I’ve been thinking about petromodernity wrong, or at least not as clearly as I could. I’ve failed to make an important distinction between petromodernity as a condition and as a project. In the first instance, what I mean is how we live our lives in a world saturated by oil. In the second, what I mean is the goals to which we claim to be working, with the help of oil and its attendant technologies. To understand petromodernity as a condition is an empirical task. To understand it as a project is rhetorical and philosophical.

Simply put, the API advertisements tell a story that explains the nature of progress. They tell us what progress is and how oil helps us achieve it. They explain how we get from “here” to “there” (and, more fundamentally, where we understand “here” and “there” to be). It is this way that they underpin a project of modernity, or more to the point, a project of petromodernity.

My task now, it seems, will be to piece together the story the API ads tell, and answer these questions:

• How has petromodernity as a project shaped petromodernity as a condition?
• How has petromodernity as a condition shaped petromodernity as a project?
• Who exactly do I mean when I say “we”?
• What does this project of petromodernity reveal about the iterations of petromodernity described by others?

In my last post, I made five statements about petromodernity. To define the term, I plan to flesh out each one. But I find theory (by which I mean efforts we make to explain the world) works best if I have a concrete object to talk about. It is what I seek to explain, but it is also the test case for any explanation I offer. The world we describe is always more complex than our descriptions, and it is only in dialogue with the world that we can refine our notions of it.

But before I get to that, I have a more basic question to answer. How have people before me defined petromodernity? They have talked about it in a number of ways, but no one has offered more than a cursory definition. Stephanie LeMenager, for instance, speaks in Living Oil of “modern life based in the cheap energy systems made possible by oil”
(p. 67). Others talk about what we might call the symptoms of petromodernity. The Petrocultures Research Group, which is based in Alberta and draws together scholars from across Canada (and the world), writes that people living in the petromodern world are “highly mobile [with] access to the full variety of available goods and services, access to a full range of information access” (After Oil, p. 60). Petromodernity produces by-products “such as oil spills, air pollution, nuclear contamination, and global warming” and is thus characterized by a “slow violence” (p. 62). Consequently, “if petromodernity persists beyond the current decade, it will likely ensure catastrophic global climate change and the extinction of most life on earth, including human beings” (p. 64).

I have still more examples, but I’ll save them for the article I’ll make of these posts eventually. My point here is simple: it is clear that scholars mean something by petromodernity, given the way they identify its symptoms, but no one has yet provided a systematic definition. I plan to do so here by turning my attention to a surprising trove of documents I’ve stumbled upon lately, all published by the American Petroleum Institute in the 1950s. They’re aggressive forms of PR, part of an effort the API, through its Oil Industry Information Committee, undertook to educate the public (not to mention school children) about the benefits of oil. One is a booklet called What Makes This Nation Go (special thanks to the kind folks at the archives of the Glenbow Museum for scanning the document for me). A second is a film called American Frontier, about the boom in the 1950s in Williston, North Dakota. A third is an advertisement the API placed in a number of American magazines and newspapers, including Time, in 1953.

These documents (and others I hope to get my hands on) are valuable because their purpose was to make the ideas that underpinned the modern world, bound inextricably to the development of oil and its attendant industries, seem like common sense. What I want to uncover are those ideas. They will form the basis of my definition of petromodernity.

For the last few years, I have been thinking about oil and its effect on people, especially in the town where my parents live: Williston, North Dakota. Between 2008 and 2014, the region, which sits atop the Bakken oil fields (named after the family on whose farm oil was first found in the 1950s), went through a boom. Since the price of oil dropped, it has gone through a bust. I’ve written about both at my other blog and in a book I co-edited with William Caraher called The Bakken Goes Boom.

In those places, I look largely at the history of the boom-bust cycle in western North Dakota. Here I want to ask some more pointed theoretical questions. I want to understand how the boom-bust cycle affected people’s sense of home and how their evolving relationship to home in turn shaped the way they saw others. At first glance, it might seem that I’m asking how people would feel about their home (and about Williston) if there had been no oil. But of course, there’s no counterfactual to be had: the oil was always there, not just in the ground waiting to be extracted, but in the gas in people’s cars or transformed into ubiquitous everyday materials like plastic. It was also there more abstractly, in the relationships it made possible between people in Williston and people far away, who made the goods residents bought at Walmart or in the city’s charming little downtown. And it was there in the ideas people had about the nature of space (people relate to distance differently in the upper Great Plains than elsewhere) and their ability to overcome it.

In short, my question is not about Williston and oil but about the conditions of modernity, or the complex social, political, economic, and technological forces that structure how people in Williston (and elsewhere) lead their lives. Oil is an integral part of it, but one that is often overlooked.

In the next few posts, I will begin to lay out a definition of the idea of “petromodernity,” which others have mentioned but not explored (e.g., Stephanie LeMenager in Living Oil). But first, a preliminary working definition: petromodernity is the logic that results from the interplay between political, economic, and technological forces and that structures the way people live in a society that is dependent on oil, where oil is one determining factor among others.

My plan here is to propose five theses of petromodernity, and then flesh them out in later posts. They are:

1. The beginning of petromodernity, if we must date it, is the late 18th century. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, in the article in which they propose the idea of the anthropocene, identify James Watts’s invention of the steam engine in 1784 as the point where humans begin to affect Earth’s climate. It’s a useful heuristic starting point.

2. Petromodernity is punctuated by moments of acceleration, such as after the Second World War, when car culture expanded and people in North America (and elsewhere) began moving out of cities into the suburbs.

3. Petromodernity is characterized by invisible ubiquity. Because oil is thoroughly imbricated in the way North Americans (and others) live, we do not see it, except in moments of crisis.

4. If we look for its effects, however, we can map them out, in a structure that, like a fractal tree, describes a recursive series of relationships.

5. Petromodernity is global in scope, but its effects are distributed unevenly as a function of the degree to which people in a given locale are integrated into the criss-cross paths of international techno-, ethno-, and finance-scapes.

In 2013, I was teaching a class on semiotics at the University of North Dakota. We ran a blog, and on it I posted some notes about Charles Peirce. They were my own notes, published to help my students work through a set of challenging ideas, and I didn’t think they’d ever go beyond the class.

I’m republishing them here (1) because I found them again while working on an article about the meaning of “multiculturalism” in Canada’s 1991 Broadcasting Act and (2) because I found a published article where the authors had lifted an entire paragraph word for word without attribution. In the original, it’s hard to find my name (the entry is attributed to my login name, undcomm103) — perhaps they looked. I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt.

At any rate, I wanted to repost my notes here to make it clear I wrote them.

Notes on Peirce:

Peirce’s definition of a sign is usefully broad because it extends beyond words: “something which stands to somebody for something on some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign.” [note 1] More simply, a sign is something that evokes something for someone. A sign points to an object and, at the same time, it brings to the interpreter’s mind another sign (called the “interpretant”) that translates and mediates the original sign. This is the structure of semiosis, or the making of meaning, of which sign, object, and interpretant are three necessary parts. Without one of the parts, semiosis does not take place—the triad is not reducible to pairs of dyads.

This triadic structure recurs throughout Peirce’s analysis. He loves typologies, especially those that describe levels of mediation. The typology he returns to most is that of firstness, secondness, and thirdness, which describe degrees of mediation and reflexivity. Firstness is a condition of unmediated, unreflexive access. Firsts are experience without reaction, cause without effect. Secondness is a condition of mediated but not yet reflexive access. Seconds are experience and the reaction it evokes, cause and the effect it provokes, but not yet a reflection on the reaction or effect. Thirdness is a condition of mediated, reflexive access. Thirds are experience, reaction, and the reflection upon that reaction. They are cause, effect, and the extension of that effect to the form of habit or convention or law.

Peirce’s triads follow this structure, and they are nested. Consider the structure of semiosis: the sign is a first, the object it evokes is a second, and the interpretant is a third. Where signs are concerned, they are characterized by their presentative condition (the ground, or the quality that makes them a sign), a condition of firstness; by their representative condition (the relation in which they stand to their object), a condition of secondness; and finally by their interpretative power (their ability to direct attention to an object in such a way as to evoke an interpretant), a condition of thirdness.

Each of these conditions is also follows a triadic structure. Peirce identifies three types of signs as a function of their presentative condition: qualisigns, or qualities that act as signs (the color red), sinsigns, or actual instantiations of signs (a light that turns red), and legisigns, or signs that have a meaning deriving from convention, habit, or law (a red traffic light that signals to drivers to stop). [note 2] Qualisigns are firsts, sinsigns are seconds, and legisigns are thirds.

He also identifies three types of signs as a function of their representative condition: icons, or signs that resemble their object (an image of fire), indices, or signs that are contiguous with, are caused by, or somehow point to their objects (smoke coming from a fire), and symbols, or signs whose meanings are a function of convention, habit, or law (fire as knowledge in the story of Prometheus). Here again, icons are firsts, indices are seconds, and symbols are thirds.

The same is true of signs as a function of their interpretive condition: rhemes identify a sign but do not reveal whether it exists or can be judged true or false (“a dog”); dicents are propositions that can be judged true or false (“a dog is an animal”); and arguments are signs whose interpretation relates to convention, habit, or law (“a dog is a man’s best friend”). Rhemes are firsts, dicents are seconds, and arguments are thirds.

One implication of these typologies is that we can identify ten types of signs ranging from the barely elaborated (rhematic iconic qualisigns such as “a nebulous patch of color, seeing a blotch of red in an afterimage, hearing the wind blow through an old house, the musty smell while walking in a forest, the aftertaste from a deliciously exotic meal” [note 3]) to the complex (argumentative symbolic legisigns, where the “paradigm case is that of an inference of an argument, which shows the connection between one set of propositions [the premises] and another [the conclusion]” [note 4]).

Why only ten types, rather than twenty-seven, as three sets of triads would suggest? Peirce argues the interpretive condition of a sign cannot be of a higher order than its representative condition, which in turn cannot be of a higher order than its presentative condition. That is, a qualisign (a first) cannot be a dicent (a second) or an argument (a third), nor can it be an index (a second) or a symbol (a third). As a result, the only type of qualisign conceivable is a rhematic iconic qualisign, but many types of legisigns are conceivable. [note 5]

[1] Charles Peirce, The Philosphy of Peirce: Selected Writings, ed. Justus Buchler. London: Routledge and Kegan, 1940, p. 99.

[2] Examples adapted from James Jakób Liszka, A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 35–36.

[3] Liszka, p. 48.

[4] Liszka, p. 52.

[5] Although these signs are conceivable, they are not in fact possible. By definition, any instantiation of a sign is a sinsign. Therefore, qualisigns and legisigns cannot be instantiated as such.

I’m happy to announce that the book The Bakken Goes Boom: Oil and the Changing Geographies of Western North Dakota has been published. You can find it on the website of the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. Plus, you can download it for free. (Please do!)