Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork with engineers in the experimental oil fields of West Texas, this paper reflects on the customary association, drawn in both capitalist practice and much critical theory, of nature with limits and technology with limitlessness.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork with engineers in the experimental oil fields of West Texas, this paper reflects on the customary association, drawn in both capitalist practice and much critical theory, of nature with limits and technology with limitlessness. In the world of non-conventional fossil fuels, and in the world of fracking in particular, oil is increasingly addressed as an indefinite technological problem rather than a finite natural resource. I observe how this relocates the locus of political-economic speculation from ineliminably uncertain knowledge of nature to a more diffuse ambiguity surrounding the plausible future creative powers of the modern business corporation. This requires, I propose, a rethinking of the geopolitics of the multinational corporation in terms of an indefinite (and indefinitely catastrophic) experimentality; and a reinterpretation of the process Hannah Arendt called the "political emancipation of the bourgeoisie."