Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture 9780773550391

Table of contents :
Cover
PETROCULTURES
Title
Copyright
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: On Petrocultures: Or, Why We Need to Understand Oil to Understand Everything Else
PART ONE: RIGS, PLATFORMS, AND PIPELINES
1 Extreme Oil and the Perils of Cinematic Practice
2 Containing Oil: The Pipeline in Petroculture
3 Who We Are and What We Do: Canada as a Pipeline Nation
4 Can the Petro-Modern State Form “Wither Away”? The Implications of Hyperobjects for Anti-Statist Politics
PART TWO: AMERICAN PETRO-IMAGINARIES: MODERNISM AND AUTOMOBILITY
5 Behind the Closet Door: Pixar and Petro-Literacy
6 “Made for Mankind”: Cars, Cosmetics, and the Petrocultural Feminine
7 Oil Tragedy as Modern Genre
8 Where Is the Oil in Modernism?
PART THREE: PETRO-MATTERS: PLASTICITY, TOXICITY, LUBRICITY
9 Plastic Vision and the Sight of Petroculture
10 Oil Futures/Petrotextiles
11 Holding Water in Times of Hydrophobia
12 Lubricity: Smooth Oil’s Political Frictions
PART FOUR: OIL THEORY
13 Petrocultures in Passive Revolution: The Autonomous Domain of Treaty Poetics
14 Getting into Accidents: Stoekl, Virilio, Postsustainability
15 Being and Oil: Or, How to Run a Pipeline through Heidegger
16 Petroleum’s Longue Durée: Writing Oil’s Temporalities into History
PART FIVE: PETROSCAPE AESTHETICS
17 Petro-Pastoralism: Agrarian Hydrocarbons in South Trinidad
18 Sensing Oil: Sublime Art and Politics in Canada
19 Photography from Benjamin to Žižek, via the Petrochemical Sublime of Edward Burtynsky
PART SIX: NEW STORIES, NEW KNOWLEDGE: RESEARCH CREATION
20 Live from Alberta! Radio Petro Presents A Scary Home Companion
21 The Tar Sands Exploration Station: A Self-Directed Artist Residency
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Pet rocult ur es

P E T R O C U LT U R E S Oil, Politics, Culture

Edited by SHEENA WILSON, ADAM CARLSON, AND IMRE SZEMAN

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2017 ISBN 978-0-7735-5037-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-5038-4 (paper) ISBN 978-0-7735-5039-1 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-7735-5040-7 (ePUB) Legal deposit second quarter 2017 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the University of Alberta. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Petrocultures : oil, politics, culture / edited by Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-5037-7 (cloth). – isbn 978-0-7735-5038-4 (paper). – isbn 978-0-7735-5039-1 (epdf). – isbn 978-0-7735-5040-7 (epub) 1. Petroleum industry and trade – Social aspects. 2. Petroleum industry and trade – Political aspects. I. Szeman, Imre, 1968–, editor II. Wilson, Sheena, 1974–, editor III. Carlson, Adam, 1978–, editor hd9560.5.p48 2017

338.2’7282

c2017-900434-4 c2017-900435-2

Set in 10.5/13 Sabon. Interior design and typesetting by James Leahy.

Contents

Figures ix Acknowledgments

xi

On Petrocultures: Or, Why We Need to Understand Oil to Understand Everything Else 3 Sheena Wilson, Imre Szeman, and Adam Carlson Part One: Rigs, Platforms, and Pipelines 21 1 Extreme Oil and the Perils of Cinematic Practice Brenda Longfellow

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2 Containing Oil: The Pipeline in Petroculture 36 Graeme Macdonald 3 Who We Are and What We Do: Canada as a Pipeline Nation 78 Darin Barney 4 Can the Petro-Modern State Form “Wither Away”? The Implications of Hyperobjects for Anti-Statist Politics 120 Michael Truscello Part Two: American Petro-Imaginaries: Modernism and Automobility 133 5 Behind the Closet Door: Pixar and Petro-Literacy 138 Michael Malouf 6 “Made for Mankind”: Cars, Cosmetics, and the Petrocultural Feminine 162 Cecily Devereux

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7 Oil Tragedy as Modern Genre Glenn Willmott

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8 Where Is the Oil in Modernism? 197 Joshua Schuster Part Three: Petro-Matters: Plasticity, Toxicity, Lubricity 215 9 Plastic Vision and the Sight of Petroculture Amanda Boetzkes 10 Oil Futures/Petrotextiles Kirsty Robertson

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11 Holding Water in Times of Hydrophobia Janine MacLeod

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12 Lubricity: Smooth Oil’s Political Frictions 287 Mark Simpson Part Four: Oil Theory 319 13 Petrocultures in Passive Revolution: The Autonomous Domain of Treaty Poetics 325 Sourayan Mookerjea 14 Getting into Accidents: Stoekl, Virilio, Postsustainability 355 Randy Schroeder 15 Being and Oil: Or, How to Run a Pipeline through Heidegger 377 Andrew Pendakis 16 Petroleum’s Longue Durée: Writing Oil’s Temporalities into History 389 Tim Kaposy Part Five: Petroscape Aesthetics 407 17 Petro-Pastoralism: Agrarian Hydrocarbons in South Trinidad 411 David McDermott Hughes 18 Sensing Oil: Sublime Art and Politics in Canada 431 Georgiana Banita

Contents

19 Photography from Benjamin to Žižek, via the Petrochemical Sublime of Edward Burtynsky 458 Clint Burnham Part Six: New Stories, New Knowledge: Research Creation 477 20 Live from Alberta! Radio Petro Presents A Scary Home Companion 479 Geo Takach 21 The Tar Sands Exploration Station: A Self-Directed Artist Residency 498 Allison Rowe Contributors Index 515

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Figures

2.1 2.2 2.3

2.4

2.5 2.6

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2.8 2.9 9.1 9.2

Ernst Logar, Petrol Storage, Aberdeen Harbour. Photo courtesy of the artist 44 Ernst Logar, Heliport, Aberdeen Airport. Photo courtesy of the artist 45 Edward Burtynsky, Oil Refineries #23, Oakville, Ontario, Canada, 1999. Photo courtesy of Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto / Flowers, London 51 Edward Burtynsky, Oil Fields #22, Cold Lake Production Project, Cold Lake, Alberta, Canada, 2001. Photo courtesy of Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto / Flowers, London 53 Matthew Coolidge, Trans-Alaska Pipeline, 2008. Photo courtesy of the Center for Land Use Interpretation Archive 60 George Osodi, Near Shell’s Utorogun Flow Station, Nigeria, January 15 2006. Photo courtesy of Panos Pictures, www .panos.co.uk 63 A man wipes soot from his face in the aftermath of a Lagos slum gas pipeline explosion, in December 2006. It killed five hundred people. Photo by Akintunde Akinleye for Reuters 64 Ed Kashi, Children Play on Oil Pipelines, Okrika, Nigeria, 2008. Photo courtesy of the artist 67 Trans-Alaska pipeline, 2001. Photo by Damien Gillie, courtesy of BP Archives 68 Portia Munson, Green Piece: Lawn, 2007. Photo courtesy of PPOW Gallery, New York 229 Melanie Smith, Orange Lush I, 1995. Photo courtesy of the artist 230

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21.1 21.2 21.3 21.4

Figures

Choi Jeong Hwa, Beautiful! Beautiful life!, TINA B project in San Salvatore, Prague, 2012. Photo courtesy of the artist 232 Edward Burtynsky, Alberta Oil Sands #6, Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, 2007. Photo courtesy of Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto / Flowers, London 469 Allison Rowe, Highway, from the series Postcards from Fort McMurray, 2010. Photo by author 499 Allison Rowe, Bit-u-men, from the series Postcards from Fort McMurray, 2010. Photo by author 501 Allison Rowe, Remediated, from the series Postcards from Fort McMurray, 2010. Photo by author 502 Exterior view of the Tar Sands Exploration Station, parked at the Richview Library in Toronto, Ontario, 2011. Photo by author 504

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge all of the authors whose intellectual labour has made this collection possible and whose ongoing work is contributing in significant ways to the discipline of the energy humanities. Their work adds to the body of knowledge being created by the members of the Petrocultures Research Group and its affiliates: colleagues working on oil and energy-related issues in more than twelve countries around the world. We would also like to thank the more than one hundred participants in the first Petrocultures conference we hosted, in 2012 (Edmonton, Alberta), and the organizers and participants of Petrocultures 2014 and 2016 at McGill University (Montreal, Quebec) and Memorial University (St John’s, Newfoundland). Now a biennial event, these gatherings are helping to build and shape the discipline, as well as to create a community of scholars and artists in dialogue with industry, government, and policy makers. This research will help to give shape to the energy transitions and social transformations of the coming century. A huge thanks to the sponsors of the original Petrocultures conference, which include the Kule Institute for Advanced Study (University of Alberta), Campus Saint-Jean (University of Alberta), the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies (University of Alberta), the Department of English and Film Studies (University of Alberta), the Faculty of Arts (University of Alberta), the Fort McKay Métis gallery@501 (Sherwood Park, Alberta), and the Alberta Institute for American Studies (University of Alberta). This collection was also made possible through the generous financial contribution of a number of organizations: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies, the Kule Institute for Advanced Study, and Faculté Saint-Jean

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and the Office of the Vice-President (Research) of the University of Alberta. Thank you to University of Alabama Press and Duke University Press for permission to republish, respectively, a chapter from Joshua Schuster’s The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (2015) and David McDermott Hughes’s Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity (2017). We acknowledge the journal e-flux for the republication of passages that first appeared in Amanda Boetzkes and Andrew Pendakis’s article “Visions of Eternity: Plastic and the Ontology of Oil” (2013). We would also like to thank our generous peer reviewers for their feedback. On a more personal note, we are grateful to Jonathan Crago and the team at McGill-Queen’s for their unwavering support over the several years it has taken to make this project a reality. Sheena thanks: my co-editors, as well as Stephanie Secklemann for her contributions to the project, and my communities of support that include fantastic colleagues and students at Campus Saint-Jean, the University of Alberta, and across the energy humanities: Janice Williamson, Asma Sayed, Natalie Loveless, Carrie Smith-Prei, Mél Hogan, M.E. Luka, Naomi Krogman, Pat Makokis, Fay Fletcher, Katy Campbell, Sourayan Mookerjea, Donald Ipperciel, David Kahane, Eva Lemaire, Pierre-Yves Mocquais, Hassan Safouhi, Martine Pellerin, Heather Young-Leslie, Susan Hamilton, and so many of the wonderful people and mutual friends that Adam and Imre thank below. Of course, it goes without saying that none of this would be possible without my friends from outside the academy and my loving family. Special thanks and appreciation to Ajay Pandhi. Adam thanks: first, Imre and Sheena. Thank you also to Mika Minio-Paluello, Dominique Perron, Sina Rahmani, and Graeme Macdonald, as well as my dad, Keith Carlson, for great conversations that helped me think through the politics of oil. And, of course, my deepest gratitude goes to Katie Lewandowski. Imre thanks: my colleagues and students at the University of Alberta who have helped make it such a wonderful place to work and think. And to all my colleagues elsewhere who continue to energize the life of ideas, including Lynn Badia, Darin Barney, Brent Bellamy, Sarah Blacker, Nicholas Brown, Dominic Boyer, Warren Cariou, Jeff Diamanti, Cymene Howe, Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Huimin Jin, Jordan Kinder, Tanner Mirrlees, Susie O’Brien, Andrew Pendakis, Mark Simpson, Justin Sully, Priscilla Wald, and Jennifer Wenzel.

Pet rocult ur es

introduction

On Petrocultures: Or, Why We Need to Understand Oil to Understand Everything Else Sheena Wilson, Imre Szeman, and Adam Carlson

Oil transformed everyday life in the twentieth century. In the twentyfirst century, we are finally beginning to realize the degree to which oil has made us moderns who and what we are, shaping our existence close at hand while narrating us into networks of power and commerce far, far away. At the heart of this newfound awareness of oil’s importance to our sensibilities and social expectations – our belief, for example, that sociality is of necessity narrated by perpetual growth, ceaseless mobility, and the expanded personal capacities and possibilities associated with the past century’s new flood of energy into our lives – is our recognition that over the course of our current century we will need to extract ourselves from our dependence on oil and make the transition to new energy sources and new ways of living. In June 2015, the g7 nations pronounced that the era of fossil fuels would end by 2100. With this declaration (and many more ambitious ones like it),1 we have embarked upon a social transformation without historical precedent, especially given the scope (the earth’s population may reach 9.6 billion people by midcentury) and scale (affecting the infrastructure of the entire planet) involved. Oil transformed life over the century in which we came to depend on it; the looming threat of its absence from our lives means that it will transform us again, from people who are at home and comfortable in the petrocultures we have devised for ourselves to people who will have to shape ourselves to fit contexts and landscapes we can barely imagine, even if we need to do so – and quickly. To help begin this work of energy transition and transformation, researchers in the arts, humanities, and social sciences have turned

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their critical attention toward oil and energy as never before. What distinguishes the scholarly discussions that make up the emerging field of the “energy humanities,” to which the essays in this collection are a contribution, is that they position oil and energy as the fulcrum around which many of today’s most pressing social, economic, and political issues must be analyzed and understood.2 The energy transition that will need to take place over the twenty-first century is certainly filled with all manner of technological and political challenges. However, the most significant challenges involved in moving away from fossil fuels to new forms of energy are less matters of technology or public policy than they are social and cultural problems. At issue is not only the kinds of energy we use and depend on  – that is, whether we should replace fossil fuels with solar or wind power – but also the purposes to which we put energy, the why and how of energy. These purposes are varied and extensive, and are folded into every aspect of our lives, linking our deepest hopes and desires to the spaces of energy extraction and to the measure of watts used per person per year. Energy transition will therefore involve not only a change in the kinds of energy we use, but also a transition in the values and practices that have been shaped around our use of the vast amounts of energy provided by fossil fuels. The lack, to date, of critical intellectual resources by which we might make possible the social transition needed to support and enable energy transition is one of the reasons why ever-increasing public knowledge about global warming has resulted in relatively minimal action to address it. The challenges we face are significant. As Vaclav Smil points out, “lessons of the past energy transitions may not be particularly useful for appraising and handicapping the coming energy transition, because it will be exceedingly difficult to restructure the modern high-energy industrial and post-industrial civilization on the basis of non-fossil  – that is, overwhelmingly renewable – fuels and flows.”3 The essays collected in Petrocultures provide a map of the social and political challenges of the energy transition we face now, laying bare the complex and contradictory ways oil has shaped our social imaginaries and offering a multifaceted analysis of the claims and assumptions that shape and guide how we think and talk about fossil fuels. Energy has played an essential role in shaping modern social and cultural life. As many social and cultural critics are now becoming

Introduction: On Petrocultures

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aware, “the story of human development has been the story of the increased use of energy. Indeed, we can even think of human history as falling into epochs marked by the human ability to exploit various sources of energy.”4 The modern discovery of oil in 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania, played a crucial role in enabling the monumental growth of human populations and of the technological innovation that we now associate with the development of modernity. The sixteenfold increase in economic output over the course of the twentieth century required a seventeenfold increase in energy consumption;5 similar increases in water use, sulphur dioxide emissions, world population levels, and (of course) carbon dioxide emissions are directly related to the expanded economic capacities enabled by fossil fuels.6 While it would be reductive to see in the expanded use of energy an explanation for every aspect of modernity, it is equally problematic not to include energy in our narratives of historical change and development, including social and cultural shifts and transitions. Despite evidence of the importance of energy to the shape of our lives – and of the specific importance of fossil fuels, which have fuelled not just automobiles and the culture of mass individual mobility, but also a consumer era shaped around polymers and plastics (as Kirsty Robertson, Amanda Boetzkes, and Janine MacLeod point out in their contributions to this volume) – we moderns have been almost wilfully blind to its impact on us. Figuring energy in relation to historical developments opens up new insights into the forces of power and politics that have shaped modernity, and demands that we critically explore the surprising limits of aesthetics and representation in relation to energy – an issue addressed by almost every essay in this book. The twentieth century was transformed by oil. Why, then, has it taken until the twenty-first century for us to begin to grapple with the cultural and social consequences of this transformation and with the substance that made it happen? The importance of fossil fuels in defining modernity has stood in inverse relationship to their presence in our cultural and social imaginaries, a fact that comes as a surprise to almost everyone who engages in critical explorations of energy today. In order to understand how fossil fuels have managed to be hidden in plain sight – an obviously important resource but one whose importance has not been determinately and precisely figured in culture – a great deal of work on petrocultures has examined

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the relationship between fossil fuels and literary representation. An early work in the energy humanities is Amitav Ghosh’s essay “Petrofiction.”7 Ghosh poses a simple question. Given the geopolitics of the twentieth century, which has been shaped to an inordinate degree around struggles over oil and gas, why have fossil fuels been thematized in so few of the fictions of the petro-hegemon of the century, the United States? This absence of energy from much of twentiethcentury narrative has prompted critics to re-examine literary history, not only to hunt for those few examples of oil fiction that do exist, but also to interrogate the broader relationship between energy, representation, and culture. Glenn Willmott’s and Joshua Schuster’s explorations of oil in American and modernist literature offer new perspectives on these literary fields. Given the absence of oil from our narratives, these authors also raise questions about the politics of literary representation and our capacity to fully name the forms and forces of modern culture and experience. Similar investigations into the significance of fossil fuel representation have been undertaken in relation to the visual arts, film, and photography. The absence noted by Ghosh of fossil fuels in twentieth-century literature (and even earlier by Bertolt Brecht, who noted that “petroleum resists the five-act form”8) extends to these other areas of culture as well, and the growing critical interest in naming and explaining this absence is reflected in the number of pieces in this volume that situate themselves at the conjunction of energy, aesthetics, and representation. Georgiana Banita and Amanda Boetzkes offer analyses of the aesthetics of petrocultures, probing the way that oil culture shapes and conditions vision. One example of the complex manner in which oil shapes visuality – and how, in turn, modern visuality has been shaped to make it difficult to see oil – is offered in Michael Malouf’s investigation of the way our deadened relationship to the social consequences of energy is naturalized in popular children’s films, the resource’s invisibility reaffirmed even in those films that thematize the need for us to transition to new forms of energy. The possibility of a critical petro-aesthetic  – and the challenges of making visible this socially invisible substance – is further explored in Clint Burnham’s analysis of Edward Burtynsky’s widely known photo-narrative Oil. This volume is additionally distinguished by the contributions of Brenda Longfellow, Allison Rowe, and Geo Takach – artists who recognize the challenges that oil has

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posed to representation and who work to develop a critico-aesthetic vocabulary so that we might all the more forcefully make oil a part of representation – a crucial step in figuring the true cultural, social, and political significance of energy. Critical engagement with the history and politics of oil is also integral to a fuller understanding of the petrocultures we inhabit. That energy (and fossil fuels in particular) shaped and defined twentieth-century politics is undeniable. The geopolitics of the modern era – everything from colonial expansion, which was underwritten by the energy from coal in the UK, to the ongoing misadventures of the West in the Middle East, to the just-in-time production and container shipping networks of globalization – is tied to availability of and access to fossil fuels. But the impact of fossil fuels on politics goes deeper than this, extending to the very core of our political experience and shaping even our political philosophy, whether we have realized it or not. “The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use. Most of our freedoms are energy intensive,” writes Dipesh Chakrabarty.9 The verities and pieties of liberal political philosophy were imagined against the backdrop of a world with ever-expanding energy resources. In a world in which energy will no longer be so abundant, we now have to revisit and reimagine our energy intensive freedoms.10 In Carbon Democracy, Timothy Mitchell argues that carbon-based energy (first coal and then oil) has played an important role in shaping our contemporary conceptions of democracy  – something the West insistently deploys as a rhetorical strategy in justifying expansion projects into oil-rich nations in the Middle East (we bring democracy as we extract oil). Mitchell’s research shows the formative role of energy in the political project of democracy and, by extension, the constitution of the modern nation-state and the neoliberal state of the twenty-first century. Many of the contributions to this volume highlight the political significance of energy resources; they do so not by noting the (undeniable) geopolitical importance of energy, but by alerting us to the deeper political operations of oil and energy. If oil has been hidden in plain sight in cultural representation, this is equally true of its social and political presence. Pipelines serve an important material function in getting energy from extraction sites in the hinterland to the postmodern spaces in which oil and gas are consumed. As

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Graeme Macdonald and Darin Barney explain, pipelines also play an important role in making oil invisible, naturalizing its presence in our lives and hiding the environmental impacts of extraction far from the eyes of concerned publics. Barney’s essay treats pipelines as an important media form that has played (and continues to play) a key role in the constitution of the Canadian nation-state. As Sourayan Mookerjea shows in his contribution, the redefinition of Canadian nationalism in relation to the country’s status as a petrostate (especially during the decade-long reign of Prime Minister Stephen Harper) has had implications for the country’s narrative of multiculturalism and its relations with First Nations communities. These subtle re-narrations and re-imaginings of politics as a result of energy have taken place in other oil-producing nations as well, as David McDermott Hughes shows in his investigations of “petropastoralism” in Trinidad. Hughes offers an account of the political processes by which broad local support for petro-projects is secured, even given the community worries about the environmental implications of living near extraction sites. Michael Truscello argues that we need to see nation-states as complex petro-modern assemblages whose action and activities include by-products – like the poisons in water systems mapped in Janine MacLeod’s essay – that will outlive contemporary political arrangements by hundreds of years. These essays point to political contexts and circumstances produced by oil and fossil fuels, and the range of new political questions that arise from a critical focus on energy. Just as politics has been shaped by and in reaction to oil, so, too, have many of our most important concepts and theories. Once again, as with the link between politics and energy, the shaping influence of fossil fuels on philosophy and critical theory has had an impact on how we view the present and our collective ability to respond to the problems and provocations of a fossil fuel society. Andrew Pendakis explores oil as the hidden Real of metaphysics and matter in the modern era – the ur-commodity that constitutes a key component of ontological essence and which is also a prime source of value. Tim Kaposy argues that oil necessitates new forms and modes of historiography in order to capture the substance’s power and impact, especially if we are to ever organize ourselves in relation to energy alternatives. Randy Schroeder’s engagement with Allan Stoekl’s Bataille’s Peak – one of the only extended encounters

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between philosophy and oil – is intended to unsettle the assumptions informing the concept of “sustainability,” arguing that the rational instrumental philosophy that shapes sustainability is the self-same one that produced our environmental and energy crisis. In his contribution, Mark Simpson critiques the ideology of “lubricity” – the contemporary fantasy world we inhabit, one of smooth flows of people, resources, and capital that demands intensified use of petrocarbons to keep everything moving. These essays track dangerous logics and concepts – ideas that are threatening either because of their (hitherto unexplained) link to fossil fuel energy or because they impede our capacity to fully address environmental problems. The logics that shape our present have been passed down to us, some dating back millennia and grounded in religions and cultural beliefs about what it means to be human and to live in society, others a product of Western Enlightenment modes of relating to the world  – of Keynesian models of growth and progress, Cartesian dualism resulting in racial and gender subjugation, the ideologies governing conquest and colonialism – that now undergird the nation-state system and global business alliances alike.11 Now, suddenly, within a generation or two, we need to confront from within our current conundrum, and without the luxury of objectivity or distance, how to reinvent and reimagine our lives and the concepts and philosophies that have long shaped them. Oil has transformed life, and in a deeper and more profound way than one might first imagine. The contributions to Petrocultures highlight this in multiple ways, drawing attention to energy’s shaping influence, at once cultural, social, and political. We recognize that it can seem like an overstatement to claim that energy and fossil fuels in particular have had such a determinate historical influence, especially given energy’s long absence from critical consideration. The question might be posed: If energy was so important, why hadn’t we noticed before now? And yet, its importance to shaping our lives is significant, reaching across the register of our experiences and moving from the concrete and material to the abstract and immaterial. To take just one example: to be modern is to be mobile as never before. At the heart of this mobility is the culture of the automobile. In the West, the automobile has been imbricated as a normal and necessary tool for personal independence and the successful management of a nuclear family, which in and of itself is intrinsic to the

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neoliberal construction of personal success. The promotion of the nuclear family as the accepted social norm has had significant ramifications for women and men, who must independently reproduce in each household tasks that, had they been socioculturally constructed otherwise, could have easily been industrialized, thereby relieving many women and families of a significant amount of domestic labour.12 The housing needs of the nuclear family home have shaped the design of urban and suburban living in petrocultures, just as the number of consumer goods and services necessary to run a single residence has created a large capitalist marketplace. These socially constructed relationships to consumer products – whether it is the automobile, or even women’s fashion and cosmetic products, including silicone breast implants – have been naturalized to such a degree that they are being upheld in twenty-first-century advertising campaigns as symbols of Western women’s equality and freedom. By proxy, non-Western women’s inability to access these products is upheld as evidence of women’s oppression. Advertising images as well as cinematic and cultural narratives represent the largely uncritical socio-cultural acceptance of the automobile as a symbol of our own individual freedoms. These ideals of liberty or emancipation have been constructed very differently according to one’s subject position relative to cis-heteropatriarchal normativity. Ultimately, however, mobility is part of the construction of a petro-capitalist economy in which the car and other petroleum-powered machines and petroleum-derived consumer products become inextricable from the modern imaginary. As Andrew S. Gross argues, “the most common trope of driving – ‘the freedom of the road’” popularized in the early twentieth century is linked to market strategies that were targeting women as consumers. In fact, he argues, “the woman driver quickly became the central figure of consumerism. Gender, in fact, turns out to be an important strategy for mediating some of the conflicts and anxieties attending the transition to a consumer-oriented economy.”13 Within this system, women become both consumers of automobile culture as well as commodities within the same circular network.14 As Cecily Devereux discusses in her chapter, women and cars, in many instances, are made synonymous with one another, the automobile being perceived as an object of desire and either equated to or accessorized by a woman: both objectified and both fetishized. Our relations and our gendered

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relationships to commodities and the identity tropes they embody have been figured as the natural outcome of oil and progress, when in fact they form a complex series of socio-cultural entanglements in the West over the last two centuries, culminating in neoliberal politics and economics. Freedom, identity, success: our deepest ideals and most prominent social fantasies are mediated and enabled by the energies of fossil fuels. Capitalist imperatives ensure that we measure what we value; therefore, transformation will require a radical shift in worldview and how we attribute meaning. Oil prices are indexed daily. That which does not neatly fit into such indexes is rendered valueless as an externality or even casualty to this structural violence: glaciers, clean water, clean air, environmental rights, Indigenous rights, Indigenous peoples, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (mmiw) in Canada. In her work, Audra Simpson makes a strong critique of the genocidal project of extractivism, whereby the handmaidens of white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchal petrocapitalism deploy specific logics in the name of nation building and economic growth that require the eradication of certain bodies, in particular those of Indigenous women: the original owners of the oil- and resource-rich lands now occupied by settler Canadians.15 The colonial project of the nation relies on the pillage of natural resources and the construction of race, class, and gender, which reify some people as resources to be exploited, resulting in socio-cultural paradigms where some lives matter more than others. However, for extraction to carry on, this reality must be denied, as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada did for a decade (up until 2015), in order to push through environmentally damaging industrial projects and legislation. As the field of energy humanities develops, it will need to pay greater attention to the uneven impacts of fossil fuels on human communities. Our oil-fuelled neoliberal economies and the vicious, voracious practices of globalization have created conditions of increasing disparity between rich and poor, and have feminized/ wife-ized (in other words, rendered precarious) whole new strata of the global population over the last half century. Such reorganizations have increased the wealth of a few elites built on a foundation of short-term, part-time contracts with masses of overworked debtors. All of this has been accomplished as markets drive personal aspirations toward increased consumption (on the one

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hand) while reducing wages and salaries, proclaiming we must all “do more with less” in the workplace and public sphere (on the other). We must work harder and expect less in return, in terms of social security and social services – the commons, and the common good, constantly being eroded. This reality has reproduced itself time and again, the planet over.16 Extractivist, capitalist production has resulted in what is now being referred to as the Anthropocene: human-induced climate change on such a scale and to such a degree that it can now be mapped within geological time.17 Of course, this geological term redistributes responsibility for the negative impacts on our planetary ecosystem to all “humans,” when these outcomes have largely been caused by populations in the global West, and by those with the greatest access to power – fossil fuels and capital – within those zones.18 To successfully undertake an energy transition in this century, it is essential to unravel these logics and our attachments to them in order to better understand the material and immaterial infrastructures and superstructures that shape our daily lived realities and govern our choices and mobilities within existing social, economic, and political networks. Petrocultures is an attempt to name and explain some of the key aspects of this monumental challenge  – an early step in a still-unfolding cultural, social, and political project. This collection is composed of twenty-one chapters that touch on oil issues in almost every corner of the globe: from the Arctic to Scotland to Saudi Arabia; from Alberta’s oil sands and Ontario’s manufacturing regions to the Gulf of Mexico; from Iraq and Kuwait to China and India; and from Nigeria to Trinidad and Tobago. The authors analyze a range of social and political discourses – sometimes regional, sometimes national, and at other times planetary  – that, when taken together, illustrate the ways that oil has been valorized and has thus transformed life as we know it. Many of the contributors specifically address oil as it is represented in cultural productions, including the visual arts, popular culture, corporate advertising, and national branding campaigns  – for example, in the photography and filmmaking of Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, Peter Mettler, Emmet Gowin, Ursula Biemann, Allan Sekula, Ernst Logar, Matt Coolidge, and George Osodi; in the visual and installation art of Portia Munson, Song Dong, Melanie Smith, and Choi

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Jeong-Hwa; in modernist poetry, pulp fiction, and the literature and criticism of Upton Sinclair, Stephen King, and Amitav Ghosh; in the lyrics of such songs as “Baby Got Back” (1992) and “Mustang Sally” (1965); and in the films watched by a generation of children who have grown up seeing oil culture animated by Pixar. The chapters have been organized into six sections, grouped in ways that, when read against one another, provide added layers of nuance and meaning that help to outline what it means to live in a twenty-first-century petroculture and what it might mean to extract ourselves from our petro-driven realities. Energy humanities scholars are interdisciplinary and come to issues around oil and energy drawing on a range analytic traditions. The styles of some contributors reflect their backgrounds in social and political thought and cultural studies, while others draw on practices more typical of literary analysis and close reading. Still others, such as Geo Takash and Allison Rowe, represent creative research interventions that mobilize visual and textual imaginaries of the past and present to render visible specific networks in the web of planetary oil relations. The multidisciplinarity of this collection and the interdisciplinary work of the individual chapters is representative of ongoing work in the energy humanities – a field in which scholars are collectively tackling new and arising environmental and social challenges. The essays collected here were presented at the first Petrocultures conference, held at Campus Saint-Jean of the University of Alberta in September 2012. As academics working in literary and cultural studies in Alberta and living in Edmonton, the largest city located closest to the Alberta oil sands, we could not avoid studying the impact and effects of fossil fuels on the space and place in which we lived. Since the turn of the century, when extraction activity in Northern Alberta ramped up significantly, the oil sands have become one of the world’s most important sites of struggle over our energy and environmental futures. This especially dirty source of energy, with an extremely low energy return on energy invested (an eroei of about 3.0),19 has become for many an index of everything that is wrong with the way in which we use energy today. The oil sands have become increasingly visible in recent years due to the struggle over the Keystone XL pipeline – which was supposed to transport oil from Alberta across the Canada-US border to refinery and storage facilities in Oklahoma – and the other major pipelines proposed to take

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oil from the oil sands to Canada’s east and west coasts. When we20 began the Petrocultures Research Group at the University of Alberta in 2010, we were surprised by the gaps we found in the critical literature on fossil fuels in general and on the oil sands in particular. While there were existing activist and environmental texts advocating for renewable and sustainable energy, and historical studies of oil and energy systems (notably the groundbreaking work of David Nye),21 investigations of the social imaginaries brought into being by the energies of fossil fuels – which is what we termed “petrocultures” – were in short supply. It was in an effort to canvas the existing state of research into petrocultures that we staged the 2012 conference, which was originally planned to take place over one-and-a-half days. The response to our call for papers came as a pleasant shock and surprise. We received so many proposals – and so many superb ones – that the inaugural conference became a six-day event: a Petrocultures art show at Gallery@501 in Sherwood Park, Alberta, four days of sharing papers in Edmonton, and a two-day trip to the home of the oil sands in the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo (with one day in the town of Fort McMurray, Alberta and a day spent with community members, leaders, and elders in the Métis and First Nations community of Fort McKay). A second Petrocultures conference, held in 2014 at McGill University in Montreal, confirmed this initial flurry of interest: researchers from around the world are posing the questions and seeking the answers to the ways in which oil and energy have shaped our forms of being, belonging, and behaving. The third Petrocultures conference, held in 2016 at Memorial University in St John’s, has established this biennial conference as a major event, gathering scholars from around the world and across the disciplines who are investigating the social, cultural, and political implications of energy practices and systems. As the field of energy humanities develops, expanding to cover more and more territory geographically, conceptually, and historically, it has become possible to identify areas of petroculture that require more critical exploration than they have received thus far. In 2015, in conjunction with colleagues at the University of Alberta, the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and the University of Manitoba, we co-authored a report that was intended to gather knowledge about research on Indigenous communities and energy, and research-creation projects on fossil fuel

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cultures and environmental change.22 The collection of essays that we have brought together here deals with a wide range of issues and topics related to the significance of energy for contemporary society. As we are still near the beginning of our collective exploration of energy humanities, it is necessary to continue to expand the scope of investigation. We expect that Petrocultures will set the stage for deeper, more extensive, and more expansive analyses of energy and power, with specific attention to the sites and spaces in which energy intersects with class, gender, and race – particularly in relationship to treaty rights and traditional Aboriginal energy-use practices,23 given the central role of Indigenous communities not only in providing insights into other modes of engaging with the environment, but also in approving or resisting extraction projects.24 As criticisms of carbon- and energy-intensive projects become increasingly common, we need more than ever a critical project adequate to energy’s pervasiveness across contemporary experience. As scientists and publics mobilize knowledge into new calls for moratoriums,25 debates about oil have stalled around the predictable opposition of environment versus economics, drill versus don’t drill. We can neither give up oil all at once, nor can we continue to shape our societies around it: as is so often the case, here, too, each pole of the “either/or” discussion on fossil fuels constitutes a way of avoiding the real questions that need to be answered. The purpose of studying the petrocultures we inhabit is to uncover and elaborate the political potential and theoretical nuances crowded out in current forms of public discourse. Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture provides much-needed research that addresses head-on the conceptual, philosophical, and theoretical challenges that emerge from a sustained examination of the social and cultural significance of energy in various forms, oil being only the most prevalent form at present. As an ongoing project, the study of petrocultures confronts critical issues around oil and energy, providing crucial insights into what it means to live at this historical moment and what we need to do to imagine and create new ways of being. Oil and its outcomes – speed, plastics, and the luxuries of capitalism, to name a few – have lubricated our relationship to one another and the environment for the duration of the twentieth century. As we struggle to transition to less carbon-intensive energies and lifestyles, this collection provides scholars and engaged publics with a

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more nuanced understanding of oil as an energy source and substance imbricated into every aspect of our daily lived realities. Oil transformed our lives in the twentieth century. Might we transform our lives in the twenty-first century, reshaping our petrocultures into societies whose energy use doesn’t imperil the future and the environment we inhabit? notes 1 For instance, in June 2016 Norway proclaimed that it would aim to have net zero carbon emissions by 2030 by severely limiting fossil fuel use. See Arthur Neslen, “Norway Pledges to Become Climate Neutral by 2030,” Guardian, 15 June 2016, accessed 4 July 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/15/norway -pledges-to-become-climate-neutral-by-2030. 2 For Dominic Boyer and Imre Szeman, “energy humanities” is a field that contends that “our energy and environmental dilemmas are fundamentally problems of ethics, habits, values, institutions, beliefs and power – all areas of expertise of the humanities and humanistic social sciences.” See Boyer and Szeman, “The Rise of the Energy Humanities,” University Affairs (March 2014): 40. Though this field is still nascent, this present collection is in dialogue with several works: Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden, eds., Oil Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Dominic Boyer and Imre Szeman, eds., Energy Humanities: An Anthology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017); Gerry Canavan, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu, “Ecology & Ideology,” Polygraph 22 (2010): 1–32; Amitav Ghosh, “Petrofiction,” New Republic 2 (March 1992): 29–34; Peter Hitchcock, “Oil in an American Imaginary,” New Formations 69.4 (2010): 81–97; Matthew Huber, Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum and Culture in the American Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello, The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London (New York: Verso, 2013); Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy (New York: Verso, 2011); Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Allan Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and

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5 6 7 8 9 10

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Postsustainability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger, eds., Fueling Culture: 101 Words on Energy and Environment (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017); Sheena Wilson and Andrew Pendakis, eds., “Sighting Oil,” Imaginations 3.2 (2012); and Patricia Yaeger et al., “Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale-Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power and Other Energy Sources,” pmla 126:2 (2011): 305–26. Vaclav Smil, Energy Transitions (New York: Praeger, 2010), 105. Dale Jamieson, “Energy, Ethics and the Transformation of Nature,” in The Ethics of Global Climate Change, ed. Denis G. Arnold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 16. Smil, Energy Transitions, 14. See J.R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: Norton, 2000). Ghosh, “Petrofiction.” Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 29. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 208. In A Theory of Justice, political philosopher John Rawls famously begins his elaboration of the principles of social justice by articulating a thought experiment – the “original position” – a hypothetical ground zero from which the principles of liberalism were reconstituted. Rawls doesn’t consider the impact of available energy on the principles established within the thought experiment. How might these principles look different if they had to account for energy justice as well as social justice? Might an awareness of declining levels of energy alter the principles advocated? Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999). Ruth Irwin provides an excellent overview of the range of logics that undergird modern social life in “Ecological Ethics in the Context of Climate Change: Feminist and Indigenous Critique of Modernity,” International Social Science Journal 64.211–212 (2013): 111–23. Ruth Cowan details social experiments in industrializing aspects of women’s domestic work – such as laundry and cooking – which ultimately failed in the face of socio-cultural pressures and advertising campaigns. For example, a market for the washing machine was created by undermining industrial laundries via discourses of suspect

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Wilson, Szeman, and Carlson hygiene, which were linked to racism. Cooking as the responsibility of each mother-wife was reinforced through concerns about how communal kitchens and other social-housing experiments that eliminated this task from daily life posed a threat to Western family values and insinuated parallels with communism. See especially chapters 3 and 4 of Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983) for a detailed analysis of the ways in which technological development has affected (or not affected) gendered divisions of labour. Andrew S. Gross, “Cars, Postcards, and Patriotism: Tourism and National Politics in the United States, 1893–1929,” Pacific Coast Philology 40.1 (2005), 85. For more details on the gendered aspects of oil and energy, see Sheena Wilson’s “Gendering Oil: Tracing Western Petro-Sexual Relations,” in Oil Culture, ed. Barrett and Worden, 244–66. See, for instance, Simpson’s talk, “The Chiefs Two Bodies: Theresa Spence and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty,” at “Unsettling Conversations, Unmaking Racisms and Colonialisms,” RACE Network’s 14th Annual Critical Race and Anticolonial Studies Conference, University of Alberta, Edmonton, accessed 20 August 2016, https://vimeo.com/ 110948627. This argument concerning the genocidal, gendered, and human rights aspects of oil and energy is more extensively described in Sheena Wilson’s “Energy Imaginaries at the Impasse,” Materialism and the Critique of Energy, eds. Brent Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti (Chicago and Edmonton: MCM Prime Press, 2017). See also Sheena Wilson, “Oil Ethics,” American Book Review 33.2 (2012), 8–9; and “Gender,” in Fueling Culture: 101 Words on Energy and Environment, ed. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). See Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stroemer, “The Anthropocene,” igbp [International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme] Newsletter 41 (2000): 17. See Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159–65; and Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015).

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19 See A.R. Brandt, J. Englander, and S. Bharadwaj, “The Energy Efficiency of Oil Sands Extraction: Energy Return Ratios from 1970 to 2010,” Energy 55 (2013): 693. 20 “We” in this context refers to the first two authors, who founded and co-direct the Petrocultures Research Group. 21 See, for instance, Nye’s Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992). 22 See Imre Szeman et al., “On the Energy Humanities: Contributions from the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts to Understanding Energy Transition and Energy Impasse,” SSHRC Imagining Canada’s Future initiative, Knowledge Synthesis Grants: Energy and Natural Resources. 13 May 2016. Available at http://www.ideas-idees.ca/ sites/default/files/sites/default/uploads/general/2016/2016-sshrc-ksgszeman.pdf. 23 Warren Cariou, “Aboriginal,” in Fueling Culture: 101 Words on Energy and Environment, ed. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). 24 To take just one example, in Canada in June 2016, the Northern Gateway Pipeline approval was overturned by the federal courts, based on a failure of the company backing the pipeline to consult with First Nations. 25 Sheila Pratt, “Researchers’ Open Letter Calls for Moratorium on New Oil Sands Projects,” Edmonton Journal, 10 June 2015, accessed 10 June 2015, http://www.edmontonjournal.com/Researchers+open+letter+calls +moratorium+oilsands+projects/11125320/story.html.

part one

Rigs, Platforms, and Pipelines

Infrastructures connect strange bedfellows. Take the US military’s Canol project: in 1942, the perceived threat of Japanese invasion prompted the construction of the Alaska Highway. In order to provide fuel for this new military supply line, thousands of American troops and workers set up on Canadian soil in what has been called the “the greatest construction job since the Panama Canal.” Canol “involved construction of a string of 10 northern airfields,” more than 3,000 kilometres of roads through the wilderness, 2,500 kilometres of pipelines, “and a refinery scraped together from second hand pieces collected from throughout North America.”1 Completed in only twenty months, Canol was abandoned less than a year later. In 1947, the discovery of oil in Leduc, Alberta convinced Texas-based oilmen that Canada’s oil reserves were worthy of private investment. And later that year the project’s refinery plant in Whitehorse, Yukon was sold and disassembled, and its seven thousand tonnes of pieces were hauled more than 2,000 kilometres to Edmonton, to be met by the American capital and expertise that would develop Canada’s oil industry.2 The history of Canol shows the complexity and scale of the assemblages of knowledge, multinational capital investment, and national/international security strategies embodied in modern oil infrastructure.3 Yet the public conversations by which we discuss and understand infrastructure consistently rely on the simplest notions of self-interest and appeal to the crudest nationalisms. Of course, massive infrastructure projects do build nations, but they do so in complicated and uneven ways, in effect structuring unevenness between nations.

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As fluid transnational capital fixes itself within borders, it mobilizes nationalism toward several ends. For instance, infrastructure projects are always justified through pseudo-protectionist discourses of energy security or job creation – discourses that are as mobile and liquid as oil in a pipeline. Just days after Barack Obama announced that the construction of TransCanada’s Keystone xl pipeline was not in the US national interest, TransCanada and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (capp) turned their efforts toward emphasizing the “nation-building” aspects of their Canadian pipeline projects.4 Canada is a petro-state, what Harold Innis called a staples economy. In this view, Canadian Confederation was “essentially dictated by the need to create a larger state to provide security for foreign capital to build first the canals and then the railways to facilitate the movement of staples.”5 Today, the dramatic drop in oil prices has shown Canada to be in a classic case of what Innis called a staples trap: that vulnerability peculiar to an economy whose capital is rigidly fixed in relation to the liquid freedom enjoyed by metropolitan financial centres. Infrastructures also naturalize and reproduce unevenesses within nations. The discovery of oil and gas in Alaska and the Canadian North synthesized convergent aspects of the liberal nation-building project; technology for extracting and transporting resources developed co-extensively with those state technologies for administering the peoples of the North. Indeed Canada’s midcentury discourses of northern development and nation building are intrinsic to the colonial and ongoing neo-colonial rationalization of the dispossession of Indigenous lands and the assimilation of Indigenous peoples into capitalist modernity. Finally, infrastructure mediates the intersection between the inter- and the intra-national. Here, the nation as an internally dynamic economic unit made up of diverse financial, regional, and historical interests and experiences confronts its cultural reflection as an ideological unity – “the nation” (however imperfect or imaginary) to be built. Myths of national unity naturalize the material dependencies concretized in energy infrastructures. These dependencies are managed by affects that are themselves unevenly distributed, as we see in the complex example of path dependency, or, the grim way infrastructure threatens to extend the present’s reliance on fossil fuels into the future. In a petro-state

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like Canada, path dependency is promoted as offering dependable revenue streams. In the US, the path dependencies developing out of exploiting the Marcellus Shale and Bakken crude are marketed as energy independence. These subtle differences in self-delusion reflect the shifting perspectives through which struggles over resources take place across the world system. Each of the chapters in part one, “Rigs, Platforms, and Pipelines,” engages in an analysis of such resource struggles, making visible the relations of power and the political contingencies held in place by the infrastructures of petroculture. The section opens with an essay by Brenda Longfellow about her cinematic trilogy on oil megaprojects. In “Extreme Oil and the Perils of Cinematic Practice,” she reflects on the challenges of creating art pieces capable of representing and engaging with the new and proliferating frontiers of extreme oil. Her first two films, Carpe Diem (2010) and Dead Ducks (2011), use opera and animation to critique the development of the Alberta oil sands. offshore (2012), an interactive documentary inspired by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, entices viewers to confront the dark world of offshore oil drilling as they explore a hastily abandoned oil rig. As players move deeper into offshore’s multimedia structure, they try to piece together a narrative of what has gone wrong. Mapping the environmental and human scope of energy extraction, offshore resonates across multiple registers: exposing crony capitalism, corporate corruption, and government mismanagement; provoking existential unease in the face of enormous inhuman structures and alien frontiers; and framing the unimaginable ecological scale of current and future disasters. However, as Longfellow points out, “on some very deep and mythic level” offshore’s most profound message concerns “the humiliation and materialization of our toxic dependency on oil.” Using research-creation as a means to reach broader audiences, all three of Longfellow’s projects highlight the pervasive social character of oil – a substance that is simultaneously omnipresent and invisible.6 Interrogating the oil pipeline as both a visible metaphor and an invisible infrastructural element supporting contemporary petroculture, Graeme Macdonald’s “Containing Oil: The Pipeline in Petroculture” thinks through the key role that petrocultures and energy humanities research plays in addressing the crisis of oil in

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the context of environmental sustainability. Examining the aesthetics and politics of pipelines, Macdonald argues that “comparing images of pipelines from core and periphery of the world petro-system offers one means to consider how this ‘invisibility’ is both culturally ‘naturalized’ and internationally relative – structurally managed in the interests of an oil-reliant capitalism seeking to extend and perpetuate supply while downplaying the ongoing, exploitative shame of extraction and land dispossession and the inevitable endpoints of burning.” Drawing on visual representations of oil fields from Scotland to Canada, and from the US to Nigeria, Macdonald demonstrates how “the debate over ‘efficient’ and ‘sustainable’ forms of energy is always fundamentally global, set within a predominant and world-systemic form of political economy and material infrastructure dependent on flowing petroleum.” Darin Barney similarly troubles the ideological and technological infrastructures by which petroculture is naturalized. In “Who We Are and What We Do: Canada as a Pipeline Nation,” Barney explores the politics of Canadian nationalism as expressed in both historical and ongoing debates about oil pipelines in Canada. Providing an overview of pipelines in Canada since 1853, he explores the current and projected economic benefits perpetuated by propipeline commentators and investigates how these contestable “facts” link up to other discourses of national interest. Prominent politicians, including former federal cabinet minister and former Alberta premier the late Jim Prentice, frequently describe pipelines as nation-building infrastructure. But they do so via a rhetoric of “technological nationalism,” through which the imaginary community of the nation is divined in accordance with the uninterrupted flows of goods and capital: “In this imaginary country, jobs spring from the ground in great numbers and seem to go on forever, and the public coffers are always full of revenues generated by taxes and resource royalties.” Barney concludes that despite all the confident appeals to a unified nation, the fierce, ongoing, and increasingly regionalized debates over pipelines in Canada “might actually reflect an uncertainty about who we are and what we do, about whether exploiting resources such as the oil sands, for the profit of the few, is what it means to be Canadian.” This section closes with Michael Truscello’s “Can the PetroModern State Form ‘Wither Away’? The Implications of

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Hyperobjects for Anti-Statist Politics.” Truscello draws on Timothy Morton’s influential concept of hyperobjects to examine some of the material tendencies that have been generated by petro-modernity. He does so in an effort to rebuke various political programs that consciously promote or uncritically imply a return to a mythical, normative, pre-oil world as the antidote to our petro-modern maladies. Assemblages of agencies that are only discernable across planetary and epochal registers, hyperobjects include by-products such as radioactive waste and global climate change that will outlive contemporary social arrangements by thousands or millions of years. These objects and the “attenuated disasters” they index are materially and historically inextricable from the modern infrastructural state form. Seeing states as petro-modern assemblages, Truscello reveals the scale of the challenge – not only for late-capitalist liberal democracy but also, and perhaps especially, for radical politics aimed at abolishing the state and averting mass extinction. As the study of petroculture consolidates and extends into a general disciplinary field connecting the humanities to energy studies, it has become clear that questions about what is being delivered in pipelines necessarily extend beyond the logistics of the physical substance to confront the unsustainable contradictions of oil and oil-based living in general. These chapters address what infrastructures produce when they work or fail, and what they achieve in terms of consolidating national identities and nation-building projects. But these papers also gesture well beyond nations to imagine what petrocultural ruins will leave those who survive the multiple catastrophes and species genocides of climate change to deal with in a post-oil future.

notes 1 Earle Grey, The Great Canadian Oil Patch (Toronto: Maclean-Hunter, 1970), 78–80. 2 Ibid., 94; see also Mary Janigan, Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark: The West versus the Rest since Confederation (Toronto: Vintage, 2013), 335. 3 Of course, infrastructures for other energy sources generate different connections and exclusions. See, for example, Dominique Perron, Le

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Part One nouveau roman de l’énergie nationale: Analyse des discours promotionnels D’Hydro-Quebec de 1964 à 1997 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006); and Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso, 2011). See, for example, “Energy East Remains Safest Way of Transporting Crude Oil to Market,” TransCanada Corporation, press release, 5 November 2015, accessed 19 November 2016, http:// transcanada.mwnewsroom.com/Files/3b/3bc2ef22-9c8d-4b0a-9a5b617c6c4314b0.pdf. See also capp president Tim McMillan’s February 2016 remarks to the Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources: http://www.parl.gc.ca/content/ sen/committee/421/ENEV/52392-E.HTM. Mel Watkins, “The Innis Tradition in Canadian Political Economy,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory / Revue Canadienne de theorie politique et sociale 6, no. 1–2 (1982): 12–60, 24–5. On research-creation as petrocultural intervention, see part 6 of this collection.

1 Extreme Oil and the Perils of Cinematic Practice Brenda Longfellow

For the past several years, I have been producing a trilogy of art projects about proliferating oil mega projects. The first, Carpe Diem, is a short satiric piece that uses opera and animation as a completely perverse way of tackling the ongoing development of the Alberta tar sands. Set on board a direct flight from Houston to Fort McMurray, our central character, the vp of Hexon Oil, a fictitious oil company, finds his world collapsing around him as the oil market goes into a tailspin, investors get antsy, and he is assailed by the environmental logic of a two-headed fish. Carpe Diem was made as an antidote, as the creative process often is, to a pretty conventional television documentary I completed in 2008 for The Nature of Things called Weather Report with David Suzuki. Weather Report travelled around the globe – to Inner Mongolia in China to report on the sandstorms that were forcing mass migrations, to Northern Kenya to document the drought conditions that were leading to increased violence and struggles over resources, and to the Canadian North to speak with Inuit communities on the front line of a melting Arctic. Working on that project brought into sharp focus the challenge and particular difficulty of dealing with representations of climate change, a difficulty that I believe has to do with two critical vectors: (1) the spatial geographies of climate change that we had elected to focus on – something happening to other people in hinterland areas far from metropolitan centres, where climate change appeared as one more disaster added to the disasters of poverty, colonialism, and underdevelopment; and (2) the complex temporality of climate change as a future projection that lacks any punctual event or finite end.

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Producing Weather Report over a period of years also taught how volatile the issue of climate change is in relation to surrounding political and social contexts of reception. When we began that film, interest in climate change was at a peak: every mainstream US magazine featured the issue, including the famous 2006 Vanity Fair cover with Julia Roberts as “Mother Nature” and a tagline that read, “A Threat Graver than Terrorism.” The horrifying devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 taught an important lesson on the complex imbrication of social and so-called natural disasters and instigated a dramatic public discussion on the link between the intensity of hurricanes and climate change. Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006, and in Europe activists were holding climate camps and occupying coal plants. In fact, 2007 is frequently recorded as the period when the ecological crisis definitively established itself as a widespread concern, and it did seem, in that brief space of time, that all the years of environmental activism built on accumulating irrefutable scientific evidence might very well be approaching a tipping point in terms of public perceptions of the crisis. But in 2008 the financial meltdown hit, followed by the global recession, and environmental concerns were immediately shunted to the side. In every poll thereafter, the economy and jobs were people’s top priorities, and global climate change ranked the lowest in decades. This is obviously not new: the old trade-off of jobs versus the environment has been used consistently to generate enthusiasm for oil megaprojects, refineries in your neighbourhood, or offshore drilling in the Arctic. But this volatility of public concern  – the speed with which the pressing and immediate demands of the everyday, with their powerful affective charge of anxiety and fear of imminent material insecurity, can so quickly eclipse political and ethical concerns around a planetary emergency – puts into sharp focus how the complex temporality of climate change as future environmental risk complicates any notion of simple political efficacy. As Stephanie LeMenager points out in her wonderful essay “Petro-Melancholia: The bp Blowout and the Arts of Grief,” “environmental damage yet to come, without (current) aesthetic dimensions, does not stir up alarm or activate an ethic of care.”1 LeMenager’s insight provides a particularly haunting and provocative way to think through the manner in which the aesthetic functions as a crucial field where ethical claims and affective charges might evolve. Each of the art projects in my trilogy began with a question or series of questions about

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the challenge of representing the environmental crisis in a mode that complicated the simple rhetoric of denunciation or declamation, with its tendency to organize the world into binaries of moral certitude. With Carpe Diem, the question went something like, “Rather than posing climate change as a ‘problem’ that might be amenable to an enlightened range of rational solutions, what if we confront the seeming intractability of those systems which support and enable the proliferation of petro-capitalism?” This is a far more pessimistic starting point, but it might help us come to grips with the way in which the reproduction of petro-capitalism is dependent on and implicated in particular systems of finance and investment facilitated by the cultural and ideological contexts that my friends at Platform, an absolutely ingenious activist and artist collective in London, England call “the carbon web.”2 In other words, it is not simply oil companies who are responsible for proliferation of the tar sands or for high-risk multi-billion dollar adventures like offshore drilling in the Arctic. Oil is intimately linked and imbricated in the financial system through the huge amounts of surplus capital in insurance funds, pensions, rrsps, and mutual funds invested in bankrolling international oil megaprojects, not the least of which includes the pension fund at my university. The second piece in my oil trilogy, Dead Ducks, was inspired by the true story of 1,606 mallard and bufflehead ducks that landed on the Syncrude tailings pond in the Alberta tar sands during their spring migration in 2008 and perished in a mass of toxic bitumen. Like Carpe Diem, Dead Ducks is a hybrid documentary-opera that uses arias sung by ducks, satire, and hyper-real animation by Jan Czechowicz to render the story. Shamelessly deploying a highly anthromorphized point of view of the ducks themselves, the film follows their migration as the ducks sing their traditional migratory songs of longing, exhaustion, and hunger. Other witnesses and culpable participants include a First Nations worker who is torn between his job in the tar sands and his peoples’ traditional practices of hunting and a soon-to-be-retired feminist veterinarian who eventually kidnaps the surviving ducks at the end of the film. Their subjective points of view are intercut with scenes in corporate headquarters, where executives are being trained in the fine art of public apology. Satire certainly seemed like an essential response to how this event actually played out in the mass media. While it was certainly no surprise to First Nations communities or residents of Northern

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Alberta that the notorious toxic and leaky tailings ponds in the tar sands posed a deadly threat to animals and people, given the ongoing documentation of two-headed fish, migratory bird deaths, and advanced cancer rates in downstream communities, what was significant about the duck incident was how visual documentation of a punctual event worked to galvanize international public opinion. While Syncrude endeavoured mightily to lock down the area and to keep press out, on-site workers uploaded images taken on their cellphones. In addition, Todd Powell, a senior wildlife biologist with the Alberta government, filmed gory scenes featuring mallards dying in gooey muck that instantly went viral and were picked up by the international press – just as senior ministers from the Alberta government were lobbying American senators to adopt the view that the oil sands represented the solution to American energy security. For a single brief moment, the reputation of the entire enterprise was royally tarred and feathered. Despite the fact that First Nations communities, well-established environmental organizations, and senior climate scientists had been clamouring for years that the tar sands represented environmental Armageddon, the plight of wildfowl seemed to galvanize public opinion in an unprecedented fashion. Was this a peculiarly Canadian trait, this over-identification with animal victims? How was it that the plight of a few tarry ducks could evoke such emotional response when the plight of millions of Bangladeshis, coastal inhabitants, Inuit, and sub-Saharans left most Canadians indifferent? Dead Ducks proposes that part of the response to this question has to do with the way in which multinational oil corporations are managing ongoing environmental disasters with a slick combination of infomercials, re-branding as “energy companies,” and targeted public relations campaigns. Seen from this vantage point, the story of the dead ducks demonstrates how an ecological crisis can be easily reconfigured as a public relations crisis – an event managed by the impeccably rehearsed performance of an earnest public apology, almost as if the tragedy functions as a kind of “pharmakon” (cure and poison) – an inoculating dose of disaster that can be contained, managed, and ultimately forgotten as the real and ongoing disaster of unconstrained oil extraction is allowed to flourish. Syncrude was eventually convicted on two counts, one under the Alberta Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act and the other under the federal Migratory Birds Convention Act, for

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allegedly depositing a substance harmful to migratory birds, and fined a paltry $1 million. Two days after the sentence was passed, another 350 ducks landed in the Syncrude pond at Mildred Lake, and all had to be euthanized. offshore is the final and most elaborate and ambitious piece in this trilogy. Inspired by the Deepwater Horizon disaster, offshore is an interactive web documentary about deepwater drilling: “Extreme Oil,” “Cowboy Drilling,” hundreds of miles offshore, thousands of feet beneath the ocean floor, in dangerous and risky conditions where the hazards are immense but the profits are bigger. On 20 April 2010, Earth Day, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, instantly killing eleven workers and ultimately spewing more than five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The blowout from bp’s Macondo Well has a complex provenance that lawyers, activists, and commentators are still trying to work out. It’s about global capital and the particular culture of cost-cutting that infected bp and Halliburton; it is about the technological hubris of these multinationals who assumed that a worst-case scenario could never happen and who wrote oil spill response plans on the back of a napkin, citing concerns about walruses in the Gulf of Mexico (there are no walruses in the Gulf of Mexico).3 It’s about crony capitalism and the sordid story of the Minerals Management Service, the federal bureau charged with regulating the oil industry whose stalwarts, when they weren’t enjoying sex and cocaine parties with oil industry representatives, were busy rubber-stamping oil rig inspections that had been written by the oil companies themselves. But on some very deep and mythic level it was also about the humiliation and materialization of our toxic dependency on oil. For sixty-eight days we watched transfixed as the online video feed spewed dark clouds of oil, “the devil’s excrement” as one might imagine it, into the ocean’s depths. The images took on a kind of iconic ferocity, leading every news report of the disaster and going viral on the Internet. Unlike the representational challenge of climate change, which as LeMenager notes “resists narrative because of its global scale and its as-yetlimited visibility,”4 here was an event, a veritable punctum in a field of normalized expectations, a dark trauma that, at the very least, might be translated into a “teachable moment.” But after sixty-eight days, the well was finally capped and the oil dispersed, at least, according to bp and the Obama administration, although not, it should be pointed out, as far as coastal residents and

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fisherpeople of the Gulf, whose health and livelihoods continue to be severely impacted, were concerned. With the live feed turned off, mass media attention moved onto other more punctual events, and the world returned to business as usual. The moratorium on exploratory offshore drilling that had been imposed by the US Department of the Interior was lifted after six months, and at the first lease sale after the Deepwater disaster, a record number of deepwater leases were sold, eleven leases going to bp alone for a modest $237 million. offshore was originally going to focus only on the Deepwater Horizon, but we (my creative partners, Glen Richards and Helios Design Labs) quickly realized that what was really gripping us about the disaster was how little we all actually knew about this new frontier and how rapidly it was proliferating around the world. Billions of dollars are being invested, and the prediction is that in the next thirty years, 35 per cent of the world’s oil will come from offshore sources. While crashing oil prices have slowed offshore development (and, in the case of the US Arctic Chukchi Sea development, have halted it indefinitely), offshore production is expanding in Norway and Russia; off the coast of Vietnam and Thailand; in the waters off Greenland; in the salt shelf off the coast of Brazil; in the Jubilee field off the coast of Ghana; off the coasts of Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Australia, and China; anywhere, in fact, where there is access to the sea. In the nineties and up to the first years of our new millennium, the discourse of “peak oil” brought together a weird combination of survivalists, gun advocates, and environmentalists who forwarded the then-unheard-of idea that scarcity or, more specifically, declining reserves of conventional oil and gas would usher in a dramatically different kind of future for humankind. The complexion of the post-peak future, whether it involved utter social collapse, living in armed compounds, or a devolution into a bucolic pastoral where we all did with less, churned our own butter, and made our own music, was entirely dependent on which end of the political spectrum you woke up on. But from the current vantage point, peak oil seems like a rather abortive apocalypse, not unlike y2k. The fact of the matter is that we are now experiencing a new age of oil that Michael Klare, among others, calls “extreme oil” and what industry insiders, much less dramatically, call “unconventional oil.” Conventional oil meant you stick a straw into the sand in the

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Middle East or the flats of Texas and siphon off the stuff. Extreme oil, and here we can think of fracking or the tar sands or deepwater drilling, always involves mind-boggling technological sophistication, massive amounts of investment, and a vastly increased chance of environmental disaster. As Klare argues: “The hunt for oil and gas has always entailed a certain amount of risk  … [but today] [a]s energy companies encounter fresh and unexpected hazards, their existing technologies  – largely developed in more benign environments – often prove incapable of responding adequately to the new challenges. And when disasters occur, as is increasingly likely, the resulting environmental damage is sure to prove exponentially more devastating than anything experienced in the industrial annals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”5 offshore evolved as a provocative thought exercise: “What if, we are asking, our future is not going to hold some promise of a massive shift away from fossil fuels but might very well involve the catastrophic burning of every last drop of oil and gas wrenched from every crack and crevice in the planet? What if?” Of course the aesthetic and formal challenges of doing an art project on offshore drilling have to do with the issue of access. Like the tar sands, offshore production takes place in increasingly remote and hard-to-access territories, particularly the deepwater variety, which can be two hundred miles offshore like bp’s Atlantis rig in the Gulf of Mexico. It is this magic cloak of invisibility, of course, which gives licence to international oil companies to operate with relative impunity, far from the prying eyes of locals. In Nigeria, for example, years of uprisings and guerrilla actions on the part of militants in the Niger Delta are pushing oil production further and further offshore in a bid to avoid the messy and costly complications of onshore confrontations. So if the oil companies wouldn’t let us film on their rigs (we asked; they predictably said “no”), we decided to build our own in 3d. What we wanted to do, though, was devise a documentary experience that might implicate the viewer in a different, more intimate and personal way as an active participant in the exploration of this new resource frontier. I became fascinated with the possibilities of the non-linear and interactive documentary as a formal metaphor for the complexities and labyrinthine structure of the carbon web. The process began to evolve into a collaboration with my partner

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Glen Richards, who would shoot and do the bulk of the editing, and Helios Design Labs in Toronto, a marvellously inventive company that is a leader in the design and execution of interactive web documentaries. We began to imagine an oil rig as our central interface, where viewers would be encouraged to navigate through the noisy and unsettling architecture where they would encounter documentary elements. The storyworld of the rig is initiated through a firstperson journey that begins with a helicopter flight to a rig helipad in the middle of a desolate, indeterminate oceanscape dotted with countless other drilling platforms. Our rig is deserted and desolate, and there is overwhelming evidence of an unspecified disturbance that has led to a hurried evacuation. The ghosts are everywhere if one chooses to listen. These are our “ghosts in the machine,” a humanistic core trapped by a manufactured, unnatural world, people who tell stories about the visceral and material impacts of offshore oil on their bodies and on local ecologies. Our rig is a labyrinth and, as with notorious labyrinths throughout history, is a product of a complex and domineering organization connected with mega-wealth and power. But labyrinths are also tools of transformation and initiation, designed to teach through embodied experience and confusion. offshore’s labyrinthine interface hopes to similarly shift perceptions and, through its documentary and aesthetic gaming elements, connect information (left brain) with emotion (right brain) to bring viewers to a new way of seeing oil’s relationship to the world and themselves. These film projects may be viewed online: offshore: http://offshore-interactive.com Dead Ducks: https://vimeo.com/37867483 Carpe Diem: https://vimeo.com/8336784 notes 1 Stephanie LeMenager, “Petro-Melancholia: The bp Blowout and the Arts of Grief,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 19, no. 2 (2011): 25–56, 31. 2 For more information on Platform, please visit their website: http:// platformlondon.org/. 3 Mark Davis, director of the Institute on Water Resources Law and

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Policy at Tulane University notes: “bp … copied word for word from the response plans that had been developed after the Exxon-Valdez oil spill [in Alaska in 1989] instead of a plan tailored to the conditions in the gulf.” Quoted in Mark Hertsgaard, “What bp Doesn’t Want You to Know about the 2010 Gulf Spill,” Newsweek, 22 April 2013, accessed 16 September 2016, http://www.newsweek.com/ what-bp-doesnt-want-you-know-about-2010-gulf-spill-63015. 4 LeMenager, “Petro-Melancholia,” 22. 5 Michael Klare, “The Relentless Pursuit of Extreme Energy: A New Oil Rush Endangers the Gulf of Mexico and the Planet,” TomDispatch. com, 18 May 2010, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.tomdispatch .com/post/175249/.

2 Containing Oil: The Pipeline in Petroculture Graeme Macdonald

The pipeline is who we are now. It is our need. Samuel Avery, The Pipeline and the Paradigm

Given that industry and government are unable to find a solution to the crisis of oil in the context of environmental sustainability, it is tempting to be cynical about the chances of cultural criticism to accomplish this goal. Yet the recent rise and growth of petroculture as object of study, mode of interpretive critique, and field of cultural practice confirms that its various practitioners inside and outside the academy believe it has a key role to play. But what? And how? In an editorial in a landmark journal collection on the subject of the oil imaginary, Andrew Pendakis asks, “Is there an aesthetics of oil or are its cultural manifestations too diverse and localized to be usefully generalized?”1 Recent scholarly contributions (we can now include this volume) have made it clear we can answer a resounding “yes” to the first part of this query. Registering oil’s sheer significance in modern petro-life – in myriad material, representational, and nonmanifest forms – provides a platform for interpretive and imaginative disciplines to elicit new ways to consider oil’s past, present, and future. It also presents a challenge for humanities scholars and cultural practitioners to make good on the claim that how we read, cognize, visualize, narrate, perform, and represent oil is connected to the social and cultural way we inhabit and are habituated to it. The second part of Pendakis’s question, however, is arguably thornier. It is a question concerning the necessity and means of integration and connection – of how to understand ways in which locally exclusive forms of petroculture are always already extra-national.

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This is a comparativist question of relative system and scale that has haunted those seeking a petrocultural perspective capacious enough to afford sufficient focus on oil’s global terrain. In a pioneering article pondering the absence of oil in literary history, for example, Amitav Ghosh wondered if one reason for this absence was to do with the fact that the experience of oil is so loosely dispersed across the world, over a territory “bafflingly multilingual … a space that is no place at all, a world that is intrinsically displaced. Heterogeneous and international.” Such a world “poses a radical challenge not merely to the practice of writing as we know it but to much of modern culture.”2 This remains a methodological and organizational challenge that is crucial to resolve. Only by widening our optics, without losing sense of the networked system of oil’s numerous (and often peripheral) locales, can we comprehend the integrated nature of petroculture’s global concerns. My focus in this chapter will, therefore, seek to offer an assured but qualified “no” to Pendakis’s geocultural anxiety, by demonstrating how visual representations provide effective means for considering how the debate over “efficient” and “sustainable” forms of energy is always fundamentally global, set within a predominant and world-systemic form of political economy and material infrastructure dependent on flowing petroleum. This context locks the “containment” of my title in interpretive tension. On the one hand, it signifies interest in the “secure” storage, “assured” directional flow, and “safe” onward movement of oil and fossil-based modes of living in general amid ever-renewed rounds of privatization and financialization that ensure the reproduction of the world petro-economy. On the other, “containment” is read under the sign of a radical planetary environmentalism, explicitly acknowledging oil’s (and, admittedly, petroculture’s) finitude and proffering emergent ecological arguments for oil’s arrest and (geological) enclosure, for “keeping it in the ground.”3 A subsequent interpretation arises amid the terrain between these interests, concerning the manner in which the toxic social relations and carbonizing effects of oil and the oil system on both planetary and localized levels are “contained” in their occlusion by the consumer-sovereign cultures and carbon-democratic governments of the capitalist world-system. The representation of oil becomes critical in this light. For these and other reasons explained below, I focus on a significant but critically neglected strand of oil’s visual culture: images of pipelines. Seeing

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(and comparing) these crucial entities of oil’s containing infrastructure as cultural-ecological objects, I argue, allows re-evaluation of the temporal, spatial, and environmental limits of the petrolic culture their transnationally transported product sustains. A strong petrocultural meme has it that a critical dialectic of visibility lies at the centre of the seemingly intractable contradictions between the social and physical costs and economic value of oil as a dominant world commodity. Perceptual and representative problems are generated by oil’s very invisibility – literally and ontologically – across large swathes of contemporary life. This seems ironic, given its sheer ubiquity, but an “oil-fetishism” argument maintains the peripheral geography of fossil fuel extraction on land and water has always effectively “offshored” features of its refining, transmission, and emission across the Global North in particular. This includes the “unseeing” of local extraction and production sites in “developed” or “advanced” industrial countries. As Frederick Buell has noted, the tangible exuberance of the initial oil age has long since dimmed to an era where oil lives a humiliating contradiction: as a “necessary,” enabling unter-substance in late-capitalist modernity, simultaneously haunted by “a large portfolio of dread problems.”4 And yet the last forty years has witnessed a historically unprecedented rising curve of extraction, production, and ongoing global demand. Scholars in the humanities might interpret this contradiction as a challenge. Would its disentanglement involve “humanizing” oil? How does interpreting or representing oil  – seeing and reading it better – contribute to meaningful forms of action? Such questions, hitherto unconsidered, are finally being posed. They involve rethinking how to discern oil’s cultural life and its signifying properties within a larger social/energy matrix. The extent to which an inability and/or refusal to act upon the widely acknowledged negative effects of oil remains defensible in a context of generally accepted worldecological crisis is due to the intensifying techno-social “lock-in” to a high-carbon system across the world-system. For Mimi Sheller: “speed and accelerated mobilities ‘lock in’ energy not only in the form of complex mobility regimes, spatially fixed infrastructure, industrial plants, and logistics systems but also in the constantly updated military balance of power which shapes global energy economies. These are all aspects of the contemporary energy regime and wider landscape for energy that are not so easily re-shaped by technical

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efficiencies, consumer choices, or even by national domestic policy.”5 The transnational spread and integration of what John Urry calls the “carbon complex” is the result of the installation and reproduction of a system of high-carbon living that “presupposes oil” across structural and subjective scales.6 This has made oil synonymous with development, modernity, and “the good life,” a notion that operates on multiple levels: economic, cultural, geopolitical, and – crucially, for this essay – infrastructural. Since the 1970s, an intensifying supply anxiety has driven carbon capital’s funding and construction of oil-related infrastructures, most notably of pipeline systems in multiple territories. Pipeline developments funded by the US and the International Monetary Fund in less-developed and peripheral areas have been a crucial element of the maintenance of the petrodollar carbon system. I want to explore ways in which we can re-conceptualize this infrastructural tendency, in part by making a case for the eco-political cogency of the aesthetic and cultural interpretation of what remains a crucial combustible material, which is yet predominantly measured by energy efficiency quotas, petrodollars, and geopolitics. It is not enough to simply bring such infrastructure into wider visibility. It is about seeing pipelines as cultural objects. In doing so, we might be able to get a better, alternative purchase on those factors that keep oil literally moving despite unprecedented ecological anxiety. The correlation, then, with a general refusal or inability to see and conceptualize oil, within and beyond oil’s own powerfully fictive and violent logic, becomes central to discern. Comparing images of pipelines from core and periphery of the world petro-system offers one means to consider how this “invisibility” is both culturally “naturalized” and internationally relative – structurally managed in the interests of an oil-reliant capitalism seeking to extend and perpetuate supply while downplaying the ongoing, exploitative shame of extraction and land dispossession and the inevitable endpoints of burning. A well-oiled public indiscernibility is usually attributed to an unconscious form of collective repression. The reasons provided for this, to reiterate, are multiple. Public and individual apathy is the commonsensical response overshadowing more structurally based accounts, yet inaction is neither inevitable nor wholly fragmented. One major cause of what Imre Szeman has argued is an “epistemic

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inability or unwillingness to name our energy ontologies” is the cultural and political agenda successfully prosecuted by those with a vested interest in continuing (and, indeed, expanding) oil’s productive appeal.7 This agenda downplays the dread aspect, in part by making oil’s infrastructure and procurement invisible, rendering it inaccessible and thus unassailable, while vigorously promoting its refinements. The signifying import of this should be of interest to any cultural scholar or theorist of modernity. The extent to which the evident social, cultural, and material benefits of petroleum-based products are appreciated in myriad ways across various publics seems a point often lost on groups utterly opposed to its very existence in social life.8 As Mathew Huber has authoritatively demonstrated, the postwar West has been dominated by neoliberal policies propagated by the petroleum nexus.9 Though oil’s harmful effects tend to be more visible and less contained in politically and economically “weaker” regions and states, the challenge is to identify them within what Jason Moore calls a “world-ecological” frame, constructed by successive biophysical “resource-frontiers” continually established and exhausted through the longue durée of historical capitalism. Here, hegemonic centres continually seek to establish a “regularization” of energy/commodity supply and to ceaselessly revolutionize time, technology, and (often foreign or peripheral) space in order to maintain it.10 This has utilized what Michael Niblett, following Moore, calls “the ‘flow system’ of the capitalist world-ecology,” where, unlike closed social and ecological systems that recycle nutrients, energy supplies, and other elements, a dependency on external sources is maintained.11 The difference now, from previous phases of rupture, crisis, and reboot in the world-ecology is that oil-driven capitalism’s perennial accumulation venture meets an environmental argument – arguably more apocalyptic, voluble, and influential than ever – that seeks to arrest the determination of yet another new “flow system” fossil frontier. This resistance confronts the considerable heft of what Szeman calls the “strategic realism” of the powerful agencies of the carbon web governing both state-controlled and neoliberal forms of energy capitalism, where fossil power is configured as essential to national economic strategies and continues to be internationally sourced, harnessed, and secured in nation-based political visions of energy “security” and independence that throw most of

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the positive discourses about globalization and environmentalism into sharp relief.12 Constraints in export capacity and projections of ever-increasing demand for energy continue to cause and shape arguments surrounding supply networks around the world, though those confronting the world energy system in the last decade have never been so extreme.13 As Canada’s oil sands have risen to world prominence, for example, controversy has snowballed over the structure, placements, and routes of pipelines carrying processed and unrefined heavy bitumen from Alberta to the US – to date, the sole importer. Lines such as Enbridge’s Northern Gateway extension, TransCanada’s Keystone xl, Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain expansion, and other projects to access and grow lucrative international markets have met high-profile resistance. Protesters have utilized a range of methods, from the traditional (such as physically obstructing and occupying the proposed routes and sites of proposed petro-infrastructure) to the opportunistic command of new media technologies. A raft of documentary films, subvertisements, front-line culture festivals, photography, and visual art have figured prominently in this crucible, as have more diffuse forms of literature, cinema, and social media in campaigns against pipeline extensions and fossilfuelled culture in general.14 The relative “success” of this resistance  – what has been called “the largest expression of civil disobedience since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s”  – has yet to be fully measured.15 Given that campaigning against the expansionary tendencies of the global oil complex has a century-long history of relative failure, opposition to the contemporary oil system is confronted by the thousands of miles of operating transmission lines flowing oil at a relatively slow but consistent pace around the world’s grids, across seafloors, over mountain ranges, and under cities, day upon day. And, as I have established, for oil companies operating within a world-system increasingly dominated by variant forms of neoliberal capitalism, the flow must go on, come what may. This has been reinforced in the early twenty-first century, where we have entered a condition that might be described as “enduring oil,” where the verb applies in both its senses. For Bob Dudley, the ceo of bp, there is an “exploration imperative” to meet unprecedented global demand. In a speech at the World Petroleum Congress in Qatar, in the year following

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the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Dudley underlined what he would reiterate in speeches around the world to date: getting out of oil and gas was unthinkable for the late-capitalist energy corporation and for the fuel-hungry world in general. For Dudley, upstream projects will remain crucial for a long time yet: “refusing to explore is not an option. That would condemn humanity to a future of shortages, poverty and conflict … It makes sense for all parties – today and into the future – to do all we can to underpin supply.”16 As the study of petroculture consolidates and extends into a general disciplinary field connecting the humanities to energy studies, it has become increasingly clear that questions about what exactly is being delivered in pipelines necessarily extend beyond the logistics of the physical substance to confront the unsustainable contradictions of oil and oil-based living in general. A prowess for decoding signs and signification opens up novel views on notoriously occluded material that prefers non-obtrusive encasement and the certainty of unidirectional movement. If containing oil motivates world petroculture, then aesthetic modes of representation enter the picture to fashion an eco-globalist perspective, one that opens out oblique angles, reverses orthodox movements, and defines oil’s (dis)appearance and enclosure in wholly different terms than those determined by the expansionary objectives of oil-based capitalism seeking yet another global ecological fix. In short, we can train the eye to see the supercommodity fuelling global cosmo-capitalism as the apotheosis of the Anthropocene moment. “Disastrous” moments when oil copiously spills into public visibility percolate through the history of petroculture. But equally if not more crucial for eco-critical interpretation is the ongoing “success” of oil-based modernity in the less spectacular, contained movements of oil that flows “safely” in huge volumes around the world every day. As Szeman argues, “existing [oil] systems have failed precisely by working all too well.”17 The representative dilemma of confronting everyday oil’s representative banality is tied to its sheer opacity – most prevalent in the Global North – and confirms the added challenge of depicting multiple extremely productive but relatively unspectacular objects and routes of transmission. As a rule, pipelines are dull. They are neither transparent nor particularly distinctive. Many are buried. Those running above ground are often located in remote and/or private terrain. The lay viewer must guess what

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liquid(s) runs inside. In addition to challenges of topography, geopolitical constraints challenge fuel transportation, notably on transnational routes through delicately treatied, contested, or non-sovereign territory. This only increases the often-tortuous complexity of a pipeline’s infrastructural financing, legal and safety regulation, and maintenance program. Subject to assorted technical requirements, possible transit fees and “lift” costs on top of these limitations, pipelines are not necessarily dictated at a zero-sum level by demand or supply, being subject to geographically varying mediums of credit settings and financing schemes, not to mention the multiple contingencies surrounding oil and gas prices. Despite all these obstacles, immense amounts of fossil fuels are transmitted daily through pipelines the world over, and in the second decade of the twenty-first century, demand grows. In the remainder of this chapter, I will elaborate some of the points and questions I have opened by concentrating on a specific subsector of the petro-world: what might tentatively be called the pipeline imaginary. My aim is not only to demonstrate how we might perceive and compare energy structures as cultural objects but also to think how such representative engagements in turn offer a means to realize how the dynamic mobility of oil produces political and economic unevenness in the oil-and-gas-driven world-system: an unevenness that enables it to drive ever onwards.

Line Management As crucial parts of the converter chain that brings an entire energy system into social, economic, and biophysical existence, pipelines are powerful environmental conveyances. If their depiction offers a means to rethink how oil’s transmission infrastructure is a central marker of its latent yet hegemonic presence in modernity, then an initial challenge comes in seeking to represent a petro-world reliant on restricted environmental vision and the command of peripheral space. “Part of the problem,” Szeman argues, “is that the supply chain is in many parts of the world not just carefully guarded, but hidden away, sequestered underground.” Inevitably this reduces forms of mobilization against oil, for “it is one thing to block trucks dragging coal away from mines and another to identify essential sites in the supply chain of oil. How do you stand in front of a pipeline, for

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Figure 2.1 Ernst Logar, Petrol Storage, Aberdeen Harbour.

instance?”18 Such a situation is satirically identified by the Austrian artist Ernst Logar in his work on the occulted spaces and corporate logistics of privatized oil in Aberdeen, Scotland’s “oil capital of Europe” since the 1970s. Two photographs from his Invisible Oil installation show reddened signs (against “green” backgrounds – a familiar trope in the oil imaginary) declaring prohibited access to pipeline installations. Figure 2.1 calls attention to the “danger” of a “high pressure” pipeline, deliberately unseen in this shot. The sign warns, “entry or work in this area is strictly forbidden.” Figure 2.2 is a mock-up, placed close to the Rig Helipads of Aberdeen Airport.19 The petrocultural configuration of these photographs rejects any discouragement of cultural “work” trespassing on oil’s terrain, partly by indicating the artistic allure of strict access controls. Invoking Hans Haacke’s notion of art as “productive provocation,” Logar’s work subversively responds to the restricted visual and linguistic regime operated by oil producers. Alejandra Rodríguez-Remedi sees in Logar’s images an attempt to encourage public openness about oil, countering the delimiting tendencies of securitized infrastructure. The artist becomes “an agent of petroconscientization,” registering

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Figure 2.2 Ernst Logar, Heliport, Aberdeen Airport.

contained and redacted flows of information that service maximal oil flow.20 As tentative viewers apparently outside or at a “safe” distance from oil, we are forced to take a perspective on the manner in which it is seen and interpreted, accessed, and represented, and also to consider the extent to which it is incorporated across public domains where “everybody is complicit in committing the carbon commodity crime.”21 The mundane, ostensibly banal realism of each image makes Logar’s scenarios deliberately uncertain. Is the signage a joke, planted like the pipeline? From a superficial environmental perspective, the “danger” sign obviously reflects a “high pressure” situation. But how does a pipeline signify this? Indeed, if there were a pipeline here  – or under us right now, wherever we are in the world – how would we know? Such inscrutability is Logar’s point, further conveyed in the wry series of displayed rejection letters from various oil companies he wrote requesting access to control centres, refining facilities, and boardrooms. Replete with blackened lines of redaction, the correspondence illustrates the anxiety of corporate operational secrecy and offers a more fundamental, abstract question: What does oil  – as burned substance and restricted capital asset – signify, and what does it not? What has it got to hide?

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The control and sequestering of the informatics and infrastructure of production, transmission, and emission is a central feature in the world operational history of oil and gas. The extent to which modes of military and economic securitization help sustain a general and equivalent oil unconscious across the public cultures of the world-system is a moot issue. As the Swiss artist and cultural theorist Ursula Biemann notes, it has always been risky for artists to record prohibited industrial territory. In her 2005 Black Sea Files two-channel video essay on the planning and building of the BakuTbilisi-Ceyhan (btc) Trans-Caucasian pipeline, she asks, “What is the meaning of this tube in the hidden corporate imaginary of this space?”22 Throughout the film, the controversial line is repeatedly depicted extending into the horizon, awaiting burial. A non-linear narrative combines with the forced synchrony of her “split” screen technique, showing the tube and those around and affected by it, from smallholders to planners to incidental citizens. In this transparently dialectical style, the film challenges its viewer to comprehend the awkward, often messy confrontations between the surface/subsurface worlds of oil. The film’s comparative, transnational trajectory confirms oil’s explicit and prolific hidden presence in areas of resource pressure inflicted by pointedly uneven levels of redistribution and accessibility, political instability, and sedimentary layers of energy imperialism. In their investigative book on the btc pipeline and its journey from the Caspian to the European energy grid, James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello describe how comprador forms of state corruption, international finance capital, and corporate energy ambition work in conjunction to forge an impressive and highly managed view of essential “energy corridors” that in fact resemble “resource colonies”: anti-sovereign sites of one-way transit bereft of social and environmental regulation. Here, in oil’s peripheries, explicit correlations and territorial differences appear between petro-infrastructure, democratic and human rights abuses, and socio-ecological violence. Noting the pipeline’s highly mediated presentation by oil companies, financial centres, and governments as a “transparent” and “pioneering” project, conceived as the first of a planned “vast cobweb” of lines in the region, the writers exert a powerful metaphor, reframing the line as “a machine built to transport Azeri geology westward along hills and valleys, forests and plains, orchards and fields.”23

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The extent to which this peripheralized facet of the “resource curse” remains structurally invisible to the consuming citizens (and even some petro-critics) of the Global North is socially and environmentally critical to discern. It involves a wholesale rethinking of the essential terms and international ambit of oil’s delivery, realizing the importance placed on uninterrupted flow by what remains a largely imperial system predicated on endless worldwide expansion and capital accumulation.

Inside the Line Revealingly, this is not all about burning oil. Ultimately, a number of factors have always made oil pipelines lucrative. The mobility, density, and flexibility of liquid-phase hydrocarbons and the capaciousness of crude oil’s combustible properties gain advantage over other fossil fuels, ensuring increased energy per unit of volume, with reduced labour requirements across the phases and sectors of the oil complex. Pipelines require relatively minimal maintenance to build cost and profit margin, though this fluctuates and is one of the most debated and controversial aspects of their functioning. Oil’s general safety is punctuated by considerable spillage; highly publicized moments of catastrophic tanker or platform failure tend to obscure “lesser” but frequent (and often under-reported) line faults and “routine” spills. (Indeed pipelines are often celebrated as the most “environmental” method of moving petroleum.) Overall, our sustained period of relatively high (if plateauing) barrel prices ensures the relatively low cost of oil’s national and continental movement, and underlines the capital advantages of pipelines over other modes of land transportation. For Rafael Kandiyoti, “building and operating pipelines is nearly always a profitable business and most of the world’s pipelines are only discussed in relation to routine engineering or financial matters.”24 The extent to which petrocultural interventions can intrude in this delimiting and definitive terrain is significant. As Marriott and Minio-Paluello note, pipelines have their own “tongue,” anonymously recorded in “the universal language of engineering,” staging point code and site coordinates.25 But as conflicts over crude pipeline placement or shale-gas platforms become increasingly subject to notable forms of public objection and opposition across the physical and political landscapes of the developed

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world, they become a lodestar for wider environmental engagements with expanded oil and gas production and prospecting. The debates over energy infrastructure are not solely technical; these are highly politicized and mediated forms of civic and aesthetic discussion.26 The demand for new or alternative transmission infrastructure is inescapably parsed through various representational formats: contested arenas where environmental interpretations and artistic projections can utilize an alternative language of form, narrative, and impression. This discursive complexity inevitably spills into the wider geopolitics of the energy-wrought inter-state system, adding to the grander, more fundamental debate about the sites, concepts, and fundamental meaning of “sustainability.”

Pressure and Balance In a way, it’s nothing new. Since the 1850s, oil companies around the world have sought to establish uninhibited energy corridors by means of regulatory compliance (or avoidance!), compensation or buy-out schemes, legislated property rights, and even militarization. In the questions and struggles surrounding pipelines, therefore, the unobstructed line has always been a resonant figure: a potent pipe dream for energy firms seeking to maximize transmission capacity, a nightmare image for agencies seeking to stem oil’s incessant global flow. As Christopher Jones has argued, pipelines were crucial in managing the liquid end of the modern mineral energy transition. By overcoming distance and creating the demand that drove supply up, their construction ensured what Jones calls “a landscape of intensification” that sustained and deepened US and world petroculture.27 They became fetishized but also vulnerable objects. Inevitably, the aim of the straight, unbroken line confronts diversions, in messy accommodations to cultural, ethical, political, and natural obstacles. Citing the economic historian Douglass North’s pioneering study of the “deep history” of transport modes, former pipeline consultant Jeff D. Makholm argues that vested interest has always “pressed for (or [taken] advantage of) new governing institutions to surmount obstacles to development and profitability.”28 The twenty-first-century desire to maintain and extend the long era of cheap fuel by discovering and developing untapped fossil deposits guarantees the contemporary carbon democratic form of lobbying

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Makholm sees as a successful feature of competitive “diversification” in the industry. He employs a revealing visual metaphor in his economic assessment: “Pipelines are long, inanimate, tubular steel assets accompanied by the occasional pump or compressor. There is nothing subtle about them. There is subtlety, though, in seeing pipelines not just as tangible steel tubes but rather as the physical means for providing an intangible property right to transport fuel from one point to another at a highly predictable payment to the pipeline owner.”29 Rendering those tangible tubes’ hydrocarbon contents with intangible elements not only occludes the substantial social and economic costs visited upon those outside that “intangible property right” but also makes reversing the biophysical consequences of fuel emissions in the atmosphere so much more intangible. For Makholm, a pipeline’s owner has the “right” to profit and payment, and must seek to maintain “frictionless trade.”30 The extent to which this neoliberal desire for smooth transaction via deregulated markets and privatized resources contributes to externalized human and environmental costs – from a warming planet to the enclosure of commons land and access rights  – is a recurring petrocultural concern. Capital’s “expert” resort to representation here and elsewhere, however, albeit inadvertently, establishes a petrocultural opening. If pipelines are signifiers, then they are subject to alternative horizons of interpretation, allowing us to consider oil’s visual economy and view pipelines as codifying structures: public, environmental objects and cultural edifices as much as mediums of fuel delivery, economic contract, and private property. Perhaps unwittingly, Makholm subtly narrativizes these unsubtle structures as social and financial things, creating an opportunity for metaphor and symbol where oil’s technically guarded and closely fenced signifying regime might not care to go. And where aesthetic and cultural interpretation is involved, eco-critical visions and alternate disciplinary languages are afforded opportunity. For Makholm, “pipeline systems exhibit physical simplicity and predictability.”31 This wistful envisioning registers the desire for unobstructed flow and manifests in many images of pipelines. A recognizably modernist aesthetic of clear, straight lines punctuates oil capital’s utopic horizon, promoting a techno-idealist vision of smooth running, efficient delivery and perpetual supply. In this context the proliferation of lines formed by the steel tendrils in Edward

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Burtynsky’s Oakville refinery photograph (figure 2.3) appears problematic. For opponents and proponents of oil, an image such as Oakville broadcasts a mixture of systemic mastery and daunting complexity. A well-orchestrated, tubular triumph of vascular flow radiates from the shining surface of each component conduit. Yet a nagging sense of entanglement and directional confusion accompanies the yearning for symmetry invoked by the composition. Suggestive affinities with Futurism’s steely enthusiasm for machine-cool dynamism, processing force, speed, reach, and power are placed in tension here – as they are throughout Burtynsky’s work on oil and manufactured landscapes  – with the social, ecological, health, and political crises enmeshed around fossil fuels. The objective magnitude of Burtynsky’s photographs also conveys a provocative consideration of the physical limits of oil’s mega-terrain and related questions concerning the exhaustive limits of its known reserves. Dark ecological scenarios make any technocratic impression of progressive carbon flow difficult to valorize, and Oakville’s visual grammar maintains this resistant tension. Any pressurizing system requires balance, but whereas the depicted image urges directional precision, its knotty, Escher-like challenge hits the viewer with an intestinal puzzle of unconnected lines, multiple directions, and seminetworked parts. Admittedly, there’s artfulness here. The compressed frame of the shot severs the horizon and direction of compressorenabled delivery, but the composition manages nonetheless to suggest multiple energetic planes of interminable processing. Envisioned thusly, the interpretive tension in the image doesn’t fully connect the depicted guts of this petro-system to the larger realms of oil’s production and consumption. It asks its viewer to try to think where oil is headed outside the frame. A couple of circular valve handles hint at human control, but those of us believing ourselves to be “outside” oil can only assume meticulous safety and planning, can only believe each component sector properly balanced and directed by this apparently artificial organism. Many scholars and curators note that the stark epic scale of Burtynsky’s renowned photographs, with their privileged vantage points and reliance on a reduced human context (in content but also in production, displayed in galleries without immediate text, title, or identification of place), convey elements of either (or both) the Kantian and/or Burkean sublime. In this predominant reading the

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Figure 2.3 Edward Burtynsky, Oil Refineries #23, Oakville, Ontario, Canada, 1999.

improbable spatial geometry implied by Oakville provokes an awestruck response, generated by either (or, indeed, both) technocratic admiration or eco-horror at the strangulating order of an “inhuman” industrial system, predicated as it is on an impossible attempt to contain fossil flow and manage toxic waste on a vast scale.32 There

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is some debate over the politicized levels of documentary exposé and ecological activism in Burtynsky’s “awesome” aesthetics. What influence, if any, does the apprehension of shades of weird Escherian geometry or technological wonder or even post-apocalyptic dread in such images have in urging a general rethinking of the materialist origin and component elements of what is in technocratic terms an incredibly dynamic and “successful” system of energy conversion and supply? Might an ecological politics require a more grounded, unrefined aesthetic approach? Official oil company representations typically betray a penchant for the Enlightenment visions of technological innovation that Burtynsky’s photographs seem to critique. This involves fetishizing futuristic, machine-cool images of efficiency and enablement that sublate notions of a solitary, “heroic” line of oil in harmony with its environment, running safely over desert dunes, through bright blue ocean or boreal wilderness. Brought from the “out there,” oil transcends all landscapes and (almost magically) reaches the gas station forecourt or domestic power supply. Many machine-in-the-garden images of North American pipelines present the line in an ostensibly empty landscape, a “nonplace” seemingly (and often disingenuously) far from centres of human habitation. Tempting as it is to frame such depictions within a recognizable American frontierism, oil’s environmentality, bound up as it is with a transnational infrastructure, demands a wider, more “worldly” and “timely” sense of critical capture. Seeking to accommodate impressive scale and distance, transmission photographs favour a prominent line running across frame, implying the grand extent of the network and resources reachable beyond the apprehended (often empty) landscape, establishing the estranged structure as part of a larger (if abstract) system. Such compositions obfuscate origins, operations, and destinations, accentuating the impression of the regular, ongoing movements of oil on terra incognita. A question remains, however, as to how effectively such suggestive images portray local oil’s “world” provenance and the social relations that etch its contours. It has been argued that by inducing questions about location and perspective from their “improbable perches,” Burtynsky’s petro-photographs “test our capacity for explanation,” and force us to “barter for [their] logic.”33 His Oil Fields #22 for example (figure 2.4) shows only a transitory section

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Figure 2.4 Edward Burtynsky, Oil Fields #22, Cold Lake Production Project, Cold Lake, Alberta, Canada, 2001.

of a numbered line, like Oakville leaving the viewer to comprehend what remains contained, unseen, and out of frame: product, grid, and system. An initial impression registers the silent, remote movement of fuel, pumping away unattended in discreet and farflung corners of the globe. The environmentally managed quality of this peripheral vision, however, serves to confirm the coordinates of a viewer’s relatively proximate (and privileged) position within the world-oil system. The application of a more informed environmental aesthetic is assisted, in part, by basic operational knowledge, but is also – and somewhat counterintuitively – informed by unveiling the representative management of degrees of ignorance. Because running dry increases corrosion risk, pipelines benefit from continuous, steady flow. Most storage facilities are not equipped to stay

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at maximum capacity for long. Technical advantages of continual movement produce a system, with myriad subsidiaries, reliant on regular extraction and movement, demand and supply. The privatized ownership of many pipelines imposes tolls and tariffs on oil companies for terrain rights and throughput, virtually guaranteeing oil-related state and capital investment in maintaining oil’s perpetual movement and consumption.34 Only institutional diversity threatens fluid, operational commonality and consistency, with the erratic vertical integration of the international oil and gas production system creating further supply issues. Here, cultural analysis might find traction for counter-narrative by offering arresting, alternative means of signification. As I have argued, the varied constituencies and landscapes of petroculture are marked by a contrasting desire for “safe” containment. If, for environmentalism “safety” means disinvestment  – leaving fossil deposits in the earth, dropping carbon assets, stemming flow – then energy capital’s techno-utopian dreams of non-contaminating, non-exploitative modes of transmission are placed under pressure. This reading enhances the visual politics of pipeline images, injecting a transitive dynamism into the visual interpretation of a photograph such as #22. The fugacious substance in such shots usually remains unseen, placing emphasis on the relaying structure and its space, style, and form of delivery. The optical challenge thus becomes interrogative, inviting speculative narrative and metaphor: What lies inside the tubes? From where do the lines come and where are they headed? Who is responsible for them? Where on the grid, in the world, is this taken? Formal arrangements thus provoke an interrogative mode that induces the political and ecological into the frame. We assume flow and material content in an image like Burtynsky’s, but the evidentiary lack of substance opens a space for radical environmental contemplation: What if this and so many other lines like it contained and delivered no oil at all? In a peak-deferred age of enduring oil (the verb is double-edged), a slick response to this query is appropriated by the speculative reasoning of the fossil fuel industry and usually supported by state agencies: the question is unthinkable – how could we live without it? (Note the sustainability agenda smuggled into the question.) The consequences of oil’s extended finitude are often displaced by apocalyptic scenarios of its end, that, curiously, petroculture has frequently been happy to

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supply. Based as it is on depletion, petro-modernity from its nineteenth-century beginnings has been haunted by a post-oil anxiety. This is a detectable feature of the pipeline imaginary, most obviously in renditions of arrested supply, oil drought, or calamity. Wasted, defunct, or exploded petro-infrastructure fills the war-torn landscapes of films like Werner Herzog’s Gulf War documentary Lessons of Darkness (1992); polluted sump pools and rusted nodding donkeys have been mournfully depicted in film and static images from post-oil Baku or dry-well Texas; blowouts and spills like Deepwater Horizon generate myriad phantasmagorias; the redundant or sabotaged pipes tentacling the Niger Delta are equally well-documented in documentary, visual, and literary representations from the region. These “disasters” of oil are copiously reproduced in numerous dystopically tinged images and narratives, their immediate, spectacular drama undeniable. Despite its environmentally progressive intent, such work – however inadvertently – conveys negative projections of a world deprived of oil (the verb signalling loss rather than gain). An interpretive challenge for contemporary environmentalism, therefore, is how to demonstrate the catastrophic in the everyday life of “banal” oil, to advocate that the fundamental disaster inheres in the productive volume of the “efficient,” operative, and regularized extraction-emission cycle. It is also tasked with arresting (or at least nuancing) the successful narrative of oil’s munificent, modernizing prowess. This is monumentally difficult.35 Predominantly imaged as the “free gift” of nature and power, the means to progress and development, it is difficult to deny the hegemony of oil is very much sustained by its everyday effectiveness. How, then, to dramatize the disastrous nature of oil’s benevolent banality? To reiterate: petroculture contends that this can be done partly by rethinking how oil everywhere has social, aesthetic, and historical form, and by recoding these forms through an environmental narrative. Though precise direction of movement is undetectable in #22, for example, the conflict surrounding demand for constant flow does not lend the frozen image interpretive stasis or aesthetic neutrality. The diagonally vectored lines ensure this, presenting an active, formidable, and determined corridor. A material force is apparent in the anthropogenic rendition, appearing in the green space’s partition by tubular incursion. A familiar image, such chromatic intrusion emphasizes the dominating moves of synthetic

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machine over the “obstacle” of wild nature. Yet, again, an environmental subtlety registers in the swerve in the conduit. This signifies technological tractability, suggesting the ability of petro-infrastructure to move the way it does, cutting a swathe across and through “natural,” national, and/or “foreign” landscapes at will, with powerful determination. It also suggests, if not compliance, then certainly a degree of flexibility, a necessary feature in a capricious context where alternative transmission routes are required for a variety of reasons, including the avoidance of assorted social obstacles to oil’s advance. An environmental frame enhances the composition’s axial conflict: diagonal lines run through and away from the trees – vertically rooted “natural” oxygenators (and carbon captors)  – to an unspecified destination. Others nip and hide from and between the trees in the back of shot. The implied suggestion is, can this (or any) local oil scene detour and hide from its wider magnitudes? The contained product of these pipelines may be delivered elsewhere  – a specific storage hub, for example, or the gas stations of a particular city. An environmental reading must stress emissions affecting everywhere, however, including but transcending local spaces and ecologies (such as the woods in the picture). Despite their transitory nature, these shiny, seemingly non-polluting lines cannot, ultimately, contain themselves. Their composition and subsequent interpretive apprehension demands we consider how they get away with it. Signalling oil’s routes and routines, such a reading also exposes petroleum’s historical desire for dominance through avoidance of natural and political obstacles and draws attention to late capitalism’s systemic and geographically enlarging demand for export, transit, and transmission. The 1973 oil shocks clarified that the ability to host and direct oil involves the capability to supply and deny it, thereby creating geopolitical strength for elites in mineral-rich states (but also in transit territories) to bargain and control regional and international terms surrounding extraction rates, control of routes and supplies, price-setting, etc.36 One enduring problem, however, even in a post-Hubbert age of unconventional oil and gas, for those seeking expansion and movement in a more deregulated, “open” landscape, is that despite assets such as low build and maintenance costs, pipeline capital remains relatively immobile and subject to variables such as “institutional evolution, intangible property rights, and collective action.”37 Vertical integration may be the best means

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to achieve unhindered flow, but the obstacles to this neoliberal ambition in regions with deep public institutions, strong environmental movements, and corporate competition regulations can be formidable – even against an ascendant neoliberalism busy enclosing and prospecting ever more fossil supplies. Here, but more so in “weaker” oil producing and transiting regions, however, the financial benefits for the energy company always outweigh the costs. I have argued thus far that if cultural production is to play a more involved role in establishing public scrutiny of the environmental costs of extended and expanded production capacity, it cannot solely focus on the dramatic spectacles of spillage and the disastrous (but deferred) endpoint of carbon overburn. Neither is it simply a case of following the oil money and its attendant power, but of scrutinizing what Timothy Mitchell describes as the “particular ways of engineering political relations out of flows of energy.”38 The manner in which these connections and flows are controlled and established, legally and financially processed, and materially engineered into hegemonic networks that sustain, redirect, and reproduce a received or “natural” form of global petroculture is critical to comprehend. In this respect, representation and rhetoric become oil capital’s means of enabling – and an energy humanities’ means of potentially disabling – the entangled roots and origins of petroleum routes and extraction sites. With this in mind, any suggestion in images like #22 of an accommodation, even a harmonious meeting between a non-socialized nature and oil, is unsustainable. This impossibility was all but guaranteed by the massive postwar expansion of oil. A hopeful, alternative, way of seeing might read the #22 pipelines as conceding something to natural terrain, cleaving closer to the original “natural” environment than might be readily apparent. But is there a zoning ordinance here? The space suggests a firebreak in a forest cleared and planted for productive reasons.39 Nevertheless, the very possibility of reading the trees as accommodating the alien structures moving between them illustrates how ostensibly natural organisms become socialized features in the “world-ecological” process of resource capitalism, where, as Moore demonstrates, the historical spread and generalization of fossil fuel production has led to repeated waves of expansion and accumulation to the extent that the traditional binary between natural and social forms of production has long since collapsed.40

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Following the logic of fossil-based modernity, the entirety of this landscape – standing and uprooted trees, pipelines, grassland, etc. – can be viewed as commoditized nature. In this frame, the pipelines, like the refineries they run toward and from, are ecological structures as much as the “wild” environments they traverse. The spatial encounter in #22’s composition hems the pipelines in as much as it centres their insistent movement through the landscape. To see this as a horizontal concession of sorts by oil to the agency of external nature, however, would be not only forgetting the green-screening strategies of environmentally sensitive late capitalism but also neglecting evidence of the aggressive enclosures made by a particularly acute form of carbon neoliberalism, marked by what Szeman sees as a “ferocious return to primitive accumulation,” with historically unprecedented force, extent, and speed.41 The forest here becomes a “green asset,” as much a productive resource site as the oil infrastructure it shelters and accommodates. To counter such a scenario demands a reboot of the kind of Marxian theorizations of “nature” conceptualized by Neil Smith’s persuasive geo-historical reading of nature’s wholesale material and cultural “production”  by flexible capital interests, a theory consolidated by the creation in capitalism of what George Monbiot calls “natural capital.”42 Oil and gas in this view are exemplary and essential natural commodities, as much as trees in the age of wood. The distinction is in renewability, though even fossil fuels’ “natural” exhaustibility is appropriated by the contradictory logic of petro-capitalist culture, as an excuse to explore and exploit ever more reserves. In the climate change era, oil and gas are immediately “naturalized” as they are capitalized, in an attempt to conceal their social properties and “ecological” (or, if you will, “anti-natural”) constitution and consequences.

Source, Placement, Distribution The standard vision of the pipeline harnessing the remote transmissions of nature’s resources as it reshapes and commands rural and urban topographies comes under sustained pressure in late environmentalism. As an outlier expression of human incursion into the “undeveloped” environment, the pipeline services the oilelectric urban and exurban world that oil enabled, accelerated, and continues, with increasing difficulty, to sustain. Following Moore’s

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claims, the oily structures of the built environment, from the suburb to the stock exchange, must also be seen as world-ecological. But oil often seeks to camouflage such connections, even in its professed moments of transparency. The landscape-blended element of the pipeline in a photograph such as Matt Coolidge’s The Trans-Alaska Pipeline (figure 2.5) subtly highlights the extent to which oil’s essentialism is naturalized in modern petro-economies. This commands what Owen Logan argues is the “undialectical representation” of a petroculture dominated by “supply-side aesthetics, which asks viewers to position themselves as consumers and receivers, thereby eroding earlier practices of representation that succeeded in portraying socio-economic relations.”43 Following Logan and Moore, we are asked to redraw our cognitive petro-maps. Such isolate, apparently humdrum, lines, slashing a way through territory considered natural or unspoiled, are in fact representative of urbanization’s wild nature. Again, from a world-ecological perspective, the aesthetic pitch of Coolidge’s beshadowed photograph of the Trans-Alaska line invites us to imagine the scene without the pipeline. Is there a composite decision here, to appear to fuse with the background? That it may not or cannot appear so is the critical point of a petrocultural critique, one that would highlight how the photograph’s linear formations question the extent of the forceful impositions of energy transmission. It also exposes imposture: despite “environmental” attempts to blend into a green background, pipelines cut a firm line against the grain, shooting through the fore and centre of frame, consigning the flowing green world to secondary concern. The ecoactive subtext of such a pictorial arrangement, however, exposes the superficial aesthetics of a green-screened pipeline and in doing so foregrounds the buried implication: oil will be delivered regardless of distance or terrain. The encoded mastery in generic “wild” pipeline shots determines and channels nature, and in so doing attempts to contain the messy social aspects of oil’s physical journey to surplus value. Here a coreperiphery relation remains stubbornly critical to discern, a matter of scale as much as gps. All over the globe, the refining, transportation, and distribution of oil is not always distant from densely populated areas, but its differing modes of containment and appearance are evidenced by social and geo-economic (and thus environmental) unevenness, both domestically and internationally. This unevenness

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Figure 2.5 Matthew Coolidge, Trans-Alaska Pipeline, 2008. Etching on the side of the pipeline reads “YOU WENT TOO FAR NORTH.”

is borne out in the contested and uneven geography of most pipeline routings. Oil’s visible tracks determine ways in which its circulation and exchange extend beyond the domestication of “remote” territory. Given its production and transmission as a world-systemic capitalized natural resource, we would expect uneven development to be readable in oil’s trajectories. At various times and spaces across the globe, from Alaskan tundra to Scottish islands, from Colombian rainforest to Niger Delta and Caspian corridor, oil’s discovery and production has involved the pacification and/or incorporation of peripheral communities with claims to the land and resource extracted, stored, and shipped. The manner in which this displacement registers as a difficult accommodation in visual culture, however, is also uneven when compared at a “world” level. In the regulatory environments of highly developed states, for example, the pipeline generally appears solo: efficient, remote from human habitation, and ostensibly noncontaminating. A generic predicate for images of unobstructed lines suggests a quiet, ordered, and functioning circulation system. This, to reiterate, is the slick image-managed techno-architecture of

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oil-driven modernity. It works to contain such (perennial) disasters as Deepwater Horizon as aberrant events within a generally “safe” system. Eco-globalist readings, as I have suggested, are tasked with reframing such unexceptional visions of oil as catastrophic: to show the ecological violence of the mundane world of oil in its voluminous quasi-containment. This work questions banalized oil’s superficial ecology, where comparative representations with visible oil’s explosive situation demonstrate the underside of petroleum’s glistening surface. If to understand oil as cultural and material substance with fundamental ecological import means realizing its mystification in the societies of the Global North, it also behooves us to connect this mystification to oil’s world circulation in petro-modernity, a massive ecological regime in itself which has overseen tremendous world-systemic revolutions in ecological space. This extractivist view places notions of oil’s “invisibility” under some pressure. One of the central factors ensuring oil’s relation to the accretive volatility of the post-1945 world-system has been Western (in particular US) determination to maintain secure resources of an exhaustible substance. The continuing legacy of this at a time when the rapid growth of domestically produced unconventional oil and gas is impacting upon the North American (and subsequently the European) energy landscape is central to the twenty-first-century debate on future energy supply.44 Objections to new pipeline routes or fracking zones extend beyond familiar concerns about “visual impact” into the realms of environmental pollution, geological disturbance, land and water rights, and ultimately the condition of democratic power. If oil’s cheap and routine delivery has (literally, historically, and metaphorically) been an offshore issue to North American consumers, emergent transmission disputes enable us to realize fundamental connections to those “pumping places” of the globe that operate as the forecourt of the Global North – and increasingly South and West Asia, most notably and drastically the mega slums, rural peripheries, and satellite states of the Global South and post-Soviet territories, where oil’s proximity to fragile forms of human dwelling has formed a condition of banal petro-violence.45 Death and injury from pipeline explosions remain a routine occurrence in and around cities such as Lagos, Port Harcourt, and Nairobi, for example. A well-rehearsed irony of the

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petro-capitalist world-system is that these oil-“rich” territories contain areas of excessive fuel poverty, where the unregulated maintenance and illegal tapping of exposed oil and gas lines is commonplace. Initial impressions of typical depictions of Nigerian or Kenyan pipelines display a strong contrast with the sanitized aesthetic of the wilderness pipeline. Consider George Osodi’s photograph capturing a woman walking along flow pipes in the Niger Delta (figure 2.6). Similarities don’t quite disappear between such shots and those such as Burtynsky’s #22. The pipes still dominate the centre and horizon of a green landscape, with vegetation defiantly persistent around and through them. If the pedestrian actions of the human figure at the centre of the scene suggest the naturalization of oil’s infrastructure in everyday life, however, it seems an uncomfortable accommodation for the viewer. The oil line may form a convenient path here, but its depicted position in the spatial environment is not immediately consonant with the kind of problems visited on a daily basis upon large numbers of the urban or rural dispossessed by oil and its transport through and out of their local environment. The uneven development and convulsive political problems of Nigeria’s petro-state are well-documented, where widespread forms of subsistence living exist disproportionately alongside the super-modernity built on exporting volumes of pristine light crude. The greater propensity (by both official and unofficial oil operators) for sabotage, theft, leakage, and accident in such territories scotches any harmonious positioning of oil, nature, and citizen. Danger is subtle and implicit in Osodi’s depiction. It is explicit and viscerally rendered in numerous images of pipeline explosions and human injury in oil’s peripheries, those of Africa in particular. In capturing the prevalent dangers of a corrupt and weakly regulated energy infrastructure, such dramatic images offer a general projection of the explosive problem of liquid fuel on a level on and beyond the local and immediate. The absence of straight, flowing lines from such scenes is instructive: the pipeline asunder, the routine movement of fuel suspended, the acrid effect of uncontained oil in the air all too visible. The man trying to wash the sooty deposits of this toxic environment from his face in Akintunde Akinleye’s photograph (figure 2.7) displays a mixture of shock, woe, and relief. Much is encoded in the wretched gesturing of his empty – though intact – plastic container. The vibrant blue bucket haunts the centre of the

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Figure 2.6 George Osodi, Near Shell’s Utorogun Flow Station, Nigeria, January 15 2006.

devastated scene. Its position under the blackened tree not only is a reminder of the baleful consequences of the common practice of illegal scooping from makeshift refineries and poorly secured, easily accessed pipelines, but it also projects the globally unequal distribution of risk-filled environments in the oil-driven world-system. The line’s smouldering devastation accentuates an informal urban environment already rent around amenity-deprived and fuel-poor communities. The photograph further underpins the irony that bodily proximity to oil and gas in Nigeria’s under-regulated petrocorridors (demonstrated in numerous press photographs, available online, depicting crowds of “casual spectators” watching the burning pipeline  – a depressingly common image) signifies socioeconomic distance from a civically shrunken public sphere and its environmentally challenged inhabitants. Explicit representations of oil’s everyday volatility in the Global North are, as has been demonstrated, less consistently available. This is perhaps testament to more regulated institutional safety frameworks, punctuated by media proclivity to the occasional spectacular disaster, though this is increasingly debatable. Might it be that it is more convenient to

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Figure 2.7 A man wipes soot from his face in the aftermath of a Lagos slum gas pipeline explosion, in December 2006. It killed five hundred people. Photo by Akintunde Akinleye for Reuters.

retain an attitude that offshores the “problem” of oil to somewhere beyond, an irresponsible elsewhere?46

Conclusion: Between the Cracks Part of my aim in this chapter has been to explore ways to connect the evident and explicit dangers of oil, such as those depicted in the preceding images, with the fundamental endangerment the extended life of “released” oil presents on a world-ecological scale. In the slipstream of the ultra-visible spectacle of Deepwater Horizon and the rise across North America and elsewhere of environmental resistance to the extractive and transmission ambitions of producers, a politically aesthetic means of depicting oil’s slow violence helps expose long and short, hidden and invisible forms of abstracted and accretive degradation and integrates it with more common visions of oil’s momentary volatility. This is what Michael Watts has identified as a structurally driven condition of “petro-violence” endemic to

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hydrocarbon modernity, one that conjoins immediate and abstract forms of ecological and social violence, and which ensures that oil in all its localities “cannot be rigidly demarcated from the crucial consequences of oil rents on the state, on national political discourse, and on the broad rhythms of accumulation.”47 A focus on oil’s disastrous effects needs to return to oil’s points of origin and follow its circulation to refining, transmission, consumption, and emission: from resource site to incidental body, from polluted “foreign” locale to domestic suburb, from atmosphere to biosphere and back again. Given boundless state and corporate enthusiasm for speculative drilling in new territories, any campaign to prevent oil’s progression faces enormous difficulty, compounded by an evidently general inability or unwillingness to radically alter or discard the dangers and inequities of fossil fuel–based power and the uneven development it reproduces. This situation is ironically emphasized by another interpretation of Akinleye’s photograph, extending its documentary impact. The man’s hanging bucket gestures at despair, but what if his trauma is located in the realization he is unable to access the resource he needs? He mourns violent injury and the destruction of his environment, but the evacuation of the source of this devastation  – the fuel and his specific energy needs  – is also lamentable. As Akinleye reminds us, this man was also trying to put out the fire.48 Here is the resource curse signified in one pathetic gesture. Grief caused by but also for the exploded pipeline reveals a fundamental dependency on a destructive yet enabling system. Such are the contradictions of an oil-dependent world-system, illuminated by cultural and aesthetic interpretations that enable fundamental questions to be asked about the immediate and ultimate value of oil and its relative costs in perpetuating the world-system of circulation and evaluation. Twenty-first century claims for energy rights, security, and “independence” are unprecedented. As global resource hunger proliferates and fixes on securing ever more fossil fuels, will “glocal” public awareness of the planetary consequences of rising petro-demand increase? The African examples demonstrate the globally relative connections and differences wrought by perspectives and definitions of “energy deprivation” within a capitalist world-ecology primarily engaged in keeping cycles of supply and demand onstream and increasing them.

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I have argued that the problematic distinction between artificial petro-structures and wild “natural” landscape is a common feature of the oil imaginary. Discrepancies between pipelines in remote and populated spaces are also commonplace. But rather than perceive these as separate provinces of oil, the transnational character of the carbon web demands we see coeval entanglements that reveal the relative exploitations of resource-borne modernity increasingly exposed by the crisis scenarios of capitalist world-ecology. This exposure, in turn, informs the eco-globalist view that ultimately places the petro-subjects of the West African oil littoral in the (sight) lines of Northern (and increasingly, Eastern) transmission – and vice versa. This view is demonstrated by making representative connections between core and periphery in the world oil-system, forging dialectical relationships. Such connections can be realized by comparing two archetypal images: one from Nigeria by the photojournalist Ed Kashi (figure 2.8), the other (figure 2.9) a shot of the TransAlaska pipeline.49 Capturing human movement on a smaller scale, in and between domestic power infrastructure, with small businesses and dwelling places surrounding the flow pipes, Kashi’s photograph exudes forms of the social.50 Oil lines replace the river as a place for settlement. Bodily and civic risk is again automatically apparent, in oil’s dominating position within both the social and physical landscape. But to what extent is this a truly explosive image? The degree to which this “river” of oil is locally penetrated and environmentally convulsive becomes key to the photograph’s petrocultural rendition. This is visible oil, albeit contained: the extent of its hidden costs and sequestered value is not automatically clear, despite forms of vulnerability reflected in the ostensibly mundane aspects of the pipeline as a “natural” but predominant obstacle to be negotiated in the routine movements of everyday life. The relative weakness of local communities’ relations with both state administration and corporate oil – and the latters’ collusive relations with each other – can, however, be visually perceived in terms of the lines’ placement. Here we witness what Watts calls the “anarchic quality” of industrial development and urban social processes that oil imposed on Nigeria.51 There are no “no access” signs here, which is ironic, given both the volume of exported Nigerian crude and the considerable amounts “lost” in fiscal corruption and in bunkering practices that

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Figure 2.8 Ed Kashi, Children Play on Oil Pipelines, Okrika, Nigeria, 2008.

see it siphoned and sold in the informal domestic market. Regulation and safety in environment, workplace, and living space appear a less immediate concern – a feature attractive to “fast capitalist” external investment. Ultimately, Kashi’s photograph renders what Kandiyoti argues is “one of the defining contradictions of present day globalization,” where civically strong organization and regulation of industry pushes it to export capital to places of the globe less robust in such areas, increasing civic and financial corruption, environmental degradation, and endemic poverty in that weaker space.52 While oil appears neither invisible nor untouchable in such a context, its disappearance is indicative. As in previous photographs, the lines govern the scene, running through the centre of shot in a vertical direction – northerly – away from the horizontally moving locals. In its composition, the photograph rehearses the well-documented facts of the Nigerian petro-state, where a drastically uneven distribution system functionalized by what Watts calls “radical fiscal centralism” has operated against local claims to ownership and control.53 Here, resource governance for those communities who live within and around Nigeria’s crude and its infrastructure remains a

Figure 2.9 Trans-Alaska pipeline, 2001. Photo by Damien Gillie, courtesy of bp Archives.

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pipe dream. Seven thousand kilometres of pipelines displace agricultural and fishing territory to suck out the fossil resources. Little of the “profits” are redistributed back to either riverine or urban communities. Instead, “the ultra-modernity of oil sits cheek by jowl with the most unimaginable poverty.”54 The powerful imposition of an uneven oil-based environment is graphically apparent. The boy in Kashi’s photo watches, apparently unaware or uncaring of his capricious position on oil’s flow. In detailing oil’s permanent domestic threat and pervasively explosive qualities, Kashi’s photographs of everyday living despite oil, when placed in comparison with pipeline images from around the world, fashion distinct scopic and scalar perspectives in world petroculture. On one comparative level, the Alaskan-Nigerian images demonstrate formal and international unevenness.55 This corresponds to Niblett’s comparison of the aesthetic distinctions between the cultural products of core and peripheral ecological regimes. Those from the Global North “at least generate the appearance of stability and perhaps offer some sense of autonomous control over the production of nature; conversely, the extent and degree of the coercions entailed in [examples from the Caribbean] ensure that no socio-ecological unity can be properly stabilized and the leaching away of resources remains a highly visible, violently disruptive affair.”56 From a world-systemic and singular ecological perspective, of course, the violence of oil, driven by the structural elements that govern and control the production, transmission, and atmospheric emissions of fossil fuel, implicates everyone and everywhere on the planet. As David Jefferess argues, the problems depicted in Kashi’s and Watts’s Nigerian oil Mordor “are a consequence of the demand for cheap oil by a certain group of people – who remain outside the narratives and photographs of the book  … those who ‘need’ and consume this oil, who are just as much a part of this ‘curse.’”57 We really ought to see images of the urban, domestic, motive, commodity, and industrial infrastructure of the Global North superimposed on such images. The extent to which that constituency governs and determines the weaker oilspace is a key engagement in contemporary energy debates, within an emerging context of controlled scarcity, debatable deficit, cheaper and unconventional oil and gas, and continuing climate crisis. As Biemann’s Black Sea Files demonstrates, a different continent is a parallel, related oil environment. Vulnerable forms of social life

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gather and cluster around oil-lines across the world, especially in capital-bereft spaces. The btc line was built, in part, for Europe’s and the US’s energy future, and the extent to which the democracies of the Global North can continue to ignore the crises oil creates in all production and transmission spaces will be testament to corporate oil’s ability to “socially license” its operations in both weak and “strong” state systems. Such crises may appear distant from the oilcompany image of the Alaskan line (figure 2.9), where first impressions of such a “wilderness” picture garner technological power and impressive scale and distance, as well as disconnection from the messy social forms displayed in African or Asian representations. The heroic oil imaginary of North American “ethical oil” depicts the pipeline zipping up the “wild” natural landscape.58 The ecoglobalist purview provided by heightened petrocultural awareness, however, discerns a fracture in this ungrounded view. Engineering’s “resourcefulness” is visually denigrated by the symbolic reading of the apparent crack in the photograph’s depiction of the earth’s surface, a visual politics that resonates in an era of shrinking polar ice, intensifying Arctic drilling, and the mooted extension of Euro-Asian pipelines into the globe’s northernmost region. A cultural perspective triangulating source, transmission, and destination can be pressed into service to question oil’s “natural” habitat and endpoints. The spectacular disclosure of the remote rig and refinery in numerous recent petro-documentaries and photographs informs the petrocultural eye, asking us to cognize the transmission and transformation of the crude products of desert, forest, or ocean subsurface in the food supply, pharmaceutical products, gas tanks, smartphones, and financial systems of hydrocarbon modernity. In addition, a world-ecological perspective demands we consistently question the extent of petroculture’s horizons. Only by reconceiving the manner in which we are all petro-politan subjects with relative degrees of connection to those peripheral zones of extraction can we unite “hidden” petrolic experience with those centralizing flows of capital, energy, and consumption that dictate how global petroculture is sustained. One way of doing this, as I have sought to show in this chapter, is by revealing how the pipeline is a worldecological object, conjoining predominant modes of modern highcarbon living with the energy infrastructures, political economies, and foreign policies of occidental and other petro-state governments

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and the carbon-democratic choices of their electorates. It behooves petroculturalists to consider how we think about and act upon the continuing circulation of oil and other fossil forms of energy deepening in an ecologically unsustainable world-petro-system. This can be influenced by how we see, narrate, and interpret beyond oil – and how, more often than not, we don’t. notes 1 Andrew Pendakis and Ursula Biemann, “This Is Not a Pipeline: Thoughts on the Politico-Aesthetics of Oil,” Imaginations 3-2 (2012): 6–15, 8. 2 Amitav Ghosh, “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel,” The New Republic (2 March 1992): 29–34, 30–1. In the wake of the emergence of petroculture as a field of study, Ghosh blogged a reflection on his original piece, including an expanded bibliography. See “Petrofiction and Petroculture,” Amitav Ghosh, 27 August 2014, accessed 29 July 2016, http://amitavghosh.com/blog/?p=6441. 3 Economic arguments have emerged for a supply-side climate coalition strategy to purchase “rival” carbon deposits and leave them unextracted. See Bård Harstad, “Buy Coal! A Case for Supply-Side Environmental Policy,” Journal of Political Economy 120, no. 1 (2012): 77–115. The highly publicized failure of the most ambitious and globally prominent anti-drilling initiative – the Ecuadorean government’s proposals to external environmental and political agencies to fund the non-extraction of the massive oil deposits in the Yasuní National Park – is sobering. See Elissa Dennis, “Keep It in the Ground: An Alternative Vision for Petroleum Emerges in Ecuador,” Common Dreams, 1 July 2010, https://www.commondreams.org/ view/2010/07/01-8, and “Ecuador Approves Yasuni Park Oil Drilling in Amazon Rainforest,” bbc News, 16 August 2013, http://www.bbc .co.uk/news/world-latin-america-23722204, both accessed 29 July 2016. 4 Frederick Buell, “A Short History of Oil Cultures: Or, the Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance,” Journal of American Studies 46, no. 2 (2012): 273–93, 274. 5 Mimi Sheller, “Global Energy Cultures of Speed and Lightness: Materials, Mobilities and Transnational Power,” Theory, Culture & Society 31, no. 5 (2014): 127–54, 147.

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6 John Urry, Societies beyond Oil: Oil Dregs and Social Futures (London: Zed Books, 2013), ch. 4. 7 “Editors’ Column: Literature and Energy Futures,” pmla 126, no. 2 (2011): 323–6, 324. 8 Urry (Societies beyond Oil, 94) calls this “carbon populism,” where “carbon enthusiasm” is generated by all manner of cultural productions and affective behaviours. I have argued elsewhere that oil is not sufficiently acknowledged as the fantastic, emancipating substance it is – and that petroculturalists and environmentalists alike need to begin to accept this quality as a means to advance their own claims and solutions concerning oil’s replacements and endpoints. See my “The Resources of Fiction,” Reviews in Cultural Theory 4, no. 2 (2013): 1–24. 9 Mathew Huber, Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom and the Forces of Capital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 10 Jason Moore, “Ecology, Capital and the Nature of Our Times: Accumulation and Crisis in the Capitalist World-Ecology,” Journal of World-Systems Research 17, no. 1 (2011): 108–47. On “Regularization” see page 134. 11 Michael Niblett, “World-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature,” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticsm 16, no. 1 (2012): 15–30; 22. 12 Imre Szeman, “System Failure: Oil, Futurity and the Anticipation of Disaster,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 4 (2007): 805–23. 13 Industry consistently reiterates the need to match growth in world demand. In their pr booklet Upstream Dialogue: The Facts On: Oil Sands (2012), for example, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers states that “global demand is expected to increase 40%.” Such figures, of course, conveniently attest to the market necessity of their key (and geographically constrained) product. 14 The anti-fracking movement has produced considerable artistic responses. See Dazed magazine’s 2013 article “Top Ten Anti-Fracking Artists” for an introductory roster: accessed 29 July 2016, http:// www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/16925/1/top-ten-anti -fracking-artists. On petro-documentaries, see Imre Szeman, “Crude Aesthetics: The Politics of Oil Documentaries,” Journal of American Studies 46, no. 2 (2012): 423–49. 15 Publisher’s description of subject of Samuel Avery’s The Pipeline and the Paradigm: Keystone xl, Tar Sands and the Battle to Defuse the Carbon Bomb (2013), accessed 28 July 2016, http://www.rukapress

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.com/books/the-pipeline-and-the-paradigm/. The “whack-a-mole” nature of the system is exemplified by the fact that President Obama’s high-profile rejection of the Keystone xl permit in 2015 overshadowed the approval of the Dakota Access pipeline – a pipeline almost as long as Keystone, and which would soon become even more controversial. 16 Bob Dudley, “The Exploration Imperative: Speech to the World Petroleum Congress,” delivered 5 December 2011, Qatar. Available to read and download at http://www. http://www.bp.com/en/global/ corporate/press/speeches/the-exploration-imperative-bob-dudley -speech-to-the-world-petroleum-congress.html, accessed 26 July 2016. Dudley’s speeches and quoted remarks (available on bp’s webpages) since Deepwater reiterate a marked determination to continue oil production well into the future. 17 Szeman, “Crude Aesthetics,” 433. 18 “Oil and the Left: An Interview with Imre Szeman,” Platypus 29 (2010), accessed 25 July 2016, http://platypus1917.org/2010/11/06/ oil-and-the-left-an-interview-with-imre-szeman/. Various activist groups involved in blocking the construction of pipelines or fracking installations might reply that you simply stand in front of it, or chain yourself to it, or build a tree blockade and then a social media platform reporting in “real time” from direct action in the construction corridor. See, for example, 350.org, @TarSandsAction, @KXLBlockade, @tarsandsRESIST, @Occupy_Pipeline, @Unist’ot’enCamp, and the First Nations movement #idlenomore, among many others. In the UK, groups such as Frack Off (http://frack-off.org.uk/) form fronts against shale gas exploration. But other highly effective forms of protests occur in the second-order “presence” of oil’s domain, especially in the various arenas of public culture. In the UK, for example, Platform London (www.platformlondon.org) and others such as Art Not Oil (www.artnotoil.org.uk), bp or not bp? (www.bp-or-not-bp. org), and Liberate Tate (www.liberatetate.org) held high-profile protests against bp’s sponsorship of the London 2012 Olympiad. They have made hi-viz art-activist interventions at exhibitions and events held by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the British Museum, and the Tate Galleries in London – all recipients of bp sponsorship. Liberate Tate had a notable success in March 2016, when Tate Museums announced the end of their sponsorship with bp, hailed by Platform London as “a victory for cultural divestment.” See “bp’s Sponsorship

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graeme macdonald of Tate Is Over!” accessed 25 July 2016, http://platformlondon. org/2016/03/11/bps-sponsorship-of-tate-is-over/. Greenpeace has made highly visible protest interventions at international sporting events sponsored by oil companies. Such campaigns effectively target the widespread cultural subtending of oil companies. These ventures are perceived by activists as a means for energy companies to improve their image management and ultimately secure oil’s future use. Figures 2.1 and 2.2 are in Ernst Logar, Invisible Oil (Vienna: Springer, 2011). “Through a Glass, Darkly: Visualization, Revelation and Reflection in Ernst Logar’s Invisible Oil,” in Logar, Invisible Oil, 47–56, 48. Peter Troxler, “Oil and the City,” in Logar, Invisible Oil, 19–27, 26. Ursula Biemann, Black Sea Files (2005), accessed 4 July 2016, http:// www.geobodies.org/art-and-videos/black-sea-files. The relative transnational visibility of the btc line – even when it is buried it leaves a scar on the rural landscape – indicates areas of regulatory weakness and corporate capture on a continental scale. It “disappears” as it enters Western European territory, literally and metaphorically burying evidence as to origin and destination. For Andrew Barry, bp’s attempt to promote the line’s invisibility meant it had to become “demonstrable and made public.” The company efforts to contain the “visible impact” of the pipeline as (in the words of one press release) “safe, silent and unseen,” only served to render more abstract elements uncontainable, such as environmental awareness, which became heightened and more diffuse. Barry, Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), 116. James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello, The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London (New York: Verso, 2012), 8. Rafael Kandiyoti, Pipelines: Flowing Oil and Crude Politics (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 11. Marriott and Minio-Paluello, The Oil Road, viiii. The aesthetic element is often a visual one, which forms an ironic comparison with the main complaint against the onshore development of renewable infrastructures, especially wind turbines, so often categorized as visibly ugly. The burial of pipelines proves a convenient, if ironic, way to avoid similar “environmental” objections. Christopher F. Jones, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 150.

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28 Jeff D. Makholm, The Political Economy of Pipelines: A Century of Comparative Institutional Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 8. 29 Ibid., 9. 30 Ibid., 11. 31 Ibid., 12. 32 Edward Burtynsky, Oil (Steidl, 2009). See Paul Roth, “Edward Burtynsky: Oil – A Ballardian Interpretation” (2010), 5 January 2010, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.ballardian.com/edward-burtynskyoil-a-ballardian-interpretation. See also Maria Whiteman, “Oil Landscapes,” American Book Review 33, no. 3 (2012): 6; Merle Patchett and Andriko Lozowy, “Reframing the Canadian Oil Sands,” Imaginations 3, no. 2 (2012): 140–68, 145. 33 Roth, “Edward Burtynsky.” 34 The last thirty years has seen a worldwide spate of pipeline privatizations. As Jerome à Paris notes, not all pipelines are in use all the time, yet more are built as a lucrative capital opportunity: “the only thing needed to commit to a pipeline investment (and spend all that money upfront) is a reasonable certainty that the pipeline will be full enough for long enough.” “How to Get a Pipeline Built: Revisited,” The Oil Drum: Europe, 6 November 2010, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www .theoildrum.com/tag/pipelines. 35 It is perhaps best effected by the kind of satire provided by the Onion headline of 11 August 2010: “Millions of Barrels of Oil Safely Reach Port in Major Environmental Catastrophe,” accessed 28 July 2016, http://www.theonion.com/article/millions-of-barrels-of-oil-safely -reach-port-in-ma-17875. 36 Russia is a high-profile example, creating chokepoints for geopolitical gain in neighbouring states such as Georgia, Belarus, and Ukraine. 37 Makholm, The Political Economy of Pipelines, 4. 38 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011), 8. 39 The felling (and “reclaiming”) of swathes of boreal forest has been one of the most controversial features of the Athabasca oil sands development area. 40 Moore, “Ecology, Capital and the Nature of Our Times.” 41 Szeman, “System Failure,” 817. 42 Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (London: Verso [1984], 2010). George Monbiot, “A

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graeme macdonald Ghost Agreement,” 1 November 2010, accessed 30 July 2016, http:// www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/11/01/a-ghost-agreement/. Timothy Morton’s book Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) is a central work in this context. Owen Logan, “Where Pathos Rules: The Resource Curse in Visual Culture,” in Flammable Societies: Studies on the Socio-Economics of Oil and Gas, ed. Owen Logan and John Andrew McNeish (London: Pluto, 2012), 105. Pipeline construction projects have met resistance and sabotage from vested interests since the beginning of oil extraction to the present. The Nobels’ Azeri pipeline in Baku in the 1870s met fierce resistance, as did the first Pennsylvania lines in the 1860s from teamsters aghast at the speedy obsolescence of their operation. A 2011 report by the Guardian newspaper noted the prolific amount of fatal pipeline explosions in African cities, linking these to an unregulated environment that allows companies to site pipelines above ground. See John Vidal, “Lethal Lines That Tempt the Desperately Poor,” 12 September 2011, accessed 30 July 2016, http://bit.ly/ W8jJKK. This is not as simplistic as a North/South divide implies. “Safety” is a term plastered over the homepage of the Association of Oil Pipe Lines website (www.aopl.org) because the industry cannot guarantee it. All lines fail routinely. bp’s Trans-Alaska pipeline, for example, has had a number of large- and small-scale accidents. The level of reportage and monitoring is clearly significant here. Russian and postSoviet territory spills are prolific, for example, but failure accounts are difficult to gain. See Greenpeace, “Black Ice: Russia’s Ongoing Spill Crisis,” accessed 30 July 2016, http://tinyurl.com/d54y855. A similar scenario exists for the North Sea. See “Oil Companies Going Unpunished for Thousands of North Sea Spills,” Guardian, 25 October 2012, accessed 30 July 2016, http://tinyurl.com/dxhtmnd. Also relevant is Alex Luhn, “The Town That Reveals How Russia Spills Two Deepwater Horizons of Oil Each Year,” Guardian, 5 August 2016, accessed 6 August 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/ environment/2016/aug/05/the-town-that-reveals-how-russia-spills -two-deepwater-horizons-of-oil-each-year?utm_source=esp&utm _medium=Email&utm_campaign=KIITG_Russia_040816&utm_term =184764&subid=41387&CMP=ema-60. 

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47 “Petro-Violence in Nigeria and Ecuador,” in Violent Environments, ed. Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 189–212, 190. 48 See “Akintunde Akinleye’s Best Photograph,” on a shot Reuters declared one of the best of the last decade. 31 July 2014, accessed 1 August 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jul/31/ akintunde-akinleye-best-photograph-nigerian-pipeline-explosion. 49 See National Science Resource Center, “The Trans-Alaska Pipeline: Meeting Nature’s Challenges,” accessed 14 October 2016, www .propertiesofmatter.si.edu/pipeline.html. 50 Ed Kashi and Michael Watts, Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta (New York: Powerhouse Books, 2008). 51 “The Shock of Modernity: Petroleum, Protest and Fast Capitalism in an Industrializing Society,” in Reworking Modernity: Capitalisms and Symbolic Discontent, ed. Allan Pred and Michael John Watts (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 21–64, 28. 52 Kandiyoti, Pipelines, 38. 53 Watts, “Sweet and Sour,” in Kashi and Watts, Curse, 36–47, 45. 54 Ibid., 44. Among the raft of statistics to explain the collapse of Nigerian civic life, the most dismal is that “85 percent of oil revenues accrue to 1 percent of the population.” (43). 55 Kashi often employs contrast, with forms of social and economic production (wood chopping, fishing and baking, play, etc.) backdropped by storage tanks, gas flares, and pipelines. 56 Niblett, “World-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature,” 23. 57 David Jefferess, “Oil’s Long Shadow,” in American Book Review 33, no. 3 (2012): 5–6, 6. 58 The line is shod in holders to allow animal migration, avoid permafrost groundmelt, and strengthen support in geo-climatically sensitive zones. It is zigzagged to allow expansion and contraction and prevent rupture. On the imaginary of “Ethical Oil,” see Sheena Wilson, “Gendering Oil: Tracing Western Petro-Sexual Relations,” in Oil Culture, ed. Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 244–63, and Mark Simpson’s chapter in this volume.

3 Who We Are and What We Do: Canada as a Pipeline Nation Darin Barney

“We should take pride in who we are and what we do.” So said the Honourable Jim Prentice, former Conservative minister of the environment and then–vice president of the Canadian banking and financial services conglomerate cibc, speaking at a June 2012 meeting of the Business Council of British Columbia.1 The remark implicitly rebuked people opposed to a number of pipeline projects linked to the ongoing exploitation of Alberta’s oil sands. In Prentice’s view, such people labour under a false and counterproductive impression of who Canadians are and what it is that we do: “We extract resources from our abundant natural deposits and rely on the proceeds of those sales to help provide an exceptional standard of living … We’re blessed in every sense to profit as much as we do.” That is what we do and thus (though Prentice makes for a curious Marxist) that is who we are.2 One can hardly imagine a more precise statement of the material and existential substance of Canadian national identity, at least as it has been conjured, reproduced, and internalized over two centuries of the staples economy in British North America.3 No matter that it effaces the experience of those whose ongoing dispossession has been the condition of its possibility, as well as that of newcomers who have never extracted a resource, seen proceeds, or been blessed by profits and an exceptional standard of living. This is presumably not the “we” to whom Mr Prentice refers. The statement has the virtue of soberly articulating at least one of the truths of the Canadian state. For those who get rich and those who enjoy comfort in this country, much of it can be attributed to the fact that for centuries we have been committed to systematically exploiting our disproportionate share of the global

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standing-reserve.4 Indeed, as Mr Prentice observed, “We do it better than anyone in the world.” Whether that is something in which to take pride is an open question. It certainly is something that has been mobilized ideologically, especially in relation to infrastructures that enable the extraction, storage, and transportation of resource commodities. Such infrastructure has been idealized not only as instrumental to the Canadian economy but, moreover, as materializing the Canadian nation. Following Benedict Anderson, it has become commonplace to describe nations as “imagined communities.”5 It might be more accurate to say that Canada was not so much imagined as fabricated, produced materially by means of infrastructures onto which an imaginary nation was subsequently (and repeatedly) projected. As Jonathan Vance has written in his account of twelve infrastructure projects that “shaped the nation” – including the Trans-Canada Highway; grain elevators; telephone, postal, and electrical systems; airways and airports  – “infrastructure, in addition to its immense practical value, had psychological value.”6 That psychological value accrued to the capacity of transportation, trade, and logistical infrastructure, built to support the possibility of transnational commerce, to mediate a “national consciousness,” something which Laurentian industrial and political elites were also keen to manufacture. Making railways and highways would be what “made us Canadian.” Building bridges and tunnels was also “building a nation with a strong sense of itself.”7 Or, as Maurice Charland has put it in his definitive account of technological nationalism in Canada: “the popular mind, like the land, must be occupied.”8 Infrastructure accomplishes both. Materially, space-binding infrastructure spans far-flung territories and creates a common economic and political space supportive of commercial exchange and capital accumulation. Discursively, infrastructure provides a medium for a rhetoric of national purpose and identification that summons collective investment in large-scale technological projects presented as coinciding with the nation’s interests. This is the recipe for technological nationalism in Canada: the nation needs infrastructure to bind it physically, and massive infrastructure projects that serve the interests of capital need the imperative of national purpose in order to be considered legitimate. Infrastructure is materially and discursively performative: it constitutes in words and things the nation whose authorization

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it requires to proceed smoothly. In both respects, technology  – as means and end, material and ideology – constitutes the nation from and as “communication itself,” with communication understood in its richest sense, encompassing both the transportation of bodies and things and the attempted (but imperfectly accomplished) circulation of shared meaning.9 Pipelines do not make Vance’s list of nation-shaping infrastructure and are mentioned by Charland only in passing.10 The first natural gas pipeline in Canada was built at Trois-Rivières, Quebec, in 1853. The first oil pipeline was built at Petrolia, Ontario, in 1862. Oil and gas pipelines in Canada thus predate Confederation but did not really start to proliferate until after Imperial Oil’s #1 well at Leduc, Alberta, came in a gusher on 13 February 1947. If, as every Canadian schoolchild knows, the Canadian Pacific Railway was the infrastructural midwife to Canada’s birth as a country, then pipelines have been the material infrastructure of Canada’s unfinished rebirth as a distinctly “modern” nation.11 Debates over oil and gas pipeline projects, including especially the TransCanada Pipeline built in the 1950s, and the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, first proposed in the 1970s, approved in 2011, and still not built, represent crucial moments in the political economy of twentieth-century Canada.12 There currently exist over 835,000 kilometres of gathering, feeder, transmission, and distribution pipelines for oil and natural gas in Canada.13 Laid end to end, that is over two hundred times the distance covered by the St Lawrence Seaway system, more than one hundred times the length of the Trans-Canada Highway, and twenty-two times the length of the entire National Highway System.14 Oil and gas transported by these pipelines – 5.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas per year and three million barrels of crude oil per day, through the transmission system alone – heat the vast majority of Canadian homes and supply over two-thirds of the overall energy used in Canada, including 95 per cent of the energy used for transportation.15 Pipelines are, arguably, the most extensive and important infrastructure connecting urban Canada to the vast rural standing-reserve of resources that energizes and sustains its economy and its self-image. Nevertheless, like the ether, pipelines are a mostly invisible infrastructure, owing to the fact that almost all of them are buried underground, running beneath farms and wilderness, permafrost and

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neighbourhoods, private, crown, and Aboriginal land, and seldom register with our daily experience. In this respect, pipelines are pieces of equipment that are ready-to-hand but not present-at-hand.16 They are imperceptible devices that deliver their commodities (and power and wealth to their operators) without notice until something goes wrong – a leak, usually – and they suddenly become present, briefly demanding our attention. Even then, we mostly do not notice them. According to Alberta’s Energy Resources Conservation Board, between 1975 and 2012 there were 28,666 unintentional releases of crude oil from pipelines in that province alone, an average of two per day.17 The US Department of Transportation reports 5,613 “significant incidents” across pipeline systems in the United States between 1993 and 2012, including 367 fatalities, 1465 injuries, and nearly $6.5 billion in property damage.18 Sometimes, large spills  – such as the 2011 leak of twenty-eight thousand barrels of oil from the Rainbow Pipeline operated by Plains Midstream Canada near Little Buffalo, Alberta  – garner significant public attention.19 However, the discrepancy between the regularity of failure and the sporadic nature of public concern suggests that pipeline spills, the majority of which are considered “minor” even when they are “significant,” have become mundane distractions in the attentional economy of petrocultures. Most people are probably prepared to accept the Canadian government’s repeated assertion that “Pipelines are currently the safest and most efficient method of transporting large volumes of crude oil and petroleum products over long distances.”20 Pipelines are ordinary and unseen, even, for the most part, when they fail. Perhaps this is why, despite their space-binding qualities, they have rarely been invoked as one of those infrastructures onto which the national imaginary might be projected. Pipelines do not stand proudly on the horizon in the manner of prairie grain elevators, radio towers, or bridges across a great sea. Instead, they hide underground, insulated from the sort of affective attachment required to fetishize infrastructure technologies as objects of national identity. However, the low profile of pipelines in the discourse of technological nationalism in Canada is changing, as several pipeline developments associated with the transportation of bitumen extracted from Alberta’s oil sands have recently become present to Canadian (and international) public attention as sites of political investment and contest. Moreover, the promotion of these developments by both

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state and capital has raised anew the question of infrastructure as a medium of Canadian “national” interest and identity, only this time the infrastructure poised to materialize “who we are what we do” is not, for example, a network that allows us to pack up the station wagon for a cross-country road trip or to gather in front of a screen on Saturday night to watch the Habs wallop the Leafs. Nor is it even a digital communication network that will position Canada to lead the global information “revolution.”21 It is, instead, an infrastructure for transporting toxic black goo from a huge pit in the middle of nowhere to distant markets where it will be refined, sold, and burned, a commodity whose contribution to dangerous trends in global climate has exposed Canada’s international reputation to considerable damage.22 Moreover, the economic benefits of this infrastructure will be concentrated in a province (and unevenly distributed even there) that has historically rejected the alleged imperatives of a national interest in relation to which its elites have considered themselves misrecognized and disadvantaged.23 If this is the new National Dream, it is an uneasy one. As Charland has observed, the strictly instrumental character of technological nationalism, devoid of “substance or commonality” beyond collective investment in technological development itself, leaves it particularly vulnerable to contradiction and incoherence.24 This chapter will examine the curious, often incoherent, and contradictory politics of nationalism attached to the development of oil sands pipelines in Canada.

Extremely Heavy Crude Oil sands are comprised of sand, water, clay, and bitumen, a viscous form of crude oil that is often described as “extremely heavy” (as opposed to “light” and “sweet”). The extremely heavy crude that saturates oil sands is categorized as “unconventional” because, unlike conventional oil deposits, bitumen cannot simply be pumped from the ground and transported to a refinery by container or pipeline. Before it can be transported, bitumen must be separated from the compound of sand, water, and clay that is its medium. There are two primary methods for extracting bitumen from oil sand deposits.25 The first is surface mining, whereby shallow deposits are mined, crushed, and diluted with hot water to create a slurry whose bituminous froth is then skimmed for further processing and transport.

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The second is so-called in situ extraction, whereby horizontal wells are drilled into deposits deeper than 75 metres below the surface. In a process known as steam-assisted gravity drainage (sagd), highpressure steam is pumped into an upper wellbore to heat the bitumen, causing it to lose viscosity and seep down into a lower wellbore from which it is pumped out. It is estimated that 80 per cent of Alberta’s oil sands deposits are recoverable by in situ methods, with the remaining 20 per cent recoverable by surface mining.26 It takes an average of two tonnes of mined oil sands to produce one barrel of synthetic crude oil.27 Once extracted, in order to flow through a pipeline, bitumen must be diluted to reduce its viscosity, typically with natural gas condensate. It is for this reason that pipelines for transporting diluted bitumen, or “dilbit,” to ports or refineries are typically accompanied by companion pipelines transporting condensate from those ports or refineries back to the site of extraction and upgrading.28 The magnitude of the resource contained in the oil sands of Alberta is truly impressive. Oil sands  – first discovered near Wainwright, Alberta, in 1923 and first mined at the Great Canadian Oil Sands site in 1967 – lie beneath 140,200 square kilometres of territory in the Athabasca, Cold Lake, and Peace River regions of northern Alberta, representing an estimated 1.84 trillion barrels of crude bitumen. Of this, 168.7 billion barrels (9 per cent) are recoverable using current technology and are thus counted as “proven reserves.” Added to Alberta’s comparatively meagre 1.5 billion barrels of conventional crude reserves, this represents 98 per cent of Canada’s oil reserves and ranks Alberta (and Canada) third in terms of proven reserves globally, behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela and ahead of Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait. In 2014, Alberta produced about 2.3 million barrels of bitumen per day, with a projected increase to 3.7 million barrels per day by 2021. In 2016, there were 131 oil sands extraction projects operating in Alberta.29 The economic activity associated with the oil sands yields numbers of a similar scale. In 2013, capital spending on oil sands mining, in situ extraction, and upgrading reached $32.7 billion. Industry revenues in 2014 reached nearly $66.5 billion, with royalties to the province of Alberta totalling $5.2 billion.30 The Government of Alberta estimates that 133,000 people were employed in the province’s upstream energy sector and that the sector accounts for roughly 36 per cent of the province’s gross domestic product.31

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According to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (capp), oil sands contributed to 478,000 direct, indirect, or induced jobs in the oil and gas industry in Canada in 2015.32 In this respect, the future would appear to be bright, despite a recent downturn in global oil prices and the pressure this has placed on the Alberta economy. The International Energy Agency predicts that global demand for oil will increase by 14 per cent by 2040 from 2014 levels, representing over 25 per cent of world energy demands.33 Meanwhile, capp forecasts that production of oil sands bitumen will exceed five million barrels per day by 2030.34 As I will discuss below, the “facts” concerning the projected economic and employment benefits of oil sands development are highly contested and therefore difficult to discern. The investments required to extract bitumen from the oil sands and deliver it to market are extensive and risky, especially as Alberta crude faces pressure from other sources of unconventional oil, such as the Bakken Shale fields of North Dakota.35 Still, the oil sands are generally thought to represent a resource with great potential to deliver massive rents, well into the future, to those who are positioned to exploit them.36 For this to happen, among myriad other considerations at play in the profitable production and marketing of oil sands crude, one fact stands as indisputable: once extracted, the bitumen must move. Diluted bitumen can travel over land by tanker truck, rail, and pipeline. From the point of view of oil sands producers, pipelines are the most economical, efficient, and secure means of transporting bitumen, and a deficit of pipeline capacity relative to available supply has been cited as the source of foregone revenues in the order of $15 billion per year.37 The attribution of lost revenue to limited pipeline capacity has been disputed – critics argue that price differentials applied to bitumen arise from the higher costs of refining it, not backups behind full pipelines  – but the fact that industry advocates would resort to such an alarmist argument signals the depth of their desire to accelerate exploitation of this resource by building more pipelines to carry it.38 As oil and gas economist Andrew Potter has put it, “Pipeline capacity out of western Canada is adequate for the short term, but substantial progress must be made on this front … Canada needs pipe – and lots of it – to avoid the opportunity cost of stranding over a million barrels a day of potential crude oil growth.”39

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Not everyone agrees that Canada needs pipe, or that an additional million barrels a day of extremely heavy crude drawn from the oil sands is an opportunity too good to pass up. The oil sands have provoked sustained criticism and active opposition both within Alberta and without, most of it motivated by concerns about their environmental impact.40 Bitumen extraction consumes a massive volume of freshwater. The Pembina Institute, an environmental think tank with headquarters in Alberta, reports that oil sands extraction consumed roughly 1.1 billion barrels of freshwater in 2011 and projects 4.8 million barrels (the equivalent of 309 Olympic-size swimming pools) per day by 2022, nearly all of it drawn from the Athabasca River.41 Extracting bitumen also burns great quantities of fossil fuels – whether coal-fired electricity or diesel fuel for surface mining machines and vehicles, or natural gas to make heat and steam for in situ sagd – and is estimated to produce greenhouse gas emissions at a rate three to four times higher than that of conventional oil production in North America. This makes the oil sands “the fastest growing source of climate change pollution in Canada.”42 Also, the residual waste produced by surface mining is stored in tailings ponds whose unstable containment risks fouling nearby ecosystems. In 2010, the total volume of oil sands tailings held in Alberta “ponds” was 830 million cubic metres, a number projected to increase dramatically if currently approved oil sands projects are pursued.43 These characteristics of bitumen extraction, together with the view that production of this resource is likely to increase global dependence on fossil fuels and undermine efforts to arrest petroleum consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and global warming, have led to characterization of bitumen as “dirty oil” and have spawned a transnational environmental movement determined to prevent its harvest.44 Along with opposing oil sands development directly, actors involved in this movement have targeted pipelines as the necessary infrastructure for transporting the commodity to market. In this view, if the bitumen cannot move, it cannot be a commodity and its exploitation will cease to be economically attractive.45 A wide variety of actors have also contested the development of pipeline infrastructure itself. Pipelines (and the tanker vessels connected to them) traverse wilderness, wildlife migration routes, aquifers, wetlands and watercourses, marine ecosystems, urban and rural communities,

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agricultural lands, and Aboriginal territories. Their construction is disruptive of these and, once built and operating, they sometimes leak or explode.46 Additionally, economic benefits derived from pipelines and the commodities they transport are unevenly distributed among their operators and the local stakeholders who are disproportionately exposed to their risks. In North America, new pipelines require approval by government agencies mandated to consider the public interest – including environmental protection – in their development, which provides a high-profile and consequential venue for activists and stakeholders to contest their construction. In considering applications for proposed pipelines, Canada’s National Energy Board (neb) is mandated to consider, along with various technical and economic factors, “any public interest that in the Board’s opinion may be affected by the issuance of the certificate or the dismissal of the application.”47 In recent years, consideration of the public interest in the environmental impacts of pipelines has been carried out by Joint Review Panels charged by the neb and the federal Ministry of the Environment with reporting on these impacts, a process that involves public submissions and hearings, often in the communities that are to be directly affected by the proposed development.48 Accordingly, proposed oil sands pipelines have become a flashpoint for political opposition, notwithstanding the considerable riches they promise to yield. It is in this context – contention over the benefits and harms of developing the oil sands and their related infrastructure, and the threat this poses to the interests of state and capital in exploiting this resource – that pipelines have emerged as the latest medium of technological nationalism in Canada.

The Best News of All In an earlier version of the speech in which he characterized the exploitation of natural resources as “who we are and what we do,” former cabinet minister Jim Prentice described proposed oil sands pipelines and several other energy projects as “nation-building infrastructure,” asserting that “the build-out of Canada’s energy infrastructure could be the main driver of our economic growth.” He went on to specify that “With our enormous untapped resource wealth, Canada stands uniquely positioned to achieve economic growth and job creation while securing new markets for our resources. And the

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best news of all is that all this development can be led by the private sector.” Thus, Prentice concluded, “the era of nation-building is far from over,” adding that “Nation-building is always a bet on the future. It requires courage, commitment and vision, tempered by a clear-eyed assessment of how the future will unfold.” 49 According to the Government of Alberta, “Only 13 percent of the world’s oil is accessible to private investment – the rest is controlled by national governments. Of this accessible oil, 51 percent is found in Alberta’s oil sands.”50 This – the availability of a gigantic collective resource for private appropriation – is what Mr Prentice refers to as “the best news of all.” It might seem contradictory that a project cast as “nation-building” would define itself in opposition to national, public control of a key resource and, instead, celebrate its exploitation by relatively few private (and, in many cases, foreign) corporations in their own interests, but this construction is consistent with the formula for technological nationalism. The primary concern of technological nationalism is to represent the particular, private interest of the (increasingly transnational) capitalist class in developing commodity infrastructure as the general, collective interest of the nation. In this process, the concrete interests of capital are abstracted and projected onto the body of the nation as whole, whose interests are reduced to those of something called “the economy.” Actual corporations and the actual people who control them to extract actual wealth give way to abstract categories of economic growth and job “creation,” defined by statistically aggregated “person-years” of employment whose correspondence to real jobs that real workers might have or keep is tenuous at best. Typically, this appeal to economic interest is augmented by an association of productivity, innovation, and growth with loftier ideals of national independence and sovereignty, and by a cultivated fear of their loss. In the Canadian context, this has often produced a shared commitment to develop technological infrastructures deemed necessary to advance these ideals and secure the interests for which they stand.51 In this way, collective investment in what is presented as the national interest – for example, pipelines – becomes an urgent moral imperative shared by all, one that cannot withstand timidity or doubt, but instead calls upon heroic qualities with which we long to be identified, qualities such as “courage, commitment and vision.”52

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It is something like this investment, and these qualities, that former prime minister Stephen Harper attempted to summon in raising the prospect of Canada’s future as a “global energy superpower.”53 Speaking in London in 2006, Harper described Canada’s impressive performance in the areas of hydroelectricity, natural gas, and uranium production, but minimized these as “only the beginning” in light of the discovery that an “ocean of oil-soaked sand lies under the muskeg of northern Alberta.” He went on to characterize the task of exploiting the oil sands as “an enterprise of epic proportions, akin to the building of the pyramids or China’s Great Wall. Only bigger.” The enterprise of building the pyramids left behind the pyramids, while that of the Great Wall left the Great Wall. That Harper invoked these enduring global treasures as comparable to (but lesser than) a project whose chief legacy will be a great scar upon the landscape, thousands of kilometres of buried pipelines, scores of potentially toxic tailings ponds, continued rise in global temperatures, and the fattened accounts of a handful of transnational energy industrialists, speaks volumes about the perceived need to cultivate nationalist affect in relation to this infrastructure. The same goes for the former prime minister’s characterization of the technology required to process bitumen as “Brobdingnagian,” by which he meant to signal the gigantic opportunity for profitable foreign investment represented by the oil sands. It bears noting that Brobdingnag, the mythical land of giants in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, is an imaginary country, much like the one that must be conjured to accomplish an identification of Canada’s national interest with that of the global energy industry and those who profit from it. In this imaginary country, jobs spring from the ground in great numbers and seem to go on forever, and the public coffers are always full of revenues generated by taxes and resource royalties. Cultivating a perception that the economic benefits of oil sands development will be socialized in the form of jobs for working class Canadians and revenue support for public services has been crucial to the effort to frame the project as a national imperative. A key document in this effort has been a report projecting economic impacts of oil sands development up to 2035, published in 2011 by the Canadian Energy Research Institute (ceri). ceri is funded by Natural Resources Canada, Alberta Energy, and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, but describes itself as “an

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independent, not-for-profit research environment,” dedicated to providing “independent and objective research.”54 The ceri report, which has been cited widely by private- and public-sector supporters of oil sands development, estimated that new oil sands projects would have a gdp impact for Canada of $2.1 trillion by 2035, including 905,000 jobs. The Canadian government’s share of tax revenues over the same period was estimated at $311 billion; the Alberta government’s total revenue was projected to be $455 billion ($105 billion in taxes plus $350 billion in royalties). When added to existing oil sands projects, the cumulative total of royalties projected for the province of Alberta over the next twenty-five years is presented as exceeding $623 billion.55 Numbers such as this made it seem self-evident that the oil sands are so central to Canada’s economic prosperity and standard of living that their development, including construction of the infrastructure required to transport bitumen to market, is a unifying national purpose of historic proportions. However, it bears noting that the economic benefits projected by ceri were concentrated heavily in the province of Alberta, even after federal tax revenue is taken into account. According to the ceri report, 94 per cent of the projected gdp impact of new oil sands projects over the next twenty-five years will occur in Alberta, with only 6 per cent occurring in the rest of Canada. In terms of employment gains, 85 per cent will be realized in Alberta.56 Thus, manufacturing national legitimacy for oil sands pipelines requires a two-pronged ideological operation: first, the economic interests of the energy industry must be socialized in the form of the promise of jobs and public revenues; and, second, the interests of the country as a whole must be identified with those of the province of Alberta (or at least that portion of it that benefits from the energy industry).57 Alberta Energy has declared that “Alberta’s oil sands reserves are enough to meet Canada’s current oil demand for almost 400 years,” but no one seriously suggests that this, rather than export aimed at maximizing profit in the short term, is how the resource will actually be used.58 For the most part, proposed oil sands pipelines such as the Keystone xl, Northern Gateway, and Energy East are for transporting bitumen out of the country as fast as possible, not husbanding the resource for domestic use. There is also little hope that Canadians will see reduced fuel prices as a result of oil sands development. If additional pipeline

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capacity reduces the market differential attached to extremely heavy crude (as pipeline advocates routinely insist it will), the price of bitumen will rise closer to global crude benchmarks, increasing industry revenues but exerting no downward pressure on gasoline prices in Canada.59 Concerns about domestic energy supply and prices at the pump might be more populist than critical, but they do point to the difficulty proponents face in constructing pipelines as “national” infrastructure. Industry commentators consistently remark that “few people would dispute that the oil sands benefit Canada economically.”60 This suggests that while there might be reason to oppose oil sands development and pipeline projects on environmental or political grounds, the case for their economic benefit to Canada is closed. However, as with any consensus, this obscures a more contested field than such claims indicate. A recent report prepared for the Polaris Institute and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (pi/ccpa) casts doubt on the presumption that oil sands development is unambiguously in the national economic interest.61 The report describes oil sands development as the latest iteration of what Harold Innis famously labelled the “staples trap,” whereby production of staple commodities for large-scale export requires massive up-front (often foreign) capital investment in production and transportation infrastructure, which subsequently creates pressure to develop and export the unprocessed resource quickly and in great volumes, rather than wait for secondary processing capacity to be developed. Canada is then left to import value-added goods manufactured using the very staple it has exported. According to the pi/ccpa report, Canada’s bitumen industry exhibits “all the classic features of a staples economy … including heavy investment in production and transportation infrastructure, growing reliance on foreign capital, disproportionate political influence of staplesproducing corporations, and growing regional inequality.”62 The report estimates that foreign direct investment (fdi) in the energy sector has expanded by $135 billion over the past decade, “likely the biggest sustained inward surge in fdi in Canadian history.”63 As a result, “over one-third of the assets and more than half of the operating revenues in the Canadian petroleum sector are associated with foreign-controlled firms.”64 Countries with relatively small domestic capital reserves such as Canada require foreign investment for

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large-scale economic development, but investors expect that profits will be portable across Canada’s borders, and levels of fdi such as this, concentrated in a single sector over a short period of time, raise the question of whether the economic interests served by oil sands development can really be described as primarily “national.” It is also far from clear that the economic benefits of oil sands projects will be effectively socialized in the form of public revenues and working class jobs. For example, expected tax revenues from oil sands activity are mitigated by the various tax incentives federal and provincial governments have put in place to attract investment and development in the sector in the first place.65 Similarly, when projected royalty revenues are measured in relation to the real value of the resource, all of which belongs constitutionally to the citizens of the provinces in which it is located, the promise of public coffers enriched by oil revenues seems a much poorer bargain than the bonanza promoted by proponents. As Diana Gibson has observed, royalty schedules necessarily fall far short of the return that could be generated by a publicly owned corporation with preferred access to the resource and dedicated to developing it in the public interest. “Public ownership is the best way to capture royalties,” Gibson argues, “as 100 percent goes to the owners, the people of Alberta.”66 She points out that the vast majority of the top twenty oil and gas companies in the world are publicly owned corporations, including several that operate in the Alberta oil sands. “It is ironic,” Gibson writes, “that the citizens of Norway, China, Korea, Japan and Abu Dhabi are profiting from Alberta’s oil and gas while Albertans do not publicly own any of the companies involved.”67 It is not just that Alberta has foregone the revenue that could arise from public ownership of oil sands enterprises but also that, “Alberta is currently the lowest tax and royalty jurisdiction in North America and one of the lowest in the world.”68 As a report prepared for the University of Alberta’s Parkland Institute describes, “virtually royalty-free bitumen” has become the means by which Alberta effectively reimburses the capital and operating costs incurred by the energy industry in developing and exploiting the resource.69 The report documents that, between 1986 and 2012, more than $285 billion worth of bitumen and synthetic crude was produced in the oil sands. Over this period, Alberta’s public revenue from royalties and land transfer taxes related to oil sands production totalled $25 billion, representing

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just 6 per cent of the total value of the resource extracted. In contrast, pre-tax profits flowing to oil sands companies over this period reached $260 billion, exceeding the public take more than tenfold.70 As the author of the report observes, the disproportional distribution of the benefits of the bitumen industry is ironic given the similarly disproportionate burden the public has borne in facilitating the development of the resource: “for such a small slice of the pie, it was the public who, over decades, paid for the bulk of the research necessary to make the tar sands industry possible, including developing the technologies at the centre of mining and in-situ extraction.”71 The 2015 Alberta provincial election installed a New Democratic Party government under Rachel Notley, who had previously criticized the province’s oil and gas royalty schedule for failing to deliver a fair share to citizens. Constrained by depressed global oil prices, the government’s much-anticipated revision of the provincial royalty regime did not materially alter the situation, instead “holding the line on oil sands royalties under an industry-friendly policy” that included cuts to existing royalty rates.72 What about jobs? As described in the pi/ccpa report cited above, “Petroleum extraction is a uniquely capital-intensive undertaking, which implies that an unusually small number of jobs are created by the expansion of this industry.”73 Drawing on Statistics Canada data, the report shows that, among the nineteen major sectors of the Canadian economy, the oil and gas industry ranks second from last in terms of overall employment and last in terms of employment intensity, or jobs per $1 million contribution to gdp. To take but one comparative example, while the oil and gas industry employed 56,283 people in 2011, with an intensity of 0.48 jobs per $1 million contribution to gdp, the arts and entertainment sector employed 241,916 people, with an intensity of 17.71 jobs per $1 million of gdp, suggesting that, as far as job creation is concerned, film studies, musical education, creative writing, and sound engineering might be far better investments than oil sands development.74 Most projections of oil sands–related employment, especially those for proposed pipeline projects, are careful to include “indirect” and “induced” jobs in other sectors in their calculations.75 Industry-friendly projections also typically include both jobs created and jobs “preserved” by oil sands development, the latter being a much more ambiguous and inflationary category.

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Much depends on what counts as a job. Projections such as those used in the ceri report and in pipeline proponents’ applications to the neb use the unit of “person-years” as equivalent to a job.76 That means a person hired to work on a pipeline, or for a company that services a pipeline project, or in a restaurant that serves pipeline workers, for a year or less, is counted as having a job. It also means that, should their employment extend into a second year, it counts as two jobs. Calculations such as these systematically inflate the employment projections associated with the oil sands and related pipeline projects. For example, Enbridge’s assertion that its proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline will create 3,000 jobs during the construction phase and 650 permanent jobs thereafter relies wholly on the conflation of direct, indirect, and induced employment and the equation of person-years of employment with jobs. As Robyn Allan observes in her critique of the application, “Person-years of employment are not jobs. If you work for a company for five years as a carpenter or an electrician: that is a job. Enbridge would call it five … The 650 permanent jobs come from the same document as the construction employment figures. Only 78 jobs are related to the actual project. The rest are estimates of employment from direct input purchases, indirect and induced impacts over 30 years.”77 Thus, employment projections are far from convincing as a basis upon which to claim that the economic benefits of oil sands and pipeline development will be socialized in the form of real jobs for working class Canadians. Providing well-distributed employment income is simply not what the exploitation of this resource is for. While it is true that oil sands development provides some relatively high-paying jobs, relative to the surplus-value and capital returns generated by these projects, “it is not at all clear that workers in the petroleum industry (and in petroleum producing provinces) have been capturing a fair share of the wealth they produce in the form of wages, salaries, and benefits. Indeed, labour incomes paid in the petroleum industry are uniquely low as a share of the industry’s total output … a booming petroleum industry provides no guarantee whatsoever of healthy labour incomes.”78 In Alberta, the province where the economic benefits of the oil sands boom are heavily concentrated, the top 1 per cent of income earners are “by far the wealthiest in the nation, while at the bottom Alberta has the most intense poverty,” disparities that are growing wider, not narrower,

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as oil sands development accelerates.79 Apparently, pipelines are not just devices for transporting oil, or even for socializing the economic benefits of the oil sands. They are also technologies that manufacture and intensify the inequalities that are a structural characteristic of petroleum economies everywhere.80 This, it would seem, is who we are and what we do. At a minimum, the proposition that oil sands and pipeline development are imperative to economic interests that are self-evidently “national” is highly contestable. If anything about these projects is being socialized and borne by the country as a whole, it is the externalities and costs of these developments, in the form of other public goods that have been foregone or sacrificed to facilitate accelerated expansion of bitumen production and transportation. As a report published by Ontario’s Mowat Centre puts it, “for over three decades, the Alberta government and the oil sector have very strongly said that they expect to reap all the economic benefits of oil sands development but that others will have to deal with the environmental risks.”81 In addition to the local, national, and global environmental implications of oil sands and pipeline development, it is also the case that pursuit of these projects has brought with it a systematic dismantling of the public apparatus by which collective interest in these matters might be established and protected. The omnibus legislation passed to implement the Canadian government’s 2012 budget (Bill c-38) was emblematic in this regard.82 The overriding priority of the legislation was to create the conditions for accelerated exploitation of the oil sands, including expedited approval of related pipeline projects. Justified in terms of the “historic opportunity” for prosperity presented by the oil sands, Bill c-38 included several changes to Canada’s immigration and unemployment insurance systems to facilitate the supply of skilled labour for the energy sector. It also repealed and amended multiple pieces of legislation that had previously mandated environmental review and regulation of various activities related to environmental impacts of oil sands and pipelines projects.83 At the same time, the government also shut down several arm’s-length agencies active in environmental monitoring, including the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy and the First Nations Statistical Institute, and enhanced cabinet authority over neb decisions on pipeline approvals and environmental assessments.84 Speaking to these measures, then–minister of natural

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resources Joe Oliver reportedly said, “it is more important for the government, rather than regulators, to make final decisions on projects of national importance.”85 Bill c-38 also made changes to the Income Tax Act aimed at restricting the ability of charitable environmental organizations to engage in public interest advocacy, and earmarked $8 million to assist the Canada Revenue Agency to “target registered charities that the government believes are too overtly political.”86 About a year later, the neb announced new rules concerning who would be permitted to make written or oral submissions concerning proposed pipeline projects. While both “indirect” and “induced” employment are counted as jobs for the purpose of constructing the national interest in pipeline development, participation in the neb’s public hearings on pipeline applications would be limited to those who were deemed to be “directly” affected by the proposal, or to have “relevant” expertise, and could demonstrate this in a ten-page application.87 Taken together, these measures meant that, in addition to dismantling public institutions charged with the authority to protect the environment against the harmful impacts of the energy industry, the public sphere in which these impacts might be exposed to democratic consideration was intentionally eroded by the Harper government. Soon after its election in 2015, the Liberal government led by Justin Trudeau added additional consultation requirements to the neb process for existing pipeline proposals, and in 2016 announced the establishment of expert panels to review the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and the National Energy Board mandate and procedures, including public consultations.88

We, the Pipeline … Whether the Trudeau Liberal government is committed to placing environmental responsibility ahead of economic development in Canada’s resource sector remains to be seen, as does whether it will continue its predecessor’s practice of promoting the energy sector and its infrastructures using the language of national imperative and identity. In his speech tabling the 2012 budget, former finance minister Jim Flaherty justified the sweeping changes entailed in the legislation specifically in terms of a national imperative to build pipelines for the transportation of bitumen: “We will streamline the review process for such projects … We will ensure that Canada has the infrastructure

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we need to move our exports to new markets.”89 Who, it should be asked, is included in the “we” for whom the minister purported to speak and act? In the twelve months leading up to September 2012, the period in which the legislative changes noted above were being formulated and implemented, senior figures in the energy industry – including representatives of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, Suncor Energy, and Imperial Oil Limited, and pipeline companies TransCanada Corporation and Enbridge  – held 791 separate meetings with federal cabinet ministers, members of Parliament, and senior officials, more than any other Canadian industry. Over the same period, cabinet ministers met with representatives of the environmental lobby only once.90 As one commentator put it, “The Canadian energy industry has forged unrivalled access to the federal government among major industries, as key companies and their associations met frequently with politicians and senior bureaucrats in recent years to craft common messages and discuss regulatory changes.”91 Thus, it would seem clear that when the Harper government declared its intention to ensure that Canada has “the infrastructure we need” to transport bitumen to tidewater, the energy industry and pipeline proponents are definitely well-represented in this “we.” Less clear is whether those who oppose these developments were similarly included. Certainly, this “we” did not include the thousands of American (and other) citizens and activists opposed to the proposed Keystone xl pipeline, slated to deliver 850,000 barrels per day across the border and through several states to Gulf Coast refineries in Texas.92 Against this opposition, the governments of Alberta and Canada and the pipeline industry mounted a massive public relations and lobby campaign, involving powerful lobbying firms with established ties to the Obama administration, pricey ads in Washington, dc, newspapers and airports, ambassadorial appeals, and high-profile speeches by the prime minister, the premier of Alberta, and several other senior officials at influential US policy venues.93 All of this is was aimed at persuading the American government of the imperative to approve the Keystone xl project, despite the massive domestic and international social movement that had arisen to oppose it.94 Along with downplaying the environmental impacts of the pipeline, a major element of this strategy entailed portraying Canada as a

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reliable, stable, secure, and even ethical source for the United States’ energy needs.95 Thus, Prime Minister Harper characterized Canada as a “stable, reliable producer in a volatile, unpredictable world.”96 Conservative minister of natural resources Joe Oliver similarly encouraged the United States to buy from a loyal ally rather than “less friendly, less stable” countries.97 Industry promoters were even more direct: “if oil is not shipped in increasing quantities by pipeline from secure, stable Canada, the U.S. will be obliged to rely on crude oil from more volatile Middle Eastern and South American suppliers who share neither American interests nor values.”98 Aside from the subtle racism implied by this discourse, it also exposed the incoherent character of Canada’s supposedly “national” interest in oil sands development. First, as noted above, Canada as a country actually owns and controls no enterprises in the Alberta oil sands (recall, this is “the best news of all”) and Canadian corporations own and operate only some of the companies involved in extracting, selling, and transporting bitumen, the remainder being owned by enterprises from several other countries, including corporations owned by states whose “interests” and “values” sometimes differ from those of the United States. Second, even if “Canada” did own properties in the oil patch, such that it could enforce its sovereign national interest over the disposal of that resource, portraying Canada as a reliable, stable energy source for the United States suggests that – in contrast to other “unreliable” states such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, which have sometimes used their status as energy exporters to privilege domestic interests – “we” can be counted on never to prioritize “national” interest in a way that might conflict with the energy needs of the United States. This is undoubtedly what former cabinet minister and now-champion of “nation-building infrastructure” Jim Prentice meant when he described Canada as a “dependable” source of energy but, if this was an assertion of national interest, it was a curiously self-abnegating one.99 Interestingly, this very argument has been mobilized by promoters of oil sands development to press the case for latitudinal pipelines oriented towards delivering bitumen to markets other than the United States. Describing himself as a “Canadian nationalist,” Rick George, the former ceo of Suncor Energy, pointed out that: “It is not inconceivable to imagine the United States insisting that Canada alter various standards to match its own. Why would we let another

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country dictate environmental policy and commercial terms to us? That’s what happens where energy is concerned, and it’s a breach of Canadian sovereignty when it occurs.” It bears noting that executives such as Mr George have become extremely wealthy letting the United States dictate environmental policy and commercial terms to them.100 Nonetheless, national sovereignty was readily invoked to support approval and construction of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline, slated to deliver 525,000 barrels per day from Bruderheim, Alberta, to tidewater at Kitimat, bc, and the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion, slated to transport 529,000 barrels daily from Edmonton, Alberta, to a terminal on Burrard Inlet in Burnaby, bc. Both of these are intended to facilitate the sale of bitumen to lucrative markets in Asia, a purpose whose importance to the national interest has been deemed by the federal government to be non-negotiable. Speaking specifically of the need to gain access to Asian markets for oil sands crude, former Conservative foreign affairs minister John Baird expressed the matter succinctly: “It’s simply not a choice; it’s not an option. It has to be a national imperative.”101 Former natural resources minister Joe Oliver went even further, declaring that, “Gateway, in our opinion, is in the national interest,” a highly unusual intervention given that the pipeline proposal was before the neb at the time.102 In December 2013, the neb recommended approval of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline proposal, satisfied that it was “required by the present and future public convenience and necessity,” subject to a set of conditions the proponent appeared welldisposed to meet.103 Shortly before the deadline for the government’s final decision on the neb recommendation, a consortium of Canadian political and economic elites weighed in with the full force of economic and technological nationalism. On 12 June 2014, an open letter titled “Northern Gateway: A Project for Canada” appeared in several major Canadian daily newspapers, signed by a high-profile group (whose ties to the energy and financial sectors were not disclosed) of forty former federal cabinet ministers, former and sitting provincial premiers, and several representatives of the business community, including the presidents of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. The letter sets out the imperative that “Canada opens up new markets so that taxpayers get full value for our energy resources and

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that our natural resources find a way to those markets as quickly as possible.”104 As discussed above, prevailing financial arrangements in the oil patch guarantee that “taxpayers” will get nothing close to “full value” for their energy resources whether they are successfully marketed or not. Resolution of this contradiction inevitably devolves to the standard formula expressed in the letter’s closing lines: “Canada stands on the edge of an unprecedented opportunity – one that promises to strengthen our entire nation … Northern Gateway is such a project and that is why we support it.”105 On 17 June 2014, the federal government approved the proposal.106 If the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain Pipelines are so clearly in the national interest that choosing not to build them is “not an option,” then those who oppose or contest their approval and development cannot be included in the “we” for whom the Canadian government and political and economic elites speak when they assert a national interest in this technology. Apparently, the 130 First Nations whose leaders signed the Save the Fraser Declaration, in which they pledged, “We will not allow the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline, or similar Tar Sands projects, to cross our lands, territories and watershed, or the ocean migration routes of Fraser River salmon,” are not included in the nation defined by an existential need for this infrastructure.107 Neither are the nine First Nations of the Central and North Pacific Coast and Haida Gwaii, whose Coastal First Nations Declaration pledges that “oil tankers carrying crude oil from the Alberta Tar Sands will not be allowed to transit our lands and waters.”108 Nor are the three hundred scientists (the overwhelming majority of whom are Canadian) who signed an open letter to Prime Minister Harper concluding that the Joint Review Panel’s assessment of the environmental impact of the Northern Gateway Pipeline Project represents “a flawed analysis of the risks and benefits to British Columbia’s environment and society” and is “indefensible as a basis to judge in favour of the Project.”109 Nor is the expansive and diverse popular movement that arose in British Columbia to oppose these pipelines on environmental grounds, and also to reject the increased and highly risky tanker traffic they will draw to ecologically sensitive and hard-tonavigate coastal waters.110 This was made clear in January 2012 when, in a widely published open letter, Conservative natural resources minister Joe Oliver

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accused “environmental and other radical groups” of working to “hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.”111 “Their goal,” according to Oliver, “is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams.” In other words, these are people who are confused about who we are and what we do. They are not even really Canadian. Apparently referring to environmental groups scheduled to participate in the neb’s public hearings on the Northern Gateway Pipeline application, Oliver accused these groups of “stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects,” and alleged that “they use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest.” It is interesting that the government would raise the spectre of unwanted foreign intervention in domestic affairs by well-funded radicals at precisely the moment it was itself engaging in a well-orchestrated, state-funded campaign to influence domestic decision-making in the United States on the Keystone xl Pipeline. But technological nationalism is not about consistency; it is about picking teams.112 In characterizing opponents of oil sands pipelines as irrational aliens bent on undermining a national interest that, as I have argued above, can hardly be said to exist at all, the government unwittingly exposed something important about technological nationalism: if infrastructure can be used to unite Canadians in common identity and purpose, it can also be used to divide them, by separating those who are willing to commit to the collective project of delivering the country and its resources to capital, whether foreign or domestic, from those who are not.113 The former are to be mobilized, the latter are to be marginalized. In his letter, the minister concluded by indicating that the need to reform the regulatory system such that ideologically driven radicals could no longer provoke “unnecessary delays” in the approval of pipeline projects was “an urgent matter of Canada’s national interest.” In due course, the changes to the neb process described above were implemented, whereby dissenting parties would find their opportunity to express their opposition dramatically curtailed. Shortly thereafter, documents obtained by journalists under the Access to Information Act revealed that the neb, in consultation with the rcmp and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had been routinely gathering “security” information on a range

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of environmental and advocacy organizations known to oppose oil sands pipeline projects.114 In June 2016, the Federal Court of Appeal quashed the Conservative cabinet’s permit for the Northern Gateway Pipeline, on the grounds that the government had failed to meet its legal obligation to consult in good faith with First Nations affected by the project.115 The decision confirmed that the national imperative attached to development of pipeline infrastructure had been built upon the intentional exclusion of entire categories interested citizens, including those who inhabit the lands this infrastructure would traverse. Historically, technological nationalism has posed Canada’s expansive and harsh geography as the primary obstacle to be overcome in the attempt to bind the country as a nation, a task for which the building of transportation and communication infrastructure was perfectly suited. The primary purpose of these infrastructures was to facilitate industry and commerce, and thereby to serve the interests of capital, but their construction demanded exactly the sort of collective commitment and sacrifice that could be manufactured by invoking the prospect of a heroic triumph over the country’s formidable expanse. In the process, a nation could be forged both materially and ideologically. The building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, for example, was accompanied by a rhetoric of shared national purpose and common striving, and has been mythologized as a collective achievement that established Canada’s nationhood and materialized the state’s independence. However, as Charland points out, the actual imperative that drove the project was “the circulation or communication of commodities and capital. The civilization the railroad extended was one of commerce … If the cpr was a ‘national project,’ it was so first and foremost as an economic venture.”116 The Canadian state whose sovereignty was materialized by the railroad was, first and last, “a state of capitalists.”117 Casting geography as a common obstacle to overcome served the effort to craft an identity, not so much between east and west, French and English, Catholic and Protestant, Tory and Liberal but, rather, between the interests of capital and those of a country still becoming who and what it was. Some things never change. Then again, some things do. These days, the obstacle faced by those seeking to build an infrastructure that will traverse the country in the interests of capital is not primarily geographical. It is political. It is true that oil sands bitumen

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is situated at an inconvenient distance from the tidewater ports it must reach in order to generate value as a commodity. However, overcoming this distance technologically is really no big deal: all you have to do is build a pipeline. The problem is not that the country is not bound geographically – after all, the highways and railroads and canals and airports and telecommunications networks have already been built – the problem is that it is not bound politically by the belief that oil sands development is unambiguously in the national interest and that, therefore, building pipelines is a national imperative. Documents detailing meetings between the Harper government’s minister of natural resources and the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association confirm that the government and the energy industry found themselves “aligned on priorities” and that they committed themselves to the “importance of communicating to Canadians” the benefits of building infrastructure that will enable rapid exploitation of the oil sands.118 Be that as it may, the priorities of the government and the energy industry were evidently not aligned with those of the numerically significant, well-organized, well-informed, and committed opposition to oil sands development and the pipelines required for that purpose. As the foregoing suggests, it is this political opposition that had to be overcome if the interests of the country as a whole were to be identified once again with the interests of capital, and if the allegedly “national” project of making Canada an “energy superpower” was to be achieved. It was in favour of this imperative, and against the political differences that frustrate it, that a contemporary version of technological nationalism was mobilized. The romantic appeal of heroically conquering the rivers, mountains, ice, and plains of Canada’s geography might once have been enough to cultivate nationalist sentiment. However, uniting a nation by summoning it to defend a common economic interest for which the case cannot be made, and to identify against environmentalists, Indigenous people, ranchers and farmers, caribou and salmon, and friends and neighbours – all of whom look and sound as Canadian as the next person – is a different and altogether less viable proposition. Perhaps this is why, in the most recent proposal for a pipeline to get the bitumen moving from its hole in the ground to distant refineries and ports, elite supporters of the energy industry have reverted to the tired rhetoric of previous episodes of technological nationalism. TransCanada Corporation’s proposed Energy

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East Pipeline will carry up to one million barrels of bitumen per day from Hardisty, Alberta, to refineries in Quebec and Saint John, New Brunswick, where there is also an existing deepwater tanker port. A consultant’s report prepared for TransCanada pegs the project’s potential contribution to gdp at $25 billion over forty years, tax revenues at $10 billion, and “full-time equivalent” jobs at ten thousand over the lifetime of the project, all numbers that demand the sort of critical scrutiny suggested above.119 Proponents have high hopes for approval of this project, as it mainly involves conversion of the existing TransCanada gas mainline to Montreal, with extensions required only for the legs to Quebec City and Saint John. The pipeline will be a boon for Saint John’s Irving Oil, which will reap the benefits of a steady supply of unconventional crude at a price point significantly lower than that of the conventional oil it currently imports from around the world to feed its refinery. Recent reports indicate that “under the current plan, few permanent jobs will be created,” and that “it remains unclear how much actual economic benefit the city will see from the project, especially once the short-term gains from construction have ended.”120 Irving, also a significant player in the shipping industry, has abandoned plans to build a second refinery in Saint John (which, if built, would generate hundreds of long-term jobs) and instead plans to build a crude export terminal in partnership with TransCanada Corporation, adjacent to its existing refinery. Reports indicate that “the terminal would employ just a couple dozen workers.”121 Saint John currently suffers from the highest urban unemployment rate in Canada.122 Shortly after the project was first announced in March 2012, former premier of New Brunswick and now deputy chair of td Bank Frank McKenna invoked the building of the cpr as an example of infrastructure that “knit the country together both symbolically and economically.”123 Deploying the heroic rhetoric of bygone days, McKenna suggested that an east-west pipeline could do the same: “It is time for another bold project, national in scope: A pipeline network extending from coast to coast. This essential infrastructure project would be good for all regions of Canada. It would be an extraordinary catalyst for economic growth. It would be powerful symbol of Canadian unity.” Elaborating, McKenna made it clear that an east-west pipeline would not just overcome geography and bind the country spatially, it would, more importantly, overcome the

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political divisions jeopardizing exploitation of the valuable resource in Alberta’s oil sands. “Much has been made recently,” McKenna wrote, “about who wins and who loses from Western oil sands. This is the wrong way to look at it. We should turn this challenge into a nation-building exercise rather than encourage a corrosive debate pitting one region against another.” Speaking in Saint John alongside Premier David Alward and Irving Oil executives in 2013, then– prime minister Harper endorsed the Energy East as a “Pan-Canadian project … that will benefit the entire country.”124 His successor, Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau, appears to agree, and has made approval of the Energy East project  – under a renovated process of environmental scrutiny and Indigenous consultation designed to bolster perceptions of its legitimacy – a priority of his government.125 Characterizing the pipeline as an opportunity for resource development that combines the values of economic growth and ecological sustainability, Trudeau declared, “That’s something that Albertans and Quebecers and everyone across the country is united in wanting.”126 In this, he has been encouraged by former prime minister Brian Mulroney, who described Alberta’s oil sands as “wealth that was God-given to Canada,” and suggested that accomplishing its extraction will be “a big-ticket item going straight into the history book.”127 Environmental activists, Indigenous communities, and municipal leaders in British Columbia, Quebec, and elsewhere might not agree with the prime minister that facilitating movement of bituminous oil to tidewater for export is the best way to achieve the goal of environmental sustainability or egalitarian economic development but, as the cbc reported, “Industry is delighted.”128 Premier Brad Wall of Saskatchewan, a province whose economy relies heavily on infrastructure for the export of primary resources, travelled eastward in spring 2016 to make the pitch for Energy East. At a speech at the Empire Club of Canada in Toronto, he asked, “Who will benefit?” The answer: “All of Canada will benefit.”129 In light of the irreducible diversity of political positions and interests surrounding bitumen extraction and its infrastructures, and the highly differentiated distribution of its impacts and benefits, it is hard to imagine what the phrase “all of Canada” could possibly mean. This is precisely the problem that technological nationalism tries to overcome. The recurring appearance of its rhetoric in elite discourse is symptomatic of contemporary anxiety over the “corrosive” effects of

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fundamental disagreement: that the politics really brewing around these pipelines might actually reflect an uncertainty about who we are and what we do, about whether exploiting resources such as the oil sands, for the profit of the few, is what it means to be Canadian. The hope is that, as Frank McKenna put it, “A national pipeline would put the issue beyond dispute.”130 That, finally, is what technological nationalism is for. notes 1 Jim Prentice, “Nation-Building Infrastructure: Creating an Environment for Investment,” Address to the Business Council of British Columbia, 21 June 2016, https://www.cibc.com/ca/pdf/investor/ jprentice-business-council-speech-en.pdf. Prentice became premier of Alberta in 2014 and presided over the province’s Progressive Conservative party’s historic defeat in May 2015. 2 Compare Prentice’s rhetoric to the central premise of Marxist materialism: “As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce.” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 42. 3 On the staples economy, see Harold A. Innis, Essays in Canadian Economic History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956). 4 The phrase “standing-reserve” belongs to Heidegger’s account of the essentially extractive character of modern technological experience. See Martin Heidegger, “The Question concerning Technology,” The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 17. 5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006). 6 Jonathan Vance, Building Canada: People and Projects That Shaped the Nation (Toronto: Penguin, 2006), xii. 7 Ibid., xvii. 8 Maurice Charland, “Technological Nationalism,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory/Revue canadienne de théorie politique et sociale 10, no. 1–2 (1986): 206. 9 Ibid., 198. See also Jonathan Sterne, “Transportation and Communication: Together as You’ve Always Wanted Them,” in Thinking with James Carey: Essays on Communication, Transportation, History,

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darin barney Place, ed. Jeremy Packer and Craig Robertson (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 117–35. See Vance, Building Canada, xvii and Charland, “Technological Nationalism,” 212. The classic statement is Pierre Berton’s The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871–1881 (Toronto: Anchor, 2001). The book inspired an eight-part tv series by the same title, broadcast by the cbc in 1973. On the TransCanada Pipeline see William Kilbourn, Pipeline (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin and Company Limited, 1970). On the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, see Thomas R. Berger, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland, Report of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry 1 (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services, 1977) and The Mackenzie Pipeline, ed. P.H. Pearse (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974). Gathering pipelines move oil and gas from the point of extraction at wellheads to batteries and initial processing facilities. Feeder pipelines move this material on to transmission pipelines, which transport oil and gas longer distances to ports and refineries. Distribution pipelines deliver refined products to the point of consumption. Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, About Pipelines – 2012: Our Energy Connections (Calgary, ab: Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, 2012), accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.cepa.com/wp-content/ uploads/2013/10/CEPA_Our-Energy-ConnectionsE_Oct04.pdf. The National Highway System was defined in 1988 by the federalprovincial Council of Ministers and deemed to include all “primary routes that support inter-provincial and international trade and travel.” It was expanded in 2005 to include core, remote, and feeder routes and presently consists of over thirty-eight thousand kilometres of highways. See Canada, Transport Canada, “National Highway System,” accessed 15 July 2016, https://www.tc.gc.ca/eng/ policy/acg-acgd-menu-highways-2149.htm. Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, About Pipelines – 2012. On the distinction between readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 67–72. For a related, contemporary account of how technological systems are concealed by devices, see Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

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17 As reported by Leslie Young, “Introduction: 37 Years of Oil Spills in Alberta,” Global News (22 May 2013), accessed 15 July 2016, http://globalnews.ca/news/571494/introduction-37-years-of-oil -spills-in-alberta/. These figures are derived from a leaked database. For figures up to 2005, see Alberta Energy and Utilities Board, Pipeline Performance in Alberta, 1990–2005 (Calgary: Alberta Energy Regulator, 2007), accessed 15 July 2016, https://www.aer.ca/ documents/reports/r2007-A.pdf. 18 United States, Department of Transportation, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, “Significant Pipeline Incidents” (Washington, dc: 2013), accessed 15 July 2016, www.primis.phsma .dot.gov. 19 Nathan VanderKlippe, “Alberta Pipeline Leak Largest since 1975,” Globe and Mail, 3 May 2011, accessed 15 July 2016, http://www .theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/energy-and -resources/alberta-pipeline-leak-largest-since-1975/article578814/. 20 Canada, Department of Finance, “Pipeline Safety in Canada,” Canada’s Economic Action Plan (Ottawa: 2013), accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.budget.gc.ca/2012/plan/pdf/Plan2012-eng.pdf. 21 On technological nationalism and the development of the Internet in Canada, see Darin Barney, Communication Technology: The Canadian Democratic Audit (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2005), 68–107. 22 George Monbiot, “Canada’s Image Lies in Tatters. It Is Now to Climate What Japan Is to Whaling,” Guardian, 30 November 2009, online edition. See also Wendy J. Palen et al., “Consider the Global Impacts of Oil Pipelines,” Nature 510 (June 2014): 465–7. 23 On Alberta’s opposition to the National Energy Program in the 1980s, see John F. Helliwell and Robert N. McRae, “Resolving the Energy Conflict: From the National Energy Program to the Energy Agreements,” Canadian Public Policy / Analyse de Politiques 8, no. 1 (1982): 14–23. On Alberta’s fraught relationship with the national agenda in subsequent years, including Stephen Harper’s notorious call in 2001 to build a “firewall” around Alberta to protect it from abuse by the Canadian government, see Allan Tupper, “Uncertain Future: Alberta in the Canadian Community,” in Forging Alberta’s Constitutional Framework, ed. Richard Connors and John M. Law (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2005), 479–96. 24 Charland, “Technological Nationalism,” 198. 25 Canadian Centre for Energy Information, “Oil Sands and Heavy Oil,” accessed 1 August 2016, www.centreforenergy.com.

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26 Government of Alberta, Alberta Energy, “What Is Oil Sands?” accessed 15 July 2016, http://www.energy.alberta.ca/OilSands/793.asp. 27 Government of Alberta, Alberta Energy, “Facts and Statistics,” accessed 15 July 2016, http://www.energy.alberta.ca/OilSands/791.asp. 28 Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines, “Dilbit,” accessed 2 August 2013, www.northerngateway.ca. 29 Government of Alberta, Alberta Energy, “Facts and Statistics.” A further fifty-eight projects were indicated as approved, under construction, in application, or announced. See Government of Alberta, “Alberta Old Sands Projects and Upgraders,” accessed 15 July 2016, http://www.energy.alberta.ca/LandAccess/pdfs/OilSands_Projects.pdf. 30 Government of Alberta, Alberta Energy, “Facts and Statistics.” 31 Ibid. See also Government of Alberta, Alberta Economic Development and Trade, “Highlights of the Alberta Economy 2016,” accessed 15 July 2016, www.albertacanada.com/files/albertacanada/ SP-EH_highlightsABEconomyPresentation.pdf. 32 Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, “Canadian Oil and Natural Gas: Tax and Fiscal Environment,” accessed 15 July 2016, www.capp.ca./canadian-oil-and-natural-gas/economic-competitive ness/tax-and-fiscal-environment. 33 International Energy Agency, “Executive Summary,” World Energy Outlook 2015, accessed 15 July 2016, https://www.iea.org/Textbase/ npsum/WEO2015SUM.pdf. 34 Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, “Crude Oil: Forecast, Markets and Transportation (2016),” accessed 15 July 2016, http:// www.capp.ca/publications-and-statistics/crude-oil-forecast. 35 Reuters, “Bakken Oil Output Posts Record Monthly Increase in May – Genscape,” 13 August 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, http:// www.reuters.com/article/bakken-genscape-record-idUSL2N0GE0OZ 20130813. The Bakken Shale occupies roughly 520,000 square kilometres in North Dakota and Montana. The US Geological Survey estimates the Bakken and nearby Three Forks Shales contain roughly 7.4 billion barrels of “tight oil” recoverable by hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” US Department of the Interior, “usgs Releases New Oil and Gas Assessment for Bakken and Three Forks Formation,” press release, 30 April 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, https://www2 .usgs.gov/blogs/features/usgs_top_story/usgs-releases-new-oil-and-gas -assessment-for-bakken-and-three-forks-formations/. 36 This understanding might be changing. A recently leaked draft report

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by Policy Horizons Canada, the federal government’s forecasting agency, warns of the possibility of a rapid and radical shift away from fossil fuels and toward renewables in global energy consumption, owing to decreasing costs and the growing threat of climate change. See Government of Canada, Policy Horizons Canada, Canada 2030: Canada in a Changing Global Energy Landscape, Draft – for Discussion, (Ottawa) 3 March 2016, accessed 15 July 2016, http:// www.horizons.gc.ca/eng/content/canada-changing-global-energylandscape. Similarly, the former governor of the Bank of Canada and current governor of the Bank of England has recently warned of investments in oil and gas extraction risk becoming stranded assets, as fossil fuels become unburnable in light of their contribution to climate change. See Mark Carney, “Breaking the Tragedy of the Horizon – Climate Change and Financial Stability,” speech to Lloyd’s of London, 29 September 2015, accessed 15 July 2016, www.bankofengland. co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/2015/844.aspx. Julian Beltrame, “Canada to Lose $15-billion a Year on Keystone, Lack of Oil Pipeline Capacity: cibc,” Financial Post, 13 April 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, http://business.financialpost.com/news/energy/ canada-oil-producers-losing-15-billion-a-year-keystone-cibc. For example, see Canadian Chamber of Commerce, $50 Million a Day (Ottawa: September 2013), accessed 4 July 2016, http://www .chamber.ca/media/blog/130917-50-Million-a-Day/. See also Robyn Allan, “Bitumen’s Deep Discount Deception and Canada’s Pipeline Mania: An Economic and Financial Analysis,” 2 April 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.robynallan.com/wp-content/ uploads/2013/04/Bitumens-Deep-Discount-Deception-April-2-2013 .pdf. Allan is former president and ceo of the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia. Andrew Potter, “Oil: Uncertainty Reigns,” cibc: A Look to the Future, 2013 Edition, accessed 4 July 2016, http://research.cibcwm .com/economic_public/download/a_look_to_the_future_2013.pdf. In Canada see, variously, the Sierra Club of Canada (www.sierra club.ca), Greenpeace (www.greanpeace.org/canada), ForestEthics (www.forestethics.org), and the Wilderness Committee (www.wilder nesscommittee.org). In the United States, see 350.org (www.350 .org) – “350” refers to 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the number below which it is thought emissions must be reduced to stop climate change.

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41 Jennifer Grant, Eli Angen, and Simon Dyer, “Forecasting the Impacts of Oilsands Expansion,” (Calgary: Pembina Institute, 2013), accessed 4 July 2016, https://www.pembina.org/reports/oilsands-metrics.pdf. 42 Ibid., 4. Emissions data is taken from United States Department of Energy. National Energy Technology Laboratory, “Development of Baseline Data and Analysis of Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Petroleum-Based Fuels” (Washington, dc: US Department of Energy, 2008), accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.netl.doe.gov/energy -analyses/pubs/NETL%20LCA%20Petroleum-based%20Fuels%20 Nov%202008.pdf. 43 Grant et al., “Forecasting the Impacts of Oilsands Expansion,” 6. 44 See Andrew Nikiforuk, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent (Vancouver: Greystone, 2010). 45 Diluted bitumen can also be transported by rail, and in the midst of ongoing uncertainty about the approval of oil sands pipelines, transport of oil by rail in Canada has increased considerably. However, a derailment of oil cars in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, on 6 July 2013 that led to a massive fire which destroyed the town centre and took forty-seven lives led to renewed concerns about the safety of oil-by-rail, and has been seized upon by proponents of pipelines to argue for the safety of pipelines. See Brent Jang, “The Equation of a Disaster: What Went Wrong in Lac-Mégantic,” Globe and Mail, 14 July 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/ news/national/the-equation-of-a-disaster-what-went-wrong-in-lac -megantic/article13214911/. See also Scott Haggett, Dave Sherwood, and Cezary Podkul, “Analysis: Quebec Rail Disaster Shines Critical Light on Oil-by-Rail Boom,” Reuters, 7 July 2013, http://www .reuters.com/article/us-train-rail-analysis-idUSBRE9660KZ20130707. 46 Associated Press, “Illinois Pipeline Blast Sends Flames 90 Metres into Air,” cbc News, 13 August 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, http:// www.cbc.ca/news/world/illinois-pipeline-blast-sends-flames-90 -metres-into-air-1.1397611. 47 Canada, National Energy Board Act, R.S.C. 1985, Section 52 (2) (e). 48 On the Joint Review process see, for example, National Energy Board, Enbridge Northern Gateway Project, “The Joint Review Process,” accessed 4 July 2016, www.gatewaypanel.review-examen.gc.ca. 49 Jim Prentice, “Nation-building Infrastructure: A Roadmap to Economic Growth,” address to the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce, 21 November 2011, accessed 17 June 2013, https://www.cibc.com/ ca/pdf/investor/jprentice-business-council-speech-en.pdf.

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50 Government of Alberta, Alberta Energy, “Oil Sands: The Resource,” accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.energy.alberta.ca/ourbusiness/ oilsands.asp. 51 See Marco Adria, Technology and Nationalism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). 52 See R. Douglas Francis, The Technological Imperative in Canada: An Intellectual History (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009). 53 Prime Minister Stephen Harper, “Address by the Prime Minister at the Canada-UK Chamber of Commerce,” London, UK (Ottawa: Prime Minister’s Office, 14 July 2006). 54 Afshin Hnarvar et al., Economic Impacts of New Oil Sands Projects in Alberta (2010–2035) (Calgary: Canadian Energy Research Institute, 2011), accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.americanpetroleuminstitute.net/~/media/files/news/2011/economic_impacts_of_new_oil _sands_projects_alberta.pdf. 55 Ibid., ix–xii. 56 Ibid., 10. See also Carrie Tait and Ian Bailey, “Proposed Pipelines All Risk, Little Reward for bc: Report,” Globe and Mail, 31 July 2012, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-onbusiness/industry-news/energy-and-resources/proposed-pipelines -all-risk-little-reward-for-bc-report/article4451041/. 57 See Richard Carlson and Matthew Mendelsohn, The Politics of Pipelines: Ontario’s Stake in Canada’s Pipeline Debate (Toronto: Mowat Centre, 2013). See also Tait and Bailey, “Proposed Pipelines All Risk, Little Reward for bc.” 58 Government of Alberta, Energy Alberta, “Oil Sands: The Resource.” 59 Jeff Rubin, “Canada’s Race to Build Pipelines Won’t Spell Relief at the Pumps,” Globe and Mail, 19 August 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry -news/energy-and-resources/why-gasoline-prices-will-rise-along-with -canadas-race-to-build-pipelines/article13837648/. 60 David Parkinson, “Shiny Happy Oil Sands Ads? The Facts Would Work Better,” Globe and Mail, 7 June 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/ rob-commentary/executive-insight/shiny-happy-oil-sands-adshow-about-some-facts/article12397009/. Parkinson cites the 2011 ceri report as evidence of the economic benefits of oil sands development. 61 Tony Clarke, Diana Gibson, Brendan Harley, and Jim Stanford, The Bitumen Cliff: Lessons and Challenges of Bitumen Mega-Developments

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darin barney for Canada’s Economy in an Age of Climate Change (Toronto: Polaris Institute/Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2013). Ibid., 6. See also Brendan Haley, “From Staples Trap to Carbon Trap: Canada’s Peculiar Form of Carbon Lock-in,” Studies in Political Economy 88 (2011): 97–132. Clarke et al., The Bitumen Cliff, 20. Ibid., 65. Data is derived from Statistics Canada cansim Table 1790004. For a list of foreign-controlled firms with stakes in oil sands, see pages 66–7. See also Nathan VanderKlippe, “Foreign vs. Domestic,” Globe and Mail, 4 December 2012, b4. Clarke et al., The Bitumen Cliff, 34. Diana Gibson, Selling Albertans Short: Alberta’s Royalty Review Panel Fails the Public Interest (Edmonton: Parkland Institute, 2007), 5. Ibid., 5. In December 2012, the Government of Canada approved two major acquisitions of oil sands properties by state-controlled energy companies from Malaysia and China. At the same time, the government announced new restrictions on foreign state-owned investment in Canada. The government made it clear that it continued to welcome foreign investment in the oil sands by private enterprises. See Andrew Mayeda and Greg Quinn, “Canada Toughens Oil Sands Investment Rules as Nexen, Progress Takeovers Approved,”Financial Post, 7 December 2012, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.financial post.com/m/wp/tag/blog.html?b=business.financialpost.com/2012/12/ 07/nexen-progress-canada-oil-sands-state-owned-firms. Alberta’s royalty rate is 1 per cent of gross revenues until a project’s capital expenses have been recovered and 33 per cent of net profits thereafter. By comparison, Norway and Venezuela obtain 78 per cent and 90 per cent respectively. Gibson, Selling Albertans Short, 6, 14. David Campanella, Misplaced Generosity: Update 2012. Extraordinary Profits in Alberta’s Oil and Gas Industry (Edmonton: The Parkland Institute, 2012), 6. Ibid., 7. The report notes similarly that the corporate share of resource rents (the value remaining after accounting for costs and profits) has exceeded the public share by an average factor of nine since 1997. Ibid., 8. Jeffrey Jones and Jeff Lewis, “Alberta ndp Spares Industry, Offering Oil Sands a Royalty Break,” Globe and Mail, 29 January 2016, accessed 15 July 2016, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-onbusiness/industry-news/energy-and-resources/alberta-ndp-spares

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-industry-with-new-energy-royalties/article28457466/. See also Canadian Press, “Alberta to Cut Royalty Rates to Squeeze Out More Oil, Gas Production,” Globe and Mail, 11 July 2016. For an excellent account of the Notley government’s early record, see Jeff Diamanti, “Transition in a Petro Province? The Alberta ndp in Office,” Socialism and Democracy (2016) 30:2, 187–202. Clarke et al., The Bitumen Cliff, 44. Ibid., 45. Data is derived from Statistics Canada cansim Tables 3790023 and 381-0024. The influential ceri report cited above includes direct, indirect, and induced employment in its overall job projections. Indirect jobs include those in industries that supply goods and services to the energy sector; induced jobs include those that provide goods and services to people employed directly or indirectly by the energy sector. See Hnarvar et al., Economic Impacts of New Oil Sands Projects in Alberta, xiii. Hnarvar et al., Economic Impacts of New Oil Sands Projects in Alberta, xiv. Robyn Allan, “Enbridge Misrepresents Pipeline Benefits,” Vancouver Sun, 12 August 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www. vancouversun.com/business/Opinion+Enbridge+misrepresents+pipeli ne+benefits/8780459/story.html. Clarke et al., The Bitumen Cliff, 47. Diana Gibson, Executive Summary, A Social Policy Framework for Alberta: Fairness and Justice for All (Edmonton: Parkland Institute, 2012), accessed 4 July 2016, http://parklandinstitute.ca/research/ summary/a_social_policy_framework_for_alberta/. See James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello, The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London (London: Verso, 2013). Richard Carlson and Matthew Mendelsohn, The Politics of Pipelines, 21. See Canada, Department of Finance, Bill c-38: Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act: An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 29, 2012 and other measures, accessed 14 August 2013, www.openparliament.ca. See Shawn McCarthy, “Budget Bill Gives Harper Cabinet Free Hand on Environmental Assessments,” Globe and Mail, 9 May 2012, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/ news/politics/budget-bill-gives-harper-cabinet-free-hand-on-

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darin barney environmental-assessments/article4105864/. Amended or repealed legislation included the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, the Navigable Waters Protection Act, the Fisheries Act, the Species at Risk Act, the Coasting Trade Act, the Parks Canada Agency Act, and the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act. See Max Paris, “Cabinet to Get Final Say on Pipeline Projects,” cbc News, 19 April 2012, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.cbc.ca/news/ politics/cabinet-to-get-final-say-on-pipeline-projects-1.1217699. See Shawn McCarthy, “Ottawa to Wrest Control of Environmental Approval Process,” Globe and Mail, 22 April 2012, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ ottawa-to-wrest-control-of-environmental-approval-process/ article4101793/. Peter O’Neil, “Budget 2012 Good News for Canada’s Oilsands, but Environmentalists Cry Foul,” National Post, 29 March 2012, accessed 4 July 2016, http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/ budget-2012-was-good-news-for-canadas-oil-sands-but-environmentalist-say-it-comes-at-their-expense. See Gloria Galloway, “Energy Board Changes Pipeline Complaint Rules,” Globe and Mail, 5 April 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, http:// www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/energy-board-changes -pipeline-complaint-rules/article10824925/. For similar developments at the provincial level in Alberta, see Bob Weber, “Oil Patch Critics Say Alberta Energy Regulator Is Denying Them the Right to Speak,” Globe and Mail, 18 May 2014, accessed 4 July 2016, http:// www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/ energy-and-resources/oilpatch-critics-say-alberta-energy-regulator-is -denying-them-right-to-speak/article18738361/. Shawn McCarthy, “Ottawa Adds Additional Steps to Pipeline Reviews,” Globe and Mail, 27 January 2016, accessed 15 July 2016, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/liberals-to-announce -new-transition-rules-for-assessing-pipelines/article28412555/. Canadian Press, “Liberals Launch Public Reviews of Environmental Assessments, National Energy Board,” Toronto Star, 20 June 2016, accessed 15 July 2016, https://www.thestar.com/news/ canada/2016/06/20/liberals-launch-public-reviews-of-environmental -assessments-national-energy-board.html. Government of Canada, Department of Finance, Jobs Growth and Long-term Prosperity: Economic Action Plan 2012 – The Budget

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Speech, 8, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.budget.gc.ca/2012/plan/ pdf/Plan2012-eng.pdf. Daniel Cayley-Daoust and Richard Girard, Big Oil’s Oily Grasp: The Making of Canada as a Petro-State and How Oil Money Is Corrupting Canadian Politics (Ottawa: Polaris Institute, 2012), accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.polarisinstitute.org/big_oil_s_oily_grasp. Shawn McCarthy, “Face-Time on the Hill: The Energy Lobby Pipeline to Ottawa,” Globe and Mail, 4 December 2012, b1. See, for example, National Post Wire Service, “TransCanada Wins Right to Lay Keystone xl across Texas Family Farm,” Financial Post, 28 August 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, http://business.financialpost .com/news/energy/keystone-xls-southern-leg-may-be-delayed-analyst. See Anna Fifield, “Who’s Who of Obama Lobbyists Pushes Keystone Pipeline,” Financial Times, 30 May 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/91300bf0-c80e-11e2-be27-00144feab7de .html#axzz4DaMQgqcu; Jason Fekete, “Tories Hope Ads Aimed at US Lawmakers Will Win Support for Keystone Pipeline,” Ottawa Citizen, 13 May 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, http://o.canada.com/ news/national/0514-ads-pipeline; Amy Harder, “Meet Canada, Keystone’s Marquee Lobbyist,” National Journal, 14 July 2013, accessed 21 July 2013, www.nationaljournal.com; Joanna Slater, “Redford Takes Pipeline Pitch to Manhattan,” Globe and Mail, 19 June 2013; and Josh Wingrove, “Canada’s Envoy to the US Implores Approval of Keystone Pipeline,” Globe and Mail, 12 July 2013, b2. US president Barack Obama rejected the Keystone xl pipeline application in November 2015. See Coral Davenport, “Citing Climate Change, Obama Rejects Construction of Keystone xl Oil Pipeline,” New York Times, 6 November 2015, accessed 15 July 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/07/us/obamaexpected-to-reject-construction-of-keystone-xl-oil-pipeline.html. In June 2016, the pipeline’s proponent, TransCanada Corporation, filed a claim under Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement seeking to recover $15 billion in costs and damages arising from the rejection of the proposal. See Jennifer Dlouhy, “TransCanada Files $15-billion nafta Claim over U.S. Rejection of Keystone Pipeline,” Globe and Mail, 25 June 2016, accessed 15 July 2016, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/reporton-business/industry-news/energy-and-resources/transcanadafiles-15-billion-nafta-claim-over-us-rejection-of-keystone-pipeline/ article30619844/.

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95 See Ezra Levant, Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2011). 96 Harper, “Address by the Prime Minister at the Canada-UK Chamber of Commerce.” 97 As quoted in Barrie McKenna, “The Secret Threat to Canada’s Oil Sands,” Globe and Mail, 28 April 2013, accessed 4 July 4 2016, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry -news/energy-and-resources/the-secret-threat-to-canadas-oil-sands/ article11597201/. 98 Derek Burney and Fen Osler Hampson, “Ticket to North American Energy Independence,” Globe and Mail, 22 February 2013, A10. Burney was Canada’s ambassador to the United States from 1989 to 1993, and is a director of TransCanada Corporation. 99 Jim Prentice, “Nation-Building Infrastructure: A Roadmap to Economic Growth.” 100 President Obama had indicated that his decision on whether to approve the Keystone xl pipeline would depend on whether the pipeline would contribute significantly to overall carbon emissions. He also cast doubt on the significance of the temporary jobs that would be produced by construction of the pipeline and whether it would serve America’s energy needs given that the bitumen would largely be exported outside the United States. See “Interview with President Obama,” New York Times, 27 July 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/us/politics/interviewwith-president-obama.html?_r=0. 101 Quoted in Josh Wingrove, “Canadian Oil Trade Must Expand,” Globe and Mail, 9 March 2013, A6. 102 Nathan VanderKlippe, “How Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline Lost Its Way,” Globe and Mail, 10 August 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industrynews/energy-and-resouces/how-enbridges-northern-gateway-pipeline -lost-its-way/article13700746/. 103 National Energy Board, Report of the Joint Review Panel for the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project, 2 vol., 19 December 2013, accessed 12 January 2014, http://gatewaypanel.review-examen.gc.ca/. 104 Hon. Perrin Beatty et al., “Northern Gateway: A Project for Canada,” Globe and Mail, 12 June 2014, A19. 105 Ibid. 106 National Energy Board, Decision Statement Issued under Section

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54 of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, 2012 and Paragraph 104 (4) (b) of the Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act, 17 June 2014, accessed 4 July 2016, http://gatewaypanel.review -examen.gc.ca/. Accessed 13 May 2013, www.savethefraser.ca. Accessed 13 May 2013, www.coastalfirstnations.ca. On the legal basis of these declarations, see Jessica Clogg and Josh Paterson, Legal Backgrounder: Coastal First Nations Declaration and Save the Fraser Declaration (Vancouver: West Coast Environmental Law Association, 2012), accessed 4 July 2016, http://wcel.org/resources/ publication/legal-backgrounder-coastal-first-nations-declarationand-save-fraser-declarati. Kai Ma Chan et al., “Open Letter on the Joint Review Panel report regarding the Northern Gateway Project,” 26 May 2014, accessed 4 July 2016, http://chanslab.ires.ubc.ca/files/2014/05/Letter-to-FederalGovt-re-ENG-JRP-Report.pdf. See also cbc News, “Northern Gateway Pipeline Report ‘Flawed,’ 300 Scientists tell pm,” cbc News British Columbia, 3 June 2014, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www .cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/northern-gateway-pipelinereport-flawed-300-scholars-tell-pm-1.2663230. See, for example, Pipe Up Against Enbridge, online at www.pipeup againstenbridge.ca, and Burnaby Residents Opposed to Kinder Mogan Expansion (broke), www.burnabypipelinewatch.ca. See also Carrie Saxifrage et al., Extract, The Pipeline Wars: Vol. 1 Enbridge (Vancouver: Vancouver Observer, 2012). Rt. Hon. Joe Oliver, “An Open Letter from National Resources Minister Joe Oliver,” Globe and Mail, 9 January 2012, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/an-open -letter-from-natural-resources-minister-joe-oliver/article4085663/. Soon after the publication of Minister Oliver’s open letter, the government unveiled a new counter-terrorism strategy, listing environmental and anti-capitalist activists alongside white supremacists as potential domestic terrorists. See Canada, Department of Public Safety, Building Resilience against Terrorism: Canada’s Counterterrorism Strategy (Ottawa: Department of Public Safety, 2013), accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/ rslnc-gnst-trrrsm/index-en.aspx. See Stephen Leahy, “Canada’s Environmental Activists Seen as ‘Threat to National Security,’” Guardian, 14 February 2013,

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darin barney accessed 4 July 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ 2013/feb/14/canada-environmental-activism-threat. Matthew Millar, “Harper Government’s Extensive Spying on Anti-oilsands Groups Revealed in fois,” Vancouver Observer, 19 November 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, http://friendsofwildsalmon .ca/news/article/harper_governments_extensive_spying_on_anti _oilsands_groups_revealed_in_foi. See also Jenny Uechi, “neb Statement on Board’s Involvement in Oil Sands Activist Spying,” Vancouver Observer, 19 November 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.vancouverobserver.com/world/canada/ neb-statement-boards-involvement-oil-sands-activist-spying. Gitxaala Nation v. Canada, 2016 fca 187 (CanLII), accessed 15 July 2016, http://canlii.ca/t/gscxq. See also Shawn McCarthy and Jeff Lewis, “Court Overturns Ottawa’s Approval of Northern Gateway Pipeline,” Globe and Mail, 30 June 2016, accessed 15 July 2016, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/ energy-and-resources/federal-court-overturns-ottawas-approval -of-northern-gateway-pipeline/article30703563/. Charland, “Technological Nationalism,” 199. Ibid. Bruce Cheadle, “Natural Resources Minister ‘Aligned Priorities’ with Pipeline Lobby: Documents,” Times-Colonist, 6 March 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.timescolonist.com/business/ natural-resources-minister-aligned-priorities-with-pipeline-lobby -documents-1.86028. Deloitte, “Energy East: The Economic Benefits of TransCanada’s Canadian Mainline Conversion Project,” Deloitte & Touche llp, September 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, https://www.energyeast pipeline.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Energy-East-Deloitte -Economic-Benefits-Report.pdf. Shawn McCarthy, “Inside Irving’s New World,” Globe and Mail, 31 August 2013, b6–7. Ibid., b7. Statistics Canada, Labour Force Information, July 14–20, 2013 (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, August 9, 2013), Cat. No. 71-001-x, Table 5-1, 41. Frank McKenna, “Let’s Build a Canadian Oil Pipeline from Coast to Coast,” Globe and Mail, 18 June 2012, accessed 4 July 2016, http:// www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/lets-build-a-canadian-oil-pipeline -from-coast-to-coast/article4299451/.

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124 Quoted in Shawn McCarthy, “Environmental, First Nations Groups Question the Safety of Energy East Pipeline Plan,” Globe and Mail, 9 August 2013, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.theglobeandmail .com/news/politics/environmental-first-nations-groups-question -pipeline-plan/article13701985/. 125 John Ivison, “Trudeau Convinced That Pipeline Strategy Must Be Top Priority,” National Post, 11 April 2016, accessed 15 July 2016, http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/john-ivison-trudeauconvinced-that-pipeline-strategy-must-be-top-priority. See also Jane Taber, Shawn McCarthy, and Robert Fife, “Trudeau Supports Notley on Energy East Pipeline.” 126 Ivison, “Trudeau Convinced That Pipeline Strategy Must Be Top Priority.” Inset video: “Justin Trudeau Downplays Regional Split on Energy East Pipeline.” Globe and Mail, 22 January 2016, accessed 15 July 2016, http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/johnivison-trudeau-convinced-that-pipeline-strategy-must-be-top-priority. 127 Dario Balca, “Mulroney Says Energy East ‘a Nation-Building opportunity’ for Trudeau,” ctv News, 24 April 2016, accessed 15 July 2016, www.ctvnews.ca/politics/mulroney-says-energy-east-a-nationbuilding-opportunity-for-trudeau-1.2872504. 128 Tracy Johnson, “Pipelines and Politics, How the Debate Has Shiftedin Canada,” cbc News, 27 April 2016, accessed 16 July 2016, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/pipeline-approval-politics -1.3552494. 129 Brad Wall, “The Case for Energy East: Why Canadians Should Embrace Their Good Fortune,” Empire Club of Canada, 14 June 2016, accessed 16 July 2016, http://www.mediaevents.ca/ the-honourable-brad-wall-premier-of-saskatchewan/. 130 McKenna, “Let’s Build a Canadian Oil Pipeline from Coast to Coast.”

4 Can the Petro-Modern State Form “Wither Away”? The Implications of Hyperobjects for Anti-Statist Politics Michael Truscello

One of the many compelling insights in Allan Stoekl’s book Bataille’s Peak (2007) is the recognition that the other side of peak oil will not be a simple reflection of petro-modernity’s ascent. “It is tempting to assume a simple reverse dialectic: the return of the feudal,” writes Stoekl. “But there is more than an energy blip that separates us from the Middle Ages.”1 He continues: “We cannot simply flip over the dialectic and predict a decline where previously there had been an advance … the unknowable future will not be conceivable as the simple downside of a bell curve  … We cannot assume that we will be forced into any given social regime by any given energy regime.”2 Stoekl argues that one thing that separates the “downside” of the bell curve from the “upside” is what he calls “the fact of knowledge.” “Non-knowledge is not simple ignorance, but the follow-through of the consequences of attained knowledge; in our case, this implies a full understanding of the energy regime of modernity, the benefits and pitfalls of rationalism and humanism.”3 A significant set of material consequences issue from the petro-modern state form, an energy regime that prizes fossil fuel consumption and the hydraulic apparatus necessary to territorialize space. While some peak oil observers may envision the post-oil era as a return to technosocial assemblages of earlier stages of capitalism, perhaps even to a neo-feudal order defined as much by its technologies as by its wealth disparity, the hyperobjects of the petro-modern state form – such as global climate change, landscapes erased and refashioned by infrastructure, and durable forms of industrial toxicity  – must be factored into any consideration of the coming assemblages. The

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petro-modern state form has created objects of almost unimaginable size and persistence, akin to what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects,” because they are “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.”4 Anthropogenic global climate change, a by-product primarily of industrial capitalism, will continue to reverberate with distributive agencies for hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years. This particular hyperobject emerged from an assemblage that includes hundreds of thousands of miles of oil pipelines, railroad tracks, and paved roads, as well as consumers, zooplankton, algae, and automobiles. If anthropogenic global climate change, abandoned shopping malls, and parasitic tendrils of pipelines that ensnare host organisms are hyperobjects with a prolonged material existence courtesy of the petro-modern state form, then what are the implications for anti-statist politics? What does it mean to “abolish” the state, if the state form includes durable, massively distributed objects? Can the state “wither away,” as in Marxist-Leninist theory, if its material form includes such persistent objects? Similarly, how will revolutionary projects address engineering megaprojects that could require decades to decommission, or inherently unstable and potentially omnicidal infrastructure such as nuclear reactors and their waste, which, once constructed, require particular kinds of persistent and expert attention, in the process of decommissioning or maintaining?5 The petro-modern state form is also not a material tendency that will be abandoned anytime soon, barring a significant energy crisis; China, for example, has spent the last thirty years engaged in the most rapid and widespread urbanization project in human history. In other words, opposition to the petro-modern state form is not simply a matter of confronting the ruins of modernity; it is also a matter of finding ways to halt, sabotage, and destroy the expansion of the petro-modern state form. It is also, unfortunately, about learning to live with irreversible material tendencies, such as the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet or the mass extinction event currently in process, while adapting to emergent structures and agencies.

Infrastructure as Hyperobject Some hyperobjects are categorized under the term infrastructure, and this is the category most explicitly identified with state formation. While state formation obviously includes symbolic indoctrination

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and violent domination, this chapter emphasizes only the infrastructure of state capitalism. The “hydraulic science” of the state form, as Deleuze and Guattari refer to the phenomenon,6 is often implicated in discourses of nationalism to signify modernity and notions of progress; in some instances, material instantiations of infrastructure have “accompanied and transcended ‘official’ processes of political and economic integration” of nation states.7 While the state form also includes institutions, symbols, practices, and ideological propensities, here I would like to focus on the material legacies of infrastructure to emphasize the durability of the state form and the challenge this poses to its abolition. To do this, I invoke theorists who, while often diverging from radical politics, emphasize the materiality of the state form, especially its infrastructure, in their cultural analyses. Work in this area of cultural studies embraces the “new materialisms” of political theorists such as Jane Bennett, Diana Coole, and Timothy Morton, and of critical urbanists including Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin. Prominent strands of materialist cultural studies and urban studies employ the concept of “assemblage” in order to understand the distributed agency of urban infrastructure, which is often obscured either by its relative invisibility or by the anthropocentrism of cultural theory. As Jane Bennett writes, “There was never a time when human agency was anything other than an interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity. What is perhaps different today is that the higher degree of infrastructural and technological complexity has rendered this harder to deny.”8 Cultural critics need to examine the “unstable cascade”9 of intentionalities, flows of energy, material combinations, and “the conjoined effect of a variety of kinds of bodies”10 that are contained within infrastructure. This understanding of agency and materiality recognizes that individuals are “simply incapable of bearing full responsibility for their effects,”11 an ontological reality that seems particularly noteworthy for industrial nations built on vast and complex technological infrastructures with extensive historical, political, and environmental legacies.

The Withering Away of the State If petro-modern infrastructure represents a kind of hyperobject that is massively distributed in time and space, then what does it mean to “abolish the state”? In the nineteenth century, of course, Marxists

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ridiculed anarchists for their desire to abolish the state “immediately”; instead, Marxists typically advocated for some kind of intermediate period following the revolution, in which a proletarian state would govern and then dissipate. The Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre describes the Marxist-Leninist notion of the “withering away of the state” in the following manner: “The proletariat must have a State. This State is not that of the bourgeoisie, it is that of the proletariat organized as the ruling class. But this state is such that it begins immediately to wither away and cannot but wither. The passage is categorical.”12 The goal of this essay is not to debate the process of state capture, the ethics or tactics of the “proletariat organized as the ruling class,” or the history of the debate between Marxists and anarchists over the principle of anti-statism; rather, my focus here is on whether the state form can “wither away,” when one recognizes the material properties of the petro-modern state form, even when the emphasis of the Marxist-Leninist definition of the state form is clearly on its social properties. Most theories of the state admit some combination of material and semiotic components, the state form as institutions, practices, and iconography. Recently, however, some historians of the state have emphasized its material legacies. In particular, scholars such as Tony Bennett, Patrick Carroll, Patrick Joyce, Chandra Mukerji, Jo Guldi, and Germà Bel have explored the material properties of state formation, especially the construction of infrastructure. The enduring material legacies of state formation are not deterministic, but they definitely articulate specific affordances and constraints. As Joyce and Bennett note, “if certain capacities or affordances are ‘built-in’ to the material world this is very far from dictating outcomes, for these affordances are continually disrupted and transformed through the action of the innumerable other agencies of things and people.” They add that the power of infrastructure systems lies in their “very muteness, this capacity to be left to operate by themselves.”13 Infrastructure thus typically escapes theories of the “withering away” of the state form, and this omission produces significant forms of myopia in certain revolutionary politics. Would oil and gas pipelines wither away “categorically” following a proletarian seizure of the petro-modern state? No, they obviously would not. How problematic is such a material legacy, in the context of anthropogenic climate change? I believe the anarchists of the nineteenth century were right: the state should have been abolished immediately. In

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hindsight, the success of Marxist revolutions around the world in the twentieth century – revolutions in which the state not only remained but also expanded the reach of industrial infrastructure – produced conditions in which communist countries, such as China and Russia, could easily transition from state communism to state capitalism. The result is that the urbanization of China has all but guaranteed that global climate change, largely a consequence of Western industrial capitalism, will lead to the extinction of the human species, or at the very least will produce global ecological conditions that ensure a mass die-off of humans in the coming centuries. In other words, the anarchists were right, but now it is too late for even an anarchist revolution of breathtaking scope and success to reverse the effects of industrialization; the best we can hope for is a revolution that slows the pace of destruction. The question does remain, however: How will the hyperobjects of petro-modernity shape radical politics in the context of attenuated catastrophe?

The Material Legacies of the State Form Attention in social theory to the materiality of infrastructure is not by itself new: “Since the eighteenth century, experts have seen ‘the government of things’ as one of the central tasks of state rationality.”14 The materiality and legacy of particular state infrastructures may offer lessons in how to resist particular political assemblages, how to adapt to conditions of collapse, or how to build revolutionary infrastructures. Understanding the history of infrastructure may assist with adapting to its collapse. In some cases, infrastructure has significantly shaped politics for centuries. For example, Germà Bel describes the impact of infrastructure policy in Spain over hundreds of years. Bel connects eighteenth-century infrastructure planning to the centralization of Spanish governance, a model that was supposed to imitate how Paris was situated within France.15 In recent years, Spain made connecting all of the provincial capitals with Madrid by high-speed rail “a national objective,” and the project was “an extreme example of the use of infrastructure policy in the service of territorial hierarchical structuring and the organization of power.”16 Likewise, the design of postal routes in the nineteenth century in service of the monarchy, for example, “established a radial network whose characteristics have remained unchanged up to the present.”17

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These forms of transportation infrastructure “left a permanent imprint on Spanish politics.”18 Jo Guldi would describe Bel’s depiction of Spain as an example of the “infrastructure state.” Guldi describes the history of Britain’s roads in the nineteenth century, the origins of which date back to 1726 and the military survey of Scotland. Instead of providing a material basis for erasing class differences between regions of the country, new conflicts arose over “access to infrastructure.”19 The conflict over the design of roads, of course, was a conflict over “the flow of bodies, information, and goods.”20 The standardization of toll booths and sidewalks oriented “labor and capital to a new centralized management.”21 Guldi argues that the separation of trade and the state on “ancient” highways was erased by the advent of the infrastructure state.22 The infrastructure state was built “around the logic of conquest”23 and ensured that the paving and management of roads included the application of “manuals, forms, and bureaucratic hierarchy” in the scrutiny of every component of construction.24 Despite the expectation that infrastructure such as paved roads would bring an egalitarian peace to the land, such infrastructure instead pitted “region against region, experts against the people, and class against class.”25 To the examples of Spain and England, Patrick Carroll adds Ireland as another case study that proves, he says, the modern state is “by definition” an “engineering state.”26 Carroll argues that “modern statecraft is science-based as well as coercion-based”:27 “It is through the state-system that governing practices materially incorporate land, bodies, and built environment into the state-country.”28 This coalition of statecraft and engineering, especially given the ubiquitous toxicity of modern industrial capitalism, articulates the material pervasiveness of the state form, something Carroll describes as a “plexus,” or “a dense and minutely interwoven structure of intercommunicating fibers or tissues.”29 The shift in analytical model for Carroll, and similarly for Patrick Joyce, involves an emphasis on practices of government instead of the rationalities of government, the latter of which is the emphasis in governmentality studies.30 Carroll sees his methodology as a “single triangulated distinction among state discourses, state practices, and state materialities”31 that transforms land, people, and the built environment into “a socio-technical network of technoterritory, bio-population, and infrastructural jurisdiction.”32

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Finally, Chandra Mukerji has written about the emergence of the “territorial state” in seventeenth-century France. This “transformation of the French landscape – with the construction of fortresses, factories, garrisons, canals, roads, and port cities  – imprinted the political order onto the earth, making it seem almost an extension of the natural order.”33 Massive infrastructures enabled power to be exercised according to bounded territories instead of through centres of power such as towns or cities.34 As Carroll argues, this new state form was an engineering achievement as much as it was anything else, and Mukerji similarly emphasizes material practices and not simply rationalities. Under Louis XIV, “territorial politics entered the French court, not as a threat to the king, but as a way to associate his legitimacy with the management of the state.”35 In her recent book Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi, Mukerji examines how the construction of a canal, a piece of infrastructure, “pointed obliquely toward techniques of governance that lay beyond the visible and familiar practices of domination – war, taxation, and court life.”36 The building of the Canal du Midi, however, was not simply a triumph of isolated expertise: it “was a product of a collective intelligence – the work of groups with both formal and vernacular expertise in land measurement, construction, and hydraulics.”37 Today, the industrial capitalist state claims a similar kind of territorial legitimacy by defining infrastructure in terms of the state’s projection of force: “critical infrastructure protection” aligns state legitimacy and violence with the necessities of life to such an extent that to oppose the state is to oppose one’s own right to clean water, electricity, telecommunications, heat, and so on. As commitment to the state form collapses, the state escalates its regulatory and coercive apparatuses designed to necessitate dependence on the state form. For example, dozens of American cities, including Los Angeles, have passed laws making it illegal for homeless people to sleep in their cars.38 A woman in Cape Coral, Florida, was taken to court by the city because she refused to use city water and electricity – in essence, she was living off the grid.39 Eminent domain and other forms of state expropriation, often for the purpose of building industrial infrastructure, also continue to ensure the encroachment of the state form. The gradual accumulation on the frayed perimeter of the state form challenges the private property regime through massification:

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over one billion humans currently live in slums, a number estimated to grow to two billion by 2020. And all of these intensifications of collapse and state encroachment assemble on the corpses of Indigenous people, the original victims of the petro-modern state.

Conclusion These historical examples must be matched with contemporary engineering megaprojects such as large dams, industrial mining, and perhaps even the Internet, which, in their scale, capacities, and endurance, ensure the concomitant flow of resources into industrial capitalism and the incremental elimination of escape routes from industrial capitalism. The suicidal trajectory of the state form, which begins with genocidal campaigns to erase Indigenous populations and ends in the long shadow of species extinction,40 has produced hyperobjects such as global climate change and nuclear contamination, which will outlast even the most successful seizure of state power or transformation of statist relations. The petro-modern state form cannot “wither away” for decades, centuries, or perhaps thousands of years. The implications for anti-statist revolutionary theories is profound. Lefebvre believed Marxism itself could not survive such a reality: “I think that if the theory of the withering away of the State is false, it must be abandoned, thrown overboard. If ever it were proven that the State could not be made to wither away, that the State is destined to prosper and flourish until the end of time, then Marxism as a whole would have to jump ship.”41 The hyperobjects of petro-modernity may continue to haunt life on earth long after humans disappear, a prospect that nineteenth-century socialists probably could not imagine. While nineteenth-century socialisms were primarily interested in communizing industrial civilization, contemporary radical politics must grapple with the material legacy of petro-modernity while trying to imagine a better world in the context of one whose ecological systems are in dramatic and attenuated decline. While pieces of the state form – the institution of policing, certain bureaucracies, maybe eventually militarism and the private property regime – might someday be dismantled or transformed into less oppressive mechanisms, the debris of the state form will linger and need to be accounted for by even most radical political activities.

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Radical anti-statists should continue to work toward the abolition of the state form; however, anti-statists must also theorize practices that incorporate the hyperobjects of petro-modernity, search for ways to minimize their damage to life on earth, and recognize that the rationalism and humanism that produced the current crisis cannot be the solution to that crisis. To understand the ethical implications of distributed agencies and the functioning of radical contingencies is to understand that anti-humanist thought and behaviour have the potential to benefit humanity, and that an openness to emergent agencies may be a more effective response to techno-scientific catastrophe than an escalation of techno-scientific engineering of solutions. Above all, radical anti-statist politics must envision self-interest in a radically diffuse way. Jane Bennett offers a view of a world of distributed agency and radical contingency: “And in a knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself. Such an enlightened or expanded notion of self-interest is good for humans. A vital materialism does not reject self-interest as a motivation for ethical behavior, though it does seek to cultivate a broader definition of self and of interest.”42 In terms of state infrastructure, this “expanded notion of self-interest” may help humans cope with the collapse of a massively distributed technosocial assemblage by helping us understand the dangers and potentials of material structures at a distance. Awareness of engineering megaprojects, for example, encourages humans to imagine their own effacement, their own slide into agential irrelevance. Perhaps the humility gained by such an experience of massive objects will contribute to a retreat from modernist self-aggrandizement. Similarly, the degree to which we are locked into centuries of global climate change provides humans with another recognition of the transient nature of multicellular organisms in the deep time of life on Earth. Perhaps such spatial and temporal humbling will compel humans to adopt anti-humanist orientations, the politics of modesty, material retrenchment, triage, and hospice in the age of collapse. If the self, understood as a web of interconnectedness, becomes as massively distributed in time and space as our infrastructural assemblages, we may see self-interest as slow, materially interconnected, and capable of having agency at a distance, a transition from the dromological, aggressive, speciesist orientation of petro-modernity.

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notes 1 Allan Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 199. 2 Ibid., 203. 3 Ibid. 4 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1. I am not importing the entirety of Morton’s argument concerning hyperobjects and object-oriented ontology. My primary interest in the term “hyperobjects” is how it describes objects of massive scale and distribution. 5 Marxist geographer David Harvey has argued in favour of commandand-control hierarchies for the operation of some techno-social systems: “There are many aspects of contemporary life that are now organized in what you might call ‘tightly-coupled systems’ where you need command and control structures. I wouldn’t want my anarchist friends to be in charge of a nuclear power station when the light started blinking red and yellow and all that kind of stuff” (libcom. org, 22 January 2013, accessed 13 October 2016, https://libcom.org/ library/i-wouldnt-want-my-anarchist-friends-be-charge-nuclear-power -station-david-harvey-anarchi). Harvey is incorrect for several reasons. First, as noted by the anonymous author of the article at libcom, command-and-control structures have been primarily responsible for the most notable nuclear reactor meltdowns. Second, there is no reason why an anarchist “assembly” would have to be called in the middle of a crisis situation at a reactor; most safety regulations are automated, and the workers, not the management, handle most of the duties related to safety. Third, anarchists are generally not opposed to expertise (though they are almost universally opposed to nuclear power). As Bakunin famously said: In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content

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michael truscello myself with consulting authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. (As quoted in Mikhail Bakunin, “What Is Authority?” 1882, Panarchy, accessed 13 October 2016, http:// www.panarchy.org/bakunin/authority.1871.html.) So, Harvey’s portrait of incapable anarchists convening in an inefficient manner to solve a serious crisis at a nuclear power plant is misguided. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 363. Alexander Badenoch and Andreas Fickers, “Europe Materializing? Toward a Transnational History of European Infrastructures,” in Materializing Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Project of Europe, ed. Alexander Badenoch and Andreas Fickers (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1. Jane Bennett, “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,” Public Culture 17.3 (2005), 463. Ibid., 457. Ibid,. 454. Ibid., 463. Henri Lefebvre, State, Space, World: Selected Essays, trans. Gerald Moore, Neil Brenner, and Stuart Elden, ed. Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 71. Patrick Joyce and Tony Bennett, “Introduction,” in Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn, ed. Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce (New York: Routledge, 2010), 10. Andrew Lakoff and Stephen J. Collier, “Infrastructure and Event: The Political Technology of Preparedness,” in Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life, ed. Bruce Braun and Sarah J. Whatmore (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 244. Germà Bel, Infrastructure and the Political Economy of Nation Building in Spain, 1720–2010, trans. William Truini (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012), 7. Ibid. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 42. Jo Guldi, Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 5.

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Ibid., 6. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 19. Patrick Carroll, Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 23. Ibid. Ibid., 22; italics in original. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 25. Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 21. Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 2. Ibid., 5. Gary Blasi, “The 1% Wants to Ban Sleeping in Cars – Because It Hurts Their ‘Quality of Life,’” Guardian, 15 April 2014, accessed 28 September 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/ apr/15/ban-sleeping-in-cars-homeless-silicon-valley. George Solis, “Cape Woman Living ‘Off the Grid’ Challenged by City,” nbc-2, 21 February 2014, accessed 28 September 2016, http:// www.nbc-2.com/story/24790572/cape-woman-living-off-the-grid -challenged-by-city. Sean Robertson, extending Foucault’s claim that “genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers,” astutely observes, “given the effortlessness of extinction and that the distinctly modern characteristic of (disciplinary) power is its ability to cultivate life by barely touching bodies, it would therefore seem that extinction is the dream of modern powers: a victimless genocide emblematic of ‘making live and letting die.’” Sean Robertson, “Extinction is the Dream of Modern Powers: Bearing Witness to the Return to Life of the Sinixt Peoples?” Antipode 46.3 (2014): 786. Lefebvre, State, Space, World, 72. Jane Bennett, “Thing-Power,” in Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life, ed. Bruce Braun and Sarah J. Whatmore (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 48.

part two

American Petro-Imaginaries: Modernism and Automobility

Part two focuses on the cultural production and material reproduction of petroculture. The four essays in this section draw their examples from American culture to examine how oil has been imaginatively figured in and as modernity. Michael Malouf’s “Behind the Closet Door: Pixar and PetroLiteracy” explores the role of children’s movies in reinforcing North American relationships to petroleum. Malouf’s analysis of four Pixar films produced at the apex of peak oil discourse – Monsters, Inc. (2001), Cars (2006), wall-e (2008), and Cars 2 (2011) – illustrates how the reproduction of petrocultural subjects is managed by way of normalizing our reliance on fossil fuels. Malouf integrates petrocultural critique into ecocriticism by elaborating a concept of “petro-literacy.” He articulates how, even when they appear to critically engage consumer society, these films leave out “the oil that makes consumption possible” and that also “naturalizes it as a social order.” Pixar films do frequently take up energy transition as they “narrate processes of ‘change’ from an old petro-energy system to an alternative world order.” But as they do so, they reproduce the limits of petrocultural common sense and render any critical dimension inert by positing “these changes as occurring around those discursive sites dominated by petro-literacy narratives: the individual, the corporation, and the future.” The alternative worlds of the films thus function as pedagogical sites in which children assimilate petrocultural narratives including the ability to not see, to overlook, the necessity of petroleum in the built environment. Malouf explains that both Pixar and its films imaginatively “situate themselves ‘outside’ petroculture,” through “their role in

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a new media economy that implicitly disavows its relation to old energy systems.” By partaking of the Silicon Valley–led imaginary of immaterial, “green” production – what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron call “The Californian Ideology” – Pixar bases its particular version of petro-literacy on “new media” as completely liberated from “old energy.” But, Malouf concludes, these projects aimed at petro-literacy must ultimately be read as disavowals of oil’s persistence, the twenty-first-century “monsters behind our closet doors.” Cecily Devereux interrogates another side of this mode of production, in which petrocultural subjects are reproduced in relation to gendered discourses of automobility. In “‘Made for Mankind’: Cars, Cosmetics, and the Petrocultural Feminine,” Devereux brings to light the political and aesthetic consequences occluded in the aggressive visibility of car culture. She situates Stephen King’s novel Christine (1983) alongside recent car advertisements, bringing these into relation with the cultural history of cosmetics, thereby locating the petrocultural roots of twentieth-century consumer society. Provocatively arguing that the materials that go into the making of femininity are the same as those that fuel nationalist-capitalist car culture, Devereux makes explicit the petrocultural assumptions that allow for the mutual construction and exchangeability of women and cars as productive and reproductive objects. The overlapping roles played by film, cars, and cosmetics in the formation of petrocultural subjects become apparent only by probing for what’s missing, what’s not seen, whether as the hidden assumptions of petro-literacy or as the obscurity of a psychodynamic mytheme, as Devereux puts it: the fear of woman’s automobility as “a Freudian castration horror based, as in Luce Irigaray’s account of the Oedipal, in the ‘horror of nothing to see.’” The final two essays turn to literature to trouble the invisibility of oil in the period of American modernism. Glenn Willmott’s chapter, “Oil Tragedy as Modern Genre,” explores how oil was imagined in US literature in the first half of the twentieth century. Descrying our everyday world “as strangely bereft of signs and symbols by which to imagine, feel, or think” the ubiquity of oil, Willmott investigates those rare moments “where oil erupts explicitly into the imagination of early petroculture literature” as instances of a form he terms “Oedipal oil.” His analysis draws on

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texts from the American interwar period, focusing on the fiction of Raymond Chandler, John Joseph Mathews, and John H. Green. But Willmott applies the broader insight of Oedipal oil to recontextualize canonical texts as well, in the process identifying a corpus of oil tragedies – a genre, Willmott argues, characterized by “the destructive yet enlightening trajectory of human beings alienated both from each other and from their natural world, as these are commodified as resources to fuel the production of an imagined personal sovereignty.” In these texts, “Hell is lived, and it is an artifact … of the individualist soul experienced as a fire euphorically feeding on a degraded, depersonalized world. Oil is the sign and synecdoche of that fire in modern history, its material supplement.” Joshua Schuster’s “Where Is the Oil in Modernism?” continues this investigation, probing the invisibility of oil in both modernist art and dominant critical understandings of modernism – a lack of attention made all the more remarkable considering that modernism is the era in which oil became the pervasive substance of American culture. Schuster links oil to more conspicuous modernist literary subjects such as cities and speed by way of an analysis of the “commodity poem.” “The modernist commodity poem,” he argues, “situates a resource accumulated or extracted from the earth into a meditation on labour, literary craft, and the facticity and aesthetic impact of elemental materials.” Secondly, he claims, “[t]hese poems also gesture outwards toward global networks of trade, the role of the poem as commodity, and the changes evident in nature as modernization spreads.” Framed by the insights of Amitav Ghosh and Bertolt Brecht, this chapter reanimates questions of modernism versus realism by addressing the energy- and oil-related work common to William Carlos Williams, Upton Sinclair, Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and Allen Ginsberg. Oil’s constitutive relationship with modernity is culturally intelligible by way of the tragic narrative of Oedipal alienation, which governs both the education of masculine petro-subjects and the objectification of women’s bodies. Let us now conclude by considering how some of the aesthetic and political insights from this section’s chapters can be brought to bear on American modernism’s structural assimilation of the commodity form. For instance, we might immediately notice petrocultural objectifications in William

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Carlos Williams’s poem “To Elsie,” in which “The pure products of America / go crazy.” These products – utterly abject and gendered “young slatterns, bathed / in filth,” racialized “perhaps / with a dash of Indian blood,” and objectified with “flopping breasts / addressed to cheap / jewelry / and rich young men” – embody the fragmented nature of reified consumer society: “It is only in isolate flecks that / something / is given off.” The poem ends with “No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car.” As the oblique rhyme of “flecks” recasts the opening’s “isolate lakes,” we see the American settler state as an automobile blindly traversing new landscapes of cheap objects, “gauds” with no histories “to give them / character.”1 Devereux’s formulation of the car/woman as a motor of capitalism, and of woman’s subjective automobility as one of patriarchy’s repressed fears, describes a dialectic of duelling objectifications, each of which employs gender in the construction of petro-subjects, but each of which also obscures its basis in patriarchal violence. Consumer culture’s Oedipal blindness lacks precisely the phallic authority Williams imagines to be overseeing his imagist manifesto “A Sort of a Song”: Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words … – through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent!2 Like each of the authors and texts discussed in these chapters, the poet Williams presents a new environment under the premise that its objects are materials to be processed into commodities subordinated to the genius of the patriarchal author. Yet in these modernist anxieties of authority we can see the (gendered and racialized) limitations of the human agent, urged to “compose” and “invent,” but whose reconciliation can only come about in alienated language, the heresy of paraphrase that effects the exchangeability of people and objects in the first place. Despite the vexed

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protestations of authors like Williams – looking out upon a nation overrun with unfamiliar, foreign objects – this exchangeability is fetishized as much in the twentieth century’s critical formalisms as in its mass culture. Through Willmott’s narrative archetype and Schuster’s form of the commodity poem, we see how woman’s body becomes a screen upon which anxieties of this new relationship of people to petrocultural things can be projected and imagined to be resolved. Similarly, Pixar’s claims to immaterial production create idealized closet doors to hide the material realities of fossil fuel dependency behind the exchangeability of the digital, a totalized alienation whose spectre still haunts us from the bygone age of cheap petroleum, and which we can call “Oedipal oil.” These essays help to show that as the energized vistas and exhaustive congeries of early consumer society paved the way for the high-modernist encounter with the objet trouvé, the assemblage, and the utter abstractions of things, the conspicuous absence of oil in modernism reflects the almosttotal success of American modernity’s petro-literacy. notes 1 William Carlos Williams, “To Elsie,” The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams (Norfolk: New Directions, 1951), 270. 2 William Carlos Williams, “A Sort of a Song,” Selected Poems, ed. Charles Tomlinson (New York: New Directions, 1985), 145.

5 Behind the Closet Door: Pixar and Petro-Literacy Michael Malouf

Slice open one of my veins and cartoons will pour out; open another vein and you’ll get a flood of motor oil. Pixar founder John Lasseter1

David Orr coined the term “ecoliteracy” in the 1990s to argue for the necessity of environmental education within school curriculums. The object was to offer a corrective to children’s “nature deficit” and to prepare the next generation to confront the global environmental crisis. This essay suggests that one way to understand this deficit is by recognizing the ideological conditions through which we perceive the built and the natural worlds, a way of seeing that I refer to here as “petro-literacy.” This refers to the informal education that naturalizes the presence and significance of petroleum-based products for children in petrocultural societies.2 As any parent can understand, children learn at a very young age how to read signs in a world built on the basic assumptions of petroculture. Are not “car,” “plane,” and “train” among the first words for many children? Petro-literacy draws attention to the ways that children grow up within a petro-consumption society structured loosely around a developmental process determined by various “worlds” based in fossil fuels. As a result, theories of petroculture cannot ignore the role of popular children’s culture in mediating how petroleum and fossil fuel energy economies determine our affective relation to the world. It is through this petro-literacy that the encounter with oil is “missed,” as Peter Hitchcock memorably puts it in his 2010 essay, “Oil in an American Imaginary.” Similarly, petro-literacy refers to the ways in which children assimilate petrocultural narratives and learn to disavow their contradictions.

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My essay takes place within this “American Imaginary,” looking at the renaissance in children’s movies that took place in late 1990s and the early 2000s led by John Lasseter’s innovative animation studio, Pixar. While petroculture criticism has mainly focused on canonical petroculture films like Giant (1956) or There Will Be Blood (2008), I suggest that Pixar’s films  – and other aspects of children’s entertainment – hold a significant place as pedagogical sites for petro-literacy.3 Of course, there are many other engagements with petroculture in children’s and young adult entertainment that are not tied to Pixar, usually in generic appropriations from adult forms, as seen in the corrupt oilman in The Muppets (2011) or the resource conflict that provides the backstory for the dc Comics hero the Black Panther. The focus of this essay is films produced between 2001 and 2011, a period of crisis for oil capital marked by the second Gulf War, the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and the threat of Peak Oil. I find Pixar a fitting subject through which to examine this period as this petrocultural crisis coincided with the rise of Web 2.0 and of Silicon Valley as figures for an alternative, “clean” economy. The way in which the developments in hydraulic fracking, natural gas, and the Alberta oil sands confirmed this discourse was due, I believe, to the role that early 2000s popular culture played in shaping our post-oil future imaginary.4 Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe define “pedagogical sites” as “places where power is organized and deployed, including libraries, tv movies, newspapers, magazines, toys, advertisements, video games, books, sports, and so on.”5 Such sites can be imagined as existing on a progressive scale in which, as children mature from the crib to kindergarten, so do their petrocultural “worlds”: the toddler begins with an early carbon technology like Thomas the Tank Engine; the preschool child matures into modern, twentieth-century, petroleum-based objects through Matchbox cars and Pixar’s Cars and Planes; then the school-age child outstrips reality and enters the futuristic world of space travel through the Star Wars franchise. This final world is less “post-petroleum” than it is a more efficient and cleaner version of the child’s more familiar reality. The idea of a hidden, latent energy source runs throughout children’s entertainment as in the invisible sources of power that transform humans into superheroes or, as in the case of the 2013 film Turbo, snails into speed racers. These petrocultural worlds are also strongly gendered,

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as the marketing targets young boys who define their maturity by their relationship to the worlds they encounter in these pedagogical sites.6 Petro-literacy puts a name to a phenomenon that is often only described in terms of its deficits – what it lacks – but not in terms of what it actively creates in terms of socialized subjects. A subsidiary to Disney since 2006, Pixar is the most successful children’s animation company since Disney in the mid-twentieth century. Since the studio came to renown with Toy Story in 1995, it has become as well-known for its innovations in applying new computer technologies to animation as for its films. Originating in the 1970s and ’80s in the Lucasfilm Computer Division, Pixar was run by Ed Catmull, a leading computer scientist working on graphics technology and special effects for live-action films (including the invention of “motion-blur” technology in 1984, a significant moment in the digitization of film). The group invented the Pixar Image Computer in 1984 and then the RenderMan Interface in 1987, which became the basis for films using computer graphics. According to Karen Paik, in 1986, when the Computer Division sought to form their own company, animation was merely a side project that helped pay the bills by creating advertisements. Ironically, the company was almost bought in 1985 by General Motors, who wanted to use the Pixar Image Computer to assist in automotive design.7 When Steve Jobs bought a majority stake in the new company in 1986, Pixar was spared from this association with an old energy economy and became the face of a new information economy. Because of its influence in the field of computer graphics and the fact that it originated as a start-up in a famously contentious relationship with Disney, Pixar has always had a dual cultural significance as an animation studio and also (especially pre-Facebook and Web 2.0) as a popular representative for Silicon Valley, where its studio is based. At a time when new technology was seen as threatening by many, Pixar’s films made it seem fun, harmless, and, in the nostalgic feel of the Toy Story series, normal. As critics have noted, many of their films represent the company’s own story, often pitting small groups of individuals against large corporations and warning, paradoxically, of the dangers of putting too much faith in technology. By situating their films within the context of petroculture, I am drawing attention to their role in a new media economy that implicitly disavows its relation to old energy systems and their role as the humanizing

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face for the technological neo-libertarianism that Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron famously referred to in 1996 as “The Californian Ideology.”8 The ecocritics Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann argue that despite their different creative contexts, Pixar films “address conflicts between organic and inorganic, between nature and culture, and between nonhuman and human nature.”9 This is true for all of the films that I consider in this essay: wall-e (2008), the two Cars films (2006, 2011), and Monsters, Inc. (2001). Each had different directors: John Lasseter, the founding animator at Pixar, directed Cars and Cars 2; Monsters, Inc. was directed by Pete Docter; and wall-e was written and directed by Andrew Stanton.10 Unlike other children’s film studios, Pixar has been subject to many ecocritical readings for their use of nature and their invocation of environmental themes. Murray and Heumann situate Pixar’s “envirotoons” favourably within the popular tradition of environmentalist animation. Yet their reading has to confront the contradictions and ambiguities that come with political and ethical interpretations of popular culture, what Ann Howey, in her essay on wall-e, calls the “limits of social commentary.”11 This can involve the contradiction of producing films that seem to be nostalgic about preserving nature while also creating worlds populated entirely by personified cars, or creating films that criticize over-consumption while also being in the business of marketing products. In contrast to these ecocritical readings, a petrocultural interpretation is not concerned with judging the films for the adequacy of their ecological critique, but instead with looking at the ways that these cultural paradoxes are aspects of petroculture. Whether it is the subplot of alternative fuel in Cars 2, the apocalyptic world of wall-e, or the alternative to “scream energy” in Monsters, Inc., these Pixar films narrate processes of “change” from an old petro-energy system to an alternative world order using comic, dystopian, and utopian forms. The films posit these changes as occurring around those discursive sites dominated by petro-literacy narratives: the individual, the corporation, and the future. Yet each of these modes of petro-literacy presents models for thinking about the future and conceiving of change within the available structures of petroculture. As a result, these films offer insight into both the ways that petro-literacy functions culturally and the limits to its subversion.

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Petro-Individualism: cars It could be said that the Cars franchise, with its message of friendship, fairness, and putting community before self, is in fact antithetical to the unencumbered individualism promulgated in automobile culture that I refer to here as “petro-individualism.” The latter is evident in car advertisements that showcase the car, often with a lone driver, speeding through a scenic landscape. This imagery captures a libertarian view of the car as providing the fulfillment of our human desire for subjective “autonomy.”12 Summarizing perceptions of the automobile’s transcendence in philosophical terms, Allan Stoekl writes that in this view, “All is mediated through the automobile: everyone derives the meaning of their lives through it: as a status marker, as simulacrum of the freedom of movement and consumption  … as the timelessness of a religion shared by all.”13 This romanticism of the “automobile as self” and driving as a “right” is a common petro-literacy narrative that appears throughout automobilist manifestos.14 Yet it would appear that the Cars films are based on a different narrative; rather than a celebration of individualism, Cars posits instead a celebratory nostalgia for an older, more communal automobile culture. This appeal originated with Lasseter (whose natural affinity for cars and cartoons is clear in the epigraph to this essay), who attributes his obsession with cars to growing up in the “carcrazy culture” of Southern California in the 1960s and ’70s.15 The film seeks to bring together two antithetical strains in car culture that were the creators’ sources of inspiration: car racing and the old highway system. In the six-year making of the film, the makers attended raceways, took tours of Route 66, visited auto shows, and even visited the ruins of the abandoned Packard Motor Car plant in Detroit.16 Each of these phenomena represents a view of car culture as communal – the populism of the races, the small towns linked by the old highways, and the shared corporate culture of Detroit – that contrasts with the lone individualism often evoked in car advertisements. One effect of this strategy is that it allows the film to disavow the fetishism of the car as a commodity. Similarly, in making Lightning McQueen, the celebrated race car, “slow down” and learn to make friends in an out-of-the-way town, Lasseter and his co-creator Joe Ranft were trying to comment on

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contemporary society which had become, Lasseter says, “about the destination, not the journey.”17 The film seeks to convey this mixture of old and new in its structure as it balances two fast racing sequences around a long middle section set in Radiator Springs where McQueen learns the art of “slowing down” and makes friends across classes, genders, and generations through his bonds with Mater, the working class, tow truck character; with Sally, his romantic interest and an exile from the city; and with Doc Hudson, the gruff, older, retired race car. Ironically, what McQueen learns to set aside is precisely those features normally associated with the marketing of automobiles: speed, solitude, and individualism. At the same time, the film profits from the racing sequences based on those ideals and celebrates community only as a collection of essentialized racial, class, ethnic, and gender identities. The Cars films, then, are not so much subversive of petro-individualism as they dramatize the problems of subjectivity and agency it entails. Rather than the coming-of-age, road movie genre of the first film, the sequel, Cars 2, draws on the genre of the James Bond–type spy movie. Lightning McQueen, with Mater as his pit crew, takes part in a European grand prix race promoted by the duplicitous Miles Axelrod, a former oilman who claims to be using the race to showcase his new alternative fuel, “Allinol.” Aimed at a global market, the sequel focuses more on superficial explosions, car chases, and notable 3d effects than the original film.18 Another contrast comes in the depiction of Axelrod in the generic role of the corrupt oilman, a figure with a long tradition in US cinema.19 In the first film, the oil corporation sponsoring the Piston Cup, Dinoco, was represented as an honourable family business that recognizes the virtues that McQueen learns. The seeming promotion of alternative fuels in Cars 2, along with the vilification of Axelrod, brought some criticism from US conservatives. Yet such criticism is difficult to comprehend considering the mixed message that the film ultimately sends about the possibility of society changing away from fossil fuels. Axelrod is engaging in a bait and switch: while he is promoting a race showcasing his alternative oil, he is also buying a monopoly on the crashing shares of traditional oil market. When he decimates their confidence in alternative fuel by diabolically blowing up several cars during the race through a trace within the alternative biofuel, it scares the public away from alternative fuels. In the end, Lightning McQueen wins

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the race because he was not using the biofuel, and thus could not be destroyed. Even though he thought he was using Allinol, McQueen was racing on traditional gasoline. It is revealed that his fuel was changed surreptitiously by the Jeep character, “Sarge,” who delivers the perverse punchline for a film ostensibly about changing to alternative fuels: “once big oil, always big oil.” In reading this franchise in terms of petroculture, I want to consider the relation between the autonomous individualism of the first film and the role of the repressed materiality of the car culture that is exposed in the sequel. As an animated children’s film, it is not surprising that the procurement, processing, delivery, and pricing of oil – in short, its reality as a commodity – is left out. But I want to think counterintuitively here to consider the ways that the problematic role of oil in the Cars films suggests a problem of agency that occurs whenever children’s narratives depend upon anthropomorphizing “things” into living form. While more traditionally such “hidden lives” occur with toys and animals like Winnie-the-Pooh, the Velveteen Rabbit, and Pinocchio, there are questions about the degree to which such characters possess agency or are dependent on a childlike Christopher Robin.20 But while a toy bear or rabbit typically takes on consciousness and self-directed mobility at the same time, this becomes more complicated in worlds with mechanical toys, where consciousness and agency are divided. For example, in Thomas the Tank Engine, many episodes depend upon conflict between the wilfulness of the trains and their conductors. This often results in disasters that come from the machines acting out on their own, without a driver to control them. But there are also many instances where the trains want to act out their will but are constrained by the driver or, conversely, the driver is unable to constrain the wilfulness of the train. These contradictions suggest D.W. Winnicott’s description of the child at play working out fantasies of agency and omnipotence while really aware that she is under the authority of the parent. The trains act out their agency in terms of moving or, in some cases, refusing to move in protest over some perceived slight, but always under the control of the parent/conductor. In the Thomas series, these acts of agency almost always end badly for the train, who is subject to ridicule and discipline for exercising his own will.

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In the Cars films, agency appears in the disconnect between the characters and their necessary substance, fuel, which is the closest thing to a conductor/parent in this individualized, mechanistic world. For instance, in the first film, McQueen fails to win the first race because he is unaware of how much gas he has left in his tank; he also tries to escape Radiator Springs, but fails when it turns out that the police limited his fuel, a fact of which he was unaware. Similarly, in Cars 2 he wins the race because he has regular fuel, not biofuel, inside him but, again, without his own knowledge. The disconnect between the character and his fuel suggests that the cars are subjects with individual characteristics, but like the trains in Thomas, they are not agents in that they lack ultimate control over their machine-bodies. While this fits the realism of Thomas, where the trains share the world with humans, it creates some questions in Cars, which involves a world devoid of humans. As objects endowed with forms of subjectivity but limited agency, the cars in these films might be seen, in Winnicott’s terms, as both the playing child and the transitional toy-object: the Cars characters act and are acted upon, performing subjectivity without controlling agency. This dramatizes the conditions of petro-individualism insofar as it presupposes a free, liberated self but only insofar as it is driving the car. In reality, this condition is not so different from the automaton car-characters. The individual driver’s imagined agency is in fact deferred to a prosthetic self embodied in the car; the fantasy of agency is not an act but a childlike condition of being acted upon. In his critique of such theories of the self that are used to support the “autonomist lifestyle,” Stoekl follows Heidegger in arguing that “their version of car culture inevitably entails a subjectivity, one that, as in Heidegger, is both produced by their model and in turn produces it.”21 Similarly, the non-human, mechanical world of Cars represents this divided sense of self that Stoekl identifies as endemic to car culture: a world in which the notion of identities depend upon forces outside of representation. In describing the relations between the human and nature, Timothy Morton writes, “Unable fully to introject or digest the idea of the other, we are caught in its headlights, suspended in the possibility of acting without being able to act.”22 Morton’s automobilist metaphor is intended to convey the aporia in our relation to nature as an object. His concept of “dark ecology”

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pertains at some level to Cars insofar as the machine-selves, like our own selves in relation to our own auto-machines, are produced by that object which we are unable to “digest.” In this way, Cars 2 might be seen as taking a radical step in revealing that which was repressed in the first film: the relationship between the cars and their enabling resource. This is evident in the plot of the film, regarding the shift to a biofuel as well as in the opening scene, which is set on board an oil rig. Just as the first film opened with the intensity of the car race, this film opens with a chase up and down the oil rig before it blows up. While used only during the opening scene of the movie, the oil rig became a dominant motif in the film’s marketing of its toys and video games. By opening with images of an exploding oil rig, the film unwittingly evokes the iconographic 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon. The tragic iconography of the oil rig in smoke had become so ubiquitous that it is surprising that more critics did not make the connection or that the directors did not try to amend the opening sequence.23 But this reveals how petro-literacy works since this is precisely how the encounter with oil is “missed.” By recasting the event, we are able to conveniently “forget” about the return of the repressed through an act of disavowal. Much like the abject presence of “Bessie” – the beastly asphalt machine in Cars – or the reminder of the lack of agency, the Deepwater Horizon represents oil as the return of the repressed. Thus, the petrocultural response to that which cannot be put back down, out of sight, is to reinvent it in a different context, as if to say, who’s afraid of an exploding oil rig?

petro-apocalypse: wall-e Cars presents a world without humans except as indexical ciphers suggested by the unexplained empty car seats and unused steering wheels; wall-e similarly presents a humanless world but one that is more dystopian than playful. Here, the indexical signs of human life come from the detritus that was left behind on a scarred, toxic planet. While the earth’s surface is covered by garbage, the remaining humans live in giant spaceships that are operated by computers, and the cleanup is relegated to robots, of which only one survives, wall-e (Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth). The robot has the

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Sisyphean task of collecting garbage, packing it into cubes, and making large towers that await incineration by other robots or machines that no longer function. Even though wall-e has been programmed to fulfill his “directive” in cleaning up the earth, he begins to move beyond this limited role in several ways: he has a pet cockroach; he collects odd trinkets such as silverware, lighters, and other debris from the human world; and he watches his favourite vhs tape of the 1969 movie Hello, Dolly!, mimicking the dance routines. As M. Keith Booker notes, the robot evolves, “becoming humanlike even as the humans in space become robotlike.”24 The film’s most evocative moments come in the opening thirty minutes, which are silent except for music and the sounds generated by wall-e fulfilling his tasks. In keeping with Pixar’s persistent attempts at innovation, this unique opening sequence mixes genres, mimicking the style of silent movies with the robot playing the role of an industrious “tramp,” incorporating elements of Buster Keaton’s physical comedy as well. While the comedy entertains the audience, the silence puts them in the uncomfortable position of acknowledging the absence of human activity. Like Keaton or Chaplin, wall-e falls in love with an unattainable object when a reconnaissance robot, eve (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), comes to Earth searching for signs of plant life. Her job is to survey the planet in order to signal to the humans when it is safe to return. When she finds a plant that wall-e was saving, she leaves him in order to take it back to the mother ship. wall-e follows after her, and the film shifts into the more conventional genre of adventure movie as wall-e and eve battle the autopilot robot auto who runs the “mother ship” and seeks to prevent the humans from returning to earth. Awakening the humans from their slumber, the two robots lead a pioneering group back to Earth. The film concludes with eve going “beyond her directive” to resuscitate wall-e, who had been damaged in the battle with auto. During the closing credits, we see the pioneers recreating their world by building houses and growing gardens. Because of its direct representation of a dystopian reality not normally broached in children’s entertainment, wall-e has received the most critical attention of the Pixar films, particularly from environmentalists. But those who look to the film for lessons about sustainability often end up disappointed, especially when their analysis goes beyond the film’s first half hour. As Booker argues, “The basic

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scenario of wall-e offers a number of opportunities for environmentalist and anticonsumerist commentary … [But] some commentators have seen the film as irresponsible precisely because it does not follow up on these implications or provide any sort of suggestion for preventing an environmental catastrophe such as the one depicted in the film, while even providing a contrived happy ending in which the two lovers are together, humanity has returned to Earth, and all appears well.”25 Booker notes many of the factors that go into the mixed political reception of Pixar films where their radical potential  – at least in comparison to other pop culture products – is rendered inert due to their adherence to safe, formulaic filmmaking and marketing tie-ins. As Howey succinctly puts it, “wall-e simultaneously critiques and reinforces as natural a consumerist ethic.”26 While Booker laments the fact that wall-e is neutralized by its “postmodern nostalgia,”27 Murray and Heumann see potential in its use of nostalgia for an environmentalist critique, even if it is “incomplete.”28 They believe that the film demonstrates “human ecology that encourages conservation and organismic ecology that demonstrates the need for interdependence.”29 In contrast to these two perspectives that dismiss and celebrate the film’s purported environmentalism, Howey argues that these contradictions are sustainable because of the different ways that individuals experience texts and create meanings. Taking figuratively the film’s premise of a programming “directive” that determines the plot and the behaviour of the characters, both robot and human, Howey suggests that the film might be read as a “sustained meditation on the relationship of cultural products, consumers, and programming.”30 While I agree that the film offers a paradoxical warning against consumption wrapped in products to be consumed, I believe that the figure of consumption has been seen either in postmodern terms, as signifiers for late capitalism as Howey puts it, or, in Booker’s case, as Marxian examples of commodity fetishism. Both of these perspectives determine the authors’ conclusions about the film and its conception of “programming.” That is, for Booker, programming is ideological – with all of the determinism that implies – while for Howey, the presence of cultural programming is no less real, but is more hegemonic and strategic than overdetermined. But if consumption is seen in petrocultural terms as the by-product of a political economy

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based in the maintenance of the cheap and profitable extraction of oil, then the contradictory relationship between the film’s “message” and its marketing appears in a different light. For example, the central corporation “Buy n Large” would not be able to exist – much as Walmart could not exist – without access to cheap oil. Overall, the premise of a future destroyed by overconsumption assumes the persistent availability of oil at a constant rate into the future. Therefore, wall-e is an example of petro-literacy in that it describes a world in which petroculture is taken for granted; in fact, its so-called criticism of consumption is what makes it such a pedagogical site since it is this distraction from the oil that makes consumption possible that naturalizes it as a social order. In his comments on the dvd, director Andrew Stanton denies any political message for the film, which began with the idea of a lonely trash-collecting robot. The challenge then was to develop a backstory: Why was there a robot alone on the planet collecting trash? Stanton says the rest of the film is quite logical: “you look at the state of the world as it is and extrapolate from that … once there’s no room [for the waste] what would you do? You would have to leave while it gets cleaned up.” This is to assume that it is easier to imagine the persistence of petroculture than to imagine a social order in which it did not exist. There are only two signs of energy in the film: the image of the Buy n Large gas station that wall-e rolls by during the opening sequence and the solar power he uses to maintain his energy supply. Now the first one is typical of petroliteracy in that it only figures petroculture through its presence as a commodity, as gasoline, or more importantly as a gas station. The solar power is mainly for realistic effect as it explains how he is able to power himself on a desolate planet. But there are no images of abandoned oil derricks or tankers, or of fires, which confirms the point of view of petro-consumption, not production. What we see in Stanton’s explanation and in the absent reference to petroculture in the film is an example of the “programming” by petro-literacy that is similar to the commodity programming critiqued by the film. In this case, programming refers to the way that society is “locked in” to a fossil fuel–based system, as an example of what Imre Szeman describes as “petro futurity,” a liberal point of view that takes for granted (as Stanton’s comments suggest) the “eco-apocalypse” that presents the liberal vision of the “end of oil.”31

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But the film’s positive message is unlike that of the Cars films, in which individual personalities are programmed into petroculture; in Stanton’s film, it is possible for individuals – or individual robots like wall-e and eve – to “evolve” imaginations that allow them to act against their “directives.” Also, unlike the conformist world of Cars, this film extends this possibility to an entire society. Where the Cars movies present a form of individual “programming” that maintains a de-commodified, psychological identification with automobiles, wall-e presents a form of social programming that maintains a carbon-based political order. This is most evident in the images of the returning humans recreating society. The little boy who asks if they could plant a “pizza tree” suggests the problem with seeing nature as anything other than an object to be exploited in the form of a commodity. From an environmentalist perspective, this would be an example of how the end of the movie detracts from the potential of its opening critique; yet when seen as an example of petro-literacy, it is consistent with the ontology of oil present in its apocalyptic landscape produced by oil. It is not as much a sign of the repetition of consumption as it is the persistence of a petrocultural view of the natural world. What the film cannot fully explore is the difficulty in escaping this programming; that is, what would be necessary to imagine a world beyond oil or beyond the twin possibilities of either the superfluousness of Cars or the nadir of wall-e? In Cars 2, the possibility of a transition away from a world of fossil fuels is mocked through the cloak-and-dagger plot. Change, it seems to say, can only be a con, a trick upon our essentially conservative human nature. In wall-e, change occurs through the heroic actions of the robot and the captain, awakening the people from their Cars-like stupor. Yet the persistence of old habits as seen in the end of the film suggests a similar view of human nature as inexorably linked to petroculture. The Pixar film that goes the furthest toward imagining a change in energy regime, and which preceded both Cars and wall-e, is 2001’s Monsters, Inc.

Petro-Carnivalesque: monsters, inc. As with most Pixar films, and in keeping with the tradition of children’s fiction, Monsters, Inc. was conceived as a story about the coexistence of the human with an alternate world. This premise runs

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through the alternate worlds of toys, bugs, fish, superheroes, and robots in Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and wall-e. It is notable in this regard that in the Cars films the “human” world is absent as an “alternate” though its non-human world is saturated with humanity. In each of these other films, however, the relationships between the human and non-human take different shapes: in A Bug’s Life and Nemo, the human world is mostly a nuisance, creating crises in the alternate world that need to be resolved in order to reconstitute a social order based in their absolute separation (hence the significance of the escape of the rest of the aquarium fish at the end of Nemo). In Toy Story, wall-e, and The Incredibles, the two worlds coexist in a mutually dependent status quo that is disturbed by the human world acting selfishly and/ or in conformist fashion (this is particularly obvious in the latter two films but exists more complexly in the Toy Story films, where the dichotomy is not simply between human and non-human but is also more specifically located in inhumane alternatives such as the sadistic neighbor Sid, the sterile museum, and the totalitarian daycare, which are explicitly contrasted with Andy’s humanist world). For these films, the restoration of the status quo usually requires the non-human world to intervene and force changes in behaviour in the human world. For example, the toys take revenge upon Sid; in The Incredibles, human society recognizes the need for “supers”; and, as we have just seen in wall-e, the humans are saved by the robots’ intervention. By the end of these films, a status quo of mutually dependent coexistence has been achieved through the impact of a non-human world on the human. In contrast, Monsters, Inc. presents a scenario in which the monster world and the human world are segregated and defined by exploitation rather than codependence, which problematizes a typical Pixar resolution. The premise of the film is that there exists a real monster world that depends for its energy upon the screams of children, which are extracted by the company Monsters, Inc. Accessing the human world through closet doors, the monsters known as “scarers” frighten children at night and collect their screams in canisters. Where Cars and wall-e present petro-literacy narratives for the individual and society, Monsters, Inc. draws on the traditional conspiracy narrative about oil corporations. In fact, Monsters, Inc. has often been read as a satirical film about corporate culture – a

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concept that also appears in wall-e’s “Buy n Large” – that forms part of the company’s self-image as a plucky independent, despite its own size and association with Disney. Monsters, Inc. borrows from the genre of movies interested in oil corporations in a number of ways. First, the ceo follows the stereotype of the hard-working wildcatter who turns dictatorial and corrupt exemplified by Jett Rink in Giant and Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood.32 Second, the film draws on conspiracy films like Syriana. Third, the film is in the Left tradition of reform movies like Erin Brockovich that show individuals fighting to reform corporation practices (but not to end their monopolies). The film opens with the crisis that children are no longer as frightened of monsters as they used to be, thus resulting in a decline in the energy resource. The analogy of this scenario with that of peak oil discourse is apparent. But the analogy of scream-energy and petro-energy functions on a number of levels, mainly through the figure of the closet door that maintains the exploitative terms of this relationship. Key to petro-literacy in all of the films so far has been the invisibility or the reification of the resource. We see this in the question over agency and fuel in Cars and in the representation of over-consumption in wall-e. Monsters, Inc. is unique among petrocultural artifacts in not only representing the resource within an energy system but also making explicit the exploitative relationship that is normally repressed. One of its opening scenes shows a flow chart representing the development from scream to electricity and fuel. Insofar as petroculture depends upon a cultural amnesia regarding resource cultures, petro-literacy offers narratives that occlude “seeing” the resource. While the figure of the closet door can represent one version of this representation (as, for example, Flo’s v8 Café in Cars, or the Buy n Large gas station), it certainly pertains more significantly to what is on the other side. The taboo that is put on thinking about resource cultures appears in the film through the conceit of the toxicity associated with the human world, particularly with children. This is reinforced in a scene early in the film where a scarer with orange and yellow fur, “George,” returns with a child’s sock caught in his fur. This breach of the human into the monster world signals a “2319” alert that is comparable to the real-world reaction to an oil spill. Instantly, he is besieged by the Child Detection Agency (cda), a

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swift-moving army of faceless operatives who destroy the sock and strip George of his fur to eradicate any sign of the child’s toxicity. On the one hand, a comparison might be easily made between this reaction and the rhetoric of “hysteria” that is applied to those who become concerned when there is any “leaking” of resources into the perception of consumer cultures through events like oil spills. While such events are truly toxic, there is a powerful and influential presence that casts such reactions to their toxicity as irrational.33 On the other hand, another way that the crossing of these borders produces a hysterical reaction occurs when resource cultures frustrate petrocultural ideologies, such as when “resource rebels”34 dare to emerge through the “closet door” that separates production and consumption (as in, to take one celebrated case, the claims by Ecuadorians against Chevron for polluting their landscape). Also, the reaction by the cda team might be compared to the way that the plot in Cars 2 reacts to the notion of an alternative biofuel by marking it as unstable and “hysterical.” Even the legitimately outraged reaction to the Deepwater Horizon is parodied through the film’s farcical rendering of the exploding oil rig. Thus, we can see that there are crossover situations such as oil spills in which the resource interrupts petrocultural narratives by becoming visible, but there are also situations in which the resource cultures threaten to make their exploitation visible. Petro-literacy’s task is to make such crossings appear illegitimate and make them disappear, to be “not seen” (as indicated in the reaction by the corrupt ceo Waternoose, who covers his eyes), like the unfortunate George’s orange and yellow fur. Therefore, there is a lot at stake when the main characters in the film, Sulley, the lead scarer, and his assistant, Mike Wazowski, find themselves involved with a little human girl, Boo, who has accidentally ended up on their side of the door in the monster world. Yet this situation does not end up being threatening; instead, Boo becomes emotionally attached to Sulley, who, after a series of adventures, changes his own attitude toward his work. As a peak oil allegory, the film presents two ways of responding to the energy crisis: the first is presented through the evil figure of Sulley’s rival, the lizardlike Randall Boggs, who, along with Waternoose, develops a more efficient and extreme means of extracting screams from children. Using technology for evil, Boggs creates a torture device, a “scream extractor,” that goes deep into the child’s throat both to frighten

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and to get closer to the source. Boggs’s approach suggests the more extreme measures taken by energy companies over the past twenty years to extract oil and natural gas, whether by drilling deeper into the oceans or through hydraulic fracking. The premise, like Boggs’s device, is to use new technology to torture the earth into giving up its resources more efficiently. In contrast, the film offers another way out of the peak energy situation as a result of Sulley’s connection with Boo. Not only does Sulley learn that she is not really toxic, that such toxicity is an ideological myth promulgated in order to maintain the exploitative relationship between the two worlds, but he also learns that human children can also produce energy through their laughter, not just their screams. Unlike the other Pixar films in which the non-human world restores order by intervening in the human world, in Monsters, Inc. it is the human agent that saves the non-human world. The difference between these two energy sources can be characterized in terms of “homogeneous” and “heterogeneous” energies, Georges Bataille’s terms from his essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism.”35 Adapted by Stoekl to a petrocultural context, “homogeneous energy” is “energy that has been refined, made efficient, and that is fully the ‘power to do work’ under the control and direction of Man,” while “Heterogeneous energy … precisely resists refining, makes itself felt in ways humans cannot control.”36 Children’s laughter in this case represents a form of heterogeneous energy in that, unlike the technological models of extraction, it “cannot be easily ordered.” Like the carnivalesque, laughter is spontaneous, surprising, and arbitrary. For instance, in his new role as extractor/comedian, we see Mike Wazowski attempt to tell a traditional joke based on wordplay. When it falls flat, he turns to slapstick, mimicking farting sounds, and receives the precious laughter required. As the carnivalesque, this new heterogeneous energy regime is associated with the lower part of the body. At the same time, the film’s solution anticipates the utopian ending of wall-e in suggesting that change might occur without any real sacrifices. Sulley’s alternative occurs without the trauma of Boggs’s “scream extractor,” yet it shares with it the same desire to maintain a monster world without any of the impediments or losses that would occur if there were such a transformation to a green energy system based on wind and solar power, for instance. As a work of petro-literacy, the movie offers a utopian

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conclusion in which a positive use of technology creates the conditions for the perpetuation of a normative social order. This might be seen as a petro-literacy narrative that tells us that the transition to the next energy regime will come from the current providers of old energy (as can be seen in the misleading “green energy” ads from bp and Exxon). The utopian ending also avoids questions about the sustainability of the new energy regime. We see the transformation at the end of a hyper-efficient corporation to one that appears as a perpetual party, a kind of official carnivalesque. But there is another sense of the carnivalesque, one that is more traditionally revolutionary and that does not come from the film’s narrative conclusion but from its final image, a lingering screen shot that shows Sulley entering Boo’s room through a “reconstructed” closet door. I want to suggest that this coda image disrupts the petro-literacy narrative that the film has developed in that Sulley and Boo see each other now in their own “reconstructed” roles insofar as his crossing arises from nonexploitative reasons. During this extended close up of Sulley coming through the door, we hear Boo’s expression of joy but notably do not see her except through its effect upon Sulley’s expression. While the final scene is classically sentimental and provides closure in keeping with a children’s film, it also disturbs the taboo placed upon the figure of the closet door that was unchanged in the new energy system. This close up of Sulley’s face with the sound of Boo’s joyous giggle suggests the sense of heterogeneous energy “as insubordinate, not only as that which is ‘left over’ and ‘unemployed’ after the job is done, but above all as that which is a priori unemployable, always situated just beyond the limits of sense and growth.”37 Breaking the taboo of the closet door, the scene reworks the utopian discovery of the new resource. Through this final image, taking place on a threshold, the film reimagines the relationship between source and consumption, upsetting the commodity chain and the ideological social order it sustains. Film critic Boaz Hagin offers a Lacanian reading of this scene as suggesting the possibility of a non-traumatic relation to the Real that the film had previously foreclosed: [A]lthough he was told that he could no longer see Boo because “that’s the way it has to be,” at the end of the film, we see him entering the door that transports him from the monster world

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into her bedroom, thus violating what had appeared to be the most important interdiction of the monster world. He has risked exposure to the toxic presence of a real child who was not gullible and so was able to introduce real change into his beliefs and world – to perform what Žižek would define as a Lacanian “act,” the unpredictable madness of doing something impossible within the coordinates of the current symbolic so as to change it, an “intervention which redefines the rules and contours of the existing order.”38 What Hagin describes here is precisely the risks involved in making the remarkable changes that Sulley undergoes in the film. Unlike the characters in wall-e who go beyond their “directives” only to reinstate their original programming, Monsters, Inc. enacts the dramatic change required for a shift from one energy system to another with all of its difficulties and risks: psychological, economic, and social. One criticism might be that the movie describes only what the newly found resource does for Sulley, in terms of changing his affect from industrious worker to an individual with feelings for the other, rather than what it might mean for a collective, shared relationship between the self on one side of the door with the resources on the other. However, in contrast to Cars, with its individualist conclusion and wall-e, with its social ending, Monsters, Inc. dramatizes the dialogical connection between a reinvented self and other that suggests what would actually be required for real-world social and political change to occur. This petrocultural reading posits the new (dis)order as a heterogeneous energy system with its insubordination and unpredictability as part of a new carnivalesque world that is not only difficult to sustain within a corporate model but also impossible to represent within traditional petrocultural terms. The limits of this representation are apparent in the follow-up film, Monsters University, released twelve years later, with a new director and writer. It is revealing that Monsters University is a prequel, set nostalgically in the pre–peak energy past. We do not witness the company adapting itself to the new energy regime invented at the end of the film. It is as if the creators recognized that petrocultural representation is generated by the figurative presence of the closet door and that with the door rendered meaningless in the conclusion to the first film, there could be no proper sequel set within

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a “heterogeneous” world. Coincidentally, Monsters University was released in the summer of 2013, at the same time that the Oil Drum website closed and peak oil was declared officially “dead” by the mainstream media.39 In keeping with its own “post–peak oil” context, Monsters University imagined an unproblematic relation to energy in which the exploitative relationship between resource and consumption cultures are “not seen” by its participants.

Conclusion: New Media/Old Energy It is telling that since Pixar officially became partners with Disney in 2006, wall-e, which had already been in production, remains the only film to address petrocultural topics in any way. In contrast, the sequels to Cars and Monsters, Inc. lack the inventiveness of the first films in terms of recasting relations between our social identities and petroculture, and they adhere more strictly to generic models for their plots.40 The outbreak of inventive, creative films from the early 2000s also occurred during a period when issues like peak oil started to be discussed and the start of the second Gulf War (with its anthem of “No Blood for Oil”) brought the concept of energy dependency more into the mainstream. Recent films like Inside Out (2015) and The Good Dinosaur (2015), while inventive in many ways, have traditional plots concerning individual achievement and self-knowledge rather than social change. However, the plot of The Good Dinosaur is consistent with the use of energy systems as a significant structural element in Pixar films. The plot is based on the conceit that the meteor that would have made the dinosaurs extinct, and hence provided the geological basis for petroleum, misses the earth. Consistent with the human/non-human trope of Pixar films, the film depicts a world in which dinosaurs and humans coexist, but with the twist that dinosaurs develop into an agricultural, settler species and the humans remain savage. In a sense, the film starts from the petrocultural paradox that concludes both wall-e and Monsters Inc. – that is, how to represent a world without oil? The Good Dinosaur does not answer the problems the earlier films pose; rather, the prehistoric setting suggests that it is easier to represent a world in which oil does not happen than one in which we move beyond it. When considered as petrocultural texts, the Pixar films are useful for the ways in which they use animation and the concept of

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alternate, coexisting human–non-human worlds to convey how our world is “programmed” under petro-control. These films do this in part by playing on the narrative conventions of children’s entertainment where the boundaries between agency and object are always shifting and indefinite. But they also produce a sense of being “outside” the old energy order through their engagement with new technology. As many critics have noted, Pixar films dramatize the pros and cons of technology with the moral that their new, clean, millennial technological world provides the answer for a more human future.41 This can be seen in the conclusions to Monsters, Inc. and wall-e, but it is also implicit in the “proper” use of toys, a primitive technological form of “play,” in the Toy Story movies. In this way, Pixar aligns itself with the Silicon Valley ideology that suggests a radical break between new media and old energy, as if the former promises a kind of liberation from the latter. As can be seen in their self-promotion in terms of “green energy,” new media companies like Google and Apple seek to disavow not only their connections to real-world conditions such as exploitative global labour but also their dependency on fossil-fuel economies. When they address energy at all, it is often to declare their heightened efficiencies as part of ecological arguments directed at climate change.42 Yet when seen in terms of petroculture, new media is remarkably complicit: from the plastics used in parts and fibre optic cables to the energy needed to maintain servers and to fuel the global distribution and production of resources, from assembly plants in China to coltan mines in the Congo.43 In this way, Pixar’s films formally situate themselves as “outside” petroculture through the company’s faith in itself as part of a liberated new media world that is “beyond oil.” But then this is just the twenty-first-century version of the old petro-literacy lie: that there are no such things as monsters behind our closet doors. notes 1 Karen Paik, To Infinity and Beyond! The Story of Pixar Animation Studios (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2007), 256. 2 I am indebted to two books on children’s films and ideology that influenced my approach: M. Keith Booker, Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children’s Films (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010) and Ian Wojcik-Andrews, Children’s Films: History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory (New York: Garland, 2000).

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3 For influential essays on There Will Be Blood and Giant, see Daniel Worden, “Fossil-Fuel Futurity: Oil in Giant,” Journal of American Studies 46, no. 02 (2012): 441–60; Peter Hitchcock, “Oil in an American Imaginary,” New Formations 69 (Summer 2010): 81–97; Stephanie LeMenager, “The Aesthetics of Petroleum, after Oil!,” American Literary History 24, no. 1 (2012): 59–86. 4 On the role of culture in imagining post-oil futurity, see Imre Szeman’s essay written during this period of crisis: Imre Szeman, “System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 4 (2007): 805–23. 5 Quoted in Anne F. Howey, “Going beyond Our Directive: Wall-E and the Limits of Social Commentary,” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 2, no. 1 (2010): 45–70, 48. 6 In terms of film and tv, young girls’ entertainment exists in precarbon worlds such as the early modern setting for Frozen or the rustic, magical world of My Little Pony. However, like the boys’ petrocultural worlds, both involve the production of invisible sources of energy and transformative power. An exception is a film outside of the time frame for my study, Home (2014), in which a young girl drives a flying car. The toy market is another issue as the consumerist products for girls serve as the main pedagogical site for petro-literacy. 7 Paik, To Infinity and Beyond!, 51. 8 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44–72. 9 Robin L. Murray and Joseph Heumann, That’s All Folks? Ecocritical Readings of American Animated Features (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 227. 10 As Paik and others have noted, the creative system at Pixar makes all of the company’s films part of a unified vision. Despite the different directors, many of the same figures contribute to the films. 11 Howey, “Going beyond Our Directive,” 45. 12 For an example of this point of view see Loren Lomasky, “Autonomy and Automobility,” The Independent Review 2, no. 1 (1997): 5–28. For a contrasting perspective on automobilism, see Mimi Sheller, “Automotive Emotions: Feeling the Car,” Theory, Culture, Society 21, no. 4/5 (2004): 221–42. Also, see Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back (New York: Crown Publishers, 1997). 13 Allan Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 184.

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21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

michael malouf For instance, see Lomasky, “Autonomy and Automobility.” Paik, To Infinity and Beyond!, 256. Ibid., 267. Ibid., 259. Almost universally panned by critics, it was seen as the first Pixar film that did not improve upon its predecessors (see James B. Stewart, “A Collision of Creativity and Cash,” New York Times, 2 July 2011, B1); however, it did well on the global market, recouping $559 million at the global box office, according to boxofficemojo.com. See Brooks Barnes, “It Wasn’t a Wreck, Not Really,” New York Times, 18 October 2011, c1. For more on this stock figure, see Worden, “Fossil-Fuel Futurity.” David Rudd, “Animal and Object Stories,” Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature, ed. M.O. Grenby and Andrea Immel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 242–57. Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak, 132. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 186. In a similar situation after 9/11, Pete Docter remade a sequence of explosions from Monsters, Inc. (Paik, To Infinity and Beyond!, 198). M. Keith Booker, Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children’s Films (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010), 104. Ibid., 105. Howey, “Going beyond Our Directive,” 51. Booker, Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages, 109. Murray and Heumann, That’s All Folks?, 225–7. Ibid., 208. Howey, “Going beyond Our Directive,” 51. Szeman, “System Failure,” 815. For more on this transformation of the wildcatter into the oil man, see LeMenager, “The Aesthetics of Petroleum,” 79. See Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 21–2. To use Rob Nixon’s phrase (ibid., 23). Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” trans. Carl R. Lovitt, New German Critique 16 (Winter, 1979), 64–87. Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak, 231–2, note. 22. Ibid., 200.

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38 Boaz Hagin, “Examples in Theory: Interpassive Illustrations and Celluloid Fetishism,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 1 (2008): 21. 39 For just one example of this conclusion, which became something of a meme when the Oil Drum website closed in July 2013, see Claudia Assis, “Peak Oil Website to Close Its Doors,” Wall Street Journal: MarketWatch, 9 July 2013. 40 See Stewart, “A Collision of Creativity and Cash,” b1. 41 See J.P. Telotte, “Better than Real: Digital Disney, Pixar, and Beyond,” The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 159–78. 42 See “Google Green” website. There was concern over the environmental costs of Big Data around 2009–12. Since then, Google has positioned itself as protecting the environment through its driverless cars – a utopian world view anticipated in Pixar. See Jen Alic, “Just How Green Is Google?,” AltEnergy eMagazine, June–July 2012. 43 For a fascinating account of the real-world presence of new media, see Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (New York: Ecco, 2012). On the environmental impact of Big Data servers see Jean-Marc Pierson and Laurent Lefèvre, “Does Big Data Cause Pollution?” in cnrs News, 26 October 2015, accessed 27 July 2016, https://news.cnrs.fr/opinions/does-big-data-cause-pollution.

6 “Made for Mankind”: Cars, Cosmetics, and the Petrocultural Feminine Cecily Devereux

“This here is the best car I ever owned. Bought her back in September 1957. Back then, that’s when you got your new model year, in September. All summer long they’d show you pictures of cars under hoods and cars under tarps until you were fair dyin t’know what they looked like underneath. Not like now.” His voice dripped contempt for the debased times he had lived to see. “Brand-new, she was. Had the smell of a brand-new car, and that’s about the finest smell in the world.” He considered. “Except maybe for pussy.” Stephen King, Christine All objects, cars included, become women in order to be bought – but this is a function of the cultural system. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects

When emcee and producer Anthony Ray  – better known by his performing name Sir Mix-a-Lot – described a woman in his 1992 classic “Baby Got Back” as “goin’ like a turbo ’Vette,” he mobilized what was well-established in popular music and across popular culture by the middle of the twentieth century as a practice of representing women metaphorically with reference to cars and vice versa, as in the case of Brian Wilson’s ambiguous “Little Deuce Coupe” of 1963, or Wilson Pickett’s cover of Mack Rice’s “Mustang Sally” of 1965.1 The figure in Ray’s song that has a dancing woman with a “motor” in “the back of her Honda” is represented using metaphor’s characteristic indexing of what is evident, comprehensible,

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and immediate. She is as familiar as the cars that both represent and stand in for human presence in urban space and that are visible ubiquitously, not only in that space but across media, through advertising as well as in “ordinary” representation. It is not hard to see that Ray’s trope is indicative of a familiar cultural impulse to represent both cars as women and women as cars and thus, equally and interchangeably, as commodities: “objects … to be bought,” as Jean Baudrillard puts it.2 In this sense, as Edward Madden has suggested, “this reversible metaphorization [attests to] the traffic in women [that] may mark the sociosymbolic relations between men … that in many ways structure society.”3 Even more specifically, however, the representation of women as cars and cars as women marks both as “objects” constituted from, sustained by, and dependent on oil industries. This is not only a matter of repeatedly and insistently associating women with cars, as in so much advertising media, but of constituting them equally as products. It is not, then, a matter “just” of metaphor but of what so much advertising, media, and popular representation has constructed as a foundational symbolic interchangeability between women and cars. “Cars are girls,” says Leigh Cabot in Stephen King’s 1983 pulp horror novel Christine, and again one page later with a slightly different but equally significant emphasis, “Cars are girls.”4 The relationship Leigh traces and that the novel negotiates as “horror” is not so much metaphorical (women are like cars; cars are like women) as, at least symbolically, in language and image, synonymous. This paper begins to consider the ways in which petroculture, the “cultural system” that situates its meanings in the context of the late nineteenth- to early twenty-first-century business of oil, drives the representation and performance of femininity into the twenty-first century. It focuses on two cultural problems: the symbolic alignment of women and cars in media and in popular representation – looking in particular at King’s Christine alongside some recent automobile advertisements and music and other video – and the relationship of contemporary ideologies of femininity to a commerce in cosmetics that are themselves a product of oil industries – looking in particular at mascara, a product that has been firmly established in the “everyday” since the early twentieth century when petroleum-based mascara was first produced for a mass market in North America. Underlying this investigation is the idea that, if women, as King’s

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novel and so much media suggest, “are” cars, and are thus symbolically interchangeable, the promotion of petroleum-based cosmetics for use by women cannot arise from a relationship less meaningful to the constitution of the product that is femininity than that of oil to automobiles. This paper does not propose to trace in any detailed way the complicated relationship of the petroleum industry to cosmetics from the late nineteenth century into the twenty-first, nor to provide a comprehensive analytical overview of the nature and effects of petrochemicals in cosmetics, historically and at this time. These two lines of inquiry require another kind of analytical work and another kind of archive. But, in focusing attention on the relationship of women and cars in the symbolic economy (of image and language) and the relationship of that economy to petroculture (and vice versa), it does undertake to consider the implications for women of the representation of femininity in synonymy with automobiles. These are not, this paper suggests, “just” a matter of women’s being constituted as commodities. As in Baudrillard’s bland insistence on the necessity of all objects, including cars, becoming women “in order to be bought,” such commoditization is a fact and a principle of patriarchy, the social and economic structure that continues to function systemically across, at least, North American culture. Nor are these implications “just” a matter of the banal alignment of women and cars as patriarchal commodities through the genital synecdoche of “pussy,” as is so evident in the passage from King’s Christine, cited above. This practice of gender and object representation through genital synecdoche (women are “cunts”) is also pretty standard stuff in the context of patriarchy, a system that, after all, is based on the exchange of women constituted as reproductive vehicles, valued precisely for their genital capacity to bear the progeny that ensures the patriarchal future. What this paper suggests makes petroculture’s mobilization of the standard commodity figures of femininity so significant in the aligning of women and cars in media and popular representation and, crucially, across the culture and industry of cosmetics is its sustaining of a symbolic economy that depends on women’s not having the capacity to be self-propelling or self-determining: not to be driving but to be driven, not to be subject but object. Women “are” cars in this “cultural system,” but through an obfuscatory exchange of

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value, they – like cars – are not or cannot be “automobile.” Petroculture undertakes this work of sustaining what we might call women’s auto-immobility across multiple registers of which this essay considers three: the conventional representation of cars and women as symbolically interchangeable; the interpellation of women through the rhetoric of cosmetically constituted femininity in the making of themselves as specifically petrocultural commodities; and the circulation of narratives such as King’s Christine that undertake to demonstrate the “horror” of women’s automobility. When, that is, King’s novel suggests, the car/woman has the capacity to drive herself – or, as is the case for the Bride in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003) and, later, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé in the 2010 video for the song “Telephone,” to drive the “Pussy Wagon” – the “cultural system” (the patriarchal and phallic economy) that depends on the circulation of (a traffic in) women is imperilled. The car in this system is thus not just any “object,” not just one among “all objects”: it is what Paul Gilroy describes as “the ur commodity” of “capitalism as it moves into and leaves its industrial phase” but with a dual referentiality not only to itself but to the women and the traffic in women it represents, and it is therefore a crucial index of the operation of the “cultural system” as a whole.5 Carol Sanger, considering the question of “[h]ow it is that the automobile has come to serve women – as drivers, as passengers, as purchasers – less well than men,” has astutely observed that “the car has reinforced women’s subordinated status in ways that make the subordination seem ordinary, even logical.”6 Sanger focuses on what she describes as “two predictable, but subtle, mechanisms” in this work of reinforcement: the first, she suggests, “permits” women to drive cars but does so “by increasing [their] domestic obligations,” in effect making the car an extension of the domestic space of the home and the job of the maternal caregiver; the second works “by sexualizing the relation between women and cars.”7 Sanger considers this latter mechanism with reference to the car as a space for as well as an index of the sexual subordination of women: it is an extension of the home, a location for sexual danger. Sarah S. Jain likewise considers the implications of the “gendered space” of the car, demonstrating through an attentive analysis of Star, Guy Ritchie’s 2001 six-minute film/ad for bmw, how the space of the car serves as the location for the film’s violent affirmation of women’s subordination:

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Madonna, the “complete cunt”8 in the back of the car, is, in effect, put in her place by the driver (Clive Owen). Ritchie’s little film is a version of the scenario Quentin Tarantino would develop in the 2007 film Death Proof, and thus an index of what Sanger suggests are the “perils for women” in cars. This paper also looks at what might be seen as the “perils for women” in car culture. Rather, however, than considering the relationship of women to cars as material objects – a crucial issue, given the extent to which, as Jain observes, “it is the very materiality of [the car] that makes it such an important site of analysis” – it focuses on the ways in which the “sexualizing” of the relation between women and cars (women = cars = pussy) can be found in popular representation that indexes petroculture as a frame of reference and a pervasive system of signs and the ways in which – and why – this symbolic economy reinforces “women’s subordinated status” precisely by denying women automobility and affirming their function as objects in a commerce between men. Petroculture, that is, does not simply reflect a pervasive problem: through its ubiquitous and insistently reductive gendered representations of woman and cars and, this paper suggests, its foundational relationship with cosmetics, it produces it. In 1955, so the story goes, Chuck Berry “brought to Chess Records a recording of his cover version of [Bob] Wills’ [1938] tune [‘Ida Red’] which he had renamed ‘Ida May.’”9 Producer Leonard Chess was enthusiastic, Glenn C. Altschuler suggests, about “the commercial possibilities in a hillbilly song” performed by an African American man.10 Chess “added a bass and maraca player,” renamed the song, and directed the rewriting of the lyrics to respond, he indicates, to the contemporary “trend” of “the big beat, cars, and young love.”11 His renaming of the song, according to Altschuler, was a matter of happenstance: “Spotting a mascara box on the floor of the studio … Chess said, ‘Well, hell, let’s name the damn thing Maybellene,’ altering the spelling to avoid a suit by the cosmetics company.”12 Although represented as chance, Chess’s assigning of what was immediately recognizable phonetically as the name of the biggest cosmetic company in the US in 1955 to the object of desire in this song about women and cars is a compelling index of the significant imbrication of cosmetics and car culture across and in relation to

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women’s bodies. Both “objects” operate in the constitution of the pervasive ideology of what we should understand to be the petrocultural feminine or femininity as it is constituted and as it interpellates women in the time and space of what is still comprehensible as the “motor age” and one phase of industrial capitalism: the formation of society in and around oil.13 Car culture’s role in this work is certainly well-established as both the automobile industry in North America and the gendered vocabulary of car ads move into their second century. Indeed, it is almost impossible not to encounter what Sanger and Jain both describe as the “tedious practice of draping women across car hoods at auto shows and the prominence of  … women in cars ads” in everyday media.14 Across the web, in magazines, on television, in music videos, women’s bodies are represented alongside, with, and as cars. These images are so pervasive and so familiar that they have arguably been internalized in North America as “ordinary”  – at least, as “ordinary” as cars themselves. While “ordinary,” however, these images of women and cars are far from neutral, functionalized as they are as affirmation of a contractual relationship between a male buyer and his prospective automobile: what is promised is his automobility and his control over both “objects.” As they are represented in so much advertising, women in their not-going-anywhere bodywear (bikinis, heels), invoked, literally, as hood adornment, attached to cars synecdochally but constellated with them as “objects” in relation to the male buyer, signify their own immobility while affirming an ideology of femininity subordinated in the making of masculinity. This ideology  – patriarchy’s cornerstone, it hardly needs to be pointed out  – is evident across the media that has promoted car culture since, as Virginia Scharff puts it, it “was born in a masculine manger” in the early twentieth century.15 A compelling index of this point can be found in the 1987 video for rock band Whitesnake’s song “Here I Go Again,” famous for the appearance of porn performer (and, later, musician David Coverdale’s wife) Tawny Kitaen, in white lingerie in and on Coverdale’s own Jaguar xj.16 What makes the video such a useful location for considering the implications of the petrocultural feminine for women is its alignment of the image of Kitaen with the lyrics of a song whose real subject is the automobile male: the song is not about her but about him. “And here I go again on my own,” he sings, “Goin’ down the only

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road I’ve ever known.” He – the first-person singer – is mobile and self-determining; the car and the woman, conversely, are static: the woman moves, but only on it, and only within the frame of the image. Indeed, in the frame of the video, it is only the image that moves, propelled by and as the video whose movement underscores the woman’s own stasis, at least in relation to the viewer. Neither she nor the car can be understood to be mobile without the male subject in relation to whom both are subordinated. This principle of representation and the ideology it reproduces arguably underpin car advertising from the early twentieth-century moment Scharff traces of women’s having to “combat both subtle and overt resistance” to their taking the wheel into the present.17 In 2013, for example, automobile company Acura launched a new campaign for its 2014 mdx luxury crossover suv, “its most expensive” campaign ever, according to autoblog.com. By summer 2013, there were at least two print versions of the ad circulating in magazines. In one case, the ad shows a woman’s head aligned with the front of a red vehicle, her hair echoing the car’s colour. Both images are fragmentary: just a head, eyes covered with hair; just a headlight and a bit of grille. In the other case, the ad presents the face of a woman and the front of a vehicle emerging from a black background from which they are more or less indistinguishable. Not so much parallel as simultaneous and interchangeable (the headlights and eyes; the mouth and grill; the skin and paint), the two images, in both ads, are separated by a single line of text: “Made for mankind.” The “for” is underlined, presumably to emphasize the purpose of both the automobile and the woman in the service of “mankind.” Both, it is implicit, are available to the masculine consumer, the subject interpellated by the ad itself. While the ad’s gesturing toward “mankind” might seem to suggest “humanity,” something that is also apparent in the campaign’s first video, entitled “Human Race,” the alignment of the car with the woman in each print ad powerfully suggests that it is “man” and not “woman” who is being hailed. In other words, while these ads might purport to move away from the well-established media practices of representing cars as women and drivers as men, they reaffirm the gender specificity of the principle articulated in their own tagline. The point made in the Acura mdx ads is the same as that made putatively more critically (and, it seems likely, less expensively) in

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a YouTube video posted by Khyan Mansley a year earlier, in 2012. Not an advertisement (unless it is one for Mansley himself), the video is titled “All cars are girls.” It begins with a man who has just bought a car and wants to affirm its maleness (to name it “Paul”) against the arguments of a friend. When the car owner objects to the feminization of the object and suggests the “contours” of the car “are clearly masculine,” his friend responds: “No matter how masculine it may look or feel, just remember it is a woman … because you own it. It’s in service to you, just like a woman.” “I’m not saying I agree with it,” the friend says, echoing Baudrillard’s affirmation of the “cultural system,” “but it’s there.”18 This point is arguably also saliently “there” a year earlier in the 2011 advertising campaign of used car dealer Dale Wurfel in Strathroy, Ontario, as it interpellates the masculine subject who understands his relationship to the car through his relationship to women and vice versa. Wurfel’s ad in the Ontario paper the London Free Press drew on an earlier bmw campaign,19 showing a woman, arms raised and breasts lifted, with the text, “You know you’re not the first / But do you really care?” Discussed in a 2011 blog under the title “Non-Virgin Women Are Just Like Used Cars (update),” the ad raised questions, at least in the feminist blogosphere, of “objectification” and of the implications of seeing sexually experienced women as “used” “goods,” or commodities whose value (worth and meaning) is genital.20 Like Madonna in Star and Christine in Christine, the woman in this ad is essentially a “cunt”: the man knows he is “not the first” to the woman’s “pussy” and to the car, equally. (Neither is “brand new.”) The implications at one level are clear: the advertising practice of selling cars using images of women not as drivers but as figures who are the same as cars, who stand for cars, as cars stand for them, is a business of also “selling” an affirmation of male subjectivity at the expense of women’s automobility. If the business of selling cars depends on the constitution of an idea of femininity that is symbolically aligned with cars and thus rendered immobile, subordinate, and infinitely exchangeable (the petrocultural feminine), then the business of constituting masculinity in this “cultural system” arguably depends on the affirmation of car culture’s representations. Such affirmation is readily evident where this paper began, in twentieth- and twenty-first-century North

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American popular music where “chicks” and “cars,” as Colin James puts it,21 are as ubiquitously aligned (and fetishized) as they are in the erotic commoditization of women and cars in automobile advertising. Stephen King’s 1983 novel Christine, the story of a (nice) boy and his (evil) car, prefaces every chapter with a quoted passage from a twentieth-century North American popular song: the text cites forty-six songs, most of which work explicitly to emphasize the text’s interest in tracing a link between automobiles and women and the ways in which both are perceived by and relate to men. These fragments of song and the culture they index thus operate in exactly the same way as car ads or the Whitesnake video, affirming the automobility of the male subject through his relationship to the petrocultural feminine (car = woman = pussy) and establishing this relationship as “normal.” Christine represents the “horror” that ensues when the “normal” is subverted and the car/woman takes on subjectivity and drives herself. That the book’s anxiety is directed toward women rather than “just” cars is evident in the fact that Christine’s actions are routinely characterized not just as feminine but as a woman’s: the car’s engine sounds “like the shriek of a woman who scents treachery”22 and “like an insanely angry, murderous woman”;23 the car itself moves with “the high womanscream of burning rubber.”24 The impetus of the narrative is to return “her” to the status of “it” while containing what it describes as the “terrible female force that animated her”25 as it also does Arnie Cunningham’s mother Regina. Indeed, Christine and Regina are insistently aligned throughout the text. Both are metonymically genital, Christine through the text’s insistently repeated affirmation of her “pussy” smell and, as Andrew Schopp points out, her “plush upholstery”26 (“you could enter her any time”27); Regina through the near rhyme in the North American English pronunciation of her name with a long i: Regina/vagina. Regina, that is, is as much characterized by her threatening, castrating, vaginal femininity as Christine is by her vagina dentata grille:28 both fall into the category narrator Dennis references when he says “some cunts have teeth.”29 Regina, characterized by her “Momism supreme,” “unmans” her husband and son, as Christine likewise reduces men to what are represented as blubbering “unmen” before actually killing them.30 Phallic mothers both, Regina and Christine crucially represent what is at stake in the symbolic alignment of women and cars, not

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only in this text, but broadly and culturally. They do so most significantly in their more or less simultaneous and parallel conclusions, Regina’s in a fiery car crash with a semi, Christine’s in her maceration by Dennis Guilder when he is driving the waste truck “Petunia.” Both represent the anxious psychosexual imperatives of patriarchy as it works to normalize and affirm as necessary the exchange of women in a phallic economy and to pathologize the instability of this economic structure and its symbolic practices as a crucial “failure” of women (the “terrible female force”). Women, inescapably constituted as both castrated and castrating in the phallic economy (industrial capitalism, patriarchy) whose psychic life Freud’s theories of the Oedipal articulated and fixed as a “science” of gender from the late nineteenth into the twenty-first century, can only both affirm and challenge the principles of their own constitution: they can only ever want to have and to be the phallus; they can only ever neurotically desire what they cannot have or be. In King’s car story, these inevitabilities produce the frightening, man-eating mother Regina and “old whore”31 car Christine, who both and equally represent loss and death for all the men around them, a Freudian castration horror based, as in Luce Irigaray’s account of the Oedipal, in the “horror of nothing to see.” But they also motivate  – or, as in the text itself as it functionalizes Chuck Berry’s term, “motorvate”32  – the narrative to contain the threat represented by women by, in effect, immobilizing them. In the story, that means neutralizing their castrating danger by violently destroying them, “returning” them, as Schopp puts it, “to [their] space as passive object of barter between men.”33 Regina is incinerated in a car crash; Christine is reduced to “a spread-out pile of twisted, gored metal, puffs of upholstery, and glittering broken glass.”34 Baudrillard has suggested that the dismembered and mutilated bodies in J.G. Ballard’s 1973 car culture novel Crash do not represent “the pejorative illusion of a lost unity of the subject (which is still the horizon of psychoanalysis).”35 King’s car culture novel Christine, however, arguably does represent dismembered and mutilated bodies – those of Christine and Regina, as well as those of Christine’s male victims – with reference to this lost unity, the psychoanalytic “horizon” and the maintenance of the phallic symbolic economy. At one level, as Madden observes, Christine works toward neutralizing the threat of the castrating phallic feminine by constituting it as commodity of exchange that serves to index the worth (size,

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value, prestige) of the man in possession of that object. This work of neutralizing involves a series of symbolic exchanges: cars are phallic; cars are women; women and cars are “death-traps,” but they can be managed through the affirmation that both are equally commodities in a patriarchal market. They may be, as Colin James puts it (with “the Third World War”) the “only things worth fighting for,” but they are also only “things” and things that representation, narrative, and a phallic economy can control or fantasize about controlling at the levels of circulation and signification. The story of the phallic economy that King mobilizes in Christine is, of course, not new: the petroculture that emerges around 1859 as a commercial industry in North America does not invent femininity constituted as masculinity’s castrated other. What King’s novel does at the level of the narrative is thus not fundamentally different from the work of representation in advertising and other media, which likewise operate to construct women and cars as objects that signify on the same terms and in the same way (“Cars are girls”). Indeed, as Jain shows in her analysis of Guy Ritchie’s six-minute Star bmw film, it is not difficult to see how Christine’s vengeful patriarchal fantasy is played out precisely in car advertising. In insisting, as Madden suggests, that “women are objects of exchange, not acting subjects”36 and thus working to constitute women, along with cars, as things, Christine affirms what Baudrillard has suggested is normal and inevitable in the “cultural system.” It is, however, not only in the representation of women as cars and cars as women that petroculture reproduces the ideology of women’s “function” as “objects ... to be bought”: the cosmetics industry that emerges from the petroleum industry alongside the automobile industry in the early twentieth century should likewise be seen not only to be materially invested but to be symbolically imbricated in this “system” and thus to be a crucial part of the constitution of the petrocultural feminine. In 1915, so the story goes, teenage mail-order entrepreneur Thomas Lyle Williams watched his sister Mabel applying a mixture of burnt cork and petroleum jelly to her eyelashes, which had been scorched earlier in the day while she was cooking at the stove. According to Williams family historian Sharrie Williams and her co-writer Bettie Youngs, Tom Lyle was stunned by his sister’s transformation

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through what she described as a “harem secret.” Williams writes: “The charcoal eyebrows and lashes next to his sister’s porcelain skin made for a dramatic and lovely contrast. With no more than a blob of Vaseline, some incinerated cork and a bit of coal dust, Mabel had not only resurrected her appearance, she had improved it.”37 Williams describes her uncle’s eureka moment: “Why hadn’t he realized it before? The magic key to the beauty of Hollywood goddesses was not their figures or their wardrobes or their smiles. It was their eyes.”38 Tom Lyle set to work on the composition of his product and within short order had developed and began marketing by mail, mostly, a colourless lash enhancer he called Lash-Brow-Ine.39 (This product did not contain “incinerated cork” or any other darkening agent.) Claimed not only to improve the appearance of lashes but to help them “grow longer and fuller,”40 the product’s primary ingredient, indicated in its own third syllable, was Vaseline. In 1859, so the story goes, British-born US-based chemist Robert Chesebrough, his work clarifying kerosene from the oil of sperm whales rendered obsolete by the discovery of petroleum in Titusville, Pennsylvania, travelled to the oil fields there “hoping to profit from [the emerging oil industry].”41 In the oil fields Chesebrough learned of “a gooey substance known as ‘Rod Wax’ that  … stuck to the drilling rigs, causing them to seize up.” Seeing that the “oil workers would smear their skin with the residue from their drills, as it appeared to aid the healing of cuts and burns,”42 “Chesebrough took samples of the rod wax back to Brooklyn, extracted the usable petroleum jelly, and began manufacturing the medicinal product he called Vaseline.”43 Chesebrough is reported to have marketed his product by staging demonstrations in which he would “burn his skin with acid or an open flame, then spread the clear jelly on his injuries.”44 In 1872, he applied for a patent (US Patent 127,568) thus: “I, Robert Chesebrough, have invented a new and useful product from petroleum which I have named ‘Vaseline.’”45 In 1883, according to Wikipedia, he was knighted, reportedly being told at the time by Queen Victoria that she “used Vaseline every day.”46 “By the late 1880s,” according to vaselineskinfund.com, “Chesebrough was selling Vaseline® Petroleum Jelly nationwide at the rate of one jar per minute.”47 By the early twentieth century, his product would prove to be foundational for the emerging new industry in cosmetics, where it and the later forms of similarly derived petrolatum would

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be widely used as key components not only of mascara but of many kinds of makeup. The early colourless Maybelline mascara (or, strictly speaking, eyelash and eyebrow enhancer) Lash-Brow-Ine did not survive after 1921. It was pushed out of the marketplace by the US Bureau of Chemistry, precursor to the Food and Drug Administration (fda), who objected not to its ingredients but to its false claims that it stimulated hair growth.48 But this early product nonetheless served to establish for Williams a sense that a product engineered to make lashes look longer and darker could be readily marketed in North America, and it became the cornerstone for his business, named “Maybell Laboratories” in honour of his sister.49 In the wake of Lash-Brown-Ine, Williams developed another product, a cake mascara with darkening agents, which likewise depended on the petroleum jelly Chesebrough had patented in 1872, and which he called Maybelline, the name given both to the company’s products and, after 1923, to the company itself. The name Maybelline quickly became virtually synonymous with mascara itself, in North America, at any rate,50 and the company, now owned by L’Oréal, is still one of the best-known makers of cosmetics. In 2011, Maybelline celebrated the fortieth year of its Great Lash mascara, which had been launched in what is typically described as its “iconic” pink and green tube in 1971, and which has continued to hold a strong place in the mascara market. As recently as 2012 a tube of Great Lash was sold every 1.7 seconds.51 Although “ordinary” and ubiquitous in the early twenty-first century, at the beginning of the twentieth, industrially produced cosmetics were not big business and not a part of the routine of “everyday” femininity. Makeup, with the exception of the kind of “harem secret” Mabel Williams put to work, still by and large belonged in the context of the theatre, and mascara in particular does not appear to have been in wide use – was, indeed, not even used as a term for the product, the Oxford English Dictionary shows, until 1886. It was certainly not operating as a principal tool in the construction of the public feminine body, as it would in the twentieth century. In 1858, for instance, when dancer Lola Montez published her guidebook for women, The Arts of Beauty, she provided quite detailed information about the ingredients needed for making homemade concoctions for the hair, skin, and breasts, but did not include any recipe for mascara

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and did not advise women to wear it (or, for that matter, not to wear it). Rather, she suggested that “It [was] within the power of almost every lady to have long and strong eyelashes by simply chipping with scissors the points of the hair once in five or six weeks.”52 Published a year before the establishment of the Titusville oil well, Montez’s Arts of Beauty predates the petroculture that would shape North American society over the next hundred and fifty years. In fact, it was not until almost half a century later that a burgeoning cosmetics industry in North America began to develop a rhetoric to promote its products, and even then, as Kathy Peiss shows, it had to work to make women believe that they not only could but should use cosmetics.53 In Europe, Eugène Rimmel’s mascara and makeup company was actively engaged in this work. Rimmel London’s current website candidly draws attention to the company founder’s sense of what is described as “the potential of advertising to bring his products to a wider public” and to his early practice of “publish[ing] lavishly illustrated mail order catalogues and … plac[ing] advertisements in theatre programmes.”54 In the US, Tom Lyle and Maybelline, as Sharrie Williams’s account of the family business suggests, were likewise coming to terms with this “potential.” Sharrie Williams notes Maybelline’s “first wartime  … ad show[ing] a housewife – her eyes perfectly Maybellined, of course – writing a letter to her husband at the front. The slogan read: They’re doing their bit by keeping their femininity. That’s one of the reasons we are fighting. Another ad showed an elegant young woman being admired by a military officer as he helped her on with her white stole. The caption read: Just as he dreamed her eyes would be. Another ad simply said: War, Women, and Maybelline.”55 These ads, it is not hard to see, mobilize a rhetoric that makes a powerful case for women’s duty to wear makeup, to “keep  … their femininity,” in effect, establishing the hallmark principle of twentieth- and twenty-first-century media representations of women and cosmetics: it is the duty of all woman, not only in wartime, to “keep their femininity” or, in other words, to use makeup. As Peiss shows, ads such as these would make cosmetic products that were not homemade but industrially mass produced appear to be indispensible to women, necessary to the correct performance of femininity, crucial measures of individual beauty and value, and an effect not of media, technology, industry, or patriarchy, but of nature.

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“What,” Peiss observes, “had once been seen as women’s vices – vanity, deceit, desire – were now signs of a ‘normal mind,’” their absence, concomitantly, signs of abnormality, unfemininity, and failure.56 The effects of early cosmetics advertising are dramatic. As Peiss points out, cosmetics use among women in North America expanded dramatically between 1849, when “the value of manufactured toiletries throughout the United States totalled only $355,000,”57 and 1929, when, she notes, “sociologist Robert Lloyd estimated [that] Americans were spending $700 million annually for cosmetics and beauty services.”58 Gwen Kay suggests that between 1900 and the mid-1920s the North American cosmetic industry grew from “sales [of] less than $100,000” to “an estimated $125,000,000 retail.”59 Between 1909 and 1929 alone, Peiss notes, “the number of American perfume and cosmetics manufacturers nearly doubled, and the factory value of their products rose tenfold, from $14.2 million to nearly $141 million.”60 Nancy Koehn charts the rise of retail sales of toiletries and cosmetics in the US between 1915 and 1995, showing an increase from zero to more than $35 billion in that eighty-year period. In less than a century, in other words, makeup had gone from being largely homemade and a requirement only, arguably, in theatrical performance to a billion-dollar industry, an essential part of everyday femininity, and a foundational element in the cost and labour of “doing girl.” In terms of chronology and social history in North America, the cosmetically constituted woman and the automobile emerge together in the early twentieth century. Car production in the US begins in the 1890s but gets underway as an industry in the first and second decades of the twentieth century, at the same time the cosmetic industry is being established. “In 1901,” Virginia Scharff points out, Ransom E. Olds, designer of the “first automobile in the world to be manufactured in quantity,” “produced six hundred cars; in 1904, the company built five thousand vehicles.”61 “In 1900,” she further observes, “only 8,000 passenger automobiles had been registered in the United States; by 1905, the number of registrations had increased nearly tenfold, to 77,000.”62 If the two industries rise (tenfold) alongside one another, they do so at least in part because both depend from the beginning on petroleum. While it is difficult to ascertain the precise extent of the petroleum industry’s engagement with the cosmetics industry, it is nonetheless possible to see

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powerful economic connections between the two. Some of these economic connections can be traced to Maybelline’s own early history. I have already drawn attention to the implications of Maybelline’s wartime ads for the circulation of an idea of women’s responsibility and duty to wear makeup in order to be properly feminine. These ads were also motivated by the company’s interest in maintaining access to its key ingredient. When supplies of petroleum to nonmilitary industry in the US were to be rationed during the Second World War, Tom Lyle Williams fought to have the supply to his cosmetics company maintained. Sharrie Williams cites a warning sent from the Pentagon to the White House “that the war should not create a glamour shortage” and that “such a loss of beauty ‘might lower national morale,’”63 and suggests that her uncle’s campaign was instrumental in “sav[ing] the entire cosmetics industry for the duration” of the war.64 Although Williams’s story draws attention to the reliance of Maybelline and other midcentury North American cosmetic companies on the petroleum industry, the dependence or at least the interest in maintaining connections between cosmetics and petroleum may be mutual, something that is perhaps not all that surprising, given the massive growth of the cosmetics industry. That is, the petroleum industry itself began to produce cosmetics in the twentieth century. Teresa Riordan, in her study of the invention of a range of twentiethcentury beauty products, notes that During the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s, industry was transmuting oil into a motherlode of new wonder synthetics. Researchers broke down natural petroleum into its constituent parts and put them back together in sophisticated new combinations that yielded polyesters and acrylics, polyethylenes and polypropylenes. This hive of experimentation also produced hydrocarbon solvents that ultimately were used in cosmetics  … In an era when cosmetic formulas were usually guarded as trade secrets, the oil company Esso patented a new mascara made with hydrocarbon solvents.65 This relationship continues, and, implicitly, it continues to be profitable. Indeed, petroleum is a significant element in a business

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worth billions of dollars. Petroleum jelly is only one form of petrochemical, but its use, according to Wikipedia in 2012, is primarily cosmetic: “Most petroleum jelly today is consumed as an ingredient in skin lotions and cosmetics.”66 Experimentation in cosmetics by and for oil companies likewise clearly continues half a century later, as the many interconnections between cosmetic and petroleum patents demonstrate: patents for cosmetic-use petroleum products are numerous, coming from both petroleum companies and cosmetic companies.67 The question of whether women should worry about the potential physical dangers (the perils) of petroleum-based cosmetics has been a topic of discussion since makeup emerged into the mass market, most often with reference to the possible effects of petrochemicals on human bodies. In Fashions in Makeup: From Ancient to Modern Times (1972), for instance, Richard Corson cites a New York dermatologist, Charles W. Pabst, commenting in the early twentieth century that “Some women  … apply mixtures to their faces that would take the paint off an automobile.”68 Pabst’s comment not only highlights the potential effect of some cosmetic ingredients on human skin, but, while he does not specify petroleum products, also explicitly links cosmetics with petroculture and women with cars. Such links are similarly made later in the century, with the clear object of foregrounding what are seen to be the hazards of cosmetics containing petrochemicals. A case in point is an undated ad for Zorah “natural” cosmetics. In the ad, posted on YouTube under the title “Petroleum is for your car, not for your skin!,” a woman in a sunlit white bathroom pumps a cosmetic bottle only to find it is empty. Her horror is evident as she looks from the pump to herself in the mirror. As the music shifts from a gentle folky melody to darker strains, the woman grabs the pump, holding it like a weapon, stomps in her small black panties and filmy undone bathrobe past a man and little girl in a kitchen, and storms into the garage. As the music stops, she opens the hood of a car, plunges the pump into the oil reservoir, pumps oil from the engine into her hand, and smears it on her face, relaxing and appearing blissfully happy, while still not paying attention to the man and child peering out at her through the garage door. At that point, text appears on the screen: first, “95% of cosmetics contain Petroleum or Petroleum By-products,” then, the concluding

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admonishment, “Petroleum is for your car, not for your skin!” The folky music returns, and we are taken to a scene of Zorah cosmetics clustered around the text “My earth. My body.”69 While this ad draws dramatic attention to one set of implications of women using cosmetics with petrochemical ingredients (this stuff is dirty; it’s in the garage), it does not disrupt the ideology of women called upon to spend their money and their time making themselves look as they do not without products. This ad, in fact, mobilizes the image of a slender, young, partly dressed, sexy woman who is immediately recognizable as the common currency of the cosmetics economy: the female consumer who, significantly, has been constituted in advertising in the west since the early twentieth century as responsible for her own maintenance, presentation, and circulation as a commodity. It still wants to sell her stuff that she needs to understand she needs in order to keep being pretty, and it does so by telling her she’ll be prettier and more feminine if she doesn’t race past her heterosexual life partner and influenceable girl-child to siphon oil out of her car but instead makes use of “natural” cosmetics – to be, in effect, “really” natural through the use of “natural” cosmetics. The ad thus raises the spectre of potential, if unidentified, hazards in petrochemical-based cosmetics, but, while criticizing the relationship between cosmetics and petroleum, ultimately does not interfere with the cultural structure that relationship has been instrumental in producing. The point the ad makes is that this everywoman is inevitably and naturally going to want cosmetics: how much better it would be for her body and the earth if those cosmetics were not made with petrochemicals. The ad does not provide hard data on the effects of the petrochemicals approved by the fda in specified quantities on human bodies. Rather, the ad appeals, largely aesthetically (it is a beauty matter), to a largely middle-class consumer culture motivated and economically positioned to be able to buy expensive “natural” products. It is not difficult to see that the petroleum and cosmetics industries share an interest and an investment in an idea of femininity that is not “normal” or “natural” without makeup: such an idea is, by this point in the twentieth century, itself “normal” and “natural.” But it is arguably neither. The Zorah ad draws important attention to another kind of hazard: the interpellation of women in the making of themselves on the terms of their exchange as petrocultural “objects.”

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In 2011, French cosmetics company Lancôme launched an advertising campaign for a new version of its Hypnose mascara. According to lifestyle and fashion blog footluxe.com, the “success[ful]” mascara had already “been seen in several new formulations since 2007.”70 The new version, called “Doll Eyes,” claimed, as blogger footluxe puts it, “to give your eyelashes a voluminous and lengthy finish that will make your eyes hypnotizing like a doll [sic] eyelashes.” This effect may be enhanced by the “four eyeshadow palettes” that were also launched in June 2011: these palettes, “which create the look of a doll absolutely irresistible [sic],” are “called Baby Glam, Baby Nu, Baby Romance and Baby Pop.”71 The ad, according to footluxe, was “styled” by Ukrainian-Canadian model Daria Werbowy, Dominican model Arlenis Sosa, and American Elettra Wiedemann, the daughter of actress and earlier Lancôme “face” Isabella Rossellini; it was shot by Peruvian fashion photographer Mario Testino. With nothing in the background, the ad has three beautiful multiracial women stacked up, heads and a bit of shoulder only. Everything about them is reduced in order to foreground their eyes: their hair is flat and, if not unstyled, minimally evident; their clothing is similarly blank and plainly cut. The women’s eyes, as footluxe suggests, are salient, and, if their eyelashes are not themselves “hypnotizing,” their eyes, blank, glassy, staring, have a startling effect, not least because three grown women are presented in the advertisement with “doll-like” characteristics to which other grown women are invited to aspire, and to undertake to produce in themselves, in part through the acquisition of this mascara, initially priced at US$45.00. The 2011 Hypnose ad campaign is noteworthy because of its representation of mascara as a tool to render women doll-like, having the effect not only of infantilizing women (thus the palette of “Baby” colours), but of immobilizing them and of calling upon women to render themselves thus immobilized. These are images of women without automobility: like (or as) dolls, they are necessarily manipulated by an agent who makes them move and speak and act. The ad thus operates through the mobilization of a fantasy that powerfully references the phallic economy that produces it. King’s Christine suggests that this fantasy is what is needed to maintain that economy and to keep it from the “horror” King represents in the novel, where female automobility is grotesque and unnatural, weakening

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masculinity, undermining patriarchy, and ultimately leading to the death of the male subject. There is nothing in the Hypnose mascara campaign that suggests an intention to convey something like “horror” in the representation of women as petrocultural commodities immobilized in the “service” of mankind and called upon to make themselves “feminine” on these terms (in time and money). But there should be. This is not necessarily a matter of women’s not using cosmetics, nor of men’s recognizing the “masculine” contours of their cars, but of dismantling the system of the petrocultural feminine (cars = women = pussy). It is arguably not possible to operate – or to constitute subjectivity and gender identity  – outside of the petrocultural frame of reference, as impossible as it is to live in a material way outside of it. The question then is not one of returning to a pre-petroculture ideology of femininity (no cosmetics, no car ads, no castration anxiety) but of radically changing the terms of reference and representation: not “just” women driving the “Pussy Wagon,” like Beyoncé and Lady Gaga at the end of the fantasy of women’s automobility in “Telephone,”72 but actually uncoupling women from cars, and cars and women from the reductive genital synecdoche of the phallic economy, and thus foundationally redirecting the traffic in women that petroculture sustains. notes 1 “Little Deuce Coupe,” song and album of the same name (Capitol), was released in 1963. Written by Brian Wilson and Roger Christian, the title refers to the 1932 Ford Model b Coupe, “considered by many,” according to Wikipedia, “to be the definitive ‘hot rod’” (“Little Deuce Coupe”). The album was the Beach Boys’ fourth. “Mustang Sally” was written and first recorded by Mack Rice in 1965 and by Wilson Pickett the following year. It has since been covered by many performers. See “Mustang Sally (song),” Wikipedia, accessed 1 August 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustang_Sally_(song). 2 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (New York: Verso 1996), 69. 3 Edward Madden, “Cars Are Girls: Sexual Power and Sexual Panic in Stephen King’s Christine,” in Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women, ed. Kathleen Margaret Lant and

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cecily devereux Theresa Thompson (Westport, ct: Greenwood 1998), 143–58, 143. Madden compellingly traces the operation of this “reversible metaphorization” in Christine with reference to the homosocial. See also Andrew Schopp, “From Misogyny to Homophobia and Back Again: The Play of Erotic Triangles in Stephen King’s Christine,” Extrapolation 38, no. 1 (1997): 66–78. Stephen King, Christine (New York: Penguin 1983), 194–5. In “Driving While Black,” Paul Gilroy describes cars as “the ur commodity”: “as such,” he suggests, “they not only help to periodize our encounters with capitalism as it moves into and leaves its industrial phase, they also politicize and moralize everyday life in unprecedented configurations” (89). Paul Gilroy, “Driving While Black,” in Car Cultures, ed. Danny Miller (Oxford: Berg 2001), 81–104. Carol Sanger, “Girls and the Getaway: Cars, Culture, and the Predicament of Gendered Space,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 144 (1995–96): 705–56, 705–7. Ibid., 707. Guy Ritchie, quoted in Sarah S. Jain, “Violent Submission: Gendered Automobility,” Cultural Critique 61 (2005): 186–214. “Maybellene,” Wikipedia, accessed 1 August 2016, http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Maybellene. Glenn C. Altschuler, All Shook Up: How Rock ’n’ Roll Changed America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 63. Ibid. “Maybellene,” Wikipedia. W.T. Lhamon, Jr, brilliantly discusses the ways in which “Maybellene” “concerns a black trickster’s tactics of speed within a life understood as competition” (78). See Deliberate Speed: Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s (Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1990), 78–86. See also Gilroy, “Driving While Black,” 88. Sanger, 709; Jain also observes, “Women have been for decades ubiquitously draped over hoods and sprawled in passenger seats in car ads and shows.” Jain, “Violent Submission,” 196–7. Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (New York: Free Press, 1991), 13. “Here I Go Again,” Wikipedia, accessed 1 August 2016, http://en .wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_I_Go_Again. Scharff, Taking the Wheel, 13. Scharff discusses the difficulties experienced by women wanting to drive in North America in the early twentieth century.

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18 Khyan Mansley, “All Cars Are Girls,” YouTube video, 2:27, posted by “Kyan,” 3 May 2012, accessed 1 August 2016, http://www.youtube .com/watch?v=sTmmoSvleWs. 19 This bmw ad is reproduced and discussed in a Ms Magazine blog in 2011. See Mimi Seldner, “Still Using the Old Model for Sexist Car Advertisements,” MsMagazine blog, accessed 1 August 2016, http:// msmagazine.com/blog/2011/08/29/still-using-the-old-model-for-sexist -car-advertisements/. 20 Wurfel withdrew the ad and published an apology in the London Free Press (erroneously identified in the Society Pages blog as a “free newspaper”), indicating that the ad would not be used again. He had also earlier issued a companion ad, with the figure of a man, although it did little to mitigate the feminist response to the original ad. 21 Colin James, “Chicks ’n Cars (And the Third World War),” Colin James, Virgin, 1988. 22 King, Christine, 368. 23 Ibid., 240. 24 Ibid., 226. 25 Ibid., 427. 26 Schopp, “From Misogyny to Homophobia,” 71. 27 King, Christine, 319. 28 See, for example, Dennis Guilder’s nightmare of Christine “lung[ing]” at him, “her grille snarling like an open mouth full of chrome teeth”; King, Christine, 64. 29 Ibid., 111. Leonard Cassuto notes, interestingly, that King, when asked in a 1982 interview about his “greatest sexual fear,” named the “vagina dentata, the vagina with teeth. The story where you were making love to a woman and it just slammed shut and cut your penis off”; Leonard Cassuto, “Repulsive Attractions: ‘The Raft,’ the Vagina Dentata, and the Slasher Formula,” in Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women, ed. Kathleen Margaret Lant and Theresa Thompson (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998), 61–78, 62. This “fear” also arguably underpins King’s 2002 novel, From a Buick 8 (New York: Pocket Books), in which a feminized car with a “mouth full of chrome teeth” (96) eats men and gives birth to grotesque progeny. 30 King, Christine, 222. 31 Ibid., 489. 32 See Lhamon, Jr, Deliberate Speed, 78–9. 33 Schopp, “From Misogyny to Homophobia,” 73.

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34 King, Christine, 490. 35 Jean Baudrillard, “Crash,” Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 111–19, 111. 36 Madden, “Cars Are Girls,” 144. 37 Sharrie Williams with Bettie Youngs, The Maybelline Story and the Spirited Family Dynasty behind It (Bettie Youngs Books, 2010), 21. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 20–5. 40 Ibid., 25. 41 “History of Vaseline,” Vaseline.co.uk, accessed 1 August 2016, http:// www.vaseline.co.uk/article/vaselinestory.html. The Vaseline website has since changed the phrasing quoted here; as of 1 August 2016 it now reads, “Chesebrough, who had been making kerosene from the oil of sperm whales, was eager to learn what other products could be made from petroleum.” 42 Ibid. 43 “Robert Chesebrough,” Wikipedia, accessed 1 August 2016, http://en .wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Chesebrough. The Wikipedia article “Robert Chesebrough” cites “The History of Vaseline Petroleum Jelly began in the Pennsylvania Oil Fields!,” Drake Well Museum pamphlet, 1996. 44 “Robert Chesebrough,” Wikipedia. 45 Ibid. See also “United States patent 127568,” Wikisource, and uspto Full-Text and Image Database. 46 Noted without citation in “Robert Chesebrough.” Information about Chesebrough is uneven and his knighthood is not mentioned on his gravestone in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. See “Robert Augustus Chesebrough (1837–1933) – Find a Grave Memorial,” accessed 1 August 2016, http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=pv &GRid=26832968&PIpi=428037. 47 “History of Vaseline.” 48 Williams, The Maybelline Story, 27. 49 Ibid., 25. 50 While the name Maybelline is often observed to have been synonymous with mascara in North America since the early twentieth century, the same is true of Rimmel in Europe. Eugène Rimmel, according to rimmelcosmetic, produced a “commercially ready” mascara in 1860 (http://rimmelcosmetic.weebly.com/history-of-mascara.html). The site, accessed 1 August 2016, also notes the use of the term “Rimmel” in

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52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

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“Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Turkish, Romanian, and Persian” to refer to mascara. Shivani Vora, “Old Standbys, New Stand-Ins,” New York Times, 12 September 2012, accessed 5 September 2013, http://www.nytimes .com/2012/09/13/fashion/old-standbys-new-stand-ins-classic -beauty-products-that-still-deliver.html. See also Maura Brannigan, “Great Lash Turns 40!,” MarieClaire, 14 August 2011, accessed 1 August 2016, http://www.marieclaire.com/beauty/makeup/a6392/ great-lash-limited-edition/. Lola Montez, The Arts of Beauty (1858) (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Co. 1997), 81. See Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). “About Rimmel.” Rimmel London US, accessed 1 August 2016, http:// us.rimmellondon.com/content/about-rimmel. Williams, The Maybelline Story, 218. Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 158. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 97. Gwen Kay, Dying to Be Beautiful: The Fight for Safe Cosmetics (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), 6. Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 97. Scharff, Taking the Wheel, 11. Ibid., 25. Quoted in Williams, The Maybelline Story, 218. Ibid. Teresa Riordan, Inventing Beauty: A History of the Innovations That Have Made Us Beautiful (New York: Broadway Books 2004), 30–1. “Petroleum Jelly,” Wikipedia, accessed 1 August 2016, http://en .wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_jelly. For instance, to cite only one case, among the citations provided in a 1995 US patent filing for mascara composition by Jack Mausner for Chanel Inc. is one to US patent 4125549, a “[p]rocess for the manufacture of cosmetic quality isooctyl neodecanoate” (14 November 1978). The isooctyl neodecanoate produced through the process outlines in US Patent 4125549 is described as “a colorless, odorless compound which is suitable as a cosmetic oil” (US Patent 41285549, uspto Patent Full-Text and Image Database). Richard Corson, Fashions in Makeup from Ancient to Modern Times (New York: Universe Books, 1972), 491.

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69 ZorahBIOrganic, “Petroleum Is for Your Car, Not for Your Skin!” YouTube video, 0:40, n.d, posted by “Zorah BIOrganic,” accessed 1 August 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGe0e-v_pno. 70 “New Lancôme Hypnose Doll Eyes Mascara Advertising Campaign,” Footluxe.com, 3 June 2011, accessed 5 September 2013, http://www .footluxe.com/new-lancome-hypnose-doll-eyes-mascara-advertising -campaign/ (site discontinued). 71 Ibid. 72 Lady Gaga, “Telephone,” dir. Jonas Akerlund, music video (Interscope Records, 2010), Vevo video, 9:32, accessed 1 August 2016, http:// www.vevo.com/watch/lady-gaga/telephone/USUV71000338.

7 Oil Tragedy as Modern Genre Glenn Willmott

Oil was imagined rather curiously, when it was imagined at all, in works of literature written in the first half of the twentieth century, during the oil boom and transition to our current petroculture. One must admit with Joshua Schuster that petroleum sources, the oil industry, and even popular oil products such as automotive gasoline are hardly visible in the panoramic sweep of modernist writing.1 Gasoline stations occasionally register, along with car travel, as a new form of personal speed and mobility, but these remain dissociated from any thinking about their new, liquid energy source drawn from the earth. It seems that writers at the dawn of our shift from coal to oil-dominated economies, when they turned their attention to economic matters, continued to focus almost entirely on the many entanglements, dangers, and anxieties of modern money and property, rather than of their natural resource base. Indeed the predominant scholarship on economics in the modernist literary imagination has shown it to be immersed in concerns of social class, mass commodity production and marketing, distribution of wealth, and the industrial transformation of the rural and the wild. The problem of non-renewable resources had little public currency until much later in the century. The emergent ubiquity of oil (along with rare metals, not to be discussed here) as a resource in our everyday world of manufactured commodities and environments, transportation, consumer energy, and synthetic materials may seem strangely bereft of signs and symbols by which to imagine, feel, or think it. By “oil” I mean here the material resource of crude oil and its petroleum derivatives which are the centre of a new structure unique to the twentieth century’s accelerated and exponentially diversified commodity

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production, as well as its distribution and consumption of commodities – in a word, the resource that has enabled “growth” as we now know it and live it. It is tempting to see an exception in the idiosyncratic vision of Ezra Pound, who promoted “human resources” as a kind of natural wealth more important than capitalist property, and who saw the artist and writer in particular as valuable energy sources crying out for investment with non-monetary returns. Pound imagined art and poetry as products of a slow, subsurface work of the artist’s nature, and likened the risks of subsidizing an artist to those of investing in an oil well.2 Aaron Jaffe has read this comparison in the context of Pound’s “paleofuturist” search for an alternative economic culture to that of capitalism in deep time.3 Such connections between history, prehistory, economic life, and poetry are exemplified in the naming of the Rock-Drill cantos, where Pound continues to drill into the planetary past in order to reveal layers and fissures of ideas in action, set explosive charges of his own, and bring to the surface gushes of buried wealth. Thus oil is suggestively signified in Pound’s poetry, but obliquely so, never itself in the foreground. Where oil erupts explicitly into the imagination of early petroculture literature, I will argue, it does so in a consistent and peculiar way that I will call, because of its evocations of tragic miasma and social alienation, Oedipal oil. I will be looking at what I consider the most interesting examples of this type of fiction written between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the 1950s, the period during which American petroculture emerges: works by Raymond Chandler, John Joseph Mathews, John H. Green, and Ray Bradbury. A story titled “Seven Men in a Tank” by John H. Green in a 1925 issue of Weird Tales foresees this tragic mindset with remarkable concision, if rather sensationally. At this time, though coal remained the dominant heating and industrial fuel, gasoline-powered automobiles and trucks had quickly revolutionized habits of speed and mobility in everyday life; the oil boom so darkly portrayed in Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! had become a popular symbol of rampant capitalist wealth; while polyvinyl chloride (pvc) was just entering the marketplace, the vanguard of a growing array of petroleum-based plastics – materials whose provenance defied the average person’s imagination, appearing as sui generis substances vaguely birthed in human factories – that would begin to permeate commodity production in

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the 1940s and ’50s. Oil thus loomed inscrutable behind fragmentary experiences of power in modern life. Hence perhaps it is not surprising to find oil symbolically explored in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, which started up in 1923 by offering to publish stories that were “taboo,” that were too outrageous, too extraordinary, too equivocal with regard to “good taste,” for other magazines.4 These are stories, as one reader enthused a few pages away from “Seven Men in a Tank,” that “the great ultraconservative magazines might refuse.” The readership shared a certain occult identity, a taste for the unpoliced shadows cast by modern life. “To me the apotheosis of comfort and content,” a fellow reader confides, “is the Pullman berth with its drawn curtains shutting out the world, the lulling rock of the fast train, a box of carefully selected chocolates and a copy of the newest weird tales with its delightful shudders.”5 Green’s story shares three pages of Weird Tales with advertisements for the next issue, for artificial diamond rings, for a book offering to explain sex, and for a variety of handguns – commodities that promise to unveil power, wealth, or knowledge at the twist of a finger or a turn of the page. “Seven Men in a Tank” is told from the perspective of a sheriff in the oil country around Smackover, Arkansas. He is called to investigate seven corpses found in the bottom of a recently emptied oil storage tank. How they got into the tank and why these people may have been murdered remains an unsolved mystery – until the sheriff goes mad with guilt and reveals that he arrested seven young oil workers playing poker after work, simply so that he could earn commission on the fines, and stored them in an empty oil tank until he could return with a paddy wagon. While he is gone, the tank is unexpectedly filled with oil from a new well, drowning the men. Eventually haunted by the “indescribable hate, terror and fear” he imagines the men experienced, the sheriff quotes Omar Khayyam and shoots himself.6 Apart from the sinister effect of the use of oil and tank as unforeseen means of death, the plot is formulaic. But the story’s description of the oil field, both materially and culturally, is striking. The industrial modernity of the “tank farm” has dystopian and monstrous aspects: “Twenty big, black steel tanks squatted in accurately spaced rows. Each held fifty-five thousand barrels of crude” alongside “two corrugated iron engine houses and a small field office.”7 The human

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seems already pushed aside here, so it is no surprise that oil is associated with death. Because of the tank imagery, oil is also associated with hiddenness – the hiddenness of the human presence in the tank, the men undiscovered even when oil is poured over them, enveloping them in asphyxiating fumes. This hiddenness doubles the hiddenness of the oil itself below the story’s landscape. The inhuman modernity of the tank farm is conjoined with the inhuman prehistory of the oil itself when the sheriff imagines it: “this huge mass of steel gave one the impression of a great, black reptile or prehistoric monster.”8 There is a kind of return of the repressed, or hidden primal inhumanity, in the oil field. All of this is mirrored in the characterization of the sheriff, who is at first insouciant about his killing because “oil field life had hardened me to almost anything.”9 He tells us that it is “one of the toughest oil fields in the country”10 and attracts “hardened gamblers, hijackers,” and “vultures,”11 but this immoral or amoral world ironically permeates and undermines justice itself: “I stand high over the whole state as an officer of the law. No-one remembers the seven bodies in the tank. I was strong. I gloried in my will power and self-control.”12 The sheriff represents a person bent on his own, Nietzschean self-development; desensitized to empathy with others; in a word, profoundly alienated. The lesson of the story, at least in its dream-like coherence, is clear: oil is a symbol of a kind of peculiar, primal alienation or inhumanity that may be drawn to the surface by industrial modernity. A symbol, yes, but also a synecdoche: a symbolic but real part for a whole, dystopian petroculture of the oil fields. This story explains the curious frame in which Raymond Chandler placed his better-known story of amoral degeneration, power seeking, and violence, The Big Sleep (1939). The story is narrated by a detective, Marlowe, hired by an elderly oil tycoon with two out-of-control daughters. One of the daughters turns out to be a murderer, and this is revealed at the climax of the novel in one of the tycoon’s abandoned oil fields – a bizarre staging that requires quite a bit of work for Chandler to justify – where she tries to shoot Marlowe. This field is described as an ugly and noxious remnant of fields “cleaned up and donated” to the city as public parkland, a remnant that the family pretends not to see from its front windows. This is how Marlowe describes it:

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I followed the ruts [of a narrow dirt road] along and the noise of city traffic grew curiously and quickly faint, as if this were not in the city at all, but far away in a daydream land. Then the oil-stained, motionless walking-beam of a squat wooden derrick stuck up over a branch. I could see the rusty old steel cable that connected this walking-beam with a half a dozen others. The beams didn’t move, probably hadn’t moved for a year. The wells were no longer pumping. There was a pile of rusted pipe, a loading platform that sagged at one end, half a dozen empty oil drums lying in a ragged pile. There was the stagnant, oilscummed water of an old sump iridescent in the sunlight. “Like it?” the daughter asks. “Beautiful,” Marlowe sardonically replies.13 Here, as in the Weird Tales story, the oil field is both modernly industrial and prehistorically primal, an occult, decaying otherworld. Again it enables and reveals amoral power and violence, in this case in an empathy-deficient child. Again oil is a synecdoche for a larger modernity, but one that points inwards, toward the inhumanity latent in human society, toward a dangerously alienated self and the exercise of a ruthlessly indifferent sovereignty that is marked as timeless, but awoken by a dystopian petroculture. Marlowe even oddly offers the balefulness of the oil ground as a cause for the daughter’s violence, telling her sister that “she wanted to show me the old oil wells down the hill where your family made some of its money. So we went down there and the place was pretty creepy, all rusted metal and old wood and silent wells and greasy scummy sumps. Maybe that upset her. I guess you’ve been there yourself. It was kind of eerie.”14 Oil is weird, powerful, hidden, somehow both removed from history and erupting into it, both materially and psychologically. The oil field is again a dystopian petroculture of pollution, ugliness, alienation, and anaesthetic ruthlessness in the 1934 novel Sundown by John Joseph Mathews, a story about oil field culture from a Native American perspective. The novel is historical fiction, and unlike the other stories considered here, reveals the changing industry, landscape, and social lives involved in oil production. In Sundown, oil is created by human activity, negotiation, decision, and conflict among differing Indigenous groups, Euro-American entrepreneurs, and government; it is variously developed and resisted.

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As in the visions of Green and Chandler, oil is a metaphor for some wider, social miasma, for a failure of empathy, and violence that afflicts its fictional world. But nowhere in modern fiction is oil represented more clearly both as metaphorical sign and as the historical stuff itself; nowhere is it so persistently de-reified to reveal struggling layers of social and environmental life. But because these layers are fatally misrecognized by the protagonist, the story is also a tragedy. Sundown’s protagonist is a young Osage man, Chal, who, following the political ideals of his father, dreams of a vague future and yet more vague glory associated with the economic growth that oil extraction brings to his community – a dream that promises access to the aura of white “civilization.”15 Yet these mistaken dreams are never realized, and oil and glory come together in an ominous “symbol,” in an uncontrollably burning well, which fascinates the community with its “flames light[ing] up the whole countryside” and “terrific, ground-shivering roar.” Ironically, the vague glory associated with modern capitalist growth betrays the welfare of the people and their land, leading to degradation instead. It blinds Chal and others to their natural environment and condemns them to the empty, directionless culture of commodity acquisition, to its anaesthetic drugs and its meaningless compulsion for speed. The natural landscape is rendered dead and toxic; the trees cry the accusation of “murder.”16 Osage are themselves murdered by white men seeking fortunes through guardianship or marriage. Meanwhile Chal, like others, loves his euphorically fast car and his contraband liquor. He forgets that the oil that fuels his car to speed over the land is also the oil that cast a slower, more intimate, red light in his home, the sacred red of fire. In an epiphanic moment he may yearn to be “brother … to the forces that came out of the earth,” but he feels only aversion or indifference; he fails to imagine oil or himself as a thing of the land, the earth.17 Oil fuels a miasma of material violence and degradation that burns through the lives of the Osage people and land. Along with the culture of growth it represents, its vitality is harnessed at the cost of what it burns. It may be argued that neither oil nor petroculture is essential to the modernist tragic imagination of these three writers. Perhaps the same miasma afflicts Captain Ahab and his ship in the monomaniacal violence and euphoria of Herman Melville’s 1851 Moby-Dick, published several decades earlier. For Melville, the whale – which by

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uncanny coincidence is hunted for both its fuel oil and its plastic bone material – is a prehistoric, hidden creature, both actually in nature and in its metaphysical significations. Yet it also comes to symbolize the relentless, depersonalized violence of specifically modern commercial industry. I call this prototypical narrative, as well as early petroculture narratives, generic tragedies of “Oedipal oil” because they represent, in diverse cases, the destructive yet enlightening trajectory of human beings alienated both from each other and from their natural world, as these are commodified as resources to fuel the production of an imagined personal sovereignty. Oil is always the sign of a pure otherness, of a human capacity for alienation (misrecognition of home and kin) that is its tragic, Oedipal hamartia, or error in judgment. This is an inward and imaginative capacity, but the oil field has an outward and material signification as well, which is the unrepresentable, absent cause of this alienation in modern society itself. This absent cause is the cultural and economic meshwork of a (now) petrocultural capitalism whose dispersed, shifting sovereign agency can never be pinned down and may only be grasped, if Fredric Jameson is right, as a structural pattern, a leviathan-like “mode of production.”18 In Jameson’s Freudian-Marxist view, this symbolism functions ambivalently as sheer metaphor, as an ideological displacement of real conditions. But synecdoche is here more dangerous, effecting a displacement that is referential rather than obfuscatory, thrusting into literary view a fragment of the real with its own material nature and agency – oil – that is just as surely an ill-fated sign, like the whale species in Moby-Dick, of its larger, global entanglement with human institutions and activity. If Sundown is a historical novel that probes the contours of a conflicted transition to petroculture, it is left to science fiction to imagine its dystopian completion. The future society of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 may be remembered most for its burning of books, but the central image of the story – the Poundian vortex through which all its ideas and images intersect – is not paper but oil: the oil that burns the books and the readers, the oil that in burning explodes with colour akin to the bright media screens with whose virtual images people replace their own family and physical world, and the oil that in high-speed engines powers the euphoric recreation of personal cars but also the military jets that bring nuclear holocaust. “Kerosene,” the protagonist Montag

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proclaims, “is nothing but perfume to me.”19 Oil is totemic, held in fear and in reverence, in a society devoted to virtual and violent pleasures and addicted to amnesiac drugs – an entertainment culture whose fate Neil Postman would later sum up as “amusing ourselves to death,” here literalized. Oil is the vehicle of escape – from history, from others, from oneself, from nature. The “comfortable people” of the world are “living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without ever completing the cycle back to reality.” Especially we wish to forget the uncomfortable ones, the disposable populations upon whose exploitation and suffering our lives are built. Bradbury pushes synecdoche to an allegorical extreme. From ourselves and our planet, we are restlessly haunted, “gasoline refugees.”20 Green’s quotation from Omar Khayyam seems to sum up the nexus of ominous idea and feeling in the modernist genre of tragic oil: “Hell is the reflection of a soul on fire.”21 In these fictions, Hell is lived, and it is an artifact of human making, the collective by-product of a spiritual alienation, of the individualist soul experienced as a fire euphorically feeding on a degraded, depersonalized world. Oil is the sign and synecdoche of that fire in modern history, its material supplement. While the genre offers a radical challenge to the heroism or repressions of capitalist petroculture, it may thus risk reifying it as an ineluctable fate, a tragedy without resolution. Such is the feeling of Green’s pulp horror and Chandler’s noir writing, in which oil casts a looming, starkly inhuman shadow. Bradbury’s and Mathew’s reminders that human life too emerges mysteriously from its ground in earthly nature offer a more melancholically hopeful, more authentically tragic and remediable view of history and its resources. Though once marginal, the oil tragedy is a genre now worth recovering, having new resonance in the age of the public oil disaster, the peak oil future, and the challenge to imagine global ecological scales: paleofuturism for a small planet.

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notes 1 Joshua Schuster, “Where Is the Oil in Modernism?,” presentation at Petrocultures: Oil, Energy, Culture, University of Alberta, 7 September 2012. 2 On human resources, see Ezra Pound’s essay pleading for artist subsidies circa 1913, Patria Mia (Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour, 1950), 57. On artists as energy sources and the oil well investment comparison, see his 1922 letters to William Carlos Williams and Kate Buss respectively, in Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, ed. D.D. Paige (New York: Haskell House, 1974), 239–40, 242. 3 Aaron Jaffe, “Modernist Paleofuturism and Deep Temporal Drift,” presentation to the Modernist Studies Association, University of Sussex, 31 August 2013. 4 Edwin Baird, “The Eyrie,” Weird Tales 1, no. 1 (March 1923): 180. 5 H. Warner Munn, quoted in “The Eyrie,” Weird Tales 5, no. 3 (March 1925): 164; Anne Forman Ellis, quoted in ibid., 162. 6 John H. Green, “Seven Men in a Tank,” in Weird Tales 5, no. 3 (March 1925): 187–89, 187. 7 Ibid., 187. 8 Ibid., 188. 9 Ibid., 189. 10 Ibid., 187. 11 Ibid., 188. 12 Ibid. 13 Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (New York: Vintage, 1992), 21, 217–18. 14 Ibid., 222. 15 John Joseph Mathews, Sundown ([1934] Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988). On vague dreams, glory, and the aura of “civilization,” see 67, 73–4, 281, 307. On the vague glory of growth, see especially 49, 61. 16 Ibid., 85, 302. 17 Ibid., 294–5, 297. On speed as an aspect of growth, also see 77. 18 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). 19 Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (Toronto: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 4. Bradbury wrote this novel just after his film script for John Huston’s film adaptation of Moby Dick (1956); coincidentally, the mass

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marketing of kerosene was a factor in the decline of whale oil and of the whale-hunting industry described by Melville. In Bradbury’s novel, for an explicit connection between oil as engine fuel and as auto-da-fé fuel, see 105. For imagery that conflates the pleasure of televisual colour with the final, nuclear destruction (which bookends the kerosene house-burning at the novel’s opening), see 151. 20 Ibid., 79, 54. 21 Green, “Seven Men in a Tank,” 189.

8 Where Is the Oil in Modernism? Joshua Schuster

In 1900, there were 8,000 cars in the United States. By 1930, there were 26.5 million.1 In 1910, the largest recorded single oil spill to date occurred in Kern County, California. The “Lakeview Gusher” spewed 378 million gallons of oil, lasted for eighteen months, and cut the world price of oil in half. Oil is everywhere during the modernist era, changing the shape of the landscape with cars, roads, airplanes, military equipment, and spawning suburbs, intensifying land speculation and commodity trading, further mechanizing agriculture, and producing new chemicals and plastics. But oil  – and, for that matter, most other raw non-renewable commodities – rarely appears directly in modernist art, with the great exception of one work, Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (1927). Engines, however, are humming constantly in the literature. How can we explain this gap between modernism and modernity? How does oil fit in the discussions over what aspects of the environment American modernists saw well and saw poorly, keeping in mind the knowledge about oil’s history and boom-and-bust cycle available at the time? What does nature mean in modernism when artists either overlook or underplay the transformative roles of commodities and non-renewable energies? But why should oil or any other commodity command special interest for modernist writers? We assume that commodities are not works of art and works of art cannot be reduced to commodities, so conjoining the two seems to be a mistake in categorization, even though we know that all artworks are made from commodities and circulate with them in the broader marketplace. If modernists did not care much about the role of oil, neither have modernist critics, and so far modernist cultural production and its industry of academics

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have done fine without such worries. Combing modernism for one particular theme is like scanning a vast stretch of land for a place to put an oil well – one might get a lucky strike, but there are so many other things going on in modernist literature that one seems to be mistaking the derrick for the forest of other matters to address. Or as Daniel Tiffany puts it, “Only a fool reads poetry for facts.”2 Yet maybe it is time to be foolish and break the rules set forth in literary criticism that forbid reducing art to anything so literal and obvious. Indeed, thematic reduction can be a strategic method by which to open art to new ways of reading the material conditions that make the irreducible and non-thematic possible. There is something compulsive about oil and its incredibly rapid transformation of the earth that makes its reduction to thematic reading all the more compelling. Admittedly, academic arguments that proceed by saying we need to look more at whatever x topic is being promoted as underserved usually lack some intellectual elegance. Furthermore, sifting a cultural archive for a certain item of content (flowers, airplanes, handshakes) tends to be an arbitrary and narrowly selffulfilling end – one could just as well have searched for any other keyword. Oil, however, may not be just a keyword into modernity but is arguably one of its primary enabling events and what has helped it to keep running hot up to today. Oil is a global substance that frames globalization itself and transforms what it means to search for modernist content in the first place. Art is by definition open-ended and allusive, which makes thematizing it in elementary or totalizing terms impossible, but oil also has a special elusiveness, malleability, and an ability to stretch the possible that contributes to its definitive position in modernity. Oil is a trope and a condition, a substance and a spectacle, a paradigmatic experience of the new and the now, as well as an ancient, epochal form of pressurized carbon. It is a vision of the sublime encrusted in geology and a tradable commodity that can move as fast as finance capital. Oil has modernism, modernity, and the slash between the two written all over it. Oil both celebrates modernity and literally exhausts it, as F.T. Marinetti well knew: “combustion engines and rubber tires are divine. Gasoline is divine.”3 I take further inspiration for this inquiry from Patricia Yaeger’s recent call in pmla to examine the “coordinates for an energydriven literary theory.”4 Yaeger’s proposition comes in the context

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of a push for more environmentally invested criticism to further analyze how literature and non-renewable resources work in and through each other as enabling constraints. “Without reverting to crude materialism,” Yaeger recommends a more critical eye toward the role of resource commodities in modes of economic and literary production. Regarding the missing oil in modernism, she notes that “energy invisibilities may constitute different kinds of erasures.”5 To read oil in modernism then is to read obliquely and after erasure or expenditure, which happens to be one of the favoured ways of reading that theorists of modernism advocate. As Brecht once declared, “Petroleum resists the five-act form.”6 Oil defies direct representation and symbolic narrative. It is hidden underground, the end product of a still not fully known process; the technical apparatuses used to extract it are beyond the knowledge of laymen; to store it is to not see it; and to use it is to vaporize it or fix it into a new material (we usually see oil only when something has gone wrong and it is spilled). Its effects spread inexorably into the conscious and unconscious, begging to be leered at in forms of spectacle and conspicuous consumption but resisting vision all the same. Oil beckons the cultural critic with the lure of offering juicy prose describing the gooey confection that is easy to write. The sensual power of oil is tied into the way it affects an exquisite sensory synaesthesia (proffering mobility, movies, plastics, military power) that supports its addiction. As Stephanie LeMenager remarks, “Visual, kinaesthetic, acoustic (‘hissing’), tactile, olfactory  – oil touches us intimately, and everywhere.”7 Let’s face it, the absent presence of oil in modernist art is too compelling to not demand critical investigation, even as such inquiry is like the plot of a film noir, with the detective looking for the perpetrator who is everywhere woven into the fabric of the mise-en-scène but still confounds direct interrogation. Oil commands authority in modernist cultures, but its quick combustion raises perpetual problems that make the commodity a source of both power and crisis. The story of the rise of oil, which spread across the globe at the same time as modernist culture, is tied to the rise of specific national and regional fortunes, first in the United States and the Russiancontrolled region of Baku, then in Mexico, Venezuela, and the Middle East. Matters of modernism and modernity weave through these national and regional centres as they deal with the spectacular rise

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of the oil economy and the insatiable desire for more of it. A.R. Orage testified to the imbrication of modernism, modernity, and state power through oil in an editorial statement in a 1920 issue of The New Age: “Oil is power in its most modern form; it is almost a condition of any industrial future whatever; and still more absolutely of the industrial future of the United States.”8 Orage is actually one of the few to take seriously oil’s finitude at the time, which he foresees as making the inevitable connection of oil to global power plays that much more volatile. Orage asks, “Where is the oil to come from, since of the American-controlled resources, forty per cent are already exhausted?”9 This chapter provides a brief sketch of how the stories of oil and modernism intertwine in the context of American culture. Primarily, I am interested in how the ecological side of this story is generative of both form and content for modernist literary works. To bring oil to the surface of modernist studies means attending to not just modes of production as base and background of cultural output. This way of reading also analyzes how environmental disturbances and dependencies reverberate across cultural forms and how commodity forms intersect with issues of cultural productivity. Furthermore, it means accounting for the new material, psychological, and subjective states that appear under such conditions. Since the American modernist archive shows relatively little ostensible, overt engagement with oil itself, we must attend to the matter of how oil enabled yet eluded the rise of modernism as well. Amitav Ghosh pointed to the mystery of “the muteness of the Oil Encounter” in literature in an essay written in the early 1990s, calling out to American writers in particular to explain “why there isn’t a Great American Oil Novel.”10 In Ghosh’s view, oil turned away many literary heads until just recently because of its impenetrable grime, brooding blackness, and the soulless message of its pursuit by way of a violently militant opportunism at all costs.11 Modernist and postmodernist writers can at times be quite attracted to these motifs and affects in other contexts, and Ghosh is rightly surprised that the epochal shifts in energy, economic, and social organization spurred by oil did not translate into a similar generic demand.12 And if the novel could not accommodate oil, poetry was not really even in the game: “As for an epic poem [on oil], the very idea is ludicrous.”13 Though don’t tell this to Lucretius, whose De rerum natura is an epic poem largely about raw goods from atoms on up.14

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In considering modernist poetics, the idea of oil mixing with poetry seems ludicrous given that modernist poetry never sticks to a single topic but flashes from image to image, and generally sees new technology and science as enticements for new aesthetic forms instead of barometers for the politics of ecology. Yet the lack of a petroleum consciousness in modernist poems stands out even more considering that modernists were obsessed with ascribing a kind of energy to the poem itself. Ezra Pound compared poetry to a turbine and a vortex of high energy forces. William Carlos Williams used words like “electricity,” “dynamism,” and “power” to describe the impetus of the poetic (“the imagination is an actual force comparable to electricity or steam”).15 Indeed, in modernism more generally, new sources of energy are frequently understood to pulsate not just through machines, but also within words, bodies, and minds, and at the moment of creativity as well. H.G. Wells thought “A petrol motor  … does exactly the same” as the human body, since “in both cases, besides fuel, there must be a supply of air.”16 Wells added that “The living organism so far as its energy-output is concerned is really and precisely a combustion engine.”17 New and more powerful forms of energy seemed to require an equally energetic writing style, as if it were literally impossible to write languid or flowery prose while using electric lights or riding in a speeding car.18 For Henry Adams, new forms of power production educated the eponymous figure as much as classrooms full of philosophy or history: “the next great influx of new forces seemed near at hand, and its style of education promised to be violently coercive.”19 Adams extrapolated that these energies and technologies would henceforth serve to raise up all Americans as cyborg-like beings with astonishing powers: “[T]he new American – the child of incalculable coalpower, chemical power, electric power, and radiating energy, as well as of new forces yet undetermined – must be a sort of God compared with any former creation of nature. At the rate of progress since 1800, every American who lived to the year 2000 would know how to control unlimited power.”20 If energy is the impulse of the now, the dynamism of the everyday, and the inexorable acceleration into the future, there is no need to think of energy’s structural limits and environmental costs.21 Storing and releasing energy is ascribed by Heidegger to be the essence of modernity itself (another example of what he calls “enframing”). Heidegger cannot resist phrasing his own spectacular version of what the oil sublime has done to the

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world: “Nature becomes a giant gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry.”22 Heidegger’s totalizing vision of oil elides the multiple roles that oil plays in modernity (including the spectre of scarcity). It is important to mention that as much as oil changed what we mean by nature, it also gave a boost to some aspects of environmentalism. The discovery of oil in North America almost certainly saved whales from being hunted into extinction for their oils, used in the mid-nineteenth century to light lamps and to grease machines. Oil also prompted a slow but important shift away from coal, the latter of which is relatively less energy efficient and pollutes more. The global shift to oil and hydroelectric power, along with more efficient use of coal, came at the same time as American national fervour arose for parks and wilderness preserves, which industry and government increasingly supported since using timber for fuel had obvious inefficiencies. Automobile manufacturers and oil companies promoted advertisements of breezy drives in the countryside and protected parks, peddling a kind of petroleum pastoralism, finding they could make more money by leaving these regions intact than by turning them into an energy source. When the car became as much a character as the human protagonists in the first road trip novels in the United States, it was the long-standing romance of the American landscape rather than the investigation of the harnessing of the land into a commodity that drove the narrative. Sinclair Lewis’s Free Air (1919), perhaps the first major American novel to feature both car and cross-country road adventure, made the democratically suggestive title coincident with the fumes of the combustion engine. Lewis’s novel tells the story of Claire Boltwood’s journey in her car from Brooklyn to Seattle, the sundry lot of folks she meets along the way, and the fellow motorist Milt Daggett that she eventually swoons over. Sinclair puts an able female character at the wheel, although the plot is driven by her constant need of rescue as she deals with what will become the staples of every driver’s angst: hitchhikers, carjackers, bad roads, night driving, mechanical breakdowns, where to sleep at night, back-seat drivers, and roadkill. Claire proves to be a more than capable driver as she invents a code for the road, which boils down to not thinking much at all about it: “she was finding the one secret of long-distance driving – namely, driving; keeping on, thinking by fifty-mile units, not

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by the ten-mile stretches of Long Island runs; and not fretting over anything whatever. She seemed charmed; if she had a puncture  – why, she put on the spare. If she ran out of gas – why, any passing driver would lend her a gallon. Nothing, it seemed, could halt her level flight across the giant land.”23 Nothing could stop her except, maybe, the land itself, which at that point had hardly been graded for anything more than horse and covered wagon. In the same year as Lewis’s novel, the US Army sent a cross-country caravan to demonstrate the power of the automobile and the need for a national road system, which was demanded by a modern military that needed transportation arteries to rapidly mobilize anywhere in the country in the event of an attack. Dwight D. Eisenhower, then an army captain, joined the convoy of forty-two trucks, which left Washington, dc, on 7 July. After many misadventures over rocky and muddy roads that led to constant breakdowns, the group arrived at San Francisco on 6 September.24 Eisenhower later would combine his dedication to military management and automobility with the famous 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act, forever changing the conditions of the American road trip. At the turn of the twentieth century, when the United States led the world in oil exploration and production, oil had been cast by the journalist Ida Tarbell and others as the essence of monopoly capitalism, which was defended by many as the economic signature of American nationalism at the time. Upton Sinclair’s Oil! narrates the plot of oil as the plot of American power, inextricable from the nation’s business acumen, scandals, exploitations, and windfalls. In a recent essay, Peter Hitchcock has argued that Sinclair’s book fits the bill of the Great American Oil Novel that Ghosh had been looking for after all.25 Indeed, Oil! has an impressive amount of fact and description about the hardscrabble industrial techniques involved in drilling: “Drilling was always a dirty business; you swam in pale grey mud until the well came in, and after that you slid in oil.”26 The book mixes a kind of anthropology of oil drilling with stories about the effects of oil discovery on land transformations (oil fields displace homesteads and food crops in Southern California), financial speculation, the spread of capitalist fever and risk, and the militarization of oil in the First World War and after. The narrator tells us that patriotism and oil were hand in glove during the war: “there was nothing more important than oil, and the way for them

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to serve their country was to keep the stuff flowing.”27 As always in the case of oil narratives, there is the money shot that paid the bills for the writer and oilman alike: “The inside of the earth seemed to burst through that hole; a roaring and rushing, as Niagara, and a black column shot up into the air, two hundred feet, two hundred and fifty – no one could say for sure – and came thundering down to earth as a mass of thick, black, slimy, slippery fluid.”28 But there is something too easy in the celebration of the “great” and the “American” that Sinclair buys into, and which sets him up to construct a particularly boosterish national fantasy about the impact of oil on state power and the dirty but heroic work of extraction. Hitchcock remarks that the novel locks into an agenda that “wants to make oil more intimately American”;29 for Sinclair, this means telling a story of the struggle for American labourers to rise up and get their due, while also still appreciating the outrageous rags-toriches storyline that oil has offered to frontier speculators. Sinclair’s oil becomes the setting as well as the lubricant for the spread of social realism, with its moral certainties, salt-of-the-earth codes of honour, and anthropocentric pride (as in the line in “The Internationale”: “The earth belongs to us, the people”). The novel streamlines social critique toward issues of class (race and gender are treated as mostly insignificant matters in the book and often corralled into stereotypes) and exudes disdain for aesthetic experimentation. Sinclair excoriates corruption and monopolies because he wants to see oil extraction democratized and funnelled to bolster big America and its foreign-power prowess. He has no time or patience with modernist avant-gardes who use indirect or even non-semantic writing to imagine another world, one where production and consumption are not the be-all and end-all, because for Sinclair the democratizing of more and more industrial production appears to be the only Leftist political storyline out there.

Commodity Poetry I want to conclude here by offering some brief thoughts on how to bring forth an oil analysis in a selection of modernist American poetry in particular that opens up different representational and affective terrain from realism. Because oil appears so rarely as a direct referent, and more in indirect forms such as cars, speed, consumption,

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and energy expenditure, one way we can appreciate its suppleness is in the context of the wider aesthetics of commodities and the rise of “carboniferous capitalism” (Lewis Mumford’s phrase).30 There is enough evidence to suggest that one can identify a loose yet coherent subgenre of poetry emerging in modernism that can be called the “commodity poem.” The modernist commodity poem situates a resource accumulated or extracted from the earth into a meditation on labour, literary craft, and the facticity and aesthetic impact of elemental materials. These poems also gesture outwards toward global networks of trade, the role of the poem as commodity, and the changes evident in nature as modernization spreads. The modernist commodity poem embodies the central importance of the lives of made things in modernity, and sees itself in connection with as well as in distinction from the world of goods that circulate around the planet. The commodity poem is not exclusively American or about oil but makes a widespread appearance in the nation that dominates the global commodities market at the time. The historian Gavin Wright argues that, at the outset of the twentieth century, “the single most robust characteristic of American manufacturing exports was intensity in non-reproducible natural resources.”31 By 1913, the United States led the world in natural gas and oil production and consumption, and also was the world’s largest producer of coal and practically all other minerals. These resources and the control and shaping of them convey a cultural as well as economic experience, providing the basis for a sense of national prosperity and confidence in modernity. Marshall McLuhan argued that commodities are mediums just like new technologies  – indeed the two are inseparable, as the virtual reality of radios and computers is impossible without new discoveries in the engineering of raw materials. McLuhan, following on the influence of his mentor Harold Innis (who researched how practices and technologies of communication were inextricable from the mobility of goods and information infrastructures), declared that “technological media are staples or natural resources, exactly as are coal and cotton and oil … For a society configured by reliance on a few commodities accepts them as a social bond quite as much as the metropolis does the press. Cotton and oil, like radio and tv, become ‘fixed charges’ on the entire psychic life of the community. And this pervasive fact creates the unique cultural flavor of any society.”32 Commodities are mediums that are messages just as

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much as print or television. Coal, cotton, and oil effectuate cultural and psychological frameworks specific to their material properties and the modes of production required to harvest them. Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass is perhaps then the first commodity poem, in that its making, materials, editing, printing and visual layout, and vocabulary all contribute to its self-reflexive awareness as an object of “natureculture.” In Whitman’s oeuvre, commodities, labourers, idlers, and elements of nature circulate continuously along with the poet who sees himself as both object and subject in a world saturated with materials. Pound’s Cantos expanded on the notion of commodities as poetic and poem as commodity by embedding in the epic form lyrical reflections on bookmaking, pricing, debt, circulation, and the literary marketplace in the context of geopolitical world-shaping. Perhaps the most prominent, and maybe simplistic, example of the commodity poem can be found in the work of Carl Sandburg. His banner poem “Chicago,” in Chicago Poems (1916), stacks words horizontally and vertically like so many goods: Hog Butcher for the world, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders.33 Here, commodities are figured as personifications and persons as commodities, as one cannot tell the difference between object and worker  – is the “Tool Maker” a machine or a person? Goods are abundant, towering in capital letters, nationalistic, and rendered as aesthetically bombastic at the level of sound, typography, and lineation. For Sandburg, commodities are heroes to the poem and to the nation, putting both to work for each other. In his long poem “Good Morning, America,” Sandburg locates supreme authority in the apparent solidity, use value, and political heft of the commodity. “Steel, coal, oil, the test tube arise as facts, dominions, / Standing establishments with world ambassadors.”34 Practically all of Sandburg’s work consists of thematically driven paeans to the interchangeability of words, works, and workers. Commodity poems can be odes to things, as in Sandburg’s case, or they can be more ambivalent or polarized, concerning the role that

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raw materiality and economics plays in modernist poetics. In William Carlos Williams’s iconic “so much depends / upon // a red wheel / barrow // glazed with rain / water // beside the white / chickens,” the ready-made wheelbarrow, water, and chickens are commonplace commodities that take on added aura and economic pressures as single lines. These objects are akin to the Duchampian ready-made, modernism at its zero degree, which is nothing more than a commodity placed in the context of an art institution. “[S]o much” pressure borne by bare things feeds back into the poem’s own sense of pause over what it means to “depend upon” commodities that are taken out of the marketplace, converted into aesthetic images, and set circulating among other art objects. Williams also would write several unconsciously oil-inflected poems about coolly surveying the suburban roads in his automobile, idling in his car while letting his mind wander.35 Oil and the automobile made the suburban much more navigable and integrated small town America more seamlessly into the flow of modernity. Williams erotically and poetically cathected to the car, but also hallucinated petrol as a thing of horror: “poems are small and tied and gasping, they eat gasoline, they all ate gasoline and died.”36 Counter to the Futurist mania for the machine and the ironic Dadaist eye for oil-driven motors and cranks evocative of unsentimental, repetitive sexual acts, poets associated with Objectivism such as Charles Reznikoff and George Oppen drew melancholy portraits of how oil abruptly changed the landscape and turned Imagism into an elegiac form. Objectivism was a loosely used moniker for a small grouping of mostly New York-based avant-garde poets in the 1920s and ’30s. In “A Garden” (1934), Reznikoff’s anti-pastoral short poem finds a line of taxis making a garish bouquet. About the railway station as the taxicabs leave, the smoke from their exhaust pipes is murky blue – stinking flowers, budding, unfolding, over the ruts in the snow.37 The visual precision and burst of conceptual intuition that are features of Imagism here are applied to a scene of evanescent pollution, the puffs of smoke emanating from a car tailpipe. Neither car nor combustion of oil occupies the centre of the image, showing continued evidence of oil as representable only as an oblique cause. The

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poem lingers on the after-effects of motor exhaust billowing into the snow, which gives the shadowy feel of the Imagist poem a sordid aftertaste. Many of Reznikoff’s short imagistic poems follow from a scenario of the poet taking a leisurely, pastoral-like stroll through an urban world of detritus, industrial waste, beggars, factories, and ghettos. The strolling poet sympathizes with the sundry things of the world, be they trees or trash, as companions irrelevant of status, who struggle to survive in the city as he does. In an untitled poem from the same period, Reznikoff writes while likely waiting for his subway to appear: “Rails in the subway, / what did you know of happiness, / when you were ore in the earth; / now the electric lights shine upon you.”38 Reznikoff points to a melancholy of the commodity, tracing the outline of a fairly Marxist story of commodities ripped from their dwellings, alienated from their fabricators, and left to fend for themselves in a cold marketplace. The socialist-realist portrayals of the lives of workers enmeshed with the lives of commodities often tried to dignify both with outsized portraits of their collective natures. Indeed, the frame of socialist-realism is hard to avoid when discussing the aesthetics of commodities in the modernist era. There seems to be no other way to think politically about commodities at that moment outside of advocacy for the labourers who handle them and contra the heavyhanded methods used by commodity monopolies to control their terrain. There is no momentum yet for directly politicizing individual commodities such as oil or coal for their polluting properties, ties to colonialism, and fostering of addiction for non-renewable things. Nations needed cheap oil to get out of the Depression, win World Wars, and develop the middle class, so critiquing oil directly seemed to have no political backing until the environmental movement really took hold in the 1960s. Socialist-realism glorifies the grime of commodity extraction as a leftist platform since these are the sites of labour union power. Objectivist poets interacted at length with socialist-realist writers and generally supported their causes, but decidedly sought a different aesthetics, one that would both break with the dogmatic political approach and the simplistic appeal to the transparency of left-identified signifiers. George Oppen’s first book of poetry, Discrete Series (1934), approaches the poem as a set of pieces that can be taken apart, examined, serialized, and contemplated in critical relation to the Fordist mode of production. Many

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of the poems in Oppen’s book offer glimpses of a world made in the image of cars, with glass windows framing perception in the opening page, to roads, traffic, streetcars, street lights, subways, and a machine aesthetic jarring throughout the serialized poems. These telltale traces of a motorized world cluster in lines wary about “that dark instrument / A car.”39 Oppen famously took a hiatus of twenty-five years before he would publish again, citing in part a need to focus on leftist politics. The mechanical ambience of Discrete Series that is the pace of 1930s New York City does not disappear but is further examined in Oppen’s next book The Materials (1962), which opens with three ecologically potent poems: “Eclogue,” “Image of the Engine,” and “Population.” Oppen resets his poetic career with a garden and juxtaposes it with a machine and the growing planetary multitude. “Image of the Engine” begins with a section extolling the metallic intricacies of the car’s motor, which Oppen was adept at fixing. The engine before the poet, however, breaks down, and its failure prompts thoughts of mortality, entropy, and “embarkations / foundered.”40 This poem is full of ruin, “every crevice of the city leaking / Rubble: concrete, conduit, pipe, a crumbling / Rubble of our roots.”41 It is not a stretch to say that this poem offers an early glimpse at the connection between cars, oil, and a series of infrastructural crises that are veering toward the big collapse, when the breakdown of machines and ecosystems overtakes the capacity to restore these. I do not think Oppen is making a grand statement here about peak oil per se, yet he demarcates how modernist machines are no longer naively energizing or enchanting, and instead disclose a shadow in which pools the darkness of oily things. What Oppen begins to tap into then is the aesthetic and political hallmarks of both the rise and fall of commodity modernism. Oppen was joined in this sentiment by Allen Ginsberg, who crisscrossed the states in cars and wrote poems drawing from the geography and radio soundscape the car enabled, but consistently cast such machines in a melancholic and dejected pose. In Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra,” the garden and the machine have both collapsed. The globe has become addicted to disposable consumer goods, and a politics of refusal toward the world enabled by cheap, nonrenewable energies starts to take shape. Ginsberg wanders among train tracks and sees a litany of used-up objects that have long lost

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their industrial verve and erotic cathexis: “rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos – all these.”42 Ginsberg and Oppen cite the abject aftermath of the industrial age as the gateway not to the abandonment of machine aesthetics but its entrance into a new phase that takes seriously the cycles of boom and bust that are built into the commodity-dependent world and the culture it exudes. The leftover ends of “free oil,” the becoming of oil into a global political problem, and the rise of the trope of the end of oil all come together at the close of this period of modernism and its paean to the commodity. notes 1 Public Roads Administration, Federal Works Agency, Highway Statistics Summary to 1945 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1947), 18. 2 Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Science, Materialism, and Modern Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 11. To emphasize his skepticism toward any reductive materialist reading practices, Tiffany adds: “a modern reader does not generally consider poetry to be a reliable source of knowledge about the nature or substance of material things” (11). 3 F.T. Marinetti, “The New Ethical Religion of Speed,” in Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 256. Eventually, some Futurist had to write a poem about oil exploration itself. This poem finally came with Maria Goretti’s “Song of Petroleum” in 1941. Maria Goretti, “Song of Petroleum,” in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 476–9. 4 Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources,” pmla 126, no. 2 (March 2011): 307. 5 Ibid., 309. 6 Quoted in Christopher Innes, “Modernism in Drama,” in The

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Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 150. Stephanie LeMenager, “The Aesthetics of Petroleum, after Oil!,” American Literary History 24, no. 1 (2012): 82. A.R. Orage, “Notes of the Week,” The New Age 27, no. 4 (May 27, 1920): 51. Ibid. Amitav Ghosh, Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 140. As Ghosh phrases it, “To a great many Americans, oil smells bad. It reeks of unavoidable overseas entanglements, a worrisome foreign dependency, economic uncertainty, risky and expensive military enterprises; of thousands of dead civilians and children and all the troublesome questions that lie buried in their graves” (139). More recently, Peter Hitchcock has expanded the list of disciplines that missed the importance of oil to the fields of social and political theory: “Why is it, for instance, that oil’s representation seems ubiquitous and yet is relatively absent from critically and creatively articulated claims on space, history and social formation?” Peter Hitchcock, “Oil in an American Imaginary,” New Formations 69 (Summer 2010): 81. Ghosh, Incendiary Circumstances, 138. Marx, in Grundrisse, also makes the case for the close connections of commodities and epic poetry in particular: “[I]s Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?” Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 2005), 111. Williams, “The Right of Way,” The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume 1, 1909–1939 (New York: New Directions, 1986), 207. H.G. Wells, Julian Huxley, G.P. Wells, The Science of Life, Vol. 1 (London: Doubleday, 1931), 29. Ibid., 30. Garry Leonard suggests that we should think of modernism as running according to a kind of engine of its own. “The internal combustion engine is a machine that requires explosion and repetitive rupture to produce smooth, continuous, forward motion. As such, it is an apt metaphor for modernity where a continually renewed series of

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joshua schuster ‘shocks’ is systematically converted into ‘progress.’” Garry Leonard, “‘The Famished Roar of Automobiles’: Modernity, the Internal Combustion Engine, and Modernism,” in Disciplining Modernism, ed. Pamela Caughie (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 222. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 414. Ibid., 413. Here I think it is relevant to mention that the price of oil stayed remarkably cheap and consistent for nearly one hundred years; from 1870 to 1970, the price of a gallon at the pump ranged from $0.20 to $0.40, and only began to rise volatilely with opec intervention in the early 1970s. Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 50. Sinclair Lewis, Free Air (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1919), 69. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 207–8. Hitchcock, “Oil in an American Imaginary,” 81. Upton Sinclair, Oil! (New York: Penguin, 2007), 65. Ibid., 206. Ibid., 25. Hitchcock, “Oil in an American Imaginary,” 91. Mumford further connects a critique of the carbon-dependent economy with a nascent environmentalist awareness: “The animus of mining affected the whole social organism: this dominant mode of exploitation became the pattern for subordinate forms of industry … And the damage to form and civilization through the prevalence of these new habits of disorderly exploitation and wasteful expenditure remained, whether or not the source of energy itself disappeared. The psychological result of carboniferous capitalism – the lowered morale, the expectation of getting something for nothing, the disregard for a balanced mode of production and consumption, the habituation to wreckage and debris as part of the normal human environment – all these results were plainly mischievous.” Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1934), 158. Gavin Wright, “The Origins of American Industrial Success, 1879– 1940,” American Economic Review 80, no. 4 (September 1990): 651. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: mit Press, 1994), 21.

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33 Carl Sandburg, The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (New York: Harcourt, 1991), 3. 34 Ibid., 327. 35 For an example of literary criticism on Williams and cars, see John Chatlos, “Automobility and Lyric Poetry: The Mobile Gaze in William Carlos Williams’ ‘Right of Way,’” Journal of Modern Literature 30, no. 1 (2006): 140–54. 36 “The Descent of Winter 1928,” Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 295. 37 Charles Reznikoff, The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918–1975, ed. Seamus Cooney (Boston: David R. Godine, 2005), 103. 38 Ibid., 97. 39 George Oppen, New Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson (New York: New Directions, 2002), 8. 40 Ibid., 41. 41 Ibid., 42. 42 Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems 1947–1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 138–9.

part three

Petro-Matters: Plasticity, Toxicity, Lubricity

The chapters in this section seek to apprehend petrocultural production and its potential politics in terms of what might be broadly called ecological thought. Such thought encompasses a diverse collection of ideologies and links sundry political stances, practices, and forms of life, which nonetheless share the premise that ecosystems are multiple, complex, and interconnected. These approaches also emphasize the porosity and permeability between entities – perhaps most importantly between nature and culture.1 This ecological focus on dynamic processes (as opposed to more static views of environments as structures prone to equilibrium) coincides with a wider shift in cultural production from an aesthetics of representation into an aesthetics of reproduction. Approaching petroculture ecologically can provide sensory and cognitive paradigms adequate to the contemporary oil-fuelled mode of production structured according to transnational finance and commerce; such approaches can also produce artistic and critical practices capable of challenging the reproduction of global petroculture. For example, performance artist/activist collective Platform London maps the ecological relations between art, capital, resource exploitation, and environmental violence in their figure of the Carbon Web;2 meanwhile, the Liberate Tate collective and the World of Matter project similarly mobilize their acute understandings of petrocultural relations within the proliferating networks of worldwide divestment movements. This section’s four chapters aim to discern the political, aesthetic, and chemical ecologies of contemporary petroculture. Oil in its myriad petrochemical manifestations does not simply loom

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menacingly over a passive nature; rather, it is an integral part of nature’s fabric, an ecological actor with pervasive influence on the ways we sense, understand, and survive. These papers focus on contemporary efforts to visualize and articulate connections and disjunctions that radically challenge distinctions between natural and synthetic, as well as the natural smoothness presumed by oil capitalism. “A shift has taken place,” as Amanda Boetzkes puts it, “from the appearance of plastic objects … to an overarching mode of being. This mode is characterized by discursive contortions, a requisite cultural adaptation to a primary axis of energy-oil profit, the failure of visual realism and the rise of a sensualized plastic aesthetic, and a crisis of objectivity whereby information and ‘knowledge’ have become groundless and prone to appropriation.” In “Plastic Vision and the Sight of Petroculture,” Boetzkes examines how petroculture “conditions vision,” providing a compelling and timely intervention into the concept of plasticity as it “appears in contemporary art, and as it characterizes the malleable politics of oil more broadly.” Arguing that petroculture cannot be challenged through any critique centred on representation, she analyzes the artistic production of Melanie Smith, Choi Jeong-Hwa, Song Dong, and Portia Munson, foregrounding the material links between these works and an aesthetics of plastics that reorients the senses in relation to the geopolitics of oil. Boetzkes’s archive includes petroleum extraction, petrochemical production, and the pervasive plasticities of the age of oil, tracing a movement in cultural perception away from the twentieth century’s representation of alienated objects toward the artistic potential of engaging with the viral proliferation of the all too familiar. For Boetzkes, contemporary art points to “a condition in which we’re immersed and to which we adapt ourselves.” Further elaborating on how senses and bodies adapt to their immersion in petrochemical ecologies, the next two essays – Kirsty Robertson’s “Oil Futures/Petrotextiles” and Janine MacLeod’s “Holding Water in Times of Hydrophobia” – explore the material politics of survival for the embodied petro-organism. Interrogating what she terms “petrotextiles,” Robertson shows how class and embodied risk are coded within a petrochemical fashion system that is currently developing at the frontiers of extreme oil. She draws links between the civilian clothing of oil

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executives, the uniforms worn by oil rig workers, and a history of military and technological developments that extends from the First World War up to the present: from nylon and polyester to high-tech, fashionable “frackwear.” Connecting the invisibility of oil with the invisible systems of textile production that oil fuels, Robertson situates the petrocultural subject in the contradictory webs created by petrotextiles, which “offer very real safety to workers who are functioning in conditions demanded by the quest to extract oil and gas from ever more difficult to reach locations.” As the locations of extraction become more hazardous, so do the petrotextiles that enable human beings to survive extreme environments. Robertson concludes by tracking the toxicity of the clothing itself – clothes sprayed with poisonous flame retardant, fleeces that shed fibres contaminating water and food chains – through the “full circle of oil dependency,” where climate disasters and their attendant security crises promise an ever-growing demand for survival gear and tactical clothing. Continuing down the routes of petrochemical contamination, Janine MacLeod argues “All living bodies are minutely receptive to water and its dissolved cargo. It is, in many ways, the lingua franca of the biosphere.” MacLeod’s “Holding Water in Times of Hydrophobia” follows petrochemical flows through the wastewaters produced by fossil fuel use, as well as by the capitalist social relations that animate our energy-intensive lives. These toxins infiltrate rivers, aquifers, and oceans, ultimately accumulating in living bodies, “whether belonging to whales, earthworms, or executives.” Discerning the petrochemical connections that tie the embalmed corpse to the plastic water bottle, MacLeod diagnoses our culture’s hydrophobia: “the notion that widespread dependence on coal, oil, and gas has made water-fearing substances major constituents of our social-material worlds.” Considering our aqueous makeup in light of this concept, she finds a suggestive figure for how, “through their interactions with water, petrochemicals contribute to a pervasive aversion toward – and denial of – the many important and inescapable ways in which the world is shared in common.” MacLeod illustrates the means by which the material properties of hydrocarbons come to articulate existential anxieties, and how these hydrocarbons – combined with our desire for material persistence – inflect our cultural relationships with water: “These materials are simultaneously ephemeral and persistent, productive

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of screamingly high velocities and millennial longevity. They excite both desires for stability and longings for lightness and impermanence. By contrast, water is a medium of erasure; it erodes, fades, and washes away the marks made by human histories.” McLeod exposes the processes by which our cultural hydrophobia indulges our most secret, repressed fears of death and dissolution. Such fears express the facts that we are embodied petro-subjects, surrounded by – and composed of – troubled waters. In “Lubricity: Smooth Oil’s Political Frictions,” Mark Simpson analyzes how this material fact is divined and symbolically resolved by lubricity – an ideology or texture he identifies as essential to the operations of neoliberal petroculture. Lubricity installs “smoothness as cultural common sense, promoting the fantasy of a frictionless world contingent on the continued, intensifying use of petrocarbons from underexploited reserves in North America.” He focuses first on “Ethical Oil,” the designation embraced by many corporations and policy consultants who rely on lubricity to make their claims that “only smooth societies, ones supposedly without conflict or crisis, can ensure oil’s ethically clean production and consumption.” Lubricity is the fantasy of smooth biopolitical flows of people, resources, and capital. Boosters of the Canadian oil industry construct lubricity by way of an obsessive projection of roughness – barbarism and terrorism – onto the racialized other. Yet through this projection and its consequent disavowal of friction, friction itself becomes a charged medium of political contestation. Simpson analyzes the discourse of oil advertisements, reading them against the work of Allan Sekula and of groups such as Platform London, arguing these latter works employ “material friction so as to mobilize key modes of affective friction” – providing a means by which analysis, critique, and mass action can disturb lubricity’s texture. Following cultural production’s move away from representing environments toward modes of engaging with the efflorescence of objects, the essays in this section highlight how aesthetic problems of form or media are indissolubly connected to material, social, and ecological realities. As vision is conditioned in accord with a lifeworld characterized by plastic malleability, the relations between subject and object are dissolved, and we encounter Boetzkes’s crisis of objectivity. The material reality of the petrocultural object

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unsettles the foundations of epistemic objectivity, and “information and ‘knowledge’ … become groundless and prone to appropriation.” Simpson’s chapter elucidates both aspects of this crisis: lubricity appropriates images and manipulates information as it asserts the ideally smooth movement and exchangeability of objects and capital; simultaneously, its dreams of a frictionless world aesthetically fetishize and celebrate this plasticity. Furthermore, the cultural fetishization of smoothness reflects and enacts the hydrophobic character of petrochemicals. As MacLeod explains: “The fact that [petrochemical products] are relatively biologically indigestible only contributes to the perception that they are fundamentally separate from the intimate rounds of eating and being eaten, sweating, lactating, photosynthesizing, and gestating that goes on within the community of water-based life. Of course, this delusion becomes more difficult to maintain when it runs into, say, data on the presence of plasticizers in umbilical cord blood or pesticides in human breast milk.” Considered in relation to this section’s terms of plasticity and toxicity, lubricity offers a way into understanding the symbolic metabolism by which hydrophobia is processed. What appears as smoothness and integration is the textural sheen of the suffocating petrochemical enclosure threatening the waters upon which all life on earth relies and holds in common. Finally, Robertson reminds us that in the age of extreme oil and climate change, it is so often in the water that petroculture’s smooth textures reveal their material basis and ecological interconnections. The “full cycle of oil dependency” becomes apparent from the aspect of the very petrotextiles we rely on to clean up oil’s toxic smears: “the textile booms, the high-tech sponges, and skimmers, even the booms made from human and animal hair stuffed into used nylons (famously created to sop up oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill), are often, themselves, made from petroleum-based products … Here is the paradox of oil: the textile ‘solution’ to the oil spill actually tacitly endorses petroculture at the moment when its harmful effects are most apparent.” notes 1 The phrase “ecological thought” is of course associated with Timothy Morton following his 2010 book of that name. But there are many ongoing – we might even say deep-ecological – confrontations over such terms and approaches across the fields engaged in the so-called

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and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty,” at “Unsettling Conversations, Unmaking Racisms and Colonialisms,” race Network’s 14th Annual Critical Race and Anticolonial Studies Conference, University of Alberta, Edmonton, accessed 20 August 2016; and Sheena Wilson, “Where are the Women? Energy Imaginaries at the Impasse: A Feminist Critique,” Materialism and the Critique of Energy, ed. B. Bellamy and J. Diamanti (Edmonton and Chicago: mcm Prime, 2017). See also Erica Violet Lee, “In Defence of the Wastelands: A Survival Guide” Guts Magazine 7, 30 November 2016, http://gutsmagazine.ca/ wastelands/; Zoe Todd, “Indigenizing the Anthropocene,” in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, ed. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 241–54; Vanessa Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European Tour!),” dies: Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education and Society 2, no. 1 (2013): 20–34; and Laura Hall, “My Mother’s Garden: Aesthetics, Indigenous Renewal, and Creativity,” in Davis and Turpin, Art in the Anthropocene, 283–92. 2 Platform, “The Carbon Web,” accessed 1 August 2016, http://platform london.org/about-us/platform-the-carbon-web/; James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello follow the carbon web in their book, The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London (London: Verso, 2013).

9 Plastic Vision and the Sight of Petroculture Amanda Boetzkes

Transparency and Sight This essay addresses the sight of petroculture, which is to say it examines how the global oil industry is represented, and how this, in turn, conditions vision. I challenge the political investment in documentary modes of representation which presume to “reveal” petroculture, proposing that the ways the oil industry conceals its destructive impact cannot be exposed or remedied through tactics of demystification or objective reportage. Moreover, the ubiquity and momentum of global petroculture suggest an aesthetic regime that has anticipated and precluded the efficacy of dissensus, thus neutralizing a longstanding tradition of artistic critique. I propose to remap the visual terrain of petroculture through a study of plastic as it appears in contemporary art and as it characterizes the malleable politics of oil more broadly. Plasticity, I suggest, is precisely the condition that ensures the robustness of the oil industry: what spurs its continual reinvention while pre-empting critical purchase. Plasticity is therefore not simply a material substance that indexes the structure of the industry. Rather, it is a mobile, responsive, and all-encompassing apparatus that orients perception. Vision is linked to the political conflicts that shape petroculture. On the one hand, criticisms of the industry directed at both corporations and governments tend to focus on what is hidden or obscured from public view. On the other, there is a dogged insistence on the part of oil corporations that their practices and decisions are entirely transparent. Take, for example, the following statement in Suncor’s Stakeholder Relations Policy: “Suncor will be transparent

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and accountable by engaging regularly, openly and honestly with stakeholders and by reporting objectively on our activities.”1 This reporting is, indeed, a lively dimension of the company’s publicity. It makes its financial statements, sustainability reports, policies, and other news easily accessible. Visibility, it would seem, is a moot point, for there is nothing to hide. The issue, however, is not simply about the availability of information but, rather, the terms by which the public is capable of interpreting and responding to what it sees. The transparency and objectivity to which Suncor’s statement refers are empty concepts that subtend a disastrous industry. It is here that a study of the sight of petroculture can lead to a reflection on the relationship between the conditions of vision, practices of representation, and the state of criticism. In the obscurity of the oil discourse, one might think that the place of art is to reveal or even disrupt the terms of its visibility. But given the failure of transparency and objectivity, attempts to visualize petroculture, whether as industry, economic structure, or energy system, fall short. It is for this reason we might look to plastics and to artworks that consider the fabric of global oil and disclose the way in which it conditions the subject and in turn becomes an essential condition. In what follows, I will consider the assumptions that contribute to the sight of petroculture and how these lead to a deeper questioning of the intersection between vision, plastics, and plasticity.

Conditions of Visibility Although the rise of oil as a primary source of energy has been steadily taking place since the nineteenth century, its cultural centrality has not been evident to many in North America until recent decades, when its peak and scarcity became a motivator and determinant of world events, among them the Gulf War, which prompted the Gulf War oil spill and the Kuwaiti oil fires, and the more recent Iraq War. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 underscored what these wars already made clear: that oil has become excessively visible, publicly present, and politically charged precisely in the time of its shortage, which has been accompanied by a push to locate new sources and new techniques of oil extraction, such as offshore drilling and fracking. Oil now appears in a profusion of media images

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of pipeline explosions, spills, tailing ponds, and monumental “landscrapes,” amid headlines of cancers, toxic groundwater, and the ongoing problem of carbon emissions. Dirty oil has found its way into the world of art and documentary film too. But it would be too optimistic to link the abundant visibility of oil to any real crisis of the industry, as though the revealing power of the media, documentary, and art is showing us the cracks and fissures in this monumental edifice. This tempting assumption is borrowed in part from Heidegger and in part from Jacques Rancière. I will consider each in turn, with a view to redirecting such claims. Heidegger’s position is invaluable if there is to be a remote hope that art can turn the all-encompassing “enframement” of technology into a more profound “unconcealing” of its essence. Heidegger’s reading of art (or the fine arts) through its common root with technology, in the Greek word techne, leads him to see a common operation of unconcealing the world in two modes: either the poetic revealing of art or the blind challenging-forth of technology. Both are intertwined but converse aspects of revealing the world. Thus he quotes the poet Hölderlin, saying, “Where the danger is, grows the saving power also.”2 But before leaping to the conclusion that art is the saving power of technology, that it has the capacity to invite a true questioning of technology, it is worthwhile to consider Heidegger’s subtle inference that technology produces not just one kind of blindness, but two. First, in its claim to reveal truth, technology prevents a questioning of itself: “in our sheer preoccupation with technology we do not yet experience the coming to presence of technology.”3 But by the same token, and no less importantly, “in our sheer aesthetic-mindedness we no longer guard and preserve the coming to presence of art.”4 Technology is accepted, and perhaps even enabled, by an aesthetic predisposition that also conceals. We would do well to question what that aesthetic-mindedness might be in the context of oil politics. The work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky stands as a notable example of the fine line between an aestheticization of technology and a technique of revealing. Burtynsky is known for his photographs of the main industries of our time within a visual vocabulary that couples documentary with landscape photography (and frequently with the aesthetic of the sublime). His Oil series maps the trajectory of the industry from early extraction

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technologies to the development of the tar sands, the refinement of oil, car culture, and the afterlife of oil manufacturing. For better or worse, Burtynsky doggedly insists that his photographs are not motivated by any political or environmental agenda. The move from witnessing the industry to taking some kind of action is not prescribed and is to be decided on by the viewer. The photographs articulate the dilemma of industry: they read its destruction and irreparable transformation of the landscape alongside the power and beauty of technological prowess. So in eschewing a pedagogy or moral, Burtynsky’s photographs have a currency that rests on the assumption that a revealing is taking place: they presence the technological apparatus shot through with sublime beauty – the coextant danger and saving power. But it is here that we might question whether there is some kind of aesthetic operation that obscures rather than reveals global oil. After all, Burtynsky’s photographs appear in the midst of a surplus, not a dearth, of visual imagery of dirty oil, most of which make claims to being a form of documentary. This is especially true of coverage of the tar sands, pipelines, and oil spills, with its familiar polarity: on the one side, corporate promotion of the responsibility and economic profitability of the industry with its purported boost in employment; on the other, an exposure of the social and environmental consequences, which are complex and far-reaching. Two notable examples of artists operating in the documentary mode include Ursula Biemann and Allan Sekula. Biemann’s 2005 video, Black Sea Files, tracks the construction of a new subterranean pipeline that runs across the Caucasus, pumping oil to Western Europe. The video shows the pipeline in its construction and punctuates the endeavour with a portrait of its human geography, as the artist interviews workers, farmers, prostitutes, and refugees, all of whose lives are governed by its development. The video, she claims, “displaces the singular and powerful signifying practices of oil corporations and oil politicians.” The other example is Allan Sekula’s photographic series Black Tide, which documents the cleanup of the Galician coast after the massive oil spill caused by the sinking of the oil tanker Prestige. In a similar vein, it brings that monumental environmental disaster to an individual scale through personalized images of workers charged with the daunting task of repairing the damage.

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This genre of documentary appears in the middle of a battle of objectivities: on the one hand, the corporate and governmental deployment of the science and technology of oil sands and offshore drilling, exacerbated by the issue of the employment that oil generates, so that our consumption of oil is visually repitched as productive, prosperous, and even green; on the other, an exposure of the “truth” of exactly the same events, technologies, and phenomena. If the industry is concealed by this polarity  – in other words not hidden at all but embedded and misrepresented in an ideologically charged visual field – then what do these ambivalent documentaries do? What can be made of the presumption to witness, to present one objectivity in the midst of other supposed objectivities? Here is where Rancière enters the equation, as someone who contends that there is no “real world” that functions outside of art, but rather a multiplicity of folds within a common sensory fabric. The visualization of petroculture, whether in art or media, happens within a shared field. What critical art can do is produce a dissensus, or disarticulation from within that field: it questions the self-evidence of the visible and ruptures given relations and sutures new ones to alter the cartography of the sensible and the thinkable.5 Above all, for Rancière, dissensus is a severing of intentions from consequences, an aspiration that Burtynsky, Biemann, and Sekula attempt to preserve in their insistence to simply show. But one wonders if the concept of dissensus itself is not too often interpreted and codified as crisis, catastrophe, rupture, or contradiction. Without a doubt, Burtynsky commands a wide and diverse public, and therefore his work has a light power to reveal. No doubt, his work has such widespread appeal that it shows the operations of the oil economy to a public that is probably otherwise uninterested in art or politics. Further, his images bind together that information with the enchantment of digital photography. But the real cartography of petrocultures cannot be subsumed into an external view of either the structure or the system so that the viewing subject is positioned outside or above, as is always the case with a landscape. Petroculture is lived from within, and thus the line between it and the potential for an altered sensorial field is as fine as that between my eye and the plastic contact lens through which I read this page. In other words, dissensus starts from a hair’s breadth. It is not something that we can necessarily “see” as representation, let

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alone assemble into a landscape. Rather, it is the way in which we see. Otherwise put, the organization of the senses that subtends and perpetuates petroculture is not a landscape at all. It might be something like Graham Harman’s description: “if we imagine the universe as an ocean, it would be an ocean without a floor, but with a turbulent surface of objects.” If the genre of documentary that has emerged with particular intensity alongside the oil industry relies on a hybrid of information dissemination (it presumes to visualize the industry for the public) and aestheticization (in landscapes and portraits underwritten by a sensibility of rupture, conflict, post-history, etc.), the question becomes, do these responses mistake the problem? Is the problem lack of information and knowledge that must be corrected, a lack of visibility that must be countered with showing, or a naive sensibility that must be perturbed? Or is the lynchpin of the oil economy, rather, a certain incapacity in the face of knowing, seeing, and feeling, as though our senses have been rendered inert, smothered even? And is this incapacity perhaps due to the fact that oil has already been mobilized as a global mesh, so that any response appears belated? Certainly, if we are to take into consideration the supposed overcoming of peak oil – that through extreme technological measures, we have overcome the problem of its scarcity – then we must consider how that persistence, tenacity, and adaptability is integral to the industry and its visual culture. What I am suggesting, then, is that if we want to access the machinery of global oil, this would not necessarily be, as one might expect, by visualizing its reterritorialization of the landscape or by picturing its technological history. The equipmental being of petroculture occurs as a permeation and proliferation of objects. That is to say, it is by turning to its sub-industry, plastics, that one can see how petrocultures are interwoven with a plastic condition.

The Fourfold Plastic Object It is with this notion of petroculture as plastic mesh, not simply sublime machinery, that we can turn to four artworks that summarize the appearance of dozens if not hundreds of contemporary installations that stage accumulations of plastic objects. I would suggest that these works are indicative of an alternative paradigm from the

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aesthetics of fracture, entropy, and exhaustion that has been the mainstay of critical practice from arte povera to postminimalism, the new topographics, earthworks, and beyond. Instead, these works emphasize material endurance, sensorial fullness, flexibility, and hollow affects. Among these installations are works that consider the cultural signification of commodities through their accumulation and redistribution, such as those of New York artist Portia Munson’s installations Pink Project and Green Piece (figure 9.1), which make the classification of plastic objects the premise of display. There are artists who consider the use value of plastics as they enter different contexts, as does Song Dong in his touring installation Waste Not. There are those who consider the relationship of plastics to exchange value, as does Melanie Smith in Orange Lush (figure 9.2). As well, the affective qualities of plastic are frequently on display, as in the case of works by Seoul-based artist Choi Jeong-Hwa, which have titles such as Happy Together, Happy Happy, In the Mood for Love, and Beautiful! Beautiful life! (figure 9.3). Common to all is a conflation of use value, exchange value, and what Walter Benjamin terms “exhibition value,” as plastic figures the immeasurable penetration, dissemination, and sedimentation of oil into the world market as plastic object. Thus, the preoccupation with plastic art turns up everywhere from Mexico City to Colombia, Seoul, New York, Beijing, Delhi, and so forth. The phenomenon is not necessarily grounded in the locations where the petroleum was extracted and refined; it is distinctly non-localized and ubiquitous. If plastic art seems beside the point when we’re dealing with the magnitude of the oil industry, this is perhaps because we’re looking for a structure to disassemble or a limit to expose, rather than a condition in which we’re immersed and to which we adapt ourselves. The practice of incorporating plastic objects in art discloses both the anxiety and excitability that surrounds the oil industry. Plastics are linked to oil for a few reasons: not only are they sourced from petrochemicals that claim 10 per cent of global fossil fuel consumption,6 but also they are considered a potential resource for oil as well. Since the early nineties, chemists have experimented on a process called “coliquefaction” which combines and heats waste plastics with coal in order to recuperate oil.7 Plastics are therefore positioned as the most wasteful and toxic of oil commodities, and the

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Figure 9.1 Portia Munson, Green Piece: Lawn, 2007.

site of the most utopian technological innovation. More than this, it is through plastic that we can begin to fathom the complete permeation of oil into every facet of daily life, as the primary material of almost all objects: commodities, cosmetics, and technological and medical products. It has integrated with or even replaced almost all other substances, too: textiles, clothing, paper, lumber, cork, and rubber. In fact, it is now the fabric of Canadian dollar bills. Plastic brings us to the realization of the global scope of the oil economy, how it is integral to every arena of production, consumption, and sedimentation of human activity. But it also shows the procedure by which oil obscures itself from visibility, in the same way that plastic voids itself of an earthly basis, an inherent form, and a stable value. Further, plastic enacts a temporal condition in which the future is pre-empted, permeated, and its origin evacuated before it arrives (a point to which I will return). Heidegger follows such a procedure in his analysis of technology: here Aristotle’s four causes of an object are folded into one another with neither precedence nor priority but rather with a coresponsibility. The four causes, however, have been misunderstood and overtaken through technological enframement. In a similar vein, the four

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Figure 9.2 Melanie Smith, Orange Lush I, 1995.

causes of the plastic object disclose the more sweeping condition of their framing assemblage. The plastic object in its state of entanglement does not merely exist on an individual scale. It would be more accurate to describe plastics as both integral parts and signals of a “hyperobject,” to use Timothy Morton’s term. Morton uses the term hyperobject to describe the ways objects relate to one another in vast

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meshes, “massively distributed in time and space” so that objects are entities in and of themselves but are at the same time imbricated in a phenomenon of interrelatedness on a scale that exceeds the human field of perception.8 From this perspective, objects as such are fragile entities that shatter and reformulate precisely within and through hyperobjects. Morton gives the examples of the biosphere, climate change, and the age of the “Anthropocene” to illustrate the ontologically real but imperceptible nature of hyperobjects. Moreover, hyperobjects become visible precisely in an age of ecological crisis. Here, we must certainly include global oil as a hyperobject, for it is not merely a human construction (a resource to be refined and marketed, an economic foundation, an energy system) but also now an integral facet of world ecologies, bird migration, species endangerment, the rise of rare cancers, the uprooting of communities, and other forms of reterritorialization. Only on this scale does the magnitude of oil and its interruptions into daily life become evident. The plastic object in contemporary art stands in for, and is an integral part of, the continual formation, reformation, and distribution of an oil hyperobject. This operation of representation, by which the object connects to a hyperobject (plastic to oil), recalls Heidegger’s four causes, but then exceeds them to point to a form of enframement without origin or destination, with no known beginning or end. The plastic object both obscures and exposes global oil, and thereby sits at the crux of the dilemmas of visibility in which petrocultures are bound. I want to consider the aforementioned artworks, each of which (with various emphases) take up the plastic object as an infolding of a causa materialis (a material substance), causa formalis (a shape into which the material enters), causa finalis (a context in which matter and form are ushered into meaning), and causa efficiens (the gathering of the first three together to effect the thing in its fullness and unity). The four causes, however, are shown as insufficient or rather distorted access points into the plastic object. The plastic object registers without the weight of substance, without a formal integrity or use, and appears essentially meaningless, as though it has been completed and finalized without intention. It is only as a fragment in the hyperobject of global oil that the ubiquity of plastic objects begins to make sense.

Figure 9.3 Choi Jeong Hwa, Beautiful! Beautiful life! tina b project in San Salvatore, Prague, 2012.

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causa materialis The work of Portia Munson can be taken as a protracted meditation on the materiality of plastic, as objects cycle from absurd commodity to meaningless thing to excessive substance. Munson is perhaps best known for her Pink Project, a 1994 work in the feminist exhibition Bad Girls at the New Museum in New York, in which the artist gathered over two thousand pink plastic objects, assembling them into an installation that summarizes a hyperbolic femininity produced and mediated through the dissemination of products: girls’ dolls, baby pacifiers, hair accessories, mirrors, fake nails, cleaning products, and so on. In a similar vein, Munson collected and organized hundreds of green plastic objects reclaimed from landfills and yard sales for her 2007 work with the pithy title Green Piece: Lawn (figure 9.1). The banalization of green politics is made explicit, as green is shown in the proliferation of objects needed to tend suburban lawns – fly swatters, lawn furniture, garden hoses, yard tools, AstroTurf, bug spray – alongside plastic cucumbers and artificial plants. A key aspect of Munson’s practice is the reorganization of these objects according to new taxonomies, sometimes classifying according to size, shape, and shade, while at other times she resorts to haphazard gathering, mounding, and containing. The 2009 adaptation of Green Piece, Sarcophagus, immortalizes the objects, providing a geological lens by borrowing the display technique of a natural history museum. A sarcophagus was originally thought to encourage decomposition. But the plastic “flesh” of the objects does not decay; the work is only a perverse and ineffectual recycling. At this stage, the objects cannot be rerouted back into the economy for their use value; they are divorced from exchange, and they cannot renew their shape, for they are encrypted in a banal agglomeration. Plastic substance is held in a tensile mass of objects that flagrantly exceeds ecological systems of growth and degeneration, as well as the economic logic which generates value through exchange.

causa formalis If Munson’s work shows the indefinite persistence of plastic substance in excess of human production and ecological balance, Beijing-based artist Song Dong situates plastics among accumulations

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of other objects, all primed to be discovered for a latent function. His 2005 installation Waste Not at the Museum of Modern Art in New York organizes the entire sum of his family’s worldly goods, which his mother had painstakingly saved for decades, adhering to the dictum of the Cultural Revolution to “Waste Not”: “Wu jin qi gong.” The work is a testament to the impulse to conserve in times of deprivation and poverty, a condition that leads to the amassment of objects of all stripes, so that they may be considered in terms of a possible future utility. The collection of over ten thousand objects included everything from shoes, dolls, crayons, kitchen utensils, and tubes of toothpaste and other toiletries to cardboard boxes and shopping bags. The sheer mass of objects is surprising when considered in relation to the demure size of the family’s home, recreated at the centre of the installation. The artist essentially turned the home inside-out, excavating it like an archaeological dig and laying out the objects as artifacts. Many of the objects were replete with the artist’s family history: for example, when interviewed, Song described a pair of shoes worn by his grandfather, his father, his mother, and then finally by him. However, there was also a prominent section of plastic water bottles and detergent containers amid the collection of family treasures. Innocuous as they appear, the plastic objects are still equally weighted among those objects that would have more obvious sentimental value, such as clothes or books. The artwork submitted all the objects to a meticulous classification that included an aesthetic investigation of their existence in a state of abundance. Song describes the process of making the artwork as awakening him to a new sense of richness. Thus, the obsolescent objects produced a sense of plenitude, paradoxically reconstruing an impoverished condition into a form of wealth. Waste Not is not simply a family archive, then. It intertwines plastic with the family’s stockpile of goods, airing the drive to conserve a standing-reserve of objects that they may be redeployed for as-yet-undetermined future uses. In this respect, the work links the directive to “waste not” with a mandatory adaptability – each home, each family, and each individual is geared toward recovering a value and function for those objects, regardless of their substance, form, or history. Plastic, in turn, is naturalized, taking its place among other kinds of objects, all of which are stockpiled so that they can be contorted to suit a potential function.

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In his 1957 essay, “Plastic,” Roland Barthes reflects that plastic was developed because of its capacity to imitate rare substances, such as diamonds, feathers, fur, and silk.9 He links it specifically to the rise of bourgeois culture and its claim to a new form of wealth. Plastic is in fact celebrated precisely because it is infinitely transposable. While luxury objects such as metals or precious stones still recall their earthly source, plastic is the paradigmatic material to signal the departure from an assumed origin, and thus, an instance of the fundamental evacuation of the referent. It so perfectly encompasses the transformation of materials into commodities, it is, in Barthes’s words, “wholly swallowed up in the fact of being used.”10 Plastic disappears precisely because of its usability: it does not fall into dysfunction; it merely waits to be recomposed into a new shape. Moreover, it abolishes the hierarchy of substances, because it can effectively replace them all. One might therefore suggest that plastic has an equalizing effect that neutralizes the link between substance and function, between objects and their causa formalis. In Song’s work, this transposability is epistemic – it is not just the objects that contort to any possible function, but people who, under political and economic duress, carry out these contortions themselves and obscure the demands on them by naturalizing them, turning them into cultural practices, rituals, a personal ethic, and eventually art. Plastic objects converge with a plastic subject.

causa finalis Song’s work points to the fact that the plastic object has become a “thing,” an entity and a phenomenon above and beyond its matter and form. It is employed, deployed, recycled, reviled, celebrated, and more. It is what it is through the relations of intentionality it cultivates by declaring its usefulness, flexibility, and desirability. Heidegger calls these relations the causa finalis, a telos that is not so much an aim or purpose as an aspect or context in which a thing’s form and matter become co-responsible for one another, making the thing what it is. What, then, is this causa finalis that gathers the plastic object into a generalized plasticity? It becomes apparent in works of art that plastics are expressly consolidated through exchange. One might even say that the plastic object is the material trace of

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globalized oil capital. To return to an earlier point, what plastic shows is that oil is not simply a localized industry and petroculture is not exclusively bound to the substance of oil, with all the sensorial associations of an exhausted and dirty fossil fuel industry. Rather, it ushers in a new paradigm of economy that makes demands and shapes the subject in unprecedented ways. Mexico City–based artist Melanie Smith encapsulates the co-extensiveness of the plastic object and a plastic condition that has inserted itself into the visual field. Since the early nineties, Smith’s work has addressed what has been called an everyday phenomenology of capitalism in Mexico. Executed between 1995 and 2003, her series of installations, Orange Lush, is comprised of bright orange plastic objects, among them life preservers, extension cords, buoys, cheerleaders’ pompoms, water wings, flip-flops, lightbulbs, balloons, and water rafts (see figure 9.2, above). In short, Orange Lush is a collage of blissful associations with the tourist industry in Mexico. The relationship to sensual pleasure is secured by the smooth surfaces of the objects and their abundance of colour. Orange takes on a particularized significance as well. Smith comments on the invasion of Mexico City with cheap orange-coloured commodities in the 1990s, when inflation caused the devaluation of the peso and, after bailouts from the US and the Bank for International Settlements, the market was flooded with foreign goods.11 Orange Lush can therefore be read in conjunction with her series of photographs of sites of commercial exchange, such as Super Soya and Commercial Mexicana Mixcoac, a café and a shopping centre that are peppered with orange signs, products, and price tags. Orange Lush is underwritten by the gratification of shopping and buying, reorganizing the photographs of sites of consumption into their post-consumer corollary, an assembly of objects gathered together without context, function, or purpose. In this way, orange acts as an archaeological stratigraphy for market activity. Yet in their rich colour, the objects of Orange Lush trigger layers of conflicted associations. Smith explains her preoccupation with the colour orange in terms of its relationship to authority: orange is the colour of road signs, for directing the flow of traffic, forbidding entry, marking danger, as well as for advertisement and attracting the attention of consumers. In this regard, the intense colour designates the objects as both authoritarian warning and cheap product. They

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deliver two imperatives simultaneously – to “obey” and to “buy” – in such a way as to conflate the impulse to comply and the desire to consume. In its state of sensorial plenitude and semiotic slippage, the plastic object embodies the fraught terms of exchange in which inflation empties money of value, the need for plastics is prefabricated, and the objects multiply and massify in the marketplace. Orange Lush visualizes what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the glomus, the pervasive and suffocating double of the global condition. If globalization has produced the conditions of possibility for a shared world beyond the confines of the nation-state, it has equally generated a frenzied circulation of all knowledge and representations of that world in the form of commodities, which proliferate, accumulate, and foreclose the possibility of imagining a world to come.12 Smith’s work pictures a global market in this hypostasis and closure, a random assemblage of plastic commodities gathered from the buoyant activity of economic exchange. It visualizes an economy as aesthetic sensibility – not just to picture an industry but to link the dissemination of plastics to jubilant accumulation as a worthless double of profit that is gathered together as visual wealth. Orange plastic is an objectification of petroculture, then, but more than this it is also its modality of contorting value, desire, and sensation. Smith’s works take a specific resonance at this time when peak oil has not only reached a maximum visibility but also, as Allan Stoekl argues, the concept of oil’s peak now undulates.13 That is to say, the scientific fact that oil is non-renewable and that it has run out has been subjected to the distortions of a highly suspect political and scientific discourse that would challenge and misrepresent the limits of oil in order to ensure its continued supremacy as a primary source of energy and profit. The abundance of plastic objects in the visual field appears in conjunction with a crisis of objectivity.

causa efficiens By what agent is plastic produced and circulated as worthless, purposeless, and directionless commodities in such a way as to visualize the malleable critical discourse and ineffective visual field that plagues contemporary petrocultures? By no agent at all, by no direct cause, and certainly by no conscious “presencing” of a truth about oil. To the contrary, plastics are effected by a self-propagating,

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flexible, and resilient condition: plasticity. Plasticity has overtaken the terrain of questioning about oil, economy, environment, health, and well-being. Indeed, it has replaced any expression of concern at all. And, in turn, plasticity has been overtaken by global oil. Consider Choi Jeong-Hwa’s Happy Happy, a 2010 installation consisting of a towering column of bright corkscrew-shaped balloons that stood in the atrium of the Shanghai Exhibition Centre during the shc (Shanghai Contemporary) art fair. The colourful centrepiece appeared to both embody the tenor of the venue and lightheartedly embellish on its themes, a spectacular public event that markets leisure, pleasure, and spectacle. The title of the piece, Happy Happy, underscores its affectation, while the repetition of the word curiously alters the sentiment  – it is hyperbolic, simplistic, childish, automatic, generic. Moreover, if the balloons encompass the fullness and plenitude of happiness, they also bring this sentiment to its catharsis, as balloons randomly pop and fall to the ground in dribbles of burst plastic. Viewed in terms of the popularization of urban and world art exhibitions, the work is a ludic and eye-catching sculpture that is neither profound nor critical. Viewed from the perspectives of its material, the industry that generated it, and the economy it inadvertently indexes, the work captures the subtle way that plastic has intervened on the affective dimensions of cultural activity and disarmed any visual expression of protest or resistance to the oil regime. Like a contemporary Andy Warhol, Choi Jeong-Hwa presents a literal Exploding Plastic Inevitable. If one were to shift attention slightly from the array of festive balloons to the sharp rise of pipeline and drilling explosions, the total dissemination of plastic into nearly every market good, and the seeming inevitability of global warming, with all of the ecological disasters it causes, Happy Happy is a chilling reflection of the general denial that accompanies any imagining of the future global oil brings.

Exploding Plastic Inevitable A shift has taken place, then, from the appearance of plastic objects (an appearance that takes form in their ubiquitous presence and the visual modality they proffer) to an overarching mode of being. This mode is characterized by discursive contortions, a requisite cultural

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adaptation to a primary axis of energy-oil profit, the failure of visual realism and the rise of a sensualized plastic aesthetic, and a crisis of objectivity whereby information and “knowledge” have become groundless and prone to appropriation by the hyperobject of a selfperpetuating petroculture. The plastic condition forecloses the future and comes to rest on a new understanding of “plasticity.” The new formation of plasticity, however, is an inversion of its association with Hegelian philosophy.14 Plasticity is the term Hegel uses for the dialectical movement of thought, as substance and Idea collide and shape one another, metamorphosing over time. The plastic arts have a privileged position in exemplifying this activity over the course of history, from architecture to sculpture to painting and beyond. More profoundly, plasticity is a tensile figuration of time itself, in the sense that the Idea seizes, moulds, and shapes the future, while equally being malleable and receptive, so that it achieves individual precision as it comes into being. Catherine Malabou explains that plasticity is essentially the anticipatory structure of the dialectic; it is the future. But here, the future occurs in a “philosophical faceto-face between two temporal modalities”: between teleological circularity and representational linearity; between what is actual and what is potential; between the retrospective and the prospective.15 Thus, she explains, the reader of Hegel waits for what is to come (according to a linear and representational thinking), while presupposing that the outcome has already arrived. In short, plasticity is this dynamic temporal system in which a time ushers in its future, a future that configures its history, that imagines its past as the future and its future as coming to pass. Crucially, Malabou redeploys Hegelian plasticity with a view to distinguishing it from its ideological forms. This is especially evident in her account of neuroplasticity. Plasticity here is not just about the Idea and substance co-shaping one another in the abstract, but about consciousness and its specific moulding of the brain. This consciousness, though – a consciousness of our very plasticity – has been put under pressure by a “bad plasticity” (for want of a better phrase), a plasticity that enables the restrictions of the economy by encouraging a flexible subject in a system that neurologically maximizes desirable behaviour and a general “positivity.” Malabou is especially adept at explaining the continuities between neuroplasticity, with

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its emphasis on adaptability and a “feedback model” of subjectivity, and the latest form of global capitalism as a decentred and networked organization reliant on a pliable neoliberal subject.16 Important to Malabou’s recovery of plasticity is that it is also a philosophical disposition, a speculative attitude to the possible configurations of the future coming to pass, and to the unknowability of the specific materialization of the event in the future. Plasticity is heterogeneous and cannot be contained by its particularity at any given moment in history.17 In this regard, Malabou recovers the association of plasticity with plastic explosives. The dialectic might effectively take shape through the explosion of given forms. In fact, that is precisely the result of the polarizing energies of dialectical oppositions. But can plasticity be rescued from its ideological double? Especially when its connotation with explosives and the radical dispersal of thinking is itself sublated and prefigured in the rise of explosive oil disasters, the future of plasticity appears to have already been overtaken by its opposite, an exploding plastic inevitable: the predetermination of a future oil regime and its reification through a mesh of plastic objects.

Conclusion The sight of petroculture that we face is one in which plastic and oil combine in a common aesthetic and economic regime. Together, they produce an episteme, invading substance, ways of being, the terms of exchange, and systems of signification. This becomes evident when we consider how the oil industry relies on techniques of transposability that we can associate with plasticity: to turn sand into fuel, waste into energy; to reformulate the scarcity of oil into an accumulation of profit; to spin environmental disaster into job opportunities and turn environmental science into mere “politics”; to fabricate the moods with which we should perceive this energy source. But rather than a true plasticity, as a taking hold of consciousness, petrocultures are afflicted by an ideological moulding, a plastic condition that self-perpetuates, not simply in the proliferation of plastic objects but as a hyperobject. In this condition, the senses are both saturated and muted, affects are prescribed, and criticality loses purchase. Thus, the question to be posed is, what kind of vision can recover us from plasticity and plasticity from us?

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notes 1 Steve Williams, “Suncor Policy Statement: Stakeholder Relations,” June 2012, para. 4. 2 Martin Heidegger, “The Question concerning Technology,” The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Garland Publishers, 1977), 28. 3 Ibid., 34. 4 Ibid., 35. 5 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 139. 6 Dermot J. Roddy, “Biomass in a Petrochemical World,” Interface Focus 3, no. 1 (2013), accessed 4 November 2016, https://www.ncbi .nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3638281/. 7 M. Mehdi Taghiei, Zhen Fang, Frank E. Huggins, and Gerald P. Huffman, “Coliquefaction of Waste Plastics with Coal,” Energy Fuels 8.6 (1994): 1228–32. 8 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 130–5. 9 Roland Barthes, “Plastic,” Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1972), 98. 10 Ibid., 99. 11 Melanie Smith, “Orange Lush,” 11 February 2012, accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.melaniesmith.net/projects/orange_lush/index.html. 12 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World, or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: suny Press, 2007), 33–4. 13 Allan Stoekl, “Unconventional Oil and the Gift of the Undulating Peak,” Imaginations 3, no.2 (2012): 37. 14 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Adrian V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 39. 15 Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic (London: Routledge, 2005), 17. 16 Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 43. 17 Jacques Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” in Bataille: A Critical Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Malden: Blackwell, 1998), 102–38.

10 Oil Futures/Petrotextiles Kirsty Robertson

Oil spills on water are, in many ways, the sites where the destructive capacity of oil is made visible. But when oil spills happen, they are often accompanied with stories of heroic cleanup efforts. Birds and mammals are handwashed, armies of volunteers clean sand and try to separate the oil from the water. And while numerous techniques are used, one of the most visible is that of textile booms and sponges set up to contain oil and then to mop up the surface of water.1 While there are others who could say much more about the effectiveness or lack thereof in such strategies, my interest lies in the fact that the textile booms, the high-tech sponges, and skimmers, even the booms made from human and animal hair stuffed into used nylons (famously created to sop up oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill) are often, themselves, made from petroleum-based products. Many of them are high-tech nonwovens or vinyl-coated polyester – oil repellent textiles made from petroleum. Here is the paradox of oil: the textile “solution” to the oil spill actually tacitly endorses petroculture at the moment when its harmful effects are most apparent. In this paper, I move through a series of scenarios ranging from the everyday life of textiles to the clothing of oil and gas workers – from the suits of executives to the makeup of fleece worn by academics on a tour of Suncor facilities in the Alberta tar sands – to get at the relationship between textiles and oil, or what I’m calling in shorthand, petrotextiles. My goal here is partially to simply reveal this relationship, which remains for the most part obscured, but also to think through what it means for contemporary textiles to be found on multiple sides of current conflicts circulating around fossil fuels and the future of the planet.

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Petrotextiles Writing about plastics and oil, Amanda Boetzkes and Andrew Pendakis note that “plastic weaves itself into every facet of our contemporary reality. It does not simply surround us, it is an epistemology and the reflection of a galling political impasse.”2 The same can be said of textiles. Textiles are ubiquitous – they clothe us and comfort us, their making signifies static, agrarian society, a “civilization.” The trade in textiles has subtended the evil extents of human culture, in slavery and suppression, but it has also demonstrated infinite possibilities as restrictive fashions have been discarded, labour rights have been fought for, and innovation has led to the development of increasingly sophisticated problem-solving materials. There is no place on the globe or even in the explored realms of outer space unaffected by the growing, making, invention, and disposal of textiles. From the place where I am writing, I can see in my clothing, furniture, and surroundings, cotton, felt, neoprene, canvas, leather, corduroy, burlap, silk, terry cloth, polyester, wool, and even woven straw, all within three feet of my working space. That small collection of traditional and contemporary fabrics, woven and pressed, equals thousands of hours of innovation, labour, and travel. So too there is a cocktail of natural and synthetic materials involved: cotton, jute, and wool, yes, but also synthetic rubber produced by the polymerization of chloroprene in the neoprene, Lycra (a polyesterpolyurethane copolymer) in the terry cloth, synthetic tannins likely used in the dyeing of the leather strap of a bag hanging in the corner of the room, and in many of these items the plant cutin, polycarbonate, and polybutyrate combination of polyester, the world’s most popular synthetic fabric. Pulling back the curtain further, one finds a broad spectrum of petroleum-based organiphosphates and carbamate pesticides sprayed on cotton fields, such that US-based Pesticide Action Network claims that cotton is responsible for 25 per cent of insecticide use globally, and 10 per cent of global pesticide use.3 In short, from this brief description alone it is possible to trace the heavy reliance of textiles on petroleum. As Samantha MacBride notes, “The textile and apparel industry is one of the most energyintensive and heavily polluting manufacturing sectors: petroleum

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refining, pesticide application to cotton, and finishing and dyeing processes have substantial impacts on air, water, and ground pollution.”4 But the chains of labour, natural resource extraction, and chemical production involved in the making of textiles and apparel are almost completely invisible in the final product. Entire systems are at work to keep things this way. Invisibility is common to many elements of daily life, textiles being one, oil being another. As Matthew T. Huber writes, “oil is … incredibly ordinary because it is embedded in the everyday patterns of life.”5 While it is noticed at certain points and moments (the Alberta oil sands, the Niger Delta, or, the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, the Exxon Valdez spill), consumption of oil is naturalized; it is a part of everyday life. Surely one could not do without oil, just as one could not do without textiles. Both are banalities. Apparel performs its act of cleansing, of erasing its links to oil, pesticides, labour abuses, and other negativities even more effectively than does oil, which in its initial form at least tends to cluster in the “big world” of oil companies, governments, and the oil trade. The textile industry is radically dispersed, occupying micro- and macro-levels of the global economy, from cotton fields and sheep farms to offshore oil rigs, and from the back alleys of Bangladesh to shop fronts of well-known clothing companies. Textiles are as intimate as underwear and as public as stadium roofs. They are both old and new economy, pre- and post-Fordist; they represent, obviously, the most material of labour and commodities. Textile production is often described as the stepping stone into capitalism,6 and as capitalism steps forward in ever expansionist ways, textiles are there, proliferating through invention and innovation. Textiles are no longer just fabrics, but are also tires, bicycle and boat frames, space suits, riot gear, and medical materials; they stretch from the nano- to the macro-human scale. They are part and parcel of capitalism, and as such are closely connected to oil, in terms of manufacture and transport, but also at more intimate scales.7 The American Dream is an aspirational life, and it is textiles, in new curtains and carpets and sofas, and especially in changing fashions, which clothe and cloak and make possible its dreamy narratives, literally from rags to riches. Huber quotes a 1945 Conoco Oil company annual report that notes the company’s worries that postwar civilian consumption would not be sufficiently large to replace military requirements

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for oil were unfounded. The postwar years saw an unprecedented demand for petroleum products, a demand expressed in a 1957 television special on Standard Oil that celebrated “manmade fibers derived  … from that incredible chemical wonderbox petroleum.”8 The molecular chemical transformation of crude oil into polyester and polyamide performs an alchemy that has quite literally changed the fabric worn by the world. Textiles and gasoline are closely related. Thermal cracking processes that quickly break up hydrocarbon molecules at low temperatures, creating gasoline, lead to waste by-products of ethylene and propylene, essential to the petrochemicals and plastics industries.9 The list of textiles made using petroleum is long, but polyester and nylon are by far the most popular. Unlike in the textile and apparel sector in general (where there are tens of thousands of manufacturers), in instances where textiles are directly connected to oil, ownership coalesces under the power of a few companies, mostly in terms of trademarks and patenting. This is now a welldeveloped area of production, but the processes by which ethylene and propylene were turned into synthetic materials remained long out of reach to researchers. What was necessary to turn oil into fabric was a company with the drive to fund the research and development of an entire field of cheap, durable synthetic textiles, and that company was DuPont. Escaping from the Terror in post-Revolution France, the du Pont family settled outside of Philadelphia in the late-eighteenth century, quickly becoming well-known manufacturers of gunpowder (interestingly, the first gunpowder factory owned by the family was housed in a burned-out cotton mill). By the 1920s, the du Pont family had become DuPont and had moved into chemicals and technology. In 1920, they obtained from France the technology for making artificial silk, and quickly became a leader in manufacturing synthetic materials. In 1927 DuPont established a pure science research laboratory, and it was here, in 1930, that research on polymerization (the process by which individual short molecules form long-chain macromolecules) led to the production of a long polymeric ester – the first polyester.10 In 1934, after many failed attempts (mostly related to the heat at which the fibre would melt, making synthetic clothing un-ironable), Dr Wallace Hume Carothers (who had been tempted to DuPont from Harvard) developed a synthetic fibre that

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looked and acted like silk. This was nylon. Not a polyester, nylon was a polyamide. Nylon came to market in 1940 and was an instant commercial success. Helped by the war, nylon production expanded to meet military needs – parachutes, airplane tires, tow ropes, flak vests, and blood plasma filters – as well as civilian purposes. Nylon could be found in everything from toothbrushes and fishing line to football pants, and, of course, nylons, which proved immensely popular in the late 1930s, though production was quickly halted to make way for the war effort.11 After the war, production of nylon expanded, primarily into civilian clothing, carpets, and industrial nylon. From the 1960s to the 1980s, nylon textile consumption in the United States grew enormously, at a rate of 7.5 per cent per annum. But as a corporate history on the DuPont website reminds us, “the oil shortages of 1973 and 1979 hit nylon hard.”12 Nevertheless, production continued, and DuPont invested heavily in research and development, leading to the invention of well-known branded materials such as Kevlar and Tyvek, and lesser known ones such as Reemay and Typar – all created to fill niches in the textile industry (bulletproofing, waterproofing, and so on).13 Numerous chemical companies branded new textiles (a process that is still ongoing), attempting to win customers to particular kinds of fabric – Bri-Nylon, Dacron, Terylene, Crimplene, Orlon, Acrilan, and Tricel (to name just a few) – rather than to specific fashions.14 Nevertheless, DuPont in particular worked closely with wellknown fashion houses, developing relationships with Coco Chanel, Jean Patou, Pierre Cardin, and Christian Dior, all of whom, by 1955, were using synthetic fibres in high-couture fashion gowns.15 As one report reminds us, “Cheap and colorful, synthetic fibers offered the promise of an easy-care, wash-and-wear, disposable future.”16 In 1965, synthetic fibres made up 63 per cent of the world’s production of textiles, but by the early 1970s that percentage had dropped to 45 per cent.17 Synthetic textiles were already, in the 1960s, perceived as environmentally questionable. Not only was the process by which they were made reliant on oil, but they also consumed enormous amounts of energy. So too the disposal of synthetic fabrics was extremely difficult as, for the most part, they do not biodegrade. They also came to be seen as tacky and cheap, and many consumers returned to natural fibres, for a time. Synthetic fabrics began making

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a strong comeback in the 1990s, in goods such as Gore-Tex waterproof jackets, mixed fibres (for example stretch denim made from cotton and Lycra), and fire retardant fabrics. The relationship between oil and synthetic textiles was well-established in the 1950s, but in the 1980s, DuPont made it even more direct. In 1981, DuPont acquired Conoco (then Continental Oil) for US$7.6 billion. As a history of the transaction notes, “This was done to insure a source of petroleum based feedstock, and coincidentally, an earnings hedge.”18 In other words, DuPont now had direct access to the petroleum that, when refined, was the basis of its synthetic fibres division. This division was renamed Invista and established as a separate company within the DuPont portfolio. DuPont owned Conoco until 1998, when it began to divest it in favour of biotechnology initiatives. In 1999, Conoco was fully sold, and it merged with Phillips Petroleum Company. Then, in 2004, DuPont sold Invista, which included Lycra spandex, Dacron polyester, Orlon acrylic, Antron nylon, Stainmaster and Thermolite, to the oil conglomerate Koch Industries. DuPont had already been cutting jobs in its US textile mills, and “DuPont’s sale of Invista was part of a company-wide restructuring undertaken amid years of decline in the U.S. textile and apparel industries, mostly because of weakened demand and foreign competition.”19 Why would Koch Industries want a company that was part of the failing American textile industry? Likely, Koch Industries, as an oil conglomerate, saw in Invista a potential set of uses for the oil that the company was extracting and refining. Thus, in 2004, instead of DuPont owning an oil company to serve its petroleum needs, an oil conglomerate owned Invista and KoSa, two of the largest synthetic textile manufacturers in the world. I will return to the immensely controversial Koch Industries in the second half of the chapter, but first, a detour.

Frackwear Life on the deepwater oil rig is hard. Even bp admits this on the information page of their recruiting website: “To work here you need to wear a safety helmet, earplugs, protective clothing and plastic glasses. ‘Warning’ signs and daily emergency drills help keep potential dangers top of mind, so that no one gets complacent. Shifts

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are long, up to 12 hours a day, with breaks built in to minimize fatigue and avoid long-term exposure to noise.”20 But it’s not all work. “If watching a movie or sporting event on satellite tv isn’t enough to fill the rest periods, the sea offers its own entertainments. There might be whales to watch, or sea lions or migrating birds.”21 Workers chosen for the rig are advised to bring with them adequate clothing, including boots that are steel toed, oil resistant, slip resistant, waterproof, and insulated. Workers are also advised to bring a sufficient supply of oil resistant gloves, warm socks, water and flame resistant clothing, and safety goggles. Hard hats are provided. Around deepwater oil rigs, the oil sands, and the emerging natural gas fracking fields across North America, a burgeoning fashion industry is growing. A report in US News from 2013 discussed “Frackwear”: “As thousands of workers have poured into the oil and gas business, demand for appropriate work wear has skyrocketed.”22 Frackwear is an actual thing – clothing made to withstand arduous, hot, and dangerous conditions. “Retailers have been overwhelmed with demand for battle-tested equipment like well-built work boots and fire-resistant clothing,” the report continues, noting that in 2012 sales of protective clothing climbed to US$1.6 billion, up from US$1.5 billion in 2011, in large part due to the expansion of domestic US oil and gas production, and speculating that by 2017 sales might reach US$2.3 billion.23 Interestingly, some manufacturers are carving out niches in the shadow left by the ongoing precipitous decline of the US textile and apparel manufacturing industry. Now specialty companies such as Red Wing Shoes of Minnesota, which makes footwear and flameresistant garments, and Carhartt from Dearborn, Michigan, make protective wear for a growing market. The companies even talk in terms of the fashion of oil wear. “Carhartt has expanded its product offerings … from around five styles 10 years ago to more than 100 today,” notes Carhartt Director of Sales Tom Kiddle, who continues, “style is coming into play with [fire resistant] clothing.”24 Kiddle and others note that fears of fire or explosions following the Deepwater Horizon disaster changed the fashion choices of oil and gas workers. VF Corporation, makers of Timberland boots, Wrangler jeans, and North Face jackets have also tapped into this market, sending research teams into the oil fields to conduct “deep consumer ethnography” to find out what workers want, and to adapt already

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existing protective clothing such as firefighters’ uniforms and military garments to lighter and more breathable gear wanted by oil workers.25 Where workers had previously worn jeans and T-shirts, fire-retardant clothing has quickly become the norm. Generally its use is insisted upon by employers, prompted by a 2010 memo from the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration requiring workers at oil refineries to wear flame-resistant clothing.26 Frackwear is indicative of the larger destructive paradox at the centre of the petrotextile relationship. The clothing that protects in the present moment has potentially catastrophic long-term consequences. Halogenated flame retardants are found not just in the clothing of oil workers scared by the explosion at Deepwater Horizon. They are, in fact, found in many electronics and in most upholstery, carpets, insulation, vehicle parts, children’s clothing, and strollers. The problem is that petroleum-based textiles, such as hardwearing polyester, nylon, or other synthetics, are highly flammable. The solution is to coat them in flame-retardant chemicals. The coatings involved, particularly polybrominated diphenyl ethers, have been associated with thyroid dysfunction in pregnant women and impaired neurological development in newborns. Many companies operating in certain sectors (for example, products for children) have voluntarily removed the environmentally mobile and persistent flame retardants from their goods.27 Kathy Curtis, executive director of Clean and Healthy New York – an advocacy group for chemical safety – says, “polyurethane foam in furniture and baby care products is also highly flammable, despite the added flame retardants certain flammability standards require. We have to stop using such fuel-rich, petroleum-based materials in buildings when safer, inherently flame retardant substitutes [such as wool] are available for these same uses.”28 But for those working in dangerous conditions in the oil sector, from which the petroleum of the flammable materials is derived, flame-retardant protective clothing is seen as a must. Often these are accompanied by chemical resistant coveralls (made usually from Tyvek, a high-density polyethylene fibre that acts as an intrusion barrier). Many of these items of clothing also use wick and anti-microbial technology to produce softer and lighter fabrics. The advent of frackwear has created a monetary feedback loop. First a perceived need is created. Jeans and T-shirts are no longer safe, for example. Clothing is adapted from other sectors, such as

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uniforms worn by firefighters. Oil workers begin to buy such clothing en masse, regardless of wider and largely undocumented concerns about environmental impacts. Safety comes first, and the environments in which oil and gas workers are operating are becoming increasingly hazardous. And finally, oil companies begin to invest in research and development of new forms of clothing, ultimately also providing the petroleum by-products that are used in their making. A new market is created. Tecgen Select, for example, is a brand of flame-resistant clothing that was acquired in March 2013 by Invista.29 Invista is a top producer of many of the patented materials that make up frackwear and other protective clothing worn in the oil and gas sector. With very little effort, Koch Industries has profited from a new development in textile needs, benefiting from a problem (oil workers killed or hurt from explosions and hard conditions on oil rigs and in gas fields) and creating a solution  – apparently better materials that protect workers.30 There is even a certain fashion consciousness developing among workers and a growing sense of status connected with owning certain kinds of expensive frackwear. The environmental implications of frackwear do not play well when worker safety is on the line. Koch Industries (until recently “the billionaire company you’ve never heard of”), has received extensive coverage from environmental groups of late, in large part because, according to Greenpeace and numerous others, they have been quietly funding (often through their charitable foundations) conservative think tanks and other groups that focus on fighting environmental regulation, opposing clean energy legislation, and easing limits on industry pollution.31 Groups supported by Koch money allegedly also help to organize and fund the Tea Party movement, and advocate for the privatization of social security and the restriction of voter rights.32 Koch Industries is the second-largest privately held company in the US (after Cargill).33 The Wichita, Kansas–based company operates oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota and also controls four thousand miles of pipeline, in addition to owning Brawny Paper Towels, Georgia-Pacific Lumber, and Invista. Lifelong libertarians, the Koch brothers David and Charles support less oversight of industry (especially environmental oversight), minimal personal and corporate taxes, and few social services. As one savvy commentator

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noted, the Kochs’ libertarianism in not an idealistic one. Rather it supports corporate self-interest.34 Even the conservative William Buckley calls it Anarcho-Totalitarianism – arguing that for the Koch brothers, government is there only to protect individual rights. In her now well-known article in the New Yorker, Jane Mayer argued that the seemingly behind-the-scenes operations of the Koch brothers has actually had large-scale political impact, effectively stymieing the Obama government through the twin processes of funded think tank “research” released to the media (for example questioning climate change science) and well-timed protests ostensibly showing widespread public support for anti-government, anti-social-service initiatives.35 In each case, the protests and lobbying efforts are relatively small, but they receive a disproportionate amount of media coverage, which in turn creates a sense of public support for, for example, climate denial, anti-union legislation, and so on. Also in each case, Koch Industries denies involvement – easy to do as it is not the brothers or their companies that are involved, only their money that funds some of the think tanks and lobby groups doing the organizing. While this is not the place to explore the Koch family dealings in detail, Koch Industries, through its Canadian subsidiaries Koch Exploration Canada and Koch Oil Sands Operating ULC, is heavily involved in the Alberta oil sands, a geographic centre-point toward which we are making our way in this essay. According to a recent report, Koch Industries has been involved in the oil sands since the late 1950s, and its Pine Bend Refinery in Minnesota was responsible for between 20 and 25 per cent of oil sands crude pumped into the United States in 2013.36 Koch Industries has been remarkably tightlipped about its presence in Alberta, to the extent that in public and news coverage, numbers differ and no one seems to know precisely how many acres Koch Industries owns, what lies beneath that land, and how much profit Koch gains from Canada.37 Much of the available information comes from extensive research by activist groups. Nevertheless, Koch Industries owns a great deal of infrastructure that undergirds a petro-relationship between Canada and the United States, and the company cannot help but benefit if oil trade between the two countries grows.38 Textiles come back into the story at the Pine Bend Refinery in Minnesota. Charles Koch acquired a controlling interest in the refinery

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in 1969. By 2007, he was still referring to that acquisition as “one of the most significant events in the evolution of our company.”39 According to InsideClimate News reporter David Sassoon, drawing on Koch’s 2007 memoir, “The refinery was a doorway that permitted Koch Industries ‘to enter chemicals and, more recently, fibers and polymers.’”40 The Pine Bend Refinery refines petroleum into a variety of fuels and by-products, including the ethylene and propylene used by companies such as Invista to make branded materials, textiles, and fabrics for the wider industry, finding their way into airbags and carpet backings at the Canadian Invista plant, and a wide array of other products made in Invista’s numerous other factories. The intervening step is a many-thousands-of-kilometres-long journey, during which fabrics are assembled into wearable and other goods in offshore facilities before making their way back to familiar stores and shopping centres. Clothing companies, however, are quick to distance themselves from the connection to oil. In 2010, it was widely reported that a number of well-known companies such as the Gap, Levi Strauss, Timberland (all companies that have clothing made from synthetic fibres if not specifically from fibres made by Invista), and Walgreens had announced a boycott of oil sands–related gasoline. The move prompted a counter-boycott by the Alberta Enterprise Group, which urged Albertans to stop buying products made by these companies.41 But Gap Canada, for example, insisted that no boycott had been called for or organized. They did admit to a “standard request for information” in asking their shipping companies “what they are doing to eliminate highcarbon intensive fuels.” Levi Strauss and Timberland both claimed that they supported the use of clean and renewable fuel sources, but both denied any sort of boycott.42 Walgreens did not back off from the idea of a boycott, but found few products in their line that used oil sands petroleum. In all cases, concerns had been about fuel used in transportation. No link was made to petroleum by-products found in materials used by each of the named companies. On the other hand, those organizing the counter-boycott were quick to point to labour abuses at the other end of the chain of production. Tom Shipton, the Alberta Enterprise Group’s president, said, “Gap, a company that is regularly accused of using unethical labour practices in developing countries to produce its stock, wants the world to buy bloody oil from Nigeria and the Middle East … It’s high time for Albertans to say, ‘No way!’”43

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Textiles are connected at every point to the immense power of big oil. Some of the biggest oil companies in the world own subsidiaries that control patents and trademarks to many of the best-known brands of synthetic fibres and textiles, which are then sewn into clothing and goods that probably many of us reading this chapter have in our closets, basements, and garages. In no way conspiratorial, oil companies are entirely open about the relationship, though clothing companies are less so. It remains largely invisible nonetheless. Somewhere in the transition from oil as liquid to petroleum as textile the oiliness gets lost, though the fluidity remains. Nothing resembles oil so much as a slick, shiny, synthetic textile.

Executive Wear Moving up the labour chain from oil workers on the rigs to oil executives in the boardrooms, the fashions change from synthetics to natural fabrics. At the middle-rung, Gore-Tex jackets, cotton-blend golf shirts, leather belts, polyester blend pants, and khakis protected with Stainguard give way to the top-rung executive suits made from lightweight wool, mohair, or cashmere, paired with satin lining, Egyptian cotton shirts, silk ties, wool socks, and leather shoes. The higher up the chain one moves, the presence of the hand is increasingly visible, as handmade, made-to-measure, and bespoke clothing often signifies the heights of power. A suit from Gucci’s new madeto-measure line comes in at a cool US$3,040, a bargain for an oil executive on the move.44 In fact, despite the emissions of ammonia from disintegrating post-wear wool, executive wear, often made from textiles woven nearby, sewn on the spot, and in contact with the purchaser, are likely to contain the least amount of petrotextile fabrics discussed in this essay. Of course, oil executives are often far removed from the day-to-day operations of the oil rig. The mopping up that they do consists of hearings, media appearances, lobbying, lunches, or golf (perhaps without the suits). Their hands are only dirty in the metaphorical sense. In the mid-space between abject poverty and a complete lack of choice in what one wears and the luxurious bespoke wardrobes of the few, millions, perhaps billions, of people choose and buy clothing every day. In this group can be found the academics, authors, artists, and others who participated in the Petrocultures conference from which this book developed, and who travelled together to

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Fort McMurray, Alberta. I was one of those participants. We got off the bus from the airport confident in the knowledge that we, at least, could see through the corporate-friendly display strategies at the industry-sponsored Oil Sands Discovery Centre and could read between the lines of the Suncor representative’s carefully prepared talk and guided tour of the Suncor facilities (the bus went nowhere near the open pit mines). The air, which smelled like sulphur, and the constant noise of air cannons used to (hopefully) scare ducks away, combined to create a landscape both beautiful and marred. Fort McMurray is a performative space, and there we were, part of the performance. In Fort McMurray, divisions of labour play out obviously through clothing: workers wear jeans and jackets, coveralls, or frackwear; executives at play wear golf shirts, polyester pants, and shiny shoes; academics observing look like academics observing. In our cotton, flannel, polyester, and colourful prints we were obviously tourists, at odds with the Fort McMurray scene. We stood apart, but were in many ways, through the fuel that brought us to the site and the clothes we were wearing, deeply imbricated in the culture of oil. I have put us, these participants, back into this paper not to poke fun or to lay blame but rather to point out the ubiquity of oil, the expansive nature of a petroculture, and the difficulty of solving problems when the solutions create yet more problems. Many of us, cold on our last night in Edmonton where the weather had just been hot, brought fleece jackets on our trip to the oil sands. Bringing fleece jackets to Fort McMurray was something of a homecoming (tongue-in-cheek). Fleece is the success story of textile recycling. Much of it, especially that sold by environmentally conscious companies such as Mountain Equipment Co-op and Patagonia,45 is made from recycled fleece or recycled plastic bottles. In both its virgin and recycled forms, fleece is a soft-napped insulating synthetic fabric made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET). It is, in essence, plastic fabric. Recycled fleece appears to answer a dual problem. First, it recycles plastic bottles. And second, it answers a problem of vast overconsumption. As noted above, the overall consumption of textiles has increased enormously over the past three decades. This has implications both for the sprawling textiles and apparel sector, and for the oil sector. A textile industry report on potential sustainability

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in the sector notes that “the immovable object of the need for textiles will soon meet the unstoppable forces of population pressure and resource depletion.”46 The report notes the twin challenges for future textile industries: peak oil and lowered access to freshwater. It also notes overconsumption as both a boon and a challenge for the industry. Clothing remains visible only for a short time before it becomes hidden in closets (this is known in the industry as latent waste), donated to charity thrift stores, or thrown away. In the United States, 8.5 million tonnes of textile waste is disposed of annually,47 and between 2001 and 2007, donations to Goodwill rose by 67 per cent.48 There is a strong market for secondary textiles – baled and shipped as secondhand clothing (primarily to Eastern Europe and Western Africa), or sold to scrap dealers and so on. But even so, only 15 per cent of textile waste generated annually is diverted from landfills.49 And while textiles are resold, they are not often publicly recycled. As Samantha MacBride notes, although other goods, such as plastics, glass, and paper have been marked as “recyclable,” the same is largely not true for textiles. She writes, comparing the low interest in recycling textiles with the high interest in recycling glass, “This disparity in attention … is the inverse of the ecological and economic qualities of both materials in waste.”50 The trade in textiles and clothing, as it currently exists, is epically unsustainable. And yet, sustainability seems difficult and farfetched. Huber suggests that there is a deep connection between subjectivity and oil in America that makes sustainability and change seem overwhelming. He writes, “The fractionated products spewing from petroleum refineries are literally an explosive underpinning of particular lives, practices and structures of feeling that supplement [the] imaginary of entrepreneurial life … the oil industry was careful to promote a narrative that reminded American consumers that the materiality of that life was inseparable from the multiple petroleum products distilled and cracked from the hydrocarbon assemblages of crude oil.”51 Fleece seems in many ways to be an answer.52 Although new fleece or synthetic fleece relies extensively on raw petroleum products, ecofleece is seen as a break in the cycle, being in part or wholly made from melt-spinning and processing post-consumer polyethylene terephthalate (or PET).53 There is a growing market here, and numerous companies are now producing jackets, exercise wear, furnishings,

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and even school uniforms from recycled PET. Recycled fleece is attractive, fashionable, and expensive enough that it is seen to have value but not so expensive that it is out of reach for most consumers. It avoids negative associations of homespun coarse fabrics, and is, to put it frankly, more hip than hippie. Fleece and other fabrics made from recycled plastics have been promoted as environmental solutions, diverting plastics from landfills. According to Wellman, Inc., one of the top producers of recycled fleece, which supplies well-known companies such as Patagonia, 150 fleece jackets made from recycled plastic bottles saves a barrel of oil and avoids approximately half a tonne of toxic air emissions.54 But in 2006, a group of scientists from Australia published an article showing that when washed, the plastic particles making up fleece were not stable.55 Rather, with each wash, fleece jackets were shedding up to two thousand polyester fibres, and those micro-plastic fibres were ending up in oceans and on beaches.56 According to a follow-up article in Science, the plastic from synthetic lint (from fleece and other synthetic fibres including those used in yoga and leisure clothing) were making their way through sewage treatment plants. It is noted, “Not a single beach [in the study] was free of the colourful synthetic lint. Each cup of sand contained at least two fibres and as many as 31.”57 Bioaccumulation (that is, the ingestion of micro-plastics at various levels of the food chain) is difficult to trace, but the effects are clear in terms of the build-up of plastic micro-particles gathering in enormous gyres in the world’s oceans. What are we talking about here? Certainly nothing that can be seen. One of the issues at hand is that these are micro-particles, invisible to the human eye. Drink a glass of water full of microparticles and you probably will not notice. Seen in this light, fleece is both a solution and a problem. It skips the use of pure petroleum in recycling PET, but in creating a felted non-woven fabric made of tiny shedding plastic particles, it actually creates significant environmental damage – it is the oil spill and the boom to clean it up, and then a garbage problem derived from disposing of the boom. Bringing the threads of this paper together, one might return to Invista. Invista manufactures several PET resins used in the food and beverage industries (there is even a picture of a plastic water bottle on its website). As noted, Invista also manufactures numerous energy intensive polyesters and polyamides made from raw PET.

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And, the company also manufactures COOLMAX EcoMade fibre, made “from 97% recycled plastic bottles and 100% imagination.”58 The EcoMade website documents how plastic bottles are collected, cleaned, and ground into flakes. The flakes are turned into chips, which are converted into nylon yarn. The yarn is then made into socks sold under the Dansko, DeFeet, Injinji, Timberland, and REI brands. EcoMade fibre is essentially an “ecological” Lycra – a segmented polyurethane that appears to be a single thread, but is actually a bundle of (shedding) tiny filaments.59 Reading between the lines, and drawing on admittedly circumstantial evidence, it is possible to imagine that even as Timberland was looking at the use of Alberta oil sands crude in their transportation, it was actually making its environmentally “friendly” socks from recycled PET made by Invista with oil that may have been imported to the Pine Bend Refinery from the oil sands. In the profit-making operations of the benign-sounding “EcoMade” are a set of connections – ecologically both helpful and disastrous, both genuine and phony – that boggle the mind. Naomi Klein notes with a great deal of trepidation how such relationships work. “It’s not, ‘sue the bastards,’; it’s, ‘work through corporate partnerships with the bastards.’ There is no enemy anymore. More than that, it’s casting corporations as the solution.”60 Certainly this seems to increasingly be the case when it comes to supposedly environmentally friendly fleece. There are companies, large and small, working hard to bring sustainable textiles and apparel to market. Upcycling, organic and local cottons and wools, the possibilities of bamboo, hemp, and Tencel have all become relatively familiar as sustainable possibilities. But the growing popularity of the sustainability market has opened it to fabrics that look greener than they are or that may undo the environmental benefits of their manufacture through still relatively unknown consequences in their disposal. As Timothy Mitchell eloquently puts it, quoting Jean-Paul Sartre, the earth’s stock of “capital bequeathed to mankind by other living things” has been consumed at a shockingly fast rate. As Mitchell notes, more than half the total oil “consumed in the 150 years between the 1860s, when the modern petroleum industry began, and 2010 was burned in the three decades after 1980. From the perspective of human history, the era of fossil fuels now appears as a brief interlude.”61 The increase in atmospheric temperatures,

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with consequent changes to the earth’s climate, has necessitated increasing awareness of the limits of human existence. On the one hand, climate change has brought textile solutions into being: tents, waterproof jackets, emergency gear. And on the other hand, one finds security forces wearing Kevlar and other enhanced fabrics that facilitate the policing of climate change activists and intervention in regions affected by climate disaster (such as New Orleans in the weeks following Hurricane Katrina). With petrotextiles, the full circle of oil dependency is revealed. Such textiles offer very real safety to workers who are functioning in conditions demanded by the quest to extract oil and gas from ever more difficult to reach locations. Petrotextiles offer promising scientific and technological intervention into seemingly intractable problems. But for every cause an effect. This paper has looked at how petrotextiles have major environmental implications that are currently almost invisible. What is visible is a frustrating tangle because it is impossible to deny the advances made in the textile industry and to square these with the wider ecological implications of enhanced synthetic fabrics. Here is the paradox of oil, and, increasingly, the paradox of textiles. And thus we are left at an impasse. But perhaps an impasse is a point from which to argue, and inconclusiveness in some way matters; it is the raggedy edge, the margin, the fraying seam. All those things that plastic fabrics are not. notes 1 “Fibers for Non-Wovens,” Textile World, 13 September 2010, accessed 15 July 2016, http://www.textileworld.com/textile-world/ nonwovens-technical-textiles/2010/09/fibers-for-nonwovens/. 2 Amanda Boetzkes and Andrew Pendakis, “Visions of Eternity: Plastic and the Ontology of Oil,” e-flux 47, (September 2013), accessed 4 July 2016, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/visions-of-eternity-plastic -and-the-ontology-of-oil/. 3 Even organic cotton, which is linked to crop degradation and the exhaustion of arable lands, is not blameless. Pesticide Action Network, “Cotton,” pan North America, accessed 29 September 2013, http://www.panna.org/resources/cotton. 4 Samantha MacBride, Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States

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(Cambridge: mit Press, 2011), 28. See also Keith Slater, Environmental Impact of Textiles: Production, Processes and Protection (Cambridge: Woodhead Publishing, 2003). Matthew T. Huber, Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom and the Forces of Capital (Ann Arbor: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Most famously, of course, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Huber, Lifeblood. Quoted in Huber, Lifeblood. Ibid. Audra J. Wolfe, “Nylon: A Revolution in Textiles,” Chemical Heritage Magazine 26, no. 3 (2008), accessed 4 July 2016, http://www .chemheritage.org/discover/media/magazine/articles/26-3-nylon-a -revolution-in-textiles.aspx. Ibid. Cook-Hauptman Associates, Inc., “History of Du Pont’s Nylon Fibers,” cha, accessed 13 September 2013, http://www.cha4mot.com/p _jc_dph.html. Ibid. Wolfe, “Nylon.” Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Cook-Hauptman, “History of Du Pont’s Nylon Fibers.” Randall Chase, “DuPont Sells Textiles Unit to Koch Industries,” Star News (Wilmington, nc), 18 November 2003: 1, 3. bp, “Life on Remote Platforms: Hard Work and Close Quarters,” bp Global, accessed 13 September 2013, http://www.bp.com/en/global/ corporate/about-bp/what-we-do/extracting-oil-and-gas/life-on-remote -platforms.html. Website no longer available. Ibid. Meg Handley, “Booming Oil and Gas Industry Fuels Emergence of ‘Frackwear,’” US News, 21 May 2013, accessed 27 August 2016, http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/05/21/booming-oil-and -gas-industry-fuels-emergence-of-frackwear. The term “frackwear” appeared in 2013 and was widespread in coverage of the oil business that year. In the years since, it has largely been replaced by “workwear” as a catch-all term for hard-wearing clothing typically coated in fire-retardant chemicals. Ibid.

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24 Quoted in Handley, “Booming Oil and Gas.” 25 Shelly Banjo, “What the Well-Dressed Fracker Is Wearing,” Wall Street Journal, 15 May 2013, accessed 27 August 2016, http://online.wsj .com/news/articles/SB100014241278873237981045784533100802 03022. See also Bev Betkowski, “Fashioning Safer Garments to Suit the Oil Industry,” University of Alberta Homepage, 25 February 2013, http://uofa.ualberta.ca/news-and-events/newsarticles/2013/february/ fashioningasafergarmenttosuittheoilindustry, and James Waterman, “The Industry’s New Clothes,” Pipeline News, 27 March 2013, for how this kind of deep ethnography was used to produce safety wear for oil workers exposed to steam and hot water. 26 Banjo, “What the Well-Dressed Fracker Is Wearing.” 27 Elizabeth Grossman, “Are Flame Retardants Safe? Growing Evidence Says ‘No,’” environment360, 29 September 2011, accessed 13 August 2016, http://e360.yale.edu/feature/pbdes_are_flame_retardants_safe _growing_evidence_says_no/2446/. 28 Quoted in Grossman, “Are Flame Retardants Safe?” 29 Banjo, “What the Well-Dressed Fracker Is Wearing.” 30 This feedback loop is made even more clear by the recent announcement that Invista has begun to create nylon pipelines for the oil and gas sector. Mike Kezdi, “Invista’s Raptor Nylon Pipe Offers Alternative to Steel, Composites,” North American Oil & Gas Pipelines, 5 March 2015, accessed 16 July 2016, http://napipelines.com/invista -seizing-pipeline-industry-raptor-nylon-pipe-offers-alternative-to-steel -composites/. 31 Greenpeace, “Koch Industries: Still Fueling Climate Denial,” Greenpeace USA, accessed 27 August 2016, http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/ koch-industries-still-fueling-climate-denial/. 32 Jane Mayer, “Covert Operations: The Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War against Obama,” New Yorker, 30 August 2010, accessed 27 August 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/ 08/30/covert-operations. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 J.K. Trotter, “The Smear Campaign against Jane Mayer Takes an Interesting New Turn,” Gawker, 27 January 2016, accessed 16 July 2016, http://gawker.com/the-smear-campaign-against-jane-mayer -takes-an-interest-1755486235.

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36 Elizabeth Douglass, “Koch Brothers Cashing in 220,000 Acres of Tar Sands,” International Forum on Globalization/Inside Climate News, accessed 13 August 2016, http://insideclimatenews.org/ news/20120919/koch-brothers-industries-canadian-tar-sands -properties-keystone-xl-pipeline-alberta-dilbit-climate-skeptics. 37 David Sassoon, “Koch Brothers’ Political Activism Protects Their 50-Year Stake in Canadian Heavy Oils,” InsideClimate News, 10 May 2012, accessed 21 August 2016, http://insideclimatenews.org/ news/20120510/koch-industries-brothers-tar-sands-bitumen-heavy -oil-flint-pipelines-refinery-alberta-canada. 38 Karen Kleiss, “U.S. Energy Giant Lobbying Province,” Edmonton Journal, 23 March 2011. 39 Sassoon, “Koch Brothers’ Political Activism.” 40 Ibid. 41 Helena Zhu, “Alberta Group Calls for Oil Sands Counter-Boycott,” Epoch Times, 2 September 2010, accessed 13 September 2013, http:// www.theepochtimes.com/n2/canada/alberta-group-calls-for-oil-sands -counter-boycott-42051.html. Article no longer available. A French translation can be found here: http://www.epochtimes.fr/archive/front/ 10/9/6/n3503458p.html. 42 Canadian Press, “Not Boycotting Oilsands, 3 U.S. Firms Say,” cbc News, 30 August 2010, accessed 13 August 2016, http://www.cbc.ca/ news/canada/edmonton/not-boycotting-oilsands-3-u-s-firms-say -1.945517. 43 Quoted in Kevin Libin, “When an Oil Sands Boycott Is Not a Boycott,” National Post, 2 September 2010, accessed 13 August 2016, http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/09/02/kevin-libin-when -an-oil-sands-boycott-is-not-a-boycott/?__federated=1. 44 Gucci, “Personalized Luxury: Made to Measure,” Gucci. 45 Patagonia recently started funding research into microplastics and microfibers. However, their website still proudly proclaims that the company uses recycled plastic bottles in their fleece. Leah Messinger, “How Your Clothes Are Poisoning Our Oceans and Food Supply,” Guardian, 20 June 2016, accessed 16 July 2016, https://www .theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/20/microfibers-plastic -pollution-oceans-patagonia-synthetic-clothes-microbeads. 46 Maria C. Thiry, “Staying Alive: Making Textiles Sustainable,” aatcc

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kirsty robertson Review (November–December 2011): 3, http://www.aatcc.org/wp -content/uploads/2015/03/Sustain1111.pdf. Samantha MacBride, Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States (Cambridge: mit Press, 2011), 25. Luz Claudio, “Waste Couture: Environmental Impact of the Clothing Industry,” Environmental Health Perspectives 115, no. 9 (September 2007), online edition. MacBride, Recycling Reconsidered, 28. Ibid., 25. Huber, Lifeblood, chapter 3. Despite the negative comments I’ve made in this chapter about fleece, I felt it worth mentioning positive correspondence and openness from companies such as Mountain Equipment Co-op. mec claimed that they were not aware of plastic shedding from recycled polyester, but committed (over email) to researching further into these issues. I sent them several articles quoted in this chapter. Lynne Haley Rose, “About Eco-Friendly Fleece Fabric,” Demand Media/SFGate, accessed 13 August 2016, http://homeguides.sfgate .com/ecofriendly-fleece-fabric-78691.html. There are also fleece products that involve no petroleum products at all. These include a new all-wool fleece from the Portland, Oregon, company Icebreaker. See Christina Williams, “Icebreaker Introduces Wool-Based Fleece,” Sustainable Business Oregon, 8 May 2011, accessed 13 August 2016, http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/blog/sbo/2010/09/icebreaker _introduces_wool-based_fleece.html. Patagonia also has a program called ReFleece, which recycles fleece scrap (which contains petroleum), but uses a low-energy process to press scrap into a felted material that is not remelted. The final product is generally used as a liner or felt. See “Refleece: New Life for Old Fleece,” Recycle Outdoor Gear, 8 August 2013, accessed 3 August 2014, http:// recycleoutdoorgear.com/1875/refleece-new-life-for-old-fleece/. Wellman, “EcoSpun (Eco-fi),” eartheasy: Solutions for Sustainable Living, accessed 13 August 2013, http://eartheasy.com/wear_ecospun.htm. Mark Anthony Browne et al., “Accumulation of Microplastic on Shorelines Worldwide: Sources and Sinks,” Environmental Science and Technology 45, no. 21 (2011): 9175–9. Although I do not cover it here, scientists have begun to note that silver nanoparticles, which are added to cloth and as well as

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numerous other consumer objects to make them anti-microbial, can kill and mutate fish embryos. See Gordon Shetler, “Fish Kill: Nanosilver Mutates Fish,” Scientific American, 17 November 2009, accessed 13 August 2016, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ nanotechnology-silver-nanoparticles-fish-malformation/. Elsa Youngstead, “Laundry Lint Pollutes the World’s Oceans,” Science, 21 October 2011, accessed 13 August 2016, http://news.sciencemag .org/environment/2011/10/laundry-lint-pollutes-worlds-oceans. Coolmax, “Coolmax EcoMade,” accessed 13 August 2016, http:// www.coolmaxecomade.com. Ibid. There is also cordura EcoMade, used primarily in backpacks, daypacks, bags, and luggage. Naomi Klein, “Big Green Groups Are More Damaging than Climate Deniers,” Guardian, 10 September 2013, accessed 13 August 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/sep/10/naomi-klein -green-groups-climate-deniers. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso, 2011), 6.

11 Holding Water in Times of Hydrophobia janine macleod

On the other hand, materiélization could be a denial of death altogether, as in the case of things made permanent and denied access to decomposition, their return to elements. We inflict our rage for immortality on things, marooning them on static islands; and then, frequently enough, we condemn them as pollutants. Why are the fixed smiles on Barbie Dolls and Fisher Price toys so pathetic? Don McKay, Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry and Wilderness O me a water-o (Water, it no get enemy) If you fight am, unless you wan die (Water, it no get enemy) I say water no get enemy Fela Kuti, “Water No Get Enemy”

Since the dramatic postwar expansion of the commercial petrochemicals industry only six or seven decades ago, everyday life across the globe has been inextricably permeated by substances derived from coal, oil, and gas. The living bodies immersed in this socially complex soup of pesticides, fuels, process chemicals, solvents, toys, and packages – whether belonging to whales, earthworms, or executives – are mostly made of water. Water is as constitutive for our emotional lives as it is for our bodies and economies. The material relationships between petrochemicals and water can thus be expected to have significant implications for everyday affective experience. As rivers, aquifers, and oceans accumulate the long-lived by-products of fossil fuel dependence and capitalist social relations, the meanings and emotional resonances of water are likewise profoundly altered.

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Water is a visible and tangible manifestation of sociability. We “immerse” ourselves in languages and cultures, “circulate” through parties, join or divert from “mainstream” opinions and practices. Crowds “trickle” out of theatres and “flood” through gates. Anthropologist Veronica Strang writes that “water offers a metaphor of social being, connecting individuals within the larger body of society.”1 Civilizations, famously, emerge around great rivers; romances bloom beside the well and the oasis; and the fountain in the central square becomes emblematic of the public sphere.2 Along with air, water is one of the universal media of interspecies communication. It carries nutrients, smells, sounds, pheromones, micro-organisms, heat and cold, sugar, salt and coffee, contaminants and toxins. All living bodies are minutely receptive to water and its dissolved cargo. It is, in many ways, the lingua franca of the biosphere. I will argue that, through their interactions with water, petrochemicals contribute to a pervasive aversion toward – and denial of – the many important and inescapable ways in which the world is shared in common. The temporal dimensions of hydrocarbons and their synthetic progeny are of particular interest within this inquiry. These materials are simultaneously ephemeral and persistent, productive of screamingly high velocities and millennial longevity. They excite both desires for stability and longings for lightness and impermanence. By contrast, water is a medium of erasure; it erodes, fades, and washes away the marks made by human histories. Water evokes transience, conjures the threat of inundation, and intimates the possibility of blissful oceanic oneness. The potent fears and desires inspired by these forces of dissolution and integration may have important implications for environmental politics. How do the speeds, slownesses, and toxicities of petrochemical products shape attitudes toward water, mortality, and more-than-human shared worlds? After reviewing some of the relevant chemical properties and cultural codings of petrochemicals, this chapter will consider some of their implications for relations with water through an analysis of two figures  – the embalmed corpse and the plastic water bottle.

Hydrophobia and Persistence Many of the products and by-products of human engagement with fossil fuels are chemically hydrophobic: they are repelled by water. The term combines the Greek words hydros, meaning water, and

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phobos, meaning “to hate.” Or, if we stick with the common usage of the term “phobia,” we can translate this term as “water-fearing.” Petrochemicals are not alone in their hydrophobia. Hydrophobic waxes on the surfaces of lotus leaves cause water droplets to bead up and roll away. The enzymes on which our metabolism depends have hydrophobic parts that curl inward to avoid the watery environment of our bodies, while hydrophilic, or “water-loving,” portions turn eagerly outward. These aversions and affinities for water give enzymes their precise and complex folded shapes. There is nothing inherently new or “unnatural” about hydrophobia. However, as one of the distinguishing characteristics of hydrocarbons, this chemical property has significant cultural and ecological implications in the context of an entrenched petro-capitalism. I am intrigued by the notion that widespread dependence on coal, oil, and gas has made water-fearing substances major constituents of our social-material worlds. It is hydrophobia that makes many petrochemical products environmentally persistent. Binding readily to fats, these compounds linger in breast tissue, as well as tissues of the prostate, bone marrow, brain, and liver.3 In a process of biomagnification, persistent chemicals increase in concentration as predators devour large numbers of their small prey. At the end of this process, the fatty tissues of top predators such as human beings and beluga whales can accumulate concentrations of flame retardants, stain repellents, drycleaning chemicals, and synthetic perfumes many times higher than those found in polluted waterways. Bioaccumulative substances thus have the ability not only to resist the forces of dilution and dissolution, but also to actually reverse them, increasing in potency as they move out into the world. In order to metabolize and eliminate toxic substances, the body must first render them water soluble.4 Unfortunately, the process of producing enzymes capable of effectively transforming particular toxins is a very slow evolutionary process.5 While hydrocarbons have been around for millennia, they did not become significant factors in the environment until human use took its exponential upward turn over the last two centuries. New chemicals are synthesized on an even faster timeline. When faced with toxins like organochlorine insecticides, vinyl chloride, or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, the body’s efforts at metabolic transformation often backfire: instead of

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rendering these substances harmless and excretable, the metabolic reaction produces carcinogens, or converts the chemical into a form that binds more readily to the body’s DNA.6 Very large molecules like those that make up synthetic plastics simply do not fit into the spaces adjacent to the catalytic sites on enzymes.7 Our bodies will take generations to learn how to effectively handle these substances. Like climate change, the release of xenobiotic toxins is not in itself deeply problematic. The difficulty stems from the fact that these things happen at a rate that so dramatically exceeds the speed of biological adaptation.8 The velocity of petrochemical “innovation” under conditions of late capitalism is, in fact, key to the biological indigestibility – and thus to the longevity – of persistent toxins. Herein lies the strange and contradictory temporality of coal, oil, gas, and their chemical by-products. On one level, hydrocarbons are capable of generating a great deal of speed. Petrochemically derived fertilizers make crops grow faster. Devices powered by cheap energy allow us to travel faster, cut down trees faster, kill each other faster, do laundry faster, and send and receive messages more rapidly. Petrochemical inputs make feedlot cattle bulk up more quickly. However, as they are helping to produce all of this rapid change within cultures, ecosystems, and atmospheric conditions alike, the hydrocarbons themselves are often very resistant to dissolution. The endurance of petrochemicals is qualitatively different from the stability of metals or minerals. With varying longevity, many hydrocarbon by-products are able to make marks on the waters of the world. While mummies and diamonds persist through desiccation and firmness, the molecular immortals of modern science can maintain their integrity within both the swollen currents of oceans and the nebulous damp of fog. When the poet John Keats requested that his tombstone read, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” he meant that his name would eventually be forgotten. Water is that substance that has always seemed to carry no scars. However, despite their aversion to water molecules, persistent chemicals like Teflon and alkylphenols manage to travel around the world in rain clouds.9 Some pesticides can remain relatively unchanged through all the transformations of the hydrological cycle.10 It is now possible to leave enduring traces on water itself. Whether they biomagnify through food webs or simply persist, many petrochemicals thus display an uncanny immortality. Plastics,

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in particular, have incredibly stable molecular structures. Out in the open ocean, surging in the foam of powerful waves and currents, restless hordes of the plastic undead lure fish, turtles, and seabirds to their deaths. Denser plastics such as the PET used in single-serving water bottles sink in seawater, accumulating in bottom sediments.11 Drifting over the ocean floor, these potent remnants inhibit the exchange of gases from overlying waters into sediments, suffocating benthic invertebrates. Increasingly, the beaches we walk on are composed not only of sand, but also of plastic granules.12 There is something obnoxious about the longevity of these materials. They sit awkwardly next to other examples of long-lasting human artifacts; everyone knows they do not belong with the cave paintings, the church frescos, the enormous stone likenesses of Gautama Buddha. They are unwanted. We cast them out to live on the margins. We burn them, bury them, and commit them to the ocean as we do our dead, as if we could, through these rituals, convince these substances to behave as though their active lives were over. The immortality of these substances is something we will need to grapple with for a long time. How strange that so many of these relatively new chemical compounds and polymers should actually match or exceed our most beloved artworks in their staying power. Tossing in the cold currents of the mid-oceanic gyres, or bunkered in the fats of deep-dwelling fish, they may outlast the great musical works that receive such thunderous applause in the warm centres of the world’s great cities. Durability is important. Long-lasting things, places, and activities can act as meeting grounds where the living, the dead, and the unborn come into meaningful contact. Memory dwells in objects and places; a teapot passed down from a great-grandmother provides a sense that the world is shared between generations. Most artifacts survive by making themselves attractive to the living. The artworks that remain buoyant atop the floodwaters of history do so because they are loved and revered. We organize performances of old plays, protect venerable paintings from the direct sun, and teach our children the songs we love. Other works from the past remain with us because they have etched themselves in very hard and lasting materials. Statues, monuments, and metalwork set out to resist the rain and the damp, the wind and the weather, by allying themselves with solidity. However, these objects, too, usually need to be

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valued if they are to survive. Gold statuary can be melted down by conquering armies to make coins or jewellery, leaving no trace of its former shape. Stone monuments can be blasted away by developers or flooded by dam projects. As disposable objects, most of the things we make from plastic are remarkable for the transience of their useful presence in our lives. Likewise, materials such as chemical pesticides, solvents, and adhesives are only intended to be used once. It is undeniable that people attach memories to petrochemical substances – a collection of plastic Hello Kitty figurines may make someone feel more at home in the world and may even be passed down from generation to generation. However, the same cannot be said of the plastic seal that covers the top of the yogurt container, the non-stick coating on the frying pan, or the PET water bottle. All of these things are absurdly long-lived. They persist without being valued and without carrying human memory, as poorly integrated into regimes of meaning and belonging as they are into the bodies of those who swallow them by accident. When synthetic petrochemicals first emerged, their durability was highly valued. In fact, the commercial explosion of modern chemistry was ignited by a revolution in permanence. In 1856, eighteenyear-old William Perkins threw a failed experiment into the sink and noticed that the coal tar residue he had been working on had turned a brilliant shade of mauve. Curious, he used some of the substance to stain a silk cloth. To his delight, he found that the brilliant colour did not fade, as a natural dye would, under the eroding influences of water or sunlight.13 His discovery, besides being a lavish commercial success, prompted the synthesis of other dyes from the waste products of burning coal, substances now plentiful in the new era of intensive fossil fuel energy use. After the dyes that would not fade in the wash, there were pesticides that could withstand the sun and rain, plastic containers that would take a thousand years to decay, synthetic fibres that could keep hikers dry in tropical storms, and preservatives that could isolate human cadavers (temporarily) from the forces of putrefaction. In the beginning, these virtues of durability were not lost on promoters of the new petrochemical materials. A 1926 booklet advertising Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic, praised it for having achieved “the ultimate degree of chemical stability.”14 Likewise, John

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Mumford, an author commissioned by the Bakelite Corporation to write a book about its products, described Bakelite as possessing “a solidity that mocks the disintegrating forces of heat and cold, time and tide, acid and solvent.”15 The ability to withstand the eroding influences of water was among the properties that garnered approbation for the earliest petrochemicals. As historian Jeffrey Meikle observes, the utopian visions inspired by plastics lauded these new synthetic substances as agents of social stability.16 In a 1906 speech honouring the fiftieth anniversary of William Perkins’s discovery, the president of the US General Chemical Company declared proudly to his fellows: “You have seen the dawn of a golden age of chemistry – that science which by synthesis will gather together the fragments and wastes of other dynasties, and build for the world a civilization which will last until the end.”17 Initially, then, petrochemical products were celebrated as allies in the human struggle against the forces of transience and dissolution. By the 1950s, however, petrochemicals such as plastic had come to be coded as impermanent and eminently disposable.18 Just prior to the end of the Second World War, the vice president of DuPont gathered together a group of marketing professionals to address the spectre of finite demand. He proposed plastic as an ideal substance from which to construct a culture of limitless desire: it is inexpensive, lightweight, and capable of being moulded into any conceivable shape.19 Clearly this project was a resounding success. Despite their high molecular weights, plastics took on an appearance of lightness in service to modern values of change and novelty. Meikle observes that by the second half of the twentieth century, “forms taken by plastic increasingly expressed American society’s fluidity and mobility … its desire for impermanence, its urge to finally control all of life by transforming it into a whimsical or fantastic play of entertainment.”20 Petrochemicals in general can by tailor-made to the demands of ever-changing markets and production processes. Although durability continues to serve as a selling feature for particular petrochemicals and synthetic polymers, disposability has become much more dominant in the cultural coding of these substances and in their design. Subservience to the demands of capital accumulation has thus engendered the very deadly contradiction between these products’ intended transience and the realities of their persistence.

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Dissolution and Detachment Materials like cling-wrap appear ephemeral because they are designed for disposal – everything about them communicates impermanence. However, the flux of petroculture, from which such a diverse array of consumer goods flow, is quite different from the transience of water. As noted previously, water resists inscription. One can carve ice, but always with the expectation that it will melt. We use water to express ourselves in innumerable ways – irrigating gardens, cooling nuclear reactants, blending colours of paint – but water is always on its way to becoming something else. As Rita Wong observes, water teaches humility.21 As a symbol of impermanence, it evokes the process by which everyone and everything returns to the undifferentiated substance from whence they came. Freud refers to an “oceanic feeling,” both mystical and erotic, in which the boundaries between self and other dissolve into a sense of oneness. He describes it as “a feeling … of being indissolubly bound up with and belonging to the whole of the world outside oneself.”22 When the fluids in my body rise from a cremation fire, they become indistinguishable from the clouds overhead. This is the nature of water’s (alternately delicious, uncanny, sublime, and numinous) threat to individuality: it promises, sooner or later, to integrate us completely with everything else. Petrochemicals, by contrast, partake of the “liquidity” of capital, in which all things become light by severing their ties to what surrounds them. Commodities appear transient and ephemeral because they can be easily exchanged for other things. Moreover, while it is easy to imagine oil rushing up from the ground, most people who are not directly involved in the production of petrochemicals likely experience a conceptual gap between this image of subsurface oil and the appearance of a polystyrene flotation device. The arcane processes of their production make petrochemicals especially amenable to fetishization. In being coded as “unnatural” and “artificial,” petrochemicals come to seem as though they do not come from the earth. When we deal with these substances, we seem to be operating in a purely anthropogenic world. Like money apparently growing by itself in an investment fund, plastics, solvents, and detergents seem to emerge from thin air. This delusion reaches its apogee in a persistent strain of technological utopianism that imagines that anthropogenic substances

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and structures are actually capable of unhinging the operations of human life from the earth. An 1878 advertising circular proclaims that “as petroleum came to the relief of the whale … celluloid [has] given the elephant, the tortoise, and the coral insect a respite in their native haunts; and it will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer.”23 This notion continues to enchant self-proclaimed “environmental modernists” in the present. In a 2013, journalist Fred Pearce argues that “the idea of ‘decoupling’ economic growth from resource use and pollution is a common aspiration, which only technology can achieve.”24 This fantasy of a “decoupling” or “dematerialization” of economies evokes a material culture so light and transient that it makes no marks and leaves no traces. As the New York Times’ science editor put it in 1940, the hope behind this vision is that science will one day “assume complete control over matter, and free men from their ancient dependence on animals and plants and the crust of the earth.”25 The imagined impermanence of petrochemicals has both emerged from and enabled this desire for disembedding and disassociation. The futility and destructiveness of these attempts to disengage from “animals and plants and the crust of the earth” – that is, from the community of water-based life – is nowhere more starkly evident than in contemporary North American burial practices. Formaldehyde, today’s embalming chemical of choice, is a potent germicide and bactericide.26 The methanol from which formaldehyde is made was originally distilled from wood; since 1923, however, methanol has mostly been derived from natural gas.27 Formaldehyde reacts with the body’s proteins to render them more stable, temporarily preventing tissues from breaking down.28 In effect, formaldehyde makes the body a little more akin to plastic: proteins are bound into cross-linked structures described by those in the embalming profession as “insoluble resins.”29 While not technically hydrophobic itself (formaldehyde is water soluble), formaldehyde comes to the assistance of the dissolution-fearing consumer: this hydrocarbon derivative gives dead tissues a solidity, insolubility, and indigestibility they would not otherwise possess. The role of water in the dissolution of the body should not be understated. Our transience is profoundly bound up with our wateriness. For every bone or fingernail left underground after death, so

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much more body mass leaks and drips and evaporates. Even if we choose to be cremated, or die in a fire, we will dissipate as steam more than we will crumble into ash. In many traditions, souls cross or travel on waterways – the Styx, the Jordan, the Ganges – to reach the land of the dead or to arrive in a new body, gaining passage on a boat or evaporating with the dew. Everywhere water goes, there is also life with its continual hungers. The word “erode” derives from the Latin rodere, to gnaw or chew. It is water that invites the inhabitants of the soil to feast on the corpse: fat microscopic “water bears” ride currents of humidity into its aqueous interior; hard-shelled arthropods graze the savannahs of its thighs and very, very small archaea bacteria multiply between the hairs of its arms.30 In the damp embrace of the groundwater, the body becomes more disaggregated: its face caves; its surfaces fur with moulds; threads of fungi steal its nutrients as presents for the darling little roots of plants. If the body has been embalmed, however, bacteria foolish enough to nibble at it will meet untimely ends. The corpse will trail a delicate plume of formaldehyde into the wet soil beneath it, perhaps trickling into a local stream to plague aquatic life. This gesture of withholding the corpse from the inhabitants of the soil seems mean. It is “mean” both in the sense of “lacking moral dignity” and in the sense of being “ungenerous.” At a moment when we finally have no choice but to give our bodies back to the world, a common response in North America is to lace the feast with poison. All our lives, we depend on earthworms and microbes and insects to break down other dead organisms into component pieces and feed them to the plants whose fruits and roots and leaves we eat, or that will be eaten by cows and chickens and fish and pigs. What sort of miserly spirit, then, animates the refusal to be dissolved by water and devoured by detritivores after death? While embalming has been part of many cultures at many times, the dominant meanings in the contemporary North American context seem clear. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz writes that “the word death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips. The Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love.”31Anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer argues that in the twentieth century, death replaced sex as

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the most forbidden subject of discussion.32 His thesis is borne out by the careful avoidance and sanitization of contact with dead bodies in the contemporary West. If the corpse is to be seen during a funeral, it is always elaborately prepared beforehand. Perfumes and chemicals help to produce the illusion of life, effectively shielding mourners from the sensual evidence of their loss.33 Most dead North Americans go to earth resembling lonely soldiers in well-defended garrisons: the chemically preserved body lies within a durable metal casket, which is itself protected by a concrete or aluminum or fiberglass vault.34 Marketing for these products and services implies that the beloved dead require shelter from the elements, championing the “durable” and “eternal” qualities of caskets and vaults.35 The resistance to dissolution evidenced in these burial practices may form a profound affective barrier to perceiving the embeddedness of human life within broader ecosystems. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer identify a terror of dissolution at the core of the Enlightenment project. In response to the unknown, threatening mass of external nature, they argue, enlightenment subordinates every aspect of life to an all-encompassing impulse of self-preservation.36 Among the dangers that enlightenment thought must tame, many are surely associated with water: its capacity to erode, drown, and flood, to wash away the traces of human activity, to break down and blend together discrete wholes. However, as Horkheimer and Adorno point out, “enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized.”37 As a radical fear, it goes too far. The Enlightenment hero not only attempts to live a long life, but also makes a project of “abolishing death” altogether.38 The water-hating properties of hydrocarbons make them powerful – albeit treacherous – allies in this project. Petrochemical products feed fantasies of detachment because the mysterious processes of their production make them easy to fetishize. The fact that they are relatively biologically indigestible only contributes to the perception that they are fundamentally separate from the intimate rounds of eating and being eaten, sweating, lactating, photosynthesizing, and gestating that goes on within the community of water-based life. Of course, this delusion becomes more difficult to maintain when it runs into, say, data on the presence of plasticizers in umbilical cord blood or pesticides in human breast milk. However, evidence that petrochemical substances penetrate the

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borders of the skin, the walls of cells, and even the blood-brain barrier does not necessarily deflate the belief that it is possible to hover bubble-like above the world – never touching or being touched by anything that might elude human control. In fact, the threat of being permeated by a host of invisible and hostile waterborne toxins may even inflame the desire to dwell in an impermeable world.

Immortality and the Impermeable Skin On one level, it is simply useful to be able to refuse water’s communicative gestures from time to time. Plastic bags keep our lunches from leaking onto our books; their ability to form an impermeable membrane against the movements of water is key to their functional presence in everyday life. I find it delightful to crash through wet bushes in synthetic raingear or to land a lightweight Kevlar kayak on a rocky beach. Hydrophobic adhesives binding together lengths of equally hydrophobic pvc pipe connect solar hot water heating arrays to community swimming pools. These objects and substances do not inevitably or necessarily imply a radical posture of detachment. However, in the context of mounting ecological and social instabilities, the widespread proliferation of impermeable synthetic materials cannot be divorced from a powerful impulse to keep the shared world out. The attractions of water are indisputable. People go to wells and waterways to conduct religious rituals and to meditate. They go to water for comfort when they are upset and hold celebrations beside it, in it, or on it when they are happy. People take showers and baths, perform ablutions and immersions to wash away trauma, grief, and guilt. All over the world, we gather at the edges of oceans, lakes, and rivers to play, wade, and float, to enjoy the sight of sunrises, sunsets, and moonlight on water, and to seduce one another. A clear, sparkling river, overhung, perhaps, with aromatic plants – it is pleasing to imagine such a thing as an extension of oneself. What happens to this affinity for water when the river in question is drifting past the refineries in Sarnia, Ontario’s Chemical Valley, or carrying diluted bitumen from a pipeline rupture? Responses to chemical toxicity are culturally variable. Reverence for the Mother Ganges as a sacred and healing river continues despite her heavy load of contaminants.39 However, I think it is safe to say that a waterway’s

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cargo of petrochemical toxins often complicates feelings of closeness and intimacy. Among their other meanings – convenience, athleticism, and the like  – bottled waters promise to protect the drinking body from pollution. As Maude Barlow has observed, the industry explicitly cultivates fears of contamination, often casting aspersions on local tap water in regions with well-functioning public water systems.40 Culligan International, a specialist in purified water carboys for homes and offices, writes in their promotional materials that “the decision between tap water and bottled water simply comes down to personal preference and the degree to which you want to protect the health of you and your family.”41 The mountains and snow on the labels of popular spring waters evoke a source somewhere far away and uncontaminated by human or beast. No beaver lifts its leg over this stream. No labourer sweats over the extraction of its waters. Used condoms, certainly, do not wash up on the shores of the mountain lake in the picture. Andy Opel notes that “the absence of human, animal or plant forms” on many bottled water labels “tells us this water is not connected to the systems we are part of.”42 The transparency and impermeability of the HDPE or pet bottle augments the amnesiac effects already at play in the commoditization of drinking waters. Through the miraculous intercession of commodification and polymerization, then, the water inside the bottle has been made “new.” When you break the seal on the top of the bottle for the first time, it is easy to participate in the illusion that you are the first to touch its contents. The past, to the extent that it circulates with and as water, has been kept outside. Based on her ethnographic work in the Stour Valley in Britain, Veronica Strang observes that consumers of bottled water seem to be seeking a life “‘unadulterated’ by otherness.”43 Indeed, one of Nestlé’s leading brands of bottled water is called “Pure Life.” As a symbol of healthy living, the water bottle advertises the possibility and pleasure of detachment. Our need for water reminds us that we cannot subsist alone. Often, the most visible exchanges between our bodies and the world take the form of fluids. Elisabeth Grosz writes that “body fluids attest to the permeability of the body, its necessary dependence on an outside … they affront a subject’s aspiration toward autonomy and self-identity.”44 Like the embalming chemicals which render human

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tissues more solid and insoluble, the plastic water bottle excites a fantasy of impermeable corporeality. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, this desire has long roots. In their reading of Homer’s Odyssey, they argue that Odysseus’s response to the Sirens sets the tone for centuries of individualism. Like the waters to which it is tied, the Sirens’ song evokes the pleasures of integration, of “losing the self” and “suspending … the boundary between oneself and other life.”45 Against this offer of deadly and erotic dissolution, Odysseus asserts the impermeable borders of an atomized individuality: “the unity of his own life, the identity of the person, have been hardened.”46 In its claim to keep out threatening and polluting influences, the water bottle comes to symbolize the perfectly atomized body – unitary, smooth, discrete, and invulnerable. An impermeable outer layer, in fact, appears to be one of the hallmarks of immortality. Heroes like Achilles or Siegfried in the eleventh-century Niebelungenlied were gifted with almost invulnerable skins. Half man, half god, Achilles could only be wounded on a small patch of his ankle. After bathing in dragon blood, Siegfried, similarly, had a skin that could withstand any weapon. Like Achilles, his divinity was not quite complete: a spot between his shoulder blades could be penetrated by a spear. Otherwise, he could not be harmed. Disguised as banal consumer goods, plastic containers offer the security of a prosthetic immortal skin. Even in the midst of their coding as impermanent and disposable, petrochemicals can still evoke stasis and immortality. And they do so by promising to bring us with them into a place of perfect containment. Our own skins are so much softer. Stepping into a hot shower or a bath, our pores open, and our moist lungs draw in steam. If the local water supply is contaminated by any of the petrochemical byproducts known as “volatile organics,” they will quickly make their way into our bloodstream. Volatile organics hold only lightly onto the water molecules that carry them. A little heat, a little motion, and they break off into the air surrounding us. Benzene, for example, can pass easily across the border of our skin, into our blood, and from there into our bone marrow. Benzene exposure has been linked to cancers like leukemia and multiple myeloma.47 In fact, chemicals absorbed through the skin or through the lungs may be more harmful to the body than those encountered in drinking water. Whatever

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we drink passes into our liver, an organ specialized in handling the toxins our bodies receive. However, what gets absorbed with water through our skin or through our lungs will enter our blood and encounter other organs before being metabolized.48 Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the impulse of self-preservation turns malignant as it intensifies into the realm of radical fear. Even as enlightenment supposedly liberates humanity from necessity and fear, we come to be controlled by blind forces of our own making. We may no longer cower in terror of floods and fires, they argue, but our lives are subject to threats such as fascism, nuclear annihilation, and socially produced scarcity.49 Plastic bottle production generates known carcinogens such as benzene.50 Ethylbenzene, another toxic compound used to create pet water bottles, contaminates tap water and air in the vicinity of the factories where it is used and produced.51 Animal studies have associated exposure to this chemical with a higher incidence of birth defects, as well as effects of the nervous system, liver, kidneys, and eyes.52 The polymerization of terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol necessary for the production of plastic bottles produces a potent neurotoxicant, while sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from plastics production acidify the rain.53 Expressions of hostility toward the forces of dissolution, however unconscious, can end up damaging the medium of life. It is the same water. It is not only the bottles themselves (and a host of other petrochemical substances) that pose a threat to the ability of waters to sustain life. The belief in perfect containment is itself dangerous. The idea that pipelines carrying diluted bitumen will not rupture and that oil tankers navigating coastal routes will not founder helps to legitimate the continued trade in hydrocarbons. Producers of petrochemicals are well aware of the high toxicity of some of the substances they manufacture. It is the fallacy of perfect and indefinite containment that keeps the production of deadly toxics from seeming like an act of mass assault. The circulation of these poisons does make careful containment necessary. In the absence of effective public water treatment infrastructures, bottled water is often the only “safe” source of drinking water. Drinking water filtration systems, in homes or municipalities, skim out toxic chemicals and bacteriological contaminants alike. Membranes can remove solvents, pesticides, and other pollutants.

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Water can be aerated to vaporize volatile organics, releasing them in the treatment facility rather than in the steam from our showers and baths. However, as Sandra Steingraber points out, everything that is filtered or aerated out of our drinking water must go somewhere. If they cannot be degraded by sunlight or water, or metabolized by living creatures, toxins will end up in someone’s body eventually. “Even while providing some immediate respite from exposure through tap water,” she argues, “these technological shell games keep carcinogens in circulation.”54 The only certain way to securely protect ourselves and others from the dangerous substances we produce is to stop producing them. Even as it protects us from contaminants, therefore, the impermeable membrane is semiotically dangerous. It allows us to engage in a pretence of control over both the movements of water and the afterlives of the substances we synthesize. Further, in their incarnations as everyday consumer goods, petrochemical substances may encourage a perception that agency is primarily located in the realm of private consumption. Materials whose molecular structures have been tailored to our convenience and comfort give us a sense of complete control over individual objects,55 even as we are profoundly disempowered collectively by the politics of neoliberalism. Most distressingly, perhaps, the postures of detachment invited by substances like plastic may discourage involvement in the cultivation of common worlds.

Hating Water Although only some petrochemicals are technically classified as “water-hating,” it seems at times that every stage and form of our engagement with fossil fuels could be encompassed by this term. As extractive industries pursue “unconventional” deposits of hydrocarbons, the degradation of waters associated with mining and drilling activities only intensifies. “Fracking” for natural gas in shale deposits contaminates local groundwater with both process chemicals and the gas itself. As the Deepwater Horizon spill so dramatically demonstrated, deep-sea oil extraction is even more “risky” than conventional drilling. And the extraction of bitumen from tar sands notoriously consumes – and contaminates – vast quantities of water. In the Niger Delta, ongoing oil spills from deteriorating pipelines,

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terminals, pumping stations, and platforms have devastating effects on rivers, streams, and groundwater. These instances of large-scale contamination are only the beginning, however  – the spectacular damage wrought at the moment of extraction. A truncated catalogue of petrochemical impacts on waters might include the effects of effluent from the production of plastics, the contamination of groundwater by pesticides, dry cleaning chemicals, and industrial solvents, and the oceanic dead zones we have come to associate with the widespread use of petrochemical fertilizers. Derailments of trains and ruptures of tankers and pipelines carrying hydrocarbons are disturbingly routine events. Acid rain and the burgeoning mass of oceanic plastic debris also belong on this list. I have emphasized the chemical properties of hydrocarbons in this paper, but petrocultures also compromise water’s capacity as a relational medium in other ways. The sounds of boat engines, for example, inhibit the social lives of whales by masking their underwater calls. Isolation occurs in a sonic register as well.56 And sooner or later we have to consider the staggering hydrological implications of rapid climate change. Droughts and floods have become more commonplace. Water supplies for populations living downstream from glaciers are deeply uncertain. The ocean acidifies as it absorbs more atmospheric carbon dioxide, making it more difficult for creatures like coral and plankton to form their calcium carbonate bodies from the water around them. Given that they produce half of the oxygen on the planet and that they constitute the base of its largest ecosystem, we have no idea what sort of life will be possible following a large dip in plankton concentrations.57 Our brief and intense collective relationship with hydrocarbons seems at every point to trouble relations with waters. Whatever benefits we might have hoped to gain from these materials, we have found substances in the ground that hate water, and we have unearthed them as rapidly as we possibly can. I do not mean to suggest that petrochemical production or the use of fossil fuels constitute conscious acts of aggression against the waters of the world. Further, in invoking the notion of radical fear, I do not mean to posit a fear of merging-with-everything-else as an ultimate cause of widespread hydrocarbon dependence. Clearly, there have been many compelling reasons to engage with coal, oil, and gas. However, among all of their other properties and capacities,

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petrochemicals may encourage us to pretend that we are actually impermeable and that the movements of water are subject to our absolute control. Like any tool of domination, they alienate us in sometimes devastating ways from the entities they presume to subjugate. As waters become more dangerous and unpredictable through the effects of climate change and contamination, the tendency may be for fears of water to intensify.

Sharing Water In the midst of the terrifying geopolitical, ecological, and social uncertainties associated with late capitalism and oil dependence, petrochemical substances invite fantasies of stasis  – they shield us from the moment of decay and transformation, from intimate contact with the other or with the past. Capital is a solvent that erodes other sources of stability. In the absence of durable material cultures, reliable community structures, and links to collective endeavours that will outlast us, mortality appears that much more final. To the extent that we lack strong connections to the dead and to the unborn, the end of our life is in some sense the end of the world. Even if we do feel a strong sense of belonging to human collectivities larger than ourselves, phenomena like climate change make the longevity of even our shared worlds far from certain. In the face of these socially produced “liquidities,” the threat posed by elemental forces of transience become more terrifying, even before we take into account the parlous states of global waters. To inhabitants of a social fabric defined by the endless hungers of capital, the appetites of the sub-soil “water bears” and earthworms may seem intolerable. In the midst of all of this, petrochemicals invite us to feel protected and disembedded. And they do so in ways that help to ensure the continuity of existing relations of power: the proliferation of impermeable membranes feeds mentalities of atomization and detachment, deferring the gestures of social solidarity which could quite possibly initiate very different material cultures and forms of social organization. However, the antipathy between petro-capitalism and water can cut both ways. Shared water has been a repeated refrain for Indigenous-settler solidarity networks in Canada, as these have developed recently around the Idle No More movement, as well as in

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opposition to oil sands, pipelines, mining, and fracking operations.58 Given the potency of emotional connections to waters, the notion that oil and capital are “water-hating” could serve as a powerful rhetorical trope in struggles for systemic eco-social transformation. A virtuous circle might emerge from political identification with the community of water-based life, as an involvement with water ties us to a social world that overspills the borders of our own species. If fears of dissolution are indeed reinforcing dynamics of disengagement and continued oil dependence, then the palliation of these terrors may be a crucial task for eco-politics. Utopian imaginings are important in this regard. We need to love the shared world enough to want to engage with it. If the waters of the present do not inspire an easy intimacy, if we find them ugly and degraded and toxic, then we will need to trust ourselves and the ones who come after us to turn them into something more inviting. We are going to dissolve into them either way. Our encounters with persistent petrochemical substances have coincided with a period of accelerated capitalist production, a rapid turnover of everyday goods and built environments fuelled not insignificantly by the hydrocarbons themselves. What possibilities might emerge for relationships to plastics and persistent chemicals in a post-capitalist, post-oil future? We are not at liberty to imagine a future without plastics or xenobiotic toxins, although we can certainly imagine one where the production of petrochemicals has been radically curtailed, if not halted altogether. Given that these substances are with us now in such vast quantities, how can we make more gracious use of their permanence? Perhaps counterintuitively, it may be by more fully integrating persistent petrochemicals into our lives that their destructive impacts might be mitigated. We will need to unravel their coding as “unnatural,” and invite them to add their talents for longevity to the fabric of remembrance. Uncoupled from both a culture of disposable goods and the loneliness of individualism, the long-lived Happy Meal toys and masses of floating plastic debris might find a place of rest. We might think of them as strangers who do not speak the language of water. How could we treat them more hospitably?

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notes 1 Veronica Strang, The Meaning of Water (New York: Berg, 2004), 131. 2 Rousseau speculates that “in the arid places where water could be had only from wells, people had to rejoin one another to sink the wells, or at least to agree upon their use. Such must have been the origin of societies and languages in warm countries. That is where the first ties were formed among the families; there were the first rendezvous of the two sexes … There at last was the true cradle of nations: from the pure crystal of the fountains flow the first fires of love.” JeanJacques Rousseau, On the Origin of Language, trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (Ungar Publishing, 1967), 44. In musing on the origin of “the common,” similarly, Habermas locates it in shared use of the fountain in the medieval central square. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: mit Press, 1991), 6. In describing water use in medieval Britain, historian Brian Bailey observes that village pumps “stand like symbols of village continuity … the community’s source of life” (quoted in Strang, 23). 3 Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 93. 4 C.H. Walker, S.P. Hopkin, R.M. Sibley, and D.B. Peakall, Principles of Ecotoxicology, 3rd ed. (Boca Raton: Taylor and Francis, 2006), 59. 5 Ibid., 7. 6 Ibid., 65. 7 Ibid., 64–5. 8 Jody Berland, “Walkerton: The Memory of Matter,” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 14 (Fall 2005): 104. 9 Brian Scott, Christine Spencer, Scott Mabury, and Derek Muir, “Poly and Perfluorinated Carboxylates in North American Precipitation,” Environmental Science and Technology 40, no. 23 (2006): 7167–74; Jacqueline Schuiling and Wytze van der Naald, “A Present for Life: Hazardous Chemicals in Umbilical Cord Blood” (Amsterdam: Greenpeace Netherlands, 2005). 10 Steingraber, Living Downstream, 5. 11 Harry Burton, and Cecilia Eriksson, “Origins and Biological Accumulation of Small Plastic Particles in Fur Seals from Macquarie Island,” Ambio: A Journal of the Human Environment 32, no. 6 (2003): 380–4.

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12 Jose G.B. Derriak, “The Pollution of the Marine Environment by Plastic Debris: A Review,” Marine Pollution Bulletin 44, no. 9 (2002): 842–52. 13 Simon Garfield, Mauve: How One Man Invented a Colour That Changed the World (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), 37. 14 Quoted in Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 31. 15 Quoted in Meikle, American Plastic, 61. 16 Ibid., 67–9. 17 Garfield, Mauve, 11; italics added. 18 Meikle, American Plastic, 68. 19 Ibid., 176. 20 Ibid., 181. 21 Rita Wong and Dorothy Christian, “Untapping Watershed Mind,” in Thinking with Water, ed. Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 233. 22 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2002), 3–5. 23 Quoted in Meikle, American Plastic, 12. What is interesting about the aspiration expressed in this statement is that the flight into a world of artificial substances seems to emerge not only from the familiar desire to conquer scarcity once and for all, but also from concern for the other. Where the infinite hungers of capitalism come to be thoroughly naturalized, detachment from living systems appears to be the only way of ensuring their survival. 24 Fred Pearce, “New Green Vision: Technology as Our Planet’s Last Best Hope,” environment360, 15 July 2013, accessed 27 July 2016, http:// e360.yale.edu/feature/new_green_vision_technology_as_our_planets _last_best_hope/2671/. 25 Quoted in Meikle, American Plastic, 124. 26 Erich Brenner, “Human Body Preservation – Old and New Techniques,” Journal of Anatomy 224 (2014): 325. 27 Donald L. Burdick and William L. Leffler, Petrochemicals in Nontechnical Language, 3rd ed. (Tulsa: PennWell Publishing, 2001), 177. 28 Harold T. McKone, “Embalming: A ‘Living’ Rite,” Today’s Chemist at Work (December, 2002), 33–4. 29 Robert Mayer, Embalming: History, Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000), 109.

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30 David Wolfe, Tales from the Underground: A Natural History of Subterranean Life (Cambridge: Perseus Publishing, 2001), 11; 22. 31 Quoted in Christine Quigley, The Corpse: A History (Jefferson: McFarland, 1996), 21. 32 Philippe Aries, Western Attitudes toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 92. 33 Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death Revisited (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 36. 34 Mitford, The American Way of Death, 36–7; 147. 35 Ibid., 147. 36 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 22. 37 Ibid., 11. 38 Ibid., 60. 39 Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit (Cambridge: South End Press, 2002), 131–4. 40 Maude Barlow, Blue Covenant (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2007), 83–4. 41 Quoted in Tony Clarke, Inside the Bottle: An Expose of the Bottled Water Industry (Ottawa: Polaris Institute, 2005), 79. 42 Andy Opel, “Constructing Purity: Bottled Water and the Commodification of Nature,” Journal of American Culture 22, no. 4 (1999): 73. 43 Strang, The Meaning of Water, 218. 44 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 193. 45 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 26. 46 Ibid., 25. 47 Steingraber, Living Downstream, 55. 48 Ibid., 197–8. 49 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 21–4. 50 Ecology Centre, “ptf: Environmental Impacts,” accessed 1 August 2016, http://ecologycenter.org/plastics/ptf/report3/; Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (US), “Toxicological Profile for Benzene,” 6, accessed 1 August 2016, http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/ ToxProfiles/tp3.pdf. 51 Ecology Centre, “ptf: Environmental Impacts”; Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (US), “Toxicological Profile for Ethyl-benzene,” 161, accessed 1 August 2016, http://www.atsdr.cdc .gov/toxprofiles/tp110-c6.pdf.

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52 Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (US), “Toxfaqs: Ethylbenzene,” accessed 27 July 2016, http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/ substances/toxsubstance.asp?toxid=66. 53 Tony Clarke, Inside the Bottle: An Expose of the Bottled Water Industry (Ottawa: Polaris Institute, 2005), 57–8. 54 Steingraber, Living Downstream, 205. 55 Meikle, American Plastic, 179. 56 Shirley Roburn, “Sounding a Sea-Change: Acoustic Ecology and Arctic Ocean Governance,” in Thinking with Water, ed. Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 106–28. 57 Alanna Mitchell, Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2009), 70. 58 Some examples: In calling for solidarity with their resistance to extractive industries and pipelines on their territory, members of the Unist’ot’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation repeatedly refer to water as something we all share. Freda Huson, a spokesperson for the Unist’ot’en speaking at an April 2013 toxic tour demonstration in Vancouver, noted that “we as a nation and people cannot survive without water … not only Indigenous people will suffer, but everybody in this world will suffer so we all need to stand up.” At a February 2013 open meeting on environmental justice strategy in Canada, Dave Vasey, a Toronto-based organizer, summed up what he saw as the central basis of unity for the movement as follows: “We all like water.” During their “Freedom Train” tour across Canada, members of the Yinka Dene Alliance performed water ceremonies every time they stopped en route. And at a demonstration in Vancouver outside the National Energy Board Joint Review Panel hearings on the proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline, protesters chanted “We Are Water! We Are Water! We Are Water!” while carrying blue “water drops” above their heads for the benefit of aerial photographers. In these and other instances, water is invoked as a basis of unity – and sometimes even as a site of shared identity – defined against colonial extractive activities and the neoliberal state.

12 Lubricity: Smooth Oil’s Political Frictions Mark Simpson

From oil flows capitalism as we still know it … No petroleum, no modern war machine, no global shipping industry, no communication revolution. Imre Szeman, “System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster”

In the drawn-out campaign to support the controversial – and now stalled  – Northern Gateway Pipeline, Enbridge, the Calgary-based company spearheading the project, relied heavily on video mediation to promote its claims about route safety, tanker safety, and marine safety. Interspersing sound-bite commentary from company experts with shots of employees hard at work and segments of “flyover” animation, these videos aimed to reassure pipeline skeptics, while also inspiring pipeline converts, with vivid evidence of the project’s feasibility, security, and necessity: endeavour is safe, technology is infallible, route is risk free, oversight is ensured, profit is guaranteed – an overarching perspective that, while eminently sensible from a corporate, extractivist viewpoint, palpably diminished the material challenges and occluded the political dynamics of pipeline transport. Especially notorious in this regard was a 2012 video on route safety featuring a minute-long, animated bird’s-eye view of the proposed pipeline route that simplified and de-realized Albertan and British Columbian topography, most dramatically and controversially by excising from view some 1,000 square kilometres of islands in the Douglas Channel west of the tanker port at Kitimat. In the weeks and months following its initial release, this route map video became

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a kind of lightning rod for critiques of the Northern Gateway project as well as of Enbridge’s corporate style and of Canada’s unconventional oil industry more generally. The decision to make numerous islands simply disappear was, for most commentators, viciously cynical: Lori Waters, a graphic designer, first publicized the erasure by decrying Enbridge’s “corporate deceit,” while Rafe Mair, a prominent bc lawyer and political analyst, branded the video “a shameful misrepresentation.”1 Such critiques evidently hit their marks, at least to judge from Enbridge’s subsequent removal from the safety video of the route map animation and its reframing of that animation, in an updated standalone video, as serving “illustrative purposes only,” ones “meant to be broadly representational, not to scale.”2 The attacks on Enbridge’s promotional tactics, fired by righteous outrage, spoke a kind of grassroots truth to corporate power, and thereby did a useful kind of journalistic work. But they also missed a signal component of the investments at stake in the Enbridge aesthetic, investments that render the unrealism of island redaction not just about rapacious subterfuge (as the “‘shameful deceit’” argument would imply) but also, and more so, about underlying perceptual and conceptual commitment, even longing. When Enbridge’s graphic designers retrospectively contextualized the route map video in terms of its “broadly representational” purpose, the reframing amalgamated felt truth with callous ploy: the desire for (and for the widespread habituation to) a virtual world in which geography – and thereby geopolitics – would be, precisely, immaterial to the transport of energy as to the flow of profit. The unreality of the Douglas Channel free of island obstacles is exactly what Enbridge wanted to realize – to posit, imagine, and embrace as the underlying condition, the deeper truth, of the Northern Gateway project. Video animation, on this model, would chart pipeline transport as a feeling or mood in excess of any actual engineering challenge or spatialized itinerary. The practice of mapping at issue is affective: a neoliberal structure of feeling according to which the immediacy, the instantaneity, the openness so often attributed to digital culture – and manifest in the relays of contemporary finance  – might be traced back into the very crevices of material topography. In liquid times, why shouldn’t islands melt back into the sea?3 Although in the wake of recent federal court rulings the Northern Gateway Pipeline project itself seems all but dead,4 the larger

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dynamics of commitment and desire described above obdurately persist in the contemporary moment. In this regard, the tactics of Enbridge’s animators – broad representationality and the refusal of scale – prove tellingly symptomatic of the condition they sought, in 2012, to advance: lubricity, the texture and mood requisite to the operations of neoliberal petroculture. Lubricity offers smoothness as cultural common sense, promoting the fantasy of a frictionless world contingent on the continued, intensifying use of petro-carbons from underexploited reserves in North America. It thereby contributes to the contemporary mobility regime that, idealizing smooth flow, mystifies so as to maximize the violent asymmetries of movement and circulation globally.5 “Ethical oil,” the concept notoriously favoured by some proponents of bitumen extraction, trades on lubricity in the sense I am defining here: only smooth societies, ones supposedly without conflict or crisis, can ensure oil’s ethically clean production and consumption. In challenging critics who brand unconventional petroleum “dirty oil,” the “ethical oil” narrative strives to dispel messy complexities of energy geopolitics with truisms of neoliberal governance. The proclaimed ethicalness of “ethical oil” thus converts petrochemical need into petrocultural duty, rendering the specifics of oil use itself interpellative for contemporary capitalism: “the choice we all have to make,” as the avowedly “grassroots” organization Ethical Oil memorably insisted to its prospective supporters – an urgent, imperative choice that is no choice at all.6 In what follows I develop my argument with reference to materials from popular journalism, mass advertising, cultural history, contemporary photography, experimental documentary film, and activist media and performance that engage in one way or another with the aesthetics and politics of smooth oil. I begin by analyzing Ezra Levant’s Ethical Oil, the 2010 smooth oil manifesto that popularized its titular phrase, aiming as I do so less to critique the book’s evidentiary specifics and more to assess the cultural narrative it composes and the commitments and investments therein at stake. Next, inspired by Stephanie LeMenager’s dry insight that “[o]il sands promoters recognize the power of visual culture,”7 I revisit the idiom of visual suasion exemplified by Enbridge’s route map video, examining a sample archive of advertisements by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and EthicalOil.org that depict petroculture

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in divergent ways for a common cause: to drive home the ethics and affects of smooth oil. Then, guided by Timothy Mitchell’s account of the political economy of oil, I highlight some impediments to lubricity  – viscous contradictions that clog the lines of the smooth oil narrative. I turn finally to consider versions of contemporary petrocritique advanced, in photography and film, by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch and, in art performance, by the textiles artist Lucy Sparrow and the activist collectives Platform, Liberate Tate, Art Not Oil, and UK Tar Sands Network. Such petro-critique, I conclude, will indicate the force of friction within contemporary capital’s mobility regime – a prospect that, bringing the argument full circle, decimates Enbridge’s sea-borne cartography of longing.8

Grease Is the Word Unlike conventional oil, the bitumen found in Northern Alberta does not take liquid form and so requires intensive processing and refinement before it can serve as commercial fuel. Some bitumen deposits, found close to the surface of the land, are strip-mined, with the bitumen then separated from the sand in massive hot water tanks. Most deposits are too deep to mine, however, and are instead extracted in situ, a process using steam to liquefy the bitumen so it can be pumped to the surface. Once collected by either method, the bitumen is “cracked” in an upgrader, its hydrocarbon molecules broken down by extreme heat to make the substance flow. The result is a synthetic crude oil that can be piped to refineries (usually located in the US), where it is turned into burnable fuel. The process is expensive in several senses: it grinds up thousands of hectares above and beneath the earth’s surface (“overburden,” in the industry’s euphemism9 – correlative, perhaps, to islands in the Douglas Channel?); it uses enormous energy resources (the equivalent of an eighth of a barrel of oil for every strip-mined barrel produced, and a third of a barrel for every in situ barrel produced); and it leaves behind huge volumes of contaminated water (routinely consigned to giant tailings ponds that risk further contamination of the landscape). What’s more, the final product is a heavy fuel, releasing when burned significantly more co2 into the atmosphere than conventional, light crude. For all these reasons, bitumen oil is widely condemned by critics as dirty oil.10

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In 2010, aiming to counter such critique and thereby shift the terrain in what Anna Zalik calls “a kind of epistemological battle concerning tar sands expansion,” Ezra Levant – lawyer, journalist, and former aide to now-defunct Canadian federal political parties Reform and Canadian Alliance  – published Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands.11 Over twelve chapters, the book passionately defends Alberta’s unconventional oil industry and furiously attacks its detractors, utilizing what Sheena Wilson calls “a rhetorical management strategy to persuade citizens from across the political spectrum to support oil sands development in multiple ways.”12 The title phrase itself tacitly rebukes journalists, intellectuals, and activists who brand bitumen-derived fuels “dirty oil.” Divisive and controversial, Levant’s project nevertheless helped to frame debate about Alberta’s booming petroculture, spawning a think tank, the Ethical Oil Institute, and a self-proclaimed “grassroots” advocacy movement, EthicalOil.org. Such “grassroots” claims notwithstanding, however, the movement’s major players were from the outset demonstrably close to the then-ruling federal Conservatives as well as to right-leaning law firms and media outlets with deep ties to the oil industry. And while the movement always disavowed foreign and corporate funding, it has obstinately refused to disclose its donors. In Ethical Oil, Levant asks his readers to believe that critiques of bitumen extraction offer distortion and falsehood inspired by ineptitude or rank opportunism. He therefore casts his project in terms of exposure: correcting mistakes, dispelling myths, and puncturing lies on every page – a kind of muckraking against the political grain. At stake is “an economic story, and … a story of the success of capitalism, and of the success of science too, which finally solved the puzzle of how to extract the oil in an economically viable manner … [b]ut  … also a story of social justice  – the kind of equitable sharing of the wealth that many anti-capitalists talk about … [Thus] the oil sands are proof of the great good fortune that a huge amount of energy, in the right hands, can deliver to a staggering number of people.”13 Follow Levant’s conjunctive chain far enough, and you might suppose that Fort McMurray, epicentre of Alberta’s bitumen industry, is in fact and at last the promised city on the hill. Striving to make this story irresistible, Levant attacks the credibility of energy alternatives to bitumen and of interpretive alternatives to his own account. Some of the arguments are predictable: that

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energy consumers in the global north must embrace unconventional oil from Canada because most conventional oil – what Levant calls “conflict oil” – comes from places hostile to human rights, or that critics target what they call the tar sands only because Canada’s tolerant culture admits critique. Other arguments prove more surprising: that Euro-American environmentalists and Middle Eastern oil barons conspire to undermine Alberta’s oil industry; that the ngos Greenpeace and Tides Canada represent the worst sort of corporation, mining causes in social justice like so many veins for profit; that the ethical fund movement preys on a credulous public, promising clean capitalism while brazenly investing in suspect commodities, bitumen oil foremost among them. Levant’s assault is capacious, and relentless. Yet it requires a certain suspension of disbelief, and so a kind of naive fantasy: whereas foreign oil producers and all critics of synthetic crude are brazen tyrants or secret hypocrites, in Alberta – and in the Canadian imagined community bankrolled by that province’s petroculture  – political practice, economic motive, environmental commitment, and industrial process remain perfectly transparent and unremittingly pure. Such fantasy labours under the volume and force of the outbursts that surround it: Would it not be just as plausible to conclude that the purported co-optation of ethical fund idealists and ecological activists confirms, once and for all, capital’s omnivorous malevolence in subsuming everyone and everything in perpetuity? Hardly the question, one imagines, that Levant hoped to inspire. Such argumentative overburden notwithstanding, Levant is rhetorically adroit, a master of the bait and switch with a fondness for sassy punchlines. By ending paragraphs with barbs such as “Iran has friends in low places,”14 “Who are you going to believe about China being ‘tops’ in the environment: Greenpeace or your lying eyes?,”15 and “Is there a word in Arabic for chutzpah?,”16 Levant calls on cultural common sense about the intolerance of racial and religious “others” to secure readerly assent to the premises, terms, and implications of his overarching argument. The effect serves to confuse substantiated and unsubstantiated claims, allowing free-floating assertions and hypotheses to coagulate with cited evidence.17 The phrase “ethical oil” itself extends such methods. The language of ethics allows Levant to engage critics of bitumen oil on their home turf: the realm of conscience. At stake, in a tacit play on

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the current system of carbon trading, is a model of “ethics credits” in which Canada’s benevolence – measured in terms of stock neoliberal truisms: market choice, freedom of movement, unfettered opinion, and so on – will offset the myriad costs of unconventional oil manufacture and use. Yet tellingly, the force of ethics, in his treatment, proves pragmatic: bitumen fuel is ethical because it is better than any comparable option in a combustion-engine world, whether or not it is good in itself. This shift, where ethics folds over into pragmatics, complements a terminological slipperiness in Levant’s argument, with “ethical oil” and “ethical source of oil” invoked interchangeably. The first is clearly shorthand for the second, but the condensation enables conceptual slippage, a kind of argumentative alchemy by which a material substance  – bitumen oil  – begins to take on the putative character of the social and cultural space in which it is manufactured. Ethics infuses this oil  – or maybe emanates from it. Either way, ethicalness stands in Levant’s account as the inherent condition of this substance, an artificial product’s natural property. Argumentative shorthand thus refines discourse, foreclosing debate by filtering philosophical and conceptual impurities so as to smooth the circulation of unconventional oil’s terminological correlate.

Populist Petroculture Within a year of the publication of Ethical Oil, Levant, collaborating with two other lawyers, Alykhan Velshi and Thomas Ross, had used his catchphrase to launch the Ethical Oil Institute as well as a series of like-named ventures online.18 At stake, it seems, was an effort to extend the reach of the ethical oil brand – and thereby to advance the particulars of Levant’s argument in at once more economical and more varied ways. The website, when describing its purpose, certainly renders the dichotomies pivotal to Levant’s book as starkly as possible: We at EthicalOil.org encourage people, businesses, and governments to choose Ethical Oil from Canada, its oil sands, and from other liberal democracies. Unlike Conflict Oil from some of the most politically oppressive and environmentally reckless regimes in the world, Ethical Oil is the “fair trade” choice in oil …

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Currently, we  still require growing amounts of oil. Businesses, governments, and even you have a choice to make: Do we continue to buy Conflict Oil from politically oppressive and environmentally reckless regimes or do we support Ethical Oil that is discovered, produced, and transported responsibly from the Canadian oil sands?19 The very dubiousness of the “fair trade” analogy signals the mode of tactical misdirection underwriting the EthicalOil.org strategy – as epitomized by the site’s logo, which evokes with its stylized green and blue oil drop the International Fairtrade Certification Mark. In keeping with the eco-populist tenor evoked by the “fair trade” reference, the origin narrative offered on the EthicalOil.org site makes “grassroots” its talisman. “EthicalOil.org began as a blog created by Alykhan Velshi to promote the ideas in Ezra Levant’s bestselling book Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands,” claims text under the “About EthicalOil.org” link. “Within a month [of the launch], based on the generosity of its readers, EthicalOil.org has become an online community that empowers people to become grassroots community activists on the frontlines of the campaign for Ethical Oil.” This image of spontaneous grassroots action likewise informs the account of and appeal for funding on the site: Unlike most anti-oilsands organizations,  EthicalOil.org does not accept any money from foreign donors like Greenpeace International, the U.S. Tides Foundation or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We are 100% Canadian. We are a registered non-profit ngo and do not accept money from any government agency. We are non-partisan and believe that the Canadian values reflected in Ethical Oil appeal to people from all walks of life and across the political spectrum. We do accept donations from Canadian individuals and companies, including those working to produce Ethical Oil. Since launching our website in July, hundreds of Canadians from all walks of life have donated through our PayPal button. The median size of our donations to date is $38. Even one dollar helps to get the word out. We believe that by using our blog, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube we can spread the word about

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Ethical Oil even without the money and professional staff that the anti-oilsands activists have at their disposal.20 In distinguishing financial support of EthicalOil.org from that of bitumen’s critics, the site pits national authenticity against the spectre of foreign conspiracy. The appeal entails a version of affective mapping, designed to plot the coordinates of petro-carbon debate through feeling or mood. Integrity, defiance, decency, patriotism: primed to hail potential donors by triggering such feelings, this funding narrative – much like the prospect of “the ‘fair trade’ choice in oil” – works, conceptually and affectively, to establish the ethical oil movement as petroculture’s plucky underdog, punching far above its weight among rapacious, border-raiding lobbyists, corporations, governments, and ngos. At stake, tacitly, is a version of the ethical exceptionalism found in Levant’s book-borne arguments: the ethicalness of bitumen oil’s advocates, like the ethicalness of the fuel they defend, issues as if from the very place they inhabit  – nativist integrity and contrarian orneriness nothing less, it would seem, than chemical properties of the Alberta landscape itself. The structure of feeling on offer in the narrative can help to explain one of EthicalOil.org’s most puzzling claims: that, far from undermining the ethical oil premise, recent investment in the bitumen industry by the China National Offshore Oil Corporation and the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation provides an object lesson in the transformative powers of ethical oil – its remarkable capacity to refine the suspect ethics of corporations weaned on the culture of conflict oil simply through proximate engagement with Canada’s petroculture.21 No matter how enticing as an affective map of the bitumen debate, however, the grassroots narrative advanced by EthicalOil.org deviates significantly – as several commentators have noted – from the organization’s underlying investments.22 Where the project’s averred genesis as a blog created by Velshi to champion Levant’s arguments evokes the altruistic, even missionary zeal of the acolyte – a prospect likewise insinuating the devotional syllogism by which grassroots donors are to EthicalOil.org as Velshi is to Levant  – details from the organization’s founding change the picture. Indeed, the initial incorporation of the Ethical Oil Institute as a Calgary-based entity might well seem to indicate its geographical proximity to  – and so raise suspicions about its economic and instrumental affinity

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with – major corporate players in Alberta’s bitumen industry. Telling in this regard is the originary position as “silent partner” in the institute of Calgary lawyer and Levant collaborator Thomas Ross, whose firm, McLennan-Ross, has a deep history of defending oil patch clients (so much so that in 2009 it launched an online service, “www.OilSandsLaw.com,” devised specifically to assist unconventional oil companies in meeting industry challenges – which is to say, in smoothing or indeed lubricating the complex industrial process of bitumen extraction in the interests of minimum corporate disruption and maximum corporate profit).23 Viewed in light of such convergences, the “grassroots” stand of EthicalOil.org comes to seem less like a principled defiance of shadowy foreign agents and more like a convenient smokescreen obscuring the reach of corporate influence much closer to home.

Through Lying Eyes: Smooth Oil Imagery In light of such contextualizing details, the tone and intensity of the Ethical Oil web presence become more striking still. For in bringing Levant’s book project online, EthicalOil.org managed from the outset to put sensationalism into overdrive. The organization’s signature method involved combining text with image to intensify Levant’s narrative strategy: affirm the ethicalness of Alberta’s unconventional oil negatively by relishing the horrors of rival sources of energy. We can measure the force of this practice by first considering its counterpart in materials circulated by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (capp) – an organization that, while avoiding the language of “ethical oil,” has clung tightly to the smooth narrative in contemporary petroculture. capp’s investment in smoothness runs throughout its promotional discourse. Consider, for instance, the claim that “Canada has a tremendous resource base combined with a stable, democratic political environment and skilled people that make it the ideal place to develop natural resources,” or the claim that “Canada is uniquely positioned to supply safe, secure and reliable energy” globally.24 Such assertions promote a vision of Canadian exceptionalism by submitting social and political dynamics to a resource logic that renders them intrinsic features of national landscape or indeed ontology, not contingent conditions within lived material history.

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Advertising by capp has tended to deliver this brand of exceptionalism above all by associating Canada’s bitumen industry with an idyllic national future. Take, for instance, a 2012 ad captioned: “Energy the world needs. The approach Canadians expect.”25 The slogan floats over an image of rolling grassland and gleaming water, bright gold under a setting sun  – an image evoking the pastoral’s heartwarmingly smooth mood. Together, text and image imply that unspoiled wilderness is not only consonant with but natural or intrinsic to world oil need alongside national oil expectation. By way of such implication, the ad turns the screw in tricking the eye, for the photograph, one learns on reading the fine print, depicts a reclaimed Syncrude mine site: wilderness not unspoiled, but rather reconstituted from ruin. Thus the experience of smooth mood offered by this ad comes at the expense of discernment – of the eye’s capacity to distinguish untouched from re-engineered landscapes. Where Enbridge, in its route map video, digitally eliminates the island overburden clogging the Douglas Channel, here capp channels the immateriality of earth-work, the apparent ease – or, more properly, the feeling of the ease – with which whole habitats can be obliterated or composed as enterprise, and its optics, require.26 Comparably telling, with respect to the idyll of national futurity, is another 2012 capp ad that asks “What do the Oil Sands mean to all Canadians?”27 The image shows a young girl at a wood-topped school desk, writing in pencil in a lined notebook. The caption answers its initial question with another: “Want the answer in hospitals, schools, doctors, or teachers?” The subsequent text drives the implications home: “Harnessing the oil sands will mean $311 billion in revenue for the federal government over the next 25 years. Money that can help pay for doctors, teachers, hospitals, schools and other things we value as Canadians. Our energy builds Canadian communities.” Submitted to such reasoning, bitumen would seem to undergo a kind of conceptual refinement – turning from viscous sand not just to burnable fuel but also, in a remarkable alchemy (the alchemy of resource capitalism), to institutions and agents of medicine and education. The calculus is biopolitical: this latest in new math works, through the numerology of health and learning, to figure the “profit” of unconventional oil for the project of managing life itself.28 And the serious, determined young girl, studiously solving her problems, serves to embody – literally, to supply the profile

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of – such biopolitical futurity. Never mind the percolating ironies: that the unconventional oil industry banks on the ignorance, not knowledge, of citizen-subjects in Canada and internationally – and has made growing numbers of people in places such as Fort Chipewyan, Alberta very, very sick. Although now lost to the vertiginous amnesia of the Internet’s present tense, these ads nonetheless typified a persistent capp method of promoting unconventional sources of petroleum: inspire a mood at once strongly optimistic and resolutely patriotic so as to make the business of resource extraction feel inextricable from national health and ecological vitality. From the perspective generated by this method  – and against all critical reports otherwise  – Canada’s booming oil industry harmoniously fuels natural and cultural growth, fostering the comprehensive care of life. In capp’s treatment, the smooth oil narrative consistently lubricates the biopolitics of bitumen in a bid to mitigate any sense of friction between industry, society, and ecology. Now consider the very different advertising strategy adopted by EthicalOil.org as exemplified in two of its most notorious ads, ones developed in response to boycotts on Albertan bitumen fuel by Chiquita and Lush Cosmetics. The first of these, captioned “Chiquita has gone bananas!,” depicts a scowling olive-skinned woman in camouflage pants and black tank top, brandishing an assault rifle while wearing a fruit hat (headwear associated most strongly with actor Carmen Miranda, but also appearing on the Chiquita trademark for decades).29 The ludicrousness of the image seems purposeful: mixing incommensurate visual tropes to make the ad’s target, Chiquita, merely ridiculous yet also to circulate toxic stereotypes about people from Latin America being cartoonishly exotic and cartoonishly violent. Key to the image’s force is the slipperiness of its point of reference: Is Carmen Miranda a terrorist because of her dangerous associations (the folks she knows in the banana groves down south) or her dangerous intentions (the carnage she will bring to the oil sands up north)? The text accompanying the image makes a blunt appeal: “EthicalOil.org is calling on all Canadians to boycott Chiquita brands until they reverse their boycott on Canada’s ethical oil!” At stake is not just the familiar charge of reliance on socalled conflict oil levelled, by rote, against bitumen oil’s critics, but also Chiquita’s notorious financial support of paramilitary organizations – or, as the ad prefers, “terrorist groups” – in Colombia.30

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Understood historically, such paramilitary funding will constitute a prime symptom of the larger corporate strategy of US-based multinationals in the era of geo-economic imperialism,31 and so a point of comparison and affiliation between modes and patterns of industrialized resource extraction on the fruit plantations of Latin America as in the oil fields of Azerbaijan – or Alberta. The prospect of such messy comparison and convergence, though, does nothing to advance the smooth oil narrative. Better, then, to posit stark dichotomies and hope that sensationalizing imagery can overwhelm any sense of nuance or complexity so as to prevent traces of contradiction from seeping through. The ad targeting Lush Cosmetics is, if anything, even more volatile in its provocation.32 Capitalized text protesting that “Lush attacks Canada’s oil sands, yet does business in Saudi Arabia” hovers over an image at once gruesome and oddly obscure: a slim, fair-skinned hand, nails carefully manicured, silver ring on index finger, and arm above wrist outside the image frame, slumps knuckles-down on a white floor; both hand and floor are spattered with blood. The image indicates violence, yet its cropping renders that violence oblique, unspecified  – a matter of grim conjecture. The tactic is sharp: in order to convert image-fragment into visual synecdoche, the viewer must fill in the picture  – and thereby collude in the making of its meaning. Originally distributed, in postcard form, by actors in niqab protesting outside an Ottawa Lush outlet (recuperation of Situationist performance, anyone?), the image also accompanied a June 2012 story on the EthicalOil.org website carrying the headline “Boycott Bath Bombs! Lush attacks Canadian jobs” (a story from which it has since been redacted and replaced with more sedate animation).33 In light of the injunction to boycott – and since the ensuing text indicts Lush for continuing to operate stores in Saudi Arabia – one might suppose the pictured hand to belong to a Saudi woman driven to suicide by patriarchal repression. But the whiteness of the hand complicates this reading, and suggests another: if as a Canadian consumer you shop at Lush, you might as well be funding a cell of suicide bath bombers sure to bring terror to North American homes, permanently dirtying the symbolic spaces of white hygiene.34 That the ad can blithely combine this morbid, punning humour with grisly hyperbole is what makes it so chilling. Both ads use incendiary imagery – the Carmen Miranda terrorist; the lifeless, bloody hand of the bathtub suicide or bomb victim – not

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so much to illustrate as to overload the accompanying textual polemics for the ethicalness of Canada’s unconventional oil. Near incoherence must be part of the point: transposing from a textual to a visual register Levant’s rhetorical tricks, these attacks on Chiquita and Lush work to pre-empt sense with bias, stereotype, and visceral feeling. Lubricity  – the smoothness of ethical oil  – is nowhere in evidence in the two ads, but completely presupposed by them. They picture hysterics of global friction: a volatile world of energy costs and conflicts that, by inference, only Alberta’s bitumen can smooth. Yet the persuasive circulation of the smooth oil narrative requires that its two petrocultural streams (ethical oil from Alberta, conflict oil from elsewhere) remain utterly antithetical, never commingling – an ideological necessity rendered tenuous, to say the least, by the material history and political economy of oil in the modern era.35

An End to Ethics: The Oil System One of the striking aspects of Timothy Mitchell’s 2011 study Carbon Democracy is the way it manages to illuminate the problem of modern democracy as a matter of energy flows. In Mitchell’s account, genuine democratic possibility was born on the coal-face: the world’s coal mines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries afforded those employed in extracting and distributing coal the ability, through their labour power and expertise, to control  – and so to disrupt  – the flows of energy in service of political demands for social justice, equality, dignity, and prosperity. As Mitchell shows, this prospect – unbearable to hegemonic political power as to corporate capital – helped to inspire the shift from coal to oil energy, a form of fuel extractable, refinable, and distributable with much less hands-on labour, and so ideally suited to fostering a more distended network of energy flows in which powers of sabotage would come from above, not below, away from workers and toward corporations and the state. “Unlike the movement of coal,” writes Mitchell, “the flow of oil could not readily be assembled into a machine that enabled large numbers of people to exercise novel forms of political power,” with the result that “[t]he rise of oil reorganized fossil fuel networks in ways that were to alter the mechanics of democracy.”36 Thus the turn to oil makes democracy prospective: idealized yet de-realized, an investment in conditional

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futures, not an insistently present array of material political claims and struggles – and so increasingly a subset of “the economy” and “the market” as seeming forces of nature, given and self-evident. Mitchell demonstrates that oil is a technology more than a natural resource, serving in the modern era along with armaments as the indispensible mechanism for circulating capital between state and corporation. He highlights the occluding powers of expertise and the abiding values of crisis and incalculability within the operational dynamics of the oil system. And he shatters the economist myth of supply and demand with respect to oil by documenting how, through the twentieth century, the largest petrochemical corporations conspired with hegemonic states from the global north to manufacture artificial scarcity in service of maximal profit, routinely enlisting or installing despotic factions within oil-producing regions to facilitate the process: “[t]he transformation of oil into large and unaccountable government incomes is not a cause of the problem of democracy and oil, but the outcome of particular ways of engineering political relations out of flows of energy.”37 Read through the lens of Mitchell’s argument, the ethical oil project starts to look like a symptom of the messier consequences of this modern history. Desperately committed to the antinomy between “ethical oil” and “conflict oil” – one that, tellingly, serves as code for the distinction between private and public ownership of industry38 – Levant and company must at all costs obscure the coordinate system of global petroculture, a system fuelling and fuelled by a particular (and particularly impoverished) concept and practice of democracy: a “mode of governing populations that employs popular consent as a means of limiting claims for greater equality and justice by dividing up the common worlds.”39 The petro-tyrannies that epitomize, for Levant, the stark antithesis to bitumen-rich Alberta emerge, in Mitchell’s analysis, as monstrous extrusions from Euro-American Big Oil’s political economy – a calculated geopolitical risk, to be sure, yet one preferable (for Big Oil and its allies) to the alternative: multitudinous democracy from below. So one could hardly distinguish, in any meaningful sense, between conventional oil from Sudan or the Emirates and unconventional oil from Alberta when, genealogically, they both commingle within an ongoing corporate history and, materially, they both enrich an overarching corporate strategy. The entrepreneurial powers bankrolling bitumen extraction in Northern

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Alberta – Shell, Imperial Oil, ConocoPhillips, and bp, among others – have long invested, and continue to invest, in oil production in what Levant likes to call the world’s “nasty places,”40 and have no particular interest, at the level of profit, in making antithetical distinctions among them. The juxtaposition of Canadian freedom and Middle Eastern despotism thus begins to break down – precisely because the social and cultural values that, for Levant, effectively constitute the ethicalness of ethical oil reflect the impoverished version of democracy outlined above and rely on unfreedom as a perpetual condition elsewhere. The privileges particular to consumer capitalism – market choice, freedom of movement, unfettered opinion – require as they presuppose a system of energy supply enabled, from the outset, by the repression of dissent (whether through authoritarian rule or what Mitchell terms “carbon democracy”) across the oil-producing and the oil-consuming world. A political history of outsourced tyranny and a political economy of corporate sabotage prove to have brokered the ethics supposed to distinguish Canada’s unconventional oil supply and the smoothness supposed to distinguish North America’s neoliberal societies. Lubricity disavows friction at every turn – yet it cannot do without the material difference friction makes.41

Delivering Friction; or, Friction’s Differential How might we begin to picture the coordinate system of global petroculture against the occluding antinomies advanced by the smooth oil narrative? One answer emerges in contemporary aesthetic practice that limns the material, political, and affective contours of this system in all its contradictory power. By way of conclusion, I want to consider a cluster of relevant examples: the image-work of the American photographer, filmmaker, and writer Allan Sekula (some of it in collaboration with the American filmmaker and theorist Noël Burch); and performative aesthetic interventions by British textile artist Lucy Sparrow and British activist collectives Platform, Liberate Tate, Art Not Oil, and the UK Tar Sands Network. Although the endeavours of each are strikingly different, they share a common, connective impulse: to deliver friction from within contemporary petroculture by reckoning friction’s differential power.

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Allan Sekula mines traditions in documentary photography so as to confront the dynamics, contradictions, and costs of contemporary capitalism’s mobility regime – or, as LeMenager puts it, “to offer the possibility that images might reveal material contexts indicative of obscured social relations.”42 “For Sekula,” write Marie Muracciole and Benjamin Young, “a materialist account of the traffic in photographs shows that the myth of photography as a universal language finds its material conditions in the development of the capitalist world order, a global system of commodity production and exchange.”43 As Jennifer Burris notes, Sekula’s “use of disjuncture as an artistic strategy formally translates the inherent complexities and contradictions of his overarching subject; he brings together a vast archive of photographic and textual details in order to make the constructed nature of the advanced capitalist world apparent.”44 Entailing a mode of critical (or what Sekula alternately terms dialogical) realism,45 his image-work ventures  – as many commentators have observed – to puncture the hegemonic order of seeing and understanding in ways that echo and extend, in particular, the methods of Bertolt Brecht.46 In a bracing rejoinder to celebratory accounts of the seamless, instantaneous, immaterialized fluidity of globalized life, Sekula captures in his work the inescapable persistence within contemporary capitalism of ocean transport, epitomized by its generic unit of volumetric measure, the cargo container. As Imre Szeman and Maria Whiteman observe, “Sekula’s mode of critical realism opens up a way of thinking about the politics of globalization and of the globalization of culture that permits us to remain both open to and yet critical of the potentialities occasioned by the contemporary reorganization of space. Sekula’s critical-aesthetic practice is a model of how it might be possible to think space – and so, too, culture and economics – differently.”47 At stake is an attempt to disrupt fictions of fluidity – the interpellating narrative of smooth societies – by making manifest, and so materializing, the often violently differential rhythms (or what in the title of one photograph Sekula calls the “churn”) of capitalist mobility today. Sekula’s art turns our eyes toward nodes of tension or friction within the global system. As Alberto Toscano argues, “Sekula  … criticizes a view of frictionless transactions, seeing it in fact as a contemporary fetishization of finance and the immaterial.”48 Thus

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in Black Tide/Marea negra, a photographic sequence on the Prestige oil spill off the Galician coast in 2002, Sekula captures the damages wrought by breakdowns in oil’s network  – oil-slimed bird, tanker fragment, oil-slimed crab – alongside the efforts and affects of those enlisted to clean up the mess. These photos are formally stunning and often hauntingly beautiful. And yet, channelling Walter Benjamin, they politicize the aesthetic, precisely by requiring us to wonder what beauty can mean in the presence of ecological and biopolitical carnage – not to mention what perspective, and what privilege, can command such meaning. In effect, we must see two ways at once: the image itself alongside the social and political conditions of its possibility. The perspective afforded by Sekula’s image-work is one that modernity’s petroculture has, from its inception, laboured painstakingly to obscure. Sekula’s extended intervention entails a kind of counter-accumulation from within yet against the hegemony of capital. The arc through many of his projects  – from Fish Story (1988–1995) to Black Tide/Marea negra (2003) to The Lottery of the Sea (2006) to The Forgotten Space (2010) – tracks a compelling problematic: the role of maritime transport in the global economy. As Muracciole and Young observe, such projects “explore the sea as the often neglected material condition for the contemporary economy, countering the rhetoric of instantaneous, digital connectivity by attentively recording a world of manual labor, of the construction of vast new spaces and vehicles of industrial production, and of the slow, ponderous movement of material goods.”49 Again and again, Sekula seems to churn back through his own archive in order to proliferate everintensifying visions of the same urgent conjuncture. The citational effect of such recursive return is at once accumulative and circulatory, compiling meaning and accruing value so as to mobilize and proliferate perspectives of critique and angles of attack.50 The Forgotten Space, Sekula’s 2010 collaboration with Noël Burch, materializes such dynamics in the form of documentary – or what in the opening credits its makers call a “film essay.” As Gaia Tedone observes, “[t]he film excavates the disorientation, violence, and alienation that contemporary capitalism produces as it binds the world together through trade.”51 Sekula and Burch venture to remember the forgotten space of the sea as a thriving yet violently dissymmetrical space of global traffic through four sections or

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passages: “Phoenix and Mammoth,” about port, barge, and rail politics around Rotterdam; “Mud and Sun,” about truck transport and the carnage of debt orbiting the harbours at Los Angeles and Long Beach; “Mirrors and Smoke,” about capital speculation, industrial production, and worker migration in Hong Kong and Guangdong; and “Rust,” about the post-industrial turn to culture in Bilbao. Each part hones in on the precarious yet also grinding materiality of everyday existence in a purportedly immaterial age – on what, in “Mirrors and Smoke,” Sekula and Burch call “the world of relentless toil” shaped by the advent of the shipping container and the flag of convenience as modern circulatory innovations. The film’s several sections, framed by a prologue and epilogue set in Doel, a crumbling Netherlands town, are linked by interludes set aboard a Korean container ship – a structuring conceit that makes formal filmic suture inextricable from, even identical to the material mode of global capitalist articulation. In the film as in the world, such ships, we see, constitute a vital kind of connective tissue. The Forgotten Space rarely refers to petroculture  – but two moments stand out. The first, in the prologue, concerns the Galician spill in 2002: over a montage of images of slicked ocean and laborious cleanup, Sekula’s narration pointedly observes that “the sea is really remembered only when maritime disaster strikes, when the black tide rolls in. Some of the oil is recovered and burned, polluting twice over – and then we forget again.” The second moment, in the interlude between the film’s first two sections, glosses the energy needs of the massive container ship: “The first engineer compares the ship to a powerful and voracious bear, guzzling 5,000 gallons of bunker fuel per day. Bunker oil is sulphurous, tar-like in its viscosity, the cheapest and dirtiest available, the very dregs of the refinery, leaving a smoky yellow smear on the horizon and turning the ocean acidic.” However brief in duration, these moments render the oceanic system’s forgotten space – or, more exactly, the forgottenness of that system’s forgotten space  – as petrocultural space, thrown into periodic visibility in those moments of crisis when oil has spilled and the ocean becomes the medium through which dynamics of petroleum dependency emerge into view, while otherwise, and ordinarily, receding from consideration, consciousness, picturability. And it’s precisely through such dynamics that the persistence of an oceanic modernity remains essential to the thriving of petroculture

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and would be impossible without petroculture. Oceanic flow and petroleum flow, as the compound condition of global traffic in late capitalism, enable (arguably even constitute) one another. At stake is a differential system. As containerization materializes the formal equivalence requisite to capitalist exchange, so the differential logic of the smooth oil narrative lubricates such equivalence. The point is not just that whereas the ethical oil narrative aims to induce the (happy) feeling that we could choose between dichotomous cultures  – one smooth, the other friction filled  – the systemic condition involves the inextricability of smoothness from friction, friction somewhere as the requisite for smoothness elsewhere. It is also that this differential inextricability of smoothness from friction is itself constitutively friction filled  – that friction constitutes the formal substance or medium (figured, in the film, by oil on water) through which systemic differentials play out. As the credits to The Forgotten Space roll, we watch a member of the film’s crew carefully and laboriously cleaning the lens of the camera that records her. The shot encapsulates the double puncture, by Sekula and Burch, of the opacity of maritime commerce and the indexical self-evidence of documentary filmmaking. Image-work, we see, is work – a form of labour that mediates, and so makes, the world it shows. What’s more, the labour of filming enjoins the labour of looking: in seeing explicitly the work of filmwork, we must consider as well the work we do in viewing. The efforts of attention, that is, are not just receptive but properly productive. (And they are heavy – because of the harrowing dynamics and often drudging rhythm of the scenes we work on with our eyes.) The force of this closing moment drives home the inextricability of material processes (manufacture and circulation) from immaterial ones (attention and affect) in contemporary capitalism. And if the inextricability of these flows signals our implication, as viewers, within the system we have watched unfold on screen, at the same time it delineates some terms of commonality among viewers and all these labourers in forgotten space – and so intimates the potential for unexpected solidarities to emerge.52 The London-based activist collective Platform delivers friction within contemporary petroculture through a coordinated practice of reportorial, critical, and aesthetic intervention. Much like Mitchell and Sekula, the members of Platform endeavour to track the systemic

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coordinates of the contemporary hydrocarbon economy. In so doing they seek to contest the hegemony – epitomized by the smoothness narrative – that enables corporate oil to operate unencumbered and unchallenged: “In order for an oil company to produce oil and transport it to the global market, it needs either the support or the silence of the population in those areas of the world where this takes place. Where the necessary support – or ‘social licence to operate’ – is not forthcoming, the ability of that company to carry out its business becomes seriously impaired.”53 In order to contest “social licence,” Platform maps what it calls “the Carbon Web,” that network of connections linking oil companies with the institutions and infrastructures of contemporary social, political, economic, and cultural life.54 Platform glosses the dynamics of this “Carbon Web” on a poster circulated in 2011: “Extraction operations by international oil & gas companies rely on support from a web of institutions & companies, including banks, universities, government departments and cultural institutions that provide financing & technology as well as public relations, political & legal assistance … Because the oil companies are dependent on these external institutions, they provide levers for human rights defenders, ecological activists and social movements to challenge the industry’s practices.”55 The emphasis here on dependency is key, since it captures the ways in which and ends to which oil’s edifice is fuelled by those myriad institutions it fuels. The very expansiveness of petrocultural reach – oil’s extension into and subsumption of all facets of contemporary life – effectively constitutes the locus of systemic vulnerability. Platform and comparably committed activist organizations Liberate Tate, Art Not Oil, and the UK Tar Sands Network target this vulnerability in various ways – but most relevant for my argument here are those aesthetic events that deliver friction by staging, insistently, the material and obdurate import of oil for institutions ostensibly detached from petroculture. Take, for instance, Human Cost, the 20 April 2011 action by Liberate Tate commemorating the first anniversary of the bp Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico in order to protest the continued sponsorship of the Tate galleries by bp. In this performance – eighty-seven minutes in duration, one for each day of the spill  – members of Liberate Tate occupied the Duveen Gallery in Tate Britain, with one member stripping naked and lying on the floor in a fetal position so that

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two other members (wearing veils) could pour “oil” – a mixture of charcoal and sunflower oil  – over him.56 As with Sekula’s imagework, the performance politicizes the aesthetic: oil now intrudes, insistently and vulgarly, in a space typically disassociated (or more properly disarticulated) from the petrocultural profits that sustain it. The spilling of oil literally spoils the hegemonic harmony of culture, using an aesthetic intervention to materialize discordant disjuncture within the corporate realm of the gallery. The event is beautiful as well as visceral, achieving through the temporary occupation of gallery space an insurgent seizure of the means of aesthetic production and reproduction. At stake is the manufacture of friction through which to expose and exploit vulnerabilities in the Carbon Web.57 The Felt Impacts of the Tar Sands, a 2013 artwork and performance created and coordinated by Lucy Sparrow, gives a comparably compelling instance of the generative power of aesthetic friction in compromising petroculture’s circuitry. In order to protest and disrupt the annual Canada Europe Energy Summit, Sparrow and members of the UK Tar Sands Network displayed an enormous felted piece depicting environmental damage around Northern Alberta’s tar sands on the sidewalk in front of London’s Canada House even as government ministers and corporate executives arrived for the summit. As performers in haz-mat suits “cleaned up” the spill, the artist – wearing a bear costume – enacted animal suffering on top of the artwork.58 Sparrow’s piece delivers friction through its positioning and performative duration, but also through its very materiality: for the most common method of felting entails the rubbing together of wet wool fibres in order to mat and enmesh them. As the medium for Sparrow’s protest, then, felt materializes what it simultaneously signifies and serves to expose: aggravated entanglement through friction. Where Enbridge’s maritime cartography sought to erase islands in order to smooth petrocultural traffic as a matter of understanding and feeling, the sort of image-work produced by Sekula and Burch and the sort of activist intervention ventured by Platform, Liberate Tate, Art Not Oil, the UK Tar Sands Network, and Lucy Sparrow all chart occluded dynamics within the contemporary conjuncture – and materialize those dynamics into new and jarring visibility. The force of such mapping is at once conceptual and affective, serving to render key points of material friction so as to mobilize key modes of

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affective friction. For the valence of friction in supplying the necessary texture and requisite mood of a system primed to thrive on the differentials between the smooth and the rough likewise entails that system’s vulnerability. Can picturing or performing friction begin to make friction’s political potential – its militant counter-mood – proliferate? By posing and unfolding this question, the critical and activist aesthetics considered here manage to orient us toward the political demands or indeed textures of the contemporary conjuncture far more convincingly than ethical oil’s lubricating fantasies ever could. notes 1 Lori Waters, “Story of Corporate Deceit: How Enbridge Erased bc Islands,” David Suzuki Foundation, accessed 1 August 2016, http:// www.davidsuzuki.org/issues/oceans/projects/healthy-oceans/pacific -ocean-stories/story-of-corporate-deception-how-enbridge-erased-bc -islands-1; Rafe Mair, “Memo to Enbridge: Special Effects Don’t Erase Risks,” The Tyee, 20 August 2012, accessed 1 August 2016, http:// thetyee.ca/Opinion/2012/08/20/Memo-To-Enbridge. For similar critiques, see also Elizabeth Hames, “Not So Clear Sailing in ‘Misleading’ Enbridge Animation,” Metro News, 15 August 2012, accessed 1 August 2016, http://metronews.ca/news/victoria/338354/not-so-clearsailing-in-misleading-enbridge-animation; Judith Lavoe, “Enbridge Stirs Up Controversy with Depiction of Waterway without Islands,” Victoria Times Colonist, 15 August 2012, accessed 1 August 2016, http://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/enbridge-stirs-up-contro versy-with-depiction-of-waterway-without-islands-1.6408; Daniel Tencer, “Northern Gateway: Enbridge Accused of Misleading Public with Video That Shows Smooth Sailing in Douglas Channel,” Huffington Post Canada, 16 August 2012, accessed 1 August 2016, http:// www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/08/16/enbridge-douglas-channel -islands_n_1789223.html. 2 Enbridge’s attempt to effect a sort of double disappearance – to make disappear the video in which islands disappear – was precluded by the posting, in August 2012, of both the original route safety video and the route animation by the online progressive organization SumOfUs .org, accessed 1 August 2016, http://sumofus.org/campaigns/enbridge/. Watch the route animation – complete with retrospective caveat about illustrative purpose and broad representationality – at “Original

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Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline route animation” YouTube video, 1:01, posted by Leadnow.ca, 16 August 2012, https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=yiVfYb8lt5o (accessed 1 August, 2016); and the route safety video at “The Original ‘Route Safety’ Video Enbridge Doesn’t Want You to See,” YouTube video, 5:57, posted by Leadnow .ca, 15 August 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTP7ua72 vns (accessed 1 August 2016). 3 On liquid times, see Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). I derive my understanding of affective mapping from Jonathan Flatley’s bracing theorization of the concept and practice; see in particular Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 76–84. Flatley might dispute my use of his concept, as his emphasis falls on the experimental aesthetics of literary modernism, and on the defamiliarizing – and so counterhegemonic – effects of the process. Recognizing and valuing the importance of the specificity of Flatley’s theory, I nevertheless feel that much can be gained by extrapolating its significance for more dominant modes of culture-work that map their coordinates (and so interpellate their producers alongside their audiences) by means of mood, feeling, and affect. Indeed, one of the most illuminating aspects of Flatley’s theory of affective mapping is the way in which it presents affect as a terrain of political struggle – which, I would argue, the Enbridge video vividly dramatizes. As I suggest in my account of artworks critical of petroculture, the mapping of affect constitutes a key part of their interventions – what Flatley elsewhere (and with reference to different cultural methods) has called the making of “revolutionary counter-mood.” See Jonathan Flatley, “How a Revolutionary Counter-Mood Is Made,” New Literary History 43, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 503–25. 4 Graham Thompson, “Ottawa’s Arrogance, Not Enbridge, Sealed the Fate of Northern Gateway Pipeline,” National Post, 5 July 2016, accessed 1 August 2016, http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/ graham-thomson-ottawas-arrogance-not-enbridge-sealed-the-fate-of -northern-gateway-pipeline. 5 Pertinent, here, is Matthew Huber’s sharp account of the oil-mobility relation: “Oil is primarily about powering a certain kind of mobility characterized by an individuated command over space, or what Raymond Williams called ‘mobile privatization’ … What if the most problematic relation to oil is the way it powers forms of social life

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that allow individuals to imagine themselves as severed from society and public life? Oil is a powerful force not only because of the material geographies of mobility it makes possible but also because its combustion often accompanies deeply felt visions of freedom and individualism.” Matthew T. Huber, Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), xi. See as well Peter Hitchcock’s provocative account of what he terms “petroleum mobile” (52). Peter Hitchcock, “Velocity and Viscosity,” in Subterranean Estates: Lifeworlds of Oil and Gas, ed. Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2015), 45–60. 6 The phrase “It’s the choice we all have to make,” originally appearing on EthicalOil.org’s donation page, now shows up in subtle variations on the site’s “Letter to the Editor tool,” accessed 1 August 2016, http://www.ethicaloil.org/letter-to-the-editor/. In “Gendering Oil,” Sheena Wilson astutely glosses this imperative with the phrase “no choice but to choose” – a constraining condition inscribed, for Wilson, into the very design aesthetics, “[t]he color codes of red and green,” of the EthicalOil campaign (251). I would add that the use of red and green to encode this false or forced choice aligns its putative necessity with the stop-go rhythms of automotive traffic – that key mode of interpellation within what Gilles Deleuze memorably termed “societies of control.” Sheena Wilson, “Gendering Oil: Tracing Western Petro-Sexual Relations,” in Oil Culture, ed. Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 244–63. See Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7; and also Cotton Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 7 Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 161. 8 The anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing offers a provocative and compelling theorization of friction in her book of that name: Speaking of friction is a reminder of the importance of interaction in defining movement, cultural form, and agency. Friction is not just about slowing things down. Friction is required to keep global power in motion. Friction inflects historical trajectories, enabling, excluding, and particularizing … Friction is not a synonym for resistance. Hegemony is made as well as unmade

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mark simpson with friction … Friction makes global connection powerful and effective. Meanwhile, without even trying, friction gets in the way of the smooth operation of global power. Difference can disrupt, causing everyday malfunctions as well as unexpected cataclysms. Friction refuses the lie that global power operates as a well-oiled machine. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 6. This nuanced, ambidextrous understanding of the concept provides an important reminder about the conceptual and political risks involved in treating friction too reductively – risks I hope to avert when, below, I address lubricity’s abiding reliance on friction. That said, my prevailing use of the term holds most closely to the concluding sense of refusal in Tsing’s theorization. For suggestive commentary on friction’s dialectic, see Hitchcock, “Velocity and Viscosity,” 58–9. Jennifer Wenzel gives a wonderful account of the resource logic and resource aesthetic of overburden. See Jennifer Wenzel, “Afterword: Improvement and Overburden,” in Postmodern Culture 26.2 (January 2016 [published November 2016]), “Resource Aesthetics” special issue, ed. Brent Bellamy, Michael O’Driscoll, and Mark Simpson. For vividly informative critical accounts of the process, see Elizabeth Kolbert, “Unconventional Crude: Canada’s Synthetic-Fuels Boom,” The New Yorker, 12 November 2007, accessed 1 August 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/11/12/unconventionalcrude; Andrew Nikiforuk, “Five Falsehoods about Ethical Oil,” The Tyee, 29 September 2011, accessed 1 August 2016, http://thetyee.ca/ Opinion/2011/09/29/Ethical-Oil-Falsehoods/; Andrew Nikiforuk, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2010); LeMenager, Living Oil. Anna Zalik, “Vicious Transparency: Contesting Canada’s Hydrocarbon Future,” in Subterranean Estates, 364. Sheena Wilson, “Oil Ethics,” American Book Review 33.3 (March/ April 2012): 8–9. Ezra Levant, Ethical Oil (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010), 224–5. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 155. Ibid., 195. Levant’s rhetorical fluency and slipperiness will instance – and

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assist – the “metaphorical blitz” identified by LeMenager as a key feature of “the contest of meanings” about Albertan bitumen. Living Oil, 163. Both the website and affiliated Facebook page now seem largely dormant (with the former not really active since August 2014 and the latter used most recently in March 2015) – perhaps suggesting the growing outmodedness of these platforms in an age of mobile devices. “Ethical Oil” retains pride of place on Levant’s personal website (http://www.ezralevant.com), however, while the organization’s Twitter account (@Ethical_Oil) remains active in promoting its cause. In what follows, I consider discourse and imagery from Ethical Oil’s website as archival evidence of the persistence of the smooth oil narrative. “About EthicalOil.org,” accessed 1 August 2016, http://www.ethical oil.org/about/. Ibid. Until recently, the anti-foreign edge was even sharper, with the site’s donations page railing that “The No Tar Sands Coalition, Greenpeace, and other opponents of Ethical Oil are funded by grants from foreign foundations. EthicalOil.org, by contrast, will not take money from foreign corporations, foundations, governments, or lobbyists. We will not allow foreign corporate interests to compromise our independence. This means we rely on small donors like you to sustain our grassroots advocacy. Please consider making a $5, $10, or $15 donation.” (Accessed 2 December 2013; now removed from site.) Jamie Ellerton, “No Foreign Investments Can Tarnish Our Ethical Oil,” Huffington Post Canada, 9 October 2012, accessed 1 August 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/jamie-ellerton/canadaoil_b_1861528.html?utm_hp_ref=canada-business. See Deep Climate, “The Institute,” 1 September 2011, accessed 1 August 2016, http://deepclimate.org/2011/09/01/the-institute/; Geoff Dembicki, “Who’s behind New Pro-Oil Sand’s Ad Blitz?” The Tyee, 8 September 2011, accessed 1 August 2016, http://thetyee.ca/ Mediacheck/2011/09/08/Ethical-Oil-Blitz/; Karen Kleiss, “Who Is behind the Ethical Oil Institute?” Edmonton Journal, 9 September 2011, accessed 1 August 2016, http://blogs.edmontonjournal.com/ 2011/09/09/who-is-behind-the-ethical-oil-institute/. Deep Climate’s “The Institute” post identifies Ross as “silent partner.” The link www.OilSandsLaw.com now leads straight to the McLennan-Ross website, suggesting perhaps that the firm no longer

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mark simpson wants to promote such service so brazenly. McLennan-Ross continues to advertise its expertise in energy, environmental, and regulatory law, however. McLennan-Ross, “Energy, Environmental, and Regulatory,” accessed 12 October 2016, https://mross.com/law/Practice_Areas/ Energy__Environmental_Regulatory. Canadian Association of Energy Producers, “Canada’s Oil Sands,” accessed 1 August 2016, http://www.capp.ca/initiatives/canadas-oil -sands; “The World Needs Energy,” accessed 1 August 2016, http:// www.capp.ca/canadian-oil-and-natural-gas/the-world-needs-energy. Chris Turner begins his article on tar sands pr with reference to the appearance of this ad in the Globe and Mail in July 2012. See Chris Turner, “The Oils Sands pr War: The Down-and-Dirty Fight to Brand Canada’s Oil Patch,” Marketing, 30 July 2012, accessed 1 August 2016, http://www.marketingmag.ca/advertising/the-oil-sands-pr -war-58235. I last accessed this ad on the capp website on 2 July 2014; it has since disappeared from the site. On the dubiousness of such reclamation projects, see Nikiforuk, Tar Sands, 102–11, and LeMenager, Living Oil, 161–4. I last accessed this ad on the capp website on 2 July 2014; it has since disappeared from the site. For an incisive account of the significance of the biopolitical turn, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 22–41. The ad no longer appears on the Ethical Oil website, but can be seen on the “Boycott Chiquita – Support Ethical Oil” Facebook page, accessed 1 August 2016, https://www.facebook.com/BoycottChiquita, as well as on the Fuel Fix blog, accessed 1 August, 2016, http://fuelfix .com/blog/2011/12/19/oil-group-calls-for-chiquita-banana-boycott/. See Michael Evans, “‘Para-Politics’ Goes Bananas,” The Nation, 4 April 2007, accessed 1 August 2016, http://www.thenation.com/ article/para-politics-goes-bananas#. Ironically enough, the invocation of “terrorist groups” – one of the contemporary era’s most pernicious totemic phrases – recalls and recapitulates Chiquita’s own (strategic?) failure to differentiate between fascist militias and leftist rebels when distributing funds. At stake for EthicalOil.org in rendering the opponents in a specific geopolitical conflict generically indistinguishable and interchangeable is arguably a strategy of decontextualization – the transmission of smooth myth (and indeed mood) beyond textured, tangled history.

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31 On the imperialist genealogy of United Fruit, Chiquita’s progenitor, see Peter Chapman, Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World (Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2007), 38. On geo-economic imperialism in the modern era, see Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 32 The image no longer appears on the Ethical Oil website, but can still be accessed through a link, accessed 1 August 2016, http://www .ethicaloil.org/media/2011/08/POSTCARD-FRONT.jpg, embedded in Deep Climate’s “The Institute” piece. As Deep Climate makes clear, and as I note subsequently, the Lush boycott link on EthicalOil.org now features an animated video in place of the volatile image – see “Boycott Bath Bombs! Lush Attacks Canadian Jobs,” accessed 1 August 2016, http://www.ethicaloil.org/news/boycott-bath-bombs -lush-attacks-canadian-jobs/. 33 Ethical Oil’s cooptational mimicry of the aesthetics of counter-cultural performance will resonate, rather queasily, with critical accounts of the vulnerability of so-called “culture jamming” to corporate appropriation – see, for instance, Richard Gilman-Opalsky, “Unjamming the Insurrectionary Imagination: Rescuing Détournement from the Liberal Complacencies of Culture Jamming,” Theory in Action 6, no. 3 (July 2013): 1–34; Christine Harold, “Pranking Rhetoric: ‘Culture Jamming’ as Media Activism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21, no. 3 (2004): 189–211; Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2000). Notwithstanding such mimicry, the militant potential of aesthetic performance in delivering friction within petroculture is considerable, as I explore in this essay’s concluding section. 34 The import of hygiene for moralizing imperial discourse is longstanding. For compelling accounts of the dynamic, see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995); Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 35 Pertinent here is Rob Nixon’s account of “slow violence”: “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence,

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mark simpson a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales.” Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2. Absorbed with the explosive, the instantaneous, and the sensational, the ethical oil narrative – with its hystericizing habits of visualization or picturability – has no capacity whatsoever to reckon either the grinding, lurching cadences or the “calamitous repercussions” of “incremental and accretive” violence. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011), 39, 42. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 5. Resonant with Mitchell’s historical account is Matthew Huber’s contention, in his essay on “the ecology of entrepreneurial life,” that “[w]e often think too much about the politics of energy – geopolitics, petrostates, oil-spill regulations – and not enough about how energized practices prefigure particular forms of politics” (227). Matthew T. Huber, “Refined Politics: Petroleum Products, Neoliberalism, and the Ecology of Entrepreneurial Life,” in Oil Culture, ed. Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 226–43. Andreas Malm’s compelling account of the rise of “fossil capital” in the cotton mills of early nineteenth-century England locates a history of such prefiguration in the very emergence of industrial capitalism as a modern formation, in which the intensive energy afforded by fossil fuels (here, coal) effectively triggered an industrialization of both machinic power and labour power – a reconfigured socio-economic set of relations that enabled capital to redress the falling rate of profit while undermining rights and capacities newly won by organized workers. Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016). For a bracing theorization of the dialectics of intensifying energics in the contemporary era, see Jeff Diamanti, “Energyscapes, Architecture, and the Expanded Field of Postindustrial Philosophy,” in Postmodern Culture 26.2, “Resource Aesthetics” special issue, ed. Brent Bellamy, Michael O’Driscoll, and Mark Simpson (January 2016). I am indebted to Imre Szeman for this sharp insight. See Imre Szeman, “System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 805–23. See also Huber’s account of “petro-privatism” in “Refined Politics” (234). Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 9.

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40 Levant, Ethical Oil, 46. 41 Relevant here is Nixon’s account of the complexities of the “resource curse” narrative (Nixon, Slow Violence, 71). 42 LeMenager, Living Oil, 36. 43 Marie Muracciole and Benjamin J. Young, “Editors’ Introduction: Allan Sekula and the Traffic in Photographs,” Grey Room 55 (Spring 2014): 9. 44 Jennifer Burris, “Estuaries of Thought,” in Foreclosed: Between Crisis and Possibility, ed. Joyce Markovics and Sarah Lookofsky (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2011), 76. Burris’s essay unfolds as a kind of double entry, with arguments in two columns; the citation here refers to the first argument-column. 45 Hilde Van Gelder and Jan Baetens, “A Debate on Critical Realism Today,” in Critical Realism in Contemporary Art: Around Allan Sekula’s Photography, ed. Jan Baetens and Hilde Van Gelder (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2006), 132. 46 See, for instance, Burris, “Estuaries of Thought,” 78, and Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans, “Loops of History: Allan Sekula and Representations of Labor,” in Baetens and Van Gelder, Critical Realism in Contemporary Art, 38. 47 Imre Szeman and Maria Whiteman, “Oil Imag(e)inaries: Critical Realism and the Oil Sands,” Imaginations 3, no. 2 (September 2012), http://www3.csj.ualberta.ca/imaginations/?p=3628. 48 Alberto Toscano, “Seeing It Whole: Staging Totality in Social Theory and Art,” The Sociological Review 60, no. S1 (2012): 79; Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans also uses the concept of friction in examining Sekula’s aesthetic practice. While I developed my analysis of the importance of friction within Sekula’s work specifically and within petroculture more generally before encountering these sources, their conceptual resonance lends welcome support for my argument. Ruchel-Stockmans, “Loops of History,” 28–39. 49 Muracciole and Young, “Editors’ Introduction,” 8. 50 Resonant here – if distinct in its scene of reading – is Nat Hurley’s bracing account of the power of citation as circulatory method; see Nat Hurley, “The Queer Traffic in Literature; or, Reading Anthologically,” English Studies in Canada 36, no. 1 (2010): 81–108. 51 Gaia Tedone, “Abstract Patterns, Material Conditions,” in Jennifer Burris, Sofía Olascoaga, Sadia Shirazi, and Gaia Tedone, Foreclosed: Between Crisis and Possibility (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 129.

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52 My conception of the labour of viewing comes from Jonathan Beller’s remarkable theorization of “the attention theory of value” in Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2006). Not all commentators find – or read for – signs of solidarity in the film. Notable here is Christina Sharpe’s provocative account of slavery’s Middle Passage as the forgotten space at the heart of The Forgotten Space. See Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 25–30. 53 Platform, “What We Do: Oil and the Arts,” accessed 1 August 2016, http://platformlondon.org/oil-the-arts/. 54 Platform, “The Carbon Web,” accessed 1 August 2016, http://platform london.org/about-us/platform-the-carbon-web/. 55 Platform, “The Carbon Web” (image), accessed 1 August 2016, http:// platformlondon.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/The-Carbon-Web.jpg. 56 The video of the event is no longer viewable online. For an account of the event, see Liberate Tate’s website, accessed 1 August 2016, http:// www.liberatetate.org.uk/oil-spilled-in-inside-tate-britain-on-gulf-of -mexico-anniversary-2/. Images of the event appear on the Rex Features website, accessed 1 August 2016, http://www.rexfeatures.com/ livefeed/2011/04/20/protest_against_bp_at_tate_britain,_london, _britain. 57 In the case of the Tate and bp, such friction seems to have produced welcome results, with bp announcing in March 2016 a decision to end its sponsorship of the Tate in 2017. The corporation denies that this move has anything to do with activist pressure, however. Nick Clark, “bp to End Controversial Sponsorship of Tate in 2017,” The Independent, 10 March 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/ arts-entertainment/art/news/bp-to-end-controversial-sponsorshipof-tate-in-2017-a6923471.html; Henri Neuendorf, “Oil Giant bp to End Controversial 26-Year Tate Sponsorship in 2017,” artnetnews, 11 March 2016, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ bp-ends-tate-sponsorship-2017-447041. 58 “The ‘Felt Impacts of the Tar Sands’ Artwork Unveiled at the Canada Europe Energy Summit,” accessed 1 August 2016, http://www.no-tar -sands.org/2013/11/felt-impacts-unveiled/.

part four

Oil Theory

With its inexhaustible malleability – as both a plastic, material substance and as an abstract benchmark for value in late capitalism – oil has the ability to make things over in its image. Petroculture produces populations exposed to oil’s unpredictable violence through pollution, contamination, and fire; it also renders people, communities, and nations precarious by subjecting them to structural adjustment plans or domestic policies in which social funding is tied to commodity prices. This section engages with how oil’s protean power can be theorized: as a source of political potential emerging from sites of extraction and transportation, as the figure for the impossibility of totalizing knowledge, or as a manifestation of the inexorable forces of technology and history that form the material and philosophical basis for human existence. Each chapter illuminates how oil distributes risk and reward and how it determines what counts as inside and what is external to its dominion. Oil makes social and political conditions explode into visibility as petro-relations: the train explosion at Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in July 2013 was the first of ten explosions or serious derailments of oil trains in North America over the next two years.1 Accidents from Oregon to New Brunswick, from Illinois to Alabama, have shown that oil and gas production in the US and Canada has outgrown transport capacity. In the face of this imbalance, not to mention the uncertainty surrounding new pipeline construction, railways have themselves become pipelines: part of a de facto infrastructure that makes shockingly explicit how risk is configured according to the needs of production and consumption. While geographically and politically peripheral populations have always

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been disproportionately exposed to environmental damage, today we are seeing risk externalized and distributed as never before. For example, when an ExxonMobil pipeline burst under a suburban middle-class neighbourhood in Mayflower, Arkansas, in May 2013, the resulting oil spill surprised residents who had had no idea they lived above such sensitive infrastructure. The episode brought to light that legislation passed in the wake of 9/11 ensured American homebuyers/owners are no longer legally allowed to know if pipelines exist near or under their homes. Information regarding energy infrastructures – including routes, inspection reports, distribution details, and corporations’ emergency response plans – has become a national security secret.2 By theorizing oil’s epistemic and ontological status and effects, the chapters in this section help us to see phenomena like the securitization of knowledge as instances of the desire to render externalities and accidents manageable and to disavow the dangers threatening our planet. Sourayan Mookerjea’s “Petrocultures in Passive Revolution: The Autonomous Domain of Treaty Poetics” begins with a summary of recent financial, environmental, and political disasters in oil production. Mookerjea theorizes our current moment as one of convergent crises wherein “social and ecological crises are so intensively intermediated and entangled … that environmental politics mediates all other forms of class and cultural politics.” To delineate a form of political action adequate to this entanglement, he proposes what Clayton ThomasMuller calls the “native rights based strategic framework” as an example of a poetics of the “autonomous domain of subaltern politics.” Mookerjea sees in this approach “a subaltern conjunctural perspective” capable of reclaiming a class politics in the age of transnational capital; it can do so by inhabiting a “counterenvironment.”3 Hegemony is a consensus of diverse agencies. A counter-environment is an instance of localized difference that actualizes characteristics held together by the hegemony, but which are non-identical to the terms of the consensus. As such, a counterenvironment can emerge to challenge the dominant configuration with its own alterity. Mookerjea combines Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of the multitude with Harold Innis’s political economy of staples production to map the uneven spatio-temporal structures linking centre and periphery. These unevenesses,

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reproduced inter- and intranationally within the multitude’s “intersection of oppressions,” constitute an “environmental-historical path dependency” that temporally constrains political agency. In a settler-colonial society like Canada, however, these path dependencies are underwritten by “the constitutional status of treaty and other Aboriginal rights.” To force recognition of these rights is to exploit “a symptom of the rational impossibility of legitimizing law and Canadian sovereignty, founded, as they are, upon the enclosure of the commons.” The native rights–based strategic framework promises to leverage this symptom against settler-colonial states’ “historical violence in the positivity of law to constitutionally limit the ambitions of petro-state power while searching for autonomous paths toward low-carbon modes of social reproduction and environmental justice.” The subaltern poetics Mookerjea sketches articulate the radical immanence of those who are politically marginalized and excluded. Randy Schroeder takes a much different tack to similarly trouble the desire to exclude, contain, or otherwise manage what is radically immanent. In “Getting into Accidents: Stoekl, Virilio, Postsustainability,” Schroeder takes up Allan Stoekl’s Bataille’s Peak (2007) and the challenge of postsustainability by putting the text into productive confrontation with Paul Virilio’s philosophy of the accident. “[P]ostsustainability thinking is a useful provocation in a petroculture where almost all actors are possessed by the Will to Manage,” he writes. This will animates all conservationist and consumerist thought aimed at mastering, mitigating, or eliminating the unexpected. From design practice to the business jargon of innovation and creativity, contemporary thought tries to integrate accidents into productive practices. Schroeder sees this desire to manage as extending from the market logic that seeks to incorporate and profit from externalities. Of course the accidental is a constitutive feature of all experience. This relationship is especially visible “in a petroculture – where pipelines open new markets but also burst, where fracking circumvents Hubbert’s peak but sometimes lights tap water on fire, even as it reignites the American economy at the expense of the Nigerian economy – ingenuity and the accident are co-dependent.” In the concepts of postsustainability and the accident, Schroeder sees the possibility of overcoming the will to manage by engaging with what George

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Bataille calls “non-knowledge,” a non-dualist logic that has long been relegated to religious mysticism but which has deep roots in Western thought, and, Schroeder argues, crucial practical relevance to human life, from governance to species survival. For critics of instrumental reason, modernity is characterized by the desire to incorporate or eliminate the accidental – that which doesn’t neatly fit into rational calculation. Such a will to master the things of existence reveals what Martin Heidegger sees as the essence of technology. This essence, which constitutes the project of Western metaphysics, apprehends the world as a “standing-reserve” of resources and objects to be employed in accordance with scientific rationality. In “Being and Oil: Or, How to Run a Pipeline through Heidegger,” Andrew Pendakis dismantles the shaky structures propping up those claims to rationality our moment holds to be most secure. Starting from Imre Szeman’s claim that “oil is … ontology, the structuring ‘Real’ of our contemporary sociopolitical imaginary,”4 Pendakis extends this provocation, arguing that oil’s formless slipperiness requires a critical detour through philosophical questions long thought to be resolved. Oil is an essence that refuels old essentialism; as arche – simultaneously primary and synthetic – it is the origin, agent, and medium of Being’s plasticity. Oil is also money, value materialized as currency; thus financialized, oil’s material and symbolic value determines the speculative limits of our lifeworld. Reckoned ontologically, oil becomes visible as the obscure residue of metaphysics and matter in this purportedly immaterial and infinitely plural age. Heidegger sought to destroy metaphysics’ instrumentalism with a thought adequate to establishing a new relationship to things in the fullness of Being. By elucidating the ways in which oil allows metaphysics to seep back into thought, Pendakis uncovers “the scandal of a creator in an age in which there was supposed to be only creativity itself.” Moreover, he uses this metaphysical character to articulate the collective and political dimension of oil’s destructive externalities in the suggestive figure of smog. Smog utterly defies being managed or instrumentalized: “Smog, like snow, universalizes the particular, folding back into a primary relatedness things once imagined as separate and distinct. Smog transforms the space of liberalism – a space modelled on the bourgeois home or room and experienced as locally bounded, serial, and discrete – into the proto-socialism of collectively shared risk.”

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In this section’s final chapter, “Petroleum’s Longue Durée: Writing Oil’s Temporalities into History,” Tim Kaposy takes up symptoms of modernity’s instrumental reason in popular history writing. He argues for the need to think about oil in terms of the longue durée, an approach to historiography capable of resisting the all-too-common corporate and governmental appropriation of historical thinking. Beginning from the premise that “the convenience afforded by petroleum made material immediacy a defining quality of contemporary economies,” Kaposy looks at several works in the sparsely populated genre of oil history in order to demonstrate that the history of the present is rooted in this defining quality of immediacy. Uncritically employing standard liberal tropes which make up the narratives of individualism, the corporation, or the nation, these modes of writing history reflect a temporality which cannot see beyond the expedience of short-term forecasts, micro-level trends, and prices at the pump. Such histories cannot discern the great, slow movements of networked forces – institutions, modes of production, or environmental devastation. In other words, these oil histories reflect the temporal perspective in which phenomena like environmental and financial disasters are seen only as externalities within an otherwise stable narrative of progress. Only from the point of view of the longue durée, however, can today’s most serious threats be articulated in their proper urgency, within the massively distributed time and space of periods and nations, the “cyclical history” rendered coherent by patterns of long-term recurrence. The chapters in this section theorize the conceptual, epistemic, and ontological conditions that determine, and which potentially trouble, the phantasmal smoothnesses of the petrocultural imagination. Challenging the connectedness our petroculture takes for granted, they discern the historical, political economic, and agential unevennesses that form the terrain upon which the contemporary and future struggles of oil are being contested. notes 1 Eric de Place and Keiko Budech, “Oil Train Explosions: A Timeline in Pictures,” Sightline Institute, 6 May 2015, accessed 26 August 2016, http://www.sightline.org/2015/05/06/oil-train-explosions-a-timeline -in-pictures/.

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2 Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Energy Pipeline News Year in Review 2003, ed. Noel L. Griese (Atlanta: Anvil, 2004): 58–9. This legislated uncertainty is only one example of the legal obstacles to knowledge of petro-disasters, which also include selfregulated industry control of information regarding what kinds of oil (heavy, light, diluted, etc.) are released in accidents, as well as proprietary knowledge of the procedures and chemicals used in cleanup operations. Perhaps the most glaring instance of the latter is the secrecy surrounding the chemical makeup, the toxic effects, and even the amounts of dispersants used by bp in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill. See also Maria Gallucci, “Dilbit or Not? Wabasca Crude Is the Question,” InsideClimate News 18 April 2013, accessed 26 August 2016, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20130418/ dilbit-or-not-wabasca-crude-question. 3 Marshall McLuhan, “Canada as Counter-Environment,” in Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Sourayan Mookerjea, Imre Szeman, and Gail Faurschou (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 71–86. 4 Imre Szeman, “The Cultural Politics of Oil: On Lesson of Darkness and Black Sea Files,” Polygraph 22 (2010): 34.

13 Petrocultures in Passive Revolution: The Autonomous Domain of Treaty Poetics Sourayan Mookerjea

As the smoke and dust settles, let us look back on the wild ride we have just been on and contemplate this recent wonder in the history of fossil capitalism: the exploitation of the Athabasca tar sands, one of the world’s largest industrial mega-developments ever, still projects a spatial monumentalism seemingly super-sized to defy the very speed with which the sand now falls in the hourglass at the climate change endgame of oil. The Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, incorporated in 1995 to provide an administrative grip on development, is one of the world’s most expansive municipalities, spanning 68,484 square kilometres, a vastness that only magnifies in the mind’s eye the distances between settlements in Canada’s North. Bitumen mining, whether through open pit or steam injection wells, at its peak in 2014 processed 4.6 million tonnes of tar sand in order to produce 2.3 million barrels of oil per day.1 The net water consumed in production was by volume a staggering two to four times greater than this yield of oil daily.2 Toxic tailings ponds now cover an area of more than 180 square kilometres, holding more than 760 billion litres of legacy effluent sludge.3 Press reports of occasional visitors to the region invariably depict them upon their return through the portal to quotidian urban distractions as either stunned or awestruck, in any case left speechless, by their glimpse of an infinity whose tracks, roads, dikes, lines, and asymptotes appear wellnigh alter-planetary and are indeed now famously visible from outer space itself. Such Jovian imagery then collides with another order of unlimited magnitudes, that of globalization, of the “emerging markets” of China and India, of ceaseless urbanization, transportation, and communication density and intensity, in a rare conjunction of

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the spheres of production and consumption in the order of popular representation. It is at this point that Atlas’s knees suddenly buckle and the ebb and flow of these spatial images abruptly crystallize into a thought of time, urgently calculating the years or decades before one or another finitude, of climate or culture or energy or environment or of them all, overtakes us. “Oil capital seems to represent a stage,” notes Imre Szeman in an essay that queries just such limits to the imagination, “that neither capital nor its opponents can think beyond.”4 Indeed, this latest gasp of postmodern Prometheanism, the good old Yankee “can do” optimism with which the Americans set off to do a “Japan” on Iraq, now seems to have trained its formidable ray guns on just such planetary oblivion. “Drill, baby, drill,” as the American electioneering slogan went not so long ago, has been realized in the frenzy of fracking from Dakotan shale as well as from Athabascan sand, while from the far reaches of a new subterranean frontier of natural gas emerged nebular hopes that North America would become a net energy exporter by 2030.5 The panic of standing over the peak of oil abruptly dropped into the vertigo of another promised universe of plenitude and prosperity before time and space implode into one another again and the dark seas beneath our feet rise and drown us once more. Through the crackling noise of such post-sublime fluctuations of desire and fantasy, of such oscillations in media and technocultural imaginaries, there next circulated discourses of Canada’s emergence as an energy superpower, its withering into a petro-state, as well as the displacement of its national multiculturalism by some new kind of petrocultural nationalism. And then, in 2014, no more than six years after the world financial crisis, the price of oil began to nosedive, from an altitude of US$115/barrel in June 2014 to under US$35 in February 2016.6 Investors began to cut their losses, and by July 2016 an estimated forty-three thousand people employed in the sector had been laid off.7 In the midst of all this, the electorate in the province of Alberta swept away forty-three years of seamlessly cynical, populist, and corrupt Conservative Party power by doing the unthinkable (for Albertans, it was said) and electing a social democratic party to government in May 2015. Within six months, as the price of oil continued to fall and the unemployment rate rose, then prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives were driven out at the national level as well. As if to illuminate the devastations of the

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crash, five hundred thousand hectares of boreal forest in Athabasca itself caught fire in May 2016 and burned half of Wood Buffalo’s main urban centre, Fort McMurray, to the ground,8 to be followed two and a half short months later in July 2016 by torrential downpours resulting in extensive flooding. In an era of speculative bubbles and their even more spectacular and catastrophic bursts, how are we to assess the damage of this petro-bubble blowout both in terms of local cultural politics as well as with regard to our entanglements and involvements with a world-scale order of events? This chapter navigates such uncharted currents in our passage between empires and queries this conjuncture now looming on the horizon. This essay is an exploratory probe that cannot plumb the full depths of this passage, as doing so demands a collective effort. Nor does it claim to sound all the main channels between residual, emergent, and dominant cultural formations flowing through this passage. Rather, this essay restricts itself to the more limited task of theorizing some of the probable fault lines of this emerging conjuncture in which the geopolitics of climate change and energy transition will impose themselves with greater urgency and guile. As the 2015 Paris Climate Conference (cop 21) made abundantly clear, an ever-larger section of the proprietorship of capital has now awoken to the need to “hegemonize the crisis,” as Stuart Hall would have put it,9 and lead what Gramsci theorized as a “passive revolution”10 of the global social order, a project to which Canada’s new Trudeau-version-2.0 national government signed on with much song and dance. But, where, exactly, does this revolution presume to lead? As Gramsci lucidly theorizes, the problem, from this standpoint where money and power converts back and forth with the least friction (since this friction is all externalized), is how to change everything except this class apparatus of conversion and its age-old exclusive grasp on the knobs and levers of power. Thus the 2016 World Economic Forum gives us one possible trajectory for passive revolution in its endorsement of the green modernization dream of a dematerialized, “circular” economy, a dream adopted as official economic policy now by both the People’s Republic of China and the European Union.11 Consequently, this emerging conjuncture is a convergence of social and ecological crises, so intensively intermediated and entangled, hybridized as Bruno Latour puts it, that environmental politics mediates all other forms of class and cultural

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struggle. For Latour then, a new geopolitical war is underway between climate change deniers – not only the agents of industry and of imperial power but also the rest of us addicts who “believe” the science but (don’t understand it and) remain compelled by our habits of denial like all-too-human, all-too-modern zombies – and the cosmopolitical Earthbound activists we might also become. I argue here, however, that the administrative infrastructures of climate change science are politicized in more complex ways than Latour suggests in this characterization of “ecological war and peace.”12 A crucial operation for any class project of energy transition via passive revolution must involve more than establishing the “frame” of communication and then inviting the public in to provide the rubber stamp of democratic consultation for a path set out in advance. It must also seek to crisis-manage what some have been calling the “environmentalism of the poor,”13 whether by charm or by force, and relegate these subaltern ecologies and counter-environments of social-ecological reproduction into apparent non-existence, as happens even in Latour’s discussion of the issues. This chapter therefore probes and models a subaltern conjunctural perspective on oil sands development and climate change and argues for the renewed theoretical importance of the concept of an autonomous domain of subaltern politics. This essay situates what Indigenous activist Clayton Thomas-Muller and others call the “native rights based strategic framework”14 of popular movement building and resistance to tar sands development and petro-state neocolonial power in relation to the transcendental-historical conditions of possibility of class politics after the politics of difference and intersectionality. This strategy seeks to forge political solidarity between the Idle No More movement, the environmental movement, and other grassroots social justice movements from below. But a further dimension of this strategy involves the constitutional status of treaty and other Aboriginal rights. The constitutional recognition of Aboriginal rights is a symptom of the rational impossibility of legitimizing law and Canadian sovereignty, founded, as they are, upon the enclosure of the commons. The native rights–based strategic framework aims to use this symptom of historical violence in the positivity of law to constitutionally limit the ambitions of petro-state power while searching for autonomous paths toward low-carbon modes of social reproduction and environmental justice. But I begin with

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a brief exploration of the local, Albertan, and Canadian version of this convergence of crises before returning to such theoretical issues provoked by the conjuncture and its politics.

Resource Curses of a Petro-State Wood Buffalo, along with much of Alberta, has been living with what scholars of boom-and-bust resource economies call the “resource curse” ever since the oil and gas industry displaced agriculture and forestry over the postwar decades as the primary sector of production in terms of investment and growth. The expansion of tar sands exploitation, however, has exacerbated virtually all aspects of this curse. Environmental damage and danger are, of course, the most widely known aspects. As of 2013, Alberta’s 267 megatonnes (Mt) of emissions made up 37 per cent of Canada’s total emissions, and this figure is expected to grow by another 20 per cent. By 2030, Alberta’s emissions are expected to make up 60 per cent of the total growth of Canada’s emissions, to a projected 740 Mt – well above the Trudeau government’s Intended Nationally Determined Contribution commitment submitted in advance of cop 21 to reduce emissions to 523 Mt by 2030 (or 30 per cent below 2005 levels at the start of the last boom).15 Moreover, under the National Energy Board’s best-case scenario, the output of oil sands operations is still slated to swell to more than 6 million barrels per day by 2040.16 This expansion (potentially sprawling over an area as large as the province of New Brunswick) and the spokes and cutlines of roads and pipelines serving the region are resulting in wildlife habitat destruction and forest fragmentation that are Amazonian in scale. Just as notorious is the strain this development has placed on Wood Buffalo’s water supply from aquifers, glaciers, rivers, and lakes. The seepage of toxins from tailings ponds back into the groundwater and the smudge of airborne pollutants now proven to be falling into the lakes and rivers are equally calamitous.17 This toxic pollution, spreading through the food chain along the Athabasca River basin, is suspected by health professionals to be connected with elevated rates of cholangiocarcinoma and other rare cancers and diseases, especially among the Mikisew Cree, Métis, and Athabasca Chipewyan First Nations of the downstream community of Fort Chipewyan on the shores of Lake Athabasca.18 This form of “intoxication” has been accompanied by

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a deepening problem of substance abuse, itself only one manifestation of frontier anomie and alienation not only in the boomtown of Fort McMurray, the eye of the storm, but also throughout Alberta.19 Indeed, growing income inequality between those inside the highwage zone of the region’s division of labour and those on the outside, combined with the demands of precarious shift work, work-camp isolation, and transience, has been connected with deepening problems of violence against women, homelessness, sexual exploitation, gambling, illness, injury and degraded health, as well as of abandonment and neglect of children and the elderly.20 All of this is now being stoked by both unemployment and fear of it as well. Just as alarming has been the corruption of public authority itself. While the ousted provincial Conservative government long downplayed the gravity of these problems and denied their connection to tar sands development, it also systematically deceived the public regarding its regulation of industry  – the industry was essentially self-regulating – and, most egregiously, how it monitored water quality, monitoring that critics have demonstrated amounted to no more than bogus public relations.21 If all this were not bad enough, both the previous provincial and federal Conservative governments conspired to silence and bury news of the incidences of cancer in Fort Chipewyan by intimidating the town’s physician, Dr John O’Connor, after he notified Health Canada of his concerns. In an extraordinary move, Health Canada, Environment Canada, and Alberta Health filed a complaint against O’Connor with the Alberta College of Physicians and Surgeons. O’Connor was thus formally investigated (and eventually cleared of the spurious charges). Moreover, Heath Canada’s initial report dismissing the community’s concerns was demonstrated to be misleading by the Alberta Medical Association’s own subsequent investigation.22 The pathologies of such a resource curse projected themselves over a national scale as well. At the onset of the petro-boom, Jeffrey Simpson observed that tar sands oil had relocated core and periphery in the federal distribution of state power from east to west.23 Ontario and Quebec, the locus of regional power since Confederation  – with Quebec’s local cultural political concerns influencing federal politics from the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s to the 1995 sovereignty referendum – were sidelined by the Harper government. Indeed, Quebec, sending the majority of ndp mps to parliament at

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that time, became the regional centre of cultural political opposition to the new formation of hegemony emerging nationally. Politicians in Eastern Canada blamed (with considerable justification) the expansion of tar sands oil production for further burdening Ontario’s manufacturing industry by keeping the Canadian dollar’s exchange rate with the US dollar high.24 Such were the ambitions of power in Calgary that even talk of a National Energy Program, once anathema, were revived.25 For a growing number of commentators on the Canadian left, the developments underway since Harper’s Conservative minority government came to power in 2006 presaged a transformation of society and state into what scholars of resource dependency call a “petro-state”: a polity that is subordinated and restructured according to the needs of either the Big Oil multinationals or the global political economy of oil or both. Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Russia, and Venezuela are among the most commonly cited examples. To this list we should now add Canada: “The rapid development of the tar sands,” Andrew Nikiforuk observed, “has not only blackened the country’s environmental reputation, but also dramatically undermined its political and economic character.” In Nikiforuk’s influential view, Canada’s “dismal record on climate change, and minimal investments in green energy, simply reflect a growing dependence on oil revenue, oil volatility, and petroleum lobbyists. As a consequence, Canada now shares the same sort of unaccountability and lack of transparency that marks fellow petro-states such as Saudi Arabia.”26 The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives pointed to the “revolving door” of personnel between the petroleum industry and the Prime Minister’s Office, while exclusive, high-powered lobby agencies such as Tactix Government Relations and Public Affairs, Global Public Affairs, Hill and Knowlton Strategies, and Earnscliffe Strategy Group, have ensured that Syncrude, Suncor, ConocoPhillips (Canada), Chevron (Canada), Petro Canada, Shell, Imperial Oil, Enbridge, Synenco, and Teck Resources gained regular access to government ministers and senior federal government bureaucrats. Between 1 September 2011 and 1 September 2012, for example, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers met with government ministers no fewer than fourteen times, and TransCanada Corporation and Suncor each met with federal cabinet members thirteen times.27 As a Polaris Institute report

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moreover observed, “The amount of face time the oil industry gets in Ottawa in personal meetings and other correspondence greatly exceeds the time afforded other major industries in Canada … No one doubts the hold the oil industry has on this current government, but it is important Canadians are aware that such a high rate of lobbying to federal ministers has strong policy implications.”28 How much this backscratching intimacy has changed with the arrival of new provincial and national governments remains an open question, though the Alberta government’s quick walk back from their election promise to review oil royalty rates, their continual invocation of the oil industry as the central kernel of Albertan cultural identity, their aggressive repudiation of the Leap Manifesto, and both governments’ determination to build more pipelines suggest that the back doors are probably still wide open. But such assessments of the recent state of affairs are only as good as the political responses they enable. This indeed is a cardinal point for cultural studies. In moving from a discussion of petrostates to a discussion of petroculture, we cannot remain content with merely shifting registers from the domain of politics to that of culture, thereby reifying both. Our interrogation of petrocultures must at the same time move back from culture to politics insofar as conjunctural analysis seeks to understand the array of forces constitutive of the terrain of counter-hegemonic struggle. If petrocultural studies interrogates the history of oil capitalism to disclose the repressed and foreclosed material plasticity of oil-mediated desires, values, perceptions, of the means and ends of what Marshall McLuhan theorized as a new “world environment,”29 “bought with plastic” in more ways than we were led to understand, then, at the limit of all our credit, in a conjuncture broken open by the seeming rise of a greenwashing leviathan, we need a new hermeneutics of suspicion able to critically conjure our commodity fetishism and our petro-fetishism with the same spell, and, in the same breath, to intermediate our spectacular energetics with new egalitarian praxes of commoning. Cultural studies in this way insists on the immanence of politics, that its trajectories and vectors never transcend cultural production and everyday social-ecological reproduction, let alone history. Such a stance not only constitutes cultural studies’ materialism but also is the core of its broader intellectual significance. This argument from cultural studies takes us beyond

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the standard reified procedures of normal political science, resource economics, and political philosophy – and especially beyond waiting for miracles.

The Lock of World Enclosure And yet after the debates regarding globalization and the interventions of postcolonial theory, the temporality of conjunctures has turned out to be considerably more complicated than we too often assumed. Quite aside from the confusions regarding when the epochal break of the Anthropocene may be said to have begun, we encounter another indicative contingency. Whereas in the dominant theories produced in the world’s cultural capitals, a local decline in manufacturing gives linear rise to post-industrial knowledge society,30 to a “network society” of immaterial labour and postmodern production,31 we find our conjunctural transition involves instead a return to resource dependency. Mel Watkins reminds us that the current preponderance of resource industries over manufacturing entails a repetition with a difference of the characteristic features of Canada’s national economic development and its prehistory.32 Harold Innis theorized this as the “staples trap”:33 from the cod fisheries, the fur trade, the wheat boom, pulp and paper, to hydroelectricity and now oil, society and culture in this corner of the world economy have been recurrently shaped by the itinerary of our passage between empires at each conjuncture. Social historians call this form of historical overdetermination – the limits the past imposes on the present – “path dependency.” Innis’s theoretical point of departure is the very materiality of the non-identity of Europe and North America. Against both the ahistoricism of the dominant disciplinary trends of his time and the linear “space bias” of modernization theory’s teleology of “the industrial takeoff,” Innis intervenes with a historiographical aesthetic that foregrounds the specificity of location and its marginality to centres of accumulation of power and capital. Innis’s concept of staples is a dialectical one in the way it negotiates the oppositions between politics and culture, economy and society, space and time, centre and margin, indeed, environment and history. It thus demystifies the fetish-ontology of the commodity by concretizing what contemporary theoretical jargon would call the “assemblage” to which the commodity belongs or what Marx

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similarly unmasked as the social relations of which it is comprised.34 The focus on the social and historical materiality of staples (rather than on the abstraction “commodity,” by definition anything sold on any market) brings to the foreground the relationship between the centre of empire and its margin, as staples production and trade are contingent upon the needs of the centre and remain entirely dependent on the centre for development and growth. Insofar as staples production fulfills such a need, the imperial centre actively maintains the marginality of the margin in an imperial-scale social division of labour. But this spatial relation turns out to be a temporal one. A key aspect of what makes a staples economy a trap, Innis argued, is the very high overhead costs staples production entails. For example, the fur trade required an initial heavy outlay in renting ships, loading them with outbound trade goods, building and maintaining remote trading posts, providing for sailors and traders all in the face of an extensive turnaround time for the capital advanced. Furs could take five years or more to reach markets and realize profits. Innis outlines several consequences from these contingencies. Fur trading was a matter of high finance, excluding small players, but it was also a matter of political connections, as armies and navies were necessary for creating and preserving the monopolies on which profits depended. Extensive turnaround time for capital invested placed a premium on inventing strategies for controlling time by spatializing it. On the one hand, the governmental apparatus of the fur trade was highly centralized. On the other hand, the heavy burden of carrying the debt was distributed and downloaded to each factory and each trapper, recreating a centre-margin relationship of dependence at another more local scale. Innis argues that the very success of this system becomes the ground for its subsequent failure, a dialectical thesis that runs parallel with Marx’s more general account of the crisis tendencies of capitalism.35 Insofar as the fur trade surmounted its obstacles and accumulated capital effectively, the established assemblage of technical, economic, social, cultural, and political solutions turned into “rigidities” and vested interests incapable of further innovation and creativity and were thus left vulnerable to the dynamic transformations taking place at the centre. Briefly, when beaver hats went out of fashion in Europe, fur trade society went into crisis, and its ruling elites were institutionally deterred from undertaking innovations, though some scattershot efforts

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were made that would put the colonial society at the cutting edge of industrialization. It is important to note, however, that remaining caught within the staples trap is not a matter of fate. What are called backward, forward, and final economic linkages can lead to other transformations, as indeed happened to some extent over the second half of the twentieth century when wartime industry spurred further manufacturing while hydroelectricity and lumber were linked forward to aluminum smelting and pulp and paper. But colonial elites searched by and large for a transformation within the framework of the staple assemblage, renewing a marginal relationship to the centre by replacing the fur trade with square timber and a boom in wheat production. Thus Innis’s account of the articulation of New France, British North America, and Canada within the world economy in terms of a series of staples traps, and the subsequent analysis by Canadian political economists bringing this tradition up to date by including mining, hydroelectricity, and oil, confirms the worldsystem analysis thesis regarding the longue durée of a world-scale division of labour between core, semi-peripheries, and peripheries of the system of accumulation.36 The conjunctural features of our petroculture that we are concerned with here include the “deep time” of the world-scale system of accumulation, a quasi-transcendental movement in our form of life, if you will. Moreover, such a quasi-transcendental has everything to do with the class politics of the conjuncture specifically. For the historical determination of the social division of labour – of who does what and under what conditions – is crucially at stake in class politics. So our probe of our conjuncture will need to examine not only the features of the staples trap specific to our petroculture but also the quasi-transcendental movement of class politics today.

Conjunctural Trappings of Time What avatar of the staples trap might then be articulating petroculture and petro-states in the current conjuncture? What Brendan Haley has called a “carbon trap” is a useful place for us to begin.37 The investments necessary and the costs of production for bitumen mining were deemed prohibitive until the price of oil reached around US$60 per barrel. Since this benchmark has been reached, bitumen mining has required heavy capital investment to bring this

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unconventional oil to market. Moreover, the process of separating oil from sand was developed through Canadian taxpayer-funded research, and the first Syncrude operation of 1978 was also heavily subsidized by the public purse.38 The scale of such investment has been amplified by investments in the urbanization of the boreal forest into the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, as well as into its administration and the infrastructure connecting the site of production to global markets. The current political conflicts over various pipeline proposals incur a political investment in this resource as well, whatever results from them. Moreover, the education and coordination of various forms of technical, administrative, financial, commercial, and legal expertise entails a massive social investment in this industry, even if not all of this was borne locally or nationally and, like the investment of political capital, defies measurement. Innis’s writings on staples development enable us to understand how such high stakes in a monumental collective project create a developmental “bias” and, in a world of high-velocity, footloose capital, impart inertia to the facticity of invested capital, especially in the form of political interests invested in preserving such a staple assemblage. Haley then draws our attention to the ways such stakes in resource development revert into the rigidities of a carbon trap. The broader context of bitumen mining is of crucial importance here, especially the urgent and escalating necessity for the world to revolutionize modes of production into low-carbon energy paradigms. Various social, cultural, economic, and political forces in play around the world are indeed searching for paths to such transitions, and, as noted earlier, this too is a decisive aspect of our current conjuncture. Understood against this backdrop, the full range of stakes now committed to tar sands mega-development  – from infrastructure, money, and desire, to forms of life and modes of social cooperation, institutional arrangements, and other existences of time  – constitute so many obstacles, locally and nationally certainly, but to some extent even globally, to the search for low-carbon energy paradigms, precisely because the value and viability of these stakes depend on the deferral if not the ultimate failure of such transitions taking place. Haley notes, for example, that both of the “Current Policies Scenarios” from the International Energy Agency (iea) forecast global demand by 2020 to fall far below the once-upona-time-planned expansion of bitumen production to 7.2 million

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barrels per day, resulting in an “unused capacity” crisis characteristic of the staples trap. The iea’s first scenario assumes that governments take no further action regarding climate change, not even following through on current commitments, resulting in a catastrophic rise of average temperature by 6˚C. In this case, global energy demand and world prices for oil continue to rise, and tar sands mining expands to produce 4.6 million barrels per day by 2035. In the iea’s second scenario, governments do follow through on existing commitments to the fullest. The demand for oil in this case peaks at only four million barrels per day above current levels by 2020, after which it declines. The price of oil then reaches a ceiling at $90/ barrel in 2020, at which point new tar sands projects are no longer worth undertaking.39 These forecasts consider only small steps toward a sustainable low-carbon energy paradigm, and jurisdictions not captive to the interests of the oil industry will only intensify their search for an alternative paradigm. “This battle over a future based on the persistence of an economic trajectory with oil as a key input,” argues Haley, “versus one that realizes the emergence of a green economic paradigm to reduce ghg emissions creates a series of vulnerabilities, uncertainties, and instabilities for oil sands interests.”40

The Multitude and the General Intellect One compelling provocation of Haley’s argument regarding our current carbon “lock-in” is the unexpected light it sheds not only on the interplay between cultural politics and class politics in this conjuncture but especially as this imposes itself on the cultural politics of the university sector in Canada. As Haley observes, one needs to understand systemic innovation of the kind capable of making a transition to a low-carbon energy paradigm in terms of learning processes across social and cultural assemblages through which trajectories of technological innovation unfold.41 Moreover, Imre Szeman’s study of contemporary discourses of oil capital underscores the importance of the imaginary to any actual transition process. As Szeman argues, “the problem” is as much about narrative as it is about science and technology, insofar as predictions and calculations are interpreted and acted upon in relation to “social narratives … fears, and hopes.”42 As is often noted, some kind of “interdisciplinary” education in the human, social, and natural sciences – indeed

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precisely of the kind cultural studies programs often seek to provide  – is an essential condition for the emergence of an environmentalist subjectivity capable of going beyond “nimby” reaction and finding a path through the blockages and limits of our contemporary carbon lock-in. With regard to one of its crucial, indeed, Utopian and negative determinations, then, “petroculture” is nothing less than a generalized need for new kinds of people dispossessed of the habits of the recent past and so able to live together in new ways and to invent the rationalities with which a new mode of social reproduction may be built. But this raises new stakes in the cultural politics of the university, and we can begin to discern the outlines of class politics unfolding with this conjuncture by attending to just these stakes, especially if we extend the line of analysis opened by Edward Said in his masterwork on the politics of knowledge production, Orientalism.43 It will be recalled that Orientalism concludes with a discussion of the postwar expansion of the university system and, in the US especially, the emergence of area studies programs answering to the needs of the Cold War.44 Domination of the Middle East and control over oil supplies of course was a crucial strategic imperative for fighting the Cold War, and Said details both the continuities with, and the displacements of, nineteenth-century Orientalism in the representational field of Middle Eastern studies that emerged with the new postwar university system. In doing so, Said famously inaugurates a key point of intersection between the cultural politics of cultural studies and those of postcolonial studies, but it is rather several other implicit dimensions of his argument that are important for us here. First of all, the very expansion of the university system itself has often been described, problematically but not entirely wrongly, as its democratization. Insofar as the expansion of the Canadian university system entailed a no-frills, knock-off imitation of both US and British models (but within a mostly public framework at first) the characterization of expansion as democratization is reasonably accurate. Nonetheless, Hardt and Negri’s theory of the multitude needs to be contextualized in relationship to this historical rupture.45 The transformation of elite institutions for those born to rule into mass institutions is one key condition of possibility of the “making of the multitude,” though not the only one. The theory of the multitude seeks to discover a virtual body of political power and

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an immanent plane of commonality not only across different kinds of cultural and affective production, teaching, research, as well as diverse kinds of service work, all classified under the unfortunately misleading concept of “immaterial labour,” but with every other kind of proletarian wage dependency as well. For these ambitions, the theory has drawn criticism, especially from those who overlook the transcendental dimension of Hardt and Negri’s argument and then understandably fail to find the multitude anywhere in the heat and dust of our present. I will present a different kind of criticism of this theory below but for the moment will only underscore a Utopian desire animating this narrative. One crucial dimension of this Utopianism is the invitation the theory places before us to search through the wars of position mounted over the last few decades by the alter-globalization and anti-capitalist convergence of new social movements, not only for some elusive and ever fleeting possibility of solidarity but also for their intersection with class politics under the changed conditions of globalized capital flows, debt crises, and informationalized production, all which separate our conjuncture from the inaugural conjuncture of the new social movements in the world revolution of 1968. This search would have to include the various inroads these movements have made in the universities over this period as well as their current prospects in the face of the relentless reclaiming of these institutions by proprietors of capital through public underfunding. This is the moment to recall another implication of Said’s intervention. The discourse of Orientalism is only possible through the mediation of its various discursive opposites. Cultural politics waged across and through the high culture/ popular culture opposition consequently involved negotiation with projections of class and culture through each other. To make a long story short, US Cold War strategists refurbished and deployed “the discourse of the West” in order to rehabilitate a former enemy, now West Germany, as a member of the nato alliance.46 One of the main fronts of contestation between the academic Right and the cultural studies Left that emerged in the wake of Orientalism was comprised of the trenchwork of this last, late essentialism. The defenders of canons in the humanities sought to continue the ethno-political project of ontologizing the flag of this geopolitical class alliance through the rhetorical fabric of racialized particularity. The keyword of this project was the same as ours, “culture.” Among the range of critical

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opposition to this project, two currents will be important for my argument. The first of these are the interventions of postcolonial theorists such as Anibal Quijano, Ranajit Guha, Stuart Hall, and Arif Dirlik, among others, who argued that questions of our modernity/postmodernity, of contemporary cultural politics, of the legacies of Enlightenment, could not be productively addressed without our forging a new historiographical imagination able to grasp the links between colonialism and capital accumulation and their implications for the operations of power in the present.47 The second critical current is the reassessment of the significance of Marx’s critique of the discourse of primitive accumulation by Michael Perelman, David Harvey, Kalyan Sanyal, and especially Silvia Federici.48 These interventions not only deepen our understanding of the concept of exploitation, bringing to the foreground its inflection as an account of power, but they also enable us to restore historicity to contemporary discussions of “the common(s).” While Hardt and Negri’s reformulation of this discourse on the commons usefully cuts through the reified opposition between nature and culture to include affects, codes, knowledge, and language, along with land, forests, and the seas as a kind of dispositif of the wealth, power, and fullness of being,49 the result is a synchronic spatialization of this plenitude of biopolitical living labour power (including its exploitation). For Hardt and Negri and their followers, the singular but connected pasts of the common’s formation are not granted any consequences in a present conceived to emerge without any environmental-historical path dependency. Before we turn to these issues, however, it remains to be noted that the spatial turn in cultural studies has nonetheless made it possible to understand that beyond the matter of forging alliances under US leadership between different, competing factions of national and transnational proprietors of capital, the political tasks assigned to the discourse of the West included the enclosure of a zone in the world economy clustered with what Innis called “monopolies of knowledge” constituted by technical innovation. The construction and protection of monopolies of knowledge has been a crucial component of the strategy of capital accumulation since the US-led rebooting of capitalist production after the protracted crises of the first half of the twentieth century, which culminated in the Second World War. This monopolization has been especially important over the globalization

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decades, as intensifying competition between industrial producers increased the pressure on the rate of profit system-wide. Here, then, is the other main fault line of contestation with which the postwar university has been riven: the conflicts between the priorities of pure and applied research, over commercialization and corporatization, in litigation over patents and copyrights, in struggles against biopiracy, over the emergence of the open access movement, and resistance, mostly ineffective, against the marginalization of the lone, iconoclast arts researcher by the juggernaut of Schumpeterian entrepreneurs drilled into mega-productive research teams. In their many different ways, these conflicts converge in a point of resistance to the continuing enclosure of the knowledge commons. The current crisis of the discourse of the West, coincident with the deep crisis of US world hegemony (only a decade after its alleged Cold War victory), is tied up with the intensifying contradictions of commodifying knowledge. This is a situation that g8 governments do not know how to handle, alternately investing heavily in their universities only to suddenly slash budgets back in hopes of striking the right balance between stimulating “breakthrough” innovation and installing an “apparatus of capture,” securing enclosure.50 Nonetheless, the possibility of transitions to low-carbon energy paradigms that Haley discusses also hinges on the outcome of these struggles against the continuing enclosure of the knowledge common, as proprietary knowledge cannot possibly establish the rationality of low-carbon-energy-based social and cultural practices. The current fiscal crisis imposed upon universities in Alberta as a spur to commercialization can then be better understood as an imperative of our petrocultural carbon trap: a tactic of system shock borne of the need to forestall the emergence of a new mode of social reproduction out of the multitude of innovations in the being of our times.

Time Bias of the Common Among the mediations connecting these strategic transcendentals of the cultural politics of knowledge to class politics beyond university campuses is the strategic significance of technological innovation in setting in motion “disruptive change” in the historically constituted practico-inert of the social division of labour. One dimension of this mediation, especially relevant to cultural studies, involves the

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speed of technological innovation, which undermines and devalues the experience and insight people might develop of the social and political materiality of production over the course of their working lives. Labour processes restructured from top to bottom and transformed beyond recognition from one generation to the next yield little by way of storied cunning and wisdom worth passing down to the young regarding the politics of production. The deskilling and planned obsolescence of labour power resulting from Taylorized line-assembly, then automation, and now informationalization, then, is strategically cultural and political as much as it is a tactic of class politics. Continual “disruptive change” imposes tight constraints on the capacity for sites of production to give rise to autonomous cultural traditions. What Marx theorized as the real subsumption of production now includes the mediation of popular culture by, on the one hand, mass culture, and by, on the other, what Lacan theorized as the university discourse of expertise. Innis’s diagnosis of the space bias of the industrialized world is instanced in such obliteration of the popular work culture of the past (and so of the future as well).51 Innis’s communication theory is thus helpful for formulating a critical cultural political response to such a situation, as his alternate critical category, time bias, points toward other marginalized, subordinated, and exorbitant poles on the compass, instead of positing a symmetrical, and therefore imaginary, opposition between a priori forms of space and time. To turn up the dial on time bias against the space bias of our present (this metaphor from the analogue world itself gestures to the temporality of its obsolescence in the digital), then, requires another kind of cultural and technical innovation, one involving a form of social and historical poesis that breaks with Eurocentric Plato-to-nato linearity in both of its dominant and widespread forms, whether of Heideggerian authentic civilizational continuity or its Foucauldian discontinuous opposite. At stake here is some aesthetic articulation of theory and praxis that very specifically takes up for its domain of intervention the temporality of the common. To this end, Innis’s theory of the bias of communication can help us grapple with a structural ambiguity in the concept of the multitude that this discussion of cultural politics thus far implies and to make the adjustments that will enable us to map the class contradictions of this emerging conjuncture.

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The multitude, as the “singularity of differences in common,” is meant to serve, in Hardt and Negri’s account, as a concept of class that builds on the insights generated by the literature and politics of intersectionality;52 it is in this regard that the theory is indispensable to our concerns here. But the possibility for the “making of the multitude” into an agent of class politics turns, for Hardt and Negri, on a noncontradictory linear advancement of Fordist industrial production into postmodern biopolitical production and the emergence of a knowledge society with a service economy where symbolic operations, affective production, and informationalization are all attended by both new patterns of migration and increasingly precarious informalization. But the whole world has not become Silicon Valley nor even are the great global cities of high finance and hot data cloning themselves universally. Hardt and Negri concede this by qualifying biopolitical production as the hegemonic mode of production: “Even though immaterial labor is not dominant in quantitative terms, our claim is that it has imposed a tendency on all other forms of labor, transforming them in accordance with its own characteristics.”53 Hardt and Negri claim to be following Marx’s method of identifying the dominant historical tendency here, but their argument turns on the most dubious reading of Marx’s chapter on historical tendency in the first volume of Capital. Marx’s discussion there has nothing to do with the succession of one technological paradigm by another or even the hegemony of one kind of social relation of production by another. Rather, the historical tendencies Marx is concerned with are the crisis tendencies of capitalist production, and his discussion draws out the implications of his insight that the more capitalist production succeeds, the more it paints itself into new corners, especially with regard to the capitalist form of private property.54 We have already noted how time is “out of joint” recurrently and enduringly in our corner of the world economy with regard to the crises of the staples trap. In any case, the undeniable importance of computerization and of services to the world economy today still does not mean that this process is without its own contradictions and that all production will become “immaterial.” There is a second difficulty with Hardt and Negri’s argument for us here. The very socio-historical processes Hardt and Negri point toward as the historical-transcendental conditions of possibility for the making of the multitude  – the proliferation of biopolitical

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services, new movements of migration, the “flexible” informalization of work – are also processes that have given rise to what Leslie Sklair and his colleagues theorize as the transnational capitalist class.55 In Hardt and Negri’s trilogy, the newly minted concept of Empire works as a narrative character standing in the place of the absent description of this class formation of the proprietorship of capital. We must therefore concede that the concept of the multitude is not identical to itself, insofar as it is structurally undecidable as to whether the transcendental historical conditions of possibility turn out to be those of the class agency of a new world proletariat or those of a transnational capitalist class, since, in historical fact, the historical processes are the conditions of possibility of both, as Hardt and Negri themselves recognize.56 This binary structure of the multitude qua transnational capitalist class manifests itself in two ways that will be important for my discussion. If what we used to call the “new social movements” emerged through protest against the co-optation of the old social movements by the postwar global interstate system, then the proliferation of ngos over the neoliberal decades can be understood in terms of the co-optation of the new social movements themselves by this interstate system (and, in some cases, new forms of class struggle against this co-optation). Moreover, the twentieth century’s global environmental movement is surely a paradigmatic example of the multitude’s political creativity. Political contestation within this movement, especially between conservative, elitist, technocratic, and astroturf currents in the movement on the one hand, and those working toward more radical transformations oriented by egalitarian concerns regarding social and environmental justice on the other, are then another manifestation of this binary form of the multitude. I have therefore argued elsewhere that the character of the multitude, in order to become adequate to the Utopianism of its concept, points toward its own completion by another character of class heterogeneity with contemporary currency: the subaltern.57 From Gramsci to Guha and beyond, the problematic of subalternity has entailed a crucial theorization of the social heterogeneity of class identifications and politics, especially so by theorists in the Global South. Gramsci’s inaugural appropriation of the term from military nomenclature alerts us to the relative and contextual character of

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subordination it implies and which then usefully allows us to highlight the intersection of oppressions as a defining feature of social heterogeneity. The multitude qua “singularity of differences” can be differentiated from the transnational capitalist class only in so far as it is subaltern. In this regard, we can say that the subaltern names the non-identity of the multitude with itself. Guha, however, introduces a new problematic to the theoretical discourse on subalternity that has remained important to a younger generation of scholars despite the various disparate directions the subaltern studies collective have subsequently travelled.58 This was his breakthrough insistence on a history of an autonomous domain of subaltern politics. For Guha, this originally referred to the autonomy of heterogeneous subaltern insurgencies from the Congress-led Indian national independence movement. The significance of this breakthrough for us today, however, follows from the vast expansion not only of a world proletariat but also of social inequality, both quantitatively but especially qualitatively, over the decades of attempted neoliberalization. The long-term consequences of this inequality have only rarely been contemplated, let alone theorized, though governmental rationality fantasizes this autonomy relentlessly through myriad scenarios of imminent threats to security. Nonetheless, in retrieving this old concept of “autonomous domain” from its use in subcontinental historiography in order to apply it to this growing heterogeneity of situations of subalternity on a world scale, I need to prevent a possible misunderstanding. “Autonomous domain” in my usage here does not refer to any kind of empirical space beyond the reach of colonial power but rather to what makes the reach of power necessary: the politics of subaltern classes, their cultures, memories, histories, and their claims and entitlements to the planetary ecology of social reproduction. We can better understand, perhaps, how crucial this concept of the autonomous domain of subaltern politics is for our understanding of our conjuncture’s petrocultural geopolitics if we consider what the “native rights– based strategic framework” of resistance to tar sands development and petro-state settler-colonial power seeks to make possible. For this is a domain of politics foreclosed by both the global governance infrastructures of green modernization energy transition and of climate change diplomacy alike.

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Subaltern Counter-Environments For over a decade now, this strategy of resistance has been building an anti-colonial anti-capitalist solidarity movement in which questions and issues of cultural resurgence, sustainable livelihoods, intersectional politics of difference, equality, and ecology are the grist of a cultural production and cultural politics that seek to decolonize Canadian society and get us to remember and honour the treaties of our history. As Thomas-Muller explains: in “the fiduciary obligation governments have to Native Americans – defined by our sacred treaties, trust relationships and other unique legal instruments – Native American and First Nations peoples have an important tool. We are the keystones in a hemispheric social movement strategy that could end the era of big oil and eventually usher in another paradigm from this current destructive time of free market economics.”59 Indeed, the poetics of this cultural production and these politics derive from the historical contingency and symbolic power of the treaties themselves. The treaties concluded between the Crown and some First Nations are above all a communication technology and in that regard are an ethico-political mediation of social belonging; in fact, they are what I propose to call a counter-environmental ground for the mediation of canals, railroads, and satellite networks that feature prominently in standard settler-colonial accounts of nation-building, especially since the earliest treaties established a state of peace. I appropriate this term “counter-environment” from McLuhan but bend it to my purposes to mean those experiences and histories sacrificed by the powerful as a pure beginning or as the ground on which they build dominant and authoritative accounts of the present.60 As media, the treaties are therefore singular in the domain of law in several ways: they are part of the text of the written document of the Canadian state’s constitution, but they are also oral traditions with their own modes of iteration, the time bias of which as such always remains supplementary to the space bias of the letter of the Charter. In so far as this text (which exceeds any opposition between speech and writing) mediates any trajectory of purposive analysis in constitutional reasoning, the written documents oscillate between the possibilities of being simulacra, corrupted copies without originals, and outright forgeries.61 Yet they are corrupted or forged in determinate ways and there is a determinate tradition of their interpretation as there is

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of their suppression. No interpretation of their prescriptions for us now is therefore possible that is not given to the domain of cultural politics. Such a quasi-transcendental poetics of the treaties has made possible a long-established tradition of cultural production and politics in Canada, which is now seeking to lead political opposition to big oil and petro-state power: “This multi-pronged campaign would contain elements of legal intervention, base-building, policy intervention (at all levels of government, including the United Nations), narrative-based story-telling strategies in conventional and social media, civil disobedience and popular education and a whole lot of prayer and ceremony.”62 Moreover, this repoliticization of constituted power allows us to specify more rigorously the significance of the autonomy of the domain of subaltern politics. The treaties bind not only nations to nations but also places to all kinds of beings and as such are capable of producing the Utopian sacred. In this regard, not only are they directed to the forging of political alliances and solidarities, but also, in the process, they consequently negate their own particularity in the making of something common. Indeed, this politics asserts that all citizens of Canada (and therefore also all Aboriginal peoples) are bound by and so possess treaty rights,63 and this is a crucial ethical supplement to Étienne Balibar’s axiom of equaliberty,64 one that is both a defence against the real danger of clientelist manipulation as well as against the instrumentality of articulatory practices and affinity calculations, all of which otherwise lead to a war of all against all through which Empire will once again triumph. Moreover, the recovery of constitutional legitimacy through the recognition of Aboriginal rights also depends precisely on this ethical supplementation of equaliberty. In the sense of this negation of particularity, then, one must now also say that the multitude names the non-identity of the subaltern with itself. In so far as repoliticization is constituted here as the forging of solidarities and as the negation of particularity through joining in a common cause of peace, the autonomy of this domain of politics consists of its refusal of both liberal democratic platitudes regarding recognition and deliberation (as these only involve depoliticization through assimilation and normalization by Orwellian empty speech) as well as of its cynical, realist opposite: the foundation of politics on a Schmittian line drawn in the sand between friend and enemy, a stance now shared by many influential

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positions on the theoretical Left as well as the white supremacist Right.65 As the counter-environmental ground to world-enclosure, the autonomous domain of subaltern politics endures in a line of flight from this circling of wagons, an evasion of this trap of transcendence, through an act of political theatre in which multitude and subaltern are imposters in an anonymous agon. In this regard, the native rights–based strategic framework’s radicalization of opposition to petro-state settler-colonial power not only articulates its politics as a class politics, a struggle against the enclosure of the commons, but in doing so also turns up the time bias of political mediation. At stake in this politics is precisely what the quasitranscendental poetics of the treaties makes possible: a subalternist historical imagination that remembers how different systems of oppression build upon each other through the accumulated violence of world enclosure; how this violence of the capitalist form of private property – whether with regard to resources or to science and technology, since these both belong in common – calls forth living labour power in a counter-environmental struggle against a passive revolution without a future; how we might invent media through which to think and act together once the modern-colonialist distinctions among society, nature, and culture no longer lead anywhere. notes 1 Government of Alberta, “Alberta Energy: Facts and Statistics,” accessed 30 July 2016, http://www.energy.alberta.ca/oilsands/791.asp. 2 R.J. Mikula, V.A. Munoz, and O. Omotoso, “Water Use in Bitumen Production: Tailings Management in Surface Mined Oil Sands” (paper presented at the World Heavy Oil Congress, Edmonton, Alberta, 2008). 3 Government of Alberta, “Alberta Energy: Oilsands Tailings (2013),” accessed 30 July 2016, http://www.energy.alberta.ca/OilSands/pdfs/ FSTailings.pdf; Jennifer Grant, Simon Dyer, and Dan Woynillowicz, “Oil Sands Myths: Cleaning the Air,” Pembina Institute, June 2009, accessed 6 April 2013, https://www.pembina.org/reports/clearing-the -air-report.pdf. 4 Imre Szeman, “System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 805–23, 806. 5 World Economic Forum, Energy Vision Report (Geneva: ihs Cera, 2013), 24.

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6 Kenneth Rogoff, “What’s behind the Drop in Oil Prices?” (Geneva: World Economic Forum, Industry Agenda Oil and Gas, 2016), accessed 10 August 2016, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/03/ what-s-behind-the-drop-in-oil-prices/. 7 Tracy Johnson, “Just How Many Jobs Have Been Cut in the Oilpatch?” cbc News, 6 July 2016, accessed 30 July 2016, http://www.cbc.ca/ news/canada/calgary/oil-patch-layoffs-how-many-1.3665250. According to Alberta government data, non-conventional (or oil sands) production constituted 76.2 per cent of all oil production in Alberta during May 2016. Production of non-conventional was down 20.5 per cent while conventional oil saw a decline of 11.0 per cent from May 2015 levels. Meanwhile, the number of exploratory and development wells drilled in May 2016 decreased 58.1 per cent between May 2015 and May 2016, dropping from 129 to 54, with decreases in all well types. For details see Alberta Government, “Economic Dashboard, accessed 30 July 2016, http://economicdashboard.alberta.ca. 8 cbc News, “Fort McMurray Fire Could Burn for Months,” cbc News, 8 May 2016, accessed 10 August 2016, http://www.cbc.ca/news/ canada/edmonton/fort-mcmurray-wildfire-sunday-1.3572369. 9 Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso Books, 1988). 10 Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971). 11 Yong Geng and Brent Doberstein, “Developing the Circular Economy in China: Challenges and Opportunities for Achieving ‘Leapfrog Development,’” International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology 15.3 (2008): 231–9. For the European Commission’s adoption of an EU Action Plan for the Circular Economy in 2015, which sets aside €5.5 billion of funding for national action plans; see European Commission, “Closing the Loop: Commission Adopts Ambitious New Circular Economy Package to Boost Competitiveness, Create Jobs and Generate Sustainable Growth,” 2 December 2015, accessed 24 April 2016, http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-15-6203_en.htm. 12 Bruno Latour, “War and Peace in an Age of Ecological Conflicts.” Lecture delivered at the Peter Wall Institute, Vancouver, 23 September 2013. 13 Joan Martínez-Alier, The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2002); Isabelle Anguelovski and Joan Martínez Alier, “The Environmentalism of the Poor Revisited,” Ecological Economics 102 (2014): 167–76.

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14 Clayton Thomas-Muller, “The Rise of the Native Rights Based Strategic Framework: Our Last Best Hope to Save the Common” (paper presented at Facts, Fictions and the Politics of Truth: Parkland Institute Annual Fall Conference, Edmonton, Alberta, 23 November 2013). 15 Andrew Leach, Angela Adams, Stephanie Cairns, Linda Coady, and Gorden Lambert, Climate Leadership: Report to Minister, Executive Summary (Edmonton: Government of Alberta, November 2015), 14–15. Bitumen mining directly makes up 22 per cent of Alberta’s 267 Mt of emissions with other oil and gas extraction a further 24 per cent while the indc calculations work with nationally aggregated quantities. 16 National Energy Board, Canada’s Energy Future 2016: Energy Supply and Demand Projections to 2040, Executive Summary (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2016), 5. 17 Pierre Gosselin et al. “Environmental and Health Impacts of Canada’s Oil Sands Industry,” (Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada, 2010), December 2010, accessed 4 July 2016, https://rsc-src.ca/sites/default/ files/pdf/RSC%20Oil%20Sands%20Panel%20Main%20Report%20 Oct%202012.pdf; Erin N. Kelly, David W. Schindler, Peter V. Hodson, Jeffrey W. Short, Roseanna Radmanovich, Charlene C. Nielsen, “Oil Sands Development Contributes Elements Toxic at Low Concentrations to the Athabasca River and Its Tributaries,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2010): 8–24. 18 Bob Weinhold, “Alberta’s Oil Sands, Hard Evidence, Missing Data, New Promises,” Environmental Health Perspectives 119, no. 3 (2011): 126–33. 19 Alberta Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission, “Creating Connections: Alberta’s Addiction and Mental Health Strategy,” Alberta Health Services, 2011, 5. John R. Parkins and Angela C. Angell, “Linking Social Structure, Fragmentation, and Substance Abuse in a Resource-Based Community,” Community, Work & Family 14, no. 1 (2011): 39–55. 20 Diana Gibson, “The Spoils of the Boom: Incomes, Profits and Poverty in Alberta,” Parkland Institute, June 2007, accessed 4 July 2016, http:// www.parklandinstitute.ca/the_spoils_of_the_boom; Julia Temple Newhook, Julia Temple, Barbara Neis, Lois Jackson, Sharon R. Roseman, Paula Romanow, and Chrissy Vincent, “Employment-Related Mobility and the Health of Workers, Families, and Communities: The Canadian Context,” Labour/Le Travail 67 (Spring, 2011): 121–56; Jeff Sanford, “Boom Town,” Canadian Business 78, no. 18 (2005): 96–104. 21 Albert Hodgkins, “Manufacturing (il)literacy in Alberta’s Classrooms: The Case of an Oil-Dependent State,” Journal for Critical Education

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Policy Studies 8, no. 1 (2011); Mike de Souza, “Royal Society Oilsands Report Went Easy on Industry: Analysis,” Postmedia News, 23 February 2012; Weinhold, “Alberta’s Oil Sands, Hard Evidence, Missing Data, New Promises,” Environmental Health Perspectives 119, no. 3 (2011): 126–33. To date, Alberta’s new ndp government has introduced a Climate Action Plan that sets future caps on both co2 and methane emissions and introduced a carbon levy with householdincome-contingent progressive rebates, and aims to replace coal-fired electricity generation with entirely renewable energy by 2030. For details see Alberta Government, “Climate Leadership,” accessed 10 August 2016. http://www.alberta.ca/climate.aspx. No new initiatives have been announced so far on industrial workplace safety or watershed management, nor on the province’s capacity to police regulations on paper. Zoe Cormier, “I’ll Die Doing This: Indigenous People Are Getting Ill as a Result of Tar Sands Pollution,” New Internationalist, no. 431 (April 2010): 12–15. Jeffrey Simpson, “Canada’s Political Reversal Is Complete,” Globe and Mail, 4 April 2012, A4. Jim Stanford, “A Tale of Two Economies,” Globe and Mail, 8 May 2006, A13; Jim Stanford, “Oil Prices and the Loonie Again,” Progressive Economics Forum, accessed 12 October 2013, http://www .progressive-economics.ca/2012/08/30/oil-prices-and-the-loonieagain; Karen Howlet and Dawn Walton, “Redford’s Energy Vision Clashes with McGuinty’s View of Oil-Sands Benefits,” Globe and Mail, 27 February 2012, A1. Mike Priaro, “An All-Canadian Solution to Alberta’s Export Dilemma,” Edmonton Journal, 3 April 2012, A1. Andrew Nikiforuk, “Canada’s Curse,” New Internationalist, no. 431 (April 2010), accessed 4 July 2016, http://newint.org/features/2010/ 04/01/dirty-oil/. Tony Clarke, Diana Gibson, Brendan Harley, and Jim Stanford, The Bitumen Cliff: Lessons and Challenges of Bitumen Mega-Developments for Canada’s Economy in an Age of Climate Change (Toronto: Polaris Institute/Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2013), 34. Daniel Cayley-Daoust and Richard Girard, Big Oil’s Oily Grasp (Ottawa: Polaris Institute, 2012), 12. Marshall McLuhan, “Canada as Counter-Environment,” in Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Sourayan Mookerjea, Imre Szeman, and Gail Faurschou (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 71–86.

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30 Ulrich Beck, The Brave New World of Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Scott Lash and John Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism (London: Blackwell Press, 1987); John Urry, Mobilities (London: Polity Press, 2007); John Urry, Societies beyond Oil: Oil Dregs and Social Futures (London: Zed Books, 2013). 31 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2000); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (New York: Penguin Books, 2004); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989). 32 Mel Watkins, “Staples Redux,” Studies in Political Economy 79 (Spring 2007): 213–26. 33 Harold Innis, Staples, Markets, and Cultural Change, ed. D. Drache (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). 34 Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. F. Engels (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975). 35 Innis, Staples, Markets, and Cultural Change, 140–58. 36 See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System in the Longue Durée (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2004). 37 Brendan Haley, “From Staples Trap to Carbon Trap: Canada’s Peculiar Form of Carbon Lock-In,” Studies in Political Economy 88 (Autumn 2011): 97–132. 38 Ibid., 113. 39 The iea’s pre-crash projections compare interestingly with the National Energy Board’s post-crash 2016 “low price scenario,” which projects a flat-lining of bitumen mining with the price of oil climbing very slowly from $45/barrel in 2016 to $80 in 2040. For details, see National Energy Board, Canada’s Energy Future 2016, 2016, accessed 10 August 2016, https://www.neb-one.gc.ca/nrg/ntgrtd/ ftr/2016/2016xctvsmmr-eng.pdf. 40 Haley “From Staples Trap to Carbon Trap,” 115. 41 Ibid., 123. 42 Szeman, “System Failure,” 808. 43 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). 44 Ibid., 284–328. 45 See Hardt and Negri, Multitude.

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46 Patrick Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 2006). 47 See Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from the South 1, no. 3 (2000): 534–80; Ranajit Guha in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988); Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed. Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996); Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 2 (Winter, 1994): 328–56. 48 Michael Perelman, Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); David Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Kalyan Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism (New Delhi: Routledge, 2007); Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (New York: Autonomedia, 2004). 49 Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 127 50 oecd, Education at a Glance 2013: oecd Indicators (Paris: oecd Publishing, 2013), 179. 51 Innis, Staples, Markets, and Cultural Change, 326–46. 52 See Hardt and Negri, Multitude and Commonwealth. 53 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 141. 54 Marx, Capital, 535–36. 55 Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). 56 Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 293. 57 Sourayan Mookerjea, “Subaltern Biopolitics in the Networks of the Commonwealth,” Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences 2, no. 1 (August 2010): 245–78; Sourayan Mookerjea, “Multiculturalism and Egalitarianism,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 41, no. 1–2 (2011): 41–57. Sourayan Mookerjea, “Paths through the Utopian Forest: Athabasca Tar Sands Development, the Politics of Community and the Common,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 38, no. 2 (2013): 233–54. 58 See Ranajit Guha in Selected Subaltern Studies.

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59 Thomas-Muller, “The Rise,” 2. 60 McLuhan, “Canada as Counter-Environment.” 61 Patrick Macklem, Indigenous Difference and the Constitution of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 162–7. 62 Thomas-Muller, “The Rise,” 5. 63 Ibid. 64 See Étienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans. James Swenson (London: Routledge, 1994), 39–60. 65 Chantal Mouffe, The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 1999); Greg Johnson, “Reflections on Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political,” Counter-Currents Publishing: Books against Time, 2011, accessed 11 November 2013, http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/ reflections-on-carl-schmitts-the-concept-of-the-political.

14 Getting into Accidents: Stoekl, Virilio, Postsustainability Randy Schroeder

On 6 July 2013, a train carrying crude oil derailed in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec. The resulting fire and explosions killed forty-seven people and destroyed much of the downtown core. A week later, Wendy Tadros – then chair of the Transportation Safety Board of Canada – declared, “We hold by the theory that no accident is ever caused by one thing.”1 Three years later, we might add to her insight that no accident is ever the cause of any one thing: despite new regulations proposed for dot-111 tank cars in Canada and the US, train explosions continue with alarming frequency, and we might wonder how fully such regulations can mitigate the risk of diluted bitumen, which is far more flammable than other fuels. Interprovincial warfare continues over pipeline proposals to carry crude. After Barack Obama’s 2015 decision to deny the presidential permit for the Keystone xl, TransCanada continues to look for alternate courses of action. Other conflicts linger over other spills. At a public level, all of these issues reflect a continuing divide between economic and environmental priorities. The divide includes those who hold that green values can drive economic growth and those who hold that free market ingenuity can solve environmental problems. It includes right-wing fringers who deny climate science altogether. It includes Anarcho-primitivists and others who favour deindustrialization. It includes the most utopian geoengineer. It includes almost any current position for debating petroculture, in that the dialogues usually assume a fundamental spectrum where “growth” and “green” are the limiting cases. This spectrum overlaps yet another, whose terms are “accident” and “solution.” But do these spectrums actually enclose our options for debate and policy?

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And do any of us, despite our better judgment, ever stop looking for the distinct one cause that will help us manage our knowledge of accidents? In Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (2007), Allan Stoekl rewrites Georges Bataille in order to theorize “postsustainability.” Stoekl finds little vigour in debates over “sustainability”; he views the entire conceptual field for those discussions as governed by anemic definitions of energy and toxic visions of progress. “Environmentalist” resistance to rapacious economic growth simply refreshes a more fundamental set of assumptions about knowledge and control shared between the growth cheerleader and green advocate. This set, in turn, reinvigorates humanist visions of a predictable “nature” open to continuous refinement. Thus, consuming and conserving subjects become mutually reinforcing versions of each other. Both attempt to efface accidents – unintended consequences, design failures, catastrophes – even as both acknowledge or endorse them. More on this crucial tension later. Stoekl insists, throughout Bataille’s Peak, that the desire to manage energy is intimately tied to the desire to manage the Self. Both desires will fail. He cites philosopher Paul Virilio: the “dromosphere” of accelerating hyper-tech economies creates a situation where both consuming and conserving subjects anxiously reaffirm the “freedom, autonomy and authenticity” that legitimate both “car loving” and “car hating.”2 Further, the fundamental desires to know and understand become toxic, managerial enterprises, no matter how qualified and theorized. Stoekl’s contention, as I understand it, is unique in the domain of environmental humanities. In 2007, Imre Szeman’s article “System Failure” identified three dominant narratives circulating in North American oil culture. The first, strategic realism, offers a realpolitik to justify continued economic growth based on resource security. The second, techno-utopianism, offers a vision of neverending techno-solutions. The third, apocalyptic environmentalism, offers a nightmare of accidents.3 Szeman – following Deleuze and Guattari  – notes elsewhere that capitalism is hardly a distinct social system, but rather “the specific nightmare of every social formation,” all of which necessarily manifest a fundamental baseline inequality.4 As such, all three narratives collapse into a more foundational view that mistakenly takes capitalism as the final horizon that circumscribes available terms for thinking

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the world. Stoekl would probably take this insight further: capitalism  – indeed, any social system  – is not the crisis per se, but rather the most relentless symptom yet of a deeper, more persistent, perhaps biological, malaise: the celebration of the species and the reification of the perceptible world in which that species must survive. Thus, all circulating narratives share the therapeutic, anthropocentric desire to sustain or advance a world for humans. The differences lie in how “therapeutic,” “sustain,” and “advance” are understood. Each narrative, partaking of the same fundamental desires, will have a distinctive and vexing relationship with a world that continually serves up the unwanted, the unanticipated, and the irreconcilable. In such a world, knowledge must always lapse into silence and complete intellectual failure, into Bataille’s aphoristic “non-knowledge.” The positivist can only characterize such lapses, mistakenly, as withdrawal or “mysticism.” Stoekl’s vision, in my reading at least, gestures at a foundational totality (non-knowledge) that is evolutionary and utterly resistant to symbolic management; we have rarely seen an authentic account of this “view” in critical theory, even though it must be immediately conceded that the symbolic, its narration, its narrator, and the theorist who asserts the impossibility of such narration are all “within” that totality, along with all dialectics of subject/object, inside/outside, culture/nature. From one perspective, this is very old news. All the contortions, no matter how erroneous, are objective “stains” on objectivity itself. But, on the view I am describing in this paper, absolutely no cognitive mapping, negative dialectics, via negativa, reversed Utopianism, Žižekian ontology, or other qualified contortion can seize, grasp, map, mediate, or otherwise contend with that totality. Nor is this paradoxical assertion yet another subtle, double-jointed, conservative ideology, but, instead, it is an invocation of the “nondual” logic I am outlining. It might be both hazardous and useful, then, to supplement the nascent idea of postsustainability with more specific insights from nonlinear studies, since such studies often theorize exactly those accidental consequences that complicate models of economic growth or narratives of environmental activism, and the available subjectivities that accompany both. Virilio  – currently the theorist of the accident – turns out to be the perfect philosopher for such a supplement. But not in the way one might first expect.

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Postsustainability But first, what would postsustainability be? Certainly not some “alternative” narrative for environmental responsibility, as that would draw postsustainability into the very dialogic field it critiques. Stoekl makes clear that postsustainability is instead a necessary and impossible vision that does not exactly oppose, but winds between conventional notions of sustainability. Postsustainability would demand radical reconceptualizations: first, of energy itself, no longer seen as resource, but instead as a scintillating vitality that is “unleashed,” “recalcitrant,” and forever insubordinate “to human purposes”; second, of the future, which  – as a result of unrefined energy – would become “fundamentally resistant to planning” and utterly void of guarantee.5 These reconceptualizations align with some recent visions of posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism. But Stoekl adds an intriguing twist to this emergent field: perhaps by letting go of our Will to Manage  – our residual humanist drives to define, predict, locate, control, and fix – we would end up receiving the very benefits that we have already given up on. Giving in might be a better phrase, in that one “spends without limit, with no goal, with no desire for anything positive or constructive.”6 The paradox here is that postsustainability may carry sustainability within it, as an accident; perhaps “social practices” that reject the engineering impulse somehow end up saving the earth “in spite of themselves.”7 The gamble would be to abandon sustainability as a goal altogether, and to surrender instead to a coruscating universe that spills over with wild, abundant energy, but also with accidents. As Stoekl muses, practicality itself may end up an “afteraffect” whose very condition of possibility is its own rejection.8 This paradox is both the axiom and the conclusion of Stoekl’s book, but he seems unconcerned with argumentative circularity: two of his main registers are religion and vitalism, where contradictions proliferate as “non-knowledge” at and beyond the limits of “knowledge.” A typical claim in Bataille’s Peak is that deterministic and instrumentalist projects – green or growth – are “inevitably defeated by non-knowledge.”9 A secondary claim is that non-knowledge – as it destroys humanist fantasies – may accidentally germinate healthier

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modes of knowledge which are literally inconceivable from within the current “space of knowledge growth.”10 For Stoekl, then, the problem is not to better identify what needs solving. It is the very imperative of the solution that is toxic. We might immediately wonder: Is there any rationale for postsustainability in a petroculture gone mad with instrumentalism? Geographer Nigel Thrift offers an answer in Non-Representational Theory (2007), in which he reaffirms the tradition of intellectual projects that are tentative, without requirements to re-establish the “heroic, individualized and autonomous action of a certain kind of activist.”11 Both Thrift and Stoekl resist demands to produce immediate solutions, to harness intellectual energy in service of building clear and proximate alternatives to the putative status quo. If Bataille truly insisted that growth economies are fantastical and undesirable, and if Stoekl truly thinks in the spirit of Bataille, then postsustainability could hardly plug itself back into a growth economy/closed system of knowledge, in order to roll up its sleeves and get to work. Postsustainability thinking would be necessarily difficult to accommodate or adapt for “normal” projects: it would remain heterogeneous, defiant of “sober analysis, quantification, and systematization,” tilted precariously at the “failure point of knowledge.”12 It would discard the commonsensical need to “envision the consequences of shortage.”13 It would move gracefully and gracelessly away from thought itself, if thought is imagined as sealed activity closed off from the myriad flows of the universe; postsustainability thinking would somehow integrate more “corporeal engagement,”14 more embodiment, more affect, and “reestablish contact with a natural realm of expenditure” that expels “practical distinctions and coherent knowledge,”15 indeed, is prior to them. At the same time, the posture of postsustainability would be neither ignorance nor lethargy, even though it might appear as such from within the space of knowledge growth.16 I think it important that a handful of thinkers explore what philosopher Graham Priest often calls the real contradictions at the limits of thought. For Priest, contradictory propositions are sometimes true; further, there is a mind-turning form of realism that holds that “something about reality” must create or enable propositions that are both true and false at the same time.17 We might tentatively locate that something within “non-knowledge,” and live with the

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unintended consequences of doing so. Postsustainability offers not consolation but permission: instead of exclusively mapping conditions of possibility, we are free to gesture at conditions of impossibility. We are free to acknowledge and fully accept accidents, to fear and rejoice in them.

Accidents A starting point for confronting postsustainability is the accident, that which is toxic and dear to both consuming and conserving subjects. As brute fact that manifests the non-knowledge arising from the frenzied application of knowledge, the accident might serve as an emblem of postsustainability. Postsustainability might be, in Virilio’s idiom, a matter of “finally taking accidents seriously,” acknowledging and opening fully to a metaphysics where causality can never be fully accounted for in time.18 But this implies that we are, at the moment, in denial about accidents. A first objection would be to point out, correctly, that accidents are currently all the rage, acknowledged and celebrated. Virilio himself notes that, according to populist doctrine, we read accidents as “signs and opportunities,”19 even as mass media stokes the seductiveness and anxiety that surrounds the looming major catastrophe.20 Sexy accidents are probably no great revelation in popular culture, where routine and carnival are themselves in perpetual dance. But accidents are also hot in design theories and practice, where one might assume they would be considered disasters, glitches, noise, bugs. As architect Dana Cuff puts it, “architects and urbanists might do better to appreciate the logic of accidents.”21 Her claim is curious in that she cites Virilio as support, turning his pessimism into optimism, namely, the accident as “the kernel of reinvention.”22 Graphic designer Amanda Bowers, also citing Virilio, argues that accidents are the preferred route to new levels of understanding.23 Her essay appears in Design Disasters (2008), an anthology devoted to the lessons and inspirations offered by accidents big and small. Steven Heller, the editor, admits that this celebration of the accident is perpetually compelling for designers and engineers.24 To take a fourth example: curator Su Ballard once again cites Virilio and claims that the accident is a force that shapes learning. Unlike her compatriots, Ballard takes seriously Virilio’s diagnosis of our nettled relationship

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with design failure: “it is no longer a matter, as it was in the past, of covering up an accident or failure, but indeed of making it productive, psychologically speaking.”25 Virilio links the surge and “success of Progress” with the necessary disaster, and the necessary disaster with “the paradox of the failure of success.”26 Today, the definition of accident is almost everywhere an ontological miscalculation, an example of knowledge as it begins unravelling to non-knowledge. Accidents are indeed all the rage, and a raging mistake. Philosopher Debra Satz reminds us that economists used to view “externalities” – accidents that happen “outside” the immediate economic topography as a result of the economic activity “inside” that topography – as unusual. Now external effects “form the core of the economist’s theory of market failure.”27 If we can monetize everything in order to complete the market – increase its range and make it whole – then externalities will vanish. Logically, at least, there will be nothing left to be external to in this pure circle of management. Put crudely, without accidents there is no need for creative solutions. Without creative solutions, there will be fewer accidents. So creativity – sparked by its own failures and the gestating failures that are always in utero, so to speak – must solve each accident in order to make space for further accidents in an accelerating cycle that is both clean and dirty, sensible and contradictory. As Virilio puts it, “too much light and you get blindness.”28 Who in the oil patch or green movement is going to acknowledge such strangeness? So within the jurisdiction of “knowledge,” accidents become necessary, and necessarily obscured, through a logic that simultaneously embraces and rejects them. The accident is both toxic and dear. It is primary cost and primary benefit. It is well-lit and shadowy. It is domestic and wild. Both consuming and conserving subjects are meliorists who must be periodic fallibilists in order to sustain their own meliorism: they are unwittingly devoted to a particular kind of asymptotic progress that perpetually approaches the limit of perfection but never reaches it. To take another spatial metaphor, they require, simultaneously, a pure and refined closed system of exchange and a crude and dirty open system of accidents. If consuming and conserving subjects, despite their opposed goals, are all meliorist gadgeteers, then it seems the accident has the same status for both: it requires knowledge and non-knowledge, manifesting either at the same time or in rapid series. Stoekl calls the

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latter “circular agitation.”29 But it is unclear, so far, how circular agitation reconciles with the linearity implied by the peak, whether Hubbert’s or Bataille’s.

Virilio and Accidents First, grant that in a petroculture – where pipelines open new markets but also burst, where fracking circumvents Hubbert’s peak but sometimes lights tap water on fire, even as it reignites the American economy at the expense of the Nigerian economy – ingenuity and the accident are co-dependent. For the consuming subject, ingenuity is entrepreneurship. For the conserving subject, ingenuity is the deferral or aversion of crises. For both, the accident is understood primarily as the unintended consequence. What about the unexpected consequence? Perhaps one of the reasons unintended consequences are “known” everywhere is that they are seen in retrospect, when the arrow of time can be partially reconstructed. In this situation, the accident can be understood and acknowledged as unintended. But what slides into opacity is that it was necessarily unpredictable and uncontrollable, not a purely scientific problem at all. Unexpected opens whole new layers of risk and possibility, uncomfortable realms of non-knowledge where it may be impossible to say with finality what is toxic and what is adaptive, and for how long, and for whom. If the Alberta tar sands produce a by-product called “petroleum coke” that is dirtier than coal itself, but producers manage to sell it as an alternative to coal that can fuel power plants at drastic cost reductions; if American oil refineries originally bought into and responded to Peak Oil Theory by modifying their technologies to process less “sweet” and more “sour” oil, only to end up with the means to process a wealth of unexpected shale oil – then the question becomes: Do we even know exactly what accidents are? In the idiom of chemist Ilya Prigogine – a founding figure in chaos theory – we can now delimit very precisely “what can and cannot be predicted and controlled.”30 In Prigogine’s view, science now inhabits the space between pure determinism and pure randomness. There is no going back to Einstein’s longing for science as a mode to manage “the turmoil of everyday existence.”31 Yet that is exactly how science seems to function for all actors in a petroculture, where the circular agitation of knowledge and non-knowledge is also the circular agitation of manifest optimism and latent fear.

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Enter Paul Virilio, philosopher of technology, speed, perception, and the accident. In The Original Accident (2005), Virilio offers a rich inventory of accident types and deep knowledge of the accident’s history as a knowledge category. He is, to my knowledge, the philosopher most fully engaged with the philosophical traditions of the accident as they collide with contemporary notions of the accident. He meditates on what we might call the “phenomenology of the accident,” whereby techno-catastrophe is sensed dimly by entire populations and attended by the conglomerated affects of panic, seduction, fascination, and claustrophobia. He calls the cognitive aspect of this affect philofolly, a knowledge condition in which we learn to love our catastrophes.32 Accelerated technology also produces an excruciating compression of how all subjects perceive space, where self-propelled technologies come prepackaged with their accidents on board, as necessary design features. So Virilio’s claims resonate with the postsustainability axiom that consuming and conserving subjects are inversions of one another within an identical field of possibilities. But I finally find myself surprised by my own close rereadings of Virilio. His vast erudition remains intimidating, and he has much insight to offer in both conventional and radical modes of thought. He accounts for non-knowledge: that much is obvious from his style. Further, he is under no delusions about his own commitments. He situates his thought accurately, historically, and unapologetically as religious, localist, cautionary, humanist, and even atavistic. I would guess that he thinks there are enough cheerleaders for “augmented” reality, and so he locates his often dramatic and apocalyptic rhetoric as redress to an imbalance in the public dialogue. But reading Virilio in the context of postsustainability, I would argue that he fails to clearly illuminate the accident, and instead continues a knotty tradition begun by Aristotle, a tradition that performs graphically the intricate feedback loops between knowledge and non-knowledge mutating in time. This performance is “useful” in that it demonstrates how a nascent postsustainability might work, so to speak, by not working, or at least by misplacing the very goals and rationales that would seem necessary to it. Virilio’s project, read this way, is “looped” evidence that Stoekl is right about the interaction of knowledge and non-knowledge: knowledge about the accident is itself rich with accidents, and could never be otherwise. To further complicate Virilio’s contributions, postsustainability would clearly

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partake of what we currently designate the “non-human turn.” But Virilio demonstrates how any nascent vision with a cautionary tone might partly lapse back into humanism, and thus itself dramatize the very subject inversions that Bataille’s Peak notes and rejects (in that consumers and conservers both share the dream of a world that affirms the security and happiness of humans and non-humans). The logic and terminology of the accident, as presented by Virilio, compromises itself in two ways: it shows the fluidity with which emergent insights can reprise the residual terms they hope to undermine; it reveals the uncertainty and anguish that often accompanies emergent thought, and the comfort that residual thought subtly provides. The Original Accident begins with an inscription from the Gospel of Luke: “Father, forgive them: for they know not what they do.” So clearly we are not in for an enthusiastic non-humanist provocation, but rather a lament for the denuded Greco-Roman and JudeoChristian traditions that have oxygenated Western civilization for millennia. In fact, we are in for a dose of exactly the useful, codified, fixed religion that is rejected by Bataille and Stoekl. It is no accident that Virilio is a Catholic.

Virilio’s original accident The Original Accident is certainly not analytical philosophy. Its presentation is typical Virilio: insights cascade abruptly from selective examples to collide immediately with new insights, all the while spinning out neologisms. The argument proceeds in a recursive and elliptical spiral rather than a careful chronology of increasingly subordinate claims. Terms recur in new contexts, subtly shifting their suggestions, at times their meanings. There is always a vast subtext of erudition and commitment. However, by reading carefully, one can reconstruct a latent but systematic taxonomy of terms and formal analyses that belies a parallel desire for clear-eyed perception and conventional knowledge. Reading Virilio on the accident is a curious process; meaning must be systematized from almost poetic aperçus, but that systematic knowledge, once pieced together, is highly articulated. Then it begins to fall into non-knowledge. It is as if Virilio grudgingly concedes that any knowledge generated in the dromosphere will be, at best, like the proverbial finger pointing at the moon, and not the moon itself. Thus his kinetic, hyperbolic

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poetry. Yet, like Einstein – whom he is fond of citing – Virilio wants the moon to remain as it is when we are not looking at it. He is both a phenomenologist and a materialist, who insists that what is given in experience is currently false and distorted, cascading almost beyond hope of accurate perception. Within the very world he describes and decries, he is the perfect philosopher of the accident, and the perfect accident of the philosopher. At first read, The Original Accident appears highly consonant with contemporary nonlinear and complexity studies. Indeed, the book explicitly references Edward Lorenz’s famous “butterfly effect.”33 Virilio describes the accident as what surges or crops up, unexpectedly, ex abrupto. He concedes that most accidents are the result of nonlinear causality in irreversible time, and, as such, will necessarily confound us. They are features of a probabilistic universe: they are not optional;34 there can be no perfect “accidentology”;35 it is time for us to begin “facing up to the unpredictable.”36 Further, he notes that a universe of accidents is a universe in which the valence of the accident is relative since nothing can be gained in one domain without loss in another, and the switch from gain to loss or loss to gain in a local context can never be predicted accurately.37 This insight would seem a key point of contact between nonlinear studies and postsustainability, as it abandons the fantasy that innovations could be adaptive for all humans everywhere, let alone all non-humans. Take, for example, how well-meaning attempts to go paperless produce digital waste, which disappears in our dutiful Western recycling and donation systems, only to reappear as a poisonous landscape of smoking e-waste in Ghana through a series of accidents involving everything from overproduction to ill planning to deregulation. A persistent theme in The Original Accident is the toxicity of closed systems, described so fully by Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers in Order Out of Chaos (1984).38 But rather than the vocabulary of fluctuation and disequilibrium, Virilio employs the decidedly more apocalyptic vocabulary of contamination, disintegration, strangulation, and catastrophe (at points, he seems a complicated version of Szeman’s apocalyptic environmentalist). Virilio’s argument in The Original Accident emerges most clearly in chapter 3, “The Accident Argument.” Here, he demonstrates how the foreclosed system of our culture follows a causal chain, where acceleration collapses

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perceptible space to claustrophobic proportions. Excess of speed and loss of space then proliferate accidents of knowledge. Accidents of knowledge then proliferate accidents of design and engineering. In terms of affect, accidents then become both seductive and horrific. Without time or perspective, we lose critical distinctions between the natural and the technical accident, and between the accident in general and terrorism or sabotage. Finally, governments and the media use our fascination with the accident to supercharge the simultaneous paranoia that results from this loss of distinctions, in order to legitimize accelerating innovations in surveillance and control that are beyond anyone’s capacity to decelerate or stop. The circle encloses an escalating pathology of regulatory feedback loops. One could understand this description as Virilio’s contribution to nonlinear studies: the introduction of speed as a key concept for understanding chaos (in its technical sense). But Virilio’s innovation actually abandons genuine “chaos theory” – as it was once called – in that it implies radical nonlinearity as something relatively new and resultant from accelerated technologies, not as an ontological maxim or as the discovery of what has always been true. Virilio’s casual reference to the butterfly effect serves only as a technical description of what he believes to be a recent phenomenon, of which the ubiquity of instantaneous media is the culprit.39 To contrast: in the highly technical chapter “The Laws of Chaos,” in The End of Certainty, Prigogine retains a basic faith in science’s explanatory and predictive powers yet also rearticulates the traditional implications of the butterfly effect: “the initial conditions of a single trajectory correspond to an infinite set … But in the real world, we can only look through a finite window.”40 For Prigogine, science must now acknowledge the accident as it is and chart a path between the extremes of determinism and acausal absurdity. Virilio, on the other hand, is scandalized by both the initial conditions and final effects of the dromosphere. He imagines a past where we were plagued by neither; he hopes for a future in which both will vanish. His solution is not to offer up a fresh Bataillian vision inflected with the accident, nor to soberly navigate the circular agitation of knowledge and non-knowledge. His solution is to diagnose the accident as a signal feature of modernity, then to hope for a better future that looks more like the past. To use a spatial metaphor in keeping with Virilio’s style: he wants to locate a ventilated place outside the closed

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system, away from the imploding energies of acceleration, a space from which to illuminate the key features of the accident before it is too late. All this implies an “open system” that is highly selective in its inputs and quite different from the radical, non-humanist openness proposed by Stoekl. Virilio’s strategy  – reconstructed  – is to return to Aristotle for key concepts, then to compile an inventory and typology of accidents in hopes of displaying more clearly the decline of our accelerated world. I read this strategy as discomfort with radical openness to non-knowledge. Virilio has recently noted his position here. In The Administration of Fear (2012), he designates paradox as the “powerful tension” that “cannot be overlooked.”41 At first blush, this seems an invitation to reconcile with Priest’s real contradictions at the limits of thought. But Virilio insists that paradox is not aporia or the symbol system tracing its own failures to symbolize; paradoxes of language and reference are in fact means of understanding homologous paradoxes in the real world. Paradox finally contributes to understanding: it is itself a mode of formal analysis. Working with and through paradox is a kind of knowledge management. This basic orientation guides The Original Accident, which ultimately displays its desire to understand in the traditional mode of the scientist, before speed turned science into a monster. Ironically, perhaps, we can compile an inventory of scientistic terms and phrases from the book.42 On the first page, Virilio wants to subject the accident to a “thesis.”43 He wants to overcome “deliberate blindness.”44 He seeks to “discern,”45 “analyze,”46 “recognize,”47 “examine,”48 “think through,”49 to recover “sharp subtleties,”50 and to “modify research and development” in order to better plan for the accident long-term.51 But Virilio’s most recurrent term and mode is “expose.” He is preoccupied with the difficult question of exposition, in all senses of the term: How, in a turbo-capitalist culture, does one display, exhibit, memorialize and curate the accident, without rerouting such exhibitions back into the pathological spectacle of the dromosphere that creates and exacerbates the accident in the first place? In other words, how do we manage knowledge, and thus the accident? How do we generate knowledge that will counter our addiction to unlimited and accelerated knowledge? Virilio never quite comes to terms with the question of how his managerial modes are different from the ones he deplores.

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Thus the typology. We might read it as Virilio’s attempt to literally go outside of our time and recapture Aristotle’s mode of knowing, where clear distinctions are made and labelled, then mapped onto hierarchies of increasingly subordinate categories. For Virilio, this format of knowledge is increasingly lost in our “flat” and rhizomatic lifeworld of webs, nodes, hubs, and links, as the complex argument tree gradually deteriorates in a frenzy of temporary analogic distributions. The difficulty with The Original Accident – at least in its own terms – is that the distinctions between types of accidents often blur, and the knowledge hierarchy loses some of its articulate, arborescent structure. Virilio makes a number of foundational distinctions that result in general categories for the accident: natural versus technological, local versus global, epistemological versus ontological. He is perhaps most interested in the global accident, the looming catastrophe within the totality of the dromosphere, for which he offers a bewildering array of synonyms: the absolute accident, the great accident, the major accident, the integral accident, and the original accident. The original accident is Virilio’s most suggestive phrase, used deliberately to invoke the “original sin” of science and technology, which are born “fallen” in that they are always-already flawed by their accidents.52 Indeed, the back cover of The Original Accident designates the “catastrophic grand finale” – the integral accident in which all local accidents suddenly align in a global cataclysm – as a kind of second coming of the Big Bang. To further the religious timbre, Virilio emphasizes how the accidents are, gospel-like, revealed in time. Within the basic category of the original accident, there is then a subcategory of phrases to emphasize how techno-speed compresses perceptions of space: the accident in time and the accident of accidents (the latter rearticulated from Aristotle). On one hand, then, Virilio offers an eschatology of the accident as an inexorable feature of demonic “positivist” progress.53 On the other, he pines for an angelic progress typified by Aristotle, who pursued the “whole panoply of beneficial knowledge” that would allow us to limit, control, manage, and finally better prepare for the accident, even as we return to our humanity.54 The religious poetry and the scientistic desire are difficult to reconcile. Starting with the category of the original accident and moving to Virilio’s entire categoreal scheme, one could almost write a book on the subtle equivocations, slippages, and ellipses. But I will confine

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myself here to a basic tension noted by Ross Hamilton. Hamilton does not discuss Virilio much. But he does offer a complex history of the accident in which to locate Virilio. This history is inaugurated by Aristotle’s attempt to categorize the accident, an attempt driven by the “enduring desire to impose order on contingency,” but undermined by “the difficulty of constraining unruly events to preconceived categories of experience.”55 Hamilton notes the early equivocation that results from this tension: Aristotle uses the same word (sumbebekos) to define both the contingent properties of substance and the unintended consequences of event. Thus, “at the beginning of the history of the accident,” the term already functions in two ways that Western thought has found difficult to harmonize.56 The first definition persists in some quarters of philosophy: an accident is a property that is incidental or formally unnecessary to a substance; it is distinct from the essential properties that make a thing what it is. Importantly, this definition is located within the knowledge space of substantialism, where the final, actual elements of reality are continuously present, discrete things (like pipelines). The second definition is more familiar: an accident is an event that is unexpected, unintended, or unusual. Importantly, this definition is more consonant with the knowledge space of process-relationalism, where the final, actual elements of reality are events (like pipeline ruptures, or the atoms that give rise to pipelines). Depending on the philosopher, these events may be discrete singularities, but they always exist within a propulsive onflow of relation in which no enduring substance can be said to exist, except as a temporary vector of clustered probabilities. This second definition would align with many varieties of nonlinear studies, especially those in which accidents can rarely be predicted with full accuracy, only understood and reconstructed crudely. Hamilton traces this “double understanding” as it sheds its equivocal patterns through early Christian thought, Medievalism, and Enlightenment and contemporary secularization, accreting ambiguity and creating an irrational, unintended conflation of substantialism with process-relationalism. The enduring result is a “fissure in Enlightenment optimism.”57 This “double understanding” is what troubles The Original Accident and turns it toward non-knowledge. Virilio, true to his tradition, is unable to reconcile or even disentangle both definitions of the accident.58 One of Virilio’s strongest claims is that technological

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invention – which so often serves war – is now almost completely infected by the logics of war, as speed evaporates all other rationales for innovation. So, accidents are finally not really accidents at all, but intrinsic properties of the multiple substances of technology. “Progress,” in one of Virilio’s metaphors, becomes the absurdity of the doped athlete, pathological with desire for “performance enhancement.”59 The result is both a property and an event: the catastrophe of techno-knowledge itself, which can only  – necessarily  – be used for destruction, regardless of anyone’s intentions. In such a world, both sustainability and growth would be horrific jokes, “life in reverse.”60 Because he wants to preserve a therapeutic past from his catastrophic sense of the modern event, because he holds to his eschatology and his sensibilities of exposition and revelation of substantialist properties, Virilio turns the Aristotelian definition of the accident inside-out: the unintended consequence becomes a necessary property of high-technology within the dromosphere. There is nothing incidental about it. Indeed, it is the defining feature of a cascading modernity. When Virilio claims that the invention of the airplane is the invention of the airplane crash, he already begins this conversion of accidents from contingent to essential properties, which are concealed, but also revealed, in time. Despite his scattered characterizations of the accident as ex abrupto and unpredictable, despite his insistence that accidentology is imperfect, that “there is no science of the accident,” 61 Virilio begins to resist non-knowledge under the imperative to manage knowledge. The accident is unintended, but not unexpected at all for those who serve exposition and revelation. Thus Virilio’s oft-stated directive to create a Museum of Accidents, in order to better awaken, remember, reveal, and predict: to manage. Virilio is a fallibilist who still needs the comforts of meliorism, and finds them in the consolations of a philosophical tradition that subtly confuses substantialism and process-relationism. The Original Accident proposes that – given the proliferation of accidents and the high probability of a final great catastrophic event  – we need to be fallibilists in order to save ourselves. But we need to be meliorists about our fallibilism, since we know clearly that accidents infect all technologies except the technology of knowledge about accidents. This specialized knowledge somehow remains pure within a closed system of its own making, a unique closed system that is

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adaptive rather than entropic. Stoekl concludes Bataille’s Peak with the claim that “no matter how we prepare  … we may very well face an intolerable decline in our civilization.”62 Virilio, given his desire to ameliorate accidents by recognizing them, would take out the “may very well.” He predicts catastrophe. He demands urgency. He prescribes luminosity. He desires mastery. All are knowledge, beyond the peak. But as Stoekl would say, and as The Original Accident demonstrates, such knowledge of the accident will always be defeated by accidents. There is no knowledge of the accident that is not implicated in its own topic. The dromosphere only exacerbates what has always been there. There are probably many ways of imagining how Virilio generates his own accidents of knowledge. Here are two. In the first, Virilio downloads the contemporary sense of the accident as nonlinear event to Aristotle’s basic categoreal scheme, while leaving the rest of the scheme intact so that the distinctions remain between property and substance, substance and event, essential and accidental. But the accident itself begins to lose its articulation as a category. In the second, the inevitability or high probability of the accident as event is a property of a particular kind of substance. That substance is the evolving constellation of technology and speed. But the admission of substance evolving in time reroutes to a persistent problem with substantialism itself: the very idea that a substance can be ontologically prior to both its properties and its actions (released into or received from “the world” of other substances). It is the familiar problem of presence, as it is called in continental philosophy. It is the exhausted Cartesian debate. It is almost cliché now to show how attempts to isolate and systematize knowledge of the world results in an unravelling of the formal attempt under its own protocols. But it is still an important cliché, and the basic point of Bataille’s Peak. It is the familiar accident of knowledge, and the reason why the category of accident is so hard to articulate. It should be clear that Virilio’s status in relation to postsustainability is itself frustrating and difficult to categorize. Unwittingly, Virilio enacts the suggestion that in order to “take accidents seriously” we must open to them without defining them. Defining the “accident in knowledge” is to sometimes provoke it. Such claims would be at home in Bataille’s Peak, but not in The Original Accident, which is exactly the point. Can we live with such sacrifices of

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conventional clarity and practicality? Can we redefine our mode of “definition” itself? Forty-seven dead in a train derailment is not a theoretical issue, even for the most resolute non-humanist.

A Different Double Understanding This essay can only conclude with a call for “further work,” suggested in very broad strokes. To summarize briefly: postsustainability thinking is a useful provocation in a petroculture where almost all actors are possessed by the Will to Manage; the Will to Manage has a bizarre relationship with accidents, which must remain both adaptive and maladaptive, revealed and concealed; Virilio’s Original Accident is a useful supplement, but only in that it accidentally enacts how non-knowledge antagonizes and nourishes knowledge; Virilio’s enactment is part of a long historical vector begun partly by Aristotle’s managerial impulses, in which a threatening processual world returns despite all attempts to tame it with substantialist categories. I want to return to what I think are Stoekl’s two most interesting ideas: circular agitation and the notion that sustainability might finally be the effect of dropping the search for sustainability. As it turns out, abandoning something only to get it back as an accidental consequence is a longstanding trope in world religions and nondual logics. To take one example: in Mahayana Buddhism, meditation instructions sometimes include increasingly subtle encouragements to give up all hope of taming the mind’s wild energies. Ancillary instructions will encourage the meditator to give up on actualizing “positive or constructive” goals, to literally sit as nobody going nowhere. One of the possible consequences of giving up these hopes and plans is a more peaceful mind. But peace, equanimity, balance, kindness, self-knowledge – these are never guaranteed and can never be the goals, precisely because goals are the root problem. As goals they defeat themselves. One cannot even hope to abandon hope, if that is seen as the problem requiring a solution. Instead of invoking circular agitation, then, nondual logic imagines knowledge and non-knowledge as simultaneous. In Mahayana terms, one who is awake simply perceives, acknowledges, and inhabits both a “relative” and “absolute” reality at the same time. If this sounds too spooky, the rigorous process philosophy of Alfred

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North Whitehead and his contemporary followers includes fairly analogous pairs of terms – “presentational immediacy” and “causal efficacy; absolute and ‘real’” – that express a similar idea.63 Seething processual interdependence and reified standpoint categories do not exclude each other. Nor do event and substance, becoming and being. The latter terms always designate small manifestations within the ineffable invoked by the former terms. The accident can be acknowledged as something from the realm of non-knowledge, yet engaged provisionally as something from the realm of knowledge. We both know and do not know what we are doing. Can this arcane bit of ancient wisdom be of any use at the level of practical policy? An important place to look is the “grey literature” on the emergent, experimental democracy of Bhutan, which is channelling a deep cultural history of Himalayan Mahayana into something we have literally never seen before. Bhutan has rich and evolving “interdependent” policy tools that do not distinguish between what, in “Western” terms, would be discrete phenomena (for example, energy and gender policies). But neither do those phenomena slide into some kind of indistinct monism. Importantly, Bhutanese policy tools always take the accident into account: they give it central ontological status within their policy frameworks. They understand it in ways that perhaps render the phrases “unexpected” and “unintended” consequences redundant or meaningless, in ways that would constantly elude Virilio’s Aristotelian and Catholic traditions. It may even be true that Bhutanese policy tools work not because they work, but because longstanding Mahayana sensibilities within the culture ameliorate the “failure” of those tools. But it would be a grave mistake to say that Bhutan is inventing a “Buddhist” democracy and economy that rejects Western toxicities. That would be to reroute back into “circular agitation” at best, the familiar categories at worst. That would be the kind of romanticized philosophical error found in much conventional scholarship on Bhutan – the reason why the grey literature is so much more important to investigate. To return to Wendy Tadros – chair of the Transportation Safety Board of Canada at the time of the Lac-Mégantic disaster  – we need to accept more fully that no accident is ever caused by one thing, while paradoxically attempting to anticipate and reconstruct accidents by isolating variables. We need to acknowledge that no accident can actually be accounted for, yet account for accidents as

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a way of keeping that acknowledgment alive. To re-emphasize in the spirit of Stoekl: such double vision will without question open uncomfortable realms of non-knowledge, where it may be impossible to say with finality what is toxic and what is adaptive, and for how long, and for whom. notes 1 Quoted in Kim Mackrael, “Series of Causes behind Derailment: tsb,” Globe and Mail, Alberta edition, 13 July 2013, a3. 2 Allan Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion and Postsustainabilty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 125. 3 Imre Szeman, “System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 4 (2007): 805–23. 4 Nicholas Brown and Imre Szeman, “Theses on Philosophy in the Age of Finance Capital,” A Leftist Ontology, ed. Carsten Strathausen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 48. 5 Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak, xiv–x. 6 Ibid., 29. 7 Ibid., xix. 8 Ibid., 13. 9 Ibid., 200. 10 Ibid., 204. 11 Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space/Politics/Affect (New York: Routledge, 2007), vii. As a social scientist, Thrift is hesitant to relinquish diagnostic tools, goals, even a “certain minimal humanism” (8). He is uncomfortable with penumbral invocations of non-knowledge. But his sensibility is similar to Stoekl’s in that Thrift is sympathetic to “constant war on frozen states” (5) and to “wild ideas” (18). 12 Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak, 18–25. 13 Ibid., 33. 14 Ibid., 55. 15 Ibid., 61. 16 Ibid., 204. 17 Graham Priest, Beyond the Limits of Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 295. 18 Paul Virilio, The Original Accident, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 13.

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19 Ibid., 5. 20 Ibid., 15. 21 Dana Cuff, “Design after Disaster,” eScholarship: Place: Forum of Design for the Public Realm 21, no. 1 (2009): 1–4, accessed 27 June 2016, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0rk7r6mg, 1. 22 Ibid., 4. 23 Amanda Bowers, “When Things Go Wrong,” in Design Disasters: Great Designers, Fabulous Failure, and Lessons Learned, ed. Steven Heller (New York: Allworth Press, 2008), 100. 24 Steven Heller, “Designing Failure,” in Design Disasters: Great Designers, Fabulous Failure, and Lessons Learned, ed. Steven Heller (New York: Allworth Press, 2008), xxii. 25 Su Ballard, “The Accident,” Expanded Documentary: Event/Document/Documentary, 20 August 2012, accessed 27 June 2016, http:// www.doco.medadada.net/?p=216. 26 Virilio, Original Accident, 95. 27 Debra Satz, Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 31. 28 Virilio, Original Accident, 100. 29 Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak, 201. 30 Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature (New York: Free Press, 1996), 189. 31 Ibid., 185. 32 Virilio, Original Accident, 6. 33 Ibid., 51. 34 Ibid., 15, 47. 35 Ibid., 10. 36 Ibid., 41. 37 Ibid., 93. 38 Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1984). 39 Virilio, Original Accident, 51. 40 Prigogine, The End of Certainty, 101. 41 Paul Virilio with Betrand Richard, The Administration of Fear, trans. Ames Hodges (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 69. 42 One could quibble, at points, with Julie Rose’s translation. For example, Virilio’s thèse, which Rose tends to translate as “thesis,” might be better rendered, at times, as “analysis.” Similarly, a phrase like sujet d’exposition might be better served, simply, as “subject of an

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randy schroeder exposition,” rather than as “subject of an exhibition.” But these are minor discussions. Rose’s translation fully captures Virilio’s connotative drive toward clarification, understanding, objectivity, accuracy, and mastery. Indeed, on this score the translation may be “softer,” connotatively, than the original. Virilio, Original Accident, 3. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 71. Virilio, “Not Words but Visions!” interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, in Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, ed. John Armitage (London: Sage, 2001), 154. Virilio, Original Accident, 11. Ibid., 32. Ross Hamilton, Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 299. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 300. I cannot even begin to rehearse Virilio’s debt to Aquinas, who took up Aristotle’s notion of accidental properties while under the influence of Islamic philosophy, nor to Augustine, who was channelling Plotinus, who was himself trying to reconcile Aristotle with Plato. The history of the accident is deeply accidental. Virilio, Original Accident, 81. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 203. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: Corrected Edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978).

15 Being and Oil: Or, How to Run a Pipeline through Heidegger Andrew Pendakis

Whenever cinema requires an image of “Being itself,” an image of things as they are in the broadest possible sense, it uses a standard trick. The camera is situated in such a way as to simply record a flow of traffic: as if by magic the sight of cars passing in quick succession generates a thought of existence as such, captured in its most relaxed and unselfconscious state. Soundtrack, traffic, plot: five seconds are enough to establish this passage from the incertitude of a beginning to the vaguest and least perceptible of middles. For an image of life at its most impersonal, captured in all its casual irreversibility, it is interesting that we today rarely turn to shots of clouds or rivers, but to flows of automobiles. Why, however, this easy slippage between existence and traffic? We have to admit that such phenomena tempt us into speaking of oil – the repressed condition of possibility of the automobile and therefore of the whole ensemble of automobilic culture – as an ursubstance, as a reality that singularly subtends and maintains our social order’s content and speed. Oil’s origins deep beneath us prop up this impression of a floor or structuring limit reached within contemporary social being itself. In what precise sense, however, might oil be conceived as ontological?1 What does it mean to transplant ontology into the domain of a predicate, redrawing its borders away from its original vocation as the general science of Being and toward the local parameters of an order or object? How is it possible to invoke without contradiction a specific ontology, the ontology of a particular stratum or moment? When we speak of the ontology of a period, what are we saying that is not accomplished by the language, for example, of “zeitgeist” or of “a mode of production” or even of “a Foucauldian episteme”?

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One of the risks, as we will see, of injecting substance back into ontology and ontology back into history is that one always borders on a betrayal of that which remains precious, even frankly incontrovertible, about historical materialism. For a whole tradition of thinkers ranging from Rousseau to Marx, from Hegel to Sartre, politics are directly ontological in the sense that the essence of the human, its deep structure, is its freedom from the interdictions of Being per se. The human, says an early Hegel, is precisely that animal the nature of which is its absence of an origin or nature. The human, in other words, becomes the open limit of its own unfolding political culture: a field, it would seem, to be investigated endlessly by myriad, determinate sociological inquiries. What, then, can possibly be gained by this seeming reversion to primary substance, this reduction of the sociological multiple of modernity to the hum of oil through pipes? Is there not the danger here of a grotesque oneification, a monotonous determinism grounded in oil? If the adjective “ontological” is to mean something more than “significant,” what precisely is the nature of this “more,” and what is its relationship to an older tradition of metaphysical thinking? Might it not be better to simply italicize oil rather than to ontologize it? I want to make the case for oil as a singularly ontological substance, but I want to do so playfully, very much aware of the way in which such a project groans and creaks under the weight of its own superannuated metaphysical equipment. I want to at once go beyond saying oil is “crucial” or “indispensable” and instead allow traces from an older tradition of ontological research to echo through a series of precise attempts to think oil’s singularity. Oil, I want to argue, is not merely decisive or axial; it is essential, but in a mode that is extremely paradoxical, multiform, and distinctly perverse. Oil is to the history of ontology what radium is to a corpse in any proper zombie film: it raises ontologies (or at least their ghosts) from the dead. It does so almost spontaneously, demanding of thought a return to older aporias it thought definitively dead and gone. It’s important to emphasize here how garish and clumsy this process is: livingingly dead ontologies don’t spring back into motion in a way that is a convincing simulation of life but stagger about bearing visibly the effects of their own putrefaction and decay. Here is a veritable house of horrors: Plato’s idealist metaphysics in which all of appearance and even formal identity itself owes its existence to

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the governing ideality of the Good, like being in the light of a radiant oil sun; Spinoza’s substance, God or Nature or Oil, expressed in a seemingly endless explosion of finite modes (cellphones, medicine, Tupperware); Thales’s monist arche, Locke’s ineffable substratum, Kant’s transcendental subjectivity  – all begin to jerk back into motion as heuristic devices triggered by the singular ubiquity and potency of oil under the conditions of capitalist modernity. I want to of course avoid anything like a crude oil necessitarianism, but at the same time stop short of what I think is a reflex counter-movement to a position which concedes oil’s importance, but as merely one node among others in the ramified (perhaps unthinkable) complexity of postmodern social being. We need to remember that across a broad range of cultural territory the language of complexity today functions as a coded injunction to waiting and seeing: its secret law is laissez-faire. In politics, gestures to complexity exist at the heart of neoliberalism’s claim to a truth beyond the endless fiddling and error of interventionist policy; in the social sciences, it is the material plenitude and diversity of empirical phenomena that are consistently thought to undercut the validity of “totalizing” Marxist or historical materialist theories. It is against this background of fetishized difference and complexity that we are tempted to imagine oil as an abject, nearly vulgar simplicity. This is not a One that internalizes every possible effect in the mode of the already experienced, the grey on grey of a determinist God or Fate. Rather, it is a provocation, a speculative oil monism one might think alongside only for as long as the idea is capable of producing interesting new conjunctions and political possibilities. What follows, to be sure, is a house of horrors, but no more so than the reality of a society that has passed so absolutely, so unthinkingly, into the humming One of pipelines.

How to Run a Pipeline through Heidegger When we speak of ontology we usually imply a knowledge directed toward a class of entities that are in some sense more decisive than others: ontological entities are those that everything else in the universe ostensibly relies upon for its existence. For Heidegger, however, ontology is not the domain of a class of essential or determinant objects (as it is in Plato or the standard Christian metaphysics).

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Its purview is not a nexus of elementary particles or forces (be it substance, God, or transcendental subjectivity), but rather a diffuse field of immanent relations, a “Being-in-the-World” that is more a state of universal affairs, a historical praxis, than it is a constitutive unit.2 Being notoriously relies for its essence on the existence of human beings; if Dasein were to cease to exist so too would Being itself insofar as the latter is the special preserve of the only entity for whom Being is an issue. Being is a relation, the prerogative of a selfinterpreting, self-questioning human encounter with what appears. The notion that oil might be phrased in the language of ontology is, then, utterly foreign to the project of Being and Time. However pervasive its effects, whatever its stakes, however central its indispensability to contemporary life, oil, for Heidegger, like any entity, remains irrecoverably ontic. Oil is soundly condemned to the kingdom of What-Being. There is no ur-substance, no fundamental unit, nothing upon which the human relies to be the thing it is; this is not to say that the human can be thought apart from its fundamental imbrication with nature, only that the Is-ness that pertains to the essence of the human lies on a plane parallel to such biological necessity. What is, in Heidegger, despite his sensitivity to time, finitude, and place, is formally universal, an anthropological invariant that does not so much pass through specific ages but cycles or oscillates between times of remembering and forgetting, authenticity and inauthenticity. Oddly Heidegger confines Mine-ness to Dasein and leaves nature in a state of process that is in some sense monotonous, an endless formal repetition of the same. This is an obscure point and one that may be in part attributable to Heidegger’s explicit desire to get away from anthropology and the kinds of history of nature provided by natural sciences like geology. What we have, then, is nature as physus, as a universalized form of self-appearance, but not as a determinate planetary unfolding. What happens, then, when an ontic component of the real skips the rails on its own finitude, on its own That-ness, and enters into direct relation with what can with reservations be called “Being itself”? What if a substance distends to a point where its sovereignty contaminates the elegant universality of Heidegger’s infamous “fourfold” (sky, earth, divinities, mortals)?3 What happens when WhatBeing breaks out of its own specificity and touches directly upon That-Being itself? This, of course, would not be a merely quantitative

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process, but one the scale of which absorbs the difference between quality and quantity itself. That is, it would not merely happen in the object, but within the indistinction of subject and object such that Being was historically and irreversibly petrified. There are other such candidates here: the atom bomb for example atomizes time, placing it under the spectre of a total erasure. The same is true of those nascent nanotechnologies that portend the infinite malleability of “matter” itself (literally making and remaking the fabric of “Being”). None of these alternatives, however, under-stand the present in quite the same way as petroleum. This relationship between the ontic and ontological in Heidegger is, of course, regularly problematized by moments of crossover: the whole of his project insists on the fact that it is only among objects, among and amid entities, that Being itself is discernible in the first place. That-Being, being as unconcealment of presencing, can never ultimately be separated from the Thing, from the Thing it nevertheless always exceeds and defies. Being, in this sense, is always locally produced for Heidegger, always an affair of place, light, and time. It is, in other words, an event. It is not simply the hammer that is encountered in its objectality, its quidditas, but the latticework of relations that sustain and enlighten it. This is also true of the bridge that crosses the river and in doing so worlds a place. In one sense, every object in the Heideggerian universe is capable of becoming the vessel of an encounter with Being, a point of contact or relay between Dasein and its own comprehension of existence. At the same time, some objects do a better job of repressing their ontologicity than others: the hydroelectric station, for example, is a machine that inadvertently transforms Being and Nature into stable presence. About the airliner on the runway, Heidegger argues that it “conceals itself as to what and how it is.”4 In other words, some objects in Heidegger appear inimical to Being; often it is their passage through mathematized forms of knowing or a standardized production process that quickens this antagonism. And yet there are moments in his work in which we are forced to conclude that there are some objects, some substances, that are simply more ontological than others. The house and the woods, air and the earth, are all substances that do more than simply refract Being: they either enter into a kind of analogical relationship with the thing itself or come to function as an essential

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structuring beam of its architecture. What happens, then, when the aspiring jugular of a pipeline is run through Heidegger’s fundamental ontology? How can oil be ontologized along the border zones of the Heideggerian schema? With all of what I’ve said above working in the background, I’d like to propose three criteria for the ontologicity of oil. At the same time, I’d like to lay down some thoughts for a future conversation between Heidegger, historical materialism, and the singularity of oil.

Oil as arche Oil is an arche in the exact sense consolidated by the earliest Milesian philosophers and extended throughout the whole of the classical period. The concept of arche in ancient Greek signals the idea of an origin or beginning, a “first cause,” but also, significantly, that which underlies and renders possible change. To posit oil as an arche is not a matter of abstruse cosmogony, nor some immemorial origin of things, but to thread the domain of appearance to its occluded, undemonstrable first principle. Oil is that upon which an enormous mass of extended, plastic Being directly relies for its beginning: it renders not just thinkable, but actualizable its very existence. There is an important double function here, at once epistemological and metaphysical: oil is simultaneously that through which the present becomes intelligible to itself and the very organizing principle or vital fluid by which it subsists. The profusion of form made possible by oil’s plasticity renders it an arche in the precise sense of an ultimately underlying substance, one that literally provides objects with the physical condition of their own existence. It is this “unnatural” breadth of possibilities, one that probably has no rival in nature, that makes oil an oddly feral God, one that almost seems to mirror the infinite creativity of thought itself. Plastic, too, has this tendency to feel like a form adequate to the infinite lability and scope of thought (or at least thought in the form imagined by thinkers like Hegel and Deleuze). As I will suggest below, there is a way in which oil’s “naturalness” allows us to imagine it alongside earth, water, wind, and fire as an “essential element,” but its proximity to synthetics and to complex industrial processes places it simultaneously within the jurisdiction of an almost paradigmatic artificiality and of an entire postmodern phenomenology of simulation.

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There is almost no aspect of postwar growth culture, from its reliance on the automobile to the commoditization of plastic, that does not pass through the conditioning arche of oil: what remains to be thought is how the resumption of ontology set in motion by the universalization of oil – and therefore the resumption of a new discourse of the One  – simultaneously laid down the conditions for consumerism’s spectacular plenum (populated by an infinite stratum of dispersed pleasures and objects). The question of the “society of the spectacle” then rehearses directly the Platonic agonism between appearance and reality, an “is” and its opposite, only to the extent that we do not counterpose Being and change but instead think falseness as a moment internal to the historical potentialities of oil’s plasticity. Oil, in this sense, is an utterly fallen, utterly terrestrial truth, an essence without transcendence or illumination. Oil is Plato upside-down: a Sun lodged in the centre of the Earth. To be sure, we are not bound to speak of substance in the Cartesian/Spinozan sense of something conceived of in and through itself, nor is such an essence necessarily something eternal or immutable (à la Spinoza’s infinite modes). Instead we can speak of ontologization, the becoming ontological of oil (more on this below). But what if we were all, for a moment and in a manner consciously antagonistic to Heidegger’s formal conception of Being as Time, considered as mere properties or modes of a primary substance called Oil, secondary echoes from an occluded x named petroleum. Often forgotten in critiques of Descartes’s methodic doubt, whatever its limits and ruses, its pantomimes of anxiety and loss, is its genuinely abject flirtation with the self-strangeness of the human: “I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams  … I will consider myself as without hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or any of the senses.”5 The fact that this doubt, with all of its rich existential echoes and reversals, is in the end little more than a detour on the way to idealist certitude does nothing to mute its power and bizarreness. Similarly, there is a deconstructive frisson (one part pleasure, one part horror) in taking seriously the macabre way our bodies, politics, and lives hang suspended in the monotony of oil. One way to visualize this entanglement would be along the lines of a Bosch-like bestiary of oil and bodies, slimed, plasticized, morphed, or oozing (contemporary art practices provide an almost

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infinite catalogue of these possibilities). However, it is important to go beyond those ritual images of tarred birds we so often use to think our moment’s capture by petroleum: too often the conclusion one draws from such images is an injunction to caution, better management, a mere tweaking of the way things run. There is no question, here, of a species side-swiped by externality (an adventitious “being slimed”). Instead, we are today made and remade in the perpetual image of oil. What shame, power, melancholy, or politics might appear here to accompany this disgusting reduction? How might the touch of one’s cellphone, or the skin of a diaphragm or condom, be allowed to crystallize in an impossible to ignore connectedness, an immanent, collectivist monism filthy (and historical) enough to repulse every idealist liberal “elsewhere”? Can oil’s contiguity do for thought and for virtual universalities what nature tout court was always too abstract and plural to do? How might such a monism counter the delirious and formally monotonous impression of difference, the endless temporal deferral and dispersion convoked by universal exchange? A provisional answer to these questions lies in the distinctly modern phenomenon of carbon-based smog. Smog, like snow, universalizes the particular, folding back into a primary relatedness things once imagined as separate and distinct. Smog transforms the space of liberalism – a space modelled on the bourgeois home or room and experienced as locally bounded, serial, and discrete – into the protosocialism of collectively shared risk. If snow interprets univocity as nature, if its oneness takes the form of a whole as old as Being itself, smog is its dark twin, a unity without wholeness or the grandeur of deep antiquity that emerges entirely out of human acquisitiveness: it doesn’t restore, in the manner promised by Romanticism, a fullness lost to science and capitalism. It foregrounds the latter as the unholy horizon of the contemporary, making out of disenchantment itself the groundwork for a “second nature” de-linked from all holism. Smog belies any claim to a nature untouched by the omnipresence of industry: its scope is too wide, its effects too intimate. It is wholeness become fatal, a whole alive in our lungs, homes, food, and children: it gets into everything and by doing so shows us that the latter is not simply the preserve of Idealists or revolutionaries. Said otherwise, smog is the gift of totality, the smoke signal of a petro-capitalism that always prefers to stay out of sight.

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Oil Is Money Were oil not money, it would cease to be phraseable in the weighty language of ontology. In other words, oil stands under or subtends the present only because it is also a uniquely sensitive region in the broader body of capital itself. Not only do oil companies occupy the commanding heights of contemporary economies, controlling immense swaths of Being, entire empires of material, land, and labour, but oil is itself preferred currency, an extremely common store of monetary value. At the same time, oil’s financialization allows it to function as a speculative instrument bought to produce money directly out of money. It is this direct linkage between oil and money that simultaneously exerts an almost alchemical effect directly onto the body of all existing objects in the capitalist life-world: a change in the price of oil is a direct change in the composition of the visible within capitalist societies. When we add to this economist Jeff Rubin’s thesis of a self-cancelling relation between growth and oil prices, between the growth which feeds demand and increased costs which dampen growth,6 we can begin to explore a reality in which money’s universality has reached an absolute limit, a point in which two primary substances suddenly appear to jockey for symbolic dominance. Oil, then, insofar as it is also money, or a peculiar intensification of money, is also a form of extraordinary terrestrial power. I do not need to belabour the full tragedy of this capture of history by the geopolitics of monetized (but also statist) oil. Oil in its double being as money and power presents us with the spectacle of an almost absolutist fiefdom: a transnational kingdom of manipulation and material efficacy that may have no rival in history. Before I move on to my last point, I want to gloss what I’m saying with an eye to the argument I made above about oil as arche. No substance can be deemed essential today – that is, deemed ontological – that does not pass through this determination by money, through this essential mediation by the cash nexus. Air, for example, is structurally indispensable to human life, but air is not the substance par excellence of capitalist modernity. If money is within the domain of capitalist sociality as close a thing to an efficient cause as we have, a direct impetus to the motion of bodies both human and inhuman, moving containers off of ships, moving workers into factories, then oil is in a manner that is not exactly metaphorical the lifeblood of

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this mechanism. Oil is, in this sense, the propulsive material that understands/subtends the symbolic propulsive materiality of money. It is not that any of this would continue to work away from labour or language, away from social imaginaries or whole ecosystems of micropolitical desire (let alone the rest of nature itself); it is only that amid the genuine complexity of postmodern societies there remains this bald linearity, this almost embarrassing reliance on a classically Cartesian mode of mechanist causation. In this sense, for a society that envisions itself as infinitely complex, as filled to the brim with particularity and individuality, one that holds itself open to myriad technological futures, money does in the sphere of psychology what oil does in the sphere of physical bodies. Oil, in this sense, is the embarrassing presence of a Plotinian One at the heart of a society imagined to be nothing but multiples of multiples: it is the scandal of a creator in an age in which there was supposed to be only creativity itself (that is, if we are to believe Bill Gates or Richard Florida). This a matter not only for the line separating the one from the many, but also for the one dividing the near present and its (postmodern) uniqueness from its recent (modern) past. Oil, in this latter sense, is a turn-of-the-century engine shamefully caught chugging away at the very heart of the flatness, motionlessness, and silence of the microchip. It is a bane to those who would like their capitalism effortlessly digital and green, de-linked once and for all from the limits posed to growth by nature.

Oil Is Death + Time Oil is very literally time materialized, time that has pooled in the form of a liquid. One might even say that oil is – in a way socks or automobiles are not – a singularly temporal substance. These latter, to be sure, are themselves temporally indebted: they too are indistinguishable from an essential encounter with duration. This linkage is erased in the case of the manufactured commodity: one is left, as Marx and Lukács well knew, with objects from which the temporal substance of labour has been systematically liquidated. Moreover, what Aristotle would have pointed to as their material cause – the raw steel or cotton that grounds the manufacturing process  – is unquestionably the distillate of time. In both of these instances, we

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are still in the presence of nature’s slow kitchen, the imperceptible time proper to the growth of all things mineral, animal, and vegetable. However, neither cotton nor steel arrives dressed up in the very form of time. Why? Because neither, it would appear, is an effective symptom of time, sign of the labour of the temporal. We must keep in mind that oil is not just time; it is death: it is the energy made possible by eons of concrete dying. Though air and water, for example, are primeval, substances imagined at the origin of things, they are not recognizably historical. Though both in fact have complex histories, a whole ensemble of critical eras and ages, water and air do not feel as if they belong to determinate geological strata, to specific or irreversible moments in the history of the planet. They appear to us like numbers or primary colours; we imagine them cleaning themselves, forever enacting the reproduction of their own essentiality. Oil, however, as we all know, happens only once: it is an arrow fired through history. Oil gushes into visibility, spiking gloriously at the very heart of historical time (it matters that its century is also that of the recording operation enacted by celluloid, the time of the sovereignty of film). We are witnesses, hyper-witness to this accidental essence called oil, this directly effective cause that is also the most Heideggerian of metaphors, a substance literally composed of death and time. A last thought: the reason it is oil and not money that governs the ontology of our age is largely because money itself roughly corresponds to the age of the end of any thought of Being whatsoever. It is not clear that money alone could carry the associational weight of an ontology. Oil’s location in an anthropologically necessary beneath or below; its easy slippage into a vernacular of repressed Freudian reality/filth (all viscous Id); its high concentration of explosive/propulsive energy and remarkable industrial plasticity; its deeply Heideggerian associative linkages with time and death: What account can be made of the chance or necessity by which such a substance came to lie so fully and appropriately beneath the floorboards of an entire global system and culture? Oil, in other words, conserves a memory of Being, the entire thematics and thinkability of Being, not in the Heideggerian sense of an origin that has been lost, but rather in the mode of a compelling proposition, something that was never more

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or less than a possibility for thought. It makes contact with an idea of Being, but it does so meekly and under the erasure of money, like a signal sent from a planet that may or may not still be there. notes 1 This question emerges out of a sentence in Imre Szeman’s essay “The Cultural Politics of Oil: On Lessons of Darkness and Black Sea Files.” He writes: “Oil is history, a source of cheap energy without which the past century and a half would have been utterly different. And oil is also ontology, the structuring ‘Real’ of our contemporary sociopolitical imaginary, and perhaps for this reason just as inaccessible as any noumenon in the flow of everyday experience from the smoggy blur of sunrise to sundown.” Imre Szeman, “The Cultural Politics of Oil: On Lesson of Darkness and Black Sea Files,” Polygraph 22 (2010): 33–45. 2 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: suny Press, 1996), 56. 3 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2013), 148. 4 Martin Heidegger, The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977), 77. 5 René Descartes, Discourse on the Method and the Meditations, trans. John Veitch (New York: Cosimo Books, 2008), 76–7. 6 See Jeff Rubin, The End of Growth, Toronto, Random House, 2012.

16 Petroleum’s Longue Durée: Writing Oil’s Temporalities into History Tim Kaposy Oil Temporalities Since the 1920s, the decade when petroleum became the primary fuel source traded globally, new types of goods and services have reshaped the culture of economies. Automobiles became moderately affordable. Commercial airliners flew a growing number of passengers. Fast food franchises generated initial revenue. Disposable polystyrene utensils and containers became the norm. Commodities were manufactured with the aim to deliver in an instant whatever was desired. From the expedience of these goods, economists studied capitalism’s experiences by reducing complex details to mathematical equations and discrete consumer choices. The mid-1920s saw preeminent economists such as Alfred Marshall revive inquiries into the laws of a commodity’s marginal utility.1 Marshall sought to explain the benefit gained by consumers who purchase a good in an amount beyond what they needed. His lauded formula typifies a disciplinary shift from macro-scale variables of production and trade to microscale factors such as consumer behaviour and marketing strategies. Fixated on the convenience this influx of commodities fostered, few economists anticipated the collapse of financial and industrial institutions by the end of the decade. Fewer still assessed oil’s elementary role in reproducing analogous crises in subsequent years. The economic integration of petrochemicals in the years surrounding the Great Depression, a time that established its current dependency, complicates how oil is written into history. With a few exceptions, historians since the 1920s have relegated petroleum to a minor or absent cause in their documentation of time. This is despite

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oil’s increasing influence. This long historiographic absence is the result of the emergent temporalities catalyzed by petroleum’s integration. In one sense, the convenience afforded by petroleum made material immediacy a defining quality of contemporary economies. Oil’s viscosity, its molecular flow, allows it to run through wells and pipelines faster than, say, the painstaking pace of coal’s mining, refinement, and trade. Oil ultimately makes possible “just in time” logistics in a way that confounded previous eras of trade. In another sense, petroleum’s accumulated effects in the form of carbon emissions generates slow, largely imperceptible, and irreversible ecological damage. These gradual effects include acidifying large bodies of water and dwindling biodiversity. Oil propels daily activity into a rapid pace (e.g. travel, meals, communications) while simultaneously incurring effects that are understandable only after decades of study. The total arc of oil’s life as a commodity, from extraction and refinement to trade and emission, creates temporal circumstances at odds with one another. If histories of oil seek to assess petroleum’s role in the present – an urgent task given oil’s ubiquity – these divergent temporalities need narratives that can distinguish them and explain their interrelations. Given the lack of concepts in circulation that describe oil’s temporal complexity, our most-read oil histories tend to default into a generic narrative that is interchangeable with other themes and topics. Consider a standard-bearing case: Daniel Yergin’s The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (1991) is a linear chronology of oil’s growing international influence and corporate consolidation. Yergin focuses almost exclusively on governments and firms based in the United States and the Middle East. His self-described “epic” coheres with a plot that leads from one powerful figure to another. From George Bissell and John D. Rockefeller to Ibn Saud and Saddam Hussein, Yergin traces the decisions made among the most powerful oil barons, tycoons, and statesmen to tell oil’s story. Unacknowledged by Yergin’s history are not only the aforementioned temporalities of material immediacy and gradual damage. One can also say that he pays no attention to the distinctly nonhuman temporalities of oil time. The economic integration of oil is made possible by its infrastructural automation. The waning social dynamics of industrial production, combined with mass migrations to dense metropolises since 1945, have greatly diminished the

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reliance on human and solar power. However, urban populations are largely alienated from knowing the extent of their reliance on carbon and the effects of its use. Our most beloved cities give the appearance of innovative growth. Their economies are arranged such that massive populations are consumers of energy generated by others. Timothy Mitchell notes that, today, “a much smaller part of the population now [handles] the production and distribution of energy, and they [handle] it in huge quantities.”2 Even though human labour is scattered ever more remotely across the energy sector, billions of consumers depend upon the smooth running of rigs, refineries, tankers, pipelines, and trucks comprising oil’s semi-automated logistics infrastructure.3 Yergin’s text provides few if any details concerning the independent running of machinery in oil’s expansion. A second non-human dimension strikes the eye if we are willing to admit that oil’s growth since the 1920s has had increasing climatic consequences. Such consequences are most significant if they are seen beyond the scale of human well-being. Since Yergin organizes his chapters in one to two thousand word increments, brief sections about oil’s futurity titled “Environmental Impact,” “The Third Environmental Wave,” and “Climate Change” constitute little more than minor asides about oil’s ecological impact.4 Instead, Yergin outlines three central themes of his text: “the rise and development of capitalism and modern business”; “oil as a commodity intimately intertwined with national strategies and global politics and power”; and “the history of oil illuminates how ours has become a ‘Hydrocarbon Society’ and we, in the language of anthropologists, Hydrocarbon Man.”5 The Prize’s argument is that geopolitics and human understandings thereof are mediated by the access to, control over and profitability of petroleum. Both temporalities – automated continuity and ecological contingency – appear to be distinctive experiences that demand narratives to do them justice. Narratives akin to Yergin’s, which put human beings at the centre of oil’s causes and effects, elide crucial details of what Roy Scranton and others have called “the Great Acceleration”6 in the transition from coal to mixed fossil fuels. Species extinction is one such temporal contingency that the large majority of oil historians have yet to accept as a common effect of the present.7 Oil’s imperium, it would seem, compels the historian’s complicity with traditional genres such as “great industrialist” biographies and

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their respective periodizations. Parsing oil’s histories raises authorial quandaries including from what perspective oil’s many processes might be told. To this point, my articulation of unacknowledged oil temporalities (i.e. material immediacy, slow ecological damage, incessant infrastructural automation, contingent species extinction) raises questions about how its histories elide knowledge that directly opposes the oil industry. Fortunately, for those who deal with the problems of writing oil histories – a number bound to grow – these questions play an essential part in challenging tacit affirmations of the global petroleum industry. Exxon, bp, Royal Dutch Shell, and the dominant petro-states try to legitimate their practices, no matter how insidious, no matter what their degrees of violence, with no questions desired. The historian faces an opposition made up of marketing firms, public relations officers, business operatives, and politicos who seek to occlude the realities of the oil industry. This essay takes up two recent texts which try to re-animate oil history: Lisa Margonelli’s Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank and Steve Coll’s Private Empire: ExxonMobile and American Power. The genre of these works differs. Margonelli’s text is a pseudo-ethnography, while Coll’s is written in the style of investigative journalism. Both, however, share the aim of representing the oil industry with a wide-angle lens in order to display petroleum’s effects within the global economy. Guided by the temporal markers I have noted here, I consider how oil’s history is written most incisively when it is situated within national and corporate contexts. Margonelli and Coll’s oil narratives recast oil’s historiographic forms less in terms of an anthropomorphic epic than as conflicts in which states and corporations seek an erasure of time’s markers. To interpret these texts further, the final section of this essay considers how Fernand Braudel’s longue durée historical method may help draw oil’s temporal complexities into history. Braudel’s work proves instructive for puzzling out the temporal quandaries of writing about oil, a task still in its incipient stage.

Pennies and Panic In cases in which oil is made a distinct cause of national and corporate histories, the results can be illuminating. In his 1999 book, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia,

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Ahmed Rashid all but predicted the rise of Afghanistan’s Taliban on the world stage.8 He did so by describing the group’s volatile relation to Middle East oil ownership. Linked to Russia, Turkey, and Israel via oil barons (and their geographical strategies, such as pipeline routes), the Taliban played a central role in what Rashid calls “The Great Game.” As the Cold War transitioned into resource wars, Rashid argues, the post-Soviet era in the Middle East became “an even larger complex quagmire of competing interests.”9 Russia, China, and the US, along with the region’s neighbours Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Turkey, competed with oil companies for control of oil.10 To be sure, narratives akin to Rashid’s have been reiterated many times since the 1940s: the race to control finite resources between nations germinates a conflict. What makes Rashid’s work different is that in his description of the struggle among states and companies to determine who controls the flow of oil through pipelines and across borders, a small disaffiliated terrorist group emerges as a power to reckon with. Therefore, Rashid grasped the geopolitical prominence of the Taliban well before the War on Terror. Historians rarely attune themselves to energy’s intrinsic place in statecraft. Making oil a cause of national development, as Rashid does for Pakistan, helps to shed light on the less understood conflicts that populations endure. But writing oil’s presence into recent national histories has rarely altered official chronology and the form in which the story is told. For the most part, oil has a glaringly incidental role in the representation of national development. This is especially true for recent histories of the world’s largest petroleum producers (e.g. Russia, Saudi Arabia, the US, Iran, China, Iraq).11 Whether the case is Pakistan or Afghanistan or elsewhere, the national genre of oil history relegates petroleum production to a minor variable. What might a national history look like when it includes oil as a primary force? What might oil’s inclusion reveal about national history and what distinct oil temporality emerges from this type of writing? One of the most widely read chronicles of the petroleum industry was published to critical and popular acclaim in 2007 by Lisa Margonelli. Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank is best read as two separate texts. The first section of the book is told on US soil, and the second is told from oil-producing countries. In the initial pages, the reader encounters gas station

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salespeople, financiers, consumers, and land speculators – the “front line managers” of the US industry. Margonelli retells their stories in order to bear witness to oil’s commodity chain links. Breaking down the monolithic image of the “oil industry” into its component parts, she shows how oil speculation and the securing of mineral rights leads to extraction, refinement as automobile fuel, global shipment (including storage in government facilities), and finally consumption. As a net consumer of petroleum, the US’s commodity chain reads, in Margonelli’s collection of various viewpoints, as struggling to meet its changing demands and contend with a growing number of small-scale crises. In the first half of her book, Margonelli searches for an accurate but expanded definition of cost – that is, what is the cost the petroleum industry incurs on those who work within it? She adeptly unravels the idea that monetary value ties together the industry’s separate activities. One might assume that the price of oil, listed alongside the Dow Jones and Nasdaq on computer screens, is a truthful index of the cost of producing oil. Is not profitability the true measure of the oil industry’s growth? Margonelli refutes this assumption and expands the concept of cost to include non-monetary value. For example, in the chapter “Drilling Rig,” she reads a report on tax incentives written by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission. Margonelli remarks that due to the daily fluctuations of the price of oil, “it behooves everyone to understand the cost of ‘cheap’ energy.”12 Her imperative is aimed at US consumers. She asks the reader to discern how costs rise at times when oil prices decrease. “Cost” differs from price in an interminable way that demands consumers (i.e. a US reader in oil’s commodity chain) try to see the big picture of the industry producing and trafficking its commodities. Although the price of gas narrows one’s ability to rationalize oil’s larger consequences, Margonelli uses “the penny” as a symptom of oil’s proliferating externalities: “I see hidden pennies everywhere – from health effects of air pollution to the social cost of human rights violations in oil producing countries to the money used by the U.S. military to police oil shipping lanes.”13 The penny is a precise image to signify the US industry’s externalities. Defined as an unintended side effect of an industrial activity, oil industry externalities have the regulatory effect of slowing the speed in which the commodity

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runs its course from extraction to emission. With more externalities that become apparent, more regulation is required to address its by-products. An expanded concept of cost, in Margonelli’s estimation, is a pitiful but instructive concept that puts into relief the increasing number of automated aspects of the oil industry. Oil catalyzes so many industries across a nation that most net consumers will go into debt to develop, modernize, and innovate their particular niches. “So if there’s no real price limit on how much we spend,” she writes, “and no larger economic rationality to our fuel use, what’s to fence us in? Not much.”14 As a result, the most automated of oil consuming cultures (the US, China, the European Union, Japan, etc.) are those who are least likely to address the end of oil and its significance for their nation’s future. Margonelli uses no definition or theory of automation in her account. Rather, the incessant running of one sub-industry (extraction, tanker transport, pipelines, financial futures) into another shows that the oil commodity as a resource would falter without their coordination. Most of this coordination is organized by national economies and their regulators rather than the standalone industry. Margonelli’s second insight about net oil consumer nations arises in relation to the topic of risk. Her chapters describe the panic caused by oil’s dangers. Her accounts span from the topsy-turvy stress of gas station attendants to the difficulty of proposing national solutions to what are transnational crises (e.g. acute disasters, health trends, climate change). Here we read that most gas stations clear minimal profits daily, balancing their books with money made from candy and cigarettes. Margonelli is aware that her observations in the specific locales that make up her text comprise a system of booms and busts. National and regional variations of oil history separate what are its useful global periodizations, some of which Margonelli mentions, like 1870–1912 (Standard Oil), 1920 (technological and trade breakthroughs), 1945 (post–Second World War consolidation of oil cartels), 1961 (opec), and 1973 (the oil shock). But when Margonelli steps back from the details of her reportage and evaluates the frantic activity of the oil sector, she asks what policies and political actions will slow the rate of fossil fuel consumption and quell risk. Oil prices lead her to say that many of the private risks compound to create irreparable social and ecological costs: “Because

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the political melodrama around gas prices is largely a delaying tactic, oil companies, which work on timelines of ten to fifteen years, have figured out how to harness public anger for their own ends. They view anxiety over gas prices as an opportunity to change environmental laws. When prices are high … public opinion swings in favor of offshore drilling, drilling in parklands, and other moves that are unthinkable to voters when prices are low.”15 Margonelli’s writing style allows her to raise this key insight. The repeated panics that fuel a politics of consumer activism – over increasing prices, for instance – subjugates the citizen into the consumer role for an indeterminate time. If the subject position of citizen gives way to concerned oil consumer, then oil industry marketing has done its job effectively. Heightening the panic of populations to concern themselves with risk is a remarkably effective way to narrow their view on the social significance of the industry. The second, much less detailed part of the book recounts five visits to the petro-states of Venezuela, Chad, Iran, Nigeria, and China. These chapters delve into the social effects created by the dominance of oil production in each nation’s economy. Margonelli’s witness to these five countries is informed by the gasoline commodity chain arc. However, the national temporality of oil  – call it “nonsynchronicity”  – is more apparent from a reading of the overall book. In the global context of oil consumers versus oil producers, Margonelli conceives of a combined unevenness of oil’s temporalities. This is to say that no one nation, theory, time frame, or point of reference anchors our understanding of the industry in place. One cannot simply assert that oil is “ubiquitous” or “universal” without first explaining its precarious and historically contingent organization across time and space. In Oil on the Brain’s five non-US, international chapters, Margonelli confronts the potential illusions that English-language readers might have that oil producers are simply oppressive regimes. As a witness to Tehran’s calm, in her chapter on Iran she ascribes socially ameliorating properties to the national possession of abundant fuel: Gasoline holds Iran together. Tehran has 3 million cars, all burning copious quantities of fuel that costs just 34 cents a gallon. Gasoline is at the heart of the government’s pact with

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the governed, and prices must be kept artificially low. Because it is so cheap, gasoline consumption is rising by 10 percent a year, contributing to the city’s spectacular traffic jams. In a country with unemployment of as much as 15 to 20 percent, cars and gasoline are a balm for life with few prospects. And while many aspects of life in the city are repressive, traffic rules are not.16 Margonelli pictures Iran’s oil culture in more rudimentary prose than does Rashid. Whereas Rashid describes oil-producing nations in the “Great Game” as if from above, Margonelli’s street view provides her with images of oil’s use. Similar to the way she follows the commodity’s trajectory in the US, she links the social ills and livelihoods of petro-states like Iran and Venezuela’s populations to the full arc of the commodity. Her point is that oil may be the most revealing historical symptom by which one can interpret and understand national identity. In her book’s epilogue, Margonelli speculates about possible stopgap prescriptions for alleviating oil crises. She includes an argument that cities and insurance companies might provide incentives for petroleum producers (e.g., ExxonMobil) and institutions (opec) to limit emissions and develop meaningful alternative energy sources. These prescriptions are a necessary component of any history – the historian must respond to the narrative he or she has provided. As we shall see in the next section, the absence of commentary potentially mars the political viability of the writing. A politics of oil historiography bases itself on more than the accurate reconstruction of events as they occurred. In the case of Exxon, the world’s most profitable oil company, a history of its processes anticipates that no narration of its events can occur without political judgment.

Erasure Influenced by arguably the most circulated oil history to date, Yergin’s The Prize, Steve Coll’s Private Empire is based on extensive investigative research of the world’s biggest privately owned oil producer, ExxonMobil. Buoyed by The United States’ Freedom of Information Act, Coll’s research grew out of waves of memoranda he received from the US State Department that detailed the influence

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of Exxon on a planetary scale. For every exposé of oil’s destructive trade, we find that oil companies – Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, ExxonMobil, bp, and Royal Dutch Shell (to name the wealthiest) – silence attempts to delineate alternatives to oil. Since at least 1945, these corporate regimes have worked diligently through lawyers, lobbyists, public relations officers, advertisement campaigns, and marketing strategies to efface the realities of oil production and its effects. If national oil histories use oil as a signifier of future prosperity, corporate strategies reduce oil’s complicated narratives to mere images or seek their erasure entirely. A joke circulating through Exxon’s public affairs department in the early 2000s was that their primary media strategy “was to say ‘no comment’ in fifty different languages.”17 Exxon has a notoriously secretive public relations protocol. Their marketing strategy is to minimize or erase any oil narrative that may attract public scrutiny. Coll’s study is bookended by two iconic ecological disasters. The text begins with an intimate, in-the-captain’s-quarters account of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and it ends with an insider’s recounting of the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010 (the largest offshore oil spill in the history of the United States). Coll provides intimate portraits of Joseph Hazelwood, captain of the Valdez, and of the engineers housed on bp’s oil rig. He recounts these disasters as a stinging indictment of the sizable cost of the industry’s operational flaws. Coll’s history of Exxon is partially based in the decisions and protocols of an organization managing potential financial disasters and violently intervening against populist revolts. In detailing how the firm hires operatives to refinance its public holdings and engineer proxy wars for the control of oil-rich lands, Coll’s central conceit in his book is that a risk-prone company such as Exxon handles contingencies with a blend of political collusion and consistent refinancing to spur greater control over, and accumulation from, new oil fields. At its heart, the corporate narrative of growth based in profitability at any cost is one companies would prefer to tell themselves without public interlocutors. Between two of “Big Oil’s” landmark North American disasters, Coll employs the type of humanist periodization I questioned earlier: the ceo tenures of Exxon’s Lee Raymond and Rex Tillerson frame the book’s overall story. Spanning the early 1990s until 2006, Raymond’s leadership is explained as the reason for the company’s

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growth and competitiveness after the oil shocks of 1973. In this sense, Coll’s narrative becomes less about petroleum than about the perils of business leadership. For example, Coll describes Raymond’s personality, decision-making, and lifestyle choices in a way that conjures a mythos of leadership: “Raymond ruled over ExxonMobil in the manner of an emir.”18 These personal details reduce Coll’s potentially expansive petroleum history into one about useful business practices and anecdotes. He lessens what can be learned from the carbon footprint of such an institution. The most glaring omission from Coll’s history is any trace of judgment or summary. Where Margonelli ends her work by addressing possible solutions to the growing challenges of petroculture (e.g. legal prohibition of excess and financial incentives), Coll makes no claim to survey the material immediacy, slowly accumulating effects, irreversible damages, automated continuities, spiked panics, or unevenness while portraying ExxonMobil. Content to allow the details of his formidable history explain how this private firm contends with risks as it tries to grow, Coll seems more intrigued than troubled by the risk-diminishing management culture of Exxon’s geological speculation and production. The tension in Coll’s narrative consists in whether Exxon faces too many ecological and political risks for it to continue to develop as an institution over time. In this sense, Exxon is a fine example of the way short-term competition prevents corporations from grasping the finitude of resources that make them wealthy and powerful. Coll never directly renders judgment on Exxon’s long-term planning. Instead, he wonders to what effects Exxon might export its business model to other oil institutions. Using the example of its safety regulations and a decreasing rate of spills, he writes, “even if one accepted that ExxonMobil’s own safety and self-regulatory record was exemplary, relative to peers, and even if one assumed that the corporation’s relatively vigilant internal practices would endure indefinitely, without ever deteriorating again, how [does] Exxon propose to ensure that every other corporation in the oil industry adopted its standards, if not by government regulation?”19 Whereas Margonelli’s history seeks to proliferate the consequences of oil commodification in the national context, Coll’s institutional history brackets details of the ecological forces in which Exxon’s livelihood is effectively based. The replacement of inhuman forces

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with distinctly executive strategy shows that Coll’s sentences are akin to the details of memoranda exchanged between “decisionmakers.” Other more contentious questions pertaining to Coll’s history, including the fixity of corporate power exacerbating global crises, are tentatively raised but left unexamined. What then do we make of Exxon’s erasure of oil’s temporalities? If Coll is perhaps too immersed in the history of the organization to judge its censorship of the past, where might we look for guidance? The renowned artist Maya Lin’s 2009 art installation What Is Missing? enumerates the increase of extinct species and habitats over the last half century. Lin’s work provides a visible counter to the omission of climate change facts in American science institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History. The museum is largely funded by industry donors such as Exxon and the industrialist brothers David and Charles Koch, who have campaigned to block access to public knowledge of climate science. What Is Missing? is a multimedia project that brings together video installations, monographs, and an interactive Internet site to source and disseminate information about climate change’s effects of planet-wide exterminations and decreasing biodiversity. Lin describes the central rift of immediacy as one of remembrance: “We have actually forgotten how abundant the planet used to be and I think if I can pique your memory and make you realize how incredible biodiversity was in your own backyard, then maybe it is going to spur you to action.”20 An invitation to action in lieu of solemnly witnessing oil disaster (and the “slow violence” of climate change that gives it rise) marks a sea change in the visual form of historiography. Lin’s project draws its impetus from a waning of ecological memory. She asks: Is extinction itself a trait of the present under erasure? The answer, and the success of her work, is predicated on how well audiences interface with the work to provide (or “crowdsource”) details of species facing extinction or those already lost to our changing climate. This type of engagement is a quality lacking from one’s reading of Coll’s Exxon history. To address the difficulty of non-human forces of history and how these are reckoned with as a task of historiography, I turn in the final section to the ideas of Fernand Braudel. His specification of the problems faced when writing divergent temporalities into history assists in clarifying how oil histories might be represented in ways different from the examples we have considered thus far.

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The longue durée Fernand Braudel’s writings have helped to recast both the genre and institutional practices of history since the 1940s. Braudel’s leadership in taking the journal Annales from a prominent periodical in France to a paradigm-shifting school of thought is perhaps the most drastic reframing of historiography’s central tenets. “The Annales School,” Immanuel Wallerstein recounts, “asserted holism against ‘segmentalized thought’ – the economic and social roots against the political façade, the longue durée against événementiel, ‘global man’ against fractional man.”21 Braudel recounts the disciplinary crisis of history in his “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée.” Anticipating the need for a study of the polysemic and contradictory nature of historical temporalities, Braudel argues: “nothing is more important … than this living, intimate, infinitely repeated opposition between the instantaneous and the time that flows slowly. Whether we are dealing with the past or the present, an awareness of the plurality of temporalities is indispensable to a common methodology of the human sciences.”22 Braudel lauds researchers who engage in productive debates concerning how humanity might improve its self-understanding, and he laments how historical writing increasingly contends with “the agitated frontier of the short term.”23 Braudel’s method invites historians to enlarge a period of time but maintain the accuracy of its details. His essay offers insights for the writing of history; I pare these down to three examples to make a Braudelian through-line for the history of petroleum. First, Braudel explains that “a new mode of historical narrative is emerging. Let us call it the ‘recitative’ of the cyclical phase (conjoncture), the cycle, even the ‘intercycle,’ which offered us time lengths of a dozen years, a quarter century, and the longest, the half century.”24 His discussion of cyclical history stops short of the claim that the model provides all the answers, but its focus on patterns gives the historian a useful tool to debunk the notion that the passage of time is like an utterly unique swath of fabric fraying in as many directions as threads. Wallerstein claims that Braudel’s concept of conjoncture allows us to differentiate microeconomic trends from a larger network of material production. The latter usually dictates the changes in the former by dint of scale and the tendency toward monopolistic consolidation. Conjonctural thinking can keep one from succumbing

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to fragmentary micro-trends or partial patterns in oil’s conflicts. One should be attuned not “to a conjuncture” (to epochal periods), “but rather to either phase (the rising or the declining phase) of a cyclical process, one half, so to speak, of a bell-shaped curve on a chart … It would be more fruitful to translate [conjuncture] therefore as ‘cyclical history.’”25 Temporality is rendered historically coherent by patterns of long-term recurrence. Second, Braudel shows methodological concern for “an organization, a degree of coherence, rather than fixed relations between realities and social masses.”26 Naming this relation a “structure,” Braudel differentiates between the three durées of historical inquiry: “the longue durée of geological time, then the middle time of the waxing and waning of institutions, and finally the short durée of historical events.”27 Although Braudel advocates for extending any historical study into the longue durée, the middle category indexes how “certain structures, in their long life, become the stable elements of an infinity of generations. They encumber history and restrict it, and hence control its flow.”28 Braudel lists geography, biological trends, modes of production, and institutional forms as the basis of middle durée structures. Historicity is the ongoing condition of living in uneven social conditions and in multiple durées. Without merely reconciling these conceptual dimensions of history, one is meant to draw their ramifications against the immediacy of local culture. Braudel’s third lesson focuses on the intrinsic relation of history to its geological substratum. “Man,” he writes, “is a prisoner for long centuries of climates, of vegetations, of animal populations, of types of crops, or slowly constructed equilibria, which he cannot transform without the risk of endangering everything.”29 Although Braudel and the Annales School’s methods flirt with national narratives because of their prolonged focus on France, Braudel was also genuinely engaged with the cycles of seasons, with massive features of physical geography – such as oceans, lakes, islands, mountains – all of which bind populations together across trade routes and subject human existence to an ecological set of forces often unintelligible to national consciousness. Oil history fits with this method in that oil is a geological material and its extraction produced numerous effects on the ground beneath our feet and the immense bodies of water that surround us.

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Braudel’s ongoing negotiation of the three durées should continue to inform our engagement with oil history. Historical narration is a judicious negotiation of oil’s plural ramifications. The challenge of writing oil’s durées is in negotiating their differences without collapsing them into one bloc or overvaluing the longest of durations. After reading Margonelli and Coll, we can tell that shorter time periods might spike engagement against oil as a violent force of necessity. Due to the challenges of narrating the distinctive temporalities that oil fuels, the troika of durées Braudel theorized will be useful for the historian who requires formally distinct approaches for his or her representation. A final point. Political economy is an associated field of petroleum’s history. Where ethnography and investigative exposé provide narratives that chronicle oil’s impact on national and global economies, political economy has made the most extensive narratives of oil on a planetary scale. For instance, Terry Lynn Karl and Michael Klare’s writing on the political economy of oil has brought the “resource curse” thesis into familiar parlance. This thesis, as developed by Richard Auty, is that “when poor countries became suddenly rich in oil or minerals, they could often expect to go backwards rather than forwards … [and] weak governments made rich by oil were prone to corruption and underinvestment in agriculture.”30 This idea has great purchase for historians who attempt to differentiate oil’s social effects from its promise of development. The notion that oil fosters a culture devoid of social and political principles which undermine economic well-being should be rethought as endemic to all commodification. Traditional resource curse narratives in diamonds, coal, and lesser commodities like coffee are now found in areas of fertile soil and clean water. The corrupting influence of one commodity spreads to other resources by dint of their molecular proximity and analogous channels of circulation. For instance, potable water and breathable air are now deemed scarce materials with increasing monetary value. The key question missed by political economists is whether socio-political efficiency is oil’s biggest curse. Perhaps this is where the writing of oil’s durées should begin. The most consequential historical writings about petroleum have yet to be written. I have sought to provide a few useful and revealing

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temporal qualities that we associate with oil’s history and the experience of its industry. Where the temporal dimension of oil’s commodification has shown to raise up companies who seek its secrecy, I sought to show that oil history requires an instructive and politically oppositional collection and synthesis of its multi-faceted problems. Oil’s problems are by no means alleviated by the writing of its history. Instead, it is here in its essential details that we reckon with the cost of its omnipotence. notes 1 Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (London: Macmillan, 1920). 2 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2013), 19. 3 The most compelling infrastructural histories of energy are Christopher F. Jones, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); and James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello, The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London (London: Verso, 2013). 4 Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Money, Oil and Power (New York: Free Press, 1991), 500–1, 760–2, 771. 5 Ibid., xiv–vi. 6 Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015), 56. 7 A notable exception is Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014). 8 Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 9 Ibid., 80. 10 Ibid., 145. 11 Nicholas V. Riasanovsky and Mark D. Steinberg, A History of Russia, Volume II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Alexei Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia (New York: nyu Press, 2000); Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper Perennial, 1980); Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Ray Huang, China: A Macro History (London: M.E. Sharpe, 1996). 12 Lisa Margonelli, Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank (New York: Broadway, 2007), 88.

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Ibid., 283. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 211. Steven Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (New York: Penguin, 2012), 214. Ibid., 209. Ibid., 614. Diane Toomey, “Maya Lin: A Memorial to a Vanishing Natural World,” Environment360, 25 June 2012, accessed 4 August 2016, http://e360.yale.edu/feature/maya_lin_a_memorial_to_a _vanishing_natural_world/2545/. Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” trans. Immanuel Wallerstein, in Richard E. Lee, ed., The Longue Durée and World Systems Analysis (Albany: suny Press, 2012), 193–4. Ibid., 245. Ibid., 259. Ibid., 247. Immanuel Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 136. Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences,” 250. Fredric Jameson, Valances of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), 532. Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences,” 249. Ibid., 250. Coll, Private Empire, 166.

part five

Petroscape Aesthetics

The word “petroscape” in the title of this section immediately calls to mind blasted, despoiled expanses ravaged by resource extraction. It is also intended to foreground how our sensory experience of land has been deeply shaped according to the logics of resource extraction, staples production, empire, and late-capitalist modernity. Whether we know it or not, we inhabit petroscapes. Just how is this reflected in our cognitive structures, our sensory flows, and our affective ecologies? As the contributors to this section show, aesthetic categories and literary tropologies function to inscribe both local and global landscapes within the map of world petroculture. These concepts and narratives also constitute sites of political struggle in the age of oil; moving from nostalgic pastoralism in Trinidad to sublime imagery in Canada, these essays trace the ways in which global petroculture and its landscapes are reproduced and repackaged in historically and nationally specific local vernaculars. “Nothing is more natural than an oil spill,” David McDermott Hughes declares in “Petro-Pastoralism: Agrarian Hydrocarbons in South Trinidad.” Recounting naturally occurring oil spills – and the biological production of co2 that links breathing to burning fossil fuels – Hughes sketches the overlapping scientific and pastoral discourses that partly explain how the oil industry has faced such meagre criticism relative to the global destruction carbon dioxide is causing. Presenting fieldwork he conducted in the South Trinidad town of La Brea, Hughes defines what he calls “petro-pastoralism.” The concept identifies and interrogates the values that “become apparent mostly in political silences, at moments where one might expect a reaction against oil – but finds there is none.” Hughes analyzes the pastoralist discourses shared by agrarian communities, oil

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companies, and governments alike to explain how these are used across constructions of cultural identity, folk history, infrastructure development, and industrial projects. Asking why “hydrocarbons often enjoy the most support precisely at the point of their production,” this ethnographic study has much to teach us about how local politics come into conflict with the environmental policies and national or global initiatives aimed at protecting these spaces. Hughes offers instances of how local experiences of landscape can be rhetorically finessed into a form of nationalism that obscures the presence of multinational oil. Through the legal figure of terra nullius to eugenic state racism to official projects aimed at “Northern Development” and recent efforts to brand Canada as a strong, oil-rich nation, the sublime dimension has always played a role in mapping and administering the Canadian North, establishing the region as an unspoiled nationalist icon as well as a national storehouse of energy. In “Sensing Oil: Sublime Art and Politics in Canada,” Georgiana Banita explores the affects of landscape in Canada, tracing the sublime as it’s been theorized. She asks how the sublime aesthetics of oil representation can contribute to political thought as she takes up texts which engage with the vastnesses of land and petroculture. Banita offers an analysis of R. Murray Schafer’s 1973 orchestra piece North/White, John Greyson’s 2000 film The Law of Enclosures, and Peter Mettler’s 2009 documentary film Petropolis. Each text stages a sublime breakdown of signification – through snow, sand, or smoke – and as sound, sight, or sensory data are decontextualized and reified, oil becomes apparent as the force that overflows all perceptual and cognitive categories. Banita concludes by discussing Edward Burtynsky’s industrial photography (as represented in Jennifer Baichwal’s 2006 documentary Manufactured Landscapes), and Emmet Gowin’s photographic exhibit published in the 2002 collection Changing the Earth: Aerial Photographs. Answering charges that Burtynsky manipulates particularities to appeal to a universalizing beauty, Banita explains, “What Burtynsky’s uncommitted style achieves is to isolate the emergence of what we see, what is visible to us, so that the political regime of what ought to be visible may be established. The impartial terrain of his images is in this sense pre-political. The visible chaos of the images prepares the ground for a more radical response.” Banita’s paper claims that perceptual knowledge – “sound, tactility, toxic contagion and

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diagnostic pathology” – and political knowledge operate synchronously, each contingent on the other. In the decontextualization of reified perspectives and sensory data we can see the materials for a future politics: “there is a deeper, less obtrusive tactility to the detachment of these images which reassemble the landscape into the shape and texture of the human body at a cellular level.” Gowin’s photos also evoke a human dimension of the petroscape, as they “imagine the tissue and capillaries of the energy industry.” In the final essay in this section, “Photography from Benjamin to Žižek, via the Petrochemical Sublime of Edward Burtynsky,” Clint Burnham claims that, far from signalling a first step toward a petrocultural politics, Burtynsky’s images are consequences of how neoliberalism has taken over and renovated our affects. Burnham begins by discussing Walter Benjamin’s formulation of the optical unconscious in order to challenge prevalent readings that position Burtynsky’s work via a Burkean or Kantian sublime. Using Slavoj Žižek’s dialectical sublime, Burnham argues that “in many ways, what happens in the discourse around Burtynsky’s photographs is a gentrification of the sublime, where that word (sublime!) is a soft sell for the paradox of seeing beautiful objects made out of horrible scenes.” Burnham reads Burtynsky’s Oil, finding “in the photographs an antagonism between their epic grandeur and size (which in effect bully the viewer into a sublime submission) and their putative content or images,” which, “convey a formal beauty which nonetheless functions as a screen for desire.” He concludes that “Burtynsky’s gentrified sublime is what protects us from confronting the disaster that is nature.” The sublime names the moment of discord between faculties, registering the intimation that there is no common sense or sensibility, even and especially within the subject who senses. The scale and extension of petroscapes reveal how this experience can be transformed and distributed by the extension of perceptual and cognitive faculties, taking narrative form in pastoral archetypes and technological form in God’s-eye-view aerial photography that today make up our political and optical unconscious. These disembodied sensations return to us as (depending on one’s idiom) signs taken for wonders, as commodified spectacles, or as the hyperobjects of the distributed sensorium. However one puts it, the structured unevennesses of global petroculture generate ideological fantasies of fully rational smoothness, enlisting the sublime as an agent

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of common sense, of a concord that betrays the discord of the faculties and suspends historicity. Thus the sublime gothic decay we find in Ann Radcliffe’s novels or in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich crumbles into the ruin porn of a present fascinated by its own image persisting through eternity. The annexation of the sublime is the gentrification of history – what, as historical materialists believe, happens when the point of view of a reified object becomes the criterion or the norm for a common sense, that is, for the sense of a common order among things. The gentrification of the sublime and of history aestheticizes the scale of ecological disaster into “the way it is,” thus dooming the future to repeat the past by naturalizing fossil fuel path dependency. By the same process, make-believe notions of dependable energy, growth, and sustainability coalesce into the bad-faith optimism that our petrocultures can continue indefinitely. Applying Burnham’s reading of the gentrified sublime to ecological thought, we understand why a properly dialectical theory is necessary in theorizing petroculture, an operation capable of historicizing its own transcendental position. Read dialectically, as Banita’s ecological analogy between the landscape and the organic body suggests, Burtynsky’s photos don’t simply register an unconscious but constitute one, and in this sense, they retain great potential as pre-political materials. By presenting the global and the infinitesimal aspects of the international division of labour, Burtynsky isn’t simply bringing to light what’s known by some and ignored by others. Rather, his work – however imperfect in its self-awareness – offers glimpses of the material reality that underwrites the totality. The political force of such work then becomes apparent as its ability to illuminate how, given the infinite mediation of webs and networks within the uneven world system and the international division of labour, there’s no singular subject who can know the whole; as of yet there are only fragments of experience, expertise, action, and thoughts to be apprehended and assembled in new and revolutionary ways. The material and infrastructural unconscious that constitutes these petroscapes is precisely the field for these new politics, and this is precisely why we need to understand oil to understand everything else.

17 Petro-Pastoralism: Agrarian Hydrocarbons in South Trinidad David McDermott Hughes

Nothing is more natural than an oil spill. Oil bubbles up to the surface, sorting itself by density with heavier deposits of underground water. Pressure, too, pushes oil skyward toward the seeps and vents that usher it into the human world. Even before this appearance, oil existed as microscopic organisms. Floating down, say, the paleoMississippi one hundred million years ago, they fell in the Gulf of Mexico. Sediments buried them before they could decay. Eventually, thousands of feet of rock piled on top of this material. The heat of the earth transformed it molecularly into long strings of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Before all that, of course, these animals, really zooplankton, consumed photosynthesizing organisms, which themselves had gained energy from the sun. The resulting hydrocarbon molecule thus harvests from the two basic energy sources available to the Earth, the fusion reaction of the sun and the heat of the planet’s core. All these forces – and their derivatives in hydrology and geology – both make and move oil, gas, and other hydrocarbons. This process has taken place before and beyond the reach of the human species. The only thing humans add to it that is truly important – and unnatural – is to burn oil. And with that profoundly artificial act, we change the climate and impose a catastrophe upon ourselves and the rest of the world. Yet, this moment of combustion rarely connotes such rupture and crisis. It produces, after all, carbon dioxide, the same gas that lungs exhale. Bill McKibben distinguishes co2 from “traditional pollutants.”1 It differs from, say, the asbestos in insulation, which came from a factory and which harms the body in tiny amounts. co2 feeds plants. Moved in the right quantities and to the right places, it makes the world diverse and beautiful. Oil and

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burned oil, in short, constitute nature sometimes and destroy nature at other times. This ambiguous quality  – described as “second nature” or “anthropogenic nature”  – inoculates oil from much political criticism.2 Environmentalists attack the petroleum industry far less than one might expect, given the global damage it is causing. And the most widely reported attacks focus on malfunctions, when oil leaks promiscuously into the ocean or when gas explodes in a neighbourhood. Mostly oil and gas flow unremarkably and unremarked. Few consumers see any signs of production, let alone of production gone awry. An inconspicuous hole thirty inches wide may yield hydrocarbons sufficient to light and heat a city. Machinery only clangs and smokestacks only belch as the substance moves downstream to refining. And, especially now, drillers produce oil in places too remote or inhospitable to support either human settlement or manufacturing. A pipeline carries Alaska’s petroleum to the nested factories, highways, and dumps that signal industry. To a surprising degree, the point of production appears pristine. Oil belts may approximate what Leo Marx describes as “middle landscapes,” between, yet in a transcendent relation to, the opposing forces of civilization and nature.3 That transcendence depends a great deal upon the technology used. The vast excavating of Canada’s tar sands – which includes refining and upgrading on site – can hardly escape an industrial interpretation. In comparison, the dispersed farmsteads of Pennsylvania suck gas from fractured shale in a fashion that seems almost artisanal. In Texas, pumpjacks still sway like horses, a metal rodeo bucking up oil. Perhaps plains and valleys can thrum gently, pastorally with wells and rigs. To the resident who wants to stay, this oil-land is home: a mosaic of soil, vegetation, and of an old, sticky kind of biomass, sought by many and loved by nearly all. Such an imaginary – which I call the petro-pastoral – runs through South Trinidad, an early crucible of various hydrocarbons. I use the term “pastoral” as a metaphor for a genre that does not really exist. Literature does not acclaim the rig-dotted countryside as any communitarian alternative to the modern, capitalist city, as in the fashion of English rural nostalgia.4 And, in any case, slavery still taints agriculture in much of the Caribbean. In this compromised state, values of the petro-pastoral become apparent mostly in political silences, at moments where one might expect a reaction against oil  – but

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finds there is none. Petro-pastoralism, in other words, underwrites a surprising tolerance. In 2009 and 2010, I carried out ethnographic fieldwork in South Trinidad in and around the town of La Brea. Named by the Spanish for a stunning outcrop of bitumen – the Pitch Lake  – the area became a centre of oil production at the turn of the twentieth century. All these hydrocarbons acquired a positive reputation. They represented the heritage and, in some sense, the essence of La Brea. Most ironically, bitumen, oil, and gas served as a foil in Trinidad’s leading anti-industrial struggle, whose last stages coincided with my fieldwork. Local activists defended their “natural” landscape – dotted with oil wells – against the pollution of a proposed aluminum smelter. Another set of activists in and around Port of Spain attacked the smelter on different but related grounds. These spokespeople treated the entire hydrocarbon sector as small, suited to Trinidad’s tiny landmass. The smelter loomed large, a threatening megaproject. Nearly literary in their use of symbolism, these activists defeated the smelter and brought petro-pastoralism to its apogee. In the end, exploitable ambiguities in the meanings of landscape, industrial pollution, and scale helped whitewash the dirtiest substance of them all.

Healing versus Industry In the twentieth century, petro-pastoralism had to do double duty, for bitumen and oil. Walter Darwent drilled the island’s first well in 1866.5 Production spread through the southern tranche of the island and soon surrounded the Pitch Lake. In the 1910s, La Brea became an oil town – as well as a pitch town – surrounded by the infrastructure and staff housing of the various British firms that eventually merged with Royal Dutch Shell.6 Soon wells, oil tanks, and ponds of wastewater dotted the environs. The industry cut many corners in those early days. The infamous Dome Fire of 1928 – in which gas and spurting oil exploded close to La Brea – killed sixteen workers and bystanders.7 Outside the actual fields, all the companies practiced blatant discrimination. They limited the advancement of black and Indian workers and squeezed them into the narrow, crowded, segregated accommodation known as barracks. Frustration eventually boiled over in strikes, riots, and sabotage in 1937. By midcentury, however, the industry seemed to have overcome these growing

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pains. It no longer caused visible, violent damage. Especially as Trinidadians gained higher positions and control in the 1950s and 1960s, many began to consider hydrocarbons to be the island’s pre-eminent asset. Resource nationalism took hold, after Trinidad’s independence in 1962 and its industrial push of the 1970s. But, in La Brea itself, people began to imagine oil as more than a symbol of national identity. Hydrocarbons connoted a pre-capitalist purity usually associated with rural nostalgia. Writers and keepers of oral history, in other words, cloaked the most industrial aspect of Trinidad in the mantle of its most agrarian past. In and around La Brea, I collected popular views in the frenzied last months of the anti-smelter campaign. Older residents recalled an almost mythical figure, Agatha Proud. Probably in the late 1950s, this woman presented herself as the owner of the Pitch Lake. Ethelbert Monroe, whom I visited in his house tilted and sliding in pitch, recalled her as a “negro woman” who owned “the whole of the Pitch Lake.” She also claimed the adjoining parcels, owned legally by oil companies and rented to tenants. She visited the latter, demanding rent, “threatening to move them from the land.” Another resident, who actually guided tourists across the Pitch Lake, recalled Proud more positively and as “probably one of the last of the natives living here.” Proud, who was probably born around 1900, died or disappeared in the 1960s. Although she had pressed her claim in court, I could find no record of it. Proud seemed to exist only as a confused memory. I tracked down a neighbour of hers, born in roughly 1920 (she did not know the exact year). Virginia Piper spoke as vociferously as her frailty allowed: “this tiefing company  … tief Miss Proud.” Piper was referring to Lake Asphalt of Trinidad and Tobago, the holder of the asphalt concession (locally known as “Trinidad Lake Asphalt”). Proud, she continued, had inherited the land from her grandparents, at least some of whom were Carib. Piper recounted her story with much political criticism and little specificity. In inverse proportion, Errol Jones rendered Miss Proud in the greatest detail: she had worked as a servant for an American family who held property claims to the Pitch Lake (possibly related to one of the concessionaire families who worked with the lake’s German-born landlord, Conrad Stollmeyer). Dying without issue, the family willed its entitlement to Miss Proud. She pursued that claim until a fire – possibly due to arson – destroyed all

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her documents. “They say she was screw-loose,” concluded Jones. I found this last conjecture most believable. But nostalgia migrates far from fact. The most widely disseminated story was the most inspiring and the first one I had heard. When I said I was interested in local history, people pointed me toward Joshua Logan, the drama teacher at Vessigny Secondary School. While earning a bachelor’s at the University of the West Indies, he had written a paper on La Brea’s past. He had also, I discovered, penned a oneact play about the Pitch Lake called The Price of Progress. In the text, capitalist companies represent progress, exacting the price of lost land. Proud appears as Mrs Bird, a name alluding intentionally to nature. A French planter owned Bird’s great-great-grandmother. When his child fell incurably, desperately ill, he asked the slave for an African remedy. Upon its success, as Bird recounts in scene 2, the master freed the slave and granted her a wish: “Mamma say she want de Pitch Lake,” and she got it. Why, so long before Stollmeyer and others began selling it, did Bird’s ancestor want the asphalt? “[I]t had healing powers,” Bird continues, and Mamma “wanted de Pitch Lake for everybody.” Later, she refuses to sell to extractors because “people does use it, and it is sacred.” When we met at his house – just across the street from Monroe’s – Logan explained that he “was trying to tie the Amerindian legend” to that of Bird/Proud. Of course, he also knew of the widespread practice of bathing in the highly sulphuretted water sitting atop the Pitch Lake. The play thus represents hydrocarbons as nature’s gift to human health – stolen by capital. Avaricious firms collude with the state to swindle the Birds, just as  – in Logan’s experience  – oil companies are polluting the water and destroying the local fishery. But, at this point, Logan pulls his punch. Perhaps because he anticipated that The Price of Progress would advance, as it did, to the national Best Village Competition, the last scene reduces that price nearly to zero. The aggrieved fisherman inherits Bird’s house and finds a generous buyer for his seemingly worthless boat. Meanwhile, the real-life drama of La Brea appeared to be heading toward a less happy ending. Here too, new forms of pollution threatened a healthy environment. Led by Logan’s uncle, Noah Premdas, the group of activists in La Brea pulled no punches.8 But they began with a similarly trusting attitude toward hydrocarbons. I encountered this sensibility first one evening in 2009 after a meeting

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of the pressure group known as La Brea Concerned Citizens United. Liming (hanging out) in Premdas’s open garage, the activists recalled the forest and lake recently destroyed for the smelter and its associated power plant. People enjoyed fishing, drinking, and, as one activist put it, prayerfully, “giving thanks for the virgin environment, the untouchedness.” When municipal water supplies failed, as they frequently did, families collected their drinking supplies from nearby ponds. They drew a ring on the water with soap, recounted his colleague, “the soap used to push the oil [away from the water being collected] … They were like little scientists. They were experimenting.” At that, everyone giggled. The site’s three lakes, I later learned, resulted from dumping in the 1930s of what is known as “produced water,” the highly contaminated fluids separated from oil. Locals knew this history: they called the pond with the most obvious sheen the “oil dam.” Over time, further hydrocarbons leeched into the reservoirs as pitch moved though the adjoining soil. An environmental impact assessment – carried out before the bulldozing – showed levels of oil and grease 8.7 times Trinidad’s healthy standard.9 My informants treated hazardous waste as a minor irritant, like sand blowing on one’s beach picnic. Not everyone agreed with them. Roger Brown, a local politician and major proponent of the smelter, told me, “the lake itself emits a sulfuric gas that is more dangerous than the aluminum.” He may have been referring to polyaromatic hydrocarbons, dangerous compounds also found in La Brea at extreme levels. But, Brown continued, “God has constructed the immune system to take care of that.”10 In this way, the smelter’s local promoter – like its detractors – held hydrocarbons harmless. What was true for water and air was also true for forest and field: oil brought at least as much pastoralism as pollution. The smelter’s construction site had contained twenty-seven oil wells. When the government capped those wells in preparation for the smelter, onlookers misinterpreted the operations as an acceleration of drilling. They greeted this development with equanimity. “It is only when people started to see the magnitude of the clearing,” Premdas recalled, that they realized a more sinister project was afoot. Premdas, in fact, worked as a well survey supervisor for Petrotrin, the national oil company. “People actually live with – you can say – oil fields in their yards,” he explained, “a few feet from their houses.” He defended oil and attacked the smelter by saying “we for any industry that

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doesn’t create a health risk to the communities.” Of course, he was also for an industry that employed him and others. But, the other activists – as I spoke with them before and after the meeting – all but overlooked the economic benefits of oil. They remembered life with oil, rather than a living from oil. A Rastafarian, Isaac Gregory, wore his hair in dreads and considered the Earth sacred. He put me up the night after the meeting, gave me breakfast the next day, and submitted to my questions on the pumpjacks that used to suck oil from nearby wells. “There was no hamburg,” he responded, using a Creole word for “problem.” “We used to get up and ride on those,” he continued with amusement, “they used to look like horses.”11 Adam Chalant smiled at the same diversions: “I always like[d] the area … nice, quiet, serene. You could do what you want.” Did the whirring of pumpjacks disrupt that quiet? I asked. No, he said, and the infrastructure was “nothing too dangerous or anything like that. You’d see more or less a puddle of oil bubbling. It wasn’t, to say, dangerous.”12 We sat at the protestors’ encampment, outside the gate of the construction site. Their signs labelled aluminum a “death industry,” and one – perhaps written by Gregory – referred to “Smelter Babylon.” Persuasively, then, militants contrasted “heavy industry” with a community and ecology otherwise at peace. To me, however, bitumen sounded heavier than aluminum. Bulldozers digging pitch and retorts boiling and purifying it loomed larger and louder than even the pumpjacks. How could one assimilate this aspect of hydrocarbons to the activists’ bucolic image of their locale? After some difficulty, I finally gained access to Trinidad Lake Asphalt, the firm that had eventually acquired the various parcels of the lake. Just before Carnival, the company held its annual calypso competition  – an excellent point of entry for the anthropologist. At the event, two deafeningly loud songs dwelled on the smelter. Alfred Antoine’s lyrics sympathized with a woman protesting the smelter, regretting that “industrialization, it come to stay.”13 A casual worker – and therefore feeling awkward in the head office where we later met – Antoine backed away from any criticism of the smelter. “I for industrialization,” he assured me, but he associated the term with future projects only. Trinidad Lake Asphalt fell outside this category. The second calypsonian, Roger Achong, worked as a chemist in the head office. His calypso praised “Mother Earth [who] will bless and see you through” and pronounced the smelter “an environmental

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blight.” At the same time, the song endorsed “fires of progress  … burning bright” and criticized oil and gas only for their depletion due to which, “yuh still ketching yuh ras [catching your ass].”14 In our conversation, Achong clarified the distinction between pitch and aluminum. “It’s a natural project,” he assured me, gesturing toward bitumen samples, “we are like caretakers.” He contrasted this stewardship with his earlier experience working in Trinidad’s methanol plant, the largest in the world. That industry synthesizes ammonia gas at the intense temperatures and pressure of the Haber-Bosch system. I asked Achong what he meant by “processing.” “When you have a chemical change taking place from the beginning to the end,” he explained, “this [Trinidad Lake Asphalt] is just a mining operation with a still. It’s a joke.” Laughably simple, the still heated asphalt to 150˚C  – boiling away the water  – while maintaining atmospheric pressure. Asphalt, in other words, was as industrial as moonshine and equally compatible with rural life. As every word against the smelter turned to tolerance for hydrocarbons, I hunted deeper in and around La Brea for someone willing to criticize both of them. Just east of La Brea lies San Fernando, the unofficial capital of the oil industry and a town large enough to produce its own Carnival parade. Most revellers bought masquerade costumes from a small number of producers, chief among them the award-winning Kalicharan family. In early 2010, the Kalicharan family introduced eight costumes. Focused the theme “Outta d’rainforest,” the skimpy outfits evoked macaws, leopards, and similarly colourful creatures. This biodiversity harboured one oddity, however: a blue-black, fringed bikini advertised as “oil spill.” Thinking I had last found an anti-petroleum artist, I hurried to San Fernando. No, Wendy Kalicharan explained, the slick-like bathing suit did not indict hydrocarbons – sponsored, as it was, by Lenny Sumadh, Ltd, Automotive, Petroleum, and Industrial Supplies. She only objected to oil “sputing.” Producers “need to be a little more environment friendly and look into that,” she said, before referring me to her daughter, the real mastermind behind the costumes. Ayana Kalicharan worked for a hydrocarbon firm on matters of health, safety, and environment. Her employer, she assured me, was “going green,” as were many others. The ambiguous costume referred to oil spills elsewhere, not in Trinidad’s rainforests. Occidental Petroleum’s horrific spills in Ecuador served as a cautionary tale in the brochure

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the Kalicharans distributed at Carnival. Generally, the document promised, “these fossil fuels can be extracted in an environmentally friendly way.” Once again, blue-black crude gained a whitewash. Meanwhile, still seeking a nature-minded criticism of oil, I scouted slightly north of San Fernando. Since Molly Gaskin founded it in 1966, the Pointe-à-Pierre Wildfowl Trust had operated on the grounds of the country’s oil refinery. In that facility, pipes snaked everywhere, as gas ignited in flares. To me, the lurking smell of sulphur – and constant warnings against fire, sabotage, and even taking pictures  – blared danger at every corner. I drove through Pointeà-Pierre vigilantly. Gaskin knew these sensations, too. But, as she explained at the end of the bird pond, “once you are inside here, you don’t know that there is a refinery out there.” The abundant avifauna did not appear concerned either. Their water, Gaskin justified further, had not spurted from an oil well. Rather, the refinery had pumped liquid from aquifers up and stored it in ponds to cool the machinery. Water waited, so to speak, upstream rather than downstream of an encounter with hydrocarbons. Perhaps to her credit, these forms of complicity did not impede Gaskin’s efforts at environmental education. A poster on the pond’s shore asked, “Are we changing the world’s climate?” The answer was “yes,” and, as a specific cause, the poster mentioned, “industrial pollution in the atmosphere, including gas and oil.” The Organization of American States had donated this billboard in 1989. To me, Gaskin quickly disclaimed it. She would have modified the indictment of oil and gas with a caveat regarding “proper checks and balances.” On her account, she had printed a poster on “What you can do,” which recommended mildly that one inflate one’s car tires fully and turn off unused electronic devices. A “balanced” smelter might proceed too because, as Gaskin explained, “if you are totally unreasonable  … you don’t make any sense.” Among industries, only a nuclear sector lay truly beyond the pale. Gaskin had first made news in 1995 when she invited Greenpeace to help obstruct the transshipment of nuclear waste through Trinidadian waters. Elastic in the extreme, the environmental sensibility of South Trinidad embraced any chemical short of radionuclides. I found no pastoralism against petroleum. At root, industries generated dread in and around La Brea when they involved fast, high-risk transformation processes. The industrial sociologist Charles Perrow distinguishes such operations from

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mere mixing, separation, or fabrication. Transformation occurs through chemical reactions at high temperature and pressure. These conditions enable reactions that would not otherwise take place, and, in some cases, accelerate them to the point where they are hard to control or even to see. Fission, as Perrow’s case in point, sustains itself independently in a nuclear power station.15 Aluminum stands midway between such self-piloting and something more tool-like. In a smelter, raw alumina flows into room-sized pots where it is bathed in cryolite and aluminum fluoride, heated to 1,000˚C, and submitted to powerful electric currents. This Hall-Héroult process creates aluminum while coating the pots with a highly hazardous residue and, as an ever-present risk, sometimes releasing dangerous vapours of hydrogen fluoride. In the event of an accident, human operators can stop the reactions, but not immediately, and they may delay doing so since rapid cooling can crack the expensive pots. Some of the well-educated activists from Port of Spain understood these specifics. More vaguely, members of La Brea Concerned Citizens United identified smelting as a kind of juggernaut. Back at the activist camp, Adam Chalant distinguished heavy from light industry by defining heavy industry as making noise “all day all night” with “shifts.” With light industry, “you have an opening time and a close off time.” Trinidad Lake Asphalt, whose bulldozers slept for the night, harmonized with nature and the land in this way. Chalant had even seen Papa Bois, the French-derived deity of the forest, flitting in the same woodland as the pumpjacks. The government, of course, felled those trees for the smelter. But, even beyond this spatial displacement, the smelter would bring to La Brea a pace and rhythm foreign to both the forest and the fuel it produced.

The Island against the Mega At the national level, the movement against smelters began with tropes closer to standard, agrarian pastoralism. I retraced this history of rhetoric in conversations with a handful of dissident intellectuals, mostly associated with the University of the West Indies. In 2006, the government first suggested manufacturing aluminum in an even less promising site, Chatham. Down the Cedros Peninsula, Chatham lay beyond the arc of industrial sites. Indo-Trinidadians fished and raised crops in a string of inland settlements and beachside

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villages. This topography fit the popular “racial landscape” of South Trinidad, where those descended from indentured labourers still worked the land.16 The land also held memories of an earlier, African population. Fortuitously, archaeological research in 2006 located Bou’Kongo, an early nineteenth-century settlement of slaves freed in the Middle Passage by the British navy. Burton Sankeralli, a public intellectual, accompanied  – perhaps even instigated  – the expedition. Later, having become an activist, he published his diary. “[S]o much is going on,” he narrates breathlessly in print, “The search for Bou’Kongo. An African liberated village, the Congo nation, the cradle of the Chatham community. In the bush … our history in the bush … not quite lost … not altogether forgotten … but getting there unless we struggle.”17 Elsewhere in the same volume, Sankeralli explains: “[T]his African village sources the ongoing living presence and soul. It provides a grounding for the ongoing living Spirit of struggle.”18 That struggle – in which Sankeralli became a leading voice – encompassed much more than the environment. “My notion of rights is tied with the notion of community,” Sankeralli explained to me when we met for lunch in 2009. He practiced Orisha, an African-derived religion, and was writing a dissertation on it. At a later lunch, he sketched a “philosophical affinity” between Orisha and forms of spirituality native to places far and wide. As one of these locales, Bou’Kongo channelled powerful currents from the Caribbean past. The Cedros Peninsula, where Africans had disembarked as free, preserved an Antillean arcadia. The most public opponent of the smelter, Wayne Kublalsingh publicized related histories and their associated pastoral aesthetics. Prior to entering politics, he had written children’s books and occasionally lectured at the University of the West Indies. Then, although a slight man, he had undertaken a one-person hunger strike in the central square of Port of Spain. Hounded and arrested repeatedly, Kublalsingh moved with grace and spoke with a quiet calm that inspired the other activists around him. “He is doing this from something in his core,” a follower told me, “motivated from some deep sense of connection to the land … and people being able to reap healthy living off the land.” When we met at his home in Central Trinidad, Kublalsingh began with first principles: “Spanish conquistadors smashed the Amerindian culture  … We’ve always been small and vulnerable.” A week later, at a strategy session, he predicted a rocky

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road to legal reform: “over the past five hundred years of our history … constitutions have been implemented … though vast violence and blood.” Actually more lurid than pastoral, this form of generalization reached its apogee under the influence of the blockbuster film Avatar. The story, wherein humanoids native to planet Na’vi eject a mining corporation, reminded Kublalsingh of his own struggle. In a newspaper editorial entitled “The Avatar threat,” he warned readers of “the corporation imperialist’s wars … which natives, some in Chatham and La Brea … and certainly all natives on the planet, must confront as this century wears on.”19 Only Kublalsingh could stretch Caribbean history and identity to this extent and get away with it. He and his followers descended mostly from involuntary migrants rather than from Caribs, Arawaks, or other Indigenous people. Yet – compared to aluminum – even the most alien aspects of Trinidad’s social landscape appeared authentic. Kublalsingh emphasized the metal’s role as a component of advanced weaponry. To him, it glinted menacingly – at once, hypermodern and atavistically violent.20 Rhetoric that had worked in Chatham, however, gained less purchase in La Brea. As the government moved its proposed smelter eastwards, opponents reframed arguments from place to scale. In depressed La Brea, the smelter’s promise of jobs garnered distinct support. Some activists still clung to pastoral discourse. Mary Landsman, Kublalsingh’s follower mentioned above, displayed a poster of one of La Brea’s ponds. Saved in her house as a memento of demonstrations, the image struck Landsman as both beautiful and pristine. “It’s a body of water. That is not a common thing in Trinidad,” she marvelled, disappointed as I explained the industrial history of that water.21 By and large, however, northern activists found this sort of rural pastoralism – when applied to the oilbelt – impossible to sustain. They did not, moreover, wish to appear “unreasonable,” to use Gaskin’s phrase. Distancing themselves from environmentalism in any form, Kublalsingh and others chose to emphasize questions of size. The footprint of development projects, they assumed or asserted, should be commensurate with the given landmass. In 2008, the economist Dennis Pantin specified this principle in a number of widely circulated papers. His text on “mega-projects in small places” recommended that planners apply an “irreversibility principle.” “Given our small island reality,” he wrote, “if we make an error, there will be little or no room for correction. The nuclear accident at

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Chernobyl affected a geographical area, for example, several times the size of Trinidad!”22 I met with Pantin in early 2010 in his university office and suggested that all places were small and fragile. No, he argued, larger nations are “in some way able to pick up the slack in terms of providing alternative space.” “[I]f you have one wetland,” he further illustrated, “it’s a different thing [than] if you have a thousand.” In other words, he believed parts of continents were interchangeable and replaceable. Islands were unique. At exactly this time – as the smelter suffered insults in the press and at public rallies – the government raised the stakes on megaprojects. It announced an infrastructure project that seemed to burst the bounds of Trinidad’s scale and its history. The “Rapid Rail” would connect Port of Spain to all of Trinidad’s major cities. Prime Minister Eric Williams had torn up Trinidad’s first rails in the 1960s, creating conditions for staggering rates of automobile use. Surely, a commuter rail system would benefit the environment, not to mention decreasing traffic congestion as well. “Stupidity. That is total stupidity!” denounced Norris Deonarine, head of the National Food Crop Farmers Association, referring to the claim that rail would lower Trinidad’s carbon emissions. The way to do so, he insisted over (imported) coffee, was to become self-sufficient in food. He reminded me of the slogan “No smelter – agriculture!” As fate would have it, Rapid Rail’s tracks would pass through a coastal corridor of Indian small farmers, who flooded angrily into three public consultations on the project. Such an expensive project would surely encourage government corruption, many argued. More immediately, as their member of parliament explained at the time, “They now fear that all their lands that their grandparents toiled very hard to give to them are now going to be taken away.”23 At a later consultation, Deonarine referred to himself and others as “generational farmers,” who had improved the soil quality by two grades.24 Indentureship hung unspoken in the air, except when Nyahuma Obika associated it bluntly with Trinidad’s colonial rail system, “when our people had no say whatsoever.”25 The train had carried cane. Taken together, these public comments indicted rail for, first, underwriting rural exploitation and for, second, confiscating the land base of rural liberation. The rail corridor would bifurcate and eviscerate a dozen Bou’Kongos. In terms of scale, as well, the corridor provoked anxiety. Two participants compared Trinidad to the former metropole. Trinidad was

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“smaller than London and smaller than Europe,” asserted Stephan Kangal of the Caroni Assembly of Villages.26 Presumably Port of Spain needed neither the Tube nor the Eurostar. A few minutes later, Anderson Wilson of Beetham Estate took the microphone. “I travel London. I travel the world,” he asserted – rather improbably, given that Beetham was notoriously poor – “Trinidad is too small for this thing.”27 In part, farmers were voicing a conventional not-in-mybackyard complaint. Few seemed to realize how narrow a rail corridor would be.28 Just as important, though, opponents of Rapid Rail associated trains with a kind of hyper-industrialization they thought alien to Trinidad. The Rights Action Group joined publicly with the farmers. “We need to lessen the speed at which we are moving,” Kublalsingh explained intently to me at a food court close to the airport, “It is more of a metaphysical issue … [The Rapid Rail] would give a metropolitan feel.” The eight- and four-lane highways running by the food court and parallel to the proposed tracks might also have imparted such a feel – but not enough to stir protest. In fact, by “metropolitan,” Kublalsingh meant Euro-American or continental, rather than merely urban or built up. Short, insular distances, he believed, did not require a faster pace than that of the bicycle. Size – whether imagined as the footprint of the infrastructure or the way in which the technology would further compress Trinidad – seemed to trigger environmental alarms. Meanwhile, the promoters of Rapid Rail distributed and posted on the web predictions regarding cuts in carbon emissions. As motorists switched to rail, they would release 85 per cent less carbon per passenger-kilometre.29 The claim fell on deaf ears. Not a single participant in the public meetings even mentioned carbon or other forms of air pollution. The quality of the atmosphere mattered that much less than the quantity of terra firma. By its very nature, this spatial vigilance gives hydrocarbons  – and particularly the power source of the smelter – a free pass. The resource lies underground and exits though tubes thirty inches wide. Of course, rigs, refineries, storage tanks, and the occasional spill enlarge this lateral spread. But, in terms of their efficient consumption of the earth’s surface, hydrocarbons have no equal. Like a skyscraper, they save lateral space. At a Carnival fête, I asked Dennis Pantin about oil and gas. Did the sector constitute a megaproject? Not at all: “No problem,” he shouted over the music, so long as rigs lay far enough apart. In La Brea, the National Energy Corporation

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had always planned to build a 720-megawatt gas-fired power plant near the smelter so as to supply its huge need for electric current. Opponents knew this, but had not devised a strategy regarding the plant. On 9 June 2009, Gary Aboud of the organization Fishermen and Friends of the Sea issued a “national call” to demonstrate against the plant.30 Aboud’s electronic broadsheet mentioned the waste of money and electricity – but not any environmental consequences. Finally, in November, another member of the Rights Action Group – Cathal Healy-Singh – addressed a People’s Democracy rally. He called the moment “the age of global warming – when humanity itself is at risk.” Yet, on the radio, in early 2010, he denounced megaprojects that are “contaminating this tiny land mass that we reside on,” including the Rapid Rail. No one – inside or outside the group  – noted these contradictions. In per capita terms, Trinidadians stood as fourth highest emitters of co2. By some calculations, rail would cut Trinidad’s national emissions by 0.5 per cent and the power plant would raise them by 6 per cent. But size overshadowed these concerns. As it finally went down in defeat, aluminum production completely overshadowed and displaced the issue of carbon. In May 2010, the smelter – but not the power plant – became an electoral issue. I attended a candidates’ forum in my neighbourhood and asked through the moderator, “How do you assess Trinidad and Tobago’s responsibility for climate change and for the reduction of carbon emissions?” “Very poorly,” shot back the main opposition candidate for parliament, Annabelle Davis. The moderator resumed reading my question: “And how would you suggest that the country fulfill that responsibility?” “No smelter!” Davis retorted, to hearty applause, “Simple!” But it was not so simple. Davis’s People’s Partnership ousted the People’s National Movement and shelved the smelter as well as the Rapid Rail. The government continued building the gas-fired generator at La Brea, this time with Kublalsingh’s blessing. “[K]eep the power plant, keep the port, stop the smelter,” he urged in the newspaper.31 At a conference in early 2011, I asked Kublalsingh about the generator, then nearly complete. “I’m not worried about pollution there at all,” he assured me, “it can be mitigated.” He seemed to forget about carbon dioxide. Kublalsingh and Sankeralli were in the audience when I presented this work to the University of the West Indies, mentioning the 6 per cent figure.

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Afterwards, I asked Sankeralli what he thought of the outcome. Still digesting the information, he answered me with a pithy, unrepeatable expression of regret. Sankeralli’s “Oh, fuck”  – to quote the unquotable  – represented a breakthrough in my engaged ethnography. I had spent an awkward year among the smelter’s opponents. They suspected me of supporting aluminum, even of working for the US Central Intelligence Agency. I repeated continually that I opposed the smelter, but perhaps not for the same reasons as every one of them. This partial declaration of solidarity could have opened a dialogue with these hesitant environmentalists. How do you weigh the risks of climate change against those of purely local import? I wanted to ask. Of course, an ethnographer rarely poses questions so directly, as that method tends to produce strategic answers. Instead, I observed in meetings, speeches, and declarations a consistent neglect of hydrocarbons and climate change. When faced with opportunities to protest Trinidad’s carbon emissions, even activists concerned about climate change grew strangely silent. Their “sense of place” overrode the “sense of planet.” At such times, I did not admire my informants. Indeed, the protest against the smelter sometimes resembled a selfish not-in-my-backyard complaint: Kublalsingh and others did not wish to abolish aluminum smelting, only to conduct it elsewhere. An engaged or activist ethnographer “collaborates with an organized group in struggle for social justice.”32 I wanted to live these politics too, but they seemed unattainable in my fieldwork. La Brea Concerned Citizens United and the Rights Action Group clearly opposed an injustice: the imposition of environmental risk without a democratic endorsement from below. Yet, the spatial remedy proposed by the Rights Action Group did not seem significantly more just. Indeed, the activists’ laissez-faire approach to carbon emissions ran directly counter to climate justice. Perhaps I could engage with these informants by suggesting alternative models of fairness, as I do with my students. But who I was I teach these militants how to fight their government? Until Sankeralli expressed his shock – none had valued my perspective. At root, the community of La Brea had long insulated the oil industry from criticism. They lived in a toxic area, what in the

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United States, would be called a “brown field.” In the US, they might have mobilized to demand the remediation of contaminated water and soil. They might have further claimed rights to restitution for cancers and other illnesses linked to industrial plants.33 Or, like those surrounding Shell’s refinery in Flammable, Argentina, they could have waited. Scholars Javier Auyero and Débora Swistun describe a limbo in which victims hope alternately for health or for provable, actionable pathologies.34 Residents of La Brea, by contrast, consider oil, gas, and bitumen as neither a threat nor a mystery. Bitumen cures the sick and provides raw material for sculpture. Other hydrocarbons – and the machinery for their production – form part of the surface continuum of houses, household gardens, and fishing ponds. The lakeland encompassed water, petro-aqueous mixtures, and – in the case of pitch – pure petroleum. All this also constituted “scenery”: “that is the main reason I left the bright life,” explained one La Brea activist, relocated from the well-lit heart of Port of Spain. Formulaic and contradictory at the same time, La Brea’s pastoralism approximates the anti-urban sentiment of Martiniquais writer Patrick Chamoiseau. “Texaco,” he narrates in the novel bearing that title, “was what the city conserved of the humanity of the countryside.”35 Texaco is, in fact, a shantytown at the site of that company’s former refinery in Fort-de-France. The first squatters notice the smell and danger of gasoline, but Chamoiseau emphasizes hazards from across the harbour: “The city stutters pollution and insecurity ... It threatens cultures and diversity like a global virus.”36 For La Brea, aluminum and other megaprojects constituted this sort of metropolitan peril. Ultimately, smelting made its opponents appreciate hydrocarbons all the more, as both more humane and more natural than the alternative. At root, these politics of place do not serve the unfolding battle against carbon-intensive development. Hydrocarbons often enjoy the most support precisely at the point of their production. There they benefit not only from pastoralism, but from the entire sentiment of local belonging and history. To be sure, oil destroys and displaces some longstanding agricultural landscapes. But people do not always react with outrage. Frequently, they stretch agrarian language to accommodate hydrocarbons. The corn “field” becomes an oil “field.” Perhaps the experience of La Brea demonstrates the

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need for a politics of the planet. I am wary of the charge of “global reach”  – the sleight of hand whereby environmentalists claim a relationship with distant elsewheres. But, in fact, the landscape of South Trinidad wreaks effects far and wide. Substances extracted and burned there exacerbate the hurricanes that buffet my coastline in New Jersey. Is it enough to say to the Rights Action Group, “My perspective matters because I am a victim of your values and strategies?” I did not attempt this approach; New Jersey emits far too much carbon for me to represent it as a victim only. But, the sensibility of an interconnected, inter-polluting globe would add much to Trinidad’s environmental debates. A politics of the planet could supplement those of place. Or, one might consider the whole Earth a place, bounded by the twenty-kilometre depth of its atmosphere. Lying off the sun’s shore, our island is small, and, more and more, it needs a large vision. notes 1 Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Anchor, 1990), 35–6. 2 See William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), 69–90; Ramachandra Guha, “The Authoritarian Biologist and the Arrogance of Anti-Humanism: Wildlife Conservation in the Third World,” The Ecologist 27, no. 1 (1997): 14–20; Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (New York: Dell, 1991). 3 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 23. 4 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 5 George E. Higgens, A History of Trinidad Oil (Port of Spain: Trinidad Express Newspapers, 1996). 41ff. 6 Ibid. 7 Anthony de Verteuil, “Bunsee Partap (and an account of the Dome Fire, 1928),” in George E. Higgens, A History of Trinidad Oil (Port of Spain: Trinidad Express Newspapers, 1996), 394–410. 8 Noah Premdas is a pseudonym. 9 The reading taken downstream from the reservoirs, at the mouth of the Vessigny River, showed 87.0 milligrams per litre (mg/L), as compared with Trinidad and Tobago’s limit of 10 mg/L. The US Environmental

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Protection Agency stipulates only 0.01 mg/L as the threshold for safe drinking water. See Institute of Marine Affairs, “Environmental Impact Assessment for the Establishment of an Industrial Estate at Union Estate, La Brea (phase 2), Southwestern Trinidad” (Chaguaramas, Trinidad and Tobago: Institute of Marine Affairs, 2003), 41. Roger Brown is a pseudonym. Isaac Gregory is a pseudonym. Adam Chalant is a pseudonym. Alfred Antoine, “Why They Arrest Here,” handwritten calypso lyrics, 2010. Xante, “The Wanderer,” track 10 on Jump Start, compact disc, no date. Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1999), 9–10. Aisha Khan, “Rurality and ‘Racial’ Landscapes in Trinidad,” in Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy, ed. Barbard Chinge and Gerald W. Creed (New York: Routledge, 1997), 39–69, 4. Burton Sankeralli, The rag File: Writings of the Aluminium Smelter Wars (Toronto and Trinidad and Tobago: Just World Publications, 2009), 163; the ellipses appear in the original. Ibid., 63. Wayne Kublalsingh, “The Avatar Threat to La Brea, Claxton Bay,” The Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, January 13, 2010, A25. Cf. Mimi Sheller, Aluminum Dreams: Lightness, Speed, and Modernity (Cambridge: mit Press, 2014). Interview, Port of Spain, 22 February 2010. Mary Landsman is a pseudonym. Dennis Pantin, “A Sustainable Development Planning Framework for Mega-Projects in Small Places” (2008): 2, accessed 4 September 2014, http://thecropperfoundation.org/sdn/documents/aug%2015,08%20 edited%20_A_Sustainable_Development_Planning_Framework_for _Megaprojects.pdf. Tim Gopeesingh, quoted in the transcript of the Trinitrain Public Consultation, Port of Spain, 6 April 2010. Trinitrain Public Consultation, Tunapuna, 8 April 2010. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Many may have confused the one-kilometre-wide “study area” with the eventual rail corridor, sure to be a fraction of that width.

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29 Trinitrain, “Rapid Rail Project Information Fact Sheet” (Port of Spain: Trinitrain, 2010). 30 This notice was distributed widely via email. 31 Wayne Kublalsingh, “The Correct Way to Stop the Smelter,” Trinidad and Tobago’s Newsday, 20 June 2010. 32 Daniel Goldstein, Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian Shantytown (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 35; Goldstein is citing oral comments by Charles Hale. 33 Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder: Westview, 1990). 34 Javier Auyero and Débora Alejandra Swistun, Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 35 Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 360. 36 Ibid., 443–4.

18 Sensing Oil: Sublime Art and Politics in Canada Georgiana Banita Sublimity, Politics, Sensation Discussions of petroleum culture often focus on the aesthetics of representation, overstating perhaps the importance of aesthetics for a psycho-social understanding of the oil age. To help redress this overemphasis, I want to provide an account of how concrete and actionable political meaning emerges from aesthetic  – particularly from sublime  – representations of Canadian oil culture. To do so, I will bring Canadian cultural and political theory to bear on some works of art that are Canadian too. My aim is to show that sublime oil art leads to political thought and action because it addresses us as sentient, material subjects endowed with agency, rather than as passive receptors of aesthetic pleasure.1 Though not without controversy, an aesthetic of the sublime has dominated nature discourses in Canadian culture. “The way in which the sublime has been expressed in Canada,” Susan Glickman writes, “is unique to this country”; indeed “it is one of the formative ideas of Canadian culture.”2 But Glickman is critical of the general assumption that the Canadian encounter with nature inspires terror. She wonders, moreover, why “terror has been dismissed as a negative response, and associated with colonial timidity, or postcolonial neurosis, as though it were expressive of a uniquely local pathology.”3 Like Glickman, I adopt the sublime as a key paradigm of Canadian culture and believe that, far from merely channelling a sense of monstrous landscapes, the sublime imagination helps move the subject from passive terror to an “ontological imperative.”4

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I see problems, however, with looking at oil through the prism of the sublime. The territory on which oil excavation encroaches is not a pastoral, garden-like plot of land, but an endless expanse of rugged scenery. Precisely because the petro-sublime often associated with works by Edward Burtynsky and with countless documentaries5 fits so well with the standard Canadian wilderness that Northrop Frye described as “a huge, unthinking, menacing, and formidable physical setting,”6 it is more difficult to mount resistance to it. What Frye wrote about the impact of Canadian landscape applies with eerie accuracy to the landscapes of oil: “its primeval lawlessness and moral nihilism, its indifference to the supreme value placed on life within human society, its faceless, mindless unconsciousness, which fosters life without benevolence and destroys it without malice.”7 The same sense of impending destruction emanating from the environment is also what Canadian poet Dennis Lee invoked when he argued that, contrary to the American impulse to conquer the land through technology, Canadians “feel a deep sense of being claimed by it.”8 Or, in the words of Robert Kroetsch about Canadian wilderness: “We don’t want to conquer it. Sometimes we want it to conquer us.”9 Nature both attracts and repels, both terrifies and fascinates; these are the poles between which the sublime oscillates. The sublime is a capacious rubric that pivots on the differences between beauty and sublimity. The Kantian understanding of the sublime famously separates beauty from personal interest. Once we conceive of benefitting from an object, we can no longer judge its beauty. This idea finds an interesting application in oil imagery: if we regard petro-pictures as beautiful, does this elevate us above any personal benefit from resource production (a patently impossible ambition for most of us), or do we assert the beauty of the images precisely so as to claim an exemption from that benefit? This dynamic works, if at all, partly because beauty claims universal validity by exceeding subjective evaluation. In clarifying this issue I turn to Canadian philosopher and cultural theorist Davide Panagia, who in The Poetics of Political Thinking defines beauty, sublimity, and politics in ways that lend themselves well to oil aesthetics. “Though beauty appeals to the senses,” he writes of Kant’s non-utilitarian notion of taste, “its determination is independent of private sensation.”10 The sublime, by contrast, becomes political precisely by engaging subjective perception, and it does so, as Burke maintains, by inspiring the kind of

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horror and terror that requires somatic responses. Confronted with the sublime, Burke writes, “the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence, reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force.”11 A mind overflowing with sublime imagery suits petroleum vistas especially well. For Panagia, it also reinforces the empiricist essence of the sublime, which relies not on universal beauty but on sensory perception. In The Critique of Judgment, Kant of course wrote about the sublime as a feeling – namely a mixture of the pain caused by reason’s failure to understand the sublime object and the pleasure we take in recognizing this limitation. Panagia moves beyond the sensorial premise of the sublime to emphasize its dissociating potential, which operates at two levels: personal sensation and socio-historical context. “By interrupting the flow of history as an experience available for human sensation, the sublime returns us to an antisocial state of radical individuality  … Indeed, the sublime is so radically individuating that it forces us to confront our own mortality  … in a manner that resembles actual pain.”12 Not only that, it also “interrupts society as an organic and historical force” because it so effectively destabilizes clear judgment. Oil similarly “pollutes the mind to such a degree that one can no longer rely on it for discernment … no longer rely on traditional categories,” putting pressure on the politics of petroleum as a commodity of international exchange through what turns out to be physical, bodily, infinitesimal distortions.13 Panagia is not the only one to find in the sublime a bridge between the aesthetic and the political. In an article entitled “Sublime Politics,” the late Montreal scholar Bill Readings explains how liberal late capitalism defines the political subject as a consumer in a commodity culture in which “ideology takes the form of sensory overload.”14 Readings usefully distinguishes between a politics of the sublime – which assigns to its object “the political significance of absolute zero, simple opposition to meaning,”15 thus reducing ambiguity to the mere absence of clarity  – and a sublime politics, which in a broader sense “would attempt to subject politics to the radical indeterminacy of the sublime as a questioning of rules and criteria.”16 The former applies to many dialectical readings of oil as

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invisible capital of modernity. The latter promises a “politics of dissensus”17 by adopting the destabilizing effect of oil representation as a political principle. I have assembled an archive of oil images that do not merely expose hitherto occluded cultural narratives, but deploy the unreadability of oil culture to probe familiar images and narratives of politics. What I have said so far (and will say in relation to the works at hand) suggests that sensation concretizes the sublime subject of oil into a moment of rupture or a detailed, disorienting site (often very small, or suggestive of smallness). Readings’s sublime, while accepting of otherness and dissensus, also involves an opening to the other and to society, a sharing of the sublime. My archive supports this opening through gestures of communion: people converge around oil, seeking to make sense of it together. I organize these networks around immigration, war, border zones, and aerial sight. Across these networks, collapsed certainties are replaced with pure sensation. It is in this substitution that I locate the sublime politics of oil.

Oil, Music, Snowmobiles R. Murray Schafer’s 1973 orchestra piece North/White straightforwardly condemns the impact of the oil industry on the pristine landscapes of the Canadian North. Schafer achieves this by superimposing three layers of sublime imagery. First, the piece draws on the “spectacular and terrifying geography” of the North, which Schafer describes as “a place of austerity, of spaciousness and loneliness,” a “pure,” “temptationless” realm that inspires both fear and the satisfied recognition that experiencing fear enriches and hardens the character – for Schafer a quality of the Canadian national temperament.18 Sadly, “men and machines … blocking the awe-inspiring mysteries with gas stations” trouble the composer’s fantasy of a sublime national identity forged in the chill and purity of driven snows. Second, while the whiteness of the title refers to snow, Schafer also intended that “like white light, which is composed of all visible frequencies, it [sc. whiteness] combines all the producible notes of the symphony orchestra from the deepest to the highest instruments.”19 The third sublime layer rests on the “concentration of harsh metallic sounds, either sustained or in pounding reiterations” – including some unusual instruments like metal sheets, pipes, and chains that

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create an “imposing, even terrifying” effect.20 This technological sublime manifests itself in the quirky addition of a snowmobile to the orchestra’s percussion section. The resulting logistical nightmare probably explains the piece’s relative obscurity. Another reason is Schafer’s political stance, namely the way he enlists a politics of the sublime rather than a sublime politics. The raspy sound that interrupts the serenity of the opening strings stands for a vile and violent invasion, what he calls “the rape of the Canadian North,” carried out with the blunt instruments of “pipelines and airstrips, highways and snowmobiles.”21 More problematically – and, again, in keeping with a politics that equates the sublime with otherness and with the denial of a passionately defended status quo – the invasion is as much technological as it is human, or rather demographic. It opens the North to what Schafer perceives as consumption-happy, hapless, and smelly immigrant hordes that sully its splendid spaces and national mythology. While this uninhibited nationalism, masked by the piece’s ecological stance, may have led to its cultural suppression, North/White is memorable in its vision of petroleum as the pure lifeblood of the North. Violent extraction threatens to spill this blood and darken the uncontaminated whiteness of the Arctic (there are obvious racial notes in the title). North/White comes to life – if this is what we may call its rarefied, gloomy coldness – once the underground border has been breached and the horror of leaking oil envelops the land. After a lengthy cacophony of tones meant to denote the sprawl of business and industry, silence follows, and we begin to hear the slow release of petroleum in the aftermath of violence. The sound situates petroleum in the realm of the abject as despicable evidence of environmental coercion. We can almost see it, and, through the transparent sexual imagery at work in the piece, we are asked to feel the physical harm that has been done. Sherrill Grace describes this sound as a “repeated glubbing that conceivably mimics the sound of oil moving through a pipeline.”22 But most of what we hear is not the swish of a lightly circulating liquid but the gurgle of a thick fluid rising to the surface with broken burbling sounds. Because the sound seems partly natural, we are asked to understand that there is nothing wrong or obscene about petroleum as long as it remains under the ground. But the increasingly sharp noise calls to mind the technologies harnessing oil into fuel in a society for which oil acts as a sublime polar opposite.

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In this way, Schafer dissolves the boundaries that separate the grandiose, monumental, and ecstatic from the shapes of everyday life. The pure snow and the dark oil: wilderness and technology share aspects of the sublime. With this displacement, Schafer prefigures another movement, that of oil away from the North and of people into heavily industrialized areas. After all, we wouldn’t be hearing anything had the oil not been coaxed out of the earth and captured in pipelines by migrant workers as darkly threatening as the oil itself. The gurgle indexes oil’s departure as one type of energy drains away from the North and another one streams in. The murmur of this labour army coats and dissolves the Arctic iciness so artfully distilled by the strings and long moments of near silence. The music moves from openness to mechanical enclosure and control. The mythical space is partitioned by the grid of pipelines and oil tanks, made real and concrete by a variety of claps, chugs, and clatters, murmurs and burbles, spurts and whooshes. So a sublime politics is also at work in Schafer’s imagination of oil, which disorganizes the sensorial categories that determine our perception of oil and actively looks for a new natural and human geography – though it is perhaps misguided in what it thinks it finds: a geography ready to both imagine oil and to condemn the people and processes that press it to the surface. It is through moments of sensation that North/White punctuates the otherwise banal relation of the petroleum industry to the Canadian North. Schafer revises familiar ways of sensing oil by using a kind of symphonic petro-synaesthesia “in which sustained blocks of sound would be fractured into splinters of colour, like sun-glintings off vast folds of arctic snow.”23 While the piece promotes a reprehensible xenophobic nationalism, it does succeed in aligning oil with the blankness of other tropes we are more familiar with: snow, the emptiness of Northern landscapes. In this sense oil is an apt correlative for sensation itself, which Panagia defines as “an experience of unrepresentability in that a sensation occurs without having to rely on a recognizable shape, outline or identity to determine its value.”24 Because it functions one step removed from familiar structures of cognition, sensation can actively challenge such structures. “The limits posed by sensation’s unrepresentability thus interrupt our conventional ways of perceiving the world and giving it value.”25 The works I engage with in the following pages reconfigure the context

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of petroleum in Canada, interrupting what we know about the history of a sublime aesthetics in the Canadian imagination, the Canada–US axis in the production and export of oil, and the material politics of global oil culture.

Sarnia, Iraq, and the Petrochemical Sublime: John Greyson’s the law of enclosures Sarnia, Ontario’s Chemical Valley, is a complex border zone in John Greyson’s The Law of Enclosures (2000).26 Time-wise, the film shifts between the First Gulf War and the present; geographically, it is set around the Blue Water Bridge linking Sarnia and Port Huron, Michigan. The film doesn’t feature the oil sands, yet its interest in the Gulf War fetishizes sand as a cipher for the invisible ubiquity of oil. The inhabitants of Chemical Valley inhale the contaminated air around the area’s oil refineries and chemical plants in the same imperceptible way they ingest news of the ongoing Iraq War. The film shows that by looking at oil as an “enclosed” mass  – enclosed, that is, safely, inside the containers of chemical refineries, and as a polluting agent within the human body – we can reshape our appreciation of how the politics of oil comes into being from a calculus of risk, toxicity, and sensation. The Law of Enclosures was adapted from a story by Dale Peck, in turn based on his 1996 novel of the same name.27 Even though the novel is set on Long Island, there are traces in it of what would later prompt Greyson (himself a Canadian) to change the setting to an Ontario refinery hub. I won’t discuss the novel at length here, but will just point out its delicate politics of sensation. The Iraq War on tv carries to the viewer “the smoke of oil fires and burning homes and charred bodies.”28 This indirect exposure to the toxicity of the war is aligned with industrial pollution. Due to some chemical contamination that makes more sense in Greyson’s petrochemical setting than in the original plot, one character suffers from a brain tumour. The resulting pain fills the head “like a sac filling with liquid” until it “burst into flame from the burning oil that spilled out.”29 Such strong sensorial imagery links the Kuwait oil fires with the effects of the oil industry in areas much closer to home. Meanwhile in the protagonists’ lives hidden substances “leach” outward, and this tendency toward spillage and excess is echoed by several attempts in the

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novel to invoke a sublime substance that “seems to lack all meaning beyond the fact of its existence” – “unseen shapes and formless forces,” often ignored because they cannot be touched.30 The lack of touch in a novel about illness and war allows the sublime to provide an ethereal foil to things that are too painfully present. Greyson’s film encodes a sublime politics by focusing on sensation as a membrane between the fragility of individual lives and the monumentality of war. Greyson takes to heart the novel’s concluding insight, voiced by the protagonist, that “no ghostly truth was writhing in the mist waiting for him to grab it.”31 So what we see in the film is always material, embodied, and starkly and unsparingly lit. The establishing shots contain scenes from the life cycle of petroleum (pumpjacks, refineries32) alternating with grainy Gulf War footage. While the war images may be blurred, their juxtaposition with rigs and refineries isn’t. The bridge that Greyson spans between Canada and the US rests on the connection between Sarnia’s petrochemical industry and the ongoing Gulf War, ongoing in the double sense that it forms the backdrop to the film’s plot and that, unexpectedly, the war never ceases throughout the two-tiered story of a young couple – Beatrice (Sarah Polley) and Henry (Brendan Fletcher), and their aged selves forty years later – Bea (Diane Ladd) and Hank (Sean McCann). All four protagonists appear to exist in the same temporal plane, side by side, young and aged, as if history had stopped in its tracks. “Greyson’s forty-year Gulf War is depressingly prescient,” Christopher Gittings wrote in an essay from the era framed by George W. Bush’s second war with Iraq, “suggesting that the imperial moment has not and will not pass.”33 He concludes that The Law of Enclosures “conveys the interdependence of global economies, Canada’s historical and contemporary roles in the oil industry, and its complicity in a destructive global imperial order structuring the lives of people like Bea and Hank, people like you and me.”34 But how exactly does the film manage to pack such a broad scope into such a small and small-minded story? I argue that it succeeds precisely by enclosing petroleum in a series of real and metaphorical containers, in tight spaces and relations that question how intimate with oil we can (claim to) be. The enclosure is threefold: the couples are insulated from the war through distance and indifference; they are removed from oil by a petrochemical landscape of containers; and

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finally, emotion cannot penetrate the shell of boredom that has hardened around their marriage – until they visit an oil museum. In all three cases, various levels of sensory intimacy with oil suggest a politics of petroleum marked by permanent conflict along domestic and geopolitical contact zones. Petroleum infiltrates the lives of these people in much the same way that news of the war does. And, like the war, it hardly touches them at all. Oil and war converge to paint a picture of a city and its people driven by forces at a vast geographical remove from, or deeply buried beneath, the industrial façade. The persistent echoes of war don’t go beyond scattered tv footage of aerial bombardments captured on satellite cameras and framed by scraps of voice commentary. Because it remains so impenetrable, the war mirrors the tragedies that beset both romances. Henry meets Beatrice shortly before a tumour on his head is removed, in an operation that he miraculously survives. Hank is accidentally shot by a deer hunter in the woods where he and Bea have built their home for retirement. The hazy permanence of the war subtly reflects the opaqueness of the protagonists’ emotional entanglements and mutual resentment over many years. While the Gulf War images on television are tragic and violent, they inspire less fear and horror than Sarnia’s local petrochemical sublime. The Beatrice-Henry story features static, saturated shots of refineries reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni’s rusty, steamengulfed refinery landscapes in the similarly anaemic Red Desert (1964).35 On the surface, soporific suburbia is contending here with the flow of petroleum, resource wars, and history itself. Until, that is, we realize that in this film oil simply pools quietly in huge white tanks, is merely suggested by the creaking old derricks at the museum, or appears in tiny containers that Bea and Hank stare into with expectancy and awe. Because the museum documents the regional birth of the oil industry in North America while the war stages its global crisis, The Law of Enclosures metaphorically stakes out a diminishment of fossil and emotional energy. The museum gives Hank and Bea the opportunity to symbolically drill through the crust of their withered love to feast on fresh reservoirs of energy. Their slow stroll through the field of rickety pumpjacks  – which the camera stylizes into a playful, almost dreamlike wonderland populated by flirty, boisterous youngsters – fuels a momentary spark of emotion.

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Partly due to its absence or scarcity, and above all through its repression from the images of the Gulf War, oil suddenly overpowers and intoxicates the couple. Looking at it, holding it in small vials that give them the illusion of control over this elusive substance – as elusive as their own life and love – allows them to sense and embrace the sublime disorientation the film associates with the unfolding war and the petrochemical monumentality of the region. Even though Sarnia may have been the scene for one of the world’s first oil booms, in the film the city itself no longer entertains any contact with an outside. This is simply Sarnia, as Henry’s mother explains to Beatrice, who aspires vaguely toward a different kind of life but finds herself grounded, again and again, in the ways circumstances converge to “enclose” her. The image of oil highlights the tension between the town’s pumpjack pastoral and the mediatized global war – between the kind of oil that fits into vials and the kind that fuels wars and desert fires. Greyson portrays a Canadian oil town that sits on history but shields itself from it, or isn’t capable of reading its own ruins. The sublime politics of the film disrupts the various laws of enclosure that shield the tv viewers from the war, the city from its quietly looming petrochemical infrastructure, and the couple from a fuller understanding of what energy means in the tangible language of domestic experience.

The Aerial Sublime: petropolis Greyson’s oil community is both closely entangled with global events and isolated from geography and history, even though only a bridge separates Sarnia from the US, and only a tv screen stands between the Canadian household and the Gulf War. Images of Western Canada’s oil sands evoke a similar kind of global aesthetics in order to make sense of the opaque, eviscerated topographies of open-pit mining. Much has been said about the aerial sublime in representations of the oil sands, but the political power of this approach is often gauged, if at all, as a narrative of failure. The politics of oil documentaries lies, Imre Szeman writes, “in the evidence they provide of the limit of what can be said about a socially ubiquitous substance that remains hidden from view – even today, and even in the process of bringing it to light.”36 Conceiving of oil within “the antinomy of limitlessness and limit”37 creates a tension

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not only between the small scope of the visible and the vast realm of the unseen, but also between the measurable action that may be taken to redress the violence and injustice of oil capitalism and the immeasurable extent of oil’s suffusion of daily life. Szeman delineates here a politics of the sublime that is no doubt valid for oil documentaries seeking to reveal secret oil sites and their role in steering global politics. Peter Mettler’s Petropolis (2009) depicts the oil sands as “a spectacle that can only be understood from above,” so it appears conventional in exposing the sheer scale of the extraction industry in the tar sands.38 It exceeds this frame by shifting from the macro-scale of extraction to the micro-level of textures and sensory experience. It doesn’t ask what can be done, but how action is always contingent on precise forms of experience. To make this point, it explores and explodes the idea of action as a corrector to oil politics by focusing on how action can be triggered and how it manifests itself at the somatic level. The method it chooses is to take apart aerial representation itself, revealing not just oil sites but the mechanisms of capturing them on film. The object of the documentary isn’t the vast domain of the oil sands, one visible from space and part of a post-terrestrial, post-human landscape, but something very human indeed, dependent on the viewers’ ability to make sense, literally, of what they see on the surface of the earth, whose every mound and fracture the film painstakingly registers. Petropolis begins with high-angle shots of the Athabasca River and of the forests that line its course, explaining in brief captions how bitumen is produced and piped to upgraders for refining. What sets Petropolis apart from similar documentaries, such as Dirty Oil – a more overtly militant work, narrated in large part by journalist Andrew Nikiforuk – is not so much its vantage point as the implicit suggestion that angle and altitude (both high and low, large and small) are always integral to representing the oil sands. This is partly because they are the most obvious approach to their vastness. More importantly, scale perception involves a sudden sensorial readjustment and thereby stresses the role of the senses in connecting work and audience in sharing the experience of oil. Exactly how Petropolis stages this sublime politics from the sky is worth examining in detail. The montage of mobile helicopter views alternates with still shots, held for an awkwardly long time,

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until they resemble abstract paintings accompanied by a soundtrack of penetrating metal clangs. Against the backdrop of the deserted landscape and ooze seeping from the ground, the long stretches of silence suggest that surreptitious encroachment is underway as a gothic spirit takes hold of the entire area. Gradually we identify in the sound an intermittent radio transmission. Coupled with the ravaged landscapes, the noise evokes an expedition to an alien planet, fearsome not so much for the uneasy encounters that might occur there as for the danger of a complete and lethal sensory deprivation. There are few traces here of either gravity or atmosphere. The few visible people navigate the tailings sea like a terraforming crew. Processed water flows through an eerie infrastructure, partly mechanical, partly inorganic. Pipes, tar, and overburden create a monstrous environment, too poisonous and hostile to sustain life. Further downstream, the toxic sludge plagues Fort Chipewyan with diseases and upsets the social order. This pollution of the physical and social body is formally embodied in the movement of the camera. At first it rushes forward, looking for its subject in oblique aerial views, coming upon it with a thrilling pan or tilt.39 But in observing the trucks, it takes on a stealthy, investigative alertness somewhere between that of a wildlife documentary and police surveillance of suspicious cargo shipments. Toward the end, it moves backward and away from the oil sands, as if abandoning the battlefield in the aftermath of a bloody defeat, with the enemy in hot pursuit. Even more than the oil sands, the frantic camera is the film’s protagonist. The political narrative of Petropolis matches Szeman’s diagnosis of a sense of failure in ascertaining the possibility – and even the usefulness – of political action in the petro-documentary genre. But the focus here is decidedly on the “sense” of failure. Not everything the film suggests has to do with gothic invasions and extraterrestrial gloom. A reference to Karl Clark, the Canadian chemist and oil sands researcher who patented the hot water oil separation process in 1929 and was reportedly horrified at the destruction that his discovery made possible, reorients the politics of the oil sands toward their chemical origins, making possible responses more manageable and concrete. The oil sands are boiled down to a chemical formula: a specific moment when everything went wrong. And, even if the sublime expanses of the region may, as Szeman suggested,

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vitiate the viewer’s comprehension of the problem and their ability to react, Mettler cannily reduces sublime aeriality to its material contexts and genealogy. The commentary that closes the film recounts the first free flight by humans in a hot air balloon in France in 1783. Between Clark’s revolutionary formula and the dizzying balloon flight of almost three centuries ago, the film attempts to break down the vast sublimity of the oil sands into a formula almost playful in its diminished proportions: chemical reactions, balloons, the science fiction fare of distant planets, the Mordor of tailings ponds. The sublime politics of the film rests on this inversion of energetic excess into whimsical imagery, which scrutinizes the calcified sublimity of oil sands photography and injects some freshness into it. Mettler is essentially asking whether we are going to lean back and gasp with awe, or try to demystify the coffee-table-book grandness of the tar sands spectacle. In other ways, the proportions of the oil sands are difficult to gauge, partly because they lack a point of reference such as a skyline. The camera faces the ground at a ninety-degree angle in vertical aerial shots, catching nothing of the surrounding forests or sky, resting on the oil sands with the finality of a meteor or explosive about to hit the ground – although, by all appearances, something destructive has already struck (the land is pocked with excavation craters). Often the site resembles human epidermis and other organs. The human body is in fact the key metaphor that Petropolis uses to represent the “body” of the oil giant and the parasites crawling over it. The two main echoes of humanity here are scatological waste and death. Seen from above, the oil sands bespeak a failure of containment. Pipes, ponds, and trucks are leaking, or their content is spilling over; the entire landscape exudes a foul incontinence. The camera zooms out and then back in on the trucks carrying full loads of earth away from the quarries, looking, from far up, like maggots feeding on carrion. From black pools to brown earth, a variety of textures and consistencies in between solid and fluid suggests the excremental nature of what is going on. The sublime becomes political through the sordidly palpable quality of the tar sands as an unconventional fossil fuel, somewhere on the boundary between hardness and liquidity: not extracted from hard rock out of which it explosively gushes, but in a slower, more unsettling kind of controlled bleeding.

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The Subatomic Sublime: Burtynsky, Gowin, Synecdoche, and Scale The unifying feature of the works in my archive is their desire to disturb material perspectives on oil in order to reach a level of abstraction that paradoxically permits a more concrete interiority. The arc I am delineating moves from pipelines and snowmobiles to individual lives and deaths in the shadow of refineries, and finally to an aerial – and at the same time radiological – view of the oil sands that locates them both outside and inside the body: a part of nature and a resource inside the mind. Common to the photographic work I focus on in this section is an aerial aesthetics that draws on the futurist fascination with technologies of flight. Despite its disreputable political pedigree and its imperialistic and militaristic origins, futurist aeropainting  – as launched by Marinetti shortly after Lindbergh’s transatlantic journey and during Mussolini’s fascist regime  – has left a clear imprint on aerial oil photography. On the one hand, oil photos retain the challenge to search for new means of expression that are commensurate with the technology of aerial sight and with the technological abominations of resource extraction. On the other hand, aerial petro-photography responds much differently to the repression of detail typical of futurist aerial art. Because the erasure of natural specificity is seen as a result of extraction disasters, aerial photos of the oil sands seek to recontextualize the amorphous views of the earth in ways that re-embody them, routing them back into the body. While futurism championed an idea of art “liberated from the representational restraints of the material world,”40 petro-photographs elevate to an essential principle the materiality of what they depict and of how their technology operates. The violence of aeropainting had a universalizing effect, as it subjected details to the dominance of omnipotent technologies of military attack and reconnaissance. The violence of oil images promotes a mode of observation that is both sympathetic and grotesque, in order to bring forth the visceral reality of the individual  – the singular, the obscenely intimate and particular. The modernist architect Le Corbusier understood that the view from the air materialized what had merely been imagined before: “the eye now sees in substance what the mind could only subjectively conceive; it is a new function added to our senses; it is a

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new standard of measurement; it is the basis of a new sensation.”41 In the work of Edward Burtynsky, the body emerges at the confluence of two seemingly opposing vectors: extraordinary detail, for which his images of hydrocarbon landscapes are so renowned, and flat aesthetic beauty, for which the same images are so often reviled. Could their sublime politics lie precisely in the coexistence of these contradictory drives? Despite their massive scale, Burtynsky’s photographs of industrial incursions draw the viewer in with detail. Even more than in the photographs, this is evident in Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary Manufactured Landscapes (2006), which traces the quick mechanical movements that Burtynsky’s large and still images work to obscure.42 This dual perspective of macro-scale and micro-detail sustains the sublime in Burtynsky’s work. His work’s sublime politics consists in how he extrapolates from the specificity of local detail to the characteristic blur of his most powerful assemblages, from definition and clarity to a kind of nervous (but also sedating) sheen. The images are shocking, but their compositional clutter reassures like the mess (and mass) of a familiar, lived-in room. I want to look at how Burtynsky communicates this sense of lived experience, which I consider essential to the success of his images of otherwise unfamiliar, disorienting locales. The typical photograph in Burtynsky’s Oil, for instance, hinges on duplication, repetition, seriality, and an impenetrable industriousness for its effect. Things and people engage in a constant reproduction of themselves and in the production of small, identical objects in small, identical gestures, which lull the viewer into an ambient spleen. This dynamic reveals the complacency of a society so accustomed to the availability of petroleum that any reflection on the topic seems at once mind-numbing and meaningless. Manufactured Landscapes uncovers this effect more clearly than the photographs do: individual shots never reveal one tire, but a million tires in a garbage dump; never one computer part, but countless parts; never one worker, but thousands. The multiplication enhances the sense that we are privy to something secret, something that has been accumulating while we weren’t watching, so the fact that we are watching now is of paramount importance in these pictures. What are we looking for? To unveil mounds of petrochemical detritus and the fungus of derricks everywhere is akin to an autopsy on a body whose death, we

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are made to feel, could have been avoided. The images convey a surgical violence in their attention to malignant sprawl, the metastases of toxic refuse, and the scalpel of mining equipment ravaging the earth’s crust. The film of oil mingled with the earth’s surface has the unfinished, un-chewed quality of something our bodies secretly consume or excrete. Burtynsky, like Mettler, collapses regionalism and globalism in a metaphor of the body. The gesture of the images is that of a medical device registering a mutation of the familiar or unwanted growth in a panoramic view meant to single out troubling punctualities. Burtynsky hands over the result with the kind of responsible yet uninterested care of a surgeon we don’t regard as a personal enemy, yet from whom we expect bad news. Burtynsky has been accused of erasing the local specificities of places he represents, of mashing them into frames that invoke beauty rather than consternation.43 Yet one cannot escape the feeling that the pictures are set in a vacuum, a sort of flatness or historical one-dimensionality. A child holding one of the photographs given to him by the Canadian celebrity in the film suddenly flips it over after regarding the image at some length, as if there might be, or should be, a second level of meaning underneath. What Burtynsky’s uncommitted style achieves is to isolate the emergence of what we see, what is visible to us, so that the political regime of what ought to be visible may be established. The impartial terrain of his images is in this sense pre-political. The visible chaos of the images prepares the ground for a more radical response, but the images don’t themselves constitute that response. Nadia Bozak blames the pictures’ “insentient detachment” for their lack of political power.44 But there is a deeper, less obtrusive tactility to the detachment of these images, which reassemble the landscape into the shape and texture of the human body at a cellular level. I want to read Burtynsky obliquely, by juxtaposing his aesthetics with that of US photographer Emmet Gowin, who hasn’t so far been compared with Burtynsky, despite Gowin’s much earlier interest in the type of sites that attracted Burtynsky’s attention in the late 1990s. I argue that the photographic work of both Burtynsky and Gowin converts a horizontal perspective into a vertical view, effectively turning the aerial image into a microscopic lens.45 Both render oil visible not by zooming out, which they also do, but most effectively by zooming in on sublimely indecipherable forms, showing

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how oil imbibes textured surfaces reminiscent of the human skin. It’s a simple yet effective synecdoche.46 Since the mid-1980s, Gowin has photographed military test sites, mining operations, air strips, bomb disposal craters, weapons disposal trenches, and other sites that document the large-scale impact of humans on natural landscape. Most of these pictures were taken in Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Colorado and were published in 2002 in conjunction with the Yale University Art Gallery exhibition Changing the Earth: Aerial Photographs.47 Separating the first phase of Gowin’s work, which focuses on intimate family pictures, from the second, “global” phase is a series of fastidiously printed images taken in other regions of the world, including Kuwait (traffic patterns and troop placements), Israel, and Japan. The hand-toned black-and-white images make the landscapes appear archaic and surreal while imbuing them with documentary precision. The photos in Changing the Earth look nothing like the Earth. We are never entirely sure whether what we are seeing is a nebulous galaxy or glacial potholes, a mining exploration or the surface of an uninhabitable planet. The pictures aim to denaturalize the “natural” landscapes by reducing them to a basic yet not immediately recognizable formula, which oscillates between natural and man-made forms. A toxic water treatment facility in Arkansas puzzles with a series of what look like giant amoebas, obviously out of place in a perfectly rectangular pool. The tension between a natural appearance (cast in neutral, non-informational hues) and the edifying clues provided by the image captions sustains the sinister effect of the images themselves. “This is the stuff of environmentalist porn,” one reviewer writes,48 confirming the prurient, borderline mannerist obsession of the images with excess and sensation. In contrast, Gowin’s photographs of the Chemopetrol mines and plants in and around the town of Litvinov in the Most region of the Czech Republic (1992–94) stand out because they capture less stylized, more recognizable sites.49 Gowin travelled to the Czech Republic at the suggestion of Magnum photographer Josef Koudelka, who took pictures of waste heaps and dried-up lakes in Czech coal mining areas.50 The region surrounding the strip mines is known as the Black Triangle, since millions of acres of land have been damaged by acid rain. “The Czech soil is surely just like American soil,” Gowin observes on the similarities between home and abroad. “If northern

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Bohemia had a sister state, it would be Pennsylvania, with all its mining, underground fires, and polluted streams. You need only to adjust for the time frame.”51 Gowin’s panoramic camerawork, much like Burtynsky’s, captures geological faults and craters like pockmarked skin. The earth’s surface is the organ through which the images project an embodied experience of the planet. Gowin elsewhere locates the body as the site of ecological sense and sensibility: “What we know in our bodies, never in our minds” ensures “the integrity of our own experience.”52 But the real paradox of the images resides in the inverted aeriality of this embodied knowledge. As Russell Hart, executive editor of American Photo, notes in his review of the book, “Scale is ambiguous in these aerial photos: Off-road vehicle tracks in the Great Salt Lake look like the tracings of subatomic particles, while massive petrochemical plants in the Czech Republic resemble electron photomicrographs.”53 The microscopy of the technique  – which makes depicted objects appear minuscule and magnified  – belies the broad perspective suggested in the captions and the specificity of the featured sites. In ways that resemble Burtynsky’s reliance on the human body and on waste as an optical grid, Gowin’s images imagine the tissue and capillaries of the energy industry. They hint at the invisibility of this industry by imagining it as too small to be recognized with the naked eye. The photograph renders the microworld visible only through labelling. The captions are as important here as the images themselves, and it’s often the grainy details that the captions name – for instance a relocated cathedral close to an open pit and overburden. What sets Gowin’s photographs apart from the perpendicular shots of Petropolis is their wider structure, which prevents the picture from being completely flattened. Beyond the horizon line, the landscape appears less affected than in the pocked and pitted foreground. By eliminating the horizon line, Petropolis shifts easily between tracking shots of the wider Athabasca basin and static close-ups of heavy hauler trucks and shovels. Gowin’s horizon line combines the cropping gesture of local attention with the broader sweep of a global view. The cuts and gashes of the nuclear West in his photographs destabilize the viewer’s relationship with the land and stimulate reflection on what emotions the shapes themselves invoke. They could be exhibited sideways or upside-down. All references to

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reality are obliterated, and there is no intrinsic evidence to locate them in time or place. The Czech images, however, articulate a more overtly political project by retaining the coordinates of the landscape. Up and down are unmistakable. Despite the lack of clues to scale within the frame, the specific time and place redirects emotion toward a sublime politics that both reorganizes known coordinates and points to a recognizable physical world. Much like Mettler’s autopsy of the oil sands, Gowin’s images often resemble catalogues of human body parts captioned in the typical scientific nomenclature of textbook anatomy: “One cannot look at the images in Changing the Earth without seeing images of the human body: face, neck, breasts, torso, pelvis, thighs, arms and legs, embodied and disembodied, at once. Nor can we speak of Emmet Gowin’s photographs without using the vernacular of biology: cells, nucleus, mitochondria, dna, tissue, nerve, muscle, arteries, veins, and vessels.”54 This anthropomorphic structure allows the viewer not only to feel the image in the deepest physiological sense of the word, but also to absorb its irreversible temporality – the temporality of disease and disaster. Like Burtynsky, Gowin relies on repetition (of similar images as identical parts of a single organism) and duplication (of human flesh into artificial, man-made structures) as a structural and serial device. People are “superimposed as an elusive and ephemeral presence, one either hovering or passing from human form into a visual union with geologic and/or botanic vistas.”55 Yet, unlike the rhizomatic depthlessness of Burtynsky’s static images, Gowin’s sonogramic clues track the teleological horror of a fatal systemic disorder in full progress. These aren’t local ailments but the sores, tumours, and ulcerations that announce serious, organismwide damage. Gowin sees the American West and the Czech Republic as linked by this systemic affliction, co-dependent in the same way that two different parts of the same body are: “As we examine our relationship to things – all that is invisible, indirect, or distant to us – we get a more proper understanding of how all life is intimately interrelated.”56 And, even though he works with scale as much as Burtynsky does, the deeper scale of his images revolves around the body and not around the ecosystem: physiology rather than ecology. At a remove from the extroverted awe of Burtynsky’s landscapes, the deep sublime that Mettler and Gowin achieve touches on the intimate sensorium of the body.

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Compounding their haptic effect is the additional detail that Gowin’s photographs are chemically hand toned. The black, white, and tan chromatics turn the expected tonal distribution of the landscape upside-down, making lighter-toned water (presumably tailings ponds) stand out in a glowing, unnatural-looking light. Indeed, the sublimity of these images is inseparable from the material splendour of the photographic surface on which abstract, disorienting shapes appear – amorphously physical (their metallic tints provoke alarm), yet not immediately palpable, despite the dry and crunchy earth tones. Like oil itself, this oil photography hovers between solidity and abstraction, abject morbidity and intoxicating awe. And, while in Burtynsky the sublime derives in large measure from detail and excess, Gowin draws attention to entropic emptiness through images that invoke drained basins or tongue-less clocks – spaces out of time, frozen by eternal inertia. Burtynsky, Mettler, and Gowin convey a sublime politics of oil in their ability to condense a transnational experience of oil culture in the codes and imagery of physical sensation. They redraw the field of vision in a way that isn’t explicitly or aggressively political, but that enacts a pre-political “partition of the sensible”  – as Jacques Rancière puts it57  – by questioning why we see certain things and not others, what sheds light on some parts of the world and obscures other parts. “Politics,” Rancière asserts, “is aesthetic in that it makes visible what had been excluded from a perceptual field.”58 Panagia also draws on Rancière to valorize sense experience in political life, especially through “sublime dissonance.”59 Put simply, Rancière shifts focus from a discussion of words or images as already invested with mimetic signification to a stage at which semantic designation has not yet taken place. “We tremble at the feelings we experience as our sense of wholeness is reorganized by what we see,” Gowin likewise remarked in 1994.60 The approaches of Burtynsky and Gowin in particular also shed light on how fossil fuel mining is perceived in the two countries. The much shorter history of the industry in Canada prompts Burtynsky to look to other global locations, or to a global consciousness in general, to compensate for the relatively shallow genealogy of Canadian petroculture. Gowin’s globalism is historical; his Czech photographs are historical studies inasmuch as his earlier work consists of autobiographical studies. And, even though Burtynsky and Gowin are

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obviously tempted to hollow out a vast abyss of incomprehensible sublimity in the place of the very real extraction sites they describe, it is clear to me that the works of both of them draw their sublime power from concrete sources of knowledge woven into a map of political dissensus. Rather than simply revere the incalculable otherness of the oil imaginary, each photographer assumes the difficult task of opening oil representation to the sharpness of sensorial knowledge. Recognizing in the petro-sublime not an aesthetic category but an unruly agent capable of disrupting aesthetic categorization, these works effectively demarcate the phenomenological realms the petrosublime disorganizes as it passes through. A key moment in materializing the politics of oil has been to trace it back to local sites and to isolated, often passionate communities, whose lives are tightly enmeshed with the circuits of hydrocarbon culture.61 In ways that address not specific communities as much as the individual perception of petroleum culture in a country increasingly defined by its booming oil industry, the sensory imaginary of petroleum affects us in works by Schafer, Greyson, Mettler, and Burtynsky at several registers of experience, sense and sensibility, feeling and knowledge. They all convert the ethereal images of petroleum into palpable representations, but this specific capture transects them in very different ways, which point to the political potential of a sublime aesthetics for making sense of oil. Specifically, a focus on sensation draws attention – despite the often unsavoury materiality of crude oil itself – to the palpable comforts afforded by oil culture. “Greed,” Burtynsky once observed, “the rampant pursuit of comfort, ease and sensory gratification,” is what drives humanity’s largescale abuse of resources.62 While the abundant plastics of fossil fuel culture and its mobile lifestyles engender pleasure, we are repelled by their crude source and toxic residues. Reading oil through the lens of the senses makes the abject underbelly of this unbridled hedonism blatant and unbearable. Further, contamination through the mining behemoth manifests itself in the body through abnormal sensation (pain, disease). A tactile rather than visual perspective thus unveils sites of toxicity that may otherwise have gone unnoticed. There are many other sites where petroleum invades the senses and dislocates established registers of sense making. I hope to have shown that the regimes of perception that ensue (based on sound, tactility, toxic contagion, and diagnostic pathology) acquire political

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valence in the sense attributed by Rancière to the practice of politics, namely through the reconfiguration of what is available to be sensed. Certainly the perceptions detailed here make sense at a more immediate political level as well, but they trickle down to the deeper strata of how perceptual and political knowledge operates, how each is contingent on the other. As Panagia writes, “political life is comprised of the constant articulation and disarticulation of contours; and these kinds of activities are as informed by our aesthetic sensibilities as they are by our political ones.”63 Canadian petroculture is attentive to the ambiguities that persist in how oil becomes an object of perception, and it also derives from the sublime indeterminacy of this process valuable insights into oil politics. notes 1 The politics of the sublime is hotly debated. Sublime aesthetics have often been criticized for being used in the service of asymmetrical power relationships, for instance by pushing the agenda of “manifest destiny” and the conquest of nature (Pease), imperialism (Laura Doyle’s “racial sublime”), gender and sexual difference (as in Barbara Claire Freeman’s conceptualizations of a “feminine” sublime), or revolutionary terror and contemporary terrorism (Battersby). In this chapter I disentangle sublime “aesthetics” (in the original meaning of the term, as related to sense perception) from the politics of inequity by distinguishing between a politics of the sublime, largely coincident with these critical agendas, and a sublime politics that reverts to a pre-political domain of sense perception and the construction of knowledge. 2 Susan Glickman, The Picturesque and the Sublime: A Poetics of the Canadian Landscape (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 59. 3 Ibid., 45. 4 Ibid. 5 Jennifer Peeples uses the phrase “toxic sublime” to describe “the tensions that arise from recognizing the toxicity of a place, object, or situation, while simultaneously appreciating its mystery, magnificence and ability to inspire awe.” Jennifer Peeples, “Toxic Sublime: Imaging Contaminated Landscapes,” Environmental Communication 5, no. 4 (2011): 373–92, 375; emphasis in original. This is a variation of David Nye’s technological sublime, highlighting not sheer marvel at human accomplishment but horror at the immense destruction it leaves in its

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wake; see David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: mit Press, 1996). Rod Giblett sees in Burtynsky’s photographs a “time sublime – an empty now and a terrifying prospect.” Rod Giblett, “Terrifying Prospects and Resources of Hope: Minescapes, Timescapes and the Aesthetics of the Future,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 23, no. 6 (2009): 781–9, 786. All of these versions place nature, in its victimized state, at the core of sublime affect and can be seen as various renditions of what Christopher Hitt in 1999 called “ecological sublime.” Christopher Hitt, “Toward an Ecological Sublime,” New Literary History 30, no. 3 (1999): 603–23, 603. Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1971), 227. Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye on Canada, vol. 12 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 56. Dennis Lee, “Rejoinder,” Saturday Night 87 (September 1972): 31–3, 33. Robert Kroetsch, “The American Writer and the Literary Tradition,” in Robert Kroetsch, The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989), 53–7, 54. Davide Panagia, The Poetics of Political Thinking (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 73. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 53. Panagia, Poetics of Political Thinking, 86. Ibid., 86–7. Bill Readings, “Sublime Politics: The End of the Party Line,” Modern Language Quarterly 53, no. 4 (1992): 409–25, 410. Ibid., 419. Ibid., 411. Ibid., 420. R. Murray Schafer, On Canadian Music (Bancroft: Arcana Editions, 1984), 62. Ibid., 62–3. Stephen Adams, R. Murray Schafer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 127. Schafer, Canadian Music, 62. Sherrill E. Grace, Canada and the Idea of North (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 139.

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23 Schafer, Canadian Music, 62. 24 Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 2. 25 Ibid. 26 See The Law of Enclosures (dvd), dir. John Greyson, with Sarah Polley, Diane Ladd, and Brendan Fletcher (Echo Bridge Entertainment, 2000). 27 Dale Peck, The Law of Enclosures (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 28 Ibid., 10. 29 Ibid., 16. 30 Ibid., 62, 146, 182. 31 Ibid., 248. 32 Even though the film is clearly set in a small town and the surrounding industrial area, the museum pieces it features (actual artifacts of the Oil Museum of Canada in the village of Oil Springs, Ontario, which is visited by the central figures) take a giant step back to recall “North America’s first oil boom” – as one exhibit has it. Indeed it was Canada – rather than the United States – that witnessed the first North American oil boom. The village of Black Creek just south of Sarnia, the setting (though not the actual location) of Greyson’s film, is where asphalt producer James Williams dug a water well in 1858 only to strike oil and accidentally trigger an oil rush that preceded the comparable development south of the US border. (Black Creek was soon renamed Oil Springs and became a veritable boom town, only to be replaced by nearby Petrolia some years later as Canada’s oil capital.) The area of Lambton County still draws attention as an Oil Heritage District, partly because Petrolia, Canada’s so-called Victorian Oil Town, has been so well-preserved; see Christina Burr, Canada’s Victorian Oil Town: The Transformation of Petrolia from Resource Town into a Victorian Community (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2006). As the home of several oil refineries served by pipelines from the western oil sands, the city of Sarnia has in fact remained a major player in the oil industry. 33 Christopher Gittings, “Activism and Aesthetics: The Work of John Greyson,” in Great Canadian Film Directors, ed. George Melnyk (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2007), 124–47, 140. 34 Ibid., 140. 35 For more about the aesthetic and psychoanalytic integration of oil into cinema more generally, see Georgiana Banita, “Antonionis

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Ölmalerei: Zum unbewussten Rohstoff einer materiellen Filmästhetik,” in Michelangelo Antonioni: Wege in die filmische Moderne, ed. Jörn Glasenapp (Munich: Fink, 2012), 153–81; and Georgiana Banita, “From Isfahan to Ingolstadt: Bernardo Bertolucci’s La via del petrolio and the Global Culture of Neorealism,” in Oil Culture, ed. Scott Barrett and Daniel Worden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 145–68. Imre Szeman, “Crude Aesthetics: The Politics of Oil Documentaries,” Journal of American Studies 46, no. 2 (2012): 423–39, 439. Ibid., 438. Petropolis, directed by Peter Mettler for Greenpeace, Canada (Dogwood, 2010), dvd. The oblique aerial view directs the eye both downward and laterally. The vertical aerial view is perpendicular to the ground and tends to flatten and suppress the landscape to the point of abstraction, which explains its origin in (and continued use for) surveillance and military operations that depend on strategic data gathering; see Mark Dorrian, “The Aerial View: Notes for a Cultural History,” Strates 13 (2007): 105–18. Mettler uses both to great effect. Gerald Silk, “‘Our Future Is in the Air’: Aviation and American Art,” The Airplane in American Culture, ed. Dominick Pisano (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 250–98, 258. Quoted in James Corner and Alex S. MacLean, Taking Measures across the American Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 15. Manufactured Landscapes, directed by Jennifer Baichwal, with Edward Burtynsky (New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2007), dvd. For a rare and compelling analysis of Burtynsky’s sublime aesthetics in his Chinese photographs as yoked with a political vision, see Soenke Zehle, “Dispatches from the Depletion Zone: Edward Burtynsky and the Documentary Sublime,” Media International Australia: Incorporating Culture & Policy 127 (2008): 109–15. Zehle recalls not only the historical function of the sublime in legitimating narratives of industrial development, but also its role in articulating Chinese industrial ambitions. While the standard reproach levelled at Burtynsky is his lack of politics, I sympathize with Rebecca Solnit, who wonders whether it might make more sense, considering that the toxicity of the medium itself makes “political photography” something of a hypocritical paradox, to read Burtynsky’s images outside concrete advocacy: “His oil

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georgiana banita fields, oil refineries, tire dumps, oil pipelines, and dismantled tankers begin to get at the cycle of oil, nasty at every turn even without politics and war.” Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 138. Nadia Bozak, “Manufactured Landscapes,” Film Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2008/2009): 68–72, 68. Michael Truscello, in “The New Topographics, Dark Ecology, and the Energy Infrastructure of Nations: Considering Agency in the Photographs of Edward Burtynsky and Mitch Epstein from a Post-Anarchist Perspective,” Imaginations 3, no. 2 (2012): 188–205, makes the same point quite vividly: “Absent are the intimate portraits of oil-soaked birds, dislocated indigenous communities, or tattered corpses that normally signify in the visual register of the social justice jeremiad the criminal machinations of Big Oil” (190). Writing about scalar approaches to the oil sands in general, Imre Szeman and Maria Whiteman similarly emphasize “what is left out of such oil images: labour, forms of life, the experience of bodies working and living in proximity to the oil sands.” Imre Szeman and Maria Whiteman, “Oil Imag(e)inaries: Critical Realism and the Oil Sands,” Imaginations 3, no. 2 (2012): 46–67, 56. On the relation between the aerial view and microscopy, see Dorrian, “The Aerial View.” I am not claiming that a sensorial approach to energy aesthetics is specific to Canadian culture, even though the texts selected here, both the primary and the theoretical ones, belong to this culture. Burtynsky himself even describes his work as “profoundly Canadian” (Edward Burtynsky, “Extraction,” The Walrus 4, no. 6 (2007): 33–4, 33); see also a reading of Burtynsky alongside Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and George Grant in Emily Gilbert, “Beyond Survival? Wilderness and Canadian National Identity into the Twenty-First Century,” British Journal of Canadian Studies 21, no. 1 (2008): 63–88. The comparison with Gowin suggests that, even though sensation offers productive insights into images of petroculture in Canada, I would be overreaching or extremely selective in my choice of material if I were to make a case for sensorial politics as a uniquely Canadian phenomenon. See Emmet Gowin, Jock Reynolds, Philip Brookman, and Terry Tempest Williams, Changing the Earth: Aerial Photographs (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery in association with the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 2002). Ken Johnson, “Aerial Spy,” Art in America 90, no. 12 (2002): 34–7, 35.

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49 The history of the company, which Gowin was probably aware of, offers some clues as to the political relevance of this region. The current Chemopetrol as, which is engaged in the generation, processing, distribution, and supply of energy, was established in 1996. But the enterprise originally began in 1939, as a factory that produced motor fuel from gasified brown coal: Sudetenländische Treibstoffwerke ag, a major subsidiary of Hermann Göring’s Reichswerke, which thereby took direct and all-embracing control of resources in the captured Czech territory. See Richard Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), ii. The history of the company name reveals the shifting political boundaries of the area: Stalin Works in 1946, Chemical Works of the Czechoslovak–Soviet Friendship by 1962. 50 See especially Josef Koudelka, The Black Triangle (Prague: Vesmir, 1994) and Josef Koudelka, Chaos (London: Phaidon, 1994). 51 Philip Brookman, “Keys Are Stronger Than the Doors They Open: A Dialogue with Emmet Gowin,” in Gowin et al., Changing the Earth, 151–8, 156. 52 Ibid., 125. 53 Russell Hart, “Changing the Earth,” American Photo (January–February 2003): 80. Gowin’s images arguably resonate with the tonally similar infrared photography that Hart is known for. 54 Terry Tempest Williams, “The Earth Stares Back,” in Gowin et al., Changing the Earth, 125–32, 126. 55 Jock Reynolds, “Above the Fruited Plain: Reflections on the Origins and Trajectories of Emmet Gowin’s Aerial Landscape Photographs,” in Gowin et al., Changing the Earth, 133–50, 140. 56 Brookman, “Keys Are Stronger,” 154. 57 See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 58 Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 226. 59 Panagia, Poetics of Political Thinking, 88. 60 Quoted in Reynolds, “Above the Fruited Plain,” 133. 61 See here especially Stephanie LeMenager’s Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 62 Quoted in Sarah Milroy, “Deepwater Blues,” Canadian Art 27, no. 3 (2010): 111–17, 111. 63 Panagia, Political Life of Sensation, 9.

19 Photography from Benjamin to Žižek, via the Petrochemical Sublime of Edward Burtynsky Clint Burnham

Isn’t it the task of the photographer … to reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his pictures? “The illiteracy of the future,” someone has said, “will be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography.” But shouldn’t a photographer who cannot read his own pictures be no less accounted an illiterate? Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography”

I want to begin with Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography,” in part because here Benjamin develops the concept of aura in a strictly photographic context, but also for how he discusses aura and the “optical unconscious” in precisely the genre of art criticism, without ever forgetting the role of the social. So this is a sort of a Double Dutch of dialectics, a dialectics first of genre (not just art criticism but the attempt to sum up a history of photography  – a genre that is also a history) but also of the social, a situating of aesthetic paradigms in history. There is then a tension between these formal dialectics, as well as between aura and the optical unconscious. Next I ditch, momentarily, these concerns for the contemporary photographer Edward Burtynsky, looking at how the sublime functions both in the critical (but actually uncritical) reception of his work and also as a tool to determine how Burtynsky makes such stunning (banal for all that) photographs of environmental waste on a gargantuan scale. What I am interested in in Burtynsky’s Oil series, for example, is how there obtains in the photographs an antagonism between their epic grandeur and size (which in effect bully

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the viewer into a sublime submission) and their putative content or images (which in classic fetishistic disavowal, convey a formal beauty which nonetheless functions as a screen for desire: in effect, Burtynsky’s photographs allow us to enjoy our petro-symptom). His work is often described as “sublime” for its large-format depiction of landscapes and ecological disaster, but what sublime are we talking about here? Burke’s disquiet when confronted by natural disorder, or Kant’s absolute breakdown of cognitive faculties? I will discuss Burtynsky’s pictures first of all in terms of Slavoj Žižek’s properly dialectical sublime (that which is both Kantian and Lacanian). Žižek has discussed the sublime as some form of the Lacanian Real or jouissance; that is, Žižek’s sublime varies from a version of the Kantian aesthetic (that which in nature, especially, discombobulates our cognitive faculties) to the more properly Lacanian sublime of das Ding or the objet petit a. So the sublime is for Žižek – although he never argues such – a dialectical sublime, an antagonistic sublime, in a way similar to Benjamin’s dialectic of the aura (which Rodolphe Gasché and Shepherd Steiner discuss in terms of a Kantian genealogy) and the optical unconscious.1 That is, for Žižek, the sublime object – the objet petit a, Lacan’s Thing or das Ding  – is what structures our desire but also serves as a screen against the abyss of desire, which is to say against the sublime; in a way, for Žižek, Lacan is the sublime object to counter the abyss of Kant. In a similar fashion, Burtynsky’s gentrified sublime is what protects us from confronting the disaster that is nature. With Burtynsky, then, the problem is not so much a nondialectical sublime, but rather one of a merely middlebrow Kant, one that is all aura, no unconscious. Finally, as counter-examples to Burtynsky’s reified sublime, I will discuss two photographic practices that engage with the sublime of the industrial archive: Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan’s Evidence (1977) and Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber’s Events Are Always Original (2010). Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography” essay was first published in Die literarische Welt, in 1931; if this is where he continues to work out the term aura (Miriam Hansen traces its roots back to some of the hashish protocols),2 it is also here that he introduces the optical unconscious, in a passage so rich for the history of photographic criticism that I hope you will forgive me quoting at length. Benjamin is discussing Karl Dauthendey’s photograph of “the father of the poet” and his wife, the latter of whom will go on to commit suicide:

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No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it. For it is another nature that speaks to the camera rather than to the eye: “other” above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the fraction of a second when a person actually takes a step. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.3 What one notices first of all in this declaration is the way Benjamin here formulates what Barthes will later call the punctum, that “tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now” which evades the will of the photographer, no matter how artful. For Barthes, the punctum was often just a way to assert the sovereignty of the viewer, but for Benjamin that contingency is also marked by the “here and now,” a historical marking that seems indeterminate, since it is perhaps both the now of the photograph’s making and, later, of a knowledge brought to the picture by the viewer (that the woman would go on to commit suicide, for instance). But that “inconspicuous spot” is where, for Benjamin, “the future nests so eloquently” that we can “rediscover it,” which formulation also perhaps can be thought of in terms of Benjamin’s messianic time, that retroactive or (to use a Freudian vocabulary surely authorized in the present context) nachträglich understanding of the photograph only possible at a later time. Benjamin’s concept is more social than is Barthes’s, and perhaps more historical. But it is social and psychoanalytic, to be sure: the camera speaks (and it does “speak,” for Benjamin, just as the future is so “eloquent”) not to the eye but to the unconscious (or at least “to a space

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formed by the unconscious”); it is by way of developing this concept, or of giving an example, that Benjamin first argues that “we have no idea” what goes on when someone takes a step, and that photography, via its technology, can reveal this secret, can reveal the existence of an “optical unconscious” just as psychoanalysis did for the instincts. I want to come back later to this footstep – to the footstep as a photographic sign, perhaps – but first to think a bit about this “optical unconscious.” Rosalind Krauss takes up that phrase in her book of the same name – as a generally psychoanalytic way of viewing a counter-history of modernism – but has some trouble with its use in Benjamin. On the one hand, she agrees, the “powerful” and “dispassionate eye” of the camera can detect the “unseen visual data” analogous to lapses and parapraxes that betray the unconscious, but what is there, she asks, in the visual field itself that corresponds to a “sentient being,” with a structure or space in conflict with its consciousness?4 To be sure, Krauss is correct in that the visual field – the world that we see – is not itself inherently sentient or possessing an unconscious,5 and in some ways Benjamin’s examples (the gait of a person or a horse as we might see in an Eadweard Muybridge photograph, or Karl Blossfeldt’s botanical pictures) are more formal than structuralist. And Benjamin’s optical unconscious is resolutely a matter of desire, of the dialectics of desire. First of all, this concept is developed as a way of distinguishing photography (and especially photography of anonymous subjects, as Rancière will stress)6 from painting – thus with David Octavius Hill’s well-known Newhaven Fishwife, “we encounter something new and strange … something that goes beyond testimony to the photographer’s art, something that cannot be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there, who even now is still real and will never consent to be wholly absorbed in ‘art.’”7 For Benjamin, a ladies’ man, this may have been a gendered desire, but I think it is also the Real of desire, the Real of the optical unconscious, that is apparent as well in photography’s antagonism with painting (and it is worth noting that this photographer, Hill, was at the time merely taking shots for his paintings). But perhaps here I have not sufficiently answered Krauss’s objection that Benjamin is just being too poetic in attributing an unconscious to the world. The other well-known idea that Benjamin was

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developing in the 1930s was that of the aura, and the question of what photography does to the aura. And I used the term “developing” advisedly, for Benjamin articulates the concept with specific reference first of all to the history of photography, to its chemical and social history. This history includes noting the motionless process of sitting for daguerreotypes, which “caused the subject to focus his life in the moment … [e]verything in these pictures was built to last,”8 as well as the commercialization of portrait photography in the late nineteenth century. Benjamin’s is a social history where not only did the aura come from the technical limitations of the midcentury work of Hill or of Nadar, but also from the encounter, in the photographer’s studio, of a “technician of the latest school” and “a member of a rising class equipped with an aura that had seeped into the very folds of the man’s frock coat or floppy cravat,” an “aura [that] was by no means the mere product of a primitive camera,” but rather was due to a brief moment when “subject and technique” were “exactly congruent.”9 So this is a specifically materialist account of aura  – one rooted in the dialectics of class relations – rather than the more theological readings such critics as Hansen, Steiner, or David Ferris will bring to Benjamin. But I think my reading is faithful to the essay, for Benjamin will then argue that just as technological advances in lenses and production rendered the aura invisible, photographers began to simulate the same (in the so-called “Pictorialist” era of artistic photography), “exactly as [aura] was being banished from reality by the deepening degeneration of the imperialist bourgeoisie.”10 That is to say, the Pictorialists’ fetish of the aura was a matter of an imaginary resolution to the real contradiction of the change in the dialectical relationship between the photographer (and his or her technology) and the bourgeois subject.11 So it is the aura of the photograph itself  – its appearance with early nineteenth century portraits, its disappearance with technical innovation, and then its simulation with the Pictorialists – that first is worked out in Benjamin’s essay here, and which then underwrites the better-known development of aura in the “Little History” (and of course in the famous “Artworks” essay), when Benjamin first of all compares aura to the phenomenal halo of light around a far-off mountain top or tree’s branch, and then to photography’s work, in bringing images of far-off places closer to the masses, in the destruction of the aura. But, again, Benjamin grounds this discussion in a

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specific passage of photographic criticism: his discussion of Eugène Atget, whose work, he argues, “initiates the emancipation of object from aura,”12 whose pictures, in an odd image, “suck the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship.” The first phrase makes sense if we think of Benjamin’s dialectical narrative of photography and capitalism: Atget’s photographs, in their “straight” presentation of the street (“like the scene of a crime,” in Benjamin’s memorable phrase), liberate the street and other objects, in the image, from the Pictorialists’ lamentable aestheticization. But what does it mean not only to “suck” aura, and not only out of reality (we are back in Rosalind Krauss’s dilemma), but to do so “like water from a ship”? Does water suck from a ship? Here, too, Benjamin is being specific: Atget’s pictures of Parisian streets take the aura out of the scene in that they signal a break with the Pictorialist aesthetic – they remove what was only added, the aura as remainder, as objet petit a, via what Rancière calls “the appropriation of the commonplace.”13 In a well-known aphorism in Das Passagen-Werk, Benjamin offers a characterization of the “Marxian theory of art: one moment swaggering, and the next scholastic.”14 Now, Margaret Cohen has argued that these lines are evidence of “Benjamin’s dissatisfaction with existing” Marxist aesthetics,15 but I think it is possible to read a bit of envy, or emulation, or perhaps even desire, if not even one of those typical moments in The Arcades Project where Benjamin is also talking about his own work. Swaggering scholasticism: another dialectic. In my reading of the “Little History,” I have argued that Benjamin’s concepts of art come out of the history of photography, and that the history of the form is itself social, and for how we can come to think of that relation between the concept and the history, on the one hand, and the history and the social, on the other, in terms of these dialectics. But for this approach to work we also need to think about the sublime, and how the sublime in the visual field can be thought of as a return of the aura. The contemporary photographer whose work is most often – or at least very often – thought of in terms of the sublime is Edward Burtynsky. Just a cursory survey of the criticism of his work – journalistic for the most part – reveals the word is sprinkled through reviews like semicolons: it appears three times in a fulsome 2004 review by the usually more rigorous Tom McDonough in Art in America (referencing in particular the Romantic sublime and awe/

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terror); as many or more times in a Canadian Art profile from the year before by Gary Michael Dault (“if what we see in the photograph is more than we could see otherwise, the experience is thrillingly, exhilaratingly fearsome in its sudden awful, vertiginous clarities”); in Frieze magazine, Owen Hatherley argues that Burtynsky’s “Oil is still the most astonishing presentation of the petroleum sublime”; another critic writes that “Burtynsky’s sense of the sublime draws on Californian landscape tradition, including the work of Ansel Adams, Carleton Watkins, and Richard Misrach”; in the same journal, we see Burtynsky’s “negative sublime”; we read discussions of the “technological sublime” and “the toxic sublime,” but also, in Burtynsky’s own words, about his own work as an “inverted sublime”; finally, a travelling exhibition from 2012 was called The Industrial Sublime, and begins with a quote from Edmund Burke.16 As the Burke or Romantic references suggest, the sublime in Burtynsky criticism suggests the ability of his photographs, in their depiction of man-made ruin, to nonetheless affect viewers. So let us try to see what it is more specifically, whether formally, thematically, or contextually, that is sublime about the photographs. First, as mentioned, their very size: Burtynsky has owned a photo processing lab (Toronto Image Works) since the 1980s, for, he said, the very purpose of producing on a monumental scale  – he “uses four-by-five inch sheet film that he develops into prints that are 50 by 60 inches.”17 In this regard, of course, Burtynsky is utterly typical of contemporary photographic production – from Stan Douglas’s transparent mural of a hippie riot in downtown Vancouver to Andreas Gursky’s photographs of shipyards and dollar stores and Thomas Struth’s of art museums and stock exchanges. But the second sublime criteria of Burtynsky’s photographs comes from his subject matter, particularly that of the past fifteen years, when he has been shooting quarries, shipbreaking yards, Chinese factories, and fields of oil derricks: by this I mean, of course, the scale of his work, and how that further contorts or enfolds an admixture of the aesthetic and the repulsive. So tailing streams in Northern Ontario look beautiful but, as one critic argues, only if we do not think too hard about the “chemical and ecological reality.”18 Presumably, and even though Burtynsky’s imagery has a great deal of traction on the environmental left, it would not succeed so well

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in the art world if it were not possible to stop thinking about those chemical and ecological realities. So how does this happen? I would argue that this final aspect of the sublime nature of Burtynsky’s photographs which constitutes or builds toward its recycling, as it were, of Benjaminian aura, is due as well to his point of view, to the frequent (or more frequently, over the past ten years) use of an elevated position, a “god’s eye” or at least “crane-shot eye” point of view. Here Burtynsky is very frank: “I don’t want to have any restrictions as to where the camera can be  … It is an interesting way to engage because you literally release yourself from gravity. If I want to be 30 feet up, I’ll be up 30 feet, or 100 feet, or 200 feet. I’ve totally liberated myself from the limits of a point of view.”19 Thus we have the same technique very self-consciously (as depicted in the film Manufactured Landscapes) connecting a photograph of workers in a Chinese factory and one of motorcyclists in a Sturgis, South Dakota, bike rally. And, indeed, it is with respect to this very fantasy of “liberation” (corresponding to the viewers’ presumed fetishistic disavowal of his or her role in the environmental disaster), that art journalism unwittingly raises the very problems or Achilles heel of the artwork in the act of praising it. For Dault, the power, the greatness, of Burtynsky’s photographs lies in how they offer the viewer a privileged gaze on the despoliation of nature (“what we see in the photograph is more than we could see otherwise”). And so in interviews with Burtynsky, including those of Dault, of the Manufactured Landscapes book, and of the film, the photographer disavows any politics or didacticism on his part: “I’m not trying to editorialize and say this is right or this is wrong. Either extreme is simplistic. We are compelled to progress,”20 “this is what it is,”21 “this is not an indictment of the industry.”22 Evidently Burtynsky, like his viewers, can have it both ways (Fredric Jameson’s imaginary resolution of a real contradiction): “I’m one of the foot soldiers in the fight for sustainability.”23 But is it really sublime? Do we feel such a horrific fear of dismemberment or lack of subjectivity? Do we feel a breakdown in Kantian categories, or is it closer to the Burkean notion of a distance from the fright or horror of environmental disaster that enables this sublime? In many ways, what happens in the discourse around Burtynsky’s photographs is a gentrification of the sublime, where that word (sublime!) is a soft sell for the paradox of seeing beautiful

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objects made out of horrible scenes, along with the middlebrow notion of the sublime as actually just “more beautiful,” “awe-inspiring,” or, the neoliberal keyword, “awesome!” Of course I am talking about the sublime in Burtynsky not only because this is how he and his apologists discuss his work: the term also has had special importance for Žižek in his mash-up of Lacan and Kant since, well, The Sublime Object of Ideology. But before I turn to this third part of my paper, I want to talk a bit about method. In my reading of Benjamin, I wanted to situate his development of the optical unconscious and aura specifically in the essay the “Little History,” qua text, but also as genre, as art criticism (rather than as, say, Hansen situates them, not only across the range of Benjamin’s writings but also in his biographical obsessions). That is, I wanted to argue that these terms emerge out of Benjamin’s critical practice in that text: as an intervention into the practice of art writing. Then, in looking at Burtynsky’s photography, I have been more interested in how the discourse around them – rather than the compositional or historical features – constructs a certain version of the sublime. Again, this version emerges in a critical practice, the middlebrow one of art journalism, whether written by hacks or by more rigorous practitioners like McDonough (editor of a Situationist collection and a study of negation in postwar France) or Hatherley (author of a study of British Brutalist architecture); that is, the critical keyword is produced by that ensemble of practices. Finally, in turning now to Žižek’s discourse, I’d like to preface it with a little description of my way of reading his work: a practice Canadian critic Louis Cabri terms “geaging,” or reading via Google. Call this method “impure digital humanities” or “data foraging.” When I am writing on Žižek, my first step is often not to look at his books that I have in my office or at home; rather, I google the concept or quotation, start looking through the offerings (from Google Books for many of his texts, or lacan.com, or articles on Žižek, etc.), and then, if necessary, reread the relevant passage or page or chapter or essay. Of course, such a method is fully commensurate with Žižek’s performance of philosophy or political theory in this media age – not only his cut-and-paste method of writing (and we should remember how many of Benjamin’s ideas float around between the “Little History,” his “Artworks” essay in its various versions, The Arcades Project, etc.) but his YouTube videos, documentaries, lectures, television,

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and Occupy Wall Street appearances, and so on. In part, I think, the sublime nature of Žižek’s production demands we abandon the old techniques of “research” and “reading” and “citation.” And to stay with Burtynsky, are not the digital humanities metaphors of “data mining” and other “hands-on” techniques (more hacking, less yacking, as the dh-ers say) as much a nostalgia for actual mining or bluecollar labour as are the photographs of industrial ruin? But I do want to quickly point to how Žižek develops, in his texts, a dialectical sublime, beginning with The Sublime Object of Ideology, where the “sublime object” refers to Lacan’s seventh seminar, as an ordinary object raised to the “dignity of the Thing” (Žižek’s example is the Titanic shipwreck). In terms of the Kantian theory of a threat to one’s cognitive capacities, this is an antagonism whereby the sublime object  – the objet a being the more familiar term of Lacan’s Thing or das Ding – is what structures our desire but also serves as a screen against the abyss of desire, which is to say against the sublime: Lacan is the sublime object to counter the abyss of Kant. And so it is that in Tarrying with the Negative the sublime is an index of the Real qua an ethics of evil,24 but also, perhaps Žižek’s discussion of Kant and Sade provides a figure for Burtynsky as “the sadist who enjoys [photographing ruin] as an instrumentalized bureaucratic duty [who] reverses and thereby brings to its truth the Kantian Sublime in which we become aware of the suprasensible Measure through the chaotic, boundless character of our [aesthetic] experience.”25 In this reading, the sublime in Burtynsky’s photographs functions as the objet a to protect us from the Kantian sublime, or from the disaster that is nature (we turn to environmentalism to gentrify nature). Too, in For They Know Not What They Do, Žižek outlines this antagonism in a way that, for our purposes here, nails Burtynsky because of how “[t]he paradox of the Sublime … is in the conversion of the impossibility of presentation into the presentation of impossibility.”26 So even if it is impossible to imagine the scale of the New Jersey Turnpike, it is nonetheless possible for a photograph (Burtynsky’s Highway #3) to do that work of imaging, or imagining, for us, or, rather, perhaps it is the other way around: if, thanks to Robert Smithson or Tony Soprano, we can imagine the New Jersey landscape quite well, Burtynsky makes it unimaginable except via his picture. That is, in Žižek’s reading, and in the gentrified sublime of Burtynsky’s photographs (Mines #22, Kennecott

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Copper Mine, Bingham Valley, Utah, or Densified Oil Filters #1) our inability to determine scale in effect renders our subjectivity a moot point. Our jaw-dropping comments looking at Mines #22  – “Can you see those specks, they’re giant trucks!” – is the very protection against the horror of that space. And so, too, would be any literalistenvironmentalist theory of the tar sands sublime: looking at Alberta Oil Sands #6, Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, 2007 (figure 19.1), the Mark Rothko–like composition must be brought into a critical antagonism with that ecological sublime, the better to understand how Burtynsky’s work is neither (and both) pictorial representation and protest. Žižek continues in Enjoy Your Symptom!, arguing that in an encounter with the sublime, as with “the senseless real: the subject is never simply absent from it – the very absence, the lack that the brute presence of the real recalls is the subject”27 – hence the bird’seye view that provides a prostheses not only for the photographer but the viewer; in The Plague of Fantasies where, drawing on Alenka Zupančič, he reads the sublime in terms of scale (Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life), in a manner, again, not incommensurable with the lack of scale – are those forms buildings, abstractions, or oil cans?28 We know so there is no indeterminacy. Finally, in The Ticklish Subject, Žižek reads Kant’s sublime against Badiou’s event – the distance in Kant’s discussion of the French Revolution savagely critiqued by Badiou; thus the Sublime indicates the abyss gentrified by Reason29 but also the distance inherent in the unreadable Burtynsky photograph. Too, Žižek often offers the “sublime ‘indivisible remainder’” (a version of the Thing or objet a in his canon) which in the same way contrasts brutally the textbook Kantian sublime of Hurricane Katrina versus, on the one hand, the desublimation of the MarxistFreudian hermeneutics of suspicion, and, on the other, the Lacanian distinction between Beauty as the Good (or the ego-ideal) and the Sublime as the superego.30 Surely then this working out of the sublime turns out to be what is fundamental to Žižek’s theoretical practice: from the beginning he has had to bring not so much Kant avec Sade as Kant avec Lacan, or Lacan le plus sublime, or even “between two sublimes,” which is where Žižek finds himself. At this point I would like finish with questions and proposals rather than a conclusion. First of all, how does Žižek’s sublime compare with Benjamin’s optical unconscious and aura? My argument

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Figure 19.1 Edward Burtynsky, Alberta Oil Sands #6, Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, 2007.

in reading the genealogy of Benjamin’s concept has been that the two terms must be considered dialectically. On the one hand, “aura” ranges in meaning and application in Benjamin’s writings from a drug haze to an optical illusion, from the chemical nimbus in early photography to the socio-economic context for the bourgeois portrait, from the authentic original in art to its simulacrum in the movie star. Then, the optical unconscious is both an imputation of agency to the thing of the referent and a psychoanalytic argument for photography’s de-reification of the object, be that de-reification to do with motion (the gait of a horse) or structure (of a plant). And the dialectics of these terms mean we have to consider the optical unconscious as a deconstruction of aura. Žižek’s sublime then contains, as my “impure digital humanities” reading of the term suggests, both these possibilities: the sublime as the Kantian or Burkean

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discombobulation of the subject (which would be akin to the optical unconscious) and the Lacanian objet petit a or “indivisible remainder” that sticks around (akin to aura). If, as I suggested earlier, Burtynsky’s photographs are all aura, no optical unconscious, in terms of Benjamin’s dialectic they would fail, being mere middlebrow kitsch. Secondly, how do these theoretical concepts offer better ways of accounting for what is going on in Burtynsky’s photographs than the essentially journalistic tropes of the sublime to be found in the criticism? That is, perhaps the sublime in Burtynsky is more than that banal concept, perhaps his photographs are more than enviroguilt trips and their concomitant disavowal (and perhaps they are also more than what are dismissed by conceptualists as bad photography – bad because it is popular, I suspect: when I mentioned this project to a prominent Vancouver artist, he asked, mystified, why I was working on Burtynsky). Since, for Žižek, the sublime is both the Kantian or Burkean challenge to our perception and that which protects us from that very challenge, it is both the void and the gentrification of the void. As he puts it in Enjoy Your Symptom!, “the lack that the brute presence of the real recalls is the subject”; or, elsewhere in The Sublime Object, discussing Luis Buñuel, “To ‘unmask the illusion’ does not mean that ‘there is nothing to see behind it’: what we must be able to see is precisely this nothing as such – beyond the phenomena, there is nothing but this nothing itself, ‘nothing’ which is the subject.”31 That void is the subject, but this does not mean we cannot act, indeed (if Ian Wallace’s Clayoquot Protest [1993–95] shows the attempt to stop a landscape from becoming a Burtynsky picture) the result of Burtynsky’s photos is to leave us drained of hope, of any possibility for social change, since he shows the de facto (“sublime”) effect of industrialism on nature – on such a scale that the picture’s grandeur is related to that lack of hope (hence the only possibility of politics is the charity politics of neoliberalism: environmentalism, putting a bandage on a severed limb).32 But there is nonetheless a dialectics of the subject. That is to say – and I do not want to be too neat about this – the sublime is both the optical unconscious and the aura: it reveals the dialectics therein. Or, to put it another way, if the optical unconscious is that which is revealed by photography as the Real, or the unconscious, of the

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physical world (revealed through enlargement, through framing, through composition and light), then the aura is the aesthetics of that very framing, composition, and light. The role of the sublime in the reception and form of Burtynsky’s photography – and, ultimately, in its politics – means we also should think about how art engages with the history of capitalism. To further explore this problem, I would like to turn to two artistic practices that may offer different ways to intervene into, and make art about, such a history. Call it the industrial sublime. In Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s 1970s work Evidence, and in Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber’s recent Events Are Always Original, the artists construct photographic series or installations out of pre-existing archives. Evidence began when Sultan and Mandel visited seventy-five different industrial, organizational, police, and government offices and chose photographs from official records.33 The photographs show the weirdness of postwar America: men in business suits stand before a podium on a boulder, or a test monkey is suffocated by a hand in a work glove, or scientists in lab coats stand in a huge (artificial?) snowbank: ultimately, images of nature-culture clashes. In high conceptualist fashion, the photographs were presented in a deadpan manner, underscoring their bizarre imagery but also their purported role as scientific or bureaucratic evidence. Industry is thus subjected to a critique based not on a pre-existing code or ethic (environmentalism, as is the case with Burtynsky) but one arising out of its own conditions  – or at least representations. The satire here is akin to Žižek’s argument that the most critical stance is to take capital seriously, to emulate it too much (his example is usually The Good Soldier Švejk). Such a style of critique would come to be typical of postmodernism very quickly, but what is interesting for our purposes here is how Sultan and Mandel’s practice is so different from that of Burtynsky: they do not make pictures or engage in most or any of the aesthetics of photography. Rather, their practice is to extract from the archive, in the curatorial mode that Boris Groys celebrates in Art Power.34 Viewed in conjunction with Burtynsky’s work, the critique of representation in Evidence is more, well, evident. A similar working with the archive, but one more political, is the practice of Bitter and Weber’s Events Are Always Original, which compares student protests in the first decade of the twenty-first century with those in the 1960s. Bitter and Weber again do not make

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photographs; rather, they make artworks that include photographs, in an anti-heroic history of protest. Students activate the modernist architecture of the university in a Lefebvrean take on Badiou. But whereas Sultan and Mandel present archival photographs without any text (thereby reinstating, perhaps, the fetish of the image), Bitter and Weber draw out textual details, including archival data and other random fragments. Individual works, then, have such titles as general meeting/9:15 pm/(Back to power politics/like good revolutionaries) or i love you.35 Perversely, I would read Evidence as being more political than the artists wished, and Events Are Always Original with more reference to its form. In both practices, any traditional aesthetics of the photographs derive from the skills and context of anonymous institutional photographers from an earlier era (but also from the curatorial framing by the respective pairs of artists). These artists thus engage with the industrial or archival sublime in the sense of an almost arbitrary reserve of images. Even before the Internet there were too many photographs. Why make more? is a question surely all the more pressing when confronted with the environmentalist agenda of Burtynsky.36 notes 1 See Rodolphe Gasché, “Objective Diversions: On Some Kantian Themes in Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’” in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, eds. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 1994), 183–204; and Shepherd Steiner, “Reading Reading in Benjamin’s ‘Little History of Photography,’” InTensions 1 (2008). 2 Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (2008): 336–75. 3 Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” Selected Writings 2, ed. Michael Jennings et al., trans. Edmond Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (Cambridge: Belknap, 2005), 506–30, 510, 512. 4 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: mit Press, 1993), 178–9. 5 But see the work of Bruno Latour and Bill Brown. 6 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2006), 33.

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7 Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 510. See Robert Adamson, David Octavius Hill, “Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall, Newhaven fishwife,” 1843–46, flickr, accessed 4 July 2016. Our contemporary social media affirms Benjamin’s prognostication. Thus “GwennieP” writes on flickr: “I love this. It would be great to see more photos of women from this time – see what their lives were like” (Adamson and Hill). 8 Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 514. 9 Ibid., 517. 10 Ibid. 11 Expressed crudely, the history of photography is the history of the triumph of the objective photograph over the “pictorial.” As an art movement, Pictorialism refers to a tendency in photography from the late-nineteenth century into the 1930s. Photographers would pose their subjects or shoot scenes with reference to art-historical conventions and composition; too, they would often manipulate the negative or use development processes (from photogravure to gum bichromate prints) that would soften or otherwise alter the image. Pictorialism can be seen as an attempt on the part of art photographers to separate their work both from the rapid explosion in hobbyists and from the camera’s unforgiving accuracy: if Henry Peach Robinson, Robert Demachy, and George Davidson were progenitors, Edward Steichen, and Alfred Stieglitz were the twentieth century’s best-known practitioners. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, the Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity movement in Weimar Germany, and the turn toward pure or straight photography in the work of such artists as Paul Strand, Eugène Atget, August Sander, and Fredrick H. Evans affected another reversal, and documentary styles became a dominant form in photography. See Alison Nordstrom, Truth Beauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845–1945 (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2008). 12 Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 518. 13 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 33. 14 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap, 1999), 465. 15 Margaret Cohen, “Walter Benjamin’s Phantasmagoria,” New German Critique 48, (Autumn 1989): 87–107. 16 Tom McDonough, “Edward Burtynsky at Charles Cowles,” Art in America 92, no. 5 (2004): 157–8; Gary M. Dault, “The Eleventh Hour in Photography: Edward Burtynsky Makes Beautiful Photographs of Heroic Industrial Landscapes That Raise Ambiguous Issues

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clint burnham for Their Audience,” Canadian Art (2003): 56–61; Owen Hatherley, “Crude Awakening,” Frieze 136 (Jan–Feb 2011); Carol Diehl, “The Toxic Sublime (Edward Burtynsky),” Art in America (February 2006): 118–23; Francis Hodgson, Portfolio Magazine 51 (May 2010): 22–33; Duncan Forbes, “Edward Burtynsky’s Negative Sublime,” Portfolio Magazine 47 (2008): 4–21. Another angle might inquire into how the semantic content of “the sublime” is itself overdetermined by the cultural field of visual arts journalism. Robert Enright, “The Fine and Excruciating Construction of the World: An Interview with Ed Burtynsky,” Border Crossings 30, no. 1 (2011): 22–37. Kenneth Baker, “Form versus Portent: Edward Burtynsky’s Endangered Landscapes,” in Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky, Lori Pauli et al. (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2003), 40–5. Enright, “The Fine and Excruciating Construction of the World.” Lori Pauli et al., Manufactured Landscapes, 49. Manufactured Landscapes, directed by Jennifer Baichwal (2007, Mongrel Media), dvd. John Davies and Ed Burtynsky, “‘The Images Aren’t an Indictment of Industry,’” Art World 3 (2008): 126–7. Enright, “The Fine and Excruciating Construction of the World.” Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 47. Ibid., 248, note 2. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 2008), 144. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London: Routledge, 2008), 220n61. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 2008), 219. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 43. See Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Picador, 2008), 96; For They Know Not, lxxv; “Afterword: Where Do We Stand Today?” in The Universal Exception, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2006), 314; and “A Hair of the Dog That Bit You,” in Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2006), 146. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 195.

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32 The most pointed (and recent) critical stance on Burtynsky’s project can be found in Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle’s Cartographies of the Absolute (Winchester: Zero Books, 2015) and in Toscano’s “The World Is Already without Us,” Social Text 127/34, no. 2 (June 2016). In the first, the authors argue that Burtynsky’s works “present us with beautiful monuments to alienation without any inquiry into the processes of their production” (358); in the second, Toscano repeats this critique, adding that Burtynsky’s photographs “and their viewers don’t often do the representational work of revealing or recovering the past labour (paid and unpaid, free and forced) that had entered into their production” (120). 33 Sandra S. Phillips, “A History of the Evidence,” in Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, Evidence (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2003), no page. See also Charles Desmerais, “A Kind of Truth,” in Under the Big Black Sun: California Art, 1974–1981 (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011), 81–9. 34 Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge: mit Press, 2008). 35 Please see Sabine Bitter and Mark Weber, “Events Are Always Original,” accessed 4 July 2016, http://lot.at/archive/events-are-alwaysoriginal, and Christian Höller, “Communitas. Die unrepräsentierbare Gemeinshaft,” Springerin VXII (Fall 2011), 65–6. 36 Here we may contrast the environmental footprint of traditional photography – chemical waste – with the energy use of servers and other cloud technology. Please see my forthcoming essay “Lacan and New Media,” in After Lacan, ed. Ankhi Mukherjee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

part six

New Stories, New Knowledge: Research Creation

Creative interventions into petrocultural production call into question how we have arrived at the current moment. In doing so, they open up conversations about where we go from here and how we might extricate ourselves from petroculture’s dangerous complexities. This section consists of two creative pieces – a radio play and an account of an artist’s residency – that invite readers to engage imaginatively with the social and political issues raised throughout this collection. Geo Takach’s “Live from Alberta! Radio Petro Presents A Scary Home Companion” pastiches together the great minds of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Adam Smith, Henry Ford, Catherine the Great, Matsuo Bashō, and Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, along with sundry others, to debate the case of Alberta’s oil sands. In this play, Takach combines scholarship with satire, making visible the cultural and historical materials undergirding the narratives that mediate relationships between people and resources, history and politics, regions and the world. Allison Rowe’s “The Tar Sands Exploration Station” details how she spent three weeks on a self-directed artist’s residency immersed in the spaces and communities of Fort McMurray, Alberta. Her time in Northern Alberta produced a travelling multimedia exhibition, the Tar Sands Exploration Station, that entices visitors into a tactile, experiential engagement with the oil sands industrial project. Interactive elements of the installation are intended to inspire discussion and debate with the host artist and among visitors who meet on site. The political project is to create dialogue about the ethical dilemmas associated with our current petroculture in general and the oil sands in particular.

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To reinvent our societies around new forms of energy and in newly defined relationships with the environment and one another will require rigorous interdisciplinary thinking mobilized by a diverse constituency of people with a range of worldviews, political commitments, scholarly and professional expertise, and lived experiences. It will also require engaging wider publics in environmental scholarship on a deeper and more visceral level through artistic forms, as Takach argues in his book Scripting the Environment: Oil, Democracy and the Sands of Time and Space.1 Creative production and research-creation2 projects like these and others build new knowledge around a range of twenty-firstcentury questions that evade simplicity, and do so in accessible ways that invite participation from students, citizens, community members, and even policy-makers. What should our post-carbon futures look like? It is time to read and create new stories. notes 1 2

Geo Takach, Scripting the Environment: Oil, Democracy and the Sands of Time and Space (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Natalie Loveless explains that [r]esearch-creation, while endogenous to the field of contemporary art, is an academic category. It is a category produced within, with, and for an ever adapting university landscape, one that, while crucially informed by new and historical directions in the field of the professional fine arts (that is, grounded in a history of social, pedagogical, dialogic, conceptual, and institutional critique work in the visual arts), is not synonymous with these non-academically oriented practices. This is because research-creation does not aim at visibility and circulation within the professional art world. Rather, its aim is the production of new pedagogical and research modalities and outputs within the academy. Loveless argues: “Research-creation is also the logical outcome of interdisciplinary, conceptual, institutional critique and activist legacies in contemporary art … it is [an] extension of what Irit Rogoff first noted as a ‘pedagogical turning’ in the arts.” Haraway’s Dog, or How to Make Art at the End of the World (A Manifesto for ResearchCreation), forthcoming 2017.

20 Live from Alberta! Radio Petro Presents A Scary Home Companion Geo Takach

(opening fanfare: Wurlitzer organ riffs) announcer: Good day, listeners! Welcome to A Scary Home Companion, streaming to you live on Radio Petro, the satellite network that goes full bore on pressing and pungent issues around everybody’s favourite hydrocarbon! (energetic applause from the studio audience) Today, we dig into Alberta, Canada and its mighty bituminous sands – 166 billion barrels’ worth, making it the world’s third-largest recoverable supply of oil.1 Our special guests will bring you a rollicking revue exploring just how oil affects life in “Canada’s Energy Province.” We’ll roll out the barrel right after this. macho voice: Today’s world is busy, complex, and globally linked by trade, technology, and tough competition. That’s why we need visionary, responsible leadership in developing our assets to meet rising demand and provide a solid, responsible foundation for our future. We’re proud to be doing just that. This message is brought to you by the Federation of Canadian Oil Producers. announcer: And now, let’s welcome the host of A Scary Home Companion, that quintessential Canadian, Garrison Montaliti! (polite applause from the audience) host: Alberta’s bituminous bonanza raises questions as deep as the resource itself. Is Alberta a petroculture or even a petro-state? What forces frame Albertans’ choices in the Age of Oil? How does oil affect the way of life in what has been popularly called the wealthiest,2 the

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most conservative,3 the angriest,4 and the most American5 province in Canada? These are just some of the questions fuelling today’s show. (fluid applause from the audience) Let’s get cracking with our first special guest. Born in Otterville, Ontario in 1894, he blended history and political economy to become a profoundly influential scholar in Canadian communications and cultural studies, a status that not even his death could kill. In fact, it adds a longitudinal quality to his voice. That voice, and the rest of its owner, are brought to us through the miracle of time travel, sponsored as always by National Petroleum, one of the many innovative, interdisciplinary, and international enterprises active in resource extraction today. exotic voice: At National Petroleum, we’re working to bring the best of old-world vision, courage, know-how, and industry to the exciting, evolving world of oil sands production in Alberta, Canada. In keeping with those values, we’re proud to bring back exemplary people to take part in this program and inspire us further. National: working to create value, fuel the world … and raise spirits. host: Folks, please welcome “Doc” Harold Innis! (biased applause from the audience) What’s up, Doc? innis: Oil has become the ultimate medium, as it mediates our lives as citizen-consumers. So I say, the balance between time (concerned with humanity, community, and permanence) and space (technical, militaristic, and present-minded concerns) “has been seriously disturbed with disastrous consequences to Western civilization.”6 host: That’s great, Doc. You’re performing an original tune with your jazz combo. How about introducing the band? innis: We are Minerva’s Owl. On upright bass is Irene “The Sirene” Spry. On keys is Mars “Eight-Bars” McLuhan. I’m on tenor sax, of course. host: Of course. So let’s hear your new number, A Plea for Time. Go, cats! (extended cool-jazz instrumental intro from the band)

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innis: (in the style of Leonard Cohen) In a barbecue world Mirrors and smoke curl Hiding the rising tedium But be aware Oil isn’t rare No, it’s more of a medium … mcluhan: A hot medium! innis: Lost in our blind race To conquer all space Veering far from time’s oasis Once mere fluid Oil’s our druid We ache for homeostasis … spry: Social democracy! innis: For all the demands Of the bituminous sands Twisting Canada, oo-la-la The power’s gone chargin’ From centre to margin In present-minded brouhaha … spry/mcluhan: Yeah! (peripheral applause from the audience) host: Thanks, Minerva’s Owl, that was a real hoot. We’re back after this. anxious voice: (mile-a-minute) The tar sands are a catastrophe.7 Decimating downstream Aboriginal communities and ways of life. Sucking up enough precious freshwater every year for a city of two million people and turning 90 per cent of it into vast, toxic lakes visible from outer space. Burning up enough non-renewable natural gas to heat one million homes every day. That’s Canadian homes, which are large and northerly. Pumping out oil three times dirtier than conventional oil. Literally tarring Canada’s once-sterling reputation abroad. Bottom line: the tar sands suck, Alberta has no plan, and we need its unbridled and unhinged pace of extraction to slow down, and fast! This message is paid for by Citizens Against Tar Sands Overkill. (pause) And it would have been longer,

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but this is all the airtime we can afford for the next three years. Thanks. host: Um, back on A Scary Home Companion, let’s pick it up with some rigorous banter from our next act, two titans of the theory and practice of the most exciting place on Earth: the marketplace. Our first guest was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland way back in 1723. He became a scholar, an educator, and a brilliant writer whose influence endures to this day. Here to lend a not-quite-so-invisible hand to our topic is the one and only Adam Smith! (unfettered applause from the audience) smith: Thank you, Signor. As I once said, “The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects.”8 So it is with the utmost humility that I join this colloquium. host: Sweet. And who better to join the father of capitalism than its seminal exponent in the last century, a man so deeply embedded in our culture that he earned his own “ism.” Born in Michigan, usa in 1863, he pioneered mass production, ushered in the automobile and is credited with causing the Age of Oil, all while indirectly inspiring both trade unionism and Nazism. How’s that for variety? Folks, give it up for Mr Henry Ford! (systematic applause from the audience) ford: Thank you for your kindness, but as I have said, “I don’t read history. That’s in the past. I’m thinking of the future.”9 host: How visionary can you get? We’ll be back after these notes. british choir: (singing to the tune of “My Bonnie”) It’s funny how folks have a notion That money is printed from trees But honey, true wealth is in motion In pipelines from Fort Mac-Murr-ee! british voice: This message is brought to you by Beckham Petroleum: oil sands production with a kick to it. host: So, Adam Smith and Henry Ford, what do you make of Alberta in the Age of Oil? smith: ’Tis an odd choice for a case study. Unlike the world’s other leading producers of oil (Venezuela and Saudi Arabia ahead of it and

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Iran and Iraq following in the first five), Alberta is a Western democracy. Its oil projects are privately rather than state owned. And the bituminous sands – ford: Commonly called “oil sands” … smith: Commonly but inaccurately, along with “tar sands.” The scientifically correct term is “bituminous,”10 which of course is bulkier and appreciably less colloquial. ford: “To resent efficiency is a mark of inefficiency.”11 smith: As interruption has never been a hallmark of efficiency, we continue. host: Oooh, burn! smith: The resource is termed “unconventional” in contrast to the “conventional” production characterizing historical methods of extracting petroleum. Conventional extraction is simpler, faster, and vastly less costly in terms of labour, physical apparatus, technological requirements, financial investment, energy inputs, environmental risk, and so forth. These factors make Alberta’s situation singular from an economic perspective. ford: Alberta is an oil province. It depends on revenue from nonrenewable natural resources (primarily oil) for what in the last decade or so has averaged 29 per cent of its annual revenue.12 That’s hardly as elevated as in states such as Nigeria or Venezuela. smith: But it does fall within the range of what some call a petrostate.13 Three-quarters of Alberta’s exports have come from crude petroleum, gas and gas liquids, and petrochemicals,14 and a quarter of its gdp has come directly from the energy sector.15 However, this does not include oil’s significant, indirect impact on other sectors. Alberta’s deep dependency on one resource makes its fiscal position 50 per cent more volatile than the average of the other Canadian provinces.16 host: And speaking of the effects of energy … business voice: Looking for a place to invest? Alberta has led the land in economic growth for the better part of two decades.17 Small wonder that per capita, it’s the retail capital of Canada.18 It’s also the only Canadian province without a sales tax, and boasts by far the lowest tax burden in the country.19 This message is brought to you by the Government of Alberta.

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ford: I say bully for Alberta and the oil that powers her! Hang the taxes! When prices go up, business goes down.20 smith: But this tax situation is a problem. ford: Excuse me? smith: When did paying taxes become a “burden”? “Every different order of citizens is bound to contribute to the support of the sovereign or commonwealth,” and taxes on consumer goods other than essentials should be paid by the consumer.21 Oil has freed not only Albertans from contributing their fair share, but also the Alberta government from having to listen to its citizens. host: Um … did we book the right Adam Smith? ford: That is from The Wealth of Nations.22 But it doesn’t mean we have to like it. Or him. host: But folks will like this … friendly voice: Alberta is energy. And there’s no better example of this than the oil sands, our gift to the world. Come and see for yourself. Take one of our oil sands tours and get the real facts on Canada’s economic miracle. This message is brought to you by the Federation of Canadian Oil Producers and by the Alberta Tourism Enhancement Council. host: We’re back on A Scary Home Companion. So how do all of this oil wealth and favourable tax environment affect Alberta politically? smith: Friedman’s First Law of Petropolitics posits that the quality of democracy in a nation is inversely proportional to the extent that its government relies on petroleum revenue to finance its public services and provide employment for its citizens.23 ford: Preposterous! Oil makes us free! smith: Au contraire, Voltaire. Certainly, oil has freed us from ostensibly menial physical tasks. But in terms of consuming energy, a finite resource, each resident of the developed world today consumes, by one account, the energy equivalent of almost one hundred Roman slaves.24 This may increase our material well-being, but it actually enslaves us to oil. ford: Heresy! Have you forgotten your own words, man? In The Wealth of Nations, you yourself conclude that the fulfillment of our

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wants is the driving force of our species. How dare you condemn Albertans, let alone oil, for enabling this? smith: You misunderstand me, sir, by citing but half of the human equation. A closer reading of that work and its predecessor, The Theory of Moral Sentiments,25 would clearly suggest that benevolence, as well as self-interest, defines our condition. Did you not show benevolence in doubling your workers’ wages, offering them shares in your company and so forth? ford: All for valid business reasons, as with Alberta and its accelerated extraction and production of oil. Its wealth benefits everyone. smith: A debatable proposition, as Alberta has recorded the largest after-tax income gap between poor and rich in Canada.26 Is it not odd that Alberta’s low taxes and negligible resource-royalty rates privilege the wealthy at the expense of budgetary assaults on public goods such as health care, basic and post-secondary education, social services, and environmental protection? ford: Life is not utopia, sir. On the bottom line, thanks to oil, Alberta is by far Canada’s wealthiest province in terms of after-tax income.27 smith: But at what price? The price of disengagement from Albertans and their government. Everyone’s fealty shifts from the good of the commonwealth to the furtherance of private petroleum interests, and of people’s own atomistic, material concerns at the expense of the public good. ford: Piston poop! Where is your proof, sir? smith: Since the major oil strike at Leduc in 1947, there have been only two changes in provincial government in Alberta, and the second one only recently, in 2015. Elected opposition has been minimal, as governments have held about four out of every five seats in provincial elections since then.28 ford: Luck of the draw. smith: Alberta has hosted Canada’s lowest electoral turnouts, including the lowest provincial total in fifty years, 41 per cent, in 2008.29 And the province boasts a vigorous tradition of quelling political dissent at home while circling the wagons against external adversaries, both real and imagined.30

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ford: Mass-market-media fabrications! Like when? smith: Like when the former Progressive Conservative government fired a chief medical officer for supporting the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gas emissions as an issue of public health. When it cut loose a chief electoral officer whose report cited 182 violations of democratic electoral procedures. When it hired detectives to spy on landowners opposed to a proposed transmission line across their properties. ford: Isolated incidents. smith: And when it grossly stacked appointments to provincial agencies, boards, and commissions with card-carrying members of the then-ruling political party. This cannot but engage Friedman’s argument about oil diminishing democracy. ford: And what of the recent, socialist government in Alberta, eh? smith: The one that legislated a cap on emissions from the bituminous sands? Progressive, certainly, but the said cap is at 100 megatonnes per year (with another 10 per cent for upgrading and cogeneration projects), up from some 70 megatonnes emitted at the time.31 How, for example, will Canada meet benchmarks for emissions set by the international scientific community?32 Or its obligations to local Indigenous populations?33 Oil is a mighty mistress. ford: Codswallop! “The world is held together by the mass of honest folk who do their daily tasks, tend their own spot in the world, and have faith that at last the Right will come fully into its own.”34 Surely you concur, sir. smith: This is the problem with the right. When every human value, every duty to each other and to the Earth, is sacrificed on the altar of the marketplace, we lose everything. “He is certainly not a good citizen who does not wish to promote, by every means in his power, the welfare of the whole society of his fellow-citizens.”35 Excuse the eighteenth-century gender-exclusivity. ford: Rigor mortis has gone to your head, man! Clearly, your invisible hand is up your – smith: Perhaps. But at least my modest honours do not include a Grand Cross awarded by Herr Hitler for publishing fascist propaganda.

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host: (hastily) Let’s pause for station identification. announcer: You’re listening to Radio Petro, live from Alberta, Canada and broadcast online around the world via satellite. Radio Petro, where we’re always upgrading. host: We’re back on A Scary Home Companion. Our producer would like to thank Mr Ford and Dr Smith for joining us. (pause) Our sponsors and lawyers, not so much. Our next guest ranks widely among history’s greatest poets. Born in 1644 in the Iga province of Japan, he was a teacher and a revered master of the haiku. Please welcome Matsuo Bashō! (tranquil applause from the audience) bashō: stilled warning cannons on a languid lake of tar feathers float in death host: Thank you, Master Bashō. (meditative silence from the audience) And now, this. child: Mommy! I left Freddie out in the rain! mom: No problem, honey! Freddie Bear is made of plastic, one of the amazing variety of products of oil that are an indispensible part of our daily lives. Just like your favourite pink sweater, your bouncybubble shampoo and Softy, your special pillow. Not to mention Derek’s basketball, Mommy’s computer, and Daddy’s new leg. The list goes on and on! child: You mean my snuggle buddy comes from … an oil well in some desert? mom: (chuckling) Silly goose. Freddie is made partly from oil mined from a friendly, principled resource found right here in Canada: the oil sands! child: I’ve heard of that! mom: (chuckling) Of course you have. In addition to all manner of wonderful consumer items, the oil sands provide jobs, wealth, and energy security for millions of people all over our great nation, not to mention our good neighbours and customers south of the border.

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child: You mean, like, Antarctica? (telephone rings) mom: (chuckling) Probably there, too. Please excuse me, honey. That’s your dad calling on my cellphone, likely also made from oil sands oil. smooth voice: Alberta’s oil sands. Friendly. Safe. Green. And part of all of our lives as Canadians. This message is brought to you by the Government of Canada. host: And now, for the comedy segment of our program. catherine: (Russian accent) Besides last commercial, you mean? host: (nervous laughter) Good one, Your Highness. Folks, our next guest was born a German princess in what is now Szczecin, Poland, back in 1729. Noted for her grand vision and steel will, she is said to have brought Russia into modernity and the orbit of greater European civilization. catherine: If you call Europe civilized, you are sadly mistaken, bobrovnik. host: Known at various times as Sophia Augusta Frederika of Anhalt-Zerbst, Grand Duchess Yekaterina Alexeyevna and other exotica, she is undeniably Catherine the Great. (courtly applause from the audience) catherine: You may wonder what Empress of Imperial Russia has to say to Alberta in twenty-first century. I say, your puny, former first minister Harper called your country “energy superpower.” Pah! Today, Mother Russia is energy superpower, with leading oil company and pipelines owned by state. Canada is Cossack backwater energy supermarket. Bituminous sands making others rich instead of rulers at home. Redonkulous! (guffaws from the audience) Seriously, Alberta does to state power even more than what French press said I did with all those Russian generals. Have you no pride in country? Leaving public finances in hands of global politics and fickle commodity prices, so when oil price tumble down toilet, government kicked in ushanka? Oil companies taking credit

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for paying for hospitals, schools and welfare of people? Trying for to force universities to become industrial arm of oil industry, instead of leaving job to prisons? And taxation: what brazhnik decided not to tax robho out of populace? Such imbecility! (chortles from the audience) host: Hilarious stuff, Your Majesty! And now, this special message – catherine: How dare you interrupt? In Imperial Russia, I would have your mudak! deep voice: There’s a new kind of oil sands in Alberta. No levelled forests, no huge trucks, no open-pit mines. It’s called steam-assisted gravity drainage, or sagd. Sink two pipes deep in the ground, pump superheated water through one and pump the bitumen out through the other. Easy-peasy! It’s a great example of how we’re using leading-edge technology to keep our environmental footprint down. And anyone who says sagd uses up way more energy and water than open-pit mining or poses serious risks to underground aquifers is a simpering, anti-Albertan, un-Canadian liar! This message brought to you by the Noncon Oil Group. catherine: What seditious lunacy is this? Interrupting business of state with this, how you say it, goat-turd? host: Your Majesty! You may be an empress, but you’re talking about … a sponsor! catherine: Muzhik! I will not suffer your indignities any – host: And now, this very important message. drawler: Albertans are visionaries, innovators and risk-takers. That’s why we set up the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund in 1976, to hold energy royalties and build a legacy for our future. That model inspired Statoil in Norway, which set up its own legacy fund fourteen years later. norwegian: We are inspired by Alberta. So inspired that our Oil Fund (a pension for our citizens that’s contributed to equitably and held apart from public general revenue) earns more in interest in one business quarter this year than all the principal accumulated in Alberta’s fund for forty years. Alberta, we salute you! smooth voice: This message is brought to you by the Government of Alberta.

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host: Back on A Scary Home Companion, let’s meet our last guest. What’s a radio revue without magic? Born in Blois, France in 1805, our closer dazzled nations with his conjuring and technical wizardry – so much so that authorities forced him to reveal his tricks under threat of prosecution for witchcraft. Known as the Father of Modern Magic, he moved the art from the streets into the theatre, presenting lifelike mechanical figures, making people float, and getting trees to grow onstage. Welcome the lord of legerdemain, the prelate of prestidigitation, the sultan of sorcery … Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin! (electric applause from the audience) Assisting him on our studio stage is his dapper assistant, Camille. robert-houdin: Mesdames et monsieurs, the hand is quicker than the ear! I will now show you the most amazing act of conjuring since my automated house! You see Camille, holding out to you in her white gloves a handful of sables bitumineux … the sands in Alberta from which the unconventional oil, she is produced, oui? (tympani drumroll) The bituminous sands, they are hard for us to process in language, yes? Les peuples indigènes used it to patch canoes. Later, the whites used it to pave roads. And it is tarry, heavier than conventional oil, and much harder to extract. So voilà, I wave my wand, and the sands in Camille’s hands become … tar sands! (hi-hat, then oohs and ahs from the audience, then another drumroll) But of course the demand for oil, she is great, and for decades, the federal and provincial governments, they try to produce it from the sands on a commercial scale. That takes years of government, and then private, investment. So voilà, I wave my wand again and the sands in Camille’s hands become … oil sands! (hi-hat, then oohs and ahs from the audience) Industry and la publique générale, they all use the terms interchangeably. I wave my wand like so … (thunderclap) Tar sands!

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(oohs and ahs from the audience) And I wave it again … (squeals of delight from the audience) Oil sands! And again … (rapturous gasps from the audience) Tar sands once more! Amazing transformation, n’est-ce pas? (amazed applause from the audience) But then, in the sixties, the province and its partners begin commercial production, and the government decides “oil sands,” she sounds cleaner, nicer, lighter, and zestier than “tar sands”! (thunderclap, then gasps from the audience) So oil sands they shall be! (deafening tympani drumroll crescendo) La publique, she does not care much for these fine distinctions, so she continues to use both terms. But the hired pr specialists, they work very hard, yes? And the so-called “mainstream” media, they quite properly follow the dominant economic frame of their employers. They see the resource as purely a business story and decree that “tar sands,” she is the lingo of les “extrémistes écologiques.” So voilà, from now on, it shall be “oil sands” only! Even better, some media streamline it to one word, “oilsands,” so it is even more, how you say, naturalized! (earth-shattering boom) “Unconventional” becomes “conventional.” “Dirty oil” becomes “green.” And illusion becomes reality. I wave my wand, and poof! (startled shrieks from the audience) The sand is gone. So is Camille. And now, so am I. (a loud gong, a pause, then rapt applause from the audience) host: Awesome, J.E. … wherever you’ve disappeared to. And speaking of awesome …

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deep voice: My name is Kwame and I am one of the many international workers who have come to Alberta to work in the oil sands. It is a wonderful place, full of exciting opportunities for me and my family. Although our tent in the company work camp is not quite as comfortable as the manor house and estate where we reside in our home country, it is not nearly as swelteringly hot outside, especially in January. We owe so much to Alberta and the oil sands. macho voice: This message is brought to you by the Federation of Canadian Oil Producers and the Wood Buffalo Business Association. host: Back on A Scary Home Companion, let’s bring it all home with a discussant tasked to pull together everything we’ve heard here today. To that end, please welcome back … Adam Smith! (applause from the audience) Wow, nice suit, Smitty, a brand-new Henri Coquet! I see you’ve lost the ratty white wig. And is that your new convertible I saw in the studio lot? smith: Just call me a victim of fashion, Signor. The horseless carriage now belongs to the Kidney Foundation. Worry not, I did get a tax receipt. host: O…kay. Folks, we’ve chosen Dr Smith as our discussant to so we can clear up any, ah, misunderstanding arising from his earlier remarks on the program. So, Smitty, tell us, just how does oil affect life in an affluent Western democracy today? smith: Having heard and given careful consideration to all of your distinguished guests (and sponsors), I come to praise oil, not to bury it. I offer a good half-dozen answers to your question. host: A six-pack? Don’t keep us waiting any longer! smith: As you wish. First, oil does not create authoritarian, repressive regimes falling outside of wider societal mainstreams and sacrificing the long-term interests of the many for the immediate privileges of the few. Rather, oil frees citizens from bloated, invasive government and the burden of oppressive regulation and taxation! host: Right on! Let’s hear it, folks! (liberal applause from the audience) smith: Second, oil does not subject government’s provision of essential public services to the vagaries of foreign markets, exchange

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rates, and other factors far beyond local control; nor does it sell out local autonomy or sovereignty. It simply aligns public revenue with the needs of the greater, international community, while providing mutually beneficial links that enrich everyone in the global marketplace! (neoliberal applause from the audience) Third, oil does not privilege entrenched economic elites and the ruling politicos beholden to them, or widen existing social inequalities. Rather, it creates the foundation for an increasingly rich and diverse socio-economic demographic! (gaping applause from the audience) Fourth, oil does not impair democracy or disengage citizens from their governments, and vice-versa. It leaves people free to pursue their consumer needs and wants. And all without the hindrance of taking part in public affairs or concerning themselves with the health, education, or welfare of people or places they don’t even know. (unbridled applause from the audience) Fifth, oil does not lead to revisionist history, groupthink, or thought control by people who benefit most from gross inequalities in the status quo and its dominant discourse. Rather, oil highlights and clarifies our correct use of language in a manner consistent with the interests of all citizens. And in a way that’s easier to say, to boot. Let me hear you say it: oil sands! audience: (in unison) Oil sands! (authoritative applause from the audience) smith: Finally, oil emphatically does not destroy, or even damage, our precious natural environment, the Earth’s ecosystems, or life on the planet. What oil does is inspire innovative, responsible processes and exciting new technologies – advances that continue to set impeccable standards for the clean, sustainable, and principled extraction of Albertans’ birthright. (righteous applause from the audience) host: Brilliant, thank you so much. Adam Smith, ladies and gentlemen! (forgiving applause from the audience)

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We’ll be right back. earnest voice: I’m Dale Campbell. As a chemist, I’m proud to work in Alberta’s oil sands with a team of dedicated professionals who care about their work and its impacts. We’re always trying to find better ways to do business, no matter what anyone says. So don’t just take nosy foreign activists or nasty local naysayers at their word. Check us out online and get the real story on Alberta, from Alberta. macho voice: This message is brought to you by the Government of Alberta. host: Folks, that’s A Scary Home Companion for today. I’m Garrison Montaliti, and I’ll catch you … audience: (in unison) Oily in the morning! announcer: As is tradition on Radio Petro, we close this program and our broadcast day with the singing of Alberta’s rational anthem. You may recognize it as an adaptation of the British anthem (borrowed at the suggestion of the former prime minister) or the clever American appropriation of the tune. Please rise wherever you are, and face the direction of the Athabasca Oil Sands Formation. (school-piano introduction) singer: Don’t save our bitumen Mine as fast as we can Don’t save our oil Billions more to be found Free it from underground For booming export markets bound Don’t save our oil. announcer: Bonus verse, different from the first! singer: Don’t save our heavy oil Release it from the soil Don’t save our oil Reserves voluminous Balance sheet luminous Colour our world bituminous Don’t save our oil. (respectful pause, then piercing audio tone signalling station sign-off)

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notes 1 Government of Alberta, Alberta Energy, “Facts and Statistics,” 2016, accessed 25 July 2016,http://www.energy.alberta.ca/OilSands/791.asp. 2 Josh Wingrove and Dawn Walton, “Alberta Turns to Austerity,” Globe and Mail, 8 March 2013, A1. 3 Lawrence Solomon, “The 51st and 52nd States,” National Post, 5 June 2003, fp13. 4 Will Ferguson and Ian Ferguson, How to Be a Canadian (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2001). 5 Tamsin Carlisle and Joel Baglole, “In Western Canada, a Rising Sense of Grievance,” Wall Street Journal, 20 March 2001, a19. 6 Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 71. 7 Andrew Nikiforuk, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, revised edition (Vancouver: Greystone, 2010). 8 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Amherst: Prometheus, 2000), 380. 9 Louis Paul Lochner, Henry Ford: America’s Don Quixote (New York: International, 1925), 18. 10 K.A. Clark and S.M. Blair, The Bituminous Sands of Alberta: Scientific and Industrial Research Council of Alberta, Report No. 18 (Edmonton: King’s Printer, 1927). 11 Henry Ford, “Popular Research Topics: Henry Ford Quotations” (quoted from Ford News, 1 June 1925), Benson Ford Research Center, accessed 25 July 2016, http://www.thehenryford.org/research/ henryFordQuotes.aspx. 12 Government of Alberta, “Backgrounder on Alberta’s Fiscal Situation,” accessed 25 July 2016, finance.alberta.ca/publications/fiscal/ spotlights/2015-0115-Backgrounder-on-Alberta-Fiscal-Situation.pdf. 13 Nikiforuk, Tar Sands. 14 Government of Alberta, Alberta Enterprise and Advanced Education, “Exports,” in “Highlights of the Alberta Economy 2013,” accessed 25 July 2016, http://brookschamber.ab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/ Highlights-of-the-Alberta-Economy-2013.pdf. 15 Ibid. 16 Alberta, “Backgrounder.” 17 Alberta, “Growth,” in Highlights of the Alberta Economy 2012, accessed 25 July 2016, http://www.albertacanada.com/SP-EH_high lightsABEconomy.pdf.

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18 Statistics Canada, “Retail Trade, by Province and Territory,” accessed 25 July 2016, http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/ cst01/trad17a-eng.htm; “Population by Year, by Province and Territory (Number),” accessed 25 July 2016, http://www.statcan.gc.ca/ tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/demo02a-eng.htm. 19 Government of Alberta, “Competitive Tax Environment,” accessed 25 July 2016, http://www.albertacanada.com/business/invest/lowpersonal-and-corporate-taxes.aspx. 20 Henry Ford (quoted from Wall Street Journal, 4 April 1934), Benson Ford Research Center, accessed 25 July 2016, http://www.thehenry ford.org/research/henryFordQuotes.aspx. 21 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 2 (London: Strahan & Cadell, 1789), 504. 22 Smith, Wealth of Nations. 23 Thomas L. Friedman, “The First Law of Petropolitics,” Foreign Policy 154 (2006): 28–36. 24 Andrew Nikiforuk, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude (Vancouver: Greystone, 2012). 25 Smith, Moral Sentiments. 26 Diana Gibson, A Social Policy Framework for Alberta: Fairness and Justice for All, Report for Alberta College of Social Workers and the Parkland Institute, November 2012, accessed 25 July 2016, http:// parklandinstitute.ca/research/summary/a_social_policy_framework _for_alberta. 27 Employment and Social Development Canada, “Financial Security – Family Income: Regions,” accessed 3 September 2014, http://www4 .hrsdc.gc.ca/[email protected]?iid=21. 28 Elections Alberta. “Candidate Summary of Results (General Elections 1905–2015),” n.d., accessed 25 July 2016, http://www.elections.ab.ca/ reports/statistics/candidate-summary-of-results-general-elections. 29 cbc News, “Low Voter Turnout in Alberta Election Being Questioned,” cbc News Edmonton, 5 March 2008, accessed 25 July 2016, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/ low-voter-turnout-in-alberta-election-being-questioned-1.761174. 30 Geo Takach, Will the Real Alberta Please Stand Up? (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2010). 31 Government of Alberta, “Capping Oil Sands Emissions,” n.d. [2015], accessed 25 July 2016, http://www.alberta.ca/climate-oilsandsemissions.aspx.

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32 See, for example, Christophe McGlade and Paul Ekins, “The Geographical Distribution of Fossil Fuels Unused When Limiting Global Warming to 2°C,” Nature 517, no. 7533 (8 January 2015): 187–90. 33 See, for example, Indigenous Environmental Network, “Tar Sands,” n.d., accessed 25 July 2016, http://www.ienearth.org/what-we-do/ tar-sands. 34 Henry Ford (quoted from Ford News, 15 January 1924), Benson Ford Research Center, accessed 25 July 2016, http://www.thehenryford.org/ research/henryFordQuotes.aspx. 35 Smith, Moral Sentiments, 339.

21 The Tar Sands Exploration Station: A Self-Directed Artist Residency Allison Rowe

During the summer of 2010, I set out from Toronto on a road trip west across Canada to visit the tar sands. After years of making artwork about the oil sands, I asked myself, how might visiting the oil sands and conducting site research transform, intensify, or remake my artistic practice on the topic? Why might it be important for me to experience firsthand the environmental issues I was responding to? The essay that follows responds to these questions. It recounts my experiences as I travelled to the oil mining hub of Fort McMurray, Alberta, in my 1982 camper van, took up temporary residence, and began an exploratory art project documenting the community and oil industry through the collection of images, audio, and objects from the surrounding area. These amassed materials now find their form in the Tar Sands Exploration Station, a mobile sculpture that gives people far removed from Fort McMurray an embodied experience of the oil sands. I stopped to visit family in Edmonton before heading north on Highway 63, the only road that leads directly to the oil sands (figure 21.1). Trucks, sports cars, and suvs zoomed by me at speeds of 140– 160 km/hr, giving credence to the road’s popular nicknames: “Hell’s Highway” and “Highway of Death.” The drive was beautiful but monotonous, though every now and again there would be a memorial or site of interest to catch one’s attention, such as the farm with blue-hard-hat-clad fenceposts interrupting the bucolic landscape of freshly baled hay and wheat. As I drove further north, the fields gave way to a seemingly endless dense forest. Clear blue rivers and lakes peeked through gaps between the trees as green signs with white text

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Figure 21.1 Allison Rowe, Highway, from the series Postcards from Fort McMurray, 2010. Highway 63, often referred to by locals as “Hell’s Highway” or the “Highway of Death,” is the only road that goes directly to the Fort McMurray oil sands.

relayed the names of nearby towns: Bryant, Mariana Lake, Aznac, and, finally, Fort McMurray. My van climbed over the crest of a large, forested hill, and I found myself looking down the winding road into the valley of Fort McMurray, the city at the centre of the oil sands boom. The core of the municipality was largely made up of brown and grey buildings, a 1970s-style architecture that evoked memories of orange and yellow floral wallpaper and shag carpeting. These buildings were surrounded by newer-looking commercial structures, grocery stores and banks, restaurants, and, of course, gas stations. Along the highway, hotels of varying boxish styles rose up above the low-lying skyline. I noticed immediately that Fort McMurray is divided in half by the deceptively quiet Athabasca River, whose powerful rushing, greentinged depths can only be crossed via an aqua-coloured steel bridge. The day I arrived, there was construction everywhere: on the bridge, on the highway itself, and in nearly every subdivision on the northern side of town, workers steadily – almost desperately – labouring

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to expand the city’s infrastructure to match its burgeoning population. As I crossed the bridge, through the construction and out of the valley, the deep woody smell of the adjacent boreal forest was subsumed by the increasingly caustic scent of the oil sands – a repulsive fragrance akin to the scent of a freshly set hair perm combined with the odour of a leaky gas station, overlaid with the faint but putridly sweet smell of decay. The stench was so aggressive it assaulted all of my senses, leaving my eyes burning and my head pounding. The freeway continued over hills and around bends as trucks barrelled past me, their horns blaring at my hesitant navigation of the road. Suddenly, turning a sharp corner, I saw a huge cloud rising from a smokestack in the distance. I was so busy staring at it that I almost missed the abrupt shift from boreal forest to the grey sand dunes that appeared to the left of the van. The sand was piled high along the side of the road but it was easy to see that it stretched more than a kilometre. This moon-like landscape was dotted with trucks, tarps, excavators, and men. Were it not for the looming refinery, it could be mistaken for the world’s largest sandbox. Across the road from the sandscape was a chain-link fence covered in a semi-opaque black cloth. Though the fence followed the rises and falls in the road (presumably to block the view of curious visitors) the height of my van allowed me to see just over the top to a large body of still water. It was a tailings pond, a massive manmade lake filled with contaminated waste water produced during the process of separating oil from bituminous sand. The surface of this “lake” was black except for in a few places, which, on that particular day, reflected the blue of the sky overhead. Odd, misshapen, orange figures swayed gently atop circular metal buoys throughout and around the water. I would later learn these were oil industry scarecrows intended to fend off birds who meet a quick demise when they land on the toxic pond (figure 21.2). No more than a moment after I pulled onto the shoulder to get a better look at these forms, a tremendous blast filled the air. Moments later, there was another boom, then another and another until the air was filled with a cacophony reminiscent of a war movie. Before it stopped, I realized these noises emanated from motion-activated sound-cannons designed to scare birds away from the pond’s poisonous waters.

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Figure 21.2 Allison Rowe, Bit-u-men, from the series Postcards from Fort McMurray, 2010. Scarecrow-like forms called “bit-u-men” are used to deter birds from landing on tailing ponds.

Conceding to the honking of passing trucks, I pulling off the shoulder and gunned it back into the stream of traffic on the highway, headed toward the ominous oil sands refinery in the distance. As I approached, I saw massive built structures in the shapes of cones, cubes, and rectangles; oversized metallic pipes and conveyor belts created a complex maze that twisted and turned like the map of a subway system. Gigantic yellow dump trucks the size of a twostorey house able to move 300 tonnes of bituminous sands inched around, spewing a steady stream of stinking exhaust into the air. As I turned my vehicle off the main road, planning to reroute and head back into town, I came across a surprisingly beautiful, lush green field and a calm, quiet lake. I pulled my van into a small parking lot and got out. A fence separated me from the seemingly pristine landscape, and a sign nailed to a post informed me that although this parcel of land had been “remediated” it was still unsafe for the general public – that is, for human use (figure 21.3). It was then that I noticed bison grazing in the distance.

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Figure 21.3 Allison Rowe, Remediated, from the series Postcards from Fort McMurray, 2010. Despite asserting that this landscape has been remediated, Syncrude does not allow the public to walk in this area.

After a few days in Wood Buffalo, I acculturated to the smell of the oil sands and the speed of traffic. I began meeting people in the community as I worked to unravel and understand the social landscape of the city. In Fort McMurray, I encountered Canadians from every region of the country, along with people from the four corners of the globe, most of whom had moved here so they, or their partner, could find employment opportunities unavailable “back home.” Almost everyone I met was kind, generous, and above all, welcoming. Many invited me to partake in outdoor activities such as hiking, fishing, and swimming. During these outings, I was surprised to discover that many people working in the oil industry are also concerned about the environmental impacts of their daily labour, which forced me to confront my own preconceived notion that the community would be blind to the impacts of this industrial mining project on the planet and the climate. I spent just under a month in Fort McMurray living in my camper van, hanging out with locals, researching in the library, exploring the environment, and accumulating photographs, sounds, and objects

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from the area encircling the oil sands. When I left, I wasn’t certain how to simplify the myriad contradictory emotions, ideas, and knowledge that I had acquired during my time in the community. I created a number of small works with materials amassed during my residency, but these projects seemed to lack scale and nuance. It was only after I left the community that I recognized that in order to represent the oil sands and Fort McMurray I needed to embrace and embody the complexities of the landscape. This realization produced the Tar Sand Exploration Station (tses), a mobile museum about the oil sands housed in the 1982 Dodge Ram camper van that I had called home during my residency (figure 21.4). This project functions as both an exhibition and a living space, colliding science and museology with the aesthetics of daily life. Since 2011, the entirety of my van has taken the form of an immersive installation made up of photographs, sculptures, environmental samples, audio, food, and performance works that I tour across North America to facilitate discourse about the oil sands and related environmental issues. The tses travels to places it’s been invited, such as art exhibitions, community events, and organized protests, as well as to non-sanctioned locations, such as the parking lot of an oil company or outside a museum that accepts funding from fossil fuel corporations. The tses employs interaction as a means to not only engage visitors, but to provide them a tactile experience. Drawing from the hands-on sensorial practices of the Montessori Method, I make the environmental samples I collected from the area surrounding the oil sands (including oil sand, tailing sand, and downstream water) available for the audience to touch, smell, and investigate with basic scientific equipment. The tses embraces chaos and collaboration, inviting visitors to explore the samples together and to record their observations in a communal notebook. Over time, this notebook has become a collective artwork in itself, containing the sensorial knowledge and observations of people from across North America. Provided alongside the environmental samples are plates of snacks and a beer-filled fridge to encourage lengthy stays in the space. The longer guests spend in the van, the more they unearth. There are, for example, true/false questions hidden in the cupboards, and, in the kitchen, an oil sand extraction machine made out of a kettle, straws, and used food containers allows participants to emulate the science of refining. Built into the cabinets are mining models with

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Figure 21.4 Exterior view of the Tar Sands Exploration Station, parked at the Richview Library in Toronto, Ontario, 2011.

construction equipment that younger visitors can drive. All of the artworks displayed in the van are made of commonplace objects such as mason jars, old blankets, worn maps, and utensils, creating accessible and familiar entry points for different types of visitor engagement with the work. The homemade, domestic aesthetics of the tses disempower the industry they represent by downplaying its political and economic power and by recontextualizing the oil sands through embodied experience and the lens of daily life. These aesthetics also brings home these politics in ways that make the personal political and the political personal. The tses is hosted at all times by either me or a volunteer. We welcome people into the space, provide tours, and invite guests to grab a drink from the fridge. Due to the widely varied perspectives on the oil sands, we do not offer our own opinions but rather try to match the tone of the visitor and then utilize the works in the space to build a conversation in different directions. The tses has been designed in such a way that guests usually end up in conversation with other visitors. The coziness of the van facilitates dialogue among people with widely divergent perspectives who might not typically have

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the opportunity or willingness to speak to others who differ on the issues. As an artist, I am most interested in these exchanges where oil sands anecdotes, community knowledge, affective/emotional responses to environmental destruction, and bodily experiences are valued and shared. It is in these moments that the tses facilitates transformative learning and asserts the importance of continued dialogue and action around oil issues. One of the ways that the tses supports continued discussion is by making the landscape photographs of Fort McMurray included in this text available to visitors as free, mailable postcards. Nostalgic colouring and expansive vistas offer senders and receivers a palpable entry point from which to consider the uncomfortable signposts about oil, environmental degradation, and Canada buried in the details of these images. My trip to Fort McMurray was both more pleasurable and more disturbing than I had anticipated. The outdoorsy, friendly people and the community bonds they have built exist in stark contrast to their context, nestled in the midst of a massive and violent industrial mining project. The beauty of the nearby forests and lakes are in sharp relief against a soundscape of thunderous tailings-pond cannons and the putrid scents of oil extraction. Many of the landscapes I encountered during my residency have since been devastated by the aggressive forest fires that ripped through the community in 2016, rendering even more urgent the need to address the catastrophic environmental and social consequences of oil sands extraction and processing. The Tar Sands Exploration Station subverts the power of the oil industry by offering people a chance to learn, explore, and discuss the uncomfortable knowledge that the oil sands industry has global environmental impacts, all in a comfortable space that encourages exchange and repersonalizes political discourses.

Contributors

georgiana banita is assistant professor of North American literature and media studies at the University of Bamberg, Germany, and honorary research fellow at the United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney. Her book Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11 (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) reads the contemporary ethics of narrative through racial profiling, psychoanalysis, and globalization. She is currently completing a trilogy on American resource literature from Emerson to fracking fiction and starting a research project on post-carbon cultures in North America and Europe. She has published on oil movies, entropy and comics, petro-photography, and the role of energy in US election cultures. She is co-editor of Electoral Cultures: American Democracy and Choice (University of Heidelberg Press, 2015). darin barney is Grierson Chair in Communication Studies and associate professor at McGill University. He is the author of Communication Technology: The Canadian Democratic Audit (ubc Press, 2005), The Network Society (Polity Press, 2006), and Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and co-editor of The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). His current work focuses on the politics of resource infrastructure in rural Canada, including projects on the transformation of grain-handling technology in the Canadian Prairies and the politics of petroleum and gas pipelines in Canada. amanda boetzkes is associate professor of contemporary art history and theory at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses

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on the intersection of the biological sciences with artistic practices of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her book The Ethics of Earth Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) examines the ways in which contemporary art developed an ethical concern for the earth and a corresponding aesthetic sensibility borne of elemental thinking. She is co-editor, with Aron Vinegar, of Heidegger and the Work of Art History (Routledge, 2014). Boetzkes has published in the journals Postmodern Culture, Art History, Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, racar, Antennae: The Journal of Nature and Visual Culture, e-flux, and nonsite.org. She is currently completing a book entitled Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste, which examines the interplay between the aesthetics of contemporary art, global systems of energy use, and the life cycle of garbage. clint burnham is associate professor in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. A founding member of Vancouver’s Lacan Salon, he writes widely on contemporary art, poetry, film, and theory. Recent books include The Only Poetry That Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing (Arsenal Pulp, 2011), exhibition catalogue essays for the Kunsthalle Wien and the grunt gallery, and the poetry collection Pound @ Guantánamo (Talonbooks); forthcoming publications include an essay on Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (for a McGill-Queen’s collection on the literary archive edited by Jason Camlot) and Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street (Bloomsbury). Clint’s current project centres on Slavoj Žižek and digital culture and is slated for a 2018 publication. adam carlson is a PhD candidate and Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholar in English and film studies at the University of Alberta. His doctoral research focuses on the cultural politics of energy in Quebec and Alberta. He is a member of the Petrocultures Research Group and After Oil. He is associate editor for Reviews in Cultural Theory, and his work has appeared in the journal Mediations. cecily devereux is professor of English and film studies at the University of Alberta. Her publications have taken up questions of femininity in the imperial context across a range of categories, including the maternal body, ideologies of imperial motherhood, eugenics

Contributors

509

and eugenic feminism, the figure of the “white slave,” the “Indian maiden,” hysteria, and the erotic or burlesque dancer. Her book Growing a Race: Nellie L. McClung and the Fiction of Eugenic Feminism (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005) focuses on the politics of maternalism in first-wave feminism in English Canada. She has also co-edited volumes on women in the British Empire for Routledge (2009) and Pickering and Chatto (2006). She is currently completing a sshrc-funded study of erotic and burlesque dancers in the nineteenth-century Euro-imperial context. david mcdermott hughes is professor of anthropology at Rutgers University. He has written Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity (Duke University Press, 2017) and two books on environmental struggles in Southern Africa: Whiteness in Zimbabwe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and From Enslavement to Environmentalism (University of Washington Press, 2006). He is currently conducting ethnography on wind power, beauty, property, unemployment, and utopian thought in southern Spain. tim kaposy is assistant professor of English and communications at Niagara College. He is co-editor, with Imre Szeman, of Cultural Theory: An Anthology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), and his forthcoming monograph is entitled The Economic Documentary: Photography, Cinema and Capitalism from 1945–2008. brenda longfellow is associate professor in the Department of Film at York University and is an award-winning filmmaker and film theorist. Her productions include Our Marilyn (1987); Gerda (1992); A Balkan Journey/Fragments From The Other Side of War (1996); Shadow Maker: Gwendolyn MacEwen, Poet (1998); and Tina in Mexico (2002). Since 2007, she has been focusing on environmental issues, producing films such as Weather Report (2008) for The Nature of Things, Carpe Diem (2010), and Dead Ducks (2012). Her two interactive documentaries on offshore oil, offshore and Offshore International, were launched in 2013 and 2015. graeme macdonald is associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He has authored various articles and essays on modern and

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contemporary literature and culture, and is editor of Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism (1999) and Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature (2011). He is a member of the Warwick Research Collective (wrec), who have published a monograph, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World Literature (2015). Petrocultural work includes an edition of John McGrath’s play The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (2015) and various essays on oil, energy, and literature. Forthcoming projects include editing Energy Humanities: A Handbook (Routledge, 2018) and a special olh issue: “Powering the Future: Energy and Science Fiction” (2017). Graeme teaches a graduate class on Petrofiction and is at present engaged on a monograph project on oil and world literature. He is a member of the research collectives After Oil and Petrocultures. janine macleod is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. Along with Astrida Neimanis and Cecilia Chen, she is co-editor of Thinking with Water (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013). Her essays have appeared in downstream: reimagining water (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017); Hydros (Landucci, 2007); and The Walrus. Janine’s doctoral research approaches water both as a key term in the exercise of hegemony and as a potent medium of social transformation. michael malouf is associate professor of English at George Mason University specializing in modernism and postcolonial studies. He has published a book, Transatlantic Solidarities: Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics (uva Press, 2009) and essays in journals and book collections such as New Hibernia Review; Jouvert; Comparative American Studies; Interventions; The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2006); Ireland and Transatlantic Poetics (Delaware University Press, 2007); The Black and Green Atlantic (Palgrave, 2009); and George Bernard Shaw in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2015). sourayan mookerjea is associate professor of sociology and director of the Intermedia Research Studio at the University of Alberta. He is a social and cultural theorist whose research addresses

Contributors

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contradictions of globalization, migration, urbanization, development dispossession, subaltern social movements, popular culture, and class politics. His current projects include sshrc-funded research on The Commons and the Convergence of Crises, an intermedia/decolonizing theory of the commons; RePublicU, a critical university studies collaboration; and Toxic Media Ecologies for Arts and the Anthropocene, a social justice, research creation CoLab at the Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta. Dr Mookerjea is also coeditor of Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press, 2009). andrew pendakis is assistant professor of theory and rhetoric at Brock University and a research fellow at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. His research focuses broadly on contemporary (neo)liberal culture with a special interest in the genealogy of centrist reason in the West. Essays on Badiou, Heidegger, Blanqui, Deleuze, Marx, Veblen, and Sartre, and on topics ranging from plastic to dialectics, have appeared or are forthcoming in Criticism, Imaginations, Critical Inquiry, e-flux, Politics and Culture, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Mediations. He is a co-editor of Contemporary Marxist Theory: A Reader and presently at work on a monograph entitled Critique of Centrist Reason. kirsty robertson is associate professor of contemporary art and museum studies at Western University, Canada. Her research focuses on activism, visual culture, and changing economies. She has published widely on these topics and is currently finishing her book Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Museums, Culture. Since 2008, she has worked on textiles, the textile industry, and textile-based arts, writing about textiles and technology, craftivism, and petrotextiles. Finally, Kirsty has an ongoing interest in critical museum studies, and is starting a large-scale project focused on small and microcollections that work against traditional museum formats. Her coedited volumes Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture, and Activism in Canada and Negotiations in a Vacant Lot were released in 2011 and 2014, and her tri-authored volume Putting Intellectual Property in Its Place: Rights Discourse, Creativity and the Everyday was published in 2013.

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Contributors

allison rowe is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher. Her artistic work attempts to re-personalize political discourses, exploring the possibilities that exist in this transitional process. Rowe’s recent creative projects investigate the intersections of generosity, power, and sustainability through performance, print, and installation. She is a PhD candidate in art education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is researching museumbased socially engaged art. Rowe holds an mfa in social practices from California College of the Arts and is the recent recipient of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship. Her work can be viewed at allisonroweart.com. randy schroeder is associate professor of general studies and English at Mount Royal University. His creative and critical publications have appeared in diverse venues that include Descant, Extrapolation, The Café Irreal, and Criminal Justice Abstracts. With his brother Kent – director of projects for the International Development Institute at Humber College – he studies the emergent concept of Gross National Happiness, as embodied in the economic and ecological policies of Bhutan, and as recently prioritized by the UN and other international actors seeking “interdependent” frameworks for governance. Their 2014 article, “Happy Environments,” is currently being assessed for its policy implications by the Centre for Bhutan Studies in Thimphu, under the direction of Dasho Karma Ura, a Bhutanese knight and one of the architects of Bhutan’s first constitution. To their delight, the same article has been cited in “Dinheiro Não Traz Felicidade? Algumas Revelações Do Indicador De Felicidade Interna Bruta.” joshua schuster is associate professor of English at Western University. He has essays appearing recently in Photography & Culture, the minnesota review, Humanimalia, and Jacket2. His essay on Edward Burtynsky’s photography is the concluding statement in Edward Burtynsky: Essential Elements (Thames & Hudson, 2016). His first book is The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (University of Alabama Press, 2015). He is currently working on a new book project: What Is Extinction? A Cultural and Natural History of Last Animals.

Contributors

513

mark simpson is associate professor of English in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. His work takes up mobility’s modern regimes. He is the author of Trafficking Subjects: The Politics of Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (Minnesota, 2004) as well as essays appearing in such venues as English Studies in Canada, Essays on Canadian Writing, The Canadian Review of American Studies, and Cultural Critique. He has co-edited special journal issues on “Traffic” (English Studies in Canada, 2012) and “Resource Aesthetics” (Postmodern Culture, 2016). He is also a founding collaborator in the multi-disciplinary research partnership After Oil. imre szeman is Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and professor of English and film studies at the University of Alberta, and adjunct professor of research and graduate studies at ocad University. He conducts research on and teaches in the areas of energy and environmental studies, literary and cultural theory, and social and political philosophy. Recent works include Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (co-edited, Fordham University Press, 2017); Energy Humanities: An Anthology (co-edited, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017); Popular Culture: A User’s Guide (co-written, 4th edition, Nelson, 2017); and Globalization, Culture, Energy: Selected Essays, 2000–2013 (Henan University Press, 2017), a Chinese translation of his work. geo takach is associate professor and head of the ba in professional communication online program in the School of Communication and Culture at Royal Roads University. He is also a writer, filmmaker, speaker, and workshop leader, with adventures spanning hundreds of publications, speeches, theatre, print, film, radio, television, the corporate world, and online. Recent work includes a reading of his contribution to this collection at a free public event during the 2016 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Calgary, and his latest books, Tar Wars: Oil, Environment and Alberta’s Image (University of Alberta Press, 2017) and Scripting the Environment: Oil, Democracy and the Sands of Time and Space (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

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Contributors

michael truscello is associate professor of English and general education at Mount Royal University. He is the author of Infrastructural Brutalism (mit Press, forthcoming) and co-editor of Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up? Organizing 21st Century Resistance (ak Press, 2017). His publications have appeared in journals such as Postmodern Culture and Affinities, and in anthologies such as Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham University Press, 2017) and Hit the Road, Jack: Essays on the Culture of the American Road (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012). In 2011, he released the film Capitalism Is the Crisis: Radical Politics in the Age of Austerity. glenn willmott is professor of English at Queen’s University and author of several books on modernism, including most recently a study of imagined resource economies, Modern Animalism: Habitats of Scarcity and Wealth in Comics and Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2012). He has forthcoming publications in ecocriticism, animal studies, and formalist fundamentals in comics, and is writing a book on reading for wonder. sheena wilson is associate professor at Campus Saint-Jean, University of Alberta, where she is also co-founder and co-director of the Petrocultures Research Group; editor of Petrocultures: A Series in Energy Humanities, a new book series with the University of Alberta Press; and editor-in-chief of Imaginations: Journal for Cross-Cultural Image Studies. Her energy humanities research focuses on the culture and politics of oil, including intersectional feminist readings of energy transition and climate justice that allow for the inclusion of a plurality of worldviews, as we collectively imagine new ways of being in relationship to energy and the environment. Publication highlights include the edited collection Sighting Oil (2012), “Oil Ethics” (2012), “Gendering Oil: Tracing Western Petro-Sexual Relations” (2014), “PetroMama: Mothering in a Crude World” (2014), and “Energy Imaginaries at the Impasse” (2017). Her film PetroMama premiered in spring 2016.

Index

accidents, 324n2, 355–6, 357, 360–74, 420; and instrumental reason, 322; pipeline accidents, 62–4, 76nn45–6, 250, 320, 398; railway accidents, 319, 355; and uneven distribution of risk, 63–4, 319–20 Achilles, 211n14, 277 Acrilan, 246 Acura MDX campaign, 168–9 Adams, Henry, 201 Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer, 274, 277–8 Akinleye, Akintunde, 62, 65, 77n48 Alberta, 13–14, 21, 78, 80, 81, 83–5, 88, 89, 91, 93, 98, 112n68, 251, 254, 291, 292, 298, 300, 326, 329–30, 479–95, 498–505; Alberta Government, 30, 83–4, 87, 89, 92, 94, 96, 105n1, 332, 349n7, 351n21. See also oil sands Alberta Oil Sands #6 (Burtynsky), 468 alienation, 135–7, 188, 190–4, 208, 281, 304–5, 330, 391, 475n32 Allan, Robyn, 93, 109n38 Altschuler, Glenn C., 166

Alward, David, 104 anarchism, 122–4, 129n5, 355 Anderson, Benedict, 79 Annales School, 401–2 Anthropocene, 12, 42, 231, 333 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 439, 454n35 Antron, 247 apocalyptic environmentalism (Szeman), 356, 365 Aristotle, 229, 363, 367–71, 372, 373, 376n58, 386 art, 198, 215–16, 224, 226, 290, 302, 303, 307–8, 461, 463, 465, 466, 469, 471–2, 478n2, 498– 505; and commodities, 197–9, 207; contemporary art, 222, 227–8, 231, 233–4, 235–7, 238, 383–4, 400; and environmental crisis, 27–34; and visibility, 41, 43–5, 46, 48, 73n18, 74n22, 222–3, 225, 226, 240. See also photography; sublime arte povera, 228 Art Not Oil, 73n18, 290, 302, 307, 308 AstroTurf, 233 Atget, Eugène, 463, 473n11 Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, 329–30

516

Index

Athabasca oil sands. See oil sands automation, 342, 390, 392, 395 automobiles, 9, 10, 136, 140, 142, 143, 150, 163–4, 165, 167, 168, 172, 176, 202, 203, 207, 311n6, 377, 423 automobile advertising, 10, 168, 170, 202, 203 automobility, 5, 9, 136, 145, 165, 166, 167, 169, 180, 181, 188, 377 Auty, Richard, 403 Auyero, Javier, 427 Avatar, 422 “Baby Got Back” (Anthony Ray), 162–3 Badiou, Alain, 468, 472 Baird, John, 98 Bakelite, 269–70 Bakken Shale, 23, 84, 108n35 Bakunin, Mikhail, 129n5 Baku oilfield, 76n44, 199, Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (BTC), 46, 70, 74n22 Balibar, Étienne, 347 Ballard, Su, 360 Barbrook, Richard, 134, 141 Barlow, Maude, 276 Barry, Andrew, 74n22 Barthes, Roland, 171, 235, 460 Bataille, Georges, 154, 356, 357, 359, 366 Battersby, Christine, 452n1 Baudrillard, Jean, 162, 163, 164, 169 Beautiful! Beautiful life! (Choi), 232 Bel, Germà, 123, 124–5 Beller, Jonathan, 318n52 Benjamin, Walter, 228, 458, 459– 63, 465, 466, 468–70, 473n7

Bennett, Jane, 122, 128 Bennett, Tony, 123 benzene, 227, 278 Berry, Chuck, 166, 171 Beyoncé, 165, 181 Bhutan, 373 Biemann, Ursula, 46, 69, 225, 226 Big Sleep, The (Chandler), 190–1 Bingham Valley, Utah (Burtynsky), 467–8 bioaccumulation, 256, 264 Bitter, Sabine, 459, 471, 472 bitumen, 29, 41, 81–4, 85, 88, 89–92, 94, 95–8, 101–4, 110n45, 116n100, 279, 290, 291, 292–3, 295, 297, 298, 301–2, 325, 335–7, 350n15, 352n39, 355, 413, 417–18, 427, 441, 500, 501; diluted bitumen (dilbit), 82–3, 84, 110n45, 278, 355. See also oil sands Black Sea Files (Biemann), 46, 69, 225 Black Tide/Marea negra (Sekula), 225, 304 Boetzkes, Amanda, 243 Booker, M. Keith, 147–8 boreal forest, 52, 75n39, 327, 336, 500 Bou’Kongo settlement, 421–3 Bowers, Amanda, 360 Boyer, Dominic, 16n2 Bozak, Nadia, 446 bp, 31–2, 35n3, 41–2, 72n22, 73n16, 73n18, 76n46, 155, 247–8, 302, 307, 318n57, 324n2. See also Deepwater Horizon Bradbury, Ray, 193–4, 195n19 Braudel, Fernand, 392, 400–3 Brecht, Bertolt, 6, 199, 303 Bri-Nylon, 246

Index Buckley, William, 251 Buell, Frederick, 38 Bug’s Life, A, 151 Burch, Noël, 290, 302, 304–6, 308 Burke, Edmund, 50, 432–3, 459, 464, 465, 469–70 Burris, Jennifer, 303, 317n44 Burtynsky, Edward, 49–54, 52–8, 224–6, 408, 409–10, 432, 445–6, 448–50, 451, 455n43, 456n46, 458–9, 463–8, 470, 471, 472, 475n32 Cabri, Louis, 466 Cameron, Andy, 134, 141 Canada, 27, 30, 78–80, 86–8, 90–1, 92–105, 293–4, 301–2, 325, 326–7, 408, 431–2, 434–4, 450–2; government of Canada, 89, 94–5, 107n23, 109n36, 112n67, 327; Harper government, 95, 96, 102, 330–1; oil and gas in, 21, 22–3, 78–80, 83–4, 110n45, 251, 289, 291–300, 308, 325–33, 335–7, 349n7, 350n15, 355, 454n32, 456n46; and pipelines, 13–14, 19n24, 22, 41, 80–2, 84–6, 89–90, 93–7, 98–105, 110n45; as resource economy, 22, 88, 90–1, 97, 100, 102, 326–8, 329–32, 333–7; and settler colonialism, 11, 321, 328, 346–8; Trudeau government, 95, 327, 329; water in, 281–2, 286n58, 287–8. See also oil sands Canada Europe Energy Summit, 308 Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), 22, 72n13, 84, 88, 96, 98–9, 289–90, 296, 297, 298, 331–2

517

Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), 90, 92, 331 Canadian Chamber of Commerce, 98–9 Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, 96, 102 Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI), 88–9, 93, 111n60, 113n75 Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), 80, 101, 103 Canadian Security Intelligence Service, 100–1 Canol project, 21 Cantos, The (Pound), 188, 206 capitalism, 31, 39–40, 41, 79, 82, 86–7, 100–2, 121–2, 124, 125, 126, 127, 171, 203–5, 212n30, 244, 264, 292, 297, 300–2, 303, 304–6, 333–5, 336, 340, 343–5, 348, 356–7, 389–91, 415, 433, 463, 471; capitalist world-ecology, 39–40, 57–8, 65, 66–7; finance vs. commodity, 21–2, 198, 304, 319; fossil capital, 316n37; and petroculture, 10–11, 12, 15, 29, 38–42, 45, 46–7, 49, 54, 56–8, 62, 70, 75n34, 79, 82, 121, 139, 165, 167, 182n5, 188, 193–4, 215, 220n1, 236, 240, 266–7, 270–1, 281–2, 284n23, 289, 290–2, 319, 325–7, 332, 337, 367, 379, 384, 385–8; transnational capital, 21–2, 29, 31, 39, 46–7, 56–7, 60, 70, 87, 90–1, 100, 344–5 Cardin, Pierre, 246 Carhartt, 248 Carothers, Wallace Hume, 245 Carpe Diem (Longfellow), 27, 29 Carroll, Patrick, 123, 125, 126

518

Index

Cars, 139, 141, 142–3, 145–6, 150, 151, 152, 157 Cars 2, 141, 143–4, 145–6, 150, 151, 157, 160n18 Cassuto, Leonard, 183 castration, 170, 171, 172, 181, 183n29 Catmull, Ed, 140 Cedros Peninsula, 420, 421 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 7 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 427 Chandler, Raymond, 190–1, 192, 194 Chanel, 185n64 Chanel, Coco, 246 Changing the Earth: Aerial Photographs (Gowin), 447–9, 457n53 Charland, Maurice, 79–80, 82, 101 Chemical Valley. See Sarnia, Ontario Chemopetrol, 447, 457n49 Chesebrough, Robert, 173, 174, 184n41, 184n46 Chess, Leonard, 166 Chess Records, 166 Chevron, 153, 331 “Chicago” (Sandburg), 206 Children Play on Oil Pipelines, Okrika, Nigeria (Kashi), 66–9 Chiquita, 298, 300, 314n29, 314n30 Choi Jeong-Hwa, 228, 232, 238 Christian, Roger, 181n1 Christine (King), 162, 163–5, 169, 170–2, 180–1 Chukchi Sea development, 32 Clark, Karl, 442, 443 class, 11, 15, 87, 88, 91, 93, 123, 125, 143, 179, 187, 204, 208, 320, 327–8, 335, 337–9, 341–5, 348, 462 Clayoquot Protest (Wallace), 470

climate change, 4, 12, 27–31, 49, 58, 69, 71n3, 82, 85, 109n36, 109n40, 120–4, 127–8, 158, 220n1, 231, 238, 251, 258, 280–1, 325–6, 327–8, 331, 337, 351n21, 391, 400, 411, 419, 425–6 Coastal First Nations Declaration, 99 Cohen, Margaret, 463 Coll, Steve, 392, 397–400, 403 colonialism, 27, 335, 345, 346, 348, 423, 431; colonial dispossession, 11, 22, 286n58; decolonization, 346; and petroculture, 7, 46, 208, 220n1; postcolonial studies, 333, 338, 340; settler colonialism, 11, 22, 136, 157, 220n1, 328, 345, 346, 348 Commercial Mexicana Mixcoac (Smith), 236 commodities, 79, 87, 90, 101, 165, 182n5, 187–9, 197, 198, 199, 202, 211n14, 228–9, 233–7, 244, 271, 303, 389; commodity fetish, 38, 48, 52, 81, 137, 142, 144, 148, 150, 155, 170, 192, 271, 274, 332–4, 379; commodity form, 135–7, 150, 165, 171–2, 179, 181, 182n5, 200, 235, 244, 383, 386; commodity vs. finance capital, 21–2, 198, 304, 319; oil as commodity, 38, 40, 42, 45, 58, 69, 81–2, 85–6, 102, 149, 199, 390–1, 394–7, 399, 404, 433; commodity poetry, 204–10 commodification, 58, 164, 193, 276, 341, 403; and gender, 10–11, 163–5, 169–72, 179, 181 Conoco Oil (ConocoPhillips/Continental Oil), 244, 247, 302, 331

Index Coole, Diana, 122 Coolidge, Matt, 59–60 COOLMAX, 257 CORDURA, 263n59 Corson, Richard, 178 cosmetics, 10, 163–6, 172–81, 184n41, 184n50, 185n67, 298–9 Coverdale, David, 167 Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, 17n12 Crash (J.G. Ballard), 171 Crimplene, 246 crisis, 128, 129n5, 139, 199, 218–19, 224, 226, 237–9, 301, 305, 327–8, 334; ecological, 9, 16n2, 27–9, 30, 36, 38, 40, 66, 69, 128, 138, 231; economic, 28, 326, 334–5, 337; energy, 9, 121, 152–3, 341, 343, 357, 401, 439 Cuff, Dana, 360 Culligan International, 276 cultural studies, 122, 332, 338–40, 341 Czechowicz, Jan, 29 Dacron, 246 Dakota Access Pipeline, 73n15 Dansko, 257 Darwent, Walter, 413 Dault, Gary Michel, 464, 465 Dauthendey, Karl, 459 Davidson, George, 473n11 Davis, Mark, 34n3 Dead Ducks (Longfellow), 29–31 Death Proof (Tarantino), 166 Deep Climate, 313nn22–3, 315n32 Deepwater Horizon, 31–2, 42, 61, 64, 73n16, 139, 146, 153, 233, 242, 248, 249, 279, 307, 398 DeFeet, 257

519

Deleuze, Gilles, 311n6, 382 Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, 122, 356 Demachy, Robert, 473n11 democracy, 338, 347, 373, 426; and oil, 7, 46, 48, 61, 70–1, 95, 202, 204, 293, 296, 300–2, 316n37, 328 Densified Oil Filters #1 (Burtynsky), 467–8 Descartes, René, 9, 371, 383, 386 Dior, Christian, 246 Dirlik, Arif, 340 Dirty Oil (Nikiforuk), 441 disavowal, 138, 140–2, 146, 158, 218, 291, 302, 320, 459, 465, 470 Discrete Series (Oppen), 208–9 Disney, 140, 152, 157 Docter, Pete, 141, 160n23 documentary, 27–34, 41, 55, 65, 70, 222, 224–7, 303–4, 306, 408, 432, 440–2, 445–7, 455n43, 466, 473n11 Dome Fire (1928), 413 DOT-111 tank cars, 355 Douglas, Stan, 464 Douglas Channel, 287, 288, 290, 297 Doyle, Laura, 452n1 Dudley, Bob, 41–2, 73n16 DuPont, 245–7, 270 Earnscliffe Strategy Group, 331 ecoliteracy, 138 ecology: and aesthetics, 52–6, 58, 61, 64, 69, 194, 200, 201, 209–10, 304, 402, 407, 410; capitalist world-ecology, 39–40, 57–9, 64–5, 66–7, 70–1, 345; dark ecology, 50, 145–6; ecoglobalism, 42, 61; ecological

520

Index

crisis, 9, 16n2, 27–9, 30, 36, 38, 40, 66, 69, 128, 138, 231, 327–8; ecological critique, 141, 148, 158, 292, 346; ecological thought, 215–19, 219n1, 231; ecological violence/disaster, 46, 61, 65, 69, 124, 127, 238, 390–2, 398, 459; and economy, 104, 255, 281, 298, 316n37, 435–52, 453n5, 459, 464–5, 468; and risk, 99, 266, 395–6, 399; and textiles, 242, 257, 258, 266, 275 economists, 389 economy: and aesthetics, 237–40, 356; economic activity in Canada, 83–6, 87–104, 111n60; “the economy,” 87, 301; and energy, 5, 10, 11, 38, 39, 59, 138, 140, 149, 158, 187–8, 193, 199–200, 212n30, 226, 227, 229, 233, 236, 290, 300–4, 307, 331, 337, 390–1; and/ vs. environment, 15, 28, 71n3, 272, 355, 356, 357; and gender, 10, 164–6, 171–2, 179, 180–1; immaterial economy, 139–40, 158, 327, 343; and knowledge/ non-knowledge, 357–61; and nation states, 22, 40, 79, 80, 82, 87, 122, 203, 205, 333–5, 395–6; political economy, 37, 43, 48–9, 70–1, 80, 290, 300–4, 331, 403; staples economy, 22, 78–9, 329, 333–5, 343; and textiles, 244, 255 ecosystems, 85, 209, 215, 231, 233, 274, 280 Einstein, Albert, 362, 365 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 203 embalming, 265, 272–3, 276 embodiment, 34, 145, 216–18,

220n1, 277, 359, 409, 438, 442, 448–9, 498, 504 employment/jobs, 21, 22, 28, 29, 83–4, 86–9, 91–5, 100, 103, 113n75, 116n100, 225–6, 240, 247, 249, 287, 299, 300, 326, 330, 397, 417, 418, 422, 502 Enbridge, 41, 93, 96, 98, 99, 287–9, 290, 297, 308, 309n2, 310n3, 331 Energy East project, 89, 104 energy security, 22, 30, 40–1, 65, 356 energy transition, 3–6, 12, 15, 48, 133, 150, 155, 187, 193, 327–8, 336–7, 341, 345, 391 environment: and/vs. economy, 15, 28, 71n3, 272, 355, 356, 357. See also ecology: ecological crisis environmental activism, 28, 29, 30, 52, 73n18, 86, 95, 96, 104, 117n112, 215, 251, 258, 289–92, 294–5, 302, 306–9, 318n57, 328, 346, 357, 359, 413, 415–17, 420–2, 426–7, 478n2 environmentalism/environmentalist discourse, 15, 16n2, 32, 36, 37, 40–1, 43, 45, 46–8, 52–9, 61, 64, 71n3, 72n8, 74n22, 74n26, 85–6, 90, 96, 99–102, 138, 141, 147–8, 150, 161n42, 199, 202, 208, 212n30, 220n1, 225, 240, 246, 250, 254, 256, 257, 265, 272, 286n58, 292, 293–4, 328, 338, 344, 355, 356, 391, 412, 419, 422, 426, 428, 447, 464, 467–8, 470–2, 478 Erin Brockovich, 152 Ethical Oil, 70, 77n58, 97,

Index 289–90, 291–6, 298–300, 301–2, 306, 309, 311n6, 313n18, 313n20, 314nn29–30, 315nn32–3, 315n35. See also Levant, Ezra Events Are Always Original (Bitter and Weber), 459, 471, 472 Evidence (Mandel and Sultan), 459, 471–2 Exploding Plastic Inevitable (Warhol), 238 Exxon/ExxonMobil, 155, 320, 397–400 Exxon Valdez oil spill, 35n3, 244, 398 Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury), 193–4, 195n19 Federici, Silvia, 340 Finding Nemo, 151 First Nations: and Canadian government, 8, 19n24, 101, 104; and Canadian settler colonialism, 11, 22, 102, 220n1, 328, 348, 456n44; and environmental activism, 29–30, 73n18, 85–6, 99–100, 281–2, 286n58; First Nations Statistical Institute, 94–5; and gendered violence, 11, 220n1; and native rights–based strategic framework, 345–8; and proximity to extraction, 29–30, 329–30; and treaties, 346–8 Fish Story (Sekula), 304 Flaherty, Jim, 95–6 Flatley, Jonathan, 310n3 Fletcher, Brendan, 438 Florida, Richard, 386 Food and Drug Administration (US), 174, 179 Fordism, 208–9, 244, 343

521

Forgotten Space, The (Sekula), 304–6 formaldehyde, 272, 273 Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, 298, 329–30, 442 Fort McKay, Alberta, 14, 26 Fort McMurray, Alberta, 14, 27, 254, 291, 327, 330, 498–503, 505 Foucault, Michel, 131n40 frackwear, 247–50, 254, 259n22 Free Air (Lewis), 202 Freeman, Barbara Claire, 452n1 Friedman, Thomas L., 484, 486 From a Buick 8 (King), 183n29 Frye, Northrup, 432 Futurism, 50, 444 “Garden, A” (Reznikoff), 207–8 Gasché, Rodolphe, 459 Gates, Bill, 386 Gazprom, 398 gender: and petroculture, 10–11, 15, 18n12, 134–6, 139–40, 143, 162–81, 182n14, 182n17, 249, 220n1, 330; and plastic objects, 233; and the sublime, 452n1 General Motors, 140 George, Rick, 97–8 Georgia-Pacific Lumber, 250 Ghana, 32, 365 Ghosh, Amitav, 6, 37, 71n2, 200, 203, 211n11 Giant, 139, 152 Giblett, Rod, 453n5 Gibson, Diana, 91 Gilroy, Paul, 165, 182n5 Ginsberg, Allen, 209–10 Gittings, Christopher, 438 Glickman, Susan, 431 Global Public Affairs, 331 global warming. See climate change

522

Index

Good Dinosaur, The, 157 “Good Morning, America” (Sandburg), 206 Goodwill, 255 Google, 158, 161n42, 466 Gorer, Geoffrey, 273–4 Gore-Tex, 247, 253 Goretti, Maria, 210n3 Göring, Hermann, 457n49 Gowin, Emmet, 408–9, 446–50, 456n46, 457n49, 457n53 Grace, Sherrill, 435 Graham, Stephen, 122 Gramsci, Antonio, 327, 344 Great Canadian Oil Sands, 83 Great Depression, 208, 389 Green, John H., 188–90, 192, 194 Greenpeace, 74n18, 250, 292, 294, 419, Green Piece (Munson), 228, 229, 233 Greyson, John, 437–40, 451, 454n32 Gross, Andrew S., 10 Groys, Boris, 471 Grundrisse (Marx), 211n14 Guha, Ranajit, 340, 344, 345 Guldi, Jo, 123, 125 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. See Deepwater Horizon Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 88 Gursky, Andreas, 464 Haacke, Hans, 44 Habermas, Jürgen, 283n2 Hagin, Boaz, 155–6 Haley, Brendan, 335–7, 341 Halliburton, 31 Hall, Stuart, 327, 340 Hamilton, Ross, 369 Hansen, Miriam, 459, 462, 466 Happy Happy (Choi), 238

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri, 338–40, 343–4 Harman, Graham, 227 Harper, Stephen, 8, 11, 88, 95–7, 99, 104, 107n23, 326, 330–1 Harper government, 95, 96, 102, 330–1 Hart, Russell, 448, 457n53 Hatherley, Owen, 464, 466 Hazelwood, Joseph, 398 Hegel, G.W.F., 239, 378, 382, Heidegger, Martin, 105n4, 106n16, 145, 201–2, 224, 229–30, 231, 235, 322, 342, 379–82, 383, 387 Helios Design Labs, 32, 34 Heliport, Aberdeen Airport (Logar), 45 Heller, Steven, 360 Heumann, Joseph, 141, 148 Highway #3 (Burtynsky), 467 Hill, David Octavius, 461, 462 Hill and Knowlton Strategies, 331 Hitchcock, Peter, 138, 203–4, 211n12, 311n5 Hitt, Christopher, 453 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 224 Howey, Anne, 141, 148 Huber, Matthew T., 40, 244–5, 255, 310n5, 316n37 Hurley, Nat, 317n50 Hurricane Katrina, 28, 258, 468 Huson, Freda, 286n58 hyperobjects, 120–8, 129n4, 220n1, 230–1, 239–40, 409 Hypnose (Lancôme), 180–1 Idle No More, 73n18, 281, 328 “Image of the Engine” (Oppen), 209 Imagism, 136, 207–8 Imperial Oil, 80, 96, 302, 331

Index Inconvenient Truth, An (Gore), 28 Incredibles, The, 151 Indigenous peoples: in American literature, 136, 191; in Canada (see First Nations); Métis, 329; native rights–based strategic framework, 328, 345–8; in Trinidad and Tobago, 414–15, 421, 422 infrastructure, 3, 12, 21–5, 25n3, 36–71, 78–105, 106n14, 108n29, 110n45, 120–9, 129n5, 205, 209, 251, 278, 307, 319–20, 336, 390–2, 407–10, 440, 442, 500; and nations, 21–5, 78–105, 106n14, 108n29, 110n45, 120–9, 411–28 Injinji, 257 Innis, Harold, 22, 90, 205, 333–5, 336, 340, 342 Inside Out, 157 International Energy Agency (IEA), 84, 336–7, 352n39 Invista, 247, 250, 252, 256–7, 260n30 Irigaray, Luce, 171 Irwin, Ruth, 17n11 Jaffe, Aaron, 188 Jain, Sarah S., 165–6, 167, 172, 182n14 Jameson, Fredric, 193, 465 Jefferess, David, 69 Jobs, Steve, 140 Jones, Christopher, 48 Joyce, Patrick, 123, 125 Jubilee oilfield (Ghana), 32 Kandiyoti, Rafael, 47, 67 Kant, Immanuel, 50, 432–3, 459, 465–7, 468, 469–70 Karl, Terry Lynn, 403

523

Kashi, Ed, 66–9, 77n55 Kay, Gwen, 176 Keaton, Buster, 147 Keats, John, 267 Kennecott Copper Mine (Burtynsky), 467–8 Kevlar, 246, 258, 275 Keystone xl pipeline project, 13, 22, 41, 72n15, 89, 96, 100, 115n94, 116n100, 355 Khayyam, Omar, 189, 194 Kill Bill: Volume 1 (Tarantino), 165 Kincheloe, Joe L., 139 King, Stephen, 162, 163–5, 170–2, 180–1, 183n29 Kinkle, Jeff, 475n32 Kitaen, Tawny, 167–8 Klare, Michael, 32–3, 403 Klein, Naomi, 257 Koch, Charles and David, 250–1, 260n35, 400 Koch Exploration Canada, 251 Koch Industries, 247, 250–1, 252 Koch Oil Sands Operating ulc, 251 Koehn, Nancy, 176 KoSa, 247 Koudelka, Josef, 447 Krauss, Rosalind, 461, 463 Kroetsch, Robert, 432 Kublalsingh, Wayne, 421–6 La Brea, Trinidad, 413–20, 422, 424, 425, 426–7 Lacan, Jacques, 155–6, 342, 459, 466, 467, 468, 470 Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, 110n45, 319, 355, 372, 373 Ladd, Diane, 438 Lady Gaga, 165 Lakeview Gusher, 197

524

Index

Lancôme, 180–1 Lash-Brow-Ine, 173–4 Lasseter, John, 138, 139, 141, 142–3 Latour, Bruno, 327–8 Law of Enclosures, The (Grayson), 437–40, 454n32 Law of Enclosures, The (Peck), 437 Leap Manifesto, 322 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 206 Le Corbusier, 444 Leduc, Alberta, 21, 80 Lee, Dennis, 432 Lefebvre, Henri, 123, 127, 472 LeMenager, Stephanie, 28, 160n32, 199, 289, 303, 312n17 Leonard, Garry, 211n18 Lessons of Darkness (Herzog), 55 Levant, Ezra, 289, 291–6, 300, 301, 302, 312n17, 313n18. See also Ethical Oil Levi Strauss, 252 Lewis, Sinclair, 202 Lhamon, W.R., Jr, 183n13 Liberate Tate, 73n18, 215, 290, 307, 308, 318n56 Lindbergh, Charles, 444 Lin, Maya, 400 “Little Deuce Coupe” (Wilson and Christian), 162, 181n1 Logan, Joshua, 415 Logan, Owen, 59 Logar, Ernst, 44–5 London Free Press, 169, 183n25 L’Oréal, 174 Lorenz, Edward, 365 Lottery of the Sea, The (Sekula), 304 Louis XIV, 126 Loveless, Natalie, 490n2 lubricity (Simpson), 287–309 Lucretius, 200

Lukács, Georg, 386 Lush Cosmetics, 298, 299–300, 315n32 Lycra, 243, 247, 257 MacBride, Samantha, 243, 255 Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, 80 Macondo Well blowout. See Deepwater Horizon Madden, Edward, 163, 171, 172, 181n3 Mahayana Buddhism, 372–3 Mair, Rafe, 288 Makholm, Jeff D., 48–9 Malabou, Catherine, 239–40 Malm, Andreas, 316n37 Mandel, Mike, 459, 471–2 Mansley, Khyan, 169 Manufactured Landscapes (Baichwal), 445–6, 465 Marcellus Shale, 23 Margonelli, Lisa, 392, 393–7, 399, 403 Marinetti, F.T., 198, 444 Marriott, James, 46, 47, 221n2 Marshall, Alfred, 389 Marvin, Simon, 122 Marxism, 58, 105n2, 122–3, 124, 127, 129n5, 148, 193, 208, 340, 379, 386, 463, 468 Marxism-Leninism, 121, 123 Marx, Karl, 105n2, 211, 333–4, 340, 342, 343, 378 Marx, Leo, 412 Materials, The (Oppen), 209 Mathews, John Joseph, 188, 191 “Maybellene” (Barry), 166, 182n13 Maybelline, 174, 175, 177, 184n50 Mayer, Jane, 251, 260n35 Mayflower, Arkansas, oil spill, 320 McCann, Sean, 438 McDonough, Tom, 463, 466

Index McKenna, Frank, 103–4, 105 McKibben, Bill, 411 McLennan-Ross, 296, 313n23. See also Ross, Thomas McLuhan, Marshall, 205, 332, 346, 456n46 Meikle, Jeffrey, 270 meliorism, 361, 370–3 Melville, Herman, 192–3, 195n19 Métis: and proximity to extraction, 329 Mettler, Peter, 408, 441, 443, 446, 449, 450, 451, 455n39 Mikisew Cree, 329–30 Mines #22 (Burtynsky), 467–8 Minio-Paluello, Mika, 46, 47, 221n2 Mitchell, Timothy, 7, 57, 257, 290, 300–2, 306, 316n37, 391 Moby-Dick (Melville), 192–3 Monbiot, George, 58 modernism: and aesthetics, 444–5, 461, 472; “environmental modernism,” 272; and literature, 133–7, 187–94, 197–210, 210n3, 310n3; and petroculture, 133–7, 211n18 modernity: “green modernization,” 327, 345; and oil, 3–13, 22, 36–9, 40, 42, 43, 55, 58, 60–2, 64–6, 69–70, 80, 120–8, 133–7, 178, 300–1, 304, 305–6, 316n37, 322, 379, 385–6, 407, 433; and philosophy, 340, 366, 370, 378 Monsters, Inc., 141, 150, 151–5, 156, 157, 158, 160n23 Monsters University, 156–7 Montez, Lola, 174–5 Moore, Jason, 40, 57, 58–9 Morton, Timothy, 121, 122, 129n4, 145–6, 219n1, 230–1

525

Mountain Equipment Co-op, 254, 262n52 Mowat Centre, 94 Mukerji, Chandra, 123, 126 Mulroney, Brian, 104 Mumford, John, 269–70 Mumford, Lewis, 205, 212n30 Munson, Portia, 228, 229, 233–4 Muppets, The, 139 Muracciole, Marie, 304 Murray, Robin, 141 Mussolini, Benito, 444 “Mustang Sally” (Rice/Picket), 162, 181n1 Muybridge, Eadweard, 461 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 237 National Energy Board (NEB) (Canada), 86, 93, 94, 95, 98, 100–1, 286n58, 329, 352n39 National Energy Corporation (Trinidad and Tobago), 424–5 National Energy Program (Canada), 107n23, 331 National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, 94–5 nation-states: and fossil fuels, 22–3, 37, 40, 43, 46, 47, 54, 56, 62, 65, 78–82, 91, 94, 98, 200, 204, 286n58, 300–1, 319, 330–1, 395–403; and infrastructure, 21, 22–3, 46, 47, 54, 56, 60, 66, 79–82, 86–7, 88–90, 95, 98–9, 102–4, 105, 121–2, 124, 203, 320; nationalism, 8, 12, 21, 22, 25, 78–82, 88, 95, 97, 98, 100, 102, 105, 122, 203–4, 206, 295–9, 408, 414, 434–6; national unity, 22, 89, 95, 101; nation-building, 11, 22–3, 25, 86–7, 97, 102, 104,

526

Index

346; nation-state form, 7–8, 9, 25, 120–8, 237, 283n2, 347; nations in the world-system, 21, 22–3, 37, 48, 60, 61, 75n36, 78, 344; petro-states, 7, 8, 22, 62, 67, 71, 102, 316n37, 321, 326–8, 329–33, 335, 345–8, 392–7, 408; technological nationalism (Charland), 79–82, 86–7, 98, 100–2, 104, 105 native rights–based strategic framework, 328–9, 345, 348 Nature of Things, The, 27 Near Shell’s Utorogun Flow Station, Nigeria, January 15 2006 (Osodi), 62–3 Nestlé, 276 Newhaven Fishwife (Hill), 461 Niblett, Michael, 40, 69 Niger Delta, 33, 55, 60, 62, 244, 279–80 Nigeria, 33, 55, 60, 62–4, 66–8, 69, 77n54, 252, 331, 362 Nikiforuk, Andrew, 331, 441 Nixon, Rob, 315n35, 317n41 North, Douglass, 48 Northern Gateway Pipeline project, 19n24, 41, 89, 93, 98–101, 286n58, 287–9 North Face, 248 North/White (Schafer), 434, 435–6 Notley, Rachel, 92, 112n72 Nye, David, 14, 452n5 Obama, Barack, 22, 73n15, 115n94, 116n100, 251, 355 Obama administration, 31, 96, 251 Objectivism, 207 Occidental Petroleum Corporation, 418–19 O’Connor, John, 330 Odyssey (Homer), 277

Oedipal oil (Willmott), 134–7, 187–94 offshore (Longfellow), 31, 32, 33–4 oil: and democracy, 7, 46, 48, 61, 70–1, 95, 202, 204, 293, 296, 300–2, 316n37, 328; dirty oil, 13, 85, 203–4, 224–5, 236, 289–91, 441; and collective experience, 8, 39, 56–7, 87, 94, 100–1, 279–80, 336, 384, 503; Ethical Oil, 70, 77n58, 97, 289–90, 291–6, 298–300, 301–2, 306, 309, 311n6, 313n18, 313n20, 314n29, 314n30, 315n32, 315n33, 315n35 (see also Levant, Ezra); and modernity, 3–13, 22, 36–9, 40, 42, 43, 55, 58, 60–2, 64–6, 69–70, 80, 120–8, 133–7, 178, 300–1, 304, 305–6, 316n37, 322, 379, 385–6, 407, 433; offshore oil, 23, 28, 31–4, 38, 61, 64, 70, 146, 153, 216–17, 226, 244, 247–8, 250, 253, 394, 396, 398 (see also Deepwater Horizon); peak oil, 32, 54, 120, 139, 152–4, 156–7, 194, 209, 223, 227, 237, 255, 321, 326, 362; prices, 11, 22, 32, 43, 47, 56, 84, 89–90, 92, 103, 197, 212n21, 319, 326–7, 335–7, 352n39, 385, 394–7; and security, 21–2, 30, 40, 65, 100–1, 217, 258, 320, 356; and textiles, 242–58, 260n30. See also oil sands; pipelines Oil (Burtynsky series), 224–5 Oil! (Sinclair), 188, 197, 203–4 Oil Drum, The, 157, 161n39 Oil Fields #22 (Burtynsky), 52–8, 62

Index Oil Refineries #23, Oakville, Ontario, Canada, 1999 (Burtynsky), 50–1, 53 oil sands, 27, 29–30, 33, 41, 75n39, 78–119, 139, 225–6, 248, 251, 252, 254, 257, 279, 282, 289–99, 307–8, 313n20, 314n25, 325, 328–31, 336–7, 345, 349n7, 362, 412, 437, 440–4, 454n32, 456n44, 468, 469, 479–97, 498–505 Oil Sands Discovery Centre, 254 Oil Springs, Ontario, 454n32 Olds, Ransom E., 176 Oliver, Joe, 95, 97, 98, 99–100, 117n112 ontology: and accidents, 357, 361, 366–73; object-oriented ontology, 122, 219n1, 231; and oil, 40, 150, 320, 322, 377–88 OPEC, 212n21, 395, 397 Opel, Andy, 276 Oppen, George, 207, 208–10 Orage, A.R., 200 Orange Lush (Smith), 228, 230, 236–7 Orientalism (Said), 338–9 Orisha, 421 Orr, David, 138 Osodi, George, 62–3 Owen, Clive, 166 Pabst, Charles W., 178 Paik, Karen, 140, 159n10 Panagia, Davide, 432–3, 436, 450, 452 Pantin, Dennis, 422–3, 424 Paris, Jerome à, 75n34 Parkland Institute, 91 Patagonia, Inc., 254, 256, 261n45, 266n53 Patou, Jean, 246

527

Paz, Octavio, 273 peak oil, 32, 54, 120, 139, 152–4, 156–7, 194, 209, 223, 227, 237, 255, 321, 326, 362 Pease, Donald E., 452n1 Peck, Dale, 437 Peeples, Jennifer, 452n5 Peiss, Kathy, 175–6 Pembina Institute, 85 Pendakis, Andrew, 36, 37 Perelman, Michael, 340 Perkins, William, 269, 270 Perrow, Charles, 419–20 petro-apocalypse, 54–5, 146–50, 356 Petrocultures research group, 13–15, 253–4 Petrolia, Ontario, 80, 454n32 petro-literacy (Malouf), 138–58 petro-pastoralism (Hughes), 411–28 Petrol Storage, Aberdeen Harbour (Logar), 44 Petropolis (Mettler), 441–3 petrotextiles, 242–58, 259n22, 260n30, 261n45, 262nn52–3, 262n56 photography, 41, 44–5, 49–54, 55–8, 59–61, 62–3, 65, 66–9, 70, 224–6, 286n58, 289–90, 297, 302–4, 408–10, 443, 444– 51, 453n5, 455n43, 456n44, 458–72, 473n11, 475n32, 475n36, 498–505 Pickett, Wilson, 162, 181n1 Pictorialism, 462–3, 473n11 Pink Project (Munson), 228, 233 pipelines, 7–8, 13–14, 19n24, 21–5, 36–71, 73n15, 73n18, 74n22, 74n26, 75n34, 76nn44– 6, 78–105, 106n13, 110n45, 115n94, 116n100, 121, 123,

528

Index

224–5, 238, 250, 260n30, 278, 279–80, 286n58, 287–9, 319–20, 329, 332, 336, 355, 362, 369, 378–82, 390–1, 393, 412, 435–6, 441, 444, 454n32, 455n43; Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (BTC), 46, 70, 74n22; Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, 96, 102; Dakota Access Pipeline, 73n15; Keystone XL pipeline project, 13, 22, 41, 72n15, 89, 96, 100, 115n94, 116n100, 355; Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, 80; Mayflower, Arkansas, oil spill, 320; Northern Gateway Pipeline project, 19n24, 41, 89, 93, 98–101, 286n58, 287–9; Rainbow Pipeline, 81; Trans-Alaska Pipeline, 59–60, 66, 68, 76n46; TransCanada Pipeline, 80; Trans Mountain Pipeline, 41, 98, 99 Pixar, 139, 140–1, 147, 148, 150, 151, 154, 157–8, 159n10, 160n18, 161n42 plastic: in art, 62–3, 222–40, 243, 451; and persistence, 267–9, 272–5, 276–7, 282, 284n23; and petroculture, 5, 15, 158, 188, 197, 215–19, 222–40, 242–58, 284n23, 332, 451; as petro-textiles, 242–58; objects, 227–34, 235–7, 238, 240, 265, 267–71, 275–6, 278, 280, 282, 451 plasticity, 193, 222–3, 238–40, 319, 382–4, 387 Platform London, 29, 73n18, 215, 290, 302, 306–8 Plato, 378, 379, 383 Polaris Institute, 90, 331–2 Policy Horizons Canada, 109n36

Polley, Sarah, 438 polyethylene terephthalate (PET), 254, 255, 256–7, 268, 276, 278 Postman, Neil, 194 Potter, Andrew, 84 Pound, Ezra, 188, 193, 201, 206 Powell, Todd, 30 Prentice, Jim, 24, 78–9, 86–7, 97, 105nn1–2 Prestige oil spill, 225, 304 Priest, Graham, 359, 367 Prigogine, Ilya, 362, 365, 366 Quijano, Anibal, 340 Rainbow Pipeline, 81 Rancière, Jacques, 224, 226, 450, 452, 461, 463 Ranft, Joe, 142–3 Rashid, Ahmed, 393, 397 Rawls, John, 17n10 Ray, Anthony (Sir Mix-a-Lot), 162–3 Raymond, Lee, 398–9 Readings, Bill, 433–4 Red Desert, 439, 454n35 “Red Wheelbarrow, The” (Williams), 207 Red Wing Shoe Company, 248 Reemay, 246 ReFleece, 262n53 reification, 136, 152, 192, 240, 357, 409–10, 459, 469 research creation, 23, 477–8, 478n2 Reznikoff, Charles, 207–8 Rice, Mack, 162, 181n1 Richards, Glen, 32, 34 Rimmel, Eugène, 175, 184n50 Ritchie, Guy, 165–6, 172 Roberts, Julia, 28 Robertson, Sean, 131n40

Index Robinson, Henry Peach, 473n11 Rodríguez-Remedi, Alejandra, 44–5 Rossellini, Isabella, 180 Ross, Thomas, 293, 296, 313n23 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 283n2, 378 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), 100–1 Rubin, Jeff, 385 Ruchel-Stockmans, Katarzyna, 317n48 Said, Edward, 338–9 Sandburg, Carl, 206 Sanger, Carol, 165, 166, 167 Sankeralli, Burton, 421, 425–6 Sanyal, Kalyan, 340 Sarnia, Ontario, 437–9, 440, 454n32 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 257, 278 Sassoon, David, 252 Satz, Debra, 361 Save the Fraser Declaration, 99 Schafer, R. Murray, 434–6, 451 Scharff, Virginia, 167, 168, 176, 182n17 Schopp, Andrew, 170, 171 Schuster, Joshua, 187 Scranton, Roy, 391 Sekula, Allan, 225, 226, 290, 302–6, 308, 317n48 “Seven Men in a Tank” (Green), 188–90, 192, 194 settler colonialism, 11, 22, 136, 157, 220n1, 328, 345, 346, 348 Shell/Royal Dutch Shell, 302, 331, 413, 427 Sheller, Mimi, 38 Siegfried, 277 Simpson, Audra, 11, 220n1 Simpson, Jeffrey, 330

529

Sinclair, Upton, 188, 197, 203–4 Sir Mix-a-Lot (Anthony Ray), 162–3 Sklair, Leslie, 344 Smil, Vaclav, 4 Smith, Melanie, 228, 230, 236–7 Smith, Neil, 58 smog, 384, 388n1 Solnit, Rebecca, 455n43 Song Dong, 228, 233–4, 235 “Song of Petroleum” (Goretti), 210n3 “Sort of a Song, A” (Williams), 136 Sosa, Arlenis, 180 Sparrow, Lucy, 302, 308 Stainguard, 253 Stainmaster, 247 Standard Oil, 245, 395 Stanton, Andrew, 141, 149, 150 states. See nation-states Steichen, Edward, 473n11 Steinberg, Shirley R., 139 Steiner, Shepherd, 459, 462 Steingraber, Sandra, 279 Stengers, Isabelle, 365 Stieglitz, Alfred, 473n11 Stoekl, Allan, 120, 142, 145, 154, 237, 356, 357, 358–9, 361–2, 363–4, 367, 371, 372, 374, 374n11 Strang, Veronica, 265, 276 strategic realism (Szeman), 40, 356 Struth, Thomas, 464 sublime: aerial sublime, 440–3; aesthetics of, 49–52, 198, 202, 224–5, 227, 326, 408–10, 431–5, 437, 452n1, 455n43, 458–9, 463–4, 465–72, 474n16; dialectical sublime, 459; gentrified sublime, 410, 459, 465–8, 470; negative sublime, 464; petrochemical sublime, 437–40;

530

Index

politics of, 408–10, 431–4, 435–6, 452n1; subatomic sublime, 444–52; technological sublime, 435–7, 452n5, 464; toxic sublime, 452n5, 464 Sultan, Larry, 459, 471–2 Suncor Energy, 96, 97, 222–3, 242, 254, 331 Sundown (Mathews), 188, 191 “Sunflower Sutra” (Ginsberg), 209–10 Super Soya (Smith), 236 Swistun, Débora, 427 Syncrude, 29–31, 297, 331, 336, 502 Synenco, 331 Syriana, 152 Szeman, Imre, 16n2, 39–40, 42, 43–4, 58, 149, 287, 303, 322, 326, 337, 356–7, 365, 388n1, 440–1, 442, 456n44 Tactix Government Relations and Public Affairs, 331 Tadros, Wendy, 355, 373 Takach, Geo, 478 Taliban, 392–3 Tarantino, Quentin, 165, 166 Tarbell, Ida, 203 tar sands. See oil sands Tar Sands Exploration Station (Rowe), 498, 503–5 Tecgen Select, 250 technological nationalism (Charland), 79–82, 86–7, 98, 100–2, 104, 105 techno-utopianism (Szeman), 54, 356–7 Teck Resources, 331 Tedone, Gaia, 304 Teflon, 267 Tencel, 257

Terylene, 246 Testino, Mario, 180 Texaco (Chamoiseau), 427 There Will Be Blood, 139, 152 Thermolite, 247 Thomas-Muller, Clayton, 328, 346. See also native rights–based strategic framework Three Forks Shale, 108n35 Thrift, Nigel, 359, 374n11 Tides Canada, 292 Tiffany, Daniel, 198, 210n2 Timberland, 248, 252, 257 Titusville, Pennsylvania, 5, 173, 175 Todd, Zoe, 220n1 “To Elsie” (Williams), 136 Toscano, Alberto, 303, 475n32 totality, 357, 368, 379, 384, 410 Toy Story, 140, 151, 158 Trans-Alaska Pipeline, 59–60, 66, 68, 76n46 Trans-Alaska Pipeline, The (Coolidge), 59, 60 TransCanada Corporation, 22, 96, 102–3, 115n94, 116n98, 331, 355 Trans-Canada Highway, 79, 80 TransCanada Pipeline, 80 Trans Mountain Pipeline, 41, 98, 99 treaties, 346–8 Tricel, 246 Trinidad and Tobago: Indigenous peoples, 414–15, 421, 422; La Brea, 413–20, 422, 424, 425, 426–7; National Energy Corporation, 424–5; Trinidad Lake Asphalt, 414, 417–18, 420 Trudeau, Justin, 95, 104 Trudeau government, 95, 327, 329 Truscello, Michael, 456n44

Index Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 311n8 Turbo, 139 Typar, 246 Tyvek, 246, 249 UK Tar Sands Network, 290, 302, 307, 308 Unist’ot’en Clan, 73n18, 286n58 United Fruit, 315n31 University of the West Indies, 420, 421, 425 Urry, John, 39, 72n8 utopianism, 161n42, 271, 282, 338–9, 344, 347; and petroliteracy, 141, 154–5; and pipeline aesthetics, 49–50; and plastics, 229, 270–1; technoutopianism (Szeman), 54, 356–7 Vance, Jonathan, 79, 80 Vaseline, 173, 184n41, 184n43 Vasey, Dave, 286n58 Velshi, Alykhan, 293, 294, 295. See also Ethical Oil Virilio, Paul, 356, 357, 360–1, 362, 363–71, 372, 373, 375n42, 376n58 VF Corporation, 248 Wall, Brad, 104 Wallace, Ian, 470 wall-e, 141, 146–50, 151–2, 154, 156, 157–8 Walgreens, 252 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 401 Walmart, 149 Waste Not (Song), 228, 234 water: hydrophobia (MacLeod), 265–70, 279–82; as medium of erasure, 265, 267, 269–70, 271, 274; and petrochemicals, 264–82, 447; and pollution,

531

242, 244, 256, 265–8, 276–9, 280–2, 390, 415, 442; protection and access, 11, 61, 85–6, 99, 126, 216–19, 224, 255, 280, 286n58, 329–30, 362, 403, 415–16, 422, 429n9; and shared worlds, 265, 271–8, 280, 281–2, 283n2, 286n58; use in extraction, 5, 82–5, 279–80, 290, 325, 413, 418–19, 442, 450, 500 Waters, Lori, 288 Watkins, Mel, 333 Watts, Michael, 64–5, 66, 67, 69 Weather Report (Longfellow), 27, 28 Weber, Helmut, 459, 471, 472 Weeks, Maya, 220n1 Weird Tales, 188–9, 191 Wellman, Inc., 256 Wells, H.G., 201 Wenzel, Jennifer, 312n9 Werbowy, Daria, 180 Wet’suwet’en First Nation, 286n58 What Is Missing? (Lin), 400 Whiteman, Maria, 303, 456n44 white supremacy, 11, 117n112, 192, 220, 299, 348, 434–6 Whitman, Walt, 206 Wiedemann, Elettra, 180 Williams, Eric, 423 Williams, James, 454n32 Williams, Mabel, 172–3, 174 Williams, Raymond, 310n5 Williams, Sharrie, 172–3, 175, 177 Williams, Thomas Lyle, 172–3, 174, 175, 177 Williams, William Carlos, 136–7, 195n2, 201, 207, 213n35 Wilson, Brian, 162, 181n1 Wilson, Sheena, 18n16, 77n58, 291, 311n6 Winnicott, D.W., 144, 145

532 Wong, Rita, 271 Wood Buffalo (Regional Municipality), Alberta, 14, 325–7, 329–30, 336, 498–505 Wrangler Jeans, 248 Wright, Gavin, 205 Wurfel, Dale, 169, 183n20 Yaeger, Patricia, 198–9 Yergin, Daniel, 390, 391, 397 Yinka Dene Alliance, 286n58 Young, Benjamin, 303, 304 Youngs, Bettie. See Williams, Sharrie

Index Zalik, Anna, 291 Zehle, Soenke, 455n43 Žižek, Slavoj, 156, 459, 466, 467, 468, 469, 470, 471 Zorah Cosmetics, 178–9 Zupančič, Alenka, 468