Wondrous Extermination
Methane Prequel (-1.5)
The manufactured gas of the cities and oil from Petrolia, Pennsylvania, consigned one specific commodity to obsolescence: whale oil, which had become popular among the set of Americans who might, say, make their fortunes by selling slave-grown cotton to textile mills in England in the decades preceding the Civil War. It was said to cast a most pleasing flame. It was also used as an industrial and narrative lubricant.1 The commodity sale of whale oil created a market that oil and gas poured into and exploded.
Jamie Jones’ book Rendered Obsolete argues that Moby Dick created the metaphorical, linguistic, and ideological shape that oil and gas filled: the concept of energy. The novel was published at the peak of American whaling culture, which means it was written during the heady ascent, and yet in the novel the business of whaling is already a receding object-aesthetic of nostalgia, the type of nostalgia that would mark a decline that was to begin in the 1860s, when the whales moved inland, along with whaling workers, who were a major constituency in the man-camps along the Oil river. Reporters at Petrolia in the 1860s wrote that “the oil wells ‘spouted…sounding like the “blowing” of a whale.’” “Oil was oil, and whalemen were oilmen.”
Ishmael anticipated fossil fuels’ power and function in the business of whaling:
I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life, point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last sixty years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling. One way and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in themselves, and so continuously momentous in their sequential issues, that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore offspring themselves pregnant from her womb.
This image of “pure fertility, focused on the violent whaling industry, is ironic and even grotesque. The booming American whaling industry, its excessive power as an agent of vast historical change on a global scale: Is its fecundity itself unnatural, perhaps even cancerous? Consider the consequences of the Egyptian mother’s pregnant newborns.” (Jones 56)
The key component of the modern concept of energy is, according to Jones, the myth of “wealth without work.” In describing the mansions of New Bedford, Ishmael says “Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.” Wealth without work continues to be a foundation of the energy industry today. It is a lie, of course, as Ishmael spends most of the novel showing that each cask of oil is earned at an intense animal cost (human and non-) and the drama and violence of extractive labor is the heart of the book.
When Ishmael arrives in Nantucket, he sees whale oil in commodity form before he even sees the ships:
“Huge hills and mountains of casks on casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored at last, while from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended only begins a second; and a second ended only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthy effort.”
The hills and mountains of casks on casks echo not only barrels of oil, but also the hills and mountains of bison carcasses that were being piled up out West as part of the genocide.2
The proto-industrial aural backdrop supports Jones’ contention that this passage is about the capitalist ideal of perpetual growth, which Melville pairs with a constant anxiety about extinction, conceived of as a type of resource depletion. Jones writes, “Ishmael reveals the fatal fallacies of extractive capitalism by testing the landsman’s view of whaling against the direct experience of the industry he acquires as a laborer on the Pequod: endlessness is the mandate of capitalism, but intolerableness is its reality.” This test lies in many places, including the graphic violence of the whale hunt, a violence that is hidden out of sight from the landsman’s view.
What is it that is intolerable? Is it the violence, or is it “the specter of exhaustion and extinction that haunts the industry” (Jones)? This specter is raised in the name of the ship, as Ishmael says “Pequod, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians, now extinct as the ancient Medes.” Here Ishmael commits the verbal violence that scholar Jean O’Brien calls “lasting,” which writes American Indians out of existence by declaring them extinct when they are still alive: the Mashantucket Pequot tribe is not extinct but is a federally recognized tribal nation in Connecticut. But for Ishmael, they are as utterly extinct as an ancient Persian dynasty that left no written records. But he also said that the whale was a fish (it is not).
Will the same fate be shared by whales? This is the concern of “Chapter 105: Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? — Will He Perish?” Wherein Ishmael reminds us “Though so short a period ago — not a good lifetime — the census of the buffalo in Illinois exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan.” No; Ishmael knows that the buffalo were killed as part of a mass genocide, not for their value in commodities markets, and he believes that the labor expenditure required to harvest whales for these markets will save them. As if labor has ever been fairly valued. He concludes: “we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality.” Only familiar with somatic, 19th century methods of whaling, this error is forgivable: the whale didn’t become threatened with extinction until the mechanized harvesting began in the 20th century.
He then commits the same logical error that has since been popularized by the climate deniers: something has never happened before, and therefore it can never happen in the future, no matter the changed conditions. “He [the whale] once swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In Noah’s flood he despised Noah’s ark.”
But nonetheless wonderous extermination is upon the whaling business, at least as a living cultural and economic influence, not from resource depletion but from technological obsolescence.
For Jones, Moby Dick “offers a vision of the future, not by dreaming up new forms to come, but by imagining the structures of the present in ruins. Moby Dick narrates energy history in the future past tense, in futur antérieur: whaling will have declined.” Going out in the middle of the ocean and stabbing whales is best done in moderation, and America proved to be intolerant of moderation after the lights turned on. The slaughter escalated to a new level entirely in the twentieth century, but with none of the cultural power of Nantucket and New Bedford.
This is why we get so much nostalgia from Ishmael. He insists on shipping out of Nantucket when the bulk of the business had already moved to New Bedford, because he is looking not to work in a modernized commodity environment but rather for something a little more romantic. He chooses the most gnarled, small, haunted-looking ship.
Ahab’s unproductive obsession with vengeance upon a single white whale could only have been supported by a profitable extractive economy, but not one that had been fully ingested into capitalism. Before Ahab can be seen, we must meet the Pequod’s primary investors. The owners are not representatives of New York banks, but rather old Peleg and Bilal, “well-to-do, retired whalemen,” who came up in the trade and are romanticized at least as much as Ahab, if in different ways. Melville’s capitalism didn’t have room for outside investors; it gives us a romantic vision of a craftsman’s capitalism, of small-scale industry supported by the production of a luxury item. If this corner of the American economy did once exist, it proved to be brittle, and Melville knew it, or predicted it.
After the first whale is killed and taken aboard the Pequod, the ship transforms into a factory to render the oil. Turning it from an animal into a liquid fuel. It is during these scenes that we get the lovely homoeroticism of the men’s hands finding each other in the vats of spermaceti as they massage the fat into a liquid that can be poured into the kettles. This is how Melville makes the Pequod generalizable into America the Nation, as it becomes a butchery, a refinery, and other bits of infrastructure that Jones points out to us, including gas pipes and plumbing. Jones: “At the moment of the birth of the concept of energy, Moby Dick’s infrastructural metaphors model the way that an energy resource, the whale’s body, is put to use in terrestrial infrastructures: first in imagination and then, fatally, in practice.”
What Moby Dick does well is to show the violence at the heart of all extractive industry. The single-minded madness that drove Ahab was echoed by many oilmen as they drove their crews to drill deeper and deeper into dry holes, at the cost of worker’s lives. They used to hire “bean boys” who would literally be paid in beans, so the wildcatter’s lottery ticket could be punched. For whalers, casual violence toward workers and animals alike was a daily part of the job. Ahab was driven by a romantic or perhaps medieval idea of vengeance, rather than the quotidian profit motive that operates out here in the real world. Nonetheless, Melville reveals and reinforces the horror of the whaling industry upon both sailors (workers) and whales. Jones: “Commercial whaling as portrayed in Moby Dick is death-driven settler ideology that makes whale bodies into commodities and infrastructures that fuel capitalist expansion and settler colonialism.” But Melville cannot see anything outside of that, cannot imagine non-suicidal livelihoods. Ahab could always only die in the past, even a future past.
This post was submitted to Amazon as a 5-star review for Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of Us Whaling by Jamie Jones. Pick up a copy.
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1 Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials by Reza Negarestani:
First Hyperstitional Entity of Oil: “Oil as lubricant or Tellurian lube, upon which everything moves forward, spreading smoothly and inevitably. Events are configured by the superconductivitiy of oil and global petrodynamic currents to such an extent that the progression and emergence of events may be influenced more than by time. If narrative development, the unfolding of events in a narration, implies the progression of chronological time, for contemporary planetary formations, history and its progression is determined by the influz and outflow of petroleum.” …
“According to a blobjective point of view, petropolitical undercurrents function as narrative lubes: they interconnect inconsistencies, anomalies, or what we might simply call the ‘plot holes’ in narratives of planetary formations and activities.”
photo taken taken outside of Michigan Carbon Works in Rougeville, Mich., in 1892
Jones: “Melville renders the violence of whale slaughter in unflinching detail, but he does indeed flinch when it comes to representing violence against Indigenous people, whose existence is only implied.” Historian Nancy Shoemaker, shows that “in fact, most young men from Indigenous communities in Southern New England worked on commercial whaling ships in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.” But only in non-leadership positions, though their skill and knowledge comprised the core competency of every ship. Indigenous Americans are represented aboard the Pequod only by Tashtego, who is thrust to the frontlines of the extractive violence and is otherwise only mentioned as one of a trio of harpooners with Daggoo and Queequeg. When he is described, it is as non-human: “The parted mouth of Tashtego revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely gleamed as if they too had been tipped by corposants…”
