Stabilizing Energies: Intersections Between Energy Promotion Texts and Rhetorical Theory

Abstract

Rhetorical theory often deploys an energy trope to name how rhetorical action occurs. This chapter details how rhetorical scholarship uses this trope to explain the rhetorical power of fossil fuel promotional texts. Cozen focuses analysis on ExxonMobil’s Energy Lives Here campaign, in which the company prepares and maintains the infrastructure through which individuals activate their energetic potential. By arguing that fossil fuel systems set the conditions for human potential, or that human activity and vitality emanates through these systems, such texts endorse the permanence of current energy practices. While naming the fossil fuel system as the source of energetic potential helps legitimate current energy practices, politicizing the energy trope in rhetorical scholarship can inform how to conceive social transformation beyond these systems.