Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Mar 2021)
A mayamera economy: petroleum, expenditure and consumption at the twilight of “Saudi” Venezuela
Abstract
In this article I study the cultural logic of expenditure through a reading of the documentary Mayami nuestro (1981) by Carlos Oteyza. I argue that the film –countering the standard criticism of the consumerist boom of the seventies and eighties during the Venezuelan oil bonanza –articulates the social productivity of squandering as a form of participation in the country’s natural wealth (petroleum) metabolized into money. Following Fernando Coronil, I understand the nexus between oil, politics, and democracy in Venezuela as an effect of a national agreement according to which national belonging (and the very idea of democracy) depended on the collective ownership of the subsoil. Georges Bataille’s notion of expenditure allows me to illuminate the ways in which the Venezuelan middle class challenged the boundaries imposed by social ranks and the geopolitical subordination of the “third world”. Lastly, I understand oil-money as a force in the production of a global space that is always unstable and subject to the risks and fluctuations of the capitalist ecology. In the last section I unveil how Mayami nuestro alerts about the dangers of unsustainable dreams and the illusions of oil.
