Oil in an American Imaginary

Abstract

If money, according to Augier, comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek, capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. Karl Marx, Capital It is common to view oil as emblematic of all that is dynamic and disastrous in advanced capitalism. Just as oil dominates commodity trade and circulation globally, so its symbolic order critically organises competing discourses about its human worth. The rhetoric of oil remains extremely powerful and is not so much an integer of price swings in oil on the world market but is deeply embedded in the ways a society represents itself to itself. In 1992 the critic and author Amitav Ghosh pertinently argued that oil had little presence in cultural expression apart from standout contributions like that of Abdelrahman Munif and his brilliant extended fiction of the petro-state, the quintet Cities of Salt (1) Much of Ghosh's reading of Munif holds but petrofiction, as he calls it, has a more substantial and turbulent genealogy than Ghosh suggests. Why is it, for instance, that oil's representation seems ubiquitous and yet is relatively absent from critically and creatively articulated claims on space, history and social formation? If climate change has provoked utopian desires for a world beyond oil, a planet where oil does not and cannot centrally drive its economic activity, then that challenge must include an imaginative grasp of its otherwise abstruse narrative of modernity, not in the mere content of oil's omnipresence, but in the very ways oil has fictively come to define so much of being in modernity, or what is sometimes referred to as an oil ontology. (2) It is oil's saturation of the infrastructure of modernity that paradoxically has placed a significant bar on its cultural representation. The following argument will address this conundrum, particularly as it informs an understanding of the rise and fall of United States' hegemony in the twentieth century. Obviously, oil is not the only way to understand this history (which has been extensively critiqued by Wallerstein, Arrighi, and Harvey, among others (3)) but nevertheless, petrofiction provides provocative insight into oil's claims on an American imaginary and holds some important lessons for the ways we might read oil both as a commodity and as a cultural logic in its own right. Crucially, Ghosh does not consider the possibilities of a logic of oil that puts it in the shade, in his eyes, when compared with the creative commodity par excellence, spice (although even here, in the realm of commodities of colonisation, he might have made space for the vast histories on sugar and coffee). In the case of the United States, for instance, Ghosh claims that a literature reflecting oil's great influence - what he terms the 'oil encounter'--never emerged and there is consequently no Great American Oil Novel because to Americans oil 'smells bad': 'It reeks of unavoidable overseas entanglements, a worrisome foreign dependency, economic uncertainty, risky and expensive military enterprises; of thousands of dead civilians and children and all the troublesome questions that lie buried in their graves'. (4) Who would want an encounter of this kind, the thinking goes, when it betrays a sordid history harder to wash off than blood or dirt, to recall our epigraph? It is important to underline the fact that Ghosh's position in 1992 derives directly from the experience of the Gulf War: a short but brutal conflict that provides a telling script for the aversion he describes. Furthermore, the immediacy of the war overdetermines at a second level precisely the absence which Ghosh discerns in the literature of oil. If we are to understand the oil encounter and its genealogy, then the Gulf War must be an initial pivot: a veritable punctum in a field of apparent over-representation, one that points simultaneously to an encounter--or what Lacan calls a tuche or traumatic experience that interrupts repetition (5)--in American self representation, but also to a war of position that anticipates the ultimate decline of oil's pivotal role in the global economy. …