The cartography of oil as an
omnipresent entity narrating the dynamics of Earth. According to Hamid Parsani, oil is the
undercurrent of all narrations.
Petropolitics can be studied to pursue the emergence of Xerodrome as a
flat climax to the Pipeline Odyssey or a world whose narrative is mainly
conducted through and by oil.
~Reza
Negarestani
When oil spills, Earth opens its
archives.
~Tom
McCarthy
Taking into consideration its formal and stylistic nuances,
which have been acknowledged although not yet fully realized, we should insist
that the most important aspect of the first (and thus far, only) season of Nic
Pizzolatto’s True Detective (2014) is
not the disturbing, provocative, and obscure case that occupies the dark heart
of the show’s narrative before unfolding into an unimaginable network of
criminal debauchery and lechery. What
about those recurring backdrops of the Louisiana oil industry: swaths of
factories laid out in patterned tracts along the coastline? Or what about Rust Cohle’s brief comment on
the oil landscape and the state of the Anthropocene: “Pipeline covering up this
coast like a jigsaw. Place is going to be under water within 30 years”? Or, finally, what about the delirious and
oneiric opening credits sequence – images of oil refineries superimposed over
shots of characters and stills from various episodes. Throughout the entire season, oil remains a
kind of specter haunting the backdrop of the American landscape, weaving the
relations of the inhabitants of Louisiana and conducting patterns of behavior
and interaction to a degree that is likely unquantifiable. Episodes of climatological catastrophe and
erosion dictate the elements of the very case to which the show’s main characters
are assigned. Late in the season, Cohle
theorizes that their murderer “had a real good time after Katrina.” Everywhere, large-scale processes of
technological augmentation and environmental reaction shape the trajectory of
the narrative.[i]
This is not a commentary on True Detective exclusively, but on something more widespread and
permeating: oil. However, this is not an
analytical or political paper on the geopolitics of oil, or international
global strategies for securing oil reserves across the world, although such
posturings play a role in what I want to discuss. I want to discuss oil as darkness, oil as
horror. I will not be the first to do
this: Reza Negarestani beat me to the punch in his genre-defying Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous
Materials (2008), and foreshadowings of this pattern can be detected in
Lovecraft and other weird fiction authors, and even earlier, in more
classically Gothic texts such as The
Moonstone (1868), and even earlier in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of
Usher” (1839). My justification for
making these speculative leaps lies in the presence not of oil per se, but of
slime, ooze, tarn, swamps, and so on: the presence of a dark, sneaking
substance. While it is certainly the
case that oil evokes sharper political dynamics than, say, the tarn beneath
Poe’s House of Usher, the dark implications and ambiguities of substance –
material substance, dark matter –
carries over into oil, its appearance as oozy, slimy, and organic.[ii] My project in this post is thus not to
construct any intensely researched argument, but rather to illuminate the
disparate points of a potentially radiant constellation – to ponder some
possibilities on the cultural meaning of oil, or its location in the cultural
unconscious. Perhaps most simply, this
post is an exploration of nothing more than various images.
First and foremost, I want to think of oil in a dual
capacity, as both literal and figurative.
By this, I mean that in the texts I focus on here oil serves an
important figurative purpose. Oil is
dark, it is sticky and heavy, it fuels engines as well as economies; and it
derives from the leftover decay of perished organisms, the dead entities of
prior epochs. Through these energies,
oil takes on a variety of metaphoric values.
However, oil is never entirely
figurative – it is tactile and flammable, it bears the testimony of previously
living organisms. Oil is literally
matter, and as matter it is meaningless.
Our apprehension of this ubiquitous substance produces an oscillation
between oil in its many figurative and literal ontologies. There is matter here, and there is
meaning. Thus, in a very strict sense, I
adhere to Negarestani’s definition of petropolitics, printed at the beginning
of this piece: oil is a narrative medium,
a material through which meaning emerges.
This speculative pursuit not only figures the darkness of modernity that
I aim to explore, but the well-known diplomatic relations of our current
geopolitical state: “US relations with Israel largely developed within this
general context,” Noam Chomsky writes in Hegemony
or Survival; “In 1948 the Joint Chiefs of Staff were impressed with
Israel’s military prowess, describing Israel as second only to Turkey in
military power in the region. They
suggested that Israel might offer the US means ‘to gain strategic advantage in
the Middle East’ to offset Britain’s declining role” (163). Oil lurks in the background of our national
narrative, the narrative of our relations with foreign nations, despite efforts
by the State Department and other governmental bodies to spin the arc of this
narrative in other directions (usually along the lines of “good guys” versus
“bad guys” – the US and Israel against the evil terrorists).
We must make a distinction here between oil as narrator and oil as medium. There is some
confusion in Negarestani’s definition, for he identifies oil as an “omnipresent
entity narrating the dynamics of Earth,” but also as “the undercurrent of all
narrations” (Cyclonopedia 242). Regardless of Negarestani’s intended meaning
(if one exists), I want to propose that oil works, before all else, as a medium
of transmission. Narrative might emerge
through oil, in Negarestani’s conception; but oil itself is not the narrator, at least not in any traditional
sense. Kate Marshall addresses this
point succinctly in her essay, “Cyclonopedia
as Novel (a meditation on complicity as inauthenticity).” Treating Negarestani’s novel in the context
of China Miéville’s discussion in World
Literature Today, which describes the text as an outline “For a Science
Fiction of the Earth as Narrated from a Nethermost Point of View” (Miéville,
“Fiction” 12), Marshall suggests that Miéville’s piece
describes
a fiction, a fact of narration, a point of view. But unlike, for example, the definition of
‘world petropolitics’ as ‘earth narrated by oil,’ or even oil as organizer of
the earth’s narrations, something else is going on. The phrase ‘Earth as narrated by oil” has a
subject earth, and a narrator, oil.
Narrated by oil. But a ‘fiction
of the earth as narrated from a nethermost point of view’ has no narrator. It is not narrated ‘by’ any one or
thing. Or if it is, this science fiction
of the earth is narrated by the point of view itself. But can a point of view narrate, even in Cyclonopedia? (Marshall, “Novel” 153-54)
Marshall gestures here
toward the ambiguity of narratological perspective in Cyclonopedia, and how this ambiguity is bound implicitly (according
to the text) to the image of oil.
Marshall goes on to explore the complexities of perspective in the
novel, and how these complexities respond to traditional questions in narrative
theory and novel studies; however, I want to remain on the presence of oil
itself.
Oil is ubiquitous in Negarestani’s text, and he spends
much of the first chapter of the book theorizing on the narratological capacity
of oil. However, he also expounds upon
the material qualities of oil – oil as tellurian
lubricant, he writes (Negarestani 19).
There are narratological implications to this, but also organic
qualities, which he specifies as the “Telluro-conspiratorial” aspects of oil:
“trapping the energy of the sun accumulated in organisms by means of lithologic
sedimentation, stratification, anaerobic decay and bacteria in highly
stratified sedimentary basins” (19). In
other words, geological processes become signifying processes, processes of
writing. The imaginative and highly
speculative tone of these suggestions organizes much of the text’s
self-conscious humor: as a purportedly scholarly document framed within a
fictional context, Cyclonopedia actively
undercuts the gravity of its hypotheses.
Various agents within the text, including anonymous frequenters of
internet forums as well as the text’s central figure, Hamid Parsani, develop
questionable theories based on evidence from less than reputable sources: one
character appeals to the work of Dean Koontz (20), while Parsani even cites the
Hollywood movie The Core
(161-62). Another way of putting this is
that the text is, to an extent, self-deprecating. The initials of its enigmatic central
character – a failed academic whose notes are described as “more like the
contents of [his] office trash can than a notebook of an exceedingly
disciplined scholar” (9) – even echo those of another early-20th-century
failed academician: Hamid Parsani… H.P. Lovecraft…
Despite the humorous and occasionally self-deprecating
tone of the text, the lurking presence of oil offers as much food for serious
intellectual thought as it does for dismissal.
Perhaps one of the most impressive aspects of the novel is its reflexive
commentary on its own encoded status: its quality as a text of hidden writing
(60-67). Attending to the explanatory
pages closely, readers come to learn that Negarestani’s text operates not
according to any linear narrative or cohesive plot, but according to its holes,
its apertures, its gaps. Thus, the
unexplained disappearance of Parsani and his entire team, although enticing on
the level of narrative, does not comprise the central, or even a considerable,
concern of the text. What emerges as its
primary motivation is a network of veiled communications, but veiled only in
the sense that we, as readers, have been conditioned to overlook them. Just as religion and morality take center
stage when reading the narrative of Western military occupation in the Middle
East, the center of the text must be something profoundly meaningful and
explanatory – something that grounds us in the plot we have been pursuing. However, as Chomsky tells us about the US
alliance with Israel, it has less to do with religious unity and more to do
with the dictation of material forces, fossil fuels, oil. It has much less to do
with our complicity with moral purity and much more to do with our complicity
with anonymous materials. Likewise, the
ideological act of reading has less to do with our grasp of a transcendental
meaning and more to do with our direction by (and our complicity with) the
material forces of language.
This is how oil functions as both matter and metaphor in
Negarestani’s text. Oil positions
countries and governments, it influences the ideological behaviors of a
population; and it achieves this not through some innate or divine quality, but
through its presence as matter. Like the
refineries in True Detective, oil
slickens the background and the stage, organizes the whole drama for the final
act. Oil begins, in this sense, to look
like a sentient entity; and Negarestani’s mysterious Parsani even evinces that
the Middle East is a living entity, an organism moisturized by the blood of
oil, the remnant of dead matter. In Tom
McCarthy’s more recent literary vision, Satin
Island, oil takes on a less intentional aspect and becomes part of
something even less anthropomorphic: a computational system, an evolutionary
program. Yet oil remains something of a
conductor, or transmitter – a programmer of vast networks of life and
energy. McCarthy’s narrator, known only
as U., develops this presence of oil in an imagined lecture on oil spills:
Oil
and water, as the old adage goes, do not mix.
So what are we observing when we watch these elements con. When we watch them introduced to. When we watch these liquids thrown
together? You might say that we’re
observing ecological catastrophe, or an indictment of industrial society, or a
parable of mankind’s hubris. Or you
might say, more dispassionately, that we’re observing a demonstration of
chemical propensities. But the truth is
that, behind all these episodes. Dramas:
beneath these. Beneath all these dramas, I’d say, and before
them, we’re observing, simply (gentlemen), differentiation. Differentiation in its purest form: the very principle of differentiation. Ones and zeroes, p and not-p: oil,
water. Behind all behaviour, issuing
instructions, sending in the plays – just as behind life itself, its endless
sequencing of polymers – there lies a source code. This is the basic premise of all
anthropology. (Satin Island 112)
McCarthy’s U.
criticizes the traditional humanist response to oil spills as part of a
“misguided and ignorant” ideology that romanticizes the natural world “as
sublime, virginal and pure” (116). In
contrast, U. encourages an embrace of oil as
nature: “Rock-filtered organic compounds – animal, vegetable and mineral –
broken down and concentrated by the planet’s very crust: what could be purer
than that” (116). Satin Island exposes humanity’s adverse reaction to oil spills as
indicative of a deeper exposure: that of our reluctance to witness the exposure
of the death we walk on.
In a sense invoked by both McCarthy and Negarestani, oil
is parasitic. It is organic
decomposition appropriated as fuel, as economic product. We thrive literally upon death, and death
thrives, literally, upon us; and one
of our greatest cultural fears is that death could have its day. Death, of course, in its relation to Life, is
tied up in a biological dynamic with the relation of the earth to the sun; as
Freud wrote as early as 1920 in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, “In the last resort, what has left its mark on the
development of thought must be the history of the earth we live on and its
relation to the sun” (qtd. in Brassier 223).
In this sense, the truth of horror,
not as emotional phenomenon but as a condition of thought itself, comes to the
fore. Horror is the condition of all
thought that finds itself fundamentally concomitant with that which it cannot
think – not that it cannot conceive of something that cannot think, but that it
remains ontologically blind to the very notion of thoughtlessness: as Eugene
Thacker says, “Horror is about the paradoxical thought of the unthinkable”
(Thacker 9). Horror communicates a thing
to which thought necessarily remains incapable of conceptualizing. All we have to work with at this point is a
kind of roughness, a material
presence that terrifies by remaining concealed and horrifies by the realization
that it conceals nothing – no agency, no conceptual being: “what genre horror
does do,” Thacker goes on to say, “is it takes aim at the presuppositions of
philosophical inquiry – that the world is always the world-for-us – and makes
of those blind spots its central concern, expressing them not in abstract
concepts but in a whole bestiary of impossible life forms – mists, ooze, blobs,
slime, clouds, muck” (9). I would add,
of course, to Thacker’s inanimate menagerie: oil.
Despite being the ultimate unconscious condition of human
thought, as well as a deep-seated fear at a visceral – biological even – level,
the paradox of thought, its inability to think its own origins, also secures a
certain libidinal drive: that of thoughtfulness to recede back into
thoughtlessness. This is the basic
premise of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure
Principle as well as one of the major themes of Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010): the idea that matter
“‘wants to lose its self-consciousness’” (50).
DeLillo’s novel is set in the desert, directly in the heart of the
earth’s most visible expressions of accumulation and erosion. In a word, DeLillo’s novel addresses what
Quentin Meillassoux has called the “ancestral,” or the scientifically
quantified and yet cognitively paradoxical temporal period of anteriority: put
simply, time before life. During this
time, there would not only have been no organisms capable of not thinking the
category of thoughtlessness; there would simply have been no organisms at all. Ancestrality, Meillassoux argues, levels a
direct challenge to post-Kantian philosophy by complicating the correlational
quality of thought objects.[iii] Meillassoux’s formulation of the problem and
his proposed solution have enjoyed recent scholarly attention and been hailed
as indicative of a turning point in contemporary philosophy; however, it
remains true that anti-Kantian energies and the paradox of thought have been
expressed before, perhaps most recognizably in Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966), in which the author declares that the
“modern cogito does not reduce the
whole being of things to thought without ramifying the being of thought right
down to the inert network of what does not think” (324). The problem in question, in both Foucault and
Meillassoux, is how thinking beings can conceptualize a temporal period prior
to the emergence of conceptualizing organisms.
The paradox makes itself painfully visible: before the emergence of
thinking beings, thoughtlessness was a condition of the world. Therefore, thinking a world of
thoughtlessness engenders the paradox of making it into a world conceived by
thought.
In Negarestani’s vision, which is only half-fantasy, oil
extends this time of thoughtlessness into modernity itself. Oil enables the inconceivable mobilization of
the earth, sparking a chain reaction of terrestrial events within which human
agents and governments play only passing roles.
Despite its prevalence in much of the text’s theoretical posturings, it
remains in the background. Likewise, True Detective keeps oil in the
background, confined to refineries along the coast, landscape shots and
tangential commentary. In McCarthy’s
novel, Satin Island, oil occupies
newsfeeds, quick snapshots often in background settings even when they grab the
narrator’s attention; furthermore, the grand speech that he delivers on oil
spills is never actually delivered, it is only imagined. The pattern I
develop here should not aim to bring oil into the foreground, to expose it,
open it up and deconstruct it chemically – this is precisely what we should
avoid. The picture painted here
resembles Holbein’s The Ambassadors;
our oil is a smudge, a streak, a material presence that eludes our
perspective. Should we twist ourselves
enough to get a good look at it, we would find that (to our horror) we lose the
world.
True Detective
demonstrates the impossibility of grasping the pure plane of death, the
intractable narrative conditionality of oil, when it takes its viewers to
Carcosa.[iv] Little if anything is explained in the mythic
and ritualistic depths of this holy of holies, the serial killer’s inner
sanctum. As Cohle pursues the killer, we
hear whispered beckonings: “Come die with me, little priest”; or, perhaps more
tellingly, “You know what they did to me? What I will do to all the sons and
daughters of man. You blessed Reggie, Dewall. Acolytes. Witnesses to my journey.
Lovers. I am not ashamed” (Pizzolatto).
While the history of the killer remains largely shrouded in mystery, the
real-life location of Carcosa does not: it was filmed in Fort Macomb, “a
19th-century brick fortress that once guarded the waters of Chef Menteur Pass
in New Orleans” (“Real Location,” Slate). In more recent decades, the fort succumbed to
the natural forces of hurricanes and the gradual weakening of its stone
structure – in short, to the slow but consistent creep and clatter of the
earth. It is a place of abandonment, the
relinquishing of manmade structures to the shifts of the earth, and of
contribution to the expanding layers of the Anthropocene. It has fallen victim, to borrow from McCarthy,
to the source-code of matter.
Following this sense of a code, True Detective’s attention to the creep of matter recalls Cyclonopedia’s numerological explanation
of terrestrial energy. Negarestani’s
text speaks of “feedback spirals,” abstract machines that regulate and organize
the interaction of Trisons: alliances of numerological code (Negarestani
244). These feedback spirals influence
governmental invasions and radical insurgencies by combining Trisons in specific
patterns, thus having large-scale impacts on broad political alliances and
maneuvers; at this point, the text claims, politics morphs into “polytics,” or
political organization that is enabled by the shaping forces of the hard, cold,
nonhuman earth itself. I do not wish to
dwell on these terms or definitions, since they are unrelentingly vague and
highly speculative. However, I do want
to focus on Negarestani’s proposed shape
of this dynamic interaction between Trisons, an interaction that informs the
text’s title. Such machinations materialize,
he claims, as cyclones: “In feedback spirals, all these pragmatic orientations
are simultaneously mobilized to produce a type of polar rotation or degree of
differentiation necessary for the construction of a vortex” (35). The defining figure of material relations,
the organizational complicity of which Negarestani writes, appears as a
cyclone; and Cyclonopedia functions
as a purported (if failed) taxonomy of elements related to the cyclone. In other words, the entire network of
Negarestani’s dark model appears as a destructive phenomenon of material force
and climatological energy.
The connection between oil and cyclones emerges as one of
strata, or layers; over time, as the surface of the earth is battered and worn
by cyclones, the waste and death left behind, that which is covered by the
detritus of ages, comprises the thick darkness that expands beneath. Oil, as McCarthy suggests, is the archives of
terrestrial history – a history of death, of dark ritual murder, of the
inconceivable drive of matter itself.
The compulsion to kill, ritualized and aestheticized in Carcosa, echoes
the compulsion to die, recorded in the fossils and organic substances of epochs
past (just as the killer’s lair is housed within an abandoned and decaying
structure). The altar in the center of
Carcosa, the idol of the Yellow King, presents a secret of matter that does not
want to know itself because to truly know itself would be to no longer know
anything – to be that which does not know.
Dead matter.
Immediately prior to Cohle’s harrowing confrontation with
the killer, he witnesses a vision that seems to hang in the air in the midst of
Carcosa’s holy of holies. The vision
recalls previous episodes and invocations of time “as a flat circle,” and the
ominous description of Carcosa as “he who eats time” (Pizzolatto). The line conjures specters of Lovecraft and
other supernatural entities, but it also refers to something far more banal and
yet excessively horrifying: the ooze of death itself, its material remainder, oil.
It is thus only fitting that when Cohle experiences this vision in the
final episode, it appears to him not as a formless chaos, the very substance of
death itself. It appears, rather, in the
shape of organization that
Negarestani invokes for his impossible taxonomical project. That is, the communicating passage to the
space of death – to the dark heart of Carcosa, he who eats time, the Outside – appears in a vortical fashion,
as a cyclone.
It is also the shape, we must recall, of hurricanes.
And drills.[v]
Works
Cited
Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Chomsky, Noam. Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for
Global Dominance. New York: Metropolitan
Books, 2004.
DeLillo, Don. Point Omega. New York: Scribner, 2010.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage,
1994.
Marshall, Kate. “Cyclonopedia as Novel (a meditation on
complicity as inauthenticity).” Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium. Brooklyn: Punctum Books,
2012.
McCarthy, Tom. Satin Island. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2015.
Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: an Essay on the Necessity of
Contingency. Trans. Ray Brassier.
London: Continuum, 2008.
Morton, Ella. “The Real
Location of True Detective’s Carcosa.”
Slate. The Slate Group. 11 March 2014.
Negarestani, Reza. Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous
Materials. Melbourne: re.press, 2008.
Pizzolatto, Nic. True Detective. HBO. 2014.
Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of
Philosophy Vol. 1. Winchester: Zero Books,
2011.
[i] For more on the Louisiana
landscape and its role in True Detective,
see Adrian Van Young’s brief but compelling piece in Salon, “Santeria and Voodoo All Mashed Together,” published on
March 4, 2014.
[ii] Dark matter also conjures the more cosmic image of dark matter in
an astronomical sense. See Neil deGrasse
Tyson, Death By Black Hole and Other
Cosmic Quandaries, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007, 20: “At the end
of the day, no matter how confident we are in our observations, our
experiments, our data, or our theories, we must go home knowing that 85 percent
of all the gravity in the cosmos comes from an unknown, mysterious source that
remains completely undetected by all means we have ever devised to observe the
universe. As far as we can tell, it’s
not made of ordinary stuff such as electrons, protons, and neutrons, or any
form of matter or energy that interacts with them. We call this ghostly, offending substance
‘dark matter,’ and it remains among the greatest of all quandaries.”
[iii] For more on this compelling topic,
see Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude:
an Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier, London:
Continuum, 2008, 1-27.
[iv] Taken from Ambrose Bierce’s short
story, “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” in which the anonymous narrator wanders
through Carcosa only to eventually stumble upon his own gravestone.
[v] Of course, oil drills have a very
unique shape that does not resemble the shape of typical, smaller drill
bits. However, the spectacular
phenomenon of watching a cyclone spiral to the ground eerily recalls the act of
drilling into the earth.
