Oil

“To reiterate, impasse can be an optimistic space, a liminal space, a space of hope in which we can attempt on many different levels and social registers to begin to articulate the outcomes of less energy intensive lifestyles. While the new ways of being in relationship to energy, the environment, and on another will be built on the legacies of oil, there is the opportunity for breaking with the limitations in that legacy.” (16)
Petrocultures Research Group, After Oil.

‘Oil modulates’ everything suggest the authors of the petrocultures research group: like coal before, oil changes human relationships with labour, distribution of access to resources and power – impacting these performance spaces.

How do we fuel our performance work with intensities that reminds us of energy outside the spheres of petrocultures and petrocapital? Where does this sustained energy to enact histories and futures, to mobilize deep energies of affirmation and resistance, where did these come from?

How do we generate and transmit these to those who join us for AnthrApology?

Reza Negarestani’s awesome Cyclonopedia gives oil a tellurian and otherworldy potency: oil has agency and is using humans for nefarious ends but humans are too narcissistic and greedy to see that they will be consumed by the political fires and heat that already rage and reign triumphant in the Middle East.

Negarestani echoes Said’s realizations that he has potency before oil in 82. Oil Man (Said, Galveston, Texas, 2004):

these dark pieces of me
they too desire to drain away and
secrete themselves to become
part of this greater body of lightness and darkness with no territory
ever-flowing
angelic
this endless place of
infinite liquid flexibility
connection and variation

[force, fire, violence, lust.]

All that remains is
the oldest body of all
that came before everything
—before man desiring woman
before woman desiring man
and woman desiring woman
and man desiring man—
waiting jealously under the earth
in this place with no law
except
the law of movement
the law of the flammable
of the law of that which has no choice but to burn