Let’s talk Petroculture

The study of petroculture assumes that modes of energy production influence culture, and that art and media function as a kind of “dream catcher” registering implicitly or explicitly the particularities of these modes of production (Yaeger 309). In the case of oil, however, there exists a tension between its ubiquity and its invisibility. Oil saturates modern life, that much is sure. It is essential in the production of food in the form of industrial fertilizer; we wear it on our bodies as polyester clothing; and it is fundamentally responsible for the level of mobility and prosperity enjoyed in most developed nations. Not to mention the way oil drives geopolitics. And yet it seems strangely missing from the public sphere except perhaps in places where the local economy relies on it – like Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada.

One of the biggest blind spots of petrosubjects, people whose lives are subject to petroculture, is realizing to what extent fossil fuels enshrine certain freedoms. In the words of Raymond Williams, industrialization brought “the gift of power that is everything to men who have worked with their hands,” and while it also came with disadvantages, “in the new conditions there was more real freedom to dispose of our lives, more real personal grasp where it mattered, more real say” (qtd. in Szeman 15). And yet some people may reject this freedom to move around unfettered and to consume indiscriminately, in favour of a different kind of freedom – the freedom from dependency on oil in favour of the more independent and sustainable way of life presumed to be fostered by renewables.

Efforts to uncover or rematerialize oil range from mapping its chain of production down a multitude of kaleidoscopic pathways as the raw material changes hands, names, and forms, to deconstructing the specific desires petroculture has normalized in the 21^st century. Another way of revealing the matrix of oil that underwrites modern life is to try and think other energy cultures. What would a renewable energy culture look like and how is it different? What politics would such a culture nourish, what habits, what art, and what infrastructure. This is where worldbuilding genres like sci-fi and utopian fiction may prove helpful. But while it is important to imagine different kinds of energy cultures, thinking of them in isolation risks distorting the way in which sources of energies interact and overlap. Moreover in the current age we not only need to envision renewable energy cultures, but also how to get there – which means thinking of cultures in transition.

Another way to attend to the impact of energy systems on culture is to consider the different phenomenologies they bring about, and how they make their way into artistic expression: “The touch-a-switch-and-it’s-light magic of electrical power, the anxiety engendered by atomic residue, the odour of coal pollution, the viscous animality of whale oil, the technology of chopping wood: each resource instantiates a changing phenomenology that could recreate our ideas about the literary text’s relation to its originating modes of production as quasi-objects” (Yaeger 309-310). Reading like this, for symptoms instead of content, may yield more various results and may also serve to bring the abstract hyperobject of oil within the scope of human experience.

Laura op de Beke

Works Cited

Yaeger Patricia. “Editer’s column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources.” MLA, 2011.

Szeman, Imre. “Introduction.” On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture and Energy. Morgantown: West Virginia UP, 2019.
Image: Highway #1 by Edward Burtynsky

Handy dandy resource: http://petrocultures.com/