Petropolitics

In *Cyclonopedia*, petropolitics is not simply government policy about an energy resource. It is a narrative and material method for following oil across geology, infrastructure, war, religion, capital, and planetary history. The book's glossary defines it as a cartography in which oil narrates terrestrial dynamics and calls petroleum “the undercurrent of all narrations” (Cyclonopedia, p. 242).

OCR NOTE: The archive's 245-page Cyclonopedia PDF was produced with ABBYY FineReader and its text layer corrupts some names and coined terms. Citations use physical PDF pages. The page image at p. 32 was inspected directly; the coinage is presented here as “blobjectivity,” while the scan/OCR also yields “biobjectivity.” The later primary essay and the secondary symposium volume have cleaner digital text.

Primary text: oil as route, agent, and narrator

The Cross of Akht gives petropolitics a diagram. Its folding geometry is said to grasp planetary inconsistencies through petroleum, while the anonymous Hyperstition discussion names “blobjectivity” as the logic of petropolitical undercurrents. These undercurrents join plot holes across political, economic, religious, and geological narratives; they move through declared human purposes rather than waiting to become their object (Cyclonopedia, pp. 29–35).

Oil consequently appears through multiple fictional avatars: lubricant, corpse of the sun, chemical weapon, pipeline-crawler, “devil's excrement,” and an ancient subterranean body. The plurality matters. No single scientific origin story or political ideology exhausts petroleum's role; oil changes narrative function as it passes among extraction, combustion, finance, military logistics, plastics, and apocalypse (Cyclonopedia, pp. 41–44).

These are propositions staged by the primary theory fiction, not empirical proof that petroleum has intentions. “Agency” here first means the capacity of material circulation and dependence to route events beyond any actor's declared plan. The book deliberately intensifies that reversal into horror: humans, states, and doctrines become hosts or puppets in oil's plot (Cyclonopedia, pp. 29–44).

Later primary text: from occult oil to chemical ecology

Negarestani's later “Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss” retains oil's power to reorder terrestrial thought but changes the register. The essay opposes a self-contained, life-bearing Earth to an abyssal ecology of cosmic contingency. In its pairing of Venice with water and Dubai with oil, petroleum is no longer mainly a conspiratorial narrator; it is the corrosive chemical medium through which climate, industry, and capitalism are joined (“Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss”, p. 1).

The essay argues that capitalism tracks planetary waters and chemical potencies so that accumulation and consumption can attach themselves to the foundations of life. Its target is not only fossil-fuel scarcity but a solar economy that restricts how earthly life can relate to exteriority and death. This is later primary evidence for a mutation of petropolitical thought: the occult personality of oil recedes while chemistry, ecology, and energetic dependence remain (“Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss”, pp. 1–4).

Secondary interpretation: Bratton's de-metaphorization

Benjamin Bratton reads Cyclonopedia against peak oil. He explicitly proposes to “de-metaphorize” the book and treat oil's agency as a modeling problem: because petroleum and plasticity are embedded in the modern world's objects and infrastructures, imagining their withdrawal requires a formal account of what oil currently enables (Benjamin H. Bratton, “Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apophenia,” in Leper Creativity, pp. 54–57).

But Bratton also identifies a danger in the primary text's method. When overwhelmingly complex geosystems are rendered as authored conspiracies, correlation hardens into causation and petropolitics becomes apophenia. His answer is neither to deny oil's infrastructural agency nor to preserve its occult personality: peak oil demands secular governance of interconnected energetic forces without turning ecological emergency into a new sovereign theology (Bratton, “Root the Earth”, pp. 57–63).

Secondary interpretation: Thacker's threshold of the unhuman

Eugene Thacker approaches the same reversal through Fritz Leiber's “Black Gondolier.” His secondary essay distinguishes four stages: oil as a human instrument; the “anthropic inversion” in which oil uses humans; an ontogenic inversion in which the human is one instance of the unhuman; and a final subtraction where human categories fail (Eugene Thacker, “Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans,” in Leper Creativity, pp. 182–190).

Thacker's distinction disciplines the word agency. Simply giving oil human intelligence, intention, or malice reverses anthropocentrism without escaping anthropomorphism. The stronger unhuman claim begins when material dependence can no longer be translated into a human psychology (Thacker, “Black Infinity”, pp. 184–190).

CONTRADICTION: The primary theory-fiction gains force by personifying oil as an ancient conspirator, while Bratton's secondary reading asks that petropolitics be de-metaphorized and Thacker shows why reversed intentionality can remain anthropomorphic. The archive supports both uses. The fiction dramatizes material capture; the critical readings prevent that drama from substituting for causal analysis.

Relation to acceleration and the Outside

Petropolitics complicates accelerationism because intensification is never abstract: it requires fuels, pipes, ports, plastics, credit, military protection, and waste sinks. It also materializes the Outside without making exteriority automatically emancipatory. Oil is an “insider” whose geological depth and infrastructural intimacy allow it to alter systems from within; the result may be mobility, war, accumulation, decay, or dependence rather than liberation (Cyclonopedia, pp. 32–48).