| Reading Guide for Week 10 | |
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Tuesday This week we will start with three investigative essays about the contemporary political economy. Let’s see what catches your eye, and what surprises you. Thursday Last week we dealt with a “transportation sublime,” whereas this week we shall deal with a “technological sublime”: the first oil boom in the United States and, for that matter, in the world. The best feature of Brian Black’s article is the remarkable photographs taken in the 1860s by John Mather. Black argues that these photographs celebrated a “technological sublime” — the in-progress, not-yet-complete subjugation of the landscape to commodification by a new oil industry in western Pennsylvania. According to Black, the fact that the photographs’ imagery was often enough rather gruesome a depiction of that being-transformed landscape did not undermine the photographs’ central message equating resource extraction, reductively, with progress and profit. Sustainability was not remotely an ethical value in this time and place. Nor was it an historical dimension of the oil industry in western Pennsylvania. The oil industry there proved transient, quickly exhausting the supply of oil, and leaving behind a wrecked landscape and a wrecked boomtown. What can be called “ruins.” |