A doubtful hope: resource affect in a future oil economy

Abstract

In global debates about natural resource extraction, affect has played an increasingly prominent, if somewhat nameless, role. This paper proposes a theorization of resource affect both as an intrinsic element of capitalist dynamics and as an object problematized by corporate, government, and third-sector practice. Drawing on ethnographic research in São Tomé and Príncipe (STP), I explore the affective horizons generated by the prospect of hydrocarbon exploration: a doubtful hope comprised of visions of material betterment, personal and collective transformation, as well as anticipations of failure, friction, and discontent. I also examine the multitude of oil-related campaigns, activities, and programmes initiated by non-governmental organizations and global governance institutions in STP, animated by the specific conundrums presented by oil's futurity. In light of this, I argue that what we see emerging is a new resource politics that revolves around not simply the democratic and technical aspects of resource exploitation but increasingly their associated affective dissonances and inconsistencies.How do people sense prospective oil? What do they expect from it? And how does this relate to the indeterminacies that characterize contemporary petroleum production? These questions link conceptions of futurity -that is, imaginations of how we might be and associated ethical orientations towards likely and unlikely things to come -with petroleum source rocks, exploration technologies, and calculations of commercial viability, and with concepts of wealth, labour, and redistribution in extractive economies. Importantly, these questions cast oil not as an abstract commodity form but as entangled in the affective fabric of contemporary economic life. 1 This paper examines how lithospheric dreams 2 of wealth, progress, and modernity emerge alongside anxieties and doubts about uncertain outcomes. In doing so, it also reveals a mounting preoccupation borne out by the accounts and practices of public, corporate, and third-sector agencies with the potential for an excess of affect, specifically, in the context of hydrocarbon exploration.Attention to the affective resonances of natural resources, I argue, has to be part of an effort to comprehend resource environments as simultaneously social, aesthetic, and deeply politicized as well as materially and biophysically grounded (cf. Richardson &

Mining Leftovers: Making Futures on the Margins of Capitalism

“…Mines, even after closure, remain an important link between past, present, and future for local communities (Halvaksz 2008; Beckett and Keeling 2019). Likewise, research on contemporary capitalist enterprises (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009; Blanco, Arce, and Fisher 2015; Weszkalnys 2016) has highlighted the importance of affect in the production of resources, commodities, and labor. Thinking about affect also helps overcome notions of the economy as guided solely by rational means.…”

“…I want to point to other alternatives. As explained by Sebastián Ureta (2016), mining waste points to the importance of a caring relationship between humans and nonhumans in extractive activities. Ethnographic studies on small-scale mining processes and temporalities show similar results.…”

A social take on unconventional resources: Materiality, alienation and the making of shale gas in Poland and the United Kingdom

“…The forms of affect intrinsic to resistance and protest have become an object of political, scientific, and PR action on the part of different actors (see also Weszkalnys, 2016). The UK government, for example, announced plans to pay up to £10,000 to households near fracking pads.…”

Orphaned wells, oil assets, and debt: the competing ethics of value creation and care within petrocapitalist projects of return

“…: 11). Using a broader scan of the moral horizon of a resource scape, Weszkalnys (: 127) theorizes a ‘resource affect’, or the mix of anticipation, transformation, hope, and friction that variously shape the ‘affective horizons generated by hydrocarbon exploration’, which also includes the state and citizens and not strictly the capital investors. These affective stances are also anticipatory and restless, characterized by seeking to produce particular imagined futures that may result from potential investment (Muniesa ; Weszkalnys ; Zaloom ).…”