Slow Down the Flow Talk: An Ethnography of the Transversality of Life-with-oil in Esmeraldas, Ecuador.

Building on Deleuze and Guattari's theorising of transversality, this paper offers an ethnography of life-with-oil in the city of Esmeraldas, home to Ecuador's largest oil refinery complex and a chokepoint of the country's oil export logistics. The paper elaborates how desires, struggles, and wagers that shape everyday life in the city, which appear peripheral to the formal circulation of oil, are in fact constitutive of how hydrocarbon capital is enacted. Transversal desires move in and out of the logistics of oil flow, sometimes hosting and facilitating, other times choking the dynamics of said flow. I rely on the aesthetics and potentialities of the ethnographic ground to get at the disruptions, ruptures, and shifts through which transversal flows become part of the logistics of oil flow in Esmeraldas, and to remain attentive to what is obscured in master narratives about oil in capitalist systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]