This archive is situated squarely within Austin’s social, energy, and environmental politics, including the City’s regime of divisible governance (Howey and Neal 2022), which is, itself, situated within Texas’s own divisible governance regime. Popular cultural imaginaries of the state of Texas often entail a rugged/rural, conservative, and enthusiastically capitalist socio-political landscape that is drenched in petro-politics (which is not completely inaccurate). Austin, by contrast, has a well-known reputation as a liberal (or neoliberal), environmentally friendly, artsy, high-tech, opportunity rich, and lively cultural scene. However, Austin is also gaining recognition as one of the most racially segregated and economically unequal cities in the United States. While some of Austin’s persistent environmental problems can be rooted in the City’s past and present struggle to resist the callous environmental politics of the state, the municipal government is more directly culpable for the production and reproduction of its local social inequities.
This archive is dedicated to enabling multiple and iterative “re-punctuations” of Austin’s past and present. This entails tracing the multi-dimensional connections between its development as a liberal and environmental technopolis and its sordid history of racial inequality and racial violence, rampant homelessness, gentrification, and environmental injustice. That is, the archive is designed to resist Austin’s regime of “divisible governance,” which has enabled/produced and characterized the way Austinites conceive and engage in energy/environmental politics. To resist these divisions, I have selected “eco-logics” as the archive’s primary “substantive logic.” Influenced by Bateson’s conception of an ecology of mind, Guattari’s notion of ecosophy, and Fortun’s approach to the entangled scales and systems of late industrialism, this archive is designed to enable an iterative meta-modeling of Austin’s techno-political, social, discursive, and mental ecologies, to help scholars, activists, renewable advocates and entrepreneurs, utility staff, public officials, and even your casually interested Austinite to diagram the gaps, frictions, barriers, and feedback loops between the multi-scalar processes that have both enabled and restricted Austin’s ability to perform an expedient and just transition to a more ecologically sound society.
