Traumas and aporias of oil as a global object of desire: from petro-mania to petro-melancholia in Ella Hickson’s Oil

Abstract

Whilst a handful of other plays and performances have appeared on the scene of modern European drama—most prominently Konjunktur (1928) by Leo Lania and Petroleuminseln (1927) by Lion Feuchtwanger—Ella Hickson’s Oil is, to my knowledge, among the very first works in contemporary Anglo-American drama that takes oil and its concomitant existential-psychological, social-political and economic implications as its sole, sustained focal point. Nevertheless, the neglect of the vital relevance of oil to the modes of subjective-political economy, and to the modes of social-cultural relationality of lived experience in contemporary life, does not betoken a lesser degree of socio-cultural or political urgency or significance—at least for the Anglo-American public and life. Instead, I would argue, that it demonstrates the symptomatic invisibility of oil from literary and dramatic discourse. Indeed, if “the history of oil”, as Ghosh—writing in 1992 on the “missed encounter” between oil and the modern American novel—contends, “is a matter of embarrassment verging on the unspeakable, the pornographic”, Hickson’s Oil depicts the ravages and obscenities of such a history.21
Peter Hitchcock compounds the issue of this missed encounter by adding: “But what if the very structure of the oil encounter compels the suppression of a missed encounter”.22 In making the latter statement, Hitchcock hints at the traumatic structure of the oil encounter and, to derive our terms from Lacan, the role of oil as an objet petit a in such an encounter. As I will seek to demonstrate here, what Hickson’s Oil struggles to represent is the frame of this missed encounter. She accomplishes this, on the one hand, by exposing the political economy, cultural politics and ethics of the traumatic encounter/experience or touché in the real of oil’s meaning, both for the peripheral countries and Western modernity; and, on the other, by showing how the political economy of oil in globalization is contingent on a transnational division of labour. As Hitchcock explains: “The unpleasant truths of wars that kill innocents and produce environmental disasters are much easier to explicate than the touché stitching these truths together into the fabric of the modern state”.23 I will argue that Hickson’s Oil, as a paradigmatic example of world dramas, constitutes a potent means to register not only the world-systemic nature of petro-capitalism, but also the different meanings of “oil” available in different historical moments, social systems, and world cultures. More specifically, I will argue how the thematics and dynamics of the play demand us to ponder the meanings of oil under such rubrics as oil as commodity, social agent, cultural signifier, hyper-object24, and, above all, an impossible object of desire. The use of the modifier “impossible” is intended here to capture three facets of oil: its perceived nature as an at once object/signifier/symbol which is, first, transcendental, secondly, traumatic in its effects, and, thirdly, charged with unconscious cathexis, phantasies, and a libidinal economy of excess. I will thus probe this pivotal facet of oil: oil as a traumatic and aporetic object of desire along with the questions of gender politics and ethics implicated in it. Finally, probing the questions of gender politics and ethics of gender in conjunction with the economy of gendered subjectivity as depicted in the play, it will be demonstrated how May, and later Amy, come to embody a neoliberal vision of selfhood and subjective autonomy, a neoliberal mode of self-governmentality (self as an entrepreneurial agent), and, finally, a neoliberal understanding of freedom and self-worth. Of significance, in this regard, will be the questions of a neoliberal relational ethics, that is, between individuals (particularly women) and nations both within the same national world or coming from core and peripheries of world systems and between human and nature.
Until recently, there has been an absence of scholarship exploring oil’s constitutive role in “world”—and more specifically Scottish and Anglo-American—aesthetic practices, discourses, and cultural forms.25 Over the past five years, scholars across the humanities and social sciences have paid increasing attention to the ways in which petroleum circulates as “capitalism’s lifeblood”,26 further insisting on energy regimes as a foundational paradigm for both historical and literary periodization. This essay will also scrutinize the discursive mechanisms and dynamics underpinning the “constructedness of oil’s connections with futurity”27 as critically accentuated or deconstructively dramatized by Hickson’s Oil. The consideration of the subtle intertwining of oil-addicted culture and oil-driven capital has long been one of the focal points of critical scholarship; this has recently assumed new dimensions in the context of “materialist” understandings of culture and the attendant re-conceptualisation of literature as “worlded” (beyond a merely Said-based definition of the term).

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