Upstate Modern MAKING METROPOLITAN AMERICA ALONG THE ERIE CANAL
Upstate Modern is a series of courses and public programs at Syracuse University examining the urban history of Upstate New York through transdisciplinary research that draws on archives, buildings, landscapes, and communities.
Oil Conditioning and “Westoxification”
by Hamza Hasan.
An informational booklet introducing the role of Carrier in the development of Saudi Arabia in the various markets of air-conditioning and refrigeration
Carrier’s operations in the Middle East began in the 1940s, when many British and French colonies gained independence. These former colonies approached their sovereignty with two agendas: exploiting their natural resources and ‘modernizing’ via industrialization and contemporary consumerism. Carrier’s operations provided for many of these countries’ desires: air-conditioning for small-scale homes, medium-scale offices, large-scale institutions, and refrigeration for industrial production. Carrier’s expertise in the breadth of cooling allowed for the company’s infiltration into Middle Eastern ambitions towards modernization.
One can consider the modernization of the Middle East similarly to Pomeranz’s account for modernization in China. Pomeranz uses the term “industrious revolution,” quoting Jan de Vries’ term for the shift towards increasing labor and Smithian specialization from the 16th to 19th centuries. In the Middle East, air-conditioning maps a similar shift in labor and the emergence of particular classes via specialization. The introduction of cooling does not modernize, for example, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia the same way as modernization occurred in Europe or the United States. Prakash’s arguments for many modernisms, or more specifically, “New Third World Modernisms” rely on a postcolonial articulation from a particular cultural history. He states that “in the Third World, modernism cannot be construed as a Western event […] it has to be re-legitimized, not as a simple import, but as a secondary derivative construct, one that self-consciously localizes and transforms the claimed universality of modernism.”
Carrier’s insertion into the Middle East is broad and multi-faceted; the primary investigation here is to unpack the primarily twofold history of the company’s focus on the region: Carrier’s globalization and the rise of Middle Eastern companies as players in the global natural resource market. The relationship between oil and air-conditioning is not only a financial or technological one, but also a spatial one. To understand the modernized space in the Middle East, one must think through the multiple scales in which spaces changed through refrigeration and air-conditioning. Three specific spatial platforms arise:
1) The use of refrigeration in industrial applications to normatively ‘modernize’ the infrastructure of the region
2) The use of air-conditioning to modernize an emerging white collar class in the postcolonial era, and how this demographic provides for and requires air-conditioning
3) Air-conditioning and refrigeration working to create or renovate institutions supporting the dominant political and royal classes in the Middle East.
The three platforms converge to show the effect of cooling technologies on the social and cultural construction of space. Elmusa criticizes the notion that the Middle Eastern (specifically Saudi) establishment wants to retain tradition while embracing modern technologies (“modernization without Westernization”). The construction of a new Saudi space hinges upon a deal with the devil:
For the essence of the modernist, “Faustian” project is the ceaseless sabotage of tradition, and the first to experience its havoc were Western societies themselves […] In Saudi Arabia, the Saudi poet’s metaphor of the futile resistance by the camel not to have its eyes blinded by the airport’s floodlights is emblematic of the fact, scale and price of change.
One can argue that modernization is singular from a Western perspective, and that globalization into emerging economies and industries serves Western interests; indeed, this a frequent assertion, defensible in a critique of globalization. Instead, one can argue for a non-Western dialectical relationship: out of Western expansion, an Eastern autonomy occurs. That relationship is a fundamental relationship between a Western company and an Eastern country. The evidence for this transformation is not in a universally modern progression or loss, but a particular advancement and sabotage in the character of a “New Third World.”
A press release photograph portraying several utility vehicles prepping for oil and gas extraction.
A press release photograph showing an Arab in a thobe, looking at an extraction machine.
A press release photograph of Dammam’s Carrier service and parts center
A press release photograph of a 1/2″ = 1′ model of Carrier’s refrigeration unit for a nuclear power plant in Pahlavi’s Iran
A press release photograph of the control room for Carrier’s air-conditioning installation at King Saud University
A press release photograph showing Harry J. Gray, CEO of UTC, at the Renaissance of Islam opening at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History
This page of the informational booklet informs readers of the 2nd largest air-conditioning installation in the world and of the potent refrigeration system for Aramco’s gas extraction from oil production
An internal memo from a Carrier PR representative provisionally listing Carrier’s Middle East installations until 1977
A press release photograph of Malene Björn’s Kuwait Towers at night
A press release photograph of Carrier’s air-conditioning installation for King Saud University, north of Riyadh
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