Energy discourses are strongly charged with emotions. This is already indicated by recurrent terms such as "petro-melancholia", "energy anxiety", "carbon enthusiasm" or "resource curse". The ambivalence of enthusiasm for and the suffering from energy has accompanied the debate on energy at least since the age of the so-called Anthropocene. The avant-gardes are usually associated with ecstatic enthusiasm for energy. Futurism, Expressionism and Projectionism gave themselves wholeheartedly to the pathos of a new energy age. The production and construction site novels that became popular in the early Soviet context from the mid-1920s onwards also devote themselves to energy primacy with their raw material hymns. Here, energy and enthusiasm intertwine to form a stable syntagma. On the horizon of these energetic promises of salvation, however, an energetic apocalypse looms: "Energy anxiety keeps popping up." (Yaeger 2011) The sub-project works out how the aesthetics of the avant-garde negotiates the correlation of energy and affect in its attempt to manage the dynamics of enthusiasm between calculation and loss of control.

Supervisor: Susanne Strätling