1 See, for example, a forthcoming issue of Regeneration on Arboreal Humanities: https: / / www .regeneration-journal.org/ issue/ 1686/ info/ or Routledge’s Economics and Humanities book series. Energy, Aesthetics, and the Role of Interpretation in Petroculture Studies Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis 1 Introduction Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. (Sontag 1987 [1964]: -98) The humanities have diversified tremendously in the first quarter of the century: From the by now firmly institutionalised Environmental Humanities to the Blue, Arboreal, Energy, Economic, and Digital Humanities. 1 Some have mushroomed out of or grappled with various turns - be they institutional, infrastructural, affective or nonhuman. Already back in 2007, Jennifer Wenzel quipped that “‘British and American literature’ will no longer suffice to describe what English departments do” (Yaeger 2007: 633-634), and while then postcolonialism was the field diagnosed with exhaustion, it appears that today the arts and humanities have gone through another dry spell and are in desperate need of a re-branding. Particularly dynamic in their constant metamorphosis are the environmental humanities which have produced - or sprouted - so many interand transdisciplinary branches within and beyond the humanities that it is beyond the scope of this chapter to rough out these developments in their entirety. I will therefore hone in on energy, aesthetics, interpretation and their value in light of these disciplinary crossovers which have, among other things, produced petroculture studies, a field of research particularly vibrant in Canada, the US, and UK, which I will introduce in more detail below. What 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 2 Suspicious readings incite pleasure: “intense engagements and eager commitments. It is a strange and multifaceted creature: mistrust of others, but also merciless excoriation of self; critique of the text, but also fascination with the text as a source of critique, or at least of contradiction. It is negative, but not only or unambiguously negative” (Felski 2015b: -10). 3 Sontag comments on the limitation of the spatial understanding of form inherited from Greek antiquity (1987[1964]: -103). See also ch. 2 in Felski’s Limits of Critique (2015b). appear to have remained somewhat steady companions throughout all of these disciplinary and institutional developments in the arts and humanities, I argue, are suspicious forms of reading, interpretation, and their still predominantly spatial conceptualisations. A question this contribution asks is to what extent petroculture studies in their engagement with literary fiction have fostered a hermeneutics of suspicion, a form of criticism and interpretation not devoid of but offering “specific pleas‐ ures” (Felski 2011: 216), 2 a way of reading and interpreting that shows “an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for appearances” (Sontag 1987 [1964]: 98). The hermeneutics of suspicion have sidelined other hermeneutic, caring, and loving reading practices as aesthetic experiences (see Felski 2020: 123). Already in the mid-1960s, Susan Sontag criticised the negative effects of a “culture based on excess, on overproduction” which had resulted in “a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience” (ibid.: 104) and, one may argue, this has intensified over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first century; a culture in constant overdrive and in desperate search for novelty which also appears to manifest in an ever faster-paced academia as argued above. What was needed back then and is needed more so now is a “recover[y of] our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more” (Sontag 1987 [1964]: 104, original emphasis). What could these “new affective styles and modes of argument” (Felski 2015b: 3) in petroculture studies look like? Can we imagine - and practice - a form of literary and cultural criticism, a method and way of interpreting that does away with the “critic-as-archaeologist” or “sleuth” (Felski 2015b: 7)? How would one read petrofiction, petroculture, or petromodernity in other than spatial terms, i.e. following something other than “a ‘deep-energy’ methodological perspective” (Macdonald 2013: 9)? 3 What does ‘being receptive’ to a text come to mean when we wrest it from the chokehold of negative critique? What of a text - or piece of art - leaves a mark on us? Are we perceptive to the “seductive shimmer” (Felski 2015b: 9) of art, are we still capable of being impressed and animated by the energy literature exudes? In the following I will provide a meta-discursive reading of the hermeneutics of suspicion at work in petroculture studies research. I hypothesise that its 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 288 Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis 4 In the early 2010s also often referred to as petroculture criticism (see Macdonald 2013: 9), petroculture studies is a subfield of the Energy Humanities in the process of being institutionalised through a biennial conference Petrocultures and an open-access journal Energy Humanities to be published with the Open Library of the Humanities Press: https: / / www.openlibhums.org/ news/ 811/ . The efforts to institutionalise petroculture studies, of course, go beyond these examples. firm grounding in spatial conceptualisations of interpretation are, in part, due to the very materiality of petroleum with which it grapples but also due to its theoretical and methodological positioning in cultural materialism. In this reading I adopt the idea of the impasse which oil as a substance creates and transfer this metaphor into my discussion of the hermeneutics at play in petroculture studies. 2 Petroculture Studies at a Methodological Impasse? The term ‘petrocultures’ refers to the social and cultural imaginaries, “the knowledge, practices, and discourses that result[] from the consumption of and subsequent dependence on oil” (Baptista 2017: n.pag.). ‘Petrocultures’ does not only denote the use of oil for cars which produce “the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere”, as Sontag has it, but also pertains to the refinement of oil, its transformation into derivatives such as polymers and plastics, which are indispensable for our capitalist consumer culture. Petroculture studies 4 may be one of the fields of research which has developed the strongest interdisciplinarity in the humanities. Its main objective “in theorizing energy as cultural is […] to expose and determine reasons for our acculturation to its hierarchy of material (and, increasingly, immaterial) forms and the manner in which they dictate fundamental aspects of social life and organization” (Macdonald 2013: 10, emphasis added). An interdisciplinary approach therefore is particularly apt to even begin fathoming the extents to which petrol has made modern life possible and sustains it still. Such a ‘petromodernity’ is defined by Stephanie LeMenager as “a modern life based in the cheap energy systems long made possible by petroleum” (2012: 60). Fossil fuels are a key driver and component of geopolitics but also a site of contestation and struggle: oil spillages are a recurring event which underscore the destructive force of human-made technologies and their (oftentimes unknown) long-term effects on ecosystems. Despite the spectacle and short-lived medial outrage such accidents create, “we moderns have been almost wilfully blind to its 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 Energy, Aesthetics, and the Role of Interpretation in Petroculture Studies 289 5 Concepts such as Rob Nixon’s slow violence (2011) have, of course, aided both the theoretical and political work on making sense of and communicating the temporally and spatially dispersed effects of, for example, oil extraction. 6 This has led Imre Szeman and others to propose the Energy Humanities as “a hub for new ideas and insights about climate, energy, and culture”. See the Energy Humanities website: https: / / www.energyhumanities.ca/ . 7 A premise of petroculture studies’ engagement with literature firmly rooted in its spatial dispersal - or sprawl - is that there is no American, Nigerian or British oil novel since “[n]o oil culture can exist without the self-consciousness of the world energy markets and foreign wars that oil sustains” but there are regional manifestations and variations, “there can be Louisianan and Californian and Texas oil novels, films, poems, and blogs that spill into the world—while at the same time offering scrupulous accounts of material effects and aesthetics” (LeMenager 2014: -14). 8 While petroculture studies is particularly vibrant in North America, it has sparked literary and cultural studies research into the aesthetics of automobility and generic change such as the road or historical novel: see Ivry (2024) or the ERC-funded project “Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility” at the University of Konstanz: https: / / offtheroad.org/ . In an attempt to extend the purview of petroculture studies, the sixth biennial conference by the Petrocultures Research Group in 2024 was hosted in both Los Angeles, USA and in Perth, Australia. 9 Given the interdisciplinary topography of petroculture studies, Balkan and Nandi furthermore align their research with projects in the Energy Humanities as they see economic history and energy as dialectically bound up (2021a: 3). [oil’s] impact on us” (Wilson, Szeman and Carlson 2017: 5). 5 Discourses on petrocultures and petromodernity do not only emphasise the entanglement of our conceptions of sociality, mobility, progress, and flow with the materiality and deep time of petroleum but also always emphasise an ethical and political dimension. In their introduction to On Petrocultures, Wilson et al. as early as in their third sentence stress that “over the course of our current century we will need to extract ourselves from our dependence on oil and make the transition to new energy sources and new ways of living” (2017: 3, emphasis added). Engaging with petromodernity and petroculture within literary studies thus means not only hunting for oil fictions “but also to interrogate the broader relationship between energy, representation, and culture” (ibid.: 6) and their interpretation. 6 Petroculture studies has since its inception been entangled with postcolonial 7 and world literary studies (see Macdonald 2012) 8 but, as Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi have argued, the “glaring lacuna of a sustained petrocultural paradigm in postcolonial contexts” (2021b: x) 9 had to be addressed outright: “the discourse around petroculture has thus far been centered on, and to a great extent mediated by, the resource aesthetics of the Global North, [but] the province of Oil Fictions is instead a world ecology transformed by petrol” (Balkan and Nandi 2021a: 6-7). They therefore “do not distinguish between economic and aesthetic production”, but instead “recognize and seek to make visible 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 290 Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis 10 One could argue that research in petroculture studies on the literary and/ or artistic representation of oil and petroculture(s) is exemplary of what Dollimore and Sinfield described as “cultural materialism”: “a combination of historical context, theoretical method, political commitment, and textual analysis”(1992: vii). The espoused approach “studies the implication of literary texts in history” (viii) and affords examining the succession and/ or simultaneity of dominant energy sources and how they both inspire and make possible their cultural representation. See, for example, Dominic Boyer’s work on Sucro-, Carbo-, and Petropolitics in No More Fossils (2023) or the edited volume Materialism and the Critique of Energy (Bellamy and Diamanti 2018). the evident materiality of petroculture” (Balkan and Nandi 2021a: 3, emphasis added). Thus, foundational to petroculture studies is its firm grounding in cultural materialism, i.e. the entwinement of material and symbolic culture and the quest to lay bare how oil - and other energy sources such as coal - “at least partially determine[] cultural production and reproduction on many levels” (Buell 2012: 274). 10 Fredrick Buell therefore argues that “coal capitalism devel‐ oped (appropriately, given its mode of extraction) a sinister cultural geography of depths and instructive descents” (Buell 2012: 279, emphasis added). Analysis of cultural productions such as literature and film therefore rests on a disclosing of their deep structure (Tiefenstruktur) through the cultural or literary critic turned archaeologist, as Buell remarks: “Oil geography suggests fascinating homologies with psychoanalytic theory and modern cultural practice, from therapy to poetry and art” (281). Moreover, the poetics of oil, which developed in the course of the twentieth century, were heavily shaped by excessive use and conversion of oil which “reappeared as an agent of chemical and social metamorphosis”, which entered into all spheres of life as well as the mind and body: “Bodies became literally oily, in what they ate, and in the cosmetics and clothes they put on; pharmaceuticals began doing the same thing for minds” (Buell 2012: 290, original emphasis). It therefore appears only consequential that one would employ a suspicious reading of the oil-trenched deep structures of the cultural representations of this all-pervasive substance. This short survey of petroculture studies research suggests that one of the key concerns was to make visible, to materialise oil and its derivatives. Jennifer Wenzel, in her review of LeMenager’s seminal Living Oil (2014) therefore states that “[m]atter thus becomes method” and “to materialize” denotes the “fundamental task [of] teasing out its various connotations of making material, representing, narrating, making visible, and […] making ‘something (seem to) appear’ (185) - an apt term for the contradictory elusiveness, invisibility, spectrality, and spectacle associated with oil and its relation to human bodies, work, and labor” (2015: 511, original emphasis). Indicative of such a quest to make oil seen and felt - like psychoanalytic readings attempt to do with trauma 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 Energy, Aesthetics, and the Role of Interpretation in Petroculture Studies 291 11 She further elaborates that “the transnational, as the fundamental if elusive space of economic globalization, tends to be most visible in regional sites of capital production and transshipment. Commodity regionalism activates vital historical and ecological frames, opening an explicit point of view onto global-scale forces and flows, such that we can see and sense them” (2014: -12-13). - is the notion of oil as “the personal unconscious of modernity” that needs to be made visible: Narratives and visual narrative form can make something visible and make the unconscious conscious so that we can grasp it and perceive it. Thus the fairytale of transformation can be seen as one archetypal narrative that captures the potential magic of oil and its transformative power, acknowledging oil’s seductive qualities. (Petrocultures Research Group 2016: -47-48) Oil - both the material and its imaginary - needs to be made visible, unearthed, drilled for and engaged with cautiously due to its “seductive qualities” which again echoes Sontag’s criticism of interpretation as showcasing an “overt contempt for appearances” (98). Put differently by Karina Baptista: “The emerg‐ ing scholarship on petrocultures has taken on the task of investigating the cultural import of the materiality of oil in society, uncovering it as an ideological substratum in contemporary culture” (2017: n.pag., emphasis added). Could anything other than mistrust and suspicion follow from that? Zeroing in on the juncture of oil and literature, Jennifer Wenzel has similarly argued that to read for oil is to attend to its “simultaneous ubiquity and invisi‐ bility”, to ask “how do different kinds of texts […] either work against or contribute to oil’s invisibility” but also probe the “material aspects of literary production and consumption, […] how oil not only fuels the imagination in a metaphorical sense” but also powers the devices needed for consumption (2014: 157, original emphasis). Petroleum’s dispersal in space, time, and form therefore requires a wide interdisciplinary reading for/ of oil. Stephanie LeMenager, for example, employs a critical commodity regionalism in her work which entangles “cultural geography, arts practice, and architectural history” (2014: 12), 11 but she also attends to the affective dimension of petromodernity, our attachment to oil and the various (im)material possibilities it opens up and our fear of losing them. This petrophilia (LeMenager 2014: 84) and petromelancholia - “an unresolved grieving of conventional fossil fuel reserves” (2014: 16; 2011: 25; Vermeulen 2020: 177-178) - come to figure in theorisations of petro-epistemologies through which Imre Szeman has sought to make sense of how oil as “a concrete thing […] animates and enables all manner of abstract categories, including freedom, mobility, growth, entrepreneurship, and the future” but also how it can be used 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 292 Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis 12 The story was first published in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera before being included in his posthumous collection Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (Prima che tu dica “Pronto”) in 1993 (cf. McLaughlin 1998). 13 LeMenager, however, has worked to establish such a post-oil imaginary by repeatedly invoking the mutability and creativity of human imagination (2012: -59). as a heuristic to “interrogate the energy-demanding structures and categories of modernity” (2013: 146). Consider the following quote taken from Italo Calvino’s short story “The Petrol Pump” (La pompa di benzina), written in 1974 12 : “Money and the subterranean world are family and they go back a long way; their relationship unfolds in one cataclysm after another, sometimes desperately slow, sometimes quite sudden” (1995: -173, emphasis added). Doesn’t Calvino already set the tone for our interpretation? Do we not only have to attend to the surface to see the criticism formulated by the autodiegetic narrator? Not latent but in plain sight? We do not have to be suspicious of the text because it is already “doing the work of suspicion for us. Critic and work […] [are] bound together in an alliance of mutual mistrust” (Felski 2015b: 16). But then, what is it that we should or can do with “The Petrol Pump” or other petrofictions if they already perform the critical reading petroculture criticism would otherwise provide? Petroculture studies is firmly invested in examining, scrutinising, and troubling “an energy imaginary beyond fiction [which] underpins fossils as epitomizing a future of security, efficiency, and, even ‘sustainability’” (Macdonald 2013: 11). Scholarly work in the energy humanities has shown that the forms of energy on which our petromodernity rely create a literal impasse: “a situation in which progress is not possible due to entrenched disagreements or deadlocked opinions” (Petrocultures Research Group 2016: -29). This impasse manifests on three inter‐ related planes: Maybe most obviously in the material sense in that petroleum - like all fossil fuels - is a finite resource and will eventually have to be replaced as that which powers our combined but uneven modernities. Second, on a temporal plane, as an impasse which forecloses other futures due to its negative (often detrimental and irreversible) environmental impacts and, third, an imaginative impasse in that its all-pervasiveness given its entanglement with capitalist realism (Fisher 2009) makes another imaginary, a post-fossil imaginary, nigh impossible. 13 As the Petrocultures Research Group notes in reference to Lauren Berlant and in line with LeMenager’s concept of petromelancholia: While many of us remain optimistic that we can sustain our attachment to oil and the good life that it has come to define in the global West, it is increasingly clear that a continuance of the fossil economy is a form of ‘cruel optimism’ that not only carries forward old risks but also introduces radically new risks into our lives. (2016: 15) 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 Energy, Aesthetics, and the Role of Interpretation in Petroculture Studies 293 The Petrocultures Research Group sees the role of the arts and humanities clearly mapped out as they are “uniquely equipped to help us engage in a full, successful energy transition” as they provide the means to engage with “words, images, and performances” (2016: 41, original emphasis). They offer the necessary critique to lay bare the ideological foundations of our material and imaginative impasse, but also the speculative means through which we can imagine another, more just, sustainable future (42). The arts and humanities therefore fulfil an epistemic function: they “create knowledge that can help us to see the social change [that] is desirable and possible” (ibid.). In short they offer critique, reflection, knowledge, historical consciousness, language (43), and conceptual work (here again critical and generative). More than ten years ago, Graeme Macdonald noted that “an energy awareness has finally begun to spread through the Arts, Humanities and cultural analysis generally” and he highlights “key questions” that thus arise, among them “to what degree […] conventional modes” such as ecocriticism and other approaches have “enough sources and resources to deal with the size and scale” (2013: 12) of the various crises as well as the forms of dependence: our criticism, like our technology and terminology, might not be sufficiently refined. But interpretively skilled cultural practitioners prove crucial - not solely in decoding and countering the signifying prowess of oil capital, but in framing the social and planetary ‘story’ of oil and narrativizing alternative energy signatures and structures in a form and space outside orthodox or vested representations. (ibid.: 16, emphasis added) I therefore wish to inquire into an additional, fourth plane on which such an impasse may come to restrain our imagination and academic practice: The methodological impasse. The study of petrofiction, the reading of/ for oil has yet again set the hermeneutics of suspicion aflame and smothered the faintest flicker of new methods in light of the most recent energy turn. If, as Szeman and Boyer argue, “fossil fuels are saturated into every aspect of our social [and cultural] substance” (2017: 6), is it even possible to read closely but not deeply (Love 2010), to approach petrofiction not in orthodox, i.e. suspicious, symptomatic, and paranoid fashion but in a heterodox, i.e. loving and reparative, reading practice? The form and function of literature and literary criticism has more recently been questioned in petroculture studies: What does it accomplish to continue to attend to the literary using the rationales and orientations that emerged as part of this violent history of energy - to employ critical practices that cannot in any easy way be said to have developed outside of or 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 294 Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis 14 This thought furthermore resonates with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s take on the impov‐ erished theoretical vocabulary which would afford attending to reparative ways of reading and knowing to which I will return later on (see Sedgwick 2003: 150). See also Heidi Liedke’s contribution to this volume for more on reparative surface reading as well as Stella Butter’s take on (in)consolability in pandemic fiction. in opposition to the history of extraction? Has literature been part of the problem of petrocultures more than we might imagine it to be - a device that, with exceptions, has worked to conceal our resource reality from us? (Szeman 2021: -269) While Szeman’s call to reflect on the suitability of methods employed in an engagement with petroleum, its derivatives and afforded possibilities is laudable, he nonetheless reproduces the petro-diction of depth and suspicion which pervades much of petroculture studies research. Literature as complicit, as veiling reality inspires a suspicion - or paranoia - both a lay reader and literary critic may not be able to resist and which further facilitates a hermeneutics of suspicion. Such a methodological impasse caused, to a large degree, by such suspicious, paranoid, and symptomatic reading in petroculture studies tends to discount an artworks singularity in favour of its sociability (Felski 2015b: 11) - particularly its reading as social critique however defined. Felski compellingly argues that they are not distinct spheres, that one should not “champion aesthetics over politics, talk up the wonders of literature’s radical or intransigent otherness, or seek to tear it out of the sticky embrace of naive or credulous readers” but do away with the false “belief that the ‘social’ aspects of literature […] can be peeled away from its ‘purely literary’ ones. No more separate spheres! ” (Felski 2015b: 11). What I therefore seek to explore are the methodological affordances of postcritical and new formalist approaches with particular emphasis on reparative motives to what is often read as oil or petrofiction. Such a combination, I hypothesise, will provide “a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary - for forms” (Sontag 1987 [1964]: -103) 14 which in turn affords “a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art” (ibid., emphasis added). Key questions I thus formulate and seek to answer at least tentatively are: How to read those realist, fantastic or speculative stories of ecological injustice, environmental degradation, exploitation and expropriation, of technological, social and cultural infrastructure other than suspiciously or symptomatically? Put differently, by perking up the ears to the reverberance of postcritique, one might wonder how to read for attachment, attunement, and pleasure of energy aesthetics? How to go beyond a form of critique as unearthing the hidden truths from “the fossil record, as a sedimentary script” (Nixon 2011: 69)? What 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 Energy, Aesthetics, and the Role of Interpretation in Petroculture Studies 295 15 See work done by the Petroculture Research Group and its subgroup After Oil Collective. lies beyond the confines of “a mindset of mistrust combined with a morally inflected presumption of guilt, a conviction that surface appearances were not only misleading, but deliberately deceptive” (Felski 2011: 221)? In a move to dismantle the belief in an often decried gap between politics and aesthetics (Levine 2023), between singularity and sociability (Felski 2015b: 11), this chapter dwells on that which animates narrative, its energy, that force which pulls us in and its value beyond market logics. It aims to do so by intervening in a discussion about methodology within petroculture studies given its, as I argue, heavy reliance on the marriage of an hermeneutics of suspicion and humanist activist approach to narrative more broadly, and literary fiction in particular. I do so by offering a mid-level reading (Felski 2015a: 741) of Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021) as a first step in this methodology-minded branch of petroculture studies. While some call for an extension of literary and cultural research on energy, 15 I wonder about the contribution(s) narratology, narrative and literary theory in light of postcritique can make to such a study of energy. What drives - fuels - energises narratives? I here further follow Szeman, who asks what it would “mean to refashion our critical approach to attend to the ontological power and capacities of energy - to make energy more than just a theme of our literary analysis but an animating principle of both its critical apparatus and its politics” (2021: 269) which, I argue, may afford attending to “the moral, affective, and cognitive bonds that infuse it [the text] with energy and life” (Felski 2015b: 28). Which concepts and understanding of value undergirds our readings - whatever form they take - of fiction? Does joy, attachment, attunement, and pleasure play a role here or are they bracketed in favour of a “politically effective” (Macdonald 2013: 1-2) interpretation? What constitutes a critical yet loving practice? Again, none of this is done to dissolve singularity into sociability or vice versa: To ask such questions is not to abandon politics for aesthetics. It is, rather, to contend that both art and politics are also a matter of connecting, composing, creating, coproducing, inventing, imagining, making possible: that neither is reducible to the piercing but one-eyed gaze of critique. (Felski 2015b: -17-18) Thus, for Felski, a caring practice does not substitute the sociality of an artwork for its singularity, does not substitute politics for aesthetics but it opens the possibility to conceive of “critique as an affective stance that orients us in certain ways” (2015b: 18, emphasis added). What I aim to tease out is in how far the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 296 Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis 16 This could, of course, also be framed in terms of the “business ontology” Mark Fisher described in his seminal work on Capitalist Realism (2009: 17). 17 See also Christine Künzel’s work on ‘barriers of the imagination’ (2024: 76) which are, according to her, to a large extent due to the overwriting of a cultural or social imaginary by an economic imaginary confined by market capitalist blinders (78). Thanks to Marie- Theres Stickel for pointing this out to me. 18 A survey of the whole field of petroculture studies in terms of methods would go beyond the scope of this chapter and I will therefore limit myself to honing in on the methods used in research at the juncture of literary criticism and petroculture studies. Just to be clear, this is not a genre-defining discussion; I do not intend to make a case for or against any of the texts discussed as oil or petrofiction or something else. It is a metadiscursive discussion of scholarly engagements with these texts read as petrofiction and a close - but not deep - reading of the mind style of such work, i.e. their theoretical and hermeneutic underpinnings. Moreover, this is also not to discredit or disparage the work done by scholars in petroculture, literary or cultural studies. “thought style that slices across differences of field and discipline” (ibid.: 2, original emphasis), i.e. deep suspicious reading, has steered much of twentyfirst-century research, but especially petroculture studies, into a methodological impasse. I content that this impasse is inextricably tied in with the legitimation crises mapped out in the introduction to this volume and which Felski traces back to the “sadly depleted language of value that leaves us struggling to find reasons why students should care about Beowulf or Baudelaire. Why is literature worth bothering with? ” (2015b: 5). The vocabulary of economics which provides the conceptual metaphors we describe our relation to literature with 16 have left us both in an imaginary and methodological impasse, 17 i.e. left us unable to image, describe, and narrate another story of our love for and attachment to literature and the arts: “Both aesthetic and social worth, it seems, can only be cashed out in terms of a rhetoric of againstness” (Felski 2015b: 17, original emphasis). Do we only read so that we can assign a piece of art to a category of being complicit or resistant (see Felski 2020: x) to any -ism one is currently investigating? Does our mimetic impulse in reading (see Sontag 1987 [1964]: 96) rule out any other understanding and interpretation of a literary text as reflection of the world (see Serpell 2017: 1233)? Does postcritique and new formalism hold the potential to “shake up our mimetic approach to form and ethics” (Serpell 2017: 1234) and, by extension, politics? I would like to dwell on the confluence of politics and aesthetics in postcritical and new formalist readings as I believe this to be a productive combinatory approach to Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were  18 to break the methodological and imaginative impasse outlined above. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 Energy, Aesthetics, and the Role of Interpretation in Petroculture Studies 297 19 Henry Ivry’s very dense reading of How Beautiful We Were and Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019) in light of the recent infrastructural turn makes a compelling argument for the generic changes the historical novel has undergone in the twenty-first century as an age of crisis: The two novels as “narratives of infrastructure trace an alternative archive of colonial, neocolonial, and contemporary violence while also pointing to an insurgent politics within the contemporary African novel. These books […] rehistoricize the supposed contemporaneity of infrastructural crisis while using the historical novel to build infrastructures otherwise. Serpell and Mbue represent two examples of a nascent genre that I describe throughout this article as the ‘historical novel of infrastructure’” (2024: -151). 20 Nandi also describes this as a “petro-matrix” (2021: 132-133) akin to Aníbal Quijano’s colonial matrix of power (see Mignolo 2007: 156). 3 A Mid-Level Reading of Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were Materials resonate - in bodies, theories, aesthetics. Petroleum is one such material that due its shapeshifting properties over large temporal scales but also its residual and derivative forms holds sway in academic discourses from economics, environmental sciences, geology, sociology to literary and cultural studies. When it comes to oil fictions (Balkan and Nandi 2021a: 4) and a critic’s need - or desire - to lay bare the oily deep structures of a piece of art, especially literary texts, metaphors of depth abound in analytical petro-diction. A case in point is Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021), which is predominantly read as a cautionary tale about “environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company” as the blurb on the book informs its readers - which may already incite suspicion to be on the lookout for “the stranger,” usually “a sinister corporate interloper, working behind the scenes with local elites to change the destiny of local lives by dragging them and their territory into petromodernity” (Macdonald 2012: 31). Research on Mbue’s novel has focused on the representation of ecological consciousness (Mwaga, Mutie and Gaita 2024), said environmental degradation and its slow violence (Ohagwam and Albert 2024; Tournay-Theodotou 2024), has performed postcolonial ecocritical (Xausa 2023) or infrastructural readings (Ivry 2024). 19 All these studies work interdisciplinarily; yet most read the novel as that which already does the work of the suspicious critic, of the archaeologist who unearths the hidden truths of the neocolonial practices of exploitation and environmental degradation or reads the novel symptomatically as representative of the neoliberal spectre that haunts the ever-growing global precariat. It is also viewed as a case in point of a postcolonial project which seeks to unmask the intricate entanglement of petroeconomies and colonialism. 20 Both tend to rely on a practice of interpretation which “make art into an article for use” (Sontag 1987[1964]: 101) to pursue 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 298 Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis or support a however ideologically or politically inflected agenda. A mid-level reading, inspired by both postcritical and new formalist thinking and reading, does not hierarchically order discourse or form over content; it perceives of both as intricately bound up (cf. Sontag 1987[1964]: 96). I will therefore approach the story How Beautiful We Were tells via its formal features and aim for a sharp but loving description of both. The novel is set in Kosawa, a fictional African village, and tells a tale of resistance: The corrupt government of the fictional country has sold the village’s land off to a US-American petro-giant, Pexton. The drilling for and transportation of oil through pipelines has not only left the land altered beyond recognition but it has also resulted in spillages which negatively - or, rather, lethally - affect the village’s people and ecosystem. As readers we enter the story at a moment in time in which the villagers are desperate for answers, reparation, and prevention of future accidents after three decades of drilling. But despite their pleas, the Pexton representatives do not give in. The oil near Kosawa therefore constitutes a resource curse as the novel explores “the repercussions of having mineral belongings that literally undermine a community or society’s capacity to belong” (Nixon 2011: 69) and the role the petro-despotism plays in that. To the people of Kosawa the future is - who would have thought - foreclosed due to an impasse: the nearing end is declared in the opening line and thus the future appears predetermined: “We should have known the end was near. How could we not have known? ” (Mbue 2021: 3). The doom and gloom does not keep the villagers from fighting back, which, however, “will come at a steep price - one which generation after generation will have to pay” (Mbue 2021: paratext). The novel as “extraction literature” (Szeman 2021: 269) in the vast field of “energy art” (Macdonald 2013: 12), read for plot only, ticks some of the boxes of oil or petrofiction outlined by Macdonald: it provides an “extraction narrative” that spans the local and transnational, it stages the “dramatic transformation of space, place and lifestyle,” it adds “tales of corporate corruption and petro-despotism; spill and disaster; the conflict between oil capital and labor” (ibid.: 12-13) to a particular locale. The book’s blurb furthermore immediately steeps the environment(al) in economic terms: “Promises of clean-up and financial reparations are made - and broken” by both Pexton and the corrupt government. When an oil well explodes due to a “broken oil-well head, long overdue for replacement,” Thula as character-narrator asks: “but why should Pexton replace it when the cost of its negligence would be borne largely by us? “ (Mbue 2021: 28). The despot, “His Excellency” (Mbue 2021: 7), 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 Energy, Aesthetics, and the Role of Interpretation in Petroculture Studies 299 21 It may be worthwhile to consider the almost Kafkaesque quality of the petrodespotic state apparatus Mbue imagines here, especially in light of what Daniel Hartley has called “impersonality under neoliberalism” (2019). and the government before him “had given us to Pexton” (11) 21 which measures anything and everything in use and exchange value only. The novel opens in the collective voice (“we”) of “The Children,” a group of peers in the village, who introduce the dominant conflict and immediately invoke the tragic nature of the story, i.e. a prefiguration of a future impasse. Tragedy furthermore figures in formal terms as the collective voice can be read as a “‘Greek chorus’ providing interpretations […] and moving the plot forward” (Mwaga, Mutie and Gaita 2024: 169) and as a use of agon which “alludes to the act in classical Greek theatre in which characters debate the play’s dominant conflict” (Osinubi 2024: 16-17): The story begins with a visit of the stranger - here three Pexton representatives - whom the villagers implore to prevent oil spillages which have poisoned both land and people: “We hoped the men would look into our eyes and feel something for us. […] They’d come for Pexton, to keep its conscience clean; they hadn’t come for us” (Mbue 2021: 5). It is the “village madman” (11), Konga, who nabs the officials’ car keys, threatening them to swallow it should they not comply with the demands made by the village. To deescalate the situation, the three representatives are taken hostage and a conflict is set in motion which will spiral out of control as the novel progresses. Alternating between individual character narrators and we-narration, the tragic plot spans several decades in the course of which the village is raided by armed government forces, leaving many dead and wounded, the arrival of the Restoration Movement, which aims to aid the village in its fight for justice, as well as violent vigilante action by The Five - a small part of The Children - who bomb Pexton’s infrastructure. The transnational tragedy, however locally grounded, “deal[s] with affairs of state, revolts against authority, thrusting ambition, court intrigues, violations of justice, struggles for sovereignty” but instead of focussing “on the careers of high-born figures whose lives and deaths have momentous consequences for society as a whole” (Eagleton 2020: 3) as tragic drama would, the novel centres on the village as collective as well as a select few of its members, among them Thula, who is given the opportunity to study in the US and returns to lead a peaceful fight for justice. How Beautiful We Were is polyphonic due to its shifting narration from indi‐ vidual character narrators to we-narration (Bekhta 2017: 165; Xausa 2023: 201), all of which hinge, however, on the Nangi family (Mbue 2021: 25). Natalya Bekhta’s helpful terminological and theoretical differentiation between we-nar‐ ratives and we-narration affords homing in on the narrative form of the novel: 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 300 Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis 22 See for example: “We would have no such chance. Of all the ways we’d imagined on those nights when we’d lain in bed stiff with trepidation, why did we never consider that we’d be away when the soldiers arrived and we’d return to find them waiting for us in the square, nine guns loaded and pointed at us? […] How fast the bullets came. How we stumbled, how we staggered, how we cried, fleeing into the forest. How heavy the blood flowed - the blood of our families, the blood of our friends. Why do we hope on when life has revealed itself to be meaningless? ” (Mbue 2021: 129, emphasis added). How Beautiful We Were uses shifts in first-person narration and we-narration; the latter thus forms only a part of the novel’s overall narrative structure. Nonetheless, the sections narrated by ‘The Children’ in first-person plural are illustrative of “the importance of social minds in fiction and, in particular, of intersubjectivity rooted in socially distributed, situated, or extended cognition” (Bekhta 2017: 171, original emphasis). ‘The Children’ function as “a collective agent - a collective subjectivity which the narrative performatively creates and maintains throughout its course” (ibid.: 177). The collectively narrated sections furthermore combine free indirect and direct speech in dialogue, contributing to “we-narrative’s own set of mimetic conventions, creating the rules of ‘collective realism’” (ibid.: 174). The we-narrator’s language use may appear somewhat paradoxical in that rhetorical questions, syntactic inversions (see also Tournay-Theodotou 2024: 286), repetitions (esp. first-person plural pronoun but also anaphora) 22 and an overall “archaic narrative mode” (Tournay- Theodotou 2024: 287) are juxtaposed with more childish language such as calling the representatives the “Sick One” or the “Round One” (Mbue 2021: 4), which casts them as types or stock figures. In light of the overall narrative structure of the novel, the paradoxical style dissolves in that the story shifts between narrators and tense, between we-narrator and individual character narrators, past and present tense. The repeated use of the conditional - “we should have known” (3), “we would have left,” “would have said,” “would have walked” (11) - can be interpreted as a narrative strategy that creates additional uncertainty about the happenings or events on story level, it marks the events as extraordinary - even in an already extraordinary situation, further igniting a paranoia and suspicion of the text’s surface. It furthermore creates a sense of (un)certainty about the interpretative sovereignty of the narrating instance by which I mean that the level of transmission (discourse) becomes more discernible, granting the narrative a metafictional quality. Additionally, the we-narrator clearly marks their own prejudices and the limitations of their perspective, for example, in terms of Konga’s madness: “We thought him incapable of anger toward anyone but the voices in his head and the spirit that had ruined him. We thought him 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 Energy, Aesthetics, and the Role of Interpretation in Petroculture Studies 301 23 Tournay-Theodotou, reading Konga as allegory of resistance, furthermore points to the evocation of “the historical institution of slavery” due to “the use of ‘overseer’ […] which simultaneously points to the new colonisers and the contemporary global order of exploitation” (2024: 293) continuing the symptomatic line of argumentation the novel inspires. unaware of everyone and everything around him besides his mediate needs and the phantoms following him” (17). The novel furthermore probes the boundaries of first-person character narration by making use of scale variance characteristic of contemporary climate (see Caracciolo 2022: 49-50) and petrofiction (see Macdonald 2013: 12-13). In a chapter narrated and focalised by then nine-yearold Thula, one of ‘The Children,’ focalisation suddenly shifts and appears to follow the wails of the village’s women as they learn of the disappearance - and likely death - of six of their men: Wives and daughters and mothers begin wailing, their voices flying through the double doors of Woja Beki’s house, over the apples trees in his compound, along the path that leads to Gardens, through the supervisors’ offices and the school Pexton built for the children there, past their clinic, into the meeting hall where the laborers gather on many evenings to reminisce about the distant homes they left behind to work for Pexton, onto the vast, grassless field on which stand structures of metal spewing fire and smoke, and down into the wells, where they become one with the oil. (Mbue 2021: -47) The women’s wails traverse the space between the village and the oil wells of the euphemistically called “Gardens” where foreign men extract the crude mingled with the pain and desperation of the villagers. The section furthermore juxtaposes the precarious state of the villagers - both materially and mentally - with the prosperity of both the corrupt local Woja Beki as well as the Pexton employees who are provided with an infrastructure the Kosawa residents are in desperate need of. The traversal of scale and juxtaposition drives home the overarching criticism the novel appears to formulate in its symptomatic diagnostic of petro-economics: The prosperity of the West or, rather, the global North more broadly, is based on and continues to rely on exploitation of resources and people in the global South: We wondered if America was populated with cheerful people like that overseer, which made it hard for us to understand them: How could they be happy when we were dying for their sake? Was it possible they knew nothing of our plight? Was Pexton lying to them, just as they were lying to us? (Mbue 2021: 72) 23 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 302 Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis 24 See also Magdalena Pfalzgraf ’s contribution to this volume. As outlined above, even paratextual elements such as the blurb add to a symptomatic reading and highlight the suspicious work done by the novel for its readers. One could therefore ask if such suspicious texts remain flatter in their didacticism, stultifying rather than enticing (see Sedgwick 2003: 124; Felski 2015b: 34). Moreover, one may wonder in line with Sedgwick about the political effectiveness of such “paranoid trust in exposure […]. What is the basis for assuming that it will surprise or disturb, never mind motivate, anyone to learn that a given social manifestation is artificial, self-contradictory, imitative, phantasmatic, or even violent? ” (Sedgwick 2003: 141). In the case of Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were as petroor oil fiction, the reader is cast as ally 24 of the environmentally conscious critic - here: the text itself. Text and reader are partners in the trenches in a war on the corporate West, allied forces situated on the right side of history, united in the suspicion of petro-capitalism. Does such a writing and reading practice not evoke a self-righteousness which hinders more than it incites an activist (humanist) stance? Even though the text points to the morally and ethically objectionable practices and entanglements, does a reader as ally not feel like they deserve their indulgence? But what if one were to resist taking “the predetermined paths” (Felski 2015b: 34) of paranoid, symptomatic, and suspicious reading - sticking with the spatial metaphors - and venture into postcritical territory, not following the fast lane dictated by the suspicious text which is bound to end up in an impasse; what if one were to allow for the hermeneutics of suspicion to be accompanied, if not be replaced, by “a ‘hermeneutics of restoration’ [which] is infused with moments of wonder, reverence, exaltation, hope, epiphany, or joy” (Felski 2015b: 32)? Such a “flexible to-and-fro movement” between “paranoid and reparative critical practices” is what I envision a mid-level reading to consist of, “not as theoretical ideologies (and certainly not as stable personality types of critics), but as changing and heterogeneous relational stances” (Sedgwick 2003: 128). Such a middle road would create space for “other ways of knowing, ways less oriented around suspicion” (ibid.: 143) so that the “monopolistic program of paranoid knowing” would be met with reparative motives, “inadmissible in paranoid theory both because they are about pleasure (‘merely aesthetic’) and because they are frankly ameliorative (‘merely reformist’). What makes pleasure and amelioration so ‘mere’? ” (ibid.: 144). Here postcritique’s emphasis on attachment and love as well as new formalism’s attention to form offer a way out of “the exclusiveness of paranoia’s faith in demystifying exposure” (ibid.). 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 Energy, Aesthetics, and the Role of Interpretation in Petroculture Studies 303 This is not to postulate a naïve reading or to deny “the reality or gravity of enmity or oppression” (ibid.: 127-128), but inspired by a particular affective, political stance. What is the ethical possibility that is afforded by and in the Energy Humanities? What are the spaces of possibility? ‘We’ all know that oil is bad - don’t we? So what do we read these texts for? Are we stuck in a reading in favour of post-oil economies and futures and reading against petro-capitalism? Such a reparative, loving practice would afford methodologically, ethically, and politically “to surrender” and “to experience surprise,” both good and bad: “Hope […] is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates” (Sedgwick 2003: 146, emphasis added). Conceiving of art and literature as that which imbues such an energy, interpretation approached via a reparative mode casts it in line with Sontag’s call “to make works of art […] more, rather than less” but to not ursurp them (1987[1964]: 104), interpretation thus appears as “additive and accretive,” that which “nurture[s]; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self ” (Sedgwick 2003: 149, emphasis added). Sontag’s vocabulary of form therefore may productively compliment Sedgwick’s vocabulary of affect (2003: 145) so that one may attend to the directionality and efficacy of reading and interpretation which “resides somewhere else than in the relation of demystification to knowledge per se” (ibid.). Recast in such reparative motives, the use of modal verbs and what-if ’s signals the power of storytelling to allow for a dwelling in the possible in How Beautiful We Were: “We’re somewhere else, thinking of Kosawa, thinking of Thula. We’re wondering if Thula would still be fighting if she were alive. It’s such moments that the children of our children come to us and say, please, Yaya, please, Big Papa, tell us a story” (Mbue 2021: 360, emphasis added). Storytelling here thus appears as a reparative, nurturing, caring practice which fosters intergenerational relations - of course not without transmitting injustices and trauma along the way - which goes to show “the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture - even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (Sedgwick 2003: 150-151). The tragic story and its entanglement with its polyphonic form, narrative structure, and poetic qualities may surprise its readers, thus providing glimpses of a seductive shimmer despite - or, rather, amidst - its violent plot. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 304 Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis 4 Conclusion This contribution has sought to highlight the methodological impasse which I see petroculture studies steering into and has argued that while the herme‐ neutics of suspicion do offer specific pleasures of exposure, they nonetheless may foreclose being impressed by the positive affect and aesthetics of art and literature. A continued exploration of the affordances of postcritque and new formalism in the field of petroculture studies opens up future avenues of research which 1) could flesh out the more intricate mechanics of midlevel reading, 2) ask what the knowledge generated, to speak with Sedgwick, does, 3) further explore what animates literature, what energises narrative, and, conntected to that, which role narrative theory and narratology play in filling these gaps. While I content that a mid-level reading inspired by postcritical and new formalist work is a step into the right direction, I believe that it will take more to break the methodological stalemate of suspicion and depth. Other oil or petrofictions such as Italo Calvino’s short story “The Petrol Pump” (1974), Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010), Adolphsen and Barslund’s Machine (2007) and Sea State. 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