Ciara Patten

Ciara Patten (she/her) is a doctoral student in Social and Cultural Analysis at Concordia University, supervised by Dr. Beverley Best. She holds an MA in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. Working at the nexus of Marxian value-form theory and political ecology, her research responds to associations of resource extraction with the aesthetic category of the sublime, which is often invoked to register seemingly irrepresentable scales of ecological crisis. In a project titled “The Spectral Sublime: Political Ecology and the Moving Form and Force of Value,” a rather different approach is taken, reconceptualizing the sublime as an aesthetic register of value itself: an invisible, immaterial form that moves through the Earth’s political and ecological fields. Connecting the “suprasensuous” dimensions—those which lie beyond the range of immediate, sensuous experience—of both the sublime and the commodity form, a central hypothesis is that the sublime represents the (absent) dimension through which value moves, and that this spectral movement is always present in aesthetic renderings, carrying forth the interconnections of political economy and ecology, including specters of capitalist coloniality, racialization, and exploitation.

This project was conceived in part at the residency “Critical Raw Cartographies” (March 2024) at Casino Display, Luxembourg, in an exploration of how the European Commission’s efforts to secure “strategic autonomy” in its access to rare earths (charted in the 2023 Critical Raw Materials Act) hinges on the formation of an infrastructure via abstraction, or through the mechanisms of international alliances, trade deals, and extraction rights, to consolidate supply chains and thus reinforce economic, energy, and strategic security. This theorisation will be extended into the current research project—through fieldwork and case studies of sites identified by EU, Canadian, and U.S. stakeholders as reserves rich in critical materials—taking up value-form theory as an orienting analytic within empirical research, to devise a method of reading for interlocking spectral/suprasensuous relations, at the level of economics, that exert real, world-shaping force.

Publications 

‘Recast the Institution: Reports from the Goldsmiths Boycott’, Viewpoint Magazine, https://viewpointmag.com/2022/05/10/recast-the-institution-reports-from-the-goldsmiths-boycott/