Description
An emergent communication strategy of the oil industry is to claim that continued oil and gas production is essential to finance the energy transition. This stance paradoxically frames the cause of the climate crisis – fossil fuel – as its solution, implicitly suggesting that climate change will fix climate change. Whereas existing scholarship has interrogated the reality of this claim, this article asks what order of reality it produces. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of heterotopia and Deleuze’s concept of dividualization, I argue that the idea that exacerbating climate change now will eventually fix it in the future operates as a heterotopia of dividualization. This heterotopia is a representational space where the oil industry becomes ‘other to itself’ by dividualizing its identity – polluter and climate-conscious actor – thus mirroring the subject’s competing dividualities in affluent, carbon-intensive societies. This heterotopic dividualization functions as a governmentality that justifies ongoing extraction and sanitizes fossil fuel consumption.
