Giambattista Vico1

As an inscription device, the energy graph reflects a style of hydrocarbon aesthetics that celebrates abstractness. The graph is an abstract image that does not make a great deal of sense on the surface of things. In fact, as I argue below, abstractness in graphical representation is analogous to the contemporary art image – the latter, a visual representation whose recognition reflects the consecration of an effort. Pierre Bourdieu notes that contemporary art invites appreciation through an imposition of refinement of taste – what he calls the Kantian aesthetic. As a form of taste, the Kantian aesthetic functions to endow populations with a feeling for the world that favours distance. Peter Sloterdijk employs a similar aesthetic regime, which he labels cynical reason. Both the Kantian aesthetic and cynical reason tend towards a rejection of the obvious in favour of abstractness. By applying these discourses in this instance, in this chapter I draw attention to the way in which graphical representation in energy development (and in climate change) favours distanced reflection as a form of aesthetic appreciation.

In The Pulse of Modernism, the historian Robert Brain notes that the origin of the modern graph lies in graphical inscription instruments invented in the nineteenth century which opened new ways of moving from materiality to semiotics and established a desire for linear temporality. For example, in their attempts to modify the work of steam engines, engineers such as James Watt introduced graphical copying processes for mechanically tracing the movement of the piston inside the cylinder of an engine. Brain notes that such instruments, which began crudely by affixing a pencil to a piston rod and then to a registering apparatus made up in part of writing paper, transformed the piston's mechanical movement into graphical expression.