Dispersants hide oil from view without removing it, shortening a disaster’s perceived duration.

Evidence

The oil would disperse and sink, only later to reaccumulate. So the appearance and disappearance took on a certain rhythm: the mass spraying of Corexit occurred mostly under cover of night, effectively disappearing much of the surface oil, which did not vanish but merely dispersed and sank beneath the water to the sea bed or accumulated in underwater plumes. Thus the oil dispersant operated as an image dispersant: as McClintock observes, it was a way of “disappearing the story.” By dissipating the slicks without actually removing the oil from the ecosystems, BP was able to soften the imagery of disaster-as it had sought to do by Photoshopping oil slick images on its Web site and, as McClintock documents, by barring (with the Coast Guard’s complicity) the media from accessing the worst-hit areas. With slow violence in general, I have suggested, the temporal projections of disaster are routinely foreshortened; in the Gulf of Mexico that foreshortening was given a head start by the application of an image emollient The slow violence that underlies Deepwater Horizon long predates the out-of-control gusher. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 831

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Gulf War ‘precision warfare’ chapter — the euphemism of dispersants paralleling depleted-uranium and ‘humanitarian war’ rhetoric.
• DEFINE: The ‘image dispersant’ concept — a physical intervention that simultaneously performs representational work.
• ADDENDUM: Directly illustrates the earlier chapters’ theme that euphemism/rhetoric masks extraction harm by rendering it invisible.