3 Agency and Energy Regimes in Ruins: The Photography of Oil Landscapes

It is indeed no little thing to control without restriction a commodity that uncountable millions of people are dependent on.

—Gustav Landauer, German anarchist, writing in Der Sozialist on September 9, 1895

Empires have a way of coming to an end, leaving behind their landscapes as relics and ruins.

—W. J. T. Mitchell

Infrastructural brutalism describes the historical moment when global capitalist destruction converges with global ecological crises including the Great Acceleration and the Anthropocene, and capitalism, instead of slowing the pace of its destruction, escalates its commitment to the construction of industrial infrastructure with unprecedented investment and resource consumption. One of the arguments to which I return throughout this book is that the attention given by anticapitalists to renewable energy technosocial assemblages, while important, is not as imperative as the need to disable oil capitalism before it permanently locks humanity into a near-term extinction scenario. While it is essential that alternatives to oil capitalism are constructed, the mere existence of these alternatives will not prevent oil capitalism from continuing to extract fossil fuels, produce toxic synthetics, and emit record levels of greenhouse gases. In short, what we destroy in the coming decades will be more important than what we build. An implicit assumption in most progressive or radical scenarios that foreground alternatives to oil capitalism is that oil capitalism will somehow become a responsible ecological steward of its own accord or as a result of government regulations. In addition to contradicting the history of capitalism, this assumption does not align with explicit contemporary capitalist ambitions. For example, according to the IMF, global fossil fuel subsidies in 2017 totaled approximately $5.7 trillion.1 In aggregate terms, China is the largest subsidizer of fossil fuels. In 2015, the United States spent more on subsidies for the fossil fuel industry than it did on its military.2 Globally, the state form remains profoundly committed to fossil fuel extraction and at odds with the nonbinding targets of the Paris Accord. A 2019 report from the environmentalist group Global Witness estimates commitments by global oil and gas corporations to new fossil fuel exploration at $4.9 trillion for the coming decades.3 Global Energy Monitor estimates slightly more than half of the 302 oil and gas pipelines in development worldwide are located in North America; if these pipelines are constructed, they will increase global oil and gas pipelines by almost one-third and ensure decades of increased oil and gas extraction and consumption.4 Oil capitalism shows no signs of slowing extraction, and even peak oil is unlikely to prevent climate catastrophe, because of the probability that a decline in oil supply will lead to the tapping of other, more dangerous fuel sources. Progressive analyses of the situation also tend to ignore geopolitical factors, such as the rise of far-right governments that typically deny the existence of global climate breakdown and eliminate existing marginal regulations on capitalist exploitation. Many progressive and radical analyses assume, explicitly or implicitly, that either market conditions will dramatically reduce the presence of fossil fuels in our energy mix (and, concomitantly, that renewables will ascend because of affordability), or that capture of the state by progressive forces will enable some kind of global regulation of fossil fuel extraction and consumption. These assumptions are incompatible with the history of state and capitalist formations, and with the momentum of existing extractive industry assets.

Photography and Oil: Petrography

As Adrian Forty notes, the French word for concrete (béton) derives from the same word in Old French as bitumen.5 Both words etymologically originate from a “mass of rubbish in the ground.” In a series of photographic experiments that began in 2012, Métis scholar and artist Warren Cariou used bitumen to recreate photography as it was originally assembled in the nineteenth century.6 The so-called “first photograph” was created by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 using “bitumen of Judea.” Cariou and his collaborators retrieved bitumen from the Athabasca River in northern Alberta, location of the notorious Tar Sands, a catastrophic combination of extractive industry invention and brute force. The oil industry in Canada estimates 170 billion barrels of recoverable oil to be in the Tar Sands, and a massive and durable infrastructure has been constructed to facilitate its extraction. The recovery of bitumen, which is then refined into oil at great expense and ecological devastation, is a “temporally inflexible” process, extremely expensive to initiate and therefore persistent once commenced.7 Troy Vettese rightly calls bitumen a “recalcitrant fuel,” but one that private investors prize because it represents half of the remaining oil deposits not controlled by nation-states, and because the $250 billion invested in its development from 1999 to 2015 make the Tar Sands “the largest single industrial project ever.”8 As recently as the nineteenth century, Indigenous people used bitumen as part of canoe construction. Cariou retrieved some bitumen from the banks of the Athabasca to see if he could experiment with the medium of modernity: “extractive industry viewed through a film of oil.”9 The results are impressive, like X-ray images embossed on sheets of gold.

Syncrude Storage Tanks and Infrastructure (fig. 3.1) illustrates what Cariou calls “petrography.” Notably, this reproduction does not capture how Cariou’s petrographs react to different luminosity; the image becomes more or less visible as one changes its angle of exposure to light. Viewers of these images can often see their own reflections in a petrograph as well. Jon Gordon ascribes a disruptive quality to the reflection in the petrograph: “The way we see ourselves through the bitumen of a petrograph, one’s own face reflected in the images, is a way of showing the viewers their implication in the process of development that the images depict. This disrupts the typical effect of photo-realist representation in which the viewer assumes the image shows a ‘reality’ out there, distant from and possessed by the viewer.”10 For Cariou, the process of making petrographs was a way of becoming more explicitly aware of ubiquitous petrocultural toxicity. While he, like many people, was aware of the many toxic consequences of a culture in which oil extraction, refining, and consumption are pervasive, it was not until he began working with bitumen as an artistic medium that he “became more viscerally aware of the risk” posed by the material.11 Contrary to expectation, Cariou’s encounter with bitumen as an artistic medium made the substance more ambiguous to him; he considered the role capitalist modernity played in transforming this naturally occurring substance into something toxic and part of the climate change catastrophe. Cariou compares bitumen to the history of tobacco, “which has a sacred spiritual value for many Indigenous people, but when transformed in the machinery of capitalist modernity, it becomes a harmful, toxic, addictive substance.”12 How, asks Cariou, can we “establish a different relationship with [bitumen], one that is more respectful of its power for destruction as well as its potential for creation”?13

The “different relationship” of which Cariou speaks will require a dramatic global social transformation, given how deeply entrenched oil capitalism remains, and even if such a relationship were achieved we would still encounter the remnants of oil capitalism in abandoned infrastructure, catastrophic climate change, and massive biodiversity loss for hundreds or thousands of years. Until the past ten years, much academic social theory ignored the centrality of oil, or of “energy” more generally, to the constitution of capitalist social relations. Allan Stoekl, for example, describes the “occlusion of energy as a source of value” in Hardt and Negri’s post-Marxist bestseller Empire as “remarkable.”14 During the past decade—inspired by a combination of peak oil discourse, the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and growing awareness of the unfolding climate catastrophe—some social theorists have returned to considerations of the particular dynamics that structure social assemblages and the dominant energy regimes; much of this research is articulated in the emerging literature of “petrocultures.”15 In the introduction to their recent anthology Oil Culture, which features many prominent scholars in the field of petrocultures, Barrett and Worden summarize the primary cultural objects investigated by scholars in the field: “As we envision it, then, oil culture encompasses the fundamental semiotic processes by which oil is imbued with value within petrocapitalism, the promotional discourses that circulate through the material networks of the oil economy, the symbolic forms that rearrange daily experience around oil-bound ways of life, and the many creative expressions of ambivalence about, and resistance to, oil that have greeted the expansion of oil capitalism.”16 Christopher F. Jones has critiqued the emphasis on oil in energy humanities to the exclusion of other energy topics, what he calls “petromyopia,” and though the following chapter focuses on oil, it is worth considering Jones’s critique. As very important as oil is to the constitution of the current form of capitalism (below I will continue to use terms such as “oil capitalism” and “petromodernity,” to indicate an object of study and not a universalization of fossil fuel dominance), Jones argues that “coal has been a more transformative fossil fuel, food has been the single most essential energy source for human history, and electricity constitutes the most commonly used form of energy for those living in developed nations.”17 The heterogeneous energy assemblage worldwide has significant implications for the study and transformation of infrastructure, for example. Oil is not the primary source of electricity in most parts of the world, which means structural differences for electricity consumption: “in critical ways, the social consequences of electricity diverge from those of oil, as the systems involve a different cast of companies (regional versus multinational corporations), regulatory patterns (state-level utility commissions versus national and international regimes), infrastructures (grid versus tankers and pipelines), markets (regulated monopolies versus international markets), and consumption patterns (appliances versus transportation).”18 Jones provides several substantive critiques of the study of petrocultures, and his conclusions deserve consideration by infrastructure scholars; in particular, his advocacy for a shift from foregrounding fuel to a more diverse scholarship of energy sources, especially electricity, might correspond with a shift from the festishization of oil to a concern for the structural transmission of energy in infrastructural forms. For this chapter, oil capitalism is the focus because of the significant role it plays in environmental devastation (global climate change and plastics especially), indexed by the photographs under consideration.

Energy regimes produce affordances and constraints for social actors, specific assemblages of labor, communications, transport, and consumption. When those energy regimes diminish or collapse, and even in their normal functioning, they leave behind ruins—what Gastón R. Gordillo calls the “ruptured multiplicity that is constitutive of all geographies as they are produced, destroyed, and remade”19—some of which can be salvaged for continuing human use, some of which can be retrofitted or upgraded for the new energy regimes, and some of which either have no use or must be destroyed. For Gordillo, the concept of “rubble” is “a concept of both theoretical and political importance because it deglamorizes ruins by revealing the material sedimentation of destruction.”20 Oil capitalism tries to conceal its destruction and sedimentary residue, by the proliferation of propaganda (to obscure resource wars, the violence of extractive industries, etc.) and the valorization of “creative destruction” as a progressive element of capitalism. The ruins of oil capitalism—desert countries reduced to rubble, pockmarked and impassable paved roads, abandoned oil rigs, impoverished and toxic human bodies, nonhuman animal carcasses processed by mechanized slaughterhouses—are often made invisible by their pedestrian presence and the glaring confusion of the spectacle, but artistic media such as photography, television, and film can help us to see the “ruptured multiplicity,” the “processes of ruination”21 that oil capitalism makes and remakes, all while durable infrastructure assemblages shroud the ubiquitous ruination with a sense of structural continuity and benevolence. Oil capitalism also faces another ruinous reality: oil infrastructure is functionally extinct. Oil capitalism is no longer compatible with life on earth, in its current scale and with its accumulation of emissions and wreckages. As Roy Scranton says, industrial civilization is “already dead.”22 To witness the ruination of oil capitalism therefore incorporates multiple temporalities: ruins past, present, and future. The images examined below include energy regime materialities of varying ruinations: abandoned oil wells that have stopped extracting but whose byproduct has inevitably been burned or used to produce plastics that will contaminate the environment for centuries; oil refineries that seem frozen in time in the image, but which continue to be an active component in the production of gasoline, petroleum coke, asphalt, and other petroleum products; coal power plants (the most pollutive of the fossil fuels) that evoke not only the ruins of airborne particulates appropriately named “fugitive coal dust” but also the entire assemblage of black lung, acid rain, cancer, smog, and mercury and other heavy metal contamination. How will we process the visualization of the ruins of modernity: in mourning for the beauty and diversity of life that has been lost and cannot be revived, or as resilient combatants against a suicidal regime determined to kill most life on earth? Gordillo wisely reminds us that destroyed “sites of power” make “people less fearful of the powerful”;23 ruins can be a source of inspiration. Gordillo calls this the “core of the elite fear of rubble in moments of unrest: that the rubble, indeed, could be an invitation to remake the world differently.”24 The rubble can also be fetishized in dangerous ways that accommodate people to gentrification and war, forms of violence that advantage the death spiral of capitalism. In what follows, images of oil capitalism are considered for their depictions of agency among the ruins.

The New Topographics

The New Topographics movement in photography—made famous by the exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York in October 1975—broke with the traditional landscape photography of Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter to frame the postwar industrialization of America in aesthetic terms “marked by repetition and isolation,” the disappearance of community “in an atmosphere of vacant alienation” defined by suburban sprawl, and a “celebration of directness, emotional remove, and attentiveness to humanity’s shaping of the land.”25 Curator William Jenkins included in the famous exhibit (reproduced in 2009) photographers Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr. Decades after the seminal exhibit, the New Topographics aesthetic remains relevant and is being reassessed by scholars; in the summer of 2011, for example, the exhibition “Public Works” at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago examined contemporary built infrastructure. Above all, and perhaps concomitant with post-1968 cultural theorists who emphasized the micropolitics of everyday life, the New Topographics photographers demonstrated an appreciation for “the altered environments of daily life,” something Finis Dunaway sees as “contributing to ecological citizenship by encouraging viewers to form attachments to a broader continuum of sites.”26

Contrary to earlier forms of landscape photography that situated nature as pristine and untouched by human development, the New Topographics engaged American landscapes as the scarred and decaying byproducts of capitalist exploitation, often featuring vacant spaces for automobility such as parking lots, highways, or gas stations, as in the work of Robert Adams, indicating “the new West’s utter dependence upon petroleum and private transportation.”27 The Rochester exhibition’s “juxtaposition of abandoned, new, and incomplete structures instills the human-altered landscape with a sense of built-in obsolescence and distinguishes its rapid growth from the natural environment in which it is situated.”28 Whether borrowing aesthetic inspiration from commercial real estate photography29 or aerial photography,30 the New Topographics was a photographic style commonly interpreted as apolitical, due to its “flatness, dehumanization, and deception of scale.”31 The same complaint has been levied against Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose manufactured landscapes seem to avoid explicit commentary on the industrial alterations they depict and often seem to beautify industrial waste and ecological devastation.

In her review of Jennifer Baichwal’s film about Burtynsky’s work, Manufactured Landscapes, Nadia Bozak writes, “Because Burtynsky systematically aestheticizes industrial civilization’s environmental incursions, his images are marked with an almost insentient detachment and lack of critical positioning that can be troubling.”32 To this point, Jonathan Bordo asks, “Does such beautification sooth irremediable loss by making human interventions appear like inevitable natural facts?”33 This essential tension between ecological catastrophe and aesthetic beauty becomes the central dilemma for most viewers of Burtynsky’s photographs, what Bordo characterizes as “an ambiguous situation of pondering pictures of ecological devastation while beholding dazzling visual surfaces.”34 Burtynsky’s aesthetic and the New Topographic aesthetic from which it derives should not be seen as apolitical, but rather as traces of an empire in ruins and a sociality to come; that is, Burtynsky’s photographs in his collection Oil, and Mitch Epstein’s images from American Power, produce an aesthetic of what Yves Abrioux calls “intensive landscaping,” or “landscaping as style, as the promise of a social spacing yet to come.”35 What Burtynsky and Epstein accomplish in their photographs related to energy in particular is “to invent relations, rather than assert ideological or cultural control.”36 In Burtynsky specifically, the place of energy extraction and transport becomes not a self-contained striation of ecological degradation but a “place of passage,” to use Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, a depiction of wildness and civilization in contact, assembled and reformulating the landscape into something other. Burtynsky himself described the ambivalence of his images: “I think that’s the duality. I think that’s what makes the images unstable. I think that’s what makes them interesting that they’re not kind of used as indictments. . . . Their meaning is not fixed.”37

It is obvious to observers of Burtynsky’s photographs that they catalogue ecological devastation. What is often perceived as a beautification of this devastation might also be considered a rhizomatic depiction of an always-incomplete process of becoming postempire, postcapital, and postnatural; the industrial revolution, after all, “fuelled by coal, oil and gas has resulted in a level of landscape change that is—in both its nature and magnitude—unprecedented in the history of humankind.”38 The ambivalence provoked by these photos signifies the death of conventional landscape photography and its ossified understanding of nature as a static, pristine construct, a representational form passing into something else. Burtynsky and Epstein depict an associationalism in place of state modalities of capture and striation, while foregrounding the energy relationships that shape landscapes as the sun sets on the suicidal state.

What is especially compelling about Burtynsky’s vision of state capture and striation is that it perceives this passage from the “distant vision” of a state, unlike some “environmentalist” framing of ecological devastation that sees “apparatuses of capture” from the vantage of what Deleuze and Guattari call the “close-range” vision of smooth space.39 That is, Burtynsky’s photographs see state modalities “like a state,” like the cadastral maps that produced the “synoptic view of the state,”40 and this perspective is unnerving for many viewers, especially those who do not identify with the optical space of the state. Absent are the intimate portraits of oil-soaked birds, dislocated Indigenous communities, or tattered corpses that normally signify, in the visual register of the social justice jeremiad, the criminal machinations of Big Oil. Instead of witnessing industrial evisceration from the intimate space of the indignant observer, Burtynsky complicates the observer’s relationship to agency in the age of oil by foregrounding the scale, technological complexity, and almost mythical ubiquity of petroculture. Absent is the bilateralism of earnest environmental portraiture, the simplistic agential dualism that pits “people” against Big Oil. Instead, Burtynsky offers a vision of a distributed agency, in which the “unstable cascade”41 of intentionalities resists a linear cause and effect in favor of depicting objects produced by flows of energy, material combinations, and “the conjoined effect of a variety of kinds of bodies,”42 an ontological reality that seems particularly noteworthy for industrial nations built on vast and complex technological infrastructures with extensive historical, political, and environmental legacies.

State Infrastructure

The modern state form coevolved with the material capacities of infrastructure, massive hydraulic processes that could generate and transfer electricity, excavate waste, and couple mobility with communication. “Between 1880 and 1950 modern nation states emerged as great territorial ‘containers’ with growing powers over many domains,” note Graham and Marvin.43 Within this context, infrastructure was widely perceived as the cohesive assemblage for a sense of national identity, and “infrastructure policies were the central way in which national states engaged in shaping capitalist territorial organization.”44 Some of the most notable infrastructure projects of this period include “the Nazis’ Autobahn network, the electrification of the Ukraine and the Soviet Union, the New Deal regional projects of the Tennessee Valley and the national highway programme in the United States.”45 These historical touchstones conform to Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of state territorialization:

One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space. It is a vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire “exterior,” over all the flows traversing the ecumenon. If it can help it, the State does not dissociate itself from a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc. There is still a need for fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects.46

James C. Scott traces this striation of space in early modern Europe primarily in the form of cadastral maps used for the segregation and taxation of land, among other state functions, in his book Seeing Like a State. Beginning with German scientific forestry, in which the “uniform forest was intended to facilitate management and extraction,”47 Scott demonstrates the translation of the state’s synoptic vision from forestry to other forms of striation including taxation. For the purposes of taxation and conscription, and in conjunction with the emergence of the modern state, cadastral maps translated the complexity of phenomenal flows into simplistic abstractions, becoming, to use Mark Halsey’s phrase from another context, “a machine of axiomisation,” something that “expunges the world of pre-formed things . . . the world composed only of rhythms and of bodies without organs, and in its place substitutes the certainties of Royal science and (il)logics of capital.”48 Scott writes:

The crowning artifact of this almighty simplification is the cadastral map. Created by trained surveyors and mapped to a given scale, the cadastral map is a more or less complete and accurate survey of all landholdings. . . . The cadastral map and property register are to the taxation of land as the maps of tables of the scientific forester were to the fiscal exploitation of the forest.49

The cadastral map, this “machine of axiomisation” or modality of state capture, not only “ignored anything lying outside its sharply defined field of vision,”50 it also produced a specific aesthetic: “The visual sign of the well-managed forest, in Germany and in the many settings where German scientific forestry took hold, came to be the regularity and neatness of its appearance.”51 Similar to the symmetry and synthetic appearance of the managed forest, landscapes under the synoptic vision of cadastral maps exhibit a quilted calculus primarily visible from an elevated vantage, “a God’s-eye view, or the view of an absolute ruler.”52 The reconstruction of Paris by Baron Haussmann from 1853 to 1869 exhibited the same logic as the scientific management of old-growth forests, and in the city “the aboveground order . . . facilitates its underground order in the layout of water pipes, storm drains, sewers, electric cables, natural gas lines, and subways—an order no less important to the administration of a city.”53 Thus, submersed infrastructure functions as a supplementary force of relations with “aboveground” striations, the repressed material strata of the flanêur.

Edward Burtynsky’s Oil

I began to think about oil itself: as both the source of energy that makes everything possible, and as a source of dread, for its ongoing endangerment of our habitat.54

—Edward Burtynsky, Oil

“The cadastral map is very much like a still photograph of the current in a river,” writes Scott,55 using a simile that effectively expresses the paradox of Burtynsky’s photography about oil. The cadastral map captures innumerable social processes in a state of becoming and occludes their very transitive properties for the administrative logic of the state. Burtynsky’s photographs often provide a sense of stasis where enormous sociotechnical apparatuses are operating in conjunctural tension. A perfect example of this is Oil Fields #22 (fig. 3.2), taken near Cold Lake, Alberta. This image, which opens his Oil collection, captures pipelines parsing a forest in a nondescript patch of wilderness. The pipelines travel from outside the left frame to beyond the horizon near the center of the image, in a winding path that evokes the natural contours of a river rather than the mechanical trajectory of something constructed. And yet this river of oil is still, the trees are erect as if there is no wind, and, typical of Burtynsky and the New Topographics, no human activity is visible. This image of the pipeline as pristine and autonomous conforms to what Graeme Macdonald calls “an oil-reliant capitalism seeking to extend and perpetuate supply while downplaying the ongoing, exploitative shame of extraction and land dispossession and the inevitable endpoints of burning.”56 Despite the obvious impact on the forest in the photograph, one could easily imagine Burtynsky’s Oil Fields #22 receiving the approval of the oil industry; the depiction of technical and natural elegance defers consideration of where the oil comes from and where and how it is ultimately used. The image belies the reality of oil pipelines in Alberta, which averaged two oil spills per day from 1975 to 2012; that’s 28,666 crude oil spills, and that does not include spills from pipelines that cross provincial or national borders.57 According to a 2016 estimate from the Alberta Energy Regulator, it will cost $22.75 billion to clean up the tailings—the toxic refuse from oilsands extraction—which totaled 1.13 billion cubic meters as of 2015.58 A report from Environmental Defence and the Natural Resources Defense Council estimates the cleanup cost for the tailings ponds at $44.5 billion, a figure that does not include additional expenses related to land reclamation and water monitoring.59 The cost of the cleanup already exceeds the amount of royalties collected by the province between 1970 and 2016.60 And the estimated 343,000 oil wells in Alberta could take more than 2,800 years to clean up, a process the Alberta Energy Regulator estimated in 2019 will ultimately cost $260 billion.61 These figures, likely a fraction of the actual damage the tar sands will produce once the oil companies are finished and leave, represent only part of the destruction to northern Alberta, and if the history of Big Oil is any indication the task and expense of trying to clean up the mess left by the oil industry in Alberta will fall almost entirely on public institutions. The stasis of the oil delivery apparatus and its riverlike curvature in Oil Fields #22 connote ambivalence about what is really happening, an ambivalence registered above by the reviewers of Burtynsky’s work. One could note, for example, that the more than 370,000 kilometers of pipelines in Alberta present a number of significant threats to the provincial environment: potential contamination of land and water from spills; loss and fragmentation of wildlife habitat and natural vegetation; loss and compaction of soils; reduced availability of agricultural, prairie, and forested areas; loss of historical resources such as archaeological sites; and stream sedimentation.62 At the same time, oil is implicated in a host of social benefits (medical advances, certain forms of mobility, warmth, agricultural production, etc.) and devastation (militarism, pollution, toxification of water and soil, agriculture—again, etc.), and complex, distributed forms of agency make it difficult to create a binary division of sinners and saints, malevolent demand and benevolent supply, those who are solely responsible for the petrocultural apparatus and those who stand entirely outside of it. Most notably absent from Burtynsky’s oil images, and yet most aggressively affected by capitalist resource extraction, are the First Nations communities of Alberta. This absence contributes to the ambivalent tone of his photographs, by visually displacing the most obviously aggrieved subjects of oil capitalism; their presence would make it easier for viewers to identify a political trajectory of accusation. But such a trajectory would also ignore the distribution of complicity with the atrocities of oil capitalism. By expanding our understanding of distributed human and nonhuman agencies in “petromodernity,”63 we can better recognize the shifting intensities of petrocultural assemblages.

In other words, if Burtynsky’s Oil Fields #22 is considered as synecdoche for the oil industry in its entirety, then clearly it conceals what Graeme Macdonald calls “the disastrous nature of oil’s benevolent banality”;64 similarly, Christopher F. Jones describes pipelines as a “dissociating technology,” because they tend to operate away from the view of the consumers they serve, thus making it easier for industrial subjects to ignore the consequences of their energy use.65 The theoretical lens of the ruin, on the other hand, or rather Ann Laura Stoler’s emphasis on ruination—“an active, ongoing process that allocates imperial debris differentially”66—provides a heuristic for oil photography that recognizes images of oil capitalism as representations of an energy regime becoming ruins; the pipelines that define this imperial formation are monuments “to what remains blocking livelihoods and health, to the aftershocks of imperial assault, to the social afterlife of structures, sensibilities, and things.”67 Oil Fields #22 portrays a stage in the dispossession of Indigenous territory, the polluting of the air, the evisceration of ecosystems, the enrichment of ecocidal capitalists, the enabling of state war machines, the powering of resource wars, the death and impoverishment of foreign populations. One question that must be asked regarding the energy regime to come is the question Stoler asks of “imperial debris”: “how do imperial formations persist in their material debris, in ruined landscapes and through the social ruination of people’s lives?”68 Whatever energy regime replaces oil capitalism, it will have to deal with the material, ecological, and social ruination produced by oil capitalism.

The juxtaposition of the forest and the pipelines in Oil Fields #22 recalls what Deleuze and Guattari famously described as the rhizomatic multiplicity that they contrasted with the hierarchical structure of the tree, associated with what they called arborescent thought—“thought, which like a tree, judges the world from one fixed point (roots, Cartesian rationality), or requires that thinking proceed in only one direction (scientifically, dialectically).”69 Burtynsky’s collection Oil thus begins with an image of trees, a metaphor used by Deleuze and Guattari to describe arborescent thought. However, the structure of the pipeline system has also been compared with a tree:

The pipeline system is organized like a tree. Small collector pipelines in the oil field, called flow lines, are the fine roots of the system. They gather crude oil from many wells and bring it to the field processing station. Somewhat larger pipes carry the oil to the terminus of a main-line pipeline, which supplies refineries hundreds of miles away; this is the trunk of the tree. The products of the refinery are then distributed through another system of main-line pipes, which divide into smaller and smaller branches until they reach distribution depots—the leaves of the tree.70

The entire apparatus of oil extraction, refinement, and distribution perfectly encapsulates the hydraulic science of the state, its hierarchical, arborescent thought that captures flows in a constant struggle with rhizomatic, open multiplicities. Burtynsky’s Oil begins not with an image of oil extraction or combustion, but with an image of trees and a treelike system of pipelines, the image of Royal science, arborescent thought.

The rows of “nodding donkey” oil wells in Belridge, California, depicted from an oblique angle in Burtynsky’s Oil Fields #19a (fig. 3.3), could easily be mistaken for an abandoned oil patch, if not for the two devices in the foreground visibly blurred because they are operating. Much like the pipelines in Oil Fields #22, the wells depicted in Oil Fields #19a encode the ambiguous agencies of modern industrial infrastructure. The oblique angle separates the image from the conventional geometry of the cadastral map, but only the two wells in the foreground appear to be moving. No humans are visible. Is this a dried-up oil patch, or the beating heart of the industrial society? Burtynsky allows the viewer to contemplate the space of passage between the two, between the dying empire and the vision of sociality to come, by isolating the materiality of petroculture from a detached and distant perspective. Instead of bisecting a forest, which might commonly connote forms of biodiversity, the wells depicted here are in the desert, a landscape frequently associated with hostility to life and, in the context of oil, with the crude oil deposits of the Middle East. Perhaps Burtynsky’s purpose with this image is to disorient the American viewer, with a landscape that could be either California or Iraq? A combination of elements in this image suggests psychological tension and alienation: the oblique angle, god’s-eye view, desert setting, and absence of human activity. Burtynsky’s familiar use of the horizon intimates a mythological scale of production. But where are the people who use the oil, and to what ends do they use it? Is this particular striation of oil wells and transformers, pipes and storage tanks, the beginning or the end of agency, the source of combustible mobility, long distance communication, and petroleum-based cultural products, or the mechanical moans and sighs of an empire reaching exhaustion? Burtynsky does not tell us. Will these ruins of oil capitalism have any functionality in the energy regime to come? It is difficult to say, but probably not. Burtynsky described this picture to the CBC in terms that reflect the associationalist perspective discussed here: “It’s a mosquito drawing blood. It’s like we have these pipes into the ground sucking it out and we never really get a chance to see very much of the material itself, but each one of us is almost using it every day.”71 The metaphorical connection between pump jacks and the drawing of blood is reminiscent of Any Lily Amirpour’s 2014 film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, which juxtaposes the ubiquitous pump jacks that surround the fictional ghost town of Bad City with the vampire at the center of the story. Extraction does not always produce life; sometimes it simply perpetuates an undead civilization, and always there are necropolitical consequences, the dictate that some or many must die.

To understand the materiality of agency in Burtynsky’s photography, one can summon the observations of the “new materialisms” of political theorists such as Jane Bennett, Diana Coole, and Timothy W. Luke, and of critical urbanists including Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin. Prominent strands of materialist cultural studies and urban studies employ the concept of “assemblage”72 to understand the distributed agency of urban infrastructure, which is often obscured either by its relative invisibility or by the anthropocentrism of cultural theory. Jane Bennett reminds us, “There was never a time when human agency was anything other than an interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity. What is perhaps different today is that the higher degree of infrastructural and technological complexity has rendered this harder to deny.”73 Oil pipeline or well assemblages, in this context, should not be studied as just the material product of oil company intentions, nor should their construction be understood as either the victory of an oil company or the loss of community resistance (the popular media framing of pipeline debates). Rather, cultural critics need to examine the “unstable cascade”74 of intentionalities, flows of energy, material combinations, and “the conjoined effect of a variety of kinds of bodies”75 that are contained within the mass structures of petrocultural landscapes. Assessing the distributed agency of petrocultural assemblages is not an act of becoming an apologist for environmental degradation or colonial racism, but instead recognizes that individuals are “simply incapable of bearing full responsibility for their effects.”76 Burtynsky’s photography is particularly useful for encouraging a discussion of agency in this manner.

Oil pipelines are but one aspect of oil extraction, transport, and use, but they connect the environmental, cultural, and health impacts of oil exploration, drilling, and extraction with the assemblages of oil transport, refining, and consumption. The spillage of oil is not always the most devastating effect of this process: “The physical alteration of environments from exploration, drilling, and extraction can be greater than from a large oil spill.”77 Oil refineries, such as the one in Texas depicted in Burtynsky’s Oil Refineries #34 (fig. 3.4), “produce huge volumes of air, water, solid, and hazardous waste, including toxic substances such as benzene, heavy metals, hydrogen sulfide, acid gases, mercury, and dioxin.”78 The oil and gas industry in the United States creates more solid and liquid waste “than all other categories of municipal, agricultural, mining, and industrial wastes combined.”79 The transport of oil from its place of extraction occurs by supertankers, barges, trucks, and pipelines; there are now “more miles of oil pipelines in the world than railroads.”80 Typically, these pipelines have “caused disproportionate impacts on low-income and minority communities in the United States and been connected to human rights violations around the world.”81 In other words, perhaps we could view what often lies within Burtynsky’s frame as an invitation to contemplate the many associations beyond the frame; in the case of his photographs about oil, the pipelines, wells, and refineries represent passages, associations, transfers of energy beyond the frame. Burtynsky’s images do not neglect social, psychological, and environmental devastation so much as they invite consideration of an agency that is multiple and beyond arborescent capture.

Therefore, when we see an image such as Highway #5 (fig. 3.5), we might see in this image an aesthetic parallel with Oil Fields #22. In Highway #5, tributary lanes of traffic converge into a river of asphalt that extends to the horizon in a seemingly endless bisection of the frame and the built landscape. Like the pipelines in Oil Fields #22, the highway bends casually as it drifts toward the horizon; this curvature, a feature of undomesticated objects, contrasts with the cadastral strips of habitation on either side. In the foreground is a highway that runs parallel with the frame, and in the background lie rolling hills. While the foreground and background portray conventional contrasts of striated and smooth space, the center of the image features a provocative strip of highway that destabilizes our topographic expectations. The horizon once again gives the impression that the built landscape continues forever, the hills standing like phantasms on the edge of a dream (or nightmare). Reyner Banham, whose 1955 essay and 1966 book on the “New Brutalism” were foundational documents in the understanding of architectural brutalism, famously wrote a love letter to Los Angeles in which he called the Los Angeles freeway “one of the greater works of man.”82 Decades later, Los Angeles has several of the worst highway bottlenecks in the United States,83 the Auto Insurance Center calls the 101 freeway the worst commute in the country,84 and the 1.2 million people who live within 500 feet of a southern California freeway “suffer higher rates of asthma, heart attacks, strokes, lung cancer and preterm births. Recent research has added more health risks to the list, including childhood obesity, autism and dementia.”85 Burtynsky’s image offers little recognition of this reality. Instead, similar to Oil Fields #22, Highway #5 seems to decontaminate the typical scene of industrial congestion and pollution.

Burtynsky’s Oil collection is organized to emphasize the ubiquity of oil and the distribution of agency. It is telling that the image of a pipeline opens the collection, and not an image of the point of extraction, refinement, or use; this is a collection about the places of passage. Without that epigraphic image of the pipeline, the rest of the collection would unfold in a more conventional way: the section titles progress from “Extraction and Refinement” to “Transportation & Motor Culture” and “The End of Oil.” The last image in the collection, Recycling #10, is that of oily footprints in the earth, taken at Chittagong, Bangladesh. The last section of the collection depicts abandoned oil wells, scrap yards with discarded jets and bombers, cars and tires, and the shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh where oil tankers go to die. By the end of the collection, readers have some idea of how oil capitalism ruination proceeds; however, the potential contamination or incorporation of these ruins beyond the scrap yards and oily footprints remains something of a mystery. Obviously, there is a conventional message here: the culture of oil leaves a footprint, and it is massive and destructive. But the image of the pipelines in the forest that opens the collection suggests we should not read the processes of petroculture as unidirectional and linear, as the obvious passage from extraction to deposit. Instead, consider the absence of human activity in the first and last images of Oil. Burtynsky’s vision is distinctly materialist, with human activity reduced to a relatively minor presence (in the few photographs devoted to “Motor Culture” and later to “Shipbreaking” and “Recycling”). The diminution of human actors reveals at least two ways in which his photography is consonant with the “materialist turn” in cultural studies: first, his cadastral vision articulates what Patrick Joyce and Tony Bennett call the “muteness” of infrastructural power, the ways in which “infrastructure is a good location for understanding how material powers can to varying extents operate outside human consciousness and language,” the durable power of “objects and processes,” “this capacity to be left to operate by themselves”;86 and second, Burtynsky’s relative resistance to the “close range” of smooth space suggests the primary concern of his photographs about oil is “less the ways in which objects become effective by being integrated into the subjective world of human consciousness, and more the difference they make in their own right as a consequence of their specific material properties considered relationally.”87 The story of Oil is the story of distributed agency within oil capitalism and the ruination of energy regime materiality, a process that will continue into the next dominant energy regime, or might even prevent the next energy regime from coming into being.

Mitch Epstein’s American Power

I wanted to photograph the relationship between American society and the American landscape, and energy was the linchpin. . . . Energy—how it was made, how it got used, and the ramifications of both—would therefore be my focus.88

—Mitch Epstein

While Edward Burtynsky says he had his “oil epiphany” in 1997, American photographer Mitch Epstein embarked on a form of what he calls “energy tourism” in 2003 after witnessing the evacuation of an Ohio town due to environmental contamination. For five years, Epstein catalogued the various forms of American energy production and their consequences. His comments in the afterword of American Power reflect a realization about energy that emphasizes the current moment as one of passage:

About a year into making this series of pictures, I realized that power was like a Russian nesting doll. Each time I opened one kind of power, I found another kind inside. . . . But now—while America teeters between collapse and transformation—I see it differently: as an artist, I sit outside, but also within, exerting my own power.89

Epstein’s photographs share with Burtynsky’s this sense of living between a dying empire and the sociality to come. Epstein and Burtynsky also share an understanding of being implicated as artists in what Imre Szeman calls “oil capitalism.”90 Many of Epstein’s images, such as Amos Coal Power Plant, juxtapose the settings of the New Topographics, in documentary form, with the types of energy that either make habitation possible or constitute the industry for that locale. In Amos Coal Power Plant, a lower-middle-class habitat shares the frame with apparitional cooling towers; the connection of everyday life with what in Burtynsky’s images is often a distant and secluded phenomenon—the production of energy—foregrounds the associative ethos of Epstein’s photo, and the lush, saturated conceptualism of the image makes the power plant seem even more discordant by contrast, like a background created by rear projection special effects in a film. Epstein’s documentary proficiency and almost surreal conceptualism creates an effect much like the ambiguity of Burtynsky’s cadastral images: something either banal or deeply corrosive acquires an aesthetic sheen that troubles the viewer’s desire to condemn in simple binarisms the social and environmental causes and effects that produced this scene. Whereas Burtynsky prefers the cadastral spatiality of the distant view and the frequently unseen materials of petroculture infrastructure, Epstein visits many of the everyday spaces and architectures of modern energy regimes. Epstein captures the associative qualities of energy production and transfer not by gesturing beyond the frame, as Burtynsky often does, but by filling the frame with uncommon objects within this transfer: the perforated American flag that adorns the refinery in BP Carson Refinery, or the belching stacks of the Amos coal power plant observing a high school football practice in Poca High School and Amos Coal Power Plant. Epstein’s images of coal and oil power represent a more balanced appreciation of the energy mix in the United States and globally. As Christopher F. Jones reminds us, “coal, not oil, set the stage for American and European hegemony and the modern world order,” and “globally coal consumption is on the rise, and Americans burned more coal in 1950 than they did in 1900, and more in 2000 than in 1950.”91 While coal power might represent an antiquated energy regime to the popular imagination of the overdeveloped world, its presence in Epstein’s images performs the return of the repressed.

Alien Capitalism and the Dark Ecology of Burtynsky and Epstein

The content of Burtynsky’s and Epstein’s photographs invites an associationalist perspective on the relationships between energy and landscapes. More specifically, Burtynsky and Epstein evoke some of the implications of Timothy Morton’s “dark ecology”: in the way they “linger in the shadowy world of irony and difference,”92 in the way their images are “dark but not suicidal,”93 and in the way they foreground “hyperobjects,” materials that will “far outlast current social and biological forms.”94 In Ecology without Nature, Morton declares that his work is “about an ‘ecology to come,’ not about no ecology at all.”95 The idea of “nature,” so explicitly foregrounded in the photography of Ansel Adams and reconfigured in the New Topographics, “will have to wither away in an ‘ecological’ state of human society,” says Morton.96 “Substantialist images of a palpable, distinct ‘nature’ embodied in at least one actually existing phenomenon (a particular species, a particular figure),” he claims, “generate authoritarian forms of collective organization.”97 Morton’s project is to deconstruct “nature” to the point where it no longer registers, resulting in what he calls “the ecological thought,” the “thinking of interconnectedness” and a form of thinking “that is ecological.”98

The concept of dark ecology is a “melancholy ethics”99 that “preserves the dark, depressive quality of life in the shadow of ecological catastrophe.”100 Morton believes “we can’t mourn for the environment because we are so deeply attached to it—we are it”;101 instead, deep ecology is “saturated with unrequited longing,” “a politicized version of deconstructive hesitation or aporia.”102 In this chapter, I have suggested repeatedly that Burtynsky and Epstein represent this kind of ambivalence in their photographs, even in the face of certain catastrophe, though some might challenge this reading, perhaps not seeing the same ambivalence or irony. To this objection, I would promote dark ecology as a more ethical response to these photographs than the perspective that sees only arborescent capture; as Morton writes, “We should be finding ways to stick around with the sticky mess that we’re in and that we are, making thinking dirtier, identifying with ugliness, practicing ‘hauntology’ (Derrida’s phrase) rather than ontology.”103 Burtynsky’s SOCAR Oil Fields #4 exemplifies “the sticky mess that we’re in,” pausing at an abandoned oil field in Baku, Azerbaijan, to see its haunted reflection in a pool of dirt and oil. Dark ecology also promotes lines of flight that interrupt the intersection of nation and nature, cadastral map and the ecological thought. “Later in the modern period,” Morton writes in Ecology without Nature, “the idea of the nation-state emerged as a way of going beyond the authority of the monarch. The nation all too often depends upon the very same list that evokes the idea of nature.”104 Deconstructing the synoptic view of the state conjoins with the ecological thought, when contemplating and practicing the ecology to come.

Nowhere in these collections of photographs does one find an image that intimates a possible return to some form of pristine natural world; instead, viewers must confront the toxic future of oil refineries, hundreds of thousands of kilometers of pipelines, and other hyperobjects of petromodernity. Morton compares these hyperobjects, such as the plutonium waste from nuclear reactors, to the “acidic blood of the Alien in Ridley Scott’s film.”105 Indeed, in conjunction with Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence,”106 Morton’s hyperobjects begin to articulate what I would call alien capitalism, an economic system whose materiality kills while dying, unleashes almost unimaginable toxicity even as its functionality wanes. In this sense, the sociality to come is always already toxic. Certainly, Burtynsky and Epstein do not try to avoid the toxicity to come in their haunted images.

In addition to Morton’s, the work of Stephanie LeMenager speaks to the aesthetics of ecology and energy in the work of Burtynsky and Epstein. Burtynsky and Epstein provide an aesthetic experience of energy infrastructure that presents some of its associations with landscape but does not impose a solution to the problem of environmental degradation (there are no images of wind farms juxtaposed with oil refineries, for example). There are, however, several impressions of everyday life under oil capitalism: a high school football team practicing, a busy freeway, the Talladega Speedway, a McDonald’s, a gas station. LeMenager rightly identifies the relationship, moving forward, between “ecological narrative”107 and the embodied memories of life under petromodernity:

The petroleum infrastructure has become embodied memory and habitus for modern humans, insofar as everyday events such as driving or feeling the summer heat of asphalt on the soles of one’s feet are incorporating practices, in Paul Connerton’s term for the repeated performances that become encoded in the body. Decoupling human corporeal memory from the infrastructures that have sustained it may be the primary challenge for ecological narrative in the service of human species survival beyond the twenty-first century.108

One way to decouple “human corporeal memory from the infrastructures that have sustained it” is to depict, as Epstein does, explicit conjunctions of energy production and everyday life, such as a coal-fired power plant looming over a lower-middle-class home and yard, or that same power plant spectating at a high school football practice. The juxtaposition of toxic energy production—coal power plants are the leading source in the United States of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide pollution, as well as significant sources of nitrogen oxides, mercury, and fly ash109—and everyday life performs a kind of defamiliarization that disrupts the quotidian affect associated with petromodernity. Though Burtynsky often isolates energy production from human cultures, his images of energy production, as noted above, depict the “sticky mess” we are in, what LeMenager calls the “humiliating desire and dependency of the human vis-a-vis non-human actors.”110 LeMenager, in a nod to Morton, calls this “feeling ecological,” and it “need not be pleasant.”111

That Ecological Feeling in Petrochemical America and True Detective

Several recent television shows situate the contamination of petromodernity as a quotidian feature of everyday life. Casey Ryan Kelly describes how shows such as Rectify, True Blood, and The Walking Dead portray toxicity in the American South “as a complex but discernable collective trauma that pervades everyday life in zones of human sacrifice.”112 These sacrifice zones are in fact overwhelmingly inhabited by the poor and people of color, but, tellingly, the shows mentioned above, and True Detective discussed below, feature casts of almost exclusively white central characters. The unpleasant reality of life at the end of petromodernity has become horrifyingly visible in popular culture, but its racist and classist quality tends to feature in these shows as background subtext. Despite this oversight, representations of alien capitalism and its fallout offer insight into certain forms of life in the twilight of synthetic living. For example, the opening credits for HBO’s True Detective, season 1, feature photographs from Richard Misrach and Kate Orff’s Petrochemical America layered into images of the central characters, symbols of sin and redemption, and more glimpses of the Louisiana coastline. One of the images in the opening montage for True Detective is Misrach’s Swamp and Pipeline, Geismar, Louisiana, 1998 (fig. 3.6), the haunted Other of Burtynsky’s Oil Fields #22, Cold Lake, Alberta, Canada, 2001, discussed earlier.

Burtynsky’s pipelines are shiny and new, and they curl through a pristine forest like a river; Misrach’s pipeline appears to be rusted, aging, and of a smaller diameter than the pipes in Burtynsky’s photo. Misrach’s pipeline already belongs to the ruins of petromodernity. The forest in Misrach’s photo is a leafless apparition in the retreating wetlands of Louisiana, a monument to the toxicity of the coastline and the alterations of the climate that are submerging southern Louisiana. This haunted pipeline is a premonition; it demarcates and predicts coastline erosion and toxic incursion. It bisects the bottom third of the frame as if holding back the swamp, preventing the natural from unraveling. The location is in Cancer Alley, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, one of the most toxic stretches of industrialization in the United States.

Kelly describes True Detective, season 1, as “less of a noir-themed murder investigation than a visual exploration of the degradation of the human condition in advanced industrial society.”113 In Kelly’s reading of the show, “toxic exposure” is “a structural force, a constraint on human agency that noticeably inflicts pain on the bodies of vulnerable populations.”114 Kelly sees the show as an allegory for modern America, “a yellowing, or jaundiced, landscape in toxic ruin that disables its inhabitants both physically and mentally.”115 Indeed, as detectives Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson) scour the Louisiana coast in search of an occult-inspired murderer, the landscape of Cancer Alley and its inhabitants visualize what Cohle describes as a “psychosphere” of “aluminum and ash,” human and nonhuman industrial actants in covalent bonds of ethylene and despair. In addition to the visualization of the always already toxic spaces and populations of contemporary America, True Detective also articulates an ethic for living in this “sticky mess,” this sickly body politic.

As a piece of genre television, True Detective trades in several familiar conventions: everything from the mismatched detective partners to the final showdown with the villain in a space of ruins. In this context, one could argue that the suicidal trajectory of Detective Cohle, who lost his young daughter in a car accident, also replicates the convention of the self-destructive cop, a convention usually paired with some kind of substance abuse. However, True Detective undermines its collection of clichés by the way in which it situates suicide, transforming suicide from a character arc into an ontological problematic, and as a result the show performs more than just a visual representation of environmental contamination: this is a show about living with ontological toxicity. In conversation with his partner Martin Hart, Rust describes his antinatalist philosophy, his belief that “the honorable thing” for human beings to do “is to deny (our) programming. Stop reproducing, walk hand-in-hand into extinction.” When Marty asks why Rust bothers living, Rust replies that he lacks “the constitution for suicide.” It is the first mention of suicide in the show, and it is articulated both in terms of the belief that humanity would be better off never having been born, and in terms of the individual choice of Rust to continue living after the death of his daughter. Clearly, Rust’s antinatalism emerges from the tragedy of his daughter’s death. The two subjects, suicide and dead children, become inextricably bound in the show’s narrative: the death or murder of young children defines the horrific crimes Marty and Rust are trying to solve; the death of Rust’s daughter provokes his suicidal thoughts; during the investigation of the Dora Lange murder, an informant commits suicide (or is “suicided”) in a jail cell; Rust encourages a child-murdering mother to kill herself before going to jail; and children and suicide coalesce in the ambiguities of the show’s conclusion, which enacts a form of what Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism.”

Edelman describes reproductive futurism as “terms that impose an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations.”116 Reproductive futurism circumscribes ideological possibilities by privileging the survival of the body politic, often articulated in the “coercive universalization” of what Edelman calls “the image of the Child.”117 In True Detective, the image of the horizon of horror is identified with a videotape of a ritual murder of a young girl; the tape is analogous to the play in Robert Chambers’s The King in Yellow that inflicts madness on readers who read beyond the first act. The greatest threat to the social order, in terms of the show, runs parallel with Rust’s battle with suicidal ideation: the death of a child, the death of the “insistence of hope.”118 The nihilistic horizon of the in-show universe and the character of Rust ask a similar question: If we can’t protect the (image of the) children (the future social order), do we deserve to live? Rust could not protect his daughter from dying accidentally. Marty and Rust together pursue a secret society of child-molesting, occult-inspired murderers. The question that looms over the conclusion of season 1 is whether the show will reify the cult of the child, or whether Rust will continue to efface the “insistence of hope.” For most of the show, Rust seems to embody what Edelman calls queer resistance, an “oppositional status” against reproductive futurism, one that does not “intend a new politics, a better society or a brighter tomorrow, since all of these fantasies reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of the future.”119 Rust’s self-imposed exile and antinatalist philosophy appear to be forms of queer resistance, until he reunites with Marty and reopens the investigation of the unsolved murders they had disbanded years earlier. The narrative trajectory and thematic appeal of the show pivots on the “act of resisting enslavement to the future in the name of having a life,”120 what Edelman also describes as “this willingness to insist intransitively—to insist that the future stop here.”121 The show’s ambiguous ending, when Rust declares “once there was only dark” but now “the light’s winning,” suggests a restoration of the social order, a refutation of the antinatalist philosophy he espoused throughout season 1. A diplomatic reading of this conclusion might decide that Rust remains pessimistic but no longer in the grip of suicide. Rust’s suicidal trajectory parallels the “sticky mess” of living with the aftermath of petrochemical catastrophes: If the future is already a toxic mess conjoined with catastrophic global climate change and a host of other calamities—what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “a civilizational catastrophe that expands every time [a so-called natural catastrophe occurs]”122—and many of these calamities can be diminished but not eliminated, then living with the effects of ubiquitous toxic contamination means we must refuse to reproduce the social order that created this condition (capitalism, petrochemical industries, the technoscientific order), and imagine contemporary ethics as a hopeless enterprise. Rather than see hopeless politics as nihilistic, hopelessness is radically self-effacing and profoundly antihumanist.

Season 2 of True Detective (2015) implicates infrastructure construction in the actual plot. The much-maligned second season involves a convoluted story about dirty politicians, cops, gangsters, and the construction of a high-speed rail line in central California, a plan that resembles the actual high-speed rail line approved in 2008 and for which construction began in 2015. The first phase of the real-life line, which will connect San Francisco with Los Angeles and Anaheim, is estimated to cost $64.2 billion. In True Detective, season 2, the central storyline involves politicians and gangsters competing to profit from the land and government contracts dedicated to the rail line construction. In the show, the fictional city of Vinci is played by the city of Vernon, California, famous for its corruption, and Vernon landmarks such as the Vernon Light and Power Facility, an art deco building constructed in 1929, provide architectural touchstones of hyperindustrial noir.123 In the first episode of season 2, an aerial shot of the BP refinery in Carson, California—the same refinery photographed by Mitch Epstein in BP Carson Refinery, California 2007—is supposed to represent industry in the fictional city of Vinci. By channeling a real infrastructure megaproject as the premise for a neo-noir serial, Nic Pizzolatto, the series creator, combines the genre’s penchant for cynicism and despair with the modernist myth of the progressive trajectory of industrial infrastructure; the most famous antecedent of this story is, of course, Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), which was very loosely based on William Mulholland and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. True Detective and Chinatown, like the many films, television shows, and novels discussed in this book, remind viewers of the ideological composition of infrastructure, but, in the case of these “infrastructure noir”124 narratives, the story of modernity dovetails with noir misanthropy in a paradoxical collision of cultural myths about human agency. The corruption that surrounds the high-speed rail project in True Detective smothers technophilic optimism, and the crushing existential presence of infrastructure megaprojects, once constructed, achieves a sense of fatalism that is concrete, immediate, and of a scale that moody, darkened, rain-swept streets, with their menacing portent, cannot match. That is, film noir coincided historically and ideologically with a postwar, post-bomb, post-Holocaust reality, and birthed an important component of the aesthetic of infrastructural brutalism: the urban condition in which nothing, not even paved roads and an increasingly international mobility, could alleviate the feeling that industrial civilization is doomed. Industrial infrastructure, in the large dams that powered the development of nuclear weapons and the railways that facilitated the Holocaust, was essential to the disillusionment registered by film noir.

Deleuzoguattarian Ecology and the Synoptic View

The media examined above provide a series of cultural objects with which to consider relationships between agency and energy in oil capitalism. As demonstrated by reference to the “material turn” in cultural studies and the poststructuralist associationalism of Deleuze and Guattari, the foregrounding of infrastructure in the context of oil capitalism in these photographs offers an occasion and a visual lexicon for interrogating the “cascade of intentionalities” sometimes unseen in everyday life. Agency, once explored through a materialist and associationalist lens, appears distributed among human and nonhuman actors, as scholars in science and technology studies have argued for some time, and the images of oil wells, pipelines, and power plants represent temporary stabilizations of agency observable from the cadastral perspective of the state. What are some of the consequences of this theory of agency? In particular, what Deleuze and Guattari call “geophilosophy”—described by Patrick Hayden as an “attempt to formulate a mode of thinking in association with, and as the affirmation of, the diversity and multiplicity of the continuous becomings of a fluctuating natural reality”125—represents a form of ecology that is antiessentialist, antihumanist, and decentralist. The basic question of geophilosophy, for the current moment of ecological crises brought on primarily by oil capitalism, is the following: “How do Deleuze and Guattari help us rethink our ecological crises beyond the impasses of State-sanctioned resource exploitation and reactive environmentalism?”126 This impasse is a source of ambivalence commonly found in critiques of Burtynsky’s work. As Bernd Herzogenrath explains,

As a conceptualizing machine, [Deleuzian philosophy] can provide ecology with concepts that complement its scientific prospects or “reprocess” its inherited philosophical notions. Deleuzian concepts are “ecological” in the sense that they do not address the essences of things, but the dynamics of events and the becomings that go through them.127

The philosophy of becoming advocated by Deleuze (and Guattari) allows for the “active, unfinalized flux of constantly circulating relations, interactive encounters, and shared transformations” among the Earth’s “natural-social habitats,”128 while simultaneously it offers political ecology a consideration of “which concepts, practices, and values best promote the collective life and interests of the diverse modes of existence inhabiting the planet.”129 In this sense, Deleuzoguattarian ecology works against the systematizing and categorizing of conventional imperialist science. Deleuze and Guattari are unique in poststructuralist circles in their promotion of a form of naturalism that is antiessentialist and avoids reactionary nostalgia for some kind of pristine past.130 Instead, Deleuze promotes “a type of naturalism that highlights the diverse interconnections between human and nonhuman modes of life, in such a way as to provide some overlooked philosophical resources for integrating ethical and political considerations with ecological concerns, while resisting the reductive temptation to turn nature into a static metaphysical foundation.”131 This form of naturalism stands in contrast to some prominent thinkers in the anarchist tradition because it rejects both “a static metaphysical foundation” (including an essentialist understanding of human nature) and forms of speciesism that have contaminated Left thinking, as Steven Best writes, “from Kropotkin and Marx to Bookchin and beyond.”132

A Deleuzoguattarian ecology emphasizes the micropolitical over the macropolitical, but not to the exclusion of the macropolitical. Hayden argues, “for ecopolitical activism to engage itself effectively, it must steer clear of universalized abstractions and carefully study the specific needs and alternative possibilities within localized situations.”133 The global scale of the ecological crisis has led some to demand a global solution; however, “a micropolitical focus on the particular needs and interests of diverse local habitats and inhabitants in light of the available knowledge of ecological conditions will perhaps better contribute to the creation of effective ecopolitical interventions than will a focus solely from a unitary, large-scale framework.”134 This mode of thought is also consistent with the anarchist preference for direct action and aversion to bureaucratic and institutional structures. Any global response to environmental crises is more likely to produce arborescent power structures than it is to produce open multiplicities. Deleuzean micropolitics “is about critical emancipation, not necessarily from systems, but towards other types of open systems.”135 For centuries, state capitalism has killed Indigenous ways of existing and nonhuman animal species. The prolonged emancipation from this rule of arborescent thought will require an unprecedented proliferation of “open systems” attuned to “diverse local habitats and inhabitants,” not a one-world order of resistance. That will include avoiding forms of ideological purity, at times, something many revolutionaries find challenging.

Finally, a Deleuzoguattarian ecology could embrace their concept of machinic assemblages, not only for the epistemological and ontological advantages of a process philosophy that emphasizes relations over essences, but also to avoid the limitations of debates over what kinds of technology—self-contained types—are appropriate for an anarchist politics. Herzogenrath summarizes the advantage of the concept of the “machine” in Deleuze and Guattari, which concerns connections rather than essences: “Their model [of machines] also affords a single mode of articulating developmental, environmental, and evolutionary relations within ecological systems, and makes room for a conceptualization of a general, nonanthropomorphic affectivity within dynamic systems.”136 From this perspective, a Deleuzoguattarian ecology concerns itself with “resonances, alliances and feedback loops between various regimes, signifying and non-signifying, human and non-human, natural and cultural, material and representational.”137 The resulting philosophy avoids outmoded invocations of the technology neutrality thesis and Manichean compartmentalizations of “good” and “bad” technology: “[Deleuze and Guattari’s] ‘machinism’ avoids both technophilia and technophobia, its guiding principle being that of the invention of possibilities of life.”138 Instead, as Mark Halsey notes, the “function of machines” in Deleuze and Guattari “is to break and redirect flows—flows of capital, wood, metal, genes, friendship, knowledge, work and so forth.”139 How machines connect flows of desire and produce habit-forming potentials is never simply a question of doing the right thing for the environment, obviously, and something always escapes machinic encoding. But at least Deleuze and Guattari offer a perspective that always seeks to proliferate the “invention of possibilities of life.”

Halsey argues that this perspective forces the question, “What would it mean to cease mapping the earth? Alternatively, what might it mean to map earth according to, for instance, a becoming-eagle, a becoming-fish, a becoming-redwood, a becoming-worm, or a becoming-river? This is what Deleuze and Guattari demand of us—that we move beyond the bodies, lexicons and modes of envisioning traditionally associated with late capitalist subjectivities in order to develop and inhabit the worlds of others.”140 Burtynsky reminds us of the cadastral legacy of the synoptic state, but as a place of passage. He does not offer the perspectives of nonhuman animal subjectivities. In that regard, his photos are generative but not radical or transformative. As Halsey concludes, “What else are environmental problems other than the visible and audible result of attempts to constitute various portions of earth as a unity in spite of its being a multiplicity? The challenge, it would seem, is to develop a lexicon which does the least violence to the nuances of each (socio-ecological) event.”141 In this context, the photographs of Burtynsky, Epstein, and Misrach effectively invite viewers to see oil infrastructure and human interaction with it as a multiplicity with distributed agency. Rather than depict alternatives to oil capitalism, these photographers show us places of passage in the infrastructural web of human and nonhuman actors; they foreground the transitional, associative, and conjunctive debris of petroculture. They show us that we are becoming something other, but do not dictate the terms on which this passage shall be accomplished or its destination.

The transition from postempire to the sociality to come has, because of the material infrastructure of the petromodern state form, more than simply ideological possibilities: the gathering storms of climate crises, toxic hyperobjects, and rapid resource depletion, all intimately connected to the infrastructure of petrodmodernity, represent an assemblage of material conditions that threaten the survival of the human species. Unlike liberal and progressive responses to oil capitalism, which often propose technological fixes or global institutional arrangements, a Deleuzoguattarian ecology is better equipped to describe and respond to the longue durée of petromodern infrastructure, the “slow violence” of its principal assemblages, and the suicidal state form of hydraulic sciences that are slowly but surely striating the escape routes.

Will the Ruins of the State Form Wither Away?

To conclude this chapter, I offer a provocation concerning ruins, the state form, and revolution. If the passage from the global order of oil capitalism to the sociality to come must pass through the hyperobjects of oil capitalism—the durable ruins of this ecocidal order—then what consequences might this have for the very concept of revolution? Specifically, most of the anarchist and Marxist left believes in a revolution that abolishes the state form; indeed, given the material constitution of the petromodern state, perpetuation of the state form effectively concedes near-term human extinction as inevitable. However, if we consider the durable effects of the petrostate—global warming, plastics, etc.—as part of the state form, a state form as hyperobject, then how does this material afterlife for the petrostate impact the politics of state abolition? To contemplate this question, consider the photography of Ernst Logar in Invisible Oil, especially the image Tillydrone.

Logar’s Invisible Oil project examines North Sea oil and its impact on Aberdeen, foregrounding the otherwise obscured spaces of the oil industry. While Invisible Oil includes sculpture and photography, here I will focus on one photograph as a kind of visualization of the question that motivates this conclusion. Tillydrone is in the northern part of Aberdeen, and Logar’s photograph is one of several based on recovering oil-based refuse from the beaches of Aberdeen and constructing sculptures of offshore oil rigs with the garbage. This offshore rig wrapped in plastic, sitting on the shore of Aberdeen, disrupts an idyllic view of the North Sea and brings into view the durable synthetic waste of petroleum: the one million plastic bottles purchased every minute worldwide, of which not even half are recycled;142 the 8 million tons of plastic that end up in the ocean every year, including trillions of microplastics that are carried by currents into the Arctic;143 the fact that there will be more plastic waste than fish in the sea by 2050, if current practices do not change144 (and some scientists believe it is already too late to remove the plastic from the oceans).145 This synthetic product of petromodernity now approaches climate change in terms of its potential devastation to ecosystems. Tillydrone shows viewers the shape of the global oil industry under capitalism, what the industry overwhelmingly produces; whereas Warren Cariou’s petrography, which opened this chapter, reflected and therefore implicated the viewer in the technosocial assemblage that created the art made from a naturally occurring substance, Tillydrone confronts viewers with a synthetic creation of an economic system that is inherently ecocidal. The social organization that has extracted and consumed oil on a global scale now leaves a wake of plastic debris whose turbulence will reverberate for centuries. It will require an estimated $68 billion, much of which will be covered by British taxpayers, to decommission the UK oil and gas fields of the North Sea, a project that will take at least 40 years; the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate estimates its own decommissioning efforts at $19 billion, and Denmark will have to spend at least $4 billion; and these estimates could double or triple over time.146 What does revolution look like in this context?

One of the many compelling insights in Allan Stoekl’s book Bataille’s Peak is the recognition that the other side of peak oil will not be a simple reflection of petromodernity’s ascent. “It is tempting to assume a simple reverse dialectic: the return of the feudal,” writes Stoekl, “but there is more than an energy blip that separates us from the Middle Ages.”147 He continues:

We cannot simply flip over the dialectic and predict a decline where previously there had been an advance. . . . The unknowable future will not be conceivable as the simple downside of a bell curve. . . . We cannot assume that we will be forced into any given social regime by any given energy regime.148

Stoekl argues that one thing that separates the “downside” of the peak oil bell curve from the “upside” is what he calls “the fact of knowledge”: “Non-knowledge is not simple ignorance, but the follow-through of the consequences of attained knowledge; in our case, this implies a full understanding of the energy regime of modernity, the benefits and pitfalls of rationalism and humanism.”149 A significant set of material consequences issue from the petromodern state form, an energy regime that prizes fossil fuel consumption, and the hydraulic apparatus necessary to territorialize space. While some peak oil observers may envision the post-oil era as a return to technosocial assemblages of earlier stages of capitalism, perhaps even to a neofeudal order defined as much by its technologies as by its wealth disparity, the hyperobjects of the petromodern state form—such as global climate change, landscapes erased and refashioned by infrastructure, and durable forms of industrial toxicity—must be factored into any consideration of the coming assemblages. The petromodern state form has created objects of almost unimaginable size and persistence, akin to what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects,” because they are “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.”150 Anthropogenic global climate change, a by-product primarily of industrial capitalism, will continue to reverberate with distributive agencies for hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years. This particular hyperobject emerged from an assemblage that includes hundreds of thousands of miles of oil pipelines, railroad tracks, and paved roads, as well as consumers, zooplankton, algae, and automobiles. If anthropogenic global climate change, abandoned shopping malls, and parasitic tendrils of pipelines that ensnare host organisms are hyperobjects with a prolonged material existence courtesy of the petromodern state form, then what are the implications for antistatist politics? What does it mean to “abolish” the state, if the state form includes durable, massively distributed objects? Can the state “wither away,” as in Marxist-Leninist theory, if its material form includes such persistent objects? Similarly, how will revolutionary projects address engineering megaprojects that could require decades to decommission, or inherently unstable and potentially omnicidal infrastructure such as nuclear reactors and their waste, which, once constructed, require particular kinds of persistent and expert attention in the process of decommissioning or maintaining?151 The petromodern state form is also not a material tendency that will be abandoned anytime soon, barring a significant energy crisis; China, for example, has spent the last 30 years engaged in the most rapid and widespread urbanization project in human history; according to BP, global petroleum consumption and carbon dioxide emissions achieved record highs in 2015;152 and there are approximately 435 nuclear reactors worldwide, with 71 more under construction.153 In other words, opposition to the petromodern state form is not simply a matter of confronting the ruins of modernity; it is also a matter of finding ways to halt, sabotage, and destroy the expansion of the petromodern state form.154 It is also, unfortunately, about learning to live with irreversible material tendencies, such as the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet or the mass extinction event currently in process, while adapting to emergent structures and agencies.

Some hyperobjects are categorized under the term infrastructure, and this is the category most explicitly identified with state formation. While state formation obviously includes symbolic indoctrination and violent domination, this brief provocation emphasizes only the infrastructure of state capitalism. The “hydraulic science” of the state form155 is often implicated in discourses of nationalism to signify modernity and notions of progress; in some instances, material instantiations of infrastructure have “accompanied and transcended ‘official’ processes of political and economic integration” of nation-states.156 Patrick Joyce and Chandra Mukerji recommend the state form be defined as “an assemblage that is distinguished as a whole by its ability and tendency to use logistical power,” a processual, associationist definition of statism that also emphasizes state “territorial, legal, and bureaucratic infrastructures [that are] unlike other institutions” that “exercise logistical and impersonal power,” such as corporations.157 As I suggested in the introduction to this book, state logistical power, to the extent that it dispossesses people for extractive industries and fossil fuel infrastructure, is now suicidal. Who governs these industrial assemblages is relatively insignificant, given the material and ideological pressure they exert on governance. While the state form also includes institutions, symbols, practices, and ideological propensities, here the focus is on the material legacies of infrastructure to emphasize the durability of the state form and the challenge this poses to its abolition.

If petromodern infrastructure represents a kind of hyperobject that is massively distributed in time and space, then what does it mean to “abolish the state”? In the nineteenth century, of course, Marxists ridiculed anarchists for their desire to abolish the state “immediately”; instead, Marxists typically advocated some kind of intermediate period following the revolution, in which a proletarian state would govern and then dissipate. The Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre describes the Marxist-Leninist notion of the “withering away of the state” in the following manner:

The proletariat must have a State. This State is not that of the bourgeoisie, it is that of the proletariat organized as the ruling class. But this state is such that it begins immediately to wither away and cannot but wither. The passage is categorical.158

Most theories of the state admit some combination of material and semiotic components, the state form as institutions, practices, and iconography. Recently, however, some historians of the modern state have emphasized its material legacies. In particular, scholars such as Tony Bennett, Patrick Carroll, Patrick Joyce, Chandra Mukerji, Jo Guldi, and Germà Bel have explored the material properties of state formation, especially the construction of infrastructure. The enduring material legacies of state formation are not deterministic, but they definitely articulate specific affordances and constraints. As Joyce and Bennett note, “if certain capacities or affordances are ‘built-in’ to the material world this is very far from dictating outcomes, for these affordances are continually disrupted and transformed through the action of the innumerable other agencies of things and people.” The power of infrastructures might lie in their “very muteness, this capacity to be left to operate by themselves,”159 but such an observation should never be confused with the idea that infrastructure does not require human participants, or with the incorrect belief that infrastructure is invisible.

Infrastructure thus typically escapes theories of the “withering away” of the state form, and this omission produces significant forms of myopia in certain revolutionary politics. Would oil and gas pipelines wither away “categorically” following a proletarian seizure of the petromodern state? No, they obviously would not. How problematic is such a material legacy, in the context of anthropogenic climate change? The anarchists of the nineteenth century were right—the state should have been abolished immediately. In hindsight, the success of Marxist revolutions around the world in the twentieth century—revolutions in which the state not only remained but expanded the reach of industrial infrastructure—produced conditions in which communist countries, such as China and Russia, could easily transition from state communism to state capitalism. The result is that the urbanization of China has all but guaranteed that global climate change, largely a consequence of Western industrial capitalism, will lead to the extinction of the human species, or at the very least will produce global ecological conditions that ensure a mass die-off of humans in the coming century. In other words, the anarchists were right, but now it is too late for even an anarchist revolution of breathtaking scope and success to reverse the effects of industrialization; the best we can hope for is a revolution that slows the pace of destruction and perhaps avoids human extinction. The question does remain, however: How will the hyperobjects of petromodernity shape radical politics in the context of attenuated catastrophe?

Attention in social theory to the materiality of infrastructure is not by itself new: “Since the eighteenth century, experts have seen ‘the government of things’ as one of the central tasks of state rationality.”160 The materiality and legacy of particular state infrastructures may offer lessons in how to resist particular political assemblages, how to adapt to conditions of collapse, or how to build revolutionary infrastructures. Understanding the history of infrastructure may assist with adapting to its collapse. In some cases, infrastructure has significantly shaped politics for centuries. For example, Germà Bel describes the impact of infrastructure policy in Spain over hundreds of years. Bel connects eighteenth-century infrastructure planning to the centralization of Spanish governance, a model that was supposed to imitate how Paris was situated within France.161 In recent years Spain made connecting all of the provincial capitals with Madrid by high-speed rail “a national objective,” thus becoming “an extreme example of the use of infrastructure policy in the service of territorial hierarchical structuring and the organization of power in Spain.”162 Likewise, the design of postal routes in the nineteenth century in service of the monarchy, for example, “established a radial network whose characteristics have remained unchanged up to the present.”163 These forms of transportation infrastructure “left a permanent imprint on Spanish politics.”164

Jo Guldi would describe Bel’s depiction of Spain as an example of the “infrastructure state.” Guldi describes the history of Britain’s roads in the nineteenth century, the origins of which date back to 1726 and the military survey of Scotland: “Rich and poor regions were pitted against one another as new political fault lines opened over issues of access to infrastructure.”165 The conflict over the design of roads, of course, was a conflict over “the flow of bodies, information, and goods.”166 The standardization of toll booths and sidewalks oriented “labor and capital to a new centralized management.”167 Guldi argues that the separation of trade and the state on “ancient” highways was erased by the advent of the infrastructure state.168 The infrastructure state was built “around the logic of conquest,”169 and ensured that the paving and management of roads included the application of “manuals, forms, and bureaucratic hierarchy” in the scrutiny of every component of construction.170 Despite the expectation that infrastructure such as paved roads would bring an egalitarian peace to the land, such infrastructure instead pitted “region against region, experts against the people, and class against class.”171

To the examples of Spain and England, Patrick Carroll adds Ireland as another case study that proves, he says, the modern state is “by definition” an “engineering state.”172 Carroll argues that “modern statecraft is science-based as well as coercion-based”:173 “It is through the state-system that governing practices materially incorporate land, bodies, and built environment into the state-country.”174 This coalition of statecraft and engineering, especially given the ubiquitous toxicity of modern industrial capitalism, articulates the material pervasiveness of the state form, something Carroll describes as a “plexus” or “dense and minutely interwoven structure of intercommunicating fibers or tissues.”175 The shift in analytical model for Carroll, and similarly for Patrick Joyce, involves an emphasis on practices of government instead of the rationalities of government, the latter of which are the emphasis in governmentality studies.176 Carroll sees his methodology as a “single triangulated distinction among state discourses, state practices, and state materialities”177 that transforms land, people, and the built environment into “a socio-technical network of techno-territory, bio-population, and infrastructural jurisdiction.”178

Finally, Chandra Mukerji has written about the emergence of the “territorial state” in seventeenth-century France. This “transformation of the French landscape—with the construction of fortresses, factories, garrisons, canals, roads, and port cities—imprinted the political order onto the earth, making it seem almost an extension of the natural order.”179 Massive infrastructures enabled power to be exercised according to bounded territories instead of through centers of power such as towns or cities.180 As Carroll argues, this new state form was an engineering achievement as much as it was anything else, and Mukerji similarly emphasizes material practices and not simply rationalities. Under Louis XIV, “territorial politics entered the French court, not as a threat to the king, but as a way to associate his legitimacy with the management of the state.”181 In her book Impossible Engineering, Mukerji examines how the construction of a canal “pointed obliquely toward techniques of governance that lay beyond the visible and familiar practices of domination—war, taxation, and court life.”182 The building of the Canal du Midi, however, was not simply a triumph of isolated expertise: it “was a product of a collective intelligence—the work of groups with both formal and vernacular expertise in land measurement, construction, and hydraulics.”183

Today, the industrial capitalist state claims a similar kind of territorial legitimacy by defining infrastructure in terms of the state’s projection of force: “critical infrastructure protection” aligns state legitimacy and violence with the necessities of life to such an extent that to oppose the state is to oppose one’s own right to clean water, electricity, telecommunications, heat, and so on. As commitment to the state form collapses, the state escalates its regulatory and coercive apparatuses designed to necessitate dependence on the state form. For example, dozens of American cities, including Los Angeles, have passed laws making it illegal for homeless people to sleep in their cars.184 A woman in Cape Coral, Florida was taken to court by the city because she refused to use city water and electricity—in essence, she was living off the grid.185 In the Canadian province of Alberta, a special detachment of the RCMP protects oil and gas pipelines from sabotage. Eminent domain and other forms of state expropriation, often in order to build industrial infrastructure, also continue to ensure the encroachment of the state form. The gradual accumulation on the frayed perimeter of the state form challenges the private property regime through massification: over 1 billion humans currently live in slums, a number estimated to grow to 2 billion by 2020. And these intensifications of collapse and state encroachment assemble on the corpses of Indigenous people, the original victims of the petromodern state.

These historical examples must be matched with contemporary engineering megaprojects such as large dams, industrial mining, and even the Internet, which, in their scale, capacities, and endurance, ensure the concomitant flow of resources into industrial capitalism and the incremental elimination of escape routes from it. The suicidal trajectory of the state form, which begins with genocidal campaigns to erase Indigenous populations and ends in the long shadow of species extinction, has produced hyperobjects such as global climate change, plastic oceans, and nuclear contamination which will outlast even the most successful seizure of state power or transformation of statist relations. The petromodern state form cannot “wither away” for decades, centuries, or perhaps thousands of years. The implications for antistatist revolutionary theories are profound. Lefebvre believed Marxism itself could not survive such a reality:

I think that if the theory of the withering away of the State is false, it must be abandoned, thrown overboard. If ever it were proven that the State could not be made to wither away, that the State is destined to prosper and flourish until the end of time, then Marxism as a whole would have to jump ship.186

The hyperobjects of petromodernity may continue to haunt life on earth long after humans disappear, a prospect that nineteenth-century socialists probably could not imagine. While nineteenth-century socialisms were primarily interested in communizing industrial civilization, contemporary radical politics must grapple with the material legacy of petromodernity while trying to imagine a better world in the context of one whose ecological systems are in dramatic and attenuated decline.

Radical antistatists should continue to work toward the abolition of the state form; however, antistatists must also theorize practices that incorporate the hyperobjects of petromodernity, search for ways to minimize their damage to life on earth, and recognize that the “rationalism” and “humanism” that produced the current crisis cannot be the solution to that crisis. To understand the ethical implications of distributed agencies and the functioning of radical contingencies is to understand that antihumanist thought and behavior have the potential to benefit humanity, and that an openness to emergent agencies may be a more effective response to technoscientific catastrophe than an escalation of technoscientific engineering of solutions. Above all, radical antistatist politics must envision self-interest in a radically diffuse way. Jane Bennett offers a view of a world of distributed agency and radical contingency:

And in a knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself. Such an enlightened or expanded notion of self-interest is good for humans. A vital materialism does not reject self-interest as a motivation for ethical behavior, though it does seek to cultivate a broader definition of self and of interest.187

In terms of state infrastructure, this “expanded notion of self-interest” may help humans cope with the collapse of a massively distributed technosocial assemblage by helping us understand the dangers and potentials of material structures at a distance. Awareness of engineering megaprojects, for example, encourages humans to imagine their own effacement, their own slide into agential irrelevance. Perhaps the humility gained by such an experience of massive objects will contribute to a retreat from modernist self-aggrandizement. Similarly, the degree to which we are locked into centuries of global climate breakdown provides humans with another recognition of the transient nature of multicellular organisms in the deep time of life on Earth. Perhaps such spatial and temporal humbling will compel humans to adopt antihumanist orientations, the politics of modesty, material retrenchment, triage, and hospice in the age of collapse. If the self becomes as massively distributed in time and space as our infrastructural assemblages, we might see self-interest as slow, materially interconnected, and capable of agency at a distance, a transition from the dromological, aggressive, speciesist orientation of petromodernity.