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• Impasse, Time, InfrastructurePolitics of Reinhabitation in Karen Tei Yamashita's Petroapocalyptic Fictions
• Wenjia Chen (bio)

We urge Congress to approve the United-States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement. Having Canada as a trading partner and a party to this agreement is critical for North American energy security and US consumers. Retaining a trade agreement for North America will help ensure the US energy revolution continues into the future.

Mike Sommers, October 2018

Readers familiar with Karen Tei Yamashita's oeuvre would be unlikely to connect them with the word "impasse." From the globalized stew of cultural diaspora and labor migration in Circle K Cycles to the mind-boggling history of multiethnic coalition in I-Hotel, Yamashita's works are always preoccupied with movements and flows, with characters "whose footsteps set global changes in motion."¹ However, it is exactly the idea of impasse that I bring to bear on two of Yamashita's novels: Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990) and Tropic of Orange (1997). "Impasse" here is not a generic term but specifically describes the self-perpetuating dominance of the oil regime, evident in the resurgence of "Drill, baby, drill" during the Trump era. In the epigraph to this article, for instance, a statement that the CEO of the American Petroleum Institute made before the passage of the new NAFTA deal in 2018 that greenlighted the expansion of oil and gas industry on a much wider scale than its predecessor, the emphasis he puts on the terms "energy revolution" and "the future" is ironic when read against Tropic, in which NAFTA [End Page 105] is a primary culprit that renders the future of petrocapitalism a matter of apocalyptic endurance and uncertainty.

By attending to the way Arc and Tropic use complicated hydrocarbon forms to imagine the apocalypse, I situate these novels within the expanding discourse of petrocultures. Written more than two decades ago, they not only anticipate recent studies exploring oil's impasse but also advance a temporal politics of reinhabiting petroinfrastructure as a strategy of intervention. Seeking to reestablish eco-apocalypse as a genre capable of accommodating slow and mundane changes, I ultimately situate the imperative of living/leaving oil's impasse in the long-term project of living/leaving its infrastructure—a project that relies on the contingent, nonradical, daily participation of the grass roots instead of on traditional confrontational strategies that court destruction and seek quick solutions.

The Impasse of Oil and Its Temporal Politics

Let me first lay out a theoretical framework by explaining the interrelation of the key words in the title—"impasse," "time," "infrastructure," "reinhabitation." Impasse, an emerging concept in petroculture studies, often evokes the cul-de-sac the oil regime faces as it constantly reproduces its technopolitical logic of predominance and its attendant hold on our values and visions in a way that obstructs alternative possibilities. While this understanding accentuates the structural, ideological, and technological obstacles to energy transition, I suggest, first of all, that the obstinacy of oil's infrastructure both produces and evinces this impasse—that is, infrastructure as a social material terrain on which power and value is reproduced and contested. The long duration of oil's logistical network, manifested in highways and pipelines, further sustains the inertia of oil dependency. This leads to my second claim, which is that the tenacity of the status quo produces a decelerated, stretched, and prolonged temporality that requires politics and narrative forms to adjust their temporal horizon accordingly toward the longue durée. Therefore I turn to Yamashita, who materializes these forms across her creative trajectory through the idea of reinhabiting petroinfrastructure.

The idea of our technopolitical stuckness with oil dates back to Gregory C. Unruh's term "carbon lock-in" and is reiterated in phrases such as "the inertia of energy" and "impasse."² "Impasse" gained particular traction with the publication of After Oil, a widely circulated pamphlet in petroculture criticism that brings to the fore the impasse posed by oil. It maintains that, on top of the financial and technological limits to switching to alternatives, the structures of power, privilege, value, and desire undergirding the hydrocarbon economy are constantly being reproduced and stabilized—thus, an "impasse."³ [End Page 106...

中文翻译：

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僵局、时间、基础设施：Karen Tei Yamashita 的石油世界末日小说中的重新居住政治

代替摘要，这里是内容的简短摘录：

• Karen Tei Yamashita 的石油世界末日小说中的僵局、时间、基础设施政治
• 陈文佳 (bio)

我们敦促国会批准美国-墨西哥-加拿大协议。让加拿大作为贸易伙伴和该协议的缔约方对北美能源安全和美国消费者至关重要。保留北美贸易协定将有助于确保美国能源革命持续到未来。

迈克·萨默斯，2018 年 10 月

熟悉Karen Tei Yamashita 作品的读者不太可能将它们与“僵局”这个词联系起来。从Circle K Cycles中文化散居和劳动力迁移的全球化炖菜，到I-Hotel中令人难以置信的多民族联盟历史，山下的作品总是专注于运动和流动，人物“他们的脚步引发了全球变化”。¹然而，正是我在山下的两部小说中提出了僵局的想法：穿越热带雨林（1990 年）和奥兰治热带(1997)。这里的“僵局”不是一个通用术语，而是专门描述了石油政权自我延续的主导地位，这在特朗普时代“钻，宝贝，钻”的复苏中显而易见。例如，在这篇文章的题词中，美国石油协会的首席执行官在 2018 年新的北美自由贸易协定通过之前发表的声明为石油和天然气行业在比其前任更广泛的范围内扩张开绿灯。他对“能源革命”和“未来”这两个词的强调在阅读热带地区时具有讽刺意味，其中北美自由贸易协定[End Page 105]是使石油资本主义的未来成为世界末日持久性和不确定性的主要罪魁祸首。

通过关注弧线和热带的方式使用复杂的碳氢化合物形式来想象世界末日，我将这些小说置于不断扩大的石油文化话语中。写于 20 多年前，他们不仅预测了近期探索石油僵局的研究，还推进了将石油基础设施重新安置为干预策略的时间政治。为了将生态启示录重新确立为一种能够适应缓慢而平凡的变化的类型，我最终将生存/离开石油僵局的必要性置于生存/离开其基础设施的长期项目中——一个依赖于偶然的、非激进的项目，草根的日常参与，而不是传统的对抗策略，即寻求破坏和寻求快速解决方案。

石油的僵局及其时间政治

让我首先通过解释标题中的关键词——“僵局”、“时间”、“基础设施”、“重新居住”的相互关系来构建一个理论框架。僵局是石油文化研究中的一个新兴概念，它经常让人联想到石油政权所面临的死胡同，因为它不断复制其主导的技术政治逻辑以及随之而来的以阻碍替代可能性的方式对我们的价值观和愿景的持有。虽然这种理解强调了能源转型的结构、意识形态和技术障碍，但我首先建议，石油基础设施的固执既产生并证明了这一僵局——也就是说，基础设施作为一种社会物质领域，权力和价值在被复制和竞争。石油物流网络持续时间长，表现在高速公路和管道上，进一步维持了石油依赖的惯性。这导致了我的第二个主张，即现状的坚韧产生了一种减速、拉伸和延长的时间性，这需要政治和叙事形式相应地调整它们的时间视野，朝着长时间的。因此，我求助于山下，她通过重新安置石油基础设施的想法在她的创作轨迹中将这些形式具体化。

我们与石油的技术政治卡顿的想法可以追溯到 Gregory C. Unruh 的术语“碳锁定”，并在“能源惯性”和“僵局”等短语中得到重申。^{2 “僵局”在《}石油之后》的出版中获得了特别的关注，这是一本广为流传的关于石油养殖批评的小册子，突出了石油造成的僵局。它坚持认为，除了转向替代品的财务和技术限制之外，支撑碳氢化合物经济的权力、特权、价值和欲望结构不断被复制和稳定——因此，这是一个“僵局”。³ [结束第 106 页...