"As an illuminator the Oil is without a figure—it is the light of the age": Traumas and Aporias of Oil as a Global Object of Desire in Ella Hickson's Oil

Abstract

Ella Hickson's Oil is the first and only work in modern and contemporary Anglo-American drama that takes Oil and its concomitant existential-psychological, social-political and economic implications as its sole, sustained focal point. Undertaking an exploration of Hickson's Oil, this essay seeks to demonstrate how Oil, as a paradigmatic example of world dramas, constitutes a potent means to register not only the world-systemic nature of petro-capitalism, but also the different meanings of "oil" available in different historical moments, social systems, and world cultures. Indeed, the thematics and dynamics of Oil demand that we probe the meanings of oil under such rubrics as oil as commodity, social agent, social relation, cultural signifier, hyper-object, and, above all, an impossible object of desire. Accordingly, the crux of this essay is an exploration of this pivotal facet of oil: oil as a traumatic and aporetic object of desire along with the questions of racial and gender politics and ethics implicated in it. Finally, pondering the questions of the politics and ethics of gender in conjunction with the economy of gendered subjectivity, I demonstrate how May, and later Amy, come to varyingly embody a neoliberalist vision of selfhood and subjective autonomy, mode of self-governmentality, and, finally, understanding of freedom and self-worth. Ultimately, the essay argues how Hickson's Oil presents a bio-energetic deconstruction of the Eurocentric account of modernity subjectivity (and its ultimate value: autonomy) by exposing its material conditions of possibility and its uneven, core-periphery economic dynamics.