Introduction

It’s July 2014. On a weekly routine trip to the nearest PDV petrol station in Caracas, while waiting for the tank to fill (Venezuela has the cheapest fuel in the world) I looked up to the fuel dispenser and its empty shelves. Instead of the usual adverts for PDV lubricants or motor oil, it featured the nineteenth century white filigree gazebo of El Calvario park in Caracas; looming over it appeared a Gulliver-scale version of an oil worker wearing red coloured gear. I got out of my car to take a photograph and noticed that the dispenser on the opposite lane also had a similar advert with another giant oil worker grazing the multicolour ceramic mural that covers Libertador Avenue in Caracas. The presence of the giant oil workers in the images signalled that something different was at play in the manner in which the state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela Sociedad Anónima (PDVSA) has been extending its dominion over the city and its cultural symbols. Within contemporary scholarly work on the politics of culture of Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution (Kozak Rovero, 2014, 2015; Silva-Ferrer, 2014), little attention has been paid to PDVSA’s recent interventions in the city, which I regard as a clear sign of the increasing power Hugo Chávez had granted to the state-owned oil company. Amid the myriad of recent publications on the cultural representations of oil capitalism in pop culture, literature and the visual arts (Barrett and Worden, 2014; LeMenager, 2014; Lord, 2014), far less attention has been paid to the spatial dimension of the material cultural effects of oil, both as a mineral and as a flow of energy, political power and wealth. Furthermore, recent cultural studies of oil have been predominantly focused on European and North Amer ican oil producing countries, with little focus on the Global South or OPEC countries more specifically. This book sets out to challenge the disciplinary compartmentalisation of the analysis of the material and cultural effects of oil. Tim Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy (2011) marks the point of departure of this book’s approach to look beyond the attention confined to the allocation of oil money to examine the processes through which oil flows are converted into political and cultural power (Mitchell, 2011, pp. 5-6). The particular case of the Venezuelan Petrostate in the era of Petro-Socialism serves to develop a reconsideration of the premises behind the cultural analyses of oil. Historically, the formation of modern statecraft and society in Venezuela is inextricable from the oil industry;

the influence of oil cannot be confined to a set of tropes or circumscribed to punctual interventions in the public sphere. Hugo Chávez shifted the relationship between PDVSA and the state by making the state-owned oil company subservient to his centralist political project of Petro-Socialism, further coalescing oil, territory, state and culture. This book examines the discursive and spatial dimensions of the entanglement between oil, territory, Bureaucratic Power and culture in the contemporary Venezuelan Petrostate. To develop these themes, this introductory chapter is divided into three parts. The first part sketches the historical context of this study, situating it within debates around the pervasive presence of oil in the formation of modern statecraft in Venezuela and the shift in the relationship between oil, modernity and statecraft brought by Hugo Chávez’s PetroSocialism. The second part presents the theoretical premises that inform this book and identifies the key themes that will be developed throughout, how in a Petrostate, oil traverses territory, Bureaucratic Power and culture. Finally, the third part presents the chapter outlines, providing an introduction to the discussions and main arguments developed in this book.