When Energy is the Focus: Methodology, Politics, and Pedagogy

A Conversation with Brent Ryan Bellamy, Stephanie LeMenager, and Imre Szeman

Brent Ryan Bellamy (bio), Stephanie LeMenager (bio), and Imre Szeman (bio)
University of Alberta

“The world itself writes oil, you and I write it.” —Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil

I sat down with Stephanie LeMenager and Imre Szeman to talk about “Resource Aesthetics,” the topic of this special issue of Postmodern Culture, in Vancouver, B.C. during the 2015 Modern Language Association annual meeting. LeMenager and Szeman were both early proponents of critical work on oil and energy from within the humanities. Their work has helped to shape the ways scholars continue to think about the impasse between our rampant, energy-hungry economic system and the flourishing of human and more-than-human life on the Earth. I wanted to ask them how they each got started in this field and where they think a compelling place to start thinking about energy, culture, and politics would be now.

What strikes me about this conversation, retrospectively, is the way that placing energy at the heart of one’s analysis produces such unexpected, generative outcomes. Certainly, it raises methodological questions. Where does one locate energy’s impacts? Why take up one form of energy, oil, and not another, nuclear or coal? When does one (de)limit the importance of energy to one’s thinking? How best to report the impacts of energy on social life? What is to be done with the infrastructural remainders of our carbon saturated world?

Our conversation also deals in the practical outcomes that would result from taking energy into account. On the one hand, focusing on energy enables a different kind of politics to emerge. For instance, a politics that concerns infrastructure and planning seems possible in light of the costs of energy’s transport and logistical systems. Moreover, rather than asking “What kind of political world do we want?” we might start asking “How do we want to use energy?” On the other hand, centering energy in the curriculum deeply affects our pedagogy and its outcomes. Once baffled by the limits to imagining the world differently, students can now come prepared to address practical questions related to energy on a manageable scale. What strikes me about the following exchange is the way it hinges on sharing knowledge about pipelines, fossil freight trains, and energy grids as much as on devising new ways of engaging in research and conversation that start from the point of where we are now rather than where we would like to be.

BRB: You are both early voices in the field of thinking about energy and culture. Could you tell me a little bit about the origin of your interests in studying oil and energy? How did you come to this research work, and what drew you to the field?

SL: I felt personally involved in what it means to live with petro-modernity because of a family connection to oil that had been a powerful imaginary throughout my young life, and then there was the fact that the neighborhood in California where I was living at the time of writing was being fracked. Also, on a more positive note, the peak oil literatures that were coming out in the early twenty-first century, even in the form of design plans from my former city of Ventura, California, were incredibly interesting to me and created design scenarios that seemed to foretell a different energy future and insist on a different political possibility. But as I began to pursue these interests—in my own neighborhood, in my own immediate history—I started to realize that for me the way to talk about global climate shift, the way to talk about the privatization of water and a lot of resource issues that are at the forefront of our minds, the way “in” was oil and more broadly fossil fuel culture, and the way that fossil fuels have been naturalized into an everyday. I realize I am close to Matt Huber’s work in this regard (see Huber Lifeblood), but it was an interest that developed individually for me as well—it just seems to me that the most compelling way to talk about global climate change and its multiple collateral damages and to potentially act within this infinitely complex scalar problem is to center our inquiries around oil, and more broadly energy.

IS: My interest in the cultures of oil originates in two places. Like Stephanie, the first is a personal one. I grew up in Calgary, Alberta, which is one of the centers of the oil industry in Canada. It’s the place where all of the administrative offices of oil corporations are located. My father worked not in administration but as a pipe fitter and boiler maker, working on pipelines and sour gas plants as a welder. I went to high school in downtown Calgary, a place where working class kids and the children of those living in the affluent areas, like Mount Royal, came together as a result of the Calgary Board of Education’s allotment of school spaces. One of the things that I became aware of very quickly while growing up in Calgary is the gap between the kinds of things my father and the fathers of my friends did—mine was one of the workers who actually went out and created the apparatus of oil. Oil culture has always been in the back of my mind as something that needed to be dealt with if we were ever to understand how politics truly operates in Canada.

The other place where my interest in oil culture can be marked is an article I was asked to write for a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on the topic of system failure (see Szeman “System Failure”). It was left very wide open as to what we could do under this general rubric. The more I thought about what constituted system failure and what might result in the end of the current system of liberal capitalism and perhaps produce a political opening, the more I realized that one of the unspoken elements of contemporary life was the importance of energy. If we were to trace the significance of energy for the system of capital, we might understand how irruptions or shifts in the former might cause uncertainty or problem in the latter, and do so in a way that current political movements seem unable to do. Questioning the necessity or givenness of current systems of energy is a way of provoking or anticipating another system of energy, another system of collective, social life.

BRB: I want to pick up on something Stephanie said about the moment of looking at those peak oil plans. It seems to me that there is an interesting connection between the recognition of a limit and speculation, in a different sense than trying to figure out where we could find more oil. I mean in the sense of a different future that could be lived, something Imre is interested in as well. Like a mapping of oil and capital, the thing about the plan is that it is a form that lets you think through the (im)possibility of transition. I find that really compelling.

SL: Yes, I do too, and I think that there is so much emphasis right now in Environmental Studies or Environmental Humanities on speculative fiction as a form that might somehow open up dystopian narrative toward a different kind of activism and a different kind of imagination. When I look at design plans, like the one that was created for a post-oil Ventura, my former town, for instance, there is a lot of speculation that goes into that kind of architectural, engineering, and infrastructural planning. The idea of scenario design is not one that is limited to literary studies and in fact doesn’t even come from literary studies. So, I looked at those plans and I thought how exciting it was that people with real expertise could imagine a city where 75% of the food that was consumed would come from within 100 miles, where almost all the water that was used for industrial or domestic purposes was greywater, it seemed very clear looking at those peak oil plans that solutions are not that far from the plausible, and yet I think we tend to get caught up in an idea of political malfunction and even a failure of will. Whatever the mistakes or ideological shortcomings of peak oil activism, it was also a watershed moment for design, I think.

BRB: Let’s move from maybe these two, overlapping ideas, the blueprint of what the future could look like and a way out of our fossil fuel reliance, to come at the structure of things. I think these play nicely into my next question, which has to do with the title of this special issue: “Resource Aesthetics.” I am wondering what you find most productive or provocative in thinking about oil in a specifically aesthetic register, or in such a way that includes questions based in form, representation, or figuration. Are there other facets of sensation and the sensorium besides vision that, to you, can offer us particular purchase on oil as substance and problem?

IS: I think Stephanie will be better at answering this question than I will. She certainly writes about this in Living Oil quite a bit. I guess the first thing I want to say is that when I think about resources I want to play things off against one another: I want to insist on the importance of their sheer materiality, their character as something we can’t possibly avoid or get away from. Why? I think sometimes it’s too easy for those of us working in the critical humanities to insist on the importance of representations—to point out that there is no such thing as society, or a city, or anything, outside of the systems of representation that have made these an element of our social imaginaries. I don’t disagree with this; but I still think that insisting on the sheer materiality of natural resources demands that we ask different kinds of questions. A resource like oil is not something that we can think our way around or beyond. We can’t simply figure a different way of viewing it or position it in a different kind of aesthetic and so unnerve it. Resources are material in ways that, in part, evade aesthetics, evade representation. There’s a double movement in thinking about aesthetics and resources that I want to keep alive: one in which we recognize their sheer necessity and blunt reality, and another in which we try to bring them into representation. You can witness this in the work of all of those who work on energy humanities or petro-cultures. We first say: why haven’t resources been figured more prominently given how important they are for capitalist modernity? And second: we begin the work of tracking down the aesthetic or epistemic registers where representations of resource culture do arise. I wouldn’t want our attention to the latter to make us forget that initial resistance, which seems so important to how resources mean in and for modernity.

SL: I’ll take a slightly different tack here and say that if we think about aesthetics in a really fundamental sense as being about how we as embodied beings experience the world and how the world experiences us in return, then aesthetics can be a means to what we might think of as relationality or as a relationship with matter as such. When I started writing Living Oil I wasn’t expecting to make any kind of declamations about media or mediatization, but I really became interested in the ways in which certain infrastructural features that are normative in the US or Canada certainly—like freeway systems, like suburban malls, like subdivisions—are themselves a mediatized mode of representing life to ourselves and in turn are representing as aesthetic agents. That kind of intense relationship with the world that makes a path for us into the everyday is where I tend to locate the most exciting aesthetic exploration. Some of that is present in my work, and it has precedence in work by artist-geographers like Matt Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, or some of the civically engaged artists in Los Angeles like the Los Angeles Urban Rangers, who work with, in many ways, deprivatizing public spaces and deprivatizing corporate spaces, giving those spaces the materiality in fact they always already possess and radiate. So I re-thought what I meant by aesthetics when I got into the question of oil and became very focused on aspects other than vision—I don’t think the visual is by any means the most important way to understand what “aesthetics” is and does. I think the tactile is incredibly important—the world of plastics that Roland Barthes wrote about as being ubiquity itself—there’s a world of a certain kind of smoothness and a certain kind of suppleness that is for many people in wealthier nations normative; it is also destroying our oceans. The question of the aesthetic can be a politicized one and it also has been taken up with a great deal of attention to the micro scale by people who are associated with the new materialist philosophy, think about theorists like Stacy Alaimo or Jane Bennett—that new materialist focus on the porousness of bodies and their material exchange that Alaimo calls transcorporeality—that’s a part too of what the aesthetic problem is here and it’s one that keeps leading back to the material, which is so hard to get at. We can’t think our way around it and yet how can we not think with it?

BRB: It’s interesting to me—especially now that you’ve mentioned the question of scale—that “material” and “matter” appear in both of your answers but these terms operate differently for each of you. To put it bluntly one seems to be an old materialism and the other a kind of new one. Perhaps one point of contact, at least in terms of interest, is infrastructure.

SL: I think in both of our answers there may be an interest in recovering bodies and even forms of labor that may be more explicit in Imre’s answer, but the erasure of laboring bodies of various kinds is part of the problem that energy as metaphysic presents to us.

IS: Edward Renshaw wrote an article in 1963, I think in the Journal of Political Economy, in which he figured out a basic statistic: over the preceding century (1850–1950), what were the shifts in the sources of the energy used? He discovers that in 1850 that 6.8% of energy consumption on the planet was from fossil fuels—a number that immediately gives us a different idea of the Victorian Era and pace of industrialization than we typically have. By 1950 he estimates 90.8% of the work output was from fossil fuels. That’s an incredible shift, one that is mirrored by another: the laboring body of humans and of animals became a distinctly minor part of overall work output between 1850 and 1950. The explosion of fossil fuel use generates, among other things, an abstraction of work from the body, pushing the world of energy away from the ready-to-hand of daily, phenomenal experience. This growing abstraction has significance for aesthetics as well as labor. If you live in a world in which you have to collect your own firewood, you have an idea of what warmth is and what it means for your body. The minute that disappears, however, and heat comes into your house as if by magic, one no longer possesses the capability to experience, phenomenologically and aesthetically, an earlier moment when energy was linked more directly to the body. Many of us live in a world in which energy abstracts us from life, at least with respect to many of our life activities: mobility, movement, heat, and food.

I worry that such claims can come off as bad anthropology underwritten by a bad Heideggerianism. And yet, I think we can’t deny that it’s this kind of violent abstraction that’s built into oil modernity, a kind of abstraction that’s manifest in suburbs and highways, but also in every other act of the modern. There are still parts of the world that don’t experience this degree of abstraction, where there are different ideas, capacities, and relations to the material world. So, maybe one of the things we’re talking about here is an increasing abstraction that becomes an element of our chosen aesthetics, which then become hard to work around, hard to think past.

SL: Yes, hard to think past. But as I’ve said, I also think aesthetics can be understood as a series of methods and movements that push us back toward embodiments and specificities and sites. I think as long as we don’t take an Arnoldian view of aesthetics in relation to civilizational “bests” etcetera, you know Beauty with a capital B, the aesthetic mode of analysis—really the aesthetic mode of action—has a tremendous potentiality. In some ways, I’m gesturing back to the early days of Cultural Studies, here, and also toward Social Practice art. I can think of a couple of relevant books to think with here, not just books like Huber’s Lifeblood or my book or the various works that Imre has done including his wonderful collaborative photo essay on the tar sands, but something like Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital (2009), another great example of what is a social, political, but also an aesthetic analysis of the erasure, in many respects, of animal bodies and then of the process of critical re-embodiment to some degree.

BRB: Now, I’m just thinking about the anatomical image of the beaver that Shukin looks at in her introduction. You have abstraction at play there too, in the separation between the icon and animal and the way that Maclean’s Magazine, where the image comes from, labels the beaver’s anatomy “Canada in Depth”—a grandiose national abstraction! Here, in the midst of considering abstraction, I want to ask about where you locate a starting point for researching oil culture. This question builds on something you write in your book, Stephanie: that “compelling oil media are everywhere. Films, books, cars, food, museums, even towns are oil media. The world itself writes oil, you and I write it” (LeMenager 2014, 11). That’s why I say “starting point”—if oil is so ubiquitous in the number of ways we have already been tracing out in the conversation then what impact do specific oil media have on our understanding of resource aesthetics? In what ways do our starting points matter, if they matter at all?

SL: For me, site specific work is really important, and so when I started thinking about how to get into the everywhere, the everything of oil, I wanted to go initially local, but I also wanted to think about tracing specific flows and hovering over particular kinds of transhipment or even particular ports. And in this I think I am similar to other people who have written about oil, I think about Timothy Mitchell—an entirely different book in the larger arguments that came out of it (see Mitchell Carbon Democracy)—but like my own work a book interested in following the supply lines, creating site-specific genealogies of what we might call petro-modernity. I was inspired by people in my region in LA at the time, like Matt Coolidge, I was inspired by Nicola Twilley, a New York based artist who has done recently the “cold chain” or Perishable Project with Coolidge through the CLUI (Center for Land Use Interpretation). That project traces refrigerated foods throughout North America, hovering at particular sites of storage and transhipment—this kind of conceptual geographical work that begins with ground-truthing in specific places was what inspired my method of environmental cultural studies, I would say— and I started in Santa Barbara because I was teaching in Santa Barbara and I wanted to know it vertically, you might say, from the underground up. There had been a very important, historically important oil spill there that created a certain kind of cultural environmentalism which was, in a sense, in a decadent phase by the time I wrote about it. I wanted to talk about how oil had impacted a certain sociality in that region—an environmental sociality—how it had begun to create the radicalization in one sociologist’s view of an affluent class of people and then how that “radicalization” of the affluent in turn spun off into a very specific and in some sense consumer-oriented form of environmental politics. So I like looking at regional and local resource chains and then the social worlds that grow up and interact with them, are developed from them, and produce them. I think those relationships make a world. And I also think it’s important to be site specific, because then you can see you work roll over into various kinds of activism. Where you start is incredibly important. Everybody is going to choose a different place to start. In a way there is no site that isn’t relevant. Whether you are in a resource region that is an affluent one, a very wealthy one, whether you’re in one that’s extremely injured by its resource destiny, in a sense—I don’t actually believe in resource destinies but some politicians do—the implications for the epistemological reach of the project, the possibilities for activism, the aesthetic affordances that a project might have are all about where you choose to start. I chose to start in a particular place that was relevant to me and that I could in some respects ground-truth through interviewing and through photography and really looking at my environment. That’s what I wanted. It was a method that came out of conceptual geography and art and not out of literary cultural studies per se.

IS: By “where do you start?” do you mean “where do you start your analysis?”

BRB: Yes, I guess if we are hoping to go back to an earlier point about rendering visible, whether that is to get a better grasp of resources for people already compelled to find solutions to these problems or whether it’s to get people thinking about them in the first place, where do you start your analysis?

IS: One of the reasons that I am attracted to work like Stephanie’s is that it shows me a critical path that is somewhat different than how I would go about things. It reminds me to pay attention to the distinct type of work that people are doing in relation to resources. To start with, it reminds me of the importance of activist work, that people care about where they live and work, and that they are (of course) able to understand the significance of oil when it arises in their particular situation. When I am here in Vancouver, I find it very hard not to think about the protest against Kinder Morgan near Simon Fraser University and what that has meant for that community of students and scholars in the last few months. It isn’t where I would necessarily start my analysis of energy—from looking at this particular protest, that is—but that’s just a difference of training and conceptual orientation. Where does one start? I guess I agree with Stephanie that one generates different answers to the questions about oil modernity depending on what you want to analyze. One place you could start is in Titusville, Pennsylvania, which I would say is the historical starting point of oil modernity, and you figure out what comes next. Starting historically is one way to go. I’m not saying that’s where I start, but when I think about a scholar like Timothy Mitchell, he starts at a moment when energy was still visible to the bodies that could interrupt its movement, and what intrigues him, in part, is that that becomes increasingly difficult—impossible!—when we move from coal to oil as our dominant energy source.

Stephanie is right; “The world itself writes oil,” which means, in the period of modernity, that oil is written absolutely everywhere. And yet one of the places to start for people doing literary criticism is to ask why oil and energy tend not to be in literature when one sees oil everywhere. Patsy Yeager, for instance, talked about the ways in which, despite the importance of the road in American Literature, oil doesn’t really figure into narratives of the road. She talks about how in Kerouac’s On the Road the protagonists don’t even really stop for gas. On the one hand this seems like a silly demand—Kerouac, of course, can write about whatever he wants, and we needn’t draw conclusions about the nature of modernity as a result of missing elements in the road novel! After all, he doesn’t write about exchanging windshield wiper fluid either, and we would never read anything major into that absence. But there is, of course, something distinct about oil, as we’ve been pointing to throughout this interview.

Starting points: Patsy, Jennifer Wenzel, and I have just finished editing a book called Fueling Culture, which is made up of 101 short essays on energy, on oil primarily, each linked to a keyword. What I found fascinating about putting the book together is that it seemed that you could start almost anywhere when talking about oil and generate a whole worldview in the process, whether starting with the word Lebenskraft in the German philosophical tradition, or by reflecting on the Greek word energeia, which leads one to recognize (for instance) the word “energy” doesn’t start to be used in the English language with its current meanings until the late 1850s. Or you could start by talking about comic books. My colleague at the University of Calgary, Bart Beaty, describes how difficult it was for illustrators of American comic books to figure out how to visualize the energy of the post-WWII world of superheroes, i.e., nuclear energy, gamma radiation, and the like, because this is energy you cannot see it. Jack Kirby’s solution to this problem—bright colored lines and spheres filled with intent —generated a visual vocabulary for energy with which we are all familiar.

The world writes oil. What this means is that we need many people starting from many different points to get us to understand how that world works, what that has meant for us and what that might mean down the road. When we say what it means for us, I want to insist again strongly that what it means to be modern is to be creatures of oil. We spend a lot of time talking about all kind of things that name what it is to be modern: the expansion of rights, accumulation through dispossession, and the globalization of the world. It is telling that up until recently we haven’t made oil and energy part of this story, and we have to. Just as those other narratives require many starting points, so must the one about oil as well.

SL: I would just add to what Imre has said, well first of all, in Lolita, the gas station is a very important site. It is true with Kerouac, and I agree with Patsy. Really, Kerouac was writing a lot about nostalgia for public transit, for buses, for shared transport, for hitchhiking. There was a world of the 1940s that was longed for and missed in Kerouac.

IS: The world of pre-Eisenhower highway infrastructure.

SL: Right, a pre-Eisenhower, more public culture of mobility, which itself is interesting as a comment on oil culture, I think. And then, in Lolita, the gas station is written with a pop sensibility, very much akin to the work of Ed Ruscha in his small books, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and Thirtyfour Parking Lots (1967). It’s also almost always metonymically connected with rape. So oil has generated quite a few literary artifacts, but again it’s not always as visible as it might be. Oil is not crudely visible—so to speak. It’s certainly visible through infrastructure. There are layers of mediation that have to be considered to bring its visibility to the surface or to make it felt. But I think there are a lot of different places one can look for it. I had a conversation with Amitav Ghosh last year, last spring when he visited Oregon. He was frustrated that although he wrote an essay that in many ways began a whole critical movement around Petro-culture and petro-fiction, there hasn’t been more writing about what fossil fuel culture, and the automobile in particular, is meaning for south Asia. So that would be another interesting question to ask in terms of where to start. Where to start in terms of global elision, colonial or postcolonial forgetting. To say that oil is everywhere is to some degree a provincial statement on my part, because it is really about certain parts of the world that have experienced modernity in a certain way while in other parts of the world that particular experience of modernity may be happening more recently, has happened more recently, or may not exist. I do think coming at oil from a multi-sited, multi-disciplinary perspective is absolutely necessary. You can make a conversation that’s more exciting and ultimately more about political possibility beyond oil.

BRB: Again, infrastructure plays such an important role in the way we come to understand these starting points. Whether we begin with the regional or with the absent presence of petrol itself, the built spaces of petro-modernity shape our sense of starting points. I agree we need these launching points to be multiple. What is your sense of how petro-modernity plays out in non-North American spaces and on the registers of everyday life?

IS: To start, it’s interesting that the automobile has retained its role as an index of modernity.

SL: Yes.

IS: I was in Beijing recently and one of the strongest desires of the emergent middle classes is to own a vehicle. It may have one of the best mass transportation systems in the world, built very, very quickly by the central government at great cost, and expanding all the time. It’s exceptional. It’s hard to be in Beijing and complain that public transportation is terrible. It’s very cheap and readily accessible. But it doesn’t make a difference: everybody still wants a car. Despite all of the difficulties, despite the fact that you can’t really drive it because there are already too many people on the various ring roads, ensuring that there is almost always a traffic jam on every major highway, despite it being very expensive, having a car is still the index for finally fully reaching modernity. Despite everything else—you could have a very, very fancy phone, work in a tall skyscraper, I don’t know what else, be surrounded by computers everywhere—it doesn’t make a difference: the car rules. It’s odd that this crude mechanical creature continues to have so many fans. Middle class Chinese not only want cars—they want SUVs! Even if they might feel some guilt about this desire, they give into it because they imagine it as a safe space for their families. And so I think Ghosh is right: even if it hasn’t arrived everywhere, one of my fears is that the automobile will be retained as an index of what it means to finally have arrived in the twenty-first century, despite all we know about the social and environmental traumas it inflicts.

SL: I love what you said just now about the family and how that particular idea of modern family locked into automobility is a Western or global Northern expression. One of the first articles I read that excited me and pushed me toward writing Living Oil was Mimi Sheller’s article on car culture (for Theory, Culture, and Society) where she was talking about the ways in which automobility creates a whole assemblage of gendered being. I became frustrated while writing Living Oil by how much of what I think of as progressive modernity—feminism, environmentalism even, as it has been expressed in the U.S. in particular—is actually tied to assumptions, but also objects and paths, that have been created by fossil fuel energy. So it’s not just the things that we associate with environmental injury or evil, but also certain kinds of progressive politics and progressive identity relations or assemblages of identity that are very much locked into these objects and prostheses—the automobile being the foremost one.

BRB: I am curious about the relationship in your thinking between fossil-fueled capitalism and the specific political regime that we might name modernity or liberal democracy. How might we endeavor to reckon and to map fossil capital with respect to political contexts configured otherwise? You both seem focused on petro-culture as a feature and symptom of Americanized modernity. How would your perspectives shift in view of, and how would they account for, different coordinates, for instance in the case of Saudi Arabia’s non-liberal, a-modern fossil capitalism? And we could also add any number of other examples here—Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Kazakhstan, Sudan, Venezuela, and so on.

SL: I actually prefer the term petro-modernity to the term petro-culture, and use “petro-modernity” to explicitly describe a certain US/North American mode of living which is largely aspirational, in the sense that its imagined rewards have been realized by very few people, globally, as Imre was just mentioning. My book is about the end of the American century, by which I mean a very specific ideological, economic, and cultural hegemony—if not empire. So of course it would be an entirely different book if it were located elsewhere. Fortunately such books, and articles, and documentaries, and poems about fossil-fuel capitalism worldwide are being made. They are even being made in languages other than English, thank god! The flurry of cultural production around fossil fuel cultures counters the more apolitical musings of Anthropocene thought, where we imagine ourselves as fossil trace. I am not waiting for the apocalypse to get me out of the political morass that climate change both indicates and underwrites. In other words, I want to keep talking about oil, and certainly in a global context.

IS: As many political commentators have pointed out, the presence of oil and the riches that it creates help to support all manner of totalitarian regimes of power and privilege. And it continues to do so. The sheer amount of value generated by oil, and the remarkable capacity for small groups of elites to control this value, has generated enormous amounts of power—from Rockefeller to Putin, and from Nigeria to Angola to any of the places you mention in your question. Michael Klare and other commentators (see Salas 2009 and Gustafson 2012) have attended to the ways in which the presence of oil appears to undermine or disable democratic state practices. If the presence of oil appears to benefit the bottom line of GDPs (however unequally that wealth is distributed), when it comes to politics it is the lead actor in the drama known as the resource curse.

It’s true: I don’t spend much time studying these parts of the world (at least I have not done so to date). In part, this is because what I hope I have been attending to in my work is the larger, hidden narrative of the power produced by oil and of resources more generally. Modernity and liberal democracy should not be conflated in the way that you seem to do in your question. Modernity can take a range of political forms (which I take to be one of the lessons of, for instance, Susan Buck-Morss’s Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West). Analyses of non-liberal fossil capitalism are generally underwritten by a liberal narrative, one that would deem the political transformation of Nigeria into Norway to be a success that solves the problem of oil. Far from solving the problem, however, this approach doesn’t even pose the question of the role played by fossil fuels in producing modernity!

If my emphasis has been on Western modernity, it’s precisely because of the “problem solved” character with which fossil fuels are treated in relation to the West. The group EthicalOil.org has made a name for itself by pointing out that, despite what critics say, Canadian oil from the oil sands is ethical. Why? Well, Canada is one of the only oil nations to have a democratic government! Problem solved regarding the use of fossil fuels! And so fossil fuels disappear. They don’t need our attention anymore. Fossil fuels can play a role in propping up totalitarian regimes. But the argument being advanced here is that they needn’t have this role: fossil fuels can be a great resource for countries that know how to figure them into economics and politics. Part of the argument here is, of course, for the need for governments to leave the oil business to private industry.

What’s missing in Ethical Oil’s account of the link between oil and politics? In a word: everything. To begin with, there’s no concern about how the fossil fuel economy creates power and money within liberal democracies. There’s no interest in the unequal access to power within countries, which both determines and is determined by race, class and ethnicity. And there’s no interest in unequal access to energy between countries. I won’t even mention the lack of attention to the environmental impacts of fossil fuel economies or the lack of concern about the capacity for fossil fuel economies to continue on into the twenty-first century: it’s obvious that neither really matters in such accounts.

BRB: Right, and another problem with Ethical Oil is that it is simultaneously laughable and incredibly powerful. Despite the cringe it elicits from the left, it still catches a hold of some underlying truth about oil economies. IS:

Indeed. Liberal democracy isn’t totalitarianism; but it’s not real democracy either. The power of extant liberal democracy is that, in a Francis Fukuyama-esque manner, it puts itself forward as having resolved the drama of modern politics. Problem solved! In the process, what gets lost is both the nature of this form of politics and the specific role of oil in making it possible—the latter is far easier to see in the case of totalitarian regimes. The work of Timothy Mitchell has been so important to the study of energy because he shows how “carbon-energy and modern democratic politics were tied intricately together” (5). For Mitchell, democracy is an apparatus of modern governmentality—“a mode of governing populations that employs popular consent as a means of limiting claims for greater equality and justice by dividing up the common world” (9). Fossil fuels produced industrial modernization and mass society, as well as the various political forms that are used to govern these societies. One of the most important and least well-understood roles played by the energy of fossil fuels is the production of a politics “with a particular orientation towards the future: the future was a limitless horizon of growth. This horizon was not some natural reflection of a time of plenty; it was the result of a particular way of organising expert knowledge and its objects, in terms of a novel world called ‘the economy’” (143). This is a long answer to your question: in short, at the heart of petro-modernity, political contexts that seem to be configured otherwise are in fact variations on a common theme: the enduring power of oil in shaping human affairs.

BRB: In light of the connection between fossil fuels and modernity, how do you teach resources and energy? What are the sorts of challenges you and your students face? Is there anything they do not get, surprisingly, or do get right away? Do they find thinking and talking about oil comes naturally to them, or does it seem difficult? What lessons do they find particularly hard to take? What do you find surprising when teaching about resources and energy?

SL: I have an energy unit in my introductory course for undergraduates and I also cannot help but talk about questions of energy in the Cultures of Climate Change class that I have taught as a graduate seminar recently. I think Imre and I both have been influenced by Allan Sekula’s work. One of the things I love that Sekula did in Fish Story is his account in the very beginning about how his inspiration for writing it came from growing up in San Pedro, a port, and from being continually made aware of the materiality of shipping—that accidents happen, et cetera—so that the finance capital that was first associated with the high seas comes to ground, for him, in the maritime ports. But that is also true about oil. I think we all live next to some railway, pipeline, oil refining facility, liquefied natural gas facility, oil or coal port facility that powerfully materializes what energy capital is and how it bulks up the world, and the dangers it carries, particularly in trains that are not retrofitted to carry the kind of crude matter that comes from the Bakken Shale and other shale and sand deposits. My students, when they start thinking about how close they are to accident, and at the same time how close they are to the very stuff of capital, want to talk about it. There’s a lot to talk about. There’s a lot to map. There’s a lot to explore. It’s not a conversation that’s always about despair either because, certainly for Environmental Studies students who have taken classes across fields in sciences, as well as in social science and humanities, they are thinking very creatively about renewables and other forms of cleaner energy. So I have my students do a speculative fiction in which they sketch sustainable worlds of the near future, and almost always they begin with ‘this is the kind of grid that I want to see’ or ‘this is the kind of energy system’ or ‘I want this kind of density so that energy resources will not be overspent.’ I think it’s a great teaching topic in many different registers, both for the speculative aspects of it and the technological creativity and innovation that can be attached to it, but also to get people living in place more dynamically and self-consciously and thinking again about what it means to be so close to accident and at the same time so close to the stuff of capital.

IS: One might expect students to give into despair and throw up their hands and say ‘what can we possibly do?’ There is something interesting and unique about energy. Given the fact that we are making claims that we are absolutely shaped by our energy sources—that oil is necessary for modernity, and, as it is running out, we might no longer have the modernity that is in our bodies and beliefs as much as in our infrastructures—one might expect students to think: ‘what can possibly be done to create some utterly new way of being and belonging?’ Strangely, this doesn’t disable students. There is something about the materiality of oil that allows them to imagine forms of change that would be very hard to do if one was just doing a class on democracy or collectivity. Oil gives students a concrete problem and object to work with when they are imagining environmental and political futures. Framing the problem of contemporary collective life as one about the use and abuse of energy offers a much more concrete way to describe those futures. Students say, ‘Ah! If it’s oil modernity, then energy is a place where one can intervene to reshape modernity in some ways.’ If oil modernity shapes our experience of things, we must then be able to fundamentally reshape it via oil: modernity and its various discontents offer a bigger target than just oil, but because this target is co-equivalent with contemporary life itself, it actually renders students unable to imagine new futures (how the hell do you change everything?). Not so when we approach it all along the vector of energy.

Examining the present through the socio-political dynamics of energy produces a fascinating class dynamic. I teach a course called Resource Fictions at the graduate level. For one thing, I found that the students come from a broader range of disciplines than is usual in a class offered by the Department of English and Film Studies. The students contribute in distinct and productive ways, drawing on their very specific fields of research. They all read Stephanie’s work or the work of others, and say ‘Oh my gosh, I didn’t really grasp the degree to which we have to attend to this particular problem of energy.’ And they feel troubled by it, alert to it, and alarmed by it. But they are not overwhelmed by it, at least not in a way that they are in some of the other classes I teach. Brent was in a graduate class I taught on collectivity in which I concluded the semester by screening Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple (2006 Dir. Stanley Nelson Jr.). I wanted us to think about different forms of collectivity and what the end result of alternative modes of belonging can be (what happened in Jonestown is tragic; the People’s Temple started out in a much more intriguing place—an origin that is too quickly forgotten and cancelled out by its crazed conclusion). When the lights went up, many of my graduate students were crying: they felt undone not only by the story of Jim Jones, but also by what it seemed I was suggesting about the impossibility of new forms of collectivity—though that certainly wasn’t my intention!

SL: I want to take your class now!

IS: Consider the difference between imagining a new collectivity and imagining a different energy future. The models of the latter are quite powerful in the way that they grab people’s attention. Nobody will say ‘no’ if the city of Edmonton introduces street lights that use less energy because each incorporates a small solar panel. No one is going to object to that. No one will rush to City Hall to say: ‘No way, those old lights were so much better!’ in a way that they might over trickier social issues such as gay marriage or access to abortion. And I really do believe that different systems of energy introduce alternate modernities, even if on the sly. I don’t believe that we can have neoliberal capitalism run on wind or solar power.

SL: It’s actually a kind of interpellation.

IS: I’d just like to add one more thing: At the 3rd Annual Cultures of Energy Symposium held at Rice University in April 2014, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson had his class display posters of their work—in the way that students might do at a science conference, even though not all were scientists—about some solutions they would take to very specific things. I thought they were all incredible. I could not believe the sophistication of the alternative energy projects mapped out by these eighteen- and nineteen-year olds. None of them had the slightest hesitation about either the need or the possibility of the energy shifts for which they argued. I will often say ‘to change oil modernity we have to change absolutely everything all at once,’ which is perhaps as effective rhetorically as it is limited politically. The students were well aware of how difficult it is to make systemic change in the U.S. if one names it as such. So what they did in their projects—whether knowingly or not—is to map a problem that is lived by everyone: how we use energy. Even those who deny climate change would embrace plans to use less energy. Again: there’s a way to articulate a global, post-national politics via energy that might be impossible via nation-to-nation climate accords, as nations are modes of belonging built around difference and competition in ways that don’t easily map onto ways of acting that have to be agreed upon globally.

SL: I would say that students are much more solution-focused than faculty tend to be on these issues. Also, on the other side of the apparent invisibility of oil, we might imagine intervention or re-mapping of systems because there are identifiable routes—such as train routes, even though they try to obscure those in the U.S. But there are symbols that are fairly easily read that mark which trains are oil trains, which trains are not; there are coal trains now running along rivers in Oregon and the dust from the coal is polluting the rivers, affecting the salmon runs—because you can identify points potentially where interference might occur, people, students and otherwise, start to realize how communities of activism or civic investment can coalesce and interventions might be made. I think the pipeline communities have been a really great example. Emily Ferguson, the Ontario activist, has talked about pipeline citizenship. It’s almost like a new version of bio regionalism, where we’re thinking in terms of the energy shed—one that was imposed upon us, not that came about organically—but how do we live in that energy shed? How do we re-identify ourselves as a citizenry living with that and then begin to shift our own behaviors so as to potentially make our lives safer and cleaner? There is a lot of very productive local imagining and imagining in social media—that I think maybe you were talking about with those posters, Imre—where I can identify real agency, whereas when I try to talk about climate change with my students, I get students weeping and I get despair. Or I get people telling me they just don’t want to hear about it at all. And of course I myself can become overwhelmed by sadness when faced particularly with climate-related issues such as ocean acidification or, more broadly, the sixth extinction. It’s an interesting place where pedagogical friction happens— where I’ve realized most powerfully that environmental pedagogy can be a kind of grief work, yes, but that productive grieving requires what I’ll call supportive infrastructure: we need to be able to think in terms of systems that we can identify and interact with.

BRB: I have often felt that having the right concept for a particularly nagging social or ecological ill helps to alleviate my sense of the pain it generates. The lived experience of being a pedestrian in Edmonton, Alberta, for instance, is the experience of being a person in a built world that is totally against you. To chalk it all up to fossil capitalism and the path dependency of petroculture offers a small sense of relief, yet recognizing this feeling makes me think that stopping inquiry there is not enough. How can we, as researches, use this kind of revelatory moment and also move beyond comfortable explanatory systems? In what ways has your approach to researching energy and, critically, to teaching it pushed you beyond your disciplinary boundaries? Has your focus on oil, in particular, meant that you had to reconsider your methodology and your pedagogy?

IS: There’s no question: doing research on and teaching about energy has forced me to contend with disciplines outside of my comfort zone. And this goes well beyond what normally constitutes interdisciplinarity—as when an English professor dips their toe into continental philosophy. The disciplines of energy today are geology, engineering, economics, and, to a certain degree, history. Those of us who have been advocating for an energy humanities are, in effect, arguing that other disciplines need to contend with the worlds produced by different forms of energy at different times. To do this effectively means understanding how energy has been figured (or not figured, as the case may be) to date, and this means contending generously and expansively with other disciplines.

But let me provide some further nuance to this answer—which is an expected one, no doubt (who these days affirms disciplinary boundaries?). I’ve had very little commitment to any given discipline to begin with; indeed, I’ve spent a good part of my career railing against the prescribed limits produced by our standard division of university research. So much energy has been expended either on defending or attacking disciplines that I think we forget that disciplinary division is a feature of a system as much as (or even more than) what is demanded by the issue or question under investigation. The system in question? The university—a bureaucratic, biopolitical space of knowledge transfer and a mechanism for the assignation of social and cultural capital. It’s hard to have encountered the work of Pierre Bourdieu and not be left questioning the real reasons for fields of study that emerge within disciplines, as well as the structure of the disciplines themselves; and we all too often fail to position the university within the structure of modern governmentality outlined by Michel Foucault, in which it acts as a structure for the organization of large, complex populations.

The problems and questions that emerge out of the concatenation of energy and politics are what interest me; these shape my research and my teaching. The how of methodology and pedagogy has to be driven by the problem in question, and not the pre-established orientation of this or that discipline, or even a mix of disciplines (which for critico-theoretical communities too quickly acts as a confirmation of the legitimacy of method and/or the problem under consideration). The problem at the core of all of my interrogations of petro-cultures is the capacity for socio-political change. We are faced with a deep, structural threat to the continuity of the modern: the energy source that enables it is (of necessity) in short supply, and the use of it is making the planet uninhabitable. These are immediate, material threats, which are well understood. Can these threats be used as a way of engineering a transformation that fundamentally alters not only our energy systems but also the socio-political systems they sustain? Is there a way to use this material threat as a way to engender social justice? Energy and social justice can seem far apart. My task, and the task of others interested in the politics of energy, is to show just how deeply they are in fact connected. Whatever research and pedagogic methods I employ start from here.

SL: Along similar lines to Imre’s tracking of the problem, for me the focus on oil demanded a breaking of the fourth wall. I felt I had to look at the world around me and move out into communities beyond academia. Which isn’t to say that my book intends to place itself far beyond literary and cultural studies—it has simply opened from the inside out via newer fields like eco-media and infrastructure studies. I had learned from the work of former colleagues like Lisa Parks—and from my fan-like following of the Center for Land Use Interpretation—that you have to go outside. To get into the affective worlds oil creates, the feeling of places it has injured, boosted, busted, I had to do some ground-truthing. This meant talking with people, recording the oral histories of activists in the case of my first chapter, which treats the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. I talked with neighbors in Ventura, California, where I then lived, who had worked in the oil industry or who were at that time combating fracking in our neighborhood; I joined anti-fracking efforts, talked with the Environmental Defense Center in Santa Barbara, I went to Fort McMurray, where I sat in cafes and talked with people, with cab drivers, with the wife of an oil sands worker, with other energy tourists. I learned as much as could be learned about Port Arthur, Texas, on a day of driving around there and trying to engage people in conversation— none of this was grant-funded, by the way. It was simply what I could do on very little time and my own money to feel that I had gotten some sense (literally, a sensory knowledge) for the places oil extraction and production has shaped and is shaping, places I had read about but felt I couldn’t write about with integrity if I hadn’t gone there, met people who lived “in” oil differently than I myself do, as an academic. The weight of what oil has meant to modernity, what I call petro-modernity, affected me quite personally. For me to write about oil essentially meant researching a sprawling social novel that I will never complete—and which came out as an academic book. I felt that the oil story was, and is, the story of the end of America, America the idea (which intrudes into many global places) at its best and worst.

BRB: It’s immensely interesting that the pedagogy of energy is so closely linked to the politics of energy, both in an activist sense and in a cognitive mapping sense. To use a turn of phrase from Imre’s work, the question of how to know about oil seems to generate both a knowledge set and a view towards politics.

IS: It may be that what Mitchell has mapped for us is the trajectory of a certain kind of politics that has now come to an end.

SL: Yes.

IS: And there is another politics that is in the process of emerging—one that Mitchell perhaps cannot see. If part of the politics that he’s imagining is based in labor and the movement of labor against capital and the state, I think vis-à-vis energy that that is gone. The workers who are in energy industries tend to be much more invested in those industries than they are in defining themselves as laborers against capital. Then-Premier of Alberta Ed Stelmach’s increase in royalty rates in 2007 was greeted with criticism from corporate head offices and oil field workers, who protested in front of the legislature (see “Alberta oil workers”). There’s an investment on the part of those who are part of the industry that they continue to make money from oil.

But this isn’t to say that there aren’t multiple sites at which exist the forms of awareness about resources that might yet generate a ground for a new politics. It’s a relatively new situation in the history of political movements to be against infrastructure. I can’t help but be intrigued by a mass movement against a pipeline, that is, against what was a previously invisible bit of infrastructure. This is a more promising politics about oil than one which starts from the position that we shouldn’t use oil whatsoever. The latter is an impossible position. It doesn’t get us anywhere. We can’t immediately step out of oil modernity because we don’t like it and into something else, for all kinds of reasons. But we certainly can begin to figure that infrastructure and its apparatus in ways that we haven’t before, at least not to any significant degree. As you were talking, Stephanie, it seemed to me Mitchell tells about one kind of politics about fossil fuels and not other, emergent politics of resources. Just because we can’t stop coal shipments in their tracks doesn’t mean that infrastructure has ceased to be a productive site of political action.

SL: Right. I would say, too, Keystone XL aside for a moment—although this might play into that as well—that the digital mapping tools that are available to us now, in combination with social media, have created a generation of people much more aware of infrastructural realities and infrastructural intensities, and also maybe empowered to feel a little bit like ‘I get to choose my own infrastructure,’ you know, ‘I get to DIY my infrastructure,’ or ‘I can do it on the computer.’ I’m thinking again about Emily Ferguson, this young woman out of McMaster, who ends up mapping line 9 late at night, over a series of nights, through Google maps. She ends up doing something no one had ever seen before because Enbridge wasn’t putting this out to the public. As a geography student, an undergraduate, who happens to be able to use Google mapping tools, she calls a new public into being. There are ways in which our worlds are revealed to us and are seemingly more manipulable now (even as we see our traditional political systems gridlocked), and I think this has created for us the potentiality for a new kind of politics. Specifically, I’m talking about politics around energy. I think Mitchell is great in that he actually lays down the infrastructure as that which affords particular kinds of political formations, movements, and alliances, but now we are in a different phase.

IS: It may be, just to follow up on this, that climate change is one of those hyper-objects that we can’t figure, and so the tendency is to feel that we can’t act on it.

SL: Or simply to not know what to do.

IS: Yes, or not know what to do. I think that when it comes to infrastructure and energy, we know that energy relates to climate directly, and that there might be possibilities to mobilize change around energy use that there aren’t around the abstraction we name climate change.

SL: Exactly.

IS: The use of older structures like borders with new political objects like pipelines generates a politics that I’m not sure we fully understand. The fact of the border allows for an intervention into our oil system, since it’s not only a “not in my back yard” scenario that is being played out with Keystone XL or pipelines in Canada that traveling from Alberta to the West and East Coast. The border—national, territorial, First Nations—enables bigger, planetary concerns to be critically examined, and does so in a way that has proved to be unexpectedly powerful and effective.

SL: Yeah. I think it’s in some respects a reiteration of the bio-regionalist politics of an earlier moment, but I guess I’d have to substitute something for bio-. Not quite sure what yet.

IS: Well, we’ll have to figure this out.

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