Oil, TVs, and Babylon

I’ve been working on revising my paper on the Bakken and Babylon and it just so happens that I’ve also read two pretty great things that contribute directly to these efforts. This was not really intentional, but not entirely coincidental either. 

First, I really enjoyed my colleague Kyle Conway’s piece in the International Journal of Cultural Studies: “Reading oil (back) into media history: The case of postwar television”. The article is short and manageable while still making an interesting point. The rise of the television in the 1950s and 1960s depended on oil (and other carbon based forms of energy) in the manufacturing of cabinets, the transporting of TVs to market, and as the center piece of electrified and increasingly synthetic living room. This is true also of vinyl records, plastic taps and CDs, and synthetic material boom of the post-war decades that fed both our thirst for oil and the growing need for infinitely customizable and profoundly disposable consumer culture. Or as the kids say: plastics.

I read this alongside Alejandro Varela’s The Town of Babylon(2022) which was short listed for a National Book Award. The town in the book, which I think is otherwise unnamed, might well refer to the Long Island town which was the backdrop to Nick Mirzoeff’s Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (2005). In fact, Mirzoeff’s and Varela’s book begin in oddly similar ways: Mirzoeff described himself at on an exercise bike at a gym witnessing a man “pumping an elliptical trainer” and Varela’s main character, Andres, walked along the sidewalk-less road to his high school reunion. Both Mirzoeff and Varela situate their characters bodily in relation to the spectacle of Babylon. In Mirzoeff’s case this allows him to observe how we witnessed the start of the first Gulf War and in Varela’s, this is his encounter with his high school classmates at a reunion. In both cases, there physical activity of the observer helped the author to reify their character’s detachment from the mis-en-scène, on the one hand, and perhaps allude to the pointlessness of their character’s actions in relation to their environment, on the other. Both books seem to suggest that Babylon is more to be seen than experienced. 

Thus the television in Conway’s article is more than simply part of a petroleum drenched assemblage of plastics, electrical current, and expectations. The television becomes a key tool in creating the kind of alienation experienced by Mirzoeff’s authorial narration and Varela’s Andres who drifts through his hometown while struggling to reconcile his past with his present circumstances. In this way, the alienation experienced after the fall of the Tower of Babel continues to define our encounter with Babylon whether that be visually, literally, or figuratively. Conway’s article reminds us that our modern Babylonian exile is mediated by carbon based energy, material, and experiences. Our markers of social status — cars, television, suburbs, (including our bodies as Bob Johnson’s Mineral Rites: An Archaeology of the Fossil Economy [Baltimore 2019] or Scott W. Schwartz’s The Archaeology of Temperature: Numerical Materials in the Capitalized Landscape [2022]) — exist in the same reality as the war in the Middle East and the flow of oil through Iraqi pipelines, fracked wells in North Dakota, and coastal refineries.

What makes this especially challenging for us is that the former works to preserve our detachment from the latter.