ABSTRACT
Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez aimed to build a socialism different from Marx’s vision; Chavez envisioned a twenty-first century Bolivarian socialism supported by oil rent, in sum, petro-socialism. To explore the relationship among the Petrostate, the state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., and public space in Venezuela, I focus primarily on recent work by PDVSA La Estancia, the social and cultural arm of the oil company, and the construction of imaginaries of Petrosocialism in the city of Caracas. Here I examine PDVSA La Estancia’s advertising campaign launched in 2013, Transformamos el petróleo en un recurso renovable para ti (We transform oil into a renewable source for you) drawing on George Yúdice’s The Expediency of Culture and Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. Yúdice argues that the notion of culture has acquired the status of “natural resource,” something that can be exploited, invested, and utilized for social, political, and economic purposes. This expediency of culture is driven by a performativity that implies the institutional state-sanctioned models that guide such performance. Barthes defined Myth as a form of signification defined by its intention more than its literal sense. For Barthes, everything can be a myth as long as “it is conveyed by a discourse"; in this sense, all media of visual representation can become vehicles for mythical speech whose function is to naturalize the dominant ideology. I argue that the adverts provide a new imaginary of urban life and culture under Petrosocialism, a complex vision of a particular lived geography that attempts to integrate high culture and oil aesthetics into urban space through the myth of culture-as-renewable-oil.
