Petroculture Sideways: Coeval, coevil

Dominic Boyer

Petroculture Sideways: Coeval, coevil

The anthropological literature on experts and cultures of expertise has paid significant attention to the complex epistemic relations within fieldwork situations, how for example, intellectual partnerships mediated the interpretation of cultures and research partnerships with experts can overturn conventional divisions of labor between “theory” and “data.” This kind of reflexive attention is less common in the anthropological literature on energy, perhaps due to the extraordinarily urgent existential questions wound up in studying phenomena like climate change and energy transition. At times, it seems, energy anthropology does not believe it can afford the indulgence of reflexivity. And yet, fossil energy elicits its own unique epistemic challenges of “studying sideways” (Hannerz 1998), especially in the context of critical anthropological engagements with petroculture (e.g., Coronil 1997, Sawyer 2004, Appel 2019). In addition to the generally heavy carbon footprint of northern academic life—e.g., sprawling campuses and conference life—anthropological research practice is arguably one of more routinely carbon heavy disciplines because of its pragmatic reliance on extensive translocal transportation and high energy data infrastructures. Critical reflexive attention to energy spotlights the ubiquity of petroculture as coeval socio-material-infrastructural context in which much field research unfolds. In this paper, I discuss what it means to practice critical energy anthropology in the shared sideways context of petroculture. And I ask what strategies exist, what reforms might be necessary, to avoid the coeval becoming coevil in a moral sense.

AAA/CASCA 2023 Presenter: Dominic Boyer, Rice U Panel: The Space(s) Between: Transitioning Toward a Sideways Anthropology of Coevalness Paper Title: Petroculture Sideways: Coeval, coevil Paper Abstract: The anthropological literature on experts and cultures of expertise has paid significant attention to the complex epistemic relations within fieldwork situations, how for example, intellectual partnerships mediated the interpretation of cultures and research partnerships with experts can overturn conventional divisions of labor between “theory” and “data.” This kind of reflexive attention is less common in the anthropological literature on energy, perhaps due to the extraordinarily urgent existential questions wound up in studying phenomena like climate change and energy transition. At times, it seems, energy anthropology does not believe it can afford the indulgence of reflexivity. And yet, fossil energy elicits its own unique epistemic challenges of “studying sideways” (Hannerz 1998), especially in the context of critical anthropological engagements with petroculture (e.g., Coronil 1997, Sawyer 2004, Appel 2019). In addition to the generally heavy carbon footprint of northern academic life—e.g., sprawling campuses and conference life—anthropological research practice is arguably one of more routinely carbon heavy disciplines because of its pragmatic reliance on extensive translocal transportation and high energy data infrastructures. Critical reflexive attention to energy spotlights the ubiquity of petroculture as coeval socio-material-infrastructural context in which much field research unfolds. In this paper, I discuss what it means to practice critical energy anthropology in the shared sideways context of petroculture. And I ask what strategies exist, what reforms might be necessary, to avoid the coeval becoming coevil in a moral sense. Petroculture is deixis on steroids: it is you, it is me, it is they and them, and always us. Petroculture sets us into motion, it occupies the carpet and the paint on the walls, it makes the world of plastics outside and, increasingly, inside our bodies. Petroculture is up, down, here, there, everywhere. If only Dr. Seuss had lived to write the definitive book about petroculture. [SLIDE] But settling now on our panel theme, petroculture is sideways too. Once you know what you’re looking for, it will never leave your peripheral vision. I used to spend a lot of time thinking and writing about reflexivity. Honestly, I miss those days. That’s how I came into contact with many of the fine people on this panel. But the last 15 years has dragged me deeper and deeper into energy and environmental research. And the more lost I have become in the recesses of that cave system, the dimmer the guiding light of reflexivity has seemed. This panel challenges that dim light. [SLIDE] Of course, reflexivity is important to anthropological research on energy and environment. Reflexivity is the art of knowing not only what is known but how what is known is known. Without reflexivity there is no perspective, no way to appreciate the sculpting powers of history and sociality upon understanding. The problem in the energy/environmental cavern is the threat of asphyxiation. The urgency of climate change and related Anthropocene phenomena feels like more and more stones being placed on our chests each year. When you are gasping for breath reflexivity feels like the luxury you can ill afford. Who has time for nuance when the world is burning? Irony seems completely senseless. As our mouths fill with smoke and water, we want an actual life raft, a straight political manifesto, some direct action, we want the salvation right now. Yet that attitude of uncompromising presence, of living in the livid moment, is itself a kind of mania. [SLIDE] Mania overestimates the experience of now versus both past and future. It is worth remembering that the manic lifestyle of the global North is what summoned the Anthropocene in the first place. Petroculture is mania as my colleague Joseph Campana argues. He writes of how the centralization of oil capitalism in modern economies infiltrated cultural rhythms, creating an “interlacing of energic and affective cycles constituted by the oscillation between booms and busts” and manifesting in wild swings of exuberance and catastrophe. For Campana, petroculture disposes us to manic behavior even in our efforts to escape petroculture; he instead urges us to resist our most zealous impulses and instead to explore “powering down,” not so much in the sense of turning off lights and turning to bikes but rather by retraining “the susceptible and interlocking circuits of feeling and flesh” to do less. The instinctive critical response to the intensifying Anthropocene is to talk about all the hard work that needs to be done to reform this civilization. But we might achieve more not by working harder to be greener but simply by doing less, committing to a kind of ethical, sustainable idleness that my dissertation advisor Marshall Sahlins once called the original affluent society. In our unoriginal affluent society by contrast, petromania abides, epitomized in the American model of growth-obsessed high energy modernity that continues to set a global standard for prosperity. The political question I often ask myself these days is what it will take to dispel petromania. But it seems impossible to answer that question without reflexive reflection on how we became petromaniacs in the first place. [SLIDE] Stephanie LeMenager poses a similarly haunted question in her brilliant book, Living Oil, when she wonders “why [does] the world that oil makes remain so beloved?” (2014: 69). Peering into the affective depths of American petroculture, she asks what complex of emotions and urges binds us to a mode of life that, with each passing year, reveals itself to be more environmentally catastrophic. LeMenager rightly identifies love for oil and the way of life it has made possible as a fundamental feature of the affective ties that bind. She discusses the “petromelancholia” that reference yearnings for the “easy oil” of the mid 20th century. In that era, the American model of modernity globalized, greased by the massive petro/chemical apparatus of the second world war that sought to rationalize its continued existence through a new postwar dispensation of high carbon democracy (Mitchell 2009). American modernity advertised unfettered luxury in the form of new time-saving machines, breathtaking speeds and automobility, and magical materials like plastics. Easy oil promised both prosperity today and an ever-brighter future; in the mid 20th century, experts and public alike sincerely believed that fossil fueled economic and technological development could expand infinitely. This was before the consequences of petroculture began to interrupt fantasies of fossil infinitude. Courageous projects like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and tragic events like the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 drew widespread public attention to mounting evidence of ecosystemic destabilization. At first these destabilization trends were interpreted as isolated pathologies within an otherwise sound system. But, after the Club of Rome report in 1972, [SLIDE] the future outlook of fossil fueled modernity was clouded by premonitions of widespread and rapid civilizational collapse were global trends in economic growth and resource depletion to continue into the 21st century. The “environmentality” (Luke 1995) that coalesced in the 1970s ironically saw its greatest victory in the hobbling of nuclear energy, a cause that the fossil fuel industry vigorously supported. [SLIDE] Nevertheless, it became harder to love fossil fuels without qualification and “sustainability” emerged as a new, if also obscure, object of desire. [SLIDE] Ecosocialist alternatives flickered in the 1970s and 1980s and philosophers like André Gorz challenged petrocapitalism’s “poverty of affluence” and gave birth to the concept of décroissance (Gorz 1980) or “degrowth” as it is more commonly known today. But these knowledges were actively repressed. The American model doubled down on petromodernity in the form of neoliberal globalization, which, among many other dispossessive projects, relocated the worst sites of environmental pollution and waste beyond the view of northern media and northern publics. [SLIDE] The shrouding of the world’s silent springs allowed the love of oil to endure a few decades longer, at least in the North, and even to deepen. Over half of cumulative global greenhouse gas emissions have taken place in the last thirty years, a time in which the world allegedly “knew better” than to continue burning fossil fuels. Today it is rare to hear encouraging environmental news. In fact, most days there is none. The climate emergency is upon us, ceaselessly manifesting in record-breaking floods, fires, droughts, extinctions and blooms, a moveable feast of terror that sweeps across the globe with each changing season. Unsurprisingly, “climate anxiety” has become a new affective phenomenon, especially among those unaccustomed to experiencing other kinds of social and environmental precarity (Ray 2020). It is striking how quickly anxiety slides into calamity for some of those with the most resources to endure a chaotic future. Indigenous philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte diagnoses this phenomenon as settler apocalypticism: the anxious end-of-the-world doomsaying that appears when the North experiences a mere fraction of the existential terror it once visited upon its colonies (2018). So, what does it mean to try to study sideways in this time of emergency? [SLIDE] In my recent, affordable and readable and very very small book, No More Fossils, I talk about the need for decompositional politics with regard to petroculture. The message is pretty straightforward: We have to kill the global assemblage of the petrostate. [SLIDE] I say we not as an offhand deictic appeal but in the specific sense of the co-eval raised by this panel. Only a small subset of humanity set the Anthropocene trajectory in motion and fewer still benefited from it. Nevertheless, the emergency has arrived for all of us. There are few things more coeval than climate change. [SLIDE] It is our time together, our atmosphere, contemporaries and consociates alike. Indeed, there are only a few comparable hyperobject-scale threats of this kind including nuclear weapons and settler colonialism and finance capital and after some study one realizes they are all knotted together. I don’t know what your moral standard for evil is and I’m not expecting us to agree on one. I won’t argue that the petroleum—by the way the second most abundant liquid on the planet—is intrinsically evil because a humble ball of tar never hurt any humans though the ghosts of a great many sabre tooth tigers and mastodons and dwarf pronghorn antelopes may have different stories to tell. [SLIDE] But I will say that petroleum has been made by settler colonialism and liberalism into the most evil infrastructure the world knows. [SLIDE] More evil than the war machines that scour the planet? Well, show me the tank that runs on wind power. Show me the bullet made of bamboo. Take oil and coal out of the world tomorrow and you end the machinery of modern warfare too. Oil is war, yes, but also climate change, plastic pollution, scorching drought, air choked with soot. If oil isn’t evil infrastructure then I can’t imagine what else meets the collective moral threshold. Oil is our coeval via petroculture, and also our coevil, because each of us works in the petrostate, practices petrohabits and is soaked in petroknowledge of various kinds. The reflexive question is what we academics can do to start decomposing that evil infrastructure. How can we compost the petrostate? No one is virtuous here, certainly not me. I’m not going to talk about carbon footprints, not going to step into the neoliberal bear trap of individualizing responsibility for collective social and political phenomena like energy and transportation infrastructures. We need to act collectively. Perhaps especially anthropologists. Despite our generally progressive and sometimes radical political orientation, our research practice is one of the more routinely greenhouse gas intensive, given its reliance on extensive transportation and high energy data infrastructures. The numbers aren’t great for academia overall. [SLIDE] Of the 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States only about 100 have pledged to divest from fossil fuels. That’s 2.5%. Of Canada’s over four hundred colleges, universities and institutes, only 10 or less than 2.5% have pledged even a partial divestment. [SLIDE] These numbers are roughly on par with divestments from Apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. Putting a brave face on this we can say that it’s a start and I want to personally acknowledge the courage and tenacity of everyone in this room who has helped move a divestment campaign forward. But if you haven’t and if you teach in North America and your institution is not on this list then you have something to bring up at your next department meeting. The best book on the political possibilities of contemporary academic life is hands down The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. [SLIDE] Every academic should read this book, especially every academic who has suffered through an interminable co-eval (choose your homonym!) academic meeting, which could have been email, but for some administrator’s clumsy effort at humanity became an in-person meeting to discuss the contents of some spreadsheet, only to resolve to the making of a new spreadsheet, while everyone present silently cursed their vital life being sapped away and then slunk back to their office to stare blankly at a screen before deciding that they were only capable of writing another email. For everyone in that boat, The Undercommons is the most blazing indictment of the negligent, asocial attitudes of bureaucratization and professionalization that have come to define much of higher education. But it also offers the most appreciative recognition of the refuge that the university still offers. Almost despite itself, universities and colleges provide home and shelter to a resilient “maroon community,” an “undercommons of enlightenment” that challenges the negligent asociality of the university and its myriad empty policy proclamations with humble experiments in relationality, mutual indebtedness, theft, abolition and revolution. Harney and Moten write, “The plan is to invent the means in a common experiment launched from any kitchen, any back porch, any basement, any hall, any park bench, any improvised party, every night. This ongoing experiment with the informal, carried out by and on the means of social reproduction, as the to come of the forms of life, is what we mean by planning; planning in the undercommons is not an activity, not fishing or dancing or teaching or loving, but the ceaseless experiment with the futurial presence of the forms of life that make such activities possible.” (74) [SLIDE] To experiment with the futurial presence of forms of life. That is the task at hand. If you can remember the future then you know where you are going. It doesn’t matter how bureaucratized your university is. It doesn’t matter how addicted it is to oil revenue. It doesn’t matter how negligent or frightened your local bureaucrats are about ending oil. The undercommons is there too, not below you, but in the spaces between, planning and partying in secret rooms with hidden doors or flying low where the petroradar can’t spot them. There, a maroon community is experimenting with the futurial presence of life after oil. We need decompositional politics to unmake the ecocidal trajectory of a manic delusional petroculture and recompositional politics aimed at restoring futurity and mutual thriving. I guarantee those politics are already happening somewhere nearby. You might just need to look sideways. Thank you. 1

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Petroculture Sideways: Coeval, coevil

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