The Chemical Theory of Phlogiston in the Cultural Economy of Fire: From the Enlightenment to Contemporary Times

Abstract

The article focuses on how the chemical concept of phlogiston functions in the so-called economy of fire from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries, in view of a shift in “pyropolitics” (politics of fire) in their relation to the economic paradigms (cameralism, industrial capitalism, postindustrial digital economy), and theories of chemical flame processes (phlogistics, oxygen theory,theory of detonation and deflagration). The phlogiston concept is explored as the key substantial notion of the phlogictic chemical theory of the Enlightenment (regarded also as a natural “cameralistic science” in terms of metallurgy), the epistemological metaphor of ignorance in nineteenth-century Marxist discourse. Phlogiston circulates in the economics of fire discourse as a signifier for surplus value (and some other Marxist terms). “Fire as equivalent to money” becomes, in petropolitical studies, a means for turning petropolitics into pyropolitics with the radical metaphor of “PyroGaia” (Nigel Clark) in the Anthropocene period.