The editors are pleased to present this special issue, Materialism and the Critique of Energy. Each of the essays here appears in an edited volume by the same name forthcoming from MCMʹ. As Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti put it in their introduction: though the “environmental problem of energy” is often “framed as a consequence of bad consumer habits,” it is in fact “deeply bound to the material origins of the commodity form.” And because the current ecological crisis is so deeply bound to the production and consumption of the commodity, it cannot be solved with the “techno-future vision” of energy-transition experts who imagine a future rescued through engineering. “The core contradiction of today’s economic system,” they write, “is and always has been tied to its facility with energy.” Thus, “a critical standpoint on the conditions of political, economic, and ecological possibility requires a new account of energy’s historical function” — of its relation to production and consumption of commodities, to the accumulation of value. The key insight of this collection of essays, and of the larger volume, is that our relation to fossil fuels — and all forms of energy — is its relation to the production and extraction of value.

Collected selection from the book are several approaches to the problem of energy and its relation to history and art. Andreas Malm, for example, lays out a long history of the relation between capitalist expansion and energy consumption, while Amanda Boetzkes tracks the ways energy consumption circulates in some contemporary art. Turning to the novel, Amy Riddle too looks at the relation between aesthetic forms and the political economy of energy. Katherine Lawless explores the “materiality of an energy unconscious” through a history of nuclear power. And David Thomas explores the relation between energy systems and energy cultures through the lens of Raymond Williams. Finally, Alberto Toscano turns to the concept of “exhaustion” and what the tragedy of materiality to “connect contemporary debates on the consequences of climate change to theorizations of the multiple crises of social reproduction.” Taken together, these essays offer a snapshot of the intervention that dialectical materialism might make in contemporary debates of the Anthropocene, and why theorizing energy is indispensable to understanding our current regime of accumulation and the existential threat it poses.

– Davis Smith-Brecheisen, for the Mediations editors