Translation - Petro-fossil: Requiem for Our Fossil Fuel Civilization (original) (raw)
Related papers
Beyond Doom and Gloom in Petroaesthetics: Facing Oil, Making Energy Matter
MediaTropes, 2020
This essay argues that one of the factors holding back civilization-wide transitions to renewable energy is the widespread tendency to render petroleum and other hydrocarbons abject and abstract. Fossil fuel industry representations do this by hiding the true costs of petroculture behind the virtualization Energy; environmentalist framings do it by relying too much on petroaesthetics of doom (i.e., apocalyptic imagery) and gloom (i.e., Gothic visualizations of oil spills and rusting extractive infrastructure). The scarcity of representations of hydrocarbons that acknowledge both their life-giving and life-destroying properties, their powerful nonhuman agency in mediating practically every human and nonhuman relationship in the modern world, makes it hard to imagine alternatives to petroculture. Recently, artists have begun subverting petroaesthetic conventions in ways that counter the abstraction and abjection of hydrocarbons, including by using crude oil as an artistic medium in it...
This is not an oil novel: obstacles to reading petronarratives in high-energy cultures
Textual Practice, 2021
This article explores the conceptual habits that made it difficult for twentieth-century literary studies to take novels about oil extraction seriously. Focusing primarily on Ramón Díaz Sánchez’s Mene (1936) from Venezuela, and Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1983), published in Lebanon, but ostensibly about Saudi Arabia, I argue that oil extractive novels present an aesthetic and political challenge to the sensibilities and spatial imaginaries of high-energy societies. By exploring the overlooked connections among petronarratives, this essay ultimately posits that we should read texts like Mene and Cities of Salt as part of a global archipelago of texts depicting sites with shared histories of social and environmental harm, which have accumulated into our current planetary ecological crisis. Such a reading involves resisting the impulse to reduce extractive literature to a single context because reckoning with the narratives that sustained and resisted our fossil-fuelled ways of life requires being less concerned with situating a text in its proper place, and more with articulating relations among the particular and planetary phenomena.
Petrocultures: Oil, Energy, and Culture
McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017
Presenting a multifaceted analysis of the cultural, social, and political claims and assumptions that guide how we think and talk about oil, Petrocultures maps the complex and often contradictory ways in which oil has influenced the public’s imagination around the world. This collection of essays shows that oil’s vast network of social and historical narratives and the processes that enable its extraction are what characterize its importance, and that its circulation through this immense web of relations forms worldwide experiences and expectations. Contributors’ essays investigate the discourses surrounding oil in contemporary culture while advancing and configuring new ways to discuss the cultural ecosystem that it has created.
Centaurus, 63.4 (Special Issue: Making Power Visible), pp. 675–694, 2021
This article examines three cases of mid-20th-century oil media—oil-related imagery, iconographies, and media—in visual culture: a series of popular science books entitled The Story of Oil published in the US, an oil-themed set of Kuwaiti postage stamps (1959), and an art exhibition in Zurich (1956) titled Welt des Erdöls: Junge Maler sehen eine Industrie (World of Petroleum: Young Artists See an Industry). While depicting crude oil in its natural habitat was a common photographic theme in the early 20th-century United States, the material discussed shows that, by the mid-20th century, crude oil no longer had the same visual presence. The iconography of oil in the three case studies came to rely increasingly on images of oil infrastructure and on context-specific depictions of living within petro-modernity or petro-culture, meaning lifestyles fueled by cheap fossil energy. However, it is not just the changes in visual representations of petroleum that matter; any debate about the visibility and invisibility of petroleum has to take into account the very media through which petroleum has become visually communicated—that is, the precise forms of oil's mediatization. The aesthetic negotiation of petroleum through media-based visual representations has been crucial for the dematerialization of fossil matter in its conversion to fossil energy, as well as the decoupling of sites of extraction from sites of production and consumption in the public imagination. As petro-culture has morphed into national or even global culture (rather than representing just one possible energy source among many), oil media has paved the way for our intimate relationship with fossil energy-dependent lifestyles, which is one of the biggest drivers of climate change.
OIL. Beauty and Horror in the Petrol Age (Exhibition Catalogue Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg), 2021
The art of petromodernism responds to the many-millionfold bang of explosively burning hydrocarbon molecules in engines and factories. The waves and splinters of these explosions and transformations have been spreading around the world and into the twenty-first century— physically and mentally. Now, however, the era shaped by petroleum technologies and materials seems to be coming to an end. An exceptional, contradictory epoch in cultural history is becoming recognizable. With it, the art of petromodernism is also being put to the test. Perhaps it can help us to better understand certain aspects and charac- teristics of that time. According to the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, artists are the only ones who can “encounter technology with impunity” because it is part of their profession to recognize “the changes in sense perception.” Our curatorial research and exhibition project Oil: Beauty and Horror in the Petrol Age relies on this ability. Although we are still deeply caught up in the era, we claim here that it is already past and can be treated in its entirety retrospectively—in a survey of petromodern art that reconstructs essential elements of our present with an archaeological eye.