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Hyperstitions of Oil

Oil is the lubricant of universal history, it streams across the surface of the earth feeding petropolitical networks of money, power and technology. This is why Negarestani defines oil as a great map of the world: ‘the cartography of oil as an omnipresent entity narrates the dynamics of planetary events. Oil is the undercurrent of all narrations, not only the political but also that of the ethics of life on earth’. Oil is the ultimate ‘hyperstitional’ entity, hyperstition being defined as the capacity of desire to give thoughts, beliefs etc. an effective reality (as with self-fulfilling prophecy). Just as Deleuze and Guattari define all history in terms of one universal vanishing point, one absolute limit or Outside towards which all territories are led, the universal history of oil leads us to the smooth space of the desert. All idols and ideologies topple and are swallowed in the sand. American capitalist and militant Islamic warmachines alike are drawn towards the deserts of the Middle East in pursuit of the Omega Point.

This universal history narrated by oil is profoundly of our time, and no less universal for that. Universal history is only made possible at a point or threshold ushered in by capitalism. But instead of being a confrontation between social classes, as Marx believed, this point is where the earth confronts itself, takes itself as object, and thus becomes separate from itself, ungrounded and deterritorialised. Oil is our ultimate Logos. In it, we live, move and have our being, it mediates our relation to the earth-as-totality. But it also fuels our basest, most pathological desires (consumerism, war).

The classic theory of fossil fuel as decomposed organic matter, secreted in the ancient ‘mega-graveyards’ of sedimentary basins, is underwritten by the capitalist logic of scarcity, which Deleuze and Guattari describe in terms of their famous critique of desire-as-lack:

‘[lack] creates empty spaces or vacuoles, and propagates itself in accordance with the organization of an already existing organization of production. The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied’ (Anti-Oedipus).

Oil is a finite resource mediating our relation to the earth through a cost/benefit economics that follows this logic of desire-as-lack. What better means of governing desire has contemporary capitalism found than so-called ethical or green consumerism, by which one consumes in the midst of the threat of not being allowed to consume? All systems of power and authority, Deleuze and Guattari argue, are based on double binds which place on us simultaneous but mutually exclusive injunctions. That’s how familial control works. As Bateson showed, the expression of unconditional love is premised on all sorts of implicit demands and calculations. The more society is oedipalised, the more it becomes a virtual family. We are told to enjoy ourselves, to consume unconditionally, but also to conserve energy, think of the dwindling oil supplies. What better figure of desire-as-lack is there than the terrifying spectre of ‘peak oil’, which hovers over us like a judgment of God? Negarestani observes that fossil fuel is ‘a typical Freudian oedipal case’, the earth’s own Oedipus complex, the manner in which it relates to itself as a totalitarian whole.

The judgment of the earth occurs in the suffocating heat of stratigraphic pressure: ‘petroleum inevitably “wells up” through the God-complex deposited in the strata’. Oil, in this sense, is the result of the earth’s paranoiac self-repression or divine frenzy for wholeness (nothing must escape the double pincer of stratification). But strata, no matter how densely layered, always involve, by their very definition, ‘in-between’ spaces that invoke a non-stratified (chaotic, unformed) Outside. The earth composes itself out of this chaos, but also passes judgment on itself, deifies itself, via the strata: ‘Stratification is like the creation of the world from chaos, a continual, renewed creation. And the strata constitute the Judgment of God.’ (A Thousand Plateaus). But how could stratification proceed, how could a Whole express itself as divided, without letting the outside in, without giving up its mania for wholeness? These are the gaps from which petroleum seeps. In this sense, Negarestani turns Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of holes or vacuoles into a principle of anti-authoritarian propagation inextricable from the system of authority itself:

‘paranoid cultures and their establishments always leave security leaks, they breed more holes and more solids than anyone; but these latter, far from augmenting or purging the solidus leave it as a corpse necrotized by heavy scarring (a fibroproliferative mess) … hole … solid … hole … solid … solid … hole … hole … hole … de-faced; it is left as the corpse of solidus, ready to decay and turn into mess’.

Resisting Solar Capitalism

Negarestani sees the submission of the earth to the sun as an economic, ethical and political problem that cannot be solved as long as we restrict the definition of life to the domain of the surface biosphere. The sun is pure onanistic self-indulgence, a pure exorbitance that keeps the Outside out. The sun is the source of life, but also incinerating, immolating, destructive. As such, the source of life is non-life, what supports the organism is the dominion of its finitude. Surface dwellers are slaves to death as well as to the sun. This is why Negarestani calls the relationship between the earth and the sun ‘simultaneously vitalistic and necrocratic’ (‘Solar Inferno and Earthbound Abyss’).

This solar capitalist union of vitalism and necrocracy is embodied in fossil fuels. But what if oil were not the product of organic degradation but something else entirely? Negarestani points to Thomas Gold’s ‘deep hot biosphere’ theory which argues that microbial life, independent of solar energy, is widespread deep beneath the surface of the earth, and that oil is itself an inorganic secretion from the very depths of the earth’s core providing energy for these subterranean life forms. This would explain the presence of biological material in petroleum, and thus the hydrocarbons of oil and petroleum would not have to be biological in origin, but a secretion from somewhere deep in the earth itself. Negarestani etymologically connects the Avestan word ‘drujaskan’ with oil and petroleum. Historian Philippe Gignoux writes that ‘drujaskan’ means ‘house of falsehood’, the feminine noun ‘druj’ meaning to blacken, deceive or obscure, and is defined as ‘the bottom of darkness where the chief demon [of hell] resides’. This is what Land named Cthelll:

‘the interior third of terrestrial mass, semifluid metallic ocean, mega-molecule and pressure-cooker beyond imagination. It’s hotter than the surface off the sun down there, three thousand clicks below the crust, and all that thermic energy is sheer impersonal nonsubjective memory of the outside, running the plate-tectonic machinery of the planet via the conductive and convective dynamics of silicate magma flux, bathing the whole system in electromagnetic fields as it tidally pulses to the orbit of the moon. Cthell is the terrestrial inner nightmare, nocturnal ocean, Xanadu: the anorganic metal-body trauma howl of the earth’ (Fanged Noumena).

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