Fracking and Historicizing

This article draws on ethnographic research in the oil fields of West Texas to reflect on the imperial-modern compulsion to historicize—to explicate more and more of the world in terms of contingent, indeterminate historical process. A century ago, petroleum drilling turned West Texas into a vast extractive zone and simultaneously historicized the desert plain as a former reef. Today, I show, fracking moves to shape and accelerate the region’s geological processes on the logic that the Earth, now burdened with historicity, is somehow too slow. This confluence of events highlights a common moral-political undertow shared across the “deep” historiography of the Earth and the “shallow” historiography of the human. Conceptually and concretely, both historiographic operations reorder their objects as open-ended processes that modern powers may adjust and modulate. From West Texas, the question arises: Does modernity wreck the planet by historicizing it?