ABSTRACT
The emergence of modern statecraft in Venezuela is inextricable from the arrival of the oil industry; Venezuela is a country where oil has a historical clout as the carrier of modernity and political power. Oil, understood primarily as wealth that flows like manna from heaven to the state’s coffers, made the Venezuelan state more powerful as it exercised its monopoly over the oil rent. Territory, Bureaucratic Power and culture are intrinsically interwoven by oil in a Petrostate, there is a spatial dimension to this entanglement that is the focus of this chapter, which establishes the three interconnected theoretical premises that underpin the book: State Space, Bureaucratic Power and Culture as a Resource. The chapter is divided into four parts. The first part provides a discussion on Lefebvre’s triad of space and David Harvey’s matrix of spatiotemporality followed by a review of Neil Brenner and Steve Elden’s reading of Lefebvre as a theorist of State Space as territory. It then develops a review of the literature on state theory, focusing primarily on Bureaucratic Power and rentier state theory to define the particular characteristics of the Petrostate. Part three subsequently builds on the discussion on State Space and oil rentier states to examine the intersections between the literatures on city, culture and oil. Finally, part four reviews the literature on culture as well recent texts from the emerging field of Energy Humanities that address the cultural dimension of oil, which provide the theoretical foundations to characterise the notion of Culture as Renewable Oil construed within Petro-Socialism.
