Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1

1. Post-Carbon Philosophy

This is an essay about philosophy, its task and object, after the end of a carbon economy. This topic is not wild science fiction; according to most estimates we (collectively as a planet) have reached or surpassed the moment of peak oil (the point at which world reserves begin to dwindle). Effectively the post-carbon epoch has already begun, since it is now a task of the critical imagination to envisage a world beyond the fractal distillation of petroleum. The task of thinking a post-carbon world also revolves around the difficulty of thinking ‘a world’ at this moment, that is to say, a world made global by what we have been taught to term mondelization or more strictly mondelatinization (a globalization based on western hegemony and privilege). [1] The place of philosophy, as a western model of thought, is no doubt vexed in this situation, given that all of the terms of globalization such as “economy,” “law,” “sovereignty,” “world,” and so on are all philosophical terms and are all metaphysical through and through. However, given where this task of thinking is beginning from and the resources it has to hand we will have to pick up the philosophical heritage that confronts us and come to terms with the obvious and inevitable difficulty of becoming part of the history of the object that one wishes to describe through this philosophical vocabulary. If it is true that we are entering an epoch of new materialities for which we as yet have no descriptive framework then philosophy must respond to this situation. The question of matter after all is also a philosophical concept. The empirical and all empiricisms are, as Derrida notes as early as “Violence and Metaphysics,” philosophical gestures that embed themselves within the history of philosophy. His reading of Levinas in this essay is to suggest the ways in which Levinas demonstrates that all empiricism is metaphysical, and a constant philosophical thematization “of the infinite exteriority of the other.” Levinas in contrast understands the empirical not as a positivism but as an experience of difference and of the other. “Empiricism,” claims Derrida, “always has been determined by philosophy, from Plato to Husserl as nonphilosophy: as the philosophical pretention to nonphilosophy” (152). That is as philosophy’s way of affecting to speak in a non-philosophical way. However, nothing can more profoundly conjure the need for philosophy than this denial of philosophy by philosophy. Within the metaphysical schema that is nonphilosophy, the irruption of the wholly other solicits philosophy (i.e. the logos) as its own origin, end, and other. There is no escape from philosophy as far as empiricism is concerned; there will only ever be a thinking about the empirical that is philosophical. It is this radicalization of empiricism that deconstruction proposes as a breathless, inspiring journey for philosophy in the later years of the twentieth century; as Derrida states in the opening paragraphs of the essay on Levinas, it is the closure of philosophy by nonphilosophy that gives thought a future: “it may even be that these questions are not philosophical, are not philosophy’s questions. Nevertheless, these should be the only questions today capable of founding the community, within the world, of those who are still called philosophers; and called such in remembrance, at very least, of the fact that these questions must be examined unrelentingly” (79). So, the question of the materiality of a post-carbon economy may not be a question that philosophy has the resources to answer but which must nevertheless be thought about and so determined in a philosophical manner. It may be the case that long before peak oil we reached the point of peak philosophy, with Hegel or Marx, Nietzsche, or Heidegger and what remains is a post-philosophical speculative economy, which in some necessary way sits on considerable philosophical and metaphysical reserves. This thought will be of use to us in the coming pages; just as I am at pains in this opening paragraph to point out that one cannot seek to swap climate change denial for the denial of philosophy.

It will then be difficult to imagine the new materialities of the age of climate change without philosophy and in fact the persistent theme of matter in the discourse on environmentalism will undoubtedly compel us towards philosophy. It may be the case that philosophy will tell us that all and every environmentalism is a metaphysics grounded on an unquestioned empiricism based upon an unsustainable distinction between nature and culture. The task of a deconstruction of the question of the environmental then might be a rethinking of the experience of the environment, and the environment as experience, as an encounter with an irreducible presence and perception of a phenomenality that is also an experience of the other, the wholly other, and of difference. It is this wholly other, the other that separates Derrida from Levinas, that must be attended to as the new materiality of an epoch of climate change and post-carbon economy. However, in this essay I will not be attending to the environmental effects as such of carbon. In a certain sense it is nonsense to speak of a post-carbon materiality since even if hydrocarbon fuels were to be outlawed tomorrow, carbon and its allotropes would remain, as they were in Plato’s time, the fourth most abundant element in the universe. Therefore, whenever I speak of a ‘post-carbon philosophy’ the question in hand does not strictly concern the depletion of a material itself. Rather, the task for thinking relates to the sort of world, being in the world, and thought concerning the world that an economy and culture based on the exploitation of hydrocarbons has given rise to, and what its prospects might be as this economy and culture inevitably weans itself off of petroleum and onto some other alternative energy source, while living with the inheritance of a century of intensive hydrocarbon use. In the end, the culture and economy of post-carbon-modernity might not look that different from the one that we occupy today. Undoubtedly, carbon-fuelled capital will not easily give up its privileges in favour of so-called sustainable living, and will seek to replace the risks of a carbon-based economy with those of a nuclear-based economy. The new materialities and bio-diversity challenges of the post-carbon age may quickly begin to look exactly the same as those of the present moment, the here and now proposing its own future. The shape of things to come is not the object of our speculation here. Rather, in this text I would like to consider the question of speculation itself.

Philosophy will not name an alternative energy source, and this is a question that philosophy cannot answer and may not be a philosophical question. Philosophy, on the other hand, offers a model of crisis. It is at its most eloquent when talking about limits, ends and telos, and about the inability of theory or the humanities or the human sciences to ground themselves in institutions and actions, and concerning the incommensurability between what we still call “politics,” “ethics,” “economy,” and the global mutations today and the deconstruction of those mutations. If we are to understand what is most singular about our present time it will emerge from this philosophical reflection. However, the challenge for philosophy is not to draw down upon this template but to name and situate the most acute moment of the here and now as a crisis that distinguishes it from all previous crises. It is in understanding how the present crisis (of the globalization of neoliberalism, climate change, peak oil, and bio-diversity extinction), differs from all other crises (in the history of western colonialism, say) that philosophy might begin to think philosophically about this moment. Equally, there may well be no universal experience of this moment that would enable philosophy to act in a philosophical manner with respect to it. Given the diverse experiences of what it might mean for different parts of the world to be in this situation there may not be either a common horizon or discourse capable of offering an assured competence to frame and explain the crisis. In this sense, the philosophical concept of crisis that holds in the tradition after Valéry and Husserl would be faced with an inability to phenomenalize and ontologize a determinable universal experience of the crisis. Philosophy then sits on the cusp between being drawn to the crisis as the only means of determining it and having its own constitutive divisibility demonstrated by its inability to address the crisis through the redundancy of its own model of crisis. [2]

It may be the case that the crisis of peak oil and simultaneous irreversible climate change is only a concentration and reiteration of previous liminal cases in the history of the exploitation of planetary resources by the west. For example, kerosene derived from coal and petroleum replaced whale oil as the source of illumination in America and Europe. The whaling industry had been in decline for a decade due to diminishing sperm whale populations and the destruction of the Northern whaling fleet during the civil war, when hydrocarbon illuminants were introduced out of necessity and innovation leading to gaslight homes and cities and a new phase of development in modernity. However, to say that our present crisis today is not unique does not mean that it is not singular. The task for thinking about the present crisis might be to understand the idea of the crisis today, the understanding that this is a crisis, that it corresponds to an idea or model of a crisis, provided for us by, say, philosophy and is theatricalized in contemporary discourse as such. The status of the idea that the world is in crisis as doxa might be one of the defining features of this crisis, the very thing that makes it like no other moment. The singularity of our present crisis might be defined by the resources spent in the mediatisation of the idea that the world is in crisis, by the competing political interests of the day (the advocates, the activists, the sceptics, the deniers, and the lobbyists) through all the channels of contemporary communication. On the one hand, within such rhetorical exchanges, the naming or denial of a crisis always serves a political interest. On the other hand, to identify an event as a crisis is always to ontologize it and to submit it to the model of the crisis that would explain it and domesticate it. Perhaps, we might say that today is not a crisis at all but rather the latest instance of a long history of planetary exploitation by capital, this instance being no more critical than any other in a long history. The naming of a crisis in the present works to mask that history and to neutralize it, giving it form and therefore a program and calculability.

For either side of the present debate on climate change, say, to name only one of the threats to planetary life today, to name this process and event as a crisis would be to appropriate it for the present and for a metaphysics of presence. In giving the event of climate change a form and a certain calculability one has begun to neutralize the effects of its unknowable future and to erase the experience of alterity at the heart of an encounter with the wholly other. To name it as a crisis is to subject it to the temporality of “the crisis,” namely that it will one day come to an end and a state of normativity will be restored. One side of the debate would say that “normality” (whatever normal might mean on a planet that has weathered at least five major ice ages) can be resumed by cutting carbon emissions and introducing “sustainable” energy consumption. The other side says the present is in fact normal and no change in climate is in process. Either way, each side depends upon the idea of a normative climate derived from the idea that a change in climatic conditions would constitute a crisis for the human race. A crisis that would no longer allow mankind to run a system of resource exploitation that has sustained its development for the last two hundred years. In other words, what is at stake in the climate change debate is the very future of a world economy and the normative, or, ideal conditions for its operation. That is to say, the debate is predicated on an essentially conservative notion of how to sustain the ideal or normative. In fact, the event and singularity of climate change is constituted in the concept that it is already irreversible. The singularity of climate change as a crisis might be that it is not subject to the temporality of the crisis and that it might be a crisis without resolution and so demonstrate itself not to be a crisis at all but a constant state. In this sense crisis becomes a permanent condition or at least the resolution of this crisis is the construction of a new idea of the normative. In this way, climate change must change the very idea of a crisis by which we seek to determine it. At the same time, climate change becomes part of the latest chapter in the history of the idea of crisis and continues to be appropriated by it and subsumed to the model it undermines.

On the issue of irreversible climate change and peak oil, I find myself to be surprisingly sceptical. Given that hydrocarbon consumption is already in decline and without fresh initiatives (although there are many mountain tops to be dynamited and much oil shale to be extracted yet) even the most optimistic forecasts suggest that petroleum consumption will have dwindled to almost nothing in my life time, why should we then be overly concerned by targets for climate emissions set for fifty years into the future? I do not doubt the damage that will be caused to, say, the polar ice caps during those fifty years and the resultant biodiversity loss. However, such targets seem to me to be aimed at ‘eking out’ the remains of carbon emission rather than addressing the more fundamental underlying causes of climate change. This “eking out” is also a transition phase for global capital as it acquires a new carbonless fuel. In fact, while it may take a million years for the planet to correct the damage inflicted in the next fifty, surely this realignment of the environment will take place in the absence of continued fossil fuel consumption. That is to say, that irreversible climate change is not necessarily irreversible, just that it is irreversible in the lifetime of global capital that as a planetary life form is something of a Johnny-come-lately. In this way, the discourse on climate change on all sides retains the vestiges of an irreducible humanism and the parochialism of western metaphysics. It would not be enough, it seems to me, for philosophy to accept the discourse and axiomatics of climate change advocates, even if it were possible to accept the science without reservation. Rather, this discourse in its present state is open to question, is fragile and perfectible, or even deconstructable (as Derrida reminds us of the abolitionist discourse on the death penalty [3] ) because it more often than not limits the idea of planetary life to the present conditions of a western-lead globalization and so inadvertently positions climate change as the latest accident to befall the western subject. In this way, climate change is the latest phase of the crisis of European humanity. Accordingly, it calls for a response from western humanity, one that will require the response of science, philosophy, and the human sciences (including economics). However, as an encounter with the wholly other of planetary life beyond the limits of western humanism, the event of climate change will transform, mutate, and challenge the protocols of European humanity’s intellectual apparatus. Climate change accordingly is a challenge to reason and so to philosophy as the custodian of western reason. If one were to question or attempt to exceed this as the locus of the present discourse of crisis, one might quickly find oneself in a position where terms like “crisis” and “irreversible” were no longer appropriate.

As soon as we have determined a moment of crisis, with the temporality of a crisis and the calculability of a crisis, then we have entered the realm of economy. The response to a crisis is always economic in every sense of that word. Just as we bring a crisis “in house” by naming it as such, one must always ask what is the quickest and most efficient way of bringing a crisis to an end. Equally, in the final analysis, we are often told a planetary crisis will be a question of economics. However, just as one must question reason as the axiom of crisis, then we must question whether economics can continue to stand as a strictly determinable region of competence in the face of such a crisis. One would have to ask if economics can offer a competent realm of judgment, decision, and will to respond to the demands of the incalculable. It is not that economics does not have a response to the incalculable, but rather that a response directed here cannot be purely or strictly economical. This is where philosophy makes a return in the economy of crisis management.

There is a clear and legible connection between what the oil industry calls “speculation” and the speculative philosophical enterprise. I would like to suggest that speculating for oil has been the basis of industrial modernity and the western economy for the last two hundred years (whether that oil was derived from the exploitation of hydrocarbons or whales is a moot point, even though the use of oil as a fuel dates, according to Herodotus, to Babylon 4,000 years ago). As that which fuels the engine of the economy, that which makes the economy as such possible, the search for oil is an investment in a venture with the hope of gain but with the risk of loss. The speculative structure of oil exploitation follows from and is now itself the basis for the structure of all investment in stock, property, and the fictional products of capital today. As with speculative philosophy, it involves the conjecture or theorization of a future event in the absence of the firm evidence of a present. It is this speculative structure that opens the future as a thinking of risk and as thinking as risk, that closely ties philosophy to the carbon economy. The question of the post-carbon economy is therefore clearly a matter of concern for philosophy. I have been careful to speak here from the beginning of a “post-carbon economy” (although we might also say “post-carbon-economies” since there will undoubtedly be more than one). While oil is a material thing, the stuff itself as it were, the price of oil is a question of economy, a matter of relation, and is irreducibly conceptual. My concern in this text is to think through the prospects for an economy and culture (if that is not a tautology) based upon the pricing of hydrocarbons as fuel. This question may come down to one that concerns the future of speculation itself, as much as it does a speculation on the future. I would like to offer a hypothesis here, even a speculation, apropos of today, that will need to be put at risk and tested, namely that whenever we speak of so-called “environmental catastrophe” the business of “financial crisis” is never far behind. In fact, a strong formulation of the hypothesis might be that the two are intimately connected, and that their relation always follows from a structure of speculation. In this sense, philosophy is what is put at risk and must put itself at risk by the conjuncture of the two.

2. Oil Reserves

The western-lead global economy is predicated on the value of oil. At the end of the Second World War, the Bretton Woods monetary conferences created the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and established a new international monetary system of competitive disinflation relative to the US dollar by tying the gold standard to the dollar. This system worked well for a while and enabled the post-war reconstruction of western Europe and Japan, and put in place the inaugural openings of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade which form the basis of the global economy today. However, the Bretton Woods Gold Exchange system began to break down in the mid-sixties under the pressures of the excessive costs of the Vietnam War and the resurgence of the European and south Asian manufacturing base as exporters of global trade. By November 1967 as the value of the dollar began to look increasingly precarious, withdrawals of gold bullion from the US Treasury were becoming excessive (as national governments, notably De Gaulle’s France, redeemed their dollar holdings against bullion stocks as agreed at Bretton Woods). When sterling was devalued in 1967, Bretton Woods was doomed; the dollar came under further pressure to devalue itself against gold in order to protect the value of Federal reserves against redemption of dollars by foreign governments. The plot of Ian Fleming’s 1959 Goldfinger (adapted as a film in 1964) can only be understood in relation to the Bretton Woods concords. The threat to render the Federal gold reserve inaccessible after exploding a radioactive bomb, would have meant national governments could only redeem their reserve dollars against Ulrich Goldfinger’s own gold reserve (said to be the second largest in the world) thus pushing up the value of his gold and mortgaging the US economy to Goldfinger’s personal enterprises. Consequently, James Bond, agent for the sick man of Europe, temporarily rescues not only the post-war, cold war status quo of the Bretton Woods agreement but secures the future of western leadership in a global economy. Rather than risk the depletion of the US gold reserve and the collapse of the US credit rating in 1971 President Nixon abandoned the dollar-gold link dissolving the terms of Bretton Woods in favour of a system of free floating currencies, with the international banks and the markets determining the value of the dollar. This combined with the ongoing costs of Vietnam lead to inflationary pressures and wage-price freezes in the American national economy. OPEC discussed the value of pricing oil in several currencies to spread the risks of the volatile American domestic scene. However, in 1974, Nixon moved to do a deal with Saudi Arabia only to price oil in dollars when the Saudis, unknown to the rest of OPEC and the US’s western allies, secretly purchased $2.5 billion in US Treasury bills with their surplus oil funds (equivalent to 70% of all Saudi assets), once more ensuring the position of the dollar as the international reserve currency and initiating the phase of American global hegemony based on petrodollar recycling, swapping the gold standard for the standard of oil, so-called “black gold.” As shocks in the price of oil followed political and supply instabilities, so the need for national governments to acquire US dollars ensued. On the one hand, dollars flow into oil supplying countries far beyond the needs of domestic investment. These surplus dollars are stored in banks in New York and London to retain their value as dollars. On the other hand, oil-importing countries need to buy dollars to meet the rising price of oil. In the 1970s developing nations in Africa borrowed dollars from international banks sitting on surplus petrol dollars, creating debts to be repaid entirely in dollars and at the then-high levels of interest rates based on inflationary pressures in the western national economies. In this way, the emergent, post-colonial African continent was impoverished and a cycle of crippling debt initiated. The IMF set up by Bretton Woods was used to enforce debt repayment to the international banks through the implementation of ‘austerity’ programmes that also opened up developing countries to western private companies. As surplus petrol dollars flow in from OPEC countries and are leant out again as Eurodollar bonds or loans, the Federal Reserve is in a unique position with respect to creating credit and expanding the money supply. [4] It is this situation that enables the United States to sustain improbable budget deficits and latterly allowed the bail out of Wall Street after the 2007 banking crisis. However, in a post-cold war, multi-polar era, after peak oil, the position of the dollar as world reserve currency is once more in question. Previous attempts to rebalance the world economy now have genuine impetus from the need to address the imbalance of current accounts between the US and China, Chinese currency manipulation, and the emergence of the Euro as an alternative or additional reserve currency. Further, the cost in blood and treasure of physically securing the oil supply through military means may prove unsustainable for the US (the cost of bailing out the banks, $660 billion, was the same as the US annual military budget for 2007). In a post-carbon economy, it might not be the best position to be sitting on a mountain of petrodollars.

There is then a great deal at stake in the question of a post-carbon economy, beyond the actual “irreversible” damage done to the earth’s climate by carbon emissions. Oil is presently the essential fuel of the global economy and oil trades are the basic enablers of manufacturing infrastructure in every industrial nation, of global transportation, and the primary energy source for 40 percent of the industrial economy. Oil trades in dollars have been the basis for American economic, cultural, and military hegemony since the 1970s, and the liquidity that ensures the development of the western-lead global economy. A post-carbon economy presents a considerable challenge to the present geo-political dispensation and, co-terminus to this, the current conditions of capital. It is for these reasons that we might say that the response to climate change as a staging post in the on-going crisis of European humanity, revolves around more than a purely scientific solution that will bring the crisis to a dénouement to enable a return to western-capital normativity, and everything that depends upon it.

Modern as the phenomenon might be and while philosophy has a great deal to say about “energy,” for example, if I might be allowed to paraphrase one of Derrida’s more familiar hyperboles: no philosopher as a philosopher has ever taken seriously the question of oil. Oil and carbon emission has a massive readability today and may define the most acute moment of the paroxysm that makes the present crisis like no other. This is not to say that there have not previously been bouts of financial uncertainty and environmental disasters precipitated by oil. In fact, the history of oil production might be nothing other than a chain of such instances. Rather, the most decisive index of the present moment is the toxic combination of climate change caused by carbon emission, the urgency for global capital of the risks of peak oil, and the central role played by oil trades in the global economy. We might go so far as to say on this later point that the entire practice of the western economy, that is the so-called global economy, depends upon oil. That is to say, that while the idea of the world market and of the “free exchange” of goods has a philosophical heritage running through early modern humanism and enlightenment thought, our present understanding of all exchange, debt, and faith runs through oil. To speak of a post-carbon economy might in fact be to say something quite radical, given that our present situation is so intensively related to the price of oil. To think an industrialized economy without the price of oil may on the one hand simply be a question of swapping one transcendental signifier for another, as gold was replaced by oil, so oil might be replaced by a trade in plutonium recycling. On the other hand, an opportunity exists here to understand economy as an experience of difference and as an encounter with the wholly other. This would require an other understanding of economy, one that was not dedicated to the utilization of wealth (what we now call a “restricted economy”) but one in which we began to understand the complexities of a sovereign economic term such as gold or oil, not in its loss of meaning but in relation to its possible loss of meaning (what Derrida, after Bataille, after Hegel calls a “general economy”). [5] In this sense, a “post-carbon economy,” presents an opportunity for a consideration of economy not to be limited to the circulation of strictly commercial values, the meaning and established value of objects such as gold, oil, and plutonium or so-called “carbon swaps.” Rather than a phenomenology of values as a restricted economy, we might begin to understand what exceeds the production, consumption, and destruction of value within the circuit of exchange. What Bataille might call “energy” beyond the energy of oil. This would not be a reserve of meaning within economy but an aneconomic writing of economy that is legible because its concepts move outside of the symmetrical exchanges from which they are identified and which according to a certain logic of recuperation they continue to occupy. This task of paleonymy as deconstruction is not one that philosophy will undertake on its own but one that will be played out in the irreversible mutations that take place in the global economy as a consequence of climate change, one which philosophy, opened by the materialism of nonphilosophy, will merely be at the forefront of reporting. It returns us to a familiar problem with which we began: having exhausted the oil reserve and the language of philosophy, the unfinished project of Modernity must continue to inscribe within its frames and language of intelligibility (i.e. philosophy) that which nevertheless exceeds the oppositions of concepts governed by its doxical logic. It is not that nineteenth and twentieth-century thought is incapable of responding to the new crisis of climate change but that climate change is a product of such thought as its latest episode and challenge. On the other hand, such a reading of economy seeks to understand or think what is unthinkable for philosophy, its economic blind spot.

The reserves of deconstruction suggest writing in general as a slick economy without oil reserve. Derrida’s text on Bataille and economy was first published in L’arc in May 1967, well into de Gaulle’s diplomatic and economic attack on Bretton Woods and American expropriation of the European economy through dollar investment. His seminar on counterfeit money was given in the academic year 1977–78, between the two shocks in the price of oil in 1974 and 1979, when, as Muriel Spark puts it her 1976 novel The Takeover, “a complete mutation of our means of nourishment had already come into being where the concept of money and property were concerned, a complete mutation not merely to be defined as a collapse of the capitalist system, or a global recession, but a sea-change in the nature of reality as could not have been envisaged by Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud” (127). Spark’s fiction identifies here a “mutation” more significant than the local weather of a global recession or the collapse of western capitalism. She recognizes precisely the deportation of value itself from the symmetrical alternatives of exchange within a restricted economy of meaning. This is not a deconstruction brought about by philosophy but a critical climate change in the entire environment of meaning that shifts and re-settles of its own accord. For sure, capitalism survived the oil crisis of the early 1970s but as result there was an irreversible change and redistribution in the meaning of meaning itself. A clear line can be drawn from the substitution of gold for oil in 1971 to the credit bubble of 2007 and the transformations in capitalism (around futures and credit transfer derivatives) and the global economy (around the planetary production and consumption of natural resources). The question of the price of oil, and so of the petrodollar and the pricing of the global economy, must always be a question of the phenomenon of credit. The monetary crisis of 2007, the so-called “credit crunch,” was a matter of the credit-worthiness and the credibility of the value of assets. Oil futures and the future of oil are a question of credit and so of faith: belief in the conventional authority of the market and the credibility of the economy, economists, and politicians. The authority of the market is constituted by the accreditation, both in the literal sense of capitalization and creditworthiness in future exchanges but also in the sense of legitimation as an effect of belief or credulity. The authority of a fiction of economy such as a global financial and industrial system based on the future pricing of petroleum depends upon a planetary act of faith that far exceeds the credibility required to believe in climate change. It should not be surprising that the current financial crisis is a crisis of credit, a monetary crisis based upon the exchange of credit itself independent of physical assets, a dematerialization of money and value that requires a leap of faith and which in the absence of tangible proof tests that credibility to the limit: a sea change in the very idea of reality.

Carbon is the element that oils faith in the global economy. It is inextricably bound to the history of a formation of a world that is essentially Abrahamic and European. It is over the question of the propriety of oil that the geopolitical now plays out all the contests between Europe and its others, and between the religions of the book. [6] The price of oil is the liquidity that fuels what Derrida called in 1994, “the world war” between all the people of the book, whose preeminent figure is “the appropriation of Jerusalem” (Spectres 52). Faith in the book and faith in oil are the two pillars of globalization and the temple of capitalism. In the complex history of the development of industrial capital and industrial Capitals, the city, polis and metropolis, oil powers the transformation of monetary forms from the pre-modern faith in metals to the belief in credit exchanges and credit-worthiness of the name as signature or future position. In this history of Modernity, oil is surely then closely linked to literature, not only as the energy source that fuels the illumination of literary production, but as the alternative, yet intimately related, site of an idea of credit, debt, and belief that runs across the modern period. Oil itself is not the stuff of literature, although certain exceptional cases might be identified. For example, Melville’s Moby Dick in 1851 is a text on the cusp of a transition from whale oil to hydrocarbons; modern literature would be unthinkable without the automobile, the aeroplane or gas lighting, from The Great Gatsby and Mrs. Dalloway to Sherlock Holmes. Zola’s Germinal is one of many texts on the subject of carbon extraction, and Dickens’ Hard Times is notable for its description of Coketown: better examples could no doubt be multiplied. On the other hand, film is the stuff of oil, and cinema is only a special case within the history of modern literature.

3. Post-Carbon Culturology

As Mac and Oldsen walk across a sunset beach in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, the American petroleum negotiator asks his Scottish guide, “Can you imagine a world without oil?” Between them they make a list of the potential losses to modernity: “No automobiles, no paint or polish, no ink and nylon, no detergents, no Perspex, no polythene, no dry cleaning fluid and no waterproof coats.” Mac stops Oldsen incredulously—“they make dry cleaning fluid out of oil?” They should also have added to this list “no film and no cinema.” Acetate film or “safety film” replaced the combustible Nitrocellulose in the 1950s, and has in turn been superseded by polyester of PET film. Local Hero (1983) is a slick and economic film about the optimism of the North Sea oil rush in the 1970s. Environmental catastrophe is assured as the Knox Oil and Gas Company from Texas seek to transform a Scottish beauty spot into an oil refinery for the exploitation of North Sea oil reserves. However, the wily locals welcome this, understanding that striking oil will transform their lives from subsistence farming to considerable affluence. In the best traditions of Ealing comedy, Forsyth’s villagers and their black African missionary minister, Murdo MacPherson, seek to extract the maximum value for their land from the American corporation that imagines that it is exploiting the locals. Nothing was known of the effects of climate change when this film was made. Instead, we have a comedy of aneconomic, colonial reversal and exchange, in which the Texan company (founded by a Scot, with a Calvinist work ethic no doubt) returns to appropriate the Scottish mainland, only to be exploited in return by subjects on the peripherary of an American empire compelled to seek ever further afield for carbon stocks to fuel its industrial economy after US domestic peak oil. A series of visual parallels and exchanges are set up between the streets of Houston, a city arising from the desert and designed for the automobile, and Ferness [pronounced ‘Fairness’] Bay, a fishing village with a sandy bay and rolling green hills, interrupted only by the leitmotif of a solitary motor cycle that appears every time Mac and Oldsen attempt to cross the street. NATO jets also disturb the bucolic scene, combining the advances of oil consumption with the defence of capitalism against the Soviet threat, reminding us of the strategic importance of the Scottish coastline and the north Atlantic oil reserves during the Cold War.

The development at Ferness Bay we are told will make the village the “petro-chemical capital of the western world” and will last a 1,000 years “even through the next Ice Age,” which is a telling sign of the status of climate science at this time. Ricky Fulton playing the Knox Oil research scientist working on the project tells his colleague that the predicted Ice Age can be averted by diverting the Gulf Stream and melting the Arctic Circle, “but they won’t listen, they want to freeze.” There are no concerns here about global warming; rather the wild west of a black gold rush is returned from Texas to Scotland as the frontier of ‘European’ development and expansion, praising the oil industry as “some business…the only business.” MacIntosh, the negotiator sent by Knox Oil to seal the deal, is of Jewish Hungarian stock but is mistaken by the lucky and cheerful Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster), CEO of Knox Oil and Gas, for a Scot. MacIntosh falls in love with the village, becoming more Scot than the Scots, and is one of the few sad to see it being bought out by his own company. Having agreed to set up a trust fund for the villagers, giving them faith in the project by allowing them a share of the profits, he offers to exchange his life in Texas with Gordon Urquart (the villagers’ lead negotiator, hotelier, accountant, and mini-bus driver played by Dominic Lawson). He offers “thirty thousand dollars in mixed securities” and his Porsche (“nothing to pay on it, it’s pure ownership”) for the hotel and Urquart’s wife Stella. However, the future of Ferness as a trading place is put on hold with the arrival of Felix Happer from Texas.

Happer is an obsessive amateur astronomer and is drawn to Scotland by MacIntosh’s description of the aurora borealis. Happer has a messianic zeal for comets; “look to the heavens for a sign” he instructs MacIntosh before leaving for Scotland. He arrives in the village just as the acquisition has hit a snag. The beach where oil tankers would dock is owned by a beachcomber, Ben Knox, and has been owned by the Knox family for years (Happer’s father having bought out the original oil-exploring Mr. Knox while retaining the company name). Several attempts are made to persuade Ben to sell his beach but he declines, explaining that the beach has provided the village economy for years, with between four and five hundred people earning a living through the extraction of chemicals from seaweed: “then the trade routes opened up to the East and farewell Ferness. The business went but the beach is still here. If you got the place, it would be goodbye beach forever.” Mac is sidelined as Happer and Ben share their interest in astronomy. Happer abandons his plans to site an oil refinery on the beach in favor of something all together more refined—The Happer Institute for marine research and astronomical observation. Mac returns to Texas; justice has been done in Ferness, a local economy has been created once more around the beach and the proposed Happer Institute but the villagers will no longer be millionaires, as environmental damage has been replaced by marine research. However, it is not clear who the eponymous Local Hero is: the popular Mac, who offered millions of dollars to the villagers; Gordon Urquart, who negotiated on their behalf; the charismatic Soviet fisherman Victor, who visits Ferness to review his portfolio of investments with Urquart; Marina, the research assistant and mermaid (with webbed-feet) who proposes the research institute to Oldsen; or Ben Knox, whose refusal to sell the beach scuppers the oil refinery.

Few radical claims can be made for Forsyth’s gentle comedy, but it might be worth noting some features of the film as a study in an economy without oil reserve. Whenever we confront the thematics and axiomatics of oil, there is always a mismatch in exchange values, and always the testing of faith. Mac initially hopes to exploit the locals, they in turn exploit him, Mac and Gordon’s negotiations over the trust fund leads to a faith in one another and a proposed if unequal exchange and a wife swap, Ben offers to sell the beach to Mac if he can guess how many grains of sand he is holding but Mac refuses the deal thinking he is being cheated, and ultimately Ben refuses to put a price on the natural resource of the beach. However, this is a film about oil in which no oil appears; all of the comedy is fuelled by speculation concerning the value of the oil, as are the plastic positions adopted by those in pursuit of the movement from oil extraction to plastic and credit cards. When negotiations are ongoing with Mac over the trust fund, Gordon Urquart addresses the villagers from the Reverend MacPherson’s pulpit asking them to have faith in him. Faith requires an economic gesture to invest belief in something without tangible evidence and the faith in the value of oil requires a speculative investment in economy without guarantee or reserve.

Local Hero represents an optimistic moment in the history of oil and its relation to money. Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 There Will be Blood is another oil film that pushes the question of oil and faith to its limits. Once again this text works through a series of theo-thanato-econo-carbo exchanges and substitutions that test the faith of those involved in them. Daniel Plainview (played mesmerically by Daniel Day Lewis) is a silver miner who accidently strikes oil in 1898 during the exploration of California. By 1911 he has become an oil speculator seeking further openings in the state. He is told of substantial reserves under farmland owned by the Sunday family and having bought this information for $100 from the runaway son Paul, he visits the Sunday ranch. There he encounters Paul’s father Abel and Paul’s twin brother Eli (both brothers are played by Paul Dano). Paul’s good news proves correct but Eli strikes a harder bargain and asks for $10,000 to fund the Church of the Third Revelation. However, Abel has a misplaced faith in the seeming Plainview and sells his birth right for a bargain price. Eli was the biblical last judge of Israel before the rule of kings, whose lineage was cursed for defilement of the temple. The filmic Eli’s judgment comes into conflict with this Daniel-come-to-judgment on the Sunday oil fields, a veritable den in which it is increasingly difficult to tell who is lying and who is the lion, even when motives are barely disguised in plain view.

Daniel Plainview refuses to bless the first oil well, which he christens “Mary” after the Sunday’s youngest daughter who is beaten by her father. He promises her “no more beatings” but the remainder of the film is little more than a chain of beatings in a tale of errant filiations and false fraternity. Daniel beats and humiliates Eli in public in a fight over a supposed loan to the Church; on discovery that the trusted Noah is not his long lost half-brother but a stranger who merely robbed him of his story, Daniel kills Noah and buries his body. However, having been witnessed in the act, Daniel must be baptized in the Church of the Third Revelation as the price of forgiveness for would-be fratricide and in exchange for a piece of land that will enable him to build a pipeline to the Californian coast. During his baptism, Eli humiliates and beats Daniel to exorcise his demons. Oil or the price of oil proves thicker than the blood of the lamb or the blood of the competing families. Eli leaves the community to go on a missionary trip to Las Vegas, while the repentant Daniel is reunited with his son HW who he sent away after losing his hearing in an industrial accident at the Mary well. Years later in 1927 we discover the now alcoholic Plainview in his oil man’s mansion confronting his adopted son over his true parentage, stating “You have none of me in you… I took you for no reason other than I needed a sweet face to buy land.” HW communicates through sign language, renouncing any claim on a Plainview inheritance in order to marry his childhood sweetheart Mary Sunday, set up his own business, and practice the religion of the Third Revelation.

After all these signs and revelations, dissolved and resolved partnerships, the film overheats and reaches a tipping point in its final extraordinary scene. In 1927 Plainview lies plain drunk in the bowling alley he has had constructed in his mansion. He is visited by Eli who has become an evangelical radio host and pastor of a far larger church in Vegas. He offers to broker a deal with Daniel for the remaining land owned by the Bandy family over which the pipeline runs; the grandson of the Bandy family requires capital to leave the farm and move to Hollywood “to be in the movies.” Daniel agrees to the deal only if Eli will admit that he is “a false prophet and God is a superstition.” It emerges that Eli is bankrupt and in desperation agrees to Daniel’s contract, and a third revelation of humiliation and beating ensues as the bowling alley substitutes for the previous scenes of the oil well and the church. Eli repeatedly calls out Daniel’s words: “say it like you mean it, say it like it’s your sermon.” However, the broken Eli has put his faith in another false promise as Daniel tells him he has already drained all the oil from the Bandy land. He counsels the miserable Eli who admits that he is a sinner and his disappointment in the Lord who “failed to alert me to the recent panic in our economy…these mysteries he presents.” Plainview chases him around the bowling alley striking him repeatedly with a skittle, sparing nothing over Eli’s pleas that they are brothers by marriage. He rants “It was Paul who was the chosen brother, you are just after birth…I am the third revelation…I told you I would eat you up.” The biblical Eli was the last keeper of the Ark of the Covenant who is told that his sons will die on the same day. With Eli’s broken body and Daniel’s broken promises littering the scene, Plainview tells his astonished butler “I am finished” as the credits roll.

Anderson’s film is made in the full knowledge of the risks of oil production and consumption, as part of an epistemological climate change concerning global warming by 2008. This narrative contract with the viewer of who is also aware of the risks of global warming, is the third revelation of the film: neither the old testament of a covenant with the oil men as part of the manifest destiny of American expansionism, nor the good news of salvation from domestic Peak Oil by the arrival of the new resources in the lands of the Abrahamic tradition, but the apocalypse, namely that oil and the price of oil will bring about the end of everything. There are no comic villagers here with a touching faith in the developmental possibilities of oil exploration, only the singular promise of the sons of Eli that “there will be blood.” There should be little doubt about the status of carbon in the world that Anderson’s film addresses through the representation of its oily past. Globalization is a theo-thanato-carbo-economy in which all the spectres of the religious and the political, old and new, circulate in a death drive towards depletion and extinction. From the military enforcement of the value of the petrodollar in the Persian Gulf to the devastation of marine life in the Gulf of Mexico, where oil is concerned, as Plainview tells Eli at his baptism, “universal salvation is a lie.” Instead the speculative structure of a carbon economy is, like philosophy, always a death drive. A drive towards extraction, consumption, burning off, calculating and fixing the price that must be paid. Similarly, philosophy drives to know and for absolute knowledge to posses the object of its inquiry. However, there is always a price to be paid for absolute knowledge and for speculating on oil. In the hydrocarbon cycle we are left with carbon deposits, traces in the atmosphere that are the cause of global warming and which threaten planetary life for years to come. Philosophical and textual production leaves other traces in carbon-based graphite and ink, which similarly escape the restrictions of circulation and exchange. Writing philosophy about carbon, like making film about oil, is one of those tasks that must inevitably inhabit the positions of the theo-thanato-carbo-economy but somehow render those positions plastic by reading the deposits emitted by the economy in order to rearrange them according to a new logic and criteriology. One must think about carbon and use carbon to do so in order that carbon and thinking about carbon might have a future. Dealing in carbon futures will be the coming task of all materialisms, theologies, politics, and ethics on a planet attempting to keep a world economy above water as the polar ice caps melt.

Post-Carbon Coda

This text has begun to open up a number of questions for thinking the present and future of a “European” culture and economy based on the consumption of oil. It has identified the interrelation of the present economic and environmental crises and suggested a role for philosophy in framing our understanding of these events. It has also proposed a history of oil pricing that demonstrates that its supposedly robust materiality is conceptual through and through. Finally, it has considered the relation of carbon consumption to the dematerialization of money and to faith, credit, debt, and literature (the later pointing towards alternative forms of exchange that disrupt established economies). At each of these steps, an attempt has been made to submit the experience of oil to a thinking of difference and to understanding the risk of climate change as an encounter with a wholly other (planetary life itself) that is also unlocking the reserves of difference within the human. It has proposed a hypothesis for future consideration: the inextricable link between financial crisis and environmental damage. The testing and demonstration of this hypothesis will require a larger work of comparison and analysis that will involve an expanded deconstruction of political economy, political theology, and the unavoidable question of what theory today calls bio-power. This speculation will require time and will give time, the time of a speculation proposed against redemption at a future date, in a race to keep the lights on as one writes in the shadow of oil depletion, a waning telos for a resource that will have been and which will never come again. It is a task of the carbonic economy that will be complicit with the very thing it provokes, ensuring its guilt of the exact thing it believes itself to be innocent of. Perhaps, there will be no thought on carbon without carbon. Perhaps philosophy since Plato will have only ever been a carbon-based form and the end of philosophy will have been the end of carbon. There will always be a price to be paid for such speculations with all hands to the pump in an epoch of what Tom Cohen calls “irreversible critical climate change.”