New Book "Atlas of Petromodernity" by Benjamin Steininger and Alexander Klose
Petroleum is one of the most prominent driving substances for the modern era, the Anthropocene, and therefore an important subject for Geoanthropology. It connects the deep natural history of the planet with all layers of modern human life and affects all types of politicial, societal, and ecological futures. It is both a global and intensely local commodity that can tell stories of empowerment as well as of destruction. In the forty-four chapters of their Atlas of Petromodernity, Benjamin Steininger and Alexander Klose present insight into sciences, technologies, geographies, politics, cultures, and subjectivities connected by a substance that, in all its complexities, contradictions, and ambivalences still needs more understanding to be left behind.
an der Zaya, Lower Austria, black-and-white photograph, late 1930s.
Petroleum has shaped the history of the 20th century and the rise of the Anthropocene like no other substance. We drive with oil, we dress in oil, we even eat oil. Oil powers armed conflicts – literally and figuratively fueling the machines of war. Petroleum has driven enlightenment and liberation, while also facilitating the horrors of modernity. The legacy of ‘petromodernity’ includes Blitzkrieg, Shoa, and Napalm, which Geoanthropology needs to address. In all political, social, financial, and epistemic systems of modernity, petroleum-related products like the internal combustion engine, the airplane, satellites, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and artificial fertilizers have pushed the boundaries of technological innovation and thus have enabled new possibilities. It is one of the central claims of the book, that it is not petroleum as a raw material that ‘made history’, but a ‘molecular mobilisation’ set in motion by chemical techologies such as catalysis in refineries and other chemical plants.
But these material effects are not even the whole story. In the Atlas of Petromodernity, authors Benjamin Steininger and Alexander Klose explore how petroleum has also changed subjectivities, knowledge systems, and psychogeographies. The car, they show, is not only a means of transport, but a means to produce petromodern subjects.
By following the routes of petroleum through extraction sites, technological infrastructures, political, ecological, and speculative environments, the book provides insight into both the planetary and anthropological condition of the 20th and 21st Century. In this way, petroleum is revealed as a key substance for the endeavours of Geoanthropology.
The Atlas of Petromodernity contributes to Geoanthropology through the perspectives of cultural theory and history of thought. The book is many things in one: historical and geographical non-fiction, cultural theory essay, and picture book. We stroll through Baku, Rotterdam, and Louisiana, into Manchuria and through the Vienna Basin. We read Bertolt Brecht, Karl Valentin, and technical manuals, as well as petroculture theory. We reinterpret Kasimir Malewitch, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, and listen to Neil Young. We confront the cases of Joseph Stalin, Adolf Eichmann, and Bin Laden. We go to the moon, through refineries and over highways emptied by the COVID-19 pandemic. We confront petrochemistry with petromelancholy, catalysis with catharsis, cosmos with cosmetics. We see tractors winning over tanks.
Each chapter is based on an illustration which provides a narrative and complements the text. These graphic findings include, among others, maps, film stills, technical drawings, book and album covers, photographs, and postcards. Some are marginal testimonies of lesser-known phenomena, some show well-known cultural monuments that get a new interpretation in the light of petrocultural research.
The idea of an 'atlas' is realized both in its geographical and its historical function, as well as in its potential as a format of accessing a very diverse array of academic and non-academic bodies of knowledge and thought.
Although each chapter stands for its own and can provide a unique entry into the whole network of topics – via a special system of references – the book is grouped into three main sections: 1. ‘Upstream/Downstream’ is a technical parcours. It follows petroleum from geological reservoirs through pipelines into refineries and from there into engines, urban centers, and human bodies. 2. ‘Oil encounters’ is a series of more geographical and historical pieces. 3. ‘Regard eloigné’ collects more speculative essays. Two introductions and two epilogues frame this set of three main sections.
The now published book is already the third version of the Atlas. After the original German release in 2020 and the translation into Russian from 2021, it is now an updated and enlarged edition with - among other updates - a new foreword by Stephanie LeMenager (University of Oregon) – in 2014 'inventor’ of the notions of ‘petromodernity’ and ‘petromelancholoy.’ It also includes a long new closing chapter ‘Zombie’ on the Russian war in Ukraine and the drastically ongoing case of petromodern destruction.
This publication introduces a Central European perspective on petromodernity, breaking new ground by adding a European perspective to the existing, mainly North American-dominated discourses on energy humanities. Within German humanities and cultural theory, it is the first book on petromodernism. As a representative of 'new German media studies,' the volume not only introduces new topics and areas of debate, it also offers new terms and methods, and thus directions, for the interpretation of the numerous phenomena within the expanding field of materialist approaches in art and humanities.
