Fragmented abundance: disjunction and uncertainty in a solar economy

This project examines contemporary capitalism's relationship to abundance and uncertainty, via the political economy of electrical infrastructure.Echoing Bataille's notion of solar economy, in which the primary problem is not scarcity but managing excess, I orient around a case of relative wealth and literal solar energy abundance: California's electricity grid, especially from the 1990s to the present.Whereas much recent attention to infrastructure has focused on moments of breakdown, I develop the conceptual terrain surrounding positive investments in infrastructural mediation of the human-earth metabolism.In attempting to smooth over the uncertainty and intermittency introduced by renewable energy, electrical infrastructures work to compose abstract, homogeneous spacetimes insulated from other rhythms (producing stasis out of flux).By maintaining this type of gap, I show how the category of infrastructure occupies a key point of convergence between Marx's theory of metabolic rift and Deleuze and Guattari's concept of disjunction in Anti-Oedipus, in a way that opens questions about the meaning of communism today (with ecological issues given prominence).Part I describes the problem of intermittency and its driving role in grid dynamics, showing how capital seizes on this to recapture the potentials of solar energy.Part II examines different figurations of the concept of planning, which is often suggested as a means of reining in capitalist irrationalities of this type.For an articulation of planning sensitive to questions of self-sufficiency, scale, and uncertainty amidst abundance, I turn toward Harney and Moten's The Undercommons, asking how their framework might bear on questions of energy, ecology, and infrastructure.First and foremost, thank you to my incredible supervisor, Darin Barney.I chose McGill in large part because I sensed in him an exceptional intellectual, political, and personal integrity, and he has proven that hunch more correct than I could have hoped for.My thinking has deepened immeasurably under his guidance.The debt that this project owes to Tom Lamarre is also without measure.It was while reading Marx and Anti-Oedipus in his seminar that I began to develop many of the ideas here.He encouraged me that there was something worth pursuing about Deleuze and Guattari in relation to electricity, and to follow the madness in getting there.My reading of these texts is profoundly informed by his teaching and truly overflowing intellect.Any errors, of course, are entirely my own.A very warm thank you to Gabriella Coleman and the Wolfe Graduate Fellowship program for

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