Infrastructuring consciousness: North American surrealism’s non-reproduction of the fossil infrastructural status quo

Fossil fuels and the infrastructures they proliferate offer the promise of stability, ease of movement, and a sense of political belonging to the future. However, the resurgence of poets, writers, and artists working within surrealism in the US’s post-war period – an era in which fossil fuel relations deepened – suggests that fossil infrastructural life is intense, oneiric, and traumatic. Using surrealist insight that traces the past lives of infrastructure, these surrealist texts excavate histories of violence and exploitation that hegemonic fossil infrastructural imaginaries obfuscate. In turn, they refuse to reproduce the racial, colonial, and animal configurations and violences that fossil infrastructure enables and repeats. Nonetheless, their selective valorisation of fossil infrastructure’s reproductive capability mean that they often reclaim the autonomy and creative power fossil fuels hold. This tension between non-reproduction and textual/artistic reproduction reframes the priorities of alternative energy futures toward reparation and the means of self-representation for groups marginalised by infrastructural development.