement of people and goods - is the lifeblood of the global economy… we depend on transport to go about our daily lives…. At Shell we are constantly finding innovative ways to address these challenges and help move more people and goods safely, cost-effectively, and with reduced impact on the environment. Our approach, called smarter mobility, focuses on products, use and infrastructure. (Shell, n.d.e, para. 1). The argument, here, is how to maintain the contours of mobility in the present for an ever-evolving future that will still require the movement of people (and goods). Such requirements are also deemed desirable and universal. The top of the webpage includes an image of a compact car at the Sepang International Circuit motorsport racetrack in Malaysia. Embedded in this image are multiple assumptions about the future: that it is global; that the future of energy is predominantly in Asia; that it will maintain our mobility habits such as speed racing, if with advancements in cars' efficiencies and 59 changes in aesthetics; and that Shell, with its logo and color scheme on the side of the car, will lead the way. The webpage includes hyperlinks on smarter products, smarter use, and smarter infrastructure. Under "smarter products," Shell states, "demand for transport will continue to grow over the coming decades," and that the purpose of their fuel research and development is "to help keep the world moving" (Shell, n.d.d). Articulating "smart" and "mobility" combines communication and transportation into a managed network of interconnectivity for the purpose of motion. Overall, the emphasis on mobility suggests that this movement of people and goods, as "the lifeblood of the global economy," is the starting, unquestionable, and hence naturalized premise from which Shell operates its energy decisions now and into the future. In that regard they advance new fuels, efficient uses, and urban planning efforts in a world that will continue to move at accelerated speeds but, with Shell's guiding hand, can do so "from cleaner sources," that is, new advances in fossil fuels more than alternatives to fossil fuels (Shell, n.d.e, para. 2). While the mobility system infrastructure functions as the "lifeblood of the global economy," the advertising videos under the "Let's Go" tagline emphasize the human-centered purpose to all this infrastructural work. Shell mobilizes the movement of the world to build the context through which one moves, as the advertising discourse positions the company as the enabler of human rhythms and sensations. In particular, Shell's "Global Energy Mix" commercials feature three main characters-American Leni, Brazilian Elcimar, and Chinese Madame Lu-whose everyday practices function as loci for the global flows of energy resources. Each story raises a specific, common sense, and universalized dilemma: how to maintain the energy-dependent infrastructures that every person relies on to live their mobile lives. A few iterations of these people's stories 60 include the same repeated opening. After overhead imagery of a Brazilian and Chinese cityscape (Rio de Janeiro and Shanghai, respectively) and the Mountain West (somewhere in Colorado), the commercials depict these three people in their daily activities: Leni in band practice, playing out in the snow, grabbing hot chocolate, answering a phone, and using a pencil sharpener; Madame Lu directing an employee, a child eating in her restaurant, and a cook doling out rice; and Elcimar inside a control room and on a walkie talkie near a stadium field as soccer (or fútbol) players run past him. The narrator asks us what these three people "have in common" and proceeds: "The answer is simple: they all need energy to go about their daily lives" (Shell, n.d.a; Shell, n.d.b; Shell, n.d.c). These lives are mobile lives, evident in one iteration that incorporates all three people's stories over the narration, "energy: we all need it to move" (Shell, 2012a). In each personal story, the characters narrate their reliance on energy resources in th