Crude Methodologies
According to folktales about the origin of oil it is the blubber of the earth, which is but a
vast animal, or it is the urine of whales, conveyed from the North Pole in subterranean
channels. A Methodist revivalist once claimed that oil was in storage underground until it
was required by God to destroy the world at Armageddon, while Episcopalian proctors
have warned that it should only be used to light the fires of Hell and most certainly not
for profane purposes. A reformed scientist once described it rather poetically as buried
sunshine, comprising the unexpended solar power housed in plants and marine organisms
dead and buried some 150 to 350 million years ago. More recently, a sect of diehard
procreators maintained that oil is made up of the liquefied souls of the dead, and so, since
resources will increase with world population, to keep the home fires burning it follows
that we must go forth and multiply.
I’m not swallowing any of these myths though, precisely because they go down too
easily. Oil, in our motorised, electrified and plasticised age, overspills any such handy
lozenge, oozing, gushing and pooling into a very large and complicated, multi-part thing.
To my reckoning, the first step towards understanding such a thing might be a long one
backwards, to eye it from a distance and take it all in at once – although you would need
a really long arm to turn it around for a thorough going over. Or you might mount an
umpire’s chair, if you thought a god’s eye view would be more authoritative. The larger
the thing is, of course, the taller the chair required (although the chair can remain as
simple as you like, no matter how complex the thing is). But when the object of scrutiny
approaches planetary proportions, it’s probably better to switch from a chair to a satellite;
although this would probably require the funds of an oilygarch. But anyway, once you
have gained this overview by whatever means, you can then gradually step in to ratchet
up the resolution, filling in your initial sketch with increasing detail.
But would it be best to work in these details left to right, or radially from the centre, like
a portraitist working from the philtrum outwards? Or is the other way round better? Get
all the details straight in the first place, so that the overall structure then falls into place?
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In which case, the first step would be forward, for a super-close-up view. You could then
inch over the surface of the large, complicated thing, measuring as you go its local
contours, colours, gradients, textures, temperatures, apertures or whatever empirical
information it elicits or embodies, and then parse this data to assemble an understanding
of the whole. The practical downsides of this are the time involved in taking
measurements and the pressure required to consolidate them into a comprehensible
whole. Different local knowledges would produce apparent contradictions, and a whole
mass of contradictions is as friable as a forkful of couscous; and this is unlikely to instil
much confidence, since conventional understanding should appear solid until it is really
thumped.
A third approach would be a less thoroughgoing version of the second: sampling here and
there from what is easily within reach, moving on, then sampling some more, moving on
again, sampling again, moving, sampling, moving and so on. From this smattering of
gleanings an approximation of a whole can be extrapolated. This is, scientifically
speaking, the least satisfactory approach, but it is the most achievable and therefore
common. A major drawback here is that if the large, complicated thing under
examination is an individual, a community, an ideology, a nation or indeed anything that
a person or persons might be touchy over the erroneous representation of, this method of
data extrusion (also known as patchy knowledge) can cause much annoyance. And it is
this annoyance that is called ‘politics’. Certain liberals, wishing to avoid the friction caused by two lots of patchy knowledge
rubbing up against one another, would caveat their own as entirely contingent and invite
a whole host of other representations drawn from different perspectives to create a sort of
relative soup, where the multitude of frictions cancel one another out. But this broth of
voices – each conveying a variation on a representation, description or interpretation of
the same large, complicated thing – is even more complex than the thing itself, and so
gets us nowhere. A hegemony, on the other hand, would insist that its is the only viable
account and that any other representation must be shot and buried. But while this
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compression into rigid singularity is obviously more wieldy, brute elegance is generally
not the main aim of modern politics. And so, on at least two counts, it is questionable whether large, complex, important and
multi-part entities such as the oil industry should be tackled through this latter politicising
method of informed guesswork. Oil, like the systems that flow from it, is opaque and
slippery; random incursions are unlikely to elicit a clear picture of the whole. No, I shall
have to be more rigorous, most likely starting at an intimate scale and working my way
up incrementally to a total understanding. But what are the fundamental elements of such
an understanding? And how big are the increments of knowledge? Should I start with
what is known at present, or should I amass knowledge in the order that it was
discovered? And was it discovered, or was it devised or invented? Or inferred? Or
guessed and then verified? Would I start with organic chemistry? Or the moment that the
first prospector struck oil? Or with the price of a litre of petrol? Being a humanist by
training, I’d be more comfortable taking a critical analysis of the poetics of the
sociological impact of the history of post-colonial oil politics as my embarkation point,
but maybe it would be more au courant to push off from material essentials and follow
their tentacular involvements inwards, backwards, outwards and forwards all at once…
But actually, the best way of all to start, I find, is to close my eyes and jump. This way,
merely surviving is admirable and any perceptible virtuosity or useful outcome is a plus.
As chance would have it, when I closed my eyes last night – not as I was about to jump,
but just bedding down – I was visited by none other than a spectre of the oil industry. It
appeared during a typical dream, a movie-trailer of incoherent but profoundly significant
images and incidents, which was abruptly buffered by the ringing of bells for half a
minute, or a minute maybe, or perhaps an hour, followed by a clanking noise, far below,
as if someone were dragging a heavy chain over some casks, and then a booming noise as
a door flung open and footsteps mounted the stairs to my room. Then a spectre bearing
the public face of the oil industry oozed through the bedroom door, drawing a weighty
chain clasped about its middle. This chain was long, wound around and about like a tail
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and was garlanded with jerry cans, well heads, pipe sections, tankers, holding vats, share
indexes, cartels and regulatory bodies.
Following the customary exchange of denial and verification between the living and the
undead, the spectre showed me the truly ghastly sight of a global industry so complex
that not a single participant understood their position within it. My eyes took in scenes of
such abundant contingency that they looked like utter chaos, and my ears funnelled reams
of statistics like telephone numbers, which I tried to memorise, but they slipped away
like, well, telephone numbers. And then the spectre, with dark strings of drool grieving
downwards from its mouth, delivered a monologue, lost to me now, so devastating that
my blood curdled and froze. Eventually spent, it walked backwards towards the window,
which gradually opened to let in confused noises in the air: incoherent sounds of
lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and self-accusatory. Then, after
listening for a moment, the spectre joined in the mournful dirge, and percolated out into
the cold, dark night…
As with all dreams, the details faded with daylight, but I woke with a cry of ‘What the
Dickens?’ and with the sense that the edge of my ignorance had been truly knocked off.
My previous understanding – of a single vast structure made up of solid parts that joined
up through the efforts of those that manufactured them – had been swept away by a
multitudinous torrent of self-reflexive indeterminacy. This felt like the sort of radical
ground clearance undertaken before some serious knowledge-building. But whereas
dreams, like theories, are famously non-Newtonian, in that they are abstracted,
dematerialised, lubed by fantasy and seldom have audio (for noise is traditionally
produced through friction, impact or vibration), this dream was cacophonous with the
shrieks, clatters and clanks of girders, joists, pivots and winches, the rolling of barrels and
grinding of drills, the whirring of data and sky rocketing of prices, the whoops of the
fortunate and the howls of the fleeced. And so I woke thoroughly knackered, any
aspirations of vigorous research and exhaustive field studies, interviews, site visits and
the like slumped for the nonce. I can only really face a spot of gentle fishing in the British
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Library, and so I find myself now in the Trade, Industry & Occult reading room, where a
raft of men are typing on PCs with two fingers.
These men enjoy the full compliment of fingers and thumbs, but seem to have excused
80% of them from the exertions of high-impact work, presumably to keep them soft as
leisure-class credentials (although they must have to hide their callused forefingers in the
nearest handy orifice when such credentials are requested). The air is vibrating with their
qwerty clamour and I am slightly worried that all this whisking of air molecules might
turn it semi-solid like cream, embedding me forever. But I can glimpse, in the furthest
corner, a typing pool of tranquillity, where the fleet fingered huddle together beyond the
thunder. I shall head their way with my trolley of books, pick the small buds of fleece
from my sleeve for a quarter of an hour or so, which I shall roll into a ball far too large to
flick onto the floor with impunity, since the colour of my clothing will irrevocably link
me to it, stashing it instead in my handbag – most likely giving myself a fright later – and
then open the first page of the first book that the library database has suggested as most
likely to satisfy the search term ‘what on earth is the oil industry?’
***
Well, I got as far as the second footnote in the preface to the first book before I was
shunted off course. It was about how Boulton and Watt’s steam engine, patented in 1775
and employing a separate condenser, held off further improvement until 1800, thereby
temporarily suppressing development of engine efficiency. Boulton and Watt’s precursor,
Newcomen’s atmospheric-pressure steam engine, had converted less than one percent of
the energy it consumed into useful motion, but 19th-century fuel developments –
involving a move from charcoal to coke to heat the smelters that produced the iron from
which the mining machinery was made, and the convergence of iron, steam engines and
coal usage with the invention of the train and the expansion of the railway network,
primarily for further coal transportation – sparked an exponential increase in power
generation efficiency. Interestingly, while carbon-based power has now left human and
animal muscle power way behind, it is still expressed as horsepower, the capacity for
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generating electricity in the Britain in 1870 being 1.56 million horse power and rising to
22 million by 1950 and 100 million in 1977.
Anyway, the footnote alluded to bearings as a means of increasing efficiency, but left the
notion hanging like a game bird for currying. It was The Bumper Book of Bearings that
filled me in on these marvellous objects, with reproductions of sketches made by
Leonardo da Vinci of a set of roller disc bearings based on an idea mooted by an
anonymous contemporaneous German engineer and eventually fitted onto a coach in
1734 by one Jacob Rowe; then it related how, in 1772, a handful of years before the
Boulton and Watt engine patent, a resident of York, remembered as C Varlo, fitted
bearings with the full complement of cast iron balls to his carriage with considerable
success. Two years later Welsh ironfounder Philip Vaughan registered, in patent no.
2006, a pair of full complement ball bearings for each wheel of a carriage, with grooves
in the axle and the inner ball races. But it was not for another 70 years, with patent no.
2855, that these balls would be kept in a separate cage rather than being fed through a
hole in the bearing that was then stoppered up.
Flipping through a fistful of pages to speed up the narrative, I find that by 1898 one
company alone was manufacturing 20 million steel balls a month. It seems that this
exponential rise in demand was due to the popularisation of the bicycle. The evolutionary
leapfrog from French velocipede to British bicycle was spawned when a pioneering
English cyclist won the first ever Paris-Rouen road race, beating his nearest competitor
by a full 45 minutes and averaging a stunning 7.5 miles per hour over the 76 mile course.
This, added to the advent of the Franco-Prussian war, prompted a boom in bicycle
production to the north of La Manche, where by 1893 there were an estimated half a
million cyclists, and twice that by the turn of the century. A frenzy of innovation
culminated in the widespread adoption of the cup-and-cone full-complement bearing by
1897, although it wasn’t until the refinement of steel production that real precision in the
manufacture of these ball bearings would make unthought-of levels of efficiency
possible. In 1890 balls could be made consistently to within 0.025mm, and half this by
1892; high-precision balls of the last decade of the last century were made with a radial
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run-out to less than one micrometre (0.001mm). I can’t bring myself to peek at the final
chapter to find out the limit of accuracy now. It will no doubt be chillingly inhuman.
These early volumes on extraction technologies have provided the missing olfactory
aspect to my anosmic dream. While I can recognise the base bouquets of utility and
economic imperative among their pages, there is a marked absence of the instantaneous
digital tang or floral notes of stylisation that I am used to. But the strongest aroma in this
world of shunting logic is that of sweat, overriding the delicacies of anti-gravitational
theory and leaps of fancy, since material strength and mechanical ingenuity are the sole
weapons against the terrible magnetism of the earth. But this, I figure, is putting the cart
before the horse – or, rather, the tanker before the plankton – for there is an ancient
process of deposit to consider before extraction can happen.
Oil, it turns out, according to George Bernard Shaw’s illuminating Power and
Superpower (published by Random University Press), is not made from whales or dead
souls or horses, but from dead sea creatures. One litre of petrol is, in compressed form,
the equivalent of 25 metric tons of ancient marine life; or, to turn it about, if all the plant
and animal life produced over the entire planet for 400 years were compressed into fossil
fuel, it would last us just one year. This compression, woefully inadequate now, back in
the day freed settlements from the practical need for woodland. If Britain had had a
continued reliance on wood, by the 1820s it would have devoured a forest the size of the
country, double that by the 1840s and double that again by the 1890s. It would no longer
be a green and pleasant land, but an auto-parasite that had entirely gorged itself on itself.
Fossil fuel, however, placed pressure not on land at home to actually provide this energy,
but elsewhere to provide raw materials, such as cotton, to which these industrial
processes could be applied, and sugar, tea and coffee to sustain the human labour to
perform them. Colonial control of large sunny regions was the most obvious way to go
about this, and so oil is buried sunshine after all, since it supplants photosynthesis-based
fuels and withers certain freedoms previously enjoyed in hotter climes.
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My understanding of history is rocked by this causal linking of oil in one place with
oppression in another. I hadn’t really considered the potency of stuff to make things
happen, having always laid the blame with people; but I find, on an open access shelf,
(while looking for the hidden door to the ladies’ room) What’s What, a fantastic almanac
that traces the material cause of every historical incident right back to even the most
nonchalant catalyst. It is researched, collated and published by a group calling themselves
Carbon Watch, which may seem, to anyone believing the inorganic equally culpable, a bit
biased. Anyway, not holding such beliefs myself, I heave to my desk a whole stack of
early editions, which, from a speed read through the major entries, lay almost every coup
and revolution at oil’s door: ‘The Great Game’ as the Anglo-Russian political skirmishes
in central Asia during the late 19th century were known; the Russian Revolution of 1905;
The Constitutional Revolution of 1905-11 in Persia; in 1906 the Bamabatha rebellion in
Natal and the Dinshaway incident in Egypt; the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20; The
First World War; the popular uprising of Egypt in 1919; the Great Syrian Revolt of 19257…
I am assuming that, as the world’s reliance on oil has intensified, so has its lubrication of
global events; and indeed I can see that the type in What’s What becomes smaller and
smaller with each volume, until the very last page is, to the naked eye, solid black. I shall
bring my opera glasses to penetrate this tomorrow, but more immediately disconcerting
for this copper-bottomed humanist is the lack of personal narratives. Call me old
fashioned, but can’t an oil company be broken down not only into executive,
management and workforce, but into further subdivisions, factions and splinter groups;
and can’t these in turn be crumbled into smaller and smaller aggregates, and eventually
into individuals? But What’s What ignores the individuals involved, their circumstances
and motivations. When I read that it was the second general strike by oil workers in Baku
that precipitated the Russian Revolution of 1905, I cannot know if some took industrial
action regretfully, some aggressively, some with half an eye on a day off. And if World
War Two was really about restricting flow from Ottoman oilfield concessions, who did
the actual squeezing, and how? What I need are the voices of the people, and what better
way, I figure, to access the folk than through their songs?
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I order up a clutch of Texan Sounds, a peer-to-peer journal of crude doggerel and refined
barrel-raps from the gushing state, containing reviews, in-depth analysis and lyric
transcriptions of the latest songs. Some songs have a close-to-the-ground, day-in-the-life
narrative, others are as sweeping as What’s What, but have the advantage of being written
from the inside. Fly, inspired couplets such as ‘twentieth century’ and ‘state penitentiary’
paint an evocative picture, while more obvious pairings, like ‘repressed’ and
‘suppressed’, recur with the regularity of a school bell. One drum-driving rap with a
whole rack of sexy hooks, by Riggers with Attitude featuring Ten Gallon, describes how
the control exerted by striking miners in the 19th and early 20th centuries was dissipated
by the contrivance of a dependency on oil, which had previously been used only in
kerosene lamps. The lyrics of this thumping cut go on to outline how large-scale
conversion of the British Navy to an oil-fuelled fleet, not to mention the invention of the
combustion engine on land, secured a dependence on a substance that could be extracted
and distributed more easily than coal. Coal, we learn from the high-octane gangstas, is
hacked directly from underground seams and shovelled from ‘place to place to place to
place’, whereas oil can be pumped remotely, keeping workers closer to managers, their
every decision governable and working conditions essentially safer and cleaner. There
may have been less autonomy, but there was also ‘less to beef about to ya mutha’. And
the workforce required was much smaller, since once oil starts flowing it ‘just keeps acoming, baby’. Pipelines replaced trains and the ‘gangs of bloods’ that ran them, and
although vulnerable to sabotage, they have fewer points of weakness than railway
networks with all their mechanical and human components. The final verse explains, in a
hard-spat rhyme over a dope-arse drumming track, how ‘oil flowed a fluid course, of
course’, with tankers, unconstrained by rail tracks, able to switch destination according to
demand, or to avoid flashpoints. But while this presented the problem of competition,
with the arrival of cheap reserves from elsewhere a perpetual possibility, the industry
installed anti-flow mechanisms that enabled them to bring about its scarcity when
necessary: ‘Wham, bam, I am a dam,’ as Ten Gallon puts it.
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In the May issue of Texan Sounds my interest is piqued by a feature on Fathers’ Day,
mainly because this is an invention that I have always found particularly cynical on the
part of the Filial Love Marketing Board, and in certain moods I am perversely attracted to
phenomena that annoy me. The article, ‘Who’s the Daddy?’, traces the lineage of Texan
hip-hop back to Petro-Suppression Blues Ballads and singles out the master of the genre,
a proto-petro-protest singer-songwriter Buzz Car Willy. A quick library database forage
unearths a book of Buzz’s scores and, seventy minutes later, I am leafing with misty eyes
through song sheets that recount the invention of cars that run on electricity or vegetable
oil, the latter with 25% fuel efficiency advantage over contemporaneous designs, the
chorus regaling one Bavarian design that employed a whole new combustion process,
where the injected fuel, which is slower to vaporise than oil, combusted in a central core
of hot air without making contact with the chamber walls, which themselves have a
reduced surface area, thereby minimising loss of heat, loss of heat, loss of heeeeat. Other
songs mourn the kerosene lamp’s overshadowing of sticks made from whale, bee, sheep
or insect matter run through with string and set light to for reading by, the displacement
of electric shavers by their two-stroke counterpart and the running off the road of a
motorless contraption for the conveyance of one or two persons, which sounds familiar…
***
Hours later the city has donned its evening dress of rising darkness, with wolfram and
neon details picked out in twinkle and shoulders draped in diaphanous ochre. A half
revolution of the rotating door bears me from the glaring silence of the library into the
murky stridor that many shrink from in homes and hostelries. And no wonder, for after
the reading room – where external stimuli are smothered to encourage internal animation
– I am keenly aware of the clanking, booming and wailing of the spectral population
coming on-shift to oversee the night’s illuminations. The outside world is pressing and I
feel my freshly bottled knowledge roll to the back of the draw to make room for the
deliberation required to find my way home from this esoteric part of town.
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