UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation considers the cultural, philosophical, and techno-scientific conditions of the early American oil industry, to transform ruinous anthropocentric conceptions of nature. This period matters because it is the commonly accepted historical origination of crude oil as a global energy commodity. The seemingly prosaic question “what is oil?” opens up new conceptual frameworks, ethics, and material circumstances. Oil is a resource commodity; oil is techno-scientific; oil is political; oil is an earthly substance. But what does it mean to think with oil beyond the practices of representation that enact its contemporary form? As new energy regimes and new critiques of the Anthropocene emerge, why does the predominant ontological status of oil as a fossil fuel persist? Given the outsized role oil has played in making the contemporary world, these under-examined questions foreground the guiding inquiry of the project: what kinds of practices can produce new concepts of oil?

Utilizing feminist philosopher Karen Barad’s posthumanist performative approach and media theorist Jussi Parikka’s notion of geological media materialism, my dissertation examines the early American oil industry to refigure oil as media. This critical and creative work conjoins media and science studies scholarship with speculative field notes to create a theory/fiction document that reconceptualizes the onto-epistemological status of oil as media. This method accounts for the entangled ways that oil, as a technologically, culturally, and naturally manufactured fossil fuel, has structured how things are and how they are known throughout Western industrialization. The unconventional form of this work proposes that alternative knowledge practices are a pathway towards new petro-practices. The project poses a key question: if oil use predates the concept of fossil fuel, what is the origin of the theory of fossil fuels? The question distinguishes between the science of petroleum, constituted of ancient organisms and biomass, and the techno-cultural assumption that energetic entities should be put to work as fuel. It is taken for granted that the former implies the latter. By scrutinizing some of the most basic—but overlooked— assumptions of oil, my work challenges the orthodoxy of how Western society has come to conceptualize the earth as a source of raw resources.