This week I’m in San Antonio, Texas at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). One of the events I’m participating in is a book panel for my friend and colleague Terra Rowe’s new book Of Modern Extraction. This week, I wanted to share my thoughts about her book with you, here. If you’re at the AAR, please join us for the panel (details here)! There will also be a panel on my book, Sister Death (details here). Finally, for those of you in the Chicago area, please join me on December 5th for a Sister Death book event with my friend and colleague Adam Kotsko, at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore.
Ever since writing a book about death, I have been writing and thinking about the underworld. The land of the dead, as it’s sometimes been known. Modern western relationships to underworld spaces differ significantly from ancient and medieval views. Think about the way that hell, and the devil, were reinvented in literature and pop culture as figures of curiosity and sympathy, for instance. Skepticism about old mythological narratives of the underworld have changed many things. But it’s also the case that so much of this modern relational shift—this shift in how we see or think about the underworld—is indebted to extraction. To what has been ripped from from the underworld, and exploited.
Humans seem to have always been engaging with the underworld in some manner or method, whether it be to communicate with the dead, or to source some form of material and spiritual treasure. Practices like mining are nothing new. But look at the way we shroud ourselves in plastics. We are covered in, we even now consume in the water we drink, these spoils of the underworld. This is a cosmological upheaval that our fellow humans, living only a thousand years ago, would have probably found not only unthinkable but probably sickening. We have brought their hell to earth, in a sense, and covered ourselves with it. Terra’s book has helped me better see and understand the nature and the logic of the extraction that made this possible.
What is Extraction?
Extraction, as Terra defines it, is not simply the act of removing minerals from a subterranean environment. Extraction doesn’t name Neolithic quarrying or indigenous mining practices, for instance. Rather, extraction names a set of forces and practices that are modern, perhaps even paradigmatically modern. It is a doubled act of removal: a forced displacement of both humans and minerals. Modern energy, Terra notes, rarely enters the global market “without extractive practices that recapitulate histories of slavery, colonization, and domination.” Modern energy is shaped by these extractive practices, which take a human and more than human toll.
We can even see an extractive logic at work, Terra shows us, in the way that modern energy itself is conceived. Modern energy is understood to be, like minerals themselves, a substance that must be brought to the surface. It lays in wait. “Every living being, every form of material life contains energy that, given the right methods, can be removed and put to human use,” says Terra. Extraction is not simply a literal, physical act. It’s also a mentality, a way of thinking and being. It’s a way of pushing beyond the surface of things, and feeling entitled to what one finds below. It’s an act of taking edges, crusts, skins, films, and material surfaces for granted and believing that one deserves a better treasure that waits in seductive secrecy somewhere below. It’s appropriative. It’s the basic impulse of capitalism. It’s what makes capitalism possible. It’s what shapes the good capitalist subject.
Terra builds on the work of Kathryn Yusoff, particularly her 2019 book A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Yusoff has studied the emergence of geology as an extractive science and her work teaches us to be deeply attentive to exactly what was shaping the emerging science and technology of extraction. What has never been obvious enough for Yusoff, in the scientific figure of the Anthropocene, is the way that geology itself wrote race into deep time, as it were fixed into the very minerals and sediments of our being—as natural as a layer in the rock.
For instance, in a commentary on the work of Charles Lyell—one of the “founding fathers” of geology, and of the concept of deep time itself—Yusoff examines the language that he uses to discuss (in his work on geology) the “problem of the races.” Lyell uses geological terms to discuss the emergence of races in time, as if he were simply “defining the stratification of rock formations and species in time,” says Yusoff. For Yusoff, biology was not the only science that constructed race. It was constructed (albeit differently) in geology as well.
The Anthropocene may be presented as some deracinated figure of generic human activity. But when we look back at the emergence of geology we can see that geologic time itself was always and already racialized. How could the Anthropocene not be, as well? Stories about the raw earth—the one that pre-existed us in deep time, by billions of years—still bear the traces of a very particular human story. This is the story of Man and his emergence: white, and male, and seeking out a particular sort of truth or treasure. In geology, we can see the fossils of his emerging subjectivity. Geology was a science carved out, initially, with Man’s words and views. We have to be able to read even geology more critically.
Terra finds Yusoff’s work helpful, but also rightly notes that Yusoff’s understanding of (and critique of) power has its own limits. It doesn’t touch on the power discourses in theology that helped give shape to Man’s own subjectivity, for instance. Yusoff doesn’t touch on the theopolitics of the Doctrine of Discovery, which justified not only colonization and transatlantic slavery, but also mineral extraction. Terra helps us track a genealogy of Man’s extractive subjectivity deeper in time. She finds its origins in the development of modern theology.
Power and Petrotheology
One of the stories in the field (of theology) with great shaping power is that in the Middle Ages, theology made a transition from thinking about God’s power as paradigmatically that of logos to that of voluntas. Early Christian theologies of creation drew from classical philosophy, and held that divine creation was a form of logos—a rational ordering of the world. This made the world feel intelligible, to a rational human mind. But this narrative was displaced in the Middle Ages, when creation increasingly came to be understood as God’s act of voluntas, or will. Creation went from being something intelligible to being an unintelligible, mysterious divine power surge.
One of the things that this standard narrative shift tends to obscure, says Terra, is a shift in how divine power itself is said to work. More than just a principle of the rationality of creation, Terra sees early Christian creation theologies articulating certain limits on God’s power, as well. In the work of Gregory of Nyssa (335-95 CE) for instance, Terra finds him describing God’s power as “perfect” only insofar as it is “bound or conditioned by” the other divine attributes of divine justice, mercy, and wisdom. There are, in other words, limits on God’s power that God sets within godself. A power that exceeds the justice, mercy, or wisdom of the divine is no longer divine.
The shift to thinking of God’s power as pure will loses these internal limits. Terra notes that there were social and political reasons for this theological shift in the mainstream (climate changes, plagues, crusades). People had begun to think about God differently. They needed something else (not intelligibility) from God’s power. Along with this theoretical shift came a total refusal of any limits or limitation on God’s power. The sheer force of will emerges to the surface and transcends all limits in the world of matter and mere things. Creation becomes “subject to divine whim and will” and “unconstrained by reason or the laws of nature.” God holds the power of exception to all rules and laws. Even the ones that used to be internal constraints.
This new view of God was not merely a response to social and political changes. It helped to usher in its own social and political changes. The emerging modern figure of Man—fashioning himself in the image of the God he once felt constrained by—takes on this sovereign power of will. The power of this will was revealed to Man, as the story goes, and once he sees this power he takes it unto himself.
This was, quite naturally, also a major cosmological shift as it changed the way that the relationship between God and the natural world was understood. Notably, for Terra’s account of extraction, it precipitated a change in the moral terms of mining. She notes that in the work of mineralogist Georgius Agricola (1494-1555), especially his De Re Metallica, ancient and medieval moral restrictions on mining (which had often historically been constrained, by moral objection) were thrown into question. Crucially, Agricola contests the moral claim that mining is an “immoral disruption of the divine ordering (the logos) of the world.” Instead, Agricola argues, the morality of mining all hinges on will. Namely, it hinges on the will of Man, and how Man decides it’s best to use the materials. This argument had an immediate impact on the colonial mines that began to expand in the wake of his publication. Extraction itself was authorized by the extractive will of Man. He set his wells deep within the underworld, and began to live in the spoils of what he dredged up.
Sacred Oil
Oddly enough, however, Terra also illuminates the fact that modern Man also began to look to oil itself for redemption. Oil itself comes from the belly of the earth. It is imbued with a power that not even Man could ignore. In early oil exploration and extraction, “a spiritually infused sense of wonder and expectancy” shaped how people perceived of what was buried below the surface of the earth. Oil lubricated what were seen, in other areas of culture, to be rigid lines between science and spirituality. Oil felt redemptive.
Terra critiques this misguided quest for redemption, in oil itself. It only feeds on extractive impulses. But she also cautions us against the total demythologization of oil. She recognizes that oil has been held as sacred, in contexts like the Latin America Andean U’wa culture. In this context, “oil is the lifeblood of sacred Mother Earth and thereby should be reverenced and not exploited or instrumentalized.”
I want to think a little bit more about us, middle class American consumer-citizens, in 2023. What would it look like for us, in the midst of the plastic fantastic world we inhabit, to start thinking more seriously about the sacred dimensions of oil? We are, from one angle, living in a kind of hell. We are so immersed in the spoils of the underworld that we can’t even remove plastics from our drinking water. I think that one possible standpoint would be to determine that, because of the sacredness of oil, we’ve profaned it by using it as we have: so excessively. And the answer is to stop using it. To preserve its sacredness by making it rare. To get it out of our production lines, our homes, and our water lines. We have to stop becoming victims of this capitalist system of production that is essentially pumping plastics into our bloodlines.
Yet I can’t help but also remember how deeply dependent we are on these plastics for dimensions of our enchantment. The enchantments that we have come to depend upon, to get us through the night. I think about my daughter’s obsessive love for stuffed animals, for instance. Because she loves them, the people who love her shower her with them. When she looks at them, she sees the friendly faces animal beings who look back at her with a fixed gaze. When I look at them, I see synthetics, plastic pellets, and polyester fiberfill. I see plastics. I can recall one particular conversation, when my daughter begged me for another addition to her menagerie and I had a meltdown. I picked at the fur of the poor beast right there, in the store, and sketched out a horrific future where the real animals of the earth would not be able to survive the onslaught of discarded synthetic animals who have been dumped, and have thus invaded the shrinking lifeworlds of real living beings.
She cried, of course. But it has not stopped her from thinking of her mess of stuffed animals as the precious, fluffy, more than human cloud of half-animated beings who authorize her sense of belonging to a world that’s bigger and kinder than us, that’s bigger and kinder than her mad mother melting down in the aisle of a Target. She depends on them for a certain kind of magic. And it’s not entirely unlike the way that I desperately depend upon these plastics, these spoils of the underworld, to bring a little color and texture to my body and face—like an armor against the drudgery of working life in America today. I shroud myself with them, like a prayer for something beautiful.
I think about these animations and enchantments, the way the underworld’s crude oil has been transformed into something that lights up the horizons in our strange American days, and I’m a little disgusted, of course. But I can’t help but also see that these plastics that line our life have funneled and channeled and lubricated so many dimensions of our humanity. It makes me feel a little more gratitude for the dusty fur of these little beasts that litter the floor of my daughter’s bedroom.
Does it fetishize this powerful food from the belly of the earth, to imagine that it ripples through the textures of our everyday lives with something that feels magical, even sacred? Does it make an idol of this powerful underworld fuel that everything in our economy revolves around? Or does it simply recognize, and acknowledge, the power that belongs to it? Can we tap into these ripples or textures, where oil has enchanted us in our everyday lives, to convince people to pay attention to it in a new way? Or does this leave us too vulnerable to expect redemption from it, yet again?