BRENT RYAN BELLAMY

science fiction studies, American literature and culture, energy humanities

World Building, World Reduction: Science Fiction, White America, and Totality

Today I want to offer some remarks on the sub-genre of science fiction commonly known as the post-apocalyptic in order to address the topic at hand, thinking totality as remedy to the trouble with the trouble with diversity. This variety of science fiction story imagines a near-future scenario set just after a major destructive event. The plague has already run rampant. The flood has ended. The bombs have long gone off. The fashioning of such a story set after rather than before revises the older apocalyptic plot. The post-apocalyptic mode is not typically concerned with the thrilling how of survival. Instead, it focuses on what new world may be built in the ashes of the old. In this way, post-apocalyptic novels offer a slightly less subtle estrangement effect than many science fiction novels do. These are not alien worlds; they are cognitively reduced versions of our own. The thinning out of the world that appears in post-apocalyptic texts offers a chilling lesson for thinking totality without something like diversity, for thinking totality without imagining what does not appear, for thinking totality without considering the overdeterminations of class. It is this connection between the real world we know and the fictional version of it that gets destroyed in these novels about which I would like to make a few brief remarks today.

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The image to the left is of Lincoln Kilpatrick in whiteface as Zachary from Boris Sagal’s film The Omega Man (1971). The film was based on Richard Matheson’s I am Legend and featured Charlton Heston as its leading man.

World building is a key term for speculative fiction of all kinds. Here is an example of world building from a 1950s post-apocalyptic novel:

On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back. If he had been more analytical, he might have calculated the approximate time of their arrival; but he still used the lifetime habit of judging nightfall from the sky, and on cloudy days that method didn’t work. That was why he chose to stay near the house on those days. (Matheson 13)

The novel is Richard Matheson’s I am Legend (1954). The passage reveals the central conflict of the novel with an air of mystery. Besides establishing the opposition of Neville and an unknown “they,” this passage reveals little about the world or its characters. We do learn that Neville does not easily change his habits, something that the novel will continue to include as a kind of refrain. Matheson’s book features a common trope of post-apocalyptic novels, in which the last human stands out against a number of dead or very alive, very threatening others.

In I am Legend, Neville, a single, white male holed up in his house with whiskey, Schönberg, and rage, signifies as completely incidental to history, manifesting the melodramatic alienation of his particular standpoint. The contrast the novel reveals, however, is located in its critical, didactic lesson about the relation of the dominant (here the white male) to historical change. While Matheson’s novel smartly engages with a changing American racial and cultural milieu, it does so by introducing an ideologically volatile narrative solution: by revealing its last man protagonist as the (unwitting) champion of conservative white male values, I am Legend (just as unwittingly) establishes a trope that has since been consistently remobilized in order to affirm the same reactionary fears it originally sought to undermine. Thus, the clever reversal of political polarity in I am Legend reappears in contemporary post-apocalyptic novels only in failed form, unable to affect a similarly meaningful deconstruction of inequality; here, the clever plot twist becomes symptomatic of nothing so much as the history of a genre too long accustomed to a reactionary conservatism.

The dominance of post-nuclear apocalyptic survival stories emerges for suburban white Americans in the 1950s—just after the Bomb—but has a possible different resonance for black Americans left behind in the inner cities after white flight. In their co-curated exhibit, From the Bomb to the Crash: Geographies of Disaster in the American Century, Laura Finch and Jessica Hurley explain, “White flight, aided by federal and municipal investments in highway construction, suburban housing stock, and mortgage guarantees, recreated the inner city as predominantly African American at the same time that the inner city was being written off as the inevitable ground zero of a future nuclear war.” They also cite a Civil Defense Administrator in Phillip Wylie’s post-apocalyptic novel Tomorrow! (a novel ahead of its time ecologically and disturbingly of its time racially), who makes the connection shockingly clear when he says, “Niggertown was right at ground zero” (Qtd. in Finch and Hurley 2014). The overlap of ghettoized city cores and the imagined space of nuclear destruction illuminates the white supremacist fantasies that vie for dominance in the post-apocalyptic imaginary.

It will come as no surprise that in The Apocalypse in the African American Tradition (1996), Maxine Lavon Montgomery describes two U.S. political agendas “one predominantly white, the other primarily black,” as having “conflicting notions of what constitutes an apocalypse” (Montgomery 1996, 1). Thus, explicitly or not, race becomes a locus of contest for the post-apocalyptic novel—these novels are predominantly written by white people about white people and they make claims about the future with racial implications. One need not look far to find other texts like Wylie’s, Robert Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold (1964) imagines a post-nuclear future where the family emerges from the bomb shelter into white slavery. Revisionary texts such as Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirship Chronicles (1978) and Octavia Butler’s Xenogensis Trilogy—Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989)—break Wylie’s mold as they refuse to disavow Indigeneity or race, in exception to the general history of the genre; they make strange the white future that is typically imagined to survive unchanged even through apocalyptic destruction.

For the post-apocalyptic mode, I would compare world building to what Fredric Jameson calls world reduction: a particular attempt to imagine “an experimental landscape in which our being-in-the-world is simplified to the extreme,” which is based on “a principle of systematic exclusion, a kind of surgical excision of empirical reality, something like a process of ontological attenuation in which the sheer teeming multiplicity of what exists, of what we call reality, is deliberately thinned and weeded out through an operation of radical abstraction and simplification” (Jameson 269, 271). I am Legend can imagine a world without class only as a consequence of the universalization of a specifically white version of race; thus, the trick for me is not to diversify the literary field as a corrective to the genre’s racism, but rather to read the genre’s racism as an account of how to grasp class, its social modulation, and its invisibilities.

The above text was taken from my talk at the MLA for 2016. My thanks go to the organizers of the roundtable “Who’s Afraid of Totality? The Trouble with the Trouble with Diversity” Jen Phillis and Kevin Floyd.

Works Cited

Finch, Laura and Jessica Hurley. From the Bomb to the Crash: Geographies of Disaster in the American Century. Web. 2014.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. Print.
Matheson, Richard. I am Legend. Garden City: Nelson Doubleday, 1954. Print.
Montgomery, Maxine Lavon. The Apocalypse in African-American Fiction. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1996. Print.

Under the Shadow David Seed

As evidenced by the FX television channel’s The Americans (2013), about suburban Russian sleeper-agents, and the latest Die Hard installment, A Good Day to Die Hard (2013), which features not only a Russian antagonist, but is shot and set almost entirely in Russia, there appears to be a renewed popular interest in the cultural concerns and antagonisms of the Cold War. Similarly, critical attention to film and fiction from the Cold War era has also been on the rise. The subject of this review, David Seed’s Under the Shadow: The Atomic Bomb and Cold War Narratives (2013), participates in this trend and follows on the heels of a collection of essays and several book-length studies of literature and the Cold War: American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War (2012) edited by Steven Belletto and Daniel Grausam, Grausam’s own On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War (2011), Derek C. Maus’s Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire (2011), and Adam Piette’s The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam (2009). But Seed, having published American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film (1999) over ten years ago, was ahead of this trend. Indeed, he acknowledges that Under the Shadow is an extension and a deepening of the work done in his earlier study. What stands out about these recent accounts is that they all tend to focus on narrative cultures so that, in effect, what we retain from such a body of work is a developing contest over making-meaning out of the cultural production of the Cold War years.
 
Seed divides his account of Cold War narratives into fourteen chapters, signalling his study’s privileging of the subtleties and nuances of its corpus. The first five chapters move forward chronologically and thematically from short fictions that feature the discovery of the atom and imagine its destructive potential in chapter one, “The Atom—from H.G. Wells to Leó Szilárd,” to topics in the larger popular discourse, such as chapter three, “The Debate over Nuclear Refuge,” where he discusses Judith Merril, one of the only female authors included in the study, and chapter five, “Philip Wylie on the State of the Nation.” Each chapter analyzes a variety of non-fictional and fictional texts (from Collier’s to H. G. Wells) that establish the critical cornerstones for those chapters that follow. Chapters six through eight focus on particular authors and texts, as Seed elaborates on Walter Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo (1952), and Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7 (1959). Next, chapters nine through eleven focus on novels that have been adapted to film, such as Mark Rascovich’s The Bedford Incident (1963) and its 1965 film adaptation by James B. Harris; Harvey Wheeler and Eugene Burdick’s Fail-Safe (1962) and Sidney Lumet’s 1964 film adaptation;and, finally, Peter George’s Red Alert (1958) and Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove (1964). His final three chapters, chapter twelve, “Mapping the Postnuclear Landscape,” chapter thirteen, “Future Reportage on World War III,” and chapter fourteen, “Beyond the Cold War,” diverge from the single text study approach and consider the consequences of nuclear war in a range of popular texts. As a study of Cold War narratives, Under the Shadow does a great deal of interpretive heavily lifting, but abstains from offering analytic payout or any broad conclusions since there is no closing, summative chapter.Seed’s account of specific texts displays a wealth of knowledge that recommends Under the Shadow for scholars working on this period in general or on specific texts from his corpus. For example, his treatment of Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959) in chapter four, “Do-It Yourself Survival,” is noteworthy as Seed takes up a complex novel that few scholars have addressed, but which he identifies as an early turn away from narratives of apocalyptic destruction toward post-apocalyptic new beginnings and questions of survival (he also mentions that Alas, Babylon has never been out of print). Chapter six, “Cultural Cycles in Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz,” identifies Miller’s classic sf novel as “proto-postmodern” due to its “fictional chronology” and “methodology,” which anticipates the “fiction of the 1960s and beyond referred to as ‘historiographic metafiction’” (99). In addition to in-depth analyses of outstanding works, Under the Shadow also offers insights about texts that are only briefly mentioned. For instance, in chapter 9, “Whales, Submarines and The Bedford Incident,” Seed mentions Frank Herbert’s The Dragon in the Sea (1956) as being “the first novel to make a nuclear submarine its subject”(148). Significantly, he describes it as “set in a future where America is locked in a war with the Eastern Powers to find fuel” (148), a topic which will be of interest to those engaged in the ways in which the twenty-first-century history.
 
Those interested in the genealogy of contemporary apocalyptic, disaster, and post-apocalyptic fiction will find chapter twelve, “Mapping the Post-nuclear Landscape,” a most compelling chapter. Seed identifies two phases of post-nuclear narratives, one in the long 1950s, which includes the novels of Frank, Miller, Wylie, and others, and another during the 1980s, comprised of works like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore (1984), Whitley Strieber and James W. Kunetka’s Warday and the Journey Onward (1984), and David Brin’s The Postman (1985). He emphasizes the latter’s “narrative reconstruction” and “exploration of the [postnuclear] terrain”(199), outlining the compelling ways that Cold War narratives begin to contest the post-apocalyptic cultural landscape even before the end of the Cold War. By recounting this narrative contest, Seed’s work participates in its own re-narration of Cold War fiction as socially reflective and often critical of the status quo.
 
Perhaps due to the breadth of Seed’s study, his references to genre often come across as cluttered and difficult to navigate. A list of genre and narrative descriptors that he invokes throughout the study and with varying frequency will help to illustrate this problem; he refers to:“a novel of the atomic age” (1), “nuclear novels,” (7); “future histories” (7), nuclear energy tales (9), “the nuclear sublime” (44), “political parable” (57), “protosurvivalist work” (71), “secular apocalypse” (93); “disaster narratives” (31), “encyclopedic narratives” (113), “hypothetical narratives” (48), “narratives of nuclear war” (6), “postnuclear narratives” (95), and “[the] search narrative” (10), among others. My problem isn’t with the proliferation of genres and subgenres, per se, but with the lack of the theoretical scaffolding that would allow a reader to make sense of them. How do future histories play out in relation to secular apocalypses? Which of these genres overlap and which cannot be used to describe the same text? To be fair, Seed does draw on other critics for at least some of these labels, as with nuclear sublime narratives, which he credits to Frances Ferguson (40), and with encyclopedic narratives, which he credits to Edward Mendelson (113). The introduction to Seed’s earlier American Science Fiction and the Cold War provides one answer to the genre problem of Under the Shadow: Seed explains that nuclear war is always already textual; the focus and drive of his work seems to suggest that the same holds true for history itself and by extension all narrative, thus shifting his concern from the production and reception of texts towards their content. Genre, for Seed, becomes a less complex formal term and more a way of distinguishing what happens in a given story. On a positive note, the proliferation of genres is a sign of the richness of the archive of Cold War narratives and the remaining, though sometimes conflicting, interpretive possibilities for engaging that archive.
 
Seed’s project to re-narrate and re-situate Cold War narratives in Under the Shadow includes “more material about” and gives “more detailed attention” to key nuclear narratives (6) and, crucially, is published at a moment when this return to the Cold War seems logically possible once more. In the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis and the ensuing global recession, globalization and capitalism appear more intensely entwined than they have since the fall of Soviet communism. This could be one reason for the return to the cultural field of Cold War narratives today. Seed’s account refreshingly draws our attention not only to the ideological battles fought over and, crucially, with nuclear energy and atomic weapons, but also, and this is where his study differs from those others mentioned above, to the ways the authors in his study discuss their ecological impacts. Today, the threat of mutually assured self-destruction seems to be arriving from a much slower, much hotter ecological war, implied in Seed’s chapter on Philip Wylie (who drew on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring [1962] as a source for The End of the Dream [1972]). Reading Seed’s work, then, we must remain mindful of its historical mediations, as his study of the development of Cold War narratives is one and the same time a reflection on the ecological crises we face at present. As such, I recommend Seed’s book as an immensely useful critical tool for those pursuing their own theories of Cold War cultural production and its contemporary revival.
This review first appeared in  Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 25.2-3: Seed, David. Under the Shadow: The Atomic Bomb and Cold War Narratives. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2013. Hardcover. ISBN 978-1-60635-146-8. $60.00.

Mad Max: Fury Road as Political Allegory — Oded Nir

guest post by Oded Nir: It is by now almost a cliché to celebrate the ascent of affect in Hollywood—it having become the organizational (or disorganizational) principle of so many films, including the action flick. One might finally be allowed to assert that even with the decline of plot to a mere appendage of, or excuse for, the strings of over-the-top visceral scenes, narrative never actually died and is in fact doing quite well, thank you, even in films such as Mad Max: Road Fury. If nothing else, the debate over the movie’s feminism tells us that some meaning is still hidden in it somewhere among the affective excesses. Yet, there is no doubt that plot has become a subservient element in many action movies, curiously switching places with the affective itself: what was once mere ornament has become a hegemonic functional principle, while, plot, that old cumbersome causal chain of events, has been itself degraded to a decorative status, a mere vestige of the obsolete.  We are probably not far from the day in which action movies will consist solely of constellations of affective scenes, thereby getting rid of plot altogether (the Saw series of movies definitely comes close to this already). Whether one can withstand, let alone enjoy, the constant hammering at one’s nervous system seems in part to be a generational question, one which we will not address here, even if in it we can perhaps find the feeble remnants of modernism’s attempt to shock their bourgeois audience.

Yet, there is nothing more formal than the embodied viscerality of affect in films such as Mad Max: Fury Road George Miller 2015). No matter how often affect theorists insist on the incapturability of affect in meaning or form, there could be no doubt that on the level of filmmaking, affective supercharges are more carefully planned and executed than perhaps anything else in the world of film (and this should also signal to us that the convergence of mastery of affect and painstaking attention to visual detail, such as in Wes Anderson’s films, is no accident). It is on the level of form, therefore, that narrative’s preponderance reemerges in even the most purely affective films. The remnants of plot in the new Mad Max, which hardly cohere, do not in any way enact the cognitive estrangement, to use Suvin’s terms, of serious science fiction. Whatever political content the plot does hold is clearly secondary to the movie’s affective focus.  As in many films, the opening of the new Mad Max gives us something like a key to its understanding: the slowing of the rate of filming in the opening scene—that flickering which makes action look as if slightly fast-forwarded—is no accident here. It queues the viewer to a particular formal pastiche of older filmic form, in which it was the technological limitations of film itself that created the distortion of pace. Mad Max, however, seems to have a more specific referent in mind: Charlie Chaplin’s movies, and in particularly Modern Times (Charles Chaplin 1936) with its organizing thematic of human violent encounter with a new industrial urban existence. The bodily focus of the original is undeniable, captured most strongly perhaps in Chaplin’s character getting stuck between industrial gears or trying to escape the automated feeding machine.

The opening scene of the new Mad Max, in which Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy)  is constantly trying to escape the—now partly human—machine, clawing and scratching as he goes, are perfectly analogous to Chaplin’s bricoleur’s attempt to resist fordist industrial violence. The tension between passivity and frenzied activity is captured in Max’s hanging desperately from the chain-pendulum at the end of the opening sequence, trying to stay out of his pursuers’ reach. Other scenes suggestive of Chaplin’s machinic violence can be seen in Max’s attempt to survive while tied to the front of a vehicle during the long first chase or the scene in which he is fighting someone to whom he is physically chained. 

The grounding affective experience of Mad Max can be described as the combination of gruesome violence and the hilarious, which is the result of its conjuring up of Chaplin, which sends us directly into the tradition of nonsense and slapstick of the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy kind, and its equivalents in the realm of animation. Of these latter, Adorno and Horkheimer already noted long ago their status as last remnants of a resisting folk culture within an increasingly industrialized cultural landscape. Curiously enough, for them too it was precisely the first signs of the decline of plot which occupied them in their brief commentary.

Yet, in Mad Max we are dealing not with the real thing—modernism—but with its pastiche. For the Chaplinesque embattled rascal is completely abstracted from its social and economic foundations (in the original it is the advent of industrial capitalism, of course). Nor, as we already said, should we look to the sorry excuse for a social setting and a plot for a renewed social content, even if these latter do feebly invoke biopolitics, surplus populations, extreme scarcity, and a rigid class system. In other words, the affective supercharges and their particular formal determinants do not function here as figures for the social. Rather, they themselves become objects of ironized play. The parodic distance is perhaps clearest in the scene in which we first see the women that were hidden in the truck, which visually invokes the use of good looking women in action films and commercials alike. Also obviously ironic is the Max’s grunts after emerging injured from wildly violent confrontations. These ironically evoke Mel Gibson’s “mad” characters of Lethal Weapon, or Die Hard’s Bruce Willis’s performances.  Thus, to the Chaplin pastiche we have to add that of the 80s and 90s action films, whose form is ironically invoked throughout Mad Max.

 
While in Lethal Weapon and Die Hard series some personal unfinished business between the arch-cop and arch-criminal many times allows for plot to happen, in Mad Max the action is completely flattened, as some merely professional confrontation between anonymous combatants. This radical flattening poses a challenge for the very long, affect packed, chase scenes: they are so long, that some form is necessary in order to give them any logic at all. It is here that a sort of mythological structure is mobilized, replete with references to passing into Valhalla after glorious death in battle. In the first chase scene, various characters approach the “immortal” with a plea to let them engage the renegade vehicle in the name of mythical glory, which allows for some structure to be set in motion. It was Erich Auerbach that posited the compatibility of flatness and the Homeric myth. When in the Illiad two legendary antagonists are about to fight each other, this flatness is expressed according to Auerbach in the long breaks from present action, in which the histories of both figures is told (thereby allowing for generating something like historicity). In Mad Max, in contrast, no such opening to history happens. The mythological structure is only there to further the affective bombardment. The tragedy of the individual is thus merely pastiche as well, with no significance for a larger collective history.

What kind of historical narrative, then, does the new Mad Max offer its viewers? If the postapocalyptic landscape does not generate here historical thinking  through what Suvin called cognitive estrangement, and the point of closure—the masses’ taking back control of water—is merely another instance of pastiche (with its own set of coordinates, within which the classical Western is an important reference point—think of the protagonist of Shane, saving the helpless farmer town from the menace of the Rancher’s “primitive accumulation,” then riding off into the wilderness), what kind of deeper logic undergirds the movie’s formal play? If the postapocalyptic setting of Mad Max is nothing but the catastrophe which is already here—as Zizek and others claim—then the formal invocation of so many instances of “action” movies (from Chaplin, through the Western, all the way to the 80s and 90s action blockbusters) enacts here something like a frenzied search for an appropriate form to narrate the present catastrophe. Mad Max enacts a kind of allegorical encounter between our apocalyptic present and an array of representational vehicles through which this present might be captured. The difference between Mad Max’s frenetic search for form and that of so many similar searches in Modernism is that here we enjoy the failure to find an appropriate form – as if trying to enjoy trauma. To conclude, it is only through affect that we can unpack the new Mad Max. The pastiche of modernism and earlier postmodern moments reveals itself only through the ways in which affect is generated. Yet—and this is an important “yet”—narrative itself never goes away just because affect becomes hegemonic formally; rather, even in pure affective films such as Mad Max, historical narration is still unconsciously active, in the frenzied attempt to find a form of thought that might make it possible for us to imagine the present as a space of historical collective practice.


Oded Nir recently received his PhD from the department of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University. His work focuses on Marxist notions of totality, and figurations of collectivity in Israeli literature and culture.

Oil Infrastructure as Literary Form

The problem I am interested in elaborating here today has to do with the difficulty of getting a grasp on oil. From the now famous claim of Amitav Ghosh—that the oil encounter lacks the same literary production and imaginary that bore witness to the spice encounter—to more recent attempts to know oil or to come to terms with living it, oil presents issues for both infrastructural and theoretical mapping. It is a moving target.
As Timothy Mitchell points out in Carbon Democracy, oil tankers can be redirected to new ports either to avoid conflict or to seek the highest prices (and preferably avoiding strife also means reaping higher profits). Oil’s liquid mobility is part of what makes it a difficult target for academic study and political action. In the face of such difficulties, the work of James Marriot and Mika Minio-Paluello devises a compellingly elegant formal solution to petroleum’s historical “slipperiness” (Ghosh 141): The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London(2012) takes up the Baku-Tbilisi-Cehyan pipeline as the backbone of its plot, which, at the same time, spatially delimits the terrain of its story. This focus has the formal effect of creating a travelogue that is at once historically deep and politically focused. Indeed, its targeting apparatus is primarily focused on the company now known as BP. As Marriot and Minio-Paluello move along the same route as the crude pumped from the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oilfield they also recount major shifts in regional power, from Soviet dominance to the present multinational control. The lesson seems to be that the way to grasp oil, in both a cognitive and physical sense, is through its infrastructures just as the way to stop its crude dominance is by ceasing to engineer, build, and expand its platforms, pump jacks, pipelines, tanker routes, refineries, and pumping stations.

This paper falls under the guise of what Sheena Wilson and Imre Szeman have called Petrocultures. Though you may already be familiar with the study of energy in the humanities, I will offer a brief overview of this emerging critical approach. Thinking about petroculture, simply put, involves giving energy, specifically petrol, a central role within humanities and social science frameworks. An initial task for petrocultures is to elaborate the impasse that our petro-reliance puts us in either along the lines of Imre Szeman’s provocative query “How to Know about Oil?” or through our experiences of oil life as Stephanie LeMenager proposes in Living Oil(2014). Focusing on oil means taking risks—especially that one might begin to see petrol as the source of all conflict, the substance behind all commodities, and the reason under all global political decision making. While cautioning against reading energy as the prime-mover of history, Allan Stoekl writes, “the most effective way of refusing such a reification of oil, all the while granting it the visibility it deserves, is to write its history…It’s when we think about what “oil history” could mean that we take a natural entity and recognize its cultural centrality” (Stoekl 2014, xii). Though oil presents itself as critically overwhelming, responses to it should find ways to mediate the particulars of oil and the general situation of our energy system. My aim in what follows is to take the pipeline as an infrastructural innovation of petroculture and examine the effects it produces as a narrative tool in The Oil Road. I turn to the formal innovations of writing about oil to better understand the possibilities of oil and its limits.


Snaking across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America, miles of pipe have been laid in order to convey fossil fuels from the source of extraction to refineries and distribution centres. So long as oil keeps flowing, the length and duration of the journey does not seem to matter—each instant when oil is fed into the mouth of the pipeline is buoyed up by the tanker and then completed in the barrel on the other end. In The Oil Road, the authors describe those silent seafaring tankers as “the emissaries of Azeri geology, camel trains of the industrial age. Picking up where the pipeline leaves off, they distribute the dark matter across the surface of the earth” (250). Whether by rail, ocean tanker, or pipeline, the energy costs of transporting oil are great. As Marriot and Minio-Paluello suggest,

This global oil trade does not just flow by itself. Every day, close to 100 million barrels of crude are collected from zones of extraction and delivered to points of consumption….The mass relocation of great volumes of fossil fuels requires constant coordination of logistical and financial resources. (250)

Pipelines came into being as part of what Fredrick Buell calls the “bootstrapped system” (Buell 2012, p. 280) of oil-capital transport: first carts and barrels, then rail, and then pipelines. Unlike those earlier modes of conveyance, the pipeline appears shaped by the logic of oil capital. That is, the pipeline is shaped in the interest of a smoothness that does not require workers and can flow evenly throughout the entire day. The authors of The Oil Road work very carefully to undo the assumed “smoothness” of oil transport, by calling attention to its bumps, snags, corrosions and ruptures along the way. In a review of the book, Doreen Massey incisively claims that it depicts a “space full of obstacles”:

The Caucasus, the sea, the Alps… all have to be overcome. Every kilometre along the pipeline route there is a metal stake, with a yellow hat and numbers on, to mark where it is buried, itself a vast earthmoving exercise. Every few kilometres there is a block valve, where the oil can be shut off in an emergency, surrounded by steel and concrete. There are pumping stations, to force the oil on and on up gradients and through mountain ranges. The oil only flows because of all this material effort – grinding, tough, often slow, often bitterly contested, heavy. (130)

Rather than say this outright, the authors show the reader each painstaking step in the construction and maintenance of the Oil Road, creating an itinerary of their journey and the petrol’s journey as well as a conceptual map of BPs legal, economic, and cultural dealings.

The book illustrates the struggle over the way oil moves, both as substance and as fuel. The authors enumerate the juridical battles fought over the development and construction of the pipeline. In “Without Having to Amend Local Laws, We Went Above or Around Them by Using a Treaty,” they outline the legal massaging that British Petroleum had to carry out across three countries—Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey—from two other legal contexts—the UK and the USA. These “Agreements” circumvent local laws by “overriding all existing and future domestic law apart from the constitutions of the states in question” (144). Furthermore, a new tax structure was put in place to exempt the energy companies and construction companies that worked on the pipeline. Any disputes arising would be settled by international tribunals in Stockholm, Geneva, or London. The legal adjustments made on behalf of energy transport define the legal maneuvering in the struggle over the energy future. In a passage headed with the title “Burnaz, Turkey,” Marriot and Minio-Paluello write that “People have learned from the nearby experience of BTC and the Isken coal plant that battles must be fought early on. New projects need to be challenged before they are approved, financed, and planned on hard drives and flipcharts in far-off capitals” (239). The importance of these insights into the infrastructure of post-industrial energy systems seem worth emphasizing here: the development of energy infrastructure displays economic, engineering, industrial, and political effort on a massive scale. The only way to get ahead of it is to do so literally: to be ready before hand and to map before the mappers.
 
The text also operates on a speculative register. At several points along their journey the authors encounter barriers, like fences or seas. They write, “The wells lie in a forbidden zone to which only our imaginations can travel… the route we are following is obscure. It is described only in technical manuals and industry journals, data logs and government memos” (16). And so, Marriot and Minio-Paluello attend to the mediated nature of every moment of their journey. Imagined moments, like when they describe the oil tanker, the Dugi Otok, silently gliding over the waters of the Adriatic, are no less real than when they are able to reach out and touch the pipeline itself, and moments that seem all too real are no less mediated!
 
The form of the travelogue, in the hands of Marriot and Minio-Paluello, carefully tells multiple stories at once. The unfolding of the plot happens along the BTC pipeline, which takes the authors through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey as they follow the pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean. Succinctly “plot”-able on the map, the itinerary of the trip remains linear even while the authors delve into the history of region. Indeed, some of the drama of the text arrives from it fulfilling a promise it makes early: that the journey along the Oil Road will pass “through the crucibles of Bolshevism and fascism, Futurism and social democracy, through the furnaces of an industrial continent” (9). In this manner, the descriptions of the pipe’s visibility—sometimes it is buried, sometimes it runs through private property, sometimes it is under heavy guard—are supplemented by other layers of the text. As Marriot and Minio-Paluello recount stories of their previous visits to the region, they describe the development of the pipeline as technology, and offer a political history of the area from its soviet days through to its corporate present. In one particular instance they describe the seizure of Rijeka, a port city with a large refinery, in 1919 by the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio who arrived “triumphantly in a red sports car at the head of a column of 297 black-shirted Arditi followers” (265); while, in another, they turn to the “outbreak of World War II,” when Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil, and BP, then Anglo-Persian, “shared 57.8 of the German market,” and “all three companies provided fuel to the Nazi state as it rearmed, re-industrialized, and established its structure of terror” (301). BP’s web published history passes over the years spanning 1932 and 1948 in silence. These strata of thick description in The Oil Road tellingly reveal the difficulty of knowing about energy infrastructure. Travelling the route of oil surely offers a place to start, but the book also suggests that more time is needed to grasp the magnitude of energy extraction and transport. The missing years and the strata of thick history The Oil Road make available arrive through its own familiarity with the oil archive–they are reading industry journals, promo materials, investor updates, and so on. This effort tells us about the genres of writing that oil both traffics in—engineering tracts, investor opinion, public promotion, CEO biographies—and the types of approach that a materialist critique of energy must navigate in order to register as mapping at all. In a sense, it’s a kind of political realism.

 

As members of Platform London—a collective that combines research, artistic practice, and activism—Marriot and Minio-Paluello have the experience, contacts, and resources to undertake the more than five thousand kilometer long journey along the path of oil. As reviewer Terry Macalister points out, they “know the industry from a decade of campaigning against it.” A part of these resources means that they have been able to work to devise a theoretical map to match the infrastructural one traced in the book. In the prologue, they write:

Our experience, gained over years of researching BTC, has taught us that such a massive project is not carried out by one company, BP, but rather by a network of bodies, which we have come to call the Carbon Web. Around the oil corporation are gathered institutions that enable it to conduct its business. These include public and private banks, government ministries and military bodies, engineering companies and legal firms, universities and environmental consultants, non-governmental organizations, and cultural institutions. All of these make up the Carbon Web that drives forward the extraction, transportation, and consumption of fossil fuels. In our attempt to explore and unravel this network, we will not only travel through the landscape of the pipelines, but also investigate the topography of bodies most responsible for this contemporary Oil Road. (6)

Here is The Carbon Web designed by Platform London and charted in The Oil Road. The Oil Road seems to move a step beyond the assumed limits to representing oil. This is a difficult feat and great accomplishment, but I would like to suggest that the book does not stop there. As slippery as oil is or can be, by taking it as the structuring force of its plot and the ground of its story The Oil Road effectively begins to figure the larger structure lurking in the background—that other, much more difficult to grasp totality: the mode of production itself. The Carbon Web bears a striking resemblance to Fredric Jameson’s revision of the Marxist schema of base and superstructure. Where,

the more narrowly economic—the forces of production, the labor process, technical development, or relations of production, such as the functional interrelation of social classes—is, however privileged, not identical with the mode of production as a whole, which assigns this narrowly “economic” level its particular function and efficiency as it does all the others. (36) 

 
Jameson goes on to say that, if one were to consider this a structuralism it is a structuralism where there is only one structure “namely the mode of production itself…, it is not a part of the whole or one of the levels, but rather the entire system of relationships among those levels” (36). What we get then, in The Oil Road, is the start of a mapping of the mode of production from the standpoint of energy.
In closing, I’d like to make reference to a conversation that has been unfolding recently under the heading of Paranoid Subjectivity on e-flux. I want to attempt to avoid the risk, as Sarah Brouillette puts it, of “simply mapping the mapmakers” by emphasizing “capitalism’s mysteriousness and intractability, […] our incapacity in the face of it, [or] our anxiety about our incapacity, and so forth.” To avoid this risk, Brouillette implores us to foreground “the importance of a given map’s relationship to struggle.” The practicality of Marriot and Minio-Paluello’s map lies in its dialectic between infrastructure and form. Where the occasion of the pipeline presents a through line for plot, the tale of the Oil Road enables the story of the Carbon Web. In this sense, the text’s careful development of BP’s connections as a totality is central to its political usefulness. The labour and the maintenance of such roads comprised of pumps, steel tubes, security fences, security personnel, spouts, gauges, monitoring devices, tanker ships, refineries, more steel tubes, more spouts, more security personnel, delivery trucks, gas pumps, and on and on, is a very real, ongoing kind of work. Marriot and Minio-Plauello show us this work, which in a way helps us to understand the scope of the task at hand and to locate crucial starting places to begin to dismantle the Oil Road and the Carbon Web it weaves.
Special thanks to Adam Carlson, Alexandra Carruthers, and Jeff Diamanti for their conversations and guidance as I wrote this paper. Thanks also to the participants of the session “Infrastructure and Form” at the 2015 meeting of the ACLA, especially the organizers Joseph Jeon and Kate Marshall. 
Notes
Buell, Fredrick. “A Short History of Oil Cultures: Or, the Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance.” Journal of American Studies 46 (2012): 273-293.
Brouillette, Sarah. “Paranoid Subjectivity.” e-flux.com. 12 March 2015. Web. 24 March 2015.
Ghosh, Amitav. “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel.”Incendiary Circumstances. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. 138-151.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.
LeMenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum in the American Century.Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014.
Macalister, Terry. “The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London by James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello – review.” The Guardian. 14 December 2012. Web. 24 March 2015.
Marriot, James and Mika Minio-Paluello. The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London. London: Verso, 2013.
Massey, Doreen. “Mapping the Carbon Web.” Soundings 54 (Summer 2013): 127-130.
Szeman, Imre. “How to Know About Oil: Energy Epistemologies and Political Futures.” Journal of Canadian Studies 47.3 (2013): 145-168.

Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase…Frack, Gene-splice, Hinder, Immolate…We all have dystopias to write.

With an introduction and twenty-five separate essays, Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase covers impressive ground. The book comes to terms with a genre that appears to be, if anything, broadly conceived: while the sheer length of the project suggests that it might have benefited from editorial discretion, the ethos of dystopia lends itself to varied applications and interpretations. Indeed, the rewards of engaging the text as a whole are great, especially as some of the strongest work is found in its latter half.The collection, when read in sequence, does not allow one to settle in to a particular geography, national-economic space, or version of dystopia; instead, the arrangement of the chapters jumps, for instance, from alter-histories of women in the Mexican Revolution, to the deeply troubled Montreal of the mid-nineties, to Douglas Coupland’s slacker realism. The effect produced is one of cycling defamiliarization, a shuffling of imagined destinies and short-circuited hopes that comprise a dauntingly heterogeneous futurity. These vertiginous snap between futures subtends, but does not override, the critical intervention of the book: to shift contemporary studies of dystopia from an Anglo-American or loosely international frame to one that understands the dystopian literary mode, and the texts specifically produced, in the wake of the cultural changes that have taken place in North America since the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta). In this collection, held separate from its literary tradition, dystopia becomes a critical tool that assesses the unevenness of the North American political economy. Indeed, the dizziness of considering, in turn, Nalo Hopkinson’s hollowed Toronto, Alex Rivera’s sleep factories, and Neil Gaiman’s dystopian phantasmagoria emulates the free flow of goods across Canadian, U.S., Mexican, and the ever-obfuscated Indigenous borders of the continent.
From the start, I noticed a typical formal split in the author’s approaches to dystopia. On the one hand, some seem to refuse to assume the kind of shared intimacy with their object literary critics so often accept as a part of their endeavour. This variety of essay in the collection relies heavily on quotation, communicating as much as possible of the dystopia in question in its own words, be it Cormac McCarthy’s futureless future or Lisa Robertson’s critique of a gentrified Vancouver. I like this approach particularly in “‘The Dystopia of the Obsolete’: Lisa Robertson’s Vancouver and the Poetics of Nostalgia,” Paul Stephens’s essay on Robertson’s The Office for Soft Architecture (2003), precisely because he seemed able to remain true to her poetics and her politics through his citational practice. On the other hand, Sharlee Reimer insists on the critical project of interpretation championed by Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) in “Logical Gaps and Capitalist Seduction in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl”; Sharon DeGraw places Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) against Detroit’s deterioration to highlight the green urban policy of the novel; while Robert T. Tally Jr. comes closest to naming the obfuscated futurity of the global hegemon through Gaiman’s American Gods (2001) in “Lost in Grand Central: Dystopia and Transgression in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.” The essays that work through their texts, rather than alongside them, seem to extend the critical work of the dystopia in a shared world-building with their authors, developing their work, riffing on Jameson’s description of the dystopia as “near future novel,” into a near future criticism.
 
Although the 1993 ratification of the North American Free Trade agreement liberalized trade, it did not liberalize history, as the essays on Central American dystopias bear out. These six essays, focusing explicitly on Mexican, Chicano/a novels and film stand out for their strongly unified generic theory of dystopia. In “Archive Failure? Cielos de la tierra’s Historical Dystopia,” Zac Zimmer assesses that “as Americans, North, Central, and South, we live in a series of superimposed afters: after the conquest; after colonialism; after independence; after this revolution; after that revolution; after this war; after that war. Perhaps, one day, there will indeed be an ‘after globalization,’ an ‘after neoliberalism,’ an ‘after nafta’” (233). Thinking about the histories and present of settler-colonialism María Odette Canivell similarly posits that “when speaking about the Latina American utopian imaginary, two clearly defined camps emerge: utopias for Latin America and utopias of Latin America” (240). Further, Adam Spires argues that Homero Ardjis’s novels are “informed by Aztec history” and that they “remind us that, like the laws of nature, mythological time is cyclical not linear, and that indigenous legacy of mythology is inextricable from Mexico’s future” (352). Finally, Luis Gómez Romero describes Latin America in Borgesesque terms as “a historical labyrinth erected upon antique and new stories of oppression and inequality that seem to stretch from the sixteenth century right into the twenty-first” (373). What Zimmer, Canivell, Spires, and Romero collectively uncover is the radical critical quality of the Latin American dystopia and the penchant for such texts to outdo their U.S. counterparts, even those as developed as Gaiman’s, in their mobilization of history. One overwhelming result of this collection’s purview is the revelation of how the centre seems determined-yet-unable to represent its own decline. While this observation does little to address post-nafta unevenness, it does address the kinds of diagnosis that help to depict the system behind such liberalizing agreements themselves, reminding me of the very real dystopian settler-colonial petro-capitalist hetero-patriarchy that we live in today.
 
Several chapters are worth mentioning outside of my interpretative synthesis: Janine Tobeck on William Gibson’s Bigend trilogy; Richard Gooding on the ya dystopian novel Feed; Annette Lapointe on eating and eating disorders in Atwood’s Maddadam trilogy; and Lee Skallerup Bassette on Canada and Quebec’s cultural responses to nafta. Whether for teaching or research, I anticipate this collection will prove an invaluable reference, opening up new pathways and connections for those well versed in science fiction’s dystopian variants as well as for those newly embarking down the pathways of the future.
 
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Cecily Devereux for the opportunity to review this book and to Alexandra Carruthers and Adam Carlson for their editorial suggestions. This review first appeared in English Studies in Canada 40.2-3: Brett Josef Grubisic, Gisèle M. Baxter, and Tara Lee, eds. Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP, 2014. 480 pp.