Aesthetics and the Dark Gratifications of Petroculture

by Lourd Razooq | Jun 14, 2023 | 6 comments

[Note: this essay is part of a series of six essays on How to Know about Line 5. You can read the series introduction and find links to the other essays as they are posted here.]

Lying beneath the surface of our wondrous Great Lakes is a pipeline that extends for 645 miles across Wisconsin and Michigan, transporting thousands of barrels of oil and gas every day. The pipeline threatens to cause tremendous damage to our Great Lakes. This danger exists, and can cease to exist, because of our choices. Us. But the question that we have to confront is this:

Why are we only interested in the things that benefit us and overlooking the negative consequences that come with them?

How is it that we find pleasure in the things that blind us from reality? The comfortable parts of our lives that remove us from our immediate environment, like driving to another state, pumping gas after an exhausting day at work, or buying that expensive makeup palette one has been fervently awaiting to purchase, only glorifying the beautiful exterior and aestheticizing our experiences? These are the kind of questions that we rarely ask ourselves because well, let’s face it…why even burden ourselves with such inconvenient thoughts? But, that is the problem. In order to understand the matters that sustain our existence, we must also pore over those concealed issues that play a part in the downfall of our planet, and eventually our same existence.

The problem in our vicinity, in our wake, is what scholars call petroculture. It is a term that describes the global culture that has emerged from the dependence on and consumption of fossil fuels, specifically oil. It is through the extraction and circulation of petroleum that humans gain access to daily essentials that include modern transportation, feminine cosmetics, cleaning products, medicine, clothing— in a word: everything. Yet, we are so entangled in all these materials, we cannot even comprehend their destruction on the world around us. We are too caught up in their aesthetic, their appeasements.

We are bound to the aesthetics of petroculture—an aesthetic that tugs on human fantasy and desire. Aesthetics in this sense is not a representation, but an experience that produces the surrounding conditions of our everyday lives, like our sense of speed and progress. Aesthetics is about how our mind and body become conditioned to what it means to be modern. We become more in tune with sensorial experiences–how clean a road looks, how fast an ordered package arrives in the mail, and how soft and cozy a sweater feels when touching it. These experiences become a language of understanding for us.

The infrastructure of fossil fuels promotes petrocultural aesthetics. Infrastructure not only enables the movement of goods and people but also bridges the gap between time and space and reshapes the meaning of autonomy and freedom. As a result, citizens become not only materially dependent on fossil fuels but also find them infused into their norms and values to the point where they becomes their only source of emotional response and ways of understanding. So how can we break away from the one thing that has come to define our ideologies and conduct? What is at issue as a result of those attachments? Well, literally everything that we know.

Enbridge has continually defended the operation of Line 5 by calling it a piece of “critical infrastructure.” But critical for whom? For Indigenous people whose land has been invaded by an existential threat and their natural resources of sustainability jeopardized? Or for the rest of us? Those of us who have been conditioned to believe that our needs supersede everyone else’s? That oil has to exist if we want to maintain a life of comfort and convenience? Whether it is us or Indigenous peoples, we are all expendable in the eyes of Enbridge, mere targets they can toy with as long as their pockets are filled and their intentions fulfilled.

As the expansion of oil and gas networks continues to dominate our everyday lives, they also operate as forms of settler colonialism, facilitating colonial principles of settler domination over Native lands. As the Tlingit scholar Anne Spice has argued, the railroads that enabled westward expansion onto Indigenous lands in the nineteenth-century were colonial projects that not only transported capital and settlers to the West, they also replaced pre-existing Indigenous infrastructures and further concealed the historical and cultural presence of Indigenous peoples. Spice shows how the concept of modernity and “modern” infrastructure has not only come to refer to the “brand-new” and the contemporary but also to the removal of the “non modern,” or more appropriately, the removal and negating of Indigenous “critical infrastructure” in their own historical spaces. By referring to Line 5 as “critical infrastructure,”—that is, critical for settlers– Enbridge is erasing Indigenous narratives of critical infrastructure; theirs is the clean drinking water while Enbridge’s is the pipeline that is infecting their waters.

Thus, like other modern infrastructures, pipelines represent the disruption of Indigenous sovereignty and naturalize the domination of petroculture; pipelines are a link between the dispossession of Native territory and the omnipresence of the oil industry. In the words of anthropologist Kregg Hetherington: “To behold something as infrastructure is to suspend that thing’s present as the future’s necessary past, the tense we call the “Future Perfect” (5). In this kind of linear thinking, Indigenous peoples are removed from the emerging future and, in turn, a way is paved for different kinds of subjects who are more acquiescent to the investments made by their society and who wish to be included in the future promised by infrastructure. With Line 5, we are seeing that scenario play out in real life. Indigenous people are stripped of their resources and homeland and forced to live in constant disturbance by intrusions beyond their control. Last month, for example, an emergency filing was made by the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa in Wisconsin in an attempt to shut down Line 5 due to ongoing flooding and erosion near the pipeline.

We learn of all these troubling matters regarding the world of petroculture and its colonial and technological invasion and, yet we struggle to find the willpower to find a solution that unshackles us from the bounds of extractive capitalism. That’s because we are shaped by the very thing that damages our environment. It is difficult to extract ourselves from the evolutionary thinking of modern infrastructure because its promises are what attracts us. Infrastructures harness a kind of power so compelling that it obscures reality and leaves us in a circle of doom: infrastructures create change, and through change, they produce historical and cultural advancements, and through those advancements, we gain autonomy, and repeat. They offer a feeling of hope and a sense of grounding in that one feels control over one’s own movements.

We view pipelines in the same way. If pipelines can produce a fruitful economy and allow for the movement of exchange, why should we put a stop to that? Despite being material things, oil and oil pipelines vivify abstractions like freedom, accessibility, autonomy, and pleasure. Commodities and objects are encoded with certain qualities that come to oversee one’s emotional responses and senses of pride, anger, frustration, and pleasure. According to theorist Brian Larkin, such experiences “come to represent the possibility of being modern, of having a future, or the foreclosing of that possibility and a resulting experience of abjection” (333). It is like a game of inculcation that preys on people’s desires and imagination.

But while we have been conditioned to think that our investments and dependence upon oil and oil infrastructure have made our lives easier, the question is, at the expense of whom? At the expense of those whose history has been replaced and removed by petroculture, and, realistically, by us.

As our economy continues to steep itself in the casks of oil culture, it has become harder and harder to imagine a world beyond the nets of capitalism. It seems impossible to extricate ourselves from petroculture and the notion that ‘it is making my life easier, so why should I try to complicate it by involving myself in things that are beyond my control?’ We are victims of a culture that promised to nurture our needs and supposedly gave us “autonomy” in choosing what is best for us. But that autonomy is illusory. We have become so accustomed to the ease of petroculture that we cannot bear to see the blazing inferno below the sheets. It is like we know of the monster that exists in the closet; we just don’t want to open that door and face its rebuke.

This is why Line 5 continues to be an issue. How can we separate ourselves from the monster that has made our life easier?

But ask yourself this: where are the pleasures and fantasies of petroculture leading us? Are we—are all of us– really living as comfortably as we like to believe? Although we cannot dwell on the past or change its results, we can do better for the future. Today’s present regards Line 5. That present now has to be challenged in order to become “the future’s necessary past,” as Hetherington puts it. We can challenge infrastrucure’s “future perfect” tense by reclaiming what was ours and connecting with our past and present to protect our water and our future.

If you think about it, we are an indispensable part of Enbridge’s continued enterprise; they need us to keep buying into their ventures and to perpetuate the capitalist system that underpins petroculture. They like to make us think that we are disposable so they can keep us under their thumb, but we possess much larger power than they would like to think.

Watching the world burn before your eyes because you were simply unaware of the consequences is understandable but choosing to be oblivious is jus self-destructive.

So please do your part because our critical infrastructure depends on you.