Fracking the National Ethos: The Pressures of Globalization on Sovereignty and Justice in Will Ferguson’s <i>419</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article looks at the award-winning 2012 novel 419, by Calgary-based author Will Ferguson, through the lens of fracking, understood as a trope for pressure that may destabilize received understandings, releasing new awareness, knowledge, and political action. I argue that 419 is an inquiry into the strain that increasing global connectivity and unfettered late capitalism exert on the modern concept of sovereignty and on contemporary notions of justice. I also suggest that Ferguson’s use of the thriller genre introduces an innovative move by resisting both retributive and restorative justice resolutions. Furthermore, Ferguson’s novel functions as a petrofiction by placing oil at the centre of the discussion about the intersection of sovereignty, justice, and ethics, while offering a scathing critique of how energy resources around the world are managed through the exercise of bio- and necro-power. The novel is thus firmly anchored in contemporary debates about bio- and necro-politics that revolve round Michel Foucault’s unfinished project on governmentality. Consequently, my analysis draws on a variety of philosophical theories that reveal contesting understandings of sovereignty (Foucault, Montag, Mbembe, Banerjee) and humanity (Agamben, Butler) vis-à-vis the socio-cultural aspects of oil and energy both in Canada and in the world (Ghosh, Szeman, Gordon).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".