Category: conference papers (page 1 of 3)

January 12, 2016 / 0 Comments

World Building, World Reduction: Science Fiction, White America, and Totality

Today I want to offer some remarks on the sub-genre of science fiction commonly known as the post-apocalyptic in order to address the topic at hand, thinking totality as remedy to the trouble with the trouble with diversity. This variety of science fiction story imagines a near-future scenario set just after a major destructive event. The plague has already run rampant. The flood has ended. The bombs have long gone off. The fashioning of such a story set after rather than before revises the older apocalyptic plot. The post-apocalyptic mode is not typically concerned with the thrilling how of survival. Instead, it focuses on what new world may be built in the ashes of the old. In this way, post-apocalyptic novels offer a slightly less subtle estrangement effect than many science fiction novels do. These are not alien worlds; they are cognitively reduced versions of our own. The thinning out of the world that appears in post-apocalyptic texts offers a chilling lesson for thinking totality without something like diversity, for thinking totality without imagining what does not appear, for thinking totality without considering the overdeterminations of class. It is this connection between the real world we know and the fictional version of it that gets destroyed in these novels about which I would like to make a few brief remarks today.

The image to the left is of Lincoln Kilpatrick in whiteface as Zachary from Boris Sagal’s film The Omega Man (1971). The film was based on Richard Matheson’s I am Legend and featured Charlton Heston as its leading man.

World building is a key term for speculative fiction of all kinds. Here is an example of world building from a 1950s post-apocalyptic novel:

On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back. If he had been more analytical, he might have calculated the approximate time of their arrival; but he still used the lifetime habit of judging nightfall from the sky, and on cloudy days that method didn’t work. That was why he chose to stay near the house on those days. (Matheson 13)

The novel is Richard Matheson’s I am Legend (1954). The passage reveals the central conflict of the novel with an air of mystery. Besides establishing the opposition of Neville and an unknown “they,” this passage reveals little about the world or its characters. We do learn that Neville does not easily change his habits, something that the novel will continue to include as a kind of refrain. Matheson’s book features a common trope of post-apocalyptic novels, in which the last human stands out against a number of dead or very alive, very threatening others.

In I am Legend, Neville, a single, white male holed up in his house with whiskey, Schönberg, and rage, signifies as completely incidental to history, manifesting the melodramatic alienation of his particular standpoint. The contrast the novel reveals, however, is located in its critical, didactic lesson about the relation of the dominant (here the white male) to historical change. While Matheson’s novel smartly engages with a changing American racial and cultural milieu, it does so by introducing an ideologically volatile narrative solution: by revealing its last man protagonist as the (unwitting) champion of conservative white male values, I am Legend (just as unwittingly) establishes a trope that has since been consistently remobilized in order to affirm the same reactionary fears it originally sought to undermine. Thus, the clever reversal of political polarity in I am Legend reappears in contemporary post-apocalyptic novels only in failed form, unable to affect a similarly meaningful deconstruction of inequality; here, the clever plot twist becomes symptomatic of nothing so much as the history of a genre too long accustomed to a reactionary conservatism.

The dominance of post-nuclear apocalyptic survival stories emerges for suburban white Americans in the 1950s—just after the Bomb—but has a possible different resonance for black Americans left behind in the inner cities after white flight. In their co-curated exhibit, From the Bomb to the Crash: Geographies of Disaster in the American Century, Laura Finch and Jessica Hurley explain, “White flight, aided by federal and municipal investments in highway construction, suburban housing stock, and mortgage guarantees, recreated the inner city as predominantly African American at the same time that the inner city was being written off as the inevitable ground zero of a future nuclear war.” They also cite a Civil Defense Administrator in Phillip Wylie’s post-apocalyptic novel Tomorrow! (a novel ahead of its time ecologically and disturbingly of its time racially), who makes the connection shockingly clear when he says, “Niggertown was right at ground zero” (Qtd. in Finch and Hurley 2014). The overlap of ghettoized city cores and the imagined space of nuclear destruction illuminates the white supremacist fantasies that vie for dominance in the post-apocalyptic imaginary.

It will come as no surprise that in The Apocalypse in the African American Tradition (1996), Maxine Lavon Montgomery describes two U.S. political agendas “one predominantly white, the other primarily black,” as having “conflicting notions of what constitutes an apocalypse” (Montgomery 1996, 1). Thus, explicitly or not, race becomes a locus of contest for the post-apocalyptic novel—these novels are predominantly written by white people about white people and they make claims about the future with racial implications. One need not look far to find other texts like Wylie’s, Robert Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold (1964) imagines a post-nuclear future where the family emerges from the bomb shelter into white slavery. Revisionary texts such as Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirship Chronicles (1978) and Octavia Butler’s Xenogensis Trilogy—Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989)—break Wylie’s mold as they refuse to disavow Indigeneity or race, in exception to the general history of the genre; they make strange the white future that is typically imagined to survive unchanged even through apocalyptic destruction.

For the post-apocalyptic mode, I would compare world building to what Fredric Jameson calls world reduction: a particular attempt to imagine “an experimental landscape in which our being-in-the-world is simplified to the extreme,” which is based on “a principle of systematic exclusion, a kind of surgical excision of empirical reality, something like a process of ontological attenuation in which the sheer teeming multiplicity of what exists, of what we call reality, is deliberately thinned and weeded out through an operation of radical abstraction and simplification” (Jameson 269, 271). I am Legend can imagine a world without class only as a consequence of the universalization of a specifically white version of race; thus, the trick for me is not to diversify the literary field as a corrective to the genre’s racism, but rather to read the genre’s racism as an account of how to grasp class, its social modulation, and its invisibilities.

The above text was taken from my talk at the MLA for 2016. My thanks go to the organizers of the roundtable “Who’s Afraid of Totality? The Trouble with the Trouble with Diversity” Jen Phillis and Kevin Floyd.

Works Cited

Finch, Laura and Jessica Hurley. From the Bomb to the Crash: Geographies of Disaster in the American Century. Web. 2014.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. Print.
Matheson, Richard. I am Legend. Garden City: Nelson Doubleday, 1954. Print.
Montgomery, Maxine Lavon. The Apocalypse in African-American Fiction. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1996. Print.

April 2, 2015 / 0 Comments

Oil Infrastructure as Literary Form

The problem I am interested in elaborating here today has to do with the difficulty of getting a grasp on oil. From the now famous claim of Amitav Ghosh—that the oil encounter lacks the same literary production and imaginary that bore witness to the spice encounter—to more recent attempts to know oil or to come to terms with living it, oil presents issues for both infrastructural and theoretical mapping. It is a moving target.

As Timothy Mitchell points out in Carbon Democracy, oil tankers can be redirected to new ports either to avoid conflict or to seek the highest prices (and preferably avoiding strife also means reaping higher profits). Oil’s liquid mobility is part of what makes it a difficult target for academic study and political action. In the face of such difficulties, the work of James Marriot and Mika Minio-Paluello devises a compellingly elegant formal solution to petroleum’s historical “slipperiness” (Ghosh 141): The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London(2012) takes up the Baku-Tbilisi-Cehyan pipeline as the backbone of its plot, which, at the same time, spatially delimits the terrain of its story. This focus has the formal effect of creating a travelogue that is at once historically deep and politically focused. Indeed, its targeting apparatus is primarily focused on the company now known as BP. As Marriot and Minio-Paluello move along the same route as the crude pumped from the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oilfield they also recount major shifts in regional power, from Soviet dominance to the present multinational control. The lesson seems to be that the way to grasp oil, in both a cognitive and physical sense, is through its infrastructures just as the way to stop its crude dominance is by ceasing to engineer, build, and expand its platforms, pump jacks, pipelines, tanker routes, refineries, and pumping stations.

This paper falls under the guise of what Sheena Wilson and Imre Szeman have called Petrocultures. Though you may already be familiar with the study of energy in the humanities, I will offer a brief overview of this emerging critical approach. Thinking about petroculture, simply put, involves giving energy, specifically petrol, a central role within humanities and social science frameworks. An initial task for petrocultures is to elaborate the impasse that our petro-reliance puts us in either along the lines of Imre Szeman’s provocative query “How to Know about Oil?” or through our experiences of oil life as Stephanie LeMenager proposes in Living Oil(2014). Focusing on oil means taking risks—especially that one might begin to see petrol as the source of all conflict, the substance behind all commodities, and the reason under all global political decision making. While cautioning against reading energy as the prime-mover of history, Allan Stoekl writes, “the most effective way of refusing such a reification of oil, all the while granting it the visibility it deserves, is to write its history…It’s when we think about what “oil history” could mean that we take a natural entity and recognize its cultural centrality” (Stoekl 2014, xii). Though oil presents itself as critically overwhelming, responses to it should find ways to mediate the particulars of oil and the general situation of our energy system. My aim in what follows is to take the pipeline as an infrastructural innovation of petroculture and examine the effects it produces as a narrative tool in The Oil Road. I turn to the formal innovations of writing about oil to better understand the possibilities of oil and its limits.

Snaking across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America, miles of pipe have been laid in order to convey fossil fuels from the source of extraction to refineries and distribution centres. So long as oil keeps flowing, the length and duration of the journey does not seem to matter—each instant when oil is fed into the mouth of the pipeline is buoyed up by the tanker and then completed in the barrel on the other end. In The Oil Road, the authors describe those silent seafaring tankers as “the emissaries of Azeri geology, camel trains of the industrial age. Picking up where the pipeline leaves off, they distribute the dark matter across the surface of the earth” (250). Whether by rail, ocean tanker, or pipeline, the energy costs of transporting oil are great. As Marriot and Minio-Paluello suggest,

This global oil trade does not just flow by itself. Every day, close to 100 million barrels of crude are collected from zones of extraction and delivered to points of consumption….The mass relocation of great volumes of fossil fuels requires constant coordination of logistical and financial resources. (250)

Pipelines came into being as part of what Fredrick Buell calls the “bootstrapped system” (Buell 2012, p. 280) of oil-capital transport: first carts and barrels, then rail, and then pipelines. Unlike those earlier modes of conveyance, the pipeline appears shaped by the logic of oil capital. That is, the pipeline is shaped in the interest of a smoothness that does not require workers and can flow evenly throughout the entire day. The authors of The Oil Road work very carefully to undo the assumed “smoothness” of oil transport, by calling attention to its bumps, snags, corrosions and ruptures along the way. In a review of the book, Doreen Massey incisively claims that it depicts a “space full of obstacles”:

The Caucasus, the sea, the Alps… all have to be overcome. Every kilometre along the pipeline route there is a metal stake, with a yellow hat and numbers on, to mark where it is buried, itself a vast earthmoving exercise. Every few kilometres there is a block valve, where the oil can be shut off in an emergency, surrounded by steel and concrete. There are pumping stations, to force the oil on and on up gradients and through mountain ranges. The oil only flows because of all this material effort – grinding, tough, often slow, often bitterly contested, heavy. (130)

Rather than say this outright, the authors show the reader each painstaking step in the construction and maintenance of the Oil Road, creating an itinerary of their journey and the petrol’s journey as well as a conceptual map of BPs legal, economic, and cultural dealings.

The book illustrates the struggle over the way oil moves, both as substance and as fuel. The authors enumerate the juridical battles fought over the development and construction of the pipeline. In “Without Having to Amend Local Laws, We Went Above or Around Them by Using a Treaty,” they outline the legal massaging that British Petroleum had to carry out across three countries—Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey—from two other legal contexts—the UK and the USA. These “Agreements” circumvent local laws by “overriding all existing and future domestic law apart from the constitutions of the states in question” (144). Furthermore, a new tax structure was put in place to exempt the energy companies and construction companies that worked on the pipeline. Any disputes arising would be settled by international tribunals in Stockholm, Geneva, or London. The legal adjustments made on behalf of energy transport define the legal maneuvering in the struggle over the energy future. In a passage headed with the title “Burnaz, Turkey,” Marriot and Minio-Paluello write that “People have learned from the nearby experience of BTC and the Isken coal plant that battles must be fought early on. New projects need to be challenged before they are approved, financed, and planned on hard drives and flipcharts in far-off capitals” (239). The importance of these insights into the infrastructure of post-industrial energy systems seem worth emphasizing here: the development of energy infrastructure displays economic, engineering, industrial, and political effort on a massive scale. The only way to get ahead of it is to do so literally: to be ready before hand and to map before the mappers.

The text also operates on a speculative register. At several points along their journey the authors encounter barriers, like fences or seas. They write, “The wells lie in a forbidden zone to which only our imaginations can travel… the route we are following is obscure. It is described only in technical manuals and industry journals, data logs and government memos” (16). And so, Marriot and Minio-Paluello attend to the mediated nature of every moment of their journey. Imagined moments, like when they describe the oil tanker, the Dugi Otok, silently gliding over the waters of the Adriatic, are no less real than when they are able to reach out and touch the pipeline itself, and moments that seem all too real are no less mediated!

The form of the travelogue, in the hands of Marriot and Minio-Paluello, carefully tells multiple stories at once. The unfolding of the plot happens along the BTC pipeline, which takes the authors through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey as they follow the pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean. Succinctly “plot”-able on the map, the itinerary of the trip remains linear even while the authors delve into the history of region. Indeed, some of the drama of the text arrives from it fulfilling a promise it makes early: that the journey along the Oil Road will pass “through the crucibles of Bolshevism and fascism, Futurism and social democracy, through the furnaces of an industrial continent” (9). In this manner, the descriptions of the pipe’s visibility—sometimes it is buried, sometimes it runs through private property, sometimes it is under heavy guard—are supplemented by other layers of the text. As Marriot and Minio-Paluello recount stories of their previous visits to the region, they describe the development of the pipeline as technology, and offer a political history of the area from its soviet days through to its corporate present. In one particular instance they describe the seizure of Rijeka, a port city with a large refinery, in 1919 by the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio who arrived “triumphantly in a red sports car at the head of a column of 297 black-shirted Arditi followers” (265); while, in another, they turn to the “outbreak of World War II,” when Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil, and BP, then Anglo-Persian, “shared 57.8 of the German market,” and “all three companies provided fuel to the Nazi state as it rearmed, re-industrialized, and established its structure of terror” (301). BP’s web published history passes over the years spanning 1932 and 1948 in silence. These strata of thick description in The Oil Road tellingly reveal the difficulty of knowing about energy infrastructure. Travelling the route of oil surely offers a place to start, but the book also suggests that more time is needed to grasp the magnitude of energy extraction and transport. The missing years and the strata of thick history The Oil Road make available arrive through its own familiarity with the oil archive–they are reading industry journals, promo materials, investor updates, and so on. This effort tells us about the genres of writing that oil both traffics in—engineering tracts, investor opinion, public promotion, CEO biographies—and the types of approach that a materialist critique of energy must navigate in order to register as mapping at all. In a sense, it’s a kind of political realism.

As members of Platform London—a collective that combines research, artistic practice, and activism—Marriot and Minio-Paluello have the experience, contacts, and resources to undertake the more than five thousand kilometer long journey along the path of oil. As reviewer Terry Macalister points out, they “know the industry from a decade of campaigning against it.” A part of these resources means that they have been able to work to devise a theoretical map to match the infrastructural one traced in the book. In the prologue, they write:

Our experience, gained over years of researching BTC, has taught us that such a massive project is not carried out by one company, BP, but rather by a network of bodies, which we have come to call the Carbon Web. Around the oil corporation are gathered institutions that enable it to conduct its business. These include public and private banks, government ministries and military bodies, engineering companies and legal firms, universities and environmental consultants, non-governmental organizations, and cultural institutions. All of these make up the Carbon Web that drives forward the extraction, transportation, and consumption of fossil fuels. In our attempt to explore and unravel this network, we will not only travel through the landscape of the pipelines, but also investigate the topography of bodies most responsible for this contemporary Oil Road. (6)

Here is The Carbon Web designed by Platform London and charted in The Oil Road. The Oil Road seems to move a step beyond the assumed limits to representing oil. This is a difficult feat and great accomplishment, but I would like to suggest that the book does not stop there. As slippery as oil is or can be, by taking it as the structuring force of its plot and the ground of its story The Oil Road effectively begins to figure the larger structure lurking in the background—that other, much more difficult to grasp totality: the mode of production itself. The Carbon Web bears a striking resemblance to Fredric Jameson’s revision of the Marxist schema of base and superstructure. Where,

the more narrowly economic—the forces of production, the labor process, technical development, or relations of production, such as the functional interrelation of social classes—is, however privileged, not identical with the mode of production as a whole, which assigns this narrowly “economic” level its particular function and efficiency as it does all the others. (36)

Jameson goes on to say that, if one were to consider this a structuralism it is a structuralism where there is only one structure “namely the mode of production itself…, it is not a part of the whole or one of the levels, but rather the entire system of relationships among those levels” (36). What we get then, in The Oil Road, is the start of a mapping of the mode of production from the standpoint of energy.

In closing, I’d like to make reference to a conversation that has been unfolding recently under the heading of Paranoid Subjectivity on e-flux. I want to attempt to avoid the risk, as Sarah Brouillette puts it, of “simply mapping the mapmakers” by emphasizing “capitalism’s mysteriousness and intractability, […] our incapacity in the face of it, [or] our anxiety about our incapacity, and so forth.” To avoid this risk, Brouillette implores us to foreground “the importance of a given map’s relationship to struggle.” The practicality of Marriot and Minio-Paluello’s map lies in its dialectic between infrastructure and form. Where the occasion of the pipeline presents a through line for plot, the tale of the Oil Road enables the story of the Carbon Web. In this sense, the text’s careful development of BP’s connections as a totality is central to its political usefulness. The labour and the maintenance of such roads comprised of pumps, steel tubes, security fences, security personnel, spouts, gauges, monitoring devices, tanker ships, refineries, more steel tubes, more spouts, more security personnel, delivery trucks, gas pumps, and on and on, is a very real, ongoing kind of work. Marriot and Minio-Plauello show us this work, which in a way helps us to understand the scope of the task at hand and to locate crucial starting places to begin to dismantle the Oil Road and the Carbon Web it weaves.

Special thanks to Adam Carlson, Alexandra Carruthers, and Jeff Diamanti for their conversations and guidance as I wrote this paper. Thanks also to the participants of the session “Infrastructure and Form” at the 2015 meeting of the ACLA, especially the organizers Joseph Jeon and Kate Marshall.

Notes
Buell, Fredrick. “A Short History of Oil Cultures: Or, the Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance.” Journal of American Studies 46 (2012): 273-293.

Brouillette, Sarah. “Paranoid Subjectivity.” e-flux.com. 12 March 2015. Web. 24 March 2015.
Ghosh, Amitav. “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel.”Incendiary Circumstances. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. 138-151.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.

LeMenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum in the American Century.Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014.

Macalister, Terry. “The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London by James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello – review.” The Guardian. 14 December 2012. Web. 24 March 2015.
Marriot, James and Mika Minio-Paluello. The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London. London: Verso, 2013.
Massey, Doreen. “Mapping the Carbon Web.” Soundings 54 (Summer 2013): 127-130.
Szeman, Imre. “How to Know About Oil: Energy Epistemologies and Political Futures.” Journal of Canadian Studies 47.3 (2013): 145-168.

January 6, 2015 / 0 Comments

Energy and Literature

This is the text for a talk I will give at the MLA 2015 in Vancouver on a roundtable “Envisioning the Energy Humanities, NarratingEnergy Pasts and Futures” in VCC West Room 121 from 10-11:30.

…

The energy humanities excite thought, invigorate methodology, and entice research. In one jolt the proposition that humanities researchers, literary scholars among them, address history from the standpoint of energy joins against accusations of irrelevance that humanities departments face. In Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer’s provocation “The Rise of the Energy Humanities,” they pose a crucial question for our times: “How to work towards a sustainable energy future?” (Boyer and Szeman 2014). It would seem that there is no time like the present to come to terms, on a number of fronts, with the cultural, economic, and political roles of energy in late capitalism and its historical development.

In this way the energy humanities must operate in a reflective mode, since it comes late to the party otherwise populated by scientists and policy makers. But, the energy humanities ought to be anticipatory too, since humanities scholars bring a hermeneutic precision to the table that allows us to engage the relationship between narrative and duration. Put otherwise we seek to understand the contemporary (or many contemporaries) as energy soaked moments in history.

…

Where, how, and when to incorporate energy into our various and varied research programs? I would like to offer an all-too broad methodological schematic for the study of literature and energy. We could:

– include energy in the narrative frame in a New Historical approach

– locate the signs of energy through a New Critical practice of close reading

– assess trends across a set of digitized texts in a Distant Reading approach

– return to old archives, asking which Genres are germane to the study of energy?

– read for the gaps left by energy in a Symptomaticapproach

New Historical and New Critical approaches could return to novels such as Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), which offers a bleak description of Coketown: “It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it…It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever, and never got uncoiled” (Dickens 1994, 19). Here we see the obvious sign of coal’s impact on the realist novel. What can Hard Times tell us about the impacts of carbon energy on the industrial revolution or on the bodies that lived and labored in such places or on the soil, the air, and the water? Are other texts similarly marked?

A Distant Readingapproach could look for energy keywords in a variety of texts and genres. Reading energy on the level of content would be a way to understand when and how an energy source arises in literary form and to ask which forms seem to come to terms with energy, in any given manner, most prominently and most directly. This approach could be a way to move beyond the broad questions, towards more focused research on stories about wood, about coal, about oil, about nuclear energy, and so on. We already know how to do these things, and it is amazing how attuned distant and close reading in particular are to gleaning for the narratological qualities of energy.

When it comes to Genre, considering my other work on post-apocalyptic narratives, I would ask, what does it mean to write about an energy scarce future in the midst of an energy rich one? And, what can we learn by reading against the grain in stories set after the end of petromodernity? Other questions materialize rather quickly once we begin to look for energy in relation to other literary genres.

We could perform a Symptomatic Reading that looks for energy as a kind of structuring absence. Amitav Ghosh asks why the oil encounter has not produced the same literary response as the colonial spice encounter did—there are many novels about the spice trade, where are the oil novels? A symptomatic approach to energy would need to follow Patricia Yaeger’s suggestion that “…energy invisibilities may constitute different kinds of erasures” than other invisibilities (Yaeger 2011, 309).

…

These suggested approaches cannot be read without attendant theoretical commitments, and it is my suspicion that once we wed them with our other driving concerns, such as decolonization, anti-racism, feminism, queer politics, and ecocriticism, we will begin to work towards a radical idea of what the energy humanities can be and do for our future. Perhaps it is the authority of oil as energy that precludes its narrativization on the same level as the spice encounter or the industrial uses of coal. Beyond a doubt, the fact that its role is being re-narrated today demonstrates that the age of its flourishing is at a crucial moment for intervention.

Notes

Boyer, Dominic and Imre Szeman. “The Rise of Energy Humanities: Breaking the Impasse.” University Affairs (12 February 2014) Web.
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. Penguin: New York, 1994. Print.
Yaeger, Patricia. “Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale-Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power and Other Energy Sources.” PMLA 126:2 (2011): 305-10. Print.

September 25, 2014 / 0 Comments

Into Eternity, on our Waste Containments and Energy Futures

This is the text of paper that I delivered at the Science Fiction/ Fantasy Now conference at University of Warwick in August. Thanks to Mark Bould, Valerie Savard, and Rhys Williams.

The first shot of Michael Madsen’s documentary film Into Eternity (2010) captures the border between the snowy Finnish woods and what appears to be a transformer station in grayscale. The shot draws a visual comparison between the skeletal trees, standing silently, and the vertical structures interlaced with cables in the background. Several large stones sit in the foreground of the shot. The only sound comes from the low rumble of bass drum. The shot fades to black and a new shot fades in. The camera tracks down a well-lit concrete tunnel and the title fades into focus “Into Eternity: A Film for the Future by Michael Madsen.” A few more rumbles of the bass drum sound as the camera rounds a corner, revealing a narrowing of the tunnel that fades into pitch black in the back ground. Here, the voice over beings:

I would say that you are now in a place where we have buried something from you to protect you and we have taken great pain to be sure that you are protected. We also need you to know that this place should not be disturbed and we want you to know that this is not a place for you to live in. You should stay away from this place and then you will be safe. (Madsen 2010)

The shot cuts from the tunnel to a rock wall covered with signs and diagrams in the deep dark. Trickling water can be heard. At this point two minutes into the film, even before Madsen speaks to the camera and to the audience from the dark of the tunnel, a central problematic has already been established. The opening voiceover launches the film’s science fictional stylistic conceit as an address to the future in so far as it asks the viewer to imagine a fictional being receiving the message—“you should stay away from this place”—thousands of years from when it was recorded. The reason for the ban on entry to “this place” has not yet been revealed, and still the visual comparison of the trees and the rock with the power lines and cables, the slow movement of discovery down into the earth while an audible warning plays, and even the low rumble of the bass notes speak to the core problem of the film: how to keep future entities—human, post-human, or alien—from entering Onkalo, Finland’s nuclear waste storage facility, for at least one hundred thousand years.

Through Into Eternity’s science fictional conceit of addressing the future, we discover that the working components of Onkalo are deceptively simple—the signs of warning and the entombed waste. To reach a future when the waste will no longer cause harm, the warning signs must remain constant and undisturbed, while the tomb must maintain a stable state for the waste. Later in the film, Madsen explains to the camera that “it is quite possible that we will not be understood by the future, especially by the distant future” (Madsen 2010). The historian of technology Maja Fjaestad describes one of the film’s main themes as the “imagined technological competencies of future humans” (Fjaestad 372), while, in film scholar Andrew Moisey’s words, the project captured by the film seems to want to “lure the distant future closer to the past” (Moisey 114-115). This “luring” names precisely the temporal negotiation undertaken by the film, and is captured in its opening scene as its talking heads try to conceive of how to keep future generations away from the toxic spent by-product of the energy generation of the recent past. By following the development of Finland’s solution to nuclear waste storage, Into Eternity presents an account of the impasse between the consequences of modernity’s energy use and the continuation of life on Earth as we know it.

Nuclear energy has been receiving more attention of late. In the face of anthropogenic global warming, much of this can be accounted for due to nuclear fuel’s zero level of carbon emissions, but framingnuclear energy as relatively environmentally responsible raises a set of concerns not imagined in the nuclear debates of the mid- to late-twentieth century. The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), while recognizing the clear advantage of a zero-emissions energy source, are quick to elaborate the barriers to increasing use of nuclear energy, including “concerns about operational safety and (nuclear weapon) proliferation risks, unresolved waste management issues as well as financial and regulatory risks” (Bruckner et al. 5). Of these prospective threats, it is waste that is the most difficult to incorporate into the calculation of environmental sustainability. To begin with, the risks of nuclear energy frustrate existing territorial frameworks of measurement and jurisdiction, even as decisions about the future of nuclear energy remain largely in the hands of individual state actors. “Embracing nuclear power,” historian of science and technology A. Bowdoin Van Riper suggests, “saddles national governments—and, by extension, the entire human species—with the problem of dealing with spent nuclear fuel” (Van Riper 99). Compounding the difficulty of distinguishing the jurisdiction of nation and species is the radically more challenging prospect of calculating the time of nuclear waste.

Timothy Morton describes the time of nuclear waste, in his book Hyperobjects (2013): “There is no away to which we can meaningfully sweep the radioactive dust. Nowhere is far enough or long-lasting-enough…The future of plutonium exerts a causal influence on the present, casting its shadow backwards though time” (Morton 120). For Morton, then, the time of nuclear waste involves a thinking of two times at once. The present and the future are one way to name these temporalities, which could be measured by the time when the waste is toxic and when it is not. Another way would be to think of the time scale of the human next to the time scale of the waste. That we do not have access to an epistemology of geological time is at the source of our concern about the radioactive half life of nuclear waste. Neither of these conceptions of time thinks about the energy created in the first place. The whole problem of nuclear waste arrives on the scene precisely because of the energy demands of late capital. Whichever formulation of plutonium’s “causal influence” and overshadowing of the present, Into Eternity manages the temporal crux of nuclear waste through the science fictional conceit of an address to the future.

The figure of the earth as container cuts across these two novel challenges—jurisdiction and temporality—in the contemporary debates about nuclear energy’s relative ecological costs and benefits. The IPCC has suggested that in order to maintain life on the planet as we know it we must leave all remaining reserves of oil in the ground (NewScientist2013). In an odd inversion, relying more heavily on nuclear energy in a turn away from oil and natural gas will mean placing a whole lot more material into the ground in long term storage facilities like Onkalo. This inversion does pinpoint the way that debates about the time of energy—from concerns about peak oil to carbon reduction measures and from the energy demand met by nuclear fission compared with the shelf life of nuclear waste—are insistently emplotted in space, in this case the ground, in the very earth itself. The level of risk involved in this plan remains palpable throughout Madsen’s documentary in a way that sets the film apart from other recent documentaries concerned with the legacies of nuclear power.

Madsen’s film takes an approach to the topic that one might hope for in this complex situation: a presentation of facts. The film engages the engineers, scientists, and technocrats of the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant and the tomb they are constructing to house its spent nuclear fuel, while simultaneously grappling with “the disturbing idea” that our “most lasting legacy will be the nuclear waste we bury” (Van Ripper 102). Construction on Onkalo began in 2002 and the storage facility is slated to accept the first shipments of nuclear waste in 2020. Estimates indicate that the site will remain open for a century before being sealed and will eventually house 5500 tons of highly radioactive waste: “Placed in copper canisters insulated with a layer of dense, impermeable clay and sealed using advanced welding techniques, the waste will be inserted into a network of horizontal shafts bored through solid granite 450 meters (1500 feet) below the surface” (Van Riper 99). Onkalo is the Finnish word for “cave” or “hiding place.”

Madsen’s film does a compelling job of uncovering the inconsistencies in the plan to construct Onkalo. Despite its simplicity, the architects at Onkalo, like those at the U.S. waste containment project in Carlsbad, New Mexico, cannot settle on a method to keep future human, post-human, or alien others, out of the tomb. Michael Brill, the architect for the New Mexico facility designed seven options to keep intrudes out: A landscape of thorns, “a dark masonry slab, evoking an enormous ‘black hole,’ an immense no-thing, a void, land removed from use, worthless,” spikes bursting through a grid, or a rubble landscape (Brill 1993). To add this list, the experts at Onkalo suggest using many reproductions of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) to keep people out. While these methods of keeping out curious entities would seem suitable for the present, they may not keep out the very addressees of the film—countless unknown and unknowable others from the future. Madsen address these imagined future viewers of the documentary promising that “We will leave written information for you in all the major languages of our time” and telling them that these are attempts to “give you a feeling, rather than give you a detailed message” (Madsen 2010). Similarly, the plan to pass on information about Onkalo by telling future generations founders when Madsen points out that keeping information about the long term waste storage in a “permanent manner” (Madsen 2010) shares the same risks as short-term nuclear waste storage—the power might go out, conditions might change in the archives, or wars might cause the political climate to change on the surface.

Used heavily in the film, the technique of the sound bridge mirrors the desire for consistency and transmission from one moment to the next. On screen, as the Kraftwerk song “Radioactivity” plays, cameras move attached to the automated arms that cycle the rods of radioactive material into the reactor, as the engineers and scientists in the film puzzle over this temporal problem of representation—that the sign for Danger! will change over the course of one hundred thousand years. Cameras track slowly down long hallways, behind supply trucks outside of facilities. Crane shots, dolly shots, and careful tracking shots show workers preparing a vat of material for water storage. These sequences are shot at a higher frame rate and the figures move in a slight slow-motion, mimicking a music video effect. They are unified by the beat of the song as shot cuts into shot. Another deployment of the sound bridge happens with the experts that are interviewed. Similarly, talking heads are introduced with a title and a shot, but sometimes as they speak the shot cuts to another expert who appears to sit listening, attentively, to the words of the first. Here the sound bridge suggests that they have received the message attentively just like the viewer should, just like the future view may. The experience of the film as an aesthetic object stands out as an affective experience that supports the problematic described through its dialogue and interviews. Put differently, the science fictional atmosphere remains in productive tension with the film’s documentary elements.

Even without the formal element of the sound bridge, the talking heads generate uncertainty. Van Ripper contributes to this observation through his own treatment of the talking heads and he suggests that the interviewees “project none of the confidence of traditional documentary ‘talking heads,’” speaking instead in “soft, halting voices with long pauses between and after thoughts” and, rather than cutting to a new shot after the subject has stopped speaking, “Madsen frequently holds the camera on the subject’s face, waiting—like a patient but disappointed teacher—for something more substantive” (Van Riper 101). The bind that I identified in the opening shot between quiet storage in the earth and the intervention of some future being repeats itself in these moments as the film never allows its viewer to forget the sheer impossibility of imagining how the future will divert from the present. This insistence provokes the productive realization that Madsen and each of his experts are not actually addressing the future. Instead they imply a far future viewer who, for the interim can only, disappointingly, be a viewer from their own present. One problem with nuclear waste and the human temporality is that time cannot pass quickly enough. Even though we can conceive of multiple future possibilities for Onkalo—nuclear waste containment, cultural consistency, cultural change, breach by humans, or breach by unknown others—which emphasize that the present is a moment where decisions need to, and can, be made, geological time still only crawls by. The logic of containment in the film seems to insist that whatever our energy future looks like, something will be left below in the deep dark.

Patricia Yaeger offers a language to name the problem Into Eternity grapples with in her PMLAeditor’s column, “Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources.” She raises the idea of an “energy unconscious,” (Yaeger 306) a structuring presence that is often outside the described events of a narrative and suggests that “…energy invisibilities may constitute different kinds of erasures” (Yaeger 309). This energy unconscious follows Jameson’s assessment of the literary as a “socially symbolic act” in The Political Unconscious (1981) where the conflicts and impasses of the present find expression through signs and symptoms that must be interpreted. Similarly, Yaeger posits,

We might argue that the writer who treats fuel as a cultural code or reality effect makes a symbolic move, asserts his or her class position in a system of mythic abundance not available to the energy worker who lives in carnal exhaustion. But perhaps energy sources also enter texts as fields of force that have causalities outside (or in addition to) class conflicts and commodity wars. The touch-a-switch-and-it’s-light magic of electrical power, the anxiety engendered by atomic residue, the odor of coal pollution, the viscous animality of whale oil, the technology of chopping wood…(Yaeger 309-310)

Yaeger’s schema resonates with a scene that captures Sami Savonrinne, a blaster at Onkalo, in a long shot where he is two-thirds into the frame and two-thirds down it, flanked by a half-lit rock wall that runs out of the top of the shot. He says,

This tunnel feels like a time capsule sometimes. When you arrive in the morning it may be sunny, almost like summer outside. When you come out at the end of the day, it may have snowed like hell. The weather will have completely changed and you think “how long do I actually spend in that tunnel?” And likewise: you go to work and it is dark, and when you come back up after work it is dark. And it feels like time has stopped. (Madsen 2010)

However, the worker and his “carnal exhaustion” appear as the sign of a deeper moment in the film, a moment closer to what I imagine Yaeger had in mind. Thus, I would suggest that nuclear waste acts as a glaring symptom of this energy unconscious and that Madsen’s film offers an occasion to plumb its depths. The discursive symptom, “the field of force that have causalities outside the text,” in Into Eternity is that no one can seem to imagine a sign or symbol that could last even a few hundred years, let alone 100, 000.

Into Eternity clarifies the idea of an energy unconscious, and outlines the problems associated with the study of energy in the humanities. As Madsen’s film confirms, the problem of narrative is indissociable from the discursive and political limits of the present. The film offers us a sense of the vast chambers lurking beneath surface, the catacombs entombing radioactive waste, that are at the same time a symptom of our comfortable energy reliance above the surface. The film investigates one solution for one country’s nuclear waste—to engineer and design the place where things might be laid to rest beneath the surface until their latent poisons dissipate. And yet, guided by some strikingly relevant science fictional writings, I would like to conclude by suggesting an image that completely opposes and arrests the visions of the future presented in Madsen’s film.

Into Eternity seems incapable of thinking the kind of future we get in Paolo Bacigalupi’s short story “The People of Sand and Slag” (2008) as anything but a nightmare image. In a distant future Montana, three mutated, genetically engineered, and weeviltech implanted humans oversee a mining operation. They seem to be capable of eating the very refuse, tailings, mine dumps, and slimes spewed out by the machines tearing up the countryside, they can re-grow severed limbs, and they appear to heal from cuts near instantly. The plot revolves around the trio discovering a dog wandering out among the tailings—they are baffled by how this creature could survive. One of the three revealingly observes, “‘It’s as delicate as rock. You break it, and it never comes back together” (Bacigalupi 45). The three react to the dog, a survivor from a different time, the “dead end of an evolutionary chain,” (Bacigalupi 53) much in the same way that a reader might be estranged by the three demigod humans who eat sand and slag for dinner. They vacation in Hawaii; the narrator describes his partner’s grace as a swimmer: “She flashed through the ocean’s metallic sheen like an eel out of history and when she surfaced, her naked body glistened with hundreds of iridescent petroleum jewels” (Bacigalupi 52). The future, in “The People of Sand and Slag” presents the opposite solution to Onkalo’s containment: a kind of total immersion. This solution to the problems generated by our energy commitments remains unimaginable by Madsen’s experts. It inverts the idea of the Earth as containment and renders “delicate” the very deep stone that appears so solid and immutable in the walls of the opening shots of the film. Onkalo is not a solution to the problem of nuclear waste. It is merely a stop-gap solution, a massive sludge bucket of leaky refuse that we are not quite sure where to stash. The quiet elegance of the snow covered trees and imploring address—“this is not a place you should live in”—could both be lost on future humans, as they certainly would be on Bacigalupi’s people of sand and slag.

Notes

Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. New York: Pantheon, 1985. Print.

Brill, Michael. “An Architecture of Peril: Design for a Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Carlsbad, New Mexico.” Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter (3 June 2014) Web (Fall 1993).

Bruckner T., I.A. Bashmakov, Y. Mulugetta, H. Chum, A. de la Vega Navarro, J. Edmonds, A. Faaij, B. Fungtammasan, A. Garg, E. Hertwich, D. Honnery, D. Infield, M. Kainuma, S. Khennas, S. Kim, H.B. Nimir, K. Riahi, N. Strachan, R. Wiser, and X. Zhang. “Chapter 7: Energy Systems.” Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Eds. Edenhofer, O., R. Pichs-Madruga, Y. Sokona, E. Farahani, S. Kadner, K. Seyboth, A. Adler, I. Baum, S. Brunner, P. Eickemeier, B. Kriemann, J. Savolainen, S. Schlömer, C. von Stechow, T. Zwickel and J.C. Minx. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Carrington, Damian. “Pandora’s Promise: Pro-Nuclear Movie Blows up Yesterday’s Myths.” The Guardian (8 November 2013) Web (6 June 2014).

Ferguson, Francis. “The Nuclear Sublime.” Diacritics14:2 (Summer 1984): 4-10. Print.

“Finns more Positive towards Nuclear,” World Nuclear News (15 February 2010) Web (5 June 2014).

Fjaestad, Maja. “Nuclear Waste and Historical Time.” Technology and Culture 54.2 (April 2013): 371-372. Print.

Flisfeder, Matthew. “Nuclear.” Fueling Culture: Energy, History, Politics. (New York: Fordham UP, forthcoming). Print.

Hardt, Michael. “Two Faces of Apocalypse: A Letter from Copenhagen.” Polygraph 22 (2010): 265-274. Print.

Hasted, Nick. “Into Eternity,” Sight & Sound 20.1 (December 2010): 66. Print.

Hitchcock, Peter. “Oil in an American Imaginary.” New Formations 69.4 (2010): 81-97. Print.

Into Eternity: A Film for the Future. Dir. Michael Madsen. International Film Circuit, 2010. Film.

“IPCC Digested: Just leave the fossil fuels in the ground.” NewScientist (1 October 2013). Web (28 July 2014).

Jameson, Fredric. Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One. New York: Verso, 2011. Print.

Jowett, Julie. “Fossilised Myths: Fresh Thinking on ‘Dirty’ Coal.” Guardian Weekly(17-23 March 2006): 5.

Knechtel, John. Fuel. Cambridge: Alphabet City Media, 2009. Print.

Kramer, Gary M. and Michael Miller. “Around the Circuit: Tribeca Film Festival, 22 April-2 May 2010.” Film International 8.3 (2010): 92-96. Print.

Makdisi, Saree. “Empire and Human Energy.” PMLA 126.2 (2011): 318-320. Print.

Mitchell, Timothy. “Carbon Democracy.” Economy and Society 38:3 (2009): 399-432. Print.

Moisey, Andrew. “Considering the Desire to Mark Our Buried Nuclear Waste: Into Eternityand the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.” qui parle 20.2 (Spring/Summer 2012): 101-125. Print.

Montgomery, Scott L. “Nuclear Power: New Context Changing Views.” The Powers that Be: Global Energy for the Twenty-First Century and Beyond. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. 127-148. Print.

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013. Print.

Munch, Edvard. The Scream. 1893. Oil, tempera, and pastel on cardboard. National Gallery, Oslo.

Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Print.

“Nuclear Power in Finland.” World Nuclear Association. (April 2014) Web (5 June 2014).

Orwell, George. 1984. London: Penguin Books, 2008 (1949). Print.

Pandora’s Promise Dir. Robert Stone. Vulcan Productions, 2013. Film.

Pirttilä, Mikko and Sarita Schröder. “Mankala Energy Production Model under Threat?” International Law Office. (16 May 2011) Web (5 June 2014).

“Radioactive Waste Management.” World Nuclear Association (November 2013) Web (6 June 2014).

Robbins, Denise. “3 Myths from Pro-Nuclear Film Pandora’s Promise.” EcoWatch: Transforming Green (8 November 2013) Web (6 June 2014).

Schell, Jonathan. The Fate of the Earth & The Abolition. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. Print.

Smith, Michael. “Advertising the Atom.” American Technology Ed. Carroll Pursell. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. 209-237. Print.

Szeman, Imre. “System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster.” South Atlantic Quarterly106.4 (Fall 2007): 805-823.

Van Riper, A. Bowdoin. “Into Eternity.” Film & History 43.1 (Spring 2013): 99-102. Print.

Yaeger, Patricia. “Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources.” PMLA 126.2 (2011): 305-326. Print.

June 19, 2014 / 0 Comments

Petrorealism

*** The following is a paper I delivered at MLG-ICS 2014 on a panel titled “Discourses of Carbon Culture” with Bob Johnson and Jeff Diamanti (you can read Jeff’s paper here www.analogouscity.com). This paper is also based on an entry I wrote for Fueling Culture: Politics, History, Energy edited by Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger (Fordham UP, in progress).***

Let me repeat, we are dealing with a potentiality, the realization of which depends on prevailing circumstances. The emergence of a new style is dependent on many external influences; and there is also a double internal danger which, in the history of literature, has often marked periods of transition. There may be reluctance, on the one hand, to accept the logic of some new subject-matter; there may be a timid hanging-on to traditional styles, an unwillingness to give up old habits. There may also be, on the other hand, a tendency to overemphasize abstract aspects of new subject-matter (‘in history,’ wrote Hegel, ‘every new phenomenon emerges first in abstract form’). Abstraction thus gains the upper hand. Concrete realities—the exploration with the help of the new consciousness of as yet unexplored subject matter will be neglected or considered of secondary importance.—Georg Lukács, Realism in Our Time (1971: 115-116)

Lukács disqualified the sciences as fetishes of the particular, unable to grasp the totality, over which only the non-science of philosophy had dominion…But climate science is not such a science. And curiously, it takes as its object totality in a quite different sense: the totality of metabolic processes that take place on a planetary scale, and in particular the contribution of collective human labor to those processes.—McKenzie Wark, “Four Cheers for Vulgar Marxism”

In ecological thought, thinking big is back in a big way. And why not? The twin problems of global warming and ongoing pollution are both intensified by an energy-reliant system of accumulation and dispossession that operates at a massive scale. Thinking big seems to match the size of solution-seeking to the size of the problem. In “The Rise of Energy Humanities,” Dominic Boyer and Imre Szeman frame this problem in terms of an ecology-energy impasse: “It is not an exaggeration to ask whether human civilization has a future. Neither technology nor policy can offer a silver-bullet solution to the environmental effects created by an energy-hungry, rapidly modernizing and expanding global population.” (Boyer and Szeman 2014). They posit that the problems we face as a species fall within the expertise of the human sciences, from studies of ethics, habits, and values to understandings of institutions, belief, and power. The discursive mode arguably most interested in coming to terms with the scope of our ecology-energy impasse is that of theory, with examples ranging from Eugene Stoermer’s and Paul Crutzen’s theorizations of the Anthropocene, to Timothy Morton’s attempt in Hyperobjects (2012) to furnish a language suitable to both new materialism and what he calls the “ecological emergency” (Morton 2012). But how do we begin to think between the proliferating big ideas of geology, climate science, new materialism, and the energy humanities?

I would argue that a particular risk in contemporary ecological theorizing is not the result of trying to think too big; rather, it is a problem of taking too easy a path to thinking that bigger picture. Totalities are nuanced, to say the least, and the way we imagine social and ecological relations can be expressed only in complex and indirect ways, lest we fall back into what Hegel called “picture-thinking.” To avoid the pitfall of mistaking the abstract whole for the sum of its concrete parts, I posit petrorealism – literary, cinematic, and gaming narrative forms, for example – as a possible way to creatively mediate the scalar problem between thinking big and the specific situations and contexts of petromodernity. I use Petro- because I think it is important to conceive of all texts produced within petroculture as functionally marked by the ontology of oil even as they anticipate a world after oil, and I use –realism because I aim to emphasize the way its variants share an ability to mediate the variegated scales implied in specific instances within a larger whole at once and, thus, better grasp the energy-ecology impasse.

Petrorealism (or its absence), for example, is what is really at stake in Amitav Ghosh’s seminal essay “Petrofictions: The Oil Encounter and the Novel,” where he observes the oil encounter does not produce an equivalently rich corpus of novels as the spice encounter (Ghosh 1992: 138). Extending Ghosh’s desire for big thinking, in “Oil and the American Imaginary” Peter Hitchcock cleverly suggests that sugar and coffee are two commodities that could also function analogously to oil (Hitchcock 2010: 81). But if we understand Ghosh to be marking not merely a paucity of fiction of the oil encounter, but also expressing a desire for petrorealism, then these commodities are not so easily substituted for one another. Attention to the formal strategies necessary to representing the oil encounter would reveal that the scale of big thinking is itself among the subjects of this fiction. Realism, in its varied forms and modes, has a penchant for narrating structure without losing site of specificity. Indeed, Abdulrahman Munif’s Cities of Saltquintet (1984-1989) and Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (1927) respectively fuel Ghosh’s and Hitchcock’s desire for a realistic petrofiction. For Ghosh, the slow and careful details of Munif’s story make it stand out: for instance, few of the oil developers from the US are named, and instead are simply referred to as the Americans, one exception being Sinclair, who leaps out from the page like oil gushing from a well because his obvious namesake is the 20^th century author. Hitchcock’s reading of Oil! attaches importance to Upton Sinclair’s realistic portrayal of the beginnings of US oil production and dependence. Hitchcock figures oil’s centrality to the American political and cultural imaginary, placing Oil! and Paul Thomas Anderson’s film adaptation There Will Be Blood (2007) as bookends of America’s century. Hitchcock does acknowledge, however, that oil’s centrality manifests primarily in its in invisibility: “it is oil’s saturation of the infrastructure of modernity that paradoxically has placed a significant bar on its cultural representation” (Hitchcock 2010: 81). Though oil’s ubiquity has seemed to keep it from being of central focus, petrorealism could elaborate the near omnipresence of oil in everyday life in an attempt to defamiliarize or to make strange our petrosubjectivity.

As a materialism term, petrorealism also has a polemic function: it offers an important corrective to philosophical senses of thinking big that evacuate the subject and any form of politics from its imaginations. The speculative realism of philosophers Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux contests our all-too-humanist claim that knowledge is ultimately subjective, while silently opposing already existing materialisms, which, as Wesley Phillips remarks, is notably strange when one considers their shared preoccupation with realism (Philips 2012: 290). Contrasting new materialism with historical materialism emphases a key difference between speculative realism and what I am calling petrorealism: as Phillips explains speculative realist philosophers share an understanding of “the real as the physical” (2012: 290), whereas I argue that petrorealism maintains that the abstract, and not the only the vulgarly physical, can be and is material. I do not want to suggest that the desire to decenter the human and human consciousness from the world is invalid; rather, I would suggest that by thinking along the lines of petrorealism, we can begin to recognize speculative realism as a symptom of the vast, alienating and thoroughly unhuman forces of oil-fueled capital accumulation. As Lukács suggested in the “The Ideology of Modernism,” intention can be read into a text, not as the author’s personal aim, but as the Weltanschauung or ideology of that author (Lukács 1971: 19). Thus, we might say, the object oriented ontologist seeks to escape a situation of their own making by subtracting the human from ecological questions and preferring to speculate about the consciousness of the geological formations on which human impacts have been wrought. No matter how one understands its intention, the effect of this subtraction of the human is an evacuation of politics. By contrast, Morton’s thinking about hyperobjects implies a politics: as a collection of discrete yet like objects (all nuclear materials, or all plutonium, or all uranium), or a place demarcated by a spatial imaginary (the Lago Agrio oil field in Ecuador), or an entity all but invisible except for its effects (a black hole), or a set of processes and relations (global capital) – a hyperobject can be transcoded as another word for totality. Yet hyperobjects still lack mediation – and thus with petrorealism,I aim to restore mediation to its place in thought, human or otherwise, especially big thought about the energy-ecology impasse.

Examples abound of novels, films, documentaries, and other kinds of texts that outline what petrorealism could be and do. Situated within distinct formal mechanics, the following examples manage to think big without falling into the trap of picture thinking, and are, at least provisionally, divided into five categories:

Maps of energy presents that do not foreground energy: Noel Burch and Allan Sekula’s exploration of container ships and the global circulation of commodities in The Forgotten Space (2010), Max Brooks’s depiction of social totality through circulation and exchange figured as contagion in World War Z (2006), or Steven Soderbergh’s chart of global flows and borders, whether figured through the drug trade or the spread of disease and the development of vaccines, in Traffic(2000) and Contagion (2011).
Postcolonial film and writing: in the recent short film Pumzi (Wanuri Kahiu 2010), water sovereignty and labor as a clean energy source clash with the protagonist’s discovery of uncontaminated soil. Jennifer Wenzel’s description of petro-magic-realism in Ben Okri’s story, “What the Tapster Saw,” combines “the transmogrifying creatures and liminal space of the forest in Yoruba narrative tradition” and “the monstrous-but-mundane violence of oil exploration and extraction, the state violence that supports it, and the environmental degradation that it causes” (Wenzel 2006: 456).
Science fiction energy futures: when Kim Stanley Robinson discusses terraforming in the Mars Trilogy (1993,1994,1996) he shows that petrorealism need not be only about oil, but should be able to hold together the complex of various forms of energy, their scales, and temporalities.
Actual accounts of the petro-present: James Marriot and Mika Minio-Paluello’s travelogue The Oil Road: Journey from the Caspian Sea to the City of London (2012) maps the oil present spatially, economically, and ecologically. Their figure of the “oil road,” reviewer Adam Carlson notes, “gives us a powerful tool for representing the totality, for seeing through the haze, to make sense of both the physical Oil Road, and the Carbon Web – the political, social and economic, the superstructure of the infrastructure” (Carlson 2013).
Interactive documentary and documentary/videogame hybrids: Offshore (Brenda Longfellow, Glen Richards, and Helios Labs 2013) and Fort McMoney(David Dufresne 2013) offer an immersive petrorealism. The former depicts an oil rig modelled on the Deepwater Horizon, which viewers explore at their own pace and direction by navigating an eerie maze of stations and compartments; in the latter, viewers travel to Fort McMurray, Alberta and explore the town – they can follow bottle collectors, visit the Oil Patch, and vote on important town issues.

Following these examples, petrorealism does not operate in terms of longing for a return to a time before oil. Instead, it follows Stephanie LeMenager’s (2012) insistence on the irreversibility of petrocapitalism and looks to futures that take the infrastructures and imaginaries of petromodernity into account, with ingenuity and rigor. Petrorealism is, of necessity, an attempt come to terms with petromodernity from within; indeed there is no vantage from outside from which to write about its flows and limits.

In Realism in Our Time (1971) Lukács makes a useful distinction between the view critical realism had from outside socialism versus the view socialist realism had from within it. As he points out, despite enabling the critical realist to better grasp his or her own age “it will not enable him [sic] to conceive the future from the inside” (Lukács 1971: 95). But this is precisely the task before us. To quote another mid-century Marxist “Petroleum resists the five-act form,” and so we must embrace the new styles and forms that resist petroleum! (Brecht 1977:29). My hope is that by learning from petrorealism we might reach as close to the root of the energy-ecology impasse as possible, drawing spatial connections between capital’s energy demands and effects and the temporal possibilities of reaching beyond our energy-dependant, growth-based system of social relations to a future in which energy is no longer the metaphor or the cause for speculation, but the actual driving force of our creative endeavors to overcome such crises. By maintaining a moment of narration within the elaboration of a vaster totality, petrorealism sharpens our focus on the task at hand: we must accept the logic of the impasse without overemphasizing its abstract qualities. It is here that the work of petrorealism stands revealed as a critical task to set for ourselves as much as it is an already existing archive of material.

Notes

Boyer, Dominic and Imre Szeman. “The Rise of Energy Humanities: Breaking the Impasse.” University Affairs (12 February 2014) Web (3 April 2014).

Brecht, Bertolt. 1977. Brecht on Theatre. ed. and trans. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang. Print.

Carlson, Adam. “Petrorealism in The Oil Road.” Introduction to Mika Minio-Paluello “Unpublished Talk” at the Humanities Centre, University of Alberta (18 October 13).

Ghosh, Amitav. “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel.”Incendiary Circumstances. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. 138-151. Print.

Hitchcock, Peter. “Oil in an American Imaginary.” New Formations 69 (2010): 81-97. Print.

LeMenager, Stephanie. “The Aesthetics of Petroleum, after Oil!” American Literary History 24.1 (2012): 59–86. Print.

Lukács, Georg. Realism in Our Time. New York: Harper Tourchbooks, 1971. Print.

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Print.

Philips, Wesley. “The Future of Speculation?” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 8.1 (2012): 289-303.

Wark, Mackenzie. “Four Cheers for Vulgar Marxism.” Public Seminar Commons. (25 April 2014) Web (26 April 2014).

Wenzel, Jennifer. “Petro-Magic-Realism: Toward a Political Ecology of Nigerian Literature.” Postcolonial Studies 9.4 (2006): 449-464. Print.