Footnotes to ApoCon article

With an attack on Andreas Malm

Dear reader, you’re with me in the grind now. My intention with this substack is to produce a coherent book on petrohistory, but what you’re getting here is far from the fully realized work. To support this project, buy a paid subscription now, and I’ll send you a “free” copy of the book in a few years, when it’s ready. It will be better than the below.

The good people at APOCON are hosting my next essay on petrohistory. I’m pleased to be featured in their “psyop sleaze rag” and I feel it’s a perfect aesthetic and political match. Please head over there and read it. Parts I-IV are posted together Sept 8, then V & VI will be posted Sept 10, all in time to mark the drinking-age of 9/11.

Internet publishing doesn’t lend itself to endnotes, so I’m hosting those below.

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[Edit 6/20/2024: The genocide in Gaza dwarfs things like disagreements about speculative materialism; Malm’s piece on this is very worth reading.]

Andreas Malm, who argues against this kind of vital materialism, quotes Latour saying agency is: “making some difference to a state of affairs.” Bennett likens it to Spinoza’s conatus, which she translates as “to strive” and Deleuze defines as “the right of the existing mode. All that I am determined to do in order to continue existing.”

Malm’s competing definition of agency is that it requires conscious intention: that it requires thinking about our actions before we do them. Malm is actually talking about consciousness–or at least an attribute of consciousness. He talks about having a mind. Consciousness is an experience, one that we all turn off for at least eight hours out of every day. We commonly assume that it’s dependent upon human biology, specifically neurobiology. These two men are using the same word to mean two different things, and therefore I’d prefer to separate these meanings into two different words. It would be more accurate to use Latour’s word actancy for his version. Malm’s version is consciousness or, at a stretch, intentionality. It’s too bad because of the rhetorically useful double meaning of the word “agent” (“insurance agent”), but the word has become too slippery to be useful with all these academics talking past each other. The fact that there are, so far, two competing definitions doesn’t make this a binary, or a dualism; these are two definitions among a potential infinite multiplicity. The assumption that consciousness and intentionality are rooted in human biology feels scientific, but in fact it is impossible for science to prove. In fact, signs point the other way; we know that trees communicate with each other, that even single-celled organisms exhibit behavior that is indistinguishable from “intentionality,” that animals violate any rule of intelligence that humans have made to make themselves feel special. As a human, I cannot possibly accurately understand a tree’s experience of consciousness, but that’s my limitation, not the tree’s. All of these things are alive, yes, but the harder we look for a sharp line between alive and dead, the fuzzier the divisions become. If we make the leap that consciousness could be rooted in quantum physics rather than organic chemistry, then it would be available as an attribute of all “inert” matter; everything certainly has quanta.

Malm seems to think that vital materialists all claim that all actants are equal in some metaphysical sense–that everything is the same, or that everything should be treated the same way by…the legal system, perhaps? He summarizes the arguments of Bruno Latour as, “there is only one substance, and everything made of it has the same essential attributes” (41). That’s a massive flattening of literally everything that exists, and that flattening isn’t analytically helpful. If that’s truly a fair representation of Malm’s object of critique, I agree with him.

But Bennett explicitly disclaims this idea that everything is the same. “I have not eliminated all differences between us but examined instead the affinities across these differences…The political goal of vital materialism is not the perfect equality of actants, but a polity with more channels of communication between members” (103).

We transcend the binary not by flattening everything, but by expanding it into a multiplicity. Actancy doesn’t give an actant “equal rights.” If there are such a thing as “actant rights,” they are the weakest protection imaginable: the right to persist. But this right by definition will be infringed upon, someday; nothing is permanent, something that exists now will not always exist. Actancy is only a minimal, temporary condition. An ecosystem isn’t accorded special rights simply because it exists, but because of how important it is to everyone else.

Rather, each thing will act in its own way because it is not only an actant, it is also what it is. A rock will act in one way, a cashflow in another. To return to the language of rights: a human has human rights, an aquifer has aquifer rights, rock has rock rights and plastic has plastic rights and capital has capital rights, which seem, suddenly, to be powerful enough to override all the other ones. Moreover, we are humans, so we should strategically behave towards all things with a view toward our own health, and the health of our communities. Consciousness and intentionality are only two types of actancy in a huge category — the largest category, in fact: “Everything.”

Malm’s property dualism (there are agent things and non-agent things) obscures the uncomfortable truth that humans have a very limited capacity to change the world with our intention alone. Whether or not we are “agents,” we are not at the top of the hierarchy of Power, by any measure. This is why we require the combustion of oil inside an engine to go 60 miles per hour; a human alone could never do it. This ability is super-human in a pre-petrological sense. It does not occur (only) because of intention or consciousness; it is a physical process that takes place within an assemblage of human animals and technology, and it is a process that has proven itself to be difficult to control.

Malm does allow himself to consider a nonhuman agent who can demonstrate intentionality: a corporation. I’m not sure on what side of his “division between humans and inanimate matter” a corporation falls, but he allows that it does have intentionality. A corporation can have its own agenda, which might or might not be shared by any one of its constituent individuals. The organization as a set has its own agency that transcends the sum of its parts. I guess he is saying that a corporation is ultimately human because it is composed of humans, and humans are capable of agency.

But the corporation is in reality composed of humans interacting with materials–not just adding labor to them, but also assigning them value within an economic system. And so the attributes of the material itself must be a part of the consideration, and can be a more important determinative factor than any human or group of humans. It is anthropocentric to privilege intention as a special or superior actant in the world.

Malm gives away the game when he says, “the fossil fuel industry [is where] the most intense, concentrated, and aggressive intention to excavate fossil fuels, with the greatest assets of power, resides.” Those assets of power are material. The oil corporation has power because of the power of oil–its usefulness to humans, in one sense, but also its objective physical attribute of being a material with high concentrations of chemical energy. The corporations’ possession of that material is what gives it the power to override human concerns and interests such as a healthy biosphere. Oil is not just a material but also a flow, a constant streaming down an energy gradient from densely packed carbons to parts per million outside. These corporations are literally in league with an ancient tellurian daemon against our own interests, and it sounds naive to me not to ask whether that daemon has its own agenda. Does the oil care that it can be owned by a human, the way a slave cares deeply? Probably not, but since it is not a human, it has a much more powerful way to revolt against the humans who believe they are its Masters: by insulating the earth into catastrophe.

Malm’s problem with actancy is at base a moral one; for him an agent is someone who can be held morally responsible for a result of their actions. This is a strategically pressing question, because we need to find some mechanism within society to gain control over the fossil fuel industry, so that we can stop the flow of carbon into the air. Malm’s assumption is that we can only regain control over people, and not over the material flow of oil from crude to combusted carbon dioxide. He praises the existing global warming movement, the one that arose out of the environmentalist movement, for having an implicit understanding of this. But he doesn’t acknowledge that the movement has had very little success.

At least in this text, he doesn’t mention the Rights of Nature legal idea and movement that is showing real promise. This idea is explicitly allied with Bennett’s vital materialism; indeed, one gets the impression that one of her reasons for writing is to support the strategy of giving ecosystems legal standing. Thirty localities in the U.S. have passed rights of nature laws, which are being challenged in court, but the movement has racked up significant legal victories not only in Pennsylvania but also Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil, Columbia, Uganda, Bangladesh, and New Zealand: all countries that have infinitely more moral authority, if not political power, than the U.S. Contrast this positive momentum with the status of traditional international climate negotiations, or cap and trade programs.

We should defend the rights of ecosystems–rivers, forests–because they are allies of human interests, allies of all lifeforms. Can we also imagine prosecuting oil itself, rather than individual oil corporations? Imagine if we could declare the material itself liable for harms against humanity: we could expropriate it into public ownership. Just as a government incarcerates an individual for a crime, a government could seize a material that has committed crimes against humanity. Declare that governments suddenly own the material itself–all of it–as a remedy for the harms it is causing to the world. With one radical decision, we could undermine the entire apparatus of fossil capitalism. The decision-making over the use of the material would become public, debatable, and the interests of capital would have to compete again with democratic interests. In the existing system, this is a legal fantasy, but in a revolutionary context, potentially a very useful concept.

We see a parallel debate unfolding in the ongoing struggle to limit access to guns. Testifying before congress, Christopher Killoy, the CEO of gunmaker Sturm, Ruger and Company, said “You can’t blame the firearm in particular in use [for a mass shooting]. It’s an inanimate object.” The fact that Malm’s property dualism is in the mouth of the CEO of a gun company should give him pause. The rest of us, to some degree or another, do blame the guns for the constant recurrence of mass shootings.

We can feel animus to guns and oil and solidarity with and allegiance to the interests of plants, animals, and fungi, because we are humans, and therefore animals. We intuit and know that our life is connected to all the life around us. When Rex Tillerson declares “My philosophy is to make money. If I can drill and make money, then that’s what I want to do,” he is declaring himself an enemy of life and a lackey of oil. He is a traitor not only to the species, but to all living things. He, and all like him, should be held to account: they serve a master who is pushing the Earth towards catastrophe, whether you call that master “capital” or “oil” (the two can be exchanged for each other, and therefore in this human-relational sense, interchangeable). Look to Reza’s subtitle, Complicity with Anonymous Materials; Tillerson is here declaring himself complicit with oil, so fuck him with a bayonet. My own complicity with oil–a product of my constant consumption of fossil energy–is much less intentional than Tillerson’s, to take Malm’s perspective, but a realist would also point out that my complicity is also much less important to the political contestation of fossil power. That certainly doesn’t drive my own moral culpability down to zero, but it is certainly less than Tillerson’s, and much less than that of oil itself.

Yet another problem is that Malm seems to think the idea of vital materialism is brand new, and originated with Latour. This ignores all forms of animism, which have deep roots in traditional knowledge in many different cultures. That wealth of knowledge and metaphor has been closed off to us by the “climate scientists” that Malm venerates. Negaristani shows us that humanity has encountered oil before; it didn’t spring into existence exactly at the moment that we had a use for it. Humans have deep experience with and knowledge of “the wetness that cannot be reduced to water.” We can access that traditional experience to inform our language and our understanding of the political power of oil, and standing in that realm, we can become much more comfortable with strategically useful language like “oil is evil.” Speculative vital materialism opens up, rather than forecloses, strategies to fight petropower.

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Everything is something because nothing is nothing.

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Chemical companies like du Pont and I.G. Farben must be seen as tied closely to the oil producers, since they were in charge of profitably disposing of oil refinery waste by dumping it on consumers and recycling it into the War machine. Around 30% of a unit of crude is made up of stuff that’s just too heavy to use as fuel. Refining separates the petroleum vertically along a distillation tube; Gasoline and other burnable fuels come out at the top, because they are lightest and so can be burned cleanly for energy. You still get a thick gunk leftover at the bottom of the tube, no matter what you do or how pure your crude–it is a tellurian muck. Any potential value of that stuff turns a waste product into free money. “I’ve got one word for you, kid: plastics.” The reference is as annoying to me as it is to you.

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“Stained with oil,” Henry Wallace describing James Forrestal.

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“The oil industry is utterly ruinous for independent and non-collective oil producers.” (Cyclonopedia 20)

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“The victim is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth. And he can only be withdrawn from it in order to be consumed profitlessly, and therefore utterly destroyed. Once chosen, he is the accursed share, destined for violent consumption.”(Batialle, The Accursed Share 59)

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On Kissinger’s interest in raising oil prices to open Alaska: Mitchell 186, cites Tore T. Petersen.

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“Openness emerges as radical butchery from within and without. It butchers open in all directions, in correspondence with its strategic plane of activity. Openness is not suicide, for it lures survival into life itself where ‘to live’ is a systemic redundancy.” (Cyclonopedia 199)