Trevatt, Thomas. 2021. The Axioms of Petroculture: Art and Political Transformation in the Second Age of Oil. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis] https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/29977/ The version presented here may differ from the published, performed or presented work. Please go to the persistent GRO record above for more information. If you believe that any material held in the repository infringes copyright law, please contact the Repository Team at Goldsmiths, University of London via the following email address: [email protected]. The item will be removed from the repository while any claim is being investigated. For more information, please contact the GRO team: [email protected] The Axioms of Petroculture: Art and Political Transformation in the Second Age of Oil Tom Trevatt, 2020 Student no. – 33247763 Supervisors – Professor Simon O’Sullivan and Dr Louis Moreno Visual Cultures Department, Goldsmiths College, University of London 1 2 Abstract This thesis aims to tackle three interrelated questions; does the genre of contemporary art have a distinct logic to the extent that it can be described as being axiomatic? Do these axioms relate to the socio-political conditions of our era as they are understood to be shaped by the politics of the extraction, sale and burning of petroleum hydrocarbons, and the attendant externalities of this process? And, if these questions can be answered in the affirmative, what is the politically transformative potential for Contemporary Art? The thesis understands the tentacular reach of oil into culture through the political economy of extractive accumulation and how it is reliant on the huge value drawn from fossil fuel exploitation from the early 1970s to now, and the exhaustion of this commodity. It argues that, at an axiomatic level, Contemporary Art has been conditioned by, and conditions, current variants of Liberalism that emerged in the latter part of the twentieth century, and that these variants are underwritten by the oil industry. It does this through a reading of economic theory, art theory, critical race studies and their intersections with ecological thought. This approach differs from multiple other adjacent projects in that it attempts to synthesise a critique of the logics of contemporary art and questions of political transformation in relation to the growing literature on the oil industry and climate change, rather than seeking to point to artistic practices that deal with issues of the climate. 3 Index Introduction: What is an Axiom? 9 Chapter One: The Age of Oil 26 1.1 Groundwork 26 1.2 Petropolitics not Democratisation 36 1.3 Freedom on an Indifferent Globe 46 1.4 The Problematic Logic of Environmentalism 53 Chapter Two: Petro-economic Rationality 60 2.1 Economics: Emerging out of Oil 61 2.2 Neoclassical Economic Thought and Neoliberalism 67 2.3 The Economic Individual 71 2.4 Petro-alchemy 79 2.5 Oil and Civilisation 85 Chapter Three: Autonomy 92 3.1 There Will Be Blood 92 3.2 Freedom to Extract 99 3.3 Misuses of Autonomy 102 3.4 Thunderlike Freedom 107 3.5 The Concept of Freedom as Norm Production 114 3.6 The Concept of Freedom as Occlusion 121 3.7 The Concept of Freedom as Commitment 124 4 Chapter Four: Exemplification 129 4.1 Rebrand 129 4.2 Greenwashing 131 4.3 The Expediency of Contemporary Art 135 4.4 The Paradoxical Doing of Contemporary Art 142 4.5 In the Background 147 4.6 Exemplification and Justification 149 4.7 Legitimation and Virtue 153 4.8 Critique as Justification 156 Chapter Five: Myopia in Art and Politics 161 5.1 Political Transformation 161 5.2 Myopia 168 5.3 The Universal, the Particular and the Individual 172 5.4 Spontaneity as Triviality 177 5.5 Artistic Spontaneity 181 5.6 The Racialised “We” of Extinction Rebellion 186 5.7 Petro-political Anomie 191 5.8 The Failures of Liberalism 195 5.9 Nominalism 200 Chapter Six: The Image of the Human in the World 204 6.1 Conceptions of the Human-Society Nexus 204 6.2 Worth Beyond Calculus 207 6.3 Alienation and Exnomination 215 6.4 Binding Oneself to History 218 6.5 Complex Systems 220 6.6 Metabolic Systems 224 6.7 Rebounds and Dark Matter 228 6.8 Normativity 230 5 Conclusion: In Defence of the Institutional 238 Bibliography 248 6 Acknowledgements With any project of this scale there is an understanding that many hands have participated in its creation. From friends who have listened to and read through drafts, to those who have just been there to help me let off steam, celebrate the successes, or drown my sorrows with, family who have been supportive, and of course academic staff in my university who have provided excellent opportunities and critical feedback. The most prominent of these, is of course my mother, Sarah, who has been very patient during my lengthy education and only rarely complained that I didn’t have a “proper job”, however, without her support, none of this would have been possible. A huge debt of gratitude is due to my supervisors Simon and Louis, both of whom have offered hours of suggestions and edits, and, on the whole, positive support. Elsewhere in the university, my colleague in the Politics department, Bernadette has been a constant support, her tireless commitment to pedagogy has been an inspiration. Thanks also goes to Yana, James and Robin, friends and helpful sounding boards during this research, also to Mark, who sadly passed away in early 2017 – many of the ideas herein were developed in dialogue with his work. Early on in the research I tested these ideas out in the productive environment of Treignac Projet; it is here that Sam and Liz especially, as well as Ida, Fabien, Sonia, Andrew, Inigo, and other members of The Matter of Contradiction group, became huge influences on my thinking. The wonderful team behind The London Conference of Critical Thought cannot be forgotten, without their weirdly placed belief in me, I don’t know if I’d have had as many opportunities to present my work. Thanks is also due to friends who have put up with me during this time and have mostly kept me on track, Ed, Jas, Charlotte, especially have been sources of great support and love, as has Veronika who, for a short period of time, was a very agile conversationalist and gave me a run for my money. Immense gratitude is due to Jaynee, who gave me opportunities outside of academia to earn decent money playing music to drunk people every weekend. Finally, I would like to thank the administrative staff at Goldsmiths, Mazie and Jo, who have been wonderfully helpful, and chased me in the right moments, and fought my battles when needed. And of course, thank you to my examiners who read this monstrosity during a pandemic! 7 For my father. 8 Introduction: What is an Axiom? Capitalism is a totality: its economic components rely, ultimately, on political choices; these political choices in turn rely on a set of cultural meanings; these cultural meanings in turn rely on aesthetic conventions; and these conventions in turn rely on economic fundamentals […] the social, cultural, economic, political, aesthetic, and ideological components of capitalism all fit together in non-linear and non-causal ways. (Haiven, 2015: 39) Insofar as contemporary art is a multifarious field that claims no fundamental ideological adherence, as distinct from other historically or geographically distinct regimes of art, seemingly has no internal guiding principles, there appear to be many contemporaneities – what is specific within one spatio-temporal context may or may not appear within the next – the contemporary moment seems to be characterised by a proliferation of specificities, rather than an universal or general “logic”. As such, is it legitimate to argue for something like an axiom of contemporary art? Whilst artworks might exemplify one or multiple modes that make them contemporary, their specificities seem to forever escape absolute logical categorisation. The proliferations of discrete iterations of particularities that contemporary art exemplifies reduces our capacity to articulate something generic – is there such thing as art in general? Does the name contemporary art represent a genre? Can we say that there exists some guiding principles – something axiomatic – in contemporary art? In this thesis, I develop a set of working concepts, axiomatics, that determine how the field of contemporary art in the second age of oil – what I will call petroculture – operates. This field is not isolated from the socio-political-economic-biological-ecological domains from which culture draws both its resources and materials, but also its ideological and psychic elements. Instead, 9 these fields are seen as interwoven. As Max Haiven (2015) suggests, elements in each field engage and work on each other, producing forms of power that ‘animates and is animated by a host of social institutions’ (Haiven 2015: 39). However, it is important to understand the epistemic differentiation at work here. I will not assert that these fields are the same, nor that all elements of these fields can be qualified/quantified by the same measure. This thesis is an attempt to understand how the field of art is, in part, determined by, and in turn, determines, the field of the socio-political. In this instance, I understand the current socio-political world to be dominated by the condition of petropolitical – which is to say, it is the oil industry and its attendant effects, iterations and the resistance to it that form the determining logics of this current conjuncture. The task is to track the varied roles petropolitics has played in the formation of the concepts and logics at play in contemporary art.