The Cultural Lives of Oil
Published on November 15, 2021
In this episode, Vicky Googasian speaks with Santiago Acosta, a Postdoctoral Fellow at SUNY-Old Westbury about Venezuelan oil literature, about his work on a book project entitled We Are Like Oil: An Ecology of the Venezuelan Culture Boom, 1973-1983.
Speaker: Santiago Acosta is a scholar and poet working at the intersections of literature, visual culture, and political ecology. He holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at SUNY-Old Westbury. His book project, We Are Like Oil: An Ecology of the Venezuelan Culture Boom, 1973-1983, examines the relationship between the visual arts, cultural institutions, and state-led ecological transformations in Venezuela during the 1970s oil boom. His poetry collection El próximo desierto (The coming desert) won the 2018 José Emilio Pacheco Literature Prize “City and Nature,” awarded by the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) and the Museum of Environmental Sciences of Guadalajara University.
Moderator: Victoria Googasian, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University- Qatar.
Transcript
[BIRDS CHIRPING] [DRUMMING]
CIRS INTRODUCTION [00:00:04]: Welcome to the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar. This podcast series is part of the Energy Humanities Research Initiative. The project aims to generate new scholarly conversations on everyday lived experiences of energy. [DRUMMING ENDS]
Transcript
[BIRDS CHIRPING] [DRUMMING]
CIRS INTRODUCTION [00:00:04]: Welcome to the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar. This podcast series is part of the Energy Humanities Research Initiative. The project aims to generate new scholarly conversations on everyday lived experiences of energy. [DRUMMING ENDS]
VICTORIA GOOGASIAN [00:00:24]: Welcome back to Everyday Energy. I’m Vicky Googasian, and this episode is part II of my conversation with Santiago Acosta, poet, and scholar of Venezuelan cultural history. In the second half, we speak about petro cultures of the global south, ecological crisis, and why oil is the devil’s excrement. We also get some great reading suggestions, so stay tuned for those at the end of the episode.
GOOGASAIN [00:00:49]: Maybe we can we can zoom out a little bit because one of the contributions that I think you highlight for your work is that it can widen our understanding of petro-cultures and petro-modernity, which has so far focused somewhat exclusively on the on the global north. So I wanted to ask, how is how is the study of oil culture different? Do you think when it begins with the global south or takes the global south, as the sort of center of petro-modernity is a starting point for an inquiry or with Venezuela in particular?
SANTIAGO ACOSTA [00:01:28]: Yeah, that’s a great question. Thank you. I don’t think that oil in the global south is experienced primarily as I don’t know, the comforts of modernity that are widely and easily accessible. I think, on the contrary, it is often experienced as a burden or as a as a curse. You know, as I say, this is why we encounter so many writings and work so far that identify oil with, for example, the devil’s excrement. That’s how that’s a phrase coined by OPEC founder, Venezuelan guy, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo. And oil producing countries, I think, are usually plagued by all kinds of problems, political instability, economic dependency, environmental degradation, you name it. You could think of this, I guess, as something similar to what the colonial critics have theorized as the darker side of modernity, or I would say the darker side of petro-modernity. And so the violence and destruction that that makes possible capitalist development, as such, but which falls entirely on one side of the world, usually the post-colonial societies of the global south and the marginalized peoples of the world and in nature, you know, everything that suffers negative impacts of modernity. So when I read about modern societies, addiction to abundant and always available energy, I can’t help to think of gasoline shortages in Venezuela and all over Latin America. It’s a completely different picture. Or when I hear someone say that modern society is completely dependent on oil, I don’t think of oil in terms of all the, I don’t know, petrochemical products that are available or how plastics have shaped in relation to the world. No, what I see in my head is oil as this unequal international division of labor and of nature. That sort of subjugates extractive periphery to the to to what I was saying to the negative effects of oil extraction and oil trading, including environmental degradation, but also political and economic instability. While sending most of the profits and benefits and comforts to the global south. So so I don’t think that oil as a as a civilizational force can be fully understood unless we take into account the broader history of extraction and neo-colonialism. That is not limited to hydrocarbons, by the way, but goes back to the beginnings of the modern world system with European colonization.
GOOGASIAN [00:04:09]: I really like your phrase, ‘the darker, darker side of petro-modernity,’ I think that’s a that’s a really helpful way to think about it. So thanks for that. OK, well, maybe changing tacks a little bit, but I think one of the reasons why we’re also very excited to have you on the podcast was because you’re also a practicing poet. So could you speak a little bit about the role that that oil plays, if any, or other forms of energy play in your poetry? Are you are you actively trying to engage in that project of representing the substance that resists visibility, as you were talking about earlier?
ACOSTA [00:04:55]: Yeah, a little bit, I mean, it’s not necessarily at the center of my of my project, but it’s definitely something that, as I was saying, is part of a bigger, bigger problem, the bigger context. And that is basically the workings of the capitalist world ecology. In El próximo desierto, I guess I had to to blend poetry and the narrative form to create this sort of hybrid form that made it easier to write about it and to imagine. What I did, was write about and write about several different scenarios in the future. I didn’t do this in any systematic way. Of course, of the poems are about many different things and they all tell different stories. But in the background, there’s always this type of dystopian setting. I don’t know. I prefer to write poetry about the subjects in more indirect ways as a background that influences and determines the subjectivity that the poem is trying to to to represent. So in a couple of the poems from the book, I write about this world after oil, for example, about after hydrocarbons are no longer used as a form of energy. But I develop this scenario in which this, in fact doesn’t change anything fundamentally. For example, I say something like I don’t know, we thought that after oil society, that after oil, society will become more equal, the air would be cleaner. But this never happened. Instead, the State has become more repressive and violent. Here of course, I was thinking about how Venezuela may be entering this sort of post petroleum era, being that the higher oil industry is in shambles and the government is looking to expand mining and extraction activities into the Amazon and the Orinoco River Basin, which, of course, is making everything much worse. My thinking here was that it’s not enough to think about a future that supersedes the need for abundant energy in the global north or that supersedes fossil fuels in general. That’s an important issue. But oil, as I see it, is only part of nature, just one more part of nature that is commodify, extracted and sold in the international market. And therefore, it is part of a much larger structure and a much longer history of unequal relations in capitalism that also needs to be addressed. And by creating these types of backgrounds in my poems, I was, I guess I was trying to suggest all these meanings, not in any direct, straightforward way, but simply as a small change in the context that completely defamiliarizes, the world.
GOOGASIAN [00:07:49]: Yeah, I was going to ask you specifically to talk about the sort of role of ecological crisis in your work and the links between this representation of a world in crisis and these extractive processes. I think you’ve started to answer that question. So I guess I’ll just ask if there’s anything else you’d like to add on that topic.
ACOSTA [00:08:12]: Yeah, in my research and my book project in particular, I write about those two types of works of cultural products. Some some visual artists like Carlos Cruz-Diez or Alejandro Otero, were I would say complicit with the extractive state to a certain degree and with the entire ideological apparatus of the federal state, but in very subtle ways, are not usually, I think, recognized in studies about Venezuela. But on the other hand, there cultural producers who even when many of them, not all of them, but some of them were working within the same circle of oil sponsored institutions, were capable of elaborating a critique of oil capitalism. Again, through this very indirect ways that that we really need to to read closely, to notice that. For example, I’m thinking of photographers like Ramón Paolini who try to represent how Caracas, the capital city, have become a type of monster, urban monster, an urban chimera, he says, after so many layers and layers of basically unplanned and spasmodic oil funded development. Or the works of filmmaker Carlos Oteyza. He filmed the thousands of Venezuelans who flew to Miami every day at the peak of the oil boom to basically spend all the extra money that they had, in shopping malls. This documentary called Mayami Nuestro, it’s just absolutely fascinating. And he draws some very subtle parallels between that compulsion to spend and the way that oil’s energy regime is based on continuous expenditure and the idea that energy and money are somehow infinite and unlimited and always accessible. But these were not I think, they were really neatly divided fields. And you can’t speak here of two opposing teams of cultural producers, one complaisant and the other one critical. Yeah, the reality was much more difficult to pin down. And part of my work is to evaluate in hindsight how cultural production participated in all the changes that the Venezuelan oil state went through since the 50s, until the mid 80s.
GOOGASIAN [00:10:46]: Yeah, the concept of complicity is really interesting in this in this context, because as you speak about, this is the kind of global hegemonic system in which we could not really avoid some degree of complicity. But it’s useful to hear you to make some of these distinctions about the different kinds of cultural practice that are coming out of that. Yeah. So let me move us a little bit away from oil specifically, this is this is a kind of forward looking question for our energy humanities project here at CIRS, because we’ve recently become interested in the the more effective dimensions of energy, another way of kind of tying this topic to lived experience. And so with that in mind, I was really interested in the first poem from El próximo desierto, the title of which I think translates in English, ‘Never give your heart to a nuclear plant.’ And this seems to me to be about the kinds of deep attachments that we have to cheap and abundant energy and also at the same time about the kinds of denial and despair, thinking about more negative affective relationships that those attachments cover up. So let me just ask you, what kinds of affects would you say are most important to thinking about the lived experience of energy?
ACOSTA [00:12:19]: Yeah, again, I can only think of this from the perspective of the of the global south and specifically Venezuela. I think the first thing that comes to mind is that there’s a lot of anxiety involved, mainly because of the issue of accessibility to energy. Access to the energy is deeply unequal in Latin America. There are, for example, infrastructural challenges, economic distortions that lead to problems like gasoline smuggling. And there is, of course, the problem of power outages, electrical grids that are failing, hydroelectric dams that are failing after having, you know, meant such a huge expense for these countries when in debt to build these dams. Back in the 70s, the World Bank was financing mega dams everywhere in the world. It was crazy. And now a lot of them honestly need to be dismantled. I would say, replaced by smaller ones or by solar and wind, who knows, because they’re failing and the research has proven proven that they can’t be seen anymore as any kind of clean energy with such a huge environmental impact. But still, this dams, and I’m thinking specifically of the Guri Dam in Venezuela, are part of the national imaginary. They’re an essential aspect of what makes people proud of their nation. And I think Rob Nixon says that dams are a sort of national performance art and the esthetic esthetic of mega dams plays a fundamental role here. So, I mean, at the risk of sounding like a pessimist, which I’m not, I can only think of this negative affects like anxiety, fear and disappointment, even the shame, you know. Venezuela is an oil producing country that needs to import gasoline from Iran. It’s a paradox. It’s a it’s very hard to understand. It’s very confusing, but it’s something that defines the everyday experience of energy there. And and you were you were mentioning my my poem about a nuclear plant and and, yeah, nuclear energy we know it has a lot of potential, but it also has many negative impacts. And we have to think about where those impacts will go and who will benefit and who will get the darker side of that kind of energy.
GOOGASIAN [00:14:52]: Yeah, that’s that makes a lot of sense, what you say about the kind of dominance of these more negative aspects to that darker side. So you think that that even this kind of national narrative of fear and shame and disappointment, as you were referencing, that kind of filters down to even individuals’ everyday experience of energy?
ACOSTA [00:15:17] Yeah, I mean, I think in Venezuela, you are exposed to this every day. It’s actually kind of difficult. The thing is that it’s difficult to zoom out and make these connections that I’ve been saying, you know, and so I’m…
GOOGASIAN [00:15:32]: A problem of scale
ACOSTA [00:15:34]: Yeah, exactly, a problem of scale. You’re so immersed in the society that for so long has taken oil and energy petrodollars for granted. You know, there are these oil booms, like in the 70s or even in 2006. And you don’t think about it. And it’s very hard to zoom out and see the danger in that kind of a kind of behavior. So you have to zoom out and you have to look at the geopolitics of being a major exporting society and the way that power plays out internationally, but also how the world market and global politics have this kind of local impact that can be seen every day, even when you’re in a line to fill your tank with gasoline. So you have to zoom out and look not only at the space in terms of geopolitics, as I was saying, but also the history of this larger history of colonial extraction and domination of nature, not only by foreign powers, but also internally, like the issue of internal colonialism and the expectation that the very Venezuelan state is doing, has always done, in the Amazon and Guayana Region and everywhere and the impact of all that. So it’s it’s really it’s very difficult. And you have to really zoom out. Yeah.
GOOGASIAN [00:16:59]: Well, the last thing that I wanted to ask you to leave our listeners with was maybe any any suggestions that you might have for people who are interested in learning more about either the petro-cultures of the of the global south or the cultural production of extractive states, or for that matter, any poets that you’d want us to have on our radar to recommend to our listeners.
ACOSTA [00:17:27]: Yeah, absolutely. Well, the first book that comes to mind is Fernando Coronil’s that I mentioned.
GOOGASIAN [00:17:33]: Yes, we’ll be sure to to make sure that’s linked in the podcast page.
ACOSTA [00:17:38]: I think I think it’s one of the best books about the subject. And perhaps at least for me, I’m a big fan. So to me, it’s like the greatest book ever written about Venezuela. That’s how much I love it. Then you have Jennifer Wenzel’s, The Disposition of Nature, which I believe has, she’s written a lot about Nigeria. And there are a lot of parallels, I think, between Nigeria and Venezuela, especially in the 70s. And there’s also that book by Andrew Apter called, The Pan-African Nation, about Nigeria as well in the 70s in Nigeria. That was really helpful and doing my research. And now there are people working in world ecology, for example, Kerstin Oloff or her writings about zombies in the Caribbean, literature and film. I really like them. There is Michael Niblett, his book just came out. It’s called Something Like Literature, World Ecology and Global Food System. And then in poetry, I would recommend, I think, Raquel Salas Rivera, Puerto Rican poet. His book, Lo Terciario, The Tertiary, is very amazing about depth and value and environmental impacts of of everything in Puerto Rico, and then I really like Daniel Borzutzky. His book came out a few years ago, The Performance of Becoming Human. It’s an amazing poetry book. And then recently, Timothy Donnelly, his book, The Problem of The Many. I really like that one. Yeah.
GOOGASIAN [00:19:31]: Sounds like a great list to me. Yeah, so yeah, thanks so much for that. And we’ll be sure to make a little reading list for the for the podcast page and to include your own work in that as well for listeners who might be interested in reading more.
ACOSTA [00:19:50]: Thank you.
GOOGASIAN [00:19:51]: Yeah. Well, and thank you so much Dr. Acosta for joining us today. I think is really great conversation and I hope our listeners will have enjoyed it.
ACOSTA [00:20:02]: Thank you. It was my pleasure.
[DRUMMING AND BIRDS CHIRPING]
Resources
- Fernando Coronil. The magical state: Nature, money, and modernity in Venezuela. University of Chicago Press, 1997.
- Jennifer Wenzel. The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature. Fordham University Press, 2019.
- Andrew Apter. The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria. University of Chicago Press, 2008.
- Michael Niblett. World Literature and Ecology: The Aesthetics of Commodity Frontiers, 1890-1950. Springer Nature, 2020.
- Santiago Acosta. “Una economía mayamera: petróleo, gasto y consumo en el ocaso de la “Venezuela saudita”.” Estudios de Teoría Literaria-Revista digital: artes, letras y humanidades 10, no. 21 (2021): 117-127.
- Santiago Acosta. “El Capitaloceno y la ecología de la cultura.” Reporte Saxto Piso, (2021).
- Santiago Acosta. “Posthegemonía y postsubalternidad: desencuentros del latinoamericanismo frente a la “marea rosada”.” Cuadernos de literatura 20, no. 39 (2016): 28-40.
- Santiago Acosta. “La cabellera negra de Emira Rodríguez.” Letra Muerta (2017).
- Santiago Acosta. “Los poetas del desvarío: Tensiones entre sentido y rostridad en la poesía venezolana del siglo XX.”Investigaciones Literarias 1, no. 18 (2010), 87-102.
- Santiago Acosta. “Vilas sabe lo que hace, o la poesía como crítica de la ideología.” in Antología poética by Manuel Vilas, Barco de Piedra, 2015.
- Kerstin Oloff. “‘Greening’the Zombie: Caribbean Gothic, World-Ecology, and Socio-Ecological Degradation.” Green Letters 16, no. 1 (2012): 31-45.
- Kerstin Oloff. “Zombies, gender, and world-ecology: Gothic narrative in the work of Ana Lydia Vega and Mayra Montero.” The Caribbean: Aesthetics, world-ecology, politics (2016): 46.
- El próximo desierto – by Santiago Acosta
- Negro oscuro • Blanco trágico / Mañana vendrán las piedras
- Cuaderno de otra parte – by Santiago Acosta
- Detrás de los erizos – by Santiago Acosta
- El Salmón – a journal devoted to archival work on Venezuelan poetry, founded and edited by Santiago Acosta & Willy McKey.
- Lo Terciario / The Tertiary – by Raquel Salas Rivera
- The Performance of Becoming Human – by Daniel Borzutzky
- The Problem of the Many – by Timothy Donnelly
- Mayami Nuestro by Carlos Oteyza – in Spanish