Szeman-The Cultural Politics of Oil

7/30/2019 Szeman-The Cultural Politics of Oil

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Polygraph 22 (2010)

The Cultural Politics of Oil: On Lessons

of Darkness and Black Sea Files

Imre Szeman

Capitalist production has not yet succeeded and neverwill succeed in mastering these (organic) processes inthe same way as it has mastered purely mechanical or

inorganic chemical processes. Raw materials such asskins, etc., and other animal products become dearerpartly because the insipid law o rent increases thevalue o these products as civilizations advance. As aras coal and metal (wood) are concerned, they becomemore dicult as mines are exhausted.

Karl Marx, Teories o Surplus Value1

For the past two years Ive been receiving news eeds romthe New York imes and other magazines and newspapers

alerting me to articles dealing with oil. In some weeks, thenumber o articles I would receive was staggering: seven ormore in a day, y or more in a week, and all rom a singlenewspaper. Many o these articles were (predictably enough)about the rise in gasoline prices (which peaked in the U.S. at$4.11 per gallon in July 2008) and its impact on airline ticketsales, the driving habits o suburbanites, and the price o any-thing that needed to be shipped to marketwhich is to sayalmost everything. Others dealt with existing and emerginggeopolitical challenges connected to the cost o oil and the

problem o its increasingly limited supply: the rise o petro-oligarchies (rom Russia to Venezuela, rom Kazakhstan tomy home province o Alberta), the stresses placed on energysupply by the expansion o developing economies, (especiallyChina and India), and the impact o oil on global ood sup-plies. Finally, there were articles that dealt in a broad waywith the ecological impacts o the ever-increasing use o dirtyenergy such as crude oil. Tese articles stressed the need todevelop new sources o energy and tried to draw attention to


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34 Te Cultural Politics o Oil

the necessity o reshaping, in a undamental way, our daily habits and practices inorder to save the planet.

Oil was everywhere, connected to everythingand yet there was somethingmissing. Despite all that has been and continues to be written about oil, it still seemsto be dicult to capture the undamental way in which access to petrocarbons struc-tures contemporary social lie on a global scale. Oil is not one energy source amongothersa bad habit that needs to be overcome through the creation o the energyequivalent o a nicotine patch that would slowly wean people o their 84-million-barrel-a-day habit and put us the path o cleaner living and healthier lungs. Oil is not

just energy. Oil is history, a source o cheap energy without which the past centuryand a hal would have been utterly dierent. And oil is also ontology, the structuring

Real o our contemporary sociopolitical imaginary, and perhaps or this reason justas inaccessible as any noumenon in the fow o everyday experience rom the smoggyblur o sunrise to sundown. When one discusses the end o oil and imagines the mainissue to be the possibility o replacement uelsbasically, energy rom the sun, inwhatever ormone ails to grasp that we are not dealing with an input that can easilytake other orms, but with a substance that has given shape to capitalist social reality,perhaps as much as the division o labor or the dance o commodity reication.2

Te cosmic joke is on us: the last two centuries o capitalist social developmenthas burned through energy resources which are the product o 500 million years ogeological time. As M. King Hubbert, o the amous Hubberts Peak, writes:

When these uels are burned, their precious energy, aer undergoing a se-

quence o degradations, nally leaves the earth as spent, long-wavelength,low-temperature radiation. Hence, we deal with an essentially xed store-house o energy which we are drawing upon at a phenomenal rate Terelease o this energy is a unidirectional and irreversible process. It can hap-pen only once, and the historical events associated with this release are nec-essarily without precedent and are intrinsically incapable o repetition.3

Te arcs o population, gross domestic product, and energy consumption over thepast century and a hal all swoop upward in perect harmony when graphed againstone another. It is the massive increase in per capita energy consumption that has

enabled classical industrial, urban, and economic development.4 oo bad that whatis a temporary source o energy has been treated as permanent and undamental toour growth economies, and that, even on the brink o a looming disaster, the end ooil tends to disappear over the horizon as the result o indierence, long-establishedhabits, or the diculty o imagining that things could really be as bad as all thegeologists and ecologists say they are; the decrease in the cost o a gallon o uel dueto the global nancial crisis has resulted in the immediate return o older patternso driving.

In an earlier paper, I identied three dominant narratives through which thecrisis o the end o oil has been described and comprehended to date: strategic real-

ism, techno-utopianism and eco-apocalypse.5 Discourses o strategic realism deal with


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35Imre Szeman

the problem o oil as being primarily about the ways in which governments secureongoing access to diminishing supplies o energy. Techno-utopianism recognizesthat the continuation o our current global social and political reality requires ahigh level o energy use, and imagines technological solutions that would substitutenew orms o energy or those on which we currently rely. Finally, eco-apocalypsediscoursesthe main orm o oil discourses on the Leocus on the need to unda-mentally reshape contemporary social lie. Tese discourses are aware o the absolutedependence o society on petrocarbons and try to generate an alarm loud enough toproduce a social awakening regarding our plight. Tey are apocalyptic in a doublesense: rst, because they are aware o the real nature o oilthat oil is history andsocial ontologyand are anxious about the implications o its decline or humanpopulations and the massive xed inrastructure o cities and transportation systemsin which they live; second, because despite the ability o these discourses to name theproblem, to describe it in detail and with great complexity, they conront a politicaland cultural impasse that is seen, nally, as being nearly impossible to overcome.Increasingly sophisticated charts detailing the use o land and sea resources, over-

views o the coming uture mapped through Peak Oil charts and photo-essays show-ing the impact o the economics o oil on human communities and naturethere isa sense that none o these will do what one might hope they would, i.e. help producenew political circumstances and a clearer idea o the challenges we collectively ace. 6Which is to say: apocalyptic environmentalism is as traumatized by the ailure osocial rationalitythe Enlightenment and its promised orward march rom im-maturity to maturityas it is by the material consequences o current patterns o

energy use. Or rather, the real limits such discourses conront concern the politics orepresentationo producing social and political change rom the narratives aboutthe uture that they paintin the ace o the positivism o technological thinking orpolitical imaginaries which see resource usage primarily as a problem o nationalsecurity and the health o domestic economies.

Are these the only ways to think about oil? Or are there are other narratives thatgo beyond the stubborn Realpolitiko strategic-realism, the magic o technologicalthinking, or the guilty pleasures o the coming end times? It would be helpul tohave as a ourth discourse a Marxism which is engaged not just with ecology ( laJoel Kovel and others) but with the political, economic andconceptual signicance

o raw inputs into the shape o capitalism.7 With the exception o some attention toresource scarcity (e.g., the work o Michael Perelman), the tendency, especially withthe rising interest in creative or cognitive labor, has been to arm Marxs view thatnature is subsumed directly into production without mediation.8

In the absence o such a ourth discourse, but with the problem o politicalrepresentation in mind, I want to consider the way in which the politics o oil areaddressed in two lmsWerner Herzogs Lessons o Darkness (1992) and UrsulaBiemanns Black Sea Files (2005).9 Both useully complicate my typology o oil nar-ratives and their sterile politics, and oer some insight into both what is missing andwhat is all too present in each o them. Strategic realism and techno-utopianism are

narratives which insist on maintaining the status quo at any cost; eco-apocalypse


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understands that oil is history, ontology, and culture, but cant see the way orwardgiven oils omnipresence just below the skin o society (even as it is disappearing

beneath the skin o the Earth). Current ways o thinking about oil either ignore orarm an antinomy which they know to exist even i they cant name it, as opposedto trying to think their way through it. Might these lms about oil, and about theway we represent it or ail to represent it to ourselves, give us some ideas about howto generate other narratives about the uture to comean ecological politics whichabandons the comorts o either apocalypse or business as usual?

Given the social and economic importance o oil and its strategic importance sinceat least the First World War, it comes as somewhat o a surprise that there are soew lms or other cultural narratives which address it head-on. Te oil crisis o

1973 produced many more cultural artiacts than our current encounter with steepoil priceseverything rom board games to presidential addresses on the need toseverely reduce uel consumption.10 Te two most common lmic orms in whichwe encounter oil today are geopolitical thrillers, in which oil takes the place vacatedby ideology in the Cold War, and documentary lms, which carry out a hoped-orpedagogic unction in bringing to light the problems caused by our dependenceon oil. In thrillers like Syriana (2005) and Te Deal(2005), oil is central to the plotand yet nevertheless incidental. Narratively arranged with multiple storylines whichtake place in numerous locationsa now common, overly literal attempt to rep-resent the new reality o globalizationthe struggle over oil resolves into a airly

standard storyline about the links between corporate and political power, and theways in which greed and money deorm social lie. In this respect, it is no dierentthan the television serial Dallas (19781991), and equally belated. O slim import-ance to the plot, oil in Dallas is merely the source o the Ewing amilys wealth andthe reason that they live in Dallas (though one would have thought Houston to be amore appropriate site or oil moguls); a telenovela avant la lettre, money, power andamily strie drive the narrative (Lucy wont go to school! J.R. is sleeping around!),which is otherwise so disinterested in geopolitics as to miss the act that aer 1973oil wealth springs not rom the soils o exas but rom other parts o the world(those smart Ewings wasted a lot o money on state senators who were unlikely to

be able to help them with oil claims in Saudi Arabia).On the other hand, documentaries such as A Crude Awakening(2006) or Fuel

(2008) ollow a pattern traced out by other recent docs on a range o topics. 11 Teconsequences o our dependence on oil are analyzed by experts, alarming statisticsare trotted out concerning the years remaining in the lie o oil and our levels o CO

2

emissions, and we are implored to do something beore it is too late. Oil thus becomesthe latest in a long list o social problems which could be resolved except or a lack opolitical will (which seems to be in shorter supply than even hydrocarbons), whichthe documentarians hope to kick-start by inorming the public. Documentaries onoil tend to ollow the script o eco-apocalypse; so, too, do oil thrillers, although they

do so through a ascination with the blind sel-condence and violence o strategicrealism, which oers irresistible resources or drama and characterization.


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Black Sea Files and Lessons o Darkness undertake comparatively novel explora-tions o the politics o oil. In part this is because they attend to oil as a social problemwhich still needs to be puzzled out rather than as a lesson about the act that cor-porations want money or that driving produces CO

2(neither an especially shocking

insight). It is also because each engages in experiments in documentary orm inorder to make sense o the place o oil in our lives. Herzogs better-known Lessonsis an example o his ongoing work in a genre that has been called nonction ea-ture. Deliberately pushing against the indexical qualities o documentary cinema,he has repeatedly intervened in the construction o purportedly real lms by sta-ging scenes or inventing story elements to enhance dramatic narrative (as in LittleDieter Needs to Fly[1997]), and has made use o documentary and ound ootageto construct ctions out o documented realities. Lessons is modelled on his earlierFata Morgana (1972), a more poetic, less linear lm based on ootage shot in andaround the Sahara Desert, linked together by the directors voice-over reading o aMayan creation myth and songs by Leonard Cohen. Te images in Lessons comerom ootage taken over a month-long period o oil elds le burning in Kuwait atthe conclusion o the rst Gul War in 1991. More than 700 wells were set on re byIraqi troops at the conclusion o the war; it required eight months to ully extinguishthe res due both to their scale and intensity and because land mines le around thewells had to be identied and deused beore crews could move in. An estimated 6million barrels o oil per day were burned o by the res; the total cost o puttingthem out ran to $1.5 billion U.S. Te twelve chapters o Herzogs lm dri over thehellish landscape produced by roaring, jetting ames o oil, white sand turned black

in every direction, the machines and bodies o insect-like humans rendered insig-nicant by the scale o the devastation.

Black Sea Files is also arranged into sections: ten eld notes (numbered 0 to9) taken as part o a visual exploration o the development o a British Petroleumpipeline running rom Bibi-Heibat in Azerbaijan through Georgia and urkey, whereit ends at an oil terminal on the Mediterranean. Biemanns lm is both video and artproject: while the ten eld notes can be shown successively as a documentary, theyhave also been exhibited in museums and galleries on separate monitors which canbe viewed in any order. In Black Sea Files, images appear on a split screen, both halvesin constant motion so that it is dicult to ollow either; voice-overs and right-to-le

streaming text complicate matters even more. As in Herzogs lm, its episodic char-acter interrupts but doesnt entirely displace a narrative trajectory; Biemanns visual

journey rom source to mouth o the pipeline jumps orward and backward in spaceand time as a way o deerring a linearity that would reduce her investigation intomere expos, but the overall movement is still rom source (0) to mouth (9).

I there are similarities at a ormal level, the approaches o the two lms to thesubject o oil are starkly dierent. Lessons is set up as a science-ction lma visualdocument narrated by a visitor to Earth (a trope reused by Herzog in a dierent wayin 2005s Wild Blue Yonder). Over steaming oil-soaked piles o sand, the lm openswith a voice-over: A planet in our solar system. White mountain ranges, clouds, a

land shrouded in mist. Cut to a workman in a white moon suit, gesturing at thecamera: Te rst creature we encountered tried to communicate something to us.


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What we are presented with is thus the view o the Earth and o humanity as a wholeas it appears to alien eyes studying and trying to comprehend what organizes the lieactivity o the creatures it encounters. A city, strangely empty; a war ought over oilwhich leaves behind the husks o cars, trucks, and the bones o animals on oil-soakedsand; bombed-out reneries and pipelines so rusted that their color seems to havebeen leeched by the sun over centuries. Much o the rest o the lm is made up oendless aerial shots o oil deserts and oil lakes, oil bubbling and boiling on the suraceo the Earth, recovery teams laboring with saurian machines to stop the spray o oilinto the air, not to plug it up or good but so that they can suck it out o the groundon their own terms. Te concluding voice-over makes Herzogs aims evident: wogures approach an oil well and set it ablaze again. Has lie without re becomeunbearable or them? Others, seized by madness, ollow suit. Now they are content,now there is something to extinguish again. Oil is at the center o the activity o

these creatures; without it, even given its evident destruction o nature and culture,they would not know what to be or how to live.

Lessons brings our dependence on oil to light quite literally: never has the inkyblack stu been made so visible, raining rom the sky aer a well re has been putout, draining o o workers helmets in streaks across their aces, shown in Borgesianashion as equivalent to the territory o the Earth itsel. Oil is also at the center oBiemanns lm, but what she wants to make visible is not its physical substance, butthe social and human geographies it produces. As in previous projects, such as herinvestigation o gender politics in the structuring o labor in the maquiladoras in the

video Perorming the Border(1999), Black Sea Files sets itsel the project o writingthe hidden matrix o space, o mapping the lived material realities and everydayexperiences produced out o the abstract language o contracts, company planningmaps, and handshakes between politicians. On a map, a pipeline runs straight acrossterritories that look empty, devoid o lie; Biemann wants to understand what hasbeen pushed aside in order to make this emptiness real and what new space itsprevious inhabitants are now orced to occupy. Te introductory segment (File 0)makes explicit her project: to explore geography as an ordering system, one noworganized not around weapons technology but the power o resources. Te BCpipeline project exhibits the geographic and political power o oil in condensedorm, as new petrocapitalist states rush to put in the necessary inrastructure to bring

product to market. Even on a map, existing ethnic tensions and political legacies areembodied in the path ollowed by the pipeline. While it runs in long straight vectors,it also takes sharp turns to circumnavigate Armenia and to skirt Kurdish territoryin urkey.

Each o the les in Black Sea Files lls in the story o the new geographies oresource. File 1 consists o images o the primary oil extraction site, while File 2jumps ahead to Istanbul to show a amily o Kazakhs who have been displaced romChina or ethnic reasons beore doubling back to the shallow oilelds o the CaspianSea; these apparently distinct movements are somehow related. In File 3, we see thepipeline being laid into the ground by a multinational group o engineers and geolo-

gists (mostly Colombians), who are creating not just a pathway or oil but a curious


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geopolitical space: an 80-meter wide, 750-kilometer long strip o land subject to nonational laws or 40 years. File 5 visits armers across whose land the pipeline runs. Inthe sixth le Biemann interviews two prostitutes who have traveled the routes takenby oil tankers rom Azerbaijan to urkey. Oil riches obviously dont trickle down;the completion o the pipeline will endanger even this precarious orm o employ-ment once the truckers disappear. Te nal three les investigate areas around thepipelines terminus. In File 7, Biemann learns rom a social anthropologist who isadvising BP that part o the rationale or the project is to reduce the environmentalimpact o oil tankers traversing the Black Sea and the Bosphorus. Te last two lestry to make sense o the political and signiying gap that exists between sites o oilproduction and oil consumption.

Biemanns closing voice-over brings the project to an indeterminate conclusion:Troughout my investigation, I was bound to visit the secondary scenes o currentaairs, roaming around the lesser debris o history. Secondary, lesser: do the visualand geographic investigations in Black Sea Files complete some picture o geopoliticsthat we would otherwise understand only in parts and so not grasp correctly? Is sheoering up (in line with a airly typical documentary imperative) the small pictureobscured by the bigger one o geopoliticsa document o a desire just to render

visible the minute, invisible processes by which a resource reshapes geography (andso politics, too)? What exactly are we supposed to do with the materials assembledin these les? Biemann hersel isnt sure. Te video is meant as neither investigativereport nor aesthetic arteact; her struggle with the projects political and artistic com-mitments are made explicit in File 4:

[voice-over] What does it mean to take the camera to the eld, to go to thetrenches? How did it get to the point where she stands at the ront next tothe journalists at the very moment o the incident? Without press pass orgas mask. What kind o artistic practice does such video ootage document?Tat o an embedded artist immersed in the surge o human conrontationand conusion. How to resist making the ultimate image that will capturethe whole drama in one rame? How to resist reezing the moment into asymbol?

Is an image made under dangerous conditions more valuable than materialound in libraries and archives? Is better knowledge that which is producedat great risk?

It sounds odd, but its risky to simply record a pipeline. Oil companies runa severe image regime. During construction, image making is prohibited;later it will be invisible anyway. What is the meaning o this tube in the hid-den corporate imaginary o this space? What unction does it have in their

own secret ordering system o the Caucasus?


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o generate images o oil inrastructures is not an aesthetic project, it is anundercover mission. Te challenge is to go undetected when probing orhidden, secret and restricted knowledge. Are these cognitive methods anydierent rom the ones used by geologists, anthropologists or secret intel-ligence agents?

Tey all probe dierent sorts o sediments and plots that give meaning to thespace. What is the sediment I should be probing in my artistic eldwork?What role do I play in this plot?

o generate images o oil inrastructures is not an aesthetic project, it is an under-cover mission, Biemann says. Herzogs Lessons would seem to occupy the othersideof this dichotomy. We are meant to be impressed, awed, and seduced by the scaleo the oil disaster, its stark colors (red on black, white on black), and the dynamic

visual energy o shooting ames and roiling clouds o smoke. Te lm paints thepresent as an apocalypse we are not only ated to live in, but in which we apparentlynd comort as well: without the burning oil, social lie would lose its dynamicorce, its animating rationality. Te narrative voice o the lm (an alien, remember)struggles to make sense o what it sees: can there really be such creatures or whomoil is an object o worship? But Herzog cant resist commentary, and so in parts othe lm we get excerpts rom Revelation (e.g., 16:18: And there were voices, andthunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since

men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, andso great), which direct usback to the lms epigraph, attributed to Blaise Pascal but actually an invention oHerzogs: Te collapse o the stellar universe will occur like creationin grandiosesplendor. Tis seems to be the judgment o history and thus, strictly speaking, out-side o politicsan expression o a proound gloom about human possibility thatconrms the conservative inclination o the alien metaphor, which has become anincreasingly common device in recent art (not to mention the remake oTe Daythe Earth Stood Still [1951 and 2008], now also about nature rather than the ColdWar). Te view rom an alien perspectivethe making literal o a meta-perspec-tiveis intended to allow structural truths to emerge without the intervention o

morality, ethics or political conusion. But this can oen backre: instead o insight,a radical incommensurability between subject and object opens up, resulting in adisavowal o the human as such, what J.J. Charlesworth, writing on the alien, calls

a pessimistic apprehension o impending disaster; a proound sense o uncertaintyand disorientation regarding human societys claim to progressive agency; and akind o post-historical estrangement rom the experience o modernity.12

Te passages rom Revelation arent the only breaks with the science ction nar-rative established at the beginning oLessons. Tere is the music, or one thing: se-lections rom Grieg, Mahler, Prt, Prokoev, Wagner, and others, which ampliy the

visual scale and lend the lm its romantic gravitas. Te chosen scores are ones now

cemented into social consciousness through their use in popular cinema to gesture


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to sublime experiencesthe overwhelming encounter with ate, ear or otherness. Inthis instance, however, consciousness does not return to itsel empowered, but witha sense o the impossibility o overcoming humanitys oil ontology. Ten there arethe two chaptersChapter IV orture Chamber and Chapter VI Childhoodinwhich the camera shis its ocus rom the oil elds to the victims o the Gul War,that is to say, to the victims o oil. orture Chamber begins with a tracking shotover what are presumably a collection o torture devices ound aer the war: knives,pliers, vices, whips, electrical devices, even a toaster. Te chapter ends with the mutetestimony o a woman who tries to talk to the alien narrator about the horror owatching her sons tortured to death in ront o herbut she has lost her ability tocommunicate. Childhood is also about the inability to communicate the experi-ence o a trauma. A young boy whose head was crushed beneath the boot o a sol-dier says to his mother Mama, I dont ever want to learn how to talk and remainspermanently silent thereaer. It may not be an undercover mission in the way thatBiemann imagines Black Sea Files, but, like that lm, Lessons betrays an uncertaintyabout how to explore its topic and best make sense o all the ootage collected inKuwait. Herzog makes this ailure o communication explicit diagetically so that itdoesnt appear as an aesthetic limit or ailure o his approach, but as the very problemwhich he hopes to oreground in the lm.

On a straightorward reading, Biemanns seems to be the more politically as-tute lmthe one which avoids the grand drama and pretense o metaphysics andspeaks about the complex shapes o lie lived under the reign o oil. What connectsthe projects is the joint rustration they exhibit about the object which they want to

represent and better comprehend. Both Biemann and Herzog take oil as the name ora complex problem which requires ormally innovative methods o exploration i oneis to do more than produce an already known object lesson about uel consumptionand the evils o SUVs; it is simultaneously a problem which raises questions aboutthe unction o an aesthetics with political aims and intentions. It is as interesting totake note o what is absent rom these lms so as to assess the ways in which oil isthematized and visualized. Tere is no state to rail against, and no weak politiciansin the pocket o big business to expose: they make a brie appearance in Black SeaFiles, but only as part o a larger system which exceeds them: the need or oil toow. It is not the animation o (that antastically suspect concept o) political will,

whether o audiences or o public gures, which is the objective here. Even in a videowhich takes its project to be an investigative one, the results o the investigation areindeterminate: Biemann generates an analytic o Black Sea oil geographies, but weregiven no sense o how or even iwe are supposed to use this knowledge or someorm o political intervention. Te traumatic utures to come as a result o the endo oil are also nowhere evident. One billion barrels o oil disappeared in ames inKuwaitwhich simply means that more secure access to oil is needed (such as theBC pipeline) in order to avoid the expense o uture wars over the resource.

Tere is one other thing missing: Nature. It seems that all discussions and an-alyses o our use o resources and o oil inevitably bring natural systems into play. It

is Nature that is seen as bearing the cost o a global social system built on oil. Te


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sites and spaces o oil production generate enormous amounts o pollution; tankerspillswidely underreportedleave behind the bodies o dead animals and zoneso ocean and shoreline no longer t or animal and plant habitation. It is o coursethe larger, systemic eects that raise the greatest alarm. Oil is a problem or Naturebecause the emissions released rom burning it produce changes in the atmospherewhose impact on both natural and human systems are likely to be signicant anddicult to undo. Oil narratives are thus oen about what humans must do in orderto mitigate or limit these efects. Yet neither lm seems to have much interest inpursuing this script.

Biemann is interested in social and political geographies as opposed to physicalones, in the way in which social systems are bent to make the fow o this commoditypossible. And Herzog? A desert drowned in oil might seem to be a direct commenton the human impact on the environment. But I think this would be to misreadthe lm, especially given Herzogs view o Nature. Te human relation to Naturehas emerged as a theme in a number o Herzogs lms, the most well-known beingGrizzly Man (2005). In Les Blanks documentary on the making oFitzcarraldo (1982),Herzog expresses the contrarian view o Nature which has guided his lmmaking upto and including his most recent lm, Encounters at the End o the World(2007):

aking a close look at what is around us, there is some sort o harmony. It isthe harmony o overwhelming and collective murder. And we in compari-son to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity o all this jungle,we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look

like badly pronounced and hal-nished sentences out o a stupid suburbannovela cheap noveland we have to become humble in ront o this over-whelming misery and overwhelming ornication and overwhelming growthand overwhelming lack o order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like amess. Tere is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to thisidea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it.

But when I say this I say this all ull o admiration or the jungle. It is notthat I hate it, I love it, I love it very much. But I love it against my better

judgement.

Lessons treats Nature in this way: both with admiration and suspicion, insisting onits disorder, its mess. Oil is Nature here, not something that should be banishedrom it as a oreign element. What the spew o oil draws to our attention are theproblems that exist in our comprehension o Nature that would see the bodies ozooplankton and phytoplankton as something completely other, an alien substancewhich just happens to lie below the surace o the Earth and which ulllswhatluck!two key requirements or its use by capital: it can be easily transported andstored, and it generates a signicant amount o energy per unit o uel. In Herzogs

imaginary, we love oil, and we love Nature, too: both organize our activity and sense


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o human purpose. For him, it is the desire or harmony and purpose in Naturethat uels our love or it; it is a desire which must be guarded against i we want tounderstand our deep cultural and political imperativesthe how and why o thebodies shufing across the black sand who cant help but worship the black ink andthe heat and light it generates.

Unbehagen in der Natur: a play on the original German title o Freuds DasUnbehagen in der Kultur(Te Uneasiness/Discomort in Culture, translated inEnglish as Civilization and its Discontents). Tis is the title o the nal chapter inSlavoj ieks In Deense o Lost Causes (2008).For iek, our contemporary uneasi-ness about Nature is certainly justied; and it is a productive discomortas long aswe understand it or what it is. He expresses worries that the ecology o earourworries about everything rom the potentially disastrous outcome o biogenetic ex-periments to anxieties about the exploitation o Earths resourceshas every chanceo developing into the predominant orm o ideology o global capitalism, a newopium or the masses replacing declining religion.13

Why might this be this the case? Like Herzog, iek views the treatment o Naturewithin most orms o ecological thinking as undamentally conservative. Nature istreated as the ultimate orm o order that (in the last instance) ofers security tohuman social lie; there is also an insistence on the act that the natural world iscomplete unto itsel and that any change with respect to it can only be a change orthe worse.14 Te position iek argues or is that o ecology without nature, sincehe eels that the ultimate obstacle to protecting nature is the very notion o naturewe rely on.15 Tis ecology without nature would be one that starts rom an accept-

ance o the act that nature qua the domain o balanced reproduction, o organicdeployment into which humanity intervenes with its hubris, brutally throwing itscircular motion o the rails, is mans antasy; nature is already in itsel second na-ture, its balance is always secondary, an attempt to bring into existence a habit thatwould restore some order aer catastrophic interruptions.16 It is in the chaos andgroundlessness o second nature that any political act that has a hope o radicallyconronting ecological catastrophe has to take place.

Might we not see these lms as attempts at producing ecologies without Nature?Oil seems like the most basic o substances; worries about what we might do withoutit seem as easily addressed as the placement o ads or wind and solar power in the

pages o magazines, or shis in public policy (which have been taking place, i not inthe U.S. or Canada, then in Germany and France). I I have treated oil as somethingstranger, ull o metaphysical mystery and subtlety, it is because it is in a very realway absent rom social liedespite the act that it is all around us in physical ormin plastics, uels, ertilizers, and so on. In both the labor theory o value and in thelanguage o economics, the resources we depend on are strictly speaking without

value: or capitalism, nature always comes or ree. It is only the cost o extractingresourcesthe cost o ground rents, labor, and materialsthat appear on ledgersheets, which is why it has proven so dicult or ecological economists to give anumber to natures contribution to economic processes. Estimates o the economic

contribution o Nature range rom $36 trillion annually to innite; the point o such


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calculations is to generate changes in social behavior by making the real costs o ouractions on the ecological system part o the system o value. 17 But how do you pricea nite input that is essential to the operation o the whole system? Arent oil andcapitalism in a sense one and the same? Tese questions are dicult enough to prop-erly pose, much less to answer. No grand conclusions, no mysteries solved: Black SeaFiles and Lessons o Darkness draw attention to the desperate need or contemporaryle theory to engage in the dicult work o making oil and other natural resourcesa central part o our political imaginings and strategizing, and o the need to do sowithout the comorting ease o dreams o transcendence and salvation.

1 Karl Marx, Teories o Surplus Value, 3 vols. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 19631971),3:368.

2 For what its worth, in an eort to highlight our reliance on energy, Jean-Marc Jancovicihas (provocatively) invented a slave equivalent measure to point to how many laboringbodies worth o energy (calculated quite precisely in kilowatt-hours) an average personmakes use o in her daily activities. Te energy consumption o the average French personis equivalent to each owning 100 slaves to work or her (cooking, cleaning, generating heat,moving them around, etc.); the average American would require closer to 200 slaves. Seehttp://www.manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/slaves.html.

3 Quoted in William Marsden, Stupid to the Last Drop (oronto: Vintage Canada, 2008),49.

4 Jacob Lund Fisker, Te Laws o Energy, in Te Final Energy Crisis, ed. Andrew McKillopwith Sheila Newman (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 74.

5 Imre Szeman, System Failure: Oil, Futurity and the Anticipation o Disaster, SouthAtlantic Quarterly106, no. 4 (2007): 805823.

6 For examples o all o these, see John Knechtel, ed., FUEL (Cambridge, MA: Te MIPress, 2008).

7 Joel Kovel, Te Enemy o Nature: Te End o Capitalism or the End o the World? (NewYork: Zed Books, 2007).

8 As soon as he has to produce, man possesses the resolve to use a part o the availablenatural objects directly as means o labour, and, as Hegel correctly said it, subsumes

them under his activity without urther process o mediation. Karl Marx, Grundrisse(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 734.

9 Lessons of Darkness, dir. Werner Herzog (Hemispheric Pictures, 2002) and Black Sea Files:

Video Essay in 10 Parts, dir. Ursula Biemann (2005).10 C. Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardani, Sorry, Out o Gas: Architectures Response to the

1973 Oil Crisis (Montreal: Canadian Centre or Architecture/Corraini Edizioni, 2008).11 Other examples include Te End o Suburbia (2004), Peak Oil: Imposed by Nature (2005),

Te Curse o Oil(2005), Te Power o CommunityHow Cuba Survived Peak Oil(2006),An Inconvenient ruth (2006), Who Killed the Electric Car?(2006), Blood and Oil(2008),etc.

12 J.J. Charlesworth, Any Other But Our Selves,Mute: Culture and Politics afer the Net

(September 25, 2008), http://www.metamute.org/en/content/any_other_but_our_selves.13 Slavoj iek, In Deense o Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2008), 439.14 Ibid., 441.

15 Ibid., 445.


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45Imre Szeman

16 Ibid. 442.17 For the o-cited ormer gure, see Robert Constanza, et. al., Te Value o the Worlds

Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital, Nature 387 (1997): 253260. For a contrary view,

one which emphasizes (among other things) that possible stresses to the natural world arealready accounted or by standard measures in capitalist economies, see Bjrn Lomborg,Te Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State o the World (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also Jacob Stevens insightul review o Lomborg,

Monetized Ecology, New Lef Review 16 (2002): 1431.

Szeman-The Cultural Politics of Oil

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